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"In flight snack en route to DC.  The original is crunchy, messy and delicious enough for everyone," tweeted the Premier of Ontario, atop a rather blurry picture of her, sitting in her airplane seat, about to bite into a traditional Dorito.

Wait a minute- a political figurehead wades into a divisive cultural debate with a polarizing tweet?  Gosh, where have we seen that before?

Yes, after grabbing headlines for calling Trump "dangerous for Canada" in the middle of the election that Trump won, and spending a good portion of 2017 slamming ex-PC Party leader Patrick Brown for "Trump-style politics" after he refused to apologize for comments he made, Kathleen Wynne has come full circle to lamely here comes that awful phrase again borrowing from the Trump playbook.

Granted, it's very hard for an Ontario politician's tweet to reach Trump levels (only 111 RT's and 790 likes as of this writing), so they must not have decoded that portion of the playbook yet.  But give it time!  It worked well enough when Wynne appropriated Trump's style last month when she took a position on the Tim Horton's minimum wage fight and left her critics sputtering.

It should be noted that while Wynne has broken the Trump Troll Tweet formula down to its component parts, what she's giving us is not an exact copy an exact copy would be noticed and called out.  There are no exclamation marks, no capitalizations, no random mispellings, no diminutive nicknames.

But there is calling out Ontarians by name, such as when Wynne referred to Tim Horton's founder Ron Joyce Jr. in her Tim Horton's tweet.  There is praising candidates by name, over and above the cries of the opposition.  The message is clear: If Wynne likes you, you get a pat on the head.

And to those who have displeased the Premier, or failed in some way?  Just look at what happened to Patricia "Steve Bannon" Sorbara, who was informed that she would not be returning as part of the re-election team.  Wouldn't you know it Sorbara responded the same way Bannon did, praising the Premier and accepting her decision.

Unlike the inscrutable Dalton McGuinty, who saved his passion for savaging the opposition, you know exactly who the Premier likes and who she doesn't.  Lynne comes by this naturally as someone who seems to genuinely want to be liked and is bothered by attacks on her in the way that Trump is.

Some of this is awkward, stilted, and calculated, and you would expect that coming from centrist Liberals playing at populism.  Trump's subordinates are often befuddled by his reversals and language, and while this may be damaging politically, it shows that Trump is an entity unto himself.

But, as I mentioned in my piece some months back about the Tao of Trolling the successful troll is measured by the magnitude of the effect on its intended target, not by how deft or witty it is.  And oh, how clear and present and obvious that effect is.

You see, Wynne knows she is hated.  And she knows that when she uses Trump's language and style, after spending so much time bashing Trump and putting the PC Party on the defensive for slightly resembling Trump, it will drive her opponents crazy in the way that Trump's opponents lose their cool.

In this way, all of Wynne's fans the ones who despise Trump and support her despite her worse-than-Trump unpopularity prove themselves to be no different from Trump supporters, who get a kick out of how he triggers the left even when the state of his Presidency is at its most chaotic.

You have to feel for politicians like Andrea Horwath, who try to make a virtue out of staying out of the PC-Liberal donnybrook, and who try to avoid tossing any red meat to her base, and end up pushed aside by this kind of Trump-triangulation.  Horwath no doubt believes there is no benefit to engaging in this manner, and that there is no place for this rhetoric in Canada.

Unfortunately for her, you can't stump Trump, and you can't outspin Wynne.

Photo Credit: Macleans

Written by Josh Lieblein

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.

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The Conservatives can reject their own carbon tax promise and defeat Kathleen Wynne in the June election

When the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party launched its policy platform, the People's Guarantee, the most controversial proposal was implementing a carbon tax.  Then-leader Patrick Brown was both praised and criticized for touting this decidedly anti-free-market concept.

Brown, as we know, is no longer in charge.  Two of the three declared leadership candidates, Christine Elliott and Doug Ford, oppose the carbon tax.  (Caroline Mulroney, who joined the race on Sunday, is leaning towards keeping it.)

Some political observers and party members have suggested Elliott and Ford are taking the wrong approach for three reasons.  Let's break them down:

  • The federal government has announced it will impose a carbon tax on all Canadian provinces and territories.  Ontario should therefore stay on board and try to find ways to make it work.

However, while the federal Liberal government is attempting to do this, not everyone is on board.  In particular, Saskatchewan is opposed to this economic strategy.  New Premier Scott Moe said in his victory speech last month, "The federal carbon tax threatens the livelihood of every farmer, every miner, every worker in the energy sector.  I will fight for this province, I will fight for our economy to ensure we do not have a carbon tax.  And Justin Trudeau, if you're wondering how far I will go just watch me."

That famous line, first uttered by former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, was also used by Ford a few days later.  Hence, the Ontario PCs could join the Saskatchewan Party in a court challenge against the carbon tax if they win this June's provincial election and replace Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne.

