Conservative candidates focus on unity
Leadership hopefuls barely engage after testy French-language debate
OTTAWA— The four candidates vying for the Conservative leadership spent most of Thursday night studiously ignoring each other.
On a Toronto stage for the second and final debate of the party’s leadership contest, Peter MacKay, Erin O’Toole, Leslyn Lewis and Derek Sloan were in violent agreement on the need to maintain party unity and expand beyond their traditional base.
Unlike Wednesday’s night’s testy French-language debate, the four candidates barely engaged with each other, instead sticking to their scripts, talking past, rather than over, each other.
“We need to get the party together to keep the country together; it’s that serious,” said MacKay, the presumed frontrunner in the race.
It’s unlikely the debate, watched by roughly 6,500 people on the party’s YouTube feed, will have a decisive impact on who will ultimately replace Andrew Scheer as the party’s third permanent leader.
But it did expose some key aspects of what the candidates think it will take to win.
O’Toole said a credible plan on the environment will be necessary for the Conservatives to win over suburban voters. Acknowledging attacks from the MacKay campaign that his proposals would be worse than the Liberals “carbon tax,” a political third rail for the Conservative’s base, O’Toole fought back.
“I will make sure we grow our movement to win, that is what is key. And part of it is having a platform that takes the environment seriously, that shows we can balance building pipelines while respecting programs our provincial partners are doing on the environment,” O’Toole said.
Lewis agreed that the Conservatives need to focus on their environmental pitch. But the party must also reach into those who have left the fold, moving to the People’s Party, or the Green Party, and make inroads in urban centres, Lewis said.
“I feel that we need to broaden our supporter base, looking to the urban centres. Making sure that we can reach out to new immigrants, we can reach out to people of colour, and we can bring them into the party. I’m the person who can do that,” Lewis said.
Sloan, a rookie MP from Ontario courting a more hardline social conservative demographic, said the party cannot focus only on the economy; it needs Conservative answers to issues from “housing, to poverty, to drug addiction.”
“The Conservative party has to be known to the party that has answers to every question facing Canadians,” Sloan said.
The Conservatives’ leadership race has existed in kind of a parallel reality since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. While Canadians stayed tuned in to near-daily statements from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and provincial leaders such as Doug Ford, partisan politics, especially internal Conservative partisan politics, have largely been put on the back burner.
Next to the life-and-death stakes of a global health crisis, choosing Andrew Scheer’s successor hasn’t garnered the level of attention it could have in normal circumstances. Even Conservative stalwarts and former senior operatives have privately expressed ambivalence about the race, despite the party’s dominance in federal politics for almost a decade leading up to the 2015 election.
Thursday night’s debate, along with the French-language version the night before, is likely the only time the four candidates will share a stage during the race before the mail-in ballots decide the outcome on Aug. 21.
What party members got out of these debates is probably what they were expecting. MacKay, seemingly comfortable in his front-runner role, trying to stay above the fray. O’Toole, the underdog still hoping for an upset, trying to poke holes in MacKay’s arguments and public career.
Social conservative candidates Lewis and Sloan, virtually unknown before the race began, were a tier to themselves. Few believe they have a chance at the top spot, even with dedicated organizing and support from socon camps. With Parliament winding down and Canadians trying to navigate a summer under lockdown, the leadership campaigns are expected to focus on preaching to the converted, the party’s base, and motivating those new members they signed up to mail their ballots in.
The party’s next leader will be chosen on Aug. 21, or whenever those ballots can be safely tallied under pandemic conditions.