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Kevin O’Leary, Reality TV Star, Ends Bid to Lead Canada’s Conservatives

Kevin O’Leary, right, has thrown his support behind Maxime Bernier, left, to lead Canada’s Conservative Party.Credit...Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press, via Associated Press

OTTAWA — Kevin O’Leary, a political novice who used the attention he garnered from appearing on reality television shows to become a contender to lead Canada’s Conservative Party, unexpectedly pulled out of the race on Wednesday.

During a sometimes chaotic news conference, Mr. O’Leary said he was confident that he would have won the party’s leadership vote. But he said that his failure to attract enough support in Quebec undermined his ability to lead the Conservatives to victory over the Liberal Party of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in a general election.

“I was singularly unsuccessful there for whatever reason,” Mr. O’Leary said of his efforts in Quebec, a province where French is widely spoken. He was criticized for his weak French, and he did not enter the race until January, after the first French-language debate. “It’s not good enough to win the leadership if you can’t win the majority mandate.”

The effect of Mr. O’Leary’s withdrawal, which occurred hours before the final debate, is difficult to forecast. He has thrown his support to Maxime Bernier, who is quite far to the right for a member of Parliament from Quebec. Earlier in the campaign, Mr. Bernier called Mr. O’Leary “a loser” who had been spending his time “vacationing in Florida, filming in L.A. and shilling on a home shopping channel trying to sell his line of O’Leary wine to American buyers.”

But all that was forgotten during the news conference, at which Mr. Bernier declared Mr. O’Leary to be a winner now. “We had a nice competition and now we are together,” he said.

Some polls have shown that Mr. O’Leary and Mr. Bernier were the most popular candidates in what had been a field crowded with 14 candidates until Wednesday.

But the leadership voting is open only to people who were paid members of the Conservative Party as of late March, about 260,000 people. The complex ranked ballot and points system they will use to elect the new leader at the end of next month further complicates attempts at predicting the outcome. Adding to the confusion, Mr. O’Leary said he learned on Tuesday night that the ballots had been sent out already, meaning that his name will still appear on them.

Mr. O’Leary’s celebrity in Canada first came from his appearances on Dragon’s Den, a reality show in which people pitch their business plans to a panel of investors. Mr. O’Leary, an investor, was known for his bluntness. He still appears on “Shark Tank,” a similar American show.

Mr. Bernier is not the only Canadian, inside and outside of the Conservative Party, to have noted that Mr. O’Leary spends almost as much time in the United States as in Canada. Mr. O’Leary took time away from the campaign for appearances on “Shark Tank” and a trip to Pennsylvania to pitch his line of wines on QVC, a shopping channel.

Mr. O’Leary said he would continue to raise money to pay off his campaign debt. Canadian laws prevent him from using his own money for that purpose. He also promised to help Mr. Bernier’s fund-raising efforts.

Follow Ian Austen on Twitter @ianrausten.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: Reality TV Star Ends Bid to Lead Canada’s Conservatives. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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