Juno News - November 08, 2019


Conservative caucus opts out of power to turf Andrew Scheer


Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

182.54456

Word count

792

Sentence count

34


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Andrew Scheer has passed the first test of his post-election leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada. At the first meeting of the caucus, the caucus voted against giving themselves the power to turf Andrew Scheer as leader of the party.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 Conservative leader Andrew Scheer has passed the first test of his post-election leadership of
00:00:11.160 the Conservative Party of Canada. At the first meeting of the Conservative caucus for the next
00:00:16.320 parliament, the members of the caucus voted against giving themselves the power to effectively
00:00:22.800 turf Andrew Scheer as leader of the party, at least leader of the party in parliament.
00:00:27.700 Now, they didn't vote to keep him. They voted against even having the opportunity to raise
00:00:34.640 questions about Andrew Scheer's leadership, but even so, it's an endorsement of the fact that the
00:00:39.460 majority of the caucus does not have a plan of launching some sort of a palace coup against
00:00:44.360 Andrew Scheer, though it doesn't mean that Scheer is in the clear just yet. He'll still have to face
00:00:49.680 a much bigger vote, which is the vote of party members at an April 2020 convention where, according
00:00:56.540 to the Conservative constitution, there will be a review of Andrew Scheer's leadership. If he falls
00:01:02.580 short of that, there's going to be a leadership race. He could be a candidate in it, but he'll have
00:01:07.660 to fight to lead the party into the next election. Now, of course, the decision from the caucus is one
00:01:14.280 that comes as good news to Andrew Scheer. It shows a level of confidence in him from the people that
00:01:19.640 are going to be most responsible for trumpeting the Conservative message in the next Parliament.
00:01:24.960 But what is interesting is that there still is this battle from both sides that's going after
00:01:30.960 Andrew Scheer. You've got people on the red Tory side saying he didn't win because he's too
00:01:35.460 Conservative. You've got people on the blue Tory side saying he didn't win the election because he
00:01:40.200 was too mushy and too moderate. Neither of these sides, even if they can coalesce around the idea of
00:01:46.480 getting rid of him, will agree on who replaces him. And it's important to look at how Andrew Scheer
00:01:51.840 got to where he is in the first place. He was not the first pick of most people in the leadership
00:01:57.460 race. In fact, it was, I think, just under 22% of Conservative members that voted for him as their
00:02:03.000 number one choice. He trailed behind Maxime Bernier in every single round of ballot counting except for
00:02:10.620 the one that counted, the last one. This means that Andrew Scheer was very much seen in 2017
00:02:16.140 as the consensus candidate, the guy around whom everyone could get behind, and more importantly,
00:02:22.940 the guy that was going to be the most tolerable to the most number of people in the party.
00:02:29.940 Now, of course, that doesn't work once you've lost an election. The knives are going to come out.
00:02:34.160 And this isn't an endorsement or a criticism of Andrew Scheer. This is just laying out the facts
00:02:38.620 as they are right now. If there were a Conservative Party leadership race right now, who would win?
00:02:45.680 Ultimately, the rules of the Conservatives would allow for an identical situation to unfold, which
00:02:51.640 is someone who is seen as the consensus candidate taking over. And the same problems that existed in
00:02:57.960 the 2019 election are going to exist in the next election whenever it happens to be. We've, of course,
00:03:04.000 seen reports that Peter McKay may be organizing despite his denial of it, that Aaron O'Toole may
00:03:09.540 be as well. Whatever the case may be, these are not leaders that will have a distinctly different
00:03:16.180 approach to governance and a distinctly different approach to leading the Conservative Party.
00:03:21.240 So it may be just an entirely wasted effort to get back to the very same problem. The answer for
00:03:27.220 the Conservatives is going to come in really having an introspective look at what the party wants to be.
00:03:32.720 By focusing on the leader, no one is asking the questions about what is the Conservative Party
00:03:37.760 of Canada actually standing for? What is the party about? What does Big Ten Party mean? Does this
00:03:43.840 party have a place for social Conservatives? Does it have a place for Libertarians? Is it a red Tory
00:03:48.900 party? A blue Tory party? Is it a party for everyone? What are the non-negotiables? What are the deal
00:03:54.600 breakers? I'm just rhyming off questions here. These are the questions that the party needs to answer.
00:04:00.140 For starters, these are the questions the party needs to ask. It's not going to be as simple
00:04:05.040 as getting rid of the leader and putting in someone else without going through that process.
00:04:09.800 My free advice to the Conservatives, figure out what you want to be and how you want to fit
00:04:14.260 into the Canadian discussion before you just replace the person at the top. For True North,
00:04:19.320 I'm Andrew Lutton.