A closer look at O'toole's move to grow Tory voter base
NEW CONSERVATIVE LEADER AIMS TO GROW PARTY'S BASE IN DISAFFECTED BLUE-COLLAR AREAS
The Conservative Party has a big problem when it comes to winning federal elections, and Erin O'toole's team knows it. While the party reliably draws about a third of the popular vote every election, it has little hope of ever consistently winning majority governments without substantially raising its voter ceiling.
“Conservatives have essentially run the same campaign over and over again since 2006,” one O'toole adviser said. “Strategically, the differences between the campaigns have been marginal ... If we want to win, we have to do something different.”
So O'toole is indeed trying something different, as has become strikingly apparent in his speeches and political ads since being elected leader in August. His goal is to expand the pool of people who vote Conservative, finding new voters among the working class and lower middle class who have drifted away from the left and become disengaged from electoral politics.
If it works, it will reorient Canada's political landscape. But O'toole also risks alienating his existing voter base and party caucus.
To get into sustainable majority territory, the Conservatives need to find another five per cent of voter support, boosting them into the range of 39 per cent of the popular vote.
Since the modern Conservative Party was formed in 2003, only one thing has been proven to work: a strong NDP that saps Liberal strength from the left.
This was the case in 2011, when Stephen Harper's Conservatives won their majority. But in the five other elections, nothing the party tried has gotten their vote share high enough. Peeling off Liberal voters in large numbers is hard to do from the right; if a voter wants Liberal-like policies, they will probably just vote Liberal.
Simply put, when the NDP vote is weak, it spells trouble for the Conservatives.
“Conservatives have been agonizing for as long as I've been involved in politics about what, if anything, we can do about that,” said one person working on O'toole's campaign strategy, who asked not to be named so as to speak more freely. “We need to break out of that. It's a convergence of things completely out of our control, and you can't depend on that. That's not a viable basis for a winning strategy.”
Hence, the unconventional speech O'toole gave to the Canadian Club of Toronto two weeks ago that raised eyebrows across the country.
“It may surprise you to hear a Conservative bemoan the decline of private sector union membership,” said O'toole. “But this was an essential part of the balance between what was good for business and what was good for employees. Today, that balance is dangerously disappearing. Too much power is in the hands of corporate and financial elites who have been only too happy to outsource jobs abroad.”
The speech said Canadian workers used to be able to expect full-time employment, a steady salary and a pension, but that now feels like a “bygone era.”
“Do we really want a nation of Uber drivers?” O'toole said. “Do we really want to abandon a generation of Canadians to some form of Darwinian struggle? A future without the possibility of home ownership? A sense of inevitability? While some benefit, millions are losing hope and resentment is growing.”
He questioned Canada's trading relationship with China, and said his party will put more emphasis on the national interest. “Free markets alone won't solve all our problems,” O'toole said.
Afterward, a panellist on CBC said O'toole sounded more like Bernie Sanders than a Conservative leader. But the strategy behind O'toole's comments is based in part on what's already worked in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, where right-wing parties have been picking up working class votes — and winning elections.
“Look, I think the writing has been on the wall for actually quite some time on this,” said Patrick Muttart, who was instrumental in shaping the campaign strategy for Harper's Conservatives in their string of victories from 2006 to 2011. He spoke with the National Post from London, England, where he now works in the private sector.
In 2005, Muttart started using intensive polling data to segment the Canadian population and pinpoint voters to target through tax breaks and tough-on-crime policies. But as he created an ideological map of Canadian voters, he found there was a “white space” made up of voters who are economically moderate or even left-leaning, but culturally conservative.
“They're not socialist, but they may have left-of-centre instincts on certain things, and are driven more by economic performance rather than economic ideology,” Muttart said.
“But they do tend to be quite culturally conservative in that they believe in the idea of Canadian identity, they believe in the idea of strong, controlled borders, they certainly believe that the justice system needs to be tough but fair,” Muttart said. “And they also have a problem with pervasive political correctness, cancel culture, those sorts of things.”
Muttart, who is not advising O'toole, said Harper made some progress in recruiting these voters, but it wasn't a main focus.
