The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - February 15, 2025


Liberals PANIC at Pierre Poilievre's massive 'Canada First' rally


Episode Stats


Length

17 minutes

Words per minute

178.28976

Word count

3,067

Sentence count

202

Harmful content

Misogyny

4

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Pierre Polyev's Canada First rally in Ottawa was a lot of fun, but the Liberals couldn't shut up about it. They tried to embarrass him by playing out-of-context clips from an interview Polyev had with Jordan Peterson.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Just a bit ago, Federal Conservative Party leader Pierre Polyev wrapped up his Canada First rally in Ottawa,
00:00:07.160 taking place on Flags Day in an attempt to pivot the Conservative Party's 2025 federal election messaging
00:00:14.140 away from the carbon tax election type stuff they've been saying for the past couple of years
00:00:18.880 and towards a Canada First election plan, obviously both in response to the ongoing trade tensions with the United States
00:00:27.380 as well as the fact that Mark Carney and Chrystia Freeland, no matter which one of them ends up winning the Liberal Party leadership,
00:00:34.500 have both committed to getting rid of the consumer carbon tax.
00:00:38.240 Are they really getting rid of it? Obviously not.
00:00:40.700 They will simply reorganize how people pay the carbon tax, whether they put more on industry
00:00:45.780 or like Mark Carney has proposed having a carbon tax on tariffs or like a carbon tax tariff
00:00:52.360 where you tariff countries with a carbon tax on imported goods because they do not have their own domestic carbon tax.
00:00:59.180 It's very silly and it still hurts consumers, but obviously it does take the oomph out of running on scrapping the carbon tax
00:01:06.860 if you're scrapping an industrial carbon tax or you're scrapping a carbon tax tariff.
00:01:12.260 But this rally did pretty good stuff for the Conservatives.
00:01:15.480 I think it was fairly successful. It had a lot of viewership.
00:01:18.700 Some people are exaggerating how many people truly watch this thing.
00:01:22.300 Some people are saying, like the viewership count on the photo below says,
00:01:26.920 oh, 204,000 people watch this.
00:01:29.380 Not really, because the way X counts viewership on its platform
00:01:33.140 is if someone scrolls by and looks at the video for three seconds, that is counted as a view.
00:01:38.560 That still, I guess, matters because the person saw Polyev is doing a big rally,
00:01:42.520 but it's not real viewership. In fact, tons of people who are not conservative
00:01:46.600 and hate Polyev, follow him on X, and every time they scroll past him
00:01:50.600 and they look at him and say, ugh, screw him, and they move on, that counted as a view.
00:01:56.220 But anyways, overall, still good viewership on YouTube.
00:01:58.920 I think after the rally ended, there were already 20,000 unique instances of viewership.
00:02:04.120 The rally was so big in person that a lot of people had to go stand out in the hallway.
00:02:08.440 Obviously, I'm not there. I'm in Calgary, but it wasn't the biggest room,
00:02:11.820 but it was absolutely packed to the gills, and it generally is harder to get conservatives
00:02:15.720 to show up to somewhere like Ottawa, where there is not as many conservatives in downtown Ottawa.
00:02:21.420 Regardless, though, the liberals are not taking this well.
00:02:25.640 I don't know why they decided to tweet through this entire event.
00:02:30.660 You've heard the old adage, never interrupt your enemy when they're making a mistake.
00:02:35.100 Well, also don't chirp at your enemy when they're doing something that the public likes.
00:02:39.820 There was nothing offensive about anything that Polyev was doing.
00:02:44.100 If he had messed up on stage and they pounced on it, that makes sense.
00:02:48.280 But Polyev was giving a fairly crowd-pleasing rally,
00:02:51.360 talking about a lot of very popular policies that he's running on,
00:02:54.840 and the liberals couldn't shut up.
00:02:57.220 It was bad.
00:02:58.080 I think my mom compared it to the Democrats constantly chirping at Donald Trump
