In this episode, I discuss why the People's Party of Canada has faded into irrelevancy, and if it's really the PPC or the Conservative Party that's to blame. I also give my perspective on why Maxime Bernier should have been elected in the first place.
00:00:00.240Hello, everyone. Wyatt Claypool here. And on the show today, I want to discuss the People's Party of Canada, its leader, Maxime Bernier, as well as Pierre Polyev, the leader of the Conservative Party.
00:00:13.040I made a post on X yesterday saying I might make a video on this and then giving my reasons why I think the PPC is done as a party at this point.
00:00:22.180And the response was good enough. I basically had to make this video and give you my perspective on why the PPC has faded into irrelevancy and whether it was Maxime Bernier who killed the PPC or was Pierre Polyev and the Conservative Party who killed the PPC.
00:00:39.540So I'm going to be answering that question hopefully for you today, at least from my perspective.
00:00:44.640Of course, leave a comment on what you think about the topic, you know, like this video, subscribe, do all that great stuff.
00:00:51.140But I'm just going to get straight into it. So I have been critiquing the PPC from the outside, not from the perspective that some Conservative supporters have that, oh, it's helping out the Liberals, it's splitting the vote in 2021, that they're paid by the Liberals.
00:01:06.680Guys, that's not true. I think most vote splitting is effectively a myth. You don't split your vote, you lose your vote to somebody else.
00:01:15.140And you only lost it because you didn't have it in the first place, which plays into my point about the PPC today.
00:01:22.340They don't have support because they lost it. Nobody else stole it from them.
00:01:27.040Yes, when Pierre Polyev became the Conservative Party leader in late 2022, it really ate into the PPC's polling numbers.
00:01:35.240But that's because the PPC's polling numbers were never robust in the first place.
00:01:39.820Nobody really was voting for the PPC. They just didn't like Aaron O'Toole, as nobody should have liked him.
00:01:45.780I voted for the People's Party in 2021, not because I agree with every single thing Maxime Bernier says.
00:01:52.400I think he's generally on the mark on most issues.
00:01:55.820But I was mostly just voting to not vote for the Conservatives because Aaron O'Toole had completely hollowed out all the principles of the Conservative Party.
00:02:03.140And to say something right here, right off the bat, there's a lot of people out there saying,
00:02:08.280well, the PPC's were actually responsible for Pierre Polyev becoming the leader and then becoming more conservative.
00:02:14.920Although the same PPC people will also still say the Conservative Party is still a uniparty and they're still basically socialists, as somebody told me today, which is pathfully absurd.
00:02:23.840The Conservatives were always far more conservative than Aaron O'Toole sort of portrayed as a leader.
00:02:30.660They were always more conservative probably than even Andrew Scheer was, at least on fiscal issues, since Andrew Scheer is pretty conservative when it comes to social issues.
00:02:39.480Bernier didn't move the Conservatives.
00:02:42.360Aaron O'Toole just fell out of favor and they went back towards the more conservative norm.
00:02:47.460Plus, Canadians in general became more conservative.
00:02:50.540So Pierre Polyev positioned himself more along the lines of what most Canadians wanted.
00:02:55.960They didn't want somebody who was soft on whether or not they were going to cut the carbon tax.
00:02:59.660They want someone who was very hard on saying they're going to cut the carbon tax.
00:03:02.940They want someone saying that immigration is too high, that we need to reduce regulations on house building.
00:03:07.940That doesn't mean getting rid of zoning laws.
00:03:09.500It just means speeding up housing by reducing regulations, reducing taxes, labor codes, all this sort of thing.
00:03:16.360We've had zoning laws forever, and somehow it never made housing expensive in the past.
00:03:22.440Obviously, the main issues are regulations and mass immigration.
00:03:26.100But Polyev has genuinely been far more conservative on those issues than any of the previous conservative leaders.
00:03:33.340But you'll still have the PPC saying he's still not conservative enough.
00:03:36.840And this is where I'm getting into, yes, Polyev became the leader and took some PPC support, but he didn't kill the PPC.
00:03:46.340Maxime Bernier has personal agency to do the right thing and position himself better on the issues.
00:03:52.320And my perspective is that Bernier killed the PPC.
00:03:55.920The People's Party of Canada could have been a thing.
00:03:58.640And I'm going to go all the way back to 2019, the first federal election that the PPC contested.
00:04:04.720From my perspective, Bernier intentionally flubbed that election.
