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After the shock resignation of leader Patrick Brown in the wee hours of Thursday, Ontario Progressive Conservatives legislators will meet Friday to pick a “parliamentary leader,” a job that has no definition in the party constitution.
It’s a sign of how bad a mess Brown leaves behind. He quit amid allegations aired by CTV News Wednesday evening that he made improper advances on a high-schooler when he was a Barrie city councillor and assaulted a young woman who worked for him when he was a federal Conservative MP.
The Tory caucus was united that night, agreeing that Brown’s declared wish to stay on as leader and fight the claims (which he categorically and completely denied) was untenable with a provincial election coming June 7. The MPPs forced him out at 1:30 in the morning. They knew that was the right thing, but now they aren’t sure how to fill his job.
“It was appropriate that Mr. Brown resigned as Ontario PC leader,” deputy leaders Steve Clark and Sylvia Jones said in a joint statement from Queen’s Park. “Now it’s time for the Ontario PCs to move forward together to elect a new parliamentary leader. We’re fortunate to have a team of talented, experienced MPPs and candidates preparing for the election.”
Strictly speaking, this is gibberish. A “parliamentary leader” might be an MPP who stands up at Queen’s Park for a party leader who doesn’t have a seat in the legislature. It’s not the person who’s actually in charge. The Progressive Conservatives need someone to be in charge.
But the decision on how to replace Brown will also be a pivotal decision on how they’ll fight the next election. Will they try to run a super-compressed leadership contest and have a permanent new leader chosen in time for June, or will they let an interim leader carry them into the spring campaign? All the options are perilous.
Wednesday morning, the Progressive Conservative engine was revving: they had a 200,000-strong membership list, an expansive platform, a professional campaign team, a leader who’d done a decent job of pulling together all the disparate pieces of Ontario conservatism (business conservatism, social conservatism, rural-populist libertarianism) into a functional coalition. But all this depended on the person of Patrick Brown.
Ontario PC leader Patrick Brown outlines his party’s platform for next year’s provincial election in Toronto on Nov. 25, 2017.
He increased the party membership fifteenfold.
His face is on the cover of the platform book, which was full of promises he supported, billed as “My vision for 2018.”
He assembled the campaign team, many of them people he knew from his days in the federal Conservatives. (Most of them quit when he initially wouldn’t; they might come back. They’d still be the team Brown put together.)
He united the perpetually squabbling clans in the party with the promise of impending power. He wooed star candidates and gave them copies of Bill Davis’s biography as a manual.
The Progressive Conservatives of 2018 are Patrick Brown’s party, now minus Patrick Brown. The only thing that outlasts him — and it’s not a small thing, to be fair — is the Tories’ bank account. They’ve raised far, far more money in the last year than the Liberals or New Democrats. Looking like a winner will do that. Whether the Tories look like winners now or not, they get to keep the money.
The usual duty of an interim leader is to right the ship after the storm of an election loss or a major scandal; parties whose leaders have retired gracefully don’t need placeholders. Usually it’s an elder statesman, someone respected and liked, but without further ambitions. The Tories have in recent memory turned to Bob Runciman and Jim Wilson for this. Solid and stolid. They get the finances under control, pay the rent, start mending the bad feelings left after a failure, put on a credible show in question period, and turn over a basically functional party to a new leader who has a fresh mandate from members to press into the future.
You don’t charge into an election campaign with an interim leader. You don’t ask voters to vote for your interim leader with the promise that if they do, they’ll find out later who the actual premier will be. It’s acceptable under the rules of our parliamentary system and yet ludicrous politics.
If the Tory caucus chooses one of their own for an emergency salvage job such as this, they’ll almost certainly go with someone Brown defeated. A Vic Fedeli or a Lisa MacLeod — longtime loyalists who’ve been through the wars, smart folks, but people Tories themselves didn’t see as future premiers a couple of years ago. This is the choice favoured by, for instance, Lanark-Frontenac-Lennox and Addington MPP Randy Hiller, as the only practical possibility. It’s also a likely ticket to another term in opposition.
