Juno News - August 31, 2021


Does Erin O’Toole have a pathway to victory？

Topics
Erin O'Toole pathway to victory
Mentioned
Erin O'Toole Justin Trudeau Sam Harris Yves Levesque Jagmeet Singh Andrew Scheer Harper Hamish Marshall Benny Thompson Martin François René Villemour Bloc Québécois Mary Shortall Robert Gasset Anna Roberts King Vaughn Deb Schulte Jack Layton Writings
When will Canadians get sick of Justin Trudeau？ If Trudeau loses this key demographic, it’s over for the Liberals

Episode Stats


Length

14 minutes

Words per minute

192.82

Word count

2,704

Sentence count

177


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

The Conservatives are up in the polls, but does Aaron O'Toole have a pathway to victory? In this episode of The Candice Malcolm Show, host Candice Malm joins us to talk to pollster Hamish Marshall about the latest numbers and polling data.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 The Conservatives are up in the polls, but does Aaron O'Toole have a pathway to victory?
00:00:03.680 I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.
00:00:10.360 All right, and joining us to help make sense of the recent numbers and all the polling data out
00:00:14.840 there is True North's in-house pollster, Hamish Marshall. Hamish, how are you?
00:00:18.560 Great. It's great to see you.
00:00:20.220 Great. Well, so, I mean, we've been seeing so many polls really going in favor of Aaron O'Toole.
00:00:25.780 It's really the story of the campaign so far is just how positively it seems Canadians are responding to him,
00:00:31.940 given that he was relatively unknown not that long ago.
00:00:35.340 So maybe you could help us understand, does Aaron O'Toole at this point have a pathway to victory?
00:00:42.440 I mean, certainly at the moment, it's certainly got a path to winning the most seats in the House of Commons.
00:00:46.680 I think a conservative majority of government would be an aggressive target right now based on the numbers.
00:00:51.100 But, you know, there's still two and a half weeks to go in this campaign.
00:00:54.240 And if we see progress like we've seen in the last two and a half weeks, that could be possible as well.
00:00:59.920 But right now, he can certainly get ahead of the Liberals in terms of seats.
00:01:05.440 Well, and I think we talked about this on one of the previous interviews that we did,
00:01:09.280 is that elections are sort of won and fought on a handful of seats here and there.
00:01:14.020 So five seats in this region, five seats in that region.
00:01:16.300 And really, I think you've done a tremendous job, but you put together a map and a analysis for True North viewers to understand what those ridings are.
00:01:27.560 So a handful of ridings in each region of the country to really help us understand what needs,
00:01:34.200 what each party needs to win in order to win an election or in order to gain the most seats.
00:01:39.640 So maybe you could just give us a quick overview of this project, Hamish, and explain what it is that we're looking at.
00:01:45.160 Sure.
00:01:45.440 We put together a list of 42 seats, started with what Trudeau needed.
00:01:50.340 Trudeau called this election because he thought he needed a majority government.
00:01:53.060 So it made sense to say, what does Trudeau need to get a majority?
00:01:56.440 He needed 13 more seats to win.
00:01:58.000 So he came up with a list of the 20 seats we thought he would need to win in order to win a majority government.
00:02:05.840 Of course, with where the polls are today, he's not winning a lot of the, picking up a lot of those seats,
00:02:10.120 although some of them are still on the table, which is going to make for an interesting election.
00:02:14.100 Then we've got a list of 12 Tory targets, the 12 seats that the Conservatives need to pick up.
00:02:20.700 And these are representative.
00:02:21.640 There's other seats beyond that on the Conservative target list.
00:02:24.460 Obviously, they need to win 49 more seats for a majority.
00:02:27.420 But these are the types of seats they need to win.
00:02:30.360 And if they're winning the 12 on this list, they're winning enough to get themselves to be the biggest party in the House of Commons.
00:02:36.800 We've got five NDP targets.
00:02:38.280 There's been a lot of talk about how the NDP is doing better in this campaign and where they can pick up.
