CGTN Europe speaks to Dalhousie University Professor of Political Science Lori Turnbull.
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00:00Laurie Turnbull is Professor of Political Science in the Faculty of Management at Dalhousie University, and she joins us now.
00:07Professor, thanks for your time.
00:08If Donald Trump had not threatened to annex Canada, would Mark Carney and the Liberal Party be the frontrunners in this poll?
00:16It's hard to say. That is the most interesting, kind of counterfactual question,
00:21because it's amazing how the polls have changed in the past six months.
00:24But when Justin Trudeau was still the prime minister, the Liberals were way behind the Conservatives by, like, 20, 25 points.
00:32A Conservative majority looked inevitable.
00:34But then Justin Trudeau resigned, and then Donald Trump started talking tariffs,
00:40and Mark Carney became the leader of the Liberal Party, and now the Liberals are a few points ahead.
00:44It's hard to say, because I think Justin Trudeau's departure had a lot to do with why the Liberals started to put it back together again.
00:51But there's no question that the Trump factor is helping Carney.
00:55Yeah, and I wanted to ask about Mark Carney himself, huge financial acumen.
01:00He has a lot to offer, surely, in the face of these Trump tariffs.
01:03I mean, is it a case of cometh the hour, cometh the man?
01:07Well, I mean, it's weird.
01:08Like, this election has kind of turned into a bit of a job interview,
01:11where Mark Carney kind of stands out as someone who has the experience.
01:16As you say, the financial acumen, he's got an incredible skill set and set of experiences as Bank of Canada governor, Bank of England governor.
01:23He's a banker.
01:24He's a global, you know, he's got global networks.
01:26It's almost like this is what he was built for.
01:29But that doesn't mean that everybody's going to vote for Mark Carney.
01:32I think it's really come down to a kind of struggle for who has the trust of the people.
01:37And as this has gone on for a longer period of time, I mean, our campaigns are pretty short, the 36 days.
01:43But at the end, you can see the conservatives and the liberals moving a little closer together.
01:47We've seen a huge rise in shows of Canadian pride in response to Trump's annexation calls.
01:54Do you expect that to translate into a higher voter turnout?
01:58Yes, we can definitely expect, I think, a higher voter turnout.
02:02I would be shocked if we didn't see that.
02:03The advance poll, which was held over the holiday weekend, last weekend, much, much higher turnout, like record-breaking, 25 percent higher turnout than the last record, the last election.
02:14And so I think we can really see a higher level of engagement.
02:17There's a sense that this election matters a lot.
02:20It matters whether it's Mark Carney or Pierre Polyev and the sense that it's not a foregone conclusion.
02:25People can see those close polls and they feel like their vote counts.
02:29And so I think it will be a long night of counting.
02:31Could the attack in Vancouver, we're told it's not terror-related, but do you think that has potential to impact the way people might vote?
02:41I mean, I think there's certainly a real heaviness over the country now because of what happened in Vancouver.
02:51I think it certainly put a completely different complexion on the last day of the election where the leaders all had planned big events, rallies, getting on that kind of final day of the campaign to get people all juiced up and get excited about voting and all that.
03:09And then it took a very different turn where the leaders were somber.
03:13They still had events, but their itineraries reflected the fact that this had happened and that obviously they recognized that.
03:21And so, I mean, I think it certainly brings a different mood to the election as far as whether this would – I don't see any difference in terms of engagement or in terms of vote choice.
03:34I think it was – it's a very different ending to the campaign that people had anticipated.
03:39Well, thank you so much for your time.
03:40Laurie Turnbull is Professor of Political Science in the Faculty of Management at Dalhousie University.