Conservative leadership hopeful Pierre Poilievre participates in the Conservative Party of Canada’s French-language leadership debate in Laval, Que. on May 25. Ryan Remiorz / The Canadian Press
After a weekend of Conservative leadership campaigns playing with his recruiting figures, Jean Charest said he still has a clear path to victory.
But this path is now much, much narrower, and meandering treacherously through improbable mathematics.
The ranks of Conservative Party members have increased en masse, according to the campaigns and suggestions and push of party members. Perhaps twice as eligible to vote as in any other Conservative leadership race. The total is expected to be around 600,000, an unusually large figure.
It is the number that Pierre Poilievre’s campaign claims to have entered, 311,958 nationwide, including about 25,000 in Quebec, which sounded the strongest of the race.
If true, the new recruits of Mr. Poilievre make up about half of the party members. Brampton Mayor Patrick Brown’s campaign said he had recruited 150,000. The campaign of Mr. Charest wouldn’t say, but it’s a safe guess that the number is smaller.
A large hiring total is not a deciding factor in itself. The Conservative leadership race is not decided by the total number of members, but by the points assigned to each of Canada’s 338 constituencies, so where you get votes can be as important as how many.
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In the 2020 race, Erin O’Toole took the victory by registering a small number of followers in a large number of mountains in Quebec where there were not many members.
The “path to victory” of Mr. Charest has always depended not only on winning Quebec, but on accumulating the lion’s share of the 7,800 points – about 23 percent of the total – available in the province. This strategy seems to have been shattered now.
A spokesman for Mr. Charest insisted he could still win all 78 Quebec tournaments. But even if he does, he will share the points. The Poilievre campaign claims to have recruited 25,000 members in a province that previously had less than 10,000, so it should easily take up a substantial portion of the points in Quebec that Mr. Charest.
The large number of recruits of Mr. Poilievre means that unless they focus on an unusually small number of mountains, they are within reach of winning the lead in the first round. (Party members will email a preferred ballot that will allow them to rank up to five options.)
This is not in stone. Members do not always vote; typically less than two-thirds of them vote. Some who have signed up to support one candidate may change to another, but it is usually not enough to change a tide like this.
Some Conservative MPs seem to think so. On Tuesday, two who had supported Mr. Brown, Dan Muys and Kyle Seeback changed teams to support Mr. Poilievre. Mr. Muys tweeted that Mr. Poilievre “can unite the Conservatives,” but he certainly seemed to decide that it would be a good idea to unite with the winner.
The campaign of Mr. Brown claims to have registered a large number of members as well: 150,000, which would normally be enough to win. Mr. Brown gained Ontario’s Conservative Progressive Leadership in 2015 by recruiting a large number of new members, particularly from minority communities, and acknowledged at the beginning of this campaign that he had to win the recruitment battle to win the leadership race.
My path to victory is to attract new people and have a decent level of support within the party, “he said in a video clip posted on Facebook in April.
But Mr. Poilievre seems to have contributed much more. So the path of Mr. Brown towards victory is starting to look pretty tough.
Its 150,000 new members could still be enough to put Mr. Brown second in the first round, so Mr. Charest didn’t even make it to the final round, face to face with Mr. Poilievre.
That may not matter so much. It was always quite accepted that Mr. Poilievre was the favorite of the existing party members. He is considered much more likely to get second-choice support from Social Conservative MP Leslyn Lewis, who finished third in 2020. And now, it looks like Mr. Poilievre has recruited more new members than Mr. Charest and Mr. Brown together.
The paths to victory seem extremely narrow for anyone other than Poilievre.
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