The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Could This Be What Justin Trudeau is Planning? - Encore Good Talk

Episode Date: October 14, 2024

Rumours circulated that the Trudeau government was considering a procedure to shut Parliament down for weeks or even months.

And lo there, Peter Mansbridge here. Happy Thanksgiving. And because it's Thanksgiving, because it's a holiday, we have an encore presentation. You don't have to go back far for it, though. It's Friday's Good Talk, repeated here today for your enjoyment. So happy holidays. Enjoy the broadcast.

And we'll talk to you again tomorrow right here on the bridge and hello there welcome to friday it is the friday episode of the bridge that is of course good talk bruce anderson chantilly bear are here with us and uh we have more than a few things to talk about. You know, if there's one thing that usually bores a lot of Canadians, it's when people like us start talking. This is a great intro already, I can tell. I mean, if you've got cooking, anything more valuable to do, yeah, okay. All right, let's try that again. For those of you who are left. As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted,

what does tend to bore people is parliamentary process stories. And we try to avoid those. And this, I guess you could say this is process, but it's a really unique kind of process. The word is prorogue or prorogation. And I, you know, I've always had a problem with this word, not in the topic, but in how to spell it, how to pronounce it, even at times describing what it actually means. But this week, bubbling around Parliament Hill and elsewhere, has been the possibility that the government, the Justin Trudeau government, is about to prorogue the House,

which could mean a number of things. But let's talk about it for a moment, because just in case it does become a fact, we should know why it's happening and what it could mean. Bruce, why don't you start on this? Sure. The way that you introduced that, though, it made it feel like I was on the hook to be an expert in

parliamentary procedures so i'm going to pass the puck on that one to chantal if she wants to pick it up but what the politics of it are as i see it or this there definitely has been a lot of rumor running around this week that with the passage with royal assent of the pharmacare bill coming out of the senate that the government might choose to prorogue Parliament. A couple of different scenarios you kind of hear from people. One is that it would be the step before a resignation by the Prime Minister and him calling for a leadership race. This was the scenario four, the famous Chantal scenario four

from a couple of weeks ago. 4-8. race. This was the scenario for the famous Chantal scenario for from a couple of weeks ago. For that idea. I don't know if I if I believe that that idea has completely taken hold, but the conversation about it definitely continues through this week and and could result in that in that scenario. The other scenario, I suppose, would be the government deciding to prorogue because they're anxious about the continued pressure from the opposition parties, worried about having an accidental election, not at a time or over an issue of their choosing, and that they would want to, again, give themselves some time to reset. I think there's an expectation that there's going to be a number of Liberals who

will announce that they're not going to run again, probably require a cabinet shuffle. And so, you know, there's probably a fair number of our listeners or viewers out there who are wondering how many resets are too many. And I think that that's a reasonable question. The Trudeau government has tried a number of different resets over the last year and a half almost. I wouldn't be any more optimistic about a reset of that sort, a shuffle, a new agenda, maybe new throne speech, that sort of thing, because I don't think that the problem that the liberals have is just waiting for interest rates to come down a couple of points

or inflation to come down a little bit lower. That's sort of the rationale that you hear sometimes for people who believe that Mr. Trudeau should stay on and be the leader of the party. But the evidence is that the problem that the party has is in part fatigue with the incumbency of the liberals, but also a very large part is just about how people feel about Mr. Trudeau. His negatives are much, much higher than any of his opponents. They're almost double the negatives of anybody in his cabinet who's been rumored as a possible successor. They're 25 points higher than Mark Carney or Melanie Jolie or Chrystia Freeland. So I don't know if it's a real conversation, but it wouldn't surprise me if it is. And it also wouldn't surprise me if the government decided in either one of those two scenarios

that it was time to take that step. Who's the government in this case? Like when you say if the government decides. The prime minister. Yeah. We're talking about one person, right? And maybe his closest aide. Yes. Chantal, where are you on this? Well, let me rewind to first explain what prorogation is. It basically means that the prime minister ends the current session, as I am, it's over, and we will reconvene parliament, presumably in February. And at that point, the government needs to present a Trump speech, because that's how the session begins.

