Long shot sees her profile rising
On Monday afternoon, way back when Patrick Brown’s departure from the Ontario Tory leadership race was still just a rumour, long-shot candidate Tanya Granic Allen took her seat in a cavernous television studio in Toronto’s northern suburbs.
“Most people don’t know much about you,” said interviewer Michael Shiu of Fairchild TV, a Chinese-language broadcaster. He invited her to introduce herself to his viewers, who he said share her social conservatism and concern for parental rights in education, especially about sex.
This has been the theme of her candidacy, making a strong first impression, in contrast to rivals who were all some combination of famous, infamous and notorious.
It is an unusual position for Granic Allen, 37, who has worked extensively but mostly anonymously behind the scenes in campaign politics, and in niche advocacy against abortion and the Ontario sex-ed curriculum. After dominating media coverage of the first televised debate because of her strong performance, she seems to be pulling it off.
“I enjoy my conservative values,” she tells Shiu. She calls herself a voice for the disenfranchised. She vows to repeal Ontario’s sex-ed curriculum because it “sexualizes children, robs them of their innocence.” Only then will she consult on a new one, with parental opt-outs available at every stage.
“Until that child’s 18, let the parents decide,” she said.
She wants to “get back to basics” and reverse the “dumbing down of education.”
Her slogan — “Conservative. For a change” — carries the clever double meaning that her opponents are not conservative enough, or not truly conservative.
But it also suggests a vulnerability, of being too conservative, even for a province with an unpopular Liberal leader.
Granic Allen is Catholic. Her parents immigrated from Croatia, and lived first in New Brunswick and eventually the Toronto suburb of Etobicoke, where she went to the same high school as Stephen Harper, many years later.
She became an activist early, as her studies at Western University shifted from science and math to political science.
She was a sort of freelance campus conservative, working on campaigns at all political levels, while also picketing pharmacies for stocking the morning after-pill with the Campaign Life Coalition. She was even in the Monarchist League of Canada.
She said her morality has always been informed by skepticism rather than faith or doctrine, and she thinks Canada will one day look back on abortion the way America looks back on slavery.
At Toronto’s City Hall, she worked the 2003 mayoral campaign of John Nunziata. After she got married and had children, she returned to public life as head of Parents As First Educators, advocating against Ontario’s sex-ed curriculum.
She does not pull punches. As national director of Campaign Life Coalition Youth, for example, she said she is part of the “surviving generation” of the “abortion holocaust.” People she has compared to Hitler include Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, and Emily Murphy, Canada’s first female magistrate and one of the Famous Five.
She said she was flattered to hear that when National Post reporter Jake Edmiston asked celebrity professor Jordan Peterson whether he would endorse a candidate, he was noncommittal but said he is “open to the idea, and have had discussions with Tanya Granic Allen prior to this leadership race.”
Her social media shows a clear progression from pro-life advocacy at the highest levels, into familiar themes of right-wing culture war Twitter. Her tweets suggest she has been a fan of Melanie Phillips, Brian Lilley, Faith Goldy and Catholicera Michael Coren. She was a booster of Donald Trump but said this was motivated more by dislike of Hillary Clinton.
She identifies threats to free speech as a major concern, with a primary example being bubble zone laws preventing anti-abortion protesting near clinics, and the resulting cases of “prisoners of conscience” such as Linda Gibbons and Mary Wagner.
Granic Allen recently moved with her husband and four young children from Toronto’s High Park (a safely NDP riding ) to a 100-acre property in Grey County farmland south of Georgian Bay (a safely PC riding).