The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - Carney Liberals in DEADLOCKED with Conservatives

00:00:00.000 Hey guys, Wyatt Claypool here, and welcome back to the National Telegraph YouTube channel.

00:00:06.100 Right now, Canadian federal politics are locked into a very awkward standoff.

00:00:12.000 Both Prime Minister Mark Carney's Liberals, as well as Pierre Polyev's Conservatives,

00:00:17.020 would like to have a snap election sometime in 2026. Obviously, the Conservatives would

00:00:22.620 like to take government, and Mark Carney's Liberals want a majority upgrade from their

00:00:27.340 minority status. But neither side wants to be the one to trigger the new election,

00:00:32.620 because naturally Canadians will backlash against anyone who ends up triggering an election

00:00:37.760 less than a year since the last one. Now, this is exactly why both the Conservatives,

00:00:43.560 as well as the NDP, ended up letting the Liberals pass their last budget. Yes, the Bloc voted

00:00:49.680 completely against it, and if the NDP and the Conservatives had also uniformly voted against it,

00:00:55.180 it wouldn't have passed and triggered a new election. But then Canadians would have probably

00:00:59.900 just voted Liberal and given them a massive majority, because people generally don't like

00:01:05.200 going to the polls nearly as much as you or I would like to. We're all election-obsessed political

00:01:11.100 watchers, but most people just want to be left alone. And then added on top of that, that vote was

00:01:16.800 happening in, I believe, late October or early November, which would mean that the election,

00:01:21.800 if triggered, would be taking place around Christmas, and that's a great way to be seen

00:01:26.840 as ballot box poison to most voters. Not only did you trigger the early election, but you force people

00:01:32.740 to go voting during their holidays, ruining the whole thing for themselves, because people like

00:01:37.540 to travel and visit family, and they don't want to be mailing in ballots or staying home longer

00:01:42.080 in order to vote early, so then they can go and join their relatives in another province.

00:01:46.800 But fast forward to now, even though we are out of that holiday season, the problem is we are still

00:01:54.040 less than a year since the last election. If Mark Carney triggers it, Canadians will see him as a whiner

00:02:00.060 who wants majority government and is unwilling to work with opposition parties in order to create

00:02:05.420 unified solutions to problems. And if you're the Conservatives and you trigger it, Canadians would

00:02:10.580 then see you as petulant children, and maybe we'll just give Mark Carney a majority because we don't

00:02:15.640 want this happening again. And so this is the very awkward dance that Carney, Polyev, as well as the

00:02:22.440 NDP and the Bloc Québécois are all involved in right now. And that's why we see a lot of obstruction

00:02:28.860 inside of Parliament right now. Now both sides are going to say we're not obstructing, but both of them

00:02:34.820 kind of are. They're effectively trying to annoy and bully each other into being the one who ends up

00:02:40.620 defeating the government. Now either basically blocking things up so much, Carney then goes to

00:02:45.600 the public and says, I need a majority, I can't work with these people. And then having Canadians

00:02:50.260 find him to be a whiner, or the Liberals trying to get the Conservatives to end up voting to defeat

00:02:56.780 the government. And Carney says, well, I want to cooperate. And these guys just ruined it all,

00:03:01.000 you better give me a 175 seat majority or more. Anyways, I know it's 172. I was giving a bit of a

00:03:08.400 reasonable buffer there of what you would at least want to win if you are actually going to go into

00:03:12.880 a new election. But in just a second here, I want to go to some clips from the CBC. And then I want

00:03:17.960 to talk through what campaign strategy should be looking like for the federal Conservatives if they

00:03:23.680 want to win a new snap election. Whether they trigger the election or not, I think there are a lot of

00:03:29.940 flaws with the current Conservative messaging. And if they fix them, maybe they could even be in a

00:03:34.940 position around summer or fall, where they're the ones who trigger the election that Canadians would

00:03:40.000 actually be happy for, happy to go out and vote Conservative and get rid of the Liberals.

00:03:45.080 But before I get into these CBC clips, I just want to remind you guys, if you like the show,

00:03:50.080 make sure to leave a like on this video, leave a comment about whatever you think about things,

00:03:54.740 subscribe if you are not yet a subscriber. And of course, if you want to help financially support

00:03:59.440 the channel, you can always go below the video and hit the join button and join one of the three

00:04:03.760 tiers in order to make a small monthly contribution to keep me above water, as well as make me less

00:04:09.420 reliant on the YouTube algorithm. Anyways, now let's get into this clip from CBC Power and Politics,

00:04:16.700 where Katie Harrison, I believe it's Katie Harrison, it might have been another person I'm forgetting the

00:04:20.700 name of, but they are talking about the current brinksmanship in federal politics, as well as why

00:04:26.400 everyone kind of doesn't want an election right now.

