The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Good Talk -- A First Minister's Conference -- Why Not?

Episode Date: April 12, 2024

What's the downside for Justin Trudeau in calling a first minister's conference? What's he got to lose? On the day the NDP leader begins to back away from the Liberal's carbon pricing policy, we have a serious discussion about the pros and cons of having a televised conference to address the differences between the country's prime minister, premiers and territorial leaders. Chantal and Bruce have their say.

Are you ready for Good Talk? And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here with Chantelle Hebert and Bruce Anderson. Another week of Good Talk, and we've got lots on the agenda today. We're actually going to start, I hadn't been thinking of this until I woke up this morning and saw the headlines in the Toronto Star. And one of those headlines is, Jagmeet Singh backpedals on consumer carbon levy, distances the NDP from support for Justin Trudeau's policy. Well, you know, it's not like there was a bandwagon of support for Justin Trudeau's carbon pricing policy. But it was assumed that the NDP and Jagmeet Singh were on that bandwagon.

That they were supporting the government and the prime minister at a time that he's really under attack from kind of all sides. The opposition clearly, most of the premiers, a lot of editorial condemnation of carbon pricing. Well, not a lot, but certainly some. Anyway, now Jagmeet Singh, the person who and the party who has kept the liberals in power, is saying, you know what, I don't know about this carbon pricing thing. Maybe it's time to back off on that, show a little distance between us and the government. Now, we've talked about the NDP a couple of times in the last few weeks,

including last week when we sort of wondered whether or not they were on the verge of some kind of collapse. But here we go with this one. Chantal, you start us off. What should we make of Singh's new position on carbon pricing? That if I were an NDP strategist and I was looking to put some distance between myself and the liberals, I would not affect the environment and climate change to do it.

And there are risks attendant, but a bit of history here on carbon pricing and the NDP. The first province that introduced the carbon tax was BC. It was not introduced by the NDP, but it was introduced by a liberal government and the NDP has pursued carbon tax, which is why the BC is not under the federal carbon pricing system because it has its own system, its own rebate system, and it has been leading the parade on this issue. The federal NDP, on the other hand, has been anything but a leader in the parade on climate change policy. For a number of reasons, all strategic, which I think were all bad strategic calls, and I think this is just the latest. It started with the ascent of the Green Party and Elizabeth May

and the sense that she owned by virtue of who she was and by virtue of her party's name, the environment, so the NDP, and that is not under Mr. Singh, increasingly focused on other issues. I don't think you can really name the last time that an NDP leader or someone in the NDP stood out as a Stephen Gilbo or even a Thomas Mulcair on the issue of the environment. The NDP in the last election campaign was judged by environmental observers, independent environmental observers, to have one of the weakest climate change plans on offer, weaker than that of the liberal.

They were always, the New Democrats, federally reluctant supporters of carbon pricing, or at least of some of its manifestations. And I bring you back to last fall when the liberals decided to carve out a home eating for people who use oil from their carbon pricing scheme. The conservatives predictably immediately brought in a motion to reverse that or extend it to everyone who had heating bills, not just those who use oil. And the NDP did vote with the Conservatives back then. It was the Bloc Québécois that supported the government's position on carbon pricing.

Now comes the election of a new star in the NDP firmament in the shape of Webb Canoe in Manitoba. Mr. Canoe's province is under the federal pricing system at this point, but he has said that he wants to put forward an alternative that is devoid of the carbon tax element in some way, shape, or form. It has not been presented yet, to my knowledge, and it's impossible to know whether it would meet the requirements

of the federal program and the threshold set by the federal government. There are, Mr. Singh is right, other ways to reach it. Quebec has a cap-and-trade system with California. But to do this now, to say, well, you know, there must be other ways than making Joe Public pay for this, it does two things. For one, it feeds this notion that we can fight climate change and change nothing to our lives, that it's cost-free to individual voters, which is a totally false proposition. You cannot just, and the NDP proposal is we should go more heavily against industry on this. Do you really believe that the costs of that do not get passed down to the consumer in some way, shape or form. But the other issue is the case for the carbon tax

