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Conservatives write. They write, and they say that Erin O’Toole should have won the election, he made too many mistakes, he needs to be replaced, blah blah blah.

They’re wrong. Here’s ten reasons why, gratis.

Erin O’Toole was never going to win the election. Liberal cult leader Justin Trudeau called the election because – way back in August – he was way, way ahead in the polls. Remember? He was in majority territory. He was going to romp to victory, the Opposition didn’t stand a chance, etc. etc. Well, he lost what he wanted the most: a Parliamentary majority. By holding him to that, O’Toole’s Conservatives won.

Erin O’Toole exceeded expectations. Everyone was surprised by that, this writer included. O’Toole had the advantage that my former boss Jean Chretien had: he was underestimated. When you’re underestimated, you can only go up. O’Toole went up – not dramatically, but enough to deny Trudeau a majority.

Erin O’Toole ran a not-bad campaign. Was it perfect? Nope. Was it flawless? No sir. But the Tories ran a campaign that was pretty good (with two notable exceptions, discussed below). His platform launch went well, his tour was error-free, and he had fewer candidate bimbo eruptions than anyone else.

Erin O’Toole wasn’t bad on his feet. Politics generally – and national elections specifically – are hard. They’re not easy, particularly when it’s your first time before the klieg lights. But O’Toole had been underestimated, as noted above, and he had been practicing for the big time – a lot. It showed.

Erin O’Toole looked pretty good. He lost a lot of weight. He looked comfortable. And he looked like he was having fun, too. Early on, O’Toole’s team decided to set up a professional-looking TV studio at Ottawa’s Westin hotel, and O’Toole shot a lot of videos there, and he looked…professional. Trudeau, meanwhile, was outside a lot, looking sweaty and angsty, with puny crowds and people shouting at him.

Erin O’Toole had good debates. He surprised the perpetually-angry/resentful/humiliated French media with his facility with their language. In the two French debates, he didn’t just play defence – he was comfortable enough going on the offence, too. And, in the single English debate – as with all of his TV appearances – O’Toole kept cool, per Marshall McLuhan’s maxim.

Erin O’Toole recovered from mistakes well. The worst errors in politics, in the Kinsellian Rule Book, are the self-inflicted ones. O’Toole’s promise to keep legal the weapon used in the Montreal and Nova Scotia massacres was stupid, stupid, stupid. So, too, his unwillingness to promise – as Ontario Premier Doug Ford has – to green-light only those candidates who are fully vaccinated. Stupid, stupid, stupid. But O’Toole pivoted away from both mistakes not-badly. He shouldn’t have made those mistakes in the first place – but he survived. Sometimes in politics, mere survival is the biggest win.

Erin O’Toole won’t be underestimated again – but he’ll be more ready. (Is that grammatical? More ready? How about readier? Readiest? Anyway, you get the drift.) He’s learned how to run a decent national campaign. Next time, he’ll obviously be better at it. Dumping him now means yet another rookie Tory leader, making yet more rookie mistakes mid-campaign. Bad idea.

Erin O’Toole can’t be replaced during a minority government. Okay, well, he can be, but it’s a dumb idea. Justin Trudeau, who has no soul, will take full and frequent advantage of a Conservative Party at war with itself. The instant he sees that Tories are divided, he’ll engineer a pretext for another election. Don’t fall into that trap.

Erin O’Toole seems to be a decent guy. Sure, yes: I know the maxim – in politics, nice guys finish last. But it’s not true. I’ve proudly worked for Jean Chretien and Dalton McGuinty – two HOAGS (Hell Of A Guy). We were able to secure six Parliamentary majorities with those HOAG-y good guys. Oftentimes, good guys finish first.

Will the Tories listen to me? Of course not.

Nobody listens to me.

Warren Kinsella was chairman of the war rooms for five of Chretien and McGuinty’s victories.

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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Listening to Erin O’Toole’s party critics today, you might think that he is the first Conservative leader to tack in different directions between his leadership and election campaign races, or to face the outrage of his early supporters about his policy flip-flops. He will not likely be the last one either, as long as his party membership base no longer reflects the broader Canadian political consensus.

An illustrative example of the challenges within today’s Conservative party are highlighted by the striking parallels between the political journeys of Patrick Brown and Erin O’Toole. Both tracked similar paths to leadership followed by their subsequent efforts to adopt, over the objections of party members, centre pitched policy in order to attract disaffected Liberal as well as unaffiliated voters.

