At Issue - Can Trudeau afford to ignore the Bloc’s ultimatum?

Episode Date: September 27, 2024

At Issue this week: The Bloc Québécois threatens to push for an early election if the Liberals don’t top up seniors' benefits. The Conservatives boycott Bell Media for misrepresenting Pierre Polievre’s comments. And the Speaker of the House denies a debate about naming MPs implicated in the foreign interference report.  Rosemary Barton hosts Andrew Coyne, Althia Raj and Aaron Wherry.

My name is Graham Isidor. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see

about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. This is a CBC Podcast. Hey there, I'm Rosemary Barton. This week on At Issue, the podcast edition for Thursday, September 26th. The Bloc Québécois has offered to support the government so long as the Liberals meet their demands. Between now and October 29th, we could come to the conclusion

that they have not used the time being offered them to successfully go forward with the projects. But pressure is building in a rowdy House of Commons, including a sharp response from the Prime Minister to what he called homophobic comments from the Conservatives. Mr. Speaker, standing up to bullies requires us to call them out on their crap sometimes. That's what I would do. But it had nothing to do with sex. I wasn't thinking about sex at all.

So this week we're asking what's to be made of the bloc's offer. Can the Liberals afford to say no? Andrew Coyne, Althea Raj and Aaron Wary in for Chantal Hébert join me to talk about that. Plus Pierre Poiliev calls out Bell Media for altering a quote. There's two things we want to talk about here both the substance and of the what is going on in terms of the debate or negotiations, and then the tone. And I don't know which one is more important to all of you, but let's start with the blocks ultimatum. And Althea, maybe I'll start with you on that, on how real that is and whether you think they are likely to get any movement by October 29th. How real their demands are, yes.

Are they likely to get movement? Likely, I think, is the short answer to that question. So essentially, and we've talked about this a few weeks ago now, but there are seven opposition days that the House, the Liberal government has to hand to the opposition. Already two have gone to the Conservatives. They can get rid of the next five before that date actually so they could just string the block cubic wa along and then they would be in like free zone until the spring if they back end them so there's like strategic games they could play we are told that they actually are negotiating on one part which is the part where the block wants OAS payments to senior is aged 65 to 74 to increase by 10%

to match what is currently being given to those 75 and above. That's a very expensive proposition that would cost annually more than $3 billion a year. But the Liberals seem willing to trade on that. The other part that's perhaps even more controversial, but kind of getting into the weeds, is a bill on supply management. Now, both these bills are private members' bills from the Bloc, so they want to win, but it's also like very crass partisan politics, vote-getting in Quebec, that also the Conservatives and the Liberals want. But most of the MPs from the political parties supported the supply management bill.

In the Senate, there is strong opposition because it is a terrible bill. The bill basically binds the hands of the foreign affairs minister. It says you cannot trade any quota, any tariff room on supply management, which means that if you're entering a negotiation to try to expand territory for other goods, you wouldn't be able to do any dealing. Right now, they have done dealings, but they financially compensate the farmers that are in the supply management scheme. So there is strong opposition, and the Liberals have made it an independent Senate. It's not exactly clear where the Senators are going to go.

Okay, and I don't want this to devolve into a thing about supply management, although I know some of you would like that, Andrew. Where do you think that leaves the liberals in terms of having to accept or negotiate with the bloc to survive at least the fall? Well, let me say, first of all, they're both really bad ideas, really crass politics, basically ransom notes. I'll leave supply management aside. We know how bad that is. But the ransom they want to pay for people over 65 is to a group that already has a lower rate of poverty than the general population. There's a reason why the over 75s have a different rate than the under 75s, because the older you get, the more likely you are to have depleted your savings. This is an extremely expensive payoff that generations to come are going

