The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - September 04, 2025


Carney Liberals FALL HARD in polls after AWFUL performance!

Topics
polling trends in Canada
Hosted by
Wyatt Claypool
Mentioned
Donald Trump Mark Carney Justin Trudeau Heather McPherson Jagmeet Singh Dallas Brody Ralph Klein Avi Lewis Paliyev O'Toole Wyatt
Carney MAD at reporter calling him out for flip-flopping on Trump Canadians think the Carney Liberals are failing in new poll!

Episode Stats


Length

22 minutes

Words per minute

173.1

Word count

3,906

Sentence count

196

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

4

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, we discuss the dramatic decline in support for the Liberal government, and its impact on the rest of the country's political landscape. We look at three major pollsters, Abacus Data, Innovative Research, and Main Street, as well as Main Street s Main Street Research.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Ahoy, everyone. We are back on the whiteboard today to talk about the polling trends in Canada
00:00:06.520 because we have finally had a big drop of polls over this last week
00:00:11.080 that are reflecting the way the Canadians are feeling about Mark Carney's liberal government.
00:00:16.640 Carney came into office as the man to lead us through a crisis,
00:00:19.920 and then he proceeded to not even pass a budget and go on a long summer vacation.
00:00:24.620 He has dealt with men like Donald Trump before,
00:00:27.260 and then he can't even get us a trade deal signed,
00:00:29.840 and now we are currently groveling to get anything signed before the fall parliamentary session starts up.
00:00:36.160 It has not been very good.
00:00:38.140 And while the Liberals have been in a honeymoon phase,
00:00:41.480 I think we are officially out of the honeymoon phase.
00:00:44.520 Canadians have not turned on the Liberals in such a way where they're going to start having high negative ratings
00:00:50.540 and they're going to fall behind the Conservatives by 10 points,
00:00:53.700 but I think a lot of people are seeing that they're kind of mediocre.
00:00:58.020 A lot of people will be in denial for a while,
00:01:00.380 but the difference between normal polling and honeymoon polling is during a honeymoon phase,
00:01:05.960 people will artificially think nice things about a new government or one that was just re-elected.
00:01:12.060 This one kind of feels semi-new to people because it's a different leader,
00:01:15.920 even if it's basically the exact same MPs,
00:01:18.280 and it was just re-elected.
00:01:20.740 And so people were willing to say,
00:01:22.220 well, let's give them the benefit of the doubt.
00:01:24.320 Maybe Carney is who he said he is,
00:01:26.860 and it turns out he's not.
00:01:28.440 And so now the honeymoon's ending with Canadians sort of falling back into the normal way 0.97
00:01:34.040 of sort of viewing the government based on its performance.
00:01:37.660 A honeymoon can end with the government still polling high.
00:01:41.400 That just means that they've concluded that actually they are quite good.
00:01:44.820 Ralph Klein would have started off with high approvals when he first became the Alberta Premier,
00:01:50.280 and he stayed very high because people liked what he was doing.
00:01:54.120 But anyways, but today we are going to go over the trend lines in three major pollsters,
00:01:59.420 Abacus Data, Innovative Research, as well as Main Street,
00:02:03.140 and I can show you the deterioration of the Liberals' polling,
00:02:07.220 as well as the Conservatives actually starting to gain a little bit too.
00:02:11.160 No doubt Carney is still going to have a positive approval rating for a while,
00:02:16.180 because in so many people's minds it's like,
00:02:18.140 well, if I don't like Carney, it's like I like Donald Trump,
00:02:21.740 which wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing.
00:02:24.060 But goodness, there are people out there who can convince themselves
00:02:27.300 that they have to like something they don't even like simply to oppose something else.
00:02:32.280 But the national numbers on what party people are voting for
00:02:35.480 is telling you more of a story of a little bit of buyer's remorse,
00:02:39.700 considering how quickly the Liberals rose in popularity after it and how fast it's crashed down.
00:02:45.580 But before I get into it, guys, I just want to remind you that if you like the show,
00:02:49.760 make sure to leave a like on this video, subscribe if you are not yet a subscriber.
00:02:54.100 I'm trying to hit 100,000 by mid-December of this year.
00:02:57.180 And then also leave a comment on what you think about the current political situation in Canada.
00:03:02.140 And no doubt there's going to be like 100 comments about the fact that I said ahoy at the start of the episode
