“Now who do I put first on my ballot?”
Reactions to Kevin O’Leary’s April 26 announcement that he was not only dropping out of the race for leader of the Conservative Party of Canada but endorsing his main rival, Maxime Bernier, have run the gamut from glee to heartbreak. But the above remark, posted on Facebook by a young O’Leary fan, neatly sums up the conundrum his 35,000-plus supporters face just as ballots start arriving in their mailboxes: do they follow the Dragon and go to Bernier or vote for someone else? They can vote for up to ten of the 13 candidates on the ranked ballot. It all seemed so simple when “Mr. Wonderful” was the only name they recognized. Now they have to find out who all the others are and what they stand for.
We ought to feel sympathy for these folks, many of whom purchased CPC memberships for the first time because they liked the man, if not the movement. The qualities they admired in O’Leary – like wealth, celebrity, over-the-top bombast, perhaps even his English unilingualism – are mostly absent in the remaining frontrunners, all of whom are that maligned archetype, the career politician.
Chances are a lot of O’Leary insta-Tories will just toss their ballots and memberships and return to watching Fox News explain how President Donald Trump is Making America Great Again. But in the weeks ahead they will all be relentlessly bombarded by propaganda from the other campaigns, and many will likely find echoes of O’Learyism in Bernier’s libertarian, less-government, more freedom platform. It’s hard to see many being persuaded to back establishment candidates like Andrew Scheer, the aspiring heir to Stephen Harper’s legacy, or Erin O’Toole, who as of this writing has the endorsement of 29 of his caucus colleagues. Kellie Leitch’s noisy populism might resonate with some O’Learyites, but her focus on national security and protecting cultural values was entirely absent from his agenda.
Michael Chong and Lisa Raitt are the only other candidates with any hope of winning, although most polling pegs their support in single digits. Still, whatever the polls suggest, a ranked ballot with so many names on it makes it all but impossible to predict the result. Whoever ultimately wins will face the daunting task of trying to prop up a big blue tent that has developed a few tears over the course of the long campaign.
The mainstream media have effectively crowned Bernier already, and on the face of it, he has the hallmarks of a winner: his fans (like O’Leary’s) are young, vocal, connected, and fluent in Internet culture, which bodes well for his ability to challenge Justin Trudeau’s wide appeal among Millennials. He has run on a bold and ambitiously conservative fiscal and economic plan that stands in stark contrast to his predecessor’s careful incrementalism. And as the only candidate in the top four from Quebec, he claims with some plausibility that he is the only one who can actually deliver Quebec.
A Mainstreet poll conducted on behalf of iPolitics shortly before O’Leary’s exit (or #Olexit, as one journalist cheekily dubbed it on Twitter) found that Leitch was the second choice of most O’Leary supporters, and that for the first time in the campaign, Scheer had surpassed Bernier in first-choice support. The Bernier camp then released its own post-O’Leary poll that – naturally – put their man first at 35 percent and Scheer second at 19 percent, followed by Leitch (11.3 percent) O’Toole (9.8 percent), Chong (7.9 percent) and Raitt (6.5 percent).
Within the party rank and file, there are rumblings of uncertainty about the ‘Albertan from Quebec.’ What’s the problem? He has baggage, certainly, from his early days as a Harper cabinet minister, when he earned a reputation as a lazy dilettante with a weakness for pulchritudinous biker molls. But the 54-year-old seems to have matured, and his signature policy proposals – phase out supply management, end corporate welfare, massive tax and spending cuts, wipe out the deficit, remove barriers to interprovincial trade, introduce competition into the telecommunications industry by scrapping the CRTC, – are as rock-ribbed conservative as they come. Some, as Andrew Coyne pointed out approvingly in a recent column for the National Post, have been widely discussed and recommended by conservative policy experts, but they’ve been framed as radical by both Bernier’s opponents and his own campaign. It is not difficult to imagine the Liberal-NDP attack machines portraying them as barbaric assaults on an entire herd of sacred cows in the next election campaign, which is why many Conservatives are wondering if the Bernier doctrine is too radical for a Canadian electorate with seemingly little appetite for real change.
By contrast, Leitch has stuck to a single, simple message since becoming the first candidate to officially enter the race 13 long months ago: namely, that Canada needs a more rigorous screening process for immigrants and visitors in order to protect our shared values. Protect them from what, or whom? She has maintained all along that her proposed Canadian values test isn’t directed at a specific ethnic or religious group, leaving it to her supporters at The Rebel and the general public to assume (correctly) she’s talking about Islamic fundamentalism. Canadians are reasonably concerned about border security when refugees from the “Trump terror” in the U.S. and real terror elsewhere are massing at our borders – and crossing them – in ever larger numbers. And notwithstanding Trudeau’s airy fantasy of Canada as the world’s first “post-national” state, it is reasonable for Leitch to calculate there is still a big constituency for Canadian nationalism. But the fact that her ideas have been widely criticized as anti-immigrant and excessively nativist, even by her caucus colleagues, does not inspire confidence in her ability to garner support among mainstream voters.
As noted, O’Toole has the endorsement of 29 caucus colleagues and a host of sitting and former Conservative MPPs, MLAs and Senators, all of whom cite his experience in the Royal Canadian Air Force, his steady performance in Harper’s cabinet, and his substantive experience in the private sector (as a corporate lawyer) as evidence of his leadership chops. But popularity with party colleagues is apparently cheap currency in modern politics; it didn’t prevent Patrick Brown from defeating Christine Elliott from the leadership of the Ontario PCs or Donald Trump from beating a host of Republican stalwarts to become the GOP candidate and president.
O’Toole’s policies show rare breadth and depth: he is one of the few candidates to offer a credible conservative approach to reconciliation with Canada’s First Nations and a vision for Canada’s Arctic that goes beyond the vague conceit of “the true north strong and free.” His comprehensive platform offers detailed policy on defense, resource development and healthcare, that would be marketable across the voter spectrum. But can a prematurely balding middle-aged (44) white guy compete against Canada’s hirsute selfie-superstar Trudeau? Some members have doubts.
And what of Scheer, who finally seemed to be gathering momentum prior to O’Leary’s departure and now seems the odds-on favourite to benefit most from an anybody-but-Bernier movement, if such a phenomenon takes hold in the campaign. On the trail, he has demonstrated the same cheerful charm and bi-partisan appeal that got him elected as Speaker of the House in 2011. He’s the youngest of the frontrunners at 37 (a consideration for those who think a Conservative return to power is a two-election project) and the only westerner. The father of five is presumably also the most Catholic candidate, which should endear him to the sizeable religious faction in the party. His platform is an inoffensive mix of conservative boilerplate – no carbon cax, support for Israel, freer trade – and libertarian-lite: enshrine property rights in the Charter, deny federal funding to academic institutions that curtail free speech, and end corporate welfare.
Scheer has maintained all along that he’s the only leader who appeals to conservatives of all stripes without spooking the non-partisan swing voters the party needs to beat the Liberals. There’s little to get upset about – as he told the Post’s John Ivison, he “didn’t get chased off of anybody’s lawn [in the last election]” – but little to get excited about either. Scheer is promising change, but not too much; an extension of the pragmatism of the Harper years, but with a warmer, friendlier visage. Will it be enough to woo Canadians come election time? That may depend more on how badly Trudeau disappoints them than on anything Scheer does or doesn’t do in the intervening months.
Indeed, an April 27th poll by Abacus Data suggests that it doesn’t matter who wins the leadership; unless Trudeau says or does something far worse than tripling his projected deficits, holidaying in the Caribbean on a private island, praising dictators, or reminiscing about how his father used his “connections” to make a pot charge “go away” for his brother, it won’t be enough to convince Canadians to hold the Liberals to one term. The poll found that faced with a choice between Trudeau and seven possible Conservative leaders, including all those discussed in this article, more than 60 percent of respondents chose Trudeau in every single instance. That survey also calculated the “push and pull” score for each candidate – that is, their ability to woo erstwhile Liberal voters to the Conservatives – and found that some (Leitch and O’Toole) would actually push more voters away than they would pull towards the party.
So where does this leave party members still struggling to finalize their ballot ranking? Perhaps it’s more important to remember that regardless who wins, one-term governments are rare in Canada’s history, and failure in 2019 does not mean Conservatives are destined to spend eternity in political purgatory. The objective of the leadership contest, from this perspective, will be to do no harm and choose the candidate who will keep the party in contention, while positioning it for a return to power in 2023.
