EXPECT A SPRINT FOR TORY LEADERSHIP RACE
LITTLE APPETITE FOR LONG, DRAWN-OUT BATTLE DURING MINORITY PARLIAMENT
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 (race). 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. 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 adviser, on iPolitics.ca. “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 re-purposed for a leadership vote. 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, 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.
Part of the decision could revolve around the logistics of booking a venue for the vote, which could attract several thousand people. If the party doesn’t hold the vote at the April convention it will have to scramble to find a venue on short notice, which could be expensive or in an undesirable location.
Lietaer says he favours a short race, because a long race “cements rivalries and makes it difficult to heal.”
A long race also diverts the energy of the party’s most loyal and committed members. Although the candidates spend their time signing up new members, they are also collecting donations for their own campaigns that may have otherwise gone to the party.
Darrell Bricker, CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs, said the party needs a broader rethink but that a long leadership race isn’t the way to do it. When the Liberals transitioned from Michael Ignatieff to Justin Trudeau, they revitalized the party from the ground up.
“I watched as the Liberals were going through their transitional period, they spent a lot of time talking to academics, intellectuals, civic leaders, people who had new ideas, and putting that together in terms of what their program was going to be. It was really smart,” said Bricker. “I think, in the Conservative Party, there’s a feeling that this is something that emerges from a couple of people sitting in an office and deciding on what’s going to sell. That’s not really going to work,” he said.
That view has been echoed by many Conservatives after the last election, that the party was thinking too small, concerned with micro-targeting policies at certain demographics.
On Saturday, Calgary MP Michelle Rempel Garner agreed with that assessment.
“I feel like our party has been cowed into submission that somehow transactional politics are the only thing that we should be doing, that big bold transformative ideas on the right are verboten simply by virtue of them not being Liberal,” said Rempel Garner.
“So now is the time for ideas, and a big tough conversation about what we want to do for Canada,” she said.