The winter of Erin O’Toole’s discontent

The new year has started as poorly as the old one ended for federal Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole. The only difference is that now his problems aren’t confined to a gang of his own cranky Tory MPs; they’re also with the guy he sees in the mirror every day. With the year barely three weeks old, O’Toole’s latest missteps have raised far more questions about his own leadership than about the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau — or the prime minister himself.

Start with O’Toole’s failure to renew the House of Commons special committee on Canada-China relations. Many of the most urgent challenges confronting Canada today start and end with that pushy global powerhouse. O’Toole has tirelessly promoted himself as a fearless opponent of China’s authoritarian and increasingly aggressive rulers. But without the drive and focus that would come from the special committee, MPs will find it harder to deal with Huawei’s bid to be part of Canada’s 5G network, with China’s genocide of the Uyghur people or the chilling allegations of Chinese interference in Canadian domestic affairs. Embarrassingly for O’Toole, members of his own caucus have accused him of not renewing the committee out of fear that some voters would punish the Conservatives for disparaging the Chinese Communist Party. That charge seems far-fetched. Even so, O’Toole made the wrong call. The special committee should be resurrected.

Next, think back to last week when the Tory leader posted on his social media account a video of himself lambasting federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault for wanting — in O’Toole’s words — “to end fossil fuel usage in 18 months.” Contrary to that assertion, Guilbeault’s actual commitment has been to end fossil fuel subsidies over that time — an entirely different proposition. O’Toole might defend himself by citing a single quote in an interview Guilbeault gave to The Narwhal in which he did talk about “phasing out fossil fuel … in the next 18 months.” Yet anyone reading the full interview would have realized the environment minister omitted the word “subsidies” in that one instance. Guilbeault had already made it abundantly clear in the interview that the Liberals wanted to end fossil fuel subsidies next year — not the entire petroleum industry. Despite that, O’Toole distorted the truth to seriously misrepresent the government’s plan. Whether he wanted to play “gotcha” politics or whether he spoke before he and his staff had done their homework, he deserved the critical fusillade fired back at him.

The last of O’Toole’s January trifecta of trip-ups came in a misguided message on the pandemic. At the precise moment when the Omicron variant of COVID-19 was tearing through the nation, threatening to overwhelm hospital intensive care units and leading to new lockdowns, O’Toole called on the country to accommodate the unvaccinated though measures such as rapid testing: This when the unvaccinated bear a greater responsibility than the vaccinated population for spreading COVID-19 and filling the ICUs. Calling for calm and co-operation are never out of place for a national leader. In this case, O’Toole should have been pleading with the vaccine holdouts — including those in his own party.

It says a lot about the state of his leadership that the verbal boomerangs O’Toole tosses at the Liberals these days come back and clobber him instead. Four months after a federal election in which the Tories actually captured more votes than the Liberals (who won the most seats) O’Toole’s party is still hot on the Liberals’ heels. For instance, an Abacus Data poll released Friday pegged Conservative support at 30 per cent — two points behind the Liberals. But while recent Angus Reid polls said only 38 per cent of respondents approved of Trudeau’s performance, O’Toole’s approval rating was even lower, at just 24 per cent.

With numbers like that, his future as leader might become an open question in the coming months. While that might seem an issue of greatest worry to Conservatives, it matters to the entire country. O’Toole is leader of the Official Opposition. Not only are he and his party charged with questioning government policies and proposing improvements, they’re supposed to hold it accountable. They can’t do this when O’Toole is spinning his wheels in a public relations snowdrift he drove into himself.