THE LITTLE-KNOWN MP WHO HALTED AN ONTARIO CORONATION
Elliott wants to put ‘progressive’ back in the party while Brown wants to streamline fiscal and social conservatives
The race to lead Ontario’s Progressive Conservative party started with talk of a coronation, but it turned into a referendum.
The ballot question is whether the party wants to take a centrist, progressive turn or continue down a more rightward path, but with the organizational zeal of the federal Tories.
Christine Elliott, current deputy leader, wants to put the “progressive” back in the PC party, while federal MP Patrick Brown wants to emulate Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s successful “voting coalition” of social and fiscal conservatives, new Canadians and young Tories, in Ontario.
For a party that has been shut out of government for well over a decade, it’s a crucial choice.
Elliott was the first official entrant in the race to succeed Tim Hudak, who stepped down after losing his second election to the Liberals. She announced in July, on a drizzling summer day, flanked by a half-dozen members of caucus and a handful of unsuccessful candidates, and was immediately the presumed front-runner.
She’s well-liked on all sides of the aisle at Queen’s Park, with a respected grasp of her health critic policy files and an ability to navigate between Tory fiscal conservatism and championing issues like developmental services. A lawyer for decades before winning her seat in 2006, Elliott could be the first woman to run the PCs, which would also mark the first time women helm all three parties at Queen’s Park, alongside Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne and New Democrat Andrea Horwath.
Elliott has suggested PCers have forgotten to explain why they are fiscally conservative: not because they don’t want to fund services for families and vulnerable people but because sound finances make that more possible. She said young Tories tell her it’s almost a dirty word to be a PC on campus.
“How did we get so far away from what our party really stands for? I was to get us back to that,” Elliot said in an interview this week.
Her late husband, longtime federal finance minister Jim Flaherty, was beloved among Tories, and dozens of federal ministers, MPs and MPPs started lining up behind her.
It seemed Elliott was headed to certain victory when fundraising numbers released in January showed her doubling her closest rivals’ fundraising totals. But then Brown reported he’d added 40,000 new members to the party through an effort to reach into cultural communities, attract new Canadians, involve the youth wing of the party and by criss-crossing the province by plane.
The 36-year-old career politician was trained as a lawyer, but his vocation is politics. He started out fighting for the presidency of the PC youth party in the late 1990s, and after six years on Barrie city council has sat since 2006 on Harper’s backbenches (he now chairs the Tories’ GTA caucus.)
Few Ontarians would know his face, but he is friends with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which has earned support in the Hindu community. A group called Guptas for Patrick is very active online and off.
Brown regards Elliott as a representative of the old establishment.
“By not being involved in any of the past policy disasters, I believe I can bring that fresh start to the party,” Brown said. “I’m not far left or far right. I’m not a red Tory or a blue Tory or a social conservative or a blue Liberal. I’m someone who is focused sim- ply on being pragmatic.”
So, how did an unknown MP with few ties to the provincial Tories manage to get so close to winning its leadership?
A known workhorse who tweets his way across Ontario and back, Brown’s an intuitive politician who knows how to build a constituency. Supporters and critics alike praise his ability to sign up members and to organize.
“I think the campaign has ended far more competitive than it started,” said Rob Leone, a former Tory MPP and professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario. He said the length of the campaign — which unofficially started in July but officially began in November — has helped Brown catch up with Elliott as one-time candi- dates Vic Fedeli, Lisa MacLeod and Monte McNaughton all dropped out.
Both Brown’s and Elliott’s camps claim they can cinch the nomination, since memberships and fundraising totals, the two essential metrics for leadership races that can’t be easily polled, show they’re essentially tied. That’s why Brown’s claim to have added 40,000 members to Elliott’s 36,000 was a key turning point.
There are now about 76,000 in the party eligible to vote on Sunday and Thursday, and other leadership hopefuls, MPPs and r i dings sold cards as well. That means one, or more likely both, teams are boosting their numbers to create the appearance of momentum. The party’s weighted voting system will also play a key role, which means whoever wins will have solicited the most votes from across Ontario, not just from a handful of heavily populated ridings.
So can Brown, who had few ties to the provincial party, convince enough people that he should lead it?
His political savvy may have done what once seemed impossible: According to one former candidate, Brown arrives at events ready to talk local issues. When he visited the riding in question, Brown didn’t just bring a stock speech. He’d researched a party policy paper the candidate had helped write and knew what issues the local riding association had championed — and he was ready to talk about them.
Elliott, by contrast, visited the same riding briefly, and used a standard stump speech barely tweaked for the constituency.
“Patrick is very good at speaking to the crowd before him and getting them a message they want to hear,” Leone said.
Elliott has released a platform that includes a pledge to reform Ontario’s energy system, lower the corporate tax rate from 11.5 per cent to 10 per cent and streamline the delivery of home and community health care. Brown has not released a platform, instead opting to promise to re-engage the grassroots. He has outlined three key themes: cheaper hydro, bet- ter transportation and less red tape.
“If you want to be leader you need to be straight with people what you stand for, and I think that’s only fair,” Elliot said.
PC members don’t have competing policies to parse, but ideologies. In the final debate of the race this week, Elliott said Brown is too socially conservative to lead the party back to victory.
“Patrick represents the constituency that I’m concerned about: the social conservative group in the party would take over,” she said. “I don’t think we would win if we went out with that kind of message.”
Brown countered that Elliott, as the establishment candidate, is proposing the same “top down” policy-making that cost the Tories the last four elections.
“The same old, same old does not work,” he said. “It didn’t in 2003, 2007, 2011, and 2014, and it won’t in 2018.”
So what does that mean for party members voting this weekend?
Leone said Elliott has looked at “how to position herself and the party going into 2018” while Brown is offering a ‘ hands-on” leadership style and a “fresh start.”
“I think members of the party who go out to vote this weekend … are going to have to weigh the pros and cons of each.”
For Bob Lopinski, a veteran Liberal organizer, both candidates have played to their base, but are also in danger of having gone too far. Like primaries in the U.S., where candidates sometimes veer too hard left or right for the general election, he wonders whether the candidates will take the leadership but never the premier’s office. He pointed to Elliott’s flirting with the anti-sex ed movement, first saying she would speak at a rally, then changing her mind and attacking Brown for speaking. Lopinski has heard from moderate Tories some might be “disillusioned” with her.
As someone outside the party, he’s also been surprised that Brown, who was essentially unknown provincially going into the race, has surged ahead. He called it less of an election and “more of a hostile takeover of the Ontario PC party.’’