Carney bans Canadians who disagree with him from events (ft. Bryan Breguet)
Episode Stats
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Summary
Brian Breguet talks about being kicked out of a Mark Carney event for being a non-Carney supporter. He also talks about a recent incident at a Carney event where he was asked to leave because he wasn't a fan of the candidate.
Transcript
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Hello everyone, welcome back to the Wyatt Claypool Show. What's telling me that Mark Carney is
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probably not going to be a very successful Liberal Party leader has been his reaction
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and his own campaign's reaction to those they disagree with. If you show up to a Mark Carney
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campaign event and you just openly do not agree with many of his policy positions,
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they won't let you stick around the room, maybe ask him a question or something like that.
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They will escort you out. This is not something that Pierre Polyev and his campaign does and it
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shows to me that there is sort of a lacking in personableness to Carney that I think is going
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to end up hurting him in the long run. He's lacking confidence and to talk about this I want to bring
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on Brian Breguet who has been on the receiving end of a polite escorting out of a Mark Carney event for
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the crime of not being like a diehard Carney fan. So Brian, how's it going? Did you get manhandled?
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What happened? All right. Yeah, no, that was a roller coaster yesterday. So Carney had an event in
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North Van yesterday at 630. And I didn't, you know, I registered a long time ago for all the updates,
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but I usually don't get them. But I had registered for the event and I never received a confirmation
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that I was invited. So I had friends who had received the confirmation. So, you know, I went
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there thinking they're not going to let me in. I'm not on the list. And sure enough, I arrived.
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My friend was there already and said, yeah, you're not on the list. I checked. And other people were
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not on the list and they're not being let in. So anyway, I'm like, I'm here. I might as well wait.
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And so I go, I explain, I give my name to one of the volunteers and they tell me, okay, it's fine.
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They give me a stamp on my hand and I go inside waiting for Carney. So I went with my friends for
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about, I would say 30 minutes. And then all of a sudden there was a security guard who's there
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standing in front of the room and he's looking left and right. And then he approached me and he had my
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picture on his phone, like my profile picture from Twitter. And he said, Hey, is that you?
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And, you know, I should have lied at this point. I should say, Oh, absolutely not. This guy is much
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better looking than me. You know? So, and, uh, I said, yeah, I said, yeah, no, you need to come with
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me. And we left the room and he had to make a phone call. And at that point, you know, I'm like,
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I tell him, I was like, look, are you kicking me out or just wasting my time? You know, at this point,
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he's like, no, no, you need, you need to talk to a manager. I'm like, okay, where? And he's like,
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oh, over there. So he escorts me all the way, like the back, well, the front technically,
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but nobody is there anymore. And we're waiting. There is another security guard. I don't want to
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make, you know, their life difficult or anything. I wait five, 10 minutes. I ask again. I'm like,
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look guys, am I just being kicked out? Or is somebody actually coming to talk to me?
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It's like, no, no, no. Somebody's coming. I waited another 10 minutes. Nobody came.
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I decided to leave at this point. You know, I had a friend leaving anywhere. So, uh, I wasn't,
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you know, rudely escorted out. Like they didn't carry me or anything, but I mean, I just couldn't
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be there. I got the feeling that the security guard had no idea what was going on. You know,
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they just got a text or an order to remove this guy from the room. And that's what happened. So,
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And this has been kind of a pattern with Carney's campaign from literally his launch in Edmonton.
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They've not been allowing non, not even just mainstream, but just non-friendly media sources.
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And you'll have like really small fringe, uh, type organizations let in, but they're obviously
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left wing, but independent media is kept out in places where they're obviously not going to
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make a disruption because you end up making yourself look like an idiot. That's the thing
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too. It's like, I don't really see what the benefit to Mark Carney's whole persona is by
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removing people. Like, I just want to quickly play this video. This has been an ongoing thing
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even recently with, uh, just random citizens who have signed up to be liberal party members
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being kicked out. And yeah, you could say they ironically signed up, but like you allowed people
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to ironically sign up. I don't get what the problem is. I'm a lawyer, sir. I am not going
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to, you should get, give this trader a good old warm welcome. Referring to a member in good
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standing as a trader, despite your, your failure to spell a lot of new words, um, is not okay.
