The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - March 06, 2024


The media still doesn't understand Canadians

Hosted by
Wyatt Claypool
Mentioned
Pierre Poilievre Don Martin Erin O'Toole Danielle Smith Rob Ford John A. Macdonald Jason Kenney Blaine Higgs Harper
Trudeau Liberals got crushed in the Durham byelection The Liberals' desperation cannot be hidden

Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

180.41

Word count

1,946

Sentence count

81

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, I take a look at why the media seems so confused about why Pierre Polyev is so popular in Canada, and why it comes as a surprise that he won a seat in the House of Commons with such a large margin of victory.

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 .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Every once in a while on social media, I'll see someone repeat the old adage that they likely got from the legacy media that Canada is a fundamentally left-wing country politically, that on average, the typical Canadian has center-left political sensibilities, and that's why so many liberal governments have been elected over time in Canada, that Canadians like that bigger government vision for the country, they like more benefits, they like more government intervention in the market, they like their public health care, and all that sort of thing.
00:00:28.280 And so, so many legacy media journalists seem absolutely baffled that Pierre Polyev is as popular as he is. Pierre Polyev seems to be a very fundamentalist conservative leader, very orthodox in his views of wanting smaller government, tougher on crime laws, and doesn't actually think that government-supplied benefits are the way to actually bring prosperity to the country.
00:00:49.640 And one journalist I want to pick on today, not because I have any personal vendetta against him, I think he just lays out the sort of media's confusion about conservatism very well, is this article by CTV News op-ed writer Don Martin, which it was titled,
00:01:05.580 Don Martin, Pierre Polyev's road to apparent victory will soon start getting rougher, in which he starts it off by saying he may be peaking too soon.
00:01:13.180 I'm going to get back to reading a little bit of that article, but it doesn't even really make sense on its face when you look through Canadian history, and I'm not talking about the founding of the country where we had a conservative government for multiple terms with John A. Macdonald.
00:01:26.080 I'm thinking of just going back to the mayor race with Rob Ford in Toronto. Supposedly Toronto is the receptacle of all liberalism in Canada, that that is where the liberals get the large portion of their seats in government, yet how did we ever get Rob Ford being the mayor of Toronto, the better of the Ford brothers?
00:01:44.980 He was an actual real taxpayer-focused conservative who tried to cut as much spending as he could in the city of Toronto and give back money to taxpayers, and he was wildly popular.
00:01:55.200 He was cutting programs, he was cutting supposed benefits that Torontonians relied on, and yet people really liked him.
00:02:02.860 And I think it's that the reason why conservatism hasn't been as popular in Canada over time is that Canadians really have never been served up conservatism in its more pure form.
00:02:13.220 It's always been in the form of an Aaron O'Toole or a Doug Ford or a Jason Kenney, where they aren't really free market conservatives, they're just people who effectively run a liberal agenda with a little bit more fiscal responsibility, the efficiency of the programs and the spending is better, they don't create as many new benefit programs, and so they're conservative, but only relative to the liberals are they conservative.
00:02:39.040 And that's why the media seems very sort of confused and befuddled by people like Daniel Smith and Blaine Higgs and Pierre Polyev.
00:02:47.960 They're more orthodox conservatives or libertarians, but I will criticize Daniel Smith because the budget was not nearly as good as it should have been.
00:02:55.120 She should have cut taxes, but that's another rabbit hole for me to go down on another day.
00:02:59.000 But Pierre Polyev, because he actually is sharing a small government vision, which the media keeps accusing him of not having a vision for the country, but really they're just fundamentally missing the point that his vision is smaller government and that is actually appealing to Canadians.
