National Post (National Edition)
ALSO Chris Selley
Conservative Leader Erin O'Toole and his advisers are making no secret of their plan to expand the big blue tent. “If we want to win, we have to do something different,” an adviser told National Post's Brian Platt this week. And the different thing is pretty simple: reaching out across traditional boundaries to non-dogmatic conservatives.
These are people who “believe in the idea of Canadian identity, … strong, controlled borders, … that the justice system needs to be tough but fair,” Stephen Harper-era Conservative strategist Patrick Muttart told Platt. They don't like “cancel culture,” he added. They think it's insane that a few protesters can shut down the CN railroad. But they haven't read Hayek and have no particularly strong views on fiscal policy except inasmuch as it affects their ability to feed, clothe and otherwise content their families.
Thus O'Toole has lately been publicly lamenting falling rates of private-sector unionization and the perils of the gig economy — “Do we really want a nation of Uber drivers?” — and talking up the benefits of permanent blue-collar jobs like GM used to offer in his suburban Toronto riding.
That's theoretically awkward on several levels: in theory, fat-cat union leaders and the endless subsidies Ontario's and Canada's governments lavish on the Big Three automakers, among others, are the bane of the Core Conservative Voter's existence. But those “investments,” as governments always call them, also keep a lot of potential Conservative voters employed.
“Easy rule: if a business venture needs a government handout, it's a money loser," Pierre Poilievre, O'Toole's finance critic, tweeted recently.
When GM or Fiatworkers hear that sort of talk, the prospect of terminal unemployment might well come to mind. When they see Conservatives in constant rhetorical battle with Unifor national president Jerry Dias, they may well side with the guy who battles for their jobs. O'Toole clearly wants to change that. (He may need to have a chat with Poilievre.) And he even seems willing to throw free trade under the bus, associating it with wanton outsourcing, corporate greed and inequality.
“The left always goes on about income inequality, and they have a point,” one O'Toole adviser told Platt. “The gap just keeps getting bigger and bigger.” That's not actually true: The share of after-tax income at every income level has been pretty much dead flat for 20 years. But pretending otherwise worked wonders for the Liberals' populist platform in 2015. Perhaps it could work wonders for a Conservative populist platform next time around.
It always amazes me how frankly many political strategists will talk about their efforts to attract votes. If I were a party leader, I would ask that they at least pretend I believed in things other than winning. But then, O'Toole successfully auditioned for leader as the “True Blue” alternative to the suspiciously purple Peter MacKay. He promised to be Dias' “worst nightmare.” Now this brand-new strategy. Perhaps it's best he just embraces winning as his raison d'être, and the party too.
After all, while this new strategy may deviate from conservative orthodoxy, that orthodoxy was never a very powerful force except in opposition. Stephen Harper's government got Canadian taxpayers in up to their nipples in Bombardier's CSeries debacle. They jumped off a cliff into stimulus spending sooner than risk defeat in Parliament. They threw $7.2 billion at GM in 2009 with hardly any long-term plan whatsoever, Auditor-General Michael Ferguson reported in 2014, and duly lost the lion's share of it.
Conservatives will tell you those were special cases. But ideology that vaporizes in extremis isn't ideology. It's just a theoretical preference. Canadian politics isn't the battle of civilizations that its combatants want us to believe it is. It's been more like a battle between store-brand colas. It does no one any good to pretend otherwise.
Still, a government in waiting needs to offer a plausible vision of what it would do somewhat differently. And when it comes to the hottest-button issues for conservatives, that's remarkably difficult. A Conservative prime minister can be as thunderous as he likes about rail blockades, but enforcing laws and court injunctions is up to provincial police forces — and if the blockade is in Ontario, the provincial police force will be proud to do nothing until it bloody well feels like it. The “unofficial” Roxham Road border crossing was objectively absurd, but a “strong, controlled border,” as Muttart put it, is not a realistic possibility. It took a catastrophic, once-acentury pandemic to shut the crossing down, and nothing Joe Biden is likely to do in the White House is going to eliminate the demand. I don't know what a federal government might propose to tackle “cancel culture,” but I'm 100-per-cent sure it would make things worse.
Perhaps the best we can hope for is an explanation of how the Conservatives would govern Canada mostly the same, but better. How would a Conservative government subsidize the construction of pickup trucks in Oshawa more efficiently and effectively? What exactly would the “fairer” international trade deals it concluded look like? How much money does True Blue Erin O'Toole propose to redistribute from the richest to the poorer, and via what method? A curious nation awaits answers.