We haven't heard much from the PC Party of Ontario recently, save for Patrick Brown's decision to support the Ontario Liberals' motion condemning Islamophobia and his scoring some easy points off the government when it came to calling them out over disconnecting some Ontario residents' hydro in the dead of winter.

Supporting Wynne's anti-Islamophobia motion may have been the last straw for some as far as Brown was concerned, but all in all, his choice to go along to get along rated relatively low on the PCPO botch-o-meter.  There was nothing to be gained from getting involved in a battle over semantics with the Liberals while a similar fight is taking place at the federal level and crowding out provincial politics in general.

This calm spot, and others like it, is a time when the PCPO can repair the damage caused by their previous missteps.  Unfortunately, they're so battle weary and the party's top brass is so completely committed to maintaining a low profile that they never do take advantage of the lack of scrutiny.  They just cruise along in their comfort zone, blithely ignoring signals from the membership and the media, pretending everything is A-OK.

At the best of times, the PCPO is actively disdainful of their membership.  As I've said previously, despite the fact that the party's decisions to immolate themselves in the midst of previous election campaigns and by-elections always came from the very top, it's the rank-and-file who gets the blame each time for "distracting" the party.  So, you can count on any advice offered up from below to be acknowledged with a smile and ignored.

It's too bad, because the reason why the base is so restive and angry is because they don't feel like they're being listened to.  If the top brass actually heard out the members until they stopped yelling, things might improve.  Sadly, the PCPO brain trust has come up with some of the most creative excuses and spin I've ever seen and heard for not taking this step.

After listening to members complain about the party for years, I've done the work of curating those comments into 5 simple suggestions that really aren't that hard to implement:

Stop pretending nobody is watching you, or is too mad at the Liberals to notice your screw-ups

The Liberals are sure good at pointing out that conservatives are being a bunch of big fat hypocrites, aren't they?  We recently saw this at the federal level, where the Liberals discovered that Rona Ambrose was criticizing Justin Trudeau for vacationing on the Aga Khan's private island while she herself was lounging on an oil billionaire's yacht.  Whoops!

Even if Team Blue manages to squiggle out of these embarrassing scrapes, as Ambrose did, the fact is that she thought nobody would notice or care.  And if the PCPO falls into that trap, they will end up swinging and missing like the CPC did.

It's getting near budget time, for example, and the PCPO will begin their annual litany of complaints over overspending.  Fair game, but has anyone checked if the party's MPP's voted themselves another pay raise recently?

Hear out your worst critics instead of assuming they'll never listen to you

I never understood the CPC's strategy of using criticisms from the so-called "far-right" to burnish their own supposedly moderate credentials, especially since the architect of this theory, Tom Flanagan, eventually found himself under the wheels of the bus.

Patrick Brown is playing his own version of this game.  You see, he tried listening to those awful so-cons and the Rebel crew and all he got for it was more trouble, so he now has an excuse to ignore them.

As we saw with the Oosterhoof debacle, however, shoving the more radical elements of the party into the closet works in the short term but creates problems in the long term, because- as I said earlier- ignoring people makes them angrier.  Like it or not, Brown will have to deal with attacks from the so-cons and he'll have to push back against them, or lose the argument by default.

Call people back

I don't really need to explain this one too much, do I?  The PCPO has admittedly gotten a little better on this front since the Hudak regime, but it's still not where it needs to be.

"I'm busy" isn't an excuse for not welcoming new party members or potential nomination candidates with open arms.  We're all busy, and not everyone knows as much as the insiders.  Regardless of what someone has said or done in the past, or even if they were a Liberal yesterday, they still deserve a fair kick at the can.  We may not like it, but that's the process.

This seems as good of a time as any to remind various party stalwarts that complaining on Facebook about someone's lack of credentials makes you look defensive and scared, and that you care more about protecting your spot than sharing it with others.

Bozo eruptions don't lose elections- freakouts over bozo eruptions do

An astonishing number of PCPO activists believe they can go an entire election without something bad or controversial happening to the party.  As if the Liberals will just wear their shame into defeat.

Even if this has actually happened in the past with the short-lived Peterson government, it's unlikely that Kathleen Wynne will just go quietly into the night.  If nothing else, past behaviour will predict future behaviour.

