Canadian Future Party hoping to garner support from those fed up with Liberals, Conservatives

Dominic Cardy, Interim Leader of the Canadian Future Party, discusses the goals of the newest federal political party.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length

Michael Higgins: The Canadian Future Party is aiming to attract voters frustrated with the federal Liberals and Conservatives. Its first candidate will run in an upcoming by-election in Montreal.

Let’s start with the drive behind the Canadian Future Party. What does doing politics differently look like for you in this time of deepening partisan divide?

Dominic Cardy: We’ve got 70 per cent or so Canadians who say they'd like to see a moderate, centrist option that was fiscally responsible and socially liberal, and we don't have that. So having a choice in between the fiscal incontinence of the Liberal Party and their obsession with making announcements that aren't connected to results, and the desire of Mr. Poilievre’s team to make people angry based off that failure of Mr. Trudeau, but to offer solutions that are either not being shared publicly or kind of worrying in this idea of Canada being broken.

Our perspective is that we don't need to go left, we don't need to go right; we need to go forward. We need brave solutions for Canada's problems around healthcare, immigration, national defense. We're not hearing those from either of the two old parties. So we felt that it was important to offer something new and different and we've got everyone from Peter Kent, former Harper cabinet minister, Denis Blanchette, former NDP MP, people from the Liberals, Greens, Bloc Quebecois all together going, ‘We need to do something to save Canada.' And that has to be evidence based, it has to be brave, and if we can get the other parties talking along those lines, great. But in the meantime, we're going to do our best to win seats and change the conversation and hopefully make our country better.

MH: We spoke close to a year ago about the prospect of transitioning from political advocacy, that of the Centre Ice Canadians and before that the Centre Ice Conservatives. How much does this new party now reflect that advocacy?

DC: We took a lot from the Centre Ice Canadians experience in which we're starting to bring Canadians together around the idea of, 'How do we get our politicians to start talking about these problems?’ And I'm still in my last few weeks now as a sitting member of the New Brunswick legislature, having served for a number of years, including four as education minister, and I hear from currently elected and former politicians saying, ‘Where is the bravery and where are the plans?'

We see issues facing our country right now and rather than coming up with concrete solutions that could actually, definably, make things better, we just see this sniping back and forth. And the only results that we're seeing from that is, as you were saying off the outset, increasing division, increasing partisanship, and an increasing divide where our leaders talk over our heads using social media. Ignoring evidence, ignoring expertise and that is worrying because we've seen what happens in the past when politicians ignore structures, when they just think that they can just work to be popular. That's populism in a nutshell. It doesn't give good results for Canadians, or for anyone else.

So we want to do our best to push back against that but not just in a way that we're just going to complain about it. We want to put forward evidence-based solutions. Canadians can decide whether they like that or not. That's the beauty of democracy.

MH: What are your expectations of building a presence here in Alberta, and in the west, where federal conservatives rule the roost?

DC: I think it's pretty clear Canadians have decided they want to have a change from Mr. Trudeau and I totally get that. I want to see a change from Mr. Trudeau. There's a lot of people who are parking their votes with Mr. Poilievre right now who are concerned about the direction he's taking his party. That you didn't have to be extreme to be a conservative in Canada until recently. And having a conservative party that is not committing to spending two per cent of our budget on defense, as our NATO allies have been begging us for years, at a time of growing war and international conflict is kind of bizarre. Where are we on plans for the actual energy transition? It’s great to say no carbon tax. The carbon tax has turned into a political football that doesn't work. Where are the concrete plans?

So from Albertans, who I think have seen a little bit of left and right-wing extremism, because we are as concerned about extremism on the left as on the right, we're hearing a lot of people signing up and saying, ‘Where can I get involved? How can I sign up? Can I be a candidate?’ So we've got people interested after our launch last Wednesday, setting up riding associations across the province. People who’ve been involved in leadership roles in the other parties saying, ‘I am done with parties that don't have serious solutions to 2024 problems, who want to keep on either apologizing for the distant past or saying that Canada is broken today.’ People who actually want to be part of building something new, evidence-based, where we would actually have evidence as our ideology. So that, I think, is going to be an appealing project.

Alberta was one of the first places we saw real strength and growth. And since last week, when we officially launched, we have had hundreds and hundreds of people across the country signing up, tens of thousands of dollars coming in, and a good chunk of that has come from Albertans who, I think, know what happens when politics gets divided too much between out-of-date left and out-of-date right. We need something modern, we need something for the future that includes the best elements of the old left and right, which are pretty simple. If you've got a strong private sector, controlled by, under the rule of law, an open democracy, that gives you the most wealth, the most equality, the most opportunities to be creative and to have a good life of any model ever tried by human beings anywhere on Earth. Our job today is to try and make sure we save that system and then fix it and get it ready for the next generation, not to keep on arguing about things that happened 10, 20, or 500 years ago.

MH: As a party, how would you approach working with a province like Alberta where tensions continue to grow over federal policies, jurisdiction, and constitutional battles?

DC: We need to have a federal government that respects the Constitution. I was education minister in New Brunswick and negotiated the child care deal with the feds to try and move towards $10/day child care. The feds immediately came back, about a year later, and started trying to blame the province for the fact that the program was so successful that we needed more spaces, which meant we needed more money.

There's a level of cynicism in the way the feds have played the provinces off against each other; we want no part of that. We need to respect the Constitution. If the federal government ever gets all the things that are in its list of responsibilities in our Constitution dealt with to a very high level and everyone says, ‘Man, our federal government is kind of perfect’, then I might have a tiny bit of tolerance for federal politicians mucking around a little bit with provincial areas of jurisdiction, but still not a lot. Today, there is no excuse for that. The federal government has dropped the ball and previous ones as well, on just about every critical file you can think of. Whether it's immigration, health care, housing, defense, the list goes on. So we want to focus on those areas of federal responsibility.

A tax reform commission, for example, something that's been discussed since the 1960s to simplify our tax code so that productivity can go up, business profits can go up, which means people have more money to spend and a little bit gets invested in taxes to make better social programs for all of us. That's our approach to the provinces. You guys sort out what you need to do, the federal government will work on its end, and let's all work together to try and make Canada a better place using our federal system to try different things across the country. That's always been the goal of federalism and we embrace rather than condemn that.