TORY LEADERSHIP CANDIDATE KEVIN O’LEARY, LEFT, MAY BE THE OUTSIDER VOTERS WANT, OR MAYBE HE’S THE ONLY ONE PEOPLE OUTSIDE OF OTTAWA ACTUALLY RECOGNIZE.
When Kevin O’Leary, part-time Canadian resident and full-time television troll, walked into conservative Canada’s answer to ComicCon Thursday night, the gravity of the ballroom — in a convention centre attached to an Ottawa mall — shifted around him.
The campus partisans came first, fan boys in first suits, lapels overladen with pins. They lined up four deep for selfies. O’Leary, tanned and smaller than you’d imagine, seemed slightly pained between smiles. A steady halo of cameras and gawkers surrounding him everywhere he moved.
In a leadership race dominated by second-tier ex-ministers and one-issue cranks, O’Leary has emerged as, if not the favourite, then a favourite to become the next Conservative chief. Strategists from other campaigns and unaligned insiders almost universally agree he has a real chance to win. In fact, that’s about the only thing all of them accept as true.
Thanks to the party’s Byzantine selection process, the 14-candidate field and a lack of big names, the Conservative race remains nearly impossible to predict two and a half months out. Some see it as a battle between O’Leary and Maxime Bernier. Others think its O’Leary versus a broader field, including Andrew Scheer, Kellie Leitch, Erin O’Toole and Michael Chong. But everyone feels like O’Leary, who has no political experience, no roots in the party, and no history of not saying and doing dumb things on TV, will be there at the end, if not on top, then in the final tier.
At the leadership debate at the Manning Centre Conference Friday, O’Leary, along with Leitch, was the main target of opponent abuse. Lisa Raitt got in digs about the amount of time he spends in the United States. In a scrum afterward he faced questions about an incident on Dragons’ Den when he grabbed a model’s butt. (Asked if the model had consented, O’Leary replied: “I honestly don’t remember, and I’m sure she wasn’t offended.”)
O’Leary’s rise from television loudmouth to possible favourite for Conservative leader has been generally seen as part of a wider global phenomenon: the growth of the kind of nativist, antielite populism that helped elect Donald Trump. It would certainly be easy enough to make an argument after a weekend at Manning that some threads of that are alive in conservatism here.
The conference organizers seemed to bend over backwards to give voice to elements that might once have been seen as fringe. There were multiple sessions on combating Islamic extremism that featured far more fearmongering than actual debate. There was a panel called “Down with the elites?” that gave Doug Ford the chance to air his usual grievances next to a Scheer strategist in a Make America Great Again hat.
But in truth, O’Leary seems like an odd fit for that mantle.
He does on the surface resemble Trump in several ways. Both are stars of reality TV, famous for pitching a brand of business moxie and narcissistic flair. Both practice a kind of insult comic politics that travels well on social media. But on policy, O’Leary seems much more mainstream. He is pro-choice and pro-LGBTQ rights. He’s pro-trade and pro-immigration. He seems, in reality, more like an end run around Trumpism than a Canadian articulation of the creed.
Based on the conversations and panels at the conference, the Conservative Party doesn’t seem to know what it’s members want any more than anyone else does right now. Some are clearly itching for a fight on identity politics.
But among party organizers, volunteers and loyalists, there remains a strong faction that hopes the next leader can be Stephen Harper, just nicer (O’Toole) or more socially conservative (Scheer) or libertarian (Bernier).
What no one knows yet is how big the audience for an actual new-right, populist might be in the party.
O’Leary isn’t that. He’s deeply flawed, but he isn’t Marine La Pen or Nigel Farage, or even Kellie Leitch. The fact he’s doing as well as most assume he has might indicate a deep desire among some for an outsider, for an end to the way things have always been.
On the other hand, it might just be this: unlike his opponents, people outside of Ottawa actually know O’Leary’s name.