The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Good Talk -- A Global Liberal Icon Resigns

Episode Date: January 20, 2023

Rob Russo sits in for Bruce this week as he joins Chantal for more on health care, and an intriguing suggestion of what Justin Trudeau may be up to with his cabinet.  But leading the show, what does the resignation of New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern say about the pressures of leadership? That plus the NDP, and the latest threat to pull the plug on support for the government.

Are you ready for good talk? And hello there, Peter Mansbridge, talking to you from Toronto on this day. Chantelle Hebert is in Montreal and in Ottawa. Rob Russo sitting in for Bruce Anderson, who couldn't make it today. But Rob, not unfamiliar to the bridge, has been on a number of times before, usually filling in for Bruce, I might add. Rob is my former boss as Bureau Chief of the CBC in Ottawa. As if, as if.

And the former Bureau Chief for Canadian Press in Ottawa. Before that, he was a correspondent in Washington and in Quebec City for Canadian Press in Ottawa. Before that, he was a correspondent in Washington and in Quebec City for Canadian Press. So he's been around, as they say, in the business. And we can certainly use his thoughtful expertise and insight on today's program. So let's get it started. I'm going to start not in Canada, not even close to Canada.

We're going all the way to New Zealand, where this week Jacinda Ardern stepped down as Prime Minister of New Zealand. Now, I'm sure you've heard of her. She's kind of the New York Times recognized her this week as the global liberal icon. She's only been in power five years, but incredibly well thought of outside of New Zealand for sure. Clearly was in the two elections she ran in,

including the last one where she had a big majority victory. But she has faced some really difficult decision-making. You remember there was the mass shooting, 51 people killed, and the decision she made about gun control in New Zealand after that. Then, of course, trying to navigate through COVID. It made it difficult not only on her political life but her personal life. She was supposed to get married last year. She couldn't because of COVID.

So that's kind of waiting on the sidelines. And when she stepped down this week, which was a surprise for a lot of people, she said her tank is basically running on empty right now. And she had to get away. Now, you don't hear many politicians say that at the time of resigning. They'll come up with all kinds of different things, reasons why they, you know, offer in the private sector, the family reasons, et cetera, et cetera. But my tank is running on empty after basically five years in power, but some very difficult decision-making. And it brings to the fore a number of issues, not the least of which is do we underestimate the kind of toll it takes for leaders, especially through difficult times?

But that, and I say other reasons as well. Chantal, your thoughts on Jacinda Ardern? Which I noted took everyone by surprise, and in the Canadian context, probably does remind us that people who lead are only leading until they decide that they've had enough for a variety of reasons. We write all these things about he or she is going to leave because the polls are bad or because there's a controversy over this or that. But the real question always is the question that she answered yesterday, which is, do I still have it in me to do this, knowing what it takes? And I would argue that there are no easy times to be in government. The challenges do change.

We have war, COVID. The magnitude of them may seem larger, but the burden of those challenges is also spread more evenly than when you have, for instance, a unity crisis. When you're Jean Chrétien and you wake up the morning after, one sizable province has almost decided to leave the federation with all the rancor that comes from that result. Frank McKenna, remember, when he resigned after being premier of New Brunswick

after a decade, said, I no longer have the fire in the belly. And that's the other thing that leaders ask themselves. They don't ask a friend. They ask themselves, do I really want to go through this ringer again that is an election campaign? And it is that. And that's why I always caution colleagues who think they have a scoop about someone staying or leaving or entering in politics, that they must beware of the syndrome of the sleep on it reflex,

because nobody knows. Justin Trudeau today is meeting all his ministers one-on-one. He's not going to be sharing with them his personal questions about whether he's still the proper leader and should continue or whether he has it in him, because he can't. Those are things that leaders can't share. They can only show up one morning and say, that's it. I think I have done or given the best that I had.

