Let's Talk Politics

Ep 28: Are We Living in a Two-Party Canada?

• Julia Pennella • Season 1 • Episode 28

Share episode

Send us a text

Polling has quietly revolutionized Canadian politics, transforming from occasional front-page news to a constant stream of data that shapes both voter behavior and party strategy. Political analyst  Éric Grenier joins us to unpack this evolution and what it means for democracy in the digital age.

"The fact that polling numbers come out adds credence, adds urgency to political conversations," Grenier explains, highlighting how data doesn't just measure public opinion—it actively shapes it. This was dramatically demonstrated in the recent federal election when daily polling reinforced a two-party narrative that contributed to the NDP's worst-ever electoral performance at just 6% support.

The conversation takes fascinating turns through regional political landscapes. In Quebec, the Liberals made surprising inroads with francophone voters who have long been skeptical of federal Liberal leadership. Atlantic Canada revealed complex voter realignments, with Liberals picking up traditionally Conservative ridings in Nova Scotia while losing ground in rural Newfoundland. These shifts challenge conventional wisdom about regional voting patterns and suggest new electoral possibilities.

Perhaps most striking is Grenier's analysis of Canadian voter fluidity. Unlike Americans, Canadians regularly switch party allegiances—sometimes dramatically. "One in five Canadians changed their minds over the last couple of months," Grenier notes about the pre-election period. This fluidity stems from our less class-based politics and regionalized party system, creating opportunities and challenges for political strategists.

The episode concludes with a sobering look at Alberta separatism, where polling shows 25-35% support for independence. However, this sentiment appears more tied to federal leadership than a fundamental desire for separation—a revealing insight into the complex relationship between western Canada and Ottawa.

Quick heads up this episode was recorded on May 29, 2025 so while the news may have changed this conversation was recorded the thoughts and ideas still remain relevant. 

This conversation offers invaluable context for understanding Canada's evolving political landscape. Subscribe now and join us next week for another in-depth exploration of the forces shaping our democracy.

Follow Éric on:

X: https://x.com/EricGrenierTW 

The Writ: https://www.thewrit.ca/ 

The Numbers/Les Chiffres: https://www.patreon.com/cw/thenumberspod 

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheWrit 

Julia Pennella:

Welcome back to let's Talk Politics, where we break down the news stories shaping our world. Joining us again is Eric Grenier, writer, podcaster and political analyst behind the Writ, where he covers everything you need to know about Canadian politics and elections. In this episode, we dive into what political polling looks like in an era dominated by algorithms, the uncertain future of the federal NDP and the growing rhetoric around Alberta separatism. Eric also shares key insights from the federal election, with a closer look at what really happened with the polling in Atlantic Canada and Quebec. Quick heads up this episode was recorded on May 29, 2025. So, while the news may have changed since this conversation was recorded, the ideas and thoughts still remain relevant. Before we dive into today's episode, let's take a moment to catch you up on the headlines making waves right now.

Julia Pennella:

First, a major shift in Canada's defence posture. Prime Minister Mark Carney says the country has been too dependent on the United States when it comes to security. On Monday, he announced a dramatic increase in military spending, a move that will bring Canada in line with NATO's 2% defence target this fiscal year, five years ahead of schedule. Carney pointed to the fading dominance of the US on the global stage, emphasizing the need for Canada to work more closely with European allies. The new defense budget injects an additional $9.3 billion into the Department of National Defense, pushing total military-related expenditures to nearly $63 billion. And there's more to come as Carney prepares for the upcoming NATO summit later this month, where leaders will discuss raising their spending target to 3.5% of GDP. In diplomatic news, carney also extends an invitation to India's Prime Minister to attend the G7 summit in Alberta, signalling a possible thaw in Canada-India relations after several years of tension.

