Whenever a senior and important politician resigns or announces that they will not be running again, as Ontario’s deputy premier and health minister Christine Elliott did today, there’s an urge to view the event entirely through the prism of politics. What does the announcement mean? Is there a hidden scandal? Who wins? Who loses? And so on and so on.
Before we indulge in that — and we will indulge in some — let’s just acknowledge a dark, sad reality. Everyone in every government in this country who has had any sort of leadership role during this pandemic has got to be crushingly exhausted.
I took a peek on Twitter after Elliott made her decision official (word had already leaked on Thursday night). There was a lot of dancing on her political grave: people who dislike her and/or her government, either on general principles or because of specific pandemic-related decisions, rejoiced in what they saw as Elliott’s defeat and another blow to Premier Doug Ford. Such reactions are simply part of politics, and Elliott is a political veteran. She would not be surprised by the reaction.
Still, I maintain that we have consistently underestimated the psychological damage that cumulative stress and exhaustion have done to our leaders. You don’t have to like them. Hell, you can hate their guts. But it’s not some kind of partisan whitewash to point out that everyone who has had to lead during this crisis, from the prime minister and the premiers on down, is exhausted. Indeed, if you don’t acknowledge that, you’re doing yourself a disservice. The cognitive toll that extreme stress and fatigue can take is well documented. Precisely none of our leaders are at their best right now. Admitting this doesn't absolve anyone of responsibility for their decisions, but it can help explain them.
So when registering your reaction to the news that Elliott is leaving public life after 16 years in elected office (or other government service — she served as the Ontario patient ombudsperson for a spell), keep this at the front of your mind: the most likely explanation for her decision is that she’s leaving politics because the past two years have probably been the worst of her life, beyond anything she could have imagined. If you’re so blinded by partisanship that you cannot see things in those terms, well, that’s on you.
But yes, we are three months out from an election, and we must indeed talk about the political impact of all of this. I noted in a column just yesterday, in what I had intended to be my final column of the week, that one of the difficulties in trying to comprehend Ford’s first term in office stems from the challenge of keeping the various overlapping crises and scandals straight in your mind. Everything we are seeing right now is part of a sequence of astonishing political events going back at least to Patrick Brown’s 2018 defenestration as Progressive Conservative leader — or, arguably, to Rob Ford’s term as mayor of Toronto, which ended in 2014. These intertwined dramas are a lot to remember, especially with all the fresh hell being loosed upon us every day by a relentlessly awful news cycle. But it’s worth recalling that Elliott was a player in some of these stories.
Agenda segment, June 23, 2021: Is Ontario Doing Enough to Beat COVID-19?
Elliott has, of course, been involved in politics for a long time. Her late husband, Jim Flaherty, was a prominent conservative in Ontario; when he left provincial politics to go federal in 2006, Elliott won the seat he’d vacated. They were considered a powerful political duo — he in Ottawa, she in Toronto. After Flaherty’s sudden passing in 2014, Elliott continued on in her own political career, and when Brown’s leadership was suddenly terminated, Elliott became an instant favourite to succeed him.
She came very close. In the 2018 leadership race, she finished ahead of Ford in terms of actual votes cast. Ford won the contest, and shortly thereafter the premiership, only by virtue of the PCs’ vote-weighting system. I was one of the first journalists to interview Elliott after the results of that leadership vote came in, if not the first, and to describe her as surprised would be to make something of an understatement. Ford winning was not supposed to be what happened. But Elliott — one of the more prominent members of the party’s old guard — endured, despite a sometimes uneasy relationship with Ford (particularly during his first year in office). Her selection as deputy premier and health minister is as much a reflection of this delicate political balance as it is a reflection on her talents.
This naturally raises questions about how things might have unfolded differently if we’d had a Premier Elliott instead of Premier Ford. It’s impossible to say, of course, but I imagine things would have been consistently different in tone but surprisingly unchanged in substance. As frustrating as it is to admit, much of what has happened in Ontario during the pandemic, though not exactly pre-ordained, was largely locked in by the chronic structural weaknesses of our health and long-term-care systems. Smarter, faster decision-making would almost certainly have saved lives, but probably not as many as we’d like to think. More stable, consistent decision-making would obviously have spared this government some of its stupider scandals and more wrenching flip-flops, too, but it’s far from clear that Ford will pay a high price for those at the ballot box. The Liberals and the NDP, after all, still need to convince Ontarians that they’d do better.
This is not to say that Elliott’s departure won’t matter. It will. It’s not a good sign for Ford, and there will certainly be speculation about low party morale, not to mention concerns about June’s vote. But again, before you speculate too much, remember that Elliott never wanted the job she’s had these past four years — she wanted Ford’s. Her reward for faithful service to the party was one of the worst jobs in the country during this long pandemic.
So perhaps the real question isn’t why she’s choosing to leave. It’s how the hell she put up with all this as long as she did.
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