00:04:29.660 Afternoon, Prime Minister. Is it time for a spring election?

00:04:32.740 It's time to do a lot more work. We've got a lot of work to do.

00:04:37.660 Prime Minister Mark Carney says it's time to get to work as he faces questions about a spring election

00:04:42.320 from our Chris Rands there. It comes as the Globe and Mail reports that Carney and Ontario Premier

00:04:46.720 Doug Ford discussed a snap election casually in order to secure a majority. Well, CBC News has also

00:04:53.000 learned that liberals and conservatives are working out a path that could keep the government in power

00:04:57.560 and keep this minority parliament running for a bit longer. Here's also another little rub here for

00:05:02.780 the conservatives is that although I know a lot of conservatives out there are going to be mad that

00:05:07.700 they don't trigger an election whenever available, you need the narrative to be good. And I know that

00:05:13.280 the conservatives are basically trying to keep the government alive. At the same time, they are

00:05:18.380 trying to attack it as much as possible, which is kind of what they have to do. So right now in the House of

00:05:23.800 Commons, this might not be brought up in this show, I believe it's not, this is probably too new. But right

00:05:28.380 now, the conservatives keep trying to put forward motion votes on certain aspects of the current

00:05:33.600 liberal policy, where the liberals don't want the motion vote to come forward on an aspect of like

00:05:39.120 immigration fraud, or basically deporting criminals and lowering other aspects of like

00:05:45.380 immigration into the country. They want to put that forward, forward a motion vote on some of these

00:05:49.840 things. The liberals clearly don't want to vote on it because their agenda on these matters has been

00:05:54.420 really bad. And so they don't want that put to them in an actual vote, and either voting in favor of

00:05:59.860 their agenda or what the conservatives want to do. And because they won't let that motion vote come

00:06:04.180 forward, the conservatives aren't letting the liberals put anything for bring anything forward. And this is

00:06:09.080 the sort of cooperative chaos that is currently going on. Conservatives will vote to continue the

00:06:14.920 government, but they're not going to let the government actually get much done, which is kind

00:06:19.380 of their job. They are in opposition, and they're supposed to prevent bad things from happening.

00:06:23.380 Let's start there with the power panel. We've got Supri Devedi, who is an advisor to former

00:06:26.500 Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Brad Levine is a former National Campaign Director for the NDP.

00:06:31.520 Rob Russo is the Canada correspondent for The Economist. And here with me in the studio is Kate

00:06:36.200 Harrison. She is a conservative political analyst. So Kate, I want to start with you, if I can.

00:06:41.280 The trade-off, or the discussions about a trade-off that's happening with coming out of the meeting

00:06:45.960 with the Prime Minister and Pierre Polyev, maybe changes to the Budget Implementation Act to keep

00:06:50.500 things going. Is this suddenly there is alignment between the two parties, or do the conservatives

00:06:55.620 really not want to give the liberals an excuse to have an election?

00:06:58.700 Well, I don't think anybody wants an election. You heard James Maloney say that in the earlier

00:07:03.560 interview. And really, what would we be having an election about? The very last election was about,

00:07:08.980 you know, the path forward to deal with Donald Trump, in addition to cost of living issues,

00:07:13.480 neither of which the liberals have made, I would say, meaningful progress on. So going to test voters

00:07:18.920 on a ballot question that we just litigated back in the spring, I'm not sure that the government would

00:07:24.520 necessarily get the result that they're hoping for out of that. I do think that it's going to be

00:07:29.440 difficult for the government, if they change their mind, to pull the plug against a backdrop of

00:07:36.120 conservatives saying, you know, we're willing to work with you to advance the needle. It's not just

00:07:39.640 on the Budget Implementation Bill, it's on the grocery rebate, you saw it even back in the fall

00:07:44.460 around some of the major projects legislation. So conservatives are, where appropriate, I think,

00:07:50.140 willing to work with the government to try and make parliament work at a time of instability.

00:07:54.160 So the questions about when to go or not go, I think, are really in the government's court.

00:07:59.060 So Priya, how do you see this?

00:08:00.220 So I want to get to the liberal here in just a second there. But I think Kate Harrison is

00:08:04.520 absolutely right. Right now, you don't want to be the party that is defeating the government over

00:08:10.060 a budget issue. Because guess what, the vast majority of Canadians really don't know what's

00:08:15.360 going on with the budget. This is why I get mad when conservatives sometimes talk about the deficit

00:08:19.880 too much. Guys, the deficit sucks, adding a few extra billion dollars to it is not really going to

00:08:25.760 make it any suckier than it already is. Obviously, every other dollar added to the debt is already

00:08:30.680 a bad thing, and it gets worse the more you add. But when you talk about the GST rebate from the

00:08:37.040 perspective that it's costing a lot of money, it's not really the best way of going about that issue.

00:08:43.500 Because nobody really thought the deficit was good before. You're not changing anyone's minds.

00:08:47.960 Everyone who thought it sucked before thinks it sucks more now. And all those who didn't care are

00:08:52.500 going to continue to not care, even if it has a few extra billion dollars added to it.

00:08:56.660 And we have some stories out there with the parliamentary budget officer coming out

00:09:00.100 and adjusting up the estimates for how much the GST rebate is going to cost.

00:09:04.080 I think the liberals said it was going to cost around $10 billion. And the PBO is saying it's

00:09:09.020 going to cost around $12.8 billion, which is actually quite a miss on something that should be

00:09:13.800 a very simple program to deliver. Figure out who qualifies, send out the checks every quarter,

00:09:19.140 and that's it. And somehow they still missed it by like $2.8 billion in terms of how much it will

00:09:24.760 cost. That's quite a large estimate upwards. But what the conservatives need to be very cognizant of

00:09:32.060 is not talking too much about the numbers. And that's why they can't defeat the government over

00:09:38.240 the budget. Nobody really knows much about the budget. They know either it sucks or they're okay

00:09:43.020 with it. Defeating the government over it is just going to look whiny. Even if I actually agree

00:09:48.260 that we probably should be, you know, the budget is terrible and they should be thrown out of

00:09:54.160 offices for it doesn't mean that the average voter agrees with me.

00:09:57.180 You know, there may be some bits of the Budget Implementation Act that the prime minister and

00:10:01.320 others may be willing to compromise on. But the conservatives will be paving a way for a budget

00:10:06.000 that has a deficit of like $80 billion and may be growing, which, as we know from Mr. Polyev is

00:10:12.600 a problem. I mean, how does this look politically for them on this compromise?

00:10:18.480 I mean, I think I agree largely with Kate, which is that I think Canadians, you know, the vast

00:10:23.820 majority of Canadians want to see politicians working together to get stuff done. So quite

00:10:28.980 frankly, I think it's smart for both the conservatives and the liberals to work together to get, you

00:10:34.100 know, pieces of legislation passed or to get parts of the budget passed and to work forward

00:10:39.100 through this. Now, of course, the more cynical part of me needs to point out that if recent polls

00:10:43.060 are indeed correct, then it would be terrible for the conservatives to go to the polls right now,

00:10:47.300 right? Because an election would likely yield a liberal majority government. But of course,

00:10:51.700 the usual caveats here apply, right? Campaigns matter. And the only poll that matters is on election

00:10:56.440 day. So I'd come back to my first point in agreeing with Kate, which is they would have to make

00:11:03.100 the case, something else would have to happen in order for the liberals to look as though they were

00:11:09.400 going to the polls for good reason. Because otherwise, if they can't justify the main question,

00:11:16.560 which will be okay, so then why are we going to an election? You know, I don't think voters would

00:11:21.620 take too kindly to that, particularly not right now. And, you know, it's very possible that the ballot

00:11:27.040 question can shift. It can still be Trump related or America related, but some new threat or some new

00:11:32.400 thing has emerged. And then I think that changes the game. But I think I would largely agree with

00:11:37.100 right now, I think it's smart for both parties to work to make parliament better.

