Episode 995: Missing the point(s)

Zain 0:02

This is The Strategist, episode 995. My name is Zain Velji. With me, as always, Corey Hogan, Stephen Carter.

Zain 0:08

Guys, what is going on? I can't see you.

Zain 0:12

That is what's going on. I cannot see you.

Zain 0:14

And you know what? It's the best part of my day.

Corey 0:16

day. You know, the great irony is that other people can see us. If you were a listener rather than a participant, you would have no problems whatsoever right now.

Zain 0:25

yeah. I'm barely a listener, just

Corey 0:27

just to let you know. I'm barely a listener, let alone a participant. legitimately the case

Zain 0:31

carter i am back uh you guys of course did a show without me how did it go um

Carter 0:35

um cory made me ask terrible

Zain 0:37

okay good to know good

Carter 0:38

good to know thanks thanks for being back man thanks for having covid just the one day so we'd appreciate you more um

Carter 0:45

you know whatever i don't know anybody else who's had covid for one day but whatever you just do you you

Carter 0:51

you know we're glad to have you back anyways yeah

Corey 0:54

yeah it is pretty not pretty amazing that you managed to find a way to be on CBC on Wednesday, and I think you were on Friday as well, but you were too sick for

Zain 1:03

for the strategists on

Carter 1:03

on Thursday. Too sick for the strategists. Let

Zain 1:05

Let me tell you something. I can do seven minutes, okay? I can do seven minutes, of which I speak two minutes, barely. And you know why I went on the CBC? I have to clarify this. So I was not on CBC on Friday. I was, however, on CBC on Wednesday. You know why? Because Wednesday was the verdict, Corey, was

Zain 1:24

the verdict of whether flair airlines was canadian enough and guess what guys flair airlines is

Zain 1:31

is canadian enough yeah

Zain 1:32

yeah oh my goodness carter this is i had to talk about that if i wasn't going to who was going to carter that's

Carter 1:38

that's the only part of your interview i watched that

Carter 1:40

that was the only part that i was interested in i

Corey 1:42

i think canadian enough is an amazing slogan for flair airlines who's with me i

Corey 1:48

mean i think they're they will be they

Corey 1:49

they will be i mean they are our sponsor

Zain 1:50

sponsor they they take tremendous uh you know uh

Zain 1:53

uh pains to listen to every episode of this show i know that for a fact uh being our sponsor not why

Carter 1:58

why wouldn't they just put us in charge of all their communications efforts right like we should be in charge of everything we would have canadian enough as a slogan you know we we've already popularized a uh a number of phrases we're pretty much the best why are they being such jerks about it we've

Corey 2:14

we've popularized a number of phrases is just the weakest sauce carter just yeah carter

Zain 2:20

carter carter improve the pitch deck we'll do our we'll do our pitch episode in fact you know what we'll do it for patreon see here's what happens we

Corey 2:27

we will we will pitch in a way that they cannot hear it that's a good idea thank you that's good i like that carter you

Carter 2:34

you guys forgetting the rules of the strategist i come up with the vague idea cory hones it and then we make you do all the work to make sure that it happens so i'm already done my part it's

Corey 2:44

fine yeah mission accomplished it's very good uh

Zain 2:48

uh carter uh before we move on uh we have been talking about the cbc uh your appearance on west of center um overrated or underrated and why was it overrated it's

Carter 2:56

it's overrated um hurley didn't understand the joke when i apologized to him uh you know it's very upsetting that uh hurley's just a little too old to understand the pop culture references i'm throwing at him uh oh my god

Zain 3:11

god we're not here to dig even further what did i do jesus christ what

Carter 3:15

i do i said nothing but the truth oh carter

Zain 3:19

carter carter yeah it is it is very upsetting um cory i'm not gonna ask you any questions i don't

Corey 3:28

uh doing the old pot calling the kettle old thing a little bit more is that what's gonna happen i also went

Carter 3:33

went three for six in my afl predictions so it

Carter 3:36

it was the worst week it actually

Corey 3:38

just feels like that would be the same as um just randomly guessing so it

Carter 3:43

it pretty much was true yeah you

Corey 3:45

you went three for six congrats

Zain 3:47

fantastic i i don't care i'm moving it on i'm moving it on to our first segment our first segment i'll show you mine if you show me yours guys the leadership of the conservative party goes on but the deadline for memberships has has come and gone june 3rd was the deadline the day after the ontario election and yes hold your horses we'll talk about that as well guys

Zain 4:08

guys as soon as the deadline came and went campaign

Zain 4:12

campaign started to roll out their numbers it started with patrick brown on twitter indicating that he had sold a hundred and fifty thousand

Zain 4:21

thousand uh members or memberships associated with his campaign campaign uh

Zain 4:26

uh soon thereafter stephen carter jean charre uh

Zain 4:30

in a long post said worry not we've got enough points to win yep

Zain 4:35

uh but not indicating how many memberships uh his campaign had sold and then of course pierre

Zain 4:40

pierre polly ever uh the front runner in the campaign indicating through a tweet by their senior advisor jenny burn that that's it they had sold nearly 312 000 memberships first i I want to talk about the numbers, then I want to talk about the value of the numbers. Carter, talk to me about these numbers. We're looking at rumors that say north of 400,000, some rumors saying sources say 600,000.

Zain 5:05

Put this into context for people from a national leadership perspective.

Zain 5:10

These are staggering on paper. Are they staggering to you, or is this what you kind of expected, given the

Zain 5:15

the soul-searching mission that the conservative party was on, so to speak?

Carter 5:18

No, I mean, if all of these numbers are true, and for them to be true, we need to be sitting at probably 700 000 members by the time this thing or 600 000 members uh you know pierre plus uh brown alone is is is 400 000 members um they had existing members before they started this little ball game yeah

Carter 5:37

uh so they'd be you know they have to hit 600 700 000 members uh for everybody's numbers to be true um so you know if if we do that if we take everybody at their word this is staggered it is just it's the largest main uh leadership campaign ever i think uh even when cory you know convinced the liberals to to give away their memberships for free um you know that that you

Carter 6:00

you you know literally this is the same as giving it away for free uh but way bigger and if

Carter 6:06

if these numbers hold if this is the case then uh this could show a uh a rather significant significant bump for all of the conservatives

Carter 6:18

conservatives and really holds

Carter 6:20

holds to create a really significant party because members are one step away from being donors and donors are what carry a party.

Zain 6:32

Corey, talk to me about these numbers from your perspective. You've run leaderships, you've administered and managed them. What do you make of these numbers? Would you agree with it staggering as a conclusion?

Corey 6:42

Yeah, I mean, really big. And I think that speaks to the stakes of this particular conservative leadership. It's interesting to me because the last two were by no means sleepy affairs when you consider leadership, you

Corey 6:54

you know, context and everything going on. But this one has clearly resonated with the general public in a way that those other two did not. Part of it is the stakes seem a little bit higher for the Conservative Party. They're now Now, multiple elections having lost, three elections in a row having lost, every party starts to find religion. But there are such stark differences between the candidates. It's really driving the conversation in a way that feels more

Corey 7:20

more breathless, for sure. Both sides are saying it could be the end of the party if you go with the other candidate. At least in the last couple of them, even if they hated each other, even if they thought that they weren't real conservatives, even if there were whisper campaigns to that effect, it wasn't so overt, right?

Corey 7:35

right? Right. And so that's a big part of it. And also one of the things I find interesting and I'm not convinced

Corey 7:39

convinced it was smart, but

Corey 7:41

but Pierre Pogliev for prime minister has really decided that's his slogan. Right. He's really decided to make this like

Corey 7:49

like a conversation in the general public.

Corey 7:52

Right. He's not just playing for the party leadership. And as a result, a lot of his communications decisions are being broadcast rather than narrowcast. And that that has consequences, not all of them good.

Corey 8:03

But it's it has just changed the overall nature of this race. Now, in terms of these numbers, I

Corey 8:08

I would be very surprised if there weren't more than six hundred thousand. I'm hearing six twenty five, six seventy five is just a general area that people are floating to. No idea if that's true. I should just say off the top. But if that

Corey 8:23

that is the case, it's going to be a wild, wild ride. And and that is a number that allows everybody to be telling the truth. A couple of things, though, about these numbers, a few caveats here.

Corey 8:34

Membership sales are not equal to points. That's why Sheree said the thing that he said. And membership renewals are

Corey 8:43

are counted in that number. But that doesn't mean obviously the party membership has increased by that much. So some of this is low hanging fruit. We are not that far from an election. Those do tend to an extent to drive membership sales. else. So unclear,

Zain 8:58

Carter, talk to me about the numbers because from a strategist's eye, right? Because there's a lot of, I shouldn't call them lazy because I think they might be accurate in the seed of their analysis, but there's a lot of what you'd call borderline lazy analysis out there saying, if these pure numbers are true, game, set, match, what are we doing here? The next 90 some odd days are just a waste. Talk to me about when you read read these

Zain 9:23

these numbers, kind of did some of the quick math, seen

Zain 9:26

seen these sort of numbers. You've seen roll-ups, you've seen roll-downs in campaigns and leaderships. What did you make of it? From your strategist's eye, what did you kind of make of it from

Zain 9:35

from perhaps even a dispassionate perspective when you saw these numbers for the first time?

