After a tumultuous and controversial tenure that ended with a convoy of trucks sieging the capital, Erin O’Toole’s time as Conservative leader has drawn to a close. Tory mainstay Candice Bergen has taken his place; she will serve as interim leader until the next permanent leader is chosen. There’s still no telling when that leadership convention might take place, but Rona Ambrose served as interim leader for a year-and-a-half after Stephen Harper’s 2015 defeat.
So just who is Candice Bergen, and how will she fare as the glue binding a crumbling party together? We’ve compiled everything you need to know about the country’s new opposition leader.
She’s a long-time Parliamentarian
Bergen was first elected to the House of Commons in 2008, representing the Manitoba riding of Portage–Lisgar for the Conservatives under Stephen Harper. She’s held the riding ever since, and slowly climbed the internal Tory ladder after her initial election. Harper gave her a junior cabinet position in 2013–Minister of State for Social Development–and former interim leader Rona Ambrose anointed her Opposition House Leader in 2016.
In a Globe and Mail profile, Bergen said she considered running for the Conservative leadership in 2020, but ultimately decided not to because she can’t speak fluent French. Erin O’Toole wound up winning the leadership that year and appointed her deputy leader of the party.
She’s a rural MP with a distaste for big government
Bergen hails from the small community of Morden, Man. Her dad sold car parts and her mom was a cleaner at a hospital. She got involved with the Canadian Alliance party in the early 2000s, and increasingly grew distressed about the growing federal deficits being incurred by the governing Liberals. Her current riding of Portage–Lisgar covers a number of rural Manitoba communities, including Morden.
Most Tories seem to like her
Bergen’s stepping into the leadership at a time where her party is fiercely divided between social conservatives and moderates—a divide that led to her predecessor’s demise and her ascension to the party’s helm. Bergen seems to be someone who could bridge that divide, at least temporarily. She’s popular in the prairies, a favourite of social conservatives like Andrew Scheer and moderates like Erin O’Toole, and is seen as a peacemaker with a steady hand.
She has the backing of her party for now, but she’ll be tasked with holding the party together until her replacement is chosen at the next party convention. Although many moderate Conservatives (including former interim leader Rona Ambrose) view Bergen as a safe choice, Bergen’s consistent history of social conservatism have led to significant backlash outside the party.
She’s socially conservative–and it’s already getting her in trouble
Much of the coverage around Bergen’s latest appointment has revolved around her apparent approval of the trucker convoy causing mayhem on Parliament Hill. “I don’t think we should be asking them to go home,” wrote Bergen in an internal email acquired by the Globe. It’s also come out that she pushed O’Toole to publicly support the convoy before his ouster, saying there’s “good people on both sides.”
She shares a name with a famous actress. But they aren’t politically aligned. The other Candice Bergen is best known for leading 80s sitcom Murphy Brown, scoring an Oscar nomination for the 1979 movie Starting Over, and hosting a slew of SNL episodes over the years.
This Bergen also went on a date with Donald Trump back in the mid-60s, when she was just 18. She said the date was a “dud.” Fittingly, Bergen’s character in the 2018 reboot of Murphy Brown got in a fictional Twitter fight with the former president.
Canada’s Candice Bergen, on the other hand, got in hot water last year after a photo of her in a camo “Make America Great Again” hat showed up online.
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New (interim) Conservative leader Candice Bergen was welcomed to her new job with a resounding standing ovation from her caucus colleagues and a story revealing that she argued that her party shouldn’t ask the Freedom Convoy protesters to go home. Marieke Walsh, reports in the Globe that, while she was deputy leader to Erin O’Toole, she emailed: “I don’t think we should be asking them to go home. I understand the mood may shift soon. So we need to turn this into the PM’s problem.”
While the Conservatives debated the contents of a possible statement on Monday, protesters were outside Parliament Hill for a fourth day, blockading streets and ignoring traffic laws. On Thursday, many businesses remained closed over safety concerns, and residents of the core were on day seven of horns and fireworks disrupting their lives. A Conservative Party spokesperson did not provide a response on Thursday to a request for comment on Ms. Bergen’s stand and whether it has changed.
PPC threat: Global’s David Akin has an interesting Twitter thread pointing out that Bergen, who has spoken up for the protest, comes from a riding where the PPC vote surged in the 2021 election, likely based on objections to health restrictions that brought the convoy of horn honkers to Ottawa.
Fairly popular: The protest, which continues to make life miserable for people in downtown Ottawa, is surprisingly popular with Canadians, according to an Abacus poll in the Post.
A new poll released Thursday found that while two out of three respondents feel they “have very little in common with how the protesters in Ottawa see things,” 32 per cent feel they “have a lot in common.” The poll, conducted by Abacus Data, found that the public’s reaction and sympathy for the convoy in Ottawa and similar protests across the country were divisive and responses mostly correlated to one’s political orientation. People’s Party (82 per cent) and Green Party (57 per cent) voters are more likely to feel aligned with the protesters while the large majority of Liberal (75 per cent), NDP (77 per cent), and Bloc Québécois (81 per cent) voters feel they have very little in common. Conservative party voters were divided, with 46 per cent saying they have a lot in common with how the protesters view things and 54 per cent saying they have little in common.
Not popular downtown: The protest may be popular across the country, but it is not popular where it is happening. Reuters reports on the growing anger in downtown Ottawa.
The city’s police force has stood idly by as protesters filled jugs of diesel to top up their rigs, which they keep running to provide heat in sub-zero temperatures, rather than cutting off the fuel supply. “For six days and nights, residents living in downtown Ottawa continue to experience unprecedented violence on their local streets,” said city councillor Catherine McKenney in a letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Thursday.
Mounties called in: After McKenney sent her letter,Mayor Jim Watson got on the phone to Public Safety Minister Marco Mendocino, who announced that the federal government will provide Mounties, CP reports. Don’t expect the army, though.
Earlier in the day, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau played down the notion of a military response to the ongoing Ottawa protest, saying that sending in troops is “not in the cards right now.” One must be “very, very cautious” about deploying troops on Canadian soil in such cases, Trudeau said at a news conference Thursday. “It is not something that anyone should enter in lightly.”
