Juno News - Does Conservative upset mean end of Trudeau？

00:00:00.000 Transcription by CastingWords

00:00:30.000 Thank you.

00:01:00.000 welcome to canada's most irreverent talk show this is the andrew lawton show brought to you by true

00:01:19.720 north hello and welcome to you all canada's most irreverent talk show here this is the

00:01:30.120 andrew lawton show on true north on this tuesday june 25th 2024 it is a rather momentous day and

00:01:39.640 i well momentous for two reasons number one i'm going to admit that i was wrong i know it never

00:01:45.960 ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever happens. Don't tell my wife I said that and don't fact check it

00:01:51.820 for the love of all that is holy. But I try to not make predictions because when I make predictions,

00:01:56.440 you can be wrong. If you don't make a prediction, you can't be wrong. It's actually a great way to,

00:02:00.420 you know, to do the opposite of that old Wayne Gretzky quote of you'll always miss 100% of the

00:02:04.480 shots you don't take. Well, conversely, you'll never miss a shot that you don't take. But anyway,

00:02:09.700 let me just point out here. I said yesterday that I didn't think the Conservatives were going to win

00:02:14.600 St. Paul's. Toronto St. Paul's is the riding in Midtown Toronto that has been

00:02:18.880 in Liberal hands since 1993. It was not a seat that elected a Conservative since 1988,

00:02:26.780 but well, let's just take a look at the poll numbers from yesterday's by-election. Conservative

00:02:32.540 Don Stewart, 15,555 votes. That is 42.1%. Liberal Leslie Church, 14,965 votes. Not too,

00:02:44.120 too many behind, but enough. That is 40.5%, meaning that the Conservatives have won Toronto

00:02:50.740 St. Paul's. Now, this is quite something. Let us just put this into a little bit of context here

00:02:57.660 for what this means in Toronto. I like maps. I like geography. Let's put up a political map of

00:03:04.900 Toronto. Yeah, look at that sea of red all the way from Lake Ontario right up to Steele Zav, 0.57

00:03:12.300 and then smack dab in the middle, that little glimmer of blue,

00:03:16.100 that is Don Stewart's riding, the MP elect for Toronto St. Paul's.

00:03:20.560 If Justin Trudeau's view of economics holds politically

00:03:23.200 that these things grow from the heart outward,

00:03:25.960 that will not be good for the Conservatives

00:03:28.460 by the time the next election rolls around.

00:03:32.200 But this is where we get into the fascinating discussion

00:03:36.740 of what exactly went wrong for the Liberals

00:03:40.500 and whether you can extrapolate anything from this moving forward.

00:03:44.440 Now, Leslie Church was, by all accounts, a star Liberal candidate.

00:03:47.960 She was a longtime Liberal staffer, well-liked personally,

00:03:51.580 not from the riding, but from Toronto.

00:03:53.680 She had been Chrystia Freeland's chief of staff up until quite recently.

00:03:57.900 Leslie Church is the Liberal who lost Toronto St. Paul's.

00:04:02.220 Now, I don't want to blame her.

00:04:04.180 I think Justin Trudeau bears a lot more of the blame, to be honest.

00:04:07.100 I think this is just another church that went down in flames on Justin Trudeau's watch.

00:04:11.920 But this is, I think, an interesting dilemma, because the Justin Trudeau brand is so tarnished,

00:04:18.920 is so damaging, that even in one of the Liberal strongholds that the Liberals held in 2011,

00:04:25.340 when Michael Ignatiev got just blown out of the water, they could not win that in a by-election.

00:04:31.020 What's changed?

00:04:31.900 Well, you've got more time with Justin Trudeau at the helm, which has not obviously worked

00:04:35.860 out well for him.

00:04:36.500 you have a new leader who is, in actuality, bringing a fair bit of hope and momentum

00:04:42.660 towards Canadians. Pierre Polyev is doing well. He is doing well. He is not the scary,

00:04:49.520 evil conservative boogeyman that the Liberals have tried to make him out to be. Yesterday,

00:04:54.220 the Liberal Party was tweeting nonstop from all its accounts about how Conservatives are going to

00:04:58.640 roll back abortion rights, and they're trying to do this. Again, abortion and assault rifles. These

00:05:03.100 the two things the liberals talk about when their backs are up against the wall but it didn't work

00:05:09.660 it did not work now i thought this was going to be close i thought the conservatives were

00:05:14.460 going to be within five percent of the liberals i was correct although it was on the other end of

00:05:18.460 it conservatives were ahead by less than five points rather than behind the liberals and

00:05:23.740 conservatives were both downplaying expectations right up until the polls closed and even a little

00:05:28.300 little bit after. But the Liberals threw everything they had at this. The Liberals threw everything.

00:05:33.980 They had cabinet ministers knocking on doors. Remember this photo of Ahmed Hassan? He was

00:05:39.040 going there. And do you remember if you, I don't know if we have the close-up, the woman's face

00:05:44.140 when, ah, there we go. Evidently, that poor woman who recoiled when a Liberal cabinet minister came 0.99

00:05:50.420 to her door was far more representative of the people of Toronto St. Paul's than anyone else.

00:05:55.840 I decided given the results and what happened yesterday we had to memorialize that pivotal

00:06:02.800 moment in a key way and what better more Canadian way than this yes that is a Canadian heritage

00:06:09.480 minute for you there it is part of our history so we've had some fun about this I'm going to

00:06:15.460 continue to have some fun about this Sheila Copps interestingly enough the former deputy

00:06:20.180 prime minister herself took to Twitter late last night as she probably shouldn't do and said you 0.99

00:06:25.820 have to wonder why the Tories with a 20% lead in the national polls didn't do better in a riding

00:06:31.400 with a 15% Jewish vote. Maybe the community likes liberal party policies. So she thinks that, oh,

00:06:39.260 if all the Jews voted, well, all the Jews voted liberal, that's why conservatives didn't win 0.84

00:06:43.980 when they should have. Well, maybe just maybe that's not the way it works. For starters,

00:06:49.280 ethnic groups are not a monolith. But if there is a quote unquote Jewish vote,

00:06:53.840 I think that was a lot more in line with the conservatives, which is why the liberals just like scrambled to get Anthony Housefather, the pro-Israel, one of like the only two pro-Israel MPs in the liberal caucus, to go down and campaign in St. Paul's because they were worried, and rightfully so, that a lot of Jews in that riding didn't want to vote liberal anymore, even though they had for much of, well, the last, you know, 35 years or so. 0.84

00:07:20.200 So what's interesting here, if we look at this, and by the way, this was a by-election.

