Stephen Harper was set to step down as Conservative leader Monday night after going down in defeat to a Liberal majority.
“Over the past nine and a half years I’ve had the incredible honour serving as prime minister,” he told supporters. “We gave all we had, and we regret nothing.”
And now Harper has announced that he will step down as leader, although he won his riding in Calgary-Heritage and will serve as MP.
John Walsh, President of the Conservative Party of Canada, issued the following statement on the matter:
I have spoken to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and he has instructed me to reach out to the newly elected parliamentary caucus to appoint an Interim Leader and to the National Council to implement the leadership selection process pursuant to the Conservative Party of Canada constitution.
Blame game underway before ballots counted
There are already questions about who to blame. Harper’s decision to drop the writ 78 days ago, smack in the middle of a summer holiday weekend, was a bold one.
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Add to that a wedge issue most Canadians didn’t believe was relevant to the campaign — allowing Muslim women to wear the niqab while taking the citizenship oath — or criticisms from his rivals the Conservatives didn’t act soon enough on the Syrian refugee crisis and tying human desperation to security.
Heading into Monday, an Ipsos poll for Global News dimmed the Conservatives’ hopes for an 11th-hour surge and a chance to overcome Justin Trudeau and the Liberals — who started off the campaign in third place behind the Tories and Tom Mulcair’s NDP.
After more than nine years in power, the last four with a majority government, Canada has returned to a Liberal-led majority government.
Although the Conservatives gave it their all in the final days, using up the last of their war chest to buy front-page ads on newspapers across the country, they returned to Opposition status.
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Blame could also be placed on campaign manager Jenni Byrne, who went back to Ottawa in September after travelling with the Conservative leader for the first month of the campaign. She took heat after the first pair in a series of candidates lost their candidacy because of past comments or social media fumbles.
A source inside the Conservative campaign told Global News the vetting process for candidates this time around was not nearly as comprehensive as in the past and those tasked with looking into candidates’ backgrounds had little experience.
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Eyes could also be looking at Kory Teneycke, the bulldog Conservative campaign spokesperson who had no love for the media and who, in his previous gig at the defunct Sun News Network made a career out of trying to paint mainstream news outlets as “lamestream.”
Even before the campaign officially kicked off Aug. 2, Teneycke was taking jabs at the media. In a June interview with Global News Chief Political Correspondent Tom Clark, in which he was defending the uses of ISIS propaganda in a Trudeau attack ad, Teneycke said the Conservatives were “better than news, we’re truthful.”
But throughout the past 11 weeks, the Conservatives also put limits on the number of questions reporters could ask and cancelled some interviews with mainstream news outlets at the last minute.
With just five days to go until the campaign came to a close, Teneycke told Global News reporter Vassy Kapelos the Conservatives were already expecting they would likely only stand a chance at getting another minority government.
“I don’t think that’s terribly realistic for any of the parties where we’re at right now,” he said an Oct. 14 event in Brampton, Ont, referring to a majority.
With files from Vassy Kapelos and Jacques Bourbeau
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