Juno News - Trudeau and Singh should be shaking in their boots over Conservative membership numbers

00:00:00.000 The Conservative leadership candidates claim to have recruited over half a million members into the party.

00:00:05.480 Justin Trudeau and Jagmeet Singh should be shaking in their boots.

00:00:08.660 I'm Candace Malcolm and this is The Candace Malcolm Show.

00:00:23.040 Hi everyone, thank you so much for tuning into the podcast.

00:00:25.680 So there was a bit of news with the Conservative leadership race last week.

00:00:30.080 Friday was the membership cutoff.

00:00:31.780 So as of midnight on Friday, you could no longer sign up for a membership in order to vote in the leadership race.

00:00:37.800 Of course, the leadership race is going to happen in September.

00:00:41.340 But in order to vote in that September race, you have to have been a member.

00:00:44.580 And the membership cutoff came and went on June 3rd.

00:00:47.400 So following that, we sort of saw an avalanche of announcements from the various candidates bragging and boasting about the number of memberships that they and their campaigns have sold.

00:00:57.000 So it started off with Patrick Brown.

00:00:58.920 At noon on Friday, Patrick Brown tweeted the following, claiming to have sold over 150,000 memberships.

00:01:04.960 He said, I'm so happy to announce that we have smashed our membership goal and they're still pouring in.

00:01:10.640 Thank you so much to my hardworking team from coast to coast.

00:01:14.120 A few hours later, Jean Charest also claimed that he had the points needed to win.

00:01:19.220 He tweeted this at 4 p.m.

00:01:20.620 He said, we are excited to confirm that we have the points needed to win the Conservative Party leadership.

00:01:26.020 We have recruited tens of thousands of new members and reengaged thousands of past members.

00:01:30.660 There is still a lot of work to do.

00:01:33.040 Getting out the vote is critical to our victory.

00:01:35.740 And then I think the biggest news of the entire weekend came on Saturday morning when Jenny Byrne, who is Pierre Polyev's campaign advisor, she tweeted this about the Pierre Polyev campaign.

00:01:47.080 These numbers are incredibly staggering.

00:01:49.300 She wrote this.

00:01:49.960 She said, 311,958 Canadians joined the Conservative Party through the Pierre4PM.ca membership website.

00:02:00.080 Last night, Pierre's campaign wrote to the Conservative Party headquarters asking it to publicly release the number of memberships sold through the Pierre website.

00:02:08.800 And we encourage all campaigns to follow suit.

00:02:11.960 And so, you know, there was that tweet went viral.

00:02:15.160 Every journalist, every political insider was just sort of shocked to see that number, that huge number of people, of Canadians who were inspired by Pierre.

00:02:25.780 So just from these three campaigns alone, we can surprise that, what, 460,000, 470,000, plus however many Jean Charest brought in, maybe 400,000, sorry, maybe 500,000 Canadians joined the party just to vote in this.

00:02:41.100 No matter which way you look at it, there's a lot of enthusiasm.

00:02:44.040 And I want to talk about that enthusiasm and break down these numbers a little more.

00:02:47.520 And that's why I'm pleased to be joined by Hamish Marshall, our friend Hamish, who is a partner over at One Persuades, a government relations and strategy firm.

00:02:54.460 You know him because he was our in-house pollster at True North during the 2021 election.

00:02:59.680 He's also worked for Andrew Scheer and Stephen Harper.

00:03:03.420 Hamish, welcome back to the show.

00:03:04.760 Great to see you.

00:03:05.720 Good to be here, Candace.

00:03:07.280 So what was your impression when you saw these campaigns releasing these staggering numbers?

00:03:12.560 I mean, just by contrast, we can look at what the numbers were back in, you know, in 2020 when they were voting, when Aaron O'Toole became leader.

00:03:21.060 170,000 Canadians voted in that race in 2017.

00:03:24.460 The campaign that you ran for Andrew Scheer, 140,000 Canadians voted.

00:03:29.200 Back when Justin Trudeau was about to be elected leader of the Liberal Party, back in 2013, 104,000 people voted in that leadership race.

00:03:38.700 80,000 voted for Trudeau.

00:03:40.280 So, you know, we're talking about huge multiples and a huge growth in enthusiasm.

00:03:46.580 What do you make of all this?

00:03:48.320 Well, look, it's a very, it shows that there's Canadians who are really engaged in this race.

