Dr. Leslyn Lewis will win not only the Conservative Party leadership race, but surpass Diefenbaker’s 53.7% popular vote in the next general election.

Posted on behalf of contributing author: Ian Prittie |Twitter: @thereds8

Note this is not a political endorsement by Sunday Preach or the author, but an opinion piece on the Conservative Party of Canada’s current internal leadership race. All opinions in this post are of the contributing author.

But with what platform?

In March of 1958, John Diefenbaker led the Conservative Party to an historic win, capturing 208 seats and winning over 53% of the popular vote.  I predict Dr. Leslyn Lewis will surpass this result, and below I’ll explain why.  But first, some history from a personal perspective.

I was (and still apparently am) a CPC member, even though I cut up my card in 2019.  I was so inspired by the formation of the People’s Party of Canada that I decided to run for office for the first time, and became the candidate in Don Valley West. Prior to that, I decided to get more involved with the CPC, and went to both the ‘leadership’ event in 2017 and the party’s national convention in Halifax in 2018.

I was gutted when Maxime Bernier did not win the leadership in 2017.  He walked into the hall on the Friday night and had the opportunity to give a last minute speech as some of the other candidates did to which he declined.  He was acting like he had already won. On the other hand, Andrew Scheer walked in and looked like he had been hit by a train.  He looked like a man who had spent months campaigning and knew he had lost. Of course, as we all know, that wasn’t the result.  The authenticity, or lack thereof, about that result may never be known.

After the leadership result, though I was gutted, I sent Scheer a letter in 2018 with the maximum donation of $1575, and asked one of the party strategists to get in touch with me.  I never heard from anyone, but they did cash the cheque.

At the Halifax convention in 2018, I was in the policy breakout room where the vote on Supply Management was put at the bottom of thirteen items, with only one hour to go through the whole list.  The party ensured that there wasn’t enough time to get to it.

My main criticism of the CPC is that not only Max, but half of the party was ostracized after the ‘leadership’ result.  They had an obligation to bring the party back together, and instead did the opposite.  I will always respect Max for revealing this to the country, as I didn’t understand what was happening until he split from the party.

Although many of the policy points can be discussed with regards to the differences between PPC and the CPC, in my opinion it boils down to this: do you believe in what’s right for the whole country, or do you believe in slicing and dicing the population into special interest voting blocks and pandering to each of them? The CPC should study the success the UK Conservatives have had.  The UK Conservatives have multiple MPs who are libertarian.  They believe in lowering tariffs.  They have a wide range of backbenchers who openly challenge the government.  The UK public believes the party is a ‘big tent’ operation, and rightly so.

Let’s start with the obvious: if you believe in the PPC platform as I do, we are guaranteed to be disappointed with what the CPC will have to offer.  Which brings us to Dr Lewis.

The main reason I think she will win is she will appeal to newer Canadians, which no other candidate in the CPC will.  Growing up in Toronto, I have seen a continuous trend over the years in growing support for the Liberals.  If the CPC can’t capture this vote, nothing will ever change. The best part of her winning the CPC leadership will be the $2.2b per year taxpayer-funded MSM having a total meltdown.  As a black woman who wasn’t born here, she will drop an A-bomb on the  evil identity politics agenda, and it will be a tad difficult for anyone in the MSM to insinuate she is racist. Dr Lewis has said a number of very encouraging things so far on policy.  She is candid on life issues, such as stating directly that overseas funding for abortion should be stopped.  She understands that what Canadians need is unity, not identity politics.

But so much is broken in the CPC, and there are many questions that are still outstanding.

Top of my list is defunding the MSM.  The CPC never learns that Canada’s MSM are simply PR firms for the Liberal Party.  The MSM will not be nice, they will not change, they will not challenge the Liberal government.  It is time for our tax money to stop supporting their broken business models.

Will the CPC finally develop a plan to get rid of equalization, or continue fooling its supporters in Alberta? Will crony capitalism continue, or will it finally be stopped? Will Canadian consumers continue to be cheated on dairy products, or will Supply Management finally be abolished?

There is concern about Dr Lewis’ involvement with Trillium, and potentially with Tides.  It’s fine for her to address those concerns in a tweet, but would she use constitutional authority to get pipelines built? 

Will her government finally simplify the tax code, or continue making it more complex? Canadians spend over $7b per year filing taxes.

Will the CPC do what’s right for Canada and abandon globalism? There isn’t one dollar that taxpayers should be sending unnecessarily overseas, especially to the United Nations.

If the CPC continues with the same awful policy they have always had, they will never get a good result over the long term.

In conclusion, I predict a big result for both Dr. Leslyn Lewis and the CPC.  But the big question is, with what platform?