Conservative Leadership Weekend
Episode Stats
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Summary
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
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You're listening to The Blueprint, Canada's Conservative Podcast.
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You're listening to The Blueprint, Canada's official podcast of the Canadian Conservative Party.
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I'm here as your host. My name is Tony Clement.
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I'm the Member of Parliament for Paris Sound Muskoka,
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and a member of the Conservative Caucus team in Ottawa, working for you.
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I'm here with John Broussard, MP for Barrie, Innisfil. Welcome, John.
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I'm doing very well. Great to have you on the program.
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We're going to talk a little bit about where we are right now.
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We're actually in Toronto at the Congress Centre,
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and this is part of the culmination, really, of the leadership contest
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that happened in the Conservative Party of Canada over the last few months,
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and it is culminating in the selection of a new leader for the Conservative Party of Canada.
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John, is this your first leadership convention?
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and, you know, you can actually feel the excitement out there in the hallways right now.
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so I didn't want to get stuck in traffic on the 400 with these ballots in my car,
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They're coming up to you and saying hi and wanting to get their picture taken with you,
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so there's a lot of excitement going into this weekend.
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Well, and, you know, the members have, you know,
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our colleagues have worked very, very hard to get to this point,
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and it all begins, actually, tomorrow night after a leader is chosen.
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Yeah, a new stage, really, because one thing ends,
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that is to say the leadership contest, and another thing begins,
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which is the party pivoting from what is essentially an internal event,
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a race inside the family of the Conservative Party of Canada,
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and then we start to then really focus outside to talk to Canadians more and more and more,
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which we're doing a lot of already with interim leader Ronna Ambrose.
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I know you've been a very forceful critic on veterans issues, as an example,
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Ontario-based issues as well, because you're a Barry-based politician.
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But it really is a unique event, and let's unpack that a little bit,
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And I ran for leader twice, once provincially in Ontario,
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once at the last leadership contest in 2004 against Stephen Harper.
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But what's different about this is we're going to break the record
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in terms of the number of people participating in a leadership contest.
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It's going to be over north of 125,000, 130,000 people.
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Tell us a little bit from your perspective, and Barry,
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the people getting involved, membership sales, these kinds of things.
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Give us a little bit of a taste from your writing.
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Well, we've seen our membership numbers double during this leadership contest.
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I actually did an interview with one of the local radio stations on my way down here,
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and I was telling them, you know, we've got 13 of our colleagues, conservative members,
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some in caucus, some not, who are running in this campaign.
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And a lot of them have shared a lot of different ideas.
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And, you know, any time you go through a leadership process, you really look at renewal.
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There are, you know, people that you agree with, some people you don't agree with
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But at the end of the day, we're all conservatives,
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and we need to come out of this leadership convention working and rowing in the same direction.
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And if anything, Rana's done, Tony, over the last 18 months that she's been the interim leader,
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is, you know, create this caucus unity, put the party in great financial shape.
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There's 259,000 conservative members now within our party.
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So whoever wins the leadership at the end of the day tomorrow has a party that's in great shape,
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has a caucus that's strong, not just a strong opposition,
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but as we've said many times in our caucus, a government in waiting.
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And I look forward to what the future holds for our conservative cause and our conservative movement.
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I think that's a key point, that unity is going to be important.
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We've had a race with, and this is a good thing, people with different ideas,
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different policy planks, different proposals for the future of the country
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And that's been a great debate to have inside the party.
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But at the end of the day, the members are going to speak.
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And then we're going to come out of it with a leader, and we should be unified under that leadership.
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One of the things I should mention to listeners is how the voting process takes place,
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because really the voting has been taking place over the last couple of weeks already
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And so every party member who was signed up by a certain date got a ballot through the mail.
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And indeed, they could mark off the ballot, but not just one choice.
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They could mark up to 10 choices out of the 13 candidates.
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And I think it's, you know, it's difficult to predict who is going to win because of that.
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And I think it's relatively easy to predict after that first ballot who might be first.
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You know, who ended up second on a certain candidate's, you know, ballot?
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So, you know, I think it's going to be intense.
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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
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to figure out, you know, who's going to be first, second, or third after, you know,
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the first round of balloting is counted, the second round, third round.
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I don't think that this is going to be settled much until probably the sixth or seventh round,
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if not beyond that, because there are so many variables at play here.
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And so I kind of, you know, I used to watch the conventions.
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I kind of like when those, you know, those groups start sort of working their way over to different candidates.
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We're not going to see that tomorrow night in the convention, but we are going to get a sense,
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I think, by the second, third, maybe fourth ballot, you know,
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which direction the party membership is going in terms of who they're going to select as a leader.
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And the other thing that's happening, of course, is each riding is given the same number of points.
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Each riding is equal in the selection of leader.
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We have 338 ridings, so there's 33,800 points up for grabs.
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And the first person to 50% plus one of those points becomes the leader.
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So what that means, you know, in more densely populated areas like the GTA, for example,
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or even Alberta, where they may have 2,500 members in a particular riding,
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But a riding in eastern Canada, for example, that has 25 members, it still counts as 100 points.
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And so what that has meant throughout this process is to make sure the importance of our leadership candidates
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to get to every region and to get to every riding in the country to not only listen to our grassroots memberships,
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but also to understand the importance of those ridings in our conservative family.
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Well, the good news, when you have 260,000 members across the country,
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it really does mean that the average riding has, you know, hundreds of members associated with it,
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which is great news for the revitalization of the party.
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Much to our surprise, the party has been able to fundraise throughout the leadership contest.
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You have the leadership candidates fundraising for their own campaigns,
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but the party fundraising has been a big success as well.
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And we were able to beat the liberals at their own game in terms of that,
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but doing it by each incremental person donating 10 bucks, 25 bucks, 50 bucks.
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It's not one of these big, richy-rich, you know, let's meet Justin Trudeau.
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Yeah, let's meet Justin Trudeau for 1,500 bucks.
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And again, it speaks to the grassroots of our party,
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motivated not just to donate to the conservative party to make sure that we're a viable opposition,
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but also understanding perhaps that, you know, there's a lot of conservatives that are not happy,
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who are not happy with the job that the liberals are doing.
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And as I said earlier, not just be a strong opposition, but a government in waiting.
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And so, you know, it's not really a surprise to me.
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Blaine Culkins and I have really sort of taken that ethics issue into the House of Commons
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and tried to expose the liberals and their, you know, they're seemingly back to their old ways.
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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?
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That they weren't, you know, they were going to be open.
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So when I look at our base, and you probably hear it in your writing, Tony, I'm hearing it in mine.
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I mean, people are not happy with the current situation, debt, deficit, ethics issues.
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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,
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We've got a couple of seconds left in the program.
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But you're optimistic about the future in terms of once the leader is chosen, we can move forward.
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Because, you know, for Canadians to have a viable alternative like a strong conservative party that's united behind our leader,
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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,
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not just to our finances, the economy, you know, security, perhaps.
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Tony, as public safety critic, you understand exactly what I'm talking about there.
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We need to make sure that we come out of this united, strong, and be ready for 2019.
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We are at the Leadership Convention of the Conservative Party of Canada.
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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.
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Thank you for listening to The Blueprint, Canada's Conservative podcast.
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To find more episodes, interviews, and in-depth discussions of politics in Canada,
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search for The Blueprint on iTunes or visit podcast.conservative.ca.