← Bulwark Takes
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- [00:00]
Tim Miller
Hey, everybody, it's Tim Miller for the Bulwark. And we did it. Canada, we did it. Oh, Canada Our home and native land I can do it all if you want to if you want me to True patriot love. I went to a lot of hockey games as a kid. What a win for Mark Carney. I've just seen it. I was downstairs watching the CBC as they made the official call that the Liberal will control the government. Might be a minority government, might be a majority government. We're going to bring in our resident Canada expert, J.J. mcCullough to tell us, you know, about how things are looking and how things are shaping up exactly as far as the scope of the victory. But first, before we get to jj, I just wanted to focus on, you know, the Bulwark specialty, which is the fact that this was an absolutely humiliating defeat for Donald Trump. Humiliating. I know he tried to spin it with the Atlantic as like a strong thing, that he could single handedly tank a conservative's campaign, but, yeah, no, your ability to crush your own side is not actually a sign of strength. It's a sign of unbelievable unpopularity and incompetence and absurdity. It is a sign that, frankly, when the rest of the world looks at you, Donald Trump, they see a big fat loser. And, well, that's how many of us just not enough here in America see as well. So Donald Trump was so, so unappealing, so noxious, so, so disgusting in his treatment of our ally up north that he managed to take a campaign that the Conservative Party in Canada, Pierre Poliev, was on a glide path to victory. We're unprecedented territory here. Someone else will get into with jj. But the Conservatives are on a glide path to victory. And the Trump stank was so putrid and so intense that the wind blew it north across the border and it completely infected all of Pierre's entire campaign. There was nothing Pierre could do to get the stink off of him. And so there really is no other way to look at this except a massive L for Trump, a massive L for conservative parties around the world in Western countries at least, that are trying to navigate the Trump question, right, how to deal with someone that has turned our friends into a foe. Not Western countries, let me put that more accurately. Conservative parties in countries that had traditionally been American allies, because Donald Trump is so committed to bullying or to trying, failing, but trying to bully our allies, trying to punish them economically, you know, trying to rub their face in the dirt. Essentially, every ally, except for Israel and our new ally of El Salvador, that has been Donald Trump's M.O. and so it becomes very challenging, if you are in the Conservative Party in those countries to balance how to deal with, you know, the person that should be your reliable ally, but who instead is trying to use his tiny little fingers to wedgie you. And that's what was happening to Poliev. He got wedgied this time with Trump, took his tiny little fingers and he wedgied Poliev, and as a result, you know, they both ended up with shit on their fingers. Just, you know, anyway, excuse me for enjoying it. You know, we've had a couple of owls here lately. I don't know if you've noticed down here in the States. And so I did. I did get a little bit of joy, a little bit of extra pleasure watching the Canadiens just in pretty short order, frankly, deliver a massive, massive L to Trump and, well, to PollyV, but more. But more importantly for me, by extension, Trump. So I am going to pull up here, my friend J.J. mcCullough, for folks that want to go deep on. On what was happening in the writings. I'm learning all the terms. And following the Canadian election so closely, I'm learning all the terms. We're gonna see what's going on in the writings. We're gonna see what we could learn demographically from some of the exit polls. I think there's some interesting things that I was seeing there on the cbc. And we'll learn a little bit more, you know, because JJ's interviewed Pierre and has a perspective on what's happening there as to, you know, just. Just how the extent of the sadness coming from the Canadian conservatives who thought that they were ascended. So we're gonna get into all of that right now. All right, so to bring in my friend JJ McCullough, Canadian YouTuber JJ, you just missed my intro then there, which was essentially that it was a big night for the Fuck Trump coalition and the people that wanted to say Fuck Trump were successful and that all the other, you know, little random local issues or concerns, provincial concerns up there took a second. Took a back seat to that. Is that. Is that a fair assessment of the state of play, or is this just my American Americano file, Trump centric brain that is. That is processing this in that. In that way?
