The Socialist Foil that Never Was: Part Four

Re-Examining Canadian Conservatism in Practice

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(If you haven’t read the first part of this essay series, here you go: The Socialist Foil that Never Was: Part One . Also, listen to Scott Miller discuss conservatism on the View Points podcast).

By Scott Miller (Historian)

4.0 Patrick Brown, Doug Ford and Tanya Granic Allen Having sketched the development of social conservativism in prior installments, together with one possible way to frame the justification for such a political movement, the next several paragraphs will return to several key players in the Kathleen Wynne Sex Ed Curriculum Saga. For those not entirely familiar with this saga, in a nutshell, Wynne —the first openly lesbian Ontario premier— pushed a radical sex ed curriculum into schools in 2015, one that brought queer theory and notions such as gender identity into Ontario classrooms for the first time. Conservative politicians in Ontario, mostly notably Patrick Brown and, later, Doug Ford, campaigned on promises to repeal Wynne sex ed; in actuality, neither had a social conservative bone in their body and they quickly broke their campaign pledges once they had won their respective campaigns (with the help of duped social conservative voters). Tanya Granic Allen is a social conservative who gained considerable political clout by running the activist group PAFE (Parents as First Educators); her decision to enter the 2018 race for Ontario premier was the principle reason that the Wynne sex ed issue even made it on to the Ford campaign platform in the place.

The Progressive, not the flip-flopper — Patrick Brown: In the frontmatter of his 2018 tell-all book “Takedown: the Attempted Political Assassination of Patrick Brown,” Brown dedicated his book to his mentor, recently deceased conservative William Davis, the former premier of Ontario, using the following words: “to my mentor William Grenville Davis who taught me that a proud Conservative can also care deeply about the environment, social justice issues and labour rights. He taught me the importance of a big tent and being open to good ideas from all sides. I thank him for showing me here is a better path than the deeply divided ideological battles we see dictating the politics of our day.” It is obviously of no concern to Brown that his mentor, William Davis, during his time as (supposedly conservative) education minister, commissioned a report on education that, when published in 1968, advocated for getting rid of “authoritarian principals, anachronistic structures, rot memorization and traditional exams” — it was a gift to “new left [=neo-Marxist] parents, students and teachers who had been fighting to change education system from the outside” (this from Peter Graham, the historian of Toronto’s new left movement; Graham 2019, 121). As Conrad Black said of Davis, his “definition of progressive conservatism was to make tokenistic gestures to what he imagined to be conservatism, such as preventing beer from being served at Blue Jays games (a terrible nuisance), while chasing Liberal and NDP votes like a famished hound” (https://nationalpost.com/opinion/conrad-black-doug-fords-leftward-shift-has-created-a-vacuum-for-new-blue-to-fill). 

When Brown says that he stands for social justice, he means it. He represents another category of Canadian conservative: for most Canadian conservatives, the fact that the word “progressive” was built into the name of the Ontario conservative party (and for a time, the name of the federal conservative party also) is something of a historical accident, it doesn’t mean that they are socially progressive. Most of these conservatives continued to maintain that social matters were not matters for political action “category a,” although a smaller faction of social conservatives came to present direct opposition to left-liberal progressives “category b.” Patrick Brown represents another category of conservative that actually advocates for left-liberal progressivism and, for him, “progressive conservative” actually does mean progressive. In fact, he describes himself as “fiscally conservative, socially progressive” (https://www.thestar.com/politics/federal/race-for-conservative-leadership-tightens-as-two-more-names-added-to-ballot/article_5b6142c1-365b-5ceb-b56f-0a8644e982ce.html).

In 2015, Brown entered the race for the leadership of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario and squared off against Christine Elliott, who supported Kathleen Wynne’s Sex Ed curriculum, and Monte McNaughton, heading a socially conservative opposition to the Sex Ed curriculum, among others. In an interview with Steve Paikon (https://www.tvo.org/video/brown-vs-elliott), and elsewhere, Brown attempted to steal the thunder from McNaughton by stating that he had spoken out against the Wynne Sex Ed curriculum and that “I trust families to teach values and I trust the school system to teach science and mathematics”; he even attacked his opponent, Elliott, for being “liberal light” for her support of the Sex Ed Curriculum. In reality, social conservatives emit a foul stench, at least to the nostrils of Brown, and after siphoning off all of McNaughton’s supporters and winning the leadership of the PC party, he gloats in his 2018 memoir that socons should have spotted his progressive pride flag a mile away: “Had either McNaughton’s or Elliott’s campaigns been smart, they would have done some research. And they would have discovered that I participated in the Pride flag-raising in Barrie [in 2012]. But no one did. You simply google “Patrick Brown Pride flag-raising Barrie,” and there would have been a photo of me on the front page of the Barrie Examiner in 2012. It would speak of how I was proud to be the first MP in Barrie’s history to be in a Pride flag-raising” (Brown 2018, 78). However, this reality surely began to set in for McNaughton supporters when, in the first months of his time as elected leader of the PC party, Brown made a show of being the first in his position to march in the Toronto Pride parade in June 2015.

