Gentlemen, start your engines. The four candidates who are vying to succeed Jim Abbott as the Conservative Party of Canada nominee for Kootenay-Columbia will learn on March 19 who will carry the party’s banner into the next federal election.
“It’s a really compressed campaign,” Creston’s Wes Graham said on Monday. “Candidates have seven days left to sell memberships.”
Only party members who have purchased memberships a week before the vote is held can cast ballots. A portable poll will travel to several communities throughout the huge constituency, visiting in Creston on March 17. The final day of voting will take place in Cranbrook on March 19.
Graham said constituency organizers were pushed to fast-track the nomination process so the party is prepared for the possibility of an election call this spring. He said the short official campaign favours him and Sparwood mayor David Wilks, who have been selling memberships for the past few months. Candidates Dale Shudra of Radium and Cranbrook’s John Zimmer only joined the race in the last few weeks and are less likely to have sold as many memberships, Graham said.
“The short campaign period is unfortunate in a way,” he said. “It limits the candidates’ ability to get around the whole riding — it takes about seven hours to drive from one end of the riding to the other. Now there is less opportunity for all the party members to get to know the candidates.”
Nonetheless, Graham is excited by his chances, saying that he’s sold a large number of memberships.
While Graham and Wilks have been campaigning for a few months, the campaign now falls under the watchful eye of Elections Canada, which requires all spending during the formal campaign by candidates to be reported now that the nomination date has been declared.
The Creston town councillor, who is also active in regional and provincial municipal government organizations, said he will focus the coming week on Creston and Cranbrook (where he was born and raised), but hopes also to travel northeast to Golden and Revelstoke.
“I’m very happy with how the membership sales have gone,” he said. “I think I have a very realistic chance of becoming our party’s nominee.”
More information about Graham and his campaign can be found at www.wesgraham.ca.