In this episode, I give a letter grade to each of the three main candidates in the first French debate. I also discuss Mark Carney's embarrassing press conference after the debate, and how it could affect the upcoming election.
00:00:00.000Hey guys, Wyatt Claypool here. Yesterday we had the federal leaders French debate, and today I want to go over it with you guys and give a letter grade to how I think each of the individual leaders did, and then talk about how I think this is going to affect the overall election.
00:00:16.700I also want to discuss the frankly embarrassing press conference that Mark Carney had after the debate where he got cornered by conservative independent media journalists and couldn't answer the most basic questions or gave really stupid answers to things that he should be frankly trying to dodge on, like what he thinks about Justin Trudeau's time as prime minister.
00:00:38.780So we're going to go in ascending order from who I think is the least relevant person on the debate stage to the most relevant person, so that will be Jagmeet Singh, Blaschet, Pierre Polyev, then Mark Carney, and then I will be talking about how I think it's going to affect the election, then we will be moving on to that press conference that happened afterwards with Mark Carney.
00:01:02.640So, Jagmeet Singh, why is he even there? The man didn't even seem to want to be on stage to debate the actual big election issues. All he wanted to do was talk about healthcare and try and thrash Pierre Polyev. That was it. He doesn't understand why the NDP even exists, it seems.
00:01:23.180Also, isn't Mark Carney and the Liberals currently the government of Canada? He should be attacking Mark Carney. But instead, it was kind of like a debate where it was Mark Carney and Jagmeet Singh teaming up against Pierre Polyev and Yves Francois Blanchet.
00:01:54.600Jagmeet Singh, his French is fine. I do not speak like a French, I am just basing this on the commentary of fluent French speakers on social media yesterday, like, what's his name?
00:02:06.160I don't want to mess it up here. He has a great sounding name. Sylvain Charlebois. I'm basing it off of his commentary on the French skills of the different leaders.
00:02:16.040Jagmeet Singh's French is fine. It's nothing to write home about. It's not what you would describe as great, but it's serviceable for the debate.
00:02:24.500He can actually answer questions that he wasn't pre-prepared for. He can have debates with the different leaders.
00:02:30.060And other than the fact that he would randomly attack Polya for things when he should be going after Mark Carney, nothing.
00:02:38.060He would keep redirecting things to healthcare. He ranted on about Gaza and genocide. He didn't even need to be there.
00:02:45.600Okay, I give Jagmeet Singh a D. He absolutely was a waste of time.
00:02:50.900Now, Yves-Francois Blanchet. He is actually a very important figure in this election, so the other three people I'm talking about here, Blanchet, Polyev, and Carney, are very relevant to the debate.
00:03:04.340I could almost say that they're pretty much all almost equally relevant, but Blanchet did what he had to do, in my opinion, and if you're looking for a debate winner, it's probably Blanchet.
00:03:13.900And we're going to get to why I actually think it's good for Blanchet to be the debate winner over Pierre Polyev, but Blanchet generally ended up distinguishing himself as the Quebecers champion.
00:03:26.720That's a good thing if you don't want the liberals to win.
00:03:29.480He generally took the middle ground between Polyev and Carney on a lot of issues, or he even tacked himself a little bit more to the left and criticized Carney as not having been like past liberals and he's too conservative and whatnot.
00:03:45.320Doesn't really matter what the points were, but I would say that he generally stuck up for a very militant French position.
00:03:54.160And so that is actually going to serve him well because what Blanchet really needs to do is just gird up the places that the BQ already hold.
00:04:03.220The Bloc have a lot of ridings that they won back in 2021.
00:04:10.080That's a high watermark for the Bloc because that was like 37, 38% of the vote back in 2021.
00:04:16.200And so what he did here in debating against Mark Carney and going on the attack on things like immigration, on things like resource development, rejecting nuclear reactor plans and whatnot, which a lot of French people do not like, he basically solidified himself as the guy who was going to push back against an overly aggressive federal government.
00:04:37.760And if you don't like this Mark Carney guy, then I'm your next best choice.
00:04:41.180So I would give Blanchet an A for his goals.
00:04:45.620He had generally achieved them, even if I don't agree with any of his positions.
00:04:54.960He didn't go on the attack as much as maybe I would have suggested, but I understand strategy.
00:05:00.040What Pierre Polyev is trying to do is take some small jabs at Mark Carney, make himself seem like a likable person, generally speaking.
00:05:08.580Make sure he can gird up the writings of the Conservatives already own.
00:05:12.440But there really isn't many gains to be made in Quebec for the Conservatives.
00:05:16.400For the Conservatives to gain seats, they would need to gain like another 10% of the vote in Quebec because Quebec is a very particular place in the sense that when you're in Quebec, you would understand that there are regions that vote Conservative.
00:05:30.440There are regions that vote Bloc and there are regions that vote Liberal.
00:05:33.840It is actually a lot like New Brunswick for the exact same reasons.