Carter 9:39

I think that Pierre has really good membership sales, but he doesn't have great membership sales across the country. These sales are, are, you know, they differ by region. Alberta's got 71,000 or something along those lines. That's 2,000 people per riding. Ontario has approximately 1,000 people or less than 1,000 people per riding. Quebec has about 25,000 people, so about 350 people per riding. So each one of those things, you know, if this is true, and again, I'm not necessarily saying that these are all true. But the first step is that because it's a point system, you've got differences in each riding. So that could matter. You could be seeing significant numbers in one Quebec riding or 10 Quebec ridings to generate 25,000 memberships. The same could be holding true if you're looking at British Columbia, where you have 50,000 memberships, but you could be literally looking at 25 000 of those memberships coming out of surrey alone right like there's significant questions of where are all of these things spread and i think that the fact that this campaign showed us the detail of this is what we're seeing per per province is actually something we should look at and say what

Carter 11:00

what does this actually mean for

Carter 11:01

for the uh for the ridings because it's the riding level that actually matters not the provincial level yeah

Carter 11:08

and the second thing is how committed are these members, right? Are these the truckers that bought all the memberships and just want to take over the party?

Carter 11:18

party? Are these people who will buy a membership and then lose interest? Are these people who are sold,

Carter 11:23

sold, are these bulk buys essentially being done? And we saw this in the Alberta leadership race.

Carter 11:30

And I mean, so will these actually turn into voters? So those are the kind of my two questions. What's happening at the actual riding level? I think that that could to be significantly different. And how committed are each of these members? Because I'll tell you something, the lowest hanging fruit are hyper-engaged, right? The people who signed up on day one, we went through this with Kenny, the people who had one bought for them by their boss, less hyper-engaged. They may be able to convert that into a vote, but they may not be able to convert it into a vote the way they thought they could.

Zain 12:03

Corey, I want to come to you on this, but before I do that, Carter, you've mentioned something a few times here that I have to pick So let me leave this bracket open for a second, because,

Zain 12:10

because, Carter, you've talked about if these numbers are true.

Zain 12:13

Talk to me about the strategy of putting out the numbers to begin with. And is there any value? Would there be value for any campaign to lie about the numbers? Of course. Like, I guess, tell me what you're, okay, so tell me about, let's talk about the strategy of the numbers. And Corey, I do want to come back to you on

Carter 12:28

on this. Listen to what you just said, right? There's a question of whether or not, you know, if these numbers are true, why would anybody else even try? Why would I vote for John Charest when Pierre Polyev's already got over half the membership sold, right? Pierre Polyev's going to win on the first ballot. Why would I even bother to go out and cast my ballot? it. This type of duplicity, you know, like this type of misinformation actually has tremendous value. I mean, sure. Afterwards, the member numbers are going to come out and they're not going to match up or the member numbers may not match up even in a week or two. But of course, you know, we don't we don't know all the information. We're not looking at the membership list. So we don't know if Patrick Brown is lying, if Pierre is lying, if Sheree is lying. We don't know any of these things until afterwards. But everybody wants to appear Pierre, at the very least, in the game. And this level

Carter 13:18

level of misinformation actually should help people quite considerably. So I think that it's

Carter 13:29

it's rife for misinformation, and I don't trust Pierre's team as far as I can throw them.

Zain 13:36

Corey, let's address both of those questions if you don't mind. The first one, maybe respond to Carter on the value of putting out these numbers the strategy of putting out these numbers to begin with and is there any value in poisoning the well and then i wanted to get your strategist's eye on the the numbers as you see them thus far assuming that let's just say they are true

Corey 13:53

true yeah i don't i don't think there's huge value because ultimately we're going to know um about

Corey 13:58

about lying now because you're going to know the real numbers and not too distant amount of time once the party goes through all of the validation of all of that and it's the reason why the party is cautious you don't want to announce a number the thing gets knocked down by 15% because of improper purchases,

Corey 14:14

purchases, any of that other crap that can be going on here.

Corey 14:17

In terms of the overall read of it, I understand why it's in Polyev's interest to focus on the metric that he's so clearly winning on, which is the overall sales number. But a couple of cautions on that, a few caveats. Membership, it's not points. And that's not an academic distinction here. Every writing gets up to 100 points. points and uh if there are more than 100 members everything gets prorated down there well

Corey 14:43

well almost a quarter of his signups as steven was saying are from alberta and alberta will get 10 of the points at the end of the day because it's based on seats in the house of commons so 34 seats in the house of commons 338 seats overall uh there you go you're going to get 10 meanwhile eight percent of polyev's membership sales if we believe those leaked numbers and i have no reason not to are from Quebec, which will get 25% of the points. And

Corey 15:08

And we also know or can reasonably expect that Jean Charest will do very well in the province of Quebec. So it's

Corey 15:15

it's not 100% clear to me that it is such a slam dunk case there. Although I do want to underline this is probably Polyev's

Corey 15:22

Polyev's to lose still. We thought he was in the pole position going into this. He sold the most memberships. Let's not overstate the facts here. But Leslin

Corey 15:31

Leslin Lewis on the second round of the last leadership had the most votes and ended up in third place in points that that is a thing that can happen here and

Corey 15:40

and uh that's got to be a bit of a fear of the poly f campaign is that their votes are not in the right places because imagine it's not too hard to imagine that patrick brown's 150 000 were in the gta uh

Corey 15:53

uh and it's not hard to imagine that charre's tens of thousands i'm quoting here or who

Corey 15:58

who knows what the actual number is. We're in Quebec.

Corey 16:00

And that combined, you've

Corey 16:02

you've got a pretty challenging block that if you're Pierre Poliev, you might be very worried about. Charest said a bunch of other things too, like he overperformed in Calgary. I don't know what that means. I also think that Charest coming out so quick, saying he had the points to win before anybody knew the final numbers was not

Corey 16:20

not the strongest, most convincing move. I would have waited a day or two.

Corey 16:24

It seemed so preemptive that it became suspicious. But it's

Corey 16:28

it's not over yet, although everything that we do have still points to a Pierre Poliev win.

Zain 16:35

Carter, I want to actually jump off what Corey said here in terms of how well did each camp, each of the leading three camps, if we can call them that, do

Zain 16:42

do in your mind from a strategy perspective to show strength?

Zain 16:46

And I think we've addressed to Pierre Poliev when they put out their number, it's the largest number. You may want to comment on that more, but I'll let you, I'll maybe like park that on the side. But

Zain 16:54

Patrick Brown comes up with the number 250,000. And for a good six to 12 hours, people

Zain 16:59

people were like, holy shit, that's a lot of memberships. And then Jean Charest, to Corey's point, was we've got the points to win. How did each do and what could have each camp done better in your mind to position themselves for strength if they were indeed going to put out these numbers, which all of them did to some degree or put out some narrative about the numbers to some degree? Well,

Carter 17:20

I think that the only thing that's left to do, and I don't know that they should have done it to this point, because I actually don't mind the Charest, I've got the points to win piece.

Carter 17:29

piece. I didn't have the same concerns about Corey about the timing. I think it's the right message for Charest. Charest has always been taking this position that there's 7,500 points in Quebec. That's a lot of points.

Carter 17:43

There's another 4,500 or so in Atlantic Canada. That's a lot of points. You

Carter 17:48

know, he has the ability to get those types of points. And Patrick Brown, in terms of his 150,000 memberships, I don't think that Patrick Brown is going to win this. I don't think that that's

Carter 17:58

that's going to be his future. But I do think that Patrick Brown plus Jean Charest could exceed Pierre Polyev, even though he's sold the most memberships because his memberships are in the wrong places. So I do think, you know, like when when I look at a points leadership, the very first thing I do is look for low, like

Carter 18:19

like high value points. So where are the high value points? Where does my low investment to get points? And those high value points exist and they exist in every leadership. High value, low investment points for the most part in the Conservative Party are going to are going to be in places where you don't have a Conservative member of parliament. So winning, you know, getting extra memberships sold in Saskatchewan, getting extra memberships sold in Manitoba, you know, the extra stuff that's happening in Alberta isn't as valuable. And I think that given what happens in British Columbia, where you see significant membership sales without necessarily significant membership engagement, I'm not sure that this is like, I think that we are looking at something that's going to be more competitive than

Carter 19:08

than Corey is alluding to. So

Carter 19:10

So I think that everybody did the right thing. And the next thing that comes together is Patrick Brown and John Charest saying, you know what, we

Carter 19:17

we each campaign for this thing on our own, but

Carter 19:20

but we will work together to ensure that Pierre Palliev does not win. win is

Zain 19:25

that the next chapter here cory do you think that that should be the next chapter for for for both of those camps to strategically start coming together coalescing a bit looking like one uh sort of machine that could beat pete pierre polyevera and it and his juggernaut

Corey 19:43

don't think it's the next chapter it's the current chapter it's the previous chapter the fact that they'd be on stage and say yeah we get along great we like each other i mean this is what it looks like and

Corey 19:52

and you can look at a strengthening of that language as it's going on but there's clearly

Corey 19:57

a uh a bit of a coalition you

Corey 20:00

you know it's unspoken but it's real like there is no way in my mind those two camps have not been in active conversations about talking how they're going to support each other it

Corey 20:10

it will have to be overt at a certain point if it was a delegated convention it's something you could announce after round one it's

Corey 20:16

it's not a delegated convention so you're You're going to need to telegraph to all of your members that it's the case now. There's two versions of that. Stephen's very familiar with version one, which is to say, they're my second choice, right? Yes. Which basically kind of pulls in the people in a very implicit way, but it's not necessarily explicit. The explicit version is to say, mark

Corey 20:41

mark them second. Like if you're not going to vote for me, vote for them or and have both of them come to that accord more publicly. You know, I actually can't think of recent history where that has happened, you know, where it's been so overt that the two are ganging up on a on a front runner. So it'll be interesting to see if they go that road.