00:07:24.740 By-elections are always a bit wacky.

00:07:26.340 I think we have a photo of the ballot, and you saw there were on that ballot 84 candidates,

00:07:31.940 84 candidates, because there's this group of people that are trying to protest for electoral

00:07:35.780 reform by just loading up the ballots as independents.

00:07:38.920 And it was that long ballot that was actually one of the reasons the results took so long

00:07:43.400 to count.

00:07:44.300 Elections Canada was counting until 4.44 a.m. this morning.

00:07:48.380 so it was great because if he and he was in the lead until like the last ballots were added uh

00:07:54.600 sorry leslie church was in the lead until the last ballots were added so if you were a liberal that

00:07:58.960 went to bed before 4 30 a.m uh you were thinking great we won hallelujah i politics even uh had

00:08:05.780 declared the liberals the winner they just like wrote the story declared the liberals the winner

00:08:09.720 and then just like went to bed and said job well done and then they wake up at i don't know 6 a.m

00:08:14.500 next morning and are like oh holy crap we made a little bit of a boo-boo there but what's happening

00:08:20.820 is you have now this panic this panic of people trying to figure out what this means sherry de

00:08:25.700 nova who's a former new democrat in parkdale high park provincially she had tweeted out that this is

00:08:31.540 a sign the alt-right is taking over the alt-right well if the alt-right were elected in toronto

00:08:39.460 St. Paul's we've got bigger problems here maybe just maybe your framing of the so-called alt-right

00:08:46.320 is not accurate that's not how Canadian voters not how Toronto voters are viewing the Conservative

00:08:52.100 Party of Canada when stacked up against the Liberal Party of Canada under Justin Trudeau

00:08:57.700 now we have not yet heard from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau he is set to have a press conference

00:09:02.780 any minute now and we'll try to get some clips and reaction from that as it comes in we did have

00:09:08.360 Chrystia Freeland speaking just moments ago to reporters in Toronto. She was making an announcement

00:09:13.440 about something to do with rural Ontario municipalities, but of course no one had a

00:09:17.620 single question about that announcement. All the questions she took were from reporters about the

00:09:23.460 Toronto St. Paul's by-election. This was the first one from Marika Walsh of the Globe and Mail.

00:09:29.220 Deputy Prime Minister, can the Prime Minister still stay on to lead the Liberal Party into the

00:09:34.040 next election given that you just lost one of the safest seats in the entire country last night?

00:09:40.120 Yes, he certainly can. Can you explain why? Because everybody we're hearing from behind the scenes

00:09:45.560 believes that the result last night means catastrophic losses across the country. If

00:09:50.280 you cannot win in Toronto under Justin Trudeau, why should anybody believe you can win anywhere

00:09:56.840 else under him. Our government is focused on working hard for Canada and Canadians and on

00:10:05.440 delivering results for Canada and Canadians. That is what the prime minister is focused on.

00:10:11.640 That is what we are all focused on. The prime minister is committed to leading us into the

00:10:17.500 next election and he has our support. Now, whether Justin Trudeau himself will have a bit more

00:10:25.960 self-awareness than that, I don't know. It's funny, as Chrystia Freeland was singing, I have a very

00:10:31.460 bad taste in music. It's one of my most off-putting qualities. I have a few of them, but my taste in

00:10:37.240 music is one of them. I listen to horrendous 90s adult contemporary music, but as my wife says,

00:10:43.920 if they don't play it in a Winners, you probably don't listen to it. So anyway, that's my little

00:10:48.780 bias there. But as Freeland was talking, I was hearing Dido in my head, I will go down with this

00:10:55.200 ship uh that is basically christia freeland right now she is hitching herself so closely 0.86

00:11:00.480 to justin trudeau's wagon that there is no wiggle room there is no post-political future for christia

00:11:06.240 freeland and by the way if the liberals aren't safe in toronto st paul's university rosedale

00:11:11.360 where liberal mp christia freeland is the liberal mp uh sounds redundant but that's the point of it

00:11:18.000 is the that that one's not necessarily safe i mean imagine if what would happen if all of these

00:11:23.840 ridings that the Torontos have been very cushy and comfy and cozy in are now all of a sudden up

00:11:28.480 for grabs and they need to devote their campaign resources to just not going down to four seats

00:11:34.240 that's what we're basically looking at right now I think we I don't know if we have a graphic of

00:11:39.240 it but David Coletto who's a pollster wrote a really interesting analysis on there where he

00:11:44.580 says this is a swing big enough that if you extrapolate it it could wipe out 55 liberal

00:11:50.660 seats in Ontario. He said this was a 25-point swing between how the Liberals were in St. Paul's

00:11:57.020 in the last election and how they are now, a 25-point swing. So if that's going to happen

00:12:02.140 here and you kind of extrapolate that to other so-called safe Liberal seats, this is the

00:12:06.980 Liberals potentially losing 55 seats in Ontario. Now, campaigns are won and lost based on how you

00:12:14.120 deploy your resources in a lot of ways. It's not just about whether you have the best ideas,

00:12:19.040 the best slogan the best hair uh campaigns are in many ways about where you choose to devote your

00:12:24.960 energy the phone calls the canvassers all of that so just imagine a campaign in which the liberals

00:12:31.120 who right now have you know 100 and some odd seats a minority but enough have to devote all

00:12:35.600 their resources just to holding on to ridings like saint paul's to hold on to christia freeland's

00:12:42.480 riding where in an ideal world the liberals shouldn't have to spend more than five cents

00:12:46.800 to run a campaign and now all of a sudden they have to spend their money there they're never

00:12:51.280 going to be able to win seats that the conservatives have in other parts of the riding they're never

00:12:55.760 going to be able to hold on to swing ridings they have to deploy resources just to not get decimated

00:13:02.960 that's what's basically happening here and by the way resources will be a heck of a lot more finite

00:13:08.160 if no liberals are wanting to show up to the polls liberals aren't wanting to put up lawn signs

00:13:14.000 Liberals aren't wanting to volunteer. They aren't wanting to go knock on doors, which is what we 0.67

00:13:18.300 were getting a sense of in the lead up to the St. Paul's by-election. Even people that were

00:13:21.860 just begrudgingly voting liberal because they are liberals were not enthusiastic about it.

