The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - May 01, 2025


Will NDP MPs defect to Liberals to give Carney a majority？


Episode Stats


Length

14 minutes

Words per minute

183.09604

Word count

2,692

Sentence count

133

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Wyatt Claypool talks about whether or not some NDP MPs may cross the floor to join the Liberals, and what the party should do to win back working class voters who voted for the Liberals in the last election.

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 .
00:00:00.720 Hey guys, Wyatt Claypool here. Although there were many losses in Canada's federal election,
00:00:06.720 I don't think it can be argued that a party lost harder than Jagmeet Singh's NDP. They had gotten
00:00:13.200 18% of the vote in the 2021 election and fell all the way down to just 6.7%, which is really
00:00:21.280 pathetic because you need to get at least 10% of the vote in ridings in order to get 50% of your
00:00:27.040 election spending given back to you. The NDP are heavily in debt right now, which is what is
00:00:33.280 fueling rumors that NDP MPs, which there are only seven of now, may end up crossing the floor and
00:00:40.160 joining Mark Carney's Liberals to give Prime Minister Carney a full working majority. I'm
00:00:45.920 going to play some news clips here and I'm going to talk about this issue with the NDP, whether or not
00:00:51.520 there's a chance some could cross the floor. At the very least, it seems like those who have been
00:00:56.800 interviewed have ruled it out, but I do want to talk about the discourse that's been online about
00:01:02.000 it and then I want to move over to what should the NDP do if it actually wants to be a real party again.
00:01:08.240 I know I'm a conservative and if you're watching this channel, you're probably a conservative,
00:01:12.560 but I do think it's an interesting thought experiment to put yourself in the shoes of someone
00:01:17.040 who may vote NDP and talk about what the NDP has to do to win those people back. Because for the
00:01:23.360 conservatives to win in the future, one thing that would severely help them a lot would be the NDP
00:01:29.440 becoming a real party again and not just a place that can elect hyper populists in urban city centers.
00:01:36.960 Anyways, here is this news clip from the CBC that got a lot of people chattering on whether or not
00:01:43.200 NDP MPs were willing to basically be bought out and cross the floor to the Liberals.
00:01:49.920 Well, it has been speculated the Liberals may reach across and invite members to join them,
00:01:57.280 cross the floor. Would that be something you would consider sitting as a Liberal?
00:02:00.640 Well, that's a very interesting thought. As I say, I'm going to be focused on the issues itself.
00:02:06.960 There may be moments where we can work collaboratively with the government to get things done and that
00:02:12.720 would be my primary goal to get things done for Canadians. I think people interpreted Jenny Kwan
00:02:20.000 here, the NDP MP, saying that it's an interesting thought as basically she was considering it. I
00:02:27.280 don't think she actually was ever. And she kind of clarified that by actually posting this underneath
00:02:34.240 the National News Watch clipping of that interview. I'm going to bring this up on screen in just a
00:02:39.440 second here. But Jenny Kwan said, this headline is totally misleading. I'm a proud member of the NDP
00:02:46.160 caucus. I will always remain open to working collaboratively with other parties on public
00:02:52.560 policy solutions. But I am a new Democrat and will remain a new Democrat. At the very least, I would
00:02:59.280 think that NDP MPs, again, the only seven that are remaining, at least want to see who's the new leader
00:03:05.680 going to be. Because it would be a bit premature to give up the party and the leverage you have
00:03:11.600 working in a party against the Liberals over when you haven't even seen who's going to take over for
00:03:17.680 Jagmeet. Because it's been three elections with Jagmeet. You're really not going to see if it's
00:03:21.840 like a wab canoe that's going to take over next time, who has some populist energy and can 0.99
00:03:26.400 win back working class Canadians and start doing better in the cities where they lost most of their
00:03:32.720 ground. And I'm going to get over to another interview in just a second with MP Don Davies.
00:03:39.200 But I just want to discuss the idea of where the NDP votes went. Because it's not exactly
00:03:46.560 just that they were absorbed into the Liberals. While yes, the Liberals had absorbed about two
00:03:51.840 thirds of the NDP vote that went away from the party, the Conservatives actually gained an entire third.
00:03:58.560 And in ridings like Windsor West, which the Conservatives have not won since I believe 1935,
00:04:06.080 the Conservatives in fact grabbed up the vast majority of the NDP vote in that riding.
00:04:11.600 The NDP has fundamentally lost touch with what its party is all about. They've considered themselves
00:04:18.560 like a urban progressive party since Jagmeet Singh took over, when that was never the purpose of the
00:04:25.040 New Democrats or the Collective Commonwealth Federation, which was the previous party before
00:04:30.560 the NDP. It was always supposed to be a labor union working man's party, but it became the party for
00:04:37.840 people who are 19 years old taking a sociology degree. It's a party that does well in university
00:04:44.560 towns, but those are the voters most prone to swinging Liberal when there is the fear put into them that
