The Candice Malcolm Show - Trudeau dismisses pro-freedom protesters as “angry, racist and misogynistic”

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

00:00:05.280 I'm Candace Malcolm and this is The Candace Malcolm Show.

00:00:11.860 Hi and welcome to The Candace Malcolm Show. Thank you so much everyone for tuning in.

00:00:15.640 The Liberals are not looking good in the polls. Poll after poll after poll is giving us hints and giving us signs that the Liberals are just not where they were in 2019.

00:00:23.660 They're not appealing to Canadians after a year and a half of long lockdowns and Trudeau, just really every appearance on this campaign, he's just looking more and more desperate, frankly more and more unhinged.

00:00:35.320 The Liberals finally unleashed their policy platform on Wednesday, which again showed more and more signs of desperation.

00:00:42.880 We saw another huge bailout going to the CBC. On top of the $1.2 billion the Liberals give the organization, that state broadcaster, annually,

00:00:51.920 we're going to see another $400 million, $400 million taxpayer dollars going to the CBC.

00:00:58.760 To me, that's a sign of desperation. We know that there is no end to the new spending, no end to deficits.

00:01:05.240 Again, it could be 50 years before the Liberals were able to balance the budget and it is just not good news for Canadians and I think that is being reflected into the polls.

00:01:16.080 But I want to bring in Hamish Marshall, True North's in-host pollster, to help us make sense of the recent polls and the recent data.

00:01:22.880 Hamish, thanks so much for joining the program.

00:01:25.080 Pleasure to be here, Candice.

00:01:26.380 So from my perspective, it looks like the Conservatives are really running away with this election.

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

00:01:34.500 There was that Hill Times article that talked about how the Liberal reception at the door is a lot worse than it was in 2019 for Liberal candidates and volunteers.

00:01:43.340 There was another poll that found that two out of five, so around 40 percent of Canadians, say they really dislike Justin Trudeau, not moderately, but really dislike him.

00:01:52.680 And then that latest poll today showing that up to three quarters of Canadians are not likely to vote for Trudeau.

00:01:58.420 So can you help us understand, are the Conservatives running away with this campaign or is it still pretty close?

00:02:05.260 I think it's still pretty close.

00:02:07.100 There's been a general tightening in the polls.

00:02:09.560 Main Street, yes, had the Conservatives 9.5, 10 points ahead.

00:02:12.140 That's now come down to a five-point lead.

00:02:15.080 Some of the other pollsters that don't collect their data using demon dials are generally finding a much closer race.

00:02:21.220 Conservatives may be ahead by one or two, maybe three points at most.

00:02:25.760 Some people still have levels ahead by a point.

00:02:28.240 I think we're in an election where which party is up by one and a half or two points, hard to tell right now.

00:02:34.520 Conservatives seem to have a slight edge, but it's only a slight edge.

00:02:37.540 But I think you're right to point out that Trudeau's personal numbers are down.

00:02:41.000 That's pretty consistent across the board is that Trudeau's personal numbers are down and they're much, much worse than they've been at any point since before he became Prime Minister.

00:02:49.960 So that is definitely the challenge.

00:02:51.640 And I'm sure that's one of the reasons why those Liberal candidates are having a much harder time at the door, that Justin Trudeau is not the asset he once was to them.

00:02:58.880 Interesting. How much of that do you think is the fact that we're in this pandemic election that Canadians don't really seem to want to be in?

00:03:06.080 Well, that's an extremely good question.

00:03:08.060 I think that was certainly true in the first part of the campaign.

00:03:10.400 The further we get away from the original election call, that's likely to dissipate as a reason.

00:03:16.200 But what I've found in the past in research is once people find a reason to dislike Justin Trudeau, they don't kind of come back to him.

00:03:23.540 Once they're turned off by him, they turn off.

00:03:25.620 So whether that's still the motivating issue when the polls close in a couple of weeks, well, hard to say.

00:03:32.420 But I don't see those people who've now decided that they don't like him are suddenly going to fall in love again.

00:03:37.000 Right. Exactly.

00:03:38.140 All right. Well, the Liberals unleashed their platform on Wednesday.