Corey 21:02

If it's going to happen, it's going to happen this time because they've already done the steps that you expect near the end with

Corey 21:09

with 100 days to go.

Zain 21:12

Carter, how do they make that successful?

Zain 21:14

How do they actually make that convincing and successful? Corey's right. We've

Zain 21:18

We've known this from the beginning. Ever since Patrick Brown announced he talked about Jean Charest being his political

Zain 21:22

political idol, we talked about, you know, all that stuff is already out there. So we know, right?

Zain 21:26

right? This hasn't gotten to the Trojan horse level, right? Like, this is not that.

Zain 21:31

But how do they make this successful? And to Corey's point, when

Zain 21:34

when and how does it start looking overt in your mind, strategically and optimally strategically?

Carter 21:40

Well, I mean, as soon as the ballots start landing in people's mailboxes, you've got to start talking about how to fill them in. So that overt piece needs to be communicated. If it were me, I'd be sending them negative

Carter 21:53

negative information right now about Pierre Polyev. I would be going through, I'd be focusing on Bitcoin. I'd be focusing on the Bank of Canada. I'd be focusing on, you know, he's got so many outlandish positions that you can go and say, this is not someone who's ever going to be prime minister. If we want to elect the prime minister, then, you know, whatever points and as much commonalities you can get between Brown and Sharae, that's super, super easy. But as

Carter 22:20

as soon as the ballots start to land, you've got to send out to people how to fill in the ballot. And the excuse is, the

Carter 22:27

the excuse of how to fill in the ballot is it's a single transferable vote. We don't do it all the time, you know, preferential ballot, whatever words we want to use. So we're going to walk people through how to fill in this ballot and how important it is. I would also include in that how this is likely to roll up. Pierre Polyev significantly leveraged in high population ridings. The opportunity

Carter 22:50

opportunity exists for us, especially if you live in an area with blank.

Carter 22:58

You're far more valuable to the Conservative Party of Canada than anybody else. I don't know. I'd need to workshop that a bit before I got there. But your communications at that point need to be very clear that this is winnable and that each vote is going to count disproportionately. The Patrick Brown, Jean Charest votes are worth two votes of the Pierre Polyev votes. Pierre Polyev.

Zain 23:24

you're spoon feeding that message.

Corey 23:25

message. Corey, you want to jump in on this? Well, so I do think you need to show that there's a path to victory, which is the logic of the Jean Charest conversation. conversation and he's got to continue to remind around the points and how he's been so explicit

Zain 23:36

explicit about that yeah

Corey 23:37

yeah and he's going to have to find language that's not we've got the points to win it's it's that the conservative party chooses its leader based on a

Corey 23:46

not narrow interest group support or something to that effect and we have very broad support we've sold more

Corey 23:51

more memberships in in places where the conservatives can be competitive but haven't been competitive recently whatever it is you can't look like you're just trying to win on on the points alone that's going to cause you troubles down the road if you win

Corey 24:02

You've got some time. I don't think the membership or sort of the ballots go out until the

Corey 24:07

the end of July, the start of August. I could be wrong on that, but it seems to be. It's a long

Carter 24:11

long time. I mean, it's still 90 plus days until the results are announced. So they've got time. So,

Corey 24:17

So, yeah, they've got a bit of time on this. And so they can play out this theater a little bit longer. What's going to be interesting to see is obviously going into the summer, you

Corey 24:26

you don't have as much interest in politics generally. and

Corey 24:31

there are no other debates currently scheduled so yeah

Corey 24:35

look where are the flash points going to come from what's going to shake things up what's going to be the thing that's going to allow you to to say the thing um you're going to have to create those as a campaign because the thing we haven't talked about here and i think it's worth saying is we

Corey 24:48

we are largely treating the membership sales as destiny which is i think that's actually the bias steven and i both bring game here right you choose the electorate you choose the outcome but

Corey 24:57

but if this is a game of inches if the charrette campaign has managed to get close if charrette plus brown in points say equals 45 percent right

Corey 25:08

then maybe changing minds is how you get that last five percent bringing

Corey 25:12

bringing up the negatives of peer polyads shaking them out of that campaign and having them kick to you or making yourself the second choice of the lewis voters whatever Whatever your strategy is, this is the time for strategy. And it's to think about those things.

Corey 25:25

Depends on the numbers. That's going to dictate what happens next. But persuasion is not necessarily gone and dead from this campaign.

Zain 25:33

Carter, I'm glad Corey mentioned this. I do want to talk about this. What does strategy look like to you now as some basic principles when you

Zain 25:43

the fact that the universe is now defined, right?

Zain 25:46

right? The universe of membership is now defined. But

Zain 25:48

But then the question can really be brought up. And Corey, you were hinting at this maybe in some ways, which is, is

Zain 25:54

is there any value to start doing things more publicly beyond

Zain 25:58

beyond the membership to

Zain 26:00

to kind of persuade the folks that are in the membership indirectly?

Zain 26:04

indirectly? Or are you now speaking directly to this base, Carter? Carter. Carter, how are you juggling all the competing priorities? How are you juggling all those things, all the opportunities or lack thereof? Corey mentioned no debates. What

Zain 26:17

What is your baseline thinking of strategy if you're, let's say, one of the camps,

Zain 26:21

camps, either Sharae or

Zain 26:23

or Brown here? How are you thinking about strategy over the course of the next 90 some days in your mind if you're leading these campaigns, Carter? I'm

Carter 26:29

I'm thinking a lot about how selfish the average voter is. And I don't say that in any kind of judgmental fashion. The average voter is a pretty pretty selfish person. Um, my thinking would be a lot of direct mail. I'd be, I'd be using direct mail instead of using major, um, communications tactics. Um, there'd be an event. So I would do a direct mail campaign structure. I do an event campaign structure and I'd have a media relations campaign structure. And all three of those things can in fact be linked. You know, you have a big event, your, your charade. If you've outperformed in Calgary, then we expect to see you at the Calgary stampede. And when you're at the Calgary stampede, it's going to be a fantastic fucking an event because you've outperformed in Calgary.

Carter 27:07

So we're going to see a bunch of people there and we're going to have that part of our media relations campaign. And then once that happens, we're going to send that information either

Carter 27:14

either through an email or direct mail to the rest of our voting population to show the strength and capacity that we have in places that people would be surprised. But

Carter 27:25

also, I'm making sure that we're communicating on a micro basis. I'm not talking as much about myself. I'm going to talk about the people that Pierre hurt. I'd

Carter 27:33

I'd be doing and I'd be doing as much research as humanly possible to try and find someone who bought cryptocurrency when Pierre told them to buy cryptocurrency. And I would then share that person's story through the membership, right?

Carter 27:46

right? Pierre Polyev did this in order to win points, but he cost this person $8,000, right? The cost to the individual, this is Pierre's model. He will hurt the individual in an effort to help himself. And

Carter 28:01

And that's all he's ever been about. You know, so that type of thing where you build up your own strength and your own chances while tearing down the other guys, I would be doing that all the time. That would be my primary strategy. And I would use those three primary tactics, events, you know, direct mail and media relations.

Zain 28:21

You know, Corey Carter got into some tactics, but I'm curious to hear whether it's tactics or a larger

Zain 28:25

larger framework for strategy and how you think about it. What

Zain 28:28

would you be thinking about over the next 90 some odd days if you're in the Charest or Patrick Brown camp?

Corey 28:35

Yeah. So let's just say you've got 650,000 conservative voters out there. In a way, it's not so different from a general at this point. You've got three fundamental questions. Whose mind can you change? Who are the accessible voters out there? Who needs your help to go vote? So your supporters who are maybe going to vote or not vote, depending on how much you drum up their enthusiasm to go cast their ballot. And then finally, how can you reduce the other side's enthusiasm to vote, which is not the same as saying you

Corey 29:05

you vote at the wrong poll or anything like that.

