Juno News - The knives come out against Erin O’Toole

00:00:00.000 The knives have come out against Conservative Party leader Erin O'Toole, and the Conservative

00:00:03.720 Party and its leader, as well as the elites running that party, may be finally forced to

00:00:08.320 face their own base. And let me tell you, the Conservative base is not happy. I'm Candace

00:00:12.380 Malcolm and this is The Candace Malcolm Show. Hi everyone, thank you so much for tuning into

00:00:20.760 The Candace Malcolm Show. Let me tell you, there is anger that is brewing in the Conservative

00:00:24.840 Party. It is finally starting to bubble over into the public. There is infighting in the

00:00:29.880 party and we're going to talk about it and break it all down on the program today. I

00:00:34.300 appreciate you tuning into The Candace Malcolm Show. If you like what we do at the show, if

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00:01:01.400 don't take any money from the government. In fact, we think it's wrong that journalists take money from

00:01:05.380 the government. It's a basic conflict of interest. You should not be covering someone while also being

00:01:10.180 reliant on them for a paycheck. It doesn't work. The power dynamics are all wrong, which is why True

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00:01:36.220 True to Liberals hat in hand to get money. And you really can't trust the coverage. You don't really

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00:01:45.760 because they're dependent. They're beholden to the government. It's so important for a free society

00:01:50.640 to have independent media. So let me talk about what's happening in the Conservative Party, because

00:01:57.420 basically since the election ended, there's been a lot of grumbling. There's been a lot of

00:02:01.600 dissatisfaction among the base. On the show, I dedicated probably two weeks every single day to

00:02:06.780 talking about the various ways of how Aaron O'Toole failed, how he failed to win the election, but also

00:02:11.740 how he failed Conservatives. He failed to promote a vision of Conservative ideas and policies. He flip

00:02:16.680 flopped on all of his core principles. So go back to when he was running for leader of the party. He

00:02:21.800 presented himself as an authentic, common sense, the real deal, someone who was really going to

00:02:27.780 cut through the noise, who was going to defend Canadian values, defend our culture, push back against

00:02:32.540 the woke left, and really stand for something, stand his ground. He wasn't going to cave to the

00:02:38.360 latest fads of the kooky left. And really, that's what we wanted to hear. The last thing that Canada 0.64

00:02:44.320 needs is yet another socially trendy left-wing progressive party. We already have, what, four of

00:02:50.300 those? And Conservatives are supposed to provide something different. They're supposed to stand their 0.66

00:02:54.500 ground. They're supposed to defend the sort of traditions and the basic institutions of our country

00:02:59.980 against all of the sort of latest trends and fads from the progressive left. That's what we want

00:03:04.760 from a Conservative government. That's what we want from a Conservative leader. That's what many of us

00:03:08.140 thought we had in Aaron O'Toole. But then the election came, and we saw that he really didn't

00:03:13.260 want to do that. He wanted, his strategy was to sort of near the Trudeau Liberals, to sort of repeat

00:03:18.580 whatever they're saying, whatever they believed on an issue. That's what Aaron O'Toole believed into.

00:03:22.720 So the election was fought on all the things that Justin Trudeau and the Liberals wanted to talk

00:03:26.360 about. And rather than seeing Aaron O'Toole stand their ground and defend Conservatism while also

00:03:31.980 leveling effective attacks on Justin Trudeau, we saw the opposite. We saw O'Toole was defensive,

00:03:37.600 and because of that, he just ended up caving and flip-flopping on all of the sort of major core

00:03:42.980 issues that were being talked about on the election, whether it was vaccine mandates for the

00:03:47.420 civil service, whether it was on carbon taxes, whether it was on the legal rights of gun owners in

00:03:53.480 Canada to legally own their property. All of those issues, we saw O'Toole just sort of cave. And the

00:03:59.200 strategy didn't even pay off. It's not like he did all that, he conceded, he threw Conservatives

00:04:03.420 out of the bus, and he won or he gained ground. The opposite. He lost ground. Canadians weren't

00:04:07.760 interested. They saw someone who was sort of wavering, someone who was weak, someone who was perhaps

