Aitchison says Conservatives, Liberals both guilty of ‘using division’ in politics

Former mayor and two-time Conservative MP Scott Aitchison is set to announce his entrance into the Conservative race on Sunday, joining an increasingly crowded field.

Conservative leadership hopeful Scott Aitchison says both his party and the governing Liberals have been guilty of trying to divide Canadians for personal gain.

And if his longshot candidacy to lead the party into the next election succeeds, he’s promising a “new approach.”

Speaking to The West Block guest host David Akin, Aitchison said that people — both inside his party and the broader voting public — “recognize that Ottawa is not working.”

“It’s … divisive, and the rhetoric, it’s all about division in Ottawa. And I think Canadians have had enough of that,” Aitchison said.

“I think both parties are guilty of using division and differences of opinion among Canadians to divide us, whether it’s differences of opinion or differences of where we live. East versus west, urban versus rural. There’s no shortage of it on all sides of the aisle, and I think that Canadians have had enough of it.”

Aitchison was touching on an undercurrent of the party’s increasingly crowded 2022 leadership race: how the Conservative party wants to present themselves to Canadians after three straight general election losses, and a failure to secure the kind of suburban and exurban ridings that gave Stephen Harper a majority in 2015.

On the one hand, you have the pugilistic Pierre Poilievre — the presumed frontrunner in the race — who has never shied away from a political scrap. Poilievre’s team has already taken several shots at rivals Jean Charest and Patrick Brown in the early days of the race.

On the other side, Charest and Brown have tooled their messaging more around unity — although Brown has had some choice words, both directly and indirectly, about Poilievre’s style of politics.