What on earth were Bob Rae, Kory Teneycke and Doug Ford thinking?

For that matter, what in the world was Andrew Scheer smoking?

Somehow, in the aftermath of the federal election, the first three political figures have come to believe, along with a number of conservative-leaning pundits, that disgraced Ontario Premier Doug Ford could have actually saved Scheer’s lost bid for victory if he had been allowed to campaign for the Conservatives.

And somehow Scheer has come to believe he and his losing Conservatives performed fantastically well in the Greater Toronto Area and across Ontario — with or without Ford.

They are all dead wrong!

The reality is that Ford is to blame for Scheer’s defeat.

The Conservatives needed to do well in seat-rich Ontario to win the national election. But they failed to do so, largely because Ford, widely disliked by voters from all parties, turned off enough potential Tory voters to allow the Liberals to maintain their firm grip on Ontario.

But you sure wouldn’t know that listening to Rae, Teneycke, Ford loyalists and Scheer after the outcome was announced on Monday.

Appearing on the CBC’s election-night panel, both Rae, the former Ontario premier, and Teneycke, who was Ford’s campaign manager in the 2018 provincial election, suggested Scheer would have fared dramatically better in Ontario if he had not demanded Ford stay out of sight during the campaign.

“It was a mistake putting Doug Ford into the witness-protection program,” Rae said.

Teneycke insisted Ford is far more popular than Scheer with Conservative voters in the province, that he could have reached out to Ontarians better than Scheer and that the premier wasn’t a factor at all in Scheer’s defeat.

At Queen’s Park, while Ford was silent on how he viewed Scheer’s campaign, senior Conservatives were spinning self-serving tales about how Ford wasn’t to blame for the loss, about how he could have really helped Scheer and about how the premier is actually rebounding in opinion polls.

In Scheer’s case, he appears delusional about how he fared in Ontario, telling reporters on Tuesday that “we made significant gains throughout the GTA and throughout Ontario.”

In fact, the Tories didn’t win a single seat in Toronto, failed to increase their seat total in the 905 area, saw the Liberals’ seat total in Ontario drop by just one to 79, and witnessed the percentage of votes the Tories won slip to 33.2 per cent from 35 per cent in the 2015 election.

How can Scheer believe all that negative news constitutes “significant gains?”

In reality, the Conservatives lost the election because they failed to increase their number of seats in vote-rich urban areas of Ontario, the key battleground where the progressive voters that Scheer needed to attract were fed up with Ford. Ontario was the only English Canada province where the Tories’ vote percentage actually dropped.

There’s no evidence Ford would provide any real help to Scheer other than to appeal to his hard-core supporters, most of whom would never vote for any party other than the Conservatives. Indeed, just the opposite might have occurred if Ford had been unleashed on the campaign trail.

Polls clearly showed most Ontario voters took Ford into consideration when deciding which party to support. An exit poll conducted for Global News indicated more than half those polled said Ford “had at least some impact on their vote.”

Also, Vote Compass, a civic engagement app distributed through the CBC, showed 51 per cent of some 24,000 who took part said they were much less likely to vote for Scheer because of Ford’s policies.

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In addition, Conservative candidates knocking on doors across the province spoke candidly about encountering countless voters with a visceral hate for Ford, who told them that because of Ford there was no way they would vote Tory.

Scheer hurt his own cause by running a campaign dramatically out of touch with where most Ontario residents are these days, especially on issues such as climate change. But he would have hurt it much worse if he had bowed to siren calls to set Ford free.

Ultimately, keeping Ford under wraps was Scheer’s smartest campaign move — because the outcome could otherwise have been much worse for the Tories.

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