Canada Kicks Ass
‘The way we’re heading, we’re unelectable,’ says former Con

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Scape @ Mon Jul 04, 2022 5:52 pm

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The Conservative Party’s leadership election entered a divisive phase late last week when leadership candidates started challenging each other’s supporters’ memberships, calling on the party to declare those ineligible to vote. The last day to challenge anyone's membership is July 4. The final list will be made available to all candidates by July 29.

After losing three back-to-back winnable elections, the Conservatives are now undergoing their third leadership election in seven years and if they don’t get it right this time, the party could fracture, says Marjory LeBreton, former Conservative government leader in the Senate who retired in 2015.

“I’m very fearful, we’ve got to get this right,” said LeBreton, who was also a cabinet minister in the Stephen Harper government between 2006 and 2013. “All the candidates bring their ideas forward, and some of them I wouldn’t support in a million years, but they’ve got the right to say what they would do. All of the issues that everyone’s bringing to the table will never get addressed if we are unelectable. And at the moment, the way we’re heading, we are unelectable.”

LeBreton, who has been a political insider since John Diefenbaker’s time and was appointed to the Red Chamber in 1993 by former PC prime minister Brian Mulroney, said the leadership vote is not only critical for the party, but also for the country, to provide Canadians with a viable alternative to what she described as the “incompetent” government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (Papineau, Que.) and the Liberals.

She said if the party wants to win and form government after the leadership election, it has to choose a candidate who is inclusive, not exclusive. LeBreton said that she has not endorsed any leadership candidate and declined to say who she thinks would be the best in leading the party going forward. She has donated money to three candidates, but declined to share their names.

Six candidates are seeking the party’s top job, including Conservative MPs Pierre Poilievre (Carleton, Ont.), Leslyn Lewis (Haldimand-Norfolk, Ont.), and Scott Aitchison (Parry Sound-Muskoka, Ont.); former Quebec premier Jean Charest; Brampton Mayor Patrick Brown; and former Independent Ontario MPP Roman Baber.

Poilievre is a right-of-centre candidate, while Charest, Brown, and Aitchison are progressive conservatives. Lewis is a social conservative and Baber is a libertarian candidate.

Most political observers expect Poilievre to win the leadership, but some progressive Conservatives are worried that the Ottawa MP will take the party further to the right and make their party unelectable in swing ridings in major urban centres.

One recent example of this concern was Poilievre’s support of the truckers’ protest that brought the downtown Ottawa to a standstill, along with several Canada-U.S. border crossings at the end of January and February.

The issue is divisive, not only in Canada, but also within the Conservative Party. When Poilievre supported the truckers’ protest, LeBreton resigned from the Carleton, Ont., electoral district association board.

She said the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back in going public with her concerns about the party’s direction was the recent meeting of approximately two dozen Conservative MPs with Freedom Convoy representatives on the Hill with assurances that they have “allies” in Parliament. During the first unofficial leadership debate, Poilievre and Lewis sparred furiously over who was the first to support the protesters.

In a recent speech in Quebec, Mulroney also expressed his dissatisfaction with the party’s current direction. As reported by La Presse, Mulroney said he didn’t recognize himself in the current version of the Conservative party, but expressed support for his “friend” Jean Charest.

Meanwhile, LeBreton said the Liberals did not win the last two elections, rather the Conservatives lost, referring to the fact that the Liberals lost the popular vote to the Conservatives in 2019 and 2021, and the incumbent government was restricted to a minority government each time.

In the 2019 federal election, the Liberals faced a number of high-profile controversies like the SNC-Lavalin scandal and the Black face-brown face controversies, among others. And in 2021, Canadians were upset with Trudeau for triggering an unnecessary election two years ahead of time to capitalize on the goodwill as a result of the management of COVID-19. Both times, the Conservatives failed to capitalize on the openings that the Liberals gave them.

“To use a good Canadian analogy, it was like having a breakaway on an open net and missing the net,” Peter MacKay, a former Conservative cabinet minister and unsuccessful leadership candidate in 2021, famously quipped after the 2019 federal election.

