UNCENSORED: What Poilievre should have done differently and how he can win the next election (with Wyatt Claypool)
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Summary
Wyatt Claypool and Candice Malan discuss what they think the Tories should have done differently in order to have a better shot at winning the election. They also talk about why they think Pierre Polyev should have been a better candidate.
Transcript
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Hi, I'm Candace Malcolm and this is The Candace Malcolm Show. So we're doing a second segment
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here with Wyatt Claypool. We just did a segment on the biggest winners and losers of the election.
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So if you haven't already, go watch that one first. You can watch this one second before
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we get back into it. I'm just going to ask you quickly to like the video. It really helps us
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with the YouTube algorithm. It really helps us get discovered by more Canadians. Okay,
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so in our biggest winners and losers list, we didn't explicitly put Pierre Polyev on either
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list. And I think it's just because it's a gray area. There's a lot of good things that happened
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on Monday night and a lot of not so good things that happened. So we wanted to do a separate
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segment here to talk about our advice. We're giving some free advice to the Conservative Party,
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the War Room and to Pierre Polyev and his campaign on what we think they should have done differently.
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Now, I want to start by just putting one sort of rumor to rest. I don't think this is true
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and it is spreading a lot. I hear this a lot from people. I heard it from Donald Trump,
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President Donald Trump and many others that Pierre Polyev blew a 20 point lead. And while in a
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certain sense, that might be true, I just want to walk you through the numbers and the facts here,
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because look at this. This is from the polling aggregate 338. And it shows the polling numbers
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dating back to January of 2024. Now, Wyatt and I talked in the last segment about why we don't always
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trust the pollsters and we think that they got it wrong during the election. But I think generally
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speaking, you can use it as a good barometer to find out where someone is polling. So if you go
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back to January 2024 and go all the way through to today, you will see that yes, Pierre Polyev did
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have a 20 point lead. But that is because the liberal numbers were so down. Pierre Polyev has the entire
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time been polling around 40%. I would say that that is the average going back. It was right at 40%
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in January 2024. It bumped up to 42%, 43% in the time when Justin Trudeau was just wildly unpopular.
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And then he kind of stuck around in that 41% to 43% area. He got a little bit of a bump at the end
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of the year, 2024 and beginning of 2025, when Justin Trudeau was just at peak weakness. And then you can
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see the major thing that happened is that the NDP vote collapsed. So the NDP vote collapsed. They
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basically did what Ezra Levant called a controlled demolition of the party. And all of their voters
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did exactly what they were told and went over and voted for Mark Carney. So Mark Carney's victory
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came at the expense of the NDP. Mark Carney did a miraculous 20 point turnaround. That's what he
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accomplished. But in order to say that Pierre Polyev blew a 20 point lead, you would have to assume
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that he fell 20 points. He didn't. He maintained his share. We talked about this before. He got more,
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a greater percentage of the vote than any conservative has since the 80s, folks. And he
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got a higher percent even than Stephen Harper in any of his governments and in his 2011 majority
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government. Wyatt, what do you think? And like we mentioned in the last segment, the conservatives
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also gained seats that they hadn't won in literally several decades. So this isn't something where
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we've taken our geographical appeal and we've moved the borders a little bit over. In fact,
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it was a very strange election where not only were the seats, like not only did the conservatives
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gain a lot of seats, but the liberals just happened to gain even more seats. The thing with the
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conservatives was, is that they ended up actually shifting their appeal in a more blue collar
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direction. We had more minority supporters, a lot of union workers voting conservative, obviously
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Western rural voters were still very solid conservative voters, but it's more so on the other side of
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things. Things shifted in such a way for the liberal party that they ended up capturing a lot of seats
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that maybe we assumed were safe. Not only was it Carlton, Pierre Polyev's seat, although again,
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that was helped by a redistribution of boundaries into a more liberal area. And that was always a
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riding I'd heard that Polyev in the past had had to fight for to maintain his 10% victory margin.
