The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - A Mini Good Talk --The Morning After The Night Before

Episode Date: September 21, 2021

So what was the point of all that?  The Liberals are back with another minority almost the mirror image of the one that wasn't good enough for them just six weeks ago.  The Conservatives get more votes, the Liberals get more seats. The NDP makes no breakthroughs and still sits in fourth place behind the Bloc. Deja vu all over again.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge, The Day After The Night Before. Coming right up. You know, I've been thinking this week that for the first time since 1968, I wasn't involved in an election night broadcast. And I'm sure many of you are saying, it's about time, buddy. Give it a rest. 72 was my first federal election coverage. I was a local reporter in Winnipeg And as a result we did these little cut-ins into the national broadcast Every once in a while in terms of what was happening in Manitoba And 72, as you will recall

If you study Canadian politics, was quite the night. It ended up in a virtual tie. In the end, after all the counting was said and done through the night and early into the next day, the Liberals ended up winning Pierre Trudeau by two seats over Robert Stanfield's Conservatives. Very close. But that was my first one. So in every election since, I've been involved. You know, always, 15, 19.

So last night I actually got to sit at home. And you know what I did for the very first time on an election night? I got to watch all the networks. not just the one I was sitting in. And so it was really interesting for me. It was an interesting evening I've spent watching how other people do it. Now, obviously, I still think the CBC does it best. I'm biased. That's where I spent half a century. But it was interesting to watch others do what they do on an election night. It is a defining moment usually for a news organization, mainly in broadcast, television, radio, some digital now.

But it's a big night. You put your big guns forward. You try to do the best job possible. You try to avoid mistakes. And you tell the story as it unfolds across the nation. And viewers and listeners and readers eventually will make their determination on how they felt you did. And we can all be picky because, listen, a big live broadcast that lasts hours, there are going to be issues.

There are going to be problems. But overall, it's the journalistic credibility of a news organization that goes on display on nights like that. And last night was no different than all the other ones in the past. But for me, as I said, it was a totally new perspective, really, on an election night, being able to watch how others do their work. Okay, some general thoughts before we bring on Chantel and Bruce.

For a kind of mini, I thought, and a number of you had asked, you know, please do something good talkish on the morning, the day, the afternoon, the evening after, depending on when you listen to these things, the after the election result. And so Chantel and Bruce have agreed to do

what we're calling a mini good talk for this day. They'll still have their regular one on Friday, of course. All right. Here's some general thoughts before I bring them into the tent here. Because we're at a point on this day where mail-in ballots are being counted and there's still, I don't know, 12 or as many as 18 seats that have not been finalized. In other words, the news organizations have not declared a winner based on the results

they've seen so far. Keep in mind, Elections Canada, they never declare winners, right? They just count votes. And when they're finished counting votes, they'll say, here's the result. Now, the networks primarily, who are always in a rush to get to the story, have teams of senior journalists, they call them the decisions desk, who analyze numbers and go by past performances in different writings and make decisions as they are the decisions desk about what the trends show as to who is likely to win.

Now, 99% of the time they're right. Occasionally, there can be a problem. There might be a problem in some of the declarations that were made last night because of mail-in ballots. There are quite a few ridings where the margin for the winner is quite small, and yet the number of ballots still to be counted is in the thousands. So some things may change. I don't think the overall story is going to change at all. Liberal minority government, conservatives with more votes than the

liberals, second election in a row, which will, as it always does, bring up calls for electoral reform we know what happened with that one so we'll see we'll see how things play out in these next hours and days on that front and on that front. Any other? Remember how we talked about the writing of Peterborough Co-author being a bellwether and has been historically in Canada

for most of the last hundred years? Not last night. The Liberals won the election, and if a true bellwether is in Peterborough-Kawartha, whoever wins the election is likely to win that riding. Didn't happen last night. The Conservatives knocked off a cabinet minister, Marion Moncef, was the MP for Peterborough-Kawartha, was also in the Trudeau cabinet. She was one of a couple of cabinet ministers who went down to defeat last night. And so, not a bellwether yesterday, and we talked about that during the campaign. So that status is gone.