It could present a budget right on the heels of it, if it thinks that it's really close to an election, which everyone by February assumes we will be for a spring election. It also means that the bills that are currently in the Senate and in the House of Commons die on the order paper. They have to be resuscitated. And there are processes, and I'm not going to bore you with that, that allow you to resuscitate bills, but it still means that nothing will happen to them. Among those bills, to give you an example, I suppose that next week when the House is on the break, the Prime Minister says the House is paralyzed by opposition tactics and the Senate by maneuvers in the committee. We need a reset. We need everyone to go home, cool their heads, and we'll come back in February. That would mean that, for instance,

Chrystia Freeland's capital gains tax measures from the last budget, because they were off the budget in separate legislation, would not be voted on. And at some point, it would not be law. It might never become law under this scenario, depending on what happens when the house comes back. The government's food program for schoolchildren would also be dead on arrival, at least until February and probably for a long, long time. The Bloc Québécois request for the bill on management, farm management, would also stay where it is. So those are basically the consequences of proroguing. That being said, and it would look like Justin Trudeau, if he wouldn't be resigning at the same time, is running away from accountability in the opposition majority. But the price to pay for

a prorogation is always higher within the bubble, or has been in the past, than it has been in the real world. And I'll give you an example, the most obvious example, and why the word prorogation may be more familiar to Canadians today than it used to be. And that's 2008, just after the election that saw Stephen Harper re-elected with a minority. Within months, Mr. Harper was threatened with losing his job as prime minister at the hands of an arrangement between the liberals, the NDP and the Bloc Québécois that would have seen Stéphane Zion become prime minister. Stephen Harper was one confidence vote away from that scenario taking hold. He decided to prorogue the House of Commons, the Parliament, and sent everybody home until late in January.

Everyone kind of screamed abuse of prorogation, democracy, etc. Except that within those six, seven weeks that the House and Parliament wasn't sitting, the deal between the Liberals, the NDP, and the Bloc Québécois fell apart. And by the time the House of Commons did come back in the winter, Stephen Harper was safe in his role. And clear prorogation did work. You can say all that you want about how terrible it was to do this. My stance on this particular deal was that if it wasn't sturdy enough to survive a Christmas break, a long Christmas break, then it wasn't sturdy enough to ensure stability in government, but still. So if Justin Trudeau decides to prorogue,

everyone will be saying he is running away from accountability and the House of Commons. I don't know that a reset would make a difference, but I do know that there comes a point where governments, if the prime minister is staying and looking to the next campaign, needs to exhaust every possible option that it has. And that would include a cabinet shuffle. May I suggest that if we're going to go down that path, and I'm not convinced we are, but if we are, it may be time for the

prime minister to put it to Mark Carney that he's either in or out and offer him a cabinet seat, which is exactly, by the way, what Brian Mulroney did with Lucien Bouchard three months before he called an election in 1988. So there is precedent for bringing someone in cabinet, even at this late stage in the game. But do I think it's likely that there will be prorogation? I think if you ask cabinet ministers these days or MPs, nobody knows. The government is, at the same time, trying to advance the supply management bill in the House over a filibuster by the conservatives is serving the liberals more than it serves the conservatives. That the story of the documents that the government has refused to hand over, and the RCMP being of two minds about whether it wants to have documents handed to it that way,

that story doesn't have long legs in the coffee shops of the nation. It has taken the conservatives into territory that is very far from the bread and butter issues that have made its success so far. And I think the liberals and the NDP up to a point are not sad to be able to say every day, as NDP House leader Peter Julian put it last week, that the conservatives are agents of chaos and have been agents of chaos. That's a quote that's not my judgment in the House of Commons. So there is a break coming, time to regroup. Presumably the liberals will appoint a campaign director. It's always useful in an election year to have one of those persons. So that tells me there's a lot of catching up that they have to do

if they're going to even fight an election rather than play dead until it's over. But this is where we are. All right. With the danger of slipping too deeply into process, let me raise a couple of things. First of all, you know, that 2008 example is a really good one. And when he made that decision, or at least when he asked the Governor General to sign on to prorogation,

