Remember Tim Hudak?

The departing Tory leader will be fast forgotten by voters, a footnote to Ontario politics. But he will be much missed by his political rivals, and the media, as a memorable foil.

Tories who doubted Hudak’s toxicity before the election discovered it soon enough on the doorstep, where doors were slammed in their faces. His post-election plan to helm them a while longer provoked a caucus revolt.

Every extra hour Hudak remained as the public face of the party was an hour they’d never get back. Bowing to a mutiny, he promised to bow out by month’s end.

Now, to paraphrase Richard Nixon, Ontarians won’t have Hudak to kick around anymore.


Hudak is history. Does the party have a future?

After a four-election losing streak that has claimed three leaders since 2003, it’s a life-or-death question for Progressive Conservatives: Not just who’s next, but what’s next.

More than a mere change of face, they need a new voice and a broader vision. Cheap talk about “compassionate conservatism” won’t win over voters when a party muses about mass firings.

Forced smiles fool no one when the underlying message boasts of biting off the heads of public servants in the public square and spitting them out. Scapegoating workers, treating them like sacrificial lambs for a photo-op, won’t win over their friends or families at the doorstep.

In the aftermath, shell-shocked Tories are blaming the Working Families coalition of unions for bankrolling anti-Hudak ads. What did they expect when the PCs feverishly tried to whip up antipathy against workers?

If you prick them, do they not bleed? If you wrong them, shall they not revenge?

Working Families targeted the Tories in the 2011 election with similar TV firepower but far less effect, so its ads can’t take the credit for Hudak’s 2014 collapse. Moreover, the union coalition was in disarray between elections, fractured by the McGuinty government’s tough bargaining tactics against teachers. It was only after Hudak’s obsessive poking of “union bosses” — threatening to import U.S.-style Right to Work laws and make union dues optional — that organized labour came back together to fight back for its own survival.


Inexplicably, the Tories kept tacking to the right long after the Liberals had tacked to the left under Kathleen Wynne’s premiership, ceding ground in the centre of the political spectrum. Now, the party is not just hobbled by ideology but hemmed in by geography and demography.

It’s almost a rural rump, absent in Toronto’s 416 core, feeble in the 905 suburbs and weak in other urban centres. The Tory caucus and grassroots are whiter and older than the province they aspire to govern.

Self-pitying PCs tell themselves that voters couldn’t handle hard truths, but these partisans are blind to their own tall tales. Hudak proclaimed himself a straight shooter even while promising to eliminate a $12.5-billion budget deficit a year ahead of schedule (implausibly faster than he’d promised in the 2011 campaign). He claimed the mantle of truth teller even while peddling a phony Million Jobs Plan (long after most economists mocked his math).

Nor can the Tories bank on deficit fighting as an election issue four years — and four budgets — from now: By the 2018 campaign, the budget will most likely be in surplus (see: Paul Martin).

Beyond balanced budgets, the party needs bigger, bolder ideas that don’t bash people in the head. Leadership candidates must revisit the corporate-tax-cuts-create-jobs canard that the Liberals are slowly distancing themselves from.

A better bet would be to revive foundational Tory principles, such as value for money. Transit building would be a good place to begin the journey.

Despite his self-proclaimed cloak of honesty, Hudak blatantly misled people by insisting that world-class cities build only subways (in truth, LRTs are found in Madrid, Paris and Tory Calgary). The party could have undercut Kathleen Wynne’s expedient Scarborough subway extension, rather than aligning itself with Rob Ford’s profligate suburban spending spree.

Why not revert to sensible Tory economics, such as road tolls that act as price signals to ration scarce resources (congested roadways)? Why not unleash retail competition in beer sales, now the preserve of foreign-owned multinationals that profit from The Beer Store’s quasi-monopoly?

Who will make up the new coalition of voters that returns the Progressive Conservatives to power? What are those voters looking for, and what can the party offer to win them back?

If it remains a party of angry McGuinty haters (he left the building long ago), the Tories will stay stunted through 2018 and beyond. If they cling to the old glory (gory) days of Mike Harris, whose election was a reaction to an unpopular NDP government and an unelectable Liberal alternative in the 1990s, their party will remain frozen in time.

As they choose another leader, today’s Tories won’t have Harris to hearken back to, or Hudak to kick around anymore. Rather than clinging to the past, party members must chart their own future — asking hard questions not just of the candidates, but themselves.

Four years from now, their new leader must present policies that are rooted in Ontario and right for its people, not rely on right-wing prescriptions imported from America. Rejected by voters, Progressive Conservatives must find a way to reconnect and make themselves relevant again.
