At Issue - Your political questions answered

Episode Date: January 3, 2025

The At Issue panel answers questions from across the country about the state of Canadian politics as we start 2025. Rosemary Barton hosts Chantal Hébert, Andrew Coyne and Althia Raj.

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. This is a CBC Podcast. Hey there, I'm Rosemary Barton. This week on At Issue, the podcast edition for Thursday, January 2nd.

At Issue tonight, your political questions. My question for the At Issue, the podcast edition for Thursday, January 2nd. At Issue tonight, your political questions. My question for the At Issue panel is. My question to the At Issue panel is. My question for the At Issue panel is. Here's my question for the At Issue panel. My question for the At Issue panel is. My question for the At Issue panel is. We are asking your political questions from a busy year. Thank you for all of your submissions. We've brought in Chantal, Andrew and Althea to help answer what you think is at issue. Let's get right into it because people really want your answers. Doesn't that feel nice to have people ask questions? Our first question is from Pat and Cheryl Hickey. What has our present government accomplished for over 65 but under 75 year old retirees?

Folks who've invested in a modest defined benefit pension plan that now renders them ineligible to access government-sponsored supports like dental care and pharmacare. Even while these retirees deplete their savings at a disheartening rate. Thank you at issue. That's kind of adorable. I will say I got a lot of emails from seniors when the government announced its affordability measures, particularly that rebate check that wasn't going to go to seniors. A lot of seniors were asking me, why aren't we getting anything? What would you say to our friends, Pat and Cheryl? Well, I'm glad they thanked us ahead of time because they may not thank me for the answer. But boy, what a specific question. Well, I mean, specifically, they've pushed back the retirement age for OAS, which they shouldn't have done. They made a much more generous but more expensive CPP, which they shouldn't have done.

It could have been done in much more narrowly targeted ways. The reason I say it shouldn't be done is seniors are better off than your average Canadian. They have the lowest rate of poverty of any demographic group. We've done everything to set things up for seniors. I'm not taking away from the specific complaints they may have in that specific situation. And if anybody's got the problem in the long run for seniors, it's not younger seniors, it's older. The issue we're going to be increasingly facing

is people outliving their savings because people are living so much longer than they used to in the past. So I wish I could be more helpful to them, but 65 to 75-year-old people are not the first in line in terms of problems in this country. Well, Cheryl and Pat don't like you anymore. Let's go to David Manjour with a question about a different age group. My question for the ad issue panel is, how are people ages 18 to 40 voting and how are political parties responding to this group? Thank you. Okay, this is a good question, because obviously the Liberals tried this year to pivot back to

young people. Last year, they tried to pivot back to young people. I don't know that that has worked. But what would you answer to that? Althea? Well, we don't know how they're voting yet, because we haven't had an election. Public opinion polls suggest that the Conservatives are leading in we don't know how they're voting yet because we haven't had an election. Public opinion polls suggest that the Conservatives are leading in every age group. So they're leading with young people and they're leading with a message on affordability.

Rent and housing has gone way up. A lot of young people are worried that they'll never be able to afford their own home. Precarious nature of work. This idea that you're going to have a job and have it for 30 years and then have defined benefit pension is something that people my age don't believe in and certainly younger people don't believe in

or don't believe that that will be there for them. So that message has resonated. You're right, the government has tried to pivot. We've seen the NDP also have a message directed towards young people. I don't know that it's going to be as successful as it was for the Liberals in 2015. But we do know that when young people decide to march in one direction, they can make a difference. At the moment, it seems to be landing with Conservatives. It's unusual for Conservatives to win the youth vote. Donald Trump, for example, did not win the youth vote in his recent election victory.

But 18 to 40 is a large fork. But 18 to 40 is when you want to leave your parents home and get an apartment, or when you want to buy a house for the first time, or when you suddenly have kids and a mortgage. So I think the bottom line, it has more to do with affordability, but it also has to do with branding.

