THE ELEMENT OF SURPRISE
Scheer not just a ‘smiling teddy bear’
Lorne Nystrom’s opponent didn’t look like much on paper. He was 25 years old. He wasn’t from the riding — he’d barely lived in the province two years — and his work experience amounted to little more than a gig busing tables and a few years in the office of a disgraced MP.
It was 2004 and Andrew Scheer was, politically speaking, a nobody. “He ran against me primarily because the local Conservatives couldn’t find anyone (else),” said Nystrom, an NDP legend who spent more than 30 years in Parliament. “He had just moved (to Regina) from Ottawa . ... Nobody knew him.”
On the phone, 13 years down the line, Nystrom sounded both rueful and defiant about what happened next. He still blames vote splitting and a nasty campaign for his eventual upset. You get the sense, even now, he still can’t believe how he lost, or more importantly, whom he lost to. Late in the conversation he went silent and then laughed. “Nobody knew him at all.”
On May 27, Scheer, an unassuming MP from Regina, came from behind to capture an upset victory in the Conservative Party leadership race. He beat out the odds-on favourite Maxime Bernier; the older, more life-experienced consensus option in Erin O’Toole, and a host other fringe and serious candidates, including former cabinet ministers Lisa Raitt and Michael Chong.
His victory propelled him into one of the most prominent political offices in the country: The Leader of Her Majesty’s Official Opposition. But it was also, in the view of many, a bit of a booby prize. The long-held assumption in Canadian political circles has been that whoever won the Tory leadership this year was in for a rough ride in 2019, when the country is next scheduled to go to the polls.
That’s the reason, many assume, that party heavyweights like Peter MacKay, Jason Kenney and Rona Ambrose sat this race out. They’re biding their time for 2023, when the Liberal government will be eight years in and more vulnerable to a renewed Conservative attack.
But Scheer has experience as a political underdog. In fact, he’s rarely been in a contest he was expected win. And beneath his doughy, genial exterior, according to those who have worked with him, and in some cases lost to him, lies a calculating strategist with no fear of bareknuckle politics.
“He’s not just the big cuddly smiling teddy bear by any stretch of the imagination,” said Nystrom.
While Scheer sells an image of wholesome Prairie populism, he is in fact a creature born and bred of the Ottawa machine. He has been active in right wing politics since his teens. He has worked steadily on Parliament Hill, with only one interlude, since he was 20. He has never entered a significant political contest as the favourite, and in 17 years, he’s only lost once: a no-hope bid for the Ottawa school board in 2000.
“The first thing you have to look at are results,” said Andrew MacDougall, a writer and political strategist who worked in the Prime Minister’s Office under Stephen Harper. Scheer wins. He beat Nystrom in 2004 and again in 2006. He became Speaker of the House of Commons in 2011, when he was only 32. And of course, he won the party leadership in May.
“I think Andrew has been underestimated several times by different people over the years,” said Barry Devolin, a former Conservative MP who fought Scheer for the Speaker’s throne in 2011. “He looks young, right. He has kind of a baby face and he jokes himself that he’s always smiling, and I think a lot of people mistakenly think that someone who looks young and happy can’t be kind of deep and strategic.”
Of course, that doesn’t mean that Scheer is a shooin to win the next election. His party has trailed Trudeau’s Liberals consistently by between 10 and 14 per cent since the last contest, according to pollster Nik Nanos. He also remains a bit of a blank slate for most voters outside the Ottawa bubble, according to polling conducted by Mainstream Research, and will face an uphill battle to define himself before the Liberals do it for him.
But it does suggest that he shouldn’t be expected to roll over. He has spent his political life taking on and winning contests that most expected him to lose. “Elections need to be fought, they need to be won,” said MacDougall.
Since the leadership vote, Scheer has moved to consolidate his team, stitching together the wounds from a long campaign even as some in the party have continued to question the legitimacy of his win.
Scheer inherits a party that seemed, at several points during the campaign, to be on the brink of schizophrenic collapse. Polls suggested for much of the race that Kevin O’Leary — a part-time candidate and part-time Canadian resident with no political experience — was poised to win in a landslide. O’Leary quit, according to his own campaign team, when he realized what would happen if he actually won.
Compared to O’Leary, or even Bernier, Scheer represents a radical shift back to the status quo for the Conservatives. One longtime party insider mused during the race that the party would unify behind anyone who won — other than O’Leary or Kellie Leitch. And despite the grumblings of some Bernier partisans, that certainly seems to be the case so far.
The long race, however, exposed new fault lines in the Canadian right — ones Scheer will be forced to grapple with in the coming years. Leitch, who tried to embrace a kind of Trump-light nationalism in her campaign, attracted enormous attention but failed miserably in the end. She finished seventh on the first ballot.
Still, her failure should not be taken as a sign that the popular nationalist message she preached has no audience among the Conservative base. She was just such an inauthentic messenger; it’s impossible to know how someone more credible would have done with a similar strategy.
For Scheer the challenge will be in understanding that base, keeping the new nationalists under the big Conservative tent, without letting the Liberals use them to define the party as a whole. As the remarkable fight over the innocuous anti-Islamophobia motion, M103, showed, that may be a difficult task.
For now, Scheer seems focused on making sure everyone gets along. “I think that he’s made the point that he’s looking for places of agreement rather than places of disagreement with our party,” said Georganne Burke, a Conservative strategist who volunteered on the Scheer campaign. “He’s trying to build that internal strength ... that will give us the unity we need going forward.”
