Yesterday a bunch of prominent Conservatives all posted the same anti-carbon tax tweet. Many commentators believed that this was directed at the Liberals but in fact I believe it was directed at Erin O'Toole.
The simple fact is he lost an election to the HATED Justin Trudeau, even losing a couple of seats in the process. There is internal tension within the party as a result as they try to figure out why they lost. The reason is simple and obvious and you would know what it is by reading some of my previous posts. This figuring out what went wrong is causing various factions within the party to jockey for position so that they can influence policy and election planning for the next go round in 18 to 24 months.
It would seem one of those factions still believes that eliminating the carbon tax is the way to go and they are letting Erin O'Toole know this because he has accepted the need for one, a watered down carbon tax but a price on carbon nonetheless.
The Conservative loss is going to test Mr. O'Toole's leadership. Before the election he was an untested leader and the party was not going to replace him. Now he has been tested and found wanting. He will be struggling to hang onto his job and for that he is going to have to find allies within the Party. Many of the factions in the party will be putting forward their conditions for providing their support and it would appear that one of those factions did just that, in a very public way, yesterday.
It is still an open question of whether Mr. O'Toole will stay on as leader or be pushed out. If he succeeds in keeping his job then it will be because he managed to "buy off" enough of the different factions within the party. Of course we will not know which ones he managed to buy, the internal logic of the deals and how they will impact party policy until the next election. However, if history is a guide, Mr. O'Toole will probably still have the same issues he had during the last election. Different factions, with positions in opposition with each other, expecting him and the party to satisfy their demands.
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He also lost votes among Chinese Canadians with his Trumpish posturing on GHINA GHINA GHINA. Entire ridings that were once stalwart CPC went Liberal because Chinese Canadians were put off by his obnoxious jingoism, especially as they've faced horrific hate and blaming over the pandemic. Some voted Liberal for the first time, while others just stayed home. The member of the party's national council who started the petition calling for an early leadership review by the membership cited this among his priority concerns, and was rebuffed by the backroom brass. Now it's been reported this morning that a Chinese Canadian Conservative group is calling for him to resign.
Those votes are not likely to come back if he decides to continue with the nationalistic chest-thumping to appeal to the rabid (white) base. He has already signalled that he wants to continue pursuing the conspiracy theory about the Winnipeg lab. The defeated MPs are doubling down on the notion that it was "Chinese state propaganda" that cost them their seats (and they are of Chinese ethnicity themselves, the equivalent of Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio making noise about "illegal immigration"). It looks like more yellow-peril "Manchurian Canada Date" bluster about Trudeau and the Liberals being "compromised" by "communists" is on the table for the foreseeable future. Of course, no one in the party utters a peep that it was Harper who signed the FIPA treaty, and O'Toole himself who proudly stood in the HoC defending it.
The CPC finds themselves in a situation like the GOP where there are quite a few immigrant/non-white communities who might consider the party, whether for economic reasons or even cultural/religious conservatism, or have even supported them in the past, but are turned off if not outright disgusted by the abject racism. Trump for whatever reason managed to break through in spite of even louder and more deliberate, intentional racism, but those among minority groups who supported him because he was an "outsider" are having buyer's remorse. They've gone full white nationalist now. Right out in the open. No dog whistling anymore.
The GOP is where the CPC crazy train is heading. 40 percent of their voters want a Trump, and if he runs again, I'm not sure if O'Toole will manage to convince them that he's their version of the mango madman. Even despite the fact that during the leadership race (or shortly afterward), he was asked about whether his policy track differed from Trumpism and he actually said, "no, it's no different at all."
If he wants those racist crazy-base votes, he's going to have to put on an orange wig and start openly accusing Trudeau in the HoC of spreading the "Wu Kung Flu." They might even come back in droves if he did a WWE clothesline to Michael Chong, and then made a racist gesture stretching out his eyelids and sticking out his teeth.
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