00:04:12.020 willing to say anything to get elected. They didn't like what they saw. They passed on him. And so I think

00:04:17.540 it's only right that the Conservatives now do some soul searching, do the difficult task of saying,

00:04:22.580 no, this is a, this is a failed strategy. We don't want to go down this path. Let's find a new leader

00:04:27.080 who can enthusiastically defend Conservatives, who's authentic, who will be who they say they are going

00:04:32.240 to be, who presents themselves based on what they really believe in, not someone who's just really

00:04:36.700 willing to say anything to get elected. So here on the Candace Malcolm Show here at True North, we went

00:04:40.760 through in great detail, all of the various ways that the Conservatives were failed or were let down by

00:04:46.500 this leader. Interestingly, at the time, though, you know, there was definitely grumblings, there was

00:04:50.780 murmurings that I heard from lots of people within the Conservative Party, as well as people outside

00:04:56.180 small C Conservative activists, people who were really the activists of the party were the ones who were

00:05:01.680 the most truly disappointed, the people who were more willing to defend the status quo and Aaron O'Toole

00:05:06.740 were sort of more the insiders, the sort of lobbyist class, those kind of people who just sort of want to go

00:05:12.540 along and get along and didn't want to make any changes, just said, look, O'Toole's better than anyone else.

00:05:16.820 Let's just go with the devil that we know kind of idea. So now here we are two months later, and we're

00:05:21.900 starting to see more of an uprising, more people, more voices come out and say, no, no, Aaron O'Toole

00:05:26.780 is not the guy for the job. And so this was all led this week by Conservative Senator from Saskatchewan,

00:05:32.440 Denise Batters, who launched a petition to review Aaron O'Toole's CPC leadership within six months.

00:05:38.880 So Batters is calling on the Conservatives to hold a review of O'Toole's leadership in the next six months,

00:05:44.120 rather than waiting for 2023. She released a video this morning and launched a campaign. And so 0.98

00:05:49.400 I'll play a bit of the video. But like I said, that the points that she's making here are completely

00:05:54.780 correct. They're exactly the same things that we have been talking about here on the program

00:05:58.240 for the past two months. Basically, under Aaron O'Toole's leadership, the party isn't growing,

00:06:03.560 the party is stuck. And really, when you have a leader who seems to be embarrassed and distancing

00:06:08.620 himself from the core values and ideas and principles of conservatism, you got a problem. And so

00:06:14.080 that is what Senator Denise Batters is saying in this video. Let's play this clip. 0.98

00:06:18.360 Aaron O'Toole lost this election by every measure. Our party lost half a million votes,

00:06:24.460 claimed fewer seats and a lower popular vote than in 2019. We lost diverse seats and MPs in the GTA,

00:06:31.160 Alberta and in Vancouver suburbs. Mr. O'Toole's inability to communicate or connect with female voters

00:06:37.840 left us with an even wider gender gap. Aaron O'Toole lost a trust election to Justin Trudeau of all

00:06:45.040 people. This campaign was not lost because of Mr. O'Toole's mistakes or inexperience. It was lost

00:06:52.000 because of what Canadian voters perceive as his character flaw, that he is not trustworthy. You can't

00:06:58.300 come back from that. Aaron O'Toole lectured our party members on election night, telling us we need to

00:07:04.200 have the courage to change into what he hasn't yet said. But members deserve to have a say on this

00:07:10.700 change and the future direction of this party, including our leadership. Fellow Conservative Party

00:07:16.760 members, join me in signing this petition and make your voice heard.

00:07:21.080 So Global News is reporting that her petition is part of a, quote, multi-step campaign that includes

00:07:28.740 MPs and senators, as well as current and former party officials that want O'Toole gone after

00:07:33.640 September's disappointing election. So the website that was launched, membersvote.ca, outlines the

00:07:39.620 process for which this could happen. It says, the official petition under the Conservative Party of

00:07:44.200 Canada constitution was launched by Senator Denise Batters on November 15th, 2021. To succeed within 90 days,

00:07:51.480 5% of Conservative members in five provinces must sign the petition. And it notes that in the Conservative

00:07:57.320 Party constitution, all of the territories come together to constitute one province. So the threshold is

