A PERFECT STORM
ONTARIO PCs STILL HAVE TIME TO WIN JUNE ELECTION
Several ready-made headlines spring to mind to describe the weekend’s events within Ontario’s opposition Progressive Conservatives. Night of the Long Knives. Saturday Night Massacre. Revenge of the Stooges.
No wait, hold that third title. What’s going on in the Tory party at the moment may be no more than an attempt at a housecleaning. It’s logical enough. When you’ve just dumped a leader who threatened the party’s future, you have to clear out his main allies and leftover enablers as well. The departure of Rick Dykstra was the sensible next step to the ousting of Patrick Brown. Dykstra, the party president, was not only seen as a Brown holdover but offered a similar juicy target for Liberal strategists eager to assail the moral core of the party: weekend reports indicate he was allowed to run in the 2015 election despite allegations of sexual assault stemming from a 2014 incident, which was reported to police but did not result in charges.
It may have taken a while, but the message seems to be getting through: male politicians need to keep their pants zipped, their fantasies private and their hands to themselves, period. It’s not OK.
But there’s danger lurking in every step the PCs take over the next few weeks. A rapid cleansing and rebooting in advance of the June election is well and good; a civil war over the spoils of an unsettled organization is a sign the party hasn’t learned a thing from its four consecutive defeats.
Until the weekend, which spawned a raft of rumours, it was a bit of a surprise how few media voices were willing to pronounce the Tories dead in the water. You’d think that losing your leader in humiliating fashion barely four months before an election would represent an automatic death knell, yet a considerable body of opinion has suggested it could, just maybe, be an opportunity to correct the mistake made when Brown was chosen in the first place.
Even the loyally Liberal Toronto Star, which should have been giddy at the prospect of an easy victory for Premier Kathleen Wynne, saw the possibility. Editorial notes accidentally posted alongside a story on Brown’s demise suggested Brown’s fall could be “the Tories’ silver lining,” advising reporters that Brown “was sinking and now suddenly they have a chance to potentially find a white knight in shining armour to sweep in and win.”
The notes quickly disappeared, but the thought must have triggered alarm in the Star’s nether reaches, as a poll was quickly ordered up in which an astounding number of people were willing to claim they’d like to see Doug Ford run for the leadership — which he announced Monday he is doing. Other than maybe Mike Duffy, there’s no one the Star would more like to see reemerge on a Tory stage than Doug Ford, solely for the fun of pummelling him with diseased tomatoes.
There’s also no one who could ruin party prospects faster and more completely. Brown’s main accomplishment, such as it was, was an uneasy pause in the struggle between party moderates and a social conservative wing that would be happy to lose elections from now to eternity rather than admit the electorate isn’t on their side. Brown wasn’t overly popular in either camp, but his middle-of-the-road platform was a plausible effort to rob the Liberals of easy targets. As long as victory appeared possible, both factions were willing to hold fire.
Now there’s a danger of it breaking out, with Ford as the trigger man. Such is the alarm over a Ford candidacy that a weekend movement sought to enlist Toronto mayor John Tory — he who defeated Ford — as a leadership candidate. (Tory replied that he’s happy being mayor.)
Ford’s bid looks to a lot of us like it could almost certainly end any PC hopes.
Other than pockets of Rexdale, the Toronto suburb that still thinks it was fun having a sadly overwhelmed bumbler as mayor, Ford Nation is a failed experiment. Equally damaging would be any attempt to bypass a leadership race in which members get to have their say. Vic Fedeli, named interim leader, may have support in caucus, but that doesn’t make him the party’s choice.
The swiftness of Brown’s fall, and the rapidity of his relegation to non-person status, has occurred with a finality that would have impressed Khrushchev. However, closing the wound is just the start of the process the Tories will have to pull off if they hope to mount a serious challenge to Premier Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals. They need to replace Brown with a credible alternative to Wynne, and while Fedeli is a capable and experienced member of the legislature, the situation cries out for the provincial party’s first female leader, not for the tokenist, optics-inspired reasons that inspire federal Liberals, but because their best chance of pressing home the case against Wynne and her tired troops is with a strong and capable woman who can confront the premier on an equal footing.
They are fortunate to have a number of choices. Lisa MacLeod, a 10-year veteran who contested the 2015 leadership race and opposed both Brown and Dykstra; Christine Elliott, the candidate party elders favoured in 2015; and Caroline Mulroney, daughter of the former prime minister, whose private-sector experience would offer a welcome contrast to Wynne’s decades on the public payroll. Lisa Raitt, the former federal cabinet member, indicated Saturday she would not be a candidate, but she may yet be urged to change her mind.
Any of the above would offer a reasonable prospect of ending the PCs’ 14 years of often self-inflicted frustration. Mulroney is untested — and the prospect of another adventure in dynastic politics is unsettling — but has name recognition, a pleasant demeanour, a respectable c.v., and is free of the taint of past party mistakes. The brief pause between the time of the March leadership and the start of the election campaign would likely deny the Liberals the opportunity to develop an effective smear campaign, as they will surely strive to do.
Ontarians paid little attention to the Tories under the colourless Brown. Their support lay largely in the deep dislike of Wynne, and desire for change. An open and well-managed leadership race might be hard to pull off, but could attract the sort of interest Brown never managed, and result in a better choice of leader to boot.
KELLY MCPARLAND ONTARIANS PAID LITTLE ATTENTION TO THE TORIES UNDER THE COLOURLESS BROWN.