In this episode of the podcast, I talk about the importance of not using polling to predict who's going to be Prime Minister in the next election, and why you should be focusing on the narratives of the election, rather than the polling numbers.
00:00:00.000I've done this before, but I want to do it again today. And that is talking about the 2025 Canadian federal election without reference to polling. Obviously, if we look at the polling today, pure poly of the Conservatives are simply going to win. They have 16% leads in some of the polls, anywhere from 8% to 16%. It's a complete walkover for the Conservatives.
00:00:21.700But I think that it just leads to lazy thinking. If we just look at the polling number and say, oh, the Conservatives are higher, they're going to win the election, or the NDP is higher in this provincial election, they're going to win. What you really want to focus on is the narratives of the election. What are people talking about way ahead of the election? Because that can even be more telling of who's likely to win.
00:00:43.060Because obviously, when the federal election gets called, like every election, the poll is going to tighten up because people get it in their minds that, oh, I have to be much more careful with who I'm going to vote for.
00:00:52.600No, now I have to reconsider, even though their gut instinct is probably to vote for the party that they know is not going to screw anything up. And that's the Conservatives these days.
00:01:00.380But as soon as the election is called, a bunch of people are going to start reconsidering that the Liberals or the NDP can win their votes, even though, like, on policy issues, obviously, they've only been terrible.
00:01:10.300But right now, in terms of the narrative of this next election, you can tell who's going to win based on who everyone is going to talk about.
00:01:19.220And one rule of thumb, the one of the most important rules of thumb, is that in an election, if you're talking about the opposition leader, that's probably going to be the next Prime Minister of Canada.
00:01:28.680How many elections do we have where we just talk about the person who is not the incumbent, and that person ends up losing?
00:01:35.720It's extremely rare, and unless they have a lot of character flaws that people didn't know about that you needed to talk about in order to bring it to light,
00:01:44.240usually, if you're talking about the opposition leader, it's because you know that they're clearly in the lead.
00:01:49.300And this is what the NDP, what the Liberals, and obviously what the PPC is doing these days, is that they won't shut up about pure poly of, and just the Conservatives in general.
00:01:58.800And it's so self-defeating, and I honestly, I understand the idea, like I'm a Conservative, so I do talk like I'm trying to help the Liberals,
00:02:07.120but it's just from the strategic point of view what you should be doing.
00:02:11.000But from the Liberal perspective, by continually talking about the opposition leader, you're just giving him name recognition,
00:02:18.000you're just making him seem like a real contender for the Prime Ministership,
00:02:21.420and you're just moving him up in people's rankings of who they might vote for when they might have been potentially default Liberal or NDP voters today,
00:02:30.360but they keep hearing about this pure poly of a guy, so he can't be all that bad, or at least he's a deeply important person.
00:02:35.920Whereas if you stop talking about him, they might fade into the background, nobody cares.
00:02:40.660That's what happened to Aaron O'Toole.
00:02:42.160Nobody talked about him, nobody cared who Aaron O'Toole was.
00:02:45.040So once the election rolled around, the few smear ads against Aaron O'Toole worked really well because people didn't really know anything about him,
00:02:52.060so they're just going to probably take the first commercial they see about him at face value because, well, no one really wants to go look up who Aaron O'Toole is.
00:02:59.940He was really boring, so if the unions are going to say he hates Labour or whatever,
00:03:04.600and the Liberals are going to say he's a crazy gun person or whatever, they'll believe it even though he threw gun owners under the bus.
00:03:11.840That was the disadvantage of not being talked about for Aaron O'Toole.
00:03:15.620But you can't do the same thing to pure poly of because he has defined himself,
00:03:19.100and as the Liberals keep talking about him, they keep making him more interesting and keep raising his profile,
00:03:23.340keep making more people follow him on social media, and keep making more people think,
00:03:27.420well, this guy could be a Prime Minister.
00:03:28.940This is the problem between the 2011 Conservative Party advertising and the 2015 Conservative Party advertising.
00:03:36.240The brilliant nature of the 2011 Conservative Party advertising was the whole Michael Ignatieff just visiting ads.
