The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Are The Polls Tied, Or Is The CPC Way Ahead?

Episode Date: February 17, 2023

Some polls say the Conservatives are up by seven points, but some say the CPC and the Liberals are all tied up.  What to believe?  Chantal and Bruce have their say on that, plus ethics, Branda Lucki and balloons all up for discussion on a busy Good Talk. 

Are you ready for good talk? And hello there, welcome to Friday. I'm Peter Mansbridge. I'm in Toronto. Chantal's in Montreal. Bruce is, as we say, at points south. Getting more tanned with each time he's on. And we're glad you're having a good time, and we're thinking of you, because the weather is, you know, iffy, let's say, up here. The struggle's real. Yeah.

Yeah, you sure ooze sympathy and empathy. Yeah. Sorry. Okay. Bruce always gets mad at me and with some justification when I bring up the subject of polls, because I usually preface it by saying, I don't like polls. I don't trust polls. And yet, let's talk about polls for a minute.

And that's kind of where we are today as we start. We've got a lot of things to cover on today's Good Talk. And I want to start with this because I got to say I'm puzzled. It kind of fits with some of my concerns about polls, but I am puzzled. You know, a couple of weeks ago, we seemed to be seeing the Conservatives opening up a significant gap over the Liberals in the polls, upwards of seven, eight points, in a couple of different polls. And now suddenly this week we're looking at, well, at least one poll,

but one that is fairly well respected even by other pollsters in the Nanos poll, which shows basically a dead heat, which I think is the first time or one of the first times since the last election where the Conservatives haven't been ahead by at least two or three points. So it begs the question, Bruce, and you're the pollster, so why don't we start with you on this. What's going on? Why do you think we're seeing this? Well, I think there are two possible reasons why we're seeing it. One is that there is a

normal margin of error and nobody really likes to say, well, let's not read too much into it, because if you compare two polls and you take into account the margin of error, the actual difference between them might be two points or three points, not bigger than that. So I'd be cautious about the interpretation that things have really improved for the Liberals relative to the Conservatives. But I think that, you know, with a couple more weeks of seeing the same evidence, I would say, yeah, that's probably true. The second thing is that, well, what could explain that, I suppose, is a combination of things. In the coldest, harshest part of winter, it's never that great a time to be incumbents, especially if things are going wrong from the standpoint of the cost of food and the cost of housing and the uncertainty about the economy. And if you've got an opposition leader who's a fairly effective voice rallying frustration with those kinds of situations.

And as we've said before in this conversation, I think we probably all agree, the government is not its own best advocate most days. It's not particularly good at putting the evidence of what it's doing in front of people in a way that's compelling and interesting to them. So that's probably part of it. If there's another thing, though, that's improving, just rather than the passage of time from the depths of January, it might have something to do with health care. And I do think that in the run up to that first minister's meeting, the conversation was really about how poorly the federal government had supported the provinces in delivering health care. Now, I don't think that was a characterization, but I think it was the dominant way in which the story was reported and all of the pressure

had been placed on the federal government to respond to this urgent crisis in health care. Coming out of that meeting, it feels almost as though the federal government exceeded expectations, and not by a little bit, by quite a bit. You've got all the premiers saying that they accept the proposal that the government put on the table. They accept the idea of bilateral conversations. They accept, in many cases, the idea of sharing non-personalized data to help improve the functioning of the healthcare system. And so it looks as though the federal government approached the conversation with the right mix of fiscal prudence, collaboration, and determination to have some accountability, which is all that they were looking for. So they've had a relatively good run on that issue.

All right. Chantal. And if the part of the health care package that actually is putting a bit of wind in liberal sales has to do with fiscal prudence, that seems to tell Chrystia Freeland which way she needs to lean when she presents that budget. I think the fact that the Conservatives basically came out and said, well, this deal is fine by us, also allowed the Liberals to get a bigger win out of it. Because if it's OK for Pierre Poilievre, it makes the premiers lament that it was not enough, almost moot. He's got more allies at the provincial table than Justin Trudeau. And despite all his allies saying this is not enough, Poiliev basically avoided saying I would give you more. And I think that helped the liberals. But I looked at that nano-spoll, I looked at the breakdown, and I totally agree with Bruce, margin of error even larger when you look at the provincial breakdowns. Still, if I were looking at those numbers, I would not want to go in an election if I were Pierre Poiliev, because he is significantly behind, over and above a margin of error in both provinces.

