The Ben Mulroney Show - Ben calls out Justin Trudeau for being tone deaf

Episode Date: December 18, 2024

Ben calls out Justin Trudeau for being tone deaf -Trudeau told Freeland that Carney would replace her as finance minister over Zoom with Guest: Robert Fife, Globe and Mail's Ottawa Bureau Chief -What���s the bottom for this Trudeau liberal Government? 4th place? with Guest: Angus Reid, Canada's best-known and longest-practicing pollster If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! https://globalnews.ca/national/program/the-ben-mulroney-show Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Enjoy

I know it's been, it feels like a long week given the chaos that we have been chronicling in Ottawa. So let's keep doing that, shall we? Justin Trudeau has, I mean, he's been making some interesting choices. That's to say, let's put it mildly. Last night, he spoke at the Liberal Christmas party. And, well, let's just listen to a few seconds of it. It has been an eventful couple of days. It hasn't been easy.

That's why I'm so happy to see you guys. You know, it's hard not to feel happy when we're like this, liberals, among family, because that's what we really are, a big family. It's like most families. Sometimes we have fights around the holidays. But of course, like most families, we find our way through it. You know, I love this country. I deeply love this party. I love you guys.

And love is what families are all about. Oh my, oh my, my oh my oh my god that uh i if i listen to any more of that my ears are going to bleed but i'm going to take one for the team and we have 17 more seconds of this insufferable pap for you. In politics, there's always tough days and big challenges. But this team doesn't hold the record for the longest minority in Canadian history because we shy away from these moments. We put in the work, whether it's easy or hard. There are moments on this show, I try to be respectful.

I really do. It comes off sometimes with bluster and bravado. Sometimes it comes off more aggressive than it is intended. And I want anybody who comes on this show to feel respected. But that is one of the most offensive friggin' things I have ever heard from this prime minister in a long line of insulting things. That is one of the top five most insulting things I have ever heard this prime minister say with pride. He speaks about holding the record for the longest running minority government. That is an affront to every Canadian. You were handed a minority in 2019.

We said, we don't trust you with a majority. Then he gets some polling data in 2021 that suggests, hmm, I might be able to get that majority that I wanted so bad. So he throws us back into the polls in the middle of a pandemic, in the middle of a pandemic. I want you guys to go wait and wait in line and vote because I think I might be able to get my majority. And what happened?

He got pretty much the exact same turnout result as he got the first in 2019. Wasn't happy about that. Wasn't happy about that. Wasn't happy about that. But we as a country said, we do not trust you with the keys to the whole house. And in Canada, the natural thing that happens in a minority situation is that government falls sometime between the nine month mark and the 18 month mark.

The reason he holds the record is because he concocted a deal with the NDP to tack even farther left than he was, something that we did not vote for as a country, and govern as if he had a majority, depriving you and me and every single card-carrying Canadian the right to hold this government to account within 18 months. He has been governing without the mandate to do so for longer than he was entitled to, which is why people don't just want to vote for Pierre Poliev. They want to vote against this maniev. They want to vote against this man. And they want to vote against this man with a level of anger and frustration that I have not seen in years. He has been depriving us of our constitutional God-given right to hold him to account.

And he is holding it up like not only a badge of honor, but an accomplishment. That is not an accomplishment, sir. That is the deprivation of our rights. And you are walking around, thumping your chest with pride over it. Disgusting. And we don't shy away from our problems and our challenges.

Where are you right now by the way where are you because you've cancelled all of your end of year interviews with the press something Paul Wells said on his sub stack he has never seen in his 30 years

covering Ottawa so you're not doing that you're not on Fox Business You're not on Fox Business. You're not on CNN. I know because Danielle Smith and Doug Ford were there. You're not doing interviews at home. You're not doing interviews abroad.