00:05:37.580There is Anglo parts of New Brunswick.
00:05:39.840There are French parts of New Brunswick.
00:05:41.640Obviously, all of Quebec is French, but there are very specific regions that have very specific interests.
00:05:53.500And then you have all the rural areas and the suburban areas outside of Quebec and Quebec City, and those are Bloc.
00:06:00.300And then you have a couple of ridings in Quebec City, and then you have the ridings that are along the border with the U.S. that are Conservative, and that's pretty much it.
00:06:08.560And there is one NDP riding that you don't need to care about.
00:06:11.460So what Polyev is doing is just making sure he maintains his Quebec support because there is no point in launching this debate and taking big risks to gain 3% or 4% of the vote that doesn't even result in another riding.
00:06:28.240He had some good jabs on Carney going after him for basically trying to propose that having a fourth liberal term will be what the secret sauce that Canada needs to get back ahead.
00:06:38.680He stumped Carney a few times, pushed him into the corridor, made Carney seem awkward.
00:07:01.100And so what I would give Polyev is a B, a B minus, but I think that Polyev just wanted to achieve that B minus because he will probably be keeping most of his attacks, his really, really big attacks for English.
00:07:16.240Because if he put them all out there in French, what does he have to gain?
00:07:20.4803% or 4% in Quebec, that's really not going to do him any good in terms of the seat count.
00:07:25.160And then Carney knows exactly what he's going to hit him on in English.
00:07:28.660He mostly stuck to just seeming like a good guy that people can be comfortable with as the prime minister, don't come off as pompous, don't come off as too cocky, because that is generally the media narrative about Polyev.
00:08:31.740This was a debate performance where not only was this French bad, which is going to alienate a lot of the people who are Bloc liberal swing voters who really care about the quality of a French.
00:08:40.740I know people keep saying, oh, it doesn't matter that much.
00:08:44.120Ignatius fell on his face because he spoke Parisian-style French.
00:08:48.520That is enough to tick off voters in Quebec.
00:08:51.160And you think that Carney, not being able to really engage on many of the topics, having to go back to talking points he's memorized rather than responding to something one of the other leaders directly said to him, makes him look good?
00:09:05.920Again, so I'd give him a C, a C minus.
00:09:08.160His positions on immigration and whatnot were not very good.
00:09:12.640He was called out by Blanchet and Polly for his support of the century initiative for wanting to radically increase immigration.
00:09:22.640He seemed to take a less than a middle ground approach when it came to taxes.
00:09:27.640His tax proposals are kind of flabby compared to the NDP and the conservatives who want to cut way more taxes than the liberals.
00:09:34.920But then he's not even in favor of supporting social services as much as Blanchet.
00:09:39.100So he's kind of the leader for Montrealers, for those middle ground metropolitan liberals.
00:09:47.200And again, I'm speaking in generalities.
00:09:49.060I watched the debate twice with the English dub.
00:09:51.940So I could go into specific issues on foreign policy, on energy and stuff like that.
00:09:59.200Carney was very mealy mouthed on saying that we need new energy projects.
00:10:03.920But then Blanchet would say, well, you want to force them on Quebec.
00:10:06.740Mark Carney would kind of like go into himself a little bit and he would not actually make a good argument for how we can get the energy projects through if there's any challenges from Quebec or indigenous groups.
00:10:23.100And again, he needed better than an OK performance because, like I said, the liberal support is very soft.
00:10:32.120When you look at Angus Reid's polling, even though I think they oversample liberals, their supporters polls should be generally good in terms of when you poll supporters of the liberals, how likely are they to show up?
00:10:45.000But 63% of them in their last poll rated themselves as very committed to voting liberal, which means just over a third of liberals are not actually sure if they're actually going to show up and vote liberal.
00:10:57.160And I think this debate performance basically made a lot of the people who were only leaning or thinking about it saying, hmm, I'll vote block again.
00:11:04.760And that's the problem, is that he did a good debate performance to hold on to what he had, but he needed to expand past that and he never beat Blanchet.
00:11:12.640He never beat Polyev and he didn't even beat Jagmeet Singh on any of the topics.
00:11:19.360He seemed serviceable, plus his French sect.
00:11:21.760So I would say that he deserves a C or a C minus.
00:11:25.180It wasn't something that did him any favors.
00:11:27.120I know people pretend like because he's ahead in many polls, that means he just needed to maintain his ground and that's why the CBC is giving him a golf clap saying, oh, well, again, he didn't have his pants fall down and he generally defended himself OK.
00:11:50.820He's a great he's like a great businessman.
00:11:53.380He's a great economist and he's who the country needs.
00:11:56.980He didn't live up to those expectations.
00:11:59.380Yes, people didn't think he was going to do well in the French debate, but they thought his French would just be the thing holding him back.
00:12:08.540His French was not very good and his answers were very, very lackluster.
00:12:12.620Like there's this great, silly quote from him at the very beginning where he said, well, I know how to deal with Trump because I know how to negotiate.
