It is likely Whitby-Oshawa MPP Christine Elliott is serious this time out. She wants another try at being leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party. She has disappointed Prime Minister Stephen Harper in her quick decision. Harper had hoped she would replace her late husband Jim Flaherty in Ottawa. She is far wiser to travel the provincial path.
After being beaten by the right wing Tim Hudak at the 2009 leadership convention, Elliott is quick off the mark this time. She is betting that the Ontario PCs will want to offer voters a more humanist view of conservative politics after Hudak’s humbling.
It is likely to be a lengthy campaign as the party might take as long as a year before holding a leadership convention. The caucus has already selected MPP Jim Wilson from Simcoe-Grey, one of its more reliable long-time members, as an interim leader. With the majority held today by the Liberals, nobody is worried about an early election.
A lawyer, Elliott comes by her political credentials in her own right as well as her late husband’s. She took over the former Whitby-Ajax provincial riding in a 2006 by-election when Jim Flaherty switched to the federal seat to become Stephen Harper’s finance minister. They became the federal-provincial tag team when Whitby-Oshawa riding became both federal and provincial in 2007.
The question is very much whether today’s Ontario PC Party will accept Elliott as leader? As both Jim Flaherty and her proved, she is from a kinder, gentler era. Her problem will be to prove that she has hard-nosed fiscal credentials. And that will be the gist of her campaign. If the party can find its way back to the politics of the Bill Davis era, can it win in the 21st Century?
It looks as though the early challengers are hard liners compared to Elliott. There can be lots of conjectures but it is too early for forecasts. The PCs might end up with an interesting leader but how she would ever handle the likes of MPP Randy Hellier is the question.
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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry
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