The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - March 16, 2025


Liberals surge in polls, but will it last？ - Conservatives hold key edge

Topics
unaligned voters equalization election and polling
Hosted by
Wyatt Claypool
Mentioned
Mark Carney Justin Trudeau Pierre Poilievre Kim Campbell Yves-Francois Blanchet Michael Ignatieff Francois Legault Brian Mulroney Brian Breguet Pierre Paglia Shari Attiste Abbott Stata Shreya Teest Papineau Chrétien
Poilievre calls Carney's Liberal leadership victory ＂suspicious＂ Poilievre and Carney war over Carbon Tax - Liberals pull dirty trick

Episode Stats


Length

21 minutes

Words per minute

189.4

Word count

4,025

Sentence count

228

Harmful content

Misogyny

4

sentences flagged

Toxicity

4

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, Wyatt Claypool explains why we may be in a honeymoon phase for the Liberals, and why the Tories still have a chance to win a majority government even with all the surging Liberals are currently doing in the polls.

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 .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hey guys, Wyatt Claypool here. Today I want to address where the current polls are at right now in Canada because there is a lot of people panicking on social media because the Liberals are not just surging, they are surging past the Conservatives in many of the polls.
00:00:17.020 I'm here today to do a rational breakdown, explain why we're probably seeing a bit of a honeymoon phase for the Liberals and whether it will actually last or not.
00:00:27.600 Plus, I want to get to some of the categories of the polls that demonstrate that the Conservatives still have an edge and a very real ability not just to win a minority government, but a majority government.
00:00:38.160 Even with all the surging that Liberals are currently doing right now, at best, they are getting a slim minority government, like barely outpacing the Conservatives.
00:00:47.920 And if you've seen a lot of videos from me, you'll know that I don't really respect most of the pollsters, at least at this moment.
00:00:54.760 I think they are subject to response biases, Trudeau's gone, Mark Carney has just been sworn in as Prime Minister, so there's this kind of halo effect right now around the Liberal government.
00:01:05.160 Is it going to last? I don't really think so, because it's too shallow, it's too frivolous to really leave a lasting impression on Canadians.
00:01:14.100 Because can you really name anything that's truly happened since Trudeau stepped down and Mark Carney has stepped up?
00:01:21.380 I guess they've sort of gotten rid of the carbon tax. I don't really want to argue with whether or not the carbon tax is truly gone or not.
00:01:28.580 On the surface level, for what most people are going to see, they think the carbon tax is gone.
00:01:33.040 Yes, it's still in the form of an industrial carbon tax, and Carney is a congenial liar, but let's just talk about it as if that's true, that they have gotten rid of at least the consumer carbon tax.
00:01:45.020 So, this is what the current polling looks like.
00:01:48.040 Oh, by the way, guys, make sure to like this video, subscribe to the channel if you want more polling updates like this, and leave a comment.
00:01:54.700 I almost forgot to do that.
00:01:55.820 But here is what the current polling looks like according to 338 Canada.
00:02:00.800 Every single dot that you see on screen is an individual poll, and you will see that the trend line has quickly risen up for the Liberals.
00:02:09.900 At one point, you can see, on average, they were at only 20% in January, but now, on average, they're supposedly at 35%, and the Conservatives are at 38%.
00:02:21.480 This seems very bad, and I think the main loser in all this has been the NDP, falling from 19 down to 14 or 13.
00:02:30.440 The Bloc has gone from 8 to 7.
00:02:32.840 I'm almost a little skeptical if the Bloc is really going to go down.
00:02:36.740 There is a lot of separatist sentiments in Quebec right now.
00:02:39.460 The PQ is doing very well.
00:02:41.140 The Parti Quebecois is doing very well provincially.
00:02:43.680 And the CAQ, Francois Legault's CAC party, is still doing quite well.
00:02:48.620 So I couldn't really see then the Bloc doing super bad, when usually if the PQ and the CAC are doing well on a provincial level, you're going to have the Bloc doing well on a federal level.
