Heal
By Eric Dowd
Toronto
– Ontario’s
new Progressive Conservative leader, John Tory, needs healing powers not
available under medicare and he might be better off using a family
counselor anyway.
Tory,
a moderate who defeated strong right-wing opposition, has acknowledged he
has differences in his party to heal, although he downplayed them, saying
merely he has to undertake the `usual soothing of feelings’ after a race
for leader and is not worried it will fail to pull together.
Healing
wounds after Conservative leadership races in fact often has been
difficult and sometimes impossible and winners have punished the
vanquished, losers continued fighting and undermined their party and many
who would be useful to it have been pushed out or quit.
Tory’s
main task is to keep on side the 46 per cent who voted for Jim Flaherty,
who in two leadership campaigns proved articulate, passionate and brimming
with ideas, although they do not represent the majority mood these days.
Flaherty,
as a sitting, working MPP, has to be angry at losing first to Ernie Eves,
who was resurrected after retiring from politics, and Tory, who had never
been elected to any public office.
Leaders
have sometimes mollified close runners-up by appointing them deputy
leader, but (as an example of the back-stabbing after leadership races)
Flaherty already has been deputy premier, when Mike Harris was premier.
Eves
took the post from Flaherty and gave it to Elizabeth Witmer for reasons
including wanting to reward her for throwing her leadership support to him
and avoid an appearance the right wing was too influential in his
government.
Tory
similarly may shy from making Flaherty deputy leader to avoid suggesting
the right wing has clout and reward someone else and Flaherty is entitled
to feel well liked by his party but without any title to show for it.
Eves
not surprisingly was undermined in his short time as leader. Some defeated
rivals leaked reports top Tories felt he could not win an election and the
moment he lost demanded he leave `and the sooner the better.’
Harris
was a rarity in avoiding such back-stabbing after he won for leader, but
the moderate candidate he defeated, Dianne Cunningham, had been an MPP
only two years and still had to find her feet and by then Harris and his
Common Sense Revolution had become so popular with voters none in his
party could quibble.
Larry
Grossman, leader before Harris, was undermined constantly by some who
opposed him for leader. Some of his MPPs refused to vote with him to
expand French-language rights and protection for homosexuals and the two
bright lights he defeated for leader, Dennis Timbrell and Alan Pope,
dropped out of elected politics.
Grossman
may have deserved all he got, because he undermined former premier Frank
Miller after he fell into minority government and opposition when the New
Democrat Party installed the Liberals.
Miller
called Grossman and Timbrell, who had run unsuccessfully against him for
leader, to his office and asked them give him a year to show he could
unite the party and meanwhile stop organizing campaigns to succeed him,
but it did not stop the organizing.
William
Davis, pictured these days as a saint who helped Tory win, won a
leadership race narrowly over Allan Lawrence and made him secretary for
justice, where he shaped policy but had no hand in the daily running of a
ministry, vanished from public view and quit and ran federally.
Another
of Davis’s rivals for leader, Bert Lawrence, made an unauthorized trip
by government plane to Cuba, supposedly to drum up trade, and Davis fired
him, although other ministers committed worse gaffes and survived.
John
Robarts’s main rival for leader was Kelso Roberts, who led on the first
ballot, but Robarts demoted him from attorney general to lands and forests
minister and he disappeared as if lost in the middle of Algonquin Park and
retired.
Political
leaders often are thought to be brutal to their opponents, but they are
not much different to their friends.
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