Juno News - September 22, 2023


New centrist party seeks to act as counter-weight to Poilievre


Episode Stats

Length

15 minutes

Words per Minute

208.74458

Word Count

3,264

Sentence Count

161

Misogynist Sentences

1

Hate Speech Sentences

6


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 But I do want to talk about this story that came about this week, which is a bit of a
00:00:14.680 deviation from what we've been talking about the rest of the show, which makes it a good
00:00:17.760 note to end on for the week. A new political party. Now, I should say that there are a great
00:00:23.760 many political parties in this country. You've got the Communist Party, the Marxist-Leninist
00:00:27.640 Party. I think there was a marijuana party at one point. So you've got a bunch of parties
00:00:31.940 that don't really do anything and are kind of just existing on paper only. And then you
00:00:36.820 have parties that come on and they want to make a splash because they feel they are filling
00:00:41.300 a void that the status quo is not addressing. And that is what this new initiative seeks
00:00:47.840 to do. It is a party formed by the folks behind Centre Ice Canadians, which was formerly Centre
00:00:53.100 Ice Conservatives. It is called Canadian Future and is being led in the interim by New Brunswick
00:00:58.560 MLA Dominic Carty, who joins me now. Dominic, good to talk to you. Thanks for coming on today.
00:01:04.100 Hey, thanks for having me on the show. Appreciate it.
00:01:06.000 So let me just ask first and foremost, I know this is being presented as a centrist party,
00:01:10.820 which is a term you often hear kind of appropriated by both sides. Do you view this as a party for
00:01:17.240 Conservatives that don't like Pierre Polly ever or Liberals who don't like Justin Trudeau?
00:01:21.480 Well, we'll take both and lots of other people who are fed up with politics in general. We've had
00:01:26.200 some support coming even from other parties because there's, I think, a feeling that we've
00:01:31.660 ended up with kind of a mushy politics where you've got this kind of sterile debate about left versus
00:01:36.540 right based on a 200 plus year old idea about how we should run our economies. We've got 100 plus
00:01:41.940 years now of ideas and evidence about how to run mixed economies. We know that's generally what
00:01:47.360 works. To me, the big fight right now is about, do we have an open society or a closed society?
00:01:52.080 Do we fall in line with the models of governments that we're seeing pushed by the Chinese and the
00:01:56.220 Russians around the world, clearly trying to influence Canada directly and indirectly?
00:02:00.540 And do we have a party based on evidence? Because I think that's something that
00:02:04.100 all the parties have slipped away from as the years of left-wing postmodernism made truth somewhat
00:02:09.920 relative. And that's now being a mantra embraced by the right, where we have,
00:02:13.280 unfortunately, Mr. Pollyer, out campaigning Max Bernier, talking about the World Economic Forum
00:02:18.400 and how apparently it's running our lives, which has got to be one of the daftest things I've ever
00:02:22.380 heard. And I'm getting kind of fed up with people saying that Canadians aren't responsible for what
00:02:25.760 happens in Canada. We're not subject to shadowy foreign influences. We're a sovereign country. We can
00:02:30.980 make this place better. We built it. We can fix it.
00:02:33.860 Oftentimes when people call themselves centrist, they usually kind of cloak it in saying they're
00:02:39.720 fiscally conservative and socially liberal, which I find is somewhat counterintuitive because it
00:02:44.220 still sort of falls into that left-right dichotomy here. How do you define what a centrist is in the
00:02:50.700 context of what your party seeks to be? Yeah, although I think that these definitions
00:02:54.360 change, right? And you look at the Soviet Union, it was pretty damn left when it came to the economy,
00:02:58.760 but it was also pretty right-wing when it came to social structures. It was not the land of free love
00:03:05.380 and progressivism that some of its modern day young adherents like to imagine that it was.
00:03:10.060 So when I say center, I'm talking about being a radical centrist. So I'm not talking about some
00:03:15.420 mushy middle with softened down versions of policies taken from the old lines, supposedly left,
00:03:20.380 supposedly right parties. I'm talking about the sharp end of the arrow, getting some really aggressive
00:03:25.820 policies in Canada that will help to fix some programs that we have, but also really change the
00:03:30.100 direction of the country. Because I think people are kind of tired after a number of years of Mr.
00:03:34.040 Trudeau's cheerful and somewhat empty ways. And I think that's why Mr. Polyev is doing well in
00:03:39.600 the polls. But I'd have to hope again that at some point, either he shapes up and stops spreading
00:03:43.920 conspiracy theories and starts actually sharing some real solutions, or that we'll be there to
00:03:48.700 help try and fill that void. Because there's got to be something better than having two parties,
00:03:52.760 neither of whom accept that there's such a thing as reality.
