Juno News - Conservative Caucus Leadership Vote Live Show

00:00:00.000 Thank you for joining us.

00:00:30.000 Hello and welcome. Sorry about that. I'm still just like trying to keep up on all the news

00:00:44.460 that's coming out of Ottawa right now. This is True North. I'm Andrew Lawton and we are covering

00:00:50.480 live the results of the Conservative Party of Canada's caucus vote on Erin O'Toole's leadership.

00:00:56.580 If you haven't heard yet, Aaron O'Toole has been ousted as leader by a vote of his own caucus.

00:01:03.020 Now, I'm getting some conflicting numbers here.

00:01:05.740 There are 119 Conservative members of Parliament.

00:01:08.600 That part's clear.

00:01:09.840 It sounds like 73 of those voted against him.

00:01:14.040 73.

00:01:14.800 Now, the reason there's still a little bit of doubt is because it's not exactly clear how many might not have voted.

00:01:20.240 This seems like a big deal.

00:01:21.480 You wouldn't want to miss this, but evidently some people did.

00:01:24.480 We're going to be talking about this.

00:01:26.180 also monitoring some of the developments about who's throwing their hat in the ring for interim

00:01:30.320 leader. But more importantly, what does this mean for the conservative movement in the country?

00:01:35.040 What does this mean for Canada's Conservative Party and all of that? And what does it mean

00:01:39.800 for Erin O'Toole? I want to welcome into the show here Candice Malcolm, my friend, colleague and

00:01:45.140 boss, the founder and editor-in-chief of True North, and also Harley Sims. I just realized,

00:01:50.640 Harley, I don't know your title, but you are pretty much the smartest person at True North.

00:01:55.260 So I thank both of you for joining.

00:01:57.140 Good to have you here.

00:01:58.900 Thanks so much, Andrew, for introducing us.

00:02:01.720 And thank you, everyone, for joining us.

00:02:03.320 I think it's a really exciting, I have to say, I was kind of nervous.

00:02:06.580 I didn't know what was going to happen.

00:02:07.820 And I felt a lot of anticipation about this vote.

00:02:11.500 I am not surprised that the Conservatives decided to remove O'Toole.

00:02:15.360 There's so many issues with him.

00:02:16.480 And this was a long time coming.

00:02:18.020 But I will still say, I think it's a bit of a sad moment in Canadian politics.

00:02:23.000 I think it's upsetting.

00:02:25.160 So many people really did believe in Aaron O'Toole.

00:02:27.340 They thought that he had the potential to be a great leader and a great prime minister.

00:02:32.300 And I mean, for him personally, it's like he was trying and doing everything he could

00:02:37.100 to basically beg and plea for his job. 0.96

00:02:40.540 I mean, it was kind of sad and kind of pathetic to see his response over the past 48 hours 0.98

00:02:45.380 or so. 0.99

00:02:46.280 And, you know, he's got a family.

00:02:47.880 He lives in Stornoway.

00:02:49.140 He's got to move.

00:02:49.860 He's not just losing his job.

00:02:51.140 He's getting evicted from his house.

00:02:53.000 It's unfortunate to see.

00:02:54.060 It's sad to see the infighting in the Conservative Party.

00:02:56.640 But I'm going to remain optimistic that this is a move for the better and that the party will become stronger.

00:03:03.420 Hopefully they can find a leader that they can all unite around and they can carve out a path for the Canadian people, for their party, that is unique and distinct and appealing to Canadians.

00:03:15.200 You said you weren't surprised, which takes the wind out of the question I was about to ask.

00:03:19.640 if we had started this show before the results were in, I would have asked everyone to make

00:03:23.680 predictions. This is actually a better way because no one can be wrong. They can just claim that

00:03:27.300 the result was what they would have predicted. But I'll ask it in a different way. Harley,

00:03:31.700 are you surprised by this result or is this where you thought it was headed?

00:03:37.360 That's a good question, Andrew. I think like a lot of Canadians, I've gotten a little bit cynical

00:03:41.700 about parliamentary politics over the last two years. You start wondering what they're thinking,

00:03:47.580 whether they're seeing the way Canadians are, you know, suffering under these lockdowns.

00:03:53.580 And we haven't heard O'Toole really reflect any of the concerns that the convoy has brought forward.

00:04:00.540 I'm thrilled to see such immediate movement.

00:04:04.900 And let's not pretend that the convoy didn't have anything to do with this.

00:04:09.260 When you're on Parliament Hill, it's easy to sit within those walls and kind of, you know,

00:04:14.720 focus on what you're talking about and think that that reflects what's outside the walls but when

00:04:20.580 you've got a bunch of trucks and people right outside on the street that is bringing the

00:04:25.740 concerns of canadians right to their doorstep and so the effect that that has had has been immediate

00:04:31.020 um i think this is the right way to go i agree with candace that this isn't entirely positive

00:04:37.280 i think for this to happen i mean it's shaking the conservative party uh but let's face it um

00:04:42.540 in the last 48 hours, what Aaron O'Toole has brought forward as concessions, maybe a sooner

00:04:48.000 leadership review than he'd wanted, reaching out to the 905 region. These are opportunities he had

00:04:55.920 already, and they didn't work. And so now it's time that we try something new, and we'll have

00:05:00.480 to see what happens with the interim leadership. I just want to jump in on that, Andrew, because

00:05:05.980 I think that one of the interesting things that we've seen, and sorry to interrupt you, Andrew,

00:05:10.640 I just wanted to respond because I agree with something Harley said here, which is that

00:05:14.920 when after the election, we saw like a pretty confident and almost arrogant Aaron O'Toole.

00:05:20.800 He was really defensive. He was insistent that the path that he was going on was the right path.

00:05:27.100 He continued a lot of the rhetoric that really upset the base, talking about how conservatives

00:05:31.980 have to have the courage to change. It was like the things that he was most excited about were

00:05:36.080 his own progressive personal values. And that just isn't really what a lot of conservatives

00:05:41.580 want to hear from their leader, especially after losing, losing a disappointing and winnable

00:05:45.720 election. We didn't see a lot of reconciliation. We saw a leader that was really willing to

00:05:52.860 punish people who were criticizing him, saw some vindictiveness in the way that he treated

00:05:58.140 people like Denise Batters and Shannon Stubbs. Look, you're going to have a lot of disagreement

00:06:02.940 within a conservative party that's just the nature of conservatism we don't all agree on every single

00:06:07.340 point we don't have one monolithic brain we're not the liberal parties we have a lot of different

00:06:11.500 people different folks different backgrounds different ideas and part of the part of the

00:06:15.420 challenge of a conservative leader is holding that coalition together and and i i say i i thought it

00:06:22.540 was sort of sad to see the way that aaron was acting over the past 48 hours because initially

00:06:27.420 we saw him put out a statement basically saying you're either with me or against me you're either

00:06:31.660 with if you're if you're against me you're with randy hillier and sort of trying to paint

00:06:35.980 his own party as being like half the people my party are crazy fringe people and the other half

00:06:40.700 are like me and we're we're the pristine moderate uh progressives and we want to lead the country

00:06:47.740 that was a really bad position to take and then over the last 24 hours the news stories that we've

00:06:53.020 seen have been focused on i'll basically i'll do anything i'll change i'll be better i'll be true

00:06:57.980 true blue again, I'll be true or bluer, as we were joking on the True North Slack channel.

00:07:02.660 And it's like, maybe if he had shown more reconciliation after the election, more humility,

00:07:08.380 more willingness to engage with the other side, and instead of just malign them, like we saw

00:07:13.680 sort of full circle in the last 40 hours, he went from saying, if you're with me, if you're against

00:07:19.300 me, you're a crazy person to, okay, I'm willing to listen to the other side. And I think you're 0.94

00:07:24.940 right, Harley, that if he had taken more of that approach in October after the election,

00:07:30.040 he might still have a job today. Yeah. And I think that one of the dimensions of this that I want to

00:07:37.000 bring about to something you both had said, I mean, this isn't a happy thing. I've met Aaron O'Toole.

00:07:41.580 I've interviewed him. I've met his family. I don't like seeing anyone go down like this. Ideally,

00:07:46.880 he could have dealt with the concerns right after the election or simply resigned gracefully when

00:07:51.780 he realized that he just didn't have the grip on his caucus that he thought he did. And I do want

00:07:56.300 to go back and talk about the timeline here because it's very important. So he went into

00:08:00.800 the 2021 election thinking it was not necessarily his to lose, but thinking like he stood a good

00:08:06.060 shot, which I think in some ways he may have. And then by the end of it, he's lost ground that

00:08:12.580 Andrew Scheer had made up, but he spoke about the election as though he had won. There was never

00:08:17.900 really any acknowledgement that he had lost. He refused to talk about the PPC surge, much of which

00:08:23.380 came off the backs of conservative candidates. And ever since the election, anytime he's been

00:08:29.380 asked about what happened, he said, well, well, we've got a review. We're doing an independent

00:08:33.280 review. We're doing all of these things. And then the review comes out last week. And I think the

00:08:38.380 timing of the review plus the convoy really worked against Aaron O'Toole here. The review comes out

00:08:43.720 and from everything we've read about it doesn't really get into the big issues that conservative

00:08:50.340 Canadians and people in the Conservative Party have with O'Toole. So you had flip-flops throughout

00:08:55.800 the election. You had a lot of caucus members that had no idea where they stood because of

00:09:00.400 policies he had put forward. And then you had from O'Toole a refusal to speak to conservatives

00:09:05.940 and address the issue he had with the base since the election because he still kept chasing after

00:09:11.420 those centrist votes in the strategy that just didn't work for him in the general. So I guess

00:09:17.980 the question is looking beyond what's happening right now, do you think that the O'Toole scenario

00:09:23.300 is something that we can learn from, Harley? Do you think this proves that this plan that

00:09:29.080 conservatives sometimes put forward of, okay, we've just got to run to the middle and make

00:09:32.940 people like us, that'll work. Do you think this is the test case that proves that that won't work?

