Once the Conservative Party picks a new leader in Toronto on June 27, it will need a plan to leverage that individual’s strengths to make inroads in the Greater Toronto Area if it aims to seriously contest the next election. As longtime Conservative strategist Yaroslav Baran writes, Toronto likes to vote for nationally viable contenders who have a plausible Quebec strategy. This column has been reprinted with permission from Policy magazine's March-April issue.
Some federal Conservative tacticians try to write Toronto off, seeing it as a political dead zone for the party, arguing campaign resources are better spent squeezing out the remaining isolated swing ridings that still went Red last year in more fertile regions of the country. How do you do that? Concentrate on a combination of demographic micro targeting (to boost Conservative votes) and 'opposition research' (to suppress Liberal votes). That means more small-fry boutique policy and more negative campaigning. Yet we want our politics to be more than this, writes Yaroslav Baran. The Hill Times photograph by Andrew Meade
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