The Conservative Party of Canada today released the list of candidates who will appear on the ballot when party members vote for a new leader in September — and it doesn’t include three candidates who say they collected enough money and signatures to qualify.
Patrick Brown is under fire from pro-Israel groups after breaking ranks with the Conservative Party of Canada’s official position on the Canadian embassy in Israel and for drawing analogies between Ukrainians and Palestinians.
He’s so multicultural! Diversity is just another word for identity politics.
OTTAWA — The last time federal Conservatives were picking a leader, their race was transformed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
More than two years later, they are at it again. But this time, the race is happening during what appears to be the end of Canadians living under government-imposed pandemic rules.
The events of the past 25 months, from when the health crisis first landed until now, are shaping the contest for who will lead the Conservative party after Sept. 10.
The race is officially on. As of Friday afternoon, at least six candidates had filed their signatures and big bucks to appear on the final ballot in hopes of becoming the next leader of the Conservative Party of Canada.
Prepare to see a shift in strategies as candidates gear up for the upcoming debates in May. They will have to decide who they want on their side and who they want to attack. And how do some intend to get noticed in a more crowded race than anticipated?
Poilievre seems to be in control. Not sure anyone can beat him.
Believe it or not, there was a time when being a conservative in Canada was fair and reasonable. In fact, it wasn’t that long ago. It was during the twelve year period that Conservative Stephen Harper served as prime minister that a line of demarcation appeared.
Toward the end of Harper’s tenure, Canadian media began to play the “race card.” One catalyst involved a new arrival to Canada who demanded to cover her face during her citizenship ceremony. General society objected to the idea of Islamic Law overruling 145 years of Canadian tradition. PM Stephen Harper agreed.
An association between conservative politics and “Islamophobia” was born. To this day, mainstream media has clung to the concept. As years passed, a notion of conservatives as racist– both the party and the public– has solidified into a common social perception.
Pierre Poilievre is a populist politician — there’s that demonizing word again — and, as a result, he scares the bejeebers out of the political elite.
He’s actually got crowds coming out.
Pierre Poilievre may be known for his social media savvy, but his campaign is getting some help from a conservative meme machine.
Jeff Ballingall’s company, Mobilize Media, has been retained by the Poilievre Conservative leadership campaign, sources familiar with the hiring told CBC News.
... Ballingall specializes in shareable, anti-Liberal messaging that often takes on a mocking or outraged tone. His Canada Proud and Ontario Proud accounts have amassed hundreds of thousands of followers on Facebook and tens of thousands more on Twitter and Instagram.
The Horror!
Conservative leadership candidate Jean Charest is promising to repeal the Liberal government’s consumer carbon price and eliminate the federal portion of the HST on low-carbon purchases.
He also pledges to stick with an older target for reducing the country’s greenhouse-gas emissions by 2030 should he win the Sept. 10 leadership election – and return the Conservatives to power.
… To incentivize Canadians to reduce their own carbon footprints, Charest’s plan pitches eliminating the federal part of the HST on purchases such as electric vehicles, Energy Star appliances and high-efficiency windows.
… Take the former Quebec premier’s visit to Oakville on Thursday night. It was billed as a great event on his social media feed, but all his Twitter account had to show for it were pictures of Charest flanked by his spouse and a couple of local supporters.
One must assume that had hundreds of people showed up to see Charest in the flesh, his campaign would have been eager to showcase the fact. By all indications — and not for the first time — his social media team had to make the most of a meagre offering.
The Star’s Chantal Hebert basically crowns Poilievre in this piece.
He’s fun no question but there’s plenty of time before the next election for the CPC braintrust to squeeze the likeability out of him.
Will he alter the ersatz LPC policy offerings of the party and tackle mass immigration? Free speech? Identity politics? Wokism? The Green-scam?
Being “conservative” has nothing to do with being a lackey of the corporate class but I suspect that’s a wish too far.
Pierre Poilievre might recoil at the suggestion, but the Conservative leadership campaign he is running in 2022 is not entirely dissimilar to the campaign Justin Trudeau started running a decade ago.
There are certainly discordant notes — and Poilievre is pursuing very different ends. But at the heart of Poilievre’s current stump speech is something that was at the core of Trudeau’s Liberal campaign: financial insecurity.
Trudeau built a campaign for “real change” upon a foundation of addressing the insecurities felt by the “middle class and those working hard to join it.”
Plagiarizing the LPC? This has to be the worst slander CBC has ever uttered against the CPC. The LPC must be desperate!
Isn’t it interesting how the elites attempt to divert attention to race whenever the public starts to get angry about the failed economic policies of the establishment?
This is about the crowds showing up at Pierre Poilievre’s rallies, and it is not about the crowds showing up at his rallies. Of their size and enthusiasm both I and others have written. The crowds, in the numbers, showing up for his events in all parts of the country — even in the heart of downtown Toronto, at an apologetic venue mere yards from the headquarters of the CBC, the Canadian temple of current wokeness and identity/race fascination — have to be alarming for the bunch who have signed up to run against him.
OTTAWA – Even as he decries government policies for pushing up the cost of housing, Conservative leadership candidate Pierre Poilievre is defending investments he and his wife made in rental properties of the kind that some economists say contribute to rising real estate prices.
Poilievre co-owns a real estate investment company that owns a rental property in Calgary and his wife owns a rental home in Ottawa.
It’s not so much that Pierre Poilievre drew a crowd to an event in downtown Toronto. It’s that after the rally, hundreds stood in a long, swirling line for as long as an hour-and-a-half, waiting for a picture and a few words with the politician and his wife, Anaida.
So if you are still wondering: Yes, this is a thing. Mr. Poilievre has hit a nerve, and has some people responding in a rare way in Canadian politics: expending shoe leather to hear a politician speak.
Go incognito.
The idea that the rightness of a cause is to be judged by the demographic makeup of those who appear to support it, a common assumption on the left, is itself racist
As Pierre Poilievre crisscrosses Canada, very much the front runner in the Conservative leadership race, he continues to attract large crowds wherever he goes. On April 12, he addressed a large gathering at Spruce Meadows, on the southern edge of Calgary, where around 5,000 people came out to hear him address a range of issues, from pandemic lockdowns and restrictions, to the Freedom Convoy protests, inflation and bitcoin.
Related: We will never be short a reason to Nuke Toronto.
