The Liberals are not connecting with Canadians and Justin Trudeau is no longer an appealing option to most of them. Candice Malan talks to pollster Hamish Marshall to try to make sense of the latest polling numbers and what s happening in the polls.
00:00:00.000The Liberals are not connecting with Canadians and Justin Trudeau is no longer an appealing option to most Canadians.
00:00:05.280I'm Candace Malcolm and this is The Candace Malcolm Show.
00:00:11.860Hi and welcome to The Candace Malcolm Show. Thank you so much everyone for tuning in.
00:00:15.640The 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.
00:00:23.660They'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.
00:00:35.320The Liberals finally unleashed their policy platform on Wednesday, which again showed more and more signs of desperation.
00:00:42.880We saw another huge bailout going to the CBC. On top of the $1.2 billion the Liberals give the organization, that state broadcaster, annually,
00:00:51.920we're going to see another $400 million, $400 million taxpayer dollars going to the CBC.
00:00:58.760To me, that's a sign of desperation. We know that there is no end to the new spending, no end to deficits.
00:01:05.240Again, 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.
00:01:16.080But 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.
00:01:22.880Hamish, thanks so much for joining the program.
00:01:26.380So from my perspective, it looks like the Conservatives are really running away with this election.
00:01:31.120There was that mainstream poll that found them up by 10 points.
00:01:34.500There 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.
00:01:43.340There 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.
00:01:52.680And then that latest poll today showing that up to three quarters of Canadians are not likely to vote for Trudeau.
00:01:58.420So can you help us understand, are the Conservatives running away with this campaign or is it still pretty close?
00:02:07.100There's been a general tightening in the polls.
00:02:09.560Main Street, yes, had the Conservatives 9.5, 10 points ahead.
00:02:12.140That's now come down to a five-point lead.
00:02:15.080Some of the other pollsters that don't collect their data using demon dials are generally finding a much closer race.
00:02:21.220Conservatives may be ahead by one or two, maybe three points at most.
00:02:25.760Some people still have levels ahead by a point.
00:02:28.240I think we're in an election where which party is up by one and a half or two points, hard to tell right now.
00:02:34.520Conservatives seem to have a slight edge, but it's only a slight edge.
00:02:37.540But I think you're right to point out that Trudeau's personal numbers are down.
00:02:41.000That'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.
00:02:51.640And 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.
00:02:58.880Interesting. 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?
00:03:06.080Well, that's an extremely good question.
00:03:08.060I think that was certainly true in the first part of the campaign.
00:03:10.400The further we get away from the original election call, that's likely to dissipate as a reason.
00:03:16.200But 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.
00:03:23.540Once they're turned off by him, they turn off.
00:03:25.620So whether that's still the motivating issue when the polls close in a couple of weeks, well, hard to say.
00:03:32.420But I don't see those people who've now decided that they don't like him are suddenly going to fall in love again.
00:03:38.140All right. Well, the Liberals unleashed their platform on Wednesday.
00:03:42.060What we saw was a lot of new spending.
00:03:44.800So 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.
00:03:55.620The platform's divided into six categories that sort of echo what Trudeau has been talking about in the campaign.
00:04:00.200So that's the pandemic, housing, health care, the economy, climate change and reconciliation.
00:04:05.720I want to note that there is nothing in this platform about balancing the budget.
00:04:10.980Trudeau, it looks like the deficit would be somewhere around $350 billion.
00:04:15.100No 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.
00:04:21.740And there was that Parliamentary Budget Office projection that showed us that the Liberals probably won't balance the budget until 2070.
00:04:29.920So not a lot of fiscal restraint, but this is an election.
00:04:33.300So, you know, they're not here to show us how responsible they are.
00:04:36.500They're here to show us all the things they're going to spend money on and all the goodies.
00:04:39.520So how do you think this platform is going to play and do you think it's going to help the Liberals in the polls?
00:04:46.140I think it's a platform that's designed around the idea of causing trouble for the Conservatives.
00:04:51.220I 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.
00:04:59.080This 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.
00:05:06.040I 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.
00:05:13.920Of course, in Canada, we don't have an abortion law, so they're going to bring in some regulations around that.
00:05:18.140It'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.
00:05:30.900So 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.
00:05:45.240No 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.
00:05:56.620The 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.
00:06:13.000The 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.
00:06:22.000And 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.
00:06:29.000And O'Toole is now having to defend the costing of his platform that he doesn't have yet.
00:06:34.460We don't know when it's going to be released, but the liberals are trying to flip the script on that.
00:06:39.720So that's what I see in this platform, is it's designed in a way to cause trouble for O'Toole.
00:06:47.780We'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.
00:06:58.460Well, 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.
00:07:06.120I think that Aaron O'Toole has been incredibly disciplined. I'll just say that.
00:07:09.340Like, 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.
00:07:19.820I mean, they kind of got into that trouble with the Canada Summer Jobs program and had to eventually walk that back.
00:07:25.640But, you know, if it was another conservative leader, I can't imagine that they would have done what Aaron O'Toole did.
00:07:31.840It was kind of mirroring the liberals when it comes to mandatory vaccines.
00:07:35.080I didn't see a conservative going along with that.
00:07:38.040I 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.
