Boomerang Bergen

Twitter can be cruel. Case in point: poor Jason Kenney (@jasonkenney), an innocent American who has suffered with good humour as his account has been regularly flooded with abuse intended for Alberta’s premier @jkenney.

American actor Candice Bergen does not appear to have a Twitter account, and for that she must be congratulating herself daily. Tweets aimed at her namesake — interim federal Conservative Leader Candice Bergen — would surely be plaguing the Hollywood star these days. “Why,” she would have to wonder, “are people suddenly calling me “Murphy Brownshirt”?

Opposition leader Bergen is not exactly a political luminary. The 57-year-old Portage-Lisgar MP kept a fairly low profile before taking over as caretaker party head following last month’s abdication of Erin O’Toole. This was not even Bergen’s first grab for that rented crown — she also tried unsuccessfully to become interim leader after the departure of Stephen Harper.* She lost to Rona Ambrose then, but say this much for the Conservative party: it’s a land of opportunity for would-be interim bosses. At last Bergen has achieved her goal as throne-warmer-in-chief. And along with her temporary eminence has come greater scrutiny. Could Bergen be the harbinger of a more populist future for her party? Or will a more moderate candidate emerge, such as Jean Charest?

Once upon a time, celebrity name confusion was no problem for Bergen. Under her then-married name of Candice Hoeppner, she served as Stephen Harper’s Manitoba campaign manager in 2004. Backing the right horse paved the way for her own successful run in Portage-Lisgar four years later. A series of committee assignments during the Harper era eventually led her to a job as parliamentary secretary to Minister of Public Safety Vic Toews, assisting him in his quest to end the Liberals’ long gun registry. She was in that position when Toews defended his privacy-shredding, internet-policing Bill C-30 by saying that people “can either stand with us or the child predators.”

In July 2013, a few months after the government killed the bill, and a week after Toews resigned his position and retired from politics, Bergen reached her government zenith with a newly created cabinet position: minister of state for social development. In that role, she illustrated her concept of social development by attacking affordable daycare as government interference. By that time divorced from David Hoeppner, she had reverted to her birth name of Bergen.

Bergen has always occupied the socially conservative wing of the Conservative party. She is anti-abortion, supports de-funding the CBC, has appeared on Ezra Levant’s Rebel Media, and was among those MPs who initially voted against the conversion therapy bill. O’Toole’s decision to whip his party into line for the December 2021 passage of the anti-conversion therapy bill is said to have inspired the party coup against him. If so, Bergen’s status as a member of the so-called “conversion crew” was likely a factor in her successful bid for the interim job.

Unlike Conservative leadership hopeful Pierre Poilievre, who left his native Alberta behind to represent an Ottawa riding, Bergen has stuck close to home in her political career. Her Manitoba riding includes her birthplace of Morden, located in the heart of Mennonite country.

The region’s political inclinations can be inferred from a couple of facts. One is that the municipality of Stanley, which includes Morden, is the epicentre of anti-vaccine sentiment in Manitoba and perhaps the entire country. As of last August, the vaccination rate in Stanley was a shade over 21 per cent. Then there is the fact that Portage-Lisgar is one of just a handful of Prairie ridings where the People’s Party of Canada candidate finished second in 2021 balloting. While Bergen was in no danger, she did lose 18 per cent of her previous support, while PPC candidate Solomon Wiebe garnered 19 per cent of the local vote. Viewed in that light, Bergen’s support for the truckers’ convoy at least makes eminent political sense for her, if not for her party.

As interim Tory leader, Bergen has made sure the party’s stance on the Ottawa occupation aligns with her own. Days before she took over as temporary boss, Bergen argued in a leaked email that the Conservatives should not ask the convoy to leave the city. At a caucus meeting before O’Toole’s resignation, Bergen is reported to have echoed Donald Trump’s infamous statement about a murderous neo-Nazi rally by saying that there were “good people on both sides.”

Bergen has tried out Trump material before. Photos of the MP wearing a camouflage-style Trump MAGA cap have popped up all over the internet, raising questions that do not merely concern her judgement or fashion sense. A 2020 fundraising letter sent out by the Trump/Mike Pence campaign declared that the special camouflage MAGA hat is “for donors only.” Political donations by foreigners are illegal in the United States. Bergen has declined to say how she obtained the hat.

Another recent photo, posted on Conservative MP Marilyn Gladu’s Facebook page on Jan. 31, showed a smiling Bergen and Gladu in a restaurant booth with two convoy members, one of whom is organizer Chris Barber, who would be arrested Feb. 18 and later granted bail on condition that he leave Ottawa.

As Opposition leader, Bergen has taken up the cudgels for the anti-mandate crowd in the House of Commons, attacking the government House leader as a “mansplainer” for pointing out that U.S. rules require cross-border truckers to vaccinate, regardless of what Canada does.

And she fell afoul of parliamentary procedure when she tried to immediately revoke the passage of the Emergencies Act.

But Bergen herself would soon revoke her support for the Ottawa hot-tub-and-bouncy-castle crowd, eventually telling the freedom warriors to dismantle their barriers and go home. The unpopularity of the occupation finally made continued support untenable for even the most devoted of its federal backers.

Bergen is unlikely to pay any personal political price for her support of the truckers’ convoy, which remains popular among her base. The question for the Conservative Party of Canada is whether it will continue along the path its interim leader has set. If so, Bergen’s brief spell as leader may yet have more lasting consequences.

* Story updated on March 9 at 9:30 a.m. to correct information about when Bergen initially sought to be interim leader.