On Monday morning, when Andrew Scheer addresses the 98 other Conservative MPs on Parliament Hill, he will be looking at a lot of relieved Tories.

Scheer, the boyish former speaker, is a lot more to their liking than the radical libertarian Maxime Bernier would have been, which means that the caucus will unify behind him more easily.

Scheer is like Stephen Harper, only nice, with a fairly middle-of-road policy platform. He has not advocated for an end to supply management — which would have guaranteed a long, bitter fight with farmers — or ending the federal government’s role as guarantor of the public health-care system — which would have given the Liberals a big club.

Rather than having to defend these contentious positions in the 2019 campaign, the Tories will be able to focus on attacking the Liberals for their carbon tax and broadway tickets and fancy holidays and whatnot, which sure seems more likely to be electorally successful.

However, Scheer won thanks to the votes of social conservative voters who supported Brad Trost and Pierre Lemieux on their first and second ballots.

Campaign Life Coalition, the country’s largest anti-abortion group, put out a release when the first results were out, hailing Trost and Lemieux’s showing.

“The combined points for Trost and Lemieux, and those of Andrew Scheer, who has a pro-life voting record, shows the strength of the pro-life, pro-family vote. We encourage whoever is elected the new leader of the Conservative Party of Canada to embrace social conservative voters and reflect their values in policy.”

This being politics, Scheer will have little choice but to listen to that appeal. He would not have won the leadership without those people and he can’t ignore them now.

This puts him in a difficult position, since he, like Harper before him, promised not to re-open the abortion debate, since that way lies electoral difficulties.

In 2002, when Stephen Harper beat Stockwell Day for the leadership of the Canadian Alliance, he promised to stay away from abortion. He did so, too, imposing discipline on the social conservatives in his caucus however obtusely they tried to bring it forward.

It was an ongoing headache in caucus and media management, which Harper managed astutely. It appeared that he was able to mollify social conservatives by consulting with them on other issues and quietly giving them victories, failing to fund Pride events, for example.

The social conservatives will be emboldened by their key role in Saturday’s result, though, and even Canadians who are hostile to their aims should see that in a democracy, they must have their due. They signed up tens of thousands of memberships, giving Trost and Lemieux 16 per cent of the votes, stealing the prize that Bernier thought was his and handing it to Scheer.

So Scheer needs to heed them, and, as Campaign Life Coalition put it, “embrace social conservative voters and reflect their values in policy.”

The problem for the Conservatives is that most Canadians are not socially conservative, and the people whose votes decide elections in this country — like suburban women — are not required to listen politely to social conservatives.

The next election will be decided by millennial voters, who have more socially liberal attitudes than their parents.

To keep social conservatives happy, Scheer will have to talk about thing that matter to them. To have a chance at winning the election to come, he will have to talk about things that matter to politically moderate young Canadians.

It won’t be easy to walk that line, but he is a likeable man, with a mild personality, a photogenic young family and an easy smile, and he will have the support of his caucus and the staff in the leader’s office and party headquarters, which would not have been true for Bernier.

He’s also, at 38, younger than Trudeau. He could be a good two-election candidate, if Trudeau wins in 2019.

One sign that he may have been a safer candidate for the Tories than Bernier would have been: The Liberals were licking their chops at the prospect of a Bernier victory, handing reporters material making fun of his separatist past and secret-document-losing ways.

They thought Bernier would win, and that pleased them, which suggests the Tories, in picking Scheer, made a safer, more conservative choice.