Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario

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Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario
Active Provincial Party
Founded 1854
Leader John Tory
President Blair McCreadie
Headquarters 2020-120 Adelaide St. West
Toronto, Ontario
M5H 1T1
Political ideology Conservatism
International alignment
Colours Blue
Website http://www.ontariopc.com
John Sandfield Macdonald
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John Sandfield Macdonald

The Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario, more commonly known as the Ontario PC Party, is a right-of-centre political party in Ontario, Canada. The party was known for many years as "Ontario's natural governing party." It has ruled the province for 79 of the 129 years since Confederation, including an uninterrupted run from 1943 to 1985. It currently forms the Official Opposition in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario.

Contents

[edit] History

[edit] Origins

The first Conservative Party in Upper Canada was made up of United Empire Loyalists and supporters of the wealthy Family Compact that ruled the colony and opposed responsible government. Once responsible government was granted in response to the 1837 Rebellions, the Tories re-emerged as moderate reformers who opposed the radical policies of the Reformers and then the Clear Grits.

The modern Conservative Party originated in the Liberal-Conservative coalition founded by Sir John A. Macdonald and George-Étienne Cartier in 1854. It is a variant of this coalition that formed the first government in Ontario with John Sandfield Macdonald as Premier. After losing power in 1871, this Conservative coalition began to dissolve. What was originally a party that included Catholics and Protestants, became an almost exclusively English and Protestant party, more and more dependent on the Protestant Orange Order for support, and even for its leadership. The party became opposed to funding for Separate (Catholic) schools, opposed to language rights for French-Canadians and distrustful of immigrants. Paradoxically, an element of the party gained a reputation for being pro-labour as a result of links between the Orange Order and the labour movement.

[edit] Pre-war dynasty

After 33 years in Opposition, the Tories returned to power under James P. Whitney, who led a progressive administration in its development of the province. The Whitney government initiated massive public works projects such as the creation of Ontario Hydro. It also enacted reactionary legislation (such as Regulation 17) against the French-Canadian population in Ontario. The Tories were in power for all but five years from 1905 to 1934. After the death of Whitney in 1914, however, they lacked vision and became complacent. The Tories lost power to the United Farmers of Ontario in the 1919 election but were able to regain office in 1923 election due to the UFO's disintegration and divisions in the Ontario Liberal Party. They were defeated by Mitch Hepburn's Liberals in 1934 due to their inability to cope with the Great Depression.

[edit] Post-war dynasty

The Conservatives took advantage of Liberal infighting to win a minority government in the 1943 provincial election, reducing the Liberals to third-party status. Drew called another election in 1945, only two years into his mandate, to get a majority government. The Tories played up Cold War tensions to win a landslide majority, though it emerged several years later that the Tory government had set up a secret department of the Ontario Provincial Police to spy on the opposition and the media. The party would dominate Ontario politics for the next four decades.

The anti-Catholic, anti-French, anti-immigrant strain of the Tories was evident under Drew and his successor, Leslie Frost, who embodied all those elements. In 1961, John Robarts became the 17th premier of Ontario. He was one of the most popular premiers in years. Under Robarts' lead, the party epitomized power. He was an advocate of individual freedoms and promoted the rights of the provinces against what he saw as the centralizing initiatives of the federal government, while also promoting national unity against Quebec separatism. He hosted the 1967 "Confederation of Tomorrow" conference in Toronto in an unsuccessful attempt to achieve an agreement for a new Constitution of Canada.

Robarts initially opposed Canadian medicare when it was proposed, but later endorsed it fully. He led the party towards a civil libertarian movement. As a strong believer in the promotion of both official languages, he opened the door to French education in Ontario schools.

[edit] Big Blue Machine era

In 1971, Bill Davis became party leader and the 18th premier. Anti-Catholicism became an issue again in the 1971 election, when the Tories under campaigned strenuously against a Liberal proposal to extend funding for Catholic separate schools until Grade 13. Davis reversed himself in 1985, and enacted the funding extension as one of his last acts before leaving office.

Davis governed until 1985 with a team of advisers known as the "Big Blue Machine" because of their reputed political and strategic skills. Their stamp on the party was so strong that many refer to the Tories' long rule over Ontario as the "Big Blue Machine era."

During Davis's time as leader of the PC Party, the party moved to the centre, and on some issues, moved to the left of the Liberals. This made him one of the most popular politicians in Ontario's history. Other conservatives in the federal PC Party accused him of damaging the conservative image in Canada by moving to the left on some issues.