So can we please stop panicking over every little wheel wobble?  Can't we just assume that the left will attack us no matter what we do, and deal with the issue decisively instead of pretending like it doesn't bother us?

Try being authentic for a change

As I said at the beginning of this article, not attacking the Liberals when there is nothing to be gained from it makes sense.  The problem is that Brown's PCPO refuses to attack when it's needed, which is in response to Liberal attacks.

During the John Tory years the same mistake was made.  The party calculated that butter would not melt in Tory's mouth, and that any attacks on the man would make the attacker look unhinged and ridiculous.  Maybe so, but the attacks clearly stung Tory, and worse yet, he never responded until it was too late.  So much for Tory the Unassailable.

In the Hudak years, not much was made of Tim's character because the party seemed to have learned that making your leader out to be a moral exemplar created a ridiculously high bar, but they forgot to give Tim a coherent personality to speak of.  Depending on the day of the week you would get Fake Smile Tim or Angry Tim, and you never got Responds To Liberal Attacks Effectively Tim.  If you look at Hudak's relaxed and personable personal conduct since leaving the PCPO, you see just how much of a put-on his acts were.

Now with Brown as leader the party has continued to divert attention away from his personal life, putting out inspiring stories about overcoming stutters and writing to Brian Mulroney about acid rain.  All very heartwarming, but how does this make Brown the kind of guy you can relate to?  Can he tell a joke?  Did he ever get pulled over for speeding?  If you prick him, will he bleed?

Patrick Brown could and should be allowed to relax and have fun every so often.  The fact that the party can't let him do that shows how scared they really are.  But what would you expect from a party who claims that they are constantly blindsided by attacks that everyone else could see coming a mile away?

Written by Josh Lieblein

On Wednesday of the new spring session at Queen's Park, the Liberals attempted to stanch some of the political bleeding of steadily rising hydro prices by unanimously passing Bill 95, the Protecting Vulnerable Consumers Act.

This new legislation amended the Ontario Energy Board Act, giving the Ontario Energy Board (OEB) the new authority to demand Local Distribution Companies (LDCs) not disconnect Ontarians in arrears for their hydro bills.

The wording of Bill 95 was unclear on many of the details, but the OEB by Thursday afternoon explained how it was going to proceed with the new law, announcing a ban on all disconnections and installation of load limiting devices until April 30.  The LDCs were also ordered to uninstall all load limiting devices and reconnect all households currently without power, while also having to waive any costs incurred in the process.

The OEB's order also divulged that there are about 930 households disconnected and 3,000 households with load limiting devices currently.  These numbers are substantially lower than the oft-cited-by-the-opposition estimate of 60,000 Ontarian households disconnected last year, but many of those households were likely reconnected in the interim, after spending days/weeks/months without power in the frigid winter months.

Although both opposition parties welcomed the Liberal government's action, they still claimed it was a case of too little, too late.

"Why didn't they time-allocate this bill leading into the Christmas break, well before these winter disconnects would've occurred?  Unfortunately there have been thousands of people who have had their power disconnected over this past winter and this all could've been avoided had the government been serious about this back in the fall," said Progressive Conservative MPP and Energy Critic Todd Smith after question period.

"This kind of change has been a long time coming.  People are stuck … They're in a situation where they have to make choices they shouldn't have to make.  Paying their hydro bill or putting food on the table.  Paying their hydro bill or paying for childcare," said NDP Leader Andrea Horwath.

Despite the temporary relief for struggling low-income households unable to pay their hydro bills, the rates continue to steadily climb, making hydro more and more unaffordable for many households.

Premier Kathleen Wynne admitted this week that her government's removal of the 8 per cent provincial portion of the HST on hydro wasn't enough, and promises more relief for ratepayers in the upcoming budget.

However, this week The Canadian Press reported the federal government is in discussions with the Ontario government about the payment of $25 million in damages and $3 million in legal fees a NAFTA tribunal awarded Windstream Energy, after the wind power company sued the federal government because the provincial government put a moratorium on offshore wind development, breaching the three parties' contract.  The Liberal government will also be mired in the rehashing of the gas plant scandal in September, when two former Liberal staffers from former premier Dalton McGuinty's tenure go to trial for breach of trust and mischief.  And finally, the Liberal's partial privatization of Hydro One and the rapid increase in electricity costs will make this a lightning rod issue for the opposition parties and emotionally charged issue for voters in the runup to the 2018 election.

