Every major political party in Canada is the exact same. Vaccine mandates are the latest policy they all agree on. In this episode, Candice talks about why the lack of diversity in Canada's political parties is making them uninspiring.
00:09:12.720And this is because everything is the same.
00:09:15.420The political parties have the same views.
00:09:17.580Now, let me just make one small note here, because I know a lot of people in the comment sections are probably making this point already.
00:09:23.580There is, of course, one exception, one major exception to this rule where every single party has the same view.
00:09:29.220And that, of course, came by way of Maxime Bernier and the People's Party of Canada.
00:09:33.700They, to give them credit, ran on a very different set of ideas.
00:09:37.380So here we had this political system with five mainstream parties, the five parties that are always there, that always get invited to the debates, that are always sort of featured on the legacy media, the liberals, the conservatives, the Democrats, the bloc, and the greens.
00:09:51.200And then now we have this new party, the People's Party, who comes from more of the political right, although they do attract voters from across the spectrum, the sort of protest voters.
00:10:00.080They created a very different set of issues that they campaigned on.
00:10:05.300And because of this, the media, who also suffer from the exact same toxic groupthink and rigid, boring sameness as the political parties, well, they didn't know what to make of Maxime Bernier.
00:10:16.640They didn't know what to make of his large followers.
00:10:22.160They called him and his supporters every name in the book.
00:10:25.740Regardless of all that, because Bernier and the People's Party were different, they managed to nearly triple their vote count in this election.
00:10:33.100So Bernier and the People's Party did get rewarded in terms of the number of vote casts, but because of our first pass-to-post system, they didn't make any real gains in terms of winning any seats.
00:10:42.960So I will note that that was the one exception.
00:10:45.780Thank goodness for Maxime Bernier saying something different.
00:10:48.340At least it makes it a little more interesting for us tuning in and watching.
00:10:52.380But, you know, this is sort of the sad point.
00:10:54.520This is the point of my show today, the point of my article over in the Toronto Sun, is that it was the Conservative Party, the Conservative Party of Canada, that once offered the occasional spark of originality.
00:11:06.120They were the ones who would occasionally push back against the painful dullness of Canada's political party system.
00:11:12.820They sometimes resisted the media-induced conformity.
00:11:16.180And they would say no to the left's latest insistence that we all have the exact same opinion on every single issue.
00:11:22.720And that is the crux of this whole thing.
00:11:24.420The left wants absolute ideological conformity.
00:11:27.580They want everyone to agree on every single thing.
00:11:30.400And the Conservatives used to say, no, we're okay with having a different view.
00:11:55.880But sometimes, sometimes we would see them push back.
00:11:59.040They'd say no to the latest leftist fad, whether that be the fanatical climate alarmism,
00:12:03.860whether it be the open borders immigration ideas, or recently the idea that Canada has committed the worst forms of crimes against humanity, including genocide.
00:12:15.220Conservatives would stand up and say, let's bring some common sense to this scenario.
00:12:19.380And no, we don't agree with these statements.
00:12:22.300But it appears that those days are behind us.
00:12:24.940Under Erin O'Toole, the party seems committed to whitewashing itself and becoming a true Big L Liberal Party.
00:12:46.480And I'm told that the meeting basically consisted of Erin O'Toole and some of his sort of close allies in the party
00:12:53.240presenting on this idea that the Conservatives should just go along and get along on vaccine mandates.
00:12:58.640They should force their MPs to get double vaccinated.
00:13:01.500And they should just kind of align with what the Liberals believe on that.
00:13:05.220I'm told there was a lot of pushback that the MPs in caucus vehemently opposed this idea.
00:13:12.660And they let it be known to Erin O'Toole that he was not going to be allowed to have this vaccine mandate for caucus.
00:13:20.400And so as a result of that, we had Blake Richards, who is the Conservative Party whip, come out following the meeting and basically just state that, say that the Conservative Party is not in favor of this idea of forced vaccinations for all MPs.
00:13:34.500Obviously, there's broader repercussions for this.
00:13:36.780It's not just about MPs, but once they allow it in Parliament, once they force all the MPs to get vaccinated, it's only a matter of time before every aspect of our society will have this kind of double vax rule.
00:13:47.260So the Conservatives were the only holdout, even though it sort of is a distinction without a difference.
00:13:51.720But here is Blake Richards on CTV explaining the Conservative position.
00:13:56.680And you can see, I'll play a bit longer of the clip, but you can see how the host is sort of outraged about this idea that the Conservatives are not forcing their MPs to get vaccinated.
00:14:07.080And they refuse to reveal the vaccine status of members of Parliament in the Conservative caucus.
00:14:12.880Well, we've said all along that we believe workplace safety, including in Parliament, can be assured by either vaccination or producing a negative rapid test.
00:14:23.240So we think that all members of Parliament can safely perform their duties in the House of Commons and in our committee rooms with either a vaccination or a rapid test.
