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


Conservative Leadership Weekend


Episode Stats

Length

11 minutes

Words per Minute

170.89876

Word Count

2,046

Sentence Count

124

Misogynist Sentences

1

Hate Speech Sentences

1


Summary


Transcript

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.
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,
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.