There are some people who say that Conservative politicians are liars who will say anything to get elected, govern unethically, or flirt with racial discrimination to win votes. But those are just the people running for the leadership of the Conservative Party.
The things Tory leadership candidates are saying about each other are downright scathing. To Canadians outside the Conservative tent, that’s bound to send an ugly message about the folks squabbling inside.
Pierre Poilievre, the Ottawa MP widely considered the front-runner, got the ball rolling with some blistering attacks on former Quebec premier Jean Charest before the latter even joined the race.
Then on Sunday, when Brampton, Ont., mayor and former Ontario provincial Progressive Conservative leader Patrick Brown jumped into the race, Mr. Poilievre’s campaign quickly posted a social-media ad to attack him.
It said Mr. Brown “will say anything” to win votes – because Mr. Brown opposed carbon taxes when he ran for the provincial PC leadership in Ontario, but once he won, adopted a carbon-tax policy.
The next day, Mr. Brown fired back with a statement that accused Mr. Poilievre of backing “discriminatory policies.”
It cited Mr. Poilievre’s support for the Conservatives’ 2015 election campaign proposal for a “barbaric cultural practices tip line,” and the ban on wearing a niqab while taking a citizenship oath – a ban which former prime minister Stephen Harper once said he would consider extending to civil servants. Mr. Brown said that Mr. Poilievre “has never once spoken out against these policies.”
“Rather than making this the most welcoming country to immigrants in the world, he has happily pushed rhetoric that only attempted to divide people rather than bring them together,” Mr. Brown said in the statement. Mr. Brown called Mr. Poilievre’s campaign strategist, Jenni Byrne, the “architect” of the 2015 campaign that promoted those two “abhorrent” policies.
But it didn’t stop there.
Jean Charest is against trucker blockades. Will he clash with the Conservative mood?
Mr. Charest’s campaign co-chair, Tasha Kheiriddin, retweeted Mr. Brown’s statement, adding that Conservatives have to confront “racism.” A supporter of Mr. Poilievre, New Brunswick MP John Williamson, said that retweet showed the Brown and Charest campaigns have a “secret pact,” and will “do and say whatever it takes.”
To top it off, Mr. Poilievre issued a signed statement that called Mr. Brown a liar – saying the niqab ban never went into effect. “Patrick Brown lies a lot,” it said.
Yikes. This campaign is getting nasty, brutish and personal. The Liberals used to be known for indulging in internecine warfare, but this is a public knife fight. Canadian Conservatives seem to have a lot of bad blood. And in this field, it goes deeper than the tweets.
Take Mr. Brown. He recently settled a lawsuit with CTV over a 2018 story that included two allegations of sexual misconduct, with the network admitting the original story included errors – one of the women was not an underage high schooler at the time of the alleged incident, but 19.
But Mr. Brown had previously published a book, Takedown, that not only blasted CTV but also ripped into his own advisers and many still-sitting Ontario Tory MPPs – who decided almost immediately after the allegations surfaced that they were not willing to defend Mr. Brown – as backstabbers.
Another, lesser-known candidate in the race, Ontario MPP Roman Baber, was kicked out of the Ontario Progressive Conservative caucus by Mr. Brown’s successor, Premier Doug Ford, for opposing the province’s COVID-19 lockdowns in early 2021.
There are prior beefs, and current vitriol. Taken in the aggregate, this is a field of contenders that now seems to be sending a message that Conservatives don’t believe in each other, won’t work with each other or can’t stand each other.
That’s not entirely new. Maxime Bernier, who came a close second to Andrew Scheer in the 2017 leadership race, quit to form the People’s Party. Erin O’Toole won the 2020 leadership race with a surprisingly nasty campaign that painted rival Peter MacKay as a hapless Trudeau-lite Red Tory.
Perhaps there’s just a feeling that the only way to settle differences within the party is to go beyond the cut-and-thrust of lively debate, plus the slash-and-burn of scorched-earth tactics.
In the meantime, leading Conservatives are using the campaign stage to tell the country that leading Conservatives can’t be trusted. And there’s six more months to go in the race.
For subscribers: Get exclusive political news and analysis by signing up for the Politics Briefing.
Campbell Clark