O’LEARY IS NOT CANADA’S ANSWER TO TRUMP.
Much more mainstream on policy issues
When Kevin O’Leary, part-time Canadian resident and full- time TV troll, walked into conservative Canada’s answer to ComicCon Thursday night, the gravity of the ballroom — in a convention centre attached to an Ottawa mall — shifted around him.
The campus partisans came first, fan boys in first suits, lapels overladen with pins. They lined up four deep for selfies. O’Leary, tanned and smaller than you’d imagine — seemed slightly pained between smiles. He posed with each student before circling out and moving on, a steady halo of cameras and gawkers surrounding him everywhere he moved.
In a leadership race dominated by second-tier ex-ministers and one- issue cranks, O’Leary has emerged as, if not the favourite, than a favourite to become the next Conservative chief. Strategists from other campaigns and unaligned insiders almost universally agree he has a real chance to win. In fact, that’s about the only thing all of them accept as true.
Thanks to t he party’s byzantine selection process, the 14- candidate field and a lack of big names, the Conservative race remains nearly impossible to predict two and a half months out.
O’Leary’s rise from television loudmouth to possible favourite for Conservative leader has been generally seen as part of a wider global phenomenon: the growth of the kind of nativist, antielite populism that helped elect Donald Trump. It would certainly be easy enough to make an argument after a weekend at Manning that some threads of that are alive in conservatism here. The conference organizers seemed to bend over backwards to give voice to elements that might once have been seen as fringe.
There were multiple sessions on combating Islamic extremism that featured far more fearmongering than actual debate. There was a panel called “Down with the elites?” that gave Doug Ford the chance to air his usual grievances. But in truth, O’Leary seems like an odd fit for that mantle.
He does on the surface resemble Trump in several ways. Both are stars of reality TV, famous for pitching a brand of business moxie and narcissistic flair. Both practise a kind of insult comic politics that travels well on social media. But on policy, O’Leary seems much more mainstream. He is pro-choice and pro- LGBTQ rights. He’s pro- trade and pro- immigration. He seems, in reality, more like an end run around Trumpism than a Canadian articulation of the creed.
Based on the conversations and panels at the Manning Conference, the Conservative Party doesn’t seem to know what it’s members want any more than anyone else does right now. Some are clearly itching for a fight on identity politics.
O’Leary and his team hope to run him on jobs and the economy and a general dislike among conservatives for the Trudeau name. He would be Stephen Harper, in other words, but with more bluster: A boastful celebrity, sure, but a centre-right one at that.
What no one knows yet, and what the Manning Conference failed to make clear, is how big the audience for an actual new-right, populist might be in the party.
The fact he’s doing as well as most assume he has, that when he appears, people circle and gawk and follow along, might indicate a deep desire among some for an outsider, for an end to the way things have always been.
On the other hand, it might just be this: unlike his opponents, people outside of Ottawa actually know O’Leary’s name.