Scheer scuttled his campaign in Quebec debate

Tory leader defied popular views, says Martin Patriquin.

It is difficult to identify a turning point in the 40 days of boilerplate hubris and scripted outrage that was Canada’s 43rd election campaign. But if I had to pick a moment when Conservative Party Leader Andrew Scheer lost the election, it was when he was standing on an east-end Montreal stage, demonstrating in his broken French just how out of sync he is with the country he sought to govern.

TVA’s French-language debate on Oct. 2 was a chance for the federal leaders to hash out policy for an outsized, mostly francophone audience. Time and again, Scheer found himself on the wrong side of mainstream political consensus in Quebec.

To wit: He couldn’t admit he was personally against a woman’s right to choose, much less square this belief with his party’s position on keeping the door on the abortion debate slammed shut. Ditto gay marriage and sexual-minority rights. Ditto medically assisted dying, in which he tried to obfuscate about his own clear opposition to the concept even though the modern iteration of it was born in Quebec.

Finally, he repeated (meekly) his intention of scrapping the federal carbon levy brought into being by Justin Trudeau. All told, Scheer found himself on the defensive on these issues for about 10 minutes, an eternity in a televised debate. It left marks on him: after the abortion kerfuffle, a sheen of flop sweat gleamed on his forehead.

A debate doesn’t win or lose an election campaign, particularly when the debate is in the mother tongue of less than 25 per cent of the population. Yet the positions staked out (or not staked out) by Scheer in the TVA debate reverberated across the country, in both official languages.

His party’s intention to ram an oil pipeline through Quebec, despite uniform opposition from the province’s National Assembly, gelded his chances in the province. Beyond Quebec’s borders, Scheer’s oil-first mentality similarly neutered his appeal to anyone beyond the hardcore Conservative base, which, while considerable, doesn’t win elections on its own.

Then there was Scheer’s sin of omission. In late September, several hundred thousand people descended on the streets of Montreal

The thick, round belt encircling Toronto is where ... elections are won or lost.

to protest our carbon-heavy status quo. The spectacle was the ideological equivalent of click bait for any politician wanting to appeal to the loud and righteous sensibilities of a restive demographic. Three leaders — Trudeau, the Bloc’s Yves-François Blanchet and the Greens’ Elizabeth May — were conspicuous in their attendance, while the NDP’s Jagmeet Singh attended a march in Victoria.

How telling, then, that Scheer and the Conservatives took one look at nearly a half a million mostly young, mostly politically active potential voters marching the streets in a politically crucial province and said, “No, we’re good, thanks.”

This position, clearly delineated in Quebec, hurt Scheer in the vote-rich confines of suburban and exurban Ontario. The thick, round belt encircling Toronto is where Canadian elections are won or lost. Scheer decidedly lost, picking up a scant additional three seats in the province. Combined with an underwhelming performance in Quebec, the Conservatives lost an eminently winnable election against a beatable candidate.

The knock-on effect of this is such that despite winning the popular vote and sitting as Official Opposition, the Conservatives are effectively on the sidelines.

The party’s petulant opposition to the carbon levy, despite myriad court decisions and the weight of public opinion, means the NDP will arguably have more sway over policy and direction in the next government. It’s an astonishing thing. With all of one Quebec seat, the NDP better represents the dominant will of Quebec voters than does the entire Conservative caucus.

The lesson in here, of course, is that you don’t win elections by preaching to your base alone. And for the Conservatives, it means an acknowledgment that in this country, any party without a credible plan to fight climate change is doomed to failure.