By the time the federal Conservative party belatedly pulled the plug on its June leadership vote, Peter MacKay, the presumed front-runner to succeed Andrew Scheer, was well on the way to self-destruction.

Knowing that campaign suspension train was about to leave the station on Thursday, MacKay’s team could apparently think of nothing better than to tie their candidate to the tracks.

With the clock ticking, it spent the day carpet-bombing social media with tweets designed to advance the argument that the country could not dispense with MacKay’s leadership a day longer than was absolutely necessary to maintain a façade of due process.

In case anyone is tempted to conclude that the former minister was hostage to a tone-deaf strategy, it is worth noting that MacKay hammered the same point over the course of various television interviews.

Even as those efforts were underway, Donald Trump’s administration was musing about militarizing the Canada-U.S. border.

Thousands of workers from coast to coast to coast were joining the ranks of the newly unemployed with more to come over the next days and weeks.

In Quebec, Premier François Legault was calling for volunteers to help food banks cope with demand.

In British Columbia, Premier John Horgan was stepping in to prevent landlords from putting tenants on the street for failing to come up with the rent next week.

In Ontario, Premier Doug Ford was launching a very public and — as it turned out — efficient attack on companies that would take advantage of the pandemic by price gouging.

And COVID-19 was exacting an ever-increasing toll on Canadians.

If MacKay’s goal was to demonstrate that he was indispensable to the massive efforts unfolding to meet the pandemic challenge, he achieved the opposite. Reviews of his performance pegged him somewhere between a distraction and a nuisance.

His core argument boiled down to the notion that it would be an affront to democracy to let a pandemic stand in the way of a leadership vote. Yet, by the time the federal Conservatives suspended the hostilities, a number of provincial parties had already come to the same decision.

Those include Quebec’s two main opposition parties, the Liberals and the Parti Québécois.

The last time the Conservatives changed leaders, from Stephen Harper to Andrew Scheer, they gave themselves more than a year to do so. Ditto in the case of the Liberals during the transition from Michael Ignatieff to Justin Trudeau.

It has not been six months since Canada last went to the polls. And while Scheer is on the way out, there is no evidence the official opposition he leads has disappeared into the rabbit hole that MacKay’s team apparently inhabits.

Indeed, just this week, the opposition in the House of Commons stopped the Liberal government from handing itself broad powers to bypass Parliament during the pandemic.

In contrast with MacKay, Scheer holds a seat in the Commons and is supported by a battle-tested shadow cabinet.

In the short term, one could easily argue that a stable official opposition front line is preferable to one in flux as a result of a change in management.

The line between holding the government accountable and being perceived as playing partisan politics has never been finer. Finding that delicate balance is hard for anyone in opposition; it is simply not compatible with running a competitive leadership campaign.

Before the pandemic caught up with Canada a few weeks ago, MacKay was promising to try to engineer a federal election this fall.

This week, he doubled down on the contention that the Conservatives should put the leadership behind them so as to be election-ready for a federal vote this year.

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Absent any evidence that the Bloc Québécois and the NDP adults in the opposition backrooms share his enthusiasm for a quick return to the hustings, MacKay’s fighting words amounted to little more than juvenile sabre-rattling.

Still, by delaying the leadership vote, the Conservative party is giving its next leader more time to enter the scene as the bearer of a constructive and comprehensive plan to reconstruct Canada’s economic fabric, rather than as the self-serving prosecutor of the Liberal incumbent.

It’s also giving its members more time to reflect on whether they want their next leader to be someone whose main contribution to Canadian politics over the past few extraordinarily difficult weeks has been to make the prime minister look good.

Chantal Hébert is an Ottawa-based freelance contributing columnist covering politics for the Star. Reach her via email: chantalh28@gmail.com or follow her on Twitter: @ChantalHbert

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