Are the Tories still the party of law and order?

The Conservative Party was going to tackle lawlessness. The party announced a detailed anti-drug initiative promising to punish and prevent the use and sale of illegal narcotics. The party’s election manifesto pledged to hold the governing Liberal Party to account and crack down on crime in Canada. That sounds familiar because those statements were made in 2006, when Stephen Harper successfully led the party. It is 2021 and multiple people are being gunned down in the GTA every week. That is not an exaggeration. In the last two weeks, police responded to homicides or attempted homicides all over the GTA. For a city trying too hard to imitate New York, Toronto is matching its role-model in the drive-by shooting category. Homicides are up from last year in Toronto and the city saw more than two murders per week in October. Nobody is suggesting the GTA has become the snow-covered version of Juarez, but that doesn’t make it more comforting when nobody in Ottawa is talking about it. The issue goes beyond Toronto. Violent crime rates in Canada’s biggest cities have skyrocketed. Vancouver is undergoing its own wave of violent crime, as four people are being assaulted per day downtown. The assailants on the West Coast sometimes substitute guns for hypodermic needles, but they also sometimes shoot up Vancouver International Airport and flee to the suburb of Surrey to light it up as well. There have been few, if any, conversations about this on Parliament Hill. The pandemic forced many of the shooters, stabbers, and victims into lockdown which temporarily lowered the crime rate, but only a little. As normalcy returns in fits and starts, so have the criminals returned to the streets. Tories are supposed to be the politicians visibly leading the charge against crime. The Liberals and NDP certainly will not with their current leaders. Tough-on-crime Justin Trudeau is something to try and wrap your head around. Law and order is a classic issue that centre-right parties are supposed to champion. Not in Erin O’Toole’s Conservative Party. Ever sensitive to what happens in the United States, Canadians bore witness to Donald Trump’s all-cap tweeting of “LAW AND ORDER” during his failed re-election bid. Accusing the Tories of being aspirant Republicans is a time-honoured tradition for their critics, and the charge is sometimes accurate. Nonetheless, the GOP is the least popular of the two American parties in Canada. Tories are therefore extra careful when it comes to taking cues from the Republican Party and God forbid anybody calls them out on it O’Toole steered clear of law and order in the last election, despite the legitimate need to address the growing tendency of people to shoot, shank, or beat each other. He drove towards making himself appear as a Liberal-lite in a blue blazer instead. The most O’Toole did was briefly promise to send more RCMP officers to the GTA and the Vancouver area, and not much more. In the eyes of Tory strategists, the best way to do that is to abrogate as many traces of social conservatism as possible, which apparently taints crime fighting as well. It did not work, as Trudeau and the Liberals won the election. It has not stopped O’Toole from trying to make his party resemble the Liberals enough that voters in the 905 will vote for it. Instead of responding to rising crime, O’Toole ostentatiously fast-tracked a Liberal anti-conversion therapy bill in the House of Commons to the Senate for approval. CBC posted photos of O’Toole and his opposition firmly grasping hands with the Liberals after the vote in a show of unity to help kick off the 44th Canadian parliament. Conversion therapy is a terrible procedure and it was the right decision for the Tories to support the bill. Will they get credit for it? No. The Toronto Star’s editorial page isn’t going to swing in their favour and neither will their readership. No matter what O’Toole does to try to shed the Conservative Party’s image as a conservative party, the only Tory that urban Torontontians will vote for is Mayor John Tory. Are the majority of Canadians, including many Tory voters, happy that conversion therapy is banned? Maybe. But is that the issue that keeps the majority of Canadians up at night? Definitely not. The majority of Canadians will not be glad to be caught in the crossfire of a gang shootout or the rising possibility of that. Being stabbed by a stranger with a dirty needle will ruin more than one day of your life. People are worried about growing violent crime and not just the free-flow of hate crimes being typed on the internet. Nonetheless, only internet hate speech, crypto-currency crime, and misinformation crackdowns are being discussed by the current batch of MPs. They have nothing worthy to say about physical crime on the streets of the cities that urban voters live and work in. The climbing violence is at its worst in the GTA where the Tories need to win to ever get back into power. By refusing to address crime as the ostensible party of law and order, the Tories are missing a golden opportunity to appeal to voters they need. O’Toole is so concerned with convincing voters he actually leads a liberal party that he’s ignoring crime fighting when it's more urgent than ever. This is apparently “modernizing” the Conservative Party. The problem is crime isn’t a modern or outdated issue. Violent crime never ceases, it ebbs and flows. Right now, it is flowing redder and redder on Canadian streets and no party leader will say anything about it, even the one that should. Geoff Russ is a journalist and commentator focusing on political and cultural affairs in Canada. He is a graduate of the University of Victoria and a member of the Haida Nation. The Hill Times