And what I found striking, for instance, in Quebec, the liberals are essentially holding their own. They're at 35%. But the conservatives have lost six points from one such poll to this one, which seems to suggest that Mr. Poiliev is still a long, long way from succeeding to reintroduce himself positively to Quebecers. I also note that in that poll, and I always treat those numbers even more carefully, the Bloc seems to be losing ground. What has been happening in Quebec that has not been apparent in national coverage is Yves-François Blanchet has been closer to the Parti Québécois than to François Legault over the past couple of months. And this notion that the Parti Québécois could be resurging is probably hurting

the Bloc. A lot of people who vote for the Bloc don't want a referendum or the PQ to come back. And those are interesting numbers. In Ontario, there is not that much movement, I think, but I still think that when you look at Ontario numbers and see that Liberal lead, you kind of think that the Premier Ford's policies and the controversies that he's embroiled in are taking a toll on the federal Conservatives. These are all

realities that Poiliev will be hard put to fix on his own. But they do show why that equality in the votes or that very close proximity does not necessarily bode really well for the conservatives and why they should keep their powder dry pertaining to an election. And that was right after he'd just been to a tour of Quebec, right? Polyev, and it didn't seem to go that well. Bruce, you wanted to add a point on that? Yeah, I wanted to add a point about a new way of looking at this that I've started to introduce into the polling work that I've done.

And I'll probably push some stuff out on social media and maybe we'll talk about it a little bit more as we go forward. But Chantelle, I should Chantelle some of this in a conversation that we were having yesterday. I'm trying to break down the idea of the Canadian voting public into a few easy to understand categories. First one is that just under half of those who vote in Canada always vote for the same party, they say. And right now, if you look at that category of voter, very large cohort of voter, the Conservatives are at 35%, the Liberals at 34%. It's a dead heat.

And the NDP is at 18%. So those votes right now kind of play to a in Quebec and in Ontario if those numbers, if those are the only numbers that they depend on. There's about 20 odd percent who say, I don't always vote, which to be honest, probably means they usually don't vote. And Chantal made the point in a conversation we were having yesterday that these may be a prime target for Pierre Polyev in terms of how he's approaching his role in politics and the kind of signal that he wants to send. And it's a reasonable bet for him to make that he may be able to draw some of those voters in. The counter argument would be, you know, they don't vote. And sometimes they vote for more radical protest parties if they do vote. And the more that he has to pitch the mainstream voter, the easier it is for those voters to lose interest in him. So it's a hard gamble to make for

him. And it's a gamble that we've seen some conservative leaders toy with before, and sometimes their fingers get burned trying to do it. Which brings me to the last group and the most important group, in my view, which is about 36% of the public, about 10 million adult voters who say, I always vote, but I don't always vote for the same party. Those are the swing voters. And if we look at those right now, the Liberals are ahead by two points, 28 to 26, with the NDP at 19, another party, probably the People's Party, in this case, around nine, and the Green Party at nine. Now, the People's Party and the Green Party votes can soften, the NDP vote can soften or strengthen. That will affect how the Conservatives do with the Liberals. And for me, that's the cohort I'm watching the most. And I don't think those people are saying, I changed my mind 12 months before an election.

I think those are the people who say, I follow politics before the election, but I really tune in during the election, and that's when I make my choice. And I think we see a lot of that in most campaigns. Let me just pick up on your point about the 20% who, you know, may not have no intention of voting at all. That was the, you know, the figure was somewhat similar in the States in 2016, and that's what Bannon, Steve Bannon, Trump's guy, targeted and kept telling trump if we can get those people out to vote they're going to vote for us and we can win with those

people so it is a you know i mean there was nothing uh unique about that idea but it's it does seem like an idea that that polyev may well well be trying to take for himself here in Canada. And it would be smart to go after that vote. If they're not going to vote, they're no help to you. But if they do vote and they vote for you, it's game on. Chantal? But I do think the cost of doing what you need to do to bring these people to vote is much higher than the benefits. That is when NDP voters coalesce behind the liberals or, big turn in the situation, coalesce behind whoever you would need to undergo to get such vote.

