Front Burner - Beyond the dimples: A profile of Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer

Episode Date: August 8, 2019

He's called, "the smiling Stephen Harper," and he's known for his knack of bringing people together. But beyond his dimples, what do you really know about Andrew Scheer? Today, with the federal election fast approaching, we talk to Maclean's Ottawa bureau chief, John Geddes about the leader of the Conservative Party. We'll get insight into how he became such a unifier (hint: his favourite book is the self-help classic How to Win Friends and Influence People) and how that squares with his more divisive moments, such as his hardline stance on the United Nations migration pact. This is the first in a series of pre-election profiles we'll do about Canada's federal party leaders.

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Like, yep, I'm disabled. Google it, bitch. You can find Chosen Family wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the family. Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. We've got a really great episode today profiling Conservative leader Andrew Scheer. But first, some breaking news yesterday from Gillum, Manitoba. After weeks of evading capture, the hunt for accused killers Cam McLeod and Briar Schmigelski is finally over. The two men were accused of killing three strangers in B.C. last month.

over. The two men were accused of killing three strangers in B.C. last month. The suspects led police on a massive search that spanned four provinces, ending in northern Manitoba. At approximately 10 a.m., RCMP officers located two male bodies in the dense brush. At this time, we believe these are the bodies of the two suspects wanted in connection with the homicides in British Columbia. The discovery has brought relief to the small community of Gillum. John McDonald is the deputy mayor of Gillum. I talked to him yesterday after the news broke. Hi John, are you there? Yeah, good afternoon. Thanks so much for making the time to talk with me today. You're welcome. Can I ask, how did you react when you heard the police had found these two young men? Relieved.

I know that Gillum is a small community. How were people feeling as the manhunt dragged on? I think everybody was, you know, concerned, of course. And life, I believe, was slowly starting to, you know, try to get back to normal. Now that they, you know, we're pretty sure they found them, I'm sure that everybody's, you know, the same thoughts that the good thing it's over and anybody I've talked to, you know, we do have sympathy for their families and especially for the families of their victims.

I saw online that some residents were actually feeling a bit sad, sad that they died before anyone could get answers as to why this all happened. Do you understand that? I do. Yeah. Yeah, I really do. Everybody wonders what caused this in the first place. Why did they do what they did? Why did they come here? And until the hot tops results come in, you know, did they survive out there for two weeks or was it over fairly quickly? All the normal questions when you don't know the answers. Right, right. Talking about the possibility that they survived out there for two weeks.

You know, the police believe the two bodies were found in very dense bush near the Nelson River. And can you describe this bush for me? What's it like? Well, when they say dense, they mean dense. It's a thick bush. It can have lots of willows, lots of spruce, creeks and swamps. You know, it's rough country. So for people trying to get a sense of what it would be like to live in that bush,

what would it be like? Well, you've got to remember that this is not southern Manitoba, so there's not a road every mile. There's no farms, you know, no farmhouses in the distance. You can walk off in the bush here and get lost and wander around and not find a trail. You may find some rivers, you know, you might find some big creeks, but there's not going to be boats parked at them or directions on which way to go, and I really can't describe it. It's wilderness. It's true Canadian wilderness.

Well, John, thank you so much for chatting with me today. And I do hope that for you and all the people of Gillam, you can get back to your lives. Thank you very much. get back to your lives. Thank you very much. The RCMP said that an autopsy needs to be performed before they can confirm if the bodies are indeed Cam McLeod and Briar Schmigelski and

the cause of death. All right, let's talk Andrew Scheer, leader of the Conservative Party, head of the official opposition, Prime Minister hopeful. But beyond all that, what do we really know about Andrew Scheer? Is he the guy who brings everyone together, believing in this big tent philosophy? Or is he open to the more radical aspects of his party? To help us dig down and learn a little more about who Andrew Scheer really is, I'm speaking with the Ottawa Bureau Chief of Maclean's magazine, John Geddes. This is Frontburner. John, thank you so much for joining me today.

