Ontario Progressive Conservative Leader John Tory set out Monday to diffuse the controversy over his policy on faith-based schools by announcing that he would put it to a free vote in the legislature should he become premier.
Allowing his caucus members to vote with their conscience all but guarantees that the policy will never see the light of day, given that many Conservatives oppose it. The vote also gives Mr. Tory a way to extricate himself from an issue that has dogged him throughout the campaign for the Oct. 10 election.
Mr. Tory told reporters he has not broken his pledge to make the education system fairer by extending funding to all religious schools. Nor, he said, has his own commitment to the issue changed. The only thing that's new, he said, is that Ontarians will have a greater say in the final outcome through their elected representatives. "I listened to people. I heard them," Mr. Tory said at a news conference Monday. "They said that they had very strong and deep concerns about this. It was becoming more divisive than I wanted."
Specifically, Mr. Tory said he listened to Beverly Cassel, a 66-year-old retired insurance broker.
Ms. Cassell, a long-time Conservative, gave Mr. Tory an earful at a rally in Sarnia, Ont., last Monday: If he wanted her vote, he'd have to provide a lot more details about how he would implement his plan.
"Listen, if you want people to vote for you ... they have to know what your plans are," Ms. Cassel told him, television cameras rolling.
"Well, I'm doing my best on that," Mr. Tory responded.
"You're not," she countered.
That exchange, he said Monday in a speech to the Economic Club of Canada, "convinced me that something I had genuinely, honestly put forward in a spirit of inclusion and fairness had in fact become too much a source of division."
Mr. Tory's about-face on the free vote by no means ends the matter. As the Ontario campaign enters the final stretch, the debate will shift into a postmortem phase, with questions about why the policy was introduced in the first place and what it means for the kind of leadership Mr. Tory offers, said Tim Woolstencroft, managing partner of the Toronto polling firm the Strategic Counsel.
"This is an issue that just keeps on giving," he said.
The debate began immediately after Mr. Tory's news conference ended, with Liberal Party campaign chairman Greg Sorbara denouncing his "appalling" lack of leadership.
"A real leader does not hurl the province into years of divisiveness, instability and turmoil," Mr. Sorbara told reporters. "This is the sign of a desperate man who is not ready to be premier."
Mr. Tory said he was disappointed that the faith-based school policy has overshadowed everything else in his campaign platform, as well as his attacks on his Liberal Leader Dalton McGuinty for breaking promises. But he denied to reporters that he is now at risk of being tarred with the same brush.
The announcement followed a 90-minute telephone call Sunday evening among all 25 members of the Tory caucus. It marked a dramatic about-face from Thursday, when Mr. Tory said he had no intention of backing down on the policy, despite mounting opposition to it.
He also ruled out holding a free vote on the matter last week.
Former Ontario premier Bill Davis, who had been asked previously by Mr. Tory to lead a commission to work out the details of the proposal, said Monday's announcement shows that his protégé listened to Ontarians' concerns about the issue. "He heard what people were saying. He got a sense that they didn't totally understand the complexity of the issue, and he listens," he said.
With reports from Caroline Alphonso and Jill Mahoney