I also note that in this country, the Trump-style approach, the Scores for it, Trump-style approach to facts, to policies, etc., was rejected by a majority of voters in every single political family, including the conservatives. Yes, the conservatives are home to the largest number, but that number is a minority in the conservative movement. So I think there are limits to that comparison. What struck me, and in part because of that conversation we had yesterday, it was also that we talked and we have in the past on this podcast talked about the fact that people are fatigued with Trudeau. And I was trying to think of the difference between the fatigue I see with Trudeau and the fatigue I've seen with Pierre Trudeau, Brian Malroney, Paul Martin, Jean Chrétien, the combination of the liberals. And the biggest difference that I see and why it should give the liberals hope is that this rejection is not,

or this fatigue is not tied to a single policy. Remember the GST, MEECH, the sponsorship scandal. When people tell you that they're kind of sick of Justin Trudeau, and I will accept the people who were mobilized or galvanized by the Convoy events, etc., or who always disliked Justin Trudeau, they never tie up to a big policy that stands out, that is kind of a ballot box issue that you want to reject, even as you reject the prime minister. I find that interesting, especially coming on the heels of a month that saw the main leader of the opposition embrace a major policy of his future rival in the next election

and the shape of that health care. Yeah. If I can just add one thing quickly, Sean's point about the risks or the costs or the dangers associated with that strategy, the Bannon strategy, if you like, you know, Pierre Poliev used it in his leadership campaign, talking about cryptocurrency and firing the government of the Bank of Canada.

That's what that is. And one of the things that we see in our research is that the people who are in this category also happen to mistrust more than everybody else. All of the stakeholders that are seen as institutional voices in Canada. And it doesn't matter whether you're talking about businesses or church leaders or labor leaders or CEOs or journalists or the news media. They're mistrustful of all of those institutional voices. So the more you play to those audiences, the more you could be playing into the dynamic that the liberals will probably want, which is, well, if this election is a choice between fatigue with us or fear of him, let's let it be fear of him. And so I think Pierre Palliev in particular has to be careful to keep his eye on what I think is the bigger prize, which is winning that share of that 36% who always vote and who say, I haven't made up my mind who I'm going to vote for,

because those people are more likely to vote. And if they do come to your side, they don't come with the same kind of risks of the things that you've had to say in order to get them in your tent. All right. That's our discussion on polls for this day. We're going to move from polls. Maybe we're going to love polls one day.

Maybe we're going to dispense with the advisory of this. It's going to be a conversation about things that we don't like to talk about. Well, clearly I like to talk about them because I've spent a career talking about them while trying to run the second track of saying I got real concerns about polls. Anyway, we're going to move, and perhaps it's not too far, from polls to ethics. We'll do that right after this. And welcome back. Chantal and Bruce are here. This is Good Talk for this Friday.

You're listening on SiriusXM, channel 167. Canada Talks are on your favorite podcast platform, or you're watching us on our YouTube channel. You can find it by getting the link on my Twitter or Instagram post. No charge for this visually exciting edition of Good Talk. Some of you may be wondering, if you're listening to this over the weekend, hey, they're not talking about the Rouleau Commission. We're not talking about the Rouleau Commission because at the point that this

is first aired on Friday at noon, it hasn't been handed down yet. But you can be sure that we'll probably end up talking about it next week, especially if there are real surprises in that report. That's the report that deals with the protests in Ottawa last year. All right, ethics. I don't know whether you've ever heard of Mario Dion before, but he's been the ethics commissioner through some tumultuous years on the ethics front as the ethics commissioner in his office have been looking at various issues

surrounding MPs and cabinet ministers, and in particular the prime minister, over the last few years, and he hasn't always been very flattering about the way things have operated on the ethics front. His term is up, and he's kind of leaving with the note saying, you know, they don't really listen to me. You know, the prime minister's been caught in ethics violations as far as he was concerned. And that, you know, his ministers watch what he does and, you know, maybe they're picking up on some of his style and we've got an ethics problem or we had an ethics problem. He seems to be indicating things are a little better right now. What should we make of this?

