Juno News - August 24, 2021


Could Erin O'Toole actually become Prime Minister？


Episode Stats

Length

10 minutes

Words per Minute

185.50296

Word Count

1,881

Sentence Count

111


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 The polls are not looking good for the Liberals, but does that mean that Aaron O'Toole could
00:00:03.340 actually become Prime Minister? Trinor's in-house pollster joins us to break it all down. I'm
00:00:07.520 Candace Malcolm and this is The Candace Malcolm Show.
00:00:14.380 We have seen a remarkable change in the polls over the last week. Now we've talked about it
00:00:19.660 on the show that Justin Trudeau is not running a very good campaign. A few of his major wedge
00:00:24.320 issues have sort of fallen apart, but the way that the polls have reacted is quite sharp and
00:00:29.600 quite telling. So I'm going to go through a couple of them here and I'm joined by Hamish
00:00:33.960 Marshall, who is our in-house pollster at Trinor, who's going to help us make sense of it all. I
00:00:38.600 think the most interesting thing I've seen so far is the 338 Canada breakdown, which is
00:00:43.920 the aggregator of all the polls. So on August 13th, before this thing was called, the odds
00:00:48.920 of Trudeau winning a majority government were at 58%. No wonder he called the election. By
00:00:54.760 a week later, August 22nd, the odds of a Trudeau winning a majority is down to 22%. And meanwhile,
00:01:01.540 the odds of the Conservatives winning a minority government is up at 20%. So Hamish, the chances
00:01:07.460 of the Trudeau Liberals forming a majority, about one in five, the odds of the Conservatives
00:01:12.220 forming a minority, one in five. What do you make of this?
00:01:16.760 Well, it's been obviously a big move in the polls for the Conservatives. I mean, they had been
00:01:21.240 earlier in the summer, it's historic lows. And they're moving into a position where,
00:01:25.560 depending on the pollster, they're somewhere between five and five points behind to one
00:01:30.360 point ahead in some cases. So this election has become extremely competitive. You know,
00:01:36.680 as much as we'd seen in previous polls, like we spoke about in the past, people didn't seem scared
00:01:41.240 by the idea of a liberal majority government. People are questioning the rationale for this election,
00:01:46.680 and Trudeau has not had a particularly good reason for it. And it's given them some stumbles. And
00:01:54.280 O'Toole has come out of the gate strong.
00:01:57.720 Absolutely. Well, let's talk about that, because there was a poll that came out that showed that
00:02:01.840 the vast majority of Canadians don't want an election. They think that we could have waited
00:02:06.320 a year calling this election a power grab. So we talked about this on the night that the writ was
00:02:12.480 drawn up, and the election was announced that, in some ways, Trudeau has a fair rationale for
00:02:17.120 calling an election, just given that the pandemic is over. And he wants a new agenda for his new
00:02:21.280 spending, his new vision for spending in Canada. It doesn't seem like Canadians really agree. So
00:02:28.160 let's go back to that question. Do you think that that he will pay for forcing an early election that,
00:02:34.000 I mean, if you're looking at the polls right now, we may end up in the exact same boat with another
00:02:38.880 liberal minority? Do you think Trudeau will pay for that? And do you think Trudeau will be able to
00:02:43.280 maintain his role as prime minister and leader of the party if that happens?
00:02:46.640 Well, I think I think it's up to Trudeau. I think if the election was held today, I think that would
00:02:50.960 be a big, big problem for him. The election's gonna be held on September 20th. So, you know, Trudeau's
00:02:56.160 got the better part of a month now to get it right to figure out what to figure out how to give that
00:03:00.880 rationale and figure out what he needs to do going forward. So what is a problem today, whether it'll be
00:03:06.640 a problem September 20th remains to be seen. If he wins a minority, the question is, I don't think
00:03:13.200 I don't think there's there'd be a push to get rid of him as as a liberal leader. I think the question
00:03:18.880 is whether he wants to stick around with something like that. He is, you know, he has completely remade
00:03:25.440 the Liberal Party in his own image. And I don't believe there would be any mechanism or any desire
00:03:31.280 or capacity to really to move past him. It doesn't come from him in turn. Interesting.
00:03:37.120 Let's talk about this ECOS poll because it's getting a lot of attention. And I'm not sure if
00:03:41.120 it's an outlier. I'm not sure if it's completely accurate. But let's let's go through and say so
00:03:46.160 ECOS asked Canadians, how do you plan to vote in the upcoming election? Now on August 15th,
00:03:52.080 we had 35% saying Liberal 31% saying Conservative on August 21st. So a week later,
00:03:57.520 the Conservatives are ahead in this poll 32.8% just by a very, very, very small margin. And the
00:04:02.880 Liberals are at 32.4%. So is it possible that the Conservatives are actually winning this election so
00:04:08.400 far? Well, I mean, if we look at all the polls, there's there's clearly a two or one three point
00:04:13.920 gap called a two point gap. The Liberals seem to be ahead across all the pollsters. You know,
00:04:18.720 this is a rolling poll, which they take a certain number of poll of interviews every night and drop off
00:04:24.400 a previous night. So these sort of things, you think it's easy to move up and down a point or two.
00:04:30.800 And they've got the Conservatives ahead by 0.4%. I point out that in the in the 2019 election,
00:04:36.320 Conservatives won the election by 1.1% in terms of the popular vote, but still lost in terms of the
