The next Conservative leader has to prepare quickly for a political agenda they don’t control

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The new Conservative leader will be in place in a week and is going to have to quickly get their head around a big issue: They don’t control the political agenda – and it is hurtling at them at high speed.

Either Peter MacKay or Erin O’Toole – the two candidates seen as possible winners – will have to figure out how to respond to an expansive, big-government pandemic recovery plan, one that will pile up more debt.

That’s what Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals are hinting is coming, starting this fall. And the Conservative leader will have to make a pretty quick decision about what kind of tone to take. Will they start warning about spending and deficits when voters are still feeling vulnerable? Or will they tout ambitious recovery plans of their own?

Neither Mr. MacKay nor Mr. O’Toole really made it clear how they would deal with that as they courted Conservative members this summer. But Mr. Trudeau’s own agenda will force the question upon them – and the new Conservative leader won’t have too much say in how long they have to answer it.

Early on in the leadership race, both vowed that they would swiftly defeat Mr. Trudeau’s minority government if they took over at the helm of the Conservative Party. But in a weekend appearance on Global TV’s The West Block, Mr. O’Toole fudged, saying he would topple the government at “the right time.”

That’s wise for a lot of reasons. One is that even though the WE controversy has taken the momentum out of Mr. Trudeau’s popularity, his Liberals remain ahead of the Tories in polls. The latest Nanos Research tracking has the Liberals ahead in every region except the Prairies. A new Conservative leader might get a bump in the polls, but it would still be risky to rush into an election.

More importantly, the Conservatives don’t have the levers to bring down the government. It would take the votes of the three largest opposition parties – the Conservatives, the Bloc Québécois and the NDP – to defeat the Liberals. When BQ Leader Yves-François Blanchet threatened last week to move a non-confidence vote against Mr. Trudeau, it was the emptiest of threats.

Confidence votes can be a headache for leaders of the Official Opposition, too, because it’s embarrassing to prop up the government to avoid an election.

So it’s just as likely to be Mr. Trudeau who controls the timing of the next election. It is probably risky to call an election this fall, still in the midst of a pandemic, but by next spring the Liberals can claim they need a mandate for their recovery plan. And it gets easier to justify that move when the Conservative leader criticizes it.

Mr. Trudeau’s advisers have been broadly hinting that the Prime Minister has a big, “transformative” recovery plan, including a big climate-change initiative, a major expansion of employment insurance and other possible social initiatives, such as a national pharmacare or child-care plan.

Over the leadership race, both Mr. MacKay and Mr. O’Toole have complained about the Liberals’ deficit spending and suggested they’d set out a path back to balanced budgets, but neither has provided much detail. Fiscal restraint is part of the Conservative brand, but cutting deficits might be a tough sell when voters are still feeling vulnerable.

Mr. MacKay, especially, has instead run his leadership campaign on creating jobs. And although some of the details are sketchy, it’s not a balanced-budget program. It suggests he’d double military spending, for instance, and cut some taxes.

Mr. O’Toole has emphasized economic growth, but his platform suggests he’d be more of a fiscal hawk. It talks about winding down temporary spending “in a responsible way” and also creating a “pay-as-you-go rule” that forces government to cut existing spending to pay for new programs.

Neither really gives a clear idea of how he intends to handle spending. And they won’t have much time before they have to start answering the big political question on the horizon: Will their recovery plan spend big or cut back?

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