The Peterborough Examiner e-edition

Could Justin Trudeau or Erin O’Toole survive a defeat in Monday’s federal election? //

Chantal Hébert

Could Justin Trudeau or Erin O’Toole survive a defeat on Monday? For different reasons, that’s unlikely in either case.

Let’s start with the no-brainer involving the Liberal leader. Defeated prime ministers do not as a rule stick around to lead their party in opposition. Even if one wanted to stay put in a humbler role, his caucus and those aspiring to lead it would almost certainly beg to differ.

Trudeau made the call that put his top job and the Liberals’ hold on federal power on the line more than two years early. If the Liberal ship goes down on Monday night, he will be widely expected to walk the plank.

In similar circumstances, most outgoing government leaders tend to not wait for the morning after the vote to announce their resignation. But things could play out differently in this instance. More on that later.

At first glance, one might expect a defeated Erin O’Toole to be given a second chance at leading the Conservative party in an election.

Win or lose, the party has exceeded pre-writ expectations. Few, even within Conservative ranks, believed O’Toole would manage to run as competitive a campaign.

But at what price? In an increasingly frantic quest for momentum, the Conservative leader has pivoted and repivoted on many fronts. On that score the last week of the campaign has been a head-spinning

experience for insiders and observers alike.

Set aside for a moment the obvious negative fallout from Alberta Premier Jason Kenney’s belated reversal on vaccine passports and on the need for pandemic-related restrictions.

It was not so long ago that O’Toole was touting Kenney as a better pandemic manager than Trudeau. In hindsight, he probably rues the day he put those assertions on tape.

Over the past week, the sight of an aspiring prime minister running from his own partisan assessment of what amounts to sound management of the pandemic has not been a pretty or an inspiring one.

If O’Toole can’t find the fortitude to agree with Kenney that

the latter messed up by allowing the fourth wave of COVID-19 to go unchecked, one can only wonder in what circumstances he as prime minister would ever call out a friendly premier for reckless behaviour. But even before Kenney emerged from the throes of pandemic denial, O’Toole’s campaign had lost or tangled its narrative thread.

At week’s end, it has become unclear what fate a Conservative government would deal to the Liberal carbon tax.

Since his leadership bid a year ago, O’Toole has gone from promising to scrap the tax to proposing to weaken it to looking to the provinces for guidance.

The road to Damascus O’Toole has chosen to take on

gun control, the future of the CBC or that of the child-care agreements Trudeau has struck with seven provinces is equally foggy.

And then there was the decision to propel Brian Mulroney to the centre stage of the Conservative campaign.

Make no mistake, the former Tory prime minister is a wellrespected figure in his home province of Quebec. And he has a nostalgic following within what is left of the progressive wing of the Conservative party.

But his name is also anathema to much of the Conservative base west of Quebec. While O’Toole and his campaign revelled in Mulroney’s aura, Stephen Harper has remained unnamed and unseen. This is not a development many of the Conservatives

who supported O’Toole for the leadership could have seen coming.

In a competitive election, job one in the last week of the campaign is to put boots on the ground to get the vote out.

Jean Chrétien’s appearance alongside Trudeau in Brampton earlier this week was mostly meant to mobilize the Liberal base.

By and large, the former prime minister makes Liberals feel good about their party. It was not always the case but by now he is more of a unifying figure than a divisive one.

The reverse could be said of Mulroney’s impact on a significant section of the Conservative base. It should come as no surprise that in some ridings the ranks of Conservative volunteers are sparse this year.

If O’Toole is defeated on Monday, the Conservative activists who are staying home this weekend — in some cases the better to ponder a vote for Maxime Bernier’s People’s party — will be back for a leadership review.

A note in closing: short of a decisive result on Monday night, the issue of the loser’s political future could play out over days and weeks.

In the event of a photo finish, it may be impossible to declare a definitive result until all the mail-in ballots are factored in later in the week.

And if there are only a handful of seats between the winner and the runner-up, it could take a few weeks to determine which of the two leading parties has enough opposition support to form a relatively stable minority government.

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2021-09-20T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-09-20T07:00:00.0000000Z

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