The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - February 10, 2026


Carney wants a SNAP ELECTION - Doug Ford betrays Conservatives!


Episode Stats


Length

21 minutes

Words per minute

190.66953

Word count

4,117

Sentence count

240

Harmful content

Misogyny

5

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

A Canadian election could be called as early as spring of 2026. Is Doug Ford betraying the Tories? Or is Prime Minister Mark Carney talking about a snap election? And what does it mean for the chances of a Tory win in Ontario?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Hey guys, Wyatt Claypool here, and welcome back to the National Telegraph YouTube channel.
00:00:06.040 This feels like the most formulaic story in Canadian politics right now.
00:00:11.000 We've been discussing the possibility of a snap election for several months now,
00:00:15.440 and that's not just because of fake hype. There genuinely is a good chance of having a snap
00:00:21.200 election in the year 2026. But the other part of the story that we're going to talk about that is
00:00:26.300 going to shock absolutely nobody is Ontario Premier Doug Ford betraying Conservatives.
00:00:32.960 Yes, he is supposedly a Conservative politician himself. He leads a progressive Conservative
00:00:39.100 government in Ontario. But let's be clear, he is not a Conservative in any way. If you live in the
00:00:46.120 province of Ontario, I urge you to go and support the New Blue Party of Ontario. Honestly, it doesn't
00:00:52.080 even matter if they can win a seat or not. There's just no point in voting for the PCs.
00:00:56.300 Voting for the PC party is just as bad as voting for the Liberals. And here is where I completely
00:01:01.620 disagree with the pleb reporter, because he said, well, Doug Ford sucks so much, I'm going to go and
00:01:06.560 encourage people to vote for the Liberals. No, I still don't think you vote for a party that you
00:01:11.840 hate. I think you should at least vote for a party that actually stands for things you like.
00:01:16.500 But I can in no good conscience tell people to vote for the Progressive Conservative Party.
00:01:20.940 Maybe if your MPP is like, really, really good, and it's a complete outlier from the normal PC party
00:01:28.860 politicians like Sam Oosterhoff, maybe. Bobby and Brady's a great independent if you're in
00:01:34.720 Halderman Norfolk. But elsewhere, I'd basically say pretty much New Blue Party is your main option.
00:01:40.880 But just a second here, I want to go through the Globe and Mail story about the snap election
00:01:45.740 potentially getting called, because we had Mark Carney discussing the possibility with Doug Ford,
00:01:51.580 who looks like he is absolutely scheming with the Federal Liberals to try and help get them a
00:01:56.660 majority Liberal government. But before I get into it, guys, I just want to remind you,
00:02:01.700 if you like the show, make sure to leave a like on this video, subscribe if you are not yet a
00:02:06.740 subscriber, leave a comment about what you think about all this stuff. And of course, if you want to
00:02:12.060 help sustain the channel, you can always make a monthly contribution by hitting the join button
00:02:16.500 and joining the membership program. It helps make the channel more sustainable for me, as well as
00:02:21.300 it allows me to be less reliant on the YouTube algorithm and cover more niche topics that usually
00:02:26.900 would not do well on this platform, you know, like provincial politics in a place like New Brunswick
00:02:31.860 or covering a Toronto or Vancouver mayor's race. Anyways, let's get right into it. I'll bring up the
00:02:38.180 Globe and Mail story and we'll go through some of the details. A little bit of it's kind of what you'd
00:02:43.580 assume. So I'm not going to read you this full thing. But we have here in the story from I'll discredit
00:02:51.000 them. Laura Stone and Robert Freythe from the Globe and Mail, it says, Prime Minister Mark Carney and
00:02:58.520 Ontario Premier Doug Ford have discussed the possibility of an early federal election in casual
00:03:03.860 conversation about the importance of a majority mandate to deal with uncertain economic times,
00:03:09.360 according to three sources. The sources said that the progressive conservative premier who has forged
00:03:14.840 a close relationship with the liberal leader offers his opinion that the country needs economic
00:03:20.200 stability. One of the sources familiar with the discussion said Ford told Mr. Carney that an election
00:03:25.780 is an opportunity to win a clear majority mandate. But the source stressed that Mr. Ford's comments
00:03:30.460 should not be seen as an endorsement of the federal liberals who are currently two seats shy of
00:03:35.280 majority. Mr. Carney previously said publicly that he is not considering a stamp election and his office
00:03:41.140 repeated the assertion on Sunday, quote, we are not going to the polls as the Prime Minister has clearly
