Front Burner - Erin O'Toole's far-right line in the sand

Episode Date: January 19, 2021

"There is no place for the far right in our party." That's a quote from a statement released on Sunday by Conservative Leader Erin O'Toole, where he condemns the riot in the U.S. Capitol and paints a moderate picture of the Conservative Party under his leadership. On the heels of the statement, PressProgress revealed that MP Derek Sloan accepted a donation from a notorious white supremacist, leading O'Toole to move to oust Sloan from the Conservative party. Today, CBC parliamentary hill journalist Aaron Wherry on why O'Toole felt he had to declare the Conservatives to be "sitting squarely in the centre of Canadian politics" and what it says about him and the party he leads.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. There is no place for the far right in our party. That's a quote from a bit of an unusual letter sent out on the weekend by Conservative leader Aaron O'Toole, where he condemns the riot in the U.S. Capitol and paints a moderate picture of the Conservative Party under his leadership. Today, I'm talking to my colleague in the Parliament Hill Bureau, Aaron Wherry,

about exactly why O'Toole had to spell this out and what it says about him and the party that he leads. This is Frontburner. Hey, Aaron, thanks so much for being here. Hey, Jamie, happy to be here. So I was hoping we could start today by talking about this letter. In it, Conservative leader Aaron O'Toole says there's no place for the far right in the Conservative Party. And let's start today by talking about what else is in it. Yeah. So in the letter, he talks about the Conservative Party and he describes it as a moderate, pragmatic, mainstream party, as old as Confederation, that sits squarely in the centre of Canadian politics. about how as soon as he became leader, he talked about he wanted the Conservative Party to welcome all Canadians regardless of race, religion, economic standing, education, or sexual orientation.

Whether you're black, white, brown, or from any race or creed, whether you're LGBT or straight, you are an important part of Canada. And you have a home in the Conservative Party of Canada. He says he'd govern on behalf of all Canadians. He's pro-choice. He welcomes people of every background. He wants a Conservative Party that takes inequality seriously. He's spoken up about the need to, quote, help those who haven't kept up with Canada's growth and prosperity over the years, lamented the decline of private sector union membership, talked about reconciliation. It's, you know, he goes on to talk about the Capitol,

the attack on Capitol Hill and how he's condemned it. And he has some criticism for Justin Trudeau and how he has governed. But it's mainly a statement of a very broad vision and trying to give a sense that he is a moderate political leader whose interests and priorities are issues that are shared by a large number of Canadians. Right, right. And there's this one line in the letter I want to pick up on here. If the Liberals want to label me as far right, they're welcome to try. And Aaron, can we talk a little bit here about how the Liberals have tried to do this?

Yeah, this letter, this statement from Aaron O'Toole does not come out of nowhere. So first of all, ever since the attack on Capitol Hill, obviously, there's been a ton of attention on it in Canada and every country, really. And lots of concern about Donald Trump and where his style of politics come from. And coming out of that, the liberals, in addition to condemning what happened in Washington. We must always work to secure our democracy and not give comfort to those who promote things that are not true or give space for hatred or extremism. Have started this sort of campaign, to kind of poke the Conservatives

and raise questions about the way the Conservatives have conducted themselves in Canada. So, you know, sort of linking what they, how they have talked and how they have acted with what has gone on in the United States. Not outright saying that the Canadian Conservatives are the same as Donald Trump, but just sort of raising questions about exactly how Aaron O'Toole's Conservatives and the Conservatives in years previous have sort of conducted themselves. And so this is really, this statement has to be understood as Aaron O'Toole wanting to, I think, very quickly make sure that the stain, the potential stain of Trumpism doesn't attach itself to him and his party. Right, right. And talking about some of the language that the Liberal Party is using.

Last week, I know they sent out this fundraising letter where they accused the conservatives of, quote, continuing a worrisome pattern of divisive politics catering to the extreme right. I want to talk about some recent controversies that have come up around the Conservative Party, around Aaron O'Toole, that I guess play into this larger narrative here. And maybe we could start with this video that was on the Conservative website about election rigging. The Prime Minister ordered Elections Canada to implement his electoral changes before the bill was even debated in the House of Commons.

Without one word of debate or one vote. Now, if that's not trying to rig the rules in his favor, I don't know what is. Right. So this is a charge that goes back to about 2018, sort of early 2019, when the Liberals were introducing changes to election laws, covered a broad number of things. But the Conservatives had specific objections to the way the pre-WIT campaign period was going to be regulated. And they started throwing around this accusation that the liberals were trying to, quote unquote, rig the next election. Now, at the time, you could have very easily understood that as a fairly dangerous accusation to make or a potentially risky accusation to make. But in the wake of what

Donald Trump did over the last few months, that sort of language takes on a different tone, a different seriousness, I think. And so the Liberals brought this page back up that the Conservatives had put up in 2018, early 2019, and said, look at this, you know, the Conservatives shouldn't be sort of stoking this sort of divisive rhetoric. The Conservative response is essentially, well, that's an old page. It went up before Aaron O'Toole became leader. So they pulled it down and said, you know, it's old, it's out of date. And then they also said, now look, when the Conservative government of Stephen Harper changed election laws,

you know, Liberals and opposition MPs also said we were trying to rig the last election, which is fair. I think that's a, you can by all means point out that this is not exactly a new thing for partisans to say about each other, though that doesn't quite get around the point that using that kind of language, we should now know, even if we should have known it many years ago, is potentially pretty serious. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I also saw people bringing up this slogan O'Toole's Conservatives had used, something like, take back Canada. And talk to me about this. Yeah. So this was a phrase that Aaron O'Toole used when he was running to be Conservative leader through 2020. His main campaign message, the message on the front of his campaign platform was take back Canada. We are ready to take back Canada. Let's take back Canada. Serving in the trenches of making sure we can fight back to get our prosperity agenda back. I promise to fight for energy workers, auto workers, forestry workers, and all of the hard-working Canadians who build this great country. Now that's a pretty strong phrase,

but it also raises a bunch of questions about exactly how he sees himself and how he sees his politics. Who took Canada? Who does he plan to take it back on a sort of it's a very populist message that suggests, you know, that there's this struggle for for Canada. And it's not make America great again, but it's it's a it's it's a heavy of enough message and a problematic enough message that the liberals brought it up to say, look, you know, this is what Aaron O'Toole campaigned on when he was running for leader. Now, interestingly, it's not a message Aaron O'Toole has repeated since he became leader, but it was a message he carried a lot when he was running to become conservative leader. Who's going to stand up for those who wear a uniform of service to protect us at home and abroad? Who's going to defend our history, our institutions against attacks from cancel culture and the radical left? Right. I was also hoping that we can talk about this sort of unusual incident with The Rebel that happened last week, where The Rebel, a right wing website here in Canada, was touting that they'd had an exclusive interview with Aaron O'Toole and O'Toole's camp denied this.

Yeah. So what appears to have happened there was The Rebel emailed questions to O'Toole's camp denied this. Yeah. So what appears to have happened there was the rebel emailed questions to O'Toole's office and O'Toole's office responded with quotes attributable to Aaron O'Toole, but no interview, no sort of one-on-one interview, as you would understand, that ever took place. But the rebel promoted it as an exclusive interview. And that made trouble for the conservatives because the conservatives in the past have said that they would not do interviews with the rebel. And it seems like the conservatives have readopted that position that they won't speak with the rebel, they won't cooperate with it.

But for at least, you know, a couple of emails, they seem to have at least offered comment and the rebels' use of that comment, it just landed just as the liberals were trying to raise concerns about the way the conservatives were operating and just sort of fed into that general idea that the conservatives were, there were questions to be asked about exactly, you know, what the conservatives stood for. Right, right. And talking about sort of feeding into this general idea, you know, I can't help but think there was much made in the wake of the Capitol attack of Parler, the right-wing social media site, where much planning for the attack took place. And so there was talk about O'Toole having a Parler account, but his office actually ended up saying that this account was not real and that they've asked Parler to remove it as well.

But this was all part of the conversation, too, in recent days. Yeah, it all fed into what was kind of going on on social media. You know, there was a picture distributed or sort of passed around on Twitter of a Conservative MP with a Make America Great hat on. It was sort of a bunch of things being used to sort of drive at the same idea that, you know, questions about the Conservative Party and the direction of the Conservative Party needed to be asked in light of what we've seen in the United States. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization.

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That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Cops. Talking about that MP with the Make America Great hat, you know, obviously Aaron O'Toole is not the sole representative of the Conservative Party. And have members of his caucus done anything to play into this larger right-wing Trumpist narrative? And I think you're going to say yes, because you have literally been on the show before talking about this. And so can you talk to me about some of those examples

and how O'Toole has dealt with them? Yeah, if you look at, if you understand sort of politics of the last four or five years now as having this sort of populist strain, particularly on the conservative side of things. You can definitely look at the federal conservatives and point to examples of where they seem to have at least nodded to that, right? Like Leslyn Lewis, who is also a leadership candidate who now might run for the party in an Ontario riding.

