(OTTAWA) Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole said changes would be made to his team and the party after an internal review revealed what went wrong in the recent election.
Updated yesterday at 10:08 p.m.
The review led by former Alberta MP James Cumming was presented to Conservative MPs on Thursday on the final day of the party’s caucus retreat, held before Parliament resumes Monday.
The caucus was briefed on the findings which were compiled using feedback Mr Cumming received from some 400 people, including campaign staff, candidates, MPs and senators.
The post-election analysis landed at a time when Mr. O’Toole faces divisions within caucus and rank-and-file members. Some of his critics are pushing for his leadership to go to an early confidence vote by mid-June instead of waiting for a vote scheduled at a national convention in 2023. At least three of the riding associations in the party have called for an early vote.
After two days spent facing his deputies, Mr. O’Toole took on his shoulders the failures of the electoral campaign.
“I am responsible for the setback,” Mr. O’Toole told reporters at a press conference Thursday evening.
Regarding his performance during the campaign, Mr O’Toole said the review confirmed that he had spent too much time in a broadcast studio the party had set up in a downtown hotel. Ottawa and which served as a campaign backdrop during the COVID-19 pandemic. That meant he was out of touch with Canadians, he said.
Additionally, O’Toole said he was too stuck on prepared scripts in his public messages in the latter part of the campaign and failed to address some of the issues Canadians were hoping to hear about.
“We didn’t come up with some of the great policies we had for Western Canada,” O’Toole said. All these decisions are my responsibility. »
Many Conservative MPs hail from the party’s heartland in Saskatchewan and Alberta, where some of them lost votes in last September’s election. It raised fears that Mr. O’Toole’s failed attempt to win support in Ontario and Quebec by taking a more moderate stance on a host of issues has ended up costing the party some of its traditional support.
CCP needs to recruit more diverse candidates
The Conservatives’ post-election analysis recommends the party recruit more diverse candidates and better target cultural communities, where the “conservative brand” was tarnished during the previous campaign in 2015.
Three Conservative sources who were briefed on the report presented to the Conservative caucus on Thursday, as part of a two-day retreat, shared some of the findings and recommendations, on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to discuss publicly of the question. The Canadian Press has not seen the report or all of its findings.
According to the sources, the Cumming report recommends the party find ways to recruit more diverse candidates and improve the way it reaches out to different cultural communities.
The report would conclude that the party was still grappling with the effects of the 2015 election campaign, when Prime Minister Stephen Harper was seeking re-election. The party then promised to set up a hotline to denounce “barbaric cultural practices” – an idea that has been poorly received in some communities.
According to the sources, the report also concludes that Canadians’ trust in the party has been undermined by the infighting that has rocked it since Stephen Harper’s departure in 2015 — and the fact that it has since gone through two management, in five years. Andrew Scheer was elected leader in 2017 and led the Conservatives in the 2019 election; after his defeat, Mr O’Toole won the next leadership contest, in 2020.
Two of the sources say Mr Cumming’s review found Chief O’Toole’s message was best received by Canadians when he campaigned outside the election studio the party had set up in a downtown hotel -city of Ottawa, to campaign during the pandemic.