Carney Liberal FLOP - Budget polls poorly with Canadians!
Episode Stats
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Summary
Wyatt Clunock is back on the whiteboard to talk about Canadian polling numbers, and why the media seems to be more interested in talking about the supposed leadership crisis going on inside the Conservative Party, rather than the budget itself.
Transcript
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Ahoy everyone, Wyatt Claypool here back on the whiteboard again to talk about Canadian polling numbers.
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Today we are going to discuss the general public's reaction to the budget that Prime Minister Mark Carney's Liberal government put out.
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Before we get into the specific numbers, I just want to say, as a general overview,
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what we are going to talk about today really validates my perspective that the media seem to be deliberately not talking about the budget
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and deflecting towards the supposed leadership crisis going on inside the Conservative Party?
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Because the budget's not popular. Canadians, the more they hear about what's in the budget, the less they like it.
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So we have all these panels on CBC and Global News and CTV discussing,
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is Polyev going to survive as Conservative Party leader? Is he going to get ousted during his leadership review?
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Are all the Conservative moderates going to leave with Chris Dantremont as he crosses the floor to the Liberals?
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We will be discussing more of the media coverage of this and Chris Dantremont's just abysmal interview he did on the CBC just this morning,
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or I think it might have been last night. That is a story worth discussing.
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But the media is using that story as an excuse not to talk about the budget, because the budget sucks.
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And so that is why we are going to now jump into the numbers here, and we will start off.
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The survey came from Abacus Data. They do very good work.
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We're going to start off with the most general question that they asked,
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which actually tends to get you the best sort of like gauge of what Canadians think.
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The thing with a budget, though, is that budgets are hard to hate.
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Do that many people really follow politics closely enough that they're going to have an extremely informed perspective on the budget?
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Or as long as the budget was literally not on fire in Mark Carney's hand as he presented it,
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you're going to get a good amount of people who assume, well, they're smart.
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But when you see a budget full that is this close, you know there are problems for the current government.
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We're going to just talk about the right track, wrong track question that Abacus Data ended up asking people,
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asking whether or not they thought this budget was bringing the country in the right direction or the wrong direction.
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So right off the bat, we had only, and again, it is a majority, but I'm saying only for a reason,
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only 52% of Canadians think that this budget is putting the country in the right direction.
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For wrong direction, naturally, the rest of it is going there.
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We have 48% of Canadians saying that this budget is putting the country in the wrong direction.
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Now, again, you could say, well, it's 52 to 48.
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Guys, even when Justin Trudeau was putting up budgets in 2023,
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he could get most people to say, oh, that sounds about right.
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one of the most boring things that the government puts out is the budget numbers.
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That means that you ticked off a lot of people for no reason.
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This is a repudiation of Mark Carney's theory of politics,
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that you can say things like, we're going to spend less and invest more.
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Well, the spending less and investing more budget is deeply disliked.
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And if you are a liberal strategist, you were so annoyed at what Mark Carney was doing here,
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because it was calculated to tick off everybody who ended up switching their votes to the liberal
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Now, if you're a liberal stalwart, you will like anything the liberals are doing.
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But if you were one of the NDP voters who switched over to the liberals,
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or a Bloc Québécois voter who switched over to the liberals,
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or a conservative who switched over to liberals for the 2025 election,
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for whatever reason, I think the biggest one was they just wanted to stick it to Trump,
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The problem is, is if you're on the left of those switch voters,
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they're mad that Carney is reducing personnel spending.
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He's reducing the amount of public sector employees.
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He's not investing enough in old-age pensions and other services.
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And if you're on the right, you don't care about Carney saying,
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You just see a $78 billion deficit, $54 billion in the budget just going to debt servicing.
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And so you don't care about the limited amounts of tax relief for corporations for a single year
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or them doing other things to try and spur the economy,
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because the overall picture of the budget is bloated, it's debt-ridden,
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and if you're on the left, you're saying that this isn't doing enough in order to create jobs.
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In fact, it's getting rid of jobs and all this.
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So Carney has put himself in a position where, on his left and right flank of his own party,
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and we are going to talk about the word association that people are doing with the budget.
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Abacus Data put out basically a bunch of words,
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select which ones you think apply to the budget,
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and the problem for him is that they are mostly negative on the top end.
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Okay, we are back for the word association part of the poll.
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I want to go through maybe the top five words here that people use to describe the budget,
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because what you'll notice is that the people who didn't like it are more sure as to why they don't like it,
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whereas the positive words tend to be more spread out and vague,
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which means that there's probably no general sense of why it's good.
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You know, I'm a liberal voter, or I'm generally positive about the country,
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But when you actually go through the people who are sure why they don't like it,
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and the people who are unsure are more positive,
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But topping the list of words people are using to describe the budget is disappointing.
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That is the top-cited word by people of what they thought of the budget,
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and that is representing, of the browned 1,300, 1,200 people poll,
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that is representing 30% of people who ended up selecting that word
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as one of the words they would use to describe the budget.
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But after disappointing, it doesn't get better.
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Scary, hence of being the next word people use to describe the budget,
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That actually strikes me as something that left-leaning liberal voters
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And the funny thing is it's actually probably not even going to really cut jobs,
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because when you reduce $1 billion of personnel spending and service spending over here,
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but you create $5 billion more of spending over here on infrastructure projects,
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a lot of those people are probably just going to get absorbed by the departments
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carrying out those new big bloated infrastructure projects.
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Now, it does get a little bit more positive for Carney's budget.
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The next word that people associate most with it is hopeful.
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We spent $78 billion, and I guess that means hope.
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After that, we go back to negativity, and it is out of touch.
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And that was garnering 25% of people choosing that word out of the word cloud.
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We do go after that to another word that is positive,
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and that word being responsible, which is a giant laugh,
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if you give a bunch of liberal supporters options of what to say about the budget,
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they will just say generally vaguely nice things.
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And I'm going to go on and just kind of read you the other ones that were around,
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but that ends up getting just 24% of people selecting it.
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Naturally, it's a bit of a car crash at the top of the list
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and you are allowed to pick multiple words out of the cloud.
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But after that, it goes ambitious, and then it goes inflationary, reckless,
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But the problem is the upper side of the words people are using,
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because it starts to slip into the high teens to the lower teens
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on the last about five words if we go a little bit deeper,
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and I assume there were other words that they just didn't end up placing
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because only like 4% or 5% of people selected them.
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But overall, when you actually look at the top,
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we have three out of five of the words that were used at the top,
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than the ones that were used that were positive.
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Later on, saying something's ambitious doesn't necessarily mean that it's good.
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but ambitious doesn't necessarily mean responsible,
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and I don't really know what the definition of responsible here is.
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I'm not trying to disagree with the people, the selections that people make,
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but overall, disappointing, scary, and out of touch
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are probably going to rule the day over the 50% of people,
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give or take, who say it's hopeful or responsible.
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Overall, even here, only 55% of the words that were selected by respondents
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were positive words, or 55% of respondents used positive words,
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but at the same time, 53% of respondents ended up selecting negative words.
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So, obviously, there is a lot of crossover here.
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And then, I had about 28% of people used both positive and negative sounding words,
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kind of in an equal amount to describe the budget,
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which probably tells me that a lot of the people who said that it's the right track
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Again, they'd like to think we're going on in the right track,
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so they'll say that we're going along in the right track.
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the issue with that is that people naturally like to assume the government's doing a good job,
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and when it's effectively 50-50 between right track and wrong track,
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But now, I do want to move on to just a couple other numbers here,
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and just sort of demonstrate my point about what people think of the budget.
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and we will come back with one more statistic I want to show you guys.
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and I want to take you guys through the results,
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And I'm just going to write off not certain right now.
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28% of people overall were not certain about their opinion on the budget.
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Generally speaking, when people say not certain or undecided,
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they're probably going to end up falling into the other categories
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at the proportion that people in those categories are already in.
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So like, you know, if outside of the not certain,
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the not sure's are probably going to split 70 to 30 as well.
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for those who the budget exceeded the expectations of,
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And then I want to give you guys a small party breakdown of this,
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because it's quite telling that even inside the Liberal Party,
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How many Canadians did it exceed the expectations of?
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Well, 5% of Canadians overall had their expectations exceeded.
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which is kind of a bit of a neutral answer in a lot of ways.
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That is, 28% of people said that it met their expectations,
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You got to experiment sometimes, see what works.
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I'm actually going to end up making this one a bit darker.
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So 28% of people said that the budget had met their expectations.
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to who said that the budget fell short of their expectations.
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Well, if you're doing the math and you're adding these up,
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you know that this one's going to be a big number.
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39% of Canadians polled said that the budget fell short in their opinion.
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you know, maybe exceeded is going to go up to seven.
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Met might go up to like, you know, 35 or something like that.
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And then fell short is going to get pretty close.
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And then those who had their expectations exceeded
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was only actually 7% of Liberal Party supporters.
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Maybe it's because they just are really good at clocking
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and there was no way of exceeding my expectations.
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this ain't exactly a super healthy amount of people
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that tells me that the budget wasn't very good.
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That people who in the last election voted Liberal
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they put a lot of their hopes and dreams into Mark Carney,
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but because he's trying to keep this kind of shaky coalition together
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19% of the Liberal coalition from last election,
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That at least it fell short of their expectations.
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or they're not even exactly happy with it either.