Juno News - September 15, 2021


Could the rise of Maxime Bernier and the PPC be the deciding factor in the election？


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Candice Malcolm and Hamish Marshall break down the latest polling numbers and take a look across the country to see who's winning and who's losing in the final week of the campaign. They talk about how close the race is between the Liberals and Tories, and why it's still too close to call.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
00:00:00.000 We're neck and neck in the final week of the campaign.
00:00:02.500 Could Maxime Bernier and the People's Party of Canada make the difference in this election campaign?
00:00:06.960 I'm Candice Malcolm and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.
00:00:13.340 Hi everyone, thank you so much for tuning in.
00:00:15.540 If you're watching on YouTube, please don't forget to like this video and hit the subscription button.
00:00:20.760 Please subscribe to True North to stay in touch with everything that's happening in the campaign, in Canadian politics.
00:00:26.320 We will be here with you every step of the way throughout the rest of the campaign and we'll be coming live on election night to break everything down, to give you the results as they come in.
00:00:35.880 We'll have lots of exciting and interesting guests and we'll be there all night with you.
00:00:40.540 So please consider joining us for that live broadcast.
00:00:43.240 Now, like I said, this election is incredibly close.
00:00:45.860 It's too close to call and to help us make sense of the recent numbers and to look at what's happening across the country,
00:00:51.640 I am joined by True North's in-house pollster, Hamish Marshall.
00:00:55.280 Hi Hamish, how are you?
00:00:56.660 Hi Candice, how's it going?
00:00:58.060 So I think what we're seeing at this point in the campaign, Hamish, is more or less evening out.
00:01:03.880 Depending on the poll, the Tories might be up a few points, Liberals might be up a few points,
00:01:08.720 but for best you can tell us, it's the same result as what we saw in your poll that we did through True North last week,
00:01:13.920 which is that the parties are neck and neck, it's virtually a tie.
00:01:16.900 So what does this mean? What can we make of this at this point in the campaign?
00:01:20.000 Well, it's actually, it's fascinating because what we're seeing is, you're right, the national polls are all sort of coming together
00:01:25.640 where generally speaking, it looks like Liberals have perhaps a slightly, maybe a percent, maybe a little, maybe less than a percent.
00:01:32.380 So it's really extraordinarily close.
00:01:35.160 And the really complicated thing is that, you know, Canada, we don't really have an election across the country.
00:01:41.040 We have dozens of regional elections because what's happening in different parts of the country is very, very, very different.
00:01:47.880 And so the real story is in the regional poll and what's happening in each of the provinces and even sub-regions.
00:01:54.600 And the, I guess, frustrating thing is with all these polls being very close,
00:01:58.380 there actually isn't a great deal of agreement on what's going on.
00:02:01.900 Some areas, some polls that might have a similar overall number show Liberals pulling away in Ontario
00:02:07.560 and other ones show a very, very close race in Ontario.
00:02:10.140 So it's very, very difficult to say exactly what's going to happen right now.
00:02:16.620 The polls are not especially helpful in that.
00:02:21.840 Generally speaking, I think, though, if we're tied in the polls on Election Day,
00:02:29.160 that's probably a structural advantage to Liberals.
00:02:31.920 You know, the Conservatives won the last election with 1.1% of the popular vote,
00:02:38.400 but obviously lost the seats.
00:02:40.980 The Liberals won 37 or 36, rather, more seats than the Conservatives.
00:02:47.000 The Conservatives don't seem to be as far ahead in Alberta and Saskatchewan as they were last time,
00:02:53.300 but they still have a structural advantage, which means that,
00:02:56.080 or the Liberals have a structural advantage, which means that the exact same number of,
00:03:00.080 they both get the exact same number of votes nationwide.
00:03:03.040 The Liberals will probably win the most seats.
00:03:05.680 That's really interesting.
00:03:06.480 Well, I saw an article that sort of stuck out to me because it reminded me a little bit of your
00:03:11.600 Writings to Watch report that you did for us, except for it really only focused on three cities.
00:03:16.900 So it was in the National Post.
00:03:18.180 It was, you know, these three area codes could determine who wins the election,
00:03:22.520 and they basically broke it down to the 450, which is the area around Montreal that the Liberals
00:03:27.860 desperately need to win and win back against the bloc.
00:03:30.460 We have the 905, which is the belt around, the sort of suburban belt around Toronto that
00:03:36.500 Stephen Harper was able to do really, really well back in 2011, and right now it's pretty much a
00:03:42.620 Liberal stronghold.
