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Leader of the Opposition Erin O'Toole responds to a question during a news conference on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, March 23, 2021.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press

Erin O’Toole’s speech to the Conservative convention, admonishing party members to “change” and “grow,” was well received on the whole. One passage attracted particular notice: “We must present new ideas, not make the same arguments hoping that maybe this time more Canadians will come around to our position.”

It sounds bold, clear-eyed, logical. But is he right? Isn’t it the job of a political party to “make the same arguments,” or at least argue for the same things, from one election to the next – even if, especially if, it loses? If they’re what you believe, you take defeat as a challenge to explain them better, not toss aside your convictions the moment they prove inconvenient.

The Liberals make pretty much the same argument every election – elect us or the Tories will plunge the country into eternal darkness – and it hasn’t hurt them much. The NDP typically hammers away at the same theme for several elections – medicare, childcare, pharmacare, etc. – until the Grits implement it. God knows the Greens and the Bloc never change. The notion that a party should turn itself inside out after each loss, trading in whatever it once believed for a passel of “new ideas,” seems unique to the Conservatives.

(The demand for “new ideas” is a reliable indicator of a politician on the make. There are no new ideas, or none of any consequence. Maybe one per century; Einstein had a new idea, after all. Whereas most of what passes as “new ideas” nowadays are the same old bad ideas as before, only they’ve been out of favour so long people have forgotten why they fell out of favour in the first place.)

In any event it’s a false diagnosis. The problem with the last couple of Conservative election campaigns is not that they were making the same arguments, but that they weren’t making any arguments at all. The exception, of course, was the party’s usual mulish opposition to carbon pricing, the only clear policy stance it has taken in two decades. But the problem with this idea is not that it is unpopular, but that it is wrong, and not only wrong, but incoherent, coming from a nominally conservative party that professes to be interested in market-based solutions.

If it were the right position, they’d be right to stick with it. If it were the wrong position, but popular, they’d be wrong to stick with it, but you could at least understand why they would. But a policy that is not only wrong, but unpopular? Naturally, this is where Conservatives choose to stand and fight.

Indeed, Mr. O’Toole is all for making “the same arguments” here. “To those who were expecting a dramatic moment,” he told the convention, “I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed.” He’d scrap the carbon tax, but promises a detailed plan that meets our Paris targets without costing anyone a nickel in time for the next election. Where have I heard that before?

Which makes all that hectoring of the grassroots to embrace “change” more than a little stomach-turning. The problem isn’t the party: It’s the leadership. It isn’t the convention’s refusal to acknowledge the reality of climate change that will hurt the Conservatives at the next election so much as the leadership’s continuing refusal to put forward any serious policy to address it. It wasn’t the rank and file that took the same platform to the electorate, election after election, with the same bouquet of microtargeted tax credits in place of substantive proposals for change – it was the leadership.

It’s true that a political party has an obligation to be relevant. It’s not enough just to campaign on the same hobby-horse issues, if these are not issues the public cares about. Though it will be sometimes necessary for a party to raise issues the public may have overlooked, the general assignment is to propose the sorts of solutions to current issues that its principles recommend to it.

How long has it been since any Conservative party has done that? What does the party actually have to say about the great issues of our time – not just climate change, but race, inequality, etc.? What positions has it taken that would make any real difference to anyone or involve any political risk whatsoever? Can anyone even name a Conservative policy?

While the left has been advancing confidently, proposing one new government program after another, the Conservatives cannot even rouse themselves to defend their old ideas, let alone come up with new ones. Mr. O’Toole’s notion of change would appear to include opposition to “bad trade deals,” which puts him with the NDP circa 1987.

New ideas? How about we just start with ideas, first, and see how that goes?

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