Julia Pennella:

Meanwhile, in international waters, israeli forces intercepted a Gaza-bound boat early Monday. Among those detained was climate activist Greta Thunberg, along with several other activists. As Israel continues to enforce its blockade during the ongoing conflict with Hamas, and in the US, political and legal tensions are escalating. California Governor Gavin Newsom says he's preparing to sue the Trump administration after National Guard troops were deployed to Los Angeles without his consent, a move he's calling unconstitutional. On Monday, the US Northern Command announced that a battalion of 700 Marines is being sent to the city to protect federal property and personnel. They will join approximately 2,000 National Guard troops already on the ground. The deployment comes after several days of unrest, as demonstrators and protesters clashed with law enforcement over the Trump administration's aggressive immigration crackdown. There's a lot to unpack, so let's talk politics with Eric Grenier. You've spent years analyzing Canadian political polling. How has the role of polling changed in shaping narratives in elections and maybe even political discourse over the last decade?

Éric Grenier :

I think that polling still has a huge place in the discourse, and more maybe than it did. I'm not sure if it's more than it was in the past, but it is definitely still very present. I think that polling, when it comes to political issues, can have a big impact. The fact, for example, that we're starting to see some polling out of Alberta showing not enough to win, but pretty significant support for independence. The fact that those polls come out add credence, add urgency to that conversation that if we didn't have those polls you would be a little bit more adrift trying to figure out where things actually stand. So we can see how the polling can have an impact on the narrative and on political discussions, depending on what the polling is showing. You know, when you have polling on other issues like the carbon tax, the fact that the carbon tax polled so poorly for so long contributed to the fact that the Liberals decided to kibosh it. But in terms of political parties, it really can have a huge impact. Justin Trudeau was in so much trouble for so long because his polling was so bad and we had those by-elections that happened. That showed that the polls weren't just gauging something that wasn't real. They were being backed up by those by-election results, so that can contribute to the problems that leaders have. We can see that during a campaign it can have a huge bandwagon effect that people can see like, okay, in this case, the last one that it was a race between the liberals and the conservatives that probably contributed to the NDP dropping even more than it would have if people didn't know what the situation was. So there's definitely an impact there and whether it's more than was in the past, there is more polling. I think that is what is the difference.

Éric Grenier :

If you look at an election that took place in maybe the 1970s or the 1980s, there might be a couple polls in a campaign and they'd be kind of big deals, like they'd be front page news. They'd be covered on TV for a few days and then you wouldn't hear for a week before you had some new polling data. Now we have. During a campaign, we had three pollsters that were putting out numbers every single day and we had other pollsters that were coming out every day, every week or so. So we ended up having usually three to six polls on any given day.

Éric Grenier :

So I think one of the things that has changed is that there are people like me. There's people like Philippe Fournier at 338 Canada who become a bit more involved in trying to cut through all of those different sources of data to try to explain to people where things stand. In the past it would be a little bit more that it would be the individual pollsters who would get a lot of that space and they still have a lot of it especially the ones that have media relationships with some of the media outlets. But now there is a little bit of a different kind of landscape when it comes to how the polls are discussed in the media, and I think it's a good thing. Some pollsters might disagree and certainly some political people disagree when their party or their own candidacy is seen as not viable. There's often a little bit of grievances that the polls are revealing sometimes how much trouble the party is in.

Julia Pennella:

Yeah, well said and I'm going to put a pin in Alberta. We're going to circle back to that. But I want to lean into that last point you said there and I talked about this a little bit with an NDP strategist that came on the show and there's this misunderstanding sometimes of polling because the public like the polling's probably very accurate within their margin of error, but the public understands that national polling and doesn't understand, maybe, necessarily writing by writing. So I'm curious, like what do you think is maybe that misunderstood aspect of polling among the general public and even among political insiders that you kind of alluded to a little bit?

