Bernier’s demotion risks dividing the Tories
Quebec MP remains popular among members
When you’re ahead in the polls and raising twice as much money as your nearest rival, why would you do something that is likely to upset half of your party membership?
Andrew Scheer might want to ask himself that question, after stripping his former leadership rival Maxime Bernier of his position in the Conservative shadow cabinet.
The ostensible reason was that Bernier had committed to his caucus colleagues not to publish or promote a book he was writing that was critical of the way Scheer won the leadership last year.
He subsequently posted a chapter dealing with supply management on his website, and, according to one person in the leader’s office, “that’s where the line was drawn.”
The passage that upset the Conservative leader was the part, entirely accurate, that claims Scheer pandered to dairy farmers in Quebec to get their votes. Bernier wrote these “fake Conservatives” signed up to block his candidacy because of his fierce opposition to supply management, the protectionist pricing scheme that shelters dairy, egg and poultry farmers from foreign competition.
The support of the dairy farmers was “precisely why (Scheer) got elected,” Bernier wrote.
He has a point. But the chapter continued: “After the vote I told Andrew I would keep quiet on the issue — there was no point in continuing the fight and in doing so foment disunity in the party and show disrespect to the new leader.” He has not kept his word. Bernier knew exactly what he was doing when he made the chapter public in the first place. It was only after peer pressure from his caucus colleagues and the leader’s office that he was quietly persuaded to indefinitely postpone publication.
The incident smacked of sour grapes to members of caucus who wanted to concentrate their firepower on Justin Trudeau.
But the decision this week to publicly humiliate Bernier, who won 49 per cent support in the final leadership vote, is another matter. This was a decision that didn’t have to be taken — and the fact that it was suggests it was a only a pretext for dealing with the problem that is Max.
As Bernier pointed out in a tweet, the chapter was publicly available for weeks. “There was nothing new. I didn’t ‘publish’ it,” he said.
This is just the latest sign of a lack of mature judgment in the opposition leader’s office.
In the few weeks since Scheer parted with his veteran chief of staff David McArthur, he has misjudged the public mood by accusing Trudeau of failure in his negotiations with President Donald Trump. Only members of the Conservative leader’s immediate family might think he would do any better taming a bull who travels with his own china shop.
After Trudeau said on U.S. television that Canada was prepared to show “flexibility” on dairy access, Scheer said any weakening of the tariffs that protect supply managed sector was “totally unacceptable.”
Bernier’s expulsion, in the wake of that statement, makes it looks like the cow’s tail is wagging the rest of the beast — that Scheer is taking his orders directly from the people who got him elected.
Bernier would be a challenge for any leader. But it is an advantage for Canada’s party of economic liberalism to have someone clearly arguing the case for free trade and open markets. Given he ran on the issue, Bernier would look a complete idiot if he equivocated on it now. He could surely have been convinced to take the offending chapter down in the interests of party unity, as he did last time. But the knives were out. Scheer’s acting chief-of-staff, Marc-André Leclerc, is said to be no fan of Bernier and the cabal around the leader — including MPs Mark Strahl, Shannon Stubbs, Pierre Poilievre and Chris Warkentin — are understood to have lost their patience with the MP from the Beauce.
Yet they run the risk of splitting the party by acting with such impunity against someone who would have been leader if as few as 66 votes in eight ridings had gone in his favour.
Judging by the reaction on social media there are many Conservatives who are upset the party leadership is so servile toward an industry that represents the corporatism and state-directed enterprise they detest. Nor are they impressed that Scheer, who made protection of free speech a central plank of his leadership platform, is now set on muzzling Bernier’s voice on supply management.
If the party’s leadership were determined to remove Bernier from the front lines, it could have been done quietly in the dog days of July. But demoting him when the debate over tariffs in the dairy industry is at the top of the news agenda was guaranteed to attract attention.
Maybe that was the point — to reassure the dairy farmers, lest there by any doubt, of the Conservative Party’s absolute and utter submission to the concept of cartels, 300-per-cent tariffs and production quotas.
The leader still has support in caucus. Erin O’Toole, who came third in the leadership race, said Bernier has found it hard to leave the campaign behind him. “It was a poor decision to release that chapter, after he’d told the whole team he was shelving the book,” he said.
But Bernier’s ouster suggests an insecurity, even an inferiority complex at the heart of the party.
Scheer had best hope that Trudeau standing up to Trump doesn’t send his public approval ratings skyward. If the Conservative leader was anxious when he was winning, how will he cope with being behind?