The Candice Malcolm Show - Could the rise of Maxime Bernier and the PPC be the deciding factor in the election？

00:00:00.040 We're neck and neck in the final week of the campaign. Could Maxime Bernier and the People's

00:00:04.300 Party of Canada make the difference in this election campaign? I'm Candace Malcolm and

00:00:07.800 this is The Candace Malcolm Show. Hi everyone, thank you so much for tuning in. If you're

00:00:15.820 watching on YouTube, please don't forget to like this video and hit the subscription button.

00:00:20.800 Please subscribe to True North to stay in touch with everything that's happening in the campaign,

00:00:25.360 in Canadian politics. We will be here with you every step of the way throughout the rest of

00:00:29.820 the campaign and we'll be coming live on election night to break everything down, to give you the

00:00:34.620 results as they come in. We'll have lots of exciting and interesting guests and we'll be there all night

00:00:39.920 with you. So please consider joining us for that live broadcast. Now, like I said, this election

00:00:44.560 is incredibly close. It's too close to call and to help us make sense of the recent numbers and to

00:00:50.300 look at what's happening across the country, I am joined by True North's in-house pollster Hamish

00:00:54.900 Marshall. Hi Hamish, how are you? Hi Candace, how's it going? So I think what we're seeing at

00:00:59.760 this point in the campaign, Hamish, is more or less evening out. Depending on the poll,

00:01:05.080 the Tories might be up a few points, Liberals might be up a few points. But for us to get

00:01:09.540 to tell, it's the same result as what we saw in your poll that we did through True North last week,

00:01:13.920 which is that the parties are neck and neck. It's virtually a tie. So what does this mean?

00:01:18.320 What can we make of this at this point in the campaign? Well, it's actually, it's fascinating

00:01:22.020 because what we're seeing is, you're right, the national polls are all sort of coming together.

00:01:25.680 Generally speaking, it looks like Liberals have perhaps a slightly, maybe a percent,

00:01:31.140 maybe less than a percent. So it's really extraordinarily close. And the really complicated

00:01:36.980 thing is that, you know, Canada, we don't really have an election across the country. We have

00:01:41.460 dozens of regional elections because what's happening in different parts of the country is

00:01:46.900 very, very, very different. And so the real story is in the regional poll and what's happening in each of

00:01:52.560 the provinces and even sub-regions. And the, I guess, frustrating thing is with all these polls

00:01:57.020 being very close, there actually isn't a great deal of agreement on what's going on. Some areas,

00:02:02.740 some polls that might have a similar overall number show Liberals pulling away in Ontario and other

00:02:08.260 ones show a very, very close race in Ontario. So it's very, very difficult to say exactly what's

00:02:15.000 going to happen right now. The polls are not especially helpful in that. Generally speaking,

00:02:22.680 I think though, if, if the, if we're tied in the polls on election day, that's probably a structural

00:02:30.780 advantage to Liberals. You know, the Conservatives won the last election with, with 1.1% of the popular

00:02:38.160 vote, but obviously lost the seats. All right. The Liberals won, 1.37 or 36 or more seats than the

00:02:44.900 Conservatives. The Conservatives don't, aren't, don't seem to be as far ahead in Alberta and

00:02:50.920 Saskatchewan as they were last time, but they still have a structural advantage, which means that,

00:02:55.720 or the Liberals have a structural advantage, which means that the exact same number of,

00:03:00.180 they both get the exact same number of votes nationwide. The Liberals will probably win the most seats.