00:03:43.520 And then we have the 604, which is Vancouver proper, and that's typically a very, very strong
00:03:48.900 place for the Liberals.
00:03:51.520 I know that two of those seats right now are held by the NDP.
00:03:53.920 One is held by an independent, Jody Wilson-Rabel, who's not seeking re-election.
00:03:56.920 So the Liberals need to win all of those, but according to polling, Hamish, it shows that
00:04:01.580 the Liberals are in third place in Vancouver, which is really shocking.
00:04:04.180 I don't think I've seen Conservatives do this well, or at least appear to be doing this well
00:04:09.040 in Vancouver in a very long time.
00:04:10.800 So I was wondering if you could just sort of comment, is this election really going to
00:04:15.580 boil down to just the three biggest cities in the country?
00:04:18.380 It's such a big country, there's so much going on.
00:04:21.000 Is it these three, and can you comment on each of the three cities to see how each party
00:04:25.480 is doing?
00:04:25.780 Sure, we'll go east to west.
00:04:28.020 So in Montreal, there's this band of seats in the 450 area code around the city.
00:04:34.400 So they aren't really the seats on the island of Montreal.
00:04:36.980 It's what they call the Rive Nord, the Rive Sud, suburban bedroom communities.
00:04:42.460 And a lot of these seats are very classic Liberal block swing seats.
00:04:46.760 And so the seats the Liberals want to win, places like Cluvial de Mille-Ile, La Paris,
00:04:50.900 Longueil de Saint-Hubert, suburban seats where they, in many cases, Liberals won these seats
00:04:56.300 in 2015, lost them in 2019.
00:04:58.660 The bloc's trying to take them back.
00:05:00.140 But there's also a few seats that the bloc want to pick up themselves.
00:05:03.900 You know, the bloc across Quebec missed eight more seats, but I think less than 2,000 votes
00:05:09.740 or less than.
00:05:10.580 And so there's a lot of very close seats in Quebec.
00:05:13.660 And this goes to my point about the regional polling.
00:05:15.500 We've seen polling numbers in Quebec that are very inconsistent.
00:05:20.600 Some polls will show the bloc up over the last time, which means they're probably going to
00:05:25.220 be cutting into those Liberal seats, could win two or three seats off the Liberals, which
00:05:29.040 means the Liberal quest for a majority is that much harder.
00:05:31.180 It means the Conservatives need to win less seats than the rest of the country in order
00:05:34.500 to get ahead of the Liberals.
00:05:35.940 On the other hand, there's regional polling that seems to show that the Liberals have
00:05:38.940 opened their lead over the bloc a little bit more.
00:05:41.060 And the Liberals could win two or three seats off the bloc, which means that, or maybe even
00:05:46.660 four seats off the bloc, which means that Conservatives and NDPers have to win more seats in other
00:05:51.500 parts of the country in order to offset that.
00:05:56.160 And right now, I don't think anybody truly knows which way it's going to go.
00:06:00.260 It's going to be very tight.
00:06:01.100 But these suburban seats around Montreal are very important.
00:06:05.340 In suburban Toronto, you're right, the 905 was obviously swept by Harper in 2011, and then
00:06:11.140 virtually swept by Trudeau in 2015.
00:06:15.920 And the Conservatives and Liberals won the same number of seats as they did in 2019, as they
00:06:21.500 did in 2015, although the exact seats changed a little bit.
00:06:25.320 I don't think at this point any of the polling seems to suggest that there's a knife edge where,
00:06:30.420 where, you know, 15 or 20 of these seats is going to, it's going to switch, but everything
00:06:34.480 looks like right now is that there's a few seats that Conservatives didn't win by a lot
00:06:38.520 last time, or certainly didn't lose by a lot last time, which are in play.
00:06:43.120 So a place like Whitby, which is right, which is adjacent to Oshawa is in Durham region,
00:06:47.340 where Erin O'Toole is from, or a seat like King Vaughan, which is the northern rural part,
00:06:53.960 we've talked about it earlier.
00:06:55.960 And then there's a seat like Richmond Hill, where the Conservatives lost by a couple hundred
00:06:58.820 votes.
00:06:59.560 The twist is in a seat like Richmond Hill, which has been very, very interesting, is obviously
00:07:04.400 we're seeing the PPC cost the Conservatives that seat in the last election, because PPC
00:07:08.760 is clearly on the rise.
