We Have Two Weeks to Flatten the Tyranny
Roman Baber is our moonshot chance to save Canada
(June 9th Note: Some of this information may now be out of date. It is too late to buy a membership to become eligible to vote in the CPC leadership race. But we have until September to persuade people. Join us in the Roman Baber Fans Facebook group or visit his website to help.)
It was a cold, Canadian winter day in the capital when the sound of freedom finally rang out at Parliament. The capital I refer to is Toronto, the capital of Ontario, and the Parliament is Queen's Park. The winter I refer to is the one before last, and the sound is not a truck horn but the sound of then-Progressive Conservative Party MPP Roman Baber publicly calling for an end to Doug Ford's lockdowns and other pandemic restrictions.
Roman had been lobbying against lockdowns behind the scenes since May 2020, and had first alluded to his differences with Ford publicly in October 2020. But it was on January 15th, 2021 that he realized the Doug Ford Government would not change course, and he spoke out against lockdowns explicitly.
It took under two hours for him to be kicked out of the PC caucus, and become Independent MPP Roman Baber.
That's what he'll be until the provincial election on June 2nd. The day after that, June 3rd, is your deadline to spend $15 to join the federal Conservative Party of Canada if you want to vote for him in its September leadership race, which will determine who runs against Trudeau in the next federal election, and likely determine the next Prime Minister of Canada.
My name is Derick. I am an activist in Toronto's anti-mandate/pro-freedom scene, the kind of activist who doesn't mind marching alone in the rain, or canvassing for hours in the snow, or getting punched in the face, or roughed up by cops. I'm also an expert in both political science and PR, and I’ve had the privilege of meeting Roman twice.
I have given Roman’s story and our wider political situation a lot of thought, and I would like the opportunity to persuade you of the following, if you will hear me out:
Roman Baber is the real deal—a genuine believer in freedom and civil liberties, and a man of extreme honesty and integrity. One of our own.
Roman Baber is likely the only such person in the Conservative Party leadership race, and therefore the only one with a real shot at becoming Prime Minister in the foreseeable future.
Roman Baber does have a real shot at becoming Prime Minister.
But that involves you—yes, you, because I need everyone who reads this to be on board—signing up to vote for him in the leadership race today, and taking some time over the next two weeks to help make certain everyone in Canada's freedom movement knows who he is and that he urgently needs their help.
I believe this is our moonshot chance to save the country. We have to take it.
The Real Deal
Roman Baber was born in the Soviet Union, before escaping at the age of nine, so he knows the horrors of authoritarianism first hand, which is part of why he’s passionate about defunding the CBC, stopping online censorship, and ending travel mandates.
An immigrant, he doesn't come from "old money" and has no connection to the established political class in Canada, like John Tory and Justin Trudeau grew up with. He is a self-made man, who slept on a used air mattress when arriving here as a minor before building an extremely successful legal career, working his way through school at a call centre.
He’s also a relative newcomer to politics, further signaling that he isn’t part of the “old boys network”. It wasn’t until 2018 that he decided to run, became the PC candidate for MPP in York Centre where he’s lived the last 27 years, and instantly flipped the hotly contested Toronto riding, which had gone Liberal five straight elections.
It took only two and a half years for him to be kicked out of his own party for standing up against government overreach.
Baber spent the year and a half since as our voice in Ontario Parliament, proposing bills that would end the madness, or punish politicians for it, or voting and speaking against the extension of emergency powers, before announcing his Conservative Party leadership candidacy in March. He’s also visited activists, including speaking at Toronto’s rally two weeks ago, where he is expected to speak again tomorrow.
Getting kicked out of caucus is usually a death-knell for a political career, especially so early on and with no party to cross over to. Yet he made his stand against Doug Ford eight months before last year’s election, when we had no idea there would be a federal Conservative Party leadership race this year. It was also over a year before the truckers arrived in Ottawa, at a time when opposing these measures was not popular. This means there was no political opportunism involved, except perhaps the thought that “one day, this madness will be unpopular, and I will be rewarded in some way for doing the right thing.” That is the kind of “opportunism” I can get behind.
Baber has proven “skin in the game” when it comes to fighting for our freedom, because he was willing to speak up at great risk to his career, against his own party. This all proves that he not only says the right things, but genuinely means them and is willing to fight for them, and can be trusted to continue to do so when he’s Prime Minister, including when the next “emergency” comes down the pipeline.
I am not someone who trusts people easily. My own childhood was way too hard to trust easily. I didn’t come to this conclusion about Baber lightly, even after he risked his career for us. It took following his story over the last year, and meeting him in person twice, to fully get behind him. I had a skeptical mindset prior to first meeting him—he is technically a politician after all—but I was extremely impressed, especially with how he acted when almost no one was looking. As I got to know him and his team a bit more in recent weeks by arranging to have him speak at Queen’s Park and exchanging a few emails and Twitter DMs, it has further confirmed that impression.
Whenever the next federal general election happens, we will badly need a new, pro-freedom Prime Minister to reverse all of the damage Trudeau is doing, from mandates to online censorship to the pandemic treaty.