In tacking hard right to secure internal party victory, Brown and O’Toole were frequently accused by their rivals of catering to the party’s social conservative base.

Brown had actively campaigned for the ON PC leadership by rejecting the ‘radical’ sex education curriculum modernization proposed by the Kathleen Wynne government. He used his opposition as a rallying cry to recruit major support for his candidacy among new immigrant and faith groups opposed to the Wynne initiative.

Federally, Brown had sided with pro-life groups and voted against same-sex marriage and abortion.

By the lead up to the 2018 campaign, Mr Brown disavowed his earlier positioning. Saying he wanted to lead a “fiscally conservative, socially liberal” party, PC Leader Patrick Brown confessed some of his ‘mistakes’ in courting social conservatives. He downplayed their importance to his initial leadership campaign success.

As leader, Mr. O’Toole, like Mr. Brown, openly declared that he was “pro-choice”, in the face of dissenting caucus members.

But he has continued to uncomfortably walk a tight rope between courting and rejecting social conservatives.

O’Toole controversially permitted his deputy chief of staff to help social conservatives secure party nominations. He allowed his caucus a free vote on banning conversion therapy and offered a defence of Egerton Ryerson and the residential school system.

O’Toole demoted Finance Critic Pierre Poilievre; he expelled Derek Sloan from the caucus for accepting donations from a white supremacist during the leadership race. Both MPs had deep support in the socially conservative party base.

O’Toole was against banning assault weapons, an important issue for his western and rural caucus- before he was for it- sort of-during the campaign.

In response to the question how his portrayal of a different Conservative party ‘squared with allowing candidates who have shared racist, conspiratorial, and anti-vaccine views to remain under his party banner’, O’Toole repeated that he would have a zero tolerance to racism.

Both leaders reversed themselves on climate change.

As a federal MP, Brown had opposed the Liberal carbon tax. As the newly minted leader, he spoke out against the Ontario Liberals joining a Western Climate cap and trade initiative. In the provincial election run-up, he ultimately accepted the value of some kind of carbon tax.

Like Mr Brown, Mr O’Toole started out rejecting any carbon tax. Shortly after his election as leader, O’Toole signed a pledge that he would “immediately repeal the Trudeau carbon tax … and reject any future national carbon tax or cap-and-trade scheme.”

By the time of the 2021 campaign, O’Toole had committed to a 30 per cent reduction in national emissions by 2030; the party platform he authorized “recognized that the most efficient way to reduce our emissions is to use pricing mechanisms”.

Brown declared himself a fiscal conservative and claimed to be able to reclaim billions in wasted government spending through value for money auditing. But he refused to renounce Ontario Liberal pre-election initiatives like expanded pharma-care and rent control, and a $15 minimum wage.

Brown clothed his election platform in populist garb. His ‘People’s Guarantee’ was aimed at re-establishing the same trust with voters that Erin O’Toole would later describe as the focus of his campaign.

Mr. O’Toole had been a fierce critic of Liberal deficits and spending plans, campaigning for leader as a ‘True Blue’ Conservative in 2019 after failing in the 2017 leadership race as a moderate.

Yet, his 2021 platform highlighted massive increases in health care transfers and mental health spending with no corresponding tax increases or program cuts, accepting a deficit that would not be under control for up to a decade.

His platform was swathed in blue collar rhetoric about fighting for unions, working people and economic nationalism instead of traditional Conservative free market and free trade policies

As long as the governing Liberals were slumping in the polls, disapproving federal and provincial Conservatives bit their tongues.

Mr Brown lost his leadership because of accusations against his personal conduct.

However, his successor, Doug Ford, supported similar social conservative tropes in the following leadership race, seasoned with a dash of populism ‘for the people’.

Ford wasted little time after his leadership victory in discarding a controversial social conservative candidate and former leadership opponent Tanya Granic Allen and modifying social conservative policies he had previously embraced.

Ford won his election and could face down his internal critics. By the measures of seats, popular vote or an urban breakthrough, Mr. O”Toole did not even improve over his predecessor’s achievement .

Failure has opened the floodgates of pressure for an accelerated federal leadership review process .

Loyalty is a two way street in every political party. As Mr Mulroney famously was quoted, ‘you dance with the one that brung ya’.

Winning remains the best way a leader can avoid paying the price for abandoning his political base.

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Erin O’Toole has a very simple question he must ask himself: was it worth it?

