Conservative Lisa Raitt loses seat but says party is 'on the rise' under Andrew Scheer

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Justin Trudeau was doing his best to sound optimistic at his victory party on Monday night. 

But Canadian voters have reduced the prime minister and his Liberals to a minority in Parliament. That leaves them looking for opposition support before any of their legislation can take flight. 

And on Tuesday morning, Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer promised his supporters that he is ready to clip Trudeau's wings.

Lisa Raitt is ready to support that challenge. But the Conservative deputy leader will have to do it from outside of the House of Commons. Raitt lost the Ontario riding of Milton to the Liberal's giant-killer, the Olympic paddler Adam van Koeverden. 

As It Happens host Carol Off spoke to Raitt about the upset and the future of the Conservatives under the leadership of Andrew Scheer. Here is part of their conversation.

What happened last night?

Well, clearly the Liberals certainly got a message that Canadians were not going to give them an automatic majority and the Conservatives did better than they did in 2015.

So we're on the rise and they are on the fall and it's going to be an important Parliament for the next couple of years.

What happened to you?

Well, you know, I'm grateful that I made it through 2015. I was the lone holdout from that giant red wave that came through the GTA and as a result I was able to represent Miltonians for another four years.

And, quite frankly, we ran a great campaign. I'm so grateful to all my volunteers and we put the effort in. But, you know, the voter always gets it right. They chose to go in the direction with Adam van Koeverden and all I can do is thank them for the best 11 years that I've been able to experience.

We we won't see you in the House of Commons. But last night we heard Andrew Scheer sending a message to Mr. Trudeau that, he says, when the Liberal government falls, Conservatives will be ready to win. Does that mean we'll be seeing a lot more of the bitter partisanship that marked this campaign? Is that going to continue in the future for all of us?

I believe that Canadians set out to give somebody a minority. Whether it was us or the Liberals, they clearly had decided that nobody was going to have a majority in the country and that they wanted to see us work together.

And I think every party, every single one of the parties now, if I could say speaking from the outside, are going to have to have that in the back of their mind as they plot their course because Canadians are watching and they want to see people work with one another.

But they also want to see the parties uphold the values that they voted for. So I think our leader, Andrew Scheer, set the course very well last night when he said that we'll be ready and we're going to hold you to account.

We'll have to see what the Liberals and the NDP decide — how they're going to approach Parliament coming up.

We've seen in the election 65 per cent of Canadians voted from parties on the left or the centre left. And the one thing in common among them is that they were very passionate about fighting climate change. One party did not have a platform that was passionate about fighting climate change and that was the Conservatives. Do you think that that hurt you?

It's interesting because if you look at the Liberal platform and our platform the biggest difference was of course the carbon tax. But there were some similarities in there.

We both talked about the home renovation tax credit and we both talked about using technology and investment in technology and we've all talked about the importance of sending our products around the world.

Carbon tax was the big divider of course. We still don't believe that it was something that's going to help reduce emissions. But nonetheless, we're going to go forward in a minority Parliament and deal with the issues that are brought to the fore as they come up from the government.

Do you think if you had been more on top of the climate change file — been more passionate, more determined about it — you might have won last night?

Lot of what ifs. And I know that there's going to be smart folks in Ontario looking at all of the individual ridings to see what would have changed the vote or if you could have changed the vote.

So it's hard to say right now what would have made the difference. But I know that going forward we're going to try to find those things that will make the difference in the next election.

Do you think that people did not vote Conservative because the platform was, as [National Post] columnist Chris Selley was saying today, that it was "a dumb, pandering, unambitious mess that reeked of focus grouping?" 

If you say focus grouping what I would say is talking to Canadians in grassroots is an important part of understanding what they're looking for from a government or a potential government. And I think that is exactly the way that you should move forward.

When we did our policy platform we developed a very strong framework and reached out to every constituency and we reached out to every MP and candidate to put forth their ideas and what we put forward was an amalgamation of it all.

We'll have to take a look at whether or not it resonated with certain parts of the country. But we also won more seats than we did last time so certainly it did resonate. And the Liberals, they're held to a minority. They lost seats.

For many Conservatives you were the progressive face of the party. You were the one who would be in the Pride parade when Andrew Scheer and others would not. You were the one who would speak up for the social agenda. You were the one, when we interviewed you just some weeks ago, you said that the reason why you knew the Conservative government of Andrew Scheer would never re-open the abortion debate was because, "you wouldn't let that happen." So who plays that role now without you?

Well, I may not be elected in Parliament but I'm still a card-carrying Conservative and I'm going to be working within the grassroots that I have here in Milton, Ont.

I will be making my concerns known and my voice known if I see anything that's happening that I'm not in agreement with — just like every other Conservative can across the country.

It's going to be up to other members of Parliament to determine exactly what they're going to bring to the House of Commons from their community. 

Do you think Andrew Scheer should step down?

No, not at all.

I think he added to the seat count. That's what he was expected [to do] and that's what we anticipated.

He also held Mr. Trudeau to a minority and we also now have far more manoeuvrability on committees to allow us to ask questions and get answers that we were unable to get before because of the majority control of committees.

So I think that mission accomplished and who would have thought in 2015 that they wouldn't have had an automatic eight years.

Written by Kevin Robertson, Chloe Shantz-Hilkes and John McGill. Interview produced by Kevin Robertson. Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.