The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Good Talk -- A Mixed Bag Today -- Jan 6, Emergencies Act, and Pierre Poilievre.

Episode Date: June 10, 2022

The finger of blame was pointed directly at Donald Trump last night for the  January 6, 2021 insurrection on Capitol Hill.  Chantal and Bruce with their take on whether that blame will become the accepted truth.  Also the latest on the investigation into the use of the Emergencies Act in Ottawa, and can Pierre Poilievre be caught by his rivals for the Conservative leadership?

Are you ready for good talk? And of course you're ready. It's Friday. You're ready for good talk. Chantelle Hebert is in Montreal. Bruce Anderson is in Saskatoon. Looking out the window. Beautiful sunrise here. Beautiful sunrise today. Beautiful sunrise. The prairies have been hit.

Certainly Manitoba. I'm not sure how bad it's been in Saskatchewan. A lot of rain this spring, which is going to make things tough for farmers at a time when the prairies is being dependent upon not just for Canada, but for other parts of the world as well, given the situation in Ukraine. Anyway, good to see both of you on this day. I'm going to start with the January 6th hearings because I know that Chantel didn't get a chance to watch them last night because she was otherwise engaged on a few different things. Bruce did manage to see them from his hotel room in Saskatoon.

I watched them. I wasn't expecting much. I think I got a little more than I was expecting. I thought they made the case very clearly about what had happened and the knowledge by the most senior leadership of the United States at that time, which would have been Donald Trump, that Trump was behind it all, had been planning it for weeks. They were able to detail more than a few meetings.

They were able to put forward, as evidence, a number of key Trump people who tried to talk him out of the position he was in, in terms of wanting a major demonstration to try and overturn the election. All these things, I thought, were fairly well done with a mix of fact and emotion over a tight period of two hours. Didn't drag on. There were only two speakers, the chair and the deputy chair, vice chair of the committee.

So I thought it was, I thought it was overall was pretty impressive. Does it change the equation? Does it change, you know, move the needle as they say? I don't know about that. Bruce, why don't we start with you seeing as you watch your thoughts on what you witnessed last night? Sure. Look, I think it's way too early in this process to know whether or not any of what comes out affects the way that people think about the choices in the United States. But I'm keeping an open mind about that for sure. Look, the way that you described it, Peter, reminded me of the thing that we all know now about how debates get consumed as well, which is that for all of the people who will watch it

right through from beginning to end, there will be more people who will consume clips of it. I turned on YouTube this morning just to see how that worked in this particular instance. And the way that the event was produced allowed for the extraction of some very, very effective clips. I saw four or five different things where specific moments were taken and reproduced in different programming. I watched Stephen Colbert's use of clips from it and his monologue. And so I think the right way to understand the content

is to understand that the effort that went into the production values and the flow of it did produce a lot of usable and reusable and shareable clips. And so the impact is going to continue, I think, over time. Now, getting to the substance of it, if you say you thought you saw a little bit more than you expected, I saw a lot more than I expected. And it wasn't that I had weak expectations of it. I read people saying that she was

courageous in doing what she was doing and it reminded me of the fact that yes in politics in the United States and in the media if you take the positions and say the things that she's saying your life is going to be under threat and so I commend her for the leadership that she's saying, your life is going to be under threat. And so I commend her for the leadership that she's showing on it and the people who testified for the things that they said and will now feel some repercussions for. I thought she did a great job. Some of the best moments in terms of relevance and impact, I thought, were the clip with Ivanka Trump, where she said that she agreed with Bill Barr's assessment that there was no evidence that the election was stolen from Trump. The quote specifically from Bill Barr and the other quotes that that were shown, the other clips that were shown but also really fascinating was this uh these clips with general millie the military chief of defense where he was talking about conversations that he had with

mike pence who was very animated and very very concerned about what was going on and he wanted the military sent in to quell what was happening on capitol. And he contrasted that with conversations that he had with then President Trump, who showed no interest, or with Mark Meadows, I should say, who showed no interest in that and really just wanted Milley to help fashion a narrative that Trump was still very much in charge and that Pence wasn't. Last thing I'll say is the quote of all of the quotes that i thought really stood out for me was cheney saying to her republican colleagues one day trump will be gone but your dishonor in defending him will remain and i thought that is a um that was a very well crafted and put

