Erin O'Toole has no good options. Althia Raj writes:
No matter what happens tomorrow — whether Conservative MPs show Erin O’Toole the door or keep him as leader — the result will be a deeply divided caucus and a dead or dying leader at their feet.
MPs expect the vote will be close; each side is predicting victory.
The group of MPs who want to see O’Toole gone hold various grievances about their leader.
Some believe O’Toole’s office leaked disparaging information about Alberta MP Shannon Stubbs to a newspaper and that the leader lied about it to caucus.
Some feel betrayed O’Toole promised to uphold conscience rights during his leadership, only to reverse course during the election campaign and surprise MPs with a unanimous consent motion in Parliament giving swift passage to the Liberals’ conversion therapy ban.
Some are disappointed the party lost seats in Western Canada and failed to crack the suburbs around the Greater Toronto Area. They feel the leader is insufficiently focused on outreach to ethnic communities, and are dismayed he won’t denounce Quebec’s discriminatory Bill 21.
Some just don’t like him. Many, actually. Several Conservatives during the last leadership race told me they chose to support Peter MacKay, despite his pro-choice stance, because they felt he was a better person. In the past week, O’Toole has been called a bully privately, and a liar publicly by his own MPs. Under the cloak of anonymity, they speak of his vindictiveness.
Mostly what unites the dissenters is a belief that they cannot win with O’Toole at the helm. That his flip flops, over the carbon tax, gun control, or even last week’s meeting with truckers, are too frequent. That O’Toole can’t take a stand or keep his message focused. That he lacks authenticity. This view, coupled with his declining approval rating, last week’s whitewash report of his election performance, and the party’s latest fundraising numbers — the worst Q4 result since 2004 — made for a toxic brew.
All of these complaints point to a bigger problem than O'Toole. The root of the problem is the party itself. The Conservative Party is a gathering of people who are driven by their grievances -- and, of those, there are many.
Whatever you think of Justin Trudeau, the Conservatives are not the party to govern Canada.
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