Season 2, Episode 6: Smart Voting Canada
with JB Burrows
In this episode, I discuss the 2025 Canadian election with JB, founder of Smart Voting Canada. JB explains the concept of strategic voting to prevent vote splitting among progressive parties, which can inadvertently lead to conservative victories. He shares insights on the development and accuracy of Smart Voting Canada’s predictive model, which uses demographic data and AI to recommend the best candidate to support in each riding. The conversation also touches on the importance of youth voter turnout, the impact of regional polling, and the broader goal of electoral reform in Canada. JD emphasizes the need for a fair voting system that truly represents all Canadians and encourages civic engagement and informed voting.
The Gravity Well Podcast, hosted by Jenny Yeremiy, delves into complex issues to foster understanding and improve the world.
Introductions to JB Burrows and Smart Voting Canada, a strategic voting tool
Alex:
Welcome to The Gravity Well Podcast with Alex and Jenny here. You break down heavy ideas with us to understand their complexities and connections. Our mission is to work through your dilemmas with you in conversation and process making our world a better place for all.
Jenny:
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Alex:
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Jenny:
Welcome. I’m here Live with JB Burrows. Thank you JB for being here, especially on a holiday day. Didn’t think about that when I got so excited to invite Smart Voting Canada here to discuss the election, the 2025 Canadian election. Thank you very much for
JB:
Thanks. Thanks for having me. I’m very excited to be here.
Jenny:
Great. Yeah, so just to set the stage, I just want a funny story. I went to the Liberal rally in Calgary here, cut the line. It was a huge lineup. I was really surprised and impressed to see how many progressive people were out in Calgary at the stampede grounds to meet Prime Minister Carney and these lovely ladies standing behind us. We asked them, do you mind if we hop in? And one said she was working and we got talking. A friend of mine, Claire Kraatz, who’s been on the show before as a guest, and I were just discussing, she lives in a riding that has two strong candidates, two strong progressive candidates, I should say. Full disclosure, I am a progressive. I am someone who’s looking to help us move. Well, let’s be clear. We’re in an economic war, at least with the United States right now.
Our country is on the line. It’s been made very clear that our country is on the line and we have evidence that our conservative party is aligned with that vision of, and I know it hasn’t been set outright, but there is alignment between those parties. There’s evidence I can speak to from oil and gas executives talking about their connections with Washington, et cetera. There are lots of reasons to be concerned that the Conservative Party of Canada is aligned with the direction of the US and potentially trying to annex Canada. To me, that’s on the line. I’m a geophysicist by background, became a liability expert in the oil and gas industry and want us to follow the laws of the land. And Canada is my home. Obviously, I’m a very proud Albertan. And the last thing I will say is I split the vote. Well, I don’t necessarily know if I did that, but I ran in the 2023 election as what I thought it was for a progressive party in Alberta, and I’ll try to be specific. The riding I ran in went conservative by 147 votes, and I got 777 votes, so my votes could have swayed the election on the day that people voted. So anyway, that’s my backstory and why I’m really excited to be talking to smart voting in Canada. So JB, would you mind taking a moment just to introduce yourself? Tell us about how you started Smart Voting Canada, and then a bit about it itself. Thank
JB:
You. Yeah, so “Hi” everyone. My name’s JB. I founded Smart Voting Canada just before the recent Ontario election that we just had. I live in Ontario, sorry, Albertans, but yet another Ontario talking to Alberta about what’s right and wrong, but I started it just before the Ontario election, but this has been an idea that I had since the 2018 Ontario election. I was a poll worker at the time, and I remember counting the votes in my deep, deep, deep urban Toronto riding, and I’m like, my poll went conservative and I didn’t understand why I live. This was one of the most, at the time in Ontario, a very Liberal riding, but the riding ended up going Liberal. But my poll itself, my particular poll didn’t, and I was like, whoa, this is confusing because I live here. I’ve lived 20 minutes down the road. It was very confusing and I realized as I counted the votes that there’s a split.
We have the conservative who got, I don’t remember the numbers, it was years ago, but say a hundred votes. The NDP got 30 votes, the Liberal got 50 votes, the Green got another 10 votes, and when you added it all together, I was like, oh, this is a split. This didn’t represent what the rioting or this particular group of people that were assigned to this poll actually wanted in this area. And that kind of said, we need to change it. So I originally went to school for political science and journalism and broadcasting. So I had this kind of canning ability to make a thing that kind of works. So I started to build a model. I bought the domain and over Covid really, I slowly just picked away at this system that helped determine who was the best candidate to win, to not split the vote, not just at a particular poll level, but also at a riding level and broader regional or provincial or country, federal level.
Then covid hit and I had job changes as we all did, and I never did anything with it. And then finally after when Doug Ford called his snap election here, I was like, it’s time. It’s time to turn this on and it’s ready. I was secretly testing it during the last BC election, the Saskatchewan election, the New Brunswick election and the Nova Scotia election, and we got our accuracy, or I got my accuracy in the predictions almost as high as 98% in some cases. I got the Saskatchewan election bang on. I didn’t get a riding wrong.
What that tells me is that the model and the algorithm that I was building over the years and fine tuned to get even more accurate was ready. And in the Ontario election that we just had, we boasted about a 95% accuracy for the predictions that we have. And why that matters is because if we have a good accuracy, then we feel confident in the predictions we make to not split the vote because we know the numbers are good. And that makes more of an impact in actually rallying people and stopping people because they see, hey, smart voting was right, and we flipped this riding away from the conservatives. We stopped the conservatives from winning 12 ridings in Ontario in the last election because of strategic voting. Huge win for us in just 20 something days of popping this thing up and now the federal elections here, we have almost 10 million hits on the website since the start of the election across this country. That’s not unique people, but that’s just how many visits we’ve had to the site all in Canada, we’ve sold about 500 to 600 lawn signs skittled across this country. The response has been absolutely astonishing.
I would be happy if a thousand people went to the site and said, “Hey, this is really cool, JB”, but this many people are blowing my mind. And now we’ve got an amazing team of volunteers, 12 volunteers, bipartisan from former conservatives to Liberals to New Democrats to Greens, all getting together and with this common goal to give us true electoral reform. Stop splitting the vote and let’s not be like the states. Cool. Can we agree on that? That’s kind of the main point here, right?
Jenny:
Yeah.
JB:
Preventing this thing,
Jenny:
Right? I mean, we’re seeing how unsuccessful that’s going in the United States right now for everyone. Let’s be clear.
JB:
It isn’t going great, not going great.
Jenny:
I just want to reiterate a couple things. You’ve tested this thing, you started it in covid. Did you get a chance to test it at all in the 2021 election? I was just curious.
JB:
I did, but more than that, we will get into it, I think. But the challenge with doing this kind of thing is you have to make a prediction at a riding [district] level.
Jenny:
When you don’t necessarily have data from the riding.
JB:
I ran into this issue in 2021 federally where I was building out the model and I could make the predictions, but I’m like, I don’t trust this. This is based off of some national poll, and they only got 200 people in this riding, I really needed to take the time to hone in the model a bit and work the code to accommodate for these regional sways. I’ll be honest, in 2021, I still have the sheet somewhere deep in my drive, but I biffed it. I was wrong across the country and it was because I didn’t have demographic data factored in, which was a big, big factor. And I spoke with a couple friends who also know how to build these things out, and we all suggested and agreed that what we needed to do was we needed to take these polls that we’d get from the national level, which inside the national poll, there’s regional polls, so we know how many people in Alberta answered the poll.
But what pollsters have started to do is give us demographics inside of that so we know how much 18 to 30 5-year-old males answered the poll and 65 plus women and what their income levels are and what their employment status sometimes is. We even sometimes get raw postal code demographic data, so we know that this is from this T four a postal code or whatever, right? With that, we can then take existing demographic data from Statistics Canada, do some math and figure out, oh, well, we know 18 to 35 year old’s in Alberta are leaning this way and this riding has this many 18 to 35 year old’s, so we’re able to apply some math to that and get our predictions. That was the secret sauce. That’s what really honed in on that accuracy.
Jenny:
Great. Yeah, thank you. Yes, we’re going to get into that a little bit more. Yeah. You’ve tested this at a provincial level. You saw almost 98% comparison to the Saskatchewan outcome, which I’m very interested to hear more about. Okay. What I’d like to get into now, if you don’t mind, is that I brought up my concern, and so can you help me? You said that you swayed, for example, I think you said 12 ridings in the Ontario election. Can you talk about the concern, the vote splitting concern and how you predicted this change in those ridings, for example?
What is Vote Splitting?
JB (11:31):
Yeah, so the vote splitting for those who are unaware is not unique to Canada. It’s an issue that happens around this world in democracies where you have ideological parties that overpopulate, so to speak, in a certain way in Canada, if we remember back to who are old enough, back in the nineties, the conservatives were severed. There was the reform party, there was the progressive conservative party, and they were splitting the vote on the conservative side, and there was the Jean Chretien era. The conservatives were not around, they were just this distant party that didn’t exist, and reform was this pesky party in the west that was just causing issues. And they merged famously and formed the modern day conservative party that we know today in Canada.
Jenny:
Under Stephen Harper, right?
JB:
I think Harper was the orchestrator of a lot of that merging, and that’s ultimately why he became the leader. I was just a kid when that happened, so I can’t remember too much about that. But now what we have in the modern day political landscape is we have conservatives aligned on the right, if you’re a right voter, you’ve got one, two, but the PPC is not really viable, they don’t really have a lot of viability. So really there’s just the Conservatives. The other side though, you have the Liberals, which Liberals are the Liberals, they’re always, this can potentially be the strong governing party. But then you have the New Democrats, which have a lot of support and more urban pockets, your Edmonton’s, Hamilton’s, Vancouver Island, Vancouver itself, even Montreal has a lot of new democratic pockets in it that can get anywhere between 20 to even a hundred and something seats.
If there’s a good leader we saw in 2011, then the Greens, the Greens have been steadily increasing their vote share every election as we’ve gotten through their progress. And then in Quebec, there’s the pesky old Bloc that does take votes away from progressive sides. Depending on where you live, you have a lot of choices on the left and voting for one of the others, not necessarily a bad thing. I don’t shame Liberal voters as a new democratic voter myself. I don’t shame Green voters if that’s the way you want to go. There is a split. And when we look at the current projections on smart voting, there are 34 ridings as we speak, in this country that if they aligned and picked one candidate, the conservative wouldn’t win because there’s just not enough votes for the conservatives in there. But the left is splitting and we’re seeing a really, really noticeable issue with that on Vancouver Island. And it’s a three way split between the Greens, the New Democrats and the Liberals. Edmonton is another one. Edmonton’s just divided like crazy right now.
Jenny:
Well, and I’d like to speak a bit about Calgary too, where I am of course. But yes, I looked at the results from the BC election because I was very intrigued by, because people were saying, “Oh, it’s very conservative there”, but no, the reason why the Conservatives won in a lot of cases is because of this boat splitting that you’re describing, or at least that’s how I interpreted the data.