00:04:09.680The PPC only got 1.9% support, but that doesn't really matter.
00:04:12.940You don't actually need a lot of popular vote support in order to have a political impact.
00:04:18.200My problem is it seemed like Bernier didn't actually want to have a political impact by winning a seat.
00:04:23.080And he intentionally never campaigned at all in his riding of Bose.
00:04:26.900He only lost Bose, can I remind people, by around 10%.
00:04:31.400I think it was like 9.8%, which isn't a big loss considering that Bose was a riding that was only really being contested between Bernier and his conservative opponent.
00:04:41.360If he took 5% from the conservative of the vote, he would have been tied with them.
00:05:04.560I think he intentionally didn't do that because he's already being paid to be the PPC leader, $114,000 a year.
00:05:10.860Plus, if he doesn't get back into Parliament, he can just start taking his pension.
00:05:14.280I don't think Bernier ever actually wanted to win.
00:05:16.820Why else would he just be gallivanting around rural Alberta and rural Manitoba, rural Saskatchewan, winning no seats?
00:05:24.820Yes, you can gain a lot of rural votes, but you're not going to get more than 15%, 16%, even the most rural supportive ridings you can find.
00:05:33.440You have to prove, and it's crazy I have to give her a compliment, you have to prove the formula works.
00:05:39.460And Elizabeth May did that with the Green Party.
00:06:09.800But there was enough kind of a granola conservative crossover voters who are willing to vote green because there's a lot of anti-establishment voters who vote green, even though they maybe don't even agree with the policies.
00:06:21.080They like voting for non-typical politicians.
00:06:24.180So Elizabeth May targeted this riding, literally flew in tons of Green Party activists from around Canada and the U.S. to hit doors with her, to drop leaflets, to put up signs.
00:06:33.820She was there for months in advance of the election, and she won it.
00:06:38.660Bernier, after he lost in Boas twice in 2019 and 2021, and then for some reason ran in York Center just to get slapped, you never run your leader in a dead-on-arrival riding.
00:06:51.260That's a great way of stealing away their mystique.
00:06:53.820Watching your leader get less than 5% of the vote in a given riding is a very stupid idea.
00:06:59.000But anyways, then in 2023, he targets the riding of Portage Lisgar.
00:07:05.300He's going to run in the PPC's best riding in 2021, which is really pathetic that his best riding wasn't his own.
00:07:11.820He only got like 18% the second time in Boas, even though the first time he got like 36%.
00:07:18.440So he goes to Portage Lisgar, which the PPC got 21% in the last time.
00:07:23.700He only shows up 28 days, 30 days before the race.
00:07:27.420He knew there was going to be a by-election there for probably six months because when Bergen, Candace Bergen, the interim leader for the Conservatives between O'Toole and Polyev, when she said that she was going to resign from Parliament, she's going to be retiring, he knew that that was going to be a coming by-election area, and it was a really great riding for the PPC.
00:07:45.760He could have been there for six months, talking to people, showing that he was serious, moving to the riding, buying a house there, you know, showing up to farmers markets, talking to people at churches, going to bars, just meeting people at where they're at.
00:07:59.240Instead, he shows up right when the Ritt gets dropped for that election, and he gets clobbered by Brandon Leslie, the Conservative candidate, who had already had to run in a nomination to become the Conservative candidate in that riding, so he had already been campaigning for months.
00:08:13.660Did Bernie really think he was going to show up, still dressed like a Montreal ponce, and that people in Portage Lisgar, a partially farming community, was going to vote for him?
00:08:23.260He's out of his mind to think they would, and I don't think he actually is out of his mind, I think he knew he was going to lose, and he intentionally lost, because he doesn't actually want the PPC to get traction, because that might mean work.
00:08:34.880And so, that's the real thing here, Bernie doesn't work, that's why he's losing, but to keep people donating, and the donations are drying up right now, this is where I'll bring up Twitter, donations are drying up.
00:08:46.040But to be able to keep the donations coming in the last couple years, because they raised more than a million dollars in 2023, which is decently impressive, since Polyev is the Conservative leader, and he was gaining a lot of traction.
00:08:57.580So, it showed that the PPC hadn't run out of gas yet, there were still the resources around to try and expand.
00:09:04.040Right now, they're only at $582,189, with all three of the last quarters combined.
00:09:10.600That's absolutely pathetic. You cannot run a party nationally on this kind of a budget.
00:09:17.460But to keep people donating, he takes hardcore stances, and that's what drives me off the wall with Maxime Bernier.
00:09:26.400Oh, here Polyev wants to lower immigration, even below what Justin Trudeau just proposed, down to 400,000 permanent residents.
00:09:33.220Polyev wants to go even lower, and has been telling French media and other media that he wants immigration rates to be much lower, temporary foreign worker rates to be much lower, all that stuff.
00:09:43.180Well, Bernier will come out and say, I want a moratorium.
00:09:45.500See, Polyev, you're a communist compared to me, because I have taken a ridiculously purist position, which you're not going to take, because you're not insane.
00:09:53.240But I get to go talk to my supporters, who still believe in me, and say, see, he's still liberal light.
00:09:59.180He's still part of the uniparty, because he doesn't want zero immigration.
00:10:03.920Even people who want very low immigration, I want very low immigration for the next several years, because of how high it's been over the past decade.
00:11:21.680So that's where the PPC undermines itself.
00:11:24.020And that's where I want to bring up some more Maxime Bernier posts.
00:11:27.420It's delusional how he casts himself as being like a populist hero like Donald Trump, when he hasn't put the work in that Donald Trump did.
00:11:36.300Where is the membership signups for the PPC?
00:11:40.680Their EDAs get dissolved all the time because they don't even put in their paperwork, their financials at the end of the year that every party has to.
00:11:46.800It's because they aren't putting in the work.
00:11:48.240Here's what Maxime Bernier said after Donald Trump won the presidency.
00:11:51.560This is on the 9th, so it's a few days afterwards.
00:11:53.980He says, woke leftists are saying that right-wing populist politicians like me, Trump and others, are fascists.
00:13:45.280Bernier, despite being the freedom guy, is effectively a dictator of his party.
00:13:48.880You cannot do – they had a leadership review, but he did the leadership review right after the 21 election where a lot of people were, like, happy that the PPC got 5%, not 1.9%.
00:13:59.440And so he passed it, even though – even if he failed that leadership test, it wouldn't have mattered because Bernier chooses if he stops being a leader or not.
00:14:07.260He has the same protections as leader that Justin Trudeau does.
00:14:11.000Nobody can throw him out, and nobody's membership means anything.
00:14:14.480You don't get to vote on anything other than if he lets you vote on it at the time that best suits himself.
00:14:18.980But here's him delusionally talking about how he has momentum.
00:15:41.800Actually, that happens with the new blue party in Ontario.
00:15:44.340Small party starting off doesn't have seats yet.
00:15:46.360But from when it ran in the 22 Ontario provincial election and into the by-elections, it's basically maintained its support around 5%, 6% or so.
00:15:55.200In many of the ridings in the southwest they ran in, they're able to score better in some of these by-elections by small margins.
00:16:02.220But that's not bad if you're a small party being able to hold on to the support you previously won.
00:16:07.720I'd encourage people even to join the new blue party of Ontario because Doug Ford is just not actually conservative.
00:16:14.080He is very liberal in both his social and fiscal policy.
00:16:18.140And so to give him a slap on the head at the very least, someone should join the new blue party to actually pose a threat to the PCs rather than just simply being the best of the worst between himself, the Liberals, and the NDP.
00:16:29.240He's blowing out the spending on Ontario.
00:16:31.640He is doing the same types of subsidy politics that Justin Trudeau does.
00:16:35.200He just targets subsidies to specific industries and regions in order to try and win support in those areas.
00:16:41.720He literally will partner with Trudeau at times to do that same thing where they'll both go in on the same EV or battery plant subsidized jobs in order to both claim credit for creating jobs and driving the economy even though it's fake jobs because you had to pay for them to exist.
00:16:56.780Anyways, but I'll let Bernier to get back to his point here.
00:17:05.460We are not afraid to say that this country has been built on the supremacy of God and the rule of law.
00:17:15.920You could tell he was uncomfortable saying that one because Bernier, spoiler alert, and I don't care, but Bernier is an atheist.
00:17:22.120I don't care that he is, but stop pretending that you're a big social conservative now.
00:17:30.080Here's a great one where somebody was responding to this guy, Alex Cargill, transplender on X, attacking my post about Bernier.
00:17:40.060And this guy agreed with Alex saying, what a maroon.
00:17:44.000He sees that Maxime Bernier is gaining traction, mostly because of his strong and consistent message on mass immigration and wants to get out in front of that before it intensifies.
00:17:53.600New addition to the rebel smear machine dot com.
00:18:02.920I've had Bernier on the show before, back in the day, and then he didn't answer our questions about the Constitution because he wasn't going to make one, even though he keeps promising it.
00:18:18.020The traction died, and Bernier killed it because Bernier hasn't put the work in.
00:18:22.880Just taking good positions on policy, and I can agree with a lot of the PPC's positions, just taking a good position doesn't mean that you've marketed that position.
00:18:31.100You've got to take a good position and then market it to people.
00:18:34.280I tell people all the time, I hate the Aaron O'Toole way of doing politics, where you water yourself down until you're so inoffensive that, in theory, anyone could vote for you.
00:18:46.800But if you're the party for everyone, you're also the party for nobody.
00:18:49.840People vote on issues that they're passionate about, and Aaron O'Toole lacked passion.
00:18:53.860I always tell people, run on very conservative ideas and values and platform points, and then figure out how to describe that to somebody who might not be very conservative.
00:19:06.520I got kicked out of a conservative nomination because certain advisors at the top of the party didn't want me to win.
00:19:12.060But I was gaining massive support running against immigration, running on reducing spending in government, running on putting way more police on the streets, expanding military spending, reducing a lot of bloated immigration incentive programs.
00:19:37.240There's no incentives to do anything right because the PPC's genuine theory on politics, or at least the cheerleaders, are everyone is just a temporarily confused populist PPC supporter who's only voting for the conservatives or the liberals or the NDP because they haven't been woken up yet.
00:19:53.960This is also what we call woke politics.
00:19:55.880The idea that everyone's just an asleep sheep until they will wake up one day to the injustice of the system and start voting for your party.
00:20:02.720If you sound like a far left Antifa communist, but from the right, you're doing something wrong.
00:20:09.800And I'm not accusing them of being lefties, obviously.
00:20:12.620I'm just saying that when your theory of politics, that things just have to get bad enough, then people flock over to you.
00:20:18.160If that's your theory of how things are going to work, you're not going to win ever.
00:21:11.300It's just a stupid little jab to say to make your people like you more, to make your own supporters who are already supporting you keep supporting you harder.
00:21:20.240Here, I'm going to try and find this other one.
00:21:21.900It's crazy the type of people he retweets.
00:21:23.900He'll just retweet the most openly, not case type accounts as long as they're screeching his name enough.
00:21:29.800And the problem with what I would say is purity politics is eventually with purity politics, you will cause other people from the right to say you're not pure enough.
00:21:39.460Not even really on the right because I find who I'm about to talk about, white nationalists, are in fact not on the right.
00:21:45.580They're collectivist leftists when you actually know what their social and economic views are.
00:21:50.920And so now he has all these morons, these people who fell out of pickup trucks and landed headfirst like Ferryman's Troll, criticizing Bernier because he met with a Hindu group.
00:21:59.340That's how nuts some of the people who used to support him are, that if you meet with Indian people, you're now bad.
00:22:04.780But here's something that he posted himself, not just retweeting someone.
00:22:08.200Oh, pure poly is against the carbon tax, but he's in favor of the Paris climate agreement.
00:22:56.660No, they invited him to speak, and Trump likes to speak to crowds.
00:22:59.960And he'll even attack the organization that he's on stage speaking at.
00:23:04.260Javier Mele did this when he went to the UN and went to the WEF, just basically made fun of them and saying that you guys are the past and you guys are like socialist nutcases.
00:23:12.880You can go to the places without being tainted.
00:23:34.340It's an immaterial issue because other than like Chrystia Freeland inside the Liberal Party, no politician is ever going to say something nice about the WEF or run on a WEF platform.
00:23:46.340Like, yes, the liberals are very much in line with the WEF, but that's just saying they're in line.
00:23:52.620They just happen to agree on those issues.
00:23:54.860That's really the real secret of the WEF.
00:23:56.700There's a lot of idiots and they all happen to agree with each other.
00:23:59.660Regardless, what type of voters care how hardcore the PPC is?
00:24:29.080There's a lot of parties that have succeeded that are smaller, start out small.
00:24:32.440BC Conservatives, even I would say the new blue party of Ontario, even though it hasn't won a seat yet, has been operating EDAs in all 124 ridings.
00:24:53.440Some people didn't like certain aspects of it or the membership, but it was done democratically because they promised to do that and they fulfilled it.
