Change in leadership rules shows Conservative Party's old fault lines haven't gone away

At last week's party convention, Conservative delegates voted to change how they pick their leaders.

While the new rules would not have cost Erin O'Toole his victory had they been in force for last year's leadership contest, they will affect how future leadership campaigns are fought — and could determine whether the party's old fault lines can ever be bridged.

With 74 per cent voting in favour, delegates on Friday approved a change to the party's leadership rules that previously awarded all 338 electoral districts equal weight in a leadership vote. The old rules made each riding worth 100 points regardless of how many members it had, and distributed those points to each leadership contestant according to their share of the vote in the riding.

No longer. The new rules will still cap each riding's value at 100 points — but those ridings with fewer than 100 members will be worth only as many points as the number of ballots cast. That means a riding with 500 members will still be worth 100 points, but a riding with 50 members will be worth 50 points.

That might seem like a subtle change. It actually represents the culmination of nearly two decades of internal party debate.

The principle of equally-weighted ridings was one of the cornerstones of the merger between the Canadian Alliance and Progressive Conservatives in 2003. The PCs — led by Peter MacKay, who finished second to O'Toole in last year's leadership contest — had their base in Atlantic Canada (and, to a lesser extent, in Quebec), while the Alliance was dominant in Western Canada (and, compared to the PCs, in Ontario).

The PCs were worried that their members in the East would be swamped by Alliance members in the West.

In every Conservative convention since, the PC and Alliance wings butted heads over keeping or jettisoning the equal-weight rule. The old PCs had always won the day — until now.

Regional cleavages in party vote

With nearly three-quarters supporting the rule change, the result wasn't particularly close. But how it broke down regionally betrayed the existence of those old internal fault lines.

About 80 per cent of delegates from Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador voted against the change, as did 64 per cent of New Brunswick delegates, 62 per cent of those in Quebec and 60 per cent of delegates in the North.

The motion passed with the help of more than 80 per cent of delegates in Ontario and Alberta and more than 90 per cent of delegates in Saskatchewan.

Self-interest played a role in how the vote panned out. In the last two leadership contests, the ridings with fewer than 100 voting Conservative members tended to be located in Quebec and Atlantic Canada, while those with 1,000 or more were mostly in Ontario and the West.

This rule change would have affected 59 ridings in the 2020 leadership contest — all but 7 of them in Quebec. Six affected ridings were divided equally between Newfoundland and Labrador, New Brunswick and Manitoba. And, as in 2017, Nunavut did not reach the bar of 100 voting members.

While this rule would have affected some ridings more than others — Nunavut would have seen its weight in the final count reduced by two-thirds — Quebec is the province that would have seen its clout in leadership contests diminish the most.

With each riding given equal weight in 2020, Conservative Party members in Quebec cast ballots worth 23.1 per cent of the total points allocated. Had the new rules been in place, Quebec would have accounted for just 18.2 per cent of total points.

2020 outcome would have been closer, but unchanged

O'Toole's victory in the leadership contest over MacKay and social conservatives Leslyn Lewis and Derek Sloan was due in part to his strong support in Quebec — and its majority of the ridings where fewer than 100 ballots were cast.

The change to the rules approved by party delegates last week would not have changed the overall outcome, though it would have made it closer, particularly in the second round.

When Sloan dropped off after the first ballot, most of his supporters ranked Lewis as their next choice. This helped Lewis close the gap on MacKay and O'Toole. The new rules would have closed that gap even more, as they would have reduced O'Toole's total by 1,076 points. That's more than the combined total of points MacKay and Lewis would have lost from the rule change.

As a result, MacKay would have stayed in first place on the second ballot instead of slipping to second. Both MacKay and O'Toole still would have survived to the final round, but Lewis would have fallen just 3.2 percentage points short of making it to that final ballot, compared to her deficit of 4.8 percentage points under the old rules.

On the final ballot, O'Toole would have defeated MacKay by about 13 percentage points instead of 14.

The results of the 2017 leadership contest wouldn't have been greatly affected by the rule change either. Maxime Bernier, defeated by Andrew Scheer by a whisker on the final ballot, had more support than Scheer in Quebec, so the rule change would only have widened Scheer's overall margin of victory by a few percentage points.

Changes ensure the next race will be different

Of course, any change to the points system would have ended up changing how the candidates conducted their campaigns. So it's really not possible to know for certain how the results of the last two contests would have played out under different rules.

We do know that, with these new rules in place, the next contenders for the Conservative leadership aren't likely to spend a lot of valuable time and effort in regions of the country with few party members.

Individual votes in ridings with few members will still carry outsized weight, however. Each vote in a riding with just 10 members is worth one point, while each vote in a riding with 1,000 members is worth one tenth of a point.

And candidates will have more of an incentive now to recruit new party members in ridings with few members. That could have the side benefit of breathing a little life into electoral district associations that are hanging on due entirely to the work of a handful of dedicated volunteers.

But the shift in the rules does push the party further toward the old Alliance wing — a trend that MacKay and the PCs tried to avoid in 2003.

While those old parties are distant memories, the regional split between West and East that defined them has endured. This was demonstrated by the leadership rule change — and also by the delegates' vote against a proposal that included a recognition that climate change is real.

A majority of delegates in Quebec and all four Atlantic provinces supported that policy proposal. Delegates in Ontario and the four Western provinces voted against it. The way the Conservative Party is going to choose its leaders from now on is not going to help bridge that divide.