Tories’ campaign fails to break through

Conservatives unable to make major gains in capturing GTA seats

O’Toole set out to remake the Conservative party.

In the end, it could be his political unmaking.

Early projections suggested the O’Toole campaign has failed to break through and the Conservatives are on track to reprise their opposition role in a minority parliament.

At midnight on election day, the Conservatives had secured or were leading in 122 ridings. The Liberals had won or were leading in 157, suggesting a minority government led by Justin Trudeau would be the most likely outcome after all the votes were counted.

There has been a somber mood on the Conservative campaign heading into Monday’s vote, and that extended to Oshawa’s Tribute Communities Centre. O’Toole’s friends, family, supporters and staff were nowhere to be seen on the hockey arena’s floor — opting to take in the news in a pub overlooking the rink, or in the private boxes in the upper decks.

Early in the evening, there were promising signs the Conservatives would show the kind of growth O’Toole had promised the membership they’d get with him as leader when he won the job last year.

They defeated a Liberal cabinet minister there, Bernadette Jordan, and then took down another one, Maryam Monsef in the bellweather riding of Peterborough.

But that was a rare bright blue spot in Ontario.

While the Tories held much of their existing ground, Leona Alleslev, who had crossed the floor from the Liberals to the Conservatives to much fanfare in 2018, and then won the seat for the Tories in 2019, lost this round to the Liberals.

Her Greater Toronto Area seat represented the exact kind of ridings the Tories needed to pull in order to best the Liberals and form government this elec tion, and they did not appear to be on the cusp of capturing any others.

That fact could hold the key to O’Toole’s future.

Walied Soliman, O’Toole’s campaign chair, told the Star Monday afternoon that he would consider it a win if the Conservatives could hold Justin Trudeau and the Liberals to a minority government. His comments were echoed by two other senior campaign sources, who spoke on the condition they not be named, who confirmed the “baseline” for what they would consider a win would be limiting Trudeau to a minority.

“Even without a plurality (in seats) today, we will have achieved our objective,” Soliman said.

“The victory comes in advancing the dialogue with Canadians. At the start of this race, nobody would’ve expected that we’d be in a knife fight in strongly-held Liberal ridings. And today we are.”

Party stalwarts publicly questioned the wisdom in suggesting O’Toole was heading for a loss while the polls were still open. The Star story was published four hours before polls closed across the country — and while Conservative volunteers worked feverishly to get their supporters to ballot boxes.

“If Erin O’Toole’s team is satisfied allowing Justin Trudeau to remain prime minister, then clearly Erin is unfit to lead our party any longer,” one Conservative MP and candidate told the Star, on the condition they not be named.

Senior campaign sources told the Star they considered the race very close as of Monday afternoon — that the results of the election would come down to tough fights in ridings across the country.

But there were known unknowns — the rise of support for the People’s Party of Canada, the decline in support for the Green party, the potential for long lines at fewer polling places, and the ongoing fourth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic — that made gaming out the results more difficult.

The party entered the campaign considerably behind in public polling, with many political observers expecting Trudeau had good odds to transform his minority government into a majority. But a puzzlingly slow start to the Liberal campaign, coupled with a good opening week for O’Toole’s team, put wind in the Conservatives’ sails.

The campaign struggled to maintain a midcampaign lead, however, as the Liberal campaign continued to hammer them over questions about mandatory vaccinations, about O’Toole’s stance on “assaultstyle” firearms, and on the Conservatives’ consumer-rebate style carbon tax scheme — which O’Toole told the Star’s editorial board would be optional.

Candidates were left twisting at the doors to defend O’Toole’s pivots, sometimes receiving multiple different talking points on an issue within the span of 24 hours. O’Toole’s decision to campaign largely from Ottawa was also a sore spot as it left them feeling disconnected, and when O’Toole would come to town, he’d rarely pump up the local candidates in his speeches, instead focusing on himself and his own narrative.

O’Toole’s gambit to move the party closer to the political centre also opened up problems on his right flank. And not just with Maxime Bernier’s upstart right-wing, People’s Party of Canada, whose supporters did appear to be taking votes away Monday. The Tories were also looking at losing seats in Alberta.

O’Toole repeatedly pointed out that the party he wanted to run wasn’t “your father’s Conservative party.” The Conservative leader studiously avoided talking about Stephen Harper. A senior campaign source told the Star Sunday that it was deliberate — they wanted to avoid giving the Liberals an opening to painting O’Toole as a Harperite, as they did to Scheer in 2019.

But in so doing, O’Toole alienated a contingent of Conservative politicians and former staffers already angry about his embrace of a carbon tax.

The deal he’d struck with the base when he did embrace one — despite the party railing against it for years — was that it would deliver those voters in Ontario so crucial to a Conservative government.

That O’Toole also repeatedly seemed to be apologizing for the party’s past approaches, saying he knew it needed to regain the confidence of voters also irritated Tories who felt he was in turn dismissing all their past success.

“As we were desperately trying to make this election about Justin Trudeau and his leadership, Erin O’Toole was desperately trying to make the election about Erin O’Toole and his leadership,” the candidate said.

In the final 24 hours of the campaign, the Tory war room began circulating graphics for candidates to use on their social media, perhaps underscoring the fight O’Toole has ahead to keep the support of his caucus.

Over a sepia-toned photo of the leader, the words “stand with Erin.”