00:09:37.260 i think as a conservative leader you can't ignore conservatives and i think that's what's been

00:09:44.740 happening here and uh i mean uh you know i'm happy to be talking with you guys but my roots

00:09:50.960 are in trucking my parents ran a heavy duty repair shop i worked there for seven years

00:09:55.420 i knew the industry pretty well and uh what i know is that um in order to make these people mad you

00:10:03.620 have to do something really wrong um i wouldn't say they are overly politically active but they

00:10:10.260 get furious when they feel that their freedoms are being taken away uh they're very independent

00:10:16.340 their owner operators uh it's a very unforgiving job they don't make a lot of money and uh you know

00:10:22.900 when we got to the point where vaccine mandates um not uh started taking away their livelihoods

00:10:28.100 Let's face it, we've already been locked down. The supply chains are strained, our economies in shambles. And then, oh, yeah, by the way, you need to get vaccinated to keep working. It's not just about that. It's about freedom. It's about their ability to make choices, accept risks on their own. And there was nothing coming out of Parliament Hill reflecting those concerns. It was like you had a liberal majority, you know, wall to wall.

00:10:53.700 and uh do you think candace that the convoy effect contributed to this or do you think it was

00:10:59.380 more of a coincidence or perhaps the final nail in the coffin really well it's interesting and

00:11:05.560 i really appreciate what harley was just saying i didn't realize that you had a family and

00:11:09.300 background in that and i think it's such a tremendous contribution that truckers do and

00:11:14.900 so many of us don't realize that we take for granted what we see on our shelves and the fact

00:11:18.780 that even during a coveted pandemic i mean i remember thinking it was pretty amazing you know

00:11:22.800 to go to my local Loblaws right in the middle of the pandemic when everyone was afraid to go

00:11:26.980 outside. And there was the grocery store looking beautifully, fully packed with fresh vegetables

00:11:32.100 and fruit in the middle of March in winter in Canada. And it is an incredible, they're the

00:11:37.780 sort of unsung, unrecognized heroes. It's interesting, Andrew, to your question that

00:11:42.480 when I was speaking to MPs and I spoke to a lot of them, none of them wanted to go on the record,

00:11:47.380 but they would all talk to me sort of what we call on background. So they tell me stuff and

00:11:50.840 asked me not to attribute to them but they would kind of brush that off and say no no this was a

00:11:55.360 long time coming we've seen the writing on the wall this was all because of his poor performance

00:11:59.940 in january with everything from the his position on mandates to his his sort of flip-flops the way

00:12:07.160 that he stumbled around the truckers was part of it but that wasn't like that wasn't what compelled

00:12:12.980 basically it was like q4 fundraising numbers which were really low for the conservative

00:12:17.020 like the lowest in the history of the party and also just just this this this weird thing that

00:12:23.000 he was going to do where he was going to demand a public showing of loyalty among MPs and they

00:12:27.700 didn't want to participate in that something along those lines and so they kind of downplay it but

00:12:31.660 I think to Harley's point it's absolutely obvious and and you cannot ignore the fact that we are

00:12:38.080 seeing something pretty remarkable which is a grassroots working class uprising you know when

00:12:44.920 was in university i used to hear a lot from friends on the far left and the political left

00:12:49.080 about the you know the need for a working class revolution uh to overthrow the bourgeoisie and

00:12:54.120 to have the proletariat own the means of productions and all the marxist stuff right but it's like

00:12:58.200 it's like this is what the left used to want and used to call for they say that the working man 0.64

00:13:03.000 needs to stand up and defend himself and fight against the powers that be and and here that is

00:13:08.360 it's happening i mean you see the way that the media tried to downplay it at first and then

00:13:14.280 switch to really, really malicious slurring and trying to completely denigrate an entire group

00:13:22.200 based on a handful of crazy lunatics, which, frankly, you see at any single political event 0.86

00:13:27.420 in the world and any protest, certainly. But this weird new standard that they've put on, 0.96

00:13:33.600 I've been pretty vocal about my support for the trucking convoy on Twitter. And it's really

00:13:37.980 interesting to read some of my quote tweets, which are from left-wing people like Gerald

00:13:44.160 butts or something like that uh and what they say in response like like the way that they critique

00:13:49.760 me and it's like they don't really understand or they don't recognize i can't tell if they're 0.98

00:13:54.480 malicious or if they're ignorant or if they truly just believe their own crazy crazy rhetoric but 0.87

00:14:01.280 but but they've convinced themselves that the people who are on parliament hill the truckers 0.96

00:14:06.080 the the freedom convoy that they're all just a bunch of far-right radicals which is so opposite

00:14:11.920 from like any anyone who just spends a few minutes looking through videos watching videos of the

00:14:15.680 truckers i mean some of them will bring you to tears i've been posting a lot of them and you get

00:14:19.280 emotional thinking about what these guys go through the sacrifices that they make and the

00:14:23.360 beautiful thing that to any non-same person this is an incredibly inspiring thing to watch and we

00:14:29.200 have seen the support pour in from all over the world it is incredible to see these people who

00:14:34.080 are kind of like the underdogs of our society the marginalized people of our society the people who

00:14:37.920 don't typically have a voice. Here they are having this uprising, this conscious, this political

00:14:43.200 conscious moment of consciousness. And what do you see? You see Justin Trudeau and his thousands

00:14:48.300 and thousands of gaggles of reporters and liberal partisan hacks sitting there denigrating them and

00:14:53.640 calling them Nazis. I cannot believe it. I was playing around on Twitter spaces last night going

00:14:58.080 from room to room. I ended up speaking in a liberal room. I didn't realize it was liberal,

00:15:01.480 but I ended up speaking to them and I couldn't believe it. I was kind of shocked and saddened

00:15:06.380 hear the way that they were talking about the the blue-collar workers and i think it's disgraceful i

00:15:11.180 think that people in this country need to realize that that we're heading in dangerous territory

00:15:15.740 here if we say you you no longer have a right to protest they were saying that there's something

00:15:20.380 illegal about what these guys were doing like i don't i true north reported there were zero

00:15:25.180 arrests all weekend i know there's been a few since but but the main freedom convoy where we

00:15:29.020 saw tens of thousands of people no arrests no injuries a few incidents but nothing compared to

00:15:34.780 any kind of protests we've seen over the last year be it the cancel canada mobs the black live rally

00:15:40.620 um riots or protests that devolved into riots in much of the u.s and many canadian cities as well

00:15:45.900 they were looting a guitar store in montreal uh you know we didn't hear report after report after

00:15:51.340 report about how these people were violent and therefore we couldn't even listen to their

00:15:54.620 concerns the way that they painted these these protesters these freedom trucker convoys has been

00:15:59.500 absolutely malicious and despicable. I think we need to defend them more clearly. Conservatives

00:16:05.060 need to defend them more clearly. I am completely certain, Andrew, to get back to your question,

00:16:09.360 that this is tied to why this vote happened today. Right now, this is a victory for the

00:16:15.980 truckers. They wanted to replace Justin Trudeau. They didn't quite get that, but they did get

00:16:20.760 some change. Some things are shaking up. Saskatchewan's announced that they're opening

00:16:24.360 up completely quebec got rid of that god-awful draconian proposition to tax uh to add an

00:16:30.120 additional tax on the vaccine the tides are turning towards freedom and i think that this

00:16:35.000 is just another reason why we should be thankful for these truckers and conservatives should make

00:16:39.000 a much much better effort at engaging with blue-collar working-class voters people who

00:16:44.680 are disenfranchised disenfranchised who feel alienated who feel maligned by the ridiculous

00:16:50.920 awful media it's been i think i think it's a huge opportunity for conservatives i i would agree with

00:16:56.520 that and and i think that even if the timing is just coincidental and like those sources told you

00:17:01.720 this was a long time coming i i certainly think that the the momentum to get rid of o'toole came

00:17:07.480 from the same place as the momentum that carried the convoy which is that we're in the midst of

00:17:12.520 some of the most monumental assaults on freedom that we've seen in canada certainly in generations

00:17:18.440 and there's been virtually no political opposition to it and that's true of provincial and federal

00:17:23.480 but ultimately the federal government tends to be the symbol of government itself and erin o'toole

00:17:28.440 was just going along with it and remember when justin trudeau called the election

00:17:32.040 the argument the line of defense that erin o'toole carried for weeks is well it's irresponsible

00:17:36.280 because of covet instead of and that because this is around the time when canadians were starting

00:17:40.360 to talk about you know why are we not reopening can we break out of this fear and there was no

00:17:44.840 political opposition to this idea that we do need to live in perpetual fear and in a perpetual state

00:17:50.760 of emergency so so even if the timing is somewhat coincidental i i think that aaron o'toole needed

00:17:57.080 to be a leader to this growing part of canadians that were wanting a sensible not a crazy unhinged

00:18:03.160 conspiracy theory but a sensible approach to the pandemic and we're we're going to get through a

00:18:09.480 lot of the themes that are emerging here and we're also going to get questions from our true north

00:18:13.880 insiders. And if you want to become one of those, head on over to donate.tnc.news. Melody asks,

00:18:20.280 what is the process to move forward? Interim leader, leadership competition, etc. And how

00:18:25.400 long would all of that take? So the caucus is meeting tonight at 7 p.m. so that they can vote

00:18:33.100 on an interim leader. So 7 p.m. We've already had at least one MP, Conservative Member of Parliament,

00:18:38.840 John Williamson step up and say that he's going to seek the interim leadership. The conservative

00:18:44.140 constitution, just so you know, says that if you're the interim leader, you cannot run for

00:18:49.400 the permanent leadership of the, well, as permanent as leadership of the conservatives is,

00:18:54.200 but you can't run for the actual non-interim leadership of the conservatives. So I just know

00:18:59.320 that like tonight, a lot of people are going to be like, why is Pierre Polyev not the interim

00:19:02.940 leader? Why is Candace Bergen not or whatever? A lot of the big heavyweights who are contenders

00:19:07.420 for leader don't want to step up and be interim leader because that'll take them out of the

00:19:11.900 running. And that was the whole Ronna Ambrose thing back in 2017. And as far as how long it'll

00:19:18.180 take, I'll take you back to Ontario 2018. So in Ontario, they had an election scheduled for June

00:19:25.080 2018. They had a leader, Patrick Brown. And in January, the end of January, Patrick Brown had

00:19:31.020 to resign in scandal. And they had a leadership race up and running within days with a result

00:19:38.660 determined in March. So I think it was like six weeks, seven weeks total. So you can run a very

00:19:45.280 quick, very efficient leadership race. That doesn't mean there always will be one, but it is possible.

00:19:50.860 And in a minority government, the next leader has to be able to hit the ground running. So

00:19:55.540 with all of that out of the way, let me ask you, Harley, what do you think should inform

00:20:00.820 the leadership race? Because we didn't really have a huge amount of competition in 2020. You had

00:20:06.760 Derek Sloan and Leslyn Lewis that were unknowns that were running for social conservatives. And

00:20:12.020 Leslyn Lewis, of course, did establish herself quite well among the conservative base. But it 0.91

00:20:17.440 was a two horse race from the beginning, Peter McKay versus Aaron O'Toole, in contrast with

00:20:22.160 2017, where you had like the Hollywood squares, like just they're stacked on top of each other

00:20:26.880 because there were so many candidates.

00:20:28.200 So what do you think need to be the big issues

00:20:30.060 and perhaps some of the candidates you'd like to see in the race now?

00:20:34.840 Well, first of all, with an interim leader,

00:20:38.060 they just need to find a steady hand,

00:20:40.320 someone who can hold the fort and let the leadership frontrunners

00:20:44.180 kind of distinguish themselves in question period,

00:20:46.660 as they've already been doing.

00:20:49.100 In that case, Aaron O'Toole would have made a good interim leader.

00:20:54.440 But as we've seen, I mean, we've got Leslie Lewis,

00:20:56.880 but Pierre Poliver especially, I mean, he stood out in this. And I mean, I look back 2017 earlier,

00:21:04.520 it's really a shame that Maxime Bernier isn't still a conservative because he's the only

00:21:09.120 political figure that was speaking out against all of these lockdowns from the very start.

00:21:14.140 But that said, better late than never, Poliver has stood up for the working class. He's stood

00:21:20.220 up against lockdowns. He's defended the constitution. It'll be interesting to see

00:21:24.700 how many other conservatives now that erin o'toole has gone kind of step up to that line and start

00:21:29.420 speaking the same way he does but this is a new reality we're in a new world now what what has

00:21:35.020 happened in canada under justin trudeau is unconscionable i never thought it would happen

00:21:40.220 a lot of these truckers are there because they couldn't believe what has happened and we need a

00:21:46.140 a conservative leader who understands how far we've been pushed back and is willing to push

00:21:52.300 just as hard to get things back where we were before all this and even better it's like we

00:21:57.820 don't have a lot of politicians in this country who are of contenders here but who else do you

00:22:03.900 think is on that list of people that should run or people that you think will run well i was just

00:22:09.340 trying to say that it's like conservative politicians in this country have failed us

00:22:13.980 when it comes to covid when it comes to the lockdowns i mean we just saw this metadata

00:22:18.780 release from Johns Hopkins University saying that lockdowns didn't help. Lockdowns did not

00:22:24.520 stop the spread of COVID. That's it. And it's like, how many more scientific papers do we have

00:22:31.220 to have disproving their narrative and their theory? And it's so weird to see liberals continue

00:22:35.500 to double down on the idea that mandates work, on the idea that somehow getting vaccinated will

00:22:40.400 stop the spread of COVID. That's false. We have updated scientific information telling us

00:22:45.980 otherwise. And so the way that it's been politicized in the sort of weak response from

00:22:50.140 conservatives is a major problem in this country for conservatives. I just think that they've lost

00:22:55.560 touch. And I'm glad you brought up Maxime Bernier, because I think that if the conservative party

00:23:00.020 really wanted to recognize the grassroots, and something I was going to say earlier was I'll say

00:23:04.560 now, if this vote was among the base of the party and the membership, I don't think it would have

00:23:10.780 even been that close. You had 73 MPs vote against O'Toole and what, 35 voting for him. I don't think

00:23:17.860 that split would have been anywhere near that if this was the members voting. I think it would

00:23:21.640 have been like 95 to 5% because the people who want him are the much more establishment types

00:23:26.720 of the party, the people who fear a populist uprising and they sort of think that O'Toole's

00:23:32.640 not great, but he's better than some alternative, which everyone's afraid of, Canada having their

00:23:37.300 own Trump. Back to the point about Bernier. I think that the Conservatives need to take a

00:23:42.600 long, hard look in the mirror and recognize how out of touch they are with the sentiments

00:23:47.180 of Canadians, especially the Canadians that they're supposed to represent, the people who have

00:23:51.380 suspicion and are mistrusting of big, grand government initiatives. And I think that the

00:23:57.580 provincial leaders have faltered. I see a lot of comments with people talking about Ford and

00:24:02.380 kenny and how they have to go to i think that they have let down conservatives and certainly

00:24:06.920 erno told is which is why he's facing this fate today if the conservatives were to do that and

00:24:12.240 really take a look in the mirror uh reflect on how they've managed in their communication how

00:24:18.160 they've handled these uh lockdowns in the covid crisis over the last two years and they really

00:24:23.620 wanted to show uh some good faith in connecting with the base they might consider letting maxine

00:24:28.660 Bernier back into the party and inviting him to run for leader. Because I'll just say when I was

00:24:32.900 a young conservative or when I was a young person who was political, one of the things that really

00:24:37.980 excited me about the Conservative Party of Canada was Maxime Bernier and his libertarian ideas. I

00:24:42.280 think it really appeals to young people. Bernier has a very exciting style. I think that he brings

00:24:47.360 in a lot of people to the party, a lot of excitement. You can see it on social media,

00:24:51.340 the PPC supporters are always the loudest. They're the most enthusiastic. I think that we saw Bernier

00:24:56.780 raised a lot of money for the conservative party and that money is now not going to them anymore

00:25:00.520 and i think that if you can channel bernier's talents and his powers for good in in a in the

00:25:07.160 conservative sense and bring him back on board it would be it would it would show that they were

00:25:12.380 willing to listen to the base that they were willing to engage on libertarian and sort of

00:25:18.100 you know a different set of ideals that many conservatives hold many conservatives believe

00:25:23.340 in what Maxime Bernier is saying and they'll just say that the reason that they don't like the PC

00:25:27.200 is because they think it's like a one-man show or that it that it's it's risking the the future

00:25:33.280 of conservatism in the country but but they don't disagree with him on principle and on policy

00:25:37.440 and so I I would I don't think it's going to happen but I would like to see the conservatives

00:25:42.860 taking that step because if if the conservative party loses the libertarians if they say that

00:25:47.740 libertarianism is not part of our movement and the libertarians can just go away and go to the

00:25:52.680 ppc that that that's the problem for the party in the long run as well i i think i think the vision

00:25:59.500 that you're putting out is an optimistic one because i mean maxime bernier has gone scorched

00:26:05.820 earth on the conservatives and he's been asked in fact i might have even asked him at one point if

00:26:09.400 there were ever a leadership opening if he would seek the leadership i mean even in fairness when

00:26:13.600 uh andrew sheer left that he could have run in that one and he's since doubled tripled quadrupled

00:26:18.880 down that he thinks the party itself is corrupt. I mean, if we want to go back in time here, I think

00:26:24.280 had he just kept his mouth shut and waited for Andrew Scheer to lose the election, he would be

00:26:29.060 the leader right now. And he very well could be the prime minister right now if we're talking about

00:26:33.880 just alternate histories here. But you raise an important point about all of the people that the

00:26:38.940 party has pushed away. Derek Sloan was one who Aaron O'Toole had expelled from caucus. Jim

00:26:44.320 Karahalios was disqualified from seeking the leadership. Going back, we have Maxime Bernier.

