Did the Best Candidate Win? A Comment on Levesque's Analysis

Professor Levesque's note raises a number of interesting and important questions. I shall be concerned directly with only one of these—the question of whether or not John Crosbie was the “best candidate,” as that term has been defined in Levesque's note. I shall try to show that while there was good reason to suppose that Crosbie was the “best candidate,” in fact he was not. I shall then comment briefly on why Brian Mulroney won the convention. The data on which these observations are based are from a series of surveys of delegates to the convention—the first conducted by mail beginning in the first week of May, the second conducted face-to-face by student interviewers during the three-day registration period at the convention, and the third conducted by mail beginning two weeks after the convention.