00:03:08.240 and I didn't say, hey, guys, Wyatt Claypool here.
00:03:10.620 I have to rerecord that part like 50 times some days because you just say it so much,
00:03:15.180 your muscle memory starts to mess you over every time you say it.
00:03:18.300 And you're like, hey, guys, Wyatt Claypool here.
00:03:20.920 And you're like, why did I do that?
00:03:23.400 But Wyatt, focus up.
00:03:24.700 We're into the numbers now.
00:03:25.760 So let's start off at the top with the last poll that Abacus did.
00:03:31.980 And the most recent one, their last poll had the Liberals at 43%.
00:03:38.220 And now they only have them in their most recent poll at 39%.
00:03:46.380 And remember, even this 39% rating was before the capitulation on trade.
00:03:54.140 And their polling period only picked up a little bit of what people were feeling during the Air Canada fiasco.
00:04:00.940 So that actually may be a bit of an overpoll for them in that particular poll.
00:04:05.440 But in the last poll, they had the Conservatives at 40%.
00:04:09.000 And this one, they had the Conservatives at 41%.
00:04:12.280 Not a big gain, but they're maintaining what they have and gaining a little bit.
00:04:17.100 And it's probably not, the polling shift is demonstrating that it's mostly people not liking the Liberals.
00:04:24.380 Again, politics is not about converting 50% of the people who voted Liberal last time to voting Conservative next time.
00:04:31.900 It's taking 5, 7% of people who voted Liberal last time.
00:04:36.240 I don't even mean a macro 7% of 7% of the whole voting population.
00:04:41.200 I just mean 7% of those who did put their ballot in for the Liberals.
00:04:46.640 Switching to the Conservatives would change the entire election result if not give the Conservatives a majority.
00:04:52.760 That's all that politics is about.
00:04:54.620 It's about fighting along the margins.
00:04:56.400 It's about finding different demographics who are ticked off at the Liberals.
00:05:00.020 And converting them over to vote for the Conservatives next time.
00:05:03.040 But in these polls, and now I look, goodness guys, I have an orange marker.
00:05:07.920 Last time, Abacus had the NDP at 8%.
00:05:12.160 And then in their most recent poll, it was at 7%.
00:05:15.480 With the Bloc Québécois in the last one at 6%.
00:05:21.040 Later, rising to 7%.
00:05:24.580 So basically, the other left-wing party vote was up pretty much stable throughout.
00:05:30.060 You know, 8-6 and then 7-7, it's exactly the same.
00:05:34.760 I actually do believe in the aftermath of this whole Air Canada thing.
00:05:39.980 We are going to see the NDP doing far better. 0.77
00:05:43.040 No matter how crazy they are.
00:05:44.720 Like, in their current leadership race, the NDP are saying that you cannot have more than 50% of your 500 signatures from cis white men. 0.93
00:05:53.860 It's like, or I think it's just cis men.
00:05:56.280 It's like, guys, you're the NDP.
00:05:59.440 Who cares?
00:06:00.680 You're actually an extremely female party. 1.00
00:06:03.660 It is a party for mostly female, younger to middle-aged women.
00:06:08.860 And I'm stereotyping, but that's generally the demographic that is voting NDP.
00:06:13.660 It's like the people who are voting PPC tend to be, you know, working class, younger men.
00:06:20.180 That is an average PPC voter.
00:06:22.720 A conservative voter tends to be, like, middle class, working class men and women, but leaning more men.
00:06:29.980 Liberals tends to be older voters as well as a little bit more disproportionately women. 0.99
00:06:36.060 But so the thing is with the NDP saying you have to have 50% only, you can only have up to 50% cis men signing your signature forms for its various leadership candidates.
00:06:45.620 Like, you should want a candidate who comes in with mostly men because that's the demographic you are suffering with.
00:06:52.280 But now let's jump down to Innovative Research.
00:06:55.400 So in the last poll that Innovative Research did, which was a while ago, I'm making sure I'm not going too far past it because it's really been a while since they did one.
00:07:05.540 So in the last Innovative Research poll that I can even find on the 338 Canada website, it was 43, they had it 43 for the Liberals.
00:07:23.220 I'll try and write a little bit bigger as we go along.
00:07:29.320 And 38% for the Conservatives.
00:07:34.140 Now, in their latest poll, I don't need to fill in the NDP for you here, it just doesn't matter as much.
00:07:40.500 They had the Liberals dropping down to 41 and the Conservatives rose to 39%.
00:07:47.220 Now, it's not a lead like in the Abacus poll where the Conservatives started leading the Liberals by two points.
00:07:55.300 But it is significant when you have them tightening at a time when it should be very easy for the Liberals to be way ahead of their opposition.
00:08:04.940 They just won the election.
