Born: August 24, 2020. Died: February 2, 2022.
Erin O’Toole’s 526-day intra-pandemic Conservative leadership has been euthanized, taken down by a mercifully quick and decisive 75-vote backstabbing from his own MPs.
It was stunningly brutal finish for a one-campaign leader, capital punishment enacted on incredibly short notice by almost two-thirds of the MPs who decreed a truer-bluer Conservative leader was needed for the next election.
Justin Trudeau, now having beaten down three Conservative leaders, must be gleefully delaying any retirement plans and trying to figure out how to force an election within the next year.
A majority Liberal government beckons as the Conservative government-in-waiting party sets out to defeat itself by isolating further to the right.
But perhaps there’s a bright lining to the dark clouds over the Conservatives.
With zero chance the Liberals can engineer another election in the next year or two, the Official Opposition has time to regroup and reset under new management.
And that manager will most likely be Ottawa MP Pierre Poilievre.
Ironically Poilievre, who was clearly leading the mutiny against O’Toole, was once a Stockwell Day staffer who berated columnists (particularly me) for delivering last rites to Day’s leadership as it went palliative in 2001.
Now a veteran MP, he is quick with a clip, articulately decisive in firm policy positions and works hard on building relationships inside the party. As my MP, I can also testify he’s an excellent constituency MP.
Trouble is, while he would make an good interim Official Opposition leader tormenting Trudeau, Poilievre only wants the big prize. And unless he has some very-well-hidden skills, he’ll be a difficult national sell on the next ballot.
The 42-year-old’s policies lean hard-right and his nasal-twanged snark needs to be softened to polish his image. Mixing it up with the anti-mandate truckers’ convoy was a mistake. And his empathy with social conservatives will give the Liberals plenty of fearmongering material.
But no matter who wins, the next leader faces a helluva challenge holding together a profoundly fractured party with far too many fringes.
The need to become more "conservative" may have been the blade pushing O’Toole of the plank, but it’s the wrong answer if the goal is to win the election in the urban Ontario battlegrounds.
And keep in mind that whoever inherits the leadership "prize" won’t have the clout that comes from leading a party poised to take power. He or she will preside over a caucus of cabinet wannabes who are resigned to be stuck as opposition critics, which makes hard discipline over the fringe elements difficult to enforce.
Still, a comeback under new leadership is not mission impossible.
If the party can shake loose from social conservative influences; preach fiscal discipline against a government engaged in runaway spending; focus policies on growing business in contrast with Liberals preoccupied with growing government; and front it all with a credible face capable of stringing nouns and verbs into straight-talking sentences, well, it could win, particularly if expiry-dated Trudeau runs again.
So if a new leader is essential, now is the best-timed push of a reset button.
And while O’Toole has more flip-flops than a Cancun lifeguard, he leaves behind lessons that should be learned by future leaders.
He understood the true-blue policies he advanced to win the leadership were incompatible with winning a general election.
It was the awkward pivot from his leadership promises to connect with mainstream polices that killed him, exacerbated by failing to communicate those changes to his MPs, who twisted in the winds of his shifting positions on carbon taxes and guns.
But whoever follows O’Toole will still have to walk a different way along the same path.
Canada desperately needs a strong Opposition against this arrogant, fearless, uncompromising government.
But if the answer is to go further and harder to the right, it sets up the Conservatives for a prolonged period in Official Opposition, if not third-party status.
After the party knifed Stockwell Day, it took four years of leadership change and chaotic party reunification to win an election.
With no adult supervision like Stephen Harper in sight, that may well be the electoral future confronting the Conservatives today.
How fitting if that repeat fate restarts on Groundhog Day.
That’s the bottom line…
