Juno News - Should the Conservatives embrace woke progressive ideas to beat Trudeau？

00:00:00.000 As a conservative leadership race heats up, more party insiders and party elites are calling on

00:00:05.060 conservatives to become more progressive and once again appeal to leftist voters. But is this really

00:00:11.300 a path to victory? I'm Candace Malcolm, and this is The Candace Malcolm Show.

00:00:14.540 Everyone, thank you so much for tuning into the podcast. I hope that all the dads out there,

00:00:31.700 all the fathers had a wonderful Father's Day. I hope everyone reached out to their dad to talk

00:00:35.960 about how much they appreciate the role of fathers in our society. I know we had a great day yesterday

00:00:41.160 with my husband and my kids. It's just so great to get to appreciate the role that he plays in the

00:00:47.760 family. The kids love every second, every minute that they get with their daddy. So it was really

00:00:51.660 fun and really great. Today, I want to talk about the conservative leadership race and this familiar

00:00:58.100 call that we get from party insiders and from the sort of brass of the conservative party urging

00:01:04.160 conservatives to be more progressive, be more left-wing in order to win elections. Well, first,

00:01:09.240 I just want to make a clear point. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is the worst prime minister of

00:01:14.360 my lifetime. He is eminently beatable and the conservatives should be able to beat him. They 0.74

00:01:18.820 almost beat him in the last two elections, but almost isn't good enough. If you look at Justin

00:01:23.680 Trudeau and look at what he's done to our country, he's arguably the worst prime minister since his

00:01:28.320 father, arguably even worse given what's happened in the last year. During his time in office, he's

00:01:34.100 infused the federal government with every latest leftist woke trend, scrubbing our country of its

00:01:40.160 proud traditions, apologizing on behalf of every other Canadian. But for himself, he never takes

00:01:45.660 responsibility for his scandals, for his ethical violations, or for the old boys club liberal

00:01:50.940 corruption that he has re-implemented. He's racked up more debt than anyone thought imaginable.

00:01:56.400 He's plunged our country into economic instability with out-of-control inflation, higher taxes,

00:02:01.680 anemic growth rates, and an out-of-control housing bubble and cost-of-living bubble.

00:02:07.520 Interest rates are going up. Things are getting even more expensive. In all likelihood, our country

00:02:11.720 is on the verge of another crushing recession, all with Justin Trudeau at the helm, who frankly has no

00:02:17.920 idea how to get us out of this or how to change course. Meanwhile, Trudeau's stomped on our civil

00:02:23.360 liberties. He's used wartime measures against peaceful protesters, and he's continued to divide the

00:02:29.240 country worse than any leader in our history. Anyone who criticizes him, he calls them racist,

00:02:33.680 sexist, bigots. He calls them anti-vaxxers, and of course, he calls them anti-science.

00:02:37.980 Trudeau is loathsome. He's a disgrace. He's no business running our country. And Canadians see this. 1.00

00:02:43.520 They know this. That's why the majority of Canadians don't vote for Trudeau. They don't support him.

00:02:47.600 In the last election, Trudeau won with the smallest share of the vote in Canadian history. So once again,

00:02:53.480 he's eminently beatable. And yet, three elections in a row here, the Conservatives haven't

00:02:58.020 been able to edge him out. They have not been successful in beating him. Like I said,

00:03:01.640 they came very close, but they didn't do it. Now, during this Conservative race, leadership race,

00:03:07.000 we're voting to see who will run against Trudeau in the next election. That vote's going to happen

00:03:12.580 over the summer. We had Ian Brody on the show last week to explain the process and how it's all going

00:03:16.980 to work. But it's time to look at who to vote for and what the strategy will be. And one of the

00:03:23.720 strategies that we keep seeing floated by party insiders and sort of the party brass

00:03:28.640 is this idea that in order to beat Trudeau, the Conservatives have to become more like Justin

00:03:34.280 Trudeau, that we need to run a moderate, maybe fiscally prudent, but socially leftist or woke

00:03:40.080 or progressive party. And that's the path to victory, that we need to abandon conservatism and

00:03:45.680 just appeal to people who would otherwise vote for Justin Trudeau in the Liberals.

00:03:50.460 This isn't true, though. And we shouldn't look any further than the 2021 election to see this

00:03:56.220 strategy didn't work. That essentially was the Aaron O'Toole strategy. And that is why he lost.