00:04:51.440 if the Conservatives win, that there's going to be the 51st state and Donald Trump is going to ride
00:04:56.960 over the border in an Abrams tank to take parliament. So the NDP does not have a sustainable base by
00:05:05.200 trend chasing progressive urban voters who actually tend to be pretty flaky. I think Tristan Hopper had a
00:05:12.880 really funny insight into this because he was at the NDP headquarters on election night and he noticed
00:05:20.160 you didn't see any keffias, you didn't see any Palestinian watermelon pins, you didn't see any of
00:05:26.160 that associated with a big portion of activists that the NDP had bent over backwards to try and please.
00:05:33.840 They're flaky voters. The trying to chase the activists is a stupid thing to do because they are
00:05:40.240 so ideological. If you do a thing an inch out of the box that they want you to stay in, they will
00:05:46.320 clobber you first even before the people who are absolutely opposed to them. So the NDP absolutely
00:05:52.240 destroyed themselves doing that. And now before I get to this interview clip with Don Davies,
00:05:57.840 I think the thing that the NDP has to do is it has to choose when it's going to go into coalition with
00:06:03.760 the Liberals because it's obvious that the NDP are going to work with them. They are both lefty parties.
00:06:08.560 Are they going to move forward in the style of Jagmeet Singh again, be complicit with the Liberals,
00:06:16.080 just back them up to the absolute hilt? Or are you going to do this in the style that Jack Layton did
00:06:23.680 in 2004 when Paul Martin was the Prime Minister? Because Paul Martin effectively had as big a majority,
00:06:31.440 or sorry, not a majority, a minority as Mr. Carney does now. In fact, actually, the Liberals just lost
00:06:38.000 a seat back to the block on a recount. And there's still a few more recounts that could happen to reduce
00:06:42.800 the Liberals minority a little bit more. But the minority government pretty much looked the exact same
00:06:48.560 as Paul Martin's in 2004. But Jack Layton, when he was the NDP leader in 2004, didn't just do the stupid
00:06:56.320 algorithmic calculus that, well, we're a party on the left, and the Liberals are a party on the left,
00:07:01.600 ergo, we should always back them or we're siding with the Conservatives. The NDP needs to learn to
00:07:09.600 pull the cork out of the bathtub. They need to realize that at some point, your people don't 1.00
00:07:15.120 notice the difference between voting for you and voting for the people you're in coalition with
00:07:19.440 if there is never a red line that if they cross, you walk away. In fact, it was Layton who defeated
00:07:26.320 the government in 2004 because he saw blood in the water. Paul Martin was weak. He didn't care if
00:07:32.560 Harper won. His first duty is to his own party and growing their base. And in 2004, 2008, and 2011,
00:07:42.000 he saw blood in the water to gain seats for the NDP. And he may have actually become Prime Minister one day
00:07:47.920 if he hadn't tragically died of cancer. Like, I would have never voted for the NDP under Layton.
00:07:53.200 I would never have considered it. But it was a functional, real party that had goals and in fact
00:07:59.520 did not alienate voters unnecessarily the way Jagmeet Singh did. Layton very much cut a Ted Turner-esque
00:08:06.400 figure. He seemed like if he was holding blueprints in his hand and wearing a hard hat, you'd like,
00:08:10.880 make sense. I believe the guy wasn't even really ever a big public sector person, I think. I think he was
00:08:17.120 always kind of in government or around government in some way. But Layton gave you that feeling that
00:08:21.680 he could start a building project and finish it, that he could run his own business, a restaurant,
00:08:26.400 and it could be successful. Jagmeet Singh only gives you the sense that he has been given a lot of money
00:08:31.760 by his parents. I don't even think that's true, but he's just been given a lot of money and he likes to
00:08:35.760 flutter his eyelashes at people while he sits in a VIP booth that somebody else paid for. He never seems
00:08:41.680 like somebody who does it himself. But now let's get to Don Davies here, who was on an interview with
00:08:47.760 Fasci Capellos, where I think he laid out more what the real terms are going to be for the NDP
00:08:54.080 in a liberal coalition government. Just a quick question on sort of, I guess, what it looks like
00:09:00.640 if you do end up, I mean, you do have enough seats to hold the balance of power. What do you envision that
00:09:06.400 as looking like? And have you ruled out, for example, the kind of formal agreement that your
00:09:10.480 party was in with the liberals for two years? Well, it's far too premature to rule in or rule
00:09:16.880 out anything. I mean, you know, we're just right now, we're just dealing with the results of the
00:09:22.960 election. I expect our colleagues will meet in the next few days. We'll have to pick an interim leader,
00:09:29.280 and then we'll have to begin the process of scheduling and organizing a leadership contest.
00:09:34.400 In the meantime, you know, there's all sorts of issues, you know, everything's negotiable in
00:09:39.520 politics. And one of the things that I'm already thinking about is official party status. That number
00:09:45.200 is arbitrary of 12. I know in BC, the last legislative session, the Greens secured official party status