If United Conservative Party Leader Jason Kenney wins next year's Alberta provincial election and joins them, this could have an effect on the next federal election.

  • Section 18.7 of the Ontario PC constitution states, "Recommended Resolutions passed at annual Policy Conferences shall constitute the foundation on which Party policy and legislation is developed until the next Policy Conference."  Combine this with the Leadership Election Organizing Committee's Section 5(c) related to candidate eligibility "No person shall be a Candidate unless he or she … supports the aims, principles and objects of the Party and the policy resolutions adopted at the Constitutionally-mandated 2017 policy process" and opposition to a carbon tax is little more than political posturing.

Not really.  You can't be expected to come from outside the party caucus and membership, and go along with what was decided before you became active in the decision-making process.  A new leader should have the right to put their stamp of approval on a political party, and either reject or ignore any policy measure that they disagree with.

If Elliott and Ford are opposed to a carbon tax (or any other policy measure), they don't have to campaign on it.  The PCs are a democratic party, not a party governed by fiat.

  • The People's Guarantee was discussed, constructed and costed with a carbon tax in mind.  If we take this into consideration, it would be illogical and virtually impossible to create a new policy platform in such a short window of time.

While a complete overhaul of the People's Guarantee would be counterproductive, no one is calling for this.  Some tinkering would certainly be in order if the carbon tax was eliminated from the equation.  It wouldn't be easy but it's not an impossible task.

Elliott and Ford would therefore have to sharpen their pencils and find cost savings from other sources.  This could include: additional tax relief for individuals and corporations, cutting back on red tape and the bureaucracy, encouraging more private-sector influence, reducing government's role in social programs and transit spending, more fiscal prudence with respect to writing off daycare costs and reducing hydro rates, and so forth.

End result?  Ontario PC leadership candidates can legitimately remove the carbon tax from the People's Guarantee without too much concern or difficulty.

It won't hurt their chances of winning the June provincial election, either.

Troy Media columnist and political commentator Michael Taube is also a Washington Times contributor, Canadian Jewish News columnist, and radio and TV pundit.  He was also a speechwriter for former Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.

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In the wake of the sudden demise of Patrick Brown's political career, the hastily organized race to replace him as Ontario Progressive Conservative Party leader has thus far merited three candidates Christine Elliott, Caroline Mulroney, and Doug Ford.  None of those three are members of the caucus, and two of them have never been members.  One of them, Caroline Mulroney, has never held elected office at all, while Ford has only served at the municipal level, which is a very different kettle of fish than provincial politics.  But any way you look at it, a race that only consists of outsiders can't be considered a good thing for the health of our province's democracy.

Before we begin, let me lay it out there that I firmly believe in the traditional Westminster model where the caucus should both choose and remove the party leader.  It's a system that ensures there is accountability at the top, and empowers the MPs to do their jobs as representatives of their constituents while ensuring that the party remains the vehicle by which there is an interlocutor relationship between grassroots members and the caucus.  But that's no longer the way things work in Canada, which is causing more problems the longer it goes on.

Now, because we have turned over the power to select leaders to grassroots members in either delegated conventions or the increasingly common one-member-one-vote systems, we have created a system that was intended to be "more democratic" but instead has become a vehicle for leaders to create cults of personality and engage in what amounts to warlordism with his or her own party because they have been granted the "democratic legitimacy" of the membership to do so.  Elected officials, be they MPs or MPPs, are reduced to voting machines for the leader's whims, and grassroots party members increasingly have their power and roles reduced to being mere placeholders for support as the work of policy and indeed, sometimes even nomination is taken up by the increasingly powerful leaders.

Why this matters in Ontario in particular is because the problems with Patrick Brown, from his selection right to the eventual "rot" found within the party organization upon his departure, all stems from this unaccountable way in which leaders are chosen.  And the fact that the party is now looking to yet more outsiders to deal with the problem of this "rot" within their ranks show that absolutely nobody has learned their lesson from what happened, and is indeed doubling down on it.

And why this being enamoured with someone who isn't in the caucus?  Already there is talk about how they're looking for someone who isn't a "political elite" to come in and take charge.  While Elliott probably fits that description of a "political elite" given her history and experience, and it will be used against her you can be sure, the fact that this charge is being used against the caucus is a huge problem.  It's especially a problem when it's coming from other elected officials as we heard last week from sitting federal MP Alex Nutgall.  We also saw this kind of behaviour during the debates on Michael Chong's Reform Act, where several Conservative MPs decried that "elites" in the caucus shouldn't be able to override the wishes of the grassroots in order to remove a leader.  That elected officials deride themselves as "elites" is mind-boggling, because they're undermining their own ability to do their jobs and have surrendered their autonomy and ability to hold their leader to account.

