{"id":200541,"date":"2021-03-12T16:01:29","date_gmt":"2021-03-12T13:01:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/erin-otoole-question-mark-macleans-ca\/"},"modified":"2021-03-12T16:01:29","modified_gmt":"2021-03-12T13:01:29","slug":"erin-otoole-question-mark-macleans-ca","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/erin-otoole-question-mark-macleans-ca\/","title":{"rendered":"#Erin O’Toole, question mark – Macleans.ca"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Erin O’Toole, question mark – Macleans.ca<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n Paul Wells: The Conservative leader can only be sure of having one shot, and people in his party are still not sure what that shot will look like\n <\/div>\n
\n The good news<\/a> for Conservative Leader Erin O\u2019Toole, as an election looms more or less ominously, is that winners often look like losers before they win. In July 2005 I attended a dinner at the Calgary Stampede with assorted federal Conservatives. \u201cStephen Harper has earned the right to run one more campaign,\u201d one said mournfully. \u201cWe\u2019ll do our best and then pick up the pieces.\u201d Seven months later Harper was Prime Minister.<\/p>\n

In May 2015 I ran into Justin Trudeau at a Kentucky Derby party at the U.S. ambassador\u2019s residence. The Liberals were in third place in the polls. \u201cThe Conservatives have made this about whether we have any ideas,\u201d he told me. \u201cThat\u2019s easy to fix.\u201d Two days later he announced plans for a Canada Child Benefit. Six months later he was Prime Minister.<\/p>\n

The bad news for O\u2019Toole is that, on the other hand, losers often look like losers before they lose. St\u00e9phane Dion and Michael Ignatieff and Thomas Mulcair and Andrew Scheer all had plans for victory that didn\u2019t work. None was permitted by his party to try again. O\u2019Toole can only be sure of one shot, and talking to Conservatives this week, what struck me was that they still don\u2019t know what that shot will look like.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s normal for a leader to have closely-held policy positions as a campaign app<\/a>roaches. It\u2019s less common for a party to be a week from a national convention<\/a> and\u2014two? Three? Six?\u2014months from a general<\/a> election and have no idea what the party will propose on major issues.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t feel like there\u2019s a threat<\/em> to his leadership,\u201d one MP who\u2019s never struck me as any kind of troublemaker said this week, speaking on condition of anonymity because they\u2019re no fool. \u201cThere\u2019s frustration<\/em> with his leadership. Nobody\u2019s saying, \u2018We so-cons [social<\/a> conservatives] need to rise up,\u2019 or \u2018Next time we\u2019re going to be united behind this other person.\u2019 There\u2019s no danger of a coup, but people are saying, \u2018Let\u2019s go<\/em>. Tell us what you stand for and we\u2019ll get behind it and support it.’\u201d<\/p>\n

This person characterized O\u2019Toole\u2019s public message to date as, \u201cWe\u2019re going to do everything the Liberals are doing, only better.\u201d And they weren\u2019t the only one to express frustration with the party\u2019s repeated attempts to re-introduce the leader as a personality<\/a> instead of saying much about Conservative ideas or Liberal errors. \u201cWe can\u2019t just keep running ads saying, \u2018Nobody knows who I am, please visit my website.’\u201d<\/p>\n

Two of the biggest question marks facing the party are matters that once seemed settled, at least within the Conservative Party\u2019s internal culture. (Canadians could decide whether they liked the answers, but at least Conservatives had answers.) The first is the place within the party of religious conservatives whose views, especially on abortion, drive their political engagement. The second is what to do about curbing carbon emissions as a response to climate change.<\/p>\n

On climate change, the party had a clear debate in its 2017 leadership contest, with candidate Mike Chong urging the party to back a carbon tax, and every other real or imagined candidate saying, \u201cNope.\u201d Chong lost big, and every other candidate won. Well, at least at first. Andrew Scheer joined a national coalition of conservative leaders<\/a> with, at best, minimalist carbon-reduction plans, and he got absolutely shut down at the Manitoba-Ontario border. Nor was he helped by having no answer on assorted social-conservative questions more persuasive than a promise to refrain from doing what he plainly wished he could.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Toole won the leadership on his second try by running to Scheer\u2019s right and, essentially, building a coalition of Conservatives who bought the act and Conservatives who knew it was baloney. Turns out the two halves of that coalition are having a hard time getting along.<\/p>\n

Those who come from the West and especially Alberta are starting to suspect the cheerfully inoffensive O\u2019Toole they knew from 2012 to 2019 was the real one, and the firebrand who showed up for a leadership campaign in 2020 was fibbing. They didn\u2019t run four national election campaigns against carbon taxes between 2008 and 2019, winning two of those elections and losing two more, because they thought it was strategically clever. They ran against carbon taxes because they don\u2019t want carbon taxes. They\u2019re less and less sure<\/a> the new boss agrees with them.<\/p>\n

Much of their concern centres on the presence around O\u2019Toole of senior Ontario advisors like Dan Robertson and Walied Soliman, who worked for Patrick Brown when he was leader of Ontario\u2019s provincial Conservatives. Brown was the only prominent Conservative leader in Canada who wanted to accept the Trudeau Liberals\u2019 federal carbon tax<\/a>. So there\u2019s plenty of reason to speculate about what O\u2019Toole would do. And since his own caucus doesn\u2019t know more than you or I do, there\u2019s no reason to refrain from speculating.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not as though there were an obvious policy on carbon taxes that O\u2019Toole refuses to see. One longtime Harper Conservative acknowledged it\u2019s a harder question today than it was when Conservatives who opposed carbon taxes used to routinely stomp their opponents. Public opinion keeps shifting and the markets are starting to put their foot down<\/a> too. Even Jason Kenney lately claims to discern complexity<\/a> on the climate file. Not that Kenney is lately seen as a model of Conservative victory, even in Conservative circles.<\/p>\n

Which brings us to the last bit of trouble for O\u2019Toole. The party\u2019s activist and donor base remains its right wing, overwhelmingly based in Alberta, Saskatchewan and the British Columbia interior. Stephen Harper lived in the party\u2019s geographic and ideological centre of gravity. Erin O\u2019Toole doesn\u2019t. When there\u2019s tension between the party\u2019s factions, he\u2019s poorly placed to defuse those disputes. His roots are in Progressive Conservative parties in Nova Scotia and Ontario. And unlike Harper, who leaned heavily on Progressive Conservatives like Peter MacKay and Marjory LeBreton to explain to Tory alumni the benefits of unity, O\u2019Toole has no prominent and loyal Alberta Conservative loudly protecting his right flank.<\/p>\n

If he picks up a few more points of support, none of this will matter. That\u2019s clearly his game<\/a>. And if he doesn\u2019t? One veteran Conservative told me the party is unified for now, more or less, by the imperative of defeating Justin Trudeau. But if the Liberals win their majority back, Canadian Conservatism will have four years to revisit whether its various factions feel like sharing one party. And that\u2019s the kind of debate that takes place whether a leader wants it to or not.
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