O’toole’s Teflon coating a new look

Erin O’toole isn’t angry at Justin Trudeau. Just disappointed. And by the looks of it Friday afternoon, very confident — both in himself and in his campaign, coming out of two debates that almost no one seems to think Trudeau won.

O’toole expected Trudeau to at least “engage on the ideas, to provide some vision … for the country,” he told reporters early Friday afternoon in a suburban idyll next to the Port Credit branch of the Royal Canadian Legion, on the banks of the placid Credit River. (The roar and clatter of commuter trains crossing the river every 90 seconds made it an odd choice of venue, but at least O’toole didn’t arrive by canoe.)

“What have we seen from Mr. Trudeau instead?” asked O’toole. “Day after day of relentless negativity … A campaign based purely on seeking to divide Canadians on issue after issue, with no concern about the damage he does.”

“Justin Trudeau came to power promising a new way of doing things. He promised ‘sunny ways.’ He said he abhorred the politics of division,” O’toole said, mocksadly. “Where did that Justin Trudeau go?”

It’s a wonder he could keep a straight face, so delighted must he be by this desultory shambles of a Liberal campaign.

Some of us thought triggering a back-to-school fourth-wave-pandemic election was a daft risk-reward proposition well before Trudeau took the plunge. But I never imagined the Liberals would let Trudeau out of the stalls with so few answers, never mind compelling ones, to the most basic questions: Why are you proposing to do these things on the election trail instead of doing them in Parliament, where the NDP would only encourage you to be bolder? Why are you putting things you have already done at risk — childcare agreements with eight provinces, for example, all of which were signed just in recent weeks — when they would be so much harder to wind down, having already benefited people, in six or 12 or 18 months?

How on earth did the Liberals think they could run a standard fear-based campaign against the Conservatives when it was Trudeau, all by himself, who by calling an election freed the blue bogeymen from their cages?

Even if the Liberal damage is mostly self-inflicted, though, it is still remarkable how deftly O’toole bats away questions on major policy differences that have stuck fast to other conservative leaders in this country.

Consider child care. O’toole is vowing to tear up those agreements with the provinces after the first year, but has framed his solution as superior: a tax credit that would pay up to 75 per cent of the first $8,000 in childcare costs for the lowest-income claimants.

The costing the Conservatives released this week should make that a much harder political sell: It budgets $2.62 billion over five years for the tax credit, which is less than onetenth what the Liberals have promised to spend creating 250,000 new regulated spaces at $10 per day within five years. The Conservatives offer no such targets, framing it (very defensibly) as a matter of giving parents maximum flexibility: shift workers, gig workers, farmers, and other non-nineto-fivers are usually afterthoughts in government-run daycare programs.

Quebec is much lauded (not least on the campaign trail) for its $8.50-a-day program, but in reality that accounts for less than a third of the child-care spaces in the province. Indeed, the Liberal talking point that tax credits won’t create new child-care spaces is belied most effectively by Quebec: As the C.D. Howe Institute noted in a brief this week, after Quebec boosted its refundable tax credit for non-subsidized child-care spaces in 2009, the number of such spaces increased tenfold over the ensuing decade, whereas subsidized spaces increased just 25 per cent.

Wonkery aside, however, you can surely buy a lot more child care by giving $30 billion to the provinces than you can by giving $2.6 billion to parents. And yet no other leader really landed a glove on O’toole during the debates on this issue, or on the other traditional Conservative pitfalls. Abortion, climate change, gun control — none are really dogging O’toole on the campaign trail the way they have his predecessors and provincial counterparts.

O’toole's call to raise Canadian flags from half-mast, after three months lowered in honour of Indigenous children who died at residential schools, hasn’t produced major controversy. And some potential wedges haven’t even made their way out of the bag: While running for leader, O’toole essentially promised to burn down CBC’S English-language television operations. He now promises a mandate review with an eye to a Pbsstyle model.

That’s revolutionary stuff, and CBC’S more excitable defenders are up in arms. But their umbrage hasn’t broken through as a major election issue in the way one might expect.

If O’toole is developing an ever-thicker non-stick coating, it doesn’t seem to have put him in any compelling position to become prime minister. But at the very least, it offers a glimpse of a better future for his party, if Conservatives are willing to choose halfway decent retail politicians as their leaders. And if they do, the Liberals might have to tear up their whole playbook.

For starters, if they actually want to leave a lasting mark on Canada on things like access to child care, they might try making them a priority in the first four years of their mandates, rather than in the final four weeks.