CONSERVATIVE CONUNDRUM
Would confidence have helped Tories win?
It may be a comparison between apples and oranges, but the contrast was hard for many conservatives to miss.
Two weeks after federal Conservative leader Andrew Scheer unveiled his costed platform in the late afternoon on the Friday before Thanksgiving weekend in British Columbia — essentially imposing a media blackout on it — Alberta Premier Jason Kenney went on television to explain in detail why he was going to make budget cuts.
“We spent $2,000 more per person than other provinces do,” Kenney said. “In many government programs we get worse outcomes than other provinces. In other words, in program after program, Albertans pay more but get less.”
While one leader appeared to be defensive and even shy over tackling deficits and spending, the other was putting himself front and centre with voters on this issue.
The difference gets at a fundamental problem some strategists had with the Scheer campaign: It often seemed to be too reticent about conservative values, rather than championing them and trying to win voters to their side.
Scheer’s defenders will be quick to point out the different circumstances. Kenney is a newly-elected premier in a province that returned Conservative MPS in all but one riding during the federal election, often by massive margins. When Scheer released his platform, meanwhile, he was in the middle of a national campaign and trying to reach voters in places like B.C., Toronto’s suburbs and Quebec
But even so, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals have been making a political case for increased government spending, promising in 2015 to run deficits when Tom Mulcair’s NDP wanted to balance the budget. The Liberals have made their ideological argument forcefully, while the Conservatives appear to be engaged in a tactical retreat.
Now, after an election night that saw Trudeau returned with a strong minority government, federal Conservatives will be conducting a post-mortem on this campaign. They will have to consider everything from their fiscal policies, to their environmental platform, to the performance of their leader.
And in each area where they stumbled, they’ll have to decide: Was the problem one of strategy, or tactics?
IF YOU PRETEND TO BE A LIBERAL ... (VOTERS) WILL PROBABLY HIRE THE REAL LIBERAL.
In other words, do they need a whole new approach — or do they need to do a better job of selling their vision?
Conservative strategists are predicting an onrush of opinion columns now arguing the Conservatives would have won if only they’d been a little more left-wing.
“It’s a phoney premise you frequently hear after an election campaign, that tends to be self-serving and fairly ideological, that Conservatives have lost this campaign because they haven’t agreed on all the issues and approaches and outcomes that the Liberal candidate advocated,” said Kory Teneycke, the former campaign manager for Ontario Premier Doug Ford and director of communications for prime minister Stephen Harper.
Jason Lietaer, who has worked for conservatives in the Prime Minister’s Office, the Ontario Premier’s Office and on a number of Tory campaigns, said it’s important to read the room and figure out what each situation demands. Moving to the left, though, rarely makes sense.
“Anybody who pretends that you need to be more like the Liberals to get elected fundamentally doesn’t understand the conservative coalition, because if you pretend to be a Liberal and they’ve got a real Liberal, (voters) will probably hire the real Liberal rather than the fake Liberal,” he said. “You have to differentiate yourself with small-c conservative ideas.”
Sean Speer, a former Harper senior adviser and now a fellow at the Munk School at the University of Toronto, said the Conservatives are somewhat cursed with a high floor and low ceiling for vote-share. It often means they are dependent on a strong NDP to win a majority nationally.
“I mean, think about it: The only majority we’ve won since 1988 was because Jack Layton caught fire,” said Speer. “That’s just an awful political existence. And it’s a highly risky one, as we’ve observed, because the Liberals have successfully marginalized the New Democrats.”
“The Harper model for a majority government is broken,” said Ken Boessenkool, who also worked as an adviser to the former prime minister. When Harper’s Conservatives won a majority in 2011, the party was boosted by a surging NDP that took more than 30 per cent of the vote and helped crush the Liberals. That allowed Harper’s party to win a majority of seats with less than 40 per cent of the vote.