Éric Grenier :

Well with the system we have, you need to understand how the polling and the voting intentions and numbers, the popular support, is going to translate into seats. Because in the past, in the last two elections not the most previous ones, but the two ones before that the Liberals were tied with the Conservatives. They were neck and neck during both of those campaigns, but we all knew that the Liberals had a much better chance of winning the most seats and that is what happened. There wasn't much of a surprise that Trudeau was able to win a minority government when he was in a tied situation with the Conservatives, because we were able to translate those numbers into seats. So it is, I think, an important step to take those polling numbers to try to understand how this is going to produce different seat outcomes. And for the most part, you know those projections did pretty well in this campaign in the context of the fact that the voting numbers ended up being a little bit closer than expected, as the polls were For the NDP. For smaller parties, that is where it gets really, really tricky for them, because the NDP was down to 8% in the polls. They ended up getting 6%. So they even didn't do as well as their polls suggested they would. In the polls they ended up getting 6%. So they even didn't do as well as their poll suggested they would. It's hard to know how to translate those numbers into seats when you have such a tremendous drop in support.

Éric Grenier :

We saw in the Ontario provincial election that the NDP had a drop in support and it suggested that they could lose more seats than they actually did. They outperformed expectations because they had good incumbents. They had resources that were concentrated in those individual ridings. The federal NDP, I think, almost kind of assumed the same thing was going to happen for them, even though it didn't my projection. I had them at five seats. At the end, philippe, he had them at nine seats. They ended up winning seven. So we were not out of range with how many seats they were going to win and you saw from a lot of the results across the country that the NDP support in a lot of those ridings was really really low. Really surprising, a lot of their incumbents finished in third place.

Éric Grenier :

So I can understand why there can be this discomfort and discontent among some of these parties when the polling numbers suggest they're going to lose a lot of seats. But there is an element of science behind it. So I do think that it is still a useful exercise, and for a lot of voters they don't really know what to make of those national numbers. That's why there are people who do put out projections for individual ridings. I do it in a way that is a bit more limited, because people do have a misunderstanding of how to use that information, but I think it's better to say look, all else being equal, this kind of drop in support should mean that this seat is winnable for the liberals, that the NDP is in a position to lose it, or, all else being equal, the NDP could actually keep winning this seat based on their polling numbers. I think that's a little bit more useful than to say well, the NDP is at 8%. Figure it out on your own whether your riding is an NDP seat or not.

Julia Pennella:

Yeah, and I think there is that, unfortunately, civic disconnect. I've knocked on thousands of doors and even still today explaining to people you don't vote for the leader, you vote for your local representative. You know we elect a House of Commons. So, yeah, I think hopefully the media access to pollsters about where maybe people's political alliances lie and they can maybe help fill those gaps of explaining different writings or different processes. Obviously, it comes with a bias, naturally, but I want to point to so you mentioned in one of your responses about back in the 70s polling was very different than today. How do you factor in social media and the data that is being collected there? Like I just mentioned, you know you can watch a news influencer like that. They may be a bit more right-leaning or conservative, vice versa, left or liberal. How does that get factored in when it comes to polling and maybe where the political climate is for Canadians?

Éric Grenier :

That is still something that I think a lot of pollsters are trying to figure out. There have been some pollsters who have tried to use methods of scraping social media to gauge public opinion. In my view, the way that social media has become increasingly siloed makes that kind of dangerous, because not only now do you have to make sure that you have the right amount of men and women that you're trying to scrape, you have to make sure you have enough people who follow on Twitter or on Instagram or Blue Sky or whatever. So I do think there is an element that is still really kind of fraught, and so I think that's why most of the major pollsters are still sticking to the traditional methods.

Éric Grenier :

Telephone is increasingly rare, but telephone and just people I still get that question.

Éric Grenier :

They call cell phones primarily, not landlines, but there's also now a lot of polling that is done online, and one of the ways that I think that it might be delving into that kind of world that you're talking about is that the way that they recruit people now to get on to the online panels a lot of it is now done on social media right that they try to get people there to try to build as big of a panel of people as possible that they can pull from, so that it becomes the replacement from doing random dialing. But I still feel very apprehensive about the idea of delving into social media to try to get people's opinions, because social media is it's not a random sample of the population. It's a very specific kind of person who watches a certain kind of podcast versus, you know, goes on Facebook. To me it's still a lot of big unknowns. So if any pollsters are delving into that, they have to do it with a lot of caveats to make sure that their sample isn't biased in some way towards one group or another.