00:11:42.240 So what I hear, it's not really about making parliament better. This is not going to make

00:11:46.060 parliament better. If you're conservative, we're still mostly only going to have bad liberal policy

00:11:50.080 leaking through. It's more so parliament's more stable. And I've heard behind the scenes,

00:11:55.140 both parties, this isn't just my intuition. Both parties want to avoid an election right now,

00:12:00.380 like the plague. Now, I still think we are going to have an election in 2026. But this is why I've

00:12:06.220 always given the caveat, I don't think it's going to be spring. I think it's going to be sometime in

00:12:10.380 the summer or the fall could still be spring. I just say 80% shot it happens sometime this year,

00:12:16.440 because right now, the news stories out there are not good for the conservatives, not because they've

00:12:21.540 done anything wrong. But this thing with Donald Trump and the Gordie Howe bridge makes the liberals look

00:12:27.060 reasonable. Because even though I actually like a lot of stuff that Trump does, his perspective on

00:12:31.780 the Gordie Howe bridge is unreasonable. Canada built the bridge, it connects to the United States.

00:12:36.960 Yes, there was not enough US steel used or whatever, from Trump's perspective. It doesn't really matter

00:12:43.100 though, if you didn't pay for the thing. This is one of those things as well that the Canadian media

00:12:47.500 is going to freak out about. Now, I like certain things Trump does. I don't like certain things he

00:12:51.720 does. This is a thing I don't like. But with a lot of things that Trump does, I don't like,

00:12:56.520 usually it's something stupid that's going to like go, you know, go away in about a week or two,

00:13:01.200 he's going to change his mind and then focus on things that are more serious. But yeah,

00:13:05.340 to basically contradict her there, though, this is not Parliament working better. This is simply in

00:13:10.860 the parties, both their best interests to not hit the polls right now. And I'm going to correct her a

00:13:16.640 little bit on the polling, though. Yes, if you look at individual polls, it doesn't look that good for

00:13:21.320 the Conservatives. So remember, this is actually not even the last election, I guess. But the last

00:13:26.580 election was 43.5 for the Liberals, and I think it was like 41.3 for the Conservatives. The Liberals

00:13:34.480 beat the Conservatives by a little bit more than two points, like 2.3%. Now, right now, the Liberals do

00:13:42.420 have a polling advantage. I will not deny that. But when you actually strip away all of the really bad

00:13:49.440 pollsters, I like this website called Polywave that Shreya Teest runs, he allows you to turn off

00:13:55.280 all the polling that you don't want added into the average. Now, obviously, I don't want ECOS. ECOS is

00:14:01.100 terrible. Main Street, although I like them, their last poll was so bad, I just can't add it in. I'll

00:14:06.600 probably add them back in as we go. Ipsos, Research Cove, Spark Advocacy, Leger, a lot of these pollsters are

00:14:13.460 showing these like 14 point leads for the Liberals, but they don't make any sense when you look at the

00:14:18.300 regionals. Like, no, Alberta's not within a few points. I've seen some of these recent polls that

00:14:24.080 would have my riding, I live in, Calgary, Signal Hill, going liberal. No, David McKenzie, the

00:14:29.840 Conservative MP, won this riding with like a 20 point, with like an 18 point advantage the last

00:14:35.660 election. I don't think a lot of people have shifted that much in the riding. And so whenever

00:14:40.120 you see a poll that has this crazy lead for one party over the other, resulting in like very strange

00:14:46.100 regional results where the Liberals are winning where they don't, like they never win and the

00:14:50.980 Conservatives are winning where they never win, ignore polls like that. But these are the polls

00:14:55.340 I currently have in this average. Abacus Data, Bagel Polling, Kulsovsky, Nanos, Palace, and Innovative.

00:15:03.860 And they show the current lead for the Liberals is, you know, significant. It's bigger than on election

00:15:09.380 day. But they have it at 39.3 to 36%. New Democrats have 11.4. Bloc is at 8.1. Greens 2.9. And People's

00:15:20.120 Party 1.2. Now, if the Conservatives, and remember that this is after what is, I admit, a good news

00:15:26.980 cycle, a good couple news cycles for Mark Carney. But we still haven't seen any polls done since the

00:15:33.860 really bad job numbers came out, which is going to hurt Carney. So even this, after his, you know,

00:15:39.680 again, I'm not saying he did good things, but in terms of the news cycle was beneficial to him.

