Erin O’Toole appeals to Conservative MPs as leadership vote looms

OTTAWA — Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole made a last-ditch effort to save his job Wednesday morning in a heated meeting with a single item on the agenda: a vote by MPs on whether or not he should stay on.

The virtual gathering of the party’s 119 members of Parliament kicked off at 9 am with the sponsor of the bid to oust him – Alberta MP Chris Warkentin – making the case that O’Toole has lost the trust and respect of colleagues and it’s time for him to go.

Several MPs asked O’Toole to resign outright, sources tell the Star, while others leapt to his defense.

O’Toole himself asked caucus to keep him on, promising to let the party’s membership have an earlier than scheduled leadership vote and a rejig of some party policies.

The process for the first-ever vote of this kind in the Conservative caucus allows all sides to have a say before MPs vote in a secret ballot on whether or not he should be replaced.

If a majority of MPs – which is 60 in this case – think he should go, the next step would be to vote in an interim leader.

Should O’Toole be sent packing, the vote will see the Conservatives plunge into yet another leadership race, the third since former leader and prime minister Stephen Harper resigned from the job when the party lost government in 2015.

Wednesday morning’s meeting marked the culmination of more than a year’s worth of infighting among Conservatives over O’Toole’s leadership and the future of the party.

Challenges to his status as leader, however, took off in earnest after the 2021 election and his failure to defeat the governing Liberals thanks to what many believed were a series of communication and policy missteps that he never did enough to correct.

While the Conservative party’s constitution stipulates a leader who fails to win must face membership in a leadership review at the party’s next convention, that event is currently scheduled for 2023 and for many in the party that is not soon enough.

That included MPs who voted in favor of implementing legislation that gives them a direct say in the matter, the Reform Act. It provides for a leadership review if 20 per cent of elected members request one.

A letter to that effect had been drafted in the fall, and the final signatures required – and then some – to trigger the review were gathered in the wake of a caucus meeting last week that largely focused on the party’s election report.

The report placed blame on a number of different facts, but in the eyes of some, not enough on O’Toole’s own performance.

The other thing, several MPs told the Star, was that O’Toole came to the meeting with no obvious plan for changes he was going to make as a result of the review, or even any sign of strategy for the coming parliamentary session.

MPs told the Star many had just lost patience with him.

“We still have a job to do, and it’s time to just move on and do it,” said one MP, granted anonymity to freely discuss internal caucus deliberations.

O’Toole’s team had gotten wind of the efforts to get signatures on the letter, and tried to mount a counter offensive over the weekend, calling MPs to ask for them to pledge their loyalty but those efforts fell short.

O’Toole himself was on the phone for hours on Monday and Tuesday, pleading with MPs to give him another shot, promising everything from a speedier leadership review by members to a new approach on carbon pricing and policy and even finding policies that would allow those against abortion to feel some action was being taken on their concerns.

But to many in caucus those calls came too late, and also on the heels of a statement he’d issued late Monday night where he painted his naysayers as people who wanted to take the party to a deep and angry place and destroy the movement.

MPs told the Star that statement amounts to a final nail in his coffin

“It pushed people right over the edge,” one told the Star.

“He was pointing fingers at all these other people and it’s his lack of leadership that is the problem.”