The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - October 29, 2024


BC Election overview - Canada's closest election ever


Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

202.271

Word count

2,387

Sentence count

124


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Wyatt Claypool gives his thoughts on the BC election results and what he thinks about the future of the Conservative Party of Canada. He also talks about why the election was so close and the implications for David Eby and the current government.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.400 Hey everyone, Wyatt Claypool here. I just wanted to put out a quick video overview of the British Columbia provincial election, because I know a lot of people are going to be asking me my opinion on the results.
00:00:12.860 And I'm going to get into that, where the Conservatives came from, where we ended up, sort of issues around the election, whatnot, where I think the Conservatives can move going forward, and the state of play for David Eby in the current legislature.
00:00:26.640 Before I get into that, I just want to encourage you all who are not subscribed, to subscribe to the channel. I've looked at my analytics, and I think about 75% of people who watch are not actually subscribed.
00:00:37.320 So make sure you do that. Like the video, too. But technically, the results are still not final in this election. I'm just going to say whatever's in place is the final for now, unless things change.
00:00:47.980 There are judicial recounts happening in Surrey-Guilford, where the BC NDP only outed out the Conservatives by 17 votes, and then Kelowna Center, where the Conservatives are only ahead by 40 votes.
00:01:00.800 Judicial recounts don't tend to overturn election results. Sometimes it does. If the Conservatives end up picking up Guilford, that means that the NDP only have a minority government,
00:01:11.140 since they only have barely a majority right now at 47 seats, which actually causes problems in the legislature, because now David Eby has to figure out who's going to be the Speaker.
00:01:20.720 And if the NDP end up picking someone from their party to be the Speaker, that means they're going to have to take the long process to have the Speaker tie-break votes constantly,
00:01:30.380 unless the BC Greens are supporting them on pieces of legislation, which is actually kind of hazy, because I've heard that although Sonia Firstenow is staying on as the leader of the Green Party,
00:01:42.060 which is wild, considering she got blown out in Victoria Beacon Hill, and obviously is not much of a political tactician or strategist,
00:01:49.740 the other two people who were elected for the Greens, I've heard, are more on the Andrew Weaver side of the party,
00:01:56.300 in terms of they're more pragmatic and willing to work with the Conservatives on certain issues, and maybe with the NDP on others.
00:02:03.560 That remains to be seen. They seem to be old trade unionist-type people, from what I've seen from their careers,
00:02:09.480 because the two Greens, or three Greens from last legislature, are not the two people who just got elected.
00:02:15.160 Either they retired or lost elections, like Firstenow did.
00:02:18.880 Anyways, so the NDP, and this is literally the tightest election in Canadian history.
00:02:24.160 If you know of a tighter one than this one, like, let me know, because I don't know.
00:02:28.900 This was basically like a coin toss.
00:02:31.120 Whose people turned out, I have no doubt that the weather probably affected some of the ridings,
00:02:35.980 and it's not really much of a victory for David Eby if he barely wins re-election with a bare majority,
00:02:43.320 and he had $8 million taxpayer dollars.
00:02:46.100 This is really what I'm talking about around issues with the election.
00:02:48.840 Not like issues, I'm not going to say that the election's rigged or anything, it's not.
00:02:52.960 I have no evidence for that. I don't think that, yeah, I have problems with mail-in ballots being
00:02:57.840 counted multiple days after the election's ended. I don't think that people are stuffing ballot boxes
00:03:02.480 or creating mail-in ballots out of nowhere. I think that all mail-in ballots should be counted
00:03:07.540 on election day, and we should have procedures in place to make sure that people mail in early,
00:03:12.100 and you're not mailing in literally on the day.
00:03:15.080 The NDP ended up getting the best of the mail-in ballots.
00:03:17.820 It was surprising to me, considering Main Street polling asked people,
00:03:21.700 how did you choose to vote? And conservatives seemed to be higher in most polls than the NDP.
00:03:26.160 But whatever, that's just somehow sometimes how the cookie crumbles.
00:03:29.440 And really, it just comes down to the NDP had $8 million taxpayer dollars,
00:03:33.420 the BC conservatives only had $200,000.
00:03:35.920 Because the BC conservatives in British Columbia, I think it's like $1.87, $2, something like that,
