On the show today, I go over some demographic data and how the Conservatives and Liberals are currently stacking up to each other, especially when compared to several months ago. I also go over the government's approval rating, and why the Conservatives are in a good position if there is a snap election in spring, summer, or fall of 2026.
00:07:30.360I'm at that point where I'm not even sure exactly what generation people are in anymore, which I feel like is a sign I'm getting older, even though I'm still only 26.
00:07:39.800But we then have the liberals only behind by four points in this group with the NDP at 13%, which makes it actually tied with the 65-plus for the NDP.
00:07:53.840And then, so this one is a plus four for the conservatives.
00:07:58.000The only thing I would note for this young demographic group is that the PPC, in fact, was actually 4% on this one.
00:08:10.940And the thing is, with all the other brackets, that's such an ugly-looking four guy, so my goodness, you should unsubscribe right now because of that four.
00:08:21.360So the PPC was at 4% with this demographic, and I don't think it's a bad assumption that come Election Day, you are probably going to see most of that 4% end up feeding into the 38%.
00:08:37.660And I'm not just saying this because, oh, I don't like the PPC, and I think they should be voting conservative.
00:08:42.780The only reason I'm doing this is because I do think they're going to be voting conservative.
00:08:47.400Younger people tend to actually answer polls in a little bit more of an obtuse fashion than the rest of voters because young people like to kind of flex that they know and like the more obscure parties.
00:08:58.780But on Election Day, there's not going to be a PPC candidate probably in most of the ridings next time.
00:09:05.260Remember, guys, they only got 0.7% of the vote in 2025.
00:09:10.640Who's signing up to be a PPC candidate this next election?
00:09:13.860I think they only got candidates in like two-thirds of the ridings this last time.
00:09:18.100They're not going to be signing up in droves to run for the PPC again.
00:09:23.140I'm not trying to slag them too hard and think that the party never had a purpose.
00:09:26.300When Aaron O'Toole was the conservative party leader, goodness, the PPC had a purpose for me, and that was withholding my vote from O'Toole because he was so milquetoast.
00:09:34.580There was no point in electing the guy.
00:09:36.640If he became prime minister, he'd lead probably a really weak conservative minority government for like a year like Joe Clark did, and then get immediately blown up by another liberal majority, and then we would be on to the next liberal prime minister for another 12 years.
00:09:50.980Sometimes it's a good thing to have a weak leader on your own side, go down to defeat so then you can actually get someone good in, which is what I would say pure Polyev definitely is.
00:10:01.660Polyev didn't win the last election, but at least he was running on the right things, and if he cleans up and gets rid of some really bad advisors, I think he can easily win it from Mark Carney this next time if we have a snap election.
00:10:11.960But again, in all the other demographics, I'm not even kidding, in 65 plus, PPC had 0%.
00:10:38.860And the fact that they only got 0.7% last time probably means they're only going to get like 0.3% or 0.5% next time.
00:10:45.300So that means that that 4%, probably at least most of it, is going to end up in the conservative category over there.
00:10:51.840So we could probably even upgrade this 4% gain for the conservatives more to like a 6% right now.
00:11:00.280But now I'm going to erase the board, and we're going to come back with the government approval rating.
00:11:04.280Because although people like to use that stupid poll result saying, oh, well, in preferred prime minister, Mark Carney's still leading pure Polyev massively.
00:11:13.620And in those same polls where Carney leads Polyev by 25 points on preferred prime minister,
00:11:19.400The national overall number between the parties shows the conservatives and the liberals neck and neck.
00:11:25.220Preferred prime minister means nothing.
00:11:27.120I care what people think about Carney and what people think about pure Polyev or what people think of the liberal government.
00:11:33.540You can't start comparing things together in polls like preferred prime minister,
00:11:38.580because pretty much every lefty Canadian is just going to pick Carney.
00:11:41.580And also, different parties tend to have a different relationship with their leader.
00:11:45.580You can vote conservative and not like the leader, where the liberals are a very leader-based party.
00:11:51.240There's a lot of personalities inside a conservative party.
00:11:54.240In the liberals, it's kind of the leader and all the Klingons around them.
00:11:58.040And so, like, the idea of preferred prime minister meaning anything when in the same polls it demonstrates people are actually voting for the liberals by those margins is just discrediting.
00:12:08.040But anyways, I'm going to erase this, and then we will get back with government approval, which I think is an actual useful statistic.
