Let’s hear it for Liberal losers. Let’s give it up for Stéphane Dion, who followed up his unexpected leadership win in 2006 with a monumental electoral cockup in 2008. And here’s a slap on the shoulder for Michael Ignatieff, who combined noblesse oblige and intellectual haughtiness in a way that led to even worse electoral results for the Grits in 2011.

Election winners get power today. The losers typically sow the seeds for getting it back tomorrow.

Losing an election is like surviving a heart attack. It curbs bad habits, refocuses priorities and strips away any notions of invincibility. The Liberal Party of Canada — an entity not known for its institutional humility — needed two heart attacks to smarten up. Losers in their own time, Dion and Ignatieff nonetheless became key elements of the path-to-victory narrative led by Justin Trudeau.

This is exactly why the Conservative Party of Canada should celebrate its 2015 loss under Stephen Harper by learning from his many mistakes. Harper stormed into power as a populist antidote to Liberal arrogance. He lost it because he ran a bitter and divisive campaign. Among other things, it turned the economy and the environment into binary options: Supporting the first meant willingly sacrificing the second, and vice versa. That’s one of the main reasons that Harper, the seasoned politician, lost the election to an allegedly out-of-touch former drama teacher with pretty hair and an empty skull.

But instead of learning from these mistakes, the Conservatives have continued in opposition with the same blinkered approach that helped lose them the 2015 election.

Exhibit one: Conservative MP Erin O’Toole. The party’s foreign affairs critic offered his support for the Liberal government in the NAFTA negotiations with the U.S. and Mexico. There was one sizeable caveat: O’Toole would tolerate no “virtue signalling” on certain issues, including the environment. Should the Liberals add climate change — or gender rights, or Indigenous issues — to their list of priority negotiation targets, the Conservatives would be forced to “attack.”

There are obvious demographic downsides to playing to the myopia and petty fears of roughly 100,000 Baby Boomers — and not only because they are literally dying off. There are obvious demographic downsides to playing to the myopia and petty fears of roughly 100,000 Baby Boomers — and not only because they aredying off.

O’Toole’s chicken hawk routine is as clear an indication as any that the Conservative party remains stubbornly rooted in its recent past. By dismissing environmental issues as “virtue signalling” — a common epithet employed by the right — O’Toole is attempting to diminish the environment as a political issue, just as the Conservative party itself attempted to feminize and diminish Trudeau before and during the last election.

In the Conservative mindset, the economy and the environment remain separate issues, to be dealt with separately — with the first always taking precedence over the second. It’s the reason why the party came to recognize the very real threat of climate change so much later than its parliamentary brethren — and why did so grudgingly, as though it were a tax burden on Canadians and not a threat to humankind. O’Toole and Ed Fast, the party’s environment critic, are emblematic of this mentality.

In a way, you can’t blame them. Shortly after the 2015 election, as the Conservative party wrenched itself from a stinging electoral loss to a divisive leadership campaign, the polling company Campaign Research looked into the roughly 100,000 paid up CPC members. These members tended to be white and overwhelmingly male, with an average age of 66. These people make a lot of noise within Conservative party circles — and hell hath no fury like a cornered Baby Boomer.

Not coincidentally, nearly every one of the 13 leadership contenders in the party downplayed the effects and importance of climate change. The one notable exception — Michael Chong — suffered the consequences of breaking ranks. In the months before the leadership vote, Conservative members literally booed Chong when he dared voice his support for a carbon tax. Chong ended the race behind Brad Trost.

There are obvious demographic downsides to playing to the myopia and petty fears of roughly 100,000 Baby Boomers — and not only because they are literally dying off. With an average age of 39, Canadians are decades younger than the average Conservative party member. A Canada-wide EKOS poll last year found that a 39-year-old Canadian likely supports stricter environmental regulation and is sensitive to the plight of the country’s Indigenous population. Addressing these concerns may well be “virtue-signalling”, as O’Toole said, but it’s also a canny extension of retail politics — a way to ensure your party doesn’t grow old.

Though Conservatives rid themselves of their leader in 2015, they have yet to move beyond the shadow of his legacy, or the cloistered confines of the party faithful. Instead, by clinging to the same rhetoric and mindset that lost them the election, they are damning themselves to more failure.

Perhaps they need a second heart attack. Maybe a third.

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