And I don't think that I can be better than I have been. I can only be worse, so I'm going. And that's a very personal question. You know, we'll be talking about trudeau meeting with his ministers one-on-one in a in a few minutes but staying on this theme i mean it trudeau's an interesting case in point uh after that last election there were a lot of people who thought you know what he does he looks like he's his tanks running on empty he looks like you know he just doesn't have the fire in the belly,

to use McKenna's term anymore. But Pierre Polyev seemed to change all that. He seems now, but you're right, Chantal, you never really know, but he seems now to have the fire in the belly. He seems now to be not running on empty anymore, if in fact he was a year ago. But, Rob, your thoughts on the Ardern resignation and what it says about, you know, political life overall. I have a couple of thoughts. Number one, it's kind of the dodo

of political leadership in that it's rare. It's rare that a sitting chief executive in an elected government opts to leave this way, more often than not, they stay too long and they're pummeled by the voting population. I'm thinking of Mulroney, not Mulroney, I'm thinking of Harper, who stayed too long. I'm thinking of going back further, Louis Saint Laurent, who stayed too long. We can go back in history and there's all kinds of examples. So it's very rare. The other thing that I'm thinking of is this is not a good time to be a sitting political leader. This is a good time to be an opposition leader with a couple of years of runway in that there's inflation, there's high interest rates. That makes up the misery index.

That's very, very tough on sitting political leaders and their popularity. The third thing I see, I really see some interesting parallels. Let's think about this for a second. We have a fresh-faced political leader in their first election in the middle of the last decade who unexpectedly wins power on a wave of optimism and rejection of Conservative Party. That fresh face is unexpectedly confronted by brutal realities like a global pandemic, and they have to impose restrictions on their voters that include vaccine mandates, which triggers division, which curdles into toxic political culture and death threats. The fresh face never really recovers the popularity that propelled them into the office after that. The fresh face is confronting a looming election date

and the fresh face ain't so fresh anymore. And there are no obvious successors. That sounds like Jacinda Ardern and it sounds like Justin Trudeau in a way. I do think Chantal and you, Peter, have put your finger on an important difference, perhaps, in the two of them. And that is that Justin Trudeau may wax and wane on the attractions of being in office, but he seems to have a reflexive impulse in kind of almost a bloodlust for a fight. He likes to fight. And the notion of fighting somebody like Pierre Poiliev seems to have relit or rekindled the fire in him. And if you watch Trudeau yesterday in Quebec, they were both in the Mauricie region of Quebec yesterday. You listen to what he says, and it's clear that there seemed to be a little bit more sting in his jab

as he took on the notion of Bonnev, who was just a few kilometers away from him, both of them essentially campaigning. You know, go ahead, Chantal. No, I was just going to say on that latter point, both of them essentially campaigning. You know, go ahead, Chantal. No, I was just going to say on that latter point, there are politicians who always look happier when they're campaigning, even though they can run governments. Jean Chariot was probably the best case in point. He never looked happier than he was on the campaign trail.

He even managed to look happy campaigning against Pierre Poilievre for a job that he once held some decades ago. And I think Justin Trudeau does get a lot of his energy from campaigning because he gets it from being in front of a crowd. Stephen Harper did not find his energy in campaigning. It was something he had to do to get to do what he wanted to do. Philippe Couillard, who was briefly the Premier of Quebec, one term, once told me that he saw being the Premier as running a board meeting. Well, he was not a retail politician, and he wasn't energized by campaigning. So you have the two types. But I think for the, and I think that is

also the case in New Zealand, for the retail types to get their energy from people, the pandemic was very difficult because that is how they stay grounded, by spending time in real life with actual people. And what did we not do, including government leaders for all of that time? We did not be, well, we, like all of us, he has now been able to be in real life with actual people in the flesh, and he has refound the pleasure that he found in that, rather than having Zoom meetings with the premiers every week, which seemed to be the kind of party time that he had for two years. I'm excluding all those lunches I spent with Justin Trudeau, he on CPAC, and me with my sandwich, as he was giving his weekly news conference to tell me that he had my back,

but obviously wasn't sending me any great food. You know, leadership isn't easy, and we all understand that. We see bad leadership, and we can understand sometimes why it's bad, because they're not really engaged. But for most leaders, this period of these last couple of years, one has to assume has taken much more of a toll on them personally, their own kind of makeup, than we may have assumed. I mean, it's taken a toll on all of us, you know, the pandemic and the way we've had to live. But for leaders who've got to make big decisions through all this, I mean, I was looking at,

you know, I tend to look at pictures of different leaders over the time they're in office to see, you know, how they've aged. And, you know, look, we all age, so we all see those differences. But sometimes the difference in leaders, like whether it was Obama or George W., or, in this case, Justin Trudeau. In a relatively short period of time, these people aged considerably. And, you know, I'm wondering whether Jacinda Ardern, because not only the professional decisions she made, but the personal decisions. I mean, she had a child during this period as prime minister.

