By Andrew Lawton:
Once again, the Conservatives are searching for a new leader, and once again it seems the party is rehashing the same fight over its identity and future.
At the time I’m writing this, the Conservative leadership race has six candidates, including the scrappy frontrunner, the media favourite, the social conservative, the outsider, the renegade, and the “Who the heck are you?”
I’ll avoid the horserace analysis and the treatise on ranked ballots, coalition-building and king-making to instead issue a caution to the conservative movement: if it’s broke, fix it.
The last three elections have ended in Conservative losses to Justin Trudeau, albeit for drastically different reasons. (The “popular vote” victory of the last two elections is about as meaningful as coming in second place in Russian Roulette.)
Stephen Harper lost in 2015 because, after a decade in power – a decade which included a recession, I might add – voters were easily grabbed by a promise of change.
Andrew Scheer lost in 2019, I humbly contend, because his campaign lacked a message, and Scheer himself seemed unable to articulate what he believed. This was unfortunate from someone I’ve spoken with on many occasions and believe to be a man of conviction – this didn’t translate on the campaign trail, however.
And this brings us to Erin O’Toole. I won’t rehash the election post-mortem I wrote in the fall, but I will borrow from it with a thought that occurred to me later on. Had O’Toole won the election, it would have been bad news for the conservative movement, particularly social conservatives.
Whatever promises O’Toole made in the leadership race, he ran his general election campaign as a moderate, which by all accounts seems to be his natural home on the political spectrum. The few red meat conservative policies he had in his platform were dead by the end of the campaign, often taken out to the woodshed by O’Toole himself during live press conferences when abandoning policy proved easier than defending it.
O’Toole pandered to Quebec, spent large amounts of time in the GTA, offered little to the conservative base, and seemed to focus his efforts on presenting himself as a less-corrupt Trudeau rather than a figure offering a drastically different vision from what Canadians were saddled with.
If O’Toole had won, it would have proved right the chunk of the Conservative establishment which thinks social conservatives are a “stinking albatross” or that the Conservative Party of Canada’s future lies in the centre (or on the left).
O’Toole didn’t win, of course, which makes the opposite true.
Those who reject the Centrist Theory, as I’ll call it, can comfortably say this time around, “Okay, we tried it your way, so step aside.”
This doesn’t mean one needs to vote for the most conservative candidate based on an ideological purity test, but it does mean we shouldn’t reject candidates outright based on the consultant class’ claim they aren’t “electable.” By their measure, O’Toole was the most electable candidate they could have dreamed of. They tried to make Scheer “electable” too. Both failed.
Voters are far more perceptive than a lot of people in politics give them credit for. A voter sees when a leader doesn’t have their own base’s support and wonders, “If his own people don’t like him, why should I?”
A leader may be able to gain a vote in the centre for every vote they lose on the right, but that hardly puts them ahead.
There will always be friction to some extent between libertarians and social conservatives, red Tories and blue Tories, fiscal conservatives and big spenders. Single-issue voters are often incredulous that more people aren’t prioritizing their issue above others.
A leader with a plan to keep that coalition together, as Harper did with great success, will be far more electable than one who decides to close the tent to one or more of those groups. When that happens, it’s the social conservatives who are the first to be shut out.
Incidentally, I’ve never met a social conservative who wasn’t comfortable sharing space in the blue tent with red Tories. I can’t say the same about the inverse.
The Conservatives will crown their next leader in September after a race that is sure to revive old grievances and perhaps create some new ones. Conservative members should learn from recent history and, if they like winning, try not to repeat it.
