Five of the six Conservative leaders will be on the scene tonight for the first debate of this election, a meeting hosted by the Conservative think tank Canada Strong and Free Network.
This network – formerly known as the Manning Center after its founder, former Reform Party leader Preston Manning – offers a stage and an hour and 30 minutes to candidates to share their views on the party and the country.
The debate starts at 17:30 ET. CBNews.ca will broadcast it live.
The debate is just one of the events planned for the network’s annual conference – a three-day summit where right-wing scholars, journalists and politicians will gather to discuss the state of conservatism in Canada and election strategies.
The Conservative Party finalized its list of “verified” candidates for leadership on Monday, cutting a larger list to six people who will appear in the last ballot when party members cast their ballots in September.
The party’s organizing committee for the Leadership Election (LEOC) has given the green light to Conservative MPs Scott Aichison, Leslin Lewis and Pierre Poalievre, Brampton Mayor Patrick Brown, former Quebec Prime Minister Jean Charest and Independent MP Roberto Oberman.
A cowboy hat was left in an empty ballroom at the Conservative National Congress in Halifax on Saturday, August 25, 2018 (Darren Calabrese / Canadian Press)
Canada’s strong and free network has invited only those candidates tested by the party. All of them, except Brown, will be on stage tonight. Brown refused to attend the event.
Manning himself declined to support a particular candidate in the race, but in a note to all campaigns sent last week, he called on the contenders to end their personal attacks to avoid tarnishing the Conservative brand among voters and exacerbating existing divisions within the party.
Manning, a senior statesman in conservative circles, said he feared such attacks would “deepen divisions in the federal conservative camp” – something he called “the party’s Achilles’ heel for a while”.
Conservative candidates Pierre Poalievre (top left), Leslin Lewis (top center), Jean Charest (top right), Roman Baber (bottom left), Patrick Brown (bottom center) and Scott Aichison. (Blair Gable / Reuters; Frank Gunn / Canadian Press; Justin Tang / Canadian Press; Canadian Press; Chris Young / Canadian Press; Scott Aichison)
The party faced a backlash from some party members this week after leaving two socially conservative candidates – Saskatchewan businessman Joseph Burgo and British Columbia consultant Grant Abraham – from its list of approved candidates. Another future candidate, Toronto lawyer Joel Etienne, also failed.
All three candidates said they had sent the required 500 signatures and $ 300,000 in donations by the April 29 deadline.
It is alleged that all three men were treated unfairly. The anti-abortion group Campaign Life Coalition has accused the party of trying to defraud and “repeal” abortion activists by rejecting Burgo and Abraham.
But a leaked document obtained from CBC News shows that party officials insist the candidates were not rejected because of their political views.
“No one – not a single candidate – was rejected because of their views or positions on any issue,” said Ian Brody, chairman of LEOC.
In this report, Brody cites some of the media stories about why the candidates were rejected as “sensational and even misleading.”
Brody writes that the candidates in question were rejected because of financial problems or the signatures they collected. He cites examples of random submission of duplicates by candidates and problems with the legal limit on how much a person can donate to a candidate.
While the party will monitor the candidates who failed to explain where they missed, they will not talk about details to the media, he wrote.
“My former boss, Stephen Harper, taught me that the easiest way for a conservative to get on the news is to attack another conservative,” Brody wrote.
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