How Andrew Scheer won
TORONTO — A closer-thanexpected battle unfolded between Andrew Scheer and Maxime Bernier, the frontrunner for the final month of the campaign, at the Conservative Party’s leadership convention Saturday.
The first sign of trouble for Bernier — and of hope for Scheer — came at the first ballot.
Worry took root in the Bernier campaign team after fewer than 30 per cent of voters marked him as their top choice. The gap between Bernier and Scheer after the first round of voting was just seven percentage points.
Earlier, before the results started rolling in, Bernier campaign manager Alex Nuttall had said he felt nervous, but in a good way. Hamish Marshall, Scheer’s campaign manager, remained optimistic. “It’s going to be very close,” he had told the Post.
It could hardly have been closer. At the seventh ballot, Bernier’s lead hadn’t widened.
At the 11th, Scheer had closed the lead to just over five percentage points, giving a jolt of hope to his team. There was visible anxiety among Bernier’s supporters, and glee among Scheer’s.
At 8:15 p.m., the room found out Scheer — who is almost universally well-liked among the party rankand-file who know him — had won the leadership with a razor-thin 51 per cent, based on turnout of about 55 per cent and 141,362 votes cast.
Scheer lost in Alberta, Manitoba, Newfoundland and Labrador, Quebec, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut. Bernier had raised more money and signed up more party members than Scheer, too.
But the result appeared to signal that Scheer’s approach — building consensus; not being too aggressive in attacking other candidates; positioning himself as the nice-guy compromise candidate, an easy second choice for voters across the conservative spectrum — was the true one in this race, where a ranked ballot meant the victor was decided by the order in which party members preferred the candidates, their vote transferring to the next candidate on their ballot once their leading choice was eliminated.
One member of the Scheer campaign team said second-choice support was “what really clinched it,” but that it helped that Scheer was able to appeal to a wide range of party members, including social conservatives. “Andrew’s a Catholic. He’s a man of faith, he’s a man of principle. But he is a unifier. He has been able to talk to every kind of conservative, and find out what unifies conservatives.”
Bernier’s campaign manager Nuttall conceded in the wake of Scheer’s victory that second-, thirdand down-ballot support had been the key.
“That’s a good way to win,” he said, because it unites the party. “The social conservatives are a key pillar of our party and they turned out in big numbers,” Nuttall said.
That social conservative vote, largely split between Pierre Lemieux and Brad Trost on the early ballots, played a key role in Saturday’s outcome.
With Trost out of contention, Scheer closed to within two percentage points of Bernier in the next round.
“Brad Trost’s rallying support is probably the story out of this. It’s the biggest surprise,” said Melanie Paradis, Erin O’Toole’s director of communications.
While Scheer may have drawn support from social conservatives, he was at pains throughout the campaign to present himself as somebody promoting big-tent policies that could find favour in a party still fond of Stephen Harper.
Marshall said Scheer’s ground organizers had focused strategically on specific regions, on ridings with low numbers of party members.
Rural Quebec was considered winnable because of Scheer’s support for dairy, egg and chicken supply management — a policy Bernier would have ended. Scheer’s approach earned him the endorsement of the Dairy Farmers of Quebec. Indeed, party results show Scheer won Beauce, Bernier’s own riding.
Scheer had the support of much of the party’s establishment, as well, entering the race with the endorsement of 20 members of the Conservative caucus.