Ontario Liberal leadership frontrunner Steven Del Duca, pictured in 2017 during his time as Minister of Transportation, speaks at the laying of the first track of Eglinton Crosstown. Anne-Marie Jackson/Toronto Star

TORONTO — With just weeks to go until the Ontario Liberal Party selects a new leader, who will be tasked with shepherding the Grits back from their 2018 electoral decimation, the numbers betray an all-but-certain result: Steven Del Duca has 56 per cent of elected delegates.

That percentage slips below half when you factor in the approximately 640 ex-officio delegates who will also have voting powers at the party’s March leadership convention in Mississauga, Ont. The myriad of ex-officios include former and sitting Liberal MPPs, Ontario MPs, riding association presidents, club presidents and smatterings of party brass.

But, with Del Duca appearing likely to clinch a first-ballot victory, the five remaining candidates are now charting paths for the final weeks before the vote. Though none appear poised to withdraw from the race, some conversations are simmering about how the competition could be amplified — including at least one candidate considering the idea of throwing her support behind one, or multiple, other hopefuls.

READ MORE: Meet the six candidates vying to lead the Ontario Liberal Party

“If it isn’t a foregone conclusion, then there are other things I might do,” Brenda Hollingsworth, an Ottawa lawyer who secured 25 delegates to Del Duca’s 1,171, hinted to iPolitics in a telephone call earlier this week, as she awaited the party’s official numbers.

“I think the best thing that could happen would be a competitive convention, whether I’m a player or not. And this has nothing to do with Steven — it just has to do with the party feeling like it has a convention, and there are choices made.”

She confirmed that she would consider supporting one or more of the other candidates, in the interest of keeping the convention climactic. In a phone call, she grappled with what the race would look like from here on out — what would debate look like, if a candidate had “effectively closed it down?” And what about the convention? A foregone conclusion wouldn’t be ideal for a party looking to renew itself, she claimed.

“I don’t know what I can do, but if there were something, I would look to it.”

And those conversations haven’t been limited to her camp.

Sitting MPP Michael Coteau, who came out of last weekend in second place with 371 elected delegates, confirmed to iPolitics on Thursday morning that he and Hollingsworth had spoken about “building a more competitive space.” He cautioned that nothing had been agreed upon, or discussed in detail, but claimed there was a “spirit” of looking towards amplifying the competitiveness that was shared among the others.

“Half of the party is represented by the other five candidates,” Coteau noted. “There’s a lot of strong positions on issues, and approaches that people would like to take. There’s a lot of energy that’s shared. I think it’s just natural for us to have those types of conversations within this competition.”

READ MORE: ‘I’ve won nothing yet,’ Steven Del Duca says of OLP leadership push

In conversations with iPolitics, none of the remaining five trailing hopefuls indicated any plans to resign from the race before convention day — but several offered new framings for what success would look like for them, given the strong leaning towards a Del Duca win.

“There’s no question in my mind that I reflected on the current situation,” Coteau said, when asked whether dropping out had crossed his thoughts.

“But I’m in this 100 per cent, and I’m going to fulfil my duty that has been placed on me,” he added. Looking at the numbers, he conceded that members had their say. “That’s the reality I have to face.”

Coteau pointed to the personal implications of his candidacy, evoking his childhood in Toronto’s Flemington Park, when he’d been seized by a feeling that his community — and others like it — were “ignored.” “I hope that my candidacy in this race sends a strong message to people who feel like they’ve been kind of pushed aside, and discounted, that there is a party out there that needs people to be part of this process.”

Other candidates held up certain subjects of discussion they feel have been pushed to the forefront by their campaigns so far. Alvin Tedjo, the former Oakville North—Burlington candidate who wound up with 72 elected delegates after last weekend, said he was pleased to see his campaign, in his view, advance debate amongst the six candidates on ideas like universal childcare or basic income programs. “Whether or not I’m the leader, I’m going to continue being an advocate for these issues, and to really push our party to make sure we’re providing those progressive and pragmatic ideas,” Tedjo told iPolitics this week.

