The Candice Malcolm Show - September 15, 2021


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


Episode Stats

Length

17 minutes

Words per Minute

197.50468

Word Count

3,509

Sentence Count

189

Misogynist Sentences

2


Summary

We re neck and neck in the polls, and the race is still too close to call. Could Maxime Bernier and the People s Party of Canada make the difference in this election campaign? To help us make sense of the numbers, we talk to pollster Hamish Marshall.


Transcript

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
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.
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.