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To my knowledge the facts are not in dispute. Andrew Scheer won the Conservative leadership race last year by the narrowest of margins, less than one per cent of the available “points” under the party’s system of equal weighting of ridings. The difference was supplied by several ridings in Quebec, and specifically by the votes of thousands of dairy farmers.

It wasn’t that these Quebec dairy farmers had any great personal enthusiasm for Scheer; I imagine they’d be hard pressed to pick him out of a crowd. Neither would most of them have had any attachment to the party, before or since. They joined for one day, and for one purpose — to vote for Scheer, or rather to vote against Maxime Bernier, his nearest rival — and, having completed that task, most of them were never seen again.

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Why did they want to stop Bernier? Because he had campaigned to abolish supply management, the official euphemism for what would otherwise be known as a state-sanctioned price-fixing scheme in force in several agricultural industries, dairy among them.