The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Good Talk - Are Higher Taxes and Higher Mortgage Rates Around The Corner

Episode Date: October 29, 2021

A full discussion with Chantal and Bruce about the new cabinet and what it could actually mean for Canadians; and whether Canadians could face soon what Brits are expecting -- higher taxes. And could the climate conference in Glasgow this coming week impact that question as well? And a pretty tough assessment of Jean Chretien's comments this week about Residential Schools.

Are you ready for Good Talk? And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. Once again, this is The Bridge, but it's Friday Bridge. That means Good Talk. Chantelle Iver is in Montreal. Bruce Anderson is in Ottawa. I'm in Darnock, Scotland for a little while to go yet. All right, here's, I want to actually start, Bruce, with you because you were here in Scotland for a couple of weeks and then you stopped off in London for a couple of days on the way out. And the reason I want to ask about that is you don't hear much about COVID over here in the UK. People still wear masks around, certainly around Scotland,

but you don't hear it talked about. It's not front and center in the news media up here or from what I've witnessed of the BBC down there. It's still mentioned, but it's not the big deal anymore. What was it like in London for two days? Were you thinking COVID all the time because of what you were watching and seeing? I was thinking about it a lot. And the reason I was thinking about it a lot wasn't that I felt exposed to risk as much as I was really stunned by the degree to which, you know, in public places, you might have 25 to 40% of the people in those places wearing masks, maybe, maybe 20%.

And everybody else wasn't. And I know that they have a good vaccination rate. But I also know that cases have been going up. So I was a little bit surprised that there, it seemed as though this was really, I don't know if it's that different from what was happening before in London, but it's very different from what we see in Canada, where in most public places you still go in and, but there's a sign that says put a mask on before you come in, just as there is in the London stores. But in Canada, people are wearing those masks. And there's a social conditioning that if you are in that situation,

and you see somebody who's not wearing a mask, it's so rare that you can almost see people turning their gaze and their stern looks towards that individual. And so just as a, I don't consider myself a social anthropologist, but I do watch and study human behavior and attitudes. And I was surprised at almost feeling like the gaze was turning on me for wearing a mask. It's like, haven't you got the memo? COVID is over. So it was quite different in London.

I was struck by it. Well, it's still locked into masks here in Scotland inside, you know, stores and restaurants until you serve your meal. But they're still very evident here. But I do get the sense, including in watching television, that London has this kind of, it's overfeeling in spite of the fact that case count is still very high in the UK. They've kind of moved on from worrying about it. That's the feeling that I got.

Now, just to be clear, I got tested once before I left London and once when I landed at Trudeau Airport in Montreal, I was kind of randomly selected for the joys of another test. But it was all handled very professionally and the tests were all negative. So I do feel like confidence is building, but I don't know whether or not overconfidence is building, at least in a large city like London, where case counts are still elevated. Okay. I want to move on unless you have something to say on that topic, Chantal. I am not like you guys, part of the international jet set.

I know it's tough being a part of the international jet set. The way I know that things are coming back to normal is I got more Chantal Hebert for my consumer dollar this week than I have in a very long time, and it was great. It just felt like, okay, the world is coming back into proper balance. So thank you for that. I actually did, along with my at-issue panel mates, we did our first in-person panel for a group this week. We had not seen each other for real for almost two years.

I can report that Andrew still looks like Andrew. But he wasn't late. Well, that would be different if he was on time. Okay. Here's how I want to transition to our situation, in other words, the Canadian situation, by just telling you a little bit, a short little bit about the British situation. It was a little more than a month ago

that Boris Johnson shuffled his cabinet and made a number of big changes. He made a bigger one even a little earlier when their equivalent of the Minister of Finance was shuffled out and a new one in. But everybody knew at the time of the shuffle a month ago that that wasn't really the big deal. The big deal would be the budget.

And when the budget came down, you'd really get a sense of where Britain was in terms of public expenditures, in terms of potential tax hikes, in terms of what may happen to mortgage rates and bank rates. And so the budget came down just a couple of days ago. And ever since then, it's been kind of all hell breaking loose here in terms of, I thought these guys were conservatives.

