Quebec leads explosive growth in Conservative membership sales: party numbers
Global News
While the Conservative caucus is concentrated in the West, leadership race sign-ups have dramatically boosted membership numbers in Quebec and Ontario.
There are now more Conservative members in Quebec than in the party’s heartland province of Saskatchewan.
Taken together, Ontario and Quebec now account for more than half of the party’s 678,708 total members eligible to vote in the Sept. 10 leadership contest. By any measure, the growth in Conservative numbers during the 2022 contest has been unprecedented in recent Canadian politics.
That’s according to official figures released by Conservative headquarters Friday morning, which suggest the party’s membership rolls have at least doubled in numbers in every province and territory since the start of the year.
Quebec – a province where the Conservatives have historically struggled – led the way in terms of proportional growth. The province had 12,957 members during the party’s 2020 leadership race and has 58,437 today.
Daniel Béland, the director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, cautioned that while 58,400 members in Quebec is an improvement for the party, it is still a small proportion of the province’s roughly 8.5 million people.
In other words, on a per capita basis, you are still more likely to run into a CPC member on the Prairies than in La Belle Province.
Béland said it’s also an open question which campaign signed up those members – and if they’ll stick around if their chosen candidate loses.
“It’s money, of course. It’s also people on mailing lists, people who they could (recruit) as potential volunteers, so having more members is really good news. But (Quebec’s numbers) are still proportionately small compared to what you see in some other provinces,” Béland said in an interview.