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#CdnPoli | Erin O’Toole | The Times and Travails of Canada’s Tory Leader

#CdnPoli | Canadian Politics, Politics, , , ,

Poor Erin O’Toole, the beleaguered leader of the Conservative Party of Canada.

When Mr. O’Toole ran for the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada, or order to defeat his  main rival, Nova Scotia’s Peter MacKay — a well-experienced senior Minister of the Crown in the near decade the Conservatives held power in Ottawa, from early 2006 through until late 2015 — Mr. O’Toole fashioned himself as a True Blue, Harperite social conservative who, although he would not allow a vote on abortion on the floor of the House of Commons were he to become Prime Minister of Canada, stood with and for the socially conservative values held by many members of the Conservative Party.

In a ranked ballot vote held on August 24, 2020, in order to secure victory and the leadership of the Conservative Party, the former Minister of Veterans Affairs in the Stephen Harper government, Erin O’Toole, explicitly sought the support of socially conservative leadership hopefuls, Leslyn Lewis and Derek Sloan, to secure the winning votes in the 3rd round of voting, with 19,271 winning ballots cast in his favour, with his rival MacKay securing only 14,528 votes.

First time leadership hopeful, Leslyn Lewis, had finished in third place on the second ballot with 10,140 votes — many of those votes going to O’Toole on the third ballot. Sloan finished last on the first ballot, with 4,864 votes. Mere months later, on January 18, 2021, Erin O’Toole kicked Derek Sloan out of the Conservative caucus. Note should be made that when Mr. O’Toole recently appointed elected members of the Conservative Party to form the Opposition’s Shadow Cabinet, social conservative Leslyn Lewis did not make the cut.

During the recent federal election, much to the chagrin of the Conservative candidates seeking election or re-election, when Erin O’Toole released the Conservative Party platform early in the campaign, in mid-August, Tory candidates were taken aback that the party’s platform came out foresquare in favour of a carbon tax — contrary to long standing Conservative party policy.

In fact, the Tory platform read, as many disgruntled Conservative Party members complained, as a “red” document, or a Liberal Party lite policy document.

In order to win over Canadians who live in the vote rich Metro Toronto and Metro Vancouver regions of Canada, Erin O’Toole had created a platform document that almost entirely jettisoned Conservative Party dogma, and where it didn’t, during the course of the election campaign, O’Toole “re-adjusted” Tory policy on the fly, all in the hopes of securing centrist urban votes.

The appeasement strategy did not work — under O’Toole’s leadership, the Tories lost four  Metro Vancouver seats, while standing pat in Metro Toronto, where the Liberal Party went onto win a near overwhelming victory.

Erin O’Toole’s Conservative Party enters the House of Commons down two seats, in a party riven by division, with a petition launched days ago by prominent Tory Senator Denise Batters calling for a leadership review within 6 months, specifically pointing to Mr. O’Toole’s loss of the 2021 federal election, and his party policy reversals during the course of the election campaign.

To make matters worse for Mr. O’Toole, as the 44th session of the Canadian Parliament gets underway, at a press conference held yesterday morning in Ottawa, Government House Leader Mark Holland told reporters that he believes it would be “statistically improbable” for several Tory MPs to have valid medical exemptions to COVID-19 vaccination — and those who do have them should provide “assurances” they were given for legitimate reasons.

“The Conservative caucus is 119 people,” Mr. Holland told reporters. “Statistically, the likelihood that they would have multiple people who are exempt … is extraordinarily low. There might be some possibility of it but I suppose there’s a possibility that that chair could fly,” he said, pointing to a chair in the room.

If one Conservative MP is claiming an exemption, Holland said, that is “exceptionally unlikely but possible.” More than one Conservative MP claiming an exemption, he said, would be “statistically impossible.”

To be fair, Erin O’Toole’s centrist position on the issues will play much better with the electorate and all but assure the Conservatives victory at the polls, when voters tire of the Liberal Party. Politics is like major sport, though: you’re ‘hired’ … only to be fired at some point in the not-too-distant future.

Still and all, Mr. O’Toole is hardly signaling defeat at the beginning of the current session of Parliament.

