The Candice Malcolm Show - February 02, 2022


Erin O’Toole’s time as CPC leader is coming to an end


Episode Stats


Length

25 minutes

Words per minute

199.16374

Word count

5,176

Sentence count

332

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

8

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Candice Malan asks the question: Where has Aaron O'Toole been since the truckers' rally in support of the Conservative Party of Canada? And why hasn't he been on the lawn of the House of Commons?

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 .
00:00:00.000 Is this the end of Aaron O'Toole's time as leader of the Conservative Party of Canada?
00:00:03.500 It's looking that way. I spoke to MPs who said that he needs to step down gracefully
00:00:07.240 to save the party. I'm Candice Malcolm and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.
00:00:15.160 Hi everyone, thank you so much for tuning into the podcast today. We have a lot to get to today.
00:00:20.060 You probably saw the story of 35 MPs who have signed a letter demanding a leadership review,
00:00:24.400 demanding a vote in the Conservative caucus meeting on Wednesday to determine the fate
00:00:28.400 of leader Aaron O'Toole and whether or not he will remain as leader. We're going to get to it all
00:00:32.820 today, but I want to start by just asking a simple question. Where has Aaron O'Toole been? Where was
00:00:38.920 he all of last week and all weekend during this trucker convoy? We saw this beautiful, amazing
00:00:44.320 moment in our country where so many people united behind these truckers, where the simple message
00:00:49.660 of just saying we want our country back, we want our freedom back, resonated with so many people.
00:00:54.820 We saw people coming out in droves on the side of freeways to cheer on these truckers.
00:00:59.600 We saw a huge rally in Ottawa, completely peaceful, no injuries, no arrests, a huge remarkable success
00:01:06.420 despite the very best efforts of the media, of the Liberal Party, of all of those out there trying to
00:01:12.400 smear these working class truckers and say that there's something that they're not. That all failed.
00:01:17.400 That all fell flat. We have this beautiful moment of unity. It really feels like the country is starting
00:01:21.980 to change, that we've come around a corner and that we can finally see light at the end of the
00:01:25.840 tunnel. This is all a great news story. And it was an opportunity for Aaron O'Toole. Remember that
00:01:31.240 when Aaron O'Toole became leader of the party, one of the messages that he had that I liked was that
00:01:35.920 he didn't shy away from comparisons with Donald Trump. He said, obviously, he's different than Trump
00:01:41.380 and he has different rhetoric and a different approach. However, the things that Trump did to capture
00:01:47.020 the imagination of the working class to woo voters who had previously voted for the Democrats in the
00:01:52.400 U.S., O'Toole wanted a similar strategy. He put out a plea to union workers, to people who worked in
00:01:58.880 steel mills, to people who worked in manufacturing, and he asked for their support. He wanted to court
00:02:04.320 blue-collar workers into the party. Well, what better opportunity for Aaron O'Toole when thousands of
00:02:10.160 them, tens of thousands of them show up on his doorstep, show up on the lawns of the House of Commons,
00:02:15.200 of Parliament, demanding their freedom. Freedom is supposed to be a core message for the Conservative
00:02:20.380 Party. That is core in their beliefs. So you have these workers that Aaron O'Toole has said that he
00:02:25.000 wants to court showing up on his lawn. We have their message being completely in sync and in unison with
00:02:30.900 the message of the Conservative Party. Less government, limited government, more individual
00:02:35.140 responsibility, more freedom. That is what they want. It was the perfect opportunity for Aaron O'Toole.
00:02:40.640 And yet O'Toole completely passed it up. He didn't know what position he wanted to take. He had that
00:02:45.980 pathetic exchange last week where he couldn't answer questions from the Parliamentary Press Gallery
00:02:50.380 about whether he was going to meet with the organizers, whether he was going to be part of
00:02:55.580 this rally. He just kind of stepped away from it. He had a very meek response. It was hard to say
00:03:00.280 whether he was in support of it or not. And so you have O'Toole sort of publicly faltering over this.
00:03:06.520 And meanwhile, we saw more and more MPs stepping up and saying that, no, no, we support the truckers.
00:03:11.980 These are our people and we support their message. We support the work that they do. And we agree
