Whatever you think of Trudeau now or thought of him then, the party that chose him did not disqualify itself from governing based on that decision alone. On another competence question, Trudeau and his team dispensed in 2015 with the “if you can’t run a campaign, you can’t run a country” test. In 2019, the fact that he hadn’t excavated and addressed the blackface scandal himself before his second election may have caused as much harm as the justified outrage over the images themselves.
But Trudeau was also running against Andrew Scheer. While Scheer possessed none of the blithe ruthlessness of his predecessor, he also may have been an over-correction as the most benign successor to Harper available. When the Conservative party chose Erin O’Toole over Peter MacKay to succeed Scheer last August, it seemed to be telling Canadians, “We see your unfathomability complaint and raise you a face-palm and a WTF.”
Because O’Toole, like Scheer, seems like the kind of guy you’d be perfectly happy to have as a neighbour but whose leadership qualities have proven to be equally unfathomable to Canadians, he is currently experiencing what was once known as Tory Syndrome and is now known as a splash-pad pissing contest-free-for-all. “Erin O’Toole approaches an election with a party so fractured that some Conservatives want him to lose,” read the headline in last Sunday’s Toronto Star.
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