Why Erin O’Toole Can’t Win a General Election

The Background

Erin O’Toole has had a terrible record over the last two weeks.

O’Toole who ran as a “True Blue Conservative” in the leadership race started his campaign to distance himself from the conservative base by getting into a silly fight with Ezra Levant and Rebel media. O’Toole had done an interview with the Rebel, but to appeal to the segment of the population that would never vote for him, he denied that he did.

In gratitude for his attempt to portray everyone at Rebel as “far-Right” the Canadian Left and the media started attacking O’Toole as “Canada’s Trump”.  In the wake of the capital hill riot, O’Toole panicked and further alienated himself from the base by trying to throw Trump under the bus. None of this gained him any support.

Erin O’Toole’s war with the Conservative party base culminated on Wednesday when he booted Derek Sloan out of the party for his “pattern of behaviour” and “Not being a team player”, after an obvious botched insider leak to smear Sloan.

Problems with the Base

All of this will give him huge problems with the social conservatives within the party, as before they go to the polls to vote for O’Toole they would need to take the knife out of their back. O’Toole ran as someone who would be against “cancel culture” and always let socially conservative voices speak in caucus, that was a lie.

Canadian politics garners very little attention from the Canadian public who would often rather gaze at the more entertaining politics down South. Having a motivated and energized base show up to vote is very important for the Conservatives, and Erin O’Toole couldn’t do more to demotivate his base if he tried.

Splitting the Party

Any student of Canadian political history would never have been so callous with the Conservative base as O’Toole has been.  The current CPC itself is a relatively young party as its first leader was Stephen Harper who helped unite the reform and the Progressive Conservative Party.

Conservative politics seems to go in a pattern in Canada. There are two factions who realize they can never win when divided so they unite. Then the Centrist and elitist factions gain enough power they start to drive the party far enough to the Left that the base can no longer morally support it and form their own party. The great skill in being the Conservative leader is the ability to balance these two factions, a skill O’Toole seems to have no interest in cultivating other than a few occasional conservative platitudes. 

The great insanity here is that there already has been a crack in the CPC when Andrew Scheer forced out Maxime Bernier for his support of Conservative/Libertarian principles on supply-side management. 

There already is another party for disaffected conservatives to jump to in the PPC, and expect a fair amount of people to abandon O’Toole over this.

Expanding Nowhere

The reasoning that O’Toole will give to justify his behaviour will be to “build a coalition that can win”. Expect O’Toole to mirror Patrick Brown’s race to the centre-Left, as he basically scooped up Brown’s old team to be his new one.

While you can expect the Conservative party to have warmer relationships with groups like the NCCM and the World Sikh Organization, this rarely translates into votes for the Conservatives.

While O’Toole sacrificing Derek Sloan onto the altar of cancel culture seems to have garnered him the approval of Justin Trudeau for the moment, it has not won him the affection of the Canadian mainstream media who spent the week pretending that his slogan “take back Canada” is racist. The interesting part is that alternative conservative media is not coming to his defence, as they seem to reciprocate the same disdain that O’Toole had shown them. 

Perhaps the most predictable outcome of O’Toole throwing his base under the bus was the emboldening of the Canadian Left who got energized and pushed for O’Toole to conduct even more Maoist struggle sessions.

Take for example Bernie Farber, head of the Left-wing group Anti-hate network:

This was his response to O’Toole’s statement about diversity. In Farber’s worldview, the Conservative party is morally deficient because Candice Bergen once wore a hat, a MAGA hat at that, which somehow cause “harm”. I just want to know if there were any survivors of Hatgate 2020.

The Problem of Being Boring

Erin O’Toole has been stacking up obstacles to his election inside the party, and to be blunt, he does not have the tools to overcome them. If he was a talented and charismatic orator he could reframe the narratives that the media will try to throw at the CPC. He is a skilled politician and tactful liar, but he will not be able to grab the attention of the public in order to put his skills to good use.

If he continues to rely on the mainstream media to slander his political opponents then he is bound to run into a buzzsaw when going up against their golden boy in Trudeau. This is compounded when he fails to distinguish himself from Trudeau. Trudeau has every advantage here, he is taller, has better name recognition, and is much more physically attractive. 

While one might scoff at this, the fact that O’Toole is ugly will hurt him. Most people do not vote with their heads on policy (if you consume political content like this in your spare time you are clearly in the minority), but rather vote with their gut. Studies have shown that people tend to rate attractive people as more trustworthy and unattractive people like the opposite. O’Toole literally has nothing going for him at this point.

Conclusion

Barring an unforeseen major shift in fortune for Erin O’Toole he is dead in the water in the next Federal election. Expect a lot of infighting under the O’Toole regime as his only argument to his base will be along the lines of “we need to unite to beat Trudeau”.  

Negative arguments are traditionally ineffective in Canadian politics, Canadian don’t want to hear how much you hate the other guy, but rather for you to make the case as to why you are the better choice. The way things are going, Erin O’Toole is very unlikely to make the argument for Conservatism.