The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - Liberals FALL 11% in Quebec - Carney Messed Up on Trade!

00:00:00.180 Ahoy, everyone, and happy Sunday. Wyatt Claypool here, back again for some more Canadian polling time on the whiteboard.

00:00:08.340 Today, we have a very interesting poll from Abacus Data to talk about that shows the Mark Carney liberals are absolutely collapsing right now in the province of Quebec, mostly related to trade dispute issues.

00:00:21.700 We will be getting into that, but we will be first starting out with the national-level polling numbers.

00:00:27.080 They're not that much different from the last Abacus data poll, but there is some interesting

00:00:30.940 tidbits that I do want to highlight from it. But before we get into all the numbers, I just want

00:00:36.480 to remind you guys, if you like the channel, make sure to leave a like on the video. Subscribe if

00:00:41.420 you are not yet a subscriber and help me get to 100,000 subscribers. Leave a comment with what

00:00:46.640 you think about all this. And if you want to become a member of the channel, hit the join

00:00:51.280 button below the video, and it really helps make it more sustainable to have a small cohort of

00:00:55.980 subscribers who also contribute monthly. With all that said, let's get into the top level

00:01:01.860 abacus data numbers that show the liberals, of course, are still leading. How could they not be

00:01:06.980 right now? Yes, you and I as conservatives do not trust Mark Carney when it comes to negotiating

00:01:12.560 with Donald Trump. He's been screwing up in several different areas of public policy. But for the

00:01:17.640 average Canadian who's not paying attention very consistently, a lot of people want to trust the

00:01:24.860 Prime Minister. So the Liberals have technically slightly increased their margin here. They're now

00:01:30.560 leading the Conservatives by 7%. But of course, that is a far cry from what we are seeing from

00:01:37.200 other pollsters like ResearchCo, supposedly showing that the Liberals are leading the

00:01:42.360 Conservatives by like 20 points. They're just not, that's not because I don't want the Liberals to

00:01:48.740 lead by 20 points. It's just that they're not leading by 20 points. In no way is the current

00:01:54.300 environment such that the Liberal Party of Canada would be leading the Conservatives by that much.

00:01:59.900 In this poll, they're only at 42%, which is what they scored during the 2025 federal election.

00:02:05.820 The Conservatives have fallen down a little bit since the federal election. But again,

00:02:10.100 we're in a bit of a political environment because Carney's up against Trump. People just inherently

00:02:15.120 trust him more. They inherently are more willing to still vote Liberal. But that can kind of all

00:02:21.140 fold in like a tent someday, when people just realize Carney is not getting the goods, he's not

00:02:26.320 a good negotiator against Trump, and he's been lying about a lot of his agenda. So the Liberals

00:02:31.800 are leading the Conservatives by seven points, with the Conservatives sitting at a rating of 35%.

00:02:38.260 And again, that is after an absolute onslaught that Pierre Paulyev and the Conservatives took

00:02:44.060 this week for absolutely no reason. The Liberals knew it has been a bad couple of past news cycles,

00:02:50.640 for Mark Carney and the liberals. So naturally, what do they do? Well, they just start battering

00:02:56.140 the conservatives, writing up a bunch of smear stories. This poll was only like, the last day

00:03:01.200 it was conducted on was a few days ago, right around that week where they really just started

00:03:06.100 hammering on Polyev to distract from the failures of Mark Carney when it comes to U.S. trade

00:03:11.460 negotiations. This poll has the NDP up a little bit since last time. They're sitting at 10% of

00:03:18.860 the vote here. Not too bad for them, considering, again, they only had 6% of the vote last time.

00:03:24.720 The big winners in this poll, as indicated by what we're going to talk about in Quebec later,

00:03:29.460 is the Bloc Québécois, who, similar to the NDP, had gotten 6% in the last election. But in this

00:03:36.440 poll, and remember, they only run in Quebec, they're currently sitting at 8% nationally.

