The Blueprint: Canada's Conservative Podcast - May 26, 2017


Conservative Leadership Weekend

Topics
leadership convention excitement leadership contest leadership fundraising united conservative party for 2019
Hosted by
Jamie Schmal
Guests
John Broussard
Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Barry Innisfil John Barrasso Stephen Harper Blaine Calkins Ronna Ambrose Rana
Michael Cooper on the Liberal gutting of Wynn’s Law Conservatives united： Andrew Scheer’s victory speech in Toronto

Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

170.9

Word count

2,046

Sentence count

129

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

John Broussard, MP for Barrie-Innisfil and a member of the Conservative caucus in Ottawa, joins the show to talk about the upcoming leadership convention in Toronto, and what he's looking forward to in the coming days.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 You're listening to The Blueprint, Canada's Conservative Podcast.
00:00:09.220 And now, here's your host, Tony Clement.
00:00:12.040 You're listening to The Blueprint, Canada's official podcast of the Canadian Conservative Party.
00:00:17.440 I'm here as your host. My name is Tony Clement.
00:00:20.380 I'm the Member of Parliament for Paris Sound Muskoka,
00:00:23.200 and a member of the Conservative Caucus team in Ottawa, working for you.
00:00:28.080 I'm here with John Broussard, MP for Barrie, Innisfil. Welcome, John.
00:00:32.940 Thank you, Tony. How are you doing today?
00:00:34.280 I'm doing very well. Great to have you on the program.
00:00:36.120 We're going to talk a little bit about where we are right now.
00:00:38.600 We're not in Ottawa broadcasting this.
00:00:40.440 We're actually in Toronto at the Congress Centre,
00:00:44.700 and this is part of the culmination, really, of the leadership contest
00:00:49.380 that happened in the Conservative Party of Canada over the last few months,
00:00:53.200 and it is culminating in the selection of a new leader for the Conservative Party of Canada.
00:00:57.620 John, is this your first leadership convention?
00:00:59.700 This is my first leadership convention,
00:01:02.680 and, you know, you can actually feel the excitement out there in the hallways right now.
00:01:07.980 I got here a little earlier this afternoon.
00:01:10.820 I actually had some ballots to drop off,
00:01:12.700 so I didn't want to get stuck in traffic on the 400 with these ballots in my car,
00:01:18.020 but you can really sense the excitement.
00:01:20.520 The members are there.
00:01:21.460 You know, many of them are here already.
00:01:24.220 They're coming up to you and saying hi and wanting to get their picture taken with you,
00:01:29.820 so there's a lot of excitement going into this weekend.
00:01:32.180 It's been a year, right?
00:01:34.020 Or over a year for some of them.
00:01:35.120 Well, and, you know, the members have, you know,
00:01:38.000 our colleagues have worked very, very hard to get to this point,
00:01:40.860 and it all begins, actually, tomorrow night after a leader is chosen.
00:01:46.980 Yeah, a new stage, really, because one thing ends,
00:01:50.720 that is to say the leadership contest, and another thing begins,
00:01:53.920 which is the party pivoting from what is essentially an internal event,
00:01:59.440 a race inside the family of the Conservative Party of Canada,
00:02:03.140 and then we start to then really focus outside to talk to Canadians more and more and more,
00:02:09.600 even more than we've been doing already,
00:02:11.620 which we're doing a lot of already with interim leader Ronna Ambrose. 0.97
00:02:15.020 I know you've been a very forceful critic on veterans issues, as an example,
00:02:20.800 Ontario-based issues as well, because you're a Barry-based politician.
00:02:25.680 But it really is a unique event, and let's unpack that a little bit,
00:02:29.860 because this is your first leadership contest.
00:02:32.460 This is my 12th leadership convention.
00:02:35.560 And you ran for leader.
00:02:36.500 And I ran for leader twice, once provincially in Ontario,
00:02:39.580 once at the last leadership contest in 2004 against Stephen Harper.
00:02:44.280 But what's different about this is we're going to break the record
00:02:49.160 in terms of the number of people participating in a leadership contest.
00:02:53.520 It's going to be over north of 125,000, 130,000 people.
00:02:58.200 Tell us a little bit from your perspective, and Barry,
00:03:00.740 the people getting involved, membership sales, these kinds of things.
00:03:05.620 Give us a little bit of a taste from your writing.
00:03:07.880 Well, we've seen our membership numbers double during this leadership contest.
00:03:14.100 I actually did an interview with one of the local radio stations on my way down here,