00:26:49.800 And at the provincial levels as well, you have some conservatives that were elected as conservatives

00:26:53.960 and then disenfranchised or expelled. So ideally, you'd want a leader who can unify these people,

00:27:01.720 at least the ones who want to come back to the table. And I have to say, Pierre Polyev, I think,

00:27:06.200 is one who could do that simply because I know whenever we have him on our show,

00:27:10.540 on our station, on our shows, whenever we write stories about him, the amount of response we get

00:27:17.100 from people that are, you know, attacking O'Toole and Kenny and Ford other times, but love Polyev,

00:27:23.120 he has a broader appeal in the conservative movement. Harley, I mean, is it his to lose

00:27:29.020 at this point? Or do you think that that might be rushing through the next few steps a bit?

00:27:34.800 Well, he's certainly been the most vocal conservative in the last couple of weeks.

00:27:39.780 especially with the convoy and with, you know, like these Justin Trudeau sort of saying the

00:27:48.100 outrageous things he did. I mean, he's been pushing back hard. I think he's got a lot of

00:27:53.360 momentum, at least, you know, within that kind of very narrow timeframe. Things can change quickly

00:28:01.620 as soon as they open up, you know, to, you know, the entire party, you know, different candidates

00:28:07.960 can emerge different perspectives i think i think he's a good choice um but at the same time i mean

00:28:13.880 just uh i i agree that bernier would be more likely to invite the conservatives to join the

00:28:18.520 people's party than the other way around but um he has doubled and quadrupled down um for good

00:28:24.120 reason he's been trying to hold them to account for things that he would have stood for if he'd

00:28:28.600 been still with them and so in the same way candace said aaron o'toole lost a huge opportunity with

00:28:34.200 this convoy to almost like apologize and say you've shown me the way i realize now what's important

00:28:40.040 and i'll push back i think there would have been willingness to hear that um and so for the for

00:28:45.080 the conservatives to now um you know pivot and to try to pick up some of that momentum and and

00:28:50.440 represent more of the libertarian even working class uh people um i think they need to change

00:28:57.800 they need to admit that they've they've been wrong they need to say we've done we've done wrong by

00:29:03.080 canadians and uh austin o'toole is the first step as and pierre polliver let's let's face it he's

00:29:09.160 been the most vocal um so like i said uh it'll be interesting to see how many other conservatives

00:29:14.200 start speaking like uh polliver as we approach the leadership race um i mean aaron o'toole was

00:29:20.440 pretty red meat but he was running for the leadership too um but then all of a sudden

00:29:24.600 you know he became this uh this red tory and he became the moderate and he started portraying

00:29:29.560 his opponents as the extreme it's it's weird i think what canadians want right now is someone

00:29:34.200 who's gonna who's gonna walk the walk and uh right now uh poliver has all that momentum

00:29:40.600 and and it's not just the momentum andrew let me just jump in here because

00:29:43.960 it polioff has something that erin otol never had right and erin otol ran in 2017 and i remember

00:29:49.320 seeing his speech on the night that they were announcing the leadership leadership victory

00:29:53.800 i remember thinking oh wow that guy has a lot there's something to him i wish i had explored

00:29:58.760 it because i just didn't really know who he was and he didn't stand out to me in the field in that

00:30:03.480 leadership race he was just another you know there were 19 candidates or whatever he didn't he didn't

00:30:07.080 do anything to make his mark and i remember thinking oh okay he's got a uh military background

00:30:12.280 and he he served the country and he seemed passionately canadian and i remember thinking

00:30:17.000 there's something to aaron tool and then when he came back in 2020 it was like a different version

00:30:21.080 of him or whatever and we now see that that was just the mask that he put on to try to get elected

00:30:25.960 All this just to say that Pierre Polyev, we know exactly what he believes in.

00:30:29.820 He speaks with conviction.

00:30:31.160 He is confident.

00:30:32.220 He believes in what he's saying, or at least from an outsider's perspective, people watching,

00:30:36.560 people who pay attention to politics, we feel the conviction in what he's saying.

00:30:40.780 I've never seen a spark of that in Erin Ochoa, and I think that was a big part of his demise

00:30:45.860 and why he's no longer the leader.

00:30:47.360 So I think that for Pierre, it's not even necessarily about what his issues are and

00:30:52.500 where he stands and how blue he is or how conservative he is on different issues because

00:30:59.100 we don't really know exactly where he stands on a lot of social issues. However, the thing that

00:31:03.400 Pierre has going for him is that he's not afraid, right? The moment that the media started maligning

00:31:08.080 and maliciously slurring all of these truckers, Pierre didn't care. He was there. He stood his

00:31:13.060 ground. He articulated his perspective. He stood up for those people in a way that most MPs were

00:31:20.220 afraid to do. And once Pierre did that, others followed. That's leadership. That's leadership.

00:31:25.000 That's conviction. I think that's exactly why people are looking to Pierre right now,

00:31:28.920 hoping that he is going to throw his hat in and say, yes, I'll do this. Because we know back in

00:31:33.280 2020, Andrew, you probably remember this, he was initially running and then he decided to pull out

00:31:38.420 and he said that he was going to focus on his family. He's got two really little kids and he

00:31:43.160 didn't want to, you know, running for leader and becoming a leader of the party is an all-consuming,

00:31:48.120 life-consuming job. You have to have the full support of your family. You have to have the

00:31:53.120 full commitment yourself to do it. And if Pierre doesn't have that, then that's going to be a

00:31:57.220 problem for him and the party. But I think that the reason that people are so excited about Pierre,

00:32:02.140 and you can see it in the comments, we can see the comments coming up on the screen here for

00:32:05.580 both Facebook and YouTube, which is really fun because usually when we do these live streams,

00:32:09.040 you can't, but because of the program and software we're using, we can see, I would estimate that

00:32:14.120 like every 10th comment is something about Pierre.

00:32:16.660 People love him.

00:32:17.340 People, the conservative, you know,

00:32:19.520 it's clear that he resonates more than any other conservative out there.

00:32:24.120 I just saw one that says, if Pierre wins, I will cry.

00:32:27.220 I don't know if that's tears of joy or tears of sadness,

00:32:29.440 but if that was you, let me know which way.

00:32:32.360 I'm curious why you'd feel emotionally either direction on that one.

00:32:36.620 Let's get to another insider question here that's relevant to this topic.

00:32:40.400 Nancy asks, well, the CPC does have champions like Pierre Paliyev,

00:32:43.920 and Candace Bergen and others who could lead them to victory.

00:32:47.200 How can the party be truly united

00:32:48.880 if its National Council has an opposing agenda

00:32:51.500 and remains intact?

00:32:53.480 So I don't want to get too in the weeds here,

00:32:55.460 but Nancy touches on, I think, an important point,

00:32:57.600 which is just the institutional identity

00:32:59.540 of the Conservative Party.

00:33:01.560 National Council is going to be the group

00:33:03.160 that's responsible for setting up

00:33:04.740 the terms of the leadership race,

00:33:06.640 everything to do with the entry fee,

00:33:08.340 to the rules, to establishing

00:33:10.200 who sits on the leadership committee.

00:33:11.820 and that's the committee that will get to decide if a candidate is unwelcome in the race. That was

00:33:16.580 the committee that disqualified Jim Karahalios last time around, for example. So ideally you'd

00:33:22.640 have someone who's respected enough that when they come in, when they enter this space,

00:33:29.420 the party itself respects that they are the leader. And this is where Canada and the U.S.

00:33:33.800 are kind of different in a way, because in the U.S., when you win a primary, for all intents

00:33:37.840 and purposes, you're the leader of the party and everything is at your disposal. In Canada,

00:33:41.860 it works like that in some ways, but you still get resistance. You get a lot of pushback from

00:33:47.180 people on bodies like the Conservative Fund and the National Council and all of that.

00:33:52.380 And remember, there are some people on council that were responsible just a couple of weeks ago

00:33:56.700 for kicking off Bert Chen, who was trying to get rid of Aaron O'Toole right after the election.

