AHC: Make Tom Wappel leader of the Liberal Party

Wappel was a social conservative, but fiscally liberal, whose comments against gay marriage have provoked some people calling on Chretien to expel him from the Liberal caucus when Chretien was PM. How could you get someone like him to be the leader of the Liberal party?

Inspired by @CanadianTory 's TL
 
I think you'd need Canadian society to be WAY more religious than it was in the latter 20th Century for this to work.

The Liberal Party Of Canada was the default party of Roman Catholics, back in the day when Catholics were a) somewhat marginalized(partly through demographic connection with the French and other ethnic groups), and b) fairly devout. As Catholics became more mainstream, they became less inclined to take shelter under the protective wing of the Liberal Party, and the Liberals thus went looking for other disgruntled members of society(women, youth, "new Canadians", nowadays glbqt) from which to pull support. Since at least some of these groups had agendas that ran counter to the social-conservative one, most Canadian SoCons(including Catholics) wandered rightward, eventually finding a home(albeit somewhat awkwardly) in the Conservative Party.

So, this is one of those OPs that kind of shows the limitations of Great Man-based AH scenarios. People like Wappel and Roseanna Skoke might have been able to get elected under the Liberal banner in their home constituencies. But winning the leadership would have been utterly counter to the general nature of the Liberal Party as it developed from about the late 1960s onward.
 
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Thinking it over, this maybe could work, IF you were to have some cataclysmic event that made the political landscape unrecognizable.

Say, the Liberals suffer an even bigger defeat than the one under Ignatieff in 2011, and this is repeated in at least one more election. So the NDP takes the place of the Liberals as the main left-of-centre party, moving itself relatively to the right in the process. The Liberals are thus left as a shell of their former self, vulnerable to entryist takeovers from various interested parties, including social-conservatives. If the remaining few MPs are people like Tom Wappel, that increases the likelihood of SoCons being the successful raiders.

To make things interesting, have David Orchard(Canadian nationalist, SoCon) leading one flank of the takeover. This gives the raid a bit more left-wing credibility(of the nationalist variety), and the realigned Liberals can claim to still be fighting the good fight of Walter Gordon and John Turner(1988 version).

Like I say, this is basically a completely re-altered political landscape.
 
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