Toronto Life – December 2018

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cp images

60 toronto life December 2018

says, “there was a feeling among a lot of party mem-

bers that they had been part of a giant bait-and-switch.”

Brown viewed Ford as a buffoonish irritant, some-

one to appease to keep Ford Nation on side. (Every

time Brown appeared in a photo with Ford, John Tory

would text him to say, “What are you doing?”) Seeking

to capture the large voting bloc that the Fords repre-

sented, he backed Doug’s flirtation with an MPP run

in Etobicoke North. But when Ford publicly praised

Trump, Brown was livid. He pulled his support.

When Brown was accused of sexual misconduct

and forced to resign, he insisted that the allegations

were false and that he was the target of a smear cam-

paign orchestrated by his adversaries. By that time,

Ford had announced his intention to run against John

Tory for mayor again, but after Brown’s resignation,

a bigger market opportunity emerged. He could run

for leader, accomplish something that neither his father

nor brother could. Shrewdly, Ford immediately branded

himself as the anti-Brown. While Caroline Mulroney

and Christine Elliott struck more moderate positions,

Ford tacked right, doubling down on issues closer to

the hearts of social conservatives. For a large part of

Ford’s coalition—which includes both old-school,

white conservatives and a religious, multi-ethnic,

lower-income population—this was red meat.

Brown had banished far-right figures like Tanya

Granic Allen and the evangelical leader Charles

McVety; Ford brought them back into the fold. Granic

Allen, a Catholic, the president of Parents as First Educators

and an outspoken social conservative, was the top choice of the

Campaign Life Coalition, a national group that works to nomi-

nate and elect candidates who oppose abortion at all levels of

government. The group claims he assured them that he supported

their various demands to defund abortion, require parental

consent before a minor receives an abortion, and scrap Wynne’s

sex-ed curriculum. He appeared at several church rallies with

McVety, whose positions on cap-and-trade (hated it) and the

sex-ed curriculum (likewise) Ford took as his own. At a rally at

a Howard Johnson in Lindsay, he told supporters, “I believe

education should start at home. It shouldn’t start with the Lib-

eral ideology breathing down our backs day in and day out....

The government thinks they’re smarter than us.” In February,

he was anointed by a pastor at the Prayer Palace, an evangelical

megachurch in North York.

Ford’s chumminess with the religious right was both oppor-

tunistic and convenient. While his opposition to cap-and-trade

and sex ed might have been by-products of his knee-jerk distaste

for taxes and government encroachment, the consensus, among

those who know him, is that he’s not a social conservative. He’s

never been publicly religious, and he will forever be associated

with his family’s well-documented history of lawlessness. “It was

a political calculation, without question, to embrace people like

McVety because that’s a huge voting bloc,” says one Tory insider.

In the end, the leadership race was a squeaker. Elliott won both

the popular vote and more ridings, but Ford had more electoral

votes, which decided the contest. Eighty-three per cent of Granic

Allen’s supporters went to Ford on the second ballot. At his accep-

tance speech, Ford asked her to join him on the podium. He shook

her hand, thanked her. She was pleased to see the issues that drove

her being seriously taken up by Ford, she told me, whatever his

personal beliefs. Afterward, he urged her to run as a candidate.

When he became premier, he said, he’d give her a job in cabinet.

I

n late March, Kathleen Wynne was the most

unpopular premier in the country. The Tories

could have run a toy poodle and beaten her.

But with an extremely short campaign—just

three months—and an unusually volatile

candidate, they played it safe. The party sur-

rounded Ford with Harperites like Teneycke

and Melissa Lantsman, both with loads of experience in govern-

ment and deep Tory roots. Lantsman had worked for Ford’s rival

Caroline Mulroney during the leadership race and long before

that had served as spokesperson for former federal finance min-

ister Joe Oliver. Teneycke had been a policy advisor to both Mike

Harris and Stephen Harper, had worked as Harper’s director of

communications, and served as vice-president of the short-lived

After the election, Ford took a victory bow at

Queen’s Park during Question Period

The Trump

comparisons are a

little too easy, but

they’re not off-base

The fif

T

y Mos

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nfluen

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ial 2018

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