The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - Pierre's 80% victory in Crowfoot by-election embarrasses Liberal Media!

00:00:00.000 Hey guys, Wyatt Claypool here. So last night, Pierre Polyev, the leader of the Federal

00:00:06.060 Conservative Party, easily won the Battle River Crowfoot by-election, and I would say that he

00:00:12.200 less beat his other 213 opponents, and more so beat the liberal media, because the liberal media

00:00:20.020 was heavily propagandizing against Pierre Polyev in this by-election, trying to push his margin

00:00:26.540 of victory down enough that they could then start spinning a narrative in the aftermath of the

00:00:31.480 by-election that maybe he's not going to win his leadership review. Maybe he's really unpopular

00:00:36.600 and Canadians just want him to go away, because if even in Battle River Crowfoot he only wins with

00:00:42.820 55% of the vote or something like that, do people in the rest of Canada want him? And it turns out

00:00:49.700 Polyev basically got the exact same percentage of the vote that Damian Couric got, the Conservative

00:00:55.040 MP who stood down so that Polyev could take the seat. Damian Couric in the general election got 82%

00:01:01.820 of the vote, and Polyev in this by-election got a little bit more than 80%. It's like 80.2, 80.4%,

00:01:09.420 which is a very good result, because by-elections can be kind of wonky. Sometimes, you know, default

00:01:15.440 voters don't show up, and when I see default, if 82% of the people voted Conservative in the last

00:01:21.220 election, you can be assured that most of the default voters are Conservative, whereas if you're

00:01:26.120 voting Green or Liberal or NDP in a riding like Battle River Crowfoot, you're probably pretty

00:01:32.020 hardcore for that party and very likely to show up in a by-election. But the Conservatives worked

00:01:37.000 hard, got their people out, and ensured that there was not going to be this stupid idea that Polyev is 0.95

00:01:43.000 on his way out because he only got 68% of the vote in Battle River Crowfoot. I want to go over some of

00:01:49.040 what the media was doing in this election because it was embarrassing. It was embarrassing for them

00:01:54.400 to be pushing this candidate, Bonnie Critchley, who obviously was complete astroturf, somebody who 1.00

00:02:01.340 probably wouldn't have run unless they knew they were going to get a bunch of media attention. 0.93

00:02:07.140 Maybe she was going to put her name on the ballot anyways, although her reasoning never made sense

00:02:11.560 because she says, oh, we need a strong local voice. Well, pretty much all the other candidates,

00:02:16.140 except for the longest ballot committee people, were local candidates. She could have backed one 0.89

00:02:20.720 of those. I think what the Liberals both in the Liberal Party and the media wanted was for a

00:02:27.160 seemingly independent centrist to push instead of Pierre Polyev in order to try and get this

00:02:33.140 groundswell of anti-Polyev support behind somebody who isn't as obvious as a literal Liberal candidate

00:02:39.060 trying to hurt Pierre Polyev. But before we get more into it, I do just want to remind you guys,

00:02:45.200 hey, if you like the show, make sure to drop a like on the video, subscribe if you are not yet

00:02:50.640 a subscriber. We are trying to hit 100,000 subscribers by mid-December of this year,

00:02:55.280 and leave a comment on what you thought of the by-election and all of the media coverage if you

00:03:00.600 even bothered watching a lot of it, although I have covered a little bit of what they've been saying

00:03:04.720 up to this point. I'm going to start off with this tweet, though, from Brian Lilly from the

00:03:09.300 Toronto Star. He says, I mean, looks to me like Polyev won. Pretty sure some Liberals will still

00:03:15.860 call this as a loss. As of this count, Bonnie Critchley didn't get over 10%, despite clear

00:03:21.620 instructions from CBC and many other MSM outlets, for people to go and back her. Or Darcy Spadey 0.99

00:03:28.180 below 5%. And Darcy Spadey is the Liberal candidate. And it doesn't surprise me that he got less than 5%

00:03:35.220 of the vote. The Liberals did much better in the actual 25 general election. I think they got like

00:03:41.640 more like 9 or 10%. Although again, Damien Couric won by 82%. So there wasn't a lot of vote left over

