At Issue - Defiant Trudeau brushes off caucus rebellion

Episode Date: October 25, 2024

The National's At Issue panel breaks down Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's decision to lead the party into the next election after 24 MPs urged him to step down. The government announces sweeping immigration cuts. Plus, what lessons should Ottawa take from provincial elections in B.C. and New Brunswick? Rosemary Barton hosts Chantal Hébert, Andrew Coyne and Althia Raj.

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hey, I'm Rosemary Barton.

This week on At Issue, the podcast edition for Thursday, October 24th. Trudeau's leadership, the prime minister confronted in caucus this week by a group of MPs calling on him to step down. But less than 24 hours later, he says he's not going anywhere. We're going to continue to have great conversations about what is the best way to take on Pierre Polyev in the next election. But that'll happen with me as leader. Some dissenting MPs say it's too soon for him to respond.

Kind of given a date of October 28th to come back to the group with an answer and that's a pretty quick response. I think he needs more reflection. This week we're asking are the Liberals united behind Justin Trudeau and have those caucus issues been resolved for the leader? Chantelle Hebert, Andrew Coyne and Althea Raj join me to talk about that. Plus, what will changes to Canada's immigration system mean? Another Thursday where I was very anxious to hear from all of you about where we're at. Chantal, let's start with you. Do you think that this is over for Justin Trudeau, that he can stay in his job?

Well, unless the group that has apparently signed a letter whose signature they will not even show the prime minister has some way forward, then that's really not clear. I think that if they wanted to know if Justin Trudeau was open to the possibility of not leading the party in the next election, they got their answer in form and in substance. And why do I say in form? Because I think it was clear from Trudeau and the PMO's actions over the past 24 hours that no one was interested in letting the impression that the prime minister was maybe pondering leaving take hold. Hence, he shows up for that news conference on immigration, where he will undoubtedly be asked and says, I'm not going anywhere. That's not a surprise, but I think the fact that he would not give it the weekend was meant to send the signal, I'm not going anywhere, and I'm not going to give the

impression that I'm even rethinking my decision to leave the party. So when he said, because when he was at caucus, he said, I'm going to stay in the job, but I'll also think about what you said. Presumably that might upset people a little bit, Andrew, that he only took 18 hours to think about what they said, or maybe he'll still think about it, but he's still not giving up his job. I think he took 18 minutes, probably. Look, the people behind this don't seem terribly well organized, don't seem terribly confident.

They certainly seem very fearful of the way they've gone about this, of, you know, everybody tiptoeing about not revealing their names and using secret passwords and what have you. So the prime minister certainly either is confident of his position or wants to look confident of his position. The only thing I would say is I don't think anything's been resolved by this. I don't think the people who are determined to see him go are likely to change their opinion. I don't think him staring them down at caucus is going to make him more popular with the public anytime soon. And I'm struck by one thing, which is why exactly are the people around the prime minister so hesitant to have a secret ballot of the caucus? If they are

quite sure that the caucus is with him, wouldn't that settle this once and for all? And so that's the only thing that gives me pause, even within the caucus, is it may be more a matter of people not wanting to stick their necks out than any actual broad-based support for the prime minister. The other thing I would mention is that petition for what it's worth, the code red from people in the party and membership at large may or may not be an ominous sign we'll see but you know this thing could spread out of caucus if you start seeing uh uh riding executives uh speaking up then things could get uglier for the prime minister because he can't corral them as quite as easily as he can the caucus but i don't

know whether that's the case or not yeah when we asked the person behind that petition about it i mean 10 names was sort of suggested to us so i don't know that that's the case or not. Yeah, when we asked the person behind that petition about it, I mean, 10 names was sort of suggested to us. So I don't know that it's picked up in his team. Althea, do you think that the dissenters here are just going to leave this alone when Monday rolls around? Some will. Some will not. I'm not sure. I do kind of feel like this week was like their one chance to get their main point across.