00:03:52.100 There's a chunk of Canadians who are excited conservative voters, but an awful lot of new people, people who don't have a background in politics, have gotten involved and was signed up for all the candidates, but particularly for Pierre Polyev.

00:04:04.120 I mean, it's really staggering numbers and watching them roll in was incredibly exciting.

00:04:10.060 And, you know, I think it speaks very well and it speaks to, you know, it speaks to something interesting, I think, what we see with Trudeau.

00:04:17.580 You know, Trudeau claimed to have signed up about 150,000 to 160,000 people back in 2013.

00:04:22.840 The media called it staggering.

00:04:24.480 They said it was evidence of Trudeau mania.

00:04:26.080 And the thing about that race is you didn't have to pay in order to join the Liberal Party to be a supporter, to be able to vote.

00:04:31.900 You just have to sign up.

00:04:32.900 You just have to give your email address.

00:04:34.560 And that's all it took.

00:04:35.860 So Trudeau was able to get, you know, 150,000, 160,000 people when they didn't have to pay.

00:04:41.820 What's amazing about these numbers is that, you know, Pierre Polyev signed up 311,000 people all had to pay $15 a head.

00:04:50.160 And that speaks to a level of dedication and a level of excitement and interest in this race that I think we've never seen anything like this before in community politics.

00:04:58.500 And we should disclose to the viewers, you should know that Hamish is involved in the Pierre Polyev campaign.

00:05:05.320 And so you're not an independent observer.

00:05:07.620 You're working over with Pierre.

00:05:09.300 And I want to ask you, Hamish, because throughout the campaign, we've seen huge rallies, huge, huge numbers of people lining up to go out and see Pierre.

00:05:19.160 It really seems like there's an electricity and excitement around that campaign.

00:05:22.720 And we saw the media sort of try to downplay it and say that, OK, well, you know, he's just picking up the momentum from the trucker convoy.

00:05:30.460 And these aren't really voters.

00:05:31.820 And it's not going to convert into memberships.

00:05:34.560 It's sort of people being skeptical, I would say, of the ground campaign that Pierre might be able to run.

00:05:39.780 Well, if these numbers are accurate and they turn out to be, I think that Pierre has really proven those pundits and those journalists wrong.

00:05:46.740 What do you what do you take about the the difference between the way that the media covered Trudeau back in 2013 and the so-called Trudeau mania signing up free members versus how Pierre has been treated in this race?

00:05:59.220 Look, what Pierre is doing is he's changing the paradigm.

00:06:01.440 He's he's he's connecting with groups of people, Canadians who have never been involved in politics.

00:06:05.800 Overwhelming thing you find if you go to one of Pierre's rallies.

00:06:08.180 And I know, you know, you've had your team there and you're asking people, have you ever been to a political event before?

00:06:13.280 It's no, it's my first one.

00:06:14.780 You hear that again and again and again.

00:06:16.700 And what's happening is that that Pierre is connected with a group of people who are not traditionally being super involved in Canadian politics and the traditional people in Canadian politics, whether that's the the the insiders in Ottawa or the media don't understand that it's not people like them.

00:06:33.080 It's not their friends going down to a peer rally. As a result, they keep coming up with excuses about why it can't be real.

00:06:39.380 Sure, you get big rallies, but it's only in Calgary or in Alberta or conservative area.

00:06:43.180 Oh, now you're getting big numbers in Windsor and Ottawa and Toronto and places that don't do well.

00:06:49.100 But those people won't sign up. Oh, now they've signed up.

00:06:51.640 But then what actually vote? We keep hearing all these excuses.

00:06:54.700 The reality on the ground is that people are are engaged.

00:06:58.520 They're fired up. They're looking for something different.

00:07:00.200 And that's what Pierre is providing. Well, you missed the latest choice of criticism from the media, which is that Pierre's rallies are too white.

00:07:09.520 There's too many white people at the rallies. And supposedly, that's a great sin in politics. 0.82

00:07:13.220 That's right. Of course, if you actually go to one of these rallies, the rallies generally represent the communities that they're being held in.

00:07:20.300 But, you know, it doesn't matter. There's always something wrong.

00:07:24.320 They can't acknowledge that there's something happening. There's something unique happening in Canadian politics because it doesn't line up with their vision of Canada and their understanding of the country.

