00:00:20.220Great. Well, so, I mean, we've been seeing so many polls really going in favor of Aaron O'Toole.
00:00:25.780It's really the story of the campaign so far is just how positively it seems Canadians are responding to him,
00:00:31.940given that he was relatively unknown not that long ago.
00:00:35.340So maybe you could help us understand, does Aaron O'Toole at this point have a pathway to victory?
00:00:42.440I mean, certainly at the moment, it's certainly got a path to winning the most seats in the House of Commons.
00:00:46.680I think a conservative majority of government would be an aggressive target right now based on the numbers.
00:00:51.100But, you know, there's still two and a half weeks to go in this campaign.
00:00:54.240And if we see progress like we've seen in the last two and a half weeks, that could be possible as well.
00:00:59.920But right now, he can certainly get ahead of the Liberals in terms of seats.
00:01:05.440Well, and I think we talked about this on one of the previous interviews that we did,
00:01:09.280is that elections are sort of won and fought on a handful of seats here and there.
00:01:14.020So five seats in this region, five seats in that region.
00:01:16.300And 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.
00:01:27.560So a handful of ridings in each region of the country to really help us understand what needs,
00:01:34.200what each party needs to win in order to win an election or in order to gain the most seats.
00:01:39.640So maybe you could just give us a quick overview of this project, Hamish, and explain what it is that we're looking at.
00:02:38.280There's been a lot of talk about how the NDP is doing better in this campaign and where they can pick up.
00:02:42.940And then there's another list of five interesting races with some three-way races and some races where unexpected things could happen,
00:02:51.520perhaps in defiance of the national trends.
00:02:53.580Great. 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.
00:03:01.560But let's spend a bit of time looking at each of these.
00:03:04.900So you put together 20 seats that the Liberals need to win.
00:03:08.640And there was one that sort of caught my eye that was interesting.
00:03:14.840Sure. So St. John's East is actually sort of the northern part of the city of St. John's in Newfoundland, Labrador.
00:03:21.520It's a city. It's a seat with a strong NDP history.
00:03:26.160In fact, the NDP won it in previous elections with Jack Harris, who was a former provincial politician and very popular local fellow.
00:03:34.740He barely lost it to the Liberals in 2015 when they had their big sweep.
00:03:40.280But he came back in 2019, took it back. But now Jack Harris isn't running again.
00:03:45.660And the big question for everyone is, is this a Jack Harris seat or is this an NDP seat?
00:03:51.140Traditionally, the provincial NDP does all right in that area.
00:03:53.980They've held seats in that area in the past, but they lost some of those seats in the last provincial election.
00:03:58.360So we now have a race between two lesser known candidates, the former Liberal MPs not running against.
00:04:05.440We'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.
00:04:16.820So 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?
00:04:25.400There's also no signs the NDP is doing markedly better in Newfoundland and Labrador.
00:04:30.260So that seat could defy the trajectory and could make the Liberals have a better seat count than their overall popular votes might otherwise suggest.
00:04:40.820Interesting. 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.
00:04:52.680But 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.
00:05:07.960And these seats are just so incredibly important and sort of up for grabs, just given the change in demographics.
00:05:14.720So why don't you walk us through this this ride in King Vaughan?
00:05:19.780Sure. So King Vaughan is a suburban and ex-urban strip northwest of Toronto and was a very close election in the last election.
00:05:29.420The Liberals won it by about two percent of the vote.
00:05:31.640This is a hundred percent seat that the Conservatives need to win for victory.
00:05:37.480There is no chance the Conservatives can get ahead of the Liberals in terms of seat count without winning a seat like King Vaughan.
00:05:45.000And it's going to be a battle of the same people who ran last time.
00:05:47.800Anna Roberts is a Conservative candidate, a municipal leader running against Deb Schulte, who's, I believe, the minister of seniors right now.
00:05:56.460And to show you how important it is, this week, both Aaron O'Toole and Justin Trudeau did events in this riding.
00:06:19.600Yeah, there's a lot of there's some smaller sort of villages and some rural areas as well.