LeBreton said the party would have to make itself relevant to reflect the wishes of the changing demographics in the country. Otherwise, she said the Conservatives will lose next time around, and will likely start anther leadership contest after the next election.

The deadline to sign up new memberships was June 3, and all candidates received the preliminary membership list June 30. The candidates are now in the persuasion phase of the leadership campaign in which they reach out to all party members and make their case for why they are the best choice. The final list will be provided to candidates by July 29 and the voting will start right after that. The winner will be announced Sept. 10.

The Conservative Party’s leadership election rules state that each electoral district association with at least 100 members is worth 100 points. But the EDAs with fewer than 100 riding association members will be worth as many points as the number of votes cast. For example, a riding that has 1,000 members will be worth 100 points, but a riding with 70 members will be worth 70 points.

In the 2020 leadership, each riding was worth 100, no matter how many members they had. But the rules were changed at the 2021 biennial policy convention.

Until the party puts together a final membership list, it will not be clear if each riding has 100 members. But considering the number of members signed up, Conservative insiders predict that all riding associations across the country will have at least 100 members.

If that turns out to be the case, the maximum points for all 338 ridings would be 33,800. In this scenario, the winner would need to secure 16,901 points to clinch the contested position. This means the winning candidate has to have supporters in most of the 338 ridings across the country.

“If we are perceived by this changing demographic in this country as moving to more extreme positions, we will be unelectable,” said LeBreton, who retired from the Upper Chamber in 2015. “Because if we narrow our potential pool of supporters, that means that a vast majority of people in the centre … those people will not see themselves in the Conservative Party.”

The Poilievre campaign did not respond to an interview request for this article from The Hill Times.

The Conservative Party was formed in 2003 after the merger of the Progressive Conservative and Canadian Alliance—the two now-defunct right-of-centre parties with sharply different ideological positions on social and economic issues. Prior to the current leadership campaign, the Conservatives have had three leadership elections, and after each, at least one unsuccessful candidate has either left the party or was pushed out for one reason or another, but in each case the conflict started during the preceding leadership election. After the 2004 leadership election, Belinda Stronach left the party to join the Liberals; after the 2017 leadership race, Maxime Bernier left the Conservative Party to start the People’s Party of Canada; and, after the 2020 leadership election, Erin O’Toole (Durham, Ont.) expelled Derek Sloan from the Conservative caucus, who has also started his own party.

It remains to be seen if the new leader will be able to keep the party together this time around.

Elmer MacKay, a former senior cabinet minister in the Joe Clark and Mulroney cabinets and the father of Peter MacKay, in an interview with The Globe and Mail, said he sees similar leadership qualities between Poilievre and Mulroney. He said that every party evolves with time and that long-time party members should embrace change. The elder MacKay described Poilievre as an “independent thinker,” with a “forthright and courageous approach” who does not back down on his principles.

“I think it’s kind of a hazard for people like Marjory LeBreton and a few others to maybe say that because they have certain opinions that the party has left them rather they have left the party,” MacKay said. “I’ve seen supposedly very loyal conservatives, for reasons of personal pique, leave the party and then say, ‘Oh. It’s not my fault. It’s the party’s fault.’”

LeBreton said that she’s been active in Conservative politics since the Diefenbaker years and the party has always been evolving and changing with times. She said that the real question is whether the party is currently changing in a constructive way, making it more appealing to Canadians, or in a way that’s counter productive for the party’s future. In her view, the answer is “no.” LeBreton, who has known Mulroney for decades, said that she is having “hard time processing” MacKay’s view about commonalities between the former PC prime minister and Poilievre.

“Are we representing positive change? Well, I don’t think so. Do people and the vast majority of Canadians recognize themselves in our party? I don’t think that they do at the moment, anyhow,” said LeBreton. “Are we addressing their issues? No, we’re not. We have a wonderful opportunity to present ourselves as an alternative, and we’re blowing it up because goodness knows the Canadian public wants to have an alternative.”


https://www.hilltimes.com/2022/07/04/th ... ton/370138

   



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