How Scheer went wrong key to make it right
Conservatives need votes in more than West
Many will wonder about what finished Andrew Scheer — what really drove home to him that his best option was to resign as Conservative leader. And why now?
Both are valid questions, but undoubtedly the more important one facing the Conservative party is: What happens now?
Obviously there will be a new leadership race, with Scheer possibly remaining as caretaker in the interim. Some of the names that have been floating about since the attacks on Scheer’s leadership began in October were naturally being buzzed about on Thursday: Rona Ambrose, Peter Mackay, Lisa Raitt, and others. Unlike the NDP, who had an even more disappointing election result, the Conservatives have bucks in the bank to fight another election, but given that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government can fall at any time, they will have to move to get a new leader quickly.
But there’s an interesting wrinkle in that. Former Harper-era cabinet minister John Baird has been conducting a review of the last election at the request of the party, a postmortem of the Conservatives’ election failure. Because, despite the best efforts of the Tories to put a happy face on it — winning the popular vote; the biggest opposition caucus ever — a failure is what it was. Trudeau was wounded and unpopular, the election was the Conservatives’ to lose, and they did. Baird was hired to find out why.
The easy answer is because, while the Conservatives dominated the west, improved in the Atlantic, and more or less held the line in Quebec, they failed to make gains in the crucial Greater Toronto Area, which by itself has a population at least 1.5 times greater than the entire province of Alberta. But Baird’s job is to find out why they blew it. If the Tories are ever going to form a national government again, they’re going to need to dramatically improve on their performance in and around Toronto (doing better in Quebec would be nice, too). And that first means discovering why they couldn’t do it during the last two elections.
Most likely the answer is basically what so much analysis since the election (and some of it before) has already suggested and certain polling has backed up. Scheer’s social conservatism was just too radioactive in the parts of the country the Tories needed to win in. I don’t believe that a social conservative can’t win in Canada, or that religious faith is an automatic disqualifier from high public office. But it does seem to be viewed by many voters, even if unfairly, as suspicious. A particularly charismatic politician might escape some of that suspicion on account of their charm. A particularly effective communicator might succeed in assuring wary voters through a forthright articulation of their views that they could be trusted with the top job. Unfortunately, charismatic, effective communicator and forthright are not words that immediately make you think of Scheer.
In other words, Scheer’s social conservatism, although not automatically lethal, appears to many, myself included, as something he personally did not wear well.
That, combined with his own deficits as a campaigner and a few damaging midrace revelations from his past (on top of some inaccurate voter ID data in the Toronto area) likely doomed him.
Perhaps Baird will come to that same conclusion. Or maybe he’ll conclude it was something else entirely. The point is, we don’t know yet. On Thursday afternoon, Baird tweeted that, despite rumours that the conclusions of his final report were the catalyst for Scheer’s decision, his work was in fact still in progress, and that no final report had been prepared or submitted.
In reality, Scheer probably was never going to survive as leader even as long as the scheduled April leadership review. The correlation of forces just weren’t shaping up in his favour. But it could have been helpful if he’d have hung on long enough for the report into what went wrong for the Tories to be complete, before his replacement is chosen. Any potential next Conservative leaders would ideally then consider the report, and ask themselves if they are confident that they’d have avoided those mistakes, or mitigated or overcome them. The party grassroots, meanwhile, would also have time to digest the findings, and then regard any would-be replacement with only one matter at the forefront of their thinking: Will this one do better?
There may still be time for some of that, of course. There’s nothing stopping Baird from giving candidates an advance look at any preliminary findings, and any would-be candidates have no doubt already drawn their own conclusions about how they could improve on Scheer’s performance. But what they need to know specifically is how they can improve in the heavily populated suburbs around Toronto, which have voted Tory before, and are really the only places blocking in the party’s path to victory. The answer may not be as obvious as they think, but it’s an answer they will need.
SCHEER’S SOCIAL CONSERVATISM WAS JUST TOO RADIOACTIVE.