Juno News - Trudeau is no longer an appealing option to Canadians

00:00:00.000 The Liberals are not connecting with Canadians and Justin Trudeau is no longer an appealing

00:00:03.880 option to most Canadians. I'm Candace Malcolm and this is The Candace Malcolm Show.

00:00:11.840 Hi and welcome to The Candace Malcolm Show. Thank you so much everyone for tuning in. The

00:00:15.720 Liberals are not looking good in the polls. Poll after poll after poll is giving us hints and

00:00:20.200 giving us signs that the Liberals are just not where they were in 2019. They're not appealing

00:00:24.560 to Canadians after a year and a half of long lockdowns and Trudeau, just really every

00:00:29.880 appearance on this campaign, he's just looking more and more desperate, frankly more and more

00:00:34.260 unhinged. The Liberals finally unleashed their policy platform on Wednesday which again showed

00:00:40.900 more and more signs of desperation. We saw another huge bailout going to the CBC. On top of the 1.2

00:00:47.380 billion dollars the Liberals give the organization, that state broadcaster, annually, we're going to

00:00:52.820 see another 400 million dollars, 400 million taxpayer dollars going to the CBC. To me, that's a sign

00:00:59.520 of desperation. We know that there is no end to the new spending, no end to deficits. Again, it could

00:01:05.920 be 50 years before the Liberals were able to balance the budget and it is just not good news for Canadians

00:01:13.020 and I think that is being reflected into the polls. But I want to bring in Hamish Marshall, True North's

00:01:18.120 in-host pollster to help us make sense of the recent polls and the recent data. Hamish, thanks so much

00:01:23.620 for joining the program.

00:01:24.820 Pleasure to be here, Candice.

00:01:26.520 So, from my perspective, it looks like the Conservatives are really running away with this election. There

00:01:31.120 was that mainstream poll that found them up by 10 points. There was that Hill Times article that talked

00:01:36.520 about how the Liberal reception at the door is a lot worse than it was in 2019 for Liberal candidates

00:01:42.520 and volunteers. There was another poll that found that two out of five, so around 40% of Canadians, say they

00:01:48.520 really dislike Justin Trudeau. Not moderately, but really dislike him. And then that latest poll today

00:01:54.220 showing that up to three-quarters of Canadians are not likely to vote for Trudeau. So, can you help us

00:02:00.820 understand, are the Conservatives running away with this campaign or is it still pretty close?

00:02:05.020 I think it's still pretty close. There's been a general tightening in the polls. Main Street, yes, had the

00:02:10.520 Conservatives nine and a half, ten points ahead. That's now come down to a five-point lead. Some of the other pollsters that

00:02:16.220 don't collect their data using demon dials are generally finding a much closer race. Conservatives

00:02:21.620 may be ahead by one or two, maybe three points at most. Some people still have levels ahead by a

00:02:27.520 point. I think we're in an election where which party is up by one and a half or two points, hard to

00:02:33.420 tell right now. Conservatives seem to have a slight edge, but it's only a slight edge. But I think you're

00:02:38.520 right to point out that Trudeau's personal numbers are down. That's pretty consistent across the board, is

00:02:43.120 Trudeau's personal numbers are down and they're much, much worse than they've been at any point

00:02:47.220 since before he became Prime Minister. So, that is definitely the challenge and I'm sure that's one

00:02:52.420 of the reasons why those Liberal candidates are having a much harder time at the door. That Justin

00:02:56.920 Trudeau is not the asset he once was to them. Interesting. How much of that do you think is the

00:03:01.520 fact that we're in this pandemic election that Canadians don't really seem to want to be in?

00:03:05.320 Well, I mean, that's an extremely good question. I think that was certainly true in the first part

00:03:09.820 of the campaign. The further we get away from the original election call, that's likely to dissipate

00:03:14.620 as a reason. But what I've found in the past in research is once people find a reason to dislike

00:03:21.220 Justin Trudeau, they don't kind of come back to him. Once they're turned off by him, they turn off.