00:03:16.620 with freedom. We agree with ending the mandates. So you have this awkward situation where O'Toole is
00:03:21.360 not taking a very strong position. His own deputy leader, Candace Bergen, was taking a strong
00:03:25.940 position. You have Pierre Polyev, who's emerged as the star of the party. And he is out there
00:03:30.260 fearlessly and passionately defending these truckers. He's at the rally. He's meeting with people.
00:03:35.540 He's dispelling the awful rumors and lies and slurs that the media was putting out there,
00:03:41.180 showing how diverse and how united and how positive and how happy these protesters were.
00:03:47.300 And yet the leader of the party himself was just nowhere to be found. My colleague Andrew
00:03:51.640 Lawton reported that the organizer of the convoy and the organizer of the GoFundMe account said that
00:03:56.820 she hadn't heard anything from Aaron O'Toole, that his office hadn't reached out to her at all. So there
00:04:01.460 was no attempt from O'Toole to reach out to the truckers, to try to connect with them, to try to
00:04:06.860 say, hey, I want blue-collar people in my party. Let me try to understand what your grievances are. 0.98
00:04:12.480 Let's have a conversation. Let me try to represent you. Instead, he was nowhere to be found, completely
00:04:18.480 disappeared. And this continued on Monday. So Monday was another opportunity. He missed the opportunity
00:04:23.280 last week to get on board with the convoy as it was picking up steam, as it was coming across the
00:04:28.440 country and more and more people, including really high, most high profile people in the world, Elon
00:04:32.740 Musk, Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, all through there as support behind the trucker rally. Even Donald
00:04:37.920 Trump and Donald Trump Jr. both did as well. O'Toole missed that opportunity. He missed the opportunity
00:04:43.000 on the weekend to be seen at the rally, to go and talk to people as more and more and more of his MPs
00:04:47.640 were there. O'Toole was just simply not there. And then on Monday, he had another opportunity,
00:04:52.260 a third opportunity when it came to the trucker convoy to, again, just defend the truckers,
00:04:57.000 say that the things that the media are saying, the things that the liberals are saying about the
00:05:00.520 truckers are malicious lies, and that he will always be there to defend blue collar workers 0.97
00:05:05.600 and the working class. Instead, he didn't do that. He let his colleagues, Pierre Polyev and Candace
00:05:11.460 Bergen, they were the ones in the House of Commons passionately defending these truckers. Here is
00:05:15.920 Candace Bergen. Here's what that looked like. 1.00
00:05:17.520 We all condemn hateful and destructive acts by a few at any protest, whether it's beheading the
00:05:24.640 statue of Queen Victoria in Manitoba, tearing down the statue of Sir Johnny in Montreal,
00:05:30.340 or putting flags on Terry Fox, whether it's burning churches, whether it's wearing blackface,
00:05:36.000 whether it's Hezbollah flags, or Nazi flags. We all condemn it. But I'm not talking about that. 0.89
00:05:43.860 And here is Pierre Polyev, again, doing the things that the leader of the party should have been doing.
00:05:50.760 Well, the problem is they've shown no respect for the people. This country right now is like a raw
00:05:58.320 nerve, and the Prime Minister is jumping up and down on it again and again with his inflammatory
00:06:05.260 rhetoric. We're talking about people who have 14-year-old kids that are suicidal after two years
00:06:11.800 of lockdowns. I just spoke to a waitress whose business was wiped out by lockdowns. I'm talking to
00:06:17.800 truckers who've been serving food on our plates throughout this, and these are the very people,
00:06:24.020 honest, hard-working, shirt-off-your-back type of people that this Prime Minister keeps attacking.
00:06:29.700 Mr. Speaker, I was out on an overpass as the truckers went by, and what I saw were cheerful,
00:06:36.360 patriotic, optimistic Canadians who want their freedom back and want their livelihoods back.
00:06:42.600 And they're standing up for their fellow Canadians, the 60% of families who fear they can't feed
00:06:48.400 themselves. The 28-year-old kid living in mom's basement because he can't afford a home. The
00:06:54.520 small businessman wiped out by endless lockdowns by incompetent politicians. These are the people
00:07:00.440 that are standing up and fighting for their livelihoods and their freedom. Why won't the
00:07:04.500 government finally stand with them?
00:07:06.160 The worst thing that happened on Monday was not anything to do with Erin O'Toole. It was when