00:03:47.960 for anyone else. But Bonnie Critchley ended up getting 9.9% of the vote. I believe that this is all

00:03:54.800 of the results we're probably going to see come in. There might be some mail-in ballots or whatever that

00:03:59.300 will adjust the results a little bit, but not my much. And I guarantee you, would you think Bonnie

00:04:06.200 Critchley, if she got the normal amount of attention that a normal candidate in a by-election 0.94

00:04:12.480 gets, do you think that she would be near 10% of the vote? No, not a chance. If she was not getting 0.95

00:04:20.440 the obsessive coverage by the media, she would get 1%, maybe. Maybe if she tried hard. Most of the

00:04:29.240 time, people actually in this writing were probably very turned off by any independent candidates because

00:04:34.040 of the longest ballot committee signing up like 205 of the candidates on the ballot. And so when I

00:04:41.560 see Bonnie, so when I see Bonnie Critchley getting 10%, I'm not thinking, oh, it must just be because

00:04:46.840 people like her. I'm thinking it's because probably she got millions of dollars in free advertising 0.98

00:04:52.120 in the sense that she was on every show. If you paid a publicity firm to try and help raise your

00:04:59.600 name recognition by getting social media influencers, YouTube channels and TV networks and newspapers to

00:05:06.200 cover you, that would probably cost a million dollars to get that many stories on that many papers

00:05:12.020 and that many appearances on podcasts and on television shows. It was absolutely ridiculous. 0.95

00:05:18.700 And you can be very sure that the liberals were probably even pushing their volunteers to go out 0.53

00:05:23.880 help out Bonnie because again, she was a good front to try and undermine Polyev's margin of victory.

00:05:30.760 Again, Polyev was never going to lose, but if he fell below a certain percentage of the vote,

00:05:35.620 like he only got 62%, they would be spinning hard right now in the media that Polyev was on his last

00:05:40.980 legs as leader because, oh my goodness, it's a 20-point drop-off for Polyev in Battle River Crowfoot

00:05:46.760 compared to what Damian Couric got. But look at this when I go on and search up Bonnie Critchley

00:05:54.620 on YouTube, and I made a specific search, Bonnie Critchley, CBC, just so I could get more of the

00:05:59.520 liberal results so you can see. But look at all of this coverage, 105,000 views on this interview with

00:06:07.000 Bonnie Critchley from CBC's Power and Politics. This CBC video about the local election heavily

00:06:13.780 focuses on Bonnie Critchley, as you can see, because they put her sign in the thumbnail, 179,000 views.

00:06:20.640 They do coverage of the debate where they highlight Bonnie Critchley heavily in it disproportionately to

00:06:26.180 everyone else, 25,000 views. You know, a lot of the Osho with Laura Babcock, the lady who needs to take 0.77

00:06:32.920 her lithium, 11,000 views on that one. You have real talk with Ryan Jesperson who had her on, and there

00:06:40.000 was people who came on just to talk about Bonnie Critchley and Pierre Polyev. You have the Rational

00:06:46.360 National, 128,000 views, talking about Bonnie Critchley, and it says he doesn't know Jack.

00:06:53.180 Pierre Polyev gets roasted by Independent Challenger. And let's be clear, you know who doesn't know Jack?

00:06:59.660 Bonnie Critchley. Because do you know what she was predicting when she was going on these podcasts?

00:07:05.620 She was saying that, well, if Polyev does beat me, he's going to get 50 to 60 percent of the vote only.

00:07:11.760 No, he got way more than that. In fact, he got 80.4 percent of the vote. I don't think that

00:07:18.040 Bonnie Critchley really knows her neighbors that well politically. If she actually thought that

00:07:22.860 Polyev was going to have a big drop-off in his voting margin, there was this idea that, oh,

00:07:28.220 she's centrist. Or even at certain times, she didn't even call herself center-right. She wasn't.

00:07:32.940 She has the politics of downtown Edmonton, of, you know, Calgary, Buffalo, very default liberal

00:07:40.440 opinions. She is somebody who clearly watches a lot of legacy media herself and has very simplistic

00:07:46.300 lefty views on a lot of issues. She called Danielle Smith a traitor. She said, oh, 1.00

00:07:51.660 our riding's being sold out by Damien Couric for stepping down and letting the leader have the seat.

