by arthur Weinreb, associate Editor,
September 27, 2004
Ontario’s Common Sense Revolution is dead. although it began to lose consciousness after Mike Harris won a second term in 1999 and became comatose during Ernie Eves leadership of the Ontario PCs, the revolution finally met its demise when the Conservatives elected John Tory as leader on September 18.
Tory is a moderate. "Moderate" is a polite word that is used to describe a member of a so-called conservative party who has little or no conservative principles and takes positions that are just ever so slightly to the right of those taken by liberals. and when you have a Liberal Party leader such as Dalton McGuinty who is not exactly in the far left of his party, there is now no appreciable difference between Ontario’s two major political parties.
John Tory is a throwback to the days of his mentor, Bill Davis. But since Davis was last re-elected we have had a taste of real conservatism. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher completed their terms. Newt Gingrich’s Contract with america has come and gone and George W. Bush was elected president. and in Ontario, despite all of the opposition and the occasional violent protest, Mike Harris did manage to form back to back majority governments. If Harris made any major mistakes, it was move to fast when the populace was used to governments making incremental changes. But Harris and his Common Sense Revolution brought real conservative government to the people of Ontario.
The biggest problem with John Tory leading the PCs is not that he will probably lose the next election, but that he will probably win it. Tory just has to find the centre and convince the voters that he is more honest than Dalton McGuinty, a task that seems too simple to fail. McGuinty, of course has continually lied about most major election promises that he made. and the promises that he kept, such as buying back MRI machines, weren’t worth keeping.
With a province being led by Premier John Tory, any vestige of true conservatism in Ontario will be gone for years. Oh sure, during the leadership Tory threw a couple of bones to the real conservatives in his party, like his promise to ban anyone who defrauds social services from collecting benefits "for life". That’s not a conservative principle--that’s just plain mean. In a country where a life sentence imposed upon the most brutal of murderers doesn’t necessarily mean life, depriving a 65-year-old woman of benefits because she defrauded the system as a single mother in her 20s is nothing more than pure posturing.
There is no doubt that the Tories would be facing problems in the next election had Jim Flaherty or Frank Klees, the two other leadership candidates, ended up at the helm of the Ontario PCs. But both would have gone back to the Common Sense Revolution that brought Mike Harris two consecutive majority governments. and a Frank Klees-led party would have been interesting because of his favouring two-tiered medicine. Martin and McGuinty rail against any aspects of privatization in health care, even though current private medical facilities are perfectly legal. It would be nice to have at least one leader of a major political party in this country who did not act as an enabler to all the misinformation that is spewed about Canada’s healthcare system.
The right in Ontario could learn a lot from the left. The NDP has to be admired for sticking to their core beliefs and if they can’t win power that way, they are content to remain in opposition or as a third or fourth party. The Ontario Progressive Conservative Party is right back to where it was before Harris was first elected in 1995--back in the mushy middle to gain power for the sake of gaining power.
The Common Sense Revolution--R.I.P.