00:13:27.800 They were not happy about it. They weren't excited about it at all. And again, when you just look at

00:13:33.740 those numbers and he gets just, you know, five, 600 votes more than the liberal did compared to

00:13:39.940 the Conservatives being behind by 24% last time, this is catastrophic for Justin Trudeau.

00:13:50.500 Now, Justin Trudeau did put out a statement. He put out a statement today. And in this statement,

00:13:55.740 it makes it sound like he's not going anywhere at all. He says, I want to thank the volunteers

00:13:59.420 and candidates for putting their name forward, participating, including Leslie Church, yada,

00:14:03.820 yada, yada. He congratulates Don Stewart. He says he wants to thank the people of,

00:14:08.280 This line, I think, rings a bit hollow.

00:14:11.040 Most of all, I want to thank the people of Toronto St. Paul's for exercising your right to vote and making your voice heard.

00:14:17.220 I really don't think he's that grateful to the voters of St. Paul's right now, Justin Trudeau.

00:14:21.540 He says, this was obviously not the result we wanted, but I want to be clear that I hear your concerns and frustrations.

00:14:28.680 These are not easy times, and it is clear I and my entire team have much more hard work to do to deliver tangible, real progress that Canadians can see and feel.

00:14:38.280 we will never stop working. They want you to stop working. Canadians want you to stop working,

00:14:44.300 Prime Minister. That's the reason they voted against your Liberal, because you've been doing

00:14:48.460 stuff. Anyway, we will never stop working and fighting to make sure you have what you need

00:14:52.760 to get through these tough times. My focus is on your successes, and that's where it's going to

00:14:58.020 stay. There is a bit more humility there than there was when Trudeau was asked about polling,

00:15:04.780 well any time but even a couple of weeks ago he was asked about polling you may remember on power

00:15:09.320 and politics and this is how he justified being 20 points behind the conservatives in the polls

00:15:13.980 despite that optimistic picture I mean the country is still angry you can see it in in the mood and

00:15:19.760 increasingly prime minister a lot of them are mad at you right I know you say you want to beat

00:15:23.820 Pierre Polyev you keep coming back to that but what if you are the reason the liberals can't

00:15:28.940 beat the conservatives in the next election where where do you factor that into your thought process

00:15:32.640 Well, I think, first of all, Canadians are not in a decision mode right now.

00:15:37.780 You know, what you tell a pollster, if they ever manage to reach you,

00:15:42.660 is very different from the choice Canadians end up making in an election campaign.

00:15:47.040 And fundamentally, and it's not just Canada, but everywhere around the world,

00:15:51.180 and indeed I was talking with this with other leaders at the G7

00:15:54.580 and in Switzerland at the peace conference for Ukraine,

00:15:57.460 I mean, everywhere people are struggling with high inflation, with cost of living issues,

00:16:05.340 with interest rates, with housing challenges, with child care challenges, all these things.

00:16:10.500 We are doing better than many countries.

00:16:13.120 It doesn't make a difference to someone who can't pay for their groceries, but people

00:16:17.880 are everywhere facing a certain amount of frustration.

00:16:20.840 And I truly believe that as we choose to step up on solving those challenges, to contrast

00:16:27.440 with a political vision that so far consists from the Conservatives of just making people

00:16:34.060 more angry and saying everything is broken, I know Canadians are pragmatic people who focus

00:16:38.940 on solutions. And that's exactly what we're going to be doing. Canadians were not in decision mode,

00:16:46.920 believe it or not. Well, maybe Canadians aren't in decision mode when they're talking to Abacus

00:16:51.920 or Ipsos or Angus Reid or anything like that. But Canadians, at least those in Toronto St. Paul's, 0.70

00:16:57.440 were very much in decision mode yesterday.

00:17:00.860 And the decision they made in a riding that, again,

00:17:03.720 has been liberal since 1993, has elected liberals for years,

00:17:08.800 that in that riding, in that riding of all ridings,

00:17:11.980 they made a decision, and the decision was,

00:17:14.320 we don't want anything to do with Justin Trudeau and the liberals.

00:17:17.780 Now, again, there's always a risk in by-elections

00:17:21.000 of trying to read too much into them.

00:17:22.960 They are inherently wacky events.

00:17:24.700 And the reason they are wacky events is because you don't tend to have the civic duty driving

00:17:30.860 people to vote like you do in general elections, which is why turnout is always down. You also have

00:17:36.540 these things that in some ways are weird microcosms of the national picture just by virtue

00:17:42.380 of when they take place. But in other ways, by-elections are odd because the candidates

00:17:47.280 are often not necessarily local. The teams running it are not necessarily local. So you have like

00:17:52.400 national talent, national attention that's all converging in this one little place. Now in this

00:17:57.920 particular writing, because you have such a large Jewish population, there is the sense that the

00:18:03.120 Israel-Gaza war, the Israel-Hamas war particularly, was probably feeding into it. I mean, I saw there

00:18:09.900 was this TikTok influencer, Rachel Gilmore, who had tweeted earlier about how basically the

00:18:16.620 liberals lost because in part they were too pro-Israel. They weren't condemning the quote

00:18:21.980 unquote, Israeli genocide enough. And, you know, the reality that anyone thinks you could win in 0.89

00:18:26.500 St. Paul's by just like knocking on doors and telling the kind Jews in Forest Hill, I think

00:18:30.700 you're complicit in genocide. That is basically the argument you're hearing from a lot of anti-Israel

00:18:35.940 activists here. And if Israel was a driving force in the vote at all, which I think it probably was

00:18:41.380 to some extent, it was the liberals being punished for not being sympathetic enough to Israel, not

00:18:47.900 being pro-Israel enough. And there was a third-party group led by Andrew Kirsch, who's been

00:18:54.120 on the show in the past, actually, a former CSIS intelligence officer, and Stephen Taylor, who's

00:18:59.180 not been on the show, but I've known him for many years. They had a third-party group called Jewish

00:19:03.620 Ally, and they were running very targeted, specific ads in this riding, in this by-election, as you're

00:19:09.120 allowed to do under Elections Canada rules. And they were really targeting Jewish votes by saying,

00:19:15.240 hey, if you want the Jewish ally, you got to vote conservative. That's a crude distillation of the 0.97

00:19:20.540 message. I'm hoping to chat with either Stephen or Andrew about that campaign tomorrow, because I

00:19:24.980 think it's a very interesting one if you look at how diaspora politics are influencing elections.

00:19:30.200 But let's not take away from the main point here, and I think the bigger picture of this,

00:19:36.280 which is that right now, the polling numbers, which people have seen that a lot of liberals

00:19:42.980 have tried to dismiss are no longer dismissible. They're just simply not dismissible. These are

00:19:49.960 not things that people can avoid. And Justin Trudeau himself, who in the past has, I've

00:19:55.880 maintained, had a relatively ironclad grip on his caucus, is probably going to be facing calls for

00:20:03.340 his head that are a lot more explicit than they have been. I would not, I mean, the liberals are

00:20:08.020 very fortunate that they don't have to go into a caucus meeting tomorrow morning because the House

00:20:12.640 of commons has risen for the summer because quite frankly if the liberals were if the liberals were

00:20:20.360 doing what is uh like what they should be doing they would be having activated the reform act

00:20:26.500 provisions that michael chong's law gives them so that they could vote him out themselves give

00:20:30.880 him the old aaron o'toole heave ho out the door because right now he has not shown the level of

00:20:36.920 self-awareness that you would expect from someone in that category now there is we'll be talking

00:20:41.900 with us in a few moments with Paul Wells. There is this idea that you cannot count Justin Trudeau

00:20:47.140 out, that he has beaten the odds time and time again. This was the thrust behind Paul Wells'

00:20:53.260 most recent book, Justin Trudeau on the ropes governing in troubled times. And he really

00:20:58.020 likens things back to Justin Trudeau in that boxing match some years ago against Patrick

00:21:03.260 Brazeau. And everyone thought Patrick Brazeau was just going to mop the floor with Trudeau.

00:21:06.720 he won the first round but the next two rounds Justin Trudeau came back and ended up emerging

00:21:12.500 victorious you may recall Ezra Levant had to because he was like Ezra was the ringside announcer

00:21:17.580 so Ezra Levant had to like declare Justin Trudeau the winner I should pull up that photo at some

00:21:22.980 point it was a fun one I think that boxing match was like the most widely viewed Sun News episode

00:21:28.160 ever in the history of Sun News Network but all of that is besides the point here we right now

00:21:35.700 are in the midst of a moment

00:21:39.360 that I think the next few days will be very revealing on.

00:21:42.320 And if you start to see some liberal MPs

00:21:45.420 announce they're not running again,

00:21:47.900 I think it's they realize

00:21:49.040 that they are simply not going to have a future.

00:21:53.640 And especially if you're already pension eligible,

00:21:56.180 if you've already served your six years,

00:21:58.340 you're not like Jagmeet Singh

00:21:59.240 and you have to wait until February

00:22:00.780 to be eligible for your pension.

00:22:02.440 But if you're one of those liberal MPs that,

00:22:04.660 again, like no, my, my thesis on this, if I want to just put it down to a crude point here is that

00:22:11.160 there's no such thing as a safe liberal seat anymore. And that's not to say there's no such

00:22:16.880 thing. Like, obviously there are ridings that, you know, like Ottawa center or whatever, Toronto

00:22:20.680 center, these are going to be liberal ridings. But, but even if you look at Ontario, there are

00:22:24.860 a lot of these downtown ridings that provincially are NDP. And if Sean, I don't know if you can put

00:22:31.020 up the polling numbers again or the the election of the results from last night or this morning

00:22:36.380 but if you look at the NDP and this is again a midtown Toronto riding 10.9 percent of the vote

00:22:43.040 so that is a collapse of the NDP now I don't know if Jagmeet Singh like ever so much as went to

00:22:49.140 St. Paul's like the NDP had basically thrown in the towel and there was in some ways like a

00:22:54.060 strategic voting effort going on there in which the NDP just was a complete non-entity. And

00:23:00.660 imagine if the NDP had stepped it up, if the NDP were there to be a principled progressive

00:23:05.860 alternative to Justin Trudeau and the Liberals in some of these downtown, midtown, urban Toronto

00:23:12.360 ridings. So that's one thing to look at as well. And I think the utter collapse and really

00:23:18.700 fecklessness of the federal ndp right now is a story that will influence the next election as

00:23:24.620 well we had i saw some activists online uh going on about how they think vote splitting cost the

00:23:30.700 election that if you can just you know take the 11 that the ndp got and add it on to the liberal

00:23:35.580 vote total ta-da the liberals will win that was the calculation the conservative party of canada

00:23:40.540 had to go through uh leading up to the merger of the alliance and pc parties in 2003 but the

00:23:47.580 problem with that is that the liberals have historically viewed themselves not as a left-wing

00:23:52.660 party. They view themselves as a centrist party. And I think there are a lot of liberals like,

00:23:57.560 you know, an Anthony Housefather, for example, that would be very uncomfortable with a liberal

00:24:02.260 party going even further to the left than it has right now to, you know, bring in people like,

00:24:10.080 you know, Nikki Ashton and, you know, Charlie Angus and those types of folks. So I think in

00:24:15.160 that sense it's going to be a fascinating thing to watch here and like just to again bring this

00:24:22.120 into perspective this is a writing that in 2011 when Michael Ignatieff was absolutely decimated

00:24:31.920 by the conservatives the year that Harper won his infamous majority government they still held

00:24:37.980 Toronto St. Paul's so that's what we're dealing with here and the liberals I so my one and only

00:24:44.160 interview with justin trudeau was in 2015 and you know even justin trudeau who was trying to

00:24:48.560 rebuild the party at the time had conceded that you know the liberals just got trounced them but

00:24:52.800 even in that toronto st paul's was one of theirs uh my colleague at true north sue ann levy she ran

00:24:58.480 in uh that in a by-election in st paul's provincially uh that was i want to say 2006

00:25:04.720 or 2007 2008 it was around there and again sue ann she was very well known through being a writer with

00:25:10.960 with the Toronto Sun. It was the provincial PCs, which at the time were going up against Kathleen

00:25:16.420 Wynne, and they're a more moderate party historically. She is Jewish. She is a lesbian.

00:25:22.600 So she was ticking off, as she said in her book, some of these progressive boxes. And even she was

00:25:28.000 not able to break through in Toronto St. Paul's. And at the time, there were people saying, why

00:25:31.900 would you even try? This is always going to be a liberal riding. So the Liberal Party right now

00:25:38.280 does not have a mechanism to get rid of Justin Trudeau.

00:25:41.400 This is a crucial point.

00:25:42.840 They do not have a mechanism by which caucus members

00:25:45.260 could vote to get rid of him.

00:25:46.780 They don't have a mechanism by which their members

00:25:48.820 could trigger some sort of a referendum or petition.

00:25:51.700 The only way Justin Trudeau is going

00:25:53.760 is if he just wakes up one day and decides he needs to go.

00:25:58.740 If Justin Trudeau wakes up and decides he needs to go,

00:26:01.280 if he just wakes up one day and says,

00:26:02.740 okay, fine, I realize it, I take the hint,

00:26:06.080 you guys don't want me, I'm gone.

00:26:09.160 But nothing about him, nothing about him has shown a willingness to do that.

00:26:15.800 Even if I go back to the statement that he sent this morning, he says,

00:26:20.700 we clearly have much more hard work to do to deliver tangible, real progress that Canadians can see and feel.

00:26:28.240 We will never stop working and fighting to make sure you have what you need to get through these tough times.

00:26:32.500 My focus is on your success and that's where it's going to stay.

00:26:35.820 They don't like you.

00:26:37.360 they don't want to like you the issue is not that they know the issue is not that they don't know

00:26:43.340 you the issue is not that they don't know what you're doing the issue is that they know too well

00:26:48.760 and do not want you to keep doing it so there's an amusing sort of joke to this all which is that

00:26:55.580 basically uh the only way to get rid of to get Justin Trudeau to stop working is by you know

00:27:01.980 like not voting a liberal mp it's very weird he's just gonna you know double down and rebuild it

00:27:06.720 And Chrystia Freeland, I shared with you that one clip or one exchange she had with Marika Walsh.

00:27:12.100 She was asked about it by other reporters, very similar iterations of the same question.

00:27:16.400 And the line that she committed to was, well, we need to rebuild trust.

00:27:22.640 We need to rebuild trust.

00:27:23.860 That's what we need to do.

00:27:24.640 And I was reminded of, well, frankly, her chums at the World Economic Forum, that was their big theme in January, rebuilding trust.

00:27:33.780 and the problem whenever people talk about rebuilding trust is that they aren't actually

00:27:38.000 all that interested in looking inward at what they've done to sow distrust. They always try

00:27:43.280 to come up with other people who can be blamed for this. For example, remember what Chrystia

00:27:49.060 Freeland said yesterday about people who vote conservative in the by-election. Take a look.

00:27:54.020 That is Leslie's vision. That's the liberal vision. That's why I'm really calling on the

00:27:59.420 people of St. Paul's to go out there and vote for her. Because the alternative is really cold

00:28:06.860 and cruel and small. The alternative is cuts and austerity, not believing in ourselves as a country,

00:28:17.880 not believing in our communities and in our neighbors.

00:28:20.880 if you vote conservative you are supporting an option that is what is it cold cruel and small

00:28:30.820 cold cruel and small that's what she said about people who vote conservative so uh intro again a

00:28:38.020 little bit of victim blaming there you know the voters of saint paul they've just voted for this

00:28:41.980 cold cruel small alternative and what was interesting linda from the former conservative

00:28:47.180 senator uh she had tweeted this morning which out of context was an admittedly weird tweet she said

00:28:53.340 well i guess conservatives are hang on let me look up the let me look up the exact wording because i

00:28:57.820 don't want to get the joke wrong uh she uh posted on social media this morning uh she guesses

00:29:04.060 conservatives are hot kind and big they're not cold cruel and small they're hot kind and big that

00:29:11.420 is what conservatives are and i was reading that and at first it took me a second like what is she

00:29:15.420 she talking and then i i you know remembered christopher freeland's thing and i responded

00:29:19.100 that i'm two of those things i i think i'm kind i'm definitely big i don't know about hot maybe

00:29:23.500 in the summer maybe in the summer i can get hot as a technicality but that was linda from's point 1.00

00:29:29.180 so again you know it proves that what christopher freeland and a lot of the liberal media spin

00:29:34.760 folks have been saying over the last month over the last couple of days in particular is just not

00:29:40.360 translating to voters. So if Pierre Polyev and the Conservatives are relatively immune,

00:29:47.100 if they're relatively immune from the attacks and the smears, what is that going to mean if you

00:29:51.960 extrapolate it to a bigger election, if you extrapolate it to a general election where it's

00:29:56.680 not just Toronto St. Paul's, but it's the whole country. And I go back to just the electoral math

00:30:01.760 on this and the deploying of resources. If the Liberals, if the Liberals are focusing on having

00:30:08.480 to just not lose places such as University Rosedale and Ottawa Centre. If they're focused on

00:30:15.220 that, how on earth are they going to maintain or heaven forbid build anywhere else? And if you're

00:30:23.960 a liberal that's been there, like John McKay, who's a long time liberal member of parliament,

00:30:28.040 he was like the last pro-lifer in the liberal caucus until Justin Trudeau kind of like bludgeoned

00:30:33.880 the pro-lifeness out of him a little while ago. John McKay, 27, I think 23 or 27 years. I can't

00:30:40.300 remember how long he's been there, but you know, quite a few. And John McKay just the other day

00:30:44.640 announced he's not going to be seeking reelection. So here's a guy that would rather not have,

00:30:48.880 and he's an MP from Scarborough. If I can't remember which one, I think like Scarborough

00:30:52.440 Southwest or something, but he's a guy who again, would rather not have the sting of defeat

00:30:57.360 on an otherwise very successful political career. So for him, it's a natural point just to get out

00:31:03.320 of there. There are Liberal MPs that were just elected for the first time in 2019 or 2021.