00:08:02.420 pretty low there. 5% of Conservative members in just five provinces are needed in order to launch a leadership

00:08:08.860 review. And so, you know, this is really interesting because we had, like I said, lots of murmuring,

00:08:14.260 lots of sort of whispering among Conservative insiders and Conservative activists, but not a lot

00:08:19.460 of high profile Conservatives willing to come out and say this directly, that it is time to replace

00:08:24.900 leader. We did have a handful of MPs, Shannon Stubbs, a couple of others who basically said more or less

00:08:30.100 the same thing, that they were unhappy with the direction that O'Toole was taking the party, but nothing

00:08:33.880 this direct. So Denise Batters really puts herself out there. Good for you, Denise Batters, good for

00:08:40.300 you to articulate this, because like I said, it is the feelings and the attitude of so many

00:08:45.640 Conservatives that I have been talking to in the base that feel the exact same way. So Denise Batters

00:08:50.180 really willing to stick her neck out. And I know there's some criticism saying, oh, she's an unelected 1.00

00:08:54.380 Senator, but that's sort of the purpose. The idea here is that within the Conservative caucus, if you're

00:08:58.700 a Conservative MP, you might not be happy with Erin O'Toole, but you kind of rely on him. He,

00:09:03.720 he's, he's the one that is leading the party. If you want to have a position, if you want to be part

00:09:07.820 of the, they call the shadow cabinet, or if you want to have a critic role, you have to be nice to

00:09:11.660 him. You kind of have to suck up to him. And you can't really express the views that you might be

00:09:15.320 hearing from your constituents, hearing from your base. You can't really represent the anger that

00:09:19.600 you're hearing out there because at the end of the day, you know, you want a position, you want a

00:09:24.240 job, and you don't want to basically burn your boss publicly. And so it is important in that way

00:09:29.620 that you have a Senator like Denise Batter who is able to do that because she's sort of removed from 0.74

00:09:34.200 the internal confines of the caucus. And in some ways she can represent Conservative members better

00:09:39.660 than some of the MPs. So of course, Denise Batters is far from alone. We know that a national

00:09:44.900 councillor, Bert Chen, also launched a petition to have a review of Erin O'Toole, but he was suspended.

00:09:51.640 He was kicked out of the National Council. At first we were told it was suspended up to 60 days.

00:09:55.640 Now Hill Times is reporting that the suspension is indefinite. And we know, as reported by True

00:10:01.240 North, that there was a letter that was sent to Bert Chen basically describing a witch hunt. The

00:10:06.800 Conservative Party is going after Bert Chen, demanding to see his private communications,

00:10:12.320 including a list of anyone he talked to about Erin O'Toole, emails, texts, phone records,

00:10:17.000 handwritten notes, anything. It really is ugly. It's a witch hunt. So the Conservative Party and the

00:10:22.260 OLO, the Opposition Leader's Office, is focusing their effort and their resources on attacking their

00:10:28.300 own members and sort of squashing out dissent, rather than trying to understand what went wrong

00:10:32.960 in the last election, rather than trying to focus on Justin Trudeau and the Liberals. And we've heard

00:10:38.500 from other Conservative leaders and insiders. This is a thread from Dean Dalmastro. Dean Dalmastro is a

00:10:43.560 former member of Parliament for the Conservatives in the Harper government. And I'm going to read his

00:10:48.600 thread because I think this is really accurate and a good way of thinking about things. So Dean

00:10:52.900 Dalmastro says this, the Federal Liberal Party changed leaders after every losing election beginning

00:10:57.420 in 2006. The same arguments about staying united and focusing on fighting the other party were made

00:11:03.620 particularly in the case of Stéphane Dion. They were wrong. Does anyone believe that if given another

00:11:08.780 chance, Stéphane Dion would have defeated Stephen Harper? Well, of course not. Stéphane Dion was terrible and

00:11:14.380 the Liberals were right to get rid of him. But going back to Dalmastro's tweet here, it says,

00:11:17.980 the Liberals made the change and Michael Ignatia did even worse. He resigned and they changed later

00:11:23.480 again. The party survived four different leaders in four successive elections. Recent history shows

