Anonymity more to blame than faulty strategy
Maybe Justin Trudeau’s decision to call a general election in the middle of a pandemic, at the very moment the Taliban took Kabul, wasn’t such a bad idea after all.
The findings of a massive post-election poll by the Conservatives found that the number one reason people who considered voting for the party did not do so was not guns or vaccines, it was: “I didn’t know enough about Erin O’toole.”
The snap election call, as most Canadians were squeezing out the last drops of summer, was purposefully designed to ensure that an all-but anonymous Conservative leader remained someone most Canadians couldn’t pick out of a police lineup.
If the 10,000-person Conservative exit poll is to be believed, the strategy worked.
That finding is unlikely to placate party members and MPS who believe that O’toole’s strategic shift to the centre was responsible for electoral failure.
The party won 119 seats last month, two short of the number won in 2019 and 40 fewer than the victorious Liberals. Of the 115 ridings in and around Canada’s three biggest cities, the Conservatives won just eight.
O’toole was forced to face down his critics at a caucus meeting in Ottawa on Tuesday. The leader believes he has enough caucus support to stay on, after two weeks spent reaching out to MPS. But his caucus voted in favour of a provision to hold a leadership review — something no losing leader can take for granted.
The internal sniping went public this week, with Alberta MP Shannon Stubbs complaining her vote share fell by 15 per cent this time around, compared to 2019 (from a Putin-esque 84 per cent to a measly 69 per cent). She said the Conservative party is “more rural, more homogeneous than we’ve ever been before. We lost great, strong, necessary colleagues in big cities, in every party of the country and there has to be an accounting for that.”
Sen. Michael Macdonald from Nova Scotia appears to have volunteered himself as a stalking horse for the wing of the party that wants to have an immediate leadership review by the membership, not just MPS.
In a letter to caucus, he said O’toole “sold out” the party’s position on fiscal responsibility by agreeing to leave the budget in deficit for a decade. He said the unpopularity of the Liberals — re-elected with the lowest percentage of the popular vote of any party since Confederation — created an “enormous opportunity” for O’toole.
But he said the strategy of moving the party to the left “drove out” traditional Conservative voters.
“This was a massive repudiation of our electoral strategy for which the leader has to bear responsibility, since nobody else, certainly not caucus, was involved in its creation,” he said.
O’toole can fight his own battles. Since winning the leadership, it’s fair to say he has hardly been gregarious with his colleagues or the media.
MPS were bushwhacked by a big-spending platform into which they had very little input.
Failure to inspire the party’s voting base undoubtedly cost O’toole support and seats, particularly in the West.
There were other notable failures, such as the inexplicable rupture with the Chinese Canadian community that resulted in the loss of three seats in Vancouver and Toronto. Some votes may have been lost because of misinformation sown by Beijing’s supporters in this country. But as Karen Woods, the co-founder of the Canadian Chinese Political Action Committee, pointed out in National Post, Alice Wong in Richmond Centre lost by fewer than 800 votes, having won by 8,000 votes in 2019. The Liberal vote only increased by 1,500, suggesting voters stayed home because the Conservative party took them for granted.
Despite the mistakes, the revisionist view that allows some Conservatives to argue that O’toole blew an “enormous opportunity” ignores the reality that for much of the pre-election period, the Conservative leader appeared destined for foot-notoriety.
The pandemic meant O’toole entered the campaign as a relative unknown. His supporters argue he simply ran out of time. That’s debatable — the second half of the Conservative campaign was a rather listless affair that suggested O’toole was losing momentum. The ground shifted midway through the campaign, as the pandemic (and the response of Conservative provincial premiers) threw Justin Trudeau a lifeline.
But the opening weeks should inspire hope in Conservatives.
O’toole’s strategy was based on the premise that while politics is partisan, voters are not.
The platform was crafted to appeal to people who have not been traditional Conservative voters, and there were signs of progress. The Conservatives saw their share of the vote increase in six provinces, including Ontario and Quebec, and they won more seats in four provinces — Ontario, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Newfoundland and Labrador. They were within 2,000 votes of winning in 30 ridings.
The result would likely have been much closer if the People’s Party had not surfed the anti-vaccination wave and added 546,913 votes to its 2019 total — even as the number of total valid votes fell by six per cent. In 21 ridings, the PPC candidate’s vote was larger than the margin of victory in seats where the Conservative candidate came second (though the party estimates only one-third of the PPC vote constituted Conservative defectors).
That may not matter next time. O’toole’s assumption is that Maxime Bernier’s vehicle has hit its high water mark — and like his low profile and the pandemic, will not be as big a factor in any future election.
There will always be right-of-centre voters who value purity over victory and they will find a home in the PPC. But the Conservative Party of Canada’s bigger challenge is how to overcome its brand issues with suburban and new Canadian voters, for whom it remains the party of climate deniers, snitch lines and barbaric cultural practices.
If the Conservative party is to avoid atrophy as the voice of rural Canada, it needs to slay its own dragons and hope that its efforts at reform prove attractive to independent voters.
SOMETHING NO LOSING LEADER CAN TAKE FOR GRANTED.