The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - What's Trending with Voters in the Ontario Election?

Episode Date: February 14, 2025

Will healthcare, housing, or tariffs decide the upcoming Ontario election? Host Steve Paikin asks Erin Kelly, CEO and co-founder of Advanced Symbolics Inc., what Polly the A.I. pollster has to say about the state of the race so far.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Time now for a check in with Erin Kelly, CEO and co-founder of Advanced Symbolics, Inc. to find out what Polly, the AI pollster, has to say about the state of the race so far. Always good to have you in that chair, Erin. Great to be here. Well, of course, with the election being called 16, 17 months early, in the dead of winter,

I'm hearing from lots of candidates that nothing's going on out there, right? People are not home, it's too cold for campaigning. What are you picking up online in terms of engagement levels? Believe it or not, because I thought the same thing. I thought people were checked out of this election. The engagement is higher this period before the election in this election than it was in 2022. How does that make any sense? Well, people are online talking, maybe they're not opening their doors, maybe they don't want to talk to the candidates.

That's possible. But they're definitely talking to each other and having lots and lots of debates about how the province should move forward, what the issues are, and what they would like to see. That is very encouraging. What are the top issues that people are talking about? Tariffs, and not just tariffs, but Ontario's economic future and economic development,

health care of course, but many, that's a minefield, public safety, and infrastructure. So there's actually a lot of issues and a lot of deep, deep discussions in all of those. Infrastructure as in, should we build a highway underneath the 401 or a tunnel under the 401? Infrastructure as in, our infrastructure is crumbling, what should we be prioritizing, feeling that the priorities haven't been where people want them to be up to date, you know, that we need roads, not spas, not, you know, luxury places, a lot of those conversations. So yeah, there's, in each of those topics, there's lots and lots of conversation taking place. I know Polly is very sophisticated

as an artificial intelligence thing. But is Polly able to disaggregate information as in, here's what people in northern Ontario think as opposed to eastern, as opposed to southwestern, as opposed to, can she do that? Yeah, absolutely. She can. So are there differences depending on where you live in the province on what you think the key issues are? Yes, yes. So if you're in say the GTA infrastructure is really important in rural areas we're

seeing in addition to tariffs and economic development we're seeing that's where the public safety because they don't have the feel the ambulances and the firefighters and things like that in rural areas that they need, health care as well of course and access to it, but different needs than what you see in the city. So yeah, there's different conversations happening in different parts of the province and among different demographics as well. Let's look at the leaders. Do you pick up stuff on Pauley which suggests, yes, Doug Ford is good on this, but not so good on this?

And what are the this and this in that case? Doug Ford specifically? Yeah. With Doug Ford, people, it's experience, basically, political experience, the fact that he's been there, he's been through a crisis before. They see him as competent at managing crises and that's a lot of what we're seeing today. So just for him it's really it's not any one thing in

particular, it's many little things that he's doing and especially in this campaign that's getting him ahead. Does he have an Achilles heel that you're picking up? He has many Achilles heels. OK. Want to make a list? Yeah. It's a polarizing thing.

So depending on the topic, so health care is an Achilles heel. And many different little topics in there, such as long-term care, acute care, there's lots of those things. I would say that's as that's as big as Achilles' heel. Do you pick up a desire by the public to increase significantly the amount of money we're spending on health which is north of 80 billion a year already?

What are you hearing? No. Really? Yeah it's a very, so healthcare, that's why I mean it's a minefield. So even something like doctor shortage, right, which a lot of the candidates are campaigning on, only about 65% of people feel that we have a doctor shortage, which maybe the candidates would be surprised at that. A lot of people are saying, we don't wanna throw money into a system that's broken, because then it becomes

an endless pit. So good money after bad. Right. Yeah. So fix the system. And so we're hearing people say things like, use the right professional, health care professional, for the issue you have. Like if you're a healthy 25-year-old, do you need a doctor, or do you just need somebody

who can run regular tests to make sure you continue to be? Healthy and then practitioner might do the job exactly or people saying pharmacists all that kind of thing People want to do more home health care They want more people are saying look the doctor's office hasn't changed since like the 1980s when they remember going there as a kid The doctors aren't primary care physicians aren't investing in new technologies because the system doesn't really incent them to do that. And so we're not seeing that progression and so fix the system so that we get better technology, more efficiency, and better use of health care practitioners before you decide to just keep throwing money into it. This may be an obvious question but is there a relationship between how

