Juno News - September 30, 2021


The PPC are not to blame for O’Toole’s failure


Episode Stats


Length

18 minutes

Words per minute

181.25

Word count

3,277

Sentence count

174

Harmful content

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Candice Malan and Hamish Marshall discuss the results of the 2019 election, and why the Liberals failed to get a majority government. They also discuss why the Tories failed to capture enough votes to defeat Justin Trudeau and his party.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.240 Even if you combined the PPC and the Conservative vote in the 2021 election,
00:00:04.480 Erin O'Toole still would not become Prime Minister.
00:00:06.800 I'm Candice Malcolm and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.
00:00:13.840 Hi everyone, thank you so much for tuning in and before we get to the meat of the program,
00:00:17.680 I just want to acknowledge that today is the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation
00:00:22.560 for Canada's First Nations people. This is the first year that we are doing this. The day 0.89
00:00:27.120 is to honor the children who were lost and who perished at residential schools in Canada,
00:00:32.480 as well as their families and communities. I think this is a really important day. I know this
00:00:36.400 issue gets really politicized and I know the issue with the supposed unmarked graves that were recently
00:00:42.080 discovered at First Nations communities in your residential schools. That story was really
00:00:47.120 torqued and I was very critical of it, but that said, I still think that this is kind of a day
00:00:51.360 to understand our history, to understand the serious flaws of a program like the residential
00:00:57.920 school program. The whole idea that a big centralized government should step in, take kids out of their
00:01:04.320 families, out of their homes, out of their communities, to try to sort of socially engineer
00:01:08.480 them into some outcome was a totally flawed program and we should learn more about that. We should
00:01:13.840 acknowledge it. So I just want to acknowledge this day, say that I think it's a good step forward,
00:01:18.160 and I hope that we can continue as a country to work towards raising the quality of life for
00:01:24.480 people who live in First Nations reserves, people who have had a totally different and unfair
00:01:30.560 opportunities in this country. So I want to acknowledge that I know you're supposed to wear
00:01:34.000 orange. I didn't know that. I don't have much orange in my outfit, so maybe next year I'll try to
00:01:38.880 wear orange for that reason. Moving on, here on The Candace Malcolm Show, we have been doing a series of
00:01:45.200 postmortems on the election, doing deep dives into the very flawed approach of Erin O'Toole and the
00:01:51.280 Conservatives to sort of tact left in the last election, run as centrists, run as moderates. We've
00:01:56.720 been quite critical of that and looking at the many reasons why that that failed and why the
00:02:01.520 Conservatives lost to Justin Trudeau. Now this series wouldn't be complete if it weren't for a
00:02:07.040 better understanding of the numbers, looking at the final outcome of the campaign. And to do that,
00:02:12.320 we're joined by Hamish Marshall. Hamish, as you know, was our in-house pollster during the election.
00:02:18.080 Hamish, welcome back to the show. Good to see you again.
00:02:24.960 So let's talk about the final outcome, but let's talk about the difference first of all. What was the
00:02:27.920 outcome because we had you on election night, but there were still some outstanding votes that hadn't
00:02:32.080 been counted. So what were the final
00:02:33.680 numbers? What was the difference between the 2019 map and the 2021 map?
00:02:37.520 Well, very little. I mean, I'd have to go back and check, but I believe this is the Canadian election with the smallest amount of changes from the previous campaign. So the Liberals picked up two seats over 2019, ending up 159. Conservatives lost two seats.
00:02:56.280 The Greens lost a seat. An Independent, obviously, Jody Wilson-Raybould didn't run again, so Independents went down one, and both the Block and the NDP went up one seat.
00:03:10.060 I think you could say it's fairly, you know, there's been a lot of coverage of how it's been disappointing for everybody, and I think that's accurate.
00:03:16.100 Everybody came out of this election expecting to have done significantly better. No one overperformed, with the possible exception of the PPC, but they didn't win any seats either, so they've got lots to be disappointed about as well.
00:03:30.380 Yeah, it did feel like everyone was a loser. I know that the Liberals technically won the election and they walked away, but obviously Justin Trudeau planned and devised this whole campaign so that he would get a majority government, and he didn't get that.
00:03:43.080 So just by virtue of him not getting a majority, it was like he lost. Well, Hamish, you came up with a really nifty guide for us during the election, the 45 ridings to watch, and you sort of broke them down by the key seats that the Liberals had to win,
00:03:58.500 the key seats that the Conservatives would have to win, and the ones that the NDP would have to win in order to make the inroads that they needed.
