Juno News - August 18, 2021


The issues that actually matter to Canadians this election

Topics
Afghanistan election impact housing policy
Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Erin O'Toole Kim Campbell Hamish Marshall Jagmeet Singh Candice
Trudeau prioritizes his vanity election over the crisis in Afghanistan Money policy is your job, Justin!

Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

191.05

Word count

1,886

Sentence count

118

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Candace Malan and Hamish Marshall talk about what s going on in the campaign so far and why they think it s important that the candidates are focusing on the issues that matter to Canadians. They talk about the gaffes, the flip-flops, and the messaging so far.

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 .
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 Is this election being fought on the issues that Canadians really care about?
00:00:03.480 I'm Candace Malcolm and this is The Candace Malcolm Show.
00:00:10.640 Former Prime Minister Kim Campbell never won an election.
00:00:13.920 In the one campaign she ran in, she made misstep after misstep and ended up losing in one of the biggest landslides in Canadian history.
00:00:21.680 One of her worst gaffes and most memorable moments on that campaign trail was when she said this,
00:00:26.360 Well, Kim Campbell lost and I think for good reason.
00:00:34.000 Elections are a perfect time to talk about the serious issues that matter to Canadians.
00:00:39.340 And so in that spirit, we surveyed our True North audience to find out what issues they care about and what issues they'd like to see focused on in the election.
00:00:47.900 There were four major issues that came out in this survey.
00:00:51.000 The first one is personal freedom, including freedom of speech, internet censorship, government funding of the media, and the collusion between big tech and big government.
00:01:00.020 The second issue that True North Nation wants us to cover is the health of the economy, including creating jobs, growing the economy, balancing the budget, and attracting investment.
00:01:09.320 The third is the tax burden on families.
00:01:11.780 And number four is bringing more jobs to Canada, specifically bringing manufacturing jobs back to Canada.
00:01:18.320 So are the leaders discussing these issues?
00:01:21.660 Are the leaders addressing the issues that actually matter to Canadians?
00:01:25.840 And to help us make sense of some of these issues, we have our True North in-house pollster, Hamish Marshall, joining us on the line.
00:01:32.680 Hi, Hamish. Thanks for joining us.
00:01:35.100 Hi, Candice. Great to be here.
00:01:36.640 So I want to focus in on the campaign so far and what each of the leaders have been talking about and their messaging so we can sort of understand how they're doing in connecting with Canadians.
00:01:46.960 So first, let's start with Justin Trudeau.
00:01:49.080 I think he started off, it looks like a pretty rocky start, to be fair.
00:01:53.560 I think that he's flip-flopped on vaccine mandates.
00:01:55.960 We've seen the bungling of the Afghanistan file.
00:01:58.400 And then he came up with this weird she-session thing yesterday. 0.96
00:02:02.460 And he didn't even deliver the lines properly.
00:02:04.060 But I think he's trying to, you know, criticize the conservatives for not being feminist enough.
00:02:09.260 So can you help us understand what it is that Justin Trudeau is going for in this campaign?
00:02:13.920 Well, I think he's, you know, his core message is that things have been going pretty well.
00:02:20.340 We've done a good job fighting the vaccine and, you know, keep going and we can do great things together.
00:02:27.000 Obviously, the last few days, I think, has been, as you say, a few bumps along the road.
00:02:31.140 Although the one thing I will say about Trudeau and the Liberals is that when they often get the initial reaction to something wrong,
00:02:36.840 Afghanistan, you know, fudging on recognizing the Taliban, even on the vaccine mandates situation,
00:02:45.820 they often get their first initial gut reaction.
00:02:47.980 They screw something up.
00:02:48.900 It doesn't really click.
00:02:50.180 They fix it fast.
00:02:51.740 And, you know, what happened is, you know, Trudeau on, I guess it was Monday, said,
00:02:57.760 we're, you know, we'll wait and see if we're recognizing the Taliban.
00:03:01.300 But by then, the next day, he was saying we have no plans to do it and they're terrorists.
00:03:05.500 They fix it fast.
00:03:06.520 And for those of us who obsess about elections, we can say, well, he said one thing, he changed his mind, he flip-flops.
00:03:13.180 The vast, vast majority of people aren't paying that close attention.
00:03:15.800 It's the middle of August and he gets to the right point quickly.
00:03:19.220 He doesn't take a week to fix something.
00:03:20.940 So we might have noticed that he flip-flops, but the vast majority of Canadians are just going to say,
00:03:25.760 well, he doesn't think we're going to recognize the Taliban.
00:03:27.880 So he has a problem, but he can fix it quickly.
00:03:31.060 And that's one of the reasons why he wins elections.
00:03:33.900 That's a really good point.
00:03:36.400 What do you think, just to focus in a little bit more on Afghanistan,
00:03:39.360 I mean, this was probably totally unforeseen by the liberals when they decided to prompt this election.
00:03:45.520 And, you know, there is a lot of punditry out there saying that this is a disaster for Trudeau.
00:03:50.080 The fact that he's hosting this election and forcing us into it,
00:03:53.700 while this country that Canada has had a stake in working on and rebuilding over the last two decades
00:03:59.680 has been taken over by the terrorist group that we helped remove.
00:04:04.840 Do you think that will have an impact on Trudeau?
00:04:07.420 Do you think that will, you know, create a negativity around him hosting this election in the first place?
00:04:12.540 Oh, look, I would love to say yes.
00:04:16.460 But I think that the, I don't know if the liberals would have called the election the same day that Kabul fell
00:04:24.260 if they didn't know what it was going to happen.
00:04:26.780 The problem he's got is that he's promised refugees, right? 0.99
00:04:29.680 He promised that we're going to bring 20,000 refugees over from Afghanistan.
00:04:34.160 You know, obviously, in some cases, people connected to people who helped the Canadian forces,
00:04:39.320 which sounds good.
00:04:41.880 How that's implemented is where the danger is for him.
00:04:44.800 You know, if stories come out that people waiting for Canadian protection
00:04:47.580 or ended up getting, you know, taken away by the Taliban or getting hurt or killed,
00:04:53.340 that's where it can become very, very, very dangerous for people that Canada may have promised to
00:04:57.140 and, while waiting for us to deliver, end up in a very bad situation.
00:05:02.820 That's where it can be very dangerous to him.
00:05:04.720 I don't think anyone's going to blame him for the fall of Kabul. 0.63
00:05:07.920 I don't think, you know, Canadians, Canada pulled its forces out of Afghanistan years ago.
00:05:14.660 It's not the same situation that's going on in the States.
00:05:17.680 Okay, let's move on and talk about Aaron O'Toole, a Conservative leader,
00:05:21.580 because he has been focusing on the issues that True North Survey found that our supporters
00:05:26.900 and our readers and our viewers really do care about.
00:05:29.240 I'm talking about consumer issues.
00:05:31.200 He had a really interesting idea to get rid of the GST for the month of December
00:05:36.060 to try to spur retail shopping.
00:05:38.860 He's focused on innovation and attracting jobs to Canada.
00:05:43.300 So I want your analysis.
00:05:45.420 How has his message been breaking through?
00:05:48.000 And do these sort of economic issues really move voters?
00:05:52.300 Well, I think they move the voters who care about them.
00:05:54.440 And as your True North Survey identified, there's a lot of people who do.
00:05:57.860 The people who are moved by those issues are more on the Conservative side of the spectrum.
00:06:03.460 So he's talking about issues that work with his Conservative base,
00:06:05.880 but they also work with voters who are open to voting Conservative
00:06:08.800 who might not be, who might just be kicking the tires right now.
00:06:11.540 So it's certainly the right message for the sort of people that he needs 0.87
00:06:15.400 in order to get more votes and more CBEs to go.
00:06:18.060 So, you know, the GST vacation, certainly interesting and eye-catching.
00:06:24.340 But we saw it tried in B.C. last year.
00:06:27.080 We're doing it for a full year.
00:06:29.860 We'll see how it plays out in this election.
00:06:32.280 And I want to pick up on his housing policy as well, because I was a little surprised.
00:06:37.260 I was reading an analysis in McLean's, which doesn't really seem to usually be a place
00:06:42.220 where you would find, you know, complimentary material about the Conservatives.
00:06:46.880 But they said that Aaron O'Toole's housing policy and his ideas to enable more houses
00:06:53.800 to be built across Canada.
00:06:55.180 I think he said that he wants a million new houses to be built.
00:06:58.300 Do you think that's a strong issue for O'Toole?
00:07:01.160 And is that something that Canadians will vote over?
00:07:05.260 Well, Canadians are deeply concerned about the price of housing,
00:07:07.520 especially in Toronto and Vancouver.
00:07:10.620 But frankly, it's in most major centres now.
00:07:13.260 It's becoming unaffordable to buy a family house, you know,
00:07:16.900 inside of a couple-hour commute.
00:07:18.880 And that's a really big problem for a lot of Canadians,
00:07:20.900 and any polling will show that.
00:07:23.860 The trick is what to do about it.
00:07:25.300 Research that I've done in the past shows that people see it primarily
00:07:28.860 as a demand issue, not a supply issue.
00:07:31.760 It might very well be a supply issue that we can do things to create a million new houses, 0.99
00:07:36.060 to reduce a red taper at city halls and everything else
00:07:38.880 in order to get more houses built quickly.
00:07:41.180 Canadians see it as a function of, you know,
00:07:44.260 a good chunk of Canadians blame this on foreign buyers,
00:07:49.080 foreign investors coming in and buying up houses.
00:07:52.320 Another group simply feel that, you know,
00:07:55.020 non-market housing should really just be constructed by a provincial or federal government
00:07:58.360 or some municipal government or someone.
00:08:00.000 The number of key people who think that we can open up,
00:08:05.000 huge amounts more housing construction based on regulatory changes
00:08:11.520 in order to make it easier to build houses is, you know,
00:08:15.020 I think a little, it's quite small.
00:08:17.320 I think it's a good idea, but it's not something that,
00:08:19.840 it's a policy that needs to be explained.
00:08:21.540 And we can't have explained to them, they get it,
00:08:23.540 but it's not their first gut instinct of what the answer is.
00:08:26.700 Yeah, that's a good point.
00:08:27.780 All right, let's move on to Dragmeet Singh.
00:08:29.120 So the NDP is really focused, it seems their entire platform was focused on ways to tax the ultra-rich.
00:08:35.600 And, you know, this seems to be going back to the sort of bread and butter for the NDP.
00:08:39.860 Do you think this is a good way for the NDP to sort of threaten Trudeau and his base
00:08:43.780 by talking about these new tax regime for ultra-rich Canadians?
00:08:48.100 Yeah, absolutely.
00:08:50.240 I think, look, the NDP have one very, very important job,
00:08:53.060 which is make sure that Trudeau can't scare progressives into voting for him
00:08:56.700 and do the NDP bleed three, four, five points in the last 10 days of the campaign.
00:09:01.360 That, for them, is the difference between keeping around the same number of seats
00:09:04.400 and picking up a few and picking up a bunch of seats.
00:09:08.180 So they need to do that.
00:09:09.560 In order to do that, they need to keep furnishing their true progressive cred
00:09:13.180 and put a wedge on Trudeau around these issues.
00:09:18.340 So they can say, well, Trudeau doesn't care about this or Trudeau doesn't care about that.
00:09:21.900 He's not in favour of a wealth tax.
00:09:24.380 So he's not really truly progressive.
00:09:26.680 So I think we're going to see a lot more from them in that vein between now and Election Day.
00:09:30.900 Interesting.
00:09:31.460 Well, Hamish, thank you so much for helping us break this down.
00:09:33.740 We look forward to your continued analysis throughout the campaign.
00:09:37.280 Hamish Marshall, True North's in-house pollster.
00:09:40.040 My pleasure.
00:09:41.300 Contrary to what former Prime Minister Kim Campbell once said,
00:09:44.520 elections are the time to talk about serious issues,
00:09:47.040 and True North will continue to be here to push these issues.
00:09:50.320 I'm Candace Malcolm, and this is The Candace Malcolm Show.