Why did Canada vote for Justin Trudeau in the 2015 election? Why did they vote for him? And why did they not vote for his opponent, Pierre Dorion, who was a much better candidate? In this episode of the podcast, we talk about why the people of Canada voted for Trudeau, and why they voted for him in the first place.
00:00:00.000If there's 70 percent, and I've seen the same polls as you, if there's 70 percent of people who believe there's too much immigration and they want it shut down, why were they voting for this guy?
00:00:09.160Polyev was talking about it during the election campaign, but I've become more aware that it's pretty much a uniparty in this country.
00:00:17.400And I thought the conservatives would give us a slower road to hell.
00:00:38.560He wasted two years making his whole campaign about the carbon tax and Justin Trudeau.
00:00:43.260And that blew up in his face when both of them were removed at the start of the year.
00:00:46.460This left him in a difficult position.
00:00:47.900They talked a little bit about immigration during the election, but it was mostly around opposing the century initiative.
00:00:52.780It was talking about this scary dystopian world where by 2100, there'd be 100 million people instead of grappling with the issues today.
00:01:00.900If he had embraced it and talked about the complications caused by mass immigration in this day and age, I think they could have been a lot more successful.
00:01:07.460But to talk about why Mark Carney won, I think it goes back to those questions about Canadian identity.
00:01:12.000And an important part about Canadian identity that we didn't cover at the start is this kind of strain of anti-Americanism.
00:01:18.040Canada as a people, Canada as a country was founded in rejection to America, like a large component of our English speaking kind of founding stock were literally loyalists who were living in the US who fought against the Americans and the Revolutionary War on the side of the British and then as such were kind of pariahs from society and came up north to help start Canada.
00:01:38.320Canadians like very instinctually have these anti-American instincts.
00:01:42.720Now, in more recent years, especially in the post-war period,
00:01:45.760we become very integrated with the Americans culturally, economically.
00:01:49.080But there's still this lasting instinct within us
00:01:52.060that just recoils of the idea of becoming America.
00:01:54.820So when Trump made this the central election issue
00:01:57.520and the liberals were more quick to kind of jump on it