00:07:32.680 And so what do you think that is? What is it about Pierre's message and the message of the Conservative Party more broadly?

00:07:38.040 Because even Patrick Brown claims to have signed up as many members for the party as Justin Trudeau did.

00:07:44.680 So it seems to me that there is an excitement around the Conservative Party and Conservative ideas more broadly, not just necessarily Pierre.

00:07:52.720 But what is it about Pierre's message specifically and then also Conservative message that's resonating?

00:07:58.060 Yeah, I think, look, I think it starts with the failures of Justin Trudeau. And obviously, Justin Trudeau came in with very, very high expectations.

00:08:03.940 He was going to do everything differently. Turned out to be a very, very traditional liberal politician in how he runs the government.

00:08:09.840 His agenda has been much further left. And as a result, he completely failed the people who put trust in him at the beginning.

00:08:16.980 You know, Canada is a lot more expensive place to live and to work in today than it was when Justin Trudeau started.

00:08:23.940 And a lot of people are correctly seeing that the Trudeau government has not just failed them, but has enriched their rich and powerful friends, but has and the people, the average person is struggling to get ahead in a way that I don't think has existed in probably even in my lifetime in this country.

00:08:41.440 Or certainly since since since the last time we had a Trudeau as prime minister.

00:08:46.840 And as a result, there are people looking for something different.

00:08:49.700 And, you know, Pierre is a remarkable communicator with the ability to communicate very, very clearly how he's going to be different than Trudeau and focus on the issues that matter.

00:09:00.360 And that's connecting and it's connecting in a big way.

00:09:03.080 And we're seeing an incredible flood of support because of that.

00:09:08.160 And so I'm hoping you can help us make sense of the way the leadership process will go, because the way that these candidates are elected is not the same as the way that we elect politicians and prime ministers to federal office.

00:09:22.000 There's all kinds of internal rules.

00:09:24.220 And because of that, I mean, it's interesting to look at someone like Jean Charest saying we have the points needed to win.

00:09:29.340 And and by that, he means that the conservatives have to win in order to get votes.

00:09:34.360 Well, you could probably explain it a lot better than I can, but it's you need to have a certain formula of support across the country in order to be able to win.

00:09:42.260 So hopefully you can help us walk, walk, walk the viewer through how that's going to work.

00:09:46.280 Yeah, basically the way it works is it's a little bit like the House of Commons in that each seat is equal.

00:09:50.900 So it doesn't matter if you, you know, and the goal is to get is to get as many votes as possible in each seat.

00:09:58.540 And the idea behind this is that the party shouldn't be able to be captured by someone who just signs up a ton of members in one area.

00:10:05.620 So if everybody, everybody in Manitoba joined the party, they could swap the party and take it over, for instance.

00:10:11.160 So the idea is that if we want to elect a national government, we should have elect leaders that have support from broadly across the country.

00:10:17.240 So the way it works is that each riding is treated equally and the percentage of the vote that each candidate gets in each riding is basically added up to, and the person with the most number, what they call points, which is basically each percent that everybody gets in each riding.

00:10:35.360 You add that up and the person with the most of those is the winner on the final ballot.

00:10:39.440 So if nobody can serve 50%, it's a preferential ballot, so the person with the least number of votes has their votes redistributed, the numbers are recalculated, and we keep going.

00:10:50.240 So that means that you have to sign up people everywhere, which is good for the party.

00:10:57.000 And it means that there's traditionally been this theory that, well, if you maximize your vote in areas with low membership, you can get small numbers of people to vote and actually be able to win with large numbers of points.

00:11:12.120 Even if, you know, you lose ridings in Alberta that have 2,000 members, if you win a riding in rural Quebec with 75 members, you can win big.

00:11:20.940 And so often you get a difference between what's happening with the popular vote, the raw number of votes someone gets, and the actual number of points as a result, but what's happened here is Pierre signed up so many people that we've signed up, they've signed up people everywhere across the country.

00:11:41.120 There aren't going to be very many ridings, and, you know, Mr. Brown's numbers are to be believed, and Mr. Charest, because he signed up tens of thousands of people, you know, the total Conservative membership is going to be 600 and something thousand, maybe over, maybe more.

00:11:56.320 And as a result, there aren't going to be a lot of ridings that are sort of weak ridings, right?

00:12:00.960 You know, Pierre signed up over 1,000 members in 111 ridings, hundreds and hundreds of members in lots more ridings.

