The leader of Ontario Conservatives has too many balls in the air. Here he is trying to run the strategy, organize the electoral districts, pick the candidates and run the nomination meetings. The only jobs he has forgotten is to show leadership and to help the party choose policies. Since the party seems to have no policies, that last part is easy.
Without policy direction, the party has become a magnet for unscrupulous political candidates with their own agendas. They are looking at the polls that currently show the Ontario Conservatives with the most support from Ontario voters. They are betting on an easy win.
It is also easy to steal nominations. In a party with an unscrupulous leader who stole his position as leader, who cares about the dirty tricks in individual ridings? It is getting so bad that Brown has charged PriceWaterhouseCoopers with the task of keeping things on the up and up. They seem to have gone downhill instead. This might be a task that is beyond the expertise of the accounting firm.
One of the major problems is that it is often Conservative Party officials who are accused of manipulating nomination meetings in favour of one candidate or another. In a Scarborough electoral district, an ethnic Tamil candidate—who was not even a party member until the month before—showed up with large numbers of recent Tamil newcomers and party officials accepted many questionable party memberships.
The same thing happened in reverse in a Hamilton area riding where the Sikh-Canadian candidate has charged that he was defeated by party officials manipulating the election process and maybe doing some ballot box stuffing.
And if you think this is just smoke, you need to check Conservative Party meetings around Ontario. Nomination meetings in Ottawa, Newmarket, Grimsby, Toronto, Hamilton are all being challenged because people are disrespecting the rules.
What the Conservatives should do is forget the accounting firm and hire some Liberal and New Democrat party members to run their meetings. They might at least know a bit about rigging a nomination meeting.
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Copyright 2017 © Peter Lowry
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