I got a note on this, you know, and this is that issue of, you know, the networks have declared so-and-so a winner. So the question is, can some of the elected people, and elected in quotes being the declared candidate, can they still lose? Well, as of 1.45 in the morning this morning, Eastern Time, CBC, for one network, had 28 ridings it had not called so the leading and elected number everyone is talking about

could certainly change but I don't think things are going to change enough as I said to knock out the order in which the parties are running right now. Liberals on top and seats counted. Second in votes counted. But on top and where seats are counted by, you know, a comfortable margin. Still a minority, but comfortable. They can't get to a majority.

Conservative second. The Bloc Québécois third, and the NDP, and we'll, I'm sure, talk about this with Bruce and

Chantel. The NDP, once again, in fourth place. After all the talk about what a great campaign

Jagmeet Singh was running, they're in fourth place. And surely there will be questions about that finish I won't run through the ridings that are all kind of still up in the air

and where mail-in ballots could have an impact but there are some and they will be ticked off as the day progresses and counts are finalized. But here's a couple of things you should know. How many elections has Canada had since 1867? 44, you know that.

This was the 44th election. Five out of the last seven have ended up in minority governments. That's a lot and raises the question of whether we're heading into a kind of period of minority governments in Canada. Well, we obviously already are five out of seven, but could that be lasting for quite some time? Could we be looking at the future of parliamentary democracy in Canada? Minority governments. But of the 44 elections, 15, 15 have ended with a minority government. So a third of the minority governments in the history of Canada have occurred this century. First one being in 2004.

So are you wondering when the next election will be? Well, the sort of minority governments usually last somewhere between 18 months and two years. But really, is anybody going to be trying to force an election here? I don't think so. The next fixed election date would be September 20th, 2025. History would tell us it's a safe bet it's going to be before that, but who knows? These are different times. And here's one last thing to keep in mind.

There's a redistribution of seats that has to happen in 2023, in two years' time. This could get really messy. It's a long process, and I'm sure we'll talk about it at some point. Not today. But what it means is that the next election, whenever it may be, could be held on seats that we have now or on a whole new set of seats after redistribution. I don't even want to think about that right now.

But it could happen. There could be more seats in the House of Commons and they could be distributed differently than they are right now. Now, the other thing I was going to check and have checked, and hopefully I'm right in saying this, but in terms of provinces, the new liberal government, a minority government, has representation in every province except Saskatchewan, at least so far. There are some seats up in the air because of counting. But at the moment, every except saskatchewan you often look for and we've had majority governments where they had a number of provinces not represented

but you you try to you know look for a government that is represented right across the country and right now this one would be with the exception of saskatchewan in terms of provinces. I'm not talking about territories here where there's just one MP in each of the three territories. Okay. As promised, let's bring in the good talk gang. Should we do that, say, right now? All right, let's take a crack at this to try and figure out what the heck last night was really all about.

You know, we can say that there are still you know there are more than a dozen seats almost a dozen and a half seats that still have to be finalized so we won't get into the the actual numbers game because they're going to be changing throughout this day but uh chantelle's in montreal bruce is in uh ottawa and let me um let me get this mini good talk going with a very simple question. This one's not complicated at all. What was the point of all this? What was achieved after five or six weeks of all this? It's too late now to say we went to couples therapy and came back with the same issues within the couple that's done the point

and trudeau deserves the blame for having called the election thinking he could get a majority and having misread the fact that it was the minority parliament and not this performance that voters were kind of rewarding with that lead in the polls. But I think the other parties also believed that they could score hits over that campaign. And in the end, nobody got anything that they actually hoped or wanted. And I think the message is quite clear. I've seen that happen before. A long time ago in Ontario, it happened to Bill Davis between 75 and 77. He got back the same minority legislature.