00:11:28.800 that those arguing that Denise Batter's efforts are cause for celebration for Justin Trudeau and the

00:11:33.000 Liberal Party are wrong. The truth is they're concerned that Aaron O'Toole or his policies will

00:11:37.380 not survive a vote of membership and with good cause. Given the rising cost of energy, groceries and the

00:11:42.980 cost of living generally, it will not be easy for Aaron O'Toole to justify his decision to support

00:11:47.360 carbon taxes. Also, social conservatives feel betrayed and the West is just flat out angry and

00:11:52.400 feeling abandoned by the conservative leader. The bottom line is that now is the only time that a

00:11:56.600 leadership review can occur and should. The suggestion that a review can wait until 2023,

00:12:01.400 a time when an election could be imminent, is dishonest at best. It's really a way to simply avoid

00:12:06.660 membership altogether. The conservative caucus may be divided on the issue, but the decision on who leads

00:12:12.260 the party is not theirs to make. That responsibility rests solely with conservative members. The leader

00:12:17.780 must have the confidence and support of membership, which can only be demonstrated with a full

00:12:23.180 membership vote. So this is really right. And I read the whole thing because I think it illuminates

00:12:28.040 what one of the sort of deeper issues here is that it seems that Aaron O'Toole is afraid of the base.

00:12:33.300 It seems like he doesn't want to face the base. He knows that he threw them under the bus, that he did so

00:12:37.560 many things throughout the campaign to anger them. And so his best hope is really to have caucus rally

00:12:43.000 around him and say, no, we're not going to allow this senator's petition to make its way to the base.

00:12:48.600 But what does this say about Aaron O'Toole, that he can't even face his own base. He can't even make

00:12:52.780 the case to his own members, to his own party, as to why he should continue to lead the party

00:12:57.240 into the next general election. I think that that shows just how far Aaron O'Toole has come from the

00:13:02.140 base. He thinks that in order to win a general election, he has to align himself with the left wing

00:13:07.160 legacy media, with liberal values and progressive values on all of these sort of major issues,

00:13:12.700 including fiscal issues. And then when it comes back to the base, he just sort of doesn't want

00:13:18.060 to face them because he knows that they just won't support his agenda. And so now we are seeing many

00:13:23.260 MPs come out and defend Aaron O'Toole. We'll sort of defend Aaron O'Toole. They're not so much

00:13:28.520 defending Aaron O'Toole as they are attacking Denise Batters. They're coming out with this really sort of

00:13:34.180 disingenuous attack against her, saying that she is distracting them from their important work of

00:13:39.140 holding Justin Trudeau accountable. So instead of seeing a real defense of Aaron O'Toole saying he's

00:13:44.920 the right guy for the job. This is why he's good on this. He's strong on this. This is the way that we

00:13:49.960 can lead forward. This is the vision that we have for a Conservative candidate. We're not hearing any of

00:13:54.820 that. What we're hearing is sort of how dare you, Denise Batters, distract us from our important work.

00:14:00.660 And so here is Conservative MP Michelle Rumpel saying basically just that.

00:14:05.820 This is an open message to my colleague from the Senate, Denise Batters. Denise, I have been working all week

00:14:17.380 on an issue that matters to my community. Denise, I have been meeting with dozens of stakeholders,

00:14:25.160 talking to people from all across the country on how we should fight Justin Trudeau's war on the

00:14:33.060 energy sector. That's what I've been doing this week. I can't believe I have to use my Facebook

00:14:37.080 platform to do this, Denise. And so I'm about to do a bunch of media on this topic and show Canadians

00:14:43.620 that, as the official opposition, we're focused on Justin Trudeau. But you know what, Denise,

00:14:47.500 I had to do this morning? I had to respond to your petition calling for a leadership review in the

00:14:53.260 party. You know what that does to me? That clears my day from being able to stand up with my

00:14:59.360 constituents. You know what it does? It's going to fill the news tonight with your petition, as opposed

00:15:04.700 to my, like, trying to hold Justin Trudeau to account to get my community back to work. I'm so frustrated