00:07:10.000 And there's no Green candidate in that seat, which means the Greens got, I think, 1800 votes
00:07:17.080 there last time.
00:07:18.080 A lot of those voters probably aren't even aware there's no Green candidate, but they're
00:07:21.420 going to walk into the polling booth and they're going to decide who they're going to vote for.
00:07:24.540 And some of them will vote Conservatives, some will vote PPC, but a lot more are going to
00:07:28.680 vote Liberal and NDP.
00:07:30.080 So that gives the Liberals a built-in advantage in a seat that the Conservatives could actually
00:07:33.940 gain votes and still not gain that seat.
00:07:36.140 So it's going to be very, very tight, but really what we're looking at in the 905 is
00:07:40.300 whether the Conservatives can pick up at best maybe five or six more seats.
00:07:44.420 We're not talking about, none of the polling syndicated sort of sweep in 2011 or where the
00:07:49.980 Conservatives could win, you know, a dozen or 15 more seats.
00:07:54.320 And just to interject there, I know you're going to get to the 604 in Vancouver, but I
00:07:58.120 wonder, because this week the sort of big news story was the Jody Wilson-Raybould book coming
00:08:02.640 out, really damning against Justin Trudeau.
00:08:04.380 You know, something else interesting happened, which is that the former Liberal MP, Selena
00:08:08.260 Cesar Chavanes, came out and endorsed the Tories and said that she was going to be voting
00:08:13.080 for her local Conservative, which for a high-profile former MP to come out, and she's based in the
00:08:19.480 905, would something like that have an impact on the vote in her riding and sort of more broadly
00:08:25.500 in that suburban belt?
00:08:27.700 I look at it.
00:08:28.420 It certainly helps the Conservatives.
00:08:29.720 And the Conservative candidate there in Whitby, whose name I can't quite remember, but she's
00:08:34.860 a local city councillor.
00:08:36.500 She's an extremely impressive candidate. 1.00
00:08:38.360 So they've got a strong candidate.
00:08:39.560 And the endorsement from the former Liberal MP certainly helps, but I don't think we should
00:08:45.360 overstate it.
00:08:46.020 You know, in the last election, that Liberal, the former Liberal MP didn't run again.
00:08:50.860 And it was very, very clear about her disputes with Trudeau.
00:08:53.680 She was extremely critical of Trudeau.
00:08:55.460 And the Conservatives did better in that seat than they had done previously, but that's
00:08:59.840 Jim Flaherty's old seat.
00:09:00.940 It's certainly a seat with a Conservative base.
00:09:02.720 And if there was sort of seats the Conservatives were going to do better in last time, that
00:09:05.380 was one of them.
00:09:06.440 So her attacks on Trudeau in 2019 weren't enough to deliver it to the Conservatives.
00:09:11.880 Her endorsement, certainly helpful.
00:09:13.880 We'll definitely move some votes.
00:09:15.720 But is it 5,000 votes?
00:09:18.040 Probably not.
00:09:18.940 Is it five?
00:09:19.600 It's probably closer to 500 than 5,000, which might make all the difference.
00:09:23.180 But it's, I don't think we should expect that she's got some magic switch that she, you
00:09:29.180 know, she's a one-term MP, let's face it, right?
00:09:31.020 And she doesn't have the ability to instantly change the seat like that. 1.00
00:09:36.400 And then moving on to Vancouver.
00:09:38.060 So I just, I think there was a little confusion over some of the numbers we're seeing.
00:09:41.140 Most of the numbers we're seeing are actually province-wide numbers in BC that show the
00:09:44.200 Liberals in third place.
00:09:45.680 And the city of Vancouver, the 604 region, really includes all the suburbs of Vancouver as
00:09:49.940 well, which is where it's really at play.
00:09:51.640 The seats in the city, I actually think the Liberals are going to gain one.
00:09:55.800 The chances of the Liberals winning Jody Wilson-Raybould's old seat, I think, are extremely, extremely
00:10:00.540 high.
00:10:02.800 If she'd run again, I think she could have held on, but she obviously decided not to.
00:10:08.120 But the further complication is that what we're seeing, broadly speaking, some polls
00:10:13.780 show the Liberals in third, some show them in second.
00:10:16.020 It's hard to say.
00:10:16.580 Most polls seem to agree in British Columbia, the NDP is on the rise.
