The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Good Talk -- A Referendum on the Monarchy?

Episode Date: September 16, 2022

A new IPSOS survey says 60 percent of Canadians want a referendum on whether to keep the monarchy.  Really?  Good grist for a start to this week's Good Talk.  Chantal and Bruce discuss that plus Pierre Poilievre's first week and why is the Quebec election getting so little interest outside the province.

Are you ready for good talk? And good morning, Peter Mansbridge here in Charlottetown, out on the island, beautiful Prince Edward Island, Royal Prince Edward Island. Chantelle's in Montreal. Bruce is in Ottawa. And we're going to start for a couple of minutes on the monarchy. And why? Because Ipsos has a new poll out today, I guess. It came out overnight.

And it suggests that 60% of Canadians want a referendum held to determine whether the country stays tied to the british monarchy 60 percent bruce we'll start with you you're the pollster this is not your poll um but you've had to be mentioning the brand though thanks for mentioning the brand of a competitor pete oh my god my God. Well, this has got off to a really long start. It was a really interesting story. I thought it was an interesting story. I thought that the, you know, it reminded me of the trauma that I felt as somebody who worked around the Charlottetown Accord referendum.

And I'd done some work before that with a kind of a friend that we all have in common, Bill Fox, to understand how referendum and petition campaigns work. And so we looked at what happened in Ireland and Australia and in different states in the United States with the petition campaigns that had run over time. And we came away from that experience learning some things that we really didn't know. And first among them is that the no side usually wins. And the reason the no side usually wins is because somebody starts out with an idea of change and it sounds to a large number of people like, oh yeah, maybe that's a good idea. And then the campaign happens.

And over the course of the campaign, people who don't think it's a good idea don't have to offer a better one. They just have to say, it's not a good idea for this specific reason. And pretty soon, if you have five or six or seven different specific reasons coming at it from different arguments, the public starts to go, well, maybe it wasn't such a good idea. So, first of all, referendum is a terrible way to decide anything. Just ask David Cameron in the UK on Brexit. Second of all, whatever people think right now, it looks like it starts at 50-50. There'd be a big generation divide on that. Peter, you'd be squarely with your demographic cohorts in the let's not change. I'd be out of place with my demographic cohorts being in favor of change, but we'd end up feeling miserable at

the end of the process and not having decided anything. That's what I think would happen, and I don't think we should do it. Although, if we are a sample of what could happen in a referendum, it's two to one on this panel. Well, let's just do it that way. But you are totally right in everything you said about referendums. I love to start the day like that. The experience in many provinces of having had plebiscites on electoral reform kind of goes to your argument in the sense that the people who are opposed to it. One, and I know that in BC almost 60% voted for it at one point, but the threshold was 60%. If you believe issues like electoral reform require a form of consensus, the bar is even higher in the case of the monarchy. 60% want a referendum. So, suppose that we have one based on the optimistic

outlook from this panel, two to one, of doing away with the monarchy. You would require for it to translate into what needs to be done constitutionally. You would require the yes side to getting rid of the monarchy to prevail in every single province? And why is that? Because you need every premier to sign on. And if a majority in your province says, I want to keep the monarchy, you're not going to go to the constitutional table and say, well, my voters want to keep it. But I'm good with getting rid of it. So let's do it.

One, two, and I'm going to tie it to what's going to be happening in this country on Monday, i.e. a patchwork of holidays, federal holiday for civil servants, no holiday in Quebec, no holiday in Ontario. I think Saskatchewan also took a pass, but the Atlantic provinces all got on board with the notion of calling a day off. And what that tells me is that there is plenty of support in many regions of the country for keeping the monarchy, even if all of Ontario and Quebec voted in a referendum to say we want to get rid of it. You could still not do it unless a majority in PEI

or New Brunswick or Nova Scotia, all those places also said yes. So it's interesting. It says something. I think the polls are also driving support for disposing of the monarchy in large part because there is a significant disconnect with every passing day between the wall-to-wall media coverage that Canadians are subjected to on the Queen and her funeral and the actual feelings of many Canadians about the monarchy. Interesting, but not necessarily something you want to hear about in every newscast for 10 days. Yeah, I tend to agree with that. You'll be interested to know. I think there is a disconnect. And what I've seen from the ratings, but I think this story is going to be dropped like a hot rock immediately when things end on Monday, and we're going to move on. But having said all that, 60% is, you know, that's a pretty significant number.

