All leadership contests require a combination of math, ideological calibration and, in Canada, allowances for regional political predispositions. For the federal Conservative Party, Atlantic Canada presents an opportunity — one that could be a test of the party’s willingness to trade partisan orthodoxy for winnability. As Dalhousie School of Public Administration Director Lori Turnbull writes, the provincial precedents are instructive.

Lori Turnbull

Regionalism has long been understood as the most salient cleavage in Canadian politics. The popularity of political parties tends to observe regional boundaries, at least to some extent, and the first-past-the-post system reinforces this. Atlantic Canada tends to be known as a Liberal stronghold – particularly at the federal level. However, the success of provincial Progressive Conservative parties in the region offers a compelling story for how federal Conservatives can win. 

If a centrist candidate were to win the federal Conservative leadership race, this could lead to a breakthrough for the party in Atlantic Canada, building on their success in last September’s federal election, when they flipped eight seats that had been held by the Liberals. However, PC voters in the region have no interest in divisive, populist rhetoric. The very sensibilities that have elected Progressive Conservative provincial governments would reject right-wing factionalism in a heartbeat.

At the time of writing, the Conservative leadership race has officially entered its second phase. Membership sales are over, and candidates’ efforts have shifted from recruiting new supporters to courting the people who have already signed up. It is not clear, however, whether there is enough overlap among the six leadership candidates for any of them to have much cross-appeal. They seem to comprise two camps: Jean Charest, Patrick Brown, and Scott Aitcheson are the moderates/centrists, while Pierre Poilievre, Leslyn Lewis, and Roman Baber represent the more right-wing side of the party.

This divide on the ballot is reflective of the broader fault lines within the Conservative movement. The question that has dominated this race – and, indeed, the discourse around the party’s future ever since Stephen Harper stepped down – is whether there is anyone capable of uniting the conservative movement in Canada. 

Even on the right side of the leadership ballot, there is significant distance between the candidates, with Lewis accusing Poilievre, during the English language debate, of not being “conservative enough”, being opportunistic and shallow in his support of the trucker convoy, and weak in social conservative principles. Without a strong sense of a common project among party members and factions, the Conservative Party of Canada is not a viable alternative to government. The role of the leader is to facilitate that unity by providing both an inspiring presence and set of common principles for supporters to rally around.

However, leaders are not miracle workers; members and supporters must see themselves as key actors and stakeholders in the unity project for it to succeed. The alternative is another split on the ideological right; this is not, in itself, a bad thing, but could make it mathematically more difficult for Conservatives to form government. 

Notwithstanding the obvious challenges around wide differences of opinion and priority between the factions of the party and the candidates vying for the leadership, the rules of engagement for the Conservative leadership contest, including the ranked ballot and the point system that weighs ridings (not votes) equally, provide incentives for candidates to appeal broadly – not just across ideological positions, but across regions as well. 

To determine the winner, the Conservatives use a system that gives each federal riding in the country 100 points, as long as the riding has at least 100 Conservative party members in it. Candidates are assigned the number of points that is proportional to the number of votes they receive from members in the riding. 

This is good news for Conservatives who live in less populous regions of the country, such as Atlantic Canada, where the population would be considered small enough to ignore if the rules were different. But, under the point system regime, which former federal PC leader and Nova Scotia cabinet minister Peter MacKay negotiated in exchange for his support in merging the Progressive Conservative and Canadian Alliance parties, all ridings have an equal voice in choosing the leader of the party. As long the riding signs up a minimum of 100 Conservative members, Sydney-Victoria has as much of a voice in this contest as does Calgary Nose Hill or Oshawa. 

Recent electoral history in Atlantic Canada tells a compelling and encouraging story about how conservatism can win. Three of the four premiers in the Atlantic region identify as Progressive Conservative. Two of them, Nova Scotia’s Tim Houston and New Brunswick’s Blaine Higgs, both formed majority governments during the COVID-19 period. PEI Premier Dennis King leads a minority government, but an undeniably stable one that boasts broad support both across the province and within the legislature. None of these leaders could be described as ideological; one would be hard-pressed to even call them partisan. Notably, in the 2021 provincial election, Houston made no apologies about defining himself as a red Tory, but not a Conservative. He boasted having more in common with Justin Trudeau than with Erin O’Toole. 

There are some differences between the Progressive Conservative leaders, with Higgs being more of a belt-tightener and Houston running a roughly $400 million deficit in his first budget to pour money into health care and access to family doctors. Differences aside though, they all campaigned on practical platforms that appeal both to common sense rather than to emotion or fear. All of these leaders, in their own ways, have demonstrated responsiveness to the general will in their province. 

Of course, Atlantic Canada is known as a Liberal stronghold at the federal level, which means that the region is not necessarily ready to go blue. That said, there is a durable Conservative base in the region that could come to life depending on the results of the leadership contest. In May, Abacus Data released polling showing that 45 percent of people in Atlantic Canada would vote Liberal, as compared to 31 percent who would vote Conservative. A Charest win, for example, could offer a choice to centrist voters who see themselves neither in the Liberal-NDP alliance on the progressive side nor in a Conservative Party that seems constantly plagued by an existential crisis and, at times, shows too much similarity – both in messaging and in tactics – to the Republicans south of the border. Though the front-runner, Poilievre’s opposition to COVID-19 restrictions is likely to fall flat in a region that managed COVID-19 cases to a zero baseline, with major success until the omicron variant took hold. 

Though Atlantic Canada is normally seen as too small to have a decisive impact on electoral outcomes, the rules that govern the Conservative leadership contest actually give the region a decent shot at affecting the results. At the very least, candidates cannot afford to ignore the pool of votes available in the region’s 32 ridings. They would also be unwise to ignore the electoral successes of moderate Conservatives in three of the four provinces.  

Contributing Writer Lori Turnbull is an Associate Professor and Director of the School of Public Administration at Dalhousie University. She is a co-winner of the Donner Prize for Political Writing.