You don't shy away from things. You were dancing at Taylor Swift when your hometown was literally on fire. A second firebombing at a synagogue in your hometown occurred. I haven't seen a statement from you on that. Not that I expect one, given your government's pathetic position on anti-Semitism, which is to say no position,

saying one thing to one group and another thing to another group I had so much more to get to in this segment but that just I didn't realize that that was going to set me off the way it did we got a little bit of time let's take a listen to somebody inside that liberal caucus talking to Vashie Kapilos

about how Justin Trudeau is delusional right now whether it's Pollyafford interference or security clearance or the GST holiday we've had, we're not moving the polls. And the problem is there's a visceral dislike for the prime minister. He needs to accept that. Do you think he will? I think, to be blunt, he's delusional right now. I think that he's living in a false reality and i think it's incumbent on those around him it's a disservice to the prime minister that they're not

telling him what canadians are thinking or feeling and you know one thing that is abundantly clear to me is the prime minister seems to feel that he knows better than the electorate or our party what will happen in the future. Yeah, this is well, that's Wayne Long, longtime Liberal MP Wayne Long, saying that the prime minister is delusional. And I think everything I said that preceded that clip about how he views his government and how he views his accomplishments speaks to that. I mean, he says things that are demonstrably false. I used to just get irritated by the buzzwords, standing up for Canadians, as if it was just, you know, that was one of their,

that was one of every liberal's talking points. And it was really irritating. But at one point, it started to really, excuse my language, but pissing me off because I was seeing that they were not standing up for Canadians on any front. And you can't just call it standing up for Canadians if you're not standing up for Canadians. You can't call it investing in Canadians if all it is is throwing money down a rat hole. It isn't what you say it is just because you say it is. And as you can hear my voice, I'm angry. And I know that you are angry too, or some of you are angry. Most of you are angry. of you are angry there's an

anger that has built up in the voter a deep desire to be able to exercise our rights the only control that we have once we elect a government is to be able to go back to the polls we should have been able to do it years ago we should have been able to do it at so many turns during this minority government. This government has proven itself ineffectual, scandal-ridden, unaccountable, opaque, corrupt. And at every turn, because it's a minority, we should have been able to hold them to account. We have not. And the frustration has turned into anger. And it's this is a self inflicted wound, Mr. Prime Minister, you have to deal with this anger that you caused. It's coming for you. It's coming for you. And you're not going to like the results. Doug Ford gets it done for

developers. We interrupt this ad to ask does get it done mean strip $3 billion out of school funding? Because yep, Doug Forrester got that done. Now, can we have an undo button, please? Help us get back to investing in schools. Visit nomore.ca. That's K-N-O-W-M-O-R-E dot C-A. This message has been approved by Kidsplain. A message from the Ontario English Catholic Teachers Association. Well, the end of last

week brought some bombshells that exploded on Monday, and the journalist at the front, who's been pointing out these bombshells since then has been Robert Fyfe, the Ottawa Bureau Chief for the Globe and Mail, and he

joins us now. Bob, great to talk to you. Thank you so much for being here on this Wednesday. Good morning, Ben. Okay, so in today's Globe, you announced that, in fact, yes, that despite some people saying it didn't happen this way, you've got enough sources that you're comfortable saying that, in fact, Trudeau did tell Friedland that Mark Carney was to replace her as finance minister, but not until after she delivered his fall economic statement. That's correct. Can you imagine the reaction on her face? Oh, OK, I'm going to go out there and tell people about a GST gimmick and that I don't believe in, and that the budget, the deficit is going to be 2020 billion more than I had promised it would be.

And once I do this and take all the heat from this, I'm going to get fired the next day. Yeah, well, and he did so over Zoom, which is, he looked her in the eye. But to me, Bob, it speaks to two tactical, questionable decisions by the prime minister that makes me question is he the right guy to be negotiating against Donald Trump? Because the position he put himself in by doing this gave her the room to do what she did. So he got played by one of his closest confidants in cabinet by saying this. I mean, she really didn't have a choice,

and we saw what happened afterwards. But part of the deal that he was offering her was, he said, you're going to be in charge of Canada-U.S. relations. Now, never mind that that's a fake position, but we know that Donald Trump dislikes her tremendously. So, to me, that's like offering the head lifeguard to a man with no arms and no legs. that he's made fun of the way she speaks. He doesn't like her. And that's as a result of the negotiations, which I think Canada did very well, that she was in charge of in 2018.

So what was he thinking? What was Trudeau thinking in doing that, in offering her a job she would not have succeeded in or thrived in? Not only that, I mean, what was even more insulting about it was a minister without portfolio. That meant that she had no departmental staff, she had no money, and she had no statutory authority. So how was she going to be able to deal with imposing tariffs,

for example, on U.S. goods if President Trump were to follow through, because she has no authority to do so. She's got to go to some other minister, the finance minister, to ask, you know, can you impose this? I mean, it was completely insulting. She had been humiliated, as you know, for quite a while. This is not the first time that she has been very publicly humiliated by this government and by the prime minister in July. She was – my phone is ringing here.

