00:02:29.220Scooplet, today Conservative Party of Canada Senator Michael McDonald sent a letter to Conservative Caucus urging a vote for a leadership review of Erin O'Toole.
00:02:37.500Voting in favor of a review vote is not pleasant, but it is necessary.
00:02:41.120The status quo under the present circumstances is a mistake.
00:02:44.440So there is a longer story in the Globe and Mail about this.
00:02:48.660So McDonald's sent out an email, a letter to all of caucus, basically urging them to vote on the Reform Act.
00:02:56.500So as I explained in the show yesterday, there's two sort of separate things that happen.
00:03:00.500The first is what they call like an airing of the grievances.
00:03:03.860Everyone lines up with the microphones and just, you know, lets Erin O'Toole have a piece of their mind, lets them hear it.
00:03:12.920Next time, this is what my constituents are saying.
00:03:15.740This is what I'm hearing from the Conservative base, et cetera, et cetera.
00:03:18.900And that's the part of the meeting that includes both incoming and outgoing MPs.
00:03:23.000So we also have to hear from the handful of people who lost, presumably because he abandoned Conservative principles and his strategy failed.
00:03:31.180So, you know, three seats were lost in Alberta, a handful of seats in British Columbia and in the 905 around Toronto as well.
00:04:11.580So when Evan Solomon says urging a vote for a leadership review, it's not even necessarily a vote for leadership review of Erin O'Toole.
00:04:18.220He's talking about just giving them the power to do that.
00:04:20.880But then if you read this Globe and Mail story, he does go into some detail about how he believes that Erin O'Toole is not the right man for the job.
00:04:31.400The only conclusion that can be drawn from these numbers is that the leader's conscious decision to move the Conservative Party to the left has been a strategic failure.
00:04:38.960As we not only failed to make breakthrough in the GTA, as promised, we actually lost seats.
00:08:24.980It is written into their editorial position.
00:08:27.140They follow something called the Atkins Principle.
00:08:28.700So they are an activist journalism outlet whose goal and all of their journalism is guided to make Canada a more left-wing, progressive, woke country.
00:08:38.560And so, for some reason, Conservatives still leak stories to the Star.
00:08:51.360On Saturday, they had two really interesting op-eds that appeared side-by-side, and it was a debate.
00:08:58.060The Saturday debate, should the Conservative Party keep Erin O'Toole as leader?
00:09:01.480And as you would expect, the people who would read and submit things to the Toronto Star.
00:09:06.300So we have two ultra-connected Conservative insiders, two former senior-senior staff members for the Harper Conservative government, who are now both consultants.
00:09:16.440So on the yes side, we have Andrew McDougal, who is a director at Trafalgar Strategy, who was previously director of communication to former Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
00:09:24.140And on the no side, on the side saying, get rid of Erin O'Toole, is Jenny Byrne, who's the CEO of Jenny Byrne Associates, a former deputy chief of staff and national campaign director to Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
00:09:35.000So like I said, senior insiders for the Conservative Party, very well-known people within the Conservative movement.
00:09:41.600So I want to go through the yes side because I think it explains exactly the mindset of red Tories and why they think that O'Toole should stay.
00:09:49.140And I'll go through a bit of Jenny Byrne's because it's pretty good.
00:10:01.840But what should happen to a Conservative leader who fights Trudeau to a draw with the deck stacked against him and with one hand tied behind his back?
00:10:10.240So he goes on to say how the deck was stacked against Erin O'Toole, mostly because Justin Trudeau spent hundreds of billions of dollars during the pandemic,
00:10:18.460kind of bribing Canadians with their own money right up until the election when he actually sent $500 out to seniors during the campaign.
00:10:25.600So, yeah, most Canadians were just grateful for the help and they didn't recognize that they were being bribed.
00:10:33.860And then but then he goes into the policy and he says this is for the one hand tied behind his back.
00:10:38.380O'Toole faced a scenario in which 75 to 80 percent of Canadians support vaccine mandates, with most of the holdouts either supporting his party or Maxine Bernier's party to the right.
00:10:47.960Lest we forget, Trudeau's government also did a solid job procuring vaccines.
00:10:52.700The reality left precious little room for O'Toole to maneuver on the biggest issue of the day.
00:10:56.420Despite these pressures, O'Toole didn't take the bait and indulge the anti-vaccination crowd.
00:11:00.920Even if it might have pulled some of that support back, that showed good judgment.
00:11:05.480So right off the bat, the position is not to lead the country, not to be a politician who has convictions, who believes in their own principles, who carves their own path and graphs policy based on their core beliefs.
