The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - April 17, 2025


French debate review - Carney claims Trudeau was a good PM!

Topics
Mark Carney debate performance
Hosted by
Wyatt Claypool
Mentioned
Mark Carney Pierre Poilievre Yves Francois Blanchet Justin Trudeau Jagmeet Singh Trump Ken Paxton Alex Zoltan Yves-Francois Blanchet Stephen Guibo New Brunswick Paul Bernardo Angus Reid Blaschet Verdun Bloc
Insane： CBC reporter acts as Carney Liberal propagandist! Pierre Poilievre demolished Carney in the English Debate! (Review)

Episode Stats


Length

22 minutes

Words per minute

188.01

Word count

4,163

Sentence count

278

Harmful content

Misogyny

9

sentences flagged

Toxicity

13

sentences flagged

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

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

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.

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 Hey 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.
00:00:16.700 I 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.
00:00:38.780 So 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.
00:01:02.640 So, 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.
00:01:23.180 Also, 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.
00:01:38.180 It was very strange, and if anything, you can kind of see the two different governments that might form out of this federal election. It would be NDP Liberal or it's going to be Conservative Bloc Québécois if a minority government is only won by the Liberals or the Conservatives.
00:01:54.600 Jagmeet 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?
00:02:06.160 I 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.
00:02:16.040 Jagmeet 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.
00:02:24.500 He can actually answer questions that he wasn't pre-prepared for. He can have debates with the different leaders.
00:02:30.060 And other than the fact that he would randomly attack Polya for things when he should be going after Mark Carney, nothing.
00:02:38.060 He would keep redirecting things to healthcare. He ranted on about Gaza and genocide. He didn't even need to be there.
00:02:45.600 Okay, I give Jagmeet Singh a D. He absolutely was a waste of time.
00:02:50.900 Now, 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.
00:03:04.340 I 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.
00:03:13.900 And 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.
00:03:26.720 That's a good thing if you don't want the liberals to win.
00:03:29.480 He 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.
00:03:45.320 Doesn't really matter what the points were, but I would say that he generally stuck up for a very militant French position.
00:03:54.160 And 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.
00:04:03.220 The Bloc have a lot of ridings that they won back in 2021.
00:04:07.560 They got 8% of the vote or 7.5%.
00:04:10.080 That's a high watermark for the Bloc because that was like 37, 38% of the vote back in 2021.
00:04:16.200 And 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.
00:04:37.760 And if you don't like this Mark Carney guy, then I'm your next best choice.
00:04:41.180 So I would give Blanchet an A for his goals.
00:04:45.620 He had generally achieved them, even if I don't agree with any of his positions.
00:04:50.060 So then we have Pierre Polyev.
00:04:52.780 I think Pierre Polyev did quite well.
00:04:54.960 He didn't go on the attack as much as maybe I would have suggested, but I understand strategy.
00:05:00.040 What Pierre Polyev is trying to do is take some small jabs at Mark Carney, make himself seem like a likable person, generally speaking.
00:05:08.580 Make sure he can gird up the writings of the Conservatives already own.
00:05:12.440 But there really isn't many gains to be made in Quebec for the Conservatives.
00:05:16.400 For 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.
00:05:30.440 There are regions that vote Bloc and there are regions that vote Liberal.
00:05:33.840 It is actually a lot like New Brunswick for the exact same reasons.
00:05:37.580 There is Anglo parts of New Brunswick.
00:05:39.840 There are French parts of New Brunswick.
00:05:41.640 Obviously, all of Quebec is French, but there are very specific regions that have very specific interests.
00:05:47.840 Montreal is the island of Red.
00:05:50.140 It is the liberal island in Quebec.
00:05:53.500 And then you have all the rural areas and the suburban areas outside of Quebec and Quebec City, and those are Bloc.
00:06:00.300 And 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.
00:06:08.560 And there is one NDP riding that you don't need to care about.
00:06:11.460 So 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.
00:06:25.280 So he mostly stuck out of it.
00:06:28.240 He 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.
00:06:38.680 He stumped Carney a few times, pushed him into the corridor, made Carney seem awkward.
00:06:43.080 Carney's French is also not great.
00:06:44.980 So oftentimes when he's responding to people on things that he wasn't expected to be asked, he uses the wrong word.