Someone remarked, and I thought that's accurate, when Chrystia Freeland and Justin Trudeau show up at the grocery store, they say they're making a visit to the grocery store. Most people don't see the grocery store as a place to visit. They don't send the message, we get what your problem is because we live it. And on this, they're losing just the visual battle is lost the second they walk into that store, which they seem to find terribly exciting as opposed to most of us. I think it's important to note climate change. For a lot of young people, climate change is a defining issue. Okay, let's go to our next question. Tate Willows about the Bloc Québécois. My question for the ad issue panel is, what does it mean for the rest of Canada if the Bloc Québécois forms the official opposition after the next election?

Is that allowed, even though they only represent one province? Thanks so much. It is true that Tate used her baby to entice us to get a question. We have to put that in. Over to you on that one, Chantal. The Bloc Québécois was the official opposition in the House of Commons in Jean Chrétien's first parliament, so between 1993 and 1997, and nothing terrible happened.

Back then, Lucien Bouchard went out of his way to make sure there was at least one English-language question asked for every QP. Yes, they are allowed, in the same way that if you had a party that only elected or ran MPs, candidates in Western Canada, they could still be the official opposition. The Reform Party back then only ran candidates in Western Canada.

They were almost the official opposition by one or two seats, and they would have been, and that would have been that. So I don't think that it's as big a deal as the optics would suggest. Is it likely, though? Because we're adding even more seats on the next electoral map, and those seats tend to benefit conservatives, from what I understand? It will certainly be possible, and that is attributed to the craziness of our electoral system, that they will get, on the best of hopes, 8% of the vote nationwide. But because it's all

clustered and concentrated in one geographic area, they may well win more seats than the Liberals who might get 20, 22, 24 percent of the vote. So it's yet another nail in the coffin to first pass the post. Nothing terrible happened the last time. Empty coffin, by the way. There is no dead body in there. Nothing terrible happened the last time, but that was partly because we had a very shrewd, adroit, old hand at Quebec politics in the prime minister. If we get what it would look like in this election, in the polls, a conservative sweep of the rest of Canada

with very few seats in Quebec, both of those subject to change, we'll see, with a rookie prime minister with very little experience of Quebec, with no particularly strong cadre of people advising him or supporting him, it's worrisome. But we were also on the eve of a referendum that saw 50% of Quebecers vote yes, while at this point it's in the 30s. And this whole hand that's running the country, Jean Chrétien, almost lost it. Somebody else might have done worse? Yeah, but we don't know what that will be like in two years, for example.

Like if the PQ wins in Quebec and they press ahead with their promise to have a referendum, I'm less worried that the Bloc Québécois is an official opposition than the PQ is in power in Quebec and has a referendum with a conservative prime minister who is pro-pipeline and all the things that most Quebecers say they disagree with, and so they don't see themselves reflected in the federal government. I think that's far more of a risk than having the Bloc Québécois ask most of the questions in question period. Okay, good conversation. We've got one more in this block. Gray Fraser with a question on KUSMA.

My question for the at-issue panel is, is it advantageous for Canada to pull out of a North American agreement with the U.S. and Mexico to renegotiate a new deal with each country separately? Good question. I believe Gray is an artist. That was some of his art behind him.

Andrew. No, terrible idea. Donald Trump would like nothing better than be able to play us off against each other. And if we did strike two separate trade deals, what does that mean? It means the U.S. is the hub and we're the spokes. You can locate a plant in the United States and serve all three markets. There's safety in numbers. We want to tackle the United States and Donald Trump collectively with all of the allies we can find.

What he said. the last thing you want is for Mexico and Canada to be negotiating each other out of deals in the same way that the last thing you want in Canada is for Canadian provinces and the federal government fighting with each other over what to give up while the person you're going to negotiate with is saying, well, this is interesting. I can divide and conquer.

