Don Newman

August 25, 2021

The first week of the election campaign ended with Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole climbing into a statistical tie with the Liberals. The second week began with him making not one, but two interesting policy suggestions on the campaign trail. Since both suggestions fly in the face of traditional Conservative solutions to the problems they are designed to confront, it will now be interesting to see how many of the party’s candidates actually embrace either one of the proposals. It would be even more interesting to see if either one of them would actually be introduced into law if the Conservatives win the election and form government.

Last weekend, O’Toole announced that, if elected, the Conservatives would spend $350 million over three years to create one thousand new beds in fifty new safe injection sites. The sites will be primarily aimed at the epidemic of opioid users who have become addicted in the last decade. So pernicious is the problem that the number of deaths from opioid overdoes is running ahead of the number of deaths from COVID-19.

The traditional Conservative approach to safe injection sites offering clean needles to addicts has been to view it as a law-and-order issue. The Conservative government of Stephen Harper was in a long- running battle over a safe injection site on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Many Conservatives have felt that making drugs and injections more readily available only encourages more addiction.

O’Toole’s second proposal to shift party policy is a pledge to make federally regulated companies appoint at least one union representative to their boards of directors. Companies with at least 1,000 employees and $100 million in annual revenues would be compelled to comply. If enacted, the policy would affect a wide variety of companies in banking, transportation and energy. Given the timing and campaign context, union leaders have expressed scepticism.

The idea of workers on company boards is a European one, and generally regarded as progressive. If that is the way it is taken, that will be a problem for some Conservatives.

Like the safe injection sites, the union board member proposal is a shift from traditional Conservative policy. And while both might at first glance be taken as moderating the party’s approach, that is not entirely true. Certainly, the safe injection sites would bring the Conservatives more in line with current thinking. But since winning the Conservative leadership a year ago with the help of the party’s culturally conservative base, O’Toole has been looking for ways to reach out to unionized workers like the ones in the United States that used to be the backbone of the Democratic party but now make up a core constituency of the Republicans. In fact, earlier speeches talking about job losses to “unfair trade deals” have had a Trumpian ring. That characterization of trade deals — a major part of the Conservative legacy of Brian Mulroney — has not been part of the Conservative party vocabulary before.

The idea of workers on company boards is a European one, and generally regarded as progressive. If that is the way it is taken, that will be a problem for some Conservatives. If it is seen as a Trump maneuver to add blue collar voters to where they have not voted before perhaps less so. But getting in bed with people who “down tools” and sometimes go on strike will be anathema to many Conservatives, no matter the strategy behind it.

So, Erin O’Toole has come up with two interesting policy proposals. Now it will be equally interesting to see how they resonate with voters generally – and within his own party.

Contributing writer and columnist Don Newman, a Life Member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery, is author of the bestselling memoir, Welcome to the Broadcast and Executive Vice President of Rubicon Strategies in Ottawa. He is an Officer of the Order of Canada.