Expect a short leadership race
OTTAWA – The upcoming Conservative leadership race to replace Andrew Scheer is, so far, shrouded in mystery.
Potential candidates are cautiously guarding their language — almost everyone is “considering” it right now — until they know what the cost of entry is and what the rules will be.
Some candidates, worried about vote-splitting, are waiting for the heavyweights to make a decision before they take the plunge.
One thing is for certain, though. It's likely to be a short race, unlike the 19-month marathon in 2017 that put Scheer in charge.
“There is no good argument for a long leadership. I don't think anyone serious is making it,” said one senior Conservative with knowledge of the discussions.
The most compelling reason could be that the Liberals are governing in a minority Parliament, which has about half the average lifespan of a majority government. A leadership race that stretches to nearly two years, could leave the Conservatives in the lurch if the government falls and an election is called.
Even in 2017, when Conservatives settled on a long race as a way to revitalize the party after more than a decade with Stephen Harper at the helm, many were expressing buyer's remorse as the race wound down.
“A leisurely process may have looked like blessed relief, with the hope of an unexpected saviour somewhere over the horizon,” wrote Howard Anglin, now Alberta Premier Jason Kenney's top adviser, at the website iPolitics. “Seventeen months on, however, it feels like purgatory in a room full of too-familiar faces.”
Anglin posted the link again on Sunday as a “plea for a shorter, sharper” leadership race this time.
The Conservatives have a convention scheduled for April in Toronto, which could be repurposed for a leadership vote. Although it would mean a short race of around three months, some party members think a shorter contest provides a good stress test for the job.
“It's a good test of quick decision-making, of the kind of things that you need as a leader of a party and as a prime minister. And a quick race brings out only the serious candidates. It'll bring out the need-to-have, not the nice-to-have candidates,” said Ken Boessenkool, a former adviser to both Harper and former British Columbia Premier Christy Clark.
Boessenkool pointed out that Clark needed fewer than three months to win the leadership of the B.C. Liberals in 2011, even though she wasn't part of the party's caucus at the time.
Clark has been named in the top tier of potential candidates for the Conservative Party, along with former interim party leader Rona Ambrose, former cabinet minister Peter MacKay and Erin O'Toole, the Ontario MP who was narrowly defeated by Scheer in 2017. None of those candidates have officially declared their intention to join the race.
Jason Lietaer, a Conservative strategist who ran the party's war room in 2011, said an April leadership vote is a possibility.
“I think it could be done, but it would be on the verge of too soon,” said Lietaer, who noted that the Ontario Progressive Conservatives held a leadership vote on March 10, 2018, a month and a half after the leader resigned, albeit with some technical difficulties.