Conservative leadership candidate Kevin O’Leary says he doesn’t know who is behind signing up fraudulent Conservative memberships, but he wants the party to get to the bottom of it.

“Nobody knows who’s behind it right now,” O’Leary told reporters in Ottawa Saturday. “Hopefully they’ll figure it out.”

“We don’t want the taint of fraud over this leadership race,” he said. “I have no idea who’s done this. All I know is clearly there’s fraud, and they are rooting it out and shining the light of transparency on it.”

O’Leary stumped at Carleton University Saturday, bringing his leadership campaign briefly back to Ottawa a day after the Conservative Party removed 1,351 party memberships – purchased through prepaid credit cards – for breaching rules, after his campaign drew concerns of potential “vote rigging.”

“Upon an expedited review, we found 1,351 memberships purchased through two IP addresses which were not purchased by those members,” an email from Conservative Party Executive Director Dustin van Vugt stated late Friday.

“The memberships purchased in contradiction to the published rules have been removed from our membership list, and are no longer eligible to vote.”

Some of the other Conservative leadership challengers took pot shots at O’Leary Friday in the lead up to the revelation, and sparks flew between Maxime Bernier and O’Leary, who are currently fighting for the lead in Mainstreet Research’s Conservative Party membership polling.

Bernier had called O’Leary a “loser,” just after the Huffington Post reported that Bernier’s campaign was under investigation for signing up members without their knowledge.

Bernier sent out a fundraising email saying O’Leary is “throwing mud to try to save his campaign” instead of “trying to win people over by putting out a platform,” and spent much of the leadership race outside of Canada.

O’Leary set his sights Saturday instead on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and other prominent Liberals, keeping with his frontrunner campaign message strategy, and wouldn’t respond directly about Bernier when asked about the challenge.

“I’m an international investor,” O’Leary said. “I will travel the world, and I will do the same as Prime Minister to attract capital to be competitive for Canada.”

Battle for the farm

Despite Bernier’s criticism of O’Leary’s lack of a platform, O’Leary waded in on a key Conservative policy flashpoint on dairy farms and the supply management system earlier Saturday.

O’Leary positioned himself as another candidate against Bernier’s promise to scrap the system, and sent out a release saying he’s pro-supply management.

“The agriculture industry is critical to ensuring a strong Canadian economy, and supply management plays a vital role,” O’Leary said. The release says O’Leary “fully supports” the regime and warns that “abolishing supply management would be detrimental to farmers and processors.”

Until now, that’s been a fight heating up only between Bernier and other challengers.

A Radio-Canada news report suggested Andrew Scheer and Steven Blaney have been mobilizing pro-supply management forces in Quebec to fight Bernier’s campaign.

Bernier attacked candidates last week, without naming them, for mobilizing “supply management lobbyists” to prevent him from winning leadership. A previous Bernier fundraising email said the leadership race shouldn’t be decided by “fake rent-a-Tories who only care about protecting their Soviet-style cartel system.”

Elsewhere on agriculture, O’Leary said Saturday that as Prime Minister he would do more to promote Canada’s pulse exports. Canadian pulse exporters are facing a potential crisis after India made a policy change on pesticide rules that effectively bars from their number one export market.

Budget prelude

Ahead of the federal budget Wednesday, O’Leary also attacked Trudeau and Finance Minister Bill Morneau for setting the budget date too early.

He said they should have delayed budget day, and instead waited to hear about Trump’s tax plans so Canada could respond competitively.

“I would have delayed this budget until he found out the actual outcome of the Trump policies, which are coming in a few weeks,” he said. “Why do this when you know have to change it? [Trudeau] is so uncompetitive that way.”

The key theme of his Saturday speech was suggesting Trudeau is a bad economic manager who can’t read a balance sheet, and that he and other Liberal cabinet ministers should be ‘fired.’

“This is going to be another budget of breathtaking debt,” he predicted.

Organizers estimated that the event, which took place the day after St. Patrick’s Day, likely pulled in just under 300 people – which would be the most attended event by any Conservative leadership candidate so far.

Carleton’s Conservatives president Adam Bradley said that Maxime Bernier drew about 70 people, the next highest attended out of nine candidates.

With files from Dustin Cook.