00:00:00.000Hey guys, Wyatt Claypool here, and welcome back to the National Telegraph YouTube channel.
00:00:05.920In this video, I want to go over the things that happened in yesterday's by-elections
00:00:11.320and the things that did not happen in yesterday's by-elections.
00:00:16.280Watching the reactions online remind me of a Scott Adams quote that
00:00:21.200we're all sitting in the same theater, looking at the same screen, but we are watching different movies.
00:00:28.120Were the by-elections good for the Conservative Party of Canada yesterday? No. Was this a disaster like some people are presenting it as and Pierre Polyev needs to step down as the federal Conservative Party leader? No.
00:00:42.720Now, one, having Polly have stepped down would change nothing.
00:00:45.560All the people who are criticizing him from the outside and obviously wanting to vie for the leadership would move into the mushy middle and lose even harder.
00:00:54.180But yesterday's by-election results, although, again, not positive for the conservatives, effectively back up what I've been saying for over a year now,
00:01:05.100that the more reasonable pollsters, Abacus Data, Angus Reid, Innovative Research,
00:01:12.180those are accurate pollsters, and the ones like Nanos, like ResearchCo, Ecos, Spark Insight,
00:01:20.840Leger, they are out to lunch. Let's go over the by-election results, and I'll explain
00:01:27.200what ended up happening in these ridings. Let's start off with the most dramatic change,
00:01:32.860and that was Chikatimi-le-Fjord, the Quebec by-election riding.
00:01:38.540The Liberal Party of Canada ended up flipping the seat from the Conservatives,
00:01:42.720winning 51.4% of the vote, gaining 20%.
00:01:48.200Bloc Québécois got 32.8%, only gaining 1.7% of the vote.
00:01:52.640The Conservatives fell down to 12.5%, losing 21.6%,
00:01:57.100and basically the rest of the results there don't actually matter.
00:02:01.380This didn't happen because pure Polyev is deeply unpopular in Quebec or the Conservative Party is losing Quebec.
00:02:09.220This is a very weird riding with a very weird electoral history.
00:02:13.440And Richard Martel, the MP for the riding for the Conservatives who ended up stepping down, he basically screwed the Conservatives over in this riding based on the way he left office.
00:02:25.140because he just up and left to take a Senate appointment from Prime Minister Mark Carney,
00:02:30.540which is a bit of a signal that he's okay with the Liberals.
00:02:33.220And by the way, voters don't like to return to the polls to just elect a successor from your same party
00:02:39.940when you were supposed to finish your term.
00:02:42.680Unless you have a really good reason to resign,
00:02:45.040it's going to negatively affect your successor when they try to run to replace you.
00:02:51.780And this has always been a super tight riding.
00:02:54.660Let's go over the electoral record of Chicotimi Le Fjord. And again, Richard Martel is basically the reason why the conservative vote collapsed here. In the other ridings, the results are far less dramatic, and in fact basically are just in line with general national polling trends from the reasonable pollsters.
00:03:12.260So this is the results from yesterday, the unofficial results from yesterday.
00:03:18.700And in 2025, as you can see, Richard Martell only won this seat with 34% of the vote to the Bloc and the Liberals, 31% each.
00:03:29.020You go back to 2021, these are the redistributed results based on the boundary changes that ended up taking place before the 25 election.
00:03:37.780But in the real 2021 election boundaries, he had 41% of the vote, the Bloc Québécois had 33, and the Liberals had 18.
00:03:46.400But if you go down further, he also, when he first, when he won the riding in 2019, he won with 36% of the vote compared to the Bloc's 34.
00:03:55.120And in 2018, when he first won the riding, he got 52% of the vote.
00:03:59.520Now, this looks like, well, this is a strong conservative riding that has a conservative winning it for multiple terms.
00:04:06.520Why did the Conservative Party collapse? Richard Martel was personally popular. And when the personally popular guy resigns arbitrarily, you're going to have your vote collapse. He was a Quebec major hockey league coach. He's very popular in the area, was their WHL team or whatever the equivalent is in Quebec.
00:04:28.480He was their coach for a long time. A lot of people really like him locally.
00:04:33.520And so that is what ended up launching him into office back during this by-election in 2018.
00:04:39.400But notice that he won in a by-election with 52% of the vote.
00:04:44.780Well, that's very funny because it happened after the resignation of Dennis Lemieux.
00:05:08.220Densalem, you just cited family reasons for resigning.
00:05:11.140There was no major scandal attached to him for any reason that I could find.
00:05:15.800He actually won in 2015, despite only spending $15,000 to the other candidates' far bigger budgets there.
