It’s enough to make you wish for the good old days when Stephen Harper was cracking the Conservative whip, keeping unruly MPs and party officials in line.
That’s because Andrew Scheer’s resignation is a reminder of how the party came apart in the late 1980s.
That’s when Canada’s conservatives divorced, creating the Reform party, forcing the word progressive out of the party’s former name — Progressive Conservatives — and leading to three mandates for the Liberals.
Jean Chrétien was the beneficiary of this division as the Reform party, mostly based in the west, and the PCs, mostly based in Ontario and Atlantic Canada, went through leader after leader for 15 years, splitting right-wing votes until Nova Scotia’s Peter MacKay finally took over the PCs, promising he wouldn’t merge the two parties.
Then he went ahead and merged the two parties anyway, eventually losing the leadership to Harper.
Harper knew that the only way conservatives could win a federal election was to build a truly national party, not one solely based on western resentment of Ottawa.
Say what you will about Harper, he ran a tight ship. Dissension in the ranks was not allowed and he moved swiftly to stifle any criticism. It was his way or the highway.
There was never that sense about Scheer, and open sniping began very quickly after the election. MacKay, for instance, was quoted at a panel saying that the leader’s fuzzy stances on abortion and same-sex marriage “hung around Andrew Scheer’s neck like a stinking albatross,” and likened the loss to missing an open net on a breakaway.
It’s understandable that the Conservatives feel they should have won the election. Scandals had tarnished Trudeau’s sunny image and they had their own fresh young face to trot out before the voters. Scheer was 40, had a young family and wasn’t afraid to smile.
But strange dishonesties about Scheer’s education and citizenship emerged during the campaign, and while they weren’t as damaging as, say, the SNC-Lavalin affair was to Trudeau, it did raise questions about his judgment.
Thursday’s revelation that party money had been paying his kids’ private school fees was the last straw for many. Even though executive director Dustin van Vugt defended the move, it appeared to surprise other members of the party’s board.
Scheer did increase the Conservatives’ standing in Parliament from 95 to 121 seats, and won the popular vote, beating the Liberals by more than 200,000. But support was concentrated heavily in Alberta and Saskatchewan, where they won seats by huge majorities.
The Liberals won with a broader appeal that won seats everywhere else by slimmer margins.
The Conservatives must now grapple with reality. Scheer’s prevarications on abortion and same-sex marriage made many centrist voters nervous. The party is still too fixated on western alienation.
And they must face facts: Canadians want credible climate change policies.
If the new leader can’t broaden the party’s appeal beyond its western base, they’ll lose the next election, too.
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