Boessenkool said that too often, the Conservatives have leaned on external factors to win a majority, and now the party will have to focus on reaching 45 per cent of the vote. How to do that should be an all-encompassing discussion among people in the party, he said, but it will involve finding conservative solutions to things that aren’t typically seen as conservative issues. He noted, as examples, that Scheer rarely talked about daycare issues or homelessness. Those are issues that Conservatives could have an easily communicable policy solution that doesn’t involve cumbersome government programs, he said.
Speer argued the Conservatives should be vocal about what animates them and what makes up the conservative worldview.
“I actually have the hypothesis that you could get a lot of the way there just by being more transparent about what conservatives believe and what the conservative worldview is. I think there’s an operating assumption on the part of most conservatives that if people knew what we thought, it wouldn’t resonate,” said Speer.
“I think it’s possible we discover that actually, when we talk about what motivates us, when we talk about what we think it means to be conservative, that people actually respond positively to it because they can piece it all together. Right now we’re giving them a bunch of disparate content and expecting them to kind of figure what it’s all about.”
Furthermore, the idea that a staunchly conservative platform can’t win in
Canada runs into the problem of the provincial scene, where in the past few years conservative parties have won elections not just in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, but also Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick (though just barely). Those governments currently cover more than 80 per cent of Canada’s population.
That success is a doubleedged sword, however. Yes, it shows that conservative platforms can win across Canada. But it also means voters may want to hedge their bets, electing different stripes of governments at different levels. (In 2015, when Harper’s Conservatives had been in power federally for nine years, most provincial governments were Liberal or left-leaning.)
These are factors — the NDP’S strength, the success of provincial conservatives — that Scheer and his team can’t control. But they can control their reaction, and the question of how the Scheer campaign navigated the issue of Ontario Premier Doug Ford will inevitably be a big topic of the postmortem.
There is already open discussion about whether the decision to treat Ford like a pariah invited more problems than it solved. Even if Ford was a liability, as many polls suggest, Scheer’s ostentatious evasion of him became a long-running narrative in itself, helped by the media and Trudeau’s non-stop talk about the premier. It was yet another way in which the Conservatives were on the defensive this campaign.
Ford’s provincial conservatives undoubtedly had fortunate timing in their 2018 election win, fighting a Liberal government that had long passed its best-before date. But the fact remains that while the Ford campaign won over vast swaths of the Greater Toronto Area, Scheer’s Conservatives were practically shut out — the single biggest reason why the Liberals ended up ahead in the seat count. It has left some bitter feelings among conservatives.
“If you can’t win a campaign where your opponent is caught in blackface and has been found to have violated ethics laws ... I’m not sure when you can,” said Teneycke, who quarterbacked Ford’s campaign. “The table was set extremely well for the Conservative party to win. It’s just we did not make a case effectively.”
He said the Conservative campaign rightfully portrayed Trudeau as a “phoney and a fraud.” But that strategy requires Scheer to stand in stark contrast, a paragon of authenticity.
“Just go through all the things that prove Andrew Scheer is not as advertised, the same as Trudeau, and you get quite a list,” said Teneycke, who listed Scheer’s waffling on social issues like same-sex marriage and abortion and his tip-toeing around his dual American citizenship. Even giving an unpopular response would have been better than a non-answer, he said.
“There’s a range of issues and circumstances through the campaign that left voters with the impression — I say this having sat through a lot of focus groups during the campaign — where they think he’s shifty or they think there’s something else going on there,” Teneycke said. “And that’s because they’re thinking about the Conservative campaign frame on Trudeau, and Andrew is not measuring up very well to it.”
The question of Scheer’s leadership will be settled in April 2020, when the party will hold a leadership review at a convention in Toronto.
If Scheer survives — and so far it appears he still has plenty of support, including from Kenney himself — his team will have to grapple with how to win over voters in areas where they failed this campaign. Waiting for external circumstances to change likely won’t cut it.
Speer said the postmortem is to be welcomed, but encouraged people to zoom out a little further from policy spats.
“I think this is exactly the right conversation and we need to try to do it in a way that is dispassionate and not just a reflection of people’s preferences,” said Speer.