1942. Europe. Soldiers find a boy surviving alone in the woods. They make him a member of Hitler's army. but what no one would know for decades. He was Jewish. Could a story so unbelievable. be true I'm Dan Goldberg I'm from CBC's Personally Toy Soldier available now wherever you get your podcasts This is a CBC Podcast. I am going to begin with the value of humility.
and by admitting that I have much to be humble about. That's true. Over my long... That's not an applause line, it's just a statement of fact. Over my long career... I have made many mistakes, and I will make more. But I commit to admitting them openly, to correcting them quickly, and always learning from them. Humility underscores the importance of governing as a team in cabinet and in caucus. and working constructively with all parties across Parliament.
And working across all parties is definitely a skill Prime Minister Mark Carney will have to hone. Because at the moment, we're taping now, CBC has just confirmed a liberal minority government. And what, that took only like 17 hours after the last polls closed? Yeah, that was super close. Interesting.
Almost a full day today. We waited for that. God, I could use a nap. Yes. We're pretty sleep deprived as we do this at about 4 p.m. on Tuesday. We have been on the air for hours of much of a break, but... Guys, this is what we live for, right? Woo, election! I'm Katherine Cullen, host of CBC's The House. I'm Daniel Thibault, host of Radio-Canada's Political Show, les coulisses du pouvoir.
I'm... Who are you? Park on all cylinders here. I'm Jason Marks. And together, we are House Party, a weekly podcast diving into the big burning questions about the election. And this week we're asking, what surprised us most? Let's get into it. Finally, we've been building to this for weeks. What was the most surprising part of the election results last night? Dan, let's start with you. The result itself, I guess. It's funny because in the past week, the liberals I was talking to...
Started to talk about the majority and put forward some numbers. Privately, of course, not publicly. 175, 76, 77. Yesterday, someone said... Maybe 180, and then we got the 169, the minority. And everyone seemed shocked. And then I had to think about it a little bit and recall that six months, four months ago.
They were supposed to be crushed. They were supposed to be nowhere. And so I guess it's not a bad result altogether. It's just that the expectations towards the end were a little higher than what we got served as a result.
Yeah, when you take the long view, it's a huge comeback for the liberals. It seemed like it was going that way. But within this world we're living in, where it seemed like things were headed to a majority, that was surprising. To me, the big... shocker story in this of last night was Where the NDP fell, how far they fell and where that vote fell to. This is a party whose caucus fits into a minivan.
That is something else. I have to say, to me, that wasn't the surprising part. I think it seemed like there was a lot of foreshadowing that things weren't going to go so well for the NDP. And you kept hearing from members. of of the new democratic party like oh no the the poll you know the the poll aggregators they just don't reflect the numbers on the ground but there was this ominous feeling the thing that surprises me the most is actually the conservative numbers and the conservative numbers
specifically in Ontario. And I will tell you, the day of the election, I was talking to people on the Conservative team and they were saying, well... you know, it's possible that we have this voter coalition that isn't going to get picked up all that well by the polls. Like, we're not saying the polls are wrong, but maybe they just...
are underestimating our voters. It's, you know, a lot of young people, a lot of young men. Pollsters don't normally pick that up. It's going to be people who haven't voted before. But it did seem to me like these conservatives were trying to sort of give themselves a little bit of hope, like maybe it won't be quite as bad as we thought. And I think those expectations have actually had an interesting part in all of this too, that the Conservatives sort of are...
Not a little bit like pleasantly surprised, but... They stumbled out into the sunlight and they're not quite sure exactly what has happened to them and where they're going to go from here. It feels like there's a community of conservative voters that didn't pick up, that no one picked up in Ontario specifically. And that number, I'm just going from memory. I think it's 40, 42, 42 percent, 41 and a bit. That's pretty big. It's a huge number. You get, like in normal times, Stephen Harper in 2011.
Got a majority with numbers like that. And so, I don't know. It didn't feel like the pollsters saw it. It didn't feel like the conservatives saw it, really. It didn't feel like the liberals saw it. in Ontario because they were forecasting some winds that just didn't materialize yesterday. And so I don't know where those people came from.