“I think under Harper it was more about making traditional conservative economics relevant to the working class, or more white-collar middle class,” he said. “It was selling the agenda to this community. Whereas I think O'toole is trying to do it the other way around. He's putting the voter group first and looking to build out policy from that, so the policy is relevant to them.”
Harper's message was centred on small government, free markets and free trade. Compare that to a video O'toole released on Labour Day, where he promised a “Canada First” economic strategy that “fights for working Canadians.”
“The goal of economic policy should be more than just wealth creation,” O'toole said in the video. “It should be solidarity and the wellness of families — and includes higher wages.”
A few big questions arise out of this. One of them is: who exactly are these voters? The “working class” is a very broad term, and some of the people O'toole hopes to attract aren't necessarily in it.
At least one group of voters O'toole is targeting are trades workers, such as people who belong to construction unions. As Conservatives sometimes point out, it's unionized workers who build the pipelines and natural resource projects championed by their party. But the party's stance against organized labour may be turning away people who would otherwise vote for them.
As one example, there are well over 50,000 construction workers belonging to LIUNA ( Laborers' International Union of North America) in the Greater Toronto Area alone. When O'toole talks about the importance of private sector unions — as opposed to teachers' unions or government workers — this is the type of worker he has in mind.
There are other voters in suburban areas that Conservative strategists believe they could pick up with a more moderate economic message, including in immigrant communities and among white- collar office workers in middle management. These are people who may be culturally conservative by temperament, but more skeptical about rigid free market ideology. Such compromises aren't completely new ground for the Conservatives; even under Harper, the party defended supply management in the dairy sector, for example.
But O'toole's team is also thinking about the more common definition of the working class, people who live outside large cities, have lower levels of education and income, and have become disengaged from politics and estranged from the left-wing parties they once supported.
There are areas of the country where the Conservatives don't consistently win — northwestern Ontario, interior B.C., Atlantic Canada, most of Quebec outside of Montreal — where O'toole's new approach is aimed at expanding the voter pool.
“One of the largest voter blocs in 2019, if you look across the parties, was non-voters,” said Sean Speer, a former Harper strategist who now writes frequently about Conservatives and the working class. “You have a third of eligible voters not voting. If you can get even a fraction of those, you can change the political dynamics.”
Speer, a National Post columnist, said he believes many of these voters should naturally fall into the Conservative camp, but they've perceived the party as “concerned about elite issues” when it comes to economics. He describes them as “people who don't like the left's positioning on cultural issues, but have not been comfortable supporting Conservatives in the past because of their emphasis on markets and capitalism (as ends in themselves).”
“One way to think about it is the people, but another way to think about it is places,” he said. “On the face of it, a place like Sudbury or Thunder Bay ought to be voting Conservative, but it's not.”
One O'toole adviser said Conservatives have to start thinking differently about economic issues.
“The left always goes on about income inequality, and they have a point,” the adviser said. “There is serious inequality in Canada that Conservatives have to wake up to, and that is the inequality that exists primarily between those who are well educated, who live in a city, who have a higher income, and those who don't. The gap just keeps getting bigger and bigger. That's the inequality that needs to be addressed and that Conservatives have to take seriously.”
O'toole's team believes left-wing parties are losing traction with working-class voters. They point to the rail blockades in early 2020, where activists shut down train lines to protest the construction of the Coastal Gaslink Pipeline through Indigenous territory in B.C., despite court orders allowing the construction to proceed. During the leadership race, O'toole promised legislation to make it easier for police to clear blockades of rail lines and other “critical infrastructure.”
“The people who were hurt economically by (the blockades) were working-class people,” one adviser said. “And the NDP and the centre-left came down very firmly on the side of protests.”
But changing the Conservative Party's message on economic issues — and especially saying nice things about organized labour — comes with significant risk as well. There has already been some pushback from caucus members, sources say, though overall most of the party's MPS and senators understand the need to forge a new strategy.
“It's a bit of a reorientation, and of course there'll be resistance to that,” said one party source. “But if you want to keep doing it the same way, you can expect the same result.”
