John Tory deserved better.
He's a decent, hard-working, worldly and intelligent man.
He embraced the diversity of Ontario as a strength, not something to be tolerated.
He stared down his party on issues like gay rights.
He tried to bring 21st century ideas to a party that includes elements that reject the 20th.
He never had a chance.
Tory took a broken political party dashed on the shoals of ideology and attempted pretty much single-handedly to tow it back to the calm waters of moderation where it used to thrive.
Unfortunately, Tory was never able to succeed in that struggle.
He lacked the strength to stand up to the reactionaries in his own party.
He was constantly forced to abandon his own moderate beliefs to keep his coalition together.
Worst of all, he had neither the vision nor judgment to see that all this compromise would lead to electoral defeat and fail to resolve the struggles within the party.
Tory's fatal compromises began before he was even elected leader.
During the 2004 leadership, Tory cut a deal with religious fundamentalists who were the only real threat to his victory. Instead of standing up to them and refusing to pledge to fund religious schools, Tory agreed to their demands and sealed his fate in the 2007 election.
Make no mistake. The religious school funding issue was not his making. Just like Ernie Eves in 2002, Tory had to pass an ideological litmus test on religious funding or risk the wrath of highly mobilized private school advocates closely aligned with Conservative front-benchers.
Tory chose to compromise with these elements of his party's grassroots and the result was his overwhelming defeat in 2007 on an issue secondary to his core agenda.
The second challenge Tory faced was the threat of a split in his party over the “rural revolution.”
The impossible decision that faced Tory was compromising his platform to attract the radical landowner movement, or potentially seeing a new party emerge on his right that would split his vote.
Tory chose to compromise and the result was Randy Hillier in his caucus, and as a leading power broker in the looming leadership.
It also left the PC Party carrying potentially fatal policies around, with gutting environmental protections as centrepieces in their manifesto.
Had the religious school issue not proved so powerful in the election, this would have been the next major target of the Liberal campaign. Bet that it will be a major thrust in 2011.
Leading up to the election, Tory occasionally acknowledged his frustration with his caucus, pledging that he would have “better” MPPs after the next election. But the sharp defeat left him with basically the same caucus he inherited from Ernie Eves and Mike Harris.
After the election, he placed his hopes in Stephen Harper to appoint one of his MPPs to a worthy position, and open up a safe seat. Instead, Harper left Tory swinging in the wind. The snub reached absurd levels when Tory was forced to miss his own “end of the year” commitment to find a seat, waiting for a potential Senate appointment that never came.
Out of step with the ideological federal regime, Tory was never more than a punching bag for it.
Tory misread the mood of the party, or trusted his delegate tracking too much, because he was clearly caught by surprise by the tepid response in the leadership review last year.
The resulting chaos in the party continually revealed the ideological divisions that split the PC Party between urban and rural, Red and Blue, conservative, communitarian and libertarian.
Today, the PC Party will likely lose its leader. It is unimaginable that Tory would attempt to stay, but if he did, it would be short.
So what does the future hold?
On the one hand, the Ontario PC Party is the single most winning political party in the democratic world. No one should count them out under any circumstances.
The Liberals could become arrogant and even more cautious. But McGuinty's "never too high, never too low, just relentless" mantra makes this possibility seem remote.
One of the Conservativecaucus members could surprise and grow to Premier stature.
But on the other, who on earth would anyone want the job, having just seen how a good man like John Tory was chewed up and spit out by his own people?
How on earth will that person hold together a party fragmented between Rosedale Red Tories, radical rural quasi-anarchists, and religious conservatives?
How will they finally straighten the PC Party out and choose a single direction?
