Conservative Party

A former Conservative is accusing party brass of blocking him from running to be nominated as a candidate in the next election.

Anthony Yacub, 24, said he believes the party made him ineligible for the nomination in order to run a “star” candidate in his riding, currently held by Liberal MP Jennifer O’Connell.

“it’s a real slap in the face to grassroots people,” he told CBC News. “What does it say to them? It basically says, ‘We don’t really care what you think.'”

No one knows what the ballot-box question will be in the next election, whenever it does come.

But at least one legal scholar in Canada believes voters should be asking some hard questions about the Constitution — specifically, whether a future prime minister would be willing to opt out of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Pierre Poilievre has dropped some broad hints in the past couple of weeks that he could be ready to blaze a trail here as prime minister. No federal government has ever used the notwithstanding clause in the 40-plus years it has been part of the Constitution. But the Conservative leader told a police chiefs’ gathering he might go down that road to get tougher on criminals.

Canada’s corporate titans are helping the country’s Conservative Party build a financial war chest to oust Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, as frustration grows among business leaders about the country’s economic performance.

The Conservatives have raised C$2.45 in donations for every C$1 Trudeau’s Liberal Party has pulled in since the start of last year. Their support base is broad, but the donor lists include a roll call of executives from the upper echelons of Canadian finance and business — including telecommunications billionaire Edward Rogers, private equity executive Paul Desmarais III and Dan Daviau, head of brokerage firm Canaccord Genuity Group Inc.

The next federal election could be more than a year away but political parties are already deep into planning their next campaigns — and recruiting new candidates.

Well ahead in the polls and reporting record-breaking sums in political donations, the Conservatives are also leading the pack on nominating candidates new to federal politics.

To date, the Conservative Party of Canada has nominated about 40 new faces as candidates. The party currently has 118 members of Parliament.

Sir Keir Starmer is leader of the United Kingdom’s Labour Party and looks all but certain to become prime minister sometime between now and Jan. 28, the latest the next election can be held.

Starmer, who got his knighthood from a previous job as the director of public prosecutions, has two things going for him. While he’s not the most exciting or personable politician to come strolling down the pike, he’s not nearly as scary as his batty predecessor, the Marxist crank Jeremy Corbyn. He’s also not nearly as disliked as Rishi Sunak, the fifth consecutive Tory prime minister and third in six years to get the job without voters first having a say-so.

OTTAWA — Political pundit Sabrina Maddeaux has suspended her campaign to become a candidate for the Conservative Party of Canada in the Greater Toronto Area, saying she has lost faith in the election’s integrity, while the party disputes allegations she has made about misconduct in the nomination process.

OTTAWA — Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s view of lobbyists as “useless and overpaid” hasn’t stopped him from meeting with them, according to records in Canada’s lobbyist registry.

Poilievre denounced the lobbying culture in corporate Canada in a speech in March and again in an opinion piece published in the National Post last week. He said any corporation looking to make legislative change should convince Canadians of the merit of the idea rather than reaching out directly to MPs and senators.

The Trudeau government’s tax hike on capital gains has investors and business leaders blowing up my phone.

They yelp: “What are you going to do about this?”

My answer: “No. What are you going to do about it?”

Most are stunned silent by the question. They had been planning to do nothing except complain and hope their useless and overpaid lobbyists meet Chrystia Freeland or Justin Trudeau to talk some sense into them while the opposition hounds the government to reverse course.

It’s been an extraordinary couple of days in the saga of Pierre Poilievre, unleashed.

Ejected from the House of Commons on Tuesday, blue-skying about making laws without Charter of Rights protection on Monday, the Conservative leader is giving Canadians a good look at his somewhat flexible views about what constrains him.

Short answer: Not much. It’s certainly not the rule book of the Commons or even the rules of political civility. So why not the Constitution, too?

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre delivered an hour-long rebuttal to the Liberal government’s budget Thursday — a fiery speech that depicted the multi-billion dollar spending plan as a threat to the country’s future.

Poilievre was particularly critical of the budget’s projection that Ottawa will run deficits for the foreseeable future, with no plan to return to balance — a program that will push the national debt to $1.4 trillion.

Ottawa will spend more to service that debt — $54.1 billion — than it will on health care this year, and the debt charges will continue to grow as the government rolls over some of that debt at higher interest rates.