I mean, you know, what's the story in every election? That the Conservatives, to win, have to take more of the 905. And they did. They took quite a bit of the 905. Markham, Brampton, they stormed Brampton. They got into Vaughn more. They won that seat at York Center where Roman Baber beat Yara Sachs. A lot of interesting developments within the Jewish community in the Jewish vote there given the issues around anti-Semitism in Israel there and probably in some other writings.
as well. And then you have the blue color. areas, Windsor, Kitchener, Cambridge, London, picking up London Fanshawe from the NDPC. There. That was really interesting to see what they were doing. But I think we haven't mentioned yet the other really interesting conservative results. Carlton. Dun, dun, dun. You know, I saw that. That was something.
I saw that in the paper a couple of weeks ago, and I put some feeler out there, and I talked to some people, and I always have a hard time believing stories like... oh, the leader's in trouble. Yeah, totally. I thought it was mischief, yeah. Yeah, and even the libs were like, probably not. And the conservatives were pretty positive, you know. And then he started seeing the results coming in last night.
And, you know, the first few boxes, you think, well, you know, it's a special box. It's a neighborhood that's not super friendly to the conservatives. And then one more and one more and one more. And then eventually that call that came in the middle of the night. But still, it blew me away. I didn't think it would make it that far, given the result that they got all through Ontario, throughout Ontario. The Liberals obviously did quite a bit of groundwork in that front.
Yeah, and I totally agree, Dan, that it feels like a story we spent a couple weeks trying to talk ourselves out of, right? We kept seeing these insinuations that something was happening, but it just seemed too wild. And now... you want to talk about interesting scenarios, this question of what happens to Pierre Polyev, right? Because he made it crystal clear on election night. And I thought there was like some very...
naked strategy in what he did. He came out early before it was revealed that he had lost his own riding, and that speech was like 75%. Well, let me tell you how I'm going to stay and I'm going to stay and I'm going to stay and I'm going to stay. I'm going to bring the change. To my fellow conservatives, we have much to celebrate tonight. We've gained well over 20 seats. We got the highest share of vote. Our party has received Since 1988. But the, um...
This conundrum, I guess, that he faces at the moment that we are taping this is the question of what he's going to do with himself now, right? He probably needs a member of his caucus to... to give up their seat, to let him run there so that he can get himself back into the House of Commons. And I want to say, you want to talk about surprises of this election. Think about how weird this is. We had the first ever prime minister who had never been elected to the House of Commons.
Now he's been elected to the House of Commons and the leader of the official opposition who has spent his career in the House of Commons is not in the House of Commons. It's just like, to me, a symptom, a sign of just what a weird, wild, remarkable nature of what can happen in Canadian politics is a sign of the time. I think in our heads, Polyev was only going to lose if it was a really, really, really bad night. For the conservatives. No, they pick up 16 seats.
This huge number, 41.5% or something, was it? That's the highest result for a conservative party since the best of Mulroney. But it's just weird. You look at the map, I was looking at where the gains were and where the flips were. The Liberals picked up quite a few seats from the Conservatives in eastern Ontario as well, Bay of Quinty, where Ryan Williams is. They stole a pair from the Conservatives in Nova Scotia but lost a seat in Newfoundland and Labrador.
It's funny, pickups and gains and losses all over the map. It's going to be an interesting parliament for sure. Now he has to find, like, he wants to lead the party, obviously. He's going to need to, if he wants to be the leader of the opposition, he needs to be sitting in the House of Commons, so he needs a seat. So you need to find someone that's willing to give you a seat. Now, if you're Mark Carney.
I'm assuming, I don't know, do you play with that? Do you want to wait? Because they have six months to call a by-election when someone resigns. Do you call it right away or you say, hmm, I have six months, let's wait. And then you have to win. And I was reminded this morning of... A story back in the days where I was covering Queen's Park in Ontario where it happened to John Tory. And John Tory had one of his MPs resign and ran in her seat and he lost.
a second time. So you don't want that to happen. One of the questions that's hung over all of this is like how much of a politician. Is Mark Carney really? And I think when he calls the by-election is going to be... Such an interesting litmus test for that, right? He came out last night. We just heard that clip off the top about humility. And, you know, now he's won this election and he wants to bring Canada together. So are you going to play some, like, crap?
politics and make things as hard for your opponents as they can possibly be. Or are you going to try to, you know, like be the bigger person and call that by-election a little bit sooner? I'm really interested in what happens there. The other thing I'm really interested in is...
