Join Andrew Lawton and Anthony Fury as they sit down outside the Manning Centre Conference to talk all things Tory leadership. Doug Ford, Andrew Scheer, Justin Trudeau, and the rest of the Tory leadership field field of candidates.
00:00:00.000Welcome everyone, Andrew Lawton here from True North, joined by Anthony Fury, two fellows in the most literal and figurative senses outside the action at the Manning Centre Conference.
00:00:12.420If you've been following on Twitter and Facebook, you've no doubt seen some of the things that are going on.
00:00:17.620Premier Doug Ford spoke this morning, Conservative leader Andrew Scheer just spoke.
00:00:21.900We've done some great sit-down interviews with some of the key players here.
00:00:25.160None more exciting than Anthony Fury and me in one place to, well, hopefully one or two of you.
00:00:32.420Anthony, how are you having a good time so far?
00:00:34.620Great, always great to be here at the Manning Networking Conference.
00:00:38.180I've been coming here for pretty much since it began.
00:00:40.860It's been going on for a number of six or seven or eight years or so.
00:00:43.880And a really interesting place, as you know Andrew, to see Conservative-minded individuals.
00:00:48.660Not necessarily big C Conservatives. It's a small C Conservative event.
00:00:52.920It's not an official party event. See people sort of get together and talk about the movement in general and the issues of the day as they kind of relate to all of that.
00:01:01.220So always compelling stuff, not just the big headline item people, but the people you meet in the halls.
00:01:06.260And talk to them about how things are going, get a feel for, you know, you touch base with someone from Alberta over here, someone from the East Coast.
00:01:11.940How's your region going? How's that issue? And it's really informative from that level.
00:01:15.580Yeah, it is. And it's interesting because the first Manning Conference I came to was in 2014.
00:01:21.020And that was Harper Majority. Would be over a year, but it was there.
00:01:25.160And then I was here two years ago. And that was a little bit of a different tone, obviously.
00:01:30.300But there was still very much a rallying going on. The Conservative leadership race was happening.
00:01:34.960And there was a big leadership debate.
00:01:36.760This year I find kind of interesting because we were chatting before this started.
00:01:40.240And this is the last rallying point, really, for Canadian Conservatives, small C and big C before the election.
00:01:47.620And do you feel it? Do you feel that here?
00:01:51.800Just between us? I'm not feeling it too much.
00:01:55.580I mean, there's a momentum and an energy.
00:02:00.060There's conviction politicians, and then there's people who are conviction politicians.
00:02:04.200And, you know, Barack Obama was a conviction politician, that hope had changed.
00:02:08.040Donald Trump, a conviction politician.
00:05:03.860One, it can make it look like he's just like, yay, this guy's imploding.
00:05:06.720And I want to be Prime Minister, so here's my opportunity to get in on this.
00:05:09.960Because I think the big issue is Canadians with lab scam right now, they want to know, I want to know, who said what to whom and when did they say it.
00:05:17.980Because then that's the integral question of did obstruction of justice happen or not.
00:05:45.380Okay, but he's not going to, so what's next?
00:05:47.320There's a good argument to be made that maybe he should not be prime minister anymore, so either there will be obstruction of justice charges by the RSMP or the voters will kick him out in October.
00:05:58.560So one thing, Tom Mulcair, as you know, was always respected for, during the Mike Duffy scandal, whatever you think about whether that was legit or not, and the courts kind of decided it wasn't, he walked on all 31 charges.
00:06:07.460Because Tom Mulcair did a very sort of prosecutorial approach to question theory, where he said, who wrote this letter to that, and what did Nigel Wright say to this person at that time?
00:06:17.240And Tom Mulcair is very respected for doing that.
00:06:19.640I'd like to see that same type of performance from Andrew Scheer.
00:06:30.700And one of the things that I found interesting is that Doug Ford was asked a question about the P in the PC party, so the progressive conservative.
00:06:39.000And his answer, I actually felt, was kind of interesting.
00:06:41.600He didn't say we're not a conservative party, but he was very clear that, look, I want NDP voters to support what we're doing.
00:06:47.700I want liberal voters to support what we're doing.
00:06:49.460I want all of this stuff, you know, because we were providing change.
00:06:53.180And change is only valuable when you are offering something specific that is better than what you're changing.
