Conservative party leader Erin O’Toole has done the unthinkable and managed to take the lead in election polls. 

In the span of two weeks, the crew behind him known for frat-boy potty jokes on Twitter before the election was called has managed to engineer (by one estimate) an eight-point lead over the governing Libs. Gaudy stuff.

It’s been a dramatic turnaround. It may also be too good to be true with the party’s support in national surveys influenced by the numbers in their base out West in Alberta. But that’s another story.

How has he managed to seemingly convince Canadians he’s the “man with a plan”, as the Dudley Do-Right-inspired cover of the Conservative leader’s campaign literature exclaims?

Mostly by flying under the radar and keeping the seamier anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers and conspiracy theorists in his base (not to mention his caucus) quiet. The party is spending lots of cash on social media polishing O’Toole’s everyman image with photo opportunities of the Conservative leader playing with Fido and feeding llamas (or were they alpacas?). It’s quite a stretch from the photoshopped images of O’Toole the party had been sharing on Twitter to make him look more buff.

So far, O’Toole has hoodwinked Canadians—and a fair number of conservative columnists in the Ottawa press gallery—into thinking his party stands for a moderate conservatism.

But that blew up in his face over the weekend when “protestors” showed up at Liberal campaign rallies in Bolton on Friday night and Cambridge on Sunday to hurl insults and threaten violence against Justin Trudeau. Canadians who may have been lulled into a false sense of security by a revamped O’Toole were reminded what the base of the Conservative party stands for and what a vote for O’Toole might actually mean. 

The angry mobs had a range of grievances. But mostly they were unified by one thing: their hatred for the Liberal leader. It’s an antipathy toward Trudeau that’s been stoked by Conservative party operatives who take a special kind of glee in making the Liberal leader out to be a drama queen or worse. But I digress.

The rally in Bolton was called off after the RCMP detail accompanying the Trudeau judged that they could not guarantee everyone’s safety. That didn’t stop protestors from turning up the anti-Trudeau volume in Cambridge on Sunday. This time one of them brought a hangman’s noose—or more accurately, a billboard of Trudeau being shown about to be hanged. A few followed the Liberal campaign bus on its way out of town afterward, just like Trump supporters did in the 2020 U.S. election with Joe Biden’s campaign.

There has been a coordinated effort to harass and intimidate the Liberal leader with similar disruptions since the campaign started. It’s designed to take the Libs off their message. It’s all part of a social media strategy to gum up the airwaves with anything but what the Libs have done to help Canadians through the pandemic. And it’s working.

Some political commentators have offered that the Libs are now turning the events into a sympathy play for Trudeau. Conservative partisans were busy on Twitter on Monday morning, for example, trying to draw comparisons to the protests faced by former PC PM Brian Mulroney during the 1988 campaign. It’s setting up a false equivalency.

To be sure, Trudeau is not the first politician to face angry protestors or death threats. But he is the only one in recent memory to face a credible threat on his life. See Corey Hurren, the Manitoba man who plowed his pickup truck through the gates at Rideau Hall last summer—locked and loaded to reportedly assassinate Trudeau. He was sentenced to six years in prison earlier this year on several weapons charges. He told police he wanted to arrest Trudeau over the federal government’s COVID-19 restrictions and its ban on assault rifles. Sound familiar?

The attack took place the day after some 400 members of far-right groups and conspiracy theorists marched on Parliament Hill. The hysteria witnessed this weekend is not an anomaly. It mirrors the hate-filled demonstrations witnessed in Alberta and that greeted Trudeau in the lead-up to the 2019 federal election. 

QAnon. Yellow Vesters. Flat earthers. They’re all part of the Con base (and growing) since Stephen Harper began stoking populist and Western separatist sentiment (not to mention Islamophobia) in the party more than a decade ago.

O’Toole was quick to condemn the behaviour at Friday’s protest on Twitter. The Conservative Party’s official Twitter account posted a tweet late Sunday to distance itself from the Cambridge event. But it was all very convenient. It was revealed in short order that some were campaign workers of Dufferin-Caledon MP Kyle Seeback.

As Conservative poll numbers rise, many voters seem to have forgotten about the Trumpeteers that occupy the lower rungs of the party.

Make no mistake. They’re the same folks who voted for “True Blue” O’Toole during the party leadership. Remember him? The campaign team behind O’Toole then are the same ones responsible for the homophobia-tinged crusade in the 2018 Ontario election against Kathleen Wynne.

While O’Toole has tried to present himself as a moderate conservative out for the little guy, it’s not the version of conservatism that the party he oversees actually stands for.

There’s no progressive in this conservatism. Truth is, many don’t believe in climate change. They don’t believe in (or see) the need for mandatory vaccinations during a public health crisis. They don’t believe in gun control. They don’t really believe in LGBTQ rights. They don’t believe in a woman’s right to choose. Many of them don’t even believe the pandemic is real. 

We should be talking about that and the continuing discovery of some 5,000 bodies (and counting) of Indigenous children in unmarked graves at the site of former residential schools. Or the explosion of Islamophobia and racism unleashed during the pandemic. Or, for that matter, the Liberals’ pandemic response and recovery plan—derided by Conservatives for Trudeau’s calling it a “she-covery.” 

But so far the Conservative party’s experts in misinformation—who happen to be the same folks who brought the U.K. Brexit—have managed to turn whether we need an election at all into the ballot box issue.

O’Toole continues to talk out of both sides of his mouth. Right on cue, O’Toole has declined to address comments by longtime Conservative MP Cheryl Gallant in the wake of Sunday’s events that the Libs are preparing to declare a “climate emergency lockdown” should they get elected. 

The campaign around the Conservative leader has been a carefully controlled affair, mostly filled with virtual call-in shows where the guest questioners are heavily vetted. He’s barely left the swank control centre in Ottawa. Fringe types in the party like Pierre Poilievre and deputy party leader Candice Bergen have been instructed to mind their Ps and Qs.

It should be no secret where the Conservatives stand on a whole host of issues. It took a few supporters to remind us this weekend. They don’t seem the kind of folks that would accept a Liberal election victory should that be the outcome on September 20. They seem more inclined to believe the whole thing is a hoax. Which creates a whole other set of problems.