Throughout his unsuccessful campaign to usurp the governing Liberals, O’Toole made every promise in the book to woo Quebec nationalists over to the Conservatives.

In his party’s platform, he vowed to do anything and everything from eliminating all restrictions on federal health and social transfers, to giving Quebec greater control over immigrants and refugees. He also pledged to “negotiate with the Québec government to simplify tax preparation and work towards a single income tax return for Québec taxpayers” while remaining “open to the development of new administrative agreements with the government of Québec to promote decentralized federalism.”

Let’s be clear about the repercussions of these proposals.

By handing over billions of dollars, no-strings-attached, in health and social transfers to the provinces, O’Toole was effectively pledging to relinquish Ottawa’s role as enforcer of the Canada Health Act. That wouldn’t have boded well for the future of national standards in Canada’s public healthcare system. Nor would it have boded well for Ottawa’s already limited influence in Quebec.

Speaking of limiting Ottawa’s influence, O’Toole’s other Quebec-centric promises to surrender Ottawa’s jurisdictional right over immigration and tax administration would have had similar, damaging consequences.

Worst of all, though, was O’Toole’s pledge to “respect the jurisdiction of the Québec National Assembly by neither intervening in nor providing federal funding to support legal challenges to Law 21.”

That’s right.

If elected Prime Minister, O’Toole would never challenge, let alone even consider challenging, Quebec’s discriminatory law which bans certain civil servants from wearing religious symbols.

This marked a particularly low point in the campaign; one that rightfully offended all citizens who take pride in Canada’s (albeit flawed) history and reputation for being a country that stands up for and promotes the ideals of multiculturalism and religious and ethnic diversity.

Perhaps seeking to blunt the criticism levied his way for failing to stand up to the rights of minority Canadians, O’Toole bizarrely stated that it was not just Bill 21 that he would never intervene against – it was all provincial laws he would never challenge, whether they be from the National Assembly of Quebec, or any other provincial legislature.

Absurd, I know. It’s like O’Toole forgot he was campaigning to be Prime Minister of Canada – not the best friend of Quebec separatists, or the “headwaiter of the provinces” as Pierre Trudeau once memorably quipped.

O’Toole was so accommodating to Quebec nationalists, so capitulating to their every demand, that he even earned the endorsement of Quebec Premier (and former separatist) Francois Legault.

During the final days of the election campaign, Legault lambasted all three of Canada’s progressive parties, going so far as to call them “dangerous” before stating that “The Conservative party has been clear: they want to increase health transfers with no conditions, they want to transfer immigration powers, and Mr. O’Toole has committed to not funding opposition to Bill 21. For the Quebec nation, Mr. O’Toole’s approach is a good one.”

One can agree to disagree with Legault on whether O’Toole’s platform would have been beneficial for Quebec. But it is much harder to argue how O’Toole’s decentralizing policies would have been anything other than crippling for the Canadian federation.

Fortunately for Canadians, though, O’Toole’s dreams of forming the next government of Canada were dashed; his aspirations for becoming Prime Minister, put on hold, perhaps indefinitely, once it was clear that the Liberals had swept a plurality of seats on election night.

Not even in Quebec were O’Toole’s hopes for a breakthrough realized. By the time all the ballots were counted, the Liberals and the Bloc Quebec emerged the clear winners in the province, winning 33 and 34 seats, respectively. In contrast, the Conservatives won a measly 10 seats. The same amount, in fact, that they won in 2019.

Put simply, O’Toole’s strategy of appeasement failed, in both Quebec and the rest of Canada, as was only right. It would not have been fitting to have a Prime Minister as weak-kneed and placating as O’Toole had been in dealing with Quebec, or any other provincial government. Canadians want more from a leader.

And so, as he nurses his electoral wounds, O’Toole must ask himself again: was his complete capitulation to Quebec nationalists worth it?

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The urban-rural divide is the underlying current in our politics.

In the 2021 election, the Liberals swept urban and largely suburban Canada, particularly in Ontario. They also lost rural seats they’d narrowly won in 2019, and got swept away in the ones they lost that year. Liberal losses – including King—Vaughan in Ontario where I helped run Election Day – occurred in semi-rural ridings, according to the Canadian Press.

That CP report nailed it by simply recording the results and letting them speak for themselves:

“The Liberals held onto their strongholds in Canada’s largest cities, winning 22 out of 24 ridings in the Montreal area and all of Toronto’s 25 ridings. The Liberals also won nine out of 10 seats in the Ottawa-Gatineau area and flipped three ridings in the Vancouver area. They also won all the ridings in the Halifax area and picked up a riding in each of Calgary and Edmonton.”

