PC platform is dead in the water as candidates kill carbon tax
You don’t have to wait until March 10 to find out who won the Progressive Conservative leadership race. We already have a victor.
Never mind if Caroline Mulroney or Christine Elliott triumphs in the end. No matter who takes over, it’s now Doug Ford’s party.
Win or lose, he’s not just setting the agenda. He’s undoing it.
Welcome to Conservative carbon chaos, in which all the candidates compete to distance themselves from their party’s past. Its recent past.
Not just denouncing disgraced ex-leader Patrick Brown, but renouncing everything he — and the party — stood for. Not only his personality, but policy, too.
A mere eight weeks ago, the provincial Tories proclaimed themselves ready to win power with a plan, a carefully crafted election platform two years in the making.
Two months later, it’s done. Or more precisely, undone — unravelling on Ford’s terms, reshaped in his own image, recalibrated to his own vision.
Mulroney and Elliott are merely following Ford’s lead, reluctantly doing as Doug does and as he dictates. Declaring his candidacy last month, Ford demanded an end to the carbon tax at a time when his rivals were both trying to have it both ways — a carbon tax if necessary, but not necessarily a carbon tax.
Within days, Elliott buckled — first claiming she was personally opposed but would consult caucus (pro-tax) and membership, before finally siding with Ford. Mulroney held out until Thursday before acquiescing to the pressure of a Tory tidal wave against any global warming measures.
A carbon tax is the ultimate litmus test, a barometer of Tory fidelity, a conversation-stopper for any candidate aspiring to woo the grassroots. If you are for a carbon tax, we are against you, nothing else to discuss, might as well end the call — forget about it.
Remember the People’s Guarantee? It promised assorted tax cuts and campaign sweeteners bankrolled by a new carbon tax.
Brown made a public show of affixing his signature to an oversized copy of the campaign pledge at November’s policy convention, “guaranteeing” he’d not seek a second term if he didn’t keep his key promises. He never got to a first term, quitting as party leader last month amid allegations of sexual misconduct that undercut his People’s Guarantee to promote “Trust, Integrity and Accountability.”
Never mind Brown. Consider the fine print in the platform where he boasts, “I’m signing my name to it and so is the Ontario PC candidate in your community.”
That means the nominated PC candidate for York-Simcoe, Caroline Mulroney, who publicly backed the platform (though she never got around to signing the document, a spokesperson confirmed Friday). Until a few days ago she was insisting with a straight face that the carbon tax was broadly supported by an unprecedented grassroots consultation.
Never mind the past. On Saturday, Mulroney is sending a representative to publicly sign a “No Carbon Tax Pledge” in her name — along with Ford and Elliott — prepared by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
Mulroney vainly tried to finesse the issue by claiming she “hates taxes,” while in the same breath noting the reality and inevitability of Ottawa collecting the money anyway (part of a mandatory national price on carbon). As soon as she disparaged taxes, she painted herself into a policy corner that made it impossible to countenance a carbon tax for much longer.
All this rhetoric is reminiscent of the last leadership race, when Brown also tried to dodge any carbon commitments, telling me, “It would not be my plan to bring in a cap-and-trade system or a carbon tax.” After winning the convention, he imposed a carbon tax on the party. Now, Mulroney is replicating his post-leadership backflip with a mid-leadership campaign volte-face of her own. The difference is that Brown waited several months to flip-flop, knowing that he had a couple of years until the next election for his reversal to fade into a political footnote.
Ford, as he likes to point out, has been unequivocal — if unintelligible — in his opposition to a carbon tax. His consistency is incongruent with reality, but that’s what Tories want to hear.
Whether it is Mulroney’s personal zigzag, or the party’s collective contortions, the contradictions are taking place at warp speed. The political dishonesty and intellectual vacuity behind vaporizing the carbon tax has left a $4-billion hole in the PC platform — forcing Mulroney, Elliott and Ford to claim they’ll just zap fat from the provincial budget (waste that wasn’t visible to the party brain trust when crunching their numbers mere months ago).
But as Dan Robertson, a senior member of the PC campaign team, observed succinctly, “If you drop the carbon tax, there is no ‘rest of the platform.’ No middle class tax cut, no child care refund, no mental health investment, no dental care for low income seniors.”
Can the party base change course in a matter of days, ditching its People’s Guarantee mere weeks before the June 7 election? No political party has ever made and remade its platform so close to a campaign, and no leadership candidates have so rapidly renounced their own promises before.
In the race to sell more memberships, the Tories have sold out the environment and sold their souls to Ford. Win or lose, he’s the ultimate victor.