The Candice Malcolm Show - The French Debate was a total waste of time

00:00:00.000 The conservative leadership candidates participated in a French language debate last night

00:00:04.320 and were all worse off because of it. I'm Candice Malcolm and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.

00:00:20.980 Hi everyone, thank you so much for tuning into the program. Originally I was going to air

00:00:25.500 an interview that I did with Tom Flanagan today in a sort of recognition of the one-year anniversary

00:00:30.400 of the apparent discovery of Unmarked Graves, but given the fact that there was a conservative

00:00:35.240 debate last night, I think we're going to push that interview, we'll air it next week,

00:00:39.520 and today I want to talk to you about the debate that happened last night. Now originally I wasn't

00:00:44.380 going to cover it because I don't think that there's a lot of interest in conservative circles

00:00:49.140 and in Canada frankly to listen to a French language debate. There's such a small percentage

00:00:54.560 percentage of conservative members who speak French and I think we're better served having

00:00:59.240 debates in English. I don't think a lot of people tuned in last night and I think the viewership

00:01:03.320 numbers will show that. We don't know them yet, but just judging by the number of people watching

00:01:07.900 them on YouTube and social media platforms last night, it was a small fraction of what we had

00:01:12.260 watching the debates, the English language debate that happened in Edmonton a few weeks ago. And I

00:01:18.820 just want to say I think it is a disservice to conservatives and more broadly to Canadians

00:01:24.540 that we had this spectacle, this charade, pretending that we should give equal weight to French and 0.96

00:01:31.980 English language. It doesn't make sense for the conservative party. We know that the conservative

00:01:36.160 party is a party based mostly out of western Canada. That is where the bulk of the support of

00:01:41.880 the party comes from, not just now, but traditionally as well. Quebecers don't vote for the conservative

00:01:48.260 party in large numbers no matter what, no matter what the strategy, no matter the candidate, no matter

00:01:53.580 how well they speak French or how poorly they speak French. We're going to go through the stats and

00:01:57.360 numbers, but the idea that there should be two equally weighted debates, right? There's two official

00:02:02.140 debates in the conservative leadership race, the English one and the French one, and it's over now.

00:02:06.520 We're done. No more debates. The decision doesn't come until September. So we're now, what,

00:02:11.040 four months out and we're not going to have another debate. That was it. Maybe someone will plan

00:02:15.780 something and try to throw something together over the summer. But at this point, the candidates have

00:02:19.800 no more debates. So that was the last opportunity that we had. And again, I think it's a disservice

00:02:24.200 that it happened in French. And as we saw last night, for those who did tune in, the French debate,

00:02:31.500 it was humiliating, right? We have six candidates on the stage. Three of them speak French fairly well.

00:02:36.460 I think that Jean Charest is obviously a native French speaker. Pierre seems to have

00:02:40.420 very good French, Pierre Polyev. And it looks like Patrick Brown has been working on his French.

00:02:45.700 So you had those three candidates who were actively participating, who really were the debate.

00:02:50.960 And then the other three candidates, Roman Babber, Lasson Lewis, and Scott Aitchison,

00:02:54.980 weren't really part of the debate at all. They were just sort of on stage. Every now and then,

00:02:59.580 they would read a line that they had or a prepared statement that they had in French,

00:03:04.700 but they weren't really participating. They weren't following along. They weren't able to jump in

00:03:08.220 and interject with their opinions and ideas because it's really hard to follow a fast-moving debate

00:03:14.880 in another language that you barely understand. And so it was pretty clear that those three candidates

00:03:19.760 don't speak French fluently enough to be able to actively participating. So again, we just heard

00:03:25.020 them kind of repeating the same thing over. It was humiliating for them. It was insulting for the crowd.

00:03:29.580 I mean, the crowd is there. The French-speaking crowd in Laval, Quebec, they're there to hear a debate

00:03:35.500 and to have candidates forced to read a statement that really doesn't have anything to do with what the

00:03:41.340 debate is about because a lot of times it was just really lost in translation. Those three candidates

00:03:46.680 didn't really understand what the questions were, the context, the actual direction that the debate had gone.