They're not conservatives. They're not conservatives. They're spending like crazy, the biggest public spending numbers in 50 years, and hints and suggestions that there are going to be tax hikes and some considerable tax hikes, up to 2,200 pounds a year per household, the average. And that's about $4,000 in our money. So people are wondering what's going on, and some conservatives are saying, oh, no, no, no, we've actually changed. Those are the old conservatives. We're the new conservatives.

We don't worry about those things. We're looking for a better UK, and we see the better UK through this route of more public spending. Anyway, so it's kind of turned and shuffled things around here a little bit, and it does make you wonder, or at least made me wonder, what was actually being said by Chrystia Freeland, who was not shuffled in or out. She's in and has been in for some time, and her budget may not be for a couple of months yet, but in suggestions of how they're going to handle

the public financial state and what hints we might have got from the kind of news conference or scrum that she held afterwards. Chantelle, can you start us on that? Not that many years, frankly, especially if we're talking about the budget in the spring and nothing in between. I've not heard that we would be presented with a mini budget or a fiscal update before the end of the year. And with the House resuming on November 22nd, that may not be on. I think the government and Freeland have been very busy keeping all their options open.

But if you look, it's not just the UK. If you look at what's happening in the US this week, it's all about spending. The issue isn't who's going to spend versus who's not going to spend. It's not the kind of economic war cabinet that you would expect if this was going to be the first concern of the government. There is very little in that makeup that suggests even an attempt to beef up the economic team of the government. The team is still there, but it was not consolidated. Other teams were consolidated. Healthcare, which means spending, no matter how those negotiations go with the provinces, it's going to end up being a spending program for the federal government. Housing, you don't recreate a federal ministry of housing to tell people that they can't live in their houses or to tax their houses. That's not the point. The environment now coupled with natural resources doesn't speak to cheerleading for pipelines or the industry, frankly. But I think governments everywhere are thinking that the spending is the way to go to get the economy back on its feet rather than the restraint agenda.

I don't doubt that at some point in the future there will be tax hikes, but I think that's not coming this spring in any way, shape or form. And you have a minority government that does not expect the official opposition, Conservative, to support its budget and to keep it in office. So it's looking for partners on the left of centre. That tells me that we are going to be on the spending route for a while. Bruce? Yeah, I think Chantal makes a lot of good points. There's probably one that I would be, I'd look at a little bit differently. But I think the overall comparison to what's going on in the United States is an interesting one in the sense that Biden is suffering from a problem of having a large proportion of his support base wanting the idea of a giant, bold spending program. And I think he got in trouble with it in part because of the size of it and people legitimately

wondering what the heck has changed that America could afford a $4 trillion or a $3.5 trillion spending boost, but also because the debate just really devolved into what number is too big, what number is too small debate. And he was going to lose that on the right, and he was going to lose it on the left. And he's now, I guess, table to bill that kind of whops a whole bunch of potentially important things off the table, like free college education. So if I look at that, and I think about the Trudeau cabinet and the Trudeau campaign pledges, it's quite different. There's no question that it's still a government that's oriented more towards supporting the economy and supporting people rather than focusing on

fixing the fiscal hole that we're digging. But it's not the same as the debate in the Democratic Party about trillions of dollars of spending. I think the bet on the part of the government is we don't know exactly how global recovery is going to work. And we're pretty connected to the global economy as a trading nation. And so at some point in the next several months, we'll get a better handle on how much growth is going to happen, how much revenues are going to go back some of the spending supports and articulate them so that the faster, the better the economy does, the less support is available. I think that's a prudent approach. Whether this works out to be the right bet, we won't know for a good year probably. But it is fair to say that I don't think they're completely working with no thought and they're

just sort of going month to month. I think there is an idea that maybe born of that 2008 experience that if you don't support the economy through a bad patch, you can create a cycle of negativity that is much worse than the potential debt problem that you create or have created in this last little bit. So the one point that Chantal touched on, which I see a little bit differently now, but it's a shift that's not quite in its infancy and I may be proven wrong over time, but I do think that the decarbonization agenda is a global phenomenon, and a lot of it has to do with governments and politicians and public policy. But increasingly, it is driven by investors and capital pools and the notion of companies wanting to meet their own net zero targets and wanting to

invest in places and grow in places which have policies like that. So I'm of the view that increasingly meeting net zero goals is going to be a function of how markets move in that direction, how quickly, to some degree with what incentives, rather than politicians and the rhetoric around meetings like COP, although that remains a kind of an important part of the equation as well. But I wasn't saying that it was going to be the business of government, but it took me a while to get this expression translated. So now I'm going to get some mileage out of my efforts. We have an expression in French that's called menagerie, la chèvre et le chou. If I translated it roughly, it would be to accommodate the goat and the cabbage.