00:03:55.720 I wonder how true that is, though. I mean, Pierre Polyev won the conservative leadership with a
00:04:01.420 resounding margin. I mean, even Stephen Harper, who was the founding prime minister and founding
00:04:07.760 leader of the party, he had 69% of the support of members. You also have the conservatives polling
00:04:14.240 right now at 40 some odd percent, which in Canada is a pretty significant margin. So where is the
00:04:22.080 political homelessness that you're describing of people that are uncomfortable with the conservatives
00:04:26.820 as an alternative to the liberals? Well, uncomfortable with the conservatives and the liberals. We did a
00:04:31.420 big poll about five months, I think, ago now, and over 2,000 people across the country. And the numbers
00:04:38.540 came back pretty much evenly on the both liberal and Tory side, people saying they felt their parties were
00:04:43.200 both of them becoming more extreme, less representative of their values, less interested in talking about
00:04:48.280 actual plans to fix the country's problems, more interested in scoring points off of their opponents.
00:04:52.760 And the sentiments about that were just about even on both sides. You had stronger core base support
00:04:58.760 for Mr. Polyev, which makes sense because I think in the end he became leader, and not to compare him
00:05:03.640 too closely, but through the same sort of process that Mr. Trump became Republican nominee in the States
00:05:07.740 by reaching out to a lot of people who'd never been involved in politics before, which on the one hand is
00:05:12.400 great because we need to get people engaged. And one of the things that kills democracies is when people
00:05:16.800 give up on it. But at the same time, when you use social media and the algorithms that drive
00:05:22.420 increasing divisiveness, conflict and extremism, which is literally built into the algorithm because
00:05:26.660 human beings like seeing fights and battles and arguments and people being grumpy with each other,
00:05:31.460 that when you fall down that rabbit hole, it's hard to know when to stop. And I assume that's how we
00:05:35.460 had a Mr. Polyev starting off pretty calm and reasonable, a guy with years of parliamentary experience,
00:05:40.980 who I know a lot of his colleagues had great respect for him, and now is out there out loonying Max
00:05:46.820 Bernier talking about the World Economic Forum and vaccine conspiracies and other things like that,
00:05:51.460 that I just don't, it's, we're not going to be able to hold our civilisation.
00:05:54.180 What vaccine conspiracies has Polyev spoken about?
00:05:58.340 Let's go through the list. He has actually officially said that regardless of the conditions,
00:06:03.700 under no circumstances would Canada ever introduce the measures that we saw during the COVID pandemic.
00:06:09.860 How is that a conspiracy theory though? You can disagree with it, but if he's saying he's
00:06:15.780 against vaccine mandates, I don't see how that's a conspiracy theory.
00:06:19.220 Let's imagine a world where Mr. Polyev is prime minister and we have an outbreak of a disease
00:06:23.300 with let's say five times the fatality rate of COVID, 10%. You honestly think he's not going to put
00:06:28.580 a mandate in place? You honestly think that's an honest statement about what he intends to do if that
00:06:33.140 situation comes up? Of course not. So lying to achieve political points is something that
00:06:39.060 I personally really believe is at the heart of why we're seeing populist movements rise up around
00:06:43.620 the Western world because people are mad about elites lying to them. But if you try and replace
00:06:48.340 those same disconnected elites, which the Liberal Party and Mr. Trudeau represent absolutely pitch
00:06:53.460 perfectly. But if you try and replace them with just another set of adjustable facts that aren't
00:06:58.260 necessarily grounded in reality, we're just contributing to the problem and it's going to make things worse.
00:07:02.820 And he'll have a lot of supporters if he doesn't get in and follow through on some of the things
00:07:07.060 he's campaigned on as opposition leader. And I think that any party that doesn't campaign in
00:07:10.820 opposition the way it intends to govern is being fundamentally dishonest and contributing to
00:07:14.660 degrading democracy. Political parties, I think, generally tend to be followers more than leaders
00:07:19.780 on a lot of issues in general. I mean, you even mentioned that your initiative did polling. You wanted
00:07:23.380 to see where Canadians were before you took a particular course, which I think is reasonable.
00:07:28.180 A lot of the things you're talking about that you don't like about the Conservatives are things that
00:07:31.860 there is a constituency for that is supporting the Conservatives. So is your problem not with where
00:07:38.420 Canadians are rather than where the Conservative Party of Canada is?
00:07:41.620 No, because there's no other option right now. That if we've got this large chunk of the population
00:07:46.100 that say that they've traditionally voted Liberal or Conservative, in some cases going back and forth,
