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It's been about four months since Andrew Scheer became leader of the Conservative Party, and in the time since, there is a definite sense that the party is approaching a state of omnishambles.  And I use the term advisedly it comes from the UK series The Thick Of It, which Scheer would appreciate in his bid to rebrand his critic roles with their Westminster-equivalent "shadow ministers," and gets very insistent that we refer to them as such.

What is striking for those of us who live and work in the Ottawa bubble is that there appears to be a crisis of competence brewing within the Office of the Leader of the Opposition.  The people who knew how to manage things in the House of Commons seem to have fled along with Rona Ambrose, and we are left with a whole lot of bumbling around, crashing around from angry populist sound-bite to angry populist sound-bite, stroking outrage whenever they can find it while at the same time insisting that they are looking to practice "positive politics."

Question Period has become shambolic.  Not only is Scheer unable to look like he's seriously holding the government to account, unable to deliver questions without a) reading, b) smiling, and c) speaking in a breathy cadence, but tactically his choices make no sense.  For the first four-and-a-half days, they stuck to a single topic that was not only poorly managed from a substantive point of view, but they ignored vast swaths of other policy areas where the government should be held to account.  Instead, it's the same question about twenty-five times a day, with nothing to show for it but a handful of media clips that will go directly to YouTube and Facebook.  And they're not even good questions about the topic of the proposed tax changes, for which there are important questions to be asked about some of the unintended consequences that have been identified.  Instead, we've had little more than insinuation and allegation about plans to destroy the economy by a tax-grab to pay for government expenditures (never mind the fact that the money generated from these changes will be a rounding error), and wildly overblown numbers that don't reflect the situation on the ground.  Whenever they talk about the "73 percent tax rate" that these changes could bring to some private corporation owners, what they neglect to say is that this would only be the case for those making $150,000 in Ontario very much not the small business owners they showcase in their questions.  Add to that, Scheer's "positive politics" that totally aren't about class warfare or the politics of envy seem to be focused pretty much exclusively on the family fortunes of the Prime Minister and the Minister of Finance, with further insinuations of feathered nests and now conspiracy theories about how these changes are done for the benefits of driving small businesses to take out private pensions from Morneau-Shepell.

There has been a focus on form over substance, starting with Scheer's picks for critic portfolios.  One might think that someone who fanboys over Westminster as much as Scheer does might try to introduce some changes into the way that his critics operate in order to better replicate the shadow minister system of the UK.  That would imply putting a great deal of more thought into regional, linguistic and gender balance in the creation of a "shadow cabinet" that could reasonably form a government, and ensure that they are dedicated to being actual shadow ministers doing the job full-time, not attending committees, working to ensure that they get tours of departments and regular briefings from the civil servants, as well as putting forward a shadow budget that would be a credible document to demonstrate how an alternate government would operate should the current government fall and they be asked to form a government in their stead.

But none of this has happened.  Instead of creating a credible shadow cabinet, Scheer has created starring roles for his deputy leader and Quebec lieutenant, while giving important critic portfolios to MPs of dubious credentials, typified by his choice of Pierre Poilievre as finance critic.  Critics are not only on committees, but Scheer has been insistent on putting those critics in the chairs of opposition-controlled committees, meaning that those committees are not operating as independently as those in Westminster, but that the more neutral position of chair is occupied by someone who is supposed to be the point person for holding the government to account, which contradicts the chair's role of being the facilitator of discussion and arbiter of rules being followed.

Nowhere is this more prevalent an issue than with Status of Women committee, where the Liberals chose to walk out rather than accept Scheer's choice for chair, critic Rachael Harder, because of her expressed pro-life views and actions.  It was a deliberately provocative move that Scheer has done to try and cast the Liberals and NDP in an intolerant light and in being against free speech, but in doing so, he has not only betrayed his promise not to re-open the abortion issue, but he has tried to cast this as the Liberals' attempt to distract from the tax change issue.  The problem with that is that Scheer created the very distraction that he's accusing the Liberals of, scoring on his own net.

I am forced to wonder if there are any experienced staffers left in Scheer's office, or if the last of them fled for greener pastures when he took over.  It's also a reminder that for a party that spent the better part of a decade trying to burn down the institutions of our parliament, they seem terribly ill-equipped to have to deal with their more-or-less normal operations once again (not that the Liberals are doing a stellar job with those very same institutions, let it be said).  I would very much like us to have a functioning Official Opposition in this country, but right now, I'm only filled with a sense of despair for the future of our parliament.

Photo Credit: Huffington Post

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