How Scheer might win over millennials
Climate policy an opportunity to differentiate
Maybe the new Conservative leader just needs a nickname to make him sound tougher and more charismatic. How about ‘Icebox’, or Andrew ‘Interesting’ Scheer?
A new poll by Abacus Data suggests Scheer has some catching up to do with Justin Trudeau.
While 84 per cent have a good idea about the prime minister as a person and leader, for Scheer the comparative number is 28 per cent and, for the NDP’s Jagmeet Singh, 22 per cent.
The Conservative leader was rated relatively highly on “intelligence” and “principles” but was ranked lowest when it came to being “interesting” and “tough.”
His biggest detractors were among the millennials who will make up the largest cohort of eligible voters at the next election. According to an earlier Abacus analysis, the Liberals won the election in 2015 because they had twice as much support as the Conservatives among millennials. Their dominance is only likely to grow.
The Conservative spin is that they will enjoy fighting an election that frames serious versus celebrity. But you don’t win elections when three out of four voters don’t know much about you.
As Bruce Anderson at Abacus noted: “Scheer may reflect on the challenge of becoming better known and the need to be seen as ‘interesting’.”
The problem of appealing to millennials is a vexing one for Scheer. He’s removed from the generation usually defined as people born between the early 1980s and early 2000s by just a couple of years.
But Scheer is a young fogey who bears none of the characteristics of the generation lampooned by satirist JP Sears as considering hard work as a severe form of abuse.
It’s fair to say the father of five is not an early adopter of social media — he has just 46,000 followers on Twitter (compared to Trudeau’s 3.78 million) and he always looks slightly sheepish in photo opportunities, as if intruding into someone else’s shot.
He can be funny — he’s got good comic timing and is self-deprecating, as he proved at this year’s Parliamentary Press Gallery Dinner. His description of his own “resting pleasant face” and his gift of compression socks for the older prime minister were the best lines of the night.
As he himself said, he can’t compete with the Trudeau “image machine.” But he can neutralize its advantage.
As noted by veteran commentators Edward Greenspon and Paul Adams in iPolitics last month, Trudeau’s litmus test issues are inclusiveness and climate change. Scheer is not likely to challenge the prime minister on the former, given his views on abortion and same-sex marriage, even if he has pledged not to reopen either debate.
His opportunity is on climate change.
Scheer has to use the political strategy known as triangulation to reduce the Liberal advantage, just as Stephen Harper did on the health-care issue that sank the Canadian Alliance in the 2000 election.
Health care was a big political problem for Reform and its successor, the Alliance. Harper’s triangulation on health care amounted to matching or even outbidding whatever the Liberals proposed, going as far as to support the National Health Accord signed by Paul Martin’s government and the provinces in 2003. It took health care off the table as a serious point of differentiation between Liberals and Conservatives.
Scheer should do something similar on climate change.
It would not be easy. As former Bill Clinton adviser Dick Morris said in his book Power Plays, departing from a party’s traditional ideology is “a bit like kicking the bottle,” requiring a leader to “daily assert his determination to blaze a different trail.”
But two-thirds of millennials in one poll said they would not even consider supporting the Conservatives, and that is unlikely to change unless the Tories have a credible policy on climate issues.
Mark Cameron, a former senior policy adviser to Harper and now executive director of Canadians for Clean Prosperity, said climate change has become a symbolic issue for a number of voting groups.
Scheer said little on the environment during the Conservative leadership race, beyond making clear his opposition to carbon pricing.
Cameron thinks he needs to shift to a position that guarantees a fully revenue neutral carbon tax, where a third party such as the auditor general would ensure that any money raised from taxing carbon is returned to taxpayers.
Battling the gravitational pull of the party’s traditional opposition to “a tax on everything” would be a major departure for a leader who prefers consensus over conflict.
But as Greenspon and Adams pointed out, the Conservatives find themselves offside with millennials in the run-up to a 2019 election in which this rising generation will eclipse the boomers as the largest voting bloc in Canada.
A federal Conservative Party supporting a carbon tax would be interesting, if nothing else.
HE CAN’T COMPETE WITH THE TRUDEAU ‘IMAGE MACHINE.’