Replacing Patrick Brown is not the answer
Conservatives disappointed with the current direction of the Ontario PC Party often say we need to replace the leader. They think getting rid of Brown will make the PC Party conservative once again. It will reunite fiscal and social conservatives under one banner, and lead us to victory in 2019.
Messiah complex
The desire to oust Brown is often combined with a wistful look back at sunnier days. If only, they say, a person like Mike Harris/Margaret Thatcher/Ronald Reagan were the leader. Then we would march to victory and put in place wonderful reforms that would fix the damage done by 15 years of Liberal mis-rule.
Unfortunately history doesn’t support that thesis.
A Mike Harris, a Margaret Thatcher, and a Ronald Reagan are once-in-a-generation phenomenon. The fact that you can’t name another Ontario premier remotely like Harris, another British PM remotely like Thatcher, or another U.S. President remotely like Reagan from the past 50 years proves this.
Even if a second Michael Deane Harris were to descend from the mountain and lead us to the promised land there’s still a problem. His successor is likely to be a second Ernie Eves. Because as I outlined in a previous post, once the hero departs from the scene things return to the mediocre mean. The next guy in charge is more likely to be a run-of-the-mill career politician. Then we’re right back where we started, hugging the left side of our lane.
Put out an ABP
Those in favour of ousting Brown might respond with “it doesn’t have to be a Mike Harris. Anyone but Patrick would be better”. By “better” they mean “more committed to conservative values”. That may be true, but does it make a difference?
Stephen Harper was very committed to conservative values before he became Prime Minister. He was policy chief of the Reform Party and President of the National Citizen’s Coalition. Those are some significant conservative bona fides.
Yet once in office things changed. Never mind his abandonment of conservative values on issues like same-sex marriage and abortion. This supposedly hawkish economist inherited a balanced budget from the profligate Liberals and promptly took the country into deficit. He then kept us there until his very last year in office. Only then he managed to bring in a minuscule surplus of 0.1% of GDP. You can argue that the Liberals and NDP made him do it because of the 2008 debt crisis. (Because everyone ‘knows’ that the solution to a debt crisis is more debt). But that hardly explains where the miserly Harper was during the majority years of 2011–2015.
In fact the 2008 budget is the perfect illustration of why we need a new party on the right. Despite having a fiscal hawk as Prime Minister, we still ended up with a massive budget deficit. That’s because all the political pressure was from the left. No party on the right threatened Harper’s base. He calculated that he could take the support of deficit hawks for granted and pursue blue Liberal support in the middle. This contrasts with the situation in the mid-1990s. That was when a Liberal government, facing no threat on their left but an ascendant Reform Party on their right, balanced the budget in 5 years. And they inherited the largest budget deficit in Canadian history up until that time.
Stephen Harper was great in theory, but didn’t work out so well in practice. Because, as Milton Friedman has articulated (and as I’ve quoted before twice now):
“I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either, or if they try, they will shortly be out of office.”
Yes, another leader would almost certainly be better than Brown, but would he be good? Probably not.
Stab in the back
But let’s set all this aside. Let’s pretend we could find a Mike Harris. A leader who doesn’t need political pressure from the right to rule like a conservative. What would happen if true conservatives conspired to oust Patrick Brown and install the new messiah?
Most likely it would fail.
There is zero appetite in caucus for such a move. And there is virtually no desire for it among the voting public. The average voter is neither a fan nor a foe of Patrick Brown. They simply don’t know him and have not been paying attention to what he’s been doing. What they do know is that they want Kathleen Wynne gone, gone, gone. So when they see conservatives scheming instead of going after Wynne, they will perceive it as not in the interests of the province. SoCons especially will get the blame for traitorous behaviour. Demands for our expulsion from the party will be widespread.
Change the system
Conservatives need a mechanism to keep the PC leader in check, no matter who that leader is. We need to make it politically profitable to do the right thing, and politically costly to do the wrong thing.
That mechanism is a new party on the right. Having a second option for conservative voters means the leader of the PC Party cannot take social and fiscal conservatives, or democratic reformers for granted. It means he has to work as hard to appeal to voters on the right as on the left. It means he has to do the right thing, no matter how good, or bad, he is.
Craig Dellandrea can be found standing in line at the consulates of Switzerland, Monaco and Lichtenstein applying for refugee status. He can also be reached at craigdellandrea@sympatico.ca
- photo by Laurel L. Russwurm [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