The root of this particular attitude is the kind of populist noise that has infected Canadian politics on either end of the political spectrum, which confuses itself with democracy.  The notion that what politics needs is outsiders to come in and "save" them from the morass of politics, or to "drain the swamp" is exactly the kind of mentality that gave America Donald Trump, and we see echoes of it in our own discourse, and yet nobody seems to want to see that for what it is.  Add to this the wrong-headed notion that someone who had success in the private sector can automatically translate that into politics compounds this kind of belief into something that can be completely toxic to the political culture of the province or the country.  (And speaking of lessons not having been learned, we've proven time and again that you can't "run government like a business" because there is no analogous bottom line that can be applied, but people continue to treat this slogan as though it were a realistic goal).

Trying to assert that yet another outsider can come into the leadership of the party, with a goal of forming a government, is putting the party and in this case the province in the hands of another personality cult with a saviour complex.  After all, who needs relevant experience, or to have earned the trust of the constituents of a riding, when you can simply skip all of that messy business and insert yourself into a leadership position by making the most populist pitch to the party faithful and those whom you can convince to take out a membership on the strength of your name?  It's debasing to the system, and it's debasing to the way in which politics is supposed to be practiced. That we're continuing to pretend that populism is an acceptable way to run a democracy throws out the notions of accountability that is supposed to hand-in-hand with the principle of elections.  What this particular PC exercise in Ontario is demonstrating is just how far things have fallen in this province, that we think that our governance problems can be solved in such a manner.  Not just PC members, but our entire electorate needs to take a good hard look at the problems we keep signing ourselves up for, and maybe learning our lessons instead of repeating our mistakes.

Photo Credit: City News

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I know almost nothing about Caroline Mulroney but I know I don't like her.  In fact, it's precisely because I know almost nothing about Caroline Mulroney that I know I don't like her.

Whenever the Conservatives are out of power federally, a strong case can be made that the leader of the Ontario PC Party — and certainly an Ontario PC premier — is the second-most important conservative politician in the country.  As head of the Tory party in Canada's biggest province, he or she is the face of conservative politics and thought a plurality of Canadians will most readily recognize, and draw conclusions from.

Should she become head of the Ontario Progressive Conservatives, what conclusions are to be drawn from Ms. Mulroney?  The most obvious one is that all previous Tory criticism of Justin Trudeau — that he was a dangerously unqualified dilettante who only got where he is through wealth, connections, and a famous last name —was essentially hollow.  There's no real argument to be made that Caroline Mulroney, the rich, well-connected daughter of the wealthiest, most well-connected Tory prime minister of living memory is substantially different from the rich, well-connected son of the wealthiest, most well-connected Liberal prime minister of living memory.  Both feel entitled to the upper echelons of political power by virtue of birthright; both feel this birthright should silence any criticism a normal mortal would face on a comparably ambitious pursuit.

Fine, Caroline is more educated — her father, by his own admission to the Oliphant commission, having used money from the "cash-stuffed envelopes" he received from the arms dealer Karlheinz Schreiber to fund her expensive schooling in Boston and New York — but she's also less politically experienced.  Justin Trudeau was on his second term as MP of Papineau when he was made head of the federal Liberals in 2013; Ms. Mulroney hopes to make the premiership her first elected office.

Mulroney has escaped the younger Trudeau's initial reputation as a malapropism-spouting intellectual lightweight largely by avoiding the public spotlight (though this is itself a byproduct of her eschewing a political career).  Yet this has also left her a far more mysterious figure, lacking even Trudeau's early 2010's public profile as the king of political correctness.  A recent interview with the National Post's Chris Selley produced only stock partisan catchphrases that, as the clearly underwhelmed Selley put it, "didn't go anywhere surprising."  She is being framed as a "moderate" promising to "broaden the appeal" of the party and make it more "inclusive" — and other shop-worn cliches alert readers will recognize as the sort of things boring people say about hackish politicians.

A pointed trend of Canadian partisan culture is for party insider-types to rally around a candidate citing virtues that only really matter to other party insider-types.  The press, citing their usual highly-placed sources, then obediently repeat the "rising star's" narrative with compete credulity, and Canadians are given standard tropes about how "the fluently bilingual so-and-so has assembled an experienced campaign team and impressed many with their enthusiastic door-knocking."  Whether voters themselves have conveyed any interest in having this person rule them rarely comes up, and if it does, the voters in question are entirely theoretical — abstract good people like the "visible minorities and women" whom the Post's John Ivison imagines being drawn to Ms. Mulroney.

