The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Did The Real Pierre Poilievre Just Stand Up?

Episode Date: November 24, 2023

After weeks, perhaps months, of being pummeled by the opposition, the media and Good Talk, Justin Trudeau got a bit of a break this week.  Pierre Poilievre found his actions under the microscope, and to many, it didn't look good. Bruce and Chantal are all over this on Good Talk this week and they sure don't hold back.

Are you ready for Good Talk? And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here with Chantelle Hebert and Bruce Anderson. It's Friday, it means Good Talk, and there's lots of good talk to talk about on this day. The overarching question I think I have, and it deals with after weeks of the pummeling of Justin Trudeau. This week, especially by the end of this week, things were not going in Pierre Polyev's favor. And I want to talk about this kind of overarching question,

which is has Pierre Polyev been getting a free pass and in a way was this the week that may signal a change in that and talking about a free pass free pass from the media so I've got a couple of examples you know what they are but I want to talk first of all general about that. Has Polyev received a free pass with all the focus of having been on Trudeau for good reason over these last couple of months and the plummeting polls? Has he been getting a free pass? Chantelle, you start. I'm going to say no. I'm going to say no. Why? Because opposition parties always get a freer path than the government and the Trudeau government has insisted in being in the frame in

a less than favorable light for months now starting I would say with the early in the new year period and the slowness of the reaction to take charge of the agenda

on Chinese interference than a missed opportunity, opportunities on the cabinet shuffle. Then, obviously, the media interest that came from the prime minister opening up the fall session of the House of Commons with assertions about India. And then you can go down the list. It is totally normal outside an election that the main focus is on the government, and it totally helps the official opposition to be able to just shovel trouble

in the way of a government that is actually making it easier to make itself a larger target week after week. That being said, it is also totally normal, and it will be happening increasingly, but even more so during the election campaign, that the lights, the spotlight will turn on Pierre Poilievre. And that will be the case over the course of the election campaign. And why is that? Because he is the person who aspires to become prime minister. And in an election campaign, he is not going to be able to spend days,

as he has since he became leader, pointing the finger at Justin Trudeau. He's going to be asked the questions that he's starting to be asked. But meanwhile, some of the realities of being the leader of the opposition in a parliament where the government is finally moving its legislation forward is that you do have to vote. And then once you vote, you do have to explain why you voted the way you did. This is not the same dynamics as question period. Substantial questions start to be asked. They start to be asked on how you vote, for instance, and we'll talk about that some more later,

on the Ukraine-Canada free trade deal. You have to explain why you voted the way you did. You have to tell Canadians and unions and workers how you will handle the anti-scav legislation that is coming forward with support from all three parties. And the list goes on. And Mr. Poirier, so far, yes, has had a good ride of taking shots at the government, as Thomas Mulcair did before him, by the way. But that does not mean that he is done with having to convince Canadians that he would be a preferable option as prime minister. And I suspect looking at the way he handles pushback and some of the stuff we saw this week, but before that,

that he may not do as well as his strategist hope, because in the process, you need to demonstrate character. And the character we've seen on offer over the past months has been that of someone who is always right, who always assumes that whoever has criticism is just an enemy of the people, and who is openly contemptuous of engaging in a substantive discussion. You know, Chantal always comes up with the phrase to remember, right? And I love this shoveling trouble.

That's a nice little phrase. We'll have to keep that one in mind. Okay, Bruce, your general thoughts on this before we go into the specifics. And, you know, Chantal mentioned a couple of them, and we will deal with them. But overall? Well, I think there has been aspects of a free pass, but I think generally I'm a little bit more aware Chantal is. But let me let me describe what I see.

I think the, you know, the media, from my standpoint, when it comes to politics, they chase accidents and incidents and they report on them. And there's been a lot of them provided by the liberals and Justin Trudeau over the last several months. So it's not illegitimate or evidence of a bias or a free pass for the others that there has been a lot of coverage of miscues and just kind of clumsy politics, I think, from the liberals. I think the liberals have made a habit of coming across as preachy, talking down to people, a bit kind of rushed

and on the defensive. And all of those things normally will attract a fair bit of media coverage. And there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing inherently biased or lacking in objectivity to do that. We can wonder about whether or not it's too focused on the sensation rather than the substance. Fair enough. But that has been a, that's not new if that's true. And I tend to think it is a little bit true, but I'm always careful when I'm talking with you two about the shortcomings of

the media, because I, you know, I don't want to hear the next. Are you saying we're defensive? What are you talking about? What do you mean we're defensive? Are you implying that we are all the same? No, exactly. If there's one thing I've learned, it's that we are not all the same in the media.