00:03:25.740 So, whether that's still the motivating issue when the polls close in a couple of weeks,

00:03:31.280 well, hard to say, but I don't see those people who've now decided that they don't like him are

00:03:35.000 suddenly going to fall in love again. Right. Exactly. All right. Well, the Liberals

00:03:39.000 unleashed their platform on Wednesday. What we saw was a lot of new spending. So, in total,

00:03:46.040 the Liberal document includes $13 billion in new spending in the fiscal year, totaling $78 billion

00:03:53.400 new spending in the next five years. The platform's divided into six categories that sort of echo what

00:03:58.600 Trudeau has been talking about in the campaign. So, that's the pandemic, housing, healthcare, the economy,

00:04:03.540 climate change, and reconciliation. I want to note that there is nothing in this platform about

00:04:09.380 balancing the budget. Trudeau, it looks like the deficit would be somewhere around $350 billion.

00:04:15.380 No doubt that that is part of the reason why the debt is now over a trillion dollars and probably

00:04:19.940 going to be much, much more. And there was that Parliamentary Budget Office projection that showed us

00:04:25.460 that the Liberals probably won't balance the budget until 2070. So, not a lot of fiscal restraint,

00:04:31.760 but this is an election. So, you know, they're not here to show us how responsible they are. They're

00:04:36.480 here to show us all the things they're going to spend money on and all the goodies. So,

00:04:40.000 how do you think this platform is going to play and do you think it's going to help the Liberals

00:04:45.040 in the polls? I think it's a platform that's designed around the idea of causing trouble for

00:04:50.160 the Conservatives. I think if the election, you know, was going better for the Liberals, if they were

00:04:55.600 eight or ten points ahead, we would have gotten a different platform. This is a platform designed

00:05:00.880 to cause trouble for Aaron O'Toole and to make him talk about things he doesn't want to talk about.

00:05:05.920 I think there's two different things they've done. One is they've announced that they're going to

00:05:12.160 bring in some rules around abortion. Of course, in Canada, we don't have an abortion law,

00:05:16.000 so they're going to bring in some regulations around that. It'll have impacts on provinces and

00:05:20.000 and they have a regulation within the Canada Health Act, which therefore becomes something

00:05:26.320 that O'Toole then has to figure out if he's for or against and how that will go over with his party.

00:05:31.440 So that's definitely a trap for them. They also say they're going to take away the

00:05:36.880 charitable tax status for crisis pregnancy centers that put out what they described as false or

00:05:42.800 misleading information about abortion. No idea what those criteria will be, but this is clearly also

00:05:48.560 designed to try to provoke conservative pro-life organizations and to put O'Toole in a difficult

00:05:55.920 situation. The other trap they've done is around their spending, because while they have no plans

00:06:02.640 to balance the budget, and I'm sure if it was a 50-year time frame to balance the budget based on

00:06:09.680 this year's budget, after this platform, that's going to be even longer.

00:06:14.160 The fact of the matter is that they now have a cost of platforms being costed

00:06:18.560 and the conservatives have not released the costing of their platform.

00:06:21.840 And after a couple of weeks of the conservatives saying, we want to see Trudeau's platform,

00:06:25.440 we want to see Trudeau's platform, the shoe is now on the other foot. And O'Toole is now

00:06:29.920 having to defend the costing of his platform that he doesn't have yet. We don't know when it's going

00:06:35.040 to be released, but the liberals are trying to flip the script on that. So that's what I see in this

00:06:41.760 platform is it's designed in a way to cause trouble for O'Toole. We'll see how successful that is.

00:06:49.840 But as a result of this close election that they weren't expecting, I'm pretty sure they were up

00:06:55.200 some pretty late nights the last 10 days, desperately rewriting their platform.

00:06:59.040 Well, absolutely. And that's sort of what happens when the conservatives release their platform very

00:07:02.880 early and sort of left it open for the liberals. I think that Aaron O'Toole has been incredibly

00:07:08.000 disciplined. I'll just say that. I know you're talking about the trap of abortion and those 0.94

00:07:12.480 policies sound just absolutely important, especially given the idea that the liberals

00:07:16.160 would get to define again what criteria a charity must meet. I mean, they kind of

00:07:20.400 got into that trouble with the Canada Summer Jobs program and had to eventually walk that back. But

00:07:26.240 you know, if it was another conservative leader, I can't imagine that they would have done

00:07:30.960 what Aaron O'Toole did was kind of mirroring the liberals when it comes to mandatory vaccines. I didn't see

00:07:36.000 a conservative going along with that. I don't like the idea of it. But again,

00:07:39.680 if this is just about winning elections, I think that Aaron O'Toole has been disciplined on so many

00:07:44.320 issues that certainly I wouldn't have been able to keep my mouth shut on. So, you know, good for him

