The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Good Talk — Are The Liberals In Full Panic Mode?

Episode Date: May 17, 2024

New data from Nanos and the Globe and Mail suggests Canadians find neither Justin Trudeau or Pierre Poilievre credible -- quite a statement about Canadian politics today. But first on today's program, Bruce and Chantal discuss whether Trudeau is making one last swing at trying to change the numbers that show Poilievre with a huge lead.  

Are you ready for Good Talk? And hello there, welcome to Friday. It's Good Talk Day. Chantelle Hebert, Bruce Anderson, Peter Mansbridge here. Lots to talk about today, so let's get right at it. How was I going to frame this? I'm trying to think of how I'm going to frame this. It's a good thing you put a lot of thought into it. I did. I just beat up all night thinking, how should I frame this first question?

So let me try it this way. We've got a situation where we're in the one way or the other. You look at it, we're in the last year of this government's mandate. There's going to be an election. It could come at any time, but it's almost certainly going to be sometime next year that the election takes place. We have a landscape where one party is 20 points ahead of the other. We have two leadership candidates in Trudeau and Polyev who are battling it out.

And there's been some doubt in the last while whether or not Justin Trudeau would hang around or whether he was going to pull the plug. Everything I'm seeing in the last week or two is that he's throwing everything at the kitchen sink, but the kitchen sink, or maybe even including the kitchen sink, at his opposition, at Polyev, and he's trying, he wants to stay. He wants a fight. He wants to get to the election.

Some of the things he's been doing drags out some of the old issues from the past, concerns about whether or not the Conservatives are heading towards some kind of a ban on abortion, trying to provoke a fight on capital gains, where exactly does Polyev stand, climate change, you name it. He's thrown everything out there. So what does this tell you on that central question? Does it look like, you know, Trudeau's last stand, this is it? He's trying everything here to jog those numbers that we're seeing

in the various polls that are out there, and they're pretty uniform in terms of anywhere from a 15 to a 20-point lead for the Conservatives. Is this, are we looking at the last, Trudeau's last stand, trying to make something happen here? Chantal? Possibly. I can't say probably because I'm not in the mind of the prime minister.

And this is a politician who has never known defeat. And having never known defeat, in sharp contrast with Jean Chrétien, Brian Mulroney, Stephen Harper, who either lost elections or leadership campaigns, probably believes more than most that he can win again. That's a powerful feeling that you have. And when it's based on your record, it tends to be reinforced. That being said, it's impossible, even if you are that person who is convinced that you can't lose in the end, not to see two trends that go hand in hand, since we did this a year from today, back a year ago. Back then, Justin Trudeau was still an asset to his party and widely considered by outsiders and insiders as a main asset to the party. Then, over the course of the summer and fall, he became the

least bad option to lead the party in the election. And I believe that by now he's become a liability. And the people who have come to think this, it started off by being many Canadian voters, most of whom had not supported the Liberals. Then it started to be people who voted liberal in 2015, 2019, 2021, thinking, I don't want to vote for Justin Trudeau again. I believe that by now the doubt or the wish for the prime minister to call it quits is reached deep into the liberal caucus. So when you look at those two curves and the strenuous efforts on the part of the prime minister

as advisors and as loyalists to move the needle in the polls, be it only by a few points to show signs of life under his leadership, what you have is, I think, a leader who is increasingly in panic mode. And I say this, having had to read the transcript of the news conference the prime minister gave in Atlantic Canada this week, where he came out swinging and kicking open doors on just about anything that came his way. Canada is left to burn by the Conservatives because they oppose the carbon tax. I think the carbon tax is a useful,

possibly essential tool in fighting climate change. But I don't believe it's credible for a prime minister to make people believe that the forest fires were injuring the summer would be changed by the official opposition supporting the carbon tax. It makes no sense. The prime minister going all out to say all conservative premiers and Pierre Poitier pose a threat to abortion rights. I've seen no evidence of Doug Ford coming out to say he wants to do anything about restricting abortion. And as a matter of

