Decisions by Jean Charest and Rona Ambrose to stay out of the Conservative leadership race were met with huge sighs of relief on more than one front.

By Sheila Copps
First published in The Hill Times on January 27, 2020.

OTTAWA—The Liberal government of Justin Trudeau dodged a couple of political bullets last week.

Decisions by Jean Charest and Rona Ambrose to stay out of the Conservative leadership race were met with huge sighs of relief on more than one front.

The immediate beneficiary of the sorties was Peter MacKay, who now leaps to the position of frontrunner amongst progressives in the party.

He was closely followed by Pierre Poilievre who was working hard to solidify his support amongst the more right-wing members of the party until he dropped out of the race last week.

MacKay must be verily relieved that neither Charest nor Ambrose will be in the race.

Most of the media attention had been focused on Ambrose’s star status, but Charest would have been a tougher adversary.

Ambrose did a terrific job as interim Tory leader. But her ministerial record was anything but stellar.

Charest, on the other hand, introduced progressive environmental legislation and, under the leadership of prime minister Brian Mulroney, his government was the first to focus on going green.

Ambrose was the minister responsible for the controversial decision to for defund pro-choice women’s organizations. Post politics, she has been very active in promoting her private member’s bill to incorporate gender sensitivity training into the judiciary. But when she had the levers of power to accomplish that as a minister, she did not.

To be fair, both were dealing with constraints imposed by their leaders.

Mulroney wanted to capitalize on the world environmental reckoning which began at the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit. The meeting was spawned by a report entitled “Our Common Future” authored by Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland in 1987. Rio marked the beginning of a world consensus that we must “Think globally and act locally” to stem environmental degradation. Mulroney mirrored that message back to Canada, launching a $3-billion Green Plan in the leadup to the summit.

Mulroney supported the global consensus that we needed to start treating the planet differently.

Then-prime minister Stephen Harper went the other way. Like Donald Trump, he ignored the world climate change consensus, and spent most of his political capital on a rearguard action to blame the environmentalists. He also forced all ministers to delete gender analysis from their cabinet analysis and was probably the key driver in cutting women’s funding across the country.

The other element that would have put Charest squarely in the leader’s seat, should he have decided to run, was his ease of communication in both official languages.

A weak command of one of Canada’s official languages may not be the deciding factor in an in-house Conservative leadership campaign. But it certainly makes a difference when someone is wooing one-quarter of the Canadian population in an election campaign.

In Quebec, New Brunswick, northern Ontario and the southern shore of Nova Scotia, one cannot expect to get any support if she or he cannot speak to voters in their mother tongue.

But speaking both languages is not enough. The leader must also reflect the values of the country.

And that is where the current leadership race gets tricky. The entrance of Quebecer and social conservative Richard Décarie has provided the perfect foil for other would-be candidates to show their progressive side. Harper’s former deputy chief of staff is the self-described leader of the so-cons in the party. He claims to be the only voice representing the values that true social conservatives hold dear, including sanctity of heterosexual marriage and a ban on abortions.

Décarie told CTV news that being gay is a choice, providing an opportunity for other putative candidates to contradict him.

By the end of the week, the campaigns of Erin O’Toole and MacKay began to narrow the focus of delegate support.

Most are moving away from the social conservative constructs that proved fatal in the last election.

MacKay hails from the former Progressive Conservative party so he won’t fall into the trap of boycotting gay pride parades. Some are calling for an eastern-based choice for leader, so the party can finally make the breakthrough it needs in Ontario and Quebec.

In five short months, we will have the answers to all these questions. The result could well turn Canadian politics on its head.

Sheila Copps is a former Jean Chrétien-era cabinet minister and a former deputy prime minister. Follow her on Twitter at @Sheila_Copps.

But it is not good news for the minority Liberal government.

By Sheila Copps
First published in The Hill Times on December 16, 2019.

OTTAWA—Even in resignation, Andrew Scheer was unable to muster kind words for any party other than that of the Conservatives.

His smile masked a bitterness that seemed to permeate his final goodbye to Parliament as leader.

He had fine prose for the people in his own party, and much support for the sacrifices made by his family. But he couldn’t even find one good thing to say about any other leader or party, except to put the prime minister on notice about how the Conservatives will keep holding the government to account.

Usually when people say their goodbyes to political leadership, they try to find something nice to say about everyone, even their sworn parliamentary enemies. But Scheer’s refusal to do so was equally as stubborn as his post-election fatal promise that he would never march in a Pride parade.

Scheer’s departure is good news for his party. It is not good news for the minority Liberal government.

Scheer’s brand was irreparably damaged by his own intransigent social conservatism.

By refusing to embrace a woman’s right to control her own body and by shunning Pride parades in celebration of gay equality, Scheer was a 19th century leader in a 21st century Parliament.

His grinning, father knows best, persona did not resonate with Canadian voters, and there was little chance he would be able to turn that around without a personality transplant.

Scheer’s muddled position on social issues and his weak campaign performance were a gift that kept on giving for the Liberals.

During the election, Scheer could not move the dial on the two-thirds of Canadians who simply could not vote for his socially conservative perspective.

From a refusal to move forward on climate change to the negative tone of his attacks on the prime minister, Scheer simply succeeded in pushing people away.

Even after the election, his embittered tone did not appeal to voters outside his party core.

At the end of the day, his departure opens the door to a clean sweep in the Conservatives, with a number of potential candidates for the leadership.

From Peter MacKay to Jason Kenney, and including Erin O’Toole and Rona Ambrose, there are a number of high-profile Conservatives who could replace Scheer.