In the context of an inter-party election, such delusions don't matter much.  Since only about 133,000 or so Ontarians — less than 1% of the population — will be eligible to vote for the next PC leader (a number seemingly declining by the day as acting leader Vic Fedeli cleans systemic fraud from his party), an odd argument can achieve critical mass relatively easily.  As Tory grandees from so-con darling Monte McNaughton to CPC deputy leader Lisa Raitt scramble to Mulroney's side, the thesis that she represents the future of Canadian conservatism has already won surprisingly broad establishment support.  One expects there will soon be pressure on rival candidate Christine Elliott, whose appeal is often generalized as "similar" to Mulroney's, to abandon the race and get in line, a la Marc Garneau circa 2013.

When polled, Canadians routinely declare their democracy to be too dominated by powerful interests, and fret about who's fighting for them.  Kathleen Wynne's team is savvy enough to grasp the advantages of running against a blueblood like Mulroney, as is the Ontario NDP and Andrea Horwath, who in some ways really have the most to gain from an out-of-touch Tory leader battling a scandal-plagued Liberal premier.

But even if she were to emerge victorious in the end, Caroline Mulroney's meteoric assent from obscure child of privilege to head of our most important province would serve as a distressing reminder of the elitist logic upon which political power is awarded and distributed in this country, and the open contempt our system has for classic democratic values like meritocracy, earned popularity, and independent thought.  It would expose the Liberals and Conservatives as broadly interchangeable cynics, consolidate the triumph of marketing over ideas, and open the door to all sorts of "if her, then why not…" scenarios in which other silver-spoon relatives of the already powerful leverage their social standing to obtain political jobs they don't deserve and shouldn't have.

As is so often the case with truly bad politicians, Mulroney's potential for success is disturbing, but her defeat would be morally valuable.

Photo Credit: Huffington Post

 

Written by J.J. McCullough

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One of the ironies of Canadian politics is that NDP leader Jagmeet Singh's biggest political challenge likely won't be coming from the rabble-rousing, populist right, but from the establishment-loving, elitist left.

Why is this the case?

Well, first of all, it's important to understand that the kind of "leftism" favored by today's ruling classes isn't exactly the old school, Karl Marx-Tommy Douglas-David Lewis-style of socialism.

What today's elites have created, in fact, is a new brand of left-leaning ideology, one that basically mixes elements of socialism with elements of crony capitalism.

You might call it, "Sociacorporatism."

At any rate, it's a philosophy which on the one hand supports things like government intervention in the economy, social liberalism and battling climate change, while on the other, it supports freer international trade; massive subsidies to corporations and building the occasional oil pipeline.

This basically is the philosophy of Canada's Establishment, i.e. the people who hold positions of authority and influence; their main goal is to maintain an economic status quo which works to their benefit.

And for this crowd, the perfect politician is Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

After all, Trudeau comes from a privileged background, his friends include millionaires, billionaires and Hollywood celebrities and he's just left-wing enough to be trendy, but not so left-wing as to be scary.

In short, the Prime Minister can more or less be relied on to keep the Establishment happy.

But the same can't be said for Singh, because from the ruling classes' point of view, his party is an ideological wildcard.

My point is, when the elites look at the NDP they see a party whose ranks include battalions of left-wing activists, which is to say true believers in socialism, people who care more about the "proletariat" than they do about corporate profits.

This means they also see a party that theoretically-speaking might one day go all "Jeremy Corbyn" and embrace and promote a hard-core, far-left-wing, status-quo-threatening agenda.

And it's this possibility which spooks the elites.

Plus, more than just ideology separates Canada's ruling classes from the NDP.

There's also a cultural element at play.

Elites typically identify with upper middle class, university-educated, urbanites and while this demographic makes up a part of the NDP's base, many of its supporters are still Canadians from small towns and from rural Canada and many are blue collar workers — the kind of people Hillary Clinton (herself an elite favorite) once famously referred to as "deplorables."

So for both ideological and cultural reasons, the elites prefer the Liberals to the NDP.

That's not to say they don't see a positive role for the NDP, but that role, as leftist elites see it, is to support the Liberals.

Basically, the elites want the NDP to attack the Conservatives and only the Conservatives.

And this puts Singh in a strategic dilemma.

What if, for instance, Singh's pollsters and strategists tell him that if the NDP is to make any gains in the next election, it will have to degrade Trudeau's brand?

In other words, instead of going negative against Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer, the NDP will have to go negative against Trudeau.

Unfortunately for Singh, if his party were to actually carry out such a strategy, if he were to put his party's interests first, he'd be overwhelmingly condemned by powerful voices in the media.

You'd see headlines like "Singh's attack on Trudeau only helping the Right Wing!" or "NDP is Ensuring the Conservatives Win Election."

In short, he'd be portrayed as betraying the cause.

Needless to say, Singh would require special kind of courage to endure such a barrage.

It's hard to roar like socialist lion when the Establishment demands you meow like a Liberal kitten.

