It’s O’Toole’s campaign to lose but he needs to find voice to speak to Canadian majority

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/09/2021 (1206 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

You could call it the tale of two O’Tooles.

For the first couple of weeks in the federal election campaign and sporadically since then, Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole has made some surprising, unorthodox and even — shall we say — progressive pledges that have rarely found a place in the platforms of right-of-centre parties in this country.

Mandating worker representation on the boards of publicly traded companies; enhanced hourly and EI benefits for working Canadians; the banning of puppy mills and enhancement of animal welfare programs; penalties for retail price gouging; forcing companies to pay CPP and EI benefits for gig employees; giving employee pensioners priority over other creditors in bankruptcy proceedings.

And then, around the start of the third week of the campaign, O’Toole pivoted to sound some more familiar notes for his core supporters: the revival of oil and gas pipelines; vague promises to balance the federal budget without cuts to funding or services; hiring more police officers; job creation through freer trade; tax credits for small businesses making capital investments; and a December-long GST holiday to spur retail activity.

Together, it makes for a fascinating hybrid approach: unleash a few unorthodox pledges to draw the attention of centrist voters, and then regain focus on a medley of right-of-centre hits to remind core supporters they are still Conservatives.

Clever? Absolutely. Effective? That is the great question hanging over the Conservative campaign.

There is little doubt the Conservatives have made gains. Although most polls still have the Tories and Liberals in a statistical dead heat, O’Toole has led the Tories to a small but noticeable advantage in support among committed voters, while erasing the small lead the Liberals enjoyed in the immediate pre-writ period.

However, the Conservatives have not been able to find enough support outside their core to break away from the pack.

Although most seat projections show the Tories with a clear shot at forming a minority government, they may have hit a ceiling of support. At this stage, it appears the Tories will need help from the Bloc Quebecois in Quebec and the NDP just about everywhere else if they hope to have any hope of a convincing election victory.

And that can only happen if voters look past the great Achilles heel of the Conservative Party: the need to build its campaign around policies that swim directly against the current of public opinion.

For example, O’Toole’s pledge to hire more cops is a Conservative party hit. Unfortunately, voters in most major cities are concerned about their ability to pay for the bloated police forces they already have.

On climate change, O’Toole made a pre-writ bid to shore up his party’s environmental bona fides by bravely introducing a carbon pricing mechanism. But not only did his policy fail to curry support from Canadians concerned about climate change, it sparked a backlash from hardcore supporters in Alberta and Saskatchewan, for whom carbon pricing is a crime against humanity.

O’Toole faces a similar problem on gun control. The Liberals routinely use gun control — and the broad public support for it — as a wedge issue with the Tories. So, it was hardly a surprise last week when Trudeau not only reminded voters his government banned more than 1,500 assault-style firearms in 2020, but also that the Conservative campaign has pledged to repeal the ban.

Recognizing that he had been cornered, O’Toole reversed course and pledged to keep the assault weapon ban in place while the party does a full review of Liberal gun control laws.

In a campaign where the Tories outwitted the Liberals on several occasions, it was a horrible miscalculation. O’Toole really needed to support the ban and take the issue off the table. It would have made some Tories angry. But O’Toole needed to spend some of the gaudy pluralities the Tories enjoy in Western Canada in pursuit of a bigger goal: defeating the Liberals.

The real irony of the Conservative campaign is that the Liberals are vulnerable on both climate change and gun control.

Although they have legitimate records on both files, there are many Canadians who think the Trudeau should have done more. But the classic Conservative platform prevents them from criticizing the Liberals for not moving quickly enough to address climate change, or not being comprehensive enough in their gun-control measures.

The Tories are also weighed down by thread-bare and incomplete policies on other important issues.

The Tory plan to address pandemic threats is nothing more than a string of buzzwords without a single concrete action attached. O’Toole’s promise to balance the federal budget without cutting programs is a classic mantra of fiscal conservatives. It’s also completely lacking in credibility. By now, most Canadians know that expedited deficit-reduction plans require austerity.

O’Toole’s Conservatives have been presented with a very special opportunity to unseat a Liberal government that continues to suffer largely from its own arrogance. Trudeau’s decision to seek a renewed and (he hoped) majority mandate with a fourth wave of COVID-19 descending has made him and his party ripe for the plucking.

This is now O’Toole’s campaign to lose. And lose he will if he cannot find a voice to speak to the clear majority of Canadians on the important issues of the day.

 

dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca