In this episode of the podcast, Wyatt Claypool talks about a new poll that shows the Liberals are only 1 point behind the Tories in the polls. He also talks about Mark Carney screwing up pancakes just like his predecessor, Justin Trudeau.
00:00:00.000Hey guys, Wyatt Claypool here. I have a very interesting poll I want to discuss with you guys today because I think it tells a story about what Canadian politics is currently like.
00:00:12.180The Liberal government and Mark Carney are currently in a support honeymoon, but when you actually look at which party Canadians prefer to be in office, things are still extremely divided.
00:00:23.980This abacus data poll that we're going to be discussing shows that the Liberals are only leading, right now, the Conservatives by 1%.
00:00:32.980We will be getting to that in just a second, but first I just want to remind you guys, if you like my coverage of Canadian politics, make sure to leave a like on this video.
00:00:41.980If you're not yet a subscriber, please hit the subscribe button. We're trying to make it to 100,000 by mid-December of this year.
00:00:47.980And leave a comment on what you think about the current political situation in Canada.
00:00:52.980But before I get into the more serious stuff, I do just want to cover a couple of videos, the first of which being Mark Carney screwing up flipping pancakes just like his predecessor, Justin Trudeau.
00:01:04.980Now, do I care about this that much? Not really, but it's funny, so we're still going to play the video.
00:01:09.980That's special. Yes. Yes, you can flip that one.
00:01:15.980Oh, there you go. That's not it. That's not, that's not. I was better in Ottawa. I'm better in Ottawa.
00:01:29.980I got to do another one. I got to do another one. I'm practicing. I got a little cocky there.
00:01:47.980I'll even say that Mark Carney as a person doesn't come across like a bad guy.
00:01:54.980I don't like his policies. I really don't like really his philosophy when it comes to politics.
00:02:00.980But still, at least he takes, you know, screwing something up better than Justin Trudeau.
00:02:05.980But this leads into, uh, what pure poly have said at the conservative party barbecue about Mark, about Mark Carney and his dealings with the United States, because he does make a reference to Mark Carney's pancake flipping in this clip.
00:02:21.980And so let me start in a spirit of nonpartisanship as a Calgarian to welcome Prime Minister Mark Carney to his very first stampede in this role.
00:02:32.980And he had, of course, to do the customary thing and flip some pancakes.
00:02:36.980Now he thought he would be great at it because in his trade talks with Trump, he's had so much experience flip-flopping.
00:04:53.980And then you can see where generally the strength of the Conservatives would lie.
00:04:58.980Basically, they would start digging more into the Brampton, Mississauga area, into the GTA, picking up a couple seats in BC.
00:05:07.980But again, this isn't that different of an election result compared to what we currently have.
00:05:12.980This is about 40 seats changing hands between all of the different parties.
00:05:16.980But now I want to get into the actual official posting of this poll by Abacus because I think it's very interesting what we see from it.
00:05:26.980So this is the current government approval rating over the last year.
00:05:30.980Since February of 2024, it's tracking this.
00:05:33.980And I think it's because this is not showing that this is a fluke.
00:05:37.980It has been a gradual rise since Justin Trudeau resigned and Mark Carney took over.
00:05:43.980Back a year ago, we would have some disapproval rating numbers as high as 64% people disapproving of the government with only 23%, 22% of people approving of it.
00:06:33.980Let's give them the benefit of the doubt.
00:06:36.980Now, remember this in the context of at the same time, the liberals and conservatives are only 1% away.
00:06:43.980I think what this is demonstrating is a lot of people, while, again, they're willing to be more surface level patriotic right now because we're in a trade dispute with the United States and we have a somewhat new government, people will think nice things.
00:06:59.980But if you ask them, who would you really like in government, you're not getting a lot of people to budge from saying conservative.
00:07:05.980Because remember, 41 and a half people voted for the conservatives in this last election.
00:07:10.980And since the election, they've only lost one point, which is in the margin of error.
00:07:21.980And now here is the impression of Mark Carney.
00:07:24.980Back in January, when not a lot of people really had a strong opinion about him, he had 19% positive, 14% negative.
00:07:31.980And as of today, he is 49% positive and only 29, 28% negative.
00:07:37.980And then when we move on to Polyev, he's actually also not doing that bad considering how much the media has been attacking him and the fact that he lost the election.
00:07:46.980Usually, if you're, you know, the loser of the election, a lot of people don't tend to hold out many good feelings for you.
00:07:51.980In fact, his approval, net approval rating has been improving since the election, which demonstrates just how big the anti-Polyev propaganda effort was during the election.
00:08:04.980During the election, like late in the election, Abacus found 39% of people had a positive impression of him and 46% had a negative impression of him.
00:08:14.980That is a pretty massive gap, a negative of seven during the election when you are trying to market yourself very positively.
00:08:23.980And now he's at negative 43 and positive 39.
00:08:26.980And so the gap has fallen to just negative four, which isn't too bad for a conservative leader, considering that typically you are considered the bad guy of Canadian politics.
00:08:39.980They present you as one of those very dirty American like Canadian politicians.
00:08:44.980And so people naturally will be like, well, I'm not conservative, so I hate whoever the conservative is.
00:08:49.980And whereas you get a lot of conservatives on the other side who, you know, if Mark Carney's nice enough and he jokes around a little bit, even though they won't vote for the guy, they'll be like, he's nice.
00:08:59.980He's nice. And maybe I'll even say his government's nice, even though in the same poll, they're saying I'm going to vote conservative.
00:09:04.980This does actually happen a lot. This happened actually when Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee for president in 2024.
00:09:13.980As soon as she was made the presidential nominee, her negative approval rating turned around and became positive because, well, she's no longer the vice president anymore.
00:09:22.980She's the nominee for the president in 2024.
00:09:25.980So there was this big reevaluation that people actually like her.
00:09:29.980Well, the presidential election results spoke for themselves.
00:09:32.980You know, hardcore Democrats would vote for her, but a lot.
00:09:35.980But obviously Republicans vote Republican and independents split Republican really hard against her.
00:09:41.980You know, people will say nice things about you.
00:09:43.980But as they, you know, live with you, they'll say, like, oh, yeah, she's nice, but I'll never vote for her.
00:09:48.980And so the reelectability of the liberals has jumped a lot.
00:09:55.980But at the same time, we actually do have when you look at accessible voter pools, the conservatives are still doing pretty well in Canada.
00:10:02.980And really, the only area that they're suffering in is Quebec, which is not surprising.
00:10:06.980It's Quebec. The conservatives have never really done that well in Quebec.
00:10:09.980And what I find slightly odd about the conservative strategy right now and what they need to change is it's so Quebec center centric.
00:10:19.980The margin of loss in Quebec, the average seat that the conservatives lost in Quebec has a much wider margin of loss than a seat that they didn't win in Ontario or a seat that they didn't win in the Maritimes.
00:10:35.980It's far easier to win the seats in the Maritimes and in Ontario and clean up the remaining ridings in Saskatchewan and Alberta and win some more in BC than it is to win in Quebec.
00:10:46.980Stop running at the wall that is Quebec here, the conservatives.
00:10:50.980The conservatives are going to win the ridings they already win in the in the province, regardless of what they do.
00:10:55.980They mostly win border ridings with the United States or with English Canada, where people tend to be more free market.
00:11:02.980They actually don't like supply management in those areas.
00:11:05.980That's why Maxime Bernier used to be able to get elected very consistently in the bows as a conservative, even though he was anti supply management is because people in the bows tend to be anti supply management, too.
00:11:15.980They're the more libertarian entrepreneur types in Quebec.
00:11:19.980And so what we have, though, is the conservatives still not willing to say that we need to adjust supply management in order to sign a trade deal.
00:11:27.980I think they should say it. Who cares if a few Quebec politicians are going to contemn you?
00:11:34.980But again, here is the chart of the current polling.
00:11:38.980Again, think about this in the context of what I just showed you.
00:11:41.980Mark Carney is considered very popular right now, a plus 21 net approval rating.
00:11:46.980We have the government with a high approval rating right now when usually even the government had a lower approval rating than when Trudeau was around.
00:11:53.980Trudeau would have a better approval rating than even his government did.
00:11:56.980And now both of them are in the positives.
00:11:59.980But we have right now the conservatives within one point of the liberals.
00:12:05.980And that's not at all like that's not at all a fluke, because do you think the working class guy in Windsor suddenly wants to vote liberal now?
00:12:14.980And anyone who was voting liberal before, they actually have a good chance potentially of bleeding off the NDP because Mark Carney wasn't the hyper progressive that Justin Trudeau was.
00:12:28.980That's not saying that Mark Carney is going to be significantly better.
00:12:31.980He still does a lot of virtue signaling. He just isn't gratuitous about it in a way where certain hyper progressives might think, well, this isn't the party I signed up for and then go vote for Don Davies MVP.
