Patrick Brown is going into his first budget lockup this week and there have been a few people who have started to notice the changing direction of the PCs.  The Star reported that Brown is ‘dragging the PCs to the centre’ of the spectrum.  A columnist for the same paper remarked at how the Tory leader has been courting the professional firefighters association.  Stories like this are starting to become more visible.  What is undeniable is that Patrick Brown is completely revamping the PCs, and it’s worth some introspection.

When Patrick Brown won, here’s what I thought would happen: The Tory leader would bring in 10s of thousands of new ethnic voters that would make the party competitive in the GTA and with the existing Tory base that has remained at about 1.5 million voters over the past few cycles, you have yourself a governing party.  But that’s not exactly how it’s playing out.  Rather than being satisfied with the base turning out plus swaths of ethnic voters, Brown is actively courting people who haven’t voted for the Tories in years, if ever before.

Witness what happened last week in the legislature.  On Tuesday, during the first Question Period back from the winter recess, Brown begins talking about doctor and nursing positions that have been cut through health care restructuring. The nurses association haven’t backed Tories in recent memory, and the doctors are warming to the Tories.  Then, on his second lead question, he declares his support for an NDP private members’ bill on presumptive legislation for first responders suffering from PTSD.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Leader of the Opposition get up on his lead question to promote a bill from another party.  He didn’t stand up to support one of his own colleague’s bills.  He went out of his way to show his support for an NDP bill. Unions representing first responders haven’t backed Tories in several election cycles now.  Then, later in the week, Brown gets up and asks a question on deteriorating conditions in prisons, supporting OPSEU’s position on the issue.  Yes, people – OPSEU!

Then there is this press conference on the Tory budget demands.  Here they are: Tories want to see a plan to lower hydro bills, a plan to reverse health care cuts, and a plan to balance the budget.  It’s not that the Tory leader has the plan.  It’s just that he wants the Liberals to have one.  Gone is any language on tax cuts, and very tepid treatment, if nonexistent, on other fiscal issues.  This is a radical departure from the Ontario PCs of the last couple decades.  All of this re-positioning is happening under the radar, but it is definitely happening.

I have known Patrick Brown for almost 20 years, and if there is one thing that he understands better than most, it is that winning elections, in the end, is a numbers game.  To be successful, you need to have more votes than the others.  Tim Hudak’s approach to this end was to try and motivate the 300,000 people who voted PC during the Harris years but haven’t voted PC since.  His calculation was that some of these people don’t vote any more and some others were parking their votes in other camps.  Hudak went full tilt to try and motivate those Tory non-voters who, as he surmized, wanted a Harris-like conservative voice to speak to them. These people weren’t motivated to vote for Hudak in the last go around – clearly. So Brown is looking at this numbers game and figures that in order to win, he’ll need votes from people who currently vote Liberal and NDP.  He is actively pursuing them, but his pitch is not ‘don’t vote for them because they are bad,’ it is vote for us because we also agree with them on these issues (evidence: ‘there is no monopoly on a good idea’ as he stated in question period, and not for the first time either).  This, too, is a radically different approach than the party has taken in the past.   We now not only agree with the other party’s issues, but we champion them over our own issues, which, in my mind, is going to extraordinary lengths to break down the partisan barriers.  It is both dramatic and unprecedented in recent memory.

The question is whether or not this reinvention of the PCs will work.  Time will tell.  People are soon going to be talking about this change.  The change that is taking place is so dramatic that people who have written the party off will undoubtedly be curious enough to stop and consider whether they like what they see.  That’s a great advantage to this approach. People will start to notice the party and be treated to something much different than what they might be used to.  I am also hearing that previously hostile union leaders have more direct access to this PC leader than they have ever had before.  The tactic seems to be either to win the support of labour, which may be hard to fathom, or at least disarm them to not put up millions of dollars in union money to campaign against the PCs with the Working Families Coalition.  It remains to be seen how that all unfolds.

All of this must be incredibly difficult for the governing Liberals, and to a lesser extent the NDP, to compete against.  The PC leader refuses to be pegged to anything ideological.  Brown prefers to call himself a pragmatic conservative.  He will dabble here and there and support selective causes which will make him difficult to negatively brand and demonize unlike the previous leaders.  I used to muse about how the Liberals were so good at knowing how we would react to something that they could accurately predict what we were going to do before we even had a chance to talk about it.  The Liberals aren’t going to be able to do this with Brown.  Early attempts to brand him as a hard right social conservative, armed with federal House of Commons votes on marriage and abortion, have been met with virtually no success for the Liberals thus far.  Social conservatives like his federal votes and his stance on reviewing the sex ed curriculum, but social progressives saw him marching in Toronto’s Gay Pride Parade and sending a statement condemning a religious institution in India for refusing to give the Premier of Ontario a ceremonial honour because of her sexual orientation.  He’s a moving target and hard to nail down, and he’ll refuse to be pigeon holed.  So if you say something like “Brown is a social conservative that doesn’t believe in abortion,” Brown will say, ‘ya but I went to Gay Pride.’  See how this works?  You can count on Patrick Brown to know his crowd better than anybody else and speak directly to them, and he has made a successful political career out of doing just that.  Coming up with aggressive policy statements, as in the sort Hudak used to lay out from time to time to try and control the media agenda, aren’t likely to emanate from Brown for the foreseeable future which will allow him to continue this dynamic.

There are always risks to any strategy, and the obvious one is that if you say to social conservatives you’re one of them and say to social progressives you’re one of them too, the problem is that people will expect you to be one or the other.  If you say you’re both, they’ll start questioning the authenticity of the leader or question the leader’s substance. I’d expect the Liberals to start zeroing in on this moving closer to an election.  However, as this new courtship between Brown and voters turns heads, the Liberal attacks to brand the new leader will likely be different than voters are used to as well.  What I mean is that the Liberals won’t be able to rely on the political capital they have been cashing in on by their negative branding of the PCs.  If they continue to use their same lines, and voters see that the PCs are a different party, the Liberals lose credibility.  The Liberals thus have to change their message attack on the Tories, and voters won’t be used to the new lines.  So, with a blank canvass on the revamped PCs, it’ll be a race between the Tories and Liberals in terms of who can adequately brand the new party first.  Whoever does has a solid shot at winning the next election.

The less obvious risk is that Brown has promised that the party grassroots will craft his policy platform, so what happens if the party starts proposing policies that detract from the success that the rookie Tory leader is having with building a new electoral coalition? It sets the possibility that either the Tories will come out with an uncoordinated plan or that the Tory leader is somehow not going to be able to fulfill the expectations of members for a grassroots policy process.  This might explain the jockeying going on within the party ahead of its first Annual General Meeting since Brown assumed the leadership.

Whatever happens, two things are clear:  In the next election, the PCs will be completely different and it’ll be fascinating to see how everybody reacts to it.