on an economic front have been debated and there is a large consensus that it is the most effective, least costly approach to reducing emissions. So up to a point, Mr. Singh is kind of going against science. He is saying, as the conservatives are, that he can come up with a new plan that will cost you nothing and will do more. And to be seen when that plan comes, me, I think the real danger is that there are many people who support the NDP, who believe that the environment is important. And the NDP is now positioning itself to be seen as not a third way to achieve or a middle road, but rather a non-player in this debate

between the liberals and the conservatives. I find it dumbfounding that the NDP brain trust or whatever is left of it would think that this is the best idea they can come up with to improve their fortunes. Bruce? Yeah, I definitely think that the NDP looked like they were on their back foot on this. But let me go back to, I think the last time that we talked about it, I referred to the idea that bad things can happen to good public policy. And I think that has been the story around carbon pricing. The bad things that have happened to, I agree with Chantal, what is essentially a good policy if you care about fighting climate change, include the pandemic and the knock-on effects in terms of inflation and the cost of living and the sense that people have of they're just desperate to hear an idea

from a politician that sounds like it could save them a little bit of money. So the next domino to fall in terms of the bad thing that happened is it turned out that there were a good number of politicians quite willing to, and I'll use parliamentary language here, grossly misrepresent the impact of carbon pricing on the cost of living for Canadians. Other people have used stronger language. I think those who said lies were told, I think were reasonable in what they were saying. And I think that the NDP movement on this reflects both a lack of courage to represent the virtues of the idea,

courage to stand up to provincial NDP wings that have different ideas about this, and courage to kind of stand in the face of the misrepresentations about consumer impact. Does that make them kind of unique in the history of politicians? No. And there's a certain point at which I look at this and say they did this in part now because they wanted to be doing it 20 minutes before the Liberals do. Because I do think that by the time of the next election, the Liberals will be running on alternatives to carbon pricing,

not just on carbon pricing. And maybe they will at that point have decided that it's not sustainable to keep pursuing the model that they have in mind, but they need another model to replace it. That remains to be seen. It remains to be seen whether Justin Trudeau is going to be the leader in that election or somebody else will. But I just don't see the liberals wanting to be the only party at the federal level that says we're going to dig in our heels around this policy. And you could also read between the lines of what the prime minister has been saying recently about

this idea of a first ministers meeting is if somebody has a better idea, let's hear what it is. I don't think he's saying that just to challenge the good faith of the premiers. I think he's saying it to signal that the government at the federal level is open to alternatives that might achieve the same results without constantly having them in a situation where they're fighting for an idea that has lost the confidence of the public. That's interesting. Do you see it that way too, Chantal? Do you think there's an opening there for the Liberals, even under Justin Trudeau, to

back off on its current carbon policy? I'm not sure. Just before I tell you why I'm not sure, but why I'm not sure that it won't happen, just a note on the timing of the NDP speech, probably accidental, but on the same week when the Prime Minister of France, Gabriel Attal, and the former Prime Minister of the UK, Boris Johnson, both came to Ottawa to praise carbon pricing and a carbon tax. Because in Europe, our debate over this and the notion that it is not an effective mechanism or possibly one of the most effective mechanism boggles minds, especially on the conservative side, since the carbon tax is a creature of the right and not the left

initially, in the sense that it relies strictly on market forces. So increasingly, our debate is detached from the reality of that of our allies, which is kind of interesting. It's as if we live in a bubble and the sound from the outside doesn't get to us. The liberals will be facing a choice before the next election. Bruce is totally right. And why will they? Because the way that the carbon tax or the carbon pricing that they have set up works is that it goes up every year. This political drama that you've watched over the last three or four weeks is, in theory, set to repeat itself coming up to April 1st of next year, when, as far as I can tell from checking online, the carbon tax is supposed to go up another $15 per ton. So if that is going to happen, we would be much closer to an election

with the conservatives basically having had a dry run for the main event coming just before the election. But that being said, it's really, really hard to rally 200 economists to the case of the carbon tax and then turn around and say, gee, you know, we were wrong and we're going to rewrite our homework. Because as many have pointed out, including the Premier of Saskatchewan, not a friend of the carbon tax, Mr. Moe, when you look at the other options, they all end up being less effective and more expensive. So I don't know how you wiggle yourself out of this. I also think that there are voters out there on the progressive side who will be only too willing, more voters, to just leave the liberals if it turns out that on their signature policy, they are so weak-kneed that they'd rather go down on their knees than to die standing up.