00:11:32.980You're not putting out a position that you believe in because you think it's right for the country.
00:11:36.600You're basing it all on what pollsters tell you to say.
00:11:39.820So I guess this is Andrew McDougall trying to say that Aaron O'Toole was smart and strong.
00:11:43.880But to me, when I read this, it just shows weakness and a lack of authenticity because you're just basing your policies on what the polls are telling you.
00:11:52.300And then he goes on to really make it clear.
00:11:55.140So he says how Aaron O'Toole started the campaign strong, the polls reflected that, and then he kind of fell back and went flat around the time of the first debate.
00:12:03.860And this, he says, is largely on account of his inability to explain why his platform included a repeal of gun regulations put in by the liberals.
00:12:11.760The slide could be down to O'Toole's fluffed comms on the issues, or it could be drawn from the fact that people in vote-rich urban, suburban areas don't understand why anyone needs a semi-automatic weapon.
00:12:22.500Either way, an election is a hell of a time to try to explain the nuance of Canadian gun use and gun control.
00:12:27.540So here we have it. The entire idea is that during the campaign, you don't try to defend your ideas, you don't try to defend principles, like the idea that there's nothing wrong with owning a gun legally, and those people aren't the ones that commit crimes by and large.
00:12:41.620But no, it's just that Trudeau picked up this wedge issue, and he was correct to do it, and the conservatives were flat-footed.
00:12:47.500And again, this is such a bad strategy.
00:12:49.220This is, Aaron O'Toole lost because he was listening to comms people like Andrew McDougal giving this kind of advice, because the whole idea that Aaron O'Toole should lose on an issue like crime, crime is bread-and-butter issue for conservatives.
00:13:00.800Aaron O'Toole's supposed to be a law-and-order guy.
00:13:02.680You flip this issue immediately, as soon as Justin Trudeau starts talking about guns, you say,
00:13:06.640You want to start talking about crime, Mr. Trudeau? Let's talk about your record.
00:13:10.020Let's talk about your decision to lessen sentences for dangerous criminals, violent criminals caught with illegal guns.
00:13:15.720Let's talk about Canada's revolving door prison system.
00:13:18.060Show some conviction. Talk about conservative principles. Flip the issue. Own the issue.
00:13:22.420That's what conservatives expect. That's what we want to see.
00:13:25.060And so this whole idea coming back that, oh, he shouldn't have never had this gun stuff in the platform to begin with, it's like, okay, we get it.
00:13:31.780This is what red Tories believe. They don't want anything conservative in the platform.
00:13:35.300And instead of blaming Aaron O'Toole for really just handling that so poorly, he goes back and says, oh, it never should have been in the platform.
00:13:42.600And then he concludes it all by just saying, besides running another leadership race in a pandemic would be an invitation to a civil war and switching horses when Trudeau is trending towards the glue factory would be a mistake.
00:13:52.900It would be better for conservatives to improve the leader they've got.
00:13:56.340So basically the reasons to keep the guy are that we don't really want to have to do this again, which is not a very compelling, not a very exciting answer.
00:14:04.820And even the people that they get to defend Aaron O'Toole have to do it half-heartedly and do it based on blaming everyone around Aaron O'Toole and not him and kind of doubling down on this idea that we need to have more liberal policies in the conservative platform.
00:14:19.040On the other side, we have Jenny Byrne. Jenny Byrne is, sure, she's a conservative insider, but I think she's still very much a member of the base and she understands conservatism and the principles behind it.
00:14:30.660So her piece is much, much, much more critical.
00:14:33.280So she starts off by saying, from a political perspective, the conservative campaign was the most disappointing.
00:14:39.320CBC ran on a platform of political expediency, hoping for a win at all costs and ending up with no wins at all.
00:14:45.740The party has fewer seats and a lower share of the popular vote than it did in 2019.
00:14:49.020It is less urban and less ethnically diverse than at any point in modern history.
00:14:53.520And so she says for that reason, O'Toole's strategy to run as a liberal failed.
00:14:58.160She says he did run a tactically good campaign.
00:15:00.460He made the decision to run as a liberal, not to the center, as some commenters have said.
00:15:05.180There was little contrast between the conservatives and the liberals.
00:15:07.980People had no distinct reason to cast their vote for the conservatives.
00:15:11.060And I suspect many people who voted for us in the past simply didn't vote at all.
00:15:14.400The argument to keep O'Toole as leader of the party, therefore, is purely an emotional one.
00:15:20.660Many people speaking for O'Toole in the months leading up to the campaign said the conservatives needed to sacrifice votes in Alberta to win in Ontario.