The Myth Of Red Tory Appeal Destroyed By Premier Blaine Higgs
Episode Stats
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198.71902
Summary
Erin O'Toole resigns from the Conservative Party, Justin Trudeau is on his way out of politics, and Blaine Higgs is on top in New Brunswick. In this episode, I discuss these three things and how they all come together.
Transcript
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I'm really happy that two things I really want to talk about are colliding right at the same time,
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so then I don't have to break it up into separate videos. And I think they make for great topics to
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contrast on. First is Erin O'Toole resigning from the Conservative Party, from his seat in Durham,
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not, I guess, from the Conservative Party, but, you know, leaving politics and on his way out,
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trying to trip Pierre Polyev and the more blue Conservatives on his way out. And then the other
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thing I want to talk about is Blaine Higgs, the Premier of New Brunswick, standing up for parental
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rights and winning. So what I want to take on is the myth that somehow being unpassionate
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Conservatives will eventually mean that the Conservative Party will win some massive
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majority. That was effectively the modus operandi of Erin O'Toole in 2021, or since 2020, after he
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pretended to be a blue Conservative, won the leadership, and then basically betrayed his base
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on almost every single issue. He proved that if you moderate heavily, you're not going to have this
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big flood of Liberals jumping over onto your bandwagon and pushing you to victory. The media
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is going to keep criticizing you. It doesn't matter if you do exactly what they want to be not called
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a, like, a big, like, scary, blue, radical Conservative. They're just going to find something
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else they don't like about you or pretend that you didn't pivot to the left on one of your policies
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and keep calling you right wing. You're never going to win that way. And it also happened a little
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bit to Andrew Scheer. Even though I think Andrew Scheer was not a bad leader, he had a lot of people
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around him basically saying, tone down your message. Don't talk about being a social Conservative.
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Don't touch social issues. Just talk about boutique tax credits, and we'll just pray that we're going
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to win. And it just didn't work either. But Erin O'Toole was kind of like the imperfection, perfected
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version of the moderate Conservative Canada. And it proved that doing that will never actually bring
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voters out. Voters like to vote for things that are people who are passionate about specific issues.
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People don't exactly run out of their houses because, you know, Erin O'Toole is going to give
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you some O'Toole bucks at the gas pump just so you can buy, like, solar panels. Nobody cares.
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It's so just a dead, boring issue. No one's going to get excited and donate to the Conservative
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Party or volunteer. When you abandon your socially Conservative base, who tend to actually be some of
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the heaviest volunteering members of the Conservative Party, you shouldn't be shocked when your campaigns
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underperform. Now, going to Blaine Higgs, the Premier of New Brunswick, he's changing policy 713 when it
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comes to gender and sexual orientation policy in schools. And he's becoming wildly popular in New
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Brunswick. Yes, there's people resigning from his cabinets who are these fence-riding red Tories.
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But overall, people in New Brunswick are extremely supportive of the changes that he's making. A poll that
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came up from Ledger shows that 57% of Canadians all across the country support what Blaine Higgs is
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doing, which is effectively just, like, girding up parental rights, basically saying that if your
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child tries to identify as the opposite gender or some sort of weird-in-the-middle thing like being
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non-binary, the parents have to be informed. You don't get to keep secrets from the parents
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at school. No random theoretical justification or excuse of saying, well, maybe the parents will be
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rude to their kid or be abusive to their kid if they're made known about this. It's a fringe
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hypothetical to basically undermine parental rights. And Blaine Higgs was not tricked by people trying to
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push that stuff on him. And again, 57% of Canadians nationally support what Blaine Higgs is doing. In
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Atlantic Canada, it's 69%. And again, with the 57% who are approving, only 18% nationally disapproved of
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what Blaine Higgs was doing. And then the rest are probably, you know, undecided seeing what everyone
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else thinks. And based on the way that public opinion has gone, I guarantee most of the undecided
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people are also going to break in the direction of supporting parental rights. Again, the media is
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trying to trash Blaine Higgs. You have Justin Trudeau coming out and basically saying that he's not
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letting kids be themselves or whatever, as if, you know, as if like buying into gender theory because
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your teacher is talking to you about it is really being yourself. That's not being yourself. That's
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just being a pawn to a progressive agenda. Anyways, but this is the 100% polar opposite of what Aaron
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O'Toole did. Blaine Higgs, and I have to give a lot of credit to Chris Austin, the former New
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Brunswick People's Alliance Party leader, who I think has been one of the driving forces behind the
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scenes on pushing the New Brunswick government to change policy 713 to actually support parental rights
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and make sure that parents are kept informed about what their kids up to at school, that this stuff
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is demonstrating that people actually like it when you stand up to progressive bullies. Aaron O'Toole
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always cowered in the face of progressive bullies, and no one wanted to stand up for Aaron O'Toole.