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But we also lost Michelle Ferreri in Peterborough, who is a fantastic MP. We lost Carolyn Finley in South Surrey
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White Rock. And these are just areas where we had just to, you know, in demographics, the demographics that
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went against conservatives were older white voters, basically legacy media viewers. And obviously, if you're
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watching a show like mine on YouTube or Candace's, you probably voted conservative no matter what age bracket
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or other demographic you're a part of. But it did make a difference. Those were kind of the battle
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lines of this election. It was those metropolitan suburban ridings that went more liberal, which were
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usually which went very liberal if they were especially more older white ridings.
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That is all very true. But I don't want to sugarcoat it. OK, I did an entire show on Tuesday of all the
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good news from the election. I complimented Pierre Polyev. I think he ran a very good campaign. It's hard to
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criticize the conservatives when they walk away with 41.3% of the vote. That is enough to win
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in a majority government in almost any other circumstance. But because of the weird thing
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that happened in this election, it wasn't enough. I do want to focus on my criticisms of the party
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in this episode. And I want to kind of zero it in on two different areas. There were one strategy and
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tactics and two the policy. So let's start with strategy and tactics because you mentioned losing
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Carlton. Why? I think this is unforgivable. I think from a strategy perspective, I don't know. I don't
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want to put the blame squarely on Pierre Polyev or whether it should be his campaign manager or his
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war room or whatever it is. But it is so unforgivable for a party leader to basically be allowed to be
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humiliated in the way that he did. Now, you mentioned that it was partially because of the
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redrawing of the district. Well, that is something that we have known about for a very long time. It
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should have been prepared, right? So if, you know, Pierre Polyev's writing used to be very rural and it
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used to be a bit more reliable, if they all of a sudden they added suburbs that we know are
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where government employees live and we know that federal employees are basically the base and the
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constituency of the liberal party, that should have all been predictable in advance of the campaign.
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And so I don't understand why they didn't put more resources, more volunteers, more money, have Pierre
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Polyev spend more time in his writing if it was that much for concern. I mean, I'll say frankly, the Friday
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before the campaign, I had you on my show and we called it Fake News Friday and we laughed at it, right? And I will
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admit that we got it wrong. I'll admit to the audience that sometimes we get it wrong here at
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The Candace Malcolm Show. I thought that the legacy media was lying about that, that they were pushing
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this story to try to humiliate Polyev. I didn't realize that it was actually true, that he was
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actually at risk of losing his seat and he did and it wasn't necessarily that close. And so if they knew
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this in advance, which they should have, if they didn't know this in advance, they should all be
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fired because this is unforgivable. Put Pierre Polyev in a safer writing. He's the leader of the party.
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He's the head of a movement. He's done so much for the Conservative Party. Find a safer writing.
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Come up with an excuse, say him and his family wanted to move out of the Ottawa area and they
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moved to this part of rural Ontario. Put them in a safe seat. And so the fact that they didn't
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is unforgivable. That is a huge L in my perspective. What do you think?
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Well, and here's the thing I frequently say about people who work in politics in terms of campaign
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staff and consultants and managers is that their big problem is that instead of being strategists and
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managers, they become risk managers. That is all they care about. They end up really pulling
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punches. They don't want to risk anything because what happens if it turns bad on us? What happens
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if we actually get hurt by doing this? And you would think that these people who tend to be risk
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averse would have made the tactical withdrawal from Carlton saying, hey, Polyev loved being the MP from
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Carlton, but it is a riding where you have to really work for it if you're the Liberal or the Conservative.