00:12:09.000 There aren't going to be ridings that have 36 people vote on Election Day.

00:12:14.700 So it really actually changes the calculus in a way that hasn't happened in the past.

00:12:19.360 It's going to be so interesting to see how it all plays out.

00:12:23.520 Some of the criticism towards Polyev's numbers, and I'll let you explain this and sort of respond.

00:12:31.360 So Chisholm Pothier, who is a campaign member for Patrick Brown, he put this onto Twitter.

00:12:38.320 You said the Polyev campaign today published numbers that over the coming weeks will evaporate, like the value of crypto.

00:12:43.820 Last week, our campaign asked the party to release the full list, membership list.

00:12:48.020 Pierre's campaign lobbied hard and ultimately succeeded in blocking that.

00:12:51.100 So a little bit of infighting and sort of claiming that Pierre's numbers might not be what they seem.

00:12:58.160 What do you make of that?

00:12:59.940 This is the number of people.

00:13:01.140 If anything, this is a Conservative number of people who have signed up.

00:13:04.220 This was people who signed up on Pierre's website.

00:13:08.580 Lots of people also bought memberships on the main party website.

00:13:12.600 So these numbers are the numbers who have signed up.

00:13:15.300 The party goes through a verification process.

00:13:17.260 And the reason that the party hasn't released the number yet is that there are a total number of memberships.

00:13:22.120 The party has to go through a verification process, check to make sure each one of these memberships is valid,

00:13:26.840 check to make sure they live at an address that exists, all that sort of thing.

00:13:30.900 And that takes time.

00:13:31.880 So it's going to take the party, you know, in the past has taken a month or so for them to go through and evaluate all that.

00:13:37.580 It might take a little longer than this time because so many people have been signed up.

00:13:40.560 But that's up to the party to figure that out.

00:13:42.940 You know, I think it was, it's ironic that Mr. Poitier is saying this when he was working for Patrick Brown.

00:13:50.060 When Patrick Brown was leader of the Ontario PC party, he claimed to sign up 200,000 members.

00:13:54.100 The party did an audit after he resigned and disgraced and discovered that, you know, at least that membership was at least 67,000 members, smaller than Mr. Brown had claimed.

00:14:05.940 So, you know, we'll see whose numbers evaporate.

00:14:10.160 You're sort of a conservative insider.

00:14:13.440 You talk to a lot of people within the party.

00:14:15.360 Do you feel like there's a chism in the party that there is a divide?

00:14:21.640 I mean, it seems like the sort of war of words between some of the campaigns, notably between Patrick Brown and Pierre Poglia, but also a little bit of Jean Charest.

00:14:28.960 Is this normal or is this more intense than normal?

00:14:33.740 And do you have the feeling that, say, for instance, if Jean Charest ended up being the candidate, would all of the other new members rally around that leader?

00:14:44.320 Would they rally around Pierre Poglia?

00:14:45.580 Would they rally around Patrick Brown?

00:14:47.300 What do you think about the unity of the party?

00:14:49.340 Because there's a lot of hay being made in the media about how the party is very divided and all this kind of stuff.

00:14:54.980 I'm just wondering if you could comment on that.

00:14:56.920 Yeah, I don't think the party is any more divided now than it was during the last leadership race.

00:15:01.120 I think leadership races themselves create the structure of the race creates the rhetoric around it.

00:15:07.640 You know, in a race like what we have this time with Mr. Poglia, who seems to be a front runner, it is incumbent upon the others to try to take him down.

00:15:19.040 So they're going to throw a whole bunch of say a bunch of things.

00:15:22.240 And on the flip side, Poglia campaign has got to keep anybody else from catching up.

00:15:26.300 You know, in the 2020 leadership race of O'Toole versus McKay, that race got extremely heated.

00:15:32.600 And again, because it was a similar dynamic.

00:15:35.800 But if you look back at the 2017 race, I don't think the 2017 race with 14 candidates in the ballot wasn't divisive or angry because of, you know, it was a different time or something.

00:15:51.020 I think that people, when you're looking at that number of people running, it was obvious that nobody was going to win or come close to winning on the first ballot.

00:16:00.580 And therefore, everybody had to run a more cooperative approach in order to get second ballot support.

00:16:05.320 And that was much more explicit.

00:16:06.840 Everyone was thinking along those lines.

