LILLEY: Ontario Liberal leaders look foolish with pitch for Green’s Schreiner

Mike Schreiner is many things, but he's not a centrist Liberal

A good portion of the Ontario Liberal Party’s brain trust have shown that they have no brains and can’t be trusted.

Over the weekend, 40 top Liberals, including former MPPs and cabinet ministers, issued an open letter asking Ontario Green Party Leader Mike Schreiner to come lead the Liberals.

Worse still, this foolish move was reported in the Toronto Star before the letter was made public along with Schreiner saying no to the idea for the second time.

“I have no plans to run for Liberal leader. And nobody’s made the case for me to change my mind,” Schreiner told the Star last week.

It is the same answer he gave in December when this idea was floated and still this group of formidable Liberals went forward and asked Schreiner to switch parties. Imagine being one of the existing Liberal contenders – there are four – and finding out some of the top names in the party looked around at who was running and decided what the Grits really need is a leader from another party.

It would be easy to dismiss this as just some party activists making a mistake if the names attached to the letter weren’t some of the biggest names in recent provincial Liberal history.

Deb Matthews, who served as deputy premier from 2013-19, Greg Sorbara, the finance minister under Dalton McGuinty, Lynn McLeod, who was party leader in the 90s, Kate Graham, who finished third in the last party leadership race, and Lucille Collard, a current Liberal MPP from Ottawa.

Collard’s decision to sign the letter might make the rather small Liberal caucus meetings awkward, two of the other seven Liberal MPPs – Mitzie Hunter and Ted Hsu – are putting together leadership bids. They shouldn’t count on Collard’s vote — she wants a leader who has no history with the Liberal Party.

“It reads like a suicide note,” Sun columnist Warren Kinsella said on his podcast over the weekend.

Kinsella, who ran the Ontario Liberal war room for McGuinty’s three successful elections, said this move hurts his former party going forward.

“They’ve given an unexpected and significant boost to the fortunes of the Ontario Green Party, and I think put a knife in any prospect of an Ontario Liberal resurgence,” Kinsella said.

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Flavio Volpe, a well-known figure in the auto industry, previously spent years as a top staffer at Queen’s Park including serving as chief of staff to the economic development minister. He says this move shows a real problem in the Ontario Liberal Party, that there is no succession culture to generate new leaders.

“So, the old guard wants to skip the generation of Ontario Liberals that served them to back someone from outside to lead them where?” Volpe asked. “This is the main reason the Ontario Libs are in the toilet.”

Political commentator and former Liberal staffer Sharon Kaur recommended that the people signing the letter just leave the Liberal fold.

“I welcome each and every person who has signed this ridiculous letter to join the Ontario Green Party,” Kaur tweeted.

That might be the best move for these people because by saying that they want Schreiner, these people have said they don’t want the once mighty Liberal brand. The party just went through an election post-mortem that, among other things, called for a return to the party being centrist.

Mike Schreiner is many things, but he’s not a centrist Liberal – not on the environment, not on other issues.

Part of the problem for the Ontario Liberals is that they no longer know who they are. They have adopted the progressive label so whole-heartedly that they have forgotten that they also used to represent moderate, middle-of-the-road, centrist voters.

They’ve abandoned those voters and as we’ve seen over the past two elections, those voters have abandoned the Ontario Liberals.

This move won’t bring those voters back.

blilley@postmedia.com