It’s too early to write off Scheer, Singh
In the spring of 1993 Opposition leader Jean Chrétien, his Liberal party sagging in the polls and projected to lose to the resurgent Conservatives under Kim Campbell, was feeling the heat, openly attacked by one critic as “a tired old man who doesn’t know how to lead the party.” There were even calls for his resignation. Facing down the “nervous Nellies” in his caucus, Chretien went on to win a solid majority in that fall’s election.
As late as the middle of 2005, there was a flourishing dump-Harper movement within Conservative ranks, barely a year after he had first won the leadership of the newly reunited party, then reduced the once-mighty Liberals to a minority in the election that followed. Critics urged a dispassionate reckoning. Whatever his accomplishments to that point, it was said, he lacked the ability to put the party over the top. A few months later he was prime minister.
Going into the 2015 election campaign, Justin Trudeau’s Liberals were well back in third, not least because of widespread unease about his readiness to lead the country. Several weeks later, they were still there. Only in the last two weeks of the campaign did they decisively pull ahead.
All of which is to say that there is nothing new in the media hazing the Conservatives’ Andrew Scheer and the NDP’s Jagmeet Singh are currently enduring. Whether as party leaders they are the duds their critics contend — Look at the polls! What about those byelections! — will be seen in the fullness of time. But mere months after they were elected, and nearly two years before the next scheduled election, that fullness would hardly seem near.
Opposition leaders in this country typically spend months and years languishing in obscurity and disregard. Lacking the prime minister’s ability to set the agenda, they struggle to attract media attention. Without the plums of office to dispense to supporters — and withhold from detractors — they have little means to enforce internal discipline, even as they attempt to put their stamp on the party.
All of this feeds on itself. Having yet to build much personal name recognition, they are derided as nobodies. While they wait for the party to decide on a platform, they are said to have no policies; if, on the other hand, they take a stand on an issue, they are “making policy on the fly” and failing to consult the members. Inevitably, in the pressure to Do Something to turn around party fortunes, they make mistakes. That’s when the whispers start.
Sometimes, to be sure, the whispers are right. For every Chretien or Harper who went on to lead his party to victory, there is a Stéphane Dion or Stockwell Day, who should have been forced out long before they were. And, while it’s early days yet, the leadership of both Scheer and Singh is open to legitimate criticism. Scheer seems caught between a desire to expand Conservative support and an unwillingness to antagonize the base, as his mishandling of the Lynn Beyak situation suggests. Singh’s inexperience of federal politics has been glaringly apparent at times, and his refusal to answer a layup question on Sikh terrorism is bizarre and troubling.
But the mere fact that a leader has not yet overcome the advantages of incumbency, without even the whiff of an election to concentrate the electorate’s mind, is no proof of anything.
Rare is the opposition leader who looks a sure thing long before the event. Campbell led the polls at the start of the 1993 campaign. So did Paul Martin, in 2005. So, believe it or not, did John Turner, before the wipeout of 1984. Tom Mulcair was the exception in 2015, but we know what happened to him.
Still, neither would one rate the opposition’s chances of toppling the Liberals as being terribly likely. Canadians do not tend, as a rule, to dismiss majority governments after only one term. It has happened just four times in our history, by my count. Three of the four — Alexander Mackenzie’s Liberals in 1878, R.B. Bennett’s Conservatives in 1935, and John Turner’s Liberals in 1984 — had the misfortune to be governing during devastating economic contractions, whatever their contributions either to their amelioration or deterioration.
The Harper Conservatives were arguably unique in losing power without such assistance — the first majority government of any kind to be driven from office with unemployment at seven per cent or less since Louis St. Laurent’s Liberals in 1957. The economy may not be the only thing on the public’s minds, but it takes some concentrated effort to overcome their preference in good times to stick with the devil they know.
So the likelihood of the Liberals losing, if the economy is in anything approaching its current shape come election time, is undoubtedly slim. It’s not inconceivable, however, that they could be cut to a minority, as the Liberals were in 1974 and 2004, or as John Diefenbaker’s Tories were in 1962, after the sweep of 1958; even a reduced majority might be counted as something of an opposition achievement.
Much could happen, moreover, in the meantime. The NAFTA negotiations; the Trans Mountain pipeline; the housing bubble — any one of these and more could blow up in the Liberals’ faces, to say nothing of the impact of a foreign war or domestic terrorist attack. As it is, the Liberals’ lead in the polls has shrunk to less than seven points, even with the lowest unemployment rate in 40 years — and that was before the prime minister was found to have broken the federal conflict of interest law in four places.
It’s far too early, in short, to be writing either opposition leader’s obituary. The people will decide, and the people’s judgment, as prime ministers Campbell, Chretien, Martin, Harper and Trudeau can attest, is not easily foretold.