Wyatt Claypool breaks down some of the dumb takes on why the Tories failed to win in 2015 and why the PPC failed to do the same in 2015. He also takes a shot at PPC leader Maxime Bernier.
00:00:00.000Hey guys, Wyatt Claypool here. Ever since the Canadian federal election happened, there has been a lot of hot takes from people on what they think caused the Conservative Party to not beat the Liberals.
00:00:13.440And I want to break some of these down for you guys today because I find them so full of dumb misinformation that I will then hear people repeat in the coming years as to why the CPC HQ didn't win.
00:00:25.580Do you know why they didn't win? They didn't take hard enough stances on certain issues. I found that they didn't let their own candidates speak on the local level enough.
00:00:34.240They didn't let them attend enough events or attend to local debates. If they did that and they had a truly grassroots campaign in all 343 ridings across Canada, I think we would have actually probably won.
00:00:45.960I think there was too much top-down control the same way there was in 2021, in 2019, and 2015.
00:00:52.900That is the last piece of the puzzle that certain people in headquarters just refuse to actually place on the board, which is letting your people do what they want to do.
00:01:02.060Obviously, don't let someone go rogue and start saying that they're going to do things that aren't in the platform, but you've got to let your own people do what's right for them in their local riding.
00:01:11.780Because every riding is very different, even the riding is right next to each other. The style of campaigning and the way the candidate has to comport themselves is extremely different if you want to win.
00:01:22.600But I want to get to some of the bad takes, because again, people are going to take the wrong ideas away from these if they take them seriously.
00:01:30.280So first up on the list to respond to is PPC leader Maxime Bernier, who thinks he's taking good shots of the Conservatives here when he's really just taking shots into his own foot.
00:01:43.100Good job, Maxime, basically calling your own people stupid if they decide to vote Conservative.
00:02:03.000And yet, that strategy failed. We still have another liberal government and Polyev couldn't even win his own seat.
00:02:10.240I know, that would be for stupid HQ reasons that they didn't win his own seat.
00:02:14.100Goodness, they shouldn't have had him running there if they knew that there was a lot more liberal areas in the riding and he didn't have enough time to campaign himself.
00:02:24.260But the insane CPC trolls and the fake independent journalists and influencers paid by the CPC are still accusing the PPC of helping to elect Carney.
00:02:33.980They refuse to recognize that Polyev dropped the ball, that it's not our fault if he failed to beat the party that destroyed Canada for a decade.
00:02:42.120It's not our fault he offered a weak platform that was indistinguishable from Carney's.
00:02:46.940Okay, that's where, no, it was not indistinguishable from Carney's.
00:02:50.560In fact, it was very different from Carney's.
00:02:52.480I think in certain areas like crime, they could have gone harder.
00:02:55.940On taxes, don't just propose reducing income taxes by 15% below $50,000.
00:03:03.000Reduce everyone's income taxes in every bracket by that much.
00:03:06.700Reduce corporations' taxes by that much.
00:03:08.920Really rip the doors off the thing and demonstrate that this isn't just going to be better than the Liberals.
00:03:14.800This is going to be completely different than the Liberals.
00:03:17.280I think that would have been a smart thing to do.
00:03:18.880So, in that small aspect, Bernier is right, but he pretends as if the platforms were indistinguishable, which is wrong.
00:03:26.340By the way, the thing that annoys me about this, and I actually don't blame the PPC for the Liberals winning any seats.
00:03:32.560I know in Brampton, there were several seats where the PPC made up the Conservatives' margin.
00:03:37.420That happened because there were people who were kicked out of Conservative Party nominations who then said, screw this, I'm going to run for the PPC just to show them.
00:03:46.680That was not some random PPC guy who delusionally thought he was going to win and ended up tripping up the Conservative candidate.
00:03:53.260That was usually like a Hindu Canadian who was arbitrarily kicked out of a nomination saying, well, screw this, I'm going to run myself.
00:03:59.940And if the PPC didn't exist, they would have run as an independent.
00:04:03.540And by the way, that's kind of their prerogative.
00:04:05.940If you mistreat a guy and you threw him out of a nomination for not a good reason, he could come and bite you by running himself in that same area against your guy.
00:04:16.360But regardless, though, I don't agree that the PPC screwed up the Liberals.
00:04:20.680But is Bernier really not going to do any self-reflection on to why his party completely collapsed, on to how he didn't even get an entire third of the country with a candidate?