Obviously, you want your governments to be squeaky clean. I can't remember the last one that was, but nevertheless, that's what you hope for. And he seems to be indicating, as he leaves office, that there are problems there greater perhaps than we had imagined. And there's kind of a trait being set or has been set. What do we make of this? Who wants to start? Bruce, why don't you get? Well, no, you got to start on polling.

We'll let Chantal start. I was only on watch for one liberal government, i.e. a number of terms. But I wonder if his scale or his perspective might not be a bit different had he been the ethics commissioner over the last two years of Stephen Harper's run, plagued as it was by the Senate scandal and the spending issues that were encountered by a number of officeholders in the upper house. And that might have tempered this sense. But on the core finding that, one, it's really hard when you've been found guilty twice of breaches to ethics and you're the prime minister to enforce discipline and to chastise, fire, or suspend people who were found guilty of unbalanced, smaller offenses than those that Mr. Dion ruled were committed by the prime minister. That's the holiday to the Aga Khan, for which I'm more inclined to give the prime minister a pass than for the second one, which is the pressures on the Attorney General in the SNC-Lavanais story, for which the Prime Minister, I think, was punished at the polls

after the resignation of Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott. But the fact is that this government has never, or does not seem inclined to ever find anything bad enough on the ethics front to fire someone from cabinet. And that stands in really stark contrast with, for instance, what happened in the Mulroney era. And if you want to look at the Mulroney era, the 88 going forward, you could also look at Bob Ray in Ontario. Those two, that premier and that prime minister, very different people, accepted countless numbers of resignations, five in the first two years of the Mulroney rule. Now, in his memoir, Mulroney wrote that he was naive,

that his standards and his notion that it was the noble thing to do to accept cabinet resignations only weaponized those resignations in the hands of the opposition. But still, if Brian Malroney were prime minister today, or had been prime minister since 2015, I think the bulk of the ministers who resigned on his watch would still be sitting somewhere around this cabinet table. And that does not speak. We always get the impression that governments are becoming more rigorous on ethics, but that doesn't speak to being more rigorous. It speaks to the price for ethic breaches is getting smaller, even on no-brainers. I know that I shouldn't use public money to hire my sister in my office. I don't need to go to some office to tell me that.

I know I shouldn't be giving contracts, untendered contracts, to a good friend because conflicts of interest are also about not creating the appearance of a conflict of interest. And it looks like there are, you know, yes, Mr. Dionne is in place, but once he's spoken, it all goes on that shelf of documents that no one will look at again, and life goes on. Bruce? Well, I think that Mr. Dionne did what somebody in his position should do as part of an exit interview, which is to sort of use his voice to say a few things that he thinks need to be said.

So good for him for doing that. I tend to agree with Chantal that his lens, we're all, I presume we're all older than him. I don't know how old he is, but I can't help but think that maybe the general standard of behavior has actually improved over the 40-odd years that I've been watching this. Montel's point about the price for a violation seems to be coming down. But on the other hand, the number of people who do things that don't pass the smell test seems to me also to be coming down. And we don't, I never believed that the we thing was a thing and we might disagree about SNC-Lavalin. But I do feel like the point that he was making, he was taking umbrage at the notion that maybe the problem in the situation involving Mary Ng and Amanda Alvaro was a lack of training or something like that. I think he's right to say, you know, more training isn't necessary to know that you shouldn't hire your friend. And I think he's also right to say, if the answer of the government is to look at a situation like that, even if the quantum of money is small, and even if the people involved are generally honorable and hardworking people, it doesn't matter. If you say that the answer is, well, sorry, made a mistake, let's move on, then it is fair for people to say that's not good enough. That's not enough of a sanction against that behavior. And I

