The Candice Malcolm Show - Should the Conservatives embrace woke progressive ideas to beat Trudeau？

00:00:00.000 As a conservative leadership race heats up, more party insiders and party elites are calling on

00:00:05.100 conservatives to become more progressive and once again appeal to leftist voters. But is this really

00:00:11.340 a path to victory? I'm Candace Malcolm and this is The Candace Malcolm Show.

00:00:14.580 Hi everyone, thank you so much for tuning into the podcast. I hope that all the dads out there,

00:00:31.740 all the fathers had a wonderful Father's Day. I hope everyone reached out to their dad to talk

00:00:36.000 about how much they appreciate the role of fathers in our society. I know we had a great day yesterday

00:00:41.200 with my husband and my kids. It's just so great to get to appreciate the role that he plays in the

00:00:47.800 family. The kids love every second, every minute that they get with their daddy. So it was really

00:00:51.720 fun and really great. Today I want to talk about the conservative leadership race and this familiar

00:00:58.140 call that we get from party insiders and from the sort of brass of the conservative party urging

00:01:04.200 conservatives to be more progressive, be more left-wing in order to win elections. Well, first

00:01:09.280 I just want to make a clear point. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is the worst prime minister of my

00:01:14.580 lifetime. He is eminently beatable and the conservatives should be able to beat him. They

00:01:18.860 almost beat him in the last two elections but almost isn't good enough. If you look at Justin

00:01:23.720 Trudeau and look at what he's done to our country, he's arguably the worst prime minister since his

00:01:28.360 father, arguably even worse given what's happened in the last year. During his time in office, he's

00:01:34.140 infused the federal government with every latest leftist woke trend, scrubbing our country of its

00:01:40.200 proud traditions, apologizing on behalf of every other Canadian. But for himself, he never takes

00:01:45.700 responsibility for his scandals, for his ethical violations, or for the old boys club liberal

00:01:50.980 corruption that he has re-implemented. He's racked up more debt than anyone thought imaginable.

00:01:56.440 He's plunged our country into economic instability with out-of-control inflation, higher taxes,

00:02:01.720 anemic growth rates, and an out-of-control housing bubble and cost-of-living bubble.

00:02:07.560 Interest rates are going up, things are getting even more expensive, and in all likelihood, our

00:02:11.440 country is on the verge of another crushing recession, all with Justin Trudeau at the helm,

00:02:16.880 who frankly has no idea how to get us out of this or how to change course. Meanwhile, Trudeau's stomped on

00:02:22.780 our civil liberties, he's used wartime measures against peaceful protesters, and he's continued to divide the

00:02:29.280 country worse than any leader in our history. Anyone who criticizes him, he calls them racist,

00:02:33.720 sexist, bigots, calls them anti-vaxxers, and of course, he calls them anti-science.

00:02:38.020 Trudeau is loathsome. He's a disgrace. He's no business running our country. And Canadians see this.

00:02:43.560 They know this. That's why the majority of Canadians don't vote for Trudeau. They don't support him.

00:02:47.640 In the last election, Trudeau won with the smallest share of the vote in Canadian history. So once again,

00:02:53.520 he's eminently beatable. And yet, three elections in a row here, the Conservatives haven't

00:02:58.060 been able to edge him out. They have not been successful in beating him. Like I said, they came

00:03:01.940 very close, but they didn't do it. Now, during this Conservative race, leadership race, we're voting

00:03:08.220 to see who will run against Trudeau in the next election. That vote's going to happen over the

00:03:13.020 summer. We had Ian Brody on the show last week to explain the process and how it's all going to work.

00:03:17.880 But it's time to look at who to vote for and what the strategy will be. And one of the strategies

00:03:24.160 that we keep seeing floated by party insiders and sort of the party brass is this idea that

00:03:30.480 in order to beat Trudeau, the Conservatives have to become more like Justin Trudeau, that

00:03:34.740 we need to run a moderate, maybe fiscally prudent, but socially leftist or woke or progressive

00:03:40.680 party. And that's the path to victory, that we need to abandon conservatism and just appeal

00:03:46.740 to people who would otherwise vote for Justin Trudeau in the Liberals. This isn't true,

00:03:52.100 though. And we shouldn't look any further than the 2021 election. To see this strategy didn't work,

00:03:57.180 that essentially was the Aaron O'Toole strategy. And that is why he lost. Sure, he had an authenticity

00:04:02.420 problem because he ran for leader as a true blue conservative, fiscally conservative and socially

00:04:08.520 conservative, or at least culturally conservative. And then when he came to the general election,

00:04:13.440 he basically flip-flopped on every issue. So Canadians didn't really trust him. But as far as the

00:04:18.480 strategy that he took himself, he wanted to appeal to those blue Liberals, those red Tories who believe

00:04:24.960 that in order to win, you know, you have to run on big government healthcare, big government spending,

00:04:32.200 big government generally. And it just didn't work. And we can look at the numbers and we can see that

00:04:36.960 the Conservatives lost seats in BC. They didn't pick up any seats in the 905. I think they only won one

00:04:42.600 seat in the entire GTA. And they saw a reduced seat count from 120 seats down to 119, a reduced vote

00:04:50.720 share from 34% down to 33%. And so the strategy didn't work. And yet we continue to see it peddled

00:04:58.340 out. I think the latest iteration of this, from this line of thinking from Tory insiders, came via a

00:05:05.180 piece written in The Hub by Aaron O'Toole's chief strategist, Dan Robertson. So Dan had a piece out

00:05:11.220 last week where he basically said that the problem with the campaign in 2021 was not the strategy,

00:05:17.780 but it was just the structural issues that face Conservatives. So I want to take a greater look

00:05:24.520 at this theory that we hear from red Tories and some party insiders saying that it wasn't Aaron

00:05:30.340 O'Toole's fault. It wasn't anything to do with their strategy. It was just that, you know, there's all

00:05:34.940 these other problems that are beyond their control. And so to break down this piece a little more,

00:05:39.040 I am pleased to be welcomed by Hamish Marshall. You know, Hamish, he was our in-house pollster

00:05:43.260 during the last election, and he's worked on a lot of different leadership campaigns,

00:05:47.220 including he worked for Stephen Harper in the Conservative Party. And then he also worked

00:05:52.220 for Andrew Scheer and ran his campaign back in 2019. So Hamish, thank you so much for joining

00:05:57.600 the show. It's great to have you on the program.

00:05:59.660 My pleasure.

00:06:00.600 So what do you think of this idea that the Conservatives lost in 2021, because of the structural issues,

00:06:08.320 and not so much because of the strategy?

00:06:10.400 Well, I think it's an excuse for losing. I mean, look, at the end of the day,

00:06:13.980 you can tell if a strategy worked by if it worked or not. You know, I ran the campaign in 2019.

00:06:19.340 We didn't win the government. My strategy didn't work. I think parts of it worked, other parts didn't.

00:06:24.380 Some things we did right, we picked up a bunch of seats, just a lot of the things we did wrong.

00:06:27.420 But I think that arguing that the strategy worked, which wasn't for the situation, is a mistake.

00:06:35.940 You know, the idea that a strategy can work outside of the situation, outside of COVID,

00:06:42.580 is ridiculous. We knew there was a pandemic happening. The pandemic had been happening for

00:06:46.460 over a year. To argue that, you know, that O'Toole had a brilliant strategy that was working,

00:06:51.840 but just COVID meant that Trudeau won despite that. Well, if your strategy, if you're running

00:06:56.580 a campaign in 2021, and your strategy doesn't include COVID and what's happening with the

00:07:01.980 pandemic, the single largest public policy issue of the previous, at that point, year and a half,

00:07:08.280 it's not much of a strategy. And when we actually look at the results, the Conservative Party

00:07:13.860 was substantially weaker after the 2021 election. And it was a move in the opposite direction.

00:07:21.940 Okay, so let's go through what the structural issues that Robertson paints that plague the

00:07:27.740 Conservative Party. And we can sort of look at the validity of each of these. So the first one he

00:07:31.520 identifies is that the liberal vote is far more efficient. And so that kind of goes hand in hand

00:07:36.340 with the fact that Trudeau had the smallest percentage of victory. Somehow he manages to win while also

00:07:42.400 losing. And so what do you think of this line of sort of justification as to why Conservatives don't

00:07:50.720 win because the Liberals are just sort of better at getting the right amount of votes in each seat?

00:07:55.900 Yeah, I mean, I don't think that's some sort of magic Liberal trick. The Liberal majority,

00:08:00.180 especially the built-in seats in Ontario, is built in them winning seats by 10, 12, 15 percent,

00:08:06.400 not by 50 percent. So they do win a lot of seats by not huge margins. They're not tiny margins either.