sentiment and it's one that will stay with me a lot and i think a lot of people in politics need to kind of hear that and think about it because as we know partisanship does make people represent certain ideas that they probably should be a bit ashamed of more and more it seems these days you know i agree with you totally on liz cheney i thought she was quite remarkable and with likely cost to her in the long run. I mean, you talk about threats on her life and I think, you know, I hear what you're saying there and I think it's a dual threat on life in terms of her life and her political life. I mean, she's apparently running about 30 points behind in the primary in Wyoming, a state which she and her family through her father have owned for decades.

But Trump has come out heavily, obviously, against her and is having her primaried, as they say, in Wyoming. And at this point, for a primary that doesn't take place until August, she's 30 points behind. She obviously doesn't care about that. For her, the goal is much bigger than just her re-election. I'll also say, I found the most striking part the Milley conversation, because it left me with the impression that on that day, in that hour, the President of the United States wasn't Donald Trump. It was Mike Pence.

He was calling the shots firmly and directly, according to Milley. Trump wasn't, was saying nothing. And there's, you know, they dropped a number of hints last night, including the fact that some members of cabinet on that day were trying to use the 25th Amendment to move Trump out of office. So I think there's still a lot more to tell on this story. Also, you know, this whole bit about how many Republicans were Congress people were looking immediately after that for pardons from Trump for any wrongdoing they might have done. I found that, you know, I think there's lots more still to come if they have the proof, if they're able to actually lay down the real proof.

And then once again, it'll get to who's listening and what difference will it all make. Chantel, I know you have some on on what's happening through this january 6th committee in spite of the fact you were unable last night unfortunately to to watch it well to go back to your point about who's listening i can't wait to see the ratings for fox for last as Fox declined to present it while every other channel rightly presented it live. So it will be interesting to see how many people deliberately decided they did not want to see and hear this. And that goes back to a larger point stemming from some of the administration insiders that were heard from last night, that not everyone who voted for Trump believes the election was stolen. And there comes a point with the repetition of these clips, and regardless of whatever action,

where you start prying off supporters, people who voted for you for reasons other than being hypnotized into it by beliefs that don't quite match the political facts. And I think this goes a long way to achieve that. I believe a lot of people who voted for Trump actually watched this last night. They did not watch Fox. They also watched a lot of people who were insiders in his administration saying this didn't happen and this president was leading you to that event, which no one is real cause to be proud of in the real world. So I'm curious to see how long it takes

for it to be not opportunistic to support Donald Trump if you're a Republican, and where it starts to be a matter of diminishing returns in the ballot box. And I think at some point we are going there. Peter, I just wanted to pick up on the point that Chantal was making about Fox. It was so remarkable what Fox was trying to do. And what underscored that for me was that for, I think, the first hour of the show that was programmed opposite the Tucker Carlson show, they didn't do any ads because they didn't want the risk. They didn't run any ads because they didn't want the risk of people switching to channels that were covering this so what a deliberate act by a news organization suppose a news organization to keep people from watching something that was

so newsworthy that every other uh outlet was putting it on live i'm with chantal i think that it's the kind of thing that will make some of those except for the diehards the people who would be watching discussion of it but not it that's a real act of trumpist paranoia that goes beyond what i think normal kind of people might might do and the other thing is that the repetition of the clips and why I think Chantal's point about where we're going ultimately is true, is that the repetition of these clips did something not so subtle to all of those people who kind of knew what was going on in the White House, were in it, around it, and have been quiet so far it enables them to say things that they have to say that are aligned with these facts i watched an interview on cnn this morning with stephanie grisham who's written a book and quite critical she was in the white house as i think press secretary for a

period of time but she referred to the fact that she was recounting her observations based on the testimony of feeling, yes, it was good to have somebody or a number of people saying what we all experienced, which was that we were all supposed to run around and pretend that the thing that he was saying was true when we all knew that it wasn't true. And we couldn't really talk to him about it because that was the unspoken rule that you can't tell him that he didn't win the election so you had all these workarounds and as i was listening to her i was thinking how many more people are there now who bearing in mind liz cheney's comment about dishonor might now start to come out of the woodwork and say yeah it was pretty bad what happened. And the evidence that Trump knew that there was going to be violence and was very comfortable with that fact, at least, I think that's starting to mount. And I think he is going to become a little bit more of a toxic figure.

