Yup. Ontario outside of the Toronto region is filled with soft right-leaning votes.
First, Ottawa is fairly centrist.
Secondly, Toronto has 25 seats. Expand that out to the suburbs and bedroom communities, and you're up to 63 seats. If the Conservatives want to become the party of rural Canada and go hard on the racism, that's a recipe for electoral disaster, since they'd be alienating all those suburban voters they need to win elections (as we saw in 2015).
Yes, and the deadline for the NDP is August I think.
I just wonder what it takes to officially "quit" a party?
They don't share membership lists or make them public, so the parties have no way of policing that. If you're just the honest type, though, you can mail in your membership card to party HQ with a note telling them you quit.
The fact that in Canada you have to actively go out of your way and join a political party, often, as in this case, paying to join (even if it's only like 15 bucks), is also a huge, absolutely yuuuge, difference between this leadership vote and the primaries in the United States. I don't know what the breakdown of this tiny subset of people is, but I highly doubt it's reflective of the general populace.
I'd be really interested to see stats about party memberships and the demographic breakdowns of them. So far I've found
this table from Stats Can showing that about 4 to 6 percent of Canadians are members of a political party, with men being a teensy bit more likely to be members, and older people being more likely to be members, especially people 65+.
This, I think, more than anything else, is the fundamental reason why a Trump-style campaign for party leadership wouldn't work. Joining a party and voting in its leadership races takes much more effort here than it does in the U.S. All Trump had to do was ask people to show up on a certain day and vote for him. O'Leary -- or anyone like him -- is relying on people being so into his candidacy that they're going to spend $15 to buy a membership, then remembering to vote by mail or in person two months later. It's a much bigger ask, and it relies on a campaign organization that I don't believe he'll have in place in just a few short months.
The main reason they didn't was more due to the split in the right-wing vote between them and the Progressive Conservatives rather than a lack of appeal for their platform. The Reform Party swept the western provinces and developed quite the support in Ontario. I'm not saying they're proof we're doomed, more that there is a history of this right-wing populist, racist movement to garner a significant amount of support on the federal level, to say nothing about the apathy towards bigotry of all strides. 2015's federal election had some of those same whiffs with Harper and the party's Islamophobia and the Conservative Party still won just under 100 seats and roughly 32% of the vote. That's a sizable portion of the vote and power in Parliament that shouldn't be ignored given what their platform entailed.
This is all ahistoric nonsense. The Liberals won majorities in 1993, 1997 and 2000 in part by nearly sweeping Ontario each time, with approximately half the vote each time. It wouldn't have mattered if there were a united right, because the combined vote totals for PC + Reform still wouldn' have come close to the Liberals -- and that's without even considering the fallacy of PC voter = Reform voter (I know I was a PCer, and I most definitely wasn't a Reformer). The only time the combined Conservative vote even came close to matching those crazy Liberal totals of 1993-2000 in Ontario was 2011, and that required a surging NDP knocking a lot of centre-right Liberals into the CPC column out of fear of an NDP victory. Even then, the CPC vote maxed out at 44%. If the Conservatives try and go Trump-style hard-right in 2019, we'll most likely see a repeat of 1993/1997/2000/2015 -- the NDP vote will collapse, and the whole centre/centre-left vote will go Liberal.
I'm not discounting the idea that a right-wing populist could sweep to power in Canada. I'm not discounting that the CPC 2015 campaign was a lot more successful than many people realize. I am saying, however, that the political realities of this country are different enough from elsewhere (and very different from the U.S.) that you can't just say that because it happened there, it'll happen here.
