CANADA’S CONSERVATIVES VOTE

ANDREW COYNE on the merits of the race, JOHN IVISON on comeback kid Maxime Bernier, CHRIS SELLEY on the lack of ‘Trumpism’,

WComment hen the Conservative Party convenes in Toronto this weekend to choose its new leader, the person many thought the most likely to win will instead be where he is most comfortable: sitting on a media panel, performing for the cameras.

Kevin O’Leary was the frontrunner in the race to succeed Stephen Harper. Victory was within reach when, just weeks before the convention and with ballots with his name on them already arriving in voters’ mailboxes, he made the sudden decision to pull out of the race. As the person who chaired Kevin’s campaign, I’ve had more than a few questions about happened. And while there has been much speculation about why he quit, at the end of the day it came down to one thing: he was never fully committed.

My journey with O’Leary began with a brief phone call at the end of November. I had never met the businessmanturned-reality TV star, but after months of rumours about his candidacy — rumours he had instigated and happily fuelled — Kevin was now looking for someone to actually lead his campaign. A mutual friend had passed along my name. After only a brief discussion, he asked me, “Will you be my guy?” It made me laugh, because it sounded like he was asking for a date. I suggested we should meet first, “so we can decide if we like each other.”

Having spent a lifetime in Tory politics, I was returning to Canada from New York after running the Americas region for the global public relations firm H+K Strategies. I had watched the Trump phenomenon unfold first-hand, and had met enough of the U.S. political establishment to wonder whether Canada was ripe for a similar change.

So I took the meeting, and immediately liked the guy I met. He wasn’t the know-it-all character from Shark Tank that I was expecting. Politically green, he was insightful about how to make an impact on public opinion, with a good strategic mind and a willingness to learn the political side of things from me, a party veteran. He also had some strong views on how he could leverage his media profile for the advantage of the party. “There has never been a candidate like me,” he’d say, and he was right.

But I was left with a nagging doubt: did Kevin really know what he was getting himself into?

The strange candidacy of Kevin O’Leary was rooted in the most basic Opposition responsibility — to present a true alternative to the party in power at a general election. Well, Kevin was certainly different. A brilliant communicator who didn’t know the meaning of subtlety, he had both high name recognition and a successful business career in Canada and in the United States. Image is of course huge in politics. It had already worked in the U.S., why couldn’t it work in Canada?

Liberal elites are fond of saying that Canada is different from the United States, and in many ways it is. But that ignores the fact that the same forces working to undermine the status quo in the U.S. are also at work here.

As economist Brian Lee Crowley has noted, Canadian labour force participation rates are at their lowest level in decades. Men in particular have seen participation rates fall off dramatically as blue-collar jobs in “There has never been a candidate like me,” said former Tory leadership hopeful Kevin O’Leary. the manufacturing and natural resources sectors have declined since the 2008 recession. Meanwhile, falling birthrates mean Canada needs an increasing number of skilled immigrants, many of whom move to parts of the country where housing costs are already high, helping to keep that housing out of reach for a growing number of Canadians.

Midway through the leadership campaign, new data published by Edelman, the world’s largest public relations agency showed that Canadians’ trust in government had eroded profoundly since Justin Trudeau became prime minister just 15 months earlier. Canada is now in the category of nations who distrust their institutions, the first time this has happened in 17 years.

The same cocktail of discontent that brought Donald Trump to power is brewing here in Canada, and it only needs a voice to give it the attention it deserves. Even my reliable snowplow operator in Madawaska Township, who said he had been thinking of moving to the U.S. until he heard Kevin O’Leary was running, thought Kevin was “a guy who could fix things." And Kevin could have been that voice, even though he had only a superficial understanding of the forces that would have allowed it to happen.

