At Issue - Can Mark Carney unify with a minority?

Episode Date: April 30, 2025

At Issue: Canada Votes edition | A tight race leaves the Liberals with a minority, the Conservatives with a seatless leader and a country divided. Can Prime Minister Mark Carney build unity in the face of unprecedented threats, and what comes next for the House of Commons? Rosemary Barton hosts Chantal Hébert, Andrew Coyne and Althia Raj.

On the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz comes an unprecedented exhibition about one of history's darkest moments. Auschwitz, not long ago, not far away, features more than 500 original objects, first-hand accounts and survivor testimonies that tell the powerful story of the Auschwitz concentration camp, its history and legacy, and the underlying conditions that allowed the Holocaust to happen. On now exclusively at Rom. Tickets at Rom.ca. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi there, I'm Rosemary Barton. This week on At Issue, the podcast edition for the day after the election, Tuesday, April 29th. My message to every Canadian is this.

No matter where you live, no matter what language you speak, no matter how you voted, I will always do my best to represent everyone who calls Canada home. This week we're asking what last night's results mean for the country and how will a new government unify Canada during a trade war? Chantelle Ibera-Andercoin and Althea Raj join me to talk about that. Plus what comes next in a drastically different House of Commons?

We all slept a little bit and now we have a firm resolve to liberal minority government. They fell short of the majority that they were seeking in those last days of the campaign. How does that complicate things, do you think, Chantal, for the prime minister? Well, unless he looks for a fight, which I don't believe would happen, it doesn't complicate things in the short or midterm. Why? Because the NDP with seven seats, no leader, and no money, no official party status is not about to go to a microphone to say, we're going to bring down this government. But the Bloc Québécois has also promised a year of support while this negotiation is ongoing.

So, and the Conservative Party is missing its best player in the House of Commons for the foreseeable future, at least until next fall, because Mr. Poliak doesn't have a seat. So, up to a point, it is up to Mark Carney to build those bridges and to do whatever he needs to do, but he doesn't need to beg, is basically what I'm trying to say. It was interesting to me that he did have a series of phone calls today,

and he called Pierre Poiliev and he called François Blanchet. And I wondered whether that, Andrew, is a sign that he does understand what he was talking about last night, which was humility and unity. Yeah. He's in a strong position, of course. We've been here before. This is, what, the sixth minority government in the last eight elections. And this is what you would call a strong minority government, very close to the majority. They can govern with the support of any one of the other opposition parties.

They don't have to go to cobble together two of them. And as Chantel said, nobody wants to go in an election at any time and certainly nobody wants to be seen to be forcing us into election. The public would have zero tolerance for anything of that kind. So while it was becoming of Mr. Carney to speak of humility last night, and as I mentioned last night, he in particular is probably a good person to be talking about that, because if anything, his reputation is the other way. But he's in a very strong position.

And as Chantel said, I don't think you've got a whole lot to worry about for the next little while, from internally anyway. Yeah. Althea. Well, I guess you need to compare it to what was the situation before. This is a much better House of Commons for the Liberal leader than if he had just continued on with Justin Trudeau's House of Commons for all the reasons that Shantana and Andrew have outlined. I will say that I think probably we won't see Pierre Pauly in the

House until next year because it takes... an MP would have 30 days after the writ to resign, so one of his MPs if he were to say run in Alberta and then the Prime Minister gets to call an election within six months, so that's an election in the fall, and then the House doesn't come back till January. So that's quite a long time. The other thing that I don't think New Democrats will be rushing to bring us to the polls

is a lot of New Democrats actually elected, or helped elect Mark Carney. So they don't want to see this government fall. And so you have all these kind of interests coalescing trying to ensure that this is at least stable for a short period of time. The conservatives don't want the government to fall within three or six months either because they only have their own house to deal with. And it's far from clear what's going to happen within that party. What kind of prime minister, I mean we saw Mark Carney be a

prime minister for what was it 11 days or something and he was, yeah, it was within that party. What kind of Prime Minister, I mean we saw Mark Kearney be a Prime Minister for what was it 11 days or something and he was, yeah it was really to launch the campaign and to you know send all sorts of signals and messages about what he was going to do. What kind of Prime Minister do we expect that he will be given the kinds of things he said on the campaign Chantal? More decisive, more quickly, also possibly to the discomfort of many of the liberals who helped elect, more to the right than the previous government and certainly more focused on the economy. Now, will liberals chafe under that kind of leadership? I don't think so. This is someone who took them from the brink and gave them