And Bruce, I appreciate what you said in your opening remarks in terms of calling on history to look at referendums. But when we hear that number, is this the first indication that we're clearly now in a post-Elizabeth world? Because it seems to me that if you'd asked that question a month ago, you probably wouldn't have got 60%. Well, I don't know, actually. I think it's an interesting question because i i i could make the case that for 40 to say no no let's not have a referendum it i mean it's almost easy in a poll to say sure let's have a referendum it's it's it sort of feels like the equivalent of

saying let's do a larger poll um People don't necessarily feel or fear the consequences. The fact that 40% said, no, we don't need a referendum, some of whom would have wanted the monarchy to say, some of whom would have just said, it's too complicated. Who cares? Why would we spend all of that money and go through all of that weird conversation. In fact, I find it interesting that the strongest argument I ever hear for keeping the monarchy is it's hard to get rid of. Well, that's not much of a sales pitch, right? The next strongest argument is Elizabeth. Shouldn't she have earned your respect? Yes. She's no longer with us. And so what happens next? So I think that it is the best argument for not having a referendum is that we probably wouldn't be able to decide anything. And so let's just move on and deal with things that we can decide on.

And I think the TV ratings are an indication in part of that but also in part of the fact that we don't pay any attention to anything for very long anymore and the various ceremonies start to all look the same at this point after this many days of people expressing their sympathy for uh queen elizabeth's close ones and their respect for Queen Elizabeth's close ones and their respect for her life. It's also not breaking news. It's kind of, you know, there was a day a few days ago when things were happening in Ukraine,

and still you would end up turning to some stations and the lead was lineups for a funeral. Really fine, except that this is not an evolving story. It's just a let's go on. Can you even remember how many days Pierre Trudeau's funeral news story lasted? And it lasted more than a day, but it certainly didn't last as long as what's been happening on various media outlets over the past week.

And Pierre Trudeau is immensely more important for good or for bad to most Canadians than the Queen for all of the historical aspect of her tenure. When I watched the coverage, Chantal, I don't know if you feel the same way. the queen for all of the historical aspect of her tenure. When I watched the coverage, Chantal, I don't know if you feel the same way. I remember Pete and all of the events over the years where he used to do live coverage and nothing would be happening and he'd need to rag the puck for minutes and minutes and minutes on end, repeating the same kind of stories and anecdotes or picking up some new ones or probably off camera is this all because i mentioned ipso so you're now going to trash my broadcasting career the best there ever was you were the best there ever

was but even you if you were trying to cover this now would be going guys i need some material uh yeah there is a certain sameness uh to it all but listen there's no doubt that many people are tied into this story especially in britain i mean you look at those lineups you know unless it's the same people going around the block going by um it's sure quite something and it's being uniform. It's not just London. It was like that in Scotland. It's going to be like that to a degree in Wales today where Charles is. But, you know, it's, you know, I'm not sure where the end of this story is, but it's clear that, Bruce, you at least have made your declaration. You are an anti-monarchist, but you're willing to let it pass.

You're not willing to fight for it. You're not willing to go to the front lines of the debate and the discussion and the let's move this away. You're just going to say it's not worth it. Let's check it in and move on. Yeah, it's not worth having a referendum on it. And I'm really more of a freedom guy, not anti-monarchist. Oh, freedom guy.

Oh, you're a freedom guy now. Oh my gosh, things change. Just this very narrow definition. Just this very narrow definition. This is one gatekeeping thing that we don't need. All right, enough. Enough on a monarchy for this week. We'll see whether anybody's talking about it a week from now.

My suspicion is they won't. They will have moved on to other things, including the discussion surrounding the new leader of the Conservative Party. And we're going to pick that up his first week right after this. And we're back. Peter Mansbridge here in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island today. Part of a speaking book tour thing that I've been on in the Maritimes.

