At Issue - Carney’s first moves

Episode Date: May 2, 2025

At Issue this week: Prime Minister Mark Carney’s new minority government faces multiple challenges, but where should he start? What’s next for the Conservatives and Pierre Poilievre? Plus, can the Green Party find a role on Parliament Hill? Rosemary Barton hosts Chantal Hébert, Andrew Coyne and Althia Raj.

In the summer of 2019, Scott Payne wanted to join a white supremacist group called The Base. But Scott wasn't a neo-Nazi or a right-wing extremist. He was an FBI agent. They hit me back and said, we'd like to have you. And of course I said yes. I'm Kathleen Goltar and this week on Crime Story, Scott takes me into his 28-year career as an undercover operative. Find Crime Story wherever Scott takes me into his 28-year career as an undercover operative. Find Crime Story wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hey there, I'm Rosemary Barton.

This week on At Issue, the podcast edition for Thursday, May 1st. Now, well, I think we're gonna have a great relationship. He called me up yesterday, he said, let's make a deal. He's a very nice gentleman and we, he's going to come to the White House very shortly, within the next week or less. This week we're asking what are Carney's priorities for his first week in office?

Chantelle Iber, Andrew Coyne and Althea Raj join me to talk about that, plus what comes next for Pierre Poiliev and the Conservatives. I want to start with the priorities. We'll talk about the president in a minute but but the priorities that we that we would expect the prime minister to to do the moves he might make in these first days and weeks. Chantal. Oh the list is so long. Trump is a priority for obvious reasons. And I'm guessing that meeting is going to take place sooner rather than later. I don't expect a lot of substance out of it, but the format will matter. Very few people, I can't think of any, walked into that Oval Office meeting and came out looking bigger than they were when they came in.

Smaller has been the case or a confrontation has ensued. Then there is the, if we're talking international stuff, that G7 meeting that Canada is heading is coming up quickly. It's at the beginning of June. So time to, and when you're the host country, you're supposed to kind of try to tie it together. And that's a big task. Moving on to domestic issues. This is a prime minister who needs to present a cabinet. He's got new members. So he's got to figure out who does what in cabinet, he has to do it quickly. He wants the House of Commons to resume in May. He needs to prepare a tron speech, possibly and presumably a budget.

It is a minority government. He needs to talk or at least go through the motions of talking to opposition leaders, which he's been doing. And then he's got to talk to the provinces. The premiers, by and large, with a possibly one and a half exception that would be Matt Alberto and Saskatchewan, have been rather positive about this election outcome. But there is a lot on the plate of someone who has promised to do things like getting rid of interprovincial barriers by

July 1st. I don't think he's going to be taking a break until after Canada Day at best. Yeah, and he's talked to some of the premiers, François Legault today. I believe he talked to Scott Moe as well. So I mean, it is a huge agenda in a very short period of time, at least for this first part of it there, Andrew. Chantal, we gave a comprehensive list and still only scratched the surface.

Yeah, that's right. I mean, on top of which, you've got a deficit that's now in the 50 to $60 billion range. You've got the mercurial Mr. Trump. You've got a set of very high expectations that Mr. Carney himself has contributed to. A lot of his rhetoric during the campaign was, we're gonna build things at a speed that we've never seen before.

You know, we're going to build pipelines. Okay, nobody really defined exactly how they were going to get over the objections that had, you know, slowed down pipelines in the past. You know, these kinds of large projects and large promises are easy to make on the campaign trail but you're now plunged into the middle of this and let's remember no actual experience of government other than being in the Bank of Canada's job, which is by comparison orders of magnitude simpler, as difficult as that job is.

And among other things, Chantel mentioned this, he impressed me, let's put it that way, by a 23-member cabinet, but it was kind of just for show. It was a notion of a cabinet. Now he's got a cabinet that he actually governs with, and there'll be enormous pressure on him to increase the size of the cabinet and lose some of that reformist cachet. I'll be interested to see the size of the cabinet as an early indication of where he's going. Althea? I think cabinet trouble could come as early as late next week. I'll be interested to see the size of the Cabinet as an early indication of where he's going. I'll see you.

I think Cabinet trouble could come as early as late next week. He has an interesting challenge ahead of him because it doesn't actually know a lot of the new people that he's elected or even any of the old people that he's elected. In fact, that Cabinet I think only met once, the one that he selected before we had the election. That's going to be really key because of all the things that Andrew said that he wants to do on housing, for example, on energy. He needs to have the right people, the right mandate letters.

