Why I won’t join Bernier’s new party

Friday, Maxime Bernier announced the creation of his new political party. He did so without my support.

There’s a reason I chose to support him when I ended my campaign for the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada last year. I believed then, as I do now, that he will fight for the issues I believe in. He will always have my respect for that.

But I simply cannot support anything that threatens to hand Justin Trudeau and the Liberals a second term in government.

Trudeau is the reason I sought to lead the Conservative party in the first place. I was so terrified of what another four years of Trudeau’s Liberals running the show would do to our country that I felt I had to step up.

Max is a friend. I respect his passion and his ideas. However now he is driving a wedge between conservatives at a time when Canadians desperately need us to be united. In recent weeks I have tried on two separate occasions to talk him back into the party but to no avail, he is hell-bent on doing this. That’s the passion I love in Max, but now is not the time.

We have a prime minister who has seemingly done everything in his power to destroy Canada’s economic competitiveness, drive investment south of the border and punish our most profitable industries with crippling taxes and regulations.

Canadians will be asked to participate in not just an election next year but an exorcism. Trudeau and his management team must be replaced. I always felt that Trudeau chose his cabinet around the doctrine of diversity not competency. That’s why we have a finance minister that calls our best and brightest entrepreneurs tax cheats, a defence minister that is buying billions of the wrong military hardware and a foreign minister that is getting slaughtered at the NAFTA negotiating table. Trudeau lacks the leadership to get pipelines built in any direction, leaving us at the mercy of Saudi oil tankers. At the same time his foreign minister is meddling in Saudi domestic policy, prompting them to threaten to cut off our oil supply.

He has made a mess of Canada’s fiscal picture, spending us into oblivion with massive deficits and sticking our children and grandchildren with the job of cleaning up after him.

Worst of all, he has refused to acknowledge any of this. He continues down this path of destruction oblivious to the damage he is causing.

Bernier’s new party may well shine more light on some of these issues, but its single most significant achievement will be to create a path for Trudeau to keep doing what he’s doing. That’s what I’m afraid of.

Canadians simply can’t afford four more years of Justin Trudeau. He has got to go. And Andrew Scheer and a more competent cabinet must replace him.

The Conservative leadership race is long over, and we have a new leader in Scheer. It’s time to put 100 per cent effort into winning the next election.

Scheer has demonstrated that he possesses the intellect, the vision and the leadership skills to be a successful prime minister. He also has a caucus teeming with talented men and women ready to take on difficult mandates. I had the opportunity to meet many of them during the leadership race and there are solid managers in that mix good enough to run complex companies if they wanted to. I know, I hire people like them for my portfolio investments every day.

Scheer and his team will deliver a more pro-growth, pro-job, pro-competitive Canada that will allow our country to prosper again and pay for the services we all cherish without piling on more debt.

He led a successful revolt last year against Finance Minister Bill Morneau’s tax changes that would have decimated small businesses across the country.

As prime minister, Scheer will get rid of the carbon tax and put Canada on a competitive footing with the rest of the world. The only answer Trudeau has when investors like Kinder Morgan pull out of Canada is to nationalize the project and then have it get stalled in the courts, leaving taxpayers with a $4.5 billion bill.

Scheer has made huge gains in Quebec and has better ideas on the important issues — from taxes, to trade, to secure borders, to a strong Canadian identity.

My sincere hope, as I expressed to Max before he left the Conservative caucus, was that he would choose to remain a part of the team, work hard to defeat Trudeau in 2019, and help elect a Conservative government that would reverse Trudeau’s destructive policies.

Unfortunately, he chose otherwise. I think it was a bad decision because under our system it is virtually impossible to build a party from scratch in 11 months that can win a leadership mandate. So, a vote for Max has a high probability of being wasted if your objective is to remove Trudeau.

The stakes in the next federal election are simply too high for Conservatives to be divided. That’s why I’m calling on all Conservatives to stay focused and united behind Scheer as we head into 2019.

Sorry, Max, what you are doing is noble, but your timing is awful. The rest of us have an election to win.

Kevin O’Leary