How to watch Conservative leadership announcement

OTTAWA –

After a seven-month campaign, the Conservative Party of Canada will announce the winner of the 2022 leadership race tonight in Ottawa.

The event is scheduled to begin at 6:00 p.m. ET, with the first voting results expected to be announced around 7:30 p.m. CTV News Channel will have special live coverage from the floor starting at 5:30 p.m. ET

There are five candidates in the running – perceived front-runner Pierre Poilievre, his progressive conservative rival Jean Charest, Leslyn Lewis, Roman Baber and Scott Aitchison – although six names have been on the ballot since they were printed before Patrick Brown’s disqualification.

The Conservatives conducted the election using mail-in ballots, which had to be submitted to the party from Tuesday.

The ballots were fed into the meter on Thursday, with the party looking to avoid the significant delay in announcing results during the 2020 leadership election as thousands of ballots were damaged when opened. However, the tabulation of the results is done today.

The party is promising a less paired announcement than originally planned in light of the death of Queen Elizabeth II.

As the country is in an official period of mourning, the event will open with a tribute to Her Majesty, the confetti cannons will not be used and more black clothing is expected to be seen among the crowd of partygoers.

This race saw a historic number of ballots cast after party membership had skyrocketed during the election campaign. A total of 678,702 party members were eligible to vote, of whom 437,854 ballot papers were received by the deadline.

Overall, however, the party leader is determined by 417,987 members, as that is the number of accepted ballots that are counted while the rest are rejected due to incomplete voting packets.

All 338 federal rides have 100 points up for grabs, meaning there are 33,800 points up for grabs, give or take a few depending on the verification process. To win, a candidate must receive 50 percent plus one of the points, which would be approximately 16,901 assuming there are at least 100 accepted votes cast from that race.

It is a preferential voting system, which means that if a candidate does not reach the majority threshold in the first ballot, the candidate with the lowest number of points is eliminated.

If a candidate is excluded from the vote, the votes of the members who placed him/her first are redistributed to the second choice of those electors. According to the party, this process is automatic for brown voters. This process would continue until a candidate emerged victorious.

One of the main questions on the agenda tonight is whether any candidate – particularly Poilievre, whose campaign claims it has sold around 300,000 memberships – will be able to prevail in the first round, a feat last seen in 2004 by former Prime Minister Stephen Harper was reached.

In July, Harper supported Poilievre, saying in a video posted to Twitter that Poilievre had put forward the “strongest argument” for recruiting new party members and winning the next general election. Harper has not offered candidate endorsements in the previous two leadership elections, in which Andrew Scheer and Erin O’Toole took over the party’s top job.

The campaign began after O’Toole resigned in February following significant power struggles following his unsuccessful 2021 federal election campaign. Candidates for the position then had to pay the required registration fees and submit signatures from 500 party members in April to get their names on the ballot.

Then it was recruiting members until June, and since then it’s been member engagement and making sure they vote to ensure their supporters get through.

The race – the party’s third in the last six years – was widely seen as a “battle for the soul of the party”, with many questioning how the winner hopes to get all of its members under one big blue tent.

As a result, the campaign has not been short of attacks as candidates presented themselves – at rallies and on debate stages – as the most suitable person for leadership.

Attacks throughout the race were largely traded between Charest and Poilievre, with Charest suggesting his opponent, who backed the ‘Liberty Convoy’, was unable to take the lead, while Poilievre blamed his rival, a Liberal in blue to be clothes.

As the party’s ballots were presented, prominent Conservatives have stressed the need for members to come together once the winner is named and focus on defeating the Liberals rather than asking questions of unity for leadership.

“The Conservative Party of Canada – after a very energetic leadership race with many strong opinions expressed – once this new leader is elected… the focus will be: who is the leader and the team that can replace the Liberals? Conservative Party President Rob Batherson said in an interview on CTV’s Question Time on Sept. 4.

The first opportunity, should the winner take it, to signal the direction of the party and set the tone for their tenure will come in a speech at the convention center tonight.

The incoming new leader will head His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition just over a week before the start of Parliament’s autumn session.

With files from Spencer Van Dyk and Sarah Turnbull of CTV News