00:12:43.980But what we see here is some decently positive numbers in B.C. The conservatives have 41 percent.
00:12:52.980Most of that strength is in Saskatchewan, to be fair. So it's very tight in Manitoba.
00:12:56.980Ontario, conservatives 43 to 44. Quebec, this is why they need to stop trying.
00:13:02.980They're at 19 percent. Atlantic Canada, 37, which is far better than what most pollsters put them at in Atlantic Canada in the last election.
00:13:09.980Still doing very well with younger voters and they tend to be trailing with older voters.
00:13:14.980And this thing is this is actually not much of a reversal.
00:13:17.980The only big thing that's happened with the age brackets is that the NDPs collapsed with younger voters.
00:13:24.980The conservatives actually have always usually been the middle aged voter party.
00:13:28.980The young party was always the NDP for the longest time until Jagmeet Singh sank that party into the quicksand.
00:13:35.980And then the older party, like 60 plus, that's actually always been the liberal party.
00:13:41.980If you're in that demo, if you're above the age of 60 and you vote conservative, you're just the conservative voting portion of that group.
00:13:48.980But disproportionately, that vote that group does vote liberal.
00:13:52.980And it's because that demographic, you know, is usually receiving CPP benefits.
00:13:58.980Disproportionately, they live a little bit more in the east.
00:14:01.980You know, they've already owned their own home.
00:14:03.980They usually live in safer neighborhoods.
00:14:05.980And so naturally, a lot of the policy issues that the liberals have caused over the last 10 years hasn't reached that group as much.
00:14:13.980So they are more willing to forgive policy failures or not even notice them.
00:14:17.980If you live in the west and you're in that older demo, no doubt the conservatives are winning you overwhelmingly because you live where the policy failures are concentrated.
00:14:25.980So even if you're retired, you still live in a province where you're constantly under attack, where it's constantly in the news.
00:14:33.980The liberals are shutting down pipeline projects or saying no to things like the tech mine.
00:14:38.980So you're not likely to fall for, you know, the progressive propaganda that, look, we have a new dental program.
00:14:44.980That means we're doing a good job because you live in the region where we pay for all of it.
00:14:48.980And you realize how much the liberals are squandering the economic powerhouse of the country.
00:14:53.980But to go through this a little bit more here, we have actually an improvement with women for the conservative party.
00:15:00.980And I think it's more so that post-election things are getting a little bit less polarized.
00:15:05.980Women for the conservatives are 37 to the liberals 41 with the new Democrats grabbing 11 men.
00:15:11.980The conservatives are leading by 42 compared to the liberals 40.
00:16:10.980Why aren't we passing legislation that's 10 pages?
00:16:13.980But you get a lot of wonky people who are in the policy world who like policy detail and they think all the problems of the universe can be solved through more detail, more regulations, more committee meetings.
00:16:27.980And that's just not like the conservative mind, what a conservative minded person believes.
00:16:31.980And the thing is that that person who was predisposed to believing that we need more detail, we need more laws, we need more restrictions are also the type of people who are going to get that extra degree that they probably didn't need because they live in the world of credentialism.
00:16:44.980Where, you know, in the policy, the policy they support, well, we should only be hiring people with a master's degree or better because that's good for, you know, it's good for government.
00:16:54.980We need people with higher educations in order to run things more efficiently, even though that's not true at all.
00:16:58.980But now I'm just rambling about education. Don't get a master's degree unless you really need it.
00:17:05.980Anyway, so that should be it for me today, guys.
00:17:08.980I think, again, right now, the story of Canadian politics is that people are giving the benefit of the doubt to Carney and the government.
00:17:15.980At the same time, if you held an election, they're not going to vote for them because they wanted the more fulsome reform that conservatives represented.
00:17:23.980At the same time, what I will say about the conservatives is that if they want to win next time, they need to run on an unmistakable reform platform.
00:17:33.980Their platform needs to be audacious with the reforms that it's trying to push. Run on a 20% across the board tax cut.
00:17:42.980Every bracket, corporate taxes, doesn't matter. Lower the amount of taxes that Canadians pay over four years by 20%.
00:17:49.980And then next election, lower it by a little bit more and keep lowering it because we are living in a world where we could probably do without 40% of the tax revenue.
00:17:59.980And we wouldn't have any of our lifestyles affected if you aren't living off of the government dole.
00:18:04.980But anyways, so that should be it for me today, guys.
00:18:08.980Again, like the video, subscribe to the channel, leave a comment if you like the show.
00:18:12.980And I will see you guys all next time.