fact, this is going to be the first time when the conservatives are led in a federal campaign by a leader who is openly pro-choice. So it kind of buys a bit of cover for Pierre Poiliev, despite the strong presence of anti-abortion MPs in his caucus, as by comparison to Andrew Scheer, for instance, who was part of the religious right section of the caucus, it looked to me like someone who was in full panic mode. I'm sure the intention was to look more aggressive, but that's not what came across from that news conference. It reminded me of the last days of the 2006 Paul Martin campaign, when they knew they were going to lose,

and they were willing to say just about anything, including against the backdrop of MPs, liberal MPs who had a strong record of voting against gay rights, same-sex marriage, abortion rights, saying Stephen Harper will take away your rights, as if you were clueless as to who was standing behind you. We'd been doing it under Jean Chastain and Paul Martin for decades. It looked like that.

I'm sure that's not the impression they were hoping for, but increasingly, that's the kind of impression you get. Bruce, what do you make of this? Well, I agree with a lot of what Chantal said the other day, because I was trying to think a little bit more about what it is that Justin Trudeau is asking Canadians to consider and how unusual it would be for somebody who has been prime minister for as long as he has to be given another four-year, call it four-year mandate. And so with the help of artificial intelligence, so if any of these facts are wrong, you have to blame the robot, not me. But I went back and I asked the robot to tell me how many people had been prime minister of the UK, of Australia, and of Canada since the turn of the last century. So 125 years.

And how many of them served for more than 10 years. And the numbers that I saw were there were 67 prime ministers, and only five of them had served for more than 10 years. So what Justin Trudeau is asking them to do, Canadians to do, to let him have a total of 13, 14 years is extremely hard to accomplish from the standpoint of any past evidence. It's not impossible, but it's not done very often. And it's not just that people get tired of politicians. I also looked at Friends, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, The Wire, Succession, popular TV series. None of them ran. None of those ran for more than 10 years. None of them ran.

None of those ran for more than 10 years. Most of them, the average was five or six. Although Walking Dead is well underway. There are some exceptions, Walking Dead. I'm sure you didn't mean it to have any kind of a pun associated with Chantal. Of course not, right? But, you know, my point in coming away from all of that was it doesn't have to be a criticism of Justin Trudeau to recognize that there's a fatigue factor that sets in for politicians. There's a fatigue factor that sets into the song that you love to listen to the most. And eventually you listen to it so many times you can't listen to it anymore. The movie that you watch more often than any other, but you can after a while only watch it

every three or four years because it doesn't stimulate you the same way. So I think it's extremely difficult what he's trying to do. I don't think he will succeed at it if he stays at it. I've said that before, and that's not to imply that he's a terrible campaigner or anything else. But if you're the incumbent in a situation like this, you really have only a few pitches that you can make. One is look at our record and give me your vote because you believe that it's been a good record. Two, look at what I want to do for the next four years and give me your support because it's what you would like to see happen. Or three, I'm better than the other guy. Now, I think there's ample evidence that people don't really vote on the basis of record. They don't want to thank you for what you did. They want to know what's coming next. And I don't think that Mr. Trudeau has yet come up with a compelling set

of ideas or even a sense of direction that people can look at it and say, I'm going to forget about how stale it feels to me listening to you talk about the way you approach politics and hear you in a different way with a different vision for the future that feels contemporary, that feels relevant to me, that feels like something that I can get behind. And I'm going to vote for you. That's not really what Mr. Trudeau is doing right now. He is starting to, I think, spend more time on this third point, which is you should like me better than the other guy. Now, he's behind on that and not by a little bit. But more importantly, he's behind a guy that a lot of voters really don't like. It isn't the case that Pierre Pauliev has become a popular figure. It's become the case that people are willing to overlook things that they don't really like about Pierre Pauliev because they're tired of Justin Trudeau.

And that's a hard thing to overcome. What Mr. Trudeau is starting to do by characterizing in more blunt language that he wants to let the planet burn or let the, you know, let the planet burn is the way that he characterized his approach on climate change by raising this question of what other rights would he take away now that he's sort of indicated that he's willing to consider taking some rights away. If you look at the playbook and it only has those three options, maybe that is the best one for him to use right now. It remains to be seen whether it's going to be attention grabbing and compelling and persuasive. I have my doubts, but that's what I see him trying to do right now.