00:07:10.540 our Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, came out and said that he was disgusted by the truckers,
00:07:16.560 repeated every single slur and lie that the media had been peddling about the truckers,
00:07:20.840 and basically just saying that he refused to talk to anybody that didn't have the same opinion of him.
00:07:26.380 So here is what our despicable, loathsome, angry, hateful, deranged Prime Minister had to say
00:07:34.240 about the good truckers of this country. Hate can never be the answer. Over the past few days,
00:07:43.520 Canadians were shocked and frankly disgusted by the behaviour displayed by some people protesting
00:07:50.780 in our nation's capital. And here is him saying that the people at the rally are wearing tinfoil hats.
00:07:56.380 The concerns expressed by a few people gathered in Ottawa right now are not new, not surprising,
00:08:06.220 are heard, but are a continuation of what we've unfortunately seen in disinformation and
00:08:15.260 misinformation online, conspiracy theorists about microchips, about God knows what else that go with
00:08:23.220 tinfoil hats. Speaking of tinfoil hats, I showed this on the podcast yesterday. One of Justin Trudeau's
00:08:28.860 state broadcast journalists, someone over at the CBC, actually asked a minister in Trudeau government
00:08:34.220 whether the Russians were the ones that were organising this whole trucker rally. Talk about 0.87
00:08:38.220 tinfoil hats, Justin Trudeau. It's so absurd the kinds of ad hominem attacks that he just throws out
00:08:44.480 at his enemies. And this is the one that really irked me. I think this really upset a lot of Canadians
00:08:49.260 because he was asked why he's not meeting with the trucker convoy after he met with other protests,
00:08:54.380 including protests that had very radical elements like Black Lives Matter. He was willing to go to
00:08:58.820 those rallies. He was willing to meet with the organisers of those rallies, even though they were
00:09:02.180 fringe in the demands, actually fringe. The trucker convoy was mainstream. It represents the mainstream
00:09:06.760 view of Canadians. That was established. 54% of Canadians said that they want the mandates gone,
00:09:11.740 that they want people to individually deal with COVID, that they want the COVID pandemic to be over.
00:09:16.400 So it's not fringe to be part of the trucker convoy. What is fringe is Black Lives Matter who wants to
00:09:21.240 defund the police. Justin Trudeau met with them and he said that the reason that he met with Black 0.88
00:09:26.040 Lives Matter but won't meet with the truckers is because he agrees with Black Lives Matter. Here's 0.93
00:09:29.940 what that looked like. I have attended protests and rallies in the past when I agreed with the goals,
00:09:36.860 when I supported the people expressing their concerns and their issues. Black Lives Matter is an 0.98
00:09:42.340 excellent example of that. But I have also chosen to not go anywhere near protests that have expressed
00:09:49.860 hateful rhetoric, violence towards fellow citizens, and a disrespect, not just of science, but of the
00:09:58.740 frontline health workers and, quite frankly, the 90% of truckers who have been doing the right thing
00:10:05.200 to keep Canadians safe.
00:10:06.620 So Justin Trudeau says he only meets with groups that he agrees with. Well, meanwhile,
00:10:11.020 he only received 32% of the popular vote in the last election. That is the slimmest share of the
00:10:16.220 overall election support in Canadian history, 32.2%, which means that 67.8% of Canadians who voted
00:10:25.000 did not vote for him. So if you're part of the two-thirds of the country who vote that didn't vote for
00:10:30.960 Trudeau, he won't even bother meeting with you because you don't share his radical,
00:10:35.360 woke, left-wing ideology. Again, all this does is set the stage for what Aaron O'Toole could have
00:10:42.040 done. Aaron O'Toole still had the opportunity to save everything, to step up and say,
00:10:47.160 Justin Trudeau, how dare you? How dare you malign these workers, these truckers, the backbone of our
00:10:52.420 economy, the ones who have sacrificed so much to make sure that Canadians continue to get the supply
00:10:57.120 chain, continue to get the food and the goods that they need. He could have come out so strong
00:11:01.540 and condemned Trudeau and stood up for the truckers and stood up for the working man and redeemed
00:11:07.280 himself in the eyes of so many conservatives. So what was O'Toole's response? Did he come out
00:11:11.500 swinging? Well, my colleague Andrew Lawton had some advice for him. This is what he tweeted.
00:11:15.540 Justin Trudeau has given Aaron O'Toole a gift. The convoy has motivated and inspired people all over