Speer compared it to muscle memory, where Conservative politicians are used to talking a certain way. “I honestly have not heard any evidence that there's hostility or division (in caucus),” he said. “It's more subtle than that. It's just not people's default setting... You don't flip the switch overnight.”
There's also the issue of O'toole's own record. Unions abhorred two Conservative private members' bills that were passed during the Harper majority years, bills C-377 (which forced more financial disclosure on federally regulated unions) and C-525 (which mandated secret ballot certification votes and made it easier to decertify.) O'toole voted in favour of both. When the Liberals won their majority in 2015, one of their first moves was repealing both bills.
O'toole's office did not answer directly when asked whether O'toole regrets his votes on those bills or would vote differently today. “Mr. O'toole is committed to unionized workers and is looking for new ways to support workers,” a spokesperson said. “We will have more to share in the coming weeks.”
Jerry Dias, who as Unifor national president leads the largest private-sector union in the country, isn't about to let O'toole forget about those votes — or the work O'toole did on free trade agreements from 2013 to 2015, when he was parliamentary secretary to the minister of international trade.
“He's really working on the premise that people have short memories,” Dias told the Post. “He says all of the right things, but the problem is his history is the opposite. That's going to be his biggest hurdle, to convince people: `Everything that I have stood for was all bull----. I'm a new man today.'”
O'toole's strategy is aimed at workers, not union leadership. But he's also done himself no favours in this regard. “I will be Jerry Dias's worst nightmare,” O'toole told a crowd last January when he was launching his leadership campaign, describing Dias as one of the “fat-cat union leaders.” O'toole's campaign later gleefully boasted about how Dias was running attack ads against him.
Dias said O'toole is now trying to take the same path as Donald Trump in the U.S., and he thinks Canadians will see through the sudden shift to union-friendly messaging.
“I just don't see it as genuine,” Dias said. “Am I pleased that he's saying it? Yes. Do I believe he means it? No.”
That brings up the biggest question of all: what does all this mean for a campaign platform? Is O'toole's new approach largely just a communications strategy, or will it result in concrete promises that substantially differ from what voters have seen before?
O'toole's team, for obvious reasons, is not giving away their platform — above all because it's still being developed. Expect it to be tough on China, tough on crime, and heavy with emphasis on building strong communities. What that actually means is yet to be seen.
“It's a balancing act,” Speer said. “The ultimate political strategy and agenda will certainly involve some of these themes and some of these issues. But it's not going to be a full abandonment of how Conservatives have thought about policy and government.”
For ideas, though, look to the other countries where Conservatives have succeeded in winning over the working class. Trump is a difficult comparison because of the overwhelming personality of Trump himself and the endless chaos and controversy he creates. U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson is a closer match, but the dominance of Brexit as an issue also makes that comparison tricky. Still, in both countries conservatives have successfully appealed to voters in areas once reliably leftist.
Muttart said he sees Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who won a surprise election victory in 2019, as the best comparable to O'toole.
“I think there's some striking similarities there,” Muttart said. “The suburban dad with a good feel for middle Australia, but still intensely political and partisan and knows how to play the game.”
Australia has mandatory voting, so growing the voter pool there wasn't an issue. But Morrison won his election primarily due to a swing of lower-income voters toward his Liberal Party (along with his coalition partner, the agrarian National Party). Higher-income urban voters in turn moved toward the leftist Labor Party, which had made climate change a major campaign focus. In his victory speech, Morrison attributed his win to the “quiet Australians” who were missed by the polling industry but came out to support him.
With these examples in mind, O'toole's team is determined to try something different in the next campaign, with the ultimate goal of finding a sustainable path to winning majority governments.
“If you think that the party's ceiling is too low, which I do, the question is how do you go about solving for it?” Speer said.
“There are different ideas on offer, including moderation, including changing its position on climate change, and all these issues,” he went on. “I think their solution, as I understand it from the speech and from the (Labour Day) video, is the kind of realignment strategy that they used in the U.K.
“Of all the options on offer, it strikes me as the most compelling and the one worth testing. It's the starting point.”
HE SAYS ALL OF THE RIGHT THINGS, BUT THE PROBLEM IS HIS HISTORY IS THE OPPOSITE.