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There's no such thing as a perfect electoral system, and the best proof can be found by looking at one that purports to be.

I think Andrew Scheer will make a fine leader of the Conservative Party (he fits the formula of a low-risk but high-potential "boring leader" I made the case for last fall), and I don't question the validity of the outcome that produced him last week.  Yet even the satisfied must concede Scheer's victory was generated by a fairly bonkers process.  Any attempt to honestly evaluate the health, demographics, and trends of the Canadian conservative movement circa 2017 must begin by correcting for a number of systemic oddities within the voting system of a party that claims to reflect all of the above.

The Conservative Party's electoral system promised to honor two abstract principles everyone can support in theory: all electoral districts should be treated equal, and the party leader should be elected with a majority of votes.  Both proved deeply difficult to implement in practice, however.

For its egalitarian electoral districts, the party chose to use Canada's existing 338 parliamentary ones, a bad choice given such things are neither equally-populated (the Maritimes in particular have way more seats than they should due to the constitution's insistence that no one gets fewer seats than they have senators — and the Maritimes have way too many senators), nor equally conservative.

Thanks to data surreptitiously obtained by OttWatch's Kevin O'Donnell, who trusts the Canadian public with the intimate details of the Tory election more than the Tories, it's been revealed that 54 ridings — about 16% of the total — cast less than 100 votes each.  The vast majority were from Quebec, where the Conservative Party is notoriously uncompetitive, and included places like Gilles Duceppe's old riding of LaurierSainte-Marie, where the Conservative candidate pulled a whopping 4% in 2015, or GaspésieLes ÃŽles-de-la-Madeleine, where total Conservative Party membership consists of 19 brave souls.

Maxime Bernier swept these ridings, which doesn't reflect too poorly on him, given he swept a number of enormous ridings as well — indeed, the fact he won first-ballot victories in both the smallest riding, Nunvut (voters: 16), and the largest, Medicine HatCardstonWarner (voters: 1,425), reflects well on the broadness of his appeal.  Yet it does go some ways to explaining why when you look beyond the party's "point" system, which is based on riding-by-riding popular vote percentages, and towards the aggregate national popular vote, Scheer's margin of victory (53-47%) looks less ambiguous.

The "Rotten Boroughs" effect is more significant in the case of Michael Chong, who eked out a fifth-place victory despite having run, basically, as a Liberal.  Chong received first ballot victories in only 18 ridings, virtually all of which were located in stereotypically far-left urban centres, including Ottawa Centre, home of Environment Minister Catherine McKenna, and Vancouver East, the riding Libby Davies held for 18 years.  The Conservative electorate was larger in these places than one might expect, though probably due to Chong's own activism.  For all the attention Chong's candidacy received from journalists (who may have been courted by Chong himself, given how much of greater Toronto and Ottawa he won), the only real takeaway from his failed candidacy is that a progressive masquerading as a conservative can be popular in places that vote left — but nowhere else.

On the other end of the spectrum, the 15 districts won by Brad Trost are equally revealing in exposing where that candidate's flavour of right-wing thought — not merely "socially conservative," but across-the-board-dogmatic-on-every-issue — approach plays best.  Unlike Chong, Trost's ridings were generally competitive territory for Conservatives, and, most revealingly, included several of the much-mythologized "very ethnic" ridings of Vancouver, Scarborough, Markham, Richmond, etc.  Many on the Tory left continue to fantasize that a more "inclusive" party is synonymous with a more moderate one.  Trost's results should offer pause.

Honoring the majoritarian victory principle proved no less a challenge.  Though Scheer beat Bernier 62,593 to 55,544 in the popular vote (or 17,221.2 to 16,577.8 in "points"), these figures are rather obtuse, given they were cobbled from 13 rounds of voter redistribution.  Because the party used a ranked ballot, which presumes you should be ecstatic when even your 10th favorite candidate winds up in power, both Bernier and Scheer gained tens of thousands of voters over the course of the evening simply by having been grudgingly tolerable to the voters of their defeated rivals.  By the time he was pushed over the top, Scheer's political destiny was being buoyed by nonsense like the 6th place rankings of Lisa Raitt voters.  They must certainly be pleased?

Man does not hold hierarchies of preference as elaborate as the ranked ballot system demands.  We saw proof in the final tally, which featured around 16% of the popular vote going to no one, thanks to a high number of lesser candidates' voters refusing to rank Scheer or runner-up Bernier at all.  This is a pretty substantial rate of dissent from candidates who, between the two of them, were often presented as offering basically anything a conservative voter could want, and should be kept in mind as Leader Scheer seeks to consolidate a victory that's both more and less decisive than it seems.

Written by J.J. McCullough

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.


By now it should be quite obvious that the PC Party of Ontario regards its own base with suspicion at best and hostility at worst, as much of a threat to their hopes of forming government as Kathleen Wynne herself.

This attitude has informed the kind of behaviour we've seen from the party during the Ottawa West Nepean nomination controversy and countless other kerfuffles, flipflops and screw-ups over the course of the long sad period in which they've spent in opposition.

The pattern is always the same.  Someone feels like they're getting the short end of the stick.  The party stonewalls and implies that that person is not being "part of the team".  The person, who has invested significant time and effort in the cause, has a public freakout.  Complications ensue.  Rinse and repeat.

The party laments aloud that their allegedly impossible to please base makes it hard to trumpet their successes, such as a historic by-election victory in Sault Ste. Marie, or to torment the government with fowl puns about the quack-mire that arose when friends of a feather goosed the Ontario Liberals with a DuckTale (woo-hoo) about a giant yellow rubber bath toy costing in excess of 100K which in an additional flip of the bird was alleged to be counterfeit.