But in this case, it means, in the case of Canada's approach to climate change until pretty much this cabinet shuffle, it meant having a foot in both camps. It meant helping out Trans Mountain and the expansion of a pipeline with taxpayers' money while you're putting in carbon pricing at the national level and kind of creating a balancing act between natural resources and the environment portfolios around the table. That's been the case not just of Justin Trudeau's government. It's been the case of all governments that we've covered for the past decades. I think that changed this week that now we have a former minister of the environment and natural resources who will be working hand in hand with the environment minister. They are both looking together in the same direction rather than defending opposing stakeholders. of the stakeholders, many of them, and maybe Jason Kenney hasn't noticed, have evolved to another camp, as have most Canadian voters. But that is still a significant shift. And it's a good sign

because it is an acknowledgement of reality on the part of the people who crafted that cabinet. Now, whether it's the goat or the cabbage that got short changed, I'm not going to try to figure out. I think that's right. Peter, if I can just pick up one more point on that. I do think that Chantal's right that there was this effort to kind of balance those political constituencies around the economic travails of the oil industry in part, and this notion of unity requiring a measure of effort to support all parts of the economy. I think what is different now, and I agree with Chantal, as she put it, that right now, when we say resources, forestry is different from mining, it's different from natural gas, it's different from oil.

Oil really stands alone as the imperiled sector within the natural resources area. All of those other sectors see opportunities in the decarbonization agenda and their participation in the next version of the economy, whether it's critical minerals that are used in clean energy technologies or e-vehicles and forest products that are developed with sustainability credentials that make them more marketable than those that aren't. In oil, the other thing that's happening, and I was interested to see Chrystia Freeland refer to it in an interview very precisely the other day. The five of the biggest, maybe the five biggest oil companies in Canada announced a pathway to net zero themselves. Now, whether they get there or not remains to be seen.

But that was almost the clearest indication ever of throwing in the towel on Jason Kenney and the idea that you're going to fight this climate change agenda. And I saw that Globe and Mail editorial the other day that just really hammered the Alberta premier and said, he's got to stop pretending that this agenda is some sort of Ottawa conspiracy. Climate change is coming. You've got to live with it. you're in alberta you have to adapt your economy and i heard the calgary mayor say something that sounded extremely similar uh not two days ago so a lot of change in that space a lot of it encouraging i think you know the two phrases you've both used in the last little bit or two two terms you know jason kenney and net zero i can tell you net zero here by 2030 is the driver in terms of the tax hikes that are likely to happen here in the UK and big tax hikes. I'm not suggesting that net zero by 2030 is a bad thing.

They are suggesting it comes with a huge price to ordinary Brits. And so that's out there. Front page stuff talked about a lot. On Jason Kenney, it would seem to me, and Chantel, perhaps you're best on this, it would seem to me that the whole idea of the shuffle, especially the way you just outlined it in terms of environment and natural resources, was basically a thumb in the face to Jason Kenney.

It was like, you're irrelevant now. You're not a player in this discussion anymore for a variety of reasons, from COVID to the referendum. You know, I didn't hear any Ottawa talk about the referendum that just went through there on equalization. But, you know, you tell me, is it like, are they just ignoring Jason Kenny, who two years ago was a player that they had to consider? Didn't seem that way this week. Two points and one clarification.

