‘A man who focuses solely and directly on himself’: Erin O’Toole slams Justin Trudeau as tight campaign enters last week

OTTAWA – Conservative leader Erin O’Toole launched an aggressive and prolonged barrage against liberal leader Justin Trudeau on Monday as the two set the stage for what will likely be a provocative final week in the election campaign.

O’Toole took advantage of the anger his campaign reports on the audience at the voters’ doorstep and set aside his strict and optimistic daily promises in favor of a tough attack, framing the election as a referendum on Trudeau the man and Trudeau the first. Minister.

“I’d say it’s all talk and no action,” O’Toole said during a campaign event outside Ottawa.

But this is worse: a person so blinded by his own ambition that he cannot see the rot in his own party. A man who is not a feminist, an environmentalist, or a public servant. A man who focuses solely and directly on himself. “

Trudeau is “privileged, has the right and is always on the lookout for number one,” which is what he was doing when he called an election that is nothing more than a takeover, O’Toole said.

Liberals have been attacking O’Toole since the start of the campaign, a move O’Toole said Monday was unnecessarily divisive at a time when the discussion should be about a way forward for the country.

He did not appear to see any contradictions when asked by reporters how he could claim that he was running a positive campaign focused on the problems and, at the same time, criticizing Trudeau.

For his part, Trudeau said his own attacks are not aimed at O’Toole personally, but at the options he offers Canadians.

The gun lobby, those who want to restrict abortion and those who oppose mandatory vaccinations have O’Toole’s ear in a way that should make Canadians fear what a conservative government could look like, Trudeau said.

“I’m going to let him and his representatives in the anti-vaccine movement, in the gun lobby, in the anti-election crowd continue to attack me. Good, ”Trudeau said during a campaign stop in Vancouver.

“I’m going to continue to focus on Canadians, what Canadians tell me about what they need for their families, what they need to fight climate change, what they need to end this pandemic once and for all.”

Trudeau noted that conservatives will not accept exactly what the fourth wave of COVID-19 would stop, mandatory vaccination, rendering their ideas for post-pandemic recovery meaningless.

As protests against mandatory vaccines continued outside hospitals on Monday, Trudeau vowed that a liberal government would make it a crime to obstruct access to any building that provides health services, or to threaten or intimidate health workers on their way to the job.

O’Toole also condemned the protests, and his campaign told the Star that a conservative government would take steps to find a way to criminalize them using a promise already on the platform that would make it a crime to interfere with critical infrastructure.

The NDP promised last week that it would make it a crime to prevent someone from accessing medical care and to make assault on health workers an aggravating circumstance in sentencing.

Ahead of a campaign stop at Neskantaga First Nation, home to Canada’s oldest boil water advisory, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh said voters need to understand that all of Trudeau’s broken promises in the past six years have a cost.

He cited failures like ending boil-water warnings and high cell phone bills as examples.

But there is also a high price, he said.

“There is also a price for cynicism. When governments promise things and don’t deliver, it breaks people’s hope a bit, in terms of their belief that things can get better, ”he said.

“I want to give that hope back.”

Just as children bounced behind O’Toole during his speech Monday, the policy tone he chose not to exaggerate related to paternity leave, national polls have been rebounding for days.

As of Monday, the Signal, Vox Pop Labs’ election forecast for the Star, shows conservatives and liberals nearly stagnant in national support, while in key electoral regions like BC, the new Democrats are mounting a formidable challenge. .

With the end of early voting on Monday, the campaigns move into their final phase of identifying and extracting followers. With the race so tight, locking that bracket means finding a way to cut through the noise.

Parties will increase advertising online and in traditional media, and the campaigns themselves are expected to accelerate as leaders move both to keep narrow paths and to elect new ones.

Conservatives released a series of new ads on Monday encouraging Canadians to punish Trudeau for calling elections during a pandemic, while Liberals unveiled one that focuses on O’Toole’s firearms policy and his long-standing promises to gun owners that it would relax restrictions. on certain firearms.

Also Monday, Green Party leader Annamie Paul made a foray out of horsemanship that she hopes to personally win in Toronto for a swing across the Atlantic provinces. There are strong green movements in the region and his party elected a parliamentarian from Fredericton in 2019.

That deputy is now running for the Liberals.

Another MP who left his fold, former Conservative cabinet minister Maxime Bernier, is also stepping up his campaign efforts.

The right-wing approach of his People’s Party of Canada has been embraced by opponents of mandatory vaccinations, and Signal suggests it is a surprising distance from winning at least one seat.