00:08:11.780 They're also not winning a lot of seats by 200 votes. And that's just sort of luck of the draw

00:08:15.200 that they win a lot of seats by 200 votes. And so the idea that in Ontario, the Liberals don't win

00:08:19.800 by a lot. But what that's really just saying is that Ontario is a very sort of, especially the 905,

00:08:26.140 is a very sort of place where a lot of votes swing together. If you start winning some seats,

00:08:30.720 you're going to win a lot of seats. That's how Harper won a lot of seats in Ontario in 2011.

00:08:34.740 That's just a function of Ontario in federal politics. And the Liberals have certainly done better

00:08:39.920 in Ontario in the last few elections. And it's something that Conservatives have to tackle.

00:08:43.900 But the argument that this is a structural thing and that Conservatives somehow mitigates against

00:08:49.260 Conservatives, and that if only things were better, that O'Toole would have won and they

00:08:54.100 were actually closer, is undercut by the facts. At the end of the day, O'Toole lost a seat in the GTA.

00:09:02.640 They lost a lot of votes. So for instance, across the GTA, Conservatives lost 80,000 votes from 2019.

00:09:12.660 So they ended up with less seats and less votes, which doesn't sound to me like the fact they were

00:09:16.900 making things closer or anything else. And this is in the face of a Trudeau that was less popular

00:09:21.860 in 2021 than he was in 2019 or 2015, certainly. So you had the Liberals declining, they lost some votes

00:09:28.740 too. But the fact that the Conservatives couldn't gain votes in this environment indicates that

00:09:34.840 O'Toole's message didn't resonate. If what you'd seen was the Liberals had lost a bunch of votes and

00:09:39.660 the Conservatives had picked up a bunch of those votes, then you can have this argument that O'Toole's

00:09:44.020 strategy was working and that this moderate message was connecting and that people were flooding to

00:09:49.400 O'Toole. But if O'Toole's message was designed to pick up votes in Ontario, the opposite happened.

00:09:55.500 He lost votes in the GTA. And what's really incredible is that for all the talk of, you know, reaching out

00:10:02.680 and creating a new environment, that isn't what happened. The, you know, O'Toole, you know, if you look

00:10:11.460 at O'Toole, if you look at the seats that O'Toole won, sorry, if you look at the seats in 2019 and how the

00:10:17.320 Conservatives won in Ontario and how they performed in 2021, Conservative vote went up by 20,000 votes.

00:10:25.500 But it dropped by 46,000 votes in seats the Conservatives hadn't held. So what ended up

00:10:30.980 happening is O'Toole, for all his talk about broadening the base and not attracting and attracting

00:10:36.120 new votes and not being afraid to piss off some old line Conservatives in order to win, ended up

00:10:41.660 getting less votes in the areas Conservatives hadn't held and more votes Conservatives had. He ended up

00:10:47.120 making the balance in Ontario worse. And so, you know, yes, Liberal vote is efficient in Ontario,

00:10:54.480 but the Conservative vote became less efficient. And that's a problem.

00:10:59.040 Yeah, it's such an interesting argument saying that, you know, being moderate worked and that but

00:11:04.400 then also not being able to point to places where moderate voters are and they're not they're not

00:11:10.060 coming into the Conservative Party. Well, the second structural issue that Robertson identified is that

00:11:15.100 more Canadians identify as as Liberals. So so Liberals walk into every election with a built in

00:11:21.080 advantage that they that they have sort of better brand loyalty, essentially. What do you what do you

00:11:26.380 make of that? So I think this is a, you know, I've looked a lot of the sort of brand identification

00:11:30.680 question over the years. And I think it's actually a problem that is actually it's sort of a concept

00:11:37.340 that's imported from the United States. In the United States, you have parties whose names don't reflect

00:11:43.180 their ideology, but Democrats and Republicans. There's no reason that a Republican party called

00:11:47.900 Republican should be right wing or one one called Democrat should be left wing. These are just names,

00:11:53.740 right? In Canada, we have party names that kind of, or at least for the big parties, reflect their values,

00:12:00.620 Liberal and Conservative. And those words, those names mean something outside of the party political context.

00:12:07.260 And I think that this question of voter identification, I've always believed,

00:12:11.500 breaks down in Canada, because when you ask people, do you think yourself more as a Conservative or a

00:12:16.780 Liberal, people are going to take a take a choice. But what those those terms mean in terms of values

00:12:21.980 and everything else, not in terms of, you know, the party identification is very different from the

00:12:27.180 situation of saying you identify as a Republican or a Democrat. So I think it's just it's an idea that's

00:12:32.540 moved into Canada in a not particularly elegant way. Look, do Conservatives need more people,

00:12:39.900 especially in Ontario, to identify as Conservatives? Would that be helpful? Of course it would.

00:12:45.260 But this isn't new. You know, the Conservatives, when Conservatives were winning majorities in 2011

00:12:50.380 and minorities in the early part of the century. Though that identification disparity existed.

00:12:57.980 When I worked in the Harper government, we saw that even when we were winning governments, more

00:13:01.740 Conservative, more Canadians identified themselves as Liberals than as Conservatives. So yeah, is it a

00:13:08.060 problem? Of course it's a problem. Is it a deep structural problem? I don't really think so. I

00:13:13.900 think it has been overcome in the past and will be overcome in the future. And also, I just don't

00:13:18.540 think it's a particularly effective measurement of where Canadians are at.

00:13:23.420 I think both of the words have very positive and negative connotations. I myself, for a long time,

00:13:28.940 thought of myself as a classical liberal. And I don't think there's much liberalism within the Liberal

00:13:34.780 Party and within the Liberal strains of thinking. These days are rather illiberal in the way that

00:13:38.860 they crack down on civil liberties and, you know, the whole concept of cancel culture. Whereas

00:13:44.860 Conservative, you know, you want to conserve the traditions of your society and you want to build

00:13:48.940 more based on what's been successful. And it's sort of interesting to see how that plays in. I

00:13:56.780 stopped referring to myself as a classical liberal because I don't think there's any point in trying

00:14:00.860 to save that word. But I think part of the problem, it really, Hamish, is that with Conservatives, you

00:14:07.340 have the Liberals sort of bashing Conservatives, the media jumping on board to say, look at these

00:14:12.300 Conservatives, they're awful, they're racist, they're bigoted, they're backwards-minded. And then the

00:14:16.140 problem is you have some progressive Conservatives sort of echoing that and agreeing with that and

00:14:20.540 saying, look back at what Harper did with the with the Necab ban, look back at what some of these 0.99

00:14:26.060 people ran on in 2019 or 2021 and sort of throwing their own side under the bus. And I think it's

00:14:30.860 sort of really need to stop doing that because it's really not helpful for the for the bigger,

00:14:35.100 broader brand. Well, to move on to the third point that Robertson makes here, and this one's the most

00:14:39.660 frustrating to me, is this idea that there's a sort of strategic voting going on that the Liberals

00:14:46.700 and NDP, the NDP vote will collapse and the Liberals will get what they need. And every single

00:14:50.940 election you hear the same story trotted out by the Liberals, like you can't vote for the NDP,

00:14:55.740 you have to vote for the Liberals, we have to stop these evil Conservatives from forming government.

00:14:59.900 And then you have Conservatives that sort of go along with that saying, okay, well, you know,

00:15:04.300 in order to appeal to these people, it's not it's not the conservative base or the sort of

00:15:08.460 broad middle class people who are apolitical that you have to appeal to, you have to start appealing

00:15:12.300 to these leftist voters in order to win. And that's sort of where the campaign strategy gets developed.

00:15:18.380 What do you what do you make of this sort of progressive tactical voting or strategic voting

00:15:22.860 issue? Look, look, it's a fact that a certain percentage of people who consider the NDP

00:15:28.540 in most campaigns end up voting Liberal, especially if they think Conservatives have a chance of winning.

00:15:33.980 This happened in 2019 happened in 2021. And I think there's there's two problems. One is

00:15:39.580 in the article, they argue that there that this was unforeseen that the NDP underperformed their

00:15:46.780 modeling. That means their modeling was wrong. It happened in 2019. It was explained to the O'Toole

00:15:53.420 campaign team. This was a problem and that they had to address it. So to now sort of feign surprise

00:15:58.380 that this happened is is is a bit a bit a bit much to take. But on top of that, you know, it creates a

00:16:06.620 there's a fundamental I like I spent a lot of time after 2019 wrestling with myself because it certainly

00:16:11.340 happened. And, you know, we believe we didn't win seats. We thought we were going to win because of

00:16:16.460 it. And and it is it is it is an issue. But I think I think the reaction to it is wrong in that,

00:16:24.380 number one, there is no universe where a Conservative Party can make itself so unscary to NDP voters

00:16:32.380 that they will still vote NDP as well as to stampede to the Liberals. And if that Conservative Party still

00:16:37.100 wants to get votes from Conservatives. Right. I mean, to create a Conservative Party that's acceptable to

00:16:43.820 to NDPers or acceptable enough that they will not vote Liberal is such a bizarre thing that will turn

00:16:49.820 off such a huge chunk of Conservative voters that I don't believe that's actually a square or a circle

00:16:56.220 that can fit into that that square hole or however the metaphor goes. I believe the solution

00:17:03.660 is to and we didn't do enough of this in 2019. It's one of the areas we failed in is you have to

00:17:10.300 persuade enough people, whether they be NDP leftists or middle of the road voters or center

00:17:16.620 right business liberals, that the Liberal Party itself and the Trudeau government itself is irredeemable,

00:17:23.340 that they cannot that even if these leftist voters don't really like the prospect of a Conservative

00:17:29.100 Conservatives doing well, that the that Trudeau is so toxic to them, the Liberals are so toxic to them,

00:17:36.060 they can't vote for them. Now, the extreme case to that would be, you know, what happened with Kathleen

00:17:42.140 Wynne in Ontario in 2018, where I'm sure the Liberals running out hoping that they could get people to

00:17:48.300 keep voting for them to stop Doug Ford, etc, etc. But the Liberal brand and the Wynne brand becomes so

00:17:53.820 toxic. Now, look, that's a historic collapse of the Liberal Party that I don't think can be recreated,

00:17:58.460 you know, easily. But there has to be more to be done to make people understand that they have to

00:18:05.180 want change. And that desire for change has to come across the political spectrum.

00:18:10.620 Well, it's one of the things that he writes about, which I hadn't heard this research before. I'll just

00:18:15.980 read a quote from a piece from Dan Robertson here in The Hub. He writes,

00:18:19.420 The research is clear 25% of Canadians who considered voting Conservative believe that the

00:18:23.980 party has not made enough progress on social issues I care about. Old negative brand attributes,

00:18:30.460 especially among suburban voters, persist and must be overcome. Focus group participants still

00:18:35.420 describe the party as corporate, American, and old-fashioned. As the suburbs urbanize a trend

00:18:40.940 all over the Western world, the Conservatives are in danger of becoming the party of rural Canada.

00:18:45.020 I've never heard that description before of the Conservative Party that the party is corporate,

00:18:50.060 American, and old-fashioned. I think of Tories as being sort of, you know, just as staunchly

00:18:57.180 loyalist and pro-Canada, probably more so now than the Liberals, just because

00:19:01.740 the Liberal Party in Canada is picking up all of these progressive, woke trends from the United States.

00:19:07.900 And it's the Conservatives that are rejecting that and, you know, being the ones who are more

00:19:12.140 patriotic and pro-Canada. I've never heard this line of attack. And I'm wondering,

00:19:18.060 is this something you see in your research that 25% of Canadians would never vote Conservative

00:19:23.340 because the party's too old-fashioned or too corporate or too American?

00:19:26.300 Well, I think what they're saying is that 25% of people who consider voting Conservative but didn't,

00:19:31.020 they listed that as their reason. This obviously comes from their internal research, which I've not

00:19:35.580 been privy to. But yeah, there's certainly a certain group of people who will say something like that.

00:19:41.660 But the fact of the matter is, is that if the O'Toole campaign, which ran the exact opposite message,

00:19:46.780 ended up with less votes and less seats in all these suburban areas, that's clearly not the

00:19:51.020 defining problem, right? Because the O'Toole message was to move dramatically to the centre,

00:19:58.460 and even to the left in many ways. And we ended up in this situation where, if that was the case,

00:20:03.980 then we should have seen a huge stream of people coming to the Conservative Party in suburban areas.

00:20:09.180 And frankly, you look at the 905. The 905, the Conservatives lost 50,000 votes in net one seat.

00:20:15.100 They lost two seats, but picked up one. So they ended up losing a lot of votes and a lot of seats.