You know, I think... Go ahead, Chantal. I just wanted to say about courage, and i'm sure it's been your experience of observing politics that for one brave person that speaks out there are usually thousands who agree and are silent but that doesn't mean that they agree and do not follow up on that agreement by their a ballot one way or another. So whether they all come out of the woodwork or not, she, Liz Cheney, and others are speaking for thousands who'd rather not say, but who still think and agree, and who will keep those

words in mind, whether it's their honor or just what they want for their country that matters. But the test of this is not that everyone is brave and speaks out. It's that everyone acts on their conviction that this is the right take on it. You know, the thing about Liz Cheney is that she's no kind of soft conservatives, no soft Republicans. She is, she's pretty right wing. She's probably more right wing than Donald Trump ever was. I mean, Donald Trump is just whatever he thinks it works for the day, whether, no matter what part of the political spectrum that's on. But Liz Cheney has made a career of being basically a hardcore right-wing Republican and having her sitting there in this chair doing what she's doing. You're right. You spell that

courage. There's no question about that. The other thing that I'll say about last night, I kind of wondered aloud the other day whether they could pull it off as an interesting, watchable couple of hours. And I thought they did that in a fairly simple format. There were only two speakers, the chair and the vice chair, and there were two witnesses, and that was it over two hours, plus clearly some video that hadn't been seen before that was pretty riveting to watch. But the two hours kind of went by very fast. I didn't find myself saying, this is boring or this is dull. Apparently, that's what they were saying on Fox, even though they didn't watch it. They said, it's really boring.

Don't watch it. They said it's really boring. Don't watch it. Anyway, they apparently have seven days, seven different hearings at different times over the next three weeks, I think it is. And they blocked out last night exactly what they're going to do with each of those hearings and it'll be a combination of some witnesses on tape from their depositions and some witnesses live in the chair in the committee room um so i you know it's going to be interesting to watch it'll be even more interesting to determine if possible what impact it's having um so unless anybody has anything else to say, we'll move on. Nobody else.

I'm just curious about, you know, people have compared this to Watergate. I'm old enough to remember Watergate on television and what it meant, even if I wasn't very political at that time. The ratings kept going up. I'm not so sure that will be the case in the sense that last night was the big night, I think.

There will be substantial audiences for the rest of it, but I think they were very wise to lay their case the way they laid it out rather than create some kind of a suspense to a foregone conclusion. Because I think increasingly more and more this will be junkies who will want to watch. But the impressions from last night will last longer than those seven moments. Look, can I just jump in on that? I think that's right. But I'm also, I was reading some comments from Steve Schmidt who said said you know americans love a courtroom drama and when we were talking about this the other day we were talking about what was going to be different about this set of hearings from the the earlier one which is basically that there was no uh kind

of republican wall of denial in the room active in the conversation there was really going to be this this questioning of witnesses so i'm a little bit more open to the idea not that people will in large numbers sit and watch full-length events wild but they'll stay in touch with this trial um you know because uh it feels like a trial and there's elements of drama and it feels like maybe they didn't put everything that they have out at once. But I say that as somebody who listened to countless episodes of the trial of Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos on podcast. And so I'm one of those people that does enjoy a good courtroom drama. Junkies, they're called. Well, there are a few of us.

True crime stories uh they're the number one podcast out there exactly people uh love that stuff and if this is considered a true crime story then they'll get the audience i'll probably watch perry mason too just like the rest of us in law and order for a few years why do you think I ended up with two sons who are lawyers from watching too many of those legal shows while pregnant? You know, you're right about how they love courtroom dramas. I think we all love courtroom dramas. And there's no doubt Cheney was thinking of that yesterday because she was like the prosecutor laying out the case, right?

