Botched vote a lost opportunity

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/08/2020 (1488 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The penultimate moment of any political leadership convention is the the inaugural speech of the new leader.

This is the moment when new leaders, employing nothing but the power of their convictions and the poetry of their ideology, create a narrative to heal any wounds or rifts inflicted during the leadership contest, and focus the rank and file on working together to defeat a political enemy.

Lamentably, this was the exact moment that the Conservative Party of Canada denied its supporters, and to the untold thousands of less-partisan Canadians who sincerely wanted to see an alternative to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his band of merry, unethical jesters.

At press time for this commentary, no new leader had been identified. Depending on the source, a malfunction with the machines that opened sealed envelopes with ballots inside, or with the machines that count and tabulate the ballots, led to hours of delay that pushed the final result well past prime-time television coverage in Eastern Canada and the deadline of just about every newspaper in the country east of Kelowna.

How badly did this Sunday night turn out for the Conservatives? After hours of swapping unfounded rumours on cable news programs and across several social media platforms, the same, obvious joke began to circulate among pundits and social media observers:

So, how many Tories does it take to open an envelope?

It’s quite possible that several weeks from now, when the new leader is firmly installed in the consciousness of the Canadian electorate, the events of Aug. 23 will be but a distant, albeit painful footnote to this leadership race. But late on Sunday night, it was a horrible tragedy unfolding in real time.

Mechanical malfunctions aside, it was quite clear that the Conservative party never truly understood the concept of a “virtual” leadership convention. Particularly, the fact that in the age of COVID-19, a party leadership is no longer an event, but rather a process that was supposed to reveal in an elegant and timely fashion.

This time around, there was no mass gathering of delegates in a convention centre ballroom, no live speeches, no convention floor negotiations or hospitality room arm-twisting. This was a process to count more than 174,000 ballots cast and mailed in by party members over the past three months.

Given the prolonged voting period, it was somewhat curious the Tories didn’t give themselves more time to process the ballots, input the results and tabulate the eventual winner. Still clinging to the idea that there was some sort of live event taking place in Ottawa, the actual vote counting did not start until very early Sunday morning.

By the time the official pre-result program started — 90 minutes later than planned — the Tories were numb to their predicament and absent of any idea about what to do.

A party official tried to downplay the vote-counting problems by introducing a pre-recorded video congratulating party volunteers on the great job they did counting votes. Although the volunteers were not the problem here, it was still a horrendously awkward moment.

And lamentably, it was not the only awkward moment.

The decision to feature a speech by outgoing leader Andrew Scheer before the new leader was crowned was quite squirm-worthy. Scheer is, after all, the man who is largely credited with snatching defeat from the jaws of victory in last fall’s election. Although Scheer likely deserved some sort of send off, his intolerably long rant about the Liberals, Eastern elites and traditional media bias served no discernible purpose.

Even as more rumours circulated that first-ballot results would be made public by 10:30 p.m. CT, party officials were still planning on some sort of cross-country video reveal of the regional breakdown of votes. That might have made for interesting, even anxious moments for party members and leadership contenders. As the clock crept closer to midnight in the eastern time zone, it seemed to be an unnecessary indulgence.

It is difficult to assess the potential damage that a screw-up of this magnitude can do to a political party brand. Obviously, a slick and well-executed leadership convention is considered to be a major win, an opportunity to create a lasting moment of political theatre that can help vault new leaders and their parties into the hearts and souls of voters, both committed and uncommitted.

In this instance, as well, there are internal battles awaiting the new Tory leader whenever he or she is finally crowned. The party core is rife with internal conflict between Western separatists, Red Tory centrists and coast-to-coast social conservatives. Depending on who ultimately, the deeply flawed vote-counting process could leave some hardcore Tories with long, bitter grudges.

The opportunity for slick and well-executed had come and gone by late Sunday night. Rather than getting a bounce in support, the new Tory leader is going to have to work extra hard to get past the stench of a leadership vote that has set a new standard for incompetence.

dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca