I don’t know for certain, but I strongly suspect he has been the recipient of private phone calls from Canada’s Conservative prime minister and even Ontario’s Liberal premier.

Which raises another interesting fact: Editorially, Angelo has written supportively of Stephen Harper federally and Dalton McGuinty provincially. Which suggests he, like most voters, supports strong leadership, regardless of partisan stripe.

 

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You know, I could have easily pictured a knuckle-dragging troglodyte like Randy Hillier railing against “affirmative action” and foreigners.  But Tim Hudak? The guy who aspires to be Premier of Ontario?

Braying and screeching about “affirmative action” is Tea Party territory. Attacking nameless “foreigners” is the obsession of groups who are far, far worse.  You know who they are.

There has been a significant strategic choice made, here.  Stephen Harper, for instance, won by consciously reaching out to new Canadians.

Tim Hudak will lose because he’s trying to keep them out.

 

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Jason Lietaer is Tea Party Tim Hudak’s official spokesman.  He’s also a former Big Tobacco lobbyist.

This morning in the Star, as noted, here’s what we all read:

“Jason Lietaer, the Hudak campaign’s communications director, said Liberals and New Democrats would be welcome at PC events as long as they are not disruptive.

Lietaer expressed astonishment that the Liberals would end the tradition of allowing observers at rival events, which allows journalists to get quick opposition reaction.“

“Astonishment,” eh?  Well, take a gander at this, Jason.  And, because it’s Monday and because I’m a nice guy, I will not accuse you of lies, and being a lying liar who tells them.

I’ll let others do that.

 

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Compare the Reform Party Blue Book to the stuff coming out of the Ontario PCs this morning. The similarities are striking.

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Norman liked this quote, for some reason, so here’s a link to the story, too!

“Harper’s got too many kooks in his caucus, so something will bust out.”

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Starting an election campaign lying to reporters isn’t a smart thing to do.  But that’s what the PCs and the Dippers are doing this morning, with this story.

What the opposition operatives neglected to tell the Toronto Star, of course, is that they’ve been denying the public access to their events for quite some time now.  What they declined to say to the reporter is that paranoia, secrecy and Soviet-style tactics have been their favoured approach for weeks.

Read the story, then look at the notice below.  It was a notice the PCs were handing out to people at their August 30 event at the “K.W. Gaming Centre,” where they were present as the guests of special interests who want to put slots in bingo halls across the province.  Anyone who came close to that event, or any event since, was threatened by private police and civil lawsuits.

Like I say, don’t lie to reporters.  Sooner or later, you’re going to get caught.

The notice:

 

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From one blogger:

“What is interesting is that the Toronto Sun, which actually ran fake stories in the federal election just to support their Conservative friends, feels compelled to speak out against Hudak.

It’s not like they’re driven by integrity to evaluate Hudak’s plan honestly.  We can only assume that the conservative editors of the Sun are genuinely unimpressed with Hudak’s performance, enough so that they’d actually argue against him to the detriment of the conservative cause.”

Two things.  One, I don’t think it’s fair to simply tag the Sun, for which I write as a freelancer, as wholly uncritical of Conservatives and conservatives.  In the year I’ve been writing for them, they haven’t once – not once – asked me to remove or moderate a criticism of any conservative hobbyhorse.

Two, and increasingly, I’ve been hearing/reading conservative blogs, etc. which have been decidedly unenthusiastic about Tim Hudak.  The choice issue is a good example of why.  Pro-lifers genuinely feel like he has equivocated on his previous pledge to defund abortion – while pro-choice folks feel that he’s being dishonest with them, too (cf. he “may have” signed a petition to defund).

In the past few weeks, Hudak’s been criticized by Ernie Eves (on the Tea Party stuff), John Tory (on a plethora of issues), and he’s been offside with Bill Davis (disrupting a Davis speech) and Mike Harris (attacking alternative energy, in which Harris’s firm has invested).  The list goes on and on.

The guy is blowing the PC coalition to bits, from top to bottom.  What’s amazing is that he’s doing it on the eve of an election.

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If you’re Stephen Harper, sitting up at Harrington Lake and reading the papers, you’re having a good chuckle this morning.

On one page, there’s Liberal Leader Bob Rae, saying a merger of his party and the NDP is a work of “fiction” and something no Liberal wants to talk about. That would be the same Bob Rae who, the day after his party was reduced to a rump in the House of Commons, said it wasn’t such a bad idea at all.

In another paper, there’s former Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, who — on the grim morning after the Liberal Party’s May 2 rout — poured cold water on the merger idea. And, last week, there’s the selfsame Michael Ignatieff musing on his Facebook page about how the Grits and Dippers now needed to consider coming together.

Senior Lib MP Ralph Goodale? Hates the idea. Senior Lib MP Denis Coderre? Loves it.

Getting confused? You’re not alone. The NDP are confused, too.

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One need only look south of the border to see how the once-proud Republican Party has been dragged down by Tea Party insurgents. Behind the scenes in Ontario, the PCs have been fighting a rearguard battle of their own with a rural rump known as the Ontario Landowners Association.

Its roughly 15,000 members have tied the Tories up in knots over the past decade with their libertarian crusade. Leery of the split between the old federal PCs and Reform Party, Ontario’s Tories tried to learn the lesson of reunification from Stephen Harper — by making peace with their fellow travellers on the fringe.

Now, without unity of purpose, the two sides are stuck in a miserable marriage of convenience for the sake of the kids. You can hear the plates smashing and the pots flying.

Eves lashed out “at those few individuals who decided that the Tea Party version of Ontario politics would be good in that particular riding.

“And I don’t happen to agree with that,” he told a radio audience last week.

He was referring to the Eastern Ontario seat long held by former Tory cabinet minister Norm Sterling, who was toppled in a bitterly-contested nomination battle by ex-Landowners chief Jack MacLaren.

“The treatment that Norm got from his own (PC) party was not very polite, was not fair, it was not loyal, it was not compassionate,” Eves told party loyalists last month.

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His campaign has hit a couple of bumps. The candidate for the riding of Pickering-Scarborough East, Salmon Farooq, quietly withdrew his candidacy last March, just days before he was charged with fraud. The Tories parachuted in Kevin Gaudet, a high-profile advocate for lower taxes, to replace Mr. Farooq.

The party also faced criticism over the ouster of Tory MPP Norm Sterling, who served in the legislature for 34 years. In a speech at a dinner for Mr. Sterling last Thursday, former Tory premier Ernie Evessaid the party’s treatment of the veteran MPP was not fair or compassionate.

“People were startled,” said one person who was at the dinner. Most of the more than 200 people in attendance applauded, he said. Mr. Eves was referring to the fact that Mr. Sterling lost a nasty nomination battle last March against Jack MacLaren, a local activist with the Ontario Landowners Association. Mr. Hudak acknowledged that having a “contest within the family” is difficult.

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