00:10:20.940 That probably means that there's seats, there's a couple of things happening.
00:10:24.180 One is there's some seats NDP can win.
00:10:26.240 So there's a seat called Coquitlam, Port Moodie Coquitlam, which the Conservatives won
00:10:31.540 by a couple hundred votes last time over the NDP.
00:10:33.740 Liberals were in close third.
00:10:35.500 NDP chances of picking up that seat are very good.
00:10:38.240 But on the other hand, there's seats like Langley-Cloverdale, where the Liberals are
00:10:43.780 coming hard and want to take that seat from the Conservatives.
00:10:46.720 The rise in the NDP probably splits the vote and lets the Conservatives squeak through.
00:10:51.600 There's other seats the Conservatives could pick up.
00:10:53.460 There's Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam, which we can end up seeing a rise in the NDP, take
00:11:00.420 some Liberal votes and let the Conservatives win.
00:11:02.480 Although, like Richmond Hill, there's no Green candidate there.
00:11:05.100 And the Greens got about 4,000 votes there last time, which is certainly going to give
00:11:09.580 the Conservatives a bit of a structural disadvantage.
00:11:12.540 So I think it's extremely tight.
00:11:14.460 I think the Conservatives can win some more seats in the 905 and the broader Greater Vancouver
00:11:22.860 region, but not a lot.
00:11:24.720 There's not 20 or 30 seats here that can be won.
00:11:28.640 The other interesting thing that I just want to point out is that we now have the
00:11:35.060 total number of people who requested mail-in ballots, which is over a million Canadians
00:11:40.280 are going to be voting by mail in this election, which is, I think, what 80,000 voted last time.
00:11:44.340 So it's a huge, huge number.
00:11:47.320 Interestingly enough, it's far less than what Elections Canada was expecting.
00:11:50.220 Elections Canada in the spring was predicting between three and four million people would
00:11:53.380 vote in ballots by mail.
00:11:57.100 And what's fascinating about this is that the top 10 ridings that I think nine of the top
00:12:02.620 10 ridings for mail-in ballots are in British Columbia.
00:12:06.800 And I think six or five of those top 10 are in Vancouver Island.
00:12:11.220 And they're where the NDP is highly organized.
00:12:13.980 I think the NDP is going to be, I think we're going to see some very interesting votes where
00:12:17.060 the NDP has embraced a mail-in ballot strategy.
00:12:20.340 And most likely when we're going to see their votes might be counted a little later,
00:12:23.940 it might be a little delayed.
00:12:25.200 And we can see seats on election night, it looks like this NDP might be losing some seats
00:12:29.160 and they win them in later parts of the count, which will be very interesting.
00:12:32.740 And it also thinks the NDP is going hard after a place like NIMO and perhaps even Saanich
00:12:37.720 Gulf Islands, where they were the green parties at play.
00:12:40.360 Interesting.
00:12:40.940 And so would that affect our ability to know who becomes prime minister on election night?
00:12:46.400 Like how, do you know how delayed these things will be and whether this will turn into something
00:12:51.560 like we saw in the last US election where it took, what, a week for them to certify president?
00:12:55.600 I don't think it'll be anything like that.
00:12:57.220 You know, we generally still know within a few hours, you know, it might be take four or
00:13:02.880 five hours to know as opposed to, you know, two hours.
00:13:07.100 But it's also hard to say, you know, a lot of these seats are reasonably safe NDP seats.
00:13:12.560 So we'll see how that plays out.
00:13:14.740 But like a million votes being counted this way, there's going to definitely be some
00:13:18.680 disputes, but when they arrive, there is, you know, there's people, the mail-in ballots
00:13:24.960 have to be received by election day, by I think five o'clock locally on election day
00:13:28.900 or maybe by the close of polls.
00:13:31.420 There's always going to be, when was this, does this bag of mail come in, does it come
00:13:35.340 in late, you know, so it could result in some very, very, in some very tight races ending
00:13:41.880 up in some sort of judicial reviews and that kind of thing.
00:13:44.900 Interesting.
00:13:45.440 All right.
00:13:45.660 I want to pick up on something else you mentioned when you were talking about the Richmond Hill
00:13:48.640 seat.
00:13:49.260 You mentioned how the PPC were the spoilers for the conservatives in the 2019 election
00:13:53.560 in that race.
00:13:54.180 I think there was two or three writings that turned out that way.