00:05:23.120But before that, it was a new Democratic riding.
00:05:26.180And before that, it was a block riding.
00:05:28.220And it was a block riding for actually quite a while there.
00:05:30.800And then it was a liberal riding back in the 2000s.
00:05:33.560The last time a conservative won was in 1997, a progressive conservative won, which is a very strange time for progressive conservatives to be winning.
00:05:42.020Because you'll remember in 93, they fell down to just two seats.
00:05:45.240but apparently this is a seat that they ended up winning back.
00:05:48.760My point here is you don't base national trends on a resignation that caused a voter collapse in a local area.
00:05:58.520That is not fair, especially considering this is a riding with a topsy-turvy voting record,
00:06:05.220and it was always a close riding, and the incumbent party was going to be punished when their guy resigned for no reason.
00:06:11.840But now let's get back to the results from the other elections so we can put this idea to bed that this was some sort of like terrible result for the conservatives.
00:06:23.620Now, I would have loved it if they started increasing their vote in some of these other ridings.
00:06:28.180But let's go to Beaches East York now.
00:06:31.480Beaches East York, the liberal who took over for Nader Skynesmith got 55.7% of the vote.
00:10:43.620I want a more aggressive conservative policy. But the idea that in this race we've been shown that everyone hates Pierre Polyev and everyone is never going to stop voting liberal, this was an ideal news cycle for the liberals to run in, and they even lost a bunch of vote in Beaches, East York.
00:11:00.220They pick up Sheikotimi Le Fjord because Richard Martel basically slapped voters in the face and walked away to take a Senate appointment from Mark Carney.
00:11:08.860And North Vancouver, Capilano, basically the exact same as it was in 2025.
00:11:14.760Again, I go to basically the conservative drop in beaches and in North Vancouver, Capilano just reflects what I've been saying.
00:11:23.740liberals are a little bit more ahead of the conservatives than they were on election night
00:11:28.260in 2025 instead of just being two and a half points above them in the national popular vote
00:11:32.660they're probably four to eight points ahead and depending on the riding you'll see a more acute
00:11:37.560effect where the conservatives lose a few points here and there because the liberals are a little
00:11:42.000bit higher than they were on election night in 2025 but if liaison was right if research co who
00:11:49.240but the Liberals 20 points up was right? Shouldn't the Liberals be winning 75% of the vote in Beaches,
00:11:55.100East York? In North Vancouver, Capilano, shouldn't they be winning 67% of the vote, not 59 like they
00:12:01.080got in a 25 election? So all the panicking is quite annoying. But the thing that Conservatives
00:12:07.520need to learn in all of this is stop chasing Quebec voters. I'm not saying don't try and win
00:12:14.560seats in Quebec, you should definitely try and win seats in Quebec. I am an advocate for running
00:12:19.580strong campaigns in every riding, no matter how much of a lost cause it might be, because it helps
00:12:25.820build the movement. It helps make it stronger. It helps create ripple effects across the country
00:12:31.040that even if the Conservative Party is trying really hard in Beaches, East York, it has an
00:12:36.300effect on some of the more winnable ridings in the area if you're really ripping the doors off
00:12:40.700the hinges in that writing but i think of one problem that gets to the heart of why the
00:12:45.560conservatives are not running on bolder policy right now is that they are scared of offending
00:12:50.380a quebec voter the conservative party is only ever going to really win about seven to maybe
00:12:58.400up to the most biggest numbers possible probably 20 seats in quebec in the last election we won 11
00:13:05.520now i would say that quebec seats are probably just going to come along with the conservatives
00:13:09.840it looks like they're going to win you're going to win some of the most the more rural some of
00:13:14.420the more traditional suburban areas but i think too often the federal conservative party hq is
00:13:21.800terrified of running on the sorts of things that i say you know immigration would actually be
00:13:26.520immigration cuts would actually be popular in quebec but the other things in the more socialistic
00:13:31.460uh sort of environment of quebec politics uh they maybe wouldn't like some of my other ideas around
00:13:37.800you know, slashing taxes, but also trying to reduce bloat in government and cutting worthless
00:13:42.640programs and whatnot. But if you if you worry about offending the voters who are least likely
00:13:48.780to shift in your direction in a federal election, you are just going to make sure that voters in
00:13:54.040other parts of the country aren't going to shift towards you either, because they want to jump on
00:13:58.100board with real change, not partial change, because we're only running only slightly to the
00:14:03.820right of the liberals on certain topics because we are terrified of what voters in Quebec swing
00:14:09.880ridings think. The thing is that I want to bring up this post I made yesterday because people were
00:14:16.200trying to criticize my take on this. So I want to read my post and then I want to read the response
00:14:20.040from Anthony Koch. And I understand some of his points here, but I think he's really missing
00:14:24.200something. So I said, it's a good time to remind conservatives that when Harper won in 2011,
00:14:30.660He basically ignored big government Quebec voters and just went for Maritimes, southwestern Ontario, the GTA, and the lower mainland BC.
