Leadership race has risks for Tories,

Never underestimate the ability of the Progressive Conservative opposition to miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

First, we give you Vic Fedeli, 61. Possibly the province’s next premier.

Then we take him away, so we can play.

A day after the party’s public selfimmolation, with ex-leader Patrick Brown publicly tarred and feathered for alleged sexual transgressions, Fedeli seemed — for a few hours Friday — like the phoenix rising from the ashes to transmogrify the Tories.

The unanimous choice of his fellow MPPs to lead them into the June 7 election, he would bring stability and predictability to a party recovering from the perils of a puerile leader. If, that is, the Tories would only let him take them all the way to power with a formal campaign barely three months away, and the pre-election home-stretch already underway.

Such was the state of play Friday afternoon, when caucus emerged united behind Fedeli as their fullyfledged “leader” — no mere interim, they insisted. Elected MPPs sent a strong message to the party executive that there was no time for infighting, that it was too late to target one another in a leadership race before pivoting to their real enemy, Premier Kathleen Wynne.

But the party executive balked. Acquiescing to pressure from outside candidates who aspire to be premier with the party leading in most polls, PC president Rick Dykstra emerged late Friday to kick off a formal leadership vote within weeks.

That left Fedeli as the unencumbered leader for just a day, or more precisely, an afternoon. Permanent leader still to come, just in time for June 7.

Too bad, for Fedeli might have been the best thing to happen to the PCs after 14 long years in the political wilderness. And a welcome change from Brown, 39 — a fulltime professional politician since his university days.

By contrast, Fedelihas held a job outside politics. He’s run a wildly successful business that made him a multimillionaire. He’s overseen a city that made him a wildly popular, two-term, dollar-a-year mayor.

He’s a son of the North who’s travelled the world. He’s happily married, seriously funny and amusingly media-friendly.

Oh, and he’s had on-the-job training at Queen’s Park, as the top cabinet critic on the opposition front benches. First as energy critic, cutting his teeth on the gas plant boondoggles; and more recently baring his teeth over the province’s finances as budget critic.

True, he’s an old white guy in a suit, with grey hair to boot — and a fondness for cowboy boots and denim shirts. Colour him avuncular.

He’s calm in a crisis and respectful to a fault. Qualities that would stand him in good stead as he tries to right the good ship Tory lest it drown in tears of sorrow or waves of insinuation and recrimination.

Back in 2014, after the party’s last electoral debacle, Fedeli first sought the leadership yet never gained traction — overtaken by the early front-runner, Christine Elliott, and outhustled by the eventual winner, Brown. This week, by contrast, he had a posse of supporters led by the younger and newer dynamos in caucus such as Todd Smith, Michael Harris, Bill Walker and Lisa MacLeod.

Today, in 2018, the campaign to dislodge Fedeli as premier-in-waiting, and put caucus in its place, was led by the two most ambitious aspirants for the leadership job — former Postmedia and CivicAction chair Rod Phillips and lawyer Caroline Mulroney (better known as the daughter of a certain former prime minister). The two rivals compared notes Thursday, issuing twin statements decrying the elitism of those who would dare to appoint a leader in a crisis situation. Watching from the sidelines was Doug Ford, brother of the former mayor and son of an ex-Tory MPP, who has publicly mused about his Ford Nation followers taking over the party. They carried the day Friday. In an ideal world, a leadership race is a democratic ideal worth aspiring to. But in the real world of the provincial party’s upheaval, a lastminute vote seems like a charade chasing a chimera.

In today’s Ontario, PC leadership conventions are far from the democratic idea or idyll we imagine. The timing is tight, pitting Tories against one another and bleeding resources when they should be mounting a coherent opposition against the governing Liberals and laying the groundwork for their own march to power.

As Brown demonstrated with his 2015 shock-and-awe campaign that took over the party — replete with sign here, pay later membership tactics — a leadership race is easily gamed, hijacked, manipulated and defrauded by relying on recruitment with no money down.

In short — especially when time is short — a leadership campaign can be utterly undemocratic. No politician will dare say this publicly, for fear of being branded elitist, but most will confess privately that leadership conventions and even local nomination meetings lend themselves to mass recruitment campaigns that distort both demography and democracy.

The Tories have made their choice, and it is a call to arms. First against themselves, and only then against the governing Liberals.

We give you the new, improved, confused, Progressive Conservatives.