New leader must build strong team: Scheer

OTTAWA — Outgoing Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer says his replacement must put together a strong team in the Commons and for the next campaign, and he’s happy to offer whatever advice needed on that score.

But there are two other pieces of advice he hopes whomever is elected later this month will also find a way to heed: the need for a leader to communicate authentically and to break through into the cities and suburbs whose voters are essential if the Tories are to win a majority government.

“That is the critical ingredient,” he said Wednesday on his last day as leader.

His failure to win that majority sparked both an internal and external debate in the aftermath of the 2019 federal election that eventually led Scheer to resign, pending the result of the Conservative leadership race.

The vote is finally coming to an end Aug. 21, after being delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic, and four candidates are in the running: current MPs Erin O’Toole and Derek Sloan, former cabinet minister Peter MacKay and Toronto lawyer Leslyn Lewis.

Sloan and Lewis come from the social conservative wing of the party. Both have said if they win, they would include legislation curtailing access to abortion on their agenda.

Though Scheer promised he’d never allow a Conservative government to bring forward legislation on abortion, his own social conservative views on the subject were a flashpoint during the campaign.

MacKay once infamously called them an “albatross” hanging around the party’s neck.

Scheer said he still believes a prime minister can be a social conservative, and it’s only under the current Liberals that people who hold those views have come to be demonized in the public square.