Front Burner - Who will be the next leader of the Conservative Party?

Episode Date: May 8, 2020

The race to become the next leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, previously paused by the COVID-19 outbreak, is back on. The party will select its new leader in August, by mail-in ballot. Today on Front Burner, Power & Politics host Vassy Kapelos analyzes the campaigns, and talks about how this current pandemic has changed the dynamics of the race.

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. So remember a few months back when the future of the Conservative Party of Canada was one of the biggest stories going? I know, it seems like eons ago. We were asking questions like, who will replace Andrew Scheer? How will they deal with

the more socially conservative elements in the party or the sustainability of the oil and gas industry? And could they beat the minority liberals in another general election? Well, a global pandemic, of course, really upended things. Debates were canceled and the leadership convention, once slated for June, will now take place in August via a mail-in ballot. Still, a lot has been happening out in the open and behind the scenes, and all of those questions remain on the table. With a bunch of new ones from the health and economic crisis we now find ourselves smack in the middle of. Today, power and politics host and longtime pod favorite Vashi Kopelos is here to bring us up to speed. This is Frontburner. Hi, Vashi. Hi, Jamie. Thank you so much for joining me today. So

the other week, this calendar invite popped up on my computer reminding me about the conservative leadership debate. And I know that you and I were supposed to be covering it at the Metro Toronto Convention Center. And of course, of course, that did not happen. That did not happen. But I'm really glad to have you here to catch up today. And also, this is my last episode for a while. I go on maternity leave on Monday. So I'm also very happy that you are my final guest for a bit. I am honoured to be your final guest, Jamie. It makes my entire week. I'm so happy to be with you. And also, I'm really going to miss you. I'm going to miss you too, but I will definitely still be tuning into Power and Politics. Okay, so let's get rolling. The field is a lot smaller than it was when we talked last time, pre-pandemic.

A number of candidates dropped out at the end of March, and now we're down to four. So frontrunners Peter McKay and Aaron O'Toole, we've talked about them quite a bit on the show before. I'm Aaron O'Toole, and I'm running to unite Conservatives on the path to victory. That's why I'm standing here today, again, to announce my candidacy for the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada. And then Leslyn Lewis and Derek Sloan. Hi, I'm Derek Sloan, Conservative Party of Canada leadership candidate. Hello, my name is Leslyn Lewis, and I'm running for the leader of the Federal Conservative Party of Canada.

Let's talk about Lewis and Sloan, because not everyone might be super familiar with them. Can you tell me a little bit more about each of them? Yeah, I sure can. So Leslyn Lewis runs her own law firm. She's got a PhD in law as well as a master's in environmental science. Both she and Derek Sloan are certainly from the sort of socially conservative wing of the party. I had the chance to interview Ms. Lewis once and I would say so, you know, she definitely tries to distinguish herself from O'Toole and from Peter McKay and present herself as the as a social conservative compared to them. She's also more on the like almost like libertarian end of things in

that she's big on free speech. The thing she went after McKay for was when he in a speech had once said, you know, like, let's not and I'm paraphrasing, but let's not focus on all the stuff that gets us into trouble. So talking about abortion, that kind of thing. Social issues and social conservatives have a place in the conservative party 100 percent. But let's not talk about going back. Let's not talk about going back. Let's talk about how we hurt those issues for a time until we get the country moving in the right direction. He said, like, it's perfectly OK to have your views on that, but like, let's not let the competition sort of frame us as all about that. And she got really mad about that and made sort of an ad saying he's telling us not to talk about this stuff, which is really important to us.

We've been accused of that in the past as conservatives having a hidden agenda. I think that the more pragmatic approach is to tell people exactly what you intend to do. That's not exactly what Peter McKay was doing, but that's how she put it forth to her supporters. And certainly it seemed to resonate at the time with those who lean more socially conservative on the spectrum in the party. Derek Sloan, also a socially conservative candidate. He's one who came out, probably the only person I could find who came out early in support of another guy, Richard Day-Curry, who was sort of running for leadership. Who's extremely, extremely, you know, said some really controversial things about being gay and said it was a choice. And Derek Sloan was one of the guys who said, OK, he's allowed to say something like that. While so many other conservatives were saying this guy should not be allowed to run for the

leadership. Lately, Derek Sloan, probably more than anybody else, has been garnering headlines for some stuff that he said about the chief public health officer in this country, Dr. Teresa Tam. One of the issues with Justin Trudeau's handling of this situation has been his reliance on the advice of Dr. Theresa Tam. Right. And so tell me a little bit more about what happened there. So in this era of, you know, their leadership race being on and them trying to make money, Derek Sloan put out a fundraise. Derek Sloan put out an email blast and then a video that went alongside it. And in that, he jumped off of what has been a more general conservative critique of the federal government's actions during all of

