AMANDA SIMARD CONFIRMS HER LEADERSHIP CHOICE
Local PC candidate Amanda Simard thinks Christine Elliott would be the perfect choice to lead the party to victor y.
“Her experience, and leadership quality too, unite our party and lead us to victor y,” Simard said during an interview March 5. The new leader for the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario will be chosen this weekend.
Simard also posted her comments and candidate choice on her campaign website. Elliott is one of four candidates vying to become the new leader of Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives, after Patrick Brown stepped down to deal with allegations of sexual misconduct.
Elliott is a former MPP who held the Whitby-Ajax for nine years, including time spent as the party deputy leader, before she stepped down after losing the 2015 party leadership campaign to Brown. For the past two years, she has been a health ombudsman under the current Wynne Liberal government.
The other three leadership candidates are Tanya Granic Allen, a parents’ rights advocate, Doug Ford, a Toronto councilor during the mayoral term of the late Robert Ford, and Caroline Mulroney, a Torontoarea lawyer and daughter of former-prime minister Brian Mulroney. She is also the PC candidate for York-Simcoe, thanks to past support from Patrick Brown.
Party members begin filing their choices for the new PC leader through electronic voting this week. Confirmation and induction of the winning candidate is expected March 10, at the party’s provincial convention in Markham.
Political pundits following the leadership campaign rate Allen as a “dark horse” candidate compared to the other three. She has condemned Brown, during his leadership period, for not opposing Ontario’s present sex education curriculum in schools. During the last leadership debate held in Ottawa, March 1, Allen promised that if she wins the leadership bid, she will overturn all the PC candidate nominations made during the past two years in ridings where Brown’s favoured candidates were chosen.
Allen named Carleton and GlengarryPrescott-Russell as examples of two ridings where Brown’s choice of candidate won the local nomination. Simard won the GPR nomination for the party in 2016 after Derek Duval of Vankleek Hill was disqualified from the running, about a week before the association’s nomination meeting.
Simard dismissed Allen’s threat, saying there are no grounds to support the leadership candidate’s allegations of improprieties in the nomination process. “If she were to look into the situation,” said Simard, “I’m confident that there were no irregularities, that the proper process was followed.”