Modeling Journey

Frank Klees pleads not guilty.

In recent days, the veteran Conservative MPP for Newmarket-Aurora has been fingered in the media and in party circles as the culprit behind the platform plank promising public funding for "faith-based schools."

Not true, said Klees in an interview this week.

Klees acknowledged that he has been "a consistent advocate" of assistance for parents who choose to send their kids to private schools, religious or otherwise. "But I always felt it should be a tax issue."

That is, he favoured restoration of the private-school tax credit, introduced by the Mike Harris government and repealed by Premier Dalton McGuinty's Liberal regime.

In Klees's recollection, the party's platform committee – of which he was not a member – came up with several other options in a report last year, including doing nothing at all, going to a voucher system, and providing direct funding but limiting it to faith-based schools.

"The term `faith-based education' was never, ever in our vocabulary prior to that," he said.

Klees said he expressed his misgivings over the faith-based option at the time because he saw "nothing but problems" with it. "I still felt that it was better to leave it as a tax issue," he recalled.

But when the draft platform came to caucus this past spring, it included the faith-based schools option. Klees did not repeat his objections.

"Once you've expressed your view and you hear that the decision has been made, you do what you can to support the decision," he said.

Attached to the document that came before caucus was a compilation of past statements from McGuinty and Education Minister Kathleen Wynne favourable to the notion that other religious schools besides the Roman Catholics' deserved consideration for public funding.

"The idea at that time was that this would be a very safe position for our party to take," recalled Klees.

The Conservatives were further encouraged to think they were on safe ground on the issue when the platform (including the faith-based plank) was publicly released in early June and the initial reaction was muted.

"That seemed to signal that what we predicted was right," said Klees.

Nonetheless, Klees said he "implored" John Tory to get out in front on the faith-based schools issue and define it in his own terms before Liberals framed it in theirs.

However, according to Klees, Tory got conflicting advice from his "communications strategists," brandishing polls that said the issue was not a big concern to the public.

"The advice that he (Tory) received was that we should not focus any attention on this issue, that we should allow this to be dealt with quietly and focus on other issues," said Klees. "My warning to John was: you risk having the Liberals distort this proposal and you will find yourself on the defensive and your good intentions will end up causing us great difficulty."

But Tory accepted the advice of his campaign team and chose not to highlight the faith-based schools policy in his campaign speeches or advertisements, until near the end of the election.

"The rest is history," concluded Klees. Indeed it is.

Klees will not have the last word on how the Conservative election campaign was conducted. Others will contribute their views. Books may even be written on the topic.

But certainly Klees has provided food for thought – especially for Conservatives wrestling with the question of where they go from here.