The Candice Malcolm Show - August 24, 2021


Could Erin O’Toole actually become Prime Minister？

Topics
polls and election competitiveness
Hosted by
Candice Malcolm
Guests
Hamish Marshall
Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Erin O'Toole Ipsos Angus Reid Harper
Trudeau is in panic mode and resorting to manipulating the truth The Taliban are not “our brothers”

Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

192.2

Word count

1,933

Sentence count

102

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

The polls are not looking good for the Liberals, but does that mean that Erin O'Toole could actually become Prime Minister? Candice and Hamish Marshall, our in-house pollster, joins us to break it all down.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
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 The polls are not looking good for the Liberals, but does that mean that Erin O'Toole could actually become Prime Minister?
00:00:05.060 Trunor's in-house pollster joins us to break it all down. I'm Candace Malcolm and this is The Candace Malcolm Show.
00:00:14.420 We have seen a remarkable change in the polls over the last week.
00:00:18.720 Now, we've talked about it on the show that Justin Trudeau is not running a very good campaign.
00:00:22.860 A few of his major wedge issues have sort of fallen apart.
00:00:26.140 But the way that the polls have reacted is quite sharp and quite telling.
00:00:30.520 So I'm going to go through a couple of them here and I'm joined by Hamish Marshall, who is our in-house pollster at Trunor, who's going to help us make sense of it all.
00:00:38.580 I think the most interesting thing I've seen so far is the 338 Canada breakdown, which is the aggregator of all the polls.
00:00:45.800 So on August 13th, before this thing was called, the odds of Trudeau winning a majority government were at 58 percent.
00:00:52.140 No wonder he called the election.
00:00:53.760 By a week later, August 22nd, the odds of a Trudeau winning a majority is down to 22 percent.
00:01:00.380 And meanwhile, the odds of the Conservatives winning a minority government is up at 20 percent.
00:01:05.700 So, Hamish, the chances of the Trudeau Liberals forming a majority, about one in five.
00:01:10.480 The odds of the Conservatives forming a minority, one in five.
00:01:15.180 What do you make of this?
00:01:16.680 Well, it's been obviously a big move in the polls for the Conservatives.
00:01:20.620 I mean, they had been earlier in the summer at some historic lows and they're moving into a position where, depending on the pollster, they're somewhere between five and five points behind to one point ahead in some cases.
00:01:31.700 So this election has become extremely competitive.
00:01:36.660 You know, as much as we'd seen in previous polls, like we spoke about in the past, people didn't seem scared by the idea of a liberal majority government.
00:01:43.500 People are questioning the rationale for this election and Trudeau has not had a particularly good reason for it.
00:01:49.760 And it's given them some stumbles and O'Toole has has come out of the gate strong.
00:01:57.700 Absolutely. Well, let's talk about that, because there was a poll that came out that showed that the vast majority of Canadians don't want an election.
00:02:05.100 They think that that we could have waited a year calling this election a power grab.
00:02:09.780 So we talked about this on the night that the writ was drawn up and the election was announced that in some ways, Trudeau has a fair rationale for calling an election,
00:02:17.880 just given that the pandemic is over and he wants a new agenda for his new spending, his new vision for spending in Canada.
00:02:25.380 It doesn't seem like Canadians really agree. So so let's go back to that question.
00:02:29.520 Do you think that that he will pay for forcing an early election that I mean, if you're looking at the polls right now,
00:02:35.860 we may end up in the exact same boat with another liberal minority.
00:02:40.880 Do you think Trudeau will pay for that? And do you think Trudeau will be able to maintain his role as prime minister and leader of the party if that happens?
00:02:46.780 Well, I think I think it's up to Trudeau. I think if the election was held today, I think that would be a big, big problem for him.
00:02:53.000 The election is going to be held on September 20th. So, you know, Trudeau's got the better part of a month now to get it right,
00:02:58.460 to figure out what to figure out how to give that rationale and figure out what he needs to do going forward.
00:03:04.540 So what is the problem today? Whether it'll be a problem September 20th remains to be seen.
00:03:08.620 If he wins a minority, the question is, I don't think I don't think there's there'd be a push to get rid of him as as as a liberal leader.
00:03:18.460 I think the question is whether he wants to stick around with something like that.
00:03:22.620 He is, you know, he has completely remade the liberal party in his own image,
00:03:27.540 and I don't believe there would be any mechanism or any desire or capacity to really to move past him.
00:03:34.660 It doesn't come from him in turn.
00:03:36.440 Interesting. Now, let's talk about this ECOS poll because it's getting a lot of attention.
00:03:40.680 And I'm not sure if it's an outlier. I'm not sure if it's completely accurate.
00:03:44.380 But let's let's go through and say so ECOS asked Canadians,
00:03:47.920 how do you plan to vote in the upcoming election?
00:03:50.120 Now, on August 15th, we had 35 percent saying liberal, 31 percent saying conservative.
00:03:55.780 On August 21st, so a week later, the conservatives are ahead in this poll, 32.8 percent,
00:04:00.620 just by a very, very, very small margin.
00:04:02.660 And the liberals are at 32.4.
00:04:05.280 So is it possible that the conservatives are actually winning this election so far?
00:04:09.260 Well, I mean, if we look at all the polls, there's there's clearly a two or one three point gap called a two point gap.
00:04:15.420 The liberals seem to be ahead across all the pollsters.
00:04:18.360 You know, this is a rolling poll, which they take a certain number of poll of interviews every night and drop off a previous night.
00:04:25.660 So these sort of things, you think it's easy to move up and down a point or two.
