Beaver Staff
After weathering some technical glitches that delayed Sunday’s election results into Monday morning, the Conservative Party of Canada named Erin O’Toole as leader.
The MP for Durham was deemed the winner after the third round of ranked ballots were calculated. Peter McKay, seen by many as the favourite for much of the campaign, held a narrow lead after the first round. O’Toole made up ground in the next rounds when those who had named Leslyn Lewis and Derek Sloan as their top choice named O’Toole as their second choice. When all was said and done, O’Toole had 57 per cent of the party’s support.
Sloan, who serves as MP for Hastings-Lennox and Addington, was the first of the four candidates eliminated in the ranked ballot system.
The actual announcement of O’Toole’s victory was delayed over six hours when ballots were damaged by the machine used to count the ballots. A total of 174,849 mail-in ballots were submitted.