The Candice Malcolm Show - September 29, 2021


O’Toole’s Bait and Switch


Episode Stats


Length

17 minutes

Words per minute

198.9585

Word count

3,464

Sentence count

179

Harmful content

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Candace Malcolm takes a deep dive into what went wrong in the Conservative leadership race, and why she believes there were many red flags along the way when it came to choosing a candidate to replace Aaron O'Toole as leader of the party.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.160 Conservative party members got duped by a bait-and-switch conservative.
00:00:03.120 It's happened before but it should never happen again. I'm Candace Malcolm and this is The Candace
00:00:06.800 Malcolm Show. Hi everyone, thank you so much for tuning in today. I hope you're enjoying our daily
00:00:16.240 installation of The Candace Malcolm Show. We started to do it every day during the campaign
00:00:19.840 and we're continuing to go on that momentum putting out a new show every single day. So
00:00:24.000 don't forget to like this page, like this episode, subscribe to this channel, and if you're watching
00:00:28.480 on YouTube hit the little notification bell so that you never miss an episode. Now today I want
00:00:33.280 to do a little bit of a deep dive into what happened in the election, what went wrong,
00:00:38.800 and how there were red flags along the way when it came to leader Aaron O'Toole. Now if you've been
00:00:44.000 watching the show you know that I am no fan of Aaron O'Toole. I believe that he misrepresented who
00:00:49.280 he was in the conservative leadership race. Remember, he told us that he was a true blue
00:00:54.240 conservative, he assured us that he would scrap the carbon tax, he told us that he would end
00:00:58.720 Trudeau's arbitrary gun ban, and he assured us that he would respect moral conservatives and allow
00:01:04.080 for free votes in the House of Commons, presumably that would include free votes on social and moral
00:01:09.600 issues like abortion. Now of course we now know that none of that was true. When the general election
00:01:15.760 came around, Aaron O'Toole took the exact opposite position on each of these issues when he was running
00:01:21.760 against Justin Trudeau. He flip-flopped, he showed weakness, and perhaps most damning of all, he was
00:01:27.680 dishonest about who he was, what he believed in, and what he wanted to do with the party. Now this comes
00:01:33.760 down to an issue of authenticity. We don't really know who the real Aaron O'Toole is. Is he the man with
00:01:40.240 a conservative vision who wanted to stand up to the radical left, stand up to woke cancel culture like
00:01:45.280 he told us he was in the leadership race, or is he the guy who embraced woke left-wing culture on the
00:01:51.360 campaign trail when running in the federal election? Remember, back when Aaron O'Toole was running for
00:01:56.800 leader of the Conservative Party back in early 2020, Aaron O'Toole warned us about another candidate,
00:02:02.720 another candidate named Peter McKay. O'Toole repeatedly warned conservatives that Peter McKay was
00:02:09.600 nothing but a red Tory, he was a centrist, he was a leftist, he was mushy, he was liberalite, and that if
00:02:16.800 Conservative Party members entrusted Peter McKay with the party leadership, that the party would
00:02:21.920 go down the wrong path, we would continue to go down the left-wing path of Justin Trudeau, and that
00:02:26.960 instead, by picking Aaron O'Toole, picking the true blue conservative option, that Canada would have a
00:02:33.840 real conservative party. That is how he positioned himself in the leadership race. And I think it's
00:02:38.400 interesting to revisit some of the specific attacks that Aaron O'Toole had against Peter McKay.
00:02:44.000 Recall that Peter McKay was the front-runner. He was the high-profile leader, he was the one that
00:02:48.400 the media loved, he's the one that everybody knows, he was key in creating the Conservative Party of
00:02:53.120 Canada. Back when the two parties merged, back when the Canadian Alliance merged with the Progressive
00:02:57.440 Conservative Party, Peter McKay was seen as a central figure in the Progressive Conservative Party. He
00:03:02.480 negotiated that deal with Stephen Harper, and he was really one of the fathers of the modern-day
00:03:07.280 Conservative Party. So again, he was sort of the apparent person who was going to lead the party,