we still don't know exactly what happened at Government House when the two of them had that conversation. It went on for a couple of hours, if I recall, because he had to get her, basically had to get her approval to do the maneuver he did, which worked out very well for him, as it turns out. In terms of, the whole reason I brought this up

is because I think it does, it does give us an indication of sorts as to where the Prime Minister in particular is in terms of what the future is going to be. Because I agree with you, Chantel, if he just prorogues the House for three or four months without resigning, there's going to be a backlash. And I wonder if, Bruce, what you were saying about some Liberal MPs and perhaps ministers announcing they're likely to announce in the next little while that they're not running again is also part of all this pressure that's building around the Prime Minister to do something yeah it

definitely is part of it um but uh just to clarify i thought chantal was making the point that prorogation inside the bubble people worry that if you do it it carries a political price but outside the bubble it doesn't generally do that or it wouldn't normally be expected to do that. I think that's right. I think that the idea of prorogation for a reset by the prime minister in the context of him staying would result in a lot of howling among people who pay a lot of attention to politics and who cover politics and who are in politics. And that's normal and it's healthy and it's to be expected. And it's exactly the arguments that both of you were making, which is people will say, you've lost the ability to control your own future. It's in the hands of other people right

now. And all you're trying to do is prevent something happening to you rather than doing something better for the nation. All of those arguments will be made if he chooses that course. And they will have merit, I think. However, as to whether or not they will have any impact on public opinion, I'm skeptical. And I say that not just because it's prorogation, but because almost nothing does right now. There is no evidence that the week in, week out skirmishing, whether it's about documents being withheld or anything else, is really affecting public opinion. Public opinion is a little bit kind of frozen in place right now. And it's frozen in place in a way that's particularly helpful to the conservatives, particularly harmful to the liberals.

The liberals have tried no shortage of things to try to do, money to spend on programs that they brought forward, ideas that they championed, putting the prime minister in different scenarios, seeing different groups of people around the country to see if that can kindle some support, putting him on to the Colbert show. None of those things seem to be having an impact. And none of the if there are some mistakes that that Pierre Poliev is making, and I think there are some, none of those seem to be really denting what I wouldn't call the enthusiasm for him, but the enthusiasm for somebody other than Justin Trudeau as a prime minister. I think that's the central organizing energy around public opinion these days. And most everything else that goes on in and around Ottawa is important and needs to have this kind of debate and discussion that we and others are having.

But I don't think it manifests in a lot of public opinion impact. Go ahead, Chantal. About people who are not re-offering within the Liberal caucus, those that have not yet declared that they're not re-offering. My understanding is that the Prime Minister's office has a pretty good take on who's not re-offering and that a request was made for an understanding that if at all possible, it would be best to announce late at the end of the year, going into January. Why? Because by doing so, there would not be probably the need to call by-elections to fill any of the seats of people who want to leave. Ollantay would give the Liberal Party time to try to line up candidates

for where it knows that there will be vacancies. For sure, Pablo Rodriguez, who is going to run for Liberal leader in Quebec, is not staying in the House of Commons sitting as an independent by accident. The January timing basically means that there will be no need, probably, to open a seat for a by-election on the eve of a general election. But I do think that the number of ministers and MPs have already told the prime minister over the summer that they're unlikely to be running again and that they should start thinking about the succession. As for prorogation, we all talk as if next week is a do or die moment to decide to prorogue, but it isn't really.

Up to a point, you could also make a case that the government could come back after the break, try to get that supply management bill out of the Senate and prorogue at the next break, which is Remembrance Day, November 11th. And then the time frame is a lot shorter. But I do believe that this government, if the prime minister is staying in particular, but even if he is to be replaced, has another Trump speech in its body, that it's not going to go to the polls without a serious cabinet shuffle and without some kind of a trance speech that opens the path to an agenda that they can run on. So I won't be surprised if on November 11th, if not next week,