to have to pay. I don't quite see why the Liberals need to deal with them. For the Liberals to go down, all three opposition parties have to vote at the same time, or in this particular case, they're going to have to get not only the Bloc to vote against them, but the NDP. The NDP doesn't want to do that. The Liberals may need to do some deals with the NDP, but I think the NDP could be bought off far less expense than the bloc. For the simple reason that the bloc is prepared to go through an election if they don't get what they want, whereas the NDP would not be. Okay, Aaron, and then I want to switch to the antics in the House, Aaron. Yeah, I mean, I think it's fair to describe it as a ransom note, but I think that's just what

happens in minority parliaments, especially when there isn't something like a supply and confidence deal around. You get these hard deals being driven and you get what you know Bob Ray once referred to as blackmail. And in this case I think you know I think Althea and Andrew probably are broadly right that the the these may not be the best things for the Liberals to pursue at this moment but I don't know that there's necessarily anything standing in the way of them doing it. And not knowing what they may be negotiating with the NDP, this might be the easiest path forward.

I mean, the supply management bill, at the risk of being cynical, some future foreign affairs minister could always just repeal that legislation and then negotiate a trade deal. And the majority government, yeah. True. On the pensions, I don't, it is $16 billion over five years is not small money. So I would wonder whether there's some negotiation to be had there. But it would not at all surprise me if the bloc ended up getting, you know,

maybe not everything they wanted here, but at least 75% of what they wanted here. Okay. So let's put aside the substance, which was very interesting, and talk about the sort of the tone, which I think we're going to be talking about now every week, because it does seem to be degrading week after week. What did you make of where, what we heard both on Wednesday and then again today, Thursday, Althea? Well, they're acting as if they're already on the election trail. The Conservatives have been acting like they're already in power, like they think that it's a certainty that they will be elected with a strong majority government. They're teasing the Liberals across the aisle saying,

which one of you will be left if there's 35 MPs here? So you can understand why tensions are running high. That doesn't excuse the use of homophobic language in the House or alleged because some people deny that what they meant to say had that intention. But it has made things a lot more tense. And then the Liberals have decided to engage the Conservatives in a more aggressive manner, which also has increased tensions. I mean, we were just talking about before we came on air about how even Elizabeth May, kind of like her tone, she was more angry than she normally is in the House too.

So it just feels like how can we sustain this for possibly another year without it actually turning physical? I hope it doesn't go there. And I don't know is the answer to that question. But you know, things can change external events and come in and bump things off the agenda. And then everybody calms down. But that is a good point there, Andrew, like the sustainability of this level of discourse, which is kind of in the toilet at this stage. Well, we've been complaining about

this level of discourse for a long time. So it is sustainable. I think in this current instance, there's blame all around. The Tories have gone to town on this thing with the New York City Council as if this was the biggest expense ever, etc. So they were teeing it up in ridiculous terms. I actually don't, from my read of it, I don't think anybody lobbed a homophobic remark. I think the Prime Minister misinterpreted. But then he took it to town and disgraced himself, frankly. And I think we should also mention there's part of the consequences.

I don't want to put all the blame. But we have a Speaker of the House who has lost the confidence of much of the House. And I think you can see it every day. He has real trouble asserting his authority in this House. And I'm not sure what to do about that. Yeah, and like far be it for me, and we've all been around for a while, to say that this is the worst it's ever been, I'm certainly not going to do that because I've seen it pretty bad.

But it does seem, there's something about just the level of conversation happening in there that at least lets me know that an election is, you know, it's going to be quite nasty I think and quite ugly, Erin. Yeah, and I don't think you need to conclude that it's worse than it's ever been to come away with the observation that it's bad, and it shouldn't be this bad. You know, regardless of whether or not the comment that was made by Garnet Jenews was homophobic, I think we can all agree it would be childish. It would be fair to describe it as childish, and I think there's one thing about the House of Commons is that it has a remarkable ability to turn grown adults into children. And, you know, I don't know that this

is necessarily sustainable, but I also know that, you know, laments about the tone and tenor in the House of Commons have been going on for a long time. And I just don't know that there's enough of an incentive for people to curb their behavior to actually lead to change. You know, it would be nice if politicians thought less about short-term political gain and more about potentially doing long-term damage to the institution. But, you know, on a day-to-day basis in question period, that doesn't seem to be front of mind. Let's just remember a larger context here is people behave in an undignified way that lacks self-respect when they don't have meaningful work