00:07:50.180 as lots of people do, or with the other smaller parties, that they're saying that there is no option
00:07:54.580 that brings together people who, just to list a couple of examples, believe that climate change is real,
00:07:59.620 want to fix it, don't believe that throwing money at problems is the way to fix it.
00:08:05.060 Following down on that policy, we have a real, not a lead anymore, because we gave it up,
00:08:10.340 but we have an established nuclear industry. If we're talking about a climate crisis,
00:08:14.020 why aren't we aggressively building nuclear power plants and exporting them around the world so that
00:08:17.540 we can make Canadian jobs, make Canadian money, help do our part to reduce carbon emissions,
00:08:22.260 and help other countries that contribute way more than we do to the carbon emissions,
00:08:25.700 to cut them down. I don't care what the cause of climate change is, it's happening right now,
00:08:29.700 and if the basic science says that reducing carbon is going to help mitigate it, I'd rather
00:08:33.700 have a slightly cooler planet where we can figure out how to handle the swimming, usually nuclear
00:08:39.140 power plants, creating a minuscule amount of nuclear waste, all the waste in the world,
00:08:43.220 I think, would fit into two Olympic-sized swimming pools, all of them created since the 1940s.
00:08:47.460 So right there, no one's talking about that in a serious way. That's got to be something that
00:08:52.020 happens in the next mandate if the people who are most pessimistic about climate change are
00:08:57.140 wrong. And if people believe they're right, regardless of whether you do or not, in the end,
00:09:02.260 that means that there is an opportunity to make money and an opportunity to address people's fears
00:09:06.820 in something that's going to make the world better by actually reducing the emissions and hopefully
00:09:11.140 reducing the horrible summer that we had with the floods and the fires raging across the country.
00:09:16.260 Let's make some money off this, make the world a better place, but to have a party that's fighting
00:09:20.580 against the idea that we should transition to a new post-petrol economy. It's like campaigning
00:09:25.220 100 years ago against transitioning to the petrol economy. I mean, it doesn't make any sense.
00:09:30.740 If you're generally someone looking to advance your country 100 plus years ago and you're saying,
00:09:34.900 you know what, guys? I think the Amish have got the right idea. Let's stick with the horse and
00:09:38.340 buggy. Let's avoid those fancy newfangled cars. Humans are supposed to progress and innovate. Let's
00:09:42.740 put money into research and development to deal with the climate issue, bring scientists to Canada.
00:09:46.980 That sort of industry always has a knockoff and helps us in all kinds of other sectors. That's
00:09:50.500 just one example. Then we could talk about defense and international affairs.
00:09:53.620 Yeah. Well, just on the climate, though, for a moment, if your belief is that this is the hole
00:09:58.980 in Canadian politics right now, how do you explain-
00:10:01.140 No, no, no. That's one issue.
00:10:03.380 Yeah, but this party and this movement and this radically centrist approach,
00:10:06.740 how do you explain the 2021 election when Aaron O'Toole did exactly what you're describing on
00:10:12.020 climate? He came out with a conservative answer. He said, climate change is real. It's a problem.
00:10:17.380 And here's what we're going to do. There was going to be a cost associated with that.
00:10:21.220 He really kept a lot of the conservative policies that the conservative flank of the
00:10:26.820 party were trying to push forward at bay. And he completely fell short in winning the election.
00:10:32.980 So how do you explain the 2021 election when the conservatives really did exactly what you're
00:10:39.460 saying they needed to do? Because no one trusted Aaron O'Toole because he campaigned one way when
00:10:44.580 he was campaigning to be leader in an opposition and then tried another way when he was campaigning
00:10:48.980 to be prime minister. And I think Canadians are smart and they could tell that he wasn't being
00:10:53.140 consistent in his messaging. So there's a real fear that when the conservatives are saying one thing
00:10:58.340 that sounds a little bit more moderate, that they're actually talking about something much more
00:11:01.300 extreme. And when you have the conservative party candidate outlooting the Bernier candidate in the
00:11:08.020 Winnipeg by-election, Manitoba by-election recently. By opposing vaccine mandates?
00:11:12.340 No, by in that case saying that Max Bernier was a tool of the globalists who went to WEF meetings
00:11:18.100 and Pierre Polyarif would never allow that to happen. I'm sorry to keep on going on about the WEF.
00:11:22.180 But since you do, let's drill into this because, you know, Justin Trudeau this morning is at the UN
00:11:29.300 talking about the virtues of a carbon tax. I've covered the World Economic Forum. I've been there
00:11:34.500 reporting on it. You'll often times hear people talk about all the great things they need to do.
00:11:39.860 Pardon me? Did you get the microchip implanted? You all set? No, no, I didn't. I needed to stay a day
