The Candice Malcolm Show - May 02, 2025


UNCENSORED: What Poilievre should have done differently and how he can win the next election (with Wyatt Claypool)


Episode Stats

Length

28 minutes

Words per Minute

212.15547

Word Count

6,068

Sentence Count

371

Misogynist Sentences

1

Hate Speech Sentences

8


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

00:00:00.000 Hi, I'm Candace Malcolm and this is The Candace Malcolm Show. So we're doing a second segment
00:00:06.600 here with Wyatt Claypool. We just did a segment on the biggest winners and losers of the election.
00:00:12.760 So if you haven't already, go watch that one first. You can watch this one second before
00:00:16.820 we get back into it. I'm just going to ask you quickly to like the video. It really helps us
00:00:19.840 with the YouTube algorithm. It really helps us get discovered by more Canadians. Okay,
00:00:24.160 so in our biggest winners and losers list, we didn't explicitly put Pierre Polyev on either
00:00:29.360 list. And I think it's just because it's a gray area. There's a lot of good things that happened
00:00:33.660 on Monday night and a lot of not so good things that happened. So we wanted to do a separate
00:00:38.000 segment here to talk about our advice. We're giving some free advice to the Conservative Party,
00:00:42.200 the War Room and to Pierre Polyev and his campaign on what we think they should have done differently.
00:00:48.420 Now, I want to start by just putting one sort of rumor to rest. I don't think this is true
00:00:53.540 and it is spreading a lot. I hear this a lot from people. I heard it from Donald Trump,
00:00:57.560 President Donald Trump and many others that Pierre Polyev blew a 20 point lead. And while in a
00:01:03.920 certain sense, that might be true, I just want to walk you through the numbers and the facts here,
00:01:08.360 because look at this. This is from the polling aggregate 338. And it shows the polling numbers
00:01:13.640 dating back to January of 2024. Now, Wyatt and I talked in the last segment about why we don't always
00:01:19.620 trust the pollsters and we think that they got it wrong during the election. But I think generally
00:01:23.320 speaking, you can use it as a good barometer to find out where someone is polling. So if you go
00:01:27.360 back to January 2024 and go all the way through to today, you will see that yes, Pierre Polyev did
00:01:35.240 have a 20 point lead. But that is because the liberal numbers were so down. Pierre Polyev has the entire
00:01:41.440 time been polling around 40%. I would say that that is the average going back. It was right at 40%
00:01:47.120 in January 2024. It bumped up to 42%, 43% in the time when Justin Trudeau was just wildly unpopular.
00:01:55.880 And then he kind of stuck around in that 41% to 43% area. He got a little bit of a bump at the end
00:02:01.560 of the year, 2024 and beginning of 2025, when Justin Trudeau was just at peak weakness. And then you can
00:02:08.400 see the major thing that happened is that the NDP vote collapsed. So the NDP vote collapsed. They
00:02:13.300 basically did what Ezra Levant called a controlled demolition of the party. And all of their voters
00:02:18.460 did exactly what they were told and went over and voted for Mark Carney. So Mark Carney's victory
00:02:23.220 came at the expense of the NDP. Mark Carney did a miraculous 20 point turnaround. That's what he
00:02:29.720 accomplished. But in order to say that Pierre Polyev blew a 20 point lead, you would have to assume
00:02:33.760 that he fell 20 points. He didn't. He maintained his share. We talked about this before. He got more,
00:02:39.340 a greater percentage of the vote than any conservative has since the 80s, folks. And he
00:02:44.760 got a higher percent even than Stephen Harper in any of his governments and in his 2011 majority
00:02:50.960 government. Wyatt, what do you think? And like we mentioned in the last segment, the conservatives
00:02:56.720 also gained seats that they hadn't won in literally several decades. So this isn't something where
00:03:02.720 we've taken our geographical appeal and we've moved the borders a little bit over. In fact,
00:03:08.840 it was a very strange election where not only were the seats, like not only did the conservatives
00:03:15.040 gain a lot of seats, but the liberals just happened to gain even more seats. The thing with the
00:03:19.800 conservatives was, is that they ended up actually shifting their appeal in a more blue collar
