Erin O’Toole Has Done Enough Damage, He Should Be Forced to Resign Now

Erin O’Toole’s election performance is being defended by many Conservative MPs and party insiders as a victory because Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was not removed from office but at least prevented from getting back his 2015 majority. This is complete nonsense.

The Conservative Party under O’Toole’s leadership ran an election campaign that should only be described as an unmitigated disaster. Let’s be clear, Trudeau failed to win, O’Toole just happened to be the Conservative leader during the election, but he was more or less a complete non-entity in the minds of most voters.

Andrew Scheer was removed as the CPC leader in late 2019 for failing to win the most seats in Parliament despite gaining 26 seats overall and taking away Trudeau’s majority, so why then should O’Toole stay when his performance was objectively worse? Well, it seems like O’Toole has more friends inside the party than Scheer did so he may have a better chance at keeping his grip on the party leadership despite his faulires, which isn’t good for Conservative Party members.

O’Toole is good at playing insider political games and surrounds himself with powerful political actors, but that also means he doesn’t have many political principles, demonstrated by his constant flip-flopping on his stance on key issues. These were stances that previously had caused Conservative members to vote for him in the 2020 leadership race, which he then demonized the base for valuing on the run-up to, and during, the federal election. 

O’Toole flip-flopped on:

• Carbon Taxes

• Mandatory Vaccines and Passports

• Balancing the Budget (10 years to balance the budget = not balancing the budget)

• Repealing the Trudeau OIC Rifle Ban

• Free Votes in Parliament

• Free Speech (members of O’Toole’s team sue journalists and he didn’t stand against Bill C-36)

• Defunding the CBC

That is not a complete list but you get the point. O’Toole would have fared much better in the election and could have even been leading a Conservative majority government if he kept his word on those issues.

The Conservative Party shot up in the polls soon after the 2021 snap election started but then over a period of three weeks, the polls tightened again. It seems likely that voters really disliked the Liberals and began looking to the Conservatives as a sensible alternative but as they saw O’Toole start reversing his Conservative positions and shift left, it acted as a soft endorsement of Trudeau’s approach seeing as the CPC leader is practically offering the same thing but just a half-step to the right. 

O’Toole failed to bring many Liberals to the Conservative side while alienating many Conservative voters who then either stayed home or voted for the PPC. O’Toole had even said before and during the election that he did not want people to support the Conservative Party if they disagreed with him on certain issues surrounding social policy and public health mandates. Not much of a mystery why some chose not to vote for the CPC this election.

O’Toole and the Conservative Party insiders can pretend that because it was a low turnout election that it was just bad luck they didn’t flip Liberal seats blue, but they are in large part the reason why so many Canadians stayed home. It was a meaningless election, not just because Trudeau called it simply to try and get his majority back, but because the Conservatives failed to offer a higher purpose for people to get out and vote, and just made it about blocking Trudeau from getting a majority. 

Clearly Erin O’Toole is not going to save Canada from the leftists in the Liberal Party and the NDP that are currently running the country because O’Toole himself is one of those leftists.

O’Toole should be forced to resign and the lefty insiders and campaign operators need to go with him if the Conservative Party is ever going to recover from its depressive slump into mediocre leftist politics.