The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - February 01, 2025


Doug Ford's early election looks set to actually work (Ontario polling analysis)

Topics
early election necessity trade war fiasco
Hosted by
Wyatt Claypool
Mentioned
Doug Ford Erin O'Toole Donald Trump Justin Trudeau Bonnie Crombie Stephen Del Duca Merritt Stiles Bobby Ann Brady Andrea Horvath Pierre Poilievre Michael Ignatieff Kathleen Wynne Dalton McGinty Danielle Smith Leslyn Lewis Mark Carney Thunder Bay Lex Luthor David Eby Scott Moe and 3 more
Liberals memberships numbers are pathetic compared to Conservatives! Liberals' fake patriotism games hurting Canadians with trade war (ft. Greg Staley)

Episode Stats


Length

19 minutes

Words per minute

187.42

Word count

3,607

Sentence count

220

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

7

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

It's election day in Ontario, and the polls are starting to come into focus. Doug Ford is on track to win a majority government, but there are still a lot of undecideds in the race. I break down the polling numbers and give my thoughts on who I think is going to win the election.

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 As much as I am loathe to say it as a conservative who actually cares about conservative policy, Doug Ford's early election ploy looks like it might actually work, and he will win not only a majority government, but a bigger majority than he already had.
00:00:16.500 This could also all fall apart as debates happen and as the public potentially turns on an early election at the same time that the U.S. is imposing tariffs on Canada, but all that is going to be left to the campaign to decide.
00:00:31.380 I want to break down some of the polls for you guys here today, what Main Street research has been showing, and then I will also be referring to what other pollsters have been showing.
00:00:40.540 I generally favor what Main Street is saying just simply because other pollsters showing the PCs at 51% in my mind isn't realistic.
00:00:48.320 It's incredibly hard to get above 50% in Canadian politics in a multi-party system, and I don't believe that Doug Ford is the man to do it.
00:00:57.580 Even in 2022, when he had won a big majority, a bigger majority than he won in 2018, he won it with like 40% of the vote.
00:01:05.720 Really, the story of Ontario politics right now is just that Doug Ford might not be a very good leader.
00:01:11.700 He's not a good conservative at all.
00:01:13.280 In fact, he tracks closer to Justin Trudeau than he does Pierre Polyev, but his opposition is utterly incompetent.
00:01:20.880 Anyways, before I show you the polls over the last few days, remember guys, like this video, subscribe to the channel.
00:01:29.340 I'm trying to get to 100,000 by mid-December, and leave a comment.
00:01:33.380 What do you think about Ontario politics?
00:01:35.460 What party would you be voting for?
00:01:38.600 I would personally recommend people check out the new blue party of Ontario because it's not even like,
00:01:44.040 oh, I just don't like the PCs, and I don't care about the threat of the liberals.
00:01:48.440 The liberals and the Ontario PCs and the NDP are borderline the same.
00:01:52.880 It is almost impossible to really name big differences between them.
00:01:56.760 Doug Ford's not pro-business.
00:01:57.860 He's pro-subsidized business.
00:01:59.460 That's the same stance as Justin Trudeau has and Mark Carney and whatnot.
00:02:03.340 Anyways, before I start ranting.
00:02:05.680 So here is the tracking poll that Main Street Research has been putting out.
00:02:09.760 These are the public numbers.
00:02:10.840 I'm not going to show as many of the private numbers that you have to pay to see because it kind of undermines the point of paying.
00:02:16.960 But here is the day one results of their tracking poll.
00:02:20.580 And I'm including the undecideds because this early into the election, the undecideds do matter.
00:02:26.580 Towards the back end of an election, the undecideds are probably just people who aren't voting at all.
00:02:31.720 But this is for if people were to vote in the provincial election on this day, who would you be voting for?
00:02:36.560 The Ford PCs early on were just grabbing up 32% of the vote.
00:02:40.840 The Liberals, 24%, and the NDP, 19%.
00:02:44.160 Of course, you also have 4% with the Greens and 5% with other.
00:02:47.920 There is going to be divided between the New Blue Party and parties like the Libertarians and the Ontario Party.
00:02:54.040 By the way, don't vote for the Ontario Party.
00:02:57.000 It is literally a PC party front group to try and prevent people who are mad at Ford from voting for the New Blue Party.
00:03:03.080 I was the mediator between New Blue and Ontario when they were negotiating in December of 2021.
