Conservative party leadership candidate Pierre Poilievre gestures as he speaks to journalists on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Feb. 16, 2022.BLAIR GABLE/Reuters
The Conservative Party will soon announce the rules for the coming leadership race. The party would be wise to follow an old idea of Stephen Harper’s: Let any Canadian who wants to cast a ballot for leader join the party for free.
The leadership organizing committee of the party’s National Council will be announced very soon. About two weeks after that, it will lay out the rules of the race, including the date for the leadership convention. The general assumption is that the earlier the date, the more inevitable Pierre Poilievre’s leadership becomes.
The Carleton MP already has the endorsement of almost a quarter of the House caucus, and observers expect he will have no trouble selling 100,000 memberships. He may be unstoppable.
But plenty of those in what is left of the establishment wing of the party would love to stop him. Mr. Poilievre, though intelligent and capable, flirts with extreme positions.
One example: On the very day that Mr. Harper, as prime minister, apologized in the House of Commons for the abuse of First Nations children in residential schools, Mr. Poilievre said on talk radio: “My view is that we need to engender the values of hard work and independence and self-reliance” among First Nations, and that “more money will not solve” their challenges.
Mr. Harper was reportedly furious and demanded that Mr. Poilievre apologize in the House, which he did.
What do you think are the chances that the Liberal Party has that radio clip teed up and ready to go?
No past provocations compare, however, with Mr. Poilievre’s stalwart support for the truckers who have blockaded downtown Ottawa in protest against pandemic restrictions.
“I’m proud of the truckers and I stand with them,” he said in a podcast last week. He said in the House that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had “insulted them and name-called them and left them with no choice but to engage in legitimate and peaceful protests.”
The Liberal attack ads write themselves.
It may be that there is no moderate candidate who could defeat Mr. Poilievre. The membership of the party has clearly moved to the right.
But the 34 per cent of Canadian voters who supported the Conservatives in the past election may have different ideas. A party led by Mr. Poilievre could drive many of them, reluctantly, into the arms of the Grits.
In the lead-up to the campaign that chose Mr. Trudeau as leader, the Liberal Party instituted a system in which any voter could sign on as a supporter and vote for leader without having to become a paid, card-carrying member. About 300,000 people were eligible to vote in that election, which provided the party with a valuable database for fundraising and voter-identification purposes.
That approach was so effective that James Cumming, in his postelection analysis of what went wrong for the Conservatives in 2021, recommended the party do the same. And in fact, the Conservatives were committed to the notion long before the Liberals adopted it.
The 2004 Conservative election campaign promised: “A Conservative government led by Stephen Harper will institute a system of voluntary voter registration for Canadians to register their party affiliation. This registration will be used as the basis for party nomination and leadership contests.”
The party later dropped the proposal. But the National Council arguably has the power to revive it, at least in an ad hoc fashion, by setting the membership fee for joining the Conservative Party at zero, with the membership expiring immediately after the leadership election.
Such a move would broaden the base of the party, while providing it with an invaluable database of supporters.
Even without such a democratizing move, a moderate Conservative might be able to prevail against Mr. Poilievre. Former premier Jean Charest could galvanize support in Quebec, Brampton Mayor Patrick Brown could do the same in suburban Ontario, with all the moderates urging their supporters to choose other moderates as their second choice on the ranked ballot. ABP: Anybody but Poilievre. But the odds are long.
One way or another, however, the Tories need to broaden their base of support. Free memberships would be one way. The National Council might want to give it some thought.
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