Ontario’s premier-in-waiting remains a mystery
The wait is almost over for our purported premier-in-waiting.
We may soon know a little more about Patrick Brown, the little-known leader of Ontario’s Progressive Conservative opposition.
Next month at a convention centre near the airport — same place where he won a leadership convention two years ago — Brown is giving us a sneak policy peak. Then as now, it is a fait accompli, held mostly for show.
Brown had the party’s votes in 2015, just as he has them in 2017. But to win the province’s votes in 2018, the PC leader can’t keep playing possum with policy. Or it won’t be worth the wait. Most public opinion polling shows Brown poised for victory over Premier Kathleen Wynne, whose personal unpopularity is dragging down a Liberal brand tarnished over time. Yet after all this time, most Ontarians still tell pollsters they don’t know anything about Brown.
Why is there so little to show, or know, about where he stands? Is it because the province’s next premier is merely afraid to say, has nothing to say, or both?
All along, the PCs have been pointing to next month’s policy convention as the big reveal, an insight into how the party will steer the province when it takes power. Against that backdrop, we bring you a sample from this week’s list of 139 “Recommended Policy Resolutions” that the party brass are feeding the grassroots — and the rest of us — as leading edge thinking:
“PC Party policy is to help make life more affordable for families with young children.”
“PC Party policy is to create a wider range of options for child care.”
“PC Party policy is to protect workers, their economic freedoms, and the pensions they’ve been promised.”
You get the idea about the lack of ideas, crafted with platitudes to cover virtually every base — something for everyone, or perhaps nothing for anyone.
Yes, there are a few deadly serious promises, mostly to kill programs such as capand-trade or renewable energy supports. But the rest of the policy folio is a fig leaf — serving as strategic foliage for the grassroots to chew on. And cloaking an emperor with no ideas. The only certainty is that a policy convention announced with great fanfare to give voice to the grassroots has rolled over them with a fresh layer of Astroturf. The better for Brown to sprint to power without tripping up.
Absent from the agenda is any hint of social policy of the kind he played footsie with during and after his leadership run. No more talk of tackling abortion, sex education or gay rights that won him the support of socially conservative PCs in the past.
It may be that Brown’s U-turn — steering clear of the people to whom he once hitched his wagon — is a politically astute move. What helped him in the party leadership race, and as a backbench MP in Stephen Harper’s Ottawa (when he backed a motion opening the door to criminalizing late-term abortions) would likely hurt him with the general population.
“Let me be very clear: I am pro-choice,” Brown declared this month.
How to square his reincarnated prochoice persona with his pro-life stance, in a previous life, suggesting a fetus is a person?
“I was a backbench member of a broader team,” he told The Canadian Press this week by way of explaining his voting record. “Now that I’m the leader of the party I can much (more) clearly speak from my own heart.”
But the abortion vote in Ottawa was a free vote of conscience — you know, from the heart — which Harper urged his own backbenchers to oppose. Brown now insists that as premier he wouldn’t reopen the debate.
That’s to his political credit, but not his political credibility. Was it a matter of conviction then, and convenience now — or vice versa?
There is nothing especially scary about Brown, beyond his being scared of his own shadow. Nor are there any ominous signs of a hidden agenda about which he won’t speak, just warning signals that there is no agenda to speak of.
Don’t take my word for it. Listen to his fellow Tories — not just the vast majority of caucus members who lined up against Brown in the leadership race, but the growing number of party members complaining about internal party democracy. Apart from dissent over the policy process, protests over candidate nominations have dissolved into a police investigation — and litigation involving an awkward tape recording.
Brown and his team are gaining a reputation for telling people what they want to hear, and then changing their story — not just with the general public, but the party faithful. That may work at next month’s carefully choreographed policy convention, but not on the campaign trail next spring, by which time motherhood resolutions promising apple pie will be awfully stale.
No one really knows who will be Ontario’s next premier — just that if it’s Brown, he may be truly unknowable.