As I said earlier, she couldn't get married because of COVID, and they've had to delay that. So I don't know. I just sometimes feel that for all the slings and arrows we toss at leaders that sometimes we don't appreciate as much as perhaps we should the pressures they're all under beyond the job. I know they choose to do this job and et cetera, et cetera, but pressure means something. I don't know. Am I overboard on that, Ron?

No, I think we've all been lucky enough to see leaders up close. And I have kind of derived from that, that they are rare, rare birds as well. And they're like, in a way, like F. Scott Fitzgerald said about the rich, they're not like you and I. They have a different kind of ambition. And sometimes it's a very, very noble ambition. A lot of people who present themselves for public leadership, you know, they give up lucrative jobs in the private sector, but they are driven by some other fire that most mortals don't have. And I remember, it might have been Brian Mulroney in a moment before he became prime minister who said privately that you need to be prepared to step over the bloody corpse of your mother with a dagger dripping blood. What an image. If you are and, you know, there was a guy who showed a lot of these qualities lost bitterly when he was not supposed to lose in 1976 to Joe Clark and just kept plugging away.

They are not like you and I. And so they do have something else that fires them. When that pilot light goes up, I assume that it's you shiver in the in the shadow of that former pilot light once it goes out um but it's there uh and it it's it's there for a bunch of a bunch of reasons so to see somebody actually willingly step away from a job like this uh is is an extraordinary event uh and it is not necessarily in keeping with the psychology of modern leaders or, you know, historic leaders in democracies in the Western world. You know, I don't think my view is as romantic or as hero driven as that of Rob. And I think we forget those that left when they were still doing well. Lucien Bouchard is a case in point that there were others. But we forget them faster because they don't end up as, well, you can call them noble failures.

If you're Rob, I'll just call them electoral failures. But I'll go back to your aging thing, because I don't believe that it's a great time to, and I don't believe it's ever a great time to be the leader of the opposition. From what I have seen, opposition politics eats at you to always have to be criticizing and finding what is wrong rather than have a chance to make changes to go back to Lucien Bouchard after he became premier. And he was a leader of the opposition in a formidable position over the time that he was on Parliament Hill, the referendum was coming, he was the official leader of the opposition. And someone asked him, so which do you prefer to be in government or to be in opposition? And he didn't even blink. And it wasn't that he was the premier, it was just the,

I get to do things in government. But if you want to talk about aging, go back to some of the pre-Christmas pictures. There aren't many. He didn't give news conferences at that point of Pierre Poilievre. And you will see someone who was totally drained from having campaigned for the leadership, having assumed that job as the house was coming back to sit, and having discovered the 60,000 things that he needed to get done if he ever was going to be prime minister, the energy required for that, for those jobs, is an uncommon amount of energy. Your days never end. And in your weekends, whenever I see Justin Trudeau's agenda and it says personal, how personal is it really a day when you're the prime minister? You mean no one's going to tell you that the sky is falling? I don't think so.

If I could just come back to Bouchard for one second. Wasn't his dream dashed by the fact that he watched the dream die and he watched it die? And then became premier? Yeah, but then he watched Quebecers vote and give a huge number of seats to his arch nemesis and the arch nemesis of that dream in Jean Chrétien in that election. I've always thought that Lucien Bouchard left because his party was, he disliked the Parti Québécois intensely. And I use as a token of that. And at that point, there was a huge discussion within the PQ over issues that will eventually become a discussion over reasonable accommodation.

And he had no appetite for those discussions. But I use as a token of my argument that he never, ever went back to a PQ meeting to say goodbye. And that he spent more time after he was in office with the likes of Mike Harris and others, and even Jean Chaguet, than with anyone from the Parti Québécois. This is best, one of his best friends these days. He's called François Legault. All right. Just to tie the knot on Jacinda Ardern, before we move on

to the next topic. It was going to be no walk in the park for her as she approached her third election. She was in some difficulty at home, some of the reasons that, you know, that both Rob and Chantal had mentioned earlier. But she was another one of those classic examples, and there are a few, and there are a few from this country, where you were much better admired,

much more admired outside of the country than you were in. And there's no doubt that we we lose a figure on the on the international stage with the departure of jacinda ardern she's still young who knows what she may be uh destined for in the future uh but she will be uh she will be missed all right uh we're going to move on we're going to take a quick break when we come back we'll talk about trudeau and his meetings one-on-one with his cabinet ministers in the next couple of days. What is that all about?

