We Must Let It Die

If it was good enough for Brian Mulroney, surely 66.9% support is good enough for one of his former advisers?  John Tory's authority as leader has been gravely weakened by this weekend's leadership review.  Many right-wing conservatives are vowing - albeit under their breadths, these are Progressive Conservatives after all - to wage what the Red Star called a "guerrilla war" against Tory's leadership.  It is a tempting approach.  He's a Bill Davis Tory in a post-Mike Harris Ontario.  Why should conservatives support a leader that can't win and isn't even conservative?  Party politics is not an intellectual bull session.  Ideas act only as a broad context in which policies and tactics can operate.  One may have a candidate as pure as the driven snow, yet if he or she can't field an organization capable of fighting and winning elections it won't matter a tinker's damn.  Whether conservatives like it or not there is a strong Red Tory element within the party, one which is reflected in the preferences of a substantial chunk of the electorate.  Either conservatives can splinter away and form their own Harrisite Party, and face electoral irrelevance, or they can co-operate with the other half of what has historically comprised the winning Progressive Conservative coalition.

Twelve years of Mike Harris as leader grated many Red Tories.  John Tory was seen as a reprieve and a reaction against the Harris era.  You've had your turn, now its ours.  Mike Harris won two elections; Leslie Frost, John Robarts and Bill Davis ruled Ontario for nearly forty years.  This is the essential Red Tory argument against a conservative led party, the Harris years were an aberration of a long historical trend, a necessary correction for the excesses for the Peterson-Rae years.  The children were placed in charge for ten years, some tough love was applied, now back to business as usual.  1995 was not a watershed, only a speed bump back to the halcyon days of the post-war Ontario consensus. 

This is a myth that must die.  What happened thirteen years ago was that for the first time in half a century people seriously questioned the role of government in society.  It was a question the Harris Tories provided only a limited answer to.  Yes, government should be smaller, yes taxes should be cut, but what, fundamentally is the role of government?  How small?  How much taxation?  How should the state be administered and to what end?  In the years since his retirement Mike Harris, working with Preston Manning, at the Fraser Institute have begun to answer the questions posed by their election victories in 1993 and 1995 respectively.  The years since 2002 have been, like the giddy boom years of David Peterson's reign, a holiday from history. 

Come the next recession, not too long off now, there will be another round of belt tightening.  Nothing catastrophic like 1994-1997, these are Liberals after all, yet it will require a cogent response from the PC opposition.  All this is a prelude, however, to the fiscal crisis that will be wrought upon us by the aging boomers.  You can't blame Bob Rae for it, even if he's in charge in Ottawa, and it will require far more than Common Sense to solve.  This is the central political, fiscal and social issue for the next 20-30 years:  How do we manage a welfare state without destroying the economy?  The answer is you can't.  It's an answer that the Liberals and NDP can't offer, it's an answer conservatives can and should.  The next four years need to be spent in preparing policies that meet this challenge.  Who will pay for your retirement and your grandchildren's education?  Keep on increasing taxes?  On whom?  John Tory does not have answers to these questions, but he is the Red Tories' Great White Hope for the future.  Put simply, brutally, he needs to lose again.  The myth of Ontario as a Red Tory province needs to die and one defeat isn't enough to do it.  Only when that myth is dead can the Progressive Conservative party, which should at some point change that preposterous name, begin to truly rebuild.