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| Glenn Lowson For The National Post |
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Ontario Conservative leader John Tory at a roundtable discussion in Toronto. (FPinfomart: Restricted, Canada.com: Restricted) |
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It was yesterday at 9 a.m. when I realized John Tory was
in serious, serious trouble. I realized it while staring at a box that
distributes copies of 24 Hours, a thin newssheet distributed free at Toronto's
subway stations and bus stops.
The cover of Monday's edition contained no news. Instead, it was a full page
advertisement from Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, which went like this: "You
know what I love about our publicly funded schools? They're public! Whatever
their race, creed or cultural background, our kids attend the same schools.
Together. They learn together. Play and laugh and sing together. Help each other
with algebra ..."
And so doth the mother's milk flow, until we get to the inevitable punchline
about how evil John Tory wants to destroy all this by handing $500-million to
private religious schools. Never mind the fact that when Dalton McGuinty
actually attended a state-funded Catholic school as a tyke, he never played with
a Muslim, or laughed with a Hindu, or sung Hava Nagila with a Jew, or taught
algebra to a Protestant.
Never mind all that, because politics is about symbolism -- especially in a
place like Ontario, where voters are more or less content, and the election is
being fought between two virtually indistinguishable white, middle-aged males
who embrace the same policies on just about every issue under the sun.
And make no mistake: The symbolism in the ad is brilliant. McGuinty is about
love and togetherness. Tory is about rancour and division. Give the Premier's
people credit. Even if it's the other guy who makes the mistake, it takes a pro
to exploit it properly. And that's what the Mc-Guinty spin machine is doing.
So how exactly did Tory step into this mess? It couldn't have been the polls
that led him into it. According to an Ipsos-Reid survey reported in yesterday's
Post, 62% of Ontario voters said they opposed Tory's school-funding plan. My
theory? Blame it on the chicken.
I am talking here of the rubber chicken dinners every politician attends in
hopes of securing endorsements from this or that civic group. A generation ago,
this meant going to the Rotary Club, or a local church. But times have changed
in multicultural Ontario. And the hottest rubber-chicken gigs are now splashy
dinners hosted by ethnic and religious groups in grand hotel ballrooms.
As a journalist, I've been to a thousand of these. Community grandees bring
their families and make expensive bids at silent auctions. Airline tickets to
Tel Aviv or Delhi or Cairo or Beijing are raffled off. Speeches are made,
fundraisers are thanked, a slick video from the old country is displayed on
giant screens and then John Tory or some similar specimen is trotted out to say
a few decorous words about diversity.
Then we all look under our plates for a sticker. The winner claims the
centre-piece. We eat dessert and then everyone goes home.
I'm betting that Tory hatched on his school-funding idea sometime between the
chicken and the dessert -- when he was shaking hands with a steady stream of
parents, each of whom trotted up to the head table to tell Tory why the state
should pay for his kids' religious education. In a private session after the
event, community leaders gave Tory the same message. "This is what our base
wants," they told him. "This issue will guide how our people vote."
Then Tory gets the bright idea: The grassroots have spoken. Polls be damned.
Religious school funding is the issue that will unite the new, multicultural
Ontario.
Except, of course, it hasn't. Because the people you meet at these rubber
chicken dinners aren't representative of the ordinary Ontarians who eat their
chicken at home, or out of a drive-thru bag. Being self-selected ethnic-group
activists who take their cultural identity seriously enough to spend small
fortunes on private religious education, they aren't even representative of the
broader, more assimilated ethnic communities they purport to represent.
The only way to dethrone a smooth, dogmatically centrist, (relatively)
popular politician like McGuinty is by finding a populist wedge issue and
torquing it hard. But Tory has never been able to do that because he's a
risk-averse politician who instinctively embraces the elite consensus on all the
issues that really matter. And so he's wasted his time in opposition, issuing
knee-jerk press releases about gun violence, factory layoffs and tinker-toy
spending scandals, but never giving anyone any indication that he'd change the
way the province is run in any substantive way.
Then, the one time he makes a bold leap, he does it by following not the will
of voters, but a handful of self-interested sectarian elites. That's what you
get for eating too much rubber chicken.
jkay@nationalpost.com
Illustration:
• Black & White Photo: Glenn
Lowson For The National Post / Ontario Conservative leader John Tory at a
roundtable discussion in Toronto.
Idnumber: 200709110041
Edition: National
Story
Type: Column
Length: 792 words
Keywords: POLITICIANS; CANDIDATES; HEALTH
CARE
Illustration Type: P
PRODUCTION FIELDS
NDATE: 20070911
NUPDATE: 20070911
DOB: 20070911
POSITION: 1