- [05:37]
J.J. McCullough
Well, yes, despite Trump's best wishes, he did not win the Canadian election. I don't know if you saw that bleed where he was. Seem to be implying that people should vote for him. But no, like, we do know from polling data that one of the big sort of divides among Canadian voters was what they considered the front of mind issue. And if you were likely to vote for Carney, which we now know more Canadians did than not, your front of mind issue was Trump. If you were voting for Pierre Poliev and the Conservative, your front of mind issue was a whole host of things. In fact, there was no consensus issue among Conservative voters. You know, some thought that it was just time for a change. Some, you know, believed in his policy agenda. You know, some had anxiety about the cost of living. You know, some hated the Trudeau legacy. You know, it was a medley of different issues, but in that sort of binary equation, and let's be clear, this was a very binary election in a way that feels quite unprecedented in Canadian history. The Carney proposition, it looks like, might have even been a 50% beyond 50% proposition. So it is a very dramatic and decisive win for Carney's theory of the case, which was the F U. Trump theory.
- [06:39]
Tim Miller
The. I was watching the cbc, which I don't usually do, just quite a different whole, just vibe. I'm much more. We're stripped down. We don't have all the graphics. There's no magic wall. There's no magic wall. But anyway, there's kind of a PBS vibe to it, I guess, which makes sense. And they were saying that in the early exits, which I'm sure are about as reliable as they are here, but just directionally that you saw that divide also between older voters and young and younger voters that, like that older voters who, you know, for whom, you know, the history with America is more central to maybe their worldview, like the Trump relation. The Trump situation was their top of mind issue. And with younger voters, it was more of a mix. I mean, does that. Does that sound right to you?
- [07:26]
J.J. McCullough
Yeah, that does sound right. And, you know, this is sort of. It's a somewhat nuanced topic because it does get to sort of like a lot of kind of complex generational issues about, like, what it means to be Canadian and how Canadians sort of see themselves, but definitely, like boomer age Canadians, especially boomer women, frankly, who we know from sort of early polls went huge for Carney. They have a certain stereotype of Americans and American government and Republicans and all of that. And like, Trump is just kind of like the horrible sort of platonic ideal of every sort of like boomer anxiety about the evil Americans, the ugly Americans, the Americans who are sort of coveting Canada and want to conquer us and want to take us over. And that sort of paranoia and fear has been a sort of animating force in a certain kind of boomer Canadian.
- [08:10]
Tim Miller
Don't call it paranoia anymore. Well, maybe it was paranoia last year, but maybe now it's just. Maybe they're just early now.
- [08:16]
J.J. McCullough
Well, that's what, that's what I mean, right? It's like, like Trump just reinforces and confirms and validates a certain theory of America that people like me, pro American Canadians, had spent so many decades denouncing and saying, no, the Americans aren't so bad. They don't hate us. They don't want to conquer our country. What are you talking about? And then Trump comes along and validates that, and then people rush to support a candidate who, and let's be frank, Carney ran a very nakedly anti American campaign. He would say it's not just Trump, it's the Americans. The Americans want our country. They want our resources, they want our land, they want our water, they want to take us. And I, Mark Carney, great civil servant and professional bureaucrat administrator, I'm the only one that can guarantee the safety and security and sovereignty of Canada. And that pitch clearly worked.
- [09:09]
Tim Miller
It was a big moment for us globalist technocrats. JJ I was feeling a little chill as a globalist technocrat saying that one of our own could rise to the top through anti Trump sentiment. But, so we're still, the numbers are still coming in here. Obviously. We've had an official call. They're still trying to figure out if it's going to be a majority or minority government. But I mean, it's. For those of us, we have some Canadian viewers who are very familiar with this. But for the American viewers, it is a gaining of seats we're looking at from Trudeau. Do we think? Can we tell at this point?
