Erin O’Toole’s Leadership is being Shielded by the Red Tory Establishment

In the wake of Erin O’Toole’s election failure there is a miniature war being fought within the Conservative party over the future of their leader. This is nothing new for the CPC as the same thing happened when Andrew Scheer failed to oust Trudeau in 2019.

There was a clearly coordinated effort behind getting rid of Scheer in late 2019 after he failed to form a government after the October election. One O’Toole team member had even claimed to have been “pretty public about my intent to assassinate [Scheer]”.

The Conservative Party social media front organization Canada Proud had quickly aligned itself with the movement to oust Scheer posting constant updates about the pressure campaign in an obvious attempt to build momentum behind the movement to undermine Scheer despite the grassroots of the Conservative Party not exactly being displeased with him.

Scheer had even likely had a scandal planted about him having the Conservative Party pay for his children’s private school education. Party insiders pretended as if they did not know this had gone on, as if it was at all realistic for only Scheer and CPC Executive Director Dustin Van Vugt to know the party was paying for the private school education but not the board of the Conservative Fund.

It’s as if members of the Conservative Fund (which included Stephen Harper at the time) are clueless children who cannot keep track of tens of thousands of dollars and had no ability to know what stipends given to Scheer were being spent on.

It shouldn’t be a shock that establishment Red Tory “Conservatives” eagerly take part in the politics of personal destruction. 

What also should not actually be shocking is that many of those publicly and privately behind the movement to oust Scheer were big promoters of Erin O’Toole. and now that O’Toole has failed worse in an election than Scheer, many of those same people don’t want O’Toole kicked to the curb. 

Conservative Party National Councillor Bert Chen launched a petition calling for O’Toole to be removed as leader, but the party had immediately circled the wagons and locked down the party’s Constituent Information Management System (CIMS) soon after the end of the 2021 snap election. 

Although the party claimed that locking down CIMS was “standard operating procedure” the timing right before Conservative Party members would predictably want to start organizing to get rid of Erin O’Toole was unmistakable. The fact the party preemptively shut down the ability for CPC officials to access the membership lists even before Councillor Chen had launched his petitions shows that they knew the failure was due to O’Toole and the Red Tory party establishment.

Rather ironically political insiders in the Conservative Party are the ones accusing those who are displeased by O’Toole’s poor performance, and want him removed, of being “organizers and insiders.” 

Insiders also went after sitting Conservative MPs who wanted to look into the CPC election strategy and what the reasons were for the election failure. 

A Conservative named Fraser MacDonald (who appears to work for a political strategy firm) also apparently started his own petition to support O’Toole in an obvious attempt to counter the petition Chen recently released. Of course, a pro-lockdown Conservative donor like Brett Wilson lined up to sign it to try and save the Red Tory leader. 

Andrew Scheer did not have the ability to activate the party establishment to defend him in this manner. Erin O’Toole, on the other hand, because he is not a social conservative and his main strength in politics is playing the insider political game and organizing his own pressure campaigns against other Conservatives he has a better chance at holding onto power. 

Clearly, this is not about a genuine evaluation of Erin O’Toole’s performance. If he was put against the standards placed on Scheer he would have been forced to resign by breakfast the day after the election. Unfortunately, the Red Tory establishment and backroom actors in the Conservative Party like how much institutional power O’Toole has given them, and removing him as the leader may limit that power if a real ideological conservative was able to win the next leadership election.

Be very skeptical of the motivations held by high-profile O’Toole defenders in the Conservative Party. If they were truly motivated to beat Justin Trudeau and save Canada from the decline into leftism O’Toole would have been sidelined by now.