In the annals of humiliating political apologies, Ontario Progressive Conservative Chatham-Kent-Essex MPP Rick Nicholls’ won’t go down as a hall-of-famer. “I retract and apologize for my comments of last week,” Nicholls said in a statement. “I fully support the direction the leader is taking our party.” It’s too pro forma, on its face, to be memorable (although the reference to an unnamed “leader” does lend it a certain cultish frisson). But the more you look at it, the more cringeworthy it really is.
Nicholls had been caught on tape promising an audience assembled by the Canadian Christian Association and the Canadian Multicultural Care Group (CMCG) that a Tory government would get busy addressing “social issues.” He explained to them that his absence when the legislature passed Bill 28, which simplifies parenting arrangements for same-sex couples — or, if you prefer, which “erases motherhood” — was a political necessity, and not a matter of principle.
“We knew that it would be problematic for us and that it would have been the __news of the day if we had been present and voted against,” Nicholls explained of his and his colleagues’ truancy. “We live in a very liberal media environment. They’re just looking for opportunities.”
But if the Tories formed government, said Nicholls, all would change. “Social issues are very, very important (to us),” he said. “We need to form government, then watch us go.”
“They told us that once they’re elected, they will abolish sexual education,” CMCG’s Noel Chaudry told TFO. “We will press all of our members and our community to vote Conservative,” said Chaudry, in hopes such a government would advance “Christian values.”
Now, it’s one thing to blow smoke up a constituency’s backside — social conservatives in particular seem to live for it — and get smacked down by your leader. It’s rather another when that leader is Patrick Brown, who until very recently was happy to be thought of as a social conservative, and who was recently busted pulling the exact same stunt on his own behalf.
In the summer, during the Scarborough-Rouge River byelection campaign, the party distributed a letter under Brown’s name promising to repeal the Liberals’ sex-ed curriculum. Faced with backlash, Brown simply turtled, blaming rogue staffers and claiming he never opposed the curriculum — a claim which may well be true in his heart of hearts, if he possesses such an organ. But he had no problem, during his leadership campaign, promising Jack Fonseca of the Campaign Life Coalition that he would repeal it.
Sadly for Brown, he put it that in writing, and with a few clicks of a mouse Fonseca compounded Brown’s disgrace.
Nicholls needn’t have “retracted” his observation that the media lie in wait for opportunities to paint the Tories as scary radicals. They do, and that poses a real problem for Brown — one he won’t be able to shake by smacking down MPPs who express unapproved opinions, or even by convincing them not to run their mouths in the first place.
Any Tory leader would have this problem. Any Tory leader who was ever thought of as a social conservative would have it worse. Brown might have it worst of all: having bent like a palm tree in the wind on social issues, it will be easier than usual for the Liberals, New Democrats and media to portray any moderate stance he takes on anything as nothing more than a politically expedient façade on some kind of hidden agenda. For those who might support such an agenda, meanwhile, his record is an invitation to stay home: whatever he or one of his MPPs might promise them isn’t worth the sound waves that conveyed it. They might reasonably conclude he has no agenda at all, hidden or otherwise.
Stephen Harper had considerable trouble with his purported “hidden agenda,” despite the gymnastics that were necessary to pin it on him. Brown having inhabited every position imaginable on a perfectly reasonable sex-ed curriculum, he cannot inspire much confidence in anyone, on any side of any truly contentious social issue, that his stated positions during campaigns would bear any resemblance to his actions as premier.
Perhaps the Liberals are finally unpopular enough that they’ll lose in 2018 no matter whom they’re up against; perhaps Ontarians will deem Brown’s apparent lack of principles an acceptable replacement for the Liberals’ long-demonstrated lack of principles. But if I were Kathleen Wynne, I’d be considerably more confident than my 16 per cent approval rating suggested I should be.
• Email: cselley@nationalpost.com | Twitter: cselley
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