When it came to Kevin O’Leary, we done good
One thing Canada cannot ordinarily be accused of is being slow to pat itself on the back. And yet! When it comes to the failure of Kevin O’Leary’s quixotic campaign for the federal Conservative leadership, we have a sort of unnoticed national mystery that demands an explanation. Whether or not you were a fan of O’Leary’s bid, I think we can agree that his chastening at the hands of Conservative cardholders was a sign of — well, conservatism. At a minimum, it must be interpreted as the body politic telling a somewhat incoherent novice: “Maybe try again later, champ.”
Everyone now agrees that there exists, throughout the democratic world, a pervasive climate of political opportunity for populist outsiders who enjoy name recognition. The public everywhere is, to varying degrees, in a throw-the-bums-out mood. Media institutions that traditionally exercised the authority to sort candidates by moral and intellectual legitimacy are in a state of disarray.
We know Canada is not immune from the effects. I think fans of Ontario Conservative Leader Doug Ford, for example, would agree that he is an improvisational sort of populist — the representative of a brand rather than a very coherent ideology — who is successfully exploiting this environment.
But he is also exploiting a unique opportunity. The traditional structure of Canadian politics had selected and groomed Patrick Brown for a political campaign, and Brown had created a very ornate plan of classic political triangulation, and the machinery went ka-flooey at an awkward moment. It was as if a Broadway play had lost its star two weeks before opening and there was no understudy.
Of course a situation like that, a situation that might happen as often as Halley’s Comet swings by, was tailormade for Doug Ford. He needed no help with name recognition, and, as part of the Ford dynasty, he had a network of friendly relationships — established personally, and kept personal through hard work — that might be the envy of almost any politician on the continent. He had a big head start in an artificially short competition. Although he almost got caught up to regardless.
By contrast, the federal Conservatives had oodles of time to study Kevin O’Leary. His advantages (i.e., being both famous and loud) were very tempting. People who comment professionally on politics noticed them, and talked about them. Influencers in Conservative politics were talking just the same way. No one was certain how well O’Leary was going to do in the nose-counting.
The answer turned out to be “He dropped out of the contest before he had the chance to be humiliated in a strictly official way.” And the semi-official humiliation has continued. A rival news organ reported Tuesday on O’Leary’s frustration over a lingering half-million in unpaid campaign liabilities. Some $200,000 or so of the money is owed to O’Leary himself, but he has to pay it back, because a Canadian federal party leadership race does not permit the nifty self-financing procedures sometimes seen in U.S. elections — a fact whose significance seems not to have been suspected in advance by the cheeky denizen of Boston, Mass.
Fundraising efforts to relieve Political Candidate Kevin O’Leary’s obligations to Rich Guy Kevin O’Leary— and to some remaining unfortunates who did campaign work for him — have not been entirely successful. Like any businessman, he is struggling with the optimum price point for his chickendinner-and-hot-air product. “It’s taking an extraordinary amount of time and people,” O’Leary told the Globe’s Laura Stone of his self-described “journey.”
No one who has a partisan rooting interest has any reason to raise the question, “Why didn’t Kevin O’Leary do better?” Liberals had fun with his candidacy while it was still part-alive, in the statistical, Schrödinger’s-cat sense. Every time he blurted out something that displayed an especially limited understanding of Canada, or of economics, or of the universe generally, they would chortle: just look at the sort of person the Conservative Party of Canada takes seriously!
When it turned out that the CPC did not even regard him as particularly welcome in the foyer, no apology was forthcoming. But no one in the CPC was too keen on reviving the memory of O’Leary’s candidacy by pointing this out, either. The televisual tormentor of desperate pitchmen had been able to raise $1.4 million from donors who presumably, on some psychological or neurological level, thought the man had possible merit as a leader.
The immune system that protected Canada from hacking by boisterous political outsiders just worked, that’s all. Partly this is a matter of written law: O’Leary was not permitted to spend unlimited amounts of his own money commandeering an existing party. Partly it is a sign of decent health in that party — members were aware of being bound to a deal, or a shared set of loosely defined goals, that made the idea of cleaning the room with hand grenades relatively unattractive. But the immune system did work, and this is worth pointing out explicitly — not just in the spirit of self-congratulation, but in the spirit of epidemiological preparedness.