00:03:08.960 I can tell you Ontario Party is pretty fake.
00:03:11.740 They, in fact, tried to start up a federal version of their party in order to, like, basically create a bigger donation funnel. 0.98
00:03:18.180 It's silly.
00:03:19.480 Anyways, so here's day two, though.
00:03:22.020 And we, again, don't really see much change with day one.
00:03:25.600 Here is day one.
00:03:26.960 And here is day two.
00:03:28.600 What we actually see happening is undecideds increasing a little bit.
00:03:32.440 Not much, though.
00:03:33.840 The Liberals are still at 24%, but the NDP have dropped to 18%.
00:03:39.000 And this is going to be a trend we are going to continue seeing.
00:03:42.280 PC is still at 32%.
00:03:43.580 Now let's just jump to day three, which is the poll that Main Street Research released today, which was, of course, polling that was done yesterday.
00:03:51.700 And we have the Conservatives now suddenly jump from 32% to 35% with the Liberals contracting by 1%.
00:03:59.360 But most significantly, we see the NDP has gone from 18% to 16%.
00:04:05.280 And then when we go back to day one, they've, in fact, contracted from 19% to 16%.
00:04:10.900 That is not very good.
00:04:13.160 And if we look at day one to day three, the undecideds are actually growing the most over time.
00:04:19.220 And I think that is going to be probably good news for the PCs and Doug Ford that, again, their opposition doesn't really know where to go.
00:04:27.640 And you are going to get that certain type of default Ontario voter that when they see Bonnie Crombie and the Liberals disorganized and they see Merritt Stiles and the NDP disorganized, naturally, you're just going to default back to PC.
00:04:41.180 If you're a disgruntled conservative, this is where ploys like the Ontario Party come in.
00:04:46.200 And you look at the alternative party scene and everything looks so divided up between the Populist Party of Ontario, the Northern Ontario Party, New Blue and Ontario Party.
00:04:54.440 You're just going to say, well, what's the point? I'll just vote Doug Ford in the PCs or I'm going to stay home.
00:05:00.160 Ford wants people to stay home.
00:05:01.760 He won in 2022 off of that, off of the back of 57% of Ontario voters saying Ford's going to win anyways.
00:05:10.000 That's crazy when you think about it.
00:05:12.180 More than half of voters didn't vote.
00:05:14.320 And people just thought, what's the point?
00:05:16.660 When everyone, in theory, I know it's very hard to mobilize people.
00:05:20.180 I'm not that naive.
00:05:21.220 But people could have gotten behind an alternative party that was actually offering something new.
00:05:26.020 And I commend Bobby Ann Brady.
00:05:28.380 She ran as an independent in Halderman's Norfolk's provincial riding federally.
00:05:33.520 That's Leslie Lewis's riding.
00:05:35.220 She won as an independent after when she tried to run for the PC nomination.
00:05:39.060 She was arbitrarily kicked out because Doug Ford tried to install one of his friends in the riding. 0.96
00:05:44.000 And she actually kicked that guy's butt as somebody without a party behind her. 0.95
00:05:48.400 I think that if Bobby Ann Brady gets reelected and she shouldn't join a party right now because her brand right now is stronger as a person than a party. 1.00
00:05:56.120 But after the election, she can lend her brand to a party.
00:05:58.680 She should genuinely consider joining the new blue party because the PCs are going to be one of those parties, in my mind, that will eventually hit the wall from, frankly, just not doing things properly, from not actually meeting promises and whatnot.
00:06:16.020 And now they're running this election on the excuse that they need to stand up to Trump and they need a new mandate.
00:06:21.160 No, they don't.
00:06:22.140 In fact, they didn't need a mandate at all.
00:06:24.120 Was this really something that was out of the realms of possibilities that you'd maybe have to have a trade negotiation with the U.S.?
00:06:32.060 And Doug Ford's been one of the people steering into the tariffs.
00:06:34.620 But I'm going to show you some of the more detailed results from the recent Main Street poll.
00:06:39.220 Again, I'm not going to show you too much because I don't want to undermine the value of their polling that some people like myself pay for.
00:06:46.240 But look at this.
00:06:47.260 So right now, Ford's main strength, and this is typical for a conservative party, is with male voters.
00:06:52.720 But the problem that we now see with Merritt Stiles and the NDP and Bonnie Crombie and the Liberals is that men do not want to vote for them.
00:07:01.400 I don't blame men for not wanting to vote for these left-wing parties, but it's kind of silly that then so many people are settling with the PCs.
