Kelly McParland: Monday's election was a wake-up call for the Conservatives
There will be lots of arguing over how the Tories managed to lose Monday’s election, but the simple truth is that Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre cost himself his chance at victory.
It was Poilievre’s party, Poilievre’s campaign, Poilievre’s stratagems, Poilievre’s statements, Poilievre’s policies, Poilievre’s record, Poilievre’s attitude and Poilievre’s personality on view. All run by Poilievre’s people, who gave no sign that any aspect of the campaign took place without Poilievre’s approval.
It was clear that the Tories had an excellent chance of success as long as former prime minister Justin Trudeau was the opponent. Canadians might not love Poilievre, but were willing to accept him if the alternative was a prime minister they’d absolutely had enough of, or someone that resonated Trudeauism. Take that away and the Conservative campaign was cooked.
U.S. President Donald Trump is getting the blame for the Conservative collapse from some quarters, but the Trump factor resonated mainly because Poilievre so conspicuously resisted the need to deal with it. He’d constructed a campaign with a certain focus and he was either unwilling or incapable of shifting gears when events called for it. There was no Plan B.
To many, Poilievre came across as a guy so absolutely sure of himself, only an earthquake could shift him. He does what he does and that’s what he does, and if you’re on his team, you accept that. Does that remind you of any recent prime ministers?
The Conservative party will have to deal with this reality. Voters demonstrated Monday that, as far as they’re concerned, “change” can mean someone at the head of the Liberal party who is significantly unlike the previous head of the Liberal party. Conservatives might have had a better chance against Liberal Leader Mark Carney if they’d had a leader who was able to connect with a wider range of people. Carney did a better job of that than Poilievre did.
Poilievre was able to hold giant, enthusiastic rallies in Alberta, but was barely on speaking terms with the Progressive Conservative premiers of Ontario and Nova Scotia. He didn’t make the effort to congratulate Ontario Premier Doug Ford following his third consecutive majority in Canada’s most populous province, and hadn’t even spoken to him in his two years as federal leader.
He so annoyed Tim Houston that the Nova Scotia premier disassociated himself with the federal operation altogether and didn’t attend Poilievre’s appearances in his province. “I’m the leader of the Nova Scotia Progressive Conservatives. There is a Conservative Party of Canada. It’s a completely different party with its own leader,” he declared.
Ford and Houston represent a wing of Canadian conservatism that supposedly lost the contest for the heart of the party when Stephen Harper negotiated a truce between the centrists and the right-wing reformists in 2003. Harper wasn’t a centrist, but he was better at handling the divide than his successors.
Andrew Scheer couldn’t hide his social conservative leanings, or admit to them in a tactical manner. Erin O’Toole was a moderate who pretended not to be and suffered when he got caught. Poilievre and his to strategists thought he could win without worrying about the sort of Tories who put Ford and Houston in office.
Conservatives now find themselves in a very tricky situation. Carney didn’t get the majority he wanted, but is close enough that, with competent management, he should be able to buy himself enough time to show what he can do.
Poilievre, on the other hand, couldn’t hold onto his own seat. Whether he stays on as leader won’t be up to him. The 144 Conservatives who appear to have won as of this writing will have it in their power to decide what sort of party they want to present to voters the next time they get a chance.
They are likely to keep losing if they can’t manage to broaden their appeal. Poilievre won more votes than any Conservative in history. More than Harper did for his 2011 majority. He won more seats than Harper did for either of his minorities. Yet he still lost because the dynamics of the country worked against him.
Canadian voters have rarely been in a greater mood to toss out an existing government, yet Conservatives couldn’t manage it because they ran a campaign that couldn’t bring itself to court the sort of people who put leaders like Ford or Houston in office.
Scheer and O’Toole both won the popular vote, but did so by running up huge margins in constituencies they were always going to win anyway. Poilievre must have known this but couldn’t resist the allure of western love-ins, even as eastern ridings were far from in the bag.
The extent that the Conservatives mishandled their opportunity is reflected in the collapse of the New Democrats. Tory prospects in any federal election depend to a considerable degree on the NDP drawing away enough votes on the left to make the Liberals vulnerable. Poilievre’s hard-edged approach had the opposite effect, driving NDP supporters into Liberal arms out of a determination to prevent a Conservative victory.
It was often pointed out in the latter days of the campaign that Poilievre’s polling numbers were quite impressive: he was in or around 39 per cent of the vote, the same number that won Harper his only majority in 2011.
But while New Democrats siphoned off dozens of Liberal seats in 2011, the current crop of nervous left-wingers fled wholesale to the Liberals. Carney made sure not to get in their way, releasing a last-minute platform so stuffed with spending baubles it could have been personally authored by Justin Trudeau.
You can’t win over a country if you limit your interest to one select portion of its inhabitants. When Doug Ford won his first mandate, he was routinely condemned by detractors in similar terms as Poilievre: he was Trump-lite, a northern version of the maladroit president then in his first term.
The criticism was not undeserved, but among Ford’s attributes is a willingness to recognize change and adapt to circumstances. In his latest majority, he cast himself as an essential ingredient to protect Ontario from Trumpist chaos, advising a recent policy forum in Toronto: “Sometimes I think the cheese slips off the cracker with this guy.”
Poilievre showed no similar ability to adapt until the very late stages of his campaign, when he finally put a damper on the cocky attack-dog tactics. Even then it almost worked: if the campaign had lasted another week or two and Trump had remained busy insulting other countries, the result might have been different.
Still, it will fall to Conservatives to build a better model for their next attempt. There is a very large number of conservative-minded Canadians, between a third and 40 per cent of the population, who consistently reject the Liberal view of the world. The party’s problem is a failure to find a formula capable of uniting its two wings rather than pitting them against one another.
If Conservatives can’t find a way to win the trust of a wider range of voters, they’ll be stuck with many more nights like Monday. It used to be that Tories got elected only every decade or so when Liberals had thoroughly worn out their welcome. Monday suggested they can’t even count on that.
National Post