O'Toole: Conservative Leadership Crisis A Distraction

The Wrong Fight

A Monday report in the Globe and Mail has it that 35 Conservative MPs have signed a letter calling for there to be an immediate leadership review, and apparently there could be a caucus vote on his status as early as Wednesday. If a majority of MPs vote to toss O’Toole, he must resign immediately, at which point an interim leader would be selected, and the party would decide a timeline for a full leadership vote of the membership.

I’m going to avoid speculating on the outcome of the vote – partially because doing so would render this out of date, but also because I don’t know enough about the internal caucus dynamics to know shit from a hole in the ground. What I do know is that this fight is a bad one for the party, because it’s a stupid distraction from their actual issues – but, of course, that’s why they’re having it now.

It is much easier for the Tories to have a fight about O’Toole and the 2021 election and how he handled the optics of the last week than for the party to have a real fight about what modern, Canadian Toryism is actually about, and in trying so hard to avoid that fight, they’re stuck in a stasis where they can’t win the next election, but they won’t do badly enough to tear it all down and restart. And this leadership skirmish, whether it becomes a full on war or not, is a waste of time, because it’s a fight about the wrong thing.

Canadian Conservatives in the post-Harper era are the equivalent of the Leafs before they finally properly tanked – they were just good enough to convince themselves that next time they’d be better. They never made the playoffs in a full season, they didn’t do anything the one time they did make it in the lockout-shortened 2012-13 season, and then they went right back to their historical tendency for mediocrity. Because the team was never truly bad, they never fixed their problems, eschewing real solutions to problems for the rush of a quick fix trade. (Raycroft for Rask? Kessel for the pick that became Tyler Seguin? How’d those work out?)

You want to know why the Tories are stuck right now? It’s because they never decided who they were in a post-Harper world. The 2017 leadership contest was a clusterfuck, with too many candidates and too many cranks taking up space and distracting from the actual conversation about the future of the party. The 2020 leadership race was even worse, with formerly-moderate O’Toole running on right wing vibes and beating Peter MacKay (and Leslyn Lewis, who actually got the most votes in the 2nd round) handily in the party’s anti-majoritarian form of electoral college. There was never an argument around ideas, just pandemic vibes, and the lack of any form of vision from the CPC has killed them in three straight elections – although, Harper’s lack of vision was mostly the consequence of any government running for a fourth term, that all the ideas they liked had already been run on and implemented.

I could spend a long time detailing the runners for the leadership if O’Toole loses, but that still feels pointless to some degree, because without an actual answer to the policy crisis the Tories are facing, the answer should be the same, and they should lose. Honestly, it’s not even a policy crisis, it’s an identity crisis, because the Conservatives are trying to both appeal to the mad as hell cultural conservatives who are ruining life in the downtown of my hometown and to the rich folk with memberships to Kanata Lakes five minutes from my home. It’s a divide they can’t straddle, because those two groups want two very different things, and going from O’Toole to Skippy isn’t going to solve this problem.

What the Conservative Party actually needs isn’t just to change the leader once again, but they need to have a civil war on what this party is supposed to be. Is it supposed to be a MacKay-esque party of moderates that prays that electability arguments keep the PPC wing of the right from splitting the party again, or is it supposed to be a Lewis-esque beacon of family values, small government, and religious freedom? I have my preference, and my ideas on what’s more electable, but fundamentally, this fight needs to be had, and the sooner they start it the better.

If the Tories want to have a fight that’s just a rehash of the last fight with different names, they’ll lose the next election the day nominations for the leadership close, just as they did the 2021 election. If they want to have a hope in hell of winning the next election, they’ll have a long, drawn out, divisive affair, with contenders needing to bring actual answers to the table, proper scrutiny for the visions being offered, and real battlelines on all sides. Will it work? I have no idea, but I have my doubts. What I do know is trying to be everything to everybody is killing the Conservative Party, and their only hope is to have a real fight about who they are and what they want to be.

Knowing them, though, they’ll just replace O’Toole with Skippy and make the Liberals the surefire favourites at the next election by default.