Right renewal for Ontario (1)

The post-John Tory leadership race of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario has not been the wholly reinvigorating exercise some of the party’s supporters had hoped for. There were few knockout policy proposals to fire up the base (though perhaps that’s a good thing given the legacy of the PCs’ last one-issue election), and none of the candidates emerged as a standout star. And while the fragile state of the economy may ultimately help the Conservatives at the polls two years from now, it has also meant that many Ontarians are too distracted to pay much mind to an internal political contest.

That said, the leadership race has also offered plenty of reasons for hope that the party can now gain some of the ground it lost in recent years. Taken in combination, the candidates have proven that there is still plenty of polish, principle and panache in the PCs’ upper ranks.

If electability in 2011 were no object, Randy Hillier might well be our choice. The suspender-wearing libertarian has a healthy distrust of government meddling and an entertaining manner. He has put forward the boldest and most appealing platform of the four candidates, promising everything from beefing up Toronto’s sorely outdated highway infrastructure to junking the unaccountable Ontario Human Rights Commission. And given his experience as a founder of the Landowners Association, he’s likely to understand better than most the burden over-regulation places on rural Ontarians.

Unfortunately, Mr. Hillier has virtually no chance of leading his party to victory. Though we are enchanted by his promise to decommission the overreaching HRC and its tribunal (which is shockingly short on due process), we recognize that running on such a platform in this province would be political suicide. Regrettably, most Ontarians aren’t aware of the HRC’s abuses and would view talk of removing it as an attack on human rights themselves, rather than on a fatally flawed institution. It would be the religious schools issue redux.

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Notes:

As I’ve said before I’m not well informed on any of these candidates.  To me they all have their good and bad points but this entry is going up so that visitors can kick things around a bit and note things that the NP editorial may have overlooked.  Have fun.