Roman Baber is the man to do it.
Pierre Poilievre
The current frontrunner in the leadership race, suburban Ottawa MP Pierre Poilievre—whom I’ve also had a friendly meeting with—announced his candidacy in February by saying he would make Canada the “freest country in the world” and hanging out with Freedom Convoy truckers. I think it is fantastic that Poilievre has chosen us as his base for the leadership race, and I think he would be a better PM than Charest or Brown, let alone Trudeau.
I also think he is very much a politician—no more, no less—who, thanks to the truckers and the relative success of the PPC last year, made a strategic political decision to make us his base, for now. Keep in mind that:
Poilievre has no record as an advocate against lockdowns and mandates through the first 22.5 months of the pandemic. It wouldn’t surprise me if he was quietly against them all along—it’s impossible to know—but unlike Baber, he waited until getting the green light from his party to speak out, serving as an obedient, quiet foot soldier for Erin O’Toole while O’Toole pivoted hard to the left during last year’s election.
Poilievre doesn’t have the record of a freedom and civil liberties advocate in general over his 18 years as an MP, for example, voting yea for Harper’s mass surveillance bill. If he wasn’t anti-lockdown, anti-mandate, and anti-authoritarian before his leadership campaign, how can we be certain he will be after?
Poilievre said he supports supply management in the first debate. This policy may not be a deal breaker in and of itself, but it’s a tell: That his passion for freedom does not extend as far as freeing new dairy farmers to enter the market or current dairy farmers to produce more dairy products, which would lower prices, likely because he’s afraid of the lobbyists that took down Maxime Bernier’s leadership campaign in 2017. It signals his hyper-libertarian branding is more marketing than anything else, and that there is a good chance he will be beholden to lobbyists and political expedience on other issues too.
Poilievre was, until recently, listed on the WEF website, and his campaign staff has connections to the WEF. Again, it is debatable how concerning this should be in and of itself. I happen to agree with Baber that it’s really the ideas spread at Davos that are the problem, and that many other international organizations are just as bad. But either way, it makes Poilievre’s promise to boycott them seem disingenuous. If he is so against the WEF, why would he have have multiple people with connections to it leading his campaign? If he isn’t, why didn’t he have the integrity to say so?
Poilievre is a prototype of a career politician. He appears to have never held a serious job besides being an MP, which he became shortly after turning 25, giving him a pension at 31. We like to joke that we want to “make Trudeau a drama teacher again”. What will they say about Poilievre? Make him a student again?
Poilievre was immediately endorsed by a dozen Conservative Party MPs and framed by the legacy media as the near-inevitable winner before the race even officially began. I think this is a huge red flag. It is hard not to get the impression he was “pre-chosen” by party insiders and the powers that be, which is not the sort of thing a movement like ours wants to be manipulated by. It’s also dangerous, if we want to make certain Trudeau loses the next election. Candidates that get that treatment tend to fail in the general election.
To be fair, this is typical politician stuff, not super villain stuff. It is hard to get ahead in politics without playing ball with your party, identifying an energetic base, and telling them what they want to hear. That’s why Poilievre is the frontrunner right now, and Baber isn’t running for re-election as an MPP. There are also genuinely good things about Poilievre, like how effectively he’s exposed Trudeau’s corruption and incompetence during Question Period (although, that’s not nearly as significant as Baber standing up to Ford). It’s also still a good thing that he is courting our support, even if it isn’t necessarily genuine.
The problem is that, as a shrewd political strategist and “political insider”, Poilievre will likely disappoint us if and when it’s politically expedient for him to do so. In the 2020 leadership race, Erin O’Toole marketed himself as a “true blue” conservative. Those who followed last year’s election know how that turned out. And that was without him even becoming Prime Minister!
We can’t take that risk when we have The Real Deal available.
Think of the landscape of political ideologies as a body of water, and think of Poilievre as a beach ball currently floating in Freedom Bay. It’s a better place to float than elsewhere, and that’s worth something. But he’s only floating. As the wind and waves change, he could easily float off somewhere else.
Baber is anchored down. He’s proven it.
In summary: Actions speak louder than words.
He Can Win
I believe Roman Baber can win the leadership race, and would then mop the floor with Justin Trudeau (or Chrystia Freeland) in the next general election.
I have seen the argument that, because Poilievre is in the lead and more well-known now, he is better suited to win the next general election. This is circular logic. The leadership race is the test of viability. Baber may be less well-known than most of the candidates right now, but if he were to win the leadership race, that would no longer be the case and that argument would no longer apply—so there is nothing to worry about! For example: Barack Obama was much less well-known than Hillary Clinton when their primary race began, but not when it ended. And he couldn’t have won without changing that.
In fact, I think it’s naive to consider Poilievre especially well-suited for a general election.
I suspect those who do are focusing on loyal Conservative Party partisans, and not those on either side of them, who we’ll also need. Poilievre has done a great job getting party insiders to endorse him and conservative legacy media to coronate him, and saying things that go viral with conservatives, which is all making him the frontrunner in the leadership race, but none of which will help him beat Trudeau. To be effective in the next general election, you’ll need a bigger tent, that includes both moderate / swing voters, and activists and radicals who voted PPC or didn’t vote at all last year.