00:04:32.220He had two-thirds of the country that had a PPC candidate, and then the other third, they just didn't do it.
00:04:37.420They just didn't even have candidates in an entire third of the country.
00:04:41.080After operating this party for years, they still cannot figure out how to get a candidate on every ballot.
00:05:47.680It's almost like doing American podcasts doesn't matter.
00:05:50.880Or else they wouldn't have fallen on their faces nearly as hard unless Bernier is going to claim they would have had zero votes unless he did that.
00:06:13.160Let's start off with the thing that this person is reacting to because this is a stupid mainstream media liberal take on why the conservatives lost.
00:06:19.280So here on CTV News, we have this article that says party needs to be not so extreme.
00:06:33.020When they ask people what did they do wrong, they are cherry picking people.
00:06:37.780They are trying to find people that they can use as basically their wedge against real conservatism in the conservative party.
00:06:45.760They want to argue that, no, no, no, you should have ran a red Tory who doesn't want to – only wants to cut taxes 1%, doesn't really want to cut any spending.
00:06:56.660He's going to maintain every social program of the liberals, and he's not going to touch social issues.
00:07:01.000He's not going to touch foreign policy.
00:07:03.100He's just going to do whatever the liberals are doing.
00:07:06.560What is actually extreme about the current conservative party of Canada?
00:07:11.300Anyone saying that they were extreme is frankly just telling on themselves, but I digress.
00:07:18.260Now, I want to move on to the real take that I found obnoxious, and it's from Viva Frye, a man who has not lived in Canada for a few years now, but is constantly telling Canadians how they should be doing politics.
00:07:31.580Keir bent himself over backwards into a devastating loss, trying to be not so extreme for Canadian media, and it still wasn't enough.
00:07:38.800I wouldn't – no, he was not bending over backwards to be not so extreme.
00:07:43.340It's like he didn't even read the headline.
00:07:45.760That's what the media is saying he has to do.
00:07:48.360He was not extreme, and he also was not trying to be not so extreme.
00:07:52.580He was frankly doing a pretty good job of just being himself.
00:07:55.540I think, again, certain policy areas, the HQ kind of bound him and didn't let him do or say or basically pressured him into doing something else and didn't work out.
00:08:04.340But the idea that the Conservatives just – they just needed to be more right is stupid.
00:08:09.560There's nothing more right that I'm suggesting about increasing criminal sentencing even more or by cutting taxes even more.
00:09:25.640Are you going to run a little differently now that the states that you need to win in order to win the Electoral College include Connecticut, includes Rhode Island?
00:09:33.920You've got to snag or either Colorado or you need to be able to win New York.
00:09:39.080It's going to be a little bit different.
00:09:41.260Before there was a big wave of conservatism in the United States.
00:09:45.420In fact, the parties actually tended to be more moderate in the sense that not like they're like soft, because in fact, you could say the Republicans are softer than like Nixon's people back in the 70s on certain issues.
00:09:58.420But they were like less ideologically conservative.
00:10:01.020You know, it wasn't a small government wasn't considered the highest value of the Republican Party at the at the time.
00:10:06.840You know, it would have been a little bit more of a hodgepodge of issues that were more regional and stuff like that.
00:10:11.840You know, more pro-union, less pro-union.
00:10:14.040That would have been kind of like American politics in the 70s.
00:10:17.400But back in the day, people need the Republicans needed New York because it used to be that the South was Democrat.
00:10:24.000And so what are you going to do if those states didn't exist?
00:11:43.740You could do a lot of stuff like this, again, an across-the-board tax cut, where that gets a lot of people's attention who are in higher brackets.
00:11:50.200When they hear that you're just going to cut 15% for the first $50,000, that person's like, yeah, I pay a million in taxes every year.
00:12:19.840He says, this is the most delusional idea I've ever heard.
00:12:22.920If the conservatives' reaction to this election loss is to quadruple down on trying to make Quebec like them, then the party is truly doomed to be on salvation.
00:12:30.860And he's responding to this text saying, the conservatives could offset their loss of PPC support.
00:12:35.980However, if they increase their seat count in Quebec, where they only gained one seat while the liberals scored 10.
00:12:42.460But this would only happen under a leader who appealed to Quebec voters, who would be more moderate in tone.
00:12:48.240As we saw in this election, Polly was not that leader.
00:12:51.280But there is now talk that he may seek a seat in Quebec City in a possible attempt to transform himself into someone Quebecers could like.