00:14:32.260I think it's critically important that all members of Parliament are able to participate in in person in those sessions and bring forward the really important issues that we need to be dealing with on behalf of our constituents.
00:14:45.760But but but OK, every single person that works in the House of Commons, all the staff, they have to be double vaccinated to get on a plane.
00:14:52.700You have to be double vaccinated to get on a bus train.
00:14:56.400Can you can you tell us how many of the Conservative MPs exactly are double vaccinated and how many this is going to be a problem for?
00:15:06.560Well, I think it's really up to each individual Canadian, including members of Parliament, to decide for themselves whether they want to disclose their personal health information.
00:15:14.720But, you know, there are other legislatures, for example, in Canada.
00:15:20.340Saskatchewan is doing this or maybe others as well.
00:15:22.340We're, you know, in order to participate in the chamber and the legislative chamber, you know, either showing a vaccination status or a negative rapid test.
00:15:32.620So we believe that it's it's worked in other jurisdictions.
00:15:35.780Why can't it be done for our Parliament?
00:15:38.640I mean, this what we're talking about here is the it's the House of Commons.
00:15:43.920People, thousands of Canadians have elected each of these members of Parliament to serve them, to represent them in the House of Commons.
00:15:50.120And we need we believe that it needs to be something that all members can do safely in in in person in the House of Commons and that through rapid testing or vaccination.
00:16:00.960Now, it's just interesting to walk away from this to see that Aaron O'Toole, I'm told, is the one that wants vaccine mandates.
00:16:07.660He wants that he has the same view as Justin Trudeau on this, but it is his caucus, the conservative caucus who hold out.
00:16:13.360So they have a different view on this and I assume a different view on most issues than Aaron O'Toole's.
00:16:18.640Aaron O'Toole that's pushing towards liberal light.
00:16:21.140But the caucus, the Tory MPs that are elected from across the country are still connected to the conservative grassroots and they're not for this kind of policy.
00:16:31.400It used to be the case that the party leader would just sort of steamroll any opposition and determine exactly what the party was going to say.
00:16:38.640But right now, Aaron O'Toole is incredibly weak within the party.
00:16:41.500As I covered on the show a couple of weeks ago, the conservative MPs voted in favor of something called a reform act, which allows for a leadership review among a party leader with just a signature of 24 conservative MPs.
00:16:54.420So all it takes is 24 MPs to say, no, we don't want this guy anymore.
00:16:58.320And it will spur a leadership review, which could potentially oast Aaron O'Toole.
00:17:03.140So right now he's weak from the election loss and he's worried about this leadership review.
00:17:07.180And so rather than just telling all of the MPs to believe what he believes, it's now basically the exact opposite of that, where the MPs get to tell the leader what to do, which is much more democratic and probably much better for the conservative party in my mind, especially with a guy like Aaron O'Toole in charge.
00:17:25.280So O'Toole allowed the caucus to win the day.
00:17:28.280He allowed Blake Richards to go out and say that the conservatives do oppose mandatory vaccines.
00:17:32.900But then get this, a mere 24 hours later, Aaron O'Toole himself was a guest on TVO, which is the public television station in Ontario.
00:17:40.720He was speaking with Steve Pakin, host of The Agenda, and O'Toole just basically changed his mind, contradicted caucus, contradicted Blake Richards.
00:17:49.000And he said that the conservatives will respect the Liberal Party's rule, which means that they will conform, which means that they now also believe in forced mandatory vaccines for all members of parliament.
00:18:00.960Your position may be very reasonable, but the Speaker, the Board of the Eternal Economy of Parliament has still said, tough, the O'Toole formula isn't good enough, we need everybody vaccinated.
00:18:10.680You can't say everybody in your caucus is vaccinated.
00:18:13.280We can say that we will follow all public health guidance.
00:18:17.180So, Steve, the BOIE and the Speaker have ruled, and we will respect that, of course.
00:18:21.520We also think, though, that we have to look at not dividing people on this issue.
00:18:27.540It is difficult to see places where we're seeing people terminated, where in some cases, I think if we work smart and use all tools we have, we could probably avoid these sort of confrontations with just not politicizing vaccinations.
00:18:42.740So, for 24 hours, we had a hint of daylight between the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party.
00:18:48.820There was a hint of a distinction, a hint of a difference between these two major parties, but that apparently was just too much for Aaron O'Toole.
00:18:56.060Aaron O'Toole prefers to take the Liberal position on every issue.
00:18:59.520He prefers not to have any kind of media scrutiny.
00:19:01.880He doesn't want to have those moderately tough questions.
00:19:04.680Like we saw the CTV host, Evan Solomon, asking Blake Richards there, under Aaron O'Toole's leadership, with Aaron O'Toole as leader, he would much prefer the parties be so similar that you can't even tell them apart, the exact same, the rigid sameness, and that is the biggest plague on our political system right now.
00:19:22.900I'm Candace Malcolm, and this is The Candace Malcolm Show.