Two views on leadership
Caroline Mulroney offers grimy Tories a fresh start
Caroline Mulroney’s run for the leadership of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party is a good thing, and not just because more women are needed in politics. It adds another option for those who think Doug Ford is yesterday’s man. He was crass and brutal even in his era and the Conservatives have to start afresh.
I assumed leadership hopeful Christine Elliott would offer an alternative but her suggestion that she is just fine with ex-leader Patrick Brown running again as MPP, despite allegations of sexual misbehaviour involving teenage girls, is proof that Ontario’s Conservatives are stuck in the past. Why didn’t she say “No more”?
Ford has his fans, such as they are, but then there are the rest of us. Although I doubt Amazon will choose Toronto for a money-spinning second headquarters, the name “Ford” would repel them. Post-Rob Ford, would you invest in a province foolish enough to haul another Ford into office? Doug Ford is a bully, a bellower of catchphrases, a contempt-generator with a dubious backstory.
But I will deal head-on with the awkwardnesses of Caroline Mulroney’s run. The first is that I look at her life — fine education, business career, a happy private life — and wonder why she seeks the pain of public office. The cruelties she endured as a young daughter of former prime minister Brian Mulroney would have driven most people into the witness protection program, or a bunker.
Why seek public life? I suppose it’s the same reason people climb Everest, because it’s there. But still, why?
The second is the speed of her ambition. Mulroney is running as a provincial candidate in York-Simcoe but she has no experience trundling through the mundanities and indignities of eggs and chicken for breakfast, lunch and dinner, canvassing, photo ops, selfies, etc. I do not know what Ontario Conservatives demand of a leader — that she attend a tractor pull, wear a hard hat, be a man — but Doug Ford can’t really plow a farmer’s field either and voters know that.
Mulroney says she wants lower taxes and help for people with ballooning electricity bills. Those two things are contradictory, but Ontario Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne has already embraced both simultaneously, which is why Wynne is one gloriously tough opponent.
The third complication is that Mulroney has inbuilt name recognition, resented by some. But so does former MPP Elliott in Ontario, especially via her late husband, Conservative politician Jim Flaherty. So does Ford, which is why he launched his PC leadership bid from his mother Diane’s basement. We all remember Diane, matriarch of the Etobicoke Kennedys.
But at this sorry #MeToo point in history, there is almost no other way for women to get a start in politics than to follow the path cut by a male relative.
Women are at a killer disadvantage. Never underestimate how much you are hated, I have always told women, so find your allies where you can.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is often attacked for having been Pierre Trudeau’s son, a child of privilege. But it’s a campaign sign asset, not an inheritance.
Justin Trudeau avoided politics at first. His highly educated father entered political life late and felt some disdain for it, never encouraging his sons to take any particular path.
What makes Justin Trudeau unique is his ease with people. Like Brian Mulroney — whatever his faults, I grew to miss him in the Harper years — Trudeau is no snob. He’ll talk to anyone. He’s at ease in town halls, famously so, winning little tennis matches with shouting hecklers inspired by Trump-rally crudity.
I tense up seeing Conservative leader Andrew Scheer on camera or in a campaign ad. He radiates discomfort. He looks like a man who went out to shovel his driveway and lost his shovel and has to ask passersby for a shovel but why should they have a shovel or even give it to him if they did, bud. On this hopeless note, the commercial ends.
I no longer think any politician can succeed without social ease. Stephen Harper, a self-made politician, detested his fellow humans, particularly women. I doubt we’ll elect a robot again.
At this point, I wouldn’t allow a PC canvasser through the door. If the provincial Conservatives don’t object to Brown running again or Rick Dykstra, accused (but never charged) of violent sexual assault, running the party, then they’re shaggy beasts of yore, provincial woolly mammoths.
Politics is not just about identity — which candidate most resembles you personally — but about “new” and “fresh” voices, so badly needed.
There is almost no other way for women to get a start in politics than to follow the path cut by a male relative