00:07:08.300 And I really can't name that many differences between Ford and Crombie.
00:07:12.660 And it's mostly stylistic differences, not policy differences.
00:07:15.560 But with the Ford PCs, they're mostly getting their strength from that 50 to 64 demographic and the middle-aged people demographic, 35 to 49,
00:07:26.160 with, again, a lot of his opposition broken up between the NDP and the Crombie Liberals,
00:07:33.640 where they're only at 16 and 16 or 17 and 23 or 12 and 24, 25 and 22.
00:07:39.100 The voters are not really settling anywhere in particular, and that's a really bad thing for the Liberals and the NDP.
00:07:48.060 None of these people deserve to win.
00:07:49.400 I'm going to keep reiterating that.
00:07:50.600 That's why I keep promoting New Blue.
00:07:52.020 By the way, if you don't have a New Blue candidate in your riding, I would actually recommend you maybe you become that New Blue candidate.
00:07:58.600 But now let's just quickly look at the numbers for what people actually think about this early election,
00:08:05.760 because I think that is actually going to play into, will Ford be able to maintain this lead?
00:08:11.140 And I think more likely than not, he will be.
00:08:13.680 But if anything falls apart, it's going to be on the fact that the early election was completely unnecessary,
00:08:18.740 and you might get a lot of ticked-off PC voters just staying home,
00:08:22.880 because this has been one of the pretty stable results day-to-day, too,
00:08:27.000 that a majority of decided people think the early election is complete nonsense.
00:08:32.000 It is a little bit more even these days, because a lot of people who are voting PC are naturally going to say,
00:08:37.420 of course, the early election is okay.
00:08:39.880 But I think that even about a third of PC voters do not like that an early election has happened.
00:08:46.220 And so with the election feeling unnecessary and the Ford PCs being ahead,
00:08:51.180 there also could be this possibility that the win is coming,
00:08:55.180 so why bother even attempting to actually, you know, vote?
00:08:59.620 Like, why even bother voting? Why even bother volunteering?
00:09:02.680 The Ford PCs are going to win anyways, and I didn't think this election was necessary,
00:09:06.840 where it might allow for left-wing activist groups to get their people up for the liberals and the NDP,
00:09:12.620 and they could end up scoring victories and ridings that we didn't maybe expect them to win.
00:09:16.980 But right now, we're seeing seat counts come out of this election based on the polling,
00:09:23.320 different modelers putting these polling results into their algorithms,
00:09:27.300 and it's popping out results where the PCs could win 100 seats.
00:09:31.300 Main streets, I believe, still gives the PCs a majority, even with only 36% of the vote, 35% of the vote.
00:09:38.040 And again, it's the problem is because the NDP and the liberals are kind of evenly popular in most regions,
00:09:46.300 and then the conservatives only need 35% of the vote to win.
00:09:50.420 They get 35%, the NDP and the liberals both only have 27 each,
00:09:55.360 and then there's some votes for other alternative parties in the Greens.
00:09:58.680 And so the conservatives, in a lot of ways, in Ontario,
00:10:02.000 are winning seats the same way the federal liberals win them.
00:10:04.720 It's not because anyone likes them, it's just because they're the consensus middle-of-the-road default party
00:10:10.340 for enough voters that there is not enough consolidation between the left to be able to beat him,
00:10:16.260 and there's not enough new people on the right to take away votes from the PCs in order for another party to win.
00:10:22.500 Again, I don't even think there's even that much of a problem with the liberals or NDP picking up more seats.
00:10:27.760 If anything, I'd actually like the conservatives to lose seats
00:10:30.680 because they need a bit of a slap on the back of the head.
00:10:33.260 But this was a selfish election.
00:10:36.200 Doug Ford is using Donald Trump's tariff threats as a reason to make himself seem all patriotic
00:10:41.640 and tough, even though he's been the one kicking Ontario taxpayers in the face,
00:10:48.320 just like Kathleen Wynne and Dalton McGinty were doing previously
00:10:51.820 with the extremely high taxes and regulations.
00:10:54.380 But as soon as Trump wants to tariff us and hurt our economy,
00:10:59.160 hey, it's our job as Team Canada to hurt our own taxpayers.
00:11:03.940 This is what drives me up the wall.
00:11:05.820 All of these people pretending like, I can't believe Trump would assault us this way.
00:11:09.440 And do I think Trump's acted reasonably on the tariff issue?
00:11:12.260 Not exactly.
00:11:13.840 I do think that we need to crack down on illegal border crossings, drugs, and guns on the border.