to do. If MPs were bigger deals, if MPs had real work to do, if MPs had real responsibilities and real power, sure, you'd still see political barracking, but I don't think you'd see this kind of childishness. This is the behavior of people who are essentially pawns in somebody else's game. Well, if they didn't have social media, I bet you they'd be a lot better behaved as well. The Conservative leader ripped into Bell Media this week after its media outlet, CTV, edited a clip to alter his words. Pierre Poiliev's party is now boycotting the network. I know that the media has worked hard to try and avoid me saying the words carbon tax as

we saw in the extremely dishonest and fraudulent report from bell media controlled ctv should tell you that ctv did apologize for uh the error or what they did and they have also now announced today that they fired the two individuals who made that edit so let's bring everybody back andrew althea and aaron. I mean, there's two things going on here about Pierre Poiliev's approach to the media. He was also blaming the CEO or suggesting the CEO was somehow involved in a journalistic decision or, in this case, mistake. Andrew, what do you make of how he approached this, which, let's be clear, was a mistake? I mean, that's not how you edit material and certainly shouldn't have been done to Mr. Poiliev's words. Well, let's be clear, was a mistake. I mean, that's not how you edit material and it certainly shouldn't have been done to Mr. Polyev's words. Well, let's hope it was just a mistake. So there's the particulars of this incident and then there's the larger game that's

being played. Particular incident is, you know, the one thing just to take a remark out of context, people sometimes make that error. To have spliced together, as it appears they did, pieces from different parts of a media scrum, to have him saying a sentence he didn't say, I hope there wasn't an actual intent to make him look bad. I don't think we've seen evidence of that, but it's certainly an unforgivable mistake, particularly in the current climate. But even before this, Pierre Paul Yeager had been ranting about,

sort of as if the president of Bell Canada had a vendetta against him or he had a vendetta against the president of Bell Canada, and that somehow this particular incident, you know, it was almost connected as if the president was dictating edits down the line to the production room at CTV, which is just preposterous. But look, you've got a party here under its current leadership that has gone in heavily on conspiracy theories, whether it's the World Economic Forum or the WTO or vaccine mandates. And they're particularly fond of conspiracy theories that involve the powers that be ganging up against them, and particularly, of course, the media. Well, if you're in that game, part of the playbook is

you try to discredit anybody who's calling you out on it you try to discredit the the fact checkers you try to say any everybody else is lying except us and so um that's the larger game that's being played here it is a catastrophic contribution of this for ctv to be for a person at ctv or people at ctv to have actually played into this but the larger game here game here is to encourage their followers to believe everybody's lying to you except us. You can believe whatever nonsense we're putting about, and the only people you shouldn't believe are the people in the media.

Yeah, I mean, when I went back and read Primal Rooney's memoir when he died, I was reminded that the conservatives, progressive conservatives in that case, really had a difficult relationship with the media as well and suspected the media was against them. Stephen Harper had that same relationship with the media and now we're seeing it again. So how is this different, do you think, Althea, or potentially worse or more damaging or is it just sort of more of the same? I don't remember covering Brian Mulroney because I was too young, so I can't really speak to that. I just read a book, to be fair. The Harper PMO did not behave the way Pierre Poiliev's current team is behaving. I think

Andrew hit the nail on the head. This is about dismissing the mainstream media because they feel the mainstream media will be carrying the Liberals' talking points in the next election. And when you hear the mainstream media say, well, the Conservatives are not answering questions about whether or not they would keep dental care, which, by the way, is true, at least at the moment. They haven't said anything.

