Making the blues work for O’toole
After the Conservatives lost the 2019 election, it was clear that the playbook that had carried Stephen Harper to power was no longer working.
Lessons from elsewhere, particularly from Boris Johnson’s emphatic victory in the U.K., suggested that the next campaign should appeal to blue-collar voters — people who have been left behind by globalism but who also shun identity politics.
As Harper noted in his book Right Here, Right Now, in an age of disruption “ordinary people” are not interested in parties that offer market-oriented, socially progressive solutions; rather, they tend towards economically interventionist, socially conservative policies that leave them less vulnerable.
New Conservative Leader Erin O’toole recognized the Conservative vote was shrinking and embraced that conclusion with enthusiasm.
Moving a political organization from its traditional centre of gravity is always difficult and O’toole’s marginal position in the Conservative Party (fewer than one in three members voted for him in the first round of the 2020 leadership contest) made it harder still.
This is a party that has bashed unions with some enthusiasm in the past — including the passage of private members bills that required unions to provide more public financial disclosures and to hold secret ballots to certify or decertify a workplace (O’toole voted in favour of both).
But the new leader saw that, if winning the affections of swing voters was important, it was even more crucial to find new voters, as the Liberals did in 2015.
Since crossing that Rubicon, he has made speeches bemoaning the fall in the union membership and issued a Labour Day statement calling for an economic policy that puts workers first.
The strategy has faced a strong internal backlash. If the Conservative Party doesn’t stand for free trade, a market economy and small government, what does it stand for, the critics charged?
But O’toole has faced down the doubters in his own party and crafted an election platform brimming with measures aimed at appealing to people who may not be traditional Conservative voters — extending Employment Insurance sickness benefits to 52 weeks from 26; paying 25 per cent of salaries for new hires for six months; requiring federally regulated employers to include worker representation on their boards, and, obliging gig economy employers to make contributions equivalent to CPP and EI premiums to a portable employee savings account.
Then there is the commitment to spend an extra $60 billion on health care over
the next 10 years — a promise the Liberals have yet to match.
Health has typically been a defensive issue for Conservatives but the central message from O’toole’s team was one of security and care (the campaign slogan is “Secure the Future”).
The promise to spend so much on health was designed to win the blessing of provincial premiers and to neutralize the concern that an O’toole government would slash and burn to balance the budget.
That health pledge mirrors Boris Johnson’s commitment in the British election to provide more nurses and funding for the National Health Service.
There are key differences to the U.K. comparison — blue collar workers were initially won over by Johnson’s pledge to “get Brexit done.” The British Conservative leader also had the advantage of being up against Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn, a leader many working class voters viewed as unpatriotic, hostile to institutions like the military and the monarchy, and soft on terrorism.
But the appeal to economic nationalism and selective intervention by government was crucial to Johnson victory in places like Sedgefield, a former mining community in the northeast of England that had been held by Labour since 1935 (a win that was all the sweeter because it was Tony Blair’s old riding).
The Canadian Conservatives have taken a similar gamble — the risk was that it might upset the party’s voting base; the reward is that, if it works, it works everywhere.
The early signs are that the wager is paying off. A deep dive by The Writ’s Eric Grenier into EKOS’ daily tracking poll suggests that since the election started, the Conservatives have seen big gains among less educated voters, particularly in the 50-64 age group. Party sources are cautious but that their polling is also showing growth among blue collar voters. If that trend continues, we could see some surprising results in parts of Ontario, Quebec and Atlantic Canada that, like Sedgefield, might previously have been viewed as out of reach for the Conservatives.
The efforts to woo workers has not impressed Canada’s big labour unions. Unifor’s Jerry Dias said O’toole’s proposals are a “grab-bag of gimmicks” and an ad campaign by the union warns working class voters not to trust him — “new name, same old Conservatives.”
Can O’toole upend political convention? The Conservatives don’t have much margin for error — even winning by four percentage points in the popular vote would not guarantee a plurality, such is the efficiency of the Liberal vote.
But the pre-election polls that suggested a country at peace with itself, happy with the direction the country is heading, with an opposition general leading his troops into the Liberal guns are all assumptions that have been proven wrong.
People are angry, they are worried about affordability issues and, it turns out, they are not repulsed by a Conservative leader who has carried himself as a reasonable, common-sense alternative to Justin Trudeau.
The traditional home for the blue-collar vote has been the New Democratic Party but senior Conservatives argue the NDP has alienated many workers by prioritizing identity politics under Jagmeet Singh. The Conservatives have countered by trying to appeal to patriotic, “hometown” values and attempting to tie Trudeau and Singh together as leaders more concerned with gender politics than the economic worries of working families.
“There’s a long way to go. A very long way to go. But these people are not voting Liberal. They’re there for us — they’ve always been there for us. We just have to have the courage to change and be acceptable to them,” said one senior campaign official.
A REASONABLE, COMMON-SENSE ALTERNATIVE TO (TRUDEAU).