or when the House breaks for Christmas, if we get to that, the House is prorogued so that the government can present that Trump speech and present a fresh agenda and a fresh cabinet coming back later in the winter. But probably, you know, me, I think November 11th, if not next week, because I think it's going to be very rocky between now and the Christmas break. And probably I don't see the government falling between now and November 11th, to tell you the truth, because it would require the NDP to find common ground with the conservatives on that. And despite what Mr. Blanchet, the Bloc Québécois leader, has been saying all week about October 29th, you know, no one's going to turn into a pumpkin on Halloween day

because the deal isn't fulfilled with the Bloc. Mr. Blanchet does not walk around with a red button that he can press and have the government ejected overnight. He does not even have an opposition day at his disposal between now and the end of the year. So I think if the government wants to see if it can get anything done before it prorogues, it can probably stretch that decision into November. Okay, last point, and it kind of a cabinet shuffle discussion, that there's no point in having one unless it's going to be a real change and real new people coming in, which circles back to your comment about Mark Carney earlier. But one assumes there has to be more than that to make anybody sit up and say, hey, this is different.

This is real change. Yeah. I mean, yes and no in the sense that you need to keep the people who are running again engaged, and so you will need to promote some people who are on the back bench now. But I don't think you can bring in more than one, maybe two new faces from the outside. And why you would want to do that in January goes to the same point.

You may not be in a hurry to get them elected. And because of why would you rush if you're on the eve of an election? But I don't know that they have it in them to realize how much a cabinet shuffle needs to feature new faces and not just, again, people who maybe seats would be in the balance. So let's make them ministers just before the election. And it's going to help them keep that seat, which has never worked, by the way. It was the rationale. It was rationale that was used a little bit last year with some of the appointments and i don't i didn't believe that it would um work out

that way which is not a criticism of the individuals who were appointed at all or even the theory behind it at a theoretical level if you were close to your opponents like say three points five points separate you're in a in a dog fight and so everything that you can do to raise the profile of local mps who are in tough ridings is probably worth looking at but when you're 20 points behind, those kinds of appointment choices are not going to materially affect the way that people think about what's happening in Ottawa. And so they're not going to change the outcome for those who, in a scenario where the party is going to lose by 20 points, would be the few seats that you could still hold on to. But at that point, you're building a cabinet, which is really a cabinet of the remaining pieces of furniture that you could imagine holding on against a massive conservative supermajority.

Well, I don't know what kind of a strategy that is for cabinet building. It's certainly a bad strategy for political campaigning. So that doesn't feel logical to me. And I also think that the idea that you could bring in people from outside into a situation where, let me put this carefully, there are not a lot of liberals around who think they have a chance of winning the next election with Justin Trudeau as leader. They may be all wrong. He may be right that he is their best chance and he has a good chance. I've never seen anything that looks like you could go from where he is today to a victory. I don't see any evidence of it, but it's

at least a debating point. However, for people who are doing other things outside politics, how hard is it to decide to go into a cabinet in Januaryuary or february when you're 20 points behind and and and even most of the people that you would talk to in the party are not convinced that that that's a viable political strategy so i i think it's hard to recruit candidates i think it's hard to imagine building a a cabinet and it's it's not that hard to write a throne speech, relatively speaking, but what is going to be the impact of that throne speech unless it has ideas that are so powerful and kind of impressive that nobody's ever thought of them before? And that's hard to do for an incumbent government at this stage of its life. All right. We're going to take a break. Got a really interesting next topic to come up. Somebody mentioned earlier the word accountability.

We're going to talk about accountability in the next segment with two examples of things that have happened in the last, actually just a couple of days, and see whether this is acceptable accountability that we're witnessing. We'll be right back after this. And welcome back. You're listening to Good Talk, the Friday episode of The Bridge. Chantelle Hebert, Bruce Anderson are here.

I'm Peter Mansbridge. You're listening on SiriusXM, Channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform, or you're watching us on our YouTube channel. We're glad to have you with us, no matter what platform you are using. Okay, I mentioned the word accountability. There's two examples. First one we're going to talk about is involving CTV. This week, the head of CTV News, you've probably never heard of this fellow, but he has been in the news business for more than three decades.

