Conservative Party

Brampton, Ont. Mayor Patrick Brown said Thursday he won’t run for the federal Conservatives if his main rival for the leadership, Pierre Poilievre, wins the party’s top job in the September leadership election.

In an interview with CBC’s Power & Politics, Brown said he’s confident he can win the leadership but, if he falls short, he’d also consider running under the party banner in the next election if former Quebec premier Jean Charest or MP Leslyn Lewis wins the leadership.

Don’t threaten me with a good time.

After their party lost another federal election last year, the Chinese Canadian Conservative Association (CCCA) made some striking comments about the Tory platform — and Canada’s relations with Beijing.

Pierre Poilievre’s campaign to lead the federal Conservatives has shaken up the race, saying it has signed up more than 300,000 new members, but his rivals insist that the battle to succeed former leader Erin O’Toole is far from over.

Jenni Byrne, senior adviser to the Ottawa-area MP, said his camp had signed up 311,958 new members before a Friday night deadline. In the 2020 leadership race, all four Conservative candidates recruited more than 269,000 people in total, which was a record for the party.

All this enthusiasm, but no election for 3 years. Go incognito.

Federal Conservatives could learn some lessons from how Doug Ford led the Progressive Conservatives to re-election in Ontario last week, but they may not be able to replicate his playbook, election analysts say.

“I think there are lessons, particularly in the [Greater Toronto Area] for the federal Conservatives to learn,” said Duane Bratt, a political science professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary.

“After all, Ford won a hell of a lot of seats in Toronto and in the GTA, something that the federal Conservatives haven’t been able to do in multiple election cycles.”

In a nutshell, support crap like CRT in classrooms and open borders and don’t forget to suck up to the public service unions. And never forget to ask the CBC for guidance. I believe the CPC is up to the task. 

OTTAWA—Pierre Poilievre’s campaign said Saturday it has sold upwards of 300,000 memberships in support of his bid for leadership of the federal Conservative party.

That number eclipses even the total number sold in the party’s last leadership race and appears to cement his status as the front-runner among the six people vying for the job.

The deadline for new members to take out a card so they can vote for the party’s new leader was Friday at midnight.

Conservative leadership contender Pierre Poilievre has tabled a bill in the House of Commons that, if passed, would prohibit the federal government from imposing vaccine mandates on federal workers and the travelling public.

Poilievre, who has been a vocal opponent of mandates since the convoy of protesters against vaccine mandates rolled into Ottawa earlier this year, said he’s tabling this legislation now “to give Canadians back control of their lives.”

It’s unlikely to pass so it’s really just red meat for potential supporters. Call me a cynic but I think a leadership campaign is in process.

Conservatives say they’re about to set another new membership record

Some Conservatives are predicting it will turn out to be the largest number of Canadians ever to join a political party at any one time in Canadian history.

Multiple Conservative Party of Canada sources say that, since the current contest to choose a new party leader began, more than 400,000 people have either joined the party, have renewed their memberships, or are existing members, giving them the right to vote in the leadership race.

With a vote looming, and widespread disgust at polarization and ideology, perhaps we can all get behind the major political figure who said, “I am unique in that I’m neither left nor right, but I’m also not a mushy moderate. I’ve always stood for something.” Provided we can figure out what that thing was. Or in which election. Or who he was.

Was it Doug Ford, whose party is poised for re-election in Ontario for being neither left, right nor… um… can’t remember? Or someone the federal Tories will soon choose to lead them to defeat whenever Jagmeet Singh realizes blindly supporting a party he openly despises is fatuous?

Perhaps Jean Charest, who wants to reform stuff, not tear it down. Or Scott Aitchison, who would do whatever nicely. Not Leslyn Lewis, whose firm beliefs too often involve the WEF. Or Roman Baber, who everyone forgets. As for Patrick Brown, well, let’s ask him.

Nobody saw Patrick Brown coming when he won the leadership of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party in 2015. Can the current mayor of Brampton, Ont., former three-term MP and ex-provincial leader repeat the feat at the federal level? In the most wide-ranging interview he’s given, Brown tells John Ivison that he is “cautiously optimistic” about victory.

Three weeks ago, Charles Vincent drove to a local hotel in Notre-Dame-du-Bon-Conseil, Que., to meet Pierre Poilievre. Vincent ended up buying a membership and even took a picture with the Ottawa-area MP, whom he first heard of during the trucker convoy last January.

But after this week’s French debate, Vincent isn’t so sure he will be voting for Poilievre.

Full disclosure I will likely be voting PPC.  Poilievre is fun but there is really no difference between the CPC & LPC.

OTTAWA – Federal Conservative leadership candidate Patrick Brown says calling social conservatives “dinosaurs” in a book he wrote about his time in Ontario politics was “the wrong terminology.”

“I guess a better way to articulate that would be to say: I don’t think the Conservative Party needs to revisit these issues,” Brown said in an interview Friday.

The mayor of Brampton, Ont., has attacked longtime MP Pierre Poilievre — once a colleague in the House of Commons back when Brown was an MP — over his position on abortion.

I hope he wins, it will absolutely kill the CPC.

There’s a general consensus that Pierre Poilievre is the front-runner in the Conservative party leadership race. Whether you’re a Conservative (or conservative) or not, and whether you support Poilievre or not, everything from the size of the crowds at his events, to the traction of his social media messages to opinion polling suggest he’s the man to beat.