Mr. O’Toole has stipulated that battling inflation will be top of mind, by re-naming Mr. Mean, Pierre Poilievre, as his finance critic earlier this month. Poilievre has repeatedly warned about the risk of inflation during the pandemic, and has lately taken aim at the $101.4-billion stimulus package promised in the spring budget, which he now dubs the “$100-billion slush fund.”

In an interview on Friday, O’Toole told National Post columnist John Ivison that his party’s major focus will be on “the economic situation in the country.”

“There’s an inflation crisis, there’s lack of confidence, wages are flat, the cost of everything is going up, so people are actually losing purchasing power as if they were getting their wages cut, and we’ve never seen the country more fractured,” O’Toole said.

Tory House leader Gerald Deltell has said his party was supportive of the initial emergency spending on COVID-19 aid measures because of the unprecedented lockdowns that decimated the economy and forced businesses to close.

But the Tories will now argue that the government was too slow to adjust to changing circumstances, pumping too much money into the economy while running up massive deficits. The result, Deltell has said: businesses are having trouble finding workers & Canadian families are getting hit with rising prices.

For the most part, though, Mr. Deltell told reporters in a press conference held in Ottawa last week, that he could not get into whether his party will oppose various government policies until he sees what’s actually put forward on paper by the Liberals. The Conservative caucus met for two full days prior to the beginning of this session of Parliament to build a strategic political game plan.

“We have a strategy behind each and every issue,” says Deltell. “I can’t be wide open on the strategy right now.”

Here’s CPAC’s Peter Van Dusen in discussion on Parliament’s return, with the Toronto Star’s Susan Delacourt, the National Post’s John Ivison, and Globe and Mail Ottawa Bureau Chief, Ian Bailey …

See you all back here tomorrow. Thank you for reading VanRamblings.

Decision 2021 | E-Day 2021 | The State of the Race | Election Day | Vote Today!

Decision Canada 2021, Politics, , , ,


The final Nanos / Globe and Mail poll in #Elxn44. Now we simply await the outcome of the election.

Well, here we are, Election Day — Monday, September 20th. At this point, it’s anybody’s guess as to the outcome, but a Liberal minority seems probable.

In the final VanRamblings #Elxn44 written prior to E-Day — we’ll be weighing in again tomorrow, Tuesday, September 21st, once the results of today’s federal election have been tabulated — we tried to do our very best to make sense of where Canadians stood heading to the polls to choose the next government of Canada.

Erin O’Toole and the Conservative Party of Canada

A few days ago, VanRamblings believed that Erin O’Toole had an even odds chance of forming a majority — or,  at the very least, a significant minority government — once (almost) all the votes have been counted late on the evening of Monday, September 20th. With the rise of the People’s Party of Canada, and Alberta Premier Jason Kenney’s decision last week to bring in a vaccine passport, we no longer believe that prospects for the Tories forming government to be all that rosy.

As may be seen in the Nanos poll above, the Liberal Party and Conservative Party remain in a neck-and-neck battle to determine who will form the next government of Canada. By August 29th, two weeks after Prime Minister Trudeau had called the election the Tories’ focused, policy-driven campaign had Erin O’Toole and the Conservatives at 37% in the polls, while the Liberals’ lacklustre, enervating campaign had their prospects in the doldrums, garnering the support of only 27.7% of the Canadian electorate. And then, the following series of events unfolded …

1. Liberal ads began to appear on the nightly news, raising concerns about a Tory platform that would “take Canada backward“;

2. Erin O’Toole began to flip flop on many of the core issues contained in the Tory handbook: gun control (“We’ll keep the current ban in place, but will review it in the first year.”); climate change (“We’re committed to carbon pricing, just not the Liberal carbon pricing plan.”); abortion (“I believe in a woman’s right to choose. Whether or not, we choose to place limits on abortion will be left to the members of my government.”); transit (“My government would be prepared to move forward on funding transit. Yes, I recognize that this represents a departure from what you see in the Tory handbook, but …”); a projected deficit that exceeds the Liberal party proposal (“We’ll work to eliminate the deficit in the next 10 years. For now, though, there is spending required to get us out of the pandemic.”); the pandemic (“The Conservative Party under my leadership will support vaccine passports, and will work with the provinces to implement this necessary restriction on Canadians’ access rights, as a meaningful way to wrestle COVID-19 to the ground.”);

3. Québec. Never before in Canadian political history has a question asked by the moderator of a Leaders’ Debate so changed the complexion, and possible outcome, of a federal election.