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No one, if Aaron O'Toole is our leader, why are we going to show up for him if he's always cowering?
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I don't want to support a guy who's not willing to support me on the issues. Blaine Higgs is obviously
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willing to back up parents and to back up social conservatives, so he's doing wildly well in his
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province. Yes, New Brunswick is a little bit more of a socially conservative province compared to
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somewhere like Quebec or Ontario, but Doug Ford, when he was running in the 2018 provincial election
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his first time around, even though he's become a very red Tory-ish hack these days, in 2018 he
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effectively won a lot of the GTA because he stood up for parental rights and he wanted to scrap the very
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perverted sex ed curriculum in which it's not even sex ed, it's just, you know, sexual ed at this
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point. It's just kind of pushing almost borderline pornographic materials on children. When you
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actually run on issues that people are passionate about, no matter what the media says, if it's a
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popular or unpopular issue, you will win ground. Justin Trudeau, we look at as conservatives at things
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that Justin Trudeau runs on, and there are these weird fringe socially progressive issues that the vast
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majority of people do not, you know, care about. And even with very, with a minority of approval on
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some of these issues, or a minority of the Canadian people agreeing with Justin Trudeau on his hyper
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progressive sort of virtue signaling kind of policies, he drives out the specific community that like those
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views, and they vote liberal, and that's what keeps Justin Trudeau in power. And if we only choose
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policies where 80% of Canadians are on our side, because who could disagree with us on, you know, tax credits,
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who could disagree with us on being against corruption, you're always going to lose because
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you're not grabbing a hot button issue that people really care about and giving them a motivation to
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come out and vote. If all they're coming out to vote for is that they might get an extra $100 or $200
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back on their power bills, they're not going to show up. And that's kind of what happened in the
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provincial election with the UCP. I never found that there was a hot button issue that the Conservative
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Party, the United Conservative Party had jumped on until the last couple of weeks. What probably helped us
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win that we started talking about crime and cutting income taxes, but it was a little too late. So I
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think we ended up losing some seats that we didn't need to lose. So at the end of the day, Aaron O'Toole's
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theory of politics, that the idea that you're just supposed to appeal to that theoretical voter right in
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the middle of the country, and you're going to win all you're going to win every election is foolish,
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people are passionate about things. And the theoretical average voter that strategy firms come up with
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is that unpassionate person. So you always are going to lose elections when you try and assume
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that there is a way of averaging every single Canadian into one person to pitch to, you're
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always going to stop talking about any issues that matter to anyone and become the boring in the middle
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party. It's like becoming, you know, the Alberta Party and Alberta Party, Alberta politics, the Alberta
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Party stands for nothing. So they lost all their voters after 2019. They basically collapsed. I think
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they're only running like 17 candidates. It was truly pathetic. So if the Conservative Party wants
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to beat Justin Trudeau next time, they should do what Paul Yev actually just did today and back people
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like Blaine Higgs and say that he's standing up for parents and I'm not going to get in the way of him