Photo Credit: Toronto Star

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For the Senate Liberals, it's been a rough couple of weeks.  Three long-time members of their caucus have decided to retire ahead of their mandatory date, and a fourth has announced that he too will be resigning once he wraps up everything he's working on, as he's just been elected to a new position closer to home.  That means that there will soon be just eleven members of the caucus left, with the recent rule changes in the Senate making the cut-off at nine for them to receive official recognition.

The way things have traditionally worked in the Senate, under the old two-party system, was that after a couple of terms by a government making appointments and replenishing the ranks of his or her party's picks, when a change of government happened, the process would start again, and it worked for the better part of 150 years.  Stephen Harper, however, on two separate occasions decided to starve the Senate of appointees, making a mass panic appointment spree in 2008, but letting the vacancies grow alarmingly by the time he lost the election in 2015.  When Justin Trudeau came in and started his new process, all new appointments came in as independents, breaking up the old duopoly.

That's not to say that breaking up that duopoly was bad it's been argued, effectively, that the Senate has been working better than it ever has with three groups in roughly equal distribution and share of the power, which limits the kinds of abuses that we saw previously when there was an attitude of one group letting the other one's sins slide because while they may not be in power currently, they would be in power next.  After the black eyes suffered by the institution in recent years, those attitudes have thankfully fallen to the wayside, and more robust processes are now in place to prevent some of the abuses and excesses we had seen.  But that the third part of that equation the Senate Liberals are now on a precipitous decline in membership.  Do they have any hope for the future?

I sat down with the Senate Liberal leader, New Brunswick Senator Joseph Day, to talk about the future prospects for the party.  There will soon be 15 vacancies to be filled, and the Independent Senators Group have stated that they won't accept new members automatically, but must vote on new admissions now that they're in a position to be choosier than before.  Prior to that, there had been a bit of an aggressive drive to get new senators into the fold in order to ensure that they had numbers to be an effective caucus group.  And it is also worth noting that there is discontent within the ISG, with one of the main points of disagreement being how independent they should be.

"We're always open to talk to anyone who would want to join our group," says Day.  "I try to, in some of my speeches, explain to everybody in the Chamber who cares to listen where we fit in the political spectrum.  What's our general philosophy?  It's a liberal, open, caring philosophy that we had when we were a part of the greater Liberal family."

Day adds that no one has to be a member of the Liberal Party to join the Senate Liberal caucus, and points to the fact that previously, particularly under Paul Martin, there had been an effort to make appointments to the Senate that weren't just the Liberal Party.  Some of those had been appointed as Progressive Conservatives, some of whom sat apart from the Conservative Party of Canada caucus, others later joining it, while one, Senator Lillian Eva Dyck, had been appointed as an NDP senator.  The NDP disavowed her, naturally, given their belief that that the Senate ought not to exist, and Dyck later joined the Liberals under Michael Ignatieff, and has found it a comfortable fit for her.

"She can still espouse her philosophy, and do whatever she wants in terms of political parties," says Day.  "She's not here to bid for them and they didn't ask her to."

Day points to mentorship as a key selling feature for new senators to his caucus, given the depth of experience in his members.

"If somebody wanted to come in and join a group that is smaller now, but therefore much more personable, much more in touch the bigger the groups get, the easier it is to have some people get lost," says Day.  "I think we have a great advantage that way."

Day says that he is fully confident that some of the current Independent senators will be interested in joining as time goes on, but he makes it clear that the Senate Liberals have very little contact with the Liberal Party writ-large, and that even before Justin Trudeau kicked the Liberal Senators out of caucus, they had already been exercising a great deal of independence.  He reiterates that one doesn't need to join a political party to agree with the caucus' philosophy.

And if the Senate Liberals do fall below the nine-member cut-off point?  While it's a bridge that remains to be crossed, Day notes that they may look to revisit the rules to return the cut-off for officialdom to the original number of six instead of nine, but they're debates yet to be had.

"We could be fifteen tomorrow if a number of people decide to move over to us," says Day.  "What happens will happen."

For me, I'm hoping that the Senate Liberals don't die out, because it's a political tradition that I think is worth carrying on (and yes, the same goes for the Conservatives), but also because I do think that having the three groups Liberals, Conservatives, and a sizeable enough section of crossbench independents does keep the institution at its best.  So here's hoping that some of the newer senators see the value in a caucus with experience, that can mentor them, that is open to their political philosophy, and give them a look and keep a good thing going.

Photo Credit: CBC News

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The first policy proposal from Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer, released just shy of two years before the 2019 federal election, was surprising only in the depth of its predictability. For one thing, it's a tax credit, a go-to mechanism for Tory pandering since the very beginning of the Harper years. For another, it's an exemption for working parents, the recipients of more government pandering than any other demographic. Most importantly, it's narrowly targeted, as two economists Carleton's Jennifer Robson and UBC's Kevin Milligan  were quick to note.