another government, so they're not going to have a choice. And he has very much control over the party and over the caucus, but I do expect it's going to be a bit different than the Trudeau era. Yeah, I would agree with the decisiveness factor that seems to be a characteristic of the Prime Minister's, the new Prime Minister. Andrew, what do you think? What do you think he, what kind of Prime Minister will he be or should he be? It would be another way to put it. Well, we're familiar with US presidents who want to come to office wanting to focus on domestic policy and get consumed by foreign policy. I wonder whether he'll find the opposite

case. I think that from the early signals he was giving off, he would like to be very much involved in creating new kinds of diplomatic arrangements, new kinds of economic arrangements, and of course the times very much demand that. But he may find he's got his hands full at home pretty quickly. We talked about he didn't have much to worry about federally, but he's got some provinces who are already knocking on the door, naming no Albertus, that are promising to make life difficult for him on that front. So yes, I think he's, you know, from what one reads he certainly is decisive. I think he's got,

one of the concerns I have is with him or with anybody like that, and we talked about this last night, the smartest guy in the room syndrome. Obviously, we don't want unintelligent political leaders, but past a certain point, if you're always accustomed to being sort of the answer guy, the person who can run rings around the people around you, it can impair your judgment. I mean, again, we talked about humility. One thing you need is intellectual humility, the ability to understand that maybe I haven't considered

every corner and every angle of this question and maybe I need to listen to that person who isn't as smart as me, but maybe has some useful experience he can draw or she can draw on. And so that'll be an early test is how well does he play with others? Althea? It'd be interesting to see who he decides to put

in his like real cabinet, because I think that was just a kind of, we needed to scrap that off the task list before the election, what ministers he will actually keep, what newcomers he will elevate. I think one thing that we can't forget is that basically, Mark Carney is Prime Minister because of Quebec, and so there will be a lot of attention paid to Quebec and Quebec now has I think a stronger hand not just the provincial government but the MPs as well to make more demands on Mr. Carney. And so there is a bit of I would say even concern within caucus that what they thought

they were getting with Mark Carney in terms of a kind of like light progressive conservative may not actually be how he ends up governing their concerns that because so many Democrats lent him his their vote that Quebec has such a strong position that you know we won't see the identity issues that Mr. Trudeau was concerned with but that maybe it's not going to be as center right as some people had expected. Chantal, last word to you. Can I just note that the current Quebec government on its second term is right of center by comparison to the federal liberals.

So the notion that Quebec voters are leftists who all voted for Mark Carney is kind of hard to sustain looking at the CAQ as the government in the province. It's a bit more complicated than that. And as for the identity issue, there's an election coming in Quebec, yes. But people who are not on the sovereignty side did note a big decline in black support, but also the fact that the PQ leaders spent the day telling you Francois Blanchet he ran the wrong campaign. So I'm not convinced that the vote that came to Mark Carney from Quebec was based on the notion that suddenly you would go into identity politics.

Well, that's not what I'm saying. I just mean that there is like there's a coalition here. There are new Democrats who lent Mark Carney their votes across the country in Alberta, for example. And then there are Quebecers who in large numbers voted for Mr. Carney, and he cannot ignore that. Yeah, there'll be expectations from Quebec. Yeah.

And that is why they elect majority CAQ governments that are right of center, the same voters. Yeah, quickly. So let's be careful with the characterization of Quebec voters as these leftists coming to storm parliament held with NDP voters who went to deliver. Okay, 20 seconds, Andrew. Just very quickly, the temptation will be to try to deliver some kind of knockout blow to the NDP, to lock up that vote, to forever lock them down. And if he expends too much capital on that and moves too far to the left in that pursuit,

he may find himself disappointed. There is a tribalism to Canadian politics, a party identification, a party loyalty that goes beyond reason, goes beyond ideology, and I think he really needs to be careful of that. I think the point Althea was making, though though was that Quebecers will have expectations of Mark Carney. Not that they're progressive or center right. I wasn't talking about Quebec, I was talking about the NDP. But just back to that point, that they will expect things from him given that they are the ones that gave him the...

Quebec voters by and large did not want, wanted someone to deal with Trump and did not want Pierre Pouillet. The only province where he was never popular. Okay. And unless you factor that in and make it a big, we're expecting great things to happen, you haven't read this place right. Okay, we're going to leave it there. When we come back, we will talk about Pierre Poiliev and what comes next for him. One opposition leader stepping down, another losing his own riding.