I got to say, I'm intrigued by this suggestion that Bruce is making because I see it, I think, the same way as Chantel. I just can't see it. I can't see a liberal party under trudeau backing off on this in spite of i can't in spite of what i don't think that will be the the case as we discussed before but i do think that nothing focuses the mind like a 20 point gap with an election only weeks away and so nobody i don't think that there's anybody in the close circle around Justin Trudeau who would ever want to imagine that they would be in that situation.

But we've all watched politics a long time. And if you're leading a party, if you've determined against, you know, an increasing amount of hesitancy slash resistance slash concern within your own party that you're going to lead that party into that election and you're still 20 points behind you're going to do a lot of things that you didn't think that you were going to do in order to try to save some furniture save some seats as i said i don't think we're going to be there uh because i don't think Trudeau is going to be there. But I do think that the Liberal Party will take a look at the public opinion, which doesn't say we don't want climate policy. It says we're not sure carbon pricing is the only

version of climate policy that we want. And so from my standpoint, the signature initiative of the Liberals is not carbon pricing, but a climate plan. And the alternative that the Conservatives have put on the table so far is no climate plan. And that's very deliberate. They won't want one. They don't want one. They're not going to bring one forward. And so all those progressive voters who care about fighting climate change will, at that point, if it's a Trudeau-Poliev election, be looking at a binary choice between a government that does have a climate plan, even if it's not carbon pricing, and one that wouldn't. Okay, so I guess on the basis of that theory, the conservatives should have dropped the GST or found a way not to do it in the early 90s, rather than go die on the battlefield of the GST.

Of course, the eulogies for Mr. Malroney might have been less eloquent if he backed off from every controversial idea that wasn't popular that this party was pushing, and for which we are now saying, thank God for Brian Mulroney being courageous and brave enough, even if it destroyed his party, for one. Two, there's the small issue of Quebec. The L'Actualité ran a list, it's very subjective, of the so-called 100 most influential figures in Quebec these days. And I looked at the list to see who among the, unsurprisingly, you've got Paul Saint-Pierre

Plamondon who's leading in the polls, the PQ leader, and then François Legault, and then eventually in the first five, Justin Trudeau, that's normal. But I want to see who is considered the most influential minister, federal minister in Quebec, thinking I'm going to see Mélanie Joly or François-Philippe Champagne since they dream of becoming leaders. Well, no, the most influential minister in Quebec is Stephen Guilbeault. So back off on carbon pricing and a carbon tax. And my MP, the Minister of the Environment, will not be spending the campaign on the hustings for the Liberals. Now, I look at the polls and the place where the Liberals are holding on and would be keeping a significant beachhead, were they to lose an election to the Conservatives, is Quebec.

But I can only imagine what Yves-François Blanchet would be saying about a retreat on this policy, and a muting of the current environment minister in an election campaign in Quebec. So maybe Bruce is right. But me, I look at all these arguments that they're going to change leaders and they're going to change this policy. And I tell myself, I hope that leader does really well in Ontario and BC because they will be sacrificing the last place where they're not doing too badly. But here's the thing, though.

The distinction that I'm trying to draw, which maybe I'm not drawing it clearly enough, is not between carbon pricing or no carbon pricing. I'm talking about how you price carbon. And so the point that you're making about Quebec, Quebec wouldn't be affected by a change in the way in which pricing for carbon is handled in other parts of the country. The other ideas that people are kicking around, which is I think partly why Jagmeet Singh got where he got to, do involve a significantly greater focus on industrial emitters.

Now I don't know as much as you do about Quebec public opinion, but I've never found Quebec public opinion to be really against that. And I'm not in favor of this. I'm not arguing that this is what should happen. that they believe can withstand public scrutiny, their level of risk of looking like they've changed the way that they're approaching something is a relatively low risk compared to continuing on in the path that they're on. The last time they backed off on something along those lines of reasoning was when they decided to carve out home eating by people who use oil, thinking it was going to restore their fortunes in Atlantic Canada, which it did not. If they had not done that, we wouldn't be having this conversation today. I completely agree with you. out about Quebec politics, that this is a province where a premier campaigned on a controversial plan called the Third Link to link the south and north shore of the St. Lawrence in the Quebec City area, which most of us, especially in Montreal, did not find terribly exciting.

