Erin O'Toole's impossible mission
In retrospect, the fact that I was an enthusiastic supporter of Erin O’Toole shows why his Conservative Party of Canada leadership was doomed from the start.
The CPC was founded by a merger of the Western-based, right-wing Canadian Alliance, and the once-mighty center-right Progressive Conservative1 Party, reduced to a mostly Atlantic Canadian rump by the early 2000s. I grew up in the PC Party (please don’t talk to me about 1993) and even in the post-9/11 blogging era, when I was much more right-wing than I am today, I was in the “moderate” wing of the CPC from the start.
Now, I have to wonder if there’s even much of a moderate faction left. O’Toole tried to have it both ways by appealing to social conservatives during the leadership campaign, while trying to assure swing voters that he’s not one of those wackos.
It didn’t work. (To be fair, Trudeau’s cynical, unnecessary election call didn’t work out as he’d planned, either.) In contrast to Andrew Lawton, who thinks the Tories lost…
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