JB:
It’s not a biased thing, it’s not a partisan thing, it’s not anything like that. It is entirely just the numbers. And sure, not every Liberal voter is going to vote New Democrat. Some of them might go vote conservative, and that’s fine. Not every new democratic voter is going to vote Liberal. We’re not asking for, I’ll use Calgary Centre for instance, as an example. We currently have the Liberals leading with 45% of the vote there. The conservatives also have 45% and the New Democrats are sitting with six, and then the Greens have two. So that is a situation where we don’t need all 6% of those new democratic voters to go vote Liberal. We just need one 2% of that to understand the assignment here that this will stop, this will unseat a conservative and take a win for the Liberals. Yes, not great. If you are a New Democratic voter, you kind of swallow your pride there, but what’s worked, what’s
Jenny:
Worse? This is where I have to be honest with you. So two things. I know the NDP candidate in that riding, so his name’s Beau Shaw. I’ve known him for at least a year now. He’s a very strong social justice leader in this city. I really am doubtful that those numbers make sense from somebody who knows a bit about Beau and knows a bit about the community. Can you help us understand, is that one of those ridings that you have specific numbers for or is it a projection based on national polls? And the last thing I’ll offer you is just in the same vein, is that it’s my understanding that Alberta specifically is not polled as much as other areas in the country. Again, this is my ignorant question, but if you can just help me understand those two things. Thank you.
JB:
So the thing we need to remember is that if you live in an urban centre, you’re going to get a lot of polls. That’s just the reality of it. It’s more of a conversation If we were to talk about Yellowhead or these really rural ridings, even in Alberta, even in Ontario, the rural ridings don’t get a lot of love. So it is hard to make those projections or have a lot of confidence behind those projections. But in Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, all these bigger cities, we do get a lot of regionalized data and we do actually get pretty specific data. So we got a nanos poll today, just about an hour or two before we started doing this. And they have the Liberals at 45% and the conservatives at 37% nationally. But when I break that down, I have Alberta data and I have the Liberals in Alberta at 30% of the votes, conservatives at 56.
That’s not surprise, that’s just pretty general for Alberta, but that’s Alberta, that is people from Alberta answering this poll, and this is just a summary that I’m looking at, but I’m sure if I even go into the actual PDF that’s probably sitting somewhere in my email, I would get a lot more regionalized and I bet you dime to dollar that there is some Calgary data in there that I could extract. And then this is where weighting comes in. This is where our algorithm applies because one of the things that we do, and this is where actually AI is actually a really helpful tool, is I can give all of this data to an AI model and say run what we call a Monte Carlo simulation, a Monte Carlo simulation. Very complicated to break down, but essentially it takes this data, you tell it, this is the party, this is where voters in this party will typically sway.
This is the margin of errors, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, simulate a thousand elections, and let me know what you got and I can sit there and watch it just spit out these numbers. And it accounts for human fluctuations. It accounts for voter turnout issues, it accounts for historical voting records, demographic data. All of this stuff is factored in. And Monte Carlo models are widely used. It is the standard simulation when simulating elections because they are pretty good at kidding it. They’ve gotten really, really good at doing it. And these AI models just get smarter and smarter and smarter with the more data that I feed this thing. It’s easier to understand. And this is what I tell people is when we first started it, when we launched the federal model and the numbers were all over the place and people are emailing us, there’s no way there’s this much Liberal support in this riding, and now they’re seeing the election play out, and we’re seeing less and less in that because people are talking in their communities and saying, yes, there is this support. We’ve gotten apology emails from people being like, I thought you were wrong, but now I’m starting to see that you are probably tapped into this. So not to toot my own horn, but we’ve gotten data from Calgary. To answer your question, I can’t speak to this directly, but
Jenny:
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, yeah, thank you for that clarity. I was mentioning offline, Lisa, who speaks on political issues in Calgary for us, was describing some of the close ridings, the ones that have this potential opportunity to be strategic. The couple in Edmonton Greisbagh, maybe you can help me, is it Centre?
JB:
We have Edmonton, Edmonton Manning, Edmonton Northwest, Edmonton River Bend, and Edmonton West all are considered tossups where the numbers are margin of aired. It could go either way. Flip of a coin, but is a vote split. And 1, 2, 3, 4 of those are existing conservative ridings. One of them is one of the new ridings they created, so we don’t really have any data from that. It’s brand spanking new, but only one of them is an existing new democratic riding, which is Edmonton, Greisbach with Blake Desjarlais, right?
Jenny:
Yes. And an Indigenous member of the yes right now. There’s a big push for that on social media to help him get elected. That’s one of those.
JB:
I would love for Blake to take it. I want Blake to win this riding because I think Blake is a fantastic member. And this just goes to show that while overwhelmingly my model is recommending Liberals across this country, there are pockets that recommend New Democrats recommend Greens. I just spent the day in Kitchener Centre meeting with Mike Morris, who’s the Green party MP there. One funny little tidbit I’ll share to everybody if I can is if anybody who’s worked or seen a member of parliament trying to get reelected is like hanging out with a bunch of squirrels. They just get so distracted from everything because somebody wants to come in and they want to shake their hand, and it’s really hard to get a conversation in with them. And I get it, he’s trying to get his job back. I totally understand it, but it’s fascinating to watch just this process play out and early voting today too. And we’re seeing record turnouts across this country.
Jenny:
I loved that offline just before we went live, he was talking about how this is the one area, is it in Toronto that has, it’s all Green signs.
JB:
Kitchener is about an hour and a half from Toronto. Kitchener Centre is a tech town. A lot of big tech companies had offices in Kitchener, so Google, Deloitte, Skip the Dishes, Uber, you name a tech company. It’s got an office in Kitchener. Blackberry’s originally from there. A very educated town, very academic town, lots of people who have university degrees or higher. And that’s very telling that the Kitchener Centre where all of these people live and work is voting Green, which is kind of interesting to think about when you break it down, but from a democratic perspective.