In the case of Canada, we were looking at net zero in 2050. So before people start running for cover for big tax hikes for 2030, we still have a while and some changes in government between now and then. Yes, it was a slap in the face of Jason Kenney, but it was not meant to be a slap in the face of Alberta. I think the thinking on Parliament Hill, in liberal but also in New Democrat circles, maybe more even so in New Democrat circles, given that every poll shows that if there was an election in Alberta tomorrow,

Rachel Notley would win by more than a country mile. As has been the case in Quebec, by the way, there is an audience for the other point of view, the not Jason Kenney point of view, and there are players, significant ones, including the new mayor in Calgary, but also in Edmonton, a former Trudeau cabinet minister, by the way, is the mayor of Edmonton, that there is an audience for the other take on climate change. And Jason Kenney has basically ruled himself out of the conversation. You talk about the referendum on equalization. Definitive results were announced on Tuesday. 62% of those who responded agreed with the

premier's question that equalization should be taken out of the Canadian constitution. The only problem is only 39% of Albertans participated in the vote. So, do the math, that's about one in four Albertans voted to get rid of equalization. But really striking was the deafening silence from almost every other political venue in the country, except for Regina and the government, the Alberta ally who is in government in Saskatchewan. You did not hear Premier Ford say, I'm going to be supporting my friend Jason Kenney. I looked this morning at Erin O'Toole's social media feed for the expected congratulations, Premier Kenney, for having secured a mandate. And we will, you know, be fighting the good fight on your behalf on Parliament Hill.

I did not. Maybe they never got around to it. They were too busy with vaccines. But I mean, once you're at 22 percent in your own province, you have no leverage. You only look like you have a stick that you and your health believe is a real sword. Peter, on this, I think that I don't think it was an active, deliberate choice to be aggressive towards Kennedy. But I think it was understood probably that it would be portrayed or characterized that way. And it presented an opportunity for Kenny to decide whether or not he was going to replay, I was going to say his greatest hits, but they're turning out not to be such successful shots. Or he was going to say something more hopeful about collaboration with the new cabinet.

And he chose to do what he always tends to do, which is to rant about it and to say that it's an act of aggression against Alberta. And I completely agree with Chantal that if Stephen Guilbeault had come out on day one and said, we're not getting anywhere fast enough, we don't have the right policy mix, we need to really drive home this point that oil needs to go away, then there would be a fight breaking out over this appointment. But he didn't say that. He said things that sounded exactly like what Jonathan Wilkinson was saying in that portfolio the day before, which is that we need a practical plan. We've got good policies, we've got goals, we've got

pricing incentives built into our system. And now we need to do the work. And I think that's what voters want. I think they want politicians on climate change to do the work, forget about the politicking. And I think that that is not so problematic for Stephen Guilbeault, because he's got the policy infrastructure in place to do it. He's got the political leadership that supports him. But it is hard for Jason Kenney. He doesn't know what that looks like or he doesn't have much taste for it. And I think he's put himself in a worse situation by pretending that this appointment is a kind of an act of war, and it will turn out to look, I think, in a few months like, no, actually, it's just somebody who's been around that top table some 17 times before knows this issue and is a pretty smart human being working with other smart human beings trying to get the work done. All right.

The big talk. Okay, go ahead. Just one, Just two words. You certainly believe, and it is a fact that, for instance, Anita Anand was appointed to national defense to do better than Arjit Sajjan. But I don't believe Stephen Guilbeault was appointed to the environment to do better on climate change than Jonathan Wilkinson. I believe that he was placed in that portfolio because that is what he was always meant to do, but not to be more aggressive, to beef up the team. Okay. I want to tell you, we've all mentioned COP,

which is the big climate conference, which starts this time around in Glasgow, Scotland, not far from here, a little south of here in Scotland. And it starts this coming week. The Prime Minister will be there. Any number of different people, leaders from around the world are going to be there. Joe Biden will be there. I want to talk briefly about that and the impact it could have in Canada as to what happens in Glasgow. And I want, before we depart the whole scene of the new cabinet, I want a basic question I'm going to ask you both to try and handle, which I'm sure you won't have any trouble with. But first, we've got to take this quick break. Our podcast is brought to you by Questrade,

