The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - April 15, 2025


How Carney could LOSE BIG at the debates？!？ (Election Analysis)

Topics
French debates matters debates impact on election
Hosted by
Wyatt Claypool
Mentioned
Mark Carney Justin Trudeau Pierre Poilievre Jagmeet Singh Frank Dominic Yves-Francois Blanchet Bloc Abiqua Joe Biden Frenchman Blanchet Brian Mulroney Stephen Harper Joseph Pennold Erin O'Toole John Turner Bill C-63 Montrealer
Conservatives take 3% lead over Liberals for first time in poll! Insane： CBC reporter acts as Carney Liberal propagandist!

Episode Stats


Length

16 minutes

Words per minute

186.02

Word count

2,993

Sentence count

146

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

9

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

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.

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. 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.
00:00:12.800 While 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.
00:00:22.140 In 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. 0.96
00:00:43.100 Having that little bit of charisma really ended up contrasting with the narrative the conservatives have painted about him. 0.67
00:00:49.000 Right 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.
00:01:02.540 They 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.
00:01:15.100 And 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.
00:01:26.660 Now, 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.
00:01:43.800 So in 2024 in Saskatchewan, they really miss because over half that province is rural.
00:01:50.060 You 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.
00:02:07.520 A massive, massive miss. And it's because pollsters are bad at getting rural support.
00:02:11.640 But let's just assume the polls are pretty accurate.
00:02:15.840 They're like 99 percent accurate and they're only going to be off by a couple of points.
00:02:20.040 The problem for the Liberals is that they are still relying on a lot of soft support.
00:02:24.760 And 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.
00:02:32.480 So tomorrow we have the French debate and then on Thursday we have the English debate. 0.95
00:02:38.220 If anything, the French debate is actually going to be more serious than the English one because Marc Caron's French sucks.
00:02:44.960 He 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.
00:02:51.200 He recently did a somewhat hostile interview show in Quebec that Pierre Polyev also did.
00:02:57.240 It has a reputation for always asking tough questions where I heard from a lot of Liberals that he had done well.
00:03:02.880 But those who aren't even conservative but obviously speak good French say, no, he didn't do great.
00:03:08.580 He, in fact, had to dodge questions a lot to obviously snake his way towards talking points that he's now memorized in French.
00:03:16.240 But this is why the French debate matters.
00:03:19.320 This is the 338 election simulator.
00:03:21.740 And again, I think that generally the 338 averages underestimate conservatives.
00:03:26.100 So I've already adjusted the bars here to show you what I think is a realistic outcome right now.
00:03:32.120 We have the Liberals at 166 seats.
00:03:34.760 If I assume that they're going to get 42.4% of the vote, we have the Conservatives winning 147 seats with 40% of the vote,
00:03:41.640 10 seats for the NDP at 9%, one for the Greens, and the bloc gets 19 seats with 5.7% of the vote.
00:03:49.700 Obviously, all of that is pretty much, not pretty much, all of that is locked up in the province of Quebec.
00:03:55.940 Sometimes I use too many qualifier words when I should just say it straight.
00:03:59.800 Sorry about that, guys.
00:04:01.220 But 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.
00:04:10.120 Okay, let's assume that Mark Carney doesn't do that great in the French debate.
00:04:16.960 It'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.
00:04:23.960 In 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.
00:04:34.300 It'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.
00:04:44.160 So let's assume that out of this debate, the Liberals drop 1% of the vote mostly because of Quebec.
00:04:50.720 So we go from 42.4, sorry, I'll go up to 41.4.
00:04:56.040 We drop them from 42.4 to 41.4 because even the French debate will affect English Canadians if they realize he sucks at French.
00:05:03.800 And 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.