00:16:08.720 So as a result, you had to be careful about, you had to be more careful about the rhetoric they throw.

00:16:12.260 In a front runner race, it's very, very different.

00:16:13.960 So I think any time you see a front runner race, you're going to see a much more, quote unquote, divisive race.

00:16:18.480 But look, the Conservative Party has a history of coming together around leaders.

00:16:25.340 You know, Mr. O'Toole, you know, didn't have a majority of caucus endorsements.

00:16:30.740 He was able to pull together a team.

00:16:33.480 Caucus is united around him through the 2021 election.

00:16:36.840 He got his chance.

00:16:37.600 And then obviously, I think he made a bunch of choices after that that resulted in him being removed as leader.

00:16:43.260 But that wasn't a result of the leadership race itself.

00:16:47.680 Yeah, that's that's interesting.

00:16:49.480 I think I think I think a lot of it is just sort of media narrative drama.

00:16:54.420 They like to make it seem like it's more contentious.

00:16:56.700 It's the media's business, right?

00:16:58.700 Drama sells newspapers, right?

00:17:00.520 So fair enough.

00:17:02.220 Well, since I have you, I wanted to ask you about the Ontario election, because Doug Ford was just reelected with a overwhelming majority.

00:17:11.820 Obviously, obviously, very popular in that province.

00:17:14.300 Now, I'm not personally a big Ford supporter or fan.

00:17:17.960 I don't like the way that he handled the lockdowns and covid.

00:17:21.200 But but it seems pretty undeniable that he he has that popularity in Ontario.

00:17:26.700 So I'm wondering if you could help us understand how was he able to win so big in the election last week?

00:17:32.480 Well, I think overwhelmingly, you know, he he he caught the mood of the province, right?

00:17:39.320 Most people in the province are generally fine with the way things are going.

00:17:43.040 There wasn't a giant demand for change.

00:17:44.820 The government, you know, has as much as you know, I think, you know, probably agree in a lot of the lockdown restrictions, as much as the government may have done lots of lockdown things in the past, they seem pretty resolute on moving forward right now.

00:17:59.600 And I think the mood of Canadians or Ontarians right now is the lockdown is a thing of the past.

00:18:06.260 Let's just move forward.

00:18:07.480 And the Liberals and the NDP, I think, walked into a trap of their own making.

00:18:11.500 They certainly got some hay earlier by attacking Ford on whether he'd done the right thing around lockdowns.

00:18:17.980 But they didn't they missed that the province had moved on and a large chunk of people just said, we want that to be in the past.

00:18:24.400 We want to move forward and other things.

00:18:26.420 And Ford's promising us that.

00:18:28.640 Whereas Del Duca and Horvath continually talking about what Ford did wrong during the lockdown, whether, you know, they should if they came up too early at this time or that time and really trying to relitigate it and making the point and continually saying that they were in favor of more restrictive COVID measures when the mood of the province had moved on.

00:18:47.320 So I think Ford, you know, said people look, yeah, we did all that stuff.

00:18:52.940 I don't agree with everything of it.

00:18:54.520 Some people wanted me to do more.

00:18:55.700 Some people wanted me to do less.

00:18:57.080 We got through it moving forward.

00:18:59.220 And the other parties really focused on the past.

00:19:02.300 And I think that more than anything else allowed Ford to move on.

00:19:05.960 That and, you know, a truly remarkable thing happened, which is, you know, a near perfect split between the Liberals and NDP.

00:19:12.780 They got almost exactly the same number of votes, which allows, which is truly remarkable.

00:19:20.140 I certainly expected that one of the Liberals and the NDP would have been able to capture the public imagination, become the anti-Ford party.

00:19:27.740 And you would have seen one of those options, maybe over 30%, with the other under 20.

00:19:32.500 Both of them right on around 24% was absolutely staggering and really speaks to the complete ineptness of those two campaigns more than anything else, which is just truly remarkable.

00:19:46.700 They never really figured out that Ford wasn't their enemy, that the other one of them was the enemy.

00:19:51.320 You know, in order to win, one of those Liberals and NDP had to become the anti-Ford option.

00:19:56.820 And the way to do that was to really attack and put down their competitor.

00:20:02.200 But they were sort of happy to not do that and, I think, reap the results that they sowed.

00:20:11.220 Interesting.

