Andrew Scheer is not planning to lose next year’s election

Thestar.com
December 19, 2018
Tonda Maccharles

Federal Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer believes he will be prime minister by this time next year, after defeating Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to lead his party to a majority government.

If he only holds Trudeau to a minority government, Scheer believes Conservatives will be happy for him to stick around as leader and try again in 2023, if not sooner.

And if he loses the 2019 federal election outright?

Scheer insists he hasn’t thought about that prospect. At all.

In a wide-ranging conversation with the Star at a holiday reception he hosted at Stornoway, the official residence of the Opposition leader, Scheer did allow that one factor he’d weigh if he does lose is the toll of public life on his family.

The 39-year-old father of five will have been in office for 15 years by then, with all of his kids born since he became MP for Regina-Qu’Appelle in 2004.

Yet Scheer insists he’s not planning to lose. Not to Trudeau, nor to Jagmeet Singh, the embattled NDP leader.

Scheer openly wishes Singh was doing better, and frequently encourages New Democrats to focus their political fire on the Trudeau Liberals --their common enemy --rather than take shots at his party.

Left-wing vote splits are important in ridings where strong Conservative candidates can come up the middle to win.

At the reception where he invited journalists to mingle with his shadow ministers (as he calls them), senior staff and Conservative commentators, Scheer also said he won’t lose ground to Maxime Bernier, the high-profile party defector and rival for Conservative voters.

Bernier went out in August with a bang, declaring the Scheer-led Conservatives were driven solely by polls and “too intellectually and morally corrupt to be reformed.”

Bernier created his own political vehicle: the People’s Party of Canada.

“Max is not going to win one seat, including his own,” Scheer predicted.

Scheer won the support of social conservatives and dairy farmers during the leadership race in which he beat Bernier, and now he’s nominated a popular local mayor and a former president of an association of Quebec municipalities to run against Bernier in 2019 in his home riding of Beauce.

The only irritant, Scheer says, is Bernier could pull away some bedrock libertarian conservative support in Western ridings where the traditional Conservative vote might splinter, but “there’s nothing I can do about that.”

And if Scheer is worried after a couple of internal critics were granted anonymity to subtly undermine him recently in the National Post, the Conservative leader does not show it.

Still, the politician who should be the centre of attention in a room is not a person around whom a crowd naturally gathers, even at a party in his own house.

According to the most recent poll from Nanos Research, Scheer lags Trudeau by about 10 percentage points as the preferred choice for prime minister.

Charisma is not his strong point. Scheer himself jokes about his dad jokes, his dad body, and his dimpled smile.

On the upside, the NDP leader is in a much worse place, with Singh trailing Green Leader Elizabeth May, both languishing in the single digits, and Bernier barely registering, at 2 per cent. A full 25 per cent of Canadians were unsure of whom they preferred.

Bob Plamondon, an author who has written extensively about Canadian conservative politics, says “if you look at the polls, most people haven’t formed an impression of Andrew Scheer one way or the other.”

Plamondon, who wrote a chronicle of successful Conservative party leaders in his book Blue Thunder, says Scheer ought to take note of the lessons of history: there is not a great track record of party leaders losing an election and coming back to fight another one, unless the results are really close or another election seems around the corner.

Although Scheer says he is looking forward to a holiday break with his wife Jill and the kids in Regina, where they still keep a home near her parents’ place, he says he’s ready for the 10 months of hard campaigning that lie ahead.

The Liberals --who only hold a 12-seat majority at the moment --say they’ll tout a record that includes more benefits for children and low-income workers, a new North American free trade deal, business tax measures to boost competitiveness, a carbon pricing plan, and spending for training for “jobs of the future.”

But despite buying a $4.5-billion pipeline, Trudeau missed an early opportunity in the fall economic update to address concerns about workers in Alberta’s struggling oilpatch, and faces new opposition among Conservative leaders in provincial legislatures who vow to fight his carbon pricing plan.

Yet on many days, it is not Scheer who seizes the spotlight. Some days it’s a Conservative premier like Doug Ford, or a former Trudeau ally like Alberta’s Rachel Notley. Other days it’s one of his own caucus members.

Often in Parliament, finance critic Pierre Poilievre is the master of the zinger, delivering pointed critiques of Trudeau or Finance Minister Bill Morneau on the fly, with gusto and without notes. It was Poilievre who delivered the Conservative response to the government’s fall economic update.

Scheer was wiped out after a red-eye journey from Vancouver that day, which is why Pierre was tapped, he said.

Scheer says he’s happy to have a “strong” parliamentary team to take the lead on files, and he’s in no rush to roll out platform details this far ahead of the election.

He said the Conservative party will release its climate policy well enough in advance of the 2019 vote that the public will be able to fully evaluate it.

“I believe,” he added, that Justin Trudeau released his climate plan “two months” before the October 2015 election.

In fact, Trudeau announced his carbon pricing plan in a February 2015 speech to Calgary’s Petroleum Club --eight months before the vote --and released the Liberals’ entire environmental platform in June, four months before the vote.

Scheer has been travelling more in the past few months, Instagramming his meetings with party supporters. He is also seeking out stakeholders who he doesn’t count as supporters including, he points out, the Toronto Star, and the country’s largest private sector union, Unifor.

The Conservative leader is pondering how to address concerns of media organizations that he says are worried about the CBC’s government-subsidized news website sucking commercial ad revenue away, and about the flow of Canadian advertising revenue to Google and Facebook.

Scheer flatly opposes what he calls Trudeau’s private sector “media bailout,” a package of taxation and other changes that he says “potentially” could corrupt professional political journalists into providing more favourable coverage to the Liberals than he believes they already do.

He says there is “definitely” a difference in how media cover the Conservatives versus the Liberals, pulling up a year-old-tweet by a CBC News account that was a promo for its coverage of a government announcement on the carbon taxation plan. It cited the government’s boast it would be effective and affordable for all.

Instead, Scheer is looking for possible solutions to the media revenue dilemma in Europe, where copyright agreements are aimed at ensuring a greater sharing of revenue between content creators and those who aggregate or simply repost original reporting.

Scheer asked to meet with Unifor president Jerry Dias, who represents many media workers and journalists. Some Conservatives were angered when Unifor Canada tweeted a photo of its national executive board that Dias says was a “parody” of Scheer’s pose with Conservative premiers and Alberta party leader Jason Kenney on the cover of Macleans magazine, dubbed the “Resistance.”

Neither Scheer nor Dias will discuss what they said in private, but Dias said it was a “respectful” conversation.

“In retrospect,” said Dias, his own retweet should not have contained the hashtag “#stopscheerstupidity.”

“It frankly wasn’t fair, and it was disrespectful when I didn’t need to be. I should have said “#scheernonsense,” because the position they were taking was sheer nonsense,” the union leader said.

While Dias says he won’t be voting for Scheer, neither he nor the Conservative leader are going anywhere, and need to deal with each other in a “respectful” way.

In fact, Dias said, they agree on the need to advance construction of oil pipelines, on the need to keep GM’s Oshawa plant open and to ensure U.S. steel and aluminum tariffs against Canada are lifted.

But Dias believes the Conservative Party lost a lot of support among unionized workers after the Stephen Harper government legislated restrictions on organized labour.

Scheer agrees those moves hurt the Conservatives he now leads, saying he got push back when he went door-to-door. But now he thinks the issues he’s raising --the “job-killing carbon tax,” among others --are resonating with workers including manual labourers.

“I’m not going to win ‘big labour,’ ” said Scheer, but he is convinced he can win back what Conservative party strategists have often called the “bread-and-butter” labour vote.

He’ll certainly need that, and more besides.