00:04:01.480 Sure, he had an authenticity problem because he ran for leader as a true blue conservative,

00:04:07.080 fiscally conservative and socially conservative, or at least culturally conservative. And then when he

00:04:12.000 came to the general election, he basically flip-flopped on every issue. So Canadians didn't really trust him.

00:04:16.940 But as far as the strategy that he took himself, he wanted to appeal to those blue liberals, those

00:04:23.360 red Tories, who believe that in order to win, you know, you have to run on big government health

00:04:30.320 care, big government spending, big government generally. And it just didn't work. And we can

00:04:35.480 look at the numbers and we can see that the Conservatives lost seats in BC. They didn't pick up

00:04:39.740 any seats in the 905. I think they only won one seat in the entire GTA. And they saw a reduced seat

00:04:45.720 count from 120 seats down to 119, a reduced vote share from 34% down to 33%. And so the strategy

00:04:55.700 didn't work. And yet we continue to see it peddled out. I think the latest iteration of this, from this

00:05:01.860 line of thinking from Tory insiders, came via a piece written in The Hub by Aaron O'Toole's chief

00:05:07.940 strategist, Dan Robertson. So Dan had a piece out last week where he basically said that the problem

00:05:13.760 with the campaign in 2021 was not the strategy, but it was just the structural issues that face

00:05:21.760 Conservatives. So I want to take a greater look at this theory that we hear from red Tories and some 0.91

00:05:28.240 party insiders saying that it wasn't Aaron O'Toole's fault. It wasn't anything to do with their strategy.

00:05:33.360 It was just that, you know, there's all these other problems that are beyond their control.

00:05:36.500 And so to break down this piece a little more, I am pleased to be welcomed by Hamish Marshall.

00:05:41.520 You know, Hamish, he was our in-house pollster during the last election. And he's worked on a

00:05:45.720 lot of different leadership campaigns, including he worked for Stephen Harper in the Conservative

00:05:50.020 Party. And then he also worked for Andrew Scheer and ran his campaign back in 2019. So Hamish,

00:05:56.480 thank you so much for joining the show. It's great to have you on the program.

00:05:59.620 My pleasure.

00:05:59.840 So what do you think of this idea that the Conservatives lost in 2021 because of the structural

00:06:07.860 issues and not so much because of the strategy?

00:06:10.360 Well, I think it's an excuse for losing. I mean, look, at the end of the day, you can tell

00:06:14.320 if a strategy worked by if it worked or not. You know, I ran the campaign in 2019. We didn't

00:06:19.700 win the government. My strategy didn't work. I think parts of it worked, other parts didn't.

00:06:24.340 Some things we did right, we picked up a bunch of seats, just a lot of the things we did wrong.

00:06:27.380 But I think that arguing that the strategy worked, which wasn't for the situation, is

00:06:34.260 a mistake. You know, the idea that a strategy can work outside of the situation, outside

00:06:41.620 of COVID is ridiculous. We knew there was a pandemic happening. The pandemic had been happening

00:06:46.160 for over a year. To argue that, you know, that O'Toole had a brilliant strategy that was

00:06:51.360 working, but just COVID mean that the Trudeau won despite that. Well, if your strategy, if

00:06:56.240 you're running a campaign in 2021, your strategy doesn't include COVID and what's happening with

00:07:01.800 the pandemic, the single largest public policy issue of the previous, at that point, year

00:07:07.160 and a half, it's not much of a strategy. And when we actually look at the results, the Conservative

00:07:13.400 Party was substantially weaker after the 2021 election, and it was a move in the opposite direction.

00:07:20.740 Okay, so let's go through what the structural issues that Robertson paints that plague the

00:07:27.700 Conservative Party, and we can sort of look at the validity of each of these. So the first one he

00:07:31.480 identifies is that the Liberal vote is far more efficient. And so that kind of goes hand in hand

00:07:36.300 with the fact that Trudeau had the smallest percentage of victory. Somehow he manages to win while also

00:07:42.360 losing. And so what do you think of this line of sort of justification as to why Conservatives don't

00:07:50.680 win because the Liberals are just sort of better at getting the right amount of votes in each seat?

00:07:55.860 Yeah, I mean, I don't think that's some sort of magic Liberal trick. The Liberal majority,

00:08:00.140 especially the built-in seats in Ontario, is built in them winning seats by 10, 12, 15 percent,

00:08:06.180 not by 50 percent. So they do win a lot of seats by not huge margins. They're not tiny margins either.