00:03:43.920The great thing about that is it never made you think for a second that Michael Ignatieff could actually be Prime Minister.
00:03:49.000It made you think he's going to lose, he's going to go down to a resounding defeat, and he's going to go back to the US.
00:03:55.020That was a great ad because it never for once made you think that Michael Ignatieff was Prime Minister material.
00:04:00.080Now, the 2015 ad, the Justin Trudeau's Just Not Ready ads that the Harper campaign was running were horrible,
00:04:06.960and it was for the reason that that ad, even if it concludes at the end that he's just not ready to be Prime Minister,
00:04:12.720you've effectively said, well, at some point he's going to be ready, so why not vote for him now and he'll grow into it.
00:04:17.860The subtle implications of the ad are, it's not actually that bad of a vote for Justin Trudeau.
00:04:23.700The Conservatives should just, the Conservatives, even though people mocked them for the ads about Justin Trudeau basically being this very, like, I don't know,
00:04:33.640soft, unserious, almost Ken-like character, they should have stuck to that.
00:04:39.300Even though people mocked them, it's better just to mock your opponent rather than seriously present them as an option for Prime Minister.
00:04:47.160And I'll just bring up some of the Liberal posts because the Liberals are competing, are replicating the Conservative mistakes from 2015.
00:04:54.820When they're comparing Conservatives, they're saying, pure polyethonist Conservatives are working hard to bring American-style far-right politics to Canada.
00:05:02.300These tactics are reckless and irresponsible.
00:06:11.100But it would actually maybe be slightly effective.
00:06:14.000But comparing them to successful American politicians, as many Canadians as there are out there who like to believe that Canada's, like, you know, best quality is not being America.
00:06:24.040As many as their people are out there, I don't think that that many people are just going to see that you're comparing them to American politicians.
00:06:33.400Because they see that you're really just comparing them to successful politicians.
00:06:36.880Even if they don't like these politicians, they're thinking, well, the Liberals seem to scare these people because they can actually win.
00:06:42.760But it doesn't actually say anything bad about them.
00:06:45.740It's just saying that they're, like, you know, far right, which is a word that's been so undermined in this meeting that nobody really reacts to it anymore.
00:07:32.340But it all started off with this clip, this video right here that they re-edited of Pure Poly of saying, well, I never really talk about left or right.
00:07:40.520And then they edit in, like, four times where, like, Pure Poly of has referenced the far left in Canada, which doesn't actually prove their point.
00:07:49.180He just said he doesn't really talk about left and right politics.
00:07:52.020But the Liberals, for some reason, stepped on this rake.
00:07:56.580That was an incredibly viral clip of Pure Poly of.
00:07:59.500And they thought it was a great idea to amplify it even more by trying to cherry pick a couple of things that might not be 100 percent accurate in the video.
00:08:09.680They also played this other one where they were talking about how conservative math is by, you know, slashing, like, revenue or, like, money from the federal budget that we're saving money.
00:08:21.700And then they go down this rabbit hole of they're actually they're cutting services.
00:08:25.320So you're going to have to spend more or whatever.
00:08:27.480Just conspiratorial nonsense from the Liberals that the conservatives are going to cut your grandmother's Social Security and they're going to stop roads from being built.
00:08:35.400Other rather than, you know, cutting worthless HR and DEI stuff in government.
00:08:40.280You know, the biggest growth in government under the Liberals has been HR, just people filing paperwork that nobody's ever going to read in their entire lives.
00:08:48.740But they get six figures a year to do it.
00:08:51.400That's what the conservatives are proposing to cut.
00:08:54.320And by continuing to amplify this viral video from from Pierre Polyev, they're only hurting themselves because it gives the conservatives fantastic opportunities to keep resharing their clip because it continues to be relevant.
00:09:09.400The Liberals also keep talking about Pierre Polyev in the cutting of Canadian support for Canadians.
00:09:15.640The problem is, is that too many Canadians right now are very well aware that the federal budget is bloated, that the deficit spending is toxic for the Canadian economy and inflation is being made in Ottawa.
00:09:28.220Inflation isn't being made by grocery giants.
00:09:30.740They can bring in grocery CEOs all day long, Galen Weston to yell at him and say he's ripping off Canadians.
