Right Turn: How the Tories Took Ontario

Randall White is the author of Voice of Region: On the Long Journey to
Senate Reform in Canada, Too Good to Be True: Toronto in the 1920s, and
Global Spin: Probing the Globalization Debate.

Right Turn doesn’t pretend to be anything more than a sympathetic
journalist’s account of how Mike Harris’s “Common Sense
Revolution” triumphed in the June 1995 Ontario provincial
election—and it isn’t. Substantial chunks of the text have been
“reproduced with permission from columns that appeared in [The Toronto
Sun] during the election period.” Those who find this newspaper’s
particular view of the world uncongenial (or worse) will have a similar
reaction to this volume.

The author’s chief concern is to give the reader the inside dope on
the mechanics of campaign management. What the 1995 election may say
about the underlying evolution of Ontario society received only cursory
rhetorical attention. Furthermore, Christina Blizzard’s grasp of the
varying human textures (or even the simple geography) in the province at
large is rather inexact.

Those who are interested in what is really happening to Canada’s most
populous province will nonetheless find that Right Turn can be read
quickly, and not altogether without profit. It offers a useful thumbnail
sketch of the genesis of the common-sense revolution and the people
behind it. Between the lines there is some partial intelligence on the
problems of the Ontario Liberals and New Democrats. The text quietly
allows that the “hot buttons” of “employment equity, welfare, and
high taxes” had a lot to do with the final election result.

One comes away from the book with a very clear sense of the extent to
which the Ontario Tories who won in 1995 are not the Tories who governed
the province so successfully between 1943 and 1985. On a number of
occasions Right Turn cites the new breed’s view that, while they are
going to have their critics, “we’re here to deliver what the
majority of Ontarians want.” Not surprisingly, Christina Blizzard
accepts this rhetoric without question. It is not, of course, exactly
what the election itself showed; a more balanced view remains to be
seen.