Should the Conservatives embrace woke progressive ideas to beat Trudeau？
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Summary
As a Conservative leadership race heats up, more party insiders and party elites are calling on conservatives to become more progressive and once again appeal to leftist voters. But is this really a path to victory? Candace Malcolm explains why.
Transcript
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As a conservative leadership race heats up, more party insiders and party elites are calling on
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conservatives to become more progressive and once again appeal to leftist voters. But is this really
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a path to victory? I'm Candace Malcolm and this is The Candace Malcolm Show.
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Hi everyone, thank you so much for tuning into the podcast. I hope that all the dads out there,
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all the fathers had a wonderful Father's Day. I hope everyone reached out to their dad to talk
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about how much they appreciate the role of fathers in our society. I know we had a great day yesterday
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with my husband and my kids. It's just so great to get to appreciate the role that he plays in the
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family. The kids love every second, every minute that they get with their daddy. So it was really
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fun and really great. Today I want to talk about the conservative leadership race and this familiar
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call that we get from party insiders and from the sort of brass of the conservative party urging
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conservatives to be more progressive, be more left-wing in order to win elections. Well, first
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I just want to make a clear point. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is the worst prime minister of my
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lifetime. He is eminently beatable and the conservatives should be able to beat him. They
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almost beat him in the last two elections but almost isn't good enough. If you look at Justin
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Trudeau and look at what he's done to our country, he's arguably the worst prime minister since his
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father, arguably even worse given what's happened in the last year. During his time in office, he's
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infused the federal government with every latest leftist woke trend, scrubbing our country of its
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proud traditions, apologizing on behalf of every other Canadian. But for himself, he never takes
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responsibility for his scandals, for his ethical violations, or for the old boys club liberal
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corruption that he has re-implemented. He's racked up more debt than anyone thought imaginable.
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He's plunged our country into economic instability with out-of-control inflation, higher taxes,
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anemic growth rates, and an out-of-control housing bubble and cost-of-living bubble.
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Interest rates are going up, things are getting even more expensive, and in all likelihood, our
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country is on the verge of another crushing recession, all with Justin Trudeau at the helm,
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who frankly has no idea how to get us out of this or how to change course. Meanwhile, Trudeau's stomped on
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our civil liberties, he's used wartime measures against peaceful protesters, and he's continued to divide the
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country worse than any leader in our history. Anyone who criticizes him, he calls them racist,
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sexist, bigots, calls them anti-vaxxers, and of course, he calls them anti-science.
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Trudeau is loathsome. He's a disgrace. He's no business running our country. And Canadians see this.
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They know this. That's why the majority of Canadians don't vote for Trudeau. They don't support him.
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In the last election, Trudeau won with the smallest share of the vote in Canadian history. So once again,
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he's eminently beatable. And yet, three elections in a row here, the Conservatives haven't
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been able to edge him out. They have not been successful in beating him. Like I said, they came
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very close, but they didn't do it. Now, during this Conservative race, leadership race, we're voting
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to see who will run against Trudeau in the next election. That vote's going to happen over the
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summer. We had Ian Brody on the show last week to explain the process and how it's all going to work.
