So, the dog days of summer are over.  The PCs in Alberta and Newfoundland have concluded their own leadership races, and now the Ontario PCs will begin their leadership process in earnest.

The introspection we’ve seen from MPPs and leadership contenders has, to say the least, been lackluster.  I say that with the greatest respect to my friends, but we’re entering a period now where more needs to be put on the table.

The first bit of chatter we heard in the aftermath of yet another electoral defeat is that we need to be more compassionate.  It piled on. Every time a blue Tory, like Hudak, loses, it’s like the red Tory thinkers come out like clock work.  The refrain is common.  We need to be nicer.  However, why any decent minded party member would concede on the point of not being nice, I’ll never figure out.  I served with 37 men and women.  They are the nicest people you’ll ever meet.  I consider them to be family. And we meant well.  We wanted to improve government and public services. We wanted to get rid of waste so we could provide more resources to the people who needed them.  It’s not true that we wanted to fire 100,000 people, but it is true that we thought government could be smaller, and that smaller government would lead to better public services.  The party needs somebody who can passionately argue for this vision, not somebody who may in fact reverse on everything we stood for.

The next major category of changes involve constitutional changes.  The ideas here involve everything from leadership selection to party ratification of platforms to defining the leader’s role in the constitution.  All of these ideas are interesting, and they are worthy of debate.  However, and it needs to be said, the Ontario PCs did not lose the last election because of our party’s constitution.  So debating the constitution endlessly slows the process of renewal we all seek.  While I can support the idea that we need to empower the grassroots, the problem is our party just doesn’t have enough grassroots people.  Yes, it’s true that some may be drawn to join the party through constitutional changes, but not enough.  I don’t see flocks of voters wanting to get involved in the constitutional bear pit session at our next party convention.  They just aren’t gong to be there!

So why did we lose? What needs to change?  Well, I’ll list a few things we need to think about.

1. We’re entirely predictable.  The issues we champion are predictable.  What we say about those issues are predictable.  I always used to joke that the Liberals knew what the PCs were about to do before the PCs even knew themselves.  Now, I realize that it’s because it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure it out.  We were falling into traps all the time.

2. We need to be smarter. The profile of PC voters has tended to veer toward older, male, less educated and lower income Ontarians. Yes, it’s true we have an urban and suburban voter problem, but it’s not simply a problem because they’re urban or suburban.  It’s because people who tend to live in urban and suburban Ontario tend to be more educated and younger families.  In order to break into these areas, we need a whole lot more breadth, and we must avoid giving simple solutions to complex problems.  This infuriates people.

3. Find a coalition of voters who will line up behind the party. Using the levers of government and public policy, the Liberals have been able to build a stable coalition of voters in a way that Bob Rae tried and failed in the early 1990s.  They have built the necessary social capital that allows them to not only campaign well, but they’ve produced an all-powerful echo effect where their core messages are amplified.  Studies on social media effect showed that Tim Hudak and the Ontario PCs were the talk of Twitter and Facebook, but that chatter was almost entirely negative.  The next leader of the Ontario PCs must address this deficit.  The party needs an army of ultras who will amplify the PC message.  The Tories need to find coalitions of voters that we can get on side by implementing smart public policy that motivates different groups.  The entire infrastructure of the party needs a major overhaul.

4. We need to stop shooting arrows at ourselves. Look, I get it that our party members are mad.  Heck, I lost a job I loved because we lost. However, we have to move beyond simply pointing fingers endlessly at people within our own party.  Our party is not run by big business and lobbyists.  If it were, they would have publicly supported our pro-business agenda, but they didn’t.  They were silent.  Our campaign team wanted to win as much as the rest of us.  Yes, mistakes were definitely made and we need to learn from them.  Talking about our party and people within our party, and describing it and them as something that they are not, is not at all helpful.  It just feeds the negative perceptions people have of us.  We have the most democratic way of selecting our leader, and to listen to members and now leadership candidates debate changes, it’s as if we expect our leader to follow the followers.  This isn’t strong leadership, ladies and gentlemen.  It’s a recipe for disaster.  The energy should be focused on building a better electoral coalition than the Liberals and destabilizing their electoral coalition.    If your energy is not pointed at this task, the future is bleak.

I’ll share more thoughts in due course.  As a disclaimer, I have not committed to any leadership candidate.  I consider each of the candidates as my friends, and I hope they take my advice in good faith.