Outcome of leadership race test for Conservative party, candidates

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It’s getting the party in fighting shape for the 2019 election.

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“This has been a long leadership race, but the hardest work is still ahead,” said former Conservative cabinet minister James Moore.

Front-runner Maxime Bernier has unabashedly campaigned on a pledge to undo one of the existing policies of the party — support for supply management.

Should he win, he said he’ll spend the next year persuading party members to change their minds, as will any of the other candidates whose proposals contradict the policy handbook, as that document comes up for review at next year’s convention.

But the winner will also have to get all the former competitors onside, making sure everyone accepts the results of the race.

Some campaigns are already muttering about the potential for high numbers of spoiled ballots to have an effect and meanwhile there’s the outstanding question of who, exactly, was behind the 2,729 ineligible memberships found on the rolls.

The party did meet Elections Canada and turned over all their materials from their review, but the Commissioner of Canada Elections won’t say whether or not there is a formal investigation in the works.

The mere suggestion of a problem makes party brass anxious, as chief among the objectives of this race has been to present Canadians with a refreshed party, one free from the baggage of its years in government that included run-ins over election laws and political finance.

On Thursday, a door finally closed on one of those — the federal ethics commissioner ruled that then-prime minister Stephen Harper’s former chief of staff broke the law when he cut a cheque to repay Mike Duffy’s Senate expenses.

Harper won’t be at the weekend event, staying away to keep the spotlight off him and on whomever inherits the party he helped found.

Harper was lauded for being able to quickly unite divergent voices in the aftermath of his win in 2004 and the next leader has the same job, said Moore.

“The leader has to bring in those candidates who weren’t successful and make sure non-supportive MPs are reassured of the new direction, ” Moore said.

The preferential ballot being used could ward off some tension, as every voter selects not just a first choice but all the way up until their 10th, meaning they’ve already decided who else they could accept as leader.

It also means the victor won’t be known quickly after polls close at 4 p.m. on Saturday. Rounds of counting will be needed before someone hits the magical 50 plus one majority sweet spot required to win.

Thursday, the candidates were hunkered down preparing their final speeches for a kick-off event in Toronto on Friday night. The vast majority of party members will have voted by then, though they can cast ballots in person Saturday both at the Toronto site and  polling stations across the country.

Campaign teams are also beavering away at their financial reports due this week, which could reveal how much people spent in the race.

The upper limit was $5 million, though candidates likely didn’t come close to raising that kind of cash individually. Since March 2016, leadership candidates have raised about $8.5 million collectively, more than half that in the first three months of this year.

The fact they could raise that much and that the party itself raised $5.3 million in just the first three months of 2017, plus unexpectedly high membership levels, suggests the party the leader is inheriting is in good shape, observers say.

What grumbling there’s been over the process — that too many people were allowed to run, that the debates never gave anyone a chance, that the voting was too complicated — should be shelved, said Chad Rogers, a longtime party organizer and now a public affairs strategist at Crestview Strategy.  

“All the things that keep parties healthy — levels of engagement, small donors, paid-up members, people who run local campaigns and associations, all of those have been improved dramatically by this race,” he said.

Stephanie Levitz, The Canadian Press