think that he's right. And I actually think that the government in that particular instance, probably would have been better served by saying, you're going to take some time in the penalty box. And that's just the way that it has to be. I understand there's awkwardness in doing that if you're the prime minister and you've been cited yourself for some violations. But it's part of the job, ultimately, is governance and management. And so I think Mr. Dionne was well within his remit to raise those issues. I happen to think that he did it in a respectful enough and constructive enough way. And it's a good conversation for people to continue to have in politics in Canada. And also doug fort i know we're not

going to talk about doug fort that is the that happened now just in case anybody thinks that i've forgotten about it that is the worst thing i've seen in 40 years of watching uh political scandals and that's you know if you're wondering about bruce feelings on that he he spent 15 or 20 minutes on it on uh smoke mirrorsrors, and the Truth on Wednesday. And that is the whole issue around Greenbelt, weddings, developers buying tickets at his daughter's wedding. There is a whiff there. It's stronger than a whiff.

A whiff? It's pretty bad. Let me just dip back in. You know, Chantel mentioned the five resignations in the Mulroney cabinet. It was like within the first couple of years of his office. It was kind of different. Some of those, they weren't really ethics. They were more about responsibility, right?

The first one was, they called it tuna gate or something. Everything had a gate to it. But basically somebody had not done a very good job on checking the tuna that was coming out of a plant that was subsidized by the government. It wasn't as if you expected the minister to go in there and open every tin and smell it. But John Fraser paid the price. Eric Malling of the Fifth Estate did the story.

And sure enough, he resigned, and that was followed by others some of them were definitely ethical questions neil mcdonald wrote the story about you know when he was at the ottawa citizen on bob coach who was the conservative defense minister who went into a strip bar in germany with confidential nato secrets or whatever, and either left them there or left them on the bar or something. And he was history fairly quickly on that. That was clearly an ethical issue. But, you know, when you look at these issues that the ethics commissioner highlighted,

they are clearly ethical questions. You can argue against them or for them, depending on how you want. But they're not as much responsibility, ministerial responsibility, as they are straight-up questions of ethics in public life and whether or not we take that seriously any more or not. I think he's simply raising that question, and I guess it's not just for the politicians, but it's for us, you know, the voters, to determine how they feel about that. And I get a lot of letters, as I'm sure both you do, with people who raise everything from the Aga Khan to the WE controversy

to the SNC-Lavalin. They all keep coming up. It's like a parade of those stories. Anything more to add on this before we move on? Well, just a reminder that Stephen Harper actually fired Maxine Delny for leaving documents, not in a sex shop, but at his girlfriend's place. And to this day, we can doubt or question how secret those documents were, considering that they mostly consisted of an itinerary to some venue for a foreign affairs meeting. But there is a larger question there. It's not Commissioner Dion's main purview, but it seems to me that the entire notion of ministerial accountability

to be responsible for major breaks in how your department operates has gone out the window. When was the last time you heard someone say, we are failing Canadians, we're not delivering passports, and we can't get Iraq together, and our airports are a mess? And that's on me, not because I caused it, but because I am the minister and the buck has to stop with me. When was the last time you saw that happen? I'm thinking.

Yes, we're going to go back to Tuna Gate. Yeah, well, he certainly accepted responsibility for those many levels below him on that file. And, you know, have there been others since then? I mean, that's digging back, what, 40 years? Yeah. There must have been. I just can't think of one off the top of my head. Yes, Michael Chong, but not for the same reason.

Resigned from his post as Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs over Stephen Harper's initiative on the Quebec Nations front and the fact that he had not been in the loop and objected to it. But that's a matter of principle, not a matter of ministerial accountability. It's a bit different. I put in a different category, I think, the things that are relevant to that point that Chantal was making that are coming out of the pandemic. So the functioning of airports and the delivery of passports. And I think that the question of what was the right response, what has been the right response of ministers, you know,

is resignation or is it you got to double down and fix the problem. And I do feel like with the passage of not that much time, you know, Carina Gould and others, I guess, across different parts of government have seemed and accepting responsibility for the need to improve it is one solution that's, you know, that's different from resignation, obviously. And I don't think those problems were necessarily caused by departmental errors as much as by circumstances beyond their control. But I'm generally with Chantal that failure doesn't usually come with a resignation, and maybe it should more often. Well, it's great. You can't be fired for lacking ethical integrity or failing an absence of running a department in a way that delivers the minimal results that Canadian taxpayers are entitled to. So I'm guessing this is a great job to be had, because I don't know very many places where you can be either incompetent or unethical,