And that brings me to my second point. I do think there is at least one organization in the Canadian media landscape which controls a great deal of real estate and which is giving Pierre Poliev a free pass routinely, and that is PostMedia. And so I think that, as Chantal has correctly pointed out to me on many occasions, media is not all the same. And so if it's true that most of them are not giving Pierre Polyev a free pass, I don't think that can be said about PostMedia. I think every day, in every way possible, that organization tries to make points that are helpful to the conservatives

and harmful to Trudeau, and they have become almost a propaganda arm for the Conservative Party. I know that sounds strong, but I don't think it's too strong. And I would add that it has helped, that kind of coverage helps cultivate an army of trolls and bots on social media that is unlike anything I've ever seen, to the point where I saw our acquaintance or friend David Aiken yesterday said he had to spend a whole bunch of time restructuring his Twitter account to take out all the bots and the trolls. Now, I don't think those were left wing people who were coming at him. I think those were people who were right wing people saying he wasn't right wing enough or wasn't full throated enough in his support for the conservatives. And David is rarely accused of that.

So there's something that's been going on in terms of the, the constellation of voices and content that are supportive of the Pierre Pauliev and the conservative party. And by the way, they're perfectly entitled to do that. That is, if you own the press, you get to say what you want to say on it. I understand that. But I do think it is fair to say that that part of the media universe has been giving Pierre Poliev a free pass. And it'll be interesting to see whether or not they continue in that direction, given that this has been a week that if he was really paying

attention to mainstream Canada and how they were reacting to the way in which he communicates and some of the substance, it would be a week that they would regret, I think. But I don't know if they'll see it that way. Okay. When we get to substance, I'm going to flip that sentence that Bruce said. I don't think we should be paying attention to a lot of the body language, but I do think we should be paying more and more attention to the substance of what was said this week, because the substance was actually a fabrication on the part of the leader of the

opposition on two scores. But before I go there, to go to Bruce's point, a case in point, the famous story of the week about Justin Trudeau having spent 25% of his time since he became prime minister on days off. Well, David Akin, to name him again, calculated how much time off you and I would be taking if we had two weeks of vacation a year, and we took every weekend. And we would end up being away 34% of the time. So actually, the prime minister is not getting enough time off. The inference is also that when, because Justin Trudeau, as opposed to Stephen Harper and other prime ministers, not only publishes an itinerary of where he is, when, but he also publishes when he is not. It's called personal, a personal date.

They mostly happen on Sundays. And the assumption is that unlike many of us who are not even prime ministers, he never gets work calls on those days. That's a pretty big assumption. But when you look at a story like that and you think this is the front page of a major national newspaper in Canada, and you can't even figure out how much time off you yourself took versus the prime minister to see that there's a big gap and he takes less than you. It does speak to an agenda-driven way of reporting that does nothing for the credibility of the media,

but it's also amusing because many conservatives really like what the National Post is publishing, but they also spent a lot of time saying that the media, the newspapers in this country are all bought by the government because they get subsidies from the Justin Trudeau's government. As it happens, post-media probably needs those subsidies to survive. So it's going to be interesting if we ever change governments to see if post-media makes the case to Pierre Poiliev

that it should continue to fund the media and keep it alive and kicking. All right. Let me just do a couple of things. You know, I found that story bizarre as well, but to me it just looked like somebody trying to find a headline with a story that, you know, that was questionable at best. And the other thing that I should mention is David Aiken is the bureau chief for Global TV in Ottawa, but is a former employee of Post Media.

This is what I want to talk about, though, as our first example. It was a scrum, a rare scrum. I don't know, I think some people call it a news conference. Maybe it was. But nevertheless, he was answering questions as Pierre Poliev. And where I disagree with Chantel is I think there is something to say about the body language when you're watching him. It's not just his questionable use of what he thinks are facts,

but when you watch it, we're going to play it here in terms of the audio, but when you watch it, you can also see some body language here. The issue was around the use of the early descriptions of what had happened at the Canada-U.S. border the other day, and there were so many of those early descriptions that were wrong. You know, the Americans had the car coming from Canada into the States. In fact, it was the other way around. It was all in the States, never got into Canada.

