OTTAWA–A senior member of Andrew Scheer’s team put his chances at 50 per cent.

It was the night before the Conservative leadership vote, and Mike MacDonell was pacing the halls at the Etobicoke convention centre where the federal party’s grassroots were selecting Stephen Harper’s successor.

MacDonell shared his assessment of Scheer’s chances with an incredulous reporter. Received wisdom from political observers and journalists was that Maxime Bernier would become the party’s next leader. But Scheer’s team saw hopeful signs that its strategy — making Scheer everybody’s second choice in the Conservatives’ ranked-ballot leadership election — was working.

The team was right.

Now, the same core team members that engineered Scheer’s come-from-behind leadership victory occupy key positions in the Conservative party’s election machine as they prepare to face similarly long odds: defeating a one-term majority government during relatively good economic times.

This time, being everybody’s second choice won’t be enough.

Hamish Marshall is leading the Conservatives’ effort as campaign manager, the same role he played in Scheer’s leadership campaign.

Marshall and Scheer have been friends since around 2001, when they worked as staffers on Parliament Hill.

Like his boss, Marshall is mild-mannered and unassuming. But he is a dyed-in-the-wool partisan, a veteran of (he estimates) more than a hundred campaigns at the local, provincial and federal levels, and within Conservative circles is known as someone who has his finger on the pulse of the party’s grassroots members.

When asked why he signed up as Scheer’s campaign manager, Marshall said his friend asked him for help. But he has other reasons.

“It’s the ability to make Justin Trudeau a one-term prime minister, to get the country back on track,” Marshall said in an interview this week. “At its very core, that’s what it’s about.”

Read more:

How the NDP is trying to find its feet before the federal campaign

How the Green party election machine is gearing up for its biggest campaign

Hébert: Trudeau’s Liberals have an early edge

Marshall is a numbers guy. He served as the Conservatives’ pollster during Harper’s 2008 campaign — although he’s had to relinquish that role this time around.

But his best-known political success, up to now at least, was helping to lead a campaign against a proposed municipal transit tax in Vancouver. Not unlike the Conservative campaign he’s running now, Marshall framed that fight as “the elites” or “the establishment” against “the people.”

“I think (the Liberals) are focusing on things that are not priorities that I see reflected in the people we talk to and what we’re seeing at the doors,” Marshall said. “And, you know, we’re very much going to run a campaign that’s focused around delivering tangible results for people to make a difference in their lives.”

The team Marshall leads looks very different from Conservative war rooms of recent past. Most of the central Harper-era staff are gone. The senior leadership, while not exactly newbies, skews younger. In some ways, it resembles the Liberals’ situation in 2015 — a new, largely untested leader, and new people around him trying to get him in the Prime Minister’s Office.

Like the Liberals in 2015, the Conservatives have put an emphasis on local campaigns knocking on doors and meeting voters. One Conservative campaign staffer told the Star that, as of Tuesday, local campaigns had knocked on nearly three million doors — still a far cry from the 11 million door knocks and phone calls the Liberals reportedly made in 2015, but there are many weeks to go.

And like the Liberals, the Conservatives have upped their data game. Volunteers at the doorstep all have access to C2G, the Conservatives’ mobile canvassing application. (It stands for “CIMS to Go,” CIMS being the Conservatives’ “Constituent Information Management System” database.)

Conservative campaign officials have repeatedly downplayed the level of information the party collects and holds on Canadians — although in the absence of any meaningful oversight into parties’ data operations, voters can only take them at their word.

One senior campaign official told the Star that C2G collects two crucial data points when volunteers speak with voters at their doorstep — which way they’re leaning on voting, and whether they want a lawn sign.

That data is bolstered by information collected from recent mass text-message campaigns. A Conservative source, who spoke about the campaign on the condition they not be named, said the value in spamming random citizens is to identify voters. Even if you don’t know who they are or where they live (outside of their area code), if someone responds positively to the text, the party can save that number, encourage them to vote when the time comes, or offer them a lawn sign.

The Conservatives use this data to rank voters in five categories: supporters, “accessible likely,” undecided, “accessible not likely,” and non-supporters. Those categories are colour-coded in the CIMS database: blue, light blue, yellow, orange and red. (A source was quick to add that the colours do not correspond to NDP orange and Liberal red.)

All of that data is fed back to the Conservative war room on Albert St. in Ottawa. It’s really more two rooms, spread out over two floors in the kind of non-descript office building that is a familiar sight in Ottawa’s parliamentary precinct. Leading the central operation is Dustin Van Vugt, the Conservative party executive director who oversaw the leadership race.

Van Vugt is a veteran campaigner, having served on local and national campaigns (as well as helping out Arnold Schwarzenegger’s campaign for California governor). He held staff positions for junior ministers in the Harper government, before being appointed executive director of the party by Harper himself.

The Conservative war rooms were still being set up this week. When fully staffed up, about 150 people will work there, but on Tuesday it was more like 50. Staffers, predominantly young staffers, sat at their work stations, ready to provide support to local campaigns and candidates — an operation run by MacDonell. Van Vugt, despite his lofty title, sits in the same pen as the staff.