Point by point by point we're going to show you this we're going to show you this we're going to show you this and trying to not only lay out the case but also hook you for future dates but you know i i'm actually old enough to remember watergate from having covered it and uh i can tell you there were a lot of slow days in Watergate. You know, it went on for more than a year. Weren't people sitting in there smoking cigarettes and all kinds of things that we would never see on TV? So were the news anchors smoking cigarettes and sometimes, you know, more than just smoking. It was, you know, that was a different era.

But there were, you know, there were big moment days, you know, John Dean, obviously, the cancer growing on the presidency. The, you know, the Alexander Butterfield, when he talked about there was a recording device in the Oval Office and nobody knew about that at that time. And that changed everything, literally everything. But the president's fate was in the balance exactly and as opposed to the president this is about a past president a past president and keeping him back from coming back to the white house and yeah i think so perhaps putting him in jail the people he is kind of their president still and uh so there's a you know there for them there's a lot at stake and uh here's hoping they if he's still their president still and uh so there's a you know there for them there's a lot at stake and uh

here's hoping they if he's still their president to them they're probably not listening to this sorry guys well i don't think liz cheney will be happy until she sees him in an orange jumpsuit behind bars um and who knows stranger things have happened um happened. Okay, we're going to take a break here. But when we come back, you know, we don't have a January 6th moment. But I guess the closest thing to it was what happened in Ottawa through the so-called Freedom Convoy. And some of the decisions that were made around the policing of that, which is under investigation as of now, and some interesting developments on that this week. We'll get back to that right after this.

And welcome back. Peter Mansbridge here in Stratford, Ontario. Bruce Anderson is in Saskatoon today. Chantelle Hebert is in Montreal. All right. The investigation into the decision by the federal government to use the Emergencies Act continues in Ottawa, and the debate surrounding that continues and the person who's been the focus of attention of the opposition MPs this week especially the Conservatives and especially Pierre Pelliev as being the Minister of Public Safety Marco Mendocino around words he used to

describe the decision to use the Emergencies Act, which gave police special powers. He said, not directly, but he left the impression, according to some, that the decision revolved around a request from a number of the police forces that they needed more powers and the Emergency Act would give them those powers. Now, he never said that directly, but there's clearly, there was the impression that that's what he meant in the words he chose.

As a result, Polyev, as he loves to do, to find a headline, has called for the resignation of Mendocino, the public safety minister. And we'll see what happens as a result of that. But it has given a bit of a spark to the investigation and the stories around that decision to use the Emergencies Act. Chantelle, on this. Okay, a number of things. The first is we are early on in this process. There will be an inquiry on top of the Parliamentary Committee that is looking into that. And make no mistake, the burden of the proof on this issue is not on whether the police acted properly or whether Ottawa police did what

it needed to do, which it clearly didn't, and as a matter for some other post-mortem. The onus is on the government to demonstrate that it had cause to use the Emergencies Act, and the test of whether it had cause is for the government to demonstrate that there were, that no normal powers at the disposal of the justice system and the police, et cetera, could have resolved the situation as the extraordinary use of the Emergencies Act. Now, that is not some creation of transparency or a push for transparency. It is part and parcel of the Emergencies Act as rewritten after the War Measures Act was shown to be used slightly casually during the October crisis at cost to civil liberties. So, when you invoke it, you know that you will have to show on what basis you invoked it and demonstrate that you met the threshold.

Now, the threshold is not that the police asked you to use the Emergencies Act. You can decide to use it without being formally requested by the police. For all kinds of reasons that I suspect will be adjusted going forward, the government initially clearly sought to hook its justification on the police advice. And it's not just an impression for some. When a minister tells you that we act repeatedly, we acted on police advice, the inference that the police asked for it is pretty clear. And when asked, the same police forces said, no, we did not formally ask for the Emergencies Act.

I don't think that says a lot for the police, that they didn't ask formally for the act, but the government says, but they ask for those powers. In any event, that is basically where the issue sits. And for me, the core of the problem for the government, beyond Minister Mendocino, who I think has ended up in a bad seat having to do this for the government, is that if they are going to make the case that they have cause and information that led them to use it, they need to do a better job

of demonstrating it. And their case was harmed from the start by the fact that the blockade at the Detroit Windsor Bridge, for instance, was cleared with no recourse to any of the powers in the Emergencies Act, or from the fact that Quebec City, which also was the site of a freedom convoy, managed to keep them out of the downtown core and forced them to go back home in a matter of hours, where Ottawa police did not. So the last point I want to make is, I don't believe one way or the other, and I totally believe it's possible the government will be found not to have provided enough costs to convince a committee or an inquiry that met the threshold. But I believe one way or another that the price in public opinion to be paid for using the act will be minimal.

