The 1990 Ontario Progressive Conservative leadership election was a
leadership convention {{Politics of Canada
In Canadian politics, a leadership convention is held by a political party when the party needs to choose a leader due to a vacancy or a challenge to the incumbent leader.
Overview
In Canada, leaders of a party generally rem ...
held in May 1990 to elect a new leader for the
Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario
The Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario (french: Parti progressiste-conservateur de l'Ontario), often shortened to the Ontario PC Party or simply the PCs, colloquially known as the Tories, is a centre-right political party in Ontario, Canada ...
. Two candidates vied for the leadership -
Mike Harris
Michael Deane Harris (born January 23, 1945) is a Canadian retired politician who served as the 22nd premier of Ontario from 1995 to 2002 and leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario (PC Party) from 1990 to 2002. During his time ...
and
Dianne Cunningham
Dianne Esther Cunningham (born December 5, 1939) is a former politician in Ontario, Canada. She was a Progressive Conservative member of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario from 1988 to 2003, and a cabinet minister in the governments of Mike Ha ...
. Using a novel voting system used due to party funding constraints, Harris was elected over Cunningham in a single ballot by a margin of 7,175 points to 5,825 points.
Background
The convention was held to replace
Larry Grossman who resigned following the
1987 provincial election in which he lost his seat and saw his party, which had ruled the province for 42 years until 1985, fall to third place.
Andy Brandt
Andrew S. Brandt (born June 11, 1938) is a former politician and public administrator who has served in a number of roles in the province of Ontario, Canada. He served in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario as a Progressive Conservative from ...
served as interim leader for three years leading to the 1990 convention.
The Progressive Conservatives had been led by
Red Tories
A Red Tory is an adherent of a centre to centre-right or paternalistic-conservative political philosophy derived from the Tory tradition, most predominantly in Canada but also in the United Kingdom and Australia. This philosophy tends to favour ...
William G. Davis from 1971 until 1985 and conservative elements in the party, particularly in the youth, believed that the moderate positions of the party leadership had led to its 1985 defeat. Their third-place finish in 1987 under Grossman, also a Red Tory, buttressed the argument that the party needed to move to the right. Conversely, the leader of the Conservatives during their fatal
1985 provincial election was
Frank Miller
Frank Miller (born January 27, 1957) is an American comic book writer, penciller and inker, novelist, screenwriter, film director, and producer known for his comic book stories and graphic novels such as his run on ''Daredevil'' and subsequen ...
, perceived as a right wing conservative who eschewed the Red Toryism of Davis and Grossman.
Procedure
The 1990 leadership vote was the first in which the Tories used a weighted
One Member One Vote
In the parliamentary politics of the United Kingdom and Canada, one member, one vote (OMOV) is a method of selecting party leaders, and determining party policy, by a direct vote of the members of a political party. Traditionally, these objectives ...
system instead of the traditional delegated
leadership convention {{Politics of Canada
In Canadian politics, a leadership convention is held by a political party when the party needs to choose a leader due to a vacancy or a challenge to the incumbent leader.
Overview
In Canada, leaders of a party generally rem ...
. In the weighted OMOV system each riding of the 130 ridings was assigned 100 points for a total of 13,000 points. Members in each riding would vote and the total for each candidate would be represented by a proportion out of 100 (effectively a percentage). The disadvantage to the system was that ridings with many voting members would be treated as equal to those ridings with few voting members.
The candidate with the most points province wide would be the winner.
Mike Harris
Michael Deane Harris (born January 23, 1945) is a Canadian retired politician who served as the 22nd premier of Ontario from 1995 to 2002 and leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario (PC Party) from 1990 to 2002. During his time ...
represented the right wing position in the 1990 race and called for the scrapping of
pay equity
Equal pay for equal work is the concept of labour rights that individuals in the same workplace be given equal pay. It is most commonly used in the context of sexual discrimination, in relation to the gender pay gap. Equal pay relates to the full ...
and the introduction of
user fees A user fee is a fee, tax, or impost payment paid to a facility owner or operator by a facility user as a necessary condition for using the facility.
People pay user fees for the use of many public services and facilities. At the federal level in ...
for health care while his rival in the leadership race,
Dianne Cunningham
Dianne Esther Cunningham (born December 5, 1939) is a former politician in Ontario, Canada. She was a Progressive Conservative member of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario from 1988 to 2003, and a cabinet minister in the governments of Mike Ha ...
, was seen as on the progressive wing of the party and was supported by Red Tory stalwarts such as
Hugh Segal
Hugh Segal (born October 13, 1950) is a Canadian political strategist, author, commentator, academic, and former senator. He served as chief of staff to Ontario Premier Bill Davis and later to Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. Segal res ...
and
John Tory
John Howard Tory (born May 28, 1954) is a Canadian politician who has served as the 65th and current mayor of Toronto since 2014.
After a career as a lawyer, political strategist and businessman, Tory ran as a mayoral candidate in the 2003 ...
.
Both candidates were considered low-profile. Harris had briefly been a junior cabinet minister in Miller's short lived 1985 government while Cunningham was a rookie MPP who was elected in a 1988 by-election. Better known potential candidates such as
Dennis Timbrell
Dennis Roy Timbrell (born November 13, 1946) is a politician in Ontario, Canada. He was a member of Provincial Parliament (MPP) from 1971 to 1987, and was a Cabinet minister in the Progressive Conservative governments of Bill Davis and Frank M ...
,
Barbara McDougall
Barbara Jean McDougall (born November 12, 1937) is a former Canadian politician. She served as a Member of Parliament from 1984 to 1993, and as Secretary of State for External Affairs from 1991 to 1993. She did not run again in the 1993 Canadian ...
,
David Crombie
David Edward Crombie (born April 24, 1936) is a Canadian former academic and politician who served as the 56th mayor of Toronto from 1972 to 1978. Crombie was elected to Parliament following his tenure as mayor. A member of the Progressive Cons ...
, John Tory and party president
Tom Long all turned down the chance to run.
Due to party debt, lingering after the 1987 election, the Conservative party decided not to hold a traditional convention. Instead, party members would vote in their respective ridings and the results would be faxed to Toronto for tabulation. Less than half of the eligible 33,000 eligible voters cast a vote. Due to the frugal nature of the convention and the voting innovation, the election received little media and public attention.
First ballot
The non-weighted vote totals were: Harris 8661, Cunningham 7189 using a
preferential ballot
The term ranked voting (also known as preferential voting or ranked choice voting) refers to any voting system in which voters rank their candidates (or options) in a sequence of first or second (or third, etc.) on their respective ballots. Ran ...
, in which they ranked the candidates by preference, rather than vote in separate rounds.
References
{{Reflist
1990
File:1990 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: The 1990 FIFA World Cup is played in Italy; The Human Genome Project is launched; Voyager I takes the famous Pale Blue Dot image- speaking on the fragility of Humankind, humanity on Earth, Astroph ...
1990 elections in Canada
Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario leadership election