and still the next day go on as if nothing ever happened. Well, we're going to talk about somebody who chose not to go on when we come back, and that's Brenda Luckey. It wasn't a question of ethics as much as it was a question of competence. But she decided to resign this week, and we'll talk about that, head of the RCMP, when we come back. And welcome back. We're into the final segment of Good Talk for this week. Chantelle and Bruce are with us. You know, you travel the world, as all three of us have done at different times, and you meet people, you know, people who aren't Canadian,

but they know something about Canada, and usually what they know about Canada is, I love those RCMP. I love that uniform. I love the way the musical ride operates, and, you know, they always get their man, and all that kind of stuff. People talk about the RCMP.

Not so much anymore, I don't think, in Canada that we talk about the RCMP. Not so much anymore, I don't think, in Canada that we talk about the RCMP, or when we do, it's usually attached to some, not necessarily a scandal, but certainly some tough talk about the operations of the RCMP, what they've done, what they haven't done. This week, the latest commissioner of the RCMP, Brenda Luckey, handed in her resignation this couple of months after saying

she wanted to keep on the job. But she's had a rough go on a number of fronts, whether it was the convoy protest in Ottawa and elsewhere, whether it was the mass slaying in Nova Scotia and the way the RCMP and in particular she handled that, she's taken a lot of criticism. And this week she's announced her resignation, that she won't go for a second term.

Anyone surprised about that? Bruce? She wasn't going to be given a second term by everything you hear. The official opposition that could form the next government within 18 to 24 months had withdrawn its confidence in her leadership. Her term was coming up within weeks, and there had been not even talk of an extension while one looked for a successor. So it's not as if she decided not to seek a second term. I think that decision was already baked in, and it had been baked in over what happened with Portapique and the inquiry and the allegation that she had tried to please her political masters at cost to an inquiry. And I say allegations because I'm not saying that that was proven. Her testimony, if anything, probably sank her at the Wooloo Commission, the fact that she was listening

in to a cabinet meeting that eventually resulted in the Emergencies Act and told the commission that she had a plan, but she didn't share it with cabinet on that occasion. So this is the move of someone who is retiring before potential storms make people say that she was chased out. But she, in my book at least, she was gone under any scenario. The only question was on what day of the week would that become news? Well, this is that day, Bruce. Yeah, I can't help but think of her in the same way that I think a little bit of Catherine Tate, the president of the CBC, and wonder if these were just poor appointments by the government. The situation for Commissioner

Luckey, I think, is that it was never really clear what her kind of philosophy of policing or the role of the RCMP in Canada was, And it never became clear, even though that there were several important challenges where there was more than ample opportunity for her to articulate something that would help Canadians understand some of the decisions that she was making, some of the choices that she was offering. I think the one for me that stood out in part because it was the most at odds with the kind of the mood of the country and the mood of not just our country, but a mood that existed in other places was the question of whether there was systemic racism within the police. It felt to me that her first instinctive response to that was almost not to be aware of the issue. It didn't feel like it was an institutional defense mechanism. It felt like

she had not been paying attention to something that had really become a huge topic of political conversation and a sense that something might be going wrong in our policing systems that needs to be addressed at a leadership level. And I don't think that she ever really kind of recovered from that, at least in my sense of her. subsequent situations where she got herself into a situation, you know, into conversations where she seemed to be trying to do damage control all the time, but there was never a kind of a higher order sense of who she was and what she was trying to aim for. And that continued right up until the last month or so when, even though the government at the cabinet level had made it clear that it wanted to ban the use of chokeholds, which some 45 of the biggest 60 police forces in the United States have banned, she found it necessary to have media coverage of the fact that she was fighting back on that. Now, I'm sure there are reasons why it made sense for her to fight back on that. I'm sure there are counter arguments to banning the chokehold that make some sense. had of kind of discordant kind of leadership relative to the mood of the country and the

