Peter MacKay Is Next Tory Leader – And Will Not Be Our Next Prime Minister

After the trio of Rona Ambrose, Jean Charest, and Pierre Poilievre declined to run for the Conservative leadership, Peter MacKay has been informally elected leader of the Conservative Party Of Canada. Obviously, it’s not yet official, but it’s official enough. This leadership race is MacKay’s to lose, and he would have to run a truly horrific campaign to even risk going to a second ballot at this point. The thing is, MacKay is probably the second best they could have done out of the people floated this time around – with Ambrose as the best option – but he cannot win the next election for the Tories.



The newly re-launched Canada model shows the Liberals getting 170 seats – a bare majority. If an election was today, they may get a majority, they may not. The polls are not meaningful right now, as time will change how the polls are and things will happen. But what they show is that the Tories are not going to ride some great wave of discontent against the Liberals into office, as it’s not evident at all that Canadians have buyers remorse on the Liberals. The Liberals have expanded their vote share leads in Ontario and Quebec and closed the gap in BC, per Tyler Stephens’ averages for LeanTossup. Obviously retirements, old incumbents recontesting, and other local factors will change up the map from now till then, but the Conservatives have to grapple with two basic facts; that Ontario and Quebec have ~60% of the people and the Tories have 24% of the seats there, and that to win marginal seats in Ontario they won in 2011, the Tories need 20% swings to them in Brampton, 17% swings to them in Mississauga, and 10% swings in Oakville.



I actually find Peter MacKay to be fine – he’s a Tory nobody should really fear if he were to win. His record on gay marriage is fine – he voted for it in 2006 and has apologized for his 2005 vote against it. He’s not a climate change denier, and MacKay’s propensity to bend with the wind means he should end up in a proper place on a carbon price of some kind by Election Day, whenever it is. If he were to somehow win in 2021 or whatever, I wouldn’t be unhappy, which is a lot more than I could have said about Andrew Scheer. Scheer was a disaster in the making, while MacKay would be merely disappointing. He would also take the title of sanest leader of the global right – non-Angela Merkel Edition – from Scott Morrison in Australia, although that’s not a huge compliment given ScoMo’s crap last month.



Despite all of that, MacKay is not going to become the second Prime Minister of the unified Conservative Party of Canada. He will go down as a modern day Robert Stanfield, a man better remembered for their first job – MacKay’s time as Cabinet minister to Stephen Harper, Stanfield’s as Premier of Nova Scotia – than as a leader of the Opposition who never won power. It will be tempting to say that MacKay can fix Scheer’s Social conservative issues, and that’ll be enough. The only problem is it isn’t true.

Peter MacKay is an affable lad and an honourable gentleman. But he’s not a particularly impressive politician, and he won’t be able to stop the migration of cities and suburbs to the parties of the left. He is not a generational talent, and given that, the leftward march of the Ajax to Niagara Falls corridor will continue unabated. Or, at least, he ain’t flipping anything in Brampton – and because of that, despite the noise, the Liberals have still won the next election.