Julia Pennella:

Yeah, for sure. No-transcript Like where do you think is the sweet spot for parties to target their voter demographic?

Éric Grenier :

I think that if a party is making its decisions based on polls, they're probably eventually you know your weather vane going back and forth and people will see that you don't really stand for anything. But you do need to have good public opinion research to understand whether a certain message is actually going to work, whether a strategy that you want to implement will have pay benefits, because it's one thing to have positions and to have the things you want to do for the country. You still got to win elections in order to make anything happen right. So you do need to understand what's going to resonate with voters. Now, if you're only doing things to try to win an election, you don't have any principles. That's not good either.

Éric Grenier :

But I do think that parties do need to have that kind of research in place to understand what they're doing, what they should do, what people want from them, because it would otherwise be kind of like going on a road trip with only a general direction. You want to go west, but you haven't looked at a map. Probably not going to go. Great, look, you know you do need to do a bit of that research to figure out how to get to the destination, which is one to get into power. And two do things that, when you're in power, aligns with your own views, but also aligns with the views of the people who put you there.

Julia Pennella:

Yeah, absolutely, and data research, all really important stuff. So I do want to point to you did an episode recently on your podcast about a deep dive into the results of the election in Quebec and Atlantic Canada. Could you maybe break down some of that data and does this suggest maybe some building blocks for both the Liberals and Conservatives for the future? And the reason why I also point this out is we obviously saw the bloc vote fall in Quebec, leaning more towards Liberal. Atlantic Canada we saw most recently that vote switch in Terranova, which was originally Liberal, held switch back to Conservative. So yeah, if you can give us maybe a bit of an overview for the listeners and again I'll be sure to tag your podcast there so they can listen more of an in-depth but any high-level summary you can provide.

Éric Grenier :

Yeah, I do think that both of those regions had some interesting kind of developments that took place. In the election In Atlanta, Canada, you did see a few different things play out. Newfoundland and Labrador was a big one. The Liberals did really well in the Avalon Peninsula, kind of increased their support by a significant margin there, dropped a lot of support in the rest of Newfoundland, on the island. They also won Labrador, but in the three kind of ridings that make up the bulk of the island of Newfoundland the Conservatives did well. So there was an element of maybe those more urban voters swinging over to the Liberals, some of the rural voters in remote communities in the outports kind of going over to the Conservatives. What was driving that? I mean there was elements of what was happening with the fisheries and discontent with the government on that. We also saw that in here in the Gaspésie, where the Bloc Québécois was able to pick up a riding from the Liberals, the only one that they did. So it kind of shows how there are often these local dynamics that buck the trends right. Based on what we saw in terms of the increase of support for the Liberals in Atlantic Canada and across the country, they shouldn't have lost any ridings. So when you do see some of those ridings that flip, it tells you something about what was motivating voters. In the rest of in the Maritimes you did have the Liberals doing quite well in some areas that are traditionally, I'd say, PC. You look at the pickups that they made. They were able to win South Shore, St Margaret's, Cumberland, Colchester in Nova Scotia these areas that support Tim Houston's PCs by big margin. I think there was a number of elements at play there. The fact that Mark Carney might be seen almost as a PC kind of leader rather than as a more left-wing liberal leader like Trudeau would have been, might have played an impact there. Also, that story that was at the end of the campaign, where it was said that Pierre Poliev's people were completely kind of ghosting Tim Houston and upset that he wasn't helping them, might not have helped when Tim Houston is more popular than Pierre Poliev in Nova Scotia.