It's been great. It's been a, it's always fabulous to be to this, be in this part of the country. Chantelle Hebert is in Montreal, as usual. Bruce Anderson is in Ottawa, as usual. All right. Week one of the Polyev leadership of the Canadian Conservative Party. Now, usually immediately after a leadership race, the new leader kind of takes it easy,

sometimes even goes on a holiday. It'll be a difficult, stressful, busy leadership campaign, and so they sort of disappear into the woodwork, take a rest, work the phones, try to unify the party if there are splits, all that kind of thing. Not so Pierre Polyev. He's been front and center most days since he won the leadership last weekend. But I look at the kind of headlines in the various news organizations today, and you have to wonder at this point in the post-leadership decision,

whether this has been a good week or a bad week for Pierre Polyev. I mean, we've, you know, the headlines today talk about, you know, the former Tory MP, Tony Clement, who kind of left the party, was asked to leave the party over some questionable actions on his part a few years ago. He's now going to serve on the board of the Conservative Fund,

which is the big money-raising part of the Conservatives. There's discussions about how convoy donors have given about a half a million dollars to the CPC leadership race, and many were first-time federal donors. What does that mean? There was the whole fallout from the kind of debate that took place between both Polyev and a journalist, David Aitken from Global Television, which kind of got out of hand for both of them. It didn't kind of get out of hand, it got out of hand. And then there is what may be the most

important part of all this in terms of impact was the departure of just one mp from the conservative caucus over the new leader but that one a mp was an extremely influential one in the province of Quebec, Alain Reyes. And he left saying he couldn't deal with the party and the direction it was going in and what happens because of that. So let me start on that particular point before we get to the more general question as was it a good week or a bad week or did it even matter the kind of week that he had?

He's now the leader. Chantal, talk to us about the departure of that particular MP. So Alain Reyes would need no introduction to most Quebec voters, as opposed to his newly, or the person who was chosen as the leader of his former party over the weekend, and as opposed to many other Quebec Conservatives.

Why is Alain Taillas well known? Well, he first ran under Stephen Harper and won a seat in the Victoriaville area that was not particularly Conservative. It used to be held by the Bloc Québécois and not by the conservatives and kept the seat in three campaigns that the party lost, which starts off with this was not a gift that was handed to Mr. Reyes. He's a former mayor of Victoriaville, by the way, and was very popular in that role. Andrew Scheer and at some point Aaron O'Toole both tasked Alain Reyes to be the Quebec lieutenant,

and that is why he has been front and center in Quebec politics ever since. He is known as a political happy warrior and someone that if you are not a conservative, you will still want to give it a time of day to. He never shies from a fight, but he is someone who fights those fights with a smile. He decided to support Jean Chaguet in this leadership campaign, having refused to do so in the previous one. And the main reason why is he wanted to have a Conservative Party that was more saleable in Quebec than it has been. And he believed, I suspect rightly, that Jean Chagall was better placed than Pierre Poilievre to sell the Conservative Party. So he has been the pleasant face of Conservative politics in this province for almost a decade.

On Saturday night, before the results were announced, he came on the Radio-Canada set where we were doing the coverage of the conservative leadership. And I have rarely seen an interview like that. I was sitting next to Mr. Reyes, and he almost had tears in his eyes. And it wasn't over the fact that Jean Chagall was going to lose. This is a political battle, and you lose battles and you win some, and he's been around long enough to know all that. But it was over the toxicity that he felt that the presumed frontrunner had brought to this leadership campaign

and the way that other conservatives, including himself, had been treated. This is an MP who, a few weeks ago, put on his Facebook page a note to say, school is coming back. I wish everyone a good school year. And this Facebook page filled itself with hate messages, threatening violence, and telling him, let's go back to school message, to the point where he taped a video that he put on the social media to say, this is what's been happening to me. Many of those people identified as provincial or federal conservatives, which also is important, or convoy people.