00:03:52.880 Every time they spoke, it was just kind of a distraction. And it didn't make for good viewing.

00:03:57.340 It didn't make for an entertaining debate. And it didn't really make for a good exchange of ideas,

00:04:03.420 which is exactly what you want to see from a debate. The whole idea is to have them debate.

00:04:07.500 So why not stick to English language that all six of them fluently speak instead of the spectacle

00:04:12.140 of trying to force conservatives to speak French? And let me just say, on the conservative side of the

00:04:19.000 aisle, it's hard enough to recruit really good talent into politics, okay? If you're a very smart,

00:04:25.720 capable, talented, competent person who has a conservative worldview, who is sort of pro-free

00:04:31.820 market, pro-business, you know, believes in a sort of tradition of our structures and is generally

00:04:37.560 speaking pro-Western liberal democracy and capitalism, you're more likely to be successful

00:04:42.880 in the private sector. You're more likely to be a business owner or an entrepreneur or an executive

00:04:48.620 at a big company. You're more likely to be successful in that realm. And it's really hard to take people

00:04:53.380 who are successful over there and convince them to come into politics. That's hard enough as it is.

00:04:59.480 Add on top of that, the layer of the fact that the media hates conservatives. And so whoever comes in

00:05:04.260 to the conservative fray is automatically going to get smeared as soon as they're the leader or as

00:05:09.580 soon as they're running an election. We saw this with, interestingly, Chris Alexander, who is a very

00:05:14.580 respected diplomat in Canadian political circles. He came into the fray of politics. He joined the

00:05:20.400 Harper conservatives, eventually becoming the immigration minister. And he talked about how

00:05:25.580 kind of blindsided he was by the smears that are regularly aimed against conservatives. It's so

00:05:31.020 different than for liberals. They will ruin your life and attack every angle of you. And so this

00:05:38.700 already makes, that's two shots against conservatives, right? Number one is that most competent, capable people

00:05:44.280 who lean conservative are successful in business and have no interest in politics. The second is that the

00:05:49.060 media will destroy your life. And the third one is that this idea that you must speak French in order

00:05:55.460 to be the conservative leader, you basically eliminate like, like 60% of the Canadian population

00:06:00.220 from ever being able to want to get involved in federal politics. I remember Kevin O'Leary, when he

00:06:06.140 was running for leader of the conservative party, he talked about this. He didn't speak French. He was a

00:06:09.640 businessman. He's from Ontario. He never learned French. He's not from a bilingual family. That's just not

00:06:14.640 part of his life. And this, this idea that he was going to be forced to learn French. He was like,

00:06:19.980 you know, that's not worth my time. There's so many other things that I would rather do

00:06:23.500 to, to, to, to, if I'm going to leave this party and going to leave this country, but rather focus on

00:06:28.480 making me learn French is a distraction. I think that's completely right. And I think that the numbers

00:06:33.220 bear this out. So again, by participating this in this event, by, by putting it on equal footing,

00:06:38.520 saying we're going to have two official debates, one in English, one in French,

00:06:40.960 it backs up this idea that conservatives must speak French in order to become prime minister.

00:06:46.580 And I think that's a dangerous position and a dangerous president. And it doesn't help when,

00:06:50.860 when it comes to electoral outcomes. So conservatives don't win in Quebec. That's, that's the reality.

00:06:56.300 Conservatives currently have 10 seats in the province of Quebec. The most that they've won in

00:07:00.860 recent elections was 12 and that was in 2015, right? So, so no matter what conservatives do,

00:07:07.040 they have a very, very, very, very small footprint in Quebec. The majority of people in Quebec don't

00:07:12.820 like the conservatives, won't vote for the conservatives. They have fundamental differences

00:07:16.260 in terms of their worldview and their values. And so the fact that we waste so much time,

00:07:20.580 the conservatives waste so much time trying to make inroads, trying to win in Quebec, participating

00:07:24.620 in the spectacle that we saw in the debate last night, it doesn't help, right? It doesn't help. And

00:07:29.640 the reality is the majority of Canadians don't speak French. Only 22% of Canadians have French as their

00:07:36.380 first language. It's about just a little under 8 million. And then another 6 million are bilingual.

00:07:42.280 So Canadians from the rest of the country who have learned to speak French or have French families,

00:07:47.260 a lot of those people live in other sort of bilingual areas like francophones in Ontario or in

00:07:53.460 New Brunswick. So just a few more stats on, on the official languages, according to the census.

00:08:01.020 So you can go through and you can see by province, what percentage of the population

00:08:05.120 is bilingual. So Newfoundland 5%, PEI 12%, Nova Scotia 10%, New Brunswick 33%. You know,

00:08:14.780 those aren't provinces, again, where conservatives do very well or win very well. But 11% of people

00:08:19.820 in Ontario are bilingual. And then once you start to go west, those numbers really drop off, right?

00:08:24.220 8%. Saskatchewan 4.7% are bilingual. Alberta 6.6%. British Columbia 6.8%. So really, there's not a lot

00:08:33.340 of need out west to learn French. It doesn't seem like an important language. I mean, I grew up in

00:08:38.200 British Columbia. And I remember in grade 11, they started offering Spanish at my school. And most of

00:08:44.560 the students got out of French and started taking Spanish because, I don't know, maybe they thought

00:08:49.400 it was more useful or a language that they would actually use in the world. French isn't that

00:08:54.240 useful. West, a point that JJ McCullough makes, a journalist who I've talked about this topic on

00:08:59.220 the show with before, he talks about how the only real reason that you could learn French is if you're

00:09:06.340 forced into a situation where you have to speak French, right? It's not just a choice. You can go

00:09:10.480 take some courses at a local community college and learn French. The way that you're going to learn

00:09:15.180 French is if you're in a situation where you must speak French to survive, you have no other option.

00:09:20.540 And the reality is in Western Canada, that's never the situation that you're going to confront unless

00:09:24.580 you go and choose to spend a year abroad or go spend some time in a very kind of French part of

00:09:32.860 Quebec, not Montreal, but outside. I want to draw your attention to a really interesting op-ed written

00:09:38.420 by Ken White, who is a conservative publisher. And he picked up on this topic again. He said that

00:09:44.700 conservatives think the next party leader should be bilingual. They're wrong. Now, this was a

00:09:48.660 older op-ed that he wrote back when Aaron O'Toole was running for leader. This was back in January

00:09:53.780 2020. But the points are still very relevant. And I want to explain why. So Ken White says this,

00:10:00.800 he says, bilingualism is not a constitutional or legislative requirement for a party leader or

00:10:07.100 prime minister. It's not even a convention. Bilingualism as a leadership prudential arose relatively

00:10:13.180 recently in our history. In response to a discreet event, the rise of separatist sentiment in Quebec,

00:10:19.220 the retiring liberal prime minister, Lester B. Pearson, thought it advisable under the circumstances

00:10:23.880 that his predecessor be a bilingual French Canadian capable of countering the appeal of René Levesque.

00:10:30.140 So it's not constitutional. It's not a legislative requirement. And it's not even a convention. This is a

00:10:34.960 very recent undertaking, this idea that the Canadian prime minister would be bilingual. And it came from the

00:10:41.380 liberal side. And look, maybe it makes sense that a liberal prime minister would be bilingual because

00:10:46.300 liberals tend to win most of the seats in Quebec, or they at least they compete with the bloc for

00:10:50.960 those seats in Quebec. Whereas the idea that the conservative party, the other party would also have

00:10:55.360 to have a bilingual leader. It doesn't, again, it doesn't make sense. It's not, it's not part of our 0.99

00:11:01.340 convention. And it's all very, very recent that conservatives have decided that they must have

00:11:06.460 a bilingual leader. We'll continue reading from Ken White's piece. He says, election after election,

00:11:12.100 conservatives chose bilingual leaders with an eye to cracking the Quebec electorate. Election after

00:11:16.880 election, they fail. In 15 attempts since the end of the Diefenbaker-Pearson era, bilingual non-Quebeckers 1.00

00:11:23.360 leading the conservative, progressive conservative, or the Canadian Alliance Party. So those are all just

00:11:27.000 the recent iterations of conservative parties federally. They have won a total of 66 seats. Okay.

00:11:33.780 66 seats in 15 elections. That's an average of four seats, 4.4 seats per election. So all of this

00:11:42.240 effort, all of this focus, this whole idea on shrinking the talent pool to an incredibly small

00:11:47.620 pool just to find a guy or a gal who can speak French. And yet, what has that resulted in? About

00:11:53.940 on average, four seats per election. It's really staggering that this is where we are as a conservative

00:12:00.940 movement. And the conservative party is so focused on this, given the data here. So Ken White continues.

00:12:06.680 He says, the bilingual Albertan, Joe Clark, won three seats in Quebec in two federal elections,

00:12:12.460 1979 and 1980. The bilingual British Columbian, Kim Campbell, took one seat in 1993. The fluently

00:12:19.060 bilingual, Jean Charest, who's now running again. Well, he also ran for leader of the PC party in 1997.

00:12:25.720 And the rehabilitated Joe Clark, leading the rump of the PC party in 1997 and 2000, respectively,

00:12:31.660 earned six seats between them. So yes, you got it right. Jean Charest, when he led the PC party

00:12:36.300 back in 1997, he only won five seats in Quebec. Five seats, despite being from Quebec and obviously

00:12:42.600 fluently bilingual. Ken White continues. He says, they fail because Quebec isn't attracted to bilingual

00:12:48.480 leaders from outside Quebec. In every election since the retirement of Lester B. Pearson, Quebec has

00:12:54.080 given the vast majority of its seats to a Quebecer. What Quebec wants is what Americans call a favorite

00:13:00.580 son or presumably a favorite daughter would do as well. One of their own, a Brian Mulroney, a Gilles

00:13:06.100 Duceppe or a Jack Layton. You get this? So Quebecers are not going to vote for a bilingual Canadian who's 0.70

00:13:12.500 not from Quebec. That's what the stats, that's what history shows us, that it doesn't matter if you

00:13:18.320 speak perfectly fluent French. If you spend all your time campaigning in Quebec, the people of Quebec

00:13:24.600 are going to vote for their own favorite son, their own native Quebecer. So all of these efforts to find

00:13:31.000 a fluently bilingual candidate, to find a conservative who has perfect French, it's all basically just a

00:13:38.920 waste of time. Final point from Ken White. He says, Preston Manning, who did not speak French,

00:13:44.220 his reform party did not win a single seat in Quebec in 1993 or 97. The Canadian Alliance brought

00:13:51.280 in Stockwell Day, who was bilingual, who did speak French, and he matched Preston Manning's record with

00:13:56.600 zero seats in Quebec. So it didn't matter that Stockwell Day was fluently French versus Preston

00:14:01.760 Manning, who did not speak French. They both won zero seats in Quebec. That's because Quebec values don't

00:14:07.660 match up with the conservative values by and large. And so again, the whole spectacle of last night,

00:14:12.220 the whole idea that we have two debates, one in French, one in English, just reiterates this,

00:14:16.460 this, I think, flawed notion, this foolish notion that conservatives can somehow crack through in

00:14:22.340 Quebec. All we have to do is pander more and speak better French and somehow that will change things

00:14:27.740 where we can just go through the election results. So in 2021, when Aaron O'Toole lost the election,

00:14:33.380 he got 10 seats in Quebec. 10 out of 78 seats went to the conservatives. The conservatives won 119 seats.