00:08:11.740 They're also not winning a lot of seats by 200 votes. And that's just sort of luck of the draw

00:08:15.160 that they win a lot of seats by 200 votes. And so the idea that in Ontario, the Liberals don't win

00:08:19.760 by a lot. But what that's really just saying is that Ontario is a very sort of, especially the 905,

00:08:26.100 is a very sort of place where a lot of votes swing together. If you start winning some seats,

00:08:30.680 they're going to win a lot of seats. That's how Harper won a lot of seats in Ontario in 2011.

00:08:34.680 That's just a function of Ontario in federal politics. And the Liberals have certainly done better

00:08:39.880 in Ontario in the last few elections. And it's something that Conservatives have to tackle.

00:08:43.860 But the argument that this is a structural thing and that Conservatives somehow mitigates against

00:08:49.200 Conservatives, and that if only things were better, that O'Toole would have won and they

00:08:54.060 were actually closer, is undercut by the facts. At the end of the day, you know, O'Toole lost a seat

00:09:02.000 in the GTA. They lost a lot of votes. So for instance, across the GTA, Conservatives lost 80,000

00:09:11.140 votes from 2019. So they ended up with less seats and less votes, which doesn't sound to me like the

00:09:16.440 fact they were making things closer or anything else. And this is in the face of a Trudeau that

00:09:20.920 was less popular in 2021 than he was in 2019 or 2015, certainly. So you had the Liberals declining,

00:09:27.620 they lost some votes too. But the fact that the Conservatives couldn't gain votes in this environment

00:09:33.760 indicates that O'Toole's message didn't resonate. If what you'd seen was the Liberals had lost a

00:09:39.040 bunch of votes and the Conservatives had picked up a bunch of those votes, then you can have this

00:09:42.800 argument that O'Toole's strategy was working and that this moderate message was connecting and

00:09:47.900 that people were flooding to O'Toole. But if O'Toole's message was designed to pick up votes in

00:09:53.640 Ontario, the opposite happened. He lost votes in the GTA. And what's really incredible is that for all

00:10:01.180 the talk of, you know, reaching out and creating a new environment, that isn't what happened.

00:10:07.280 The, you know, O'Toole, you know, if you look at O'Toole, if you look at the seats that O'Toole won,

00:10:13.920 sorry, if you look at the seats in 2019 and how the Conservatives won in Ontario and how they

00:10:19.240 performed in 2021, Conservative vote went up by 20,000 votes, but it dropped by 46,000 votes in

00:10:28.240 seats the Conservatives hadn't held. So what ended up happening is O'Toole, for all this talk about

00:10:33.300 broadening the base and not attracting and attracting new votes and not being afraid to piss off some old 0.99

00:10:38.440 line Conservatives in order to win, ended up getting less votes in the areas Conservatives hadn't held and

00:10:44.740 more votes Conservatives had. He ended up making the balance in Ontario worse. And so, you know,

00:10:52.340 yes, Liberal vote is efficient in Ontario, but the Conservative vote became less efficient. And that's

00:10:57.600 a problem. Yeah, it's such an interesting argument saying that, you know, being moderate worked and

00:11:04.080 that but then also not being able to point to places where moderate voters are and they're not

00:11:09.580 they're not coming into the Conservative Party. Well, the second structural issue that Robertson

00:11:13.560 identified is that more Canadians identify as as Liberals. So, so Liberals walk into every election

00:11:20.320 with a built in advantage that they have sort of better brand loyalty, essentially. What do you make

00:11:26.460 of that? So I think this is a, you know, I've looked a lot of the sort of brand identification

00:11:30.640 question over the years. And I think it's actually a problem that is actually it's sort of a concept

00:11:37.300 that's imported from the United States. In the United States, you have parties whose names don't

00:11:42.880 reflect their ideology, but Democrats and Republicans, there's no reason that a Republican,

00:11:47.320 a party called Republican should be right wing or one called Democrat should be left wing. These are

00:11:52.060 just names, right? In Canada, we have party names that kind of, at least for the big parties, reflect

00:12:00.120 their values, Liberal and Conservative. And those words, those names mean something outside of the

00:12:05.420 party political context. And I think that this question of voter identification, I've always