00:03:42.060 What we saw was a lot of new spending.

00:03:44.800 So in total, the Liberal document includes $13 billion in new spending in the fiscal year, totaling $78 billion new spending in the next five years.

00:03:55.620 The platform's divided into six categories that sort of echo what Trudeau has been talking about in the campaign.

00:04:00.200 So that's the pandemic, housing, health care, the economy, climate change and reconciliation.

00:04:05.720 I want to note that there is nothing in this platform about balancing the budget.

00:04:10.980 Trudeau, it looks like the deficit would be somewhere around $350 billion.

00:04:15.100 No doubt that that is part of the reason why the debt is now over a trillion dollars and probably going to be much, much more.

00:04:21.740 And there was that Parliamentary Budget Office projection that showed us that the Liberals probably won't balance the budget until 2070.

00:04:29.920 So not a lot of fiscal restraint, but this is an election.

00:04:33.300 So, you know, they're not here to show us how responsible they are.

00:04:36.500 They're here to show us all the things they're going to spend money on and all the goodies.

00:04:39.520 So how do you think this platform is going to play and do you think it's going to help the Liberals in the polls?

00:04:46.140 I think it's a platform that's designed around the idea of causing trouble for the Conservatives.

00:04:51.220 I think if the election, you know, was going better for the Liberals, if they were eight or ten points ahead, we would have gotten a different platform.

00:04:59.080 This is a platform designed to cause trouble for Aaron O'Toole and to make him talk about things he doesn't want to talk about.

00:05:06.040 I think there's two different things they've done. One is they've announced that they're going to bring in some rules around abortion.

00:05:13.920 Of course, in Canada, we don't have an abortion law, so they're going to bring in some regulations around that. 0.64

00:05:18.140 It'll have impacts on provinces and they have a regulation within the Canada Health Act, which therefore becomes something that O'Toole then has to figure out if he's for or against and how that will go over with his party.

00:05:30.900 So that's definitely a trap for them. They also say they're going to take away the charitable tax status for crisis pregnancy centers that put out what they described as false or misleading information about abortion.

00:05:45.240 No idea what those criteria will be, but this is clearly also designed to try to provoke conservative pro-life organizations and to put O'Toole in a difficult situation.

00:05:56.620 The other trap they've done is around their spending, because while they have no plans to balance the budget, and I'm sure if it was a 50-year time frame to balance the budget based on this year's budget, after this platform, that's going to be even longer.

00:06:13.000 The fact of the matter is, is that they now have a costed platform, it's been costed, and the conservatives have not released the costing of their platform.

00:06:22.000 And after a couple of weeks of the conservatives saying, we want to see Trudeau's platform, we want to see Trudeau's platform, the shoe is now on the other foot.

00:06:29.000 And O'Toole is now having to defend the costing of his platform that he doesn't have yet.

00:06:34.460 We don't know when it's going to be released, but the liberals are trying to flip the script on that.

00:06:39.720 So that's what I see in this platform, is it's designed in a way to cause trouble for O'Toole.

00:06:47.780 We'll see how successful that is, but as a result of this close election that they weren't expecting, I'm pretty sure they were up some pretty late nights the last 10 days, desperately rewriting their platform.

00:06:58.460 Well, absolutely. And that's sort of what happens when the conservatives release their platform very early and sort of left it open for the liberals.

00:07:06.120 I think that Aaron O'Toole has been incredibly disciplined. I'll just say that.

00:07:09.340 Like, I know you're talking about the trap of abortion and those policies sound just absolutely important, especially given the idea that the liberals would get to define again what criteria a charity must meet.

00:07:19.820 I mean, they kind of got into that trouble with the Canada Summer Jobs program and had to eventually walk that back.

00:07:25.640 But, you know, if it was another conservative leader, I can't imagine that they would have done what Aaron O'Toole did.

00:07:31.840 It was kind of mirroring the liberals when it comes to mandatory vaccines.

00:07:35.080 I didn't see a conservative going along with that.

00:07:38.040 I don't like the idea of it. But again, if this is just about winning elections, I think that Aaron O'Toole has been disciplined on so many issues that certainly I wouldn't have been able to keep my mouth shut on.