Oh, great to be here. So I heard that Andrew Scheer's favorite book is apparently the Depression-era self-help classic, How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. Why is this book, in his mind, the most formative thing he's read, you think? Yeah, you know, when I interviewed him shortly after he became a conservative leader, I asked that question. It's just a standard question. I'm sure you've asked it dozens of times yourself. Usually the answer is pretty pretentious, right? The average politician wants to talk about reading a weighty history book or a political biography of some politician that they'd like to be identified with. Right, like Kissinger. Exactly, or Lincoln is a favorite, even for Canadian politicians, or something about Laurier

or McDonald, that's what you normally hear. So I was a little surprised when Scheer said Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, because it's sort of this folksy, decades-old, commonsensical, it's kind of like the lawrence welk of uh of of self-help books right so so what are we getting there from sheer well one thing is is that he he says himself that he fears that before he read that book he maybe came off as a little bit you know he was very young right when he became an mp and he maybe came off as a little smart-alecky, a little know-it-all-ish, a bit precocious early in his career. And that taught him to tone it down a little, to remember that people don't want to be talked down to.

They want to be talked to as equals and individuals who have important views, not lectured, not overwhelmed by your flash. Not that Andrew Scheer is in any danger of overwhelming people with flash. You know, at the lunch table in high school, you know, if you brought up the subject of, say, balanced budget or tax bracket creep or, you know, some of the things that were issues back in 94, 95, I very quickly realized that you were the only one talking. So he thought that this was something that taught him those lessons about being modest and deferential in the way that you deal with people.

Right, and that's a huge thread through this book, the idea that you should bring people into the fold. Yeah, in trying to link it to other aspects of Scheer's career and personality, it's not that hard, really. He's a guy who has looked at other politicians who are more flamboyant, more hard hitting, more divisive, more provocative. And he's thought, I think I can beat them by being a little bit nicer, a little bit more conciliatory, a little bit more and a sort of acceptable compromise. A big theme of my leadership campaign is you take all the things that we agree on,

put it on one whiteboard, take all the things that we disagree on as conservatives, put on another whiteboard. Which whiteboard should we focus on? That's not the kind of politics that we're thinking about a lot these days in North America where there's so much polarization, but maybe he can make it work. You know, what I want to do with you today is go through that trajectory a little bit. Can we start with his home life as a kid in Ottawa? And he's talked about how this has had an important influence on him. My parents, my mom and dad, we lived in a small townhouse in Ottawa. We didn't have a lot of money.

My dad would always tell us that we'd have more money if the government didn't take so much on the front end. But we got by. And so what was his family like growing up? Fascinating family. His dad is Jim Shear, who was the librarian, for he's retired now, but was the librarian at the Ottawa Citizen, the local daily newspaper, for many years. So actually quite well known, Jamie, to journalists in Ottawa, like people know Jim. Was known to be a very bookish man, extraordinarily well-read, very conservative, very Catholic, devoted to the Catholic Church. And when I say very conservative, it has to be emphasized that that's small c conservative. He

was never a partisan during his many years at the Citizen, really only bought a party card when his son got into the leadership race. Andrew's mom, who passed away while he was running for Tory leader, Mary Shear, was a different kind of conservative. She was an activist, an anti-abortion activist, a nurse who belonged to Nurses for Life. And she would go to provincial and federal party conventions, for example, as a delegate, which Jim Shear never did. He was kind of a more an intellectual conservative and she was more of an activist. So he goes up in a very political household. But I like to think she passed away knowing that she instilled in me

a lasting obligation to make life even just a little bit better for the people around me and the people I serve. Jumping forward just a bit here, Jamie, I don't want to get things out of order here, but Jill Shear, his wife, once said to me that she grew up in a football household and Andrew grew up in a political household. So that's the way she sees it. And I do want to get to his wife in a moment. But first, can we go through his high school years? Because obviously he followed in the footsteps of his parents and he started volunteering for Preston Manning's Reform Party in that he was conservative.

Yeah. Yeah, and he continued on with the Reform Party, which then became the Canadian Alliance, right through his studies at the University of Ottawa. And so how do you think this experience has influenced his later approach? This is quite a fractious time for the Conservative Party. Right. It's absolutely foundational and fundamental to understanding it, not just Andrew Scheer, but Andrew Scheer's sort of cohort of conservatives who are all around 40 now.

together, the Reform Party and the old Progressive Conservative Party, which had been split for a decade. And it had become clear after about 1997 that the divided right was going to ensure pretty much unlimited opportunity for liberals to keep winning elections. We've had national attention for the last two months, and we're on track to create a principled alternative to the federal liberals, which is what this is all about. So Andrew Scheer gets involved at a time when the project isn't really winning the next election. The project is uniting the right. So he throws himself behind Preston as a very young guy, a teenager and then a guy in his early 20s. He throws himself behind Preston Manning's efforts to do just that. And even after Manning, you know, we're skipping over a lot of, there's a lot of like sort of involved internal battling that goes on during that period.