And, although leadership campaigns can become internally divisive, the minority Parliament situation will temper the tone on the Tory campaign trail.

The Conservative Party wants to win the next election, so it will try to minimize any cleavages that might split the party apart.

The social conservatives who initially brought Scheer to power will also be out in full force, not wanting to lose ground to party members who are social liberals and fiscal conservatives.

The last race attracted 17 candidates, although four dropped out before the end. This time, the party will likely discourage such a broad range of participation.

The race will likely attract three or four high profile candidates, and their debates will focus on attacking the Liberals instead of each other. They understand that, during a minority situation, the best chance they have of winning the next election is to remain united. Candidates must differentiate themselves, one from another, but the tone of the campaign must remain positive and not divisive.

Given minority government, a leadership campaign needs to be relatively short in nature. There is a chance that an election could come at any time, and a leaderless party is not in a good starting position.

The party will probably move to replace Scheer before next fall. Meanwhile, the status of Scheer as a lame duck leader will help the Liberal minority manage its’ parliamentary agenda.

The Conservatives cannot go into an election without a leader, so it will be unlikely to defeat the government on any issue in the near term.

In the long term, the Tories will have a new leader and newness in politics is a huge asset. It happens to be the only profession where the more experience you get, the more people want to get rid of you.

Justin Trudeau will be facing his third election. His own personal brand carried the party in 2015 but by 2019, it was the Liberal Party that carried Trudeau to victory. Trudeau’s wounds from the SNC-Lavalin affair were deep, but even with the blackface revelations, Scheer could not get traction.

The new Tory leader won’t have that problem. She or he will be facing a two-term Liberal government.

Scheer’s symbolic walk in the snow last week has definitively reshaped Canada’s political landscape.

Sheila Copps is a former Jean Chrétien-era cabinet minister and a former deputy prime minister. Follow her on Twitter at @Sheila_Copps.

By SHEILA COPPS

First published in The Hill Times on Monday, December 5, 2016.

OTTAWA—Pierre Elliott Trudeau was accused of canoodling with Fidel Castro as the two struck up a friendship so deep that Castro served as a pallbearer at the former prime minister’s state funeral.

It should come as no surprise that Canada’s current prime minister would express affection and respect in the wake of the death of the Cuban nonagenarian.

Trudeau’s statement that Castro was a remarkable leader was met with virulent opposition in the Twittersphere and muted criticism from interim Conservative Leader Rona Ambrose.

Ambrose was smart enough not to belabour her point in a House of Commons exchange about the post-mortem comments. She knows that more than a million Canadians visit Cuba annually and witness Cuban reality firsthand. Those Canadians understand that the outpouring of cyberspace vitriol comparing Castro to Josef Stalin and Adolph Hitler is absolute absurdity.

Castro was a dictator but there is zero evidence he participated in mass disappearances or exterminations. On the contrary, there is a fair bit of proof that Castro focussed primarily on the purist of socialist objectives, including mass literacy and racial and gender harmony. He also negatively promoted his own cult of hero worship, with a heavy dose of police presence.

I first visited Cuba in 1974. The place was just opening up and I travelled there with a group of journalists who were working for the Ottawa Citizen. It wasn’t a work assignment, but a vacation.

I was never much of a beach goer, so while there I made it my business to try and meet directly with Cuban citizens. I filled one suitcase with dozens of dated Time magazines, which I passed along to friends I met on the beach in Varadero.

I visited a school and even ended up touring a radio station in Havana during our week-long vacation. I was trying to understand what made this little communist island tick and went out of my way to speak to as many people as I could.

When I spotted the radio station, I entered, identified myself as a reporter on vacation, and started chatting with who turned out to be the manager.

I asked him why he was so devoted to communism, and he described to me what he considered to be the purist of motives.

In his words, if his wife and a stranger were hit by a car, he would help the stranger as quickly as he would assist a member of his family.

I couldn’t understand this and started to challenge his claim. In the middle of our debate, someone emerged from the studio to politely inform me that no foreigners were allowed in the station, and would I kindly leave?

While on my way out of the country, I was accompanied to the airport by my new Cuban friends. After I stuck a conversation with them on the beach, they had proudly toured me around their favourite haunts, as any local would. They took me to the dilapidated ruins of the Dupont estate, and the home of Ernest Hemingway. We also visited his favourite bar.

Unbeknownst to me, my new friends had been under police surveillance the whole time. When they accompanied me to the airport, they were arrested and detained.

I objected, but authorities informed me that my friends were being questioned because they had received goods from a foreigner, in violation of Cuban law. (I had passed along my jeans, T-shirts, and a few other clothing items along with the magazines.)

I later learned that they were all released after questioning, returning to their lives as students. I communicated by mail with my newfound amigos for a while and then lost touch, but I certainly cherished that brief glimpse into another world, hardly that of a Hitler.

I also had a chance to witness firsthand the obvious Castro charisma on a number of occasions.

First, was the inauguration of Nelson Mandela in 1994 and later that year at the Mexican last supper for outgoing Mexican President Carlos Salinas.

Castro was mobbed at both events, holding court to the delight of assembled world leaders. The only one who pointedly refused to speak to him on either occasion was American vice-president Al Gore.

Castro was admired by many leaders, mostly because of his record in education and equality.

On the issue of race, Cuba could probably teach Donald Trump a thing or two.

But there’s none so deaf as those who will not hear.

Sheila Copps is a former Jean Chrétien-era cabinet minister and a former deputy prime minister. Follow her on Twitter at @Sheila_Copps.