00:08:06.500 They just defeated them.
00:08:07.940 And yet they are already contracting in the polls right now.
00:08:10.740 Now, do you think there was a single poll that even put the Conservatives within punching distance of the Liberals after the 2015 election with Justin Trudeau?
00:08:19.900 No, not even after 2019 or 2021.
00:08:23.780 Victory tends to give you a boost in the polls conducted after the election.
00:08:28.600 One, people will lie and they say they voted for the winning team because people who don't know a lot about politics don't like the idea that, oh, I voted for the wrong guys.
00:08:36.140 But also you will get a lot of Conservatives or whoever is on the losing side is going to be far less likely to want to pick up the phone and tell you who they're voting for.
00:08:46.620 It's just kind of embarrassing after you lost, even if it is irrational not to want to just telepolster who you're voting for because it's good public information.
00:08:54.880 But now let's jump down to Main Street research.
00:08:58.460 I like Main Street and I actually, like mea culpa, I thought they were so wrong during the election when they were showing the NDP and the block only at 6% or 5% for the block on some days, 4%.
00:09:10.080 And then we had Election Day strike and it was 6% for the NDP. 0.88
00:09:13.900 And I was like, oh, goodness, that's absolutely pathetic.
00:09:16.800 But in this most recent poll, or in their last poll, they had the Liberals at 45%. 0.91
00:09:28.020 They then only had the Conservatives at 36%.
00:09:37.140 This is absolutely wild, the change that we have seen in this specific poll.
00:09:42.740 We went from 45% for the Liberals and 36% for the Conservatives, now to being 39% for the Conservatives and 41% for the Liberals.
00:10:00.400 This is a massive swing.
00:10:02.680 The Liberals in this poll used to be plus 9% and now they are only plus 2%, meaning that is a literal 7% swing towards the Conservatives.
00:10:19.500 And the thing is that the NDP have really not benefited that much from this.
00:10:23.460 Actually, they kind of have, but they went in this poll from just having, I can erase a little bit of this just so you can see what I'm talking about here.
00:10:32.680 But I think Main Street, I thought they wouldn't have been picking it up because other pollsters weren't picking it up.
00:10:40.600 But Main Street shows that actually the NDP in the previous poll, and this demonstrates that the Air Canada issue is helping the NDP quite a bit.
00:10:50.880 The NDP may be incompetent, but it was hard not to, it was hard to fumble that Air Canada issue.
00:10:56.620 As long as they showed up and picketed, they were good.
00:10:59.880 They were at 6% in the last Main Street poll in June, and now they have risen to 8 points, which would be too better than the last election and would probably gain them another 2 or 3 seats.
00:11:13.100 Now, if they actually pick a competent leader like Avi Lewis, I'm sad to say Heather McPherson would actually be competent.
00:11:22.240 Somebody who's just loud and they're going to be brazen, they're hyper-progressive, but they're also more of a union person, that person will end up eating into Mark Carney's support.
00:11:32.800 Because Carney, and I've said this before, he has a strange ability to be on the wrong side of an issue in every way possible.
00:11:42.280 Air Canada, it looked like he was siding with Air Canada against the workers, which rhetorically and aesthetically looks bad.
00:11:49.940 At the same time, he wasn't even right on the policy, because he also was demanding that Air Canada still make a deal.
00:11:56.580 So he's ordering the workers back to work, but he also wants Air Canada to sign some agreement, even though Air Canada really doesn't have the money to do it.
00:12:04.300 It is crazy how broke a lot of the airlines are.
00:12:07.340 Do they still make billions a year?
00:12:08.840 Billions a year?
00:12:10.180 Well, yeah, they're large corporations.
00:12:12.260 But when you're Air Canada only making 5.7%, when Carney comes in as the business wizard and his solution is just sign something with the unions and make them happy and workers go back to work, not cutting taxes, you know, not trying to support our businesses, just kind of asking everyone, can the issue please go away from me?
00:12:30.540 I mean, it's quite bad.
00:12:31.880 So up here, we had the liberal lead go from plus 3% to, I'll just say minus, because it's now the conservatives leading, to now negative 2.
00:12:44.560 On this one, they used to be leading with innovative research by plus 5, and then, now, they're only leading by plus 2.
00:12:55.420 Main Street is a much further away poll compared to the other ones where Abacus is doing a weekly poll or a by every other week poll.
00:13:03.980 Main Street was only doing it every couple of months because we're kind of, you know, it's a bit of a sluggish time of year.
