Tories draw up standards for leadership race
No spending cap unless NDP ordains one with provincial legislation
Candidates for the Progressive Conservative leadership will face no limit on how much they can spend in the race — unless the NDP government decides to impose a cap in provincial legislation.
The PC board will meet Saturday with the intent of finalizing the rules for the leadership campaign, which will officially start on Oct. 1 and culminate in a delegated convention on March 18, 2017.
Party president Katherine O’Neill, a member of the leadership election committee that has been drawing up recommendations for the rules, said Monday that “we’re not going to put rules on how much people can raise or spend” in the race.
However, NDP MLAs have proposed in the special legislature committee on ethics and accountability that a $300,000 spending limit be put on party leadership campaigns, with the motion to be debated in the assembly this fall.
O’Neill said the party and candidates will live with the cap if the government implements it in the midst of the campaign or makes it retroactive, but suggested it would be an offside move.
“I would find it a bit unusual,” she said in an interview.
“We’re a third-place party running a leadership race, it’s an internal thing, and that would be surprising if a political party, the government of the day, was deciding to get involved at that level, particularly when we have large financial issues facing the province.”
The Tories are also watching whether the government brings in new donation limits for leadership campaigns. O’Neill said the leadership committee is planning on following the rules for the 2014 PC leadership race, which had a $30,000 donation limit based on the current party donation cap in election years.
NDP MLAs have cited the $2.6 million spent by Jim Prentice in the 2014 PC leadership race as “unreasonable” and a demonstration of the need for expenditure limits.
But Jason Kenney, the Calgary MP who is the only declared leadership candidate at this point, has cried foul over the possible leadership expenditure cap and said the NDP’s proposal is aimed squarely at his campaign.
Tom Flanagan, an academic and conservative political operative who is friends with Kenney, said a limit on expenditures as proposed by the NDP would hamper the MP’s outsider campaign.
“In order to win, Jason has to sell a bunch of new memberships and then get them to move out and that requires a lot of communications,” he said.
“It would be very hard, I think, for Jason to run the type of campaign he needs to run.”
The current leadership campaign marks a significant shift for the Tories, who have moved away from the one-member, one-vote system used since the 1990s to return to a delegated convention style as used in the past.
O’Neill confirmed that PC party members will vote for delegate slates in meetings held in the province’s 87 constituencies, which are each allocated 15 delegates.
“Anybody who has a valid membership in that riding can come and vote so you could potentially have hundreds of people show up at these meetings,” she said.