As valid as Shachi Kurl’s questioning was of Bloc Québécois leader Yves-François Blanchet on the inherent discriminatory aspects of Québec’s Bill 21 — banning Québec citizens from wearing religious symbols, and mandating that one’s face be uncovered to give or receive specific public services — the contentious nature of her question had two immediate effects: a) Coalition Avenir Québec Premier François Legault came out the next morning, urging Québec voters to cast their ballot for the Conservative Party, and their leader Erin O’Toole — who would not interfere in provincial jurisdiction, he said, stating that an O’Toole government would not take Bill 21 to court; and, b) support for the Bloc Québécois shot through the roof, while cutting in half support for Justin Trudeau and the Liberal party;

4. The People’s Party of Canada. At the outset of the election, the far right-of-centre, anti-vaxxer, Trump-like People’s Party stood at 2.8% in the polls. As Erin O’Toole began to flip flop on the issues, though, the libertarian “fringe element” in the Conservative Party left in droves to join either Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party, or Jay Hill’s northern B.C. and prairie-based and separatist Maverick Party, causing support for those parties to spike dramatically. Some Ontario/Alberta polls have the People’s Party polling as high as 11%.

In the waning days of #Elxn44, Tory campaign officials made contact with disaffected members of the Conservative Party who’ve now joined the People’s Party or the Maverick Party, to bring them back into the fold, by re-assuring them that …

“Erin O’Toole’s Conservative Party is your Conservative Party. We all believe in the same things: we all want our civil rights, and don’t want to see them abridged by mask mandates or vaccine cards, or anything of the sort. Let me assure you that we’ll move forward on reversing Justin Trudeau’s gun control legislation. Just like in the U.S., we’ll introduce legislation limiting a woman’s right to a child-killing abortion. And we’ve got no intention of acting on a job-killing climate action plan. We’re this close to achieving what you want to see from your federal government — but every vote for the People’s or the Maverick party is a vote that will ensure that a Justin Trudeau government will be returned to Ottawa next Monday. Don’t let that happen! C’mon back to the Conservative Party. We need you!”

https://twitter.com/EDenhoff/status/1436059426335576075?s=20

If the Conservative Party outreach to disaffected Tory members proves even partially successful, Erin O’Toole could win a minority government this evening. If enough members of the People’s or the Maverick party cast a ballot not for either of these fringe, right-of-centre parties, Erin O’Toole and the Conservatives might even win a majority — possibly a massive majority — government tonight, although with each passing hour that potential outcome seems increasingly unlikely.

Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party of Canada

With anti-vaxx protesters dogging Justin Trudeau’s every campaign stop throughout his campaign for office, hurling gravel at the Prime Minister and shouting misogynist comments about his wife Sophie, in the final week of the campaign, Mr. Trudeau has found a vigorous new energy, his campaign now in a more spirited & dynamic gear, taking the fight for “a better Canada” to Canadians across our land.

As occurred in both the 2015 and 2019 federal election campaigns, as Election Day draws nearer, and the prospect of a right-of-centre “backward” Conservative Party once again assuming the reins of power in Ottawa looms, support for the Liberal Party has burgeoned, mostly — almost exclusively — at the expense of the long woebegotten democratic socialist party of Canada,  our beloved New Democrats.

NDP leader Jagmeet Singh did his cause no favours by failing to answer any of the questions placed to him on Tuesday evening by chief CBC political correspondent, Rosemary Barton, who pretty much savaged the under prepared and decidedly underwhelming (at least on Tuesday evening) leader of Canada’s fourth party.


Progressive’s concern: Erin O’Toole praises Alberta’s UCP leader Jason Kenney on COVID-19 response. Late news: O’Toole had asked  Mr. Kenney to delay til next Tuesday his vaccine passport announcement.