00:02:42.940 And then there's another list of five interesting races with some three-way races and some races where unexpected things could happen,
00:02:51.520 perhaps in defiance of the national trends.
00:02:53.580 Great. Well, I know that these are definitely the ridings that we'll be looking out for on election night to sort of signify what direction we're going to.
00:03:01.560 But let's spend a bit of time looking at each of these.
00:03:04.900 So you put together 20 seats that the Liberals need to win.
00:03:08.640 And there was one that sort of caught my eye that was interesting.
00:03:11.620 Why don't you break this one down?
00:03:13.760 St. John's East.
00:03:14.840 Sure. So St. John's East is actually sort of the northern part of the city of St. John's in Newfoundland, Labrador.
00:03:21.520 It's a city. It's a seat with a strong NDP history.
00:03:26.160 In fact, the NDP won it in previous elections with Jack Harris, who was a former provincial politician and very popular local fellow.
00:03:34.740 He barely lost it to the Liberals in 2015 when they had their big sweep.
00:03:40.280 But he came back in 2019, took it back. But now Jack Harris isn't running again.
00:03:45.660 And the big question for everyone is, is this a Jack Harris seat or is this an NDP seat?
00:03:51.140 Traditionally, the provincial NDP does all right in that area.
00:03:53.980 They've held seats in that area in the past, but they lost some of those seats in the last provincial election.
00:03:58.360 So we now have a race between two lesser known candidates, the former Liberal MPs not running against.
00:04:05.440 We've got Mary Shortall for the NDP, who's a longtime progressive social activist in the area, and then a community health leader and nurse Joanne Thompson running for the Liberals.
00:04:16.820 So the question is, can the Liberals, even in spite of their overall polling decline, pick up a seat like that if Jack Harris isn't on the ballot for the NDP?
00:04:25.400 There's also no signs the NDP is doing markedly better in Newfoundland and Labrador.
00:04:30.260 So that seat could defy the trajectory and could make the Liberals have a better seat count than their overall popular votes might otherwise suggest.
00:04:40.820 Interesting. OK, well, let's let's move on to the Tory target seats, because, you know, you said that these are representative and for sure the Conservatives are going to need to pick up a lot more than that.
00:04:52.680 But when it comes to the sort of general demographics that the Conservatives are after and it comes to the types of seats, I know, you know, thinking of suburban Toronto, the 905, that that was where Harper sort of cemented his majority back in 2011.
00:05:07.960 And these seats are just so incredibly important and sort of up for grabs, just given the change in demographics.
00:05:14.720 So why don't you walk us through this this ride in King Vaughan?
00:05:19.780 Sure. So King Vaughan is a suburban and ex-urban strip northwest of Toronto and was a very close election in the last election.
00:05:29.420 The Liberals won it by about two percent of the vote.
00:05:31.640 This is a hundred percent seat that the Conservatives need to win for victory.
00:05:37.480 There is no chance the Conservatives can get ahead of the Liberals in terms of seat count without winning a seat like King Vaughan.
00:05:45.000 And it's going to be a battle of the same people who ran last time.
00:05:47.800 Anna Roberts is a Conservative candidate, a municipal leader running against Deb Schulte, who's, I believe, the minister of seniors right now.
00:05:56.460 And to show you how important it is, this week, both Aaron O'Toole and Justin Trudeau did events in this riding.
00:06:03.780 They both know this riding matters.
00:06:06.020 And if the Liberals can hang on to the seat, the chances of them winning the most seats is very high.
00:06:13.000 And the Conservatives have no hope of winning the most seats without winning the seats.
00:06:16.300 This is absolutely key.
00:06:17.760 It's not pure suburbia.
00:06:19.600 Yeah, there's a lot of there's some smaller sort of villages and some rural areas as well.
00:06:24.100 But if the Conservatives are winning here, they're going to be winning some other seats in the broader 905.
00:06:29.160 And this is this is an absolutely key seat without winning the seat.
00:06:32.960 O'Toole does not have a path to victory.
