As a non-viewer of reality TV, his small-screen fame hadn’t registered on my radar at all. If ever I saw Shark Tank in television listings, I assumed it was some kind of nature programming. Dragons’ Den was equally an unknown entity.
Now, after a crash course via media archives, I have been enlightened. O’Leary is the Don Cherry of entrepreneurial TV brass balls — braggadocios blowhard. Yet somehow O’Leary seems his Q Score — the television recognition factor — coupled with a swaggering investor mogul resume is sufficient life experience to seize the reins of a floundering federal Conservative party and catapult himself into 24 Sussex Drive. Despite never having held any political office or served the Canadian public; despite not actually living in this country; and despite holding some exceedingly un-Conservative views. As if populist appeal can strike twice, carrying him to the prime minister’s office as his reality TV cohort Donald Trump implausibly landed in the White House.
The Washington Post recently described O’Leary as “Canada’s Donald Trump,” which is superficial and deeply absurd. O’Leary, who has said he would have voted for Trump, shares none of Trump’s views on social identity politics. What they do have in common is an executive-in-chief ideology — as if a country should be run like a company — and a propensity for making outrageous titter-inducing statements, as if the political arena were the World Wrestling Entertainment squared circle. (O’Leary has predicted that an electoral showdown between himself and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau would be “Godzilla versus Bambi.” You know, in the monster movies Godzilla never triumphed.)
I’m mystified why O’Leary, who calls himself “Mr. Wonderful,” believes his TV chops would translate into victory at the polls — or victory at the Conservative leadership convention in May — particularly in the 20-35 age bracket, with an avowal that he would re-capture up to 60 per cent of that constituency’s ballot approval, presumably including the votes of a son and daughter, which, he’s said, went to Trudeau last time. “I’m going to go from college to college and win back every single vote and win back every single voter — every single voter — that Trudeau took away from us,” O’Leary vowed on the weekend. “He got 82 per cent of that young vote. Now luckily, I have a wicked competitive advantage. They all know me as an entrepreneur. Yes, that’s the benefit of television.”
Spoken like a true boob-tube swellhead.
Polling does show that O’Leary jumped to the head of the 14-strong (14-weak) Tory leadership throng after slow-poke tossing his hat into the ring last month, with 24 hours of prudently sidestepping a French-language candidates’ debate in Quebec. Though born in Montreal, O’Leary doesn’t speak French, merely one of the factoids his rivals have argued make him unfit for the leadership job.
O’Leary has spent much of his time over the past fortnight squabbling — via Facebook — with Premier Kathleen Wynne in infotainment-style yips and snarls, revealing a shaky grasp of economic facts (wrongly asserting that Ontario lagged behind Michigan in auto investment and had higher corporate tax rates — you’d think this stuff would be right in his wheelhouse) and procedural matters (daring Wynne to call a snap election; we have fixed election dates now by law). As Wynne and a couple of her ministers continued to engage O’Leary, he snapped (again on Facebook, apparently his go-to platform as Twitter is for Trump): “Three letters in two days . . . why are you still writing me?” Uh, because it’s God-sent fodder for a premier up to her eyeballs in low approval ratings.
On Saturday night, at a two-hour debate with Tory leadership co-aspirants in Halifax — two hours of my life that I will never get back, watching it on TV — O’Leary was the piñata on the stage, repeatedly subjected to sarcastic jibes from his 13 adversaries, shots they’d clearly teed up.
“We have a celebrity in chief,” said Erin O’Toole, in apparent reference to Trudeau. “We don’t beat a celebrity in chief with another celebrity in chief.”
From Kellie Leitch, who got the snark ball rolling: “First I’d like to welcome Kevin to the Conservative party and I’d like to welcome him back to Canada,” a swipe at how much time O’Leary spends in the U.S. (He lives in Boston.)
Michael Chong castigated O’Leary over the tone-deaf video he posted of himself firing off automatic weapons at a Miami shooting range, on the very day that funerals were being held for some of the victims in the Quebec City mosque shooting, dissing him as a candidate who “thinks he’s Rambo.”
Lisa Raitt, born in Sydney, N.S., got off the zinger of the night — judging by audience reaction — after noting that the province traditionally sends Boston a Christmas tree every year. “I just never expected that Boston in return would send us a candidate for leadership.”
Broadly speaking, the candidates are minnows who’ve failed to engage the public’s interest since they took to the leadership hustings. Most surprising to me, in O’Leary’s debate debut, was how very lame his responses were to the five questions posed of all candidates. Neither his purported TV magnetism nor his alleged enterprising bona fides rose to the occasion.
On the subject of whether penalties are adequate for sexual crimes: “I travel the world as an investor and I go to some of the harshest places on earth. I wish I could take everyone with me to some of these countries where law is just a concept. I have a very hard time criticizing our justice system or the men and women who enforce it in this country. This is an extraordinary country. We’re the luckiest people on earth.”
On health care: “The problem with heath care as it’s constructed now in Canada has a lot to do with the economy . . . Canada does not work at .7 per cent GDP growth . . . The reason we have these long wait lines for cataract and for hip replacement surgery etcetera, it’s because the cupboard is bare.”
On jobs in Atlantic Canada, that veered off-topic: “Nowhere on your passport or in the Canadian Constitution does it say you have to tolerate mediocrity in government and incompetence. This is all about to change. The body politic in Canada is no different than anywhere else in the world. People are sick of politicians spinning BS. That time is over my friends. That’s why I’m in this race.”
Ah, so that’s it. I’d been wondering.
The Toronto Star and thestar.com, each property of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited, One Yonge Street, 4th Floor, Toronto, ON, M5E 1E6. You can unsubscribe at any time. Please contact us or see our privacy policy for more information.
Our editors found this article on this site using Google and regenerated it for our readers.