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We're challenging an ambassador, sir. And you will be, I'm asking you to leave.
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I think the thing with this is that when you contrast this to pure Polyev, again, I don't
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want to go back to this too much, but like as Carney, you should be basically trying to demonstrate
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if I'm your advisor that you can kind of go toe to toe with pure Polyev in terms of your, you know,
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strength of character and Polyev will literally allow PPC guys to debate him in his photo line.
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But you have Carney who you're not even allowed to stand in the room with them. You've been to,
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you know, Canada future party events. You've been to other political events for people that you don't
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agree with. You're perfectly fine. I guess they don't want you like tweeting or something about the event.
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Yeah. I don't know. I was quite surprised because, you know, exactly. Obviously I was
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behaving correctly. I wasn't creating a scene or anything that they could just have, you know,
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observed me at that time. Uh, and honestly, as soon as I was let in, I thought it, you know,
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that was, that was over because, uh, I was very surprised to kick me out because it's going to create
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bad press, right? I don't want to give myself too much importance there, but I'm like at this point,
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that was the easy path was just let Brian in. He's going to tweet a little bit. I'm not even tweeting
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that, you know, I'm not even putting their guys in a negative way. Most of the time I've said good
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things about, um, Mark Carney and just, you know, let it go. You know, I'm one out of a thousand people
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here. So you, you're making a bigger scene and a bigger mess by actually kicking me out. So, so that's
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funny. Actually yesterday, one of the person I was with after the event, she went for a beer with the
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person managing Mark Carney Twitter account. And that person was actually upset. I got kicked out.
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So I'm guessing that, you know, there must be like a boomer as part of the campaign.
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We said, we cannot take any chance. This guy cannot be in the room. We need to kick him out.
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Are you, did you sign up to be a liberal party member to vote in the leadership?
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No, I'm not a member. I signed up for the updates. I don't like signing up for,
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even though it's free or, you know, I don't like sabotaging or signing up ironically for another
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party. I've argued against this in the past. So I, I didn't do it myself. I should have,
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at least that would have made it more difficult for them to remove me. But as we saw in the video,
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even though it doesn't matter if they want to kick you out, they kick you out.
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Yeah. I also didn't end up taking out a free liberal membership. Like one, they also can't argue
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that, oh my goodness, all these people are signing up ironically. I'm like, yeah, you made it free.
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This is the whole point of making people pay money to make it so that you're not incentivized to do it.
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Either be like the Americans and you're automatically registered as an independent
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Republican and Democrat. And there's really no reason to switch because it's like a drop in the
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bucket or make it a fee. If you're going to have a small amount of people actually choosing your
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leader, by the way, it's kind of embarrassing that they only got up to 400,000 people qualified to vote.
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The conservatives with a $15 one year membership fee, which is pretty rich. If you think about it,
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they ended up getting 675,000 people signed up to vote in that leadership. And that was like a true
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coronation where there wasn't really any real opposition, especially after Patrick Brown was
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removed because he's an actual fraudster. Like, by the way, guys, he is Mr. Ballot Box Stuffing.
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But anyways, I want to get back to just I think this is demonstrating because, yeah, you're saying
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that the social media guy managing it knows you and probably understands the social media landscape
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of people who, you know, are really not a danger. They might jab you here and there, but they're not
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really actually a threat to your campaign. But it demonstrates that so many people, at least in my
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mind, that are running the Liberal Party are still from like the early 2000s, very fussy,
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like, you know, make sure every hair is in place on the candidate's head. And I don't think that
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really works in the current political landscape, that Mark Carney is going to be the guy who stands
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up very straight, holding the microphone looking professional, and that a lot of people are going
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to say, well, I like the cut of that guy's jib, make him Prime Minister. These days, and it's not just
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because of Trump, but these days, because of how people consume media and engage with politics,
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you got to be the person who can hang in for an hour and a half podcast and actually show yourself
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to be like a substantive person, where the problem with Mark Carney and the problem with Christia
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Freeland, maybe we can talk about her visit to Vancouver as well, is that it's kind of that drive
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by shooting type media. We I jump on smile a little bit with Rosemary Barton on the CBC, and then we move
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on to collecting checks from people at a very small donor event, and then run away to something else.