“It sort of stops being about me being the leader,” Hollingsworth told iPolitics, looking to the path ahead. “It’s about making sure the issues that I think are important are still on the table, still talked about.”

Kate Graham, the former London North Centre candidate who came third this weekend with 273 elected delegates, exuded optimism in a phone call shortly after the party released its official delegate tally. She hailed her campaign’s momentum, noting that while they only had around three per cent of overall membership sales, they had worked their way up to roughly 13 per cent of the elected delegates last weekend.

The numbers, in her view, didn’t change much — Del Duca had been the frontrunner, in her mind, since before she even entered the race. “We’ve got more details than we had at the beginning, but … for me this has always been about more than who the next leader is,” Graham said. “There are things I want to see changed in this party. That’s what the race has been about for me. I’m clearly not the only one who’s felt this way, that’s why we’ve picked up momentum every step of the way.”

And she’s still holding out a glimmer of hope for a March 7 win, noting that there was still a “slim path” that led to that outcome — before laughing, and conceding that the numbers were nonetheless “clear.”

MPP Mitzie Hunter, who has 130 delegates, distanced herself from the pursuit of increased competitiveness at the convention on Thursday afternoon. “My focus is on getting myself, and my delegates, and my volunteers to the convention,” Hunter told iPolitics in a phone call.

Asked what she thought her odds were of success, Hunter pivoted. “I will be successful in bringing forward my delegates and the ideas that we care so much about,” she replied, expressing excitement for her own next steps as a sitting member of the OLP caucus at Queen’s Park.

“I will support whoever emerges as leader,” she said.

Hunter and several other candidates reiterated calls this week for the OLP to change its selection process. A push to switch to a one-member, one-vote system was unsuccessful at a party convention in June 2019, gaining more than 50 per cent support but not the requisite two thirds.

Overall, the race for Liberal leadership has featured a degree of cohesion between those in the running. Tedjo said he’d spoken to each of his opponents over the weekend, and that “for the most part,” all of them got along. Some of that was necessity, in his view — the provincial Liberals, which were knocked down to just seven seats and lost official party status in 2018, just didn’t have the resources, the organization and the fundraising power to schism after the convention vote.

“We’re still rebuilding the party from the ground up, because it got burned down in 2018. So whoever becomes the leader cannot afford to not include everybody else, essentially, to continue being part of the rebuild. And I think for the most part, we’re all going to be,” he said — while cautioning that he didn’t think all of the candidates would necessarily “jump in with two feet right away” after a loss.

“But I think they’ll come around eventually,” he assessed.

“It takes a lot to sort of realize that you’re not going to reach your ultimate goal. But then you have to then start thinking about the future of the party, and what you can do to contribute to that success. I don’t think everyone’s necessarily ready to sort of pack it in yet, and that’s good, because we need a lot of energy going into the convention.”

Del Duca, meanwhile, is staring down his likely ascension to the top party post. While he noted that “anything can theoretically happen” at a leadership convention, he also pointed out that the elected delegates had their leadership choices locked in on a first ballot — and claimed that he also already had support from some 200 of the ex-officio delegates.

Still, he cautioned, “it’s not over yet.”

“In our party system, what matters is how many people show up to the convention, register and vote,” Del Duca said on Thursday. As campaign weeks wane, his camp will turn some focus there. He rebuffed the idea that, given the numbers, the convention could be anticlimactic — but expressed a hope that the party could emerge from the event united.

“I’ve said all the way through this campaign that if, at our convention, I was not chosen or I would not be chosen as the leader of our party, that I would do whatever I can to support the new leader,” Del Duca said. “I would be using all of my energy and my experience and my ideas to make sure the party was rebuilt. I’m sincerely hopeful that each of the other candidates would feel the same way, should they not be successful.”