00:02:57.560 But this is to say, I don't really think that this is realistic.
00:03:02.400 The two pollsters, if you've been watching for a bit, that I'm following a lot these days because I think they're doing good work, is Abacus Data and Innovative Research.
00:03:10.680 And I want to show you what those polls are currently seeing.
00:03:15.260 We'll start off with Innovative Research, which is the better one for the Conservatives right now.
00:03:21.100 But their lead has shrunk.
00:03:23.360 Last poll, they said plus 10.
00:03:25.520 This one, their overall was a plus 6.
00:03:28.400 And you can see where the actual lack of strength is for the Conservatives right now.
00:03:34.120 Right now, the main shift has been in Quebec.
00:03:37.220 In Quebec, the Conservatives have receded down to 13%.
00:03:41.560 The Liberals are at 23% and the Bloc is at 26%.
00:03:44.740 But I will note this is with 24% of voters unlined.
00:03:48.980 Maybe let's assume the Liberals are going to eat up a lot of that 24% because things are in flux, but they're the ones with momentum.
00:03:55.000 But in the rest of Canada, what we see is that the Conservative Party has 36%, the Liberals 24%, the NDP 14%, other is at 8%, so that would be the Greens, the PPC, and everybody else.
00:04:08.940 And unaligned is 18%.
00:04:11.280 If you assume, and it's usually a good assumption, that the unaligned voters are mostly going to move to where everyone else is by the same ratio, with a little bit more going to those who are ahead or who have momentum.
00:04:24.140 So I assume the NDP and other is not going to benefit much from the unaligned voters.
00:04:28.520 It's mostly going to be the Conservatives and the Liberals.
00:04:30.560 But for the Conservatives, this is actually a pretty good ratio in the rest of Canada.
00:04:36.080 And again, I will state, this is a poll that had the Conservatives only ahead by plus six, but what I would consider to be in the honeymoon phase of the Mark Carney Liberal government.
00:04:47.000 Unless Mark Carney just absolutely starts ripping up the floorboards and changing everything Trudeau did, I think you're eventually going to have a lot of Canadians kind of settle back in the feeling that not much has really changed.
00:04:58.920 Yeah, the carbon tax is gone.
00:05:01.580 But other than that, they could say, well, they stole that policy from the Conservatives, and what else have they done?
00:05:07.560 And this is where I would urge the Conservatives, they have to stop talking about the carbon tax.
00:05:12.380 It's going to take a year in order to convince people that the carbon tax isn't really gone, because most people don't pay attention to the news that much.
00:05:20.600 So harping on about how the carbon tax is actually not gone, it's just been reorganized into other places, which is true.
00:05:26.920 It just takes too long to convince people.
00:05:29.500 What I think they should do is take the W, say, see, the Liberals agree with us finally on the carbon tax, but that's just a little feeler they're putting out to see if they can get some people back.
00:05:40.120 But they're not actually wanting to do real reform.
00:05:42.720 And then the Conservatives should run on a very, very hawkish reform agenda, let's slash tax across the board, let's slash immigration numbers, slash regulations.
00:05:52.680 And that's something that my friend Brian Berguet pointed out about the Abbott Stata poll, but I will be getting to that in a second.
00:05:59.360 What I want to jump down to, and this is proving my point about currently being in a period of, like, a bit of a honeymoon for the Liberals, is I want to get down to the leadership polling.
00:06:12.140 I have to kind of zoom in a bit here, but you'll get my point.
00:06:14.800 They've stopped polling Trudeau recently, which makes sense because he's now out of office.
00:06:19.220 He's not even sitting as the MP for Papineau anymore.
00:06:22.100 But the top line, that's Yves-Francois Blanchet's approval rating in Quebec, which, you know, this is my point.
00:06:29.220 I don't see how they would slip down in their support when he's, in fact, almost more popular than he's ever been before.
00:06:35.020 You go back to 2021 during that election, and he's not doing too bad, but he's about the same as he is right now, so I don't see how he'd do worse.
00:06:43.880 But look right down here.
00:06:45.000 This is Mark Carney's line, that kind of pale red right there.
00:06:49.620 Last time they did a poll, when the Conservatives were ahead of the Liberals by 10% in the Innovative Research poll, they were basically tied, Mark Carney and Pierre Polyev, both at around negative 4.
00:07:04.340 And now, Pierre Polyev has actually improved from negative 4 to negative 2, but you'll see Mark Carney jump from negative 4, negative 3, wherever there's a very minor difference between where they were at last week.
00:07:16.120 Now he's at plus 11.
00:07:17.300 Do I think that plus 11 is real, or do I think it's because he's the Prime Minister, there's tension with the U.S., and there's just kind of a natural urge to want to just be nice to the new Prime Minister.
00:07:28.320 Let's give him a chance.
00:07:29.620 That's one of Canada's biggest failings.
00:07:31.760 We're very nice and polite people.
00:07:33.940 And so what we'll do is we will give people a chance, even if all evidence shows that we shouldn't be giving it to them.
00:07:40.520 I'll put this into context.
00:07:41.980 This is exactly what happened to Kim Campbell.
00:07:46.000 The Conservatives, the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, was around like 22% in the polls, exactly where Justin Trudeau and the Liberals were.
00:07:55.260 And the Liberals under Chrétien in 1992-93 were at like the mid-40s, like 42%, 43%.
00:08:03.360 As soon as Kim Campbell took over for Brian Mulroney, the PCs shot back up.
00:08:08.980 They even surpassed the Liberals for a while, who were very popular at the time, before cratering down and only getting, I think, 17%, 15% of the vote in the 1993 election.
00:08:20.860 Because as soon as someone new steps into office, there is a general idea that maybe we should give them a shot.
00:08:25.960 They gave Kim Campbell a shot for a couple months, and then she cratered. 1.00
00:08:30.320 I guarantee the same thing would have happened for Michael Ignatieff if he got to be Prime Minister for four months before the 2011 election.
00:08:38.860 A lot of people would have thought, like, let's say the NDP and the Liberals and the Bloc get together and they put Ignatieff in as Prime Minister for four months.
00:08:47.700 He would have had his approval rating, shoot up, because he's the Prime Minister, let's give the man a chance.
00:08:52.420 But that didn't really prove out, because eventually who you are catches up to you.
00:08:57.500 But now I want to move over to the Abacus data poll, because this poll, in fact, I think actually demonstrates the strengths that the Conservatives still have,
00:09:05.000 even though this poll only shows the Conservatives four points ahead.
00:09:09.480 Look, this is the trend line that we've been seeing since January.
00:09:12.860 They've been doing it weekly, so the poll is kind of a little bit truncated here, where usually they only do it twice a month.
00:09:18.280 But we have the Conservatives in the start of January at 47%.
00:09:22.540 Now they're only at 38%, and the Liberals have jumped up from 20% to 34%.
00:09:27.280 I don't think that jump is fully, you know, real.
00:09:30.840 I think it, again, is a bit of a honeymoon effect going on for the Liberals right now.
00:09:35.080 But I want to show you some deeper stats, demonstrating why I think the Conservatives definitely have the edge right now.
00:09:40.820 One, again, it's the honeymoon phase, and if they're still four points ahead, I think in two or three weeks,
00:09:46.080 they're then going to be eight or nine points ahead, maybe even ten, because people will eventually catch on to what's going on.
00:09:51.720 First, let's start with regionals.
00:09:53.980 Because where the Liberals haven't been improving, they're not exactly winning.
00:09:58.060 They're merely tied.
00:09:59.600 So look at the regional numbers here that Abacus data has.
00:10:02.900 In British Columbia, the Conservatives are at 40 points.
00:10:06.500 The Liberals are at 26, and the NDP are at 26.
00:10:09.020 In Alberta, of course, the Conservatives are leading massively, probably going to actually gain seats.
00:10:14.720 Probably both of the two Liberal seats in Calgary and Edmonton, they'll take.
00:10:19.540 Saskatchewan, Manitoba, the Conservatives are at 47.
00:10:22.520 That probably means they sweep Saskatchewan.
00:10:24.640 And then Manitoba ends up naturally being a bit more of a knife fight like it's historically been.
00:10:29.240 And then Ontario.
00:10:30.780 Ontario, the Liberals are effectively tied.
00:10:33.680 39 for the Conservatives, 38 for the Liberals, and 15 for the NDP.
00:10:36.980 That's where they've mainly made gains.
00:10:40.140 Their main gains, like in the Innovative Research poll, has been in Quebec.
00:10:44.220 37 Liberals, 21 Conservatives, and 30% Bloc Québécois.
00:10:48.700 Again, I do think that this is going to be a bit of a honeymoon thing.
00:10:52.020 I think the Bloc Québécois are probably still going to come first, at least in terms of seats.
00:10:58.300 And then in Atlantic Canada, again, the Liberals have surged here, but it's 42% Liberal to 40% Conservative.
00:11:07.120 You see, the problem here for the Liberals is that the provinces that they're doing well in, minus Quebec, although even then they're effectively tied with the Bloc Québécois.
00:11:18.120 This has never been a great province for the Conservatives.
00:11:20.740 Their good provinces are all ties.
00:11:22.980 Where the Conservatives' good provinces, they're massively ahead in Alberta, in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and in British Columbia.
00:11:30.280 And then they're holding it about steady everywhere else.
00:11:33.960 Even now, this is not the Liberals winning more seats.
00:11:36.680 This is the Liberals maybe potentially not losing as many seats as they normally would have in another election.
00:11:43.980 Because in 2021, they gained seats.
00:11:46.560 This is still a much better performance for the Conservatives than they had in 2021, where they barely outpaced the Liberals on the popular vote.
00:11:53.980 And then they came in behind them in the seat count.
00:11:56.780 But now, I want to move on to another demographic that I think paints the picture a little bit better with what's going on.
00:12:04.880 One, the age thing, is that the Conservatives have a lot of strength, with actually younger voters these days.
00:12:11.380 They're winning younger voters by 5%.
00:12:13.980 In fact, the Liberals won younger voters, 18 to 29, back in 2021.
00:12:18.560 And then middle-aged voters, they mostly kept as a tie.
00:12:23.780 But now the Conservatives are literally ahead by 11 points with people 30 to 44, which is now the biggest voting demographic.
00:12:30.480 And 45 to 59 and 60 and over, it's again a tie.
00:12:34.380 So it's only the Conservatives leading, or they're tied.
00:12:37.780 But what you'll see over time is that the people that the Liberals have gained with are the most likely to switch back and forth.
00:12:46.500 They haven't chiseled away at the Conservatives' main base, which are middle-aged men, which haven't budged an inch, basically.
00:12:54.500 Look at this.
00:12:55.700 They've done better in previous polls.
00:12:57.660 Obviously, when the Liberals surge, they're going to surge with every group.
00:13:00.660 But it's going to be to a different extent.
00:13:03.180 Look at men.
00:13:04.060 Men are voting Conservative 41%, and they're voting Liberal 33%.
00:13:09.920 Female, it's 35 to 34%. 0.69
00:13:12.900 Again, here's the problem.
00:13:15.360 Women, right now, based on the last two years of polling, have been far more likely to go Conservative, Liberal, NDP, jump a little bit back and forth, not knowing quite what they want yet. 1.00
00:13:26.640 Obviously, if you're a woman watching this show, you're probably a Conservative or maybe even a PPC voter.
00:13:31.280 But you're more probably stable in that you're voting Conservative right now, whereas there is kind of a swing voter who's been going back and forth Conservative, Liberal, and NDP with women.
00:13:41.460 But with men, it's basically been Conservative.
00:13:44.000 The entire time, the Conservatives have been above 40% since late 2022 when Pierre Paglia first became the Conservative leader.
00:13:51.580 So the point I am trying to make here is that the territory, let's just call it all voters and the regionals and every sort of demographic, that's territory.
00:14:01.180 The territory that the Conservatives currently control is far firmer than what the Liberals have.
00:14:08.360 The Liberals have gained a bunch of new territory recently, but it's also territory they don't have a strong foothold on, and they're still behind even though it's in the honeymoon period.