00:03:12.000 and if it wasn't for an incredibly effective attack by Aaron O'Toole, Peter McKay probably would have
00:03:18.560 been the leader of the Conservative Party, and we might have had a different outcome in the last
00:03:22.880 election. So let's go all the way back to January 2020, when Aaron O'Toole made a campaign announcement.
00:03:29.120 This is the video he put out. I'm going to play you part of this video because it's really compelling.
00:03:32.880 Again, this is the Conservative version of Aaron O'Toole. This is the iteration of himself that he sold to
00:03:38.080 party members. That was quite compelling, quite appealing, and part of the reason that he won.
00:03:42.480 Again, he told Conservatives that he would respect Social Conservatives. He courted the Social 0.93
00:03:46.880 Conservative vote, and one of the key things he said in this video is that it's time we take the hyphen
00:03:53.280 out of being Conservative. It's time we had someone that can unite the Conservative Party. Let's play this
00:03:58.640 video and we can break that down. Who's going to fight for auto workers who just saw the last car roll off the line?
00:04:04.560 Who's going to fight for forestry workers who just watched another mill close? Who's going to stand up for
00:04:09.920 those who wear a uniform of service to protect us at home and abroad? Who's going to defend our history, our
00:04:15.680 institutions against attacks from cancel culture and the radical left? The stakes are high for Canada. The
00:04:21.920 country needs a strong Conservative Party. We need strong leadership to unite our party, take the hyphen out of being
00:04:28.560 a Conservative and ensure we grow our movement to win. We need to show more urban and suburban Canadians
00:04:35.440 that their values of liberty, family and equality are at the core of our party. It's time Canadians had a
00:04:42.640 government that fights for their needs instead of fighting for attention from global celebrities and
00:04:47.680 corrupt corporate insiders. I'm Erin O'Toole and I'm running to unite Conservatives on the path to victory.
00:04:54.240 I'm not a career politician. I'm not a product of the Ottawa bubble. I spent 10 years in the private
00:05:00.400 sector and 12 years in our military where you're judged by who you are and the work you do, not where
00:05:07.600 you came from or who you know. I'm asking for your support to take on and beat Justin Trudeau. I'm in
00:05:14.240 politics to fight for you and I need you to fight alongside me for Canada.
00:05:26.880 Now when he says take the hyphen out of being Conservative, presumably he's talking about
00:05:30.720 progressive Conservatives. So if you take a step back and you look at the Conservative Party, it's sort
00:05:35.120 of a coalition of a bunch of different types of Conservatives. So you kind of have the moral or
00:05:40.320 social Conservatives, the Christian Conservatives who want to have moral issues sort of front and
00:05:44.720 centre in politics and they strongly believe in taking a position for instance when it comes
00:05:49.200 to abortion. You also have the Libertarian part of the party who just believe in limited government,
00:05:54.720 low taxes, they want free markets, individual responsibility. Unfortunately those are some
00:05:59.440 of the people who ended up following Maxime Bernier to the People's Party. And then you have the Red 0.78
00:06:03.680 Tories as sort of centrists that believe in bigger government, that don't want to take a stance on
00:06:08.560 moral issues or if they do they're progressive or Liberal. The sort of people that come from
00:06:13.360 Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, that believe in the sort of Laurentian elite consensus about Canada,
00:06:17.920 that we're sort of this left-wing version of the United States and that you know they believe in big
00:06:22.880 government and everything that goes along with it. The distinction between them and the Liberals is
00:06:27.200 that perhaps they're not as woke left as the Liberals and that's a part of the party that Peter McKay
00:06:31.760 came from. So when Aaron O'Toole talks about taking the hyphen out of being Conservative, I think he's
00:06:36.000 talking about taking the progressive conservative, that title, which a lot of Red Tories really cling
00:06:41.120 to. They don't want to be seen as conservative, they want to put the progressive in there because
