O’Toole rejects dissent and ends the year as Conservative leader

If the Conservative Party of Canada were a person, it would have reached the age where it could legally vote and drink in half the provinces.

Like many 18-year-olds, the party is deciding its future, seeking an identity and rebelling against authority.

Three months after losing to the Liberals in a general election, and amid calls from caucus members and the wider party to activate an early review of his leadership, Erin O’Toole remains at the helm of the party.

He’s stayed on the job long enough to watch Stephen Harper’s party, which brought together the old Progressive Conservative and Canadian Alliance parties under the Conservatives umbrella, reach a milestone this month: moving from adolescence to young adulthood. .

But with a new year just days away, O’Toole faces divisions within her group and the conservative movement in general, the latest over her ambivalent stance on Quebec’s controversial secularism law, which resulted in a Muslim teacher lost his job because he wears a hijab. .

British Columbia MP Mark Strahl recently said that he and “many, many” other MPs feel conservatives must be willing to fight the law in court, in contrast to the leader’s position of letting Quebecers decide.

O’Toole replied that the Tories should speak as a team.

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Then there was a Facebook post from Alberta MP and social conservative Arnold Viersen, who apologized for not speaking out against a move by conservatives to speed up a government bill banning conversion therapy for LGBTQ Canadians. He said he and others disagreed with the bill’s wording, but were caught off guard by a conservative motion to carry it through the legislative process without a vote.

And now the emergence of the Omicron variant of COVID-19 has put the spotlight back on a pandemic that has proven divisive for conservatives.

In the run-up to Parliament’s return on November 22, Conservative MPs spent weeks divided on the issue of mandatory vaccinations and what their party should say about politics.

For the party chairman, Rob Batherson, the tug of war within the coalition is nothing new.

“For Conservative party members, building coalitions and evolving to ensure that there is a good set of conservative ideas that will attract support from Canadians over the next decade takes work, it takes a little patience, it takes discipline, it takes unity,” he says. .

As for calls to get rid of O’Toole, following a successful campaign to oust former leader Andrew Scheer after the 2019 electoral defeat, Batherson attributes part of it to an impatience with spending six years out of government.

There are also complaints that his efforts to put a more moderate stamp on the conservative brand to broaden its appeal have come at the expense of entrenched values ​​such as restricted spending. Social conservatives and gun owners have also expressed frustration at the promises O’Toole made to them and later retracted.

Regardless of what happens next, conservatives know one thing: they need to grow, particularly in and around the vote-rich suburban belt around Toronto known as 905. To do that, at least one former Toronto candidate believes he must keep moving toward the political center.

Geoffrey Turner says that the party’s opposition to mandatory vaccination was one of the reasons he heard people were reluctant to vote for the Conservatives.

“He was a loser for us,” he said.

“It failed to satisfy the majority who, like me, are fully vaccinated and like to be safe when they go out in public. And our policy did not satisfy the minority in our country who doubt about vaccines.”

The party’s position on gun control created another problem, he says.

The conservative platform initially promised to repeal the ban on what the liberal government considers assault firearms. Along the way of the campaign, O’Toole walked away from the compromise and the platform was amended with a footnote explaining that all currently banned firearms would remain banned.

All of this left many people scratching their heads.

“It opened the fear about how solid we really were in this notion of moderating our policies,” Turner said.

Batherson awaits further guidance on the party’s next steps once former Conservative MP James Cumming completes a review of the party’s electoral defeat, anticipated for late January.

More broadly, Crestview Strategy vice president and former Conservative staff member Andrew Brander believes the party must decide whether it wants to root itself in a principle or in a cult of personality based on its past successes.

It would be prudent for conservatives, while out of government, to analyze how far they are willing to go on human rights and the environment, issues that appear to trigger an identity crisis for what Brander says “is still a young party.”

This Canadian Press report was first published on December 22, 2021.