Juno News - May 13, 2025


Liberals inch closer to a MAJORITY ｜ Keean and Candice DISAGREE about Alberta’s future


Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

198.73958

Word count

2,218

Sentence count

148

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Candice and Kian Bexsey discuss the results of the recent recount in Terrebonne, Quebec and why they think Elections Canada may be investigating a voter who says she voted for the Bloc and they refused to accept her vote.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Hi, I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show. We have a great episode for you
00:00:05.780 today. After the federal election, I did a broadcast where I talked about the good news
00:00:09.900 about the election. One of the things that I thought was pretty good was the fact that the
00:00:13.500 Conservatives were able to hold the Liberals to a minority government, and I predicted there'd be
00:00:17.600 another election inside two years. Well, I may have to go back on that prediction because it
00:00:22.420 seems like the Liberals are, by hell or high water, going to find a way to get a majority
00:00:27.200 government in Canada, find a way to rule this country, one-party rule. And so we are going
00:00:32.140 to go through the latest shenanigans when it comes to Elections Canada and the recount.
00:00:37.620 And joining me today, I'm very pleased to welcome Kian Bexsey, co-founder of Juno News and journalist
00:00:42.160 based in Calgary. Kian, welcome to the show. Hi, Candice. It really is recount and count again
00:00:47.660 until you win, eh? This is unbelievable, this story. Okay, let me walk you through it, folks,
00:00:51.840 because this is the headline over at CBC. Liberals won in Terrebonne, Quebec by one vote. But this
00:00:57.840 woman's block ballot wasn't counted. So the original story is that there were several recounts
00:01:02.920 in this writing in suburban Montreal. It went back and forth. So when you read the details,
00:01:06.840 it's unbelievable. Let me just read the story. Elections Canada says it is investigating after
00:01:11.220 a voter in a Quebec writing came forward with an envelope that had been returned to sender.
00:01:15.540 Inside was a vote for Bloc Quebecois in the Terrebonne writing. Where it stands, as it stands,
00:01:20.920 incoming Liberal MP, Tatiana Agusta, was declared the winner by one vote after several recounts. So
00:01:27.300 they recounted this thing several times. Turns out they found that the Liberals won by one vote.
00:01:31.600 And then a woman shows up and says, wait a minute, I voted for the Bloc, but they never accepted my 0.88
00:01:36.380 vote. And so I don't see a way how this is going to stand. Let me just again go through the details
00:01:42.380 because it's really stranger than fiction. Elections Canada said the return address printed on the
00:01:47.140 elector's return envelope was incorrect, specifically part of the postal code. We're still working to
00:01:53.060 gather all the facts. We'll be able to get back to you as soon as we have more information, the
00:01:56.960 agency said in a statement to CBC News. The voter, however, remains irked, obviously, because she said
00:02:03.060 that she sent it on time. So according to the, you know, the Elections Canada, Canada Post tracks this.
00:02:10.620 So she said that her vote was mailed on April 5th. So plenty of time before the April 28th election.
00:02:17.400 And then it was returned to her after the election on May 2nd. And of course, you can see that the
00:02:21.440 postal code was incorrect, but she didn't write the envelope herself, right? When you have a special
00:02:26.080 ballot, when you vote by mail, Elections Canada gives you a pre-written envelope that has the
00:02:32.500 address. So it was Elections Canada that made the mistake. And so I don't see how this is going to
00:02:37.880 stand. I think that there will be some kind of, they'll take this to court for sure. But let me
00:02:44.500 just read the details about what happened. On election night, Terrebonne initially went to
00:02:48.940 Augusta, so the Liberal, by 35 votes. But after a standard validation process, the result flips to
00:02:55.600 the incumbent Bloc MP, Nathaniel Sinclair Desanets, by 44 votes. So did you catch that, Kian? So initially,
00:03:04.800 the Liberals won by 35 votes. Then they did a recount, and they found that the Bloc won by 44
00:03:09.800 votes. So it's not even in the same universe. We're talking about a difference of 79 votes.
00:03:15.740 And then they did another recount. This triggered an automatic judicial recount. Days later, it showed
00:03:21.100 that Augusta had won by a single vote. So they found 35, disappeared to 44, back down to one. And