If this is the best Scheer could do for his first major policy announcement, we're in for a long ride in the magic minivan. In the first eight months of his leadership, he has consistently demonstrated difficulty relating to voters who are not as similar to him as possible, and a lack of willingness to try. A wide swath of card-carrying Tories, upset with a squandered majority, hoped the end of Stephen Harper's leadership could bring about an end to incrementalism. They haven't heard a reason to hustle for Scheer yet. Against Justin Trudeau, perhaps, but not for Scheer.

On the other hand, if you're also a suburban, middle-class parent with aggressively basic tastes, the sky is the limit! Here are some other goodies Uncle Andy can unload from his family feedbag:

The Work Transportation Tax Credit. Commuting to and from the office every day is a pain, especially for parents who can't afford to raise their children in a major city. The federal government will deduct two dollars from your income tax bill for every kilometer you drive between your home and your work address, Monday through Friday. Recipients will be required to submit photos of their odometers at the beginning and end of every eligible workday. Printed photos only, please.

The Family Nutrition Rebate. Every parent deserves help putting food on the table for their kids. To that end, the government will offer a nonrefundable 15% rebate on the total cost of groceries from an approved list (which does not include candy, cookies, ice cream, or pudding cups). Recipients will be required to submit supporting receipts to the Canada Revenue agency, as well as the labels from all jars of baby food and the tops of all cereal and Kraft Dinner boxes.

The Automobile Capacity Tax Credit. This is a credit for all non-commercial vehicle owners that escalates depending on the number of seats in the vehicle, as well as the size of the trunk. Did you know that the eight-seat Chrysler Pacifica is manufactured in Windsor, Ontario? Support Canadian jobs!

The Local Small Business Support Sales Tax Exemption. Ontarians and Albertans are already feeling the effects of drastic minimum wage hikes as local companies raise prices. To offset the impact on equally hardworking small business consumers, residents of select areas will be exempt from paying GST on any purchase from a local business. For the purposes of this credit, "local" will be defined as "any business whose physical presence is wholly within a five-kilometre radius of the city, town, village or hamlet specified on its original registration document." Plus locally owned franchises of Canadian-headquartered chains. They totally count.

The Voluntary Adult Literacy Association Grant. It's for books for the book club. In theory. We can't really stop you if you'd rather spend it on wine.

The Children's Athletics Rehabilitation Tax Credit. This credit is available for any purchases of over-the-counter medication or medical supplies, such as bandages and finger splints, for any injury or illness incurred by a child participating in an accredited athletic program. If you're a parent, you may also use this credit toward any such purchases made after Dale punches you in the face again. It's not your fault his boy is looking sloppy on the ice tonight.

The We-Spent-a-Pretty-Penny-to-Take-You-Kids-to-Marineland-So-You-Had-Better-Behave-Or-So-Help-Me-We-Are-LEAVING Refund. That $40.95 admission fee won't make up for itself.

Or, instead of all that new distortion and bureaucracy, Scheer could propose closing loopholes and lowering income tax rates across the board. One can dream.

Written by Jess Morgan

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.

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It seemed the wee hours of last Friday night was the absolute nadir of the Ontario Progressive Conservative party.  But here we are, less than a week later, dropping like a stone in an endless abyss.

Interim Leader Vic Fedeli announced Tuesday he wasn't going to be running to be permanent leader of the party.  No, instead he has the mountainous task ahead of him of to "root out any rot" in the party.

And my god, the rot.

Not only did the former leader, Patrick Brown, have to flee the party in the middle of the night when accusations surfaced via CTV he was a serial creep and possible sexual assaulter.  But the president of the party, Rick Dykstra, also had to leave the party when Maclean's started asking about an incident where police investigated whether he'd sexually assaulted a staffer before the 2015 federal election.

(None of these accusations have been tested in court, and no charges have been laid in either case, I should add.)

That's unfathomably bad, but this being the PCs, it gets even worse.  The Toronto Star reports Hamilton Police are investigating possible fraud in a riding nomination fight in that city, and Fedeli's office is cooperating.  Plus, Fedeli told reporters the party's membership list is of questionable quality.  The 200,000 members who have signed up for the party may be, according to the Star,something closer to 75,000.

"Fixing this, and it needs fixing, will be a massive undertaking.… Our party structure is in much worse shape than we knew," he told a press conference.

That's…not good. And it will probably get worse. Already, some members are lining up to complain about "Toronto elites" within the party purging real honest grass roots members. This can only get uglier.

In the initial wake of Brown's departure, people talked about this as some kind of fresh start for the party.  Freed from a leader of dubious quality—and it was assumed he was before it was known Brown was a vicious creep—the Progressive Conservatives could go into this year's election with a fresh face.

