Ontario liberals are wasting their money this weekend as they gather in Mississauga to confirm a new leader. With a new leader, about half a million in the bank and some good media coverage, the party should be ready to roar back at Doug Ford’s hapless Tories.
But it will not be long though until Ontario voters wonder what might be the difference.
It is the same problem as the American democratic party is having with its corrupt system of choosing presidential candidates. If you look at the history of those boring delegated conventions in the U.S., you realize that, in the main, they drill down to the blandest candidates. It is all manipulated anyway.
What happened to the republican party four years ago was that a pompous ass kept threatening to buy the republican convention, so they gave it to him. Donald Trump bought that convention at a fire-sale price.
To nobody’s amusement, New York billionaire Michael Bloomberg tried the Trump technique on the democratic party this time around and nobody bought it. Bloomberg wasted some of his billions.
But, thankfully, the situation is different in Canada. It would be foolish to say it cannot happen here but we are actually seeing variations of that in Ontario in recent leadership contests.
When Patrick Brown bought the Ontario conservative leadership in 2015, it cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Where the money came from is only conjectured. Brown hired the organizers from Hindi temples and Muslim mosques. They sponsored parties throughout Ontario to which they invited both citizens and recent immigrants from the Sub-Continent. Of the 100,000 of these people in Ontario, the organizers signed up close to 40,000 as members of the Ontario progressive conservative party. They could pay the $10 membership fee or the organizers would pay it for them.
In Del Duca’s case the membership fee was $20 (for two years) but he only needed to sign up 14,000 to swamp the existing liberal party membership. Back when I worked on the party newspaper in Ontario, the party had 70,000 paying members. That was back when Ontario parties were run with a higher regard for honesty.
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Copyright 2020 © Peter Lowry
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