Reflections on John Tory

I never had much faith that John Tory could passionately ignite center-right voters. My impressions when I met him the night he won the leadership was that he was a nice man but not conservative enough to jazz up the base and not charismatic enough to get anyone else. He did well in a small crowd of mostly Red Tories by the Esplanade that night, but that's a biased crowd. How would he fare in a general election?

Well in 2007, we found out, to disastrous consequences. I celebrated a minor win in Peter Shurman's election as my MPP. But the party suffered a severe blow.

Why did John Tory essentially fail? The attitude of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party under Ernie Eves was that blue Tories were in the bag. That all they had to do was go after centrist voters and win government. After all, where will the blue Tories go? Well we know where they went. They stayed home while McGuinty coasted to victory.

John Tory simply picked up where Eves left off. To great disaster. In the 2007 provincial election, he offered up a liberal platform with a big government promise to fund religious schools. It was radioactive and sometimes I fear that the party will be reminded of it in the next general election. So not only did he offer a wishy washy platform, he attached a wedge issue on top of it. No energizing the base and on top of that, alienating many potential voters who were eager to give McGuinty the boot (Tory started the election ahead in the polls). It was so bad that he lost his own Toronto riding in the election and was forced into political exile.

Then he spent 17 months trying to push one member aside so he could run. He picked one of the bluest ridings in the province. A riding that went to the PC with a 10,000+ vote margin of victory in an election that they lost everywhere else: the rural riding of Halliburton-Kawartha Lakes-Brock.

So what happened to that 10,000 vote plurality? About 9,900 of them decided not to show up. Some of the left parties' votes went the Liberals' way. Result? 900 vote Liberal victory and the leader of our party denied a seat again.

Well do you blame those 9,900? They are blue conservatives who wanted a local blue conservative to vote for. Not a red Tory from Toronto who was only running in their riding because it was just available for him to run in. No attachment to the riding. No home in the riding. And they won't vote Liberal or NDP. So why wouldn't they stay home?

You can argue that one factor is that this was a special election. Had this been a general election, they probably would have voted, but then they wouldn't have Mr. Tory has an option. But this special election had a smug feeling to it. It was all about the Red Tories saying: "we have come to cash the blank check that is our blue base." When they came, they found that the account was in NSF.

Let me tell you something about blue Tories. They think they can get along just fine without government and they'll stay home if you don't offer them a real choice. Just because you have the word Conservative in your party's name and you're the leader doesn't mean they'll get excited about you running. The blue Tories will stay home if you offer them Liberal-lite.

It's time to get back to the path Mike Harris set us on. It won back-to-back majorities. The Eves/Tory era, well, it's nothing to brag about to say the least.