Sorry. It's okay. I think somebody's telling me there may be a cap and shuffle tomorrow. Well, let's talk about that for a minute. Just on that July thing, because they leaked out that they didn't like the way she was able to, the way she was selling the government's message. And they were talking then of bringing in Mark Carney. And he never defended her once, even though she was out there all summer and in the fall defending him when Liberal MPs and party members across the

country were saying this guy's got to go. And so we've got two more things to discuss. I want to talk about this cabinet shuffle, but we got to talk about Mark Carney because you brought him up. So he was going to be he was going to be the savior. He was going to write the ship. She's been standing by him through thick and thin. And then the narrative seems to write itself that he was going to come in as finance minister. But when this whole thing blows up, he looks out for himself and says, thanks, but no, thanks. I'm out of here. He's done a very good job at allowing a narrative to be created that the conservatives will be able to capitalize on if ever he decides that he wants to put himself

forth for the liberal leadership. Yeah, I mean, there's a couple of scenarios. I haven't talked to Mark Carney. He's not returning emails or anything like that. But one scenario was that when he saw the letter from Freeland on Monday, he said, oh, I'm out of here. I'm not going to get in the middle of this mess that's being created. The other one was he had conditions that he wanted a safe riding and a by-election to be held right away, and he never got that kind of a commitment.

I don't know what the truth is. That's just information that's sort of been circulating. But clearly the prime minister had to have thought that he had a Carney in the bag because you don't call up, uh, Christopher Freeland and say, uh, by Tuesday you're gone and Mark Carney is going to be the finance minister. I mean, so somewhere, somewhere along the line, Carney got cold feet. Yeah. But the attack ads write themselves. I mean,

the stuff about Ignatieff just visiting, this is, this is, this is cut from the same cloth. He got rid of one person who stood by him and fought the fights with him and took the heat. And then you got another guy who went, as soon as the temperature got turned up just a little bit, took his toys and went home. That's not a good look for somebody who...

But it never made any sense then. Why would this guy, why would Mark Carney, who's making millions of dollars has a great reputation as a governor of the bank of canada governor of the bank of england why would he come in in the dying days of the government i mean they're barely they're barely on blight support right now and it just makes no sense i agree i agree and lastly let's talk about this cabinet shuffle because you know i've been wondering why some of these um why some of these backbench MPs don't have the courage of their convictions to come out and speak out and say what they actually think. And and Sean Casey recently said Liberal MP Sean Casey said that many MPs aren't speaking out against the prime minister because they're waiting to see if they get one of the cabinet positions. Once they know they don't make cabinet, they'll come forward and speak out.

That's a really cynical thing. but I guess it makes sense. That's politics. And, you know, he waited until after the Liberal Christmas Party, which was last night, before he's going to do this cabinet shuffle, because you don't have a cabinet shuffle and have a room full of very upset and angry MPs who all feel that they should have been invited to sit in cabinet. So it's a complete mess. Yeah. And Bob, the prime minister wasn't in the House of Commons for the fall economic statement. He hasn't addressed the only words we've seen him speak have been before party loyalists and his caucus at the Christmas party. And I'm hearing rumors

that he may be out of the country already. Do you know anything about that? I don't think so. It says today he has private functions. But, I mean, look, nothing surprises me anymore. Yeah, he's canceled all of his end-of-year interviews, which Paul Wells said he's never seen in his 30 years covering Ottawa.

Are we anticipating we're going to hear from him before the end of the year? I don't know. I mean, we may not. I mean, I think the time is coming where he's going to have to take a walk in the snow. But whether he does it before Christmas or whether he does it in January, I just can't see how he can hang in now. This is just, this is being brutal.

And maybe he's finally waking up to the fact that the country is fed up with him. And he's got to go. Or there's going to be nothing left of the Liberal Party. Look at that by-election in British Columbia. The Conservatives won it by 66% of the vote. The Liberals only had 16%. In 2021, the Liberals won that riding with 39% to 36% for the vote. The Liberals only had 16%. In 2021, the Liberals won that riding with 39% to

36% for the Conservatives. I doubt that it's a bellwether, but it's certainly a very strong indicator as to what's going to happen from coast to coast to coast. There isn't a safe Liberal seat anywhere now. Hey, Robert Fyfe, I appreciate it.