And some of the people who came to the microphone asked for things that are to happen later, like a secret ballot vote. That was not the suggestion was not to have that on Wednesday, but to have that in the future. I'm not sure that if there was a secret ballot vote, the prime minister would be able to win a decisive majority. But I think it would basically be like half and half. That being said, when Aaron O'Toole had a secret ballot vote, he was very confident that he was going to win because he had verbal support from people. And, you know, 30 MPs at least stabbed him in the back and voted against him in that secret ballot. So that can go any way. And I think that's why the prime minister's office is not completely confident that he could win. And that's why they, you know, we're kind of like lining up people to talk against it if that came

to fruition. I think a lot of people are just discouraged and they there is another group though that feels like it's too late even if he walks away it's too late to introduce a new leader to have a campaign that would be winnable and so why not just let him wear it I think there's lots more to talk about that, but I know you have a question, so I'll stop talking. No, that's okay. But you're, I mean, that is sort of where we're at, whereas if he's going to stay, then he's going to have to wear whatever happens in the election. Has it damaged him further, though, Chantal? I guess that's the question, too. Well, it can't help. When the party that is the government looks divided, and when

it's consumed by these kinds of discussions about its own leadership, it's hard to tell Canadians to continue to have confidence in Justin Trudeau when his own MPs are going around in circles about, you know, if only he would leave. I want to go back for a second to that petition. It is much like the MPs' letter in the sense that whoever is running it is saying that they will not show the names of those who signed it except to the party president in some other instance. So I'm not so sure what these secret bonding sessions with signatures are meant to accomplish. Is this a new ritual? But if you really want to take down your leader, you don't do it in slow motion like we watched all week

and like we will be watching. And I say that. I don't know about that. I mean, the Paulul martin john chris anything happened in pretty slow motion uh yeah but that was a completely different setup sure yeah and they did have someone that they wanted to put in johnson's place yeah yeah that's right slowly i think it could be the roots of something i think there's a few things. First of all, the prime minister is going to say he's going to stay until the moment he announces he's going to go. So I think we need to, like, park that aside.

The way he said it was very dismissive of what had happened on Wednesday. And I think that's what ruffled a lot of feathers. I think the answer about why he's staying hasn't been answered to the public. And it certainly hasn't been answered to MPs even in that caucus session. Like at what point do you look at the polls and say okay I'm not the right person to lead you clearly. I will step aside. Somebody else can at least do better than me. That's the answer that MPs want. At least some MPs want. That question hasn't been answered. The other thing that's important to remember in this context is there is no mechanism in Justin Trudeau's Liberal Party to actually get rid of him until you get a leadership review at convention. We don't even have a date for the next convention.

One assumes after the next election. There is no reform act. There is no petition to the party executive. There's no mechanism in the Constitution for that. Basically, there's a system that would happen if he dies or becomes incapacitated or steps aside but in order to like a recall there's no mechanism for that there's no mechanism but if 24 mps stood in front of a tv camera and said this guy's got to go i'm guessing that that would pretty much set it in motion or he says those guys need to go. Seriously, if those 24, whoever they are,

decided to walk and sit as independents, it would tear apart the government. Basically, that government would really have to count on both the Bloc and the NDP to pass any legislation. It makes no sense. And there's no appetite for that. There are three things that are keeping this prime minister or any prime minister in place. One is the terrible dread of going through the process of removing him.

Ultimately, you could find some way to push him out, even though there's no mechanism prescribed, but it would be a war without rules, without benchmarks, without standards. Nobody knows what would be the end of it. That's what the Reform Act really did was spell out the rules so you make it more certain and more swift. Secondly, even if you could do that, then you have to go through some elephant time process to elect a new leader at vast expense, vast divisions within the party, etc. And thirdly, each one of these MPs is absolutely terrified to stick their necks up because the powers of the leader, Prime Minister in particular, but party leaders in general, are so severe, particularly of

course, that they can refuse to sign the nomination papers. No other countries, Democratic countries, parties work that way. We have handed so much power to party leaders. And that to me is the context in all this, is watching all these MPs running around absolutely terrified of the consequences of this. This is demeaning. These are the people that we elect to represent us in Parliament, and they're behaving like the backstair servants in some Transylvanian count's palace, terrified of the consequences if they say boo to them. At issue, immigration shift.

The Liberal government is making major changes to immigration in order to stabilize population growth and address the housing crisis. Immigration is vital to our future and as a federal government we have to make sure that that pride, that faith in immigration is not undermined. Polls have shown Canadians are increasingly concerned about immigration and the opposition leader says the changes are coming too late. Trudeau has suddenly admitted that radical, uncontrolled immigration and policies related to it are partly to blame for joblessness, housing and health care crises. So how big a reversal is this for the government?

