The Candice Malcolm Show - Trudeau and Singh should be shaking in their boots over Conservative membership numbers

00:00:00.000 The Conservative leadership candidates claim to have recruited over half a million members into the party.

00:00:05.540 Justin Trudeau and Jagmeet Singh should be shaking in their boots.

00:00:08.720 I'm Candace Malcolm and this is The Candace Malcolm Show.

00:00:23.100 Hi everyone, thank you so much for tuning into the podcast.

00:00:25.720 So there was a bit of news with the Conservative leadership race last week.

00:00:30.160 Friday was the membership cutoff.

00:00:31.840 So as of midnight on Friday, you could no longer sign up for a membership in order to vote in the leadership race.

00:00:37.840 Of course, the leadership race is going to happen in September.

00:00:41.380 But in order to vote in that September race, you have to have been a member.

00:00:44.620 And the membership cutoff came and went on June 3rd.

00:00:47.440 So following that, we sort of saw an avalanche of announcements from the various candidates bragging and boasting about the number of memberships that they and their campaigns have sold.

00:00:57.040 So it started off with Patrick Brown at noon on Friday.

00:01:00.580 Patrick Brown tweeted the following, claiming to have sold over 150,000 memberships.

00:01:05.000 He said, I'm so happy to announce that we have smashed our membership goal and they're still pouring in.

00:01:10.700 Thank you so much to my hardworking team from coast to coast.

00:01:14.160 A few hours later, Jean Charest also claimed that he had the points needed to win.

00:01:19.260 He tweeted this at 4 p.m.

00:01:20.660 He said, we are excited to confirm that we have the points needed to win the Conservative Party leadership.

00:01:26.080 We have recruited tens of thousands of new members and reengaged thousands of past members.

00:01:31.200 There is still a lot of work to do.

00:01:33.100 Getting out the vote is critical to our victory.

00:01:35.360 And then I think the biggest news of the entire weekend came on Saturday morning when Jenny Byrne, who is Pierre Polyev's campaign advisor, she tweeted this about the Pierre Polyev campaign.

00:01:47.120 These numbers are incredibly staggering.

00:01:49.360 She wrote this.

00:01:50.000 She said, 311,958 Canadians joined the Conservative Party through the Pierre4PM.ca membership website.

00:02:00.560 Last night, Pierre's campaign wrote to the Conservative Party headquarters asking it to publicly release the number of memberships sold through the Pierre website.

00:02:08.820 And we encourage all campaigns to follow suit.

00:02:12.000 And so, you know, there was that tweet went viral.

00:02:15.200 Every journalist, every political insider was just sort of shocked to see that number, that huge number of people, of Canadians who were inspired by Pierre.

00:02:25.980 So just from these three campaigns alone, we can surprise that, what, 460, 470,000 plus however many Jean Charest brought in, maybe 400,000, sorry, maybe 500,000 Canadians joined the party just to vote in this.

00:02:40.980 No matter which way you look at it, there's a lot of enthusiasm.

00:02:44.140 And I want to talk about that enthusiasm and break down these numbers a little more.

00:02:47.560 And that's why I'm pleased to be joined by Hamish Marshall, our friend Hamish, who is a partner over at One Persuades, a government relations and strategy firm.

00:02:55.140 You know him because he was our in-house pollster at True North during the 2021 election.

00:02:59.700 He's also worked for Andrew Scheer and Stephen Harper.

00:03:03.460 Hamish, welcome back to the show.

00:03:04.800 Great to see you.

00:03:05.800 Good to be here, Candice.

00:03:06.600 So what was your impression when you saw these campaigns releasing these staggering numbers?

00:03:12.640 I mean, just by contrast, we can look at what the numbers were back in, you know, in 2020 when they were voting, when Aaron O'Toole became leader, 170,000 Canadians voted in that race.

00:03:23.900 In 2017, the campaign that you ran for Andrew Scheer, 140,000 Canadians voted.

00:03:29.020 Back when Justin Trudeau was about to be elected leader of the Liberal Party back in 2013, 104,000 people voted in that leadership race, 80,000 voted for Trudeau.

00:03:40.320 So, you know, we're talking about huge multiples and a huge growth in enthusiasm.

00:03:46.620 What do you make of all this?

00:03:47.860 Well, look, it's a very, it shows that there's Canadians that are really engaged in this race.

00:03:52.240 There's a chunk of Canadians who are excited conservative voters, but an awful lot of new people, people who don't have a background in politics, have gotten involved and were signed up for all the candidates, but particularly for Pierre Poliev.

00:04:04.640 I mean, it's really staggering numbers and watching them roll in was incredibly exciting.

00:04:10.100 And, you know, I think it speaks very well and it speaks to, you know, it speaks to something interesting, I think, what we see with Trudeau.

00:04:17.640 You know, Trudeau claimed to have signed up about 150,000 to 160,000 people back in 2013.

00:04:22.920 The media called it staggering.

00:04:24.520 They said it was evidence of Trudomania.

00:04:26.780 The thing about that race is he didn't have to pay. 0.89

00:04:29.140 In order to join the Liberal Party, to be a supporter, to be able to vote, you just have to sign up.

00:04:32.920 You just have to give your email address.

00:04:34.580 And that's all it took.

00:04:35.480 So Trudeau was able to get, you know, 150,000, 160,000 people when they didn't have to pay.

00:04:41.840 What's amazing about these numbers is that, you know, Pierre Poliev signed up 311,000 people all had to pay $15 a head.

00:04:50.900 And that speaks to a level of dedication and a level of excitement and interest in this race that I think we've never seen anything like this before in Canadian politics.

00:04:57.580 And we should disclose to the viewers, you should know that Hamish is involved in the Pierre Poliev campaign.

00:05:05.380 And so you're not an independent observer.

00:05:07.680 You're working over with Pierre.

00:05:09.700 And I want to ask you, Hamish, because throughout the campaign, we've seen huge rallies, huge, huge numbers of people lining up to go out and see Pierre.

00:05:19.320 It really seems like there's an electricity and excitement around that campaign.

00:05:22.600 And we saw the media sort of try to downplay it and say that, OK, well, you know, he's just picking up the momentum from the trucker convoy and these aren't really voters and it's not going to convert into memberships.

00:05:34.620 It's sort of people being skeptical, I would say, of the ground campaign that Pierre might be able to run.

00:05:39.920 Well, if these numbers are accurate and they turn out to be, I think that Pierre has really proven those pundits and those journalists wrong.

00:05:46.800 What do you what do you take about the the difference between the way that the media covered Trudeau back in 2013 and the so-called Trudeau mania signing up free members versus how Pierre has been treated in this race?

00:05:58.980 Look, what Pierre is doing is he's changing the paradigm.

00:06:01.480 He's he's he's connecting with groups of people, Canadians who have never been involved in politics.

00:06:05.860 Overwhelming thing you find if you go to one of Pierre's rallies.

00:06:08.220 And I know, you know, you've had your team there and you're asking people, have you ever been to a political event before?

00:06:13.360 It's no, it's my first one.

00:06:14.840 And you hear that again and again and again.

00:06:16.800 And what's happening is that that Pierre is connected with a group of people who are not traditionally being super involved in Canadian politics.

00:06:24.080 And the traditional people in Canadian politics, whether that's the the the insiders in Ottawa or the media, don't understand that.

00:06:31.960 It's not people like them. It's not their friends going down to a peer rally.

00:06:35.260 As a result, they keep coming up with excuses about why it can't be real.

00:06:39.600 Sure, you get big rallies, but it's only in Calgary or in Alberta or conservative area.

00:06:43.100 Oh, now you're getting big numbers in Windsor and Ottawa and Toronto and places that consumers don't do well.

00:06:49.140 But those people won't sign up. Oh, now they've signed up.

00:06:51.680 But then what actually vote? We keep hearing all these excuses.

00:06:54.680 The reality on the ground is that people are are engaged.

00:06:58.560 They're fired up. They're looking for something different.

00:07:00.260 And that's something that's what Pierre is providing.

00:07:02.440 Well, you missed the latest choice of criticism from the media, which is that Pierre's rallies are too white.

00:07:09.580 There's too many white people at the rallies. 0.72

00:07:11.040 And supposedly, that's a great sin in politics. 0.91

00:07:13.260 That's right. Of course, if you actually go to one of these rallies, the rallies generally represent the communities that they're being held in.

00:07:18.960 And but, you know, it's it doesn't matter.

00:07:23.260 There's always something something wrong.

00:07:24.600 They can't acknowledge that there's something happening.

00:07:27.220 There's something unique happening in Canadian politics because it doesn't line up with their vision of Canada and their understanding of the country.

00:07:33.580 And so what do you think that is?

00:07:34.720 What is it about Pierre's message and the message of the Conservative Party more broadly?

00:07:38.000 Because even Patrick Brown claims to have signed up as many members for the party as Justin Trudeau did.

00:07:45.100 So so it seems to me that there is an excitement around the Conservative Party and conservative ideas more broadly, not just necessarily Pierre.

00:07:52.760 But but what what is it about Pierre's message specifically and then also conservative message that's that's resonating?

00:07:58.520 Yeah, I think I think that starts the failures of Justin Trudeau.

00:08:00.760 Obviously, Justin Trudeau came in with very, very high expectations.

00:08:03.980 He was going to do everything differently.

00:08:05.000 He turned out to be a very, very traditional liberal politician and how he runs the government.

00:08:09.880 His agenda has been much further left.

00:08:12.080 And as a result, he completely failed the people who who put trust in him at the beginning.

00:08:17.060 You know, Canada is a lot more expensive place to to live and to work in today than it was when Justin Trudeau started.

00:08:24.560 And a lot of people are correctly seeing that the Trudeau government has is not just failed them,

00:08:30.040 but has enriched their rich and powerful friends, but has and the people, the average person is struggling to get ahead in a way that I don't think has existed in probably even in my lifetime in this country,

00:08:41.480 or certainly since since since the last time we had a Trudeau as prime minister.

00:08:45.460 And as a result, there are people looking for something different.

00:08:49.320 And, you know, Pierre is is has is a remarkable communicator with the ability to communicate very, very clearly how he's going to be different than Trudeau and focus on the issues that matter.

00:09:00.340 And that's connecting and it's connecting in a big way.

00:09:03.120 And we're seeing an incredible flood of support because of that.

00:09:09.300 And so I'm hoping you can help us make sense of the way that the leadership process will go,

00:09:14.180 because the way that these candidates are elected is not the same as the way that we elect politicians and prime ministers to federal office.

00:09:22.040 There's all kinds of internal rules.

00:09:24.260 And because of that, I mean, it's interesting to look at someone like Jean Charest saying we have the points needed to win.

00:09:29.380 And and by that, he means that the conservatives have to win in order to get votes.

00:09:34.400 Well, you could probably explain it a lot better than I can, but it's you need to have a certain formula of support across the country in order to be able to win.

00:09:42.320 So hopefully you can help us walk, walk, walk the viewer through how that's going to work.

00:09:46.320 Yeah, basically, the way it works is it's a little bit like the House of Commons in that each seat is equal.

00:09:51.920 So it doesn't matter if you, you know, and the goal is to get is to get as many votes as possible in each seat.

00:09:58.380 And the idea behind this is that the party shouldn't be able to be captured by someone who just signs up a ton of members in one area.

00:10:05.820 So everybody, everybody in Manitoba joined the party, they could swamp the party and take it over, for instance.

00:10:11.180 So the idea is that if we want to elect a national government, we should have elect leaders that have support from broadly across the country.

00:10:17.280 So the way it works is that each riding is treated equally.

00:10:21.580 And the percentage of the vote that each candidate gets in each riding is basically added up to and the person with the most number, what they call points, which is basically each percent that everybody gets in each riding.

00:10:34.200 You add that up and the person with the most of those is the winner on the final ballot.

00:10:39.660 So if nobody gets over 50 percent, it's a preferential ballot.

00:10:43.500 So the person with the least number of votes has their votes redistributed, the numbers are recalculated, and we keep going.

00:10:50.280 So that means that you have to sign up people everywhere, which is good for the party.

00:10:57.040 And it means that there's traditionally been this theory that, well, if you maximize your vote in areas with low membership, you can get small numbers of people to vote and actually be able to win with large numbers of points.

00:11:12.160 Even if, you know, you lose ridings in Alberta that have 2,000 members, if you win a riding in rural Quebec with 75 members, you can win big.

00:11:22.360 And so often you get a difference between what's happening with a popular vote, the raw number of votes someone gets, and the actual number of points as a result.

00:11:33.460 But what's happened here is Pierre signed up so many people that we've signed up, there's signed up people everywhere across the country.

00:11:41.160 There aren't going to be very many ridings, and, you know, Mr. Brown's numbers are to be believed, and if Mr. Charest, because he signed up tens of thousands of people, you know, the total conservative membership is going to be 600 and something thousand, maybe over, maybe more.

00:11:56.340 And as a result, there aren't going to be a lot of ridings that are sort of weak ridings, right?

00:12:00.980 You know, Pierre's signed up over 1,000 members in 111 ridings, hundreds and hundreds of members in lots more ridings.

00:12:09.040 There aren't going to be ridings that have 36 people vote on Election Day.

00:12:14.740 So it really actually changes the calculus in a way that hasn't happened in the past.

00:12:19.400 It's going to be so interesting to see how it all plays out.

00:12:23.560 Some of the criticism towards Polyev's numbers, and I'll let you explain this and sort of respond.

00:12:31.420 So Chisholm Pothier, who is a campaign member for Patrick Brown, he put this onto Twitter.

00:12:38.480 He said, the Polyev campaign today published numbers that over the coming weeks will evaporate like the value of crypto.

00:12:43.920 Last week, our campaign asked the party to release the full list, membership list.

00:12:48.060 Pierre's campaign lobbied hard and ultimately succeeded in blocking that.

00:12:51.020 So a little bit of infighting and sort of claiming that Pierre's numbers might not be what they seem.

00:12:58.200 What do you make of that?

00:13:00.000 This is the number of people.

00:13:01.180 If anything, this is a conservative number of people who have signed up.

00:13:04.220 Pierre's campaign signed up.

00:13:05.440 This was people who signed up on Pierre's website.

00:13:08.620 Lots of people also bought memberships on the main party website.

00:13:11.460 So these numbers are the numbers who have signed up.

00:13:15.360 The party goes through a verification process.

00:13:17.300 And the reason that the party hasn't released the number yet is that they're a total number of memberships.

00:13:22.160 The party has to go through a verification process, check to make sure each one of these memberships is valid,

00:13:26.900 check to make sure they live at an address that exists, all that sort of thing.

00:13:30.980 That takes time.

00:13:31.920 So it's going to take the party.

00:13:32.920 In the past, it's taken a month or so for them to go through and evaluate all that.

00:13:37.300 It might take a little longer than this time because so many people have been signed up.

00:13:40.620 But that's up to the party to figure that out.

00:13:43.040 You know, I think it's ironic that Mr. Poitier is saying this when he was working for Patrick Brown.

00:13:49.940 When Patrick Brown was leader of the Ontario PC party, he claimed he had signed up 200,000 members.

00:13:54.740 The party did an audit after he resigned in disgrace and discovered that, you know,

00:13:59.400 at least that the membership was at least 67,000 members, smaller than Mr. Brown had claimed.

00:14:05.480 So, you know, we'll see whose numbers evaporate.

00:14:11.620 You're sort of a conservative insider.

00:14:13.460 You talk to a lot of people within the party.

00:14:15.400 Do you feel like there's a chism in the party that there is a divide?

00:14:21.680 I mean, it seems like the sort of war of words between some of the campaigns,

00:14:24.980 notably between Patrick Brown and Pierre Poglia, but also a little bit of Jean Charest.

00:14:30.240 Is this normal or is this more intense than normal?

00:14:33.360 And do you have the feeling that, say, for instance, if Jean Charest ended up being the candidate,

00:14:40.240 would all of the other new members rally around that leader?

00:14:44.360 Would they rally around Pierre Poglia?

00:14:45.620 Would they rally around Patrick Brown?

00:14:47.320 What do you think about the unity of the party?

00:14:49.380 Because there's a lot of hay being made in the media about how the party is very divided and all this kind of stuff.

00:14:55.020 I'm just wondering if you could comment on that.

00:14:57.180 Yeah, I don't think the party is any more divided now than it was during the last leadership race.

00:15:01.020 I think leadership races themselves create the structure of the race creates the rhetoric around it.

00:15:07.680 You know, in a race like what we have this time with Mr. Poglia, who seems to be the front runner,

00:15:13.980 it is incumbent upon the others to try to take him down.

00:15:19.080 So they're going to throw a whole bunch of say a bunch of things.

00:15:21.660 And on the flip side, Poglia campaign has got to keep anybody else from catching up.

00:15:26.800 You know, in the 2020 leadership race of O'Toole versus McKay, that race got extremely heated.

00:15:32.540 And again, because it was a similar dynamic.

00:15:35.120 But if you look back at the 2017 race, I don't think the 2017 race with 14 candidates in the ballot wasn't divisive or angry because of, you know, it was a different time or something.

00:15:51.420 I think that people, when you're looking at that number of people running, it was obvious that nobody was going to win or become close to winning on the first ballot.

00:16:00.160 And therefore, everybody had to run a more cooperative approach in order to get second ballot support.

00:16:05.360 And that was much more explicit.

00:16:06.880 Everyone was thinking along those lines.

00:16:08.740 So as a result, you had to be careful about, you had to be more careful about the rhetoric they throw.

00:16:12.280 In a front runner race, it's very, very different.

00:16:14.320 So I think anytime you see a front runner race, you're going to see a much more, quote unquote, divisive race.

00:16:18.680 But look, the Conservative Party has a history of coming together around leaders.

00:16:24.980 You know, Mr. O'Toole, you know, didn't have a majority of caucus endorsements.

00:16:30.160 He was able to pull together a team, caucuses united around him through the 2020-01 election.

00:16:36.900 He got his chance.

00:16:37.680 And then obviously, I think he made a bunch of choices after that that resulted in him being removed as leader.

00:16:43.500 But that wasn't a result of the leadership race itself.

00:16:48.080 Yeah, that's interesting.

00:16:49.620 I think a lot of it is just sort of media narrative drama.

00:16:54.440 They like to make it seem like it's more contentious.

00:16:56.800 It's the media's business, right?

00:16:58.180 Drama sells newspapers, right?

00:17:00.580 So fair enough.

00:17:02.340 Well, Hamish, since I have you, I wanted to ask you about the Ontario election because Doug Ford was just reelected with an overwhelming majority, obviously very popular in that province.

00:17:14.340 Now, I'm not personally a big Ford supporter or fan.

00:17:17.920 I don't like the way that he handled the lockdowns and COVID, but it seems pretty undeniable that he has, you know, that popularity in Ontario.

00:17:26.880 So I'm wondering if you could help us understand how was he able to win so big in the election last week?

00:17:32.520 Well, I think overwhelmingly, you know, he caught the mood of the province, right?

00:17:39.280 Most people in the province are generally fine with the way things are going.

00:17:43.080 There wasn't a giant demand for change.

00:17:44.860 The government, you know, has as much as, you know, I think, you know, probably agree on a lot of the lockdown restrictions, as much as the government may have done lots of lockdown things in the past, they seem pretty resolute on moving forward right now.

00:17:59.640 And I think the mood of Canadians or Ontarians right now is the lockdown is a thing of the past.

00:18:06.300 Let's just move forward.

00:18:07.520 And the Liberals and the NDP, I think, walked into a trap of their own making.

00:18:11.540 They certainly got some hay earlier by attacking Ford on whether he'd done the right thing around lockdowns, but they didn't, they missed that the province had moved on.

00:18:21.520 And a large chunk of people just said, we want that to be in the past.

00:18:24.400 We want to move forward in other things.

00:18:26.120 And Ford's promising us that.

00:18:28.200 Whereas Del Duca and Horvath continually talking about what Ford did wrong during the lockdown, whether, you know, they should, if they came out too early at this time or that time, and really trying to relitigate it and making the point and continually saying that they were in favor of more restrictive COVID measures when the mood of the province had moved on.

00:18:47.780 So I think Ford, you know, said people look, yeah, we did all that stuff.

00:18:53.000 I don't agree with everything of it.

00:18:54.540 Some people wanted me to do more.

00:18:55.740 Some people wanted me to do less.

00:18:56.860 We got through it moving forward and the other parties really focused on the past.

00:19:02.400 And I think that more than anything else allowed Ford to move on.

00:19:06.000 That and, you know, a truly remarkable thing happened, which is, you know, a near perfect split between the Liberals and NDP.

00:19:13.140 They got almost exactly the same number of votes, which allows, which is truly remarkable.

00:19:19.620 I certainly expected that one of the Liberals and the NDP would have been able to capture the public imagination, become the anti-Ford party, and you would have seen one of those options, maybe over 30%, with the other under 20%.

00:19:32.660 Both of them right on around 24% was absolutely staggering and really speaks to the complete ineptness of those two campaigns more than anything else, which is just truly remarkable.

00:19:46.640 Well, they never really figured out that Ford wasn't their enemy, that the other one of them was the enemy.

00:19:51.020 You know, in order to win, one of those Liberals and NDP had to become the anti-Ford option.

00:19:57.220 And the way to do that was to really attack and put down their competitor.

00:20:01.780 Interesting. And one of the things that I thought was really remarkable about the PCs in Ontario is the number of union endorsements that they got.

00:20:19.380 I know Monty McNaughton, who is the Labour Minister, was working incredibly hard to win over and get these endorsements.

00:20:25.720 And it's sort of interesting because we've long heard Conservatives talk about how there's a great ideological shift and that the left-wing parties, traditional left-wing parties, have sort of abandoned the working class.

00:20:36.100 And Conservatives, culturally, are more aligned with the values of people who are part of those unions, and especially private sector unions.

00:20:44.460 I'm wondering if you can comment, tell us a little bit about how the Ford government was able to capture the support of the private sector unions in Ontario.

00:20:54.240 Well, I think you make an extremely good point that these are all private sector unions to endorse the Ford government.

00:21:00.760 I also think that the union movement itself is going through a very difficult time and a real sort of divergence between the public and private sector unions.

00:21:07.800 The membership of the private sector unions are culturally, I think, quite different.

00:21:12.220 And a lot of them are voting Conservative anyway.

00:21:14.680 A lot of the membership, as it's been true for a long time, a lot of the membership of private sector unions votes Conservative.

00:21:20.220 And the unions, I think, looked at the situation, saw that they had a government that was not hostile to the act, to the desires of private sector unions.

00:21:31.420 And that, combined with good outreach from both Minister McNaughton and the Premier, and the ineptness of the Liberals and the NDP, who sort of took them for granted, made it, with that, with their membership being quite, you know, favourable to or accepting of the Ford government, made it quite easy for these union leaders to go and endorse the Ford government this time.

00:21:53.260 The significance of that also is it took a lot of that anti-Conservative union money off the table.

00:21:59.760 It's not that these unions went and spent a ton of money in favour of the Conservative government.

00:22:03.840 But if you think back to the working families coalitions that ran attack heads against Tim Hudak in the past, spent millions upon millions of dollars helping the McGuinty and Wynne governments get elected, just the fact that they weren't active doing that was a huge boon for the Conservatives.

00:22:20.260 Interesting. Yeah, that's really interesting. Well, one other topic that I thought we should rediscover, just because last time I had you on, we talked a little bit about Alberta, and I think we were both off in what we saw.

00:22:33.180 Like, I certainly stand corrected, because I had just been in Calgary, and people I was speaking to were really telling me that Kenny had it in the bag, and that he was going to win, and that they weren't worried about it.

00:22:43.920 I heard that from many, many sort of conservative, what I would call political insiders. And I think even, you know, the day after Kenny resigned, I was trying to get some of these people to come on my show, and they basically all said no, because they didn't know what to make of it.

00:22:57.160 They were blindsided and very surprised by the fact that Kenny didn't manage to get a bigger percentage of the support of the party. You know, people were saying it was going to be 70, 75%.

00:23:07.160 So I was certainly incorrect, and the people I was talking to were, you know, not, didn't have their finger on the pulse like I thought they did. I'm wondering, you know, were you surprised? And what do you make from what happened out in Alberta?

00:23:21.380 Yeah, I mean, I think everybody got wrong. The pro-K people I was talking to were all saying high 60s, 70%, he's going to be fine. The anti-Kenny people were all saying, oh, there's no way he gets more than 45, it'll be closer to 40. And I tended to believe the pro-Kenny people a little bit more, and I thought he would be okay. I'm not sure I believe 70%, but I thought he was going to be okay.

00:23:42.520 But 51, I mean, everyone was wrong. And I think he, you know, I think at that level, he knew resigning at that point made sense, because he knew the party would be too divided going forward, and he hadn't won a decisive enough mandate.

00:23:59.260 So yeah, it was certainly a surprise. I certainly didn't think it was going to be a number as low as that. You know, but obviously, the anti-Kenny forces had signed up a lot of people to the membership and were able to get them out.

00:24:11.620 And the question becomes is, and that this has going to have a big impact on the leadership race to come, because obviously the people signing folks up, but a lot of anti-Kenny type members, obviously are already members of the party, they've already signed them up.

00:24:25.740 So in a leadership race where typically insurgents have to sign up, people who've got an anti-establishment kind of view have to be signed up, and that takes time and effort, and what will presumably be not a super long race, that makes it difficult.

00:24:43.060 We're actually walking into this race with a significant chunk, if not a majority of the party, or close to a majority of the party, who are very at odds with what the Kenny government's been doing.

00:24:54.400 And that's kind of a big impact on the leadership race. And it's going to make things a very different leadership race than we've expected.

00:25:00.120 And, you know, the assumption that it's sort of a well-known cabinet minister who, you know, genuinely believes in the same thing Kenny has, will be able to walk into the leadership, as you might expect in a lot of parties, that as a leader leaves, that's sort of often the person who follows.

00:25:18.220 You know, it's going to be, I don't know if we can assume that's going to be the case in Alberta.

00:25:21.220 So, what are you hearing in terms of who's going to be running and who could be the next successor?

00:25:27.980 I know Travis Toews, the finance minister under Kenny, has announced that he's running.

00:25:34.580 We have Danielle Smith and Brian Jean from the sort of more Wild Rose side.

00:25:38.180 There's been some rumors about federal MP Michelle Rumpel, Garner perhaps throwing her hat in the race.

00:25:44.240 What are you hearing, and who do you think would be a good candidate to replace Premier Kenny?

00:25:48.000 Well, I'm going to keep quiet on who I think would be a good candidate, because I think that we really have to understand who the field is left.

00:25:55.100 And, you know, I've heard there's up to 15 people considering it.

00:25:58.220 It's a wide open field.

00:26:00.840 From what I'm hearing right now, I think Danielle Smith's gaining a lot of early support, particularly amongst those sort of anti-Kenny folks.

00:26:09.640 Brian Jean's doing well, but has a long way to go yet.

00:26:13.660 And, you know, we'll see from there.

00:26:15.060 But, you know, as I said, I think this race is going to get a lot bigger, and it's going to be very difficult to predict the shape of the race until we understand the final tally.

00:26:25.240 The big danger of the race for the UCP is if it comes down to really a sort of division between those anti-Kenny folks and the pro-Kenny folks or whatever issues, however it plays out.

00:26:38.020 And you can see, you know, if there's a group of cabinet ministers run, and they get, you know, half the vote, and then there's a, you know, sort of the anti-Kenny folks, whether it be some, you know, Gene and Smith and maybe Todd Lowe and now an independent MLA.

00:26:55.180 Those folks, if they all, their votes, it's a preferential ballot, if their votes all sort of cascade into each other, and we end up with final two that are very evenly split.

00:27:04.580 If we end up with a result like what we got in the leadership or the review of 51% or so, I worry about the future of the party being divided.

00:27:13.080 I think this is a party that's very, very divided, and it's going to take a leader from whichever side they come from with real vision and an ability to, you know, reach to the other side of the party in order to keep the party together, which is the only way that the NDP can be stopped in Alberta in the next election.

00:27:31.000 I think that's a really good point that the, if anything, one of the main lessons that conservatives ought to draw from what happened with Premier Kenney is that whoever is the leader has to work incredibly hard to keep the party together, to talk to all factions, to make sure that everyone's getting something that they like, and you can't just have this sort of unilateral approach to governance.

00:27:50.640 You really have to, you know, bring everyone to the table, and hopefully the next leader will be able to do that.

00:27:56.540 Well, hey, Michelle, we always appreciate your time and your insights. Thank you so much for joining the show.

00:28:00.440 My pleasure, as always.

00:28:02.300 Hey, that's Samish Marshall. I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.

The Candice Malcolm Show - June 08, 2022

Trudeau and Singh should be shaking in their boots over Conservative membership numbers

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