The lesson he and Stephen Lewis, who is then the leader of the NDP, took from that is that they should just get on with the business of governing the province and went the full four years. So I suspect that that is not what Mr. Trudeau or even Mr. O'Toole will want to read in those results. But I think part of the message was just get on with it and do not come back in 18 months. And that's to everybody. I mean, you know, we can talk about how stable this minority government is. But I mean, it's not like Justin Trudeau is going to go back to the polls. And it would be kind of strange to see any of the opposition parties force an election after spending five weeks of the campaign saying there shouldn't have been an election here.

It's just like a very odd situation. Bruce? Yeah, I saw somebody last night night peter on one of the panels say that justin trudeau had no leverage because he couldn't going forward because he couldn't really threaten an election but it's also true that the others don't really have any of that leverage either having said as longly and loudly as they have that we didn't need this election they can scarcely uh threaten to trigger one without a lot of a lot of difficulty you know i'm struck by a couple of other things i mean i think that the period between 2019 and 2021 was probably the worst time to feel like you were in

politics at the national level trying to make. And I say that not because we should feel sorry for people in those roles, but just the recognition that in politics, it's often really hard work and it doesn't, it feels kind of thankless, but usually there are some psychic rewards and there have been no psychic rewards. And I think that strain of the government, that the government felt was part of why it said, why don't we just see if we can't get a majority? So maybe politics can feel a little bit less constantly threatening and stressful. And,

and, you know, in the end, I guess they couldn't do it. So it was the wrong calculation, but I think it was born of an instinct that said we could probably win right now. And maybe we couldn't win later. And I know people criticize them for that, but they're hardly the only politicians that have ever felt that way. And in fact, before they were against a politician, an election rather, conservative politicians were kind of for an election. There's, you know, there's a bit of a record of them saying those kinds of things. So I'm glad it's done. And and we get to see what the next chapter looks like. Well, part of the next chapter is going to be a lot of self-reflection by, well, by all of these leaders. I mean, as Chantal said, nobody came out a winner here.

They all fell short of what their hopes and dreams were and what they claimed was quite possible to happen. But if you look at Trudeau for one, and I think there's going to be a lot of deep thinking on his part about his own, you know, personal future and what he wants to do. I mean, the bottom line on last night, even though the, you know, the votes are still being counted because of mail-in ballots and that, and, you know. And, you know, numbers will go up for everybody in terms of actual votes cast. But still, you know, based on what we've seen so far, Justin Trudeau got less than one out of three votes in his favor. Not very different from last time, by the way. I understand the temptation to focus on Justin Trudeau's future. I still believe this was his last campaign. I don't believe that is necessarily because he's going to be pushed out.

And I don't believe another liberal leader would have done better in his place. But when we fixate on that, we stop looking at the fact that this is a trend that has been ongoing since basically 2004. It's not just a pandemic or Justin Trudeau. This is our fifth out of seven election, our fifth minority government. And the Conservatives are stuck with one third of the vote each. I think both parties suffer from the delusion that they will suddenly see all those third parties fall away and they can go back to the good old days when they fought it off with each other.

And I don't think that's going to be happening, not in two years, not in four years, except in cases where people are so sick of the incumbent, whoever he is, that they rallied to the party most likely to beat that party, which brings me back to the point that Rosen talked about, about the third parties not wanting an election. If you're the Bloc Québécois this morning, when you look at your results, much the same as the last time, you have to ask yourself what would have happened if it had not been for the English debate, which was a total accident. No credit for a campaign well run. This happened and the Bloc managed to hang on to its stake. And if you're the NDP, this is the second campaign Jagmeet Singh runs.