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Because how many people were at the Freeland events? Like you said, like 40.
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That's what I heard. And you know, the picture she posted really didn't look very good for her,
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right? No, you're absolutely right. Those are people who I don't think know how to campaign
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in the modern landscape. They still, you know, but to be fair, I don't know what they're trying to
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achieve right now, right? We know the team behind Carney is the same as the team behind Justin Trudeau,
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like literally, right? Gerald Gertz and other, they might be campaigning to just save the furniture
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and just get their voters, you know, their base. And they're pretty good at this. Yesterday was a
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good example of who their base was, like older white people, many of them still wearing masks,
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but it's not going to allow them to win an election. And it's going to make it very difficult to have a
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campaign for 30 days this way. And you know, they should learn from other parties. If you look for
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instance of the BC and DP, I think they're not the best, but they're quite competent to run modern
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campaign. They know how to do it. And I don't feel the federal liberals, they have the talent for this
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at this point. Well, I think they've been doubling down on the exact same type of voter over and over
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again. And that's where you work for elections, right? So that's what they're thinking.
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Like, obviously, we're both conservatives, I run a conservative news site, you ran for the BC
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conservatives in Vancouver, Langara. So we're not talking about that, like, so whenever we talk about
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like what the liberals should be doing, it's from like a pure perspective of not like wishful thinking,
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because we're not liberals. But like, if I was a liberal advisor, what would I be doing? And right now,
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it seems like most of their polling recovery has really nothing to do with them winning suburbs that
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usually were locked out for them. They're not tracking to win a majority. We are only talking
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about if the conservatives win a minority or a majority, because the liberals seem to mostly just
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be recovering their downtown Toronto vote and their downtown Montreal vote. They can get all of that back
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and still have a massive conservative majority end up taking parliament, because this is what Mark
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Carney's event looked like just to show people like it's decently impressive. That's probably
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equivalent of what a pure poly of 2022 leadership event was like. To be fair, it is in Vancouver,
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that is like very much home territory for the liberals. But past the big cities, whenever I've seen
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Carney posting photos of suburbs or cities that are not traditionally liberal, that's when the city,
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that's when the crowd sizes fall down to just 50 people or 30 people. You know, he's just at a
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coffee shop or something like that before he quickly moves on. And everything about the messaging is,
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again, it's kind of like the very boomer, anti-American type rhetoric about how Canada's great,
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America sucks, and we need to protect Canada. And I'm not sure if that's actually going to resonate with
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the growing 18 to, you know, 24 year old, more conservative voter, or the younger middle-aged
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voter, because those voters have shifted hard conservative. That's where the conservatives are
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getting their 25% lead sometimes. And it's their next closest competitor is the NDP, in fact.
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Yeah. Now, the only thing I'm, you know, as a conservative, I would be concerned with
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Carney is the first one is there is always Quebec and polls so far numbers have been pretty good for
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Mark Carney in Quebec, even though his French is objectively pretty terrible. But it seems,
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you know, Quebec and Quebecers really don't like Pierre Poitier overall, that that's just a different
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type of politics for them. So if he was to get really high numbers in Quebec, all of a sudden,
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that's a lot and a lot of seats, right? So that could be problematic. The bigger picture outside of
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Quebec for me would be that now that, especially with Carney, they have their base back, as you said,
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the Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver seats, they don't have to worry as much about those. When just a
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month ago, they were about to fight to win Vancouver Centre, right? I think by now they're like, no,
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Vancouver Centre and a lot of Vancouver seats and Toronto downtown, we're good. So now they can put
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their effort and energy on the suburb. Will they be successful? They're going to need a different message.
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But it's, you know, it does make it more difficult for Poitier. It would have been so easy to run an
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election where the Liberals literally had to defend downtown Toronto seats. Then if they do this,
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they cannot focus on the 905. But now they will be able to do that.
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Yeah, I wanted to bring up this poll result that came out of Leger the other day showing that if Mark
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Carney did end up becoming the leader of the Liberal Party, if he's the leader option, that he ends up
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tying the Conservatives 37 to 37 with the NDP. Yeah, falling all the way down to 12 block at six,
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you know, Greens five, PPC two. How realistic do you think this is to actually hold up in the long run?
