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Pierre Poilievre, second left, Conservative Party leadership candidate, attends a party barbecue in Calgary, July 9.Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press
The Conservative leadership race, already hollowed out by the mysterious disqualification of one of the two front-runners, has soured further since then, with the other main contender refusing to take part in a debate next week.
Pierre Poilievre, the favorite, released a malicious message last week said he would be too busy voting to bother with something as trivial as an event designed to test the mettle of a leadership candidate.
Another candidate, Leslyn Lewis, said she would only run if organizers agreed to ask questions such vital questions such as the World Economic Forum and the side effects of COVID-19 vaccines.
It follows the disqualification by the party of Patrick Brown, a progressive and leading challenger to Mr Poilievre, over allegations of inappropriate campaign tactics – allegations that change from week to week.
The no-debater debate would deprive the other progressive in the race, Jean Charest, of one of his few opportunities to catch Mr. Poilievre, the candidate with by far the most support among lawmakers, senators and the party’s top brass, a point reinforced this week when Stephen Harper endorsed Mr. Poilievre for leader.
We’d like to stop now for a minute on legacy. Theme: the complexity and scale of this place we all call home.
Canada is the second largest country in the world. It has a $2.2 trillion economy and a federal government budget this year of $462 billion. As a federation, it is bound by a constitution that divides responsibilities between levels of government, making the need for cooperation a fact of life.
Canada neighbors the world’s largest economy, the United States, and is part of a continental free trade agreement. It is an Atlantic nation, a Pacific nation and an Arctic nation. It is part of the Group of Seven, NATO, the World Trade Organization, the Commonwealth and numerous other international bodies through which a government must diplomatically defend the national interest.
Canada is blessed with natural resources and must always find a balance between economy and environment. It also faces tough challenges, from a health care crisis to chronically low productivity growth, climate change, the war in Ukraine, the rise of China and new waves of COVID-19.
All this means that the prime minister’s job – of running the federal government – is the biggest and most important job in this great and important country. This is relevant to the leadership race in the Conservative Party.
Or at least it should be.
The party’s method of selecting a new leader has been tested three times since Mr. Harper stepped down after the 2015 election. It has continued to fall short, thanks in part to a ranked ballot system that forces candidates to seek support of fringe groups that dominate party membership.
The previous leader, Erin O’Toole, found herself trying and failing to pivot from the treacherous positions she embraced to win over the narrow band of party members who elect a leader to the more moderate views of the wider electorate , who decides the elections.
The problem is systemic, and this year the Conservative leadership race is going by script, even more so. Mr. Poilievre has bought money into cryptocurrencies, fretted over the Freedom Convoy, courted anti-vaxxers and played with conspiracy theories about the World Economic Forum — all to help him sell party memberships.
Mr. Poilievre’s campaign pushed many ideas from the fringes, and it served him well. But does it serve the party? Or Canada? As demonstrated in the previous leadership race, the obsessions of tens of thousands of Conservative members are not those of millions of Canadian voters. When Mr. Poilievre’s predecessors tried to turn from courting the former to courting the latter, they faced a credibility gap.
The twist this time is that the next Conservative leader may have a better-than-average chance of winning the next general election in 2025, as the Trudeau government will have been in power for 10 years by then, which is historically the best before date for a party in power.
And that means a process that isn’t exactly designed to pick the best person to run a country as complex as Canada could be the one that gives us our next prime minister.
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