What Canadians are Thinking About Energy Transition and Politics
This week, our guest is Greg Lyle, Founder and President of Innovative Research Group. Innovative Research Group is a full-service market research firm with offices in Vancouver and Toronto. The firm has recently done some interesting polling on how Canadians are thinking about energy infrastructure and energy transition. Greg also talked politics, giving us some insight into how Canadians would vote (based on polling) if a federal election were held today.
Here are some of the questions that Peter and Jackie asked Greg: How much do Canadians know about the energy transition? How do they feel it will impact them financially? How do they feel about energy projects in general and near where they live? How important is climate as an issue versus affordability? If a federal election were held now, what political party would win? Do the Conservatives need a credible climate plan for the next election?
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Episode 228 transcript.
Speaker 1:
The information and opinions presented in this ARC Energy Ideas podcast are provided for informational purposes only and are subject to the disclaimer link in the show notes.
Speaker 2:
This is the ARC Energy Ideas Podcast with Peter Tertzakian and Jackie Forrest. Exploring trends that influence the energy business.
Jackie Forrest:
Welcome to the ARC Energy Ideas podcast. I’m Jackie Forrest.
Peter Tertzakian:
And I’m Peter Tertzakian. Welcome back. Well, we’ve just come off an election, the election in Finland, and Alexander Stubb who’s a center right candidate won the election, has a harsher stance on the whole Russia situation. But as we said in our year-end podcast, or maybe it was the first podcast of the year, Jackie, this is an important year of elections. There’s just a lot of elections going on. Of course, we’ve got the US election, which is a subject of major focus, but we also have other consequential ones like in India. We’ve got the European Union in June, we may even have a UK election. Of course, we’ve got the Russian election, which … well, if you can call it an election. We’ll leave that for subject of another debate. But I think it’s important to talk about elections because it’s a possibility we may even have one in this country, right?
Jackie Forrest:
Well, we’ll see. I’m still betting not, but you are.
Peter Tertzakian:
I think there’s a fair chance we might have an election. But anyway, that’s what we’re here to talk about today is elections, and who better than our guest for the day? Greg Lyle, President of Innovative Research Group. Greg is an uber pollster, so we’re delighted to have you.
Greg Lyle:
Thank you so much.
Jackie Forrest:
Well, Greg, maybe first give us a thumbnail of yourself. How did you become a pollster and maybe tell us a bit about Innovative Research Group
Greg Lyle:
And it was a complete accident. I meant to become a geophysicist and got misdirected along the way, but very happy I ended up in this business. Originally at university, I started out in geophysics and then I ended up shifting over to poli-sci. When I made that move, I also got involved in politics and initially I was trying to change the world. It was the eighties, the Cold War was on, Maggie Thatcher, Ronald Reagan were running the world, and the stakes were high, it felt to me. I got involved in conservative politics, very much focused on policy ideas. But then I found that it was pretty frustrating being in opposition, so I thought what was important was to become an organizer to be able to implement those ideas. Then I found out that organization really should be seen as a noun, not a verb.
And what good campaign organizations do is communicate, so I started focusing on that. And finally, I came to understand that people don’t always react to things the way that we hope they will, and that understanding that black box of political was critical to achieving change. That’s how I ended up in public opinion research. And Innovative, I initially started out in the sort of corporate polling space working for some of the big firms in Canada with some of the big names at the time, Alan Gregg, Angus Reid, people like that. But I didn’t like tracking my hours and the sort of commercial side. I really liked the work, and so it was just easier to do that on my own than in some sort of corporate structure. And so created Innovative Research 20 years ago. Most of the work that we do is in the regulated space, so my political days are well behind me now, but I have some sensibilities that come out of that. And so, it’s helpful when you’re dealing with organizations that are trying to build pipelines or power lines, run toll roads, any of those sorts of organizations.
Peter Tertzakian:
Yeah. This phrase, public opinion research really is polling to get people’s opinions, which involves quite a bit of statistics. And personally, as someone who has a minor in statistics, I’m always intrigued by the polling process, which I think has evolved. I want to ask you about that because … I’m going to personally admit it. When I see on the caller ID that it’s some survey or some other thing, I basically don’t even answer the phone. And I think probably like a lot of people these days. Of the people that actually do answer the phone, we are already in some sort of biased sample set of people who are willing to talk. And then of that biased sample set, we don’t even know if they’re telling the truth or not or whatever, depending upon how the questions are asked, I presume. Talk to us about how the polling process works today and how we can take comfort that these numbers that come out are actually representative of the broader population’s leanings.
