Columnists
A lucky man?
I feel badly for Andrew Scheer. After having won the leadership of his party on the basis of his apparent ability to straddle the gap between ‘socially conservative’ Conservatives and ‘socially liberal’ Conservatives, he finds clowns to the left of him and jokers to the right, all searching for his scalp. The socially conservative see him as a traitor to their cause, which brooks no compromise of values; while the socially liberal say he failed to clearly accept the reality of same-sex marriage and the right of women to choose what happens to their bodies. Perhaps the gap was always going to be wider than it looked at the time. It may have taken the second coming of Stephen Harper to keep it from widening.
Mr. Scheer did win the popular vote, but he failed to win a majority in Parliament. That would not have been such a bad result seen from the point at which Mr. Scheer became party leader. Indeed, it was so widely assumed that Mr. Trudeau was good for two majority terms that A-team candidates like Peter Mackay disdained running on the basis that the job on offer was that of eight years as opposition leader.
Expectations changed, however. With the SNC Lavalin affair, the Conservative party sensed victory was in the offing. It didn’t happen, and Mr. Scheer is being judged by that higher standard. Ironically, it was Peter Mackay who played the role of Brutus to Mr. Scheer’s Caesar with his comment that Mr. Scheer missed a breakaway on an open net.
Mr. Scheer is in tough. According to a poll released last month, 42 per cent of Conservative voters surveyed would get rid of him; 41 per cent would keep him; and 17 per cent are undecided. Even giving Mr. Scheer credit for all of the undecided voters, if the other proportions hold he would get less than the 66.9 per cent that Joe Clark found was insufficient for him to continue as leader in 1983. In 2005, Mr. Harper set the bar at 80 per cent support (and received 84 per cent). Mr. Scheer therefore has to meet, or come close to meeting Mr. Harper’s bar, and clear Mr. Clark’s bar by a country mile.
Still to come is the report of former cabinet minister John Baird on what went wrong with the election campaign. It is hard to imagine Mr. Scheer emerging blameless from that exercise.
Mr. Scheer seems like a nice enough guy. He is apparently a big fan of The Simpsons, and can recite whole stretches of dialog from the most memorable episodes. He is also happily married with four children, so he has a good grounding in caucus management. On the negative side, Mr. Scheer does poorly in stage presentation. He reads his lines unconvincingly. His cherubic face makes him appear young, and therefore inexperienced, beyond his years. I know; it’s not fair.
However, if Mr. Scheer is tossed out, I’m sure he will recover from the blow. He may never get a juicy government appointment like, say, consul general in Monte Carlo, but heck, he’s only 40, and has lots of experience on his resume. He was Speaker of the House of Commons at one point, and he’s been a member of parliament for years. I can’t see him returning as a backbencher. Nor can I see him being content to collect his pension and drive his kids to hockey practice. And I doubt he will want to go back to being an insurance ‘broker’. He’ll want to try something new. Perhaps he could even hook up with a socially liberal outfit like a green technology company, or a marijuana producer. Or perhaps he will take the time to do some reading and then decide to become a climate change evangelist.
He could always take a page from Patrick Brown’s book. Pushed out of the Ontario Conservative party leadership by a sex scandal, he dusted himself off and got himself elected mayor of Brampton.
And speaking of sex scandals, at least Mr. Scheer is in a better position than his namesake across the pond. The Queen (nudged on, so it is said, by an irate Prince Charles) has stripped Andrew, the Duke of York, of his royal duties for the foreseeable future. He can hardly, being a royal, take on a job as a truck driver to stay busy. So what does he do: move away to one of the distant colonies and open up a bar? More likely, he’ll have to do some sort of public penance, like former Conservative secretary of state John Profumo did back in the early 1960s. Caught in a sex scandal of his own, he resigned and devoted the rest of his life to hands-dirty charitable volunteer work, and was rehabilitated in the public mind by the time of his death.
All in all, Andrew Scheer, lose or retain the leadership of his party. should consider himself a lucky man. No sex scandal; no penance required: new challenges lie ahead. And as Homer Simpson once so elegantly put it, “trying is the first step towards failure.”
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