Randall Denley: Attacking Poilievre's Conservatives will come back to bite Doug Ford

Ontario Premier Doug Ford clearly doesn’t like federal Conservatives, but did he really sabotage their campaign in the province, as one re-elected Ontario MP recently suggested? Not likely, if you stick to the facts. The unseemly infighting between the leaderships of Ontario Progressive Conservatives and Pierre Poilievre’s federal Conservatives boiled over this week, to the credit of neither. Ontario Conservative MP Jamil Jivani took quite a run at Ford after the federal party’s election loss Monday. “ When it was our turn to run an election, h e couldn’t stay out of our business, always getting his criticisms and all his opinions out, distracting our campaign, trying to make it about him, trying to position himself as some kind of political genius that we needed to be taking cues from,” Jivani said. He added that Ford was a “hype man” for the federal Liberals. On Wednesday, Ford couldn’t resist rising to the bait , telling reporters “Last time I checked, Pierre Poilievre never came out in our (recent provincial) election. (As a) matter of fact, him, or one of his lieutenants, told every one of his members, ‘Don’t you dare go out and help the (Progressive Conservatives)’. Isn’t that ironic?” A reasonable person might make a distinction between not helping and actively, publicly criticizing, and Ford did indulge himself in some sniping at the federal party during the recent national election. So did Ford’s adviser, Kory Teneycke. But if that was sabotage, it was highly ineffective.

• Conservatives back Poilievre, but need to see changes and contrition to avoid 'problems'
• 'Hype man for the Liberal party': Ontario Tory Jamil Jivani unloads on Premier Doug Ford

Under Poilievre, the Conservatives gained seats in Ontario and the Liberals lost them in sufficient numbers to prevent their leader Mark Carney from winning a majority. Poilievre even collected a higher percentage of the popular vote than did Ford himself just months ago. Ontario is where the Conservatives held back a seemingly unstoppable Liberal tide, confounding pollsters’ predictions of a dismal result in the province. The poll aggregator 338Canada.com projected 82 seats for the Liberals in Ontario, and just 37 for the Conservatives. In the end, Poilievre took 53 seats, up from 37 in 2021. The Liberals got 69, down from 78 before. The Conservatives had 43.8 per cent of the vote, just ahead of Ford’s 42.97 per cent in the provincial vote. If an incumbent like Ford running against two weak opponents could only get about 43 per cent provincially, that suggests it’s the ceiling for conservative politicians in Ontario. The bad blood between federal Conservatives and PCs in Ontario certainly predates Ford and Poilievre. When I was a provincial PC candidate more than a decade ago, federal party types made it abundantly clear that they were the pros and the provincial PCs were inept losers. It seems like not much has changed. But it should. Ford is willing to work with federal Liberals when it furthers his political interests. He shouldn’t have let his disdain for Poilievre prevent him from doing the same with Conservatives. During the campaign, Poilievre took a tough-on-crime approach. Ford didn’t speak up to support him. Now that the election is over, Ford spent this week laying our new additions to his crime policy, one that is in sync with and arguably more severe than anything Poilievre advocated for. Couldn’t the two have worked together on that issue, at least? The Liberals will never give Ford what he wants on crime. On Wednesday, Ford went on a remarkable, self-described “rant” about “bleeding heart” judges who make decisions based on ideology — an ideology different from his own. The premier was annoyed that unelected judges would have any right to say no to his elected government on tougher crime policies, because “the people are supreme.” The solution, he suggested, was direct election of judges just like they do in the U.S. That would let the public hold them accountable. If Poilievre had said the same things, his opponents would have immediately condemned his statements as “just like Donald Trump,” and with some justification. The U.S. president is all right with the courts, as long as they rule in his favour and do what he says. We don’t need that here. Attempting to lighten the mood, Ford’s attorney general, Doug Downey, said, “You should see what he says in private.” That might not have helped as much as he intended If conservatives want future political success, their federal and provincial leaders will need to grasp the fact that they have more in common with each other than they do with the Liberals. At both levels, conservatives face a common threat. The collapse of the NDP in this federal election has fundamentally changed federal politics. If there aren’t two viable parties splitting the left-wing vote, Conservatives will face Liberal win after Liberal win. The problem is starkly apparent federally, but it’s happening provincially, too. In this year’s Ontario election, the provincial NDP support dropped to 18.5 per cent while the Liberals rose to 30 per cent. If the Ontario NDP continues to crumble, Ford or his successor will have a big problem. It’s time for conservative politicians to wake up and work together. National Post randalldenley1@gmail.com Get more deep-dive National Post political coverage and analysis in your inbox with the Political Hack newsletter, where Ottawa bureau chief Stuart Thomson and political analyst Tasha Kheiriddin get at what’s really going on behind the scenes on Parliament Hill every Wednesday and Friday, exclusively for subscribers. Sign up here.