The Canadian Conservative Party will announce its next leader in Ottawa tonight, after candidates and supporters spent the past seven months in the third leadership contest in six years.

While the candidates wait at the finish line, expectations are high for veteran Conservative contender Pierre Poilievre, who ran a populist campaign centered on the theme of "freedom" in his attempt to win the top prize.

Can he achieve a rare first-ballot victory?

Gary Keller, a former Conservative Party staffer whose roles included being chief of staff for Rona Ambrose, who served as interim party leader after Prime Minister Stephen Harper stepped down, said, "I think he can."

Poilievre would be the first to do so since Harper’s era, who won on the first ballot in 2004 in the party’s first leadership race.

Keller said such a win would be helpful for party unity because it indicates a clear direction."

The party uses a points system to tally more than 400,000 votes cast before the ballot deadline on Tuesday.

Points are allocated to candidates based on their share of the vote in each of the 338 Canadian ridings.

Anyone who receives more than 50% of the points wins. It also uses a ranked ballot, meaning members list their preferred leader choice from first to last.

If there is no clear winner in the first count of the ballots, the candidate with the least support is eliminated, and the votes they received from supporters who picked them first are transferred to the candidates those members ranked second.

In 2020, it took three rounds of counting for former leader Erin O’Toole to cross the winning threshold.