O’toole and the rise to victory
Tory has smarts, decency — and an energy crisis
The only political communication to break through my self-imposed summer news blackout was an online ad by Pierre Poilievre that railed against price hikes on homes, food and gas. “Trudeau’s plan to borrow forever means inflation and bankruptcy,” the MP says in an effective walk and talk slot that ended with the curt message: “Pierre Poilievre: Fighting for You.”
The scrappy MP for Carleton is not everyone’s cup of chamomile but for those who like that kind of thing, he is the kind of thing they like a lot. Poilievre has been elected handily in six successive elections, starting in 2004 when he first won on the “fighting for you” banner.
Yet the most conspicuous thing about his pre-election ad was what it did not say — the name of his party and his leader.
Poilievre is the most visible but not the only candidate keen to ensure that Conservative Party leader Erin O’toole’s name does not feature on their promotional material ahead of an election that looks likely to be called next Sunday. The leader is almost entirely absent from Poilievre’s Twitter feed.
One interpretation is that the 42-year-old former cabinet minister is pre-positioning himself for a post-election leadership race. If O’toole falters, Poilievre would emerge the pre-emptive favourite to succeed him, even if that risked redefining insanity as the act of choosing a polarizing figure as leader and expecting a meeting of minds.
More likely, Poilievre is worried about his own re-election and has no confidence in the central campaign to deliver any support.
A glance at the latest polls tells you why candidates are keeping their leader at arm’s length. A recent Abacus poll had the Liberals 12 points ahead, with the Conservative vote intention languishing at 25 per cent.
Only four in 10 Canadians would even consider voting for the party. O’toole’s personal numbers are even more dismal. Since he was elected leader last summer, positive impressions of him among voters have flatlined, while negative impressions have doubled. The more people see of him, the less they like him, it appears. Quite frankly, I don’t get it. His performance lacks the energy that characterized Poilievre’s video but he is an intelligent, fundamentally decent family man who should resonate with middle-aged, middle-income suburbanites across the country. Perhaps he will.
Anything can happen in an election campaign. But usually it doesn’t — at least, we typically don’t see the kind of dramatic swings in support O’toole needs to win.
As with his two predecessors, the Conservative leader is handicapped by a commitment to fiscal discipline in a fight with two parties that seem to believe that inflation and high interest rates are fairy tales designed to frighten the kids.
O’toole was in Belleville on Monday, making a pre-campaign campaign stop that brought to mind a quote by Trudeau the Elder, who once said that there are no spectacular choices in a country like Canada. The announcement, such as it was, suggested that the Liberal government has ignored rural Canada but that an O’toole ministry would be more attuned to life outside the big cities. The country would be connected by rural broadband five years ahead of schedule and a new ministry of rural affairs would be created, he said.
The Conservative leader will hope he hit his mark because he needs this seat. The Conservatives lost the Bay of Quinte by just 2.4 per cent of the vote in 2019 — one of 24 seats the party lost by six points or less. Polls analyst Eric Grenier christened the forthcoming tilt “the six per cent election” on his website, The Writ (each party, he argues, can achieve its goals if it wins seats lost by six percentage points or less in 2019).
If Andrew Scheer had won those 24 seats he would be prime minister, so O’toole is building a platform aimed at wooing voters in the suburbs of Toronto and Vancouver, and in smaller cities like Belleville, Fredericton, Saint John, Peterborough and Kitchener.
The only strategic advantage he has is that almost no one believes he can win the election — a list that apparently includes many of his own candidates. Low expectations for the Conservatives might end up bolstering NDP support, which in turn might benefit the Conservatives in some seats. In 2019, the Liberals used the time-honoured spectre of a Conservative victory to drive down the NDP vote by two to three points in Ontario.
The situation is probably not as bleak as recent polls suggest. The floor for Conservative support has been higher than 25 per cent in past elections — even when the right was split in 2000, the Canadian Alliance under Stockwell Day won 25.4 per cent of the vote and Joe Clark’s Progressive Conservatives gained a further 12 per cent.
But relying on favourable vote-splits is not exactly the King’s Gambit. O’toole could do worse than pick up on the energy and message delivery Poilievre displayed in a recent video called Open the Gates, in which he decried Canada’s “gatekeeper economy,” a place where nothing can get done or built.
Canada should be the “easiest place to build a business,” the “fastest place to get sign off to build something” and “the free-est place to do commerce, to work, to hire, to take risks and even to win.” It worked at a visceral level, even if real life is much more messy.
But Poilievre understands instinctively something that O’toole does not — it’s not what you say to voters that matters, it’s how you make them feel.
THE ONLY STRATEGIC ADVANTAGE HE HAS IS THAT ALMOST NO ONE BELIEVES HE CAN WIN.