Erin O'Toole Archives - Page 5 of 8

Erin O’Toole is in a spot of trouble. The Conservative leader’s strategy to soften the edges of his party’s polices, to make them less conservative, so he could pick up more seats outside of the West has not worked out how he’d hoped.

He’s wanted to be prime minister since he was in middle school, but he’s till just the lowly leader of opposition. And now he has to fight to keep his job on the back of that failure.

Some parties might have be more accepting, he’s only been in the job for a year and has only had one shot at leading an election, but politics is never about what’s fair.

Credit where it’s at least sort of due, O’Toole looked at the way the wind was blowing and realized that hardcore Conservative policies weren’t going to win him the big job. So he did things like accepted the idea of carbon pricing, even if the execution was more than a bit off. The trouble was he also was pretty wishy-washy though the campaign, following the wind just a bit too often, like when he flipped and sorta flopped on whether he’d keep the Liberal’s assault weapons ban.

Anyway, point being, he was willing to try and move the party’s policies more in line with what’s broadly acceptable in Canada. Since he’s neither become prime minister, nor was he able to cut into the Liberal’s seat count, it’s now time for the knives within the party to come out.

A petition was started by a member of the party’s national council to launch a leadership review of O’Toole’s tenure, according to The Hill Times. And according to the Toronto Star, the Conservative Party has locked down its internal voter information system to limit access as much as possible to internal supporter information.

“[Shutting the system down] also limits access by potential leadership rivals to the names of party members as O’Toole’s team tries to maintain his leadership in the wake of this week’s election loss,” the Star reports.

So, moves are already afoot to both attack and consolidate O’Toole’s grip on power.

On election night, O’Toole’s concession speech was odd for how positive and bombastic it was. Not only was it not a resignation speech — not that anyone should really have expected that — it was barely a concession speech. It was targeted almost entirely at the Conservative faithful, what you’d expect as a keynote address to a party convention from the leader, not from a guy who’d just blown an election.

On TV that night, long-time Harper back room staffer Jenni Byrne called O’Toole’s bombastic concession speech/rallying cry on Monday night “tone deaf.” Byrne was also linked to the aborted leadership run of Pierre Poilievre, who is hardly the moderating type, and seems spoiling for a fight.

Take Poilievre’s pre-election ad he posted and seemingly produced himself. It’s slick enough, as ads go. But what was the most interesting about it is how it was devoid of all Conservative branding. It was a Pierre Poilievre ad, not a Conservative candidate ad. The sort of thing someone thinking of challenging a leader who performed poorly might put together.

It’s not just Byrne calling out O’Toole either.

The comment editor of the National Post wrote the strategy of moderation should be abandoned. What the country really wants, Carson Jerema writes, is smaller government and less red tape. Voters would have given O’Toole more of a chance if he’d just run on cutting the deficit and been true to conservatism, rather than offering “watered-down Liberal, or even NDP, policies.”

It’s worth going a bit of a tangent, as there’s also a bit of a warning for the Liberals here. Remember that guy Doug Ford? The gigantic buffoon who could never win because of how obviously terrible he was? Yeah, that guy’s the premier of Ontario. And he got the job because of repeated Liberal failures, and a generally sclerotic approach to governing that Ontario voters found so revolting, the province kicked the provincial Liberals down to third place after more than a decade in power.

Any of this sound a bit prophetic? It should. Enough federal Liberal staffers have found their way up from the provincial party — including Trudeau’s chief of staff — they should, you’d think, be able to see this plain as day. Of course, they didn’t then, why would they now? As tempting as it may be for some Liberals to think “Hey, great, bring a crank like Poilievre on, we’ll beat him in a walk!” they should be careful what they wish for. They just might make a guy like Pierre prime minister.

But there I go getting ahead of myself. A lot has to happen before we get there. But at the speed things are moving, it may not take too long for this to play out.

One thing that might give Conservatives pause about sacking O’Toole, is he came reasonably close to winning, all things considered. Few people knew who he was before this started, and he’s been leader only through the pandemic, essentially.

He has a big job in front of him, and even if he’s up for it, it may not be possible to succeed. He took a gamble by trying to reach beyond the base of his party, it didn’t pay off. More than fighting an election, now comes the hard part, convincing his party to give him the chance to do it again.

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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Dominic LeBlanc said a funny thing on Wednesday.

First, to the Toronto Star, the Liberal cabinet member said, “I’m very confident in our chances of forming a majority government.” And then a little later he told reporters much the same thing.

“I’ve said from the beginning of the campaign that we’re campaigning to win a majority government,” LeBlanc said.

It’s an interesting thing to hear with just five days left.

It was around last weekend, when the release of excerpts from former justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould’s book were making their splash in the newspapers and the SNC scandal was once again raising it’s head that I thought, “Hmmm, smells like a Liberal win, maybe a big one.”

I hashed this out a bit on Twitter, but essentially my logic is this: However wretched that SNC Affair was, and how ever horrible the issues around ethics and the interplay between corporations and government, too much has happened since then for JWR to be the focal point of a day or two of the Conservative campaign.

More than 26,000 people are dead — more are still dying! — from COVID-19. Homes are increasingly unaffordable. There’s been a major economic shock because of the pandemic. And oh yeah the world is on fire.