00:03:18.520 and I was telling them, you know, we've got 13 of our colleagues, conservative members,
00:03:25.240 some in caucus, some not, who are running in this campaign.
00:03:28.860 And a lot of them have shared a lot of different ideas.
00:03:31.300 And, you know, any time you go through a leadership process, you really look at renewal.
00:03:36.340 It's renewal of the party.
00:03:37.620 It's an endorsement of the democratic process.
00:03:41.000 There are, you know, people that you agree with, some people you don't agree with
00:03:44.620 in terms of their vision and their policy.
00:03:47.340 But at the end of the day, we're all conservatives,
00:03:49.460 and we need to come out of this leadership convention working and rowing in the same direction.
00:03:55.580 And if anything, Rana's done, Tony, over the last 18 months that she's been the interim leader,
00:04:01.940 is, you know, create this caucus unity, put the party in great financial shape.
00:04:08.900 There's 259,000 conservative members now within our party.
00:04:14.240 So whoever wins the leadership at the end of the day tomorrow has a party that's in great shape,
00:04:20.800 has a caucus that's strong, not just a strong opposition,
00:04:24.460 but as we've said many times in our caucus, a government in waiting.
00:04:28.600 And I look forward to what the future holds for our conservative cause and our conservative movement.
00:04:34.000 I think that's a key point, that unity is going to be important.
00:04:37.060 We've had a race with, and this is a good thing, people with different ideas, 1.00
00:04:41.480 different policy planks, different proposals for the future of the country
00:04:44.680 and the direction of the Conservative Party.
00:04:46.380 And that's been a great debate to have inside the party.
00:04:49.380 But at the end of the day, the members are going to speak.
00:04:51.260 Each member has a vote in this, a direct vote.
00:04:55.300 And then we're going to come out of it with a leader, and we should be unified under that leadership.
00:05:00.560 One of the things I should mention to listeners is how the voting process takes place,
00:05:04.300 because really the voting has been taking place over the last couple of weeks already
00:05:07.600 through a mail-in ballot.
00:05:09.660 And so every party member who was signed up by a certain date got a ballot through the mail.
00:05:15.640 And indeed, they could mark off the ballot, but not just one choice.
00:05:19.060 They could mark up to 10 choices out of the 13 candidates.
00:05:21.800 Correct.
00:05:22.260 So it's a ranked ballot, right?
00:05:23.780 Yeah.
00:05:24.000 And I think it's, you know, it's difficult to predict who is going to win because of that.
00:05:29.320 I know there's been a lot of polling done.
00:05:30.980 And I think it's relatively easy to predict after that first ballot who might be first.
00:05:36.560 But then there's a lot of variables in play.
00:05:39.140 You know, who ended up second on a certain candidate's, you know, ballot?
00:05:44.680 We just don't know at this point.
00:05:46.260 So, you know, I think it's going to be intense.
00:05:49.720 I think it's going to really put people in a, people are going to be hanging off the edge of their seat tomorrow night
00:05:56.140 to figure out, you know, who's going to be first, second, or third after, you know,
00:06:01.620 the first round of balloting is counted, the second round, third round.
00:06:05.260 I don't think that this is going to be settled much until probably the sixth or seventh round,
00:06:10.460 if not beyond that, because there are so many variables at play here.
00:06:14.500 And so I kind of, you know, I used to watch the conventions.
00:06:17.480 You've been involved in many of them.
00:06:19.040 I kind of like when those, you know, those groups start sort of working their way over to different candidates.
00:06:24.240 We're not going to see that tomorrow night in the convention, but we are going to get a sense,
00:06:28.920 I think, by the second, third, maybe fourth ballot, you know,
00:06:32.660 which direction the party membership is going in terms of who they're going to select as a leader.
00:06:37.440 It's a great unveiling.
00:06:38.700 And the other thing that's happening, of course, is each riding is given the same number of points.
00:06:43.620 Each riding is equal in the selection of leader.
00:06:46.160 Each one is worth 100 points.
00:06:47.620 We have 338 ridings, so there's 33,800 points up for grabs.
00:06:53.140 And the first person to 50% plus one of those points becomes the leader.
00:06:57.640 So what that means, you know, in more densely populated areas like the GTA, for example,
00:07:03.200 or even Alberta, where they may have 2,500 members in a particular riding,
00:07:08.460 it still counts as 100 points.