00:12:10.340 believed, breaks down in Canada, because when you ask people, do you think yourself more as a

00:12:15.440 Conservative or a Liberal, people are going to take a take a choice. But what those those terms mean in

00:12:21.260 terms of values and everything else, not in terms of, you know, the party identification, it's very

00:12:26.780 different from the situation of saying, you identify as a Republican or a Democrat. So I think it's just

00:12:31.340 it's an idea that's moved into Canada in a not particularly elegant way. Look, do Conservatives

00:12:39.140 need more people, especially in Ontario to identify as Conservatives? Would that be helpful? Of course it

00:12:44.360 would. But this isn't new, you know, the Conservatives, when Conservatives were winning majorities in 2011, and

00:12:50.540 minorities in the early part of the century, though that that identification disparity existed. When I worked in the

00:12:58.640 Harper government, we saw that even when we were winning governments, more conservative, more Canadians

00:13:02.800 identified themselves as Liberals than as Conservatives. So, yeah, is it a problem? Of course, it's a

00:13:09.440 problem. Is it a deep structural problem? I don't really think so. I think it has been overcome in the

00:13:15.600 past and will be overcome in the future. And also, I just don't think it's a particularly effective

00:13:20.180 measurement of where Canadians are at.

00:13:22.900 I think both of the words have very positive and negative connotations. I myself, for a long time,

00:13:29.020 thought of myself as a classical liberal. And I don't think there's much liberalism within the

00:13:34.620 Liberal Party and within the liberal strains of thinking. These days are rather illiberal in the

00:13:38.660 way that they crack down on civil liberties and, you know, the whole concept of cancel culture.

00:13:44.380 Whereas Conservative, you know, you want to conserve the traditions of your society, and you want to

00:13:48.760 build more based on what's been successful. And it's sort of interesting to see how that plays in.

00:13:56.420 I stopped referring to myself as a classical liberal, because I don't think there's any point

00:14:00.700 in trying to save that word. But I think part of the problem, it really, Hamish, is that with

00:14:06.600 Conservatives, you have the Liberals sort of bashing Conservatives, the media jumping on board to say, 0.97

00:14:11.840 look at these Conservatives, they're awful, they're racist, they're bigoted, they're backwards minded. 0.94

00:14:15.300 And then the problem is, you have some progressive Conservatives sort of echoing that and agreeing 0.98

00:14:19.900 with that and saying, look back at what Harper did with the, with the Necab ban, look back at what

00:14:24.860 some of these people ran on in 2019 or 2021, and sort of throwing their own side under the bus.

00:14:30.540 And I think it's sort of really need to stop doing that, because it's really not helpful for the,

00:14:33.960 for the bigger, broader brand. Well, to move on to the third point that Robertson makes here,

00:14:38.820 and this one's the most frustrating to me, is this idea that there's a sort of strategic voting

00:14:44.840 going on that the Liberals and NDP, the NDP vote will collapse, and the Liberals will get what they

00:14:49.980 need. And every single election, you hear the same story trotted out by the Liberals, like,

00:14:54.420 you can't vote for the NDP, you have to vote for the Liberals, we have to stop these evil

00:14:57.840 Conservatives from forming government. And then you have Conservatives that sort of go along with that,

00:15:02.600 saying, okay, well, you know, in order to appeal to these people, it's not, it's not the Conservative

00:15:07.500 base, or the sort of broad middle class people who are apolitical that you have to appeal to,

00:15:11.100 you have to start appealing to these leftist voters, in order to win. And that's sort of where the campaign

00:15:16.460 strategy gets developed. What do you what do you make of this sort of progressive tactical voting

00:15:21.920 or strategic voting issue? Look, it's a fact that a certain percentage of people who consider the NDP

00:15:28.300 in most campaigns, end up voting Liberal, especially if they think Conservatives have a chance

00:15:33.340 of winning. This happened in 2019, happened in 2021. And I think there's, there's two problems. One is,

00:15:39.660 in the article, they argue that their, that this was unforeseen, that the NDP underperformed their

00:15:46.840 modeling, that means their modeling was wrong. It happened in 2019. It was explained to the O'Toole

00:15:53.400 campaign team, this was a problem, and that they had to address it. So to now sort of feign

00:15:57.860 surprise that this happened is, is, is a bit, a bit, a bit much to take. But on top of that,