00:07:50.560 in that regard. And I believe that their budget is now before the PBO, the parliamentary budget officer,

00:07:55.360 to get costed. So hopefully that will come out soon. Hamish, you put together a really great

00:08:01.440 product for us at True North, looking at the ridings to watch, understanding, you know, where

00:08:07.200 this campaign is being fought on the local level. I encourage everyone to head on over to tnc.news

00:08:12.240 to check that out. We went through a couple of the ridings to watch in the last show, but I wanted

00:08:17.440 to keep going with this because there's so many interesting seats out there. So let's talk about

00:08:22.320 some of the ones that, let's talk about one of the seats that the liberals absolutely need to win

00:08:26.720 in order to win this election. This is an Ontario seat, Northumberland, Peterborough South. Why don't

00:08:31.760 you tell us a bit about this riding? Sure. So it's a chunk of rural and small town Ontario,

00:08:37.840 east of Toronto. Traditionally, it's been very rural, but it's growing and it's sort of becoming

00:08:42.880 on the edge of the commuter belt. There's more people who are commuting in. And then because of

00:08:48.080 COVID, there's people who did live in Toronto who maybe have bought houses out there. It's obviously much

00:08:52.400 more affordable. So it's been a swing conservative liberal area for a long time. Generally, when the

00:08:58.480 conservatives do well, they win the seat. It was a pickup in the last election. The conservative MP

00:09:04.000 Philip Lawrence won it by three and a half percent. So obviously, it's not a huge win. And the liberals

00:09:10.480 need to win it back. Liberals don't have a path to victory without going through a seat like this. 0.95

00:09:16.800 You know, it's becoming more white collar. It should be becoming a little bit more liberal. 0.80

00:09:21.200 So we'll see, you know, in the long term, that makes it more difficult for the conservatives.

00:09:24.720 But in this election, they can hold on. Liberals are running a local lawyer called Alison Lester, 0.69

00:09:30.640 very local person with a good local story. So it's going to be a bit of a battle. But if the

00:09:35.520 conservatives can hang on here, they're going to be on for looking for a good night. If the liberals

00:09:39.600 can snatch it back, they're going to be picking up seats, broadly speaking.

00:09:43.520 Interesting. Interesting. Well, let's move on to the next one. This is one that the Tories would need to win.

00:09:47.680 Interesting, because I don't think of Eastern Canada really at play at all. But when you look

00:09:51.600 at the numbers, some of them are quite close. This one's Miramichi out in New Brunswick. And

00:09:56.480 interestingly, my colleague Andrew Lawton was on tour with the O'Toole campaign as a journalist,

00:10:02.320 and he caught up with Lisa Raitt, the former MP who's out in Nova Scotia. But she talked about

00:10:07.360 how she thinks that more and more of Atlantic Canada is at play. So let's talk about this,

00:10:12.560 this writing in New Brunswick. Well, I agree in general that Atlantic Canada has not been

00:10:16.960 ambassador support for conservatives. New Brunswick is generally the most conservative

00:10:21.040 of those provinces. The conservatives won three seats there last time, and they lost Miramichi

00:10:25.040 by only 400 votes. So it's very, very, very tight. What's also interesting is the Liberal MP

00:10:30.960 who'd won it in 2015, and then won again in 2019, isn't running again. And it's a fascinating battle,

00:10:37.440 because who we have running is the Liberals are running one of the MLAs for the area, a liberal

00:10:42.080 MLA called Lisa Harris. The conservatives are running one of the other MLAs for the area,

00:10:45.760 a conservative MLA called Jake Skinner. They've both been in cabinets, you know, Harris in the

00:10:50.480 previous Liberal government and Jake Skinner in the current conservative government, although he's

00:10:56.400 obviously had to step down to run federally. So it's two people with a strong local electoral record

00:11:02.880 who both accomplished in terms of being in cabinet at the provincial levels,

00:11:06.720 that both got name recognition. And it's going to be, it's going to be another tight fight.

00:11:11.040 And Miramichi is a place in the country that often bucks trends. It's an area that sometimes

00:11:17.360 conservatives do well there when they're not doing as well nationally and Liberals can do well.

00:11:21.680 It's sort of its own place. And what's even more interesting there is it's one of the,

00:11:25.280 it's one of the seats where the PPC could be argued, cost the conservatives a seat last time.