But does it not have a tinge of panic to it? Does it not sound a bit like he's in panic mode by throwing out some of this stuff and trying to differentiate himself from Polyev? Yeah, I think it has a little bit of a sense of urgency anyway. I don't know if, you know, I'm one of those people who's been lucky enough to always have employment. Sometimes it was washing dishes. Sometimes it was picking apples. It's been a few years since the dishwashing and the apple picking part. But I've never I've never been forced to, you know, consider the fact that I might be unemployed and I wouldn't know what my next job would be.

But I think that there are a lot of those caucus members who look at a 20 point gap, maybe 100 of them, according to the models who are starting to feel as though, well, unemployment might be a thing for me next year. And that tends to focus the mind. And so the sense of urgency goes up and the sense of pressure increases. And I think that I don't know that I would use the word panic to describe what the prime minister was doing or even the way that he was doing it. But it felt a little bit more a sense of urgent and maybe a little bit kind of unstructured is kind of what I interpreted from the I saw the same clip, I think that Chantal was referring to, it felt a little bit, you know, unstructured, and it signaled urgency anyway, if not panic.

I think you're trying every word that fits the definition of panic, as in unstructured and urgent. The urgency is merely perfect. I surrender. Fair enough. To describe the deer caught in the headlights, I think the liberals really expected a number of things that didn't happen. They thought they would get a bit more bang in voting intentions for the buck with the budget pre-release stuff, which I believe was good strategy. And many of the announcements went down well, but it didn't move the needle in any way,

shape or form. And they also totally seem to believe that Pierre Poiliev would engage in this class war attempt that is the changes in the capital gains tax. And he's not. And I don't believe he will, because the trap is too obvious. Why would you? They have this idea that, you know, this guy who goes around the country saying, I'm for the little guy, would suddenly want to stand with people who are complaining that by making over $250,000 on profit on something that they're selling, they should be paying less taxes rather than a bit more than they've been paying. There are many things that governments who are on the way out or threaten to be on the way out do. And one of the first ones that brings them out is to underestimate the person who is across the aisle

by thinking, oh, you know, we're going to, they so crave that, that they still crave it, that class war, that they hived off the capital gains tax issue in separate legislation from the main budget bill. Now, the main budget bill is, I don't know how many hundreds of pages long. So there is no clear rationale to say we're hiving off a clear budget measure from a bill that has tons of non-budget measures in it, but it allows them to call a vote on the capital gains tax. And without Pierre Poiliev saying I'm voting against it because I'm against the budget, if he votes, he's going to have to either vote for it

or vote for a tax increase or else vote against something that makes it will allow the liberals to say you see is defending the ultra rich which i don't believe the ultra rich are the only target of the changes in taxes but um so now they're kind of they've used everything they've had a cabinet shuffle that didn't work they've had a budget that didn't work. Everything that they've been trying since last summer has dug them deeper. for the only thing in their power to improve their lot, which usually happens to be, for better or for worse, a leadership change, because there is nothing more that they can do. There is no great idea that at this point they can think of, except can we change leaders? And by the way, I'm now hearing about not just MPs,

but senior ministers feeling the ground for alternative political employment, which kind of tells you a lot about the end of regime mood when people start feeling out whether they would have a shot at becoming a mayor somewhere or becoming something else somewhere else. These things are all happening in the window for Justin Trudeau to leave, according to most observers and most insiders,

is between now and July 1st, so that they have time to pick a leader in time for the last year of this parliament. Well, listen, if he's not going to walk the plank, if he's not going to go on his own, then the question is, is he going to get pushed? And, you know, caucus members so far, I mean, there have been a couple of incidents, usually kind of by minor bit players, but there hasn't been any openly, you know,

public push towards suggesting that this may be time. Is there anything that could change that in the short term? Yes. Okay. The prime minister has to call a by-election sometime soon, between now and September, yes, until July 14, in theory, to call a by-election in the Toronto Riding of St. Paul's, where I happen to live for 20 years, so I know this riding inside out.