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Because just initially, my take was always that this feels a lot like I'm not one of these people
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who goes around like polling is rigged, polling goes through cycles, there's what you would call a
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response bias. And I think right now, the kind of response bias surrounding Carney is one
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Trudeau's gone. So way more, way more Liberals are likely to take a poll because they're less
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depressed right now. And then two, also, he's because a lot of people don't know who he is.
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Yes, you are right. There are certain types of older Canadians who remember him as the
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Bank of Canada governor and that, you know, has some nostalgia to it. But there's also I think that
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the people who don't know him will just assume that he's generic, confident Liberal, where that's why
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Freeland doesn't pull very well because you can't claim to be generic, competent Liberal because
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she's too well known. Yeah. And so to go back to the poll, I mean, this one in particular seems to be
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an outlier, right? What we have seen over the last few weeks is there is a clear trend. The Liberals
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are climbing back up and it's mostly at the expense of the NDP, right? The NDP is collapsing,
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we see it everywhere. This poll here is almost like an extrapolation or exaggeration
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of recent trends where not only the Liberals are back up, but they're literally back to,
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you know, ahead and higher than they've been. You know, you have to go back to 2015 to see them as
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high as 30%, 37% in an election. So... And that's why the swing doesn't make sense to me,
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that when you put Chrystia Freeland in, like right here, that the Liberals are down to 28 and the
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Conservatives 39. Like the swing between Carney and Freeland being the Liberal leader is like quite crazy.
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It's like 14 points or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. And this is, this is between two
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people who are technically well known, right? I mean, Chrystia Freeland is well known. We know from
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Abacus data, or, you know, the person of Canadians who know what Carney and Freeland was pretty similar,
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if I remember correctly. So... Actually half, only half of Canadians who recognized
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Freeland could recognize Carney. She was at like 60% and he was at like 25. Oh really? Okay. So,
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so, so it is, you know, especially what we're seeing right now, both in the polls and technically,
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I think they're buying engagement online. They're getting way too many likes on, on, on, on, on,
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their posts for Carney is it's creating this phenomenon that it looks like a superstar. You know,
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it's almost like a mini Poitiers effect where he gets those big rallies and everybody and his videos
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are popular and whatnot, but that feels so fake at this point. You know, yesterday wasn't fake. There were
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actually a thousand people, but it's exactly the people who were expecting. Those are not the
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people who will like and share posts on Twitter. So where is this engagement coming from? Where is
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all the engagement on Google trends coming from for Carney? I'm, I'm a little bit confused by this
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right now. Unless it's, I think a lot of it is just that simply more stories being written about you
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by the media will naturally mean that you're more likely to be searched for. Because if you're,
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you know, Ruby dollar, you're going to have far less people searching for you because people don't
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see coverage of you. It kind of is one of those circular sorts of, uh, you know, relationships
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where the more people talk about you, the more people will search for you. And the more people
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search for you, the more they're talking about you and all that sort of thing.
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And you see it, right? Carney, for instance, whenever he says anything, like he, he comes out and he says,
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like the mildest thing where it's like, we need to build up and he doesn't expand. And then he's
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covered in all the media and we see on good trend, like literally that day, an hour later,
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it goes up. So, so he's benefiting from incredibly favorable coverage in the mainstream media right
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now, which is, and not to repeat the Kamala Harris comparisons too much, but I, I kind of go back to
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thinking about his interview on Jon Stewart's show. And I thought that was one of those examples
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of an interview that in my mind kind of proved actually the weakness of Mark Carney. It wasn't
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even that bad, but the whole point was that you're seeing him at his Hollywood best because he is a
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basically on the most Hollywood late night show he could possibly be on. And you always felt like
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he's a bit stiff, doesn't roll with the kind of energy that Jon Stewart's trying to put out.
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And I've been using that kind of as my base of reference for how is this man going to do in
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a debate? Is he going to be able to roll off an attack, be kind of funny, make points. And I think
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that he's going to come off more like a John Kerry and a Michael Ignatieff again. And I actually see
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the big obstacle for them. If I was Carney's campaign and I'm just trying to win the leadership
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and I don't care about anything past that, I would try and cancel the debate and not get into it.