Let's bring everybody back. Chantelle, Andrew and Althea. Althea, I'm going to start with you on this one. This is a big shift that the government tried to explain today. What did you make of how they were justifying the changes? Well, they were not very transparent in the sense that they didn't say the real reason they're doing this is because this has become a political handicap for them. It is a political response to a political problem. I'm not denying some of the facts at issue here, but the way this has become politicized has become a really big handicap for them going into the next election. About two years ago, I asked at the time the immigration minister, now the housing minister, Sean Fraser, about this,

and he was very dismissive. And frankly, the conservatives at the time were very dismissive either, because no one was tying immigration to housing yet. But then as people's insecurities have become obvious with affordability crisis, with housing, trying to get health care, these are not problems that really at its root are caused by the number of new immigrants we have seen. It's just that they have become a target for a lot of the insecurities that people feel. And that's why that's the response that we're seeing. And none of this is going to address any of the asylum crisis that we might see, because that requires a much more appropriate response from the government and governments, provincial and municipal. And that's

not part of today's numbers. Andrew, what did you make of it? Was it the right thing to do, the smart thing to do, either from a policy or a political perspective? No, not as far as they went. I think it's a vast overcorrection. There's no doubt there were problems in both the temporary foreign workers and the visiting students programs. They seem to be more or less out of control.

There are design problems in themselves in that they open people up to exploitation and being taken advantage of. I think tightening up those programs was certainly recommended. But where this sudden 25% decrease in the permanent resident program comes from, I'm not sure, except as Althea says, it's a political reaction to a political problem. That's troubling both from a policy perspective. We have an aging population. We have runaway health care costs. We are going to have a relatively smaller and smaller number of workers relative to our retiree population in the future.

So we need every spare person hour of work we can find, whether it's from immigrants or from people working later in life or working more hours in the week. So it goes against that, and I think for no particularly good reason. The problems we have in our housing system, in our job market, in our health care, have to do with the design of labor markets, the design of capital markets, the design of our health care system, problems that way predate any recent surge in immigration. Population pressures have exacerbated that, perhaps,

but they've also pointed us towards actually fixing these programs in ways that we haven't been prepared to do for 30 years. So there's policy questions. And then in the political side of things, it seems to me it just signals weakness and desperation. It basically says that this government can be rolled on this to such an extent. What can't they be rolled on? And if I were the opposition, I'd be smelling blood on this to such an extent what can't they be rolled on and if i were the

opposition i'd be smelling blood on this so what can they not be rolled on i think it was about this time last year that we were discussing the sudden discovery that carbon pricing shouldn't apply to home heating which was another brand policy of the Liberals that suddenly was being tweaked for no reason other than the impression that politically it would be the smarter move. Of course, what happened there is if you're really going to not want carbon pricing on your heating bill, you might want to vote for the guy who will take it off entirely, which is exactly what happened. So I think up to almost a year ago, and I'm going to talk about the politics of this,

I think you can argue the policy on both sides, i.e. if your health care system is under pressure and your housing system is under pressure, and you keep adding more people who suddenly find that they can't get those services or that housing, you're compounding the problem. But from the political point of view, I think this signals the end of a long period where the Liberals believed that they were going to trap the Conservatives under Pierre Poiliev into being the anti-immigration party. And they were going to stand on their soapbox and say, see, we are the immigration open

party, and they're trying to close the doors because they are the people that they are and they don't have the values that we have. Well, lo and behold, a majority of Canadians outside Quebec now feel that there are too many immigrants. So what do the Liberals do? Now they have tried to erase the difference between the Conservatives and the Liberals on immigration, because I believe that Pierre Poilievre's reaction today speaks loudly to the fact that he would probably do the same thing, not more of it, but not

less of it. So basically, he said, they've wrecked the system, let's have an election. They may have hoped to neutralize the issue. Me, personally, I believe that an election that is run on the theme of immigration is a dangerous exercise. So on that basis, I'm not unhappy yeah and i think andrew and then quickly and i think we should say i've had my criticisms of pierre poirier and oftentimes he's inclined to you know amp up the heat and the intensity and issues i think he

has been dare i say statesmanlike on this issue he has not uh tried to to demagogue it he has not you know amped up the hysteria. If anything, he has followed the public mood on this rather than tried to drag it along with him. And, you know, we've often heard there's going to be a terrible backlash and immigration would be this terrible hot button issue in our politics. And so far, that really hasn't happened. Althea, last word to you. I would say to Andrew's point, yet. I think the reason that we saw Mr. Polyev respond the way he did is actually because if you broke down the math, I think Mr. Polyev's numbers actually would have been higher than what the liberals did. So they were going to have negative population growth for the next two years. That's pretty surprising. And I don't think anybody expected that. Certainly not the Conservatives. I do think, however, that there is a strong group of people within his own caucus and Conservatives writ large across the country

who actually have a very negative view of immigration and immigrants and believe that we are spending too much on newcomers and we should be spending more on the Canadians that are already here. And we do hear that a lot from caucus members, I also think there's an undercurrent of racism. We don't try to say that on polite television often, but certainly there is. Nobody is attacking the Ukrainian immigrants, for example, in that discussion. And so I'm not convinced that this is still not going to be an election issue, and it might still turn pretty ugly.

