The removal of Erin O’Toole as leader of the Conservative Party of Canada has given rise to multiple interpretations. Obviously, Erin O’Toole’s changes of course have created dissatisfaction and misunderstanding within the conservative camp. Nevertheless, to reduce this humiliating ousting to his poor management and communication style and his flip-flops would not capture the exact measure of what is shaking the Canadian right-wing family.
In my opinion, it is necessary to widen the analytical focal point to understand what is at stake behind this eviction. More specifically, there are three temptations that plague the Conservatives, and have done so since the 2019 federal election. However, the results of the 2021 election did nothing to calm them, and the Conservative electoral treadmill during of the last election even seems to have revived them, even exacerbated them.
The first is that of regionalist withdrawal. Proponents of this current think that the seizure of power is definitively blocked by the Saint-Laurent elite, those who live in the heart of the country, that is the Toronto-Montreal axis. With the seizure of power seeming impossible or so far away, one wonders if we should not be satisfied with defending the western provinces from the liberal “assault” which “attacks” the energy sector with its environmental policies. To paraphrase Yvon Deschamps, “Ottawa, what does it give? “. This is why we should instead engage in a kind of ideological trench warfare between West and East. It is this feeling that gave birth to the Wexit movement, transformed into the Maverick Party. Admittedly, the party has seen low electoral scores in 2021, but the dissatisfaction has not gone away.
But others think, this is the second temptation, that it is necessary to fall back on ideological issues linked to social and religious conservatism. For supporters of this current, we want a party that is not afraid to raise issues that are dear to them, if not popular, whether it is about abortion or other similar issues. Successes for this current are rarely there, but zealous faithful, these deputies who are found in particular on the side of Saskatchewan but also of Ontario, do not intend to give up to defend their cause. We will have to see if they will mobilize around certain candidacies in the upcoming leadership race, which they did, moreover, in 2017, with Andrew Scheer and, in 2020, around Derek Sloan and by Leslyn Lewis.
Finally, the third temptation, the one that seems the strongest for the moment, is that of populism, which seduces certain members of the Conservative Party, including Pierre Poilièvre. It is not a question here of populism in its identity form, that of national-populism which targets immigrants, but rather of the form of protest, that which denounces the elite who no longer listen to the people, that of ordinary citizens and workers. It is revealed in particular in the support offered to truckers seen as the representatives of the people from below who express their dissatisfaction against the policy of the elites from above. Long before last week, Poilièvre was strumming along to this score of the urban liberal elite at war with the workers. This was the subject of his speech – a model of its kind – in the emergency debate which took place following the decision of the company Teck Resources to withdraw, in 2020, its major Frontier project submitted for assessment by the Liberal government. The convoy of truckers came to exacerbate this temptation to adopt the populist language, some conservatives being frankly eager to compete with Maxime Bernier and his party on his own ground.
This is how the ideological compass of the Canadian right, which was already panicked before the pandemic, is struggling even more to indicate the direction to follow. Faced with this, the most progressive deputies of the party, notably from Quebec but also from the Maritimes, could feel lonely within a formation which seems, as many times in its history, to be plagued by ideological quarrels. The next leader, whoever he is, will therefore have a lot to do to find an ideological formula allowing the different forces to be channeled in a single direction. In the past, the Conservatives often had to wait more than a decade to make the changes that brought them back to power.