00:11:30.240 So the conservatives lost by less than 400 votes. The PPC took over a thousand votes.

00:11:36.640 Nobody thinks that all PPC votes came from the conservatives in 2019, but

00:11:40.560 most people would say that somewhere in 60, 70% did. So in this, if there had been no PPC candidate,

00:11:45.600 the conservatives probably would have won it. So we'll see what happens this time.

00:11:50.880 Must win for the conservatives. If the conservatives can't win this seat,

00:11:54.400 they're not going to have a very good night across New Brunswick, much less Atlantic Canada.

00:11:57.520 Interesting. Well, speaking of the PPC, and I know a lot of our supporters have left the

00:12:02.000 conservative party and they've gone over to the PPC. Like you said, they're not all voters for the

00:12:06.960 PPC came from the conservatives. But I think that a lot of, you know, especially given how moderate

00:12:12.960 this leader has become, a lot of them are looking over to the PPC. So let's talk about the, probably

00:12:17.840 the most important riding in the country for Maxime Bernier and his party, which is Bernier's

00:12:23.120 home seat, home riding in Beauce. Does Bernier have a shot in this riding, Hamish?

00:12:28.480 Well, you know, it's, it's going to, it's, it's another boast battle, right? And the conservatives

00:12:33.520 are MP who beat Bernier last time as the gentleman called Richard LeHoux. Richard LeHoux is a consummate

00:12:41.360 local politician. He was a mayor of one of the municipalities there for a very long time. He

00:12:45.200 was the head of the MRC, which is sort of the equivalent of a county in Quebec. He was the head

00:12:49.600 of that county. He went on to become actually the head of the, of the rural municipal,

00:12:53.920 uh, association of association with his values in Quebec, uh, absolute, like sort of local,

00:13:00.480 uh, local, local guy, uh, and was really able to win, uh, last time on his local credibility,

00:13:05.920 but also, um, pushing, uh, Maxime Bernier, uh, making a point in fact that Maxime Bernier

00:13:11.760 was out, uh, campaigning around the country and wasn't being able to give the time to Beauce.

00:13:16.000 And he ended up winning by about 10 points, but this was make or break, uh, for Bernier. Um,

00:13:21.520 he's gotta do, he's gotta do well. He's gotta win this seat after not winning a seat,

00:13:25.040 especially his seat for two elections in a row. The future of the PPC is hard,

00:13:29.600 hard to figure out what it would look like. Uh, it would certainly become much more of a fringe

00:13:34.160 party, I think, and it would no longer get the coverage by the media, uh, failing to win an

00:13:38.000 election for two seats or win a seat for two elections. The other interesting thing is that as,

00:13:42.640 um, uh, the CAQ government, uh, in Quebec begins to double down and be even more restrictive. Their,

00:13:48.240 their vaccine passport on apps is, is now, uh, in play or in force. Um, we're seeing a push back

00:13:55.200 in Quebec. Obviously we've seen, um, some big, big protests in Montreal about this. Uh, and then,

00:14:01.440 uh, I know that the Quebec conservative party, uh, uh, which is, uh, Rembrandt Eric Duhem,

00:14:06.640 which is fighting against all these things is gaining members like crazy. Uh, and the Beauce

00:14:11.600 is one of those areas that's going to be very, uh, uh, except interested in those ideas. It's,

00:14:17.680 it's, it's, it's been argued it's the most freedom loving area of Quebec. So if there is

00:14:22.560 going to be pushback against the consensus around, um, vaccine passports and everything else,

00:14:27.360 uh, with Maxime Bernier in the Beauce, you know, counting them out would be a big, big mistake,

00:14:32.960 uh, but losing by 10 points, it's going to be a tough hill to climb.

00:14:35.760 Interesting. That's, that's definitely one that I'm going to be watching very closely on election night.