00:11:20.160 And that's both a Canadian and U.S. issue.
00:11:22.440 Obviously, the guns come up from the U.S.
00:11:24.060 and the drugs come mostly down from Canada into the U.S.
00:11:26.960 We need to solve that.
00:11:28.720 I wouldn't have put tariffs on if I was Trump.
00:11:30.560 I would have given the government of Canada more time
00:11:32.860 to get over their LARPing as big, tough freedom fighters against Trump.
00:11:37.320 But this is an issue that obviously needed to be dealt with.
00:11:40.860 Do you know that only less than 1% of shipping containers on ships coming from China or the East in general,
00:11:51.220 when they land in British Columbia, less than 1% of them are actually checked
00:11:55.780 to see if what is being shipped is really what is being shipped
00:11:58.880 or if there's not illegal contraband on it like supplies to manufacture fentanyl.
00:12:03.820 Because that's where all the fentanyl supplies comes from.
00:12:07.320 It's from Chinese companies that smuggle it in and then gangs collect it, 0.98
00:12:12.240 manufacture fentanyl, and then distribute it in Canada.
00:12:15.120 And make no mistake, they are also trying to distribute it over the border into the U.S.
00:12:19.780 These are not virtuous drug dealers.
00:12:22.020 They'll deal drugs to our people, but going over into Washington State
00:12:26.500 to sell it for even more money in Seattle?
00:12:29.000 Oh, no, of course, off limits. 0.66
00:12:30.760 We would never do something nasty like that, but we'll poison people in British Columbia.
00:12:35.260 This is where the B.C. government, David Eby's NDP government, Ford,
00:12:40.960 all the other people who are on Team Canada with Justin Trudeau are being delusional or dishonest.
00:12:46.860 This is a way of winning votes by seeming patriotic.
00:12:50.120 At the same time, the governments locally have been the real problem for why our domestic economy is weak.
00:12:55.560 It's not the U.S.'s fault.
00:12:57.260 It's not, yes, I don't like the tariffs, but it's not exactly fully the U.S.'s fault that we're in economic hard times.
00:13:03.780 If our economy had lower taxes, significantly lower taxes, a 25% tariff wouldn't be nice,
00:13:10.600 but we'd still be in a better economic condition than we are right now, even without the tariffs.
00:13:15.740 The tariffs actually don't even go on until Tuesday,
00:13:17.860 so I hope that someone in the Canadian government does what Danielle Smith and Scott Moe are doing
00:13:23.180 and actually put a lot of monitoring systems on the border, crack down on illegal drugs,
00:13:29.600 crack down on illegal U.S. guns coming into Canada.
00:13:31.780 Do it all, and if Trump still doesn't remove the tariffs, then we can call his bluff
00:13:35.860 and we can go directly to his voters and say he lied.
00:13:39.100 He didn't actually care about border security.
00:13:41.220 He just wanted to tariff us, and guess what?
00:13:42.820 If you live in the northern U.S., your agriculture products, your oil and gas,
00:13:48.380 all of your softwood lumber has artificially increased in price.
00:13:51.860 We did what Trump wants, and he doesn't care, but we can't call his bluff on that.
00:13:56.480 We can't say, well, obviously he didn't actually care about us doing border security when we didn't do it.
00:14:01.000 We can't call his bluff without doing the thing.
00:14:03.640 That's the problem.
00:14:04.640 And again, we should be increasing border security anyways.
00:14:07.520 But in Canada's government and in Ontario's government, B.C.'s government,
00:14:11.940 there is this mentality that because Trump told us to do it, then we shouldn't do it.
00:14:15.540 Like, these people would eat their own fingers if Trump told them not to do it. 0.99
00:14:18.700 It's ridiculous. 0.99
00:14:20.280 Anyways. 0.88
00:14:21.260 But yeah.
00:14:21.560 So Ontario's election right now looks like we're in another 2022 holding pattern.
00:14:27.920 Nobody particularly likes Ford.
00:14:29.560 All those popularity jumped because of the trade war fiasco, and that demonstrates what the game is.
00:14:35.740 He puffs out his chest.
00:14:37.120 He's the anti-Trump guy.
00:14:38.940 And so a lot of people are just going to reactionarily say, well, I like Ford then.
00:14:43.960 Have more of a head on your shoulders.
00:14:46.420 Is he simply doing this for popularity points?
00:14:49.500 Sure, well, then it's hollow, and he's also making your life worse.
00:14:53.220 In fact, Ford is literally proposing a COVID-style relief spending package to help affected industries.
00:15:01.680 Which affected industries?
00:15:02.960 Whichever one Doug Ford wants votes from.
00:15:05.440 That's really what's going on here.
00:15:06.820 Do you think he's going to give a lot of relief spending to northern Ontario?
