Businessman and reality TV star Kevin O’Leary plans to wait to see who else enters the Conservative leadership race before he decides whether to run himself, he said in an interview Thursday.

O’Leary, speaking from New York, said that he is putting a team together so that he can enter the race if he decides that he can win, but plans to wait until the “the herd gets culled by the natural Darwinian forces of finance.”

Earlier this month, O’Leary went to Saskatoon to observe the first Conservative leadership debate. He was impressed by the field, he said, but observed that with 12 candidates on the stage, the rivals were stuck with “20-second sound bites.”

“The assumptions about who’s going to be leading in two months: unknown. Let’s wait and see. Because there’s some very interesting other candidates contemplating coming into the race. And to be honest with you, I’m waiting for them. Is there going to be somebody else that’s going to change the dynamic of the race?”

O’Leary said he can wait to enter the race until closer to the Feb. 24 deadline.

“Obviously time is starting to run out but I enjoy a couple of benefits that I’m taking advantage of,” he said. “One is I don’t have a name recognition problem. I don’t really have a money problem either. So I can afford to enter this race a little later.”

He just won’t get the exposure he wants on a crowded stage, he said.

“I don’t think the networks are going to pick this up until we’ve distilled it down to four or five. There’s just not going to be enough press. I’m better off just messaging from the sidelines, which I’ve been doing relatively effectively.”

O’Leary said that he would like to campaign on an economic platform, pivoting to attack the record of the Liberals at every opportunity.

He said he does not agree with Kellie Leitch’s call for screening immigrants for their grasp of “Canadian values”.

“I’m half Lebanese and half Irish. The idea of taking away one of Canada’s strongest attributes — its ability to be an open society to any immigrant that feels they can contribute — it would be a mistake. I also don’t think that’s the issue that’s paramount for the country right now. The job of the prime minister is to provide safety and, above all, economic growth. That is the Number 1 mandate.”

O’Leary said he expects Leitch to soften her positions as the race goes on, because screening for Canadian values would not be a winning platform in a general election.

“I look at it and say to myself she’s doing what she has to do to get name recognition in a very crowded field,” he said. “It’s controversial. It’s gotten a lot of press. The question the membership has to ask themselves is, is that a platform you can lead a national contest with? Does that really work in Canada?

“Because clearly the Conservatives lost the last election on this very issue. And so I don’t think they’re going to want to revisit it. But she’s not stupid. She’s a very smart woman. She’ll probably pivot.”

O’Leary repeatedly attacked Justin Trudeau, Finance Minister Bill Morneau and Gerald Butts, Trudeau’s principal secretary, who previously played key roles in the government of Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty.

O’Leary recently has been attacking Butts directly on Twitter.

“I’m trying to shine the light on Gerald Butts,” he said. “He’s the policy maker who’s destroying Canada. He destroyed Ontario. He’s the Wizard of Oz behind the felt curtain.

“I enjoy a very large social media platform, a large media platform. I get to about 10 million eyeballs a week. So I want to shine the light of transparency on Gerald Butts. I want to put some metrics of performance and efficiency and what he’s doing, because they’re terrible. I think that’s really what the opportunity is for the Conservative party is to start to talk about how Canada can be more efficiently run. We don’t have to do stupid things any more.”

Trudeau has been polling well ever since the election, and commentators have pointed to the failure of high-profile candidates like Peter MacKay to enter the race to suggest that the Conservatives think he’ll likely win another term in 2019. O’Leary disagrees, saying he sees Trudeau as the “Kim Campbell of his generation.

“Everybody smells blood in the water. Trudeau’s a one-term kid. That’s what it looks like to me.”

O’Leary, who was born in Montreal, does not speak French. He would be the first unilingual candidate to lead a national party in decades, but he says his economic message would allow him to sell his ideas in Quebec.

“I tell my fellow Quebecers that there are three official languages in Quebec. There’s English. There’s French. And there are jobs.”

Many Conservatives on other leadership campaigns doubt that O’Leary is serious, suggesting he’s seeking publicity and intends to continue with his career on the Shark Tank. A May report in Maclean’s said that he’d recently signed a new two-year contract for the show, which is set to film in June 2017.

But O’Leary says he doesn’t really need to go into politics to boost his profile.

“The reason I do this is not for publicity. I don’t need more publicity. I’m doing this because I’m a pissed-off taxpayer. I look at Morneau, Butts and Trudeau as the three riders of the apocalypse.”