Potential for violence: A counter-protest is being organized for Saturday, which University of Ottawa professor Regina Bateson warned could lead to violence in a worrying Twitter thread.
Poor policing: In the Globe, Gary Masonwonders why the Ottawa police have failed to do a better job managing the situation.
Canadians across the country have looked on at what is taking place in the capital with a mixture of anger and incredulity. Why has nothing been done? Sure, no one wants to see the police moving in right away with batons and pepper spray, but you’d like to see some kind of sanctions for blocking streets and sounding horns at all hours of the day. People have been beaten, tasered and arrested by police in this country for doing far less than these demonstrators. Police won’t even threaten to tow their rigs away and as of Thursday had given out just 30 tickets.
Gun charges: A Nova Scotian Afghan veteran who attended the protest has been arrested and faces four firearms charges, Global reports.
Although police did not identify the accused in a news release, a court document identified him as Jeremy MacKenzie, who was in Ottawa for the so-called truckers’ protest against COVID-19 measures. The host of an anti-authority podcast and YouTube channel, MacKenzie is a Canadian military veteran who served in Afghanistan. The RCMP alleged in a search warrant application that he had post-traumatic stress disorder.
No fund them: MPs are taking steps to haul executives from GoFundMe before a parliamentary committee to “to answer questions about the California crowdfunding company’s ability to screen out hate campaigns,” the Globereports.
On Thursday, New Democrat MP Alistair MacGregor said the House of Commons public safety committee needs to know what security measures GoFundMe has “to ensure the funds are not being used to promote extremism, white supremacy, anti-Semitism and other forms of hate which have been expressed among prominent organizers of the truck convoy currently in Ottawa.” MPs on the committee unanimously passed a motion to call company officials to testify. The convoy organizers deny ties to hate groups
Tory race: Meanwhile, Conservatives, newly leaderless, are getting ready for a leadership race, the Globe reports. It might take until fall, they said.
Mark Strahl, the MP for the British Columbia riding of Chilliwack-Hope, said he hoped the new leader would be in place by mid-September for the fall session of Parliament. “Due to the minority parliament, we need to get a new leader in front of Canadians, working on their vision, working with our caucus,” he said.
Phones ringing: The Post has a roundup of people whose phones are ringing, including Jean Charest and Patrick Brown. Brad Wall is not going to run. Social Conservatives hope Leslyn Lewis will run. All eyes are apparently on Pierre Poilievre.
Poilievre put a team in place in the last leadership race before deciding not to go for family reasons, but a source pointed out that “people are just as enthusiastic, if not even more, to support him this time around” if he decides to run for leader. “I think the only thing that’s up for debate right now is whether this is going to be a Pierre Poilievre coronation or if it’s actually going to be a real leadership race,” said the source.
Sad news: Kevin O’Learycalled upLaura Stone, who is on mat leave, to say “there’s no f*cking way” he’s running this time.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is nothing if not strategic. That he deployed as many as 100,000 troops to the Ukrainian border before the Winter Olympics in Beijing, then released a joint statement of mutual support with Chinese President Xi Jinping one day before the opening ceremonies, is surely no coincidence. In their letter, they stated the two countries’ alliance had “no limits.” And why would it? Putin seemingly delights in ignoring democratic countries’ wishes in Eastern Europe. If there were a gold medal for eye-rolling, Xi’s government would win it for all the times a Western nation or organization has labelled their treatment of Uyghurs a genocide. And none of the diplomatic boycotts of these Games announced by countries like Canada has led to meaningful movement on the part of China from its campaign of deflection and denial. Authoritarian states, led by strongmen who are changing their nation’s laws to stay in power, have every reason to stick together—and stick it to the West. So it’s no surprise to see Putin at the Games’ opening ceremony, unmasked and alone, flaunting pandemic protocols. At a glance, it appears no one else in attendance went maskless. Maybe no one else knew they could get away with it, either.
Well, it looks like the Conservative caucus has decided to do the stupid thing.
Shortly after the election, I wrote here at Maclean’s that dumping leader Erin O’Toole would be short-sighted—regardless of how angry anyone was over the disappointing results or their leader’s performance. Very few nail it on their first time out, and there were plenty of indicators suggesting O’Toole’s moderate conservatism did, in fact, make inroads on the crucial 905 region.
Alas, after the trucker convoy pulled into Ottawa, drawing support from Conservative MPs and a meeting with O’Toole himself, a substantive majority of the Conservative caucus decided that my argument wasn’t compelling enough to warrant giving O’Toole another shot at becoming Prime Minister. And so they decided to oust him at the moment of maximum chaos, when a manifestation of inchoate anger at long-running—and sometimes illogical—COVID restrictions has descended on the capital, along with a handful of Confederate-flag and swastika waving extremists. Great timing, everyone.
I’m sure that this is all going to be very reassuring to the Canadian swing voters who are sick of the Liberals but were too concerned with the wingnuts in the Conservative caucus to pull the switch. I wrote during the election that there was something about the Conservatives that didn’t feel ready for prime time; and real concerns that O’Toole didn’t have a handle on his caucus. Those who stuck with the Liberals on these grounds have been justified.
Very well, then. The Conservative Party is now confronted with a full-blown crisis of identity, and none of the incentives bend toward moderation. Now that they’ve booted the last leader for flip-flopping and failing to be Conservative enough, any future leader will be required to placate the most extreme elements in the caucus room. It’s possible that this will not lead to a bad outcome.
It’s possible that I have misdiagnosed the electorate, and that the more conservative Conservatives are correct; that swing voters are not looking for a skim-milk Conservative Party, and that they are instead eagerly seeking a robust right-wing alternative. After all, why throw your lot for the unknowns when all they’re offering you is a slightly modified version of the Liberal Devil They Already Know?
I find at least one aspect of this argument compelling.
Conservative voices have already pointed out that the party’s failure to articulate sensible opposition to the more nonsensical COVID restrictions has pushed otherwise sensible people to the fringes of politics. We are seeing this in the rise of the People’s Party of Canada, and in the trucker convoy itself.
