Conservatives have reason for optimism. The question now is whether Scheer can harness this apparent momentum and keep it going

OTTAWA — It was the last day of Parliament and Conservative party MPs were sitting in a high-ceilinged caucus room, waiting for the man of the hour to give them a final pep talk before heading back to their constituencies for the summer.

That man was not Andrew Scheer, who just over a year ago narrowly won the party leadership with a pledge to unite the big blue tent.

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The speaker was Richard Martel, a former junior hockey coach who had won a majority less than 48 hours earlier in Chicoutimi, Que. — a riding that had earned Conservatives just 16.6 per cent of the vote in 2015.

“When we stick to our principles,” Scheer said before handing Martel the requisite party-branded hockey jersey, “we can win anywhere.”

We’ve got a plan, we’re working the plan and it’s going well

Conservatives have reason for optimism beyond just Martel. Recent polls put the party neck-and-neck with the Liberals. Between April and July, they raised more than $6 million — almost double their competition. There’s also the shift to the right in Ontario, and high hopes for the same in the next Alberta race.

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Several sources active in the party have expressed surprise at the current state of play. “I think we’re in a better spot than we thought we would’ve been even six months ago, competing against someone like Justin Trudeau,” said one organizer.

The prime minister himself has contributed to that success. Missteps like a disastrous trip to India earlier this year, for example, are perceived to have helped Conservative approval ratings. Credit also goes to the well-oiled Tory machine — both for keeping federal coffers full and for attracting high-calibre candidates.

The question now is whether Scheer can harness this apparent momentum and keep it up through 2019. Among his big challenges: offering voters a distinct alternative to Justin Trudeau without looking like Donald Trump, shifting electoral strategy to mitigate an apparent weakening of the NDP, and convincing some of the Conservative movement’s own brightest minds that he is the man to seize the moment.

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Next week’s party convention — the last before the federal election — will be a test. It is the rank-and-file’s opportunity to size up Scheer just over a year into his leadership, and to define the party’s policy priorities going into campaign mode.

Members are expected to vote on issues galvanized by Trump — whether to raise defence spending to the level NATO has called for (two per cent of GDP), and how to stem the increase in irregular asylum-seekers crossing the Canada-U.S. border. Although Scheer hasn’t yet proposed a specific plan, they will also brainstorm how to tackle climate change, beyond simply killing Liberal plans for a carbon tax.

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It’s no coincidence this pre-election huddle is in Halifax. The party hopes to win back at least some of the 14 seats the Liberals won from them in Atlantic Canada in 2015.

“I think there’s a dozen seats in maritime Canada where we should be very competitive,” said Mike Coates, who chaired the leadership campaign for outsider Kevin O’Leary last year and was a member of Premier Doug Ford’s transition team.

Photo by Patrick Doyle/The Canadian Press/File

Ford’s success in Ontario is something federal organizers hope to build on, especially in the Greater Toronto Area where federal Conservatives often struggle to gain ground. According to one campaign source, who would speak only under condition of anonymity, the party has been “finding good people” to run in the GTA, including Sean Weir, the outgoing CEO of a major law firm.

Running the show is a shrewd campaigner with a winning track record. “We’ve got a plan, we’re working the plan and it’s going well,” said campaign chair Hamish Marshall, who orchestrated Scheer’s leadership bid.

The game plan is complicated, however, by the NDP — which Conservatives traditionally rely on to split the left-leaning vote in many ridings (including in the GTA) where Tories would otherwise have a hard time.

When Jagmeet Singh won the leadership on the first ballot last October, Conservative MPs were delighted. But by spring, their tone in the opposition lobby at the House of Commons — described as a friendly place these days — had changed from a congratulatory “This is the guy who’s really going to propel you forward” to an anxious “Why is your guy not doing better? Seriously, what can we do to help?”

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“It was semi-joking, semi-not-joking,” said one NDP source.

