As PM faces fire over WE, Scheer’s antics astonish
Maskless in airport and snarky about it
The savage self-inflicted blows just keep coming for Justin Trudeau and his gang: On Thursday, the digital media outlet Canadaland and the CBC blew apart the story that the Trudeau family’s involvement with Craig and Marc Kielburger’s WE empire had been entirely voluntary, save for reimbursed travel expenses. Turns out Mother Margaret had collected $312,000 and Brother Sacha $40,000 in speakers’ fees over the years from WE Charity and ME to WE Social Enterprise, the for-profit appendage of the WE leviathan.
So now we have the government sole-sourcing a $19-million contract to administer a $900-million summer jobs program to an organization that’s not just closely linked to the prime minister’s family, but that had considerably enriched his mother in particular. Said prime minister didn’t even see fit to recuse himself from cabinet discussions on the matter, National Post reported on Wednesday, although the deal was eventually cancelled after the controversy blew up. In a statement on Thursday, perhaps having achieved peak shamelessness, Trudeau’s office advised us of “what is important to remember” — namely, that all this “is that this is about a charity supporting students.” (Why was the arrangement cancelled, then?)
Combined with the Aga Khan debacle and the SNC Lavalin debacle, you would think the WE debacle might leave a bit of a bruise on this government. It even gave Conservatives a rare chance to appreciate long-outgoing leader Andrew Scheer, when he smacked down what he deemed a reporter’s “ridiculous” question about his being photographed at Toronto’s
Pearson Airport, in discussion with Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister and others, with their masks — mandatory at all times at Pearson — guarding their chins.
"It’s hard to believe this is actually your question and your follow-up when we’re dealing with a prime minister that is under an investigation for an ethics violation for the third time,” he responded.
“Where was this Andrew Scheer on the election trail?” was a common refrain, and understandably so — at least to a point. Even from a neutral position, Scheer’s performance in front of the microphone during the campaign was often maddening. It remains a mystery why he could not or would not explain how his mind changed on same-sex marriage. But his position was clear: It’s a fait accompli. In lieu of an explanation, he might at least have looked irritated at being asked about it five times a day — especially since it was all in response to Liberal MP Ralph Goodale, who also voted against samesex marriage, tweeting out a 15-year-old on-the-record speech in the House of Commons. Indeed, huge chunks of daily news coverage were essentially orchestrated by Liberal campaign headquarters: An MP would Tweet out something mildly controversial a Conservative candidate had said or done and reporters would demand Scheer explain.
Occasionally he would push back: “The only people who are continuously trying to reopen (the abortion) debate or fear-monger on this issue are Liberals,” he said during a campaign stop in Toronto, on a day when Liberal MP Carolyn Bennett had tweeted evidence of Conservative candidate Rachel Willson’s (non-secret) pro-life beliefs. But too often he delivered the same lines, over and over again, looking ever more glum.
This reached its nadir at a Toronto press conference where he was asked more than a dozen times to confirm or deny that the Conservatives had hired a traditionally Liberal-aligned consulting firm to do opposition research on Maxime Bernier and his People’s Party. “As a rule, we never make comments on vendors that we may or may not have engaged with,” he said, over and over and over again. As ridiculous as his non-answer was, he would have been entirely within his rights to roll eyes at a press corps that had nothing else to ask about.
All that said, getting busted maskless was an odd occasion for Scheer to get snarky. And his explanation, that he had to take a phone call, makes no sense: You no more have to take off a mask to talk on the phone than you have to drop your trousers. Of course the Liberal government’s ethics scandal is more important than Scheer not wearing a mask, but it’s not more important than the Liberal government’s deeply unimpressive COVID-19 response overall, which we’ll be living with for a long while yet — in part, by wearing masks in public areas. One is a life-and-death situation; the other is not.
Indeed, the federal public health department’s ludicrous initial advice against mask-wearing must be at least partly to blame for Canadians’ low rate of usage now that public health officials are pleading for it: 73 per cent of Americans report wearing masks regularly in public, according to a Yougov poll, versus just 60 per cent of Canadians. A separate Abacus Data poll suggests Ontarians are most likely to mask up, with 69 per cent saying they “always or almost always” wear them in public, but Quebecers were alarmingly less likely at 55 per cent.
If leaders are supposed to set an example, which seems to be a fairly widely accepted concept — not least among Conservatives when it comes to Trudeau — then why couldn’t Scheer do as Pallister did: plead mea culpa, promise it won’t happen again, and move on?