Erin O’Toole tried to lure six-term Liberal MP Dan McTeague back into politics, but he refused..McTeague was MP from 1993 to 2011 and represented Pickering – Scarborough East in his final term. In an interview with the Western Standard, McTeague said O’Toole invited him to run there again..“He asked me to run in 2019, I said no. And he wanted me to run in my old riding,” McTeague said. “I had known Erin for many years. His father was one of my provincial counterparts when I was a federal MP….“I’ve written blogs about him already and said, ‘Look, this guy’s Trudeau-lite and don’t believe him.’ And I felt bad doing it because I personally don’t have a problem with him. But he’s obviously being pushed by the same group of people that ran Patrick Brown’s campaign when he was the leader of the Conservative Party in Ontario. And what a disaster that turned out to be.”.McTeague is the president of Canadians for Affordable Energy, an organization he founded. He believes O’Toole’s embrace of a carbon tax was a bad political and policy move..“I wasn’t surprised that he flip-flopped, but disappointed, because the vast majority of Canadians do not believe climate change is the presiding issue in Canada today. Affordability and healthcare are far more important to Canadians than philosophizing or getting involved with the alarmist agenda on the climate somehow changing. I think we all recognize there is a change in climate, but not all of us agree that it’s simply because of human-induced behavior,” he said..McTeague predicts the Conservatives will lose badly on the policy gamble..“The biggest loss of this election will be Conservative support. It’s pretty obvious that their numbers are nowhere near where they were under Andrew Scheer. And I suspect that the calculation that the Conservatives under Mr. O’Toole have made that somehow you can lose all those seats or all those votes out West in favor of picking up an extra few percent in Ontario, may have been an erroneous calculus and a gamble that they should not have taken because it’s likely to lead to Mr. O’Toole having a very short term as a leader,” he said..During McTeague’s tenure, Liberal leader Stephane Dion championed a carbon tax, only to be trounced at the polls..“There was a significant unease I was having, obviously with my own party, and the rise since 2008 of the ‘Green Shift’ in the Liberal Party when they found that as a new religion, and were promptly trounced at the polls in 2008 when Harper said, ‘This is about a carbon tax and the cost of living at a time in which prices were going through the roof,'” he said..Stephen Harper also tried to get McTeague to cross the floor but he refused..“There were repeated requests because they needed someone from Toronto and someone who was bilingual… So they’d always talk to me. And I never played the partisan card, especially when it came to the lives of Canadians abroad, and I suspect they took that as a means of saying, ‘Well, he’s not very partisan,'” he said..“My party turtled under Dion…Ultimately, Harper got them to call the election that they were afraid of calling or being involved with. And so from that point forward, I was pretty despondent about the tenacity of my own party. And so I think some Conservatives saw that as a means of saying, hey, want to come and run for us? And my answer was no. As it was then, it would be now. I’m not a Conservative.”.McTeague calls Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “a fool who is nothing more than a marionette for the Laurentian elite” and said his government must recognize that the value of western petroleum to power the Canadian economy..“I know what happens when people lose their shirts. I saw it. I saw it upfront, personally up close in 1981 when my father lost everything he had…” he said..“My education came in the school of hard knocks. And I think like a lot of other Canadians whose voices are not being heard, the direction this government’s taking on pushing the climate agenda, among other things, is totally opposite and anathema to the struggle that Canadians are facing.”