00:31:09.980 And they're kind of in the position now of saying, I haven't really had a chance to do anything,

00:31:15.760 but already I'm about to be shown the door. And this happened to a lot of Conservative MPs in

00:31:21.000 2011 when Harper won his majority. They were elected in the greater Toronto area and places

00:31:26.420 such as Aurora and Oshawa. Well, not Oshawa, that's a Conservative writing, but Aurora,

00:31:31.000 Newmarket and Markham and Mississauga, and you had all of these one-term MPs that they got in,

00:31:37.400 they served one term, and then they were out the door because Harper couldn't hold on to 0.98

00:31:41.160 his government when 2015 came around. So that's where you have, I think, this looking really bad

00:31:47.920 for Liberal members of Parliament. And will they decide once and for all it's time to start calling

00:31:54.140 for Justin Trudeau's political head on a political platter? I don't want anyone to get any ideas

00:32:00.000 about you know me suggesting something you know untoward but that's effectively the decision going

00:32:05.600 on here so look we can go and talk about oh this poll went this way or maybe this sign did this or

00:32:11.600 this canvassing did this but there's a bigger picture here that we should not lose sight of

00:32:17.200 we'll be talking in a little bit with raheem muhammad in the national post who has uh had

00:32:22.160 some well he has interesting thoughts on pretty much everything but definitely some interesting

00:32:25.680 thoughts on this but i i want to welcome in to talk about the the the psychology of justin trudeau

00:32:32.000 on this almost uh it paul wells because journalist paul wells wrote a book that was very fascinating

00:32:38.400 and we actually share a publisher in ken white of sutherland house and he wrote about this called

00:32:43.680 justin trudeau on the ropes governing in troubled times and he joins me now paul it's good to talk

00:32:49.040 to you thanks for coming on today hi andrew how are you i'm i'm doing well i i'm you i should

00:32:54.800 just say to hit this you know right out of the gate you had done what i think a lot of people

00:32:58.880 did which is like you went to bed thinking the liberals had won and then you woke up in the

00:33:02.720 morning and had to write a mea culpa on this and i just get away from it by not making predictions

00:33:08.320 because then i i don't have to be wrong ever whereas you take the swing but before you saw

00:33:13.840 the vote yesterday what did you think was going to happen before you saw the numbers come in and

00:33:17.920 kind of concluded it was over so i happened to be in the writing i'm not in front of that often but

00:33:23.440 I happened to be there a couple of weeks ago, and I ran into a bunch of Liberals who were really nervous.

00:33:28.920 And a couple who, reading between the lines, were not super interested in voting Liberal.

00:33:34.860 They thought it was time to send Justin Trudeau a message.

00:33:38.800 And I was at a fancy Ottawa garden party just before the returns came in, and I ran into a former senior public servant, now retired,

00:33:48.560 who i believe has voted liberal in most elections in their life and and they said i wish i lived in

00:33:56.960 toronto saint paul because i would use my vote to send trudeau a message and uh so i knew they

00:34:04.520 were heading for trouble but they would have to have a lot of trouble before they lost and and

00:34:09.600 so i was open to the very strong possibility that uh it was going to be um tight but not lost for

00:34:17.700 liberals and that's that was that was why i believe the early returns the way i did justin

00:34:22.740 trudeau has in the past been incredibly dismissive of anything that everyone else kind of uses to say

00:34:28.660 that he's in trouble i mean poll numbers are a great example of this and obviously you you should

00:34:33.220 be aware of polls and and not give them too too much stock but there was that line he gave to

00:34:37.780 david cochran not that long ago about how oh canadians aren't in a decision mode right now

00:34:42.180 and that's why they're saying they'll vote for poly ev and then yesterday in toronto st paul's

00:34:46.020 as they are in decision mode. And he's not really ever shown any overt sense that he gets it. And

00:34:53.120 I'm curious what your take on that is. What would it take for him to really realize, hey, I'm the

00:34:57.860 problem? So when magazines started publishing photos of him in blackface, this is now five

00:35:06.700 years ago, but he suddenly had to admit that, in fact, he had worn blackface, and that was a mistake,

00:35:12.380 uh confronted with absolutely stark evidence um uh you've been on the air i don't know if you saw

00:35:20.140 he put he sent out a a communique less than an hour ago in which he says uh okay i get it this

00:35:27.900 was bad this shows that we have work to do but it's very much uh classic first draft trudeau

00:35:34.460 it's it's like the statements he made after the snc lavallon story broke he uh understands our

00:35:41.580 concerned and he promises to do better and i think uh a lot of people including some liberals are

00:35:46.940 saying no we don't need you to do better we need you to go and uh i my hunch is that he's not

00:35:56.540 rejecting that he's processing it and trying to figure out how much maneuvering room he has

00:36:02.780 from your knowledge i mean you they pick up your i don't know if they pick up your calls still but

00:36:07.020 i think historically you've had relatively good access to the liberals certainly better than i

00:36:10.540 have because i don't think they've ever thrown you out of an event but the i'm curious insofar

00:36:15.420 as you've learned from your contacts and sources in ottawa does he did they have a plan for this

00:36:22.300 did they have a plan for what does he do if don stewart wins it's funny that was i was chatting

00:36:30.700 with my wife who's a consultant and uh conservative and uh very politically engaged as i left the house

00:36:37.260 this morning and i said i wonder whether they had a contingency plan you know it turns out so

00:36:42.700 emmanuel macron the president of france had a very bad uh election 10 days ago in european elections

00:36:48.940 and he had been discussing the possibility of a of an electoral route with his closest advisors

00:36:54.780 for a week and they came out with an audacious plan to call new legislative elections and like

00:37:00.780 it's not at all clear that it will work but macron had a what if we have a bad day plan

00:37:05.820 uh i don't know whether the liberals did i have begun to put that question to liberals

00:37:12.900 um but if they did it would be out of character because they tend to

00:37:18.300 uh hope for the best and they corner very badly when when uh when things are now less than the

00:37:26.520 best i mean i expect what i expect is uh several days of confusion during which everything the

00:37:35.820 uh treat it as a curiosity rather than than as the final word because it's going to take them

00:37:40.620 days to figure out what what they think and what they want to tell us there's been from the liberal

00:37:47.100 party i mean really going back to 2015 i'd say a public caucus unity that you know the past two

00:37:53.420 conservative leaders would have killed to have in the sense that you don't see the knives out for

00:37:57.820 justin trudeau in the way that uh conservatives have historically for their leaders and i i'm

00:38:03.100 wondering if you think that will change now will will you start to get liberals that are are speaking

00:38:07.820 up a bit more publicly about their concerns or do you think that the same pattern we've seen for the

00:38:13.500 last nine years will will continue to hold there so now i know someone who has an appointment with

00:38:20.700 christy clark today a pre-long-standing appointment with christy clark social thing uh who says the

00:38:27.100 day just got complicated because christy clark's phone is ringing off the hook uh i expect you

00:38:31.580 You can multiply that by about seven because I expect Anita Nan is having a complicated 1.00

00:38:36.600 day and Sean Fraser.

