I’m worried about West, says MP
REMPEL GARNER Refuses to rule out a run for Tory leadership
Alberta MP Michelle Rempel Garner isn’t ruling out a run for the Conservative leadership after expressing concerns Friday that the current crop of front-runners doesn’t include a candidate from her home province, where the party is most popular.
Rempel Garner’s comments came after the unexpected announcement Thursday from Ottawa- area MP Pierre Poilievre that he would not be running for the leadership, despite weeks of organizing.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do in the next few days,” said Rempel Garner, when she was asked if she would be putting her name forward.
Speaking to reporters before the party’s caucus meeting on Friday, Rempel Garner said she was worried about growing discontent in Alberta and Saskatchewan and the place of those provinces in the federation. “My role is to force that question,” said Rempel Garner, although she said she wasn’t sure if that meant she should run for the leadership or not.
Rempel Garner also criticized the way the party’s leadership election counts votes, which she says marginalizes the places where it is most popular. Each riding is assigned 100 points, which means that a riding in Rempel Garner’s hometown of Calgary with thousands of Conservative Party members counts the same as a Quebec riding with fewer than 100 members.
Rempel Garner also said that leadership contender Richard Décarie should be disqualified from the race after he said that being gay is a choice and LGBTQ is a “Liberal term.” Rempel Garner said that if any potential Conservative candidate had made comments like that before the fall election, the person would have failed the party’s vetting process.
On Saturday, former cabinet minister Peter Mackay, 54, considered one of the front- runners in the Tory race, is expected to officially launch his campaign in Stellarton, N.S.
The former leader of the Progressive Conservatives served as foreign minister and in defence and justice ministerial roles before leaving politics in 2015 to resume a legal career. His return to politics was motivated by a desire to serve, he said.
“I’ve always been very motivated by a sense of public service and I see politics as a calling,” Mackay told Postmedia.
“I feel that the country, in many ways, is in some jeopardy under the current administration and I want to do everything I can to see that we right the ship.”
Ontario MP and former leadership candidate Erin O’toole is expected to announce shortly that he is running. Marilyn Gladu, a professional engineer and the MP for the Ontario riding of Sarnia — Lambton, has already officially declared she is running.
On Friday, Poilievre divulged more details about why he was dropping out of the race as he revealed on Thursday.
Poilievre, 40, spent weeks pushing past a fear about what a run for the Conservative leadership would mean for his family.
He’d promised his wife and 18- month- old daughter, and himself, that after the October election they’d have a more “normal” life, but things had changed. He’d been swept up in the excitement of the party’s leadership race and decided he’d run.
He spent weeks crossing the country to put together a team, brought on prominent strategists, began nailing down companies to provide the back- end support he’d need, and started giving media interviews laying out some ideas. But over the past three weeks, his doubts had grown.
“As someone who has put my life on hold, my personal life on hold, for Parliament and for public service for over a decade and a half, I really got to a culmination point where I had to make a decision to have more normality in my life, or sacrifice that entirely for a campaign that was going to be all consuming,” he said.
Then, it all got very real. A hall was booked to formally launch on Sunday. His campaign manager was about to quit his day job. Contracts were ready to be signed and $ 25,000 was set to be given to the party.
“This week was fish or cut bait,” he said.
He went to bed Wednesday night with a pledge: if he woke up in the morning and wasn’t fully convinced that it was the right thing to do, he’d drop out. Otherwise, he’d be wasting a lot of people’s time and money.
“I woke up yesterday morning and I wasn’t 100 per cent in,” he said.
Though he’d canvassed many people to make his decision to run — including former prime minister Stephen Harper — it was advice from one of his friends that underpinned his choice to back out.
The suggestion was: write two letters to your daughter. In one, explain to her why you ran. In the other, explain why you didn’t.
“The letter that I wrote for her that indicated my decision not to run is the better one,” he said Friday.
“And I hope one day she reads it.”
Poilievre, known as a hard- edged scrappy fighter on the floor of the House of Commons, grew emotional as he described what went into his decision.
Still, he says he is very much at peace with it now.
On Thursday, after the news was out, he picked his daughter up at daycare. He hadn’t done that in a while. They went out for a cheeseburger.
“It was more tranquil and relaxed than I have been in a very long time.”