After Manning loses the leadership of the New Canadian Alliance and to Stockwell Day. The Canadian Alliance has a plan to cut government waste in Ottawa and use that money to pay down national debt. Scheer stays on and works in Day's official leader of the official opposition's office. So this is a guy who was there through a very key period when the right decided in Canada, we can't fight with each other anymore. We have to fight liberals. So let's get back together and let's stay together no matter who we kind of back.

It strikes me that even back then, even as a young person, he had an ability to work with lots of different people too, right? He's working for different leaders who maybe had disagreements themselves. Yeah. And a thing to remember about Andrew Scheer,

not just in that period when he's a backroom operative, a young, you know, kind of a young backroom guy, but also when he's a young member of parliament, he comes in at only 25, is that through that period, he shows on many occasions a willingness to not be a sort of divisive front and centre kind of guy. He becomes speaker, which is almost by definition a job for someone who can remain neutral,

is seen as a fair referee in the House of Commons. But I do promise one thing, and that is I will do my best to live up to the trust you've placed in me. I can't claim that I'll ever be perfect, but you can count on one thing, that I will give 100% to the job that you've given me today. This isn't the typical profile of a guy who becomes a political party leader. This is the profile of someone who usually plays a kind of interesting background role. And Scheer throughout his career has had those characteristics have predominated for him, which makes him actually quite an unusual guy to now be in that position of vying to become prime minister, because he just hasn't shown

a ton of partisan fire over the years. He's shown more of a tactical kind of strategic sense. Just to go back, you mentioned his wife, Jill. And so I understand that this is how he gets into federal politics by way of Saskatchewan, because this is where she's from. They get married and he's held the riding of Regina Capel solidly since he first won in 2004, right up to today. And he was there in parliament during the entire government of Stephen Harper. And he was there in 2003. By 2004, he has the federal nomination in his writing and is winning it in an election.

It's an incredibly fast turnaround to get himself rooted in a new place, a new political environment, and apparently be welcomed there. It was a very tough seat. It had been held by the NDP in one shape or another because of redistribution since 1968. Why do you think he was able to do that? Why do you think he was able to sort of, in a way, he's like a parachute candidate. He is, he is, but he wasn't perceived that way. People in Regina have talked to me about how they

love the way he strolls around, talks to people on the street as if he really cares about how they're feeling, what they're doing that day. I just fell in love with the province. Really? Yeah, just fantastic. What was it about it? For me, it's the people. While it's a major city, it still has that kind of small-town feel where you just know so many people.

Can you tell me about his time as House Speaker from 2011 to 2015? How did it go for him? Moral questions. Kestian Zerau, the Honourable Leader of the Opposition. I think pretty well. You know, Speaker is an unusual role because in Ottawa, people care who the Speaker is, but not many people outside the bubble of Parliament Hill

care who the Speaker is. It's someone you see on TV kind of calling order, order, and that's about it, right? So Andrew Scheer spent that time building up a sort of a layer of credibility and a degree of recognition. He was known as a solid guy among people on Parliament Hill, but that didn't translate into a profile with the general Canadian public or even a profile, I think, among hardcore Conservatives. He was not a guy whose name recognition was a big deal. His problem is that he has to somehow convert that credibility in the closed club of Parliament Hill to name recognition and credibility with first Conservative voters

and then voters at large. Right. And how do you think he ends up accomplishing that? Because he decides to run for the leadership, as you mentioned, and then he's up against some very big personalities in this race, Lisa Raitt, Maxime Bernier, Kevin O'Leary. But despite all of this, he comes out on top. So how did he do that? Well, before he has to think about those people you just listed the the first people he would have been worried about when the the race to succeed Stephen Harper began were actually even bigger names than that the the two people who who speculation centered on initially were Jason Kenney and Peter McKay right the big powerhouses those were the guys

who everyone wondered will they will they jump in and and are they beatable if they do jump in? When Kenny and McKay decide not to run, that's when Scheer and his supporters see an opening, see a potential. So they're up against, at that point, the candidates include Michael Chong and Kelly Leach and Max Bernier. The belief that the root of what it means to be a conservative is to conserve our environment for future generations. Only 9 to 15 percent of immigrants receive an interview with a trained immigration official

before they come to Canada. Maxine Bernier believes in less government intervention in your day-to-day lives and more freedom. That's good on the economy. And these are all interesting people, but they're not massive figures who you'd ever think, oh, gee, I don't think that person can be beat. They're all beatable.