00:38:40.600 I have no idea who's making those calls or what the content of those calls are.

00:38:45.080 But I think that that's kind of happening in a lot of corners.

00:38:49.900 One level of taboo has fallen.

00:38:52.340 There hasn't even been much informal discussion about next time post Trudeau leadership in

00:39:00.700 liberal party and it hasn't been enforced by above it's been consensual liberals have not felt that

00:39:06.220 it was proper that uh a leader who gave them a decade in power or nearly um owes is owed some

00:39:15.340 deference on these questions um that's gone at least privately they are now talking um the next

00:39:22.620 question is you know is it going to is there going to be public uh statements um will any sitting

00:39:29.420 member of caucus. Will any of the half-dozen cabinet ministers who left on more or less

00:39:33.820 peaceful terms, people like Navdeep Bains and Mark Garneau, will they start to say something?

00:39:41.240 And my hunch is they won't, not immediately. But, like, look, new MPs are dragged up the

00:39:48.240 House of Commons by their own leader and by the prime minister. Does Justin Trudeau really want

00:39:55.620 to be the the prime minister who drags the new mp for toronto saint paul's up the center aisle of

00:40:00.640 the house of commons like man you know yeah some decisions to make pretty fast yeah i know i think

00:40:08.340 you raise a valid point there and i'm also curious and again i i never like the armchair psychoanalysis

00:40:13.380 of politicians but with justin turno i do find it fascinating because there's there's something that

00:40:18.040 i've suspected and i'm curious if you agree or not that he doesn't really care what party he

00:40:23.440 leaves behind, that he's okay if it sort of is a sinking ship and he takes it down. And I'm not

00:40:28.940 convinced that he's as focused on legacy for the party. And I wonder how, if you take that to a

00:40:35.600 context of the next election, if that weighs in, because I do think the party would have a better

00:40:40.020 time rebuilding. They're certainly not going to win the next election at this stage, even if they

00:40:45.080 have an interim leader. But the reality is they would probably set themselves up a little bit

00:40:51.240 better to start having those succession discussions now instead of, you know, the day after the 2025

00:40:56.500 election. But I'm curious if I'm projecting something on him that you don't necessarily see.

00:41:02.600 I had a really chilling moment in conversation with a member of Trudeau's caucus,

00:41:09.420 probably five or six months ago, where I said, I have always thought that Trudeau,

00:41:15.800 the day he leaves will be the day he stops caring about the future of the Liberal Party.

00:41:19.480 and he just decides that he has to make a decision for himself and this MP said do you think he has

00:41:27.740 ever cared about the Liberal Party it was shattered when he came along and he used it as

00:41:33.740 a vehicle or a you know a kind of a hitching post for for a very personal movement and that

00:41:45.400 But there was never a time when concerns about the future of the Liberal Party without Trudeau

00:41:52.780 weighed much in his own career decisions.

00:41:57.600 It's one thing for me to say that, but for me to hear that from somebody who sits and 0.62

00:42:02.920 hears from the Prime Minister every week in Liberal caucus meetings was a different moment.

00:42:11.280 But I do think that the final calculation, the decision to leave will be based on whether he's done, and there won't be a lot of bandwidth for thinking about what's going to happen in the Liberal Party next.

00:42:30.080 I thought my thesis was kind of snarky, but it's not even as audacious or as radical as the one you got from a Liberal member of Parliament.

00:42:37.980 Paul Wells, you can catch him on Substack,

00:42:40.700 many other places, but I love his Substack.

00:42:42.500 I'm a paid subscriber.

00:42:43.480 It's at paulwells.substack.com.

00:42:45.760 And if you're there,

00:42:46.540 you should check out my long form interview

00:42:48.520 with him about my book,

00:42:49.900 Pierre Polyev, A Political Life,

00:42:51.340 which he...

00:42:52.340 Thanks.

00:43:00.700 All right.

00:43:01.320 That was journalist Paul Wells,

00:43:03.580 longtime political observer, commentator, author.

00:43:06.460 I actually quoted his book about Stephen Harper in my book on Polyev because there was a fascinating Polyev quote about social conservatives in there.

00:43:14.880 Continuing along here, I wanted to bring in Raheem Mohamed.

00:43:17.900 Now, he was one of the early adopters, the early boosters of True North.

00:43:21.780 So we always have a soft spot for him.

00:43:23.240 Now he's doing tremendous work at the National Post and has just secured a fantastic new gig talking about Ottawa's relations with the West for the National Post.

00:43:33.380 Raheem Mohamed, good to talk to you, sir.

00:43:34.860 Thanks for coming on the show today.

00:43:36.460 uh thank you andrew to be honest i i'm not sure i would have said yes had i known i'd be following

00:43:41.420 paul wells uh on maybe four hours of sleep so paul wells was your warm-up act here you go you're

00:43:47.200 the main event right now where did my camera go my camera just disappeared yeah so but good to

00:43:55.020 see you when hopefully we'll get the camera back and there we go i'm used to losing the guest video

00:44:00.360 terrific product placement by the way i love yes thank you thank you very much you you kindly

00:44:05.840 wrote a great review of that book as well when it came out. So I appreciate that.

00:44:10.160 I had to speed read it over a weekend. It was a lot of fun.

00:44:12.840 Yeah. Well, thank you, Rahim.

00:44:14.060 Speed read those 200 pages over a weekend. It's good to be well spent.

00:44:17.580 What is it you were looking for? Because you're coming at this from a different perspective.

00:44:21.620 You're not a Laurentian elite. You're not one of the typical Ottawa

00:44:24.320 reporters that weighs in on politics. You're coming at this as a Westerner.

00:44:29.120 And I'm curious what you saw and took away from the by-election results.

00:44:33.760 Well, for me, if I'm Chrystia Freeland and I'm Justin Trudeau, if I can concoct a writing, you know, out of a Petri dish, where hopefully this messaging coming out of April's budget, you know, surrounding the budget itself, and in particular surrounding the capital gains inclusion rate changes coming out of the budget,

00:44:59.800 where I would expect this rhetoric to have some sort of traction,

00:45:06.460 that riding would look an awful lot like Toronto-St. Paul's.

00:45:10.520 So it's very middle of the road.

00:45:12.800 You know, you talk about Main Street.