00:03:46.300 said to the media, media availability, unquote. His spokesperson Audrey Champot told the Globe and Mail
00:03:53.260 referring to January 26 comments from Mr. Carney in which he said he was, quote, focused on results for
00:03:59.740 Canadians, unquote. Now, you have to remember, though, is that Carney's never going to say he wants an
00:04:05.720 election until he calls one. The biggest tell so far about an election being called other than this
00:04:11.980 story where he was openly discussing the matter with Doug Ford was when he was previously at a press
00:04:18.080 conference announcing his grocery rebate. When someone asked him if he's considering a spring 2026
00:04:23.640 snap election, he basically dodged the question. If it was no, he would just say no, because by saying
00:04:29.600 anything other than no at the time, he did raise anxieties. Now, maybe that was kind of deliberate.
00:04:35.960 He was just going to give a non-answer if anyone asked him about a snap election, see what the
00:04:40.540 Canadian electorate thinks about that, and then just say no later on. Because again, as the Prime
00:04:45.980 Minister, you're never going to say yes until you're literally at a podium announcing the new snap
00:04:51.260 election, because you don't want to give your opponents more of a heads up than they already get
00:04:56.280 through their back channels. But although they said that one of the sources said that Doug Ford
00:05:02.100 is not endorsing the liberals, he very clearly has been endorsing them. He's been palling around with
00:05:08.020 them, normalizing voting liberal for his PC party base, which has mostly overlapped with federal
00:05:14.660 conservatives, but significantly relies on around a quarter to a third of federal liberals voting for
00:05:20.160 him in order to get his majority governments. Doug Ford knows what he's doing. He wants to play this
00:05:25.540 inside-outside game, where, oh no, no, no, no, he still sometimes talks tough to the liberals,
00:05:30.880 but don't worry, he's still a conservative. At the same time, he's bear-hugging Carney and saying
00:05:36.340 that, well, we need this because of Team Canada and the rest. Now, at the end of last month, it
00:05:41.560 actually did look like there could be a conflict brewing between Doug Ford and Mark Carney. But what
00:05:47.540 Mark Carney did after signing that new trade deal with China and opening up Canada's market to
00:05:53.220 49,000 Chinese-made EVs every year, at least actually just starting at 49,000. It can expand
00:05:59.340 from there. Doug Ford seems to have gotten Carney recently to come up with that new EV subsidy that
00:06:05.960 is supposedly going to subsidize the purchase of Canadian-made EVs. Although, when you actually
00:06:11.360 look at what it's subsidizing, it's actually mostly foreign-made cars. As long as a couple things are done
00:06:16.680 with them in Canada, I guess it's Canadian-owned, but that was to basically try and buoy the Canadian 0.61
00:06:22.320 auto sector. Now, it's being done incompetently, but that was probably a handout directed at getting
00:06:28.020 Doug Ford back on Mark Carney's side ahead of a new snap election. That's another big piece of evidence
00:06:34.280 to say that we are probably going to go into a snap election. It's all of the futzing around by Mark
00:06:40.500 Carney, passing stuff like his GST rebate, although I think he still has to technically pass certain
00:06:45.680 elements of that. But he has the GST rebate, he has the EV subsidy, he's putting out a bunch of
00:06:51.420 other subsidies to affected industries by tariffs, but he won't actually get a trade deal signed with
00:06:56.760 the U.S. because the liberal base is so hyper-anti-American. Mark Carney has sized it up as
00:07:02.840 better for him to fail at his only campaign promise last election rather than fulfill it. Because if he
00:07:09.280 fulfills it, maybe someone like Laura Babcock will be really upset and then they will go vote MVP 1.00
00:07:14.540 because it's not elbows up to actually sign anything. Even though we voted for him, not like
00:07:20.560 we as you and I watching on this channel, but like we as Canadians allowed him to be prime minister
00:07:26.820 for another term because he said he was going to get a trade deal done. That doesn't matter because
00:07:32.240 right now we are supposed to be mad at Trump and the Americans for everything that's mainly a problem
00:07:37.500 of our own bad domestic policies. But I want to read a little bit more of this article. Then I want to
00:07:42.960 jump over to just some more stuff regarding Doug Ford. So it says here, Mr. Ford's office declined
00:07:49.600 to comment. Oh, big shock there. The conversations between the prime minister and Mr. Ford underscore
00:07:55.280 how close the two leaders have become despite their different party affiliations as Mr. Ford pushes for
00:08:00.860 federal policies to help his province weather the trade war with the U.S. and as Mr. Carney casts
00:08:06.120 himself as an unifier in the face of American aggression. The relationship could be especially important