No matter how unpopular the guy was with the rank and file, and invisible to the electorate, it's baffling to suggest this would have been a good thing.  Modern politics are so geared toward the leader, the entire apparatus of the party swings around the fulcrum of the person at the head.

And now the party has decided to pick a new permanent leader in March and then the election is—hang on here, let me check—oh, good.  June.  So, the new leader will have three-ish months to introduce themselves, pick a direction, and run in a general election.  It's a, uh, tall order.

Now, I want to be clear about this: the Progressive Conservatives need to fully reckon with the "rot" within their ranks.  The only way to root awful behaviour Brown and Dykstra are accused of is to get rid the people accused of it.  This is a necessary moment of we're seeing in politics, specifically, and society, broadly.

The glib analysis of all this is how great it is for the Liberal party to have their main opposition completely immolate just months before the province goes to the ballot box.  But I've got to say, it's awfully bad for the province of Ontario.

The Ontario Liberals probably should have been tossed from office ages ago.  It's a party and a government been hobbled by scandals of varying degrees of magnitude for years now under two different leaders.  But each time since taking power the party has faced the electorate, some horrible idea of the PCs let's the Liberals keep skating.  It doesn't matter whether they're doing an awful job of running the province or not, there's no one with the credibility to call them to the mat on it.

To point to just one example, their only solution to ever-escalating hydro prices is to, essentially, take out a loan to give people a rebate.  That's not doing anything to actually fix the problem, hydro prices aren't really changing, they've just moved money around to put some in your pocket.  Needless to say, they will be coming back for that rebate money at some point.

And so, increasingly, Ontario looks like a one-party province in the mould of (until recently) Alberta.  It's unhealthy for a democracy when there aren't multiple credible options for citizens to choose between come election day.

The Progressive Conservatives let their party be taken over by a pack of creeps.  All sorts of shenanigans seem to have taken place in the wake of that.  And now, months before the election they've decided to clean up the mess.

Seems to me the biggest loser in all of this is the province.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.

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Party elders and grassroots members need to either shut up or turn down the volume to help get this crumbling political house back into working order

The Ontario Progressive Conservatives need to cool their jets and fast.

It's been a frustrating few days watching the resignations, bloodletting, drama, rumour mill and headless chickens dominate the news headlines.  Many people have lost perspective, various political factions are rising and falling, and the party's political momentum is on life support.

The starting point was Ontario PC Leader Patrick Brown's stunning fall from grace.  It was part of a series of political resignations involving allegations of sexual misconduct last week.  (Nova Scotia PC Leader Jamie Baillie and federal Liberal cabinet Kent Hehr fell by the wayside, too.)

Brown's resignation was painful to watch from a personal standpoint.  I've known him for about 25 years.  I wrote a long column last October to help unlock the mystery behind his political ideology.  I believed the People's Guarantee was a measured (albeit far from perfect) policy document with respect to responsible government, taxation and public funding.  I wanted him to succeed and become the 26th premier of Ontario.

What once seemed attainable and rather likely, in fact is now ancient history.

After two unnamed women spoke with CTV News's Glen McGregor on Jan. 24 alleging sexual misconduct that occurred when Brown was a federal Conservative MP, the alarm bells were set off.  This was followed by Brown's 81-second horror show of a press conference, the resignation of several key advisers and strategists, and senior party officials, MPPs and political candidates abandoning him en masse.

Within four hours, Brown had virtually no allies, no support base and no choice, other than the obvious.  He tendered his resignation in the wee hours of the morning of Jan. 25, and has kept to the shadows ever since.

Are the allegations true or false?  It wasn't a big secret that Brown, like most single guys without family or spousal commitments, dated different women.  And, while I pay little attention to political gossip, I never  ever  heard stories tying him to sexual misconduct.

Brown can obviously choose to fight these allegations in the court of law, which is how our democracy works.  But when it came to the court of public opinion, which is a different arena with a different set of rules, he'd already been knocked out.

His fiefdom of loyalists and party supporters has predictably started to crumble as the PCs clean house.  This included the removal of executive director Bob Stanley (a longtime political operative) and party president Rick Dykstra (hours before Maclean's released a piece about an allegation of sexual misconduct that reportedly occurred when he was a federal Tory MP).

Interim PC Leader Vic Fedeli has attempted to right this political ship and maintain some order.  It's been a daunting task.  There are questions about fundraising and finances.  The party's executive committee and grassroots followers co-exist in a battleground of agenda-driven controversies and ego-fueled strategies.  Speculation that other senior officials and MPPs may get caught up in Ontario's #MeToo campaign are running rampant.