Jenny:
Yeah, that’s fascinating. And yeah, it’s very interesting and I think it’s good to have diverse opinions. This is the thing is I’m a bit nervous about potentially getting fewer parties in the, not the legislature, what’s it called in…
JB:
The house.
Jenny:
Thank you. The house. My goodness. Yes. Where there is an opportunity for there to be a candidate with a different voice, I’m really thrilled to know that especially that it’s playing out in your analysis. So how do users decide? I’m going to use my, I looked up my riding from the last election, the 2021 election. There were about 31,000 people that voted conservative and just over, I think it was 22,000 that voted differently. And I voted NDP last time. I’ve voted for every party pretty much. I’ve voted Green, I’ve voted Conservative even in some cases, but I’m looking to vote Liberal based on my own assumption of the candidates I see. And then also based on your analysis. That’s one example. I’m in Calgary Signal Hill. It’s not one of those ones that’s looking like it’s close, but you never know, right?
JB:
Wow.
Jenny:
But anyway, crazier things have happened.
JB:
Crazier things have happened.
Jenny:
That’s right. Yeah. But can you help people understand how to use your system? Can you walk them through the smart voting system?
The Smart Voting Canada System
JB (24:28):
The beauty of smart voting is we do all the heavy lifting for you. We’ve done the math, we’ve done the analysis, we’ve done the number crunching, and we’ve based our numbers off of data. And I want to make it clear to people, oh, am I gone? There I am, I’m back. Sorry, lemme just repeat that.
Jenny:
Sorry about that.
JB:
That’s okay. We base our analysis off of data. I’m not sitting here with my spreadsheet, my master sheet, as we call it, my master sheets are the Bible. Nobody sees it where there’s only a few people that have access to that sheet because it’s a very powerful sheet. But we have a bylaw in our organization that that sheet cannot be touched by any human. It is used as a reference tool to see what the model spits out. This hits my email box from our system that generates this sheet around noon eastern. Every day I look at it for a bit, look at some trends, see where things are going, and I put it up on the site and that’s that this system automatically picks who the right person is, who’s the statistically best person to beat the conservative candidate in that riding or prevent it from going conservative depending on your situation.
And it does that through a bunch of different logic and rules. First things first, it’s told never to pick a conservative. And the second thing is, it looks just at the numbers. Who has the highest percentage? If the Liberal is sitting there with 50%, the New Democrats at 49 and the Green, that’s too high of numbers, but if it’s close, it’ll always favor the highest person. Now, if it’s tied, if the numbers 35, 35, it looks at the swing and a swing statistic is how much that candidate has grown or decreased since the start of the campaign because that is a sign of momentum. How is that candidate growing? And there are some cases where this upsets people because they look at our numbers and we’ve been an NDP stronghold or NDPs always been second forever. But the NDPs polling numbers, not just nationally, but regionally across this country are decreasing. So when we have to break a tie, who are we going to pick? Are we going to pick the Liberal candidate who is climbing in the polls? Are we going to pick the New Democratic candidate who’s decreasing? And that’s that tie breaker. If that is tied, it always goes to the incumbent. If the incumbent is one of the people that is in the mix here. We do favor incumbencies because incumbencies do matter. They do have a factor in.
Even on top of that, incumbencies are weighted in the model. There are a couple situations where Hamilton Centre was a lot like this for a while where Matt Green was actually losing in the number technically to the conservative, but because he was the incumbent and he’s a popular incumbent, he was weighted heavier. So technically he was two points down, but we were still saying that he’s probably going to win because of the incumbency bias and candidate popularity. Obviously leader seats have a big weight like Pierre Poilievre’s seat, and Carlton is going to have a heavy weight for him because he’s the incumbent Mark Carney seat right next door. Napean is also weighted heavily for Mark Carney, Jagmeet Singh, unfortunately, he is probably not going to win a seat even with his weight. He’s just not there. He’s third and in his own riding, and Elizabeth May, I didn’t know that Elizabeth May’s riding in San Guelph Islands in Vancouver Island.
It’s been ping ponging back and forth between her and the conservative. She’s there. But another example where the weighting for her is playing her favor, it’s tough. How do you determine popularity? Right? The hardest thing for us to make a prediction is how do you determine a candidate’s popularity? And some of that just comes from how many times they appear in the media. Where do they sit in the house? Are they a prominent member? Are they a cabinet minister? There’s ways that we can do it. And after the Ontario election, that was the first thing we looked at was our waiting, right? And then we can tweak that to be even more accurate.
Jenny:
And what did you find?
JB:
In Ontario? We were pretty good. We got the weighting for the candidates, pretty good. There were a couple that we missed. We underestimated the New Democratic support, or sorry, we overestimated the new democratic support in Hamilton and we underestimated the new democratic support in Toronto. We missed that. It was just a shift in the wrong direction that we couldn’t capture, but we were still 95% accurate across the province. We’re going to miss. And that’s just the reality of it, right? When you’re dealing with data and numbers
Jenny:
Of course, and there’s just so many things at play, like you’re saying to hear Jagmeet Singh might not make it in. This is the reason why I think your point about, well, our discussion about Beau Shaw’s riding, I think that has a lot to do with it. The feeling in Alberta, and I think probably nationally, I am curious to know this, is I don’t understand why we tear down the Liberals as a progressive party. Like I’m talking about Jagmeet Singh going after Justin Trudeau in ways that don’t serve the country. It’s showing…
JB:
Something like that.