The Conservatives want to say, no, don't listen to the mainstream media. They are lying to you. And Andrew is right. That's what they're doing. In fact, that's what they're saying on Instagram. Like Andrew Scheer, the Conservatives' house leader, has that very message there. I do think, though, that the details are important in this case, and I want to take some time to stress them. First, CTV should never have done this. In this age of deep fake, it is really important that we maintain trust with the readers or the viewers, the audience, wherever it may be. And it is odd to me that they would edit tape without like a flash or a visual signal or audio signal that the tape had been edited. What is of greater concern to me is not actually

the tape, and I'll get to it, but it's the juxtaposition. The reporter was talking about dental care, and then they used a clip about carbon tax. These things didn't go together, and they were right to be called out on it. But the tape itself, this is how it was sliced. He said, that's why it's time to put forward a motion. That's how it was edited. And what he had actually said was, that's why we need to put forward a motion that is what they're actually livid about like i think that context is important because as andrew said this fits into a message track that they want to say but when you look at the words

itself it the reaction does seem a bit of an overreaction. But Aaron, that does speak to what Andrew's saying, is that this is about sort of pushing the idea of distrust in media, which, you know, people might have for all sorts of reasons. Yeah, I mean, I think, so first of all, I think there's a couple things here. One is that Pierre Polyev likes to have enemies. He likes to have opponents. He likes to be seen fighting someone or something. And so I think the battle with CTV sort of fits into that context. Look, you have to acknowledge that CTV made an error here. I think you also have to acknowledge that one difference between journalists and politicians

is that journalists generally correct their errors and own up to them. I think the question for voters to ask really is, you know, look, the media is not beyond criticism. The media is not beyond questions. But I think the question for voters then becomes, is this politician, you know, raising real concerns about the way the media is covering something? Or is this politician essentially attacking the media so that it's harder way the media is covering something? Or is this politician essentially attacking the media so that it's harder for the media to hold them to account

and hold them responsible and to challenge them and question them? Is the politician presenting a good faith argument about media coverage or are they really just trying to undermine the media's ability to challenge them? I think there's one other point we should make about this, and I think it's very significant, that while you ever went after not the journalists involved or the editors involved, but the president of the company, they are the point of vulnerability because they are susceptible to regulation, et cetera,

under whatever government is in power. I think there's signals being sent here to other media of watch your step. And the media got themselves into this by getting into bed with the government on the subsidy question, by going hat in hand to the government and saying, give us bailouts, and receiving that money. They've simply fueled this kind of suspicion. Anytime anybody now is critical of the conservatives or says anything good about the liberal government, the first reaction you get is masses of people saying, you're just doing this because you're bought and paid for.

We as an industry should never have gone down that road, and we're reaping what we sowed. Anyone want a quick last word? Yeah, Althea, quick last word. I guess two things. One, it's not lost on me that we are entering the last bit of the third financial quarter, so I think part of it is also some fundraising. I do think it raises the specter, though, when we talked about, you know,

the Conservatives getting ready to, like, measure the drapes, that there is kind of a list of retribution. There is, like, a chill happening among especially publicly traded companies. If you're going after, and Andrew's right, like, he's been attacking the stock in public tweets, which is really unusual, and we haven't seen that before in Canada.

At issue, the Speaker of the House has decided MPs will not hold a priority debate on how to release the names of MPs implicated in a foreign interference report. The NDP called for the release, saying the report left all MPs under a cloud of suspicion. So what's to be made of that decision? Are there other ways to make this information public? saying the report left all MPs under a cloud of suspicion. So what's to be made of that decision? Are there other ways to make this information public? Let's bring everybody back. Andrew, Althea and Aaron. Aaron wrote about it on Thursday, so he gets to start us off.

