Mad Max versus Scheer insanity

Let’s start this column with the awkward admission and work backward: Maybe Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer is quite right to demote Maxime Bernier from his front bench. A “shadow cabinet” is one of the more obvious of the fictions that characterize politics in parliamentary democracies. Being “fired” from one will just give Bernier more time to roam the land and cultivate the independent following he enjoys as one of the few elected Conservatives who articulates and represents identifiably conservative ideas.

Leisure time does not seem like the ideal thing for a party leader to give a very obvious rival, one he barely beat to the leadership. At the same time, there is no denying that Scheer has the right to choose his front bench and to pick team members who will stick to the leader’s orchestral charts.

In April Bernier had announced a forthcoming book (entitled Doing Politics Differently: My Vision for Canada) and had published a chapter attacking dairy supply management. Canadian dairy policy later became Donald Trump’s stated pretext, or one of them, for a more general trade war against Canada and for personal abuse of the prime minister. The chapter had been withdrawn from the web in the spring when Bernier decided, under caucus pressure, to postpone the publication of the whole book. It then reappeared June 5, just as Trump and his surrogates were denouncing Canada’s scheme of dairy protectionism.

Last year Bernier had specifically praised Trump in an open letter for calling Canadians’ attention to supply management, which has been a sore spot in other bilateral trade negotiations. The June reappearance of Bernier’s offensive samizdat coincided with him deliberately ducking out of the House of Commons before a unanimous floor vote condemning Trump’s ravings and supporting the PM.

All this is a laborious way of establishing the answers to more obvious questions about Bernier’s political situation. Did he do anything wrong to get demoted? He has always opposed supply management very loudly, and, as he points out, the book chapter was already circulating. He didn’t really do anything different, so it is hard to see how he could be said to be doing anything obviously objectionable or punishable.

But was he engaged in a little game-playing for personal attention while his party’s leader was trying to manage a patriotic frenzy and co-operate with a united all-party front against Trump? That’s probably fair. He wasn’t thrown out of the Conservative caucus altogether. Scheer’s move amounts to a change of seating plan in the House. It is certainly within a leader’s rights to subject a member to such a “punishment” for mere lack of enthusiasm. (And Bernier’s recent verbal Nerf-gun battle with Liberal MP Celina Caesar-Chavannes probably didn’t help his case.)

But none of this solves any of the underlying strategic problems, one of which is that it is perfectly reasonable to oppose supply management in the interests of Canada while objecting to Trump’s behaviour. Scheer was made Conservative leader partly on the strength of dairy votes in agrarian regions that were weighted heavily in the balloting because they have few everyday Conservatives. He has, in turn, pursued the defence of supply management as leader with a vigour bordering on obsession. He and NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh — who are both running against a governing party that created supply management — sometimes seem to be in a war over how many photos of themselves visiting dairy farms they can tweet.

As strategy for a general election, none of this makes one fluid ounce of sense. These parties cannot all win the small handful of seats where the common welfare might seem meaningfully dependent on economic rents from overpriced milk and commodity cheese. Supply-managed foods cost 36 million of us hundreds of dollars a year in exchange for keeping a few thousand landowners in traditional, often literally inherited jobs.

The 36 million, however, are naturally not as well organized as the few thousand. For their interests to prevail, someone has to do the hard work of explaining those interests to the general public and building up political resentment of the rentiers. Or, to put it another way, “do what Max Bernier is doing.”

The dairy cartel, very intelligently, applies its voting leverage and its lavish political-action budget to the intra-party element of our political system, as opposed to the inter-party warfare. The Mad Men of Milk spend on leadership races, where each dollar and each hour of effort is worth a great deal, rather than on general elections — elections in which, if dairy gets the party leaders it wants, there is no danger of their interests being threatened by any possible result.

What this means is that when Scheer is photographed guzzling milk and grinning slyly, he is not sincerely executing Conservative general election strategy. It is just repayment of friends for having helped with Andrew Scheer leadership campaign strategy. Conservative partisans have to decide what they make of Bernier dissenting from this: is he unjustly besmirching the sacred person of the leader, or is he giving Conservatism a life raft in a sea of spoiled cream? Either way, Scheer had better damn well run the table in dairyland when the election does come.

MOVE AMOUNTS TO A CHANGE OF SEATING PLAN IN THE HOUSE. — COLBY COSH