00:04:30.680 And they've got the conservatives ahead by zero point four percent.
00:04:33.820 I'd point out that in the in the 2019 election, conservatives won the election by one point one percent in terms of the popular vote,
00:04:40.300 but still lost in terms of the number of seats.
00:04:43.020 So, you know, a lead of of point four percent is certainly encouraging for the conservatives.
00:04:49.020 And I don't want to I don't want to take that away in any way.
00:04:51.040 But extrapolating that to to victory is is, I think, very, very premature.
00:04:57.920 Interesting. Let's talk a little bit about the demographics, because there was an Ipsos poll that came out on August 24th that I found quite interesting and very surprising.
00:05:06.840 So it had the conservatives ahead in Ontario at 35 versus the liberals, 31, the conservatives ahead in British Columbia at 34 versus the liberals, 31 in British Columbia.
00:05:17.960 And this is surprising to me in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, the NDP are surging at 39 percent to the conservatives, 32.
00:05:26.220 So if this was the case and this held, Hamish, this would be a pretty different map than the 2019 election where the conservatives swept Saskatchewan, didn't do that well in Ontario, British Columbia.
00:05:37.020 So what what is happening and why is it so different this time around?
00:05:41.180 Well, that's what Ipsos numbers are saying.
00:05:44.320 Other pollsters are showing different provincial numbers.
00:05:46.740 But, you know, you're right, it would be a different map, not so much in British Columbia, it would actually still be good news for the liberals.
00:05:52.320 You know, the conservatives got 34 percent in British Columbia in 2019.
00:05:57.240 So this isn't an improvement. But the liberals got, I believe, 27 or so.
00:06:02.580 So this is actually an improvement for liberals. You can still see the liberals gain in that environment.
00:06:06.680 Manitoba and Saskatchewan numbers are fascinating.
00:06:08.920 You'd see the NDP picking up seats in Winnipeg for sure, and maybe a conservative seat in Saskatoon West.
00:06:16.740 The interesting thing is that in Winnipeg is that while those numbers, the big NDP surge, those are almost certainly going to be the liberal seats that would fall to the NDP, which would, which would, which further hurts Trudeau's quest for majority.
00:06:29.880 And then Ontario, as far as I know, Ipsos, I think, is the only pollster that puts conservatives ahead in Ontario.
00:06:34.940 But a close Ontario, even a split, even if the conservatives and liberals are completely tied in Ontario, that would mean 15, maybe 20 more seats for the conservatives.
00:06:45.820 You know, the conservatives lost in Ontario by about eight and a half percent last time.
00:06:49.200 So even a tie would be a significant, significant change.
00:06:52.500 Well, that could be right there, the difference between a liberal majority or not.
00:06:57.100 One other demographic poll that I wanted to point out, because I just thought it was so interesting and so counter to what you think about when you think about who the conservative base is.
00:07:06.100 This is an ECOS poll from August 22nd, and it shows that the conservatives have the most support among 18 to 34 year olds, 33 percent to the liberals, 28 to the NDP, 20.
00:07:17.660 That's really interesting to me.
00:07:19.700 And then and then the next youngest demographic, 35 to 49 year olds.
00:07:23.260 The conservatives are also leading in that with 33 percent to the liberals, 27 NDP, 18.
00:07:28.700 Can we talk about what it is that young people are seeing in the conservative party and in Erin O'Toole that are making them shift in this direction?
00:07:38.560 Well, I don't I don't mean to burst anyone's bubble, but I think that's more likely to come out of methodological issues because they're ECOS collecting their data via demon dial, which is going to skew towards landlines.
00:07:49.180 And you're typically going to get quite small samples of people under really under 40 or 45 answering the phone numbers with landlines and that can create some some anomalies.
00:08:01.660 You know, if we look at the the the polling from other from other pollsters, Angus Reid, for instance, and Abacus, companies like that.
00:08:13.880 What we're seeing is that the conservatives have definitely we've seen the growing they've grown with middle aged men.
00:08:19.820 They've grown with older men as well.
00:08:22.740 They're still behind with older women and with women up to 30 middle aged women, 35, 54. 0.83
00:08:29.180 And this is the key group conservatives in order for the conservatives to win a government.
00:08:34.280 They have to basically be tied with women, you know, when men in general, and men over 35 fairly strongly.
00:08:41.620 And then basically be tied with women over 35, ideally be ahead of women over 35. 0.80
00:08:51.640 One of the more interesting things that's changed in the last a little while, last 10 years or so, is that when Harper was winning his governments, he won women over 55 by fairly strong margins.
00:09:03.400 But Trudeau has won that group in 2015 quite decisively and 2019, not quite as decisively and conservatives actually did better with with middle aged women than with older women.
00:09:16.340 But those are both groups that the conservatives need to win back.
00:09:19.440 What we're seeing is that most pollsters show the numbers are decent with those groups, but not where they need to be.
00:09:26.000 You know, the conservatives looking across, you know, there's I don't know how many polls, there's been a dozen polls out in the last week or so.
00:09:32.740 Looking across them and taking them as a as a group, we see is the conservatives have a strong base that can allow them to to to to see a path towards victory.
00:09:42.000 But they're not there by any stretch of the imagination.
00:09:45.360 There's an awful lot of politics to come over the next three weeks.
00:09:48.580 Well, absolutely. The campaign is still young. We still have four weeks left of campaigning and election.
00:09:53.360 So we will continue to have Hamish Marshall to break it all down and help us make sense of it all.
00:09:59.920 True North's in-house pollster, Hamish Marshall, thank you so much for joining us.