Voters owed answers about departure of MPP Michael Harris

There’s a rotten odour emanating from the riding of Kitchener-Conestoga just days before the start of the next provincial election campaign.

And if you want to know why so many disillusioned people have tuned out of politics, take a whiff of the stink-bomb set off here by Progressive Conservative Party headquarters.

Troubling questions remain about the party’s decision to expel the riding’s current MPP, Michael Harris, from its caucus and bar him from running for the Tories in the June 7 vote.

In addition, there are equally nagging questions about how Mike Harris Jr. — son of the former Tory premier with the same name — managed to leapfrog ahead of everyone else in the riding to become Kitchener-Conestoga’s PC candidate.

The “no comment” coming from PC Leader Doug Ford’s campaign team is not only inadequate, it’s an insult to the public.

Consider this odd timeline of events. On April 5, Mike Harris Jr. was soundly defeated in the race to become the PC candidate in the riding of Waterloo.

On April 6, the Progressive Conservatives began the process of turfing MPP Michael Harris as a caucus member and candidate on the basis of inappropriate text messages he’d sent six years earlier.

Having lost their candidate, the PCs’ Kitchener-Conestoga riding association wanted to select a new one. It never received the go-ahead from party headquarters.

Then, on April 21, Mike Harris Jr. was named the PC candidate for Kitchener-Conestoga.

None of this smells like petunias.

The Tories had known about those sexually suggestive text messages since 2013. They took no action and let Michael Harris run again in the 2014 provincial election. Why was that old mistake suddenly a firing offence in 2018?

While the woman who received the text messages had worked as a PC summer intern in 2012, she was never employed by MPP Michael Harris. There are no allegations of physical contact between them. Moreover, her complaint to the Tories the following year was about not getting a job, not the messages.

Somehow, the text-message story resurfaced this spring and came to the attention of the PC Party’s provincial nomination committee.

Toby Barrett, a Tory MPP on that committee, said its members agreed to look further into the issue but did not reject Michael Harris as a PC candidate.

His version of events conflicts with the PC Party position that the provincial nomination committee unanimously ordered the ouster.

The official PC line becomes equally fuzzy when it comes to the decision to make Mike Harris Jr. the riding’s PC candidate. At least three other people wanted a crack at the job. But that plum landed in the lap of Mike Harris Jr., whose ex-premier father is a longtime friend of PC Leader Doug Ford.

Ford, by the way, insists the PC provincial nomination committee chose Mike Harris Jr. as a candidate. But committee member Barrett says the committee never discussed the selection.

All this is bewildering, disturbing and makes us fear that Ontario’s fine democratic ideals are being ground up by unseemly political machinations.

Exactly why is Michael Harris’s political career in ruins today? Who called the shots for the Progressive Conservatives in Kitchener-Conestoga?

And why does this party think voters tired of Ontario Liberal government scandals will happily trust the PCs on election day?