Whither John Tory And The Ontario PC Party?

It's been a month since Ontario's provincial election, and to judge by the news headlines since it's almost as if the entire exercise has been consigned to the dustbin of history. I suppose that amongst pundits, the possibility of a federal election this fall simply wiped Ontario provincial politics off of the radar as of October 11.

Particularly interesting has been the lack of activity by the Ontario PC Party. Although I myself had assumed that John Tory's failure to win his own seat had all but assured he would quit as party leader, it now appears that he’ll stay on. And even more interesting is the absence of any contender – serious or otherwise – emerging to challenge him.

Remember, these are partisan conservatives we’re talking about here – usually the ones quickest to pitch leaders overboard after they stumble. I don’t know whether to credit John Tory’s loyalists in the party for doing such a solid job in blocking any potential troublemakers from making waves, or to accredit this entirely to a lot of armchair all talk/no walk punditry from PCs dissatisfied with Tory’s performance, mumbling under their breath about him but either unwilling or unable to mount a coup to topple him. Perhaps the prevailing sentiment in the party is in fact that he deserves another shot after all. Or perhaps his detractors are simply too cowardly to express their views publicly.

Personally I am less concerned whether Tory goes or stays than I am about whoever the leader is in 2011 drawing all the wrong lessons from the stinker of a campaign the party just ran. There are of course those dogmatically centrist Tories who will tout the defeat in 2007 as proof that drawing outside the status quo lines is electoral suicide. And there are those who will agitate for a return of the Common Sense Revolution, noting the party’s 2-0 won/loss record under the tenure of Mike Harris vis-à-vis the softer, kinder versions of Ernie Eves and John Tory that have led to consecutive defeats. And while I’m more inclined to agree with the latter sentiment – i.e. let’s actually be conservatives again – the fear I have is that John Tory (assuming he stays) will behave like a mouse that’s bitten into an electro-charged piece of cheese.

There are two reasons that John Tory lost on October 10th. First, on what would become the campaign’s defining issue, he grossly misread both public sentiment and the capacity of his opponents to spin his own policy against him. And second, he didn’t give the media anything else to talk about besides that issue. You can count at least half a dozen policies of either of the Harris campaigns that had issues at least as controversial as funding for faith based schools, yet they didn’t seem to dog Harris the way religious school funding dogged Tory.

The reason? Because whereas Harris contrasted himself with his opponents on almost every issue, John Tory only contrasted himself with Dalton McGuinty on whether or not public dollars should flow to religious schools that aren’t Catholic. Oh, and that he would “keep his promises”. Too bad the problem is that he was making a promise that nobody wanted him to keep.

So next time around, can we expect that Tory will learn from his mistake, and not stick his neck out at all? Because if so, the Ontario PC Party has lost more than an election. It’s lost it’s nerve. It’s lost it’s rudder. It means we’ve morphed into the worst kind of political party, one that many of us live to defeat: an opposition Liberal party. You know the variety: the one that racks its brains first for the quickest recipe to get back into power, then worries about whether or not it actually believes in what it’s selling – or if it can actually be done once they get there.

The mistake that John Tory made wasn’t that he stuck his neck out. It’s that he stuck it out on the wrong issue, and only that issue. But that doesn’t mean we should play it safe next time around. Indeed, next time around will probably be even more difficult, since unless the Premier is the dumbest politician in living memory, it’s a safe bet that he won’t be raising taxes – and hence the primary weapon deployed against McGuinty in 2007 will be useless come 2011.

One of the unstated stories of the 2007 campaign was that the Tories seemed convinced there was no traction for a political party that advocated an actual reduction in government spending. This is a broad triumph for the province’s left: they have made the expansion of the state an assumption, accepted by all parties as a given, in the same way Mike Harris once made balanced budgets the new status quo.

The provincial Tories must not fall into this trap. Twice we have run on platforms strikingly close to the Liberals, and twice we have been defeated. The problem isn’t that we’re not enough like them. It’s that we’re too much like them. That’s not to say we have to have a CSR redux. But it does mean, that amongst the array of principles and policies the party’s membership supports, we must find those areas that overlap with a significant block of the voting public, and occupy that real estate.

But first thing’s first. The party needs to decide who is to lead it into the 2011 campaign, at its convention next February. I expect that John Tory and his backers will be making plenty of phone calls. So they should – he has some explaining to do. But I’d also urge the anti-John Tory sentiment in the party to either put up or shut up. Either show your knives, or put them away. Because whoever comes out of that convention as leader will need the support of the whole party – unless we wish to be stuck with a problem analogous to the Chretien/Martin or Dion/Anybody But Dion divisions that still plague the federal Liberals.