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And you can't really do that if you're the leader of a party. You can't be constantly jet setting back
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to your riding in order just to hit another few hundred doors to make sure people know that you
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still exist. You got to be out in the swing areas. So they should have been able to pull him back and
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says he's going to move over to a safer area of Ontario. He's going to move to Calgary, going to
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move to Edmonton. And the fact that, again, we assumed that he was going to win his riding partially on
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the assumption that his team wouldn't let him run there if he couldn't win. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. I think
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it's unforgivable. Okay. Next in the strategy and tactics column, this is something that Pierre
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Polyev got accused of a lot. And I half agree with this one. The idea was that they hid from
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legacy media. They refused to do sit down interviews. And oddly, they didn't do enough
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with independent media, with content creators. I will say by the end of the campaign, Pierre Polyev
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was out on podcasts. He did Jasmine Lane's podcast, I saw him on Northern Perspective. He was there,
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but he didn't do very much of that. He didn't, like we said in the last episode, he didn't do a lot of
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big US podcasts. I don't think that that really hurt him per se. But it did have, there was a sort
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of image that he was kind of hiding, that he wasn't out there in the media in the way that he
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has shown, been able to shine in the past. And on top of that, I heard this from so many people in
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local campaigns that they wouldn't let local candidates do anything. Like local candidates
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were not allowed to so much as do a local radio interview. They were told not to go to their all
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candidates forum. They're basically told to just go knock on the doors. And that was a strategy.
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And I know that that was a strategy in the past with the Harper government, like really tight
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message control. Don't let anyone say anything. We don't want the national story to become about
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some local candidate that slightly went off script. Like I understand all that. But I think in 2025,
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with the media landscape, with everyone with social media, you have all these people who are assets,
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all of your candidates. Why not let them go out there and field some questions and take on the
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issues, right? Like you're only going to win the battle of ideas if you show up for the fight. And so it
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was a little disappointing to see this strategy of sort of ducking and hiding. What do you think?
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A few things on that. So first off, let's also just acknowledge the fact that while Harper's people
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did do this, Harper also lost in 2015. Harper did this to perfection in 2015, just run a campaign that
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makes people feel nice and easy. And you know, you don't make any mistakes and hopefully then they'll
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return you to office. And the thing that he was hit for often, it might be unfair, but it's just how
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people vote. They thought, well, Harper's stale. Harper's boring. Let's have the guy with nice hair
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be the prime minister. And you know, we could say that a lot of voters fell for it, but that's just
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how politics ends up working. Another thing too here is that anyone who knows anything about marketing
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knows that you need a lot of different touch points with people in order to convince them that
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you're the guy or that they should buy this product. And if they're only ever seeing you while
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knocking their door, well, you're going to maybe talk to a third of voters. Cause if you've ever
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gone door knocking, most people are not home all the time and putting a leaflet in their door and
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them seeing a YouTube ad from HQ is not going to make a lot of people feel like I definitely got to
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run out of the house at 7am to put a ballot in the ballot box for these people. And so they needed,
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yeah, those little touch points, a local podcast, local radio show, they should be showing up to
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events. I heard that candidates were having to ask permission to go to events. So apparently you
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have to ask to go to a farmer's market. And, uh, in order, like, even though you need to connect with
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people in your local area, I heard candidates who at some point they just said, uh, they had a
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handler, they had a party handler with them. And eventually they kind of worked a relationship
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with the handler where you pretend like you're trying to stop me from doing these things. So you
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don't get fired. And I'm going to go speak to the community leaders and do the shows and do the
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videos that I want to do because we got to win this thing. And they were probably right for doing
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that. And then the last thing on this is that the conservative party, its strength over time has
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always been that it's a party of big characters, big personalities, people who are really big
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community figures. You could say that there's some of them are eccentric at the same time they won
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back in the day. I always think of my former MP, Rob Anders, who always used to be able to win
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easily in, in Calgary, uh, West and Calgary Signal Hill. You would win by rural numbers in the city
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of Calgary, 75% in some of his, in some of his elections. Yes, it's a safe riding, but you only
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make a riding that safe when there's a good portion of people who actually do like you.
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And when you end up stripping away all the virtues of a candidate and you're just left with them as a
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political machine going around asking people for votes, you're going to find that there's a certain
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type of voter who thinks that, well, this feels a little bit like you're, I'm just being rushed
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out to put a ballot in the ballot box. This isn't like the 1880s that, you know, we don't just stick
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ballots in people's hands and force them into the booth. Well, it's, it's interesting because we
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talked in the last segment about, uh, the People's Party, Maxine Bernier, and some of their criticisms
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of the conservatives. And in this way, I do kind of prefer the American system where there is no
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central party that controls all the candidates across the country. So what you end up happening in the
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States, you have the individual representatives and candidates for the Republican Party actually
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being more connected to the base. They have an incentive to be more conservative and more right
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wing because they want to get elected. Whereas in Canada, it's almost the opposite where you,
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we end up with, uh, well, this time around, certainly we have a more conservative leader.