Carter 29:08

that. It's to say,

Corey 29:09

say, well, maybe I'm not that excited about voting anymore. And maybe we'll get to this today, but see turnout in Ontario, right, of 40%. These things can happen in a leadership too. You buy the membership at one point because,

Corey 29:21

because, God, you know, your friend dragged you out to this Pierre Poliev event in Calgary and the energy in the room was huge. There were thousands of people there and

Corey 29:28

and you put some money into Bitcoin and shit, you lost a bunch. And, you know, while you generally think he's OK still, you're not that wild about him anymore. Right.

Corey 29:36

Maybe you'll vote. Maybe you're not. And

Corey 29:37

And maybe to not vote, all you need is to hear another negative thing about him. Another thing that just pushes you off to like, I'm not I fuck it. I'm not that interested anymore. And that's really, in a way, that's just campaigning one-on-one stuff, right? But it requires you to make some decisions. Whose mind can you change? Let's imagine that you can change the minds of people in

Corey 30:02

Alberta very easily and Quebec not at all. Well, you're not going to put any resources into Quebec. You're going to put them into Alberta.

Corey 30:07

That's almost certainly not the case. I'm using it as an example here. Who needs

Corey 30:11

needs your help to vote? Well, let's say anybody who had a membership in the past, maybe you even know if they voted in the last leadership, you're pretty safe that they're going to vote. Even

Corey 30:19

Even if they're your supporter, don't waste your resources there. And what you're always trying to do in a campaign, in a most fundamental sense, is allocate resources efficiently.

Corey 30:28

So what's going to get you that next point in this case, right? If you can get that point through five votes in Alberta or one vote in Quebec, that's

Corey 30:37

that's an interesting starting point, right?

Corey 30:40

if that one vote in Quebec is for sure going to show up and it's already for you and those five in Alberta up for grabs, that

Corey 30:45

that changes your thinking. So it's capturing all of those variables and it's building out a strategy as a result. Is there something common to those voters besides geography? Are they a certain age? Do they have certain issues that matter to them?

Corey 30:57

And that's what we do when we build a campaign strategy, right? That's the science that we talk about here. And it's an interesting one. And they're

Corey 31:07

they're going to now be in an environment where they're going to reset and refocus their campaigns based on the reality in front of them, which is these 650,000 voters.

Zain 31:18

Carter, talk to me as we round this out about Pierre's strategy. If the strategy of Charest and Brown is to ensure that the shine, at least for some people, comes off, that their voters turn out, what is the strategy for Pierre here? here? And it might be very simple as saying, ensure that the shine stays on, that the virality continues, that the show of strength goes on. Is it more complicated than that? And if so, what is it? And how do you ensure

Zain 31:44

ensure you execute it over the next less than a hundred days, Carter?

Carter 31:47

Well, I think I would work on two things. I would be trying to reduce the efficacy. I'd be drawing

Carter 31:55

some sort of push

Carter 31:56

push between Sharae and Brown, find something that pushes the two of them apart, park or, you know, reduces the... So you'd wedge

Carter 32:06

A little bit, if you could, or at least find a way to get their voters less engaged or less committed to voting. And the way to do that would probably be to talk a lot about the dominance, right? I think that Pierre has to go for the dominant strategy. You know, frankly, anything, it really depends on where Lewis is. We didn't hear very much about where Leslyn Lewis is, but assuming that she's in fourth place. If she's in fourth place and relatively close to Brown, then realistically, Pierre will pick up those votes and Patrick

Carter 32:38

and Jean will be dead. But if she's lower, if she's in a much lower position and doesn't transfer the votes, then

Carter 32:49

then Pierre's team is really screwed

Carter 32:53

screwed if he's under 45, you know, under 40%, under 45%. So he's really got to do what I would call a, uh, a significant geo, geo TV.

Carter 33:03

If he sold this many memberships, there's no way that these sold, you know, this many rabid members. Right. Uh, so he's got a membership commitment problem. He's got, you know, probably two, three different levels of membership commitment, and he needs to go through them and make sure that he understands who his number one members are, who his number two members are and who his number three members are and then he's got to go across the country one riding by one riding and say which not you know how big is my number ones here because if he just focuses on getting his number ones out he's going to do super well in a small number of ridings but he and if he just tries to get his number threes out then he's going to be you know his points are all over the place

Carter 33:44

he's got to focus on points that's what we did with With Redford, that's where we think we got Gary Maher. Gary Maher wasn't paying attention to points. Andrew Wilkinson's campaign, which Katie Merrifield ran, Katie's involved with Pierre, it was very focused on points because points matter. You don't win on votes. You don't win on memberships. You win on points. And when you're playing those types of games, you have to focus on that. And I think that Pierre's campaign can't get lost in 312,000 members. They need to figure out which members are going to vote, which ones need some help and how they're going to actually defeat Patrick and Jean.

Zain 34:22

Coy, round us out here. The Polyev strategy, the response to what you heard from Carter

Zain 34:27

or throw your own thoughts into the mix here.

Corey 34:30

Well, again, it's going to be very similar, but from a position of strength. So you're still looking at points at the end of the day. And you're

Corey 34:39

you're going to look at the same three questions. Whose minds can you change? Who needs your help to vote? And how do you reduce the other guy's enthusiasm? And one thing that I didn't say last time, but I think it's important, and we talk about this a lot, you're

Corey 34:50

you're going to do that exercise and you're going to have this crazy grab bag of tactics for a crazy grab bag of audiences. You know, you're going to have older folk in Nova Scotia who care about health care. You're going to have younger folk in Toronto who care about crypto. You're going to see the ability to change minds of charade supporters in Winnipeg based on, you know, electability. You're going to see the way to discourage Quebec supporters of charades based on ethical failings. and

Corey 35:14

this could be a cacophony if you let it and it could be a cacophony that

Corey 35:18

at best inefficient because everything is a one-off so you get no economies of scale well you get economies of scale and you get cohesion through story so what's the story that ties all of this together and that's a major part of the strategy that i haven't talked about

Corey 35:34

but you when you look at all of this sometimes you make what seems like the individually inefficient decision decision because it fits in the story and it props up the other four elements. And that's where you get those economies of scale. And that's how you build a winning campaign. So if I'm Polyev, I'm

Corey 35:49

I'm not taking a different approach than

Corey 35:52

than Sheree or Brown. I'm looking at the same base numbers and I'm asking the same base questions. What's the most efficient way to get my points?

Zain 36:02

I like that a lot. I really like that concept about story. We're going to leave that segment there moving on to our next segment our next segment man seeks stable relationship with province that's right i want to talk about travis taves do you get that because of the horses i thought you

Corey 36:17

you were gonna go with ontario is it

Zain 36:19

it works for so

Zain 36:20

it's good stable and horses you get it you get

Zain 36:23

get it because he loves horses and

Corey 36:24

and he loves his horse shit

Zain 36:25

shit on his shirt um guys i want to talk about travis taves the uh the

Zain 36:29

the nagus now former finance

Corey 36:31

finance minister yeah um

Zain 36:32

um of the uh Kenny Government is the first to declare that he wants the job left by his former boss. I want to talk about his strategy. I want to talk about the endorsements he's had from caucus. But, Carter, give it to me straight first. You know, we've talked about going early, being out up front.

Zain 36:53

Good strategy by Travis Tate, just being the first out of the gate. Website, video, branding, message. Not first

Zain 37:00

first out of the gate. you're

Corey 37:02

daniel smith who literally sure sure sure sure

Zain 37:06

daniel smith well but first i should good point cory first from within the caucus first from within cabinet i apologize cory uh to declare uh from from the group in in the fold already the first to declare what

Zain 37:18

what do you think of that strategy carter well

Carter 37:21

well i think that if you're going to declare you have to have your website you have to have a great uh

Carter 37:25

uh you know a great campaign video um

Carter 37:28

um preferably one obviously that has shit on your on your jean shirt your

Carter 37:33

your denim shirt you know that's pretty important that you that

Carter 37:35

that you look the part of authentic rancher um

Carter 37:38

um you know i think that it was a well done launch um he

Carter 37:42

he you know the thing that kind of bothered me about it was that he was this non-committal guy on monday and was in the race on thursday like it was just it was boom boom um i mean non

Carter 37:55

mean obviously everybody lies at that point right everybody just says oh i'm not sure or whatever he

Carter 38:01

was non-committal as opposed to i'm looking forward to being able to give you more information in the coming days which is still non-committal but it doesn't make you look like a total rat fuck uh and that's what he looked like uh because he he was you know did you make up your mind on tuesday uh travis like and

Carter 38:19

and then you happen to have everything ready to go on thursday give me a break um

Carter 38:24

um no one expects you to announce your announcement before you're in the game you

Carter 38:28

know we have a candidate announcing in surrey on on on wednesday night i'm

Carter 38:33

i'm not letting anything out of the bag because we've been talking about it in surrey for the better part of two weeks because you have to have the media there you have to do an event you have to do all these different things all of these things will matter and that event will be important um so you have to have people there um he needed to have his website ready these things need to happen so So, you

Carter 38:53

you know, I just don't think that his little silly bugger game played particularly well. And then, I mean, I'm sure you're going to bring us around to the caucus, so I'm not going to get too into that. But his launch, I was impressed with the pieces. I was not really understanding the shit on his shirt. Like, seriously, did he run out of clean shirts? What's the message? I'm willing to get down into the muck for you. Is that the message? Because that wasn't the message of everything else. Corey will probably know because Corey is an expert in bullshit. So I'm looking forward to hearing.

Carter 39:24

Or maybe it was horse shit. He's also an expert in horse shit.

Zain 39:28

A lot of shit, really. Expert in two types of shit. Corey, with your dual shit expertise, give it to me from

Zain 39:35

from your strategy perspective. Tave's going first from within the

Zain 39:40

the caucus. What do you make of that strategy? What do you make of the launch? Okay,

Corey 39:42

Okay, well, first we got to talk about this shirt. For those who are unaware, on the website, on the front page, he's wearing... Has it changed yet?

Corey 39:50

I don't know if it's changed, but there was this crisp blue shirt with just speckles of shit on it my concern was not that there was shit on the shirt it was that there was shit on a shirt that looked like it just came out of the wrapper right and so it really had this feel of you put on your sunday best and then some staffer said oh it's just you know dips his hand into a pile of cow shit and flicks his fingers at you to say you look a little too clean there minister you know like it was the it was the clear staging of it that bothered me um because a little more worn in shirt i think you could have gotten away with the shit in a way that it wouldn't have popped so much on such a such a you know if it wasn't such a crisp canvas uh in terms of the timing i i wasn't just trying to uh bust your balls there about smith smith came in first and that matters i think tave's coming in when he did uh

Corey 40:41

it really has to be considered him coming in second and in a reaction in some ways to smith And if you

Corey 40:46

you look at the people around him supporting both in the elected sense and the staff that we know around him, that is an awful lot of Jason Kenney's team. And I'm sure Smith

Corey 40:56

Smith coming in and Brian Jean acting so aggressively in caucus as they were talking about who would be the premier before the before the result was made was enough to make Jason Kenney himself probably say, you

Corey 41:11

you know, Travis, if you want to do it, you've got my blessing game on. and that's important i

Corey 41:16

do think it's a bit silly to say i'm not sure one day and two days later have 23 caucus members like that's not a believable

Carter 41:24

believable that isn't it like well it's 23

Corey 41:26

23 in addition to him and his co-chair i think so yeah

Corey 41:29

his campaign coaches yeah so like but like the kayfabe of that was not very convincing i suppose but it was a solid launch he's got 40 of the caucus on day They won.

Corey 41:40

If anything, I won. So he was clearly going for a bit of a shock and awe there. I'm not sure I would have done that, especially because so many of the people on there are so clearly Jason Kenney supporters. I feel like I would have maybe started with a

Corey 41:55

a few, like one or two, plus a lot of names that are not necessarily associated with the inner circle of Jason Kenney and trickled the rest of them out. in addition to getting media hits um you

Corey 42:07

you could almost sell this thing of yes they've come around to him and yes he's this rural guy but he's getting the urban guys on side like that's the story i think you could have told maybe it's just wouldn't have worked at all with the ucp because they they know well enough his association with jason kenney but

Corey 42:21

but it felt to me that they probably could have balanced

Corey 42:25

balanced that load a little bit better right there was just an awful lot on day one

Zain 42:30

Carter, Sonia Savage, his campaign co-chair alongside a member of parliament. Some of the names on this list will be familiar to folks who pay attention to Alberta politics. Jason LeJuan, Tyler Shandro, Tracy Allard, Adriana Lagrange.

Zain 42:48

Carter, let's just jump right into it. And by the way, as of 9.17 p.m. on Sunday, the shit is still on the shirt. But

Zain 42:57

to me about Corey's point here. Would you have done this as a show of strength and to take the pole position, which I suspect the strategy here was, tell me if I'm wrong, right? Show of strength, take the pole position. I'm out in front. I'm the guy to beat.

Zain 43:11

is this what you would have done? And is, let me ask you the double barrel question, and

Zain 43:15

and is seeking the

Zain 43:17

the poll position the right strategy for someone like Travis Daves? No.

Carter 43:21

I mean, it's going to be, we don't even know the format of the race yet, but let's assume that it's a single transferable vote or preferential ballot. Let's assume that it takes a very similar format to the CPC race with the notable exception that it's probably not going to be a points race. it will most likely be a one-member, one-vote race.

Carter 43:39

yeah. So now basically Taves has said, I'm going to win by 50%.

Carter 43:43

Because if you're going to be in first place, you have to win on the first ballot. Winning on this, you know, it is very hard. Kevin Falcon was able to do it in British Columbia. But winning from the first ballot is super hard. And I just don't see Taves, given the number of rumored candidates. I mean, we're looking at eight or nine different candidates that are going to be coming out of this. So the idea that you're going to get 50% and seven other candidates are going to get are going to share the less than other, you know, less than 50% there. That seems to me to be a really far stretch. And why would you want to pick up all the baggage? Like you've got a caucus that is broken. I wouldn't be worried about endorsements at all. I'd be worrying about selling memberships and getting people actually out there. I'll

Carter 44:30

I'll tell you something. Gary Marr had all the candidate endorsements, all the MLA endorsements in 2011.

Carter 44:36

How did he do, right?

Carter 44:37

right? Where's Jim Denning these days? How's he doing, Jim? How you doing, Jim? How was your public career at the end? It doesn't matter if you have all of the endorsements. What matters is that you're able to sell the memberships, especially in a one-member, one-vote. And Travis Taves is going to be really challenged by that because it turns out all these caucus endorsements, every caucus endorsement in general tends to have fewer membership sales. You do not get the performance out of your caucus mates, especially if they're in cabinet.

Corey 45:09

Yeah, I don't know about that. I don't know. Yeah, respond to that and I've got a follow up for

Zain 45:12

for you. Go ahead.

Corey 45:13

Well, here's the thing.

Corey 45:15

You're right. Jim Denning had the endorsements and it went to Ed Stelmack. And you're right. Gary Maher had the endorsements and it went to Alison Redford.

Corey 45:23

But with the benefit of hindsight, I think one of the things that we point to as reasons why neither leader was ultimately able to continue their term was because they did not have their caucus with them. And there's enough of an understanding of that in conservative politics that endorsements matter

Corey 45:39

matter a little, especially when you're talking about trying to keep this party together. It seems more existential now than it did for either of those two candidates as well, which is part of why you want to be able to say, I've got rural MLAs, I've got urban MLAs, I'm the person who can bridge these two together, and I can get these things done. It's part of the story that Travis Taves is trying to tell in his candidacy, and this takes us back to story again. He's somebody who can live in both worlds. He can be in

Corey 46:06

in a boardroom in downtown Calgary. He can be on his farm near Grand Prairie. he can he can walk amongst uh you know the the people that he goes to church with and

Corey 46:18

and he can walk amongst the cocktail set in downtown edmonton he

Corey 46:21

he he plays for all of these different i know it's one time so when he plays for all these time zones it would be the idea and so in that sense i think it does matter i

Corey 46:30

i do generally agree that uh endorsements are overrated in terms of delivering memberships in many ways it's kind of like the mythical man minute you know the more effort you you get from

Corey 46:41

from the more people you have doing this it's almost managing the people that becomes your focus rather than selling the memberships which can be a fucking

Corey 46:48

fucking pain in the ass for sure uh but the story he's trying to tell is one of being able to bridge both these worlds if he was a totally different candidate with totally different concerns it wouldn't matter as much but he's decided he wants to be the uniter of the caucus so having half the caucus on day one is not that

Corey 47:08

i'm almost talking myself into it rather than kind of the drift approach you're

Carter 47:11

you're wrong though i want to i want to it's a broken caucus you you've got congratulations you've got half the caucus where the fuck's the other half going to go they're not going to come to you this

Carter 47:21

this is this is a broken subset of of the of the conservative party and it is the wrong subset for the victory well

Corey 47:28

here's the thing who are the people that are bringing from different different sides different here's the base fact we've got to keep in mind at

Corey 47:34

at the end of the day this will be a vote of the membership and the last time there was a vote of the membership jason kenney won it 51.4 percent that

Corey 47:42

that wasn't enough to stay on as leader but it sure is hell enough to be leader uh

Corey 47:45

uh you know and this is that asymmetry we were talking about before so if travis taves just does as well as the deeply unpopular jason kenney he's

Corey 47:53

he's leader of this party but

Carter 47:54

but you're taking you're taking a a vote that was 51.4 percent for a bunch of different reasons and assigning it to to one candidate. There's no way that's going to happen. The bunts of different reasons aren't going to follow to the guy with fucking horse shit on his shirt.

Carter 48:10

guy, you know what I do?

Zain 48:10

do? But, but from, let's, let's talk about the strategy then, Corey, if you're talking yourself into the endorsements, would you have done what Carter would have done, which is maybe not made them so monolithic in terms of caucus mates? Would you have added a few other folks to the, to the mix? That's what Carter's ultimately suggesting here.

Zain 48:26

Would you have talked Taves into that if he if he was going to release the list at 23 you would have said actually make it 16 and make half of them you know conservative

Zain 48:35

conservative states people make

Zain 48:37

make half of them folks in the caucus what would you have kind of done to to

Zain 48:40

to kind of still signal that you're the king of the caucus but that your support is not just um in the kenny lane i'll

Zain 48:47

i'll get to you on that carter in a second

Corey 48:48

yeah you know what i i i

Corey 48:51

don't i have to confess i didn't read the actual press release for all i I know he did list a bunch of other conservative luminaries who are who are supporting him. I'm going to have to pull it up now, but that's coming. You know, that's coming. And maybe

Corey 49:05

maybe the logic of not going, Oh, this week, Shandro's supporting him. And Oh, next week, you've got the endorsement of Nicolades is you don't want to have the conversations about individual cabinet members. And you want to have the conversation about a unified team

Corey 49:19

team supporting unit. Right. Right. So rather than being able to point to individual members

Corey 49:24

members and have individual criticisms, you just have the group.

Corey 49:28

There's some logic to that.

Corey 49:29

But, you know, Carter is sitting here saying it's crazy. Jason Kenney is not the same apples to oranges.

Corey 49:35

I could not agree more, except he's

Corey 49:37

he's going to have all the apples and all the oranges because he won't have the negatives of Jason Kenney. But he'll have the team that gave Jason Kenney 51.4 percent. Oh,

Carter 49:44

Oh, yeah, because the team is beloved. Right. Like when the team shows up, when it when it's the same people. uh doesn't fucking

Corey 49:50

fucking matter they won oh

Carter 49:52

give me a break that's what he's gonna get his ass handed to him because it's i mean look at like gary marr played the same stupid mistake gary marr in the you know we have a two-week runoff it's allison redford doug horner and gary marr gary marr picks up the three candidates that fell off the first ballot he announces them all in the same fucking day one news cycle one simple news cycle he puts it all out there this guy's got one news cycle he He announces his caucus supporters that he's running for leader. He takes two stories and that he's got horse shit on his fucking shirt. Three stories and he shits it all in one day because he doesn't got a fucking thought in his head. But what comes the next day? Two days, three days, four days. Develop a narrative, you jerk. Well, what makes you a... Carter, hold on. You're making a

Corey 50:37

a crazy assumption that he doesn't have these things. Oh, I'll wait.

Carter 50:41

I'll wait. I'll wait. I'll see how it goes. You know what? Okay.

Carter 50:45

this back next week,

Zain 50:45

week, little Z. zane

Carter 50:46

bring this back okay there's

Zain 50:48

there's a there's a lot of there's a lot of horseshit on this podcast carter

Zain 50:53

there's little wayne and there's i think there's also a little zane already carter oh

Zain 50:58

talk to me about this carter channel this energy constructively that

Carter 51:01

that was which could be

Zain 51:02

be actually uh which could be another way another name of this podcast i should say uh carter channel this energy constructively you've

Zain 51:09

you've seen what taves has done he's positioning himself as the front leader, target on his back or not, to be determined, right?

Zain 51:15

You've got the Smith, you've got the Gene, they're going to go.

Zain 51:19

Carter, would you want to be in this race right now, running a campaign? Like, is there a type of, for

Zain 51:24

for lack of a better term, a horse that you'd want in this race that you could run, that you see a pathway to victory in? And what is it? You don't have to give me a name, right?

Zain 51:31

right? But you're upset about how Taves is running his campaign. You must see a lane for victory. You must see a path here.

Zain 51:37

So talk to me about it. Talk to me about the path. Pat, talk to me about the lane. I suspect your lane is not going to be joining

Zain 51:42

joining the side of the rebels, a Daniel Smith or a Brian Jean lane, but talk

Zain 51:46

talk to me about it. What pathway do you see now? So let's use it constructively.

Carter 51:50

Well, I think that there's, let's look at this as though there's three different camps that could win this thing, right? And there is the, there's the Kenny camp, which, you know, Corey Hogan's solidly in for some reason. And then there's the, the, the anti Kenny camp, which Brian Jean and, and, and

Carter 52:05

Daniel Smith will find themselves in. And then there's the other group, which is this party was never supposed to be about these people. This party was supposed to be about our members. And I think that you could win if you came from a from a this party was supposed to be about serving our members. This party is about supposed to be serving Albertans and going back to what Albertans actually want. Finding a government that they want, not one that they pretend to want when they're asked, you know, are you a conservative? Are you a liberal? And they say and everybody knows in Alberta, you don't say you're a liberal. So they pretend to be conservatives, but our values are all aligned with liberalism. And there is a path to be won by going up a different conservative party. And that path would be really interesting. I see Sonny starting to look at that. I think that an outsider could come in and look at that path. I think that Rebecca Schultz could look at that path. There are a number of different candidates that could look at them. And more important, when this thing starts to roll up, Brian Jean and Danielle Smith votes, they're going to get two marks in their ballot. They're going to get Brian Jean. They're going to get Danielle Smith.

Carter 53:10

They're not going to go over 50 percent of the of the support.

Carter 53:14

You could see someone like a Rajan Sani or someone like a Rebecca Schultz or someone like an outsider being in a position where they could roll up.

Carter 53:21

Right. Travis Taves has put himself in a position where he's going to be the front runner and front runners don't roll up.

Zain 53:29

Corey, respond to that and respond to the three stream pathway that you are, the three streams that Carter's laid out. Is that kind of how you see this race evolving?

Zain 53:38

No, not at all.

Corey 53:41

I think it's going to be a very short race and you're going to have a situation where you're going to have a number of candidates such as the Sonnies and the Schultzes of the world struggling to find enough organization to possibly get the members to win this thing. lest

Corey 53:56

lest we forget there was a big membership sale drive just for this leadership review so

Corey 54:01

so some of that work's already there some of that's baked in as i've already talked about the majority of that group was willing to support jason kenny i'll bet you if it was taves instead of kenny it would have been 60 and that's

Corey 54:10

that's because he doesn't have some of the negatives around covid and you know even his comments which you know as like i on a personal level on an individual level i hate like well

Corey 54:21

well i'm gonna keep caucus confidentiality or cabinet having a confidentiality, but I'm a rural Alberta businessman. I think you know what side of that conversation I was on, right?

Corey 54:31

mean, that's a pretty heavy wink to some of the people whose main frustration was the way Jason Kenney put

Corey 54:37

put in very sensible restrictions on COVID-19, right?

Corey 54:41

Meanwhile, he was still part of the group that brought it in. So he gets to have his cake and eat it too, if he's careful and he's smart about these things. You talk about a roll-up, Stephen, and what's likely going to happen is you will have Daniel Smith running around barnstorming. you're going to have brian jean running

Corey 54:57

and as those people fall out some

Corey 55:00

some of them will inevitably just go to taves it won't take a lot but because he's rural you

Corey 55:06

you know he's from grand prairie so some of brian jean's people will say i can live with taves rather

Corey 55:11

rather than daniel smith who's a southern alberta libertarian

Corey 55:16

lest we forget like socially very very liberal, Danielle Smith, right? Not going to be acceptable to some of Brian Jean's more church-going social conservative voters. It's not going to be as clean as you say. Taves doesn't need all of them. He just needs a few of them. He is very well positioned in this race.

Carter 55:34

But you're forgetting the- Carter, retort to this

Corey 55:35

this and we'll round it out. Yeah.

Carter 55:36

Yeah. I mean, there's a psychology. We've covered this before. There's a psychology that if you don't, if there is a presumptive first ballot victor, or there is someone who is running away way with this, then when you mark your ballot for someone else, the odds of you marking your ballot for that person, the person that was going to win the first place ballot diminished dramatically. You have to get above 43, 44, 45% on the first ballot in order to pick up anybody else's ballots because there's a reason they didn't choose you the first time. There's a reason that 57, 58, 58, 59% of the population said, nah, I don't like them. And they never ever get past that first reason that the psychology of it is really hard. It's like going and saying, well, you know, I don't like tide, but I'll pick tide the next time. It doesn't happen. If you've chosen that you don't like tide, you will pick another type of dishwasher detergent or whatever laundry detergent before you'll ever pick a fucking time. What do you want from me?

Carter 56:34

What do you want? Laughing at me? This is something that is true. true and then and then i'm

Carter 56:41

i'm gonna come to your houses i have i you know i'm gonna come to your houses tonight you just watch i

Zain 56:46

i don't want that we're gonna leave thank

Carter 56:48

thank you carter we're

Zain 56:49

we're gonna leave that segment there moving on to our next segment our next segment man

Zain 56:54

man seeks stable relationship with province cory we're doing it again we're

Zain 56:59

we're doing it about doug ford uh let's start here. Corey, is Doug Ford now the

Corey 57:04

the king of the conservatives? I mean, sure, but it's a constitutional monarchy. It doesn't carry the authority it used to. He's obviously got a recipe for success. He's not the philosopher king that

Corey 57:17

that Jason Kenney was. He's just the guy who's able

Corey 57:20

able to point to a victory in a way that most of his counterparts cannot. And that's a very strange thing i think in some ways you've still got leggo as a as a more dynamic force of conservatism fair fair enough in canada yet

Zain 57:35

he'll be re-elected though right which which happens later this year

Corey 57:38

year i mean i think he was leading by some insane amount like 30 percent or something so yeah looks like a slam dunk yeah it doesn't look like it's in a lot of dispute there but

Corey 57:48

but he's got a lot of reason to feel pretty good about himself he's created this benign conservatism that most ontarians don't even bother to show up to vote one way or another about which i want to underline right now i do not think delegitimizes his victory and um well again many many will disagree and so he

Corey 58:06

he he's um yeah like i said he's king but it's it's not as though he's an absolute monarch carter

Zain 58:14

carter is doug ford king and is his victory legitimate because let's talk about But I do want to get into the conversation of a couple of conversations here.

Zain 58:23

about voter turnout. So I'll kind of preview

Zain 58:26

preview that. And number two, about the

Zain 58:29

lack of turnout, but then even though the turnout and how it was split amongst the progressive parties. But answer the top line question. Is Doug Ford king of the conservatives? He

Carter 58:37

He is king of the conservatives. And I think that there's been some really interesting comment online about people saying, well, he's not really a conservative. Well, I'll tell you something. Here's the thing. You slap the brand on yourself, and you're a conservative, right? Conservatives have looked very dissimilar over the course of the decades, right? Conservatism in 1990 didn't look the same, or 1995 didn't look the same as conservatism in 1983. These were very different ideas, and each decade they jump and they become different. Doug Ford conservatism is the only one that seems to have the staying power to get through the challenges that government brings. That could change. And I think that Legault also fits into this category as well. A conservative that shifts to be where the people need them to be. Right. And that is the conservatism that has actual staying power. And I'll throw it back to you, Zane, to take us down the path of the

Carter 59:33

the voter turnout numbers. I agree with Corey. If 11 people came to vote, that's the turnout. You only get to play with the people who choose to play.

Zain 59:45

gore whose fault was it like i like we've there's a lot of like hand-rigging around like oh the turnout there's a democratic problem here there's a democracy problem people are turning to you know other means of expressing themselves a bunch of stuff

Zain 59:58

stuff about this but you know the other narrative is that this is an issue that the progressive parties the liberals and the ndp couldn't motivate people to hate doug ford enough to show up to the polls do you agree with do

Zain 1:00:08

do you agree with any of those that i've kind of put on the table loosely i'm

Corey 1:00:12

i'm a little cynical about anybody who's too stressed out about turnout. Obviously, it's in the interests of societies

Corey 1:00:19

societies that there's robust discussion and democratic debate. There were a lot of panics about turnout in Canada,

Corey 1:00:28

know, at the federal level, and certainly here in Alberta, we're no stranger to this anxiety that, oh my goodness,

Corey 1:00:32

turnout is just so low, people are disengaging. They're finding other ways to participate. All of that was very common. We heard that a lot in 2004, a lot in 2008

Corey 1:00:40

2008 in in those elections here in alberta um

Corey 1:00:44

um but part of it is there there wasn't a big burning platform that encouraged people to go out and vote and we saw in canada turnout really spiked up in 2015 when the election became more consequential we saw turnout amongst youth hit you

Corey 1:00:59

you know multi-decade highs so i i don't think that these things are destiny and i'm not absolutely convinced there's an absolute trajectory here i

Corey 1:01:08

i would also say you have a right to vote not an obligation to vote some people may want to change that but there's

Corey 1:01:14

there's nothing that forces you to go if you're just like i don't care right and if you are a government and the populace is in an i don't care space that

Corey 1:01:23

that tells us something too they've made a decision they've actively participated maybe not in a way you like but

Corey 1:01:29

but they've said it's not worth my time don't

Corey 1:01:31

don't really care and

Corey 1:01:32

and um and that's part of i think the the doug ford strategy and it's part of the doug ford success is that he's got people not outraged about the cases is you know deaths in nursing homes or or some of the the low-key corruption charges or the the handling of covid more generally or whatever it is right

Corey 1:01:52

they're just not mad and

Corey 1:01:54

and so the people who are showing up enough

Corey 1:01:55

enough of them voted for him not

Corey 1:01:57

not enough voted for the others he's still premier that's

Corey 1:02:00

that's how elections work

Corey 1:02:02

Carter, jump in on this. Well,

Carter 1:02:03

Well, I'd say, I mean, I'm going to pick up. I mean, the I don't care group is making two statements. What they're saying is I don't fear Doug Ford enough to jump into this election campaign, nor has Doug Ford impressed me enough that I'm going to jump in on this election campaign. campaign. There's also a tremendous amount of data that shows that when you do the polling, when you look at the group that didn't vote, oftentimes they lean towards almost the exact same product, the

Carter 1:02:25

the same group, you know, the same outcomes. So you're not looking at this group of, you know, 55% of the population. If they just got off their hineys, you would have them all voting for the liberals or all voting for the NDP or

Carter 1:02:37

or all voting for the conservatives. They

Carter 1:02:38

They tend to be a rather homogenous group when

Carter 1:02:41

when we look at the overall numbers. So it is not like, oh my God, everything would change if there was just better participation. We'd probably have the same numbers, the same outcomes, so

Carter 1:02:52

so there was no fear and there was no happiness.

Carter 1:02:56

And there could have been lots of fear. This is where I think that the failure of the Liberals and the NDP was to stoke distrust and dissatisfaction within this government. That's their requirement. That's what they have to do. They have to get you either inspired about a new government or fearful of the existing government. That's how you get elected. This is not time for whatever the hell they did. They ran a bad campaign and the voter turnout dropped as a result. And no one was

Carter 1:03:22

was better than Ford.

Carter 1:03:24

I'm not going to vote because I'm not happy enough with Ford. I'm not going to vote for the others because they didn't inspire me.

Corey 1:03:32

Let's put it through that lens we used earlier. In any election, the three basic questions you're asking is strategy. Whose mind can you change? Who needs Who needs help to go vote?

Corey 1:03:42

Who supports you? And how can you reduce the other side's enthusiasm? Well, Doug Ford, whose minds could he change? He went hard after union voters trying to get the endorsement of people related to building trades. Who needs help to vote? Maybe not a focus because his voters tend to skew older and older people show up regardless of what the election is here. how do you reduce the other side's enthusiasm mission fucking accomplished because del duca and horvath didn't connect at all with uh you know with the broader ontario electorate here and uh well a lot of that is the characteristics they brought into it doug

Corey 1:04:14

doug ford did his job by providing a contrast that seemed kind of like oh shucks oh you know reasonable like i said that the

Corey 1:04:21

the affable but mediocre boss that you've probably had at some point in your life right that was me yeah no i think i think we that's

Zain 1:04:28

that's right cory that's right i

Corey 1:04:29

i mean neither affable nor reaching the levels of mediocre but yes kind of like you yeah

Zain 1:04:34

uh carter let's talk about yeah i don't want to spend much longer talking about horvath and del duca and and what what they did to really royally fuck up but i i want to talk about where the conversation might go here because

Zain 1:04:46

because it's already starting to emerge the narratives of you know these

Zain 1:04:50

these two progressive Progressive parties, there's two lanes and they're similar, right, Carter? The first lane is these two progressive parties, if

Zain 1:04:57

if you kind of smush their two votes together, they got more votes than Doug Ford. Did you notice that, folks? Did you notice that they actually have a greater percentage of the vote than Doug Ford? There's that conversation. conversation, then

Zain 1:05:10

then there's this conversation, which is these

Zain 1:05:13

these two parties, the Liberal and the NDP, got almost the exact same amount, and the NDP ended up with almost

Zain 1:05:18

almost three times as many seats. And Carter, this is starting to trickle into a conversation about, do we change the way we're voting? Is that where you see this going? And if

Zain 1:05:27

you feel like this is a healthy jumping off point for that conversation, democratically, societally, so to speak?

Carter 1:05:34

Oh, this just angers me me to no end, right? First of all, we elect people not on a provincial

Carter 1:05:39

provincial level. We elect people on a riding level, right? And I think that people want local representatives. I don't know that we want to go to a proportional representation position where all of a sudden we're going to see, you know, the number of MMPs handed out by the percentage vote of the overall province. Most Most people that are most lunatics that support proportion of representation seem to like the MMR model where it's a mixed member representation, which we've

Carter 1:06:13

we've done a whole episode on that.

Carter 1:06:17

I don't want to do it again. But bottom line, if you go through and actually look at the voter turnout, you know, the riding by ridings, these numbers cover up tremendous differences that occur at a local level because the local levels are different. And you can see in some places the Conservatives are winning by a majority, in some places the Liberals, in some places the NDP. The

Carter 1:06:40

The Liberals had a less efficient vote. That's what we call this. It's an efficiency question. Do I have my votes in the right places in order to win me the number of seats? We talked about it ad nauseum with the Conservative Party of Canada rules and having points per riding. That is the exact same equivalent. If you can't win across a country, if you can't win across a province and get the most votes in those places, then this doesn't work. work. And I'm open to the idea of a single transferable vote in our national and provincial elections.