00:07:56.540 Does she have a problem when William Lyon Mackenzie King did that twice when he was prime minister,

00:08:02.840 having to jump over to safe seats after losing other ones in order to get back into parliament?

00:08:07.400 It's just a kind of fact of the parliamentary system that things work better when the leader

00:08:12.840 is able to be on the floor of the House of Commons with his caucus. And so you're not being

00:08:17.280 sold out. You're getting, in fact, oftentimes when you are the leader in the leader's riding,

00:08:23.120 they tend to treat you better because, well, you know, it looks really bad to have stories out

00:08:28.260 there where the leader's office is not actually, is ignoring their constituents. So maybe the leader

00:08:33.520 can't get on phone calls with local constituents, but you will have somebody answer your email and

00:08:38.780 take a call with you and write down some notes and pass it on to somebody to deal with it in

00:08:43.840 parliament. But again, the coverage here was breathless. It just kept going on and on. Lots of

00:08:51.700 people, you know, there was conservatives covering her and talking about, you know, reacting to the 0.98

00:08:58.760 overblown media coverage. But a lot of this was just the media, was just the media pumping her up.

00:09:04.820 We have Energy Media here, a lefty account. We have CTV News talking about her disproportionately in

00:09:11.180 that news broadcast. She was on tons and tons of shows discussing, just like discussing the election,

00:09:18.980 pumping her up as a big challenger. She's a threat to Polyev. I want to show you this one clip 0.74

00:09:24.020 where on Ryan Jesperson's show, we had Max Fawcett on, and I want to talk a little bit more

00:09:30.320 about Max Fawcett a bit later as well in an article he wrote. But they're talking about how Polyev

00:09:35.320 could be, you know, at risk in this riding because of people like Bonnie Critchley. Check this out on

00:09:41.580 Ryan Jesperson's show. It's an uphill climb to say the least. I don't think that Pierre Polyev is at any

00:09:48.380 risk. And I want to respect the voters in that constituency. And obviously they can rally and,

00:09:52.600 you know, maybe crazier things have happened, although that would be one of the craziest

00:09:55.980 all-time upsets in Canadian history. But Polyev's not at risk of losing that by-election, I don't

00:10:02.260 think. But do you actually think that he could be at risk of seeing his tenure as Conservative

00:10:08.180 leader end before the next federal election? Yeah, absolutely. Really? Yeah. And I don't think

00:10:15.720 that, I mean, you're right. I think the odds of Bonnie Critchley actually beating him are...

00:10:20.840 Very slim. Very low. Very slim. Can we stop saying very slim and very low? Impossible. Impossible.

00:10:28.720 She would have had 0.2% of the vote, 0.3% of the vote, like the PPC guy, if she didn't have all this 0.96

00:10:34.700 media coverage. If she just got the normal coverage that the party candidates or the major candidates,

00:10:39.840 ignoring all the longest ballot people who are obviously not serious. But if she got the normal

00:10:43.680 coverage a candidate gets in a local election, you know, a news article, maybe one radio interview,

00:10:50.140 she would have gotten nothing. It was only because of the breathless coverage of the mainstream media

00:10:55.900 that she got anything. And then we're saying, oh, very slim. Very low chance of winning. No.

00:11:01.520 Zero. She has zero chance of winning. You guys seem like clowns pretending like it's anything but zero.

00:11:08.400 Well, I think the odds of her ending his political career are much higher. Really? 0.96

00:11:11.940 Because, because if, let's just say he gets 55% of the vote or 60% of the vote, people are going to

00:11:19.660 point out that that is 20% less than a backbench MP who had to step aside for him. If he can't do

00:11:26.140 better than... He's saying people will point out. No, no. Max Fawcett will point out because he is a

00:11:31.920 propagandist at the National Observer. He is somebody who is going to spin the narrative. And I'm going to get

00:11:37.380 to an article he wrote about this. He was preemptively trying to spin the narrative that it could end

00:11:41.800 Polyev in his own articles. He's not saying that people might say this. He's the one who's going to

