Candidate rush on for PCs ahead of fundraising rules
Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives will name a lot of candidates for the 2018 general election much sooner than they’d planned, a move that will get them raising campaign money before strict new Liberal-backed rules come into effect.
The 24 seats involved are all held by Liberal or New Democrat MPPs or will be new seats in the next general election. They’re mostly suburban, some rural — the sorts of seats the Tories would need to win if they were to form a government.
“We’ve got great candidates who want to run and we want to get them out sharing our message and around the province,” said party spokeswoman Tamara Macgregor. “We’ve got a number of ridings who are ready with multiple strong candidates who are interested in running for us.”
In Eastern Ontario, the Tories are hurrying to pick candidates in Ottawa West-Nepean, GlengarryPrescott-Russell and Orléans (all of which the Liberals won in the last election), plus Carleton and Hastings-Lennox and Addington (new ridings carved off districts won by Tory MPPs Lisa MacLeod and Randy Hillier).
Those last two are in traditionally conservative territory, but the party can’t take either of them for granted, especially without incumbents; the federal Liberals won Hastings-Lennox and Addington in last fall’s election and Liberal Chris Rodgers came within a couple of points of unseating Conservative Pierre Poilievre in Carleton.
Only three of the two-dozen seats are in Toronto, historically weak ground for the Progressive Conservatives. Those are York Centre, where 85-year-old Liberal MPP Monte Kwinter is the oldest provincial politician in Ontario history and the constant subject of rumours he’ll retire. There’s Eglinton-Lawrence, where former Conservative finance minister Joe Oliver was the federal MP until last fall. And Etobicoke Centre, where Doug Ford, the brother of the late Toronto mayor Rob Ford who’s constantly threatening to re-enter politics, would probably run.
The rest are scattered across the Toronto suburbs, plus a few in smaller centres like Niagara Falls and Kitchener. The only one in the north is Sault Ste. Marie.
Having a named candidate means someone can give undivided attention to waving the party banner and raking in contributions for the eventual election campaign, not a nomination race, a big plus for a candidate hoping to knock off a sitting MPP. By the new year, those candidates could be barred from fundraising, under a new set of rules the Liberal government hasn’t yet written (or at least hasn’t revealed) but expects to have in place by January.
The decision is “not necessarily” about getting ahead of the fundraising restrictions, Macgregor said.
But it’s a simple fact that having candidates in place will help.
The new rules arose from revelations that ministers with the power to regulate billiondollar businesses were the star attractions at Liberal fundraisers targeting lobbyists and top people in those industries. The donors would pay thousands of dollars a plate to attend, on the promise that they’d have some intimate time with powerful politicians — Bob Chiarelli as energy minister, Charles Sousa as finance minister, Premier Kathleen Wynne herself — who could make or break them.
A hasty attempt to deal with the scandal with reforms banning corporate and union donations and cutting maximum contributions didn’t deal with the central problem of politicians selling access, so at the end of the summer the government said it would outright ban any provincial politician from being present at any political fundraiser of any kind.
That solves the ministers-selling-face-time problem, at least in its existing form. Also, it puts the screws to people challenging for seats in the legislature, who are usually their own best organizers and fundraisers.
Getting people to kick in a few bucks for the campaign has always been part of any meet-thecandidate event.
Since the Liberals have most of the seats at Queen’s Park, preventing challengers from raising money hurts would-be Tory and New Democrat legislators the most. Worse, Yasir Naqvi, the attorney general and government house leader, has outlined the basics but supplied no actual wording for the legislation the government wants to pass, so the opposition doesn’t even know what rules it’s going to operate under.
The Liberals scored a tactical point by surprising the opposition with the reforms, and now the opposition is trying to score one back.