00:45:14.500 It doesn't get much more Main Street than Toronto-St. Paul's.

00:45:18.600 It's about median income by the standards of Ontario,

00:45:22.720 about median income smack dab in the middle socioeconomically by the standards of Canada.

00:45:27.720 So if there's anywhere where particularly Chrystia Freeland's messaging about, you know, a kinder, gentler Canada having the rich pay their fair share, if there's anywhere where you would expect that sort of messaging to resonate, it would be a riding that looks an awful lot like Toronto St. Paul.

00:45:47.080 And we did not see that. And to make matters even worse for the Liberals, they can't point the finger at the NDP. The NDP had a much worse showing yesterday than they did back in 2021, losing about six points.

00:46:02.920 So you saw, you know, pretty much a straight up race between, you know, Paulyev's message and the liberal message coming out of the budget, hitting some of those class warfare notes much stronger than had been in the case previously.

00:46:20.560 And the Liberal message was found wanting, which if I'm Chrystia Freeland in particular, you know, I wagered a lot of political capital on this by-election. 0.61

00:46:30.960 I'm very concerned and I'm thinking my days in the finance portfolio may be numbered.

00:46:36.760 Well, you know, you raise a valid point.

00:46:38.880 I mean, we saw all the last few days, you know, every Liberal cabinet minister imaginable going and knocking on doors in St. Paul's.

00:46:45.100 And, you know, the cruel reckoning that they have to deal with here is maybe they were costing votes.

00:46:50.220 Maybe when Chrystia Freeland comes to your door and says, I want you to vote for Leslie Church, at this point you're like, oh, who's the other guy?

00:46:58.220 Yeah, and it's worth noting that Leslie Church, prior to getting into electoral politics, she was a senior staffer for Freeland for a long time in the office of the Minister of Finance and Deputy Prime Minister of Canada, rising up to Freeland's Chief of Staff.

00:47:15.340 So not only is Freeland front and center stumping for church throughout the campaign, including those remarks she gave on Monday, calling conservative voters, I think, cruel and small and mean, but also you had a close ally who actually didn't live in the riding, you know, nominated to run in the riding and not doing much to shed any sort of association with Chrystia Freeland.

00:47:44.520 So, I mean, you have in a way a sort of double whammy for Freeland and not only did her message fail, not only did her sort of personal appearances not seem to move the needle, at least in the direction she would have preferred.

00:47:58.960 But also she had, you know, a handpicked close ally run in the riding and failed to bring it home. 0.96

00:48:06.560 You were pointing out as well the Israel factor.

00:48:10.320 And I mean, foreign policy is not typically an issue that moves votes in Canadian elections.

00:48:15.300 It just isn't.

00:48:16.220 And it's a lot different when you talk about Israel, which has diaspora implications that go beyond just Canadian foreign policy.

00:48:22.600 And in a riding like St. Paul's, which has an incredibly robust Jewish population relative to other parts of the country.

00:48:28.620 And I mean, I know you've seen on Twitter this, you know, nonsensical theory that the Liberals lost because they were just too pro-Israel.

00:48:35.540 Meanwhile, anyone else who's pro-Israel is looking and saying, well, first off, no, they're not.

00:48:39.340 And secondly, being pro-Israel, if it's going to help you at all, will help you in St. Paul's.

00:48:44.820 Because you point out, you know, the Anthony Housefather issue.

00:48:47.840 This is, you know, the MP that almost quit the Liberals because of their hostility to him as a Jew.

00:48:53.460 And he was then dispatched to, like, try to get desperate votes for St. Paul's.

00:49:00.140 Yeah, so, I mean, putting aside the war in Gaza, I don't think bullying is too strong of a word to characterize Housefather's treatment.

00:49:08.960 at the hands of some of his Muslim, you know, colleagues in the Liberal Caucus. You know, 0.96

00:49:15.260 one, a member of parliament for Brampton saying, you know, house father has been divisive,

00:49:20.340 you know, just for being staunchly pro-Israel and just for being a proud Zionist. And, you know,

00:49:25.740 that house father is the wrong person to combat both anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in Canada.

00:49:32.280 I don't think bullying is too strong a word. And I think putting aside the war in Gaza,

00:49:37.700 of that treatment of house father by his own colleagues and the prime minister not being

00:49:43.260 the adult in the room and putting that sort of public criticism, that sort of speaking

00:49:50.100 outside of school to rest and saying we're not going to tolerate personal attacks within

00:49:54.960 our caucus against fellow caucus members.

00:49:57.880 I think that could have been incredibly damaging within Toronto, St. Paul, among, as you say,

00:50:05.020 the 15% or so of voters in that riding who are Jewish. Actually, Robin Urbac of the Globe and

00:50:10.960 Mail, of all outlets, had an article come out on Monday morning imploring House Father to,

00:50:18.700 out of self-respect, you know, out of sort of his personal convictions, imploring House Father to

00:50:28.520 leave the Liberal Caucus. So I think when you have not only a general environment in Canada

00:50:34.540 of anti-Semitism, but also the prime minister not lifting a finger really to one control

00:50:40.680 anti-Semitism in the streets, but not even lifting a finger to rein in anti-Semitism in his own

00:50:46.580 caucus. A lot of people in that writing, you know, Jewish voters probably looked at that and were put

00:50:52.500 off and understandably so. Yeah, very well said. Always appreciate reading your insights in the

00:50:58.300 National Post. Rahim Mohamed, thank you so much, sir. Always good to talk to you. Always a pleasure.

00:51:02.300 thank you all right thank you raheem uh by the way i was just told so justin trudeau did a

00:51:07.260 press conference he was doing an announcement on something to do with ocean conservation

00:51:11.100 uh did not take any questions did not take any questions at all he shut it down no questions no

00:51:17.500 q a bolted out of the room uh here we are thinking christia freeland was being stingy for only taking 0.98

00:51:22.700 three questions or questions from three reporters justin trudeau took zero so almost as though he

00:51:28.460 has really nothing to say. That does it for us for today. We'll have more on this tomorrow here on

00:51:33.720 Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show. This is the Andrew Lawton Show on True North. Thank you,

00:51:38.040 God bless, and good day to you all. Thanks for listening to the Andrew Lawton Show.

00:51:43.160 Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.

00:51:58.460 We'll be right back.

00:52:28.460 We'll be right back.

Juno News - June 25, 2024

Does Conservative upset mean end of Trudeau？

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript