It’s finally here. The Conservative Party of Canada will announce its next leader in Ottawa tonight after candidates and supporters spent the past seven months in its third leadership contest in six years. As the candidates wait at the finish line, party members have their eyes not only on who will win, but also on the margin of victory. Expectations are high for veteran conservative Pierre Poilievre, who ran a populist campaign around the theme of “liberty” in his bid to win the top prize. Can he pull off a rare first-ballot victory? “I think it can,” said Gary Keller, a former Conservative executive whose roles included working as chief of staff to Rona Ambrose, who served as interim party leader after Prime Minister Stephen Harper resigned. Poilievre would be the first to do so since Harper, who won on the first ballot in 2004 in the party’s first leadership race. Such a victory would be good for party unity because it signals a clear direction, Keller said. “They are all united behind one person.” The party is using a points system to count the more than 400,000 votes cast before Tuesday’s polling deadline. Candidates are ranked based on the percentage of the vote they receive in each of Canada’s 338 electoral contests. Whoever scores more than 50 percent of the points wins. It also uses a ranked ballot, meaning members mark their preferred choice for leader from first to last. If there is no clear winner the first time the ballots are counted, the candidate who receives the least support is eliminated and the votes received from backers who chose them first are transferred to the candidates who were chosen second. In 2020, it took three rounds of counting for former leader Erin O’Toole to cross the threshold of victory. In the crowded 2017 race, Andrew Scheer managed just one victory against presumptive front-runner Maxime Bernier on the 13th ballot. But now things are different. Poilievre faces only four other candidates and throughout the race has drawn crowds of thousands with his stances against inflation, the COVID-19 vaccine mandate and all things Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. He used that momentum to sell 300,000 memberships, his campaign said, and leveraged the social media he spent years building to reach supporters and gather data. Of the other 118 members of the party, 62 support him. In recent weeks, Poilievre’s campaign has turned its attention to aggressively making sure those registered to vote for him actually vote — part of a general ethos of taking nothing for granted. If they ever needed a lesson in the importance of this, they only needed to look at the fortunes of Bernier in 2017 and Peter McKay in 2020, who were considered front-runners when they ran for leader but lost in the end. One of the key battlegrounds in this year’s contest is Quebec, where Poilievre’s main competition is the province’s former premier, Jean Charest. Charest spent the contest re-introducing himself to a new generation of Conservatives after being out of federal politics for more than 20 years and leaving provincial office in 2012. Charest’s campaign said it believes it has enough support in Quebec, Ontario and Atlantic Canada to secure the points it needs to win, a victory the campaign admits would be narrow. Another factor Charest’s campaign is relying on is the support from party members brought by another centrist candidate, Patrick Brown. The mayor of Brampton, Ont. he was disqualified from the race in July on charges that he may have violated federal election law, which he has denied. Brown had focused on providing support to the country’s immigrant communities, a strategy Charest has adopted since the impeachment. With Brown’s name still on the ballot, voters who ranked him first will see their votes count toward their second-choice choices. Keller said he’s also curious to see how Leslyn Lewis performs. The MP surprised many with her strong showing when she entered the 2020 contest as a relative unknown, then finished third behind O’Toole to win Saskatchewan. As in the previous race, she benefits from support in the party’s well-mobilized social conservative wing, in part because of her opposition to abortion. But Keller said with fewer candidates in the competition, she and Poilievre are fishing out of the same pond. They have overlapping appeal, for different reasons. “There’s a group of people who can say, ‘I really like Leslyn Lewis,’” she said. “I like what he stands for. But I really love Pierre Poilievre. So he’ll be my second choice, but Pierre is my first choice.” Rural Ontario MP Scott Aitchison and former Ontario legislator Roman Baber are the two newest faces of the race. Aitchison, a former small-town mayor who was first elected to parliament in 2019, campaigned on restoring decency to politics and called out the conspiracy theories that have become common in some conservative circles, such as those around the World Economic Forum and vaccinations against COVID-19. Baber was best known before the leadership race for being kicked out of Premier Doug Ford’s caucus after speaking out against COVID-19 lockdowns in January 2021 — a move he spent the campaign pointing to as evidence he was following his beliefs. The final ranking of all five will be revealed at an event in downtown Ottawa in a more somber atmosphere than originally planned, reflecting the country’s mourning after the queen’s death on Thursday. This report by The Canadian Press was first published on September 10, 2022.