And yet, here we were, after a few days of ethics talk.

It looked to me, and still does, like a Conservative campaign that had lost its way. Plus, the Liberal sink in the polls seems to be bouncing back. The polls aren’t fully there yet, and many of the projections give it a low probability of there being a Liberal majority. And yet…

Which brings us back to LeBlanc. From the start it was clear winning a majority was the point of this whole exercise. That’s why we’re having an election. The trouble was, as soon as the election was called the Liberal poll numbers dived and so even thinking the word majority was libel to sink the whole enterprise.

And now here we have a senior Liberal not just thinking about a majority, but talking about it to reporters.

But here we are, on the other side of the debates, where Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau walked away bruised but not broken. Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole wasn’t a disaster — nothing like his predecessor — but he flubbed his answer about daycare in in the French-language, and didn’t really stand out in the English-language debate. And by that point O’Toole’s momentum seems to have stalled out.

So is it really that crazy to think that after all this Trudeau might pull off his dreams of a second majority? I’m inclined to think not.

But I think the Liberals have halted what looked like a terminal slide out of government. Instead, Trudeau and his party seem to have hit their stride at just the right moment. Summer has ended* and kids have gone back to school, and life has entered a period of sort-of normalcy where people are more focused on ‘real’ things, rather than summer leisure.

Voters seem to have given Erin O’Toole a look, and found him wanting. The Conservative Party leader made an interesting pitch to voters, that he was a different, nicer kind of Tory.

Pitching a sort-of compassionate conservatism — though it’s unlikely he or the party would ever invoke George W. Bush — O’Toole has made the case that he wasn’t like those other Conservatives that have come before.

People do not seem to have bought it. Sinking in the polls, increasingly firing off random attack lines and policies, his campaign seems to have peaked too early.

It’s possible if he was able to run in another campaign voters might come around to his vision of Conservative governing, pitching the same program twice tends to convince people you’re serious, but that would require his party to both want to keep him on and stay together.

Big changes — even if they’re just rhetorical ones — so soon after the last election are a lot to get a handle on. Especially when O’Toole is a former Conservative minister.

It’s tough for people to believe you are a kind and gentle party when they’ve seen how you’ve governed before, and how your allies have governed as premier in provinces across the province. It’s an interesting tactic, but one that doesn’t seem to have worked this time around. It’s an interesting play, and will be even more interesting if his party gives him another shot at it.

In any case, I don’t think it’s a certainty that Trudeau has his majority in hand. But I no longer think it’s an impossibility. Enough so that I put a $5 wager on it happening — figured I might as well put my money where my mouth is.

Now all we have to do is wait for Monday.

*Yes, yes, I know summer ends Sept. 21, but we all know what I mean here.

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After four uninspiring and unstimulating weeks, the campaign to form the next government of Canada has narrowed into a tight two-way race between the Liberals and the Conservatives.

For progressive voters, heading to the polls this election will be a rather disheartening exercise in civic responsibility, especially in the ridings in which third parties aren’t registering much support, leaving many torn between voting for what NDP leader Jagmeet Singh has called a choice between “pretty bad” (aka Justin Trudeau) and “worse” (Erin O’Toole).

It’s hard to find fault with Singh’s analysis on his two main rivals.

After taking stock of Trudeau’s record in office, I can’t imagine there are many Canadians that are enthusiastic about a renewed Liberal mandate.

While the Liberals have not been the failure some pundits claim they are, they also haven’t been the boldly progressive, honest, and transparent administration that Trudeau promised.

Instead, for every moment of praise this government has earned (resettling 40,000 Syrian refugees, helping lift hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty, instituting a gender-neutral cabinet, legalizing marijuana, etc.) they have cocked up equally with clumsy policy missteps and cynical politicking.

For examples, one need only recall Trudeau’s cowardly about-face on electoral reform. Or the Liberal’s abysmal record of global engagement, epitomized by their humiliating loss for a seat on the United Nations Security Council. Or their insufficient action to tax the super-wealthy, institute a national pharmacare program, and tackle the lack of affordable housing in this country.

Nonetheless, as disappointing as Trudeau’s record has been, there are even more reasons to be wary of Erin O’Toole and his Conservative cabal.

For one, O’Toole is campaigning to scrap the deals that Trudeau negotiated with various provinces to finally implement universal, federally funded childcare.

Back in 2006, Stephen Harper killed Paul Martin’s dreams of national childcare. Now, fifteen years later, another Conservative leader is pledging to do the same. For the millions of working and middle-class families, struggling to balance work with raising children, O’Toole’s promise to eliminate what could be the next major pillar in Canada’s social safety net is a worrying prospect.

Then there is O’Toole’s climate plan.

Throughout the campaign, O’Toole has stated clear his intent to rollback Canada’s emissions targets and build more pipelines, including the now-defunct Northern Gateway pipeline. This, even as scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have released yet another report, warning of dire repercussions to the planet if urgent action is not taken. But really, what else can you expect from the leader of a party whose delegates reject policy proposals affirming that “climate change is real”?

While we are on the topic of retrograde views, a majority of O’Toole’s own caucus voted against a proposed Liberal ban on conversion therapy, so don’t expect an O’Toole government to be an activist champion on LGBTQ rights, either.

Next, consider foreign policy, another area O’Toole would likely be worse than Trudeau.

With dangerous platform promises to “Recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and move the Canadian embassy to Jerusalem” and “Return Canada to its longstanding policy of not singling out Israel for criticism at the United Nations” O’Toole’s continuation of Scheer/Harper-era positions would only facilitate Palestinian injustice and hinder efforts to bring about peace in the Middle East.

Equally disheartening is his pledge to increase military spending, while offering nothing to bolster Canada’s embarrassingly low foreign aid spending.

Finally, O’Toole’s appeasement of Quebec nationalists (what with his silence over the province’s secularism law) has been so weak-kneed that it has even earned him Quebec Premier Francois Legault’s endorsement, which doesn’t bode well for all the discriminated religious minorities in the province, nor for Canada’s continued descent into crippling, ineffectual decentralization.

True, Canada’s other party leaders have not spoken out against Legault with the nerve that is required of them. But none have been quite so placating as O’Toole with his assuaging words and litany of Quebec-centered platform promises.

In an ideal election, neither the Liberals, nor the Conservatives, would be the party that forms the next government. Unfortunately, this election is far from an ideal one.

Therefore, in the ridings in which only the Liberals are competitive with the Conservatives, it is candidates of the former, not the latter, that Canadians will be better off casting their ballot for.

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If you think the federal election has been a snooze fest so far, don’t worry, all the really fun stuff is going to happen over the next few days.

I say that because, typically speaking, it’s only in the last week of an election that the legions of undecided voters out there actually make up their minds.

Before then, they’re really only half paying attention to all the political shenanigans taking place on the electoral stage.

The fact is, for a huge number of people in this country (or in any democracy for that matter), the game of politics is just not that interesting, which explains why there are so many undecided voters.

In other words, they’re undecided not because they’re diligently studying all the various competing political party platforms, or studiously comparing all the pros and cons of the leaders, or carefully pondering the issues put on the table, they’re undecided because they’re simply not engaged in the electoral process. (This is one reason why you should take all those political opinion polls conducted in late August with a huge grain of salt.)

Yet, the closer we get to Election Day, the more the undecided voters will get caught up in the electoral drama and the more their minds will become focused on politics.

Knowing this, political parties will always unleash their best, most persuasive messaging campaigns in the last week of the race, a time when they figure voters will be the most receptive.

It’s not a coincidence, for instance, that Jody Wilson-Raybould releases her book this week.

So, brace yourself; each party is about to launch a full-scale propaganda assault.

And since these ads will be geared toward the undecideds, don’t expect much in the way of subtlety or substance.

After all, if you’re reaching out to people who don’t care about ideology or policy, your ad campaign shouldn’t focus on ideology or policy.

Nor will you have time to “educate” voters on policies or issues.

The only persuasive tactic that will work during this short but crucial period is to manipulate emotions.

So, watch for all the parties to bash us over the head with strong appeals which will tap into our hates, fears and hopes.

The exact tone of the ad messaging, of course, will depend on what the internal polls are telling the party strategists.

If, for instance, pollsters are telling Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that he’s falling behind, expect the Liberals to accelerate their efforts this week to demonize Conservative Party leader Erin O’Toole.

It won’t be pretty.

In fact, if they’re truly desperate, the Liberals will throw everything they’ve got (including the kitchen sink) at the Conservatives. (Expect the name “Donald Trump” to pop up a lot.)

Also, if the Liberals are holding any dirt on O’Toole, now’s the time they’ll release it.

On the other hand, if Trudeau’s doing well in the polls, he’ll push a more inspirational, “vote for a happier Canada” sort of message.

Meanwhile, the exact same political calculations are going on in the Conservative camp, meaning if O’Toole is in trouble, he’ll drop the hammer on Trudeau; if he’s ahead in the polls, he’ll take the high moral road.

As for the New Democrats, well this is where their lack of fundraising success in the past, will come back to haunt them.

My point is, I seriously doubt they’ll have the financial resources needed to match either the Liberals or Conservatives when it comes to pushing a last week advertising blitz.

What that means is it’ll be much more difficult (but not impossible) for NDP leader Jagmeet Singh to make any sort of surge at the finish line.

Anyway, watching all the parties for broke this week should be entertaining.

So, grab some popcorn and enjoy the show.

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This week, we finally got the costing of the Conservative platform pledges, and it was little wonder that they released it a mere two hours before the second French-language debate, as things in it weren’t exactly as advertised. For example, the health spending they have been touting – particularly to premiers whose endorsements they are after – is back-loaded to what would need to be a third consecutive Conservative-led parliament, and their growth assumptions are far beyond what other credible economists are pointing to. We are running out of days until the country goes to vote, and neither the NDP nor the Greens have released their own cost projections.