Because for most people, this had to end and that was the way to do it. And it should have been done earlier but be mindful before if you think like that and and i understand that you would want to think like that be mindful that this could lay the groundwork for the same act to be used in the same way for causes that you actually support and i'm thinking thinking indigenous blockades. So this is not happening in a vacuum, just a freedom convoy. We don't like those guys. And the government was right to use it. It is laying the groundwork

for how the act will be used in the future by future governments. Bruce? Yeah, I think the point that Chantal is making is where I would start. I think it's a good thing that we live in a country where there is a process like this after the use of an act like that. I think there should be a degree of hesitation and understanding that accountability for the use of these measures will come one day so that any future government really has to think carefully about the choice that they're making to invoke this these extraordinary powers having said that i also completely agree with chantal in fact i guess i would go further i think this is the ultimate kind of uh difference without a distinction in the in the in the whole question of what did the police ask

for it's a a kind of a flimsy sorry excuse for a scandal at this point that's not to diminish the importance of having this process and we'll see where it ends up but at the end of the day even if somehow the committee concludes that the government um didn't have the justification to use the act i'm not sure that that will affect canadian public opinion very much or that somehow that there's this important distinction to be made between mendocino saying we made the decision based on the advice of the police or the police asked us specifically for the emergencies act i don't really get why that is so captivating i understand why politicians on the other side want to make a meal out of it but as far as i'm concerned watching that event unfold the policing tools

that were in place at the time weren't working. And the police said that they needed more tools. The government hesitated. There were a lot of people. I don't know if we all remember this the same way, but there were a lot of people saying, get on with it. Use the Emergencies Act. Bring this to an end. And the government did hesitate quite a bit.

And then they acted. And after they acted, the problem went away and they acted. I thought the execution of the powers that the police had as a result of the Emergencies Act in Ottawa were handled pretty well. From the standpoint of, you know, you segued from the January 6th to this. This was a much more orderly situation, obviously. And so I would say they acted and it worked. And the last point I would say is that I don't think that the Mendocino, Minister Mendocino ever sort of implied that the government was reluctant to do this and only did it because the municipalities requested it. I think he was

saying that the information coming from the municipalities was consistent with the ultimate decision that you need more tools and the Emergencies Act is the best choice, but that it was the government's choice. It wasn't the choice of the police departments. I don't think that the government is saying that they didn't make that choice or they made it under duress from other levels of government or police forces. And so I don't know. It just doesn't feel to me like it feels to me like a useful process, but there's not much there there.

Well, what I would like to see and what I said consistently since the time they used it, you know, months ago. And I think Chantel hinted at this just a moment ago too, is they got to show me the money. They got to tell me where's the beef, what was your reasoning? You hinted at the time, and I think it was Mendocino who hinted it,

that there are terrible things happening behind the scenes that we can't tell you about right now. You know, whether it's, you know, money flooding in from third parties and third countries or other countries, whether there were big caches of arms stored in hotel rooms and ready to be using, and

that they were clearly, as their manifesto said, there to try and overthrow the government. And they had the means and they had the plan to do it. Well, if all those things are true, they got to show it. At some point, they have to show it. I get it that, you know, it could expose sources and they must have had people inside on the, you know, they could expose sources and they must have had people inside on the, you know, inside the convoy

giving them information. I think you can still get some of that stuff out without, you know, revealing your sources. But nevertheless, I think that's been a constant from back in January, February that you've got to prove it to us.

