Wyatt Claypool explains why the debates are so important in this election and why the French debate is more important than the first two debates, and why it could be the deciding factor in the outcome of the election.
00:00:00.000Hey guys, Wyatt Claypool here. I find it very telling that so many commentators on the anti-conservative left are heavily downplaying how much the debates matter in this federal election.
00:00:12.800While yes, they are right that many times in past elections the debates didn't matter at all, the thing is the times it did matter look a lot like this election.
00:00:22.140In 1984, with John Turner vs. Brian Mulroney, it really mattered. In fact, in 2015, between Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau, it really mattered because, frankly, the conservatives had a bad strategy of painting Justin Trudeau as so stupid and incompetent that he ended up looking good in 2015, just seeming like a normal guy on stage.
00:00:43.100Having that little bit of charisma really ended up contrasting with the narrative the conservatives have painted about him.
00:00:49.000Right now, in 2025, the problem for Mark Carney is that he is a big walking question mark, not only because whenever he gets on stage for a press conference, you don't know if he's going to fall on his face or not, but because people don't know really that much about him.
00:01:02.540They really don't know that much about his policy. If you follow politics, you know that he's actually to the left of Justin Trudeau on many fronts, but for the average voter, he is an empty black box that you can fill up with all your hopes and dreams.
00:01:15.100And that's why we've seen a big surge in support for the Liberals since December, when Justin Trudeau's leadership was in turmoil and he eventually stepped down on January 6th.
00:01:26.660Now, the problem for the Liberals is that although I will admit that in most polls they are leading, although they are of dubious quality, I can even bring up the Saskatchewan polls to make my point that oftentimes pollsters miss when there's a lot of rural area in an election.
00:01:43.800So in 2024 in Saskatchewan, they really miss because over half that province is rural.
00:01:50.060You can see right here, this is the popular vote projections showing that most pollsters were showing the Liberals or sorry, the Saskatchewan NDP a week before the election, winning the popular vote by 2 to 5 percent, when in reality, the Saskatchewan party won by 11.9 percent.
00:02:07.520A massive, massive miss. And it's because pollsters are bad at getting rural support.
00:02:11.640But let's just assume the polls are pretty accurate.
00:02:15.840They're like 99 percent accurate and they're only going to be off by a couple of points.
00:02:20.040The problem for the Liberals is that they are still relying on a lot of soft support.
00:02:24.760And the thing is that these debates could easily swing that soft support in critical areas of the current country where they really need to run up the score.
00:02:32.480So tomorrow we have the French debate and then on Thursday we have the English debate.
00:02:38.220If anything, the French debate is actually going to be more serious than the English one because Marc Caron's French sucks.
00:02:44.960He has been doing mostly scripted events where he knows what the questions are going to be ahead of time in French and he can prepare his answers.
00:02:51.200He recently did a somewhat hostile interview show in Quebec that Pierre Polyev also did.
00:02:57.240It has a reputation for always asking tough questions where I heard from a lot of Liberals that he had done well.
00:03:02.880But those who aren't even conservative but obviously speak good French say, no, he didn't do great.
00:03:08.580He, in fact, had to dodge questions a lot to obviously snake his way towards talking points that he's now memorized in French.
00:03:16.240But this is why the French debate matters.
00:04:01.220But let's just assume that this is how the election is going to go right now if nothing changes and we just go straight to the polls, no big moments happen.
00:04:10.120Okay, let's assume that Mark Carney doesn't do that great in the French debate.
00:04:16.960It's not that much of an assumption considering that he's going to be on stage with four other leaders who are far better at French than he is.
00:04:23.960In fact, the Green Party leader might be very decisive here because Joseph Pennold actually is a Montrealer and has obviously a very good French-speaking voice.
00:04:34.300It's also Yves-Francois Blanchet, the leader of the Bloc Québécois, Paulio's French is basically near perfect, and Jagmeet Singh is much better than Mark Carney.
00:04:44.160So let's assume that out of this debate, the Liberals drop 1% of the vote mostly because of Quebec.
00:04:50.720So we go from 42.4, sorry, I'll go up to 41.4.
00:04:56.040We drop them from 42.4 to 41.4 because even the French debate will affect English Canadians if they realize he sucks at French.
00:05:03.800And let's then assume that the Bloc Québécois moves up to 6.4% of the vote, and the Conservatives then grab a couple of points with Liberals defecting over there as well.
00:05:15.220I'll just give them 0.2, and then I'll bring the Bloc Québécois up to 6.5.
00:05:21.100This goes from 166 seats for the Liberals, 142 seats for the Conservatives, now to 143 to 157 with 30 seats for the Bloc Québécois.
00:05:32.640A bad French performance for Mark Carney could realistically change the entire outcome of the election.
00:05:40.440And then we move on to the English debate.
00:05:42.520And as much as the English debate's main narrative is going to be Polyev versus Carney, can Polyev land a blow, is Carney going to be able to hold his own, is he going to be able to seem charismatic, yeah, that's all true.
00:05:55.580That's a big issue in this English debate.
00:05:58.500The other big issue is that the Liberals are currently relying on a lot of soft support who has come over from the NDP in 2021.
00:06:07.480I want to show you this chart because it demonstrates that, oddly enough, the biggest player in the next debate in English on Thursday might be Jagmeet Singh.
00:06:17.520So on the left side of the screen, and this is also why the Liberals are never in nearly as comfortable a position as they would like,
00:06:23.300the Conservatives are holding on to 86% of their 2021 vote.
00:06:28.340This entire chart is in columns of 2021 voters who voted Conservative, Liberal, and NDP and where their votes are going in this election.
00:06:37.180So 2021 Conservative voters are going 86% towards the Conservatives again.
00:06:42.240They're going 11% to the Liberals, and then they're going a negligible amount towards the NDP, the Greens, the Bloc Québécois, just 1%.
00:06:49.080Now 2021 Liberal voters are actually going 14% towards the Conservatives, only 76% towards the Liberals,
00:06:57.96010% less than the base voters of the Conservatives last election.
00:07:02.4005% are going NDP, 1% Green, 3% Bloc Québécois.
00:07:07.160Now 2021 NDP voters, a non-insignificant amount, are actually going towards the Conservatives.