00:34:02.840 So all of those national councillors that voted to get rid of someone for opposing O'Toole,

00:34:07.440 I'd say they probably owe Bert Chen an apology, but those people are still the majority on National

00:34:12.960 Council in a post-O'Toole party. So again, for the most part, victory is a strong antidote to poison

00:34:21.700 because once someone wins, people just kind of say, okay, let's just go along with it. But you've

00:34:26.460 got to get there first. Are you confident, Candace, the party can do that? Well, I just want to stop

00:34:31.780 there because I'm not even clear about this myself, and I've been around politics for, I think, 15

00:34:35.840 years. Can you explain exactly what the National Council is and what it does? I know that they

00:34:40.580 elect them and there are representatives from each of the provinces, but what is the role and

00:34:44.780 how does it affect the party and its day-to-day operations? I mean, ideally, they're supposed to

00:34:51.180 just be that oversight for the party, like a corporate board. They're not the CEO of the party,

00:34:58.480 they're not the leader of the party, but they're the ones who can make determinations that affect

00:35:02.700 the day-to-day operations of the party. But at the end of the day, they have some ability to

00:35:08.820 maneuver things. For example, National Council could have worked to move up the leadership

00:35:14.360 convention or the review that would have had Aaron O'Toole subjected to the grassroots voting

00:35:20.060 on his leadership. And interestingly enough, one of the things that we'll see here is that

00:35:26.040 the National Council didn't do that. The National Council was quite resistant. The president

00:35:30.180 of the party, Robert Bathison, was saying, no, no, no, this is all out of order. We're not

00:35:35.400 entertaining this. So the National Council does have some power when it comes to these

00:35:39.700 administrative decisions like conventions, which can be very relevant. And they're also going to

00:35:44.480 be the ones now setting up, as I mentioned, the rules of the leadership race.

00:35:50.520 Well, I think the Conservatives have a problem when it comes to the way that they

00:35:54.380 run their leadership campaign. They don't feel very democratic. They don't feel very

00:35:57.600 connected to the grassroots. I know that in 2017, you had way too many candidates, like they should

00:36:02.480 have narrowed down the field. And in the way that Maxime Bernier lost after being ahead, I think,

00:36:07.740 what was it, Andrew, like 13 or 14 ballots, it felt very undemocratic. That's not how we run

00:36:13.220 our elections in the federal election, you know, it's first past the post, right? And so to have

00:36:19.300 this weird runoff ballot thingy, where all of a sudden, someone who had 30% of the vote jumps up

00:36:26.460 having 50% of the vote. I think that a lot of Canadians, conservatives, I should say, members

00:36:31.180 didn't didn't like that, especially obviously people who supported Bernier. And then when it

00:36:35.800 came to 2020, there was a lot of shenanigans. I know that there was like lawsuits and bad blood

00:36:41.080 between O'Toole's camp and McKay's camp and the staffers still hate each other. It just doesn't

00:36:47.060 really seem like a very well run machine, Andrew. And I'm with my friend JJ McCullough, a YouTuber,

00:36:53.480 he makes a point that the American primary system is so much more democratic. Anyone can go, anyone

00:36:58.760 can vote. It's so much more engaging. When you get to the final point in Canada where, you know,

00:37:04.120 you're choosing between Aaron O'Toole and Justin Trudeau, it's like, how did we come up with these

00:37:08.040 two choices, right? How few people were, there's such a small number of Canadians got to actually

00:37:15.140 choose who those two names were that go on the ballot. Even the Liberals are more open because

00:37:19.200 at least their memberships are free but still like the fact that we have such a weird antiquated

00:37:25.000 system of choosing the leader it doesn't it doesn't feel like a very open system and i mean

00:37:29.880 conservatives have a problem with candidate recruitment as well i i don't i don't think

00:37:33.600 that they recruit necessarily enough people from across the spectrum of society like why aren't

00:37:38.760 there more high profile successful business people running for public office for the conservatives

00:37:44.060 you know why don't why don't we have you know we had kevin o'leary a couple years ago uh i don't

00:37:48.520 I don't know why he ended up not falling through because I think he would have won and he might

00:37:52.200 have become prime minister. But I think that it would be great to pull in an outsider, pull in

00:37:57.560 someone who has a different perspective as well, at least for the leadership race, so that we can

00:38:01.940 see them duke it out in battle for the future of the party. Yeah. Let me turn to you on this one,

00:38:11.340 Harley, because again, I want to get out of the weeds on this and look at the bigger picture here

00:38:15.520 because a lot of people that don't follow the day-to-day operations of the Conservative Party,

00:38:19.760 and I'd say are probably all the better for it, are just looking at this and saying, you know,

00:38:23.160 what is this going to mean for me in the next election? What is this going to mean for the

00:38:26.340 next little bit of my life? And I go back to the fact that we are in a period of monumental

00:38:31.220 challenges and encroachments on civil liberties. There's a huge opportunity for a Conservative

00:38:36.260 leader to be a leader here. And I look at how the convoy became somewhat of a litmus test for which

00:38:41.780 kind of conservative you were. And a lot of MPs that were generally keeping their mouths shut and

00:38:46.680 falling in line seemed to just break with that. We had Candace Bergen, the deputy leader, Pierre

00:38:51.540 Polyev, we've had Tim Upple, we've had all of these MPs that have been quite unrestrained in

00:38:58.000 supporting the convoy in the last week. And then Aaron O'Toole, who infamously had that press

00:39:02.300 conference, just couldn't say one way or another. So if we are looking at Canadians as a whole here,

00:39:08.820 what is the thing that will allow a conservative to appeal to the base and also expand the base

00:39:16.040 uh i think it's easy as we all have been to get to have been swept up in the past week

00:39:25.520 um in uh like in the convoy in the pressure in trudeau's heinous remarks about them

00:39:31.460 and to start hoping that this will be what turns everything around.

00:39:39.060 I think that people want things to change fast.

00:39:43.160 They don't want to see it get down to the weeds, as you said, and process as weedy.

00:39:47.060 They don't want to see front-running promising candidates disqualified for technicalities

00:39:52.760 or for tiny unsavory things they might have said 10 years ago.

00:39:57.440 I mean, out in B.C., we watched Aaron Gunn, you know, kicked out of the B.C. liberal leadership run because of opinions he supposedly had.

00:40:05.360 There's a potential candidate, by the way.

00:40:07.540 Yeah, absolutely.

00:40:08.620 And I mean, Aaron's a great guy.

00:40:10.160 And and so I think we want to see people like Pierre Polivar, Polivar, pronounce it either way.

00:40:17.200 But we want to see people who have integrity, who don't seem to be catering to, you know, the established political kind of ideologies that predated the pandemic and which have gotten us into this trouble.

00:40:32.060 We want to see quick movement. And I think in the same way that we saw the NDP under Jack Layton basically sweep Quebec, this is a great opportunity for any party and any leader who wants to turn around and say enough is enough.

00:40:46.460 We're getting back to the way things ought to be. The science is there. The precedent is there in other countries.

00:40:51.540 we can see down the road. Trudeau has proven himself completely unqualified to be a leader

00:40:58.440 of a democratic country. And we just need to get back to being Canadians and doing what we do best,

00:41:03.660 and that's working hard and minding our own business. I love that. I just want to point out

00:41:08.440 that the egregious beyond the pale thing that Aaron Gunn said that disqualified him from running

00:41:13.120 for the only centre-right party in British Columbia, which is called the Liberal Party,

00:41:16.560 unfortunately, but it's a coalition of liberals and conservatives. The egregious thing that he

00:41:21.460 said was that Canada was not a genocidal country. That's what he said. They had four examples of

00:41:28.820 tweets and it was like something factual about Johnny McDonald that was not untrue and that he

00:41:35.920 said that Canada wasn't genocidal. And according to the elites and the people who run the gatekeepers

00:41:41.960 at the BC Liberal Party, that was egregious and didn't align with their values. And we see a lot

00:41:48.400 of that kind of stuff in politics, the whole cancel culture. I think that the left and the

00:41:52.080 media are trying to do that to the entire trucker convoy. They're saying, if you defend the trucker

00:41:56.260 convoy, it is because you are a Nazi full stop. And I heard that on the Twitter spaces last night.

00:42:00.480 I know it sounds like a exaggeration or a caricature of what a liberal might say,

00:42:05.340 but I heard them saying it last night on a Twitter space channel and I was pretty

00:42:09.000 godsmacked and I jumped in with my opinion and they didn't like that, but we had a good time

00:42:13.620 anyway. But I just want to say that I think that Harley's so right that we need to get back to our

00:42:19.760 roots as Canadians and the Conservatives need to do the same thing. I saw some people commenting

00:42:25.440 on the channel and it made me want to bring this up and throw this into discussion. But the idea

00:42:30.920 that the leader of the Conservative Party needs to speak French is foolish. It makes no difference. 0.99

00:42:35.680 If you go back through and look at the electoral history of the party when you had a French-speaking

00:42:40.340 leader versus a non-French speaking leader, there's hardly any difference, okay? Quebec is not going

00:42:45.340 to vote for the Conservative Party. The only chance that the Conservative Party has of making any

00:42:50.920 inroads in Quebec is if they have a leader from Quebec. Quebecers vote for their own. That is why

00:42:56.360 they voted for Jack Layton. That is why they voted for Brian Mulroney. Otherwise, they will always

00:43:00.360 vote for Liberal. And with Justin Trudeau, even if they don't like him, and even if they don't agree

00:43:03.580 with his values, and they don't like his position and his view of Canada, they will vote for him

00:43:07.600 because he is their native son. That is how Quebec works. So this whole effort and movement

00:43:13.940 in the Conservative Party to obsess over having a Conservative speaking leader and a Conservative

00:43:19.760 that spends time and focuses in Quebec is a total waste of time and is a losing strategy.

00:43:26.000 I think that the Conservatives should focus on their strong suit, which is appealing to

00:43:30.260 Western Canadian values and trying to make the inroads that it was making before in the 905

00:43:36.240 and the Vancouver area with new Canadians.