sense of what's the right line for police not to cross, why she would choose to do that in these final weeks of her tenure seem really odd. So I don't want to be unkind to her as an individual. I don't know her. I don't know Catherine Tate either. But sometimes people who seem on the surface to be really qualified turn out to be poorly chosen leaders for the time that they're in those offices. haven't seemed to deliver the new era of policing and have a certain understanding of where the public mood is, where the government's mood is,

and where responsible policing should be, whether it's on the gender issue, whether it's on chokeholds, whether it's on guns, whatever it might be. So at this point, the government has got to find a new commissioner. Past practice has usually been to go within the force, but there's no restriction on that. They don't have to go within the force to find a new commissioner. Now, I'm not looking for names, but I'm looking for characteristics.

What are you looking for in a new commissioner of the RCMP? What should you be looking for? Someone who has the capacity to inspire within the ranks of the RCMP. I think it starts with that. If you're going to lead to change, you need people who want to follow you. And if you're going to, and what Bruce was demonstrating was, it wasn't even that there might not have been followers for Brenda Luckey,

but that there was no vision that was put forward to be followed one way or the other. I'm sure members of the RCMP find for the days when it was a respected institution. But at this point, we are not in that era at all. And if you can restore pride, even as you make changes, you usually will find that the obstacle and the resistance to change, which is always real within any institution, will be a lot less intense than if you just look like you're following political orders and in the process lose the respect of the people you're trying to lead on to change.

I'm also, and I'm wary of saying that, but I do believe that in this day and age, communication skills matter. And it matters to the institution, matters to the conversation with the larger public, and matters, period. And I do think that they need to appoint someone who has those skills, who is able to explain complex issues in simple ways and does not look like a deer caught in headlights when being asked questions in an interview or by the media, which body language is important in those circumstances. Now, I'm curious as to timing. I think it would be unhealthy for the RCMP to be under interim watch for a long period. I also think that it would be negligent on the part of the government since the date of the end of Lucky's mandate is being set in the calendar five years ago. So there is absolutely no excuse to say, oh, she suddenly resigned. That's not how these things work. So I'm curious to see what the timeline will be and whether we will let an institution that is clearly in some difficulty just linger while some interim leader tries to muddle through.

There are also questions, I think, about whether or not the RCMP should continue to provide some of the policing services that it provides. Alberta's Premier Smith has said that she likes the idea of an Alberta provincial police force. I think there are some good arguments that could be made that the RCMP would be better off getting out of the business of provincial policing. So that may become part of the process that government goes through in thinking about future leadership. But even if it doesn't, I think the culture issue, and Chantal said to inspire, I think is the right one. Now, I think the culture issue is kind of a general anxiety on the part of the public that police forces have sometimes lost sight of the idea to protect and serve is what they're there for.

And that they come off as having a kind of a more of a political agenda, more of an edge that feels a little bit thin blue line. I think that it wouldn't be only the RCM police that would have questions raised in that vein. And I think that it's always awkward for politicians to bring these issues to the fore. It's awkward generally. But I think if we pretend that it isn't a factor,

we're missing a lot of important signals that have happened over the last decade or so and some of which became more obvious during the convoy a period of time so if i'm the government i'm looking for somebody who can who can wrap their arms around that problem as well so yes inspire the people who are there but basically make sure that you deal with whatever cultural issues there are that get in the way of protect and serve as an ethos and and there are some of those um i've got five minutes left and uh i would love to get your thoughts on your latest thoughts on on on the balloon story i've been fascinated by it from the beginning,

as I think to some degree a lot of people have been. But the more we hear about it, the less it was the story we thought it was going in. It was no doubt the first balloon, the Chinese balloon, size of four school buses or whatever. It was clearly doing things that had more than gauging the weather. And when it started drifting across missile sites, the Americans did what the Americans do in conjunction with the Canadians.