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Bruce Anderson is in Ottawa. I'm in Scotland, where in a couple of days, the climate conference will begin with, you know, some pretty well-known figures sitting around the table, including Prime Minister Trudeau, President Biden, Boris Johnson from the UK, and many, many others. So my question is this. Chantal quite correctly pointed out that our net zero goal is 2050. Other countries, including this one, claim that their net zero goal is 2030, and they're heading towards that at some expense. Do you think there's any chance that our climate position and our climate restrictions or changes are going to be any tougher

than they are now as a result of COP 20 or the Glasgow COP conference? Are we going to be pressured to get more in line with other countries to bring our net zero targets down from 2050 or anything else that says the package on the environmental front? I would be surprised. And the reason for that is we did we not just have a quote unquote historical election where Canadians were presented with a plan that earned the government a third term to to to go over there and to change the targets, say take 2050 and say we're going to do it for 2045, would probably raise a lot of questions about if we are going to meet our current commitments for 2030. In theory, we are on track to doing that. In practice, it remains to be seen. In the last piece of legislation that pertained to it, if I'm not wrong, in the last parliament, what was missing was a progress report that would tend to come over the next term of the prime minister. Absent that progress report, we can't even be sure

that we will for once meet our targets in 2030. So Canada has spent a lot of time going to these conferences, making promises that it failed to keep. I think wisdom would dictate that in this case, serious people get down to actually achieving what they committed to before they start making new promises that were not presented to voters a month ago. Bruce? I agree that we've moved past the point where the only actions that matter, or even the most important actions, are the statements that politicians make about the longer-term goals for their countries. I think that was a really important conversation for the world to have, and it remains important to try to keep countries,

especially like China and India, which remain kind of outside the kind of group consensus to set those stringent targets. But ultimately, we're now on a path where the change that we need to save the planet from climate change is going to be a function of businesses and how they organize themselves and consumers as a consequence of those changes in the marketplace what kinds of choices they make and the interaction between consumers and businesses looking for innovations that fit the kind of the corporate agenda and i say that for a couple of reasons.

One is I was just looking this morning at the list of the biggest companies in the world. And among the top eight, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, Facebook, Tesla, that's a very different lineup of large enterprises than we would have seen 10 years ago. And it's completely different from what we would have seen 20 years ago. And these are companies which have huge financial resources with very strenuous commitments to net zero targets. Some of those companies are already better than net zero and on their way to going further

still. So I think that dynamic in the corporate world is there, and it's not just among fringe companies that are designed to be popular or successful because they're green. They're among the biggest industrial players in the world. And I think that's a huge factor, much bigger, frankly, than some of the political calculus that goes on in the COP meetings. And I also think the second aspect of that is the large pools of capital that are increasingly

influenced in the investment choices that they make by environmental, social, and governance considerations. I work with a lot of clients in those extractive sectors, and I do not have a meeting with them these days that doesn't include a discussion about the ESG influences and what is the Church of England saying and what is the pension fund fill in the blank saying. Those forces are driving change in corporate boardrooms, and that, in consequence, is causing companies to talk with governments about practical, pragmatic solutions. So they're no longer a question of disagreement or resistance to the end, but more practical discussion about the means and what are the things that governments can do to help incentivize the use of hydrogen, for example. So I see a lot of that going on, and I think that's a great role for governments to play. But I think that means a shift where the dynamic of change is less about the politics of it and more about the rewiring our industrial activity.

So what I find interesting about that is if the direction is going the way you say it's going, and fairly rapidly too, that our net zero 2050 could come down, not as a result of government action, catalytic. And I think this is the thing that skeptics have always kind of new technologies, the adoption of new processes, and then you wait for those to have an accelerating impact. I think that's the past. So, I think the policies weren't wrong. I think they were right, but I think that they take a little time to kick in. You know, I want to move on now to the more general discussion about what we've witnessed in the last few days in terms of the makeup of the new government. Before I do, I know there are listeners who are sort of saying, yeah, yeah, okay, this is all very interesting. You keep talking about COP26 or whatever number it is this year.

What does COP stand for? What does that got to do? I can't fit climate change into COP. What does it actually stand for? It's boring, I can tell you that. It's about conference of the parties who originally signed the agreement. I mean, it is like the worst possible title ever. Nice nerd moment, Peter.