The results are disappointing. And every time that I listened to interviews last night with NDP insiders saying, oh, yes, but Jagmeet is really a strong leader for us they're basically saying we're really comfortable with someone who does not aspire seriously to power because otherwise he is almost he won almost half no more than half of the seats that thomas malcare won uh and in 2015 and for which thomas malcare was shown the door so somehow the ndp needs to think of whether it wants to continue to be that fifth wheel of that carriage or whether it should again start reflecting on whether it's interested in power. I saw no evidence of that last night, although I'm grateful for Mr. Singh for not dancing past midnight this year on the stage of what is a mediocre NDP result. Yeah, I mean, there's still the fourth party and fourth parties are fourth parties. It's just, you know, it's not at all what many of them had

hoped for in this campaign. And as you said, that one moment in the English language debate may have cost him third place. It may have cost Trudeau a majority. It may have done a lot of things. Bruce, where are you on this Trudeau future issue? Well, I definitely think that if he wants to stay and run another election, his party will not challenge that. I don't think he will. It has never felt to me, I'm with Chantal about that,

that he will want to stay. I think he's won three elections. There's not very many people that have done that. But maybe more importantly, from his standpoint, he probably will look at the bulk of policy that he's put in place and decide that he's if he leaves at some point in the next couple of years he will have established some important policy markers that that he feels good about whether other people agree with that that's a separate issue but i think he will not have that circumstance

where people say well he didn't do anything. They might say he did too much of some things that we don't like, but there will be a body of work there. And I think he can walk away after three wins and say, I did as well as I could do. I think the more interesting questions from my standpoint will at some point come to, if not him, then who? But the more interesting questions for me around Mr. O'Toole and maybe Mr. Singh, I don't think I've seen a more vicious effort to take out an opposition leader after his first try on an election night as I watched starting to take

shape last night I was shocked to hear Ronna Ambrose be as blunt as she was on the CTV panel saying that Mr. O'Toole had made a serious miscalculation on vaccination I mean there's some people who were talking last night obviously there's some bad blood between them and Mr. O'Toole. And you can put it down to that. But it has felt very clearly for the last three or four days that Mr. O'Toole knew he was probably going to lose and that he was probably going to face a very serious challenge to his leadership. And that's what his speech was about his closing speech last night, which I thought was ungracious and unusual, but certainly designed to kind of put up some defenses against people inside his party who were going to try to take him out.

So I think that's going to be the most interesting dynamic to watch. I do think Mr. Singh ended up in a situation where observers who were open to the idea of liking him and supporting him wondered whether or not he did the work on the policy side to justify the sense of opportunity that he described for himself and his party. Can I, did you want to say something there, Chantal, first? Just about Aaron O'Toole, the fact is that his moral authority on his caucus, always a shaky proposition for a leader of the opposition, that his moral authority was undermined by the result of the election. And the Harper clan, let's call them what they are. The Harper clan is out for his blood too.

You could make a case, and I would be comfortable making it, that yes, it's possible that in 18 months, Erin O'Toole is Prime Minister of Canada. There is that scenario. But I don't think it's going to matter. The best defense in caucus that he's going to have is going to be the Quebec caucus. They know that there is no path to victory unless the party continues to come closer to the center. But I don't think they can win that fight um you know internal party politics is one thing and a lot of uh that is around the

leadership question um for everybody right now but in terms of the country itself they're wondering okay fine we're where we were five or six weeks ago but what is it going to mean to to us in terms of our you know can can he can trudeau deliver all the promises he made, whether it was on child care or, you know, continued pandemic relief or what have you? There were a whole slew of them. It's, you know, it's a minority government. Can he deliver on those things? I appreciate the fact that the opposition parties aren't going to try and defeat him early this fall based on what they did during the campaign or what they said during the campaign. But can he actually deliver? Can he make a minority parliament meaningful?

And if he is able to, how is he able to? What does he have to do? Does he have to strike bargains, you know, with the NDP or with the block or with somebody to, to make those things happen? Well, on childcare, climate change, those issues, he can count on the NDP, his healthcare proposals, long-term care. If the NDP can't support that in the role of fourth party,

when does it support something that sounds like things that they have been asking for? And on other issues, take C10, the Broadcasting Act, very controversial. The bloc is squarely behind it. So if Justin Trudeau was able to get stuff out of the previous parliament, he has the same dynamics. I don't for a second believe that we are going to watch policy paralysis. Whether those policies are the best policies for the times,

that's another issue. And to bring you back to childcare, Ontario didn't sign a childcare agreement. I'm sure Premier Ford is looking at all the people who voted for the Liberals who are people he of the election, in Quebec because of the election this time next year, but also in Alberta. I looked at those NDP numbers in Alberta, 18% of the vote. Do you think the UPC members who are looking at Jason Kenney these days did not notice that the brand is really damaged. So I think people look at a minority parliament, they say, oh, they're going to be fighting all the time. Seriously, I think we're going to be watching serious battles at the provincial level. Bruce?

