Conservative Vote: Frontrunner Bernier's path to leadership far from certain
There are 13 candidates vying for the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada. By May 27, a new leader will be crowned.
But with a crowded ballot and a preferential voting system, there's no clear path to victory for anyone.
"There are two things to know about it: one is the preferential ballot which means that people will be able to rank candidates from one to 10. There'll be 14 names on the ballot (including Kevin O'Leary, whose withdrawal was too late to have his name struck from the ballot) so people will be able to rank their candidates by their preference," Grenier tells The Current's guest host Duncan McCue.
- ANALYSIS: Dissecting the paths to victory for the 13 Conservative leadership candidates
- ANALYSIS: How the Conservative leadership vote could be won, ballot by ballot
Then, Grenier explains, there's the point system where every riding in the country has the same value of 100 points — regardless of how many members are in the riding.
"So when that is all tallied nationwide, the candidate with the fewest amount of points will be dropped and their votes will be given to the second choice. And this process will continue until one candidate gets a majority of the points."
Grenier says candidate Maxine Bernier has consistently been standing strong as the frontrunner and "looks pretty safe to be at the top of that first ballot."
"He is very popular in Quebec but also in a place like Alberta. So he has that broad base that does give him an advantage over some of those other candidates who have maybe more pockets of support, rather than a national broad base of supporters."
Conservative Party members have been warning of the consequences of ideological rifts within the party — a divide that has grown beyond the well-worn differences between Red Tories and Reformers.
According to Ottawa bureau chief for HuffPost Canada Althia Raj, frontrunner Bernier is a divisive candidate, as a libertarian who envisions himself as the new Reform party leader Preston Manning-type character.
"Much of the policy platforms that he has really are kind of lifted from the Reform Party platform book from 1997," Raj tells McCue.
"[Bernier] basically really wants to see a shrinkage of the Canadian government. That does not sit very well with the rest of his caucus."
Raj sees an uphill battle for Bernier to unite a group that is mostly against his platform.
The Hill Times columnist Gerry Nicholls doesn't necessarily see the comparison to Manning as being accurate but suggests Bernier is more like former U.S. president Ronald Reagan or former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher — representing a small "c" principled conservatism.
"I'm not sure that brand of conservatism resonates … with Canadians. I'm not even sure that resonates with Conservatives anymore because of this rise of populism which is really emotionally-based and which has shown itself to be somewhat successful," Nicholls says.
Without Stephen Harper at the helm, Nicholls says the Conservative Party now has the change to start fresh.
"The Conservative Party's ideology was whatever Stephen Harper decided it was going to be and now that he's gone there's really nothing there," Nicholls points out.
"So the party is kind of building itself from scratch, figuring out what it wants to be when it grows up."
Listen to the full segment at the top of this web post.
This segment was produced by The Current's Shannon Higgins.