The Conservative leader supposedly admires Margaret Thatcher, who despised 'consensus.' So what's he doing?

Not much surprises me in politics anymore. At least not if it’s feebly bad. But is this really the time for Andrew Scheer to go mushy on balancing the budget?

The CBC thinks so, saying “The Liberals were counting on tying Scheer to the Ford government’s austerity. That’s going to be harder now.” Um didn’t Ford win?

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If you follow the news, which surely Scheer or his staff do, you’d also know the European Parliamentary elections just delivered a stunning rebuff to the status quo parties. Especially in Britain where Nigel Farage’s fledgling “Brexit Party” won 32 per cent of the vote and 29 of 73 seats leaving Labour and Conservatives a dusty third and fifth with 22 per cent and 14 seats between them.

Photo by Peter Summers/Getty Images

Also, Australia’s right-wing Liberals just triumphed in an “unwinnable” election by thumbing their noses at climate alarmism. And in India Narendra Modi’s extremely uncool Bharatiya Janata Party confounded pundits by crushing Congress and others, raising its own seat total from 282 to 303 (of 545) and that of the National Democratic Alliance it leads from 336 to 353.

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Do I still have to say people everywhere are fed up with overly scripted mainstream consensus politics after Brexit and Trump? And Ford and others decked out in mammoth skins by the commentariat including Jason Kenney, who plays a convincing outsider on TV? And Scheer heads for the tall grass now?

People everywhere are fed up with overly scripted mainstream consensus politics

Jerry Dias of Unifor, to rebut claims his union is too biased to help Justin Trudeau hand out millions in media subsidies, just called Scheer “Canada’s anti-progressive, media-bashing ‘Trump in the North.’ ” But while the Tory leader was once genuinely conservative, what has he not since surrendered for illusory political advantage?

The short pants brigade whispered that social conservatism is yucky so he backed away fast. On foreign policy he grunts and growls but has no plan to reinvigorate the military. On economics, the last ditch for fractious conservatives, he’s for supply management and against balanced budgets. And has the best plan ever to stop global warming although it’s blank. Rah Rah Team Blue.

Perhaps Scheer was ideologically doomed from the moment he made that sleazy deal with the milk cartel to win the Tory leadership; as Louis L’Amour wrote in Flint, “If a man starts to run, there’s nothing to do but keep running.” (He didn’t mean for office.) But if ever there were a time when an unprincipled politician should want to look principled, and an evasive one to sound blunt, it’s now.

If a man starts to run, there’s nothing to do but keep running Author Louis L’Amour

Britain’s Boris Johnson, who the smart set are trying to fit into a clown suit, just wrote bluntly in The Daily Telegraph that in the EU election voters delivered “a crushing rebuke to the Government — in fact, to both major parties. I cannot find it in my heart to blame them. They gave us one chief task: to deliver Brexit” and “We have … broken promise after promise … If we go on like this, we will be fired … ”

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Exactly. And the big knock on Brexit was that it wasn’t cool. But voters increasingly don’t care who laughs at them. What a time to join the cynical sophisticated mockers.

In March 2017, Tory leadership contender Scheer sounded fiscally hawkish: “If Justin Trudeau can rack up $30-billion deficits in just one year surely Conservatives can return Canada back to balanced budgets in two years.” Now they can’t, and it’s all someone else’s fault.

Photo by David Kawai/Bloomberg

Specifically that awful Trudeau, whose own pledge to balance the budget went the way of all flesh except faster. But Trudeau seems genuinely to think everything important should be done by government. Whereas if Scheer had beliefs, he’d think the opposite. So what will he cut? Nothing. Why? Um poll focus group mumble excuses attack retreat hide equivocate VOTE FOR ME.

We don’t have to. Maxime Bernier may, like Nigel Farage, be hard to work with, for or near. But when he says Canada has only one major party, the LibCons, cynical and inept, the Tories promptly confirm Robert Conquest’s Third Law of Politics (“The simplest way to explain the behaviour of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies”) by embracing deficits from here to eternity, a.k.a. after the next election.

He picks this moment to run the wrong way

Scheer supposedly admires Margaret Thatcher, who despised “consensus” and said “Standing in the middle of the road is very dangerous; you get knocked down by the traffic from both sides.” So with more traffic on the right for the first time since Reagan’s day, he picks this moment to run the wrong way in that lane?

It would astound me if he stood up tomorrow and said I’ve listened too much to backroom operators and not enough to my conscience and from now on I’ll be conservative. Go ahead and do it anyway.