In this episode, I break down the results of yesterday's by-election in Toronto St. Paul, where the Liberals lose a key seat to the Tories. I also talk about why Prime Minister Justin Trudeau should step down as Prime Minister.
00:00:00.000Well, that was a funny night yesterday. We started off the night assuming that the liberals would be able to hold on to their seat in Toronto St. Paul. It looked good for them for a while. They were 10% up on the conservatives. And then early in the morning, the entire thing collapsed when some of the early voting had finally come in from those early polls. And now Toronto St. Paul is a conservative seat.
00:00:23.160And I want to break down some of the details of this a little bit further because I think the detail makes it so much worse than it already is. Like, this is already embarrassing for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and he should resign because of it. If you look at the map of Toronto, this is what the map currently is in terms of where the seats are. That's where Toronto St. Paul is.
00:00:42.280So right now, it is a blue seat in a sea of red, plus a couple of independents, but they were elected as liberals. This is a stronghold liberal seat. Yes, there are certain factors that would have influenced the vote, like there is 15% of Jewish voters in that area, which was going to hurt the liberals considering they have just let crazy people do their foreign policy work and who are just obviously pro-Hamas. That's the only way I can put it.
00:01:10.560So yeah, there are some factors. Yes, the incumbent was out, and having a longtime incumbent step down and then trying to replace them with a staffer doesn't really look very good. It doesn't inspire voters to come out just for the person who was Chrystia Freeland's former staffer. It's cheap. It's just saying basically elect the person who's been polishing picture frames in another MP's office.
00:01:31.600But it still balances out because the Conservatives ran a guy who's frankly a lobbyist and consultant from Jenny Burns and Associates, who's the top advisor to peer poly of Jenny Byrne is. So you could argue that they were equivalent candidates. One was a staffer, one was a consultant. Neither of them were going to be firecracker personalities.
00:01:50.760So the entire race in Toronto St. Paul effectively turned into a referendum on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Do you like Trudeau and do you like his personality? And are you willing to entrust the seat to peer poly of and the Conservatives team?
00:02:04.480And the answer was yes. Here are the results, just to give you a bit of detail. The Conservative Party of Canada and Don Stewart won 42.1% of the vote. Liberals got 40.5% of the vote. Their candidate was Leslie Church. NDP and the Green Party underperformed heavily with 10.9% and 2.9% respectively.
00:02:24.140And the PPC has fully collapsed, only getting 0.6% of the vote, losing 2.1% that they had back in 2021. Yeah, it's not a great seat for the PPC to be running in in the first place. It's a downtown core semi-suburban riding. And so the PPC are just not going to be very welcome in this area.
00:02:43.960At the same time, if you can't maintain the small, hardcore base of support that you had in a riding like this, and you are supposedly putting your volunteers out there on the doors and nobody's reacting to you, you probably need to pack it in.
00:02:56.800Pierre Polyev is against mass immigration. He's going to lower taxes, regulations. He is more in favor of freedom like the PPC wants. So at this point, the party either has to find a new identity or they have to pack it in.
00:03:09.200And it seems like Maxime Bernier is interested in packing it in since his wife just purchased them a $1.1 million home down on the Florida panhandle, I believe, which probably means that he's not going to be spending that much time in Canada in the next several years.
00:03:23.300But I also want to just quickly talk about the reaction that there has been to this by-election result because no doubt Prime Minister Justin Trudeau should be doing some soul searching and deciding if he wants to step down or not.
00:03:36.200Yes, he still might be the stronger leader to lead the Liberals into the next election cycle, but him stepping down would at least maybe give the Liberals the chance to win in four years.
00:03:46.160I want them to do the dumbest thing possible because I don't want the Liberals coming back anytime soon. I know the Liberals don't watch this show and they'll never take my advice.
00:03:54.000So if you're in the comments saying, Wyatt, stop giving the Liberals advice, don't worry. If I give them good advice, they'll make sure to do the opposite.
00:04:00.240But I just like the analysis of how politics works, so I talk about it this way.
00:04:05.260But there was a question that was then asked to Chrystia Freeland this morning after it was clear that the Conservatives had won, asking her if there's any chance that the Prime Minister would be stepping down.
00:04:15.600Thank you for Kat Canda for clipping this video. Make sure you go follow her on Twitter.