00:14:42.020Harper got 16% of the vote in Quebec in 2011.
00:14:45.320Stop caring about regions that don't want what you're selling.
00:14:48.540Liberals feel no obligation to try and win Alberta and Saskatchewan.
00:15:46.900And there's this myth that every conservative majority
00:15:49.440runs through Quebec in some way and 2011 was an outlier.
00:15:52.500And Anthony Koch responded to me by saying, your reminder that Quebec has 78 seats and Alberta and Saskatchewan and Manitoba have 65 combined.
00:16:03.0802011 is the internal curse of the Conservative Party.
00:16:05.860People think a once in a thousand year fluke is replicable because I had brought up that that Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Alberta are really the Quebec of Conservatives.
00:16:17.080Those are the ridings that you're going to get a big bulk of your seats, and then you move on to other parts of the country to cobble together your majority.
00:16:25.020Yes, there are more seats in Quebec, but there's no Bloc Quebecois in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba that eats up a bunch of seats and basically keeps them out of the hands of the two other major parties.
00:16:36.500In Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, while there are less total seats, the Conservatives win more seats from those provinces than the Liberals win from the more seat-rich Quebec.
00:16:48.940As I point out here, and I'm a little bit off. I said Liberals only won eight in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba. It was actually nine, but I was doing bad math at 1 a.m.
00:16:56.240I set a reminder that there is no BQ in those three provinces either. Conservatives won 54 seats across Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. Liberals won 9. In Quebec, Liberals won 44 seats. Block won 22, NDP won 1, and Conservatives won 11. The prairie advantage for Conservatives is far better than the Quebec advantage for the Liberals.
00:17:18.780The point is conservatives shouldn't chase their tail in Quebec, just as the liberals don't chase their tail in the prairies. Turns out different parties are different. Protestants and Catholics, social conservative voters are far more effective to try and win in Atlantic Canada than chasing Quebec voters who have very big government tendencies that turn off conservative voters in other regions.
00:17:38.100And again, I'm not saying don't try and win Quebec voters. It's just not efficient to base the way that you're going to try and run the election based on this kind of mythical Quebec swing voter that if you run on the right platform, they're going to suddenly swing over to you and you're going to win 35 seats.
00:17:57.960If you won 15, 16 seats, 18 seats in Quebec, I think, great, we can move on. We only need to increase the seat count by a few, and those seats are probably already obviously in view, more free market ridings, like Maxime Bernier's old riding, the Bose, is a really good example of a free market riding.
00:18:18.040It's very libertarian, very entrepreneurial. It's a very easy riding for the Conservatives to hold on to because the culture is more small government conservative in that portion of Quebec. And there are areas like that. Quebec City is more like that. Certain rural ridings are a little bit more like that. Other rural ridings are very supply management, Liberal or Bloc Quebecois ridings. And Montreal is just a dead zone at this point.
00:18:41.020But there's this myth that you need to win Quebec. In 1988, when Brian Mulroney won his very close majority government against John Turner, he won it. Yes, that was the first time that Conservatives needed Quebec. In every other time, Conservatives won a majority government. It was such a large majority, they could have lost every single seat in Quebec and they would have still won it, which really just says they won the country. It had nothing to do with Quebec.
00:19:09.080people will point out john dieffenbaker won 50 out of 75 seats in 1962 or whatever the election
00:19:16.180year was and it's like yeah but he also won 78 of all the seats in canada he won 66 of the quebec
00:19:25.100seats but he won 78 of all of the seats in canada of course he won a bunch of quebec the entire
00:19:31.560country had chosen him you go back to other elections where he had won minority governments
00:19:37.140or other or even joe clark when he won his minority government in 1979 you could say well
00:19:43.100not winning enough quebec seats held him back but my point is is that those are some of the least
00:19:48.240likely voters to start switching conservative they start switching conservative when conservatives
00:19:52.660become inevitable i find joe clark in 79 and he was very close to winning a majority maybe he
00:19:59.040should tried harder in quebec who knows but he was running against pierre elliot trudeau
00:20:02.500He won two in 79. When Conservatives won a majority in 1930, again, they could have lost every Quebec seat and they would have still won. Robert Borden was able to lose Quebec seats and still take the election. It's just not required.
00:20:21.520You need ridings everywhere and you need Quebec ridings.
