Juno News - June 20, 2022


Should the Conservatives embrace woke progressive ideas to beat Trudeau？


Episode Stats

Length

32 minutes

Words per Minute

187.65167

Word Count

6,109

Sentence Count

279

Hate Speech Sentences

2


Summary


Transcript

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
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.
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
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
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,
00:14:11.840 look at these Conservatives, they're awful, they're racist, they're bigoted, they're backwards minded.
00:14:15.300 And then the problem is, you have some progressive Conservatives sort of echoing that and agreeing
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.