There are people whose big "political" issue is that they're sick of being called a racist. And there's a cycle of nurtured resentment in conservative politics in which a leader says something "wink, wink" racist, gets called out, and increases his appeal among those people.

It misses the mark to treat the terrible things a person like Erin O'Toole says as "mistakes". The bread and butter of his base are the people who agree with the worst interpretations of his remarks, and who understand any subsequent apologies as appeasements of the woke left.

When Erin O'Toole won the leadership, it was a given that Canadian political discourse would get louder, angrier and dumber as a direct result. I think it's happening, and this is how it happens.

"You don't know for a fact that O'Toole meant that Indigenous people should have been grateful for residential schools and honest white people should get the vaccine before minorities."

It's irrelevant. What I do know is lots of people think he meant that, and he doesn't mind.

And when I say he doesn't mind, what I mean is that he can't afford to disagree out loud with those people and disavow their views, because they make up a substantial portion of his party's donor base.

There's no moral or practical difference between being a bona fide racist on the one hand, and accepting a job that depends on maintaining the plausibility that you're a racist on the other.

It doesn't matter if Erin O'Toole is the former. He knowingly, happily did the latter.