The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - September 17, 2024


Justin Trudeau falls flat on his face in Montreal by-election


Episode Stats


Length

13 minutes

Words per minute

185.89511

Word count

2,570

Sentence count

122

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

4

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

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.

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 .
00:00:00.000 Well, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the federal liberals are evidently not having a very good week.
00:00:06.880 If you were paying attention, yesterday there were two very important by-elections that happened,
00:00:12.120 one in Elmwood-Transcona, which we will be talking about,
00:00:15.620 and the other one that I mainly want to focus on today happening in the Montreal federal riding of La Salle-Imard-Verdon,
00:00:23.640 a riding that in, I believe, the past four decades, there has been a couple of reshuffling of the boundaries and renaming of the riding,
00:00:31.240 but the general area has been held by a liberal for the past four decades,
00:00:36.900 except 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.
00:00:46.920 That riding has now been won by the Bloc Québécois in this by-election.
00:00:51.240 David Lamedi, last election in 2021, won it with 43% of the vote.
00:00:57.460 Not a massive amount of the vote, but his next closest opponent was the Bloc, who only had 21% of the vote.
00:01:05.580 This is a safe liberal riding.
00:01:08.720 Montreal is a safe liberal city.
00:01:11.120 This would be like if there was a conservative prime minister and he started dropping by-elections in Saskatoon or Regina. 0.91
00:01:17.840 This is pathetic on Justin Trudeau's part, but he's still not going to step down. 0.94
00:01:23.980 How bad was it last night? 0.96
00:01:25.640 Well, 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.
00:01:38.560 If 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.
00:01:46.200 This was the end results for the riding.
00:01:49.820 28% Bloc, 27.2% Liberal, and 26.1% NDP.
00:01:55.400 The 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.
00:02:11.120 Because 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.
00:02:22.840 But here's the clip of them talking about this on the CBC, the liberal candidate ending up leaving the event early.
00:02:30.700 We're all trying to figure out why Laura Palestini gave that speech when she gave that speech.
00:02:36.140 You got any insight?
00:02:37.040 What's the vibe and the reaction at the headquarters after that?
00:02:42.300 Well, David, I can tell you one thing.
00:02:45.120 As much as she was energetic in her speech, she was also energetic in leaving the party.
00:02:52.840 She immediately left as soon as she gave that speech. 0.96
00:02:57.360 She did a few steps saying thank you to the volunteers, turned around, went out the door, and, of course, we followed her.
00:03:06.460 Thought maybe she was just getting some fresh air.
00:03:08.420 No, she got in the way. 1.00
00:03:10.600 Yeah, sorry for the video breaking up there a bit.
00:03:15.520 I actually think that's just the person who clipped it.
00:03:17.840 But that's basically a repeat of what happened in Toronto St. Paul.
00:03:21.660 I 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.
00:03:35.820 What went wrong is that Justin Trudeau is still the prime minister, and people don't like him anymore.
00:03:41.200 The thing is that people don't see the party as being independent from Justin Trudeau.
00:03:45.520 So if people don't like Justin Trudeau, they're not even going to consider you as a liberal candidate.
00:03:51.320 They 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.
00:04:03.480 And this is why you even have, before the by-election took place, liberal MPs basically saying, yeah, my own constituents don't like him.
00:04:11.900 Alexandra 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.
00:04:23.980 Well, 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.
00:04:36.880 Oh, 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.
00:04:45.580 He's kind of doing all this excuse-making, even though Justin Trudeau has never been a friend of Quebec Anglos.
00:04:52.300 Yes, 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.
00:05:03.520 So 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.
00:05:13.700 I actually have no doubt that the liberals might be able to recapture this riding in the next cycle.
00:05:18.780 You 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.
00:05:32.220 It'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.
00:05:41.480 It 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.
00:05:54.120 Yeah, they got 11.6% of the vote.
00:05:55.820 This 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.
00:06:13.120 So they improved pretty well, and they also improved in Elmwood Transcona.
00:06:17.780 It 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%.
00:06:28.120 A little bit of a drop to the NDP's vote share, but a massive increase to the conservatives.
00:06:34.060 This, again, should be a safe NDP riding, and it became an actual squeaker election.
00:06:40.120 If 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.
00:06:49.500 But now, here is Justin Trudeau being asked what he thinks about the election loss yesterday in La Salle de Marde, Verdun.
00:06:58.440 Justin, what's your reaction to the results last night?
00:07:00.760 Well, 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.
00:07:09.900 I 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.
00:07:20.120 At the same time, we need people to be more engaged.
00:07:22.720 We need people to understand what's at stake in this upcoming election.
00:07:27.020 Obviously, 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.
00:07:36.840 What do you think went wrong?
00:07:37.920 Oh, 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.
00:07:52.300 That is what liquefied denial looks like.
00:07:56.640 When someone asks him, what went wrong?
00:07:59.280 If, honestly, Justin Trudeau wanted to be more likable, because he is at the bottom of the barrel of his likability these days,
00:08:05.520 admit to mistakes, admit to a mistake, and you actually might re-engage some Canadians.
00:08:11.200 But he's following the kind of, he's kind of falling into the trap I see, or not really trap,
00:08:17.620 the 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.
00:08:25.600 And 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.
00:08:32.560 Yeah, you're not popular, and your candidates are losing because people aren't engaged enough.
00:08:36.820 Or maybe your problem is people are actually, people actually are engaged, and they're voting in different ways because they don't like you,
00:08:44.120 because they think you're doing a bad job.
00:08:45.900 But just because it needs to, you know, people just need to be more engaged.
00:08:49.200 It's not democracy unless we win.
00:08:50.960 So, obviously, the quality of the democracy in this by-election was just not there.
00:08:56.380 And him thinking, like, oh, it's great that people showed up and volunteered and whatnot.
00:09:01.960 How about talk about issues people care about?
00:09:03.900 This is what Justin Trudeau and many other failing premiers around the country fall into every single time,
00:09:11.260 every single time their, like, popularity starts hitting the floor is they start talking about nothing all the time
00:09:17.200 because they don't, like, because they can't win on the issues anymore.
00:09:20.260 So, they just try and happy talk their way through a crisis happening right now in British Columbia.
00:09:25.160 David Eby wants to talk about climate and positivity and reinvesting in people without actually confronting issues.
00:09:31.440 He doesn't want to talk about issues.
00:09:32.600 He wants to talk about vague truisms of community spirit and how much we, you know,
00:09:39.280 we need to reach out and pull people up and then get people up the next rung of the ladder
00:09:43.940 without talking about issues around drugs and affordability or anything like that.
00:09:48.280 Trudeau doesn't want to actually even utter the words affordability these days
00:09:51.900 because everyone knows he's at fault for what's going on right now.
00:09:55.360 He wants to talk about ancillary issues.
00:09:57.260 He wants to call peer poly of a climate denier,
00:09:59.260 just like David Eby wants to call John Restad a climate denier.
00:10:02.060 It just makes you look out of touch when you're talking about fringe social issues
00:10:06.700 rather than what's actually hurting people these days.
00:10:09.620 To lose a Montreal by-election really shows you've alienated people.
00:10:13.340 And this isn't like a specific by-election in a riding where, you know,
00:10:17.480 there's a heavy Jewish population because the liberals have been enabling anti-Semitism
00:10:21.480 and they all turned against them.
00:10:22.420 This is actually very much not a Jewish riding.
00:10:24.820 There's a few ridings out there where there's like, you know, 20%, 25% Jewish residences.
00:10:30.060 This riding is like almost nothing.
00:10:32.600 It's like maybe 2%.
00:10:33.580 They lost it just because middle class people don't like them.
00:10:36.460 There was no specific interest group who didn't like them or specific community who
00:10:40.500 they've really ticked off.
00:10:41.780 These are just Montrealers they've ticked off. 0.62
00:10:44.280 Just across the board, Montrealers don't like them.
00:10:46.760 Think about it this way too.
00:10:48.200 This riding usually was won by the liberals close to the same margins that Prime Minister
00:10:53.840 Trudeau wins his riding of Papineau.
00:10:55.640 Now, I don't think that Trudeau is going to lose Papineau in the next election, but it
00:10:59.840 makes you think that if this riding could get flipped to the Bloc Québécois, well, what
00:11:05.380 stops if the Conservatives invest a lot of money into Papineau?
00:11:09.700 If I was Pierre Polyev, I would go door knocking in Papineau just for the fun of it, just to
00:11:15.020 troll Trudeau.
00:11:16.080 Even though the Conservatives only got 4.3% of the vote in Papineau back in 2021, it really
00:11:20.900 shows you how different a world Montreal is.
00:11:23.180 Just hit the doors, even if you're not going to get more than 10% of the vote, push that
00:11:27.460 Conservative margin up to 8%.
00:11:29.120 You know, help the Bloc a little bit out in that riding.
00:11:32.720 And you could make it that Trudeau only wins by 7% in the next election.
00:11:36.480 Maybe you could even make it closer than that.
00:11:38.620 Go after the bad leaders and put the focus on, keep the pressure up on Trudeau.
00:11:44.100 Try and force the man to step down.
00:11:46.060 I know Conservatives want to run against Trudeau in 2025. 0.75
00:11:48.460 As I've been saying in my last few videos, I want to normalize when leaders suck at their
00:11:53.560 jobs, they step down and let someone else do it.
00:11:56.540 I want the Liberals to lose the next election, but I also want all parties to get better at
00:12:01.860 actually responding to what Canadians want, rather than basically just saying enough to
00:12:07.400 try and win an election, then implement whatever they want to implement.
00:12:10.160 Okay, anyways, that should be it for me today, guys.
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00:13:46.420 So anyways, that should be it for me today, guys.
00:13:48.940 Have a good one.