With senior Conservative ministers deciding not to run again, the Harper government's already thin cabinet pool just got shallower.

Former ministers John Baird, Peter MacKay and James Moore are not offering. Jim Flaherty, the former finance minister, died. And some time ago, Jim Prentice left for a job in the banking sector, a job he unwisely traded for defeat in Alberta provincial politics.

None of these ministers has been adequately replaced, so that Stephen Harper's government looks and operates even more than ever like a one-man band.

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That ministers depart for personal reasons after a long haul in politics happens all the time. Generally, however, the Prime Minister and his political aides try to recruit top-drawer candidates who in time might replace the departing cabinet members.

By and large, this has not happened in the Harper party, except perhaps in Surrey, B.C., where the Conservatives have found someone of whom it is hard to find a harsh word spoken.

Dianne Watts served three terms as mayor of Surrey, leaving in 2014. Shortly thereafter, she declared her interest in the Conservative nomination in South Surrey-White Rock-Cloverdale. She won it by acclamation, a not surprising result for someone who won 82 per cent of the votes in her last municipal election.

Ms. Watts had been a hot political property for some time. She was talked about as a possible successor to former Liberal premier Gordon Campbell. She almost took the provincial leap to replace Mr. Campbell, but decided to stay in Surrey. Now on the Conservatives' team, she will instantly be one of the (if not the) party spokespersons in British Columbia.

The federal Liberals approached Ms. Watts to run for them in the October election. She said this week she preferred the Conservatives because she believes in the party's drive for lower taxes and tougher measures against crime, a serious blight in Surrey.

"I've always been a small-c conservative," she said. "The Liberal agenda just did not align with what I believe has to be fundamental in making the economy grow."

Ms. Watts will have to mind her tongue when she gets to Ottawa, either as a Conservative cabinet minister or a front-bencher in opposition. Mayors can speak their mind, especially if they lead a municipal party as she did. In Ottawa, no one in the Conservative Party is allowed freedom of public speech. Everything is vetted by the Prime Minister's Office, something Ms. Watts will have to learn. Freedom of speech for Conservative ministers is the freedom to repeat what the PMO has decided should be said.

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For example, Ms. Watts supports the B.C. carbon tax, implemented by the Campbell government but frozen thereafter by Premier Christy Clark's. Ms. Watts would have supported raising the tax in the Lower Mainland if the new revenues had gone to finance transit infrastructure. Mr. Harper, by contrast, abhors pricing of carbon.

Ms. Watts speaks very passionately about refugees, saying Surrey has the largest concentration of refugees in Canada. "We have a moral obligation," she says, "to take more of them." That is not the Conservative Party line, for the moment.

Ms. Watts is hardly a party rebel. It's just that mayors who arrive in Ottawa often find that the freedom of expression they enjoyed crashes against the strict party discipline of federal politics. The classic example of that misfit was Toronto's enormously popular mayor David Crombie, whose federal career was unhappy and short.

Surrey is an important battleground for all three parties. Ms. Watts will easily win her riding, but the other three Surrey seats will be hotly contested. Campaigning throughout Surrey is a challenge because the area has more than 95 languages, an ever-expanding population, constant pressure for more infrastructure, deep multiculturalism and, regrettably, a crime problem that Ms. Watts grappled with as mayor.

Obviously, the Conservatives will deploy Ms. Watts outside her constituency in other parts of Surrey. With James Moore from Port Moody not running again, she will likely become the party's highest-profile candidate in the Lower Mainland.

So it's not entirely true, therefore, that the Conservatives have come up completely empty in the search for impressive new talent. In Surrey, they scored.