00:03:13.260 The media thinks that if you don't come out with a bloated program that you don't have an agenda to push, like, no, no, he does, it just requires a lot of cutting to be done, because the whole point is that there's too much government, and so getting rid of government is in fact a plan, because it actually will have the biggest impact on our problems.
00:03:30.040 The government thinks that, or at least the liberals who, like the liberal government, think that unless you do, like, the Canada Prosperity Act in which you give a bunch of money to people, then you haven't done anything.
00:03:40.720 But I want to get to this article by Don Martin, because I think his confusion is quite, you know, telling about how many people in the Toronto media bubble think.
00:03:50.160 So he starts off saying,
00:03:51.280 Okay, so by-elections are mostly low-turnout referendums on the government's popularity.
00:04:21.280 And this was, after all, a conservative seat.
00:04:23.840 Yet the historically high-margin victory seems to confirm all the lopsided polls foreshadowing a poly-majority in the making. 1.00
00:04:30.180 So I do appreciate that Don Martin does understand that this by-election was telling of the liberals' unpopularity.
00:04:36.940 People are still running around saying,
00:04:38.560 It's a conservative seat. What do you expect?
00:04:40.960 Well, what we usually expect is the conservatives get 45%, 46%, 43% of the vote.
00:04:46.100 They got 57%.
00:04:47.200 That's obviously very telling.
00:04:48.300 But Don Martin then goes on to try and cool the jets of conservatives and basically throw some cold water on the idea that they're going to win an easy majority.
00:04:56.800 And so he says,
00:04:59.360 Still, despite this week's NANOS research poll, which pegs polyo as the most popular voter choice for prime minister in 10 years,
00:05:06.040 the conservatives might be passing their best-before moment to send the liberals back to a well-deserved term in official opposition,
00:05:12.080 if not a return to third-party status.
00:05:13.880 Despite chronic liberal efforts to render themselves unelectable by rolling out gaffed after gaffed over boondoggles galore,
00:05:21.200 while enduring global humanitarian humiliation amid a carnage of fiscal ineptitude,
00:05:26.700 there's a chance that the seemingly inevitable conservative victory is not yet cast in stone.
00:05:31.760 And this is where I think he just doesn't understand Canadians.
00:05:35.660 He's going to go on to basically say,
00:05:37.220 Where are the programs?
00:05:38.540 Well, the liberals are going to be able to battle back because look at all these programs.
00:05:41.640 And it's just mistaking what Canadians think about stuff.
00:05:45.720 But before I get to that, I just quickly do want to include my shameless plug that I,
00:05:50.500 Wyatt Claypool, am running for the Calgary Signal Hill Conservative Party nomination.
00:05:54.440 So if you live on the left, like the west side of Calgary, you might be in this riding.
00:05:59.980 This is what the riding boundaries are going to look like after redistribution.
00:06:03.060 If you live in that riding, buy a membership and vote for me or go visit my website in the description below,
00:06:08.580 WyattClaypool.com.
00:06:09.740 We want real conservatives representing conservative ridings because, as we've seen with O'Toole,
00:06:14.320 if conservatives do not act conservative, they get punished at the ballot box.
00:06:18.280 Anyways, getting back to the article.
00:06:20.580 He says, despite crying, oh, yeah, sorry.
00:06:23.400 The problem for Polyev is that he needs an election now to capitalize on his party's strong popularity.
00:06:29.540 Having negotiated a Pharmacare package with the tag-along NDP,
00:06:33.020 the liberals should be able to retain power until the scheduled vote in October 2025.
00:06:36.860 And that's a long time to hold for the conservatives a commanding lead.
00:06:40.860 So far, it's easy for Polyev to merely oppose everything, particularly this government where it's a fish, me, and gun in a barrel.
00:06:48.400 But the need to propose a future conservative course in government is where the rock lies for his breezy sale to victory.
00:06:55.540 While the liberals have failed to hire judges, to hire judges, buy back, ban firearms, refined, medically assisted death,
00:07:03.180 and fallen down in a multitude of other areas where they promise action in delivering foot dragging,
00:07:08.100 they have introduced some popular big ticket programs, which will be hard to unwind.
00:07:12.860 And there's basically goes on to basically say, well,
