Despite defeat, Scheer advanced party’s progress

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 29/11/2019 (2148 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In the recent federal election, Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives boosted their vote share and, in fact, received more votes than the victorious Liberals. Scheer added 26 seats to his party caucus. NDP leader Jagmeet Singh, in contrast, lost both votes and seats from the previous election and ended with 24 seats, a disastrous result for a party that, just a few years earlier, had seriously hoped to form government.

So, naturally, Scheer is now basking in the gratitude of his party and Singh is struggling to hold onto his party leadership.

Just kidding. Welcome to the funhouse mirror of Canadian politics, where Scheer is now facing rumblings about his leadership, both within and outside his party, and Singh is travelling around the country meeting with adoring NDP crowds.

Perhaps Scheer raised expectations too high in the days prior to the election, promising to send Trudeau packing and then disappointing his supporters. There’s also the Tory Syndrome, a memorable phrase coined by political scientist George Perlin, who demonstrated that throughout Canadian history, the Conservatives have eaten themselves alive whenever in opposition, to the benefit of the Liberals.

The Tories may now be on a slow road to leadership chaos. To date, there has been no true uprising against Scheer within the party membership or, crucially, his caucus. Some influential voices, such as Stephen Harper and Preston Manning, have come out in his favour. But some party elites, former staffers and party dinosaurs have been critical of Scheer’s leadership. Newspaper columnists have jumped on board. Maybe the rebellion will catch on, maybe not, but momentum seems to be slowly building.

In case the rebellion does take off, it’s important to highlight what we might refer to as the Scheer Achievement. Scheer racked up the result he did — both increased votes and increased seats — while fighting a two-front war against both the Liberal Party to his left and Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada to his right.

It’s easy to dismiss Bernier after his party’s disastrous result in the recent election, where he lost even his own seat, but commentators were not always so dismissive. Following the formation of the party, the fear was that Bernier would take his supporters from his failed Tory leadership bid with him. The PPC would invade the party system from the right, squeezing Scheer and making it impossible for him to — as political scientists love to say — converge on the ideological centre where most voters reside. The goal was to rob the Tories of both right-wing activists and support.

Bernier had some success early on. He grabbed headlines with intemperate Twitter comments and somehow nominated a full slate of candidates. On issues such as irregular immigration and multiculturalism, Bernier threatened to rile the Conservative base and eat Scheer’s lunch on the right. Even if Bernier failed to elect a single candidate, he had the potential to damage the Tories by splitting the right-of-centre vote.

It’s within that competitive context that Scheer ran the campaign he did: cautious and conservative, with a relentless substantive focus on taxes and affordability issues. Lurching to the centre — including on social and moral issues — would certainly have drawn strong criticism from Bernier and alienated right-wing voters. Even with the terrible result Bernier received, analysis after the election estimated that vote-splitting meant the PPC cost the Tories roughly six seats.

Scheer was likely thinking of the 1993 federal election, in which Tory leader Kim Campbell led her party to an abysmal result. In part, this was because she was squeezed between the Liberal Party and a new right-wing and populist challenger, the Reform Party. Campbell careened from left to right in the campaign, but ultimately failed to head off Reform’s challenge from the right, leading to disaster for the Tories. Sound familiar?

Some critics have decried Scheer’s “unimaginative” right-wing campaign. I think the description is correct, but the criticism is misplaced. With Bernier lurking on the right, what choices did Scheer have? Those same critics — many of whom were terrified by Bernier just a few months ago — seem to have forgotten Mad Max ever existed.

For them, that’s a detail best left forgotten. Potential leadership aspirants who sat on the sidelines during this campaign can see that the Liberals will be vulnerable in the next election and so sense an opportunity to ride the party into government. Columnists know rebellion sells more newspapers than party peace. And under-employed party staffers and consultants are sizing up jobs in potential leadership campaigns and beyond. All have a vested interest in minimizing Scheer’s achievement.

But it was undoubtedly an achievement. Scheer protected his party from a dangerous right-wing challenger and, somehow, managed to boost the party’s fortunes while doing so, laying the groundwork for the Conservatives to potentially win in the next election. Party members would be well served to keep all this in mind in the months ahead.

Royce Koop is an associate professor and head of the political studies department at the University of Manitoba.