Carter 1:07:12

But no one wants to take one half step towards something like a single transferable vote. Instead, they want to upend our entire system and go to a proportional representation, which they use the wrong data to support. They use the provincial data. They use the federal data when really what they should be doing is looking at the local levels and saying, How much would we actually change? And the answer is not nearly as much as you think. And these two parties aren't the same. They just happen to be led in the same fashion. The Liberals and the NDP had the worst campaigns. The only thing in common they had was their inability to be effective. perspective.

Zain 1:07:48

Great. I want to get your thoughts on this. And I don't want to spend forever on it, but I feel like it is a nice opening to this conversation once again, and

Zain 1:07:54

and simply just an opening, not a comprehensive conversation. But your

Zain 1:07:58

your thoughts on this, you know, the hand wringing continues around how

Zain 1:08:02

how we vote. And do you feel like this is a good jumping off point for that discussion?

Corey 1:08:08

You know, it's very interesting because when conservative parties lose, they tend to say we got to merge. And when progressive

Corey 1:08:15

progressive parties lose, they say we got to change the voting system. And there's probably things you can read in to both of those, you know, the approaches to power and consensus and all of that. I do want to stress this is not entirely Monday morning quarterbacking. So Carter says nobody wants to go to ranked ballot. But actually, the liberal platform, the OLP platform said they would go to a ranked ballot. The NDP said they would use mixed member proportional representation both parties previous

Corey 1:08:41

this week were calling for changes to the electoral system because of anxieties about that like it's also not new in ontario that you look at it and you say hey ndp plus liberal equals more than the conservatives that's been true for quite some time and

Corey 1:08:54

and people have been calling for democratic reform for quite some time as well the addition of the lower turnout i think has spun into overdrive this This sense of, like, not sense, that's the wrong word. This argument by progressive partisans saying, well, is this government even legitimate? Only 40% showed up of the 40% who showed up. Only 40% voted for Doug Ford. Ergo, look how few people actually voted. Hey, if you consider the fact that's only people of voting age, because

Corey 1:09:22

because again, some have looked at lowering the voting age. I think the liberals were calling for that.

Corey 1:09:27

It's just all a mess, but come on. If the rules of the game were different, the game would be played different. That's the other thing I would tell people.

Corey 1:09:33

You can't just take, to Carter's point, the results and say, well, these results with a totally different outcome would

Corey 1:09:40

would have different outcomes. Well, sure, but everybody would act different. All the players on the field would act differently. They would take different policy positions. They would allocate resources differently. So it's a silly argument at the end of the day. And if you want to get really down to it, only

Corey 1:09:54

only conservative parties really on

Corey 1:09:57

on an individual party level have managed to get a majority of the vote at the federal level in the past 60, 70 years. Right.

Corey 1:10:05

Diefenbaker and Mulroney. So, you

Corey 1:10:08

know, it's not saying the Conservatives would never govern either.

Corey 1:10:13

One of the things that I think the Liberals need to keep in mind so they don't absolutely lose their minds here is that the

Corey 1:10:19

the difference between an inefficient party and a ruthlessly efficient party is often small.

Corey 1:10:25

Just imagine as a thought exercise, a party that wins every

Corey 1:10:28

every riding that they were contesting in by

Corey 1:10:31

by five votes and becomes government. we would say, wow, what an awesome party. How ruthlessly efficient that party is. Really smart resource allocation. If that same party loses every riding by five votes, we would say, oh, fuck those guys. They got fucked. They didn't run themselves very well at all. Reality is we're talking about 10 votes per riding in that scenario. So it's not uncommon to see parties that have really optimized their efficiency have

Corey 1:10:58

have almost no difference between getting blown out and winning big time and you saw this in 93 with

Corey 1:11:04

with the pcs right um now they didn't just lose by a couple votes but they got 18 of the vote and they ended up with two seats because

Corey 1:11:11

because they were competing everywhere right so they get you get 18 everywhere you're going to lose everywhere meanwhile

Corey 1:11:15

meanwhile you get 18 of the

Corey 1:11:18

nationally but it's all in you know western canada you're going to get 50 some seats so that's um that's just something you've got to contend with if you're a broad-based part we're

Zain 1:11:29

we're gonna leave that segment there moving on to our final segment our final segment steven carter it's the over under it's the lightning round we

Zain 1:11:36

we do it for you carter thank you we do it for you because we want to start with you carter are you in or out on the travis taves launch uh

Carter 1:11:42

uh i am out get a new shirt um and uh try and do better please cory

Zain 1:11:49

cory are you in or out

Corey 1:11:51

out on the travis taves loss from what you saw i

Corey 1:11:53

i am in uh i can see exactly the strategy he's running and it seems to be going okay also i pulled up that picture while we were recording here it's not as new of a shirt as i remember he's a little worn in the collar is a little frayed i've

Corey 1:12:05

i've been too hard on the shirt but

Carter 1:12:08

but not too hard enough on the shit maybe

Zain 1:12:11

maybe yeah it's good maybe that's probably right cory i'm going to stick with you on this jean charre and his point system explanation are Are you in or out on his showcase of strength, his showcase of path, his showcase of viability after the closing bell on memberships? Are you in or are you out on how he put himself out there to

Zain 1:12:30

to showcase his path?

Corey 1:12:31

It's a party I would go to, but he showed up too early to it. Like the hosts are still getting ready. I would have waited a couple of days.

Zain 1:12:40

Carter, are you in or out on the showcase of strength by Jean Charest and his point based we've got enough points to win line that he's been using? I'm

Carter 1:12:47

I'm in. It turns out points matter more than memberships.

Zain 1:12:52

Carter, overrated or underrated?

Zain 1:12:55

Endorsements, endorsements from the caucus as it relates to this particular UCP race, overrated

Zain 1:13:02

overrated or underrated? I'm asking you very specific, not overall, because we've done that conversation, but

Zain 1:13:08

this UCP leadership race, overrated or underrated, Carter?

Carter 1:13:11

Overrated. I mean, name three cabinet members that people like uh name three caucus members that people know uh

Carter 1:13:19

uh this is overrated nothing is going to you know jason kenney was the only issue and it now has solidified jason kenney as the j uh taves is jason kenney cory

Zain 1:13:30

cory overrated underrated in this ucp leadership race the

Zain 1:13:33

the caucus endorsements well

Corey 1:13:36

well uh every race is different and every race has different needs out of the membership. There's a lot of reason to believe that there is a heightened need to get that caucus endorsement because you want to pull things together, but 100% overrated, they always are.

Zain 1:13:51

Corey, final question. I'm going to start with you on this. There's been a lot of talk about this election in Ontario now creating a new coalition of voters for the Conservatives, this Ford coalition. In your mind, is this replicable? Is this something that can be templated everywhere is this overrated or underrated the new emerging ford coalition that he used to to grant himself victory in ontario this is

Corey 1:14:15

is the most frustrating thing to me i fucking hate whenever someone's like oh look there's the blueprint because every election is so different and temporally time will time will move on and people will be looking for different things in

Corey 1:14:27

in 2025 than they are in 2022 for sure i mean it's just it's not it's

Corey 1:14:35

it's so silly it's like We say this all the time. Generals and politicians are always trying to fight the last war. So what you're going to look at this and you're going to say, all right, this is the path to victory here. If I'm a challenger for government, all I need to do is

Corey 1:14:48

40% turnout and yet have everybody think that I'm the default option, but also have a split on the other side of the equation between two unpopular candidates who fail to motivate people. That

Corey 1:14:59

That sounds like something entirely in my control. role that sounds like a private union support yeah i mean like that's not

Corey 1:15:07

no campaign strategy is wholly replicable you always just want to pull the things that make sense for you but

Corey 1:15:12

but this this more than like this is not obama hope this is not trying to pull a blueprint of doing something differently and breaking the mold this

Corey 1:15:19

this is so of the moment it blows my mind there's nothing to be learned from this election absolutely nothing overrated

Zain 1:15:26

overrated is what i'm going with for cory Corey, Carter, overrated or underrated the emergence of the quote-unquote Ford coalition? I

Carter 1:15:34

I hope that everyone that I oppose in the next five years follows that strategy, because

Carter 1:15:38

because then I will win lots.

Zain 1:15:43

We're going to leave it there. That's a wrap on episode 995 of The Strategist. My name is Zane Velgey. With me, as always, Corey Hogan, Stephen Carter, and we'll see you next time.

Carter 1:15:58

Thank you for listening to this episode of The Strategist. It was our Sunday night special that everybody can listen to no cost. But if you want to listen to more episodes of The Strategist, you can for as little as six dollars per month, which is free, practically listen to twice as many episodes. There's specials, there's live streams, there's amazing opportunities, and it's all ad free.

Carter 1:16:21

OK, well, every episode's ad free, but it's the intention that counts. Sign up at patreon.com today.

Transcript