But it was his signature policy. And when he decided that it was off the table, what happened to that premier? The issue was not that you could replace it with a better policy, which you could. It was that this was someone who had said something that sounded like it was based on principle and conviction, and suddenly the case for it was not that solid anymore.

And the reaction, I think the typical Quebec reaction to people who do that is to say, OK, then, why should we stick with you? We've seen you for a long time and we're fatigued. These are all good points. And look, I sound like I'm offering a viable plan for Justin Trudeau to be reelected. I do not think that there is a viable plan for Justin Trudeau to be reelected. Okay. That's a whole nother discussion.

That's a whole nother discussion. Within a hypothetical. Yeah. But that is still the choice between dying with honor or dying, crawling. I love you two guys, especially when you disagree. It's just,

it's so much fun to sit back and watch. Okay. Listen, we got to take our first break. But before, you've raised a couple of things I want to pursue once we come out of this break. But before we even get to the break, that list of 100 influential Quebecers, Chantal, were you on that list?

Yes, but my journalistic honor is safe because I'm number 98. I barely made the cut. That raises some questions about the list. Let's be honest. I find the entire idea of a list subjective, and the authors of the list do agree that it's subjective. Your evidence is not accepted. Well, you may be number 98 in their heart, but you're number one in ours.

It's better to start from far, so with a bit of luck, you can only go up a bit or disappear. Okay, we're going to take a quick break, and we'll be right back on Good Talk. And welcome back. You're listening to Good Talk, the Friday episode of The Bridge, right here on Sirius XM, channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform, or you're watching us on our YouTube channel. And there are more and more people doing that each week, I'm told. So good for them.

Okay. You mentioned, you both mentioned a couple of things in that first segment that I want to follow up on. One was this discussion around a First Ministers Conference. Now, you both know that I've been an advocate of this for quite some time um but it shows the influence i have um but the the prime minister clearly is not interested or at least says he's not interested uh everybody else seems to be interested. It's kind of a growing swell of support to this idea. Why is he, you know, Bruce, you kind of hinted at possibly one reason why he's not interested in doing it. But why wouldn't he use this?

One would assume this could be a great advantage for the first first minister to be chairing a meeting. Look, honestly, I've been puzzling over this for a while, and I can well understand that every PMO ever, especially one that's got a few years behind it, tends to run on a risk aversion model. So an idea comes in and 98% of the discussion is why it's a bad idea, why it shouldn't happen, because in part it hadn't been invented there, in part because it's disruptive to a plan that other people have, in part because it's easy for people to pick apart the, to identify the risks and the downsides, and it's harder for people to sell the upside. Okay, I get all of that. But if you're 20 points behind, and if you really believe, as the people around Justin Trudeau do, that he is by far the best advocate for public policy, not just in his party, but in the country, you need a platform. Right now now he gets almost no share of voice people just tune him out

poll after poll after poll says it's not the substance of his argument or his policy that's the problem it's that people just don't listen to him anymore they don't want to listen to him anymore so you need to solve for that you can't do it just with advertising liberals won't have enough money to buy enough advertising to do that. And I'm not sure that the advertising that they could do featuring him would actually have the effect that they would want. So they need to be, in my view, my humble estimation, they need to be open to situations where, yeah, the risk is high, but the risk of doing nothing different is also extremely high. They're really far behind in the polls. I will eat everybody's hats.

Don't. Just a minute. I've got to make sure we're recording. Hold on a minute. It's going to be a disgusting spectacle. Do not do that. Well, let's find another gamble. You'll take us to dinner.

You're going to pay our bills forever. I'll take us to dinner you're gonna pay our bills if this budget spending 20 30 billion dollars on a wide variety of things and then arriving on budget day and saying this is how we're going to pay for those things the idea that that is going to be the thing that's going to uh turn things around the liberals. I don't believe it. So I will buy dinner if I'm proven wrong, but I've never seen any evidence that that kind of thing in this sort of situation will help. On the other hand, somebody either entering into that kind of conversation in command of the files with the best policy of anybody around the table

and some real good debating skills, I would take the chance. I would look for the platform. I would get that share of voice. If it meant that I had to use that share of voice to expose that I'm open to different ideas, so be it. What's the problem with that? If, on the other hand, I made a compelling case that the people who are against carbon pricing don't have an alternative, that's a pretty good outcome, too. So I just don't understand, other I missed it, is I had a first minister's meeting eight years ago or something like that, which to me is not relevant in the least. Chantal? Yes, pressure has been going up mostly because it costs nothing to ask for a first minister's meeting. So all opposition parties in the House of Commons

