John Ivison: The loss of Scott Aitchison is a grim warning for Conservatives

The Conservatives will try to spin the departure of Scott Aitchison, the popular MP for Parry Sound–Muskoka, as being of negligible importance. Here’s a guy in his early 50s who has spent more than 30 years in municipal and federal politics, and who has decided to move on to another stage in life.

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Fair enough. Aitchison’s reasons for leaving at the end of the fall session remain vague. He said on social media that it is “time for a new chapter to explore new opportunities.”

But he will become the eighth Conservative MP to leave the caucus in the last year. Losing one might be deemed unfortunate; losing eight looks like a serious exodus.

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Aitchison, a former leadership candidate, is a smart man who can read the runes, and he clearly doesn’t fancy spending his autumn years sitting in Opposition — and that’s if he is re-elected.

He won his northern Ontario riding by 10 points last year, but that was when the Pierre Poilievre-led Conservative party won 41 per cent of the vote nationally. It is much lower in the public esteem these days and the 338 Canada website rates Parry Sound–Muskoka as “Liberal-leaning” if a vote were held tomorrow.

Aitchison was always an uncomfortable fit inside Poilievre’s caucus. He is (as he noted in his letter to his constituents this week announcing his plan to leave) a consensus builder.

When the current leader was championing the Freedom Convoy in 2022, Aitchison was standing up in the House of Commons, pointing out that he and his colleagues weren’t sent to Ottawa to represent only those people who put up their lawn signs. “We weren’t sent here to represent the lowest common denominator. We were sent here to raise it,” he said.

He ran for leader that April but found it hard to raise money and support on a platform aimed at the “exhausted majority,” who he said were sick of “partisan gridlock and ideological entrenchment.”

“The majority of Canadians are incredibly reasonable people who just want their government to do what it does well, get on with life and stop the screaming,” he said. “You don’t have to attack someone to prove your point.”

The Conservative rank and file disagreed, electing Poilievre on the first ballot. Aitchison picked up just 1.2 per cent of the votes cast.

But he remained popular with his colleagues: “one of the good guys,” said an MP this week.

He was first elected as a local councillor at age 21, just six years after rejecting the Jehovah’s Witness faith in which he was raised. He said family and friends used an excommunication plan to isolate him as a teenager, until he was taken in by a local family. He apparently credits the town of Huntsville, Ont. for raising him and is planning to write a book on his life experiences.

After his leadership defeat, he hunkered down as the party’s housing critic — “contributing to a fundamental shift in the national debate on housing,” in his own words.

As a former mayor of Huntsville, he had no time for NIMBYism and his leadership campaign proposed tying municipal funding to building more homes.

His departure is more significant than merely the loss of an able, fair-minded MP.

Rather, it is indicative of a Conservative party whose reach is ebbing.

Moreover, it suggests the 2025 election result was a high-water bulge and that support levels are likely to continue dropping steadily.

In 2000, the Canadian Alliance scored a breakthrough of sorts, electing 66 MPs, including two in Ontario, with the backing of one-quarter of the electorate. Prior to that election, the Alliance and its predecessor, Reform, were considered western protest parties. That election result provided a base from which to grow. Within two years, Stephen Harper had defeated Stockwell Day to become leader and within three, the right had united to form the modern Conservative party.

Harper’s greatest achievement was building a national coalition that not only won and retained power in 2006, 2008 and 2011 but proved robust enough to endure defeat.

In his book, Harper’s Team, former Conservative campaign organizer Tom Flanagan said Conservatives had never really recovered from the death of Sir John A. Macdonald in 1891 because no leader had been able to hold together a durable coalition. Robert Borden, R. B. Bennett, John Diefenbaker and Brian Mulroney had recorded temporary successes, but all ended not just in defeat but in disaster, Flanagan wrote, leaving the party worse off than it was before.

Harper, by contrast, left a party with 99 MPs and money in the bank in 2015. “It was sad but not tragic,” in the words of one former cabinet minister.

Writing in 2007, Flanagan urged that his party follow “10 Commandments” to cement the Conservatives as Canada’s natural governing party.

They included unity among the different strands of conservatism; moderation; inclusion; and the ability to learn from experience.

Conservatives lose if the others line up together, Flanagan said. “We must avoid being painted as the Great Satan of Canadian politics, as happened with the Reform Party and Canadian Alliance.”

If Conservatives are perceived as a threat to civilization by fearful moderates or left-wing voters, those people are likely to vote Liberal, he said.

“We can’t win if we veer too far to the right of the median voter.”

Poilievre appears to have forgotten or abandoned those prescriptions as he leads the party back to Canadian Alliance levels of support.

This week’s Nanos opinion poll rated Liberal support in Ontario at nearly 60 per cent, with the Conservatives at around half that level. Not many of the party’s 50 MPs would survive that kind of electoral tidal wave.

The problem is not local to the Conservative party.

Canadian democracy is not well served by having one party or leader as dominant, as will become the case if the Conservatives do not arrest their decline.

“History proves that freedom always dies when criticism ends,” Diefenbaker once said. “The Opposition must … find fault, suggest amendments, ask questions and elicit information, arouse, educate and mold public opinion by voice and vote.”

Even after Aitchison’s departure, the Conservatives will have able men and women capable of doing these things. But the party is sorely lacking the leadership needed to make a convincing case that it should be returned to power.

National Post

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