This is a Liberal riding that's gone to the Conservatives in the past when the Conservatives have either done really well, as over the Malroney era when Barbara McDougall represented it, the last Conservative to represent it, or during Pierre Trudeau's reign briefly. And how did it flip to the Conservatives back then? Because the Conservatives promised to move the Canadian embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. What I'm trying to say here is St. Paul's has the fifth largest Jewish community of any writing according to Elections Canada. Those numbers date back a couple of years, but I believe they're still current.

The risk, of course, is that in the current climate, those voters take it out on the liberals in the ballot box in St. Paul's. To lose a city inside the old city, to lose a riding inside the old city of Toronto, would Carolyn Bennett held the seat with huge leads over the past decade. To lose and held it while Stephen Harper was prime minister, to lose a writing like that would so totally focus the minds of so many liberals, including liberal MPs, that this is probably the biggest test on the ground, a reality check on where the prime minister stands. And here's the hook.

Justin Trudeau can't afford to lose that riding. But if he wins it narrowly, a lot of people are going to do the math and say, if we barely hold St. Paul's, how in the world are we going to hold the more competitive ridings that have brought us to this government. So it's kind of a lose-lose election unless they manage to win it with, I don't know, 40-some percent of the vote or whatever score they have in previous elections, which I don't believe is in the works. Can I just add one thing on that, which is that I think St. Paul's, I think you're right, if they call St. Paul's, it seems very hard for me to imagine that they will have a successful outcome, whether that's an extremely narrow win or a loss. It won't feel like an endorsement of the current government, I think is probably how the numbers would look right now. So I think that would be a bit of a shock rather than a positive story for the Trudeau liberals.

But it would also be a riding where if you were a liberal back at the time that Pierre Pauliev was first chosen a leader of the Conservative Party, you might say, well, he'll never succeed in this riding. This is not where he will do well. He will do well in lots of smaller communities and rural Canada and suburban areas, but he won't do well in a downtown Toronto riding like this. So I think there's two aspects to it. It still won't be the case, in my view, that there's some sort of poly of mania. It will be a reflection of the fact that notwithstanding that still for many people and many people in that riding, I would say the economy isn't terrible. Inflation is a problem. Interest rates are a challenge. But it's not you wouldn't think that it would be one of the more hard-pressed economically ridings in the area.

So I think that's a challenge. I think that's one thing that could happen to kind of affect the conversation. But I think it's a conversation that keeps on social, or he put out a fragment of a poll, basically, highlighting what he thought was possibly a change in the voting intention of 18 to 29 year olds. And he was saying from the last time that he measured them a few weeks ago, there's been an improvement for the liberals with this particular demographic cohort. But he was very careful, as he should be, to say, but this is a small part of a larger sample, and it might not be reliable, so we're going to measure again.

And meanwhile, he was saying the overall gap remains at 19 points in favor of the conservatives. Why do I raise that? Because I think like the by-election, any polling information that allows the Trudeau should stay side of that argument to say we're making some progress will be grabbed on, will be seized on by people to make that case. I don't happen to think that there's going to be very much of it, but I think it's an active conversation. And I think that Chantel's right, that the time frame is between now and, she said, end of July. I'm thinking maybe Labor Day, but I think it's in that ballpark. The thing with beyond July 1st is it gets you into a leadership campaign

that doesn't really end until basically the end of the year, which gives you such a short runway if you're the new leader to kind of try to lift off. That ideally what you would want is to have a short leadership campaign that ends at the end of September so that you have a leader in place for when Parliament returns in the fall. And then it gives you, I still think the next budget is probably a big election deadline for a minority government. So it gives you until at best next April. That would be a really short time if you were selected in December.

And we also don't know how competitive or not a leadership campaign to replace Justin Trudeau would be. Some are trying to put down early markers and possibly spook the competition into not running. Well, that's the normal game. I didn't name Mark Carney, but why not? Dominic LeBlanc is what you meant. I think he's expressed some interest in it. But now he's expressed this interest in it,

so I'm not so sure where that's going. And Melanie Jolie, who is off on yet another world tour. But now he's expressed disinterest in it, so I'm not so sure where that's going. And Mélanie Joly, who is off on yet another world tour. She must be racking up the Euro plan points. Who knows? But I'll tell you, every time I look up, she's in another world capital somewhere. But remember, Mélanie Joly is a Montreal MP whose first dream was