[edit] End of a dynasty

Following a February 1985 leadership convention, the new party leader and premier, Frank Miller, called an election in which the Conservatives were reduced to a minority government, and actually finished behind the Liberals in the popular vote.

Soon aferward, the Ontario New Democratic Party of Bob Rae reached an agreement with David Peterson's Liberals in which the NDP would support a Liberal minority government. Miller was defeated in a no-confidence motion on June 18. Peterson was asked to form a government later in the day, ending the longest period of one-party rule in Canadian provincial history. Miller was replaced as leader by Larry Grossman at a second leadership convention.

When the Liberal-NDP Accord expired, an election was held in 1987 in which the Tories were reduced to third place in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario. Grossman was personally defeated in his downtown Toronto riding and resigned immediately. Andy Brandt was the party's interim leader until a leadership election was held in 1990 in which Mike Harris defeated Dianne Cunningham.

The Tories failed to improve their standing in the 1990 election under Harris, in which Peterson was defeated by Rae's NDP.

[edit] The "Common Sense Revolution"

Mike Harris
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Mike Harris

In the 1995 election, Harris catapulted his party from third place to an election victory, running on a right-wing platform known as the "Common Sense Revolution" that highlighted a number of "wedge issues" and promised significant tax cuts, cuts to welfare, the introduction of workfare, privatization and other neo-conservative measures. Harris went on to win a second majority in 1999 despite the strikes and protests that plagued his first term in office.

The Harris government was criticized on issues such as health care, the environment, education, and its tax policies, which critics said created the $5 billion deficit which the Conservatives left in their last year in government.

The slide in Conservative support began in early 2000, according to the Ipsos-Reid polling company (Ipsos-Reid website), when the Tories fell behind the Liberals in the public opinion polls for the first time since the 1999 election, with 36% support of those polled, compared to 42% for the Liberals and 17% for the NDP. Later in 2000, Liberal support rose to about half of those polled, while Conservative support remained in the low 30s. This pattern held through to the 2002 leadership campaign, when Conservative support rose to 37%, while the Liberals retained the support of about half of those polled.

[edit] Ernie Eves: distancing the party from the "Common Sense Revolution"

With the resignation of Mike Harris in 2002, the PCs held a leadership election. Ernie Eves, who had been Harris' Minister of Finance, and who had the backing of almost all PC MPPs, won the campaign, defeating his successor as Minister of Finance, Jim Flaherty.

Eves was a Red Tory, unlike Harris. He'd tried to blunt some of the edges of the more radical elements of Harris' platform while in Cabinet. His rejection of the "Common Sense Revolution" continued after he became premier. He killed plans to sell off Hydro One when deregulation of energy prices resulted in a dramatic increase in energy rates and threatened a consumer revolt. This led him to re-impose retail price controls on electricity, capping the price at 4.3 cents per kilowatt/hour, and vowing to keep it capped until at least 2006. The result was a quickly escalating public debt that made up for shortfalls in the price of electricity.

During the summer after Eves’ election as leader, the Conservatives closed the gap in popular support considerably, placing only two percentage points behind the Liberals in two summer public opinion polls. By the autumn of 2002, however, Eves’ ‘honeymoon’ with the voters was over, and the party fell back in the polls, hovering in the mid-to-high 30s, while the Liberals scored in the mid-to-high 40s.

[edit] 2003 election defeat

Despite his attempt to recast the Tory government as a moderate one, Eves was unable to reverse the slide in the polls the Tories had suffered in the last years of Harris' tenure.

Eves asked Flaherty's campaign chairman, Jamie Watt, to co-manage the Conservative election campaign, along with the rest of the "Whiz Kids" team that had previously worked for Harris. Only Tom Long, the central organizer in Harris' campaigns, refused to work for Eves.

The "Whiz Kids" reputation for competence was marred by publicity stunts such as handing down his government's second budget at the headquarters of Magna International instead of in the provincial legislature. Voter backlash against this break with parliamentary tradition forced the delay of a planned spring election in 2003.

In May 2003, Eves released the party's platform, dubbed "the Road Ahead". The document promoted an aggressive hard-right agenda, and was closer in spirit to Harris and Flaherty's agenda than to Eves' own. In releasing this document, Eves reversed his earlier positions on banning teacher's strikes, jailing the homeless, private school tax credits and same-sex marriage. The platform also called for mortgage interest deductibility.