As my friend Tim Krupa told Politico, “The urban-rural divide is real. And it’s always beneficial to have a diversity of views in the government and caucus, and I believe that perspective can also be offered in a variety of ways through the party, and through the government”.

As a municipal councillor for a suburban and rural community, this divide fascinates and worries me.

That CP story spoke to various professors about the urbane feel of the Liberals and the more rural instincts of the Tories, pointing to childcare versus gun control as focuses.

But the problems are deeper than that.

We risk divides and we risk being a country where urban Canada thrives with a creative class, yet one that forces young people to look further afield for affordable homes, and then rural Canada lacks the infrastructure of a big city, not just in terms of transit or roads but also broadband.

Of course, this is global; we saw it with Trump, we saw it with Brexit.

But a Liberal renaissance in rural Canada or a Tory revival in urban is more than good politics. It is also important for a strong sense of faith in the national government.

Erin O’Toole tried to modernize and moderate his party. He started with a standing start, and it was complicated by his own leadership race where he advocated that he would be the most right-wing candidate. But his instinct was right: to grow in the suburbs and urban Canada, to appeal to new Canadians. He failed in the execution.

What is Justin Trudeau to do to appeal to rural Canadians? Some work can be done on pushing a conservationist approach to environmental policy, but simply delivering more broadband isn’t sufficient. It’s also about tone, style and respect, allowing rural voters to feel like they are heard and not regarded somehow as lesser.

That’s a bit of a nebulous diagnostic comment, but it’s an important one. Get results, lecture less, might be another way to put it. That doesn’t mean progressive policies around equity should be sacrificed, just that a focus on bread and butter issues might help.

At the end of the day, building a strong country requires strong urban centres, dynamic suburbs and thriving rural areas, the latter of which feed the former two. Good agricultural policy, good infrastructure investments, good ministers who get rural life, and environmental protection – all these efforts matter.

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The Conservative Party’s defeat in last week’s federal election offers important lessons for Ontario Premier Doug Ford.

Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole chose to abandon core principles to try to win an election. Long-standing stances on carbon taxes, balanced budgets and broad-based tax relief crumbled in the face of focus-group gurus.

Politicians have been trying to sell voters on the idea of a carbon tax for years. Proponents claim that a carbon tax is the key to fighting climate change. But those politicians are wrong. Higher prices doesn’t mean lower emissions.

In British Columbia, thirteen years of carbon taxes has failed to stop emissions from going up. B.C. has the highest carbon tax in Canada, but emissions in the province rose by 11 per cent between 2015 and 2019, according to the province’s own numbers.

Carbon taxes simply don’t work.

Ford has stood against carbon taxes throughout his political career. O’Toole, on the other hand, decided to flipflop on carbon taxes to try to win an election.

His decision was a huge mistake. Voters consistently said the high cost of living was the number one election issue. But those who worried about skyrocketing living costs weren’t able to turn to the blue team for relief, as Conservatives were promising a carbon tax of their own.

The Parliamentary Budget Officer expects the carbon tax to cost the average Ontario family over $600 a year by 2022.

Ford ran hard against carbon taxes and won a majority just three short years ago.

Lesson one for Ford: don’t back down on carbon taxes. As Ontarians grow more and more concerned about the cost of living, he needs to be able to point out that the Trudeau government’s carbon tax agenda is hindering affordability.

O’Toole also gave up on trying to be fiscally prudent. He merely promised to balance the budget within a decade, with no reductions in government spending. His forecasts also relied on very optimistic economic growth numbers without accounting for the risk of recessions.

Canadian taxpayers are already paying $22 billion this year in interest on the national debt. Interest payments are expected to double within the next five years, forcing the government to spend tens of billions of dollars on interest payments rather than health care or tax relief.

Voters were unimpressed by O’Toole’s lack of urgency in dealing with Canada’s growing debt crisis. Many saw little difference between the Liberals and Conservatives.

As Ontario’s debt grows larger and larger, Ford should remember that he was elected on a plan to fix the province’s finances after a decade of Liberal deficits. Ontario’s debt is set to hit $450 billion next year, with the province spending more on debt interest payments than post-secondary education.

