Uphill battle
Andrew Scheer faces challenge forming a coalition. Susan Delacourt,
The voters who are going to be crucial to Canada’s Conservatives in 2019 are not the people who have been filling the convention rooms in Halifax this weekend.
When Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer leaves Halifax and puts these past few tumultuous days behind him, he and his party have to find new voters — beyond the diehard “base,” and the keener partisans who gave up a pleasant August weekend to debate policy in dark conference rooms.
While it’s always nice for politicos to hang out with old friends — and Conservatives seemed to be basking in each other’s company in Halifax — all parties need to keep making new friends, too, and that’s especially true for Conservative parties. Scheer, like all Conservative leaders before him, needs to find people who haven’t voted for the party before — a coalition like Doug Ford’s “Ford Nation,” or Stephen Harper’s “strong, stable” conservatism from 2006 to 2015.
One year away from a federal election and on the heels of Maxime Bernier’s incendiary departure from the party, it’s not entirely clear how or whether Scheer can build a coalition like Harper did.
In fact, in big ways, Scheer has not yet amassed the ingredients of Harper’s old winning coalition. Recent events call into question whether he ever can.
Harper understood that to succeed, he needed to do three things: expand his reach, respect his base and exercise firm control over his party.
In terms of expanding his reach, Harper was known to boast that Canada’s Conservatives — unlike conservatives in other nations — had built victory with the help of newcomers to the country.
In this way, the current debate over immigration and minorities, which helped catapult Bernier into the headlines and then out of the party, may not be a slam dunk for Scheer.
“The growth of conservatism in Canada, our electoral support, has been largely, not exclusively, but largely by our penetration of immigrant voters … of so-called cultural communities,” Harper told Wall Street Journal editor Gerard Baker in 2014.
Recently, Scheer’s campaign manager, Hamish Marshall, was also talking about the need for Conservatives to woo new Canadians, just like the Fords had done with Ford Nation.
Citing how well Ford had done in some of Toronto’s most diverse wards in the last mayoral race, Marshall told the Manning Centre Conference in February that there were lessons here for federal Conservatives.
“It’s a huge potential and that shows that Conservative and the establishment messages can have great appeal with new Canadians,” he said. “But we’ve got a lot of work to do.”
Half a year later, they may have even more work to do now.
It’s hard to imagine how Bernier’s chain of Twitter rants against “radical multiculturalism” would have helped Scheer make the Conservatives keep looking attractive to newcomers this last little while.
One might think that Bernier’s departure is a silver lining on this score. In other words, now that Bernier is gone, presumably to woo voters with a harder line against multiculturalism, the Conservatives can go back to their immigrant-friendly ways, such as they were.
A new poll by EKOS Research shows that may be a questionable strategy in 2018. Frank Graves, head of EKOS, put some new findings on his own Twitter feed this week about how open Conservatives are to visible-minority immigrants. The results were striking.
A full 73 per cent of Conservative respondents to the poll said Canada was taking in too many visible-minority immigrants. Only 12 per cent of Liberal respondents and17 per cent of New Democrats gave that answer.
For Graves, that finding looks like an opening for any breakaway party that Bernier might want to form, especially if one of its founding sentiments is a hard line against visible minorities or immigration.
“Bernier may provide an unambiguous political home for them,” Graves said on Twitter.
What this means, when it comes right down to it, is that Scheer has to juggle two contradictory messages — an openness to immigrants, in the Harper and Ford tradition, but a hard line on immigration too, as the new EKOS poll seems to signal on what Conservative voters want.
No matter what happens with Bernier and his new party, this is a problem for Scheer’s hopes of building a Harper-like coalition.
Social conservatism is also a wild card in any future Conservative coalition. Scheer won the leadership in May 2017 with the help of some strong anti-abortion contenders in the race — Brad Trost and Pierre Lemieux — whose supporters flocked to Scheer instead of Bernier in final balloting and probably handed him victory.
Harper didn’t have as big an IOU, but he still kept social conservatives at bay in his years in power by simply having no policy at all on those hot-button issues. It was a libertarian approach, giving assurance to those folks that they were free to hold such sentiments but that they would not make it into official Conservative policy.
At the convention Friday, Conservative delegates succeeded in getting a resolution on abortion policy to the main voting session on Saturday.
Scheer, unlike Harper, is obviously not as successful — at least not yet — in keeping this wing of the party quiet. And the more they talk, the more unfriendly the party looks to a lot of women.
Historically, Conservatives have always had trouble with attracting women voters. Flirting with social conservatives hasn’t helped.
Sometimes keeping people quiet is the strongest art of coalition building. On that score, power was a good way of enforcing a discipline of silence in the Harper years. MPs knew that if they spoke up or out of turn, they could find themselves on the outs with the powerful Prime Minister’s Office.
Scheer does not have many tools to keep troublesome coalition members in line or resources to lure new allies to the fold. What’s more, the new Ford government at Queen’s Park threatens to rob Ottawa Conservatives of many smart staffers and strategists.
Liberals encountered this too when they fell out of power back in 2006 — a migration to Toronto and only a skeleton staff around federal politics.
On the other hand, the Ford government is now in a position to lend some support to its federal cousins in Ottawa, which Scheer’s party will want to borrow as much as possible. At this moment, with its coalitionbuilding abilities looking precarious and fragile, Scheer’s Conservatives need all the new friends they can find.