If they go outside the caucus and take a risk on a yet-unelected star candidate like Caroline Mulroney (the finance executive, philanthropist and daughter-of, recruited to a safe seat north of Toronto by Brown) or Rod Phillips (a longtime Tory backroomer and most recently chairman of Postmedia, which owns this newspaper), or a Christine Elliott (who came second to Brown last time out and eventually resigned her seat) they might get someone who captures the imagination but they also might get an unexpected dud. And, again, they’d be telling voters to please pick this person, and then we’ll decide after the election whether you’ll get to keep him or her.
The third choice: a quick leadership race. The party would burn precious weeks of preparation time while would-be leaders argued in public, raised and spent money from donors, travelled. Practically, they’d all be trying to appeal to the party members who signed up under Brown. Whoever did that best would get a couple of nights’ sleep and then plunge into a much more gruelling campaign against Kathleen Wynne and Andrea Horwath, backed by people who said he or she wasn’t the best choice.
If the stars lined up, this process would yield a fair-and-square winner with a mandate, who’d caught public attention and could pick up where Brown left off. If he or she didn’t have Brown’s skills, couldn’t sell his platform, didn’t get his campaign team back, couldn’t unite the clans, the results would be catastrophic.
There’s really no time to think. The MPPs have to say a prayer, make their choice and not look back.
What the rules say
The Progressive Conservative party constitution lays out rules for what to do upon the resignation of a party leader. They’re simple but don’t allow much wiggle room.
The first thing is for the caucus — the party’s sitting MPPs — to choose an interim leader.
“Upon the death, retirement or resignation of the leader, and until the completion of the leadership election, the caucus shall elect an interim leader who shall be recognized as the leader by the party,” the constitution says. There are no restrictions on who the caucus can choose. If the legislators are unable to make a choice, for some reason, the group of eligible voters expands to include the party executive (its top organizers and finance people).
The appointment is temporary.
“Within eighteen (18) months of any event referred to in Article 23 or 24 (that is, death, retirement, resignation or a leader failing in a leadership-review vote), or at the request of the leader, the executive shall call a leadership election,” the constitution says.
The constitution gives the party executive a lot of leeway in how to conduct the race, though nominees need written endorsements from at least 100 people across 10 different ridings. Each party member gets a vote. The party needs to collect votes all across the province and deliver them for central counting, so organizing it isn’t a trivial job
The eventual winner has to secure a majority, though that can be done with multiple rounds of voting or with ranked-choice ballots.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
It’s a sign of how bad a mess Brown leaves behind. He quit amid allegations aired by CTV News Wednesday evening that he made improper advances on a high-schooler when he was a Barrie city councillor and assaulted a young woman who worked for him when he was a federal Conservative MP.
The Tory caucus was united that night, agreeing that Brown’s declared wish to stay on as leader and fight the claims (which he categorically and completely denied) was untenable with a provincial election coming June 7. The MPPs forced him out at 1:30 in the morning. They knew that was the right thing, but now they aren’t sure how to fill his job.
“It was appropriate that Mr. Brown resigned as Ontario PC leader,” deputy leaders Steve Clark and Sylvia Jones said in a joint statement from Queen’s Park. “Now it’s time for the Ontario PCs to move forward together to elect a new parliamentary leader. We’re fortunate to have a team of talented, experienced MPPs and candidates preparing for the election.”
Strictly speaking, this is gibberish. A “parliamentary leader” might be an MPP who stands up at Queen’s Park for a party leader who doesn’t have a seat in the legislature. It’s not the person who’s actually in charge. The Progressive Conservatives need someone to be in charge.
But the decision on how to replace Brown will also be a pivotal decision on how they’ll fight the next election. Will they try to run a super-compressed leadership contest and have a permanent new leader chosen in time for June, or will they let an interim leader carry them into the spring campaign? All the options are perilous.
Wednesday morning, the Progressive Conservative engine was revving: they had a 200,000-strong membership list, an expansive platform, a professional campaign team, a leader who’d done a decent job of pulling together all the disparate pieces of Ontario conservatism (business conservatism, social conservatism, rural-populist libertarianism) into a functional coalition. But all this depended on the person of Patrick Brown.
Ontario PC leader Patrick Brown outlines his party’s platform for next year’s provincial election in Toronto on Nov. 25, 2017.
He increased the party membership fifteenfold.
His face is on the cover of the platform book, which was full of promises he supported, billed as “My vision for 2018.”