The status quo is simply unacceptable. Ford needs to offer a clear plan to Ontarians, laying out how and when he will balance the budget, and he needs to be bold.

Lesson two: offer a responsible fiscal agenda that can appeal to common sense Ontarians who worry about racking-up debt and interest payments for their kids and grandkids.

O’Toole also failed to include any kind of tax relief in his platform. O’Toole’s gimmicky one month GST holiday simply wasn’t enough to motivate voters. Ford won on a tax-cut platform in 2018 – including cutting gas taxes and income taxes – but he has yet to deliver on those pledges.

Lesson three: promising to cut taxes helped Ford win in 2018, and it was a key reason why O’Toole lost the federal election. If Ford wants to avoid O’Toole’s fate, its time for him to bring home the goods.

On everything from carbon taxes to deficits to tax relief, O’Toole disappointed hardworking taxpayers looking for change. Ford would be wise to avoid those mistakes.

Jay Goldberg is the Interim Ontario Director at the Canadian Taxpayers Federation

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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.

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Now that I’ve had a few days to poke through the smoking wreckage of the Conservative Party’s crash site, I feel safe in saying that one key cause of the disaster was pilot error.

To put that in a less metaphoric way, Conservative Party leader Erin O’Toole doomed his campaign when he decided that his main objective in the race was to curry favour with the media by being a nice guy.

Indeed, O’Toole “niceness” in the campaign was exemplified by his communications strategy which was notable for its lack of aggressive anti-Trudeau attack ads; throughout the race, his messaging remained mostly positive.

Yes, I know being positive might sound appealing, but from a strategic communications perspective it’s an approach that, in my view, didn’t make a whole lot of sense in this particular election.

After all, attacks ads are proven to be an effective weapon when it comes to degrading opponents and certainly the Conservatives had plenty of ammunition to use against Trudeau – scandals, incompetence, weak foreign policy, black face, etc.

They could have had a field day!

Plus, given the tightness of the race, the Conservatives really needed to pull out all the stops, including demoralizing and disillusioning “soft Liberal voters”.

Thus, the only reason I can think of as to why O’Toole went this positive route is that he hoped it would earn him praise from the media, since journalists oppose the use of negative campaigning.

As matter of fact, the media’s initial reaction to any negative ad that’s released during an election is to instantly hate it – especially, it must be said, if that ad is put out by Conservatives.

One often repeated media complaint, for example, is that Conservatives are too “dark” in their “tone.”

Editorial writers, journalists and columnists will go on and on about how Conservative negativity debases our civic discourse, coarsens debate, and appeals to the lowest common denominator, all of which will lead them to openly pine for a Conservative leader who’ll unabashedly embrace the moral high ground.

O’Toole, I think, wanted to be that leader, he wanted the media to see him as a “kinder and gentler” Conservative, so they’d say things like, “Wow, O’Toole is the kind of positive politician we can get really get behind. Finally, a leader who gets it!”

So, I understand what the Conservatives were hoping to achieve, but unfortunately, for them their plan laid the ground for electoral defeat.

I say that for a couple of reasons.

For one thing, it wouldn’t matter if O’Toole was the most positive guy since Norman Vincent Peale, as long as he operates under the label “Conservative” the largely left-wing-leaning media will have a hard time liking him.

What’s more, and this is an important strategic point, the Liberals, for their part, had absolutely no qualms whatsoever about using negative messaging to degrade the Conservatives. (Please note, the media is usually much more forgiving of Liberal negativity.)

In fact, during this race the Liberals relentlessly hammered away at O’Toole, depicting him as a monstrous troglodyte who would supposedly take Canada back to a horrible and hellish dark age.

Essentially, the Liberals spooked voters into abandoning the Conservatives.

Now, O’Toole could have parried these attacks by fighting fire with fire, i.e., he could have blasted Trudeau with attacks of his own, but he didn’t do that because he wanted to remain positive so the media would like him.

As a result, the Conservative campaign came across as passive and defensive, and it ceded all the initiative to the Liberals.

Worse yet, O’Toole came across as a weak leader, who was unwilling to defend himself.

That’s a recipe for losing.

So, what’s the lesson from all this?

Well, anyone putting together a political messaging campaign, should never let media opinion dictate strategy. Keep in mind, most media people have zero experience when it comes to running a political campaign. Don’t listen to armchair strategists.

At any rate, my point is, if the strategic circumstances of a campaign demand you go negative against your opponent, then you gotta do it.

If the media doesn’t like it, let them squeal.

