On Friday Andrew Scheer will address the United Conservative Party convention in Calgary, and the reception he gets should give us all a better sense of his chances of hanging on to the Conservative leadership. So far we’ve mostly heard from Toronto-area Conservatives who backed other candidates against Scheer for the leadership, and colleagues of mine in the press gallery who haven’t voted Conservative since Joe Clark was the leader. Which doesn’t mean they’re wrong, necessarily. Scheer has been even less persuasive since the October election than he was before, which takes some doing. But Friday will offer hints about how Scheer is doing with the bedrock of the Conservative base.
A few words about the choices Conservatives face. Since I wrote this spectacularly half-hearted defence of Scheer a month ago, I haven’t developed greater certainty. All I know is that the problems facing the Conservative Party, and Canadian politics in general, don’t start and end with one Regina MP. And the cost of choosing the wrong path is high.
A party that makes poor leadership choices risks losing about three-quarters of its caucus. That’s not a number I made up. Between 2000, when the Liberals won 172 seats, and 2011 when they won 34, they had switched leaders three times and lost about 80 per cent of their caucus. And then the NDP followed suit. In 2011 under Jack Layton they won 103 seats. In 2019 under Jagmeet Singh they won 24. That’s a decline of 77 per cent of MPs. To be fair, of course, the NDP had no choice when this process began: keeping Layton was, sadly, not an option.
So if Conservatives spent the next decade losing 90 or so of their 121 seats, it would hardly be unprecedented. It’s precedented. Recently precedented. Doubly precedented. Keeping a leader offers no guarantee of success, but neither does replacing him. And “I’m sure we’ll come up with someone” isn’t a strategy.
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See Also:
(1) What can Scheer do better next time around? He needs to have the answers
(2) Scheer faces a battle to hold on to power, and he shouldn’t have to be told why
(3) Former SNC exec proposed $4M bribe in form of loan for witness to change testimony
(4) ‘Demolition by neglect’: Vacant 24 Sussex costing taxpayers millions
(5) Alberta Court of Appeal sets minimum sentence for wholesale fentanyl trafficking
