Just another week and we will know who is really running for the leadership of the conservative party of Canada. You know that Poilievre is in, so is Jean Charest. Brown is still busy selling south Asian memberships. And the rest, who knows?
Not everybody is about to waste $300,000 in party fees on a lost cause. Sure, the anti-abortion candidate, Leslyn Lewis, has little trouble raising the money but no matter how many votes her supporters add up to, it will never make her conservative leader. The triumvirate of Brown, Charest and Poilievre are the likely front runners.
It was obvious that someone on the organizing committee was thinking of Brampton mayor Patrick Brown when they changed the rules to only allow membership payments by personal cheque or personal credit card. That person must have been paying attention when Brown produced about 40,000 new memberships in Ontario a couple provincial leaderships ago.
Mind you, Brown is out of his league in this race. He probably has sealed a deal with Jean Charest for his second votes. Between 40,000 and 50,000 second votes could tip the scales out of as many as 350,000 national votes this time.
Brown’s problem is that the bulk of his votes are from Ontario. That limits the impact of electoral districts with a large number of conservative members against eastern and western ridings with smaller memberships.
The emerging Charest versus Poilievre race is your classic tortoise and hare event. Poilievre might be off and running but those crowds in Alberta were misleading. That is really Poilievre’s home turf and the crowds included a rowdy bunch of yahoos who caused all the problems in Ottawa in February and at the major U.S. border crossing from Alberta into the U.S. They pissed off a lot of conservative voters as well as ordinary citizens.
What surprises me is the number of liberals who are hoping that Poilievre is chosen because he could never lead the conservatives anywhere but downhill. All I know is that I was wrong about Donald Trump when he first ran for president in the U.S. Canadians can ill-afford to make a similar mistake about a weasel like Poilievre.
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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry
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