This election is a make-or-break moment for Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole, and for the federal Conservative Party more broadly. After coming second in the last two elections (in terms of seat count, anyway) and switching leaders last year, there is pressure for the party to steady itself.
This election is a test of whether O’Toole’s leadership can keep the party factions under one tent, expand its base and win.
In the early days of the campaign, things looked promising. The Conservatives led the national polls, despite a sense that the leader was not connecting with voters. O’Toole put out a big-spending platform that was meant to situate him as a progressive and compassionate conservative.
This was a bold move, given that the merger on the right side of the ideological spectrum back in 2004 saw the word “progressive” deliberately dropped from the party’s label. Is O’Toole admitting that that was a mistake? Is he sincere in his attempt to pull the party back to the centre, or is Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau right: will O’Toole say whatever it takes to get elected?
A key part of O’Toole’s claim to being progressive is his commitment to support for social programs, including child care. That O’Toole recognizes the need for federal involvement in a child care strategy is a good thing, but his proposal for a tax rebate is simply not enough.
This is a major missed opportunity that could cost him the election for failing to appreciate the challenges that families are facing and for relying on old-school conservative logic to justify the underfunding of a critical program.
O’Toole would replace the Liberals’ plan for $10-a-day care with a tax credit that would reimburse families for up to 75 per cent of child care expenses. He suggests that his plan is the fairer one because it puts money directly in your pocket, allowing you to make your own decisions about what child care arrangement works best for your family.
The appeal to personal choice and the rejection of “government intervention” is a common conservative refrain, one that is out of step with the progressive politics that O’Toole says he is embracing. Experts in the child care field have criticized O’Toole’s plan for failing to address the shortage of child care spaces and for creating tax benefits for wealthy families who don’t need the money.
If he really wanted to show how progressive he is, he would honour the agreements that the Liberals have already signed with eight provinces to work toward $10-a-day child care and he would do his best to bring the remaining two provinces on board. This would help him to reduce the appeal of the Liberals and would improve his chances greatly in vote-rich Ontario. And, at the risk of stating the obvious, copying the Liberals’ child care plan should have been a no-brainer for O’Toole if he had any hope in gaining more support from women.
The realities of COVID-19 have created a wider and deeper consensus on the need for a rethink of our social safety net, particularly in light of the changing nature of work, the gig economy, and the need for upskilling and reskilling across the labour force. Women were disproportionately affected by job losses and reduced employment during COVID-19 lockdowns. In order to fully integrate women back into the economy and to provide the conditions to enable their success going forward, we need an affordable, accessible child care program of the highest quality.
O’Toole likely gets this. However, as the leader of the Conservative Party, he’s beholden to the fiscal conservatives who want people to pay for their own child care, the libertarians who want to keep government out of your life, and the constitutional purists who think that child care should be left to the provinces, if anyone at all.
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If he wants to reduce his vulnerability to these factions of the party, he could do so by appealing to the Red Tories who were orphaned by the success of the unite-the-right movement. It worked for Tim Houston in my province, Nova Scotia, who self-identified as a Red Tory from day one in the campaign. So damaged is the federal Conservative brand in Nova Scotia that Houston actually campaigned against it — and he was rewarded with a majority. There is a lesson and opportunity for O’Toole here: there are Red Tories in this country who believe that government is in our lives to do something good and who do not want to vote for Trudeau.
In the final week of the campaign, it seems that O’Toole has lost the lead that he had built up by the end of August. Doubts have been sewn about whether he can be trusted in his shifting position on gun control or carbon pricing. He’s launched personal attacks against Trudeau, which come across as desperate and panicked at this stage of the game. And he’s contending with growing support for the People’s Party of Canada, a right/far-right wing party led by former Conservative MP Maxime Bernier.
O’Toole’s approach is not progressive enough in its substance to appeal broadly to the centre, and it’s not far enough to the right for those who have grown frustrated with what they see as government intrusion. Further, Bernier’s party has provided a home for anti-vaxxers, who have mobilized (sometimes violently) against Trudeau. Even if Bernier wins no seats, the PPC’s impact in this election could be enough to obstruct a Conservative victory in several ridings.
If O’Toole wants to recast and resituate the party as an option for progressive voters, he needs to provide the substance to back it up. The Conservative platform is a laundry list of items designed for broad appeal, but it is not deep enough to move centrist voters away from other parties. Further to that, it is clear that the right is still very much divided.
On this trajectory, O’Toole is poised to see what could have been a victory fall through the cracks on election night. If he does not outperform former leader Andrew Scheer, there will be questions as to whether anyone but Stephen Harper can lead the fractured and unwieldy conservative movement to a win.
Lori Turnbull is director of the School of Public Administration at Dalhousie University.
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