He has also taken a markedly different stance with the press than did Harper, his notoriously flinty predecessor.
“He is definitely not afraid to talk to the media,” said Burke (although his handlers did not make him available for this story.) “The very fact that I’m speaking to you” demonstrates that, she said.
Last Saturday, Scheer spoke at Ottawa’s annual Press Gallery dinner. He looked awkward on stage. In one extended riff, he poked fun at his own genial reputation, joking about his “resting pleasant face” and constant grin.
But Nystrom, for one, thinks that’s all a bit of mask. There’s more to Scheer than a bumbling family man with a pleasant visage. “Beneath that smile,” he said, “lies a pretty nasty and mean streak.”
Scheer, like many political animals, came to the game early. He grew up in Ottawa, the son of a Catholic deacon who spent more than 30 years working for the Ottawa Citizen newspaper. In earlier interviews Scheer has spoken about reading that paper cover-to-cover as a nine-year-old delivery boy, fascinated by the coverage of political campaigns.
In high school, Scheer started volunteering for the Reform Party. “I always thought, ‘If so much of my life is subject to regulation or government, I should at least be engaged,’” he told the Citizen in 2006. “My dad always used to say, ‘If you don’t like it, you should try to change it.’”
He joined the campus wing of the Canadian Alliance at the University of Ottawa and eventually parlayed an internship on Parliament Hill into a part-time job in the Leader of the Opposition’s office.
In 2002, Scheer left Ottawa to be with his then-girlfriend in Regina. He remained active in right-wing politics, married the girlfriend — his wife Jill — and in 2004 put his name forward for the Conservative Party in Regina Qu’ Appelle, a riding that bridged the city with parts of the surrounding countryside.
He was, to say the least, a rank outsider. Nystrom was first elected in 1968. He had run for the NDP leadership three separate times and was considered an institution in Saskatchewan politics.
Nystrom today considers that race unusually dirty. Near the end of the campaign, Scheer accused him of being soft on child pornography, a charge so serious Nystrom considered suing Scheer for libel. “There’s a nastier streak there than you’d find in most candidates,” he said. “I don’t mean on the issues. (There) becomes, with him, a personal tinge to it.”
Scheer also benefited in that race from a strong Liberal candidate who helped split the centre-left vote. In the end, he squeaked past Nystrom by fewer than 1,000 ballots. Two years later, he won again, beating Nystrom by a more comfortable margin to join Harper’s first minority government. He has held the seat ever since.
In his early days on the Hill, Scheer earned a reputation as a self-admitted hyperpartisan. As he aged, he mellowed, and built alliances across the floor, something that would prove crucial for his next major move.
In 2006, Scheer became one of three deputies under longtime Liberal Speaker Peter Milliken, a post he held for the next five years. When Milliken retired in 2011, Scheer went for the top job.
Devolin was one of several candidates with far more political experience to oppose Scheer in that race. Like the rest, he lost.
The Speaker of the House is elected by sitting members of Parliament in a series of secret ballots. The winner traditionally comes from the ruling party, but to get the job, candidates often need support from both sides of the aisle.
“I don’t think I appreciated how thoroughly Andrew had mapped it out in his head ahead of time,” said Devolin, who now teaches political science in South Korea. “Looking back, it was clearer to me that he had clearly figured out how the system worked.”
Devolin believes Scheer used those same skills to capture the Conservative leadership. “It did not surprise me that he had a well thoughtout strategy, and the strategy (was) simple: get enough votes on the first ballot to be in the top two or three and then be everyone’s second choice,” he said.
Indeed, in a race dominated by controversial gambits and candidates, Scheer stayed under the radar. He accumulated allies without pissing anybody off and in the end did just enough to beat Bernier on the final ballot.
“Andrew actually understood what it meant to be a candidate,” said Burke, who joined the Scheer campaign after leaving Bernier’s team last year. “He didn’t try to second-guess the decisions of the people he hired to run the campaign.”
Scheer won Burke over with a personal appeal during a long face-to-face meeting last spring. “I expected to have a 15-minute chat with him,” she said. “It ended up being ...probably an hour and 15 minutes.”
She left that meeting struck by his talents as a listener, something she says she saw over and over again on the campaign. “He would personally go out to church basements, small events in ridings, big events in ridings, wherever he needed to be to talk to people personally,” she said. “And he could win them over.”
The question for Scheer now is whether he can translate those skills, for brokerage and one-on-one campaigning, into a national race against a man who is, for better or worse, a global celebrity. Nanos, for one, doesn’t think it’s an impossible task. “He represents a stark contrast to Justin Trudeau not just in terms of policy but in terms of tone and style,” Nanos said.
What’s more, the Liberal lead was built against two parties that haven’t had permanent leaders in more than a year. A resurgent NDP and a steady hand from Scheer could be enough to upend everyone’s expectations, Nanos believes. “I think that there’s a significant chance that the Liberals could get squeezed in the next election,” he said.
For MacDougall several things would have to go right for Scheer to pull off another upset. He needs to strike the right tone — positive but confrontational. He needs the right policy environment, and he needs Trudeau to stumble.
“I think he’s smart enough to do it,” MacDougall said. “So let’s see.”
HE’S NOT JUST THE BIG CUDDLY SMILING TEDDY BEAR BY ANY STRETCH OF THE IMAGINATION.