The Conservative election campaign was riddled with mistakes and miscues, and Eves appeared very uncomfortable trying to sell a platform he had opposed only a year earlier. In contrast, the Liberals had spent the last four years positioning themselves as the government in waiting, and ran on the simple platform of "Choose Change." Conservative television ads which attacked Liberal leader Dalton McGuinty as "still not up to the job" were received poorly by the voting public, and allowed the Liberal campaign to portray the Tories as needlessly confrontational.

A critical point in the campaign was when members of the Eves team jokingly referred to McGuinty as an "evil reptilian kitten-eater from another planet", a comment that made the Conservatives appear desperate to vilify their opponents. In the final days leading up to the vote, Eves was further criticized for saying that McGuinty just says "whatever comes into his pointy little head". On election day, the Conservatives were routed, falling to 24 seats.

[edit] The John Tory years

John Tory, leader (2004-present)
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John Tory, leader (2004-present)

In early 2004, Eves announced his intention to step down as leader. A leadership convention to replace him was called for the fall.

Jim Flaherty was the first to enter the race, campaigning on the same hard-right platform as in 2002. He was soon opposed by John Tory, a former executive with Rogers Cable and a Toronto mayoral candidate in 2003, sometimes viewed as a Red Tory due to his association to former Ontario Premier Bill Davis. Member of Provincial Parliament Frank Klees, the third candidate in the race, was a supporter of the Common Sense Revolution and campaigned for a parallel private health care system.

The 2004 leadership election was held on September 18, 2004, electing John Tory as the party's new leader. Tory, a longtime backroom player in the PC Party, was elected to the Ontario legislature in a by-election in March, 2005, in the seat that Eves held.

In recent polling, the PCs' support has risen since the first Liberal budget in 2004. The party has been virtually tied with the Liberals, as Tory has experimented with several different orientations. During his first year as leader, Tory attempted to rise above partisan politics, openly contemptuous of partisan moves and pledging to improve decorum in the legislature. In his second year as leader, Tory adopted a more traditional approach to the issues, sharply opposing the Liberal plans on taxes, spending, deficits and cuts. Heading into the election year, Tory put most of his emphasis on criticizing the government's handling of a standoff with Iroquois aboriginals in Caledonia in order to portray the government as weak. He also emphasized traditional right-wing issues like taxes, crime and government spending.

During the 2006 PC Policy Convention, Tory introduced his plan for shaping up the PCs' platform for the 2007 election campaign. His ideas were stated in what have been called "The White Papers".[1]

[edit] List of members of the current shadow cabinet

[edit] Party leaders

[edit] Leaders of the Conservative Party of Canada West (pre-Confederation)

+ Shared role with Sir John A. Macdonald as joint premiers of the Province of Canada representing Canada West (Ontario).

[edit] Leaders of the Conservative Party of Ontario

[edit] Leaders of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario

[edit] Recent election results

Year of
election		 Candidates
elected		 # of seats
available		 # of
votes		 % of
popular vote		 Role in
legislature
1985 52 125 1,343,044 37.0% Official opposition
1987 16 130 931,473 24.7% Third party
1990 20 130 944,564 23.5% Third party
1995 82 129 1,870,110 44.8% Government
1999 59 103 1,978,059 45.1% Government
2003 24 103 1,559,181 34.7% Official opposition
  • Won most seats in 1985 election, but lost power after Liberals signed a pact with the NDP to form the government.

[edit] See also

[edit] External link

Ontario Political Parties
Represented in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario:
PC Liberal NDP
Other parties recognized by Elections Ontario:
Green Freedom COR Family Communist Libertarian

Provincial Elections
Major national, provincial, and territorial conservative parties (edit):

Forming the government:
Canada - Alberta - Prince Edward Island
Newfoundland and Labrador - Nova Scotia - Yukon
Forming the official opposition:
Manitoba - New Brunswick - Ontario - Saskatchewan Party
Third parties represented in legislatures:
Action démocratique du Québec - Alberta Alliance
Historical Conservative provincial governments:
British Columbia - Saskatchewan - Quebec - Northwest Territories


Leaders of the Ontario PC Party
Macdonald | Cameron | Meredith | Marter | Whitney | Hearst | Ferguson | Henry | Rowe | Drew | Kennedy | Frost | Robarts | Davis | Miller | Grossman | Brandt | Harris | Eves | Tory
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