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Now that Jack MacLaren is out of Ontario’s Progressive Conservative party, his former colleagues are out to crush him.
Tory leader Patrick Brown’s press team made sure everybody possible heard the Kanata MPP’s blowup in a radio interview Monday afternoon that was supposed to be his reintroduction to his voters as the first legislator in the populist Trillium party. Instead, he shouted down the line at CFRA host Evan Solomon, who kept interrupting him with questions about the exact chronology of his expulsion from his party as MacLaren tried to give speeches about democracy.
Deputy leader and Leeds-Grenville MPP Steve Clark went out at Queen’s Park to praise Brown’s decision to expel MacLaren from the party after a video went public — from 2012, mind you — of MacLaren saying after the next election the Tories would do all kinds of things they wouldn’t tell voters about in advance.
“I think our leader was well within his rights to turf Mr. MacLaren,” Clark told the Toronto press corps. “Our caucus supports him 100 per cent. As an eastern Ontarian, I think it will be celebrated in our neck of the woods.”
(MacLaren has publicly said he’d intended to quit the Tories anyway and Brown just sandbagged him. In support of his version of events, he had Trillium party literature ready to distribute almost immediately. MacLaren didn’t respond to Citizen requests for comment.)
Nepean-Carleton MPP Lisa MacLeod gave interviews calling on MacLaren to resign his Carleton-Mississippi Mills seat and popped onto Twitter to talk about what a boob he is.
He went to one event 12 years ago with a few people. I do remember him organizing against me & some other MPPS. Not a team player. Bye bye. https://t.co/QhkhmzH5D1
— Lisa MacLeod (@MacLeodLisa) May 28, 2017
Now that MacLaren’s outside their tent, the Tories want to end what’s left of his political career. Absolutely murder it.
Part of it is that they just don’t like him. MacLaren knocked party stalwart Norm Sterling out of the party nomination before the 2011 election as part of the volatile landowners’ movement’s foray into elected politics. The guy who blazed the trail, Lanark MPP and MacLaren in-law Randy Hillier, learned how to work within the Progressive Conservative party but MacLaren never did.
By sticking around, MacLaren threatens to split the conservative vote in the newly drawn Kanata-Carleton riding, which the federal Liberals won in 2015. In the last election MacLaren won 47 per cent of the vote to Liberal Rosalyn Stevens’ 32 per cent, and in spite of his numerous scandals, he might hold enough of those voters to make the race competitive in 2018.
MacLaren had not secured his nomination in Kanata-Carleton; the party has been quick to hold nomination votes for the 2018 election, but not there. The story goes that Brown and his brain trust were hoping that his challengers, activist doctor Merrilee Fullerton and retired cop Rick Keindel, would do to him what he did to Sterling and he’d wander off defeated — but when it seemed his loyal landowner supporters might be strong enough to fight those two off, the party trotted out the 2012 video.
Brown’s spokesman Nick Bergamini simply didn’t answer when I put this hypothesis to him except to refer me to Clark’s broadside against his former caucusmate.
The party brass has spent a lot of capital on disqualifying candidates since party president, chief organizer, friend of Brown and former MP Rick Dykstra failed to organize his way to his own nomination in Niagara last fall, losing it to the teenaged social conservative Sam Oosterhoff. Hey, that’s what happens with open nominations, Brown said at the time.
Since then, nominations all over Ontario have been marred by candidates’ claiming they’ve been denied permission from the party to run or could only do so with the deck stacked against them. Sometimes candidates have been told no just hours before nomination meetings, after they’ve spent weeks or months signing up new members.
Of course it’s comforting to believe you’ve been cheated out of a nomination you deserved. But the sheer number and depth of these controversies is extraordinary.
When the party disqualified would-be candidate Derek Duval in Glengarry-Prescott-Russell — he’s the guy who shot that video at a drinky hockey tournament that had a guy eating poutine off a hockey stick and said the party thought the poutine was a hamster — he had supporters like the mayor of Hawkesbury stick up for him.
When André Marin showed up at the Tories’ door before the Ottawa-Vanier byelection last year, they got their existing candidate, Cameron Montgomery, out of the race by promising him the nomination in next-door Orléans, never mind who else might have wanted to run.
