There are 13 candidates for the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada that ironically has the same initials - CPC - as the Communist Party of Canada.
That irony contains the essence of the leadership decision that the more that 200,000 signed-up members of the party must make before May 27 when the winner will be announced.
It isn't just the person to lead that is being decided, it is the post-Stephen Harper political heart and soul of the party created by Harper and Peter MacKay in 2003.
The ballots were in the mail on the week of April 23, so the secret ballot decision-making process has started.
Thirteen candidates are a herd. A dozen will be culled. One will survive.
Cutting the winner out of the herd will take a skilled cutting horse.
The campaign process has all but formally eliminated eight.
Party elder and Calgary Forest Lawn MP Deepak Obhrai was running for respect and to give voice to Conservatives alarmed about the undertones of racism, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiment on the fringes of the party.
Rick Peterson, a Vancouver financial sector businessman was running on the virtue of zero political experience and an ego larger than my 70-year-old prostate.
Chris Alexander, Steven Blaney, Michael Chong, Andrew Saxton, Pierre Lemieux and Brad Trost are journeymen MPs and, with the exception of Lemieux, they served in Harper cabinets.
Perhaps some of them are running for future positioning in the party. Lemieux was giving voice to the pro-life wing of the party. Otherwise their ambitions are of no account.
Milton, Ont. MP Lisa Raitt is possibly the most disappointing. She was first to enter the race and had the seasoning of multiple cabinet portfolios.
But she never built a strong narrative and her messages were inconsequential.
Kevin O'Leary backed out of the race before the last TV debate last week. It was the first smart thing he has done. He was a Trump-lite punchline for a political joke. Men like him don't belong in serious politics. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
If there is a surprise victory, it will be for Kellie Leitch, and will come if the majority of Conservatives think the party is in danger of drifting too far left under a new leader.
Leitch's political patron was the late finance minister Jim Flaherty, and her appeal is to an amorphous group of party members, some on the hard right, but an unknown number of the party's skimpy intelligentsia.
The choice that matters is between Bernier and Scheer, a choice between Bernier's conservatism for central Canadian dinner parties, call it Ottawa-lite, and Scheer's common sense conservatism with a western flair.
Scheer, supported by Olds-Didsbury-Three Hills MLA Nathan Cooper among many other Alberta MPs and MLAs, speaks the language of prairie conservatism. Fiscal responsibility, property rights, abolition of the federal carbon tax, construction of the Energy East pipeline, the nurturing of the oilsands $4-trillion contribution to the Canadian economy and saying no to pot.
Scheer said in Calgary last week, "given the choice between Liberals and Conservatives talking like Liberals, Canadians will take the real thing, so we might as well be real Conservatives."
- Frank Dabbs is a veteran political and business journalist, author of four books and editor of several more