00:06:34.980 It's interesting that we've seen, I think, two or three times now the O'Toole secure the future plane on the same tarmac as the Liberal ones.
00:06:43.800 So they're clearly going after, you know, the exact same places, the exact same seats.
00:06:48.560 You mentioned that that seat, King Vaughan, isn't entirely suburban, that there's rural and acreages as well.
00:06:55.620 Can you help us understand a little more what the demographic of Canadians that O'Toole would be targeting?
00:07:02.420 I read that, you know, older Canadians are going more and more in favor of the Conservatives.
00:07:09.180 The over 50 vote is looking pretty good.
00:07:12.080 Can you give us a bit of an idea of what the demographic might look like?
00:07:17.160 Sure. I mean, look, the group that Harper won when he won government and was able to hold on to was parents with kids under 18 in their house.
00:07:24.800 So that's generally speaking, as people from their mid 30s to their mid 50s, generally speaking, Conservatives do better with men than with women.
00:07:31.620 But at various points in the Harper government, they did very well with middle aged mothers as well.
00:07:36.380 So that's the group that those obviously are the sort of people that we see in large numbers in the suburbs, not just Toronto, but everywhere.
00:07:44.540 And that's the key group. If the Conservatives can go from winning parents or losing parents to winning them, they will do very well and they can win this election.
00:07:55.380 So people who have got a big mortgage, who commute to work, got a couple of kids under 18, maybe one in university, that's the key, key demographic.
00:08:05.800 We're seeing some movement in that group.
00:08:07.420 But there needs to be more movement if O'Toole wants to get ahead of it, enough seats ahead of Trudeau in order to stop some sort of a coalition of the progressive side of the equation.
00:08:18.800 Interesting. And we've also seen a little bit in the poll.
00:08:22.100 I don't know if you can really classify it as an orange wave.
00:08:24.900 It's not quite 2011 Jack Layton levels, but Jagmeet Singh is certainly appealing to more and more Canadians.
00:08:30.800 And it looks like he's going to do better in this campaign than the previous one.
00:08:35.540 You put together the five NDP targets and one of them was Saskatoon West.
00:08:40.220 I was a little surprised by that, Hamish, just given that to me that's such a conservative stronghold.
00:08:45.020 But maybe you can help us understand how that could be in the NDP's range.
00:08:49.360 Sure. Well, Saskatoon West is a sort of an all urban seat on obviously on the western side of Saskatoon.
00:08:54.860 It's a bit lower income.
00:08:56.120 It's got a very significant Indigenous population, 17% Indigenous.
00:09:01.300 The NDP candidates, Robert Gasset, the president of the Métis Nation of Saskatchewan, I believe.
00:09:07.200 The NDP provincially hold a lot of seats in that area.
00:09:10.660 It's an area of a strong NDP base.
00:09:13.040 And what's really interesting is that this seat didn't exist in its current configuration in 2011.
00:09:18.820 In 2011, there was a good chunk of the rural area in as well, which allowed the Conservatives to win.
00:09:23.740 So in 2011, when the Conservatives won their big majority, they wouldn't have actually won Saskatoon West.
00:09:30.680 And they won Saskatoon West for a variety of reasons last time.
00:09:34.480 But one of the reasons was, of course, was the decline in the NDP, generally speaking, but also that they had a leader from Saskatchewan in Andrew Scheer.
00:09:42.820 Without a leader from Saskatchewan, with the NDP on a bit of the upswing, I think the seat is very much in play.
00:09:49.380 And while I'm not sure if Jagmeet Singh has been to Saskatoon yet, I think we can count that he'll be there.
00:09:55.740 And this is the sort of seat.
00:09:57.380 If the NDP, you know, people are talking to the NDP moving from having the mid-20s to maybe the high 30s in terms of number of seats.
00:10:03.760 You know, if they end up at 37, 38 seats, Saskatoon West could very well be one of them.
00:10:09.220 Interesting. All right.
00:10:10.240 And you finally, you put together a list of the interesting races.
00:10:13.840 So these, I guess, are, well, I'll let you explain it.
00:10:16.020 So what are the interests?
00:10:17.840 Well, these are races where sort of anything could happen.
