Momentum is with Scheer, if he’s prepared to ride it
Times have changed at Stornoway, the official residence of the leader of the opposition.
For one thing, in the days of Stéphane Dion, Michael Ignatieff and Tom Mulcair, you wouldn’t enter the downstairs washroom to find a small boy’s pants strewn on the floor, where seven-yearold Henry Scheer left them.
On this day his father, Conservative leader Andrew, is home alone with his four older kids, his wife Jill having gone ahead with their youngest, Mary, to their home in Regina for Christmas.
It would be fair to say the parental regime is less rigorous than normal.
The other major change at Stornoway, at least from his Liberal and NDP predecessors, is that the occupant has a reasonable expectation about a change of residence after the next election.
Scheer claims to be optimistic about victory in the 2019 federal election. His critics may suggest he is delusional, and perhaps they have a point. The race does not always go to the swiftest but that’s the way to bet. In political races, it usually pays to back the candidate with almost universal name recognition versus one who surveys suggest one third of Canadians can’t rate because they don’t know enough about him.
But there have been signs of encouragement in the past few weeks for Scheer, as a backlash against Justin Trudeau’s policies has gathered steam.
An Abacus Data poll released Friday had the Liberals and Conservatives closer than at any point since the last election (35 per cent versus 34 per cent), with particularly tight races in voterich British Columbia and Ontario.
An Angus Reid Institute poll earlier in the week suggested Trudeau’s popularity has halved since 2015. (In fairness, while ARI said Scheer scored more favourably when respondents were asked about their preferred prime minister, the Abacus poll showed Trudeau with a commanding 16 point lead on the same question).
In our year-end interview, I suggested to Scheer he would be doing even better if he pitched the party unapologetically as the champion on the centre-right and was less concerned about shoring up his support on the far right.
He rejected the premise of that (and every other) question, saying that he has been successful wooing “blue Liberals that don’t recognize this Liberal Party anymore.”
“One of the things I said during the (Conservative Party’s) leadership campaign was we don’t have to change who we are or what we believe in but we can communicate it in a way that reaches more people and resonates with more people. That’s the way we’ve been doing it, staying true to our Conservative principles, talking about balancing the budget, getting rid of the carbon tax, lowering taxes for families, standing up for small businesses but doing it in a more positive way that reaches people in the centre and disaffected Liberals,” he said.
Scheer believes the Liberals are trying to make the NDP irrelevant, and in doing so are moving far to the left of where many centrist Liberals believe the party should be. That was the catalyst for former Liberal MP Leona Alleslev to cross the floor to the Conservatives in September — and Scheer suggested others might follow.
“We’re going to have some interesting announcements from people who are not just helping us at the next election but, in some cases, wanting to run for us that have come from that disaffected Liberal pool,” he said. So more floor-crossers? “I’m not saying that, I’m just saying more people who have become disaffected with the Liberal Party and don’t see themselves in it anymore.
“I had a conversation the other day with someone at an event who worked in the Paul Martin government and said: ‘I can’t support this party, this government is not something that a Paul Martin Liberal would recognize as a Liberal government.’ So that absolutely will be a key part of winning the next election, bringing those people in.”
He offered the recent UN compact on migration as an example of an issue where many people were upset at feeling demonized by the prime minister just because they didn’t agree with him.
“I think (opposing the compact is) a legitimate position to have, I’d love to have had a debate on it but Justin Trudeau signed on without a debate in Parliament, without any explanation of why they were doing it, and why they were so sure it’s wouldn’t have an impact on our domestic ability to manage our immigration system.
“When people raise those concerns, to paint them all with a very insulting brush and call them all intolerant and fearmongers is very divisive and makes people feel very angry about government.”
In many ways it remains too early to judge Scheer one way or another — he has nothing to say specifically about the environment or the fiscal landscape at the moment, beyond saying what he is against.
“We need to do something but we don’t need to do a carbon tax,” he said.
So what are you going to do? “You’ll have lots of time to analyze and dissect it. We won’t impose a carbon tax. We also won’t bring about policies that displace jobs and investment to countries that don’t have the same environmental standards. We’re not better off as a planet if a factory shuts down in Canada and pops up in China or India. They don’t have the access to clean electricity or the same regulations on particulate matter or emissions … Using incentives and rewards and taking credit for the things we can do better and more efficiently here will be part of our plan,” he said.
Will that plan have a target of reducing greenhouse gases by 30-per-cent below 2005 levels by 2030?
“We’re going to have a comprehensive plan…”
But you’ve committed to Canada’s Paris target before. Why are you not committing to it now?
“I’ve always said we’ll have a comprehensive plan that speaks to our obligations and responsibilities as a country,” Scheer said.
Another file where there is no clarity is balancing the books.
The Parliamentary Budget Officer has just released a report that suggested deficits might be billions of dollars higher than the government’s own figures indicate.
While this gives Scheer ammunition to fire at the Liberals, it also reduces his room for manoeuvre if he is intent on getting the budget back into balance in the first year of a Conservative government. Is that the plan?
“I don’t think I ever said in year one," he said. “We are committed to balancing the budget." How quickly?
“We will wait until we….” But that’s the cop-out of all governments, wait until they get into power and say…
“No, but when Justin Trudeau took office, he promised it would be balanced in year four. We saw early on that it wasn’t going to be year four, it was going to be later. The trouble is that under the Liberal government there actually is no date, there is no plan…
“We believe we can offer a financial plan to Canadians that just by getting control of the growth, not even the spending, just controlling the growth of government spending, getting it from the five-to-eight per cent where it is today to closer to inflation-plus-population-growth.”
Some of the reductions will be down to different priorities, he said, such as ditching Liberal commitments to the Asian Infrastructure Bank and the Canadian Infrastructure Bank, which he said puts the burden of risk on taxpayers without the upside of financial reward if projects go well.
I put it to him that it’s a strategy that will allow the Liberals to portray the Conservatives as program cutters.
“You’re probably right — that will be their political strategy. Our message will be: Limit the damage to one term, we can avoid tax hikes and big cuts.”
But when will a Conservative government get the books back in the black?
“Again, we’ll have a firm commitment in our campaign platform with a reasonable and responsible plan to get back to balanced budgets. That will be a stark contrast to a Liberal party running for re-election, whose promise will be to never balance the budget. That will be the choice.”
If Sir John A. Macdonald was Old Tomorrow, the incumbent Conservative leader is worthy successor, Young Tomorrow.
But voters already disillusioned by broken promises and unforced errors are going to want something more tangible than the siren call of political hucksters everywhere — “Free beer tomorrow.”