00:43:38.660 I think new Canadians are a much more fertile audience

00:43:42.040 and potential voters for the Conservative Party than Quebec.

00:43:45.220 And every single election,

00:43:46.780 we see them devote way too many resources

00:43:48.760 and focus way too much on Quebec.

00:43:51.120 We see this every single time there's a leadership race

00:43:53.040 obsessing over the ability of someone to speak French.

00:43:56.960 It doesn't matter.

00:43:57.880 It doesn't matter if you speak French.

00:43:59.300 They will not vote for you unless you're from Quebec. 0.80

00:44:01.200 And that's just the case.

00:44:02.800 That's the reality in this country.

00:44:04.160 I think that conservatives would be wise to try to find the best leader who represents conservative values and can articulate things that would appeal to Canadians, as opposed to obsessing over this idea that they have to speak Polish French, as if that matters, as if that matters, one, it doesn't.

00:44:21.500 we'll get to a couple more of your insider questions here we have one from well we I guess

00:44:28.500 we kind of addressed this Andrea says is Pierre Polyev considering a role as leader of the CPC

00:44:32.640 I think he's certainly considering it I think he's been considering it the question is will

00:44:36.880 he pull the trigger when as Candace mentioned earlier he didn't last time although it sounded

00:44:41.520 like came very close to doing so Teresa writes can't parliament vote as a whole a non-confidence

00:44:48.040 vote to oust Trudeau? I'll just answer that one quickly here. Yeah, they could do that at any

00:44:53.180 point. But the whole dimension of this is that the NDP and the Bloc Québécois back the Liberals.

00:44:59.300 In the Bloc Québécois, they know they're not going to get a better performance than they have

00:45:02.460 right now. So they want to milk the performance. And in the case of the NDP, they can't afford

00:45:06.640 to go back to the polls. So a non-confidence vote with a conservative minority opposition

00:45:12.500 is not going to be enough to topple the Liberals.

00:45:17.320 But this one, I think, is a question

00:45:18.860 we should all be delving into here.

00:45:21.080 Garth writes, the current conservative,

00:45:25.000 so he wrote this before O'Toole was ousted,

00:45:26.700 will likely be ousted today.

00:45:28.120 Will it make any difference?

00:45:30.100 I think this is a very big question

00:45:32.700 because when Andrew Scheer got elected,

00:45:34.620 he was Captain Socon up against Maxime Bernier,

00:45:37.860 the Libertarian.

00:45:38.980 Everyone thought, okay, we've got a solid blue Tory

00:45:41.540 from Western Canada here. And then not to relitigate the 2019 election, but during that

00:45:46.960 election, we hear him stumbling and stammering, not really talking about any issues of substance,

00:45:52.100 not giving a clear answer on the social questions. And it was only after the election that Andrew

00:45:57.340 Scheer started shooting from the hip again. Aaron O'Toole runs as the true blue red meat

00:46:01.980 conservative, defund the CBC, pro free speech, pro guns. And then in the election, I think pretty 0.50

00:46:07.480 much the platform was down to just two and a half pages by the end of the campaign.

00:46:11.540 because he kept just ripping pages out of it.

00:46:13.660 So people that play the conservative,

00:46:16.780 and in many cases are the conservative,

00:46:18.600 get consumed by the apparatus,

00:46:20.460 playing to the media,

00:46:21.960 and come election time,

00:46:23.200 they stop being what conservatives voted for.

00:46:26.440 So how do you prevent that from,

00:46:29.060 and I don't know which one of you wants to take this,

00:46:30.360 how do you prevent that from happening

00:46:31.740 to whoever comes next

00:46:33.320 that we may think is a solid candidate now,

00:46:35.420 but they just become consumed by the consultant class

00:46:38.460 once they get into the leadership?

00:46:40.660 Yeah. 0.96

00:46:41.540 You want to take this one, Harley? I feel like I've been talking a lot.

00:46:44.420 I could jump in, though, because I've got a lot to say about this, too.

00:46:47.600 Well, Ottawa is Ottawa, and we all come from different parts of the country,

00:46:51.860 and it's hard to understand the way Parliament Hill works unless you've been there for a while,

00:46:57.260 you've worked in it, you've been a staffer, you've been a journalist,

00:47:00.400 and it's easy for someone to come from the outside and after a while start sounding like somebody from Ottawa,

00:47:05.800 becoming autowashed, as they call it.

00:47:08.340 I like that. I've never heard that one before.

00:47:11.540 really oh man I hear that a lot I think I think it's never been easier to avoid these questions

00:47:18.660 by being opposition we need to get back to what Canada was before the pandemic

00:47:25.040 and and simply opposing the Trudeau government will will provide a party with enough ammunition

00:47:32.620 to go into the next election and really put up a fighting chance of getting elected to minority

00:47:37.800 or a majority government.

00:47:38.960 I think the issues of regionalism,

00:47:41.420 speaking French, corporatism,

00:47:44.020 a social conservative, fiscal conservative,

00:47:46.760 these things can be put on the back burner right now.

00:47:49.580 We're in a crisis right now.

00:47:51.600 We want to get our lives back.

00:47:53.160 We want to get our constitution back.

00:47:55.220 We want to be able to accept risks on our own.

00:47:58.140 So a lot of us work jobs that were inherently dangerous

00:48:01.440 and that was part of life.

00:48:03.660 And now we were being told to do things

00:48:05.440 because life was too dangerous for the policymakers.

00:48:07.800 I think that we need to just put all of these divisive kind of identity issues behind us and simply agree opposition to the Trudeau government is what's going to cause enough unification to possibly get in and try to do our best to return to rule of law.

00:48:33.820 and get out of these emergency measures that have allowed all of what we grew up believing

00:48:38.860 sacred to have been suspended well i'll go more to the take it away yeah i've got a lot to say

00:48:45.820 about everything andrew but the the technical side of it right it's like you're running for

00:48:49.340 the leader of the conservative party you're speaking to conservative voters in the conservative

00:48:52.780 base which is very different from the general public so the conventional wisdom goes that you

00:48:57.020 have to sort of swing to the right to get elected at the party level and then once you become leader

00:49:02.620 you can moderate and start talking more to people in quebec and people in ontario and specifically

00:49:08.380 in the gta and basically water down your message or change your message and and and and that's sort

00:49:13.020 of the wisdom of the party we saw that play out really really strongly with you know we saw it

00:49:17.580 with andrew sheer too i mean come on he he was backing a bunch of stuff that you know his position

00:49:22.460 on uh the paris accord changed right like like this happens to every leader however it was so

00:49:28.220 bad with the tool that i think that it just became so noticeable because of the way that he branded

00:49:32.460 himself, True Blue and just all of the flip flops. And I think that part of the way that we

00:49:36.520 counteract that, and I think I really don't want to like toot our own horn here, but I think that

00:49:40.560 the rise of independent media and having outlets like True North that are more oriented towards

00:49:45.980 a conservative worldview and therefore focus our efforts more on conservatives, we documented it,

00:49:53.060 we showed the world how Aaron O'Toole morphed and what he did and how he was super conservative

00:49:59.060 when it came to the leadership and how that wasn't what he was doing at all. And it kind of exposed

00:50:03.880 this game that a lot of the consulting class, to use Harley's phrase, what they advise, what they

00:50:10.080 say, what they say this needs to be done in order to win. And there's so many people in Toronto

00:50:14.140 that frankly agree with you and I, Andrew and Harley on most of the issues. However, they say,

00:50:21.100 well, that's not palatable to the public. Therefore we have to moderate. And so what they do is they

00:50:25.640 sort of fundamentally lie to themselves right they're out there selling ideas and policies

00:50:29.240 that they don't really believe in but they believe that they have to say that in order to get elected

00:50:33.240 and there's like an authenticity gap and i think we saw that with we've seen that with so many

00:50:37.720 leaders and so one of the things that we have to do in order to hold these people accountable

00:50:42.600 is to continue to shine the spotlight on them and to say we remember exactly what you said 0.99

00:50:48.680 when you were running for leader you said you were going to defund the cbc that was part of 0.51

00:50:52.680 your pledge that is why these people are supporting you and now that you're leader you're saying that

00:50:56.840 you want to work with them and review their mandate and and and give them different marching orders

00:51:01.880 essentially and it's like no you can't do that you can't do that canadians are watching you

00:51:06.280 and we want accountable government we want politicians who are authentic who do what

00:51:10.520 they say they're going to do who remain the same who say the same thing regardless of what part of

00:51:14.600 the country they're speaking in what language you're speaking in who they're speaking to we

00:51:18.120 We want an authentic person who we can trust.

00:51:20.720 And I think that was really a major, major flaw with Aaron O'Toole.

00:51:24.720 That's from the MPs that I was speaking to and the insiders.

00:51:27.640 It's like, yeah, we didn't agree with him policy.

00:51:29.660 We didn't like the flip-flops, this and that.

00:51:30.900 But fundamentally, the issue with Aaron O'Toole was about trust.

00:51:33.560 We couldn't trust him because we didn't know who he was.

00:51:35.520 We didn't know what he believed in.

00:51:37.140 And he would say something different every time he spoke.