Éric Grenier :

When we get to Quebec you also see that there was a big increase for the liberalsals among Francophone Quebecers in areas that we haven't seen for a long time. The Quebec City area went to the Liberals in a way that was pretty surprising. One of the seats that they picked up, which I think was one of the biggest shocks, I think, of the Quebecers who in the past might have seen the liberals as maybe more left-leaning, maybe more kind of a Montreal liberal rather than a Quebec liberal. I think that they might've seen in Mark Carney that he was more of that kind of traditional liberal leader that they could have supported in the past Concerns, with Donald Trump being a big driver for that as well. But we also saw that the Bloc Québécois it had the same kind of problem that the NDP did in other parts of the country, that they kind of got pushed out of the debate when it came to Donald Trump and the Liberals were able to do quite well as a result of that, particularly in the suburbs around Montreal, and it's one of the reasons why the Liberals were able to keep power, because they made some gains there.

Éric Grenier :

And then finally, that the Conservatives they dropped some support in some areas where they used to have support, but they gained support in the suburbs of Montreal, Not enough to win a seat or get very close to winning any of them, but some of the best results they've had since the days of Jean Charest when he was leader of the PCs, or even Brian Mulroney not as good as that, but still it does suggest that there was something that was happening among those suburban voters in Quebec that they were going away from the bloc. A lot of them were going to the Conservatives, A lot more probably went to the Liberals and that's why they won those seats. But that is a development that, if it plays out like that going forward, the map could become a bit different in subsequent elections. If the Conservatives aren't only competitive in Quebec City Now that the Liberals could be competitive there, maybe the suburbs of Montreal start to become a few three-way races. Some Liberals could be competitive there.

Julia Pennella:

Maybe the suburbs of Montreal start to become a few three-way races, Some interesting dynamics that could play over the next few elections. I'm curious as well like I don't think it's talked about enough in the Canadian context, because I think we often think still in the American context of this two-party system. I mean this election did present that. But Canadians are a bit more politically fluid, Like they might vote one way, provincially, but federally vote completely opposite and they're not necessarily party bound. I'd be interested in your take on that from data standpoint. But we talked about it a little bit at the beginning. As we age we kind of have different political views or reasons for voting for different parties and whatnot, but there's a bit more fluidity than the Americans. Where do you think this stems from? Is it because we have so many different parties or is it because of our federalism and the jurisdictions? I know it's a bit of a loaded question, but I'm just curious, from your analysis on seeing the numbers, what that stems from.

Éric Grenier :

It's actually a really longstanding thing. I'm just recently reading something that was kind of like almost a political science book written in the 80s, and it's talking about how the Canadian voter is a very fluid voter and is not tied to a single party, doesn't identify to a party in a way that we've seen in the United States and we see in the United Kingdom. So this is not just a recent thing. It's a very longstanding thing that from one election to the next, huge swaths of the electorate are willing to change their mind. We just saw that in the last couple of months. At the beginning of the year, 20% of people would have voted for the Liberals. Now they won just over 40%. So you had like one in five Canadians change their minds over the last couple of months. You do not see that in the United States. If there's like a five point swing from one election to the next, it's huge. Here people are able to change their minds. They vote for different parties provincially and federally. We had talked about those Ford Trudeau voters. Now they're Ford Carney voters. There's got to be some Polyev or NDP voters or anyway. There's tons of different kinds of combinations and I think one of the reasons we see this is two things.

Éric Grenier :

One is that our politics are not very class-based or demographic-based. This is one of the things in the United Kingdom that has been the case. In the United Kingdom older voters vote, or at least in the past. Now they're voting for reform, but older voters voted for the conservatives. Younger voters voted for the liberals in huge numbers. We don't see those kinds of 60-30 kind of results here, that working class voters in the United Kingdom would vote for Labour and more moneyed classes would vote for the Conservatives. Here we don't really have that. When you look at some of the age breakdowns, it's usually not that huge in terms of the difference. It's not a straight line that the older you are, the more likely you are to vote for one party or another. We don't see huge differences between economic classes. We do see some differences among education, but it isn't as stark as in the United States.