I think the premise from your piece is, why are we not talking about this anymore? And what are sort of the ways forward? Or maybe there aren't ways forward, Aaron. Yeah, if you go back to June, this was the biggest story in the country. Parliamentarians all around claimed to be deeply concerned about it. There were all sorts of accusations flying, and rightly so. You know, look, the National Security Committee of Parliamentarians had come out and said that there were these unnamed parliamentarians who had, you know, either been compromised

or willingly collaborated with foreign states. They didn't attach names to it, but, you know, it left the obvious impression that there were, you know, people who needed to be held account sitting in the House or in the Senate right now. And, you know, MPs sort of decided in their infinite wisdom that they would ask Justice Oge to try to solve this and take it up as part of the Foreign Interference Commission. And the commission essentially came back and said, look, we are not equipped to do this. We can't offer due process to anyone who is potentially named in this. And that leaves us kind of at a stalemate. And I think, you know, I think in an ideal world, if MPs took this seriously,

if they were as concerned as they claim to be about this, they could try to design a process that would allow for some kind of accountability, would allow for some kind of investigation. The fact that everyone seems to have dropped it, I think, is a tell about how seriously they took this issue in the first place. I mean, it is kind of baffling, Andrew. I mean, this has happened with other subjects, obviously. But where we spend so much time talking about something, there seems to be such real concern, you know, we go off on a summer break and now nobody's talking about it or very few people are talking about it anymore.

Yeah, well, we had this long debate about whether or not to release the names and the decision was made, well, we'll just entrust it to the Ogue Inquirer. And as Erin said, we're unlikely to learn much out of that inquiry because it's overloaded as it already is. So what's going to happen? Well, we're going to leave it to the parties, perhaps, to have a quiet word with somebody. I don't know we're going to see the parties do anything. On the evidence, they seem quite disinclined to turn over any of these rocks for fear of what might come out.

We do not have disinterested parties here. They are all potentially implicated. And so, you know, unless somebody takes it upon themselves somehow to release us to stand up in Parliament and read out the names, then I greatly fear the likelihood is that we're never going to find out what any of this happened. This is not stray rumours, this is not raw intelligence, this is something that went through the National Committee, the Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians, who have been working on this for months, if not years.

But it's also not confirmed. I'm not saying put anybody in jail on this. I'm saying it's serious enough and credible enough that we need to get it out and examine it, and that does not appear to be what's going to happen here. It's very similar to what's happening on the party nomination and leadership race question where there is serious evidence that these have been compromised at several points, where there needs very clearly to be reforms to the ways in which the parties run these things, where none of the parties wants to own up

to that, none of the parties wants to make changes to that. The only way we could actually get changes to that is by regulation but we can't get None of the parties wants to make changes to that. The only way we could actually get changes to that is by regulation, but we can't get regulation because the parties are the ones who have to pass the regulations. So we've got parties now that are not part of the solution. They are part of the problem of foreign interference. Althea, last word to you on this. So I usually tend to think that it's not malfeasance, but mostly incompetence that excuses things. And I think that the parties, to get to Andrew's later point, are just really badly equipped to deal with this,

and they actually don't know how. And the government hasn't really told them how. You know, there are other problems, I think, that we should flag about Elections Canada if we're going to get to that. I mean, parties can accept money from permanent residents and there's no way of checking whether or not the people who say they're giving money are the people who are actually giving money. Like there's a whole bunch of other things that we should also be concerned about. But back to this issue, NSICOP, the committee that Aaron was talking about, they're properly vetted. They decided that they were not going to name. And they left it for either law enforcement to decide to pursue or the committees and the

leadership, the rest of the members to decide to organize themselves. The reason we're not talking about it is because the parties want to talk about partisan politics. And this is not taking up the attention because our attention is focused on non-confidence vote and whether or not the government's going to live another day. If we were in a majority government, I actually think that probably MPs would be looking at this because it would give them something to do and they would try to think about how they can make a meaningful difference. I think that we have just kind of reached Parliament's best before date and I don't know that we're going to have answers if they're not going to come from an external, more neutral-like party. Okay, got to leave that subject there.

Thank you all very much. Appreciate it. That is at issue for this week. What do you think of the bloc's demands of the Liberals? Should the House debate naming MPs listed in foreign interference reports? Anything you think we want to know, you can send us an email, ask at cbc.ca. Remember, you can also catch me on all of your devices, screens, places where you watch things, on Rosemary Barton Live. It's on TV on Sundays at 10 a.m. Eastern.

Thanks for listening. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.