00:07:48.260 So, you know, good for him in that regard.

00:07:51.280 And I believe that their budget is now before the PBO, the parliamentary budget officer, to get costed.

00:07:56.260 So hopefully that will come out soon.

00:07:59.640 Hamish, you put together a really great product for us at True North, looking at the writings to watch, understanding, you know, where this campaign is being fought on the local level.

00:08:09.580 I encourage everyone to head on over to tnc.news to check that out.

00:08:13.080 We went through a couple of the writings to watch in the last show, but I wanted to keep going with this because there's so many interesting seats out there.

00:08:21.280 So let's let's talk about some of the ones that let's talk about one of the seats that the liberals absolutely need to win in order to win this election.

00:08:28.020 This is an Ontario seat, Northumberland, Peterborough South.

00:08:31.760 Why don't you tell us a bit about this writing?

00:08:32.980 Sure. So it's a chunk of rural and small town, Ontario, east of Toronto.

00:08:39.200 Traditionally, it's been very rural, but it's growing and it's sort of becoming on the edge of the commuter belt.

00:08:44.320 There's more people who are commuting in.

00:08:46.280 And then because of COVID, there's people who did live in Toronto who maybe have bought houses out there.

00:08:51.960 It's obviously much more affordable.

00:08:53.740 So it's been a swing conservative liberal area for a long time.

00:08:58.100 And generally, when the conservatives do well, they win the seat.

00:09:01.300 It was a pickup in the last election.

00:09:03.080 The conservative MP Philip Lawrence won it by three and a half percent.

00:09:07.360 So obviously, it's not a huge win.

00:09:09.960 And the liberals need to win it back.

00:09:11.420 Liberals don't have a path to victory without going through a seat like this.

00:09:16.740 You know, it's becoming more white collar. 0.65

00:09:19.160 It should be becoming a little bit more liberal.

00:09:21.440 So we'll see.

00:09:22.300 You know, in the long term, it makes it more difficult for the conservatives.

00:09:24.880 But in this election, they can hold on.

00:09:26.780 The liberals are running a local lawyer called Alison Lester, very local person with a good local story.

00:09:33.140 So it's going to be a bit of a battle.

00:09:35.080 But if the conservatives can hang on here, they're going to be looking for a good night.

00:09:39.240 If the liberals can snatch it back, they're going to be picking up seats, broadly speaking.

00:09:43.680 Interesting.

00:09:44.200 Interesting.

00:09:44.580 Well, let's move on to the next one.

00:09:45.900 This is one that the Tories would need to win.

00:09:47.880 Interesting because I don't think of Eastern Canada really at play at all.

00:09:51.020 But when you look at the numbers, some of them are quite close.

00:09:53.620 This one's Miramichi out in New Brunswick.

00:09:56.440 And interestingly, my colleague, Andrew Lawton, was on tour with the O'Toole campaign as a journalist.

00:10:02.600 And he caught up with Lisa Raitt, the former MP who's out in Nova Scotia.

00:10:06.380 But she talked about how she thinks that more and more of Atlantic Canada is at play.

00:10:11.140 So let's talk about this riding in New Brunswick.

00:10:13.800 Well, I agree in general that Atlantic Canada has not been a bastion of support for conservatives.

00:10:18.880 New Brunswick is generally the most conservative of those provinces.

00:10:22.640 The conservatives won three seats there last time.

00:10:24.420 They lost Miramichi by only 400 votes.

00:10:26.980 So it's very, very, very tight.

00:10:28.580 What's also interesting is the Liberal MP who'd won it in 2015 and then won again in 2019 isn't running again.

00:10:35.140 And it's a fascinating battle because who we have running is the Liberals are running one of the MLAs for the area, a Liberal MLA called Lisa Harris.

00:10:43.700 The conservatives are running one of the other MLAs for the area, a conservative MLA called Jake Skinner.

00:10:47.420 They've both been in cabinets, you know, Harris in the previous Liberal government and Jake Skinner in the current conservative government, although he's obviously had to step down to run federally.

00:10:59.220 So it's two people with a strong local electoral record who both accomplished in terms of being in cabinet at the provincial levels.