supported a conservative motion urging the organization of such a meeting. But talk is cheap. There's no price to pay for voting with the conservatives on this or for calling for this or for the premiers to be sending letters. But it seems to me that Trudeau's brain trust has decided that the risk that they're taking, instead of calling in the premiers to have this conversation, is to step all over provincial jurisdictions

without giving any of those premiers a heads up, so that they can do their pre-budget sales job, the one that we've been witnessing. But in so doing, they are doing the opposite of laying the groundwork for a positive meeting with the premiers. You cannot snub every premier in the country by announcing initiatives in their areas of jurisdictions, as in, you can take our money or leave it, but we're doing this, and then say, in the spirit of cooperative federalism, I'm interested in hearing your ideas. If you have ideas as to an alternative to my carbon pricing policy, it doesn't make it sound like you're in listening mode

to the provinces, given what we've just witnessed over the past three weeks. And increasingly, the premiers are thinking that the federal government is creating problems for itself over the next year or so. I'm going to give you a very easy example of a unilateral federal move in an area of normal provincial jurisdiction that could blow up in the face of the federal government and its allies, and that is dental care. It is one thing to announce free

dental care for people over the age of 70 and for children from the heights of Parliament Hill with absolutely no levers on the health care system of the provinces. But what is going to happen if the take-up by dentists in the provinces continues to be abysmally low? And what levers will the federal government have to change that? Because at this point, this is what is happening. The program is really popular.

People are signing up, but dentists are not, because they say that the raise on offer by the federal government and the paperwork that is involved is way too cumbersome for them to walk into this. Now, a number of provinces have dental care programs for targeted audiences in this province. I think it's free for children under 12. But if you're going to proceed over the heads of the provinces, they're going to sit back and say, okay, have fun.

We have the expertise. We have the expertise. We have the processes. But since it's your game you want to play, well, play on your own and let's see how you succeed. Imagine if in six months, half or more of the people who have signed up have failed to find dentists who have subscribed to the plan so that they can get the free dental care. We're talking real money, real people and real needs here. And over the past three weeks, this government has kind of multiplied these possibilities. Yes, they can handle probably more free lunches or breakfast at school because some organizations are doing it. But if you're going to do your housing initiative and you want to deal with municipalities,

increasingly provinces are going to do, Alberta is doing that, like Quebec, and say, by law, you must talk to us to talk to Montreal and Quebec City or Calgary and Edmonton. You can't go over our heads. So in that context, to call a prime minister's conference,

you have to think, so what would the outcome of it, or would there be an outcome except a reciprocal blame session? I, like Bruce, find the answer very weak. I met the premiers in 2016. I gave a course at McGill in public policy in 2018, I think, or 2019, before the pandemic. And one of the first things I would tell them about policy and why it's so hard in this country to have a national policy on anything, I would show them a picture of that meeting in 2016, and a picture of the current lineup of premiers two years later. Well, in 26, is there a premier from 2016 that is still in government? So if I were Mr. Trudeau, I would say

I have fought two elections on this and won. I have support in the House of Commons that crosses a party, the aisle. I have been validated in my approach by the Supreme Court on the constitutional front, and I have offered provinces the opportunity over all these years to come up with schemes that maybe don't involve a carbon tax, but that arrive at the same price on pollution as I have suggested. But the answer, and he never mentions the meeting on health care that he had with the premiers. Why?

Because the last time he met the premiers on health funding, he basically walked into the room and said, here's how much money I'm going to give you. Goodbye. Nice to see you. You know, all these are great lines that he could use, and he could use in a First Minister's conference, and that's what I don't get.

I mean, I accept your argument about the whole, you know, federal, provincial, who has jurisdiction on different issues, but if the central issue is carbon pricing and the carbon tax, and one side is calling the other side liars, and the other side is calling the first side phonies, do the people of Canada not deserve, at some point, a real airing of the facts from the players who have them? And let the people decide based on that.