So he goes in with the notion that it's a field that he can triumph over. But what's his strategy? Well, with his kind of main campaign strategist, a guy named Hamish Marshall, he devises what I think of as a very stealthy strategy, and it is not to fight people, not to criticize his opponents, but rather to say, hey, I'd be a good second choice, wouldn't I? We need every kind of conservative excited to be part of the party and working towards winning in 2019. So what that means, we're a big tent

party. We have a lot of different people from different sides of the spectrum. But fundamentally what keeps us all together are, of course, our solid economic principles and showing every kind of conservator that there's a home in the party, that they can at least have their say. And why is that a good strategy? Well, because it was a ranked balloting process where second and third choices mattered. So their strategy was a guy like Max Bernier may have a lot of first choices, but he's also going to turn off a lot of people who won't want him as a second choice.

Kevin O'Leary was a big player for a while, and the same thing applied to him until he dropped out, was they thought he might have a lot of first ballot support support but he can't beat us in second and third ballot support in order to stick with that kind of a strategy you need to have a lot of discipline because if you think about the heat of a leadership race there are many days where one of your adversaries slips up announces something controversial says something, and there would be a lot of political instinct, a lot of political weight leaning towards pounce, attack, hit that person now. I'm told by people who were in Andrew Scheer's leadership tent that when they had conference calls and they discussed those moments, other people were saying, time for us to attack.

And Andrew Scheer was almost always saying, no, that's not going to work. If we attack that person, we're going to turn off their supporters. We're going to lose those second and third ballot choices. Are you for abortion, a woman's right to choose or not? Our party and our caucus have constantly said that we don't want this issue to be reopened. We don't want to have this as an election issue. We don't want to have our caucus divided over this issue. So I think it's one of the things that held our coalition together was that some of these divisive issues were not brought forward as the government.

not brought forward as the government. I'm interested to hear your perspective. You know, we're talking about this politician who tries very hard to keep a big tent. And for a while, he was taking a lot of heat for supposedly aligning himself with the far right, and in particular, the anti-immigration movement. So he took a hard line on the UN's Global Migration Pact, which is like a target of the far right. Canadians and Canadians alone should make decisions on who comes into our country and under what circumstances.

He also spoke at the United We Roll rally on Parliament Hill, an event which included hard right commentator Faith Goldie. hard right commentator Faith Goldie. But most importantly, I want to thank all of you in the United We Rule convoy who have come all the way from Western Canada, Ottawa to let your voices be heard. What do you make of what he's doing there and that strategy? I think he played a very dangerous game

by addressing the United We Rule rally. The way he and his advisors presented is that he was there to talk to people who came to the Hill to protest the carbon tax and what they perceive as the Liberal government's failure to get pipelines built. Those are obviously valid concerns that any conservative leader is likely to try to align with. The problem is they had to know that these obnoxious anti-migrant yellow vest guys were going to be in the crowd, that there were going to be people who have a kind of paranoid view of the UN Migration Pact,

and those elements just could not be ignored. Now, they tried to. They tried to say that that wasn't who they were there to talk to, that that wasn't their crowd. Their crowd were the guys who were there because of energy patch concerns. But I think there was probably a tactical mistake there. To be fair, they couldn't have known that Faith Goldie was going to get up on a flatbed truck and talk to the rally. We're taking this country back and all of your globalism, communism and socialism will be squashed.

She wasn't part of the official agenda. She didn't speak from the official podium. And I suppose Shearer and company need to be given some, cut some slack on that. That being said, Faith Goldie was well known to be pretty supportive and enthusiastic about United We Roll. And to not fixate too much on her particularly, that whole stream of racist, anti-migrant, paranoid about the UN far right of center politics, that was present in the United We Roll moment. And the calculation that they could somehow address the part of the crowd they liked and ignore the part of the crowd they didn't like, I think that's a bad calculation.

Another big specific policy issue I wanted to get your thoughts on is climate change. So Scheer's climate plan was very long in the making. And thank you all for joining us here today for what is the most highly anticipated policy announcement from an opposition party in Canadian history. Now that he finally has one, it's been panned largely by environmentalists. And what do you think his strategy is when it comes to climate policy? Well, first of all, Marshall and Scheer view Alberta as the sort of bedrock, the kind of homeland of Canadian conservatism. So it was pretty obvious that they were going to have a policy that could fly there and in Saskatchewan as well.

