O’Toole’s pivoting appears to be sticking
Some of his promises have been watered down or entirely reversed
OTTAWA—Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole backed away last week from a promise to repeal the Liberal government’s ban on some 1,500 kinds of guns.
It wasn’t just a reversal of what’s in his party’s election platform, but also what he promised firearms groups during the 2020 Conservative leadership race.
And to those who’ve closely followed O’Toole’s ascent to leadership of his party, it was also completely unsurprising.
His political inconsistency is consistent.
During his leadership run a year ago, O’Toole’s flirtations with social conservatism and apparent enthusiasm for the culture wars surprised many who had known him as a moderate in the Conservative caucus. Since becoming leader, he’s dropped that “true blue” mantle to court progressive voters and switched from wanting to take Canada back to promising to secure its future.
On policy, he’s reversed — or been forced to “be clear,” as he puts it — his position on carbon pricing, conscience rights and banning assault weapons, among other issues.
But his pivot on guns is generating another question, which has been asked repeatedly by reporters in recent days and which he’s yet to answer clearly: “If you’re reversing your stance on guns, why should Canadians trust you to maintain any of the promises you’re making in your platform?”
The image O’Toole is putting out daily on the campaign trail is of a man with a plan, a runner, a former soldier and Bay Street lawyer, a self-professed guy from the ‘burbs whose travels to many corners of the country have ignited a passion for Canada and a desire to serve.
At campaign stops, his supporters raise two things repeatedly when asked what they like about him: his calm demeanour, and his obvious devotion to family.
His wife, Rebecca, and children, Mollie and Jack, are with him on the road and in outings,
he makes them part of the event, not just the photo.
At a pier in Nanaimo, B.C., over the weekend, they raced together to see swimming otters, and joked about adding a crab to their family.
At a stop in Vancouver, he pointedly introduced the children to voters as he deftly chatted about the challenges they’ve faced during the pandemic, highlighting his own promises in the process.
“Look at him,” said Tarlok Sablok, who showed up at the Bhaia Sweet Shop for the event.
“He’s humble, he loves his family, he’s not too loud. He’s the down-to-earth guy we need in this political moment.”
In this moment, it appears to be sticking.
Before the election began on Aug. 15, the Conservatives were hovering around their base level of about 30 per cent support.
As the campaign enters the final two weeks, O’Toole has managed to add anywhere from four to six percentage points to that, so far.
Conservative candidates say they think the bump is a onetwo punch being landed at the doors: people are telling them they’re tired of Justin Trudeau, and then are receptive to listening to what O’Toole presents that’s different.
“We’re seeing more volunteers, more people willing to give money and even just more people willing to give us time,”
said Syed Mohsin, the candidate in the B.C. riding of Surrey Newton.
And that’s despite the Liberals trying to paint O’Toole and the Conservatives writ-large as climate dinosaurs who would roll back women’s rights and legalize deadly assault rifles in the process.
The perennial challenge for a leader of Canada’s fragile and diverse Conservative coalition is to be conservative enough to maintain support of the party’s base, but moderate enough to pick up centrist votes. Andrew Scheer couldn’t seem to strike the right balance in the 2019 campaign, and Trudeau’s attempts to sow fear took root. O’Toole, on the other hand, seems to be finding a way to thread the needle. But doing so sometimes requires that he change the story that won him the leadership.
In his successful leadership run last year, O’Toole swore he’d never implement a carbon tax, that he’d mandate in law that health-care professionals wouldn’t have to refer patients for services that violated their conscience and that he’d rip up reams of existing gun laws — including a 2020 ban implement by the Liberals on a range of semi-automatic weapons — in favour of a classification system designed not just by the police, but by gun owners and makers.
The pledges were his path to
victory, crucial to securing the support of well-organized factions of the party who swung votes his way in exchange for meeting their demands. That was then.
Three weeks into this election campaign, and some of the hallmark promises O’Toole made during leadership have been watered down or entirely reversed.
His policy on climate was rolled out ahead of the election and contains carbon pricing, he no longer says health care professionals should have the right not to refer, and he’s now saying he’ll uphold a ban on assault weapons, and “assault-style” weapons where once he swore to repeal it.
Anti-abortion groups and the firearms lobby are both furious and still trying to find a way to support him, claiming they believe O’Toole is doing what he needs to do to win the general election and he’ll swing back around when in power.
When he’s been pressed about past pivots, O’Toole has often brushed them off.
When asked during stops in B.C. this weekend what happened to the “Take Canada Back” O’Toole of 2020, he didn’t directly answer, instead focusing on the positive message he’s trying to send now.
Once asked what happened to the moderate 2017 leadership contender O’Toole to turn him into the angrier “True Blue” of 2020, he chalked it up to three more years of the Liberals doing damage.
What about his support for a carbon pricing system when he’d promised during the leadership race he’d never do it? It’s not a tax, he’s insisted, since consumers get the money back. (They get a rebate with the existing federal carbon tax program that he opposes too.)
There’s also the saga of Derek Sloan.
He was a leadership contender along with O’Toole in 2020, and also a Tory MP.
He ran to the right of O’Toole during the race, making inflammatory statements on the pandemic and other topics that had some suggesting he ought to be booted from caucus lest he ruin the party’s broader electoral chances.
Among the only MPs who stood up to that push? O’Toole. Inside caucus he fought for Sloan’s right to remain, a choice many saw as a political move related to needing the social conservatives onside for the race.
Within weeks of becoming leader, however, O’Toole supported a move to boot Sloan out, citing a pattern of destructive behaviour that rendered his views incompatible with that of caucus.
And O’Toole is already sending signals that he may not be the last to go.
Late last month, one of his candidates, long-time MP Cheryl Gallant, suggested without evidence that the Liberals were going to impose pandemic-style restrictions to combat climate change, which she’s long suggested is overblown.
O’Toole dodged questions asking him to respond to her view, but he eventually put out statement, citing the need to be “clear” about his climate plan.
“If there are candidates who don’t support it — or any other part of Canada’s Recovery Plan,” he said in the latest version of an evolving story, “they won’t be sitting in the caucus of a future Conservative government.”
To win government, O’Toole has said, he must create a Conservative party where more Canadians can see themselves reflected. That is going to also mean some Conservatives might not like what they see.