OTTAWA — Officially, the Conservative leadership race is suspended. Unofficially, the campaigning continues from all four candidates on the final ballot, but now in a bizarre grey area of rules and recommendations.
Virtual forums are still being organized. Email blasts are still going out. Fundraising is still happening, though more quietly. And although party officials have occasionally asked campaigns to tone it down a little, it appears unlikely there will be any sanctions for campaigning.
“(Party officials) told us that we could continue to email, though they would prefer we not,” said an organizer with one campaign, speaking on background to discuss internal matters. “But they said there was no way to police a no-campaigning rule, which was absolutely right. I mean, two of the candidates are sitting MPs.”
They said there was no way to police a no-campaigning rule, which was absolutely right
An organizer supporting another campaign pointed out that at least for now, the membership sales cutoff is May 15 — an extremely tight timeline if no campaigning happens in April.
“Look, everyone’s taking cheques and memberships, they’re just stockpiling them until May,” said the organizer, adding that some campaigns are just seeking out donations more explicitly than others.
When the party’s leadership election organizing committee (LEOC) suspended the race on March 26 due to COVID-19, it cancelled the debates planned for April and stopped processing donations through the party’s online portal. It said it would re-evaluate the race’s timeline by May 1.
The party’s official stance is that if campaigns can’t restrain themselves, LEOC may still have to step in.
“We are monitoring campaign communications closely, and if we feel further steps need to be taken, such as setting it out formally in rules, we will make that consideration,” said Conservative spokesperson Cory Hann. “Our hope is that won’t be necessary, so we will again ask campaigns to refrain from contacting party members until after a decision is taken on May 1, and remind them that those voting in this election are the very members that felt now was not the time to be campaigning.”
But in the meantime the campaigns are effectively waging an arms race, as they can’t afford to sit idle while competitors keep moving. Every camp watches each other warily and keeps track of activities.
On Monday night, Peter MacKay’s campaign had a “virtual discussion about COVID-19” scheduled with Conservative MP and health critic Matt Jeneroux, who has endorsed MacKay. The invite was sent to Conservative members in Ontario.
Other candidates have also done video town halls, typically organized through the Zoom service. Erin O’Toole did one recently in southern Ontario, and has also done Facebook Live videos, most recently on April 1. O’Toole has also kept donation instructions at the bottom of his campaign emails, including a link that allows members to “pledge” a future donation.
Derek Sloan and Leslyn Lewis have continued doing outreach to members in various ways, including through virtual forums and email blasts. (The continued campaigning of Sloan in particular has attracted the ire of some party officials, given Sloan had repeatedly slammed the party for not suspending the race in light of the pandemic.)
The decision to keep campaigning isn’t sitting well with everyone — particularly with some of MacKay’s supporters. Over the weekend someone leaked a MacKay campaign call in Nova Scotia to a Canadian Press reporter , raising eyebrows among staff of other campaigns. According to the report, the campaign call featured instructions on how to continue fundraising while the race is suspended, including a $40,000 target for the province in April.
It is what it is
MacKay’s communications director Julie Vaux, a veteran of Stephen Harper’s Prime Minister’s Office, also quit the campaign in mid-March, saying she still supported MacKay but didn’t want to be campaigning during a pandemic. Multiple sources have told the Post that Vaux also clashed with members of MacKay’s campaign team.
Such tensions aren’t new in MacKay’s camp. It has always featured a mix of centrist, establishment Conservatives who are helping him fundraise and recruit support, and a core campaign team with a much more populist bent who worked on the Maxime Bernier or Doug Ford campaigns (and in some cases, both). This includes MacKay’s campaign manager Alex Nuttall, deputy campaign manager Michael Diamond, and digital director Emrys Graefe.
It was after Vaux left that MacKay’s team went on an aggressive public campaign to stop the leadership race from being suspended, including an all-out effort on March 26 featuring an email blast, social media posts and national TV interviews arguing LEOC had a duty to democracy to keep the race going.
With that effort having failed, MacKay and the other candidates are now left to figure out how to run a leadership campaign with a completely vague timeline — where the end-date could either be quickly approaching in the summer, or be pushed off far into the fall.
“We’re just gonna kind of take this week by week,” said a senior staffer on one campaign. “It is what it is.”
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