Don’t trample Tory grassroots

Tories who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. It’s a lesson Ontario Progressive Conservative Leader Patrick Brown needs to learn — and quickly.

Just last week, Brown pounced on Premier Kathleen Wynne when her former chief of staff and a Liberal party organizer went on trial, accused of illegally trying to induce a potential Liberal nominee to drop out of a 2015 byelection race in Sudbury.

But this week, it was PC party officials facing troubling allegations they had rigged the nomination process in Cambridge to favour a hand-picked candidate parachuted into the riding by party headquarters.

There’s no suggestion anything illegal happened in Cambridge.

But there are lots of furious PC party members in the city who insist what party officials did was arbitrary and unfair.

It was just last Friday that many potential nominees learned they had only until 5 p.m. on Tuesday this week to file their application papers to be the local Tory candidate in next year’s provincial election.

Riding association members complain the deadline was a month earlier than they’d expected and gave some nominees too little time to register.

At least two potential candidates either dropped out of the race or didn’t file their paperwork because of the interference from party headquarters, according to Ron Dancey, a longtime PC party member in Cambridge.

Today the Tories are divided in a riding they hope to win, and two local nomination committee members have resigned to protest what happened.

In response to the furor, PC party president Rick Dykstra labelled allegations of any improprieties as “categorically false.”

Yet Cambridge is merely the latest riding where Tories are accusing their own party leadership of interfering with nomination races.

Those allegations include ballot-stuffing, falsified membership forms, fake and party-funded memberships and other irregularities.

Brown, Dykstra and other high ranking Tories need a better response than denial.

With less than nine months left before the provincial election, the Conservatives are favoured by most opinion polls as the top choice to form the next government.

The scandals that dog the governing Liberals, including the trial in Sudbury, undoubtedly explain some of this popularity.

However, Brown can’t just talk the talk about behaving ethically and respecting democracy. He must walk the walk.

Local nominations and local advocacy give a party and a government legitimacy.

When that local participation is ignored and circumvented, voters become cynical, convinced all politics is grubby. And democracy suffers.

If the people at PC headquarters want to pick their own candidate for a riding, they should say so and do it openly.

Otherwise they should respect the wishes of local riding associations.

If there is still time to set things right and allow more nominees to step forward in Cambridge, the party should do it.

But even if this is impossible, the PC leadership must stop trampling their party’s grassroots.

Otherwise they risk facing four more long years in opposition — and replacing a lot of broken glass in their own Tory house.