00:25:00.100Bernier hasn't because he's not about fulfilling promises.
00:25:07.760He was one of the most pro-abortion people inside the Conservative Party when he was still a Conservative MP.
00:25:12.140Anyways, that's it for me today, guys.
00:25:16.180That's my – actually, you know what?
00:25:17.520I'm going to end this video off with just me reading my post because I think it was at least a good way of summing this whole conversation up.
00:25:29.420What I was basing this entire video on, I suppose, but I think I put more eloquently when I wrote it down.
00:25:35.140I said, I'm probably going to make a video tomorrow on why Maxine Bernier and the PPC failed to gain traction.
00:25:40.940But here's a general overview of the topic.
00:25:43.120Pure poly of the Conservatives didn't steal their momentum.
00:25:45.320They didn't earn the momentum they got when O'Toole was leader.
00:25:47.820So all the momentum faded after the 2021 election.
00:25:51.260The PPC could have maintained their 5% support and even potentially grown if they played their cards right and, you know, actually tried.
00:25:58.360The PPC influencers believe all voters are just temporarily confused populists and will eventually wake up and support the PPC is how you stay at 1% to 2% in the polls.
00:26:09.120People vote for candidates and parties they trust.
00:26:11.140If you truly believe people are just confused or being tricked into not voting for you, then you don't understand the average voter.
00:26:17.000The PPC has also made itself an anti-CPC party rather than an alternative to the current Liberals the way the other far more serious parties position themselves as.
00:26:26.260Campaigns are job interviews for government, but the PPC is not interviewing to become the next government.
00:26:31.600It is interviewing to be the next opposition or more purest version of the Conservatives, which is not what voters care about.
00:26:38.180Voters want a new government, not a more hardcore version of the opposition.
00:26:41.920Couldn't have said it better myself because it was me saying that.
00:26:47.840But that does touch on another thing, too.
00:26:51.240The PPC only criticizes the Conservatives.
00:26:53.340They'll criticize the Liberals sometimes, but they mostly criticize the Liberals under the umbrella of the Uniparty.
00:27:01.220They don't criticize the Liberals on their own terms and say what they would do better.
00:27:05.200They mostly just say that the Conservatives aren't doing good enough and we do whatever the Conservatives are doing but more.
00:27:11.440And nobody really wants that right now.
00:27:13.500Nobody actually thinks if Polyev becomes the new Prime Minister that there won't be substantial change.
00:27:18.640Polyev is running very hard on substantial change and they can say, well, he's like, well, how can you prove he will do substantially different things?
00:27:28.080It's like the problem with Polyev is he said so much that he wants to change that if he didn't change things substantially, he would lose the next election because people would say you're a liar and you didn't achieve 90% of the things you said you were going to do.
00:27:40.320And so Polyev has put himself in a position where he's incentivized to deliver.
00:27:47.900He is not incentivized to win an election.
00:27:51.000He is incentivized to seem more hardcore than Conservatives.
00:27:53.920And even the issues the PPC dwells on are issues where either the Conservatives are already good on those issues and Canadians agree with them and the PPC is just saying, well, we're 5% better.
00:28:05.700Or they constantly talk about foreign policy in such a way that Canadians don't care.
00:28:10.320Canadians don't think that somebody is a traitor to the nation or anti-patriotic if they care about Israel or Ukraine.
00:28:17.180But that's where the PPC have positioned themselves and unnecessarily alienated tons and tons of people.
00:28:22.900Just basically said that you're not a true patriot if you care about the sovereignty of other nations outside of Canada.
00:28:28.860You can care about other countries outside of Canada and still care about Canada, guys.
00:28:49.080If you want to support the show, you can donate to the Give, Send, Go in the description below as well as at the top of the comments.
00:28:55.320I know I'm going to be accused of being paid now because I've made a video on the PPC.
00:28:59.920But I do indeed fundraise money for my legal fund through these little donation links.
00:29:06.080And then I make my money through AdSense money.
00:29:08.740Apparently, though, I'm a conservative shill, even though I was kicked out of conservative nomination because people at the top didn't like that I wasn't, I don't know, like a shill.
00:29:20.560That's not a problem with 99% of the party.
00:29:22.620There was just a couple of advisors who didn't even necessarily hate me, but they just wanted their own guy in.
00:29:28.060And if you know how my story ended in Calgary Signal Hill, I actually made sure the guy that certain party advisors were trying to jam through, I made sure he still lost.