00:14:18.780 You would hope that the honeymoon period has actually them way out in front of the Conservatives, and then as the honeymoon period ends and they contract, they're at least still ahead or they're tied.
00:14:29.660 They're currently behind, and even if they lose another two or three points, now we're in the area where the Conservatives aren't just winning a minority government, they're winning a majority.
00:14:39.000 And I want to show you this with Shari Attiste as my reference.
00:14:43.620 He's actually a 16-year-old kid, but he does great polling modeling.
00:14:47.620 His website is PolyWave, but I'm just going to be using his Twitter profile for now.
00:14:52.960 But what you'll see here, with this Abacus data poll mapped out, which usually if the Conservatives are within only a few points of the Liberals, they are actually losing on seats.
00:15:03.840 The Liberals are winning seats, but like I showed you, because of the Regionals, because the Liberals don't really have a decisive advantage in places that they're doing better in,
00:15:12.540 but the places the Conservatives are doing better in, they're leading quite widely still.
00:15:17.400 You'll see that the Conservatives are at 160 seats based on that Abacus data poll, Liberals 137, Block 25, NDP 19, and Greens 2.
00:15:26.500 That's just a minority government.
00:15:29.020 But considering that I've kept hearing that this is rock bottom for the Conservatives, and I'm still seeing them beat the Liberals by 23 seats, is pretty good.
00:15:38.320 Do I want the Conservatives to only get a minority government?
00:15:41.040 Absolutely not, because I think the rhetoric out of all the other parties has proven that maybe other than the blocs sometimes,
00:15:48.520 all the other parties might be willing to try and form a coalition to keep Mark Carney in power.
00:15:52.800 But now I just want to move over to what the Innovation Research poll was modeled out to be by Shreya Teest here.
00:16:01.400 So that was the Abacus one, and here is the Innovation poll that Shreya Teest did. 0.96
00:16:06.380 It's, again, even though it was a little bit higher, the Regionals were a little bit less friendly to the Conservatives.
00:16:11.700 They had a little bit less strength in British Columbia in that one, but the Conservatives are at 160, Liberals 137, Block 25, NDP 19, Greens 2.
00:16:20.280 And that's where I actually value Abacus and Innovative more than all these other pollsters.
00:16:25.980 They actually tend to agree with each other quite a bit.
00:16:28.720 So they're basically showing that with slightly different methodologies, they can replicate the results.
00:16:34.880 I don't believe ECOS when it shows Liberals are actually at 52% right now,
00:16:39.220 or NANOS where they're within one and the Liberals are leading or doing well in places like Alberta.
00:16:44.340 Not like they're ahead, but they're like above 25% in Alberta.
00:16:48.720 No way the Liberals ever get above 25% in Alberta.
00:16:52.500 It doesn't matter who the leader is.
00:16:53.960 There is just a cultural disgust to the Liberals in the West because it doesn't matter who's the leader. 0.91
00:17:00.540 They are not friendly to the oil and gas industry, and equalization sucks.
00:17:05.460 Anyways, I know Polyev's not touching equalization, but that's just one of those things that he doesn't have the political bandwidth to really mess around with equalization now.
00:17:13.600 I would even advise, don't touch equalization now, wait until your second term when you've made the country way better in your first term,
00:17:21.660 and then make that your big policy that you run on in the second term.
00:17:25.780 Everyone's better off, now we can start dismantling equalization, because equalization was a boat anchor against all of us,
00:17:32.900 and we need to get back to free market principles.
00:17:35.780 In fact, that is what I think the Conservatives need to be running on.
00:17:40.220 Principles is what they should be running on.
00:17:42.080 That sounds vague, but what I mean is that Mark Carney is willing to try and take a couple Conservative ideas here and there in order to buoy himself up in the polls.
00:17:51.820 What the Conservatives should say is, hey, great, the Liberals finally agree with this, the carbon tax sucks.
