Seizing on a turn of events that saw the party’s leader kicked right out of caucus, political newcomer Caroline Mulroney says she’s exactly the fresh face the party needs after spending the last fifteen years in second place.
“I bring private-sector experience, I bring a fresh approach to governing,” Mulroney said in the Feb. 15 debate, adding she was then the only leadership hopeful that had been nominated to run in the general election prior to Brown’s resignation and re-entry into the race.
A Harvard-educated corporate lawyer, Mulroney worked as a financial analyst and corporate lawyer in New York before moving to work in Toronto.
She was nominated as the PC candidate for York-Simcoe last September.
Not surprisingly, her earliest policy utterance was also opposition to any carbon pricing.
On sexual education curriculum changes brought in by the Liberals, Mulroney is another candidate who said that although she thought changes were poorly rolled out, she would not change or remove them.
Financial disclosure from Elections Ontario indicates Mulroney has out-fundraised the other three candidates combined, with more than $700,000 raised to date.
On policy, she has staunchly opposed Patrick Brown’s carbon tax promise and says unlike some of her rivals, she won’t rule out completely changing or remaking the existing party platform ahead of the looming general election.
She told a crowd in North York last month that the existing People’s Guarantee platform leaves some conservatives’ concerns out.
She has pledged to root out government waste, and says the roughly $4 billion the government would forego by ending carbon pricing could be made up by ending wasteful spending.
At an event in Brockville last month, she told a reporter that the Ontario government’s $120,000 grant to bring a giant rubber duck to the Great Lakes last summer, as well as the $54,000 spent on Canada Goose jackets for youth correctional workers in the north, are just two of the most maddening examples of waste in government.