00:16:04.700 you know, it, it, it creates a, there's a fundamental, like I spent a lot of time after

00:16:08.800 2019 wrestling this myself, because it certainly happened. And, you know, we, we, we believe we

00:16:14.360 didn't win seats. We thought we were going to win because of it. And, and it is, it is, it is an

00:16:19.880 issue. But I think, I think the reaction to it is wrong in that, number one, there is no universe

00:16:26.300 where a conservative party can make itself so unscary to NDP voters, that they will still

00:16:33.700 vote NDP as opposed to stampede to the liberals. And if, if that conservative party still wants

00:16:37.340 to get votes from conservatives, right? I mean, to create a conservative party that's acceptable

00:16:41.980 to, to NDPers, or acceptable enough that they will not vote liberal, is such a bizarre thing

00:16:49.300 that will turn off such a huge chunk of conservative voters, that, that I don't believe that's actually

00:16:54.400 a square that, or a circle that can be fit into that, that square hole, or however the

00:16:59.440 metaphor goes. The, I, I believe the solution is to, and we didn't do enough of this in 2019,

00:17:07.420 it's one of the areas we failed in, is you have to persuade enough people, whether they be NDP

00:17:13.060 leftists, or middle of the road voters, or center right business liberals, that the liberal party

00:17:19.240 itself and the Trudeau government itself is irredeemable, that they cannot, that even if

00:17:25.660 these leftist voters don't really like the prospect of a conservative, a conservative is doing well,

00:17:31.340 that the, that Trudeau is so toxic to them, the liberals are so toxic to them, they can't vote for

00:17:37.180 them. Now, the extreme case to that would be, you know, what happened with Kathleen Wynne in Ontario

00:17:42.900 in 2018, where I'm sure the liberals running out, hoping that they could get people to, to, to keep

00:17:48.580 voting for them, to stop Doug Ford, et cetera, et cetera, but the liberal brand and the Wynne

00:17:52.980 brand have become so toxic. Now, look, that's a historic collapse of the liberal party that I don't

00:17:57.240 think can be recreated, you know, easily, but there has to be more to be done to make people

00:18:02.660 understand that they have to want change, and that desire for change has to come across the

00:18:08.920 political spectrum. Well, it's one of the things that he writes about, which I hadn't heard this

00:18:14.040 research before. I'll just read a quote from a piece from Dan Robertson here in The Hub. He writes,

00:18:19.540 the research is clear, 25% of Canadians who considered voting conservative believe that the

00:18:24.000 party has not made enough progress on social issues I care about. Old negative brand attributes,

00:18:30.640 especially among suburban voters, persist and must be overcome. Focus group participants still

00:18:35.420 describe the party as corporate American and old-fashioned. As the suburbs urbanize a trend

00:18:40.980 all over the Western world, the conservatives are in danger of becoming the party of rural Canada.

00:18:44.900 I've never heard that description before of the conservative party that the party is corporate

00:18:49.980 American and old-fashioned. I think of Tories as being sort of, you know, just as staunchly

00:18:56.620 loyalist and pro-Canada, probably more so now than the liberals, just because the liberal party in

00:19:02.660 Canada is picking up all of these progressive, woke trends from the United States. And so

00:19:08.380 conservatives that are rejecting that and, you know, being the ones who are more patriotic and

00:19:12.980 pro-Canada. I've never heard this line of attack. And I'm wondering, is this something you see in your

00:19:19.180 research that 25% of Canadians would never vote conservative because the party's too old-fashioned

00:19:24.720 or too corporate or too American? Well, I think what they're saying is that 25% of people who

00:19:28.720 to consider vote conservative but didn't, they listed that as their reason. This obviously comes

00:19:33.220 from their internal research, which I've not been privy to. But yeah, there's certainly a certain

00:19:40.060 group of people who will say something like that. But the fact of the matter is, is that if the O'Toole

00:19:44.140 campaign, which ran the exact opposite message, ended up with less votes and less seats in all

00:19:48.940 these suburban areas, that's clearly not the defining problem, right? Because the O'Toole campaign,

00:19:54.320 the O'Toole message was to move dramatically to the center and even to the left in many ways.

00:20:00.440 And we ended up in this situation where if that was the case, then we should have seen a huge

00:20:05.260 stream of people coming to the conservative party in suburban areas. And frankly, you look at the 905,

00:20:11.580 the 905, the conservatives lost 50,000 votes in net one seat. They lost two seats but picked up one.