He said, from now on, I'm just going to do something I've never done before. I'm going to block people. I don't think it's Pierre Poilievre's ideas on the economy that were the issue or Mr. Gaillet's sense that he would have no place in his team. I think he would have had a place in his team. It's the 68%, 70% of members, actually, who picked Pierre Poiliev and that style of campaigning that was the last straw and that decided him to say, well, I'm going to sit as an independent. Something he announced without going

on at length about how terrible Pierre Poilievre was, etc., etc. The party turns around and sends a text message to all of the conservatives on the party's list in his writing to say, please swap your MP's line, here's the phone number, to call on him to resign as an MP. By all indications, this was something that the other Quebec MPs and the Conservative caucus, who all backed or who all did not back Pierre Poiliev for the leadership, except for one, were not aware of. They were asked by the media, naturally, what they thought about this, and kept silent, but all hell broke loose inside. These are people who have just said, okay, we're going to follow the leader that we didn't support. Many of them still have their hand on the door handle here. They have been publicly humiliated. There is not one commentator in

Quebec that has said, this is great. The response was massive. And basically, it was, who are these people who are doing things like that? And you know that Pierre Poiliev and his organization are known to never back off. But late at night, a few days ago, they ended up apologizing. But the form of the apology is really interesting. It basically says, we apologize for an automated message that was sent to conservatives in the writing of Richmond Artabasco. Really, some computer went crazy and sent out this message. The first spin was that some zealous member was doing this. Of course, that member had access to the membership list,

all of the coordinates. It's something that the Liberals, the Bloc Québécois and the NDP have noted. And it is that, you know, usually when a new leader comes in, you try to drive a wedge between, create a wedge between voters and that party. And we've seen the Liberals do it with vaccine mandates, with abortion rights, go down the list. What they have discovered this week is that the first thing that they will be able to do that will be easy will be to drive a wedge within Pierre Poiliev's caucus,

because if that's his style of management, days like the days they had this week, which kind of ruined part of their first week, will become more common. Okay, Bruce, where are you on this? Well, I agree with a lot of what Chantal said. I was struck by a couple of things. One is that for me, the contrast in how people who are newly elected leaders of their party deal with the people who didn't vote for them is always a sign of both their classiness, their value system,

but also how they approach politics. And I don't know how many people I heard over how many days in the run-up to Pierre Poliev winning this leadership campaign, people talking about how he was going to pivot, how he was going to be a different person after he won, how he was going to show a different side of himself. And I generally think that that was people putting their hopeful thoughts on the table rather than securing any evidence in support of those. And I certainly would think, well, if he's got this job, I hope he acts that way. I hope he tries to be more of a unifier, does some things that people don't expect that kind of play against type so that there's a little bit more of a sense of, oh, reward for him if he does nice things to people who don't agree with him, not to put too fine a point on it. We haven't really seen any evidence of that. I've been looking for evidence in the people that he's appointed around him that he's interested in the support and enthusiasm and healing that can come when you treat a rival with a certain measure of respect after the fact. I don't think I've seen anything that's compelling on that. And then, of course, this situation with Mr. Reyes, very interesting to me. I think the

comments that he made about the toxicity and the US-style politics and what he feared was coming and how he had observed over a lengthy period of time, Mr. Polyev, he said all of those things in a respectful way. And they are important things for us to hear from people in elected life, as Chantal has indicated. And as I think we all know, we've talked to politicians who experience what it's like to be in the public space now, and how horrible it is when voters get animated by their party to take action against somebody in elected life. It's a terrible syndrome. And I don't know how we're going to solve it. But for sure, we're not going to solve it by equipping our parties with automated messages to trash people who disagree with us, whether that's people who

leave the caucus like Mr. Reyes. I mean, it's ludicrous beyond measure to imagine that, you know, just like you set up an automated message when you're away from your office. Oh, I'm away from the office. I won't be checking emails as often as usual that you have this other string of messages that you program, including, oh, this guy left our caucus, you know, tell him that he's got to resign and trash his reputation and everything else. What are the other messages that are automated in the data bank of the conservative party that are ready to go and there's no human that decides? It happens. Obviously, the artificial intelligence machine reads that an MP left the

caucus and lo and behold, all of these messages just have to go out and then somebody has to apologize for the artificial intelligence the idea that you should hear the one on you you should hear the one they've got on you bruce yeah exactly yeah no it's queuing it up now it's coming i'm sure but where is the human in the polyev machine who puts up their hand and says, yeah, that was on me. That was a terrible mistake. Well, the reason that we haven't heard that is we all have a pretty good idea that this was sanctioned at the top.