It would have been awfully nice to have a true opposition party in Parliament in recent months; one that was willing to point out that our dependence on lockdowns is predicated on the fragility of our health-care system compared to peer nations. Our drive to make our universal health-care system more efficient in recent decades left it ill-equipped to manage the historic demands of a once-in a generation pandemic. Our lack of surge capacity is a systemic problem we’re going to need to confront. That process is going to challenge old pieties about the status quo about how health care is funded and delivered.
Many would have welcomed an opposition that felt much more empowered to point out that the vaccine mandate on truckers actually won’t do much to staunch the spread of Omicron while needlessly placing fragile supply chains at risk. Or maybe the CPC could have been more vocal in pointing out that requiring PCR testing for vaccinated travellers presents a ridiculously expensive and onerous restriction on free movement—and unnecessary one when rapid antigen tests are widely available.
And two years into this pandemic, what is the real value of vaccine passports when Omicron is clearly blowing through vaccine-acquired immunity? By the way, those cloth masks aren’t doing much good for you anymore, either.
At this point, it’s pretty hard to ignore some uncomfortable truths; some COVID restrictions still make sense. Others do not. And some are guided more by politics, optics and tribalism than by science. An opposition party really shouldn’t be afraid to make that point.
Perhaps if the sizeable and growing minority of anti-lockdown protestors felt that they had a voice in Parliament, they wouldn’t be descending on major cities and border crossings en masse. The wobbly-eyed chickens are coming home to roost, and they’re driving very large trucks that the Ottawa police department has admitted it is helpless to manage.
Anyway, it’s quite possible that after several years of increasingly nonsensical COVID restrictions, and however many years of a Liberal government, a plurality of Canadians really won’t be looking for Liberals painted blue. It’s possible that the charm of performative politics that papers over our crumbling institutions, declining capacity, and a self-flagellating political culture will have very much worn off. It’s possible people are going to be looking for something very different.
Perhaps there will be room for a Conservative Party to articulate rational and sensible opposition on the host of problems that face this country—from economic woes and institutional capacity challenges to fear-and-panic driven COVID restrictions.
But can we trust a party of sh–posters to stay rational and sensible in the face of an exhausted, angry and increasingly polarized electorate? Nothing about how this party has behaved in recent days gives me hope that this caucus is as clever or politically savvy as it imagines itself to be.
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Exit O’Toole, stage right: In Maclean’s, Paul Wellsobserves that Erin O’Toole, whose party turfed him on Wednesday, was perhaps too blatant. “Running against carbon taxes, then proposing carbon taxes while pretending you aren’t, is not a confidence-building path.”
What will come next? Likely some kind of accommodation with the growing Trumpist wing of the party.
In 2015 a high-ranking Harper Conservative told me, unsurprisingly, that Canadian Conservatives had productive and elaborate relationships with conservative parties in the U.K., Australia and New Zealand. They’d exchange low-level and sometimes more senior staff. They’d copy one another’s ads. They’d exchange information technology. But Canadian Conservatives, this person told me, had less and less to do with U.S. Republicans, because that party was turning “strange” and had little, in doctrine or technique, that could be useful in the Canadian context.
That firewall has collapsed. The people who donate to the Conservative Party of Canada and volunteer for it watch Fox News and read Facebook. Donald Trump’s endorsement of a so-called “truckers’ convoy” inspired by the Capital Hill riot of Jan. 6, 2020 was a genuinely exciting moment for a lot of people in today’s Conservative movement. Including, I’m entirely sure, some part of the party’s national caucus.
Powder keg party: In the Globe, veteran columnist Lawrence Martinsuggests the Tories may end up being led by Pierre Poilievre.
The hard right’s stock and trade is visceral anger. If the O’Toole ouster cements its control, as opposed to the centre right, it will have the effect of further polarizing the country, debasing the dialogue, pitting region against region. On the leadership question, Pierre Poilievre is one to watch. He is a gifted politician, exceedingly articulate, more capable than anyone in Ottawa of marshalling arguments with precision and power. He is also underhanded and unscrupulous, a polarizer who will go as low as a crocodile if it suits his needs.
Hideously flawed: Chris Selley has a funny column in the Post predicting the leadership race to come will be a mess.
It was the party’s “true blue” faction that led the successful calls for O’Toole’s ouster, but that faction doesn’t get to install the next leader. The winner of the next race will once again be the person who can best keep both Tory-minded and Reform-minded voters halfway interested as their first choices are eliminated. (Twelve per cent of first-ballot voters in the 2020 contest declined to cast a third ballot.) So the incentive to mislead those voters remains — indeed, it’s probably stronger, because the chances of the Liberals defeating themselves between now and the next election are greater than last time around.
Race is on: CP has a rundown of potential replacements for O’Toole and a good roundup of the day’s CPC leadership events.
After ejecting O’Toole at a caucus meeting Wednesday morning, O’Toole released a gracious concession video. MPs reconvened Wednesday evening to elect an interim leader, Candace Bergen, CTV reports. Bergen, who was deputy leader under O’Toole, represents Portage—Lisgar, in Manitoba. She is the third female leader of the party, following in the footsteps of Kim Campbell and Rona Ambrose. She reportedly bested New Brunswick MP John Williamson for the job as interim leader. She recently defended anti-mandate protesters and has previously been criticized for wearing a MAGA hat.
A video of her defending the protesters and attacking Trudeau recently went viral internationally.
Cheese: After the caucus meeting, several Saskatchewan MPs popped down to take a photo with the protesters who are besieging the city, which Ottawa Mayor Jim Watsonfound disappointing.
Army time? Earlier, Ottawa Police Chief Peter Sloly told city councillors the security situation is dire enough that it may be necessary to call in the military, the Globereports.
