Erin O’Toole’s Flanking Maneuver—From Vimy Heartbreak to Pandemic Victory
If young Canadians' sacrifices are commensurate with those of the Vimy generation, they’ll want to see more from politicians than platitudinous op-eds.
On April 9, federal Tory leader Erin O’Toole penned an op-ed for the National Post entitled “Canadians conquered Vimy Ridge. We can win the battle against COVID, too.” It opened with a moving vignette about a young Manitoba man, Gordon Rochford, saving the life of a wounded comrade, Earl Sorel, before falling in battle the same day.
A former Air Force officer, O’Toole is a devotee of one of Canada’s most durable creation myths:
That Vimy occupies this special place in Canadian memory and mythology is a result of how we tell our national story. Charlottetown, Quebec and London were the cities where the terms of Confederation were written. Vimy was the ridge in France where the price of our union was paid in sacrifice.
As Canadian history buffs will know, this grand narrative has been challenged in recent years for its blunt-force patriotism and its centrality to the muscular “warrior nation” idea of Canada. Presumably, it does not resonate with the youthful activists who are today toppling statues, renaming public institutions, and protesting the genocidal logic on which they believe the Canadian state was founded.
But when it comes to retail politicking, things are never entirely what they seem. O’Toole is stalled in the polls, it is unclear even to insiders where he stands on the “true blue” principles for which he was elected party leader, and his “Just Erin” pitch is failing to quell party infighting or claims that he faces an “authenticity gap.”
Canadians might wonder, in short, whether O’Toole is taking a huge, unwarranted gamble by invoking the near-sacred Vimy myth while he’s still struggling to find his footing.
One possibility is that he’s playing to the Conservative base. O’Toole has inherited a big-tent party, and he pitches himself as a big-tent leader. So, to his credit, he invokes a big-tent Vimy. The majority of Canadians who shipped out to France volunteered as “Englishmen”—that is, as first- or second-generation ex-pats. But this was not the whole story. “This proudly multicultural nation,” O’Toole notes, also saw Québécois, Asian immigrants, and First Nations people fall at Vimy—in the case of the latter, “decades before this country would live up to its pledge to them.”
Point taken.
From the carnage of Vimy Ridge (3,598 dead, 10,602 total Canadian casualties), O’Toole pivots to the losses Canadians have suffered under the pandemic (over 26,000 deaths). “We have said our final goodbyes through the windows of long-term care homes, instead of artillery craters,” he writes. “We are exhausted and heartbroken because we see empty chairs at our kitchen tables where loved ones once sat.”
Analogizing battlefield heroism to pandemic tragedy requires a lighter touch than O’Toole can manage, and his sometimes maudlin tone is certain to strike some party stalwarts as annoyingly Trudeau-esque. But he has very little room to maneuver when it comes to politicizing the Liberals’ pandemic response, and nothing to gain by blaming others. Canadian voters remain reliably moderate, telling pollsters that when the vaccines do their work and the country returns to normal, they are willing to forgive governments’ sometimes ham-fisted handling of the crisis. O’Toole knows that he must take the high road if he is to sound prime-ministerial.
He must now also contend with whispers that he is Trudeau Lite, as he prods his party rank-and-file closer to the crowded political centre. But it’s 2021—and if Justin Trudeau has demonstrated anything, it’s that empathy is today the cardinal political virtue. That means O’Toole has little practical choice but to walk the knife-edge, appealing to younger voters enamored with the politics of commiseration, but without alienating older cohorts who still see virtue in stoicism.
For Canadians whose primary concern for the post-pandemic world is the plight of young people, O’Toole faces both the challenge of conventional wisdom—that the Liberals and the NDP are the natural homes of idealistic youth—but also a tremendous opportunity. For at the core of his Vimy allegory lies his apparently sincere conviction that Canadians do not wish to see another lost generation:
Our mission now must be to prevent more losses for the next generation. As COVID-19 variants begin to ravage 20- and 30-somethings, we are forced to ask what sort of country will be there for them when we are, at last, through all of this.
O’Toole concludes his piece with a statesmanlike plea for resolve in the face of adversity, which he identifies as Vimy’s greatest legacy. “May you have hope this Vimy Day anniversary and every day.”
Whether such Churchillian overtures will rehabilitate his reputation as a straight shooter—or deliver his party the votes it needs to defeat the Liberals—only time will tell. Young Canadians may be jaded and even desperate, but they are not fools. If their pandemic sacrifices are commensurate with those made by the Vimy generation, they’ll want to see more from O’Toole than platitudinous op-eds. And that goes for the entire Canadian political class.
They’ll want to see the plan.