Underdog (19 page)

As hard as I fought to woo voters in this traditionally Liberal riding, I never rid myself of the feeling that Tim Hudak was merely going through the motions, dropping into the campaign for a few cameo appearances. It was noticed by the media, too, and by those friends and family who came out to support me. I realized about halfway through the campaign that, other than providing me with a minimal amount of resources to run my riding office and some media training to get through the one and only televised all-candidates debate – my Liberal opponent, Eric Hoskins, ended up being a no show – I was really on my own. I could have died when the PCs had Mr. Shurman show up at the Queen's Park media
gallery with someone dressed as a giant chicken, suggesting Dr. Hoskins was a chicken for not participating in the debate. I didn't need shtick, I needed party support. Mr. Shurman says he's lived to regret being involved in that little photo opportunity. Nevertheless, I can't complain about the amount of media attention I received, including features in the
Globe and Mail,
the
National Post,
and my own paper, of course. Even the
Toronto Star
gave me considerable exposure, which was not just due to my position with the
Toronto Sun
but because those in the media, particularly on the left, were curious about why a newly married out Jewish lesbian would run for Tim Hudak and the Tory party.

With little more than a week to go before election day, when the final push should have been on, I found myself arguing with party brass who wanted to pull staff resources and potential canvassers from my campaign to have them work on the annual volunteer appreciation BBQ. Whether they'd lost their last shred of common sense or had given up, I wasn't prepared to throw in the towel, knocking on my very last door at 9 p.m. the night before voting day. Fact is, I was all the more inspired in the last few days when I discovered that the allegedly tolerant Liberals had issued three different attack pieces on me, pulling quotes out of context from my City Hall columns to imply I was heartless, didn't believe in human rights, and was as right wing as they come. That suggested they were a tad worried. My wife thought the Liberal Party took my clout and name recognition far more seriously than the PCs did. The Liberals spent a lot on advertising for Eric Hoskins, including bus shelter after bus shelter sporting his huge head. They even advertised in the
Canadian Jewish News,
since the September 17 by-election turned out to be a
day before the Jewish New Year. Seeing that, Denise paid for and put in her own ad in the same paper.

But the Liberals need not have worried. Sadly, only 33 per cent of eligible voters exercised their franchise, and only 15 per cent of voters in Forest Hill – where I'd won the sign war by a country mile – took a break from their personal trainers to vote. Mr. Hudak showed his true colours on election night when he arrived at our house, a bottle of wine in hand, and sat stiffly on our couch pecking on his BlackBerry until CP24 declared twenty minutes after the polls closed that I'd lost. As he stood up, ready to depart for my “victory party” and concession speech, I crumpled into our friend Karen Basian's arms sobbing out of sheer emotion and tiredness after a hard-fought thirty-five days. Ms. Basian remembers to this day how detached Mr. Hudak was, as if he was following a script that dictated he should be at my house and that this was enough. When I arrived at the victory party and saw my dad, I fell into his arms still full of emotion – a picture that was featured in the
Toronto Star
the next day.

I might run again someday for the PC Party of Ontario, maybe even for leader, but certainly not until the party is prepared to look deep within itself and realize that the face of conservatism in Ontario has changed. I'm beginning to wonder if that will ever happen and whether the party truly has a death wish. I had hoped the results on election night of June 2014 – when Mr. Hudak was completely shut out in Toronto and his jobs message barely resonated around the entire province – would inspire positive change, but considering the motley crew of people who threw their names into the 2015 leadership race, I sincerely have my doubts. Ontario's PC Party has an uphill battle to dispel the myths that the
Lib-left are only too happy to perpetuate – that “conservative” stands for intolerant and homophobic. Yet the new breed of conservatives includes openly gay people like me and a cross-section of visible minorities. We represent a diverse, kinder, and gentler face of conservatism, without abandoning our core values and the fiscal positions we have supported from the very beginning. Unless the Ontario party's old guard is prepared to call it a day and make way for those who both embrace and establish a connection with these groups, and to show that the party has evolved – as members of the federal party under Stephen Harper did so adeptly – they will not make inroads into Ontario's urban centres, particularly Toronto. It's as plain as that. New PC leader Patrick Brown and his team claim the old guard is gone, but the jury is still out on this assertion given that Mr. Brown has yet to enunciate any policy positions, having stuck to mere pablum during the leadership race of spring 2015, and pretty much since.

WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT
that the federal Conservatives would actually emerge as global leaders in gay rights? This was due largely to the unstoppable efforts of former foreign affairs minister John Baird, who, sadly for gays and for Israel, stepped down to take a job in the private sector in March 2015. Under Stephen Harper, the Tories made it clear that same-sex marriage is the law and the discussion is over. Mr. Harper put it to a vote in his early days in a minority government situation and did not touch the issue after that. Early in 2012, the Tories also rushed to close a loophole in the Liberal same-sex marriage legislation to make all gay marriages legal – even
those performed on non-citizens from countries where gay marriage is not recognized.

But it was the activism on gay rights beyond Canada's borders that established the federal Tories as a far more inclusive party than their provincial counterparts. I was immensely proud of Mr. Baird when he publicly blasted Russia and its leader, Vladimir Putin, in August 2013 for the country's hateful anti-gay law after the foreign minister had worked behind the scenes to try to persuade Mr. Putin not to put the law in place in the run-up to the 2014 Olympic Winter Games in Sochi. I certainly didn't see Barack Obama opening his mouth in the slightest to Mr. Putin on anything, let alone the gay rights issue. But there's another little secret few in the left-wing media will admit about the federal Conservatives. There are hundreds of openly gay Conservatives in this country and they are starting to make a statement because of three trailblazers: Fred Litwin, Roy Eappen, and Jamie Ellerton. Mr. Litwin, proudly gay and right of centre, is the founder of the Ottawa-based Free Thinking Film Society. Dr. Eappen is an endocrinologist and conservative blogger, originally from India and now living in Montreal.

Mr. Ellerton joined the federal and provincial Conservative parties in 2004 and officially came out as a gay Tory in 2005. He was legislative and executive assistant to Jason Kenney from 2005 to 2010 and executive assistant and communications advisor to Mr. Hudak from September 2010 to December 2011. He now has his own communications consulting firm. He says it was in 2011 that he, Mr. Litwin, and Dr. Eappen decided gay Conservatism needed to have a visible presence at the federal party's June convention. They were tired of the left
thinking they had ownership of the gay agenda. They created the Fabulous Blue Tent, a party hosted by gay Conservatives at an Ottawa hotel, to which all convention delegates were welcome. The pink and blue invitation said the party was to be hosted “by Dorothy and her sisters” (a tongue-in-cheek reference to gay men). Mr. Ellerton said the event was attended by a “wide swath” of delegates, from very socially conservative staffers and very staunch Catholics to those assumed to be more gay-positive. Senators Nancy Ruth and Linda Frum fully supported the endeavour and Mr. Baird gave money for the event. Urban Conservatives said it was about time – that at long last the party was starting to reflect diversity. Those who attended from smaller towns and cities, like Red Deer or Swift Current – not exactly hotbeds of visible gay culture – got a rare chance to interact with “fabulous” rank-and-file members, as Ellerton put it. Not surprisingly, the online left-of-centre blogs tried to make light of the event, writing about how oxymoronic it was that “self-hating people were getting together.” But Mr. Litwin, Dr. Eappen, and Mr. Ellerton followed up the Ottawa fete with a second Fabulous Blue Tent party in Calgary in 2013. This time, the colourful pink and blue invitation actually invited people to “come out” to celebrate with “gay Conservatives and friends.” “We were blown away with how successful the second one was,” says Ellerton, noting they actually had to turn people away in Calgary because of capacity issues. Slowly but surely the narrative is changing thanks to Mr. Litwin, Dr. Eappen, and Mr. Ellerton. It remains an uphill battle, however. The LGBT Tory contingent, under the able leadership of Torontonian Benjamin Dichter, had to embarrass the parade organizers to be allowed to march in Ottawa's Capital Pride Parade in August 2015, after the NDP
and the Liberals – playing politics due to the newly called federal election – tried to find a way to exclude them.