- [09:44]
J.J. McCullough
Yeah, it looks. Well, I mean, yeah, it is, frankly, still too early for me to say that. I mean, Carney's popular vote numbers are very high for a Canadian election. You know, I don't want to get too out front of my skis here, but, yeah, I mean, it does feel like Carney is establishing himself as a pretty decisive figure, in part because he has unified this very broad coalition behind him of young people, of old people, and of people of sort of the moderate left and the far left. You know, Carney's great victory in many ways is that he killed off the further left kind of Social Democratic Party, the ndp, which had traditionally sort of split the vote on the center left and was often responsible for allowing sort of conservative victories to slide up through the middle. So I was just doing a podcast with some sort of centre right Canadians. And it's kind of a difficult lesson for a lot of, I think more center right Canadians to learn, which is that it seems like the fundamentals, if we're dealing with a two party system, Canada is a pretty center left country and that's a hard environment for conservatives to compete in.
- [10:45]
Tim Miller
Yeah, it's interesting that you say that because it was something that hadn't really clicked with me until I was like paying closer attention to all this today was that a big part of Carney's gains were from these other parties, like people that would have otherwise gone. And if you're green or even the Quebecois, I mean, looks like Carney's doing better in Quebec than a lot of liberals had in the past. And so it wasn't real. I know some, I'm sure loss from Poliev, but like it seemed like a lot of the gains were, you know, from people that have a more left or more regional disposition that like we're so grossed out by the Trump factor, you know, that it was just like we're going to vote for like we'll coalesce behind Carney. Does that sound like a pretty decent explanation of what happened?
- [11:30]
J.J. McCullough
Yeah, like the poll, the polling data does sort of seem to suggest that, that like Carney was winning a majority of like NDP voters. I'm not sure if he was winning a majority of bloc law voters, but I'm sure he was like winning a majority of like Green Party voters and things like that. This is what we've sort of seen like there's been like in some ways Canadian politics is becoming to resemble more like American politics in the sense you're getting these very sort of unifying leaders who are sort of like function as a kind of culture, cultural figurehead in addition to just being a politician. And these people are just very effective at sort of bringing the whole tribe together. And it's interesting because like, you know, Carney is a technocrat. He is a sort of serious, sort of credentialed sort of guy. And yet he has had an appeal to Canadians of all flavors of the left. And I don't know if like maybe a sort of American lesson in there as well is that you don't necessarily, I suppose have to be a kind of stereotypically like hey fellow kids kind of guy to win the votes of young people or progressive people. If you just exude a sort of competence in the face of, you know, an existential threat, very high stakes politics, you know, people will apparently rally behind You.
- [12:39]
Tim Miller
Yeah, that's interesting. So we were talking about that a little before you hopped on. So your senses from, like. Because since you're in YouTube world, like, you have your hand on your finger on the pulse of like, lefty. So a lot of like, far left types up there, like lefty Canadians.
- [12:51]
J.J. McCullough
Yeah.
- [12:52]
Tim Miller
You know, who are not maybe center left technocrats, you know, they have more radical views. But even the sense was even they were rallying around Carney just out of, out of negative polarization, basically.
- [13:04]
J.J. McCullough
Yeah, absolutely. Like the polling data suggests that that's the case. And just like anecdotally, like, it's interesting. I've just been, you know, having. I'm here in Toronto right now, you know, hanging out with some of my younger friends, some of these sort of like lefty types. And it's just interesting like, how sincerely like pro Carney they are. Like when I was growing up, you know, to support the Liberal Party, you know, kind of had the same sort of cringy energy that you sometimes see far left Americans have when it comes to the Democrat Party. It's like, I don't want to support the mainstream center left party, you know, like, I want to support the like, left wing fringe as a sort of show of how much of a rebel I am. But that seems like it's kind of dissipating and the dying off of the, of the further left party that, you know, people used to go for and as well, just like the decline of Trudeau's brand of politics. You know, Trudeau, who we had previously thought was like, you know, a great, deeply skilled at appealing to young people because he exuded that, that hello, fellow kids sort of energy. It's, it's, it's just interesting. I think if you're a center left person, there's, there's a lot to sort of find perhaps inspiring here that there is a style of politics that can be successful, that doesn't have to be so overtly sort of pandering, you know?