00:03:02.100 for cutting wasteful spending in places like U.S., AID, and other places in the government
00:03:08.480 where like $50 million are going to pay for condoms in Gaza or whatever,
00:03:12.760 and they're like a chirping at Trump, which is just making them look bad
00:03:16.300 and emphasizing how much people like Trump's cuts.
00:03:19.560 But here is what the liberals have been doing the entire time.
00:03:22.640 Playing out-of-context clips of Polyev, trying to embarrass him or whatever, I don't know.
00:03:28.140 And they're playing this quote from a Jordan Peterson interview where he says,
00:03:31.840 it's not the Americans' fault, it's our fault, we're stupid.
00:03:34.500 It's not the Americans' fault, it's our fault, we're stupid.
00:03:37.140 It's not the Americans' fault, it's our fault, we're stupid.
00:03:40.020 It's not the Americans' fault.
00:03:41.420 Who wants to bet there is additional context to that post
00:03:45.700 that is not Pierre Polyev calling Canadian citizens stupid?
00:03:50.400 It is probably, because I have seen that interview, but it's been a while,
00:03:54.480 that he's probably talking about our policymakers, our politicians,
00:03:58.920 the fact that our economy is lagging behind,
00:04:01.240 or there's good things happening in the U.S. and bad things happening in Canada,
00:04:04.540 not because the Americans have stolen from us or screwed us over,
00:04:07.980 it is simply that we have bad policy, and because of our stupid actions,
00:04:12.380 we are not doing as well.
00:04:13.800 That's really what's going on here.
00:04:15.740 Anyways, moving on.
00:04:17.240 Here's another one.
00:04:17.900 It says, question for Pierre Polyev, how can you say you'll put Canada first
00:04:22.560 but not get your security clearance?
00:04:25.860 Why?
00:04:30.260 Stop.
00:04:31.020 It's such a bad talking point to constantly talk about the security clearance.
00:04:34.660 He didn't get the security clearance because there was no point in getting
00:04:37.680 the security clearance.
00:04:39.100 Getting the security clearance is worthless because you could not talk about
00:04:44.080 what was in the Nisikop and Hoag report early if you had read it,
00:04:48.500 because to be able to read it, you have to commit that you'll never talk about it.
00:04:52.160 That's why he didn't do it.
00:04:53.980 Here's another post.
00:04:55.560 Under Stephen Harper, defense spending was cut below 1%.
00:04:59.160 Pierre Polyev is all talk.
00:05:00.900 And here's a quote here saying,
00:05:01.840 Conservative leader Pierre Polyev says he won't commit to meeting the 2% NATO defense target.
00:05:07.480 And that's from CBC News, July 12, 2024.
00:05:10.000 No, right now, he's committed to doing it.
00:05:13.980 He just said in his first year or two, he wouldn't be able to get to 2%
00:05:16.720 of GDP being spent on defense, which the liberals haven't achieved in nine years, by the way.
00:05:22.860 And also, the spending on defense doesn't matter unless that defense spending is quality.
00:05:29.540 The problem right now with Canada's military is that we technically spend more on the military
00:05:34.860 by rate under Trudeau than we did Harper.
00:05:38.860 But under Harper, we had an actual fighting force that could fight in Iraq and Syria and Afghanistan.
00:05:45.520 And under Trudeau, we have like a DEI department with pencils instead of rifles.
00:05:51.240 That's a big difference here.
00:05:53.160 But yeah, another post that doesn't do the liberals any good.
00:05:56.260 Here's another one.
00:05:57.000 Pierre Polyev's conservatives voted against support to protect our borders,
00:06:00.760 take guns off our streets, fund our intelligence service agencies.
00:06:04.860 They won't stop crime and protect Canadians. 0.99
00:06:06.960 This last one is so, this middle one is so weaselly.
00:06:10.100 Like, they're all weaselly.
00:06:11.240 But take guns off our streets.
00:06:13.320 The liberals are talking about legal guns.
00:06:16.160 They want farmers having their shotguns taken from them.
00:06:20.400 And Polyev and the conservatives want to remove guns from gang members.
00:06:24.000 But the liberals are pretending now that they're the ones who want guns off the streets