Conservative backstabbing and whether anyone tries to take Pierre Poliev down. And I wonder if either of you have thoughts about whether you're surprised that in the first several hours of this, given how much infighting we saw during the campaign. that the conservatives seem to be going along with the idea that Pierre Polyev is going to stay. Can I go on the Carney as a politician thing first? Because I feel like for me, that was the big question of this campaign coming into it.
He dabbled in liberalism and he'd been a governor of two banks, but we'd never seen him as a politician. What kind of campaigner was he going to be? Was he a great campaigner? Did he light the world on fire? No, but he didn't step in it. he didn't have any of those major rookie gaffes that we thought he was going to have like that. You know, like I was thinking that I was, I had imagined that the, uh,
You know, that thing where he said I'm with Hamas or something in a French debate was going to be a foreshadowing of the rest of the debate. Didn't happen. So I think he's, you know, he surprised us in a way as a politician. So that's a good thing to touch on, Catherine. You know, I was watching the TV broadcast. By the way, Catherine, you were excellent on. But I was going to talk about how Jameel Javani, the Oshawa Bowman Bill MP reelected for the Conservatives and how...
spit and fire he was about Doug Ford. Just livid talking about how Doug Ford's a showman. He was doing table service for Mark Carney and the Liberals. Now we're seeing him because he, you know, this guy's a political genius because he beat Bonnie Crombie and Stephen Del Duca, and now we got to sit around getting advice from him? No, no. He has taken the provincial Conservative Party and turned it into something hollow.
unprincipled, something that doesn't solve problems. He's glad-handing with Chrystia Freeland, having coffees and lattes with Mark Carney. And I'm sitting here saying, we need to be fighting for change in something new and something different, not being a hype man to the Liberal Party.
I don't know how happy the Polyev types were about that, but I think that we saw quite a fissure between the Doug Ford Conservatives, which are successful three times in a row, and the Polyev Conservatives, which... didn't get across the finish line in Polyev's own words. So I wonder what we'll see there. There are going to be some MPs who, you know, had...
tasted victory, felt they were tasting victory for the last two years way ahead in the polls, and now they're in opposition. You know, maybe that's one of the good things. about Pierre Polyev not picking any major star candidates or tall poppies, that none of them were, you know, really, really forming, you know, power circles of their own within his caucus. But there was heavy criticism of his campaign during the campaign, coming from outside. We've talked about Corey tonight.
and the Ontario organization. It'll be interesting to see if it's... And I've focused a lot of the Quebec MPs today. Everyone seems to be falling back in line and saying, you know, it seems to... They seem to be willing to give Poilier a chance, a second chance at it. We'll see how it goes. As for Mark Carney and the politician, I think...
I think he's becoming more and more of a politician. And I was watching the speech last night, and I'm like, oh, wow, you're sounding like a guy who's getting the experience. You're growing in that role pretty fast. And in that fashion, if he's becoming a politician, I don't think he's going to be so nice with these.
The by-election, as in, I don't think he's going to call it for like a week and a half or two weeks after the MP resigns. I think he's going to wait a little bit and see if he can play with that. Queer life in Montreal was wild. Montreal in the 90s was a great time, but it had a dark side. It was... Not a safe city for gay people back then. But what else was behind a series of deaths in the city?
Somebody's killing gay men. We want to know why. I'm Francis Peward, and this is The Village, the Montreal Murders. Get early access to episodes... at cbc.ca slash listen or by subscribing to the CBC True Crime Premium channel on Apple Podcasts. Can you guys jog my memory? I'm thinking about the last time Knives were out for an opposition Conservative leader. Did it happen right away with Andrew Scheer and Erno Toole, or did it take a while?
No, it was pretty fast. Yeah, but not like the day of, but it was brutal, man. It was insane. When was the election? Was it in October? Yeah, by like December he was out, right? Yeah, he was out by mid, early December. Because I remember we taped... We had to re-tape a show because of that. I'm surprised. You want to know what I'm surprised by? I'm surprised that you would try to test my memory on a day like this, Jason. I'm not here for it.