00:07:10.120 But a riding in eastern Canada, for example, that has 25 members, it still counts as 100 points.
00:07:18.480 And so what that has meant throughout this process is to make sure the importance of our leadership candidates
00:07:24.800 to get to every region and to get to every riding in the country to not only listen to our grassroots memberships,
00:07:32.580 but also to understand the importance of those ridings in our conservative family.
00:07:37.240 Well, the good news, when you have 260,000 members across the country,
00:07:42.020 it really does mean that the average riding has, you know, hundreds of members associated with it,
00:07:48.280 which is great news for the revitalization of the party.
00:07:50.940 The other thing is the fundraising.
00:07:52.180 Much to our surprise, the party has been able to fundraise throughout the leadership contest.
00:07:58.860 You have the leadership candidates fundraising for their own campaigns,
00:08:01.680 but the party fundraising has been a big success as well.
00:08:04.920 And we were able to beat the liberals at their own game in terms of that,
00:08:08.200 but doing it by each incremental person donating 10 bucks, 25 bucks, 50 bucks.
00:08:14.680 It's not one of these big, richy-rich, you know, let's meet Justin Trudeau.
00:08:18.800 Cash for access fundraisers.
00:08:20.180 Yeah, let's meet Justin Trudeau for 1,500 bucks.
00:08:22.440 We're doing it $100 or $25 at a time.
00:08:25.340 And again, it speaks to the grassroots of our party,
00:08:29.360 motivated not just to donate to the conservative party to make sure that we're a viable opposition,
00:08:36.860 but also understanding perhaps that, you know, there's a lot of conservatives that are not happy,
00:08:42.660 who are not happy with the job that the liberals are doing.
00:08:45.240 And they want to see us be strong.
00:08:47.860 And as I said earlier, not just be a strong opposition, but a government in waiting.
00:08:52.100 And so, you know, it's not really a surprise to me.
00:08:54.820 Blaine Culkins and I have really sort of taken that ethics issue into the House of Commons
00:09:01.760 and tried to expose the liberals and their, you know, they're seemingly back to their old ways.
00:09:07.880 And it's upsetting a lot of people because here's a prime minister and a liberal party who talked about doing things differently, right?
00:09:16.600 That they weren't, you know, they were going to be open.
00:09:18.640 They were going to be transparent.
00:09:19.700 Well, nothing could be further from the truth.
00:09:21.160 So when I look at our base, and you probably hear it in your writing, Tony, I'm hearing it in mine.
00:09:26.160 You travel the country, I travel the country.
00:09:28.320 I mean, people are not happy with the current situation, debt, deficit, ethics issues.
00:09:33.860 So I'm not surprised that our base is motivated to donate to our party and put us in a financial position that we're in right now,
00:09:41.080 which is good for the new leader.
00:09:43.400 John Brassard is with me.
00:09:44.500 He is the MP for Barry Innisfil.
00:09:47.060 We've got a couple of seconds left in the program.
00:09:49.660 I'm John, thanks for being on the show.
00:09:51.740 But you're optimistic about the future in terms of once the leader is chosen, we can move forward.
00:09:56.660 Is that right?
00:09:57.060 We have to.
00:09:58.460 Because, you know, for Canadians to have a viable alternative like a strong conservative party that's united behind our leader,
00:10:08.460 that's, that's, we need that going into 2019.
00:10:12.540 Because if we give the Liberals another mandate for four years, I can't think of the damage, the even greater damage that's going to be done,
00:10:20.720 not just to our finances, the economy, you know, security, perhaps.
00:10:25.460 Tony, as public safety critic, you understand exactly what I'm talking about there.
00:10:29.840 We need to make sure that we come out of this united, strong, and be ready for 2019.
00:10:36.480 Well, you've heard it here, John Brassard.
00:10:39.000 Thanks for being on the program, Blueprint.
00:10:41.420 We are at the Leadership Convention of the Conservative Party of Canada.
00:10:44.580 We'll have a leader this time on Sunday.
00:10:48.340 And we'll be ready to take our case to the Canadian people in the two and a half years left of the Trudeau mandate.
00:10:54.060 Thanks again.
00:10:54.580 And a caucus meeting on Monday morning.
00:10:56.120 You got it.
00:10:56.720 We're going to keep working hard.
00:10:57.920 Thank you.
00:10:58.340 Thank you for listening to The Blueprint, Canada's Conservative podcast.
00:11:12.140 To find more episodes, interviews, and in-depth discussions of politics in Canada,
00:11:16.420 search for The Blueprint on iTunes or visit podcast.conservative.ca.
00:11:20.780 Thank you.
00:11:28.340 We'll see you next time.