00:13:08.800They might get another suburb outside where they're having a knife fight with the bloc.
00:13:13.300But there was nothing here that would give me confidence that the liberals are going to hold on to what the Poland currently has them in in Quebec.
00:13:21.600I think that they were going to be able to achieve those numbers if he truly showed up with strong French and strong answers.
00:13:36.180They just needed to make sure that Mark Carney did not win and he did not win.
00:13:40.460So now I want to go into the press conference that happened after the debate.
00:13:47.000And, yeah, so this was kind of the best part of the night was Mark Carney having to answer questions from independent conservative media journalists.
00:14:13.440I like how even a liberal, when he thinks about it for a little bit, there has to know that there's two genders.
00:14:21.080He has to say it because even he knows to the moderate voter in Canada, that's an insane thing for him to say, well, there could be thousands of them.
00:14:31.060Do you believe that women, biological women, have the right to their own spaces, their own sports, their own change rooms, their own prisons, their own homeless shelters?
00:14:40.680I think we, this is Canada, and that as a general objective, yes, we, but we work in where we value all Canadians for who they are and will continue to do so.
00:15:01.680Some sort of women's rights organization needs to take an ad out and just play that everywhere.
00:15:07.040That's pathetic that it has to be this mealy mouth.
00:15:09.640Well, yeah, generally speaking, women do have their own spaces, but, you know, who's to say?
00:15:16.040Who's to say if somebody is a woman or not when they show up to a shelter space or some sort of crisis center?
00:15:24.060It doesn't matter to actual women if they get their own spaces, you know, if they get their own bathrooms.
00:15:29.840Here's another question that was asked to Mark Carney this time by Kian Bexte on whether or not Mark Carney thinks that Justin Trudeau is a good prime minister.
00:15:38.480And I think this is an excellent question to be asking him.
00:15:41.660Hi, Mr. Carney, Kian Bexte, Juno News.
00:15:43.900In your estimation, was Justin Trudeau a good prime minister?
00:15:47.000Yeah, Justin Trudeau and the previous administration made a number of contributions to this country.
00:17:15.300How did you not get Justin Trudeau to listen to reason that you had five years to do it and it never happened?
00:17:20.180But this circumstance that we're in, given the scale of the crisis and what needs to be done,
00:17:24.800I would say a relentless focus on growing the economy to work for all Canadians.
00:17:29.400Just to follow up, if I may, your entire campaign does seem to be predicated on putting you in the front
00:17:34.960and hiding the people that stood in lockstep with Justin Trudeau for the last 10 years.
00:17:40.040You're kind of hoping that Canadians won't connect the dots that the people standing behind you in your caucus walked in lockstep with them.
00:17:46.240Regardless of what you say right now, Stephen Gobeau made the carbon taxes life work.
00:17:50.480The man that moved Paul Bernardo from a maximum security prison is now your chief of staff.
00:17:55.560I'm wondering how you reconcile this and how you can trust their judgment when they thought those ideas were good ideas.
00:18:00.460I'd say a couple of things to that rather odd question.
00:19:00.240Who did not brief Mark Carney that there was going to be independent media there?
00:19:04.580And through the lottery of who got to ask questions, he was going to be asked a question by somebody like Kian Bexty or Alex Zoltan.
00:19:12.240You think you're going to be able to deal with Trump when you cannot deal with independent conservative media asking you not even like nasty questions, just, you know, unkind questions.
00:19:24.120It's just questions that don't take you at face value.
00:19:26.820And they want you to justify yourself or say something that you seem to be unwilling to say.
00:19:32.540Because his answer on gender theory or on basically like do you believe in two genders was pathetic.
00:19:38.600Because he'll say it after kind of mealy mouth saying, well, are we talking about biological sex?
00:21:04.880You were the economic advisor for five years.
00:21:06.800That was emphasized multiple times up to that point.
00:21:09.240And he's pretending to be a fresh face.
00:21:10.840Overall, though, there wasn't really many big moments.
00:21:14.520But if you are a French voter, I would suspect that you weren't super impressed with Carney.
00:21:18.980Again, are the liberals going to fall from 43% in Quebec to 18?
00:21:22.960No, they'll fall from 43% to 38% or 37%, but that's only going to be enough to basically one Montreal because that is the area of Quebec where the liberals win it by 55%, 56%, you know, 60% in some of these ratings, which means they do far less well outside of the island of Montreal.
00:21:40.780So for the liberals to actually start picking up a lot of seats outside of Montreal, they need to be at like 45% or 46% or 47%.
00:21:49.020So I think this debate did good things for the bloc.
00:21:52.220It stabilized Polyev in the mind of many Quebecers, and it made probably a lot of people doubt whether or not Mark Carney should be the prime minister if you live in Quebec.
00:22:01.660So anyways, that's it for me today, guys.
00:22:03.700Make sure to like the video, subscribe to the channel, leave a comment, do all that great stuff, and I'll see you next time.