This conservative leadership contest is a disaster. What started out to be dull and boring has been made doubly dull and boring. We are now advised that we will know who has won the conservative party leadership on August 27. Surprise, surprise, Peter MacKay will likely be crowned. Boring wins again!
This commentary could probably end with that one paragraph. That is all it is worth.
But it seems that likely loser, Erin O’Toole, has a strategy. He is supposing that, for some reason, a slim majority of party voters decide that Peter Mackay is the most boring of all candidates. There are four candidates and O’Toole’s strategy is to try to be every conservative voter’s second choice. That way, in a tighter race, he could win on the second or third count. That is the beauty of the conservative ranked-choice balloting: It elects the most acceptable, not the most preferred.
What it means is that O’Toole needs to run a campaign savaging Peter MacKay and building up the confidence of the two other also-rans. He has to keep those other two in the running.
Mind you, it might be tough to keep social-conservative Derek Sloan in the race. When the MP made the gaffe of attacking Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief medical office of health, last week, many of his fellow conservative caucus members were calling for his head.
There might be other reasons to keep Leslyn Lewis in the race. It seems that $200,000 is a lot to spend on proving that the conservative party is not the white-bread party of old. When you listen to her social-conservative views, it is hard to think of her as a popular member of Toronto’s black community.
But even if Peter MacKay’s campaign never does shake its doldrums, O’Toole is almost as boring. He reminds us of the Porky Pig character that used to break through the drum at the end of Looney Tunes cartoons, saying, “Th-Th-That’s all folks.”
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Copyright 2020 © Peter Lowry
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