And their policy is weak. proposal for companies to you know kind of have to contribute to technological innovation in environment in a kind of green direction if they exceed certain emissions targets. We will set this limit at 40 kilotons per year that's 10 kilotons stricter than the Liberals output based system. Under the Conservative plan it will not be free to pollute and unlike the Liberal scheme there will be no sweetheart deals for anybody. I don't think very many people who have studied policy on reducing carbon emissions think it's a credible plan, but it is a plan. It's something they can, Andrew Scheer can say,

I have my policy, I have, I kind of wave that document in the air, at least figuratively during the campaign. Whether Canadians will pay enough attention to realize that it probably isn't a credible plan is another question. I don't know how much voters will focus on the details or whether some voters might be satisfied, just think, well, he sort of has his plan, the Liberals have their plan, and they'd leave it at that.

I don't know. talking to you today we've talked a lot about this strategy for lack of a better word that has come to define cheer in his early formative years in the later years of his career than now as leader the strategy of like bringing people into the fold of trying to get people to like you and you know, I know that we've discussed some potential missteps or anomalies along the way. But do you think that this is the version of Scheer that we are going to see during this upcoming election campaign? Yes, I do think so. But with one big caveat, Jamie, and that is, I think the sort of friendly, approachable, you could live with this guy version is is partly is largely what they're going to try to sell and that's largely the way

he'll position himself there's there's this one variation on that theme though and that he gets he sounds pretty dark and pretty tough when he talks about Trudeau personally he has no concept about how to stretch a dollar how to make it to the next payday. Very much so. And particularly when he makes the linkage between Justin Trudeau and his famous father, Pierre Trudeau. She has this rhetorical line about how Pierre Trudeau ruined things for his generation. The very strong belief that I cannot allow Justin Trudeau to do the same thing to my five children that his father did to my generation. It's the very strong belief that I cannot allow Justin Trudeau to do the same thing

to my five children that his father did to my generation. And it's not a bad, it's got a symmetrical political oratory that sometimes works in a speech, but I'm not sure what it's based on. Like, I'm not sure if there's a generation of Canadians right now who feel that somehow they're paying the price or their generation paid the price for Pierre Trudeau. Like, I'm not sure, most polls show that Pierre Trudeau is pretty popular among historic prime ministers, that his big accomplishments, which I guess the signature wouldn't be the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, is extremely popular. Always polls very high. We now have a charter which defines the kind of country

in which we wish to live. So I don't know. I know that among core committed conservatives, particularly in the prairies, Trudeau is a swear word. And they never liked Pierre Trudeau and they'll never like Justin Trudeau. So I get that. Although he already has those voters. Well, that's the thing. So by making that linkage and by saying he's running against the Trudeau family legacy in some way, and saying it in quite an angry and dark way, I'm not sure how that wins him supporters among where he needs them most, which would include the suburbs of Toronto and Vancouver. Do you think that if he stuck to this strategy, the strategy of being relatively positive and kind and bringing kick at the can, that they would win the election this year. But then Andrew Scheer was a young guy. He's only 40 years old. He's positioning himself for

future efforts. SNC-Lavalin, Jody Wilson-Raybould, Jane Philpott changed all that, sank Trudeau in the polls. It's now a neck and neck race between the Conservatives and the Liberals. So suddenly, Andrew Scheer's potential to win this time out is very real. And so we've shifted from thinking he has a kind of strategy that might give him a long life in politics to thinking, does he have a strategy that can make this the watershed year for him? And I'm sorry, Jane, I'm not going to make a prediction on that. I don't know whether it works or not. Fair. I find this story so fascinating.

This guy who essentially wasn't a frontrunner in his own party and saw an opening when the big names decided not to run and then positioned himself as a reasonable second chance in the leadership campaign. And then all of a sudden, now he could very well be our next prime minister. John, thank you so much for this conversation. They were so appreciative.

I hope that you'll come back on the podcast. I hope so too. Lots of fun. That's all for today. Stay tuned for more of our upcoming election coverage. We've got a lot of plans and we're going to keep you posted. Thank you. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts. It's 2011 and the Arab Spring is raging.

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