We'll find out right after this. And welcome back. You're listening to Good Talk on the Bridge. You're listening on Sirius XM, channel 167. Canada Talks are on your favorite podcast platform. Or you're watching us on our YouTube channel. Rob Russo sitting in for Bruce Anderson today. All right. Chantel mentioned earlier that the prime minister has a cabinet retreat next week,

but he's kind of starting it off already with one-on-one meetings with cabinet ministers. Nobody's saying exactly what those one-on-one meetings are, or if in fact they really are one-on-one, or whether there are staffers in there or not. But what are they about? What could they be about? So let's bounce that around for a little bit. Rob, you start us. Well, certainly, I think we all know that this is a pivotal year for Justin Trudeau

and for the government. They have to decide whether or not – he has to decide whether or not I think this year or whether or not he has to decide whether or not I think this year or whether or not he's going to stay. In order to do that, he cannot allow people to think that he's going to leave precipitously because government descends into chaos. Nobody takes him seriously. And he wants to leave himself the option of running again. And why wouldn't he? So what is he? We're in the realm of speculation here. So I'm assuming that he wants to give people a clear idea of what his intentions are, because everybody knows that that's the question that's on everybody's lips in this town.

He also wants to let people know what the priorities are for the government. And they have to be one of two or three things only, the economy and healthcare, I would imagine, that are pivotal, not only to the future of the country, but to the future of the future fortunes of the Liberal Party. The other thing that I'm curious about, and I'm speculating here as well, Morneau's book came out last week, or this week, it comes out widely. And in it, he talks about his non-existent personal relationship with the prime minister, which may run contrary to a lot of people's perceptions of Justin Trudeau, who may think that he's an easygoing, back-slapping prime minister who has easy relationships with those who sit around the cabinet table. The truth is, that's very

difficult for any prime minister. There are always close relationships that are formed, but full meetings of cabinet are very rare things. Most things are done by committees of cabinet, and they're, you know, a half a dozen members of cabinet. And even there, a lot of things are not even done with cabinet ministers, they might be done with one or two key cabinet ministers, and the people around the prime minister. So he may be trying to counter this impression, or actually work on his relationships, and tell people, look, I might have been a little distant. I might have been in a little loop over the last little while. I'm going to change that.

And as Chantal said, I've got your back. He might be trying to pass that message as well. Chantal? Well, I don't think that he's meeting, and I am too speculating. I don't think that he's meeting with his ministers to give them marching orders. I think part of the exercise is for him to listen to where his ministers are at. And for sure, the cabinets are not made of equals. There are ministers that do have more face time with the prime minister than others. That doesn't mean that those who have less face time would not have some astute observations to share with the prime minister. by ministers that the expectation was that no staffer would be there. What Bill Morneau was lamenting about was that he'd never had a real one-on-one with Justin Trudeau,

that every time he had a one-on-one, someone from the PMO and possibly one of his staffers were sitting there taking notes. Now, if you want a frank conversation with the prime minister and you're a minister, you probably don't feel as comfortable doing so if someone from the PMO is taking notes and thinking, this student has probably bad habits, or is not totally happy. That's not what you want to share with with the PMO staffer, because it's going to come back to bite you. And you know that. So I'm curious to see if it does turn out that these are real one-on-ones. I think Justin Trudeau has probably spent more time face-to-face or in meetings that were private with Emmanuel Macron and Joe Biden over the past six months.

And at this point, he needs to be paying attention to where his government's morale is at and where ministers feel that things have gone off the rail. Rob mentioned, or you mentioned, that Justin Trudeau looked like he was disengaged back in the summer. Well, some of his ministers felt that. They may not be feeling it now because we're writing that he's very engaged, but I'm not convinced that he has been engaged with them to the level that they would need. And this is leading up to a cabinet retreat next week. The government has a hell of a lot of thinking to do about very many things. One of those is that it has signature legislation going nowhere in committees. Problems within its own caucus on some of those legislations.