Nearly every swing voter I talk to, including my own mother, prefers Baber to Poilievre because he is articulate and persuasive. Nearly every activist I talk to prefers Baber to Poilievre (if they know who Baber is) because he has proven he will stand up for freedom when it isn't politically expedient. This combination will make him the most effective against Trudeau.
Regardless, the Liberal Party is set to lose the next election. They are polling way behind. Trudeau is increasingly unpopular. They won the last two by the skin of their teeth—while losing the popular vote—against relatively weak candidates. The economy is in freefall. And voters always get tired of the same party being in power for too long. The Liberals are due to lose by default soon. That makes it especially important to choose the the best possible Prime Minister as the Conservative Party candidate. We have a special opportunity to get one of our own into the highest office.
The hard part will be winning the leadership race.
I believe he can, for several reasons, the first being: There are tens and tens of thousands of freedom activists in Canada, and many more who support us: between 1/3 and 1/2 of the country according to polls. Well over half the country wants the mandates over already. And Baber is the only one who has proven he is with us. Not for a few months but for well over a year. So he is the natural candidate for this large “interest group” to rally around.
We just need to make sure the rest of us know it, and fast.
The 2017 Conservative Party leadership race was so close that ~2000 voters could have swung it from Scheer to Bernier, fewer than the number of people in my “Freedom Convoy Toronto” Facebook group. Fewer than 150,000 voters participated in that race, about the same numbers as in the “Freedom War Room” Facebook group. We have the numbers to seriously impact this race if we want to.
The main problem is that Baber needs help reaching out to the activist community, and the deadline to buy a membership and become eligible to vote is two weeks from today. Once that deadline passes, it will be a lot harder to generate votes, because our only path will be to persuade people who are already party members.
That’s where you come in.
(Note: I have seen a few people say we shouldn’t “split the vote” between Baber and Poilievre. That isn’t a concern, because the leadership race uses a ranked ballot. If you put Baber and Poilievre in the top two spots, then as soon as one is eliminated, your vote is transferred to the other.)
I Need Your Help
If we are going to truly save our country and our democracy, we need to make Roman Baber Prime Minister. If Baber is going to become Prime Minister, our community needs to (figuratively, not literally!) hack this leadership race. I have a plan to do just that.
Here is Phase One, the most important, and by far the most urgent: to get as many pro-freedom anti-mandate/lockdown activists as possible to buy memberships as fast as possible over the next two weeks—with the kind of urgency that shows we’re aware what’s at stake, and aware we only have two weeks.
I believe this is a possibly-once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to save Canada that we can’t afford to not take. And Canada has served as an inspiration to the rest of the world this year, so perhaps it’s even an opportunity to save the world.
For less than the price of a DoorDash order.
If you’d like to help, here are three basic steps you can start with:
Go to www.joinroman.ca/now and buy a membership to the CPC so you can vote in the party’s leadership race. The deadline is only two weeks away, people always forget to do these things when they put it off, and it’s only $15, so: Please don’t wait. Do it now. Do it even if you aren’t fully on board with Baber yet. You will have until September to make a final decision on how/if to vote in the leadership race, and won’t be obligated to vote CPC in the next federal election if the party doesn’t go in the direction you had hoped.
Go to www.joinroman.ca to subscribe to his newsletter and social media. Again, you can do this even if you haven’t committed to voting for him in the leadership race yet.
Join the Roman Baber Fans for Freedom Facebook group, which I am using as an HQ for my independent grassroots campaign. It is already approaching 400 members after a week in existence and will hopefully take off a lot faster as we ramp up this project.
I will assume you did each of those. Great job, thank you!
Here are some other things you can do to get this campaign going:
Tell your friends in the activism community about Baber, including in person, and ask them to do the three steps above if they are on board.
Invite some friends to the Facebook group, using the “invite” button on the right side of the menu a the top.
If you are an “influencer” in the freedom community in Canada, please consider using your large platform to promote this campaign aggressively over the next two weeks.
Whether you are or aren’t, please reach out to others who are and ask them to do the same.
Share this post with some friends or on some of your social media accounts, or to pro-freedom Facebook groups, group chats, etc.
Get into the Twitter mentions and Facebook pages of other leadership candidates or Conservative Party accounts, and promote Baber there, too.
Find a large, Canadian media outlet or podcast and reach out to them asking them to cover Baber more.
Brainstorm ideas or ask questions in the comments of this post, or of the social media posts linking to it, or by messaging me.
If he’s going to win, we need a viral social media campaign that will make sure EVERY Canadian freedom activist knows about Baber and has heard the arguments and plan in this post, in one form or another.
This isn’t going to be easy. But, we have to shoot our shot. That’s what the truckers did. That’s what everyone who’s changed the world did.
As I like to say about showing up to protests: There is too much on the line not to.
Thank you for reading. Please stay updated on my writing, campaigning, and activism by subscribing to this Substack, following me on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and joining the Freedom Convoy Toronto Facebook and Telegram groups.