Greg Lyle:
Sure. And we have a lot of different methods that we use. We’re fortunate as pollsters, not necessarily as Canadians, that Statistics Canada actually can require people to do surveys. And so as pollsters, we have the ability to look at things like the census, the General Social Survey, there’s a household finance survey that’s run every month with large samples where we can look at very large samples to see what happens when you have to fill out something and then compare that to our surveys, which are based on voluntary responses. And we set quotas to make sure that we have a sample that looks like the country, and then we use weights to adjust if some of the attitudes don’t follow the numbers that we would expect from these broad studies.
Peter Tertzakian:
I see. What you’re saying, just to be clear, is that there are some questions in your poll for which you know that there is a broader large sample set that the Canadian government has done. And if that is validated, then you assume that the rest of the questions are accurately being responded to.
Greg Lyle:
Sure. And then we also have hard behavioral numbers. For instance, if you’re going to do a survey on immunization, we know how many people have been immunized for various things, and so then we can weight the sample to reflect the actual behavior. Similarly, we know how many people have made an RRSP contribution. If we’re doing a financial services study and we ask people, “Have you made a contribution or not?” We can then weight the data to reflect the actual behavior in the real world. And then in politics, of course, we’re tested every election.
Jackie Forrest:
All right. Well, quick question. How have the polls been in terms of predicting elections? I feel like they haven’t been that good. Let me know if I’m wrong on that.
Greg Lyle:
Well, in Canada they’ve been very good. There are a couple exceptions. One for instance in Alberta, the Alison Redford versus Danielle Smith election a decade or so ago, a number of the public polls were off. But that was one of my last big political campaigns where I was polling for the Conservative party in Alberta at the time, and we polled right to the end, and our numbers were pretty much smack dead on. The campaign manager at the time, actually briefed one of the columnists on our results the night before the elections so we were sort of out there hanging with a very different number than what the public numbers were looking like, and it turned out to be true. But their mistake was they stopped polling, and what happened is that a large number of people changed in just 10 days. It went from a 10-point Wild Rose lead to a 10-point Conservative party lead.
Peter Tertzakian:
I remember that.
Greg Lyle:
In literally 10 days. Very unusual.
Peter Tertzakian:
Well, we’re going to talk about politics and recent polls, so stay tuned because that’s coming toward the end. But from an energy perspective, your firm recently conducted a poll about attitudes toward energy transition. Can you talk about that and also including when the poll was done and other details?
Greg Lyle:
Sure. We actually did two related polls. We did a poll in December of 2000 people across the country online to ask about energy infrastructure and how they felt about regulators and things like that. And then we did a second poll in early January asking generally about climate change, energy transition, and the clean energy regulation.
Jackie Forrest:
And who sponsored that poll?
Greg Lyle:
We do those polls on our own. The first poll I was talking about, the infrastructure poll, that one is actually going to be a syndicated survey so customers can buy that off the shelf if they’re interested in how people feel about pump tide earth storage. And then the other one, the way in which public opinion researchers get their name out there is that they do polls on their own. Some companies buy ads, some companies send you mail. We do polls. And so that was a poll we did on our own.
Jackie Forrest:
Okay. Well, let’s get to the results of it. The first question was, “How familiar are you with the idea of transitioning from your current energy system that depends on carbon-based fuels to a lower carbon energy system?” And only 13% of people responded that they are very familiar and can explain it to others. But interestingly enough, you’ve been doing this for some time and actually it’s been trending down. If you go back four years ago, the numbers were around 20%. Why do you think that there’s less people that understand energy transition today than back then? That surprised me.
Greg Lyle:
Well, I think the issues is if you combine both the very and the somewhat is actually more towards the higher end than the low end. But I think the reality is that people have a lot of things to think about. And right now, we know number one, the top thing they’re thinking about is affordability. And so, if something else becomes the center point of your concern, something else has got to go because we only have so much space to think about things. But we should distinguish between what people know and what they can know. So, we’re busy people. We have a lot of things to deal with. A lot of them aren’t very exciting, like getting our kids to school or shopping or whatever, but there are things that we need to know to make those things happen.
And then there are things that we don’t to be really focused on, like what type of energy am I going to use to heat my water? Every now and again, the water heater breaks, and we have to make a choice, but when the water heater’s working fine, we don’t think about it. Same as if we were looking at renewing our mortgage. We only think about that every four or five years, or if we’re making a change in our auto insurance. So those things require that we learn more at the time to be able to make a smart choice, but as soon as we’ve made that choice, we immediately start forgetting that stuff and move on to other things.
Peter Tertzakian:
Really intriguing all these questions. So, I want to tackle a couple of them. The government policies to accelerate transition away from oil and gas. There’s a question here, and I’m just going to paraphrase it. Basically, the question asks, if you believe that transitioning away from oil and gas, increased costs puts jobs at risk and does not affect climate change. So, in 2021, only 29% of the people said this was true, but now it’s grown to 44% of the people think it’s true, that moving away from oil and gas is going to create inflation for energy, is going to risk jobs and there’s not going to be much impact on climate change. So, what do you infer from this fairly significant change in the attitudes of people?
Greg Lyle:
Right. The question you focused on is the last question we ask in the energy transition section where we compare some of the narratives that are out in the public. And so, the narrative that you were talking about is what we call the skeptical narrative. And that was we also asked people whether that was closest to their point of view or whether the proponent argument that government policies to accelerate the transition show Canada as a leader on climate change and help make the world better for future generations.
And so what you’re seeing is that when we started this almost… well, 11 points more people agreed with the sort of advocacy point of view, the leadership argument than bought into the skeptical argument. And now we’re seeing that the skeptic point of view is 10 points higher than the leadership argument. And that’s pretty clearly, first and foremost, a reflection of the affordability crisis, but also as a reflection of the change in the geopolitics of the world.
Because of the war in Ukraine, we’ve seen the price of natural gas go up. We’ve seen Germany for some reason turn off the nuclear plants and turn on their coal plants. And of course, there’s been a continued ongoing pace of expansion of all types of energy, including fossil fuel-based energy in places like China and India. And so, the average person out there is looking at all this and looking at the unusual weather they’re experiencing, things like the forest fires that we saw last summer. And overall, they’re looking at this and saying, “You know what? This is a real thing.” And some of our earlier numbers that we haven’t talked about show that people think it’s real and people are concerned about it. But that being said, they want to do something, but they want to make sure that the price of doing that is reasonable given all the other pressures that they’re under.
Jackie Forrest:
Well, let’s talk about, and to me, that change going from 29 to 44. That’s significant in a short period, I think, in terms of polling. There was another question around perceptions of how energy transition could affect your household finances and your results showed that about half of people either think it would be a positive impact on their utility bills, that they’ll be lower if we move to clean energy, or that it’s going to be neither here nor there. It’s going to be kind of neutral. I was surprised by this because only 13% of people will say they understand energy transition, but half of them seem to think it’s not going to impact their pocketbooks. Maybe they’re the half that didn’t vote for the question above. So, does that surprise you? How can people have a view on how it’s going to affect them financially if they don’t understand it?
Greg Lyle:
Sure. Well, the big surprise to me in public opinion when I first came to study it was that public opinion wasn’t something carved in stone that I could discover and then it wouldn’t change. And the other thing that really surprised me being somebody that wanted to be a geophysicist originally and thought everything, I had a very logical approach to things. That is not how people generally react. We mostly react based on emotions. And it turned out, as I was studying this, that no one really learns about anything unless they feel a need to learn it. And we call that motivated reasoning. And so, people have feelings even if they don’t know very much. And that can be risky when we know that the direction that the public is giving the governments is based even more on their feelings than it is on their understanding of things.
Peter Tertzakian:
On their understanding. Yeah. Well, let’s take that a bit further. And this phrase, energy transition, which to begin with is complex, but do people understand the difference between energy transition and decarbonizing energy systems?
Greg Lyle:
It’s all jargon to them. They get the general idea that fossil fuels are contributing to global warming. People have taken that in, and most people accept that idea. How important fossil fuels is in terms of its impact on climate change is something that people still argue about to some degree. But the general idea that we’re making the planet warmer is something most people buy into. And all else being equal, most people would rather we didn’t do that just on an unintended consequences’ basis if anything else. We have a real strong natural inclination in many areas to be good stewards for future generations. And so creating a change that may have unintended consequences, or you may believe, and many do, that the changes that we’re doing actually have very clear negative consequences. Most people would want to do something about that.