There’s a silver lining to Singh’s struggles, though, especially in the critical battleground of Quebec.

Martel’s win in Chicoutimi came amid a Conservative appeal to nationalists looking for a home after the implosion of the Bloc Québécois. His numbers were also boosted by a weakened NDP — which went from holding the riding in 2011 to achieving less than 10 per cent of the vote in the recent byelection. By the same logic, a troubled NDP might be leveraged elsewhere to attract centrist voters disillusioned by the Liberals.

Phones were “blowing up” the morning after Martel’s victory, campaign sources claimed, with calls from interested candidates in Quebec.

Both Conservatives and their NDP comrades will be watching closely as two ridings elect new MPs in the lead up to the larger federal race: Outremont, Que., held by former NDP leader Tom Mulcair, and Burnaby South, B.C., where Singh recently announced he would run.

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Then there’s Trump.

Lately, Parliament Hill has felt like a snow globe cupped in his hands. The president of the United States has made Canadian politicians from all parties feel less in control of their own destinies, but he poses a particular problem for the Tories.

Until recently, Liberals were focused on comparing Scheer to his predecessor. When Stephen Harper reappeared on the international stage this year, Liberal fundraisers sent emails to supporters with subject lines like, “Guess who’s back!?”

Scheer took it in stride — despite offering a different style of leadership, he was elected on a promise to build on, rather than tear down, Harper’s legacy.

But the former prime minister has complicated the party’s approach to Canada-U.S. relations, and its response to the Liberal government’s negotiations on the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Trudeau hasn’t made it easy for the opposition to criticize his position: by “standing up” to Trump, said one former Conservative staffer, the prime minister decided to “raise the stakes, and essentially say, ‘Are you with Canada or against Canada?’”

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So the loudest criticisms have not come from current Conservative party leadership. It is Quebec Conservative MP Maxime Bernier who has continued to advocate ending Canada’s supply management system, which imposes the dairy tariffs that Trump seems fixated on. And it was Harper who earlier this summer reportedly suggested that Trudeau was deliberately stalling NAFTA talks for political reasons.

Still, Tory strategists are aware of voters’ tribal instincts. If the head of a rival tribe is throwing a spear at your leader, you will abhor anyone who helps him. That seems to be the logic behind Scheer’s comments to his caucus on June 20 — the day the introduced Martel. “President Donald Trump has made it very clear. He wants to move Canadian jobs to the United States. There’s no reason why Justin Trudeau should be helping him,” he said. “Canadians deserve a prime minister that will fight.”

Addressing the NAFTA stalemate is one of Scheer’s major political challenges. Compounding it are regular Liberal attempts to conflate Scheer and his Conservatives with Trump’s incendiary politics.

The Conservative party was accused of spreading “fake news” when it stretched the truth with several social-media posts earlier this summer — for example, erroneously claiming (though based on a news article that also contained the error) that taxpayers were footing the bill for a $7,500 swing set Trudeau bought for his kids. In fact, the National Capital Commission, responsible for maintaining the prime minister’s residence, is paying only the installation fee of just under $1,000.

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Photo by @CPC_HQ/Twitter

The party really shot itself in the foot, however, when an ad surfaced accusing Trudeau of setting off the cross-border migrant crisis: It portrayed a black man walking over Trudeau’s “#WelcomeToCanada” tweet towards a broken fence.

The ad was pulled. But, not for the first time in recent history, this gave Liberals ample opportunity to accuse Tories of dog-whistle politics — inevitably leading critics to draw parallels with Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric and, closer to home, with the far-right website The Rebel.

Before calling the shots on Scheer’s leadership bid, Marshall was listed as a “director” of that organization. But a senior Conservative source dismissed the website — which drew widespread condemnation for its favourable coverage of a violent alt-right rally in Charlottesville, Va., last year — saying it is not of major concern. Besides, it frequently criticizes Scheer.

