Russell mayor seeks Liberal nomination
Ex-Tory eyes Glengarry-Prescott-Russell as three more MPPs announce departure
The Ontario Liberals are losing three more MPPs, including Eastern Ontario’s Grant Crack, but leader Kathleen Wynne tried to take some of the hurt out of Thursday morning ’s bam-bambam announcements by immediately anointing successors to carry the Liberal banner in the June election.
Russell Township Mayor Pierre Leroux will seek the Liberal nomination in Glen garry Prescott-Russell, now that Crack is leaving politics after two terms at Queen’s Park.
“After careful consideration and heartfelt discussions with my family, I concluded that the time is right to seek out other career opportunities. This was a very difficult decision,” Crack said. He’s been in North Glengarry politics and the legislature for 17 years and that’s enough.
“This isn’t a fight for me or Wynne versus (Tory leader Doug) Ford or red versus blue. It’s about who will represent the riding best,” Leroux said.
If Leroux wins the Liberal nomination, he’ll be up against fellow Russell council member Amanda Simard, who won the Progressive Conservative nomination more than a year ago, in one of the races marred by backroom shenanigans under former leader Patrick Brown.
The Tories disallowed Simard’s competition, Derek Duval, over a mockumentary Duval shot showing some drunken horseplay at a charity hockey tournament. Supposedly the specific problem was that the video showed a guy eating a whole hamster off the blade of a hockey stick. It was a glob of poutine, Duval said at the time. If it was a hamster, everyone around the guy eating it, not to mention the guy himself, was amazingly unfazed.
This wasn’t the dirtiest nomination fight on Brown’s watch. It was the weirdest, though, and it’s still reverberating.
Leroux won a special election for mayor of Russell after the sudden death of his predecessor J.P. St. Pierre in 2014. A former Ottawan and volunteer firefighter, he opened a video and variety store in Embrun in 2001. He’s also a former Tory, having joined the party to support Duval. A Pierre Leroux of Embrun is also in public records as a donor to the federal Conservatives.
“After what happened with Derek, I wrote to the party and told them to tear up my membership,” Leroux said.
But Tories approached him after Doug Ford won the Progressive Conservative leadership last month, wondering whether he’d be interested in the Glengarry-Prescott-Russell nomination himself if they could get Simard pushed out, Leroux said. He considered it but ultimately the party chose to keep her so it didn’t matter.
(Fred DeLorey, a longtime conservative operative who managed Christine Elliott’s leadership campaign and is still involved in the provincial party, spins the story differently: “He begged me to do whatever I could to have the nomination opened and to support him,” DeLorey said by email. Not true, Leroux said.)
Meanwhile, Crack had called, too, looking for a successor as he considered his exit.
“Grant, when he reached out, it threw me for a curveball. I didn’t see that coming,” Leroux said. “I’ve always considered myself fiscally conservative and socially liberal. The fact I have qualities that both groups are interested in — I’m honoured, to be honest.”
As a 42-year-old father of three with aging parents himself, he sees the need for the Liberals’ expansions of health coverage and childcare. As a mayor, he sees what downloading social services does to municipal budgets.
“We can’t be everything for everybody, even though that’s what everybody wants. Investing in social care — those are all good ideas. How they’re implemented can always be debated,” he said, and that’s what he’s looking forward to doing.
Leroux won’t quit as mayor of Russell unless he wins the election provincially, he said. If he loses the nomination or the election, he’ll happily continue serving at the town hall and will run for re-election in the fall.
The other two Liberal MPPs heading for the exit are Trade Minister Michael Chan and Government and Consumer Affairs Minister Tracy MacCharles. Both represent suburban Toronto areas; both say they have health problems. MacCharles has had cancer twice, including a bone cancer when she was young that left her with a rebuilt leg, and breast cancer eight years ago; Chan didn’t specify his health woe but said it’s come up recently.
“These are always deeply personal decisions. For Michael and Tracy, it means taking time to focus on their health and all three members of my team have my full support and my gratitude for the contributions they have made in their collective dozens of years working for the people of Ontario,” Wynne said.
With the election barely two months away, the Liberals will fervently wish for this to be the last wave of seasoned MPPs to go. Wynne shuffled her cabinet in June 2016, easing out a bunch of veterans contemplating retirement, including Ottawa’s Madeleine Meilleur. Last summer, Glen Murray quit as environment minister to go run a think-tank, and economic-development minister Brad Duguid announced he wouldn’t run again. Just after Christmas, Deb Matthews and Liz Sandals, two of Wynne’s most experienced and loyal lieutenants, said they’ll retire. Then health minister Eric Hoskins quit to head a federal advisory panel on pharmacare.
All three of these newly open seats are battlegrounds: ones the Liberals need to keep if they’re going to hold power, and the Tories want desperately to take away. Having decent replacement candidates ready to announce ( besides Mayor Leroux, one is vice-chair of the York public school board and one is a tech entrepreneur and both are Tamil-Canadian women) mitigates the damage to the Liberals from the latest departures — but only some.