I mean, what I don't understand, and I guess it's sort of what Bruce is saying, is what have they got to lose? I mean, really? They're up a certain kind of creek without a paddle right now, one would assume if you believe the numbers out there. Anyway. I actually agree with your other point there, Peter, as well, that, you know, we've seen in recent elections a tendency towards fewer debates, less willingness to participate in debates. I think it's destructive. I think as combustible as these things can be, it's better to have more of them rather than less.

And we've been going in the last direction. and even if it's a brouhaha even and i happen to think chantal's arguments are all right but the prime minister can say them 100 different ways that aren't getting through right now and so he needs a a way that has a chance of reaching an audience he needs He needs a way to frame the choice as being climate policy or no climate policy. He doesn't need to disagree with the premiers of Quebec or British Columbia. He needs to call out the people who don't have a credible alternative to carbon pricing and make it clear that that's a binary choice heading into the next election between his party and the other parties on offer. And I don't think he has a way of doing that

without choosing a kind of a duel of this sort, as risky as it may seem. I don't think he's afraid of having a meeting where François Legault goes off wherever he goes off or Daniel Smith or Premier Ford. I think he's afraid of Webb, the new Premier of Manitoba, a new Democrat, a new star on the scene, someone who can argue French and English, and who doesn't seem to be a fan at all of the carbon pricing scheme of the federal government. I think that one scene that Justin Trudeau absolutely wants to avoid is being on national television, arguing for his carbon pricing scheme against the new premier of Manitoba. I think the optics of that would be devastating for the liberals, not for Mr. Kenyu. And I suspect that that is part

and parcel of the reason. It may sound very small as an angle, but I'm trying to picture this exchange on national television as one of the main features coming out of this meeting. And I'm thinking I would run under a desk rather than have this scene happen on national television. The one thing about Wab Kanu... Yeah, I went the other way. Just let me just say this. The one thing about Wab Kanu,

as opposed to some of the other premiers who are most vocal on this, in political debate, he doesn't lose his cool. He's very calm and reasoned and approachable. And if Trudeau is worrying about that he should work uh he should work back channels to see what they kind of an arrangement they could have going into a meeting like that well it feels to me like they've already got an arrangement i so if i'm trudeau the canoe argument against to me is more of an argument for because it always it already seems clear to me that there's not going to be a collision between

these two on this issue the canoe has said what he's going to say trudeau has said i've always been open to alternatives um so in a way for trudeau to have that conversation play out in that way is really useful because Trudeau has been positioned by his opponents as being completely intransigent, even though he modified his own policy. And that doesn't serve him well, given that he is and has been consistently open to different provincial approaches. Chantal's point about trying to govern with a national policy across all these jurisdictions and changing personnel is absolutely true. But that too is a point that the prime minister could make as part of explaining to people the way that he does every once in a while, but it's really only every once in a while, you know, what goes through his head, what happens in his life when he tries to make decisions in the public interest

and what sometimes derails those decisions. I guess one would have to know what the alternative Manitoba is putting forward is and what it looks like. And so far, that's not happened. So hard to know if they're on the same page or can find themselves on the same page.

All right, we're going to take our final break. I've had to rejuggle around the way we're dealing with things because we've got a limited amount of time left. But I think I've come up with that way. We'll find out how successful it is. Thank God we don't have a book to promote. We'll be back right after this. All right, we're back for the final segment of Good Talk, the Friday episode of The Bridge, right here on Sirius XM channel 167. Glad to have you with us. And us is Peter Mansbridge, Bruce Anderson, Shantelli Baer.

Okay. There's a couple of things. Well, there's one thing going on right now that we've witnessed over the past couple of days, the Prime Minister testifying at the Commission into the foreign interference question. We've got a budget coming up in a couple of days, and there's a gazillion dollars already on the table that's going to be spent, and the big question remains sort of, okay, fine, where are you going to get all the money? So those kind of things are set, both those issues are set against the backdrop of these

polls that Bruce has mentioned a number of times. He only mentions the extreme end of the polls, which is the 20% figure. And what's been interesting in the, well, it's been somewhat over time, over the past few months, is there is a gap between the polls. Not surprisingly, we have a number of different research companies. They use different methodology. They talk to a varying degree of numbers in terms of Canadians to come up with their statistics, but you've got sort of this eight-point gap between Nanos, which is a recognized polling company in the country.

