Like a knight errant, Conservative Party leader Erin O'Toole seems to have embarked on a quixotic quest to endear himself with the Canadian media.

In fact, O'Toole has done all the things he thinks he has to do to earn the media's affection, from publicly and enthusiastically extolling the notion of Tory moderation, to expelling "far right" MPs from his party, to shunning certain conservative websites.

His goal in all this, of course, is for the CBC to one day run headlines such as "News flash: O'Toole is actually far from being a scary and dangerous right-wing radical."

And I can certainly understand why the Conservatives are playing this game.

After all, it'd be nice for them if the media was friendlier to their leader, it might even make it easier for them to win an election.

The problem is, their plan is a fantasy, it won't work.  No matter how much O'Toole tries to portray himself as a gentle, cordial moderate leader, the media will never buy it.

For them, O'Toole will always be too "right-wing."

I say that because, unfortunately for O'Toole, the Canadian media basically believes there's only one true moderate, centrist politician in Canada and his name is Justin Trudeau.

There's a reason for this — Trudeau's a Liberal.

That matters because for the past few decades or so, one key characteristic of Canada's Liberal Party is that it lacks anything resembling a coherent ideology.

All it really cares about is power.

What this means in practice is the Liberal Party will move in whichever direction it deems the political winds are heading, sometimes it'll tack left, (think of Pierre Trudeau's National Energy Program) sometimes it'll tack right (think of Jean Chretien's deficit slashing).

At any rate, my point is, Canadian journalists have come to view this Liberal lack of principle and the resultant ideological somersaults the Liberals periodically perform, not as cynical politics at its worst, but as a stirring example of praiseworthy political moderation.

As long as the Liberals ultimately end up with positions that are somewhere between the NDP and the Conservatives, that's enough in the minds of the media, to make them centrists.

Hence, when Trudeau decided building pipelines was bad in Quebec, but good in British Columbia, that de facto became the moderate stance on the pipeline issue.

Likewise, when the Prime Minister decided to firmly wage a trade war against America in retaliation to steel tariffs, but meekly acquiesced when the Keystone pipeline was cancelled, that too was viewed as Liberal moderation in action.

Do you see the strategic problem this poses for O'Toole?

As long as the media allows Trudeau and the Liberals to define what it means to be a moderate, no matter what O'Toole does or says, he will always be deemed to be on the political fringe.

In other words, any time O'Toole takes a position on a policy that's even slightly different from Trudeau's stance, the media will label it as "right-wing," as beyond the political pale.

This will be the case no matter how many times he dilutes his brand of conservatism or how many MPs he kicks out.

Nor does it help O'Toole's cause that the media generally views the Liberals as enlightened and secular, while seeing conservatives as superstitious and Christian.

There's no way a devout Christian could ever be a moderate, right?

Anyway, what can the Conservatives do about all this?

Well, simply put, they should stop wasting their time pandering to the media.

At the end of the day, it's the voters, not the producers of CBC news, they have to win over.

How do they do that?

Well, here's an idea: rather than trying to appear as a moderate, maybe O'Toole should try looking like a leader.

Photo Credit: CBC News