Only two people from Western Canada are contending for leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada in the current leadership race, and none did so in the previous race. However, the dominance of Ontarians vying for the party’s top role does not mean the western influence, so crucial to its Reform Party roots, has diminished, some pundits say.
In 2020, Durham MP Erin O’ Toole won the leadership over Ontario residents, Derek Sloan and Lewis, as well as Peter MacKay, who for a time was based in Toronto while working at a law firm, and is now back in Nova Scotia. In 2017, Andrew Scheer emerged victorious from a pack of 14 candidates that included five westerners.
Geoffrey Hale, political science professor at the University of Lethbridge, says a much higher financial threshold for entry since then is one reason more westerners haven’t vied for the top job.
“The partly refundable $300,000 deposit and nomination signatures required from seven provinces create a fairly substantial hurdle for candidates without established financial and organizational networks across the country. These restrictions, along with broader campaign finance restrictions under federal law, make it more difficult for relative newcomers to break into the race in order to build a profile,” Hale told The Epoch Times.
“Secondly, by declaring early, Pierre Poilievre has pre-empted much of the hard-core conservative vote in Western Canada, while Jean Charest, and to a lesser extent, Patrick Brown, have largely pre-empted the party’s moderate lane. Their candidacies have largely defined the parameters of the race, which was called on relatively short notice.”
Ontario’s 122 seats in the House of Commons gives the province 36 percent of the 342 national total, a reality Hale says the party cannot ignore.
“Any party front-bencher would need significant support from Ontario colleagues to have much of a chance of winning,” he said.
Tom Flanagan, a former political strategist and professor emeritus of political science at the University of Calgary, was involved with the Reform Party in its early days, later helping Stephen Harper win the Canadian Alliance leadership and then the leadership of the CPC. Although Reform’s original slogan was “The West wants in,” Flanagan said the party always hoped to reach eastward, even in its pre-merger days.
“Reform started as a western party, but that was always temporary in Manning’s mind,” he said, referring to Reform Party founder Preston Manning.
“He wanted a national party, with a western base, that could win elections and form a government. Harper wrote that in stone by pulling off a merger with the Progressive Conservatives whose explicit purpose was to enable the winning of elections.”
Even though the Conservatives have established a strong base in Western Canada and rural Ontario, “that’s not big enough to win,” Flanagan says.
“To win, the party has to take more seats in some combination of Ontario suburbs, Atlantic Canada, and Quebec. Harper realized that and made explicit overtures to all these places, with positive results, though of varying magnitude, in each area.”
Poilievre grew up in Calgary and received his undergraduate at the University of Calgary, where Flanagan taught for many years. Although Poilievre has been an MP in the Ottawa area since 2004, Flanagan counts him as a transplanted westerner.
“A western leader can win, but not by appealing mainly to the West. If Pierre Poilievre wins the leadership race, he will have to try to do what Harper did,” he said.
Nelson Wiseman, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Toronto, also believes Poilievre was taken from the West, but the West was never taken out of him. He says the region maintains enormous influence in the CPC, as shown by interim leader Candice Bergen being from Manitoba and prominent MPs such as Mark Strahl from B.C. and Michelle Rempel Garner being from Alberta.
“If you want to see the weight in the caucus, O‘Toole was undone by westerners. [Saskatchewan Sen.] Denice Batters got the ball rolling. And, we don’t know definitively, but I believe most of the MPs that voted against him were from the West. And there were Alberta MPs who were publicly calling for O’Toole’s resignation before they had the vote.”
As Poilievre seeks to be O’Toole’s successor, Wiseman expects stronger support from his former home than his current one.
“I would say Poilievre’s support is stronger in the West than it is in Ontario, where a lot of the Ontarians, I suspect, will go for Charest,” he said.
“I have to qualify that because the Conservative Party, as we think of it, or the Conservative Party of today, is not the Conservative Party we will have on June the third, because all these new members are going to be signed up by various candidates.”