00:11:06.920 They've both got name recognition.

00:11:08.880 And it's going to be another tight fight.

00:11:11.380 And Miramichi is a place in the country that often bucks trends.

00:11:15.020 It's an area that sometimes 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.

00:11:23.520 And what's even more interesting there is it's one of the seats where the PPC could be argued cost the conservatives a seat last time.

00:11:30.440 So the conservatives lost by less than 400 votes.

00:11:33.440 The PPC took over 1,000 votes.

00:11:36.720 Nobody thinks that all PPC votes came from the conservatives in 2019, but most people would say that somewhere in the 60s, 70% did.

00:11:43.280 So in this, if there had been no PPC candidate, the conservatives probably would have won it.

00:11:48.180 So we'll see what happens this time.

00:11:50.880 Must win for the conservatives.

00:11:52.780 If the conservatives can't win this seat, they're not going to have a very good night across New Brunswick, much less Atlantic Canada.

00:11:58.260 Interesting.

00:11:58.740 Well, speaking of the PPC, and I know a lot of our supporters have left the conservative party and they've gone over to the PPC.

00:12:04.600 Like you said, not all voters for the PPC came from the conservatives, but I think that a lot of, you know, especially given how moderate this leader has become, a lot of them are looking over to the PPC.

00:12:15.920 So let's talk about probably the most important riding in the country for Maxime Bernier and his party, which is Bernier's home seat, home riding in Beauce.

00:12:25.120 Does Bernier have a shot in this riding, Hamish?

00:12:28.980 Well, you know, it's another boast battle, right?

00:12:32.420 And the conservatives are MP who beat Bernier last time as a gentleman called Richard LeHoux.

00:12:38.840 Richard LeHoux is a consummate local politician.

00:12:42.380 He was a mayor of one of the municipalities there for a very long time.

00:12:45.260 He was the head of the MRC, which is sort of the equivalent of a county in Quebec.

00:12:49.160 He was the head of that county.

00:12:50.760 He went on to become actually the head of the Rural Municipal Association of Municipalities in Quebec.

00:12:58.480 Absolute, like, sort of local, local, local guy and was really able to win last time on his local credibility, but also pushing Maxime Bernier, making a point like that Maxime Bernier was campaigning around the country and wasn't being able to give the time to Beauce.

00:13:15.600 And he ended up winning by about 10 points.

00:13:18.500 But this is make or break for Bernier.

00:13:21.660 He's got to do well.

00:13:23.140 He's got to win this seat.

00:13:24.080 After not winning a seat, especially his seat for two elections in a row, the future of the PPC is hard to figure out what it would look like.

00:13:31.620 It would certainly become much more of a fringe party, I think, and it would no longer get the coverage by the media after failing to win a seat for two elections.

00:13:40.200 The other interesting thing is that as the CAQ government in Quebec begins to double down and be even more restrictive, their vaccine passport on apps is now in play or in force.

00:13:54.200 We're seeing a pushback in Quebec.

00:13:55.840 Obviously, we've seen some big, big protests in Montreal about this.

00:13:59.900 And then I know that the Quebec Conservative Party, which is run by Eric Duham, which is fighting against all these things, is gaining members like crazy.

00:14:11.060 And the Beauce is one of those areas that's going to be very interested in those ideas.

00:14:17.940 It's been argued it's the most freedom-loving area of Quebec.

00:14:20.560 So if there is going to be pushback against the consensus around vaccine passports and everything else, with Maxine Bernier in the Beauce, you know, counting them out would be a big, big mistake.

00:14:33.540 But losing by 10 points is going to be a tough hill to climb.

00:14:36.780 Interesting. That's definitely one that I'm going to be watching very closely on election night.

00:14:40.320 All right, let's go over to the NDP side because we've talked about it before.

00:14:43.640 The Jugmeet seems to be catching on to some Conservatives.

00:14:47.900 And I'll just let the viewers know, this next riding is where my parents live, Burnaby, North Seymour.

00:14:53.240 And Hamish and I were chatting a little bit because we're both from the North Shore.

00:14:56.840 And the North Shore of Vancouver, we've seen the riding sort of broken up.

