The Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario is in such a world of chaos that members of the party must be buying U of T psychology professor Dr. Jordan Peterson's new world number one bestseller 12 Rules to Life: An Antidote to Chaos in desperate hopes of figuring out how to restore order.

After Former PCPO Leader Patrick Brown fled Queen's Park with reporters fast on his heels to ask questions about his alleged sexual misconduct with young women (just about to be dropped on CTV's 10 p.m. news show), never to return to his former Official Opposition Leader's Office, the great chain of being within the PC party was radically disturbed.

Brown's head rolling unleashed a wave of exits.  His press secretary, other office staff, and his campaign team all abandoned him.

The power vacuum left in place after Brown's political execution led to the vulnerability of anyone else up to similar questionable behaviour as Brown within the ranks to also be accused of similar misconduct.  By Sunday evening, shortly after Maclean's and journalist Stephen Maher reached out for comment on an imminent story of an sexual assault claim against him about to be published by the magazine, PCPO president Rick Dykstra stepped down.  The same guy who'd last week promised a leadership contest before the end of March is now out as the top spot of the party's executive.  Further damaging the PC brand as full of misogynistic bullies, Ontario PC candidate (Carleton) Goldie Ghamari claimed she would be dropping her story today about how an unnamed PC MPP allegedly harassed and intimidated her with his body to deter her from pursuing a career in politics.  After urging the alleged perpetrator to come forward of his own accord, PC MPP Randy Hillier tweeted to her on Twitter saying he thought they only innocently shared a cigarette, and wasn't aware of how Ghamari felt intimidated.  (Political observers waited with bated breath and had their Twitter accounts set to get any notifications of activity from Ghamari's account Monday.  She ended up telling her side of things to Ottawa Citizen journalist David Reevely, who then retold both sides' accounts in his piece looking at the incident and the PCs' new investigation into it.)

But things can always get worse, and so they have for the PCPO.  It was also just recently reported Fedeli is looking into alleged mismanagement of party funds under Brown's term.  It also turns out party members, now over 200,000 members large, had their personal information hacked from the party database.

Despite the bad news, other top Conservative political figures are licking their chomps to take over the most robustly funded and star-studded party in Ontario at this juncture, knowing if they play their cards right they could waltz in and take over the reigns of power from a beleaguered premier in just a few short months.  A golden opportunity like this only happens once in a political lifetime, if ever.

As I predicted in my last column, Victor Fedeli became the interim leader of the PCs. Despite the Fedeli team's undoubted behind-the-scenes finagling to not have a leadership race, or at the very least to let him run in it, I was wrong to think that the PC execs would try to bend the rules in order to block a leadership race before the election, crowning Fedeli as the leader.  Now matter how tempting to block some outside interlopers (namely one in particular, mentioned below), there would be an insurrection from the party base and Ontario voters wouldn't approve of voting for a party leader as the next premier without knowing they would still be in office four years down the road.

So now, to PC top brass's horror, Doug Ford, revelling in ruffling feathers and dismissing formalities, crashed the party and declared at noon on Monday that on top of running for mayor of Toronto he'll first try his luck at winning the PC leadership.

Everyone else is dipping their toes at this point, but it's obvious a several other are already pretty much a go.

Caroline Mulroney has made her intentions known.  So has Monte McNaughton.  And now initial rumours are confirmed that Christine Elliott is thinking third time's a charm, with a Facebook page "Draft Christine Elliott" created Monday indicating she's still testing the waters.

Others, however, have dispelled rumours they're also going to run.  Lisa Raitt and John Tory have both made known they won't be seeking the premiership.  However, expect more candidates not mentioned here to run as well.  This is a golden opportunity for someone to go from leader of a provincial party to the premiership in the span of a few short months, something that usually takes years or a decade or two to accomplish.  That will be far too appetizing for the politically power-hungry to pass up.

Photo Credit: Toronto Star

Written by Graeme C. Gordon

At the beginning of the 2017 Conservative Party leadership contest, I and other supporters of one candidate considered Simcoe—Grey MP Kellie Leitch our toughest competition.  Within a few months, amid unworkable policy proposals, campaign upheaval and terrible video production, she was a punch line.  Now that she has wisely decided to retire from Parliament in 2019 and return to medicine full-time, we and, it seems, the Conservative caucus are just glad to be nearly rid of her.