There is no chance whatsoever in my experience that this was not a decision that Pierre Polyev signed off on. Zero. Chantal, do you agree with that? Totally. I don't believe in accidents. Of course, I know that the Conservatives pride themselves on having a very sophisticated artificial intelligence system, but it can't make up for political intelligence. And in this case,

the missing political intelligence was right in Mr. Boyev's office, whether it's his that was missing in action or people that he is entrusted with seeing over those things. There is no way that this just happened because some lowly staffer felt that it was indicated. Now, Chantal, I loved your phrase about how the rest of that quebec caucus still has a hand on the door handle um the exit handle uh but i ask you know given the importance of of this particular mp and given the fact that really it was two m it was two members who decided to to get out of the that party decided to get out of that party or to get out of the caucus. There was him and there was Jean Charest by deciding not to run. At the end of the week, is that kind of like an

acceptable loss for Polyev? I mean, everybody else stayed. it's um i think the the the and this is playing out in quebec mostly and its impact if any will be felt in quebec and i think we will see or measure it over the next few weeks but um i expect others to not want to serve under Pierre Poilievre, but to leave by deciding not to run in the next election, and not just in Quebec. That's the more usual way of deciding that you don't want to be there is to just say, well, I'm looking for a new challenge. What happened this week is that all summer incidents or episodes like that have unfolded as part of the leadership campaign. We have seen things among people of the same party

that we had never seen before out in public, a leadership camp that prided itself in humiliating its main rival and in declining to even be accountable to members for participating in debates over the last two months of the campaign. But most people who do not do this for a living were busy doing sane things like taking a holiday, going to the cottage, having a break. They were not paying a lot of attention and Bruce's polls show that to the day-to-day unfolding of this leadership campaign. This week they were paying attention. This was the week when they said, well, you know, this guy has won a big victory. It seems like

last night one of my neighbors was having a dinner outside and I heard Pierre Poiliev's name mentioned, not necessarily nicely by the way. What I'm trying to say is what happened this week is something that people watched to make up their minds about who this guy is. And at least in this province, the main conclusion, and it goes across the political spectrum, was that he acted like a jerk or he or his team. And that matters. What the other MPs will do, we will see over time, because they will be asked to drink more Kool-Aid. And how much they can tolerate that Kool-Aid, knowing some of them, remains a question mark. For now, that is not what they want to do, to leave caucus. But in their minds, they are sitting back, trying to gauge their own tolerance level to these kinds of politics.

I think that's right. And I just want to add a couple of things, if I can, Peter, very quickly. I think Chantal's point about what people pay attention to is really well made. I think that a lot of people paid attention to this exchange between David Aiken and Pierre Poliev as well. And what these two things have in common is that they give you a little glimpse into the kind of person that we're talking about. And people might have different opinions about this Aiken-Poliev thing. And I understand that there's some folks who are critical of David Aiken. I think the more I've consumed the backdrop of it, the more I'm convinced that he was trying to do something

that was within the bounds of what a journalism professional should try to do, which is to go to a thing where he thought that there wasn't going to be adequate accountability and before anything started to say there needs to be more accountability, you know, good for him on balance, whether or not he handled it exactly the way that he would have. He acknowledged that he didn't, but the point he was trying to make was an important one.

And the point for me at the end of that whole experience is Pierre Pauliev showed something of what he was made of, that he has been this champion of freedom for all of these months. He's described his campaign as pure for PM. He doesn't talk about the Conservative Party. He doesn't share the stage with anybody else. He doesn't sort of tolerate anybody really questioning him. Anybody that questioned him in the course of the leadership campaign, he treated with venom. And I think, you know, Chantal's reference to these MPs are going

to be made to drink some Kool-Aid. It's almost like they're going to be forced to work in the kitchen making the Kool-Aid for a good period of time before they even get to have some publicly. And I think that this is not, I don't think it's going to wear well. I don't know whether or not the Trudeau liberals will be able to kind of find the energy and the creativity to be more competitive in the next election.

But I do know that I think Canadians won't like this style of leadership if it continues in this direction. Okay. I'll just note that what happened this week and why we're talking about it in this way is not because of anything smart that the Liberals or the NDP or the Bloc Québécois did to the Conservatives. It's all self-inflicted. Yeah, good point. Yeah.

