The news that the Conservative Party voted down a motion to recognize climate change as being real during their biennial policy convention this past weekend was a gift to the Liberals (and other opposition parties, really), and set the narrative for what was to come in the days ahead.  Party leader Erin O'Toole spent Monday putting on a brave face and doing the media rounds, spinning some elaborate bullshit about what that policy resolution was really about and insisting that he believed climate change is real and that as a party leader he would come up with policies to address it but that didn't stop the nagging whispers that his grassroots rejecting his stance was a sign of his weakness as a leader.  I'm not entirely sure that it demonstrates weakness but it certainly demonstrates that all is not well with our party system.

The motion itself came out a Quebec riding association, calling on the party to recognize the climate change is real and that they need to do something about it, as well as mentioning that heavy emitters need to "take more responsibility" (a conservative concept!) to reduce those emissions, while also calling to support more innovation in green tech.  It was defeated 54 percent to 46, with most of its supporters coming from Quebec and the Atlantic provinces places where the party is particularly weak in representation, and where they know that this is an issue that hurts them.  Lisa Raitt herself said so in a recent interview, saying that a credible climate plan was now "table stakes," as she was constantly faced with questions around it at the doorstop.  Nevertheless, for Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Ontario (almost certainly skewing rural in terms of delegates), this was an opportunity for some right-wing virtue-signalling, where any talk of the environment is seen as a threat to their economic prosperity.

As much as O'Toole himself talks about the reality of climate change and needing a "serious" environmental policy, he also hedged with toward that very same right-wing virtue-signalling, saying that the environment was important but the economy had to come first.  While the talk about a "serious" policy was absolutely throwing shade at Andrew Scheer's cartoonish environmental platform (which the party and its mouthpieces fell all over themselves to praise and insist that it was credible because it had so many pages never mind that most of those pages where photos with a single sentence), trying to divorce an environmental plan from an economic plan is a red flag that it is not serious after all.

Insisting that you can have an environmental plan that eschews carbon pricing is not credible or serious, and yet O'Toole is trying to go down that route.  He derides a transparent, market-based pricing system that allows consumers to make their own choices about how to reduce their own emissions based on pricing incentives, and instead talks about "working with" heavy emitters, but that essentially places a huge share of the burden on Alberta's oil and gas sector, which isn't credible given what it means for his party's voter base.  But then again, his Canada Recovery Plan doesn't mention childcare once, and he similarly derides the Liberals plans to include it as part of an inclusive growth strategy, which is also a major sign that O'Toole's much-ballyhooed plan lacks credibility given the realities of what this pandemic has done to women in the economy.

Nevertheless, O'Toole's plans to go ahead with some sort of climate plan in the face of his own membership disavowing the issue is nothing new in party politics in this country.  After all, Liberal leaders routinely ignored policy resolutions around drug decriminalization, and in one particularly notable case, a policy convention voted on including a carbon price which Michael Ignatieff immediately dismissed as a non-starter.  In recent memory, the NDP have ignored policy resolutions in support of the Leap Manifesto, which has gone nowhere as Jagmeet Singh has essentially turned the party into an AOC stan account.  These kinds of tensions between leaders and the grassroots are commonplace.

The reason, of course, is that thanks to the bastardized way in which we choose our party leaders in this country, turning what was an accountable system where the party caucus would choose a leader from among their own ranks, to one enamoured with the American presidential primaries, that overly empowered these leaders by giving them the illusion of "democratic legitimacy," and where they arrive on the scene with policy positions that they plan to enact if they win said leadership.  The role of the grassroots in developing these party policy books has largely been relegated to a bit of biennial theatre, a ceremonial performance that acts something of a check on the temperature of the grassroots rather than a serious process of policy development.  Occasionally, as with this past Conservative convention, it's also a means for certain activist groups to push their own agenda, not that it does them much good as the leader gets to decide on what forms the campaign in the end.

With this reality in mind, is it really a reflection of O'Toole's "weakness" as a party leader that his grassroots ostensibly rejected his position on climate change, or is it simply a sign that it doesn't really matter because his word is the only thing that counts?  These same grassroots members will vote for the party regardless, so I'm not sure that O'Toole will see it as a problem until he loses an election and the party turns on him.  Our leadership selection system has been driving a wedge between the leaders they choose and the concerns of the grassroots for decades now, devaluing the grassroots into little more than rented crowds to vote in leadership contests, and potential volunteers and donors for the next election.  The connection to the party is fraying, and this latest example is just one more sign that our system is in trouble.

Photo Credit: CBC News