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And then in many ways, they've planted like red Tories throughout the campaign just to keep them quiet,
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to keep them in line. They don't want to have the kind of big personalities like the
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brawbanders that you talked about. And it is disappointing. I would have liked to say,
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you know, it's 2025. You have to meet viewers where they are, do more things on TikTok,
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get, get out there more, have more people articulating the vision of the future under
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a conservative government. I think that this happened in the U.S. election, Wyatt, with,
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it wasn't just Donald Trump, right? Like I talked to many people, Americans that were convinced to
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vote for Trump when they saw J.D. Vance on the VP debate stage, because he just seemed so stable
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and competent. And he was able to articulate Trump's vision in some ways better than Trump
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himself. You also had people who voted for Trump because of someone like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or
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Tulsi Gabbard, people who were part of the coalition. And they were all empowered to go out there and
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speak on behalf of the movement. And here in Canada, it just seemed like it was all on
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Pierre Polyev's shoulders. And then again, his strategy was in many ways to not, I mean,
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he was doing his rallies, yes. But at his rallies, he was sort of giving the same speech over and over
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again. So you weren't really seeing anything new or dynamic on the campaign.
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Some say the bubbles in an aero truffle piece can take 34 seconds to melt in your mouth.
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Sometimes the very amount you're stuck at the same red light.
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Rich, creamy, chocolatey aero truffle. Feel the aero bubbles melt. It's mind bubbling.
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And that's the thing is that Polyev at his best is Polyev just doing what he wants.
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Polyev at his best is Polyev on the debate stage where you can go in with a script, but
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you can't exactly script out a debate. You got to kind of move on the spot. That's why
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Mark Carney, frankly, wasn't very good on stage because if it's not a scripted answer, he's
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going to fumble it. But he's always good on the debate stage. He's good on on Jordan Peterson's
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podcast. He's good when he's connecting with people who may be low propensity voters, convincing
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them that maybe you should turn out. Because I think that we truly probably were a few Canadian
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podcasts because I don't think the Americans would have really helped that much. Plus,
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it would have fueled the idea of, oh, my goodness, look, Pierre Polyev's going down south to speak
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to the media because he's secretly an American.
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But we were probably a few podcasts away, a few candidate debates away in terms of the
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local candidates. We were probably a few community events away from a lot of these
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ridings flipping blue. But the thing is that something I often say about the concerted strategy
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is that they fight it like blockhouse warfare. We have our territory, we have our 42% of the
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vote that we think we can get. Now we're just going to put blockhouses along the territory
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to defend it. But the problem is when you play a purely defensive game, the best you do in
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a day is you don't lose ground. And the worst you do is you lose everything you have because
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you always have to be offensive at all times. You always have to be taking territory at the
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same time that you're defending. And the Conservative Party, of course, did that at
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times. But I think with their local candidates, they didn't let them loose to go on the offensive.
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Well, what you're describing is exactly what happened in 2021 when Aaron O'Toole just assumed
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that the base would show up for him. And so he tried to tack to the left, to the center,
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copying the liberals and everything from their carbon tax to all their social policies. And it just
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didn't work for him. It fell apart. And the base was so betrayed that they ousted him as leader
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at the first possible opportunity. Well, I want to tie this next one into what you're saying.
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This is kind of a mixture of tactics and strategy and also policy, which is that as soon as Donald
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Trump came in with the 51st State stuff and Mark Carney became the leader, it seemed like
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Pierre Polyev was just sort of caught flat-footed, where he had been so effective at playing offense,
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at hitting hard against Justin Trudeau, hitting hard against the fake news and legacy media.
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And then all of a sudden, he turned around and he had to play defense to the accusations that he was
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too much like Trump, too pro-American, and that he wasn't differentiating himself. It seemed like at
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that point, the strategy was just to copy the liberals and to adopt their policy on Donald
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Trump so that they couldn't be accused of that. It seemed insincere. And it made Pierre Polyev,
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again, seem like he was playing defense. It seemed like he got stuck in Aaron O'Toole mode. And when
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I interviewed him in mid-February, when I sat down with Pierre Polyev for my exclusive interview at that
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time, I asked him, why is a conservative advocating for a 25% liberal tax on Canadians, right? That is
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what the policy was for the conservatives. They agreed there should be dollar for dollar
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reciprocal trade tariffs against the Americans. So if the Americans are going to slap 25% tariffs
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on goods coming to Canada, we're going to slap them on goods coming from the U.S. That's a tax on
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Canadians. Andrew Lawton even said this on my show yesterday, that tariffs are bad and they hurt
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everyone. And I'm thinking the conservatives advocated for tariffs in this election. That
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was their official policy. I think that that was a mistake. What do you think?
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And there was an easy win in it because by adopting the liberal policy, all you're doing
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is just reducing the positive effect of them saying it first by saying, well, both of these parties do
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advocate for it, but the first party to say it always is going to get the most credit. And obviously,
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the government has the advantage because they can actually implement. But what the conservatives
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should have been doing on that is what they were doing on the issue of crime with Polly of saying
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that multiple murderers cannot serve all of their sentences at the same time. They have to
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conserve them consecutively. He ended up baiting out Mark Carney into then saying, well, I think that
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could be seen as an abuse of power. That's not what the notwithstanding clause is used for. It's
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like, are you defending multiple murderers? And what they should have done on trade is saying,
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you know what? Like we shouldn't be putting out reciprocal tariffs. We should be cutting taxes.
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I was constantly saying on my show that what they should be painting the picture of is that it seems
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like Mark Carney is only upset by Trump putting on tariffs because it's usually him and the liberals
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job to kick Canadians in the face. That the whole point is maybe we should out-compete the
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Americans, not just sort of go down to their level. And do you know who actually had probably the best
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response on the 51st state rhetoric by Trump? It hurts me to say it. It was Green Party leader
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Elizabeth May because she joked about it and then she moved on. She talked about, well, I don't think
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Canada should be the 51st state. I think California should be the 11th province. It's like, that's a
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good line. That's just a good line. And that's what something that someone in HQ should have thought of.
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But the problem, what they do is they start focus grouping everything. And that's why it felt like
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everything screeched to a halt probably for a couple months. They were focus grouping it.
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Yeah. And then they were on their, they were on their defense or flat-footed and it just lost
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momentum at a critical, critical time. Peer poly of strength, right, was explaining complicated
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things that were happening in the economy with taxes, with inflation, with housing prices,
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and explaining it to Canadians in a way that made sense to them and coming up with a different
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solution. I could have just as easily seen them say, listen, a tariff is bad, whether it is a Trump
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tariff or whether it is a carny tariff. It is a tax on you. And all this is, is a 25% tax on Canadians
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in the middle of this economy, in the middle of all of these other taxes they put on us.
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They now want to slap another 25% tax on Canadians. I think that that should have been
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Pauliev's line. I think he would have been really good at it. And I think it could have led to a
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different outcome in the election. Now, I don't want to come down too hard on them because like I said,
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they got 42%, 41% of the vote. They did win a lot. And, you know, maybe their strategy
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was just fine. But this was one thing that I think that they could have done differently.
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And I think that it could have had a difference. I just finally, I want to talk a little bit about
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other policy positions, because I think that overall, Pauliev was really good on policy. If I
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had to do a report card, I would have given him like an eight out of 10. But I think that they could
00:20:31.660
have maybe benefited from going a little deeper and making a more clear differentiation. So back in
00:20:37.920
2011, when Stephen Harper won, he kind of famously had like very simple, I think it was like a five point
00:20:43.540
plan. It was like lower the GST. It was very simple and very easy to understand. I wish that
00:20:48.540
Pauliev had come up with something like that. I think he could have utilized the immigration issue.
00:20:52.440
I think he could have come out and said, we're going to cap immigration at a lower number,
00:20:56.060
any lower number, 150,000, 200,000, maybe go even low as 100,000. And that would have been
00:21:00.800
something that could have stuck with Canadians. Instead, he never really clearly came out and
00:21:04.640
said his immigration number. I know when he did that interview with me back in February,
00:21:07.740
he said he was going to go back to Harper level numbers, but he never put an exact number on it.
00:21:12.040
So I would have liked to see Pierre have a few more very specific policies. What do you think?
00:21:17.040
I actually did a poll with Kolsovsky strategies showing that a 100,000 PR immigration cap for
00:21:24.840
several years would get 75% of Canadians on board, a 75% reduction to get 75% of Canadians on board,
00:21:32.440
including 58% of people voting NDP and 72% of people voting liberal. And that's what your policy
00:21:39.760
book should do. It shouldn't just be ideas where people look at it and say, well, that that sounds
00:21:44.720
nice. It should be things that actually get people to think hard. Something that's not been proposed
00:21:49.380
before, but it becomes a wedge issue. Are you on side with over 400,000 new immigrants, new permanent
00:21:56.720
residents per year? Do you want it to be a hundred thousand so that your kid can actually buy a house
00:22:00.820
in the next few years? And I think that's what they need to do. And on certain topics, they did do it
00:22:04.900
again on crime. They've, they did it pretty well on other issues. They had done a good contrast with
00:22:10.800
the liberals, but on things like taxes, I know his tax reduction for under $50,000 was much bigger
00:22:18.600
than the, the Carney liberals. Carney had wanted to cut it by 1%. Polyev had wanted to cut it by two
00:22:24.680
and a quarter. I would have said, cut it by two and a quarter for every bracket, because that's how
00:22:30.080
you're going to get the upper middle-class people who are watching legacy media all day, who think
00:22:35.100
that they need to vote to stop Trump to actually say, wait, Carney's supposedly trying to protect
00:22:41.040
me, but he won't even cut my taxes. And that's what I would have gone after him on. I actually
00:22:44.780
liked when he says, I'm going to get rid of the industrial carbon tax. Guess what? That didn't
00:22:48.180
hurt the conservatives at all to say that they were going to get rid of the industrial carbon
00:22:51.340
tax, but, and I didn't think they played it well enough, but they could have put Carney in
00:22:56.160
the patriotism trap of saying, okay, so you want to defend Canada and you don't want Canada become
00:23:01.980
the 51st state, but you're going to keep punishing our businesses far more than the Americans do with
00:23:07.640
their taxes. So, sorry, who here is the person who's like, who's, who's the person hurting Canadians
00:23:13.440
more? The man who doesn't want to actually lower corporate taxes or the person who's just put in
00:23:19.220
tariff on, on all imports on certain products? Like you almost seem worse than Donald Trump on this
00:23:24.280
particular issue. And I think we should just not have either tariffs or carbon taxes.
00:23:29.000
Okay. Hear me out on this. This is what I think that Pierre Polyev should have run on.
00:23:32.260
One, 100,000 immigration cap. Two, no tariffs. Three, life, like no more consecutive life sentences.
00:23:40.020
Throw the murderers in jail. Four, I love it. Across the board, tax cuts for every bracket.
00:23:45.680
And five, this is very simple. And this is something the conservatives were afraid of in the campaign.
00:23:49.500
Boys are boys, girls are girls, and they cannot change. And I think that that last one
00:23:54.100
is something that has been a winning issue in the United States, been a winning issue in the United
00:23:58.080
Kingdom. It is a big cultural issue at the time. It is very important in the minds of parents,
00:24:03.200
in the minds of anyone who has a daughter who plays sports, anyone who is concerned about women's
00:24:07.820
prisons or women's shelters. This is a major issue. And I saw that the conservatives were just
00:24:13.200
too polite, too nervous, too worried, didn't want to touch it. And that's too bad. I'm not trying to
00:24:17.900
stoke divisions and play up identity politics. That's not what I'm trying to do.
00:24:21.640
But it is a principled issue. And it is an issue where the conservatives can be wildly successful
00:24:27.020
if they're willing to articulate the issue in a good way. So I think those five, if that was his
00:24:32.560
policy, I think that Pierre Pauli would be prime minister right now.
00:24:34.820
You're absolutely right. Because when I ran for a conservative party nomination in Calgary Signal
00:24:39.720
Hill, my three points I'd always hit people with was a parental bill of rights. I wanted a two-thirds
00:24:46.500
reduction in immigration at the time. This is 23, 24. So I would have probably increased it now if I was
00:24:51.340
doing it to three quarters. And then the last one was a 2%, like two overall point percentage
00:24:57.300
reduction of taxes in every single bracket. And I had people who described themselves as
00:25:03.520
centrists at the door, who as soon as I started talking about immigration, they'd get quieter,
00:25:07.620
but they'd be like, yeah, you're kind of right. It's like way too much. Because I would just use
00:25:10.700
the line, it's not me saying there's too many people entering the country. It's math saying there's
00:25:16.800
Well, and people just start to feel it in other ways, in the cost of living,
00:25:20.300
in cost of housing, in just kind of cultural changes that they might notice in their neighborhood.
00:25:24.620
Obviously, the radical, you know, Hamasnicks protesting or the ethnic fighting between Sikhs
00:25:30.120
and Hindus in Brampton. Like, there are all kinds of data points that hit different Canadians in
00:25:34.060
different ways. And I think that that's one of those things that they would quietly agree with,
00:25:37.440
even though, even if they wouldn't necessarily say it aloud. All right, well, Wyatt, we gave some free
00:25:41.740
advice to the Conservative Party, take it or leave it. I do think that Pierre Polyev ran a good
00:25:45.580
campaign, and I think he should stay on as leader of the party, but definitely make some changes for
00:25:49.880
the next election. Anything else you want to say on this topic?
00:25:53.640
I'd echo what you're saying. I think Polyev had far more virtues than he ever had drawbacks as leader.
00:26:00.240
Better leader than O'Toole, easily better leader than Andrew Sheeran. I would say he was better leader
00:26:04.940
than Harper was in 2015. So it would be preemptive to say, well, he lost, he has to go.
00:26:10.760
So I've even heard the idea that whenever you have a leader who maybe even underperformed,
00:26:15.720
they're only ever going to be 15% of the issue. I don't even think that Polyev was much of an
00:26:20.180
issue at all. In fact, I think he added a lot of, if he was a different leader, we probably have
00:26:25.220
performed far worse. I would say that in so many ways, I hope that Polyev doesn't get blamed for
00:26:31.020
the problems of his own team behind him, because he's the leader. He's doing rallies every day. He's
00:26:37.440
running around the country. He doesn't really have time to micromanage the people behind the scenes
00:26:41.420
who are telling candidates they're not allowed to go to local debates. They're not allowed to go to
00:26:45.340
events. And they're rolling out policy platforms really late in the campaign. And it's a little
00:26:52.060
bit watery on certain issues. And they've probably focus grouped it a little bit too much.
00:26:55.640
That's the big area that they need to have change. It's the back room of people who,
00:27:02.200
frankly, over the last couple of days have been slapping each other on the back and saying,
00:27:06.620
well, wasn't it such a great campaign? In some ways, but let's not talk, let's not keep gassing
00:27:11.580
each other up when we didn't get the win. We got to actually demonstrate the ability to know,
00:27:16.700
okay, here's a couple of points we didn't do well on. Let's do better next time.
00:27:19.880
Well, exactly. I think we're going to head into an election inside 24 months, hopefully inside 18
00:27:23.980
months. I really do hope that this parliament is short-lived and that the conservatives have
00:27:27.760
another chance to take back the country. And they have to learn from the mistakes. So that's why we
00:27:32.560
wanted to document them here for you today. All right, folks, that's all the time we have for
00:27:36.600
today. That's Wyatt Claypool. I'm Candace Malcolm. This is the Candace Malcolm Show. Thank you and God bless.
00:27:41.400
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