Written by Graeme C. Gordon

The reason the Liberal Party's motion on Islamophobia deserves to die has little to do with the motion itself, and what it will or won't legally affect through its status a decree of Parliament, and everything to do with statement on Canadian society it seeks to make.  It's a revealing window into the mindset of Canada's current progressive establishment, and their upside-down understanding of the problems and priorities of the country they seek to govern.

The fact posing the greatest existential threat to multicultural liberalism today is that the massive importation of Islamic persons to Canada through a carelessly generous immigration policy has not yielded the joyous reception that was expected.  Along with a general preference for lower immigration in general, polls consistently reveal Islam to be deeply unpopular.  A 2015 one found the religion's positive approval rating at a mere 15%, while another found 33% of Canadians supporting a ban on Muslim immigration altogether — a faction of the population higher than those who voted Conservative or NDP in the last election.  A survey last summer found 75% of Ontarians believed "Muslim immigrants have fundamentally different values," a statement the Toronto Star tendentiously took as proof of a "wave of Islamophobia."

The great existential threat to pacifist liberal foreign policy, meanwhile, has been the persistent existence of Radical Islamic terrorism, an enemy of the west that is deeply irrational in its hate.  Those who subscribe to fashionable anti-colonial action/reaction theories of foreign policy (in which the crimes of western imperialism spawn understandable backlash from the imperialized) have struggled for years to explain why radical Muslims from privileged backgrounds routinely feel the need to indiscriminately slaughter crowds of civilians — often those of their own nationality and religion — at schools, mosques, gay clubs, and rock concerts.

The conservative conclusion to all this (or perhaps just the "logical" one, since it's shared by a number of atheistic leftists) is that western nations should wage war against Islamic terrorist groups abroad, while exercising temperance and skepticism of Islam at home.  In practical terms, this entails doing at least two things Canada's current government has pointedly refused: bombing ISIS targets in Iraq and Syria, and curtailing Middle Eastern immigration (or at the very least not raising it to unprecedented highs with tens of thousands of fresh refugees every year).

The progressive conclusion, in contrast, has been to create an alternate universe containing problems more consistent with their worldview, then attempting to take credit for solving those.  Since 9/11, this has entailed repeating a steady refrain that our society is in the midst of an "Islamophobia" pandemic — the true crime of terrorism.

Thus, we get Liberal Motion 103, which describes Canada as a dystopia home to an "increasing public climate of hate and fear" born from the unchecked scourge of "Islamophobia" and demands House Heritage Committee craft a strategy to help Ottawa "develop a whole-of-government approach to reducing or eliminating" it.  M-103 also demands the state "take note" of something called petition e-411, a piece of writing that regurgitates the old saw that there exists a vast, almost incomprehensible canyon between Real Islam, the faith that has "contributed, and continue to contribute, to the positive development of human civilization" in "all areas of human endeavors," and that "infinitesimally small number of extremist individuals [who] have conducted terrorist activities while claiming to speak for the religion of Islam," which we should all just get over already, geez.

A parliamentary motion does not need to explicitly suppress speech to chill free expression.  I myself was recently unanimously denounced by Quebec's "national assembly" for writing some honest words about how Quebec society is perceived in the rest of Canada.  The purpose of my denunciation was obviously intimidation: it was a clear statement from the state that that if citizens say certain things there will be consequences, so they'd better not.

Such is the case with M-103.  You can either subscribe to the belief that the vague and broad crime of "Islamophobia" — which the motion, of course, does not even attempt to define — is rampaging across the Canadian countryside, sowing "fear and hatred," or you can be on the side of what the motion calls "systemic racism."  The purpose is quite obviously to intimidate those who may be inclined to think or say that radical Islamic violence has something to do with, you know, Islam, while simultaneously making it part of the official Canadian narrative that hysterical, bigoted fear of Islam has reached peak crisis in a country that can't import Muslim immigrants fast enough.

This is what it looks like to be misruled.

Written by J.J. McCullough