On May 27, Canadian Conservatives will elect Harper’s replacement — a new prime ministerial candidate to challenge Justin Trudeau in the 2019 general election. Of the front-runners, all but one are former ministers from Harper’s cabinet whose political careers occurred entirely within the party he created and led. The result has been a lackluster race revealing Canadian conservatism’s structural and intellectual weakness in the absence of the man who dominated it for so long.

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Canada is a society polarized into warring, ideological tribes in the same way that the United States is, which explains why the cultural-political debates of the United States are so eagerly consumed by Canadians. Surveys consistently expose a country deeply divided by the emerging challenges of the 21st century: globalization, endlessly rising immigration, increasingly visible chasms of class, growing cultural atomization, ever-stricter codes of secular morality. Trudeau’s Liberal Party has done its best to position itself on one side of all this, yet the Conservatives appear far from literate in these new realities.

Someone once quipped that the trouble with Republicans is that they cling to solutions from the 1980s to the problems of the 1960s. This is particularly evident in Canada, where Harperite doctrines were forged mostly in response to the considerable economic challenges of Canada’s past decades.

Member of Parliament Maxime Bernier and reality TV star Kevin O’Leary, who have been crowned the race’s front-runners by the press, are caricatures of a prime minister who made a point of prioritizing fiscal policy over “divisive social issues.” The shtick of Bernier, who worked briefly at a free-market think tank, is that he will out-wonk Harper’s own economic wonkiness, with his greatest enthusiasm reserved for niche causes such as reforming telecommunications regulation and ending cartelism in the dairy industry. O’Leary, best known on this continent as the Simon Cowell-esque sourpuss on “Shark Tank” and “Dragons’ Den,” has been less esoteric but no less single-minded, voicing open disdain for conversations on any topic other than money.

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Other candidates have incorporated mild critiques of immigration and political correctness, particularly Kellie Leitch, who has worked hard to market herself as a populist in the Trump-Wilders mold but has been dogged by persistent suspicion that her heart isn’t quite in it. Of the army of other also-rans, most seem content to continue to march as loyal Harper foot soldiers, repeating the only arguments they learned to make in their short political careers.

For many Conservative voters, the race’s most conspicuous theme has been a yawning gap between the unambitious platforms of candidates and the angry passion of the base they seek to channel. In any case, the outcome is unlikely to accurately reflect the will of the Tory electorate. While more than 5.6 million Canadians voted Conservative in 2015, only about 150,000 are expected to elect the next Conservative leader. Like most Canadian political parties, the Tories force would be-voters to pay to cast a ballot, a process which discourages participation from all but the most dedicated while incentivizing chicanery (already 1,400 voters have been expelled in a bulk vote-buying scandal).

A bizarre electoral college system, meanwhile, will grant an equal number of electoral points to each of Canada’s 338 parliamentary ridings, meaning that districts where Conservative parliamentary candidates routinely languish in third or fourth place will have equal say to parts of the country packed with right-wingers. Such a system — which, to cause further headache, will also use a ranked ballot — is impossible to predict through polling, which only encourages further apathy.

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The clearest compliment that can be given to Harper is that he managed Canada’s government better than any alternative. Many of his would-be successors are gambling that this is still the only pitch Conservatives want and the country needs, and will be accordingly satisfied with the sort of generic, dated leader the race seems set to produce.