00:07:48.260So, you know, good for him in that regard.
00:07:51.280And I believe that their budget is now before the PBO, the parliamentary budget officer, to get costed.
00:07:59.640Hamish, 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.
00:08:09.580I encourage everyone to head on over to tnc.news to check that out.
00:08:13.080We 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.
00:08:21.280So 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.
00:08:28.020This is an Ontario seat, Northumberland, Peterborough South.
00:08:31.760Why don't you tell us a bit about this writing?
00:08:32.980Sure. So it's a chunk of rural and small town, Ontario, east of Toronto.
00:08:39.200Traditionally, it's been very rural, but it's growing and it's sort of becoming on the edge of the commuter belt.
00:08:44.320There's more people who are commuting in.
00:08:46.280And then because of COVID, there's people who did live in Toronto who maybe have bought houses out there.
00:10:28.580What's also interesting is the Liberal MP who'd won it in 2015 and then won again in 2019 isn't running again.
00:10:35.140And 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.
00:10:43.700The conservatives are running one of the other MLAs for the area, a conservative MLA called Jake Skinner.
00:10:47.420They'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.
00:10:59.220So it's two people with a strong local electoral record who both accomplished in terms of being in cabinet at the provincial levels.
00:11:58.740Well, 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.
00:12:04.600Like 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.
00:12:15.920So 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.
00:12:25.120Does Bernier have a shot in this riding, Hamish?
00:12:28.980Well, you know, it's another boast battle, right?
00:12:32.420And the conservatives are MP who beat Bernier last time as a gentleman called Richard LeHoux.
00:12:38.840Richard LeHoux is a consummate local politician.
00:12:42.380He was a mayor of one of the municipalities there for a very long time.
00:12:45.260He was the head of the MRC, which is sort of the equivalent of a county in Quebec.
00:12:50.760He went on to become actually the head of the Rural Municipal Association of Municipalities in Quebec.
00:12:58.480Absolute, 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.
00:13:15.600And he ended up winning by about 10 points.
00:13:18.500But this is make or break for Bernier.
00:13:24.080After 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.
00:13:31.620It 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.
00:13:40.200The 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.
00:13:55.840Obviously, we've seen some big, big protests in Montreal about this.
00:13:59.900And 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.
00:14:11.060And the Beauce is one of those areas that's going to be very interested in those ideas.
00:14:17.940It's been argued it's the most freedom-loving area of Quebec.
00:14:20.560So 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.
00:14:33.540But losing by 10 points is going to be a tough hill to climb.
00:14:36.780Interesting. That's definitely one that I'm going to be watching very closely on election night.
00:14:40.320All right, let's go over to the NDP side because we've talked about it before.
00:14:43.640The Jugmeet seems to be catching on to some Conservatives.
00:14:47.900And I'll just let the viewers know, this next riding is where my parents live, Burnaby, North Seymour.
00:14:53.240And Hamish and I were chatting a little bit because we're both from the North Shore.
00:14:56.840And the North Shore of Vancouver, we've seen the riding sort of broken up.
00:15:02.280And 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.
00:15:09.700So why don't you help us understand how this riding is at play?
00:15:14.000Sure. So as you would correctly say, Candice, it's a very sort of odd riding and it's got two very distinctly different parts.
00:15:22.580Seymour part is entirely residential, older, very high income, beautiful, big, big, big, beautiful homes, predominantly Caucasian.
00:15:35.940On the North Burnaby side, it's much more Chinese-Canadian, smaller homes.
00:15:42.940There are some very nice areas in Capitol Hill, but generally definitely lower income, a large commercial strip down Hastings Street.
00:15:49.520So it's two very, very different parts of Lower Mainland.
00:15:53.740And 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.
00:16:09.560And 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.
00:16:23.560And 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.
00:16:32.180So he's a well-known councillor, been around for a while, representing that Seymour part, their weak part of the riding.
00:16:37.500So they're bringing someone with their most local credibility against that.
00:16:41.820Whereas Liberals are still running, or Terry Beach, the local MP, who is again a North Shore person.
00:16:46.060So there isn't a Burnaby candidate in the race.
00:16:48.580They're obviously hoping the NDP will be able, the NDP will hope those votes will stick with them.
00:16:56.600Ironically, it's actually because of the NDP's own actions that they probably lost.
00:17:01.380The 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.
00:17:13.680And that was pushed by the NDP candidate, pushing for her.
00:17:18.900Whereas if she'd been on the ballot, the Conservatives probably would have done better.
00:17:23.240And some of those votes probably would have gone Conservative instead of gone Liberal.
00:17:29.780It's right next to Jagmeet Singh's seat.
00:17:32.380This is the sort of seat they've got to win.
00:17:34.480It's going to be fascinating to watch an election night.
00:17:36.500And 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.
00:18:05.020We've got the Labor Day weekend coming up.
00:18:07.240And I know that many people, especially Liberal strategists, are trying to spin this idea that Canadians aren't really paying attention until Labor Day.
00:18:14.180And so the election is really going to come down to the final week or so.
00:18:17.920So we'll definitely have you back on the program next week to help us in the final stretch here.
00:18:22.700I don't agree with Liberals about a lot.
00:18:25.340But I do think this election is really going to be about the last 10 or 12 days.