00:11:46.260 try and say it and make the claim. Even if Polyev only got 65% of the vote because the Conservatives

00:11:50.760 put on a lazy campaign because we're just trying to get him back into Parliament. We don't want to

00:11:54.400 spend too much money. It really wouldn't have been that big of a deal. But the thing is that

00:11:59.940 it's just this artificial narrative that Polyev had to really push hard in the riding

00:12:04.080 in order to avoid. And he did avoid it. Damian Couric in that riding, he is a loser. And that

00:12:10.220 will be the frame that a lot of Conservatives look at it through. So if Bonnie Critchley 1.00

00:12:14.280 can, you know, get a campaign where she gets 20-25% of the vote, that's ballgame for Polyev, 1.00

00:12:20.720 I think. You know, the rumor, it's not going to happen right away, but the whispers are going

00:12:23.840 to start, you know, people are going to start organizing behind the scenes, and he's going

00:12:28.140 to have a real problem on his hands. Even on this podcast, Max Fawcett tempered himself a little

00:12:36.020 bit because Ryan Jesperson was obviously skeptical about the idea that he could lose. And look at

00:12:43.280 the actual headline. I posted about this, and I read the article. It is as ridiculous as the

00:12:50.020 headline. It's not like he gets more realistic as you read on. Max Fawcett wrote this back on 0.99

00:12:55.980 July 17th. It says, Pierre Pauly of safe seat isn't so safe after all. I like the guy who ran

00:13:05.040 as a libertarian candidate in the riding, Michael Harris. But Max Fawcett seriously pointed to the

00:13:11.600 presence of Bonnie Critchley, Michael Harris as a libertarian candidate, the PPC, and the fact that

00:13:19.040 it was a high, it's a riding with a high rating for separatism, that that was going to be a big,

00:13:25.700 you know, like that was going to be a big stumbling block for Pauly of, and there was a good chance he

00:13:30.420 could be down just at 55% of the vote. You even had one of the guys from the Alberta Prosperity

00:13:35.760 Project, an independence advocate, Jeffrey Rath, telling anyone who's a separatist not to vote for

00:13:41.820 Pierre Pauly of in this by-election. And it turns out, as I have predicted, the separatist movement is

00:13:47.600 not really all that strong overall. Yes, as an idea, a lot of people will say yes to it in a poll,

00:13:53.620 and even that will only get them to about 35%. But Jeffrey Rath, somebody who's supposed to be

00:13:58.020 respected in the movement, tried to gun at Pierre Pauly of, and utterly failed. Because guess what,

00:14:03.000 it turns out federal politics is about federal public policy. And it's not an arena where separatists

00:14:08.860 are going to have a strong, like, they're not going to have a strong effect on it, at least in Alberta,

00:14:14.340 maybe in Quebec. But in Alberta, too, this is the problem for the separatists. A lot of people

00:14:19.000 involved in it naturally are people who have grown up in Alberta. The problem is this province has a

00:14:24.480 heavy amount of people, is heavily populated by people from Nova Scotia, from Ontario, from Saskatchewan,

00:14:30.180 from British Columbia. They moved here in their 20s, they moved here in their 30s, and they got an oil

00:14:35.960 and gas job, or they worked at some other firm, they're in finance, and they moved to Calgary because

00:14:40.880 there wasn't really enough of a, you know, a market in Regina or something like that. But that

00:14:45.580 doesn't, but like, that doesn't mean people are then going to want to vote to leave, that they're

00:14:50.080 from somewhere else, they kind of like, you know, the fact that they grew up in Ontario, and now they

00:14:55.040 live in Alberta, and those are part of the same country. But now that's me going off in a bit of

00:14:59.200 a rabbit hole on the separatism thing. But the, it was, it's embarrassing. I know I was wrong about

00:15:06.200 Polyev not losing Carlton, but there was evidence out there. There was him winning the riding since

00:15:12.160 2004. There was the fact that he's the leader, and maybe people like to vote for a leader, and

00:15:17.660 I would say that in hindsight, the Polyev campaign team was just being very derelict in ignoring the