There it is anyway, now you know. All right, here's my question on what we've witnessed in the last couple of days. Is this new cabinet that fronts this new government, in the sense they were just elected, is this a cabinet that's built for action, or is it a cabinet that's built for more of the same? In other words, a year from now, are we going to have seen some significant change

in the way any number of different things are dealt with uh by this government for the country or will it play out much as we've witnessed for some time now and you can sometimes tell that by the kind of people that have been put in place and what they represent and And is there kind of a tilt to the left, tilt to the right? Is it kind of middle of the road cabinet decision, a group of decision makers, or is it whoever it is, is it something that's built for, okay, this is the time, we're going to make these things happen.

What do you think, Chantal? First, I want to note that we've just spent more than 30 minutes talking about an environment minister, which is something that I don't think has ever happened before when we were talking about new cabinet. And we still would have had things to say, which tells you this is a sign of the times. And because it is a sign of the times, I don't expect this government to be sitting on its hands on a number of files. And I believe that they have appointed people, for instance, at national defense, a huge challenge. It's much harder to card the cats at national defense on procurement or sexual harassment and the treatment of women in the military than actually procure vaccines against COVID-19, as Anita and Ann ably did

in the previous cabinet. But that is a sign that action is needed and wanted by the center. On health care, I believe that the appointment of Jean-Yves Duclos was a soft-spoken but very knowledgeable minister. It's a sign that the prime minister is serious in his desire not only to discuss health care funding with the provinces, but to try to get something or some rules in place in exchange for his money. In particular, putting a Quebec minister there who was elected in Quebec City means that there will be someone to respond to François Legault, who has been leading the charge on health care funding.

I believe in those areas, we will see action. Action and change are very different. This is a third-term government. This wasn't a change election. It was a state-of-course election, so we're not going to get a whole new agenda from a minority government in its third term. My big question mark in this cabinet shuffle is how serious Justin Trudeau is about foreign affairs. We really need a rethinking of our policies towards China. I believe the Canada-U.S. relationship post-Trump needs a lot of fixing because we are out of the Joe Biden is not Donald Trump, so we're all good period.

And the appointment of Mélanie Joly does not suggest to me that the prime minister is tapping into expertise and vision to advance the file. It would be the reverse with such a neophyte minister, neophyte to international affairs. The push would have to come from the prime minister himself. He has not been that kind of prime minister so far. There's no Brian Mulroney on apartheid with Joe Clark forming a team, and she is no Lloyd Axworthy, who was also a visionary foreign affairs minister. So I was perplexed by what it said. But I will add this, Mélanie Joly, Stephen Guilbeault, Anita Anand, Jean-Yves Duclos, they're all going to face big

challenges, and they will only succeed if the prime minister has their backs. And over the past six years, Justin Trudeau has not always convinced me that he has the backs of his ministers. Bruce? I think that Chantal's point about, you know, what were we expecting? Were we somehow expecting that a government that had been in place and ran with a fairly predictable kind of extension of their existing policy, with the addition of some new measures, was really going to reinvent itself completely i didn't expect that i i think that a lot of the commentary has fixated on the political management part of cabinet making in this context so the regionals the gender question the um the old and the new and that sort of thing. And I, that's natural, but I think it,

we maybe have spent or the community has spent a little bit less time than would be useful and looking at it as a management exercise. I think there were some really good parts of it from a management exercise standpoint. I completely agree with Chantal that you've taken someone in Anita Anand, who's done a very good job of managing a critical part of government policy for the last year and a half and given to her maybe the most perplexing challenge which is to deal with that culture once and for all and to come in with a

with this with a clear sense that there's a strong mandate from the prime minister to to go in that direction i also think that there's a confirmation in the in the role that mark miller has that the prime minister understands how much his own personal legacy is tied up in the indigenous relationships and how well he thinks this minister who he knows very well personally and trusts a lot, is doing at handling that incredibly complicated and difficult set of issues. So I think there's some good management choices there. I think Marco Mendocino, public safety is another good example. So from a management standpoint, he also introduced to cabinet a lot of newcomers who he thinks has a chance to shine. People like Sean Fraser from Nova Scotia. And whether they do or they don't, it's still the right role for a prime minister, I think, to look to his backbench and say, who are some of the people that we should give some opportunities to?

