By Klaus Rohrich
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
During the 2003 Toronto mayoral campaign, I worked for a candidate who didn't make the cut, and in the process arrived at the conclusion that John Tory would have made one hell of a good mayor. Of course history has proven me wrong in that Tory didn't get the opportunity to show his stuff as the good voters of Toronto thought David Miller's plan to stop the fixed link to the Toronto Island Airport was more important than any other issue on the table.
I have often wondered how Toronto might have turned out had Tory managed to be elected mayor. My guess is it wouldn't be staring bankruptcy in the face, as Tory has a skill and discipline that David Miller only dreams about.
Now John Tory is vying to become Premier of Ontario and I can almost guarantee with two-to-one odds that he will not be elected. That's because Mr. Tory has chosen to embrace a platform that is a definite non-starter with his traditional base of support, those living outside the GTA and in rural Ontario.
If you were to ask a farmer outside of Arnprior or Timmins, or an auto worker in Oshawa whether he is in favor of his tax money being used to fund religious schools it's a sure bet his answer would be a resounding "NO", which I think will express itself in a rout of the Conservatives in Ontario in October, regardless of how long Dalton McGuinty's nose is.
While many among Conservative supporters are indeed spiritually inclined, chances are government funding for a Sikh, Hindu or Muslim school isn't high on their list of priorities, even if those schools were to fall under the auspices of the Ontario Ministry of Education. While Mr. Tory's proposal, if enacted, would be the right thing to do, given that Ontario currently funds Catholic schools, it certainly is wrong in terms of what voters want. I'm sure that while the Conservatives will gnaw away at some of the Liberals' traditional ethnic inner city supporters, it won't be enough support to offset the vast sea of secular voters who rightly believe the government has no business funding any religious schools. A much better, but equally unpopular campaign platform might have been the amalgamation of the Catholic school system into one public system.
The Liberals are gleefully making hay out of the Conservatives ill-advised (a polite word for stupid) promise. They're even turning it into a major campaign issue on which I believe the entire campaign will hinge. It's the Liberals who embrace secular humanism and classify religion as a kind of silly superstition. They propose to replace any religious spirituality with the religion of multiculturalism, which I believe will strike more of a chord among voters than the funding of religious schools.
As I wrote in this space a week ago, I believe that the voters of Ontario have a pathology on par with that found in some abusive domestic relationships. Proposing to do the right things is the last thing the majority of them are interested in. Frankly, I think John Tory would have a much better chance of gaining the Premier's office if he lied to the voters in much the same way that McGuinty's been lying for the past four years. What's wrong with telling the voters he'll fix healthcare wait times, upload social services back onto the Province and cough up capital funding to create and improve public transit? Maybe even promise that Ontario will unequivocally meet Canada's Kyoto targets all on its own.
That's the sort of thing Ontario voters want to hear, not what's fair and what isn't.
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