- [14:10]
Tim Miller
Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, do you need an enemy to make that happen? Maybe. Do you need somebody like Trump trying to wreck your entire country and like to take your land? Perhaps. But it is encouraging, though, because you could imagine a different way, right, where there would have been some kind of radical left reaction to what Trump did, or it wouldn't have been a center left that had been ascendant. You could imagine that. I want to ask you one more thing about the conservatives, but just looking at Quebec, and again, I'm doing amateur Steve Kornacki work right now. But the Times has a nice little chart here where, like, where you can see the writings writing is what we're calling it, the writing where the block Quebec won. And like, what is happening in those this time? And I mean it, you know, it looks like about a third of them, the Liberals are winning. Right. And so it's a pretty, you know, you don't have to go much further than that to kind of see it's sort of. That's happening.
- [15:02]
J.J. McCullough
Yeah. No, and that. That sort of upsets, you know, another sort of conventional sort of theory of Canadian politics, that it was all very tribal, very regional. You know, French Canadians would never support, you know, a man like Carney who's not from a French Canadian background, who doesn't speak English or doesn't speak French that well.
- [15:18]
Tim Miller
It was funny. The little CBC person was giving a. Just a little Canadian shade, like what we, you know, kind of a Canadian nice shade attack on Carney for his bad French speaking during the thing.
- [15:29]
J.J. McCullough
Yeah. But it does suggest that, like, again, like, that maybe like some of these identity politics kind of things are just less relevant than we think they are. Like, if you just exude certain competence that you can have a sort of broad appeal. And maybe it's just as simple as just being a highly credible political figure.
- [15:47]
Tim Miller
Lastly, so are you Canadian, the center? You said you're on a center right podcast. You know, you kind of like, are the Canadian conservative types, are they mad at Trump? Like, one of the frustrating things for me down here is that, like, no matter how much Trump rubs, like Republican Party guys facing shit, I never get the satisfying moment of them being like, tim, you are right. He sucks. He's hurting me. Can I get that? Satisfying moment in Canada. Are the Canadian Conservatives ready to give him the middle finger?
- [16:18]
J.J. McCullough
Yeah, I mean, I think you'd have to. I've been thinking, like, what must be going through sort of Pierre Poliev's head right now. I mean, he was leading in the polls, Victory was all but assured. You know, some of it is Trudeau's decision to step down. Like, we shouldn't overstate that because, you know, Pierre was never popular. Pierre was popular relative to Trudeau. And once you get Trudeau Trudeau to the picture, everything sort of changes that way. But no, it is true. It's like an election that Pierre wanted to fight on the Trudeau record, on economic policy, on cost of living, on all of these other things did in many ways clearly become, in the minds of most Canadians, a referendum on Donald Trump. So Pierre tried to denounce him. I know that David Frum has brought this up on your podcast as well. Pierre was always in a difficult position because there is a faction of conservatives that don't want to hear badmouthing of Trump, let alone badmouthing of America. So. But yeah, I mean, it's going to be hard. Like, it's going to be hard to tell this story in any way in which Trump does not loom as the dominant figure. When we read the history of the 2025 Canadian election 30 years from now, there is no universe in which Trump is not as important to that story as Pierre and Carney.
- [17:22]
Tim Miller
All right, do you want to sing any Canadian hymns or give a big, you know, I don't know, Canadian curse word to Donald Trump or anything?
- [17:33]
J.J. McCullough
JJ I'll leave that to you. To you, America, Canada file Americans, because I have a feeling that Carney is now going to emerge as sort of like, you know, a kind of de facto resistance leader in the minds of many of many Americans.
- [17:45]
Tim Miller
Mr. Carney, you're welcome on this show any day. I would love to have you. J.J. mcCullough, he's got a YouTube feed. He doesn't always do politics over there. He does fun stuff, too. It's a great feedback. You should go enjoy that. You should go peruse his, like, flag videos. He did. Really does really good flag videos, a bunch of other stuff. And we appreciate your service on this very busy night. Congratulations to Mark Carney. Fu Donald Trump, everybody. Subscribe to the feed. We'll see you soon.