If this column seems more disjointed and meandering than usual, it’s because I made the mistake of watching the finale of the Conservative Party’s leadership race and I am currently running on fumes. Originally scheduled to start early Sunday evening, the vote counting was significantly delayed due to . . .
some machinery inadvertently damaging a number of ballots. It was a fitting end to a race that was thrown into chaos by COVID-19.
After an agonizing wait for results that didn’t conclude until early Monday morning, it was Durham Ontario’s Erin O’Toole who emerged victorious on the third ballot, edging out his foremost rival and former cabinet colleague Peter MacKay.
The election was decided with ranked ballots, where each of the country’s 338 ridings were allocated 100 points each, representing the percentage of support from party members in those regions. This meant that while both MacKay and O’Toole were leading in points on the second ballot (11,756.01 and 11,903.69 respectively), rookie candidate Leslyn Lewis had a significant lead in the overall number of votes cast (around 3,000 more than O’Toole).
Lewis surprised many with her strong showing, especially since she is unilingual and had never held public office, but those paying attention would have known she would perform well. For a political newbie, she proved adept at fundraising, reportedly taking in more than $2 million to O’Toole’s $2.5 million and MacKay’s $3.1 million.
A Jamaican-born Torontonian with a Masters in environmental studies and a PhD in international law, she was a refreshing change from the hoards of guys in blue ties that populated previous leadership contests. The amount of support she garnered proves that many conservatives (especially in western provinces like Saskatchewan) are fed up with the status quo. However, her personal views on gay marriage and abortion (which she tried to differentiate from her proposed policies), were enough to hobble her campaign, on top of her lack of French.
This leadership race was a lot more boring than the three ring circus the party held back in 2017, but there are similarities in the outcome.
It seems like the Conservatives have taken one uninspiring buffoon in Andrew Scheer and replaced him with another one who’s somehow even blander. Much like Andy’s razor-thin win in 2017, O’Toole relied heavily on being the second choice for a wide swath of voters by portraying himself as the more right-leaning option (though he made sure to steer clear of the “albatross” issues that dogged Scheer’s leadership).
True to form, in his last speech as the party chief Scheer trotted out a host of stale tropes and criticized the “mainstream” press for their misleading narratives about conservatives. His appeal would have been better received had he not, in the same breath, shamelessly promoted two sleazy propaganda outlets operated by sycophants and former Conservative Party staffers. No better way to speak out against “fake news” than to push some of your own.
If O’Toole hopes to defeat the scandal-prone dandy that’s leading the Liberals, he needs to forge a new path, in a different direction from where his predecessors took the party. However, with the possibility of an election in the fall, he doesn’t have much time to introduce himself to voters.
Caleb Nickerson