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But it's time to look at who to vote for and what the strategy will be. And one of the strategies
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that we keep seeing floated by party insiders and sort of the party brass is this idea that
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in order to beat Trudeau, the Conservatives have to become more like Justin Trudeau, that
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we need to run a moderate, maybe fiscally prudent, but socially leftist or woke or progressive
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party. And that's the path to victory, that we need to abandon conservatism and just appeal
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to people who would otherwise vote for Justin Trudeau in the Liberals. This isn't true,
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though. And we shouldn't look any further than the 2021 election. To see this strategy didn't work,
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that essentially was the Aaron O'Toole strategy. And that is why he lost. Sure, he had an authenticity
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problem because he ran for leader as a true blue conservative, fiscally conservative and socially
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conservative, or at least culturally conservative. And then when he came to the general election,
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he basically flip-flopped on every issue. So Canadians didn't really trust him. But as far as the
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strategy that he took himself, he wanted to appeal to those blue Liberals, those red Tories who believe
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that in order to win, you know, you have to run on big government healthcare, big government spending,
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big government generally. And it just didn't work. And we can look at the numbers and we can see that
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the Conservatives lost seats in BC. They didn't pick up any seats in the 905. I think they only won one
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seat in the entire GTA. And they saw a reduced seat count from 120 seats down to 119, a reduced vote
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share from 34% down to 33%. And so the strategy didn't work. And yet we continue to see it peddled
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out. I think the latest iteration of this, from this line of thinking from Tory insiders, came via a
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piece written in The Hub by Aaron O'Toole's chief strategist, Dan Robertson. So Dan had a piece out
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last week where he basically said that the problem with the campaign in 2021 was not the strategy,
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but it was just the structural issues that face Conservatives. So I want to take a greater look
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at this theory that we hear from red Tories and some party insiders saying that it wasn't Aaron
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O'Toole's fault. It wasn't anything to do with their strategy. It was just that, you know, there's all
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these other problems that are beyond their control. And so to break down this piece a little more,
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I am pleased to be welcomed by Hamish Marshall. You know, Hamish, he was our in-house pollster
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during the last election, and he's worked on a lot of different leadership campaigns,
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including he worked for Stephen Harper in the Conservative Party. And then he also worked
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for Andrew Scheer and ran his campaign back in 2019. So Hamish, thank you so much for joining
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the show. It's great to have you on the program.
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So what do you think of this idea that the Conservatives lost in 2021, because of the structural issues,
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Well, I think it's an excuse for losing. I mean, look, at the end of the day,
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you can tell if a strategy worked by if it worked or not. You know, I ran the campaign in 2019.
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We didn't win the government. My strategy didn't work. I think parts of it worked, other parts didn't.
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Some things we did right, we picked up a bunch of seats, just a lot of the things we did wrong.
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But I think that arguing that the strategy worked, which wasn't for the situation, is a mistake.
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You know, the idea that a strategy can work outside of the situation, outside of COVID,
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is ridiculous. We knew there was a pandemic happening. The pandemic had been happening for
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over a year. To argue that, you know, that O'Toole had a brilliant strategy that was working,
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but just COVID meant that Trudeau won despite that. Well, if your strategy, if you're running
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a campaign in 2021, and your strategy doesn't include COVID and what's happening with the
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pandemic, the single largest public policy issue of the previous, at that point, year and a half,
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it's not much of a strategy. And when we actually look at the results, the Conservative Party
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was substantially weaker after the 2021 election. And it was a move in the opposite direction.
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Okay, so let's go through what the structural issues that Robertson paints that plague the
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Conservative Party. And we can sort of look at the validity of each of these. So the first one he
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identifies is that the liberal vote is far more efficient. And so that kind of goes hand in hand
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with the fact that Trudeau had the smallest percentage of victory. Somehow he manages to win while also
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losing. And so what do you think of this line of sort of justification as to why Conservatives don't
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win because the Liberals are just sort of better at getting the right amount of votes in each seat?
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Yeah, I mean, I don't think that's some sort of magic Liberal trick. The Liberal majority,
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especially the built-in seats in Ontario, is built in them winning seats by 10, 12, 15 percent,
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not by 50 percent. So they do win a lot of seats by not huge margins. They're not tiny margins either.
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They're also not winning a lot of seats by 200 votes. And that's just sort of luck of the draw
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that they win a lot of seats by 200 votes. And so the idea that in Ontario, the Liberals don't win
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by a lot. But what that's really just saying is that Ontario is a very sort of, especially the 905,
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is a very sort of place where a lot of votes swing together. If you start winning some seats,
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you're going to win a lot of seats. That's how Harper won a lot of seats in Ontario in 2011.
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That's just a function of Ontario in federal politics. And the Liberals have certainly done better
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in Ontario in the last few elections. And it's something that Conservatives have to tackle.
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But the argument that this is a structural thing and that Conservatives somehow mitigates against
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Conservatives, and that if only things were better, that O'Toole would have won and they
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were actually closer, is undercut by the facts. At the end of the day, O'Toole lost a seat in the GTA.
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They lost a lot of votes. So for instance, across the GTA, Conservatives lost 80,000 votes from 2019.
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So they ended up with less seats and less votes, which doesn't sound to me like the fact they were
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making things closer or anything else. And this is in the face of a Trudeau that was less popular
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in 2021 than he was in 2019 or 2015, certainly. So you had the Liberals declining, they lost some votes
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too. But the fact that the Conservatives couldn't gain votes in this environment indicates that
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O'Toole's message didn't resonate. If what you'd seen was the Liberals had lost a bunch of votes and
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the Conservatives had picked up a bunch of those votes, then you can have this argument that O'Toole's
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strategy was working and that this moderate message was connecting and that people were flooding to
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O'Toole. But if O'Toole's message was designed to pick up votes in Ontario, the opposite happened.
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He lost votes in the GTA. And what's really incredible is that for all the talk of, you know, reaching out
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and creating a new environment, that isn't what happened. The, you know, O'Toole, you know, if you look
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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
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Conservatives won in Ontario and how they performed in 2021, Conservative vote went up by 20,000 votes.
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But it dropped by 46,000 votes in seats the Conservatives hadn't held. So what ended up
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happening is O'Toole, for all his talk about broadening the base and not attracting and attracting
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new votes and not being afraid to piss off some old line Conservatives in order to win, ended up
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getting less votes in the areas Conservatives hadn't held and more votes Conservatives had. He ended up
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making the balance in Ontario worse. And so, you know, yes, Liberal vote is efficient in Ontario,
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but the Conservative vote became less efficient. And that's a problem.
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Yeah, it's such an interesting argument saying that, you know, being moderate worked and that but
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then also not being able to point to places where moderate voters are and they're not they're not
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coming into the Conservative Party. Well, the second structural issue that Robertson identified is that
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more Canadians identify as as Liberals. So so Liberals walk into every election with a built in
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advantage that they that they have sort of better brand loyalty, essentially. What do you what do you
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make of that? So I think this is a, you know, I've looked a lot of the sort of brand identification
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question over the years. And I think it's actually a problem that is actually it's sort of a concept
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that's imported from the United States. In the United States, you have parties whose names don't reflect
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their ideology, but Democrats and Republicans. There's no reason that a Republican party called
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Republican should be right wing or one one called Democrat should be left wing. These are just names,
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right? In Canada, we have party names that kind of, or at least for the big parties, reflect their values,
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Liberal and Conservative. And those words, those names mean something outside of the party political context.
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And I think that this question of voter identification, I've always believed,
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breaks down in Canada, because when you ask people, do you think yourself more as a Conservative or a
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Liberal, people are going to take a take a choice. But what those those terms mean in terms of values
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and everything else, not in terms of, you know, the party identification is very different from the
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situation of saying you identify as a Republican or a Democrat. So I think it's just it's an idea that's
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moved into Canada in a not particularly elegant way. Look, do Conservatives need more people,
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especially in Ontario, to identify as Conservatives? Would that be helpful? Of course it would.
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But this isn't new. You know, the Conservatives, when Conservatives were winning majorities in 2011
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and minorities in the early part of the century. Though that identification disparity existed.
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When I worked in the Harper government, we saw that even when we were winning governments, more
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Conservative, more Canadians identified themselves as Liberals than as Conservatives. So yeah, is it a
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problem? Of course it's a problem. Is it a deep structural problem? I don't really think so. I
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think it has been overcome in the past and will be overcome in the future. And also, I just don't
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think it's a particularly effective measurement of where Canadians are at.