00:20:16.960 So they ended up, you know, losing a lot of votes and a lot of seats. And there's 29 seats in the 905

00:20:24.020 outside of the actual city of Toronto. Conservatives lost votes in 21 of those. And the situation is

00:20:29.580 even worse in Greater Vancouver. In Greater Vancouver, the conservatives lost four seats

00:20:33.580 and 35,000 votes. So if the message was the conservative party, you know, Aaron O'Toole's

00:20:41.260 progressive conservative party that was trying to run, I think Conrad Black wrote a few days ago

00:20:47.360 that there was no substantial policy difference between the liberals and the conservatives in the

00:20:51.980 last election. If that's what we're offering, and this party that had turned its back on social

00:20:58.180 conservatism and had many of much lecturing that you pointed out of sort of red Tories arguing that

00:21:03.200 the conservative party would only change in so many ways, we would end up, if only the conservative

00:21:09.280 party would frankly end up looking more like the liberal party, we could win. And if that was the

00:21:15.100 case, then why did the conservatives lose votes in 21 or 29 seats in the 905? Why did they lose four

00:21:21.380 seats in the Greater Vancouver area? The fact of the matter is, is that, you know, look, everybody in

00:21:29.640 politics has their theories of why something happened and explanations why it happened. And they're

00:21:34.660 entitled to that. But they can't be entitled to it devoid of the facts. If the argument is O'Toole's

00:21:41.180 plan was working and was connecting the 905, but COVID just ended up screwing up a little bit and

00:21:46.180 things were closer, then that should be backed up by the facts of the ground. They shouldn't have lost

00:21:50.120 all these seats, and they shouldn't have lost all these votes. You know, this one argument they say

00:21:54.580 is, well, the conservatives under O'Toole were closer to winning than they were in 2019, even though

00:21:59.500 we lost votes in seats. That's just simply not the case. They argued that, you know, O'Toole publicly said

00:22:05.200 that conservatives lost by less than 2,000 votes in around 30 seats. It's actually not true. It was 19.

00:22:11.300 But on top of that, that 19 seats include five seats that conservatives lost in the 2021 election.

00:22:18.260 So they're saying, well, we were close to winning. Yeah, but it was close to winning in a seat that

00:22:21.320 you gave up. So, you know, as I said, look, there's lots of things I think we need to do

00:22:26.760 differently. There's lots of things that when I ran a national campaign that we didn't get right.

00:22:30.900 But don't argue that your plan, the plan was a sterling success in the face of all the evidence.

00:22:36.560 Well, I would even add to that, that in 2019, Justin Trudeau was, you know, it was a known

00:22:42.860 commodity to people paying close, close attention, but he still had a little bit of the veneer of,

00:22:47.560 you know, being this celebrity famous guy with great hair that was running the country and the

00:22:53.320 media were still sort of swooning around him. I think that in the two years from 2019 to 2021,

00:22:58.960 Trudeau's reputation took a really damning hit. And it's gone even more downhill. Since then,

00:23:05.140 he's become basically a laughingstock of the international media. He doesn't have the same

00:23:09.340 sort of glossy appeal that he once did. More Canadians are starting to see through that. So

00:23:15.560 the fact that they couldn't have a better outcome, despite the fact that Trudeau had

00:23:19.980 two more years of, again, destroying our country, it doesn't bode well. I want to ask you about the

00:23:26.620 PPC because Dan Robertson writes that bringing home PPC voters isn't the path to victory that sure,

00:23:32.840 that they meant that the Conservatives didn't want to see it here or there, but basically that PPC

00:23:37.660 voters don't align with public opinion, that they're toxic, and they're better off being left

00:23:43.420 alone. I know that when you were running Andrew Scheer's campaign, you had to grapple with this,

00:23:48.460 you know, Maxine Bernier phenomenon and the PPC. What do you make of it now? Do you think that this

00:23:54.080 is right, that the PPC voters are sort of a lost cause, or do you think the Conservatives should

00:23:59.400 actively be trying to get them back into the fray? I mean, I, it's a very difficult question.

00:24:04.520 Look, you know, the author's right in that if you add every single PPC vote to the Conservative vote

00:24:10.880 totals, the Conservatives still would not have won the most number of seats in this election.