How is all of this going to shake down? That's next. another losing his own riding. How is all of this gonna shake down? That's next. Welcome back. Last night's race was a tight contest. Final results not coming until this afternoon, but the future of two opposition parties in question and perhaps two leaders.

Jagmeet Singh has announced he's resigning after losing his seat. Pierre Poilieff also lost his riding in Carlton. So what comes next for him? Chantel, Andrew and Althea. Althea, I'll start with you. What are you hearing about whether Piyarpolyev can stay on as leader, where he might run?

What are we hearing about the likelihood of him losing it? I don't know where he might run. I would suspect that he probably would pick an Alberta seat, but it will depend who volunteers to give up their seat. But he intends to fight. I mean, he made it clear to us publicly and MPs I've spoken to believe that he absolutely intends to stay. Somebody did mention to me, you know, Andrew Scheer and Aaron O'Toole also thought that

they could stay and that did not work out the way that they expected. So just because you want to stay doesn't mean that they will allow you to stay. I think he has a firm grasp on the party apparatus and on the membership base because basically these are the people that helped choose him as a leader in 2022. It's not yet clear to me what the caucus wants. We have a whole bunch of new MPs, many of whom are much further to the right. You have a lot of progressive conservatives that are still in this caucus that don't necessarily, you know, describe themselves publicly that way further to the right. You have a lot of progressive conservatives that are still in this caucus that don't necessarily, you know, describe themselves publicly that way, but are more

centrist and are very uncomfortable with the way Mr. Poliev has been running things for the last few years. So will they take advantage to kind of demand change? The other question is really how much change do they want? As far as I know, there is nobody in the wings within that caucus trying to take over his job and that's probably the thing that will save him because he was agitating in the wings to take over Aaron O'Toole's job. There is no such player that I can see at the moment. Chantal? The history of leaders who want to stay and are unseated is that they are unseated from the

outside and not from within caucus and that is what happened. Jean-Christophe Sein was on the outside when he got the better of John Turner and so was Brian Mulroney when he got the better of Joe Clark. So if you're going to look for challenges and people who operate on that basis look outside and for some reason I don't know why the name Malarone comes to mind. A different generation. Beyond that Mr. Poiliev has been running his caucus with a stick because he held carrots and those carrots were cabinet seats, appointments when the government became conservative. He's lost all of those carrots and that stick won't work. So he is going to adjust big time to a new situation.

One he has never had to put up with since he's become leader and I'm not sure how he does that. Andrew. People will put up with ideological differences. They'll put up even with personal humiliation if they think you're a winner. Mr. Puyer did the best he could on the election night to point out, yes, they've made some gains in seats.

Yes, they had a higher popular vote than before. These are the arguments you make when you lose an election. And I think once the smoke is cleared, it's going to dawn on people that this election they thought they had in the bag was lost, that the reason they lost it had a lot to do with the unpopularity of the leader and with the strategy that the leader endorsed. So is he safe for the short term? Probably. I imagine Jenny Byrne may not belong for this world politically. In the long run, he is weakened by this for the reasons we've been talking

about. I think at some point people start to exploit that. I was struck by on the night the two-track message that came out of the conservatives. One was Mr. Pagliaver giving that lovely statesman-like speech, and the other was Jameel Javani declaring holy war on Doug Ford at great length, which I suspect was neither spontaneous nor unauthorized. People have ideological differences within the party. Those are fissures within the party, but those are also just pure sort of warlordism, and people will not have taken kindly to that kind of attack. And let us remember also, it's not just Doug Ford that he's at war with.

It's Tim Houston in Nova Scotia It's the Red Tories. It's it's it's some of the SoCons he's he's built up a lot of Inventives that he could afford to roll over or ignore when he was everything was running his way But as Chantel said when things aren't running your way so much then some of that starts to come come due Okay, I gotta leave it there for our Tuesday edition. We're still doing a Thursday edition. I regret doing it for me. So I'll see you in a couple of days. Thank you all for that. That is at issue for this week. What did you think of the election campaign? What do you

want to see from Mark Carney's government? Let us know. You can send us an email, ask at cbc.ca. Remember, you can catch me on Rosemary Barton Live Sundays at 10 a.m. Eastern. We'll be back in your podcast feeds on Thursday. Thanks for listening. For more CBC podcasts go to cbc.ca slash podcasts