Erin O’Toole Gets Tossed Out Of Conservative Party Leadership

Erin O’Toole’s 2-year-long war against the Conservative party and its base is over, and he lost.  A caucus vote of 73- 45 put a decisive end to his reign.

The confrontation was inevitable since he marketed himself as a “True Blue” Conservative to win the leadership, all the while stacking his inner circle with the pro-Carbon tax left flank of the party.

O’Toole was able to succeed inside a tightly controlled vacuum of the CPC leadership race.  The insiders almost cleared the way for him and peter MacKay by setting astronomically high fund-raising goals, that were foiled by COVID forcing them to extend the deadlines which allowed Leslyn Lewis, Derek Sloan, and Jim Karahalios to meet the threshold.

Life was made even easier for O’Toole, because when Jim Karahalios rightfully pointed out that the Erin O’Toole of 2020 was not who he said he was and instead would be the man we saw in 2021-2022 (and every year prior to the leadership race, if you paid attention to these things) O’Toole got the party insiders to bend the rules and kick Jim Karahalios from the race.

The first major crack in O’Toole’s facade came over the Carbon Tax.  He, like many other CPC MPs, signed a pledge to scrap the Carbon Tax.  However, once he got past the leadership race he put his own Carbon Tax in the CPC platform. This would pretty much define the O’Toole era.  Promise to do something, do the opposite, gaslight the base by saying “I will scrap the Trudeau Carbon Tax” (and institute the O’Toole Carbon Tax), and then threaten to boot any MP who opposes him out of the party even though they all promised their constituents to fight against the Carbon Tax.

There were numerous other incidents from the exiling of Derek Sloan or Denise Batters to the disaster that was his CPC convention, all the while taking a page out of the Justin Trudeau playbook by screaming racism at any and all criticism legitimate or not.

But ultimately it came down to performance. The O’Toole theory of bashing and dismissing the base in order to gain support in the GTA did not work, he lost votes and the party lost money.

There is no other way to spin it O’Toole was a disastrous failure, the only question left is: will the party insiders learn their lesson, or will we see the same backdoor dealing to undercut the base to appease the media scrum?