But whether or not it was a terror incident is the main question at hand here, because the opposition leader had used that phrase in a question to the prime minister the day before this news conference, where he did his attack on the media in defense of himself. So let me play this. It's two minutes long, but I think it's interesting to listen to and imagine the body language. You can feel it. Here we go. Do you think it was responsible for you to call yesterday's explosion by the customs, by the checkpoint at the rainbow bridge terrorism when no u.s or canadian officials said that was the authority said that was the case and when the

new york governor also said there was no evidence to suggest terrorism activity actually you're wrong are you with cp okay so cp by the way cp just for everyone's knowledge did have to make three corrections for falsehoods that they put into a single article. I think that might be unprecedented. I'm actually thinking about checking with the Guinness Book of World Records to see if there's ever been a news agency that has had to issue three corrections for patent falsehoods that they admit they had been made in one single article, and now you've made yet another falsehood in your question.

Where you are wrong is that CTV reported that the government of Canada was presuming that the incident was terrorist. So, yeah, that was, and that's what I said in my remarks. You're right. It was a media report. But it's not a media report.

Which is what I said. In the House I said there are media reports. And you think that's a responsible thing to go on? What kind of statement? I didn't. I said there were media reports. No, there's no distinction. What I said, and I was right, was that there were media reports of a terror-related event. By your admission, there were media reports of a terror-related event. And that media report, according to CTV, unless you're questioning their integrity now, came from security officials in the Trudeau government.

So do you think the CTV was irresponsible in putting out that tweet? Do you think it was irresponsible to comment? Sorry, I'm asking. I've already answered that. Do you think CTV was irresponsible to put that tweet out? No, it doesn't sound like it was irresponsible to comment. tweet out? That's not for me to comment. Well, you just did comment. Okay. I just hope you're not going to print something

that you have to apologize for again. All right, so that's Pierre Polyev yesterday answering reporters' questions about his use of the term terror-related. A fact-check, a quick one, which I'm sure he could have done or his office could have done, and whether he knew it or not, I don't know, but he kept referring to CTV as the media report. In fact, CTV didn't report that until 15 minutes after Pierre Polyev made his statement in the House of Commons,

so it had nothing to do with CTV. In fact, the only news organizations that had reported this as a terror-related incident were in the United States, were right-wing and more extreme right-wing, including Fox News. So that was it. That was all. Those were the only people who were saying that on the media. When you listen to that or watch that, Bruce, what's your takeaway aside from the bending of the facts? for Pierre Polyev and his team. And I think this was the, maybe the worst moment of it.

I mean, there were substantive mistakes that he made that were maybe more important in terms of the long-term impact on the positioning of his party. We'll come to that. But in terms of a complete break from the image of Pierre Polyev that he was trying to create as this kind of friendly, energetic, plain speaking, but optimistic guy to contrast with what people had maybe wondered whether he would be, which is mean and boorish and thin skinskinned and overly hot-tempered. He had been making progress, I think, in letting people believe that maybe he was maturing from some of those attributes that they had seen earlier in his political career. And I think that clip that you just played, Peter, was like a flashback to the OG Pierre Pauliev. And the Liberals heading home last night or today

for the weekend in their constituencies, they haven't had many weeks where they'll go home with a spring in their step like they will after watching that. Now, I'm not saying that this is going to translate immediately into some sort of public opinion reversal of fortune. That's not usually how it works. However, the things that he said were so manifestly incorrect and inaccurate, and he did not have the wherewithal or the judgment or the instincts to pull himself out of the spiral that he put himself into. And beyond the substantive errors that he was making it was so boorish it was so obnoxious it was so aggressive everybody looked at that one little interview that he did with the apple with the reporter in the apple orchard and said does this

mean that this is who he is and there were some people who said, I hope so, because I like that kind of aggressive thing. But in my experience, there will be people in his base who will love that he browbeat that reporter. They will love the boorishness of his talk, just as there are people in the United States by the millions who like it when Donald Trump does that. But there's a lot of Canadians who won't like that. There's a lot of Canadians who think that is not how a political leader should speak to a journalist, to the country, to just a regular person. We put a little bit bigger premium on politeness than, well, I don't want to compare us to other countries, but I do think it is something that is part of our makeup. And he just showed a side of himself in that interview

that I think he'll regret having shown. And if they're on their game, we won't see too much more of that. Well, you're quite right that there was a division of opinion online about that. There were those, clearly, supporters of Polyev who loved every second of that exchange. But there were also a good deal number of others who didn't like it. How it splits in terms of who was supporting whom before that incident, who knows. Chantelle, your take on it? There are those among supporters of Pierre Poilier who also believe that

the last US presidential election was stolen or believe that climate change doesn't exist. So if that's the crowd he's going for, we also know that it's clearly a minority of Canadians and certainly not the voters that he needs to attract to win an election. You could have added this kind of tone to a journalist, to a normal person. You could have also added to a woman. This is a party that is facing a very fragile hold on female voters. And to treat in this way someone who is a woman, who is not particularly aggressive, by the way,

just doing her job in this fashion, is bound to have struck many women as, is this the way you really think you can treat women in 2023 and get away with. And I would say that you would never have caught Thomas Mulcair, Brian Mulroney, Paul Martin, Jean Chrétien, need I go down the list? I can't think of a single federal leader that I've covered that would have treated someone like that and felt that he was doing good. Now, to your prediction that his handlers will be looking at that reaction and we won't see more of it,

I tend to think over time that he can't help himself. This isn't some communication technique that is whispered in Pierre Poilier's ear as in make yourself as mean and obnoxious as you can be, because this works great. It's just him. That's how he treats pushback. I can't wait to see how that plays out in a leader's debate, because he's going to get a hell of pushback on a leader's debate. And he's not going to be able to get away just by insulting everyone else on stand. But that is the way he does it. Watch question period. Over the past three, four weeks, the Conservatives in Parliament have been asking if they already own the place, which is very dangerous because you can own it in 2023

and be in opposition in 2025. But routinely, Mr. O'Quillioff stands up in the House and then insults Jagmeet Singh, Yves-François Blanchet on his way to Justin Trudeau. There is just no one that this conservative leader apparently has any respect for except himself in the mirror. And that shows on a daily basis. And I'm not convinced that it's going to work terribly well on many Canadian voters. shown to the idea of a party. And I think that cockiness is such an essential ingredient. And it's always has been part of his political makeup. And the question that I was sort of observed, I guess what I was observing is that I thought that he had made a disciplined decision that he needed to change the way that he communicated with people. And Chantal may be right, that maybe all that happened is that once he got 10 or 15 points ahead in the polls,

he felt liberated to do him the full fat version, the unrestrained, kind of unplugged Pierre Pauliev. And liberals would be so lucky if he continues to do that, because I know that there are a lot of people who are very tired of Justin Trudeau and who really don't want to see him win another election. And if he stays, probably the single best chance he has is if there's more of this version of Pierre Pauliev on display in the weeks and months going forward. And that's why you've got to assume, and I tend to agree with Chantel, nothing seems to be able to move this guy. He has his own vision of how he wants to act and talk about the issues. But the way you look at it, that incident plus the one we're going to talk about the issues uh but this no way you look at it the that that incident plus the one we're going to talk about right after the break uh did not give a good week to pierre polliev after weeks

and weeks of bad weeks for justin trudeau which we've discussed adam finitum on this show um but this was not a good week at least the major part of it was not a good week for pierre polliev we're going to take a quick break. We're going to come back and talk about how Pierre Polyev, Ukraine, free trade, Canada, was also an issue for the conservative leader this week. That's right back after this. And welcome back. You're listening to The Bridge, the Friday episode.

Good talk. Chantel and Bruce are here. You're listening on SiriusXM, Channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform, or you're watching us on our YouTube channel, wherever you're picking us up. We're glad to have you with us. All right. I don't think you know i hadn't received a lot of discussion over the last uh few months but there's been a

kind of renegotiation or reframing of the free trade deal between ukraine and canada and uh it finally went through past this week but everybody voted for it or just seemingly everybody in the house of commons except the conservative party what they it, or seemingly everybody in the House of Commons, except the Conservative Party. What they didn't like in the free trade agreement was a clause in there that suggested that both parties would work towards a carbon tax. And this was similar to what, you know, obviously what Canada has or had.