00:11:20.160 the country, far beyond conservative political circles. Yet Trudeau wants to demonize them all.
00:11:25.160 O'Toole needs to hold a press conference on the flatbed in front of center block. That's right.
00:11:29.760 That's correct. That's what he should have done. He should have wrapped himself up in the Canadian 1.00
00:11:32.920 flag, stood shoulder to shoulder with these truckers and said to Justin Trudeau, we demand
00:11:37.740 something different. But instead, I tweeted back to Andrew just in jest, but he won't, right? He won't.
00:11:44.220 He won't do that. O'Toole will not show solidarity. He will not stand with the truckers. Instead,
00:11:49.480 he, what did he do? He put out a seven minute Facebook video where he just didn't really say
00:11:54.880 anything. In typical fashion, he just sort of repeated his own lines that he's comfortable with.
00:12:00.060 He didn't make a passionate defense. He didn't call out Justin Trudeau for the despicableness of
00:12:04.680 the statement that he put out. And again, he just showed that he doesn't really have it in him
00:12:09.200 to defend conservative principles and values. He doesn't really have it in him to fight against
00:12:14.080 Justin Trudeau. And so I think at this point, to me and to many people out there, the writing was
00:12:18.260 sort of on the wall. Like, this guy is just falling flat in every single way possible. I wasn't
00:12:23.140 surprised. I didn't know this was coming. I wasn't surprised, though, when I saw the news on Monday
00:12:28.520 evening. This came out after dinner around 7.30 p.m. This news dropped from the Globe and Mail. O'Toole
00:12:34.000 faces a caucus revolt as 35 MPs sign a letter calling for leadership review vote. The letter was sent to
00:12:40.560 caucus chair Scott Reid on Monday. It's based on the Reform Act that the conservative MPs adopted a few
00:12:47.020 months ago. And this means that it requires a leadership review by conservative MPs as early
00:12:53.080 as Wednesday's regular caucus meeting. And at that meeting, if more than 50 percent of caucus votes
00:12:58.280 against Aaron O'Toole, he will have to step down immediately. It is a secret ballot vote. So anything
00:13:04.320 could happen. And there is a lot of speculation already. I heard from a conservative source that
00:13:08.680 there are 63 MPs who are planning to vote against Aaron O'Toole. 63. There are only 119 caucus members.
00:13:15.720 So that's more than half of caucus. If that's the case, if that's accurate, then O'Toole is finished and he
00:13:20.840 will be he will be removed as leader of the party on Wednesday. That's speculation at this point, because of
00:13:26.140 course, we don't know what's going to happen. We don't know what each individual MP will choose to do on
00:13:31.220 Wednesday if that's when the vote happens, which I'm hearing from MPs. It is. We won't know till Wednesday, but that
00:13:35.880 is the direction that things are going. And so at the same time as this Globe and Mail piece came out, Alberta
00:13:42.160 conservative MP Bob Benzin issued his own statement openly calling for a caucus review of Aaron O'Toole.
00:13:48.320 And he admits that he was one of the 35 MPs who signed a letter. The 35 MPs, by the way, it's not
00:13:54.200 public. We don't know who those MPs are unless those MPs themselves choose to come forward. And for best I
00:14:00.280 can tell, we have two MPs who have publicly stepped forward saying that they are on that list. And those
00:14:04.600 MPs are Bob Benzin and Garnett Jenis, who's an MP up near Edmonton. Okay, so back to Benzin's letter.
00:14:10.980 He writes this as one of only seven sitting MPs to endorse Mr. O'Toole in both the 2017 and 2020
00:14:18.400 leadership contest. This decision did not come lightly. Mr. O'Toole campaigned in the leadership
00:14:23.300 as a principled conservative voice that would unite the party. However, since Mr. O'Toole assumed the
00:14:28.400 position of leader, there have been numerous instances of flip-flops and questionable judgment
00:14:32.560 on Mr. O'Toole's part, including, and then he names a bunch of examples, including the de facto
00:14:37.360 carbon tax policy, pressuring MPs to support the entirety of the 2021 election platform,
00:14:43.940 his failure to stand up against Bill 96 in Quebec to protest the rights of English-speaking
00:14:48.320 minority in Quebec, and finally, a failure to clearly stand up for the chart of rights and
00:14:53.220 freedoms for Canadians during the pandemic. So pretty devastating stuff there from someone
00:14:58.780 who publicly supported Aaron O'Toole twice. That's got to hurt. And so what we saw online
00:15:03.880 very, very quickly after this came out was spin. The spin, the pushing of information from Aaron
