With an election on the horizon, Poilievre's Conservatives sign up dozens of new candidates
CBC
The next federal election could be more than a year away but political parties are already deep into planning their next campaigns — and recruiting new candidates.
Well ahead in the polls and reporting record-breaking sums in political donations, the Conservatives are also leading the pack on nominating candidates new to federal politics.
To date, the Conservative Party of Canada has nominated about 40 new faces as candidates. The party currently has 118 members of Parliament.
Elections Canada records, coupled with publicly available information, show the Conservatives have been naming new candidates almost every week since the beginning of the year, especially in Ontario and British Columbia.
The newly-recruited Conservative candidates include:
Other new Conservative nominees include a former provincial Progressive Conservative leader, the former mayor of Trois-Rivières and a British Columbia MLA.
Pollster Shachi Kurl, president of the Angus Reid Institute, said being able to attract new candidates is a sign of the Conservative Party's political momentum.
"When you've got a 20-point gap in terms of polling across a number of different polls, there's one party that looks like it's got that momentum," she said.
It's not clear how many current Conservative MPs are reoffering, or how many have been nominated already. A handful of Conservative MPs — including Colin Carrie, Ed Fast, Ron Liepert and Gary Vidal — have said they're not reoffering.
The party came in for criticism last week when a former journalist dropped out of the race for the nomination in Aurora-Oak Ridges-Richmond Hill, claiming the process had been "corrupted." The party has rejected Sabrina Maddeaux's claim.
The Conservative Party did not respond to a request for comment about their nomination process.
Liberal Party spokesperson Parker Lund provided a list of 88 nominees for the next federal election. So far, all of the nominees are current members of Parliament.
Most of the Liberal cabinet, including Innovation Minister François-Philippe Champagne, Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly and Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc, are on the list to reoffer.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is not yet nominated in his longtime Montreal riding of Papineau.
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