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Patrick Brown has skilfully avoided coming off as a member of Stephen Harper’s supporting cast as he tries to rebuild the Progressive Conservative party in Ontario. Now along come these guys.
Former finance minister Joe Oliver is the latest former Conservative MP to say he wants to join his ex-caucusmate at Queen’s Park after the 2018 election. Oliver’s going to try for the provincial Tory nomination in York Centre, he said Tuesday, where 85-year-old Liberal Monte Kwinter has defeated all comers for 30 years but can’t go on forever.
Ont suffering too long from waste incompetence & scandals of Wynne Gov't. Ont can be prosperous & secure again with Patrick Brown as Premier
— Joe Oliver (@joeoliver1) October 25, 2016
Ex-MP Paul Calandra wants to run in Markham. Ex-MP Rick Dykstra lost his St. Catharines seat last fall and is in provincial politics now. Ex-MP Susan Truppe might have another go at the voters in London.
In 2006, a procession of Ontario conservatives headed for Ottawa behind Stephen Harper’s banner — former cabinet ministers like Jim Flaherty, John Baird and Tony Clement. They’d been senior people in the Mike Harris and Ernie Eves governments, people who knew how to run things. Between them, they’d been in charge of finance, health, justice, social services, energy, environment, transportation, and municipal affairs.
Clement had lost his Brampton seat in 2003 but both Flaherty and Baird kept theirs in an otherwise lousy election for their party. They resigned from the legislature to start campaigning federally. Admittedly they were in opposition against Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals, which was way less fun than being ministers, but they still put something on the line to sign up with Stephen Harper. They brought bagfuls of credibility with them.
Like Brown, Dykstra and Truppe were MPs who didn’t show off much in their years in the House of Commons.
We could say that at least they know how to win elections. But the other day Dykstra, installed with Brown’s support as the Progressive Conservatives’ party president, got beaten for the party’s nomination for the upcoming byelection in Niagara West-Glanbrook by a 19-year-old Brock student, Sam Oosterhoff. Oosterhoff’s backed by social conservatives Brown has alienated with his stances on gay marriage and Ontario’s sex-education curriculum.
“You guys aren’t used to an open nomination,” Brown joked in Ottawa Monday morning, meaning that a party that’s open to such surprises will be stronger for it in the end. Well, OK. But it’s also good if a party’s chief organizer can organize his way into a nomination he wants.
Calandra’s known for his stint as Harper’s question period stand-in, where he’d tell rambling stories about his family history to run out the clock, or just attack the questioner, rather than answering opposition queries. It got so bad that Calandra was shamed into apologizing tearfully to the Commons.
Then he kept doing it.
Only Oliver was a cabinet minister. He did a long stint at Natural Resources. Then Harper put him at Finance to get the Conservatives through to the next election when Flaherty quit. The fact a career lawyer and banker wants to run for the provincial party at age 76, when he could do pretty well anything he wants, does speak well of Brown. But Oliver delivered one budget, turtled when the economy soured, then lost his Toronto seat. As natural resources minister he attacked anti-pipeline types as foreign-funded radicals and defended asbestos exports.
Oliver’s partly occupied himself since by writing op-eds against Ontario’s climate-change policies that are difficult to reconcile with Brown’s position that Ontario needs to put a price on carbon emissions because of climate change.
Perhaps the federal Tories lost power because their quiet competence ran into the irresistible charms of Justin Trudeau, whose vapid celebrity won over voters who were just in a mood for change after 10 years of the same prime minister. In which case getting some of those mendicant Conservatives back into the mix will be great for the province and for the Progressive Conservative party. It’ll restore some of the rightful order disrupted in the Great Fluke of 2015.
Or maybe an important factor in the Conservatives’ loss a year ago was that voters got tired of watching them go around being jerks to everyone all the time.