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Because if Ruby Dalla and Chrystia Freeland is there, I don't see Mark Carney doing very well in
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terms of surviving attacks because there's going to be a lot of videos easily cut by the conservatives
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on everything that Freeland and Ruby and all these other people point out about how frankly hollow a
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lot of Mark Carney's achievements are or how obviously involved he's been in all the worst decisions.
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Yeah. And, you know, he's a front runner. We know it. He's going to play. If he goes to a debate,
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he's going to be a very defensive performance. He's going to try to take as little research as
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possible. I think the bigger picture, right, really for Carney is what we have seen so far is when he's
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on favorable territory, like the John Stewart show, and when he's prepared, he can be pretty decent.
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But as soon as he's not fully prepared or he gets asked something he wasn't expecting, like fentanyl
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the other day, then he makes a mistake because I think fundamentally his instincts are wrong for
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the country and for what the electorate wants. So I'm expecting after he wins this leadership and
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for if there's an election, whenever there's an election, I'm expecting his team to really protect
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him a lot. I mean, you know, you're not taking questions from any media that isn't the CBC. And
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even then during the campaign, you might have select those questions in advance. You will not
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allow people to ask questions or anything because you need to keep the branding. You know, he's going
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to make a mistake and everything is inauthentic with him if you let him be alone.
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Did you ever see the the CBC exchange between Rosemary Barton and Chrystia Freeland when she
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started calling him an insider or whatever? And she actually got like really defensive about how
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how can you call Mark Carney an insider when you have been the Minister of Finance for this many years?
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It's like, oh, my goodness. What is what's wrong with what's like what's wrong with you? Just
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just wear a Carney button at this point because they just will not allow criticism of the man.
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Where do you see the be like the NDP actually kind of ending up in this federal election? Because
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I think that actually determines the success of the Liberals. Can they genuinely push the NDP
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down to just 12% in the polls? Or is it going to be one of these things where, you know, you can push
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the NDP down far enough, but it tends to be a pretty diehard party in terms of a lot of its base will only
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ever vote NDP? Yeah, no, there's a limit, right? I mean, as to how much you can extract from the NDP,
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you have the diehard, like literally socialist, communist guys will not switch. You have all
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the people, you know, on Gaza and foreign intervention. I appreciate that. I agree with
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the Liberals. And at some point, you know, the Carney campaign right now, it's almost getting those
00:22:01.960
left wing voters for free. Like they're not even, you know, when you listen to Carney,
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he's not campaigning as like a diehard left wing guy. So it's almost like, I guess some people have
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this idea of him or, or what he said in the past, but during the election, my feeling is he's going
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to campaign, he's going to try to be at the center. And doing this will turn off quite of the, a lot of
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the NDP moderates. And so the very least the NDP will remain with 12, 15%. It's going to be a massacre
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in BC. It's going to be a massacre in Northern Ontario, Northern BC, but they will at least not completely
00:22:34.360
collapse. I don't think so. But my instinct has been wrong. You know, if you ask, if you had asked
00:22:39.720
me two months ago, if Carney would take so much from the NDP, I did, I don't think I would have
00:22:45.560
predicted this. I would have predicted maybe carrying a good to do this, but not Mark Carney.
