Erin O’Toole is blazing a campaign trail through uncharted territory — and it’s paying off

By Jaime WattContributing Columnist

After what some observers saw as a slow start, Erin O’Toole is making this election campaign his.

O’Toole understands the difficulty of fighting an election as the new face of a centre-right party. History, after all, is rife with Tory leaders who failed to make their mark or take control of their party early enough. So far, Erin O’Toole has learned from the past and set himself up brilliantly to avoid the same fate.

One lesson comes from former British Conservative prime minister David Cameron’s 2005 party conference speech, when he was still a leadership hopeful. The speech carried him to win the leadership and later came to define his vision for “a modern, compassionate conservatism.”

In order to form government after eight years in opposition, Cameron argued, the Conservatives needed to drastically reimagine their role in political life and become more positive, forward-looking and optimistic about changes in society. “There’s one thing [soon-to-be Labour leader] Gordon Brown fears more than anything else: a Conservative party that has the courage to change. So let’s give him the fright of his life.”