Trudeau, Scheer talk Parliament, trade in first call after Conservative race

For more information, contact Cory Hann, director of communications, Conservative Party of Canada, at 613-697-5614.

The nail-biting process of winnowing the 13-candidate field went the full distance before Scheer, 38, was declared the victor with just 50.95 per cent of the available points, barely besting longtime front-runner Maxime Bernier, who posted 49.05 per cent after leading all 12 of the previous ballots.

Scheer beat rival Maxime Bernier with just 50.95 per cent of the vote in a 13-ballot battle at the Conservative leadership convention Saturday.

Plett also believed party members narrowly rejected a giant change because they felt most things didn’t need fixing.

“You hear about people trying to make a different in the US, and you don’t hear about Canadian politics and so that’s where I live and so I have to get involved”, he said.

“He’s going to have to do the tap dance that Stephen Harper did”.

Scheer does not present quite as tantalizing a target, Liberals privately admit. During the race he had positioned himself as a conservative, though one not given to the social and economic libertarianism that characterized Bernier’s approach. He edged out Bernier by less than 1 percentage point.

“Social conservatives had an impact in this race”, Trost said afterward.

“(Scheer) had big caucus support, only Erin O’Toole had more.

Longtime member Mike Salterio, who came to the convention from Halifax, said he was most enthused about how many young people appear to have engaged in the race.

Mr. Scheer has a few odd planks in his platform – cutting funding to universities that don’t defend free speech, whatever that means; eliminating the now-substantial federal deficit in only two years. “You can not have free and open debate if you’re being told who should talk and who shouldn’t talk”.

Scheer is the “Goldilocks” candidate, not too hot, not too cold, said Gerry Nicholls, the former vice president of the National Citizens Coalition, a conservative lobby group.

Canada’s main opposition Conservative Party elected Andrew Scheer as its leader yesterday to take on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in the next election, expected in 2019.

“Imagine what we will do when we are all working together”.

Should he win, he’s said he’ll spend the next year convincing party members to change their minds on the issue.

In his victory speech, Scheer promised to keep the party true to its roots, working for average Canadian families and not “Ottawa insiders”.

Bernier had previously said that he’s opposed to Canada’s current supply management system that sets quotas and prices for different farming industries including milk and eggs. But Scheer might have his work cut out for him trying to persuade the broad swaths of Canadian voters that the Liberal government is really such a blight.

There might be another bonus for the government in Scheer’s upset.

The hosts? The Ford brothers – Rob, the controversial mayor of the city and his brother Doug, who used their considerable electoral clout to rally the party for the final Ontario campaign spot of 2015.

On this, O’Learly said, “It shows you the power of that issue that remains today in politics”. “They can’t be less than what they were, blocking, playing all kinds of games on a daily basis”.