CP/Reuters via National Post

Don Newman
September 16, 2021

With only four days to go before next Monday’s election, the two main party leaders are doubling down on insults and character attacks on each other. And they are doing it because they have a lot at stake, including not just who’ll be prime minister when the votes are counted, but who’ll remain of leader of their party if they fail at the polls.

Erin O’Toole has the most at stake in terms of his party leadership job. He won the Conservative leadership in 2020 by running as a True Blue Conservative, embracing the social Conservative policy positions of the party’s base, running to the right of the original favorite, Peter MacKay, and getting the leadership with the subsequent backing of supporters of two lesser candidates with followings in the far-right wing of the party.
Then, O’Toole staged a pre-election shift to his more moderate roots and tried to take the party with him. When delegates at a Conservative conference in the spring rejected his position of recognizing climate change as a threat to the future of the planet, O’Toole just ignored them and put it in the party’s election platform anyway. And in this campaign, he has offered more to Quebec than any Conservative since Brian Mulroney, something that the party base in Western Canada is not familiar with.

These policy shifts since his leadership race have led to complaints that O’Toole is a “flip flopper.” Those complaints are concentrated mostly in western Canada and, to some degree, have resulted in upticks in support for the libertarian anti-vaccination Peoples Party of Canada, and the Maverick Party, a fledgling quasi-western separatist party. Neither party has any chance of electing any candidates in this election, although they will probably bleed some votes in ridings in Alberta and perhaps Saskatchewan, where the Conservative candidates routinely win their seats with massive majorities.

A week ago, O’Toole and the Conservatives were ahead in the national polls. Today, they are running about even or slightly behind. Some Conservatives will be sure that the leader blew an election he was poised to win. Conservatives are not kind to leaders who lose. Just ask Andrew Scheer. In 2019 he increased the number of Conservative seats and drove the Liberals down to a minority government. He won the popular vote. But that wasn’t enough for the party. They forced his resignation, which cleared the way for O’Toole to win the leadership. Will the party be any more generous to the current leader if he, too, falls short?

As for Justin Trudeau, if he does not have the most seats when the counting is complete Monday night, or whenever this COVID-19 election is finally decided, he will be the party leader in trouble. He called the election on August 15 confident in what the public opinion polls told him; the Liberals could take their comfortable minority government and, riding the mostly successful handling of the pandemic, turn it into a comfortable majority government.

But as soon as the election was called, the Liberals were in trouble. The immediate events around the fall of Kabul and the complete Taliban take over Afghanistan on the precise day the election was called merely underlined the question many Canadians and all the opposition parties were asking: “Why are we having this unnecessary election?” To say nothing of the government’s own chief medical officer, Dr. Theresa Tam, having declared, only two days earlier, that the fourth wave had arrived.

Trudeau was unable to admit the reason, so the other parties did it for him. The election was all about him, the Liberal party and a majority. Canadians reacted badly to that. The Liberals slipped in the polls and the Conservatives came up and pulled ahead. It wasn’t until the debates on television last week that people began to focus on the fact that like it or not there is going to be an election, and to focus on all the parties. That has given Trudeau and the Liberals their rebound in the polls.

Even if the Liberals win, Trudeau is going to have to wear the worst election call in Canada since the Ontario Liberals in 1990. That party called an early election and so angered voters in Canada’s biggest province that they turned David Peterson out of office, electing Bob Rae and the NDP. It took four more elections and 13 years before they regained power.

Even if Trudeau loses this election, his job is safer than Erin O’Toole’s. The Liberals are kinder to leaders, especially ones named Trudeau. Justin’s father, Pierre Trudeau, came back from the brink of disaster in 1972 to win a majority government two years later. And he actually announced his retirement after his defeat in 1979 before returning to lead the party back to power in 1980.

Still, even if Justin Trudeau wins next week, he is going to be damaged in the Liberal party, and in the country. As for Erin O’Toole, if he now loses, the familiar knives of the Conservative party will be unsheathed again.

Contributing Writer and Columnist Don Newman is a member of the Order of Canada, a lifetime member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery, and author of the bestselling Welcome to the Broadcast. He is Executive Vice President of Rubicon Strategy, based in Ottawa.