00:09:36.740No Canadian actually believes that the grocery stores are printing money and causing inflation to increase.
00:09:42.000Yet the Liberals keep talking about it, thinking that somehow they're going to convince you that the conservatives get in.
00:09:48.080They're just going to cut like every single thing that you hold dear in the Canadian government.
00:10:01.200No, the conservatives aren't just anti-spending.
00:10:03.620They're anti-deficit spending and spending on nonsense.
00:10:07.040But the Liberals, even though they can call conservatives conspiratorial, every single election, the Liberals, as well as the Liberals in the media, always pretend like there's even a chance that the conservatives are going to cut vital services in Canada.
00:10:20.860They're not going to do it, but that's just their line of thinking.
00:10:23.660But again, it's a terrible marketing for them, not only because they won't stop talking about Pierre Polyev and raising his profile, but they keep bringing attention to issues that the conservatives are actually doing very well on.
00:10:34.560Government spending cuts are actually fairly popular in Canada right now.
00:10:38.460People, the top issues in the country, I think I saw in Angus Reeple, it's inflation, it's jobs, and it's the economy in general.
00:10:45.280The conservatives have anywhere from a 10 to 24 point lead on those issues over Justin Trudeau.
00:10:51.180I saw it was an abacus data poll where like Justin Trudeau, of course, leads a little bit on environment and childcare stuff.
00:10:57.040And on taxes, Pierre Polyev's on like a plus 24 lead over Trudeau.
00:11:01.180They should be shutting up about these spending issues because everyone has actually, frankly, gotten sick of the amount of waste in government.
00:11:09.340Anyways, but the funniest example of the Liberals not being able to stop talking about Pierre Polyev is Mark Gerritsen cutting this awful video where he effectively whines about Pierre Polyev showing up to question period or just sort of showing up to Parliament.
00:11:24.140There was some parliamentary business going on in the House chamber.
00:11:26.420And Pierre Polyev shows up and while Mark Gerritsen is asking a completely foolish question about the environment or the economy, it was dumb.
00:11:34.480It was a dumb Mark Gerritsen question that Pierre Polyev starts heckling him.
00:11:39.460And Mark Gerritsen makes this however long video, this two minute and 20 second video, like crying about the fact that Pierre Polyev showed up and started heckling him.
00:11:48.540If anything, that made Pierre Polyev seem cool.
00:11:52.360He doesn't have to show up, yet he is cool enough to show up to the House chamber just for the express purpose of making fun of Mark Gerritsen, the sweaty water buffalo of Parliament.
00:12:02.120Mark Gerritsen is trying so desperately to get into Trudeau's cabinet.
00:12:17.500I think it's like tied 36-36 in the 338 projections in Kingston and the islands with the Conservatives being slightly favored in a riding where I can believe his dad used to hold a riding and he used to be the mayor of Kingston.
00:12:31.020That's how much everyone's annoyed with Mark Gerritsen.
00:12:34.020The last election, I think he won with like 55% of the vote.
00:12:37.160It is a walkover riding that he potentially can win, sorry, lose.
00:12:41.640Yeah, like Mark Gerritsen could lose Kingston and the islands simply because he is so annoying.
00:12:46.100At one point, he even implied that he wanted to fight Kevin Vong for disagreeing with him on Chinese interference.
00:12:57.060Just keep talking about Piropolev and hopefully everyone hates his guts.
00:13:00.280They don't understand that talking about the opposition leader is so stupid.
00:13:04.460The opposition leader often doesn't have more than 50% name recognition before the federal election starts.
00:13:10.180And right now, I guarantee Piropolev is probably around 70% or 80% name recognition.
00:13:13.880He was already a popular politician before he became leader.
00:13:17.080And now he's effectively been made like ascendant for the prime ministership because Justin Trudeau won't stop talking about the possibility of Piropolev being the prime minister.
00:13:26.040I say Trudeau by us being the liberal party in general.
00:13:29.120But do not doubt that every single piece of strategy is approved by Justin Trudeau.
00:14:40.120I literally was in a Twitter space at some point back when Twitter was still called Twitter.
