SUDDEN EXIT
O’Leary out? He was barely in
Kevin O’Leary was just visiting after all. The man who plays a successful businessman on television once said that to create wealth, he needed to pair up with people whose strengths compensated for his weaknesses.
The same principle apparently applies to electoral success.
Humility will never be one of those strengths, but O’Leary remains clear-eyed enough about his weaknesses to realize he couldn’t win the Conservative leadership, and so he should fall in behind someone who could.
O’Leary withdrew from the race Wednesday, just as ballots for the May 27 vote were being mailed, and urged his supporters to vote for his rival Maxime Bernier.
The Conservative party revealed late Tuesday that 259,010 party members will be eligible to vote — far more than the 180,000 or so most campaigns initially estimated.
O’Leary said he was surprised by the number and quickly realized that the 35,335 people he claims joined the party to support his cause would not be enough to put him over the top.
In a remarkably candid statement, he said he is tied as front-runner with Bernier but has weak second ballot support. In addition, while he is strong in the West, he acknowledged he doesn’t have enough support in Quebec.
Rarely in the history of Canadian politics has so much been said by so many about a candidate who fizzled quite so spectacularly.
But the signs that O’Leary’s leadership bid was more a faint hope than a commitment have been evident from the start.
He exploded into the race like a comet but his lack of both caucus support and French-language skills meant it was always probable that he would streak across the political sky and disappear.
It was always all about Kevin and the pipe dream that his television celebrity would sweep him to a first-ballot victory.
The number of people who have signed up as members suggests a backlash by Conservatives who resent the prospect of their party being hijacked by a candidate so remote from its history and geography.
The candidate from Massachusetts did little to endear himself to rank-and-file Tories — he dismissed much of the caucus as “journeymen politicians.” They responded by supporting his rivals — he has the declared backing of just one MP.
His rejection by the Conservative voting base suggests a repudiation of Trump-style presidential politics in Canada and an affirmation of the Westminster system where party brands are more important than party leaders.
When the new membership numbers came out late Tuesday, I asked Conservatives on social media what they made of it. Unscientific as it may be, the anecdotal evidence suggests many were as motivated by their desire to keep O’Leary out as they were to vote their preferred candidate in.
There have been suggestions that the membership list has been flooded by nonConservatives, in an effort to block O’Leary and Kellie Leitch. However, one campaign manager said that he has found just 1,950 names on the list who are identified in the party’s CIMS votertracking database as “hard, non-supporters.” The integrity of the process does not seem to be threatened by outsiders.
The most obvious beneficiary of O’Leary’s withdrawal is Bernier. O’Leary said the Conservatives need to grow their support in Quebec if they are to win the 2019 election. He said he is backing Bernier because the MP from the Beauce region is the candidate “who best mirrors my policies” and has strong support in Quebec.
But even though O’Leary is throwing his support behind Bernier, there is no guarantee the people he signed up will follow his lead.
O’Leary’s withdrawal is also being welcomed by Kellie Leitch’s campaign, which lost nearly half its supporters when the reality TV star entered the race.
Yet she is also a very polarizing figure and if the large influx of new members was bad news for O’Leary, it may prove to be equally so for Leitch.
The emerging view among some observers is that there has been a reaction from more moderate Conservatives against the veiled nativism and gay-bashing coming from some candidates.
In that event, Michael Chong’s appeal for the new Conservatives to be a “credible, serious party, not one that tries to fool people with shiny objects or appeal to their baser instincts” is likely to produce a better performance than polls have predicted.
But, with O’Leary’s exit, you would have to be a contrarian gambler to bet against a Maxime Bernier victory. He is popular with fiscal conservatives who make up around half the membership and he is deemed an acceptable compromise by many of those concerned about party unity.
It’s exactly that kind of potential for second-ballot growth that O’Leary has identified as his weakness and his closest rival’s major strength.