Jenny:
I think that’s something that hasn’t landed well with the number of Albertans. I think we’ve said, what are we doing here if we’re not trying to work together and be more honest about what’s going on? Because there’s a climate crisis and real affordability crisis happening, and it’s not honest to try and level the playing field and just go after the incumbent. As you’re saying, we’ve got a Liberal party, I appreciate they don’t want to lose their seats. And that’s where it’s coming from. But it doesn’t talk. And I have to say, I’m going to correct myself a little bit by saying I was really impressed with what Jagmeet said in the debate last night. I thought he did an excellent job of holding Pierre Poilievre to account. And I think he did an excellent job of being honest, as did Carney, in my opinion, back with Jagmeet. He gave him a couple, “Yes, you’re right, sir.” You know what I mean? Anyway, that’s what I want to see more of.
JB:
It can happen. The Liberals and the Democrats can sit a table together and talk. And unfortunately as a very progressive individual, I call myself a democratic socialist. I am a political orphan in this country. There is no party that really truly represents who I am as a person. Overwhelmingly, that’s just been the New Democrats over the years. They’re just kind of the closest, I guess. But I’ve never voted Liberal in my life. This will be the first election that I’m voting Liberal because it’s just the right thing to do. But coming from me, somebody who is an anti-capitalist doesn’t like it all into socialism. I’m looking at the Liberals and going, guys, they’re fine. They’re not great. I have my reservations, I have my concerns a hundred percent, but I look down to my friends down south. I have family in the United States. I have friends in the United States. I used to go to the United States a lot for work. It’s not the United States that I remember, and I don’t want that. And if that means I got to vote for the banker, I’ll vote for the banker.
Jenny:
Well, and I don’t know.
JB:
It sucks. It’s a pit in my stomach, but I got to do it. It’s just I got to do it.
The Opportunity in Mark Carney
Jenny (32:06):
Yes. And the reality is it is an economic thing too. If we want to simplify it to an economic discussion, this is somebody with merit who works in the, as you said last night, the EU and China are our biggest purchasers of Chinese, sorry, of Canadian exports, and they want [low] carbon, they want to address climate. The reality is these are our biggest economic opportunities. And as he rightfully said last night, we will hurt the industries by contributing to something that isn’t going to have a purchaser. A phrase that’s been coming up for me this week is The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
You can have the best intentions for an industry to help them continue. Yet if there’s no purchaser, that’s not helping them either. We need to face that reality. And so I think that’s where I can get aligned with. I’ve had people say, “Oh, Carney’s going to take the party to the center.” We’ve been subsidizing the oil and gas industry more than any country in the G20. This is not [good], we need to help. And I will say that at least with the Liberal government, we know that they will listen to public pressure. And that’s the concern we have from…
JB:
Yeah, I agree. Sorry, continue, please.
Jenny:
No, no, that was all I was going to finish with. That’s my concern I have from the Conservative Party of Canada is that it’s not an honest conversation. Look what’s happening in the States.
JB:
That’s the thing. And I got to take a page from the great Rick Mercer, who knows politics in this country, nobody else on top of being a very funny, funny man. He’s got his finger on the pulse. He knows what people are talking about. And he did a podcast last year sometime, right when we started to go, oh, it’s election year 2025. Now we have to start to pay attention. And he said it best that a lot of political commentators, people who’ve worked in politics, Rick, myself included, know who Pierre Poilievre is. I remember Pierre Poilievre when I worked on the Hill. He was a junior member at the time. He just, I hate to say this, and I’m not trying to slander the guy. He was the asshole. He was the jerk. Everyone thought he was, that was what his perception was on the hill.
When he became the leader and progressed up, I’m like, who is that guy really? I knew who Pierre Poilievre was, but a lot of Canadians were kicking the tires on Pierre Poilievre. They were like, who’s this guy? He’s kind of saying things that I like to hear. Carney wasn’t in the picture yet, or at least formally in the picture yet. Trudeau was waning in popularity day by day by day. He just kept shedding away people supporting him. But then when an adult showed up in the room and that’s Mark Carney, people were like, well, I like what he’s saying, a lot more smarter things.
Jenny:
Meritocracy.
JB:
And he has a resume, he has a track record. We’re dealing with some things right now with our former ally. As I say to the south, and I’m sorry I’m perfectly content putting the guy at the table that dealt with Brexit and dealt with the 2008 financial crisis. Right Now, I’m not saying let’s do this again in 2029, but I’m saying right now I think this is the right move. That’s my personal opinion on that.
Jenny:
That’s right. Yeah. This is somebody who is qualified. If the argument was, and it was strong here, that Justin Trudeau wasn’t qualified, this is somebody who is qualified. And I would say there’s no other candidate that is more qualified to lead our country right now. I’m really grateful for those alliances that he made in the EU and his understanding of the situation. That being said, there is pressure from outside that is not necessarily being honest. We have to make sure that we support him as the public and uphold the reality of the situation that we’re in and expect more from our leaders at the same time.
JB:
Yeah. I also want to make it clear from a smart voting perspective, though I’m not overwhelmingly endorsing Liberals here. I’m endorsing strategically voting because like we’ve discussed already, there are some ridings that the Liberals are not the choice.
Jenny:
Let’s be specific since we have a little time. JB, would you mind walking through Alberta? Just talk through the ones that are close and where they’re leaning.
