The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Campaign Day 34: Watch where they go, what they do, what they say!

Episode Date: October 14, 2019

Day 34 of Canada's 2019 Federal Election. | Thank for subscribing and for submitting a rating and review! * TWITTER @petermansbridge | INSTAGRAM @thepetermansbridge ** https://www.thepetermansbridge.com/ *** Producer: Manscorp Media Services

And hello there, I'm Peter Mansbridge. This is day 34 of our election campaign. This is the bridge. It's a Thanksgiving Monday, but there's always time for the bridge. Thanksgiving Monday. What a gorgeous day it was in parts of the country and in other parts, not so gorgeous. Manitoba still being in the recovery mode from that amazing winter snowstorm for the first half of October. As the weekend began, hearing from friends and relatives in Manitoba, and it has been a tough weekend.

Here in southern Ontario, some beautiful moments, some gorgeous moments, with one of those spectacular fall weekends, colors changing, man, you can't beat it. But, you know, overall, overall tells a great story it talks about the diversity of our country that we know is in so many elements but it's also in our weather that we can have these kind of differences in different parts of the country so enjoy it wherever you were wherever you are and on this final evening of Thanksgiving weekend, I hope you're together with family or at least heading home with great memories of being with family over the weekend.

All right, a couple of things to talk about in what will be a kind of short bridge tonight, but one that will kick off this final week of the election campaign. And in a way, they're both things I kind of suggested you should be keeping in mind over the last week or two. The first one is the final week, watching the leaders, where they go, what they do, what they say. Tells you a lot about where you think their campaign is at the moment and what they're thinking that they have to do if they're going to deliver next Monday on October 21st. And today was, you know, one of those classic examples. You watch who goes to ridings that they don't hold now but think they can hold.

Who goes to ridings that they do hold but they're worried they may lose hold? Those are important things. And when you look at the campaigns today, there was a little bit of everything for everyone. Justin Trudeau was in southern Ontario kind of straddling the 401. That's the highway, the big highway that goes from one end of the province to the other in the southern part of the province. Gobbles up a lot of territory and lots of ridings.

And he started the day in a riding that the NDP hold, so it looked good. But those travels go through other ridings that the Liberals hold now, or at least won in the last election, that they're trying to hold on to in this election. So it was a little bit of both. Andrew Scheer was in Manitoba, at least for the morning. Not a lot of seats at stake in Manitoba, but some of them are Conservative seats.

Some of them are Liberal seats that the Tories think they can win, and he was in one of those this morning. Jagmeet Singh was on the West Coast. His riding is in the lower mainland. Obviously, he wants to hold on to that. It's a tough riding to start with, no matter how things were going, but he's had a good run in the last week or so. So,

interesting to watch them. Watch where they go. Watch what they do. Listen to what they say. And you'll get a good sense of whether the parties are scrambling, whether they're confident,

whether they're confident, whether they're cruising. Watch that. There's every reason to believe they're all scrambling in a sense because the public polls we see are so close with indications that the NDP have had finally, after running a good campaign and not showing anything for it, have shown an increase in support in the last week.

Did they peak too soon? Or are they just peaking at the right time to push them across the finish line with good numbers? We're about to find out. The Liberals have clearly had problems in the last week. Their numbers have dropped a few points. And they're in a race in Quebec, and they're in a race in Ontario. The Conservatives have dropped as well.

You rarely see this. The two main parties both losing votes in the last week, if you believe the polls. well. You rarely see this. The two main parties both losing votes in the last week. If you believe the polls. Conservatives having troubles in Quebec. They seem out of it in Quebec. They're running fourth in the last poll I saw in Quebec. So those hopes of gains in Quebec don't appear to be there. Ontario? That could be closer. So we'll see. Anyway, the main thing, and we're seeing it play out, you know, some of you laughed at me a couple of, I can't remember now when it was, I think it was the week before last,

when I said, I bet, I bet we're heading towards a point in this election campaign where the questions of the leaders are going to be about what would happen in a minority government situation. Specifically, what would happen if you, Mr. Trudeau, didn't have as many seats as somebody else, namely Mr. Scheer, and yet, with the support of another party, you would say to the Governor General, I want to keep power and I want to meet Parliament,

which he is entitled to do, and try to govern, even though I have fewer seats than the Conservatives? Could that happen? Well, the questions, that's what I was saying, the questions are going to come, and they did come. They came today. As Justin Trudeau was asked that very question by one of the reporters, asked it a couple of times, actually, in Windsor, Ontario today.

And he fudged his answer. He didn't give a direct answer. Now, why wouldn't he give a direct answer? Two reasons. One, he wants to keep his options open. And two, if he reads the history books, he'll know that his father answered that question in 1979 saying, well, I might consider it, yes.

And he got hammered for the next three, four, five days about saying he would try to govern even if he didn't have the most seats. Perfectly legitimate, but do you really say it in a campaign? So Justin Trudeau did not say it today. Andrew Scheer, when asked a similar kind of question, said, I'm only looking at a majority. I don't want to talk about anything other than that. I don't need anybody else's help.

