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Day: August 30, 2020

The best way to win the Republican presidential nomination, someone once said, is to run as far as possible to the Right.

Then, when one wins the nomination?

Start running back to the centre.

Conservative leader Erin O'Toole heeded that advice.  His leadership campaign was brimming with the sort of stuff that right-wing folks love.  His campaign's strategy was to depict Peter MacKay as the squishy One World Government crypto-Liberal, and O'Toole the conservative's Conservative.

He was the "true blue" Conservative.  He was going to do battle with "the Chinese regime," which would be news to our military.

He was going to start a fight to "take back Canada" from whom, he never said, but Indigenous people were likely unamused, having always correctly believed they had Canada first.

And, of course, O'Toole was going to give social conservatives what they wanted.  He was their candidate, because he was the only one who could beat the communist MacKay.

So:

• he suggested he had "concerns" about banning conversion therapy
• he mused about creating "conscience rights" to make abortions harder to get
• he intoned that he didn't like medically-assisted death, and would work to limit its use
• he implied he he would give some the "right" to refuse LGBTQ marriage
• and he said SoCons "will have a seat at the table" when he became Conservative leader.

Which, after a clown show of a voting process, he eventually did.  He won the Tory crown in the wee hours, when most of us had gone to bed.

And then, as in a dream, Erin O'Toole switched the script.

It was kind of like the Bobby Ewing dream sequence on Dallas, many years ago.  JR was dead and we were trying to figure out the identity of the murder.  And then Bobby woke up, and it was all a dream!

The producers of Dallas lost not a few fans with that little stunt, and my suspicion is Erin O'Toole is going to lose some fans, as well.

On the progressive side of the spectrum, he has created a credible case for the criticism that he has a hidden agenda.  On the social conservative side a side he actively and indisputably courted for many months there will be feelings of betrayal and anger.

That's what happens when you try and suck and blow at the same time.  That's what happens when you try to be all things to all people.  You end up satisfying nobody, really.

O'Toole had an exceedingly competent campaign team.  That is obvious.  They were up against a likable, experienced former senior cabinet minister.  They were up against the widely-held impression that their candidate lacked charisma, name recognition or a policy or two that were in some way newsworthy.

Despite that, they expertly manipulated the Byzantine Conservative voting process and captured ridings that were ridings in name only.  They decisively beat Peter MacKay by doing that.

But make no mistake: they also did that by pretending to be the most electable social conservative candidate.  The other two social conservatives in the race could not speak French a nonstarter for a truly national political party.

Sure, sure.  It is true that Justin Trudeau is no longer as popular as he once was.  It is true that he has become enmeshed in multiple ethical scandals.  It is true that one of those scandals the one that has soiled his family name may yet take down his government.

But only a fool would underestimate Justin Trudeau's electoral skills.  Andrew Scheer did that, and he ended up looking like a fool.  He ended up looking like a guy who couldn't score on an empty net if his life depended on it.

With a pandemic raging, and Canadians worrying about kids returning to school and businesses going under, it may be that Canadians will forget about Erin O'Toole's whiplash-inducing flip-flop.  Or they may not care.

But Conservatives are dreaming in technicolor if they think the Liberal electoral machine has not noticed.  They are delusional if they think Justin Trudeau will not take full and frequent advantage of their massive volte-face.

In politics, you have to believe in something.  You do.

After last week, to both progressives and social conservatives, it is fair to wonder if the new leader of the Conservative Party of Canada believes in anything at all.

Photo Credit: BT.com

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.

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As I was cogitating for this column, I received a call from La Presse's bureau chief Joël-Denis Bellavance.  His thinking was simple: there are a lot of similarities between new Conservative leader Erin O'Toole and Jack Layton, the late leader of the Federal NDP.   He claimed that the parallels that can be drawn between O'Toole and Layton are obvious in several ways.

Indeed, just like Jack Layton, Erin O'Toole was born in Quebec.  Like Layton, O'Toole has settled in Ontario, where both became Members of Parliament.  They both come from a political family, their respective fathers being Conservatives: Bob Layton was a Conservative MP, serving as Minister of State for Mines and then as Caucus Chair under Brian Mulroney.  John O'Toole was a Conservative MPP in Queen's Park for almost 20 years, representing the riding of Durham, the same riding his son now represents in the House of Commons.

Like Jack Layton, O'Toole was not the favourite entering the leadership race, with opponents racking up more party establishment support.  And like Layton, O'Toole is an unknown entity for most Quebecers.  Yet, just like Layton, Erin O'Toole wants to give prominence to Quebec soft nationalists.

So can Erin O'Toole do for the CPC in Quebec what Jack Layton did for the NDP?  Can he seduce Quebecers in a way no Conservative leader has been able to since Brian Mulroney?

Not everything is the same, obviously, starting with the politics, although one can argue that they both are populist in some ways.  But unlike Layton, who had an academic background before turning to politics, O'Toole served his country in the military before becoming a lawyer.  Layton studied in Quebec, at McGill University before going to York in Toronto, while O'Toole's degrees are from the Royal Military College in Kingston and Dalhousie University in Halifax.

So unlike O'Toole, Layton spent the first two decades of his life in Quebec.  Layton learned Quebec's history, the cultural references, the political dynamics.  He saw first hand how Quebecers' Latin blood makes them a different breed of voters.

While Jack Layton inherited a party with very thin orange roots in la Belle Province, there is no question that there is a deep, old blue stock in Quebec for O'Toole to tap into.  But the main challenge for O'Toole is similar to what Layton faced: convince the Bloc electorate to come his way.

In order to do that, O'Toole will need to develop the right reflexes to convince Quebecers he understands them, speaks for them and can deliver on their aspirations.  Can O'Toole create this emotional connection that often makes Quebeckers react and regularly makes them vote in waves?  Pierre Trudeau, Brian Mulroney, Lucien Bouchard and Jack Layton were all able to do it.  Can O'Toole?

During the leadership campaign, O'Toole was strident at times, as he was courting the social conservative voters for their support once their candidates Derek Sloan and Leslyn Lewis bit the dust.  His victory speech, delivered in the wee hours of the morning to a limited audience, was already signalling a pivot:  O'Toole's goal was not to solely motivate the conservative base, but also to build an electoral coalition that would count on the support of former Liberal, Bloc, and yes, even NDP voters.

His Liberal opponents, mainly, were quick out of the gate, trying to frame O'Toole as beholden to social conservatives.  O'Toole will quickly want to shut this framing down before it sticks.  While O'Toole will keep repeating that he was elected leader of the CPC as a pro-choice candidate and as a supporter of human rights, it will not be sufficient.  With Derek Sloan in his caucus and Leslyn Lewis announcing she would be part of his slate in the upcoming election, O'Toole will be carrying them, and all the others, like dead weight around his neck, no matter how much he tries to protest.  And that, more than his support for a new pipeline or his love of John A. MacDonald, more than anything else, will make his task of convincing Quebecers, and indeed Canadians, that much more difficult.

Photo Credit: National Post

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.

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