00:05:15.220 I'll just give them 0.2, and then I'll bring the Bloc Québécois up to 6.5.
00:05:21.100 This goes from 166 seats for the Liberals, 142 seats for the Conservatives, now to 143 to 157 with 30 seats for the Bloc Québécois.
00:05:32.640 A bad French performance for Mark Carney could realistically change the entire outcome of the election.
00:05:40.440 And then we move on to the English debate.
00:05:42.520 And 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.
00:05:55.580 That's a big issue in this English debate.
00:05:58.500 The 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.
00:06:07.480 I 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.
00:06:17.520 So 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,
00:06:23.300 the Conservatives are holding on to 86% of their 2021 vote.
00:06:28.340 This entire chart is in columns of 2021 voters who voted Conservative, Liberal, and NDP and where their votes are going in this election.
00:06:37.180 So 2021 Conservative voters are going 86% towards the Conservatives again.
00:06:42.240 They're going 11% to the Liberals, and then they're going a negligible amount towards the NDP, the Greens, the Bloc Québécois, just 1%.
00:06:49.080 Now 2021 Liberal voters are actually going 14% towards the Conservatives, only 76% towards the Liberals,
00:06:57.960 10% less than the base voters of the Conservatives last election.
00:07:02.400 5% are going NDP, 1% Green, 3% Bloc Québécois.
00:07:07.160 Now 2021 NDP voters, a non-insignificant amount, are actually going towards the Conservatives.
00:07:13.160 The Conservatives, 11% going Conservative, 45% going Liberal, and 36% going NDP.
00:07:20.580 The NDP are literally winning only around a third of their 2021 voters in the polls currently.
00:07:27.500 I do think the NDP are actually similarly under-polled like the Conservatives are,
00:07:34.040 because I think there's just so much artificial sugar-high hype around the Liberals,
00:07:38.120 that even as their polling's coming down, I think they're still being overestimated.
00:07:42.380 A good pollster to actually show that it has been trending down, though, is Main Street Research.
00:07:47.920 At the start of the race, on day one of their tracking poll, they had 36 Conservative, 41 Liberal,
00:07:52.980 and as of yesterday, or two days ago, they had 43 Conservative, 40 Liberal.
00:07:58.340 Now, if Jagmeet Singh lands blows on Mark Carney, if Mark Carney in English seems nervous,
00:08:04.620 if he's caught in lies, if he just has confusing, mixed-up answers,
00:08:09.200 especially if he actually ticks off the more left of Canadians,
00:08:12.920 he actually might cause a lot of that 45% of NDP voters in 2021
00:08:18.040 to flee and come back towards the NDP.
00:08:22.380 They are currently going 45% towards the Liberals.
00:08:24.940 If that cuts down to only 30%, then this is a very, very different type of an election.
00:08:32.280 So if the bloc shifts over even a little bit,
00:08:34.600 I know that shifting 1% in Quebec is actually a big deal,
00:08:37.820 since that's all concentrated in that province,
00:08:40.160 but if the bloc can go from where I think they're at right now, 25% to 32% or 34%,
00:08:46.220 that's the whole election for the Liberals.
00:08:49.680 The Liberals need to be able to break out of downtown Montreal.
00:08:52.900 If they can only stay on that island, that means that they now have to rely more heavily
00:08:57.880 on the GTA, Vancouver, and Atlantic Canada.
00:09:01.740 And the problem is that the Liberals are slated to do worse in all those places than they did in 2021.
00:09:06.720 So if they only do as well as they did in 2021 in Quebec,
00:09:11.440 and then they do worse everywhere else,
00:09:14.040 now they are basically having to just hope and pray that they get 151 seats
00:09:18.640 and the Conservatives get 147 seats.
00:09:21.580 They'd only be winning by a few seats.
00:09:23.660 And again, if they do badly, it would represent a big momentum shift in the rest of the country.
00:09:28.820 So it wouldn't just be the NDP and Singh eating up current Liberal support.
00:09:32.980 It would be a lot of soft Conservatives,
00:09:35.480 or soft Liberal, Red Tory Conservatives,
00:09:38.040 coming back over to the Conservatives if it's clear that Mark Carney
00:09:41.220 isn't a brand new, fresh vehicle
00:09:43.340 that's going to change everything that Justin Trudeau ever did.
00:09:47.280 We already know he's not going to change anything.
00:09:49.380 He said he's going to keep Bill C-69.
00:09:51.460 He said he's not going to repeal any of the soft-on crime laws.
