Axing O'Toole would be suicide for Cons
Canadians don't trust the Conservative Party. Constant change doesn't help.
For the second election in a row, Canada’s opposition Conservative Party received more votes than any other party. That shows there’s a broad base of public support for change in government.
Also for the second election in a row, instead of capitalizing on this public support, Canada’s Conservatives are now sharpening their knives and planning to behead themselves in a mad quest for political irrelevance.
If they got more votes, why didn’t they win?
Unfortunately for the Conservatives, their support is concentrated in regions where there aren’t many electoral seats to win. The Liberals defeated them (again) by winning more votes in seat-rich Ontario. To form government, the Conservatives need to make inroads in Ontario and urban Canada.
What does this mean?
It means the majority of Canadians want change. Only 33% of us voted to continue the ignominious reign of the Trudeau cabal. Two of every three Canadians want a new government. The party most trusted by Canadians to form that new government is the Conservatives.
But, the Conservatives are not trusted enough by voters in Ontario to get elected.
Elections are all about trust. Justin Trudeau’s handlers know this. That’s why they didn’t run on his record as prime minister – which did nothing but prove he’s untrustworthy. He ignored his past campaign promises and delivered little or nothing of his agenda.
Instead, Team Trudeau campaigned (again) on fear and hate. They seized every opportunity to use misinformation and outright lies to sow fear among Ontario voters: O’Toole will ban abortions. O’Toole will end universal healthcare. O’Toole will make machine guns and rocket launchers legal in Canada. O’Toole will destroy the environment and end the world. Erin O’Toole WILL EAT YOUR BABIES. And, so on.
It worked. Voters in urban Canada feared O’Toole enough to re-elect the same old, same old Liberal henchmen who’d done nothing for them in six years. Fear is a powerful motivator. And, the Conservatives make it easy.
What can be done?
Erin O’Toole was doing things right: he was behaving reasonably, he was answering questions honestly, and he presented a plan of action that most Canadians could (and a plurality did) support.
People who saw and heard O’Toole for the first time were impressed with him. He seemed likeable. He didn’t seem at all like a man who would EAT THEIR BABIES.
But, he was a new face. His was a new plan. The public hadn’t seen either of them before. He even admitted his plan was at odds with what Conservative leaders in the past had promised.
Trust is based on familiarity and consistency. People are more likely to believe O’Toole won’t ban abortion, destroy the planet or EAT THEIR BABIES the more times they hear him say so. People have heard evil things about Conservatives for six years. Evil things are more familiar than reality. To win public trust, Conservatives must change this.
To win the trust of Canadians, Conservatives must be familiar to them - and they have to behave consistently. Dumping the leader and tearing up the campaign plan (again) is the opposite of familiarity and consistency.
This Liberal minority government has a two year runway – at best. There will be another election soon. The Conservative Party of Canada has a choice to make.
How the Conservatives can win
There are three things Canada’s Conservative Party must do to win the next election.
Decide if they want to win. This sounds obvious, but it really isn’t. For the last six years, the Conservative Party of Canada has behaved like a fringe ideology party – a party committed to advocating for an ideology whether Canadians want it or not. This puts them in a club with the Greens, the NDP and the Communists: for them, it’s not about winning – it’s about speaking truth to the wind. Even though the wind can’t hear and doesn’t care, by God they’re going to scream their truth all night anyway.
For Conservatives, this approach is evidenced every time one of them says, “We need to be MORE CONSERVATIVE,” or “We didn’t communicate our CONSERVATIVE VALUES clearly enough,” or “Our message didn’t get through.”
This was the mantra of Ontario’s PC Party as it lost four elections in a row. The Ontario Party’s fortune only changed when it elected (briefly) Patrick Brown as a leader who understood this masturbatory delusion was bullocks. As was the case in Ontario for its PC Party, Canada has heard the federal Conservative Party message, understands its values, AND DOESN’T WANT ANY, Thank You all the same.
What Canada wants is (a) a change of government, ideally to one that isn’t rotting from the head and (b) a government that will focus on the little things that will actually make day to day life just a little bit easier/better for Canadians.
Nobody is asking for a new ideology. The vast majority of Canadians are too busy trying to survive to give a damn about ideologies. They want practical, constructive, trustworthy government.
So, Conservatives have a choice to make: Continue down the same old ideological path that leads to electoral irrelevance – or adapt to reflect the ever-changing reality of modern Canada and find a way to deliver government Canadians actually want and will vote for.
Keep the Leader they’ve got. O’Toole is now a recognizable face to Canadian voters. People like him. If more people – especially in Ontario – are going to trust him, they’re going to have to get comfortable with him. That means, seeing him continue to lead the Conservatives
Changing Leaders would only accomplish two things. It would line the pockets of Conservative Party political operatives hired to run leadership campaigns (admittedly a very powerful motive in Canada’s sparse political economy.) And, it would assure the Conservative Party’s failure in the next election.
The only way to defeat the Liberal fear factory is with a leader people trust. Another new unfamiliar face, with zero track record of consistency, would make that impossible.
Keep the plan they ran on. The “Action Plan” that was O’Toole’s campaign platform describes the kind of government most Canadians want. Abandoning it would be stupid. Making it “more Conservative” – whatever that is – would mean making it “less popular.” That’s the veritable definition of idiocy. If the Action Plan was such a great idea last week – why isn’t it a great idea this week?
Abandoning the plan now would just prove the Conservatives weren’t committed to it, and the Liberals were right. The Liberals tried to convince Canadians the plan was all a ruse: it was anti-abortion, gun-loving, BABY EATING CONSERVATIVISM wrapped up in lamb’s wool.
To win, the Conservatives must keep O’Toole and they must double down on their platform. That will help prove they were serious about the whole NOT EATING BABIES promise and they plan to govern the way they said they would.
Erin O’Toole should look, sound and act like a prime minister every day from now until the next election. He should avoid the “opposition trap” of being seen in public only when whining and whingeing about everything government does. Instead, he should take every opportunity to advance a page from his “Action Plan” and propose a practical, realistic and reasonable solution to a problem that Canadians actually struggle with today.
Trust = Familiarity & Consistency
As an old political friend once told me, "You win elections the same way you handle snakes: no sudden moves.”