00:20:11.940 And one of the things that I thought was really remarkable about the PCs in Ontario is the number of union endorsements that they got.

00:20:19.340 I know Monty McNaughton, who is the Labour Minister, was working incredibly hard to win over and get these endorsements.

00:20:25.680 And it's sort of interesting because we've long heard Conservatives talk about how there's a great ideological shift and that the left-wing parties, traditional left-wing parties, have sort of abandoned the working class.

00:20:36.060 And Conservatives, culturally, are more aligned with the values of people who are part of those unions and especially private sector unions.

00:20:44.420 I'm wondering if you can comment, tell us a little bit about how the Ford government was able to capture the support of the private sector unions in Ontario.

00:20:54.200 Well, I think you make an extremely good point that these are all private sector unions to endorse the Ford government.

00:21:00.800 I also think that the union movement itself is going through a very difficult time and a real sort of divergence between the public and private sector unions.

00:21:07.740 The membership of the public sector, the private sector unions are culturally, I think, quite different.

00:21:12.160 And a lot of them are voting Conservative anyway.

00:21:14.620 A lot of the membership has been true for a long time.

00:21:16.960 A lot of the memberships of the private sector unions votes Conservative.

00:21:20.980 And the unions, I think, looked at the situation, saw that they had a government that was not hostile to the Act, to the desires of private sector unions.

00:21:31.360 And that, combined with good outreach from both Minister McNaughton and the Premier, and the ineptness of the Liberals and the NDP, who sort of took them for granted, made it, with that, with their membership being quite, you know, favourable to or accepting of the Ford government, made it quite easy for these union leaders to go and endorse the Ford government this time.

00:21:53.220 The significance of that also is it took a lot of that anti-Conservative union money off the table.

00:21:59.660 It's not that these unions went and spent a ton of money in favour of the Conservative government.

00:22:03.800 If you think back to the working families coalitions that ran attack heads against Tim Kudak in the past, spent millions upon millions of dollars helping the McGuinty and Wynne governments get elected, just the fact that they weren't active doing that was a huge boon for the Conservatives.

00:22:20.820 Interesting. Yeah, that's really interesting.

00:22:22.340 Well, one other topic that I thought we should rediscover, just because last time I had you on, we talked a little bit about Alberta, and I think we were both off in what we saw.

00:22:33.160 Like, I certainly stand corrected, because I had just been in Calgary, and people I was speaking to were really telling me that Kenny had it in the bag, and that he was going to win, and that they weren't worried about it.

00:22:44.080 I heard that from many, many sort of conservative, what I would call political insiders.

00:22:47.720 And I think even, you know, the day after Kenny resigned, I was trying to get some of these people to come on my show, and they basically all said no, because they didn't know what to make of it.

00:22:57.160 They were blindsided and very surprised by the fact that Kenny didn't manage to get a bigger percentage of the support of the party.

00:23:04.580 You know, people were saying it was going to be 70, 75%.

00:23:07.120 So I was certainly incorrect, and the people I was talking to were, you know, not, not, not, didn't have their finger on the pulse like I thought they did.

00:23:15.500 I'm wondering, you know, were you surprised, and what do you, what do you, what do you make from what happened out in Alberta?

00:23:21.840 Yeah, I mean, I think everybody got it wrong.

00:23:23.100 The, the, the, the pro Kenny people I was talking to were all saying high 60s, 70%, he's going to be fine.

00:23:28.740 The anti-Kenny people were all saying, oh, there's no way he gets more than 45, it'll be closer to 40.

00:23:34.100 And I tended to believe the, the pro Kenny people a little bit more, and I thought he would be okay.

00:23:38.660 I'm not sure if I believe 70%, but I, but I, I thought he was going to be okay.

00:23:43.080 But 51, I mean, everyone was wrong.

00:23:45.420 Um, and I think he, you know, I think at that level, he knew it, resigning at that point made sense because he knew he, the party would be too divided going forward and he hadn't won a decisive enough mandate.

00:23:58.520 Um, so yeah, it was certainly a surprise.

00:24:01.040 Um, uh, I certainly didn't think it was going to be a number as low as that.

00:24:05.180 Um, you know, but obviously the anti-Kenny forces, uh, had signed up a lot of people to the membership and were able to get them out.

00:24:11.580 And the question becomes is, and that this has going to have a big impact on the leadership race to come because obviously the people signing folks up, but a lot of anti-Kenny type members obviously are already members of the party.

