A Mob That Is Mad As Hell

Martin Regg Cohn offers a succinct summary of the Ontario PC leadership race:

Mere months before the election, the province’s official Opposition sacrificed its leader in a scandal over sexual misconduct allegations; surrendered its official campaign platform in a policy panic; revealed the “rot” and internal wrongdoing in its nominations and machinations; and, finally, bungled the vote count virtually from start to finish, and ultimately in the aftermath.

Yesterday's vote count confirms two things: The party is deeply divided and it's deeply incompetent. Still, polls indicate that just about any PC leader can beat Kathleen Wynn. After the vote count fiasco, perhaps Andrea Horwath can run a "pox on both your houses" campaign and win.

But Horwath has her own problems. The last election revealed that she really doesn't have progressive credentials. And the memories of Ontario's last NDP government -- under Bob Rae -- haven't faded.

One thing is certain: the party of Bill Davis no longer exists. It has morphed into a mob that is mad as hell.

Stay tuned.

Image: You Tube

You Can't Go Home Again

Christine Elliott has run for the leadership of the Ontario Progressive Conservatives three times. The first two times she lost. Martin Regg Cohn writes that she was the right choice then and she's the right choice now. But this time the party platform represents a return to pre-historic times:

Modern sex-education in our schools? Roll it back to the 20-year-old curriculum we had two years ago, say most of the leadership rivals.

A future-oriented environmental policy on global warming? Put it in the deep freeze, the candidates chorus, lest they be burned at the stake by those fiery grassroots.

Walking a tightrope between Tory party diehards and the rest of Ontario — a living, breathing, provincial body politic that grasps global warming and gets sex-ed — isn’t as hard as it sounds. In normal circumstances, it’s easy as apple pie and fruitful lies.

But Doug Ford has been calling the tune -- and Mr. Ford "rarely knows what he’s talking about, but at least he knows what he believes in."

So, once again, the party is twisted in knots -- because it fails to recognize what the American novelist Thomas Wolfe wrote eighty years ago: You can't go home again.

Image: blogs.lib.unc.edu

Times Are Tough For Red Tories

The irony of the Ontario Tory leadership race is that deposed -- now back in the game leader -- Patrick Brown is the only Red Tory in the race. And his opposition is desperately trying to get  rid of him. Tom Walkom writes:

He’s also the only candidate vying for the leadership who is running as a Red Tory. That’s important because the Red Tory blend of sound economic management and moderately progressive social policy is usually the formula for political success in Ontario — for any party.

Now that Brown has decided to fight for his old job, his critics are getting harsher. Interim leader Vic Fideli has kicked him out of the Tory caucus. Tory MPP Randy Hillier has filed a complaint about him with the province’s integrity commissioner.

The Globe and Mail published a complicated story asking whether Brown had entered into a financial arrangement with someone seeking a Tory nomination (the answer apparently was no).

Political operatives, irked that he hasn’t quietly gone away, accuse him of putting his own interests before those of the party — a charge that could be levelled at any politician trying to rock the boat.

When a 23-year-old girlfriend publicly supported him, Brown, 39, was criticized for dating younger women. That’s an accusation that Brian Mulroney, who was 34 when he married 19-year-old Mila Pivnicki never faced. Nor did Pierre Trudeau when he married a young woman almost 30 years his junior.

I was never impressed by Brown. But his saga says a lot about what has happened to Progressive Conservatism. These days, being a confessed Red Tory can be a self inflicted wound.

Image: The Huffington Post Canada

Marching Backwards

After viewing yesterday's leadership debate, Martin Regg Cohn writes:

Ontario’s once-proud PC party may emerge from this renewal process having regressed — with nary an idea for the future economic, educational or technological challenges facing our province. Four candidates (three serious contenders, one single-issue contestant) were behind the microphones at TVO.

Quite apart from condemning one another, the candidates were at war with themselves — contradicting their own past positions and demolishing the party platform that, until last month, the party had put forward collectively as a carefully considered blueprint for governing Canada’s biggest province.

The platform was supposed to take them to victory in the election -- which is now three months away:

A proposed carbon tax? Repudiated by all with astonishing alacrity, even though it funds the party’s promised $4 billion in tax cuts and assorted election sweeteners;

A sex-education curriculum updated three years ago in our schools? Condemned by all with unseemly passion, based on the fictional claim that no parents were consulted and that parents must always have the last word — as if teenagers hang on their every word, because father (or mother) knows best. While joining in the chorus of condemnations, Mulroney alone mused that she wouldn’t undo the current curriculum (having lost her backbone on carbon, she recovered her voice on sex ed);

A higher minimum wage? Bad for business but worse for workers, Ford argued with a straight face and steady gaze. All candidates condemned the $14 minimum wage brought in last month and assailed the Liberal government’s law raising it to $15 next year. Oh, and dissociated themselves from the party’s platform promise to phase in the $15 target more gradually, by 25 cents a year until 2022 — still too fast, according to Ford and Elliott, who were having none of it (only Mulroney stuck by the platform’s slower 2022 target).

Cohn warns that chaos may be a winning formula. Donald Trump seems to thrive on it these days. Nevertheless, it's utterly disheartening to realize that Doug Ford is calling the tune:

The remarkable repentances of Elliott and Mulroney — who have long coasted on their images as progressives — must be a bitter pill for them both to swallow, and seems like a poison pill for many other Tories. Not just . . . carbon but consent issues . . . [have] taken the party back in time to revisit the sex-ed controversy that Brown tried to put behind them — until a sexual misconduct scandal undid him.

Tanya Granic Allan, the candidate of the religous right, only has one issue -- scraping the sex ed curriculum. These days, the Tories seem fixated on sex.

And marching backwards.

Nothing Has Changed

All three candidates for the leadership of Ontario's Progressive Conservative Party have declared their opposition to a carbon tax. Andrew Coyne writes:

When the Great Platform Revolt began, I had thought that their position would be just to default to the status quo, i.e. cap and trade, since a) this would not require them to do anything, b) the feds have said they would accept this in lieu of an explicit carbon tax, and c) the revenues the province collects from cap and trade, unlike a carbon tax, are invisible to the consumer. They could then claim to have averted the dread prospect of a carbon tax, while continuing to impose one via cap and trade.

But that's not what they're promising:

No, all pledge to repeal cap-and-trade, thereby guaranteeing the imposition of a federal carbon tax in its place: one that, as the platform boasts, would reduce the province’s carbon dioxide emissions by 10 megatonnes more over four years than what cap and trade would achieve. The sum effect of the candidates’ position, then, is to ensure precisely the thing to which they claim to be opposed.

The candidates know the base of their party. And, these days, it appears that the base of all conservative parties is petrified of the future. Rather than look forward, they prefer to look backward. The end result is that they always develop stupid policy:

As ever, the failure to embrace carbon pricing remains a missed opportunity for Conservatives: not only to prove their bona fides on the environment, but to replace all those existing schemes — and to make deep cuts in taxes in the bargain: to use carbon pricing, not just as a shield, but as a sword.

John Stuart Mill wrote: "Not all conservatives are stupid. But most stupid people are conservative." Nothing has changed since Mill reached that conclusion over one hundred years ago.