OTTAWA—In the end, Kevin O’Leary couldn’t close the deal. The television personality and businessman made the shocking decision to quit the Conservative leadership race on Wednesday, throwing his support behind Quebec MP Maxime Bernier. O’Leary ended his brief foray into Canadian politics as the perceived favourite to replace Stephen Harper, polling ahead of established MPs even before he entered the race. But despite raising hundreds of thousands of dollars and signing up tens of thousands of new Conservative members, O’Leary admitted he had little hope of leading the party to victory in 2019. “I’m a numbers guy, I look at probabilities of success, and I had to see the path if I’m going to take the party into a contest with (Prime Minister Justin) Trudeau,” O’Leary said at a press conference at the Royal York Hotel in Toronto. “It would seem foolish, even selfish, winning the leadership while knowing I didn’t have a clear path or a high probability (of winning).” The surprise move came only hours after O’Leary was campaigning in the GTA and actively encouraging donations to his campaign. And it has thrown wide open an already chaotic and hard-to-predict leadership race. In his statement, O’Leary seemed to indicate both weak support in Quebec and his status as a political “outsider” meant he would lose against Trudeau’s Liberals in 2019. O’Leary had publicly and repeatedly downplayed his lack of French as a non-issue during his brief campaign, pointing to his Montreal heritage and saying he was taking daily lessons. But on Wednesday, he admitted it was enough to sink his candidacy.“The Quebec data is a different kind of issue and a big problem for me,” O’Leary wrote. “Without growing the Conservative base in Quebec, beating Trudeau in 2019 would be a huge challenge.” The most obvious beneficiary o ...
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