MONDAY, AUGUST 17, 2020 BACKGROUNDER Down to the Wire: The Conservative Leadership The Conservative Party leadership race will come to an end on Friday, August 21. Following the counting and tabulation of the ballots, the winner will be announced on Sunday, August 23 starting at 6:00 PM. Initially slated to end June 27, the contest was extended to August due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Candidates Four candidates are in the running: Peter Mackay: He was a Member of Parliament from 1997 to 2015 and served as Minister of Foreign Affairs (2006–2007), Minister of National Defence (2007–2013) and Minister of Justice and Attorney General (2013–2015) in the cabinet of Stephen Harper. Earlier, MacKay was the final leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, and he agreed to merge the party with Stephen Harper's Canadian Alliance in 2003, forming the Conservative Party of Canada and became its first Deputy Leader. Erin O’Toole: Currently the MP for Durham, he was elected to the House of Commons of Canada in a by-election in 2012. O'Toole served as Minister of Veterans’ Affairs in 2015. In 2017, O'Toole ran in the 2017 Conservative leadership race to replace Stephen Harper, where he finished third. Since August 2017 and until he entered the current leadership race, O'Toole served as the Official Opposition critic for foreign affairs. Leslyn Lewis: Born in Jamaica, she is the first visible minority woman to contest the leadership of the Conservative Party. A practicing lawyer, she also holds several other advanced degrees, including a Masters in Environmental Studies, an MBA, a Doctor of Laws and a Ph.D. Lewis is the Managing Partner of Lewis Law, which specializes in commercial litigation and international contract trade practice specializing in energy policy. In the 2015 federal election, she ran in Scarborough-Rouge Park, placing second to the Liberal candidate. Derek Sloan: Member of Parliament for Hastings—Lennox and Addington in Eastern Ontario, he was first elected in last October’s general election. He is a businessman and lawyer. Early in the leadership campaign, he gained notoriety for questioning the loyalty of Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s Chief Medical Officer of Health by asking whether she “worked for Canada or China”. Page 1 Method of Voting When the former Canadian Alliance and Progressive Conservative parties came together to form the Conservative Party in 2003-04, the new party chose the leadership selection method formerly used by the PCs. It is a “one-member-one vote point system” in which: • Each electoral district is worth 100 points; • Candidates are assigned a point total based on his or her percentage of the vote in each electoral district; • Voting is conducted by preferential ballot—a single transferable vote; • As each candidate drops of the ballot, his or her second, third and fourth votes are distributed to the remaining candidates; • The winner must obtain a simple majority of points from across the country; • A majority of points is 16,901 points: 338 × 100 = 33,800÷2 = 16,900 + 1 Ballots are due to be received by the party by 5:00 PM EDT on Friday, August 21, 2020. The Conservative Party has announced that it will be broadcasting a low-key tabulation. Starting at 6:00 PM EDT on August 23rd, the public will be able to follow the results of the party’s leadership online through a livestream on the party’s social media and YouTube accounts. Membership Surge The party announced on July 14 that it had set a record with a total of 269,469 memberships, up roughly 100,000 from 2017, when Andrew Scheer was elected leader. According to the party, the largest percentage membership growth provincially was in Nova Scotia, Quebec, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Alberta, respectively—all nearly doubling their previous membership totals. Nearly 150 ridings across Canada have doubled their membership levels, and over 100 ridings across Canada now have more than 1,000 Conservative Party members. Policy Positions Perhaps not surprisingly, there is a remarkable amount of similarity in the policy positions among the four candidates. All candidates have promised to: • Gradually eliminate the deficit and balance the budget; • Repeal Bill C-69, (The modernization of the National Energy Board and the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency) and Bill C-48, the law prohibiting tanker traffic off the west coast. • Repeal the May 2020 federal government’s firearms ban; Page 2 • Renegotiate the Safe Third Country Agreement for asylum seekers with the United States; • Oppose defunding the RCMP; • Meet the 2% of GDP target for defence spending proposed by NATO; • Repeal the federal carbon tax; • Prevent Huawei from involvement in building Canada’s 5G network. • On contentious issues of conscience (such as restricting abortion or assisted suicide or allowing medical practitioners to refuse to participate in procedures that violate the