Alberta Projections and Progressive Vote-Split Ridings
JB (36:35):
Yeah, so let me sort this by vote splitting one second. So in Alberta there are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 ridings that are vote split. Of those, none of them are strongholds for the conservatives, they’re all either tossups or liens for the conservatives or just a general tossup. Overwhelmingly, we’re recommending Liberals Edmonton West. We’re recommending the Liberals, Riverbend, Northwest Manning are all recommended Liberals. Edmonton agrees back. We’re recommending the New Democrats and in Calgary, Crowfoot and Calgary Centre, we’re recommending the Liberals. These are based on the numbers we have. A lot of them are being broken by the swings. The swing is just better for the Liberals than it is for the New Democrats. So that’s that. And I want to make it clear that could change by a voting day that could shift. So we are encouraging people to keep checking if you’re standing in line to go vote this weekend, before you step foot inside that polling place, check your phone, go to smart voting it auto reads your location so you can know exactly where you are and it’ll tell you who’s the best person in that very second who is this? Because I would feel terrible if somebody early voted and then the recommendation change, but that’s a reality that could happen. So
Jenny:
Are you seeing some movements in Alberta? I am curious now that you talk about that you have the capability of seeing the swings.
JB:
Yeah, let me sort this by Alberta just real quick. Just give me two seconds and I will put that filter on. Sorry, this is a massive sheet, so every time I click something it’s got to think for a hot minute, Alberta. Sorry. Okay, so in Alberta, just taking a look at the swings, the Liberals are overwhelmingly in a positive swing. There are a couple ridings where they’re negative but only negative one or flat at zero. But in Edmonton Manning, the Liberals have gained six points since the start of the election.
Jenny:
Wow.
JB:
Calgary Midnapore, which is going to go conservative, has gained five points.
Jenny:
Still, that’s big for an area in the south of Calgary.
JB:
Yeah, Edmonton Riverbend has gained five points. Edmonton West is two. Calgary Shepherd and Nose Hill, both gained four. Calgary Federation has gained four. There are noticeable gains for the Liberals in Alberta. But when I swing over to the New Democrats, it’s overwhelmingly negative. It’s negative. The only person that’s holding strong is Blake at Edmonton Griesbagh, he’s flat at zero. He hasn’t moved, he’s stayed firm at 34. Even Heather McPherson is down a couple points in her riding in Edmonton Strathmore.
Jenny:
But that’s what you would recommend.
JB:
Heather’s going to win. Heather’s going to win her riding.
Jenny:
Okay, great.
JB:
There’s no worries there. And maybe that’s why she’s down a point. People are feeling comfortable maybe voting Liberal or voting Green or whatever the New Democrats are going to win. But down in Sher, up in Sherwood Park and eps down Five Points, Edmonton Centre, they’re down five points. Calgary Heritage, they’re down five points. The New Democrats fielded a candidate in every riding in Alberta. Shout out to them, but poor old Ponoka, the most conservative riding in the country, I might add, the conservatives are going to win this riding by 82%.
Jenny:
In?
JB:
Panoka. The conservatives are slated to get 82% of the vote. They have a conservative candidate, a New Democratic candidate, and a PPC candidate. And the PPC is second.
Jenny:
Wow.
JB:
This is a conservative area where the Liberals didn’t even put a candidate there. They were like, “No point, no point spending the money, finding somebody”. They didn’t even parachute somebody in just it’s the only place they’re not running a candidate in the country is Ponoka.
Jenny:
That is so interesting. Well thank you so much. This is super helpful, JB. I’ve really appreciated learning from you. So any other thing that anybody needs to do on your site, so you don’t take in any information from voters, it’s all just about the candidates and what’s happening.
What’s Next for Smart Voting Canada
JB:
We don’t collect any user data, we don’t keep any of that. If you do share your location with us, it’s in the moment. We don’t store any of that. It’s not saved in some secret thing. We are. If I can take a minute to talk about our long-term plans because we’ve been getting a lot of questions like election’s over, what are you guys going to do? What’s your next step? The next election’s not going to be for four years, obviously we’re going to be there if any provincial contests pop up, there is the potential of Alberta. I don’t know what the hell’s going to happen in Alberta over the next few years here, but hopefully an early one.
I don’t think Dani’s going to make it until the end of her term to be honest. Quebec, it might be having an election end of this year or early next. They have to have one next year. And there’s all these premiers resigning in Newfoundland and PEI. There might be something in the Maritimes, but what we’re going to be using Smart Voting for is an education tool. We’re going to start to talk about civic engagement and what is voting, how do we vote? What is electoral reform? What do we want in our mission? And hammer down on getting people more educated on this thing called voting and elections and our parliament and that system. But the other thing we are going to start to do is we’re going to start to do our own polling. So we have already started the process to register as a pollster in this country and we are going to be building out an application that will live on people’s phones. Then we will then have to collect user data and put that in. But it’s all going to be consent based. You opt into this kind of stuff
Jenny:
And
JB:
If you’re willing to share, we’ll take how much money you make, what’s your postal code, stuff like that. And our intention with polling is to solve that problem. We started off with where do we get regional polling? And our vision is if I have the ability to push a button on a system and it push notifies everybody who lives or is currently standing in a certain geolocation, we’d be able to see that I can do a targeted poll in an area that might be topical. I desperately want targeted polling out of Hamilton Steel town heavily affected by the steel and aluminum tariff. No kidding. I want to know what Hamilton is thinking. And we have nothing, not a cricket of polls coming from that area. And me as a data nerd, I’m like they have tariffs on their stuff right now.
Jenny:
No kidding.
JB:
And people are losing their jobs in that town, not temporary layoffs. I want to pull there, I want to pull Oshawa with the auto workers. Just a bunch of auto workers just got laid off. I want to talk to them. I want to talk to New Brunswick and the fisheries who are now getting tariffed from a lot of stuff.
