O'Toole and the politics of reality

THE CARBON TAX

BOAT HAS SAILED.

IT'S LEFT PORT ...

— KELLY McPARLAND

Conservative Leader Erin O'Toole has a number of natural advantages as he works to win hearts and votes among Canadians who still know little about him.

Unlike Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, he is a bona fide middle-class Canadian, raised in the small town of Bowmanville an hour east of Toronto, not far from Oshawa where his father worked at General Motors.

He signed up for the military as a teenager and spent more than a decade serving his country. While Trudeau was dabbling in teaching and painting himself up in blackface, O'Toole was assigned to a helicopter squad performing searchand-rescue operations in the Atlantic off Nova Scotia.

Again unlike the prime minister, who spent his pre-politics years largely living off his family name, O'Toole had not one but two solid careers before running for office. Following his military years he earned a law degree, joining a major Toronto law firm before serving as in-house counsel for Procter & Gamble. When elected to office in 2012 he was roughly the same age Trudeau had been when he won his first race, but with much more practical experience, a broader background and richer resumé.

That doesn't make him a better leader or politician, but it gives him potential strength in appealing to the sort of people he now has to attract to the Conservative party if it is to gain ground on Trudeau's Liberals. The prime minister may still enjoy a degree of celebrity that appeals to some voters, but his sheen has been considerably dulled by five years of rocky performance, ethics violations and serial missteps. A rise in support over the nine months of the COVID-19 crisis may yet weaken when the bills come in, taxes must be paid and people feel safe enough to more objectively evaluate the government's performance, with its mixed messages and failed opportunities.

But while O'Toole has opportunities, he also has obstacles to overcome, not least the baggage of past Tory policies that have already been tried and tested without notable success. If O'Toole persists in beating the same dead horses he has an excellent chance of ending up just like predecessor Andrew Scheer, who also promised a new and improved party but failed on both counts.

First off, Conservatives have to come to grips with the fact the carbon tax boat has sailed. It's left port, headed out to sea and is halfway across the ocean. It's not coming back, no matter how much people across Western Canada would like to put a torpedo or two into its hull. Yes, it may be an expensive program that promises far more than it may ever achieve, a virtue-signalling wunderkind that's both too expensive to ignore and too inexpensive to work, and Liberals may have broken various vows in jacking up the price after pledging not to do so, but Trudeau's trick of introducing it in the middle of a pandemic, when people are far too worried about other issues to rouse much indignation, shows signs of working.

O'Toole says he'd let provinces decide for themselves how to deal with greenhouse gases, essentially returning to the pre-tax model that pleased no one. It's a ploy to keep tax-hating Tory voters loyal to the cause, which is the same approach both Scheer and former prime minister Stephen Harper tried. It didn't work for them and it's unlikely to work for O'Toole unless he can combine it with a solid, sensible alternative that's able to persuade voters it could do a better job at less expense. O'Toole says he's working on it, but Scheer said the same thing and delivered little but mush. Canadians don't like mush. They might also wonder why, if there are brilliant alternative options out there, they haven't heard them before.

The budget deficit represents a similar hurdle. Conservative leaders are supposed to promise to balance the budget, no matter how seriously out of whack it's become. Just as they worry they'll lose loyal supporters if they fail to rail against the carbon tax, they fear a failure to promise the financially impossible will launch a race for the exit. There may have been a time when that was true, but Trudeau's Liberals have finally succeeded in spending borrowed money in such massive amounts, over so lengthy a timeline and with no known plan to ever staunch the flow, that pledges to end the red ink rank with promises to make it rain less in Vancouver.

O'Toole would be better to emphasize the extent of the financial hole Trudeau has dug, the weight it will put on the shoulders of future generations and the irresponsibility of the Liberals in refusing to prepare any semblance of a plan to eventually bring spending under control. In a year-end interview the prime minister insisted the budget would eventually be balanced once COVID was defeated, but in the four years before the pandemic arrived, his government had already strayed wildly beyond pledged levels, breaking every performance measure they'd set for themselves. There's no point in Tories making similarly implausible pledges unless they expect to similarly break them.

BETTER TO EMPHASIZE THE EXTENT OF THE FINANCIAL HOLE TRUDEAU HAS DUG.