At Issue - Did the federal leaders’ debate change anything?

Episode Date: April 18, 2025

Major party leaders meet in Montreal for the English-language leaders' debate with less than two weeks until Canada votes. And event organizers are forced to cancel the post-debate news conferences over security concerns. Rosemary Barton hosts Chantal Hébert, Andrew Coyne and Althia Raj.

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Hey, I'm Rosemary Barton. This week on At Issue, the podcast edition for Thursday, April 17th. The Liberal government has weakened our economy with anti-energy laws. Mr. Poliev, you spent years running against Justin Trudeau and the carbon tax, and neither, they're both gone. Okay, they're both gone. And we're in a new... We're doing a pretty good impersonation.

And while these two can be about who's more pro-pipeline, I think what we need to do is, I mean, it's clear. The Liberals bought a pipeline, they built a pipeline. I don't know what Pierre is complaining about. You can't do something and the opposite. And you can't fill people's minds with nonsense. The ad issue tonight from Montreal for the English debates where party leaders are participating in their final debate

and making their final cases to Canadians with just over a week to go before election day. What's at stake for federal party leaders Chantelle Bair, Andrew Coyne and Althea Raj joining me to talk about what we saw at the English debate. Let's start with what we took away from tonight. I asked you that question last night. None of you seem to think that anything changed dramatically. Let's see what you made of tonight.

Andrew, I'll start with you. I think Pierre Pellier made some yards. I think he had a good night. He looked focused. He was confident. He was fluent, he presented his case well, he was not just a critic, but also outlining his own plan. So I think by the normal standards of how you judge these debates, I think he had a

good night. Mark Carney, by the normal standards, you would say, showed his inexperience. He comes across as a normal person, he seemed to be amused by the proceedings, as I think any normal person, he seemed to be amused by the proceedings as I think any normal person would. But a lot of the rules that govern normal human conduct don't really apply in a debate. In normal human beings, you defer if somebody interrupts you or you answer the question that's put to you or you direct your answer to the person who asked it. In debating, you don't defer, you just talk through the interruptions. You don't answer the question you were asked, you answer the question you feel like asking and you don't defer, you just talk through the interruptions. You don't answer the question you were asked, you answer the question you feel like asking,

and you don't direct your answer to the questioner, you talk straight to the camera. So by those normal standards, you would say his inexperience showed. The question is, how is the public going to measure that? Are they going to look at that and say, he wasn't as good a debater as Pierre Pagliaver, or are they going to say he sounded more like a normal person does? Yeah. Yeah.

And I think that is about the context the moment we're in, Chantal. I was interested in the fact, from where I was sitting at least, that Mark Carney and Pierre Poilier, and I do agree with Andrew that Pierre Poilier had a good night, but that in the end their exchanges dominated the debate. And so this debate does not move us away from the binary choice that this election is about, which is which of those two do you want as prime minister? I don't think that Marc Carney did anything to make people say he's just not ready for the job, but I think that Khabwalev at times showed a side of himself that he should have

showed earlier that probably made him more competitive in that kind of a contest. I did see a lot of pushback online about interruptions. And that pushback was largely centered on Jörg Mietzing and his attempts at interrupting. There was a lot of complaining about that, at least online. And I don't think that... Yves-François Blanchet brought his good game to this debate, but I don't think he found a handle to pitch himself inside the binary choice in a way that he probably would have liked or got to do thanks to the

moderator in the last election. Yeah. Yeah, I would agree with that. Althea, your thoughts on where we're at after that one? I'm not sure I'll change anything. I think if you're a partisan, you probably think that your man won, because they're only men. I agree that Pierre Polyev did a lot better tonight than he did last night.

There were a lot of missed opportunities from Mark Carney. He let things go unaddressed, things like Pierre Polyev suggesting that he's going to bring back the carbon tax after the election, the Brookfield stuff. I think Mr. Parniaf was good at planting seeds of doubt about certain aspects of Mark Carney's past or ethics or values that Mr. Carney chose not to respond to. I do think, though, that on the interruption and on Jagmeet Singh, frankly, Mr. Singh needs to interrupt because he needs to remind voters that he's still there and he exists. He's there, yeah.

The problem with this two-horse race at the moment is that nobody is talking about the NDP and frankly the polling has shaped the media narrative and the NDP has been squeezed out. And I thought Mr. Singh did a good job. He did a good job last night too, but he did a better job tonight of reminding New Democrats that he is there and that, yes, maybe they want Mr. Carney to form government, but it's important to have New Democrat MPs on that stage. And I think he reminded people why the debates are so important, especially for third parties and why it is kind of a disaster for the Greens that they were not allowed to be on that stage tonight as well. It's fascinating that so much of it of his needling and interruptions was directed at Pierre Paulieva rather than Mark Carney. If I didn't know better, I swear that they'd cut a deal because you know, Mark Carney could just kind of stand back.