00:13:08.740 But they went from plus 9 to plus 2.
00:13:15.180 So we're seeing, like, an average swing here of around 5 points.
00:13:21.060 You know, 7 here, we saw 3 here, and we saw 5 up here.
00:13:25.720 That is not amazing for Mark Carney.
00:13:28.700 And so this is also why I think we are seeing him currently attempting to make a deal with the Americans for trade and on trying to sign on to the Golden Dome.
00:13:40.080 Because Mark Carney is quite literally lacking wins.
00:13:44.100 He just needs a win.
00:13:45.280 He wants to get something on the walls of Paris right now, and he's got nothing.
00:13:49.240 And so right now, with his polling deteriorating, he's actually in a dangerous position, or he's putting Canada in a dangerous position, where he may actually start trying to act rashly in order to get some sort of, like, a win.
00:14:03.840 He wants to sign something, and he's going to do it carelessly.
00:14:07.680 But anyways, I'm going to erase the board here, and then I want to move on to some other points I've noticed in the recent Main Street poll.
00:14:14.340 I will actually be making another poll on a recent drop that Abacus did, because I thought it was very interesting as you go through some of the issue-by-issue polling.
00:14:23.840 You actually see a lot of Canadians think that Mark Carney is a liar, that he is not actually who he claimed to be in the election.
00:14:31.120 You know, people still may not be fully turning on him.
00:14:34.020 You know, even here, 39% isn't terrible.
00:14:37.340 It's not like Justin Trudeau when he had polls around 22% or 23%.
00:14:41.600 But it's not great, considering that he just got back into office.
00:14:45.280 But I'm going to go do that, and then I will be back with some more stuff to show you guys.
00:14:52.100 Okay, and now we're back.
00:14:54.280 I'm actually not going to be going more into the Main Street research poll.
00:14:57.840 I think I meant to say innovative.
00:14:59.580 This one had an interesting section about what party do people most closely align with?
00:15:06.420 Not in terms of national vote, but how do you see yourself?
00:15:09.860 Do you see yourself as a liberal?
00:15:11.220 Do you see yourself as a conservative?
00:15:13.540 And this is kind of a big problem right now for the Liberal Party of Canada, is that as much as people were willing to cast a ballot for them this April,
00:15:23.200 the thing is that not that many people actually really want to proudly align themselves with the Liberal Party.
00:15:29.040 Back in around sort of like that January, February, March, April time, you know, election lead up, you would maybe be able to get low 30s of people to be able to say, oh, yeah, I'm a liberal.
00:15:41.720 But as of today, you actually only have 24% of people, 24% of Canadians saying that they see themselves as a liberal person in terms of their political stances.
00:15:58.040 Whereas with the Conservatives, and this is why you are going to see the Conservatives have a lot of stability over the next several years, is that 38% of Canadians see themselves as fundamentally conservative people.
00:16:13.880 Now, you're going to probably have some of those people potentially voting liberal in this last election because, oh, hey, I'm trying to stop Trump and for some reason I didn't trust Paliyev.
00:16:23.200 I don't think it's as many people as you would think, but you'll get some.
00:16:27.500 And here is a more another interesting little tidbit you get here.
00:16:31.940 There are then 21% of people who are unaligned, who don't consider themselves to be close to any party.
00:16:40.880 And then with the NDP, even as the party has fallen off on this rating over the last year, just because of how poorly they performed, still you get, oh, my goodness, trying to write stuff and it's looking bad and the show feels bad if things look bad.
00:16:59.480 You get 11% of people saying that they are NDP.
00:17:04.940 This is the kind of troubling situation that Carney and the Liberals find themselves in because in order to put together a coalition, and while I will give the Liberals credit that they're quite good at this, they only have a quarter of people saying that they are fundamentally liberal people and predisposing them heavily to voting liberal.
00:17:24.300 Where these days, 38% of people are willing to say that they are conservatives, and so I don't think you're actually going to see the conservatives ever fall down in the polls over the next couple of years.
00:17:35.560 The Liberals may be able to lead them, but the thing is that there's a lot, there's a growing amount of people who see themselves as fundamentally conservative, and so they're not going to easily change who they're voting for.