00:03:25.300 direction. We had more minority supporters, a lot of union workers voting conservative, obviously
00:03:30.960 Western rural voters were still very solid conservative voters, but it's more so on the other side of
00:03:36.920 things. Things shifted in such a way for the liberal party that they ended up capturing a lot of seats
00:03:42.140 that maybe we assumed were safe. Not only was it Carlton, Pierre Polyev's seat, although again,
00:03:48.100 that was helped by a redistribution of boundaries into a more liberal area. And that was always a
00:03:53.940 riding I'd heard that Polyev in the past had had to fight for to maintain his 10% victory margin.
00:03:59.020 But we also lost Michelle Ferreri in Peterborough, who is a fantastic MP. We lost Carolyn Finley in South Surrey
00:04:06.740 White Rock. And these are just areas where we had just to, you know, in demographics, the demographics that
00:04:13.840 went against conservatives were older white voters, basically legacy media viewers. And obviously, if you're
00:04:20.140 watching a show like mine on YouTube or Candace's, you probably voted conservative no matter what age bracket
00:04:26.060 or other demographic you're a part of. But it did make a difference. Those were kind of the battle
00:04:31.860 lines of this election. It was those metropolitan suburban ridings that went more liberal, which were
00:04:37.400 usually which went very liberal if they were especially more older white ridings.
00:04:42.500 That is all very true. But I don't want to sugarcoat it. OK, I did an entire show on Tuesday of all the
00:04:46.900 good news from the election. I complimented Pierre Polyev. I think he ran a very good campaign. It's hard to
00:04:51.360 criticize the conservatives when they walk away with 41.3% of the vote. That is enough to win
00:04:56.600 in a majority government in almost any other circumstance. But because of the weird thing
00:05:00.460 that happened in this election, it wasn't enough. I do want to focus on my criticisms of the party
00:05:05.140 in this episode. And I want to kind of zero it in on two different areas. There were one strategy and
00:05:11.000 tactics and two the policy. So let's start with strategy and tactics because you mentioned losing
00:05:16.040 Carlton. Why? I think this is unforgivable. I think from a strategy perspective, I don't know. I don't
00:05:21.340 want to put the blame squarely on Pierre Polyev or whether it should be his campaign manager or his
00:05:25.820 war room or whatever it is. But it is so unforgivable for a party leader to basically be allowed to be
00:05:31.700 humiliated in the way that he did. Now, you mentioned that it was partially because of the
00:05:36.040 redrawing of the district. Well, that is something that we have known about for a very long time. It
00:05:41.000 should have been prepared, right? So if, you know, Pierre Polyev's writing used to be very rural and it
00:05:45.540 used to be a bit more reliable, if they all of a sudden they added suburbs that we know are
00:05:49.260 where government employees live and we know that federal employees are basically the base and the
00:05:53.760 constituency of the liberal party, that should have all been predictable in advance of the campaign.
00:06:01.440 And so I don't understand why they didn't put more resources, more volunteers, more money, have Pierre
00:06:06.480 Polyev spend more time in his writing if it was that much for concern. I mean, I'll say frankly, the Friday
00:06:11.320 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
00:06:15.760 admit that we got it wrong. I'll admit to the audience that sometimes we get it wrong here at
00:06:18.940 The Candace Malcolm Show. I thought that the legacy media was lying about that, that they were pushing
00:06:22.700 this story to try to humiliate Polyev. I didn't realize that it was actually true, that he was
00:06:27.260 actually at risk of losing his seat and he did and it wasn't necessarily that close. And so if they knew
00:06:32.540 this in advance, which they should have, if they didn't know this in advance, they should all be
00:06:35.460 fired because this is unforgivable. Put Pierre Polyev in a safer writing. He's the leader of the party.
00:06:40.160 He's the head of a movement. He's done so much for the Conservative Party. Find a safer writing.
00:06:43.980 Come up with an excuse, say him and his family wanted to move out of the Ottawa area and they
00:06:47.640 moved to this part of rural Ontario. Put them in a safe seat. And so the fact that they didn't
