For someone who apparently deplores Justin Trudeau’s sunny ways, Andrew Scheer smiles an awful lot. The new Conservative leader radiates positivity, even when he bashes his Liberal foe — a sense of indefatigable optimism that helped push him to victory at the Conservative leadership event Saturday night. In short, Scheer is hard not to...
READ MOREKevin O’Leary is dumping on the party he wants to lead
He’s treating the race with contempt. A lot of Conservatives don’t seem to mind. “That’s it. This is balls to the wall. I can’t do what I need to do in this country without a majority mandate. I can’t cast out the virus of Trudeau without a majority mandate … You have to go...
READ MORELeitch explained her values test. It makes less sense now.
Her spin doesn’t save her proposal from being a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. In Europe, the United States and Canada, immigration is shaping up to be the hottest political issue of 2017. Across the pond, French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen is calling for the banning of all religious symbols, including...
READ MORECucks and chaos: How Trump sets conservatives at each other’s throats
The CPC risks being ripped into moderate and ‘alt-right’ camps As the leader of what we once called the Free World, now the Land of Indefinite Airport Detention, issued his executive order banning travellers, immigrants and refugees from seven predominantly Muslim countries, the rest of the globe reacted with a mixture of shock and...
READ MOREO’Leary says he’s not a capitalist. (Wait … what?)
Is this guy for real? “I am not a capitalist.” With those five words, Kevin O’Leary just blew all his credibility as a Conservative political candidate. On AM640 radio in Toronto today, he told me, “I am not a capitalist. I am in favour of jobs. There are three things I’m going to fix...
READ MOREWith Leitch and O’Leary, Conservatives are flirting with catastrophe
Neither candidate seems to represent anything beyond shameless self-interest As President-elect Donald Trump tangles with actress Meryl Streep on Twitter (could both of them please give it a rest?), U.S. politics continues to cast a long shadow north of the 49th parallel, notably on the Conservative Party of Canada’s leadership race. Two candidates in particular...
READ MOREConservatives, race and the chicken-and-egg question
Does identity politics come from the base, or are certain candidates whipping it up for personal gain? Are Conservatives more biased than other Canadian voters? They are, apparently — at least according to a recent Forum research poll on attitudes towards minorities. The pollster asked 1,300 Canadians whether they had “favourable or unfavourable feelings”...
READ MOREThe Conservatives’ identity crisis
With Leitch and Alexander in the mix, the race risks being hijacked by identity politics. The Conservative leadership race is running at full gallop — but the lead horse appears to be “none of the above.” According to a recent poll by Forum Research, 54 per cent of respondents said they would prefer to see...
READ MOREWhose party is it, anyway?
As the Conservative leadership race unfolds, the answer may surprise us This week’s Conservative caucus retreat had been billed as a “performance review” for the party, close to a year after its defeat in the 2015 general election. MPs met in Halifax, in the words of leader Rona Ambrose, “to earn back the confidence...
READ MORELeitch’s ‘values’ pitch is classic wedge politics — and it’s working
But Conservatives can’t make it go away by refusing to talk about it Kellie Leitch has had quite a week. Coast to coast, the media has been whipping itself into a frenzy over a question included in a survey sent out by the Conservative MP’s party leadership campaign: “Should we screen potential immigrants for...
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