00:22:50.840
And I still think there's a chance that he really isn't eating into the NDP as much as he is,
00:22:55.640
that we just have a, and the NDP is now the depressed party in the polls, because when you actually
00:23:01.320
pulled certain to vote NDP people, even 50% of them just say that Jag needs the wrong leader,
00:23:07.240
where the liberals get to feel a little more enthusiastic about how things are going,
00:23:10.680
the conservatives have been very positive for more than two years now. But then I think also
00:23:16.120
because Carney pulls like generic inoffensive liberal, then you have a lot of this NDP liberal
00:23:23.160
swing voters willing to come back liberal. As long as Carney is able to hold up this very kind
00:23:29.720
of squeaky clean neutral type of a face. And my, the one thing I, the problem I think that Carney has
00:23:36.600
is that when you're in, he's not an academic, but when you've said a lot of stuff, you sat on a lot
00:23:42.440
of panels, you've spoken at the century initiative and whatnot, the amount of actual policy skeletons in
00:23:48.600
your closet are going to be quite high. His love for central bank digital currency, his proposing of
00:23:54.200
carbon tax tariffs and stuff like that. That's going to be one of those things where
00:24:00.760
you're saying in a defensive manner, he's going to have to run a campaign purely defensive on all
00:24:05.000
those fronts and say, no, that's not me anymore. Yeah, exactly. So he's going to have to run this
00:24:09.160
campaign. And then whenever a throw ball or curve ball is thrown at him, you know, DP believes in all
00:24:16.120
those things, right? That's the real Mark Carney, right? The one who is from a carbon pricing and
00:24:20.840
all the great reset and all this stuff. So it's going to be easy to get him off his game, you know,
00:24:27.080
on topics that they haven't prepared. The one concern I really, really have is what we have
00:24:32.680
seen over the last 10 years in Canada is the left has become much better at getting united. So the left
00:24:40.280
used to be divided and used to have those die hard like socialist Marxist people who were like,
00:24:44.840
or, you know, environmentalist, who said, I'm not going to vote for the center left,
00:24:48.840
center left is just as bad as center right. But we've seen in Alberta, we've seen in BC,
00:24:53.960
that the left is now fully united. And so the green, they don't in BC, they barely steal from the from
00:24:59.800
the NDP. And in Alberta, literally, there is no more left wing party. So, and so we need to make sure
00:25:07.080
it's going to become very problematic for the right, if this, you know, coalition happens at the federal
00:25:14.360
level. So I'm hoping it doesn't, and I'm relatively confident the NDP or the federal level will not
00:25:19.560
collapse completely. But this is problematic how determined the left has been to, I know,
00:25:26.760
I don't like the center left that much, but they're still better than the right and center right. And so
00:25:32.440
we need to make sure that they keep being divided at least a little bit.
00:25:35.800
I think one thing that the Polyev can do is on and part of he's already been doing it partially right
00:25:41.160
already, is that he has to take Canadian nationalistic coded positions that the left
00:25:47.720
cannot take. And it undermines their case of being the real defenders of Canada. So like Polyev saying
00:25:54.120
that we should be building a military base in Calhoun and doing all this other actual stuff around
00:25:59.160
increasing military spending substantially and doing things around, you know, like tighter policing of the
00:26:05.000
ports and whatnot, the left will not do that. And then it undermines their case. Or if Karni tries to move
00:26:10.920
in that direction to match Polyev on the center to the center right, then he ends up pushing a bunch of
00:26:16.600
people back to the NDP because they're the type of people who literally at their conventions propose
00:26:23.800
Yeah, no, you're absolutely right there. And with that being said, if the election is really about
00:26:30.280
Team Canada nationalism and being the captain of Team Canada, the Liberals do start with a little bit
00:26:37.080
of a built-in advantage, right? Therefore, many people, they represent Canada and Canada nationalism.
00:26:42.760
So Polyev, I think, I think has been doing pretty well recently and he has read the room relatively well,
00:26:50.600
uh, but he, that's not a natural advantage territory for him or for his party, unfortunately, that that's just
00:26:58.600
not the way it works in this country. Uh, partially because the right has not, has ceded this field for decades to
00:27:05.400
the Liberals. So we, we need to start fighting back on this one.
00:27:08.120
Well, that's, that's where I see when he brings up that he wants an immigration cap of 200,000,
00:27:14.040
250,000. I'm like, dude, make it 150,000, make it 100,000. And you would, you would agree with me
00:27:20.680
on this probably when you run for a camp, when you run for election, you don't put out what you would
00:27:26.920
say as like policies nobody could disagree with. You put out audacious policies that are going to alienate
00:27:33.640
half the room, but are going to make half the room love you. Because if you put out stuff like
00:27:38.440
Aaron O'Toole did that 80% of the room agrees with, well, you know, who cares? Because the thing is that
00:27:44.360
they probably agree even more with what the Liberals or the NDP said, or the PPC said.
00:27:49.560
So what you need to do is take a policy that your other side cannot copy. And a lot of people really
00:27:55.800
like 100,000 cap on immigration is perfectly reasonable in my mind. It's not saying a ridiculous
00:28:02.360
thing like a moratorium. A lot of people will become excited to vote for that. And your opponents
00:28:07.400
will basically step on a rake by trying to oppose you, because they will then have to argue basically
00:28:13.640
against reality about immigration not having been way too high for the past several years.
