Andrew Scheer

Andrew Scheer is a Member of Parliament for Regina-Qu'Appelle and served as Leader of the Conservative Party of Canada from 2017 to 2020. He led the Conservatives in the 2019 federal election against a scandal-weakened Trudeau government that had just endured the SNC-Lavalin affair, the resignation of Jody Wilson-Raybould, and the political consequences of the blackface revelations — and lost. Winning a minority of seats against a government in that condition represented one of the more significant failures of political opposition in modern Canadian history. Post-defeat analysis identified several factors: Scheer's social conservative positions on same-sex marriage and abortion, which he maintained ambiguously rather than addressing directly; his dual Canadian-American citizenship, which became a campaign issue; his management of internal party financing; and a general sense that he was not able to project the stature and decisiveness that the leader of a government-in-waiting requires. He remains in Parliament as a backbench and committee MP without a shadow cabinet role, having stepped back from the front lines of national opposition after the 2019 defeat and the subsequent leadership change to Erin O'Toole and then Pierre Poilievre. His contribution in the current Parliament is as a constituency MP and a committee participant — work that is valuable and necessary but considerably less prominent than his earlier national role. His tenure as leader illustrates that political talent sufficient to win a party leadership race is not always sufficient to win a general election — and that the personal credibility of a leader matters enormously in campaigns where character is scrutinized at a level no internal leadership process can replicate.