00:03:42.180 We also have the Green Party of Canada coming in with 4% of the vote, which is definitely an

00:03:48.420 elevation for them, considering I think they only got one and a half percent in the last federal

00:03:52.600 election. And the PPC is sitting at two percent in this Abacus data poll. Now, oddly enough, the thing

00:04:01.020 I most want to talk about in this poll is the PPC. Abacus data during the 2025 federal election

00:04:09.120 had been polling the PPC around two to four percent. They actually never even pulled them

00:04:14.360 only at 1%. It was always 2 to 4. And as you remember, on election day, they got 0.7. Maybe

00:04:20.980 if they had a candidate in every single riding, they would have gotten a full 1%. I kind of doubt

00:04:27.540 it. These days, I'm kind of developing a rule. If the PPC is higher than 1% in a poll, really

00:04:34.520 just assume that it's conservatives plus whatever the PPC have above 1%. Because we just know in

00:04:43.180 the by-elections, in the last federal election, it's just a dead party at this point. They maybe

00:04:48.460 had a chance to break through in 2021. Maxime Bernier's mismanagement of the party, mismanagement

00:04:54.020 of funds, and not actually running a proper campaign meant they got 5% nationally, but never

00:04:59.920 really came close in any riding to actually winning. Yeah, they had Portage Lisger that they

00:05:04.420 did pretty well in, but still, it was just a disorganized mess for the PPC, and they're never

00:05:09.380 going to even punch over 1% again, unless there's another seismic shift in Canadian politics.

00:05:15.120 And frankly, Maxime Bernier is not the man who's ever going to capitalize on it for a second

00:05:20.320 right-wing party. So the Conservatives, I would say, are probably more at like 36%. It's probably

00:05:27.380 still just a 6% margin between the Liberals and Conservatives, like the last Abacus data poll,

00:05:32.960 because a lot of people, when they select PPC in a poll like this, they're saying,

00:05:36.640 I really like the PPC, but they're going to vote for the federal conservatives when the next

00:05:40.800 election comes around. And you could say, well, Wyatt, couldn't you do that for the Greens,

00:05:44.460 the Bloc Hippiquan, the NDP? It's like, well, not really, because these are established parties

00:05:49.520 that have been around for decades. When the Greens poll at 3% before the election,

00:05:53.880 among most pollsters, they're usually going to get 3% of the vote. Last election, the Green

00:06:00.100 Party got basically what they were polling at during the 2025 election. 1.5%, they were usually

00:06:06.500 polling at about two, so they were pretty well within their general margin of projected vote.

00:06:12.780 The PPC, though, they'll sometimes be in some of these bad pollsters, three, four percent, and they're

00:06:18.040 not getting three or four percent. The research co-poll that supposedly showed the Liberals

00:06:22.640 leading the Conservatives by 20 points showed the PPC at like seven percent in Saskatchewan,

00:06:29.500 Manitoba. No, it's their best region, but their best region these days, they can maybe pull up

00:06:34.780 2% of the vote. Everywhere else, it's 1% or even less than that, if not closer, rounding down to

00:06:41.320 zero. So right now, liberals are plus seven nationally in this abacus data poll, and if I

00:06:48.760 handicap it with my rule on the PPC, it's plus six with the PPC factor. So yeah, nothing's really

00:06:58.200 changed. The fighting with Donald Trump and the Americans and the trade deal and the crisis with

00:07:03.100 tariffs, it's not benefiting Mark Carney nearly as much as it did six months ago at the start of

00:07:09.120 the year. That he was flying super high back then because he had the perfect combination of seeming

00:07:14.040 like he was getting stuff done, signing fake trade deals everywhere, talking with the Chinese,

00:07:19.160 jabbing at Trump at Davos, and that pushed him up. In the abacus data numbers and Angus Reid,

00:07:24.600 who I trust, they were at like 12 and 13 percent. That was real, but it was a momentary lead that

00:07:30.040 Carney was never going to be able to hold on to, every politician has sometimes a big

00:07:33.800 peak because the news cycle was just perfect.

00:07:36.200 It was three back-to-back great news cycles.

00:07:38.680 He's fighting Trump.

00:07:39.740 He looks like he's getting stuff done when he's not really, and he jumps up, and it slowly

00:07:44.120 wears off, and this is where it's kind of ended off, plus six in Abacus's numbers.