And lastly, on the Melanie Jolie question,'s a, it's an interesting question for me. I do think that the Prime Minister wants to kind of works these days and i read an account of the space that the speech that he gave in to the dutch parliament yesterday um and it sounded like that was him laying out a perspective on a range of foreign policy issues so um tbd i guess in terms of that one um she's certainly somebody who's improved her uh performance as a minister in her last portfolio. We'll see where it goes from there. Okay. Well, I'm not sure. I thought you gave a wonderful answer, both of you, but I'm not, I'm not sure we answered the question. I wasn't saying maybe we didn't want to, well, you know,

I guess you get to ask, I don't think to. Well, you know, I guess. You get to ask them. I don't think you have to. You don't have to reinvent government or come up with a new definition of your mandate. But listen, they did run for a majority. They didn't get it. So one assumes they want to try to deal with something and deal with it effectively and appear to the people that they have come in here with a new team and they're going to deal with the pressures and the problems that are confronting them as a government.

And so the question was simply, like, after a year, you think, and I know this is like nobody knows what it'll be like in a year, what other problems may have come up, but we look back and say, you know, this actually was a team that really acted on the problems that they were confronted with, was put together to deal with them and did it. Or, you know, hey, they were fine. They were good. They were good people, but nothing's really changed.

That was basically the question. And I hear... Well, I'm going to jump in there and let Chantal tell me if I'm wrong on this. But I watch the occasional ad issue panel and nothing makes me crazier than hearing one of those panelists say over and over and over again

that none of these ministers matter. It's not true. The work that they do is important. I think that if somebody is saying that, and they don't know about that work, then they should inform themselves of it. Because you can like what they do or not like what they do. But to say that they don't matter is wrong. Those choices do matter. There's a lot of day to day issues, management and a lot of implementation of a policy agenda. So I hold this government to account for $10 a day child care, trying to get more deals. That's got to happen. I think the management choices at natural resources and

environment makes sense. I think putting a need and end into defense is important. So I completely reject that kind of the general inclination on the part of some, not those of us necessarily on this podcast to say that no ministers matter anymore, ever. I don't think that's true at all. I think it's unfair to the idea of public policy and politics in Canada. Am I ever glad that he did not say the media says, so I don't have to. There you go. I'm learning. I'm learning.

We're getting somewhere. By chance, I happened to do a panel this week for an organization that had invited Brian Mulroney to speak just before we did the panel. And we got to listen in. And I don't think I'm betraying any secrets by reporting some of the things he said, which is why I talked about the backing of the prime minister. His theory, and of course, in part, it's self-serving, because he does have a track record, NAFTA, free trade.

GST. GST, apartheid, et cetera, to show for his time in office. But his contention was that ministers mattered only as much as their mission mattered to the prime minister. And I totally agree with that. And that is why I don't think the issue in a year will be, was this team the right team and did it get stuff done? Or were they just okay but, you know, replaceable? This is about Justin Trudeau and his attention span and his capacity to say one thing and then to push on it and follow through. And because Bruce knows that it's not that ministers don't matter, but it is that the missions that matter to the prime minister,

he talked about Mark Miller. Mark Miller is the keeper of his friend's indigenous legacy. That matters. It cuts both ways. But if the prime minister is like a butterfly and he goes from flower to flower and then forgets to come back to see what happened, then his ministers will fail. So for me, it's on him. Whatever good that team does, the credit will, as you know, go to Justin Trudeau because that is how we look at past governments and say, you know, Pierre Trudeau did this, Jean-Claude Saint-Denis, Brian Mulroney did this.

And if the team fails, then we're going to say, well, they were all, you know, not really A-class ministers. They were more Bs and Cs, and they weren't up to the job. So I think the person who needs to think about having secured a minority government and not a majority and change some of the things he's been doing is Justin Trudeau himself. Oh, I so much more like those two answers. Well, our lab professor is happy with us. Will we get Halloween candy? I will give you somewhere between A and A pluses on those hands. We'll probably just get a free book.

