What’s the future for the Tories with O’Toole out?

• Looking to Doug Ford for inspiration?
• Conservatives don’t need close leadership vote
• ‘Tortured and disheartening’ spell could bring new hope

The future of the Conservative Party will lie in the upcoming leadership contest, after caucus members voted to oust Erin O’Toole on Groundhog Day.

The party's 119 MPs met via video conference to cast secret ballots after about one-third of them signed a notice that triggered a leadership review. Seventy-three MPs voted to replace O’Toole while 45 endorsed him.

“It leaves them in a kind of disarray,” UBC’s Richard Johnston said. “On the other hand, they were going to be in disarray anyway.”

Johnson, the Canada Research Chair in Public Opinion, Elections, and Representation at the Department of Political Science, told Kelowna10 the problems for O’Toole started in 2020 when he was elected leader.

Johnston said O'Toole pulled a “bait and switch,” as he campaigned for the top job as a ‘true blue’ conservative but drifted closer to the centre after he won.

That, he said, coupled with an election loss and several recent stumbles, like “pretending the Conservative Party was at one in no longer contesting” the conversion therapy ban, burned his backbench support.

“The last straw may have been the trucker convoy,” Johnston said, adding how O’Toole put himself on both sides of the issue. “He tolerated direct connections with the demonstrators by some of his MPs who were arguably seeking to provoke him.”

Other MPs, he said, may have just decided that the position was untenable, and it was time to move on.

The upcoming leadership contest, he said, will ultimately decide the future of the party. Johnston said depending on what happens, the party might fall apart.

But the Tories are no stranger to fracture.

Since 1935, every decade or so, the party goes through a “tortured and disheartening” internal division, often focused on the leader, he said.

“If they go through a leadership process, which either produces by a very narrow margin someone who is seriously at odds with the rank and file … or who is weak but kind of goes up the middle … then the party could just split,” he said.

Where should the party look for leadership inspiration? No further than Ontario and the success of the Fords and the Progressive Conservative Party there.

The factions that run that province, he said, are a “suburban operation.” Johnston said many suburban voters share common beliefs, and even diverse suburbs in and around the GTA can be brought into a big tent Conservative Party of sorts.

“I would be asking who out there knows how to talk about politics in the way that [Doug Ford] does,” he said. “It’s not impossible to imagine they can make inroads [to the suburbs] and doing so in a way that does not require them to turn their back on their base.”

A strong interim leader will also be key to the party’s success. Johnston said the party would be wise to find someone good on procedure to move things ahead in the House of Commons.

Once the leadership selection rolls around, he said how that plays out will be closely watched.

He said it could play to the parties benefit to have someone on the right handily defeated to send a strong message to the general electorate.

The Tories could also benefit from having one, if at most two serious contenders, so the winner represents a broad landscape of the party, Johnston said.

“It would be best if they have a leader who is not chosen by 50 per cent plus one, which is what they have had the past couple of times.”

As for those across the aisle, like the governing Liberals, anything that divides the right is always a boon.

In the 1990s, the Jean Chretien Liberals soared to massive majority victories thanks largely due to a vote split on the right, between Reform and Progressive Conservative.

“The Conservative Party, in some sense, is called by history to sort itself out. This is an opportunity one more time to sort itself out,” he said. “But it has to sort itself out in a way that leaves it as a Conservative Party but has figured out the language of Conservatism that pushes towards the middle without going all the way over to the language of the urban elites.”