Whether it’s with the main fiscal numbers, or their climate plans and the associated modelling for them, the Liberals have been clearly coming out ahead of the other parties. The Institute for Fiscal Studies and Democracy – a Canadian think-tank at the University of Ottawa, led by former Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page – has taken a look at the costing of both the Liberal and NDP platforms, and the Liberals have come out clearly ahead. The Liberals scored 15.5/18 on the three metrics that the IFSD judged them on – each meriting a “good” grade, as compared to a much more concerning 11.5/18 for the Conservatives, where the IFSD judged their “Responsible Fiscal Management” metric to be a failure. For a party that likes to call itself the “party of the economy,” or to wrap itself in an undeserved mantle of being good fiscal managers, the Conservatives are not living up to their own hype.

And then there are the environmental platforms, which have been judged by several experts in the field, one of the most notable being Mark Jaccard of Simon Fraser University. In his evaluation and modelling of the four federal main parties’ climate plans, he found that the Liberals’ plans and the sincerity behind what is being proposed garnered an 8/10 score, whereas the Conservatives got a mere 5/10, and interestingly, the Greens only got a 4/10 and the NDP merited a 2/10. Why? Because the Liberals had a plausible pathway in their platform that could reasonably achieve their GHG reduction targets with an estimated 2.5% loss of GDP. The Conservatives’ convoluted plan, with their carbon “savings accounts” (that will be an administrative nightmare and virtually unworkable) will achieve fewer reductions with a 2 percent loss of GDP, but that smaller target will also take Canada out of the Paris Accords.

As for the NDP and Greens, while they promise bigger reductions, neither has a credible pathway to achieving those reductions – certainly not a pathway that would be constitutional, and the GDP loss would be a lot bigger – 7.5% for the Greens, and 6.5% for the NDP, in part because they are promising things that will crater the economy for relatively little gain in the way of reductions. That both claim a dramatic economic transformation without job losses or economic pain, and all in the space of nine years, is neither feasible, nor is it credible. It’s not a stretch to extrapolate that their fiscal costing projections will likely also be similarly unrealistic, especially if the Greens are promising Basic Income and the NDP pledging to pay for a huge expansion in social programs that in no way could be financed by a wealth tax – certainly not for the first few years in any case.

Part of the reason why the Liberals have been able to achieve greater credibility on both the fiscal and environmental fronts are because they listen to expert advice – most of the time. The so-called “Economist Party” has had a huge influence on their platform and budgets, and that’s why we’re seeing a focus on things like inclusive growth, and why they have built an effective carbon pricing structure that will be far more likely to achieve results (particularly if provinces can effectively recycle the revenues from those pricing mechanisms). But the Liberals also have a recognized problem of over-promising, and being overly ambitious in terms of their timelines, which opens them up to attacks and opponents who are trying to foster disillusionment if things have not gone as fast as they would like, usually for good reason.

This is why we’re getting the canard of “you had six years” being thrown around for virtually any policy under the sun – it’s an attempt to skewer the Liberals for that sense of ambition and not crossing finish lines when they were hoping to (no matter how much of the journey they completed when time expired). It’s also horribly misleading, and assumes both infinite capacity within government to achieve results, and infinite parliamentary time to legislate – something that is harder to treat credibly given the toxic session we just completed, where almost no bills were passed thanks to the procedural warfare that the opposition engaged in for the first five months of the year, and displays of partisan dickishness in committees.

With this in mind, one has to wonder if the ballot question starts coming down to the credibility of what is on offer. The Liberals have done their homework, the math adds up, and their roadmaps show credibility – the other parties can’t say the same. The Conservatives most especially can’t claim much in the way of credibility given that Erin O’Toole has spent his entire time as leader both lying to Canadians about virtually everything under the sun, while also contorting his personal positions to fit whoever is in the room and to whatever the thinks he can get away with – on top of the fact that his fiscal plan is unsustainable, and his climate plan is both unworkable and won’t achieve needed reductions. The NDP and Greens had the advantage – if you can call it that – of never really being considered credible in the first place, and the analysis we’ve seen to date backs that up, but the Conservatives are supposed to be the credible alternative to the Liberals. The fact that they have not proven to be can’t be helping their chances the closer we get to election day.

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For an election that is supposed to be about the future of post-pandemic Canada, and at a time when we are having a national reckoning about the thousands of deaths that took place within residential schools as the unmarked graves at those sites are coming to light, there has been a strange lack of a conversation on Indigenous issues. One would think that given the current circumstances and the public mourning for what is essentially the death of innocence in this country as we come to grips with our genocidal past (and some say present), that this might merit some kind of attention in the campaign. Thus far, it’s been vanishingly little.

The most discussion we’ve had over these issues has been in trying to wedge partisan games into what should be serious topics of discussion. As the Assembly of First Nations was releasing their federal priorities that they want to see parties commit to in the election, the media’s focus was on Conservative leader Erin O’Toole’s statement that he wants to see flags on federal buildings return to full mast after they have been in a state of perpetual half-mast since the first discovery of the unmarked graves at the site of the former Kamloops Residential School. This was so much the preoccupation that when Power & Politics had the AFN’s National Chief on to talk about her priorities, host David Common focused almost entirely on O’Toole’s comments.

