00:00:00.000You're sort of a conservative insider. You talk to a lot of people within the party. Do you feel like there's a chism in the party that there is a divide? I mean, it seems like the sort of war of words between some of the campaigns, notably between Patrick Brown and Pierre Paglia, but also a little bit of Jean Charest.
00:00:17.800Is this normal or is this more intense than normal? And do you have the feeling that, say, for instance, if Jean Charest ended up being the candidate, would all of the other new members rally around that leader? Would they rally around Pierre Paglia? Would they rally around Patrick Brown? What do you think about the unity of the party? Because there's a lot of hay being made in the media about how the party is very divided and all this kind of stuff. I'm just wondering if you could comment on that.
00:00:45.760Yeah, I don't think the party is any more divided now than it was during the last leadership race. I think leadership races themselves create the structure of the race creates the rhetoric around it. You know, in a race like what we have this time with Mr. Paglia, who seems to be the front runner, it is incumbent upon the others to try to take him down.
00:01:07.780So they're going to throw a whole bunch of say a bunch of things. And the flip side, poly of campaigns got to keep anybody else from catching up, you know, in the in the in the 2020 leadership race of O'Toole versus McKay, that race got extremely heated.
00:01:20.120And again, because it was a similar dynamic. But if you look back at the 2017 race, I don't think the 2017 race with 14 candidates in the ballot wasn't divisive or angry, because of, you know, it was a different time or something.
00:01:39.900I think that people, when you're looking at that number of people running, it was obvious that nobody was going to win or come close to winning on the first ballot.
00:01:49.420And therefore, everybody had to run a more cooperative approach in order to get second ballot support. And that was much more explicit. Everyone was thinking along those lines.
00:01:57.260So as a result, you had to be careful about, you had to be more careful about the ballot they throw. In a front runner race, it's very, very different.
00:02:03.140So I think anytime you see a front runner race, you're going to see a much more, quote unquote, divisive race. But look, the Conservative Party has a history of coming together around leaders.
00:02:14.180You know, Mr. O'Toole, you know, didn't have a majority of caucus endorsements.
00:02:18.780He was able to pull together a team, caucuses united around him through the 2021 election, he got his chance.
00:02:26.480And then obviously, I think he made a bunch of choices after that that resulted in him being removed as leader.
00:02:32.400But that wasn't a result of the leadership race itself.