"As for Scheer, he’s soon going to see a big drop in his lifestyle. Once he’s just an ordinary MP, he’ll be taking a $90,000 a year pay cut and he’ll actually have to shell out for his housing and making public school look a lot more alluring. Maybe then, he’ll be able to speak a bit more credibly about struggling to make ends meet at the end of every month."

I can still remember the start of the English-language leaders’ debate during the election campaign when the moderator began with a softball question asking each leader how they would defend Canada’s interests and values on the international stage.

Justin Trudeau responded with some purportedly uplifting phrases on the challenge to “equip Canadians to be able to succeed in an uncertain world” while Jagmeet Singh said Canadians needed a government that would stand up to wealthy corporate interests. They were the sound bites that one could expect.

When it came time for Andrew Scheer to respond, the tone suddenly changed. The Conservative leader ignored the question and launched into a vitriolic personal attack on Trudeau, calling him two-faced, singling out the disclosure that Trudeau had worn blackface at a costume party and had demoted Jody Wilson-Raybould while professing to back Indigenous rights.

“Mr. Trudeau, you are a phoney and you are a fraud and you do not deserve to govern this country,” Scheer charged.

The attack wasn’t an one-off. It was at the core of the Conservative election campaign, the portrayal of Trudeau as a hypocritical child of privilege who was nothing but a piece of false advertising who couldn’t relate to ordinary Canadians and didn’t care about them either.

Conservatives instead invited Canadians to choose Andrew Scheer, the bland but genuine Canadian Everyman, the aw-shucks middle-class guy with the stay-at-home wife and five kids whose dream was to visit all of the NFL stadiums in the league with a bunch of buddies.

READ MORE: Tories opt to keep Scheer as leader until successor chosen despite private school controversy

It turns out it was all a lot of populist hokum. We now know that it was Andrew Scheer who wasn’t quite as advertised. His CV wasn’t transparent or truthful. It turned out that he was never really an insurance broker before entering politics. Rather, he had worked at an insurance office in Regina for six months and never got his brokerage licence.

And then there was the fact that he was a U.S. passport holder, but never bothered to tell anybody. “I’ve never been asked about it by Canadians,” he told reporters, when the news leaked out that he was a dual citizen and he said he was going to renounce his U.S. citizenship. This from a man who criticized Michaëlle Jean when she was appointed as governor-general for being a dual French and Canadian citizen.

While actively promoting the idea of low taxes and small government, Scheer owed not just his career but his whole lifestyle to the taxpayer. His first job, at age 25 and with a freshly-minted BA degree, was as an MP earning $141,000 a year. He astutely managed his political career, becoming Speaker of the House of Commons at 32 and moving into nice government-owned digs in the Gatineau Hills, north of the capital. No need for Jill to take a job, unlike the vast majority of married Canadians who can’t afford a one-income household.

By 2017, Scheer was leader of the Conservative Party, and officially became a 1 per centre with a salary of $264,000 and even posher digs at Stornoway.

All the time, Scheer and the Conservative Party kept on with this idea that he was a man of the people, because his middle-class parents didn’t own a car when he was growing up in suburban Ottawa and he had to take the bus. “I know what it’s like when families feel anxious that they cannot make to the end of the month,” he stated, not a dry eye in the house. “Someone who’s never really had to worry about that cannot possibly relate to it on a personal level.”

When Scheer as opposition leader had trouble making ends meet after opting to send four of his five kids to private Catholic school in Ottawa, he knew what to do. He turned to the Conservative Party, which secretly began paying tuition from its fundraising arm, until he got found out, helping to precipitate his much-anticipated resignation.

The party’s executive director, Dustin van Vugt, told The Globe and Mail this week that the payments were “normal practice for political parties” and that Scheer needed the money to pay for higher school fees in Ottawa. Of course, nobody else in the party seemed to know.

Backdoor subsidies for political leaders are nothing new. In the Mulroney years, there were stories of how the PC Canada Fund helped bankroll Brian and Mila’s expensive lifestyle.

Yet nobody can accuse the Mulroneys of parading around as ordinary Canadians, struggling to put a frozen dinner on the dinner table and whining about it.

The personal attacks on Trudeau were just the latest manifestation of the great cultural war led by the Republican Party in the U.S., which has successfully used issues like gun rights, opposition to abortion, patriotism, and resentment of intellectuals to get working people to embrace low taxes and weakened government, essentially voting against their own economic interests.

Canada’s Conservative Party, lacking originality, has simply taken these ideas and political tactics and attempted to transfer them to Canada. Some have worked better than others. The idea of cloning Fox News with Sun News Network was a bust. But the fight against the long-gun registry certainly brought the Tories some short-term political gains in gun-loving rural Canada.

As for the anti-Justin campaign, it worked in part, but ultimately fizzled. Canadians realized that Trudeau wasn’t all he was cracked up to be and that he had irritatingly poor judgment. But the idea that he was a fraud never stuck, except maybe in Alberta. Which is why he’s still prime minister.

While the Conservatives have succeeded in demonizing taxation of all sorts (the carbon tax being the latest example), they haven’t managed to kill Canadians’ love affair with government services. Unlike Americans, Canadians still expect government to solve big problems like climate change, or pharmacare or the need for mass transit, a realization Conservatives have been slow at understanding. Basically, we want government to do lots and not have to pay for it.

As for Scheer, he’s soon going to see a big drop in his lifestyle. Once he’s just an ordinary MP, he’ll be taking a $90,000 a year pay cut and he’ll actually have to shell out for his housing and making public school look a lot more alluring. Maybe then, he’ll be able to speak a bit more credibly about struggling to make ends meet at the end of every month.

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