A LATE-NIGHT DEAL SEALED THE FATE OF O’LEARY’S LEADERSHIP CAMPAIGN.
Could win leadership, but not election
• An early ballot mail- out, a late- night deal and an astonishing joint press conference in Toronto: these were some of the ingredients that threw the Conservative Party’s leadership race into chaos Wednesday, as Kevin O’Leary ended his campaign to succeed Stephen Harper and endorsed rival Maxime Bernier.
Though they had thrown barbs at each other throughout the race, the two were the picture of camaraderie at a Toronto hotel Wednesday, as they met the press ahead of the final debate of the campaign. It was the culmination of a weird 24 hours.
According to O’Leary’s campaign team, the businessman and reality TV star had been thinking for a good month about whether or not he should stay in the race.
“For a little while we’ve noticed he’s been disengaged from the things that a lot of candidates normally think about, which is (getting) out and getting votes. He’s been focused a lot on his winnability,” said O’Leary senior adviser Mike Coates, global vice-chairman at PR firm Hill and Knowlton Strategies.
“This discussion just recently came to a head just before the weekend and it was pretty clear to us that he was worried he could win the leadership but not win the election.
“So that’s what he was wrestling with.”
Then on Tuesday, O’Leary learned that the party had already mailed out its leadership ballots. Party organizers had initially said they would be doing so April 28, the same day the list of party members eligible to vote in the leadership would be released to the campaigns. However, the party finished processing the memberships sooner than expected — and announced a higher number of eligible voters than expected, at more than 259,000. According to the O’Leary’s campaign’s statement Wednesday, they had sold just 35,335 of those memberships.
Cory Hann, a spokesman for the party, confirmed to the Post that ballots had been mailed out earlier than expected, and that by Tuesday they had begun to land in members’ mailboxes.
Relations between the O’Leary and Bernier camps had cooled since last June, when Bernier had hosted O’Leary at a cottage for a couple of days of policy talk, but they remained in touch.
As O’Leary’s worries peaked over the weekend, regular communications between the O’Leary and Bernier campaigns turned to the possibility of O’Leary’s dropping out and backing Bernier. According to sources with both campaigns, those discussions led to a phone call between the candidates on Monday night. On Tuesday, O’Leary and Bernier met at a private location in Toronto around 11 p.m. and started talking. Two hours later, they’d struck a deal.
On Wednesday morning O’Leary’s campaign was functioning as usual, with a fundraising pitch going out just hours before he would announce his decision to leave the race — an announcement pre- empted by a Bernier campaign source leaking the news to the media early that afternoon. O’Leary released a lengthy written statement confirming the news not long after.
Coates and others on the campaign team believed O’Leary, who has consist- ently polled among the race’s frontrunners, had a real chance to win the Conservative leadership. “I got into this to win, not to be a kingmaker,” Coates said pointedly, speaking to the National Post Wednesday before attending a campaign “wake” instead of that night’s debate. Coates confirmed any outstanding money raised by the campaign after expenses are paid will be put into party coffers.
Rumours swirled that other candidates might also consider leaving the race in O’Leary’s wake. The National Post reached all of the leadership campaigns except for Deepak Obhrai’s, who didn’t immediately respond. All enthusiastically said their candidates would stay in the race.
At the beginning of Wednesday night’s debate, the moderator’s announcement of O’Leary’s departure from the race was greeted with loud applause by the crowd in the partially full theatre. The debate proceeded from there, far from the first of the campaign for which O’Leary had been absent.
At his joint press conference with Bernier hours before, O’Leary had told reporters it would have been “selfish” for him to continue his campaign if he doubted he’d be able to get a mandate in the general election, in part due, he said, to the problems his lack of French would cause in trying to win seats in Quebec, which he called “the Florida of Canada,” an apparent reference to its importance in elections.
O’Leary said Wednesday he had initially planned to reveal his decision next week, but that it would have been “disingenuous” even to be contemplating a “merger” with the Bernier campaign and not make it known publicly if people were already receiving their ballots and beginning to vote. When it was pointed out O’Leary would miss Wednesday’s bilingual debate, he shrugged off the insinuation he’d be happier not to have to answer questions in French.
Some reporters quest i oned whether O’Leary might have ultimately just decided he was more interested in focusing on his position as an American media personality.
Though he denied this had any influence on his decision, O’Leary noted he was recently on TV with Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland, “defending” Canada in what some fear is a looming trade war with the United States.
“I’m in a unique situation,” O’Leary said. “I am probably the most known Canadian that’s on American television. And I’m going to talk about what we mean to Americans.”