Likewise, when the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami released their own list of priorities for the election, Common kept his focus on ITK president Natan Obed’s comments that voters should keep in mind what happened in 2006 with the Kelowna Accords during that election, trying to paint him into a corner to force him to say that he was endorsing the Liberals over the Conservatives, which Obed was trying not to do as he has to work with whoever wins the election. Let us also not forget the 24-hour news cycle of video of Jagmeet Singh being embarrassed as Manitoba chiefs declared that they were supporting Liberal candidate Shirley Robinson over NDP incumbent Niki Ashton while at an NDP event – again, the focus being on the public humiliation and endorsement over Indigenous issues. And then there was the TVA debate last week, where a whole four minutes were spent on First Nations issues, the bulk of which was spent by Bloc leader Yves-François Blanchet declaring that Quebec wasn’t racist.

There are some particular differences between the parties and how they have approached these issues, and how their platforms differ on them – difference we should be discussing. The Liberals, for example, have a record of advancing Indigenous issues and reconciliation more than any government in history, but it’s also been slow, and prone to gaffes and personality conflicts between some of its current and former ministers. Sometimes it’s slow for reasons beyond their control – they can’t break the laws of physics when it comes to how long it’s taking to repair or replace some of the water systems on some remote First Nations reserves because of the limitations of ice roads to deliver materials (which was hampered further by the pandemic this year). Some provinces have been slow to respond when it comes to the calls to action for the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls national inquiry (and it was the provinces who refused to let the inquiry carry on longer – not the federal government). And sometimes, the path to achieving results is messy, such as with the court fight over compensation for children apprehended by the child welfare system (where the litigation is about the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal overstepping their statutory grounds, not the compensation itself).

These are some of the reasons why the former AFN National Chief, Perry Bellegarde, and the ITK’s Obed, have been putting an emphasis on the progress that has been made – and why there is more to do. Getting the Canadian framework to recognize the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples took longer than it should have because Conservatives have been afraid that this would constitute a veto on future resource extraction projects (never mind that it’s their land and they have rights to it). The bills on Indigenous language protection and on creating the mechanisms to turn over child and family services to individual First Nations instead of the provinces were monumental and will have a massive impact going forward – but they are also things that will require more time, attention, and dollars going forward to ensure that they are able to succeed.

With this in mind, the Liberal platform is largely about continuing the path they’ve been on, moving ahead with the priority areas, supporting Indigenous-led initiatives – which has really been one of the things that this government has been relatively good at, which is letting these communities take the lead and giving them the resources to do it. The NDP platform, while full of photos of Jagmeet Singh meeting with Indigenous people, makes a lot of the same promises as the Liberal platform does but insists that they will get the job done faster, as though throwing money at the problems will make that happen. (If that were the case, those problems would be fixed by now). The Conservatives, by contrast, put a larger focus on regional economic development for Indigenous communities – largely by way of natural resource extraction. This being said, their platform also promises to pass a Critical Infrastructure Protection Act to make it illegal for Indigenous groups to protest by blockading railways as they did in early 2020.

While we can count it as progress that all of the major parties now have detailed chapters in their platforms dedicated to Indigenous issues, the fact that it has been virtually ignored on the campaign trail is disappointing to say the least. We’ll see if it gets any more than five minutes’ time in either of the upcoming leaders’ debates, but even there, these are issues that require some thought and nuance, and a pugilistic battle for the cameras won’t do it justice either. We need to have this conversation, and the parties need to make space for it to happen.

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Why only appeal to conservative voters when you can become the darling of the entire political spectrum? Or that at least appears to be the strategy of Conservative party leader Erin O’Toole, as Canada hurdles toward a September general election.

But it wasn’t always thus. O’Toole was unveiled as the party’s new leader one year ago, and didn’t waste time before asserting himself as a less charismatic version of Donald Trump. Perhaps O’Toole had admired the frenzy that the former U.S. president had whipped up, and perceived an advantage from hitching his leadership to the culture wars and divisive rhetoric seen south of the border. Or maybe his concern was the growing popularity of the People’s Party of Canada, a fledgling far-right entity formed in 2018 by a former Conservative party leadership aspirant.

Whatever his reasons, O’Toole initially looked determined to lead Canadian politics down an uncomfortable path. “Take Back Canada” was the Trump-inspired slogan O’Toole employed during his successful party leadership campaign, along with the ominous rallying call to “join our fight.” Once installed as leader, he changed Conservative branding to look eerily similar to the Royal Canadian Air Force logo, in an attempt to emphasize his previous service record. The party’s fundraising wing then experimented with disinformation, claiming that “[Prime Minister] Justin Trudeau is rigging the next election in his favour.” And when much of the country eschewed typical Canada Day celebrations in favour of national self-reflection about Indigenous genocide, O’Toole briskly retorted, “It’s time to build Canada up, not tear it down,” and that, “I can’t stay silent when people want to cancel Canada Day.”

Right-wing demagoguery had arrived in Canada.

Or had it?

Turning his attention well beyond the Conservatives’ traditional support base, O’Toole gradually began to court disenfranchised voters from across the political spectrum. His “Canada First” strategy, a blatant parroting of Trump’s “America First” policy based on economic protectionism, was used to appeal to blue-collars workers who feared their manufacturing jobs would depart overseas. But, trotted out alongside other Trump-inspired policies, this didn’t initially seem like a shift in policy for O’Toole.

Eight months into his leadership, however, O’Toole pivoted, attempting to entice left-wing and centrist voters even more than Trump had done. After years of the Conservative party rejecting market-based carbon pricing, O’Toole announced in April that he would offer a “carbon levy.”