And it's usually in that first week that the other parties are trying to find where's the area to go after them. And as you mentioned earlier, Chantel looking for the wedge, but they've kind of wedged themselves. But at the end of a week, at the end of week one, is this a clear fail or does it really matter? Who's watching? Obviously, we were watching. The other parties were watching. The country seems consumed on a lot of different levels, whether it's monarchy, housing prices, inflation, whatever.

Does that have a real impact on a weak one or does he get a pass? Just the last comment before we move on. Bruce first. Missed opportunity, I think, is how I see it. I don't think it's going to have a lasting effect unless we see the same thing happen every three or four weeks, in which case there will be impacts from it. But right now, I think it's, you know, no, I don't think it will cost the Conservatives. I think it's more what could they have done with that window that they didn't. Chantal?

Hard to tell. I also thank Mr. Opportunity. It would have been easy to say we thank Mr. Galles for his service. It's too bad. But, you know, we're moving on here. And this would have been a one-day story. But I watched the stuff, the David Aitken stuff, and I thought maybe there is a large constituency outside Quebec

that thinks it's great to do a war on the media, but don't compound the Rayas episode in Quebec with a war on the Quebec media because you're going to be in deep, deep trouble. That is not how this province works. There is not an appetite here for a rebel version of what's happening in other areas. So if Mr. Poiliev wants to take his war on the media to Quebec, he's going to have so few friends that he's going to find it hard going. And his MPs are going to have to spend most of their lives apologizing on his behalf. I'll just note that the mail I've been getting on this subject, and it's been significant amount of mail, not from Quebec, rest of Canada stuff,

is probably 50-50 on this. You know, he's got support. And this being the, you know, attacking the media war and the media, you know, the media is the enemy, call it whatever you want. There's support for that position. There's no question about that.

There always has been to a degree, and this is not the first party to use it for both fundraising and for base support. I've seen all parties do it, certainly the two main parties. Anyway, enough on that. It'll be interesting to watch how it progresses over the next weeks and months and to see whether, in fact, you know, it's ironic in a way because Saturday, his opening night, he did get off to a pretty good start. Most people considered that speech the beginning of a pivot to a degree.

And, you know, it may not have been a home run but it was probably a double or a triple and it was a good way to start the week and that seems to have been like gone in a flash uh with the other developments of the week that are still playing out at this time okay just the robot just the robot did it the robot did it i gotta get that robot um okay we will take a quick break. Come back with our next segment. And welcome back. You're listening to Good Talk on the Bridge, Sirius XM, Channel 167, Canada Talks,

or on your favorite podcast platform, obviously. We always appreciate you listening, no matter what venue you have chosen to listen to the bridge on. All right. I think it's fair to say that provincial elections don't attract a lot of national attention if there's been one province in our recent history that has attracted attention in the past it's been quebec usually because of the tussle going on between the quebec liberal party and the

patrick quebec in quebec well that hasn't been the case in recent elections and certainly isn't the case in this one. And it has received little, the Quebec election, which is October 3rd, by the way, has received little attention in most parts of the country, all parts of the country outside of Quebec. So before I ask Chantal to kind of bring us up to date on what's happening, because there was the first of the leaders' debates last night, which I'll let you know secretly.

Even she couldn't sit through the whole thing live, but we'll get to that in a minute. But I get up at 4 a.m., so by 9.15. I knew I should listen and watch in the morning. Okay, I'm going to ask Bruce, first of all, to give us a sense of why it is that the rest of Canada has sort of checked out on being concerned about what happens politically inside Quebec? Well, I think there's a specific to Quebec question, which is the sense that the urgent crisis of possible separation is not as urgent or as much of a crisis or is de facto in place, whatever, whatever combination of things that made people

very, very animated about the risk of the country being rent asunder, that doesn't feel as prominent to risk. And it isn't as prominent to risk in terms of the kinds of campaigns that are being run in the province of Quebec right now. But there's a general answer that's not specific to Quebec. And I was reminded of it when I was looking at a picture that we have on the wall in our house of my wife when she was working in federal politics and also another one where she was working for Bill Davis.