Peter Sloly said the Ottawa police force is considering options ranging from a negotiated resolution to enforcement. But he warned that any option carries risks. Chief Sloly said there are only two occasions that he is aware of in the past 100 years – the Oka and FLQ crises – when the military was mixed in with police. “It is not a decision to be taken lightly,” he said. “I’ll say it again as I said before, every option is being looked at. None of the options create a beautiful, elegant, simple safe solution. They all come with massive risks.” Chief Sloly also said his service is aware of a significant element from the United States that has been involved in the funding, organization and demonstrating taking place on Parliament Hill and surrounding streets. He also said more protesters are planning to come to the city by the weekend.
Coutts deal? Meanwhile in Alberta, protesters in an illegal border blockade cleared two lanes, allowing traffic to move, apparently after negotiations, the Calgary Heraldreports.
The blockade, now in its fifth day, is a protest against COVID-19 health measures. The last several trucks blocking Highway 4 had moved as of 2:30 p.m. and traffic was able to proceed through the open lanes, though a long line of vehicles remained pointed toward the port of entry. Chad Williamson, a Calgary lawyer retained by protesters, said the demonstrators spoke with Mounties and agreed to open two blocked lanes. A livestream video posted to Facebook by one of the protesters shows participants voting on opening the lanes. In the video, a speaker says they are opening the lanes with the understanding the province has agreed to end (some restrictions). He says if this does not happen, protesters will resume the blockade. In a statement, United Conservative Party caucus chair Nathan Neudorf said no such agreement has been authorized.
Headed to Quebec: In Quebec City, police have begun to block streets in preparation for a protest there, CBC reports.
And Toronto: Police in Toronto are preparing for a protest there, CTV reports.
Nofundme: The online fundraising page for the protesters has been shut down, CBC reports, but GoFundMe is not saying what will happen to the $10 million raised so far, much of what appears to come from outside Canada.
I’m sorry to see Erin O’Toole’s leadership end. He really is a nice guy. Unfortunately they often finish, if not last, at least out of the running.
Let’s talk numbers, then personalities, then sociology. I’ll start by updating some stats I keep handy.
Of the last nine federal elections going back to 1997, the Leader of the Official Opposition has won only one: Stephen Harper in 2006.
Eight leaders of the Official Opposition party have lost elections since 1997. Of those eight, only one — Harper, in 2004 — kept his job as party leader long enough to contest another election. Andrew Scheer, Tom Mulcair, Michael Ignatieff, Stéphane Dion, Stockwell Day and Preston Manning found themselves looking for other work by the time the next election rolled around. Now so will O’Toole.
(Justin Trudeau complicates this chart with his 2015 victory, when he managed to come from third place to beat both the incumbent, Harper, and the opposition leader, Mulcair. That was an extraordinary moment, but for our purposes, it still means the leader of the main opposition party lost the election and then his job.)
The rule is clear: Being the leader of the Official Opposition, far from being a sweet gig that offers a short ride to power, is grinding work that chews men up. The next Conservative leader has, if precedent were prologue, about an 11 per cent chance of winning the election and an 89 per cent chance of not getting another shot. Best wishes to all the candidates.
That next leader will have maybe 18 months to prepare for an election against the Liberals, who have already beaten the Conservatives under three successive leaders. Just about the only good news for that next leader will be the Liberal they face. Justin Trudeau has worked diligently to wear out his welcome, so that in 2019 he won a million fewer votes than in 2015, and half a million fewer still in 2021. The Liberals lost the popular vote to the Conservatives in 2019 and 2021, so Trudeau has the lowest and second-lowest share of the popular vote for any winning federal party in Canadian history. Trends aren’t physics. Trudeau might reverse this trend. But that’s the trend. If he leaves before the election, a new Liberal PM will be fresh-faced and will have had some chance to govern differently. But when governing parties change leaders shortly before an election, voters often take the change as a chance to look around for alternatives. So replacing Trudeau would be no guarantee for the Liberals.
Anyway, there’s a limit to what statistics can teach. Why did O’Toole’s party give up on him? Lots of reasons, but mostly they decided they couldn’t find any beliefs in him. It’s a cliché that candidates for the leadership of conservative parties tack hard right, before returning to the centre for the election that follows. One guy who worked for Mitt Romney called it the “Etch-a-Sketch” strategy. O’Toole showed it’s possible to be too blatant. Running against carbon taxes, then proposing carbon taxes while pretending you aren’t, is not a confidence-building path. Running as Derek Sloan’s protector and then turfing him raised similar questions.
My own biggest concern with O’Toole during the election was his offer of blanket immunity from any federal policy for “Quebec,” defined as whatever the governing party in Quebec felt like doing. This won him an endorsement from Quebec’s premier, François Legault. The endorsement was useless or perhaps worse, since it did nothing for O’Toole in Quebec and it may have reinforced a sense in the rest of the country that O’Toole did things, not from conviction but from a pretty superficial guess at what might bring electoral advantage.
Why did it not help O’Toole in Quebec? Because Quebecers are adults and this is not their first rodeo. They expect federal governments to have opinions, policies and programs. They expect politicians in Quebec City to howl. What they don’t expect is for federal politicians to simply fold their tents. It starts to look like the federal politicians have no convictions. This is not a call for future leaders, of the Conservative Party or any other, to run “against Quebec,” a nearly meaningless phrase. It’s simply to say that two Conservative leaders, Scheer and O’Toole, have taken the same terrible advice from the same terrible advisors with the same terrible results. In O’Toole especially, it cemented the sense that everything for him was transactional. What do I have to give you for your support? Instead of, Here are some things I insist on. Decide for yourself whether you support that.
It was hard to watch the last few days, when O’Toole’s response to the caucus revolt was to try bargaining some more. There’s something pitiable in a guy who angrily declares that the alternative to what he’s been doing is “angry, negative and extreme” and “a dead end,” and then phones around offering some more angry, negative and extreme dead-endism.
What’s next? Sociology. In 2015 a high-ranking Harper Conservative told me, unsurprisingly, that Canadian Conservatives had productive and elaborate relationships with conservative parties in the U.K., Australia and New Zealand. They’d exchange low-level and sometimes more senior staff. They’d copy one another’s ads. They’d exchange information technology. But Canadian Conservatives, this person told me, had less and less to do with U.S. Republicans, because that party was turning “strange” and had little, in doctrine or technique, that could be useful in the Canadian context.
