News

There's much gnashing of teeth today over at the Toronto Star, where Jim Coyle is downright apoplectic about the return of Mike Harris and some of his handlers to Ontario Progressive Conservative circles:

The headline, "Resurrection of Harrisites boggles mind," pretty well sums it up. We've got "ghouls ... rising from the crypt" and prompting Coyle to suffer "an appalling acid flashback to a period of reckless and ruinous excess."

It's a pretty lively read, and once you get past all the stuff about the "horsemen of the apocalypse riding again," I don't disagree with the basic point that Harris ran an extremely chaotic government that left Ontario in pretty brutal shape. (How much that had to with his cutbacks, and how much it was the result of completely losing interest in his job before his first term had even expired, is open to discussion; I'd suggest it was a combination of the two.) But one aspect of Coyle's column reads more like wishful thinking than reasoned analysis:

To revisit some of the highlights – or more properly lowlights – of the Harris era is to be struck by the suspicion that this unholy renaissance of an ideology and its cast of adherents might well keep the Liberal government of Premier Dalton McGuinty in power for perpetuity, irrespective of his dreamy ditherings or the havoc global economic chaos inflicts on Ontario.

The value of Harris himself going back on the campaign trail will be mixed at best. He'll invigorate the base, but he's sufficiently prone to saying ill-considered things that invoke bad memories that I'd keep him strictly to small towns and rural ridings, if he's public at all. 

But you can't seriously argue that it's inherently contrary to the Conservatives' electoral interests to bring some of the people who were around Harris - the Tom Longs and Leslie Nobles of the world - back into the fold.

As much as we all like John Tory, and those of us outside the party admire his attempts to modernize and moderate it, he proved rather definitively that Red Tories alone are not enough to run his party. You just can't exclude the people who speak for much of your party's support base - and who, for that matter, are the only members of your party with experience running the provincial government in the last quarter-century.

That's not to say that the Conservatives have to go back to the hyper-polarizing, in-your-face style they adopted under Harris; quite apart from its destabilizing effects on government, its political appeal would be more limited now than it was as a response to Bob Rae's NDP. But nor does Liberal Lite seem to have had much appeal to the electorate, even overlooking that Tory self-sabotaged with his commitment to funding religious schools.

The challenge for the next leader will be to find some middle ground between Harris and Tory - a vision for the province that differs substantively from the one offered by the current government, but doesn't veer too far into knee-jerk populism.

There's a danger, given how happy many provincial Conservatives were to see Tory go, that they'll now be so disinterested in including other moderates that they're unable to strike the right balance. But nobody who was seriously concerned with that party's future would suggest that its most successful organizers and strategists should stay on the outside looking in.