Bernier has courage to go own way

Years and years ago, Toronto had a police chief who simply couldn’t answer a question.

Oh, he would talk. He would talk until your ears bled.

He would put together long clauses that bore no relation to each other, link them with clichés and time-fillers, add in various lawyerly bits he’d picked up (“At this point in time”; “Out of an abundance of caution”; “At the end of the day” etc.) and punctuate the whole works with serious nods of his magnificent white head such that in the end, you had absolutely no idea what on earth he was saying, and neither, probably, did he.

But he was happy anyway because after all, he was the chief and that was the point.

I thought of him this week, after watching first Max Bernier and then Andrew Scheer.

One of Bernier’s best lines about the party he was quitting was that there isn’t an idea or policy Scheer et al don’t first test drive to death with polls and focus groups. In other words, they don’t appear to have a whole lot of principles that would be their hills to die on.

“Intellectually, this party, they just want to please everybody,” Bernier said. “…What is the goal of being in politics if you don’t believe in anything?”

That’s precisely what has seemed to me to be so off about the post-Stephen Harper Conservatives — a gnawing sense that there’s no there there any more, that regaining power and winning the next election is the point, just as being the chief was good enough for the old chief.

With Harper, you knew what you got, pretty much: competence, self-confidence and gravitas.

To put it kindly, I don’t get that sense about Scheer.

I keep hearing/reading two things about him, the first that he is a wholly decent man, the second that he is making great inroads with his YouTube videos and social media. As for the former, that’s nice but I don’t really care; as for the latter, I don’t watch YouTube videos.

Certainly, in the 15 months since the Tories chose Scheer as leader, Bernier finishing just a hair behind on the 13th ballot despite having led on the first 12 (and who thinks having a dozen plus ballots is a good idea, or that the dopey points system the party uses is smart?), Scheer seems to me to have been largely absent from any public debate worth having.

And when he has been before the microphones, as he was Thursday from the Conservative convention in Halifax to respond to Bernier’s rather savage attack, he might just as well have been absent, so milquetoast was his response.

Now, the punditocracy has had time to pronounce upon Bernier’s performance, and has done so, with a few exceptions, with a single condemning voice: He’s just a sore loser; he’s a narcissist; he’s never going to be able to start a new party; why did he hang around the Conservative party so long if he didn’t like it?; and why is he putting himself first and thus “helping” the federal Liberals by dividing the party now, just when they might be vulnerable?

“I didn’t change,” was Bernier’s answer. “The party changed.”

As a total outsider (and happy to be one), that’s my sense too.

Harper was able to muscle the disparate voices in the party into a reasonably united front mostly by dint of intellect, I suspect.

But the fact is the party is naturally divided — social Conservatives versus Red Tories — which makes Canada’s natural governing party the Liberals. It’s they who are most at ease in the murky middle. It takes an exceptional Conservative leader to turn that around.

Harper was one such. Scheer isn’t. Bernier might not be either, but my God, at least he’s tangibly alive. He’s fiery. He has more natural charm in the end of one pinky than does Scheer in his entire body. He can think on his feet, in both official languages, where Scheer seems always to be reading from a script and playing it safe.

As for all those prominent Tories (including, alas, Harper) now playing nice, tweeting and chirping about uniting behind Andrew Scheer, I am reminded of the first and only political convention I ever attended (as a reporter, not, I rush to point out, a member).

It was 1993, the convention that saw Kim Campbell elected as leader and become Canada’s first female PM (she went on to lose the next election about four months later). A friend of mine was there, a former Young Conservative and then a delegate for another contender, Jean Charest.

As the tide was turning for Campbell, I watched my friend’s chants slide seamlessly from “Jean! Jean!” to “Kim! Kim!”

So maybe it’s always about winning, for Tories and everyone else.

I still like Bernier.

My muse and wise friend says he’s just like the guy in the old Midnight Express movie, who was jailed in a Turkish prison for drug trafficking. There, he finds his fellow prisoners walking clockwise around a wheel; he begins walking the other way. The other prisoners are at first distressed, then furious. They hiss at him, “It will be trouble for you if you go the other way” and “You must go to the right.”

In modern Conservative politics, you can’t go the other way. You can’t go your own way. It’s just not allowed. And that, in a nutshell, is why I like Bernier.