Who cares if journalists don’t like you, as long as you win, right?

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In the wake of an election marked by nastiness we are unaccustomed to in this country, and violence against politicians like we have never really seen before, there has been a lot of hand-wringing about how things got this bad. While many are quick to blame the Americans for somehow exporting this to our country, others are quick to point out that no, this is on us because we’ve got bad actors too in this country. Nevertheless, there is a prevailing sense among many in mainstream conservatism in this country who somehow believe that they can flirt with right-wing populism and somehow avoid the negative consequences that come along with it, as though there were some kind of “good parts only” version available to them. The hubris of that belief has come home to roost.

One of the most prominent proponents of using right-wing populism to his political advantage is Alberta premier Jason Kenney, who had spent years honing the craft of stoking and directing anger and turning it to his political advantage. First he sent it toward then-premier Rachel Notley, blaming her for every ill under the sun, and once she was defeated in the provincial election, he turned that anger entirely toward prime minister Justin Trudeau. It wasn’t Trudeau’s fault that a global supply glut in oil was depressing world prices because OPEC decided to open the taps in order to try and make the American’s shale oil unprofitable (which was even worse for the oil sands, for whom the shale boom was already sounding a death knell for their expansion plans), but Kenney was perfectly happy to blame Trudeau regardless – even if Trudeau was offering the province federal assistance that Stephen Harper had refused to.

Already, the signs were there that this was turning ugly. The “protesters” that Kenney was attracting were already selling t-shirts that promised to lynch Trudeau (or journalists, for that matter). “Lock her up!” chants about Notley and whoever else was convenient were starting, imported from the ugly Trump campaign, and Kenney gave a cursory “now, now, we vote them out,” rather than forcefully denouncing the practice and coming down hard on it and all that it entailed. Around the same time, there was a Conservative leadership contest happening, where there were candidates who were also willing to import this same American rhetoric for their own purposes.

Some of you may remember the campaign that Kellie Leitch ran, promising “values tests” and dog-whistling to the far right – so much so that Maxime Bernier denounced her as a “Karaoke Donald Trump,” while he was trying to run on libertarian values (and very nearly succeeded). That Bernier later left the party and started his own that embraced this very same rhetoric and tactics shows that he too believes there was political value in embracing it – the biggest difference seeming to be that he doesn’t seem to care about the negative consequences that come with the embrace, or he is willing to turn a very blind eye to it.

It should be no surprise that this stoking of anger in the service of political point-scoring turned to violence, whether that was with the gravel-throwing incident against the prime minister, or Liberal incumbent Marc Serré being assaulted in his campaign headquarters. And sure, the leaders of the other parties – including Bernier – denounced these acts, but again, a single statement of denunciation doesn’t go very far when you’ve amped up irrational anger in a group of people who are looking to hurt those who you have blamed for their woes. That anger needs to go somewhere, and it’s more than just forcefully marking a ballot on election day.

These kinds of tactics are deliberate. O’Toole’s social media consulting firm makes a point about messages shocking people in order to “invoke anger, pride, excitement or fear.” Kenney is a month away from holding a series of provincial referendums, one of which is to explicitly stoke anger at the federal government by asking a torqued question about equalization payments, as though the referendum could do anything about it. That referendum will also be held alongside blatantly unconstitutional “Senate nomination elections,” which is something invented whole cloth by Alberta governments in the past as a fictional grievance that they can then stoke, which Kenney was all too happy to resurrect – because he needs to keep directing that anger elsewhere. It’s too late, however – all of the anger he’s fomented is now being directed at him, and he won’t last much longer in the job.

It’s also not a surprise that this anger, not just in Alberta but in other parts of the country where the messages resonate, have led to an increase in threats against not only the prime minister (it was only a few months ago that someone rammed through the gates of Rideau Hall with a truck full of loaded weapons, intending to harm Trudeau), but also Notley, and ministers like Catherine McKenna. And it wasn’t just Kenney or Bernier stoking it either. Both Andrew Scheer and Erin O’Toole made a point of winking and nodding to these crowds, whether it was addressing the Yellow Vesters under the credulous guise of only seeing them as their fig-leaf cover story of being oil workers concerned about carbon prices (when in truth they were the same far-right operators mobilized by M-103 the year previous), or in stoking conspiracy theories about the United Nations Compact on Global Migration, the Great Reset initiative, or even George Soros. They knew what they were doing, and thought it could work for them.