The episode over the firearms legislation kind of screams for what in the world is going on in this government. And what I find striking is I asked a friend who likes politics this week, what is the signature project that Justin Trudeau would be taking in an election and then the second, third half of his mandate? I mean, look at the legislation. Are you really going to go to war over a new Broadcasting Act in an election or a new Official Languages Act? It's not like the first time around where we're creating it. And they do lack something that makes you say they

have something so important in progress, it would be terrible if they didn't get a chance to push it forward. And that's kind of a, you know, is it a healthcare accord? I don't know. But they do not have an overriding policy that, like free trade, like renegotiating NAFTA, that gives focus to the government on top of all these pieces of important but not terribly sexy legislations. Okay, I'm going to throw a wild card on the table here. I'm not advocating that this is what's going on. I'm just wondering whether something like this could even possibly happen. Let's say that part of what these one-on-one meetings is all about is kind of a loyalty litmus test. Like, are you still with me?

Do you still think I'm the right person to lead this party at this time? And I raise it because all three of us know that it wasn't that long ago, a few months ago, Chantel referred to when many of his ministers were wondering about just how engaged he was, that some people within the party were not organizing, but sort of discussing and preparing in case, in fact, there was a leadership race. And so they were talking to each other about how to do it, who would be the right candidates, et cetera, et cetera. And I'm sure if that was going on, that Trudeau would have heard about that in some fashion. So could he be throwing some kind of maybe not so blatantly open as the way I

described it, but some kind of loyalty test to find out, are you still with me? I don't know if it would be a loyalty. I think it's an interesting question and an interesting proposition. I think that he would probably want to know, all good leaders want to know, you know, I used to ask the question in my newsroom, am I doing a good job? Am I not doing what I should be doing? What do you think I should be doing? And what were the answers?

I think that that's an important question for all leaders to ask. Now, I heard from a few cabinet ministers, too, the speculation that the buzz was deafening in the summertime about whether or not he was going to go. But you know who created some of that buzz was the prime minister himself. If you look at the way he structured his cabinet and restructured it, he put people who are interested in leadership in certain positions in order to help them gain some profile. And I'm thinking of Melanie Jolie. I'm thinking of François-Philippe Champagne. These are all people who are interested in leadership and who were given jobs that they were they that would allow them to gain some profile, gain some experience. Every every good prime minister wants to be succeeded by bright, ambitious people. And I don't think he was any different. And I think that that was part of what he was doing. I think personally, I think his favorite is. Freeland. I've heard people around the prime minister refer to her as the incarnation of a Trudeau neoliberal. So he is responsible for some of that as well. But that

question that you might think that he would be posing, I think that that would be a good question for him to pose. I don't think that he's asking quite yet, are you going to run again in the next election? That would be a question that prime ministers and those around him, particularly party apparatchiks, would be posing in June at the end of this session as we go into the summer. And I'm not sure that that's what he's doing with this exercise yet. Chantal? I suspect that the question he might be asking is more, how do you think the government is doing? Then how do you think I'm doing? Which is kind of a, it's easier to answer the question if it's asked about how do you think the government is doing. It's easier to point to, to be polite and to point to communications failure or distractions

than to look at the prime minister and say, I think you're doing a really lousy job, sir, but I want to stay in your cabinet. Please, can you keep me on? I am not convinced that he has placed all those ministers where he placed them, because he was thinking about his succession. I believe that if you are, after a number of years in office, if you are on most people's short list as a viable leadership candidate to lead a party in government, it is probably because you have more talent than others, and you will end up in high profile positions in cabinet.

Because if you're the prime minister, you want ministers who will make the government look good. And as it happens, those names that Rob mentioned are ministers who have been performing well. I'm not even convinced about Freeland being his favorite in the sense that at this point, I sense that Mélanie Jolie is probably in competition for being a favorite of many, and she is doing fairly well. If they want to hang on to Quebec, at least, she is the only cabinet minister who is as popular as Trudeau is in Quebec, which is a good place to start. Chrystia Freeland was in a poll about non-Québec ministers, but I think Jolie would give her a run for her money.

Whether that will inform – and I agree with Rob. He's not asking them if they're going to run again because everyone – there are two things. If you ask, do you think I'm still the man for the job? People are going to come out of these meetings and say he's thinking of leaving. And if he asks, are you going to run again now? They're going to say the prime minister is thinking about the spring or summer election. And that's not what you want to do. He's meeting a hell of a lot of people here. He's not having a five or six one-on-ones.

