Raitt expresses confidence in Tories’ future during party fundraiser in Brandon

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This article was published 18/11/2017 (3123 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Conservative Party of Canada has an image problem, which leader Andrew Scheer appears poised to improve.

So described deputy leader Lisa Raitt during a party fundraiser at Brandon’s Victoria Inn Hotel and Convention Centre on Thursday night, during which a sense of renewal underpinned much of what she had to share.

Raitt seemed intent on reaching out beyond the supportive room during her half-hour speech and question-and-answer period.

Scheer is not “an acquired taste” like former prime minister Stephen Harper was, she said, highlighting the leader as someone more interested in answering questions and sharing his personality and sense of humour with the public at large.

While Raitt said that the national media is “never going to be in love with us,” she said that with Scheer, they have someone who is at least open to doing interviews.

“I find that when you talk to them they tend to like you little bit more,” Raitt said, adding that with Scheer, the party might “at least get a fairer shake.”

Although Brandon-Souris has been a Conservative stronghold for much of its history, minus a stint in the mid-’90s, Raitt focused her attention on the nation as a whole, which went to the Liberals in the last election.

“It’s a long road ahead of us because there is this almost internal preconceived notion that we’re the bad guys and that the Liberals are the good guys, and life is better with the Liberals in, and we tolerate it when the Conservatives are here to fix everything for us so we can go back to having the Liberals in,” she said, adding that regardless of this sentiment, Canadians appear “more small-c conservative, fiscally.”

Somewhere along the way, the party’s message failed to resonate with Canadians, Raitt said, pointing to the months leading up to the 2019 election as the time to turn things back around and adapt to the changing political climate.

“Running an election on the notion that the other guys are bad or don’t do the job, that’s not going to win any votes, today,” she said. “The reality is, what Canadians want is they want to be treated with respect, to be told what our plan is and to allow them to make the judgment.”

Reflecting on her 16-year-old son, who likes Green Party of Canada Leader Elizabeth May because she talks about the environment, Raitt said, “You can’t run an election in 2019 without talking about the environment.”

Although Raitt conceded that the party lost its way in tackling climate change during its last stint in power due to a reprioritization of resources in reaction to the global recession, she said that this “excuse” won’t work in the future, and that “there’s no excuse for not dealing with it head-on in the next election.”

Raitt’s comments about tackling the party’s image problem resonated with Brandon-Souris Conservative MP Larry Maguire, who said that their key thing moving forward would be improving the party’s “cohesiveness.”

He hopes to see Scheer flesh this out, particularly during the party’s policy convention in Halifax in August, when they will hash out what their priorities would be going into the next election.

While the Liberals seem to have claimed their position as the party that tackles greenhouse gas emissions, Maguire said, “They’re not doing any more; they’re talking the talk and not walking the walk.”

Brandon-Souris riding association president Jeff Harwood expressed a similar sentiment as it relates to the Liberals’ claim to helping Canadians who are in need of a “leg up.”

“The current federal government doesn’t have a monopoly on compassion,” Harwood said. “The Conservatives are just as much about the disadvantaged as the current administration, but that doesn’t always come through.

“We have supporters from every walk of life, every socioeconomic group, so the old myth that the party is one of the wealthy one per cent is absolutely false.”

Raitt went on to spend Friday morning with the Brandon Chamber of Commerce, after which she went to Winnipeg to take part in additional events.

» tclarke@brandonsun.com

» Twitter: @TylerClarkeMB