His name is Richard Gray. He's actually the vice president of CTV News, but he's the boss and was involved in the incident that got the Conservatives so upset a few weeks ago and ended up in Gray arranging the dismissal, the firing of two CTV News employees. Well, this week Gray appeared before the Ethics Committee of the House of Commons to discuss what had happened. Pierre Poliev was convinced and the Conservative Party was convinced that the errors that were made in the production of a news piece

a month or so ago was deliberate, malicious intent. Well, Gray testified that no, it was not malicious intent. They altered a piece for time reasons. They altered a piece to cover a technical error that had developed and that they were definitely innocent of any malicious intent, that it was something that happened that shouldn't have happened. Now that doesn't, at least to me, explain why they were fired,

but they were fired, which seemed to give the conservatives a major victory on what they'd been claiming. The issue is appearing before the committee to give that reasoning. How accountable is that? Bruce, you start us on this one. Yeah, I thought that him saying that, the vice president of CTV News saying that

even though the people were fired, that there was no malicious intent was a, I hadn't expected that CTV would paint that picture for everybody, because it does leave you with the impression that the choice that CTV made in the way that they reacted to Pierre Poliev blowing his stack was one that was too quick, made for reasons that may not have to do with, you know, how you run your news organization. And by that, I don't mean you should be allowed to put stories on air that are inaccurate.

But was this a mortal sin? Or maybe, you know, something more like venial? I guess that's the alternative. I've forgotten some of my religion. But a misdemeanor or felony may be a better way to think about it. It's not Canadian. But the idea that this particular story was so damaging to the conservative cause or was so carefully orchestrated to undermine conservative support never really

made that much sense to me. It felt to me like it was an error from the beginning and that it wasn't the kind of thing that was going to end up really damaging conservative support. And I've never felt for a moment in recent years anyway that BCE and CTV were hostile towards the conservative party. So the idea that this became a cause célèbre by Pierre Polyev to the point where he said, we will not speak to anybody from BCE. We will not give interviews to CTV. We will not have anything to do with these people because their intent is to destroy us as a political operation. I thought it was way overblown and I thought it was intemperate. I thought it was kind of behavior unbecoming a future prime minister. It sort of reminds me of what Donald Trump was saying about CBS should have its license revoked because of whatever slight he saw in terms of how they were dealing with Kamala Harris. And so yesterday for for CTV to acknowledge that, yeah, they fired these people, but they

didn't think that there was any malicious intent. It felt to me like the company was saying, even if it didn't intend to, that he had bent to political bullying by Mr. Poliev and the Conservative Party, which isn't a good look for a news organization, especially heading into an election year. Chantal? Well, I've worked in half a dozen newsrooms, and none of them was organized enough to engage into a conspiracy of the kind that the Conservative leader refers to. As you know, it's a much more disorderly place where mistakes do happen.

There is, for instance, always and will always be, and that's normal, a gap between the knowledge that press gallery members bring to political stories and the knowledge that people in the newsroom who do a variety of things bring to the same stories. And it is totally possible that in that gap, incidents such as this one will happen. If you are going to be firing people, it would be, and that's been my experience in newsrooms, people at a more senior level. You were supposed to oversee material to make sure that these things don't happen, that they have the knowledge to bridge the gap and to say, wait a minute, this isn't right, this editing leads to the wrong conclusion.

And there is no doubt that that report should never have gone to air in the way that it went and it was edited. But that being said, I think Mr. Poirier achieved this purpose. How do you feel if you work for CTV now, knowing that whenever there is political pressure, you stand to lose your job in a market where jobs are not going to be easy to find substitute jobs. How will you feel if you know that your senior management doesn't have your back? And there will be political pressure. It's normal. When an election comes around, every mainstream media outlet endures political pressure from all sides. And the only thing that stands between you and that pressure

are the people who are senior in the organizations. When I went to the Toronto Star, I made a deal with John Undrick. It was his offer, and I didn't even believe him at first. He was the publisher of the Star, and he said, when you come to work for me and write columns, political interference will stop in this office. And it did, to his credit. But he didn't say there will be no political interference. He said it will stop in this office because he knew and I knew political interference is a fact of life and never more so than during an election period.

