It has been 20 years this spring since the Reform party ran English-only election ads inviting voters to withdraw their support for federal parties whose leaders hailed from Quebec. The invitation backfired and Jean Chrétien secured a second majority mandate in no small part by winning every seat but two in Ontario.

This weekend there are better than even odds that the reunited Conservative party will emerge from the second leadership vote of its short history under its current configuration with a francophone Quebecer at the helm. Maxime Bernier has been the frontrunner in the lead-up to Saturday’s finale.

The Beauce MP is expected to win Quebec handily. His strength in the province that accounts for the second-largest number of votes after Ontario could be the ace in a winning hand. But if he wins it is Bernier’s score in the other provinces that will speak to the scope of his mandate as leader.

The stronger his showing in regions such as Ontario and the West from which hails the bulk of the Conservative caucus, the easier the task of selling skeptical MPs on his policies. Caucus support for a leader — especially in opposition — tends to be directly proportional to a demonstrated capacity to get MPs re-elected.

Stephen Harper was particularly proud to leave his successor a beachhead in Quebec. A leader that does not do well in the province in the weekend’s leadership vote would have a hard time preserving that legacy. But while winning Quebec can go a long way to pave the road to a Conservative leadership victory the party’s last and only 21st century majority victory was achieved with a minimum of help from that province.

The regional breakdown in the support of the winning Conservative candidate is just one set of numbers that will speak to the mood and the state of the party post-leadership. Here are some others.

In the last election, the Conservatives dabbled in identity politics first with the promise of a niqab ban at citizenship ceremonies and subsequently with a proposed tip line to report so-called barbaric cultural practices.

As part of Saturday’s vote, the Conservatives have an opportunity to signal whether they want the party to go further down the somewhat slippery identity road or to steer clear of it.

More so than any other candidate in the campaign, Ontario’s Kellie Leitch has ridden the identity battle horse. Her signature policy has been a values test for would-be immigrants to Canada. A strong showing for Leitch on Saturday would send the message that there is a solid constituency within the party that would like the Conservatives to stay on Harper’s controversial identity-related campaign message track.

The last election highlighted the fact that the Conservative party is plagued with a significant demographic deficit. Its voter base is ageing. The party lags far behind its competition among the millennials who will make up the largest age cohort within the electorate as of 2019.

This is a group of voters that is particularly attuned to environmental issues. Reform party founder Preston Manning has been arguing for years that unless the Conservatives take climate change seriously they will fail to thrive over time.

Under Harper, climate change was never front and centre in the Conservative narrative and most of the aspirants to his succession would rather fight any attempt at pricing carbon than undertake a greening of the party.

Ontario MP Michael Chong has been the exception. He has spent the leadership campaign promoting the notion of a carbon tax and the necessity for the party to recast itself as a strong contributor to the battle against climate change. His score on Saturday will provide some insights as to the relative strength of that particular current within the party.

By choice but also by default the Conservative party is the political home of the religious right in Canada. That has become particularly true since Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau decreed that his MPs would be bound to the party’s pro-choice policy on abortion.

At their first post-defeat convention the Conservatives abandoned the heterosexual definition of marriage they had defended over the debate on same-sex marriage.

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In the leadership campaign, Brad Trost and Pierre Lemieux have been vying for the social conservative vote with promises to revisit the marriage definition issue. And although he did not court the religious right as part of his leadership campaign, Saskatchewan’s Andrew Scheer boasted of a perfect social conservative voting record.

If Scheer goes on to a strong finish Saturday, it will at least in part be because the religious right is still a force to contend with within the Conservative party.