Russell Wangersky - Regina Leader-Post
Andrew Scheer, outgoing leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, poses in his constituency office in Regina, Saskatchewan on August 18, 2020.
BRANDON HARDER/ Regina Leader-Post
These are the personal observations of one single Canadian voter — that’s all.
Whether you agree or disagree is fine with me.
A couple of elections ago, the Conservative Party had a new leader, a guy I knew little about, except for the fact that he was from Saskatchewan and had been Speaker of the House of Commons.
It’s a job that takes a reasonable amount of fairness and balance, so I thought I’d follow the guy — Regina MP Andrew Scheer — on Twitter and see what he was about.
Not everybody is a fan of Twitter, but I find that the format is useful as starting point — the limited space per tweet means you can get a glimpse of politicians’ direction and follow up on their policies afterwards.
And, back in 2017, I thought Scheer was electable — his Twitter feed then, and his attendant policies, seemed centre-right enough to garner broad-based support. He was measured. Balanced. Reasonable.
For some reason, I didn’t stop following Scheer on Twitter after he left the Conservative leadership and came close to politically vanishing.
His tweets either dried up or seemed inconsequential enough that I can’t remember a single one … until the latest Conservative leadership campaign, when a different version of Andrew Scheer appeared.
I’m having trouble reconciling the Andrew Scheer whose Twitter feed I’m still following now with the Andrew Scheer who I followed when he was the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada.
In other words, would the real Andrew Scheer please stand up?
Scheer is only one example of a dramatic swing in style — but he’s the example that occurred to me when his account tweeted out a solid red background with silhouetted black barbed wire and a prison camp tower with the slogan “SOCIALISM: IDEAS SO GOOD THAT THEY HAVE TO BE MANDATORY.”
(I’m not even going to go into the weeds on the peculiarity of a politician — representing a riding in the province that is the home of Canadian socialized medicine — equating access to health care for all to being inmates of a prison camp.)
His Twitter feed now is anchored by a pinned tweet on Internet legislation that says, “I’m not sure how long the government will let this video stay up.” (It’s scaremongering that — spoiler alert — has been untouched by the evil government on Scheer’s Twitter feed for more than a month.)
The tone of his Twitter feed is completely different than it was.
Like I said, these are the views of one Canadian voter, and not even a voter from Scheer’s riding of Regina-Qu’Appelle.
But I would say this — I felt the 2017 edition of Andrew Scheer was electable as a national candidate. The Andrew Scheer of 2022? Not so much. (Obviously, his own riding, where he took 62 per cent of the vote in the 2021 federal election, feels differently.)
There are, of course, a couple of ways to look at this change.
One might be that Scheer, when campaigning to be prime minister, was merely masquerading as a centre-right candidate because that’s what was considered electable, and his views were actually different from his onstage persona.
Another explanation is that that Scheer has a nose for which way the wind is blowing inside his own party and his own province, and is trying on a new set of ideological clothes to better suit what he thinks that audience wants.
Or maybe it’s more baldly political and strategic — maybe Scheer feels that by hitching his wagon to the Pierre Poilievre campaign (Scheer now retweets plenty of Poilievre’s hot takes in addition to being a steadfast Poilievre supporter), he can find a more influential position within the party he used to run.
All three are understandable, I suppose, but each are also unsettling for their own reasons.
Maybe that’s why I tire of so many politicians — of all political stripes — so quickly.
I can’t help but wonder — if Canada had elected Andrew Scheer to be prime minister all those years ago (something that certainly could have happened) which one would we have gotten?
Russell Wangersky is the editor in chief of the Regina Leader-Post and the Saskatoon StarPhoenix. He can be reached at rwangersky@postmedia.com.
These are the personal observations of one single Canadian voter — that’s all.
Whether you agree or disagree is fine with me.
A couple of elections ago, the Conservative Party had a new leader, a guy I knew little about, except for the fact that he was from Saskatchewan and had been Speaker of the House of Commons.
It’s a job that takes a reasonable amount of fairness and balance, so I thought I’d follow the guy — Regina MP Andrew Scheer — on Twitter and see what he was about.
Not everybody is a fan of Twitter, but I find that the format is useful as starting point — the limited space per tweet means you can get a glimpse of politicians’ direction and follow up on their policies afterwards.
And, back in 2017, I thought Scheer was electable — his Twitter feed then, and his attendant policies, seemed centre-right enough to garner broad-based support. He was measured. Balanced. Reasonable.
For some reason, I didn’t stop following Scheer on Twitter after he left the Conservative leadership and came close to politically vanishing.
His tweets either dried up or seemed inconsequential enough that I can’t remember a single one … until the latest Conservative leadership campaign, when a different version of Andrew Scheer appeared.
I’m having trouble reconciling the Andrew Scheer whose Twitter feed I’m still following now with the Andrew Scheer who I followed when he was the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada.
In other words, would the real Andrew Scheer please stand up?
Scheer is only one example of a dramatic swing in style — but he’s the example that occurred to me when his account tweeted out a solid red background with silhouetted black barbed wire and a prison camp tower with the slogan “SOCIALISM: IDEAS SO GOOD THAT THEY HAVE TO BE MANDATORY.”
(I’m not even going to go into the weeds on the peculiarity of a politician — representing a riding in the province that is the home of Canadian socialized medicine — equating access to health care for all to being inmates of a prison camp.)
His Twitter feed now is anchored by a pinned tweet on Internet legislation that says, “I’m not sure how long the government will let this video stay up.” (It’s scaremongering that — spoiler alert — has been untouched by the evil government on Scheer’s Twitter feed for more than a month.)
The tone of his Twitter feed is completely different than it was.
Like I said, these are the views of one Canadian voter, and not even a voter from Scheer’s riding of Regina-Qu’Appelle.
But I would say this — I felt the 2017 edition of Andrew Scheer was electable as a national candidate. The Andrew Scheer of 2022? Not so much. (Obviously, his own riding, where he took 62 per cent of the vote in the 2021 federal election, feels differently.)
There are, of course, a couple of ways to look at this change.
One might be that Scheer, when campaigning to be prime minister, was merely masquerading as a centre-right candidate because that’s what was considered electable, and his views were actually different from his onstage persona.
Another explanation is that that Scheer has a nose for which way the wind is blowing inside his own party and his own province, and is trying on a new set of ideological clothes to better suit what he thinks that audience wants.
Or maybe it’s more baldly political and strategic — maybe Scheer feels that by hitching his wagon to the Pierre Poilievre campaign (Scheer now retweets plenty of Poilievre’s hot takes in addition to being a steadfast Poilievre supporter), he can find a more influential position within the party he used to run.
All three are understandable, I suppose, but each are also unsettling for their own reasons.
Maybe that’s why I tire of so many politicians — of all political stripes — so quickly.
I can’t help but wonder — if Canada had elected Andrew Scheer to be prime minister all those years ago (something that certainly could have happened) which one would we have gotten?
Russell Wangersky is the editor in chief of the Regina Leader-Post and the Saskatoon StarPhoenix. He can be reached at rwangersky@postmedia.com.
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