We’re all the losers in Tories’ stupid games
Queen’s Park right now is a wild game of 52 Pickup. You take a deck of cards, fling them into the air and everyone scrambles like mad to pick them up. I used to love this game — skill-free, chaotic and a big waste of time.
But I was 6. Mayor Patrick Brown is 40. Premier Doug Ford is 55. Finance Minister Vic Fedeli is 62.
Perhaps they are playing another game, the nature of which eludes me. A man accused of sexual misconduct accuses another man of “inappropriate behaviour” who reports to a premier who has just ousted two men after allegations of sexual misconduct. Then each man rolls a six-sided die and whoever gets to Baltic Avenue first has to guess who murdered Mr. Boddy in the library with a dagger and it turns out that Brown is Mr. Boddy and everyone stuck a dagger in his back and then they all sue each other, game over.
It’s a stupid game. In real life, you have to wonder if the Ontario Conservative Party is a cabal of incoherent, paranoid, sexually incontinent men with shadowy pasts filing lawsuits, issuing threats and hurling insults at each other.
And it’s all good fun until someone gets hurt, which turns out to be the environment watchdog and the helpless Ontario children in public care whose independent provincial advocate may vanish thanks to Fedeli, now distracted by misconduct accusations and his threats to sue Brown.
All this burst open after Brown’s eccentric and tantrum-driven book, Takedown: The Attempted Political Assassination of Patrick Brown, popped up on Wednesday from Optimum Publishing International, a peculiar entity relaunched this year from Maxville, Ont. with “approximately one employee” and a website littered with spelling errors and grammatical impossibilities.
Takedown is relentlessly petty. I haven’t encountered such a bridge-burning publica- tion since Valerie Trierweiler, girlfriend of former French president François Hollande, wrote a 2014 book about her husband’s affair with Julie Gayet, a woman so lovely that even I had a crush on her.
Titled Thank You for This Moment, it was described in reviews as “a triumph of selfobsessed raving,” an emotional storm in which Hollande “became a chilly, duplicitous, tyrannical rotter who said nasty things about disabled people.” Cue Patrick Brown.
Brown’s memoir is dripping with venom, calling his former advisers “rats” and his caucus “hyenas.” He snitches on Caroline Mulroney being her father Brian’s puppet, on Christine Elliott who “romanced” him with a job offer and then dumped him, and on Fedeli who he calls a “duplicitous” supplicant who always overegged his lavish praise. And then Brown mocks Social Services Minister Lisa MacLeod, saying she was “angry with everything, with everyone and with her situation in life” — for Conservative women must be muted in tone and modest in aspect — and said “members of caucus hated her.”
He writes that local organizers “believed that MacLeod made up the mental health issues she claimed to have suffered during the nomination races in order to endear the public to her.”
MacLeod had, with considerable courage, been open about suffering through a long spell of clinical depression that reached the depths in the winter of 2015. I do imagine that the alleged victims of all these men are profoundly frightened, anxious and depressed.
At this point, Brown lost the sympathy of his readers, and pretty much everyone else, too.
Depression is by its nature hidden, part of the reason many suicides are inexplicable to those left behind. What is a mentally hurting person supposed to do, sever a digit or two in caucus to convince the Browns of this world of their hidden pain?
And here we also are at the depths. Constant vengeful firings, allegations of sexual misconduct, acres of spite, a largely unqualified cabinet, the Ford family octopus, lavish adoration of the leader (Ford’s 21 standing ovations during Question Period, with everyone popping up and down like the State of the Union address), a Conservative fake news network, hate directed at journalists, climate change on the back burner, being nice to business and nasty to the working poor, a yearning for the 1950s, a lack of social skills, oddly dressed people with terrible hair … you can see where I’m going with this.
Or can you? Did Ford have to inherit his dad’s company, gerrymander Toronto’s wards and burn with hate for the urban elite before you notice the parallels with a certain global village idiot?
We will reach total Trumphood on the day Ford sends troops to the border to repel migrants. It will be Air Cadets. It will be the Quebec border.
Or perhaps it will happen when turbo-grievanced hysterics like Brown — and Maxime Bernier — lower the public tone, the Canadian expectation of civility, to a level below which it can never be repaired.