Its latest, I think, is a 12-point gap between the Conservatives and the Liberals, and Abacus, which also is a well-respected, well-known research company Bruce used to work closely with. And they're showing the 20-point gap. So how should we square that? I've had a couple of letters from viewers who, you know, listen to kind of hang on every word you two say. Yeah, they don't hang on my words.

They just sort of, all they ever talk about is, ask Bruce and Chantal. Yeah, right, okay. So I'm asking them, what are we supposed to make of this? The difference between these numbers, because it's not like they're close. They're pretty wide apart. What should we think, and I'm going to start with chantal i haven't looked at all the fine print i look at the quebec numbers and they are pretty much apart on the quebec numbers this week nana showed the block with a solid and lead in quebec

and abacus showed a three-way almost a three-way tie between the Conservatives, the Liberals and the Bloc. Pallas, which also does polling for L'Electualité, came out with numbers that matched Abacus, but the last Léger poll was more like Nanos. I'm not sure. And that Quebec discrepancy goes some way to explain the national discrepancy, because Quebec is the second largest province. So if your numbers are very different in Quebec, you're bound to have different numbers or a different gap nationally. Anecdotal evidence in this province,

including the fact that the Parti Québécois is very popular and it's the sister party to the Bloc, is that the Bloc is doing really well. And if there is a surge in conservative support, people on the ground, obviously not in Montreal, but outside Montreal, are not picking up on it. You don't hear that. And you don't see that. So I'm not the pollster. Me, I tend to go with polls on Quebec that have been polls that have guided me through two referendum campaigns in 30 years. So I always go with the Léger polls because I believe that Jean-Marc Léger can read his numbers beyond the numbers and sees things that we don't see necessarily from the bird's eye view of national polls from other pollsters. I also think that polls at this

point are more or less useful in the sense that it takes a while for things to percolate one way or the other. The April 1st hike in the carbon tax did not seem to result in a big hit on the liberals, but their striptease on the budget doesn't seem to have given them a bounce. And I think in both cases, it's too early to assess whether one or the other had any impact. Bruce? Yeah, a few things, I guess. One is Chantal's point about Quebec is important and right, I think, in the sense that it's a little bit unique. There's a different dynamic there from the rest of the country. The leaders and the parties are different.

The history is different. The attachment to liberals and Trudeau is different. And the idea that you would rely on somebody whose life has been, as Jean-Marc Leger has been, focusing somewhat consistently on that province. Not only does it work everywhere else, I think it makes some sense. So I set Quebec aside. I look at the numbers in BC, I look at the numbers in Ontario, and I look at what's happened in Atlantic Canada. And for me, given the quantity of surveying, the size of the samples, the consistency of methodology over time,

I believe the abacus numbers are more right than the nanos numbers. Nanos numbers, if I understand them correctly, you know, the methodology is more phone and the sample sizes are smaller, quite a bit smaller. But it's also the case that in the rest of the country, just as Chantal said, I don't feel what the numbers in a poll seem to be telling me. I have the same kind of way of looking at numbers in other parts of the country. Let me put it that way. And the size of the gap between the conservatives and the liberals in

ontario is massive uh by right now according to the abacus numbers that feels right to me based on every conversation i have uh it feels to me that the bottom has fallen out um or the liberals and the ndp have gotten nothing out of it uh which is, again, back to why is Jagmeet Singh in trouble? Those voters, many of them, you could have assumed, might have been willing to migrate to the NDP column, but that isn't happening. The Liberal situation in BC feels bad with everyone that I talk to, and it looks bad in the abacus numbers. In Atlantic Canada, I don't think that the change that they made on carbon pricing

I didn't think it was going to make any difference and it hasn't made any difference and the Conservatives have always been a capable of mounting a strong rivalry to the Liberals and again everybody that I talked to everything that I hear tells me that a sizable gap is there. So to believe the nanos numbers, I need to believe that the gap was bigger and it became smaller, and I can't fashion a logic outside of Quebec for that to have been the case. I can fashion a logic in the opposite direction. And when I look at the trajectory of the abacus numbers over the last call it year and a half they really seem to be saying once inflation started to kick in once housing costs mortgage costs food costs started to

really uh bite uh the liberal numbers just got worse and worse and worse and that trajectory has been pretty uh pretty dramatic over that period of time, but not bouncing around like this. When you see this bouncing around, it's time to wonder. But when you see that consistency of that pattern, usually that says to me something pretty reliable. So I think the conservatives would rather have people believe that there's a five or six point gap than a 20 point gap. But I think that the reality is it's probably closer to 20, whether it's 20 or 16 or 18 or 15, the higher end there. What intrigues me is that every change election that I've covered and my first change election was 1984 with Brian Mulroney. So Brian Mulroney, Jean Chrétien, Stephen Harper, Justin Trudeau.