And I don't think they've done that so far, which hinders their case. And they don't have to prove it to us because you're a journalist and I'm a journalist and we want to know. They have to prove it to us because that's what the law says they have to do. Otherwise, we are back with the War Measures Act, whose rationale, remember, was presented to Canadians as apprehended insurrection in Quebec. We need to send the army because the province is going to explode on us, which afterward turned out to be based about as true as the weapons of mass destruction that justified the war in Iraq. It didn't exist. It was a figment either of panic around the cabinet table

or collective imagination and manipulating public opinion. Now, we've been there. We've seen that movie. And so, as opposed to Bruce, I believe there is a there there. As in, you can't just shrug off, hinting at dark motives, and if you only knew everything we knew, you would understand why we do this the law says you need to show us how you got to that decision and how you got to

that decision isn't just that there was inconvenience it doesn't help their case that parliament sat and that mps who wanted to go to the house of Commons, always managed to go there without harm or actual danger. I don't support the freedom convoy. I think their means are not acceptable. I think blockades in general are bad ideas. But there is a law there, and it demands accountability, and the test of accountability is not being met at this point. I just want to be clear that my point about there not being a there there

wasn't in reference to the question that you guys are talking about, which is what was the rationale? It was the idea that there was something big to be made of, the difference between police forces saying we need more tools and Mendocino seeming to suggest that the police forces saying we need more tools and mendocino seeming to suggest that the police forces asked for the emergencies act which to me is you know that's obviously that's not the justification for using the act i think he he used he did describe what he saw as a situation where among other factors the police forces said that they needed

more tools but so i'm not suggesting that we know everything that we need to know in fact i do believe is as i said before that we need this process and that the law is kind of designed well to to force that kind of accountability i just don't happen to think that this this kind of choice of language around what the police actually ask for makes much difference. It does go, though, to the emptiness of the justification that's been offered so far. All right. Good discussion. We'll move on to our final segment where we'll look as we've done. You know, it's funny leadership campaigns the conservatives

always say we never get enough talk about our leadership campaigns and they're right those last few there was hardly any discussion or reporting on the leadership campaigns well they figured this one out i'll tell you they sure have there's not been a week gone by where we haven't had something to say about what's happening and we'll have something to say right after this and welcome back chantelle is in montreal bruce is in saskatoon today i'm in stratratford, Ontario. You're listening on Sirius XM, Channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform. All right.

The memberships have all been sold, at least as many as they could sell. And depending on who you listen to, there have been hundreds of thousands of memberships sold for the Conservative leadership vote, which doesn't take place until September. But there seems to be a lot of kind of fuzziness around just how many have been sold, who sold them, who benefits from those that have been sold. People are raising questions about why haven't you published a list? Why can't we see who the actual members are?

You've had people like Lisa Raitt, a former chairman of a conservative leadership convention and someone who many conservatives felt they wished she'd run in this convention for this race she raised openly the other day on um on david hurley's show that um there were as many as what 50 000 i think she said um the that are probably not going to pass the smell test uh when they get her get around to the actual voting and looking at these different memberships. So, I mean, there are questions being raised, and there are very few answers being given. What should we make of this, Chantal? We can, I think, take for a fact that hundreds of thousands of memberships were sold or were presented to the party as being sold. I think we can also probably take for granted that verifying and vetting all those will take time and require a massive effort on the part of the Conservative Party. Those numbers are staggering when you consider that you need to check every name, see that

it's not duplicated, to verify credit cards that go on and on and on. I think it's fair to assume that thousands will not be accepted. They will be found incomplete or wanting. And the thousands, more than 100,000 of the current membership of the party will not show up and cast a ballot come September 10th. And why I say that is because the last time they had 277,000 members and 100,000 did not eventually cast a ballot. So beyond that, we are watching what I would describe, not as a numbers game, but a psychological game. And the psychological game is being played, obviously, by Frantran-Eur-Pierre Poiliev, who is using his numbers. He says he sold 300,000 memberships.

Well, even by accident, leak a breakdown of where they are to show that they're across the country and making him unbeatable. I believe all of that is meant to spook either Jean Charest or Patrick Brown into deciding to give up before they get to the actual vote. And why would you want that if you were Pierre Poiliev? Because I think it's undeniable that if either Jean Chalet or Patrick Brown were to beat him, they would have to be each other's second choice. If you walk away, your supporters are not necessarily going to stick around to wait to vote for the other guy. You need them to vote for you and have a second choice.