Éric Grenier :

So I think that that's one of the reasons why we have that fluidity that people don't identify parties with sort of who they are their identity. The other thing is that we have hugely regionalized politics. The fact that we have Quebec that has an entire different party system both provincially and, in a way federally contributes to that and that we have parties that are very strong in some parts of the country and very weak in other parts of the country. So I think that that makes it a bit easier for the voters to move to not be the same in every election, and the last one I didn't.

Éric Grenier :

I said there was two, but there's a third is that our parties maybe a little bit more lately, but our parties haven't been that different from each other. It's more about who the leader is, what kind of style they have. The promises that the party leaders have made over the last few decades are different in degrees, but it's not like Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. It's not that kind of difference. So the ability to go from one party to the other has always been pretty easy in Canada because the parties aren't all that different. Now, yes, they're different. If you're involved in politics, I'm sure you think that that's an awful thing to say, but you know it's not the kind of stark differences we see in other countries.

Julia Pennella:

So I think that's why we see that, in one election to the next, a quarter to a third, sometimes even half of Canadian voters will change their minds. Yeah, really good points, and I appreciate that breakdown there. And as we're just kind of wrapping up here, we can't end off not talking about Alberta. There's a lot going on there, some big political waves and shifts. I want to ask you about that from a polling perspective. You know we've seen this political alienation in Alberta, or at least that feeling of it, and this rise in the separatist sentiment. This isn't new for Alberta. We've also seen referendums in Quebec.

Éric Grenier :

For Alberta. We've also seen referendums in a by-election, so we've actually had seen some success for that movement in Alberta. But that's about it. We haven't seen in the last few elections explicitly separatist parties usually get less than 1% of the vote. But we have seen that there has been this undercurrent of belief that Alberta would be better off on its own and I think that now that we have in Alberta a premier who is not pushing back against it very hard, right is kind of allowing that door to be open. By changing the rules so that there could be fewer signatures that would need to be on a petition to get a referendum on the ballot, she is making it easier for there to be a referendum next year, which I don't think we would have seen from past Alberta premiers. So she's opened that door and we have seen polling that does suggest there is a significant chunk of Albertans that would, given the chance, vote for independence.

Éric Grenier :

It depends on the poll, depends on how you ask the question. It can range from about 25 to 35 percent, but that's the significant chunk of the electorate. I do think that a big amount of that is driven by certainly legitimate grievances. I'm not going to say that they're not legitimate grievances, but it is very much focused on Ottawa because there was a poll that was done by the Angus Reid Institute and it suggested that support for independence was again somewhere in the 30, 35 percent range. But when you ask those people, if Pierre Poliev had won the election, would you be less likely to vote for sovereignty? And you had more or less, I think it was like 75% of that group saying yeah, I'd be less likely. So it's more about who is running the show in Ottawa than the fact that Alberta isn't running the show. So to me it is a little bit more dependent on what is going on in Ottawa. It does suggest that there is an opening for the federal government that if they do take some steps to try to address some of the legitimate grievances that Albertans have, that separatist sentiment will drop or that it won't be successful or at least won't grow to the point where it becomes a viable option. You do see that it is a different kind of movement than you would have in Quebec, where in Quebec it doesn't really matter who's in Ottawa.

Éric Grenier :

Support for sovereignty is dependent on just how Quebecers feel about themselves, how they feel about the viability of Quebec being an independent country. It's based on identity. It's based on language and culture, things that are a bit more ingrained For Albertans. It does seem to be based much more on whether Alberta is getting a fair share, getting a good deal, out of confederation. That's a different approach than what we've seen in Quebec, I'd say, but it does suggest that there is a way to address it for the federal government. That would be easier to do than trying to make Quebecers, who see themselves as a distinct nation, as also feeling Canadian. I think it's easier to go to Albertans and say we can work together, we can figure this out. So we'll see if Mark Craney is going to try to do that.