He's having all of his ministers. Some of them will talk to staff. Staff will talk to us. I'm being nice here. Some of them will talk to us too. If I can, about Jolie, she is doing well. And one of the reasons she's doing well is because she's running hard. I think that if I look at Jolie and having talked to people who have represented foreign governments

in this town, she is insisting often when foreign heads of government come in, that there is a public element to their meeting. So the race in some ways is not so embryonic. It's adding muscle and tissue. That being said, when the speculation was at its loudest in the summer and shortly thereafter, there was one other person that I spoke to who said that this was a shared consensus in cabinet, that this is not a guy who is, is going to walk away from a contest very, very easily. He said he is from a political family.

He is not hardwired like the rest of us. This political family is seven and one in general elections, and the one they lost, they avenged. So that's a reference to 1980 when Mr. Trudeau's father came back after being defeated. So it would be very, very difficult for this prime minister to walk away from a fight right now. Yeah, I always look to that boxing match with Brezzo years ago, which he took very, very seriously, right? It was a charity event. Brezzo was kind of expected to win, but Trudeau took him out,

and took him out fair and square in three rounds or whatever it was. And he never backed away, like he was in for the fight. Let me just update you on one thing before we move on. I don't know whether it's a real update or not, but there's been much speculation about Freeland, of course,

and whether she was the anointed one. And there's been some discussion over the last six months that, hey, you know, she's actually in line for possibility of the NATO Secretary General's job. And then that kind of got brushed aside. Most people thought that tended to be an overreach because the americans are unlikely to to go for that i've heard this week for the first time from a pretty reliable source outside of this country um that the americans think a lot more highly of freeland than perhaps we thought and uh that she's second on their list after a a european politician who

apparently does not want the job uh so who knows i don't know whether that's true or not but it keeps that possibility open and then the race really is on right um by the others if if he gives any hint at all in this next little while that he may be leaving. But it doesn't look that way. And I know I've been all over the map on this. I don't think he's going anywhere. I think he wants to fight against Poglia.

You have now a perfect, you can't be wrong now, right? That's right. I've taken the Hebert approach where you can't be wrong. You cover every possibility. I have never said he was leaving. I was the one who offered to bet when you guys said he wouldn't serve 2022 to the end. I remember that vividly. There is a tape.

I don't know. I don't remember that. Of course you don't. You're aging. Now we're going to introduce ageism into the discussion. Freeland has to hope that there is not a strong European candidate because European leaders tend to insist, or in the past have insisted, on having European leaders.

Now I'll surprise you with something really risky. All things being equal, I'm not totally convinced that Freeland wants the job of Justin Trudeau's job. I have doubts. Put me down as someone who has some doubts. And on NATO, I would say that Chantal was right, the Europeans are very skeptical of a Canadian candidate, in large part because we come nowhere close to spending the amount that we're committed to spend on our defense in terms of percentage of our GDP. It used to be like a quiet complaint.

The new ambassador from France went very public with this a couple of months ago and said that we're nowhere near pulling our weight. He openly mocked our stance in terms of defense. And if we had any chance at all, we need for Biden or another Democrat to remain in office because Republicans don't feel the same way about Christopher Leland that Democrats do. That's true. All right, well, we've settled that. We've covered all the possible bases on that one. We're going to move on, but we've got to take our final break.

And here it is. We'll be right back after this. And welcome back. Final segment of Good Talk for this week. Rob Russo is with us, filling in for Bruce Anderson, and Chantelle Hebert is in Montreal. You're listening on SiriusXM, Channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform, or you're watching on our YouTube channel. All right.

Last week, Chantelle kind of led the charge, the most recent charge on we may be close to a health deal based on some of the conversations that she'd had and specifically on some of the words we'd heard from Legault, Ford, and Trudeau. That got picked up a lot over last weekend and throughout this week. Not many people putting a damper on that, most suggesting there are some positive signs here.

