It's election day, and there's only seven days until Canadians head to the polls to choose a new Prime Minister of Canada. On Monday, Erin O'Toole and Justin Trudeau faced off in a bizarre, left-wing town hall style debate hosted by the CBC.
00:03:06.040I was joined by Hamish Marshall, who helped break down that poll.
00:03:09.580But one of the things that we learned is that depending on whether you're leaning liberal to vote liberal or leaning conservative to vote conservative, you care about very, very different issues in this election.
00:03:20.420So if you were a liberal, according to our poll, you told us that the issues you care about are COVID-19 and climate change.
00:03:26.840Those are the two big issues for liberal voters.
00:03:29.180If you're a conservative voter or leaning conservative, the things that you care about are government debt and spending and jobs and the economy.
00:03:38.340And you can see by this town hall that the CBC did that it was framed entirely around the left-wing issues, the things that liberals care about, which is entirely what we've come to expect from the CBC.
00:03:47.820So there really were two big red flags about this town hall for Erin O'Toole.
00:03:51.500I said I like the concept in theory, but of course the CBC trusts the CBC to mess things up and make it awful.
00:03:57.360So the first red flag is really just that it was organized by the CBC.
00:04:00.340They have a far-left editorial position and they're run by the government, so their default position is always more government, federal government's job, spend more money, very top-down in their way of thinking.
00:04:11.340The second red flag is that this event was hosted by none other than Rosemary Barton.
00:04:16.180Rosemary Barton is a huge fan of Justin Trudeau.
00:04:18.800She's done loving interviews with him where she basically fawns all over him and throws him softball questions.
00:04:26.260She's pretty open about how much she likes Justin Trudeau and she's also pretty open about the fact that she is a partisan liberal.
00:04:33.600The way that she views the world, the way that she frames her questions is always from the liberal perspective, using liberal spin and liberal talking points.
00:04:41.320And on top of all that, the CBC and Rosemary Barton hate conservatives so much that they actually sued the conservative party during the 2019 election.
00:04:48.680It was over CBC claiming that there is copyright infringement because the conservatives used a clip of Rosemary Barton in a conservative political ad.
00:04:57.260This is such a common practice where political parties take a clip from a news show to demonstrate something during an election that the judge threw this out.
00:05:06.480So the CBC ended up losing the lawsuit, the conservatives ended up winning, and yet somehow Rosemary Barton comes out the other end still pretending to be a neutral, unbiased journalist.
00:05:16.740I think most Canadians see through that, and especially most conservative voters, know better.
00:05:21.900So I won't walk you through the entire town hall because it was so tedious and I wouldn't want to subject you to that, but I will just point out a couple of the questions that were asked.
00:05:31.340So again, as I noted, the things that conservatives care about are jobs, the economy, and government spending.
00:05:36.540None of that was really covered in this debate.
00:05:38.460Instead, we heard from one voter who openly said that the top issues that he cared about were climate change and reconciliation.
00:05:45.080Again, not issues that matter at all to conservatives, according to the poll that we did.
00:05:49.680And the question that he ultimately asked was about child care.
00:05:53.100This election, like previous elections, issues such as climate change and reconciliation will be big issues for me.
00:06:01.340But for the first time ever, the issue of child care will also be a huge issue, helping decide who gets my vote.
00:06:10.800So, Mr. O'Toole, what I'd like to hear from you is concrete solutions that your party is going to bring forward to deal with the growing cost of child care, particularly in Canada's big cities.
00:06:23.220Again, I'm kind of hoping to know what your definition of the low-income bracket is.
00:06:29.320Where is your cutoff for low-income families?
00:06:32.860Can you put a number to that, Mr. O'Toole?
00:06:35.080Numbers seem to be your platform's thing.
00:06:36.920And again, the only reason that child care is a big issue in this election is because it's part of the liberal government's platform.
00:06:44.020They're running on a campaign to massively increase the amount of money that they transfer to the provinces.
00:06:49.200Now, child care is not a federal issue.
00:06:54.660The idea that we should have a federal program sort of implies that the solution that would work for people who live in downtown Toronto would be the same thing that works for people who live in smaller towns across the prairies.
00:07:06.540And secondary, it's based on this sort of pie-in-the-sky idea that everyone across the country can have the exact same daycare, that we're going to model it after the Quebec system, where everyone pays $10 a day.
00:07:17.940There's huge lineups, and not everyone gets in.
00:07:19.920So we're taking a provincial model that doesn't really work in Quebec, magnifying it so that it's across the whole country, and just assuming it will work, even though it didn't even work on the smaller scale.
00:07:29.440Of course, none of that is mentioned, and Aaron O'Toole is just held to the impossible standard of Justin Trudeau, which he himself hasn't even met.
00:07:36.080And then, of course, Rosemary Barton comes in with the liberal talking points, the liberal spin.
00:07:40.680The liberal plan is to create a national child care program across the country.