Different chef cooking from same recipe
On the heels of back-to-back leadership debates, the campaign to succeed Andrew Scheer as federal Conservative leader is more than ever Peter MacKay’s to lose.
Going into the debates, the former minister was already the widely perceived frontrunner in the race.
But it was a title he largely owed to his credentials as the Tory leader who, along with Stephen Harper, presided over the reunification of the Conservative party and to the decision of a handful of highprofile contenders to take a pass on a leadership run.
MacKay’s mission on the debate podium this week was to live up to his front-runner status.
At a time when the Conservative party has been slipping in voting intentions, he could not afford to give members already rattled by some of his early campaign missteps reasons to flee to his main rival, MP Erin O’Toole.
Over the course of Thursday night’s sedate English-language debate, neither of the two main contenders really laid a glove on the other.
Both offered performances solid enough to reassure party members as to their respective capacities to hold their own against the likes of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau or NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh.
But to emerge from the exercise with the wind in his back, O’Toole would have needed to eclipse MacKay.
That was even truer the night before, on the podium of the French-language debate.
That event — held in a second language that MacKay very publicly struggled with early on in his campaign — offered O’Toole his best and possibly last opportunity to move a crucial chunk of Quebec support over to his side.
The province holds the second-largest number of votes in play in the leadership election and, at the same time, the highest proportion of voters disengaged from the succession battle and the Conservative party itself.
In the lead-up to this week’s debates, many of the province’s Conservatives had yet to make a definitive leadership choice.
The fact that so many Quebec votes were still up for grabs probably goes some way to account for how much more acrimonious the French debate was in comparison to the one held in English the next night.
O’Toole needed to demonstrate that only he had the proficiency needed to survive on a French-language debate podium.
And to do that, he had to get MacKay off his talking points in the hope of causing him to stumble.
Had he succeeded, there might have been a hemorrhage of Quebec support from MacKay’s camp to his own.
Instead the two pretty much fought each other to a draw.
MacKay still has quite a way to go to become as fluent in French as Harper or Scheer. But then, so does O’Toole. The net result of Wednesday’s debate was to take the language card out of the leadership mix.
Overall, MacKay had as good a debate week as he could have hoped for. The cause of party renewal on the other hand did not fare as well.
The party may be about to change its head cook but, if the debates suggested anything, it is that it is not in the process of rewriting its last election menu.
Take climate change. In the last campaign, the Conservatives lost votes over the perception that they were not serious about the issue.
But if an election were held tomorrow, the plan the party would put forward would be built on the same premises as Scheer’s.
As prime minister, O’Toole and MacKay would similarly dismantle the climate-change framework put in place by the Liberals, including, of course, the carbon tax.
Both talk a bigger game on pipeline building than on transitioning to a carbon-free economy.
Some Conservatives believe the pandemic and its economic fallout will dispense their party from committing to more heavy lifting on climate change in the next federal election.
They expect/hope for a replay of the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, when the focus of the electorate shifted to the economy at the expense of climate change.
That shift paved the way to the 2011 Conservative majority victory.
In whole or in part, the aspirants to lead the Conservative party seem to share that assessment.
In fact, with two social conservatives — Ontario MP Derek Sloan and Toronto lawyer Leslyn Lewis — rounding out the leadership lineup, this week’s debates featured more talk of turning back the clock on abortion and LGBTQ rights than of moving the country decisively forward on climate change.