00:12:16.740I want to take you guys through the liaison strategies polling for the different months in terms of government approval rating.
00:12:23.600This is basically all the months that they actually polled in.
00:12:26.460They don't poll every single week the way a pollster does, like Nanos or Abacus Data.
00:12:31.200So we're just going to be going through their numbers from August, September, November, December.
00:12:35.320They actually don't have anything sooner or earlier than August.
00:12:38.900They just basically went on a polling hiatus post-election, which honestly kind of makes sense.
00:12:44.020I understand why some pollsters just don't even bother after the general election.
00:12:48.160You get a big artificial bump for whoever won the election for a while,
00:12:52.060and the numbers only start getting realistic several months in when people actually start evaluating whether they like the person who won or not.
00:12:58.140Like, you'll get people who didn't even vote for the party that won who just start saying that they'd vote for them in another election,
00:13:04.000or those are the people picking up the phone and actually answering.
00:13:07.200Like, again, I haven't spoken about it for a while, but that's what we call response bias.
00:13:11.660Response bias is the natural bias of which type of person is most likely to pick up the phone.
00:13:17.380Now, you can actually get around issues like that, but when pollsters don't do a good job of it,
00:13:21.880like ECOS, like other pollsters out there, Spark Insight,
00:13:26.200they end up having wonky samples where, based on the way they do their polling,
00:13:31.600they get way too many downtown urban office workers.
00:13:34.580They get way too many public employees, and so their pollster or their polling ends up looking really, really left-wing.
00:13:41.720But it's just the methodology they use and some of their tactics just end up having those people pick up the phone first.
00:13:47.100But anyways, I'm wasting your time now. We're going to get into the numbers for each of these months.
00:13:52.420So we're just going to be going through approval rating or approval and disapproval.
00:13:56.840So going back to August, Mark Carney had a genuinely impressive approval rating for his government
00:14:04.400because people usually really do not like the government.
00:14:08.180Like, I think Trudeau always pulled a little bit behind his own government at the very end because he was super hated,
00:14:13.320but usually your government itself polls better than the leader because the leader is harder, easier to, you know, it's a person.
00:14:21.960It's easier to hate a person. A government institution is a little more, like, boring to hate.
00:14:27.040Kind of like, that's honestly why Mark Carney's approval rating is still pretty good at this point.
00:14:31.320It's kind of hard to hate, you know, someone as boring as Mark Carney,
00:14:35.940although his approval ratings are really turning around these days.
00:14:38.540But back in August, 64% of Canadians approved of Mark Carney.
00:14:46.240I don't have to tell you that that is a very good stat. Let's write that a bit bigger.
00:14:50.740So we had 64% of people saying that they liked Mark Carney,
00:14:55.640and only 32% of people said that they disapproved of him, obviously,
00:15:01.020with the remaining amount of people just being people who didn't know or they didn't answer that question.
00:15:06.760I think they actually just removed people who don't answer the question,
00:15:09.540but that's effectively the, it's like the people who still haven't made up their mind.
00:15:15.360But then we go into September, a little bit less than a month later,
00:15:20.200or I think it's more than a month, so it was more like early August polling.
00:17:58.440And now, going from not that long ago, August to the end of December, we are seeing a massive deterioration from a plus 32% down to a plus 16%.
00:18:25.42032% going down to just a 16% approval lead over disapproval.
00:18:33.460This was also, remember, we're not polling in June.
00:18:37.000We're not polling them in May, right when they took office, and everyone's willing to say, let's give them a chance.
00:18:42.700Let's assume they're going to do good stuff.
00:18:44.880This is several months in where you could actually have started to sour on them.
00:18:49.120This is post the Air Canada, a flight attendant strike.
00:18:52.560This is post a few other things the liberals announced that started taking people off around, you know, firing public employees and whatnot.
00:18:59.760And we have too many public employees.
00:19:01.940But it's just a fact that that's something that would tick off a lot of more orange liberal, more greeny liberal type voters.
00:19:08.900They may get mad at the liberals for that, just as right now business liberals are getting mad at them for not getting a pipeline built, for obviously signing this MOU that's just full of hedging language.
00:19:21.540That effectively means they're never going to do it.
00:19:23.320And they're even trying to coax NDP MPs into crossing the floor who absolutely don't want a pipeline built.