That firewall has collapsed. The people who donate to the Conservative Party of Canada and volunteer for it watch Fox News and read Facebook. Donald Trump’s endorsement of a so-called “truckers’ convoy” inspired by the Capital Hill riot of Jan. 6, 2020 was a genuinely exciting moment for a lot of people in today’s Conservative movement. Including, I’m entirely sure, some part of the party’s national caucus.
I’m not sure how the party deals with that, but I’ve got a hunch it’s not a great year for Michael Chong to run for the leadership. I suspect the party will now spend a few years indulging its inner Ted Cruz, which means a mix of conviction, mercenary play-acting, and skittish tactical feints to protect the party’s right flank against even further-right opponents, led by the (luckily terrible-at-politics) Max Bernier.
To some extent this is understandable. The Trudeau party ran against O’Toole as a hard right-winger, so Conservatives could well have decided there’s no point even fielding a moderate. The next Conservative leader? For today I’ll guess at no names, but I suspect they won’t own an Etch-a-Sketch.
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Erin O’Toole is in a desperate struggle to rally enough votes to survive a vote in caucus today, the Globereports. He and his team are working the phones to stave off an open revolt, which they blame on former leader Andrew Scheer and/or Alberta MP Garnet Genuis. Both sides say they have enough votes to win.
The anti-O’Toole faction says it has 63 of the 119 MPs on its side. Mr. O’Toole’s camp, though, believes it can win a simple majority vote. But some Conservative sources acknowledged that it’s possible MPs are pledging support to both the Leader’s office and the dissidents. Another source said MPs who are sitting on the fence are concerned about who will actually run in a prospective leadership race.
Neither side is backing down. Calgary MP Bob Benzen, who posted a letter Monday calling for a vote on O’Toole’s leadership, complained that O’Toole’s defiant statement Monday night showed that he was “doubling down – launching attacks and threatening ‘consequences’ against any MP who dares dissent.”
The Globe says the likely candidates to serve as interim leader are Candace Bergen, Ed Fast or Gérard Deltell.
Willing to change: Global reports that O’Toole told caucus members that he is open “changing some policies he campaigned on just six months ago — if he survives Wednesday’s vote.”
Mail: 21 former MPs sent an open letter to current MPs asking them to ax the leader.
Kenney onside: Alberta MPs are divided, CBC reports, but Jason Kenney has O’Toole’s back.
Ford won’t run: Doug Ford, who is said to want to be prime minister, told reporters he is not interested in O’Toole’s job, the Sun reports.
CPC yahoos: Andrew Coynedissects the Conservatives’ problems in the Globe, concluding that O’Toole, whatever his shortcomings, is not the problem. The problem is MPs who have made common cause with the grifters and conspiracy theorist on the Hill — “associating the party with known racists, tossing around incendiary rhetoric about other party leaders, indulging in discredited conspiracy theories.” Get rid of them, not O’Toole, he suggests.
Bring on Poilievre:Writing in the Post, former Stephen Harper speechwriter Michael Taube is pulling for Pierre Poilievre to get the job.
I’ve known him since he was an intern in Jason Kenney’s office, and have watched him turn into a political tour de force in this country. He’s intelligent, talented, experienced and media savvy. He has youth on his side, and a young family. He knows how to sell the party and his political brand as well as anyone I’ve seen in recent years.
Increasingly miserable: Speaking of the convoy, which Poilievre supports, a chunk of downtown Ottawa remains gridlocked, with increasingly miserable residents complaining about the noise and acts of hooliganism.
Mall shut: CTV reports that the Rideau Centre mall will be shut down for a week. Police, who apparently can’t manage to guarantee safety for the biggest mall in the city, did charge two men, the Citizenreports.
Getting tough: Paramedics tell the Citizen they can’t keep it up: “This is definitely an incident the city can’t sustain. Layer COVID on top of it and it’s absolutely not sustainable. When something like this happens, the house of cards starts to crumble.”
Had enough: CBC has a nice story about irritated local three women who faced down the truckers.
Neighbourly: CTV has a nice story about how people are helping neighbours get through the misery.
Enemies of theatre: The Globereports that the convoy has killed the performance of a one-man play by legendary actor Walter Borden.
Hard to end: Experts tell CBC there is no easy way to bring the city back to normal. York professor Jack Rozdilsky says the police effort to force an end to the demonstration could be rough: “At least initially, having the protesters make the decision to leave on their own accord would be much better for everyone. Using more police force, using heavy equipment, using various crowd control tactics, would move … in the direction of paramilitary action. The types of actions we don’t traditionally see on the streets in Canada.”
Still blocked: Meanwhile in Alberta, the Mounties have begun to move on the truckers blocking the border at Coutts, CTV reports, although they do not seem to have cleared the highway.
But CTV News’ Bill Fortier reported that as some vehicles left from the initial blockade, passenger vehicles and what appeared to be farm vehicles started to arrive and create a secondary blockade. Reporters and cameras observing the situation were moved further back from the area.
-30- CP scribe Joan Bryden, who is hanging up her spurs after 40 years of scoops, was honoured with LEGO.
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There is a Conservative caucus revolt underway, and Paul Wellshas been talking to one of the MPs who wants Erin O’Toole out. That unnamed MP believes anyone would be better.
Replace O’Toole? With whom? “I don’t think it matters. To me it doesn’t. Anything would be better than this. I’m to the point of preferring a name drawn out of a hat.”
Why? The “straw that broke the camel’s back,” this MP said, was “the ham-fisted response to this trucker convoy.” The Conservative leader spent last week and the weekend looking for an attitude in response to the arrival of thousands of protesters in the nation’s capital: from studied incomprehensibility to assorted shades of support and concern.
Wells gives us a quick history lesson, reviewing the “east/west, insider/outsider shimmy” of Conservative politics in recent decades, although an infusion of Trumpism makes it hard to figure out what will happen this time.