00:06:24.100But if the Conservatives are winning here, they're going to be winning some other seats in the broader 905.
00:06:29.160And this is this is an absolutely key seat without winning the seat.
00:06:32.960O'Toole does not have a path to victory.
00:06:34.980It'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.
00:06:43.800So they're clearly going after, you know, the exact same places, the exact same seats.
00:06:48.560You mentioned that that seat, King Vaughan, isn't entirely suburban, that there's rural and acreages as well.
00:06:55.620Can you help us understand a little more what the demographic of Canadians that O'Toole would be targeting?
00:07:02.420I read that, you know, older Canadians are going more and more in favor of the Conservatives.
00:07:09.180The over 50 vote is looking pretty good.
00:07:12.080Can you give us a bit of an idea of what the demographic might look like?
00:07:17.160Sure. 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.
00:07:24.800So that's generally speaking, as people from their mid 30s to their mid 50s, generally speaking, Conservatives do better with men than with women.
00:07:31.620But at various points in the Harper government, they did very well with middle aged mothers as well.
00:07:36.380So 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.
00:07:44.540And 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.
00:07:55.380So 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.
00:08:05.800We're seeing some movement in that group.
00:08:07.420But 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.
00:08:18.800Interesting. And we've also seen a little bit in the poll.
00:08:22.100I don't know if you can really classify it as an orange wave.
00:08:24.900It's not quite 2011 Jack Layton levels, but Jagmeet Singh is certainly appealing to more and more Canadians.
00:08:30.800And it looks like he's going to do better in this campaign than the previous one.
00:08:35.540You put together the five NDP targets and one of them was Saskatoon West.
00:08:40.220I was a little surprised by that, Hamish, just given that to me that's such a conservative stronghold.
00:08:45.020But maybe you can help us understand how that could be in the NDP's range.
00:08:49.360Sure. Well, Saskatoon West is a sort of an all urban seat on obviously on the western side of Saskatoon.
00:09:13.040And what's really interesting is that this seat didn't exist in its current configuration in 2011.
00:09:18.820In 2011, there was a good chunk of the rural area in as well, which allowed the Conservatives to win.
00:09:23.740So in 2011, when the Conservatives won their big majority, they wouldn't have actually won Saskatoon West.
00:09:30.680And they won Saskatoon West for a variety of reasons last time.
00:09:34.480But 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.
00:09:42.820Without a leader from Saskatchewan, with the NDP on a bit of the upswing, I think the seat is very much in play.
00:09:49.380And while I'm not sure if Jagmeet Singh has been to Saskatoon yet, I think we can count that he'll be there.
00:11:25.520And Yves Levesque was the mayor of Trois-Rivière for, I think, 17 years.
00:11:32.000A 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.
00:11:41.220So 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.
00:11:56.520If 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.
00:12:03.280And you could see that that sort of speculation, you know, could have an impact in that riding.
00:12:10.120So if the Conservatives are picking up any seats in Quebec, it would probably be a Trois-Rivière.
00:12:18.140But 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.
00:12:27.160But depending on how things go with the Liberals, it could change again.
00:12:29.840So it's really anybody's game, and it would be fascinating to see what happens in that seat.
00:12:35.980Interesting. 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.
00:12:50.240And the fact that they are as close as they are is interesting.
00:12:53.940Well, 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.
00:13:09.000But there's an identity issue where they don't feel that the Conservative Party is the party of them.
00:13:12.520And many of them vote Bloc Québécois holding their nose a little bit, saying, the Bloc are for us.
00:13:18.620I don't really agree with them on a lot of stuff, but they're of here.
00:13:21.640And there's a large anti-Liberal sentiment in that area.
00:13:24.740So, you know, in the past, so good candidate recruitment can make a big difference.
00:13:30.500And, you know, Ilevesque was one of the pickups of the 2019 campaign for the Conservatives, getting a great candidate there.
00:13:36.660And it's one of the reasons that Mr. Scheer's first event, after he launched the campaign in 2019, was in Port Revere.
00:13:45.300Very interesting. All right, Hamish. Well, thank you so much for putting this together for us.