The fact that things have taken a turn to physical violence was the least surprising thing, and yet both the Conservatives and their apologists are acting shocked. They tried cherry-picking elements from the fetid swamp that is the eco-system of right-wing populism, and pretended that it wouldn’t come with consequences. But now that those ugly consequences have reared their heads, it’s time to dismantle this system before it festers, and that means the Conservatives making a conscious choice not to double down in the hopes of regaining PPC votes that they blame for losing them the election.

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Poking through the detritus of this week’s federal election results, the general contours of its impacts have emerged although the specific detail is yet to be refined.

The lack of change in total seat counts suggests that both the Liberals and the Conservatives will be held accountable in different ways.

Mr. Trudeau will need to find a way to recover from the personal character scars inflicted effectively by his opponents during the campaign. The party has a proven track record of reinventing itself; the search to attract new star candidates and a clearer post pandemic economic focus starts now.

The smouldering internal Conservative policy debate over the long term rewards of shifting from Harper lite to Liberal lite ones will likely flare up and consume the agenda for the next few months. That conflict may well decide Mr O’Toole’s future.

The next scene of the Green’s internecine warfare will determine not only Annamie Paul’s leadership but the party’s future itself.

While a post-pandemic populist party may be difficult to sustain nationally, the People’s Party may leave a more lasting impact on the shape of provincial politics in Alberta and Saskatchewan.

Despite an improved campaign, Mr. Singh still has to manage the expectations of critics for not returning the federal NDP to its halcyon days under Mulcair and Layton. How can the NDP avoid being squeezed again in future elections, given its likely support of the whole Liberal minority agenda beyond a few calculated tweaks? Will this necessitate yet another internal review of whether the NDP best serves as a party or a movement?

Several truisms about political campaigning have also been reinforced that our chattering classes including the media would do well to remember in their future election analysis.

Campaigns do matter, no matter the pre-election polls. Mr. O’Toole’s initial well calibrated campaign shift to the political centre including the early release of an un-costed platform appeared to take the Liberals and media off-guard.

The resurrection of Liberal fortunes from mid-campaign doldrums remind us that even short campaigns are marathons, not sprints; victory is never declared after three weeks.

Both Mr Trudeau and Mr. Singh proved to be formidable campaigners; Mr. O’Toole’s interventions increasingly lacked spontaneity .

Did the Conservatives peak too early? Did their early success focus more media attention on the inconsistencies in their platform and drive the Liberals to unveil their time tested and proven ‘fear ‘strategy to drive progressive voters their way (mid-town Toronto, as well as Vancouver)?

Political apparatchiks are constantly reminded that the final vote shift, especially among undecideds, takes place in the last 5 to 10 days of the campaign. A summer election reinforces this conclusion even more because most citizens are not paying critical attention at the outset of the call.

The quality of local candidates and incumbents’ effective attention to constituency needs between elections counts even more when faced with negative reactions at the door to an unpopular leader. Those are factors harder to quantify in aggregated polling.

While the Liberals lost a couple of so-called swing ridings (e.g. Peterborough Kawartha), they retained others (Oakville) in the competitive constituencies of the 905 for these very reasons.

Another consequential lesson is that ground games do matter, especially when dealing with pandemics and lower voter enthusiasm.

Identifying each party’s vote and getting them to the polls trumps amassing Tik Tok followers, likes or dislikes on Twitter, or general regional or national polling swings.

According to numerous media reports, a number of Conservative candidates could not find sufficient volunteers for their all-important E-day teams.

For the third federal election in a row, we are reminded in a first past the post system that efficiency of votes counts more to win a larger number of seats than racking up large majorities in a number of ridings that falsely skew the aggregated numbers.

Managing surprise events remains an ever present reality. While Afghanistan and the Delta variant dominated the early news, the provincial Tory vaccine passport flip flops refocused the campaign from the phoney war about the need for an election during the pandemic to the more Liberal friendly issue of management of the crisis. Indeed, it can be argued that Mr Kenney cost the Conservative campaign its national momentum at a critical juncture of the election.

Looking forward, Liberal last minute musings about changing the first past the post electoral system [where have we heard this before] and the likelihood of the broad implementation of the Liberals child care scheme with the remaining provinces may prove to be even more existential threats to the Conservative goal to topple the current Liberal regime.

Make no mistake. Beyond the numbers, a lot has changed in Canadian politics.

Tag: Erin O’Toole

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