Thank you very much. If I don't talk to you before the end of the year, I hope you have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Yeah, give your best to your mom. I will indeed, sir. Thank you very much. My take and my theory as to why Justin Trudeau has been sticking around for so long and why he believed or believes

that he can still be competitive in the next election is because he believed that the poll numbers couldn't get any worse. Sure, they weren't going up, but 20% of the population, that was about his ceiling, his floor rather, wasn't going to get any worse than that. I suspect that that is not the case. I suspect that the carnival of chaos that we have witnessed in Ottawa that included what many believe the marginalization, the disrespect of Chrystia Freeland, one of his most trusted and loyal advisors and foot soldiers, might have been a bridge too far for some people. I think his lack of accountability by not being in the House of Commons could play into some people who've been sitting on the fence saying, no, that's it, I'm done.

But this is just a feeling I have. So to tell me whether I'm off base or to tell us what could be coming down the pike in terms of popular support for a battered and bruised and long in the tooth government, we are joined now by Angus Reid, Canada's best known and longest practicing pollster. Doctor, thank you very much. Welcome for the first time to the Ben Mulroney Show. Great to be on. So Angus, you are, I assume,

are doing some work on this very question right now. Yeah, well, we have been continuously polling on Justin Trudeau for several years now. And I mean, the story keeps coming back the same. And that is that, you know, his approval rating is at the lowest it's been in the last, you know, eight or nine years since he became prime minister. I think I think the real issue in terms of what is the bottom rate right now, we see Justin Trudeau's vote at about 21%. These are the hardcore liberals that aren't going anywhere. But when you ask those hardcore liberals, should Trudeau stay or go, one-third of them say he must go.

So if you subtract about a third of that 21%, my math says the bottom for Trudeau could be as low as 14 or 15 percent 14 or that would be that would be the lowest that would be the lowest record for any liberal government since confederation wow michael like that's yes in 2011 held that order when the liberals slipped down to uh 19 and i believe they got around 30 35 seats. So if this were to play out, we would be looking at, you know, we could be looking at the death of the Liberal Party, frankly. 14%. Do you have any sense of what the seat count that could translate to? Well, it would be a very low seat count. It would be somewhere in the 10 to 15 seats.

It would be, I mean, it all depends on distribution, but the problem is that the fortresses that Trudeau used to enjoy in the cities among young people, those have largely evaporated for different reasons because of the economy. We can get into that if you want, but so there's no sort of safe haven for Trudeau. But the interesting thing about the guy is that I think he views himself a little bit as the comeback kid. Don't, don't forget that in the last election, he was heading into that with a very low approval rating, not as low as it is right now. I think his approval rating at that time was around 35%.

That's now dropped out of the mid twenties. But I think that, I think he really believes in his own mind that he can beat Polyab and Polyab, Polyab, you know, isn't exactly the star candidate that the conservatives would like to have. He's doing very well in the polls. They're at 43 percent, the 22 points ahead of the liberals. But Polyev himself, his own personal approval

rating, favorability rating is only in the mid 30s. So there I think there's I think Trudeau and the very small cadre of people around him are looking and saying, well, you know, we could maybe get it polyav, maybe run a negative campaign on him. The economy with interest rates dropping may be getting a little better. There's always a variety of surprise factors that could happen. So it's hard to get inside Justin Trudeau's mind, but I think that, you know, his, his, uh, retirement in my view is, is, or his resignation is less likely than a lot of people think. Yeah. Well, and what about the Jagmeet Singh of it all? Because I, I, I contend that Jagmeet Singh and, uh, people want an election. They want a, they want, they want a leader and a government with a mandate to be able to go into these tariff negotiations with with with an equally mandated Donald Trump.

And I don't think people care about the internecine wars inside the Liberal Party and whether they have their house in order or not. I think people would be even more angry if liberal voters are given a chance to vote on their leader before Canadians are given a chance to vote on their prime minister. Well, seeing as seeing has a very small window. I mean, there's some people who say there's a possibility that Trudeau could simply probe parliament. He could he could simply say, you know, we get we need more time to think about the Trump threat, whatever, and go to the governor general and prorogue. And it's been done. It happened here in B.C. for a long period of time.