So I believe that the CTV made two mistakes. The first was airing that story, which was very sloppy. And the second was by caving and not having the backs of people that it now says had no real ill intentions. This was a mistake. Mistakes always happen. They are bad. That's why retractions are so public. But it should have given CTV the occasion to say that they do have to back up their political journalists. Yeah, I mean, I can see the argument for a suspension, you know, for a week or a few days or what have you,

an admission that it was wrong, what happened, and it should never have happened. But firing them when you're concluding that there was no, you know, deliberate attempt to torque the story here, seems to me over the top, and I sort of question the story here. Seems to me over the top. And I sort of question the accountability there. I'm glad you mentioned John Hondrick because John was obviously from a famous newspaper family. His dad had been the publisher before him at some time before him. But John went through the process like he started at the bottom

and including eventually as a reporter because I worked with him when he was at the Ottawa Bureau of the Star and I was the Ottawa Bureau of the CBC we traveled together in terms of covering campaigns etc so he understood, he knew

from the ground level up what the process was like. Okay, the other issue of accountability is a different one that involves a public servant. And that is the Parliamentary Budget Officer, who a couple of months ago came up with a report that more than questioned the numbers that the government was using about the difference between the carbon tax and the rebates to the tax. It said that the government was misusing, was using incorrect numbers. Well, the government argued at the time that it wasn't. And eventually, the PBO has now conceded

that, in fact, they got the numbers wrong. They screwed up. However, they're still saying that the end result is the same. So you wonder how does that play into accountability? Who wants to start on this one? Chantelle, do you want to give this a go? At some point, I have to say that I've stopped reading those reports because to me, they are useless. They're useless. Why? Because what the parliamentary budget officer is doing is taking a very narrow,

narrow look at the carbon tax, extrapolating its impact on the GDP, but not at all. Trying, if he's going to go there, which I believe he doesn't have the means, so maybe he should just not and stick to very basics. How much is the tax? How much are you getting back? Because if you're going to go to the impact on the GDP, investments, etc., then you need to go into tariffs for economies that don't decarbonize and what they would do to our capacity to export in five or six years, since we're talking five, six, seven years down the road, or the costs of climate remedial measures, he might come to the conclusion, if he did, that maybe the federal government should stop rebating

and put that money aside to help people who won't be able to rebuild or to relocate because of- Or buy insurance. Or buy insurance. So to me, those are useless reports and they lead to a conversation that is frankly not very constructive and not very productive. Maybe I'm a little bit over-caffeinated today, but I agree with everything Chantal just said there and I would probably add a certain element of what the sequence of events, Peter, was more or less, as you describe it, but a little bit different. So they issued a report way back when saying that Canadians were worse off because of the

carbon tax. Pierre Poliev turned that into an advertising campaign and a lengthy period of hammering the government with the parliamentary budget officer says the liberals have been lying about the impact on households of the carbon price. We've been right all along. Carbon tax needs to be axed, right? This is a central part of their political campaign. And the initial report of the parliamentary budget officer was used as fodder to tell essentially a lie about the carbon tax. Why do we know it's a lie? Not just because the liberals say it's a lie, because after the liberals pushed back on that initial report, the parliamentary budget officer came forward and said, we made a mistake. We used the wrong numbers. We need a few

months to go back and redo our report, and then we'll put out another version of our conclusions. Well, it was at that point that I think the liberals correctly said, hang on just a second. This is material. You need to address a few other fundamental problems here. One is that your information gets used as political fodder to make a case that's not true, that's misinformation about an important and arguably a central political debating point these days. And second thing, this is the point that Chantal was talking about, which is the point that Chantal was talking about, which is if you're going to talk about the impact of the carbon price, not just in terms of the price you pay and the rebate that you get, but the roll on impacts on the economy, which is what

the PBO did, how can you ignore evaluating the cost of doing nothing? Because that is the kind of the political choice that appears to be on the table right now. Pierre Polyev isn't saying I'm going to replace this carbon tax with something else that will work better and cost less to the economy, but will also fight climate change. So there are going to be voters who don't care about climate change. There are going to be people who think that other priorities are more important and the country shouldn't have a policy that mitigates our emissions. There are some people who will think that how much difference can we make as one country in the mix? And that to me is a bit of a moral question. If we decide that we're too small and therefore we shouldn't carry our weight

