End of Trump could be boon for O’Toole

Chances are no federal leader will be more relieved to see the last of Donald Trump as president this week than Erin O’Toole.

Over the past four years, the proportion of Canadian voters who tend to be suspicious of the combination of a Conservative prime minister and a Republican president has grown exponentially.

When it comes to domestic electoral calculus, Trump’s departure should be Justin Trudeau’s loss and O’Toole’s gain.

It could be harder going forward for the Liberals to tar the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) with a dried-up Trump brush. Or at least it should be if O’Toole faces up to some unpleasant realities pertaining to his party.

For Trumpism within the Conservative movement does not boil down to just a figment of the partisan imagination of Liberal spin doctors.

Here are some numbers.

Among Canadian voters, the Trump constituency is a marginal group. At last check, the outgoing president’s fans in this country account for about 15% of the electorate. In the voting pool at large, that amounts to little more than a drop.

Except that for the most part, that group has congregated inside one main federal party.

Many Conservatives got off the Trump bandwagon a long time ago. Premier Doug Ford, for one, has emerged as a vocal critic. More than a few were never on it. But a recent Leger poll put the proportion of CPC supporters who would have voted for Trump last November at 40%.

By all indications, those voters are diehard fans. An Angus Reid sounding revealed that almost half of Conservative voters —41% — share Trump’s conviction that electoral fraud led to his defeat.

For one to still be pro-Trump at the end of the past four years is to be so in full knowledge of what the outgoing president was about.

If the fact that so many self-identified conservatives subscribe to the debunked conspiracy theories that the defeated president has been propagating on his way out of the White House does not give O’Toole pause, one can bet that it will weigh on voters’ mind in a not-so-distant federal campaign.

Trump sympathizers may not have a large, or at least a very vocal, presence in the Conservative caucus, but when it comes to boots on the ground in an election campaign and to bringing in money, they are a force to be reckoned with.

In politics as in other areas, he who pays the piper does get to call the tune.

At the federal level, the cohabitation within a single party of a large pro-Trump faction and slightly larger anti-Trump one is unique to the Conservatives. And while the divide between the two groups does not threaten CPC unity in the way that it does the U.S. Republican party, it is a symptom of a party at war with itself on a larger front.

When all is said and done, the CPC’s internal divisions are more reflective of the tensions that threaten to empty the Republican party from the inside than of the debates that currently engage mainstream Canada.

Take abortion. More than 30 years after the Morgentaler Supreme Court decision, the notion

that a woman has the right to decide whether to carry a pregnancy to term is supported by a wide societal consensus.

That consensus is reflected by the pro-choice stance of four of the parties represented in the House of Commons.

The only place where the abortion fight still rages on is within the CPC’s own ranks, where it pits a consequential number of prochoice conservatives against a significant number of anti-abortion social conservatives.

Or take climate change. Here,

too, the proportion of Canadians that do not believe climate change results from human activity is marginal. On the left and on the right, there is widespread support for an approach to reducing emissions based on a carbon tax.

But the CPC itself remains home to a faction of climate-change deniers who have channelled their stance into a visceral and ultimately cartoonish opposition to carbon pricing.

In the last election, two-thirds of Canadian voters supported parties that advocate carbon pricing.

Post-election polls demonstrated that this CPC’s stance stymied the party’s growth outside the Prairies. The ambiguity the party cultivates on issues such as abortion also continues to acts as a deterrent. The country is moving on and leaving the CPC to its internal divisions.

Over the past decade, the catering to factions that are increasingly disconnected from the political mainstream has turned the Conservative party into an echo chamber that distorts political reality rather than reflect it.

That has been never more apparent than in the widely held CPC notion that the party’s base incendiary dislike of Trudeau only needs to be stoked continuously to spread to the rest of the electorate.

To this day, it is acting as a firewall between the Conservatives and the voters they need to woo.