EDITORIAL: Divided, the Tories will fall

Article content

Canada’s Conservatives have an important decision to make.

Do they want to fight each other or do they want to win?

If they want to fight each other, they’re going about it the right way.

During the election, Ontario Progressive Conservative Premier Doug Ford and his campaign manager, Kory Teneycke, repeatedly attacked federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre and his campaign manager, Jenni Byrne, for how they were conducting the race.

On election night, re-elected Conservative MP Jamil Jivani fired back, accusing Ford of attempting to sabotage the Conservative campaign while favouring the Liberals and doing a lousy job of running Ontario.

This demonstrates one of the reasons the Liberals have been in charge of the country 70% of the time since 1900 — Conservatives circling the wagons and firing at each other during elections.

Given that, many voters wonder, legitimately, that if Conservatives can’t work together, how can they run the country?

When the Progressive Conservative party split into three sections in the 1993 federal election, with the formation of the Reform and Bloc Quebecois parties — putting Jean Chretien and the Liberals into power — it took almost 13 years for Stephen Harper to re-unite the right and win a Conservative minority government in 2006, followed by a second minority in 2008 and a majority government in 2011.

Harper won in 2006 because of internal feuding between the pro-Chretien and pro-Paul Martin factions within the Liberal party, with Martin reduced from a majority to a minority government in 2004, before losing power in 2006.

Since the federal Conservatives lost power to Justin Trudeau and the Liberals in 2015, they’ve been electing and discarding leaders after one election — Andrew Scheer in 2019 and Erin O’Toole in 2021.

Now, questions are being raised about Poilievre’s leadership for blowing a huge lead over the Liberals, in Monday’s federal election, by failing to pivot quickly enough to take on U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff war against Canada.

While Poilievre grew the party’s popular vote and seat count, he lost in his own riding.

Poilievre vowed on election night to continue as party leader, a decision to ultimately be made by the Conservative caucus, once again raising the question: Do the Conservatives want to win or keep fighting each other?