A once-proud party risks losing its heart and soul.
This is no mere leadership race. A ferocious battle is underway for the heart and soul — and head — of Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives.
It is not pretty, no matter whom your preferred candidate and whatever your party sympathies. Stay tuned — and if you didn’t tune in to Thursday’s first televised debate among Tories, do your democratic duty and watch at least some of it online.
For it is not to be missed. For better or for worse, there is no other way to glimpse the puerile, juvenile, infantile and facile political theatre on display by the grown-up politicians vying to lead the party that is now leading in the polls, and poised to govern the province.
Ontario’s once-proud PC party may emerge from this renewal process having regressed — with nary an idea for the future economic, educational or technological challenges facing our province. Four candidates (three serious contenders, one single-issue contestant) were behind the microphones at TVO.
But a fifth political spirit — the ghost of Patrick Brown — loomed kicking and screaming over the show, the elephant in the studio and the albatross on the screen.
Doug Ford, Christine Elliott and Caroline Mulroney (not to mention fringe anti-sex-ed crusader Tanya Granic Allen) variously denounced and renounced him in every way for sexual misconduct and mismanagement of internal party affairs. And most importantly, for misappropriating or misstating the Progressive Conservative vision.
These leadership aspirants claim they will now reclaim the party’s heart, head and soul. But the souldestroying spectacle gets worse.
Quite apart from condemning one another, the candidates were at war with themselves — contradicting their own past positions and demolishing the party platform that, until last month, the party had put forward collectively as a carefully considered blueprint for governing Canada’s biggest province:
A proposed carbon tax? Repudiated by all with astonishing alacrity, even though it funds the party’s promised $4 billion in tax cuts and assorted election sweeteners;
A sex-education curriculum updated three years ago in our schools? Condemned by all with unseemly passion, based on the fictional claim that no parents were consulted and that parents must always have the last word — as if teenagers hang on their every word, because father (or mother) knows best.
While joining in the chorus of condemnations, Mulroney alone mused that she wouldn’t undo the current curriculum (having lost her backbone on carbon, she recovered her voice on sex ed);
A higher minimum wage? Bad for business but worse for workers, Ford argued with a straight face and steady gaze. All candidates condemned the $14 minimum wage brought in last month and assailed the Liberal government’s law raising it to $15 next year. Oh, and dissociated themselves from the party’s platform promise to phase in the $15 target more gradually, by 25 cents a year until 2022 — still too fast, according to Ford and Elliott, who were having none of it (only Mul- roney stuck by the platform’s slower 2022 target).
After falling over themselves to reverse the party’s previous vision on all of the above, the three major candidates couldn’t offer a cleareyed view on what to do about their fallen leader. They mumbled bromides on Brown, watching and waiting for him to clear his name, while no doubt wringing their hands about the noise he has been making in recent days with dark accusations against his own party establishment.
It is a rare party that eats itself alive a mere three months before an election, but Ontario’s Tories are sitting down for a tainted meal of their own making, while Ford chows down at the head of the table. No one can say whether party members will fall for his falsehoods uttered so confidently in debate — no taxes at city hall being the biggest fib, given that the Ford brothers brought one in to pay for the Scarborough subway.
Whether the rest of the electorate will buy it is another matter (and a different demographic). But Donald Trump has taught us never to underestimate such political patter, and to beware the power of populist lines as rivals fall into line.
The remarkable repentances of Elliott and Mulroney — who have long coasted on their images as progressives — must be a bitter pill for them both to swallow, and seems like a poison pill for many other Tories. Not just on carbon but consent issues, for Ford (ably assisted by Granic Allen) has taken the party back in time to revisit the sex-ed controversy that Brown tried to put behind them — until a sexual misconduct scandal undid him.
Carbon pricing and sex education are emblematic of what ails a party obsessed with past battles, oblivious to present-day problems (hello global warming?) and unable to face future challenges on education and economic renewal in an era of globalization and innovation. Asked to put forward specific ideas in these areas, the candidates lapsed into myths and shibboleths — and embarrassed themselves.
Watch the debate, and see for yourself how the once-proud Progressive Conservative party that once governed Ontario, and may yet gain power again, risks losing its heart and soul. And head. Martin Regg Cohn’s political column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. mcohn@thestar.ca, Twitter: @reggcohn