Candidates for Tory leadership pass Kelowna by
Lisa Raitt only candidate to have visited local riding so far, but 2 more could visit in March
Only one of 14 leadership candidates for the federal Conservatives has so far made a pitch to party members in Kelowna-Lake Country. But that hasn’t been for a lack of trying by local party officials to attract the leadership hopefuls.
“We actually tried to get them all here as a whole group for one of the leadership debates, but it didn’t work out,” Ken Lang, president of the Conservatives’ electoral district association, said Thursday.
Nearly a year into a leadership campaign that culminates with voting in May, Lisa Raitt is the only contender to have visited Kelowna, talking with local party members last Thursday.
Erin O’Toole will meet with Conservatives in Vernon on March 4, and there’s a chance he will come to Kelowna around the same time, Lang says. Also possibly making a visit to Kelowna in March is Kelly Leitch, Lang says.
Kelowna has been a stronghold for the Conservatives and right-of-centre federal parties for decades, with candidates winning comfortable majorities. But incumbent Ron Cannan was defeated in October 2015 by Liberal challenger Stephen Fuhr.
Lang declined to reveal the number of Conservative party members in Kelowna-Lake Country, but said it’s higher than it was at the time of the 2015 federal election.
“There’s a lot of interest in the leadership campaign, and we’re getting calls from people every day to renew their membership so they can vote,” Lang said.
Only those with paid-up memberships by March 28 can cast a ballot in the leadership campaign. Voting will be done using a ranked ballot, with candidates given a score based on their percentage of the vote in each electoral district.
Each electoral district has the same weighting in the vote calculation process, so it doesn’t matter if the party has 5,000 members in one riding and 500 in another.
As a result, there’s no particular advantage to a candidate to be popular in a riding with a lot of Conservative members.
A Mainstreet Research/Ipolitics poll last week found the leadership front-runner is Kevin O’Leary, with 21 per cent support among Conservative members, followed by Leitch at 16 per cent and Maxime Bernier at 15.3 per cent.
Dan Albas, Conservative MP for Central O kan ag an Sim ilka me en-Nicola, has endorsed Bernie rf or the Tory leadership.