One of the highlights of my attendance at this past Saturday morning’s Burlington PC Riding Association’s annual general meeting was meeting one of the candidates to be the Ontario PC party’s next president, namely Richard Ciano. I had the good luck to sit beside Mr. Ciano during the brunch preceding the meeting and exchanged a few words.
It is said often that at crucial times in history, the “right” person seems to emerge. Well, Mr. Ciano’s emergence as a candidate to lead our party at a crucial time may well be one of those.
The brief speech Richard Ciano made at the AGM resonated with me—music to my ears, one might say. As I listened to him I mentally ticked-off each of my pet peeves over what I consider shortcomings/mistakes in the PC’s last general election campaign that had the unhappy consequence of Liberal Dalton McGuinty returning for his third term as premier of Ontario.
For the first time in years (probably since the early days of Mike Harris’s leadership) I heard a PC party insider “preach” the sort of things I’ve advocated as success factors for our party. Here’s a highly summarized list of the points highlighted by Mr. Ciano:
- returning to open, fair and locally controlled candidate nominations;
- restoring a grassroots policy development process to the party; and
- re-establishing the principle of local control of local campaigns giving flexibility to local ridings to customize campaign literature, etc., based on local issues and circumstances.
It’s early days yet in the campaign for party president, but Mr. Ciano is saying all the right things, at least, as far as this writer is concerned.
© Russell G. Campbell, 2011