00:28:18.840
So that's where you always want to be, you know, crafting your policy to do that. It's like,
00:28:25.000
you know, in the BC election, and you've said this publicly, you don't run on a bigger deficit than
00:28:31.480
the BC NDP were willing to say. Were the BC NDP lying? Yes, but every voter is not going to notice
00:28:37.480
that they're lying about how big their deficit is going to be. You run on cuts, you become the party
00:28:42.680
of cuts because the opponent is not going to steal that position from you. And a large portion of the
00:28:49.160
province believes in cuts at this point. Plus, anyway, for the cuts, we were getting attacked
00:28:54.280
anywhere, right? I mean, so you have a large part of the electorate that truly believes we're going to,
00:28:59.160
you know, we're going to cut 4 billion in healthcare. So we get our tax, but we don't
00:29:02.840
get any of the benefits. I think a pretty good example of what you're saying about, you know,
00:29:07.320
you can run on like centrist, well-liked policies and nobody cares is the current Ontario election.
00:29:14.200
I mean, at face value, I'm pretty sure if you look at the proposal of the Ontario Liberals,
00:29:19.880
I'm pretty sure people agree with a lot of those policies, but nobody cares. Nobody cares because it's not,
00:29:25.560
it doesn't create any engagement, right? They might have been better to go bolder, like go with the UBI,
00:29:32.120
you know, do something, create some sort of engagement on day one. But when you go and say,
00:29:36.840
we're going to double, you know, disability payments and whatnot, then everybody's like,
00:29:41.560
oh yeah, that makes sense. But it's not enough to, you know, change your vote. You're still
00:29:45.800
going to vote for Doug Ford because whatever, he's the guy you like and you know what it is. So,
00:29:50.600
so yeah, during the election, you have to, for a few issues, you have to take some risk,
00:29:55.160
right? You have to go and divide. You cannot be the centrist uniter on every issue. And I think
00:30:01.720
the Liberals know this. They've known this for a while and they've become really, really good at
00:30:06.680
picking those few issues that will create the engagement and the momentum they need.
00:30:12.040
You got to give Trudeau and his team credit back in 2015. Running as the guy willing to run on
00:30:18.920
deficits is really smart because no other party in their right mind would usually do that. But
00:30:25.720
guess what? You've now monopolized probably around 30% of the vote for yourself.
00:30:30.600
Yeah, some of the other people that are voting for you, they may not like that. They'll get over it,
00:30:37.720
but you already have a big base of people and then you just need to add. You always want,
00:30:42.040
and this is my thing, I thought Blaine Higgs in New Brunswick was probably the best premier in the
00:30:47.000
country and probably the best premier that's been in the country for about like 10 to 15 years.
00:30:52.360
But he ran on a 2% HST cut as his keystone policy. Who gives a crap? The HST in like a
00:31:01.560
New Brunswick was like a combined 15%. So they're going to 13. I would have cut the HST by 3% the
00:31:09.160
previous year before the election. And then, because they already had surpluses, you could do it,
00:31:13.960
cut it by 3% and then run on a 2% across the board income tax cut. That's something that actually like
00:31:20.440
rips up the ground and makes people reconsider how they vote. But so often it's conventional,
00:31:26.360
stupid election wisdom that don't, don't rustle people's feathers, makes them comfy. I'm like,
00:31:32.360
no, no, no, you should actually be making people uncomfortable in the sense that they're actually
00:31:36.520
going to think about, okay, is that going to work or is that not going to work? You want people to
00:31:41.080
almost feel concerned about whether or not this is the right move or not, but they think about it.
00:31:47.640
Yeah. And I think especially for the people, I think it's especially the case if you're going for
00:31:52.360
people who actually want change, right? And we know people want change and we need to make sure
00:31:58.120
that, you know, as conservative, Mark Kennedy is trying really hard to get these change voters and
00:32:02.440
to represent the change. He is using the term change all the time. But so one way to represent change is
00:32:09.160
you actually go and propose things that are very different. You're not just proposing the same stuff
00:32:14.200
as the other guys. So, and I think we see too often where a lot of parties just go, you know,
00:32:19.880
Kevin Falcon's party is dead because that's what he was doing for about a year and a half.