00:06:28.420 because they want law-abiding citizens to be disarmed,
00:06:31.180 even though the liberals haven't done anything on border security to stop gun spuggling. 0.55
00:06:35.240 They have very light sentences, especially for people who are carrying illegal handguns.
00:06:40.320 And the actual funding of the police has been, like, stagnant since they got in.
00:06:45.980 We have not had our per capita police spending really keep up with the population.
00:06:50.280 Anyways, another one.
00:06:52.960 Pierre Polyev wants to cut the programs and services you rely on.
00:06:56.220 Cutting $10 a day, child care, dental care, minimum wages, tax cuts for the middle class.
00:07:03.020 Well, he didn't vote for tax cuts for the middle class.
00:07:04.920 Are they saying that their HST freeze for two months, which just ended today,
00:07:10.000 was him voting against tax cuts for the middle class?
00:07:13.120 The carbon tax is about to go up again in April.
00:07:16.960 No, he didn't vote against tax cuts for the middle class.
00:07:19.740 Goodness, our taxes are sky high.
00:07:22.500 If the liberals would like to point out where they've cut taxes, I'd give them a round of applause.
00:07:27.920 But I know I won't have to do that.
00:07:29.280 My goodness.
00:07:30.260 But all this messaging was tried out months ago.
00:07:35.740 You can even tell the background image was when he was in, like, look, it's like the summer.
00:07:40.000 It was, like, back in, like, spring or summer of 2024 when he was at, like, a playground, like, Markham or whatever.
00:07:46.460 Like, what's going on?
00:07:48.060 Pierre Polyev had the chance to axe a tax, but instead he voted against their plan to give all Canadians a HST tax break,
00:07:55.380 which just ended the day they posted this.
00:07:57.700 He won't put Canadians first. 0.75
00:07:59.340 I thought you guys said it was racist to put Canadians first or even say Canada first, even though Wilfrid Laurier said that.
00:08:05.440 Another one, Pierre Polyev's conservatives voted against the national school food program.
00:08:10.420 Why do more kids need food?
00:08:12.500 Why are kids going hungry at school and they weren't going hungry at school when Harper was prime minister?
00:08:17.120 I wonder.
00:08:17.960 It's almost like the program doesn't matter and the economy and generally families' economic health, financial health matters.
00:08:25.580 But, yeah, it literally just goes on like this.
00:08:28.080 They'll never put Canada first.
00:08:29.860 He thinks it's a broken country.
00:08:31.820 Isn't that nasty and terrible?
00:08:33.100 Oh, look at this, and they're being community noted all over the place.
00:08:37.180 He's not fooling anyone's statement by the Liberal Party of Canada on Polyev's desperate rebrand.
00:08:42.280 After spending years calling Canada broken and following Donald Trump's playbook.
00:08:47.580 What playbook?
00:08:48.640 Pierre Polyev is now desperately trying to rebrand himself in the hopes that Canadians will forget who he is.
00:08:56.260 So here's another reminder.
00:08:57.900 He tried to cut health care services for Canadians.
00:09:00.140 He called child care a slush fund.
00:09:03.120 It is.
00:09:03.680 A lot of consultants are going to get a lot of money implementing this bloated program. 0.99
00:09:07.760 He raised the retirement age to 67, which, guys, it kind of needs to be raised because, one, we just have way too many people to spend on who are retiring.
00:09:18.880 And we just cannot afford it.
00:09:20.740 It's just how it works.
00:09:21.780 You can't pay for things you don't have money for.
00:09:26.000 And having people retire at 65 worked in the 1930s when the stuff was first created.
00:09:31.360 These days, not nearly as much.
00:09:33.620 But here he has, you can retire at 55.
00:09:36.900 You just don't get your benefits until you're 65.
00:09:38.780 Anyways, he says, he wants to put dangerous guns back on our streets.
00:09:43.560 On our streets, you mean in someone's gun safe in their house?
00:09:46.800 My goodness.
00:09:48.700 And then that's their post before the actual tirade started.
00:09:53.340 They're just shooting themselves in the foot.