In the past two weeks, support for the NDP has dropped from a campaign high of 28.4% to its current 17.5% E-Day Nanos poll standing. For most progressive voters, a national child care programme; maintenance of the Canada Child Benefit — which has not only served the interests of young families, but also reduced the child poverty rate in Canada by 40%; and a continued ban on the murderous assault weapons that have killed and maimed so many of our fellow citizens matters.

Implementation of a global best climate action plan, continuing the ban on tanker traffic along British Columbia’s pristine coast; support for the diversity that is Canada in 2021 (which will include a ban on conversion therapy, and an anti-racism strategy that will support and ensure the safety of all persons of colour), while bringing Afghan refugees and Yazidi women exploited and imprisoned by ISIS to Canada — and a hundred other programmes championed by Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government will cause many progressive voters to cast their ballot strategically this upcoming Monday, voting for the Liberal or New Democratic Party candidate best positioned to defeat the Conservative Party candidate.

Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government mounted a massive response to the pandemic, quarterbacking an unprecedented campaign against the threat of a virus that had shaken the economy, legislating necessary programmes to keep Canadians safe and economically whole, while procuring 100 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, and funding three new biomanufacturing facilities to manufacture up to four million doses per month at home, to ensure Canada’s ability to produce sufficient vaccine doses to meet our country’s need.


Justin Trudeau bringing his friend Dominic LeBlanc back into Cabinet following his cancer battle.

Last Tuesday, Justin Trudeau’s longtime friend and recent Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc told the Toronto Star’s Tonda McCharles that he thought the Liberals might win a majority government this upcoming Monday. VanRamblings believes Mr. LeBlanc is dreaming in technicolour — although some pundits believe a majority Liberal government is possible, just not probable.

Unless the New Democratic Party vote completely collapses — which seems unlikely, with current electoral prospects suggesting the NDP will, perhaps, better their 2019 election outing, when they achieved a near record low of 15.98% voter approval, and 24 seats in Parliament — the Liberals will likely win a stand pat minority around the 157-seat mark, or should the New Democratic Party really suffer in the voting booth, a minimally increased minority government. A majority federal Liberal government is not in the cards, or so it would seem.Democracy. Late on Monday evening we’ll know the will of the Canadian people.


The final #Elxn44 Curse of Politics podcast, E-Day, Monday, September 20, 2021 | A Liberal minority.


The Curse of Politics podcast, Saturday, September 18, 2021 | The campaign is over —  that’s all she wrote.


The Curse of Politics podcast, Friday, September 17, 2021
David Herle states in Friday’s Curse of Politics podcast that on voting day, the NDP vote will collapse.


The Curse of Politics podcast, Thursday, September 16, 2021

Decision 2021 | Day 25 | The 21st Century Belongs to the Conservatives?

Decision Canada 2021, Politics, , , , ,

For 9 long years, Canadian politics underwent a tectonic shift that for the longest period of time since Confederation seemingly buried the liberal elites of yesteryear, during the era of Stephen Harper’s reign as Canada’s Prime Minister.

The thesis propounded by conservative Globe and Mail columnist, John Ibbitson, and pollster Darrell Bricker, Global CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs Research, is that  Canada is undergoing a fundamental shift (the eponymous “Big Shift”) that in the 21st century will result in a reformation of Canadian politics, governance, economy and values. The authors argue in their book that the Conservative Party of Canada is the political force best poised to take advantage of this changing landscape, and over the years and in the coming decades will be transformed into what was once the purview of the Liberal Party: the natural governing party of Canada.

Bricker and Ibbitson argue that one of the world’s most consensual countries is becoming polarized, exhibiting stark differences between East and West, cities and suburbs, Canadian born citizens and immigrants. The “winners” — in both politics and business — will be those who can capitalize on these momentous changes.

For almost its entire history, Canada has been run by the political, media and business elites of Toronto, Ottawa and Montréal. For nine long, arduous years, though, these groups lost their power — without most of them realizing their power was on the wane. The Laurentian Consensus, the term John Ibbitson has coined for the dusty liberal elite, had been replaced by a new and powerful coalition based in the West and supported by immigrant voters in Ontario. How did this happen?