Jenny:
Well, and oil and gas has been tariffed 10% as well. So people aren’t talking about this. There’s a lot of stress in the industry. My son is actually looking to be a welder and their job search is N right now
JB:
For him. And that’s why I want to pull Grand Prairie and I want to pull Fort Mac. I know it’s going to be conservative, but I want to see if there’s a story there of shedding votes to Liberals for the first time. I have a friend who lives in Grand Prairie and they told me they’re seeing not a lot but more red signs than they typically see these big pollsters. And I have mad respect for all of them. They do good work. They mean well, they’re doing what they need to do, but they don’t regionalize it because they just don’t have the technology and resources to do it. So what smart voting is going to do is use technology in our favor and get this data into the ether and say we’re not going to do national polls. We’re going to do targeted regional polls, topical based off of what’s currently going on in Canada and in the world and
Jenny:
Fantastic.
JB:
I think that’s going to be very valuable data for people. It’s really going to paint a good picture. And that’s what our mission and our goal is on top of trying to get true electoral reform in this country, but to give people data that they need to see
Jenny:
And we need electoral reform. I’m just adding a question that was asked here. Apparently not a lot of younger generation in the early voting turnout. Yeah, great point. So can you speak to that
JB:
Please if I may? Because I trucked my butt over to my early voting location today. I didn’t vote today. I vote on election day. I make it a thing. I bring the kids, we make it this whole thing because my parents dragged me to polls when I was a kid and I really actually enjoyed that. And that’s what actually got me really engaged in politics. I digress. But I went there and I talked to the wonderful poll worker, a nice old lady. I asked her, I have to identify myself as a registered person with Elections Canada. ” And I said, “Can I ask you what’s turnout been like?” I live in a rural urban town north of Toronto. We’re considered GTA, but it’s conservative, thick and thin. And I’m driving around town, driving my kids to school, taking them to swimming. There are a lot of red, there’s a lot of red and I’ve never seen this much red in this town. And RNP is a conservative and if Pierre was to win will probably become a cabinet minister. He’s in that caliber, very popular.
And I said to her, I was like, I’m looking at the line and it’s lined up around the corner, out the door. And I’m like, and it’s young people, it is young people. And I’m like, what’s turnout been like? And she’s like, “I’ve worked polls for the last 20 years in this town early and on election day. She’s never seen it this busy.” I spent the morning down in Kitchener Centre, like I said, and we went to an early polling center there, very young talent in general and young talent lined up at the door and around the corner, all young people and families with their kids. And it gave me sort of hope that the youth are going to turn out this election. And I think it’s because of, as you said, young people are having a hard time finding jobs. There’s this uncertainty of building homes and when am I going to get into homeownership? Am I going to be even able to pay off my student loans when I get out of university? We’ve seen campus turnout to be higher than ever right now. I would challenge that maybe in certain regions we’re not seeing youth turnout very high, but in the GTA, which, sorry, Alberta, we got the most seats. Okay, Ontario has 124 seats. I can’t control that.
We are seeing a lot of engagement. I’ve never seen this many lawn signs in the GTA at all. And I’ve lived here for decades. And one more point I will say is back in my hometown up in Ottawa where the two leaders are running Carlton and in Nepean, I was talking to my friend who lives in Pierre’s running in Carlton and he told me, he’s like, I’ve never seen this town this politically engaged and this is Ottawa. This is the capital.
Jenny:
Right.
JB:
Politically engaged town as it is.
Jenny:
Well, there was a…Markham Hislop who’s a friend of mine that hosts a podcast. He had a conversation with a pollster and he was saying this swing between the Conservatives to the Liberals is the biggest swing in Canadian history. Which is what he was describing, and potentially in the world. This is big, it’s never been seen before. The swing that we’ve witnessed.
JB:
This election, regardless of what happens, who wins is going to be written in papers. It’s going to be studied by academia. There’s going to be books written about this thing. Mark my words because once this is over and the numbers are out there, I am sure every political science class across this great country is going to be heavily analyzing every point of this. And 1.1 area I really want people to watch on the night of the 28th when they tune in to see the results is Ottawa. And there’s a very good reason for that one. Both leaders are there. Two, this is the first federal election since the convoy. Lemme tell you something, somebody who’s from that town who has people personally affected by what the convoy did, the wounds are still open and the people of Ottawa want revenge. They’re like, I didn’t like this.
Jenny:
No kidding. Well, it was criminal, let’s be honest.
JB:
It was criminal. I didn’t tell people this, but I covered the convoy quite heavily on my social channels. I have a channel that I post stuff on and I tell people I was in Toronto that time, but I was on the streets of Ottawa. I was watching people. I went home, spent time with my friend who lived right downtown and we were out on the streets every day, not protesting, not supportive of the convoy, but just there. And we ended up having to go stay at his uncle’s because the horn noise was too high and it was torture. It was torture. And the people of Ottawa have not forgotten that they are tired of this. And Pierre gave coffee and donuts to these people and this city, that city is going to be one to watch because those wounds are still open and I think turnout in Ottawa might even eclipse. 90% people are ready to go there.
Jenny:
Very cool.
JB:
Which is crazy to think that we could have a region with a 90% turnout, but we’ll see.
Jenny:
No kidding. Wow. I’m excited, JB, I’d love to do a follow up after the election.
JB:
Let’s do it.
An Example of Successful Strategic Voting: the UK
Jenny (51:25):
Thank you. Okay. I did want to say one more thing, and this is a bit of a different… same topic, but a little bit of a reach. You helped me remember I wanted to talk about the UK and France if we can quickly.
JB:
Yeah, absolutely.