00:20:20.940 And there's 29 seats in the 905 outside of the actual city of Toronto. Conservatives lost votes in

00:20:27.340 21 of those. And the situation is even worse in Greater Vancouver. In Greater Vancouver,

00:20:31.660 the Conservatives lost four seats and 35,000 votes. So if the message was the Conservative Party,

00:20:39.820 you know, Aaron O'Toole's progressive Conservative Party that was trying to run, I think Conrad Black

00:20:45.740 wrote a few days ago that there was no substantial policy difference between the Liberals and the

00:20:51.180 Conservatives in the last election. If that's what they were offering, and this party that had turned

00:20:57.420 its back on social conservatism and had many of much of the lecturing that you pointed out of sort of

00:21:01.900 red Tories arguing that the Conservative Party would only change in so many ways, we would end up,

00:21:08.860 the Conservative Party would frankly end up looking more like the Liberal Party, we could win.

00:21:14.300 And if that was the case, then why did the Conservatives lose votes in 21 of 29 seats?

00:21:19.740 The 905? Why did they lose four seats in the Greater Vancouver area? The fact of the matter is, is that,

00:21:27.980 you know, look, everybody in politics has their theories of why something happened and explanations

00:21:33.500 why it happened. And they're entitled to that. But they can't be entitled to it devoid of the facts.

00:21:39.340 If the argument is, O'Toole's plan was working and was connecting the 905, but COVID just ended up

00:21:45.020 screwing up a little bit and things were closer, then that should be backed up by the facts of the

00:21:48.860 ground. They shouldn't have lost all these seats. And they shouldn't have lost all these votes.

00:21:53.340 You know, there's one argument they say as well, the Conservatives under O'Toole were closer to

00:21:56.860 winning than they were in 2019, even though we lost votes and seats. That's just simply not the case.

00:22:02.700 They argued that said, you know, O'Toole publicly said that the Conservatives lost by less than 2000 votes

00:22:07.500 in around 30 seats. It's actually not true. It was 19. But on top of that, that 19 seats include

00:22:14.540 five seats that Conservatives lost in the 2021 election. So they're saying, well, we were close

00:22:19.420 to winning. It was close to winning in a seat that you gave up. So, you know, as I said, look,

00:22:25.100 there's lots of things I think we need to do differently. There's lots of things that when

00:22:28.060 I ran a national campaign that we didn't get right. But don't argue that your plan,

00:22:33.020 the plan was a sterling success in the face of all the evidence.

00:22:36.540 Well, I would even add to that, that in 2019, Justin Trudeau was, you know, it was a known

00:22:43.100 commodity to people paying close, close attention, but he still had a little bit of the veneer of,

00:22:47.820 you know, being this celebrity famous guy with great hair that was running the running the country

00:22:53.020 and the media were still sort of swooning around him. I think that that in the year in the two years

00:22:57.100 from 2019 to 2021, Trudeau's reputation took a really damning hit. And and it's gone even more

00:23:03.580 downhill since then. He's become basically a laughingstock of the international media. He

00:23:08.300 doesn't have the same sort of glossy appeal that he once did. More Canadians are starting to see

00:23:15.100 through that. So the fact that they couldn't do have a better outcome, despite the fact that Trudeau

00:23:19.740 had two more years of, again, destroying our country doesn't bode well. I want to ask you about

00:23:26.380 the PPC because Dan Robertson writes that that bringing home PPC voters isn't the path to victory,

00:23:31.740 that that sure that they they meant that the conservatives didn't want to see here or there,

00:23:36.060 but basically that PPC voters don't align with public opinion, that they're toxic, and they're

00:23:41.660 better off being left alone. I know that when you were running Andrew Scheer's campaign, you had to

00:23:47.500 grapple with this, you know, Maxime Bernier phenomenon, and the PPC. What do you make of it now? Do you

00:23:53.580 think that this is right that that the PPC voters are sort of a lost cause? Or do you think the

00:23:58.780 conservatives should actively be trying to get them back into the fray? I mean, it's a very

00:24:03.580 difficult question. Look, you know, the authors write in that if you add every single PPC vote to

00:24:10.140 the conservative vote totals, the conservatives still would not have won the most number of seats

00:24:15.740 in this election. So the PPC alone isn't enough for the conservatives to win. There are a lot of

00:24:21.980 conservative-minded people instead of the PPC, and there's a lot who aren't. The question for me is,

00:24:27.420 look, the PPC is a changing organization, right? Their votes in 2019 were very much focused around