He doesn't even have a permanent chief of staff yet. So there's a lot of kind of like the apparatus of government that needs to fall in line. I will say, though, that he does know how government works. Like he has served at a senior level in the finance department. So it is an asset. And with the help of the former clerk, Jenna Charnette, around him, the team around him at the moment knows how to enact change should they choose to drive it. And I do think that there's two opportunities.

He has talked a lot about national unity and governing for all Canadians. He could pick apart the conservative platform and take some of the things that he likes from it that the liberals haven't already taken and put it in a throne speech. And also, Mr. Poliev on the campaign trail in the last few days was talking about how MPs don't need a summer break. They can keep plowing ahead and enacting legislation and change if they want it. So, maybe Mr. Carney can take, if he needs to pass legislation through the House, he could take Mr. Poliev's suggestion up and sit a little bit longer into July.

I personally would vote against that. I'm sure a lot of liberal staffers would as well. Chantel, you wanted in there. No, but the other thing to keep in mind, and I was reminded of that, it looks like it's just two months, right? But I've watched governments come in, and if you do not put the right people in the right places, including the PMO, over those first two months, you stand to lose your first two years. That's been the experience of incoming prime ministers. So the stakes in getting it right, right away, are really

high. And the fact that they, you know, even staffing inside the PMO is way up in the air, that kind of suggests that it's a huge challenge. And if you get it wrong, by the time you find your way out of those bad calls, a year and a half or two years will elapse. What about this Trump meeting? You talked about raised expectations, Andrew. It would seem that that is the case here as well, that Mr. Carney, Prime Minister Carney, has perhaps raised the expectations for this as well.

Yeah, I mean, and there's no one weird trick that's going to solve the Trump problem. You know he is what he is He'll say something on a Tuesday and then say the exact opposite on a Wednesday It's not clear exactly how many cards Canada has to play in these negotiations. It's not sure what they can negotiate It's not sure if he did negotiate it that Trump would actually live up to it So I agree with Chantel I think it was he said that this you know this is mostly just going to be an exploratory, get acquainted, try to set some ground rules for the discussions, and it won't go much further than that. Can I just add, I think one other interesting

conundrum he's got is what to do about Pierre Pauillet's Parliament seat, assuming that something comes open, and that's a question for Mr. Pauillet to discuss, but I've seen at Argonne, and I think I agree with this, that it would be uh... assuming that something comes open if and that that's a question for mister plough to discuss but uh... i've seen it are and i think i agree with this that it would be better for him to try to get him in sooner rather than later uh... for me i would say part of mister carney's brand is i'm not quite the same hard-driving take no prisoners type of politician

i'm a little more old-school little more of that kind of fair play, you know, type of approach to politics. And I think it would be disarming in a way to rather than delay and play the usual game of keeping him out of parliament to bring him in. Yeah, I actually would expect what you're saying for him to do that, for him just to let him have the by-election, win the by-election and get in the House. But as we talked about on Tuesday, even that would take a couple of months. Just last 30 seconds to you, Althea. Yeah, that wouldn't happen until the fall because you can't quit within like 30 days

of the writ. On the Trump thing, you know, Mr. Carney may have raised expectations, but Mr. Trump has lowered them. So I don't think anybody actually thinks that there will be an announceable coming out of the meeting that has any substance. If anything, it's not going to be about like, oh, we have agreed on a pathway to negotiate a new trade agreement. I think it's going to be on tariffs.

I think that's the immediate threat. And if Mr. Carney can show any movement on the US tariffs, I think that that will be a huge boon and a bit of a surprise, frankly, to many of us. Okay, we're going to take a quick break. But of us. Okay, we're gonna take a quick break, but when we come back, we're gonna look more at how the Conservatives are responding to the results this week and the future of the party. We need to have Pierre in the House of Commons,

and the only way to do that is to have some kind of by-election. People believe that he can, you know, continue to grow this party and grow this coalition. I think the Conservative Party of Canada was very good at pushing people away, not so good at pulling people in. So here to break down what comes next for Pierre Poiliev and his team, Chantilly-Pere, Andrew Coyne, Althea Raj. The past few days, it seems as though the Conservative leader has been making calls, he's been reaching out, he's trying to talk to, I think, most of his caucus

ahead of a caucus meeting next week to figure out what they're saying, what they want. Althea, what is your sense of where we are a couple days now after the election in terms of his future and his handle on the party? He must be so busy because everybody I spoke to this week had spoken to him. That's good. That's what you got to do. So he wants to ensure that there are no surprises when he walks into this caucus meeting that has been called for early next week.