Was that the real Kellie Leitch vowing to defend scarcely specified Canadian values from all immigrants, refugees and tourists?  It didn't seem so at first, especially not after her tearful recantation of the "barbaric cultural practices" tip line that never was.  Her endless jabs at "elites" didn't match the self-aggrandizement she is reported to exhibit in private.  Her attempts to copy tactics that worked for U.S. President Donald Trump were so transparent that they were rightfully compared to karaoke.  Her voice on that campaign trail was many things, but few called it "authentic."

But like all Members of Parliament, Leitch has spent years being discouraged from expressing a thought or developing a persona that might conflict with the whims of her leader.  With Stephen Harper packing it in, and immigration-skeptical populism making a comeback, the timing for Leitch to spread her proverbial wings couldn't have been better.  Campaign manager Nick Kouvalis repeatedly insisted he ran the campaign she wanted him to run.  That only got her as far as sixth place, but it ensured that she would never be dismissed as a trained seal again.  Perhaps her leadership campaign was not a ploy, but a revelation, albeit a poorly executed one.

For all the comment section denizens who found her a breath of fresh air, most Conservatives weren't having it.  The biggest difference between the two main parties on immigration is that the Tories are willing to take greater pains to identify newcomers who are committed to searching for opportunity, stability and freedom exactly the Canadian values Leitch sought to protect.  But sometimes those pains can be too great for Canadians' comfort, as she learned during that unfortunate CBC interview.  Party members as a whole are not the intractable xenophobes that low-info Liberals claim, and electing the wrong leader would provide those Liberals with too much ammunition.

So what was to be done with Leitch after Andrew Scheer took the helm?  One of the top four critic portfolios Finance, Justice, National Defence or Foreign Affairs was out of the question.  Immigration and Citizenship was way out of the question.  Putting her back on the Health file might have made sense; it would certainly have been her wheelhouse, and it would have quashed any possibility of Scheer being called petty.  Instead, that file went to Marilyn Gladu, a chemical engineer by trade, and Leitch got nothing.  Not even Deputy Critic for Curling, or whatever token portfolios new governments like to invent.  Letters, I'm sure, went flying.

Why she has announced her retirement so soon may never be clear to the public.  Unsurprisingly, Scheer's office has not offered much clarity of their own.  Forced resignation is unlikely, unless there's a behind-the-scenes firing offence they're not willing to mention.  A refusal to sign Leitch's nomination papers is possible.  But if the simplest explanation is usually the correct one, the answer is that she saw no future for herself or her agenda.  Her foresight may have failed her when she designed her campaign, but she may have very recently recovered it.

The best example of Leitch's service that Scheer's statement cited was her development of the Children's Fitness Tax Credit.  In fact, the best thing she did for the Conservative Party was to highlight a new bloc of voters, proponents of bumper-sticker nationalism and skeptics of globalists, elites and worst of all globalist elites.  These voters believe immigration will inevitably become a flashpoint in Canada on the level of the United States or Europe or wish to make it so.  They may never dominate the party, but they may try to force it to the right on immigration, the way social conservative groups still try to do on abortion and euthanasia.  By drawing their voices out, Leitch has made it all the more likely that they, too, will be shunted to the back benches for election cycles to come.

But that's a backhanded compliment.  If the best fronthanded compliment Scheer could offer was for a minor, now-defunct tax credit, she won't be missed.  Bye, Feleitcha.

Photo Credit: Macleans

Written by Jess Morgan

Before early last evening, when Brown was apparently first contacted by CTV journalists for comment and confronted with the sexual misconduct allegations made against him — allegations similar in nature to swirling rumours for years — the then-Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario Leader still thought he was the heir-apparent for the premiership of Ontario.  Within a few short hours it was all over; blood is now in the water and the sharks are circling.

One would-be shark, PC Deputy Leader Sylvia Jones, a spokesperson for the PCs' noon press conference today, was bashful about confirming or denying if she was considering a bid for the leadership.  Her description, at the press conference, of the nuclear disaster from last night as a "hiccup" should've been a disqualifier from the start, but regardless of her serious hiccup, she never really stood a shot.

The smart money, if you listen to the rumours circulating Queen's Park and PC operatives, is on seasoned politician and MPP for Nipissing Victor Fedeli, who's shown charisma throughout his political career, including his mayorship of North Bay.  Also of vital importance, he's a member of caucus and held in high-esteem within the party.

