When Erin O’Toole was elected leader of Canada’s Conservative Party last week, woke Canadians knew how to respond. “OMG, he’s the same age as Justin Trudeau,” declared the leftist Twitter hive mind. “I guess being a Right-wing bigot must take its toll.”
Thanks, guys, for unintentionally reminding us that you have no idea what a hard day’s work looks like. Trudeau, who at 47 years old is the elder by a year, does indeed look svelte and groomed. A trust fund baby, the closest he came to a proper job before assuming the leadership of his father’s old party was as a supply teacher. O’Toole, by contrast, left school to join the military. Heavyweight but with a merry twinkle in his eye, he has an everyman quality to which the metrosexual Trudeau can never aspire.
Does it matter? In the current mood, yes, it does. Trudeau is a fair-weather politician. Having inherited a budget surplus, strong growth, and falling tax rates, he didn’t need to do much in his first term except pose with his photogenic family. In other countries, his political correctness might have grated — he once ticked off a woman for saying “mankind” instead of “peoplekind” — but in Canada, or at least in official Canada, wokeness is obligatory.
Once revenues fall and unemployment rises, though, even the most bien pensant Canadians may tire of Trudeau’s antics. O’Toole is a big man for big challenges. He won his party’s leadership on a platform of standing up to Communist China, promoting closer relations with the English-speaking democracies, protecting free expression, defunding the far-left state broadcaster, restoring fiscal sanity, and forestalling separatism.
In his victory speech, O’Toole appealed for the support of Quebec nationalists in French. But he knows that these days, the chief threat to Canadian unity comes from western provinces alienated by Ottawa’s eco-extremism. Whether or not the so-called “Wexit” movement would actually split Canada — polls suggest that around half of Albertans would vote to leave — it certainly has the potential to split the right-of-center vote and let the liberals hang on. O’Toole represents a suburban Ontario riding, but he sympathizes in his bones with the independent-minded prairie voters who backed him in the primary.
In Canada, as in the United Kingdom and the United States, the corporate establishment leans left while working people drift to the right. O’Toole knows how to speak to and for the commonsense majority without toppling into populism. He wants immigration to be controlled, not ended. He fights intolerance on campus by appealing to Canada’s liberal instincts. He has worked hard to attract immigrant and nonwhite Canadians to the Tories, and he grasps that this does not mean downplaying his party’s patriotism. He was the original champion of CANZUK, the scheme for closer economic, security, and political ties among Canada, the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand — an idea that enraged the Left but that most Canadians warmly supported. He is, in short, a solid incarnation of middle Canada.
One of the oddities of our present age is that although we keep being told that politicians should “look like the country,” that phrase is intended only to mean that they shouldn’t be white. In fact, voters respond to politicians of any ethnicity who have an everyday look about them.
President Trump may be a billionaire, but he is the kind of billionaire that low-income voters could imagine being if they somehow got their hands on a billion dollars — the kind who buys Miss World and installs gold elevators. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson went to the grandest school in the world, but he also has a normal-bloke quality about him.
O’Toole, a former helicopter navigator, has it, too. As with the other two leaders, it may owe something to his physique. A mass of polling evidence suggests that voters distrust thin politicians — or, at any rate, thin male politicians. Physical solidity conveys trustworthiness, calm, and dependability in a crisis. “Let me have men about me that are fat,” says Shakespeare’s Caesar. “Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o’nights.”
O’Toole is sleek-headed, which is a bigger deal than you might think. Do you know when a hairless American party leader last defeated a hirsute one? Not a baldie beating another baldie, Eisenhower versus Stevenson, for example, but a bald candidate defeating one not so afflicted? I’ll tell you: It was 1880, when James Garfield beat Winfield Scott Hancock. In the U.K., you have to go back to 1900. (If you think I am writing with unusual force on this subject, by the way, find a picture of me.)
Yet O’Toole’s bare bonce strengthens his demotic appeal. Here, it says, is a likable, relatable, patriotic citizen, who can lead Canada back to the heart of the Western alliance. Let’s hope he does.
