Imagine if you had to write a job ad to find the new leader of the Conservative Party.
Posted yesterday at 5:00 a.m.
Even the most brilliant experts in crisis management could not manage to make it attractive. They would probably end up opting for honesty and transparency.
Like: party once prestigious, but now divided and unmanageable, seeks kamikaze leader. This politician will have to be able to unify two factions at the antipodes, which do not even agree on the fundamental principles that they must defend.
Especially since with these internal tensions, in parallel with the adoption in 2014 of a law which grants more powers to deputies, the leader is more than ever on an ejection seat.
It is enough for just over 20% of elected officials to challenge his leadership to trigger a vote of confidence.
This is what happened in the case of Erin O’Toole.
Even by obtaining the support of a majority of deputies, the abscess would not have been burst. Leading his party until the next federal election would have been the equivalent of participating in a freestyle skiing competition wearing snowshoes.
The elected officials spared him this ordeal.
He suffered a bitter defeat.
But this failure, let’s face it, does not rest solely on the shoulders of Erin O’Toole and her entourage.
Party activists still liked their leader, the recent ‘election autopsy’ report on the Conservatives’ performance in the campaign last year revealed.
Internally, however, it was felt that the leader and his inner circle were not up to the job, both in terms of the strategies adopted during the election campaign last year and those deployed in Ottawa to counter the liberals.
It is also true that he was sometimes hard to follow, Erin O’Toole.
He struggled to please both the more progressive wing of the party and the more radical conservatives.
Did he have a leadership problem within his own party? Yes, but who wouldn’t have had one in his place?
We touch here, you will have understood, at the heart of the problem: since the departure of Stephen Harper, the Conservative Party has become ungovernable.
The most radical fringe refuses to accept that a more moderate leader like Erin O’Toole finds himself in charge.
The more progressive fringe has understood that only a moderate leader will succeed in capturing a greater number of seats east of Manitoba.
She understood that denouncing abortion, fighting against the ban on conversion therapies that aim to change sexual orientation, or even denying the existence of climate change are not politically profitable strategies if we want, in the long term, lead the country.
She understood, finally, that if we let the most radical take control, the party could well be condemned to marginalization and regionalization.
A bit like its ancestor, the Reform Party, which tried to change its image and its name (by becoming the Canadian Alliance), before realizing that its salvation lay in union with the Progressive Conservative Party.
Ahead of the vote of confidence, Erin O’Toole posted a series of incisive comments on social media.
It did not help his cause because he gave the impression of washing his dirty laundry in public and stigmatizing some of his deputies.
On the merits, however, his words are correct and his analysis is the right one.
According to him, there are two paths open to his party. A first that he describes as “dissatisfied, negative and extreme” and that he identifies in particular with Derek Sloane, this deputy expelled because he had accepted the gift of a neo-Nazi.
This path is “a dead end that would turn the Confederation Party into the right-wing NDP,” he predicted.
The other path, according to Erin O’Toole, is one that recognizes that “conservatism is evolving” and “that a winning message is one of inclusion, optimism and hope.”
Perhaps, all things considered, a clarification should be added to the job offer to recruit the new chef…
It’s going to take real acrobatic talent to avoid the dead end and unify his troops while explaining to us what the true nature of the Conservative Party is… all in the hope of winning the next election.