Yes. Yes, some of that is happening for sure. Althea? Just to build on what they both said, because I agree that they're right. We have heard the Premier of Ontario, for example, suggests that there should be a bilateral agreement. Forget Mexico.

Let's just negotiate between the two of us. There is some talk, even in Ottawa, of not getting rid of KUSMA, but having an extra Canada-US agreement to cement the supply chain's integration, to cement some things. The business community seems reluctant to have that because a lot of Canadian businesses have actually made investments in Mexico because labor costs are cheaper to have access to that US.S. market. So everybody is of the feeling that it is best to negotiate with Mexico and not be outnumbered

if we're just vis-a-vis Donald Trump or the United States. Welcome back to At Issue. And tonight we're taking your political questions about, well, basically anything. Chantal Hebert, Andrew Coyne, and Althea Raj all in studio with me. Thank you again for sending in some of your questions.

Let's get right to the next one. Here's Barbara Dobson with a question about Pierre Poiliev. My question for the Ad Issue panel is, when will Pierre Poiliev go beyond slogans and be clear to Canadian voters about how he will handle the major issues our country faces, such as the affordability crisis, the climate crisis, and dealing with Donald Trump. Okay, one of our colleagues at Relative Canada, Fanny Olivier, she did a look at what he said substantively.

There are things, there are substantive things. But he is mostly focused on delivering the slogan message that Barbara's talking about here, Andrew. Yeah, so he's clear that he would axe the tax. Build a home. Defund the CBC. Stop the crime. That's not one of the slogans. Not yet.

It's definitely one of the policies. Fix the budget. But if she wants a short answer to a question, the answer is after the election. He's 22 points ahead in the polls. He's not going to do too much that's going to invite too much scrutiny or too much controversy, I would imagine. He would like to build a mandate, quote-unquote, so there'll be something. But getting into the weeds of things that are particularly controversial, I think we'll wait quite a while before we hear. Okay, but does that impact voters at all?

Like, do they start to say, I'd like to hear more? I think he's going to have to become a bit more specific about the Donald Trump thing. You can't just whistle past that issue. On climate, I do think that they will be bringing forward something a bit more structured than access axe to the axe, etc. But I also think that they feel that affordability has kind of blunted the edge of the climate issue as a shield issue for them.

So I'm not expecting to learn something that will, you know, wow the environmental community. But the proof is going to be in the pudding. If he becomes prime minister, he's not going to have a choice. We'll have to do things, yeah. Well, voters say, you know, the last time we said that we have a great opposition leader who's prosecuting the government very efficiently, that person was called Tom Mulcair. And then things happened. So I don't know what the shape of that or the dynamics of

the next federal campaign will be. I just know that after November 5th, they will be different than they would have been if Kamala Harris had won. But the slogans work. I mean, they do work. The slogans work. They unify caucus around one message. It's very clear to have message discipline when you have slogans. That being said, he does have policy. You're right. DeVos also did a really good group of what he said. On the stuff with Donald Trump, he's already being dragged in that conversation because one of his MPs, Jamil Javani, is close friends with J.D. Vance. And already he's being asked, well, do you agree with what your MP is saying?

Or like J.D. Vance was tweeting about Christians because Jamil Javani was tweeting about Christians being attacked in Canada. So there's already an entryway for that. I think the longer, the further the election is, the more pressure there is on Mr. Poiliev to fill in the gaps. We've already seen that when it came to housing. I think we're going to see it on more issues that bubble up in the spring. Okay. Our next question is from Wayne Dworvnik. And this fellow is probably going to be Andrew's new best friend.

My question for the Ad Issue panel is this. With the current showing of Justin Trudeau and the Liberals in the polls, is now a good time to bring in the promised electoral reform bill that will put an end to the first-past-the-post system that we have in Canada? That's a man after your own heart. God bless her. Can you just answer yes? You would think, just from a self-interest standpoint, first-past-the-post has worked to the Liberals' benefit in the past,

in the recent past in particular. It's about to bite them. It's about to work very hard against them. Similar to the Conservatives. In the past, it's really hurt them. Go back to 1993 when they were reduced two seats. They're about to get a, if the polls are correct, and a hugely exaggerated majority as a result of that.

You'd think the Conservatives in particular, it's very odd that they're so attached to the status quo, the first past the post, since they lose two elections in three under the current system. And yet they're the ones who are even more adamant than the liberals because they each have this kind of gambler's mentality of, well, you know, one more roll of dice and we'll win or take all. We'll benefit from the system.

But they win sweeping majorities when the left is divided. So they're incentivized to like the status quo. Plus, like, just ideologically, they like the status quo. I do wonder, though, sometimes if the prime minister regrets not pushing forward with what he said was his preferred option, which was a preferential ballot, a ranked ballot. But he never spent any political capital trying to make the case to Canadians or even organizing liberal MPs around the committee table to try to push that forward.

But, you know, that might actually have helped him. Yes. And if the question is, is this a good time? The answer is no. The prime minister is no longer have the legitimacy to change the rules of the game that they are in the process of losing. So that opportunity was lost. And I don't think it comes back quickly,

because if you come with a supermajority, then some of the people who got elected will lose their seats over that electoral reform. And it's happened in every province. Quebec was one of the latest to go through that process. And then the leaders back off, and it's the end of that story. But you shouldn't have electoral reform without every single party in the House of Commons agreeing to it. Yeah, otherwise it just looks like it's opportunistic.

Okay, I got one more question here. Robert Mitchell. My question for the ad issue panel is, what does the panel expect to see in the future if Trump's policies start hurting Americans financially? How bad could it get? Thanks for your question, Robert. I only have one minute. Andrew? It is, his policies are going to hurt Americans financially whether you're talking about the mass deportations and what that will do to labor markets, whether you're talking about the tariffs, whether you're talking about the thing

I'm most worried about which is he starts monkeying around with the Federal Reserve and ordering them to basically pursue inflationary policies. So it can get very bad economically. How bad it will get for him politically, I don't know, since to date his followers have stuck with him no matter what he did. But when he starts sitting on the pocketbook, maybe not. It's hard to know how much he will hurt Americans, but he will. And he's not running again, I guess, unless there's no longer any elections,

as he promised during the campaign. So I guess we will wait him out. That second half of the term should be interesting. Ten seconds, Althea. Recession? Depression? I guess it depends how deep things actually go. I'm not really convinced that he's going to deport 11 million people in the United States. I think there will be some shows, and then we move on. I'm not actually convinced that the terrorists... But maybe I can't let myself believe that. It just seems like political suicide. Welcome back to one more round of At Issue.

Chantal, Andrew, and Althea have been answering your questions. We've got a couple more to go, if we can fit them in. Let's start with Tom Lee with a question. Here's my question for the At Issue panel. Right now, MPs just seem to be creatures of the PMO or of their party central office. What needs to happen for them to become real representatives of their constituencies again. Thanks very much and keep up the excellent work. That's very nice, Tom. Thank you, Tom. Also, a new bestie for Andrew, apparently. But I'm going to start with Althea. I'm going to make Andrew wait. I'm not sure that they're not representatives of their constituencies. The problem is with the way modern politics works, most people are voting for the party leader. They're not actually voting for the constituency MP.

Most people don't even know who their constituency MP is. So it means that that person has less legitimacy when they're trying to, whether it's in caucus or outside of caucus, voice an opinion that is different than what the party leadership is telling them. So I do think part of it is the role of the MP themselves. Like, they are choosing to be whipped. They can choose to abide by the centre's wishes less often. But it's also on the electorate as well. If you care about who is representing you

and you legitimately want an independent voice, then pick someone who will deliver that. Yeah. The problem is when you choose someone who has an independent voice, then that person knows that their ambitions are going to be cut short. They're not going to cabinet. They're not going to get plum jobs. It doesn't really happen.