Well, perhaps because nobody else offered him help. Jagmeet Singh has made it clear he won't support the Conservatives, but he could support the Liberals. Andrew Scheer's only sort of avenue of support might be with the Bloc Québécois, but the last thing he's going to say is I want the support of a Sovereignist Party. Stephen Harper might even jump into the race

at that point in terms of saying something. So I think you'll see this dance continue over the next few days. Let me go into the history books here for a minute because I saw a prominent conservative and a backbench person talking about this issue. Justin Trudeau would never do that. His father didn't do it, wouldn't have done it and Paul Martin wouldn't have done it. Well, that's true. Neither one of them did it. Neither one of them really could

have pulled it off. In 1979 when Pierre Trudeau talked about this with a couple of weeks left in the campaign, it was only if it was a very close election, with separation only by a few seats, a couple of seats. Well, that didn't happen. In 1979, the Conservatives had 136 seats at the end of the evening. The Liberals had 114, a separation of 22 seats. Now, even though the Liberals had the higher percentage of the popular vote, total votes cast, they had four percentage points higher than the Conservatives, 40.1 to 35.9.

But he never tried that argument then. It wouldn't have worked if he had. And the other one that was mentioned today was 2006 by Paul Martin. But he didn't try to hang on to power.

Well, no kidding. He lost the popular vote by six points, and he was 21 seats behind the conservatives. So this wasn't a couple of seats. Who knows what it'll be this time and who will be on top of the party standings board at the end of the evening? Boy, one week from tonight we'll know, but tonight we don't know.

So it's all kind of a mugs game in a way. But hey, it's a fun game to play. All right, I said it was going to be brief tonight, and it is going to be brief, but that doesn't mean we can't say something from the mailbag all right we had a you know a number of you spent your Thanksgiving weekend dropping a line to the bridge, and we appreciate it here very much. And most of them were on this topic

of whether to continue the bridge after next week, after the election. I expect there are going to be questions about the election on these final days starting to come in tonight, so don't be shy about those. But these questions, you know, most people would like to see the bridge continue. That's nice, and it very well may.

It's just trying to shape, and I'm not going to read these letters because they're all kind of similar, but they did reflect an opinion across the country, different ideas about what could be done in terms of commentary. And basically it comes down to, you know, whatever I'd like to talk about and whatever you send me as potential topics that I feel comfortable talking about.

And that's fine. The other thing will be how often and from where, because I do a fair degree of traveling, and I'm in different parts of the world and certainly different parts of the country, and so it gets a little bit tricky. However, I think we're going to do something. I'm pretty sure we're going to do something. And I appreciate all your encouragement that I've heard in these past few days.

One thing I should probably mention once again is the email address for you to write if you have questions. It's themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com. themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com. I did say this would be a short bridge tonight, and it is coming in under the 15-minute mark, mainly just sort of to get us in the mood for what could be a pretty fascinating final few days. I don't recall an election campaign that was this close in the final few days, where you have the two lead parties sort of bouncing back and forth in the lead, and one day one's ahead by a point, the other day the next one's,

the other one is ahead by the point. Neither one of them showing any growth, real growth. They've both been in the mid to low 30s since the beginning of the campaign in most polls, and that remains the case tonight. But what you have seen is movement on the part of other parties. The NDP, which struggled out of the gate and was running forth behind the Greens, has made significant gains, especially in the last week. And they can credit their leader, Jagmeet Singh, with that. We picked him as the player of the week the first couple of campaigns.

We thought he had a great start, but it didn't seem to be having an impact. It has had an impact in the last week. Especially since the debates, which once again proves the point of as bad as they may have been, especially the English language one in terms of its format, it does give Canadians an opportunity to see the people who want to lead their country. And they make decisions based on that. So they've gone up, the Greens have gone down.

Still a week to turn that around for Elizabeth May. We'll see what happens. And we've seen the re-emergence of the bloc. It always reminds me of after the Parti Quebecois lost the initial referendum back in 1980, after four years of discussion since their election in November of 76 as the provincial government, after they lost the referendum in 1980, I've always remembered that a couple of years after that, the slogan became,

separatism is dead. The Parti Quebecois is dead. And I think Pierre Trudeau may even have lent credence to that belief. Well, it wasn't the case. The PQ came back, they won, and we ended up with another referendum, much, much closer, as we all remember, in 1995.

And then they kind of, in the last, I don't know, decade, kind of disappeared. Not a factor. Went from, and this, you know, we tend to forget this, federally, they were the official opposition. Even though they only had seats in one province, they were the official opposition at one point for a couple of years. But in this last parliament, they only had a handful of seats. I don't think they even had official status as a party.

And everybody was, they never used the term again. The bloc's dead. They didn't say anything like that. But they got pretty close to it. But they're back now. If you believe the polls and the analysis coming out of Quebec, they are back. They're in second place, maybe better, in Quebec.

So they could win a good chunk of seats and be in a pretty significant position. So, never say never, right? Never say never in politics. And with a week to go, things can happen. We live in a 24-7 world where things move pretty quickly. And they could move pretty quickly in these final seven days. Nobody looks confident with where they may end up.

Maybe Jagmeet Singh is looking confident. He's had a great run, but it's not over yet, and it's not a good time to be overconfident. So that sets the stage, and I've broken through the 15 minute mark and I'm sorry about that. Giving you a few things to think about and we'll get back into the substantive

play-by-play for the final four days of this week starting tomorrow. Just imagine, this time next week we're going to have a pretty good idea. Tomorrow, just imagine, this time next week, we're going to have a pretty good idea of what the country is going to look like and how it's going to be governed in the years ahead, or maybe it'll only be the months ahead,

if it's a minority. Who knows? All right, the Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. Don't be shy. Write us a letter. We'll try to deal with your issues and your concerns. But for now, on this Monday night, Thanksgiving weekend, finish it off well. Thanks for listening.

I'm Peter Mansbridge, and this is The Bridge.