From my first meeting with him on December 3, the campaign went from a standing start to a fully functioning operation by mid-February, just three weeks after he formally entered the race on January 17. We were able recruit experienced and respected organizers — the likes of Chris Rougier, who became Kevin’s campaign manager, and Andrew Boddington, hired as our senior policy and communications strategist — who had chosen to stay on the sidelines of what had been an uninspiring race. Kevin attracted the support of longtime party stalwarts such as Mike Harris, Marjory LeBreton, Rick Perkins, Ken Hughes, Tim Uppal and Guy Lauzon, giving him immediate party credibility. Although everyone was cautious of the Trump analogy, there was clearly a constituency within the party for a political outsider with a proven track record in business. Too many MPs knew how to stack riding association meetings but had yet to accomplish anything in real life. message that the country needed a leader who could get them out of their parents’ basements and into well-paying jobs.

Money came in quickly — but not from the sources we had expected. On day one of the campaign we brought in $189,000 in small donations from members who were looking for a candidate to “tell it the way it was.” By the end of the campaign, the ratio of small donations of $100 or less to large contributions from wellheeled donors who could give up to $1,550 was 3 to 1, with twothirds of the $1.5 million we eventually raised coming from small donations from regular members, many of whom we connected with via Kevin’s use of Reddit and Facebook Live to communicate spontaneously with current and potential members.

Much of the Conservative rank-and-file remained skeptical, however. “I’m leery of O’Leary,” said longtime Conservative supporter Nancy McFadden, which pretty much summed up the view of half the party. According to the campaign’s independent research, 45 per cent of members initially ranked him at or near the bottom of the 14 candidates vying for the leadership — a real problem, since the party’s rankedballot voting system and the number of candidates made it unlikely anybody could win on the first ballot. Once we toned down his bluster and Conservatives became more comfortable with him, the number of party members for whom he ranked in the bottom tier dropped from 45 per cent to nearly 30. Though still high, every scenario that we modelled quantitatively suggested it was good enough for him to win the leadership, especially given the extent to which Kevin was able to outstrip the other candidates in sales of new membership sales during the limited time he was in the race.

That success in selling memberships means he would have been even stronger had he entered the race sooner. Pundits have pointed to his late entry as a sign he wasn’t serious about winning. It’s a valid point.

But Kevin understood that timing is everything and believed waiting until the last minute would have the maximum impact on a dull race. And when he officially entered the race, he rose to the top of the polls almost immediately.

Even Kevin’s driest policies were delivered with his customary bluster, to ensure maximum media coverage. “All media is good,” he’d say — including the time he spent on U.S. television during the campaign, though it underscored the impression that he wasn’t all-in on a commitment to a career in politics. Those questions about his commitment were amplified by his failure to appear at many of the party’s debates.

Contrary to what most believe, Kevin’s spotty debate attendance had little to do with his lack of bilingualism. He was a quick study in French. He was never going to be able to carry out a conversation by the end of the campaign, but with the help of his French teacher Hélène, he was able to muster enough to satisfy most members he met that he was serious about learning the language. Kevin’s real issue with the debates — one on which I and the other members of his campaign team agreed — was that no one was watching them. It required a lot of preparation and travel and expense to participate in events the networks weren’t interested in and at which even the live audience struggled to stay awake. “I don’t do bad TV,” he’d say.

If Kevin made such an impact on the campaign, why did he pull out just before the moment of truth?

Early in his brief campaign, Kevin appeared fully committed. Something about politics clearly appealed to him. After a meeting with the Conservative caucus on Parliament Hill in early December, he told me he felt people were treating him differently — that he was no longer just a celebrity, but an emerging leader.

But while a lot of party members got what Kevin represented, he never quite got the party. As the campaign moved from membership sales into the persuasion phase, we expected him to focus his efforts on the small list of 200,000-plus paidup party members who would be eligible to vote for the leadership. Kevin, though, grew increasingly frustrated at the inefficiency of meeting small groups of those members after spending months communicating with the entire country via social and traditional media.

At the end of March, tired and worn down with the flu, facing a brutal schedule in which he tried to continue his business commitments and accommodate the necessities of an aggressive campaign tour, Kevin’s mood boiled over. “I’m not going to the Maritimes again!” he told his team. “Let’s focus on social media.”

Social media was effective for some things, but it couldn’t replace retail politics when we were trying to influence the party members who were used to having a relationship with their leadership.