I knew that the PC Party of Ontario was a haunted house full of old, unsettled grudges and thwarted ambitions.

But it wasn't until the re-emergence of Brian Mulroney  a man who ascended to the office of Prime Minister the year I was born that I understood what kind of ghost story was being played out under the auspices of PCPO Leader Patrick Brown.

For me, the PC Party of Canada has always been a dead letter.  The significance of the brand is lost on me, likely because those who claimed that the newer Conservative Party of Canada was a betrayal of some obscure legacy never bothered to make their case clear.

In their minds, they probably didn't have to.  Like so many institutional zombies in this country, the PC Party of Canada had been around since the dawn of the nation, and it was the team that you were expected to stick by through good times and bad.

And unlike the Liberals, who reinvent themselves every generation and exorcise the spirits of Liberal Parties past, Conservatives linger on and refuse to go quietly into the next world.

Thus, Patrick Brown's attempt to breathe life into what was once thought dead.  Thus, the announcement of "revenue neutral" carbon pricing and the constant sounding off about how modern and inclusive the party is even as it seemingly works overtime to alienate groups of potential voters.

So if the spectre of PC Party of Ontario President Rick Dykstra insisting there's absolutely nothing untoward about the bizarre behaviour of party members, activists and staffers at nomination meetings across the province seems bizarre and otherworldly, it's probably because you're like the one character in the horror movie who notices something is off and tries to warn the others to no avail until members of the main cast start dropping dead or are killed off.

The rest of the PC Party faithful don't notice that the walls are closing in around them because for them, this kind of behaviour is normal and natural.  For them, it's the Harper-era CPC and the Mike Harris PCPO which are the aberrations, especially at those times when those parties managed to successfully challenge the Liberal-imposed boundaries of what was acceptable.

The uncanny and supernatural only captivate the imagination because they are, in part, familiar.  Something truly scary has to be in some way recognizable and in other ways unexplainable.

So, the very thing that is supposed to make the prospect of a Mulroney backed PC Party of Ontario so welcoming actually makes it terrifying.  As tempting and familiar as it may be for older conservatives, the PC Party of Canada cannot rise again, because it is dead.  Any attempt to resurrect it will produce a Frankenstein's monster of old and new bits.

This is why the CPC and the Harris PCPO were comparatively so dynamic and full of life.  They were not the dead-and-buried PC Party of Canada.  But unfortunately as we have seen with Patrick Brown the spirits of that old party are constantly on the lookout for new hosts to possess.

And by rigging the system so that only the most eager young loyalists, those millennials who have lost any hope of a comfortable future and those hacks who are willing to sell their souls for a chance at real power, have a chance to rise through the ranks while independent-minded conservatives are pushed out, a constant supply of fresh, willing sacrifices are assured.

The dead walk in Canada, and at times outnumber the living.  And, since horror movies sometimes don't have happy endings, I cannot promise the curse will ever be lifted.

Photo Credit: CTV News

Written by Josh Lieblein