BEFORE CONSERVATIVES GO OFF LOOKING FOR A REPLACEMENT-CUM-SAVIOUR FOR SCHEER, THEY OUGHT TO DISPENSE WITH THE NOTION THAT HIS FAILURE TO BECOME PRIME MINISTER WAS AKIN TO MISSING AN OPEN NET.
There are many things for the Conservative Party of Canada to ponder in the wake of their election-night performance last week, and one of them is certainly Andrew Scheer’s leadership. It should by no means be beyond reproach. Quite apart from anything else, he signed off on a dispiriting grab-bag of a platform that seemed uninterested in attracting any new Conservative voters, with the unfortunate exception of Quebec nationalists who can’t abide teachers wearing hijabs.
One-and-done party leaderships are quite common in federal Canadian politics and they often look pretty good in hindsight: Stéphane Dion and Michael Ignatieff spring immediately to mind. Thomas Mulcair springs immediately to mind as well, though. He screwed up his leadership review, but not as badly as the NDP screwed up by ditching him.
When the relief of their late-days surge in the polls and the limited promise of holding the balance of power in the House of Commons wears off, Dippers might notice Jagmeet Singh led them to 15 fewer seats and 620,000 fewer votes than Mulcair did four years ago.
When these decisions go wrong, it can be due to unrealistic expectations such as those Mulcair faced. He was almost certainly the best person on offer for the job of trying to match Jack Layton’s astonishing 2011 gains in Quebec. But that’s only to say any of his leadership rivals likely would have fared worse.
So before Conservatives go off looking for a replacement-cum-saviour, they ought to dispense with the notion, as Peter Mackay put it at an event in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, that Scheer’s failure to become prime minister “was like having a breakaway on an open net and missing the net.” Whatever the flaws in Scheer’s campaign, it is complete nonsense. Scheer ran neither a dreadful nor a terrific campaign. It is by no means inconceivable that he could run a better one, with a better platform, to much greater effect in the future.
As has been widely noted, by knocking a first-term government holding a majority down to a minority, Scheer accomplished something that was last achieved by Robert Stanfield. The majority government Scheer promised — and he did promise it; he can’t un-promise it — was something no one in his position had accomplished since Mackenzie King dispatched R.B. Bennett in 1935. You may have read about the Great Depression.
Forty-three elections isn’t a huge sample size, obviously. But sending Trudeau to Stornoway, if not political oblivion, would have been an extraordinary outcome for any leader in Scheer’s place.
The degree to which Trudeau is reviled by partisan Conservatives might have clouded that reality. But while Trudeaumania had certainly worn off, the headline items that might have propelled Scheer to victory turned out not to have all that much horsepower.
A Léger Marketing poll released a week after the Ethics Commissioner brought the hammer down on Trudeau over the Snc-lavalin debacle found nothing had changed among decided voters: The Conservatives and Liberals were still tied in the mid-to-low 30s. And that’s exactly where they finished.
An Abacus Data poll released Sept. 23, after Trudeau had admitted there might be more blackface photos waiting to be unearthed, found 42 per cent of respondents weren’t bothered to begin with and another 34 per cent were content with Trudeau’s apology and ready to move on. Just 12 per cent said it was making them reconsider voting Liberal, and 57 per cent of those nevertheless said they would prefer a Liberal government to a Conservative one.
Rightly or wrongly, these simply weren’t crippling blows. The Conservatives should certainly consider why they weren’t: They could offer a leader, and a history of leaders, who haven’t made public jackasses out of themselves; but with record-high numbers of Canadians citing climate change as a major ballot issue, they had nothing to offer wouldbe switchers. Perhaps if the Conservatives had a squeaky-clean ethics record in government, as opposed to simply a somewhat less dirty one, folks disgusted by Trudeau’s handling of Lavalin might have been readier to change horses.
But those problems aren’t on Scheer specifically. What’s on Scheer, in addition to the dreary campaign platform, is his bizarre inability to describe the evolution of his thoughts on abortion and same-sex marriage in a way that could plausibly stop the questions from being asked; and making things up about his opponents’ intentions — taxing home sales, raising the GST, etc. — at the same time he was accusing them of doing just the same to him.
With no one particularly compelling waiting in the wings, those seem much more like “live and learn” offences than firing ones.
Anyway, what happens if they ditch Scheer? Another greasy, ridiculous one-member-one-vote leadership contest in which the winner is the one who can sell (in theory) the most memberships no matter whom to, no matter how much support he has in caucus or how beholden he might end up to special interests? Have Conservatives forgotten the 2017 leadership campaign? Have they forgotten about Kevin bloody O’leary? Before they think about reassigning the master bedroom, they ought to look at fixing the floorboards.