And Rob, you've seen another one in the last little while. Tell us about that. Well, I think that we are seeing almost a spasm of innovation and resourcefulness, which might be a polite way for desperation in some provincial capitals, as they are doing things that they haven't done before. going to India very soon to a state in northern India where English is a primary language, where they turn out nurses, and he is going to try and convince them, persuade them of the charms of Newfoundland and Labrador, which are formidable, and try and get them to send their nurses to places like Corner Brook, which are lovely, and St. John's and other places. He's going to try to recruit doctors from Ireland. And if you look at Ireland, it has actually attracted a great many Canadian medical students because they couldn't get into schools here. The universities there are excellent.

So he's going to try and bring a lot of those doctors back here and some of their Irish colleagues as well in Alberta. The province of Alberta is going to Australia where there is a surplus, it seems, of some paramedics to try and get them to come to Alberta. And those are signs that they realize that they need to do more beyond just ask the federal government for money. Yes, the percentage of federal spending in health care is way below what it was, and it needs to come up. And the PM has signaled that it's going to come up. But these guys are doing more.

And Doug Ford is doing his part as well. He's taking a political risk to do what he's doing. But we see this sudden spasm of innovation that goes beyond asking the feds for more money. A spasm of innovation. We're not going to forget that term. We'll write that one down. Chantal. Usually it's a spasm of golf lucidity that I refer to. And it actually works in French, same word, spasm. But I think I'll spare just Francois Legault's government with his spasm of success, which would be the next thing one could hope for that has been missing in action on the health care file, no matter how you look at it.

I think some of the, yes, governments are trying to think out of the box or others would see this in some cases as trying to break boxes. In the case of Doug Ford's decision to allow surgeries paid for by the public purse to be done in for profit clinics. That is a shift on the part of Ontario, for sure. It's happened in other provinces. Usually hospitals contract out, and they do contract out to for-profit. But for Justin Trudeau, it does add a new wrinkle. And yes, the elements of a deal, a federal-provin provincial deal, look like they're coming in place.

We'll know at some point between now and March, probably. February sounds like the big month for moving this file forward. But at the same time, Justin Trudeau still leads a minority government whose partner is the NDP. And what you saw this week is his main partner, Jagmeet Singh, saying, unless you tell Ontario that there will be no new money coming to it, if they're going to be doing this, allowing for-profit clinics to do those cataracts or whatever. We can't accept that. We are willing to go to war over this. And the NDP does not have many topics where it's almost tied in the public's perception as being part of the solution with the liberals and the conservatives. And the Abacus poll this week showed that on healthcare, when people are asked

who do you think is best placed to handle healthcare, it splits three ways between the NDP, the Conservatives, and the Liberals. So, I am not saying that the government could be brought down for not using the powers in the Canada Health Act

to go after provinces like Ontario on this. Because if it came to a non-confidence vote, the bloc would never vote with the NDP on a motion like that, that is basically telling the federal government, please punish provinces and become the policemen of the healthcare system. But I think it stands to fragilize the agreement between the NDP and the liberals. I think the NDP are looking for an issue that they can own and they tend to fall back on health care when they can't think of anything else. So it could make for more complicated politics in the House of Commons is basically what I'm trying to say about whatever health care accord comes about, if one does come about, maybe not bring down the government, but certainly make it less

stable. But, you know, it's one thing to be looking for an issue. It's another thing to create an election if you're the NDP right now. I mean, but they did when Paul Martin was in power. Remember how what what was the excuse for the NDP voting non-confidence in Paul Martin's government, even as they were getting to write in stuff in the budget, was some issue that I would say they mostly manufactured over health care. healthcare. And what was the result? Well, they got Stephen Harper for a decade, but they don't like it when you point that out. That risks being the outcome. But at this point, you can see, I looked at the comments and the reactions to Ford's move. And editorially, people are, you know, keeping, holding their breath to see if it does bring about some resolution of some of the wait times. But at ground level, you hear, and you guys were there for the last episode of this debate, destroying Medicare, two-tier medicine, US-style medicine is coming our way. And those may not resonate with every voter, but they do resonate inside the NDP echo chamber. the confidence and supply agreement was to increase funding to the Medicare system,

to compel the prime minister to actually sit down with the premiers to discuss this. And it wasn't. It is a good issue for the NDP, without a doubt. But he didn't take advantage of that when he could have put the prime minister in a vice on it. Now, I would also ask Mr. Singh, how much of our medical system now is delivered privately? And most Canadians would be surprised. If you look at our diagnostics, a great percentage of it is delivered privately and is delivered efficiently. And most people don't realize that when you go downstairs from your doctor's office to get an X-ray or to get a scan, that's private health care being delivered and paid for by the public. So it's not necessarily a binary choice. You can have private delivery of public care in some instances. In terms of Doug Ford, we'll see. There is an important trust but verify mechanism that is going to have to be applied.