00:51:39.160 And so I think as far as just how to stop that, well, we just have to continue to hold

00:51:44.920 these politicians accountable, Andrew.

00:51:46.240 And I think that's why, you know, we do the job we do and why we love it so much.

00:51:50.600 Yeah.

00:51:51.000 And just on the note of the independent media effect here.

00:51:53.540 So one thing that I think I mentioned it on my show, but and I don't think I made a big

00:51:58.060 deal of it because I didn't want it to sound petty, but I do think it's relevant here.

00:52:02.200 Aaron O'Toole has not spoken to True North since the election.

00:52:05.980 He has not given an interview to True North since December of 2020.

00:52:11.540 He did take questions on the campaign trail at press conferences, but True North had

00:52:16.100 to pay to be on the plane and part of the trade-off is that you pay for a seat on the plane and you

00:52:21.780 get access at press conferences but has not done an interview even after the election even after

00:52:26.740 the election when we have tried to say hey i'd like to give you the opportunity to speak to

00:52:31.780 conservatives to speak to these issues and every time if i even get a response it's no but typically

00:52:37.060 i wouldn't get a response and at press conferences as well i've called in haven't been called on is

00:52:42.260 Is it just because there's a high volume of journalists wanting to ask him questions or was I being selectively taken out of the QA?

00:52:49.120 I don't know and I don't particularly care.

00:52:51.480 But O'Toole has not wanted to speak to conservatives and conservative issues.

00:52:55.760 And the result of that is that he gets pummeled in the press anytime he does say something because the press is approaching these things from inherently liberal premises.

00:53:05.220 That's the whole point.

00:53:05.980 The questions that mainstream media journalists ask, why are you not spending more on X?

00:53:10.300 Why are you not condemning this candidate of yours? That's the approach. And I look back to

00:53:15.940 2020 when we did some coverage that I'm so proud of on the conservative leadership race. And one

00:53:23.280 example that I've told is that at the Conservative Party of Canada debates, the official debates,

00:53:28.980 they had scrums after. And at one of the debates, the 50%, literally 50% of the questions asked by

00:53:35.540 reporters were about abortion. At the other one of the debates, 50% of the questions were about

00:53:41.480 systemic racism, not the issues that conservative Canadians were wanting to get their conservative

00:53:47.300 leaders to weigh in on. Whereas we sat down at length with a couple of the candidates and we

00:53:52.460 were talking about supply management. We were talking about free speech. We were talking about

00:53:56.060 the energy sector. We were talking about things that are relevant to Canadians, but also to the

00:54:00.340 conservatives who get to decide how they're going to vote in a leadership race. So to bring this

00:54:06.600 back to where we are now, I would love for a leader to realize that you're never going to win

00:54:11.440 playing a game when the table is set by people who are against you. And one thing that Pierre

00:54:16.500 Polyev has done fairly well is be somewhat, I don't want to say Ron DeSantis-like, but the

00:54:22.640 Canadian lighter version of Ron DeSantis and actually rejecting the premises of questions

00:54:28.740 that are traps or questions that are flawed. And he does this very skillfully. If the leaders,

00:54:34.180 whoever they are, the leadership candidates can do that and start defining conservatism and their

00:54:39.380 values and their party in their own terms, I think we'll have a much better footing to see

00:54:44.640 these people head into the next election. What do you think, Harley? I completely agree. We were

00:54:51.740 talking about the convoy arriving in Ottawa on Saturday. And, you know, a lot of these guys,

00:54:58.280 these you know these blue collar guys i mean i don't know how often they've been in ottawa before

00:55:02.840 this but certainly the people way out west in canada and delta they haven't been there a lot

00:55:06.840 especially in their trucks and especially wearing their you know their overalls and their hardcover

00:55:11.400 their uh steel toed boots uh ottawa is a strange place and you can instantly step out and say wow

00:55:19.160 like i don't fit in here well on the same token there are plenty in ottawa that don't think they

00:55:25.240 fit in there either but it's our capital right and so we need to recognize that canadians uh have

00:55:32.840 have different beliefs different positions uh we're not all trying to fit in with each other

00:55:38.120 and especially not up to us to fit in into the politicians idea of what we ought to be

00:55:44.680 um and and so uh it's it's just important to stop trying to prescribe ideology um to to your to

00:55:54.280 your supporters and to focus right now like i said this is this is there's never been a greater

00:55:59.880 opportunity to cut around this stuff to to to get away from the the traps that the table has been

00:56:05.960 set like you said uh you know hot button issues like abortion and things like critical race theory

00:56:11.560 and there are all these traps that are laid and this is why the convoy organizers put out a warning

00:56:15.640 to the participants saying be very careful you are in hostile territory you're not at federal

00:56:21.240 buildings do not these are not your friends you know a lot of these mainstream legacy media they're

00:56:25.480 going to try to smear you even if you do nothing wrong which is what we saw right and so right now

00:56:31.560 like i said there is momentum for change as long as we can agree that canada is not where we want

00:56:37.400 it to be right now i think that gives uh any party that's that's that's trying to provide a viable

00:56:42.520 opposition a lot of ammunition a lot of ammo um we don't need to agree on every little thing um and

00:56:49.400 And I think this will allow us to kind of, again, cut through the identity politics and focus on what it is to be Canadian that's a belief in freedom, a belief in charter rights, a belief in rule of law, and simply like an opposition to the sort of hatred we heard from Trudeau and a constant, you know, reliance on emergency measures to pass legislation that, you know, five, ten years ago would have been considered unconscionable in a place like Canada.

00:57:16.080 But like in Nova Scotia, you can't even protest on the highway between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to support the trucker convoy anymore.

00:57:23.600 Or donate to the GoFundMe.

00:57:25.360 Exactly.

00:57:25.940 Yeah.

00:57:26.140 And they were going to have a rally there on Saturday, like a lot of places and capitals in Canada did when the convoy arrived in Ottawa.

00:57:32.380 And that was, you know, that was outlawed by the Nova Scotia government before it could happen.

00:57:37.520 This stuff's crazy.

00:57:38.720 This is absolutely nuts.

00:57:40.240 and I mean in the same way you know animals can sense a change in the weather and I can say this

00:57:46.460 because you know I come from working class roots working class guys can sense when something's

00:57:51.280 wrong they're they can feel there's something not right about what's going on about like

00:57:56.640 freedoms being taken away about you know you're being told for example that you can't have a job

00:58:03.360 unless you undergo a medical treatment these are these are unconscionable things in the minds of

00:58:07.860 many Canadians. And for them to push back and for Canadians to, you know, want so vehemently for

00:58:15.740 a viable political alternative should give the next leader and any party that wants to

00:58:23.960 capitalize this the talking points and the ammunition at the very least, but in very

00:58:29.240 hope, ability to reach out and understand what Canadians are looking for going into the next

00:58:37.400 election. Well, I just want to pick up on something you said there, Harley, because

00:58:42.040 I think that the truck convoy and the freedom rally, the focus of the media has sort of gotten

00:58:47.660 us off task, right? The media wanted to talk about violence. They wanted to talk about extremism.

00:58:52.520 They wanted to do everything they could to discredit these truckers. And I think that a

00:58:57.020 lot of conservatives went into defense mode to say you are being unfair and to rightly defend

00:59:02.640 the truckers in the places that they deserve to be defended. Of course, there's a few people that

00:59:07.240 beyond the pale and those people should be removed but but but for the most part

00:59:13.400 defending the truck i think that that misses the broader point in the broader picture

00:59:18.280 is that canada in 2022 doesn't look like canada anymore and canadians canadians who are supposed

00:59:24.920 to be loving neighborly nice kind reconciliatory easygoing people feels like we're at war with

00:59:35.240 one another the the rhetoric is really dangerous the the polit the way that the politicians sort

00:59:40.360 of pour gasoline on the fire the way that they say that if you disagree with them it's because

00:59:46.040 you hate science i think that the who was one of the liberal cabinet ministers posted that

00:59:51.480 the other day that if you disagree with science it's because you're wrong and like

00:59:55.800 science is their politicized interpretation of cherry-picked scientific figures right so

01:00:01.480 so i i think that there are some really scary things happening in this country when you start

01:00:06.280 hearing the cabinet minister for the prime minister talking about forced vaccination we're

01:00:11.480 not talking about mandates we're talking about some kind of forced vaccine when we talk about

01:00:16.040 the idea of of charging people an extra tax loving an extra tax if they don't take a medical

01:00:22.760 procedure that's supposed to be voluntary there's so many examples we could sit here for an hour and

01:00:28.040 and go through them all. People feel that their fundamental freedoms are being violated. That's

01:00:34.680 the red line for so many Canadians that has been crossed. And they are just no longer willing to

01:00:39.140 go along anymore, especially given all the changes. And we've talked about this before, but

01:00:42.540 just the idea that vaccine mandates don't work. Vaccines don't stop the spread of COVID. Everybody

01:00:47.180 gets COVID. It doesn't matter if you're vaccinated or not. Justin Trudeau has COVID right now and

01:00:51.180 he's been triple vaxxed. So people continue to say this kind of stuff. They're not paying attention

01:00:56.000 to the latest updates from science.

