National Post Published: Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Weakened as John Tory is by the half-hearted endorsement he received from his party over the weekend, it will be difficult for the Ontario Conservative leader to go forward. But since Mr. Tory has said he is staying on despite the fact that a third of his party want him out, there is not much point in us, or anyone else, carping for his resignation. Rather, it would be more useful to start recommending what he might do to salvage his leadership and, ultimately, provide a principled alternative to Ontario's Liberal government.
It is, of course, only a coincidence that Ontario Tories gave Mr. Tory exactly the same level of support -- 66.9% -- that federal Tories gave Joe Clark in 1983. Yet on Saturday evening, it looked more like a clear sign from the political gods. When the embattled Mr. Clark garnered just two-thirds support in his leadership review 25 years ago, he immediately stepped down, putting his leadership to the test in a fully contested leadership race -- which he then lost to Brian Mulroney. Mr. Tory, by contrast, announced he would stay on as leader after a pause of three hours -- which was interpreted by critics as yet another example of his indecisiveness.
However, if Mr. Tory and his party are to have any chance of unseating the McGuinty Liberals in the fall of 2011, they must pull together. Mr. Tory's internal opponents must accept that he is their man for the time being -- and he must accept that he can no longer be the nice-guy centrist so thoroughly spurned by voters last fall.
In short, Mr. Tory must agree to undergo a complete political makeover.
From the perspective of his own party members, Mr. Tory's worst sin was that he cost Ontario's Tories any chance of winning last year's provincial election. His offer to fund religious schools with tax dollars -- in a province where every previous attempt to do so has brought only trouble -- was naive. But looking beyond that colossal blunder, Mr. Tory does have leadership qualities. He is an engaging and tireless campaigner. He worked hard during the last vote, visiting more than 80% of the province's 107 constituencies. And he produced a platform that, school-funding aside, provided an assortment of worthy prescriptions on crime and taxes.
But hard work and geniality won't be enough if Mr. Tory fails to confront Premier Dalton Mc-Guinty on potentially decisive wedge issues such as health care and native lawlessness. On both issues, there is a public hunger for strong leadership. Yet Mr. Tory has offered only minor tweaks on Mr. McGuinty's policies. The Conservative leader has refused to countenance any significant challenge to the public health care monopoly in Ontario. And his fiery-sounding press releases on Caledonia mask the truth that he is too timid in his election platform to prescribe anything more forceful than civil actions against lawless native thugs.
Mr. Tory must get out ahead of the other parties in articulating his vision for Ontario. Former Tory premier Mike Harris released his Common Sense Revolution platform nearly two years before the 1995 campaign. Experts judged this manoeuvre batty, arguing that voters would forget its contents by election time. But Mr. Harris judged it would take that long for his message to pierce through an unfriendly media to reach voters. He was right and came from third place -- a place the clipped-wing Mr. Tory can expect to find himself -- to win an impressive majority, twice.
This week's news that Ontario may be slipping into have-not status compared to other provinces will provide Mr. Tory with ammunition for his own revolutionary manifesto. He must develop a coherent, conservative plan for rebuilding Ontario's once-mighty economy, which has slouched badly under the Liberals. He must also find a way to raise Ontario's profile in Confederation again. Mr. McGuinty and his Cabinet have turned the province from honest broker into just another cadging open mouth around the federal-provincial table.
Even without the school-funding issue, John Tory still probably would have lost last year's election. That's because he never really convinced most voters that he had a plan, or even the will, to take the province in a substantially different direction than the current Liberal administration. If he's serious about taking the Liberals on in 2011, he's going to have to change that. Otherwise, he will prove right all those who booed his Saturday announcement to stay on.