Jenny:
Because so it’s my understanding, again, I’m not a political person, I told you that, but geophysicists, so France I understand got the first minority government ever, is that right?
JB:
They’ve had it before, but they have coalition rules. So if you don’t get a majority, you have to make a majority. So they are forced to coalition in some capacity, not at the presidential level, but at their regional levels they have to do that.
Jenny:
And then the UK as well. And actually you struck the struck chord with me because I was looking at their results and when you look at the age group distribution of who voted for the Labour party, it is primarily the youth came out to vote in the uk is what I interpreted
JB:
From that big time. Huge, huge numbers.
Jenny:
Can you talk a little bit about how they did that? Because there was discussion. I thought I remembered hearing that there were candidates that actually dropped out of the race.
JB:
Want to know, this is going to sound very full circle, but you want to know how the UK had such a high youth turnout? They had a conversation on strategic voting and there’s been a lot of academics in this country that have spoken out against what we’re doing and the work that we’re putting out. They say strategic voting doesn’t work and I always rebuttal, let’s talk about the last UK election, an election where the conservatives were in power for, in my opinion, way too long. Then you had the reform party that was being pesky and annoying and potentially could take some seats and the social Democrats, which is like their NDP, their Greens and their labour party basically didn’t formally sit down and make an agreement, but there was an unofficial agreement between voters that if the labour is supposed to win in your riding, vote labour. If the social dems are supposed to win in your riding, vote soc dem for the Greens vote Green. That was the understanding and the youth understood that assignment and they showed up.
Jenny:
It’s like the GameStop thing, but in voting almost.
JB:
Yeah, it was unreal to watch. I covered the UK election live on my socials and I was like, I’m going to be up until [late], it’s a six hours difference. I’m going to be up until very late in the day. I was done by five 30 in the afternoon because it was like, it’s called labour majority. I can go on with my day. It was just this consensus and I’m hopeful, hopeful, cautiously optimistic I think is the better word that that’s going to be the case next week. I think we are 10 days away from this thing seeing reports from across coast to coast to coast of the early voting numbers just in every corner of this country being four hours. We got a report from somebody in Montreal about the early voting, and it took them four hours to get that pen on a paper. That’s incredible. And they looked around and it was all young people and families and middle class individuals just enjoying their day off. It’s a beautiful day in this area of the country too. It’s 22 degrees. I’m seeing people walking down the streets in my small town with their voter cards in one hand and their kid in another hand going to vote. And statistically speaking, early voting favors progressives. That’s the numbers.
Jenny:
Right.
JB:
Some vote conservative, I’m not going to say they don’t, but early voting overwhelmingly favors progressive voters or vote parties for candidates. I’m optimistic that we will be able to have a UK and I’m optimistic that Canada will make the right choice this year. We are at our deciding point. I’ve been telling my American friends, they asked me what the point, what’s, what’s the importance of this election for you guys? I’m like, this is our 2016 for you guys. You guys had to make a choice. Now you picked Donald Trump. Bad choice, but this is our point in time where we are going to tell the world that we’re okay with populism and hyper conservatism or we’re going to pick the boring banking dad. That’s the decision. And as somebody who had a boring dad, I look at Mark Carney and I go, okay, I am okay with him leading. Funny enough, fun story, if I may, I ramble a lot. When Mark Carney gave his victory speech and his daughter came up on stage and said, dad burns me CDs on my birthday still. My dad does that. And I’m like, ah, damnit, I’m going to be voting Liberal. That was my deciding point. I’m like, damnit.
Jenny:
That’s great.
JB:
That was my point.
Jenny:
I had somebody say they were voting for me for my Converse shoes, so I get it. As you were talking, I was thinking about how relieved I am to have somebody like Carney who’s stepped up to lead this country. So I’m really grateful for that and I’m grateful for this effort that you’ve done, JB. I think it’s necessary. We need a lot of reform. You said this, we need a better not first pass with post strategy in Canada. And we are not going to get there by folding down to two parties. So look at your riding, pay attention to the swing voting, make sure you know which candidate is leading and support the candidate that you know is going to at least lead us to a place where we can work together and be held accountable at the end of the day.
JB:
Yeah, I think that’s a very good point. And I want to make it also clear that despite you going to my website or you going to our website, I should say more work is done by more volunteers than me some days. But we go to the website and you look, see, “Oh man, I don’t want to vote Liberal.” And if you don’t want to go in and vote Liberal, if you still want to vote New Democrat or Green or whatever, even if you want to vote conservative, I will never shame anybody for voting. I think as much as I will sit at a table and I will vigorously disagree with a conservative, I will never be able to vote conservative in my life. I fundamentally do not agree with the things that they want to do. But I will never shame anybody into voting that way.
And I just want people to vote. And I want us to be able to vote in a system that is fair, that represents everybody, and I dream of a day that I can hit that big red button and just turn smart voting off forever where we don’t have to do this, we can just go and vote for who we want to go vote for. And people like you, Jenny, can go run as a candidate for the first time and maybe not win or maybe you do win. And it’s a really cool story and that’s what I want in this country. And that’s ultimately what smart voting is for not sticking it to the conservatives. It’s just we need to do it. We need a better system. And the only way we’re going to get this system is because the candidates don’t want to do it. The parties don’t want to do it. They say they do, but they don’t want to do it.
Jenny:
They don’t.
JB:
It’s going to take us doing it for them. And what this model does is it basically is proportional representation. In a nutshell, we are forcing proportional representation on the electorate.
Jenny:
That’s an excellent point. Well, thank you very much for this work and for your time today, especially that it’s a holiday. I appreciate it so much. Hope you have a great rest of your long weekend and we’ll chat after the election. Good luck.