00:07:15.460 they're going to provide all these medical services and different drugs for Canadians through the Pharmacare program.
00:07:20.680 And so Don Martin later on the article says, repealing a new Pharmacare program will be unpopular for women who will soon have free contraceptives.
00:07:29.360 And anyone needing diabetes prescriptions will be hard to scrap free dental care for.
00:07:34.120 Lower income Canadians, subsidized daycare is impossible to take away now.
00:07:38.720 Polyev can't cut military spending, an underfunded embarrassment on the world stage.
00:07:43.920 Canadians want rectified.
00:07:45.860 Healthcare transfers are untouchable, as are the huge indigenous reconciliation budgets.
00:07:51.180 The justice system would seem immune from cost cutting, given the conservatives' law and order focus.
00:07:55.980 And while there may be strong support to axe the carbon tax,
00:07:59.240 Canadians still demand efforts to fight climate change, which won't be cheap.
00:08:02.720 Honestly, Canadians are not asking for that.
00:08:05.080 But he keeps going on acting like the conservatives couldn't possibly find something to cut,
00:08:09.740 because he still thinks that conservatives are the Aaron O'Toole conservatives,
00:08:14.200 who think that government programs, if they have even slight popularity with Canadians, are untouchable.
00:08:20.480 Polyev has made it very clear that cutting, like, popular programs is totally on the chopping block.
00:08:26.960 Pharmacare is too expensive, and it's not going to actually provide that many people with drugs that they couldn't already purchase themselves.
00:08:33.400 Most people already had coverage for pharmaceuticals.
00:08:35.740 And so getting rid of the pharmacare program will probably save more people tax,
00:08:40.340 more people money than it will actually cost people in pharmaceutical, you know, pharmaceutical costs.
00:08:46.400 It's one of those things where, yes, there's people who are going to like the benefits,
00:08:51.200 but that is the fundamental error in Canadian politics,
00:08:54.360 that just because people like a benefit that the government is giving them
00:08:57.880 does not mean that the taxpayer can afford it.
00:09:00.640 And that's where Don Martin doesn't understand the typical Canadian.
00:09:03.700 I think most Canadians understand the spending is too high,
00:09:07.340 and they are going to probably give a lot of license for the conservatives to cut spending. 0.93
00:09:12.060 The budget since Harper's last term has gone up by 66%.
00:09:16.020 I don't think that many Canadians are going to lose sleep by cutting that down significantly,
00:09:21.160 because they know that they're not benefiting 66% since the budget has gone up.
00:09:26.080 Their service quality has not gotten 66% better.
00:09:29.080 You know, all of the public health care system has not gotten 66% faster.
00:09:33.660 It's been a complete disaster across the country.
00:09:37.560 The liberals' money, like the liberals' increase in the budget,
00:09:41.580 has mostly just gone to more public employees doing fake jobs that they get paid way too much money for.
00:09:47.280 And most Canadians are not going to be sympathetic with them
00:09:49.680 when they start protesting a polio government for cutting these jobs.
00:09:53.360 Anyways, that should be it for me today.
00:09:55.360 I just wanted to comment on the fact that these people still don't seem to understand
00:09:59.020 that Canadians are not really glamoured by the big government sort of vision of the liberals anymore,
00:10:05.820 and they actually do want to return to some, a small government, you know, role in Canadians' lives.
00:10:11.680 Anyways, but you guys can, if you live in my ride in Calgary Signal Hill,
00:10:15.080 buy a Conservative Party membership, visit my website, whyclaypool.com.
00:10:18.300 And if you don't live in my riding, you can still donate to the campaign through the website,
00:10:23.260 or you can donate to the legal fundraiser for myself, the National Telegraph.
00:10:27.240 We have a billionaire developer suing us for effectively nothing.
00:10:30.780 We reported on things that were already reported about him a year and a half ago by far larger publications,
00:10:35.920 and he is trying to basically bully us into giving a fake apology
00:10:39.040 so he can pretend everyone who's ever said something negative about him is just lying or whatever.
00:10:44.320 But anyways, that should be it for me today, guys.
00:10:46.400 See you later.