It’s finally over for Erin O’Toole. He’s officially out as Conservative Party leader. A vote of the caucus on Wednesday sealed his fate. And so ends the most inauspicious tenure of a Conservative leader since, well, the last Conservative Party leader who reportedly wants to be Conservative Party leader again. Such is the sad state of Canada’s “party of Confederation.” Well, at least it was until Stephen Harper took over.
After a weeks-long behind-the-scenes lobbying effort, a letter signed by some 35 MPs triggered the vote that submarined O’Toole’s leadership barely 18 months after he’d taken over the reins. It was as sudden (sort of) as it was out of the blue, with 73 of the party’s 119 caucus MPs voting to replace O’Toole.
It was thought that O’Toole might be able to survive until a leadership review tentatively scheduled for August 2023. But plummeting poll numbers that continued to sink post-election fast-tracked O’Toole’s demise as did his party’s recent support for the Liberals’ bill banning conversion therapy.
The ideologues in the Evangelical and so-called populist wing of the party didn’t like that. Or the fact O’Toole continues to straddle the mushy middle on a host of hot button issues, including gun control and vaccines and vaccine mandates. And so he’s gone.
O’Toole called out his conspirators on Twitter on Monday as news reports of his imminent demise surfaced.
He made no bones on what he thought about the hard-right direction his enemies want to take the party.
“It’s angry, negative, and extreme,” O’Toole wrote. “It is a dead-end; one that would see the party of Confederation become the NDP of the right.”
The other road, he said, is “To recognize that conservatism is organic not static and that a winning message is one of inclusion, optimism, ideas and hope.”
Truer words have never been spoken by the now-former Conservative leader.
But where the hell was this O’Toole during the election and after it when the first rumblings that he may be in trouble emerged? Or when he refused to require MPs to be vaccinated? Or when he sat and watched as members of his caucus made fools of themselves embracing QAnon conspiracy theories that the pandemic is a hoax?
O’Toole tried to coddle dissidents in his caucus. But that only made him look weak to party members and out of touch with mainstream Canadians. He was doing it again in the hours before the vote that sent him packing saying he was willing to change his positions on key issues if MPs supported him. Jesus.
Whether taking on his detractors publicly or exercising his authority as leader to remove them from caucus would have allowed O’Toole to survive is an open question. The Conservative Party has been splintering since Maxime Bernier came within a hair’s breadth of winning the leadership against Andrew Scheer in 2018 and then went off to start his own People’s Party, taking disaffected Cons among the party’s fringe with him. Who’s laughing now?
O’Toole never really had the stomach to take on his detractors within the CPC. The end result was that no one, not members of his own party and not Canadians, know what O’Toole really stands for.
During the Conservative Party leadership, he cast himself as a “True Blue” Conservative ready to “Take Back” Canada. During the election, he flip-flopped on everything from women’s right to choose to gun control to LGBTQ issues to, appease his party’s base. It only served to make him appear out of touch with the rest of Canada.
It made for an untenable situation that was bound to blow up in his face.
Truth is, he was the compromise candidate for a party that didn’t have a whole lot to choose from when Scheer was dispatched after falling flat on his face in Ontario during the 2019 runoff.
It was either O’Toole or Peter MacKay, who started out as the presumptive front runner but lost convincingly when it was clear he wanted to take the party in a decidedly more centrist direction.
The problem for MacKay was that the party is no longer the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada he once led – that is, the party that existed before his deal with the devil Harper and the Reform wing of the party that gave rise to its current incarnation.
If anything, the party has made an even harder right turn in recent years, embracing Trumplicanism and reverting ideologically to what remains of its Reform roots. Indeed, most of its support is now concentrated in the Prairies where Reform, which started out as a separatist movement, was born. And that’s no playbook for winning national elections.
O’Toole was never a good fit for the party. He’s a moderate “big tent” guy. His handlers tried to dress him up as a meat and potatoes Big-C Conservative. They played up his military background. They photoshopped him in campaign literature to make him look more buff and appeal to 30-something white guys they feared they were losing to the People’s Party’s base. They gave him lines to spout that he clearly didn’t believe and ended up making him look like a carnival huckster.
At some point, you’d think someone would say, “Wait a minute. This isn’t working.”
But O’Toole thought he could play both ends of the stick – spoon-feed the base pablum and BS the Canadian public. Neither bought it. September’s election proved that with the Conservatives returning two fewer seats than in 2019. More importantly, they were shut out Canada’s three major cities. They also lost a large number of socially conservative ethnic voters by indulging anti-Muslim and anti-China policies. As a consequence, the party looks a lot like its Reform predecessor under Preston Manning when it blew across the Manitoba border from out West all those years ago. This is to say, xenophobic, anti-Quebec and unable to win votes in cosmopolitan urban centres.
Only today, the party is also bleeding major support in the Conservative heartland in Alberta and Saskatchewan to Bernier’s more right-wing People’s Party. It’s been an exercise in political self-preservation for O’Toole as a result.
He was clearly not the answer. But his departure leaves the Conservative Party and the conservative movement in Canada more adrift from the mainstream than ever.
Those among the MPs behind his exit have compared the choice for the party moving forward as one between Kim Campbell and Harper brands of conservatism. It’s neither.
Clearly, whomever takes over will be closer to the folks who shut down Ottawa this past weekend – in other words, the kind Bernier has been attracting.
Pierre Poilievre, the former Jason Kenney intern whose politics are closer to a Trump QAnon Truther than mainstream Canada, is the name most often mentioned as a possible replacement for O’Toole. Scheer’s name has also been floated.
How either helps the Conservative cause moving forward is anyone’s guess. That’s what ideologues will get ya. By comparison, O’Toole isn’t half bad. Too late now.
What’s left in the wake of his expulsion, however, looks like a recipe for disaster and dysfunction not only for the conservative movement but Canadian politics in general.