There is a suggestion that he might even call for a leadership vote right away within caucus to kind of like settle that question down and to encourage his members to actually adopt the reform act, basically saying, I'm not scared. The thing that Mr. Poliev has that is an asset is that there is nobody actually within caucus or actively outside caucus really lobbying to replace him. And so he does have this kind of clean runway at the moment. But there are rumblings within caucus about things that they want to see changed. And you saw some of the changes this week, for example.

They were conservative MPs doing interviews on the CBC, speaking to journalists. People feel a little unshackled, and they feel like they don't need, you know, there is no more carrots that will go with the sticks for another three years. So they have more liberty and they feel they can demand certain changes. There's a lot of anger directed at Jenny Burns, the campaign director, at the chief of staff, Ian Todd. I'm not sure how that is going to materialize within the walls of the caucus room, but there are a lot of unhappy people.

And then the one thing that I think is on the minds of a lot of people who are unwilling to say so publicly is that one of the reasons the conservatives lost, because they didn't win the popular vote this time, unlike 2021 or 2019, is actually because of Mr. Pueble's tone and approach. And yes, that drew in the PPC supporters and that vote collapsed. But that can only help you win so many seats if the NDP remains low and the opposition is divided. If they want to win a majority on their own merits, the tone needs to be different.

And you're hearing that even from the most aggressive MPs acknowledging that maybe they need to tone things down a little. And I wonder if they will ask Mr. Poliev to tone things down a little. We'll see. Yeah, and I think that's some of what the interviews are about too. MPs doing interviews again with me and others

here at the CBC and talking about things because they have felt that they weren't allowed to talk about some of the felt that they weren't allowed to talk about some of the stuff that they discuss in caucus and now they obviously feel that their ideas are maybe or should be more welcome. Chantal. No matter what people say on Tuesday, Mr. Poiliev is a leader on probation, as is any leader who does lose an election and that did happen. It is a problem or a weakness for him to

not be able to lead this party in the House of Commons for a number of months and a humiliation, I would argue. But there's also that when you look at the results, yes, they are not as bad as one could have imagined, but what they do show is this could have been won. And there are mistakes that will rightly land on Mr. Poiliev's doorstep. The absence of an economic team he could have built. The fact that he could have made peace with Premier Ford in Ontario, Premier Houston in Nova Scotia, and decided it wasn't in his interest. And the fact that he was told repeatedly that he was creating a backlash against his persona in Quebec that would cost him,

and he just doubled down on that attitude. So when you look at all this and you look at the fact that by the end of the campaign, Pierre Poiliev was less popular than the Conservative Party. You can survive one week, two weeks, stock well-dead and think that he was going to go down, and it took the time it took. I believe that in this case, Mr. Poiliev is vulnerable to an outside bid to unseat him over the next two years, and that the way he treats caucus may

determine whether he can survive that. Yeah. Andrew. Yes, he's probably likely to survive, but he's clearly weakened. I find myself in the opposition of being preempted by Mr. Paulyev because I was going to say, A, that they should hold the, they should vote to avail themselves of the power to remove the leader. They should then promptly have a secret ballot vote on it and they would very likely vote

to reaffirm his leadership. But it would be in his interest to show that he was getting out in front of this and not trying to hide from it. And it's in caucus interest to stamp the idea and the precedent that he governs with the consent of the caucus and can be removed at any time. And I think that will induce a little newfound humility in Mr. Palyaev that certainly when it was riding high, you know, that old showbiz adage of be careful how you treat people on the way up, you know, it can be pretty rough on the way down.

But they're still faced with this dilemma, which is not only that he pretty clearly cost them that election, both in terms of his leadership style and in terms of the strategic decisions that they made, but it's hard to see how he's going to improve on it in the future, particularly when you're looking at the situation with the NDP. One of two things has to happen for the conservatives to win. Either they have to keep the vote split between the liberals and the NDP, which he's not proven very good at, or they have to expand the base so that they can win in a two-party scenario. And he's not proven particularly adept at that either. So even if they're not going to get a different leader anytime soon, the leader has to be

different. He has to find a different gear and a new tone and a new voice and a new approach if he's going to have any hope of improving on this result. 30 seconds to you, Althea. So, yes, you can say that he cost him the election, but a lot of conservatives believe that he actually brought them to where they were at 40-plus percent. And so they see him as an asset. And I think Pierre Poilier showed us during the debates, for example, that he can strike a more adult, calm demeanor, less aggressive, no name-calling tone.

