The federal Conservative Party was supposed to have its new leader on June 27, but their leadership convention was delayed by about eight weeks due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The convention happened Sunday, and when it did, there was a delay of more than four hours before announcing who the new leader was.
The four-hour wait wasn’t an afterthought. It overshadowed the victory of Erin O’Toole, it meant that many in Eastern Canada were already asleep when O’Toole won, and it gave the party’s critics plenty of ammunition and fodder for jokes online.
The initial results were to be announced at 6 p.m. Saskatchewan time Sunday night. That’s good, I thought. I can catch the results announcement while preparing supper, and then switch over to hockey.
Then the Tories announced there would be a delay with the results.
For whatever reason, I kept switching back and forth between hockey and politics. After a couple of hours, I wondered what would last longer: the overtime between the Columbus Blue Jackets and the Tampa Bay Lightning to start the Stanley Cup playoffs, or the delay for the first ballot results in the Tory leadership race.
The five overtimes in the Tampa-Columbus went longer, but not by much.
By the time we knew O’Toole had won, we had forgotten about Andrew Scheer’s swan song speech as leader of the Tories. We had forgotten all of the other self-promotional stuff that happens at these conventions.
The Tories kept pushing the announcement back. At one point it was going to be 8 p.m. in Saskatchewan. Then it was going to be 9 p.m. Then they said 9:42 p.m. I guess they didn’t believe results could be ready for 9:38 p.m. Of course, they missed the 9:42 p.m. deadline.
The Tories want to talk about the incompetence of the Liberals, how they’ve botched certain aspects of the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Well, people will question how the Tories can be trusted with our country when they can’t even get the ballot counting at their own convention right.
Ultimately, Erin O’Toole won the leadership. He’ll face the challenges any new leader encounters: getting his name out there to the masses, bridging gaps with his opponents and their supporters, and, in his case, trying to decide the best time to topple Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal minority government.
He ran with the slogan of “True Blue,” pushing Conservative ideals, which was smart. Now he has to find a way to sway undecided voters, or the “small c” conservatives who sway back and forth between the Tories and Liberals.
You would hope that he would have enough to defeat Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at the polls, and send the scandal-ridden Trudeau Liberals to the ranks of opposition. But if Trudeau resigns and is replaced by the far more qualified Christia Freeland as the Liberal leader between now and when an election is called, then O’Toole’s job of becoming prime minister will be much tougher.
Perhaps O’Toole’s biggest strike is that he finished third in the 2017 Tory leadership race, behind Scheer and Maxime Bernier, neither of whom were viewed by the masses as prime minister material.
His biggest asset is that he was the best candidate in the field to build bridges. He was the candidate most likely to draw both the “small c” conservatives and the strong social conservatives. And we saw on the night of the leadership vote that he had good, steady support from across the country, although he didn’t dominate in any particular region.
And he’s a relatively fresh face. He’s been an MP for eight years. He’s not one of these guys who’s been around forever, with past mistakes that the opposition can use against him.
That was one of the problems with Peter MacKay, the runner-up in the leadership race. Had he won, the Liberals and the other political parties would have had MacKay’s past blunders as fodder.
The night also capped the emergence of Leslyn Lewis, who finished third. She may have been the biggest story of the leadership race. And while her strong social conservative values likely would have made a Lewis-led Tory party difficult to elect, with her intellect and public speaking skills, there’s no doubt she would be an excellent addition to the Tory caucus, if she wants it.
One last note: the delays in the convention weren’t the worst part of the evening for me. That would have been the Vancouver Canucks playoff game against the Vegas Golden Knights. I had more reasons to cheer, and fewer reasons to curse, while watching the convention.