this. And that is that the federal government vis-a-vis public health officials and federal public health officials has trusted too much the WHO, the World Health Organization. And in turn, the WHO has been too trusting of the information and the data coming out of China. And that is not just a critique being leveled in this country, of course. This is right around the world right now. But he took it a step beyond the critique we had been hearing so far from the party. And he called into question Dr. Tam's loyalty to Canada. He said, who does she work for, Canada or China? Dr. Tam was born in Hong Kong. She's an immigrant to this country. It's a dual loyalty trope that has often been used with racist

connotations, in particular, anti-Semitic connotations. Lots of members of his caucus condemned those comments. Andrew Scheer took a while. The current leader of the party took a while, but eventually condemned them as well. Right. And how did the two frontrunners respond to these comments that Sloan made, Peter McKay and Erin O'Toole? By and large, they've been pretty silent on it. They haven't really come out and said, Derek Sloan should not have said this. Derek Sloan should not be using tropes that are widely identified as racist. The only other background or I don't know how you say it, but but like behind the scenes drama is that in particular Sloan's Ontario conservative colleagues, caucus colleagues, they had this big conversation about forcing him to apologize.

Right. They wanted him to apologize for this. They were considering kicking him out of caucus if there was a means, a mechanism to be able to do so. And apparently the only two people who weren't in favor of any kind of process like that taking place or vote or anything were Derek Sloan, one of them, and the other was Aaron O'Toole. What is O'Toole trying to accomplish there? I have no idea, to be completely honest. I'm not sure. I think, you know, there's a framework for what you can understand as his competitor. It would be almost a conflict of interest, perhaps. Some could see it as if you vote to kick one of your competitors out of caucus. I think there is a lot of pressure, though, on both O'Toole and McKay to articulate a position on this. I mean, it's died down a little bit, but for a good week and a half, this was a big issue for the conservatives. And other like I said, other caucus colleagues like took no time to come out and say very clearly that that should not have been said.

I should note also that Derek Sloan never did apologize specifically. He did say, you know, I could have rephrased it. I could have said something different. He insists that he wasn't being racist. He says it was just a rhetorical question. 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. I have a few questions for you about Peter McKay. So, I mean, you mentioned before that Lesley Lewis slammed him for, you know, him saying that the Conservative Party was focusing too much on these social conservative issues. him saying that the Conservative Party was focusing too much on these social conservative issues. And, you know, I can't help but remember that last October after the election, McKay really called out Andrew Scheer for letting the campaign debate focus on these socially conservative issues like abortion, LGBTQ rights. People did not want to talk about women's reproductive rights. They didn't want to talk about revisiting the issue of

same-sex marriage. And yet that was thrust onto the agenda and hung around Andrew Scheer's neck like a stinking albatross, quite frankly. He called them a stinking albatross around Scheer's neck. You know, he's been relatively silent on this issue with Derek Sloan. And then very recently, he took aim at O'Toole over his support of a bill that supported transgender rights. He called it a bathroom bill, right? Yeah. And that's a sort of very bigoted way that it has been described in the past. I'm not saying Peter McKay is, but certainly the use of that was meant to denigrate transgender people when this bill was being debated, when this issue was up for debate in the House of Commons years ago. He eventually walked back calling it that. It was in another one of those email blasts, but it immediately got the attention of a number of conservatives again themselves who were saying, what's this?

You know, why would this just be thrown out there? When he walked it back, he said that he didn't really realize, I guess, and I'm paraphrasing again here, but realized the connotation of the term. Again, said that it was, you know, staffers that did that. But once he talked to LGBTQ members of his staff, he realized that the use of the term was not a good move type of thing. And the idea being here, I know this bill is about, you know, making it essentially a hate crime to discriminate against transgender people. And then critics of this bill were basically making this about how, you know, people could sneak into unisex bathrooms. And so people were saying this was kind of like a dog whistle

from McKay to these more socially conservative elements in the party. If you look up from above at the race and you're trying to figure out where this thing is going or where it's been, it is a big switch. Because if you think after the election, they were trying to get away from the idea that they were ultra-social conservative, the idea that they were ultra social conservative, right, that they had to expand to and appeal to more voters outside of their central base. And you heard Peter McKay talk about marching in pride parades. That was supposed to happen the day after,

