Canadian Conservatives ‘learning from Boris Johnson’ in effort to defeat Justin Trudeau

In calling a snap election, Justin Trudeau was looking to pull off a feat of majority-building comparable to Boris Johnson’s success two years ago. But instead it is his Conservative rivals who have taken a leaf out of the UK prime minister’s book.

Erin O’Toole, the man aiming to unseat liberal Trudeau as Canada’s PM, has “modelled his tactics on Boris Johnson and David Cameron’s victories”, according to The Telegraph, even going as far as to hire “strategists from the Conservatives’ 2019 win”.

And the tactic of “learning from Johnson” may pay dividends. O’Toole is “now within striking distance of achieving that goal” when Canada goes to the polls on 20 September, the paper added.

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Form of flattery

When Trudeau called the snap election last month, his Liberal Party was leading in the polls and his strategy appeared to be a safe route to securing a larger majority. Just a month later, however, the race has tightened significantly.

To understand what has happened, said The Globe and Mail’s national affairs columnist Gary Mason, you must first “travel back in time” to the UK Conservative Party’s 2005 conference in Blackpool.

“On stage,” Mason said, “is a 39-year-old David Cameron, who is vying for his party’s leadership.” After a third general election defeat at the hands of Labour, Cameron is about to set out “a vision to alter the way Conservatives approach everything from education to health care”.

“He would leave the convention as his party’s next leader” and “five years later, he would be prime minister”, Mason added. The realignment of Cameron’s Tories has “become an explicit reference point” for O’Toole and his “brain trust”.

What O’Toole has successfully pulled off is a similar feat to Cameron’s “one nation Toryism”, namely a change in the Canadian “Conservative playbook” aimed at targeting the country’s “blue collar vote”, said commentator John Ivison in the National Post.

Rather than appealing only to the Conservatives’ traditional base, O’Toole has shifted the party’s appeal to “people who have been left behind by globalism but who also shun identity politics”, Ivison added. And his party’s fortunes have risen as a result.

In redefining his party, O’Toole has picked up “lessons from everywhere”, Ivison continued, most notably “Johnson’s emphatic victory” two years ago in which he decimated the UK Labour Party in their old stronghold, namely the so-called “red wall”.

O’Toole has mimicked this success by making “speeches bemoaning the fall in the union membership” and issuing “a Labour Day statement calling for an economic policy that puts workers first”, Ivison added, closely resembling Johnson’s “levelling-up” agenda.

He has also pledged “to spend an extra $60bn [£43.2m] on healthcare over the next 10 years”, a promise the Liberals are yet to counter. This has shifted his party’s position on what has often been a “defensive issue for Conservatives” in order to mimic “Johnson’s commitment in the British election to provide more nurses and funding for the NHS”.

A source in O’Toole’s campaign told The Telegraph that his aides “studied what Cameron did very closely” in terms of his rebranding of the UK Conservative Party 15 years ago, as well as Johnson’s “success winning back blue collar voters in the 2019 election”.

The paper added that “former advisers to Johnson who helped secure him a majority in that vote have also been hired”, including James Kanagasooriam, who runs data company Stack Data Strategy, and Sean Topham, of consultancy firm Topham Guerin.

O’Toole has nosed ahead in polls and now has a 54% chance of winning the most seats, according to projections by polling aggregator 338Canada.com. Such is the success of his party’s campaign that the Conservatives are “even with the Liberals in vote-rich Ontario and have a strong lead in the western provinces”, Bloomberg added.

New conservatism

As Johnson has faced criticism over manifesto-busting pledges, O’Toole’s “strategy has faced a strong internal backlash”, Ivison said. Critics have argued that “if the Conservative Party doesn’t stand for free trade, a market economy and small government, what does it stand for?”.

But O’Toole, like Johnson, has “faced down the doubters in his own party and crafted an election platform brimming with measures aimed at appealing to people who may not be traditional Conservative voters”, he added.

The campaign “is changing Canadian conservatism as we know it”, according to Mason. He suggested that “Tories have tried to court the working class and take the climate crisis more seriously, while risking alienating social conservatives”.

“Perhaps the biggest change,” he added, “has been a new focus on the working-class voter.” Pledges have included the extension of Employment Insurance sickness benefits, paying 25% of salaries for new hires for six months and requiring federally regulated employers to include worker representation on their boards.

In this regard, “there are key differences to the UK comparison”, Ivison added in the National Post. But what unites O’Toole and Johnson is an attempt to – at least partially – “realign conservative dogma”, Mason added.

In 2019, Johnson “showed it was possible to mine a whole new group of voters: disaffected blue-collar workers,” he said. The Canadian Conservatives now “have work to do here if they hope to see their strategy pay off in the same way”.