00:15:10.160 O'Toole's office, you can tell that they are getting desperate at this point because the stuff
00:15:14.220 that they're putting out is truly damaging to the conservative party. They're basically taking a
00:15:19.660 scorched earth approach. Like if you're going to take Aaron O'Toole down, we are going to destroy
00:15:23.360 the party on the way out. This is what I'm talking about. So Alex Boudelier over at Global News
00:15:28.360 tweeted the following senior conservative source just now. This is the conversion crew at work.
00:15:34.920 They got all ignited after the vote in December on conversion therapy. The far right of the party
00:15:40.160 is not happy with the leader over it. So again, trying to very simplify this and say that this
00:15:44.720 all stems back to this idiotic vote on conversion therapy, that the conversion therapy idea, the
00:15:50.480 liberals being the liberals, they created this wedge issue. They named their bill, the conversion
00:15:54.520 therapy bill, the act to end conversion therapy. But this wasn't about conversion therapy. This wasn't
00:15:59.860 about the idea of sending gay people to therapy to try to convert them to being straight. That doesn't
00:16:06.060 really happen in Canada. And in the small cases where it does happen, all the parties agree that that
00:16:10.900 should be banned, that that shouldn't be something that we do in Canada. I had Dr. Deborah So on my
00:16:15.120 podcast in December, and she talked about how the idea of conversion therapy is cruel because being gay
00:16:21.020 is something that you're born with, it's not something that you have any choice on. However, the conversion
00:16:25.120 therapy wasn't just about that, right? It was about gender identity as well. So somebody who's struggling
00:16:30.180 from gender dysphoria, someone who is not sure whether they are a woman or a man, whether their gender is
00:16:36.560 male or female. Dr. Deborah So said it's incredibly dangerous to ban therapy for those people because they
00:16:42.560 need therapy, they're confused, and they need to have support before they make a life altering
00:16:46.980 decision like having surgery or trying to change their gender. And so this bill basically just has
00:16:53.660 like a chilling effect on free speech. This is all a digression. The point is that the media and the
00:16:58.620 liberals tried to lie about what the conversion therapy bill did. Some conservatives tried to stand
00:17:03.940 up against it. Ultimately, Aaron O'Toole just said, no, we want this issue to go away, so we're going to
00:17:08.100 kill it. Now Aaron O'Toole and his office are trying to resurrect it, to try to paint the 35 MPs who
00:17:14.080 are opposing him as supporting this movement. This is so bad for the party. This is so toxic
00:17:18.720 because you're conceding to a liberal lie about the conservative party, which is never a good idea.
00:17:24.160 And you're using the liberal lie to paint half of the conservative party as being extreme and fringe
00:17:30.660 and anti-gay, anti-rights, and part of the far right. This is just not going to end well at all.
00:17:36.620 And if this is the approach that Aaron O'Toole wants to take, he does not deserve to be leader of
00:17:40.800 this party. And if he remains leader of the party, I think that he's going to have just a huge free
00:17:45.600 fall in support even more because so many people are going to be rightly angry about this. It wasn't
00:17:50.480 just Global News that was receiving this spin. Travis Danraj of the CBC also tweeted the following. He
00:17:56.060 said, senior conservative party source close to Aaron O'Toole camp says, move to oust leader stems from
00:18:01.680 the conversion therapy vote. And the far right of the party is angry with the leader because he stood up
00:18:07.240 for LGBTQ plus rights, Canadian politics. He goes on to say, source claims MP Garnet Genis is
00:18:14.560 spearheading the coup because he was in Latvia when we gave unanimous consent to make conversion
00:18:19.420 therapy illegal. So this was all started by the group that are internally referred to as the
00:18:24.700 conversion crew. They're driving this. Again, no good can come from this kind of mudslinging within 0.99
00:18:30.540 the party. And the fact that it is being initiated by the so-called leader just shows a total lack of
00:18:35.820 leadership. Garnet Genis rightly pushes back. And I think Garnet is a very diplomatic person. He is
00:18:42.180 very, very polite. He's definitely not one to publicly air his grievances in a typical way,
00:18:47.720 but I think he's reached his limit and you can see that. So he posted the following in response to
00:18:52.420 these media allegations. He said, very sad to see Aaron O'Toole launching more false personal attacks