00:09:54.920 He has said so many things on these issues
00:09:57.180 that proves he's no different than Justin Trudeau is,
00:10:00.240 minus the charisma,
00:10:01.740 minus the good hair.
00:10:02.620 So yeah, I do just want to talk again a little bit more
00:10:07.360 about the fact that there are a lot of people
00:10:09.420 just denying that the debates are going to matter.
00:10:11.960 So I actually want to jump over to somebody
00:10:13.700 I talk about semi-frequently on the channel,
00:10:16.780 and that is Frank Dominic,
00:10:18.260 who for some reason, demonstrating the low quality,
00:10:21.580 was invited to speak on CBC
00:10:23.780 about whether the debates matter or not.
00:10:26.240 The French and English debates, they're coming up this week.
00:10:28.440 Frank, is there something you're going to be looking out for?
00:10:30.120 At the end of the day, when it comes to these debates,
00:10:33.600 for the most part,
00:10:34.540 they typically don't tend to change people's minds.
00:10:36.740 The only one that I can think of in my lifetime, really,
00:10:39.840 would have been in 2015,
00:10:41.540 because the Conservatives kept painting Justin Trudeau 0.88
00:10:43.840 as being incompetent and incapable, 0.63
00:10:45.940 and I think he didn't even do that well, 0.91
00:10:48.120 but because he did well,
00:10:49.780 in the eyes of many Canadians, he swept it.
00:10:52.000 He did amazing, and it really boosted him.
00:10:54.520 And so I think...
00:10:55.360 I can agree with him there.
00:10:57.000 That's not actually a bad take,
00:10:58.980 but I don't know how he doesn't see this
00:11:01.080 as being obviously the same scenario in 2025.
00:11:04.600 Polyev is painted as some pro-Trump extremist,
00:11:07.840 and Mark Carney is painted as a very serious
00:11:10.500 and sober-minded manager of the country.
00:11:14.300 That could easily be proven wrong.
00:11:16.180 This is not like a 2011...
00:11:18.260 Sorry, 2021 debate,
00:11:19.680 where really, who was making up stuff about Aaron O'Toole?
00:11:23.280 What did people not know about Justin Trudeau?
00:11:25.260 What did they not know about Jagmeet Singh
00:11:26.980 by that election?
00:11:28.660 That the Conservatives have been wary of doing that
00:11:31.320 to other candidates,
00:11:33.640 even at the provincial level,
00:11:34.740 because they saw what happens
00:11:35.800 when you tear somebody down
00:11:37.460 and then they overperform.
00:11:38.780 So typically, debates don't really do much,
00:11:41.440 except for in Quebec,
00:11:42.880 where the French-language debates
00:11:43.900 can really change the tide of an election.
00:11:46.500 So outside of any major flubs from Carney,
00:11:48.940 I don't know if any of the debates
00:11:51.700 will actually have that much of an impact.
00:11:53.180 What could happen, though,
00:11:54.340 is if the Frenchman Blanchet does extremely well
00:11:56.920 in the French-language debates
00:11:57.800 and even in the English-language debates,
00:11:59.460 the island of Montreal might come into play
00:12:02.180 for the Bloc,
00:12:02.880 which could remove the Liberals' ability
00:12:04.880 to get a majority government.
00:12:06.440 Okay, well, I don't know where he's getting that from.
00:12:09.340 The Bloc is not going to win the island of Montreal.
00:12:12.920 If the Bloc win anything in Montreal,
00:12:14.440 it's like one or two seats.
00:12:15.600 It's just not that kind of a place.
00:12:17.660 The Conservatives actually might have a better chance
00:12:19.700 winning a seat on the island of Montreal in this election
00:12:22.000 because they might win
00:12:23.120 the heavily Jewish-populated riding of Mount Royal,
00:12:26.460 who obviously doesn't love all the enabling
00:12:28.500 of anti-Semitism within the Liberal Party these days.
00:12:31.500 So the funny thing is that Frank denies the idea
00:12:35.820 that the debate is going to matter,
00:12:37.180 and then he immediately contradicts himself
00:12:38.940 by saying that if East-Francois Blanchet
00:12:40.940 has a good debate and then Carney falls out of space,
00:12:43.820 it could actually change things.
00:12:45.480 Right now, the polls,
00:12:46.860 at least the numbers I think are realistic,
00:12:48.500 don't even show the Liberals winning a majority.
00:12:50.960 Carney would have to overperform in the debate
00:12:53.520 to actually get some more momentum in this election,
00:12:56.760 which is a tough thing because it's a bigger chance
00:12:59.440 he probably screws up than anything. 0.98
00:13:01.060 He sucks at French. 0.85
