Juno News - September 10, 2023


Are the Conservatives more united than ever？

Topics
wave of conservatism convention events
Mentioned
Pierre Poilievre Andrew Lawton Show Andrew Scheer Erin O'Toole Stephen Harper Doug Ford Ellie Cantin-Nittel Élie Cartin-Nantel Steven Guilbeault Abel Rodriguez Trudeau Anna
＂I was there for my kids＂： Freedom Convoy organizer speaks out in new book Trudeau HUMILIATED AGAIN! Another disastrous India trip

Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

214.06

Word count

1,901

Sentence count

116


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

The Conservative Party of Canada is in full swing at its national convention in Quebec City, and there's a lot to be said about the party's new leader, Pierre Polyvencic. Andrew Lawton and Elie Cartain-Nartel talk all about it.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Elie Cartain-Nartel here for True North at the Conservative Party in Canada's National Convention in Quebec City,
00:00:05.940 which is wrapping up now. Behind me, you can see people wrap things up.
00:00:10.540 I'm here with our managing editor and host of the Andrew Lawton Show, the one and only Andrew Lawton.
00:00:17.460 Andrew, what did you make of this convention?
00:00:20.040 I'm just glad I don't have to interview anyone anymore, that I'm being interviewed,
00:00:23.260 because I've spent like the last three days asking everyone questions.
00:00:26.000 It was really interesting. Now, I should say for context,
00:00:27.860 I've never been to a Conservative convention before.
00:00:31.000 I've been to a provincial, actually a couple of provincial party conventions in the past.
00:00:34.780 So at the same time, I've been able to see a pretty good sense of what these things are about.
00:00:39.740 And, you know, the one thing is that there's been a lot of malaise in the Conservative Party over the last many years,
00:00:45.380 simply because the party has been just losing.
00:00:48.660 It lost in 2015 with Stephen Harper, it lost in 2019 with Andrew Scheer, it lost in 2021 with Aaron O'Toole.
00:00:54.680 And each of those changes in leader was fraught with a number of challenges as well,
00:00:58.980 and a lot of internal turmoil.
00:01:00.540 Whereas right now, there's a Conservative Party that is pretty united behind Pierre Polyev.
00:01:05.860 The People's Party of Canada has not really been succeeding all that much after its strong showing in 2021.
00:01:12.560 I've spoken to people here that were like PPC diehard supporters that are now supporting the Conservatives.
00:01:17.880 So there's a level of optimism in this convention that I think we have not seen in the Conservative Party for several years.
00:01:24.840 I would agree.
00:01:25.800 When I spoke to everybody, I did not meet one person who told me I was dissatisfied with Pierre Polyev.
00:01:30.540 And before I started doing journalism, I used to work in politics.
00:01:34.180 And I remember under the other leaders, you would often find people who would tell me,
00:01:38.180 I'm not the biggest fan, I'll vote for him because he's not Trudeau.
00:01:41.000 But that was usually the line to, versus here, people will actually vote for Polyev.
00:01:45.760 What do you think Polyev has been able to do that others have not been able to do?
00:01:49.140 Because like, as we saw last night with his speech, there was a lot of momentum,
00:01:52.160 there was a lot of people, there was a lot of energy, and we did not see that with the other two leaders.
00:01:55.820 Well, one thing that I will point out is that in the last, well, the leadership races that elected O'Toole and Scheer,
00:02:03.380 there was really a question of which group each was appealing to.
00:02:08.960 Like, Andrew Scheer won because of social conservatives,
00:02:12.280 and Aaron O'Toole won because of people that were kind of the more blue Tory types
00:02:17.560 with some support from social conservatives.
00:02:19.440 But it was very much an us versus them, you know, the red Tories versus the blue Tories in some way.
00:02:24.700 Whereas Pierre Polyev won on the first ballot, and he had a margin of victory
00:02:28.940 that even Stephen Harper didn't have when he ran for the leadership of the first conservative party.
00:02:33.920 So I think what he's done is, at least for now, united most of the party in a way his predecessors haven't.
