TORY LEADERSHIP HOPEFUL O’TOOLE HIRES DIGITAL GURU.
Ontario Proud founder aided Ford victory
OTTAWA • Erin O’toole has signalled he will make aggressive digital messaging key to his bid for the Conservative leadership with the appointment of Jeff Ballingall, founder of Ontario Proud and other influential Facebook pages, to oversee his digital strategy.
Ballingall has made a name for himself over the past few years in pioneering the use of Facebook to spread conservative messaging, often through viral posts that don’t require any ad spending. The Ontario Proud page remains his best known effort, with nearly half a million followers, but he also runs Canada Proud (192,000 followers) and B.C. Proud (82,000 followers). In addition Ballingall co-owns The Post Millennial, another conservative website that’s gained a strong online following.
There have been efforts by various other political groups to match Ontario Proud’s reach on Facebook, but nobody has come close. During the 2018 Ontario election Ballingall also drew in big-money donations through Ontario Proud to run television ads and send out mass texts to cellphones. In the aftermath, Liberal campaign manager David Herle told a Ryerson University forum that Ontario Proud “delegitimized Kathleen Wynne. And we didn’t know how to fight it.”
Ballingall was also part of the public effort to oust Andrew Scheer as leader after the 2019 election, creating a group called Conservative Victory with fellow Conservatives Kory Teneycke and John Reynolds. “When a political leader fails, they resign,” the group’s website said.
In a 2019 Toronto Life interview, Ballingall said he was working at crisis communications firm Navigator when he came up with the plan for Ontario Proud, largely to fight back against the anti-conservative ad campaigns often run by labour unions. He figured nobody was effectively using Facebook to organize a third-party campaign. “The ecosystem was changing,” he told the magazine.
Ballingall told the National Post on Thursday that Ontario Proud and the related pages will be neutral during the Conservative leadership race and will feature news about all of the leadership candidates. He declined to comment on his campaign role for O’toole.
In the past two days, O’toole has featured prominently on sites run by Ballingall. On Wednesday, both the Ontario Proud and Canada Proud pages posted a 15-second video created by O’toole to thank Canadian energy workers for keeping homes heated during a cold snap.
The next day, both Canada Proud and Ontario Proud posted flattering quotes about O’toole from a Toronto Sun article discussing all of the candidates. They then shared a Post Millennial article on leadership candidate Peter Mackay being attacked by Conservative MP Scott Reid, and then another Post Millennial article praising O’toole’s “toughness” on criminal justice policy. Finally they posted a joint video profile of O’toole and fellow MP Pierre Poilievre, and promised further profiles would be coming on other candidates.
O’toole has pulled together a full campaign team with a wide range of experience, and will be formally launching his leadership bid soon, campaign sources said. On Thursday, O’toole was in Newfoundland to attend the funeral of John Crosbie, a legendary figure in Tory politics.
Fred Delorey, a veteran organizer who also ran O’toole’s 2017 leadership run, is the campaign manager. The campaign chair is Walied Soliman, a key figure in Patrick Brown’s successful 2015 Ontario PC leadership bid and the Canadian chair of global law firm Norton Rose Fulbright.
Melanie Paradis, Jim Burnett and Dan Mader are deputy campaign managers, and all have worked on numerous federal and provincial campaigns. Tausha Michaud, who worked for O’toole on Parliament Hill, will be the campaign’s principal secretary. Laura Kurkimaki, a former issues manager in Stephen Harper’s Prime Minister’s Office, will be a senior adviser.
So far, two candidates are publicly committed to running for the leadership: Mackay, a senior cabinet minister in Harper’s government, and Marilyn Gladu, an MP from southwestern Ontario. Poilievre is expected to formally launch his own leadership bid soon. Former Quebec Premier Jean Charest is considering entering the race, and former interim leader Rona Ambrose is still deliberating.
Candidates have until Feb. 27 to enter the race. The votes will be tallied on June 27 in Toronto.