00:03:04.700 That's really interesting. Well, I saw an article that sort of stuck out to me because it reminded

00:03:10.560 me a little bit of your Writings to Watch report that you did for us, except for it really only

00:03:15.340 focused on three cities. So, so it was in the National Post. It was, you know, these three area

00:03:20.400 codes could determine who wins the election. And they basically broke it down to the 450, which is the

00:03:26.200 area around Montreal that the Liberals desperately need to win and win back against the bloc. We have the

00:03:31.500 905, which is the belt around the sort of suburban belt around Toronto that Stephen Harper was able

00:03:38.100 to do really, really well back in 2011. And right now it's pretty much a Liberal stronghold. And then

00:03:44.000 we have the 604, which is Vancouver proper. And that's typically a very, very strong place for

00:03:50.660 the Liberals. I know that the two of those seats right now are held by the NDP. One is held by an

00:03:54.540 independent, Jody Wilson-Raybill, who's not seeking re-election. So the Liberals need to win all of

00:03:58.720 those. But according to polling, Hamish, it shows that the Liberals are in third place in Vancouver,

00:04:02.960 which is really shocking. I don't think I've seen Conservatives do this well, or at least appear to

00:04:08.540 be doing this well in Vancouver in a very long time. So I was wondering if you could just sort of

00:04:13.520 comment, is this election really going to boil down to just the three biggest cities in the country?

00:04:18.440 It's such a big country. There's so much going on. Is it these three? And can you comment on each of

00:04:23.080 the three cities to see how each party is doing? Sure. And we'll go, we'll go east to west. So in

00:04:28.460 Montreal, there's this band of seats in the 450 area code around the city. So you aren't really the

00:04:35.460 seats on the island of Montreal. It's what they call the Rive Nord, the Rive Sud, suburban bedroom

00:04:41.240 communities. And a lot of these seats are very classic Liberal block swing seats. And those are the

00:04:47.180 seats the Liberals want to win. Places like Cluvial de Mille-Ile, La Paris, Langueille-Saint-Hubert,

00:04:52.560 suburban seats where they, in many cases, Liberals won these seats in 2015, lost them in 2019. The

00:04:58.800 bloc's trying to take them back. But there's also a few seats that the bloc want to pick up themselves.

00:05:03.940 You know, the bloc across Quebec missed eight more seats, but I think less than 2,000 votes or less

00:05:10.400 than. So there's a lot of very close seats in Quebec. And this goes to my point about the regional

00:05:15.040 polling. We've seen polling numbers in Quebec that are very inconsistent. Some polls will show the

00:05:21.920 bloc up over the last time, which means they're probably going to be cutting into those Liberal

00:05:26.300 seats, could win two or three seats off the Liberals, which means the Liberal quest for majority is that

00:05:30.680 much harder. It means the Conservatives need to win less seats than the rest of the country in order to

00:05:34.680 get ahead of the Liberals. On the other hand, there's regional polling that seems to show that the

00:05:38.260 Liberals have opened their lead over the bloc a little bit more. And the Liberals could win two or

00:05:42.100 three seats off the bloc, which means that, or maybe even four seats off the bloc, which means

00:05:48.200 that Conservatives and NDPers have to win more seats in other parts of the country in order to

00:05:53.480 offset that. And right now, I don't think anybody truly knows which way it's going to go. It's going

00:06:00.500 to be very tight. But these suburban seats around Montreal are very important. In suburban Toronto,

00:06:06.100 you're right, the 905 was obviously swept by Harper in 2011, and then virtually swept by Trudeau in

00:06:13.660 2015. And the Conservatives and Liberals won the same number of seats as they did in 2019 as they

00:06:21.540 did in 2015, although those exact seats changed a little bit. I don't think at this point, any of

00:06:27.700 the polling seems to suggest that there's a knife edge where, you know, 15 or 20 of these seats is

00:06:32.880 going to switch. What everything looks like right now is that there's a few seats the Conservatives

00:06:37.360 didn't win by a lot last time, or certainly didn't lose by a lot last time, which are in play. So a

00:06:43.280 place like Whitby, which is right, which is adjacent to Oshawa, it's in Durham region, where Erin O'Toole

00:06:48.000 is from, or a seat like King Vaughan, which is the northern rural part, which talked about it earlier.

00:06:55.840 And then there's a seat like Richmond Hill, where the Conservatives lost by a couple hundred votes.