35 names: The Globebroke the story Monday night. Thirty-five MPs have signed a letter seeking a caucus leadership review vote, which could happen as early as Wednesday’s caucus meeting. Sources tell the Globe that “at least 63 MPs of the elected 119 Conservative members” are ready to vote against O’Toole. An O’Toole supporter in caucus tells the Globe, though, that most MPs support him. There have apparently been a lot of phone calls.
Conservative Party Whip James Bezan made calls Sunday and Monday to dissident MPs, warning of repercussions if they tried to oust Mr. O’Toole, according to the sources.
In the open: Calgary MP Bob Benzen, who supported O’Toole in the 2017 and 2020 leadership races, tweeted a letter calling for a review, pointing to disagreements over a carbon tax, firearms laws, English language rights in Quebec and pandemic restrictions: “I believe a caucus leadership review is the only way to prevent a dangerous split in the Conservative Party that may not be repairable.”
Revolt: O’Toole’s camp responded by telling CBC’s Travis Dhanraj that Saskatchewan MP Garnett Genuis was organizing the caucus revolt over a conversion therapy vote, and that Andrew Scheer wants to be interim leader. Genuis took to Twitter to deny that and insist that O’Toole has to go.
Still walking: Tasha Kheiriddin, with a quick column in the Post, pronounces O’Toole a “dead man walking,” and she points to the role of the convoy.
After this weekend’s protests in Ottawa, one can’t say it’s a surprise. Conservative MPs Pierre Poilievre and Leslyn Lewis were working the crowd all weekend, giving coffee and sympathy to protesters and yammering about “freedom” until their vocal cords gave out. They were basically kickstarting their respective leadership campaigns, sticking the knives in O’Toole so fast it’s a wonder he hasn’t bled out on the floor.
On Sunday, the two even got an endorsement. Organizers of the protest said O’Toole should quit and be replaced by Poilievre or Lewis. “If they were smart, they would pull Erin now. Right now. Get him out of there,” said spokesman Benjamin Dichter. “We all think that Pierre resonates with the vast majority of Canadians in his opposition to Justin Trudeau.”
Convoy talks: Meanwhile, in Ottawa, Police ChiefPeter Sloly said Monday that his force is talking to the anti-mandate protesters who have shut down much of downtown Ottawa, CTV reports: “All options are on the table, from negotiation through to enforcement.”
Afraid of violence: Earlier, Mayor Jim Watson said the threat of violence had been too great to force protesters to leave, CBC reports: “I asked … why you can’t start ticketing [on Queen Elizabeth Driveway], it’s far enough away. And they said they’d get on their CB [radio] and there would be another 20 truckers there smashing down the barricade.”
Fed up: Many downtown restaurants have closed their doors, the Citizenreports. “It’s chaos down there, wall-to-wall trucks, and the noise is unbearable,” Anthony Bailey, owner-operator of Toro Taqueria on Bank Street.
Please go: In a column in the Star, Robert Hiltz expressed his frustration with the situation: “How can you sympathize with the cause of people who will throw rocks at paramedics; who will impose their vision of maskless freedom on a mall full of people who just want to do their jobs?”
Social panic? In the Post, Jonathan Kaywrites that people are overreacting: “The last few days have provided an instructive spectacle — a microcosm for the larger, profoundly off-putting phenomenon by which progressives lazily default to labelling anything they dislike or disagree with as a manifestation of bigotry.”
Stereotypes: The Post also has a sympathetic column from Rupa Subramanya, who found the protest more diverse than media coverage would have suggested:
One myth that was busted right away was the striking diversity of the protestors starting with the two main organizers, Benjamin Dichter, who is Jewish and Tamara Lich, who is Metis. Far from being a uniformly disgruntled group of white Canadians, not that there is anything wrong with being that, one saw Indo-Canadians, Arab Canadians, Chinese Canadians, Black Canadians and just about every other ethnic Canadian under the sun.
Won’t back down: Parliament resumed on Monday, and Justin Trudeau, who is isolating with COVID, had a news conference to say that he would not yield to the protests, CTV reports: “I want to be very clear, we are not intimidated by those who hurl insults and abuse at small business workers, and steal food from the homeless. We won’t give in to those who fly racist flags. We won’t cave to those who engage in vandalism or dishonor the memory of our veterans.”
Ford speaks: Doug Ford also spoke against the excesses of the protest, the Starreports: “I was extremely disturbed, however, to see some individuals desecrate our most sacred monuments and wave swastikas and other symbols of hate and intolerance this weekend. That has no place in Ontario or Canada. Not now. Not ever.”
Opinion shifts: Politicians are speaking against the protest, but there are indications that Canadians may agree that it is time to ease restrictions. The Toronto Sun has an Angus Reid poll showing “54% want restrictions to be lifted compared to just 39% who wanted restrictions lifted when the same question was asked two weeks earlier.” And an Innovative Research poll finds 46 per cent opposed to the protest while 31 per cent support it, which would be significant, given the largely negative media coverage.
Northern tea? In the Globe, smart professors Amarnath Amarasingam and Stephanie Carvinwonder whether the convoy movement will morph into a Tea Party-style populist movement.
If many different actors claim success and seek to push the movement in competing directions, it will ultimately be unable to frame itself around a coherent narrative. Additionally, it may be abandoned by those who simply took the opportunity to express anger and frustrations as we enter year three of the pandemic.
Clear the road: Meanwhile, in Alberta, RCMP have decided that a border blockade is “no longer lawful and resources are in place to make arrests and tow away vehicles if they are unable to resolve the conflict,” CP reports.
Au bout de nos jours: Legendary Quebec singer-songwriter Gilles Vigneault, 93, announced Monday he is also removing his music from Spotify, joining Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, who recently denounced the firm for spreading misinformation, CP reports: “I find Neil Young and Joni Mitchell right to set this example and it is as honourable as it is relevant to follow them in their rejection of the dangerous falsehoods professed by theorists of rampant populism.”
A strong rule of journalistic etiquette holds that reporters mustn’t grant anonymity to sources for the purpose of badmouthing political opponents. Follow along with me now as I trample that principle underfoot. I will be ably assisted by a member of the Conservative caucus, here unnamed, with whom I chatted on Monday night.
