October 4th, 2019
Yeah, it’s actually kind of shocking how bad Scheer is at Politics 101 when he’s essentially a professional politician.
He writes a blog in 2005 or 2006 criticizing Michaelle Jean’s dual citizenship when she’s about to be chosen Governor-General. He watches his boss and mentor, Harper, criticize Mulcair for his dual citizenship and Ignatieff for having the audacity to work abroad as an academic in some of the world’s most prestigious universities.
Through all of that, Scheer never clues in that, should he have any ambition to climb out of the backbenches, he might want to do something about the dual citizenship. Quietly.
He becomes Speaker of the House. He runs for the party leadership and wins. Still nothing. By the time he clues in that maybe he should do something about it, it’s the August before an October election. One can only hope that whatever clerical work he performed at the insurance bureau was done with more dispatch and urgency than he handled his own personal affairs (and pre-political career).
And the thing is … there’s obviously nothing wrong with dual citizenship. In fact, in a lot of people, it’s the sign of an interesting family heritage, or an interesting life lived. Not in Scheer’s case, however. He’s not only not-interesting, he’s so not-interesting that, as Dave notes, he actually chose to brag about being … an insurance agent … to build up his private-sector street cred (kind of like Harper’s bio always included mention of his tour-of-duty Calgary oil company mailroom). And then it turned out he wasn’t really an insurance agent, but more like the front-counter person who hands you your new pink slips when you renew your policies once a year. Honest work – nothing wrong with it at all – but federal politics is quite a step up from that. He should have thank his lucky stars when he was on the backbench. Ask some house questions. Serve on a few committees. Vote when Harper tells you to. Fly back to Regina in time for Rider games on the weekend. Ten years later, retire and live off the pension. But that damn Speaker’s Chair has a way of feeding the ego.
Now? He’s an underqualified insurance clerk with an unremarkable 15-year legislative record running for PM who’s now got to talk about … in the middle of a damn election … signing up for the U.S. armed services draft and, probably, show us some tax returns he would have had to have filed in the U.S. as a condition of citizenship (that reason alone is one a few of my friends with U.S. parents have never bothered to get dual citizenship – it’s a paperwork hassle).
Again – all things he should have dealt with years ago. Unfinished homework assignments, essentially. I haven’t made up my mind on Trudeau, but I’ll take a teacher over an insurance clerk anytime.
Scott in Grande Prairie