O’Leary says he’s serious about Tory leadership
‘I know I can do the job,’ TV personality says
• From the moment he was first mentioned as a potential candidate for the Conservative leadership, the question about Kevin O’Leary has been whether he was seriously considering a bid or simply encouraging the attention to fuel his own personal brand.
On Monday, O’Leary insisted he was indeed serious, offering more insight into his efforts to organize a team, and said that his formal entry into the race is just a technicality.
“I wouldn’t be wasting my time or energy this way if I wasn’t dead serious,” he told the National Post Monday. “I’m assuming I’m going to go into this race. I’m going to win the leadership.”
According to a source on O’Leary’s nascent campaign team, several high-profile Conservative organizers were set to meet on a conference call Monday afternoon to discuss his bid, with former Tory staffer Chris Rougier leading the effort as O’Leary’s de facto campaign manager.
Others discussing roles in a potential O’Leary bid include former senator and cabinet minister Marjory LeBreton, who maintains what she is involved with is an “exploratory committee”; Michael Coates, global vicechairman of Hill+Knowlton Strategies and Stephen Harper’s former debateprep team leader; and Andrew Boddington, former executive director of the Ontario Progressive Conservatives, now with governmentrelations firm Policy Concepts. Neither Coates nor Boddington immediately responded to a request for comment.
O’Leary said he will announce his fundraising team this week, and that at some point after entering the race he expects to announce endorsements from Conservative caucus members. “I view them as a board of directors,” he said a week after meeting with a group of Tory MPs in Ottawa. “I was pleasantly surprised to see how many of them want some ideas like mine in that race.”
He has also changed his tune in another regard: he no longer says he would consider endorsing another candidate. “I know there’s one person who can do it — it’s me. … I know I can do the job.”
His background as a businessman and reality TV star has meant O’Leary is sometimes compared to U.S. president-elect Donald Trump. But he rejected the notion he’s trying to repeat Trump’s “make America great again” promise in Canada.
Connecting Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric to competitor Kellie Leitch, who has pledged to have immigrants screened for “Canadian values,” O’Leary said, “I personally am a LebaneseIrish person. There are no walls in my world.”
He says his platform will focus on economic growth, which he believes must be at three per cent to sustain Canada’s “social contract” and the services governments provide. (The growth rate is currently at 0.9 per cent of GDP.)
On Monday his criticisms focused on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Finance Minister Bill Morneau and the PM’s principal secretary, Gerald Butts, calling their policies “clueless,” “broken” and “a disaster.”
“I will promise the Canadian people I will shine the light of transparency on them,” O’Leary said, adding he thinks the Liberals are making Canada unattractive in global markets and their carbon tax, “defective in every way,” would be better replaced with a policy of negotiating deals with the private sector to meet emissions-reduction targets.
The “army” of new party members from whom he expects to gain support, he said, are 18- to 35-year-olds struggling to find jobs and start businesses. “Trudeau has screwed them. I think I can criss-cross the country over the next 36 months and bring them all home to the Conservative party. That’s my promise to the party.” The next federal election in 2019 will be an “exorcism,” he said.
As for the delay in making his entry official, he said he wants to wait until “Darwinian forces” cull the herd of 14 candidates before entering. Because many of those candidates say they have already paid the $100,000 in registration fees and compliance deposits required before a Dec. 31 deadline, however, the stage will probably still be crowded on Jan. 17 at the next leadership debate in Quebec City, which will be held in French.
To those who see bilingualism as a prerequisite for the job, he says he “speaks jobs” — and that the French he spoke as a seven-year-old living outside Montreal will return as he continues to practise. “I’ll get my chops back.”