00:06:44.560 then everyone knows that they are not social conservatives, that they have the liberal left-wing
00:06:48.880 approved social views and that none of those sort of thorny issues that have sometimes dogged
00:06:54.320 conservatives will get in the way. So Aaron O'Toole is saying no to that, no to being a Red Tory,
00:06:58.560 no to being a progressive conservative, he's just going to be a conservative that unites the party.
00:07:03.440 Okay, so he continues on this line of thinking. In February 2020, he sent out an email blast. So
00:07:09.120 this fundraising email, O'Toole takes a shot at his rival, Peter McKay. So he's saying that Peter
00:07:14.800 McKay is insisting on a solid caucus front on so-called conscience votes, accusing him of behaving,
00:07:21.440 quote, just like Justin Trudeau does, unquote. So O'Toole said in the email blast that he would allow
00:07:26.320 both caucus members as well as potential cabinet ministers in a government led by him to vote their own
00:07:32.320 conscience on moral issues. So presumably that means that if there were votes on abortion,
00:07:37.360 he wouldn't whip caucus. He would allow everyone to vote how they feel, based on their conscience,
00:07:42.080 based on their morals, and that he would allow social conservatives to have their say, to make
00:07:47.680 their peace, to champion the issues that they feel are incredibly important in our society. So O'Toole
00:07:52.560 was already carving himself out as being different than Peter McKay, saying Peter McKay would punish social
00:07:58.080 conservatives and not allow them to speak their peace, whereas he would enable social conservatives
00:08:02.880 and give them a platform. Of course, we know that once the federal election rolled around,
00:08:06.880 O'Toole took the exact opposite position halfway through the campaign. He said that MPs who don't
00:08:11.600 fully support his platform and every aspect of it would not be able to sit in his caucus. So if you
00:08:16.720 were pro-life and you wanted to talk about it, you didn't want to just parrot O'Toole's pro-choice,
00:08:22.160 liberal talking points, you couldn't even sit with a conservative caucus. You couldn't even be a
00:08:26.880 conservative. So back to 2020 when O'Toole was running for leader. So Aaron O'Toole continued on
00:08:32.080 this path of attacking Peter McKay, saying that Peter McKay wasn't conservative enough. On March 24th,
00:08:37.600 2020, Aaron O'Toole said this, quote, this is really a struggle for the identity of the conservative
00:08:43.040 party in 2020. Do we go back to be the mushy middle party or do we have conservative
00:08:48.160 principled ideas for the issues of the day? So again, saying that he doesn't want to be
00:08:52.960 part of the mushy middle. He wants to have principled conservative ideas. So presumably,
00:08:58.160 again, this means the liberal party is on the left. He doesn't want to be part of the mushy middle.
00:09:02.240 He wants to be on the right. He wants to have principled conservative issues. And then here he is
00:09:07.680 on June 18th, 2020, again, really just laying it all out against Peter McKay. He says,
00:09:12.800 Peter McKay has begun this campaign by dividing our party, by attacking social conservatives.
00:09:17.840 That's exactly what the liberals want. They want us divided. We don't need liberalite. We need a real
00:09:24.000 conservative with the uniting vision to win. So here you have it. This is why Aaron O'Toole won.
00:09:29.920 He successfully courted social conservatives. Remember, he won because of the second and
00:09:34.320 third ranked ballots from the actual social conservatives who ran Lesley Lewis and Derek
00:09:38.800 Sloan. Those votes went over to Aaron O'Toole, giving him enough to surpass Peter McKay,
00:09:44.080 even though Peter McKay had the most votes in the first round of voting. And so Aaron O'Toole won by
00:09:48.960 courting the social conservatives, assuring them that they would have a space in his party,
00:09:52.720 that he would have room for them, that he would respect them. And also attacking Peter McKay,
00:09:56.800 attacking the front runner, saying, this guy's a red Tory. This guy's a centrist. This guy's liberal
00:10:00.960 light. This guy's part of the mushy middle. Forget him. I'm going to be the principled conservative.
00:10:05.280 I'm going to go after the radical left. I'm true blue. Get on board. Here, here I am. I'm the real