And that was a time when we had fewer news sources and more news coverage of things like first ministers conferences and more awareness of who the premiers of the provinces were. And I bet right now, if you had told me that one day Bruce, your family dinner, you'll ask everybody or somebody will ask, name the premiers of the provinces that we wouldn't be able to get through that list. I would have said that's never going to happen. But I hope nobody asks that this weekend at dinner, because I'm not sure I've studied that enough. And I'm sure that the two of you both know all

of the names. And so I'm not visiting that failing on you. But my point is that we don't pay as much attention, not just to Quebec, but there's a pretty important leadership race going on in Alberta that's going to decide who the new premier is. The last few races that happened in British Columbia, I think the level of interest in them has been less outside of the province of British Columbia. I think this is a general trend where the information that we consume is more diverse, more scattered, less about politics generally, more about if it's about politics, it's about what's incendiary at the moment. And political debates about who's going to run a province that I don't live in,

those generally don't pass that test for very many people anymore of things I need to pay attention to. Do you want to test me on the premiers of the different provinces? Well, you spent the week in Atlantic Canada, which will be helping you bone up a little bit. No, I don't. I don't want you to show me up. Okay.

How about I test you guys on the names of the five main leaders running? Let's just assume we know and then just carry on. Or how about I test you guys on the name of the Parti Québécois leader, someone who used to be known widely outside the province, even if he didn't have a clue what he really was or she was about. But most people knew about Lucien Bouchard and Rod Begzot. I suspected that is not quite true of the current Parti Québécois leader. So let me try to draw you a picture of where we are at. This is probably the second election where it's not about sovereignty versus federalism. The first being

the previous election. Why it's not about sovereignty versus federalism because four years ago, François Legault, who created a party called Coalition Avenir Québec and called it a coalition, recruited people on both sides of that debate, liberals, federalists, nationalists,

sovereigntists, including himself, who used to sit in the Parti Québécois cabinet and was a diehard sovereignist, one of those in a hurry at the time, and managed to bring that coalition to power. And in so doing, took the entire national debate, as we call it in this province, out of play. There are still people who would like to vote yes if they were asked, and people who would vote no, and opinions have not changed. But the Coalition Avenir Québec

to keep itself together needs not to be in that debate. Otherwise, it would break apart. The election is on October 3. And what's happened as a result of the victory of the Coalition Amnesty Quebec is that the both unity warriors, the Parti Québécois and and is still in last place of five in voting intentions. And the Quebec Liberals are only held to second place, very, very far away from the leading Coalition Avenir Québec, because of the loyalty of voters who are Anglophones and allophones on the island of Montreal. In francophone Quebec, where the election plays out, the liberals are at 9%. I'm not the poster on this panel, but at 9%, you are not winning a seat outside of the island of Montreal. That is what happened to both of the parties who dominated the Quebec scene for decades. In a vacuum, new parties come about. We have a left-wing party called Quebec Solidaire, which has been doing fairly well for a very

young party and wants to be the official opposition. And the Quebec Conservative Party, a party that had no life beyond its name for as long as it existed, but under Éric Duhem, libertarian of the persuasion of Pierre Poiliev, mostly, has managed to raise itself in the polls to about 15%. So the state of play, vote on October 3rd, is we have one leading party, the incumbent, the Coalition Amnésie Québec under François Legault, and four opposition parties who are all polling in the mid-teens. The debate last night was in theory and the dynamics about can one of these four suddenly jump ahead of the pack? The debate was last night. It was, as you can guess, fairly noisy, not always easy to keep track of who was saying what,

because five people who are quite articulate were on stage. But it would be very hard for Mr. Legault to lose the election over the next two weeks, given that he's about 20-some points ahead of the main competition and more than 20 points ahead in Francophone Quebec. So the Quebec scene will continue to morph from the debate that defined it forever to this new more left versus right versus right of center that has been more powerful, of course, in B.C., for instance. That will continue to happen on October 3rd. And we will see whether there is something to be salvaged from the ashes of those former major parties.

