Scheer resignation came with some explanation
Tory leader not ousted for betraying values, but rather for embodying them
After this fall’s federal election failed to produce any clear winners or losers, it came as a surprise when Andrew Scheer resigned from the Conservative leadership this month.
It didn’t take long for the public to receive at least some explanation. But while there’s every reason to see Scheer as unsuited for the power he held and sought, there’s a far more important lesson to be drawn about the party pushing him out the door.
The first story explaining Scheer’s resignation involved his drawing from Conservative party funds to cover his children’s private school tuition. And more recently, word was circulated about an unusual amount of money spent by the Conservative leader’s office — a development which coincided with demands that Scheer vacate the leadership immediately, rather than remaining on an interim basis.
To be clear, the revelations about Scheer’s use of publicly-subsidized party money raise serious issues about honesty, transparency and fiscal responsibility. But it’s laughable for anybody associated with the Conservatives to claim to have expected anything different on those fronts.
During the course of the Conservatives’ leadership campaign, Scheer was identified as spending the most money to run his MP office of any candidate.
The subsidization of private schools was included in the Conservatives’ party platform, and called out as specifically benefiting the small pool of disproportionately wealthy people in Scheer’s position.
And the election campaign exposed glaring examples of dishonesty and disingenuousness on Scheer’s part — from his falsely claimed professional credentials, to his partisan double standard as to when past discriminatory acts could be forgiven.
None of those factors stopped the Conservative party apparatus — including the people now exposing dirty laundry to expel Scheer from the leadership — from trumpeting his candidacy to the Canadian public. Indeed, they didn’t even lead to a change in a campaign message centred on trust and fiscal responsibility.
And if there were any doubt that the excuses to push Scheer out the door now are completely detached from the Conservatives’ actual philosophy, one only needs to look at the menu of possible successors.
A party seeking increased respect for donor funds and public money surely wouldn’t turn next to one of two former premiers who took extra income from party funds while actually holding power. Nor a former cabinet minister notorious for using a search-and-rescue helicopter for a fishing trip, then enlisting the military in a cover up. Or even a former prime minister currently leveraging his political connections into a consulting contract from Saskatchewan’s public purse.
Yet those have been among the first possibilities put forward to succeed Scheer, with little apparent pushback.
And it’s hard to dispute that in some sense, their resumes — particularly when linked to the exercise of power in the interest of the privileged — are entirely suited to the position.
The Conservative Party of Canada fits neatly within the definition of a modern conservative provided by John Kenneth Galbraith: it’s dedicated to the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. (Or alternatively, the search for a political message that will induce the public to accept selfishness as the basis for governance.)
It then follows that Scheer was ousted not for betraying his party’s values, but for fully embodying them. And we shouldn’t let a moment of performative outrage in the course of an internal power struggle distract us from the form Canadian conservatism has taken.
If we actually see honesty and accountability as important qualities in our leaders, we need to build an alternative government that actually values them — not settle for the Conservatives slapping a new face on the same old selfishness.