Brown makes Liberals the right-wing bad guys

Ontarians not only should disapprove of Quebec’s new facecoverings law, the government should find a legal case to support getting it struck down, Progressive Conservative Leader Patrick Brown says, continuing to harry the Liberal party from the left.

They keep saying he’s a frightening right-winger and he keeps refusing to play along.

Quebec’s Bill 62 purportedly is about enforcing secularism in the public sphere, but will, in practice, mainly tell niqab-wearing Muslim women they have to take their veils off to ride city buses or go to school. All the parties in the legislature Thursday agreed to make time to condemn another province’s new law.

“This legislation would disproportionately affect women who are sometimes already at the margins and push them into further isolation,” Premier Kathleen Wynne said, leading off. “That is not the kind of society that we stand for in Ontario.”

Speaking for her party, Progressive Conservative MPP Lisa MacLeod agreed: “My leader has often said it doesn’t matter who you are, it doesn’t matter where you’re from, it doesn’t matter who you love, it doesn’t matter how much you make, and it doesn’t matter where you worship; you have a home here, in the province of Ontario, and we respect you.”

But, she said — and Brown echoed her Friday — Ontario should go beyond shaking its head grimly.

“I would also ask that our government seek leave to intervene in any Charter challenge on the constitutionality of this bill. I think that we must stand against it,” MacLeod said.

This followed last week’s socialissues kerfuffle, when Brown wanted to hurry a Liberal-designed ban on abortion-clinic protests into law faster than the Liberals did.

The provincial Tories are light on policy, but in the 21/2 years Brown has been their leader, he’s racked up a list of implicit promises through the criticisms he and his party have launched against the government.

The biggie is that electricity should be cheaper and the companies that provide it should be publicly owned. That’s popular, mainstream Ontario opinion and also pretty socialist.

Brown (though he’s warring with his party base over this) supports pricing carbon emissions to fight climate change, but he’s against the system of tradeable permits the Liberals have set up. Our cap-andtrade system is linked with one Quebec and California, which creates a free-trade zone for carbon permits. Brown criticizes it because it “sends millions of dollars to one of the richest jurisdictions on Earth for emission reductions there, which means failing to cut emissions here at home.” Well, that’s how trade works: we pay someone else to cut carbon emissions because they can do it more cheaply. For conservatives, this is a feature, not a bug.

The Liberals are pushing school boards to close schools that are halfempty, as many as 600 of them, to save money; the Tories want to keep them open.

The Tories criticize the Liberals for not spending enough on autism therapy, on mental health, on home care, on doctors. They fret about conditions in Ontario jails, that the government hasn’t done enough to get mining started in the Ring of Fire.

Against all this, the Liberals accuse Brown of being a “Trump-style” politician and scour his record as a federal Conservative backbencher, which is replete with socially conservative votes and mailers.

Brown has repudiated a lot of the things for which he used to stand. The Patrick Brown we’ve seen so far is making the Liberals explain the things they’ve cut, the programs they haven’t funded, the injustices they’re not fighting hard enough.

Brown’s an oddity with whom these Liberals don’t yet know how to deal.