00:06:51.340 is unforgivable. That is a huge L in my perspective. What do you think?
00:06:55.960 Well, and here's the thing I frequently say about people who work in politics in terms of campaign
00:07:02.300 staff and consultants and managers is that their big problem is that instead of being strategists and
00:07:08.920 managers, they become risk managers. That is all they care about. They end up really pulling
00:07:15.040 punches. They don't want to risk anything because what happens if it turns bad on us? What happens
00:07:19.560 if we actually get hurt by doing this? And you would think that these people who tend to be risk
00:07:24.040 averse would have made the tactical withdrawal from Carlton saying, hey, Polyev loved being the MP from
00:07:29.920 Carlton, but it is a riding where you have to really work for it if you're the Liberal or the Conservative.
00:07:34.820 And you can't really do that if you're the leader of a party. You can't be constantly jet setting back
00:07:39.220 to your riding in order just to hit another few hundred doors to make sure people know that you
00:07:43.680 still exist. You got to be out in the swing areas. So they should have been able to pull him back and
00:07:47.840 says he's going to move over to a safer area of Ontario. He's going to move to Calgary, going to
00:07:52.800 move to Edmonton. And the fact that, again, we assumed that he was going to win his riding partially on
00:07:58.780 the assumption that his team wouldn't let him run there if he couldn't win. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. I think
00:08:04.240 it's unforgivable. Okay. Next in the strategy and tactics column, this is something that Pierre
00:08:10.380 Polyev got accused of a lot. And I half agree with this one. The idea was that they hid from
00:08:15.040 legacy media. They refused to do sit down interviews. And oddly, they didn't do enough
00:08:18.940 with independent media, with content creators. I will say by the end of the campaign, Pierre Polyev
00:08:23.320 was out on podcasts. He did Jasmine Lane's podcast, I saw him on Northern Perspective. He was there,
00:08:29.500 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
00:08:33.440 big US podcasts. I don't think that that really hurt him per se. But it did have, there was a sort
00:08:38.100 of image that he was kind of hiding, that he wasn't out there in the media in the way that he
00:08:43.360 has shown, been able to shine in the past. And on top of that, I heard this from so many people in
00:08:49.700 local campaigns that they wouldn't let local candidates do anything. Like local candidates
00:08:53.780 were not allowed to so much as do a local radio interview. They were told not to go to their all
00:08:58.040 candidates forum. They're basically told to just go knock on the doors. And that was a strategy.
00:09:02.400 And I know that that was a strategy in the past with the Harper government, like really tight
00:09:05.880 message control. Don't let anyone say anything. We don't want the national story to become about
00:09:10.140 some local candidate that slightly went off script. Like I understand all that. But I think in 2025,
00:09:15.460 with the media landscape, with everyone with social media, you have all these people who are assets,
00:09:19.340 all of your candidates. Why not let them go out there and field some questions and take on the
00:09:24.420 issues, right? Like you're only going to win the battle of ideas if you show up for the fight. And so it
00:09:29.020 was a little disappointing to see this strategy of sort of ducking and hiding. What do you think?
00:09:34.000 A few things on that. So first off, let's also just acknowledge the fact that while Harper's people
00:09:39.520 did do this, Harper also lost in 2015. Harper did this to perfection in 2015, just run a campaign that
00:09:48.000 makes people feel nice and easy. And you know, you don't make any mistakes and hopefully then they'll
00:09:52.920 return you to office. And the thing that he was hit for often, it might be unfair, but it's just how
00:09:57.680 people vote. They thought, well, Harper's stale. Harper's boring. Let's have the guy with nice hair
00:10:02.380 be the prime minister. And you know, we could say that a lot of voters fell for it, but that's just
00:10:07.000 how politics ends up working. Another thing too here is that anyone who knows anything about marketing
00:10:12.920 knows that you need a lot of different touch points with people in order to convince them that
00:10:17.440 you're the guy or that they should buy this product. And if they're only ever seeing you while
