Of the 13 Conservative party leadership candidates who gathered in Toronto to face fate this past weekend, three can be safely and reliably labelled ‘social conservatives’.

Brad Trost, a brick-faced dolt from southern Saskatchewan, believes gay marriage is a Trojan horse for both sodomy and rampant socialism. Ontario’s own Pierre Lemieux, meanwhile, once stood up in Parliament to ask God “to guide us in our efforts to defend the holy sacrament of marriage as a union between a man and a woman.” Lemieux’s cause may have been righteous, but his timing was off: Gay marriage had been legal for over a year when he uttered these words.

Because they focused on harvesting their own piece of the social conservative vote, neither saw fit to drop out and support the other. Together, Trost and Lemieux received just under 16 per cent of the estimated 141,000 ballots cast.

Then there’s Andrew Scheer. Throughout the campaign, the 38-year-old former Speaker of the House of Commons hovered in the bleeder seats of the campaign, grinning and glad-handing just beyond the media’s gaze. That Scheer was able to master his party’s system of preferential ballots — a process seemingly as random as a game of Plinko — is testament to his abilities as a politician.

And, yes, his politics are socially conservative. He is pro-life and anti-euthanasia. He supports home schooling and doesn’t seem to have much time for the gays. He’s probably a climate change skeptic, at least when it comes to spending tax dollars on defeating it.

This was enough to send critics of the Conservative party into varying stages of apoplexy. Columnist Scott Gilmore labelled Scheer a “pro-Brexit social conservative.” Chief Trudeau-whisperer Gerald Butts wrote that the “Canadian anti-choice movement is on the verge of selecting the new Conservative Party leader.” NDP leadership hopeful Niki Ashton equated Sheer with Donald Trump, a comparison that is positively Trumpian in its bluster and laziness.

Harper was less Christian Mullah than benign, status quo Conservative liberal. Scheer probably will mosey down a political path similar to the one his predecessor took. Harper was less Christian Mullah than benign, status quo Conservative liberal. Scheer probably will mosey down a political path similar to the one his predecessor took.

We’ve seen this movie before — on March 20, 2004, to be exact, when Conservative party delegates elected as their leader an upstart policy wonk named Stephen Harper. His critics begged us not to be fooled by Harper’s economic conservative veneer, lest we overlook the social conservative heart beating underneath. He was against abortion and assisted dying. He believed in traditional marriage. He said “God Bless Canada” at the end of his speeches.

This “born-again Prime Minister,” as journalist Marci McDonald labeled him in her overheated tome The Armageddon Factor, was (we were told) bent on fomenting nothing short of a theocracy in this country. “Harper [and] a small band of Christian activists with ties to his government has won a series of policy and personnel concessions destined to change the Canadian political landscape that will be difficult to reverse,” McDonald wrote in 2010.

Reality has been far more banal. Harper was less Christian Mullah than benign, status quo Conservative liberal. His record ran to a decrease in military spending, a return to deficit budgets and an orgy of patronage, particularly when it came to naming senators to the red velvet chamber. Access to abortion, meanwhile, remained as free and unfettered as it was the day Harper first took office.

Scheer probably will mosey down a political path similar to the one his predecessor took. His faith may be Roman Catholic; politically, he worships at the feet of Harper. His entire political career was honed under the tutelage of our 22nd prime minister. Scheer watched as Harper paid lip service to the social conservatives who helped propel him into office, then ultimately stymied their progress at nearly every turn. Evidently, Harper liked what he saw in Scheer enough to nominate him for Speaker, a role requiring pragmatism and ideological flexibility above all else.

Yes, Scheer’s rise to the leadership is due in part to the social conservative vote. But he won thanks to a larger swath of Erin O’Toole moderates who picked Scheer as their second choice. Scheer bested Maxime Bernier in parts of Quebec thanks not to the word of God but to the province’s milk producers — who didn’t like Bernier’s take on supply management.

Scheer even failed to secure the Campaign Life coalition endorsement, the gold standard of the religious right. (That particular honour went to Trost and Lemieux.) The group took Scheer’s election with cautious optimism, much as it did with Harper in 2004. “The CLC will work to ensure that [Scheer’s] campaign promises are fulfilled,” the group wrote in a press release.

Scheer’s critics and alleged allies probably shouldn’t hold their breath. An apparently fearsome bunch, social conservatives believe their ideology stems from the word of God. As such, Harper treated them as a bloc of useful idiots.

All Harper did was convince them that he counted himself a member of their flock. How telling it is that Scheer has already done the same.

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