Caroline Mulroney last Friday made one of the most newsworthy public appearances of this Progressive Conservative leadership race. What made it worthy of our attention was the way the rookie candidate aimed her barbs at her competitors — particularly the one widely perceived to be the front-runner with less than a week to go before online voting begins.
“Christine Elliott has a long history with our party — that is true,” Mulroney said at the morning press conference, apparently complimenting her rival. “But she finished her time, and she left the party.”
Mulroney then went on to point out that until three weeks ago, Elliott had been the patient ombudsman for Ontario, appointed by the current Liberal government.
“When Christine should have been up at Queen’s Park, she was collecting paycheques from Kathleen Wynne,” Mulroney continued. “We need a candidate that will stand up to Kathleen Wynne, not work for her.”
Sources from both the Elliott and Patrick Brown campaigns have told me that their numbers show Elliott, the former MPP from Whitby–Oshawa, with a strong lead (another poll, conducted by Mainstreet Research, shows that Brown and Elliott are neck-and-neck). Expectations for Mulroney were inordinately high at the start of the race, but many observers have noted that she has yet to meet those expectations — a problem, given that there are just three months between the leadership election and the provincial general election.
As a result, the Mulroney campaign has now made some extremely sharp-elbowed comparisons between its candidate and the others. As one Mulroney adviser put it to me, “No one is cutting through amidst all the Patrick [Brown] BS. People don’t know Caroline well enough, so she needs to tell them not only why she’s the right choice, but why the others aren’t. The campaign is too short to be passive and hope for the best.”
Fair enough. Now we know the strategy.
But accuracy is important. And to say that Elliott somehow quit politics to take a patronage appointment from Wynne is unfair.
Any Ontario premier has enormous latitude to appoint thousands of party loyalists to a variety of agencies, boards, and commissions across the province. But there are a handful of posts that really have to pass the smell test. In other words, they can’t look like typical partisan patronage appointments. They have to have all-party support at Queen’s Park, because the job requires that extra level of public accountability and credibility.
Such is the case with the patient ombudsman’s job. Elliott spent nearly a decade as an opposition MPP, getting up to speed on a variety of issues. But it became clear that she had a particular passion for health-care and disability issues, mostly because one of her triplet sons, John, has special needs.
One of the crowning achievements of her time in public office was assisting in the creation of the Abilities Centre, in Whitby, which offers recreational programs and services for “people of all ages and abilities.” (Elliott and her late husband Jim Flaherty — the former MP and MPP — liked the name of the centre because it focused on what people could do rather than what they couldn’t.)
After she left politics in 2015, Elliott applied for the newly created position of patient ombudsman. An independent panel of health-policy experts, which included Patients Canada chair Michael Decter and deputy health minister Bob Bell, vetted all potential candidates for the job.
“There were two rounds of interviews,” says Decter, a former Ontario deputy health minister himself. The search committee recommended two candidates — “both capable and experienced” — for the current health minister, Eric Hoskins, to select from.
I’m told what really nailed it for Elliott was the authenticity she demonstrated during the interview, especially when she described why she wanted to be a voice for those whom the health-care system had failed.
“It was an important appointment and followed a proper public-service process,” Decter adds. “It was not a patronage appointment in any way. In my opinion, Christine Elliott was an excellent appointment.” Decter has been a long-time public servant, working for all three major parties at various times during his career.
Elliott began her duties on Canada Day, 2016. Wynne’s government actually received kudos for putting partisanship aside and giving an appointment to a former political adversary.
So Mulroney’s statement that Elliott abandoned her party for a patronage job from the enemy just doesn’t pass muster. In fact, if anybody’s nose ought to be out of joint, it’s Wynne’s: she green-lit a professional lifeline to a former opponent she thought was done with politics. Elliott, no doubt, thought the same thing, given that the man who had last defeated her for the PC leadership, Patrick Brown, was cruising in the polls.
Then Ontario’s political world got turned upside down. Now, ironically, Elliott seems closer than ever to replacing the woman who gave her a hand.
Meanwhile, critics on legacy and social media are castigating Mulroney for her overly harsh tone, which seems to go against the fresh, optimistic, unifying brand they thought she would bring to the race.
Voting starts this Friday. Mulroney will give a lunchtime speech to the Economic Club of Canada that day. One wonders if she’ll continue to go for the jugular in hopes of sowing doubts about her opponents, or realize that if she wants second- and third-ballot support, she can’t alienate her opponents’ supporters.