But I'm not sure yet that Mr. Singh is serious about this. And I'm not sure that necessarily this won't be a good issue for Justin Trudeau. I know it's going to divert from some of the problems he's going to have to face in the first six months of this year, when the fangs of the resection actually begin to bite deeply, when people need to renew their mortgages this year and find out that a lot of them won't be able to make the payments and hang on to their houses. Is this a good news possibility for the prime minister? It could be. And he's going to need it. And is there good news for Jagmeet Singh in this? But a lot of people are going to say, you had your chance. Why didn't you take it before? Now, Paul Martin believed that striking a health accord would help him tremendously with voters. And then what did

Stephen Harper do? Stephen Harper turned around and said, well, fine, if I become prime minister, I'm going to live with this accord. I fully expect Pierre Poilievre to do exactly the same thing, not go around and say this is a terrible accord. If there's an accord that's going to be signed by a majority of non-liberal premiers. So the easy path for the conservatives is to say, we're good. And in a sense, that takes away much of the profit electorally that the liberals can get from it. I think, Chantal, you're right. And it's an interesting example, because if you listen to what Poiliev said this week, when he was asked about Doug Ford, he maintained a very courageous silence on it,

on the actual elements of what was being proposed, and instead wheeled and turned around and blamed Trudeau for putting us in this position in the first place without saying really a word about the Ford proposal. So you may be right, he's guarding a courageous silence in order to say, yeah, sure. You know, I've only got a couple of minutes left, but there are times that I wonder, especially in these to say, yeah, sure. You know, I've only got a couple of minutes left, but there are times that I wonder, especially in these last year or two, whether there's, you know, the Ford-Trudeau relationship is an interesting one on policy stuff

and aligning themselves with each other on different things. Is there more going on between those two governments than just the two principles in other words is there a coordination of stuff that's happening between queen's park and parliament hill between the two governments anybody got any insight on i'll i'll take that one i think that the broad outlines of the health care deal that's going to come along were drawn in October, November, when senior people from Doug Ford's office and senior people from the prime minister's office had a casual meal here in Ottawa, where they were spotted. And they both discussed why a health care accord along the lines of what the prime

minister is proposing with visible standards that have to be met was in both their interests and in the province's interest. And Doug Ford's government believes that the hospitals are badly run and that this will compel hospitals to run better. But it's also the historic reality that when there are two different governments, one of different stripes in Ottawa and in Queen's Park, it's beneficial politically for both of them. That's a historic reality. Bill Davis and Trudeau got along very, very well and helped each other out, particularly on constitutional issues. So, yeah, I think that there is there a historic and there are current modern parallels very artisan level, Doug Ford is Justin Trudeau's greatest asset. Because if you look at the calendar, Mr. Ford is going to remain in office beyond the next federal election.

He's in the second mandate. He's a controversial figure. He's bound to become unpopular with many voters in Ontario for all kinds of reasons, good and bad, Greenbelt, this battle over private health care. What happens when Ontario voters are not happy about something their provincial government is doing? They take it out on the federal party of the same stripe, ask liberals about Dalton McGinty and going door to door after that health levy. So if you're a liberal that is looking at winning another election, you think, I can hold on to Quebec against Pierre Poiliev. The numbers suggest that is highly doable.

So all I need is to stay strong, not overwhelmingly strong in Ontario. And my best asset to stay strong is not myself, but Doug Ford, who stands to be an albatross around Pierre Poitier's neck. So it's a win-win to get along with Doug Ford. Okay. We're going to leave it at that for this week. Good conversation on a number of different topics. Monday, Dominic Barton is on the bridge for a full hour and we'll get into his time as ambassador to china the two michaels he'll talk in a way he's not talked before about that episode and his time as head of the mckinsey consulting agency and the controversy that's created and whether or not he'd appear before a committee in ot Ottawa to answer questions about consultants. That'll be interesting. Chantelle in Montreal, Rob in Ottawa, thank you both very much.

And thank you to our audience here on The Bridge and Good Talk. We'll talk to you again on Monday. Thank you.