00:14:44.040Where I was talking to PPC organizers and they were all getting mad at me because I said that the PPC didn't have the ability to grow.
00:14:51.300And at one point while they were yelling at me, I said, have you ever doorknocked in your life?
00:14:55.080And they said, I've never doorknocked because I've never had my mind change the door.
00:14:58.920And it's like, oh goodness, you sweet summer child.
00:15:02.140Please just go out and doorknock for a campaign and learn what people sound like at the door.
00:15:07.180The PPC does not grow because they think that the average person talks and thinks the way that the average person on social media does.
00:15:15.600Not that many people talk about politics on social media and even fewer talk about it in real life.
00:15:21.200Go to someone's door and talk to them about politics and you will realize that politics is an issue that for most people makes them very tight and uncomfortable.
00:15:37.980But most people, like in my riding of Calgary Signal Hill, I do a lot of door knocking around here.
00:15:42.480People get a little bit tight when you start talking about politics because it's one of those ridings where there's not that many hot button political issues.
00:15:48.800It's kind of a conservative default riding.
00:15:50.820And because of that, I think a lot of people actually kind of fall out of practice about talking about politics.
00:15:55.060So when you start talking to them about it, they get a little bit tight and they don't really want to talk about it because it feels like uncomfortable.
00:16:00.600Like, well, are we supposed to be doing this?
00:16:14.900But my point is that their main focus, the main focus of every drive that the PPC does, is to talk about how they're purer than the conservatives.
00:16:21.980And are they purer than the conservatives?
00:16:24.620Because they are not trying to win elections.
00:16:26.140Obviously, you can be the purest party ever if you don't actually care about winning an election.
00:16:31.700You just care about posting on social media about how you're cooler than the other guys.
00:16:34.980But again, that Apple video that the liberals won't stop talking about, that was fantastic media for pure poly of just dunking on a liberal journalist who did not do any fact checking on his on his questions, did not bring any evidence that pure poly of like Donald Trump or that he's using populist language and stuff like that.
00:16:54.320The PPC, Greg Wycliffe tried to do a parody video of this, that the PPC is the real conservative party that will put Canada first, and then tried to do this like parody version or the satire.
00:17:04.680Someone said it's like, oh, it's satire.
00:17:14.760But like, they don't realize how cringy this is.
00:17:17.640That they're constantly like going after pure poly of and saying he's terrible and he's not a real conservative.
00:17:23.740At the same time that they keep copying him.
00:17:26.960The thing is that trying to parody the Apple video is the most self-defeating thing you can possibly do.
00:17:34.020The PPC is showing that its brand does not exist without being able to criticize the conservative party.
00:17:39.620If you're trying to succeed as the PPC, one, door knock more, get more people signed up for memberships, maintain your EDAs because PPC EDAs keep getting deregistered because they don't actually file their financial paperwork at the end of the year.
00:17:52.540And you should be criticizing Justin Trudeau.
00:17:55.460And I'm not saying this like join with the conservatives to take down Justin Trudeau.
00:17:59.180I'm not saying that you have to be part of the team and start wearing conservative badges.
00:18:02.400My point is that the reason why small parties around the world tend to grow is because they prove that they are more competent at governing than the current government.
00:18:11.820If you only criticize the opposition and you never prove why you do a better job as Justin Trudeau, people will just ignore you.
00:18:19.160It's so down the rabbit hole for a small party to be criticizing the opposition party because they're not doing a good enough job.
00:18:27.100Are you a are you a like an actual party or are you just a pack who is trying to push the conservative party to the right?
00:18:33.640If they just came out and said, we're we're an influence organization that's trying to make the conservative party more conservative and we're not really trying to win any elections.
00:18:40.940We might try and steal some votes here and there to try and pressure them to be more like us.
00:18:44.700But at the end of the day, if they're trying to be a real party, that there's a strategy is not working.
00:18:49.500They do not connect with the average person because the average person is not looking at some purity test sheet of how great you are on all the policies that you're not actually marketing at the doors.
00:18:59.280That's just not how it works whatsoever.
00:19:01.400The PPC needs to grow up and actually became a party for more than just people who are perpetually online and someone who is terminally online myself.