00:15:44.060 After that beneficial news cycle, he's still only leading by 3.3%, which is not something that you can,

00:15:51.280 it's not an insurmountable lead in Canadian politics by any means. And with the NDP doing better,

00:15:56.600 and the Bloc Hembecois doing better, the NDP could end up stealing a lot of Liberal seats around the

00:16:02.400 Toronto area or the Vancouver area, and the Bloc Hembecois with 8.1%, which is too better than they

00:16:08.760 did in the last federal election, they could end up winning a lot of those Montreal suburbs back from

00:16:14.140 the Liberals. So right now, while the Liberals can say, hey, we're leading the Conservatives by 3.3%,

00:16:19.980 if we led the Conservatives by 3.3% in the last election, we would have a majority. Well, that's only

00:16:25.980 true insofar as the other parties aren't doing better as well. The NDP is mostly going to gain

00:16:32.280 back seats from the Liberals if an election was to occur. And the Bloc Hembecois has the same thing

00:16:37.580 going for them. They're mostly going to be taking Liberal seats back. So while the Liberals, if they're

00:16:41.940 leading the Conservatives by 3, end up winning maybe 10 more Conservative seats away from them,

00:16:47.160 the thing is they're losing potentially 10, 12, 14, 15 over to the Bloc Hembecois and the NDP as well.

00:16:54.260 So it's like you kind of have to be careful what you wish for as the Liberals when it comes to

00:16:59.320 a new election. Yes, you can maybe trigger one because you're way ahead of the Conservatives

00:17:05.280 thinking you can beat them, but your left-wing opposition might be too strong for you to actually

00:17:09.680 still be able to get to that majority government position. But this is where I just want to quickly

00:17:15.000 talk about what the Conservatives need to be doing. I know there's a lot of little news stories out

00:17:21.440 there about stuff happening in committees. I'll probably cover that on another day. But in this

00:17:26.060 video, I just wanted to say that the Conservatives need to stop talking about small things.

00:17:32.020 I watched the question period today, and I don't need to take you guys through clips of it. It would

00:17:37.400 just be basically me saying, that's a fine question, but that's the problem. It's just a fine question.

00:17:42.640 When I see Polyev and Justin Raj Halan and many other Conservative MPs from Ontario or British Columbia

00:17:49.560 or elsewhere standing up and saying, food bank usage is up, or inflation is up, or, you know,

00:17:55.800 like job numbers are down. Okay, ask one question about those things. Every question just being on

00:18:03.280 these kind of shallow affordability topics doesn't work when you're not running on a bold enough

00:18:09.820 affordability plan. The Conservatives need to run on a 20% across the board tax cut. Every single bracket,

00:18:19.920 including corporate and including the GST, then you push on affordability. You can't just simply say

00:18:25.920 they're doing a bad job. We know this. They suck. They're liberals. But the Conservatives, if they end up

00:18:32.600 playing everything too safe, and all of the talking points are just about, you haven't gotten a trade deal

00:18:38.240 signed yet, and then food inflation is bad, and did you know job numbers are down? It's like, that's great.

00:18:44.420 That's great. But the problem is that Carney can somewhat blame those things, even if it's not

00:18:49.620 factually true. He can blame them on Donald Trump. What you need to do is run on a bold reform plan

00:18:55.960 that ends up taking the election issue away from Donald Trump, and it makes it about, do you want to

00:19:01.620 cut taxes or not? They need to basically put Carney into a corner where it's either, are you in favor of

00:19:07.640 the big conservative tax cut plan or not? That's what you want the election to be about. And the

00:19:13.160 only way you can make it about your plan is if your plan is really, really bold. You can't simply run

00:19:19.980 on a slightly bigger tax cut, a slightly bigger immigration restriction, a slightly tougher on

00:19:25.920 crime stance. You need to be just hard on all the issues that you run on, or don't bother with them at

00:19:32.060 all. But anyways, that should be it for this video, guys. I just wanted to do kind of an update when it

00:19:37.620 comes to how the parties are starting to maneuver. Now, there was an interview recently on power and

00:19:42.760 politics as well with Andrew Scheer talking about the opposition or the obstruction in parliament.

00:19:49.240 It's a bit of a he said, she said story. And I would say, well, who's right between the liberals

00:19:53.360 and conservatives? Are the conservatives obstructing or are the liberals obstructing? The answer is yes,

00:19:59.120 they both are. And they are both playing politics very intelligently right now. Going to an election

00:20:04.560 would destroy either one of them if they were the one to trigger it. So we're probably going to have

00:20:08.960 to wait a while longer until either one party gets a really good excuse to trigger the election

00:20:14.300 or the other party can bait one into accidentally defeating the government, thus giving a reason

00:20:20.080 for a new election. Anyways, so with that all being said, thank you guys for watching, like, share,

00:20:25.360 subscribe, consider joining the membership program, and I'll see you all next time.

The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - February 11, 2026

Carney Liberals in DEADLOCKED with Conservatives - Election Games being played!

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