Yeah, look, I want to start with the point that Chantal touched on, which is that by the time of the next election, Justin Trudeau will probably see people paying a lot less for child care in a lot of those big cities. Like materially more people paying materially less money, because I have no doubt whatsoever that if you're Doug Ford and Stephen Del Duca, the liberal leader in Ontario, says, I'll sign the deal with Justin Trudeau, how do you say I'm not going to and hope to win those the votes of all of those people who say cost of living is terrible and child care is a big part of it. So between now and the next election, I think that child care plan that the liberals have is going to become something that nobody can really afford to be against and will probably and if they try to be against it we'll put them in political peril similarly i think that by the time of the next federal election there will no longer be a debate

about whether or not the liberal carbon price regime is more or less the right one the idea of coming up with some sort of weird confection, which I think the conservatives did, which didn't satisfy some of their supporters in the West and didn't entice anybody anywhere else. I think they're just going to drop that and say, as O'Toole hinted at, that this thing is in place now. And if we're going to aspire to goals, we're going to need to use it. So I think that carbon pricing scheme issue is over probably for good in terms of the general framework. I also think that the conservatives thought about raising the idea of an Northern Gateway pipeline. I don't think we'll ever hear of that again. You know, barring some magical turnaround in the way that energy markets are going.

I think that debate is over and TMX will be built and operational by then. So we're seeing a period of time where a number of policy of explosive policy issues are going away. What will replace them, I think, is a very interesting question. I think it was interesting that immigration did not play in this election, even though we had seen flashes of it become an issue in the past. And I'm not sure that it's going to I'm not sure that it's going to come back. The fiscal question is the last one on my mind. I mean, sorry, vaccination. I think Trudeau now has a mandate to do the things on vaccination that he said he was going to do, which are going to probably push us across the finish line in terms of the level of vaccinations that we need to feel like we're out of this pandemic, at least the pandemic that we know right now.

And I think that the Conservatives are unlikely to go against that, even if I don't know if it requires legislation, but it probably might in some instances. And so I think that that will be a matter of record that's done as well. But the fiscal question, I think, is kind of the big one looming. And this time, the Conservatives decided not to fight on the fiscal issue with the Liberals. I don't know that that'll be true come the time of the next election. All right, I want to just ask one last question, but before I do, quick break. You're listening to The Bridge with Peter Madsbridge. All right, back for final thoughts

with our mini Good Talk segment today on the morning after, the night before, the day after, the day before, whatever. It's election day plus one, and we're all trying to sort out what it all meant. You're listening on SiriusXM, Channel 167, Canada Talks, or wherever you download your favorite podcasts. So here's the final question Chantel asked you to start on it, and that is, you know, there's still going to be a few days of fallout from last night in terms of the counting of mail-in ballots and all that,

and so we won't see the final numbers in terms of the seat distribution etc etc but the the die is cast we know what what it all means it's going to be a minority liberal government so at the end of the day especially after the last week or 10 days of the campaign where there was a lot of talk about the people's party and the demonstrations that they had been holding and the number of people were turning out for maxim bernier he did do more than five percent it seems in the uh in the number of votes cast which is not insignificant and more than double what he had the last time around um but overall But overall, what is the shape of the country after this last five or six weeks? How would you describe Canada in the fall of 2021?

