Posted by Sudbury Northern Life
Toronto – The big debate in Ontario’s Progressive Conservative party is whether it should return to the far right in choosing a leader. But it should tread lightly.
Since John Tory, a party moderate, failed to win a seat in the legislature for a second time and resigned as leader, those most actively collecting support behind the scenes to succeed him both have some right-wing credentials.
Tim Hudak, the party’s finance critic, was a cabinet minister under Mike Harris, the extreme-right Conservative premier from 1995-2002. A sizeable number of Conservatives yearn for “the good old days” of his policies.
Hudak has the backing of some of Harris’s former, non-elected aides, a group into which he married. His wife, Deb Hutton, was close enough to Harris in opposition and government that when she spoke it was taken as coming from Harris. Hudak also showed his extreme right leanings by co-chairing an unsuccessful campaign in 2004 to get former Ontario finance minister and now federal finance minister Jim Flaherty chosen as provincial leader.
Flaherty was the furthest right of the candidates and a little to the right of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. He pushed for tax credits for parents who send their children to private schools, which help particularly the better off, and police “scooping” homeless people off Toronto streets and taking them to shelters, hospitals or jail, as a last resort.
Flaherty said often the Conservatives could regain government only by returning to the Common Sense Revolution policies of Harris and Hudak endorsed this to the hilt, saying their party wins only when it stand by its principles and does not water them down.
Hudak, in his own run for leader, will presumably stick to what he has said in the past, which means he will be very much like Harris, and those pledging support will expect it.
The other potential candidate gathering support is Christine Elliott, an MPP for only three years and – this gets complicated — Flaherty’s wife, a lawyer and capable speaker and MPP in her own right. Elliott has not shown a pronounced far right streak. She has urged Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty to spend more on healthcare and fund Families for a Secure Future, which helps people with disabilities reach their potential.
She once said she and Tory had “many more similarities than differences,” a statement wild horses could never drag from her husband, and almost her first act as an MPP was supporting gay rights, against which many in her party, including Harris and Flaherty, fought a long rearguard action.
But Elliott has the family knack of employing strong invective. She said the Liberals are “incapable of being straight with Ontarians and use phony numbers and inaccurate calculations” to pretend they have cut hospital waiting lists.
The Conservatives should tread warily, because moderate Conservative leaders kept their party in government without interruption from 1943-85 and Tory was almost level with the Liberals in polls in the 2007 election until he proposed funding more faith-based schools, which ended his chances.
When Harris left seven years ago, the public was fed up with his confrontational style and the weakened services his tax cuts caused.
Harris probably could not have won another election, although this can never be proven, and the Liberals have since won two elections partly by reminding of his regime. What makes his supporters sure now a Harris clone could win an election?
Eric Dowd is a veteran member of the Queen’s Park press gallery.
