Thoughtful, considerate not enough for Scheer
Conservative leader fails to gain respect
When Andrew Scheer was elected leader of the Conservative Party 18 months ago, I suggested it was a fair bet he would one day be prime minister.
“Short of a meltdown,” I suggested the odds were with him — of 22 Conservative leaders since Confederation, 13 went on to become prime minister. Scheer will only be 44 years old in 2023, by which time Canadians may have had their fill of sunny days.
But my thinking has evolved.
If the Conservatives win, or even hold Justin Trudeau to a minority, Scheer’s position is assured. Any other outcome leaves him vulnerable. There are simply too many Conservatives, in and out of caucus, complaining that he is failing to show decisive, dynamic leadership.
The election of Doug Ford in Ontario has done him few favours. The contrast is stark. Ford is brash and injudicious but his larger-thanlife personality is eclipsing the apparently irresolute federal leader.
Ford’s recent decision not to fund a francophone university in the province highlighted Scheer’s shortcomings as a leader. The federal Quebec caucus demanded the leader condemn the decision.
Scheer, conscious that he will need the support of the Ontario Progressive Conservatives in the coming election, gave a rather tepid response saying he had “concerns” with the decision.
One member of the Conservative shadow cabinet contrasted the response with Stephen Harper’s decision to support Liberal legislation to amend the Official Languages Act in 2005. Harper told caucus some members might have difficulty supporting the amendment that required the federal government to promote French-speaking minorities outside Quebec, but that they would do so to convince francophone voters that the Conservative Party could be trusted on language policy.
Not that Scheer can be Harper, anymore than he can be Trudeau.
But he has emerged as a junior partner to Ford in Ontario, just as he has to Jason Kenney in Alberta. Kenney is said to have introduced Scheer as the newspaper-clippings guy from the Opposition Leader’s Office (before being elected, the Conservative leader worked in the correspondence unit of the OLO).
It may have been said in jest but it reflects a lack of peer-to-peer respect that still afflicts Scheer among those senior colleagues who toiled in the trenches of Harper’s cabinet while he sat on the backbench or in the Speaker’s chair.
“It’s problematic,” a senior member of Scheer’s shadow cabinet repeated over and over, while professing to have no clue as to how to fix the problem of his leadership.
The Conservatives were sitting pretty in the polls in the spring and through the summer — statistically tied with the Liberals or even ahead. As fall has turned to winter, support has ticked lower, in some surveys falling below the psychological bar of 30 per cent. The concern is that this is not because a significant number of voters are defecting to Maxime Bernier’s new party. Rather, the worry is that the support is shifting to the Liberals, who are now more than 10 points up in some polls.
“Every MP is hearing: ‘Scheer needs to be strong, he needs to be out there’. And he is out there, but we are in an age where people want a fighter,” said the second shadow-cabinet member.
On any number of issues from the Canada Summer Jobs program to moving the Israeli embassy to Jerusalem, the leadership’s position has been slow to emerge.
“They seem to be afraid to take a position on things that might go against provincial partners, and so speak out of both sides of their mouth,” said one party insider.
He said that the Opposition Leader’s Office is “somewhat chaotic and not well organized.”
This is not a case of an internal rebellion by a disgruntled faction. Even those who are critical say that Scheer is thoughtful and considerate, and has fostered a strong camaraderie in caucus that easily weathered Bernier’s departure.
The leader is deemed to have performed well on certain issues — such as the drive to force the government to change the law on offenders like child killer Terri-Lynne McClintic.
But there are fears that small victories on individual files are not translating into broad support.
“I’m concerned there is no compelling narrative,” said one well-respected Conservative. “We should have stuck to a continuous message for weeks on end. It’s only when we’re sick and tired of it that people out there start hearing it.”
He said he expected the leadership to pivot to a major platform-commitment this fall.
“I thought we’d put something in the window to get people enthused. But there’s nothing. We chase an issue and then we go down a rabbit hole.”
Before the party convention in Halifax in the summer, there was a suggestion Scheer would make an unabashed pitch to disgruntled Liberal voters to come over to a moderate Conservative Party of the centre-right. But that pitch was not made and there has been little in what Scheer has said or done since then that might appeal to persuadable Liberals.
The leader remains an unknown quantity to many Canadians — a Nanos Research tracking poll suggested more than one third of respondents are so unsure of his qualities they can’t even rate him.
Scheer has been underestimated before — namely when he beat Lorne Nystrom to win a Regina seat the NDP veteran had held for 32 years.
But as one Conservative veteran pointed out, the unwritten rule that leaders automatically got two kicks at the can is a thing of the past in an age of social media and heightened partisanship.
Would Scheer survive a leadership review if he loses the next election, I asked the second shadow cabinet member?
“I don’t think so. Someone would stick the knife in,” they replied. “It is problematic.”
HE IS OUT THERE, BUT WE ARE IN AN AGE WHERE PEOPLE WANT A FIGHTER.