00:17:57.000 Yeah, they're probably going to try and continue the carbon tax in a slightly different form,
00:18:01.540 but really what do you want?
00:18:03.620 A Liberal government that gets 90% of it wrong, and 10% of the time they do something slightly correct because they eventually agree with what the Conservatives have been advocating for for years?
00:18:13.500 Or do you want the principled party that you're not going to have to drag, kick, and pull to do the right thing?
00:18:18.900 A party that believes in the free market and individual achievement, or a party run by a bureaucratic central planner who believes that the only way that you're going to be prosperous is if the bureaucrats allow you to.
00:18:31.160 They give you the right subsidies.
00:18:32.560 They give you the right tax cuts and grants.
00:18:35.300 And not when I say tax cuts, I mean like your specific industry, your green industry gets a tax break.
00:18:40.940 You get a subsidy.
00:18:41.980 I think that we don't like a government that picks winners and losers, and I think the Conservatives run on the idea of real fairness, real ability to actually set your own course.
00:18:52.500 They will do way better than talking about the carbon tax.
00:18:55.260 They need to be talking about the fundamental differences in principle between the Conservative Party that believes in you as an individual, 1.00
00:19:01.960 and the Liberal Party that thinks you're an idiot and you need their help to do everything. 0.96
00:19:06.160 Anyways, so right now, I think what we're probably going to see in the next month and a half or so, maybe there's an election next week. 1.00
00:19:14.200 I don't think it really matters in terms of the polling.
00:19:16.580 If Mark Carney triggers an election next week, I think a lot of Canadians are actually, that's when they're going to walk away from the Liberals.
00:19:21.960 Hey, you couldn't govern for another six months.
00:19:24.420 Why are you doing this?
00:19:25.780 Even though I think we need an election sooner than later.
00:19:27.940 But I think that's what's going to kill the honeymoon.
00:19:30.040 Either enough time is going to pass and people don't really notice that much different, or what you're going to see is that the election gets triggered and a bunch of people then go back to what they were going to default vote back last year.
00:19:42.680 Because I think a lot of people are eventually going to have sort of the scales removed from their eyes and realize, wait, why was I liking the Liberals all of a sudden?
00:19:49.980 I don't actually know anything about them.
00:19:51.940 I don't really know anything about what Carney wants to do, but the media is telling me he's good.
00:19:56.300 And that's why the Conservatives need to absolutely keep hammering on big policies that get attention.
00:20:01.740 You don't win elections by talking about mild little in-the-middle ideas that you have.
00:20:06.320 You have to have a big vision.
00:20:08.160 You know, let's cut the tax burden federally by 20% over the next four years.
00:20:13.220 Let's slash immigration down to 125,000 people a year, new people, in order to get the housing market stabilized. 0.96
00:20:20.560 Not 250,000.
00:20:22.340 I think Polyev's current cap is too high.
00:20:24.920 We need it down to 125,000 and say, yes, we have had too much, and now we have to correct the other way where we maybe even have too little for a few years before we figure out what a proper equilibrium is.
00:20:37.200 I hate when people think, oh, but what happens if it's too little?
00:20:40.060 Like, it's been too much for 10 years.
00:20:41.980 Why is it bad if we have a little bit too little for a while, too?
00:20:45.380 Let's figure out what the happy medium is rather than slowly tipping it back until we find it.
00:20:50.880 Because if you slowly tip it back, you'll never find it because it's always been too much consistently.
00:20:57.080 Anyways, I'm bad at ending these videos.
00:21:00.840 I'm sorry, guys.
00:21:01.600 I'm not the best presenter on the planet.
00:21:03.240 But that should be it for me today, guys.
00:21:05.280 Make sure to like this video.
00:21:06.400 Subscribe to the channel if you like these polling breakdowns.
00:21:09.740 Leave a comment what you think is going to happen over the next month.
00:21:12.660 And I'll see you guys all next time.