00:09:55.280 They are putting a high coward rifle up to their foot and shooting themselves.
00:09:59.540 There is nothing about what any of this messaging that's good.
00:10:02.000 But I'm going to give an award to Chrystia Freeland for the stupidest take on the rally. 1.00
00:10:07.860 So here we have from Freeland HQ, which is her leadership HQ's social media account.
00:10:14.980 It says, we were wondering where we've seen this movie before with a, ooh, wow, kind of face right there.
00:10:22.720 And, yeah, Donald Trump and Peter Polly are now the same because they have rallies.
00:10:26.940 Also, people actually have to name a policy of Trump's that's bad past just tariffs because Canadians tariff things all the time.
00:10:36.780 So the liberals do not want to play that game since our supply management system requires us to do things like put 200% tariffs on American dairy.
00:10:45.140 So what do they actually have a problem with Trump?
00:10:47.400 Like cutting wasteful spending?
00:10:49.860 Lowering taxes?
00:10:51.500 Securing the border?
00:10:52.600 Like what's their actual problem with Trump?
00:10:54.260 Because if they actually detailed it out, they would look insane.
00:11:00.780 I guess I don't need the audio for this.
00:11:02.780 But, yeah, oh, my goodness.
00:11:04.080 Polly of walks out on a rally like Trump. 1.00
00:11:08.440 Usually politicians just float onto the stage. 0.88
00:11:12.360 They actually get risen up from below the platform to give their speech to avoid looking like Trump.
00:11:18.260 I can't.
00:11:18.780 Oh, my goodness.
00:11:19.260 He is pointing at people, shaking hands, disgusting, can't have it, can't believe that he would let this happen.
00:11:26.900 But the runner-up for the stupidest take of this on this, oh, no, actually, okay, no.
00:11:33.140 No, no, no.
00:11:34.360 This is, I think this might be number one.
00:11:36.560 I'm not even sure.
00:11:37.240 Here's Mark Gerritsen, our favorite liberal MP from Kingston and the Islands, saying they're the same picture.
00:11:43.440 Canada's broken.
00:11:44.440 Canada first.
00:11:45.240 And then it's the whole office mean.
00:11:47.000 Corporate needs you to find the differences between this picture and this picture.
00:11:50.780 They're the same picture.
00:11:52.160 Does he actually?
00:11:52.940 No.
00:11:53.760 The whole point is that you can believe that Canada has broken policies, the economy's lagging, and that we should put Canada first instead now.
00:12:02.020 Like, what does Mark actually think that this post means?
00:12:07.100 But let's, now, I think this might be the runner-up.
00:12:10.480 The true runner-up for stupidest take goes to Mark Miller, the current failed immigration minister, who I'm not even thinking he's running as for re-election.
00:12:18.520 But he comes out with Timbits and coffee because he wants to make some tired illusion to when Polyev brought Tim Hortons to the truckers at the Freedom Convoy, which, by the way, guys, oh, I need to bring that back up.
00:12:33.980 That didn't make Polyev look bad.
00:12:35.920 Nobody was, like, scared of Polyev bringing truckers, coffee, and Tim Hortons like Timbits.
00:12:41.780 In fact, the Freedom Convoy these days is far more popular than it was even at the time it was running because a lot of people looking back are like, yeah, the government overreached.
00:12:52.080 But here's Mark Miller trying to dunk on pure Polyev and make the clown Polyev.
00:12:57.660 I brought you guys, well, I brought here some donuts today just like he was bringing to Freedom Convoy when he was watching them illegally occupy the hill.
00:13:11.720 But, you know, I didn't know if you guys will get locked out, so I got some, you probably can't accept donuts, so I'll go.
00:13:18.300 I do like Ezra Levant here saying,
00:13:27.660 Like, yeah, the media doesn't take donuts, but they do take media bailouts.
00:13:31.680 Look, I just showed up to make sure that the flags were the right side up.
00:13:36.920 The last time I seen Pierre cheering this hard, the flags were all upside down.
00:13:41.560 He was cheering for people that were focusing on Canada.
00:13:44.880 That's what Pierre did.