00:17:47.240 Whereas the Liberals, they start off with 24%, which is nothing to sneeze at, but then they need to cobble together a voting coalition with 5% from the NDP, because remember, the NDP had only gotten 6% in this last election, so we assume a lot of those people ended up going over to the Liberals in order to sort of like keep out the conservatives.
00:18:08.420 It's almost like Jagmeet Singh was telling them to do that with how pathetically he was acting, and then you would have probably gotten another bunch of people who are unaligned to then also go and vote for the Liberals, and that's what ended up putting them over the top, were these two groups of people breaking hard for the Liberal Party.
00:18:27.420 But look at the chart for yourself. This is quite remarkable. This is the years after. In 2022, this is back when, if we look down here, this is of course when the leadership race is going on, and O'Toole had just been ousted as the leader.
00:18:45.080 You will see that the people identifying as conservatives, as Polio starts running for the leadership of the party, for the first time in a long time, conservative identity outstrips the Liberals, and then in later 2023, you then see it explode.
00:19:05.040 Back here, you're only seeing around 28% of Canadians say that they're conservative, and probably about 30% saying that they're liberal, and now it has heavily reversed, even in the Carney era, when you're supposed to be all fired up with elbows up and fighting back against Donald Trump and the Americans, because the problem with that being the Liberals campaign in the last election is it's fleeting.
00:19:29.140 You can't do that same trick twice. And while it's disappointing that conservatives hadn't won the last election, at least we can be satisfied in saying that you're not going to be able to have another elbows up election. That's the one little superpower that you had for that one election, and that's it. Next time you actually need a platform.
00:19:48.560 And like we have seen in my reviews of Abacus Data's issue-by-issue polling, in the top nine issues, as I said yesterday in another video, in the top nine issues, the Liberals lead on two.
00:20:01.740 They lead on Trump, which is a whole, which is a, technically it's still the second biggest issue for Abacus, but it's one of those ones that's declining very quickly because you can't stay mad at Trump forever. At some point you're going to realize, or at least a good portion of people are going to realize, that our country's problems are mostly made domestically and not in the United States.
00:20:23.240 And then the second issue was environment, which I believe was like the seventh out of nine issues. And their second place party competing with them was actually the Greens. So it was probably just people generically saying, I guess the Green Party has a green in the name, so they're probably good for the environment. And I guess Trudeau and the Liberals were super crazy about the environment, so I guess they were the best to deal with it.
00:20:44.080 But it's not a, it's not an issue that drives a lot of votes at the end of the day. Whereas with Trump, it was a, like a singular blinders on, I don't care about anything else but fighting Trump. And so that's why it helped the Liberals so much. You go through all the other issues. The top issues, the other top issues, cost of living, the economy, crime, you know, like the healthcare, all that stuff. Conservatives were leading by at least 2%, all the way up to 53%, I believe, was the number.
00:21:11.780 That was their highest margin, where you would have over 60% of Canadians who presumably would have voted for other parties saying, well, yeah, if you care about immigration, or yeah, if you care about crime, conservatives are your guys. It's like, that's kind of pathetic that some of those people then voted Liberal, even though they acknowledge on the issues that actually affect your life that conservatives are better.
00:21:34.620 But anyways, that should be it for me today in this video, guys. Thanks for sticking around this long to watch me ramble about polls. I just want to remind you that again, if you are in Calgary on the 19th to 21st, we have the Wii Unify Reclaiming Event at the BMO Center.
00:21:52.280 If you want to buy a ticket and swing by and listen to all the other creators and organizers and policy experts talk on different issues on stage, that could be fun. Ticket link in the description below.
00:22:03.240 As well as if on the 13th of September, so the other one's 19th to the 21st of this month, on the 13th of September, I will be in Abbotsford with 1BC leader Dallas Brody, and we are doing a town hall in Abbotsford.
00:22:19.580 So if you want to swing by for that, you don't have to live in Abbotsford anywhere in BC if you're willing to drive out. I'd love to see you guys there. That will also be linked in the description of this video.
00:22:29.460 And with that being said, thank you guys for watching, and I will see you guys next time.