00:24:38.220 anti-immigration was their primary issue. In 2021, it was very much around anti-vaccinations,

00:24:46.140 and it was a very different issue. So I'm sure that some people who voted PPC in 2019 didn't stick with

00:24:51.420 the PPC and migrated to other parties. So the question becomes is, how can the PPC,

00:24:57.900 you know, what does a PPC voter look like in 2025? What is that vote? Do I think that some of those

00:25:03.020 people who didn't hear a voice fighting for them strongly enough around mandates, for instance,

00:25:09.980 are open to a conservative party who says that, yes, people shouldn't have been fired and, you know,

00:25:15.500 it's wrong to mandate all these people out of work? Absolutely. And I think there's a good chunk of

00:25:20.460 those voters that can come to the conservative party and actually help grow the conservative party.

00:25:24.140 But do I think the PPC party is a party that's voted simply to be added on top of the conservative

00:25:28.380 party? No. But it's also a, it's an unusual party in that it's, you know, these situational

00:25:35.020 parties that often created in 2019, or in 2018, I guess, out of out of the ashes of Bernier's

00:25:41.660 leadership campaign focus ended up focusing on immigration and then morphed into something else.

00:25:48.140 Usually they don't morph. Usually these parties exist, they come for one election. And as their

00:25:53.100 issue in that situation dissipates, so do they. PPC morphed into a, it took hold of a second issue,

00:25:59.260 ended up growing because of it. I think that people with, with concerns about mandates and about COVID

00:26:05.420 rules are a important part of a conservative coalition. And many of those votes can be,

00:26:11.180 can be added back in, especially since I think the Canadian public has moved on a lot of those issues.

00:26:17.900 You know, I like to say, so just last week, um, the government of Ontario removed the requirement

00:26:24.220 for masks on public transit. You know, I live in downtown Toronto. I take a streetcar every day

00:26:29.260 from, uh, from one part of very left-wing downtown Toronto, right into the heart of the financial

00:26:33.420 district. And, you know, if they were being told by sort of the COVID, uh, uh, you know, the

00:26:39.020 liberals and the NDP that, you know, that everybody should be wearing masks, nobody should be giving up

00:26:42.860 their masks, et cetera, et cetera, and concerned about all this stuff, you know, that streetcar that

00:26:46.860 I take every day should be, should not have made a difference once the government said you don't

00:26:50.300 have to wear a streetcar. There'd just be a few people taking off their masks. I'd say the streetcar

00:26:54.780 now after one week is 50% of people are unmasked. People are tired of all these rules. And so how

00:27:02.460 that, that, that argument is going to change in the future, I don't know, but I don't think the PPC

00:27:07.820 vote is a monolithic vote that can be just brought over all at once either. Well, what I saw from the

00:27:13.500 provincial election in Ontario was that when the liberals tried to drum up more fear about COVID saying

00:27:19.180 that the PCs weren't going to do a good enough job and that they were going to be stricter with

00:27:23.180 vaccines and all that kind of stuff, I saw that there was no appetite for that. The Canadians, 0.55

00:27:26.860 even in liberal Toronto and even in left-wing parts of Ontario, they didn't, that wasn't a winning

00:27:32.940 issue and strategy. And what I see, Hamish, especially from True North viewers and people in the comments

00:27:37.900 section is a real excitement around the candidacy of Pierre Polyev, even people who were long-time

00:27:44.060 supportive people who love Maxime Bernier. And they want to see Bernier and Pierre kind of run together,

00:27:50.220 or a lot of people who have signed up for the Conservative Party who had never done it before

00:27:55.180 because they're excited. Not necessarily about, you know, what Pierre is saying, but just the way that

00:28:01.500 he says it. I mean, obviously what he's saying, but, you know, he seems like a fighter. He seems like

00:28:05.980 he's going to stand up for Canadians, marginalized Canadians. The kind of people who would go to a 1.00

00:28:10.620 protest party like the PPC because they're frustrated with the status quo, well, they seem to

00:28:14.700 they seem to be listening and Pierre seems to be appealing to them. So I think, I think that

00:28:20.620 there's something to the idea that, you know, the party that morphs, you can capture imagination with

00:28:26.220 the right candidate speaking their language and really appearing to be pushing back against the

00:28:32.380 gatekeepers and the status quo like Pierre talks about. Well, I guess just a final question for you,

00:28:37.660 Hamish. You know, there's always this sort of soul searching that happens and this reflection

00:28:42.220 that happens after a party loses. And it is good that we're having these kinds of conversations

00:28:46.780 to help improve, you know, what can happen in the next election. What do you think the big takeaway

00:28:54.060 for Conservatives should be? And do you think that there's any lasting damage in trying to say, okay,

00:29:00.380 we have the right strategy, we just have to tweak it a little bit and keep with this idea that we need

00:29:05.580 a moderate, socially liberal candidate in order to beat Trudeau?