00:10:22.560 knocking their door, well, you're going to maybe talk to a third of voters. Cause if you've ever
00:10:27.840 gone door knocking, most people are not home all the time and putting a leaflet in their door and
00:10:32.560 them seeing a YouTube ad from HQ is not going to make a lot of people feel like I definitely got to
00:10:37.860 run out of the house at 7am to put a ballot in the ballot box for these people. And so they needed,
00:10:43.300 yeah, those little touch points, a local podcast, local radio show, they should be showing up to
00:10:48.260 events. I heard that candidates were having to ask permission to go to events. So apparently you
00:10:53.100 have to ask to go to a farmer's market. And, uh, in order, like, even though you need to connect with
00:10:59.320 people in your local area, I heard candidates who at some point they just said, uh, they had a
00:11:03.620 handler, they had a party handler with them. And eventually they kind of worked a relationship
00:11:08.600 with the handler where you pretend like you're trying to stop me from doing these things. So you
00:11:12.660 don't get fired. And I'm going to go speak to the community leaders and do the shows and do the
00:11:16.940 videos that I want to do because we got to win this thing. And they were probably right for doing
00:11:21.360 that. And then the last thing on this is that the conservative party, its strength over time has
00:11:28.040 always been that it's a party of big characters, big personalities, people who are really big
00:11:34.060 community figures. You could say that there's some of them are eccentric at the same time they won
00:11:38.680 back in the day. I always think of my former MP, Rob Anders, who always used to be able to win
00:11:44.380 easily in, in Calgary, uh, West and Calgary Signal Hill. You would win by rural numbers in the city
00:11:51.420 of Calgary, 75% in some of his, in some of his elections. Yes, it's a safe riding, but you only
00:11:57.320 make a riding that safe when there's a good portion of people who actually do like you.
00:12:01.560 And when you end up stripping away all the virtues of a candidate and you're just left with them as a
00:12:06.260 political machine going around asking people for votes, you're going to find that there's a certain
00:12:11.360 type of voter who thinks that, well, this feels a little bit like you're, I'm just being rushed
00:12:15.460 out to put a ballot in the ballot box. This isn't like the 1880s that, you know, we don't just stick
00:12:20.380 ballots in people's hands and force them into the booth. Well, it's, it's interesting because we
00:12:24.360 talked in the last segment about, uh, the People's Party, Maxine Bernier, and some of their criticisms
00:12:27.900 of the conservatives. And in this way, I do kind of prefer the American system where there is no
00:12:32.860 central party that controls all the candidates across the country. So what you end up happening in the
00:12:37.060 States, you have the individual representatives and candidates for the Republican Party actually
00:12:42.180 being more connected to the base. They have an incentive to be more conservative and more right
00:12:46.800 wing because they want to get elected. Whereas in Canada, it's almost the opposite where you,
00:12:51.120 we end up with, uh, well, this time around, certainly we have a more conservative leader.
00:12:55.300 And then in many ways, they've planted like red Tories throughout the campaign just to keep them quiet,
00:13:00.720 to keep them in line. They don't want to have the kind of big personalities like the
00:13:03.980 brawbanders that you talked about. And it is disappointing. I would have liked to say,
00:13:08.400 you know, it's 2025. You have to meet viewers where they are, do more things on TikTok,
00:13:11.520 get, get out there more, have more people articulating the vision of the future under
00:13:17.440 a conservative government. I think that this happened in the U.S. election, Wyatt, with,
00:13:21.140 it wasn't just Donald Trump, right? Like I talked to many people, Americans that were convinced to
00:13:26.180 vote for Trump when they saw J.D. Vance on the VP debate stage, because he just seemed so stable
00:13:30.560 and competent. And he was able to articulate Trump's vision in some ways better than Trump
00:13:34.580 himself. You also had people who voted for Trump because of someone like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or
