Tuesday December 5, 2000
Ontario Tories Tell Alliance to Purge Its Social Conservatism
OTTAWA, Dec 5, 2000 (LSN.ca) – The sore losers in the campaign to have Tom Long head the Canadian Alliance party have come out swinging after the federal election, falsely claiming that the Alliance must abandon its social conservatism to win in Ontario. This confirms what was suspected about Tom Long’s key strategists during the leadership campaign. The Harris Tories were suspected of promoting their own agenda to re-make the Alliance. This would have taken the form of another socially liberal, inner circle controlled central power machine, with no intention of strengthening the social quality of life in the country.
The charge was led by Ontario Finance Minister Ernie Eves, who earlier this year noted that his membership in the Alliance party was contingent on Long winning the leadership. On Dec. 1 the National Post quoted Eves as saying the Alliance should abandon its social conservatism on life issues and homosexuality. “I don’t think that you can convince most Ontarians to adopt a social-conservative agenda,” he said. However, Eves is a long-time abortion rights supporter who appears to have been aggressively, but stealthily advancing his social liberal agenda in Ontario. In his April 20, 2000 column, Globe and Mail reporter John Ibbitson revealed Eves strong views on abortion. Ibbitson wrote “Back in the 1980s, when the Liberals were in power, a back-bench MPP named Ernie Eves broke with his party to vote in support of publicly funded women’s health centres, which performed abortions”.
In his bid to rid the Alliance of its social conservative tradition Eves is skillfully sending his message via certain Ontario MPP’s. MPPs Frank Klees, Bob Runciman and Jim Flaherty, supposed social conservatives, have been placed up front echoing Eves in suggesting the Alliance pursue a fiscal-only conservative agenda. Klees, who himself flirted with running against Day for the Alliance leadership on a fiscal-only ticket said that in Ontario the Alliance was “off message” during the election. “Most Canadians, most people in Ontario, want to deal with the economic issues,” he said. The Post reports that Mr. Flaherty, echoing Pierre Trudeau’s justification for his political sexual revolution, said Ontarians want to keep the state out of their bedrooms. “I don’t think those are primary issues with most Canadians,” he said referring to issues around abortion and homosexuality. (Neither the Alliance nor Mr. Day ever intimated that they were.) The Ontario Tory strategy appears to dovetail with the Chretien, Joe Clark and NDP strategy to pin that false charge on Day and like-minded Alliance members. The Post reports Flaherty, “Ontario’s Attorney-General, and Bob Runciman, the Consumer and Corporate Affairs Minister, have not only suggested a change in leadership but urged the party to jettison . . . its position on homosexuality and its refusal to rule out a referendum on abortion.”
None of the quoted Tories have acknowledged that the abortion and gay issues were overwhelmingly thrust into the election by the opposition and the media and that Day desperately attempted to avoid them and stay on other messages. That obvious reality leaves big questions as to what the Ontario Tories are really up to. The intense pre-occupation with social issues by the Day critics, given that Day did so much to avoid the issues and to emphasize that he wouldn’t do anything about them, has revealed a puzzling deep fear among social liberals that has shocked social conservatives. The Harris Tories appear to be asking Alliance supporters to renounce social conservative principals as the price for political power, just as Chretien, Clark and many of the Harris Tories have themselves done.
Probably the clearest evidence to Alliance members that Tories are more interested in political opportunism is the new call from federal Conservative leader Joe Clark urging them to come back to the Conservative Party. Clark has presented his call as a willingness to join with the Alliance to form a united party. However, his conditions for the merger are elimination of the social conservatism of the Alliance and under the leadership of the Conservatives. The Globe and Mail reports today that Clark said, “The major difference has to do with social policy, and the view of the nation. The Progressive Conservative Party isn’t going to change on that.”
Clark’s ruminations are, however, ill conceived particularly since his sorrowful leadership has led, at least partially, to the dismantling of the Conservative Party as a force in Canada. Moreover, of the slim dozen MPs within the party, at least a full third are social conservatives.
Polling data have shown that the social conservative tradition within the Alliance is not the cause of its failure in Ontario. Rather, an unscrupulously quick election call in economically prosperous times, coupled with an effective media smear campaign, capitalized on the appearance of a “hidden agenda” within the Alliance. This was in part due to an inability or unwillingness to clearly voice a stand on important issues. Those were among the real reasons for the Alliance’s poor showing in Ontario. (see LifeSite’s election analysis at: https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2000/nov/001129a.html) As well, it appeared that the leader and his campaign team did not have their election policies and strategy thoroughly prepared and they were especially unprepared for the vicious and underhanded campaign waged against them by Chretien and his media allies.
Another factor hurting the Alliance in Ontario was the fact that its Ontario candidates were, in general, once again of a significantly different quality than those in the West. For instance, on the life issues, Campaign Life Coalition rated 67% of the western CA candidates as pro-life or pro-life with exceptions, whereas only 42% of Ontario’s CA candidates received the same rating.
See Eves’ quotes in the National Post at:
https://www.nationalpost.com/search/story.html?f=/stories/20001201/389567.html
See also:
https://www.nationalpost.com/search/story.html?f=/stories/20001202/391321.html