00:29:09.500 I mean, I think, I think there's two important takeaways. Number one is that you need, you can't

00:29:15.340 take the Conservative base for granted. You have to make sure that Conservatives see themselves as

00:29:20.940 part of your candidacy and your plan and hopefully will be your government. So if, if, if, uh,

00:29:26.060 Conservatives, uh, sort of activists don't see themselves as part of that, that's going to be,

00:29:31.020 that's going to be a big problem. Uh, that's number one. Number two, I believe that if you're

00:29:36.060 running for, to present change, you have to look like change. You have to put on policies that are

00:29:42.300 different. Running and saying, we agree with the government on, this is true of any party left,

00:29:46.620 right, whatever situation is. If you're running and saying, we agree on 98% of things, we're doing

00:29:51.340 a couple of little things different and our leader is a different sort of person. That's not enough.

00:29:57.020 One of the reasons Trudeau was able, and I'm obviously not a fan of it, one of the reasons Trudeau was

00:30:00.620 able to win in 2015 wasn't just that he was young and dashing and exciting and charismatic.

00:30:07.420 Um, but he offered a distinctly different policy agenda and one that frankly looked more like

00:30:12.060 change than the NDP. The NDP in 2015 ran on balanced budgets. They were trying to look more

00:30:16.380 like mature response for true responsible choice. The Canadians felt it was time for changes and what

00:30:21.340 looks more like change. Sure. There's an exciting new leader, Justin Trudeau, but he's also saying he's

00:30:25.420 going to do all these other different things. Now ended up not doing a whole bunch of them and we can,

00:30:28.860 I would argue many of those things he wanted to do were bad ideas, but you have to offer change.

00:30:34.220 You have to, if you're saying we're going to be different, you have to be different.

00:30:37.580 Um, otherwise people are going to say they're going to stick with the devil they know.

00:30:41.340 Um, so that's the big takeaway that I take from all this stuff. You have to offer something

00:30:46.460 different and you can't ignore, you can't just take the conservative base for, for, for granted,

00:30:50.700 or even as it seemed like at times during the, you know, to leadership run against your own base,

00:30:55.580 demand that the party, you know, point out how your own party was somehow lacking.

00:30:59.740 Um, and that's not the way to build a winning coalition. You should get people, uh, inch more

00:31:05.660 people into your party, get them more excited about your party, bring in new folks. That's why

00:31:10.060 O'Toole ended up losing half a million votes, but it's also why, you know, uh, Polio's campaign

00:31:15.420 has attracted so many people. Signing up 312,000 people is a massive accomplishment. Those aren't

00:31:20.700 people who are all former conservative members or people. Those are people, many of those people

00:31:24.940 are new to politics, uh, and that's exciting. And if you can build a movement and grow that movement,

00:31:31.260 that's how you win. Absolutely. And throwing, throwing your own base and throwing Canadians 1.00

00:31:35.820 under the bus and leveling the same kinds of accusations against them that we hear from

00:31:40.060 leftist pundits in the media and liberals and NDP is not, not going to work out. I completely echo,

00:31:45.340 uh, that sentiment and, uh, appreciate your time, Hamish. Thanks for coming and breaking it all

00:31:50.060 down. Hopefully, uh, the conservative party takes, takes your advice and, uh, takes the party in, in a

00:31:55.340 more authentically conservative direction. Appreciate your time, Hamish. Thank you.

00:31:58.620 My pleasure.

00:32:00.140 Thank you so much for tuning in. I'm Kenneth Malcolm, and this is The Kenneth Malcolm Show.

00:32:15.340 is

00:32:30.460 Inspired by bombshell Panic ya know

00:32:31.180 Anderson.

00:32:31.260 Yes.

The Candice Malcolm Show - June 20, 2022

Should the Conservatives embrace woke progressive ideas to beat Trudeau？

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