Leadership conventions are not just about selecting a personality to lead the party. They are about selecting the coalition of seats you want to go after.
Do you want to try to unite suburban Ontario with Toronto? Or rural and suburban? Should we make a play for Northern and industrial Ontario?
What follows is a short discourse on the history of coalition building in Ontario before using that analysis to consider the recent NDP Leadership selection and the nascent Progressive Conservative race.
During their long decades in power from 1943 to 1985, the Ontario PC Party was increasingly the party of suburban and urban Ontario. As Frost gave way to Robarts, the party was more and more urban and less rural. By the time of Bill Davis, it was firmly suburban in base with a strong anchor of Toronto seats. The Liberals had a Clear Grit rural base, which left them locked in opposition for decades, unable to communicate effectively to multicultural city seats added after every census.
This pattern was disturbed when the NDP broke out of their Northern and industrial city base and won a fair chunk of the urban vote. This would push the PCs to a minority in 1975 and 1977, but Stephen Lewis's departure allowed the PCs to build back to a majority in 1981.
When the party selected Frank Miller in 1985, Progressive Conservatives turned their back on the urban-suburban coalition and instead attempted to become a rural-suburban coalition. David Peterson, who himself had won the Liberal leadership in 1982 in part on rejecting an attempt at an urban breakthrough, suddenly saw a huge opening and drove through it to a minority government.
The PC Party realized its error and tried to fix things by shifting quickly back to the urban Larry Grossman. But the Liberals were relentless in forcing their party into urban and suburban seats and won a massive majority. The NDP was reduced to an industrial rump of seats and the PCs to the handful of rural and suburban seats that continues to form their inner core.
The PC Party then faced a fork in the road. They could attempt to rebuild themselves as an urban-suburban party, as advocated by Diane Cunningham, or a suburban-rural party, as advocated by Mike Harris. They chose the latter.
The NDP won in 1990, taking seats they normally have no business winning like Muskoka or Elgin as the only other option when voters were outraged at the Liberals and PCs simultaneously. The PCs survived the election by being the only party emphasizing the rural and small town issues of low taxes and smaller government.
When Harris won in 1995, his coalition was solidly rural and suburban, albeit with some urban bits he lost in 1999. But even as they lost seats like suburban Mississauga West and rural Northumberland, the Liberals were able to affect a major breakthrough into the NDP's traditional heartland of industrial and Northern Ontario, winning seats in Windsor, Hamilton and Sudbury.
After the Harris years were over, the PC Party made a conscious attempt to rebuild as an urban-suburban party under the ultimate urban Conservative, John Tory. However, Tory proved unable to breakthrough in Toronto, and when he attempted to win a seat in a rural PC bastion, he showed he had no traction there either.
So what does the past tell us about the future?
For starters, the next PC leader will almost certainly advocate the suburban-rural strategy.
Why is that?
Well, if they did want to pursue the urban-suburban strategy, there is no one in caucus to quarterback it, and the party will not choose a leader without a seat for the next few years.
