Thursday, July 3, 2014

Disingenuous At Best, Hypocritical At Worst

To listen to post-election Ontario Tories and to take them at their word would suggest that the lot of them were simply dupes of Machiavellian forces over which they had no control. Up to and including the day of the election, they all appeared to be solidly behind their leader and his plans. After their abject failure to win the hearts and minds of Ontarians, that narrative quickly changed, most notably in Lisa MacLeod's disavowal of both her leader and his program.

The latest exercise in what many would describe as arrant hypocrisy was evident in newly-appointed Tory interim leader Jim Wilson's public musings yesterday:

Coming from a former cabinet minister during the savage Mike Harris years, Wilson's disavowal of both tactics and tone are a little hard to take seriously. Consider this statement:

... the party has been “attacking people for a decade and in my heart and my caucus colleagues heart we not that kind of people . . . we are going to be Progressive Conservatives.”

Not that kind of people, eh? Well, perhaps Mr. Wilson could tell us exactly what kind of people enthusiastically put forward their names to run as candidates for a party that thrives on division, whether the attacks it has so wholeheartedly embraced over the years have been directed against teachers, union bosses, the Rand formula, civil servants and their 'gold-plated pensions,' progressive taxation, etc. etc. ad nauseam.

And while we're at it, he might also address what kind of people, as soon as they are denied power, so openly and ignominiously turn on their erstwhile leader? To be sure, young Tim Hudak was never fit to lead the province, but that apparently was never obvious to his many 'loyalists,' who unsheathed their knives with such unseemly dispatch as soon as the direction of the political winds became apparent to them.

What kind of people are the Progressive Conservatives, Jim? Allow me to try to answer that. They are opportunistic, cynical people who, now frustrated because of a failed strategy, are desperate to reinvent themselves into a party of inclusion and sensitivity. In other words, since all else has failed, they have decided it is time to try that 'sincerity thing.'

Trouble is, Jim, people can spot insincere sincerity a mile away. Next strategy, anyone?

6 comments:

  1. What I heard, Lorne, from some Ottawa Tories, pre-election, was that Hudak sprung the 100,000 firings business on his caucus without consultation. It was, I'm told, the handiwork of Hudak's neo-conservative advisers from the States.

    The Tory caucus did, however, support Hudak's anti-union tirades. They had plenty of time to part company with him on that score. While Wilson's mea culpa does seem disingenuous we should be hopeful that the Ontario PCs will be chastened. Let's see who they pick as their next leader.

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    1. I think it will take them some time to rebrand themselves, Mound, from Tea Party North to The New Inclusive Movement, no matter who leads them. We in Ontario have been plagued for so many years by the kind of hard-nosed divisive practices of the right that our collective electoral memory, usually notoriously short, has improved somewhat over the last two decades.

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    2. wow this is a very refreshing post, thank you for sharing this with us!

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  2. This all suggests the Harperian model of leadership, Lorne. The marching orders come from the top and everyone is supposed to fall in line.Come to think of it, Justin seems to be following the same model.

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    1. Continuing the disease metaphor of Anon's above, Owen, it would seem that the body politic is sorely afflicted these days.

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  3. I like your assessment here, Anon. Could one of the symptoms of their 'disease' be a strange vocal paralysis that has prevented them from speaking out against their now-proclaimed aversion to the politics of division? Was the election loss the purgative that has set their voices free?

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