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If there existed a political “Ten Commandments” carved in stone tablets, the very first one on the list would likely be “Thou Shalt Not Alienate Thy Base.”

After all, it’s hard to win an election when even your own side doesn’t like you.

Sounds pretty basic, right? Sounds like a concept any leader worth his or her salt would understand.

So why is it then Conservative Party leader Erin O’Toole seems intent on making himself as unpopular as possible with his grassroots base?

I mean, just think about what he’s done since taking over the leadership.

For one thing, on a whole range of issues from carbon taxes to gun rights to deficits, O’Toole has blatantly abandoned conservative principles and values to take on policy stances that are essentially indistinguishable from what the Liberals offer.

How could his conservative base, which tends be ideologically-oriented, not feel snubbed by this? The sense of their betrayal is likely even more acute, since during the Conservative Party leadership race, O’Toole had branded himself as a principled conservative and as a champion of the party’s grassroots.

Talk about false advertising!

At any rate, I guess if O’Toole had won the last election, all would have been forgiven.

But, of course, he didn’t win and now discontent with his leadership is simmering within the Conservative Party’s ranks.

In response to this growing anger the wise move for O’Toole, it seems to me, should be for him to offer some sort of olive branch to the base, just to reassure grassroots party members that he’s willing to win back their support.

Instead, however, for some inexplicable reason, he has decided to try and bully his base into submission.

Just recently, for instance, O’Toole, pour encourager les autres, booted Senator Denise Batters from the Conservative caucus after she had the audacity to launch a petition calling for an earlier than scheduled leadership review.

In announcing her expulsion, O’Toole sounded a tough note saying anyone “who’s not putting the team and the country first will not be part of this team.”

Basically, his message seems to this: “It’s my way or the highway and if you don’t like it, don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”

Yet, if he thinks such heavy-handed action will stifle dissent, he’s likely in for a rude awakening.

In fact, it could make his situation even worse, since he’s turned Batters into a martyr, someone who disaffected Tories can now rally around.

On top of that, keep in mind, angry party members have effective ways of protesting against an unpopular leader.

For example, they might start redirecting their party donations to right-wing advocacy groups, or they might stop volunteering for the party or they might stay home on election day or they might end up voting for the People’s Party.

So, in a way, O’Toole’s decision to openly antagonize his base is like a military commander ordering his artillery to bombard his own supply lines.

It just doesn’t make strategic sense.

Mind you, some might say, O’Toole’s acting no differently than former Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who also jettisoned certain conservative principles and who also ruled the party with savage discipline.

Yet, O’Toole is no Harper.

True, Harper didn’t always give the party’s ideologues everything they wanted, but he always treated his base with respect.

And for that, he won the loyalty of the rank and file.

That’s a lesson O’Toole should heed.

At any rate, the one possible explanation for O’Toole’s behaviour is that there’s actually a method to his madness, that he actually wants to dig out the party’s ideological roots, that’s he hoping hard-core conservatives will abandon his party.

Indeed, it has been suggested to me that O’Toole’s overall game plan is basically to water down the party’s ideology until it’s nothing but an idealess, wishy-washy, non-confrontational, conservative-in-name-only political entity; a Conservative party, in short, that lacks conservatives.

This he hopes will make his party more appealing to the media and more attractive to Liberal voters.

If that indeed is O’Toole’s plan, then he is taking a mighty big gamble.

As American conservative activist Morton Blackwell once noted “you cannot make friends of your enemies by making enemies of your friends.”

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.


One (1) political party. When does it lose?

When it becomes two (2) political parties.

The Conservative Party of Canada is at that point. This week, a Conservative MP non-entity, Marilyn Gladu, basically declared that she was forming a new party within the Conservative Party.

She didn’t call it a “party,” admittedly, and she insisted that it wasn’t a challenge to the leadership of Erin O’Toole. But it is a challenge to O’Toole’s leadership, such as it is.

And it is indeed a group of politicians breaking with the party that got them into Parliament. Gladu calls it a “caucus,” but to voters, that’ll be a distinction without a difference.

Gladu said up to 30 Members of Parliament and Senators are part of her shiny new political organization. Their mandate?

They’re against vaccination mandates. (We suspect they’re against man-dates, too, but that’s a discussion for another day.)

Again, Gladu and her 30 fellow Troglodytes wouldn’t describe themselves as “anti-vaccination,” of course. But that’s what they are – they’re against public health policies which were promulgated to prevent another four million humans from dying a horrible death.

It is safe to assume, and those of us in the media have, that these 30 one-time Conservative MPs and Senators are unvaccinated.

They’re getting busy, too.

“We have had a few meetings, and we’re planning to keep meeting, but we haven’t officially kicked off the caucus as a caucus. We’ve just been saying that that’s sort of seeming what it is turning into,” Gladu told the Canadian Press.

Forget about the fact that vaccines have proved to be astonishingly, historically effective in preventing Covid-19. Forget about the fact that unvaccinated people are overwhelmingly the ones filling up ICU beds in hospitals – thereby straining our health care system, and crowding out people waiting for other life-saving treatments and surgeries. Forgot about all that.

This is an opinion column about politics, and the political fact is this: when one (1) political party becomes two (2) political parties, it isn’t going to win elections anymore. If you can’t run your own little bitty political party, nobody is going to think you can run a great big country, are they?

Nope.

That’s where Erin O’Toole is at, and he is decidedly the author of his own misfortune. Unlike Ontario Premier Doug Ford – who kicked out unvaccinated MPPs, and said unvaccinated mouth-breathers wouldn’t be allowed to run for his party – Erin O’Toole tried to suck and blow at the same time. He’s done it before, too, with carbon taxes and gun control and social conservative crap.

But Canadian voters noticed. During the election, O’Toole’s Conservatives equivocated on an issue that is literally existential. They tried to be on both sides of a life-and-death issue, and voters rewarded them with another loss to the worst Canadian Prime Minister in a Century.

The irony is that Conservatives have been here before, and learned precisely nothing. Preston Manning, Stockwell Day and Lucien Bouchard giddily blew up the Conservative Party a couple decades ago, and my boss, Jean Chretien, said: merci, messieurs!

It is only when Stephen Harper came along, unifying the various conservative caucuses – creating a single new Conservative Party in His own image, you might say – that they started to win again. Because Harper knew conservative-minded voters prefer one choice on Election Day. Not ten.

Will Erin O’Toole survive this latest challenge to his leadership? Probably. He and his team will issue another sly page of talking points, claiming to be interested in consensus and against bullying and icy sidewalks and whatnot. He’ll say his one (1) party is the party of principle, blah blah blah.

Except they’re not principled. They’re morons, and they’re morns who are going to lose.

Again.

[Kinsella is the CEO of the Daisy Group.]

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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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.