The challenges facing the Conservative Party may be bigger than Erin O'Toole

Sen. Denise Batters has a point when she criticizes Erin O'Toole's leadership of the Conservative Party.

But O'Toole's leadership might also be beside the point — because the challenges facing Conservatives will be the same no matter who leads them.

That was true when Andrew Scheer was compelled to step aside and it might be even more true now.

"On [the] carbon tax, on guns, on conscience rights — he flip-flopped on our policies within the same week, the same day and even within the same sentence," Batters claims in the video she posted Monday to promote her call for a party referendum on O'Toole.

"He won the leadership race claiming to be 'true blue' but ran an election campaign nearly indistinguishable from [Justin] Trudeau's Liberals."

Batters overstates her case but she's aiming at something real. The candidate O'Toole claimed to be in this fall's federal election was different from the candidate he claimed to be in last year's Conservative leadership race. And as O'Toole tried to pivot, he turned the party in different directions.

The "true blue" leadership candidate took a harder line on government spending and a more expansive view of "conscience rights" for doctors who do not agree with abortion or medically assisted death.

O'Toole condemned "Justin Trudeau's carbon tax" but then — apparently without warning his caucus — pledged that a Conservative government led by him would introduce its own plan to price carbon emissions. He told Conservatives that he wanted to defund large parts of the CBC, then promised merely to review the Crown corporation's mandate.

This pattern made trouble for O'Toole during the election campaign. Confronted by Trudeau over a promise to repeal the Liberal government's ban on "assault-style" weapons — one O'Toole commitment from the leadership race that had made it into the Conservative Party's election platform — O'Toole abruptly and awkwardly tried to change his position.

With his confusing explanations and his inability to close the discussion, O'Toole made that issue harder for himself than it needed to be. But maybe any Conservative leader would have struggled to find a position on gun control that satisfied both his party's base and the broader electorate.

A poll released by Leger in March found that 66 per cent of Canadians agreed that "there should be stricter gun control regulations." That support ran to 71 per cent of urban dwellers and 65 per cent of suburbanites.

Among Liberal and NDP voters, support was 80 and 72 per cent. But just 47 per cent of Conservative supporters favoured stricter gun control.

Citing that and other public opinion polls, Stewart Prest, a political scientist at Simon Fraser University, recently argued that "the major fault lines" in Canadian politics "now run through the country's conservative coalitions." That, he wrote, is "preventing them from articulating stable compromises on many of the issues that matter most to Canadians."

As Prest noted, those fault lines run right through the biggest public policy issues of the day: the pandemic and climate change.