There are now more Conservative members in Quebec than in the party’s central province of Saskatchewan.
Combined, Ontario and Quebec now account for more than half of the party’s total of 678,708 members eligible to vote in the Sept. 10 leadership race. By any measure, the surge in Conservative numbers during the 2022 race is unprecedented in recent Canadian politics.
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That’s according to official figures released by Conservative party headquarters on Friday morning, which suggest the party’s membership has at least doubled in every province and territory since the start of the year.
Quebec – a province where the Conservatives have historically struggled – led the way in terms of proportional growth. The province had 12,957 members at the time of the party’s 2020 leadership race and has 58,437 today.
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Daniel Béland, director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, warned that while the 58,400 members in Quebec was an improvement for the party, it was still a small fraction of the province’s estimated 8.5 million people.
In other words, on a per capita basis, you’re still more likely to run into a CCP member in the Prairies than in La Belle Province.
Beland said it’s also open to question which campaign signed up those members — and whether they’ll stay if their chosen candidate loses.
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“It’s money, of course. These are also people on mailing lists, people who could (recruit) as potential volunteers, so having more members is really good news. But (Quebec’s numbers) are still proportionally small compared to what you see in some other provinces,” Béland said in an interview.
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In absolute numbers, Ontario leads with nearly 296,000 members, while Alberta and Saskatchewan — the party’s traditional province — total 164,499. British Columbia grew from 35,639 members in the 2020 race to 99,963 members as of Friday.
Membership tends to increase during leadership contests, when the various campaigns try to sign up as many new and defecting members as possible to ensure victory.
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But Friday’s numbers are also a revival from late 2021. After the party failed in its third straight general election, membership fell to 169,705 – the lowest number of card-carrying party members since 2016, according to party data.
Heading into the final stretch of the latest leadership campaign, most observers and conservatives believe Pierre Poilievre will be hard to beat.
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This is partly due to the assumption by Poilievre’s campaign that they have a broad base of support. An internal campaign document dated June 4 and reviewed by Global News suggests Poilievre has signed up more than 311,000 members nationwide.
The numbers could not be independently verified but were not disputed by insiders familiar with the number of members who spoke confidentially to Global News.
Comparing Poilievre’s unconfirmed numbers to the party’s official tally suggests the front-runner is strong in Newfoundland and Labrador and accounts for just under half of registered members in Quebec and nearly 119,000 members in Ontario — where now-disqualified candidate Patrick Brown likely signed up a significant chunk out of a total of 295,815 provincial members.
In Poilievre’s home province of Alberta, the campaign claims to have signed up 71,759 of a total of 131,860 members. In British Columbia, Poilievre’s campaign claims to have signed up more than half of all eligible voters for the Conservative leadership, 50,709 out of 99,963.
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In a statement, Conservative Party President Rob Batterson attributed the growth to the “excitement” generated by the leadership race and “the momentum for change in government in Ottawa.”
© 2022 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
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