A sixth Quebec MP for Mackay and 38 defeated candidates in the province also support him.
The MP criticised O'Toole's strategy of courting social conservatives in making his decision public and he's been a progressive conservative so Mackay.
Quebec Conservatives mostly seem scared of seeing social issues come up in the next election and be on the defensive.
By attacking O'Toole with wooing social conservative, it pushes him to have to explain he is not very social conservatives and disappoints those conservative voters and cuts part of the transfer of votes O'Toole would need to win.
A linguist rated the candidate's French language out of 10. Lewis 1/10, Sloan 2/10, Mackay 5/10, O'Toole 6/10.
Consensus from what I've read:
a) It's not that he couldn't speak it at all like Lewis, but his French was very poor, especially for someone who has been seen as a PM in waiting since like 2004.
b) He's improved quite a bit, but his French still isn't quite as good Scheer's or Harper's (no idea where they fit on Poirot's 1/10 scale)
Listening to it a bit, his vocabulary is okay, his pronouncian isn't great, but it's understandable. His main issue is that he's clearly just translating sentences in his head word for word from English, so it sounds very clunky.