He didn’t stop there. Since the general election was called in mid-August, O’Toole’s focus on the political left and centre has often overshadowed his interest in pandering to his own party’s typical voters. Progressive policy announcements have come thick and fast: endorsing safe-injection sites and treating illicit drug use as a health matter rather than as a criminal issue – both a considerable break from the party’s usual orthodoxy – as well as a pledge to take action on all recommendations from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission regarding the legacy of residential “schools,” at which many Indigenous children were abused and killed.

O’Toole’s focus on making the Conservatives attractive to workers also intensified, including policies that would force the country’s largest corporations to include an employee on their boards of directors, and protect workers’ private-sector pensions from dubious accounting shenanigans.

So why exactly did a Trump admirer who briefly dealt in nationalist sloganeering that bordered on xenophobia pivot into a squishy centrist who courts the proletariat, all in just a matter of months?

The allure of power, of course.

The new Conservative party leader hasn’t experienced an epiphany that radically changed his ideological view of the world. The explanation is much simpler: he’s merely an opportunist. O’Toole has come so close to seizing power he can taste it, and will say whatever the electorate wants to hear if it will help him achieve it. He has become a political chameleon, willing to wear any ideological colour if it will grease his entry into the Prime Minister’s Office. No policy idea is too divergent, too contradictory to proffer. Left, right, centre: these have become abstract, passé terms that hinder the goal of enticing every voter.

The question is: will Canadians accept O’Toole the shapeshifter? Thus far, his strategy appears to be working, with the Conservatives creeping up in popularity, narrowly behind the Liberals. This may be partly due to Canadian voters having the least familiarity with O’Toole of all three major party leaders, giving him a relative blank slate despite his early Trumpist tendencies. But of concern to Conservatives is that O’Toole is the least liked of the party leaders, with one recent poll suggesting more Canadians find him to be “untrustworthy” and “fake” rather than to reflect their values or understand them.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s governing Liberal party will also be keen to characterize O’Toole, but obviously in a much less flattering light. Armed with the savviest electoral machinery, Liberals are probably preparing attack ads that highlight O’Toole’s policy duplicity and early Trumpist inclinations, best unleashed after Labour Day when more Canadians will be paying attention to the election campaign.

O’Toole’s policy drift is a high-stakes gamble. It could backfire, causing Conservative voters to stay home on election day or throw a protest vote to the far-right People’s party. And if the Tories lose the election, party members could unceremoniously depose O’Toole, much like how former Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario leader Patrick Brown was swiftly removed from power in 2018 after he ventured too close to the political centre for the provincial membership’s liking.

Will Erin O’Toole beguile disparate voters and become the next Prime Minister of Canada? Or will he fail to seduce progressives while simultaneously alienating his core supporters? It’s a fascinating ploy, and we’ll know its effectiveness in just a few weeks.

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So there you have it. Erin O’Toole just admitted that, if elected, he won’t cut spending at all, in any area. But it’s OK because budgets balance themselves. Is anyone surprised?

No. O’Toole ran for the Tory leadership as “true blue” but he’s been bright red ever since. Social conservatism got the heave-ho first, then free markets, then credible national security, and now the very last bastion of the win-at-all-costs pseudo-conservative, balanced budgets. As if the purpose of establishment conservative parties were to make sure if you get rid of the Liberals you keep their policies.

On Tuesday O’Toole said “Under Justin Trudeau, Canada’s economy is getting worse, not better.” But cornered on where he’d cut to balance the budget, he waved a vast wad of free money instead: “We will grow the economy so that we can get back to balance in a responsible and equitable way without cuts.”

So there isn’t one single spending program that is even too big, let alone undesirable in principle. And no independent value in balancing a budget, no gain from reducing borrowing or taxes. It’s just free money, falling from the sky right into your pocket thanks to Erin the Rainmaker. As Maclean’s email teaser on August 31 put it, “Erin O’Toole, socialist crusader”. You ain’t fooling.

The received wisdom seems to be that the Tories are capitalizing on what one commentator called “the growing frivolity of progressive politics” by emphasizing pragmatic socially conservative working-class values like abortion on demand and endless handouts. But while it is easy to focus on personalities or lack of same in politics, the problem is very widespread, including under Jason Kenney in Alberta. And here it was bound to happen for three reasons.

First, O’Toole is an unashamed political opportunist. And while you may say it’s important to the health of the body politic to evict Justin Trudeau for his many hypocrisies, O’Toole’s shameless pillorying of supposed Red Tory Peter Mackay only to turn far left was either deliberate deceit or so confused as to be mentally useless.

Second, the underlying premises of the fiscally conservative, socially liberal cliché that has dominated politics for 50 years or more are false. As Ted Byfield warned in B.C. Report back in 1993, “The ‘economic conservative’ demands that the cost of government be cut, the deficit reduced, and the debts paid. But he does not face the fact that it was the pursuit of social liberalism that caused the deficit, the debt and the growth of government to begin with. Welfare costs spiralled upward as the family fell apart… Education budgets soared as discipline and standards disintegrated in the schools. Law enforcement became onerous when parents could no longer control their children. There can be no economic conservatism until we find ways of re-establishing social conservatism.”