And that won't happen if you leave. Will either of those at some point decide to go? We can come back to that. I believe there was a time when it was credible that Tjanshaya might. I don't think that's in the cards at all. And we can talk about why a bit later. Bruce? don't think that's in the cards at all and we can talk about why a bit later bruce yeah look i'm watching this race and um i must confess that i felt at some point that the blood feud aspect of it would fade away because people would kind of get over that idea that they were in this

superheated emotional contest and start to remember that they actually have to end up as a party that could present itself to Canadians as a unified force in an election as early as next year. But that hasn't happened. If anything, it continues to go in the same direction with more velocity than it already had. Yesterday, Mr. Polyev's campaign manager put out a video on Twitter about Patrick Brown that was one of the worst things I've ever seen a partisan running for the leadership say about another partisan in the same party. So the tone and the tenor of it is really something. Now I have to say that it is also the most classless front runner campaign that I can

remember seeing. If Mr. Polyev has such a massive lead, then the thing that he's doing right now feels to me like it's more likely to force an alliance among other candidates than to diminish that prospect i don't get the rationale of it i don't think it's you know it might i saw what uh patrick brown was saying yesterday which he's kind of hinting that he wouldn't run. Well, he said he wouldn't run under Pierre Polyev because he didn't think he could win a seat in the GTA under Pierre Polyev's leadership, which is a pretty striking statement if you're going to end up in the same party running an election next year. But part of why he said that, I think,

is he's keeping open the option of running for mayor of the city that he is mayor of now, which he would have to decide to do before all the votes were counted. Not to get too deep into the weeds of this, but he also said that he could run under Lesley Lewis or Jean Charest, both of whom he deemed qualified to be leader of the party and successful in that role. And so I think he was already telegraphing this idea of, if you like me, your second choice should be one of them and not Pierre Polyev. And I can't think that that was a good outcome for, maybe it was foreordained, but I don't think it was a good outcome for the Polyev campaign. So it's a classless frontrunner campaign. I think it's helping force a potential alliance, whether it'll ever be enough to keep Pauliev from winning on the first ballot, who knows.

And the last point for me is that the stop the steal story in the United States, which has dominated their political life for so long, threatens to come to Canada in this context, because if somehow the Pauliev campaign does not win, and there is numbers of questions of votes or memberships that didn't get counted or didn't get counted in time, or if there are questions about the process then you know as i think lisa rate put it there are people involved in that campaign who've been known to believe a conspiracy theory or two and i knew who she was talking about and i'm i'm worried that there's going to be a bit of chaos in the in the about the process if Mr. Poliev doesn't win and handle it.

Chantal? So on that point, it is totally possible to win this leadership campaign with less votes than the runner-up, because this is a process where every writing counts for 100 points, meaning that 20,000 members in a Calgary writing have the same way as 101 members in my Montreal writing. So, if you do the math, you could have 300,000 members in Saskatchewan and you could beat them with a bit more than 8,000 in Quebec, make them disappear. The Quebec once would be worth three times the score of the Saskatchewan once because there are 14 ridings in Saskatchewan and 78 in

Quebec. So for those who like the theory of we will have that leadership stolen if Poitier wins, the formula will yield that result. And I do not believe that either Patrick Brown or Jean Charest can beat Pierre Poitier on numbers. I believe that they can win on ridings and riding points, which is different. So yes, the possibility if either of them wins, that he has less votes than Pierre Poiliev is in the range of possible to probable, which is pretty high. That was always going to be the case.

It was even truer of the previous leadership campaigns, although it didn't happen. To go to Patrick Brown, clearly, the Poitiers camp has identified him as the weak link, the one that is more likely to go. Why? Because he has until August 19th, I believe, to declare that he is running again to be mayor of Brampton. It's really hard to imagine that you would declare that you're running to be the mayor of Brampton and you are still running to be the conservative leader, depending on an outcome on September 10th. You would be shooting yourself in both feet in this case and on both fronts. telegraphing to his supporters who their second choice should be in case he's not on the ballot and they become his first choice. Good luck to all of them. Because the last person who did that was Kevin O'Leary. Remember Kevin O'Leary signed up a lot, thousands of members, and then decided,

