Justin Trudeau and the federal Liberals are not having a good week. On this week's After Hours, we discuss two important by-elections, one in Elmwood-Transcona and one in LaSalle-Imard-Verdon.
00:00:00.000Well, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the federal liberals are evidently not having a very good week.
00:00:06.880If you were paying attention, yesterday there were two very important by-elections that happened,
00:00:12.120one in Elmwood-Transcona, which we will be talking about,
00:00:15.620and the other one that I mainly want to focus on today happening in the Montreal federal riding of La Salle-Imard-Verdon,
00:00:23.640a riding that in, I believe, the past four decades, there has been a couple of reshuffling of the boundaries and renaming of the riding,
00:00:31.240but the general area has been held by a liberal for the past four decades,
00:00:36.900except for a brief interlude in 2011 when Michael Ignatieff was the liberal leader and he absolutely scuffed that election and the NDP ended up winning the riding.
00:01:25.640Well, the liberal candidate there, Laura Palestini or whatever her name was, she ended up leaving her campaign event early because I think even she knew whether she wins or loses, this is not going to be a good look.
00:01:38.560If anything, if she won by only 1% of the vote, I don't think many people would have really seen it as a big liberal victory.
00:01:46.200This was the end results for the riding.
00:01:49.82028% Bloc, 27.2% Liberal, and 26.1% NDP.
00:01:55.400The NDP actually probably could have picked this riding up, but because their campaign was utterly befuddled at the very end, posting Palestinian flags everywhere and talking so much about progressivism and social justice that a lot of middle class voters, I think, walked away from them.
00:02:11.120Because at some point in the riding polling projections, they actually showed the NDP winning, and then they ended up fading down into a close third place simply because they couldn't keep the radicalism in.
00:02:22.840But here's the clip of them talking about this on the CBC, the liberal candidate ending up leaving the event early.
00:02:30.700We're all trying to figure out why Laura Palestini gave that speech when she gave that speech.
00:03:10.600Yeah, sorry for the video breaking up there a bit.
00:03:15.520I actually think that's just the person who clipped it.
00:03:17.840But that's basically a repeat of what happened in Toronto St. Paul.
00:03:21.660I think that Laura Palestini learned her lesson from watching another candidate go down to defeat in what should have been a safe liberal riding, and she wanted to get out of there in case she lost, and then the media started swarming her on what went wrong.
00:03:35.820What went wrong is that Justin Trudeau is still the prime minister, and people don't like him anymore.
00:03:41.200The thing is that people don't see the party as being independent from Justin Trudeau.
00:03:45.520So if people don't like Justin Trudeau, they're not even going to consider you as a liberal candidate.
00:03:51.320They don't like your leader, so they don't care about what you have to say because Justin Trudeau has turned the liberals into a personality cult where whatever he says goes, and anyone else's opinions can be kept to themselves.
00:04:03.480And this is why you even have, before the by-election took place, liberal MPs basically saying, yeah, my own constituents don't like him.
00:04:11.900Alexandra Mendez, who's in a nearby riding in Brassard in Montreal, just basically said, yeah, he does need to step down or our party's going to be in trouble.
00:04:23.980Well, Justin Trudeau knew this was probably going to be a loss because in interviews before the election even took place, he started making excuses, as I talked about in another show, for why the liberals might lose.
00:04:36.880Oh, it's just because we've been so nice to the Anglo-Canadian community in Montreal, and Francois Legault, the premier of Quebec, doesn't like that, so he's backing the bloc.
00:04:45.580He's kind of doing all this excuse-making, even though Justin Trudeau has never been a friend of Quebec Anglos.
00:04:52.300Yes, a lot of Anglo-Quebecers vote liberal because the bloc are obviously a French nationalist party, but that doesn't mean that the liberals haven't been enabling everything Francois Legault has been doing.
00:05:03.520So that rang completely hollow, and I think a lot of people could even detect that Justin Trudeau was going to go very soft in this election, and a lot of liberals ended up staying home.
00:05:13.700I actually have no doubt that the liberals might be able to recapture this riding in the next cycle.
00:05:18.780You know, I hope they don't because I don't think they deserve to win it, but the fact that a lot of people ended up not coming out is more reflective of not the bloc becoming more popular or the NDP becoming more popular.
00:05:32.220It's just Trudeau not being popular, and before I get to this clip of Justin Trudeau now trying to hand-wave away this election result, this is how tight it was the entire night.
00:05:41.480It was pretty incredible how close this by-election was, and the conservatives actually did pretty well because you would think, well, they only got like 10% of the vote, 11% of the vote to get the exact number.
00:05:55.820This is a riding where I believe the conservatives, I want to go check, the conservatives in the last election had only gotten, to get onto the right page here, sorry, the conservatives had only gotten back in 2021, 21, oh, no, sorry, 7% of the vote.
00:06:13.120So they improved pretty well, and they also improved in Elmwood Transcona.
00:06:17.780It was a winnable race for the conservatives, and they ended up falling short behind the NDP, but the NDP only got 48.1% of the vote, and the conservatives got 44%.
00:06:28.120A little bit of a drop to the NDP's vote share, but a massive increase to the conservatives.
00:06:34.060This, again, should be a safe NDP riding, and it became an actual squeaker election.
00:06:40.120If the conservatives maybe put a little bit more time into this riding, or maybe next election, now that more people are used to voting conservative, it might actually become winnable.
00:06:49.500But now, here is Justin Trudeau being asked what he thinks about the election loss yesterday in La Salle de Marde, Verdun.
00:06:58.440Justin, what's your reaction to the results last night?
00:07:00.760Well, first of all, I want to congratulate everyone who stepped up in putting their name on a ballot at a time where we know politics is a challenging moment.
00:07:09.900I also want to highlight the thousands upon thousands of volunteers who stepped out, lots for our party, but lots for other parties as well, to show that people are still very much engaged.
00:07:20.120At the same time, we need people to be more engaged.
00:07:22.720We need people to understand what's at stake in this upcoming election.
00:07:27.020Obviously, it would have been nicer to be able to win and hold Verdun, but there's more work to do, and we're going to stay focused on doing it.
00:07:37.920Oh, I think there's all sorts of reflections to take on that, but the big thing is to make sure the Canadians understand that the choice they get to make in the next election of the kind of country we are really matters, and that's the work we're going to continue to do.
00:07:52.300That is what liquefied denial looks like.
00:07:56.640When someone asks him, what went wrong?
00:07:59.280If, honestly, Justin Trudeau wanted to be more likable, because he is at the bottom of the barrel of his likability these days,
00:08:05.520admit to mistakes, admit to a mistake, and you actually might re-engage some Canadians.
00:08:11.200But he's following the kind of, he's kind of falling into the trap I see, or not really trap,
00:08:17.620the kind of toxic mindset of a lot of left-wingers, that when they don't win, it's because the election wasn't democratic enough.
00:08:25.600And I know he didn't say those words specifically, but it was going along his comment on, well, people just need to be more engaged.
00:08:32.560Yeah, you're not popular, and your candidates are losing because people aren't engaged enough.
00:08:36.820Or maybe your problem is people are actually, people actually are engaged, and they're voting in different ways because they don't like you,
00:08:44.120because they think you're doing a bad job.
00:08:45.900But just because it needs to, you know, people just need to be more engaged.