For the most part, Tories chalk up accusations of racism or xenophobia to Liberal attempts to skew the narrative, just as they are quick to brush off suggestions from the political left that social conservatives among their ranks will force the party to reopen the abortion debate.

It’s ultimately unclear whether comparisons to the American right will hold much water with the Canadian public. As one source pointed out, comparisons between Trump and Ford seem more apt — and they didn’t hurt him in the Ontario election.

According to Rachel Curran, a policy director in prime minister Stephen Harper’s office who now works for his consulting firm, what Liberal messaging really shows is that they “are worried, rightfully worried, about what they see on the horizon for the next year.”

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To challenge Trudeau for his job, Scheer has to convince not only voters he has the fight in him, but also some members of his own party.

Just weeks before Parliament’s summer break, Scheer’s chief of staff, David McArthur, made a sudden departure. Around the same time, director of communications Jake Enwright took a private-sector job at Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei.

Both had been key players in the office of interim Conservative leader Rona Ambrose. Their departures created an opportunity for a major restructuring of senior leadership. It’s odd, several people familiar with the office said, that it took more than a year for Scheer to start doing that — and that most of the new faces are junior people coming in from MPs’ offices rather than senior people coming back to Parliament Hill because they think Scheer could form government.

By contrast, Ford and Jason Kenney, the leader of Alberta’s United Conservative Party, attracted experienced former Harper officials to their ranks as soon as they took the helms of their respective parties.

Photo by Fred Chartrand/The Canadian Press/File

Seasoned staff “always tend to get spread more thinly,” Curran said, when there are multiple conservative governments in the country. And top talent may come back to Ottawa. “When you’ve got politics in your blood and there’s an election that’s looming, it’s very hard not to jump in and get involved,” said Coates.

But some are worried that Scheer’s staffing problems could point to a larger issue: that Canadians still don’t know who he is, and those best positioned to help him aren’t yet convinced it’s worth their while to step in.

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The Conservative party has closed in on the Liberal lead in most recent polls. But according to the latest Nanos Research weekly tracking poll, which tries to monitor voter sentiment over time, Scheer himself isn’t nearly as competitive versus Trudeau. In results released Tuesday, only 26.6 per cent of respondents considered Scheer to be their “preferred prime minister,” compared with 39.2 per cent who chose Trudeau.

The same poll showed a similar spread when respondents were asked whether each has the “qualities of a good leader” — 55 per cent indicated Trudeau does, compared with 40 per cent for Scheer. Potentially more troubling, is that a third of respondents still aren’t ready to form any opinion of Scheer. A full 34 per cent said they were “unsure” of his leadership qualities, a figure only five percentage points lower than it was a year ago. (The margin of error on the rolling poll is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.)

Photo by Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press/File

Contributing to Scheer’s low public profile is what multiple sources said is his decentralized leadership style. That is seen as a positive thing for the experienced MPs on his front benches, who have more autonomy than they did under Harper. But it also means that outspoken members of Scheer’s “shadow cabinet” — finance critic Pierre Poilièvre, for example, and immigration critic Michelle Rempel — often steal the show.

And it means that Scheer is vulnerable to outbursts from MPs who are not bound by strict message control. Staffing issues aside, the single biggest internal problem for Scheer in the past couple of weeks has been figuring out what to do about Maxime Bernier — who narrowly lost his own bid for party leadership last year.

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In addition to the public relations nightmare of his position on supply management, Bernier’s recent statement that “ever more diversity” would be bad for Canada prompted social-media condemnation, a Liberal fundraising push and an assertion from Scheer that the former cabinet minister doesn’t speak for the party “on any issue.”

Nonetheless, senior sources continue to paint a rosy picture of the party’s prospects next year. Part of that confidence comes from Scheer’s track record at overcoming the odds. Even with Bernier dominating the polls during last year’s leadership election, Marshall was fond of pointing out how often — and how wrongly — his candidate had been underestimated in the past.