And Ukraine has a similar wording or very similar wording in their reach out to try and join the European Union. But the Conservatives said this was the government of Canada, Justin Trudeau in particular, pushing a country torn by war into having a carbon tax. So that's been a lot of back and forth this week as well, and has shone another different kind of light on Mr. Polyev. Who wants to start with this, Chantal? So it doesn't actually say carbon tax. It talks about carbon pricing, which is in most countries

and for most parties who are in this discussion, with the exception of Mr. Poitier's Conservative Party. And I say Mr. Poitier's Conservative Party because under Aaron O'Toole, carbon pricing had become part of the toolbox to address climate change. So it talked about carbon pricing. It should be said that this Ukraine-Canada free trade deal was struck to consolidate, reinforce the relationship between two countries at a time when Ukraine is clearly in need. And it should also be said that the wording of this free trade agreement was agreed to by Ukraine. Obviously, you do not strike a free trade agreement without both sides agreeing on the

language. And by the way, and what is even more surprising, because it rarely happens. Ukraine officials have since that vote and Mr. Poiliev's explanation that Canada was going to impose on a sovereign country a carbon tax. That's very odd. It says something about a view of what Ukraine is to Mr. Poiliev that is at odds with international reality. Or is Mr. Poiliev treating Ukraine like a distant province of Canada that he as prime minister can impose or relieve of a carbon tax? No one knows. But the Ukraine officials came out and said there is no carbon tax in there.

We are under no obligation to do anything. No one is imposing anything. And we are happy for the support for for for this ukraine canada free trade deal now i may have missed it but i spent a while uh looking online see mr uh polio has a foreign affairs critic called michael chong well-respected mp uh who knows his business and his files, and who can be relied on to provide reasoned explanations for things that happen on the foreign policy file. And this party, Mr. Chong, I noted, did vote with his party against the Canada-Ukraine free trade agreement.

And I thought, well, I'm going to look up his speech, and maybe I can make sense of this vote. Except I couldn't find it. I could not find it in a social media feed. I could not find it. Again, possibly I missed it, but I parsed through all the debates and the names of the MPs who had spoken on this. I couldn't find it. I figure whatever Mr. Chong had to say, if he did say anything, it wasn't long enough or worth, in his mind, enough to be put on his own social media feed. All of which is to say, it sounds like a very amateurish way to handle foreign policy, regardless of the input that Michael Chong might have had in it. Because it doesn't, if Pierre Poilievre were the

Prime Minister, he would look very foolish with the kind of explanations he gave and the rationale, the false rationale he provided to explain why his party voted against an agreement that is supported by the Liberals, the NDP and obviously

the government. Bruce? This always happens. Chantal makes the point that I was really hoping I was going to be the first to make, but okay. And then when I go to you first, you say, start with Chantal. I know, I know. But the Michael Chong point is a really interesting one to me because I consider him to be one of the smarter people in politics.

And there's a part of me that believes that this was not his creation, his position that was taken on Ukraine, because the degree of thought that went into it, it seemed so sloppy and it seemed sloppy in a week when other choices that they made were sloppy. Polyev kind of wanting almost to say, maybe this car crash was an act of terror because it allowed him to imagine a moment of drama

where he was the center of attention making some sort of important and urgent point. That was a bad show of what a leader should look like if the role of opposition leader is auditioning to be a potential prime minister. So too was the way in which the conservatives handled this Canada-Ukraine free trade deal. I was going to say even a cursory analysis of the flaws in the position that they took would show how poor this was as a political play. But Aaron Wary, who's a great journalist, did a better than cursory review of it. And I was looking at that this morning. And one of the things that he pointed

out is, in addition to the points that Chantal made about, this is non-binding. And Ukraine said it is a non-binding thing. But he also pointed out that Ukraine has a carbon price and has had it since 2011. So the notion that the conservatives were somehow saving Ukraine from carbon pricing that would be imposed in this deal by Justin Trudeau was wrong on a whole range of counts. And so if you looked at it and said, well, they weren't really trying to undermine confidence in Ukraine at a time of its need. They were just really very anxious about Ukraine having to live under the yoke of Trudeau's carbon price. Total bullshit. Pardon my expression. I know this is a non-sweary podcast, but total bullshit. And so I don't think that was the reason

