After governing for 9 years, Harper had dug a deep trench in the political landscape.  The Conservative voter pool, according to polling data, rarely nudged beyond 40% of the electorate.   In order to win, it must be reasoned, the Conservatives needed to try to attract a small swath of swing voters.  Early gambits in this regard, such as the home renovation tax credit and other small trinkets, completely failed, and so the campaign turned to motivating the base to turn out to the polls.  That’s what Harper’s final campaign was about.  And the base, it must be noted, has shown remarkable resilience despite the flack directed at the outgoing PM.  However, the question that ought to be asked is whether the aggressive quest of motivating the base, which had a positive effect in Quebec for the Conservatives, hurt the party pretty much every where else.  More importantly, how long might this negative hit to the brand last?

The stereotypical Conservative voter is older, blue collar, middle income, less educated and typically male.  It serves to reason that in order for Conservatives to hit their 40% threshold, they need to find people outside this stereotypical comfort zone.  As I have mentioned elsewhere before, the society of the future is an educated one, and unless Conservatives start saying things to entice more educated people, the long term prospects of winning for Conservatives diminish.  Thus, as the party will undergo renewal, the ultimate question for them is how do they become more appealing to educated people, some of whom may consider supporting the party and are our swing voters?  Being more reasonable about societies problems and the solutions to those problems would be a good start.

Let’s cut to the chase and discuss the question of whether or not the Conservatives were sinisterly trying to propagate xenophobia.  For a party that has made it a necessity to control its message, talking about the Niqab and barbaric cultural practices in public debate was curious from a message control perspective.  Inserting a position on the Niqab ruling during an election forces people to talk about it.  Here you have people who are capable of sticking to the line that everyone who wishes to join the Canadian family must proudly declare it like everyone else.  But, invariably, you’re going to also have unreasonable people saying unreasonable things that some might view as intolerant.  And when you have unreasonable people making unreasonable points on your behalf, you look and sound unreasonable too.  The last thing any party wants to sound like during an election campaign is unreasonable.  Its prospect to attract swing voters diminishes considerably.

The optics are just terrible.  I can’t tell you how many Twitter and Facebook trolls I encountered along the way that tried to convince anybody who bothered to read their thoughts that the Niqab wasn’t an integral part of Islam.  It shouldn’t have been hard to see how terrible the optics of that actually is: You have an old, white, Christian dude telling a young, ethnic, Muslim girl what is and isn’t part of Islam.  Right then and there, you lose the debate on reasonableness.  And then, barbaric cultural practices comes in the form of a new law that promises to rat out those contemplating female circumcision.  Here you have old men now talking about female genitalia in public discourse.  It just doesn’t look good, and I haven’t even touched the apparent religious prejudice either, which isn’t pleasant either.  It’s time to face the music, Conservatives.  I suppose mission accomplished on getting out the base, but perhaps mission accomplished as well to turning away those who might expand that base.

And to the more reasonable people, we watch this all unfold and say this: After 9 years in power, THESE are the issues upon which we begin our conversation about the future? Are there no other issues that can captivate an electorate? These issues, by the way, sucked any potential room for Conservatives to talk about the future, and electorates have a habit of telling you that if you can’t do that while you’re in office, voters will make you do it while the other guys and gals govern.  On October 19th, that’s exactly what happened for Conservatives.

It was clear that people in this election were looking for change.  And, it ought to be said, the Conservatives were fully capable of reinventing themselves, but chose not to. As is always the case, that choice is the responsibility of the leader and team.  It’s not that the leader and team were not good.  They crafted a strategy and executed it to the best of their abilities.  It’s just that the strategy didn’t grasp how thirsty the electorate was for change, and how dissatisfied they were with Harper’s same-old approach.

The Conservative platform was a kind of legacy document.  It double downed and/or brought back some of the Harper government’s more popular policies.  Enhancements on the universal child care benefit.  A return to the home renovation tax credit.  Expanding international trade.  A continued fight against international terrorism, and a few other things.   For an electorate that was thirsty for change, the Conservatives gave them nothing substantively new.  Add to that the impression that Harper was a one man show who was perceived to have a ruthless “you’re either with me or against me” attitude, and Canadians were just tired enough to give an unproven leader a shot at governing.

Of course, the trouble with election postmortems is that we have the benefit of hindsight.  Nevertheless, I believed this election was a perfect opportunity for the Conservatives to speak about the success of their record and show Canadians the kind of change that could have occurred with a renewed Conservative mandate.  For example, the Conservatives could have bragged about their great economic management in the face of global strife.  They were pragmatic when they needed to be.  They used the state to provide necessary stimulus.  They could have campaigned on the fact that a stable economy means they won’t need the same levers – the visible hand of government – for economic stimulus.  Closing regional economic development agencies and diverting that money to broad based tax relief would have allowed the government to argue for a return to free market economics.  The Conservatives could have countered their penchant for more flashy tax credits with a pledge to simplify and flatten taxation levels for people.  The Conservatives could have claimed victory in lowering crime rates with tougher penalties and forged a new path of looking at crime prevention strategies targeted to helping vulnerable youth.  Treating affordable housing as part of a broader infrastructure spending plan could aid in crime prevention, poverty reduction, and health promotion – a triple play in social policy.  Pick a new cause for health care, similar to the wait times guarantee of 2006.  Perhaps that could be in targeted mental health support.  You see, there is a way of using the successes of the past to pivot into new areas that you’d like to conquer.  After 9 years in office, you do need new things to talk about. The Conservative base is with the party for what they’ve done in the past, but Conservatives need to figure out what swing voters really care about, and focus everybody’s attention on it.

Looking across the country, it’s hard to imagine a time when the conservative movement was in worse shape.  What looked like a promising coalition of national support after 2011 has now been reduced to a predominantly rural and Western rump.  The fact that Harper had so few provincial partners to work with was a symptom of his unwillingness to sit down with the premiers for sure, but it’s also a symptom of how defeated conservatism in Canada actually is.  Left leaning provincial capitals far outnumber the pair of conservative provincial governments today. In order for that to change, the party must remember what it stands for and broaden its appeal the swing voters who have left.   The nucleus is there, but more voters are needed for the electoral coalition to once again succeed.