00:04:42.320 number of seats. So, you know, a lead of of 0.4% is certainly encouraging for the Conservatives. And I
00:04:49.200 don't want to I don't want to take that away in any way. But extrapolating that to to victory is,
00:04:54.160 is, I think, very, very premature. Interesting. Let's talk a little bit about the demographics,
00:05:00.000 because there was an Ipsos poll that came out on August 24, that I found quite interesting and
00:05:05.840 very surprising. So it had the Conservatives ahead in Ontario at 35 versus the Liberals 31. The
00:05:13.360 Conservatives ahead in British Columbia at 34 versus the Liberals 31 in British Columbia. And this is
00:05:18.640 surprising to me. In Saskatchewan and Manitoba, the NDP are surging at 39% to the Conservatives 32. So
00:05:26.800 if this was the case and this held, Hamish, this would be a pretty different map than the 2019
00:05:31.760 election where the Conservatives swept Saskatchewan, didn't do that well in Ontario, British Columbia.
00:05:36.880 So what is happening and why is it so different this time around? Well, that's what Ipsos' numbers are
00:05:43.840 saying. Other pollsters are showing different provincial numbers. But, you know, you're right,
00:05:47.840 it would be a different map. Not so much in British Columbia, it would actually still be good
00:05:51.280 news for the Liberals. You know, the Conservatives got 34% in British Columbia in 2019. So this isn't
00:05:57.520 an improvement. But the Liberals got, I believe, 27 or so. So this is actually an improvement for
00:06:03.680 the Liberals. So you can still see the Liberals gain in that environment. Manitoba and Saskatchewan
00:06:07.440 numbers are fascinating. You'd see the NDP picking up seats in Winnipeg for sure, and maybe a
00:06:13.520 Conservative seat in Saskatoon West. The interesting thing is that in Winnipeg is that while those
00:06:20.480 numbers, the big NDP surge, those are almost certainly going to be the Liberal seats that
00:06:24.240 would fall to the NDP, which further hurts Trudeau's quest for majority. And then Ontario,
00:06:31.200 as far as I know, Ipsos, I think, is the only pollster that puts Conservatives ahead in Ontario.
00:06:34.960 But a close Ontario, even a split, even if the Conservatives and Liberals are completely tied in
00:06:40.160 Ontario, that would mean 15, maybe 20 more seats for the Conservatives. You know, the Conservatives
00:06:46.720 lost in Ontario by about 8.5% last time. So even a tie would be a significant, significant change.
00:06:52.640 Well, that could be right there, the difference between a Liberal majority or not. One other
00:06:57.760 demographic poll that I wanted to point out, because I just thought it was so interesting and so counter to
00:07:02.960 what you think about when you think about who the Conservative base is. This is an ECOS poll from
00:07:07.760 August 22, and it shows that the Conservatives have the most support among 18 to 34-year-olds,
00:07:14.560 33% to the Liberals, 28 to the NDP, 20. That's really interesting to me. And then the next youngest
00:07:20.720 demographic, 35 to 49-year-olds, the Conservatives are also leading in that with 33% to the Liberals,
00:07:26.560 27 NDP, 18. Can we talk about what it is that young people are seeing in the Conservative Party and
00:07:34.880 in Erin O'Toole that are making them shift in this direction?
00:07:37.840 Well, I don't mean to burst anyone's bubble, but I think that's more likely to come out of
00:07:42.480 methodological issues, because ECOS is collecting their data via demon dial, which is going to skew
00:07:48.080 towards landlines. And you're typically going to get quite small samples of people under, really under
00:07:54.560 about 40 or 45, answering the phone numbers with landlines. And that can create some anomalies.
00:08:01.440 You know, if we look at the polling from other pollsters, Angus Reid, for instance, and
00:08:12.080 Abacus, companies like that, what we're seeing is that the Conservatives have definitely, we've seen
00:08:17.120 they've grown. They've grown with middle-aged men. They've grown with older men as well. They're still
00:08:23.040 behind with older women and with women between middle-aged women, 35 and 54. And this is the key
00:08:29.840 group. Conservatives, in order for the Conservatives to win a government, they have to basically be tied
00:08:36.720 with women, you know, win men in general and men over 35 fairly strongly, and then basically be tied
00:08:43.520 with women over 35, ideally be ahead with women over 35. One of the more interesting things that's
00:08:53.440 changed in the last a little while, last 10 years or so, is that when Harper was winning his governments,
00:08:59.600 he won women over 55 by fairly strong margins. But Trudeau has won that group in 2015 quite decisively,
00:09:09.680 and in 2019, not quite as decisively. And Conservatives actually did better with middle-aged women than
00:09:15.040 with older women. But those are both groups that the Conservatives need to win back. What we're seeing
00:09:20.800 is that most pollsters show the numbers are decent with those groups, but not where they need to be. You
00:09:25.840 know, the Conservatives looking across, you know, there's, I don't know how many polls, there's been a dozen
00:09:29.840 polls out in the last week or so. Looking across them and taking them as a group, we see is the
00:09:36.400 Conservatives have a strong base that can allow them to see a path towards victory. But they're
00:09:43.040 not there by any stretch of the imagination. There's an awful lot of politics to come over
00:09:46.880 the next three weeks. Well, absolutely. The campaign is still young. We still have four weeks left of
00:09:51.840 campaigning and election. So we will continue to have Hamish Marshall to break it all down and help us
00:09:58.000 make sense of it all. True North's in-house pollster, Hamish Marshall, thank you so much for joining us.
00:10:06.400 Thank you.