00:04:23.140She's done a good job clipping this stuff. As much as it's easy to clip things, it's also very tedious, so I'm always happy when people like Kat, I think her name's like Katrina or whatever, when they actually go out there and make sure to do the work that I am unwilling to do because I would go stir crazy having to slowly, meticulously clip all these things out of CPAC streams.
00:04:43.520But here's Chrystia Freeland reacting to a journalist asking her about whether or not Justin Trudeau is going to go the way of the dodo.
00:04:53.480Deputy Prime Minister, can the Prime Minister still stay on to lead the Liberal Party into the next election, given that you just lost one of the safest seats in the entire country last night?
00:05:05.540Can you explain why? Because everybody we're hearing from behind the scenes believes that the result last night means catastrophic losses across the country.
00:05:14.380If you cannot win in Toronto under Justin Trudeau, why should anybody believe you can win anywhere else under him?
00:05:23.900Our government is focused on working hard for Canada and Canadians and on delivering results for Canada and Canadians.
00:05:32.620That is what the Prime Minister is focused on.
00:05:56.020Obviously, she's not going to come out and say, you know, go subscribe to Wyatt Claypool's YouTube channel, The National Telegraph.
00:06:00.620He's a great guy. Yeah, Christy Freeland's not going to come out and say everything I'd want her to say.
00:06:05.780But you think that she would put on a bit of a tone of contrition and say, yes, we've heard voters loud and clear.
00:06:11.680And we're going to make sure to react to what people are wanting us to do.
00:06:15.600People have pivoting priorities and we will pivot alongside those priorities.
00:06:19.620That would be a good way of responding to it without saying that, yeah, Justin Trudeau sucks and she's probably like move on.
00:06:25.240But the Liberals, to a certain extent, have been running this playbook for eight straight years.
00:06:31.200And you don't run a playbook like this for so long and then decide, actually, we're going to be more principled now.
00:06:36.960It's just not how people actually work.
00:06:39.240But then there was this response from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's office in which he said, I won't bring it up on screen because you guys are probably not going to want to read it while I'm doing a video here.
00:07:19.680kind of understood that this is the thing that they should be saying in the aftermath.
00:07:23.640But it still doesn't change the fact that the problem for the Liberal Party is that they've just alienated large groups of voters who the Liberals would have to effectively completely do a 180 with their playbook in order to win back.
00:07:37.140They've lost a lot of minority community support.
00:07:40.540I heard from someone texting me a few days before the election that the Muslim community, the Indian community, many sub communities in those groups were just specifically, even though they acknowledge that they're usually default Liberal voters, that they were specifically either not showing up or showing up to vote Conservative to punish the Liberals for having failed so badly on the economy and on other issue fronts.
00:08:02.900So this really demonstrates that Toronto could be completely opened up and that every single riding is pretty much in play outside of the really deep downtown ridings where it's always been either an NDP or Liberal seat.
00:08:16.700Although this means that some of these seats could go NDP.
00:08:19.480Although I also will caution that we shouldn't overread this result, just as we shouldn't have overread that when there was, frankly, nomination shenanigans in Oxford in the Conservative nomination where they kicked out Garrett Van Doren and then they slotted in Arpan Khanna effectively, that the Conservatives only won Oxford by like 4%, even though they used to win that riding by like 21%.
00:08:43.480That they that that that was not going to be representative of how the Conservatives were going to do elsewhere, because we saw when Aaron O'Toole stepped down in Durham, and then Jamil Giovanni became the candidate out there, because Jamil is a very strong Conservative candidate, he actually expanded the Conservative vote, despite it being previously the leader seat.
00:09:03.640So good quality candidates go a long way.
00:09:05.860And even in this riding, I think the Conservatives could have even picked someone a little bit more, you know, charismatic, a little bit more fiery.
00:09:13.860If you pick consultant candidates, you're almost having to rely on the Liberals also picking a candidate who's not doesn't have a big profile, a little bit more, you know, guarded in how they talk, not being not being kind of mavericks on policy.
00:09:26.920So I think this really demonstrates that the current temperature of the country is that people are not going to show up for Justin Trudeau, in the same way that in the United Kingdom, people aren't showing up for Rishi Sunak, just because you're the government in power doesn't mean that you have a power base, it just means that you simply had a power base back in 2021.
