Canadian Voters Don’t Want Erin O’Toole’s Kim Campbell Conservatism

Erin O’Toole’s short tenure as the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada can only be described as both boring and frustrating for typical Conservative voters. 

The Mr. “True Blue” Conservative image that he had attempted to cultivate in the 2020 leadership election has fully melted away and it is just an objective fact at this point that O’Toole lied and he is indeed a centre-left politician and not on the right as he claimed.

That was more than evident when O’Toole refused to take any interviews with Rebel News and said the “far-right” had no place in the Conservative Party without ever defining what he sees as the “far-right” shortly before he removed Derek Sloan from the CPC over a fake scandal.

Erin O’Toole is only Conservative in the way that Prime Minister Kim Campbell was technically a “conservative” because she happened to lead the Progressive Conservative party and was able to crib off of the legacy of previous PC prime ministers. She was a leftist on social issues, weak on firearms, and not particularly fiscally Conservative.

O’Toole himself voted against banning sex-selective abortion, voted for the compelled speech Bill C-16, has only pledged to roll back some Liberal gun control legislation, and isn’t planning on balancing the budget for a decade, while putting forward his own version of a cabon tax.

The CPC is currently plummeting in the polls, and although Conservative-supporting organizations like Canada Proud will highlight all the decent polls O’Toole gets, the overall trend is of a party that is struggling to keep enough support to even prevent the Liberals from getting a majority, let alone get enough support to win a majority of their own.

On top of the CPC’s slow polling decline over time with O’Toole at the helm, the most telling polling is regarding Erin O’Toole himself.

Not only are the plurality of Canadians not left with a strong impression of Erin O’Toole after 8 months of his leadership of the CPC, but those who do have an opinion of him around 65 percent dislike him, with only 19 percent of Canadians overall liking him despite around 30 percent voting Conservative. 

O’Toole is in one of the worst possible positions he could be. Canadians both don’t really care who he is, even more so than Jagmeet Singh leading the failing NDP, and if they do develop an opinion it is quite likely to be negative.

Kim Campbell when she was leading the PCs into the 1993 election at one point only having an approval rating of 25 percent (without a neutral option) and O’Toole has for months been hovering just above 25, around 27-32 percent. The 25 percent number is important as it was one of the key indicators that despite the PC party polling about 25 percent leading into the 1993 election, the party’s voter turnout collapsed leaving them with only 2 seats left in Parliament.

O’Toole looking for a new based for his party by rejecting those to the right of him, and trying to compete for more left-of-center voters that the Liberals and NDP are already contending for, seems like a strategy almost perfectly calibrated to win almost no new voters and make current Conservative voters stay home next election or find a new party to vote for. 

Kim Campbell conservatism is a platform that has already been tried, and in the current economic downturn, and rise in unwanted government control, why would that brand sell now?