00:15:02.280 And this is an interesting one because the North Van part of this riding, North Seymour, is quite different than the Burnaby part across the river there.

00:15:09.700 So why don't you help us understand how this riding is at play?

00:15:14.000 Sure. So as you would correctly say, Candice, it's a very sort of odd riding and it's got two very distinctly different parts.

00:15:22.580 Seymour part is entirely residential, older, very high income, beautiful, big, big, big, beautiful homes, predominantly Caucasian.

00:15:35.940 On the North Burnaby side, it's much more Chinese-Canadian, smaller homes. 1.00

00:15:42.940 There are some very nice areas in Capitol Hill, but generally definitely lower income, a large commercial strip down Hastings Street.

00:15:49.520 So it's two very, very different parts of Lower Mainland.

00:15:53.740 And what it does is it combines the Seymour part, which has traditionally had a strong liberal conservative bent, with the North Burnaby part, which has traditionally had a strong, fairly strong conservative history, but also more predominantly a strong NDP history.

00:16:09.560 And because of a variety of things that happened in the last election, the Conservatives are sort of fairly far back in this seat, and the NDP is pushing strongly.

00:16:23.560 And what's fascinating is that the NDP, knowing their strength is in the Burnaby part, went and recruited a North Vancouver City Councillor called Jim Hansen.

00:16:32.180 So he's a well-known councillor, been around for a while, representing that Seymour part, their weak part of the riding.

00:16:37.500 So they're bringing someone with their most local credibility against that.

00:16:41.820 Whereas Liberals are still running, or Terry Beach, the local MP, who is again a North Shore person.

00:16:46.060 So there isn't a Burnaby candidate in the race.

00:16:48.580 They're obviously hoping the NDP will be able, the NDP will hope those votes will stick with them.

00:16:53.880 They only lost by 3.5% last time.

00:16:56.600 Ironically, it's actually because of the NDP's own actions that they probably lost.

00:17:01.380 The Conservative candidate there last time ultimately was removed from the Conservative Party because of her unwillingness to retract some comments about gay and lesbian people.

00:17:13.680 And that was pushed by the NDP candidate, pushing for her. 0.89

00:17:18.900 Whereas if she'd been on the ballot, the Conservatives probably would have done better. 0.98

00:17:23.240 And some of those votes probably would have gone Conservative instead of gone Liberal.

00:17:26.540 And the NDP probably would have won.

00:17:28.340 So it's an NDP seat.

00:17:29.780 It's right next to Jagmeet Singh's seat.

00:17:32.380 This is the sort of seat they've got to win.

00:17:34.480 It's going to be fascinating to watch an election night.

00:17:36.500 And I'd point out that even though the North Vancouver part does not have a long NDP history, you know, they did elect an NDP MLA in the last provincial election.

00:17:45.580 Wow, that's really interesting.

00:17:46.660 I didn't know that.

00:17:47.240 But I do remember the Conservative candidate getting kicked out.

00:17:50.860 And it was not very long before the election.

00:17:52.740 So I don't think they had time to replace the candidate.

00:17:54.700 And therefore, I don't believe there was a Conservative on the ballot.

00:17:57.840 So perhaps with an actual Conservative running, it could be even a three-way race.

00:18:03.620 Well, Hamish, thank you so much.

00:18:05.020 We've got the Labor Day weekend coming up.

00:18:07.240 And I know that many people, especially Liberal strategists, are trying to spin this idea that Canadians aren't really paying attention until Labor Day.

00:18:14.180 And so the election is really going to come down to the final week or so.

00:18:17.920 So we'll definitely have you back on the program next week to help us in the final stretch here.

00:18:22.700 I don't agree with Liberals about a lot.

00:18:25.340 But I do think this election is really going to be about the last 10 or 12 days.

00:18:29.920 Great.

00:18:30.300 All right.

00:18:30.740 Thanks so much.

00:18:32.180 Thank you.

00:18:33.120 Thank you so much for tuning in.

00:18:34.260 We'll be back again tomorrow.

00:18:35.300 I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.

The Candice Malcolm Show - September 07, 2021

Trudeau dismisses pro-freedom protesters as “angry, racist and misogynistic”

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