Not yet, Andrew, not yet. Carney could just kind of stand back and rise above the fray while Chakri Singh sort of did his dirty work for him with Pierre-Paul Yavre. I will say, however, there's also a structural reason why I think this debate helped the conservative cause much more than liberals, which is everything about the liberal strategy throughout this campaign has been, it's all about Trump. It's all about the threat from Trump and it's all about who do you want in the sort of command post facing up against it. In this

debate that was just one issue amongst many and so the conservatives got to prosecute their case on a whole range of issues of housing and the economy and immigration etc. And frankly that's also to the public interest not taking sides there but we need to have debates around these issues and wouldn't it have been great if we'd had more than one debate in each language one or two days before the advance polls open? Yeah, but the point- The other thing that was really noticeable was the- Yeah.

Sorry, go ahead. No, you go ahead, Althea. Go ahead. Okay, so- Althea, then Châtel. Althea, then Châtel. Yeah. Mr. Folley, I've appeared more nuanced in some of his positioning on the CBC for example where you know during the rallies we've heard him talk about how the CBC headquarters in Toronto would be a wonderful place to have affordable housing and how he would like religious religious that thought and today we

heard him talk about basically the CBC moving to like a PBS style model where it would be a not-for-profit and people could donate if they wanted to. And so I think that that, you know, his goal was to sound more prime ministerial and look less like an attack dog that we've come to know in the House of Commons. And I do think that he succeeded in that. I do think that the liberals who want Mr.

who feel like Mr. Carney has this elder statesman will still feel like he accomplished that goal as well. Yeah, well, by definition, they have different roles and different experience. So so their strategies have to be different. The incumbent is never the one on the offensive in those debates. And that was no difference. those debates and that was no difference. But for this debate to change the outcome, you would have to assume that the NDP and the Bloc last night and the NDP tonight won back voters. And I think part of Pierre Poilier's strategy was to look more nuanced so that some of them would go back to the third parties out of less fear of him

being a prime minister. I also believe that Jokhmeet Singh wanted to show the new Democrats that he would be able to stand up to a Pyapoliev government by going after Pyapoliev this much. But at the end of the day, the dynamics of this campaign are so different, the different two days we see polls that show that the conservatives look like they're really back in the race. It might just push more of the people who have maybe considered going back to the NDP and the back in the liberal camp. So I don't think that this changed the outcome of the campaign. And I don't think we're going to know how it played out until we see more polls in three

or four days. Althea, last word to you. I think if you were coming at this cold, one of the things you might have noticed is how similar a lot of the policy offerings coming out of Mark Carney and Pierre-Polio Smouthorre. And the fact that we still, and I'm going to repeat this, I said it yesterday, that we still don't have a fully costed platform from the main three political parties is a big deal. And if we don't keep demanding it, I feel like this norm is going to be broken.

And then in the end, eventually, we won't actually even see fully costed platforms from any of the party leaders. Yeah. I mean, it's a big deal to us and it is a big deal. I just wonder, you know, these leaders also haven't done big mainstream interviews in English either. So I don't know, I don't know if the same norms apply. I'll let you respond to that quickly, Andrew. 30 seconds. Well, there's a lot of magical thinking going on, frankly, on all parties' side. We've got all parties or at least two parties in favor of unfunded tax cuts. You know, they're all in favor of supply management, which at some point has got to

go. They're all in favor that nobody wants to talk about defense and security in an incredibly dangerous world. So some of that comity amongst the parties is against the public interest. Welcome back with the leaders' debates over less than two weeks until Election Day now, and of course, advance polls opening tomorrow. What comes next? And can the candidates convince Canadians that they are the right leaders from the moment?

Let's bring everyone back. Chantelle, Andrew, and Althea. I want to get to that, the closing thought of what's going that they are the right leaders for the moment. Let's bring everyone back. Chantelle, Andrew, and Althea. I want to get to that, the closing thought of what's going to happen over the next 10 days

or so. But I want to do one quick round, if we can, about what has happened a little bit here tonight with the scrums, the opportunity to ask leaders questions being shut down because the commission couldn't

guarantee safety and security, frankly, inside the media room and the several altercations that happened here and elsewhere. What has this done now to the credibility of the Commission, Chantal, if anything? And is that something that Canadians should be concerned about? I do think Canadians should be concerned about the commission that has organized them sets of debates three times in a row and has managed to have screwups every single time. This time beating every other time the debates as far as they went were fine. But let's be serious. The people who made them fine were the moderators.