00:07:01.140Whereas Andrew Scheer, I didn't feel was doing something that was that distinct from that.
00:07:05.920He was not saying, this is why conservative policies are great.
00:07:10.060He was saying, this is why we as a party are going to be better than that party.
00:07:14.220And I know that Canadians, by and large, don't love partisanship, or they say they don't.
00:07:19.500So I don't know if that, that may well be more successful than saying this is conservatism.
00:07:23.480But, at a conservative conference, I think that's the distinction, is that I think we were getting here, at the Manning Conference, a bit more of a general populist messaging.
00:07:35.960When you talk about inspirational and regular Joe, like the Ronald Reagan celebration in America, Andrew Scheer, in one question he was asked, you know, are there these sort of neo-Nazi white supremacist type people?
00:07:47.860You know, it was one of those mushy questions that are already sort of, I find them quite banal and tedious.
00:07:52.340Andrew Scheer should have slapped them away and then also said, you know, I want to cut taxes.
00:07:56.400I want to reduce government, increase liberty for all Canadians, for Muslim Canadians, for LGBT Canadians, for, you know, people of every demographic.
00:08:04.580This party is for you and for all of you, and these conservative principles are to make a better life and a better Canada for everybody.
00:08:10.860Come on and, you know, be a part of this movement with me.
00:08:13.040I mean, bring everybody into politics and, you know, a year ago, I was, I know you're doing some events here on the schedule here.
00:08:19.080A year ago, I did an onstage interview with Doug Ford when he was running to be leader of the party.
00:09:08.520I'm not going to give Muslim Canadians a vote, Serbian Canadians a voice on this issue.
00:09:13.560And he's not going to go through it one by one.
00:09:15.740And I do think that conservatives need to do a better job at fighting that identity politics.
00:09:21.520And to be honest, I think Stephen Harper might have actually been worse on that than he could have been.
00:09:25.920And because he was so interested in having the multicultural support, Jason Kenney was in a different ethnic community and cultural community every week, every day.
00:09:35.300But at a certain point, you've started siloing your message on it.
00:09:39.080So I don't know where do you think that balance is between engaging different groups and pandering.
00:10:47.220No, but I think that also speaks volumes about where the Canadian political discourse is, that you have to run those calculations.
00:10:54.100And, I mean, I've always been a big believer in flattening taxes, for example, because if you have a flatter tax, maybe even not a pure flat tax, but if you have a flatter tax, you're basically saying, look, we want everyone to have lower taxes.
00:11:04.680As opposed to the child fitness tax credit, the home renovation tax credit, the transgender renovator tax credit.
00:11:14.880It's great politics, but it's not as good policy.
00:11:17.820And to be fair, I mean, we don't have a conservative platform yet.
00:11:20.760We have a liberal budget, which is basically a liberal platform.
00:11:23.860But I would love to see the conservative message be a solidly conservative message.
00:11:30.220And I think that if we go beyond speaking style and energy level and all of that, that's where Andrew Scheer can, first off, cut out the Maxime Bernier effect.
00:11:37.480And also, I think, appeal to centrists and moderates.
00:11:40.640And also, too, those red meat policy want conservatives.
00:11:43.580You know, I would wager the reason why people appear at this man conference if they've traveled across the country and the reason why people join any political party is because ultimately they do believe that their viewpoint, the issues they're advocating for it.
00:12:29.280Yeah, and I do think that's important.
00:12:31.060And the one issue that I think will always be the front and center is people's pocketbooks.
00:12:35.440Like, that's always going to be the number one issue.
00:12:37.780I was chatting with Joe Oliver, and that interview will be out very shortly, and he had said that, you know, deficits are important and debt's important and all of that.
00:12:44.880But you have to go to Canadians and say, this is costing you $400 a year.
00:13:11.340What do you want to be the takeaway from this, Anthony?
00:13:13.480Well, back to what we were saying at the beginning.
00:13:14.800I think the rallying cry, what conservatives who have really come from all across Canada to be a part of this meeting, that is a non-official conservative party meeting, a small-c conservative movement.
00:13:24.860What do they feel is the issue du jour, whether it's just for them or what Andrew Scheer should take to the polls, in terms of the narrative, the story, the issue?