00:09:54.160 with, I think, three. Actually, I believe it's just two seats that they needed to get official party
00:10:00.000 status because the, well, actually, I think they actually lowered it just now because the BC NDP
00:10:06.000 with a very, very slim majority, I mean, like they don't even technically have a majority because one
00:10:10.560 of their people needed to be speaker. So unless you want to go through the arduous process of tying
00:10:15.200 votes and then having him tie break votes, you need the NDP's input. So yeah, you can actually lower
00:10:21.360 the amount of seats needed to be an official party. So while the NDP lost official party status,
00:10:26.640 now that they still hold the balance of power, they may regain it from the Liberals just simply
00:10:31.280 arbitrarily lowering how many seats you need in order to be an official party and get extra taxpayer
00:10:37.200 dollars to fund your parliamentary business effectively. So I think that the big motivator for
00:10:43.680 the NDP right now is money. They're in debt. They could even, in fact, I've heard lose the Leighton
00:10:48.720 building in Ottawa. They're so in debt. Again, 86, 89% of seats. They did not even cross 10% of the vote.
00:10:56.080 They only had 6.7 overall. So that was expected that they were not going to even cross 10% in most
00:11:01.680 ridings. But that is really bad. Think about how much money they've spent in a lot of these ridings
00:11:06.880 that they don't even get back the half of it that they're supposed to by crossing 10%. And usually the
00:11:12.320 way the NDP has funded its election campaigns has been taking out mortgages on the Leighton building
00:11:18.480 and then promising a bank that we will then pay it back through not only fundraising, but also getting
00:11:26.080 half of our campaign expenditures back and then using that to pay off most of the loan. They got
00:11:31.840 back like nothing. Unless some of these candidates were just paper candidates and they only gave them
00:11:36.720 a thousand bucks and that was it. These are big losses of cash. The NDP really needs a leader who could
00:11:44.640 actually make them different than the Liberals. And this is again where Leighton succeeded and somebody
00:11:50.880 like Jagmeet Singh completely failed. Even Tom Mulcair did a far better job than Jagmeet Singh.
00:11:58.720 They need to prove that they can actually hurt the Liberals. That they're a threat to the Liberals.
00:12:03.920 Because unless you're a threat in politics, nobody's going to give you money. What is the point of giving
00:12:08.480 money to a party that does not threaten the government into actually doing what they want
00:12:13.120 or it doesn't threaten them in an election? So I think there is two paths the NDP might go down.
00:12:18.800 They might go even more progressive and wacky or they may actually start to become a union party again
00:12:25.200 and start to win back support that they've lost in this election. Again, I think that they should
00:12:30.880 become like the WAC Bennett NDP. If you know WAC Bennett, the former premier of British Columbia,
00:12:38.160 all he did as the social credit premier of BC was just build. He just built. Building infrastructure
00:12:44.000 was his big thing. The NDP, if they want to be like a serious mainstream party, become the party that
00:12:49.280 builds bridges, literally. That builds more ferry ports. That builds more ports in general. That builds
00:12:55.600 more airstrips. Builds more Wi-Fi and cellular towers. That would be really, really smart.
00:13:01.120 Because you can get away from all the silly progressive program issues that are absolutely
00:13:07.840 ruining their appeal with most Canadians and they can move back over to something that allows them 0.90
00:13:13.280 to connect with people who live in places like Windsor and Hamilton and who live in these working
00:13:18.720 class neighborhoods who used to be the bread and butter of the latent NDP. Again, I am a conservative.
00:13:24.400 I would never vote for them, but they made me advisor for like a month. And this doesn't even
00:13:29.440 be me being arrogant. It's just their people particularly suck. I'm not even that good in
00:13:33.280 any way. But if I was their advisor for a month, I could probably get them above 15% in the polls.
00:13:38.400 Because it's not that hard. A lot of people don't like the liberals and will use any excuse
00:13:42.640 to not vote liberal, even in this past election. But Jagmeet Singh gave everyone every excuse to not
00:13:47.840 vote for him as well. Anyways, so that should be it for me today in this video. I will be coming back
00:13:54.320 later to talk about some of the other issues around Trump celebrating Mark Carney's win and people still
00:13:59.760 being in denial about the fact that he absolutely wanted the liberals to win. And then coming in
00:14:05.120 probably the next few days, if not the next week, I do want to do a bit of an election post-mortem,
00:14:10.800 talk about what went well, what went wrong in the campaign, where conservatives made gains,
00:14:15.680 where they've lost ground, and what the conservatives can do to win next time. Because I feel like
00:14:21.040 some critique is needed in order to actually construct a better campaign for the next election for
00:14:26.240 the conservative party. Anyways, so that should be it for me today, guys. Make sure to like the video,
00:14:31.360 subscribe to the channel, leave a comment. What do you think the NDP needs to do to get out of debt
00:14:36.640 and stop being a completely pathetic clown show? Let me know. Have a good one.