00:24:17.900 So the PPC alone isn't enough for the Conservatives to win. There are a lot of conservative-minded

00:24:22.680 people instead of the PPC, and there's a lot who aren't. The question for me is, look, the PPC

00:24:28.180 is a changing organization, right? Their votes in 2019 were very much focused around

00:24:35.960 anti-immigration was their, was their primary issue. In 2021, it was very much around anti-vaccinations,

00:24:45.960 and it was a very different issue. So I'm sure that some people who voted PPC in 2019 didn't stick

00:24:51.400 with the PPC and migrated to other parties. So the question becomes is, how can the PPC,

00:24:57.900 you know, what does a PPC voter look like in 2025? What is that vote? Do I think that some of those

00:25:02.480 people who didn't hear a voice fighting for them strongly enough around mandates, for instance,

00:25:09.760 are open to a Conservative party who, who, who says that, yes, people shouldn't have been fired,

00:25:14.920 and, you know, it's wrong to, to mandate all these people out of, out of work. Absolutely. And I think

00:25:19.860 there's a good chunk of those voters that can come to the Conservative party and actually help grow the

00:25:23.180 Conservative party. But do I think the PPC party is a party that's vote can simply be added on top of

00:25:27.840 the Conservative party? No. But it's also a, it's an unusual party in that it's, you know,

00:25:34.260 these situational parties that often created in 2019, or in 2018, I guess, out of, out of the ashes of

00:25:41.360 Bernier's leadership campaign, focus, ended up focusing on immigration, and then morphed into

00:25:47.780 something else. Usually they don't morph. Usually these parties exist, they come for one election.

00:25:52.140 And as their issue in that situation dissipates, so do they. PPC morphed into a, it took hold of a

00:25:58.440 second issue, ended up growing because of it. I think that people with, with concerns about mandates

00:26:04.720 and about COVID rules are a important part of a conservative coalition. And many of those votes

00:26:10.840 can be, can be added back in, especially since I think the Canadian public has moved on, on a lot

00:26:16.980 of those issues. You know, I like to say, so just last week, the government of Ontario removed the

00:26:23.820 requirement for masks on public transit. You know, I live in downtown Toronto, I take a streetcar every

00:26:28.780 day from, from one part of very left wing downtown Toronto, right into the heart of the financial

00:26:33.380 district. And, you know, if they weren't being told by sort of the COVID, you know, the liberals

00:26:39.420 in the NDP that, you know, that everybody should be wearing masks, nobody should be giving up their

00:26:43.060 mask, et cetera, et cetera. I'm concerned about all this stuff. You know, that streetcar that I take

00:26:47.200 every day should be, should not have made a difference once the government said you don't

00:26:50.380 have to wear a streetcar and there'd just be a few people taking off their mask. I'd say the streetcar

00:26:54.780 now after one week is 50% of people are unmasked. People are tired of all these rules. And so how that,

00:27:02.820 that, that argument is going to change in the future. I don't know, but I don't think the PPC

00:27:07.700 vote is a monolithic vote that can be just brought over all at once either.

00:27:12.660 Well, what I saw from the provincial election in Ontario was that when the liberals tried to drum

00:27:17.420 up more fear about COVID saying that the PCs weren't going to do a good enough job and that

00:27:21.760 they were going to be stricter with vaccines on, because I saw that there was no appetite for that,

00:27:26.160 that Canadians, even in liberal Toronto, and even in left wing parts of Ontario, they didn't,

00:27:31.980 that that wasn't a winning issue and strategy. And what I see, Hamish, especially from True North

00:27:36.300 viewers and people in the comments section, is a real excitement around the candidacy of Pierre

00:27:41.520 Polyev, even people who were longtime supporters, people who love Maxime Bernier, and they want to

00:27:47.220 see Bernier and Pierre kind of run together, or, or a lot of people who have signed up for the

00:27:53.060 Conservative Party who'd never done it before, because they're excited. Not necessarily about,

00:27:58.040 you know, what Pierre is saying, but just the way that he that he says it, I mean, obviously what

00:28:02.960 he's saying, but, you know, he seems like a fighter, he seems like he's going to stand up for Canadians,

00:28:07.700 marginalized Canadians, the kind of people who would go to a protest party, like the PPC, because

00:28:12.760 they're frustrated with the status quo, well, they seem to, they seem to be listening, and Pierre