He assembled the campaign team, many of them people he knew from his days in the federal Conservatives. (Most of them quit when he initially wouldn’t; they might come back. They’d still be the team Brown put together.)
He united the perpetually squabbling clans in the party with the promise of impending power. He wooed star candidates and gave them copies of Bill Davis’s biography as a manual.
The Progressive Conservatives of 2018 are Patrick Brown’s party, now minus Patrick Brown. The only thing that outlasts him — and it’s not a small thing, to be fair — is the Tories’ bank account. They’ve raised far, far more money in the last year than the Liberals or New Democrats. Looking like a winner will do that. Whether the Tories look like winners now or not, they get to keep the money.
The usual duty of an interim leader is to right the ship after the storm of an election loss or a major scandal; parties whose leaders have retired gracefully don’t need placeholders. Usually it’s an elder statesman, someone respected and liked, but without further ambitions. The Tories have in recent memory turned to Bob Runciman and Jim Wilson for this. Solid and stolid. They get the finances under control, pay the rent, start mending the bad feelings left after a failure, put on a credible show in question period, and turn over a basically functional party to a new leader who has a fresh mandate from members to press into the future.
You don’t charge into an election campaign with an interim leader. You don’t ask voters to vote for your interim leader with the promise that if they do, they’ll find out later who the actual premier will be. It’s acceptable under the rules of our parliamentary system and yet ludicrous politics.
If the Tory caucus chooses one of their own for an emergency salvage job such as this, they’ll almost certainly go with someone Brown defeated. A Vic Fedeli or a Lisa MacLeod — longtime loyalists who’ve been through the wars, smart folks, but people Tories themselves didn’t see as future premiers a couple of years ago. This is the choice favoured by, for instance, Lanark-Frontenac-Lennox and Addington MPP Randy Hiller, as the only practical possibility. It’s also a likely ticket to another term in opposition.
If they go outside the caucus and take a risk on a yet-unelected star candidate like Caroline Mulroney (the finance executive, philanthropist and daughter-of, recruited to a safe seat north of Toronto by Brown) or Rod Phillips (a longtime Tory backroomer and most recently chairman of Postmedia, which owns this newspaper), or a Christine Elliott (who came second to Brown last time out and eventually resigned her seat) they might get someone who captures the imagination but they also might get an unexpected dud. And, again, they’d be telling voters to please pick this person, and then we’ll decide after the election whether you’ll get to keep him or her.
The third choice: a quick leadership race. The party would burn precious weeks of preparation time while would-be leaders argued in public, raised and spent money from donors, travelled. Practically, they’d all be trying to appeal to the party members who signed up under Brown. Whoever did that best would get a couple of nights’ sleep and then plunge into a much more gruelling campaign against Kathleen Wynne and Andrea Horwath, backed by people who said he or she wasn’t the best choice.
If the stars lined up, this process would yield a fair-and-square winner with a mandate, who’d caught public attention and could pick up where Brown left off. If he or she didn’t have Brown’s skills, couldn’t sell his platform, didn’t get his campaign team back, couldn’t unite the clans, the results would be catastrophic.
There’s really no time to think. The MPPs have to say a prayer, make their choice and not look back.
What the rules say
The Progressive Conservative party constitution lays out rules for what to do upon the resignation of a party leader. They’re simple but don’t allow much wiggle room.
The first thing is for the caucus — the party’s sitting MPPs — to choose an interim leader.
“Upon the death, retirement or resignation of the leader, and until the completion of the leadership election, the caucus shall elect an interim leader who shall be recognized as the leader by the party,” the constitution says. There are no restrictions on who the caucus can choose. If the legislators are unable to make a choice, for some reason, the group of eligible voters expands to include the party executive (its top organizers and finance people).
The appointment is temporary.
“Within eighteen (18) months of any event referred to in Article 23 or 24 (that is, death, retirement, resignation or a leader failing in a leadership-review vote), or at the request of the leader, the executive shall call a leadership election,” the constitution says.
The constitution gives the party executive a lot of leeway in how to conduct the race, though nominees need written endorsements from at least 100 people across 10 different ridings. Each party member gets a vote. The party needs to collect votes all across the province and deliver them for central counting, so organizing it isn’t a trivial job
The eventual winner has to secure a majority, though that can be done with multiple rounds of voting or with ranked-choice ballots.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
