The Conservative Party of Canada’s third leadership race in five years is underway. The high turnover in leadership is, in part, due to the party’s failure to topple Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals in the last several federal elections. These failures, however, do not mean that the Conservatives are seeking to crown a new leader for a ragtag outfit of also-rans. In both the 2019 and 2021 elections, the party received more votes than the Liberals.

In the election of 2015, with the country weary of the nine-year reign of his Conservative predecessor, Stephen Harper, Trudeau won a majority government. A majority government is roughly the Canadian equivalent of a US president winning control of the House of Representatives. It was only because of the peculiarities of Canada’s British-style parliamentary system, however, that Trudeau was able to scrape by in the following two elections with a plurality of seats in Parliament.

Trudeau was able to win this plurality while placing second in the popular vote because the Conservative vote was overwhelmingly concentrated in Western Canada. The Tories were further hindered by a surge from the far-right People’s Party, whose leader, Maxime Bernier, narrowly lost the 2017 Conservative leadership race to Andrew Scheer. Although the People’s Party tripled its vote share to 5 percent, it didn’t win any seats in the House. Nevertheless, the party’s increased vote share came at a cost to the Conservatives.