Up to a point, though. I mean, I know MPs in every party that work really hard to represent their constituents. Yeah, sure. So the notion that they're just like green plants sitting there saying, you know. But I think what he's referring to rightly is the inane lines that they all feel that they should repeat, which means that they always look smarter once they're not in politics anymore than when they were. But up to a point, it's also on them to take some of that independence. But the media has a role to play on that.

Whenever someone offers a perspective that is a bit different from the party line, the media pounces on this person as if that person was a traitor to some cause. And who wants that? Yeah. that person was a traitor to some cause, and who wants that? Yeah, yeah. Because it's a sign of division and fractures and there's drama inside caucus. And the argument gets totally lost because you become a maverick and not someone who is just contributing to the political conversation as MPs should. Okay, you've waited long enough.

I'm a little less sanguine than my colleagues about it. We have the most ferocious system of party discipline in the democratic world statistically. The biggest maverick in the Canadian parliament votes with his party 99% of the time. The message discipline, the requirement to say what the lines have been written out for you is even more ferocious and even more anomalous with other democracies. So we do have a legitimate problem. We have a kind of a self-reinforcing loop that Althea described there, which is because we've allowed the leader to become the be-all and end-all, then nobody votes for anything else but

the leader in the election. Then because the leader won the mandate for them, then therefore MPs are all expected to fall into line. We've got to break out of that. I wrote down a list of about ten things. I'll just say three. Two of them are from the first edition of the Reform Act. One is allow MPs to elect the leader rather than having the leader elected by the party at large, and therefore he can thumb his nose at the caucus for the rest of his term. And conversely, take away the right of the leader to veto the nominations of candidates, which is absolutely a killer thing. The third thing is shrink the size of the cabinet. We have the largest cabinet in the democratic world,

and therefore it means if you keep your nose clean, you've got a very good shot of getting into cabinet, and therefore you keep your nose clean. If you look at the British Parliament where you've got 400 members of the governing caucus and only 20 of them get into cabinet, there's a lot more opportunity or requirement basically for MPs to find some other way to make themselves useful by chairing committees, by making themselves knowledgeable about an issue, etc.,

because they're never going to get in the Cabinet. I have a question to myself. The Conservatives are the only party that have endorsed the Reform Act and given their MPs the right to fire the leader. I wonder if they win the election, whether that caucus will vote to keep that power or not. It's going to be very interesting to see. Well, because it's not like they're out there talking freely and doing whatever they want right now. And part of that is they have the right now to remove the leader.

But if you do, what happens? You don't get a new leader. You go through nine months of agony electing a new one. So it's kind of like a nuclear power that's too awful to be used. Last word to you, Althea. Well, the party's national council, depending on whichever outfit it is, can decide to change the rules of the leadership race, right? So that's not necessarily true. I actually think that the Conservatives will sign on to the Reform Act again. But I will say that on Andrew's point, if the Conservative caucus had chosen the leader,

I'm not sure they would have chosen Pierre Poulliev. Also... I think they did, actually. I think he had a majority of the caucus. He did have a majority of the caucus. No, no, after, in the race. But if you had asked, like, after they got rid of Aaron O'Toole, who in the caucus they would have selected,

I'm not sure that caucus would have picked Pierre. And before they endorse this rule, I'm sure Mr. P would have taken place. Before they endorse this rule, I'm sure Mr. Poiliev's people will be thinking that it would have been used against Jean Chrétien and it would have been used against Justin Trudeau, both of them sitting prime ministers. That's At Issue, your edition for this week.

Thank you so much for all the questions and thank you for watching and listening to At Issue all year long. We always appreciate your questions and your feedback and we know that you value what these guys have to say. Always be in touch anytime. You can send us an email, ask at cbc.ca. I'm Rosemary Barton. Happy holidays. Happy New Year. Thanks for listening.