According to his memoir, Brown’s contact with Tanya Granic Allen began in summer 2016 when she came to meet with Brown at his Queen’s Park office. Brown refers to her derisively as “a prudish activist-turned-celebrity” and as the “anal sex lady” (which is a name he, and he claims other PC politicians, use for her after an interview she gave complaining that children are being taught about anal sex in the Wynne curriculum). Predictably, the meeting at Brown’s office didn’t go well for Allen, with Brown promising only that parents would be consulted the next time the curriculum was due for an update four years in the future — he claims Allen left angry, promising to sponsor opponents for Brown in the future (Brown 2018, 134). 

True to her word, in the September 2016 by-election to replace the outgoing MPP for the Scarborough-Rouge riding, there was an Allen-backed social conservative (Queenie Yu) in the race running against Brown’s choice for MPP. Brown took this to be attempt by the social conservatives to “break up party unity” although, at the same time, he and his team noted the large Chinese, Muslim, Catholic and Hindi constituencies in this riding which were sympathetic to the anti-Sex Ed cause (Brown 2018, 141). It was this moment of panic in which the infamous 2016 letter from Brown’s office went out, promising to scrap the sex-ed. 

Brown’s memoir, which must be read with suspicion, recalls these events as follows: i) upon facing the calamity of losing Scarborough-Rouge to the Allen-backed candidate, Brown’s team urge him to send out a letter promising to scrap the Wynne Sex Ed; ii) Brown claims that he categorically refused this suggestion - he doesn’t believe in scrapping the Wynne Sex Ed; iii) Brown next supplies this story for why the letter calling the curriculum to be scrapped went out anyway: “I left to go up north, and somehow a letter was sent out from my office. Ford and Cho were involved, pushing the letter out. Walied thought I had approved it and so he OK’d the letter. Unbeknownst to him, or anyone else, I had sent Tamara Macgregor, my communications director, a message saying that such a letter was not to go out. But Macgregor was also not at the office at the time. We were both on a northern tour. By the time she relayed the message that I would not approve the letter, a thousand letters had already gone out. It was a massive screw-up” (Brown 2018, 141). One might ask “why was the letter drawn up at all if Brown really objected to it immediately?” It is also interesting that Brown implies that Doug Ford was responsible for sending out the letter, although it is unclear to me why Ford would be in a position to do so in the summer of 2016. Brown probably tells the truth in the next lines which describe his anger about the letter and decision to finally be crystal clear about his progressivism: “When I found out the letter had gone, I was furious. I made the decision that we were going to walk it back. We were not scrapping sex education, and that had to be clarified before, not after the election... that is when I wrote that famous post to facebook...I said that having had time to think about it, I had come to the view that we need sex education in the schools, and that in retrospect, I think Wynne was right” (Brown 2018, 141). 

In a foreshadowing of the way that Doug Ford would see dangling the Sex Ed repeal carrot before social conservative voters as a legitimate means to accrue support, Brown recalls that Ford was upset that he didn’t wait until the by-election the following week to walk the repeal letter back (which is quite different than objecting to walking it back at all): “neither Ford nor Cho agreed with me. My team, and Ford, pleaded with me not to walk this back until after the by-election was over, which would have been in one short week. But I just couldn’t do that” (Brown 2018, 143). Incidentally, Brown’s choice for Scarborough-Rouge, Cho, won the by-election anyway despite this debacle. 

Turning briefly to the matter of Doug Ford’s politics, I would agree with Conrad Black that it is difficult to define Ford Nation ideologically, and this is after having consulted the Ford brother’s 2016 “Ford Nation” book. Yes, they wanted to “stop the gravy train” that much is clear and, if anything, Ford should probably be categorized as a Laissez-Faire conservative with no genuine position on social policy. In provincial politics, it is the party leader who sets party policy on such matters as social issues, and Black sees PC party votes for e.g. anti-racism bills as a sign that Ford has no socially conservative principles  — he notes that only a single PC party member voted against Bill 67: “One of the most worrisome nostrums of this government was its official indulgence of Bill 67, an NDP private member’s bill, which supposedly promoted racial equity by the imposition of experts trained in critical race theory and subconscious racism, and authoritarian meddling and tinkering in schools and school administrations, vesting government racial affairs monitors with arbitrary powers... Doug Ford has taken his government farther left than any nominally conservative regime in my memory in this country” (https://nationalpost.com/opinion/conrad-black-doug-fords-leftward-shift-has-created-a-vacuum-for-new-blue-to-fill). One should probably find Black rather astute in this article right up until he mentions his preference for the “angelic Caroline Mulroney” (she ran against Ford in 2018 on with a pro-Wynne Sex Ed position and is described in Brown’s memoire as a genuine Brown protege, and a “modern” socially progressive conservative).

End of Part 4.

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Thanks for reading. For more from this author, read The Utopian Whimsy: Left Politics of Nowhere in the Here and Now

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