00:19:29.620They are willing to ally with those who are completely anti-pipeline, and they still get rejected by them.
00:19:35.320And so right now the liberals are in a bad-looking spot.
00:19:38.160And I think the floor crossings themselves have been causing this number to fall since November because it felt sleazy.
00:19:48.160You can't really put it any other way than people just didn't like the idea of people just being, not coerced, but kind of like incentivized to cross the floor and give the liberals a majority.
00:19:58.880So we have fallen quite a bit right now.
00:20:01.360And this is in a poll where the liberals are only leading the conservatives nationally by 1%.
00:20:07.760So this is still a lot of people willing to give a little bit of goodwill to the liberals, but they're still not voting for them.
00:20:14.220And so I think in the next few months, if Mark Carney doesn't start getting big wins under his belt, liaison, which tends to be a little bit more of a left-leaning pollster, not in terms of they're trying to be biased, but just what their samples tend to be like.
00:20:27.820Like, you can start finding this punching down into the low single digits.
00:20:32.400That's when Mark Carney's dead because Justin Trudeau, you could say, was a big enough character to overcome the fact that people really didn't like him.
00:20:41.400He was larger than life, so the people who liked him really liked him and they'd show up.
00:20:44.900And the people who didn't like him also didn't really hate his guts and wanted to show up and get rid of him.
00:20:49.520But Mark Carney's the type of guy where if you don't like him or if you start to hate him, like, that's horrible because he's boring.
00:20:59.440He doesn't really galvanize people to show up to defend him.
00:21:02.320The only reason he won the last election was people were voting against Donald Trump in this really abstract way where somehow voting liberal was thumbing your nose at Trump.
00:21:12.400Like, yes, he is, but it's not nearly as big of an issue as it was in the 2025 election if we have a 2026 election.
00:21:19.380And even then, the liberals still barely won that election.
00:21:22.700And Trump is going to be at least half or lower in terms of how much of an issue he's going to be.
00:21:28.220And Mark Carney's not coming in as the, you know, the nice everyman business guy who everyone kind of knows from back during the recession.
00:21:36.520And he has all these, you know, positive sounding resume credits to his name.
00:21:40.440And so if you don't know anything about him, you can default to thinking nice things.
00:21:43.880But if he hasn't got anything done, it's not like he has the personality to galvanize people to come and defend him.
00:22:16.760But anyways, that should be it for this video, guys.
00:22:19.840I don't think I missed anything other than I think that the path right now for pure poly of conservatives is trying to basically set really high bars for Mark Carney.
00:22:30.360Not unfairly high, but basically challenge Carney to get something done.
00:22:35.100Start having deadlines come down for him.
00:22:37.680Danielle Smith from Alberta is doing a very good job of this.
00:22:40.720Premier Smith is saying if you don't have a pipeline done by the fall, well, then, you know, I've lost my confidence in you.
00:22:50.700But the whole idea is she's giving him an ultimatum.
00:22:53.680You have until fall to get a pipeline built.
00:22:56.440And I think it's because that's when she expects there's going to be the independence referendum.
00:22:59.880Now, I hope I'm not breaking anyone's heart.
00:23:02.340The independence referendum in Alberta is not going to win.
00:23:04.900But I think Danielle's threatening that if you don't get a pipeline built, we could have a much closer independence vote than you think.
00:23:11.000You will turn off Albertans from believing in confederation forever.
00:23:15.540Really, I think Danielle's real threat is that she's going to pull the carpet from out under Carney if he starts screwing around too much and says, you know what?
00:23:22.760I tried to play ball with him and he lied to me.
00:23:25.520And that's going to be Polyev's narrative going into the next federal election.
00:23:28.480And Mark Carney's promising so much to Canadians.
00:24:10.660We're going to double minimum sentences for certain violent crimes.
00:24:13.820We are going to just eliminate the TFW foreign worker program and replace it with something only meant for farms and only meant for like, I guess you'd have like vacation types like communities where it's only temporary jobs.
00:24:27.460If you run on bold policies, you're going to absolutely swamp Carney, who's running on dull, small tinkering changes compared to what Justin Trudeau was already doing.
00:24:39.080Carney's already at the point where he's like promoting himself as a great prime minister because he's kept some of the same crappy Trudeau era giveaway programs in place.
00:24:48.080That's apparently the mark of a good prime minister.