And I Suppose John Tory Supporters Find Elections To Be Annoying Distractions…

So far over the past two months, I have taken some time to deconstruct the arguments put forward by those who would like to see John Tory survive the upcoming week as PC Party leader. As we enter into the final seven days, I will continue to focus in on these arguments, as well as other urgently compelling reasons why John Tory ala 2008 is the worst thing for the conservative movement in Ontario since John Tory ala 1993!

Today I would like to focus in on the most relayed argument on why we need to keep John Tory around. Well, actually, it’s more why we shouldn’t ditch him! For the past few weeks, a growing cry from the Together With Tory boat has been that a leadership race right now would be divisive, costly and strategically dangerous.

How it would be dangerous to the party’s fortunes right now I’m not so sure how, given that David Peterson tried a snap election back in 1990 and it cost him his job both as Premier and MPP for London Centre…and that was when the Liberal leader was actually popular and not seen as the lesser of evils like McGuinty is today.

As for both the cost and unity arguments, I could easily point out that if we just eliminated democracy right now in Ontario, we could probably enjoy a fairly unified province where we’d save a few billion dollars every year and various Red Tories who occupy the seats of the Liberal and PC caucuses could take turns playing dictator. Imagine all the peace it would bring. Let’s assume for a moment though that the John Tory apologists are right though. Given how much money Tory, Ruebin Devlin, Nick Kouvalis and countless others have spent in the last four months alone, I could take the pro-Tory argument to its natural conclusion and ask why Tory had to put us through this leadership question in the first place. As has been pointed out too many times in this past season, tradition states that the three strikes of losing an election, your own seat and your standings in the legislature (which is true when you account for redistribution) is enough to turf you as leader. Yet Tory is fighting “like hell” to stay in there! So, if next Saturday the vote results in Tory having to resign for either legal or practical reasons, he’ll have forced every dime spent so far to be wasted on an exercise that could’ve been avoided if he had just allowed the party to call a leadership vote in October. This would have given us a little more time to hold the contest, not that it really matters since we have 4 YEARS to do so thanks to Tory, but apparently time is also of the essence to his fans. It would have also allowed the healing to begin, which brings us to the unity issue.

If you still think that John Tory’s presence in the PC Party isn’t a controversial one, then I really have to question how much attention you’ve paid over the past three months. We have riding associations across the province entirely polarized over this man, with some sending almost two dozen delegates to London in order to boot the man back to Bay St., while others are sending their squads to keep him around at all costs. The youth and campus associations across the province are already leading the charge to create a separate party in the event Tory wins next week (again, I point out that Tory was part of the team that led to Reform’s creation due to their highly-centralized, yet grassroots-disconnected team running the show). Like it or not, loyalty is earned, not imposed and we know that there are at least 33% of PC members out there who have major grievances with Tory. Is this the kind of united team you want to have face McGuinty again; one where officially we’re all a big happy family, but realistically is unable to get volunteers out to campaign for, donate to or even vote for the party at election time?

Again, I don’t think it says much that pro-Tory forces aren’t able to resort to defending Tory based on any of his leadership merits, but even the negatory arguments that they do offer instead are conveniently circumstantial given the recent context. It all comes down to whether you think Tory, the problem in many eyes, can be the solution to all of the above-mentioned. If you think he can, then the only word I have to offer in response is “how?!”!