in the fight against climate change, that's not a moral choice as far as I'm concerned, but I recognize that some people feel that way. But in the end, the PBO has kind of muddied the lens of this issue. And yesterday, in kind of saying, here are our new numbers, and yes, we were wrong. And it was a more material impact for the positive in places like Nova Scotia and in Saskatchewan. And we had misrepresented the impacts. But we still want people to know that we think on the whole, it's a negative for Canadians because of these knock-on effects on the economy. And they still said, we're not going to evaluate the cost of doing nothing, even though here we are in a week where there's another series of horrific, or a couple of week period where there's another series of horrifically expensive, to say nothing about the tragedy of lost human lives, horrifically expensive

climate-related environmental disasters. So, you know, I don't know how much credibility that organization has had, but it's less now because of the way that this PBO has handled his responsibilities. I have no doubt about that. You know, it's had kind of a rocky go from the beginning, the Parliamentary Budget Office. There's always been some controversy attached to it and some disagreement between either the PBO and government or the PBO and the opposition parties.

It always seems to have been the case. When you look at the situation from Poliev's eyes, you can hardly blame him for his initial use of it. I mean, it was there. That was their report. That's what they were standing by originally. You can question, perhaps once the numbers were, you know, challenged, his continuing use of it. But again, now, with the kind of report that was issued yesterday, it's good to go for Polyev in terms of his campaign.

He'll use the PBO as a backup to what he has to say. Both sides will try to use the same kind of half-assed version of a report, and the public will not feel better informed by it, nor are they better informed by it. That's the bottom line as far as I'm concerned. Okay. We're going to take it. Go ahead.

If the conservatives do come to government and they do ask the tax, as they say, which I believe they will, I can't wait to see how much richer all those people who believe that it's going to solve any of their economic woes by taking away the rebates that come with this, how much of a difference they'll see at the end, as for the parliamentary budget officer, you have a bit less money in your pocket. And the fact that maybe the economy and the GDP and investment will be different, which I don't believe it will be because I believe climate change will impact the GDP in ways that go way beyond a tax on carbon with a rebate. In any event, it's not going to do anything for you at the end of the week. You won't have a loonie, an extra loonie in your pocket as a result of that move. Okay. We're going to take our final break. When we come back, we're going to talk a little bit about the British Columbia election, which comes up next week. Back right after this.

And welcome back. Peter Mansbridge here with Chantelle Hebert and Bruce Anderson. This is your Friday episode of The Bridge. It's good talk. Glad to have you with us. How many, how often do we see provincial elections on a Saturday? You know, the BC election is a week

tomorrow, October 12th, October 19th. Saturday. And I don't know, has that always been the case in BC? I don't think so. I want to throw a flag on this kind of question. If you're going to ask us skill testing questions that we don't have the opportunity to answer, then that's not cool. I just noticed.

I wasn't planning to do that. I just saw, I was just looking at my notes here and it says election October 19th and I look at the day today is the 11th and I'm thinking 19th, that's a Saturday. Well, this is clearly a Chantal question in any event. If the question is allowed to stand, which I don't think it

should, then it's not. We're going to rule it out of order? We'll rule it out of order. I can only tell you that we don't vote on Saturdays in Quebec or Ontario. I haven't voted in other places. I don't know. Listen, I know that by the end of the day

today, my inbox will be filled with people saying, that's classic central Canadians. You don't get it. Here in the real world, we vote on Saturdays. Now, I used to live in that real world. I just don't remember it as being a Saturday. That was a long time ago.