In Carleton, ex-councillor Doug Thompson ran and then dropped out after concluding party politics was too vicious for him. Late-enterer Jay Tysick was disqualified.
In Ottawa West-Nepean, the former Senate leader and Stephen Harper ally Marjory LeBreton is among those alleging that Karma Macgregor’s nomination is illegitimate because, whoopsie, there were allegedly more ballots in the boxes than there were eligible voters when Macgregor pipped fellow candidate Jeremy Roberts at the post. Macgregor is the mother of Tamara Macgregor, Brown’s deputy chief of staff. Roberts is appealing the results.
These problems are all just in Ottawa. Similar cases are all over Ontario.
Movement social conservatives are already livid with Brown over his volte-face on sex education. His support for pricing carbon-dioxide emissions to fight climate change alienated other supporters two ways: some don’t think climate change is a thing government should do something about at all; others didn’t like the way he sprang it on them at a convention that was supposed to kick off a painstaking process of reconsidering what the Progressive Conservatives stand for.
Now add whatever landowners’-rights and Anglo-rights types that weren’t already among the exasperated.
To win an election, a party needs strong candidates and it needs fired-up volunteers. It needs people knocking on doors, banging in signs, making calls, convincing their families and neighbours. Ex-loyalists don’t have to vow revenge to hurt a party’s chances — they just have to decide to show up for one night of canvassing instead of three, not pick up a phone, have one less-enthusiastic conversation. Distrust and frustration make for slow bleeds.
Carleton is a must-win for a Tory party with ambitions. Kanata-Carleton, Orléans and Ottawa West-Nepean are all on the hit list. The seats have been rearranged a couple of times since the party last won power in 1999, but back then all those areas were Tory blue. Glengarry-Prescott-Russell would be a nice pickup.
The Tories’ position, a year out from the next election, looks good on paper but it’s not so strong that they can take seats for granted. Brown’s bet is that by carving off all the inconvenient elements of his party, he’ll have an appealing mainstream alternative to the Liberals ready to offer to moderate voters in 2018.
Assuming the party still has a base left.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
Tory leader Patrick Brown’s press team made sure everybody possible heard the Kanata MPP’s blowup in a radio interview Monday afternoon that was supposed to be his reintroduction to his voters as the first legislator in the populist Trillium party. Instead, he shouted down the line at CFRA host Evan Solomon, who kept interrupting him with questions about the exact chronology of his expulsion from his party as MacLaren tried to give speeches about democracy.
Deputy leader and Leeds-Grenville MPP Steve Clark went out at Queen’s Park to praise Brown’s decision to expel MacLaren from the party after a video went public — from 2012, mind you — of MacLaren saying after the next election the Tories would do all kinds of things they wouldn’t tell voters about in advance.
“I think our leader was well within his rights to turf Mr. MacLaren,” Clark told the Toronto press corps. “Our caucus supports him 100 per cent. As an eastern Ontarian, I think it will be celebrated in our neck of the woods.”
(MacLaren has publicly said he’d intended to quit the Tories anyway and Brown just sandbagged him. In support of his version of events, he had Trillium party literature ready to distribute almost immediately. MacLaren didn’t respond to Citizen requests for comment.)
Nepean-Carleton MPP Lisa MacLeod gave interviews calling on MacLaren to resign his Carleton-Mississippi Mills seat and popped onto Twitter to talk about what a boob he is.
He went to one event 12 years ago with a few people. I do remember him organizing against me & some other MPPS. Not a team player. Bye bye. https://t.co/QhkhmzH5D1
— Lisa MacLeod (@MacLeodLisa) May 28, 2017
Now that MacLaren’s outside their tent, the Tories want to end what’s left of his political career. Absolutely murder it.
Part of it is that they just don’t like him. MacLaren knocked party stalwart Norm Sterling out of the party nomination before the 2011 election as part of the volatile landowners’ movement’s foray into elected politics. The guy who blazed the trail, Lanark MPP and MacLaren in-law Randy Hillier, learned how to work within the Progressive Conservative party but MacLaren never did.