00:28:18.260 seems to be appealing to them. So I think, I think that there's something to the idea that, you know,

00:28:23.220 the party that morphs, you can capture imagination with the right candidate, speaking their language,

00:28:28.980 and really appearing to be pushing back against the gatekeepers and the status quo, like Pierre

00:28:34.540 talks about, well, I guess just a final question for you, Hamish, you know, there's always a sort of

00:28:40.240 soul searching that happens, and this reflection that happens after a party loses, and it is good

00:28:45.020 that we're having these kinds of conversations to help improve, you know, what can happen in the

00:28:49.720 next election? What do you think the big takeaway for conservatives should be, and do you think

00:28:55.540 that there's any lasting damage in trying to say, okay, we have the right strategy, we just have to

00:29:02.040 tweak it a little bit, and keep, keep, keep with this idea that we need a moderate, socially liberal

00:29:07.560 candidate in order to beat Trudeau? I mean, I think, I think there's two important takeaways. Number one

00:29:13.260 is that you need, you can't take the conservative base for granted, you have to make sure that

00:29:18.560 conservatives see themselves as part of your candidacy and your plan, and hopefully will

00:29:23.700 be your government. So if, if, if conservatives, sort of activists don't see themselves as part of

00:29:29.920 that, that's going to be, that's going to be a big problem. That's number one. Number two, I believe

00:29:35.500 that if you're running for to present change, you have to look like change, you have to put on policies

00:29:42.000 that are different, running and saying we agree with the government on this is true of any party

00:29:46.300 left, right, whatever situation is, if you're running and saying we agree on 98% of things,

00:29:51.180 we're going to be a couple little things different, and our leader is a different sort of person.

00:29:55.920 That's not enough. One of the reasons Trudeau was able, and I'm obviously not a fan of it,

00:30:00.000 one of the reasons Trudeau was able to win in 2015 wasn't just that he was young and dashing and

00:30:05.520 exciting and charismatic. But he offered a distinctly different policy agenda, and one that frankly

00:30:11.520 looked more like change than the NDP, the NDP in 2015 ran unbalanced budgets, they were trying to

00:30:16.180 look more like mature response, true responsible choice. The Canadians felt it was time for change

00:30:20.960 and said what looks more like change? Sure, there's an exciting new leader, Justin Trudeau,

00:30:24.660 but he's also saying he's going to do all these other different things. Now, he ended up not doing

00:30:27.740 a whole bunch of them, and we can, I would argue many of those things he was wanted to do were bad

00:30:31.400 ideas, but you have to offer change. You have to, if you're saying we're going to be different,

00:30:36.100 you have to be different. Otherwise, people are going to say they're going to stick with the devil

00:30:40.420 they know. So that's the big takeaway that I take from all this stuff. You have to offer something

00:30:46.480 different, and you can't ignore, you can't just take the conservative base for granted, or even as

00:30:51.420 it seemed like at times during the O2 leadership, run against your own base, demand that the party,

00:30:57.080 point out how your own party was somehow lacking. That's not the way to build a winning coalition.

00:31:03.460 You should get people, more people into your party, get them more excited about your party,

00:31:08.780 bring in new folks. That's why O2 will end up losing half a million votes. But it's also why,

00:31:13.040 you know, the Polyev's campaign has attracted so many people. Signing up 312,000 people is a

00:31:19.220 massive accomplishment. Those aren't people who are all former conservative members, or people,

00:31:23.900 those are people, many of those people are new to politics, and that's exciting. And if you can build

00:31:28.680 a movement and grow that movement, that's how you win. Absolutely. And throwing your own base

00:31:35.040 and throwing Canadians under the bus and leveling the same kinds of accusations against them that

00:31:39.040 we hear from leftist pundits in the media and liberals and NDP is not going to work out. I

00:31:44.760 completely echo that sentiment. And I appreciate your time, Hamish. Thanks for coming and breaking it

00:31:49.960 all down. Hopefully the Conservative Party takes your advice and takes the party in a more authentically

00:31:56.100 conservative direction. Appreciate your time, Hamish. Thank you. My pleasure.

00:32:00.120 Thank you so much for tuning in. I'm Candace Malcolm, and this is The Candace Malcolm Show.

00:32:03.320 Thank you.

Juno News - June 20, 2022

Should the Conservatives embrace woke progressive ideas to beat Trudeau？

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