The Conservatives have two big problems...

And Maxime Bernier might be the solution to both.

In the nearly three weeks since the federal election was called, most polls have showed Erin O’Toole and the Conservative Party in first place with around one third of the projected vote share. As I write this, Eric Grenier’s Poll Tracker pegs the CPC at 34% to the Liberals’ 31%. Given that this campaign was supposed to be a relative cakewalk to a majority government for Justin Trudeau and his Liberal Party, the early polling ought to be seen as great news for the Conservative campaign.

Unfortunately for Mr. O’Toole, it may not be good enough to overcome the structural weaknesses in the Conservative Party as currently constructed. There are two in particular that I want to highlight.

The first is that the Conservatives suffer from an inefficient vote distribution. What do I mean by inefficient? Well, despite what a certain prime minister may have promised in 2015, our elections are still run under the first-past-the-post voting system, which means that for political parties, the name of the game is not to win votes but to win seats. A party wins a seat by being the most popular party in an electoral district. There are no participation trophies for coming in 2nd place, and no brownie points for winning in a landslide.

This is a problem for the Conservatives because they routinely place 2nd behind the Liberals in key vote-rich areas of the country like the suburbs of the Greater Toronto Area, while racking up landslide victories in ridings in the Prairies. This means that in a typical election, all else being equal, the Tories win fewer seats than they otherwise would if they swapped votes in the west for votes in the east. And crucially, they will win fewer seats than the Liberal Party would despite a comparable or even higher vote share. This is why in 2019 the Conservatives lost the election despite winning the popular vote, and why Eric Grenier’s poll tracker continues to project the Liberals winning more seats than the Conservatives despite being 3 percentage points behind them in the polls.

The inefficiency problem makes it hard for the Conservatives to come in 1st in the seat count. Unfortunately, their problems don’t end there. Even if they do manage to edge out the Liberals in the seat count, it’s not at all certain that they’ll be able to form a government, because of their second big problem: they have no natural allies in a minority parliament.

A bit of history is helpful here. The modern Conservative Party of Canada was formed in 2003 out of a merger between two predecessor parties: the historic Progressive Conservative Party (the old Tory party of Brian Mulroney and Joe Clark), and the upstart Reform/ Alliance that emerged as a grassroots protest movement in the late 80s. I’m oversimplifying, but in general terms the PCs were a moderate, establishment centre-right party with deep roots in central and eastern Canada, while the Reform Party (later rebranded as the Canadian Alliance) was more ideologically driven and further to the right on most issues, and had its base of support in western Canada.

The Reform/ Alliance movement contested three federal elections while the PCs were still extant: in 1993, 1997 and 2000. The Liberal Party under Jean Chrétien won back-to-back majority governments in all three, benefitting from a right-of-centre vote divided between the two conservative parties. Stephen Harper, who came from the Reform wing, effectively ended this civil war by striking a deal with Peter MacKay to merge the two into the present-day Conservative Party of Canada.

Whatever one may think of Stephen Harper’s record as prime minister, one cannot deny his success as a politician. His gambit succeeded in eventually leading the new Conservative Party to victory in three straight elections, and he would of course go on to occupy the Prime Minister’s Office for nearly a decade. But this consolidation of power had consequences.

Firstly, Harper’s often ideologically-driven reign helped solidify public opinion of the Conservatives, particularly amongst Ontario and Quebec voters, as a party just a wee-bit too far right-wing, and whose primary raison d’etre was to protect the fossil fuel industries of western Canada. The subsequent leadership of Andrew Scheer did very little to shake this notion.

And secondly, it created an unbalanced dynamic in parliament, with multiple parties on the progressive centre- to centre-left of the spectrum (The Liberals, NDP, Greens and, in some respects, the Bloc Québecois) and one single party to the right of centre. While this may have served Stephen Harper’s narrative well in an era of deep Liberal Party decline, it is a major liability for the Conservatives today in the face of an energetic Trudeau-led Liberal machine that, while no doubt showing signs of age, is clearly not spent. The Liberals can still threaten to win majorities, and even when they don’t, they can lean on the New Democrats to stay in power.