So far in the 21st century, though, the Conservatives have governed for only 9 of 21 years. Despite their dispiriting election losses in the 2015 and 2019 federal elections, the Conservative Party has nonetheless continued to remain strong in northern British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, in the rural regions of Ontario, and has even shown strength in Québec — but not in the Maritimes.

In his review in The Globe and Mail of John Ibbitson and Darrell Bricker’s book, The Big Shift, journalist and academic Christopher Dornan writes …

“The Big Shift, as its title suggests, is one of those books that purports to divine a single, telling fact to explain Canada. If that fact echoes Jacques Parizeau’s infamous 1995 comment about “money and the ethnic vote,” it is not, as Bricker and Ibbitson advance it, a form of bigotry, but a species of determinism: The political values, and therefore voting tendencies, of new arrivals and first-generation Canadians are contingent on their race and region of origin.

Further, this “Big Shift in power to the West and to suburban immigrants” is not only permanent but “will make Canada inexorably a more conservative place.” Resistance is futile. Bad news for progressives, whether they manage to unite or not. They’re on the wrong side of a fundamental and irreversible demographic shift.”

While both of the book’s authors take great pains to stress that they’ve merely set out to document a “seismic shift” in the demographics of Canada, and what it portends for the political, social and economic future of our nation, for most who would read the book and interpret its internal thesis, from the book’s outset through til its end, it would be difficult to ignore the sense of triumphalism evident throughout Ibbitson and Bricker’s polemical treatise, as if somehow the shift to the “new” — and increasingly right wing — Conservative Party is inalterably inevitable.

“It’s one thing for the Conservative Party to chafe and protest  when in opposition,” writes Dornan. “But, if Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s style of government — which might best be described as “undertaken in a spirit of spite” — offers an example of what Canadians might expect from a Conservative government, it is entirely likely that a goodly number of our fellow citizens would find this approach to governance to be untenable, particularly in a country populated by families who came here to escape entrenched antagonisms. If that ever changes, then the Canada we all love — left and right, newcomer or born-and-bred — will be truly at risk.”

When Canadians go to the advance polls to cast a ballot this week, or to their polling station on Election Day, Monday, September 20th, Canadians must vote not just for the Prime Minister and the government of their choice, but for the future of Canada — our most cherished home — and the uniquely Canadian values of fairness, respect, compassion, equality, inclusion, diversity, safety, peace, and for being there for one another, as collectively we seek to create a more sustainably just Canada for everyone. As in every election, there is in 2021 a great deal on the line.

Decision 2021 | Day 23 | Hoodwinking Canadians on Climate Change

Decision Canada 2021, Politics, , , , , ,

https://giverdigitalstudyguide.weebly.com/uploads/4/7/4/5/47458811/4582725_orig.png

On social media the other day, Sandy Garossino — a retired Crown Counsel, national journalist and political pundit — told her readers on Twitter that this election, and for her every election going forward, would be about one thing …

All elections determine the character of a country for the next four years.

And they have a lot to say about what the world will feel like, too. But this election may determine the flavour of the next four millennia — maybe the next 40. That’s because time is the one thing we can’t recover, and time is the one thing we’ve just about run out of in the climate fight.

Electing an Erin O’Toole-led Conservative Party would push Canada backwards fast, and would cost us dearly. Writes Max Fawcett in the National Observer …

The now-defunct Northern Gateway pipeline project is both a monument to the failed Harper-era policy of petro-nationalism and a testament to the power of Indigenous communities and those fighting for their rights. It’s emblematic of a past when concerns about climate change were far less important to the government of Canada than the interests of Alberta’s oil and gas sector.

Tankers could crash off B.C.’s west coast carrying Alberta crude

And for some strange reason, Erin O’Toole wants to bring it back from the dead — which would deal a fatal blow to any hope Canada has of reaching its net-zero emissions targets by 2050. This contradiction is at the heart of the climate plan O’Toole is trying to sell to Canadians. We are well past the point where we can delude ourselves into thinking we can have our cake and eat it, too, on climate change.

Fawcett goes on to quote Globe and Mail columnist Andrew Coyne, “The Conservatives don’t want a plan that works, still less one they might actually have to implement. They just want a plan they can wave around for a while, then discard.” If Canadian voters genuinely care about climate change, writes Fawcett, they’ll do themselves a favour and put O’Toole’s plan in the trash can — before he gets a chance to do it himself.

