Christine Elliott, the former MPP for Whitby-Oshawa and currently Ontario’s Patient Ombudsman, will enter the Progressive Conservative leadership, the National Post has learned — possibly as early as Thursday afternoon. Many in the party had been cajoling her to run, sources say, as she brings legislative experience, centrist bona fides and name recognition to the table — a combination of which no other declared candidate can boast.
“Pretty clear message that there’s a base for Doug Ford and there’s a base for Christine Elliott,” says pollster Greg Lyle of Innovative Research, referring to data he released this week on the leadership race. Twenty-four per cent of respondents picked Elliott among their top three choices in a hypothetical field of nine candidates, while 16 per cent had Ford and Caroline Mulroney in their top three.
Elliott, a lawyer by trade, had the highest “net favourability” rating at 26 per cent: just five per cent of respondents said they had a negative opinion of her, while 31 per cent had a positive one. Ford’s rating, by contrast, was minus 26 per cent.
Lyle’s poll was of the general public, however, not party members, and this would be Elliott’s third attempt at the leadership. In 2009, she criticized eventual winner Tim Hudak as a throwback to the party’s mid-1990s glory years: “What happened in 1995 is not the solution for 2009,” she said. “We have to grow our party.” That message was good for third place behind both Hudak and social-conservative candidate Frank Klees.
Elliott ran again in 2015 with by far the most support of the Tory caucus, but finished a distant second to the now-disgraced Patrick Brown. The common knock is that that she simply didn’t want it enough — a charge current supporters obviously reject, with one citing more than enough “fire in her belly.”
It’s unclear how much room in the race there would be for both Elliott and Mulroney, who both seem to be vying for the same centrist votes — albeit the latter with no experience in public office at all. If Elliott shapes up as the centrist establishment candidate with Ford as the populist disruptor, it will be an interesting dynamic: Elliott and her late husband Jim Flaherty, the former federal Finance Minister, have referred to themselves as friends of the Ford family.
Both Doug and Rob Ford endorsed Elliott in 2015, citing among other things her near-decade of experience at Queen’s Park. “The person that’s going to win the election, I can see now, clearly, it’s going to be Christine,” Rob Ford said. That would be the election that’s coming up on June 7.
