Truckers came gunning for Justin Trudeau. They got Erin O’Toole instead

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/02/2022 (1660 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

They rolled into Ottawa looking to get rid of Justin Trudeau, but they got the Conservative leader instead.

In so doing, the so-called “Freedom Convoy” currently occupying Ottawa has actually handed Trudeau a gift, at least in the short term.

A fractured opposition, possibly drifting farther to the right, is now plunged into a leadership contest — its third in five years — which probably means that Trudeau doesn’t have to worry about his government being toppled for a while.

Yet bizarrely, it didn’t take long for truck horns to start blaring in celebration on Wednesday when Conservative MPs unceremoniously dumped leader Erin O’Toole. Had it not been for the fact that the trucks were still stubbornly parked in place in front of Parliament Hill, they might have done a victory lap.

“Freedom Convoy Success,” declared Keean Bexte, a self-proclaimed Alberta nationalist who writes for an outlet called The Counter Signal.

“The Freedom Convoy that made its way to Ottawa was the catalyst for the caucus revolt which will see O’Toole thrown out of the opposition leader’s office, as well as his historic publically (sic) subsidized home, Stornoway,” Bexte wrote.

There’s nothing subtle about that warning: Any Conservative leader who tries to reach for the middle, as O’Toole did, will not succeed. If that is true, Liberals could remain in power for a while, as they did through the 1990s and early 2000s, when the right in Canada was split between progressive and populist conservatives.

Of course, Conservative MPs were insisting on Wednesday that the party is united and headed back on the road to government. But that’s what O’Toole thought too when he succeeded Andrew Scheer in 2020, and that’s what Scheer thought when he took over for Stephen Harper in 2017.

The problem may not be in who’s leading this party, as many have begun to observe, but who is following it. Ever since Harper left in the wake of his 2015 election defeat, Conservatives have been struggling to figure out whether they’re aiming for the political centre of Canada or the more populist, angry right.

The fact that they haven’t fully appealed to either shows that their aim may be as off as the convoy protesters — they keep wanting to hurt Trudeau, but they keep hurting themselves.

It isn’t an easy time to be a Conservative right now, especially the kind that is focused on small government and mistrust of institutions, as Harper was. The pandemic, for many Canadians, has vividly demonstrated the need for government and a social safety net. In the last federal election, roughly six in 10 Canadians voted for progressive parties, while fewer than four in 10 voted for the Conservatives and the People’s Party of Canada.

Mistrust of institutions, meanwhile, has metastasized into the virulent kind of hate for all politicians that is on display through the convoy protest in Ottawa — a close cousin of the violent anger that keeps Donald Trump as a political force in the U.S. It lives and grows on social media.

The trouble is that this free-floating anger can quickly turn on anyone in institutions, especially any politician who refuses to see the world in black and white, good versus evil.

This is the debate that is going to consume the Conservative party as it now falls into another leadership contest — does it go looking for the votes it lost to Maxime Bernier and the People’s Party since he broke away from Conservatives or does it try again, as O’Toole did during the election, to find some moderate, considered middle?

Analysis of political trends in this country would indicate that the path back to power is through the middle — hard as that is for some hard-right Conservatives to hear. The Environics Institute carried out a comparison of polarization in the U.S. and Canada late last year and found that while U.S. parties find their voting base at the extremes, Canada’s three main federal parties draw their support from the middle.

Yet the Conservatives, for three elections now, have appeared to bank their hopes on getting back to government on the conviction that all they need to do is make voters hate Trudeau as much as they do. One of the potential leadership contenders, Pierre Poilievre, has made this his schtick, so much so that the angry convoy protesters were calling for him to replace O’Toole over the weekend. (Or Leslyn Lewis, the rookie MP and former leadership contender who was out cultivating the favour of the protesters too.)

If that’s where the party heads in the next leadership contest, though, Conservatives may again learn the lesson that could now be sinking in with the truckers’ protest. If you storm on to the scene looking only to get Trudeau out of power, you might just misfire and keep him in power even longer.

Correction — Feb. 3, 2022: Former prime minister Stephen Harper was defeated in the 2015 federal election. A previous version of this article said he was defeated in 2016.

Susan Delacourt is an Ottawa-based columnist covering national politics for the Star. Reach her via email: sdelacourt@thestar.ca or follow her on Twitter: @susandelacourt