Jackie Forrest:
Right. Yeah. Nobody wants to hurt the environment if you ask them that question. Right?
Greg Lyle:
Exactly.
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah. Well, how about this question? You talked about building energy projects, maybe that was part of your first pool, but a lot of people supported things like hydro dams, renewable power, and hydrogen in general, maybe not in their backyard, but in general, they supported them but did not support drilling for oil and gas or pipelines. Yet all of us, most Canadians are very reliant on hydrocarbons. They don’t see their use of these products as being related to needing infrastructure to support them.
Greg Lyle:
Well, oil pipelines are not as popular as building pumped hydro storage or hydro dams, but there’s still actually more people that would support building a pipeline than oppose it. And that’s because, on average, most people understand that their daily life depends on pipelines. In most people, the view of things like pipelines or power lines or generating stations is that they’re necessary evils, that if we could get by without them, they would, but most people are not under the illusion that they can get by without them.
Peter Tertzakian:
Well, let’s expand on that because there’s questions here about social permission to build new energy projects. And you have found that generally speaking, people are favorable, as you just said, to building the infrastructure because we need it in pursuit of cheap, clean, safe, secure energy. But if you ask the question, and then I don’t know if you did, is it okay to build infrastructure if it’s in your backyard or in close proximity to where you live? How do you think the response would be?
Greg Lyle:
Well, we know. We’ve been asking a version of that question since 2012, so for a dozen years. And what we do in this infrastructure study is that we ask people of any of these sorts of projects, power dams, wind turbines, large battery storage have been proposed or built near you in the past couple of years. And if so, did you think it’s a good thing for the community that you support something you don’t really like, but you think is necessary a bad thing that you oppose, or do you just not know enough to say? And so, what we find in this year is that 76% of the people that say one of those projects has been built or proposed near them, 76% say it’s at least something they don’t like to think is necessary. So those are real projects in the real world right now.
Peter Tertzakian:
Can you just rephrase that?
Greg Lyle:
Right. We give people three options, right? The first option is this is a good thing that you support. The second option is, this is something I don’t like, but I think is necessary. And then the last one, it’s a bad thing that I oppose. And the reason I went to that is it was actually a spending question. So, I was doing focus groups where we sit down with real people in the real world, and I was asking them, “what level of government do you think does the best job of spending your money?” And in polls, people give you an answer to that. And the number one answer is municipal governments. But when you do it in a focus group, people laugh, right? It’s just hilarious to them that we’re asking what government does the best job of spending your money because they don’t think any government does a good job. And then they say, “Well, if I have to pick, I pick this.” And so, similarly, if you ask people, you go into a community that’s going to have a power line built in front of their homes and they don’t have a power line there already, and you say, “Do you support or oppose building a new power line?” Nobody is going to say I support it. They didn’t spend their life savings on buying their homes to have a power line built in front.
Peter Tertzakian:
Exactly.
Greg Lyle:
But you can convince them that we need this power line and this is the best place for it. Now, if you do that and they have to pay a private price for public good, they’re going to look for some compensation, and who wouldn’t? Because that’s a major investment they made. And that is often where these projects get into trouble that they just think that they can demand that the immediately impacted people just have to suck it up.
Peter Tertzakian:
Hey, Greg, can you just give us a quick level of support for nuclear power?
Greg Lyle:
Nuclear has got more support than opposition. Right now, it’s around 45% that would support nuclear right now with only about 25% opposed. The issue is a lot of people aren’t sure, and that’s a really important thing when you’re doing polls, is not to force people into opinions that they don’t have.
People have heard about Three Mile Island; they’ve heard about all the sort of horror stories. We just had that TV series on Netflix about nuclear. And so, people are nervous, and they’re conflicted, and they need to have that resolved. So, if you go to the communities that have nuclear power stations, they’re actually quite supportive because they’ve been around them, they’re not scary. It’s sort of the fear of the unknown. And the issue with something like nuclear is that it’s not completely unknown. You’ve heard bad things about it. And so, you’re naturally nervous if someone says, “We want to build a nuclear station down the road.”
Jackie Forrest:
Well, we want to switch to the interesting topic of politics, but just before that, you’ve implied throughout this that affordability is a bigger issue for people. Maybe you could just talk a little bit specifically of how that’s changed. How important are those issues versus climate today compared to a few years ago.
