Canada’s Conservative Party Votes To Oust Leader In Part Because He Backed Law Banning Ex-Gay Torture

February 2, 2022 News, Politics

The CBC reports:

A majority of Conservative MPs today voted to remove Erin O’Toole as party leader, paving the way for another leadership race only 18 months after the party finished the last one.

The result wasn’t particularly close: 73 of the 118 MPs on hand — the party’s caucus chair, Scott Reid, did not cast a ballot — voted to replace O’Toole with someone else. O’Toole, a four-term Ontario MP who has fought only one federal election campaign as the party’s leader, will be replaced by an interim leader later today after another caucus vote.

In a resignation video posted to Twitter, O’Toole described his time as Conservative leader as “the honour of a lifetime” — before warning that “Canada is in a dire moment of our history.”

The New York Times reports:

In a secret ballot, about 62 percent of the Conservative caucus voted against Mr. O’Toole, 49, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The vote was forced by a petition from caucus members concerned that he took the party too far away from its core conservative values on social issues.

The vote appears to have been triggered by Conservative members angered by his support of a Liberal government bill banning conversion therapy earlier this year.

Mr. O’Toole’s ouster also suggests a rift between its more socially conservative wing, which is largely based in Western Canada, and its fiscally conservative, socially liberal branch that is centered in Ontario, the most populous province and Mr. O’Toole’s home.

Earlier this week O’Toole posted tweets critical of the anti-vax extremists seen at the Ottawa trucker protest. That may have also helped push his ouster.



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