New leader should be beholden to no one
To my mind the defining image of Andrew Scheer’s efforts to become prime minister of Canada, which officially came to an end Thursday, comes from the 2017 Press Gallery Dinner in Ottawa. “There’s some suggestion out there that I’m beholden to a certain group within the Conservative family,” he told the crowd, grinning. And then, dimples at maximum, he took a swig from a one-litre carton of Neilson two-per-cent milk.
It’s nice when politicians can poke fun at themselves.
Most are really bad at it, betraying only their own ego.
Scheer’s routine, by contrast, reportedly brought the house down. The problem is that, by all the evidence, Scheer was utterly beholden to the dairy industry. And absent the effects of alcohol, that’s not really very funny.
We knew at the time that, days before, Scheer had barely beaten Maxime Bernier in the party leadership contest with help from a few thousand votes from people whom Bernier not unreasonably called “fake Conservatives” — i.e., people who had purchased memberships for the sole purpose of voting for Scheer, for the sole purpose of maintaining supply management in the dairy industry (which Bernier opposes) intact.
We came to know later, thanks to a Dairy Farmers of Canada briefing book discovered by an aggrieved delegate to the 2018 party convention in Halifax, that the dairy lobby considered Scheer a “safety net.” Regardless of any vote by the party membership that might recommend freer markets in dairy, the book alleged, the farmers had Scheer’s commitment never to undermine supply management in an election platform.
Scheer denied any such deal existed, of course. But it seemed doubtful the dairy industry’s notoriously fearsome, professional and effective lobbyists could have been so misinformed.
It ought to have been a liability from the start: Here was the self-styled middle-class alternative to Justin Trudeau, the man who knows what it’s like to plan a family budget around the breakfast table, to scrimp and save, whose parents didn’t own a car, declaring his fealty to a cartel dedicated to inflating milk prices for the benefit of wealthy businesses. Har, har, har.
He got away with it, I suspect, because supply management is so entrenched in the political system, supported by all parties and given an easy ride by many in the media, and because the bar for scandal when it comes to party politics is miles higher than it is when it comes to governance. Hey, the milkists bought their memberships fair and square.
What’s the problem?
Scheer insists it’s not why he resigned. But the revelation on Thursday that Conservative donors were paying for some of his children’s education at private schools is at the very least a fitting B-side to the resignation news.
Scheer’s man-of-thepeople act was always awfully tenuous; against anyone other than Justin Trudeau, it probably would have been useless. Scheer has been a federal legislator for 15 years, and the pay is more than decent. The base salary for an MP is $178,900, and for the majority of his time on Parliament Hill Scheer has made considerably more: as Deputy Speaker, Speaker, and Leader of the Opposition, the latter two positions coming with free accommodations. However many problems he might have had, a pension wasn’t one.
Politicians sending their kids to private school isn’t the fraught exercise for Canadian politicians that it is in more class-conscious Britain. But especially considering the Scheers could send their kids to a public Catholic school for free in Ottawa — just as Scheer’s parents sent him — it certainly doesn’t help the brand.
Considering all the perks the Scheers enjoyed for relocating to Ottawa, it took some chutzpah to ding the party and its donors for the difference in cost between educating their kids in Regina and educating them in Ottawa (which is the party’s official story).
Ultimately, though, that is beside the point. If there are internal processes that need strengthening such that senior party officials aren’t blindsided by the news donors are supplementing the leader’s income — and it would seem there are — then that’s easily done. It’s a drop in the putrid ocean of party politics, which is far dirtier than we would ever accept from an actual government. How could it not be dirty, when in so many cases the candidate who sells the most memberships is the one who comes out on top? It’s an invitation to all manner of corruption — from buying random punters memberships and herding them to the polls with promises of pizza and beer, to selling them en masse to special interest groups in exchange for promises of special treatment down the line.
Even as I write this, dairy lobbyists — and others — are likely mapping out plans on their whiteboards. The Conservatives should take their time, take a look at the entire process, and ensure “real” members elect their next leader.
There is no obvious saviour waiting in the wings, but at the very least Scheer’s successor should be beholden to nothing except the party’s and Canadians’ best interests.