Aaron Wherry· CBC News· Posted: Oct 04, 2019 4:50 PM ET

Andrew Scheer was not well known to Canadians when this election campaign began. For him, that wasn't necessarily an insurmountable problem.

But now he has spent nearly four weeks of the campaign struggling to explain to Canadians who he is, and muddling through a series of identity crises in public.

When he ran for the Conservative leadership, Scheer happily accepted the "Stephen Harper with a smile" label. With that as his political identity, the Conservatives sought to further define their leader as an average guy who grew up in a middle-class household.

Scheer (we were told) is a guy like you, or least like someone you might know. In other words, he's not Justin Trudeau.

In political terms, that persona has its merits. But this is Scheer's first election as party leader and, before winning the leadership, he was not a particularly prominent public figure. As a result, his character and personal history had not been poked and prodded in any serious way by journalists and political rivals before this fall.

Too often over the last seven weeks, he has seemed to crumble on contact.

Fast attacks, slow response

The Liberals took the first poke on Aug. 22, when they posted video of a speech Scheer gave in 2005 opposing same-sex marriage. Scheer didn't immediately step forward to address what he'd said 14 years ago. By the time he did talk about it with reporters, the Liberals had posted another video — this one raising questions about what Scheer had told anti-abortion activists during his campaign for Conservative leader.

When Scheer faced the television cameras on Aug. 30, he accused the Liberals of "dredging up divisive issues." But he didn't do much to account for what he'd said in 2005, and he struggled to clarify how he would handle matters related to abortion if he were prime minister now. A Scheer government, he said, would neither introduce nor support legislation related to abortion — but he stopped short of saying that Conservative backbenchers would be prevented from moving forward with abortion-related measures.

While questions about those issues were left to linger, others emerged.

First, there were the questions about whether he had misrepresented himself when he said he'd worked as an insurance broker. As it turned out, he had not been licensed as a broker, and he'd only worked in an insurance company's office for "six or seven months."

Asked by the CBC's Rosemary Barton this week whether he should just admit to being a "career politician," Scheer still insisted on the value of his apparently limited experience in the private sector.
During that same interview (part of CBC's Face to Face sessions with the major party leaders), Scheer again declined to elaborate or reflect on his opinion of same-sex marriage, or explain why he declines to march in Pride parades. (The parade-related questions for Scheer extended to the climate change strikes, which he also avoided last Friday.)

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Alot of stink coming out of Andrew mouth he just can't be trusted