00:04:06.460 So maybe that would be a good place to start to determine who picked up what they needed to win.
00:04:12.560 Well, as I said, nobody made a big breakthrough. So if we look at the list of, you know, we had 20 ridings the Liberals need to win.
00:04:20.040 They won Vancouver-Ranville. Jody Wilson-Raybould wasn't running again. They didn't pick up any of the seats they had targeted in Quebec.
00:04:26.340 They won St. John's East off the NDP in Newfoundland and Labrador, as predicted, although that was actually closer than expected.
00:04:34.800 You know, the NDP had lost a long-time popular local MP, and they wasn't sure that his popularity would transfer their new candidate.
00:04:43.100 They actually did pretty well there. The Liberals successfully picked up Fredericton.
00:04:48.300 That was the seat the Greens had won last time. The Green MP, Jenica Atwin, had crossed to the Liberals.
00:04:54.120 It ended up being a very, very closer race. The Greens were far, far behind, and the Conservatives actually did quite well,
00:05:00.180 but the Liberals still managed to hang on to it, winning there.
00:05:03.580 They didn't make the gains in the West. They broadly expect her in British Columbia.
00:05:09.260 There was a bunch of seats in British Columbia they had targeted, but they picked up Cloverdale-Langley City as sort of their one pickup in BC.
00:05:17.940 In Alberta, they picked up Calgary Skyview and Edmonton Centre, and then in Ontario, they picked up Aurora, Oak Ridges, Richmond Hill, which were all on the list.
00:05:33.940 But there's a lot of other seats that they didn't win. A seat like Charleswood, St. James, and Sineboya, that was certainly on their list in the Winnipeg area, went down to a recount.
00:05:45.140 The Conservatives were ahead by only 24 votes before the recount. After the recount, the Conservatives won by, I think, about 400.
00:05:52.340 So it was certainly close, and the Liberals picked up a few of their targets, but not very many, and left a lot of seats on the table.
00:05:59.540 And what's interesting is that in a lot of areas, the biggest change was that incumbents did better.
00:06:05.500 So if you look at the seats that the Liberals tried to pick up off the block, or even the ones that tried to pick up off the Conservatives, you know, a good example is West Nova in Nova Scotia, where the Conservatives in 2019 won by about less than 3%.
00:06:16.620 You know, the Conservatives won by a much, much larger margin this time.
00:06:20.840 We saw incumbents, the incumbents that survived, generally won with much larger margins, especially non-liberal incumbents.
00:06:27.280 So, you know, the Liberals did, they picked up a few of their seats, but they also lost some on the other side.
00:06:32.740 So they ended up in a situation where they were still plus 2.
00:06:36.480 So you had 12 Tory targets, and these were 12 Liberal-held seats that you thought that the Conservatives would have to win to make the gains.
00:06:44.680 I know that one of them in here, Peter Burrow-Kortha, the former member of Parliament, Maryam Monsef, and the former Cabinet Minister, she lost.
00:06:52.780 Were there any other seats in this list that went to the Conservatives?
00:06:57.480 I know they didn't do very well in the 905.
00:06:59.920 They wouldn't have won seats like the one in Richmond Hill or King Vaughn, but were there any other upsets?
00:07:06.780 No, the Conservatives did win King Vaughn.
00:07:08.760 Oh, they did? Okay.
00:07:09.380 Yeah. So, you know, in the 905, the Conservatives lost two seats, Markham Unionville and Aurora Oak Ridge's Richmond Hill, but they picked up the Kin Vaughn seats, so for a net of minus one.
00:07:21.280 On this list, they picked up Miramichi Grand Lake by a decent margin, but not perhaps as much as they would have liked.
00:07:28.800 They picked up Peter Burrow-Kortha, defeating Cabinet Minister Maryam Monsef, as you correctly pointed out.
00:07:34.520 They also won Bonavista.
00:07:37.460 No, sorry.
00:07:38.160 They won a different seat in rural Newfoundland.
00:07:39.860 Bonavista-Burin Trinity was reasonably close, but they won another seat in central Newfoundland, Costa Bay's central Nautsla Dam.
00:07:50.120 So they won some seats like that, but, you know, on the whole, they're net down minus two, mainly because of losses between Alberta and BC.
00:08:01.880 The Conservatives lost seven seats.
00:08:03.360 So the seats that they did pick up in Atlantic Canada, the four seats they picked up in Atlantic Canada were not enough to overcome those losses, which is why they ended up down minus two.
00:08:20.820 So one of the interesting takeaways is how the Conservatives just didn't really make the inroads that they were looking in suburban parts of the country, so mostly the 905, as well as Vancouver.
00:08:32.100 They didn't pick up seats in Vancouver, they actually shed some.
00:08:35.380 So what happened and why did that, why did they lose those seats?
00:08:40.200 Well, I mean, look, the Conservatives lost across the 905, they lost 50,000 votes.
00:08:43.760 They didn't get the votes out that they did last time, which certainly would have helped in a bunch of those seats.