00:09:45.120The Liberals' demographics of people who support them is so muddled and confusing, it's even harder for them to even target groups that they know are vote rich.
00:09:53.860The Liberals' votes are very, not only smaller these days, they're very spread out, so that they can't target that area of town or that specific group to get votes out.
00:10:03.180It's almost that, like, because Justin Trudeau has been such a bad Prime Minister, people are more independent-minded and not willing to be kind of corralled into voting one direction or another,
00:10:13.660because that's how my group votes. That, frankly, was kind of the stereotype of GTA, Jewish community voters.
00:10:20.300It's default Liberals, people have more progressive social sensibilities, a little bit more moderate on fiscal issues, and so they were going to default vote Liberal.
00:10:28.860The Liberals have gone both, they've failed so badly on the economy, and they've gone so hard left in terms of being pro-Hamas that Jewish voters just can't do it anymore.
00:10:37.820And so many of them did shift over to the Conservatives, and I wouldn't be surprised to see that that is what made up most of the difference for the Conservative Party,
00:10:46.740was a lot of voters going from Liberals to Conservatives, although it was still a squeaker, so I could see some of the NDP having also gotten by in the Liberals.
00:10:54.620One of the funniest things I've seen, and I'm not sure if I'm going to bring it up on screen now, I'll try and find it for you,
00:11:00.420was some Liberal Party supporters whining that people voted NDP and Green, and that they had, like, let down the Liberals as if it was, like, their duty to make sure that the Liberals kept a hold of the seat.
00:11:13.300Okay, here it is right here. I'll make it a little bit bigger on screen.
00:11:16.480So this whiner says, big thanks to the 10.9% who voted NDP and the 2.9% who voted Green on securing a Conservative win.
00:11:29.180And it shows, obviously, how close it was in that the Greens and the NDP could have put the Liberals over the top.
00:11:35.040But this is a great lesson in how politics actually works.
00:11:39.360People didn't vote for your party because they didn't like the party.
00:11:43.240I am against the myth of vote splitting.
00:11:45.800There, in my mind, is pretty much no real situation where vote splitting actually happens.
00:11:52.980Very infrequently do people get confused by two parties, and they end up basically letting another party win because they're divided between two options.
00:12:01.620It didn't even happen in 2012 or 2015 between the Wild Rose, or I guess just 2015, between the Wild Rose Party of Alberta and the PC Party.
00:12:10.540People weren't voting for the other one for very clear reasons.
00:12:17.620People aren't voting Liberal because they're not voting Liberal.
00:12:20.160People are used to voting Liberal in previous elections.
00:12:22.720They've been voting Liberal since 1988, I believe, in this riding.
00:12:26.300So if they didn't pick the Liberals, it's not because there was another option on the ballot.
00:12:30.240Carolyn Bennett had been having to deal with other options on the ballot for decades, and she was still winning that seat.
00:12:36.720As soon as she turned it over to Leslie Church and the terrible Liberal brand that now exists, remember, Carolyn Bennett still won the seat in 2011 during the Ignatius collapse, which is not really that big of a data point that it should have been a safe receipt because the established names in the party back in 2011 mostly held on to their seats and she was very established.
00:12:57.560But she was able to weather some pretty difficult storms.
00:13:01.280The fact that they couldn't do it this time more so proved that people don't like them, not that the NDP and the Greens weren't being compliant enough.
00:13:08.180The Greens and the NDP have gotten better results in this riding in the past.
00:13:19.000It was that the Conservatives gained and everyone else flopped.
00:13:22.640That's the story of this election, that people are not looking for the left.
00:13:26.660They are looking for a conservative alternative to the left right now.
00:13:31.440Jagmeet Singh has hurt his reputation by wrapping himself around Justin Trudeau, who is a complete boat anchor on Jagmeet Singh's approval, because NDP leaders usually had a big advantage in having high approval, because they have no chance of ever becoming the Prime Minister.
00:13:46.460So people just assume they're nice people.
00:13:48.300And as soon as Jagmeet Singh has actually made himself a thorn in the side of Canadians by backing Trudeau, people have completely walked away from seeing the NDP as a friendly option to park their vote with if they don't like the Conservative or the Liberal, because they're just seen as the adjunct Liberal.
00:14:04.140But anyways, that should be it for me today, guys.
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