00:13:40.100 Tulsi Gabbard, people who were part of the coalition. And they were all empowered to go out there and
00:13:44.400 speak on behalf of the movement. And here in Canada, it just seemed like it was all on
00:13:48.440 Pierre Polyev's shoulders. And then again, his strategy was in many ways to not, I mean,
00:13:52.680 he was doing his rallies, yes. But at his rallies, he was sort of giving the same speech over and over
00:13:56.440 again. So you weren't really seeing anything new or dynamic on the campaign.
00:14:01.980 Some say the bubbles in an aero truffle piece can take 34 seconds to melt in your mouth.
00:14:06.600 Sometimes the very amount you're stuck at the same red light.
00:14:10.080 Rich, creamy, chocolatey aero truffle. Feel the aero bubbles melt. It's mind bubbling.
00:14:16.480 And that's the thing is that Polyev at his best is Polyev just doing what he wants.
00:14:21.640 Polyev at his best is Polyev on the debate stage where you can go in with a script, but
00:14:27.220 you can't exactly script out a debate. You got to kind of move on the spot. That's why
00:14:30.900 Mark Carney, frankly, wasn't very good on stage because if it's not a scripted answer, he's
00:14:35.100 going to fumble it. But he's always good on the debate stage. He's good on on Jordan Peterson's
00:14:40.580 podcast. He's good when he's connecting with people who may be low propensity voters, convincing
00:14:45.740 them that maybe you should turn out. Because I think that we truly probably were a few Canadian
00:14:51.200 podcasts because I don't think the Americans would have really helped that much. Plus,
00:14:54.280 it would have fueled the idea of, oh, my goodness, look, Pierre Polyev's going down south to speak
00:14:58.600 to the media because he's secretly an American.
00:15:01.140 Yeah.
00:15:01.860 But we were probably a few podcasts away, a few candidate debates away in terms of the
00:15:08.480 local candidates. We were probably a few community events away from a lot of these
00:15:13.860 ridings flipping blue. But the thing is that something I often say about the concerted strategy
00:15:19.460 is that they fight it like blockhouse warfare. We have our territory, we have our 42% of the
00:15:26.080 vote that we think we can get. Now we're just going to put blockhouses along the territory
00:15:29.680 to defend it. But the problem is when you play a purely defensive game, the best you do in
00:15:34.820 a day is you don't lose ground. And the worst you do is you lose everything you have because
00:15:40.100 you always have to be offensive at all times. You always have to be taking territory at the
00:15:44.760 same time that you're defending. And the Conservative Party, of course, did that at
00:15:48.320 times. But I think with their local candidates, they didn't let them loose to go on the offensive.
00:15:54.040 Well, what you're describing is exactly what happened in 2021 when Aaron O'Toole just assumed
00:15:58.100 that the base would show up for him. And so he tried to tack to the left, to the center,
00:16:02.760 copying the liberals and everything from their carbon tax to all their social policies. And it just
00:16:06.880 didn't work for him. It fell apart. And the base was so betrayed that they ousted him as leader
00:16:10.640 at the first possible opportunity. Well, I want to tie this next one into what you're saying.
00:16:13.760 This is kind of a mixture of tactics and strategy and also policy, which is that as soon as Donald
00:16:19.340 Trump came in with the 51st State stuff and Mark Carney became the leader, it seemed like
00:16:24.020 Pierre Polyev was just sort of caught flat-footed, where he had been so effective at playing offense,
00:16:29.460 at hitting hard against Justin Trudeau, hitting hard against the fake news and legacy media.
00:16:33.260 And then all of a sudden, he turned around and he had to play defense to the accusations that he was
00:16:37.520 too much like Trump, too pro-American, and that he wasn't differentiating himself. It seemed like at
00:16:42.760 that point, the strategy was just to copy the liberals and to adopt their policy on Donald
00:16:47.880 Trump so that they couldn't be accused of that. It seemed insincere. And it made Pierre Polyev,
00:16:52.780 again, seem like he was playing defense. It seemed like he got stuck in Aaron O'Toole mode. And when
00:16:58.460 I interviewed him in mid-February, when I sat down with Pierre Polyev for my exclusive interview at that
00:17:03.000 time, I asked him, why is a conservative advocating for a 25% liberal tax on Canadians, right? That is