00:06:52.280 He uses awkward phrasing to express himself.
00:06:57.880 It's not technically wrong.
00:06:59.460 It's just weird on the ears.
00:07:01.100 And 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.
00:07:16.240 Because if he put them all out there in French, what does he have to gain? 0.98
00:07:20.480 3% or 4% in Quebec, that's really not going to do him any good in terms of the seat count.
00:07:25.160 And then Carney knows exactly what he's going to hit him on in English.
00:07:28.660 He 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.
00:07:42.280 He's too much like Trump.
00:07:43.540 He's braggadocious. 0.83
00:07:45.000 He's pompous. 0.98
00:07:46.160 He's cocky.
00:07:46.840 So he basically toned it down, just seemed like a nice guy on stage that if this Mark Carney guy fails, maybe you can vote for me.
00:07:53.360 But in fact, he actually wants people to vote probably for the Bloc Québécois, because that's how you keep the liberals down.
00:08:01.180 So now we are getting into Mark Carney.
00:08:05.200 The CBC legacy media outlets will say he did a great job.
00:08:08.780 He did not do a good job.
00:08:10.280 Was it an F performance?
00:08:12.480 No.
00:08:12.880 Was it a D performance?
00:08:14.120 No.
00:08:14.660 It was a C performance.
00:08:15.920 But the problem is that the liberals have a lot of soft support on their sides, especially in places like Quebec.
00:08:23.180 Will the liberals do well in Montreal?
00:08:25.000 Yes.
00:08:25.760 And this debate performance, like Mark Carney, will make sure that the liberals do well in Montreal.
00:08:30.560 And that is it.
00:08:31.740 This 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.
00:08:40.740 I know people keep saying, oh, it doesn't matter that much.
00:08:44.120 Ignatius fell on his face because he spoke Parisian-style French.
00:08:48.520 That is enough to tick off voters in Quebec.
00:08:51.160 And 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?
00:09:04.380 No, it does not.
00:09:05.920 Again, so I'd give him a C, a C minus.
00:09:08.160 His positions on immigration and whatnot were not very good.
00:09:12.640 He was called out by Blanchet and Polly for his support of the century initiative for wanting to radically increase immigration.
00:09:22.640 He seemed to take a less than a middle ground approach when it came to taxes.
00:09:27.640 His tax proposals are kind of flabby compared to the NDP and the conservatives who want to cut way more taxes than the liberals.
00:09:34.920 But then he's not even in favor of supporting social services as much as Blanchet.
00:09:39.100 So he's kind of the leader for Montrealers, for those middle ground metropolitan liberals.
00:09:47.200 And again, I'm speaking in generalities.
00:09:49.060 I watched the debate twice with the English dub.
00:09:51.940 So I could go into specific issues on foreign policy, on energy and stuff like that.
00:09:59.200 Carney was very mealy mouthed on saying that we need new energy projects.
00:10:03.920 But then Blanchet would say, well, you want to force them on Quebec.
00:10:06.740 Mark 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.
00:10:18.920 I can go into all that.
00:10:20.360 His answers are just OK.
00:10:22.540 They're just OK.
00:10:23.100 And again, he needed better than an OK performance because, like I said, the liberal support is very soft.
00:10:32.120 When 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?
00:10:45.000 But 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.
00:10:57.160 And 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.
00:11:04.760 And 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.
00:11:12.640 He never beat Polyev and he didn't even beat Jagmeet Singh on any of the topics.
00:11:17.720 He just seemed OK.
00:11:19.360 He seemed serviceable, plus his French sect.
00:11:21.760 So I would say that he deserves a C or a C minus.
00:11:25.180 It wasn't something that did him any favors.
00:11:27.120 I 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.
00:11:40.540 So that means it's good.
00:11:41.300 I'm like, no, he needed to prove that he is the figure the media says he is because they pretend that this guy is a marvel.
00:11:49.480 He's fantastic.
00:11:50.820 He's a great he's like a great businessman.
00:11:53.380 He's a great economist and he's who the country needs.
00:11:56.980 He didn't live up to those expectations.
00:11:59.380 Yes, 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. 0.99
00:12:05.480 His answers sucked, too. 0.98
00:12:07.620 That's the problem. 0.99
00:12:08.540 His French was not very good and his answers were very, very lackluster.
00:12:12.620 Like 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.
00:12:20.780 It's like, oh, my goodness. 0.64
00:12:21.720 This is such just an empty thing to say.
00:12:24.740 I have to believe that the average Canadian, when they hear that, they're like kind of roll their eyes.
00:12:30.200 It's like, well, I'm the right person to fight this war because I'm good at fighting.
00:12:34.620 Oh, I should be doing this because I'm good at that thing.
00:12:38.420 OK, dude.
00:12:39.800 Anyways, so how do I think this is generally going to affect the race?