By sticking around, MacLaren threatens to split the conservative vote in the newly drawn Kanata-Carleton riding, which the federal Liberals won in 2015. In the last election MacLaren won 47 per cent of the vote to Liberal Rosalyn Stevens’ 32 per cent, and in spite of his numerous scandals, he might hold enough of those voters to make the race competitive in 2018.
MacLaren had not secured his nomination in Kanata-Carleton; the party has been quick to hold nomination votes for the 2018 election, but not there. The story goes that Brown and his brain trust were hoping that his challengers, activist doctor Merrilee Fullerton and retired cop Rick Keindel, would do to him what he did to Sterling and he’d wander off defeated — but when it seemed his loyal landowner supporters might be strong enough to fight those two off, the party trotted out the 2012 video.
Brown’s spokesman Nick Bergamini simply didn’t answer when I put this hypothesis to him except to refer me to Clark’s broadside against his former caucusmate.
The party brass has spent a lot of capital on disqualifying candidates since party president, chief organizer, friend of Brown and former MP Rick Dykstra failed to organize his way to his own nomination in Niagara last fall, losing it to the teenaged social conservative Sam Oosterhoff. Hey, that’s what happens with open nominations, Brown said at the time.
Since then, nominations all over Ontario have been marred by candidates’ claiming they’ve been denied permission from the party to run or could only do so with the deck stacked against them. Sometimes candidates have been told no just hours before nomination meetings, after they’ve spent weeks or months signing up new members.
Of course it’s comforting to believe you’ve been cheated out of a nomination you deserved. But the sheer number and depth of these controversies is extraordinary.
When the party disqualified would-be candidate Derek Duval in Glengarry-Prescott-Russell — he’s the guy who shot that video at a drinky hockey tournament that had a guy eating poutine off a hockey stick and said the party thought the poutine was a hamster — he had supporters like the mayor of Hawkesbury stick up for him.
When André Marin showed up at the Tories’ door before the Ottawa-Vanier byelection last year, they got their existing candidate, Cameron Montgomery, out of the race by promising him the nomination in next-door Orléans, never mind who else might have wanted to run.
In Carleton, ex-councillor Doug Thompson ran and then dropped out after concluding party politics was too vicious for him. Late-enterer Jay Tysick was disqualified.
In Ottawa West-Nepean, the former Senate leader and Stephen Harper ally Marjory LeBreton is among those alleging that Karma Macgregor’s nomination is illegitimate because, whoopsie, there were allegedly more ballots in the boxes than there were eligible voters when Macgregor pipped fellow candidate Jeremy Roberts at the post. Macgregor is the mother of Tamara Macgregor, Brown’s deputy chief of staff. Roberts is appealing the results.
These problems are all just in Ottawa. Similar cases are all over Ontario.
Movement social conservatives are already livid with Brown over his volte-face on sex education. His support for pricing carbon-dioxide emissions to fight climate change alienated other supporters two ways: some don’t think climate change is a thing government should do something about at all; others didn’t like the way he sprang it on them at a convention that was supposed to kick off a painstaking process of reconsidering what the Progressive Conservatives stand for.
Now add whatever landowners’-rights and Anglo-rights types that weren’t already among the exasperated.
To win an election, a party needs strong candidates and it needs fired-up volunteers. It needs people knocking on doors, banging in signs, making calls, convincing their families and neighbours. Ex-loyalists don’t have to vow revenge to hurt a party’s chances — they just have to decide to show up for one night of canvassing instead of three, not pick up a phone, have one less-enthusiastic conversation. Distrust and frustration make for slow bleeds.
Carleton is a must-win for a Tory party with ambitions. Kanata-Carleton, Orléans and Ottawa West-Nepean are all on the hit list. The seats have been rearranged a couple of times since the party last won power in 1999, but back then all those areas were Tory blue. Glengarry-Prescott-Russell would be a nice pickup.
The Tories’ position, a year out from the next election, looks good on paper but it’s not so strong that they can take seats for granted. Brown’s bet is that by carving off all the inconvenient elements of his party, he’ll have an appealing mainstream alternative to the Liberals ready to offer to moderate voters in 2018.
Assuming the party still has a base left.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
