Tory Turmoil: Your Saturday Morning Round-Up!

New stories on the PCPO civil war breaking out in Eastern Ontario. Two of them mention Hudak's promise to abolish the Ontario Human Rights Commission, a promise made to attract Hillier delegates to the Hudak cause during last year's PCPO leadership convention.

If you recall, in the run-up to that convention, provincial Tory leadership contenders fell over one another moving right so as to appeal to Hillier's gang of "rural libertarians". So, for example, Frank Klees promised to make "White's Only" signs legal again (or, more precisely, strike down that portion of the Ontario Human Rights Code that made them illegal). However, Hillier saw through that scheme...it wasn't radical enough for him...and eventually Hudak upped the ante, promising to chuck out the whole provincial human rights apparatus and replace it with...something...some day.

But, as Michael Warren notes in his Owen Sound Times editorial, Hudak hasn't talked about this plan much since winning the leadership race. And that's not surprising. Polling at the time showed that such a pledge would be a vote evaporator among the general populace. So Hudak put it in a little box and never spoke of it again.

Except that now he may have to so as to keep Randy Hillier inside the PCPO tent. Therefore, a sincere thanks (from myself and all Ontario Liberal supporters) to Randy Hillier for taking that item off the secret agenda and putting it squarely back on the, well, non-secret agenda.