And O2 lasted a little longer, but just a little. But in the case of Andrew Scheer, there were these stories that came out in the media about his kids. schooling and stuff and it was so unpleasant and Aaron O'Toole it was this closed door caucus meeting where we know that like what we heard behind closed doors was basically they were like we will make you suffer if you don't go right like this stuff gets nasty
My point to ask that question was really just to Dan's point about that today they're all getting in line. It takes, you know, maybe not the next day, but watch in the coming weeks. And as Parliament, if Parliament gets back in like June with a throne speech and Polyev's not there, do the chickens start to play?
I think that's why he's moving so quickly on all of this stuff, making it clear he wants to stay. I think we're going to hear quickly about what happens with the by-election. I think they are just trying to like... make stuff happen, keep things moving forward and use the positive momentum of those Ontario results. I want to talk a little bit more about the Liberals and I want to ask another Are You Surprised question.
surprised. Jason raised the carny French Hamas moment, right? I agree with Hamas. Oh, wait, sorry, that's not what I meant. Are we surprised by how much Quebec ended up liking Mark Carney despite all his struggles in French because the Quebec embrace of the Liberals was a big part of the election results. I was a little surprised. I thought there was interesting traction in Quebec for the Liberals.
I've been basically living and working in Montreal for the past month and a half. And I hear a lot of people commenting and talking about Kearney and talking about his French. People being pretty open to voting for him and people from all sorts of political stripes, including a lot of nationalists coming from the bloc. I figured after the debates, when Yves-François Blanchet...
went back and said, you know, it feels to me like it's a pretty certain win for the Liberals. So if you're a nationalist in Quebec... you should feel comfortable coming back to us and voting for us. I thought that would maybe shift things a little bit. What they got at the end, what the bloc got at the end, is pretty much the lower end of the... of the fork they had imagined. They were thinking they would get between 22 and 25, maybe 26 seats in Quebec. They got 22. And so...
Yeah, the Libs did super well in a region where I was very surprised they would. So obviously, the message and the fear and the idea that they need someone to fight Trump really, really got traction with voters. Jason, are you surprised how he did in Alberta? How Carney did in Alberta? I mean, they were expecting to break through. Polls were suggesting they were really strong. They had some good candidates, some good hopes.
I had this nifty stat picked out that if George Chahal had won his seat, he would be the first ever Calgary Liberal MP to get elected twice. And in fact... The liberal, his liberal campaign baked a cake with that stack. And there's this great picture in one of the newspapers, the country herald, of the uneaten cake. that they never cut into. Nothing sadder than wasted cake.
Yeah, so the Liberals came into that campaign with two seats in Alberta, one in Calgary, one in Edmonton, and that's what they have coming out. Shahal lost, but Corey Hogan, a political podcaster and university executive in Calgary Confederation, won. And Saskatchewan was interesting. I mean, we had expected it based on the demographics and the way they had redistricted that it was a very safe... a seat in a landslide for Buckley Belanger, the former NDP cabinet minister.
provincial NEP cabinet minister in northern Saskatchewan. So it's quite likely that we're going to see some cabinet ministers from Alberta and Saskatchewan. So there are those couple nicks. in what remains a quite solid blue wall for... I'm just looking up at CBC News Network as we're talking about this, and I'm going to say another thing.
What surprises me about the liberals is that I am watching these videos of Mark Carney dancing on a loop. Like, what the heck is going on in Canadian politics? I didn't expect that. No, he's put a hoodie on. He's dancing to his favorite band down with Webster. Canadian politics is weird, guys. It gets weird sometimes. I do have to say, I don't...
I think he danced better than I would. I feel like the dad vibes are pretty strong. It works for the crowd. It works for this crowd. That's it. Let's talk about the NDP. Let's put surprise aside. Are we watching the NDP? sort of come to a conclusion? Like, where do they go from here? I'm very reluctant in forecasting the death of a political party. I've done that with the bloc in the past and see if it didn't. It didn't materialize. So I don't think it's that. But I think it's...
