Erin O’Toole will be to Blame if he Loses to Justin Trudeau, not Dissaffected Conservatives

There is a trend growing among the Conservative Party establishment and loyalists to the party leader Erin O’Toole, and that is to blame everything going wrong on the CPC base. 

This leads to broken logic from many that “if you don’t get behind O’Toole, Trudeau wins” as if politics was nothing more than a professional sport where the goal is to win without a specific agenda in mind to win on. A party cannot gain the sort of support it needs to form a government by simply demanding that the support materialize.

I personally get quite frustrated by the way that the Conservative Party and loyalists have been treating disaffected CPC voters as if the party’s polling numbers are down and O’Toole is unpopular only because people have arbitrarily chosen to hold back their support.

The funny thing is that so many establishment figures are wasting time and energy trying to convince both Conservatives and Liberals that O’Toole is the hot new thing on the market when the Conservative Party could just stand on some of its old principles that even Andrew Scheer campaigned on, or act just a bit like, Pierre Poilievre, Derek Sloan, or Jim Karahalios, the bleeding of support would end overnight.

But that seems too difficult for the Conservative Party. The CPC seems to be run by people too arrogant to admit their shift to the centre/centre-left was a terrible idea, and instead, they continue watering down their old principles in the vain hope they will suddenly stop leaking support and become popular among Liberal voters while holding onto enough Conservatives to win. 

I don’t relish that the Conservative Party has gone downhill and that it has become difficult to support, but I also don’t think trying to shame past Conservative voters, or just cheerlead the current iteration of the party, has been helpful in any way. 

I try to stay moderate about my views of the CPC, it’s never helpful to view things as all good or all bad, which is why I still advocate for supporting individual Conservative politicians who prove themselves to be principles, or a Conservative posed to beat a particularly corrupt Liberal.

Despite what I think is a fairly reasonable stance on O’Toole and the Conservative Party, myself and others are labeled as people who want to “divide the party” as if our views on political integrity and policy were made up only to be pointlessly contrarian, even though the majority of us had supported Andrew Scheer’s Conservative Party. 

At the end of the day, it won’t be anyone else’s fault but Erin O’Toole and the higher-ups in the Conservative Party of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wins another minority or majority government. It is the party’s responsibility to give voters something to vote for rather than treating Conservatives as if they are oath-bound to support whatever or whoever the party puts forward.

Many of the people who backed O’Toole during the leadership race and now are those who campaigned to push Andrew Scheer out as leader after he lost, so the sudden shift to playing the blame-game on the CPC base and right-wing media is highly unlikely to work out for O’Toole and his team, and simply just looks like the last cry on the retreat.