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I think both of the words have very positive and negative connotations. I myself, for a long time,
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thought of myself as a classical liberal. And I don't think there's much liberalism within the Liberal
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Party and within the Liberal strains of thinking. These days are rather illiberal in the way that
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they crack down on civil liberties and, you know, the whole concept of cancel culture. Whereas
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Conservative, you know, you want to conserve the traditions of your society and you want to build
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more based on what's been successful. And it's sort of interesting to see how that plays in. I
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stopped referring to myself as a classical liberal because I don't think there's any point in trying
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to save that word. But I think part of the problem, it really, Hamish, is that with Conservatives, you
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have the Liberals sort of bashing Conservatives, the media jumping on board to say, look at these
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Conservatives, they're awful, they're racist, they're bigoted, they're backwards-minded. And then the
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problem is you have some progressive Conservatives sort of echoing that and agreeing with that and
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saying, look back at what Harper did with the with the Necab ban, look back at what some of these
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people ran on in 2019 or 2021 and sort of throwing their own side under the bus. And I think it's
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sort of really need to stop doing that because it's really not helpful for the for the bigger,
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broader brand. Well, to move on to the third point that Robertson makes here, and this one's the most
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frustrating to me, is this idea that there's a sort of strategic voting going on that the Liberals
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and NDP, the NDP vote will collapse and the Liberals will get what they need. And every single
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election you hear the same story trotted out by the Liberals, like you can't vote for the NDP,
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you have to vote for the Liberals, we have to stop these evil Conservatives from forming government.
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And then you have Conservatives that sort of go along with that saying, okay, well, you know,
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in order to appeal to these people, it's not it's not the conservative base or the sort of
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broad middle class people who are apolitical that you have to appeal to, you have to start appealing
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to these leftist voters in order to win. And that's sort of where the campaign strategy gets developed.
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What do you what do you make of this sort of progressive tactical voting or strategic voting
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issue? Look, look, it's a fact that a certain percentage of people who consider the NDP
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in most campaigns end up voting Liberal, especially if they think Conservatives have a chance of winning.
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This happened in 2019 happened in 2021. And I think there's there's two problems. One is
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in the article, they argue that there that this was unforeseen that the NDP underperformed their
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modeling. That means their modeling was wrong. It happened in 2019. It was explained to the O'Toole
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campaign team. This was a problem and that they had to address it. So to now sort of feign surprise
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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
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there's a fundamental I like I spent a lot of time after 2019 wrestling with myself because it certainly
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happened. And, you know, we believe we didn't win seats. We thought we were going to win because of
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it. And and it is it is it is an issue. But I think I think the reaction to it is wrong in that,
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number one, there is no universe where a Conservative Party can make itself so unscary to NDP voters
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that they will still vote NDP as well as to stampede to the Liberals. And if that Conservative Party still
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wants to get votes from Conservatives. Right. I mean, to create a Conservative Party that's acceptable to
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to NDPers or acceptable enough that they will not vote Liberal is such a bizarre thing that will turn
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off such a huge chunk of Conservative voters that I don't believe that's actually a square or a circle
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that can fit into that that square hole or however the metaphor goes. I believe the solution
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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
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persuade enough people, whether they be NDP leftists or middle of the road voters or center
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right business liberals, that the Liberal Party itself and the Trudeau government itself is irredeemable,
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that they cannot that even if these leftist voters don't really like the prospect of a Conservative
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Conservatives doing well, that the that Trudeau is so toxic to them, the Liberals are so toxic to them,
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they can't vote for them. Now, the extreme case to that would be, you know, what happened with Kathleen
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Wynne in Ontario in 2018, where I'm sure the Liberals running out hoping that they could get people to
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keep voting for them to stop Doug Ford, etc, etc. But the Liberal brand and the Wynne brand becomes so
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toxic. Now, look, that's a historic collapse of the Liberal Party that I don't think can be recreated,
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you know, easily. But there has to be more to be done to make people understand that they have to
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want change. And that desire for change has to come across the political spectrum.
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Well, it's one of the things that he writes about, which I hadn't heard this research before. I'll just
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read a quote from a piece from Dan Robertson here in The Hub. He writes,
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The research is clear 25% of Canadians who considered voting Conservative believe that the
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party has not made enough progress on social issues I care about. Old negative brand attributes,
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especially among suburban voters, persist and must be overcome. Focus group participants still
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describe the party as corporate, American, and old-fashioned. As the suburbs urbanize a trend
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all over the Western world, the Conservatives are in danger of becoming the party of rural Canada.