because they have people on staff and who would have said, just a second, can somebody call the Ukrainian embassy or something just to make sure that we're on some sort of solid ground here? So the inevitable conclusion for me is that he's not thinking hard enough about how his words and his role as opposition leader translate into a sense of on the part of Canadians about his judgment, his temperament, his knowledge maybe of the world. But it's also possible that whenever he hears the

word carbon tax or climate change or net zero, that what's revealed is that he's against virtually all of the ideas that would help keep the planet from warming. He doesn't seem to really care about that. I think the liberals have been stuck in this mode where they're saying he doesn't have a climate plan and he doesn't support carbon pricing and he doesn't support this or that or the other thing. A very technical kind of policy by policy debate and really what i think is probably right for them is to point out that this guy doesn't seem to want to do anything to stop the warming of the planet which i think is a far more powerful indictment for them to use politically against him because that does seem to be the logic that emerges from the positions that he takes. But it also may be that he believes this treaty would bring Ukraine to force a carbon tax

on his government, if we're going to go down the road of ridiculous explanations. A more ominous explanation may be that Mr. Poilev is playing to the faction within his party that believes that we are doing too much for Ukraine and we should be joining some of the right-wing

commentators and others in the U.S. on Russia's side. If that's the case, that's a really dangerous game to play for Pierre Poiliev because he obviously doesn't want to be called Canada's Donald Trump for good reason. But this is venturing into Trumpian territory. And I know that many conservatives know that they do not want to be going there. And anything that brings them closer. And this vote does invite those kinds of questions.

Are you thinking, like many in America, that it's wrong to be helping Ukraine? That Vladimir Putin is a genius? And those are not questions. That is like to a Canadian politician who wants to be prime minister, to ask a question like that is like asking, when did you stop drinking before question period? A famous question that was posed to John Turner. It does damage.

Or when did you stop beating your wife? Never asked of a Canadian politician, let's be clear. But so it looks like there is so much into short-term thinking that the question period when you watch it, for instance, is like an addition for clips to go on social media. But I think on social media, they're increasingly playing to their own audience and not expanding it

because it does get tiresome to watch the let's bring it home, not worth the cost. It's all slogans. And once you start poking behind the slogans because you want to know what the substance of policies are, Pierre Poiliev comes up short. All right. I guess the only thing you could say is he's saying these things

when the people who support some of this stuff really don't have anywhere else to go unless you consider the Max Bernier option a possibility. So it is puzzling as to why he's saying some of the stuff um let me just say one more thing uh on this and you know maybe get your reaction because i know that um many conservatives who will be listening to this will be outraged that we're uh you know taking these shots at polyev today in spite of the fact that it's been a couple of months of shots of Justin Trudeau here. But let me remind you of something because in some ways it's similar, a lot of differences, but there are some similarities. In 2013, the very weekend that Justin Trudeau became leader of the Liberal Party, his first day on the job was the Monday, which I think was the 15th or something

like that of April. I was doing an interview with him, the first interview he would give as leader. It was almost at the same moment as the Boston bombing occurred in the States, which, you know, riveted that country and this continent and many parts of the world as to the bizarre nature of it. They were literally still picking up pieces of bodies off the street when we got into this interview. And it was about a lot of things about his day when he was leader, but I said to him, you know, this just happened in the States.

Let's assume for a moment you're prime minister. What would you say? And he said, well, the first thing we have to do is try to determine the root causes of why these people would do such a thing. At that point, we had no idea who would do it. But he talked about root causes, and you know what happened? There was an immediate backlash on Justin Trudeau for saying that, that he didn't look like a prime minister,

he didn't sound like a prime minister. The conservatives took that clip, used it in an ad campaign for a couple of years right through to the 2015 election, didn't help them. But they pounced on it, just the way a lot of people are pouncing on Polyev this week. So there are consequences, and when you get into a situation where you start, you know, to put it nicely,

bending the truth to support your position and basically get caught out on it, as he has on the CTV thing. I mean, I think for the first time yesterday, I heard the L word being used. What's that? That's like the English translation of a mentor. I was on a panel late yesterday afternoon in French, and one of my colleagues was asked about the CTV incident and said,

Hélène Buzesi, who's been on the Hill for a long time, said, what troubles me most is not so much that he used terrorism in his question in the House of Commons, but that he tried to lie publicly, lie his way out of it. And I thought to myself, when did any of us ever use the word liar or bullshit, in your case this morning, about a federal leader? We don't. It's a bit like parliament. You do not usually use that word. But she was totally right. What we have been watching this week are lies and fabrications, not spin or distortions. We are way beyond that. And apparently Mr. Poiliev feels okay with that.

