Andrew Scheer’s failure in Ontario will sink his leadership

Ontario is Andrew Scheer’s Achilles heel. The Conservative leader cannot win the next election without gaining significantly more support from voters in Canada’s largest province. Unless he dramatically changes his approach, he is unlikely to get it.

This is the sobering reality that faces members of the Conservative Party as they mull over their leader’s future.

That Scheer is in trouble is obvious. Following a marathon seven-hour caucus meeting Wednesday, Conservative MPs and senators mouthed the usual bromides about party unity. But as Scheer spoke to reporters, his deer-inthe-headlights demeanour told it all: the party is anything but unified.

The caucus decision to postpone a decision on Scheer’s future until April was not a ringing endorsement of his leadership. In fact, it gives his critics more time to organize a putsch. Some have lambasted Scheer for allowing the Liberals to drag him into a debate over abortion and same-sex marriage. Others have chided him for his failure to come clean about his past — including the fact that he holds American as well as Canadian citizenship.

Quebec Conservatives attacked him for his poor French-language skills. Still others castigated him for his minimalist climate-change policy. But it was Scheer’s failure to break through in Ontario that sealed his party’s fate.

The Conservatives did gain three more Ontario seats. However, their share of the popular vote in Ontario dropped by two percentage points.

More importantly, they were unable to unseat Liberal incumbents in huge swaths of the so-called 905 belt outside Toronto. In Toronto itself, the Conservatives were completely shut out.

The main reason is that Scheer failed to connect with Red Tories. Red Tories represent the dominant form of Conservatism in Ontario. They are typically moderate, amenable to using government to achieve useful social ends and value co-operation.

Premier Doug Ford has belatedly come to understand the importance of the Red Tory vote in Ontario. That’s why his Progressive Conservative government is so busy backing away from its initial hard-line positions.

Scheer never did get it. His campaign against the federal carbon tax had little traction in Ontario for the simple reason that the levy is not that onerous.

Ontario’s Red Tories know that refinery shutdowns and turmoil in the Middle East have more effect on gasoline prices than Ottawa’s carbon tax.

Indeed, Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s entire strategy for dealing with climate change could have come from a Red Tory playbook.

It emphasizes balance — in this case, the balance between economic and environmental needs. It suggests action without getting bogged down in the details of what this action will accomplish.

Had Scheer truly understood Red Tory Ontario, he would have stolen the carbon tax idea from the Liberals and made it his own. But he didn’t. Instead he wasted time attacking Trudeau personally. This tactic went over well with voters who already hated the prime minister. But I suspect that to many Ontario Red Tories it seemed gratuitously rude. These voters decided that Trudeau was closer to their way of thinking than ostensible Tory Scheer.

This is the conundrum that Conservatives will face when the party votes on Scheer’s leadership in April. Will they back him and hope that he does better in the next federal election? Or will they boot him and take a chance they can quickly replace him with someone able to win not only the West but mainstream Red Tory Ontario? Thomas Walkom is a Toronto-based columnist covering politics. Follow him on Twitter: @tomwalkom