New Tory leader must build a strong team in Commons and for the campaign: Scheer

OTTAWA -- Outgoing Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer says his replacement must quickly 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 in a wide-ranging interview with The Canadian Press on what was his last day in the House of Commons as Opposition 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 both come from the social conservative wing of the party. Both have promised that if they do 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 dodged a question Wednesday on whether, if an avowed social conservative is elected as the next leader, the party would just find itself stuck dealing with the subject anew. He 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.

Scheer is only the second permanent leader the Conservative Party of Canada has had since it was formed in a merger of the Canadian Alliance and Progressive Conservatives. Stephen Harper became the leader of the new party in 2004, and would go on to lead the Tories through a succession of minority governments before winning a majority in 2011. In the majority years, Scheer -- who had first been elected an MP from Regina in 2004 -served as Speaker of the House of Commons, but when the Tories lost power in 2015 and Harper resigned, he decided to try for leadership.won in a squeaker of a vote in 2017. ...more ....