most likely because he was told he wasn't going to win, then pulled out, but pulled out telling his supporters, I'm not there anymore, but please vote for Maxime Bernier. Told them specifically to vote for Maxime Bernier. You know what they did? They didn't show. They didn't show. Because they didn't sign up to vote for Maxime Bernier. They had signed up to vote for Kevin O'Leary,

and they were, in many instances, conservatives to vote for Kevin O'Leary, and they were, in many instances, conservatives to vote for Kevin O'Leary, but not conservatives to vote for a conservative leader. So if Patrick Brown does that, I believe a significant number of the people who signed up will simply not vote for Jean Charest because they won't vote for anyone. They will just give it the pass and say our guy is gone and that's that. I believe that Chaguet or Brown need each other to the maximum if they're going to carry this out

and if one of them pulls out which is why I think that the Poiliev camp is taking those chances of having this telegraphing of second choices. Poiliev is basically just about certain of winning. Now on the Poitiers thing, suppose they all stay in and they're competitive.

He's got two problems. This is going to be a very long, long, long summer for the Poitiers camp. His first problem is he has entered the zone of diminishing returns, i.e. whatever he says to firm up a fringe of his supporters and keep them energized is starting to cost him votes on the other side. People who signed up early and are saying, gee, this isn't the guy we expected, or like Bruce are saying, we expected this to become more unifying and it's more divisive. And maybe I'd like someone else. You don't have to vote for Pierre Poitier, even if you signed up through his portal. And the other one is, if you keep telling people you are so strong, you are not giving them much of an incentive to actually vote.

You are giving them an incentive to say, no need to worry about this anymore. This is in the bag. I'm out. A lot of people he has signed up are not familiar with the political process. A number of them will be reluctant to hand in a photocopy of their ID, their driver's license, etc. to anyone, including the Conservative Party, which they must do to be verified. So, I'm guessing, you know, there's a lot of strategy hinging on Patrick Brown deciding that he likes to be mayor of Brampton at this point.

Let me ask if he decides to stay in the race and so everybody's in. Does Polyev have to win on the first ballot because he suffers from that no growth problem? Depends how strong he is on that first ballot. If he's very close, suppose he's at 48%.

That's almost a first ballot win. And also the regional skews that Chantal was talking about. It really, I think, does depend a lot on on that um because the um you know that is a unique dynamic in this race that i don't think people have paid a lot of attention to but i noticed that the polyev campaign was putting out numbers for their membership sales in quebec to try to attenuate this risk of people saying well we know where your 310 000 are and they're all in in places where the relative weight of them will be less. First of all, I want to thank Chantal for making me think about Kevin O'Leary again.

Not really, I'm being sarcastic. On the other hand, the fact that nobody listened to him made me feel a little bit better by the end of that intervention because he was not a great contributor to canadian politics by any means i think it's almost inevitable that um patrick brown will leave uh the race so that he can run again i it doesn't it can't really look to him like he can win and if it did he wouldn't say what he said yesterday uh about the prospect of running under apolliev and maybe one would have to think about you know continuing to serve as mayor of of his city

but i'm not as convinced as she is that him departing the race means that there's nothing left of his or there's too little left of his support base to be material in the fight of Lewis or Cherie campaign. And the reason I say that is that I think one of the strengths of Patrick Brown is he built a team of organizers who are effective and they won't leave. They're probably pretty energized by the campaign or they wouldn't have sold as many memberships as they reportedly have sold. And so it's possible that while the general may depart, the army may remain and that it won't be lost on the Charest campaign or the Lewis campaign, that about was to signal that this knitting together has to has to happen if the people who aren't polyev um really want to overcome his lead last thing i'll say is that this really is one of those rare in fact i don't remember another one scores are usually settled after these things are done but this feels like the polyev campaign is settling scores

all along the way and i don't think it's productive for their party all right we're going to leave it at that good discussion on all three topics today um must be that western air bruce it's got you up early in saskatoon and and you're just hanging in there. Listen, we're out of time. So Bruce in Saskatoon, Chantel in Montreal. I'm in Stratford, Ontario. You've been listening to Good Talk on The Bridge. And The Bridge will be back on Monday.