00:08:11.940 for Mr. Carney, whose party fell short of a majority last year in large part because it failed
00:08:16.820 to make significant gains in popular suburban ridings in the greater Toronto area and surrounding
00:08:22.260 regions in southern Ontario. The conversations happened on several occasions, both in person
00:08:27.520 and over the phone, including at the first minister's meeting in Ottawa on January 29th,
00:08:32.640 the source says. Another of these sources said the premier recounted to them that Mr. Ford had advised
00:08:38.080 Mr. Carney to trigger an election. Mr. Ford won a third majority government after he called an early
00:08:44.280 election last year, saying he needed a mandate to take on U.S. President Donald Trump. The first
00:08:49.520 source said the two leaders have also discussed their respective poll numbers, including those that
00:08:54.080 show Mr. Carney is much farther ahead in personal popularity than conservative party leader Pierre
00:09:00.560 Polyev. Now, I feel like this is all pointing to the idea that Doug Ford really wants to try and
00:09:06.440 replace Pierre Polyev as the federal conservative leader. And despite at the recent PCAGM him saying,
00:09:12.800 oh, no, I want a fourth term. I want a full 15 years as as premier. I think that's true until it's not
00:09:20.300 true. I think Doug Ford really just is saying that because he doesn't want anyone to think he's scheming,
00:09:26.260 even though in this story, he has just been caught scheming, telling Carney that it would be a great
00:09:32.180 idea for him to go to a snap election while he is at the height of his popularity. Now, I'm just
00:09:37.380 going to quickly pull some polls up on screen. This isn't going to be a polling video on the whiteboard.
00:09:42.160 I just want to give you some context of the sort of polls that Mr. Carney is currently reacting to
00:09:47.000 and why he might call an election. Now, we're going to start off with one from ResearchCo that is
00:09:53.200 helping drive the narrative that if Carney calls an election, he's easily going to win a majority
00:09:57.360 government. This poll is from ResearchCo conducted between February 4th and 6th with 1,001 people
00:10:03.980 answering the poll. And it has the Liberals at 45 percent, the Conservatives at 32, that being a 13
00:10:10.140 percent lead for the Liberals, NDPs at 10, Bloc Québécois at 7. Obviously, that's all in Quebec.
00:10:15.760 Green Party is at 3 and PPC is at 2. Now, I don't actually think this poll is accurate. And I'll even
00:10:22.280 scroll up just to show you what I think is more realistic. Now, I think right now, and I know
00:10:27.740 people are like, no, any poll that shows the Liberals leading is bad. Now, that's not a lot
00:10:32.000 of people, but I could see the Liberals being ahead by 4 percent right now. Nanos even gives
00:10:37.580 themselves a fairly, you know, pessimistic type margin of error. They give themselves a 3.1 percent
00:10:44.560 margin of error. So their numbers could be within 3 percent. Now, it's a little bit different when you
00:10:48.780 have a lot of parties. But, you know, the Liberals could be up by another one and a half points.
00:10:52.740 Conservatives could be up by another one and a half points. Liberals could be down. I don't think
00:10:56.680 the Conservatives are actually below 35 percent at all. NDP is probably maybe a little overpolled here.
00:11:02.400 Maybe the Bloc is too. But I think this is more realistic. But Carney may accidentally screw himself
00:11:09.860 over by triggering an election because of all these frankly ridiculous polls showing he's at 50 percent
00:11:15.800 and Polyev's at 30. It's like, do you really think that that's true? Polyev just got an 87 percent
00:11:22.240 approval vote in his leadership review at the Federal Conservative Convention. And now I'm going to
00:11:27.200 qualify that by saying, obviously, those people are predisposed to liking him. They are Conservative
00:11:31.920 Party members at the convention. But my point is that if anyone on the ground seriously was feeling
00:11:37.780 that nobody likes Polyev, we can't win with him, there would have been a lot of anxiety and there
00:11:43.120 would have been a lot of people even maybe consciously, maybe unconsciously voting, saying
00:11:48.540 we got to get rid of him because we need to bring in someone more unifying. Now, I don't actually
00:11:52.500 think there is anyone more unifying than Polyev. I'm not saying he's the height of unity. I'm not
00:11:57.560 saying that everyone else sucks but him or something like that. My point is that it's kind of a media
00:12:02.620 trick acting like whoever the Conservative Party leaders, oh, people just don't like him. Maybe if they
00:12:07.640 put in someone like Aaron O'Toole, Canadians would vote for this party, even though the Conservatives
00:12:13.060 lost with Aaron O'Toole. And at the time, the media was like, oh my goodness, if only they had
