Progressive Conservative MPPs in Ontario who have been given a refresher course on how to be true Conservatives clearly are short of role models.

Leader John Tory, whose position is in question after he lost the Oct. 10 election, called his party's elected members to a retreat so they could be taught what it means to be a Conservative.

The guidance was provided by a team led by Hugh Segal, a longtime backroom adviser in Ontario and later federal politics and now a member of the Senate, and included an author and lobbyist. None of the three has ever been elected to anything, although Segal has made several attempts.

The choice was odd and even offensive, because Segal is the supreme example in a long list of Conservative backroom advisers who could not get elected, but had more influence on the party and its policies than the vast majority of its members who got elected, worked with constituents and had a better understanding of their aims, and are resented for it.

Tory's choice of Segal was another example of how the current Conservative leadership, which lost any chance of winning the election because it proposed funding private, faith-based schools, is out of touch with voters.

Segal was a principal secretary, or chief paid political adviser, to William Davis, premier from 1971 to 1985, and a key member of a small group of unelected advisers and senior ministers who met in a hotel Tuesday mornings and drafted policies, while sifting through polls.

They would make all the big decisions, and the politicians among them would then go to the caucus and tell it how to vote.

You don't have to take an outsider's word for this. Mike Harris, premier from 1995 to 2002, once recalled how "Mr. Davis would come into our caucus and tell us what we had all decided."

The respected, currently longest-serving Conservative MPP, Norm Sterling, who has held several senior ministerial posts and is no rabble-rouser, said Davis showed a distasteful lack of respect for his MPPs and his process for enabling them to share in making policies was a charade.

Conservative MPPs who turned up for the tuition must have felt insulted at being told how to do their jobs by a backroom operator who spent much of his political career undermining the power of elected members.

Segal also was noted for pushing for big government as well as spending that produced huge deficits, but today's Conservative MPPs want smaller government and lower taxes and must feel they have nothing to learn from Segal on policies.

Segal did dream up the pretentious Charter for Ontario, consisting of many promises in fancy script on imitation parchment and designed to win the 1977 election, which included a famous one to balance the provincial budget by 1981, something that never happened.

Segal's personal record also does not provide confidence that a few words from him will soon have Tory's Conservatives winning.

His two failed bids to get elected an MPP, and one for leader of the federal Conservative party, were among many examples of voters refusing to trust backroom manipulators.

As an example of failed strategy, he also contrived to get a Davis minority government defeated in the legislature on a minor issue and claim it as a vote of confidence, calculating that it could win a majority in the resulting election. But voters saw through this and refused the majority.

Segal will not inspire MPPs to devote themselves to the public good, because he abandoned working for political causes to sell his inside knowledge of government to businesses wanting to profit from it and reap a harvest of lucrative contracts awarded by Ontario and federal governments.

He can be witty, and once called being a senator "a taskless thanks," because it is a reward that requires little work.

But the Ontario Conservatives need more than glib words - they need to build some respect and the best place to start would be in their own party.