She wrote an op-ed in October that warned that Justin Trudeau was essentially trying to propagate a socialist coup. Pierre Polly of the Finance Critic brushed up against some online conspiracy theories about the Great Reset, which essentially posits that global elites are sort of conspiring to re-engineer society and take away people's freedom. He's going to renovate Canadian society to fit his Trudopian ambitions. This is not a time to re-engineer society to his liking or to his socialist ideology. Derek Sloan, who ran, who another conservative leadership candidate, who ran, who another conservative leadership candidate,

questioned the loyalty, seemed to question the loyalty of the chief public health officer, Theresa Tam. We sent an email out today asking, does she work for Canada or for China? And I encourage you to read that email. There's some interesting information in there. Raised questions about vaccines, you know, objected to the Liberal attempt to ban conversion therapy. Well, the Liberals have said, no, you can't get counselling,

and if as a parent you take your kid to get counselling for this, you can go to jail for five years. That's insane. That's ridiculous. So it's not just that O'Toole has said take back Canada, it's that there are these other incidents or other examples of people saying things that can sort of feed into this larger issue of where the Conservative Party is going. Right. And I just want to note, you and I are talking late Monday afternoon, and this news is very much breaking right now. But just picking up on MP Derek Sloan for a moment. There's some news that has just broken that, you know,

a well-known Canadian neo-Nazi donated to his campaign. And the Conservative Party is saying that Mr. O'Toole is outraged and that he will be looking into this matter. But there's a lot we don't know about that right now. Right, Aaron? Yeah, there's, I mean, that's a, that's a, that takes things, I think, to a whole other level. And we'll see how the Conservative Party deals with it. I think that the one thing that sort of ties the things together is that there is this larger narrative that O'Toole is obviously trying to shake about concerns about the Conservative Party and the views of people within it, which I, which surely acts as a sort of backdrop for what's going to happen or what may happen here. I'd want to pick up on that a little bit more, but what you think he's hoping to accomplish with this letter? Yeah, I think, I mean, I think the first priority is to put some space between him and Donald Trump. You know, it sounds like a silly thing to say, Aaron O'Toole, you know, to look at him and to, you know, broadly listen to what he has to say.

He's not, he's not Donald Trump. Then again, no one is other than Donald Trump. You know, you can see how the Trump style of politics, the issues he talks about, the things he says have become so poisonous and so stained, I guess, that you don't want that getting on you in any way. You want to put as much space between you and it as possible. And so I think that's a large part of it. I think the other part of it is, is that Aaron O'Toole at this point in his leadership, his polling numbers still aren't very solid. There was an abacus data survey that came out last week where the number of Canadians who held him in a positive, had a positive view of Aaron O'Toole was about 20%. The people who had a negative view was about 28%. So, you know, that does suggest there's still a lot of people out

there who have yet to make up their mind about Aaron O'Toole, but it does suggest that he's not starting from a position of strength. going to be able to shake, especially if an election is coming up. He wants to make sure that, you know, any attempts to kind of define him in a negative way, he pushes back against. Right. And these attempts, you know, he does say at some point in the letter that Canadians are smart, and they will see this as an attempt to mislead people and import some of the fear and division that we have witnessed in the United States? And, you know, is it possible that some of these attempts to paint him and the party as, you know, far to the right, that they will be seen as just politics? Look, every opposition leader who I've ever covered in my 12, 13 years in Ottawa has faced this issue of they're a new leader, they're facing a government, and that government attempts to define them before they can sort of define themselves. And so, you know, by all means, Canadians can look at this and see the politics of it.

And underneath it, though, there is an interesting conversation, I think, for Aaron O'Toole to have, or there's an interesting conversation to be had about Aaron O'Toole, about exactly sort of how he is defining himself. Because I don't think you can completely ignore the fact that there is a sort of populist sentiment out there, particularly in Conservative parties, but it's across the board. And how Aaron O'Toole interacts with that going forward and how he has interacted with it since running for leader, I think is an interesting challenge for him. And as much as he may not like the way the liberals are framing things, I'm sure he is also trying to figure out exactly what kind of conservative party he wants to represent. Okay, Aaron Murray, lots of interesting stuff there. Thank you so much, as always, for this conversation. Thank you. Okay, so before we go today, an update on something that came up in our conversation with Aaron. On Monday afternoon, Press Progress reported that the Conservative MP Derek Sloan

had received a donation from notorious Canadian white supremacist Frederick Fromm, better known as Paul Fromm. Later on Monday evening, Aaron O'Toole announced that he had initiated the process to remove Sloan from the Conservative Party caucus, and that he would disallow Sloan from running again, saying, quote, diligence. There have been previous calls to admonish Derek Sloan within the Conservative Party. Back in April, a motion was put forward within the party's Ontario caucus calling on Sloan to apologize for his comments, questioning whether Canada's chief public health officer,

Dr. Theresa Tam, worked for Canada or for China. According to CBC sources, only two members voted against that motion, Derek Sloan himself and Aaron O'Toole. That's all for today. Thanks so much for listening to FrontBurner, and we'll talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.