He did that during Timon Alpau as well. He did it in that speech where he was—that Caroline Mulroney introduced him, you know, addressing the Trump threat. He's capable of it, should he wish to do it. And he is disciplined enough, I think, to show that. But I agree on the vulnerability. And it will be very interesting to see who he picks as the interim leader. Does he pick somebody that continues the trend that he

has set? Or does he inadvertently give somebody a platform to kind of change the image of the conservative party that he no longer fits, like we saw with Ronna Ambrose, for example? Yeah, that will be interesting. I don't know if that will happen as early as next week, but I suppose it could as well. We're gonna take a short break. When we come back, we'll look at Elizabeth May's push for power in parliament and what comes next for the Greens. That's next.

This was an election that squeezed the smaller parties a lot. And we were not, we're not gone, we're not dead. So what comes next for this particular party? And can the leaders still fight for change inside parliament? Let's bring everyone back Chantel, Andrew and Althea. Chantel. Yeah, I mean, the Greens have struggled since their creation. And obviously, this election would be no different given as Elizabeth May said, what happened to all the parties, but it does seem

hard to see any path to growth for the Green Party right now. The Green Party actually did better when the government of the day, Stephen Harper's government, wasn't terribly interested in climate change. And it became more difficult with the Trudeau government and the various policies that it put forward. Now I understand that Ms. May would be interested in being the speaker of the House of Commons. She has expressed that interest in the past or even sitting in a liberal cabinet. And at this point, it looks to me like there's a crossing. There there are two paths yes there Elizabeth May's path

and the place of the Green Party and I'm not so sure that one jives with the other well yeah I guess that would beg me to ask the question though Andrew is the Green Party more than Elizabeth May at this stage because she has embodied it for for decades now for good or ill you know she was their ceiling their floor but also their ceiling, I think. I mean, the Green Party used to be a much more interesting party, frankly, before she took it over. It was sort of an interesting heterodox mix of free marketers and environmentalists, and it was hard to pigeonhole ideologically.

It became a pretty conventional, pretty predictable party that wasn't hugely distinguishable from the NDP or the left wing of the liberals, frankly. So I think they've got some existential questions now. Are they better off to move on to a post Elizabeth May era? She's obviously casting around. I'm a little dubious about her prospects for speaker. I think she enjoys a great deal of affection on Parliament Hill, but I'm not sure that

translates into support for her to be Speaker. Nobody doubts her commitment to Parliament and her passion for democracy. I think people may have reason to doubt her judgment. Althea? I don't know about judgment. I just think that most people believe Elizabeth May believes in democracy, in parliamentary democracy and the right of MPs to stand up and ask questions, but they also don't see her as like the most fun party person and a lot of, I'm sorry to say, but a lot of members are voting for a speaker that like will have dinners where they all get together

and drink and bond over friendships and I'm not sure that they want Elizabeth May as playing that role. Setting that aside, the color from inside the halls of parliament, I do think Sheldon raises an interesting point, which is, you know, Elizabeth May is one of the very few, I'm sorry to say, MPs who actually does her homework. She reads the bills, she will suggest amendments, she always does her homework. And that has given the Greens a huge platform for one MP. And without her, if she goes into the presidency, for example, who will speak on behalf of the Green Party?

I hope Mike Morris, who lost his seat but continues to play and engage with the Green Party, Paul Manley out on Vancouver Island as well. But she is the only person Canadians seem to recognize. And now, like every time there's a leader that leaves, she swoops in to kind of like pick up the pieces. That's right. But she also, I think, has been trying to leave for like several elections now and would desperately like somebody to come and be the follow-up to her. I guess we will find out in the weeks and months ahead if there's somebody that actually

wants to do that job because it's right now a pretty thankless job, frankly. You don't have a seat and they can't afford to pay you that much. So Chantal? That was the hope with Jonathan Pednau, the co-leader, who was supposed to be the face of the party on the debates. But seriously, even if Mr. Pednau had managed to be on the debate podium, he would not have won the seat of Outremont. Yes. And the results speak to that. So to get someone who is credible and electable and find a seat where that would work is going to be very hard going forward.

Yeah, and I'm not sure if being speaker solves that problem because then it kind of illuminates the presence of the great emperor. On the contrary, yes. Yeah, exactly. But if they had wanted to have him have a seat, they would have ran him in like, wealth, or like a seat that was potentially winnable, not in Tramont. Yeah, okay. Gotta leave it there.

That's at issue. The third one of the week. What do you think Pierre Poiliev should stay on as leader? Do you think the Greens can make a difference in the House of Commons? What do you think Mark Carney should tell Donald Trump? Let us know. You can send us an email at ask at cbc.ca. Remember, you can catch me on Rosemary Barton Live, Sundays at 10 a.m. Eastern,

back in your podcast feeds next week. Thank you for listening.