Greg Lyle:
Yeah, I mean, affordability is number one, and climate is fourth or fifth as a priority. It doesn’t mean that people aren’t concerned about climate, but if you say what’s more important for government to focus on, you’re going to get over 50% saying affordability and probably in the teens saying climate, and that’s been emerging over the past three years.
In fact, it even goes back further, but certainly over the past three years, there’s multiple issues here. So, one of those issues is the inflation that came out of COVID. But even before that, Canadian wages have not been keeping up with the cost of living. There’s been some good articles out lately about GDP per capita versus GDP overall, our GDP is growing, but our GDP per capita is actually declining.
And so, people feel they’re falling behind. And we actually have a poll coming out in the next week or so where we compared a poll that we did in 2007 to today asking people, “Do you have a better standard of living than your parents did? Will your kids have a better standard than you did?” And those numbers are plummeting for all generations.
So, if we look at where boomers were in 2007 where boomers are today, they are far more negative, both about their own circumstances and about their kids’ circumstances. And if you look at Gen Z, Gen X, Millennials, they’re just so pessimistic now. And it does sort of lead you into the politics because another thing that we did is that we tested the Poilievrets, because we were sort of curious, “Do people actually like Poilievre? Or are they just really unhappy with the Liberals, and he’s just the guy who got the lucky lottery ticket?”
And what we found is we tested seven different ads that he is running, three in French and four in English, and we found they scored as high as the best ads that we had ever tested before were actually, ironically, Justin Trudeau’s ads in 2015. And what he’s connected with, he talks about the fact that we’ve broken our promise. That the deal in Canada was that if you worked hard to obey the law, paid your taxes, that you could have a home in the suburbs, and raise your family, and enjoy a certain level of prosperity. And he’s really onto something. I mean, what we’re seeing is that people absolutely feel that they, and particularly their kids, are just not going to get the sort of deal that this country was supposed to deliver.
Peter Tertzakian:
The deal has been betrayed, basically.
Greg Lyle:
Right.
Peter Tertzakian:
The Canadian dream.
Greg Lyle:
And they’re angry, really angry. And so, what happens then is that’s bigger than what you read in the news. That’s my everyday life. I look at my kids trying to get out and establish themselves in their home. I look, I have to refinance my mortgage in a year. What is that going to do to my standard of living in all across this country? And if you don’t have a mortgage, if you’re a renter, rent prices have gone through the roof over the past couple of years.
Jackie Forrest:
Well, let’s talk a little bit about these ads in more detail. The Liberals and the Conservatives are taking quite a different approach. Poilievre has these mostly social media videos, even some mini documentaries like 17 minutes long about Canadian debt crisis or housing crisis. But the liberals through the government of Canada are taking a different approach. They’ve aired cable TV ads that are focused on climate. So, very, very different approaches. From what you just told me, the Liberals aren’t listening to some of the polling here. Would you say that’s a good conclusion?
Greg Lyle:
Yes. So, there’s a reason why they’re doing what they’re doing. The Liberals are in serious, serious difficulty. They’re depending on the poll in let’s say 15 points behind the Tories. And so, they’re at protecting the furniture, saving a furniture sort of position. If the election were in November last time we did a detailed model, they would have only run 57 seats.
So, the election is not tomorrow, it’s down the road. But nonetheless, we also back in November, looked at how people perceive what a Conservative government might do and what a Liberal government might do. And again, we did that the same set of questions at the end of the last election. So, we’re able to compare the brands, the promises of the two parties.
And on every single measure, we did seven different measures. On every single measure, the liberals have lost ground. There are only two of the seven, what we call wedge issues that we were tracking, where the Liberals are still better than the Tories. One of them is climate change. And so, while their advantage is not as strong as it used to be, people are still more likely to think the Liberals will make things better on climate change than the Tories will. And so, they’re running with one of their few remaining strengths.
Peter Tertzakian:
And is that sufficient to overcome the fact of what you said is that climate change is fourth or fifth in people’s … The kitchen table conversation.
Greg Lyle:
The problem is daily life for the Liberals. So, the affordability issue isn’t something you read in the news, it’s something you encounter every time you fill up your car or go to the grocery store. Waiting times in hospitals, we haven’t got into that, but if you look at the tracking on people’s ability to access healthcare and the quality of healthcare that they say they receive once they get it, both of those drop significantly two years ago and have not rebounded. And then you’ve got the hopes and dreams that everyone has that are dramatically down.