00:03:27.500 unbelievable, this thing has switched back and forth. And now it's just 1%. So when you look at the
00:03:33.080 official numbers there, you see just how unbelievably, incredibly close it is. Terrebonne,
00:03:40.600 the Liberals got 23,352 votes, and the Bloc, 23,351. What a mess, right? We're supposed to believe in the
00:03:50.000 integrity of Elections Canada. We're supposed to say, oh, you know, we trust that the election was
00:03:54.640 sound. You know, there's been so many stories, Kian. Let me just go through a couple of them.
00:03:58.000 Elections Canada failed to count hundreds of ballots left in a Vancouver office, 822 special
00:04:03.980 ballots. Oops, we found them after the election. They don't count. We have two other recounts
00:04:09.020 underway. One in rural Newfoundland, riding where the Liberals had a 12-vote lead, that is Terranova,
00:04:14.760 the Peninsulas. And then another one, a judge approved a ballot recount in Windsor, Tecumse,
00:04:19.960 Lakeshore. So here we are, three weeks after the election, two and a half weeks after the election.
00:04:23.740 There's still some outstanding votes. We know that the Liberals need 172 seats to get their
00:04:30.560 majority. Right now they stand at 170, which means they are two seats away, even with the Speaker,
00:04:37.080 of getting to a majority. All they have to do is just convince one or two Bloc or NDP or Elizabeth
00:04:44.200 May to come over, jump over to the Liberal side, and we could be seeing a four-year nightmare scenario.
00:04:50.920 What do you think? Elizabeth May has already committed. She said that she would join Cabinet.
00:04:55.540 She said she would do whatever it takes to support Mark Carney. So you can just count the Green MP
00:05:00.480 to be a member of the Liberal Party. Mark Carney, you know, we watched election night together,
00:05:07.300 and we saw the numbers just sort of slowly move to exactly what they needed for a majority. And then
00:05:14.500 when they didn't get it, oh, it was the recounts. And then a recount again. And keep recounting until
00:05:19.200 we get the result that we want. And now they're saying that that one specific writing that you
00:05:24.700 were mentioning is within a one-vote margin. And some votes for the Bloc were thrown out.
00:05:29.280 A lot of Canadians are saying right now, and I tend to agree, that these writings that were won by less
00:05:34.120 than 400 votes, and they have more than 400 spoiled ballots, Elections Canada should be obligated to store
00:05:40.940 those ballots, scan them, and explain what happened to each and every rejected or spoiled ballot or
00:05:48.620 damaged ballot or whatever it was. I've been on the inside count room of a lot of elections, both
00:05:54.360 general elections as a scrutineer and in political nomination contests. And I can tell you whether a
00:06:01.120 ballot is accepted or rejected is a very political process and very subjective sometimes too.
00:06:07.760 You know, one rule is that you can't identify yourself when you're marking the ballot. And if
00:06:13.720 you, people put some really crazy, you'd think that people would just put an X on the ballot,
00:06:18.000 but they don't. Sometimes they put a B, sometimes they put a one, sometimes they put a check mark,
00:06:23.060 sometimes they put an X on the ballot. And the point of putting a ballot in the ballot box
00:06:29.200 with nobody knowing who put that ballot in there, you know, there's a whole reason and process behind
00:06:34.780 it. But at the end of the day, what matters is voter intention and being able to say, yes,
00:06:40.480 the voter wanted to send this candidate to Ottawa one way or another, and they didn't identify who
00:06:46.260 they were. And if you're able to do that, the ballot should be counted. And the fact that we
00:06:50.640 can't see all those ballots and audit them with our own eyes, and we just have to trust that, oh,
00:06:55.620 this writing had 500 spoiled ballots and the candidate won by one vote. It's like,
00:07:00.300 hmm, the liberal incumbent won by one vote. Hmm, really, that's really strange to me,
00:07:05.160 I think. And the fact that Carney is just getting right up to what he needs to get a majority
00:07:09.960 government, like within a seat or two, it might even with the speaker, he might actually have it
00:07:15.480 with Elizabeth May, not crossing the floor, but you know, basically doing that with her vote, 0.94
00:07:22.260 she said she would be a speaker, or she would be in cabinet with Carney. And it's a bit of a joke
00:07:27.880 that Mark Carney was able to steal this away from Canadians when they so obviously didn't want to
00:07:34.540 give him a majority on election night. That's so true. And just the fact that you immediately
00:07:39.640 had a woman come forth saying, my ballot was rejected because of a mistake by Elections 0.97
00:07:44.860 Canada. It wasn't like she filled out the envelope herself, it was Elections Canada with a pre-printed
00:07:49.240 return envelope that caused it. I mean, how many other ballots have we just not heard about,
00:07:54.280 right? That they got spoiled that the person doesn't know about or got returned to center
00:07:57.740 and got lost in the mail or something like that, right? Like the fact that they immediately had
00:08:01.980 a person saying, wait a minute, one vote, this writing went by one vote, this entire country
00:08:06.420 could actually flip to majority based on such a slim margin. Wow, folks, it really, really brings
00:08:13.300 on the message. One vote could have given Mark Carney a majority government based on Elections Canada's
00:08:19.980 own failure. You know, don't attribute to malice, but you can attribute to incompetence. And when it
00:08:25.840 comes to bureaucrats, there's plenty of that to go around. It is really, really, really, you know,
00:08:33.560 disappointing when you look at across the country, how individual writings were handled by Elections
00:08:40.540 Canada. And it's just, you know, it's beyond the pale in some cases with what happened in that
00:08:48.540 specific writing. Well, especially given what's happened in our country, say, over the last five
00:08:52.660 years since COVID. Like, I would say trust in institutions and big government institutions
00:08:56.540 is probably at an all-time low, especially with a subset of Canadians. Some of them are probably
00:09:01.000 viewing this show right now that they just don't trust the government. They don't trust these
00:09:04.820 institutions to do what they're supposed to. So, yes, I agree. Don't attribute it to malice. It could
00:09:09.060 just probably be sheer incompetence. But there is some malice out there as well. And I think that's why
00:09:13.520 it's important to point some of these things out. Kian, I know we're on YouTube and we don't want 0.99
00:09:19.660 to get censored. I do want to get to a couple of other topics here. I want to talk about Mark Carney
00:09:24.480 introducing his new cabinet. He says that he has presented a small focus cabinet with fewer than
00:09:30.160 30 ministers and up to 10 secretaries of state. These were announced just earlier today. There
00:09:34.220 was some speculation that Chrystia Freeland would not be appointed in cabinet. Well, that is not true.
00:09:38.440 She has been demoted down to Minister of Trade, the original post that Donald Trump literally
00:09:44.700 mentioned in the Oval Office last week, that he really didn't like her in this role. And now here
00:09:49.220 she is, Minister of Trade. So we're going to go through that. And I want to talk to you a little
00:09:53.100 bit about the Alberta Separatist Project. Because I know you're out in Alberta. I know you're a patriotic
00:09:58.160 Canadian. You love our country. But you have been reporting on the ground. And we're going to talk
00:10:02.660 about the Alberta Prosperity Project and how they are unveiling their referendum question.
00:10:08.400 Yeah. I, you know, I have a lot to say about Alberta Separatism. And I want to set the record 0.62
00:10:13.820 straight on what I actually think about it. Because a lot of people online sort of say that,
00:10:19.860 oh, you know, Kian, Kian must be, you know, 1.00
00:10:22.420 Wait, wait, hold that thought. Hold that thought. I want to get your opinion. You're going to tell us
00:10:25.880 exactly what you think. But folks, we're going to do something a little different today. So Kian and I
00:10:29.140 are going to hop over to Juno News. And we're going to complete the show. We're going to finish
00:10:33.420 the show for subscribers only. So if you want to watch the rest of our conversation, we're going
00:10:36.960 to talk about Alberta Separatism. We're going to talk a bit more about Mark Carney. And we also have
00:10:41.020 some, we're going to read our hate mail. We have some hate mail, especially a couple pieces from
00:10:45.380 Legacy Media that have been, they've written about five hit pieces on us since we launched. Actually
00:10:49.340 more than that, just since the election. So they really have a lot to say about us. We're going to read
00:10:52.680 some fan mail as well. So if you want to join all of that, head on over to
00:10:56.700 JunoNews.com, become a premium subscriber. And we're going to do these fireside chats frequently
00:11:02.620 with the founders of Juno News, myself, Candice Malcolm, and Kian Bextie. So join us over there
00:11:08.260 and we're going to have a lot of fun.