Brown’s desire to get away from that has been implicit in his promise of big-tent conservatism, his energetic courting of untraditional supporters, his embrace of social liberalism. Bringing in members of the git brigade, ones not personally popular enough even to hold their own seats, will only undermine those efforts.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
Former finance minister Joe Oliver is the latest former Conservative MP to say he wants to join his ex-caucusmate at Queen’s Park after the 2018 election. Oliver’s going to try for the provincial Tory nomination in York Centre, he said Tuesday, where 85-year-old Liberal Monte Kwinter has defeated all comers for 30 years but can’t go on forever.
Ont suffering too long from waste incompetence & scandals of Wynne Gov't. Ont can be prosperous & secure again with Patrick Brown as Premier
— Joe Oliver (@joeoliver1) October 25, 2016
Ex-MP Paul Calandra wants to run in Markham. Ex-MP Rick Dykstra lost his St. Catharines seat last fall and is in provincial politics now. Ex-MP Susan Truppe might have another go at the voters in London.
In 2006, a procession of Ontario conservatives headed for Ottawa behind Stephen Harper’s banner — former cabinet ministers like Jim Flaherty, John Baird and Tony Clement. They’d been senior people in the Mike Harris and Ernie Eves governments, people who knew how to run things. Between them, they’d been in charge of finance, health, justice, social services, energy, environment, transportation, and municipal affairs.
Clement had lost his Brampton seat in 2003 but both Flaherty and Baird kept theirs in an otherwise lousy election for their party. They resigned from the legislature to start campaigning federally. Admittedly they were in opposition against Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals, which was way less fun than being ministers, but they still put something on the line to sign up with Stephen Harper. They brought bagfuls of credibility with them.
Like Brown, Dykstra and Truppe were MPs who didn’t show off much in their years in the House of Commons.
We could say that at least they know how to win elections. But the other day Dykstra, installed with Brown’s support as the Progressive Conservatives’ party president, got beaten for the party’s nomination for the upcoming byelection in Niagara West-Glanbrook by a 19-year-old Brock student, Sam Oosterhoff. Oosterhoff’s backed by social conservatives Brown has alienated with his stances on gay marriage and Ontario’s sex-education curriculum.
“You guys aren’t used to an open nomination,” Brown joked in Ottawa Monday morning, meaning that a party that’s open to such surprises will be stronger for it in the end. Well, OK. But it’s also good if a party’s chief organizer can organize his way into a nomination he wants.
Calandra’s known for his stint as Harper’s question period stand-in, where he’d tell rambling stories about his family history to run out the clock, or just attack the questioner, rather than answering opposition queries. It got so bad that Calandra was shamed into apologizing tearfully to the Commons.
Then he kept doing it.
Only Oliver was a cabinet minister. He did a long stint at Natural Resources. Then Harper put him at Finance to get the Conservatives through to the next election when Flaherty quit. The fact a career lawyer and banker wants to run for the provincial party at age 76, when he could do pretty well anything he wants, does speak well of Brown. But Oliver delivered one budget, turtled when the economy soured, then lost his Toronto seat. As natural resources minister he attacked anti-pipeline types as foreign-funded radicals and defended asbestos exports.
Oliver’s partly occupied himself since by writing op-eds against Ontario’s climate-change policies that are difficult to reconcile with Brown’s position that Ontario needs to put a price on carbon emissions because of climate change.
Perhaps the federal Tories lost power because their quiet competence ran into the irresistible charms of Justin Trudeau, whose vapid celebrity won over voters who were just in a mood for change after 10 years of the same prime minister. In which case getting some of those mendicant Conservatives back into the mix will be great for the province and for the Progressive Conservative party. It’ll restore some of the rightful order disrupted in the Great Fluke of 2015.
Or maybe an important factor in the Conservatives’ loss a year ago was that voters got tired of watching them go around being jerks to everyone all the time.
Brown’s desire to get away from that has been implicit in his promise of big-tent conservatism, his energetic courting of untraditional supporters, his embrace of social liberalism. Bringing in members of the git brigade, ones not personally popular enough even to hold their own seats, will only undermine those efforts.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