This MP strongly supports Erin O’Toole’s removal as leader of the Conservative Party of Canada. As you’ll have heard, they have company. The party’s leadership will certainly be the top issue at Wednesday’s caucus meeting, if O’Toole can even hang on that long.
Replace O’Toole? With whom? “I don’t think it matters. To me it doesn’t. Anything would be better than this. I’m to the point of preferring a name drawn out of a hat.”
Why? The “straw that broke the camel’s back,” this MP said, was “the ham-fisted response to this trucker convoy.” The Conservative leader spent last week and the weekend looking for an attitude in response to the arrival of thousands of protesters in the nation’s capital: from studied incomprehensibility to assorted shades of support and concern.
“No matter what position you have” on the truckers, “he had it too,” the MP said. “Nobody believes the guy any more.”
It’s in the nature of straws that they only break the backs of already-strained dromedaries. The trucker protest follows last week’s partial release of an internal report about the 2021 election defeat that “could have been written by Fred DeLorey,” a longtime Nova Scotia Conservative who was the party’s national campaign manager and is a staunch O’Toole supporter. The report “contained such gems as ‘universal praise for the leader’s performance’… It was a completely sanitized view of what happened.”
What’s the head count on a leadership review? “We got 30 per cent”— the fraction of the Conservatives’ national caucus required by Conservative MP Michael Chong’s Reform Act, which is now law and has been ignored by other parties but has been invoked, under its own terms, by the Conservatives. The Reform Act sets out rules for the hitherto informal process of turning on a leader and devouring him, and it means O’Toole’s caucus rebels need another 24 votes to reach a majority. “If we’re not there, we’re close,” my source said.
Surely close only counts in horseshoes? Most leaders would realize their tenure was unmanageable if they were contested by anywhere close to half the caucus, this MP thinks. O’Toole may well try to tough it out and punish the rebels, “as we saw with his ham-fisted attempt to politically assassinate Shannon Stubbs,” an MP and reputed internal critic of O’Toole’s who has faced allegations of inappropriate workplace behaviour from former staffers.
I’ll leave my unnamed source behind soon, but perhaps only after canvassing a few more issues with him or her. First, this MP believes only Chong’s Reform Act makes this sudden, quick crisis possible. And that the party leadership unwittingly prodded the rebels into quick action, starting with Chong. Last week columnist John Ivison quoted the urbane Toronto-area MP attempting to perch O’Toole’s opponents on the horns of a dilemma: they could wait for a review vote in the party’s convention in 2023, or they could invoke the Reform Act now. “We are a rule of law party and we have two processes laid out—the caucus process and the one through the party constitution at a national convention,” Chong said. “To short-circuit that, to have an expedited third ad hoc option does not follow these processes.” This received close attention in the caucus. Perhaps Chong thought he was ensuring the party would wait until next year. No such luck.
Then on Monday Rob Batherson, the Conservative Party president and, like O’Toole, a veteran of Nova Scotia Tory politics, appeared to dismiss a small number of recent votes in riding associations calling for a prompt leadership review. “I’m not overly concerned,” Batherson told the Hill Times. “To date, it’s a pretty small percentage.”
Now it’s a larger percentage.
I’ll hazard no guess about what comes next. I didn’t know this was coming. I’ll note only that historically, when Conservatives lose a few times in a row, they start to consider pretty radical tactical and philosophical shifts. Often these conflicts have had elements of geographical divides and culture clash as well as ideology.
In 1948 the Conservatives picked George Drew, an Upper Canada College toff turned Premier of Ontario, husband to an opera singer’s daughter and then to the daughter of the Globe and Mail‘s publisher, as leader over John Diefenbaker, a Saskatchewan bumpkin, all jowls and brows. Drew spent the next eight years watching from the dispiriting perch of the opposition leader as Mackenzie King and Louis St. Laurent governed. By 1956, Diefenbaker looked great to Conservatives, and he swiftly became leader, and two elections later he won the largest Parliamentary majority in Canadian history. But by 1967, Diefenbaker’s party was back to losing, and another Atlantic Red Tory group led his unwilling ouster and replacement by another very different leader, Nova Scotia premier Robert Stanfield.
If there’s a trend from this point on, it’s that after the Dief putsch, the party’s east/west, insider/outsider shimmy becomes more pronounced, threatening and even breaking Conservatives’ unity. Brian Mulroney, son of small-town Quebec and Dalhousie University, won a majority to match Dief’s in 1984, but by 1987 his coalition had begun to collapse, and in 1993 his party did. Reform and the Bloc and the rump Progressive Conservatives battled it out for another decade, and only Stephen Harper has managed to beat a Liberal leader among all the Conservative and Conservat-ish leaders since 1988. Harper wanted to leave a viable, united, competitive Conservative party as his legacy. It’s pretty clear that the jury on that is still out, at best.
The big confounding variable in the party’s internal culture since 2015 is Trumpism, seen as toxic by the party brass but cheerfully consumed in great quantity, via Fox News and Facebook, by almost everyone west of Toronto who votes for the party or donates to it. Much of the party is tempted to flirt with that current, when they aren’t afraid to confront it or simply in agreement with many of its tenets. All of this is a very long discussion for another day.
But there’s no guarantee the party will stay united. Indeed it spent nearly half of the last 35 years divided. The question facing O’Toole was always whether he was a large enough political talent to hold the party together when it took a decade of humiliation plus Stephen Harper and Peter MacKay to sew it together in the first place. The same question will await whichever name next comes from the hat.
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Not leaving: After a weekend in which they thoroughly disrupted life in downtown Ottawa, organizers of the “Freedom Convoy” plan to stay put, the Citizenreports.
“We are not leaving until all of you and all of your kids are free,” Tamara Lich, one of the organizers, told an enthusiastic crowd gathered on the lawn and streets around Parliament on Sunday. “We’re not leaving until you can open up your business. We’re not leaving until you can hug your best friend. We’re not leaving until you can go see your parents at a long-term care facility.”
Unfree in Ottawa: That is not at all what people in Ottawa want, Mayor Jim Watson said Sunday, CBC reports.