00:12:18.340 someone like Andrew Scheer. And when the Conservatives had someone like Andrew Scheer, the media was like,
00:12:22.800 oh my goodness, if only they had someone like Stephen Harper. And when Stephen Harper was around
00:12:27.060 before he won his majority, they were like, well, maybe people would like him more if he was more
00:12:32.180 like Brian Mulrooney or more like Kim Campbell or Stockwell Day. Stockwell Day is amazing, by the
00:12:37.600 way. I'm not trying to slag anyone here. But you always get this stuff. JJ McCullough just made a great
00:12:44.000 video and congratulations to him on making his 600th video. I know I've made over like 1,200 videos, but
00:12:49.900 heck, I'm making like one or two videos a day. That guy puts in like real effort into all of his content and
00:12:54.740 like draws his own cartoons to put in the video. It's great. But he noted that all of the polling asking
00:13:00.660 people what Polyev could be doing better to make him more likable ends up contradicting things like
00:13:06.500 Polyev constantly talks about kitchen table issues. One of the things the main criticisms of people who
00:13:11.280 supposedly don't like Polyev was that he doesn't talk enough about kitchen table issues. That just
00:13:16.340 seems like a backhanded attack on Polyev from people who probably are just predisposed not to like him
00:13:21.600 and pretending that he doesn't talk about the issues I care about. He does. You just don't like him
00:13:26.420 because either you're a hardcore liberal or because you just follow whatever the TV box,
00:13:32.120 the CBC box tells you about him. Oh, he's mean. He's Trump-like, so I can't like him.
00:13:38.160 I think Polyev is the type of guy who actually gets more vote than his popularity would ascribe to him,
00:13:43.920 kind of like Donald Trump, which is a strange comparison. You know, if you treat him like any
00:13:48.180 politician-like crap and demonize them, naturally, I think there are people who are going to say they
00:13:53.840 don't like them, but they'll vote for them anyways because they secretly do like them.
00:13:57.020 Same thing with Mark Carney, but in reverse. He's so boring that you kind of don't hate him,
00:14:01.740 but it doesn't mean you're actually going to vote for his party if you say that you approve of him.
00:14:06.260 This is all a very long and winding way of coming back and saying that Polyev at the moment,
00:14:12.000 really his approval numbers inside the party and elsewhere other indicators don't really show that
00:14:17.960 he's a man who is going to have a hard time running in another election. Doesn't mean he's going to
00:14:22.100 lose, but he's not as unpopular as the polls would suggest, and I don't think that the
00:14:27.580 Conservative Party federally wants a Doug Ford. I want to bring this other thing up on screen right
00:14:32.500 now, and I want to highlight something from the new Blue Party. Honestly, they always have really 0.99
00:14:36.580 good-looking communications. I know I'm rambling a little bit in this video. First, I do want to
00:14:41.960 highlight the fact that Jamil Giovanni absolutely was right back on April 30th, a little bit after the
00:14:48.600 election when he helped the Liberals win, that the Ontario PC Party is effectively a federal
00:14:53.880 liberal front group. He posted this fantastic meme. We also have this from the new Blue Party in
00:14:59.100 Ontario, and it says, Doug Ford doesn't oppose the federal Liberals. He's piggybacking off of them
00:15:04.100 and pretends he's conservative. And then you can see the graphic right here. This is the new Blue
00:15:09.940 Party kind of leadership team. It's the husband and wife, Jim and Belinda Carajalios. Belinda being a
00:15:15.040 former MPP, and Jim was the guy who started actually the Axe the Carbon Tax movement back in
00:15:20.260 2018. People always forget about that. But I think at this point, the Conservatives honestly do just
00:15:26.200 need to kick Doug Ford to the curb, at least in a subtle way. The federal Conservatives should never
00:15:32.540 pretend the PCs are a partner of them. Doug Ford is loosey in this football. Every single time
00:15:39.100 Conservatives try and partner with him, and maybe we can partner on some Conservative initiatives,
00:15:43.540 he just doesn't follow through because he's not Conservative. At the end of the day, he loves the
00:15:48.880 subsidy economics of the federal Liberals. He doesn't want Polly of winning and cutting off
00:15:53.320 all the subsidies the federal government gives to industries in Ontario. He doesn't want to build a
00:15:58.280 real economy by lowering tax and regulations. He just wants the federal government to keep pumping
00:16:02.580 money into Ontario from the taxpayers, rather than actually just, you know, doing it the hard way and
00:16:08.660 just cutting off the gravy train. And so I think that the, like the federal Conservatives don't need
00:16:13.860 to partner with like a new blue party, but just withhold, withhold your vote from the PCs. Don't help