It could happen. It could happen at the federal level. I've heard some people speculate that Trudeau takes away the means to do that. Where are the NDP's numbers trending? Are they going down or up right now? The NDP is where they've always been. They're sort of in the 18 19 20 percent range now singh's own popularity has been dropping and so it's it's hard to fathom why the ndp has been uh supportive of a leader who is so unpopular at a time when we need strong leadership more than ever given the whole trump factor well and that's that would be concerning for me as a liberal right now if if if he goes in

if he assumes that he's the guy to negotiate against trump and those tariffs come in do you not foresee the possibility that that that seal that floor of 14 could drop even further i mean if all of a sudden we're slapped with 25 tariffs and it's on trudeau's watch yeah i mean 14 really gets low i mean 14 would be an absolute disaster for the party. Although you've got to remember, Trudeau really hasn't cared about the Liberal Party. In 2015, he said parties weren't important anymore. He was leading a movement, and he was going to be the leader of the movement.

What counted was the connection between the leader and the movement. So under Trudeau, the party doesn't matter. His ministers don't matter. This is all about him and his small group of advisors of the PMO connecting with the people. Well, they failed miserably, but I'm not sure that he cares about any of that. I mean, he's got a very good job. You know, former prime ministers in Canada, when they step down, kind of have no job. So, you know, it's very hard to maneuver between the public interest and Trudeau's narcissism. Well, I put myself in the in the seat of a regular liberal MP who's gone home for Christmas.

And over the course of my couple of weeks with family and and friends and constituents, I'm going to get an earful on a lot of things. And I'm also going to be watching these numbers trend downward. And so I got to wonder what's going to happen to Trudeau when he comes back to it. They already left anxious. They're going to come back even more anxious, wondering what are you sticking around for? The numbers just keep going down. I got to wonder whether the knives are going to be out because there's no safe seat in the country for any of these guys anymore.

Well, that's going to be a problem, but they've taken away the mechanism for getting rid of the leader. So Trudeau could simply, you know, give the party the finger and say i'm not going anywhere so that's where the prog option really is a way of just saying you know i don't care about any of you guys i gotta do my own thing i don't know i guess i mean everyone every every person uh in that cabinet or that caucus rather can go out in front of a microphone and say the leader's got to go if if you have an outright revolt in in your back bench and inside your your cabinet there's not much you can do yeah he's they're gonna force his hand well yeah I

yes listen I think under the normal circumstances in any other democracy caucus should be able as as in the case in britain to simply say sorry buddy you're gone but we don't have that they don't have the power here so hard to know what is in trudeau's mind except that he enjoys a tremendous amount of autonomy in terms of that he's the guy ultimately except for a non-confidence vote in parliament the guy who ultimately is going to decide whether he's going to withstand these pressures or not and so far he has so so i mean look these guys could end up i mean he could end up obliterating the liberal party for a long time uh i'm not sure he cares about that angus reed uh thank you so much for joining us uh really appreciate the color that

you added to this conversation and Ben, have a good Christmas. Thank you. You too. The crisis at our border is front and center today. It's a crisis for a number of reasons. One, a lot of Canadians have been saying, we got to do something about our border for a very long time. Our federal government has done very little, if anything, on that file until Donald Trump highlighted his issues with our border in

reaction to his threat of leveling 25% tariffs on anything crossing the border, which would effectively destroy the Canadian economy and throw us into a terrible and possibly very long and protracted recession. Dominique Leblanc, the newly sworn in finance minister flanked by a handful of cabinet colleagues, provided details yesterday on how the government plans to spend $1.3 billion to secure that border and allay the fears of President-elect Donald Trump. And so there is a drive to add drones and a strike force made up of American and Canadian law enforcement. There is new technology that will be brought to bear. However, there is no plan, no explanation on how this is going to happen or when it's going to happen. For example, the head of the RCMP said, look, if we want to do this fast,

I'm going to have to rent myself some helicopters because it's not like I can just snap my fingers and a helicopter appears. And all these new RCMP that are going to be focused on border security, we got to hire them and we got to train them. That's going to take a while as well. So it's not as easy as laying out a plan. I'm glad that the liberals have at least some of their attention on the border, but it just doesn't feel like, to me, outside observer, I just don't feel like it's happening fast enough,

and it should have happened years ago, but we're not there anymore. Gotta take the world as it is. Meanwhile, the leader of the opposition, Pierre Poliev, was asked by a CBC reporter a question in relation to the liberals plan musa with cbc news the government is coming out with a 1.3 billion dollar plan to address border security do you think that's

enough to stop trump's tariffs and if it was up to you how much specifically would you spend on border security what number would you put on it? Well, you ask a classically CBC question, which is how much money can you spend on a problem? Well, that's the wrong question. That's exactly the question Trudeau has been asking for nine years. It's the reason he's doubled our debt while making everything worse. So, for example, he spent $80 billion on housing affordability. Well, how'd that work? He doubled housing costs.