Plus, a leadership race will be held in March.  Doug Ford, elder brother of the late Toronto mayor Rob Ford will be a candidate.  Ford is also a former Toronto city councillor and mayoral candidate.  Other possible contenders include Caroline Mulroney (daughter of former prime minister Brian Mulroney), Neil Davis (son of former Ontario premier Bill Davis) and ex-Postmedia president Rod Phillips.

It's going to be a busy couple of months.

Things will eventually calm down in Ontario PC land.  They always do in politics.  But it would wise for party elders and grassroots members to either shut up or turn down the volume to help get this political house back into working order.

If not, Ontario Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne and NDP Leader Andrea Horwath will be the main beneficiaries of this apocalyptic PC breakdown.

Troy Media columnist and political commentator Michael Taube is also a Washington Times contributor, Canadian Jewish News columnist, and radio and TV pundit.  He was also a speechwriter for former Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.

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The Ontario Progressive Conservative party seems determined to prove that politics, like life or golf, is never so bad that it can't get worse.  And that the initials PC stand for "Perpetual Chumps".  But my advice to them is not to overthink things.

To some extent their current plight is the result of an external shock not of their making at a singularly poor time.  But how they respond is in their hands.

Commentators seem agreed that they now face two urgent problems: whether to hold an leadership contest (and how) and whether to retain their current platform.  And it seems to me quite simple how they should proceed.

First, if they are satisfied that the current platform is either (a) a sincere expression of their views or (b) a suitably cunning plan to sidle into power, they should stick with it.  If it is an ideologically repellent or pragmatically flaws artifice foisted upon them by a now-disgraced leader they should ditch it.

Second, they should hold an open leadership contest and pick the best person.

Andrew Coyne has put forward his consistent idea that they should let the caucus choose the leader.  I'm sympathetic in principle, not least because if a party leader's caucus bails on him or her their career is over no matter what the party constitution says.  But I do not think it is appropriate in this crisis because it would seem to be a desperate and manipulative improvisation to show the public a "moderate" face in defiance of the grass roots.

For my money this sort of maneuvering is repellent in principle.  If your party's views are unpopular, try to persuade people that they are valid.  I can't understand why anyone would spent years scheming to implement a program they don't believe in.  What a way to spend your life.  But it is also unlikely to work.

The last time the Ontario PCs won was with Mike Harris, the last leader who didn't plainly regard conservatism as primitive and embarrassing and whose unapologetic if sometimes crude defence of his views brought back to back majorities.  Indeed, I would say that the fate of the party over the last 15 years and four elections shows what happens when you overthink politics.

Arguably their thinking was often also cloudy, they have been trying to win as, to borrow Harry Truman's priceless putdown, "Me too Liberals with a yes but platform".  But the more effort you expend trying to manipulate your way into power, the more voters shun you as manipulative.  Hence anything smacking of a rigged leadership contest would be a hideous political blunder, whatever its moral qualities.

To say so is not to deny the importance of intelligent, sometimes ruthless backroomers who excel at hidden manipulation.  As they say, the secret in politics is sincerity; once you can fake that, you've got it made.  I do not approve but I am not naïve about its effectiveness.  The real problem comes when, like the Pompidou Centre, you have your plumbing on the outside, and openly concede or ineptly conceal that everything you do, from how and whether to hold a leadership contest to what platform to advance, is done solely for the purpose of winning.  Such a stance is hollow, grasping and off-putting.  And if you then lose, it's also pathetic.

So my advice on choosing a leader is also very simple.  Given this sudden crisis, the only thing that won't look crassly manipulative is to use the same process you used last time, accelerated if need be.  (And if you can't manage that task, you sure can't run a province.)  As for the fear that such a contest would be "divisive," well, try to debate ideas not personalities, and shun the dark arts of spin, push-polling and debate "knock out" setup lines for an honest discussion including of those things that do divide you.

The objection that my advice is unlikely to bring victory would be a bit rich coming from a party, once a dynasty in Ontario, whose only real talent in recent decades has been snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.  In any case, I would answer that winning is not everything, that honour counts for more in life than slithering up the greasy pole to grasp the brass ring… briefly.

I've previously cited John Jay in this context, writing to his wife after losing the 1792 election for New York state governor on rather dubious technicalities that "A few more years will put as all in the dust, and it will then be of more importance to me to have governed myself, than to have governed the State."  And before dismissing me as a rustic simpleton, recall that Jay did win the governorship four years later and crowned his distinguished public service career by pushing through a measure to end slavery in New York.  What similar accomplishment can this generation of Ontario Tories claim?

Everybody has some bad luck.  But if it continually strikes, there is some suggestion that you're doing something wrong, that you are not just unfortunate but a chump.  And the Ontario Tories seem to me to attract misfortune by being too clever by half and too manipulative by a much greater margin. 

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.

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