That's on him. Well, we've seen that several years in the United States. I'm not suggesting for a moment that Donald Trump was the first politician in the United States to lie, but he was the first politician to lie at a scale that was nuclear. It was constant. And I do think that it has, just in terms of the conversation about politics that happens these days, lying is more common. You see it on social media all the time.

And what Pierre Polyev has been saying, what he was saying in particular in that clip, not only doesn't stand up to any kind of scrutiny as to its truthfulness, one has to know that he knew that it was not true, that he wasn't sort of kind of finding himself the way politicians sometimes do where they're trapped and they're trying to figure out how do I kind of escape this trap that I'm in. So I'm going to say something that, you know, might be mostly true or I think it might be true or something like that. And then it turns out it's not. I don't think that you can look at this and say that. I think that the attempt that he made, and again, I think there will be a whole bunch of people in his camp who will say, bravo, beat on the media, intimidate the media, bully the media, talk down to them. And we love it.

But I don't think that that's how more mainstream Canadians will feel about it. And I think that as part of how you do that is that you don't seem constrained by the facts. You can just say whatever it is that you feel like you want to say, even if it doesn't stand up to much scrutiny from a truthfulness standpoint after that, because the point is the dominance in the exchange with the other person. And I just think it's a terrible look. And I can't imagine that they'll be looking

at that going, yeah, let's do more of that. And by the way, I do believe that in a conversation between journalists and a politician, the politician should be dominating the exchanges. But my experience of covering successful politicians is that they do manage to do that without bullying or belittling the people who are asking questions. They actually use the questions to make themselves look like they know what they're doing. And it tends to work when they do it. Yeah, and there's nothing wrong with a dynamic exchange between a journalist and a politician.

And we've seen lots of those that produce well for both sides, actually. And, you know, we don't want to take that away. Anyway, we're going to take our last break here and come back with some kind of final thoughts on this. But that's right after this. All right, we're back for our final segment of Good Talk for this week. Chantelle and Bruce are here. I'm Peter Mansbridge. So, as we often say on a Friday,

is anybody going to be talking about any of this next week? Are there any kind of lessons learned or will there be a change as a result of all this? And most weeks, it's long and gone by Monday. But you wonder in this case whether there is, you know, Bruce talked about those people in the office behind the leader or on the front benches. I mean, we rarely, if ever, focus on who would be that cabinet that Polyev would lead, who would be the key people. I mentioned Michael Chong, and I think there's kind of unanimity around the feelings about Michael Chong from all sides of the House.

I mean, there's a lot of respect for Michael Chong. But you wonder whether there is going to be any, you know, starting this weekend going, you know what, we got to be careful because this or that didn't work out. Or the reverse, which is, that was great. Pound them. Keep it going. Does this week become a, I don't know, a marker week for the Conservatives?

You know, I assume it's too early to tell that. We'll know in the future. But does it have that potential to be a marker week for the Conservatives? Chantal? If you mean internally, I don't believe so. I believe the dynamics of official opposition, especially if you're well ahead in the polls, is that you do not, the French expression is spit in the soup. You just swallow and move on. And by and large, you know, I've seen some other votes this week that raised eyebrows in a less obvious way in the way that some of the Quebec MPs are voting. And one would assume that that's part of jostling for future cabinet positions.

You do not want to be sitting on the outside looking in if the party gets to government. So you keep your peace and you figure that at some point you're going to have your contribution recognized by a cabinet seat. So I think it's too early for that. But there are interesting things happening when it comes, for instance, to nominations. The fact that the party at this point is welcoming people who were well identified, for instance, in Ontario with the anti-vaccine, anti-COVID measure, to the point, in one case, Mr. Babbert, of being shown the door by Premier Ford. Now, this person is a candidate. There is talk in Quebec of Éric Duhem, the Conservative Party leader, wanting or would being open to an invitation to join the federal team.

