The niqab is still confounding Conservatives.

On the first full day of the Manning Centre’s annual conference, this year called “Recharging The Right” in reference to the Harper government’s election loss last October, Conservative MPs — past and present — were still trying to come to terms with the toxic election debate on the veil worn by only a small minority of Muslim women in Canada.

In one room at Ottawa’s Shaw Centre Friday morning, new Conservative MP Garnett Genuis was trying to understand online survey results being presented by Heather Scott-Marshall, the president of Mission Research.

As often seems to be the case in Canadian polls, Scott-Marshall’s online February survey showed most Canadians’ top priority is the economy.

Cultural concerns about diversity and the Canadian fabric weren’t exactly top of mind — so how to understand the role they played in the federal campaign?

“Even if an issue isn’t that important, it may significantly affect your view of the person taking that position. Someone could take a position on an issue that’s not actually that important to me, but maybe I conclude things about them because of the way they talk about that issue or the position they take,” Genuis ventured.

“It seems to me that they may explain why questions around diversity, immigration seemed to play a much more prominent role in the last election than the slides suggest in terms of peoples’ priorities.”

Some veteran Conservative strategists and Red Tories who ended up voting Liberal on October 19th have attributed their abandonment of the party at the polls to one key moment of biting identity politics: The unveiling on Oct. 2 of a “Barbaric Cultural Practices Tip Line” that Canadians could call to report on their Muslim neighbours.

At the Manning conference, the wife of a Conservative MP described the niqab as “the nail in the coffin”, without explaining why, and John Weston, a former Conservative MP who cruised to victory in 2008 and 2011 but lost by a landslide in 2015, asked a panel of journalists to explain the reaction he got knocking on doors.

Constituents didn’t tell him they disliked the Conservative platform, he said. They disliked them.

“At a thousand doors, I never heard somebody say our platform was inadequate or deficient. Instead, I heard more of the theme that you also brought out and others — not what we’re doing, but who we are…The reason I joined the Conservative Party is because I thought it shared the values I cared most about: freedom, responsibility, equality, compassion, integrity. And I would love to think and be those things. And I didn’t hear people saying we stood for that,” he said.

“My question is: where do you see the emphasis — what we do in terms of our platforms, which is important — or who we are and who we’re perceived to be? And the values that we stand for?”

Toronto Star columnist Chantal Hébert was blunt about the mini existential crisis the conference was exposing.

“Why did Justin Trudeau win the niqab debate on an issue he should’ve lost (according) to the polls? Because his stance on the niqab debate, which is a policy stance, goes to who the Liberals are. You could set your clock on Justin Trudeau saying what he said about the niqab,” she said.

“I look at your party and the niqab, and I don’t know who think you are. If you can, explain it….There are issues that brand a party beyond tone. And before you set out, you need to decide who you are.”

Back in the other room, where Scott-Marshall was explaining the results of their survey, she spoke of a type of free association exercise where participants were asked what words came to mind when they heard Conservative.

There were some positives, but also negative descriptors in line with what Weston had heard at peoples’ doors: “Old, outdated, and mean.”

When the survey drilled down further into how Canadians felt about common terms in the political vernacular — liberal, progressive, democrat, centre, independent, left-of-centre, socialist, conservative, libertarian, radical — they got a strong negative reaction to “conservative”.

“The most common negative reaction is to the word radical, not surprising probably. Although the second most common negative reaction is actually to the term conservative.” Scott-Marshall said.

“Just over a third of Canadians, 36 per cent, say they have a negative response to the term conservative when they hear it. And only 20 per cent say they have a positive response. Something to bare in mind just in terms of maybe negative…baggage that’s being associated with the term Conservative now.”