Exit, Pursued by a Bear

Time bomb for the unite-the-right folks?

In Saturday’s Post: Andrew Coyne raises a scenario for the federal Tory leadership that I think is plausible, and hasn’t been discussed nearly enough: Stronach gets a minority of actual votes, but ends up winning anyway through the one-riding-one vote system the party foolishly imposed on itself, and the unite-the-right effort disintegrates under the stress of internal recriminations and the derision of its enemies -

When it was announced that only 9,000 memberships had been sold in Quebec, many assumed this meant her campaign had failed. Quite the opposite: Because of the cockamamie voting system the party has installed, in which every riding has equal weight, that's all she needs - maybe not to win, but to influence the outcome. The 75 rotten boroughs of Quebec, representing just 4% of the party membership, can be bought at a fraction of the cost of organizing even one of those massive Conservative riding associations in the West, yet they represent nearly as great a proportion of convention delegates as the three westernmost provinces put together. If Quebec decides the result - not because it's Quebec, but because it has so few actual voting members - the party will be finished before it began.