00:12:43.880 I think the effect is not much in effect from 2021.
00:12:47.960 If the liberals were in the mid 40s to low 40s at the beginning of this debate, I think they're now in the high 30s.
00:12:54.260 I think this hurt them.
00:12:55.480 It did not mean that it was a full route and they're going to start losing half of Montreal.
00:12:59.120 Well, it's very difficult for the liberals to lose anything in Montreal.
00:13:03.420 They'll regain the seat they lost in La Salle de Marde, Verdun.
00:13:07.280 And that's pretty much it.
00:13:08.800 They might get another suburb outside where they're having a knife fight with the bloc.
00:13:13.300 But 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.
00:13:21.600 I think that they were going to be able to achieve those numbers if he truly showed up with strong French and strong answers.
00:13:28.760 And both were bleh. 0.51
00:13:30.940 So I think that this was a very good debate for the conservatives.
00:13:34.340 They didn't need to win the debate.
00:13:36.180 They just needed to make sure that Mark Carney did not win and he did not win.
00:13:40.460 So now I want to go into the press conference that happened after the debate.
00:13:47.000 And, yeah, so this was kind of the best part of the night was Mark Carney having to answer questions from independent conservative media journalists.
00:13:56.920 And he did not perform very well.
00:13:59.100 So Alex Soltan with True North.
00:14:00.940 If you thought my friend's question was odd, you're going to love this one.
00:14:04.100 I'm glad you self-assessed that.
00:14:06.540 OK.
00:14:07.040 How many genders are there? 1.00
00:14:10.560 There in terms of sex, there are two.
00:14:13.440 I like how even a liberal, when he thinks about it for a little bit, there has to know that there's two genders.
00:14:21.080 He 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.
00:14:29.620 My follow up question then.
00:14:31.060 Do 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? 0.89
00:14:40.680 I 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.
00:15:01.140 Thank you very much.
00:15:01.680 Some sort of women's rights organization needs to take an ad out and just play that everywhere. 1.00
00:15:07.040 That's pathetic that it has to be this mealy mouth. 0.97
00:15:09.640 Well, yeah, generally speaking, women do have their own spaces, but, you know, who's to say? 1.00
00:15:16.040 Who's to say if somebody is a woman or not when they show up to a shelter space or some sort of crisis center? 0.67
00:15:24.060 It doesn't matter to actual women if they get their own spaces, you know, if they get their own bathrooms. 1.00
00:15:29.840 Here'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.
00:15:38.480 And I think this is an excellent question to be asking him.
00:15:41.660 Hi, Mr. Carney, Kian Bexte, Juno News.
00:15:43.900 In your estimation, was Justin Trudeau a good prime minister?
00:15:47.000 Yeah, Justin Trudeau and the previous administration made a number of contributions to this country.
00:15:56.680 What does that even mean?
00:15:58.000 That's a terrible answer.
00:15:59.640 Well, many contributions, were they good or bad?
00:16:02.020 And the thing is that you served with the man for five years, and this is why he can't distance himself.
00:16:06.240 He can't say he's a bad prime minister because he was the one advising him for half the term.
00:16:10.740 And so now he has to have this mealy mouth kind of, well, you know, he's good.
00:16:14.060 And he had contributions and there were, you know, there's things happened.
00:16:17.500 I suspect since I have 10 minutes, I think, right, for the responses, I'm not going to enumerate them all.
00:16:23.420 I'll make one point, which I think is relevant on the way looking forward, which is, as I said the other night in an interview,
00:16:31.280 he and I, we share the same values in terms of solidarity, taking care of one another,
00:16:37.900 the emphasis on reconciliation, emphasis on equality of all Canadians.
00:16:43.040 And building a better country for everyone else.
00:16:46.440 The difference, one of the differences, there are many, but one of the differences between the two of us
00:16:50.420 goes to the question I was just asked, which is I put much more emphasis on the economy, on growing the economy.
00:16:56.600 In fact, in this.
00:16:58.360 How did Justin Trudeau fail to value the economy when you were the economic advisor for five years?
00:17:04.180 Did you not get through to him?
00:17:05.940 That's the problem.
00:17:07.480 That's the funny thing about the debate where he's saying, oh, I can negotiate with Trump because I have experience negotiating.
00:17:13.120 I'm a good negotiator.
00:17:15.300 How did you not get Justin Trudeau to listen to reason that you had five years to do it and it never happened?
00:17:20.180 But this circumstance that we're in, given the scale of the crisis and what needs to be done,
00:17:24.800 I would say a relentless focus on growing the economy to work for all Canadians.
00:17:29.400 Just to follow up, if I may, your entire campaign does seem to be predicated on putting you in the front