00:18:58.660 against members of his own team. Statement below. And then his statement says, efforts by Aaron O'Toole's
00:19:03.940 communication team to personally smear me by misstating my position on conversion therapy
00:19:08.980 are beyond the pale. This is the kind of division that is tearing our party and it must come to an
00:19:13.640 end. We need leadership that unites instead of divides. I did sign the letter, but I was not the
00:19:18.240 organizer of the letter. Mr. O'Toole should recognize that his position is untenable rather
00:19:22.720 than using lies to publicly attack members of his own team. Those are fighting words. Those are fighting
00:19:27.520 words. Calling the leader of your party a liar and publicly accusing him of lying about you.
00:19:32.160 It's really, really hard to see how Aaron O'Toole could possibly come back from this. This is this
00:19:36.780 kind of infighting, this kind of open infighting in the conservative party. It's, it's, it's hard to
00:19:42.280 come back from as a leader. It's disappointing to see, but I think it is necessary for the conservative
00:19:47.500 party to work through the issues that they're having and hopefully resolve them. So Aaron O'Toole
00:19:52.500 himself releases a statement Monday night, letting us know that he is not going anywhere. So this is how he
00:19:58.540 tries to paint the situation. This is, this is pretty remarkable. So he says this,
00:20:03.060 there are two roads open to the conservative party of Canada. One is the road of Randy Hillier
00:20:08.200 and Derek Sloan. It is angry, negative, and extreme. It's a dead end. One that would see the
00:20:14.240 party of confederation become the NDP of the right. I'm just going to pause right here because a couple
00:20:18.920 of quick points. First of all, Randy Hillier and Derek Sloan are not part of the conservative
00:20:23.160 party of Canada. Randy Hillier is a provincial politician who used to be part of the PCs and
00:20:28.000 now he's out on his own. Derek Sloan is not part of the conservative party. Aaron O'Toole kicked him
00:20:33.120 out and he's off on his own. He's no longer a member of parliament. So it's sort of weird to
00:20:38.380 paint this dichotomy saying that these two individuals who are not part of the party are
00:20:42.500 one part of the party. That's just not the case. Second here, here he says that that part of the party
00:20:47.540 is angry, negative, and extreme. That is the exact stereotype that the legacy media and Justin Trudeau
00:20:52.820 and the liberals want you to believe about the conservatives. That's what they want you to
00:20:56.060 believe about the working class people of this country and about the conservative base. So why
00:21:00.660 would Aaron O'Toole buy into that? Why would he repeat that? Why would he give that credence? It's
00:21:04.160 not true. And having the leader of the party say it is true is really, really damaging. Okay, here,
00:21:09.140 I'll continue from a statement. He says, the other road is to better reflect the Canada of 2022,
00:21:14.480 to recognize that conservatism is organic, not static, and that a winning message is one of inclusion,
00:21:20.080 optimism, ideas, and hope. No, no, no disagreement from me there. I would just argue that that is
00:21:25.760 not what Aaron O'Toole is doing here. I'll continue. There was a report tonight of members
00:21:30.200 of the conservative caucus who are unsure of what road to take. They are, it said, bringing a letter
00:21:34.520 to caucus to trigger a vote on my leadership of the party. Good. I'm not going anywhere and I'm not
00:21:39.640 turning back. Canada needs us to be united and serious. It's time for reckoning. Time to settle this
00:21:45.140 and caucus right here, right now, once and for all, anger versus optimism. That is a choice in
00:21:50.540 simple terms. So he's really simplifying this and saying, if you're with me, it's because you're
00:21:54.660 optimistic. If you're with them, it's because you're angry. That is so divisive. Again, this is
00:21:59.160 so Justin Trudeau. It's really interesting, this strategy that he's taking. Finally, he says,
00:22:04.420 I will accept the results of the vote. The signers of this letter must accept it too. They brought it.
00:22:09.380 They'll have to live with it. Rebecca and I, Rebecca is his wife. Rebecca and I are committed
00:22:13.320 to our party and conservatism in Canada. We look forward to continuing that journey.
00:22:18.720 So that sounds like a pretty confident Aaron O'Toole to me. It sounds like he believes that
00:22:22.260 he has support of his caucus, that he has the numbers, that this is just a bump along the road