But no matter how many times this sad wheel turns, nobody has been bold enough to allege that the party is deliberately shooting their own foot soldiers.  Except me, of course.

The evidence is right there, even if nobody wants to acknowledge it.

First we have the well-worn Flanaganite maxim that it is a good thing to have the more "radical" elements of your base in open revolt against you, because this is somehow supposed to convince moderate voters that you aren't as crazy as you seem.

Tom Flanagan never advocated deliberately kicking these beehives, but this is just one of the many examples of the CPC turning a successful strategy into a dead horse, just like the over-reliance on boutique tax credits and Harper pounding the ivories every time there was a spare moment to do so.

Another misapplied lesson from the Harper era is the heavy handed approach to nomination meetings, to the point where it seems to be standard operating procedure.

Conservative parties in Canada have good reason to be concerned about wing nuts spouting off and hurting the party's chances.  But even when Harper was at his most controlling we weren't getting reports of egregious bigfooting every other month the way we are with the PC's.

Which brings us to the other bit of recent rough news for the PC's the end of Jack Maclaren's tenure with them as an MPP.

If Patrick Brown had simply wished Maclaren well in his new role as a sitting member for the Trillium Party, he could have remained above the fray and made the controversial ex-Landowner look like he was taking his ball and going home.  That's certainly what Harper would have done.  Heck, it's what Harper did.

Instead, Brown came off as if he was desperately seeking the approval of Liberal voters and that firing Maclaren at this point instead of at the first opportunity like they would have wanted would somehow get them to toss him a bone.

P-Bizzle may have wanted to whip his voters and MPP's in line, but all he did was give the impression that he considered them disposable.

This is doubly clear given that he's not nearly as aggressive towards Kathleen Wynne as he is to those within the PC fold that he perceives to be disloyal.

But the clearest bit of evidence that the party establishment is deliberately targeting its own members is that the members are allowing them to do it.  Though they complain, they accept the premise, promulgated by the party and the Liberals, that if they speak out, they are disloyal and are responsible for any subsequent misfortunes the party suffers.

It's also why so many other PCPO "loyalists" are willing to excuse the party's behaviour.  Like their "disloyal" comrades, they "know" that the only thing standing between the party and sweet, sweet power is loose Tory lips.

Here's the problem, though: If Patrick Brown excommunicates everyone who he sees as disloyal, and he STILL loses, what then?  Who will the party blame for its failure?  The media?  Third party groups?

It would, of course, be "disloyal" to suggest they need to look in the mirror, but when has that stopped me before?

Written by Josh Lieblein

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.


Premier Kathleen Wynne got up on her high horse last Friday to squeak about how President Donald Trump's withdrawal from the Paris Agreement was "appalling!"

Wynne blowing hot air over Trump pulling out of a non-binding, ineffective, economically disadvantageous "deal" was an especially rich dish of foie gras served up from the unprecedentedly unpopular premier.  The giant ducky in the room while Wynne was scolding a pragmatic Trump was last week's earlier development of her government's debacle in blowing over $120,000 to rent said ducky to celebrate Canada's sesquicentennial.  Besides the bright yellow bird in no way representing Canada, this latest showing of utter contempt for the taxpayer perfectly encapsulates how Wynne's Liberal government has practiced the art of the wheel and deal steal when acting as banker of the public purse.

In contrast to Trump's puffery in retelling how his father used to tell people that everything his son touches turns to gold, everything Wynne touches seems to turn from glimmering promise to blackest despair.

From dooming Ontarians to outrageous hydro bills through green energy schemes, which gave her Liberal-connected friends way-above-market-value contracts, to selling off 60 per cent of Hydro One, a hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars-a-year revenue-generating golden goose for the province, Wynne has done truly appalling action after appalling action while at the helm of this province.  And don't get me started on the radioactive provincial debt expected to soon become completely unmanageable.

Wynne continues to plumb new depths in her shameless pursuit of self-preservation at any cost.  Just look at some of her most recent announcements.  The "Fair Hydro Plan" refinances the energy debt to reduce power bills by 18 per cent this summer — but now it's been revealed through leaks to include the caveats of throwing away at least $21 billion in additional interest payments and still allowing rates to skyrocket again in four years' time.  Then there's Wynne's rash decision to up the minimum wage to an unrealistic $15 an hour by 2019 which will result in thousands of layoffs, increased inflation, and many businesses going out of business.

Wynne doesn't seem to give a damn what happens to the province down the poorly paved road — in the literal sense as well, since she rewarded construction companies with more contracts for botching jobs — as long as they remain the rulers over their own increasingly fiscally hellish Ontario.

They say the devil comes with a smile and the knockoff, Dutch-designed, ripoff duck is just the latest allegorical recrudescence.  A replica of the original cheery giant duck could've been bought from the artist for a tiny fraction of the overall $200,000 rental cost, but the government gave the grant and the festival paid the fee to a copycat without question.  It wasn't their own money after all.  So this giant rubber ducky will be inflated with a bunch of air and look impressive to onlookers for a few days' time.

But after the fanfare is over the government will have ultimately wasted $120,000 on a lame duck.  This duck symbolically represents all of the Liberals big announcements over the years that go from over-inflated expectations to deflated disappointment and dejection.

Personally I hope this giant duck blows up — like one literally did in Taiwan â€” in Wynne's face in July, for all the horrible deals she's cynically made to feather her own nest politically.  But at the very least, as her premiership circles the drain, this 13,500 kilogram rubber ducky deserves to be placed squarely around her neck, like an albatross, for the many appalling sins she's committed against our dear but greatly wasted homeland.

Written by Graeme C. Gordon

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.