00:10:20.500 There's three-way races in there where multiple parties are playing to win.
00:10:25.700 Or there's big local concerns that make them different.
00:10:31.720 So the one we want to talk about this week is in Quebec, Trois-Rivière.
00:10:37.500 Trois-Rivière is an interesting seat.
00:10:39.860 You know, in the last election, it was one of the, really one of the few three-way seats in Quebec.
00:10:43.880 The Bloc Québécois just wanted ahead of the Liberals and the Conservatives were right behind where the Bloc was.
00:10:51.540 So all three seats, all three parties were within spitting distance of each other.
00:10:55.060 But a couple of interesting things have happened.
00:10:56.700 Number one, that Bloc MP who eked out the win last time isn't running again.
00:11:01.680 So suddenly the Bloc has lost the power of incumbency and any good work that that MP might have done.
00:11:07.640 They have got a new candidate, René Villemour, who is a professor.
00:11:12.020 The Liberals are also running, not running the person who almost won it last time.
00:11:16.180 They're running a local journalist, Martin François.
00:11:18.900 But then the most interesting candidate is Yves Levesque, who was a Conservative candidate last time.
00:11:24.260 He's running again.
00:11:25.520 And Yves Levesque was the mayor of Trois-Rivière for, I think, 17 years.
00:11:32.000 A very, very popular local mayor, got huge amounts of vote, very much personally responsible for increasing the Conservative vote and putting them in contention in that riding.
00:11:41.220 So if the Conservatives are doing well nationally, and it looks like the Conservatives could win the most seats, you could see a calculation in a place like that, where there's a popular local Conservative candidate, obviously, you know, mayor of one of the larger cities in Quebec for a long time.
00:11:56.520 If Erin O'Toole's winning government and if we went to our review, the chances of some of Yves Levesque would be in cabinet would be very high.
00:12:03.280 And you could see that that sort of speculation, you know, could have an impact in that riding.
00:12:10.120 So if the Conservatives are picking up any seats in Quebec, it would probably be a Trois-Rivière.
00:12:18.140 But on the other hand, the Liberals were close, and we've seen in the past, the polling has shown that the bloc seems to have declined from what they were in the last election in Quebec.
00:12:27.160 But depending on how things go with the Liberals, it could change again.
00:12:29.840 So it's really anybody's game, and it would be fascinating to see what happens in that seat.
00:12:35.980 Interesting. Well, good for the Conservatives to pick up such a strong local candidate, because I don't know if it's just me, but when I think of that part of Quebec, the part between Montreal and Quebec City, I don't really think of it as being a Conservative possibility.
00:12:50.240 And the fact that they are as close as they are is interesting.
00:12:53.940 Well, it's actually a cultural thing. Demographically and psychographically, when we look at the attitudes of that area, sort of rural area, really between Montreal and Quebec City, the rural and regional centers, they're very, very similar to Conservative voters in other parts of the country.
00:13:09.000 But there's an identity issue where they don't feel that the Conservative Party is the party of them.
00:13:12.520 And many of them vote Bloc Québécois holding their nose a little bit, saying, the Bloc are for us.
00:13:18.620 I don't really agree with them on a lot of stuff, but they're of here.
00:13:21.640 And there's a large anti-Liberal sentiment in that area.
00:13:24.740 So, you know, in the past, so good candidate recruitment can make a big difference.
00:13:30.500 And, you know, Ilevesque was one of the pickups of the 2019 campaign for the Conservatives, getting a great candidate there.
00:13:36.660 And it's one of the reasons that Mr. Scheer's first event, after he launched the campaign in 2019, was in Port Revere.
00:13:45.300 Very interesting. All right, Hamish. Well, thank you so much for putting this together for us.
00:13:49.160 Thanks for breaking it all down.
00:13:50.620 Anyone who's interested in checking out that Writings to Watch list and the map, head on over to TNC.news.
00:13:56.940 Hamish, thanks so much for joining us.
00:13:58.360 Thank you so much.
00:13:59.380 I'm Candace Malcolm, and this is The Candace Malcolm Show.