Premier Dalton Mcguinty: John Tory

Chain Gangs Dept: Polley said she couldn t even contemplate voting Conservative; when she was 15, she d had two teeth broken by police as she protested Conservative premier Mike Harris s harsh policies on welfare and poverty. She said maybe in an earlier time, when Bill Davis was Tory premier, it would have been possible. She d often heard that he was a fine person. Her seatmate beamed. You ve made an old man very happy, said Bill Davis, according to The Star. I m thinking of Davis, Joe Clark, Flora McDonald , Lowell Murray and Hugh Segal still in the Senate or best-in-show, the late, great Star columnist Dalton Camp . You d probably have enjoyed sitting beside any of them on a long flight, as Sarah Polley did, and not been tempted to fake snoozing a test for politicians once proposed by Alexander Cockburn . Never mind whether they should be called Red Tories. They sought power in order to do something, not just punish certain demographics by cutting welfare Harris , building prisons Harper or creating chain gangs Hudak . They didn t think government was the problem like Ronald Reagan, a hero of their right-wing conservative successors, or that society didn t exist at all, like another such hero, Margaret Thatcher. Labels and ideology mattered little to them and a few years ago, around the time of another Ontario election, the actor and director Sarah Polley was flying home to Toronto from Los Angeles. She found herself seated beside a nice-looking, pleasant, older fellow who clearly recognized her. They chatted amiably. He seemed especially interested in her political views, which were known to be leftish. He urged her to consider supporting Ontario s then PC leader John Tory, whose quality the man said he would vouch for. So I tried to watch Tuesday s election debate through Bill Davis s eyes. Did he start when his name was invoked in praise by Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty against current Tory Leader Tim Hudak? Probably not. They were a savvy bunch, those old Progressive Conservatives; they knew their party had been swiped from under them. Even the party acronym, PC, gradually became associated with a different term: Politically Correct a clever piece of rebranding. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.