00:13:57.540 The story, one of the major stories of this election has certainly been the huge, huge rise
00:14:02.620 and growth of the PPC.
00:14:03.980 We mentioned this on our debate night show that some polls have them up at 10, 11 percent.
00:14:10.640 You know, we've seen huge rallies and protests across the country.
00:14:14.520 Trudeau is sort of turning them into his biggest campaign foe and really going after them in pretty
00:14:21.580 nasty attacks.
00:14:22.960 So let's talk about the rise of the People's Party, Maxime Bernier.
00:14:27.380 First, do you think Bernier has a good shot at regaining his own seat out in Beauce?
00:14:35.200 I think it's extremely difficult to say at this point.
00:14:38.740 The PPC's polling numbers in Quebec as a province are pretty poor.
00:14:43.020 They're universally seen as their worst province.
00:14:46.000 That doesn't mean there isn't something different going on in Beauce.
00:14:48.160 And we've certainly seen the poll that I did for True North show that the people turning
00:14:54.360 their backs on government and being concerned about government overreach is highest in Quebec.
00:15:00.000 So I think there's the potential there.
00:15:02.000 But Maxime Bernier has been traveling in the country.
00:15:04.520 You know, Richard LeHoux, the Conservative MP, has been working the ground hard.
00:15:10.220 So I think there's a good chance Maxime Bernier will do better than he did last time.
00:15:14.640 And it might be close.
00:15:17.220 But if I had to bet, I'd say that Bernier probably won't win it.
00:15:21.060 But I believe there's a greater chance of winning it today than I would have at the beginning
00:15:26.220 of the campaign four weeks ago.
00:15:28.400 And what about the rest of the country?
00:15:30.020 So even if they don't have a good shot at winning a seat, is there a possibility that
00:15:35.280 they will make a difference in terms of those close seats?
00:15:38.920 I know you mentioned that some of the Green Party candidates aren't running.
00:15:41.720 It seems to me that a lot of the people who might have voted for a protest party like
00:15:45.180 the Greens may have swung around to support the PPC.
00:15:48.240 The polls seem to suggest, I mean, given that, you know, you have a poll that shows the Conservatives
00:15:53.080 leading and the PPC at 10 or 11 percent.
00:15:56.380 I mean, it's not like that 10 or 11 percent came directly from the Conservative Party.
00:16:00.460 The votes are coming from lots of places, it seems.
00:16:03.460 That's exactly right.
00:16:04.240 You know, I would say the general consensus is in the last election, the PPC, you know,
00:16:09.240 Bernier had just left the Conservative Party, PPC probably got two thirds of its votes from
00:16:13.640 Conservative voters.
00:16:15.060 In this election, that number seems to be down to maybe 45 percent, maybe 50, but probably
00:16:20.640 40, 40, 45, somewhere in there.
00:16:22.880 And the rest is coming from habitual non-voters, people new to the political process.
00:16:27.700 So it always happens when there's a new party that tracks people in who are new, as well
00:16:32.180 as Liberals, NDPers and Greens and Quebec Sunblock, who have for a variety of reasons,
00:16:38.400 you know, they've got questions of what vaccines have moved over to the PPC.
00:16:42.080 I agree that I think it's actually probably going to disproportionately pull from some of
00:16:45.580 that Green vote.
00:16:47.820 Because you're right, there's a protest party, there's sort of people who vote for smaller
00:16:52.160 parties, are attracted to other smaller parties.
00:16:54.700 So I think it's going to take that, but it will take, they are taking Liberal and NDP
00:17:00.260 votes as well.
00:17:03.000 But overall, it seems to be that the Conservative vote is where the most, is the plurality, whereas
00:17:10.200 last time it was the majority.
00:17:12.260 Interesting.
00:17:12.920 Well, thank you so much, Hamish, for this report.
00:17:15.140 We're really excited for our election night coverage.
00:17:17.740 You're going to be joining us for most of the evening, I believe, and helping us break down
00:17:21.700 all the results, making the calls when they come in, and helping us make sense.
00:17:25.820 So hopefully it won't be, you know, an eight, ten hour night like we've seen in the past.
00:17:31.720 But with those mail-in ballots, who knows, we could be in for a long night on election
00:17:37.800 night.
00:17:38.380 That's true.
00:17:38.960 We'll see.
00:17:39.880 All right.
00:17:40.180 Thank you so much for joining us.
00:17:41.660 I'm Candace Malcolm, and this is The Candace Malcolm Show.