Still driven to the center of the consensus. I'm going to take a small detour to Maxime Bernier's party, a man who was totally disowned in votes by the voters of that riding, a riding his father used to own when he was an MP beyond party labels. Maybe Maxime Bernier can last four years if this parliament goes on and come back. It's very hard to do that. Absent the soapbox of the anti-vaccine sanitary measure movement and a presence in the House of Commons. But there are signs in there that I made for a healthier parliament, despite the lack of changes. And one of those is the fact that the liberals and the NDP now have more

representation in the prairies, that they will have in their caucuses people who can speak for Alberta and for the realities in that province. And I think that's one of the positive outcomes of the evening. It doesn't really feel like the West was shut out. And by the West, I don't mean BC, in the way that it did in 2019. It feels slightly different. And I don't, you know, I know the Conservatives and Mr. O'Toole is very big on saying he's never seen Canada as divided as it is now. Seriously, we were all around for the Quebec referendum that meets Lake Crown. I see nothing like that at this point. Bruce? Yeah, I agree with what Chantal said. I think that the question for me about the People's Party is on the one hand, I think they lose the energy

of the Vax debate. On the other hand, I think they're propelled by, you know, media platforms that the likes of the three of us don't really see trafficking in, I was going to say information, but it's not. Trafficking an argument that challenges the best science and kind of rational information that there is. And maybe that phenomena because of the internet age that we live in, isn't going to go away um i i wanted to detour to one other thing though before we finish which is i i actually think that there was a moment in time in this election campaign where the the conservatives were on a track that might have resulted in a better outcome for them and then guns happen and And I think the gun issue became a real bump in the road that they

mishandled for reasons that I think are fairly obvious that the gun lobby was saying, if you elect these people, they will do our bidding. And Ms. Grotul's campaign had people from the gun lobby in it in fairly prominent roles. And so that was hard to deal with. And they ended up spending two or three or four days of that, which was, I think, that moment that allowed the liberals to catch their breath and say, holy cow, we're going to lose this election unless we regroup and do better. And so that might have been in a way a turning point, but it also, the gun issue speaks to the larger schism within the conservative party

that there are a lot of conservatives who go what's wrong with these weapons and there are a lot of non-conservatives who look at pictures of these weapons and say everything's wrong with them especially in urban areas and so that'll be another one i think that'll be a kind of that and pro-life will be another one that'll be at the heart of the debate within the conservative movement that includes the people's party voters at least the soft ones that that migrated over there this time just one last point if all right i i wasn't offended at all by the tone of erin o'toole's speech last night but i felt a lot of regret uh because if he had won the leadership on the basis of what was in that speech, we might be talking about a different outcome tonight. The problem is he did not. He went against his own

final election speech to win the leadership. But someone who wins the leadership of the Conservative Party with those strong arguments is someone that will be a serious threat to the Liberals. All right, we're going to leave it at that for now. We will be back at the end of the week with the regular Good Talk. By then, the dust will have completely settled. And we'll, of course, have the option, you know, to change all our views that we just made in the last 25 minutes. You never know. But that'll be Friday on Good Talk.

So Chantel, try and get some rest. Long night last night and an early morning this morning to make this deadline as well as the many others you always have on your plate. And Bruce, same goes for you. Thank you for all this. We'll talk to both of you very soon. Thank you, Peter. Thanks, Antoine.

And Bruce will be back tomorrow, the regular Wednesday, Smoke, Mirrors, and the Truth. Not sure what we'll talk about. There are a number of things other than Canadian politics that we could talk about. And we'll see. So let's look forward to that. Smoke, Mirrors, and the Truth tomorrow. So let's look forward to that. Smoke mirrors and truth tomorrow.

Thursday is your turn, so get those cards and letters, emails coming in to the Mansbridge podcast at gmail.com, the Mansbridge podcast at gmail.com. Your thoughts on what happened last night, and I will go through a selection of them, and I've already received a few, but always room for more. And on any other topic you might want to bring up. Friday will be the real good talk with Chantal and Bruce.

So it's quite the week. And final plug, go to my website, thepetermansbridge.com. You'll see the latest on my new book, which comes out in two weeks' time, and the contest around the launch of that new book that may interest you. That's it for now. I'm Peter Mansbridge. This has been The Bridge. On the day after, talk to you again in 24 hours.