00:16:20.940 them if Doug Ford's going to keep doing this stuff, just leave them, just kick them to the curb. This is
00:16:25.160 all just useless. But maybe I'll do this. I think I can find it. Before I end this video here. I remember
00:16:33.480 seeing a great Canadian bagel, I believe, or somebody else did a critique on the new research
00:16:39.040 co-poll. It's pretty bad, the research co-poll in terms of the actual results. I'm going to quickly
00:16:45.920 find this. I actually might pause because I didn't bring this up on screen yet, but I'm going to bring
00:16:49.360 it to you guys just so you understand why when I look at a poll result that puts the Liberals above
00:16:54.280 the Conservatives by 13 points, I'm not just being like, well, I hope they're, I want the Conservatives
00:16:59.200 to be doing better. I can show you why the poll should not be trusted. Okay, I found it. Now we
00:17:06.000 can bring it up on screen and talk about it. So here is on the website 338.com. This is all of the
00:17:14.000 research co-polls conducted since the last election. And the first thing you should notice is that they
00:17:18.640 basically don't do much federal polling at all. And back here, this is the federal elections. They
00:17:23.560 haven't even done four polls. They've done three. They did one in July. They did one in October or
00:17:29.760 actually September. And they've done one just now with a big departure since their last poll.
00:17:36.580 They always showed the Liberals in the lead, but this is a pretty massive expansion in their lead
00:17:41.280 from simply what is that five points back in September. And now it's 13 points as of February
00:17:48.160 5th or so. But look at the regionals here. The regionals, honestly, they're not that bad for the
00:17:54.740 Conservatives in a place like Atlantic Canada. The Conservatives would honestly take something with
00:17:58.520 like 34 to 37. That's not that bad for the Conservatives. But you go to like Quebec and the
00:18:04.780 Conservatives are only at like 17 points, which is horrific for them. They're at, what do we have
00:18:10.660 here? In Alberta, they're like barely leading 44 to 34. And in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, the Liberals are
00:18:16.540 in fact leading when obviously that's a place the Conservatives do really, really well in simply
00:18:21.660 because, well, Saskatchewan is the most conservative province. And even if Manitoba isn't, you expect a
00:18:27.780 massive Conservative lead because Conservatives do well in rural Manitoba. They win a couple suburban
00:18:33.520 ridings, but then they mop up when it comes to Saskatchewan. So even if the Liberals are doing well in
00:18:38.580 Winnipeg, even if they grab up one rural Saskatchewan riding, a good Liberal performance in Saskatchewan
00:18:45.640 is like 35, 32 percent. And then the Conservatives should be at like 50. It's just how politics works
00:18:51.600 in Manitoba. 15 is maybe even an overpoll for the NDP there. Alberta, 18 percent feels like an
00:18:58.400 overpoll. British Columbia, and this demonstrates how much of an overpoll it is for 18 percent in
00:19:03.600 Alberta for the NDP. NDP is only at 15 in British Columbia when that's kind of like one of their bread
00:19:09.220 and butter provinces. Not as much like Alberta, where the only positive city is Edmonton, where
00:19:15.980 they get like one or two seats. I think they only have one, and that is Heather McPherson running 1.00
00:19:20.760 through the leadership right now of the federal NDP. So yeah, I'm not being like, oh, well, it doesn't
00:19:26.360 have this poll doesn't have the Conservatives leading, ergo I don't believe them. Also, here's
00:19:31.420 another telltale sign a poll is bad. Female and male voters vote very differently in this country. 0.95
00:19:36.940 Not like extremely wide, but it's significant. This is a very, very unified voter base. Other
00:19:43.760 than female voters voting significantly more NDP than Bloc Québécois, the liberal and conservative
00:19:49.240 numbers are like basically no different. 31 percent female voters for the Conservatives, 0.99
00:19:54.760 34 male voters, 34 percent male voters for the Conservatives. It really should be like in a more
00:20:00.740 reasonable poll that the female voters should actually be voting Conservatives significantly less 0.98
00:20:05.400 and males should be voting for it significantly more. There's not that much variation, which
00:20:10.020 probably just says that research pulled a lot of downtown Toronto liberal boomers. That's kind of it.
00:20:17.280 Anyways, but with all that being said, thank you guys for watching this video. Make sure to like,
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00:21:11.120 not actual pure news, I think it's actually has some value in learning about politics and figuring out
00:21:17.780 who you want to vote for, figuring out the dynamics and the polling. I don't think it's useful for me to
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00:21:32.840 thank you guys for watching. I'll see you all next time.