The COVID-19 pandemic has not been kind to the federal Conservative party. Its leadership campaign is on hold and the official opposition has lost its daily House of Commons platform as a result of a five-week parliamentary shutdown.

At the same time, there are no signs of buyer’s remorse among the voters who just last fall grudgingly handed Justin Trudeau a second term. In fact, the opposite has been happening.

The latest Léger poll showed the Liberals at 39 per cent support, up six points from their election night performance. The gain was achieved at the Conservatives’ expense, mainly in Central Canada.

In Quebec, support for the Conservatives stands at 14 per cent, which is 24 points behind the Liberals and 15 points behind the second-place Bloc Québécois.

In Ontario, Premier Doug Ford, a pivotal Conservative party ally in the lead-up to the last federal campaign, has for now cast his lot with the prime minister.

For the past month, Ottawa and Queen’s Park have turned their usually adversarial relationship into a constructive one. In public at least, they have been walking in step, a transformation that has seen the two governments’ ratings rise steadily.

This week, on the matter of loosening restrictions at the Canada-U.S. border, Ford said out loud what the necessity of dealing with an unpredictable White House requires the ruling Liberals to bite their tongues about — that there is little appetite in this country for a rushed return to business as usual.

It is against this backdrop that Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives have been calling for the return of a skeleton crew of MPs to the House of Commons for as many as four regular question periods a week.

It is totally possible to agree with the opposition rationale that no government — especially a minority one — should enjoy an open-ended pass from parliamentary scrutiny, but also to question whether what ails Conservative fortunes is really the party’s restricted capacity to hold the Liberals accountable face-to-face.

The NDP and the BQ have also lost a lot of visibility over the past few weeks, yet based on Léger’s polling, they both seem to be holding their own in voting intentions.

As matters currently stand, there is precious little appetite among the public for anything that smacks of partisan politics.

The co-operation between a prime minister whose approval rating is currently on the rise and the Tory premier of Canada’s most-populous province makes it even harder for the federal Conservatives to credibly prosecute Trudeau’s management of the pandemic.

And then one does not have to look far and wide to find evidence of the Conservative party’s tendency to miss the forest for the trees in its to eagerness to score points in the theatre of question period.

Indeed, the most recent example of a tone-challenged official opposition performance goes back a little more than a month, on the very day the World Health Organization officially declared a pandemic.

On that occasion, Scheer and his caucus were happy enough to relinquish the lead on COVID-19 to the Bloc Québécois and the New Democrats, the better to focus on a dead-on-arrival attempt to resuscitate the SNC-Lavalin affair.

With COVID-19 staring Canada in the face, the Conservative party with Scheer leading the charge devoted its first dozen questions to issues other than the pandemic before finally getting around to the impending crisis.

Earlier this week, Sarnia-Lambton MP Marilyn Gladu called for an end to the social distancing measures that are keeping the Canadian economy on pause. Her rationale is that governments should focus on protecting elderly Canadians from COVID-19 and let everyone else get on with life.

“The reality,” she argued, “is more people (among under-70 Canadians) are dying of suicide, more people are dying from cancer and smoking, and we don’t shut the economy down for that.” At least one other Conservative MP has voiced similar thoughts. It is unclear whether that statement reflects the collective thinking of the Conservative caucus.

In whole or in part, the Conservative party will be getting its wish for more frequent public exchanges between the government and its opposition critics in the not-so-distant future.

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Then as in the past, its performance in its official opposition role will be measured against the Liberal response but also compared to that of the NDP, the Bloc and the Greens.

On the issue of the pandemic so far, the Conservative party has so far not benefited from any of those comparisons.

It would be wrong to assume that the Trudeau’s government will alone bear the political risks of a more active House of Commons. Unless Scheer and his caucus raise their game, he stands to leave a field of ruins for his successor.

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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