Which brings me back to Erin O’Toole. While polls continue to indicate many Canadians know little about him in this sleepy pre-Labour Day phase of the election, those who have been paying attention will have noticed a definite shift in both rhetoric and policy from what we are used to seeing from the Conservatives. To be sure, O’Toole’s pitch includes much of the standard Tory fare: a focus on the economy and lowering taxes, “tough on crime” rhetoric and strong support for the military, etc. But O’Toole is also pro-choice, has embraced carbon pricing, has placed a surprising emphasis on mental health in his platform, and has made very conspicuous overtures to union workers.

It is clear that the Conservative leader from Ontario is making a deliberate attempt to present himself as a different kind of leader than his predecessors- one more palatable to suburban voters in the GTA and francophones in Quebec. (It is worth noting on this point that his French has improved significantly, and his performance in the French-language TVA debate was, by many accounts, not bad). After nearly two decades since the old PC Party was laid to rest, one could ask: is Erin O’Toole trying to revive the progressive conservative brand?

That may end up being the ballot question for many swing voters in this election campaign. But what’s clear is that the Conservative campaign wants voters to think that he is. Because at the end of the day, just being ahead of the Liberals in the polls isn’t enough: O’Toole has very little margin for error if he hopes to get the keys to 24 Sussex (or whatever hovel the National Capital Commission is shuffling prime ministers into while that house rots) . Like under Harper in 2015 and Scheer in 2019, there is little to no appetite amongst the opposition parties to dance with a CPC minority government, meaning it’s likely majority or bust for the Tories (notwithstanding Jagmeet Singh’s recent prevarication on the question). Unless they can boost their vote share from the mid-30s to something closer to 40%, a Conservative majority government is not likely in the cards. And it will be no help for that last 5% of the vote share to come from Alberta and Saskatchewan, where the Tories already run the table. They won every single seat in Saskatchewan in 2019, and all but one in Alberta. It will need to come from the larger vote-rich provinces in Central Canada. O’Toole knows this, the Liberals and the Bloc Québecois know this, and increasingly it seems, the Canadian voters are learning this too.

There’s someone else who knows this well too, and that’s Maxime Bernier. The further Erin O’Toole leans to the centre of the political spectrum, the more space it opens up for Mad Max and his upstart People’s Party of Canada to fill on the right. Ironically, this may be precisely what the Conservative Party needs. If O’Toole wants to present himself to Canadians as a moderate, centrist conservative, it helps to have a right-wing looney in the wings that he can point to as a foil. And with violent crowds of anti-vaxxers haranguing Justin Trudeau at every campaign stop - a dynamic that will likely provoke increasing sympathy for the prime minister as the campaign wears on - O’Toole would do well to have that stench stick to anyone other than him.

Finally, a modest breakthrough for the PPC might give the Conservatives some breathing room to negotiate a governing arrangement in the event of a minority parliament. While many Canadians may recoil at the thought of a governing party having to do business with such an odious bunch as the right-wing populist People’s Party, the reality is that this faction of Canadian society exists whether we like it or not, and will find ways to make itself heard. The only question is whether that will be hidden inside the big tent of the Conservative Party (as has been the case in many ways up to now) or at arms-length in a smaller party, with its motivations and objectives laid out transparently for all to see. Or worse still, in angry mobs on the street harassing front-line healthcare workers.

It may be too soon to say how this dynamic will play out, but it is certainly one to watch over the course of this campaign and beyond. As it stands, The Conservative Party is still hamstrung by their two big problems of inefficient vote distribution and lack of a natural dance partner in a minority situation. But all that could change if O’Toole is successful in executing a strategy of sacrificing votes on his right flank to the PPC in exchange for fishing in the large pool of moderate centrist voters in Ontario and Quebec. A divided right-wing may have been a losing proposition for conservatives in the 90’s, but in the 2020s it might just end up being Erin O’Toole’s eventual ticket to the prime minister’s office.