00:14:39.760 Only 10 of those were in Quebec, despite Aaron O'Toole's French, despite him spending a lot of time

00:14:46.120 working on his French and a lot of time campaigning in Quebec. Likewise, Andrew Scheer, who also speaks

00:14:51.500 French fluently, he only won 10 seats in Quebec. Again, despite having a very significant Quebec

00:14:58.160 strategy gearing many of his policies towards Quebec, spending a lot of time in Quebec, only 10 seats

00:15:04.660 out of the conservatives, 120, only 10 seats out of Quebec's 78 seats. So not, not, not a lot of

00:15:11.700 results, right? Prime Minister Harper, same thing. He spoke French, 12 seats, 12 seats in Quebec in 2015.

00:15:18.280 In his majority government, his, his, his historic majority government in 2011, Stephen Harper won a

00:15:24.200 mere five seats in Quebec. So this idea that you need to speak French and you need to make inroads

00:15:29.700 in Quebec in order to win an election. It's just not true. It's obviously not true, given what,

00:15:35.780 what has happened over the past 30, 40 years. And we can see that. And so I, I think, I think

00:15:42.680 conservatives would be better off focusing on the areas where they can win, trying to win over voters

00:15:47.420 in suburban parts of the country and perhaps even more urban parts of the country and, and not do this

00:15:54.140 whole spectacle. Well, they humiliate their own candidates by forcing them up on the stage and

00:15:59.320 pretending that, that, that, that, that speaking French is the quintessential foundational value to

00:16:06.400 becoming a prime minister in this country. It's, it's, it's just not true. So let's, let's get to the debate

00:16:12.040 itself. Unfortunately, the majority of Canadians did not watch the debate and will not watch the debate, which is

00:16:16.840 too bad because overall, I thought it was a pretty good debate. The moderator, Marc-Olivier Fortin, who is a

00:16:21.880 longtime conservative activist and insider, is a former staffer, a former member of the National

00:16:26.540 Council in Quebec. He was moderator. He did, he did a pretty good job, pretty decent job. You could see

00:16:31.860 that the Conservative Party was pushing the same kind of rules and nonsense that they did at the

00:16:36.360 Edmonton debate because the moderator was constantly shushing the crowd, telling them not to clap, not to

00:16:42.400 applaud, not to boo, not to participate in the debate at all, just to basically sit there silently with

00:16:47.000 their, you know, is sitting on their hands and not participating, which, again, defeats the whole purpose of

00:16:53.660 doing a debate in front of a live audience. But, but, but overall, the debate format allowed for actual debate,

00:17:02.700 back and forth between the candidates. The questions were a lot better. The questions were certainly Quebec heavy and 0.71

00:17:08.220 focused on, on Quebec. But they also touched on important issues that we've that, that, that matter to Canadians, things like

00:17:15.520 energy, inflation, COVID restrictions, and a little bit on foreign affairs. So I thought overall it was, it was a

00:17:22.040 better debate. Of course, the way that it was broadcasted was a problem because basically, again, most people

00:17:29.680 watching these debates are going to be English speaking. And the way that we were watching it was online through these

00:17:34.780 feeds. And the, the way that the translators were translating the debate just didn't really work. They had like one, they had one

00:17:42.120 person that was translating for each of the candidates. And so when you're thinking about a debate where they're kind of going

00:17:47.440 back and forth, you just have one voice that is translating for all the candidates. It was confusing as to who was saying

00:17:53.940 what. Usually, you know, if you have six, six people on the stage, and you have translators, you would at least want two or

00:17:59.900 three different translators that are assigned to different candidates so that you could see the back and forth, you could hear

00:18:04.240 who was saying what. But the way that they had it translated, really didn't make for good TV at all. There were also some

00:18:11.500 technical issues, the feed continued to freeze, it froze multiple times. And so you'd be right in the middle of

00:18:17.440 exchange, and then this screen would freeze. And then it would come back like two minutes later, and they'd be talking about