At issue, provincial elections. B.C. and New Brunswick are the most recent provinces to face an election. And while the results in New Brunswick led to a majority for the Liberals... The New Brunswickers made it very clear what kind of leadership they want for our province. A tight race in B.C. has held held up results but might see the BC Greens play kingmaker. Any lessons from these races? Let's bring everybody back. Chantelle, Andrew and Althea. Chantelle, you're in BC doing the panel tonight so I'll let you start just because it was extremely, I mean we still don't actually know the final results. We might know this by the time the rebroadcast of this goes

to air on Saturday. But just like some fascinating results, both in B.C. and New Brunswick. And of course, there's an election in Saskatchewan on Monday. So, of course, me, I look at those results from a federal perspective. And I would say that regardless of the final outcome, the New Democrats took something of a beating. And in part, they took something of a beating at the hands of a conservative party that did find some of its momentum and Pierre Poiliev's momentum in B.C. So my conclusion, the larger section of Jagmeet Singh's caucus, including him, hails from BC. I don't think that the appetite, the limited appetite of the NDP for a federal election will have grown over these results. And if anything, do you really want to ask your campaign workers in BC who have just been fighting tooth and nail for a result that they would have found disappointing to start again in a federal in New Brunswick, I think there's something completely

different there, and maybe a yellow flashing light for Pierre Poilievre. Blaine Higgs, the outgoing premier who was defeated earlier this week, said that he was staking his political career on parental rights in the gender identity debate. He believed there was a winning card, and many conservatives believed that going and signing or defending parents by not allowing young people who want to make those choices to make them without their parents being told. I don't think the results speak to that as a winning card for conservatives. I think the sight of a young person fighting to figure out where he or she wants to be versus white males in power who are coming down with the law on them, I know who loses looking at those two pictures.

Well, indeed, Bert Lane Higgs lost his own seat as well. Andrew? I think there's two things that you could say about the difference between the two election results. One is right-wing populism may be a more effective strategy as political strategy for an opposition party trying to get into power than for a government trying to hold on to it. It's innately disruptive, it's innately, you know, oppositional, and it's a hard thing, it's a hard act to sustain over time. The second thing is governments, whether they're of the left or the right, that get too far off of where the public center of gravity is can pay the price.

Under the previous NDP government, under John Hogan, was essentially a much more centrist party. I think under the current leadership it's moved quite far to the left. It used to be one of the most soundly financed governments in the country. It's now heading towards having some of the worst fiscal futures ahead of it. And I think that left an opening, even for a party as far to the right as the B.C. conservatives are. As an old pollster once told me, when people are determined to get rid of the government, it doesn't matter who the opposition is,

and it doesn't matter how many crazy things some of their candidates might have said in the past. Althea, last word to you. I think it's hard to say exactly why people voted the way that they did, because we're obviously not in people's heads and we're not with them at the voting booth. There is not just across this country, but the globe a huge push against incumbent governments because of the affordability crisis because of high interest rates and inflation and housing and immigration and a whole bunch of other issues and it doesn't matter what the political stripe of that government has been we've seen it in the UK we've seen it in France, like people are just upset with the government of the day. I do think that in Atlantic Canada, conservatism presents itself differently than as Mr. Higgs was trying to

present it to New Brunswickers. And I think that when you have a leader that campaigns on the bread and butter issues, safeguarding the health care system, investing more in it, in education, sound fiscal management. These are things that people gravitate towards. And it is different what you can fundraise on and what your own party's members might be energized by and what the general electorate is energized by. And I guess at West, I do wonder if the BC Conservatives had taken a firmer stance on some of the more controversial comments by candidates, if more British Columbians would have seen themselves in that party and whether or not that would have helped them. That was all very smart for a very short segment, but you gave me lots of things to think about.

Thank you for that. That is that issue for this week. What do you think about the changes to the immigration system in this country? Do you think that Justin Trudeau needs to stay or go? 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 right back here on your podcast feeds next week. See you then.