Don't entertain the thought for too long that these power brokers within caucus will allow a new face, no matter how politically appealing, to take over the party instead of one of them.  Although Caroline Mulroney could be the fresh start the party so desperately needs at this critical juncture of four months out from the election, leaderless only a few months from the writ dropping, the PCs are not known to take risks (e.g. Patrick Brown) and any party's top players are not known to willingly hand over and entrust power to others.  Instead, expect the charismatic Mulroney to be right by Fedeli's (or whomever the eventual new leader is) side throughout the next four months, playing a vital role in Ontario PC Party's rehabilitation efforts.

No, even if it were possible, power-jockeying wise, for former PM Brian Mulroney's daughter, who has the potential to be a Progressive Conservative star and as popular as her father once was (before his own precipitous fall), the rise would be too premature as it was when people first thought Justin Trudeau should run for leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada back when Ignatieff took over.

In the likelihood Fedeli is the next interim leader of the Ontario PCs, the next question becomes will he only be interim leader.  Many political observers have quickly realized that this scenario would most likely be unpalatable to voters.  Ontarians will want to know that the person they're electing to become premier remains in that office until the next provincial election.

Expect the PCs to bend or rewrite the constitution in order to keep the crown on whomever they end up announcing as the next PC leader tomorrow.  This will be an incredibly hard to sell to party members at large.  The notion of holding a rushed leadership race four months before the election is unthinkable.  The cost of a civil war, which most party leadership races essentially are, to the party's reputation and coffers is far too great to be in the realm of possibilities.

But after last night, who can really say what will happen next?

Written by Graeme C. Gordon

The morality, and thus legality, of abortion — which is to say, the intentional destruction of a human fetus to prevent it from achieving its natural destiny as an autonomous person, is the most substantial ethical dilemma of our age.  The Atlantic published a very deep and thoughtful piece the other day describing the changing role science and scientists play in mediating this dilemma; many pro-life activists, author Emma Green noted, now routinely cite studies and experts touting novel concepts like fetal pain in an attempt to shift the debate to their side.  Pro-choice advocates who once leaned heavily on standard assumptions of fetal inhumanity — "lifeless blobs of tissue" as Green summarizes — must now rearm themselves with more scientifically literate rebuttals.

At least in America, that is.  In Canada we have evolved a political culture that has atrophied the seriousness and importance of the abortion debate, turning what should — and deserves to be — a present and ongoing political and moral conversation into something hidden, abstract, and low-stakes.

In Canada, there is no high level debate over abortion, and the moral justness of destroying embryonic humans, there is only debate about the debate, something far more easy and frivolous that allows mainstream right and left to dodge the ethical heaviness of the underlying issue.

Canada has experienced an outbreak of such frivolity in recent weeks, following Prime Minister Trudeau's decree, delivered with almost Old Testament imperiousness, that any organization or employer who wishes to obtain money from Ottawa's "Canada Summer Jobs" slush fund must first prostrate themselves with an explicit promise that any grantee's "core mandate" will respect "reproductive rights" (ie; "legal abortions").

This is the sort of manufactured crisis Canada's opinion-having class loves, because it so easily permits self-righteous posturing on the abortion debate without requiring any deep engagement with the abortion issue.  Just the contrary, in fact: posturing on the Summer Jobs story allows those who fully support Canada's abortion status quo — termination at absolutely any stage of fetal development — an easy moral distraction through which to feign greater intellectual depth on this issue than they actually have.

The Prime Minister is obviously wrong to make grants for "summer jobs" conditional on supporting such a narrow and precise ideological agenda.  But because he's so obviously wrong that's also a very easy thing to say.  It's equally easy to say you support, in the abstract, other people's freedom to hold opinions different than your own, which is what much of liberal Canada has been saying as they seek to score points for publicly scolding Trudeau.  What's difficult, however, is saying you support other people's right to express those contrary opinions in a fashion that's visible and politically consequential.  Virtually none of the people who have been loud and proud in their revulsion at Trudeau, from Margaret Wente to Andrew Scheer to the Globe and Mail editorial board, have done this.

The Globe was more honest than most.  In their editorial, they only conceded the Prime Minister's wrongness amid declarations that "anti-abortionists have zero chance of limiting access to the procedure" and "legal access to an abortion in Canada isn't going anywhere."  In other words, they framed pro-lifers as delusional weirdos existing at the most irrelevant fringe of Canadian political discourse, then conceded their right to a few bucks from the government in that context.

We go through this national kabuki every so often.

Trudeau bans pro-life candidates; columnists posture and say they should be allowed to run, knowing full well they will have zero influence in caucus.

Some campus club bans a pro-life display; we hear lectures about how it's important to support freedom of expression "even when we disagree with the message" — like this one, which all good-thinking Canadians obviously should.