He spent $60 million on his gun confiscation. Zero guns. He spent millions on a school food program that hasn't served a single solitary meal. So we should not judge a program based on how expensive we can make it. We should judge it by what it can do. It's a really powerful reframing of the question. I also liked it.

He actually killed two birds with one stone. One, he differentiated himself, not just in policy, but in vision from Justinin trudeau saying i'm going to view everything through a different lens but he also took down the cbc simultaneously which is another one of his plans so it was very well done but if that doesn't land well with you and i actually find that that answer resonates very positively with me uh He simplifies it with a parallel that should crystallize it in everybody's mind.

That's how our mentality has to change. We have to stop judging politicians by how expensive they can make things and start judging them by the results they get. You went into a restaurant and had a terrible experience. The food was awful. You got food poisoning.

The service was bad. You wouldn't walk out and say, but it was great because it cost me $1,000. And because it's the most expensive restaurant around, it must be the best. No, we judge the meal by the food on the plate and the service that delivered it. That's how I'm going to run a common sense conservative government. It makes 1,000% sense to me. And that's a very effective messaging point because everything else that he does or promises will be seen through that lens. You know, he's, he's gone on record before saying, I'm going to inherit a dumpster fire of an economy and of a

budget and whatever numbers the government is telling me now, once I have the keys to the store and I'm able to check the inventory, it's going to be worse than I could ever imagine. So I'm going to inherit a bootstrapped economy. And the finances of this country are going to be so bad that I'm going to have to do more with less. And so I'm going to have to start, I'm going to have to see things differently. I'm going to have to, I'm going to have to provide services differently.

And this is a valid and I think authentic and logical primer to explain the decisions and the priorities and the methodology of his, in his eventual government. And just for good measure, I think he gave us a dig at what's been going on in Ottawa. Yesterday, we were reminded that if you hire clowns, you get a circus. But no one should be laughing. Because there are real consequences for yesterday's chaotic liberal clown show these are the consequences the deficit is 50 higher than we were promised our dollar has plunged below 70 cents american for the first time in ages, which means more expensive fuel, food, clothing and materials for things like automobiles. It means our people will be poor and the dollars they work so hard to earn are worth less.

Yeah. And listen, just speaking personally, we're planning a family trip to Florida to visit my mom for Christmas. My dollar is not going to go as far down there. I'm not the only one. This is not the privilege of going to Florida. Tons of Canadians go to Florida and go south of the border where it's warmer for Christmas. And whatever we budgeted, we got to budget more now. And so I laid out those clips for you because I feel that they present the image of a measured, thoughtful prime minister in waiting.

Someone who has seen these problems for years. He has called them out. He has warned us against them. A lot of the problems that he predicted have come true. And now we are forced to live at the, you could feel his heart breaking as he has defended his government and their pathetic attempts to have it both ways. Saying one thing to the Jewish community, saying another to Muslim leaders, trying to equivocate, trying to, oh, let's not forget, he said he'd arrest Benjamin Netanyahu if he set foot in Canada for war crimes. That's what our government said.

So when Anthony Housefather goes on a Montreal radio station yesterday and says, quote, on his worst day, Trudeau will do a better job than Poliev on his best day, but it doesn't mean I believe Trudeau would be better than a different liberal leader. I got to scratch my head. Like I got a lot of time personally for Anthony Housefather.

He's always been kind. He's a gentleman. I know it can't be easy being a Jewish liberal in caucus these days. But he has acquitted himself rather honorably. At one point, I think he was considering resigning in protest and I could see it was very hard on him and he ended up sticking around.

To hear that though, I scratched my head. He didn't have to say that. He didn't have to say that. And so I'm just throwing this out there as a theory. A lot of my theories are wrong, but there are a lot of cabinet vacancies If Anthony Housefather ends up in cabinet, I would take a look. I would come back to this quote as maybe one of the reasons why.