00:18:22.720 something totally different. One of the things that we saw was that the lines of attack were pretty similar to what we had seen in

00:18:30.680 previous debates. They were kind of just really repeating themselves at this point. The candidates

00:18:35.460 all accused Pierre of telling people to make bad investments when it came to Bitcoin, accusing him of, you know,

00:18:42.720 saying, Oh, if you took Pierre Polyev's advice, you lose your life savings and your and your grandparents would lose

00:18:48.180 their pensions or something like that. Because of Bitcoin, which is total nonsense. We heard the same lines of

00:18:53.760 attack about abortion, and the trucker convoy against Pierre Polyev. It came to Sherey, we saw the attacks

00:19:00.280 about his record as Quebec premier, his job with Huawei, and his position on carbon taxes. Same

00:19:06.900 with Brown, same accusations were loved against him about how he flip-flopped, and how he used to be

00:19:13.300 very opposed to carbon taxes until he became leader of the Progressive Conservative Party Ontario, when all

00:19:18.100 of a sudden he changed his tune and announced that he was for those carbon taxes. So nothing new there.

00:19:23.540 There were a couple of highlights from the debate that I'll play for you. I think this is sort of a new

00:19:29.100 line of attack that they are levying against Pierre Polyev. So this is going to be Patrick Brown,

00:19:34.720 who accuses Polyev of supporting Pat King. Pat King is a racist white supremacist guy who sort of tried

00:19:42.860 to cling on to the trucker convoy. The media really, really gave him an outsized platform and pretended

00:19:50.260 that he was the leader of the convoy because he was the only guy that they could find saying despicable

00:19:55.180 things. And basically, they wanted the trucker convoy to be a group of stupid racists. They

00:20:00.840 found one stupid racist and made him a star. And so Patrick Brown is sort of giving credence to the

00:20:07.740 media narrative lies about the trucker convoy and using it to pile on to Pierre Polyev. So here is

00:20:14.800 what that exchange looked like. Well, on a daily basis, I've been working very, very hard to build our party and

00:20:22.520 to attract new members. I want to build a multicultural party. But there's a problem. As Mr. Polyev has said,

00:20:31.160 he supports Pat King, who has attacked our immigration system. Mr. Polyev has said it's important to use

00:20:39.720 his Anglo-Saxon vocabulary. How can he actually hope to expand our party when he uses that terminology?

00:20:47.880 People want to build a bigger party, a party that can lead this country. That's not true, Mr. Brown.

00:20:57.160 I rejected Mr. King. I've spoken out against him and against what he said. I said, I've said that openly.

00:21:05.880 I'm open to immigration and to diversity.

00:21:12.040 Okay, so I made this point on the show before, but I will repeat it. This whole line of attack,

00:21:16.980 this whole accusation here is not good for conservatives. And I put the blame on both

00:21:21.460 Patrick Brown and Pierre Polyev for this. So again, Patrick Brown is repeating the lies of the media

00:21:26.940 and giving them credibility, which is not helpful. This idea that white nationalists and conservatives

00:21:32.120 are all intertwined, and that the trucker convoy was really about racism and not about freedom,

00:21:37.780 just hurts the credibility of so many people on the right. And conservatives shouldn't be the one

00:21:43.500 bringing that into the fold. So that's on Patrick Brown. I don't like his strategy. I don't like what

00:21:48.720 he's doing here. I think the conservatives should use a loud voice and just say, enough, Patrick Brown,

00:21:55.000 stop giving the media narratives credibility. Just stop. This isn't true. And then blame also

00:22:02.860 falls, of course, on Pierre Polyev for even allowing these accusations to have oxygen. Like he needs to

00:22:10.700 very firmly, very clearly denounce this idea, say that I never supported Patrick King. I loudly

00:22:18.920 distance himself. And I know he did that in the clip, but I would like to see him be even more

00:22:23.380 fearful and unequivocal in the idea that he would have anything to do with these stupid racists that

00:22:30.300 are trying to, I don't know, have their 15 minutes of fame or whatever. Pierre Polyev is absolutely

00:22:36.500 right that this is very much dividing conservatives. And it's unfortunate to see. Another interesting

00:22:42.940 moment at the debate I thought last night was this moment. So Jean Charest, he's done this in every

00:22:49.200 single debate so far. He accuses Pierre Polyev of supporting the Freedom Convoy, and he calls that

00:22:55.840 convoy an illegal blockade. What I think is interesting about this clip is the reaction of

00:23:01.820 the crowd, because you can see the crowd really, really reacts to Jean Charest's accusation. It

00:23:08.220 stirred quite the controversy in the room so much so that you'll see the moderator had to sort of get up

00:23:12.580 and say, order, order, please, please stop, stop. So I'm going to play that clip. Just notice,

00:23:19.220 notice the crowd reaction, because it is really interesting. Here's that clip.

00:23:22.060 It's a bit ironic to hear Mr. Polyev talk about law and order. He's the one who supported a legal

00:23:28.460 blockade in Ottawa. Remember that? Remember that? Please, order, please, order.

00:23:46.880 You can see Pierre Polyev kind of laughing there because the crowd is booing Jean Charest. But you

00:24:01.880 could also hear that the crowd is cheering. So the crowd is split. Some people in the crowd

00:24:06.540 are very loudly booing Jean Charest. Other people in the crowd are cheering for him. You can hear that

00:24:11.300 they sort of start chanting his name, Charest, Charest. So I think the room is divided. I don't think

00:24:16.140 it's unanimous that everyone there supported the trucker convoy. But just really interesting

00:24:21.160 that in Quebec, in Laval, Quebec, a very French heavy population, that these people,

00:24:28.420 you know, they don't follow the media narrative that the trucker convoy was a group of racists.

00:24:32.860 You can see that there is a lot of support for the sentiment and the idea, the notion behind the

00:24:38.380 trucker convoy in that room, which I think is really interesting, kind of counter to the media

00:24:42.540 narrative. I think the media narrative is that the trucker convoy was a bunch of rednecks from

00:24:46.080 Western Canada. I don't think that's true. I think that the majority of the people at that convoy

00:24:50.300 were from Quebec and Ontario. And that was why it was such a threat to Justin Trudeau. That's why he

00:24:55.060 wanted to get rid of it ASAP because the trucker convoy was much more popular in Quebec than a lot

00:25:01.940 of these elites feel comfortable with. Okay, final clip I want to show you was this interesting line

00:25:07.840 of attack, which I hadn't heard before. This was new to me. So Pierre Polyev accusing Patrick Brown

00:25:13.060 of breaking the law. He highlights a 2018 Globe and Mail report that alleges that Patrick Brown took

00:25:21.100 money from a candidate for the down payment on a multimillion dollar waterfront home that he bought.

00:25:27.580 So Patrick Brown had originally said the money to buy that home came from his mother. He said that his

00:25:31.880 mom was the one that helped him buy the house. And then records came out that showed that it wasn't

00:25:36.700 actually his mom who helped him buy that house. It was a candidate, one of the candidates that ran

00:25:42.980 under Patrick Brown when he was a leader of the PC party in Ontario, an individual called Jal Johal,

00:25:50.200 who is a paralegal in Brampton, Ontario. Apparently, he deposited $375,000 into Patrick Brown's account

00:25:58.440 in June of 2016. This all came out and the ethics watchdog reprimanded Patrick Brown when he was

00:26:05.840 leader of that party for failing to disclose this. He later called it a loan. So really,

00:26:12.040 really interesting in story. You can see in this clip, how Pierre Polyev brought this up and how

00:26:18.960 Patrick Brown defended himself. Here's that clip. Mr. Brown, you have no credibility on law and order.

00:26:25.380 You were found guilty of having broken the integrity rules. You've said that the money you used to buy

00:26:35.860 your $2 million home came from your family. But after investigation, we now know that this money

00:26:41.700 came from someone that was a candidate for you. How can you forget where $375,000 comes from,

00:26:52.780 Mr. Brown? Oops. You thought it came from your family. But all of a sudden, you realized during the

00:27:01.020 investigation that, in fact, the money had come from a candidate. No one believes you when you say

00:27:06.620 that you're in favor of law and order, when you were found guilty yourself of having broken the law by

00:27:13.180 hiding that payment. You're just like Justin Trudeau, who hides the gifts people give to him,

00:27:20.780 as well on the donations people give to him. Mr. Brown, the only person here who has broken the law,

00:27:30.860 the electional law, is Mr. Polyevre. At the same time, I won't take any lessons from Mr. Polyevre.

00:27:40.540 He's a person who has made secret deals. It's much easier for Polyevre to attack

00:27:51.740 other conservatives. That's his policy. That's his approach, really, isn't it?

00:27:55.980 Okay, so those were some of my favorite parts of the debate. Those were some of the highlights that

00:27:59.980 I could find. And again, you can see how, from a viewer perspective, it was hard to enjoy the debate

00:28:04.460 just because of the weird way that it was translated. And of course, again, the fact that it was in

00:28:09.980 French, a language that most conservatives do not speak. And there was one other element of the debate

00:28:16.020 that really played in. There was an entire section of the debate on Quebec focused on protecting Quebec,

00:28:22.100 giving Quebec its special status, protecting the French language, giving the French language

00:28:26.260 its special status. A lot of the debate was geared towards those questions. So we just saw repeated

00:28:31.120 pandering from the candidates, basically all pledging that they love French, that they want

00:28:36.140 to do more to protect French, they want to do more to ensure that Canadians across the country speak

00:28:40.880 French. They were specifically asked about the appointment of the Governor General. The current

00:28:46.940 Governor General of Canada doesn't speak French, and that is very controversial in Quebec. So

00:28:51.360 they're basically all cuddled into pledging that they would only appoint French speaking candidates

00:28:56.460 to top positions of the civil service, and they would do more to protect the French language.

00:29:01.220 But you can juxtapose that support and that pandering that we saw from all the candidates when it came

00:29:06.460 to French with the discussions around Bill 21. So of course, Bill 21 is the bill that prohibits

00:29:13.940 government employees, anyone from prosecutors to police officers to teachers from wearing religious

00:29:20.460 symbols. So specifically, a headscarf, or a turban, while carrying out their civic duties. So this is 0.99

00:29:26.840 very controversial federally. In Quebec itself, it's not that controversial. It's actually very popular.

00:29:32.760 Polls show that somewhere between 55 and 70% of Quebecers support Bill 21. Whereas the candidates

00:29:40.120 last night, every single one of them opposed Bill 21. They all said that it goes against religious

00:29:45.720 freedom and that religious freedom is a cornerstone of the conservative ideology and the conservative

00:29:51.140 worldview. And so this idea that they're all up there pandering about French language and participating

00:29:57.280 in this French debate and saying that they love Quebec, they're going to do more to protect Quebec.

00:30:01.280 But then the main issue that is really, really popular in Quebec, and unpopular among the rest of

00:30:06.920 Canadians, Bill 21, they all came out against it, which again, just shows why conservatives don't win

00:30:11.780 in Quebec, because their values don't align, right? They don't see things the same way as people from 0.87

00:30:17.040 Quebec. And I think this issue, Bill 21, illustrates that perfectly, that no matter how much they pander,

00:30:22.580 they're not going to win over people because they don't share the fundamental values that Quebecers 0.99

00:30:27.000 look for. And again, I think that's why last night's debate ultimately was just a total waste of

00:30:32.640 time. All right, thank you so much for tuning in. I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.

00:30:41.780 Thank you.

The Candice Malcolm Show - May 26, 2022

The French Debate was a total waste of time

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