THERE'S NO DOUBT
in my mind that federal gay Conservatives have made great strides toward showing the true face of the party – that it is more representative of the general population than the media cares to concede – and have succeeded in changing the public perception that it is just a party of old, white men who resist change. Provincially, however, the party is not even close to achieving this goal. Mr. Ellerton, who has worked on both the federal and provincial scenes, feels the provincial PCs will have a hard time being elected if they stick to their traditional principles and retreat back to their immediate support base. “It's too easy to throw red meat to the base,” he says. The party needs to set forth with an “urban agenda” to keep the money coming in and to win a majority. Mr. Ellerton feels the party's message has to be more populist to attract LGBT and ethnic voters – not to mention to appeal to women and Millennials (those born between 1980 and the early 2000s). This is exactly what former MPP Peter Shurman and I tried to tell Mr. Hudak and his team before the 2011 election in Ontario, after spending eight months putting together proposed urban policies as co-chairs of the Toronto Policy Advisory Committee. We proposed transit ideas and suggested a review of the City of Toronto Act and the size of council. We provided ideas on how to tackle mental health, crime, and homeless issues, and how to fund desperately needed new infrastructure. I'd even hoped, knowing it was a long shot, that the Ontario Progressive Conservatives would have a strong showing with a float in
Toronto's Pride Parade. But the PC Party did not use one word of what we'd proposed in their 2011 campaign manifesto, paradoxically called
Changebook.
If it had not been for lawyer Pamela Taylor, a director of the Toronto Centre PC Riding Association, the party would have had no presence in the Pride Parade that year. Caucus members and PC staffers who are gay or lesbian are for the most part closeted. In recent years, Mr. Hudak attended one Pride Week event each year. No one was suggesting he turn up everywhere he could possibly be seen, as Ms. Wynne did during Pride Week 2013, making like she was the Queen Lesbian of Ontario. However, sadly, there is no one working from within at the provincial level to change the perception of the Ontario party like Mr. Baird, Mr. Ellerton, Dr. Eappen, and Mr. Litwin did in Ottawa. To his credit, new PC leader Patrick Brown showed up to march with a strong LGBT Tory contingent of sixty people, including me, in Toronto's Pride Parade in June 2015. I don't know if that will translate into good social policy. But he knew it would make a positive political statement if he did show.

It will be a real shame if the Ontario PCs don't evolve before the next election. By continuing to cling to their old insular ways, they not only play into but perpetuate the Lib-left mythology that paints the PC Party as not much more open and inclusive than the Tea Party south of the border. The face of the party has changed to some extent – and Mr. Brown tried to embrace ethnic minorities during his run for leader – but it still has a long way to go. A few token visible minorities and women were lured to run in Toronto ridings in the June 2014 election to make the team appear diverse and open-minded – not that the party did the slightest thing to support them. Regrettably, the Ontario Progressive
Conservative Party still acts and looks like a white men's club run by a bunch of misogynists.

In the June 2014 election, Mr. Ellerton, inspired by our conversation about how to make the provincial Tories more urban-centric, bravely signed up to run in the very strongly NDP riding of Parkdale–High Park. He told me he felt he had to “walk the talk.” I was also thrilled to see Justine Deluce, a young, hip real estate professional, sign up to run against Eric Hoskins in St. Paul's. Former Ontario Taxpayers Federation president Kevin Gaudet – an articulate, smart urban professional – took his second stab at a provincial seat in the riding of Pickering–Scarborough East. Paramedic and single mom Roberta Scott tried her hand in the left-of-left riding of Trinity-Spadina. But Mr. Ellerton's concerns proved to be prophetic. Even though the face of PC candidates had changed in Toronto, Mr. Hudak and his inner circle let them down badly in the June 2014 election, when the PCs were practically decimated by the Liberals under Kathleen Wynne. The PCs did not win a single seat in Toronto, and Doug Holyday, one of the few politicians around who sticks to his principles, lost the Etobicoke-Lakeshore seat he'd won in an August 2013 by-election. It was Mr. Hudak's race to lose and he did just that. After all, how many parties, other than the Liberals, can lurch from one costly scandal to the next, mismanage virtually every file and project they oversee (including the Pan Am Games, the true cost of which we will likely never know), be under more than one criminal investigation by the OPP, destroy the evidence pertaining to the gas plants scandal, and
still
get a majority from voters? There are no two ways about it: Mr. Hudak and his advisors fumbled badly. Why? Because they didn't have a clue about how
to connect with urban voters, or about what issues would resonate with them.