But neither the Liberals nor the PQ are in any way within sight of rebecoming the government in two weeks. Not happening. You know, Bruce wants to make a point here, but first, before he does, let me just explain. This is why we love Chantal. You know, for thousands of students across Canada who are taking political science courses in universities, who spend thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars every year

to take those courses, we just got in like six minutes or so from Chantal. Whatever, it would take a year in some of those courses to teach about what is going on in Quebec politics and how it's changed in modern day Quebec. And it really is a significant change over the last, well, almost 50 years now. 76, the PQ won for the first time,

and led us into the country into 20 years of back and forth on the sovereignty issue. And what Chantal has given us here is how that has evolved to where we are today. Bruce, they pay lots of money for your political science teachings too, so you tell us what you think of all this. I don't think people pay a lot of money for teaching, per se. You mean he gets paid a lot of money to do good talk? We need to talk here. I think they should pay Chantal all the money because you're absolutely right that her ability to discuss how our country, how our politics is changing over time is really enormously valuable.

I think that one of the things that struck me is I grew up in Quebec until I was about 16 years old. And in the town that I lived, Valleyfield, that was one of the first places where Parti Québécois MLA was elected. I think the first time they ever won any seats. They won six or eight, if memory serves me correctly, and René Lévesque was the leader of the party, and it was very much in the ascendancy. And ever since that time, most of the Quebec elections that I paid attention to had at the center of them federalism versus sovereignty, flavoring, or main event. And in discussing the parties and their positions now, just listening to Chantal, and I went on the Quebec Solidaire website, it doesn't feel like there's any advocacy for federalism because there doesn't seem to be much need for it, right?

It's almost as though the debate is settled and sovereignty association of a sort is achieved. And so why would people pay attention to a party like the Quebec Liberal Party, which for many years anyway was seen as that thing that you had to support if you didn't want Quebec to separate from Canada. I don't know whether that's a bad thing or a good thing. I can see it both ways. I think the decline of relationships across the country is not a great thing in terms of our ability to see the issues from around the world and how they affect us and to agree on joint action. And so, it's not really only Quebec where I worry about the kind of the emotional and intellectual disentangling of our country. I think it's a

problem in other places. In Quebec, I can look at it and say, I think it's healthier that people are talking about the problems that they need to solve at the local and the provincial level, without it being always a question of Ottawa is the problem and some sort of divisive conversation about the relationship with the rest of Canada is part of the solution. I'll just note two things about the campaign that are interesting from an outside Quebec perspective. The first is last night, in as clear terms as you can imagine, Premier Legault, in answer to a question from the, you know, this inference that he's a covert separatist who has a hidden agenda to eventually bring the province to a referendum on sovereignty, said, I have absolutely no plans for a referendum on Quebec's political future. Our project is a project for Quebec within Canada. So that's one down.

The other thing that has surprised me is François Legault has been one of the chief critics of Justin Trudeau. Last year in the federal campaign, he spent a lot, he wasted a lot of political capital trying to tell Quebec voters to not vote liberal

and vote for the conservatives or the Bloc. In the end, they didn't pay attention to him, and Justin Trudeau kept his seats. But in this campaign, the federal government was bracing for a lot of Fed bashing. There was so little of it last night, and you could have talked that this debate was taking place in Atlantic Canada,

where Fed bashing is not necessarily a national sport. And I thought that's kind of interesting that Legault doesn't want to go there. As for relationships, and Bruce's point about First Minister's Conference, I'll just note that there were many more First Minister's Conferences back then. So we got to know the premiers, for one. And two, that there is a certain amount of real friendship and alliance between Doug Ford in Ontario and François Legault in Quebec. All right. We've only got 30 seconds left.

Just very quickly, Chantal, roughly what's the percentage of English-speaking Quebecers, first language English? The Francophones make up about 85% of the population, but then in that 15%, there is a mix. So it's harder to go. I was just wondering, because there is no English language debate this time uh in quebec um which is interesting um that all the party leaders felt there was no need for an english language debate um okay we're gonna leave it at that for this week uh good discussion on uh some key topics

that are uh facing the country um and we'll see how they all play out. Chantelle in Montreal, Bruce in Ottawa. I'm Peter Mansbridge in Charlottetown, PEI, where the premier of the province is Dennis King. And I thank Google for that information. Well done. Okay, we'll talk to you all. Good to see you all. Take it easy. Bye.