00:22:26.340 and that he is going to continue down the path that he is going to continue down. It's interesting
00:22:30.720 because the most passionate that Aaron O'Toole ever becomes is about the direction that he wants to
00:22:35.760 take the conservative party. He doesn't really get passionate about individual issues. He doesn't
00:22:39.300 really get passionate about defending conservative principles and values or about the future
00:22:43.300 of Canada. The thing that he gets the most passionate about is his own leadership, is his own
00:22:48.480 willingness to fight to defend his job, basically, to remain leader of the party. That's the thing
00:22:54.600 that you see him really get passionate and worked up about. Now, I want to talk about an exclusive
00:22:59.100 report I have over at TNC. I basically spent the entire morning on Tuesday talking to as many
00:23:04.580 conservatives who would talk to me, talking to conservative MPs, insiders, people who work for MPs,
00:23:09.120 people who used to work in the Harper government, trying to really get my finger on the pulse
00:23:13.300 what is happening with the party, why this letter came out. And I was successfully able to talk to
00:23:18.480 nine high-level sources, including three current members of parliament. And I put together this
00:23:23.140 exclusive report over at True North. I want you to go check that out. It says,
00:23:26.720 we need to remove him to save our party. That's a quote from a conservative MP.
00:23:30.020 They say he needs to step down gracefully. So I have a lot of really interesting quotes in here,
00:23:34.520 really passionate stuff about why this came to fruition, why the letter came out now,
00:23:38.840 what led to it, what the complaints are, who's behind it, and who isn't debunking some of the
00:23:43.380 myths that are already being put out by the media. So I encourage you to head on over to
00:23:47.220 TNC.news and check that out. I'm not going to go through and read my entire report on the show,
00:23:53.280 because I think it's better if you go and check it out and read it yourself. I will say that this
00:23:57.260 initiative, the 35 MPs that came together to sign the letter, I spoke to the person who spearheaded it,
00:24:01.940 the organizer of this letter. Well, he says that he was one of several, but he's sort of the main
00:24:06.460 person who was driving this. And he said that this came together really quickly, that there was
00:24:10.620 some kind of a rumor that Aaron O'Toole was going to demand that MPs stand publicly and show their
00:24:16.180 loyalty to him. And they were concerned about that. And so they worked over the weekend, like within
00:24:20.780 one weekend, they found 30% of caucus, 35 MPs who were willing to sign this letter. And people are
00:24:26.440 just saying enough is enough. This isn't necessarily about the direction that O'Toole is taking the party
00:24:30.860 in. It's about trust. It's about integrity. It's about the fact that he flip-flops, that he's not
00:24:34.740 consistent, that we don't really know where he stands. And from what I'm told, the 35 MPs come
00:24:40.140 from a broad range of the party. It's not just the so-cons. It's not just the hardcore conservative
00:24:44.740 guys, that it's people who used to support Aaron O'Toole, people who supported him, like Bob Benzin,
00:24:49.520 who were behind him in both 2017 and 2020, people who just don't like his leadership style, don't like
00:24:55.440 the way, for instance, he treated Shannon Stubbs or Senator Denise Batters, people who were just
00:25:00.700 opposed to his style and his lack of conviction. And so again, worthwhile. Go check that out over
00:25:06.960 at TNC.news. Look, it's clear at this point that the Conservative Party of Canada needs to be led by
00:25:12.260 somebody who has the courage and the conviction to articulate and defend conservative values and
00:25:17.900 conservative principles. We saw that so much this weekend, how much leadership is missing in Canada
00:25:23.220 and how much we need a voice to defend common sense and basic principles and values like freedom in
00:25:29.020 this country. Aaron O'Toole is clearly not up to the task, and it appears that he wants to burn his
00:25:34.860 party to the ground rather than facing the facts and facing the consequences of the way that he has
00:25:40.220 run the party over the past two years. This is going to be an ugly week for Conservatives, but hopefully
00:25:45.260 by the end of the week, they will emerge stronger and more united and hopefully soon with a leader who
00:25:51.360 actually likes the party, likes the base, and believes in conservative principles and values.
00:25:56.720 I'm Candace Malcolm, and this is The Candace Malcolm Show.
00:25:59.020 Thank you.