Well, speaking of the book. Autograph. We can sell this signature. They're worth a lot, I hear. Number one again this week. There we go. Next week, be lucky to even be on the list. Mark Messier's book comes out next week, and he's going to body check me,

slam me into the board. With that, I have no doubt. But nevertheless, it's been a nice little three-week run. We're almost out of time, but we do have time for one more subject, which we'll get to right after this. You're listening to The bridge with peter madsbridge okay back for some uh final thoughts really from uh chantelle in montreal bruce in ottawa i'm in scotland um the pope has announced that he's going to come to Canada to meet with a number of First Nations groups, Indigenous groups.

And this after constant requests for the last few years for a personal apology from the Pope for the residential schools questions. Now, a number of Indigenous groups are going to meet the Pope, I think, next month or December in Rome, but coming to Canada will be quite something. Somebody who was in Fort Simpson when he dropped in in 1987, that was a big deal when he met with a number of Indigenous groups in Fort Simpson. This will be much bigger and much more important.

When it happens, we don't have a date for knowing when it will happen and what else may have happened in terms of the situation between the Canadian government and various Indigenous groups in the country. As I said, we're almost out of time, but we're not out of time. So we've got a couple of minutes. Bruce, first on the Pope. Well, I think it's an interesting development because I think that the question of the Pope is usually a question of what is he

trying to do with something like this? What is the point of a visit to Canada? Is it something that as it develops and as it happens, we'll look at and say, well, that was kind of cynical. It was an attempt to use the pageantry and the pomp of papal visit to overshadow the very legitimate and very serious criticisms that have come the way of the Catholic Church in recent years? Or is it a genuine effort on the part of the Pope, who has many people who see him as a very compassionate, very empathetic, more flexible kind of individual? Is it a genuine effort to repair the damage that has been done to the image of the Catholic Church in Canada and to the relationship between the Catholic Church and the community at large? I don't know any longer where I would put the Pope on that. And I think it remains to be seen in part because I say that the Catholic

bishops looked like that was the vehicle by which the invitation would be extended. And I tend to be fairly critical of the way that the Catholic bishops have involved themselves in Canadian political discussions in recent years. Chantal. Depending on what the spirit of the visit is, and like Bruce, I'm not certain what it would be, but it could serve an education purpose that seems to be sorely needed. that for having watched former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien on Quebec's most watched talk show, compare his experience in boarding school and the kind of breakfasts that they were served to residential schools. And you kind of had to watch it to see the false moral

equivalencies that the former Prime Minister, and I don't really care how old Mr. Chrétien is, because he is into it enough to write a book and go and do all of those interviews. He's certainly not losing any of his mental capacities, but this trivialization is only too common. And if the Pope, by coming, brings to people who have decided that this is not a big deal some realization that what we are talking about has nothing to do with the poor breakfast that you're served if you go to boarding school, then that will serve a useful purpose. Yes, here, here. It was a stunning comment from the former prime minister.

I still can't believe it, but he said it, and he's going to have to live with it, sadly. Well, he's now got these records of having been informed that there were problems at residential schools when he said in no uncertain terms that he had never heard anything about it ever. So he's created a problem for himself and a backward step on this agenda for sure. You're quite correct. I'm going to close out with something that just crossed my information feed here

in the United Kingdom. It's out of the Daily Telegraph, but it goes back to what I was saying earlier, and I understand the changes, the differences between our two countries, but here's the headline. Mortgage rates will double within months. The best mortgage interest rates could double by early next year as lenders pull their best deals from the market amid inflationary fears. Okay, but don't forget the UK is using the pandemic to hide a lot of transition issues

related to Brexit. Exactly. I mean, as I said, there are a lot of different things about the situation here than there are there. But I think everybody's got their kind of eye on the economic bull and wondering what impact it's going to have on their lives in the coming years and the coming months in many ways. Listen, Chantal in Montreal, Bruce in Ottawa,

it's great to talk to you again. I'm in Scotland for one more week, so we'll do this again in seven days. But for now, I'm Peter Mansbridge in Dornick, Scotland. Thanks for listening. We'll talk

to you again, as I said, in seven days for Good Talk on Monday for the regular bridge.