00:10:10.640 deal. I'm the conservative. And so again, we know how this played out. We know we got duped. We know
00:10:15.920 that this wasn't who Aaron O'Toole really was, or maybe it is who he really is. But then he presented
00:10:20.800 a new version of Aaron O'Toole when it came to running in the federal election. This is the bait and
00:10:25.600 switch. We were sold one thing and then we got another. And this is why we're at such a crossroads in
00:10:31.120 the conservative movement. This is why the party sees itself as such a crossroads because you do
00:10:35.760 have the voices saying, look, just keep Aaron O'Toole on as leader. He'll learn his lesson
00:10:40.000 and he'll go on and perhaps do better in the next election. And then you have the other side
00:10:44.960 of the party who feel deeply betrayed, who feel completely excluded from the party. And not just
00:10:49.760 that, but they feel like we have a charlatan running things. They feel like Aaron O'Toole,
00:10:54.320 they see Aaron O'Toole and they don't know what he stands for. He is totally inauthentic.
00:10:59.280 He presented two completely different visions of who he was, what he believes in and what he wanted
00:11:04.800 for the country. And it's hard to get past that duplicity, that fundamental lack of authenticity
00:11:11.920 that we see with Aaron O'Toole. But I want to remind viewers that this is not the first time
00:11:16.720 that this has happened to the conservative party. This is not the first time that a conservative
00:11:21.360 leadership nominee has presented themselves as part of the right wing of the party, as a social
00:11:26.160 conservative, as a true blue Tory, only to gain power and become leader of the party and completely
00:11:31.920 change course, completely rebrand as a liberal. And I'm talking about the former MP and the former
00:11:36.880 leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party, Patrick Brown. Now, I want to talk a little
00:11:41.360 bit about Patrick Brown. Patrick Brown became leader of the Ontario PCs in 2015, and then he stepped down
00:11:47.760 and resigned in disgrace in January 2018. So he never ran in an election as a conservative leader,
00:11:54.080 and it's a good thing that he didn't because this guy was a total disaster as leader of the party.
00:11:58.640 So before Patrick Brown got into provincial politics, he was a long-serving member of parliament
00:12:03.280 up in Barrie. He was a really popular MP. He was seen as young, ambitious, super hard-working,
00:12:07.840 and really in touch with the base, really socially conservative, and just, you know,
00:12:12.400 someone who had a lot of potential in conservative politics. So I want to go back and talk a little
00:12:16.880 bit about his record. So back in 2012, as a conservative MP under the Harper government,
00:12:22.560 he voted in favor of a bill to study when life begins. And this was seen, especially by the media,
00:12:28.640 as a sort of reopening of the abortion debate, something that a lot of, again, the red Tories
00:12:33.760 and the centrist in the party really didn't want. A lot of libertarians too, a lot of people who just
00:12:37.920 don't really want to talk about this issue anymore. And even Stephen Harper voted against this bill,
00:12:42.000 voted against studying when life begins because he just didn't really want to get into the thorny
00:12:46.640 abortion debate. So back then, he was, he was so committed to being a pro-life MP that he was even
00:12:51.440 willing to break ranks with the prime minister and the leader of the country because he was so
00:12:55.680 committed to his morals and to this idea of creating some kind of a law, some kind of regulation
00:13:01.120 around abortion. And so fast forward to when he was running for leader of the PC party. It's sort
00:13:07.680 of well known that, that Patrick Brown just sort of outworked the competition. He was running against
00:13:12.000 Christine Elliott, the widow of the former finance minister, Jim Flaherty. And she was sort of seen as
00:13:17.360 more of an establishment red Tory conservative, and he was seen as the grassroots social conservative
00:13:22.240 alternative. And everyone knew that he won this leadership race because he just outworked and
00:13:26.080 out hustled Christine Elliott. He was out there signing up new members, doing outreach, encouraging
00:13:30.560 people to join the party, to vote for him as leader, growing the party base. And a lot of the places,
