No contest

Harold Wilson says the right thing to do isn’t always the easiest.

But it wasn’t hard for Wilson to take the Progressive Conservative candidacy for Thunder Bay-Atikokan Saturday as he ran uncontested. Wilson, who also signed his PC membership card Saturday, said he knows the party has a big challenge ahead of it in the riding, currently held by Liberal MPP Bill Mauro for the past decade.

“I’m trying to think of those times that I did the easy thing and I don’t have a very big list,” the former head of the Thunder Bay Chamber of Commerce said. “But there are things that you have to do because it’s the right thing to do.”

People have been asking Wilson to run for years but it was never the right time. But in January PC leader Tim Hudak asked Wilson for a breakfast meeting while in Thunder Bay. Wilson said the conversation got him excited about what he can do for the region, mainly maximizing on economic opportunity. Too often the province’s financial woes are addressed by cuts rather than generating more revenue Wilson said.

“Where’s the revenue?” he said. “That’s the part I think that they’ve been missing.”

There may be times that the party might not have policies that are good for the region. It’s those times when an MPP needs to stand up for constituents Wilson said.

“You have to fight for those people all of the time,” he said.

Mauro has worked hard for the region on some things, like Bombardier, but Wilson said there were times when he needed to keep fighting.

“You’re got to try harder and you have to do it every day,” he said.

As for if or when the Liberal minority government might fall, Wilson said he’d like to see it come sooner than later but no one really knows.

This is Wilson’s second try as a PC candidate. At 28, he ran in the 1990 provincial election in the then Fort William riding. He finished third with 16.2 per cent of the vote.