From 1943 to 1985, the Progressive Conservative Party (PC) held uninterrupted power in Ontario, under Red Tory premiers such as Leslie Frost, John Robarts, and Bill Davis.
After the 1990 election, Harris and his advisors (including prominent Ontario Tories Tony Clement, then President of the party, Leslie Noble, Alister Campbell and Tom Long) set to work creating a more comprehensive reform package to present to the province.
[1] The CSR reform package was markedly neoliberal in nature, closely mirroring the platforms of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and U.S. President Ronald Reagan during the 1980s.
Among other things, Harris promised to reduce personal income tax rates by 30% and balance the provincial budget at the same time (which had reached a record $10 billion deficit under the NDP).
When Bob Rae called the 1995 general election in Ontario, most political commentators were sure that Liberal leader Lyn McLeod would end up taking the premier's job.
Specifically, he consistently delivered the party's promises to lower taxes and reduce the number of people on Ontario's social assistance program.
Another major contributing factor was a focussed advertising campaign which stuck to 3 key policy elements - "Work for Welfare, Scrap the Quota Law (Affirmative Action) and Tax Cuts for Jobs — Common Sense for a Change".
This growth allowed Harris to eliminate briefly the $11 billion annual deficit he had inherited from previous Premiers David Peterson and Bob Rae.
This in many ways was designed to counter Premier Bob Rae's government task force on the Greater Toronto Area, chaired by Anne Golden.
Long before the merger, in October 1996, a focus group conducted by Angus Reid for the government warned Municipal Affairs Minister Al Leach that there would be "considerable public resistance"[5] to the creation of a unified Toronto.
Leach would go on to blame local mayors and community groups for the opposition, going on to be quoted in the same article as saying: "In the end, it became a cause célèbre for all of the issues that the government was bringing forward on its agenda".
The Ontario New Democratic Party filibustered the legislation by proposing a series of amendments, each of which required the government to consult the residents of a specific street in the city before implementing the amalgamation.
[clarification needed] Attempting to build on the success of the CSR content and messaging strategy for the 1999 election, Harris and the Ontario Tories branded their new policy document the "Blueprint" (Blue being the official colour of the party).
Through a variety of factors, including dissatisfaction with the effects of the government's platform policies, deterioration of municipal services after downloading, the Walkerton Tragedy during the CSR, and Eves' handling of the Northeast Blackout, the Progressive Conservatives were defeated in the 2003 provincial election by Dalton McGuinty and the Ontario Liberal Party.