Leona Alleslev to announce candidacy for Conservative leadership Wednesday

Former Conservative deputy leader Leona Alleslev is expected to formally declare a bid for the party leadership in Ottawa on Wednesday.

The former Aurora-Oak Ridges-Richmond Hill MP, who crossed the floor from the Liberals to Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives in 2018, is expected to make her bid official at an afternoon press conference on Parliament Hill.

Global News reported on Mar. 24 that Alleslev had launched a leadership website. Volunteers were seen collecting signatures for her run at the posh Metropolitain Brasserie in downtown Ottawa in late March.

Requests for interviews with Alleslev in March and on Tuesday did not get a response.

Alleslev’s first task will be to raise enough money to make the leadership contest’s April 29 cutoff, when a total of $300,000 in a compliance deposit and registration fees are due to Conservative HQ.

Conservative MP and former leadership candidate Leslyn Lewis announced Monday that she had already submitted the full amount to the party, claiming to be the first candidate to do so.

Alleslev will also have to collect endorsements from no fewer than 500 Conservative party members from 30 separate ridings in seven different provinces, likely a more surmountable task.

The former consultant and military officer was first elected as a Liberal MP in 2015, when Justin Trudeau swept to power with a majority government.

In 2018, she crossed the floor to the Conservatives, and suggested that after three years in the government backbench, amid growing global instability she had lost faith in her former party. Scheer made her deputy leader.

She was re-elected in the 2019 election, even as Conservative fortunes faded in the GTA. Alleslev lost her second re-election bid in 2021 to Liberal MP Leah Taylor Roy.