Van Vugt is the deputy campaign manager in Ottawa, while Marc-André Leclerc will fill that role on the campaign trail.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Leclerc was another member of the tight circle around Scheer during the leadership contest. After Scheer’s victory, he worked in the Office of the Leader of the Opposition, eventually rising to the role of chief of staff to Scheer.

Leclerc said he got to know Scheer while working for Rona Ambrose, the interim Conservative leader, who named Scheer her House leader. Scheer asked him to join his leadership campaign to help with Quebec, and Leclerc accepted because he saw the Regina MP as the best candidate to keep the party’s disparate wings together.

Leclerc told the Star that the goal of the leader’s tour is not just to have Scheer speak at rallies and to the party faithful; those people are already voting blue. Instead, the tour will try to get Scheer in front of as many “regular” people as possible — acknowledging that outside of diehard question period viewers and news junkies, Canadians still need to get to know who the Conservative leader is.

Leclerc will be periodically joined on the road by Kenzie Potter, Scheer’s principal secretary, who has worked with the Conservative leader since his days as Speaker of the House of Commons.

Where that road will take them remains to be seen. Variables, like which debates the party leaders will take part in, make it difficult to set a schedule in stone. But Conservative sources are hopeful they can pick up 10 or so of Atlantic Canada 32 seats after being wiped out of the region in 2015.

In Nova Scotia, the Liberals have already lost a number of popular incumbents to retirement. The Conservatives, meanwhile, have tapped three Progressive Conservative MLAs — Alfie MacLeod, Eddie Orrell and Chris d’Entremont — to carry the federal banner into the election.

Southern New Brunswick is also seen as fertile ground for the Conservatives, where well-known former MPs Rob Moore, John Williamson and Rodney Weston are attempting to mount a comeback after losing in 2015.

Québec is, as always, complicated. But the Conservatives believe the Trudeau brand is hurting outside of Montreal. They see ridings around the Québec City, Trois-Rivières and Saguenay regions as potential spots for growth in a province that has remained cautious toward the modern Conservative party.

Conservative sources are confident they’ll pick up Beauce — the riding long held by Bernier, who split with the party last August.

Conservative strategists are more than enthusiastic about their chances between the Ontario border and the Rocky Mountains. Outside of a handful of seats in major urban centres, the Conservatives are expected to paint the Prairies blue once again.

In conversations with the Star, strategists from all three major parties suggested British Columbia was a toss-up, with the potential for three- or even four-way vote splits among the three major parties and the insurgent Greens under Elizabeth May.

The region the Conservatives believe will largely decide the election is the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area. It’s there that the Conservatives are expected to be pushing their message of middle-class affordability (getting rid of the Liberals’ price on carbon, cutting federal sales taxes on home heating, and so on).

Brock Harrison will be responsible for helping to craft and deliver those messages. An Alberta expat who worked for the Wildrose Party from 2010 to 2015, Harrison moved to Ottawa in 2018 to take over the job of Scheer’s director of communications.

“I think you’re going to see from us a message of hope, a message of optimism, built around tangible outcomes that make your life measurably better, measurably more affordable,” Harrison said.

“I think the Liberals have done a poor job of speaking to Canadians’ kind of general economic fears and anxieties … There’s a sense that for the first time in a long time, this generation doesn’t necessarily believe they’re going to have it better than their parents. And I think that speaks to overall economic anxiety that needs to be tapped into.”

Under Harrison will be Simon Jefferies, a recent transplant from Toronto who worked for the Doug Ford government. Jefferies will be responsible for day-to-day interaction with reporters. A separate wing of the communications shop, based out of the war room in Ottawa, will be run by Cory Hann — an affable Nova Scotian who has long served as the Conservative party’s communications director.

Hann will be responsible for “rapid response” communications. In other words: seeing what the news of the day throws at them and punching back.

The Conservatives are also working with multiple advertising firms to help sell Andrew Scheer to an unfamiliar electorate, but the party is tight-lipped about which companies are providing those services.

The party can also depend on their traditional advantages: money and a motivated, dedicated base.

The party has maintained its fundraising dominance. According to the two quarterly reports filed with Elections Canada, the Conservatives raked in $16.54 million so far in 2019. That’s almost double than the Liberals’ $8.89 million raised over the same period. The Conservatives also have more donors — 53,000 of them in the second quarter, compared to the Liberals’ 41,500 — which can be seen as a measure of how motivated their political base is in the lead-up to the election.

The Conservatives also enjoy healthy numbers in public polls. According to Forum Research’s tracking, Scheer’s party has for months either led or been within spitting distance of Justin Trudeau’s Liberals — although the national numbers are somewhat misleading, due to the Conservatives’ stranglehold on Alberta and the Prairies. But the party is polling well in all-important Ontario, and leads in the difficult-to-predict province of B.C. And it’s not yet clear if the Liberal numbers will sink further in the wake of Wednesday’s ethics commissioner report, which found Trudeau broke ethics law for a second time, in the SNC-Lavalin affair.

Whether all of this will be enough to secure a historic win for the Conservatives remains to be seen. Unlike Scheer’s last come-from-behind victory, “everybody’s second choice” is not a winning formula.

Read more about: