Christine Elliott Returns to Northern Ontario for Leadership Debate

In spring 2009 the Ontario Progressive Conservatives were choosing a replacement for John Tory, and Christine Elliott made sure Northern Ontario was part of the contest.

On May 28, 2009, candidate Christine Elliott, then MPP for Whitby–Oshawa, came to Sudbury for the second of the party’s four official leadership debates. It was her third trip to the North since the race began. Her campaign used the visit to promote a set of policies for the region that she had first announced in Thunder Bay that April.

The northern platform

Elliott said the North had the people, talent and resources to be an economic powerhouse and that government regulation was holding it back. Her campaign proposed:

• A law school in Northern Ontario. Northern advocates had wanted one for years so students would not have to move south to study law.
• Affordable broadband everywhere. Elliott called high-speed internet the infrastructure of the 21st century and said rural and northern communities had to have it.
• Post-secondary “centres of excellence.” These would help resource industries develop higher-value, greener jobs.
• Better access to justice. The plan included using the videoconferencing networks already built for health care to deliver legal services, and offering incentives for new lawyers to practise in under-served areas.

Kenora MP Greg Rickford, one of about a dozen federal Conservative MPs backing Elliott, said she had listened to issues that mattered to Northwestern Ontarians. Elliott also attacked Premier Dalton McGuinty’s record in the North and said the best people to guide northern policy were people from the North.

How the race ended

The four candidates were Elliott, Tim Hudak, Frank Klees and Randy Hillier. On June 27, 2009, Tim Hudak won on the third ballot, and Elliott finished second. Hudak led the party into the 2011 and 2014 elections and lost both.

Elliott’s career went on for many more years. She ran for the leadership again in 2015, and in 2016 she became Ontario’s first Patient Ombudsman. She came very close to winning the 2018 leadership and then served as Deputy Premier and Minister of Health in Doug Ford’s government through the COVID-19 pandemic, until she retired from politics in 2022.

Did the northern ideas happen?

Some of them did, though not because of the 2009 race.

• Law school: Lakehead University’s Bora Laskin Faculty of Law opened in Thunder Bay in 2013. It was the first new law school in Ontario in decades, and it focuses on Indigenous, natural resources and small-practice law.
• Broadband: Connectivity is still a major issue along the north shore of Lake Superior. Federal and provincial programs have since spent billions on rural and northern internet, but many Algoma households still don’t have reliable service.
• Access to justice: Virtual hearings became routine in Ontario courts during the pandemic. That was roughly the kind of remote legal service the 2009 platform described.

Leadership races are usually forgotten quickly. The northern priorities raised in Sudbury in 2009 are still on the agenda.