Erin O’Toole to stay on as MP after being forced out of Conservative party leadership

OTTAWA — Erin O’Toole says he will stay on as a Conservative member of Parliament after being pushed out of the party’s top spot by a majority of his fellow MPs. 

O’Toole addressed his loss in a six-minute video shared on social media Wednesday. It was posted only hours after he learned he had lost the support of the Tory caucus by a vote of 73 to 45. 

The Conservative’s have 119 MPs, but the party’s national caucus chair, Scott Reid, says he didn’t vote. 

In his farewell video, O’Toole, 49, said he had officially resigned as party leader and would remain in his seat as the MP for the southern Ontario riding of Durham. He also pledged his loyalty to the next Conservative leader, urging all in the party to do the same. 

He became the first party leader to be removed under a process outlined in the Reform Act, legislation passed in 2015 that allows a caucus to give members the power to trigger a leadership review. 

Conservative MPs decided they wanted that ability after O’Toole lost last year’s federal election. 

The next order of business will be to select an interim leader, which will happen tonight. New Brunswick MP John Williamson threw his name into the ring as did British Columbia MP Kerry-Lynne Findlay.Alberta MP and former national caucus chair Tom Kmiec also said he was putting his name forward, as did New Brunswick MP Rob Moore. 

Deputy party leader Candice Bergen is also considered a possible contender. Heading into the House of Commons after Wednesday’s vote, Bergen said she would have more to stay later. 

O’Toole, who had been at the party’s helm since August 2020, offered some parting advice in his goodbye message. 

“This country needs a Conservative party that is both an intellectual force and governing force. Ideology without power is vanity,” he said. “Seeking power without ideology is hubris.”

A defining element of O’Toole’s leadership was his insistence to party members that Conservatives must change and modernize if the party hoped to grow its support in major cities and suburbs. 

After news broke Monday that one-third of his MPs wanted him gone, O’Toole said he wasn’t going anywhere. He painted the dissident MPs as believing the party should hold more extreme views resembling those of Ontario MPP Randy Hillier and ex-MP Derek Sloan.

By contrast, O’Toole said he was offering a vision of building a more inclusive party. He and his team then got to work spending the next day-and-a-half before the vote trying to shore up their support.

O’Toole went into the vote fighting for his political life. 

Three caucus sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters said O’Toole told his colleagues he was committed to making changes. He told them that if members voted for him to stay, he would undergo an early leadership review by the membership ahead of the previously set timeline in 2023. His critics have spent months calling on O’Toole and the party’s national council to do that.

But it came too late. 

“The caucus has spoken,” Regina MP Michael Kram said afterward on Twitter. 

“A leader cannot lead if he does not have the confidence of his caucus colleagues.”

Several MPs said they felt more united and are ready to move on past the difficulties over the last few months. 

“Erin was a long time coming,” said Edmonton MP Matt Jeneroux, who said he didn’t support O’Toole. “You can’t run in the leadership on one thing and then do something else.” 

B.C. MP Mark Strahl, who was one of the few in caucus to publicly criticize O’Toole’s leadership for being inconsistent, said he hopes the party finds a permanent leader soon. 

Despite the deep divides O’Toole found in the caucus, many of them commended him for his service, with some remarking on the toll that doing the job during the COVID-19 pandemic has taken. 

“It’s been tough, being the leader of the Opposition during a pandemic for the O’Toole family,” said Ontario MP Michael Barrett, who serves on the party’s leadership team. 

O’Toole thanked his wife Rebecca and appeared to grow emotional when expressing appreciation to his children, Mollie and Jack, who he said “would be seeing a little more of me than over the last 18 months.”

The corporate lawyer and Air Force veteran was first elected in a byelection in 2012 in Durham, a region his father also represented when he was in provincial politics.

He served as minister of veterans affairs in former prime minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government before it fell to the Liberals in the 2015 election.

He then put his name forward to be interim leader but lost. He tried again, this time for the party leadership in 2017, but placed third behind Andrew Scheer.

One of the major knocks critics had against O’Toole began after the 2020 race, where he ran as the “true blue” candidate over former cabinet minister Peter MacKay. The former Nova Scotia MP had served as leader of the Progressive Conservative party before it merged with the Canadian Alliance to form the modern Conservative Party of Canada.

In an attempt differentiate himself from Scheer — whose social conservative views dogged him in the 2019 campaign — O’Toole promoted his support of access to abortion and LGBTQ rights.

He also embraced carbon pricing, despite the fact that some of his MPs, including many in Western Canada, fought for years against the Liberal government’s carbon-pricing mechanism, which the Conservatives called a “carbon tax.”

During the leadership contest, O’Toole pledged that it would be scrapped.

He also raised the ire of firearms activists and social conservatives by reversing course on promises midway through the last year’s federal election campaign upon being attacked by the Liberals.

Critics like Sen. Denise Batters, who last November began petitioning the party to hold an early leadership review, said his flip-flops damaged his image with Canadians and made him untrustworthy.

Others also point out that O’Toole finished with two fewer seats than Scheer did in 2019, and lost seats in Alberta, home to a considerable portion of the Conservative base. 

Since his election defeat, O’Toole has struggled to bring his caucus together on issues like vaccine mandates, with many of his MPs feeling the party needed to take a tougher stand against such policies.

He has also faced pressure to more forcefully oppose a controversial secularism law in Quebec and got pushback from members of the party’s social conservative wing for fast-tracking a government bill to ban conversion therapy for LGBTQ Canadians.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 2, 2022.

Stephanie Taylor, The Canadian Press