DEPENDING ON HOW COVID-19 CASE NUMBERS EVOLVE, HOW THE FEDERAL CAMPAIGNS COPE WITH PANDEMIC RESTRICTIONS COULD BECOME A SIGNIFICANT NARRATIVE LEADING UP TO SEPT. 20, CHRIS SELLEY WRITES.
Conservative leader makes foray into `Freedom Province'
The Conservative campaign clearly wants everyone to know it takes the fourth wave of COVID-19 very, very seriously. It bolsters leader Erin O'Toole's position that Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau's election call was “reckless.” Except during photo ops with his wife Rebecca, daughter Mollie and son Jack, and when speaking into a microphone, O'Toole is always masked in public. His campaign workers and volunteers follow suit quite assiduously. Reporters along for the ride self-administer and submit rapid antigen tests every morning.
The charming suburban Quebec City beer garden where O'Toole held his first open-to-thepublic campaign event on Wednesday afternoon had posted its masking policy at the entrance: wear a mask or don't, it's up to you. But when Chicoutimi-Le Fjord MP Richard Martel took the stage to introduce O'Toole, he politely suggested it was best the crowd mask up for safety. (There wasn't a lot of uptake, perhaps because a good few patrons hadn't actually come to see O'Toole ... and were eating.)
This policy makes good political sense. Justin Trudeau's Liberals are trying ever more shamelessly by the hour to make a ballot question out of barely discernible practical distinctions between their and the Conservatives' stances on vaccination. Best not give them any ammunition.
O'Toole does not shake hands with supporters, or even bump fists. He bumps elbows instead. (O'Toole, an Air Force veteran, even bumped elbows with two Canadian soldiers on the tarmac at Edmonton airport on Saturday afternoon: An Air North 737 was serendipitously deplaning scores of them on their way to training exercises at CFB Wainwright, just as his campaign plane was boarding for Vancouver.)
Hugs are certainly not on offer, officially. But O'Toole met his match on Friday night at an outdoor rally on the Saskatoon Exhibition grounds. As he greeted 175 or so supporters seated at picnic tables, an older woman in a Conservative cap approached him, suggested they had hugged during a previous encounter, and asked for another.
O'Toole politely declined. She looked wounded. It was awkward. Within a few moments she had her arms around his neck and he was doing his very best not to reciprocate. His right arm was at roughly three o'clock, bent 90 degrees at the elbow as if holding a ski pole; his left arm was extended almost straight down at his side. His hands both made fists, as if he might raise them heavenward in exasperation.
You would have to be made of stone, or be a rabid non-Conservative partisan, to have found it anything but endearingly funny.
Saskatoon was O'Toole's first event open to the public in what one might call, complimentarily or otherwise, the Freedom Provinces. The government in Regina flushed its last COVID restrictions on July 11. We shall see how that works out, but for now, good times are to be had.
I had never visited the city before, shamefully, but downtown was buzzing on Friday night. Glass Tiger was Friday's headliner at the Rock the River festival, on the banks of the South Saskatchewan. The restaurants nearby were full or very nearly full — and if they weren't full, it wasn't because capacity was limited by statute.
The journalists following O'Toole's campaign poured into the Cathedral Social Hall for dinner masked up to the nines, and we probably stood out like sore Ontarian thumbs. Later, a colleague remarked with amazement that even servers weren't wearing masks. Among the merrymakers at Cathedral Social Hall were members of Saturday night's Rock the River headliners, Honeymoon Suite. Normalcy. What a concept.
Canada has many more than two solitudes, but that might be one of the biggest nowadays: Is life back to normal, or is it not? Depending on how case numbers evolve in coming weeks, the answer, and how the federal campaigns cope with it, could become a significant narrative leading up to Sept. 20.
In the meantime, O'Toole has his original sin to deal with in Western Canada.
“A carbon tax is not an environmental plan, it is a tax plan,” his leadership platform hissed. And now, he proposes a price on carbon: a maximum of $50 per tonne. It's much less than the $170 Trudeau has proposed by 2030, but it's a hell of a lot more than $0.
At least one Conservative supporter at O'Toole's Saskatoon event took the Conservative leader politely but sternly to task for what he called, quite rightly, a “flip-flop.” The phrase “pissed-off farmers” came up.
“(My plan) does price carbon and I do get some questions about it, and sometimes some people (are) frustrated about it,” O'Toole conceded in Edmonton on Saturday morning. “But it shows my commitment. And by the time I had finished that conversation, (he) understood . ... My plan will meet our Paris (Agreement) commitments, but will have vastly better jobs and investment numbers than Mr. Trudeau's ever-increasing carbon tax.”
For “get-rid-of-Justin-Trudeau” voters, that might be enough. Climate change voters are almost certainly off the table for the Conservatives anyway. For the rest, who knows? It's much too early to predict what will decide this election. But it thus far looks conceivable that O'Toole himself, unlike his predecessor, might not be author or even co-author of any misfortunes that lie ahead of him.
O'Toole's campaign flew from Edmonton to Vancouver Saturday afternoon for a rally in Delta, B.C., and a drug-policy announcement in New Westminster on Sunday morning, and was returning to Ottawa on Sunday evening.