01:00:58.620 They're supposed to be the ones

01:00:59.980 that are championing Iraq and themselves in science. 0.87

01:01:01.800 And they're not even paying attention

01:01:03.020 unless it reinforces their political partisan perspective.

01:01:07.400 And I think that the trucker rally

01:01:08.840 is a huge wake-up call for so many of us

01:01:11.340 who are saying, we want Canada back.

01:01:13.840 We want enough with the tribalism,

01:01:16.300 enough with this viciousness

01:01:17.920 that we're seeing on the internet,

01:01:19.260 enough with just routinely trying to discredit people

01:01:22.240 by calling them Nazis and far-right.

01:01:23.940 Let's just stop with that.

01:01:25.120 Let's focus back on our country. Let's get rid of these ridiculous mandates that don't help. Let's stop forcing Canadians to make decisions that go against their conscience and their beliefs. Let's stop firing people and eliminating their livelihood because they don't agree with us. Like, none of those things are Canadian. And I think that these are the conversations that we need to be having and pushing forward and getting the conservatives to think about and talk about and address this stuff because the next conservative leader had better have a different response when it comes to

01:01:55.120 to COVID and vaccines and mandates than this current crop

01:01:58.880 because the current crop is so out of touch

01:02:02.480 with the people in their own party

01:02:03.920 and so many Canadians that just don't want to go along

01:02:06.440 with this medical tyranny anymore.

01:02:09.260 Yeah, I think that's very, very well said.

01:02:11.260 And as we wind down here,

01:02:12.520 I want to just say something

01:02:13.960 that I think is important to note here is that at True North,

01:02:17.840 we have to now pivot

01:02:19.400 into conservative leadership race coverage mode,

01:02:22.640 which will certainly be no shortage of content,

01:02:25.080 but it also means there are going to be costs

01:02:26.940 because this is going to be a little bit different than 2020.

01:02:29.620 There are going to be real events, we hope.

01:02:31.540 We may even talk about putting a debate on like we,

01:02:34.460 well, that's, I mean, that's the whole traumatic thing

01:02:36.500 that we have to get into about Peter McKay and all that,

01:02:38.580 but we want to do a debate.

01:02:40.000 That's going to be something on our list.

01:02:41.460 So legitimately, if you can chip into our coverage

01:02:44.460 of the trucker convoy, which is still ongoing,

01:02:46.680 and what is shaping up to be a conservative leadership race

01:02:50.040 in the coming weeks, please do.

01:02:51.540 you can head on over to donate.tnc.news donate.tnc.news and if you are watching on YouTube

01:02:59.440 you can even donate right from YouTube I've seen a couple of super chats come in so thanks very much

01:03:04.500 for those who are sharing their support on that platform but just before we say farewell want to

01:03:09.340 do a bit of a final final thought if I can here what would your closing words be Harley and then

01:03:15.180 we'll get you Candice and if I have anything to say I which is no guarantee I might add some as

01:03:19.840 well. But we'll start with you, Harley. First of all, I know everybody watching knows Andrew and

01:03:26.460 Candace very well. I've only been with True North for a couple of months. I'm extremely grateful

01:03:31.380 and happy to be here, to be pushing back against this insanity. Again, I'm a British Columbian.

01:03:37.260 I come from a working class background, worked in a heavy duty repair shop. I lived in Ottawa for a

01:03:42.660 long time and went to university as my wife worked on Parliament Hill in journalism there.

01:03:46.460 I lived across the country and now that I'm back in BC it's it's just I'm very grateful to be given

01:03:53.780 a voice and to be helping you guys to cause the kind of things to happen that we just saw 0.96

01:03:59.140 I think like I grew up wanting to be left alone working class people want to be left alone good 0.91

01:04:06.720 hard-working Canadians just want to make their own choices work hard get ahead under their you know 0.99

01:04:11.780 under their own steam and on their own merits and uh i think right now we can all get behind what's

01:04:16.900 happening here and agree if we can just get back to that self-determinism we can just get the

01:04:21.700 government out of our hair out of our faces and just get back to uh what it was that we did as

01:04:27.460 canadians best again like i said um working hard helping each other but otherwise leaving each

01:04:32.980 other alone i think we're a far better country for it uh thank you very much to all of our supporters

01:04:37.780 and just keep an eye on True North.

01:04:40.580 We'll be doing everything we can with the team we have,

01:04:42.900 working hard to cover the leadership

01:04:44.140 and also constantly pushing back

01:04:46.540 against all these measures that are continuing.

01:04:50.320 Sounded like you were about to start a campaign speech there.

01:04:53.040 You're not running for the leadership, are you?

01:04:56.360 No, no.

01:04:57.060 My children aren't quite as young as Pierre Polyev,

01:05:00.240 but I think I'd have to arm wrestle my wife

01:05:03.600 for that opportunity just to get to it in the first place. 1.00

01:05:05.740 She's a contender. I would vote for her. No offense to you. Candice, final thoughts? 1.00

01:05:12.820 Well, I just want to say Harley is very humble because he left out a whole bunch of his bio,

01:05:17.660 including the fact that he has a PhD in English from the University of Toronto and that he has

01:05:22.060 a law enforcement background. It was like when we saw his resume come on our desk, it's like,

01:05:26.180 I couldn't believe this was a real person. He has so much experience. He's done so many things in

01:05:30.420 his life. And I have a friend and I've worked with his wife in the past. And so it's just tremendous.

01:05:35.220 this, Harley, to have you on board. He's an editor. And so if you've noticed the writing

01:05:39.140 on True North's website has gotten a lot better, it's because Harley's editing our stuff and making

01:05:44.440 it better and really just representing a different voice that we're so pleased and so thrilled to

01:05:49.020 have in our organization. And tremendous. I know that we are focused on the leadership. We're

01:05:54.900 focused on the trucker rally and all the great, exciting things that are happening. The world

01:05:59.100 does feel freer. It's like we've turned a corner. We see light at the end of the tunnel. And it's

01:06:03.460 such a pleasure for us at True North. Look, I don't want to laugh at the misfortunes of the

01:06:08.760 Conservative Party, but their terrible Q4 fundraising, the fact that they didn't raise

01:06:13.180 very much money in the last quarter of last year, True North had the opposite. I think that a lot of

01:06:18.620 the people who might have otherwise donated some money to the Conservatives were donating to True

01:06:24.060 North, giving us $10, $20, $50 donations, and it really adds up. And we've seen tremendous growth

01:06:30.500 in our organization, we're continuing to grow. It feels like we have momentum that more people are

01:06:35.620 paying attention. I get so many kind and supportive notes from so many people, even people who don't

01:06:41.300 necessarily agree with us. They appreciate the independent voice and the different perspective

01:06:45.200 that we have. And so it feels like we're heading in a good direction with True North and with the

01:06:51.220 country. And I think we've got such a good team. It's so wonderful to have Andrew on board. Andrew,

01:06:56.300 you've been with us since pretty much the beginning of True North. And to have new voices

01:06:59.740 like Harley, we're going to continue to bring on new voices, different voices, different perspectives,

01:07:03.820 and continue to just provide a different perspective than what you're seeing at the

01:07:07.520 media. Andrew, you asked that question about, you know, the misleading and the obsessive

01:07:12.120 questions that the parliamentary press gallery put to the politicians. Well, True North wants

01:07:16.580 to break that up. We want to make sure that the things that you, the audience, care about are

01:07:21.260 making it to the politicians, that you're not going to be alienated and ignored, that you're

01:07:25.400 going to be participating in the political process. We all want to participate in our democracy,

01:07:29.500 And we have to. We have to. Because if we say, you know, screw this. I hate these people. Leave me alone. I'm going to just do my own thing. They're going to continue to take a country down a very, very dangerous path. We need to have political movement. We need to have representation. We need our voices to be heard. And that comes from every angle. Right. That comes from the political angle. That comes from the journalism angle. That comes from the sort of people just getting involved.

01:07:54.500 And I think it's going to take a big effort for us to get our country back, but we're heading in that direction.

01:07:58.780 We need to continue to focus and use the momentum that we have right now to just continue to drive home to what Harley was saying to get our country back, to get Canada back.

01:08:07.560 See, I should never plan to put myself after Candice because there's no following a mic drop moment like that.

01:08:12.320 So I don't have anything to add.

01:08:13.920 I'm having a show come out tomorrow.

01:08:15.180 Maybe I'll come up with some stuff.

01:08:17.220 I can't top that, though.

01:08:18.280 Well said, Candice.

01:08:19.340 Well said, Harley.

01:08:20.020 A big thanks to the team we have working behind the scenes here on this show to Phil and to Jacob.

01:08:25.820 And also, I mean, True North is so big, I can't list everyone in the closing credits and acknowledgements now,

01:08:31.220 which is a great problem to have.

01:08:32.400 But we've got people all over the country.

01:08:34.260 We are hard at work covering the race, covering the convoy and lots else.

01:08:37.780 So thanks to you, Candice and Harley, for coming on and to all of you for tuning in.

01:08:43.020 Thanks very much.

01:08:43.880 We'll talk to you soon and God bless you.

01:08:50.020 Thank you for joining us.

01:09:20.020 Thank you.

Juno News - February 02, 2022

Conservative Caucus Leadership Vote Live Show

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