00:20:24.780But this idea that, like, the bulk, 50% of our win, 50% of our win is based in Quebec in terms of, like, over our safe seats.
00:20:35.04050% of the seats we need to pick up to win are not in Quebec.
00:20:38.600They're in Atlantic Canada, some cleanup work we need to do in southwest Ontario, Mississauga, Brampton, and parts of the GTA, and the lower mainland, Kelowna, and the islands.
00:20:48.780and the island. That is the victory. Take a territory or two. That is what we need. But the
00:20:55.560thing is, we have this dumb myth that because Canada is based on the English and French first
00:21:01.640settling Canada, then we almost deeply care about what the French think. If they don't want to vote
00:21:07.180for you, they don't want to vote for you. Like, it's not special. We're all Canadians. We can
00:21:10.860respect each other's opinions. We don't need to chase our tail for Quebec voters who don't want
00:21:15.420us. There are some that want to focus on those, and I want to run hard campaigns everywhere. So
00:21:19.280I'm not saying don't even talk about Quebec, don't even show up. I'm saying run hard campaigns,
00:21:24.120but run campaigns on platforms that are appealing to suburban social conservative,
00:21:30.260fiscal conservatives in other parts of the country first, and certain Quebec voters will
00:21:34.920come along for the ride. But the Conservative Party running on an OAS promise in the Chikatimi
00:21:41.260riding where we're going to increase old age security benefits and also reduce the taxes on
00:21:46.060them. Like, yes, that's a very Quebec type promise to make. And it offends the rest of Canadian
00:21:51.820conservatives because they don't like that picking and choosing which demographic benefits
00:21:56.340from what policies. Conservatives in other parts of the country, winnable voters,
00:22:01.020they want an across the board tax cut. They want very, you know, they want like a very even,
00:22:07.760playing field. They don't like special benefits. They don't like subsidies to corporations. They
00:22:14.200don't like special tax cuts and nationalized companies and, you know, Bombardier and supply
00:22:20.160management and OAS benefits and all this stuff. Not that old OAS benefits should go away, but my
00:22:25.380point is specifically running on increasing OAS benefits. It's a stupid move. Run on something1.00
00:22:30.880that's equally applicable and a certain type of Quebec voter will come along for the ride. Don't
00:22:35.420build your platform around Quebec or you will lose. And the Conservatives and Polyev also just1.00
00:22:41.880need to start, again, stop waiting for Mark Carney and the Liberals to collapse. Mark Carney is too
00:22:47.700boring to suddenly collapse. He's not a fantastic, sparkling, dazzling anything. He's not an
00:22:53.600entertaining person like Trudeau is. Trudeau, when he messed up, it's always a spectacular fail
00:22:57.840because he's such a fop. Mark Carney isn't. You have to run on a really bold platform if you want
00:23:03.760to kind of tear up the turf and get underneath to the soil underneath you can't just wait for
00:23:08.980the liberals to go away Carney is not good for Canada but he's not obviously terrible in the way
00:23:15.580that late stage Trudeau was either and I don't think that Carney's ever going to become obviously
00:23:21.140terrible to Canadians so what conservatives need to become is obviously much better rather than just
00:23:27.860being better they are better but when you're running on slightly better tax cuts and when
00:23:32.920you're running on getting rid of the gas tax for a year or just getting rid of the industrial carbon
00:23:37.220tax as your tax policy and something around capital gains that's very boutique and very
00:23:42.700kind of hard for the average voter to understand without sitting down and hearing about it for 10
00:23:46.360minutes it's not obviously better it's better but you need to run on something so starkly better
00:23:52.400people will go out of their out of their way to vote for you and i think that the conservatives
00:23:56.980haven't grabbed that yet and they're too it's too much tinkering policy rather than massive
00:24:04.160full fat reform that we want to see anyways so with all that being said hopefully this kind of
00:24:11.260cools certain people's jets people who are declaring the conservative party is done all
00:24:15.960these people like ben woodfindan and roman fisher and whatnot who are saying that all this was a
00:24:21.840terrible night for conservatives guys it was two safe liberal seats which had the liberals
00:24:26.680falling down in one and everything basically staying in park in the other and then we had a
00:24:31.740riding where richard martell spit in his own voice face slapped them and then walked out to take a
00:24:37.060carny senate appointment and were confused that this riding that loves switching parties ended
00:24:42.220up switching parties after that that's how richard martell won the riding in the first place
00:24:46.500people switched to the conservatives because the liberal up and left for no reason anyways so with
00:24:53.880that being said, thank you guys for watching. Make sure to like, share, subscribe, and I'll see you