The person who won that campaign, who became the prime minister, came from behind. will be really different in the sense that the leader of the opposition will be going in with the lead to protect rather than with building momentum and coming from behind. And that speaks to different dynamics. I'm not saying it won't work. I'm just saying it's different. That usually voters like to discover an underdog over the course of a campaign. And we bought that underdog. And at this point, this will be really different from the change campaigns that we've covered in the past. Because the dynamics are significantly different from anything we've seen since 1984. Yeah, Trudeau in 15 was more like the discovered

underdog during the course. So was Harper. I mean, Paul Martin was supposed to win. Kim Campbell was way ahead in the summer of 1993. So you look at all those elections, those strange elections, and you think this is interesting that the challenger will for the first time, because I don't think Pierre Poilievre is going to fall to second place between now and the election, will be starting from the front. It's partly why I think that they would rather have the story be that it's a much closer race, because the longer it stays in a very wide gap, the more time there is for people to say, I wonder what's under the hood there and to look for another underdog story

to replace the underdog story that has been Pierre Poliet. Voters do love the underdog story. I can't ever forget how proud Quebecers were on their way to voting for Jack Layton and the NDP. forget how proud quebeckers were on their way to voting for jack layton and the ndp but that was part of the romance of you know we found a new love it's fresh love or it's it's rediscovered love is what i guess justin trudeau would hope for if he's around uh we got i don't know three minutes left what um wrap up in three minutes whether the well let's put it that don't wrap up tell me does the prime minister's appearance of the foreign interference commission does that have

an impact is there anything in there you can talk about you know we don't need to talk about whether he performed well or performed poorly but does it have an impact on voters? Same with the budget. They are spending considerable money and time promoting this budget that comes down in a couple of days. Will it make a difference? And we've got sort of a minute each. Chantelle? I don't think they're promoting the budget.

I think they're promoting everything in the budget, but maybe not the core of the budget, i.e. the deficit, the plan to go back to fiscal balance, whether that works or not, and possibly new taxes on some categories of taxpayers. This late in the cycle, I've not seen very many budgets turn things around for an incumbent government. As for the foreign interference, I think the appearance by the prime minister has raised the stakes of the May 3rd report that Justice Ugg is going to be publishing. Because where she comes down on how the government handled the issue is going to get a lot more attention because the prime minister was front and center in his appearance

than if he hadn't been as central to the exercise. Bruce? Yeah, I'm very interested in it, but I don't know that a lot of voters are dialing in on it. So I don't think it's going to have very much impact. Even though I'm very interested in it, but I don't know that a lot of voters are dialing in on it. So I don't think it's going to have very much impact, even though I'm very interested in it. To be honest, at this point, assuming what I've consumed of it, I'm finding it pretty foggy to figure out exactly who I should be unhappy with or who did a good job. I feel unsure that the prime minister's office did everything that might have made sense. I feel unhappy with the stories about the role of CSIS because I don't really know what to make of them.

So maybe it's too early or maybe it's just always going to remain a bit foggy. But if somebody who's got the level of interest that I have in it is having trouble figuring out what to make of it, I'm sure a lot of voters are as well. One sentence on the budget? Well, I think. Half a sentence. Give me a word. I haven't seen any budgets that can turn things around. I think what she probably was saying, I haven't seen any that can do that.

That's heavy lifting. Yeah. Okay. All lifting. Yeah, okay. All right, thank you both. Great conversation. Not quite the way we'd intended an hour ago, but I'll tell you, it was a great conversation nevertheless. Lots more coming up next week, including that your turn with the Housing Minister, Sean Fraser,

who today does the full impact of his housing plan, at least lets it be known and you'll decide the impact of it. We'll have your questions for him next Thursday. The bridge back as normal on Monday. Thanks to Chantel. Thanks to Bruce. Talk to you all. Have a great weekend. Bye.