00:07:49.360 In Angus Reid, he's plus four, and as we're going to see in Quebec, the problem is when

00:07:55.000 you don't deliver on trade like you said you were, you can start losing votes very quickly to your

00:08:01.200 rivals. And Quebec is just a very acute case because of the big issues going on there when

00:08:07.660 it comes to manufacturing, when it comes to provincial sovereignty, and the upcoming provincial

00:08:12.640 election. So I'm going to erase the board here, and then we're going to jump over to the Quebec

00:08:18.140 numbers. There we go. Movie magic. The board is clear. And now let's talk about the province of

00:08:26.440 Quebec. So the Liberals in the previous Abacus data poll in their Quebec regional numbers. Now,

00:08:33.560 remember regionals in some of these polls because it is a lower sample. Once you go down to specific

00:08:38.520 regions, they are a little bit more prone to swing. But the pollster himself, David Colletto,

00:08:44.420 said the swing has been so pronounced and there are news stories you can connect to why the swing

00:08:49.880 would be happening that he generally thinks that this is probably quite accurate to what's actually

00:08:54.660 going on here so in Quebec I haven't reordered the party name labels in terms of who's more likely

00:09:01.420 to be popular in the province so you will see a low rating for the conservative party but it's

00:09:05.340 not anything to be concerned about if you're conservative it's Quebec it's always been a

00:09:09.820 third place conservative province outside of like big majority government wins for the

00:09:15.560 conservatives where they come in second in Quebec in like 2011 and stuff like that.

00:09:19.980 But here we have in the Liberal Party of Canada in their last poll had 48% in Quebec,

00:09:27.900 the last Abacus data poll.

00:09:29.600 What do they have now?

00:09:31.200 Well, it's not that they're at like two or something like that.

00:09:34.180 Obviously, they're still going to do well.

00:09:35.940 They are currently in Quebec, sitting at 37%.

00:09:42.660 The Conservative Party is sitting at 18% of the vote.

00:09:49.680 It's not too surprising for them.

00:09:51.880 They're usually around 20 high teens, mid-20s or so.

00:09:55.880 This is a little bit of a lower rating than they'd probably like, of course.

00:09:59.960 Nothing too tragic because, again, the Conservatives kind of just have a handful of ratings.

00:10:05.200 they really compete for. They ignore Montreal. They're, in fact, more like a fifth place party

00:10:09.660 in Montreal in Trudeau's former riding of Papineau. In fact, the Conservatives get 4% of the vote.

00:10:15.960 That's just how crazy Papineau is. You know, Stephen Gilbeau's riding, I think the Conservatives

00:10:20.540 get 6% of the vote. The Conservatives do well in Quebec City, and they do well kind of in those

00:10:26.220 kind of border rural ridings where, you know, a little bit of a higher Anglophone population,

00:10:31.300 and they tend to be more free market, less socialistic, the way many other Quebec regions

00:10:36.580 can end up being. But now the big story, of course, I guess we'll fill in the NDP first.

00:10:42.380 The NDP actually came in below the Greens. They have 4% of the vote in this poll. The Greens

00:10:49.780 might be overpolling a little bit just because of climate issues, because of wildfires usually

00:10:54.720 boosting them a bit. They're actually up three whole percentage points since the last Abacus

00:10:58.860 data poll sitting at 5% of the vote. But again, that's probably more of a momentary thing for

00:11:05.880 them where they're jumping up a bit because of wildfires and Stephen Gilbeau leaving the Liberal

00:11:10.680 Party. And then the PPC, they're at 1% of the vote. I'm just going to be clear, if the PPC got

00:11:17.580 even 1% of the vote in Quebec in the next election, I would be absolutely shocked. Again, in Quebec,

00:11:24.380 Heck, I'd almost say just give the 1% to the Conservatives because I'm skeptical of Maxime Bernier's even going to bother running in the next federal election.

00:11:32.620 But now, without further ado, without me distracting myself again, the Bloc Québécois is now sitting at, they were previously at, in the previous poll, 28% of the vote.

00:11:43.940 they are now almost at where the Liberals are with 35% of the vote.

00:11:51.940 An absolutely massive rise.

00:11:55.060 And if you can do the math there, so the Liberals are ahead overall by plus two in Quebec.

00:12:05.200 But the swing, the swing in this riding...

00:12:13.940 the swing in Quebec is absolutely massive right now.

00:12:18.480 I'm not sure why I even wrote that down.

00:12:19.860 We don't need that.

00:12:20.620 I was like writing it down.

00:12:21.380 Like, why am I writing exactly what I'm saying?

00:12:23.200 The swing in Quebec, though,

00:12:24.580 because remember, the Liberals dropped negative 11 points.

00:12:29.460 The Conservatives also fell by like two points, negative two.

00:12:34.800 So we had the NDP actually still rise.

00:12:37.980 That's how bad they were doing before.

00:12:39.400 This is actually them going up by two points.

00:12:41.460 We had the Greens go up by three points.

00:12:43.780 We had the PPC go up by one point, but they're effectively a fake party at this point, so I don't really see that as being probably legitimate.

00:12:51.760 The Bloc Québécois went up by 7%, plus 7% since the last Abacus data poll.

00:12:58.680 So if you can bind those two numbers together of the two closest parties, what is the swing between those parties?

00:13:05.940 That is a plus 18% swing for the Bloc Québécois.

00:13:11.980 They have narrowed the gap between the Liberals and the Bloc by a whole 18 points.

00:13:19.400 The Bloc, at this point, could end up actually winning the most seats in Quebec, even though they trail by a couple of points.

00:13:26.800 That is what people like Sherey Attiste and others are showing in Quebec right now, because it is a riding where the Liberals, or it's a province where the Liberals waste a lot of their vote in a lot of the Montreal ridings, where they don't, like, no joke, win, like, certain areas.

00:13:40.260 65% of the vote, 75% of the vote, whereas the ridings in Quebec that the Bloc Québécois or

00:13:48.420 the NDP end up usually winning, it's ones where they're winning it with like 40% of the vote or

00:13:53.700 37% of the vote, or they're winning rural ridings with 42% or 38%. The way Quebec works, like the

00:14:01.880 new Chicotimi-le-Fjord by-election that's coming up, a lot of the Bloc wins and Conservative wins

00:14:08.200 because Chicotini-Lefjord was an incumbent conservative riding.

00:14:11.800 They're marginal victories.

00:14:13.680 They're very plurality-based victories

00:14:15.580 where liberals tend to win big dictatorship-type majorities.

00:14:20.020 So the problem is when they lose 11 points,

00:14:22.240 they're not usually losing the 11 points in downtown Montreal,

00:14:25.380 although in some areas of Montreal,

00:14:26.880 they're definitely going to be losing to the NDP,

00:14:29.140 the Greens, and a little bit of the bloc.

00:14:30.960 This is their farmer vote.

00:14:32.920 This is their manufacturing region vote.

00:14:35.660 This is happening because Mark Carney is currently kind of in a sort of cold war with the Premier of Quebec.

00:14:43.320 Now, forgive me for not knowing her name.

00:14:45.820 She's new.

00:14:46.260 She took over for Francois Legault.

00:14:48.400 She's not going to win the next provincial election that we're leading into right now.

00:14:52.320 But the bloc is on the rise because the CAQ that the Premier is a part of, they are starting to come back a little bit.

00:15:00.360 they're not going to win, but they might be able to hold on to some of their seats where

00:15:03.520 five months ago, all the projections showed that they were going to lose every single seat they

00:15:07.800 had. They're probably going to come in with like maybe seven to 10 seats now, whereas previously,

00:15:12.760 I think they won like 73 seats in the last election. The Parti Québécois, the separatist

00:15:18.400 party, or at least the very strongly ultra-nationalist type party, you know, like

00:15:23.900 maybe a hair away from separation, although they do market themselves with separation,

00:15:28.720 they're on the rise they're leading a lot of provincial polls and these provincial polls

00:15:33.840 have like a bunch of parties in them they almost i think they have more parties than i'm even

00:15:38.040 displaying here federally you have the pq caq you have the quebec conservatives you have the

00:15:44.880 quebec liberals you have quebec solid there and there might be one more there or whatever but the

00:15:51.540 the fact that the pq is leading by eight points right now and that's with the caq coming back by

00:15:56.560 a bit, demonstrates that there is a very strong Quebec nationalist kind of wave coming. And that

00:16:03.320 is not playing well for Carney while he's trying to tell them to put the booze back on the shelves.

00:16:07.820 He's telling them that they basically need to like burn their own leverage. They need to do what he

00:16:14.120 says in order so that he can get a potentially crappy deal with the Americans. Now, I want to

00:16:18.680 deal with Trump's administration. I want to deal with the Americans. The problem is Carney is going

00:16:23.720 about it in a very weak manner. He keeps taking jabs at Trump, but then his actual negotiating

00:16:28.540 skills are so weak on the counterpunch. He's just bad at this. And so the Quebec premier has been

00:16:34.060 scoring points by basically saying, heck no, I'm not putting any of that swill back on the shelves.

00:16:38.860 And Quebec also basically pushing at Carney because he's not dealing with the trade disputes

00:16:43.840 properly. This was mentioned in David Colletto's write-up of the poll. It's actually pretty crazy

00:16:51.100 just how right now anti, you know, how much Trump is a current factor in Quebec. I don't have the

00:16:58.540 exact numbers, but I tend to remember them. Quebec, I don't need to write it down. I've gone over the

00:17:04.920 polls before where it shows people's top three issues in the Abacus data survey. Quebec right now

00:17:10.580 has 53% of Quebecers who rate Trump and his administration as one of their top three issues,

00:17:17.860 which means probably for a lot of people in that province, it is their pop issue.

00:17:22.940 Nationally, it's like 39% of people rate it as one of their top issues, 39, 40%.

00:17:27.900 Places like Alberta is around 32%.

00:17:32.120 Saskatchewan, oddly enough, even though Alberta and Saskatchewan aren't really under much threat from Trump,

00:17:37.520 although it's an older population, Saskatchewan, they're about 40%.

00:17:41.080 Ontario is like 43%.

00:17:43.040 Atlantic Canada is like 32% of people putting in the top three issues.

00:17:46.520 But Quebec, it's a majority of people who put it in their top three issues. And typically, as we've seen, usually Trump being a top three issue helps the Liberals out immensely. But as we're seeing nationally, the Liberals are not getting a much bigger lead over the Conservatives.

00:18:03.460 really it's within the margin of error still since the last uh since the last poll and my ppc

00:18:09.940 theory tends to i i would say kind of resolves that problem why did the conservatives lose one

00:18:16.240 point of margin behind the liberals probably just because the ppc had over polled like they

00:18:22.780 typically do ppc's not even probably gonna get a half percentage point this next time they're

00:18:26.880 definitely not at two percent and so like what we have though is that even though the trump issue is

00:18:32.800 as elevated as it was back when the Liberals were polling plus 13, they're only polling plus six,

00:18:39.340 plus seven, because a lot of people, especially in Quebec, don't really trust Mark Carney anymore.

00:18:46.520 And although his approval rating is still positive in Quebec, that doesn't mean anything. And this

00:18:51.220 is what I mean. I've said this multiple times in past videos. Approval ratings and preferred

00:18:56.940 prime minister ratings mean squat because know what people are thinking right now when you ask

00:19:02.900 them, do you approve of Mark Carney? A lot of people take that question to mean, do you dislike

00:19:07.920 Donald Trump? Do you like the Canadian prime minister better than Donald Trump? It sounds

00:19:11.840 obtuse. That's how people answer it. And my evidence for it is that both Polyev and Avi Lewis

00:19:19.420 have negative approval ratings. Now, conservative leaders usually have negative approval ratings.

00:19:25.380 It's just the media propaganda around conservatives.

00:19:28.100 Another rule of thumb is conservatives always overperform their approval ratings and liberals always underperform their approval rating.

