The last Red Tory

Share

On this much, her political friends and foes can agree: Christine Elliott is very nice.

Nicer than any of the other candidates running for the leadership of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party. Nicer than her husband, Jim Flaherty, the federal Finance Minister. Nice enough that even at the tail end of a gruelling leadership campaign, it is very difficult to find anyone who has seen her angry.

There is less agreement about whether this is a good thing.

The provincial Conservatives have some recent experience with a very nice leader. His name is John Tory, and he was subjected to a series of public humiliations that culminated in his departure earlier this year. Less recently, they had some experience with a leader for whom niceness was not on the priority list. His name is Mike Harris, and he won two majority governments.

Because she resembles the former more than the latter, Ms. Elliott - described by a conservative blogger as "John Tory in a dress" - has attracted more ire than any of the other leadership contenders. To them, Mr. Tory's foibles proved that the socially conscious brand of conservatism is either dead or has been appropriated by Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty.

Yet Ms. Elliott contends they were not compassionate enough. "Women in particular hear all Conservatives want is to cut taxes," she argues. "That means they want to slash programs, that means that they don't care about people, and that just really bothers me."

If she's the only thing standing between her party and the return to hard-edged, Harris-era conservatism promised by front-runner Tim Hudak, Ms. Elliott has her reasons.

On the weekend before party members nominate their next leader, most underdog candidates would be out pressing the flesh in a community centre. Yet Ms. Elliott, prim as ever, is seated at a diner in her hometown of Whitby - fresh from a day spent with her son John at the 20th anniversary of a local working farm designed for people with special needs.

The amount of time she has spent at events like this has lent her a conviction that places her in the centre of a battle about just what it means to be a Progressive Conservative in the 21st century.

She has been volunteering for special-needs charities for two decades, but her involvement greatly intensified in the early 1990s when John - one of three triplets who are now 18 - suffered a battle with encephalitis. A lawyer, she became defined mostly by her role as a community activist.

After she arrived at Queen's Park in 2006 to represent the same riding that Mr. Flaherty holds federally, she was named her party's attorney-general critic. But caucus colleagues say that her special-needs advocacy informed her work as an MPP. Over the course of an hour-long interview, she tries valiantly to seem enthused by her proposal for an eight per cent flat-tax - an obvious attempt to buttress her otherwise lacking credentials as a fiscal conservative. But talk of that centrepiece policy segues into another discussion: why her plan to double charitable tax credits will help "build strong communities" that "rally around people in need."

"What I'm proposing to do is broaden the message, and tell people what we are about," she says. "It's not just the economic conservatism. That is vitally important. But we don't complete the message and talk about why it's important." In other words, the upside of frugal management is that their government will "have the money to be able to put into programs to help vulnerable people."

The best that she has to say about Mr. Harris, who has been campaigning on Mr. Hudak's behalf, is that he "had to make the decisions that had to be made in those days" - days she evidently has no desire to return to. "I know that some of the other leadership contenders are saying 'Let's not be watered-down conservatives and go back to the good old days.' Well, you can't. There's no turning back."

That view has led her to become her party's most vocal opponent of scrapping the province's human-rights tribunals, a policy of maverick fourth-place leadership candidate Randy Hillier that's been adopted by Mr. Hudak.

"As a Conservative party, to start talking about abolishing a human-rights tribunal - that just in itself should raise red flags all over the place," she says. "So I'm just pointing out to people that I think it's folly to go there." Her critics imply she's a proxy for Mr. Flaherty. She's "caught in the hoopla of a lot of the folks around Jim who wanted their own candidate," says a senior supporter of Mr. Hudak's. The fact that she's surrounded by advisers once devoted to her more conservative husband - who twice ran for the provincial leadership as the flag-bearer for the party's right wing - suggests they're there "more out of duty than belief." It is virtually impossible to get a rise out of Ms. Elliott. Her smile remains intact as she pointedly offers a reminder - without naming names - that much of Mr. Hudak's support comes from his wife, former Harris adviser Deb Hutton. "I guess everybody has some help in one way or another," she says. "Other candidates do in different ways, as you know, with the support of other people." Still, her critics have a point. For all the polish of her appearance and demeanour, Ms. Elliott's communication skills remain somewhat raw.

She can be convincing and concise; asked about her fundamental problem with Mr. McGuinty, she delivers a perfect sound bite on his "mile-wide, inch-deep approach" to problem-solving. But out of her comfort zone, she is less convincing. In responses to questions she might not already have been asked multiple times, such as why Ontarians will turn on the premier in the next election when they didn't in the last one, her sentences end with the high inflection of someone seeking approval.

Ms. Elliott is banking on the idea that not being a "career politician" - another subtle dig at Mr. Hudak, perhaps - will work in her favour.

Mr. Tory, who Ms. Elliott credits for helping attract her to front-line politics, seems to think she might be on to something. "Each person that's running for leader brings a different mix, and I'm not saying that one is better or worse," he says, his own reputation for niceness emerging unscathed. "But I think hers is interesting, because she's on the one hand a person with an established professional career and a history on the issues, and at the same time she's not seen as a professional politician."

A better argument may be that she is the only one of the leadership contenders with the potential to grow. She is, as a senior Ontario Liberal puts it, a "blank slate"; much like Mr. Harris, who started as an unknown entity, she could be moulded by party strategists into a leader who fits the times.

That assumes Ms. Elliott wants to be moulded. "I'm not changing my values or my principles at all as part of this campaign," she insists. Her mother canvassed and volunteered for local charities while running the local Conservative campaign office, she recalls; why should there be any less of an emphasis on the "progressive" side of the party today?

Whether or not she wins the leadership, she says, she will "continue to speak up for those voices that don't have one." She's not talking about her endangered species of Red Tory. But some days, being nice must seem like a lonely battle.