But the other ones, the three since then, it increasingly looks like even Biden said yesterday that they were benign they were more likely commercial um forms of research in fact i think there's some hobbyist group in illinois or indiana or somewhere said hey one of our balloons is missing and uh you know why'd you shoot it down down if ours was one of them? So the question is, at this point, the Canadian question, I think, is I know we're partners in NORAD, and I'm sure we speak up at certain times, and there must have been discussions on all of these things, but is there a chance here that we got kind of suckered in

by the Americans and they're claiming knowledge or concern or, you know, we've got to take these things down? Was this whole thing botched to some degree? Is there sort of shared responsibility on that or what? I think we went along to get along, frankly. And if it was botched, it starts with, and I don't think going forward, they're going to be able to divorce pre-electoral U.S. politics from things that happened. From a couple of sources, balloons have been on the radar

of previous prime ministers, and we never heard about them. But the reason why we never heard about them is they did not become public knowledge, in particular in the U.S., thus prompting the calculation that now that it was public knowledge, something had to be done about that Chinese balloon because suddenly we were on a Chinese balloon wash in the current climate and environment. That's understandable.

If after that the Americans decide to follow up on their initial gestures, that they're going to adjust their radars so that they're more sensitive to whatever is flying up there. I can't imagine Prime Minister Justin Trudeau helping Canada and its many files with the US by holding a press conference to say, wait a minute, this is probably just some exploratory balloon and they've gone crazy there at the White House. And I think if not military need, but politics and good relationships with the White House did not give Canada the option to prick that balloon. So to speak.

Bruce? Yeah, I find it very unlikely that, first of all, that the Americans stopped sending spy planes and other spying devices over unfriendly countries back in the days of Gary Powers. I'm pretty sure that it still happens today. So I can't imagine a moment occurred in the White House where somebody went in and said, Mr. President, this is shocking. The Chinese have a balloon that's over our territory.

And that the president would have said, I can't believe that's happening. We must shoot it down right away. I don't see that being the movie version if it's held to any measure of truthfulness. More likely, what Chantal said, which is there's a news story about a balloon, and now we've got a problem. And if we talk too much about the balloon in horrified tones, somebody might say, what about your balloons? And then we might have to say, we don't wish to talk about that. So I think that's that whole balloon thing kind of is one of those things where once the media start to grab onto something, it creates a whole other variety of consequences and not necessarily things that we can ever imagine transparency for.

On the space junk or whatever it is, the other stuff that's floating around, I don't think we know the answer to that yet. But I do think that if you're some sort of research arm of a university or whatever, and you're floating stuff up there, you should be on notice that it's probably going to get shot down now because the authorities are now using the iPhone 14, not the iPhone 11, to spot what's in the sky effectively. And they're going to see more of it. And if we can all see it, we're going to want it taken down probably especially you know especially if this stuff is flying you know is at the same height as we fly around the country and i mean i gotta say i i was in

calgary yesterday i flew back flew back last night and i i was looking out the window and i was going really you know like there could be something out there you know it could be from the university of nebraska checking weather but it could be at this height you know like what do i want them to do about it why don't we know about it because they've made it sound now that as chantelle said you know they they they changed their radar settings so they they they can see more stuff than they normally would have, which certainly indicates that there's more stuff to be seen. And as Bruce says, there's junk, there's space junk that's falling down every once in a while.

I don't know. Let's agree, though, that no plane has been downed by the space junk that we know of. That we know of. That's the space junk that we know of. That we know of. That's the key question. Yes, right. That we know of. In Canada or the US. So if it were flying at your high altitude, you'd probably not have needed this week's news to find out because something terrible would have happened. Well, that's the next thing the Russians will say when they shoot down a passenger airliner over wherever it might be. Well, it wasn't us. It must have been, you know, that weather balloon.

Must have hit it. I don't know. I think there are lots of unanswered questions on this story. But I like the direction that both of you are taking in how this has been unfolding. Listen, we're out of time. Good discussion, as always. Chantel's in Montreal. Bruce is getting a tan.

And I'm in little old Toronto, suffering as those of us in Toronto do. It must be snowing. It's a little bit of drizzle out there. Okay, thank you both. We'll talk to you again in seven days time and thank you for listening to Good Talk right here.

We'll talk to you next week. Take care, you guys. Bye.