00:13:45.640 You can't say that Canada is broken and at the same time say that Canada is the best country in the world.
00:13:53.440 Is our immigration system not broken? 1.00
00:13:55.240 He's not going to answer that question, Ezra.
00:13:58.880 That would destroy his own point, his whole point.
00:14:01.140 Is the border not broken?
00:14:02.540 You can talk about how your country is the greatest on the planet and also think that you need reforms.
00:14:06.900 It's what, you know, patriots do.
00:14:09.760 Nationalists just pretend the countries are the greatest at all times.
00:14:12.460 It doesn't matter what's going on.
00:14:13.800 That's what a lot of liberal Canadian nationalists are like.
00:14:16.440 But if you're a Canadian patriot, you can say the immigration system's broken, tax system's broken, regulations are too high, our crimes weighted too high, we have drugs everywhere.
00:14:27.800 Acknowledging that is not unpatriotic.
00:14:29.600 In fact, I think it's fairly unpatriotic to see these problems and not want to fix them.
00:14:33.660 Anyways, that should be it for me today, guys.
00:14:37.220 This was a big own goal for the Liberals.
00:14:40.400 Again, all they dented up doing was bringing more attention to a pretty good moment for Pierre Paulyev.
00:14:46.320 His rally was really good.
00:14:48.060 He hit on great points of his platform.
00:14:50.920 A lot of people, if they haven't heard them yet, might have actually now seen it because the Liberals couldn't shut up during the actual event.
00:14:58.820 They kept bringing more attention to it, thinking that they were somehow sticking a poll in between Paulyev's spokes.
00:15:06.900 And it's like, that's just not how it works.
00:15:08.880 If someone's doing something good, you can't just chirp at them and say, you know, he's actually bad to get people to not vote for you.
00:15:15.440 That's not how that works at all.
00:15:17.240 But yeah, the Liberal leadership race is boring everyone to death.
00:15:20.600 They're scared that this rebrand of Paulyev's from going from the carbon tax election to the Canada first election is going to steal the very small amount of momentum they were getting from kicking Trudeau to the curb and trying to install Mark Carney, which apparently isn't even going that well.
00:15:36.380 As I brought up yesterday, the Liberals are actually not even doing very well.
00:15:40.680 Like the Carney is actually kind of floundering right now.
00:15:43.020 I'll bring that chart back up.
00:15:44.620 He's only at 38 percent and Freeland's at 29, Gould's at 18.
00:15:49.520 That's pathetic for Carney because we're expecting a coronation and now it's a real fight.
00:15:55.240 And the crosstabs regionally show that Carney's support is very kind of diffuse.
00:16:00.720 And if it's a point system, I do believe it's a point system where each riding is worth like 100 points.
00:16:05.520 And so if you get one vote in that riding and you're the only one who gets the vote, you get 100 points.
00:16:10.140 But if you get 1,000 votes in that one riding, you only still get the 100 points.
00:16:15.180 And then people get as many points as they had like in terms of the proportion of votes in that riding.
00:16:21.000 And Carney's vote is very diffuse, which tells me that he actually doesn't have any particular appeal.
00:16:28.500 It's not actually good to be the candidate for everybody.
00:16:31.680 You want to be the candidate for enough people in the right places to become prime minister.
00:16:36.800 You'll notice that Polyev is not really campaigning in downtown Montreal or Quebec City very much or rural Quebec.
00:16:44.500 Not really a point in doing that.
00:16:46.360 Really not campaigning in Victoria.
00:16:48.340 Really not campaigning in PEI because he just doesn't need the seats and he needs to concentrate in getting the win across the finish line.
00:16:55.640 If a local candidate thinks they can win Charlottetown, leave it to them.
00:16:59.340 But mostly Polyev is focusing on areas you can make gains.
00:17:02.620 He's not campaigning in Parkdale High Park because it's just not a riding that's in the cards at the moment.
00:17:09.180 So anyways, that's it for me.
00:17:11.280 See you guys later.