Not As Advertised

Throughout the election campaign, Andrew Scheer accused Justin Trudeau of being a phoney. Trudeau, he said, was a child of privilege, whereas Scheer himself was just an ordinary working stiff. Alan Freeman writes:

I can still remember the start of the English-language leaders’ debate during the election campaign when the moderator began with a softball question asking each leader how they would defend Canada’s interests and values on the international stage.

When it came time for Andrew Scheer to respond, the tone suddenly changed. The Conservative leader ignored the question and launched into a vitriolic personal attack on Trudeau, calling him two-faced, singling out the disclosure that Trudeau had worn blackface at a costume party and had demoted Jody Wilson-Raybould while professing to back Indigenous rights.

“Mr. Trudeau, you are a phoney and you are a fraud and you do not deserve to govern this country,” Scheer charged.

But, as the campaign wore on, it became clear that the tagline Scheer and his party attached to Trudeau -- "not as advertised" -- applied to Scheer in spades:

His CV wasn’t transparent or truthful. It turned out that he was never really an insurance broker before entering politics. Rather, he had worked at an insurance office in Regina for six months and never got his brokerage licence.

And then there was the fact that he was a U.S. passport holder, but never bothered to tell anybody. “I’ve never been asked about it by Canadians,” he told reporters, when the news leaked out that he was a dual citizen and he said he was going to renounce his U.S. citizenship. This from a man who criticized Michaëlle Jean when she was appointed as governor-general for being a dual French and Canadian citizen.

While actively promoting the idea of low taxes and small government, Scheer owed not just his career but his whole lifestyle to the taxpayer. His first job, at age 25 and with a freshly-minted BA degree, was as an MP earning $141,000 a year. He astutely managed his political career, becoming Speaker of the House of Commons at 32 and moving into nice government-owned digs in the Gatineau Hills, north of the capital. No need for Jill to take a job, unlike the vast majority of married Canadians who can’t afford a one-income household.

By 2017, Scheer was leader of the Conservative Party, and officially became a 1 per centre with a salary of $264,000 and even posher digs at Stornoway.

All the time, Scheer and the Conservative Party kept on with this idea that he was a man of the people, because his middle-class parents didn’t own a car when he was growing up in suburban Ottawa and he had to take the bus. “I know what it’s like when families feel anxious that they cannot make to the end of the month,” he stated, not a dry eye in the house. “Someone who’s never really had to worry about that cannot possibly relate to it on a personal level.”

When Scheer as opposition leader had trouble making ends meet after opting to send four of his five kids to private Catholic school in Ottawa, he knew what to do. He turned to the Conservative Party, which secretly began paying tuition from its fundraising arm, until he got found out, helping to precipitate his much-anticipated resignation.

The party’s executive director, Dustin van Vugt, told The Globe and Mail this week that the payments were “normal practice for political parties” and that Scheer needed the money to pay for higher school fees in Ottawa. Of course, nobody else in the party seemed to know.

You see where this is going. The Conservatives lost the election because they had the wrong message. But they also had the wrong messenger.

Image: Macleans