As respected Québec environmentalist and Liberal Party candidate in the riding of Laurier—Sainte-Marie, Steven Guilbeault, wrote recently …

“Erin O’Toole has made the Conservative party a home for dinosaurs. The following examples just barely scratch the surface of the climate change denial rampant in the Conservative Party of Canada.”

Here are a few examples of where Mr. Guilbeault’s concerns arise, that barely scratch the surface of the climate change denial rampant within the Conservative Party of Canada.

In Red Deer-Lacombe, Erin O’Toole’s Conservative Party candidate Blaine Calkins was caught spreading misinformation to children, saying “whether or not you think carbon dioxide is pollution or not is, I still think, a question.”

Professor accuses Alberta MP of spreading ‘climate misinformation’

In the North Okanagan-Shuswap, Erin O’Toole’s Conservative candidate is the enthusiastically endorsed Mel Arnold, who has questioned whether humans are the main cause of climate change — arguing that there is no scientific consensus.

North Okanagan-Shuswap Tory candidate questions science on climate change

In Cariboo-Prince George, O’Toole’s candidate Todd Doherty couldn’t bring himself to say that climate change was caused by human activity and claimed it was due to “adding more and more bodies to the room.”

There’s a video very much worth watching embedded in the tweet below.

In Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, Cheryl Gallant has a long history of climate change denial, including having stated that: “alarmist claims about ‘man-made’ global warming have cost the Ontario government tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs.”

Ontario Conservative MP Cheryl Gallant writes over-the-top climate change rant

In Kelowna—Lake Country, Erin O’Toole’s Conservative Party candidate Tracy Gray skated and refused to give a straight answer when pushed on whether human activity is the cause of climate change, in an interview with CBC Daybreak Kelowna.

In Miramichi-Grand Lake, Erin O’Toole’s anti-choice Conservative Party candidate Jake Stewart has called environmental activists eco terrorists.

In Don Valley North, Erin O’Toole’s candidate Sabrina Zuniga has downplayed the environmental impacts of oil spills, claiming that “oil is natural … so spilling into the environment, the land will absorb it because that’s what oil is.”

Ontario Spadina-Fort York Tory candidate Sabrina Zuniga says oil is absorbed in soil, with absolutely no damage to the environment — because oil is a natural substance.

In Cloverdale—Langley City, favourite Erin O’Toole and Andrew Scheer candidate Tamara Jansen called reports of rising CO2 levels “scare mongering” and referred to scientists warning about climate change as pushing “climate change dogma.”

Cloverdale—Langley City Conservative Candidate Tamara Jansen Promoted The Idea That the Earth Was Created in 6 Days, Casting Doubt on Evolution and Climate Change, while others rally to express concern about Ms. Jansen’s extremist anti-choice views .

In Yorkton—Melville, Tory candidate Cathay Wagantall has suggested climate action is a conspiracy to hurt workers, while in Battlefords-Lloydminster, candidate Rosemarie Falk believes that the Tories need to think about: “Gen Z, which has grown up their whole lives being fed climate alarmism.”

In Québec, Trois-Rivieres, Conservative Party candidate Yves Levesque said the quiet part out loud, “as an elected official, as a person, that we’re going to destroy the planet, well we’re going to do it in a pragmatic way without lowering your purchasing power.”

In Shefford, Québec, Erin O’Toole’s preferred candidate, Céline Lalancette, denies the very existence of the human causes of climate change, telling the media: “humans are not responsible for climate change, it has never been proven” and “the universe will do what it has to do.”

Tory Céline Lalancette denies existence of human causes of climate change

Well, that’s it for VanRamblings for this Monday, September 6th, a hyperbole-free column (well, almost) on a few of the less savoury folks who comprise the Conservative Party of Canada candidate corral — not exactly the most progressive amalgam of candidates who you’d choose to cast a ballot for, or in this case, not cast a ballot for … but rally against, if you care at all about our world.

You do — and won’t vote Conservative in the 2021 Canadian federal election.