Steve Bacon tonight was really good at what he was doing. The rest of it though, excluding a party at the last minute, the Green Party, the changing the time because you don't think that the hockey schedule that is available in July matters when you set the time of the French debate, and the decision to give accreditation to a half a dozen people from media organizations that the federal court has said are not legitimate media organizations in the definition of the term and then being surprised at what happens. I mean, the rebel news in true North, it's not that they're from the right, they're from one, the extreme right, and two, they are registered with Elections Canada as a third party group that publicizes stance on issues in this campaign. I don't think the Star, the Global

Mail, or the CBC is registered as an intervenor in the campaign. So you kind of wonder what kind of due diligence do people on the Commission who earn a fair bit of money and have a nice budget to do this do to arrive at tonight's mess? Andrew? All of Chantel's points are well taken. I do want to accentuate the positive for a second. These are two of the best federal debates I can remember in terms of the format and the content, particularly the English language debate. So I think you have to give the leaders commission, if they're going to take the sticks and arrows

for the things that went wrong, I think you have to give them some credit for that. But clearly, yes, I'll particularly- I will just say, if I can just interrupt you though, that is actually a pitch that was made to the Leaders Commission and they accepted the pitch and the pitch was done by CDC and you cannot judge just to be clear. It was also how we used to do debates before the commission. Yes, that's right. That's right.

Okay, Andrew, sorry to interrupt you. Go ahead. That's okay. But particularly on this question of admitting the rebel news, et cetera, into this thing, I think we've now seen the last nail in the coffin of any idea that these people are just sort of alternative media or independent journalists or anything resembling them. These were bully boys and thugs. These are performance artists.

These are grifters. They rely on the technique of basically staking out a completely unhinged partisan position and then say that anybody who disagrees with that is just simply partisan in another direction. Journalists have our faults. We make all kinds of mistakes. We struggle with our job, but we are at least trying to be fair to people and trying to look at the things in the round and to present as accurate a picture as we can of what went

on. They're not even trying, and that is the difference. Althea, last word on that part. There's so much on this. I actually think that we need a leaders debates commission. I will remind everyone again that the reason that we have this debates commission is because Prime Minister Stephen Harper decided that he did not want to go to the consortium debate in 2015 and there was no consortium debate. And so instead you had, you know, at least we had debates in 2015 and we had a whole bunch of them, but we didn't have like one big accessible debate to everybody across

the country. And I think that's important. I think there's a lot of problems with the decisions and that this, the staff at the commission have made and should they be resigned? Probably. I mean I do think that excluding a registered political party with two elected MPs in the House of Commons the morning of the debate is insane. The fact that they accredited five reporters, really activists as Chantel rightly pointed out, they are registered third-party

advertisers with Elections Canada. So they have registered themselves saying that they are going to be engaged in the process advocating for issues or political party. I mean, that's not an independent journalistic organization, even if that's what they call themselves. The fact that they didn't do due diligence and decided to accept that many people when they had told the mainstream media that one reporter, one photographer, that was it.

There's a lot of questions to be asked, but let's not throw the baby out with the bath water. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, I think we all agree it was two good debates and that is a credit to, yes, all the people that put that together and good for Canadians. I have about 30 seconds to each of you. good debates and that is a credit to, yes, all the people that put that together and good for Canadians.

I have about 30 seconds to each of you. The next 10 days, could something still change? I guess is the question, Chateau. For the Bloc and the NDP, it's time to retreat to where their strengths are to try to protect their holdings. You talked about the mainstream interviews with the party leaders. I think probably both Mark Carney and Pia Poyev

probably would benefit from doing those in the last week. Well, that's great. I hope they call me because that was my offer to them. Andrew, 20 seconds to you. First time I would be a little nervous if I was a liberal strategist at this point. They're still there to lose. But the polls have been softening for them a bit, and I was struck by Carney's closing

statement when it was all about Trump. It sounded strange to me after everything we just heard for the two hours previous to it. The saving grace of them is Trump will probably do several crazy things between now and election day, which will remind people of the threat. But just that first tinge of nervousness if I was a liberal. Althea? Trump will probably do some crazy things between now and election day, which will remind people of the threat. But just that first tinge of nervousness if I was a liberal. Althea?

Well, what happens next is that the political parties are going to try to pull all their votes at advance polls over the weekend, all the people they've already ID'd, so it frees them up to try to convince other people the next few days. And I agree with Andrew, frankly, anything could happen and it's most likely to come out of the White House. But you never know, there could be another global event that impacts things and change things. And the Liberals should not be too comfortable. Yeah, nobody should be measuring curtains or counting chickens or any of the rest of it.

That's at issue. What did you think? Has it helped you to decide who to vote for? Or are you more confused than ever? Let us know. You can send us an email at ask at cbc.ca. You can catch me on Rosemary Barton Live Sundays at 10 a.m. Eastern. We'll be back in your feeds next week. Thanks for listening.