for example, the original vote was going to take place in June. And things have really moved. And this is emblematic, I think, of that. And I know that he says, you know, it was a mistake and he's walked it back. But this stuff like ticks away, right? And it creates an impression. And I'm wondering if you can help me out with that, because I've been having a hard time wrapping my head around it. It feels like things have changed so much with this pandemic. People are losing their jobs and, you know, they're worried about their health. And are these candidates, are these guys talking about the things that people care about right now? Are they meeting people where they are? I think it's a great question. And I think it's actually to give them a bit of sympathy. It's a difficult thing to do if you're

any opposition party, but also if you're running to be the leader of an opposition party. I think about the level of support right now I have never witnessed in my lifetime for governments of all stripes, but the government period, whether it be provincial or federal. And then you think about trying to navigate that, trying to figure out how do I highlight my positions without being overly partisan, because people don't have a big appetite for that. But how do you not be overly partisan in a race to become the leader of the official opposition? It's not a race to become the prime minister at this point. That's a really important point here. We're talking about the conservative leadership race. And basically, what you're saying here is that maybe this is

one of the reasons why they're getting stuck on some of these issues, these socially conservative issues. When we started out in January, it felt like McKay was like the anointed leader here. But I understand that now this race is quite a bit tighter. The fundraising numbers are not hugely different. And the number of donors for Aaron O'Toole is actually a thousand more than Peter McKay. So he's getting more, less money, but from more people than Peter McKay. So he's getting more, less money, but from more people than Peter McKay. So what it tells me, and money is not everything in politics. I've learned that the hard way through trying to predict various other leadership races and even

elections. But it is, it does give us a picture of the kind of support that each candidate is going to draw. And it sounds like, you know, if Aaron O'Toole has more donors, he has some game. And I think the assumption had been going in, and understandably so, that Peter McKay could, this could be a cakewalk. He was by far the most recognizable name, probably not just within conservatives, but outside of conservative circles as well, thanks to his time in parliament. Aaron O'Toole is a recognizable name, I feel like, to me and to a lot of people who watch my show. But I don't know if that was necessarily the case outside of that audience to a certain degree.

But this shows that he has a pretty good campaign and that he will give Peter McKay a run for his money. And that has also changed the dynamics, I think, of the way in which the race is unfolding. Why do you think we've seen McKay slip so much? You know, I know that there are plenty of people who will say that there have been, you know, multiple missteps. I'm thinking about an interview that you did with Peter McKay sort of in March, right, at the end of March about the pandemic. Yeah, he had this really weird day where he decided to kind of blast out on Twitter, or his staff did, a whole host of tweets about why the

conservative leadership race had to go on. And remember back to the end of March, where we were just at the beginning of all of this, right? It was two weeks before that all the flights had been canceled, people were told not to travel, and we were just in the thick of all of this. And so people were feeling scared about their health, again, worried about paying the bills. There was very few announcements yet about how the government would help them. And in comes Peter McKay sort of going on and on about why the conservative leadership race needs to happen. And it was just sort of an odd moment. It just didn't feel like the person I'd interviewed, for example, many times before. I want to start off

by asking you, I was looking through your Twitter feed today. And in the last, I think it's six hours, you've tweeted five tweets about focused on this race and how you believe that it should proceed. At a time when Canadians en masse are losing their jobs, are worried about their health, worried about losing their loved ones, is that the right call? Well, democracy doesn't take a nap or doesn't sleep. And just like the media who are continuing to cover this story, leaders of the opposition and members of the opposition have an important role to play to hold the government to account, to push forward with ideas, constructive ideas. But Vashie, I think it's important to note that in World War I, World War II, in the Great Depression, we had

elections. We actually had elections take place, the height of democratic exercise. It didn't really add up. And I'm sure there was a strategy behind it. It didn't really add up. And I'm sure there was a strategy behind it. It didn't work out in the end. The race has been delayed. They won't vote until the end of August now. It's going to be all mail-in, that kind of thing. But I think that, again, that kind of stuff leaves an impression. Now, I can't predict what conservative voters are going to think.

And I don't know if necessarily McKay has even slipped necessarily. I think he's getting bad press for a bunch of mistakes, but he still is the frontrunner. He still has raised the most money. And I think his name is still the most recognizable. But whether he can manifest that or turn that into a solid victory, I think depends on what happens over the next few months and how he ends up running this campaign. You know, the other question I wanted to ask you before we go today is, is this idea of like a potential looming election, right?

