One of the most frightening think pieces during the recent provincial election was the piece by Bob Hepburn of the Toronto Star entitled Last gasp for Harris-era dream platform? It ran on the day when voters were going to the polls on June 12. It was a fitting time for it. It explained why Conservative Timmy Hudak’s days at the helm of his party were already numbered.
The article was ostensibly about the team preparing the way for a Tim Hudak-run Conservative government for Ontario. The team was chaired by Tom Long, the boy wonder of Canadian Conservatism in the Harris era. His team included Leslie Noble and Paul Rhodes who were back for another go at the hard right Hudak version of the Common Sense Revolution. Hudak’s wife Bev Hutton, also a retread from the Harris government of 1995 through to 2003, was at least an honourary part of the team.
The team was paid by the Ontario PC Party to plan the transition from a Liberal government to the hoped for Conservative government that the Conservatives anticipated. We should all be thankful that it never happened. After the Conservatives tried to spin that Hudak was the winner of the televised debate, many Conservatives were convinced that they were winning.
Hepburn told readers that the team had not been involved in Hudak’s embarrassing loss in 2011. Hudak was expected to win that election and the loss to the McGuinty Liberals was humiliating. Yet it was only McGuinty who realized that there was no next time for him and he set the wheels in motion for the tightly controlled convention that chose Kathleen Wynne as the new leader.
Hepburn also tells us that it was Long and his team who convinced Hudak to focus on the million jobs plan in the 2014 election campaign. They are also purported to be the geniuses who led Hudak to also promise to rid the government of a hundred thousand civil service jobs. It was that straw that broke the camel’s back. It caused a shift of about four per cent of the popular vote away from the Conservatives and a humiliating loss for Tim Hudak, Tom Long, Paul Rhodes and Leslie Noble. It might be a long wait for those four horsemen to be invited to their next Ontario Conservative Party meeting.
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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry
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