A back-bench Tory seeks to introduce a motion that engages with abortion in some exceedingly circuitous way — say, denouncing the forced abortions of cleft-palate babies in rural Laos — and champions of democracy insist the bill must not be vetoed in committee, but rather voted down in the full House of Commons.

In every such episode, smart Canadians walk away feeling they've proven themselves critically engaged and open-minded about the abortion issue, without ever having to dirty their beautiful minds with thoughts of fetuses being extracted and mutilated, and the corresponding question of whether a moral society should impose some degree of legal restriction on this practice, as we do with prostitution and euthanasia and human cloning and selling bodily fluids and the slaughter of animals and everything else Ottawa has concluded is too ethically fraught to exist in an anything-goes vacuum.

There is a strain of thought in Canadian culture, encouraged by our political class, that our nation's greatest virtues can be found in government policies that ask nothing of us.  The classic example is our "free" healthcare system, through which we've learned to convince ourselves that there's something noble and selfless about getting everything for nothing.  But our abortion status quo is much the same.  It's not a fun subject to think about, so we've taught ourself there's something heroic about never engaging with the issue as anything but a thought exercise on the conscience rights of cranks.

As science marches on, and the abortion debate in America becomes increasingly sophisticated, Canada is in danger of becoming the western world's cowardly moral outlier on an issue that has proven stubbornly resistant to being ignored.

Photo Credit: CBC News

Written by J.J. McCullough

Here's a tough truth for conservatives, the ones who are constantly talking about self-government, common sense and free markets: Indigenous people are probably not waiting with bated breath for outside opinions on how they govern themselves.

That's also probably true of Black Canadians, Jewish Canadians (like myself), Muslim Canadians, Chinese Canadians or any other kind of Canadians about whom there is continued interest in "exposing" less-than-transparent financial practices and "ethnic politics".

It is just possible that, in concordance with what is supposed to be the Conservative worldview, that these issues should be the business of the communities being commented upon, and that while outsiders have the right to speak, that doesn't mean those outsiders' words are going to, or should be perceived as being very helpful by the people being spoken about.  Why?  Because what's being said is probably nothing that hasn't been heard before countless times.

So despite what Frances Widdowson and Lynne Beyak have to say on the subject, "honest talk" about what's going on in Community X is not going to "achieve genuine reconciliation" any more than spouting off about all the money transferred to Quebec and/or the degree of corruption within that province would bring the two solitudes closer together.

It is well understood by these politicians that blasting Quebec from the outside despite how true it may be would be political suicide.  And yet doing the same is assumed to be good and needed practice when it comes to minority or Indigenous communities.

Not to mention that the people doing the blasting more than likely have plenty of corruption going on in their own backyards.  Does a place governed by Kathleen Wynne really have the moral authority to be criticizing the financial transparency or the cultural character of a reserve?

Or perhaps you are upset by the fact that the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women's Inquiry appears to be having a tough time of it?  Guess what: Quite a few Indigenous people probably feel the same way you do.  It's probably a very sore subject.  So what exactly is to be gained, even from a purely strategic perspective, from pointing out what people already know and are already not too happy about?

Sure, it may feel great, but if you want to embolden the community power-brokers who you think are holding the rest of the bloc down, you couldn't give them a better excuse to justify their existence than pretending you know the community better than they do.  You don't.  You can't.

If we, as Canadians, resent clueless Americans writing puff pieces in the New York Times or Washington Post, glorifying Justin Trudeau as some avatar of progressivism and talking about our country as though they have the faintest clue what's really going on, then it isn't much of a stretch to imagine how Indigenous people feel when they are pandered or dictated to in a similar way.

"But why do the Liberals get to pander and dictate?" I hear these conservatives whine.  Because they're Liberals, and they hold absolute power by virtue of being Liberals, and the leadership of these communities are smart enough to know that the Liberals will be back someday even if they do somehow lose the government.

But here's a wacky idea: Just because the Liberals have been paternalistic and heavy handed doesn't mean conservatives should be as well.  Unless everyone WANTS to be Liberals, that is.  Unless we want to have the power to speak as Justin Trudeau or Kathleen Wynne does and effect lasting change within an entire voting bloc without having to do the work of building necessary trust, emboldening people within the community who feel as you do, or actually giving the high platform the party offers to those activists.

Because and as Canadians who live everyday in the shadow of the United States, this should be inherently obvious change is not going to be imposed on these communities from without no matter how well intentioned it is.

Rather, it must come from within.

Photo Credit: CBC News

Written by Josh Lieblein