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I've never heard that description before of the Conservative Party that the party is corporate,
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American, and old-fashioned. I think of Tories as being sort of, you know, just as staunchly
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loyalist and pro-Canada, probably more so now than the Liberals, just because
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the Liberal Party in Canada is picking up all of these progressive, woke trends from the United States.
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And it's the Conservatives that are rejecting that and, you know, being the ones who are more
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patriotic and pro-Canada. I've never heard this line of attack. And I'm wondering,
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is this something you see in your research that 25% of Canadians would never vote Conservative
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because the party's too old-fashioned or too corporate or too American?
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Well, I think what they're saying is that 25% of people who consider voting Conservative but didn't,
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they listed that as their reason. This obviously comes from their internal research, which I've not
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been privy to. But yeah, there's certainly a certain group of people who will say something like that.
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But the fact of the matter is, is that if the O'Toole campaign, which ran the exact opposite message,
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ended up with less votes and less seats in all these suburban areas, that's clearly not the
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defining problem, right? Because the O'Toole message was to move dramatically to the centre,
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and even to the left in many ways. And we ended up in this situation where, if that was the case,
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then we should have seen a huge stream of people coming to the Conservative Party in suburban areas.
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And frankly, you look at the 905. The 905, the Conservatives lost 50,000 votes in net one seat.
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They lost two seats, but picked up one. So they ended up losing a lot of votes and a lot of seats.
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And there's 29 seats in the 905 outside of the actual city of Toronto. Conservatives lost votes in
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21 of those. And the situation is even worse in Greater Vancouver. In Greater Vancouver,
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the Conservatives lost four seats and 35,000 votes. So if the message was the Conservative Party,
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you know, Aaron O'Toole's progressive Conservative Party that was trying to run, I think Conrad Black
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wrote a few days ago that there was no substantial policy difference between the Liberals and the
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Conservatives in the last election. If that's what they were offering, and this party that had turned
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its back on social conservatism and had many of much of the lecturing that you pointed out of sort of
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red Tories arguing that the Conservative Party would only change in so many ways, we would end up,
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the Conservative Party would frankly end up looking more like the Liberal Party, we could win.
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And if that was the case, then why did the Conservatives lose votes in 21 of 29 seats?
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The 905? Why did they lose four seats in the Greater Vancouver area? The fact of the matter is, is that,
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you know, look, everybody in politics has their theories of why something happened and explanations
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why it happened. And they're entitled to that. But they can't be entitled to it devoid of the facts.
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If the argument is, O'Toole's plan was working and was connecting the 905, but COVID just ended up
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screwing up a little bit and things were closer, then that should be backed up by the facts of the
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ground. They shouldn't have lost all these seats. And they shouldn't have lost all these votes.
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You know, there's one argument they say as well, the Conservatives under O'Toole were closer to
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winning than they were in 2019, even though we lost votes and seats. That's just simply not the case.
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They argued that said, you know, O'Toole publicly said that the Conservatives lost by less than 2000 votes
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in around 30 seats. It's actually not true. It was 19. But on top of that, that 19 seats include
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five seats that Conservatives lost in the 2021 election. So they're saying, well, we were close
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to winning. It was close to winning in a seat that you gave up. So, you know, as I said, look,
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there's lots of things I think we need to do differently. There's lots of things that when
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I ran a national campaign that we didn't get right. But don't argue that your plan,
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the plan was a sterling success in the face of all the evidence.
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Well, I would even add to that, that in 2019, Justin Trudeau was, you know, it was a known
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commodity to people paying close, close attention, but he still had a little bit of the veneer of,
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you know, being this celebrity famous guy with great hair that was running the running the country
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and the media were still sort of swooning around him. I think that that in the year in the two years
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from 2019 to 2021, Trudeau's reputation took a really damning hit. And and it's gone even more
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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,
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
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
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.
00:32:00.140
Thank you so much for tuning in. I'm Kenneth Malcolm, and this is The Kenneth Malcolm Show.