to be the mayor of Montreal, and we will have a mayoral election not too far down the road. Dreams change. Yes. Okay. We're going to take a quick break, come back on a related topic

that I find equally fascinating. I'll try and explain a little better than I did on this one. That's coming right up. And welcome back. You're listening to Good Talk, the Friday episode. Bruce and Chantel are in the house. You're listening on Sirius XM channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform,

or you're watching us on our YouTube channel. Glad to have you with us. Okay, we've talked a number of times about different survey results, polling results in the last little while. This one's an attitudinal one on Trudeau and Polyev, and it comes from Nanos and the Globe and Mail. And it's about credibility.

The headline is both Justin Trudeau and Pierre Polyev score poorly in terms of credibility. Poorly is an understatement. Listen to these. These are the big numbers, the overall numbers on credibility. For Justin Trudeau, the average credibility score out of 10 is 3.7. But Pierre Polyev doesn't do much better. He's 3.9. So, you know, if you take credibility to mean believability, then you've got the two people in the running for the next Prime Minister of Canada that most Canadians don't believe.

They haven't got the credibility factor, both under 4% or 4 out of 10, under 40%. What does that say about where we are in politics in Canada? Not just about these two guys, but overall, that you can't come up with a better believability number than that? Bruce? Dothan doesn't say anything. Here's why. These questions, you know, they make good fodder for stories, and they allow us to imagine that, you know, they make good fodder for stories and they allow us to imagine that, you know, politicians that maybe we feel aren't doing well enough or are not trusted.

But the reality is, is that people don't really trust anybody except maybe the people closest to them in their lives. And so when I asked the question about I think we asked it last month about 40 different people, including most of the leading journalists in the country. I'm not going to reveal all of the results here. But the reality is that everybody gets these kind of low to middling credibility scores because the question doesn't really work the way it sounds like it works. If you ask, if somebody said, well, you know, is Bruce Anderson credible on how to build an aircraft? The answer would be it should not be considered credible at all. I have no engineering knowledge. I have no understanding of how my phone works or anything else.

I could be credible on some other things. So the broad question of credibility and trust, the correct answer for the respondent these days is probably never going to be, I trust them completely, whether it's a politician or a journalist or the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. It's going to be, well, I might have some trust for them depending on what they're talking about and whether or not I think they know something about it, and whether or not I think they're being truthful about it. So I don't, you know, I don't, I would say that those numbers are probably competitive with all of the journalists who ask the questions that imply that people don't trust the politicians. And so it's a kind of a conversation that feels a little bit false to me,

which isn't to say that's good for democracy. I think it's bad for democracy that people don't have more trust in the institutions and some of the individuals, but we are where we are. And I think that's what I take from those numbers. Okay, so let me try to argue both sides of this. First, I looked at Angus Reid was out with a poll that showed that in 50 years, Canadians had never disliked the main leaders on offer to the level that they dislike them. And then they went back in history to show those numbers. But what struck me in there was that the numbers tended to suggest that one of the last recent times when the situation was similar but not as acute was 2011, where even Jack Layton that conservative majority that Stephen Harper had been hoping for. And it also ended on the best ever result that the NDP ever got. They ended up in official opposition. So in the end, people have to vote, or as Brian Malarone used to say,

they're not being offered Mother Teresa. They have to pick among the people that are on offer. That being said, the Nanos poll, what I talked was interesting and revealing, not the Trudeau numbers, because they match what's happening to his standing. But what the poll showed was that a majority of Canadians, strong majority, as you pointed out, has highly negative impressions. It goes beyond the I don't like this guy. And the words that come to mind first when they think about either leader are incompetent in the case of Trudeau or misleading and hypocrite and other not very nice words about Pierre Poiliev. And it seems to me that Mr. Poiliev is the person who has spent the past year being discovered by voters

just because Parliament Hill people knew about him as debating skills, as take no prisoner approach in question period. Doesn't mean most Canadians knew a lot about Pierre Poilievre. And if I were the Conservatives, I would worry that he is not growing on people. It's the opposite that's been happening. The notion that voters who do not really want a Conservative government will still give him a pass or at least a chance to prove that he's not as bad as they think, seem to diminish with every passing month. And I don't believe that that's either a good thing. I also think, and I know that they feel that too, that that leaves them more vulnerable to a leadership change on the liberal side than they would like. I mean,