00:11:44.580 late for that. But they talk about all of these very aggressive and I would say very radical
00:11:48.420 environmental proposals. So is your position that you cannot criticize that without being loony?
00:11:54.020 You can absolutely criticize it. Let me start right now. The WEF is an expensive talking shop of rich
00:11:59.860 people trying to make themselves feel relevant in a way that is, in terms of the way it actually
00:12:03.940 impacts power politics around the world, nearly completely meaningless. Anyone really think that
00:12:08.740 anyone's going to listen to what Iran has to say about women's rights or that Somalia has to say
00:12:14.260 about climate change? It's a talking shop that allows occasional serious work to happen. I'm talking
00:12:18.660 about the UN in this case, but most of the time it's a vast waste of time and money and is controlled
00:12:23.140 by dictators. How is that different from what Paulie ever said about the WEF?
00:12:27.620 And what's that? How is that different from what
00:12:29.780 Pierre Paulie ever said about the WEF? Because Pierre Paulie ever goes on about globalists,
00:12:33.940 which is code for anti-Semitism. Pierre Paulie ever said that he will not allow his ministers,
00:12:38.500 you talk about freeing people to do what they want. Okay, hold up, hold up. Are you accusing
00:12:42.580 Pierre Paulie of being anti-Semitic? Let me finish. If I can finish my answer,
00:12:45.780 I'll come back to that. Okay. That the WEF, he's not going to allow any of his ministers or
00:12:50.180 government officials to attend any of the meetings of the WEF. That's his great stand
00:12:53.620 against the globalist threat that's threatening all of Canada. This is rubbish. Canada is not broken,
00:13:00.500 and we are not under the sway of some shadowy foreign tentacled octopus that's trying to
00:13:05.060 dominate our lives. Anything wrong in Canada, we can fix. We fixed things before. We built this
00:13:09.940 country out of the ice and the snow. We can do it again to face these new challenges in the 21st
00:13:14.660 century. What we don't need is people dog-whistling anti-Semitic tropes. And anyone who does
00:13:20.100 think the attacks on George Soros and the WEF don't have an anti-Semitic tangent to them needs
00:13:24.660 to go and read a little bit more about anti-Semitism. Okay, let me be perfectly
00:13:28.900 frank. Do you believe Pierre Paulie is anti-Semitic? I have no idea. I know that his party is peddling
00:13:34.260 tropes that have their roots in anti-Semitism. His party, which has been one of the most stalwart
00:13:38.660 defenders of Israel for the entirety of its existence, you think is going down the road of anti-Semitism?
00:13:43.860 I would ask you how the folks in the Republican Party, who were similarly stalwart supporters of
00:13:49.780 Israel for most of Israel's history, and have now become infected with populists who are largely
00:13:55.300 influenced by ideas coming in from other countries, namely Russia, who are spreading a radical anti-Western
00:14:00.980 agenda in the guise of traditional Western values. And unfortunately, we're seeing that picked up by
00:14:05.620 elements of the Conservative Party. And it's why a lot of people don't feel comfortable with the
00:14:09.060 Conservative Party. And one of the reasons Andrew Scheer didn't win in 2021, despite people being
00:14:13.700 increasingly fed up with Justin Trudeau. I think I will get a lot of angry emails from Jewish
00:14:19.940 supporters of the Conservative Party that don't see what you're describing there.
00:14:24.020 I can again, go and look at the tropes, the stuff that's been shared around the WF,
00:14:29.140 globalism and George Soros. Go and do a tiny bit of reading produced by B'nai B'ris and the other
00:14:34.500 Jewish advocacy organizations talking about how this is part of the global rise in anti-Semitism.
00:14:40.340 And then those folks are welcome to contact me and I'll happily debate them on the subject.
00:14:44.260 Just getting to the forward-looking part of your party here, as we're already over time,
00:14:48.660 are you planning to field a full slate of candidates in the next election?
00:14:52.420 Wait, we'll see. I mean, that's my job the next year is to build up the party as the interim leader.
00:14:56.180 I had some background doing that and work overseas. I worked with dozens of different parties in
00:15:01.140 different countries. If I can get the party up and running and we're able to be prepared with
00:15:05.300 a full slate, that's awesome. Our goal is on quality more than anything else. We want to
00:15:09.140 try and restore the idea that becoming a member of parliament is a serious business.
00:15:12.740 Make sure that we offer candidates a lot of training on how the parliamentary system works,
00:15:16.900 the people who are going to try and rip them off, scam them and the public. There's a lot of
00:15:20.580 things that can be done to make sure we have a better legislature rather than pretending our
00:15:23.620 institutions are broken. Dominic Cardi, Interim Leader of Canadian Future. Thank you for coming on.
00:15:28.660 Hey, thanks. Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:15:32.580 Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.