00:15:24.400 riding. It's not Polyev's fault, he has to be on tour as leader, and his team should have probably

00:15:28.640 moved him to another riding, because it was never that wide of a margin he ever won that riding by in

00:15:34.020 the past, and they should have probably figured that out and moved him, or started hitting the

00:15:38.820 door super early to counteract Bruce Fanjoy, who, despite not liking him, I would give him props,

00:15:43.940 the fact that guy campaigned hard for two years straight, and then got rewarded for it. But this

00:15:49.180 is not that situation. It's not being wrong about Carlton. This is like being wrong about the color

00:15:54.940 of the sky, about two plus two equaling four, because they want to effectively trick people into

00:16:01.340 thinking that Polyev was, you know, finished. That Bonnie Critchley is actually a real candidate

00:16:07.160 to people on the ground like. No, she isn't. She probably wouldn't even be able to win a Calgary

00:16:11.500 suburban riding as an NDP candidate. She's just not the type of person that most people probably want 1.00

00:16:18.320 as a politician. Somebody with very, again, simplistic views, somebody who just kind of repeats

00:16:25.720 opinions that they hear from the legacy media. I think that outside of the media shine, there wasn't that

00:16:30.480 much going for her. She's a veteran. That's great. But her actual political understanding was fairly

00:16:35.260 low. I just want to talk about this, because I do like now that people after the election, people are

00:16:40.160 now trying to, like, criticize Polyev's team's tactics. This guy named Connor says, still insane

00:16:46.500 to me that these signs are allowed. They're not labeled as authorized by any campaign. Is CPC HQ

00:16:52.640 paying for them? The Polyev campaign? A third party? And they're mad because Polyev's team,

00:16:58.120 and it's obviously Polyev's team, put up these signs saying voting instructions, right first and

00:17:04.180 last name, and it says Pierre Polyev on it. It should be pretty obvious that this is a Pierre

00:17:09.620 Polyev campaign sign. Do you know how I can figure it out? It says Pierre Polyev on it. But apparently

00:17:16.820 we have to treat voters like they're stupid, and like they're going to think, oh, Elections Canada 1.00

00:17:20.960 is telling me I have to vote for Pierre Polyev. It's obviously a Polyev sign, guys. I know you 1.00

00:17:25.900 were counting on Polyev. Either some people legitimately thought he was going to lose.

00:17:30.400 No, you know, the left who are acting like Bonnie Critchley was some sort of, Bonnie Critchley is some

00:17:35.940 sort of, like, hometown hero or delusional. This is a big flop for the media. They don't have the

00:17:43.100 propaganda, their power for propaganda is not nearly as good as people think. And so I think this is

00:17:50.320 going to really help Polyev in the leadership review. I think he's easily going to pass it now.

00:17:53.820 And I think that this is also putting the media on their heels. Right now, the news cycle is not very

00:17:59.660 good for Mark Carney and the Liberal Party. They are doing just a bad job when it comes to the Air

00:18:04.720 Canada situation. In many other areas of policy, they've either already broken promises, severely

00:18:09.800 underperformed, not gotten a trade deal done. So Polyev, when he comes back to the House, is actually

00:18:14.520 going to have a lot of energy. And I think right now, we're at the moment where the sort of liberal

00:18:18.860 honeymoon is ending. The Air Canada situation did a lot to speed that process up. And now you're

00:18:24.860 probably going to have a resurgence in popularity for pure Polyev. He was never even that unpopular.

00:18:30.700 Even in the abacus data polls that I like to show, he still had a 3% net approval rating, or I think it

00:18:36.620 was only 1%. But still, he's above water. And that was with him out of office with all this propaganda

00:18:42.380 about how he could potentially lose or underperform in a by-election because people don't like him

00:18:47.280 anymore. And it turns out that's not true. But anyways, that's it for me today, guys. Or not today.

00:18:53.560 In this video, I will be back probably later today with another video. But thanks for watching. Make

00:18:58.300 sure to like the video. Leave a comment. Subscribe if you are not yet a subscriber. And I will see you guys

00:19:04.040 all later.

The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - August 19, 2025

Pierre's 80% victory in Crowfoot by-election embarrasses Liberal Media!

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