00:13:35.440 let's be, let's be honest, a lot of the ways that he was able to do this was by going to houses of
00:13:39.680 worship, going to churches, painting himself as a true social conservative, and encouraging people to sign up
00:13:44.960 for votes that way. Likewise, he was also able to get the endorsement from the campaign life
00:13:50.560 coalition, which is an influential pro-life group. So speaking to pro-life advocates from the campaign
00:13:56.400 life coalition, he said, look at my voting record. That's who I am. And then he says he has a 100%
00:14:03.200 pro-life voting record in the house of commons, which led to the endorsement from the campaign
00:14:09.120 life coalition. Well, fast forward. And just like Aaron O'Toole, once he was leader of the party,
00:14:13.840 he told the Globe and Mail, I will not change the status quo and I will oppose any effort to do so.
00:14:19.520 Later adding, we're not going to change the status quo we have in Ontario today in any fashion. And
00:14:25.600 then when he was specifically asked about how he voted for a pro-life bill, get this, he actually
00:14:30.640 pretended that he didn't know what they were talking about. He said this, he said, we probably have
00:14:34.960 four or 500 votes a year in the house of commons. I think it would be difficult to analyze every vote.
00:14:40.880 So he just pretended that he doesn't even remember voting for pro-life bills and that he just couldn't
00:14:46.880 even be asked to try to defend it because he votes on so many things. Then in 2017, he told the National
00:14:52.720 Post that any policy put forth during the PC party convention regarding social conservative issues
00:14:58.160 would be off limits. Any policy that attempts to limit a woman's right to choose, so he's already
00:15:03.120 using the left-wing terminology when it comes to abortion. Limit a woman's right to choose or the
00:15:09.520 ability of same-sex couples to marry are off limits, period. Brown endorsed same-sex marriage and also
00:15:15.520 endorsed the Liberals' changes of the sex ed curriculum once he won the PC leadership race. Also on the
00:15:21.680 issue of carbon taxes, much like Erin O'Toole, Patrick Brown didn't mention anything about a carbon tax when
00:15:27.360 running for PC leader. He basically implied that he was against it and that he wouldn't bring in any
00:15:32.320 kind of carbon tax. But then again, much like Erin O'Toole, he shocked the Tories when he announced that
00:15:37.440 he would support a carbon tax at the PC convention in Ottawa in March 2016. Patrick Brown misrepresented
00:15:44.880 himself when he was running for leader. He ran as a social conservative. Once he was leader, he basically
00:15:49.520 turned into a liberal and started pushing liberal talking points, pushing liberal ideas,
00:15:53.360 and abandoning any sense of principle. And that's why in early 2018, when he was faced with really a
00:15:58.960 ratchet job of a MeToo accusation that totally fell apart under scrutiny, it didn't matter. The entire
00:16:04.560 base had already abandoned him. His core inner circle also kind of stabbed him in the back, threw him
00:16:10.400 under the bus. And just like that, Patrick Brown resigned. This should have been a cautionary tale to
00:16:15.280 conservatives. This should have been a tale not to do what Patrick Brown had done to the PC voters
00:16:21.440 in Ontario. But here we are a few years later, and it seems like Erin O'Toole has taken Patrick
00:16:27.040 Brown's exact playbook. And much like Patrick Brown's own fate, Erin O'Toole has not been successful.
00:16:33.360 It is not a good strategy. It is not a winning playbook. Look, in today's era of social media
00:16:39.120 and direct mass communication, what Canadians want is authenticity. They want a politician and a candidate
00:16:45.680 who they can trust, who they feel like is being real and being authentic. The terrible,
00:16:50.640 terrible strategy as running as one thing. And then as soon as you become leader,
00:16:55.120 turning and doing something different, it doesn't even matter what side you're going for,
00:16:58.880 which way you're going. It is a failed tactic. It's bait and switch. We've seen it too many times,
00:17:04.400 and we've had enough of it. Conservatives should make sure that the Erin O'Toole's and the Patrick 0.71
00:17:08.880 Brown's of this world are never entrusted to lead a conservative party again. I'm Candace Malcolm, 1.00
00:17:14.160 and this is The Candace Malcolm Show.