00:08:47.900 But one of the things that unites a lot of the seats that they didn't win, other ones that they lost or the ones they'd hoped to have win didn't, is a significant Chinese population, Chinese Canadian population.
00:08:59.000 So we saw the Conservatives losing Richmond, Steveston Richmond East, Markham Unionville in Ontario, and also seats like Aurora Oak Ridge's Richmond Hill, which has a little bit of, has some Chinese Canadian population,
00:09:16.400 and Richmond Hill, which was a seat which was very close in the last election, was not as close this time.
00:09:21.920 So it was a big, big drop.
00:09:23.820 You know, the Chinese Canadian population had been, for the last decade, big supporters of the Conservative Party.
00:09:29.460 The Conservatives done very, very well with that group of Canadians.
00:09:32.580 And we saw a significant, significant drop this time, which hurt the Conservatives, both in the lower mainland and in the 905.
00:09:41.180 One of the stories that came out, I know that Aaron O'Toole sort of took a firm on China stance and was talking a little bit about how China deals unfairly on the world stage,
00:09:52.800 their human rights abuses, their trade abuses.
00:09:55.220 And he was sort of presenting himself as a tough on China type guy.
00:09:58.920 And Trudeau sort of twisted that and accused him of stoking anti-Chinese bigotry and hatred.
00:10:05.460 And then we saw a story about WeChat, the Chinese social networking texting app.
00:10:13.040 Basically, there was some kind of, I don't know if it's verified or not, but there was some kind of a campaign run from Beijing to encourage Chinese Canadians not to vote for the Conservatives.
00:10:24.120 So can you tell us a little bit more about that?
00:10:26.820 And do you think that that had an impact?
00:10:28.440 Well, there was an entirely parallel, just as campaigns have evolved on English-speaking social networks like Facebook,
00:10:36.660 there's an entirely different parallel campaign being fought strongly and viciously and with great intensity on WeChat in Chinese.
00:10:46.800 And there's a lot of accusations and it's really no holds barred politics on that app.
00:10:54.660 You know, there's been allegations that a lot of the anti-Conservative messages came from, you know, accounts associated with the Chinese government.
00:11:07.340 I obviously am not an expert in these things.
00:11:08.880 I don't know which accounts these things came from.
00:11:11.120 But it certainly seemed that there was a coordinated and concerted attack on the Conservatives on WeChat,
00:11:18.080 which I think had a big, big impact in Chinese-Canadian communities.
00:11:21.700 And we saw that in the results.
00:11:23.360 It's interesting because when the Americans thought that there was Russian interference in their election in 2016,
00:11:29.960 it led to, like, a huge, you know, overwhelming campaign movement, media campaign.
00:11:37.600 You know, it's all we heard about for years after the 2016 U.S. campaign.
00:11:42.380 Here we have another adversarial government, probably perhaps worse than the Russians. 0.99
00:11:46.980 I'm talking about the Chinese in Beijing, potentially interfering with our election, 1.00
00:11:51.860 potentially, you know, really swaying these few key ridings.
00:11:56.980 And we're not hearing much about it.
00:11:58.560 That's disappointing.
00:12:00.400 I want to...
00:12:01.120 You know, I think that, you know, I can say from, you know, my experience in the last election that,
00:12:06.520 in the last election, the Canadian Security Services had set up a group to brief the parties on attempts at foreign interference,
00:12:13.120 to representatives of the RCMP and CSIS there.
00:12:17.120 You know, I certainly hope that the Conservative campaign is bringing these concerns to that group
00:12:24.600 to see if they can get action.
00:12:27.720 You know, obviously, it's all covered by, you know, official secrets rules and things now.
00:12:32.000 And I don't have insight on what's happened so far.
00:12:34.800 But I really, really hope that someone has initiated some of those things you're talking about.
00:12:39.760 Yeah, same here.
00:12:41.840 I want to move on, Hamish, and talk a little bit about the People's Party and the sort of vote splitting.
00:12:46.900 I know we talked about this throughout the campaign, that the People's Party wasn't just made up of the sort of
00:12:52.740 libertarian wing of the Conservative Party who felt disillusioned and left,
00:12:56.020 that Maxime Bernier's anti-lockdown message was really resonating across the political spectrum,
00:13:00.960 especially with people who are already kind of open to voting for protest parties,
00:13:05.160 people who might be more on the left.
00:13:07.160 I shared this nifty little graph on Twitter that basically, even if you were to take all of the PPC's votes,
00:13:15.420 I think they got about 840,000, if you were to take all of those, give them to Conservatives,
00:13:19.880 just assume that those would have been Conservative voters.
00:13:22.580 Otherwise, if Aaron O'Toole had tried to appeal to libertarians in his campaign,
00:13:27.060 even if that were the case, the popular vote for the Conservatives would have gone up to 39%,
00:13:31.180 but they would have only gotten 142 seats.
00:13:33.980 And the Liberals, the Liberals would have lost, I think, something like 16 seats.
00:13:37.620 So the difference, the Conservatives lost 23 seats roughly because of the votes went over to the PPC.
00:13:45.040 Again, if you're assuming that they're all Conservative voters, 16 of those seats went to the Liberals.
00:13:49.780 So even if that was reversed, the Conservative vote would have gone up to 142.
00:13:53.780 The Liberal vote would have stayed at 143 of the seats once.
00:13:57.360 So it wouldn't have made the difference.
00:13:59.220 It would have been really close.
00:14:00.340 It would have been really interesting.
00:14:02.060 But the PPC vote was not the determining factor in the election.
00:14:06.720 Can you offer some insight or help us understand this a little further?
00:14:11.360 Yeah, I mean, the Liberal vote has become extraordinarily efficient.
00:14:16.760 And I imagine if we looked at those results that some of the ones that the Liberals won by would have been winning by dozens or hundreds of votes.
00:14:24.880 You know, we would see the Liberals win a lot of seats by very little and Conservatives win a lot of seats by an awful lot.
00:14:33.320 So we're in a situation where, you know, that Liberal vote has become very, very efficient, especially in Ontario.
00:14:41.400 But it speaks to a Conservative need to really break through in the 905.
00:14:46.960 We can't, you know, Conservatives can't be hoping just to add an extra percent here or percent there.
00:14:52.520 You know, if Conservatives want to win, you know, the 20-odd seats in the 905, which is what they need to do in order to win government, they should be able to, they need to be winning these seats cleanly, as Harper did in 2011, as Doug Ford did in 2018.
00:15:10.160 And as, you know, Mike Harris did historically in the late 90s.
00:15:15.260 So the Conservatives need to win these seats by a lot.
00:15:18.300 There's a lot more work to do in terms of figuring out what needs to do to get more votes out.
00:15:23.640 But they have to start from the point that the number of votes we got in the 905 in 2021 was, you know, Conservatives lost 50,000 votes.
00:15:32.760 And that's a bad, bad place to start.
00:15:34.320 Wow, yeah, absolutely, especially given the strategy of the campaign there.
00:15:39.740 A lot of people are now talking, Hamish, about the need for electoral reform, just given that the popular vote is so lopsided with the seat count.
00:15:48.420 And, you know, if you look at, there's been a graph circulating on social media showing the percentage of the popular vote that the Prime Minister has gotten.
00:15:57.420 You said that the Trudeau Liberals have gotten increasingly, you know, concise in how they campaign.
00:16:04.320 But that's not necessarily good for the country, given that they're not winning the majority or even the plurality of votes.
00:16:09.860 I know this is sort of not necessarily your area of expertise, but what do you think of the idea of electoral reform and proportional representation here in Canada?
00:16:18.880 Look, I think that I traditionally have not been a big fan of electoral reform, but I'm a sort of a traditionalist conservative sort of fellow, so I don't like big change.
00:16:29.560 But I think you could see Canada moving towards a system similar to what they have in Germany and New Zealand, a hybrid system where somewhere between a half and two thirds of the MPs are still elected in constituencies like we have right now.
00:16:42.660 And then there's a group of MPs that are elected from a list, which would make the overall result more proportional, maybe not strictly proportional, more proportional.
00:16:53.200 I think ending up in a system like that with something would be, I don't think that's inconceivable in Canada.
00:16:59.340 I just don't think it's in anyone's interest.
00:17:01.140 You know, the Liberals aren't interested in that kind of a change.
00:17:03.800 The Conservatives are doing well, would do well without it now, but never would have had a majority government.
00:17:12.720 So I don't I don't I don't I'm not holding my breath.
00:17:16.640 I don't think it would happen.
00:17:17.440 I'm not sure.
00:17:17.700 I'm not sure it's a good idea, but I could be persuaded that it is.
00:17:20.660 But I don't think it's going to happen in in a very, very, very long time in this country.
00:17:26.720 Well, especially because, I mean, Trudeau was once a proponent of it.
00:17:30.220 He once campaigned on it and promised that the 2015 election would be the last election ever determined by the first pass to post system.
00:17:36.720 But then he won a majority in that government and in that election and realized that, hey, this voting system isn't all that bad if I can win a majority.
00:17:43.600 So surprise, surprise, a politician doing something in their own self-interest.
00:17:48.720 Hamish, thank you so much for joining us and for providing insight.
00:17:51.680 Thank you for joining us throughout the election campaign.
00:17:54.200 You really helped add a lot of insight and color to the election, helping us understand what was going on out there.
00:17:59.400 We really appreciate it.
00:18:00.580 My pleasure.
00:18:01.900 All right. Thank you so much for tuning in.
00:18:03.200 I'm Candice Malcolm and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.