This is Andrew Scheer's last day as leader of the Conservative Party of Canada and leader of the Official Opposition of Canada. At times like this it is customary to look back at the time he spent in those roles and assess his performance.
Many in the media have praised him in the last few days, although that praise smacked more of not wanting to speak ill of the dead instead of being genuine praise for his accomplishments.
Now it is my turn to assess his performance and it should come as no surprise that I believed he failed on a fundamental level. Many would just put my assessment down to partisanship as I tend to support the Liberals so if you want to dismiss this assessment by all means go ahead.
Many people point to Mr. Scheer losing the last election as his greatest failure but I disagree. He really did not have much of a chance of winning because three historical voting patterns were working against him. It would have taken a near miracle for him to overcome them. And if you are still one of these people who believes that Mr. Scheer prevented the Liberals from achieving majority government I would say you are mistaken. It was the Bloc that did that. So him losing the election was not his greatest failure.
So what was his greatest failure? He did not renew the Conservative Party of Canada despite the fact that he had three years to do that. The CPC that went into the 2019 election was the same one that went into the 2015 election. He did not make the Party his Party even though he had the time to do it.
That matters because the new leader, regardless of who that is, will have to take that party into the next election. It is the same party that Stephen Harper created in 2004 and the same party that lost in 2015 and 2019. Since the new leader is facing a minority government he is going to have to focus on election readiness instead of party renewal. As well, to make things worse one of the perverse impacts of the pandemic is the Liberals now have the opportunity to develop a compelling election narrative, something that they might have had difficulty developing in normal times, for the next election.
When Justin Trudeau took over the Liberal Party he took the time offered by the Harper majority government to completely renew the Liberal Party. He changed it from the party of Jean Chretien/Paul Martin to the party of Justin Trudeau, much to the everlasting chagrin of stalwarts of those two men. I feel Mr. Trudeau does not receive the credit he deserves for that accomplishment, done in a relatively short period of time. If he had not done it the Liberals might not have won in 2015.
That 2015 loss by the CPC was a tough one but it gave them the time to renew their party. They chose Mr. Scheer to be their leader and he failed to do so. Indeed, I believe he did not even try. The CPC is still very much the party of Stephen Harper. Some believe it is because he is the man behind the curtain and that could be true but it is just as likely that the lack of renewal could have been inertia on the part of the Party Apparatus combined with laziness and/or incompetence of Mr. Scheer. Either way, the CPC of today is the same party as when he took over the leadership four years ago and that is the fundamental failure for which he is responsible.
1 comment:
The leadership circus made it clear that they are completely in hock to the social conservatives and have become a full clone of the GOP. They cannot clear them out, as it would destroy the party. What bitter irony that it was MacKay's monster that ate him alive. Had he "done a Trudeau" while the PCs were in the wilderness and rebuilt the party the way Trudeau did with the Liberals, MacKay might have gone on to be prime minister, but instead he took a shortcut and sold out to Harper and the Reform cult. Scheer was just one of the worst results that MacKay's Faustian bargain brought over. The fact he became Speaker, and the dearth of quality successors to Harper, is yet another reflection of the paucity of caliber this party attracts.
Whereas Trudeau's eventual departure would carry with it an embarrassment of riches for his replacement. He is not the egotistical control freak his detractors project him to be, as evidenced by the front bench strength that he has built up in the Liberal party. Freeland being the presumed heiress apparent but there are plenty of others who would be just as viable in the leadership role. Scheer, meanwhile, was not only a dreadful leader in his own right, but the views he represented were detestable to the majority of Canadians. Unfortunately, those views represent the Conservative party itself, just as Tea Party crackpottery and Trumpism have lobotomized the "party of Lincoln". The real reason Scheer became a pariah among the gutter snipes of the Reform Republicans is because he espoused the losing strategy of saying the quiet parts out loud.
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