00:06:59.520 The twist is in a seat like Richmond Hill, which is very, very interesting, is obviously we're

00:07:04.480 seeing the PPC cost the Conservatives that seat in the last election, because PPC is clearly on the

00:07:09.520 rise. And there's no Green candidate in that seat, which means the Greens got, I think,

00:07:16.160 1800 votes there last time. A lot of those voters probably aren't even aware there's no Green candidate,

00:07:20.960 but they're going to walk into the polling booth, and they're going to decide who they're going to vote

00:07:24.160 for. And some of them will vote Conservatives, some of them will vote PPC, but a lot more are

00:07:28.480 going to vote Liberal and NDP. So that gives the Liberals a built-in advantage and a seat that the

00:07:33.040 Conservatives could actually gain votes and still not gain that seat. So it's going to be very,

00:07:37.440 very tight. But really what we're looking at in the 905 is whether the Conservatives can pick up

00:07:42.400 at best maybe five or six more seats. We're not talking about, none of the pollings indicate

00:07:47.200 a sort of sweep in 2011, or where the Conservatives could win, you know, a dozen or 15 more seats.

00:07:54.080 And just to interject there, I know you're going to get to the 604 in Vancouver, but I wonder,

00:07:58.320 because this week, the sort of big news story was the Jody Wilson-Raybould book coming out really

00:08:03.120 damning against Justin Trudeau. And something else interesting happened, which is that the former

00:08:06.960 Liberal MP, Selena Cesar Chivanas, came out and endorsed the Tories and said that she was going to be

00:08:12.800 voting for her local Conservative, which for a high profile former MP to come out and she's based in

00:08:19.280 the 905. Would something like that have an impact on the vote in her riding and sort of more broadly

00:08:25.600 in that suburban belt? Look, it certainly helps the Conservatives and the Conservative candidate there

00:08:31.360 in Whitby, whose name I can't quite remember, but she's a local city councillor. She's an extremely

00:08:37.120 impressive candidate. So they've got a strong candidate and the endorsement from the former

00:08:42.560 Liberal MP certainly helps. But I don't think we should overstate it. You know, in the last

00:08:46.400 election, that Liberal, the former Liberal MP didn't run again. And it was very, very clear about

00:08:52.560 her disputes with Trudeau. She was extremely critical of Trudeau. And the Conservatives did

00:08:57.040 better in that seat than they had done previously. But that's Jim Flaherty's old seat. It's certainly a

00:09:01.440 seat with a Conservative base. And if there was sort of seats the Conservatives are going to do better in

00:09:04.800 last time, that was one of them. So her attacks on Trudeau in 2019 weren't enough to deliver it to the

00:09:10.800 Conservatives. Her endorsement, certainly helpful, will definitely move some votes. But is it 5,000

00:09:17.520 votes? Probably not. It's probably closer to 500 than 5,000, which might make all the difference. But

00:09:23.920 it's, I don't think we should expect that she's got some magic switch that she, you know, she's a 1.00

00:09:29.360 one-term MP, let's face it, right? And she doesn't have the ability to instantly change the seat like that. 1.00

00:09:34.560 And then moving on to Vancouver. So I just, I think there was a little confusion over some of

00:09:40.240 the numbers we're seeing. Most of the numbers we're seeing are actually province-wide numbers

00:09:43.280 in BC that show the Liberals in third place. And the city of Vancouver, the 604 region,

00:09:48.000 really includes all the suburbs of Vancouver as well, which is where it's really at play.

00:09:52.720 The seats in the city, I actually think the Liberals are going to gain one. The chances of the

00:09:56.560 Liberals winning Jody Wilson-Raybould's old seat, I think is extremely, extremely high. The, if she'd

00:10:03.680 run again, I think she could have held on, but she obviously decided not to. But the further

00:10:09.280 complication is that what we're seeing, broadly speaking, some polls for the Liberals in third,

00:10:14.560 some shall still throw them in second. It's hard to say. Most polls seem to agree in British Columbia,

00:10:18.960 the NDPs on the rise. That probably means that there's seats, there's a couple of things happening.

