Canadian Conservatives reckon with fallout from Capitol Hill riot

OTTAWA — Canada’s Liberals wasted no time after the Capitol Hill riot trying to tar the Conservatives with the brush of Trumpism.

The governing party dug up Parler accounts supposedly belonging to Conservative members of Parliament, reminded everyone of Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole’s “Take Back Canada” slogan, and passed around photos of deputy leader Candice Bergen wearing a MAGA hat.

“Canadians are disappointed to see Erin O’Toole’s Conservatives continuing a worrisome pattern of divisive politics and catering to the extreme right,” the Liberal Party claimed in a fundraising pitch last week.

Trump has never been popular in Canada. One pre-election poll showed 84 percent support for President-elect Joe Biden north of the border, with a high of 32 percent support for Trump in Alberta — Canada’s most conservative province. And so the Conservatives responded swiftly after rioters stormed the halls of Congress, with the party's foreign affairs critic releasing an unequivocal statement condemning “the violence of an unruly mob incited by outgoing President Trump” — a full day before Prime Minister Justin Trudeau did the same.

Still, the Liberals' recent tactics have put O'Toole on the defensive. On Sunday, he released a statement accusing them of "an attempt to mislead people and import some of the fear and division" from the United States. “The Conservatives are a moderate, pragmatic, mainstream party … that sits squarely in the centre of Canadian politics," he said. "There is no place for the far right in our party."

The attack in Washington, could serve as an inflection point in a larger conversation within the Conservative movement about how best to deal with Trumpism in its ranks. Several prominent Conservatives have spoken up in recent days, urging their party to carve out a clear definition of Canadian conservatism that doesn’t adhere to the vagaries of the Republican Party, and to reject Trumpism outright.

“I don’t think Erin [O’Toole] is deliberately going out to court that, but there are people around him and in his team that have made it their mission to kind of whip up the anger machine in Canada,” Andrew MacDougall, who served as communications director for former Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, said in an interview. “Yes, it might work once, it might even work twice, but in the end it will devour you.”

Canada’s Conservative Party is a broad coalition of center-right progressive conservatives, social conservatives and populists. The party has deep-rooted support in western Canada, but underperformed in the 2019 election in more progressive regions of Ontario and Quebec that it needed to win to form a government.

O’Toole, a military veteran from the Toronto area, won the party’s leadership last August and has promised to expand its reach, in part by appealing to unionized workers and stating his support for reproductive and LGBTQ rights.

But he still has to contend with a vocal minority of the Conservative base that supports Trump and his style of politics, said Ben Woodfinden, a doctoral candidate at McGill University who publishes a newsletter on conservatism. “Those people may be loud, and they may expect the party … to bend the knee to them.”

MacDougall pointed to recent polling that showed 41 percent of Conservative Party voters believe the U.S. election was unfair — a challenge for a party that needs to grow its base in what will likely be an election year in Canada after the Liberals' minority win less than two years ago. “We cannot be that party that denies reality,” he said. “They have to find ways to add people to the movement.”

The Liberals have seized new opportunities in recent days to link the Conservatives to Trump. The undated photos of Bergen in a MAGA hat made headlines, though a spokesperson said someone handed her the hat and asked for a photo at an event a few years ago, and it didn't belong to her. The Liberals also pointed to language on the Conservative Party’s website from before the 2019 election accusing Trudeau of “rigging the election in his favour.”

There was also backlash over an article published last week by the far-right Rebel News based on an email exchange with O’Toole’s office and misleadingly branded as an “exclusive interview.” In response, O’Toole’s office said it would no longer engage with the controversial outlet.

Ken Boessenkool, a former Harper adviser, said O’Toole won’t likely suffer much damage from the Liberal attacks unless he gives people reason to put stock in them. Still, he and others believe O’Toole missed an opportunity to take a firm stand against Trumpism when he elected not to eject Derek Sloan from his caucus. The Conservative MP who ran against O'Toole for the party leadership has questioned whether Canada’s chief public health officer, who was born in Hong Kong, works “for Canada or for China” and recently sponsored a petition questioning the science behind Covid-19 vaccines.

"I think that O’Toole’s going to have a moment … where he boots some bigot out of his caucus,” said Peter Donolo, former communications director to former Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. “It would be a strong signal that O’Toole could strike."

Woodfinden pointed to another recent episode in which the Conservative finance critic, Pierre Poilievre, launched a petition calling on the government to “Stop the Great Reset” — a reference to a speech Trudeau made that was adopted by conspiracy theorists as evidence of a globalist plot. “They have to be aware of the dangers here,” he said. “They’ll have to draw a line.”

There are two ways to deal with populists in any political movement, Boessenkool said: to “stoke their anger” or to design policies that target the source of their discontent. "There’s a conservative way to address the populists and a populist way to address the populists,” he said. “This has been a challenge in Canadian conservatism for a long time.”

There are signs Canada’s elected officials are reflecting on the same questions. In an unusual cross-party collaboration, Liberal MP Anthony Housefather and Conservative MP Scott Aitchison jointly penned an op-ed in the right-leaning National Post on Thursday calling for an end to political discourse too often “drenched in rage.”

“Justin Trudeau is a good person. So is Erin O’Toole,” they wrote. “Each has different views on what is best for Canada. That is healthy. What is unhealthy is when people say they hate the prime minister, or the leader of the Opposition.”

Not everyone agrees there’s any real threat of Trump-style politics taking off in Canada. Sean Speer, a former senior adviser to Harper, said Conservatives need to do “a better job of policing their side,” but claimed the Liberals will likely exaggerate the problem and broadcast the message that “you’re either with us or you’re with the insurrectionists.”

“I think [the Capitol Hill] chaos will have an effect on Canadian politics,” he said in an email to POLITICO. “It may further galvanize some extremists on the right and it will invariably cause the Liberals to ramp up their rhetoric about conservatism. The net result will be a vicious cycle in which the two sides essentially manufacture a problem that didn't really exist here.”

According to Donolo, “there’s no significant constituency for Trumpism in Canada, full stop.” The few politicians who have attempted it have paid the price, he said, including former Conservative MP Maxime Bernier, who broke away in 2018 and formed his own populist right-wing party that failed to win any seats in the last election.

“It’s been a ticket to oblivion,” Donolo said. “They ruined their careers doing that.”

Still, he believes that faction of supporters could threaten O’Toole’s attempts to broaden his appeal. “All that stuff is undone when there’s one candidate who had Proud Boys tweets that get uncovered in the middle of a campaign.”

Woodfinden said the bigger challenge for the Conservatives is deciding what they represent, instead of succumbing to the pull of Republican Party trends. “Until Canadian conservatives can offer a distinctly Canadian version of conservatism,” he said, “it will struggle to resonate beyond … whatever the base of the support is.”

People aren’t quite sure what O’Toole stands for, MacDougall said, and are therefore more likely to read what they want into a photo of the deputy leader in a MAGA hat, for example. The leader has to come up with “his own vision for the country,” and soon, he said. “There’s an election coming likely in a matter of months … and he’s not going to win with just the cohort he has.”

Last week, MacDougall published an op-ed in the Ottawa Citizen calling on O’Toole to “defenestrate” the Trump supporters in his midst. In response, he said, online detractors quickly labeled him a Liberal shill and a “cuckservative.”