Conservatives dare to be dull with Scheer as leader
In the end the favourite wasn’t; the leader through the first 12 rounds of counting was not the leader after the last. Maxime Bernier’s insurgent coalition of free marketers and social liberals came achingly close to taking over the Conservative party, only to be repelled at the gates by an odd alliance of social conservatives and centrists behind the soporific Andrew Scheer.
Could over-confidence have done in the Bernieristas? Some 9,000 party members voted on the campaign’s last day — after Bernier’s odd shrug of a speech to the party Friday night, after several days of triumphalist oinks from his young and apparently unsupervised staff. Given the closeness of the final result, could this have made the difference?
It’s impossible to say. Even if the Bernier campaign’s late-inning botches did move votes, it would depend how these were distributed: with every riding allotted the same 100 points toward the final result regardless of how many party members it contained, votes cast in some ridings were worth many times what they were in others.
What can be said is that Bernier, for all the enthusiasm of his core supporters, was unable to build a broad enough coalition to carry him over the finish line. In a race that depended upon attracting second and third choices from other candidates’ supporters, he won a plurality of redistributed ballots from just four candidates, most of them early exits: Deepak Obhrai, Rick Peterson, Kevin O’Leary and Kellie Leitch.
Scheer, by contrast, picked up the lion’s share of support in the crucial final rounds. Brad Trost’s overwhelmingly social conservative supporters — his own, and those of Pierre Lemieux, knocked out in the eighth round — went two to one to Scheer in the second-last round.
It then came down to the centrist Erin O’Toole’s voters — by that time supplemented by Michael Chong’s and Lisa Raitt’s. Would they be attracted more to Bernier’s social progressivism, or Scheer’s policy moderation?
Or, probably more to the point, would they be put off more by Scheer’s social conservatism, or by Bernier’s radicalism? As it turned out, they broke 60-40 in Scheer’s favour.
LEADERSHIP GOES TO A CANDIDATE WHOSE CAMPAIGN WAS NOTABLY DEVOID OF IDEAS
In retrospect, Bernier’s doom should probably have been evident after the first round: not so much because of his own numbers, which came in slightly under expectations, but because of Trost’s and Lemieux’s. That one of the two would be somewhere in the top halfdozen candidates was widely foreseen: that both would be was not. Though Bernier had made some effort to court the social conservative vote, notably promising he would not prevent them from bringing issues like abortion to the floor of the Commons, Scheer’s so-con bona fides proved the more compelling. Yet his cautious style left him well positioned to attract moderate voters as well.
Homage to catatonia: after an 18-month campaign full of fizzy, contrasting ideas of conservatism, the prize goes to a candidate whose campaign was notably devoid of ideas, if not hostile to them.
Scheer’s victory tells us more of what the party will not stand for than what it will. It will not stand for reform of supply management, as Bernier had urged: Scheer campaigned hard against this, especially in Quebec farm ridings. Neither will it stand for a carbon tax, the cheapest and most conservative approach to tackling climate change, the centrepiece of Chong’s campaign.
Instead, Scheer would seem disposed to keep the party on the same cautious, trimming course it followed under Stephen Harper: the same aversion to principle, the same unwillingness to share its vision with the public or define its differences with the other parties in substantive terms, the same gimmicks and baubles — Scheer’s victory speech mentioned removing the GST from heating oil — in place of serious policy proposals.
So, the triumph of the status quo? Not so fast. Scheer’s sleepy more-of-the-sameism may have been enough, just, to prevail, but it is at least as significant that 49 per cent of the vote went to a candidate promising a program of radical change. Scheer’s dominance of the hinterland made for a more efficiently distributed vote, but Bernier swept most of the country’s major cities, where the party must grow if it hopes to win.
For that matter, Scheer’s so-con supporters are hardly the establishment; neither were they particularly wellserved under Harper, who kept them under virtual lock and key.
Indeed, if there is any message from this leadership campaign, it is of the restiveness of the party’s various factions — not only the socons, but the green-cons, the libertaricons, the reformicons, even the progressicons: forbidden even to express their views under Harper’s iron rule, let alone see them reflected in party policy, they have now been liberated.
It would seem neither in Scheer’s nature, nor his capacity, to suppress these differences now that they have been allowed out into the open. Rather, he will have to mediate between them, in the more traditional style of a party leader.
The narrowness of his victory will present its own difficulties. He has supporters to repay, but also opponents to mollify. Can he afford to give the inflammatory Trost a prominent role in the party, even as it tries to moderate its image? Can he afford not to? What position does he give Bernier?
We are left with the dullness of the morning after. Scheer is the safer pair of hands, and will present less of a target for Liberal attacks.
But Bernier, flawed vehicle that he was, represented the more exciting possibility, that Conservatives would finally put aside their historic insecurity and stand for something real. For Bernier’s followers, the challenge now is to make themselves a permanent force in Conservative politics, much as the so-cons have.
It is, after all, the longterm direction of the party that counts, more than who leads it at any particular point in time.