Julia Pennella:

Yeah, and I think we're seeing a bit of sentiment from him of trying to. One of his lines that he says is you know, we don't need 13 economies, we need one Canadian economy and I'm hopeful that we can maybe bring everybody back together. But my fear is and I don't have any connection to Alberta together. But my fear is, and I don't have any connection to Alberta, but I hope it's not just an impulse vote for these folks, because when they do talk about more of the nitty gritty of, well, what is your currency going to look like? What is your health care going to look like?

Julia Pennella:

We've already seen Kenny, when he was premier, try to put forward a pension plan for Alberta. That was voted down. So there's a lot of, I think, intersections and entwinement of what that might look like. And is it going to be something similar to how Quebec has their system? I mean, again, time will tell and I just hope it's not an impulsive vote from the citizens there. But you know, as my last question here a bit of a big one, if you had to forecast one major shift in Canadian politics in the next five years ideological, institutional or electoral what?

Éric Grenier :

would it be? Ooh, okay, that's a tough one. I guess one of the shifts that I'm looking to see and I'm not sure I'm going to predict that it's going to happen but I am curious to see if what happened in this election, where we had a polarization that became very much a two-party race that we haven't seen before, the NDP's result was the worst they've ever had in their history. It wasn't just a bad election, it was the worst election. Is that going to hold? Or is it going to revert to where things were before, where we're back to a bit of a three-party system where the NDP gets 15, 20% of the vote? I'm not sure. When you look at what happened with the NDP in the last time, they had a really bad showing in 1993, it took a long time for them to get back into it. They had some good results in 97, largely based about around. Eia was very specific to a particular issue, but it was kind of about a decade, decade and a half in the wilderness for the party. Are we going to see the same thing happen here? Is the kind of polarization that we've seen between the Liberals and the Conservatives. Is that going to hold for the next five years.

Éric Grenier :

In the next election, will the NDP be back to 15, 20%, or are they still going to be at 6%? That is a huge difference when it comes to Canadian elections and I don't really want to make a prediction on it. I think the NDP is going to have trouble to get back into it. So I think that'll be the thing to watch over the next little while, because the best way to know if Pierre Pelliev or the Conservatives are going to form government is to just look at the NDP number. If it's 6%, it's not going to happen for them. So I guess it's not really a forecast, but it's kind of a thing to keep an eye on. Is that NDP number? Are they going to get off the map?

Julia Pennella:

Yeah, no, really good points, and I think that's where maybe some other voters are sitting now as well, like what? What's going to happen? And I said this in one of my podcasts too. I think the NDP need that Jack Layton magic back, or at least a candidate that brings that charisma and charm to bring them up. But that's going to be that counterbalance for the other parties. So time will tell. I think that was a big summary of our conversation today, eric, but I really want to thank you so much for joining us today on let's Talk Politics. That was Eric Grenier, and you can catch his content on the writ and the numbers. I'll be sure to add that in the show notes, but, eric, I just want to throw it to you. Any other?

Éric Grenier :

closing thoughts you want to share with the listeners. Well, just the fact that you know an election's over doesn't mean that politics aren't over, and certainly there'll be another election, maybe sooner than later. The fact that the last one lasted for four years the parliament, that was the exception. I don't think it's going to become the rule. So even if the elections are over, it doesn't mean you should stop paying attention to what's happening in Ottawa, because it matters quite a bit, and I'll be doing that at the writca so people can tune into that. But just in general, politics doesn't stop when the ballots are cast.

Julia Pennella:

Very well said. We need to keep staying engaged in our civic duty, I think, as citizens, to be informed of what's going on. So well said. What a great way to end it. So that was Eric Grenier. Be sure to catch some of his podcasts and content. He's putting out some really great stuff on polling and what's happening on the political landscape. And that was let's Talk Politics. Make sure to tune in next week for my next special guest and we'll catch you there.