00:14:39.920 All right, let's, let's go over to the NDP side, because we've talked about it before,

00:14:43.520 the jug meet seems to be, uh, catching on, uh, to some conservatives and, uh, I'll, I'll just let

00:14:49.040 the viewers know, uh, this, this next writing is where my parents live, Burnaby, North Seymour,

00:14:53.040 and Hamish and I were chatting a little bit because, uh, we're both from the North Shore

00:14:56.720 and the North Shore has, uh, the North Shore of Vancouver. We've, uh, seen the writings sort of

00:15:01.280 broken up and this is an interesting one because the North Van part of this writing, North Seymour,

00:15:07.040 is quite different than the Burnaby part across the river there. So, uh, why don't you help us

00:15:11.440 understand how this writing is at play? Sure. So as you would correctly say, Candace,

00:15:16.320 it's, it's a very, it's a very sort of, uh, uh, odd writing and it's got two very distinctly different

00:15:21.680 parts. Seymour part is entirely residential, uh, uh, older, uh, very high income, uh, beautiful,

00:15:30.000 big, big, big, beautiful homes. Um, uh, predominantly, uh, uh, Caucasian, uh, on this, on the, 0.99

00:15:37.280 the North Burnaby side, it's, uh, much more Chinese Canadian, uh, smaller homes. There are some very 0.99

00:15:43.440 nice areas in Capitol Hill, but generally definitely lower income, uh, large commercial

00:15:47.600 strip down Hastings street. Um, so it's two very, very different parts, uh, of, of lower mainland.

00:15:53.920 And what it does is it combines the Seymour part, which has traditionally had a, uh, a strong liberal

00:16:00.480 conservative bent with the, uh, North Burnaby part, which has traditionally had, uh, a strong,

00:16:06.080 fairly strong conservative history, but also more prominently a strong NDP history.

00:16:10.160 And because of a variety of things that happened in the last election, uh, the conservatives are

00:16:14.560 not, are, are, are, are sort of fairly far, uh, far back in this seat. Uh,

00:16:21.920 and the NDP is pushing strongly. And what's fascinating is this, the NDP,

00:16:25.840 knowing their strength is in the Burnaby part, went and recruited, uh, a North Vancouver city

00:16:30.800 counselor called Jim Hanson. So he's a well-known counselor, been around for a while, representing that

00:16:35.360 Seymour part, their weak part of the riding. So they're bringing someone with their most

00:16:38.960 local credibility against that. Uh, whereas liberals are still running our Terry beach,

00:16:43.840 the local MP who is again, a North shore person. So there isn't a Burnaby candidate in the race.

00:16:48.640 They're obviously hoping the NDP will be able to any people hope that those votes will stick with them.

00:16:53.600 Um, they only lost by three and a half percent last time. Ironically, it's actually because of the

00:16:58.720 NDP zone actions that they probably lost the, uh, the conservative candidate there last time,

00:17:03.440 ultimately was removed from the conservative party because of, uh, her unwillingness to track some,

00:17:08.800 uh, some, uh, some comments about, uh, gay and lesbian people. And, uh, that was pushed by the NDP

00:17:17.040 candidate pushing for her. Whereas if she'd been on the ballot, uh, the conservatives probably would 0.99

00:17:22.320 have done better than some of those votes probably would have, would have gone conservative instead of

00:17:25.680 going liberal and the NDP or probably would have won. So it's an NDP seat. It it's right next to

00:17:30.560 Jagmeet Singh seat. This is the sort of seat they've got to win. Um, it's going to be fascinating

00:17:35.360 to watch an election night. Uh, and I'd point out that even though the North, the North Vancouver

00:17:39.520 part does not have a long NDP history, you know, it went, they did elect an NDP MLA at the last

00:17:43.920 provincial election. Wow. That's really interesting. I didn't know that, but I, I do remember the, um,

00:17:48.720 the conservative candidate getting kicked out and it was not very long before the election. So I don't

00:17:52.880 think they had time to replace the candidate. And therefore I don't believe there was a conservative

00:17:56.880 on the ballot. So perhaps with, with, with an actual conservative running, uh, it could be even

00:18:02.320 a three-way race. Well, Hamish, thank you so much. We've got the Labor Day weekend coming up. And

00:18:07.520 I know that many people, especially liberal strategists are trying to spin this idea that

00:18:11.520 Canadians aren't really paying attention until Labor Day. And so the election is really going to come

00:18:15.520 down to the final, uh, week or so. So I will definitely have you back on the program next week to

00:18:20.480 help us, uh, in the final stretch here. I don't agree with liberals, uh, about a lot, but I, I do

00:18:25.760 think, uh, people, this election is really going to be about the last 10 or 12 days. Great. All right.

00:18:30.640 Thanks so much. Thank you. Thank you so much for tuning in. We'll be back again tomorrow. I'm

00:18:35.200 Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.

Juno News - September 02, 2021

Trudeau is no longer an appealing option to Canadians

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