The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - March 05, 2024


Trudeau Liberals got crushed in the Durham byelection

Topics
Durham by-election results
Hosted by
Wyatt Claypool
Mentioned
Erin O'Toole Justin Trudeau Jamil Giovanni Patricia Collins Pierre Poilievre Robert Rock David Musgrove Ron Liepert Bernier Durham
Liberals hate democracy unless they win (Gondek recall) Canada lacks a moral backbone with Trudeau in charge

Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

190.88

Word count

1,806

Sentence count

110

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In the wake of the by-election in the Ontario riding of Durham, Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party threw everything at the wall to try and win the seat, and failed miserably. In this episode, we talk about why the Liberals did so badly in this election, and why it may have been a litmus test for them.

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 .
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 I don't think that it can be overstated just how badly Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party did in the Durham by-election last night.
00:00:08.180 They knew that this race was going to be a litmus test, as it rightfully should be, and they threw everything at the wall for it. 0.99
00:00:15.460 Trudeau and his cabinet showed up to stump for the Liberal candidate Robert Rock, who previously applied to be the Conservative candidate in the riding,
00:00:22.260 which is a bad sign for your electoral chances when your own candidate only wanted you as his second choice.
00:00:27.720 But they also threw tons of money at this race, threw all of their volunteers into the riding, and they still underperformed.
00:00:35.620 It turns out when the Conservatives run a real Conservative as their candidate, Jamil Javani in this case, they do really well.
00:00:42.800 Jamil Javani got 57.4% of the vote, which is actually an 11% vote share improvement over Aaron O'Toole in 2021,
00:00:51.640 despite the fact that Aaron O'Toole was the leader of the party, but it just goes to show that nobody liked Aaron O'Toole
00:00:58.140 because he was effectively just a Liberal-lite Conservative representative.
00:01:02.760 The Liberals only got 22.5% of the vote.
00:01:06.520 The NDP got 10.4%, which is also embarrassing for them.
00:01:09.940 And the PPC should really think about packing it in because they only got 4.4% of the vote in a by-election.
00:01:16.540 I thought the PPC was supposed to be good in by-elections because their base is super, super, like, you know, hardcore,
00:01:22.900 and they'll show up to any election.
00:01:24.460 They didn't.
00:01:25.260 You guys underperformed your 2021 numbers, and you even ran the same candidate you did last time,
00:01:30.580 so in theory, you should have good name recognition in the area.
00:01:34.480 It didn't work out because people just don't want the PPC, simple as.
00:01:38.300 But there's a lot of Liberal activists and other leftists out there trying to downplay the Conservative Party victory,
00:01:44.660 even though their margin of victory jumped from just 16% in this riding under O'Toole all the way up to 36%.
00:01:51.320 They're saying, well, the Liberals haven't won this riding since 2000, so it doesn't matter.
00:01:56.580 This guy, David Musco, who is a Liberal journalist, when I say Liberal, I just mean left-wing.
00:02:01.280 I actually believe he's a socialist.
00:02:02.420 He's trying to point out, like, well, the Conservatives have been winning this riding since 2004 in every federal election and by-election.
00:02:09.500 Okay, what's your point?
00:02:11.140 The Conservatives improved their margin of victory despite all of the resources that the Liberals had jammed into this riding.
00:02:18.100 Any riding can be a litmus test.
00:02:20.160 If we had a by-election suddenly in University Rosedale, where Chrystia Freeland is the MP,
00:02:25.620 and she lost 7% of the vote that she had last time, that would be telling.
00:02:30.720 Just as if you went to a hardcore Conservative riding and that person improves on their vote or it falls backwards,
00:02:37.760 that would be telling for the rest of the country.
00:02:40.700 Any election can be a litmus test, nationally speaking,
00:02:44.340 unless there are very, very specific factors at play on the ground that are, you know, suppressing one party's vote or another.
00:02:50.780 This whole election, this by-election, is proving that people just don't show up for the Liberals.
00:02:56.720 They tried their hardest and people just don't show up.
00:02:59.340 There's an apathy within the Liberal base.
00:03:02.160 And before anyone comes to me and says, well, voter turnout was low.
00:03:06.120 Okay, what's your point?
00:03:07.580 A 28% voter turnout is enough for me to assume that the rest of the riding would have pretty much voted the exact same way.
00:03:14.100 But you get people like this G.T. Lem guy who's a big Liberal shill saying,
00:03:18.960 this is how low the voter turnout was in Durham.
00:03:21.320 More people voted for the past MP Aaron O'Toole in 2021 than all the candidates combined in 2024.
00:03:28.380 Okay, what's your point?
00:03:29.480 Yeah, not as many people know there's an election going on.
00:03:31.980 People don't take by-elections as seriously.
00:03:33.700 But the cross-section of voters who show up and vote in a by-election is pretty much going to be what the cross-section is going to look like in a general election.
00:03:43.300 It's just that less people show up because, you know, more apathetic voters don't feel like this one's even really worth, you know, voting in.
00:03:49.820 And a lot of Liberals probably showed up because they knew their guy wasn't going to win.
00:03:53.360 It's a political myth.
00:03:54.740 And this is actually something that the PPC does a lot.
00:03:57.140 That's very obnoxious.
00:03:58.180 They act as if, well, if we could only get out the people who didn't vote, then the results would have been different.
00:04:05.780 Would they have?
00:04:06.800 28% of voter turnout is a pretty good sample size of what everyone in the area would have probably generally voted like.