Peter Tertzakian:
Yeah. Okay, let’s get to the polling numbers, but before we do that, just a junior high reeducation here, or maybe even elementary school. How many seats are in Canada? Is it 338 or something like that?
Greg Lyle:
338 in Canada as a whole, roughly a quarter of them in Quebec. A little under 40% in Ontario. BC is the next biggest, then Alberta. And redistribution will end up favoring the Conservatives because the areas that are growing the most are more likely to be conservative overall.
Peter Tertzakian:
Right. Okay. So, where do the numbers stand now? I know you translate all your polling into seats. So, were the election to be held based on the latest poll? What does it look like?
Greg Lyle:
It would be a blowout. I mean, the Tories would win 217 seats of the 338, so they’d have almost two-thirds of the seats in the house.
Peter Tertzakian:
And what would the Liberals have?
Greg Lyle:
57.
Peter Tertzakian:
57?
Greg Lyle:
So, what’s really interesting in this is that both the Liberals and the NDP are at risk of losing seats to the conservatives. The Conservatives’ gains have been as big in the seats that have been core NDP seats or are stretched NDP seats as they have in the Liberals.
Peter Tertzakian:
Yeah. Poilievre has come forward as the populist, as even the working person, the layperson’s champion, which has traditionally been NDP-ish territory.
Greg Lyle:
Well, the other thing, although the NDP are not taking this line down, so you’ve heard Singh going after Loblaws and the CEOs of the grocery stores. He is trying to bring a left-wing populism to confront the right-wing populism. But there’s the whole issue of identity politics versus every day, put food on the table type politics. And so, the NDP coalition is based on a sort of downtown woke type person versus a hard hat, blue collar, unionized type person. And that hard hat voter, that lunch bucket voter, they’re starting to feel like the NDP has forgotten them. And if you looked at what happened, for instance, in the last Ontario election, Doug Ford was able to make some significant gains in seats that have historically been NDP base seats.
Jackie Forrest:
Now, one thing that’s always hard to predict, I think, is Quebec. It swings wildly between different parties. What’s the situation there? Is there some uncertainty that it would go conservative, or do you think, obviously you must be assuming a lot of Quebec goes conservative?
Greg Lyle:
No, we’re not. the 217 is with very few new seats for the conservatives. So, if they break through in Quebec, then it’s a wipe out. The issue is that the Conservatives are the third-place party in Quebec. The first-place party is the Bloc. And I think the Bloc have a very simple message to other Quebecers. Their promise is they will always put Quebec first, they will never sacrifice Quebec’s interest for any other region in Canada. And so that has a lot of appeal in Quebec. It has a lot of appeal in a lot of places.
Peter Tertzakian:
So, you’ve been in this game a long time and certainly you even have a gut feel. You don’t need to poll people to get a sense. In your experience, how difficult is it going to be for the Liberal party to reverse the deficit they’re in, given that the election is at most, by my count, I think 19 or 20 months away.
Greg Lyle:
Yeah. And I think it’s extremely difficult. There’s no obvious path there because of daily life, just because life is so hard.
Peter Tertzakian:
So, what if they did a hard turn and started focusing on daily life and going head-to-head with Poilievre on that issue and dropped the climate issue?
Greg Lyle:
Well, the question is would it be seen as authentic and believable, or is it going to be seen as a desperate tactic by a desperate government? And so deathbed repentance doesn’t carry very far in terms of the average voter. They’re going to vote for the authentic change. And normally the way that parties deal with this is they change leaders, but is Chrystia Freeland going to be seen as any more connected to the average person than Justin Trudeau? Would Mark Carney be seen as any more connected to the average person than Justin Trudeau? You know, they’re not Tim Horton’s people.
Peter Tertzakian:
Right. So do you expect… Jackie and I have this, well, I don’t know if it’s a bet, Jackie, but just I think the NDP are going to pull the pin this year in the election this year. What do you think?
Greg Lyle:
I think it’d be suicidal. That doesn’t mean they won’t do.
Peter Tertzakian:
For the NDP?
Greg Lyle:
Yeah, but it would be suicidal. They could lose more seats proportionately than the Liberals because of the Tory surge in their turf. They need to turn the table on the Tories, and they don’t have a clear angle on that yet. It’s not like Poilievre is defending the CEOs of the grocery stores. He’s just as likely to do something tough to CEOs as Singh is. It’s a very perilous time for the NDP.
