Vic Fedeli the new interim leader, but he may not last long
The Ontario Progressive Conservatives have a new interim leader, whose first public act Friday was to pick a fight with his party’s executive over how long he’ll get to keep the job. His second act was to lose. The party will hold a rapid leadership race, with a mass membership vote on a permanent leader by the end of March, the executive announced at the end of the day.
The Tories’ shell-shocked caucus picked Vic Fedeli as the temporary successor to Patrick Brown, who resigned early Thursday morning amid allegations he’d propositioned a high-school girl for oral sex years ago and later assaulted a young woman who worked for him when he was a federal member of Parliament. Brown denied the claims categorically but his party abandoned him and within hours he resigned.
Fedeli is the MPP for Nipissing. He made a fortune in the advertising business and then devoted himself to fundraising, philanthropy, and civic projects such as redeveloping a defunct airbase. He became a hugely popular mayor of North Bay. In six years in the legislature, he has served as the Tory energy and finance critic and his colleagues consider him their resident policy wonk. He issues regular “Focus on Finance” newsletters in the style of bank research papers. His zingy trademark is that he always wears a yellow necktie.
The question was whether Fedeli would lead the party into the provincial election due June 7, asking voters to choose the Tories to govern but knowing that Fedeli might be at the top for just a few months, or would hold the fort while the Tories held a quick leadership race. Fedeli wanted the first.
“Our party and the people of Ontario have a great challenge ahead,” Fedeli said in his inaugural news conference. “I am prepared to lead this party moving forward. We need to focus immediately on Kathleen Wynne and the Liberals. There’s no time to waste. The days, weeks, and months ahead will not be easy. But I’m confident that as a team we can and will bring the change Ontario needs, change that renews Ontario’s status as the best place in Canada to live, work and raise a family.”
He testily insisted that he is now the Progressive Conservative leader, not “interim leader.” Which is true in an official sense: having been chosen by the caucus, Fedeli now gets to exercise all the powers and prerogatives of the party leadership and be the leader of the opposition in the legislature. On an interim basis.
“These are semantics. We’ll get there,” Fedeli said.
Leadership battles aren’t in the party’s interests, given how little time there is to work with, he said.
“They use our resources, they use the people, they use the time, when we should be focused on Kathleen Wynne,” he said.
Fedeli praised the party platform (“it’s 80 pages of good ideas”), its keen members, and especially the “90 extremely qualified and diverse candidates” chosen so far to carry the Tory banner — one-third of whom immediately revolted after he spoke, signing a joint letter to the party executive demanding a leadership race before the election.
“Before we get a mandate from Ontario voters, we must get a mandate from our members,” the letter said. “As candidates representing the Ontario PC party, we feel it is vital that membership have the final word when it comes to selecting the Ontario PC party leader that will lead us into the next election and our first majority government.”
The Progressive Conservatives have had majority governments before, of course, but it’s been a while.
The signatories included most of the candidates challenging Liberal MPPs in Eastern Ontario, such as Karin Howard (Ottawa South), Karma Macgregor (Ottawa West-Nepean), Amanda Simard (Glengarry-PrescottRussell), Goldie Ghamari (Carleton) and Fadi Nemr (OttawaVanier). Also several candidates the party considers star recruits, such as Rod Phillips (of Ajax, and, for the record, a former chairman of Postmedia, which owns this news organization), Prabmeet Sarkaria (Brampton South) and Peter Bethlenfalvy (Pickering-Uxbridge).
The list didn’t include Caroline Mulroney, the rookie York-Simcoe candidate many Tories fancy as their best potential leader, but she said much the same thing separately.
After an hours-long meeting, the 25-member party executive chose to defy their new leader. As a concession, the executive decided to allow Fedeli to run; typically an interim leader is a neutral caretaker.
The Tory caucus members see themselves as the heart of the party. They’re the only ones who have personally won election; they’re public officials of Ontario, not just party figures. Some have won many elections, while bearing an ever-growing load of anchors slung around their necks by failed leaders and party staff. They have hard-earned wisdom. After four losing elections in a row, most of the current Tory MPPs occupy extremely safe seats. Not one of them wants to do another stint in opposition but they’re at least used to it. They know Fedeli and like him. He’s competent, thoughtful, cheery, safe.
Also, almost all of them were last elected with Tim Hudak as party leader (a few came later, in byelections) and to them Brown was an outsider. He won the party leadership fair and square, and then grafted a team of organizers, a platform and a bunch of candidates onto the party. The MPPs accepted it with varying amounts of enthusiasm, but there was no denying he had the right to lead. But now Brown’s out, the stitches are ripping open.
The party’s challenger candidates, especially the stars, such as Mulroney and Phillips, disrupted their lives (Mulroney moved house; Phillips quit his job) to run. They don’t want to charge into battle behind a temp who didn’t even finish the race Brown won in 2015. To them, the old MPPs represent a great dark age for the Progressive Conservative party. The challengers have already taken a chance by running against incumbents; they want to maximize the odds of a Tory Cinderella story, not minimize the party’s losses.
Ironically, when he ran in the leadership race Brown won, Fedeli lamented the bad Tory habit of not listening to the party’s rank-and-file members.
Fedeli was careful to say that he’d respect the choice the party executives made (he had no choice), but the decision pits the party’s eminences against its up-and-comers. The new leader, whoever it is, will have wounds to heal the moment he or she takes over.