{"id":40253,"date":"2017-09-23T04:00:24","date_gmt":"2017-09-23T08:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=40253"},"modified":"2017-09-22T09:18:08","modified_gmt":"2017-09-22T13:18:08","slug":"the-end-of-andrew-scheers-brief-political-honeymoon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/09\/23\/the-end-of-andrew-scheers-brief-political-honeymoon\/","title":{"rendered":"The end of Andrew Scheer’s brief political honeymoon"},"content":{"rendered":"

Being the leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition isn’t quite the easy job some people seem to think it is. Paul Wells<\/a> explains why Andrew Scheer’s brief time in office is already becoming much more of a grind than he may have anticipated:<\/p>\n

There comes a time in every new opposition leader\u2019s career when he discovers it\u2019s a horrible job. This usually happens early.<\/p>\n

The reasons why it seems like it shouldn\u2019t<\/em> be a horrible job are: (a) all you have to do is make fun of the government; (b) being an opposition leader, and therefore hating the government to your bones already, for reasons of ideology or team allegiance or both, it seems to you that everyone in the country will want to join you in making fun of the government; (c) it\u2019s a nice job in general, with a suite of offices and an excellent seat in the House of Commons.<\/p>\n

The reasons why it turns out to be a bad job anyway are: (a) you\u2019re probably in opposition because your party has lost an election, and many Canadians haven\u2019t yet forgotten why they wanted that to happen; (b) the rotten press corps will insist on poking and prodding the opposition\u2019s<\/em> behaviour, rather than focussing its wrath entirely on the government; (c) the job carries all of the perils of government \u2014 gaffes, caucus management, infighting \u2014 with none of the institutional clout.<\/p>\n

And so hello to Andrew Scheer, who\u2019s having a bit of a week.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Scheer (and his supporters) may have thought that just being not-Harper would be enough. It’s clearly not enough:<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think Scheer\u2019s performance on these files is determined solely by his temperament, either. It\u2019s also structural. He sold himself to his party as a specific kind of cure to Harperism. It\u2019s not clear he has the luxury to be that kind of cure.<\/p>\n

By the time Scheer became Conservative leader, many Conservatives, probably most, were heartily sick of the Harper party\u2019s oppressive message-control mechanisms. The forms you had to fill out, the layers of approval. Opinions diverged on whether the party needed to change its policy direction, but in its day-to-day communications and caucus management, the overwhelming consensus was that it needed a lighter touch.<\/p>\n

Scheer\u2019s selling proposition to Conservatives was that he could appeal to moderates by being a nicer guy than Harper, but that he could mollify the activist base by letting it act up a bit, without fear of reprisal. Blow off some steam. Have a few debates. The driving assumption seems to be that Harper brought the hammer down on his own people because Harper is the kind of guy who enjoys bringing the hammer down. And there\u2019s some truth to that!<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s also the absolutely brutal purgatory the Canadian Alliance went through for two years before Harper became that party\u2019s leader. Plummeting in the polls. Constant MP defections from caucus. Mockery in the news coverage. To some extent, this continued through the 2004 election, which Harper believed he lost because he could not trust his own candidates not to sound crazy. That\u2019s why he clamped down.<\/p>\n

Scheer will soon have to decide whether he can afford to let his caucus members say what they want. Until he does, the emerging pattern of his management style \u2014 laissez faire<\/em>, followed by hasty backtracking \u2014 will come to define him.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Being the leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition isn’t quite the easy job some people seem to think it is. Paul Wells explains why Andrew Scheer’s brief time in office is already becoming much more of a grind than he may have anticipated: There comes a time in every new opposition leader\u2019s career when he […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,53],"tags":[1130,431,458,258],"class_list":["post-40253","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-politics","tag-andrewscheer","tag-conservatism","tag-parliament","tag-stephenharper"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-atf","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40253","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40253"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40253\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40254,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40253\/revisions\/40254"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}