Conrad Black: There’s one Conservative who can beat the Liberals, decimate the NDP and vaporize the BQ: Maxime Bernier

Voting has already begun in the federal Conservative leadership election that will conclude on May 27. Paid-up party members will vote in their constituencies, which will each have an equal number of votes, regardless of how many votes are cast in each constituency. It is a preferential ballot among up to 13 candidates (14, if we count Kevin O’Leary, who quit the race after the ballots were issued), so as candidates are eliminated, votes are redistributed in ways that are impossible to predict. I have met with most of the candidates and they seemed to me a stronger field than the last Conservative race, in which Stephen Harper defeated Belinda Stronach (a friend and a great star but a bit stretched in policy terms). It is a much stronger group than recent Liberal leadership selections. As I have written here before, I do not believe a Conservative leader can be elected prime minister without speaking French passably. There are three million unilingual French Quebeckers, and approximately eight million reasonably bilingual (French and English) Canadians, mainly with French as their first language, to whom bilingualism is important. A unilingual Conservative leader will trail the Liberals by 40 or more MPs in Quebec, and will forfeit at least another 20 MPs elsewhere in largely bicultural districts, where the traditional Liberal claim that only they can keep the country working will be widely accepted. Canada did well with a 1.5-party system from 1896 to 1984, in which the Liberals governed for 66 out of 88 years, and carried Quebec in 24 elections out of 25. Laurier, King, St. Laurent, Pearson, Trudeau, and Turner were all capable prime ministers, but where usually only one party can win, it is a fundamentally unstable system.-- More....