tenets of their personal faith), all have said they would not restrict backbenchers from tabling private members’ bills; In the 2019 federal election, the party suffered from the widespread perception that it did not take climate change seriously and it struggled to compete with the Liberals in its environmental proposals. Peter MacKay's environment plan echoes what Andrew Scheer pitched to voters in the last election campaign—a promise to aggressively pursue advances in technology, invest in carbon sequestration and approve more LNG projects to sell Canadian natural gas around the world to displace coal and other higher-carbon fossil fuesls as a source of energy. Mackay has also committed to build a National Economic Corridor across the country to support access to energy resources to more Canadians and to the world. O’Toole has promised to "get to net-zero emissions" in the oil and gas sector and said his national environmental plan will focus on "making industry pay" through a "national industrial regulatory and pricing regime across the country." While critical of the current level of government spending, both Mackay and O’Toole have promised to continue the Canada Emergency Business Account (CEBA) program — which extends credit to businesses and includes a grant of up to $10,000 — for another year to help smaller businesses get through the COVID-19 crisis. MacKay has suggested business operators in two of the hardest hit sectors of the economy—restaurants and tourism—should be relieved of charging GST to make their services more affordable for consumers who all but abandoned them during the lockdown phase of the pandemic. O'Toole is proposing a "new hire incentive" that would reduce the employment insurance premiums that small- and medium-sized businesses pay if they add new workers. Peter Mackay would increase spending on projects to bring high speed internet to all parts of the country. Page 3 Fundraising Reliable fundraising numbers are available for the first two quarters of 2020, January to the end of June. Overall, they show a virtual tie between the two frontrunners, Mackay and O’Toole, and stronger fundraising performances by both O’Toole and Lewis in the second quarter. Reflecting her gaining momentum, Lewis more than doubled the dollars raised by her campaign over Q1 in Q2. Period Mackay O’Toole Lewis Sloan Q1 $1,045,851 $784,997 $447,646 $410,263 Q2 $1,160,000 $1,250,000 $996,000 $329,000 Total $2,205,851 $2,034,997 $1,443,646 $739,263 Campaign Dynamics Peter Mackay entered the race with the best name recognition of the candidates but stumbled out of the gate with weak French in his campaign launch and several additional early gaffes. He has performed more strongly as the race went on, particularly after he involved his wife, Nazanin Afshin-Jam, in the campaign. He has run a classic front-runner campaign and appeals strongly to centrist Conservatives who are not particularly ideological and value electoral competitiveness over hard principles. He has the support of 45 MPs from the Conservative caucus and 14 Senators. Erin O’Toole ran in the 2017 race that elected Andrew Scheer and placed a solid third behand Sheer and Maxime Bernier. In this campaign he has sought to paint Peter Mackay as the “Liberal Lite” Red Tory, while appealing to the Reform wing of the party. Acutely aware of the presence in the race of two social conservative candidates, Leslyn Lewis and Derek Sloan, he has also been working hard to secure second and third ballot votes from their supporters. While he has positioned himself as the “True Blue” candidate, his credentials as a hard-core conservative don’t withstand a lot of scrutiny. He has 38 MPs and three Senators in his camp. Leslyn Lewis has been the surprise of the campaign. Thoughtful and understated, she has grown well beyond her self-admitted social conservative roots, framing her pro-life views around gender-selective abortion and advancing substantive policy views across a wide range of policy areas. As veteran Conservative activist Kory Teneycke recently wrote of Lewis, “Members are excited to support an urban, well educated, professionally accomplished, Black woman as a candidate, in part because it counters the public perception (held with some cause) that the party is too rural, too male and too white.” Seven members of the federal Conservative caucus are supporting Lewis. Derek Sloan’s campaign slogan is “CONSERVATIVE. WITHOUT APOLOGY” and he is an unabashed social conservative. In addition to allowing MPs to introduce legislation to restrict abortion, he would slash immigration, end the Climate Action Incentive Fund, Page 4 repeal 70 per cent of federal regulations, make Statistics Canada surveys optional for business, defund the World Wildlife Federation, the Sierra Club of Canada and the Climate Action Network, end all funding for the World Health Organization and withdraw Canada for the UN Global Compact for Migration, the UN Paris Agreement and the UN Arms Trade Treaty.