much money you make and the party you tend to support? As in, do better off people tend to vote conservative and less well off people tend to vote, I don't know what, NDP, Liberal, Green, you tell me. Well, there's a trend, but it's not that one. It was interesting. So, NDP and the Green Party are especially, so Mike Schreiner is skewing the highest on income and interestingly enough those people like him because of his advocacy for for the for the poor so he's got the bleeding-heart liberals and then Merritt Stiles also trending in people make between you know 150 200 thousand household income and then Bonnie Cromby and Doug Ford are fighting over that middle class, with Doug Ford doing somewhat better with young people

in that middle class than Bonnie Cromby is. Younger people leaning conservative is a fascinating new trend, isn't it? Yeah, we see it in the states. We saw it here in the past provincial elections as well, young people voting for Doug Ford. In this case, he's actually courting them quite well because he's talking about the stimulus package which appeals to young people that want those jobs.

And federally, Pierre Poliev was picking up a lot of young conservative supporters. Affordable housing and they're getting in not through mainstream media but through channels that young people listen to. Doug Ford put a baseball cap on and it said Canada's not for sale and he was on the front page of all the papers and got a great deal of attention, you know, pushing back against this notion that we're about to become the 51st state. How much has that bolstered his appeal among voters? Not a lot. Not in terms of the vote. It got a blip when it happened, when he did it.

But compared to other things, like his experience and leadership, it didn't have a big effect. So that was a moment. It was a moment. But it passed. It was a passing moment. Interesting. OK.

We are, I guess, while we're more than halfway through the campaign right now, not much time left for the opposition parties to try to change the channel if that's going to happen. Maybe it won't happen. Does Polly point to anything, I don't know if it's an issue, or if it's a strategy, or whatever, that the opposition leaders could

do in order to get people to take a second look at them? Because at the moment, you know, Ford's in first place in every polls and looking like he's going to march to the finish line pretty easily. Yeah, and we see him going that way as well. So for Bonnie Cromby, we're seeing a lot of people are feeling that she's a lot like Doug Ford. I mean, she doesn't have her own brand.

She's a fiscal conservative. She says that. So there's not enough distinction there. So if she were to come out, for example, she's gone strong on healthcare, tackle some of what's less, we're seeing less conversation about the innovation in healthcare, she could really forge a path for herself there by saying I'm thinking differently. She needs to think differently because people are saying well she's sort of Doug Ford without the cronyism kind of thing, without the RCMP investigation hanging over her. So they don't see a difference in her approach

or her beliefs or her values. So she needs to parse that out again a little bit more. And Merritt-Styles, it's really amplitude. People who know her like her, but she's in an echo chamber. She's not reaching, we have a metric we call new voices, are new people talking about you. Bonnie Crombie is reaching new people but Merritt-Styles is in a little bubble. Does the leaders debate on Monday night, televised province-wide, present a

significant opportunity to change the narrative of this campaign in your view? Yes, yes especially for possibly for Merit Styles because right now we see a lot of the people that are talking about Merit Styles are already NDP supporters. They're getting their information from NDP sites, from NDP channels and she's not getting out of that so I think the debate will have hopefully a good opportunity for her to reach a new audience. And just in our last 30 seconds here the mainstream media and the way they have covered the campaign, what impact?

That's interesting because when we looked at Bonnie Cromby, for instance, we saw that where a lot of people were referencing mainstream media articles about her from the Toronto Star and various places. But when we looked at Merritt Stiles a lot of the information that they got on her platform came from NDP sources. We did not see a lot of engagement. Now I don't know if that's because she's not getting the airplay on mainstream media that Bonnie Cromby is, maybe her team is not as good at getting out there, or the articles aren't interesting enough for

people to talk about them. I don't know what it is but the like I said, she's in that bubble, and she's not bursting out of it. Bonnie Cromby seems to be getting a lot more airplay, or maybe using mainstream media much more effectively. Well, debates are usually the moment in the campaign where people start to really focus a lot more. And they do present an opportunity. And we'll have the debate here on TVO 6.30 PM Eastern Time Monday night. I hope people watch, as I hope they watch

you Erin, whenever you come in here. Thanks a lot for making the track for Ottawa. Thanks Steve.