Pre-pandemic, Peter McKay was saying that, you know, he wanted to be leader of the conservative party, wanted to get this over with, and then he was going to call an election. And he seemed really confident that he could take down this liberal minority government. And as you mentioned earlier in this conversation, we're now seeing unprecedented levels of support for incumbent governments around the world. And so what do you think, even after this leadership race, the possibility is that we could still be headed in that direction? And, you know, connected to this, has the current leader, Andrew Scheer, done anything to help the party's prospects in that goal? So those are great questions. And I think, especially on the question of an election, things may surprise us. I'm going to take a sort of outside view on this because I've had a few conversations in the past few days with particularly liberals, pretty high ranking liberals who in no way want to have an election in which anyone's life is in danger. So that's a big consideration, like number one consideration right now. I think putting aside politics, which I think we've witnessed most of our politicians can do. If this pandemic peaks again in the fall, there's not going to be an election. I think we can conclusively say that. But there are sort of these quiet conversations going on about their internal polling in the Liberals, which shows them out eons ahead, like sitting around 55 percent support. That's what they're in. And it's

internal polling. So take it for what it is. But that is a consideration. Let's be sort of crass and real for a second. For every political party, when they are calculating whether or not to force an election or to come up with a way in which an election could end up being called, they are considering their own chances. The liberals' chances have not been this good in years. Whether that sticks is a completely different story. In no way do I condone sort of like, you know, all the stuff that's going on turning into a political game. It's not that these conversations were not had in that context. It was just sort of like, you know, background stuff. But certainly it is a discussion being had in political parties, and it is not impossible to conceive of it.

It's difficult, but it's not impossible. On the question of Andrew Scheer, that's a whole other ballgame. It's going to be fascinating months from now to look back. I mean, it was impossible for me to get an interview with Mr. Scheer during the election campaign. They said no probably 60 times. And now he's available all the time, which is great. It's great to have leaders of the opposition who want to put forth alternative ideas and then being held accountable for them. But it is certainly interesting that he is so visible at this time when he is basically a

lame duck leader. And I say that not in a I'm not passing judgment. I'm saying that he's he's not running. Right. He's no longer is. Yeah, he's literally basically quit. And then now he's not running, right? He's no longer. Yeah, he's literally basically quit. And then now he's just sort of kind of stuck in the job because of this pandemic. And so he's being very visible in the question then becomes, well, is this helping them? Is it hurting them? How is it affecting their chances? But it does present a different set of circumstances that I'm not sure, just like with everything else six months ago, we could have ever predicted. So basically what you're telling me here is that when I get back from Matt leave, it's super possible that you and I are just going to be covering another election.

And that could even be called by the incumbent liberals. Yeah, but not super possible. Maybe like tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny bit, sort of possibly. Okay. Not not impossible maybe i'll put it that way yeah who is to say these days it's so hard to predict as you said anything fast eco pillows thank you so much jamie wait for being here wait before you go before we go there are a few people who have something to say to you hi jamie nick here along with the whole team. Say hi, everyone. Hi, Jamie. We just want to, from all of our homes, say we are going to miss working with you. Best of luck to you and Dan with the new baby.

We all feel really bad that Grimes and Elon Musk stole your baby name. What are you going to do? We still have a couple of weeks to pick a new one. So, yeah, have fun. It'll be hard work. We'll miss you. And we'll talk soon. Everybody, yeah.

Bye. See you, Jamie. We love you. Thanks, Jamie. You're going to be a great mom. Going to miss you. That's so nice. Thank you, guys.

It's like such a wonderful team. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. So that was really, really nice. Thank you so much. And before I go today, I want to thank all of you so much for listening, especially during these last several weeks as we all tried together to make sense of the threat this virus is posing to our health and to the way that we live. I know that it hasn't

been easy and there is a lot of hurt and anxiety out there. One thing that has really kept me going is knowing that there are still so many wonderful things to look forward to, including for me getting to be a mom. And so I wish you all a healthy and safe few months. Please take care of yourselves and each other. I'm going to be back in the fall, but in the meantime, you'll be in excellent hands. The wonderful Pia Chattopadhy will be hosting for a few weeks. She is not just an incredible journalist, but if I do say so myself, a very, very cool person too. And then Josh Block, the host of one of my favorite podcasts to date, CBC's NXIVM podcast from

their Uncover series, will be hosting this summer. And, you know, as you just heard, this show is the incredible team, some of the hardest working and most dedicated people I have ever had the privilege of working with. So on that note, and since that's all this week, here they are. Front Burner comes to you from CBC News and CBC Podcast. The show is produced this week by Mark Apollonio, Imogen Burchard, Elaine Chao, Shannon Higgins, Allie Janes, Nahayat Tzouche, and Ebby and Abdigir. Derek Vanderwyk does our sound design with help this week from Matt Cameron. Our music is by Joseph Shabison of Boombox Sound.

from Matt Cameron. Our music is by Joseph Shabison of Boombox Sound. The executive producer of Frontburner and huge Grimes and Elon Musk fan is Nick McCabe-Locos. And I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. And I'll talk to you all soon. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.