O’Toole leadership review must come sooner

Two months have passed since the last federal election and in Ottawa, the Big Three national parties are doing what’s become natural to them.

The Liberals are getting ready to lead another minority government. The New Democrats are preparing to prop them up in return for major, progressive-friendly concessions. As for the official Opposition and supposed government-in-waiting Conservatives — they’re busily warring with themselves and their leader. That lemming-like instinct for self-destruction simply seems part of their DNA.

After all, it was just months after the party lost the 2019 federal election that Andrew Scheer was booted out as leader. And it was only a few hours after the current party leader Erin O’Toole had lost the Sept. 20 nationwide vote that an elected Conservative national council member, Bert Chen, demanded an expedited review of his performance.

Last week, the challenge to O’Toole gained even more steam when Conservative Sen. Denise Batters launched a petition calling on party members to support a review of his leadership within six months instead of waiting until 2023. In her eyes, voters have come to view O’Toole as “untrustworthy,” and she says this public perception explains not only why he lost the last election, but why he cannot win the next one. She claims many Conservative caucus members agree with her, too.

However much O’Toole loyalists and Conservatives, who simply want to keep their party together, might want to silence such threats, they will not disappear. The scheduled 2023 leadership review is more than a year away. Another federal election before then can’t be ruled out. The deep crack in party solidarity can’t be papered over. The only way the Conservatives can avoid being divided, weak and unable to live up to their responsibility to hold Justin Trudeau’s Liberals to account will be if they tackle the leadership issue head-on — and now.

Give O’Toole some credit for intestinal fortitude. He tried to assert himself as leader when he ousted Sen. Batters from the national Conservative caucus last week. But that attempted show of strength boomeranged and hit O’Toole between the eyes. His own Conservatives in the Senate paid no attention to him. With their approval, Batters remains a member of the Senate Conservative caucus.

As such, she can be expected to continue firing her verbal barrages at O’Toole. Batters is, in fact, correct when she says that during the election campaign, O’Toole unilaterally rewrote the party’s platform by promising to allow provinces to keep the existing carbon tax and softening Tory opposition to gun control.

Whether that lost the party votes, however, is open to debate. What’s irrefutable is that if the Conservatives are ever to form a government in the coming years, they’ll need the support not only of rural voters and the Tory’s bedrock base in Alberta and Saskatchewan, but people living in suburban Ontario, British Columbia and Quebec. These are voters who back carbon taxes and gun controls. They’re also voters who will not be impressed by the group of Conservative MPs who recently formed a “civil liberties caucus” committed to supporting the interests of anti-vaxxers in the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Viewed in this light, the current battle for the soul of this party is not only about who should be in charge, but what it stands for. A review of O’Toole’s leadership early next year would only be the start of this process, but it should proceed. Then the party must decide how big its policy tent will be and who will feel welcome inside.

We can’t say if the Conservatives require a new leader. But surely they need a unified party. The air in the Conservative caucus chambers must be thick with accusations, recriminations and conspiracies these days. For the sake of the party, but even more for the sake of a democracy that depends upon strong, viable opposition parties, that air must be cleared.