OTTAWA-
After a seven-month campaign, the Conservative Party of Canada will announce the winner of the 2022 leadership race tonight in Ottawa.
The event is now underway, with the results of the first ballot due to be revealed around 7:30 p.m. CTV News Channel has special coverage live from the ground.
There are five candidates running – frontrunner Pierre Poilievre, his progressive conservative rival Jean Charest, Leslyn Lewis, Roman Baber and Scott Aitchison – although six names have been on the ballot since they were printed before the disqualification of Patrick Brown.
The Conservatives conducted the election using mail-in ballots which were due to be delivered to the party from Tuesday.
Ballots began to be tallied on Thursday, with the party keen to avoid the massive delay in announcing results in the 2020 leadership election due to thousands of damaged ballots at the opening. The tabulation of the results, however, occurs today.
The party promises a more stripped-down announcement than originally expected, given the death of Queen Elizabeth II.
Because the country is in a period of official mourning, the event will open with a tribute to Her Majesty, confetti cannons will not be used and expect to see more black attire in the crowd of party worshipers .
A historic number of votes were cast in this race, after party membership soared during the campaign. A total of 678,702 party members were eligible to vote, and of those 437,854 ballots were received by the deadline.
In total however, the leader of the party is chosen by 417,987 members, as it is the number of accepted ballots that will be counted, with the remainder discarded for incomplete ballots.
The 338 federal ridings have 100 points to cast, meaning there will be 33,800 points up for grabs, more or less depending on the verification process. To win, a candidate must obtain 50% plus one of the points, or approximately 16,901, provided there are at least 100 accepted votes in that constituency.
It is a preferential ballot system, so if a candidate does not reach the majority threshold in the first round, the candidate with the fewest points will be eliminated.
When a candidate is removed from the ballot, the votes of the members who placed him first will be redistributed to the second choice of these voters. This process happens automatically for Brown voters, according to the party. This process would continue until one candidate emerged victorious.
One of the main questions tonight is whether any candidate, particularly Poilievre, whose campaign claimed to have sold around 300,000 memberships, is in a position to prevail on the first ballot.
Before the results were announced, Charest’s camp said they still felt they had a way to win, although touting Poilievre’s campaign stats, senior adviser Jenni Byrne said: “We feel pretty good.
“I think no matter who wins tonight, it will be a decisive victory. And I can tell you that I have friends who work in all the other camps, and everyone I have spoken to over the past few weeks. , regardless of their side, said the same thing. We need to be united. We are focused on Justin Trudeau.”
When asked if Poilievre would take a more moderate approach if he won, the same way his predecessor strayed from the ‘true blue’ branding of his leadership race, Byrne said no. .
“What you see is what you get,” she said. “What you should expect to hear from Pierre is exactly what he is talking about.”
Winning in the first round would be a feat last achieved by former Prime Minister Stephen Harper in 2004.
In July, Harper endorsed Poilievre, saying in a video posted to Twitter that Poilievre had made the “strongest case” for being able to recruit new party members and win the next general election. Harper has not offered endorsements to candidates in the two previous leadership contests that have seen Andrew Scheer and Erin O’Toole take the party’s top job.
The campaign began after O’Toole resigned in February following considerable infighting following his unsuccessful 2021 federal election campaign. Candidates for office then had to pay the necessary registration fees and submit signatures. 500 party members in April to get their names on the ballot.
Then the push was to register members by June, and since then it’s been about member engagement and making sure they get the vote to see their supporters follow.
The race – the party’s third in the last six years – has been widely seen as a “battle for the soul of the party”, with many wondering how the winner hopes to bring all of its members together under one big blue tent.
As a result, the campaign was not short of attacks as the candidates presented themselves – through rallies and on the debate stages – as the person best suited to lead.
Attacks throughout the race were widely traded between Charest and Poilievre, seeing Charest suggest his ‘Freedom Convoy’ backing opponent was unfit to lead, while Poilievre accused his rival of being a liberal in clothes blue.
As ballots began to roll in to the party, prominent Tories stressed the need for members to come together once the winner was named and to focus on defeating the Liberals rather than post unity issues. -leadership.
“The Conservative Party of Canada – after a very vigorous leadership race with a lot of strong opinions expressed – once this new leader is chosen…the focus will be on: who is the leader and the team that can replace the liberals?” Conservative Party Chairman Rob Batherson said in a Sept. 4 CTV Question Period interview.
The first opportunity, should the winner take it, to signal the direction the party is taking and set the tone for its tenure will come tonight in a speech at the convention center.
The incoming new leader will speak at Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition Bar just over a week before the start of the autumn session of Parliament.
With files from Spencer Van Dyk and Sarah Turnbull of CTV News