00:04:15.240 There's not this secret voter who, if you just activate them to show up, they're going to vote for whatever your brand of politics is.
00:04:21.780 And this is what the Liberals and the PPC are doing, acting like, well, if the other 72% of people showed up,
00:04:27.860 it would have been different.
00:04:28.940 No, it would have been.
00:04:29.960 How do you know they're going to vote for you?
00:04:31.560 They didn't vote for you.
00:04:32.660 The best sign they were not going to vote for you is the fact they did not show up and vote for you.
00:04:38.380 The other 72% would have probably broken down the exact same way.
00:04:43.200 Here's a, I believe this is actually a PPC guy on Twitter.
00:04:47.820 And he said, the PPC didn't underperform at all.
00:04:50.500 Vote splitting is a myth.
00:04:52.080 Well, because he's responding to me saying the PPC did it really badly in this by-election.
00:04:56.500 I never said anything about vote splitting.
00:04:58.980 I'm not even mad at the PPC for vote splitting.
00:05:01.520 I actually do believe vote splitting is a little bit of a myth.
00:05:04.440 Some races it does exist, but for the most part, people vote for the party that they want.
00:05:08.780 And the PPC underperformed.
00:05:10.620 The PPC got only 4.4% of the vote.
00:05:14.220 Patricia Collin, when she ran in 21, got about 5.4, 5.5%. 0.99
00:05:19.180 So she's lost 1.1% from what she had last time, which you could say, well, that's not that different from what she had in 21. 0.80
00:05:26.460 Guys, it's a by-election.
00:05:28.040 And supposedly, the PPC has the most dedicated hardcore base.
00:05:32.020 What this shows is that the 2021 result for the PPC was a mirage.
00:05:36.740 And I think there was a good reason to vote for the PPC in 21, because Aaron O'Toole was awful.
00:05:41.180 I'm in a safe conservative seat.
00:05:42.860 I voted PPC in 21 to register my displeasure with the lack of conservatism coming out of the conservative party under Aaron O'Toole.
00:05:50.520 Things are much better under Pierre Polyev, and that's why a lot of people are not voting PPC anymore.
00:05:55.820 All of the by-election since the 21 election shows the PPC losing votes.
00:05:59.900 Even when Bernier ran in Portage-Lisgar as their candidate there in their best riding, he lost votes compared to what they had in the previous election in terms of vote share.
00:06:12.060 I don't expect anyone to have the same amount of raw votes in a by-election that they do in a general election.
00:06:17.760 But that's sad, just almost as sad as Justin Trudeau and the Liberals underperforming.
00:06:23.220 And this is what the poll that just got released today by Nanos Research shows.
00:06:28.000 The conservatives now federally have a 20% lead over the Liberals, 43 to 23, with the NDP at 21, almost tied with the Liberals.
00:06:38.720 This by-election shows that this is like realistic numbers, that what these polls are showing are probably very close to what reality is.
00:06:47.520 I even just looked at the Durham 338 projections, them sort of determining who's probably going to win this race.
00:06:54.500 They actually, like Jamil Javani, overperformed the 338 projections by 2%.
00:07:01.680 That's pretty good considering 338 was really hawkish for him to cross over 50% of the vote.
00:07:08.180 And they said 55 and he ended up with 57.4.
00:07:12.100 Very, very good results.
00:07:13.780 The Liberals just frankly do not connect with people anymore.
00:07:16.980 They are running on a 2021-2019 platform, despite all of the sort of election issues that they had made promises about.
00:07:25.840 All of those issues, in practice, have gotten worse.
00:07:29.120 And so the Liberals can't show up and say, well, we have modern solutions for modern problems,
00:07:33.580 and that we are the fresh, new, progressive party that you should vote for.
00:07:38.460 That might have worked in 2015.
00:07:40.040 It doesn't work when you've been in power for nine years and been consistently screwing things up.
00:07:45.540 I'm not sure why they need to be told this, because it should be true on its face.
00:07:50.900 Anyways, that should be it for me today, guys.
00:07:53.840 I just want to quickly plug the fact that I, Wyatt Claypool, am running for the Calgary Signal Hill Conservative Party nomination
00:08:00.020 to replace Mr. Ron Liepert since he's not running again.
00:08:03.020 If you live in these general areas of the riding, you can see it on, you can go online and go check out what the general area of the riding looks like.
00:08:11.700 But bonus is being cut out after April, and this is what that map is showing.
00:08:15.500 If you live in this riding, buy a membership to vote for me.
00:08:18.500 Go check out my website in the description below, wyattclaypool.com.
00:08:22.760 And if you do not live in the riding, but you still want to support the campaign, you can donate through an e-transfer on the website.
00:08:28.420 There is a donation link on the website, and it will show what you have to do to e-transfer money and make sure it's legal with Elections Canada.
00:08:36.160 It's just providing extra information so they know who's donating.
00:08:39.520 And if you don't want to do that, you can also donate to the TNT Legal Fund.
00:08:43.700 We have a ridiculous billionaire developer suing us for defamation, despite the fact that we have said nothing incorrect about him.
00:08:50.460 And also, our guest writer, when they mentioned him in an article, pretty much just used an old Globe and Mail article, which was a massive investigation of him.
00:08:59.360 So we never even reported anything really new about him, but he's still trying to go after us.
00:09:04.420 So any money you can contribute to that legal fund really helps us out.
00:09:08.120 Our legal costs have been more than $26,000 so far.
00:09:11.420 So even $20 helps lighten the load.
00:09:14.040 But other than that, also, if you happen to know people in my writing of Calgary Signal Hill, make them buy a membership.
00:09:20.980 If you live in Calgary, I guarantee you know like one or two households in this area.
00:09:25.440 So other than that, I will see you guys later.