Sooner Or Later

Sooner or later, Michael Harris writes, Erin O'Toole is going to be confronted with his own failure:

Sooner or later, Erin O’Toole is going to have to admit that his stroll down the left bank of Canada’s political canal is a failure.

There is the obvious failure measured by seats won in the last federal election. Poor old Andrew Scheer got the Julius Caesar treatment after his one and only election as Conservative leader, and Scheer added more seats to the party’s total in the 2019 election than it won under Stephen Harper the election prior. Erin O’Toole lost seats compared to his predecessor’s numbers. That’s failure in neon.

O’Toole’s attempt to claim a victory of sorts by saying that the Conservatives had prevented Justin Trudeau from getting a majority was a dog that wouldn’t hunt from the get-go. Political parties look to their leaders for victory, not glib rationalizations for failure.   

O'Toole wants to drag his party to the left. The problem is that his party doesn't want to go there:

While O’Toole tries to save his job, the CPC base, or at least the hard right portion of it, is stewing over the party’s drift to the left and its defeat. The exclusion of anti-vaxxers from the Shadow Cabinet, particularly Leslyn Lewis, will only confirm that O’Toole is determined to abandon socially conservative policies. That is a big problem for the party, not just Erin O’Toole. As Jenny Byrne succinctly put it on a recent podcast, Conservatives don’t want to be Liberals.

That is the deep failure of Erin O’Toole’s leadership. It is one thing to go down fighting the good fight for your beliefs. You pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and await the next fray. You still have your beliefs intact.  

It is a very different thing to unilaterally exchange core Conservative positions for a more progressive agenda, as O’Toole did in the last election, all because you believe it is the secret sauce for winning. That leaves the base confused. If you lose, as the CPC did, the confusion eventually turns to anger. At the heart of the anger is the suspicion that it was because you abandoned conservative values that you lost.  

The irony is that Erin O’Toole would have been lionized as a political genius if he had defeated Justin Trudeau and the Liberals by shifting to the left. Much is forgiven when a leader wins the only prize that matters in politics: power.  

But Erin O’Toole and his inner sanctum lost the election. They got the country wrong.  They insulted part of their own base. That leaves the leader as a man who now cannot lead from either the right or the left in any future election, at least not with any real hope of winning. Key elements of the right will never trust him again. Canadians have already resoundingly rejected his masquerade as a progressive.

Sooner or later, all of the chickens will come home to roost.

Image: The Hill Times