I think it's the Trump thing again. And I think it's the way everything focalized the attention on two main parties. And both the NDP and the bloc paid for it. the NDP more dearly, and that gave us the result. But we started seeing that like three weeks ago, three or four weeks ago. It's pretty evident. It felt like that in the polls. It felt like that in the field. Everyone saw it. Every party saw the collapse of the NDP vote.
In fact, the end result is better than what a lot of people were forecasting a week and a half ago. Well, I mean, if you're grading on a curve, yeah. What was interesting was where the NDP vote went. They went to the Conservatives too. They picked up a lot of those in places like Windsor, London, Ontario. The Vancouver Island that was largely painted, Lou, I think one seat left. Three seats left in B.C. is their big beachhead now, and there used to be, what, they have like 12?
Seats before in British Columbia or something like that. No seats. No seats in Ontario for the new Democrats. Jagmeet Singh finishing third. It was just something interesting just seeing it all. on the map now and just seeing it all done. Party is going to have a very interesting existential discussion right now. Where does it go? Yes. That's what's interesting to me.
They've lost some of their niche in blue-collar private sector and the industrial sector. The conservatives ate a lot of that. They've lost this urban, you know, with that dichotomy between liberals and conservatives. And the Trump threat, they lost that. So what is their niche? What is their angle? Do they try to carve out their own splot on the left if Carney skews more to the center, center right?
of things, and who's going to lead that. We're already seeing Avi Lewis, who finished, I don't even know how, poorly in Vancouver City Centre, or Vancouver Centre. making noise about becoming this activist leader. Charlie Angus, the now former MP for the Timmons Bay Area, has been doing this Bernie Sanders-like tour. I'll be curious to know if he has interest in taking things off as rumors about.
Heather McPherson. Rumors. I mean, last night on election night, she said the future of the NDP is in this room, which I know you can read as like warm. words about her supporters, but man, that was before Jagmeet Singh had even stepped away. That felt to me like a little bit alike. Hey, hey. Yeah. And I've heard that Boulresse in Montreal was interested, at least...
For the interim. And I've also heard Ruth Ellen Brosseau. Remember the candidate that spent the whole campaign in Vegas? In 2011. In 2011. She ran again. She lost. But she might be interested, I hear. We'll see. You know, this could be disastrous and permanently bad for the NDP, but we thought that about the year at the Bloc in 2011 and also the Liberals.
When they were the third place party after the 2011 election that Harper won a majority. Well, they've just won their fourth election since. So realignments are not permanent in politics often. The good news for them is that the left side of the spectrum that the Liberals were occupying under Justin Trudeau came up a little vacant over the past couple of months. So there's room for them to grow back on that side.
The question is now, how do you rebuild that party? It's going to take a lot of time and effort. I'm not sure. They can do it before the next election, given the fact that we're in a minority parliament. Well, and this dichotomy we're seeing, right? Like, how much does it have to do with Trump or not?
And if Trump is eventually out of the picture, what does that also mean for the NDP? Although I think the existential questions you're asking are also important ones. And I think the leadership question. supersedes all of it let's just do a quick check in on the block and sort of wither the block in all of this and Dan you know I'm going to ask you about that
Yeah, you know what? The one leader that no one seems to worry too much about his future is probably François Blanchet. He didn't do so well. He lost a third of his deputation. In Quebec, it's not a great score, but it's a better score than what a lot of people were. expecting a few weeks back. The feeling is that he did the right thing by trying to refocus the attention.
of the traditional voters that the bloc attract coming out after the debates. It was very targeted. It was very specific when we said, and I mentioned earlier, you know, trying to reassure people if you're looking for someone to block. Poiliev's way. Kearney is going to win. So you can come back to us and we'll be your Quebec.
conscience type of thing. And so that probably helped him save a few seats. He's a very good speaker. He's a good leader. The caucus really seemed to like him. And right now he seems to be... getting a lot of credit for saving the furniture this time around. And so... I think it's going to be all right, but it's going to be a bit of a complicated pattern. And the other thing is he might have to play a role in a minority parliament because he could be holding on to the balance of power.
