The conservative party has been working hard over the summer at getting ‘Chuckles’ Scheer better known. It reminds me of that old Rodgers and Hammerstein song, Getting to Know You, that Julie Andrews made famous in The King and I. What should be remembered about the song is the point that the more the teacher learns about her students, the more they learn about her.
But when it comes to party leaders and voters, that is often not the ideal. Maybe the party needs to sugar coat that party leader to make him more palatable to voters. You can bring in all the performance experts you want but Scheer will always look like a clown ready for his make-up. And you need to be very afraid of this clown.
Scheer is much like Stephen Harper without the personality. He is a hard-line social conservative. Much of the bad parliamentary behaviour in the last four years of Harper’s government could be placed in the lap of Chuckles in the speaker’s chair. Chuckles was too partisan for the job. When he ran for the leadership of the party, his slogan of “Real Conservative, Real Leader” you knew the first half was easily accepted.
When he won the conservative leadership by a convoluted voting process, he won on the 13th ballot by less than one per cent of the vote. The best way to describe the voting was that it drilled down to the least formidable of the 13 final contestants and chose Chuckles. It was anticipated that he would hold the position through this year’s election and then be replaced by someone more dynamic.
As voters see him in the spotlight over the summer, they are less than impressed. Even with a prepared text, he lacks the energy and drive that could make him credible. His policy positions are weak and his delivery of them is insipid. It is like none of his staff care to help him. Even though the conservatives and liberals were seen as equally good for the Canadian economy at the beginning of the summer, it is the conservatives that have been losing ground. They are on the ebb tide.
Once the real dialogue of the election gets under way, Chuckles will be the also-ran that was expected of him.
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Copyright 2019 © Peter Lowry
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