It was like pre-Confederation. Okay. Listen, not one of us is an expert on BC politics, although Bruce, I think you've probably done some polling there over the years. I have, yeah. It's been an interesting campaign to watch from a distance because the Conservatives are in the game in this race. After a campaign with some stuff that's been said that kind of stands out

as different from the norms. What should we expect from this race? Now, I'm not asking you to predict it, but in terms of its impact, its potential impact it could have on the rest of the country. Well, I think what's interesting about it is this, Peter. I mean, in the run-up to the election campaign, there were two parties on the rest of the country. Well, I think what's interesting about it is this, Peter. I mean, in the run up to the election campaign, there were two parties on the right and people who were more conservative leaning voters were that I know and talk to were were fairly despondent about the fact that they they had issues with the EB NDP government, but they didn't think that it was any chance that they were going to see a conservative government at the end of the next election because these two parties were going

to split the center right and the right vote. And then, of course, we had this kind of shocking development where one of the conservative parties decided that it was going to kind of stand down, essentially, and let the field be occupied by John Rostat's Conservative Party. Even then, I think there were a lot of people who were skeptical about whether or not Rostat was capable of mounting the kind of campaign that could coalesce the right and present a real challenge to the NDP. But, you know, the polling does indicate that he has. I mean, I think right now the polling indicates the NDP is still more likely to come out on top, but it's a far more competitive, conservative offering than many people had expected to happen in BC. And for me, the big takeaway is when I look at national polling data

and I see that 60% of the population now define themselves as being either on the right or on the center, but with a preference for fiscal and economic focus, which I tend to think of as center-right. That 60% on the right or the center-right is different materially from what we would have seen 10 years ago across Canada. It would have been more 60% on the left and center left. So I think there has been a material shift. I think it reflects the fact that people think that government spending got too far out ahead of itself and taxes are more of a pain point because the cost of living is more frustrating for people. There are other issues as well. The culture wars, for sure. The fact that we see 30% of Canadians now saying that they would vote for Donald Trump

instead of Kamala Harris is telling us something about the nature of the country that's different from even only a few years ago. And so for me, watching BC is a little bit like watching to see how much of that is influencing the political choice that the BC voters are having. And it's quite interesting to see, especially in the run up to a federal election. Chantal? Well, you know, you always advertise stuff at the end of Good Talk. So I'm going to make my own advertisement. Our first post-BC election Good Talk will find me in BC, just so you know, because I have to be traveling to Vancouver. And you were just out there a couple of weeks ago.

Yes, and I was out there. I was in Kelowna. I have to say that a change election, usually you can feel it when you talk to people. I didn't get that sense. But I have to say that the choices that the BC voters have to make are starker than those of most other voters provincially in this country. of conservatives in Atlantic Canada and the liberals are as deep, including in New Brunswick, which also has an election campaign on, as the choices that are being put to BC voters. And I also think that those choices are starker than they have been in recent elections on

two issues that are fairly fundamental. One of them is climate change. There was a bipartisan consensus on carbon pricing between the former liberals, the United BC party, and the NDP over the past few elections in BC. That is no longer there. The choice is to walk back a lot of environmental measures and climate policies, if you vote for the conservatives, or to keep them if you vote for the NDP. The other major change is on indigenous rights. D.C. has been well ahead as it has been on climate change, on indigenous rights.

And it has been a matter of relative political consensus within their legislative assembly, if not within the electorate. That is also a choice that is a lot more black and white as the Conservative Party would walk back a lot of the policies that the NDP has put in place with support from some of the people who were running from the conservatives, including that of the conservative leader when he was still a member of what was called the United BC Party. So I'm curious to see what choice they will make. I don't disagree with Rose's findings that people are saying they are in his mind center right.

I think that's part of a return of the pendulum. If you would ask the same question in 2015 after a decade of Stephen Harper, you probably and people voted accordingly, voted for a left of center liberal party. I think fatigue with Trudeau is also fatigue with this ideological place on the spectrum. But I've never noticed that Canadian voters really veer far from the center, even as they go from a bit to the left and a bit to the right. I don't think we are seeing a fundamental shift in the mainstream voters' outlook on policy. Okay. No, but we are, I agree with that. We're going to have to leave it there. We're going to have to leave it there, Bruce. That was our encore edition of Good Talk from last Friday. Hope you enjoyed it. We'll be back with our latest new edition of The Bridge tomorrow.