I haven't said anything about the provincial Tory race, mainly because I've never been overly interested in provincial politics. The only people who are, it would seem, are the journalists sent out to cover the story. And in their case it may only be feigned interest, the way a journalist sent to a Toronto City Council meeting pretends to care about the outcome of those boring proceedings.

Go John Tory Go

There, happy? I really hope, want, John Tory to win. That would be soooo neat. Because then we'd have a Tory leader named Tory. The Tory Tories. Well no, I'm joking, but someone had to be the first to say it.
Actually I do want Tory to win, and that fact means that I must have had a brain hemorrhage that made me forget his role in the 1993 federal election. Among other things I'd like to see under a Tory leadership is the use of the name "Progressive Conservative" Party. During the leadership campaign and this week's convention, Tory constantly referred to the party as the progressive Conservative, while Jim Flaherty refers to it as the "Conservative" party.
Oddly, the party website uses neither term. It refers only to the PC Party and I have a feeling that the party's name may have surreptitiously been changed to the Ontario PC Party. How fucking silly. I must check that.
Currently I'm watching the replay of John Tory's uninspiring convention speech. God I hate those thundery stick thingys. They shouldn't allow them in the convention hall.
What impresses me about Tory however, has nothing to do with the crappy speech, or his part in the 93 election. I like John Tory as a Bill Davis era Tory, a moderate who will take us away from the days when teachers, nurses, and other unionized professionals had an antagonistic relationship with the party.
In 1995, when Mike Harris led the Common Sense Revolution campaign, we had been out of power for 10 years, we had just seen 5 years of NDP rule in the province, and there was a lull in the infighting in the party (because one faction had near-complete control temporarily). In our minds, a Progressive Conservative government was about pragmatism. We had ruled the province since the days of my great grandfather's best friend, Leslie Frost, by doing what was best for the province and setting ideology aside.
After we lost power in 1985 though, a sharp division formed within the party, a division between those who thought we should follow ideology more strictly, and those who wanted to continue the course of pragmatism. The ideological faction, known as the "blues", referred to the "reds" as wishy washy, and many other unflattering names. I remember a letter that went out to certain party members in the early 90s that referred to the reds as "the enemy".
One thing that is next-to-impossible to do is to explain to an ideologue the value of pragmatism. All sinister references aside, it's like asking a member of the KKK to understand the value of living in harmony with minorities.

Anyway, after the 1995 win, all provincial Tories were happy to be back in power. The pragmatic reds (of which i was one) believed perhaps naively that Mike Harris would rule like Bill Davis. The first sign that something was wrong was when welfare payments in the province were reduced sharply. That was the beginning of the storm. Then came the teachers' strike, and the Opseu strike, and it was becoming obvious that it was not business as usual in this province.
Anyway, fast forward to 1994, and the division in the party is still evident, in the pragmatic, "Progressive Conservative" approach of John Tory, and in the ideological, "Conservative party" approach of Jim Flaherty.

It comes down to this weekend. In the words of the narrator of the Japanese-style tv show Banzai, "voting end now!"