00:24:24.700 They've already signed them up.

00:24:25.700 So in a leadership race where typically insurgents have to sign up, people who've got, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, an anti-establishment kind of view have to be signed up and that takes time and effort.

00:24:39.080 And then what will presumably be not super long race, that makes it difficult.

00:24:43.220 We're actually walking into this race with a significant chunk, if not a majority of the party, um, or close to a majority of the party who are very at odds with what the county government's been doing.

00:24:54.020 And that's kind of a big impact on the leadership race and it's going to make things very, very different leadership race than we've expected.

00:25:00.080 And, you know, the, the assumption that, uh, it's sort of a well-known cabinet minister who, you know, genuinely believes in the same thing Kenny has, we will walk into the leadership as you might expect in a lot of parties that as they go, as a leader leaves, that's sort of the, often the person who follows, um, you know, it's going to be, I don't know if we can assume that's going to be the case in Alberta.

00:25:21.160 So, uh, what are you, what are you hearing in terms of who, who's going to be running and who, who could be the, the next successor?

00:25:27.940 I know Travis Taves, uh, Toes, the, uh, finance minister under, under Kenny is, uh, has announced that he's running.

00:25:34.540 We have Danielle Smith and Brian Jean from the sort of more Wild Rose side.

00:25:38.140 There's been some rumors about, uh, federal MP Michelle Rumpel, Garner, perhaps throwing her hat in the race.

00:25:43.660 Uh, what, what, what are you hearing and who do you think would be a good candidate to replace Premier Kenny?

00:25:47.980 Well, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to keep quiet on who I think could be a good candidate because I, I, I think that we have to really have to understand who the field is, is left.

00:25:55.000 And, you know, I, I've heard there's up to 15 people considering it.

00:25:58.120 It's a wide open field.

00:26:00.180 Um, from what I'm hearing right now, I think Danielle Smith's, uh, gaining, gaining a lot of early support, um, particularly amongst those sort of anti-Kenny folks.

00:26:08.980 Um, Brian Jean's doing well, but has a long way to go yet.

00:26:12.400 Um, and, you know, we'll see from there, but yeah, as I said, it could be, I think, I think this race is going to get a lot bigger. 0.98

00:26:18.940 Uh, and it's going to be very difficult to predict the shape of the race until we understand the final, final tally.

00:26:24.460 Um, the big danger of this, of the rates for the UCP is if it comes down to really a sort of division between those anti-Kenny, um, folks and the pro-Kenny folks or, or whatever issues, however it plays out.

00:26:37.980 And, and you can see, uh, you know, if there's a group of cabinet ministers, uh, run, um, and they get, uh, you know, half the vote and then there's a, uh, you know, sort of the anti-Kenny folks, whether it be some, you know, Gene and, and Smith and maybe Todd Lowe and now an independent MLA.

00:26:55.140 Those folks, if they all, their votes, it's a preferential ballot.

00:26:59.400 If their votes all sort of cascade into each other and we end up with final two that are all, that are very evenly split.

00:27:04.540 If we end up with a result, like what we got in the leadership or the review of 51% or so, uh, I worry about the future of the party being divided.

00:27:13.040 I think this, this is a party that's very, very divided, um, and it's going to take, uh, a leadership, a leader from whichever side they come from with real vision and an ability to, you know, reach, reach to the other side of the party, um, in order to keep the party together, which is the only way that the NDP can be stopped, you know, over the next election.

00:27:30.960 I think that's a really good point that the, if, if anything, one of the main lessons that conservatives ought to, ought to draw from what happened with Premier Kenney is that whoever is the leader has to work incredibly hard to keep the party together, to, to talk to all factions, to make sure that everyone's getting something that they like.

00:27:46.920 And you can't just have this sort of unilateral, uh, approach to governance.

00:27:50.500 You really have to, uh, you know, bring everyone to the table and, uh, hopefully the next leader will be able to do that.

00:27:56.600 Well, hey, Michelle, we always appreciate your, your time and your insights.

00:27:59.100 Thank you so much for joining the show.

00:28:00.400 My pleasure as always.

00:28:02.260 Hey, that's Samish Marshall.

00:28:03.260 I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.

Juno News - June 08, 2022

Trudeau and Singh should be shaking in their boots over Conservative membership numbers

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