00:17:11.080 what the policy was for the conservatives. They agreed there should be dollar for dollar
00:17:15.060 reciprocal trade tariffs against the Americans. So if the Americans are going to slap 25% tariffs
00:17:20.840 on goods coming to Canada, we're going to slap them on goods coming from the U.S. That's a tax on
00:17:25.320 Canadians. Andrew Lawton even said this on my show yesterday, that tariffs are bad and they hurt
00:17:29.400 everyone. And I'm thinking the conservatives advocated for tariffs in this election. That
00:17:34.500 was their official policy. I think that that was a mistake. What do you think?
00:17:38.340 And there was an easy win in it because by adopting the liberal policy, all you're doing
00:17:44.040 is just reducing the positive effect of them saying it first by saying, well, both of these parties do
00:17:49.660 advocate for it, but the first party to say it always is going to get the most credit. And obviously,
00:17:54.360 the government has the advantage because they can actually implement. But what the conservatives
00:17:59.060 should have been doing on that is what they were doing on the issue of crime with Polly of saying
00:18:04.160 that multiple murderers cannot serve all of their sentences at the same time. They have to
00:18:09.200 conserve them consecutively. He ended up baiting out Mark Carney into then saying, well, I think that
00:18:15.700 could be seen as an abuse of power. That's not what the notwithstanding clause is used for. It's
00:18:21.000 like, are you defending multiple murderers? And what they should have done on trade is saying,
00:18:25.480 you know what? Like we shouldn't be putting out reciprocal tariffs. We should be cutting taxes.
00:18:30.080 I was constantly saying on my show that what they should be painting the picture of is that it seems
00:18:36.100 like Mark Carney is only upset by Trump putting on tariffs because it's usually him and the liberals
00:18:41.100 job to kick Canadians in the face. That the whole point is maybe we should out-compete the
00:18:45.540 Americans, not just sort of go down to their level. And do you know who actually had probably the best
00:18:51.080 response on the 51st state rhetoric by Trump? It hurts me to say it. It was Green Party leader
00:18:57.320 Elizabeth May because she joked about it and then she moved on. She talked about, well, I don't think
00:19:02.900 Canada should be the 51st state. I think California should be the 11th province. It's like, that's a
00:19:09.180 good line. That's just a good line. And that's what something that someone in HQ should have thought of.
00:19:13.960 But the problem, what they do is they start focus grouping everything. And that's why it felt like
00:19:18.540 everything screeched to a halt probably for a couple months. They were focus grouping it.
00:19:22.960 Yeah. And then they were on their, they were on their defense or flat-footed and it just lost
00:19:28.380 momentum at a critical, critical time. Peer poly of strength, right, was explaining complicated
00:19:33.360 things that were happening in the economy with taxes, with inflation, with housing prices,
00:19:37.000 and explaining it to Canadians in a way that made sense to them and coming up with a different
00:19:40.660 solution. I could have just as easily seen them say, listen, a tariff is bad, whether it is a Trump
00:19:45.560 tariff or whether it is a carny tariff. It is a tax on you. And all this is, is a 25% tax on Canadians
00:19:52.180 in the middle of this economy, in the middle of all of these other taxes they put on us.
00:19:56.020 They now want to slap another 25% tax on Canadians. I think that that should have been
00:20:01.040 Pauliev's line. I think he would have been really good at it. And I think it could have led to a
00:20:05.380 different outcome in the election. Now, I don't want to come down too hard on them because like I said,
00:20:08.580 they got 42%, 41% of the vote. They did win a lot. And, you know, maybe their strategy
00:20:14.240 was just fine. But this was one thing that I think that they could have done differently.
00:20:18.240 And I think that it could have had a difference. I just finally, I want to talk a little bit about
00:20:23.280 other policy positions, because I think that overall, Pauliev was really good on policy. If I
00:20:28.040 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
00:25:14.940 too many people.
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.
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