00:03:41.820 that each party got for the votes they received last election.
00:03:46.520 So if you're the BC conservatives who only had 2% of the vote, you didn't get much money.
00:03:50.880 And that money is given to the party every single year. So you get like $1.85. I'm not sure what
00:03:55.320 the exact number is. I sometimes hear $2. Sometimes you're like somewhere in the $1.80 range.
00:04:01.200 But you get that $1.80 or so every single year. And so yeah, that's nice for the conservatives.
00:04:06.120 But it's even nicer for the BC NDP and you won a landslide victory last election and you're getting
00:04:11.780 a massive amount of taxpayer money each year. Plus, you get 50% of what you spent in each
00:04:18.660 riding given back to you if you at least got more than 10% of the vote, which is also a pretty
00:04:23.980 big advantage for the BC NDP. Money doesn't buy votes in the sense it doesn't make people want to
00:04:30.580 support you. Bad campaigning is bad campaigning. Just ask Michael Bloomberg if money bought
00:04:35.960 him the Democratic nomination in the 2020 Democratic primaries. It does buy you get out the vote.
00:04:42.020 And the fact that the BC NDP are winning a lot of these ridings by like 100 votes, 50 votes,
00:04:47.180 230 votes is pretty pathetic since they had so many advantages over the BC conservatives.
00:04:53.200 And the BC conservatives, because they're going to get that taxpayer money next time in larger
00:04:57.100 quantities, they're going to have a much easier time driving out their votes. That's really what I
00:05:02.560 think is going to make up that discrepancy in people who said they mailed in a vote and then
00:05:07.220 people who did mail in votes is that the BC NDP are going to have a far better campaign machine and
00:05:12.600 infrastructure to go out to people and remind them to send in mail in votes to help them request
00:05:17.440 mail in votes to help them submit them. That's fair based on the rules. I tend to like it when elections
00:05:23.340 are just people showing up in person because you actually have to have skin in the game and drive there
00:05:27.780 and vote. Whatever. The rules are the rules. Fair enough. But like, so this next time, if the BC
00:05:32.900 conservatives have more money and people, a bigger volunteer list and whatnot, I think it's going to
00:05:37.640 be a wipeout for us. The BC NDP basically ended up just holding on to Vancouver. It has become a deeply
00:05:43.740 undiverse party when you look at the places that they have appeal in. A lot of the Surrey ridings were
00:05:49.520 extremely tight. And outside of Vancouver, there really wasn't that many ridings that the BC NDP won.
00:05:56.400 They also obviously won a bunch of ridings on Vancouver Island. But a lot of the ridings they
00:06:00.620 won outside in the interior, it was either like a couple, like they run a North Coast Haida Gwaii they
00:06:08.320 run. That one is a bit of a unique riding, a heavy First Nation population. So it's sort of a different
00:06:13.800 riding compared to like a another, like the more Northern farmer riding. But overall, they only won
00:06:22.240 these interior ridings if there was an independent splitting the vote. And that happened in a few,
00:06:26.680 like, I think like three or four ridings, the conservatives would have blown out the NDP,
00:06:31.220 if not for a BC United former MLA running out of spite, or some guy who wanted to be the BC
00:06:37.600 conservative candidate. And because he wasn't given it, he basically ran as an independent just
00:06:41.880 to trip up us. It was really sad. And silly in terms of like, I get it if you weren't chosen as
00:06:47.560 a candidate. And this is a tactic to try and make sure that you're maybe considered to be the
00:06:51.280 candidate next time. But some of these like BC United MLAs, they could have joined at some point,
00:06:57.020 they just didn't want to and then out of spite for the conservatives just chose to run to mess with
00:07:01.980 us. That's just stupid. Like, I don't get like, maybe that's what gets in their jollies at the end
00:07:07.300 of the day, but whatever. So I think the conservatives can be proud of where they ended up. Because right
00:07:12.640 now, we're in a position where if the conservatives, and I think this is a good strategy, start putting
00:07:17.860 up tons and tons and tons of votes about SOGI 123 in the legislature, there's going to be a lot of
00:07:24.540 NDP MLAs in the Surrey area who lied to their constituents saying, oh, of course, I'm totally against
00:07:29.700 SOGI 123. Oh, yeah, David Eby will let me vote my conscience on that issue, who are going to now be forced
00:07:35.280 to vote in favor of SOGI 123 over and over again. And if enough of these people get embarrassed enough, I could
00:07:40.960 see them crossing the floor. Right now, the position David Eby is in is that he has to keep everyone in
00:07:46.960 lockstep. But a lot of these people know that their conservative opponents who barely didn't beat them