00:32:25.080
He was proposing the same policies, but as the BC Liberal, BC United, and nobody cared.
00:32:31.720
That's the thing that frustrates me so much. You'll have so many of these examples like Kevin Falcon,
00:32:36.680
Blaine Higgs, Aaron O'Toole, who did what red Tory conventional wisdom says you should do,
00:32:43.560
and they did it to a T and it didn't work. And you will still have these campaign consultants
00:32:48.760
getting on board election campaigns and telling them what they should be doing if they really want
00:32:53.160
to win. It drives me up the wall. But to circle back to the topic that we started with, this is
00:32:58.600
another one of those things where if Carney wants to rebrand from Trudeau, he should be actually
00:33:04.040
confronting conservative critics and actually showing that he can stand up to them because
00:33:09.800
Trudeau started that way when he first became prime minister. And that was actually a good move when
00:33:14.040
he used to do those town halls where he'd have tons of people standing up and saying,
00:33:18.520
I don't like that you did this. He had stupid answers. It was, you know, he was usually not
00:33:23.320
getting the good end of it, but to a certain like liberal loyalist voter, he looked good by doing it.
00:33:29.960
Does Polioff look good when a PPC guy tries to ambush him with a stupid question about the WEF and
00:33:35.640
the UN and like whatever agenda 2030? No, he doesn't look usually good in those situations. It's not because
00:33:41.320
he's wrong, but when you're being accused by somebody and you have to come up with an answer
00:33:45.880
on the spot, usually you look kind of slightly befuddled and you look like you don't have
00:33:49.800
something good to say. But to your own people, you look like, wow, he's actually willing to stand up
00:33:55.240
and take this question. Whereas Carney is a typical, very kind of fussy liberal leader who we saw lose
00:34:02.760
multiple times in the early 2000s. He feels like a Paul Martin, Stefan Dion and Michael Ignatieff.
00:34:09.560
That's like kind of a, you know, a campaign product rather than a character.
00:34:15.000
Yeah, no, absolutely. Well, as I said before, though, right, I think the issue is
00:34:19.800
fundamentally, Carney is the guy he used to be, right? And so if you let him alone in a town hall,
00:34:26.760
he's pretty gonna make some mistake because he has to go against every bone in his body, right? I mean,
00:34:31.640
so you can tell he has been coached very well to talk about the carbon tax, for instance,
00:34:35.880
but there is no way he actually disliked the carbon tax. He loves it. But so now he has to go
00:34:40.280
saying, you know, they found good rational, or it's unfair, or it's perceived as being unfair.
00:34:45.400
But unless he has prepared, he's gonna make those mistakes on many other issues.
00:34:50.280
When Trudeau, I think Trudeau is at his peak, like, you know, 2012, 2015. I didn't agree with him all the
00:34:58.600
time. But at least I think his instincts were a little bit better. And he had more charisma.
00:35:03.240
But Trudeau, you have to give it to him. When he actually was on top of his game,
00:35:08.040
he was actually pretty good. And I don't see this with Mark Carney so far.
00:35:13.400
No, you're talking about marketing, because I, I used to, I still do. I just talked about
00:35:18.920
a lot in the past, and you tend to talk about less in the future. Like people should actually copy
00:35:23.560
certain things that Trudeau did in 2015, not in terms of policy, but in terms of style,
00:35:29.960
the fit and finish of the campaign, the willingness to say something controversial.
00:35:34.360
That was smart. Really smart. Anyways, that's probably a good place to end off here. Thank you,
00:35:39.560
Brian, for showing up on the show. People should go follow him on X. I'll link them down in the
00:35:44.360
description below and pinned at the top of the comments. So probably I'm going to have you back
00:35:49.800
on before the election ends up happening, just since you do end up doing a lot of polling analysis.
00:35:54.840
And I think that we'll be riding the polling roller coaster for quite a while now. But yeah,
00:35:59.400
thanks for coming on and I'll see you next time.
00:36:02.200
Thank you. That's always a pleasure to come on to your show.