00:10:24.080 One is, there's some seats NDP can win. So there's a seat called Coquitlam, or Moody Coquitlam,

00:10:29.760 which the Conservatives won by a couple of hundred votes last time over the NDP. Liberals were in close

00:10:34.400 third. NDP chances of picking up that seat are very, are very good. But on the other hand, there's

00:10:39.520 seats like Langley-Cloverdale, where the, where the Liberals are coming hard and want to take that

00:10:44.880 seat from the Conservatives. The rise in the NDP probably splits the vote unless the Conservatives

00:10:50.400 squeak through. There's other seats that Conservatives could pick up. There's a

00:10:55.200 Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam, which we can end up seeing a rise of the NDP, take some liberal votes,

00:11:01.040 and let the Conservatives win. Although like Richmond Hill, there's no Green candidate there,

00:11:05.040 and the Greens got about 4,000 votes there last time, which is certainly going to give the Conservatives

00:11:10.480 a bit of a structural disadvantage. So I think it's extremely tight. I think the Conservatives can win

00:11:15.760 some more seats in the 905 and the broader Greater Vancouver region, but not a lot. There's not,

00:11:25.440 you know, 20 or 30 seats here that can be won. The other interesting thing that I just want to point

00:11:30.560 out is that the, we now have the total number of people who requested mail-in ballots, which is over

00:11:39.440 a million Canadians are going to be voting by mail in this election, which is I think what 80,000 voted

00:11:43.680 last time. So it's a huge, huge number. Interestingly enough, it's far less than what Elections Canada

00:11:49.520 was expecting. Elections Canada in the spring was predicting between three and four million people

00:11:53.200 would vote in ballots by mail. And what's fascinating about this is that the top 10 ridings,

00:12:01.040 that I think nine of the top 10 ridings for mail-in ballots are in British Columbia, and I think six or

00:12:08.320 five of those top 10 are on Vancouver Island, and they're where the NDP is highly organized.

00:12:13.920 I think the NDP is going to be, I think we're going to see some very interesting votes where the NDP

00:12:17.440 has embraced a mail-in ballot strategy, and most likely when we're going to see their votes might

00:12:22.800 be counted a little later, it might be a little delayed. And we can see seats on election night,

00:12:27.200 it looks like the NDP might be losing some seats, and they win them in later parts of the count,

00:12:31.520 which will be very interesting. And it also thinks the NDP is going hard after a place like NIMO,

00:12:36.480 and perhaps even Saanich Gulf Islands where they were the green parties at play.

00:12:39.680 Interesting. And so would that affect our ability to know who becomes prime minister on election

00:12:46.160 night? Do you know how delayed these things will be and whether this will turn into something like

00:12:51.680 we saw in the last US election where it took, what, a week for them to certify president?

00:12:55.360 I don't think it'll be anything like that. We generally still know within a few hours. It might

00:13:01.600 be take four or five hours to know as opposed to, you know, two hours. But it's also hard to say,

00:13:10.240 you know, a lot of these seats are reasonably safe NDP seats. So, so we'll see, we'll see how

00:13:14.080 that plays out. But like a million votes being counted this way, there's going to definitely be

00:13:18.400 some disputes. But when they arrive, there is, you know, there's people vote, the mail-in ballots

00:13:24.960 have to be received by election day, by I think five o'clock locally on election day,

00:13:28.800 or maybe it's by the close of polls. There's always going to be, you know, was this,

00:13:33.680 does this bag of mail come in? Does it come in late? You know, so it could result in some very,

00:13:39.920 very, in some very tight races ending up in some sort of judicial reviews and that kind of thing.

00:13:44.240 Interesting. All right. I want to pick up on something else you mentioned when you're talking

00:13:47.600 about the Richmond Hill seat. You mentioned how the PPC were the spoilers for the conservatives in

00:13:52.560 the 2019 election in that race. I think there was two or three ridings that turned out that way.

