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By Eric Dowd
Toronto – Ontario’s provincial parties are calculating the federal Liberals will do badly in an election and showing it with their feet.
Liberals in the legislature are not rushing, as they often have done, to leave and run federally, where their party has governed for 47 of the last 62 years and they traditionally had more chance of getting in cabinet.
On the other hand some leading provincial Progressive Conservatives and even one well-known New Democrat are switching to run federally and suggesting there are better prospects for their parties and themselves at that level.
Former Conservative deputy premier Jim Flaherty explained he is moving because he is shocked and angered by the evidence the federal Liberals diverted government money to fund their election campaigns.
John Baird, a former Conservative social services minister, explained he is switching primarily because Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin has cut money for health care, despite his huge financial surpluses.
Tony Clement, a former Ontario health minister, has virtually abandoned provincial politics since he lost his seat in the 2003 election.
Clement ran unsuccessfully for leader of the new federal Conservative party and a seat in the Commons and is now seeking to run federally again.
Three other defeated Conservative MPPs will try for federal seats and not wait for the next provincial election in 2007.
Some of the MPPs are moving partly because they are right-wingers out of step with the more moderate direction their provincial party is taking under its new leader, John Tory, after 14 years run by the far-right.
Flaherty and Baird have denied publicly they are leaving because of Tory to avoid fostering disunity in a party that already has too much.
But Flaherty has shown his far-right passion by such acts as advocating privatizing almost everything but the legislature chamber and removing the homeless from streets.
He also said former premier Ernie Eves was a pale pink imitation of a Liberal and Tory too much like a Liberal and should not have run for leader when he had never been elected anywhere.
Baird also is philosophically closer to the federal Conservatives led by Stephen Harper. He once publicly shouted down a woman who protested Conservative cuts were hurting her disabled son and accused welfare recipients of `shooting their welfare cheques up their arms.’
But Flaherty also is the Conservatives’ most exciting orator, as he demonstrated in two runs for leader, and Baird showed talent as a house leader for being undaunted and irrepressible and injecting spirit into his party’s depleted caucus, and it will miss both.
Clement also would have been useful to the provincial party. He was the only minister who won praise in its last decaying days in government, for his fight against the SARS epidemic while Eves golfed.
New Democrat Churley will be the most missed day-to-day in the legislature. She is vocal on many issues including the environment and women’s rights, as hard to shake off as wet dental floss and among the most effective back-bench MPPs in memory.
She bravely shrugged off put-downs by male legislators that happen even in these enlightened days.
A Conservative said `why don’t you go home and take care of your own kids?’ and a Liberal said she was so argumentative she must be having a menopausal `hot flash.’
Churley as a frightened teenager gave birth to a son and surrendered him for adoption and hounded the Liberals to pass a law that gives adopted children and biological parents access to records through which they can identify and locate each other.
Churley says she has done all she can in provincial politics and wants to be part of the new force federal NDP leader Jack Layton is building and this is a worthy motive.
MPPs don’t mention it because they don’t want to seem mercenary, but their base pay also is only $86,000-a-year while an MP’s has grown to $144,000 – there are a lot of extra inducements to go federal.
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