That's a decision that Pierre Poilier will have to take. But once you start opening doors like those, people start focusing on what place these people will have in your cabinet. And that is dangerous because you look at people who bring a certain flavor that is out of sync with most Canadians, and you think, are these the people who are going to be hurt by this kind of leader? Is this who he really is?

And I think what this week did is that there will be more scrutiny on decisions like that as to who you recruit for a sense of whether the Pierre Poilievre on exhibition this week is the kind of person that will be surrounded by people who will enable that kind of behavior if he becomes prime minister. Bruce? I don't think I know the answer to whether or not this will i don't think that this one week will cause some massive catalytic change um i do think i'm going to watch carefully for the next two or three days to see if the conservatives decide that they want to keep on litigating this ukraine vote trying to make the point that they made the right call. I don't think they will.

And if they don't, that's a tell. Basically, they know they made a mistake here. The liberals are definitely up for relitigating the Ukraine vote over and over and over again. You can see it in their social media strategies. And that implies that they think that they've scored an important goal on an important matter of substance for not just for Canadians in general, but for a very significant Canadian diaspora. So I'll be watching for that. I think I'll also kind of be watching for whether the conduct of Polyev turns down the flame a little bit in the next few days,

which will tell us whether or not they think they ran that flame too hot. Whether the next encounter with journalists represents a more cool and level headed. And I don't know if I would say get to charming, but certainly move further away from kind of aggressive. So I'll watch for that. You know, maybe it'll happen, maybe it won't happen. I still think for the Liberals, they've got their own challenges to deal with, which haven't gone away. But this is the first time that I think we've seen a collective pause in the breathlessness about the ascent of Pierre Polyev to look at him and say

hmm what about that and I don't think post media is going to participate in that but I think a lot of other media organizations will have an interest in doing that and I think a lot of other media organizations will have an interest in doing that. I think a lot of Canadians will be interested in it too. Go ahead, Chantal. To compound what was a bad week, Mr. Poitier got a reminder this week that you can sit on top of the polls and suddenly not anymore.

And where did he get that reminder? In my province, where the bulletproof rises above any controversy. Premier François Legault woke up to a poll that showed him significantly behind, what, 24%? Significantly behind the Parti Québécois, a party that was given up for dead, and it has four seats in the National Assembly these days. So this happened over the course of less than a year. If I were a federal conservative and I was looking at that,

I would think maybe I don't want to be prime minister in the polls in 2023 and lose in 2025 because of my own actions. But it is possible to go from a 10 point lead to be five points behind against a party that even that has no strength except for four people. And with all the perks of power to kind of help you along. So I'm guessing that if I were Mr. Poiliev and the conservatives, I would think long and hard about the body language of the past few weeks collectively and this notion, this conqueror kind of approach to federal politics. The last people I heard that believed that they had power before they fought an election were Paul Martin's people. They were sitting at on incredible numbers when he became leader, Mr. Martin, and they saw the election as a formality

that would confirm how dominant he was, and that never happened. So a reminder in real-world terms that easy come, maybe, but easy go, too. Can I just add on that? Of course. The difference between 35 and 40 is what we're talking about in terms of the storyline of this guy who's kind of destined to repeat another, you know, shortfall in an election versus a guy who's going to win a massive majority. It's not a lot of people who need to go, oh, I thought I liked him and now I

don't like him. It's five out of a hundred people and actually less than that because not everybody votes. So yeah, people do count those chickens pretty aggressively when they're in the ascendancy and sometimes too aggressively and they need to have these kind of wake up moments and see what happens. Well, we'll see if we're still talking about it next week.

I'll give Chantel credit as, as we always do. She's been hinting to us on the last, I don't know, six weeks or so that there was something going on in Quebec. And it's certainly been borne out by the numbers we've seen of late. And how many times have we counted the peak you did over the last 50 years? All right. But that will change the election conversation if it keeps up federally, which is why it's fascinating. Yeah. All right. Listen, the two of you, thank you so much. Great to conversation. Have a great weekend. We'll talk to you again in a week.

You too. Take care, you guys.