Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer has apparently fallen out of favour with the conservative group best known for its online advocacy that helped elect Doug Ford in Ontario.

iPolitics reviewed the Canada Proud Facebook page on Friday and found that it had posted 200 times since the election. While almost half the posts (87) negatively targeted Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, there were less than 10 that even mention Scheer. Some were negative.

Three days after the election, Canada Proud asked twice in posts that were accompanied by articles, “Should Scheer get one more kick at the can?”

“Most Conservatives appear to be standing behind Scheer. Does he have your support?” the page with 168,000 likes said in a post on Oct. 29.

Canada Proud shared an article on Oct. 31 that raised the point that Conservative MPs could trigger a vote on Scheer’s leadership at its first caucus meeting.

A day later, it shared a post proposing former Conservative cabinet ministers Peter Mackay and Erin O’Toole as alternative party leaders to Scheer.

On Nov. 6, the day of the first Conservative caucus meeting, the page posted an article about the meeting and wrote, “Is Scheer doing enough to show he wants to win?”

Two days later, it wrote, “Scheer isn’t acting like he even wants to be party leader, let alone PM,” with an accompanying opinion piece questioning his leadership.

In the Oct. 21 election, Scheer’s Conservatives were victorious in 121 ridings, an improvement over the 95 they held before the vote, but a tally well short of the Liberals’ 157 seats. The Conservatives won the popular vote thanks largely to overwhelming support across the Prairies, where the Liberals won just four seats that all came in Winnipeg. The Tories failed to make significant gains in Quebec and Ontario, which included being shut out of Toronto proper, allowing Trudeau to win a second mandate.

A general distrust in Scheer — specifically over his reluctance to directly address his personal stance on sensitive social issues like women’s right to abortion and LGBTQ rights — which was perpetuated by doubts created by illegitimacies about his previous private sector career and his previously unrevealed American citizenship — has been widely cited as reason for his failure to remove Trudeau from office. The prime minister’s own scandal-ridden year featured blemishes that included the SNC-Lavalin affair and the emergence of images of him wearing blackface, mid-election campaign.

Trudeau has maintained a low profile since the election, even avoiding media appearances this week in the midst of meetings he arranged with the other federal party leaders.

Political strategist and commentator Warren Kinsella raised the point on Twitter on Thursday, saying the prime minister has handled himself in the right way since the election.

“No stunts, no selfies, no over-saturation,” Kinsella wrote about Trudeau in a tweet.

The post drew a response from right-wing political activist and former Conservative staffer Jeff Ballingall, who said, “Andrew Scheer couldn’t be handling it worse.”

Ballingall is the founder of a collective of wildly popular “Proud” Facebook pages. With its 438,000 Facebook likes, the Ontario Proud page, the first founded by Ballingall, is more popular on the platform than both the provincial Liberals and the Progressive Conservatives, as well as boasting more likes than Scheer.

In the lead up to the 2018 provincial election, Ontario Proud became well-known for its manufactured-to-go-viral memes and videos that negatively targeted then-Liberal premier Kathleen Wynne and later provincial NDP Leader Andrea Horwath. It also promoted memes and positive articles about Ford. Ballingall told iPolitics that Ontario Proud posts had more than 63 million Facebook impressions in the provincial election, as well as more than 2 million impressions from its Twitter account of the same name, while as an organization it sent over one million text messages and made 2.5 million calls.

Ballingall launched the Canada Proud page — the nationally-focussed cousin to his earlier venture — following the success of its campaign in Ontario (which it credited itself in playing a part in winning for Ford), with an open intention of defeating Trudeau’s Liberal government and installing a federal Conservative government.

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Canada Proud’s most recent negative post towards Scheer was made on Nov. 11, where it pulled a quote from an opinion piece written by conservative political observer Adam Daifallah, saying, “Conservatism as a political force in Canada is hanging on the edge of a cliff. To be sure, uninspiring leadership in Ottawa is a big part of the problem.”

Asked about his group’s apparent turn on Scheer, Ballingall told iPolitics on Friday that “Canada Proud was very disappointed with the election results.”

“It’s looking for an appetite and direction to defeat Trudeau,” he said.

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