00:13:56.800 The story, one of the major stories of this election has certainly been the huge, huge rise

00:14:02.640 and growth of the PPC. We mentioned this on our debate night show that some polls have them up at

00:14:08.560 10%, 11%. You know, we've seen huge rallies and protests across the country. Trudeau is sort of

00:14:15.200 turning them into his biggest campaign foe and really going after them in pretty nasty attacks.

00:14:22.400 So let's talk about the rise of the People's Party, Maxime Bernier. First,

00:14:28.320 do you think Bernier has a good shot at regaining his own seat out in Beauce?

00:14:34.240 I think it's extremely difficult to say at this point. The PPC's polling numbers in Quebec as a

00:14:41.360 province are pretty poor. They're universally seen as their worst province. That doesn't mean there

00:14:46.480 isn't something different going on in Beauce. And we've certainly seen the poll that I did for

00:14:52.080 True North show that the people turning their backs on government and being concerned about government

00:14:57.440 overreach is highest in Quebec. So I think there's the potential there. But Maxime Bernier has been

00:15:02.880 traveling in the country. You know, Richard LeHoux, the conservative MP, has been working the ground

00:15:09.200 hard. So I think there's a good chance Maxime Bernier will do better than he did last time.

00:15:15.840 And it might be close. But if I had to bet, I'd say that Bernier probably won't win it. But

00:15:21.920 I believe there's a greater chance of him winning it today than I would have at the beginning of the

00:15:26.400 campaign four weeks ago. And what about the the rest of the country? So even even if they don't

00:15:30.960 have a good shot at winning a seat, is there a possibility that they will make a difference in

00:15:36.960 terms of those close seats? I know you mentioned that some of the Green Party candidates aren't

00:15:41.440 running. It seems to me that a lot of the people who might have voted for a protest party like the

00:15:45.280 Greens may have swung around to support the PPC. The polls seem to suggest, I mean, given that,

00:15:50.960 you know, you have a poll that shows the conservatives leading and the PPC at 10 or 11 percent,

00:15:56.320 I mean, it's not like that 10 or 11 percent came directly from the conservative party. The votes

00:16:01.040 are coming from lots of places, it seems. That's exactly right. You know, I would say

00:16:05.680 the general consensus is in the last election, the PPC, you know, Bernier had just left the

00:16:10.080 conservative party. PPC probably got two thirds of its votes from conservative voters. In this election,

00:16:16.160 that number seems to be down to maybe 45 percent, maybe 50, but probably 40, 40, 45,

00:16:21.840 somewhere in there. And the rest is coming from habitual non-voters, people new to the political

00:16:27.120 process. It always happens when there's a new party that attracts people in who are new,

00:16:31.600 as well as Liberals, NDPers and Greens and Quebec Sunblock, who have for a variety of reasons,

00:16:38.400 you know, they've got questions about vaccines, have moved over to the PPC. I agree that I think

00:16:43.120 it's actually probably going to disproportionately pull from some of that Green vote,

00:16:46.160 because you're right, there's a protest party. There's sort of people who vote for

00:16:51.760 smaller parties are attracted to other smaller parties. So I think it's going to take that,

00:16:57.360 but they are taking Liberal and NDP votes as well. But overall, it seems to be that the conservative

00:17:06.000 vote is the plurality, whereas last time it was the majority. Interesting. Well, thank you so much,

00:17:14.000 Hamish, for this report. We're really excited for our election night coverage. You're going to be

00:17:18.320 joining us for most of the evening, I believe, and helping us break down all the results, making the

00:17:23.520 calls when they come in and helping us make sense. So hopefully it won't be, you know, an eight,

00:17:29.280 ten-hour night like we've seen in the past. But with those mail-in ballots, who knows,

00:17:34.720 we could be in for a long night on election night. That's true. We'll see. All right. Thank you so

00:17:40.720 much for joining us. I'm Candace Malcolm, and this is The Candace Malcolm Show.

00:17:44.000 I'm Candace Malcolm, and this is The Candace Malcolm.

The Candice Malcolm Show - September 15, 2021

Could the rise of Maxime Bernier and the PPC be the deciding factor in the election？

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