00:13:01.900 Do you think he's going to win 0.99
00:13:03.100 against four very fluent French speakers?
00:13:06.480 Probably not.
00:13:07.640 And then if the Bloc does well in Quebec,
00:13:10.420 if you know anything about Quebec,
00:13:12.260 it's that the Bloc is the suburban,
00:13:14.520 urban, rural, Quebec nationalist base.
00:13:18.760 Where the Conservatives do well is actually along the border
00:13:21.500 with the United States,
00:13:22.900 and they win a couple of seats in Quebec City.
00:13:25.160 Everywhere else outside of Montreal,
00:13:27.060 it's Bloc Quebecois land.
00:13:28.900 That is where they are going to pick up seats.
00:13:30.840 We even had Chantal Hubert trying to argue 1.00
00:13:33.260 that the debates aren't even going to matter at all.
00:13:35.200 And actually, a lot of papers from like the,
00:13:37.500 I don't even need to bring it up,
00:13:38.840 but like the Globe and Mail,
00:13:40.340 the Toronto Star are already saying,
00:13:41.820 well, who really cares what happens at the debate?
00:13:45.240 It's like, guys, just come out and say,
00:13:46.760 you don't want people to watch the debate.
00:13:48.420 It would be more honest.
00:13:49.640 And I think it would also be more telling
00:13:51.480 about what you think of the debate.
00:13:53.040 If you think it matters so little,
00:13:54.560 maybe people should just go to a movie,
00:13:56.400 you know, just do anything else
00:13:58.140 other than watching Mark Carney on television.
00:14:01.480 I will be trying to watch both the debate tomorrow
00:14:04.080 and on Thursday.
00:14:04.860 I'm not sure if I'm live streaming with others
00:14:06.520 or I'll just be streaming the debate myself,
00:14:08.560 but I want to prepare people.
00:14:11.160 What a bad performance for Mark Carney looks like
00:14:13.560 is not him literally falling on his face
00:14:15.640 and flubbing and missing a line.
00:14:17.280 It's him in French, obviously seeming awkward,
00:14:20.120 obviously being caught in some lies.
00:14:23.740 Yves-Francois Blanchet hitting him
00:14:26.120 for his double speak on certain issues.
00:14:28.340 That will play really well in Quebec.
00:14:30.620 In English, if Jagmeet Singh is ripping him on his left
00:14:34.860 for sounding too conservative on certain issues,
00:14:37.440 and then Polyev is showing that he's actually
00:14:39.660 a fake reformer and exactly like Justin Trudeau
00:14:43.060 and Mark Carney gets caught in a lot of kind of
00:14:45.220 awkward sentences where he's kind of obviously
00:14:47.680 splitting the baby and he doesn't really
00:14:49.540 have a solid line of defense.
00:14:52.120 That is what is going to be a big failure for Carney.
00:14:56.220 It's never going to be he loses his train of thought
00:14:58.560 and then just like ends the question
00:15:00.260 like he's Joe Biden.
00:15:01.800 It's never going to be a Joe Biden kind of meltdown
00:15:04.340 that ends up hurting Mark Carney.
00:15:06.060 It's also not that kind of an election.
00:15:08.040 Right now, again, the Liberals are barely ahead
00:15:11.240 on the polling.
00:15:12.520 And in fact, the Conservatives don't even need
00:15:14.240 to win the popular vote to win this election.
00:15:16.500 The Bloc Abiqua just eat up a lot of the vote in Quebec.
00:15:18.800 It ends the Liberals because in Anglo-Canada,
00:15:21.420 it would mean that the Liberals would be decisively
00:15:23.480 behind the Conservatives.
00:15:24.940 That's how you actually have to see the National Poll.
00:15:27.020 The Nationals, if it's like 42% for the Liberals
00:15:30.060 and like 41% for the Conservatives,
00:15:32.460 if the Bloc Abiqua are at 7%, 0.95
00:15:34.220 that means the Bloc are winning the plurality
00:15:36.360 of the Quebec vote.
00:15:37.960 The Liberals are doing pretty well,
00:15:39.300 but the Bloc's doing so well,
00:15:40.460 it doesn't really matter.
00:15:41.440 The Liberals aren't going to be winning any ridings
00:15:43.000 outside of Montreal.
00:15:44.260 And then the rest of the Canada,
00:15:45.920 the Conservatives could be leading by six or seven points.
00:15:48.900 That's how the National Vote works
00:15:50.660 when you actually break it down along the lines
00:15:52.480 of the Bloc Abiqua included 0.94
00:15:54.840 or the Bloc Abiqua not included
00:15:56.820 in the rest of the country.
00:15:57.700 So anyways, that should be it for me today, guys.
00:16:00.540 Make sure to like this video,
00:16:01.880 subscribe to the channel,
00:16:02.760 leave a comment, do all that great stuff.
00:16:04.640 I'll see you next time.