Lawrence Martin writes that, if you look at the recent history of the Conservative Party, what happened yesterday shouldn't be a surprise:
Going by the Conservative Party’s current criteria for turfing its leaders, Stephen Harper would never have become prime minister. He would have been ditched after only holding the Liberals to a minority in 2004.
The same thing would have happened to Liberals Lester Pearson and Wilfrid Laurier, who lost their first campaigns. They would never have become prime ministers. Tory Robert Stanfield was allowed three election defeats before having to step aside.
Erin O’Toole has received no such tolerance for his one defeat. He is out, guillotined by his party, brutally repudiated by a caucus vote of 75-43 after only 17 months on the job and one lost election, in which he won the popular vote. He’s gone now, reduced to rubble because he did what no Conservative leader can do. He ran afoul of the party’s hard-right base.
The Conservatives will now hold a leadership convention to crown their sixth leader – yep, sixth, including interims – since Justin Trudeau took over the Liberals in 2013.
For Conservatives, ditching leaders is normal behaviour:
It dispatched Andrew Scheer in a flash, Stockwell Day in a New York minute and Joe Clark in a leadership review. When the Mulroney Conservatives won a second straight majority in 1988, it wasn’t enough. The party proceeded to detonate into three factions – Tories, the Reform Party and the Bloc Québécois.
Mr. O’Toole had the daunting task of trying to appeal to both the party’s Western populists and Eastern pragmatists. In doing so, he bounced around like a fish on a dock. The chameleon approach worked for him in winning the leadership when he transformed himself into a true-blue type. But at the helm, he tried to tack moderate and it backfired.
He was all over the map on the trucker convoy. He alienated the base of the party on guns, on climate change and on other issues. He treated dissidents with disdain and his popularity with the public plunged well below that of the party itself. Hence the gang-up.
Conservatives like to think of themselves as the party of John A. Macdonald. Obviously, they aren't.
Image: reddit