00:15:10.140 Not a chance.
00:15:11.220 Do you think he's going to be throwing it into the suburban areas of Kitchener and Cambridge and whatnot?
00:15:16.060 No.
00:15:16.320 This money is going to go to Toronto.
00:15:19.740 It's going to go to Hamilton.
00:15:20.800 It's going to go to Mississauga and Brampton.
00:15:23.020 And then everyone else will get little bits and pieces of money.
00:15:25.360 Thunder Bay is not getting a lot of money from this.
00:15:27.300 Let's be very clear.
00:15:28.940 Anyways.
00:15:30.020 So that's it for me in this video, guys.
00:15:32.260 I'm going to be keeping up with the Ontario provincial election as it develops.
00:15:35.680 I think this election will probably stay in Doug Ford's pocket at the moment.
00:15:40.840 But again, anything, any big screw up in the campaign, any big twist in the trade war could end up affecting things hard.
00:15:48.440 I'm skeptical right now when I see polling that shows the Liberals only at 23%, 24%.
00:15:56.480 Because remember, even with Stephen Del Duca discount Lex Luthor, the Liberals still got 23% of the vote in the 2022 election.
00:16:05.360 And as much as I don't like Bonnie Crombie or Stephen Del Duca or Doug Ford or Merit Stiles or Andrea Horvath, for that matter, I can at least acknowledge that Bonnie Crombie has a far bigger brand than Del Duca does.
00:16:18.980 Del Duca was like a Michael Ignatieff type liberal leadership character.
00:16:24.020 He didn't really add anything.
00:16:26.240 And Merit Stiles might not be a very inspiring person, but at least it wasn't her third time around running like Andrea Horvath was.
00:16:33.440 And so I think both of them will probably be able to consolidate more vote than the Main Street poll is currently showing.
00:16:40.420 Yeah, I think the Undecideds will start splitting more towards Ford than not.
00:16:46.560 But I think that Ford would be lucky to be punching above what he did in 22 if certain issues start popping up around bad governance.
00:16:55.840 And if he makes any mistakes on the trade war issue, you know, if Trump calls his bluff on something and shows he hasn't done anything on the border, that's when Ford could start not losing voters on his left, but losing voters on his right.
00:17:08.520 That's the funny thing.
00:17:09.380 Ford succeeded in 2022, despite doing basically what Aaron O'Toole did in 2021, but, you know, kicking his own conservative voters in the face and then moving left.
00:17:20.900 The problem was the left in Ontario is so disorganized and they and they had like such weak leaders that Ford was actually able to eat their lunch while taking off his actual conservative base.
00:17:32.520 Like if you're a federal conservative, it's really hard to argue why Doug Ford should stay in office at this point compared to anyone else, because they it is basically like the same election as 2021.
00:17:43.600 O'Toole so bad.
00:17:44.580 What's the point of even replacing Trudeau with O'Toole?
00:17:47.440 O'Toole is going to be in office for like maybe a year and a half with a tiny weak minority government.
00:17:53.460 He's going to get nothing done.
00:17:54.820 And then it gives Justin Trudeau the opportunity to come back in that time and say, see, you can't trust the conservatives.
00:18:01.320 They didn't get anything done, even though Aaron O'Toole is not conservative and he only didn't get anything done because of the minority government.
00:18:07.400 And so that's where weak conservatives allow for the actual further left party to gain power later on.
00:18:15.220 The problem is right now Ford's basically as left as the Bonnie Crombie liberals.
00:18:18.960 But you get my point. The problem with corrupting the conservatives in order to try and win an election, because you think in theory it's good to move left to capture more voters, which is not actually true.
00:18:29.060 There's always actually more voters on the right that you're not capturing than on your left.
00:18:33.120 But if O'Toole had won, he would have corrupted the conservative party for probably a decade.
00:18:38.660 And then we would have been floundering around like the PC party of the 90s with no real purpose.
00:18:44.100 And then you'd probably get other alternative right parties popping up to fill in the void.
00:18:47.920 And then that would have to sort itself out for a long time where it was actually good.
00:18:52.800 Ironically, that Trudeau won in 21 barely and beat O'Toole because then we got to re-roll the dice and get someone like Pierre Polyev.
00:19:00.060 So then when we win a few years later, we actually get substantial reform and that government might actually stand up for two or three or even four terms of actual good governance.
00:19:11.340 Anyways, that's actually it now. See you guys later.