There's some room on the NDP side for that, but the bloc may want to use some of that leverage they have to get some stuff from Quebec and help the Liberals kind of navigate through that parliament.
Dan, I'm curious. I'm not going to try to explain any, you know, block-splain anybody listening here. But I'm curious, Dan, about that thing you said, I think it was on the last weekend, about Canada as an artificial country. Is that going to have a bit of a long tail? Like, are we going to be... hearing about that more, because that was the most, like...
Anti-Canadian thing, I've really heard somebody from one of the Pakist parties or Blackist parties say in quite a while. That was a really strong comment. And I mean, it even drew a response from the Nova Scotia premier. Yeah, it did. And it resonated quite a bit outside of Quebec. I don't think it hurt him at all on this side here. I think his electorate...
is not at all adverse to that kind of qualifier for the country. And so you heard Jagmeet Singh, you heard a couple of provincial premiers, but there was no backlash in Quebec for him on that. And given the fact that no one outside of Quebec votes for him, I don't think it's going to be an issue in the long run. Okay, so let's look into our crystal balls then before we go. Minority government, the question is always. How long is this thing going to last? I mean, listen, it's been like...
Several hours. No, it's actually been several minutes at this point since they finished counting the votes. But whatever. Let's call the lifespan of this government. What do you guys think? Jason, I'm going to start with you. Is this a durable... minority that we could be looking at? Or are we back at the polls before we know it?
I mean, there are two factors I'd really focus on. One is the fact that this is the third minority government in a row. It's the first time in Canada's history that one party has won three minorities.
governments in a row. So I think people will have a bit of election fatigue and minority suspense fatigue. I mean, the NDP isn't going to want to go into an election anytime soon. I don't know if the blocker will be rushing to the races. Pierre Polyev, well, I guess he has one of his seats, so maybe that would be convenient. But also the big question is going to be how canny an operator, how canny a politician, how good a politician is Mark Carney?
going to be. The curse he wants to avoid, of course, is the Joe Clark curse from 79, where he governed like he had a majority in 1979, and then... flubbed a vote. And in 1980, they were back into election and the conservatives lose. So those are the two big things. One, I think it's minority again. So people are used to it. I'd be shocked if it was in an election this time next year or before, what, 2027?
Yeah, I think the way Donald Trump tinted the campaign, I think it's going to have a heavy influence on the... The lifespan of that, the particular government we're looking at right now, Carney has promised and Poiliev was saying the same thing. to start negotiating with the White House as soon as he got into the Prime Minister's office. In fact, the first call already happened today.
And so I think anyone, any party would try to bring down a government that hasn't solved the issue with the U.S. yet would probably pay some price in front of the electorate. That's what they elected the Liberals for. The voters seem to think that Carney is the best guy to negotiate with the White House. So I think he needs to have some runway to negotiate. I don't know how long that will last. We say in Canada, a minority government is worried about 18 months, 16, 18 months. All right. So.
More than a year, less than two, maybe a little more than two. If he's good, if he's good, maybe it'll last more. I do think the Trump factor is going to matter in all of this. And I will say, for the sake of Canada, I hope that there can be some... stability, that we could find some consensus across political parties completely selfishly. Like, let's do it again in like a month or two so we can bring House Party back, guys. This has been a lot of fun. I need a nap. I need a little nap.
But this was really fun and I want to do it again. Yeah. Yeah, no, that would be fun. But yeah, nap first. Listen, actually, we are not. Totally done. House party. We're done for this week, but we've got another episode. One more where we're a little bit less sleep deprived. We're going to make sense of the end trails, I guess, of this election where Canadian politics is going. But for this week, we're going to say... Thanks, guys. Thanks for hanging out and bonne nuit.
I was about to say the same thing. Yeah, have a good night. I'm glad we're coming back because like Mark Carney, I got a few more dance moves. I can't wait to see that. That is House Party for this week. Thanks to my co-host, Jason Marcusoff and Daniel Thibault. And thanks to the production team, Caitlin Crocker, Jennifer Chevalier, and Catherine Rolfson. We have one more episode as we were just... I'll be back with more post-election analysis on The House on Saturday right here in this feed.
and House Party. We'll be back next week with our last big... For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca.