In the wake of his party’s election defeat, a number of Conservatives and more than a few columnists and talking heads are making the case for Erin O’Toole to stay on as Conservative leader and to give it another election cycle. It’s true that the propensity to throw a leader overboard after a single election loss is wasteful and not really in keeping with how our system should operate, but sometimes dumping a leader is warranted – particularly if they could not connect to voters, or they have proven to have spectacularly poor political judgment. I’m not entirely certain that O’Toole has particularly met the test for being allowed to stay on.

For the past week, we’ve had commentators all over the place recalling that Andrew Scheer was dumped after his election loss, which wasn’t how history played out. Scheer had initially declared that he was going to stay on and fight the next election because he had increased their seat count and they “won” the popular vote (never mind that such a concept is a logical fallacy in a system such as ours), but within weeks, it started to leak out that Scheer had been using party funds to pay for personal expenses such as his children’s private school tuition, and there were a number of prominent Conservatives who were livid over it. Scheer promptly offered his resignation, citing a need to spend more time with his children. Did his loss factor into those leaks? Probably – Scheer proved to be somewhat cringe-worthy when confronted with things like his socially conservative views as they pertained to keeping a lid on that faction of the caucus, but also his embellishments regarding his own CV and the heretofore-unknown American citizenship – when he had made a big deal out of other public figures’ dual-citizenship. But it wasn’t a full-court press to have him removed for the loss.

In O’Toole’s case, he largely performed better than Scheer on the campaign trail, and the general consensus is that he generally was able to do most things better than Scheer was, whether it was deal with the social conservative issues (though his declaration around being pro-choice and pro-LGBTQ2+ has not meant he has stepped on his caucus bringing up anti-abortion legislation for debate, or the way they slow-walked and concern-trolled the debate on the conversion therapy ban bill), and he didn’t have any surprise dual citizenships come up during the campaign either, so that was something. But I wonder if this should be enough – if the bar is really that low.

While watching the weekly video discussion put out by The Line, I was struck when Jen Gerson cited that O’Toole didn’t have any “fatal problems,” and that what problems he did have were generally fixable. It would seem to me that our definition of what should be a fatal problem is different, because the way I see it, having a leader who says different things depending on who is in the room and what he thinks he can get away with could be a problem of being fatally untrustworthy. There is already a petition being circulated by a member of the party’s national council to call for a leadership review ahead of schedule because in the sponsor’s eyes, O’Toole presented a version of himself as being “true blue” during the leadership contest, and once he won that, was immediately presenting himself as someone else, who was more progressive and comfortable to urban and centrist voters, insisting that he was going to be the one who would crack the Liberal “fortress” that was the Greater Toronto Area. O’Toole didn’t – and he had losses in other urban areas including in Edmonton and Calgary – and it’s little wonder that there are Conservatives who believe he’s sold them a bill of goods.

And there were so many reversals in position that were happening in real-time on the campaign, most especially around the gun control issue, while at the same time his allies in the gun lobby were assuring people that O’Toole planned to keep his original promise to scrap these gun laws made it really difficult to believe what he had to say. There was fact that he made the decision to keep pushing the complete falsehood that the Liberals were planning to tax home sales, citing the house-flipping tax as “proof,” when it was a completely separate argument. He campaigned on combatting inflation while offering policies that would actually accelerate it, and offered examples that his GST holiday were exempt from, or which were already supply-managed, so his promised competition changes wouldn’t affect – not to mention that when pressed, he said he would keep the Bank of Canada’s two percent inflation target intact, meaning his whole schtick was a complete lie to begin with. He also was starting to change his position on the $6 billion over five years that had been promised to Quebec to improve their child care system, saying one day that it would be cancelled, and later saying that they would negotiate about it.

While I can appreciate that O’Toole was catering to a certain imported American impulse of catering to the hard-liners to win the leadership (because we love to LARP American primaries in this country), and then trying to win voters closer to the centre in the election, it’s just not a strategy that is at all sustainable, especially when it involves swallowing yourself whole on a constant basis to prove that you’re not either too centrist or too hard-line, and then reversing yourself to please your audience at that moment. We can all see what he’s doing, and it doesn’t make him look like a savvy campaigner – rather, it makes him look like an opportunist and a serial liar. And with that in mind, is this a leadership problem that is inherently fixable, or has he tainted himself in the eyes of both his party membership and the voting public in such a way that nobody could trust anything he says, ever again? That will be up for Conservatives to decide in the coming weeks, but it would seem to me that problem might indeed be a fatal one.