Frontrunner could end up long shot
Bill Davis wants her as Ontario’s next premier. Most elected Progressive Conservative MPPs are backing her for party leader.
Christine Elliott polls higher with the general public than any rivals so far in the PC leadership race.
But 10 months after launching her campaign, she may be 10 days away from losing next month’s convention. Despite an endorsement from Davis, the province’s most successful premier in recent memory, Elliott the erstwhile frontrunner now seems a long shot to follow in his footsteps.
At a Canadian Club event packed with loyal supporters Monday, Elliott put on a brave face as she mounted the podium. Walking the audience through her economic plan, she called for tougher budgeting to make social welfare programs affordable again — because “fiscal irresponsibility denies social compassion.”
It’s rare to hear a Progressive Conservative politician speaking so unabashedly and passionately about disability issues and people in need — a distant memory from the Davis era. If party members reject her appeal at the May 9 leadership convention, it may become rarer still.
Elliott says her vision emanates from a lifetime of experience as a lawyer working for Ontario’s ombudsman, at Scotiabank, and for nearly a decade as MPP from Whitby-Oshawa.
Also as the parent of three grown boys and, yes, the widow of former federal finance Jim Flaherty, whom she mentions often.
Interviewed in her Queen’s Park office, Elliott says character is what distinguishes her from the only remaining candidate in the race, MP Patrick Brown — an unknown, untested, upstart rival from Barrie. Brown has overtaken her with a sales blitz signing up new members, but Elliott insists personal experience, public policy and social compassion are what will win more votes in the next general election.
If not quite the upcoming convention.
“I think it’s really important to have had outside business experience if you want to be leader of a party and, ultimately, premier,” she says, contrasting it with the “vague, amorphous” CV of Brown, her unmarried rival who is a 36-year-old lifetime politician.
“You have to be credible, you have to be authentic, and you have to tell people the truth — you have to be straight with people.”
She cites social issues as a defining difference. It was Elliott’s calling card when she ran against Tim Hudak in the 2009 PC leadership race, but she finished third. The party veered right and lost the next two elections.
“We really need to change the tone and direction of our party,” Elliott says today.
“We are a toxic brand right now; a lot of people don’t want to listen to what we have to say.”
But what is she saying, exactly? Elliott is progressive by PC standards, unafraid to embrace social policies, but she has been ducking serious policy pronouncements for much of the leadership campaign — almost as much as Brown.
Both have flirted with hard core opponents of an updated sex-ed curriculum, insisting that minority voices must be heeded in the end. She won’t take a firm position on fighting climate change, saying only that “I am not an expert in that area” and opposes any cash “grab.” Elliott isn’t opposed to road tolls in principle, but resists them in practice.
Her most explicit promise has been to lower the corporate tax rate from 11.5 per cent to 10 per cent (but not the 9 per cent she campaigned on in the 2014 election under former leader Tim Hudak). Interestingly, she has ditched (for now) the controversial — and utterly unprogressive — flat tax that she proposed in her 2009 campaign: “I continue to think it would be an alternative, but it’s not something that I would present to our members … without consulting.”
Despite her strong criticisms of Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne over privatizing Hydro One, Elliott says she would put most government assets up for review in order to invest in new infrastructure. She opposes Wynne’s Ontario pension plan, but says she always shared her late husband’s support for a modestly expanded CPP — some day.
The conventional wisdom, when writing about the upcoming convention, is to write off Elliott and ask: How did the frontrunner fall so far behind?
Was it the message, the messenger, or merely the campaign organization? Perhaps all of the above.
Elliott is personable and progressive, but not always passionate or persuasive — just like Davis in his day. Not that it ever hurt him on election day.
On the day Davis swung by to open her campaign headquarters, Elliott vowed to revive his vaunted, votewinning “Big Blue Machine” with her own “Big Blue Tent.” She told supporters they needed to broaden the party’s base of voter support, because “Ontarians rejected the politics of division.”
But stretching the big tent could bend it out of shape. At next month’s convention, Elliott first has to sew things up. Only then can she push the Tories in directions they haven’t taken in decades — since Davis’s day. Martin Regg Cohn’s Ontario politics column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. mcohn@thestar.ca, Twitter: @reggcohn