Rebel Hillier passes on cabinet to run for Speaker
Former rural revolutionary Randy Hillier, who made his name leading tractor protests and organizing illegal deer culls as a founder of the populist landowners’ movement, wants to be the Speaker of Ontario’s legislature.
He’d had senior critic assignments in the Progressive Conservative shadow cabinet, including justice. But after 11 years as an Opposition legislator at Queen’s Park, he asked Premier Doug Ford to leave him out of Cabinet consideration when his party finally swept to power in June’s election, he says.
“We have a transformative period in front of us that is clearly in good and competent hands,” he said in an interview.
“I think the directions of the party are absolutely consistent with the general election and the platform. I am very comfortable with where the government is moving. I thought my abilities and my skills could be better utilized to also help and modernize the Legislative Assembly.”
The Lanark-Frontenac-Kingston MPP, whose riding extends to the western edge of Ottawa, is one of four publicly declared candidates for the speakership.
They’re Rick Nicholls (a deputy speaker in the last legislature), 28-year veteran MPP Ted Arnott, and Jane McKenna, who’s starting her second term. Bill Walker, an MPP since 2011, is publicly considering a run. All are Tories.
The speaker is elected by secret ballot among all the MPPs. With so many Tories in the running and probably splitting their caucus’s votes, appealing to the dozens of opposition members will be important.
Hillier entered most Ontarians’ lives around 2004 as the spokesman for angry Lanark farmers and rural landowners, in his trademark red suspenders, protesting heavy environmental restrictions and over-regulation of small-scale food producers. If they didn’t know him, they knew about the tractors driven to Parliament Hill and clogging Highway 401. If they saw him on television, they probably remembered his soaring rhetoric and booming voice.
He co-founded the Lanark Landowners’ Association, which grew into the Ontario Landowners’ Association, a force in rural politics.
Running for office himself wasn’t in his thinking when he started, Hillier says.
“Absolutely not. That was far, far — there was no contemplation, and no interest, either, at the time. There was a problem at hand, a problem that we felt we had to deal with, and a problem that we had to expose and attempt to correct. And that was the singular motivation,” he says.
More than once, he and other demonstrators flagrantly broke laws and dared the authorities to arrest them. At one protest, a farmer at the controls of a frontend loader threatened police.
In 2007, Hillier was the vanguard of the landowners’ move into politics, seeking to change the system from within.
In 2009, he ran unsuccessfully for the Progressive Conservative leadership. In 2011, he helped landowner activist Jack MacLaren oust Tory warhorse Norm Sterling from the party nomination in his neighbouring riding.
Since then, Hillier has broken with the landowners’ movement, as it’s become preoccupied with weird constitutional arguments about property rights. He has constituents who are convinced the law doesn’t apply to them.
Hillier’s not been above reproach in office. He had a spat with Tay Valley Township, where he’s accused of harassing staff, and has himself demanded an integrity investigation of the township.
Newly elected Tory MPP Goldie Ghamari publicly accused him of physically intimidating her at a convention; a party investigation produced no public statement about what actually happened, though the Tories concluded that “no further action (was) warranted” against Hillier.
He wears suits more often now, though he still sports suspenders, in more muted colours.
He venerates the institutions of the legislature (in a letter pitching his candidacy to new MPPs, he remarked on eagle and owl carvings in the main chamber, reminders to legislators to be watchful and wise).
Amid the chaos in the Progressive Conservative party last winter, Hillier ground his heel into former leader Patrick Brown’s comeback attempt with, of all things, an ethics complaint.
But a thread ties the Randy Hillier of 2004 to the Randy Hillier seeking to don the speaker’s robes, he says.
“There was a recognition back then that people’s voices needed to be heard. People needed to play a more substantive role in the development of public policy, in the acceptance and agreement with public policy, and I still believe that today,” he says.
Citizens won’t trust a government they don’t see.
Among other things, just streaming Queen’s Park committee meetings online would make deliberations more transparent. Committees are where legislators go over laws-to-be in detail, listening to experts and discussing and making line-by-line changes. Most people may not care — until the government’s up to something that affects them directly.
Question period is important, but it’s rarely where important things happen.
“Debate takes up far more time in the house and ought to be a far more friendly environment to advance those arguments,” Hillier says.
Choosing a speaker will be the first order of business when the legislature convenes again next Wednesday.
I am very comfortable with where the government is moving.