Juno News - January 17, 2020


Is it time for an outsider to enter the CPC Leadership Race？

Mentioned
Kevin O'Leary Trudeau
The Andrew Lawton Show： Hollywood Hypocrites, CBC Fake News, Cancelling Vince Vaughn The world is changing. Is Canada prepared？

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

202.96

Word count

827

Sentence count

40


Summary

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

In this episode, I discuss the new rules for the upcoming Conservative leadership race, including a $200 entry fee and a non-refundable deposit requirement of $3,000. Is this a good thing or a bad thing?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 A lot of people in the broader federal conservative family were waiting to see
00:00:09.320 what the rules would be for the conservative leadership race. When the
00:00:13.000 timelines would be, when the deadline would happen, and this, the moolah, what's
00:00:17.840 the cash going to be? Well we've now learned that the rules are that there
00:00:21.000 will be a $200,000 non-refundable entry fee, that's just the cover price at the
00:00:27.240 door, and that before February 27th, in a few weeks time, you have to cobble
00:00:32.320 together 3,000 signatures from people all across the country and a whole bunch
00:00:37.620 of different writings must represent, I think it is, at least seven provinces and
00:00:42.120 or territories. What does all of this mean? I mean if you want to become Prime
00:00:46.740 Minister in Canada, if you want to be Conservative leader, you better be able
00:00:49.920 to raise at least a few hundred grand of course, because if you can't do that, how
00:00:53.480 can you raise the millions of dollars needed for a war chest to fund a whole
00:00:57.180 party? And of course getting 3,000 signatures, I mean you're gonna be
00:01:00.600 looking for millions of votes, so 3,000 doesn't initially seem all that
00:01:04.800 much. Or is it? How do you actually get to these people? How do you know who the
00:01:09.500 names are? You can sign up new people in a short period of time, good luck with that
00:01:13.320 for sure, or maybe you can get the lists out there of who prominent donors are,
00:01:17.800 previous donors are, who current party members are, people who are currently
00:01:21.240 organized in the grassroots and so forth. Well to do that, you're probably gonna need
00:01:25.140 some backroom boys, some seasoned operators and so forth, which has led a lot
00:01:28.560 of people to say, hold on a second, were these rules written in a way to push out
00:01:32.960 new voices, mavericks, outsiders, people who are going to do things differently? And
00:01:37.560 is this a time when the grassroots actually wants to hear from some
00:01:41.660 outsiders? You know, I will never forget those numbers. Back in 2017, Kevin O'Leary, he
00:01:46.380 was in a lot of polls, and every single poll, whether it was polling Conservative
00:01:50.980 members or polling the General Electorate, Kevin O'Leary came out on top. He came out
00:01:56.440 in first place. I'm not personally endorsing him, I would not have been advocating for
00:02:01.260 him to win that leadership, become Prime Minister and so forth, but I think it's
00:02:04.320 telling that people wanted to hear from this outsider. And even though Kevin O'Leary is
00:02:08.980 an influential and wealthy man, in certain corners of the world out there, in the business
00:02:13.900 community and the media landscape that he operates in, he was not sort of an old-school
00:02:19.520 Conservative Party figure. So he would have had some challenges. I mean, perhaps
00:02:23.200 if he was getting in the race right now, he would not actually be able to do those
00:02:27.440 things with the signatures. I don't know, maybe he'd pull it together, but I think it
00:02:30.520 would be more of a challenge for him there. I get the argument, and it makes sense to
00:02:35.680 me that this is a minority government situation. You want to get someone tested
00:02:39.960 who can quickly come in and be ready to defeat Trudeau at any time. I also get the
00:02:44.680 idea that you don't want some wingnut to pay the $500 entry fee and get up and hog a
00:02:49.360 bunch of time and make an embarrassment and just create a bunch of clips for other
00:02:53.160 media to make fun of the Conservative Party. I get all of that. But one also
00:02:57.820 wonders, if you are a party, this is more of a one-member, one-vote system. I mean, it's
00:03:02.480 ranked according to writings, of course, but they're trying to be a lot more leaning
00:03:06.900 towards one-member, one-vote. Not one of those delegated, backroom, brokered
00:03:11.280 conventions. Are these high thresholds the right way to go? I don't know. Personally, I'm not
00:03:16.780 a member of any political party because I'm in the media and I want to be free
00:03:19.620 to say positive or negative things about anyone and everyone out there, so I'm not
00:03:23.940 joining the party. But were I a member and I look at the landscape I see right now, I
00:03:27.400 would probably be supporting one of those more high-profile names that we
00:03:31.700 already know about, one of the establishment names. But the fact that the
00:03:35.960 rules have been set to discourage another outside name from coming in, is that a
00:03:40.860 good thing? Is that a healthy thing? I don't fully have the answer to that
00:03:44.900 question. What do you think? Let me know. Leave your comments and send me your
00:03:48.240 emails and so forth. Do you want a more open-source, conservative party? Or are
00:03:53.300 you happy with the lid being a little tight on this one this time around? It'll
00:03:58.340 be curious to see what result this setup actually brings for the party.