Although there was some debate in caucus, no vote was ever taken on the party's position. 'Instead, the leadership simply imposed a decision from above'

OTTAWA — One of the longest serving Conservative MPs is urging his party to return to its democratic grassroots, and has revealed a behind-the-scenes account of how he was fired from his critic role by leader Andrew Scheer for supporting the legalization of cannabis.

In an essay posted to his website , Scott Reid — who’s won his Ontario seat in seven straight elections going back to 2000 — says he’s not out to attack Scheer and supported him in the 2017 leadership race. Instead he’s telling the story of his firing because he feels the Conservatives have become too centralized and controlling of MPs.

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Reid estimates a third of Conservative MPs may have supported legalizing cannabis, but no caucus vote was ever taken. Instead, Scheer’s office enforced a party line vote against legalization. Reid decided to vote in favour after polling his constituents and finding a majority supported legalization.

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He says Scheer’s office then asked him to resign from his role as critic of democratic institutions and provided him with a statement he could release. He refused and was banished to the backbench in January 2018. Then, out of loyalty to the party, he says he told an “outright lie” to a National Post reporter who called him to ask what happened.

“The whole thing would have remained a secret, were it not for the fact that I now believe that making this story public may serve as a way of incentivizing the next leader of my party to foreswear doing the same thing in the future,” Reid writes.

Scheer’s office declined to comment on Reid’s essay.

Reid was in the Canadian Alliance, the federal party that grew out of Western Canada’s Reform movement, before it merged with the Progressive Conservatives in 2004. He wants to see the modern-day Conservative party return to the more grassroots nature of the Canadian Alliance and recommends the party advocate for an elected Senate, establish more citizen referendums, and give MPs more power to speak their minds.

In that spirit, he recounted the story of how Scheer decided to oppose the Liberal government’s cannabis legislation, Bill C-45. At the time Reid was the Conservative critic for democratic institutions, meaning he was in the “shadow cabinet.”

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It is a sign of just how craven our political culture has become

“The Conservative caucus was divided on the issue of cannabis legalization,” Reid writes. But although there was some debate in caucus, no vote was ever taken on the party’s position. “Instead, the leadership simply imposed a decision from above,” Reid says. “The real motivation for this course of action was never explained to caucus.”

With his strong feelings about citizen participation in politics, Reid decided to poll his constituents on the cannabis issue. He publicly released the results , which showed 55 per cent of the 3,100 respondents telling him to vote in favour of C-45.

“None of this mattered to the leader,” Reid writes. “I was summoned to his office, informed by him that the Constituency Referendum instrument…was worthless as a gauge of public opinion, and was presented with a choice between voting against Bill C-45, resigning my post as democracy critic, or being sacked.”

Reid says he was told to voluntarily resign from his critic role if he ever wanted back in shadow cabinet, and was given a resignation statement written by Scheer’s office — a statement he found unacceptable. “So I refused to sign the letter, although I did inform the leader that I’m a team player, and that it was not my intention to raise a fuss,” Reid writes.

Perhaps I really am a wild-eyed libertarian dreamer

The sacking came two months later. “I had been removed from my post in the evening, with neither notice to me nor explanation in the Leader’s press release, less than a week after Patrick Brown had been removed as leader of the Ontario PCs for sexual misconduct,” Reid writes. “Naturally, a reporter spotted a pattern, and called me at home, to ask if I had been terminated for a similar reason.”

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Reid says he’d promised to keep quiet and didn’t want to damage the party, so he chose to tell “an outright lie to a reporter, for the first time in my career.” He said he stepped down only because he was taking on further responsibilities in his family business.

“It is a sign of just how craven our political culture has become, that there will be some people who will say that I was right to lie to a journalist in January 2018, and am wrong to come clean about it now at the tail-end of 2019,” Reid writes.

In his essay, Reid urges the Conservatives to allow caucus members to speak their mind on policy issues and vote on the party’s position, even if they’re still whipped into line for parliamentary votes.

“Perhaps I really am a wild-eyed libertarian dreamer,” Reid concludes. “In the crazy, Leninist world of Canada’s leader-centric parliamentary politics, maybe the only proper role for any MP other than the one who has been selected as leader is to be silent and obedient…But I’m hoping that each of the candidates running to be the next leader of the Conservative Party will decide otherwise and will pledge to drag our parliamentary wing back from the situation into which it has fallen.”