00:19:35.400 So a liberal can have like a 55 percent approval rating, but they're still only getting 40 percent of the vote nationally.

00:19:41.060 A conservative can have 35 percent approval ratings, but he's going to get a 41 of 40 percent national popular vote for his party.

00:19:48.860 But the thing with the NDP is the NDP leader usually has a fairly high approval rating other than Jagmeet Singh in the last year because people just saw him as a roadblock to a new election that people were begging for.

00:20:00.800 But Avi Lewis came into office with a negative approval rating.

00:20:04.340 And you would think a lot of liberals, like they usually did with Jagmeet Singh, if they were asked, do you like Avi Lewis?

00:20:09.480 They'd be like, yeah, I think he's fine.

00:20:11.000 He's fine, especially because he's harmless.

00:20:12.960 So what's the point of even hating Avi Lewis?

00:20:14.920 He's never going to be prime minister.

00:20:16.260 And if you're already kind of a progressive liberal, anything but the most moderate of like business liberals, you'll hear about what do you think of the NDP guy? And they'll say yes, typically, but not now. And I think what's going on is that Carney's personal approval ratings are high because he's not Trump.

00:20:33.920 But Polyev and Avi Lewis and Blanchett, until recently, they had negative approval ratings, or just mediocre ones in the case of Blanchett, because they're not Carney, who is not Trump. You know what, you understand my logical path there? Carney is artificially popular because he's facing off against Trump.

00:20:52.520 And so Canadians don't really have an appetite for any other leader because that's competition for the guy we have up against Trump right now. So Avi Lewis has a negative approval rating. Polyev has a negative approval rating. And Blanchet had like a borderline neutral, if not negative approval rating until this poll where he actually jumped up quite a bit in Quebec.

00:21:14.420 He's actually has quite a positive approval rating that mostly only kind of like solidified in this poll.

00:21:23.160 He went up, his approval went up by like six points in this poll and his disapproval rating went down by four.

00:21:29.280 It's a pretty big swing on your approval, but it's because now Quebec doesn't really see Mark Carney as maybe the toughest guy against Trump.

00:21:37.360 He's bossing Quebec around on their booze ban.

00:21:40.540 He's not getting them the trade victory to save their manufacturing jobs that are bleeding out of the province left and right.

00:21:46.920 So maybe his, but the funny thing is Carney's approval rating hasn't moved because he's the guy up against Trump.

00:21:51.940 So I don't hate him.

00:21:53.420 But Blanchette's starting to come up in his approval rating and people are starting to shift to the block.

00:21:57.600 And they're basically saying, no offense to you, Carney, but you're kind of not getting the, you know, bringing home the bacon like you said.

00:22:04.400 So, you know, don't hate you.

00:22:06.140 I'm going to go vote for the block.

00:22:07.820 You know, you told us to take the booze off the shelves.

00:22:10.480 Wait a minute here.

00:22:11.440 I'm voting block.

00:22:12.840 That's kind of what's going on here.

00:22:14.500 And that's, this is why you kind of need to be able to know how to read a poll.

00:22:18.340 Most of you out there, the vast majority of the audience, especially if you've been watching

00:22:21.420 the show for like a year, you know how to read a poll.

00:22:23.520 It's crazy to me, all the supposed experts on social media who pretend to not understand

00:22:29.620 how to read polls when it benefits them to say, oh, look how unpopular pure poly of

00:22:33.800 look how popular Mark Carney is. It's just a bunch of crap. Anyways, with all that being said,

00:22:40.160 thank you guys for watching this video. Again, make sure to like, share, subscribe, leave a

00:22:45.240 comment, and consider hitting the join button if you want to become a monthly contributing member

00:22:50.020 of the channel. It really helps make the channel more sustainable for me. It helps me produce niche

00:22:55.380 content like this, and of course it also allows me to be less reliant on the extremely annoying

00:23:00.820 YouTube algorithm. But with all that being said, thank you guys for watching, and I'll see you all

00:23:05.040 next time.

The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - August 16, 2026

Liberals FALL 11% in Quebec - Carney Messed Up on Trade!

Episode Stats

Transcript