00:02:39.620 And that means that even on the convention floor,
00:02:42.420 there wasn't a lot of bickering about the type of stuff you see parties internally bickering about.
00:02:47.520 Right, no, for sure. And I would say back to when the leadership race was happening,
00:02:52.080 the diverse support he was getting from social conservatives,
00:02:55.080 some red Tories from people in the establishment class,
00:02:57.480 it was a very diverse, and yeah, we had not seen that with these other candidates.
00:03:01.700 What we saw at this convention, though, is issues that Pierre Polyev has not really been keen to talk about himself.
00:03:07.220 And I'm referring to gender ideology.
00:03:09.760 There was a motion that passed 89 percent, sorry, not even 87 percent, I believe.
00:03:14.840 87 percent in favor of defining a woman as a female person and protecting single-sex spaces.
00:03:20.660 And there was another one in the high 60s to be opposed to the gender transitioning of children.
00:03:28.380 What did you make of these really strong numbers for these resolutions by the delegates?
00:03:33.180 Well, I think, look, it's always important, as you put in your stories, to lay out the caveat that party policy is just that.
00:03:39.280 It's where the party's members have said they stand.
00:03:41.200 It's not the leader's platform.
00:03:42.360 It's not what the conservative government would do in policy.
00:03:45.320 But at the same time, these things are incredibly useful because, like, I don't support booing people that are making a contribution.
00:03:50.860 But when people were speaking up against those motions, there was snickering.
00:03:54.600 There was jeering.
00:03:55.480 Like, these were not majority opinions in the conservative party, the opposed position to these motions.
00:04:01.700 They were very popular.
00:04:03.180 And I think that Polyev needs to look around and see where his base is on issues.
00:04:07.040 And, look, one example that I'll bring up, which is not the gender stuff, but the Freedom Convoy.
00:04:11.540 So this was something I've obviously covered that the Liberals and the media have tried to say is politically toxic.
00:04:16.900 But in this crowd, any time someone mentioned a trucker, they were getting a huge amount of applause.
00:04:21.940 And Pierre Polyev's wife, Anna, acknowledged truckers and got huge applause.
00:04:26.640 So I think they are listening, and they have to understand where their base is.
00:04:30.820 And, you know, Pierre Polyev, at first, when he was asked about parental rights, said, oh, it's a provincial issue.
00:04:35.320 A couple weeks later, he gave a bit more of an answer.
00:04:38.080 And I think any time he's been asked that, he's started to become a little bit more aware of where his base is.
00:04:44.420 And I think that's an important check and balance on leaders, is what are the members saying.
00:04:49.040 And, you know, the members haven't had a policy convention in five years.
00:04:52.160 So this is a really important opportunity for them to tell the leader, this is who we are.
00:04:56.420 Right, for sure.
00:04:57.060 I guess as a follow-up to that, we saw with the Freedom Convoy, the Conservatives going from, you know,
00:05:02.280 being a little meh on mandates, being like, oh, we support rapid tests, to being unsure about the convoy,
00:05:08.220 to going unapologetically in favor of the convoy and against the mandates.
00:05:12.340 Do you think over time we're going to see the same thing with some of these radical gender ideology issues,
00:05:18.620 where they'll slowly, because in the UK now, the Labour Party is opposed to gender ideology.
00:05:23.560 So do you think we're heading there in Canada, too?
00:05:25.180 Yeah, I think so.
00:05:26.620 I mean, Doug Ford, who is not at all a hardline Conservative by any stretch,
00:05:30.920 has even come out and said, you know, parents need to be the ones educating their kids
00:05:34.360 and we need to stand against indoctrination.
00:05:36.600 And that, for a leader like Doug Ford in a province like Ontario, is a very important development.
00:05:41.240 So I think the tide is turning here.
00:05:43.040 I think you've got what's happening in New Brunswick and Alberta and Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Ontario.