Third, as Anthony de Jasay warned that same year in The State, some 30 years of competitive electoral auctions, now 60, left little meaningful difference between parties because everyone is already offering the most they can give away to voters for the least pain and there’s little or no surplus to squeeze out. Worse, this orgy of trans-partisan voter-bribing has left the state dangerously overextended; he memorably described politicians and bureaucrats on an accelerating treadmill they dare not jump off and can’t stop.

Thus the attempt to win from the modern, progressive, socialist right starts with ditching social conservatism. Then national security, not because you don’t care (O’Toole served in the military) but because you cannot find a dime for defence given what you’re already spending on “social programs” and what you must promise to add. Then balanced budgets for the same reason.

Think O’Toole has heard of de Jasay’s treadmill? Well, to steal from Leon Trotskii via the Goon Show, it’s heard of him. Likewise does he know the 2021 budget projects interest rising from $22 billion today to $39.3 billion in just four years? And what if rates rise as pedal-to-the-metal monetary policy triggers inflation? I’m not sure what O’Toole thinks of monetary policy if he even does. But I know what it thinks of him.

Of course his position is all about winning, not exactly admirable even in the short run. And what if he does?

He might, based on recent polls. He’d need an outright majority since none of the other socialist parties would prop up what they still hallucinate is a cross between Grover Cleveland and a burning cross. But if so, he’ll have to… govern. Which is about making choices. Often painful choices.

Will he really keep spending $450 billion a year while taking in, at best, $400 billion? Yes, since he doesn’t intend to cut or know how. But no, because in long run you cannot live beyond your means. So the spending promises will be broken. But not until his back is to the wall, as O’Toole just confirmed in jettisoning the last shred of conservatism in his campaign.

And we all saw it coming.

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As the mobs of anti-maskers, anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists and general misanthropes continue to dog prime minister Justin Trudeau on the campaign trail, we saw a connection between what they’ve been saying, and what long-time Conservative MP Cheryl Gallant has been putting on her YouTube channel under the unironic moniker of “Gallant News Network.” And wouldn’t you know it, Erin O’Toole has once again turned a blind eye to Gallant and the unhinged things she has been putting out to the world. Granted, she’s not the only Conservative who has been spreading increasingly ludicrous conspiracy theories and general nuttery, and it’s all been happening while O’Toole has pretended that there is nothing to see here, please disperse.

When asked about this latest Gallant video – since scrubbed from her channel – where she warns people that Trudeau is planning a “climate lockdown” as she considered him a con man and that climate change was his “biggest grift,” O’Toole refused to answer as to whether he found it acceptable, even when asked several times. He later put out a press release that said that his plan takes climate change seriously (it doesn’t) and that all Conservatives are running on said plan – which doesn’t condemn the conspiracy theories, Gallant’s comments, or even more generally the increasingly violent mobs that have been following Trudeau around the country. And this isn’t the first time either.

Gallant was previously in the news in February when video emerged from her addressing campus Conservatives at Queen’s University, saying that Liberals want “all illicit drugs to be legal. They want anything goes in every aspect of life. They want to normalize sexual activity with children,” and that “cultural Marxists” have “taken over every university administration” and are silencing free speech on campuses as part of a broader agenda. “The elites call it the great reset or build back better or green new deal. The names change but the goal remains the same: more power for the powerful and less freedom for everyone else.” O’Toole turned a blind eye there as well. His response to questions about it? “Canadians have other priorities and so do I.”

Mind you, Gallant wasn’t the only one peddling the conspiracy theories about the “Great Reset” as being some kind of New World Order plot, as Pierre Poilievre was also doing so on the floor of the House of Commons, and when pressed on it, O’Toole at the time said that he’s the leader and that people should look to him for the party’s message. (For the record the Great Reset is a World Economic Forum initiative about using the economic recovery from the pandemic to address inadequacies in areas like health, energy and education, and is endorsed by figures such as Prince Charles). Other Conservative MPs, including O’Toole himself, have also tried to build conspiracy theories about things like the CanSino vaccine development program, and in trying to connect the unlikely possibility that COVID-19 was a “lab leak” from the Wuhan Institute of Virology with the firing of the two scientists from the National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg. He was also pretty silent when MPs John Brassard and Kerry-Lynne Findlay were worrying that Chrystia Freeland was supposedly under the thumb of George Soros.

It also should be noted that Gallant has a long history of offensive and outrageous commentary. Back in 2004, she helped to sink the Conservatives’ election chances by telling the media that “the danger in having sexual orientation just listed [in hate propaganda laws], that encompasses, for example, paedophiles. I believe that the caucus as a whole would like to see it repealed.” Because that had a material effect on the Conservatives’ electoral outcome, by the next election, Stephen Harper enforced message discipline among his candidates, and Gallant was carefully handled so that she was never seen by media during a campaign, nor would she be a participant in any debates. O’Toole knows this.