“Quite frankly, [residents] feel they’re prisoners in their own home. And so my hope is that at some point, the police reach the conclusion that it’s time to have a serious discussion about moving these people on. They can’t keep blocking routes that are emergency routes, that are bus routes, that allow people to get in and out of the downtown core,” he told CBC chief political correspondent Rosemary Barton on Rosemary Barton Live on Sunday.
Investigations: Ottawa police have a lot of work to do. They are trying to manage the massive, traffic-disrupting protest and also investigating “the desecration” of the National War Memorial, the Terry Fox statue and threatening, illegal and intimidating behaviour towards police and other city workers, Global reports.
Desecrations: The desecration of the war memorial and the Terry Fox statue were widely denounced, as was the appearance of swastikas and other objectionable symbols among the protesters. The protests got more terrible PR when Ottawa’s Shepherds of Good Hope soup kitchen said its staff were harassed and a client was assaulted by “Freedom Convoy” protesters. (Donate here.)
Lost the room: In the Citizen, Kelly Egan writes that the protesters lost the room.
Instead of talking about vaccine mandates and harmful lockdowns, all anyone could talk about Saturday evening was the video clip of a young woman dancing on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the National War Memorial and using a statue of Terry Fox as a kind of political prop. It wasn’t long before everyone from the mayors of Ottawa and Port Coquitlam, B.C., to the defence minister and Canada’s top soldier were denouncing the violation of sacredness. So, straight away, you’ve lost the audience, regardless of whether the offenders were just freelance agitators or just a little stupid. It’s your convoy, you wear it.
Popular elsewhere: While the protesters may have lost the room, they have raised $9 million, won the support of Donald Trump and Elon Musk and captured headlines around the world.
Writing for the Daily Beast, Justin Lingcaptures the mood of the moment:
The blockade is perhaps the most drastic, organized, COVID-19-inspired demonstration the world has yet seen. Its organizers are a Voltron of various political factions: There’s the right-wing nationalist who is vowing to blockade MPs’ homes; the QAnon follower who wants Trudeau tried for treason; the political activist running a $7 million fundraiser, trying desperately to stop GoFundMe from seizing the dough; and a plethora of other characters who have assembled to shut down the capital.
Their mix of pseudo-science, grassroots organizing, and a dash of legal mysticism have combined to create a really potent rally cry. And while the parka-clad protesters, shivering in sub-zero temperatures, may look perfectly Canadian—it may be a sign of things to come elsewhere.
Very real distress: In Le Journal De Montréal, Emmanuelle LaTraverse has a thoughtful column (translation) in which she notes the incoherence of the protest—full of “nonsense and conspiracies,” but points to the challenge of the moment—”very real distress. That of thousands of people who can’t take it anymore.”
For 22 months, the political class led the battle to set an example. Obligatory passage to ensure essential social cohesion in the face of an unprecedented crisis. The vaccination obligation has become a weapon of choice in this political and health war. But at the end of this fifth wave, the population expects more nuance from its leaders.
Bad for O’Toole: While Justin Trudeausaid nothing, having left his official residence for security reasons, the pressure seemed to mount on Erin O’Toole, whose MPs stayed away from cameras on Sunday after taking heat for being too close to the heart of the action on Saturday.
In the Star, Supriya Dwivedi laments that the Conservatives keep “pandering to the extremist elements of their base,” and Robin Searssuggests O’Toole may soon be replaced by Pierre Poilievre, although he predicts that under his leadership the party “would probably do worse that any leader since Kim Campbell. Liberals and New Democrats will be drooling at the prospect of a contest with him.”
Trapped: In Maclean’s, Philippe J. Fournier takes a close look at O’Toole’s dismal personal approval numbers and concludes that he’s in deep trouble with his own party, which may be be why he met with truckers.
The available data could hardly be clearer: There is simply little to no room to grow for O’Toole among non-CPC voters, which may partly explain why O’Toole has looked and sounded like he’s running for the CPC leadership again of late, and not like the leader of a government in waiting. Obviously, we cannot ignore the elephant in the room: All these numbers predate this weekend’s hectic events in Ottawa, so it will be fascinating to see whether they move the needle at all for O’Toole and the CPC in the coming days.
Fournier wonders is something else is going on.
Perhaps it is a toxic minority trying to take over the CPC that is sinking O’Toole in public opinion and hindering any efforts to grow the party, not the other way around. Perhaps the true division decried by politicians right now lies not with the average Canadian voter, but within the Canadian conservative movement itself.
Leadership politics: Making a similar point on CTV, Gerald Butts noted that the data collected by the convoy organizers could be valuable in a CPC leadership struggle.
Border closed: Jason Kenney has called for the end of a demonstration blocking a southern Alberta border crossing, the Calgary Heraldreports, although he failed to mention that the protest was attended by one of his own MLAs.
Troops moved west: Anita Anand said Sunday all Canadian troops in Ukraine have been moved west of the country’s Dnieper River as worries about a Russian invasion grow, the Globereports from Kyiv.
Not coherent: In Maclean’s, Paul Wells takes a close look at the government’s action and rhetoric on Ukraine and finds they don’t match.
I don’t think it’s nitpicking to say that the government’s actions and rhetoric are starkly out of proportion. Freeland is describing an existential threat to democracy; Trudeau is packing for a weekend road trip. If this test is in any way comparable to the one “our own parents and grandparents… fought and died” for, then don’t send a smaller deployment then you sent last year to the old-folks’ homes of Quebec and Ontario, and don’t promise to airlift the drill sergeants home at the first sign of trouble. And if it’s not that kind of test, then stow the Patton speeches and the back-patting.
Joni unstreamed: As anti-mandate Canadians in trucks made headlines on Friday, one of Canada’s greatest musical legends—Joni Mitchell—made headlines of another sort, when she announced that she would follow Neil Young in yanking her music from Spotify to protest people “spreading lies that are costing people their lives.” The move will cost her and Young—both childhood polio survivors—a lot of money, Billboard reports. Spotify, which has lost a lot of money because of this, announced Sunday it would put “advisory notices” on some content, the Timesreports.