00:05:47.780 This is a wave that will be very difficult for any politician, Conservative or otherwise, to try to avoid.
00:05:53.400 So we saw something interesting, too, at this convention, where we had Liberal ministers crashing the convention.
00:05:58.760 Stephen Gilboa came yesterday, on a Friday in the morning, and Abel Rodriguez came twice.
00:06:05.020 What signal do you think this sends from the Liberal camp?
00:06:08.720 I mean, to be honest, I'm okay with it, because the more the Liberals are spending of their time doing stuff like this,
00:06:14.760 the less they're ruining the country.
00:06:16.420 So in that sense, it's like, I'd prefer they just spend all their day just going and gate-crashing Conservative events.
00:06:21.020 Well, we should have a convention all the time.
00:06:22.220 Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you're right.
00:06:23.380 Let's just, you know, keep all the stuff set up back here and let Pablo Rodriguez just, you know, spin his wheels outside.
00:06:28.540 I think it's a little bit of desperation, and I will say the shine has come off even to the media.
00:06:33.340 Like, the questions that the mainstream media journalists were asking them were like,
00:06:37.500 like, listen, are you in any position to judge when you look at your poll numbers right now?
00:06:41.180 And they don't really have an answer to it.
00:06:42.320 It's, oh, well, yeah, you know, we just need to work harder.
00:06:44.940 It's like, great, then stop, like, heckling Conservatives and go and win back this trust from Canadians.
00:06:49.560 We saw some very high poll numbers recently for the Conservatives, and that's probably one of the things that's making the Liberals nervous.
00:06:57.480 After this convention, after the media coverage that this gets, do you think the Conservatives are stronger coming out of this convention than they were coming into it?
00:07:04.100 I think they are, because I think there's a little bit more of a solidified message for what they stand for.
00:07:10.320 I mean, Pierre Paliyev spoke for just over an hour last night, and a lot of what he said was repetitive.
00:07:15.480 I mean, I'd even heard some of the jokes and, you know, asides before about, you know, a family moving into the old CBC headquarters and stuff like that.
00:07:21.280 I do like that. I do like that joke.
00:07:22.820 It's a great joke, but I'm saying I've heard it, like, you know, nine times now.
00:07:25.040 Yeah, no, he says it all the time.
00:07:25.980 Yeah, and stuff like that.
00:07:27.360 But I think at the same time, we get a bit more of a vision, because, you know, the Conservatives are not running in an election.
00:07:32.840 They don't have a platform out yet, because it's early.
00:07:35.600 So when Pierre Paliyev speaks, any time, it's kind of a little bit more of the picture of what message they're going to bring in.
00:07:42.340 And I'm sorry, this is uncontroversial stuff.
00:07:44.560 They're talking about common sense, housing, affordability.
00:07:47.400 These are pretty universal messages.
00:07:48.940 So I think that it shows where the Conservatives are really trying to focus their efforts, while not being afraid to still talk a little bit about the other stuff.
00:07:57.660 And I think your point about gender is valid.
00:07:59.780 They could do a bit more of it, but that's where their focus is.
00:08:03.220 Right, for sure.
00:08:04.020 There was an analogy that someone in the States made about a cake, and you have the cake, and you've got the icing.
00:08:08.360 And you love the icing.
00:08:09.380 The culture war stuff is the icing.
00:08:10.700 But, you know, a cake isn't good when it's this much icing and this much cake.
00:08:13.620 I disagree with that, but anyway.
00:08:15.060 On the cake thing, not on the politics thing.
00:08:18.340 You know, to be fair, there are some good icings out there.
00:08:20.520 Just give me the icing with the bowl.
00:08:21.620 That's why I look this way.
00:08:23.280 Well, this was a great way to catch up with you, Andrew.
00:08:28.080 If you support our coverage and our work here at True North, and you support Andrew's podcast, my journalism, and any other thing that we do,
00:08:36.340 then please visit donate.tnc.news to make a donation.
00:08:41.420 In Quebec City, for True North, I'm Élie Quentin-Antenne.
00:08:45.060 Thank you.
00:08:51.760 Thank you.