00:15:11.980 with this. I can't believe you're making me do this, Denise. I can't believe I have to use my

00:15:15.980 Facebook platform and distract from my important work. Michelle Rumpelook, I like Michelle. I have

00:15:19.840 a lot of time for Michelle. But again, this isn't really a good take. This isn't really a good

00:15:24.180 response. When is a good time to hold a leadership review? When is a good time to say, look, the party

00:15:29.360 leader isn't representing the base anymore? Is there any good time? No. The idea is that you kind of go

00:15:34.040 through the difficult task of doing soul searching and figuring out what went wrong in the next election

00:15:39.200 so that you can properly position yourself in the next election to face the real issues. And so this

00:15:44.560 idea that the conservative MPs were just so busy doing all this important work and now they have

00:15:48.820 to take time away from it, I think that's pretty weak. And again, you see that this is sort of the

00:15:53.960 talking points that are being pushed by O'Toole's office because a lot of the MPs, a lot of MPs are

00:15:58.740 remaining silent, but the few that are going out and sort of making a defense of him all kind of fall

00:16:04.260 along these lines. So we see Michael Barrett say this, conservatives should focus on holding the

00:16:10.100 true to liberals accountable and finding solutions to make life better for Canadians. There's an

00:16:14.000 affordability crisis with skyrocketing inflation, rising food and housing prices, labor supply and

00:16:18.900 supply shortages. Let's get back to work. Likewise, Melissa Lansman, a new MP in Thornhill said this,

00:16:25.680 we have a cost of living crisis, out of control inflation, a war on Canada's energy sector, and a

00:16:30.320 waning reputation on the world stage. That's just a start. This helps Justin Trudeau, not Canadians.

00:16:36.280 I'm a hard no, smarten up. Okay, so again, we're sort of told this idea that conservatives are so

00:16:43.820 busy fighting on all these issues. Can you name anything that the Conservative Party is doing to

00:16:47.740 address any of these issues? Cost of living crisis, out of control inflation? Well, I will say on

00:16:52.220 inflation, Pierre Polyev is very articulate and very good spokesperson on this issue. But again, what are

00:16:57.240 they really doing? A war on Canada's energy sector? Again, I don't really see what the Conservative

00:17:02.260 Party is doing. In fact, when I looked at the media and the news in the last week, I don't see any of

00:17:08.060 these issues in the news. I don't see conservatives talking about them at all. What I see in the news

00:17:12.340 is conservatives and O'Toole basically coming to all the wrong conclusions when it comes to why they

00:17:17.600 lost the election. I see them further pushing out and punishing the libertarians or the civil liberties

00:17:22.480 caucus. And I see the continuation of this conservative apology tour. There's this long

00:17:27.180 piece in CTV all about Tory MP Tim Upple basically saying that conservatives are super racist back in

00:17:34.660 2015. And that that whole campaign run by Stephen Harper was awful, basically just parroting all of

00:17:40.240 the worst accusations from the liberals and from the media from 2015 and conceding, saying those things

00:17:45.620 are true, admitting that they think that the conservatives were racist back then, which is

00:17:49.480 completely absurd. But that's a story for another day. So again, I don't see the conservatives

00:17:54.780 actually out there talking about these issues. I see this as like a very weak defense of Aaron O'Toole

00:18:00.300 instead of, again, saying any reason why Aaron O'Toole himself is in a good position to lead the

00:18:05.040 party. You know, the attacks are all just basically saying that this is a distraction. Well, again, there

00:18:11.060 is no good time to hold a leadership review. But if the conservatives want to be stronger, if they want to be

00:18:16.060 better positioned, if they want to learn anything from losing the last election, I think a very good

00:18:21.020 place to start is listening to the base. If the base wants a leadership review, then the base should

00:18:26.380 have a leadership review. And it will be up to Aaron O'Toole and his MPs to articulate the case as

00:18:31.880 to why they are in a good position to lead the party again to the next election. And if they can't do

00:18:36.860 that, well, now is a good time to start looking for a new party leader. I'm Candace Malcolm, and this is

00:18:41.960 the Candace Malcolm Show.

Juno News - November 16, 2021

The knives come out against Erin O’Toole

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