We also need to remember what happened with Derek Sloan, and how during the leadership contest, O’Toole helped to shield him from caucus censure – including the threat of expulsion – after Sloan’s racist tirade about Dr. Theresa Tam having divided loyalties. Of course, this was O’Toole being crassly opportunistic, because he knew he needed second-ballot support from the social conservatives that were flocking to Sloan’s banner, and he needed to show that his “true blue” Conservatism included people like Sloan. Of course, as soon as he secured the leadership, he found the first excuse to have Sloan dumped from the caucus – and it has not gone unnoticed that Gallant has frequently said far worse than Sloan, but she remains securely in caucus, and as we’ve seen in the current instance, secure in her nomination to run for the party yet again.

This particular selective blindness is certainly part of O’Toole’s pattern, which includes the fact that he has largely spent his time as party leader mired in deception, dishonesty, and outright lies as a strategy. He has spent months openly lying with statistics, and encouraging his MPs like Poilievre, to do the same. In refusing to condemn Gallant or Poilievre, he tacitly endorses their lies and conspiracy theories, which makes it hard to take anything O’Toole says seriously. It also makes it all the more galling that many members of the media have spent the campaign to date trying to put forward this notion that O’Toole is some kind of cheerful policy nerd, but that particular image is as much a lie as anything else he’s been saying, whether it’s that he’s “true blue,” or that he’s suddenly a friend of private sector labour unions, never mind his own voting record of trying to quash them with onerous and punitive legislation. How can you take the policy planks – as incoherent as they are – of his platform with any seriousness if he’s done nothing but lie since he became leader, and how can you believe his supposed progressive credentials if he does nothing but turn a blind eye to the hard-right parts of his caucus, or the increasingly rabid base? He has a record that should be considered in the election, and thus far it’s not.

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One of the disadvantages Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had going into this election is that the media had loudly proclaimed him as the race’s clear front-runner.

Yes, I know, that sounds a little counter-intuitive, since leading the pack is usually a good place to be when it comes to races, but keep in mind, political contests are a little bit different; in politics perception often matters more than reality.

And when it comes to perception, all politicians want to be perceived as possessing that most important of political variables: momentum.

That’s to say, they want to be viewed as candidates who are steadily and inexorably gaining support.

Why?

Well, here’s the thing about a lot of voters: they want to feel like they’re on a moving train, that they’re part of a winning team, which means they’ll be more likely to cast their ballot for a political party that seems to have momentum on its side.

It’s not about ideology, it’s not about policy, it’s about wanting to back a winner.

This is why political strategists will do everything they can to create at the least the perception that their party or candidate is on an unstoppable roll.

I remember, while working on a Republican Senate primary race in the USA, a poll came out at the outset of the campaign showing our opponent had about 40 percent support, while my candidate stood at a lowly 13 percent.

Did I despair?

Nope; in fact, that poll gave me a good opportunity to alter the media’s perception.

What I did was send out a news release saying something along the lines of, “Our opponent has clearly stalled in the polls, while we are gaining support.”

I did that because I knew in the not-too-distant future, we’d gain polling points; I also knew our opponent would lose them.

The fact is, once voters start getting focused, once issues start getting clarified, once attacks ads start circulating, it’s more than likely that any politician who’s ahead at the start of a campaign, will inevitably lose ground, while his or her opponents will inevitably gain ground.

This dynamic creates a scenario where it appears that the guy who’s out in front is losing momentum.

So simply put, I wanted to set the stage where I could say, our guy is gaining steam!

To reinforce that message, we started running what I call “switcher” ads; ads which showed “typical voters” saying something like, “I was going to vote for Candidate A, but I’ve changed my mind, I’m now voting for Candidate B.”

At any rate, this brings us back to Trudeau and his early front-runner status.

As could have been predicted, the Prime Minister is slipping in the polls.

In fact, the conventional wisdom as spouted by many of Canada’s pundits is that the Liberals “stumbled out of the gate.”

Of course, this gives Conservative Party leader Erin O’Toole a golden opportunity to play the momentum card.

In addition to pointing out Trudeau’s drop in the polls, the Conservative leader can also refer to the surprise win of the Progressive Conservative Party in Nova Scotia’s recent provincial election, marking it as another sign of the prime minister’s flagging appeal.

On top of all that, there’s peripheral evidence out there to support the idea that the Liberal Party’s brand of left-wing progressivism is also starting to wear out its welcome.

Consider, for instance, how Democratic Governor (and one time media darling) Andrew Cuomo recently resigned from office in disgrace; then there’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom who, right now, is facing a tough recall vote.

More importantly, President Joe Biden seems to be declining in the polls right now, mainly due to his perceived mishandling of the Afghanistan evacuation.

All of these things combined, can help create the impression in the Canadian public’s mind that Trudeau’s train is stuck in its tracks.

Of course, for this to work in his favour O’Toole has to push the momentum narrative quickly and forcefully.

He’s got to get voters to believe it, more crucially, he’s got to get the media to believe it.

To do that, the Conservatives should run their version of “switcher ads”, while other TV spots should show O’Toole surrounded by large enthusiastic and cheering crowds.

His overall message should be — “Join us. Join our winning team!”

If he can pull it off, it’ll help create a narrative to attract more support to his banner, which in turn will mean better polls which in turn will mean more momentum, which means better polls.

It’s a victory cycle.

The reason O’Toole needs to act quickly on this is that momentum is like a TV remote – it’s easy to lose.

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