00:17:34.960 and hiding the people that stood in lockstep with Justin Trudeau for the last 10 years.
00:17:40.040 You'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.
00:17:46.240 Regardless of what you say right now, Stephen Gobeau made the carbon taxes life work.
00:17:50.480 The man that moved Paul Bernardo from a maximum security prison is now your chief of staff.
00:17:55.560 I'm wondering how you reconcile this and how you can trust their judgment when they thought those ideas were good ideas.
00:18:00.460 I'd say a couple of things to that rather odd question.
00:18:03.760 It's not an odd question at all.
00:18:05.920 That's actually a very good description of the campaign.
00:18:08.080 I mean, he's going to go into it in a second saying, well, I always have these people standing behind me at my press conferences.
00:18:13.420 The whole point is that they're pretending like, no, no, no, don't think about the government.
00:18:16.860 Don't think about the government's record.
00:18:18.260 Think about Carney's lack of record and the fact that you can fill him with your hopes and dreams
00:18:23.160 and just pretend that he's your savior here.
00:18:26.840 First is that the candidates in this election for the Liberal Party, I mean, you go and see when I make an announcement.
00:18:34.760 I don't think I've seen you at any of them, but next time you can come.
00:18:39.020 By the way, right there, Kian Bexty says, you've kicked me out of all of them.
00:18:42.960 And you will see a wide range of the candidates that are there presenting themselves.
00:18:48.220 So, for example, with respect to our announcement on crime.
00:18:54.220 Okay, well, pause there, but I think that's a good place to pause it anyways.
00:18:57.400 But yeah, that's just terrible.
00:19:00.240 Who did not brief Mark Carney that there was going to be independent media there?
00:19:04.580 And 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.
00:19:12.240 You 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.
00:19:24.120 It's just questions that don't take you at face value.
00:19:26.820 And they want you to justify yourself or say something that you seem to be unwilling to say. 0.97
00:19:32.540 Because his answer on gender theory or on basically like do you believe in two genders was pathetic. 0.96
00:19:38.600 Because he'll say it after kind of mealy mouth saying, well, are we talking about biological sex? 0.99
00:19:43.000 No, no.
00:19:43.260 We want to know what you actually tell people when it comes to like when we have Pride Month.
00:19:50.700 Because on Pride Month, you're going to have Mark Carney talking about people of all genders.
00:19:54.760 What does that mean?
00:19:56.300 What does that mean?
00:19:57.060 And our women's space is actually for women. 1.00
00:19:59.220 You can't answer that stuff straight up.
00:20:00.680 He has to qualify.
00:20:01.660 Are we talking about biological sex?
00:20:02.980 No.
00:20:03.420 How many genders do you think there are? 1.00
00:20:05.140 Because the fact that you think there might be more than two is scary to us.
00:20:08.820 Well, in biological, there are not two different things.
00:20:11.760 They are literally the same thing.
00:20:12.900 Well, do you mean biological sex?
00:20:15.360 Do you mean gender?
00:20:16.860 Yes.
00:20:17.640 The answer is yes.
00:20:18.700 We mean both because they're the same thing. 0.67
00:20:21.680 But he has to qualify it because he doesn't think they're the same thing because he's insane.
00:20:25.520 Anyway, so that should be it for me today, guys.
00:20:28.400 That was the French debate review.
00:20:30.460 Hopefully, I didn't just skim over it too much.
00:20:33.660 It's hard.
00:20:34.360 I didn't want to play clips of it because there's not really much to show.
00:20:38.960 It was just that Mark Carney was meh.
00:20:41.540 There was no blow up.
00:20:42.540 Nobody fell on their face.
00:20:44.700 Like, again, Polioff really pushed him into the corner on the fourth liberal term question in which Carney had this very awkward response.
00:20:52.020 Well, I just arrived.
00:20:52.880 I just arrived, which is literally his wording in French and what it means.
00:20:56.820 It's a very awkward way of responding to the fact that people should be okay with a fourth liberal term because I just arrived.
00:21:02.760 I just showed up.
00:21:04.880 You were the economic advisor for five years.
00:21:06.800 That was emphasized multiple times up to that point.
00:21:09.240 And he's pretending to be a fresh face.
00:21:10.840 Overall, though, there wasn't really many big moments.
00:21:14.520 But if you are a French voter, I would suspect that you weren't super impressed with Carney.
00:21:18.980 Again, are the liberals going to fall from 43% in Quebec to 18?
00:21:22.960 No, 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.
00:21:40.780 So 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%.
00:21:49.020 So I think this debate did good things for the bloc.
00:21:52.220 It 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.
00:22:01.660 So anyways, that's it for me today, guys.
00:22:03.700 Make sure to like the video, subscribe to the channel, leave a comment, do all that great stuff, and I'll see you next time.