Jackie Forrest:
All right. We’ll wait and see if I’m right. Sounds like there’s a good chance there, Peter.
Peter Tertzakian:
I’m sorry. I just want to follow up on this because Singh has got to be in a really difficult spot because there’s also peril in hanging on to a sinking ship, isn’t there? Like he could actually lose more seats the longer they wait.
Greg Lyle:
Well, but essentially what he’s hoping is that he can flank the Liberals. And that’s what those ads are. That ad that has storm clouds talking about climate emergency, that ad is directly aimed at a voter that could vote Liberal or could vote NDP, and the Liberals are trying to keep those people at home. What Singh is trying to do is to convince people that Trudeau can’t be trusted, that this is the guy who was on the side of SNC-Lavalin. This is the guy that bought a pipeline. I mean, what sort of climate change warrior buys a pipeline? So that’s where he goes.
But the puzzling thing to me is that he’s made his cause célèbre be the PharmaCare program. The PharmaCare program is a very nice to have thing, but right now we’ve got a crisis with family doctors, with wait times and ERs. I don’t understand why he’s not focused on those issues if he’s going to focus on healthcare. Plus, those issues mobilize a unionized army of potential supporters for him in the broader public.
So anyhow, it’s a puzzle. But his strategy is somewhat more coherent than the Liberal strategy, which is really, I mean, the carve out on the carbon tax in Atlanta, Canada just had no logic to it and is nowhere near enough to stem the bleeding that they have on affordability.
Jackie Forrest:
Now, let’s switch to the Conservatives. They don’t have a climate plan as far as I can tell, other than they’re against the carbon tax. We don’t know if that means the retail one or the industrial one, which a lot of investment is happening now and over the next year because of the industrial carbon policy and even some of the other policies that the liberals are rolling out. So how important is it that he signals what his intentions are when it comes to his climate plan?
Greg Lyle:
Well, so the problem that you have in opposition is that the minute you frame a policy, you put a specific policy out there, you can’t evolve it. Once you’ve said, “This is where I stand,” if circumstances change, you can’t evolve that policy. And so the natural thing if you are in the opposition is to wait until you’re as close as possible to the election or in the election before you actually get specific. So he may come up with some sort of vision statement or something like that, but actually going out with a specific policy other than, “I’m getting rid of the tax you all hate,” I don’t think we’re going to see it until the election’s called.
But the larger issue there on energy is that energy is a bad issue to be a wedge issue. So a wedge issue is an issue that parties use to draw distinctions between each other. Energy is a critical building block of our economy and of our quality of life, right? Leaving the lights on and keeping the heat on in the middle of the winter is a big deal in Canada. And while the average person may not think about it, it takes billions and billions and billions of dollars every year to reinvest in that system to keep it up there. And what money wants is certainty. So what money doesn’t want to see… we’re competing with the world for those capital dollars. If we want to get them at a good rate, they need to know that whether the Liberals are in place or the Tories are in place, they’re going to get a stable return on their dollars.
And so that’s what I’m worried about, that we’re not seeing the sort of bargain that we saw the Liberals and Conservatives do on CPPIB when it first got set up, leaving the Alberta situation aside for the moment, but we had a big problem on our pensions. We solved it, and now we’re the world’s envy. But on energy, we’ve now become a much poorer bet for international capital.
Peter Tertzakian:
Well, Greg, it’s been a fascinating discussion. I think, Jackie, it’s safe to say we’re going to have to have you back as election fever starts to ramp up over the course of the next many months to get a sense.
Greg Lyle:
It’d be a pretty boring election.
Peter Tertzakian:
You think it’s going to be boring? I don’t know.
Greg Lyle:
As it stands right now, I think it’s only the question’s going to be how big is the Poilievre win? And there’s things that might change that, but they’re not terribly likely.
Peter Tertzakian:
People still want to talk about it, and we want to talk about it.
Greg Lyle:
Sure.
Peter Tertzakian:
And so Greg Lyle, president of Innovative Research Group, thanks so much for joining us.
Greg Lyle:
Thanks so much.
Peter Tertzakian:
And by the way, we’re glad you went from geophysics to polling.
Jackie Forrest:
And thanks to Greg and thanks to our listeners. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate us on the app that you listen to and tell someone else about us.
Speaker 1:
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