00:07:52.060 last time, are going to beat them this next time, because they're going to have more money, more
00:07:55.940 volunteers and more name recognition and brand recognition. So they're not in a super comfy
00:08:00.720 position right now. And so David Eby is going to have to try and browbeat these people to stay with the
00:08:05.420 party. Obviously, every party has issues of people getting upset and leaving or crossing the floor or
00:08:10.200 whatever. But I think the NDP is in the more uncomfortable position since the conservatives had a lot of
00:08:15.240 people. I'm not going to call them activists, but like, you know, true orthodox conservatives who believe in
00:08:21.320 the orthodox in the conservative ideology, where the NDP have a lot of like community leaders who only run for
00:08:26.840 the NDP, because that's the party that you can win with. And that is going to have a bit of a risk factor
00:08:32.680 going into it for the BC NDP into this legislative session, because if they lose one or two people,
00:08:38.260 they're done. And then the conservatives could end up picking up a minority position or whatever.
00:08:42.520 And this is also a legislature where nobody can go on vacation, because if you go on vacation,
00:08:47.180 and you leave your party without enough votes to win, to win votes on policy, you're like dead in the
00:08:53.160 water. So this could get extremely contentious and ridden with strife. Like, I guess I'm not what else
00:09:00.360 can I really say about it? Like, again, the conservatives came overcame insurmountable odds,
00:09:04.960 almost, it was really a ground war at the end of the day that was going to win a lot of these
00:09:09.940 ridings. I was in the riding of Maple Ridge East, and we've pulled out that riding by I think around
00:09:14.920 150 votes. So that's always fun when you know that if you didn't show up one of these days,
00:09:20.600 we wouldn't have won. And there were so many days where we were walking through sort of more rural
00:09:25.880 suburban parts of that riding. And it was like pouring rain, knocking on doors and making sure that
00:09:31.360 people were going to walk down the street and vote at the closest polling station. And so I think we
00:09:36.820 actually ended up turning that riding in Maple Ridge East. Lawrence Mock, the currently elected
00:09:41.680 MLA of that riding, unless things change, I don't know. He's fantastic, probably the nicest guy I've
00:09:46.840 ever seen in politics. He's, he's from Singapore, been living in the same house in Maple Ridge for 36
00:09:52.640 years, has nine academic degrees, including a PhD in theology, a PhD in business administration,
00:09:59.540 as a degree in electrical engineering, mechanical engineering. That guy's a mad lad. I love him.
00:10:04.600 He's fantastic. I hope he, I think he'd make a really good MLA and hopefully a minister one day,
00:10:09.640 especially a minister of industry. But yeah, it's really that these, these tight ridings,
00:10:14.520 it's like, did you hit every door? Were you able to text blast everyone? And that's always the problem,
00:10:20.680 especially with alternative voting methods like mail-in and telephone voting and whatnot,
00:10:25.320 because yes, I understand that there's safety features in like involved. I'm not challenging
00:10:30.740 on that side of things. The problem with it is it does gamify the election when one party doesn't
00:10:35.460 have the amount of money to text blast their people saying, Hey, all the bunch of the polling stations
00:10:39.640 in your riding are shut down, but you can technically vote by phone. If you don't have that,
00:10:44.520 it means that you really can't reach out to people. And then the other side who has millions of extra
00:10:48.340 dollars than you and way better data can just say, Hey, by the way, you can vote this way. And then they
00:10:52.800 can get a few dozen more people to do it. It's not really going to change elections if you're way
00:10:57.440 ahead, but it can end up affecting elections when it's super tight. But again, that's more of the
00:11:02.040 money issue. They have a better GOTV game. And it's not because we weren't well organized because
00:11:08.040 money tends to buy quality of turnout game because you're able to organize more volunteers. You can buy
00:11:13.500 better election systems, all types of things like that. Anyways, that should be it for me today,
00:11:19.140 guys. I'm actually about to do a live stream at 7pm Mountain Time, of course, 9pm Eastern with my
00:11:25.800 sometimes co-host Daniel Boardman. So if you're watching this, and you just realized it's past
00:11:30.600 7pm, we'll probably be live. So maybe jump in over on that. But again, like, share and subscribe,
00:11:36.440 donate if you can in the description below really helps us out. I'll see you guys next time. And I
00:11:40.840 will be making follow up videos on both the BC election, as well as BC politics in the future.
00:11:46.200 I'm not abandoning you guys. Don't worry.