I think at this point, the biggest Trudeau loyalist in the country, except for his family, is called Pierre Poilievre. He really would rather have Trudeau than anyone else. Why? Because in politics, if you're going to go in an election, you are more comfortable with what you know than unknowns. It may be that another leader would be worse than Pierre Trudeau, but there's no guarantee. So when you meet conservatives, I do meet them, they keep asking, do you think he'll stay? But they don't mean, please tell me he will leave. They mean, can we me he will leave. They mean, can we hang on to this prime minister?

You know, I'm glad Chantal brought up those word association results that Nick Nanos put out because there were a couple of things that struck me as well, and I agree with the points that Chantal just made. The words about Trudeau were kind of intensely personal in terms of the chemistry that people were expressing about how they felt about him. There wasn't really a lot of stuff that was about specific policies that he's brought forward that people don't like. I mean, we've known for a long time that there are people in particular in parts of Western Canada that don't like his energy policies or his environmental policies. But data over the long haul has shown that most of the things that he's done that he would consider to be signature policies are broadly supported by people. And so if people have come to not necessarily want to support him again or want him gone, it isn't because they look most of them anyway. It isn't because they've looked at his

record and said, we don't really like much of what you've done. It's more that it's missing certain elements or there's a freshness to it or there's a fatigue with him or that sort of thing. I think more recently, there's been a little bit more evidence that voters are starting to feel that under Trudeau, the word progressive has become an antonym for the word pragmatic, that it almost feels as though the population is saying, give me practical stuff, pragmatic stuff, stuff that will solve problems that I feel right now as soon as possible. And Trudeau is a little bit stuck in this idea of he's a leader of a progressive movement in the world and in Canada. And that seems at odds with the kind of get it done mentality of Canadians. And so that's what I saw in those numbers is kind of there's a personal – there's a lot of negative personal reactions.

There are obviously some people who like him, but the negative stuff about him is less about the policy and more about the personality. noticed is that there were more people than you would have imagined maybe five years ago saying Pierre Polyev is kind of like a happy warrior, that he's a optimistic person. And I think that's a result of a deliberate effort by him to put himself more in that mode. Because before he took on the leadership, he was definitely a more biting, cynical, more routinely negative voice in Canadian politics. I think he was quite effective at it. It's not my favorite kind of politics, but it is, you know, it does make a difference and it did work for him. But I think he's been trying to create this idea of himself as a kind of a more happier, optimistic kind of personality. And I saw at least a little bit of evidence in the Nanos results that that had worked to his favor a bit. of you are doing. When these different results have come out over the past few weeks, and Chantal mentioned the other poll from Angus Reid, that show some of the negatives on the Polyev side

in terms of the way people view them. And I wonder whether that's going back to our very first question today. That's what this approach that Trudeau is using now is all about. It's like the boxer, and we all know his boxing prowess, but it's like the boxer who sees the slight opening on his opponent's side and just keeps pounding away at that same spot. You know, he may be losing the fight, but it's the only chance he's got is to try and open up a new front by pounding away at the potential weakness.

So the potential weakness here is some of these negatives that we're seeing. And so now he's in this kind of desperate or panicky or whatever we're going to apply to it is trying to use that spot to open up a new front for him um you know we talked in the last few weeks about well you know what's the new communications approach is there one uh that the new comms person has brought in the last couple of months i don't know maybe we're witnessing're witnessing, maybe this is it. This is, you know, this is the last hope. What if you're swinging into empty air? Well, that's the risk, right? I mean, what I saw in that news conference

wasn't someone connecting with an opponent's political body. It was someone swinging wildly into nothingness. I think Chantal mentioned this before when we were talking about how Pauliev was reacting or choosing not to react to the capital gains tax bait. I think that you're right, Peter, that there is some evidence that the prime minister is trying to tag Pierre Poliev in the ring. But there seems to be so far anyway, more evidence that Poliev is pretty adept at slipping

the punch. He's just, it's not. Now, I've always felt like there was a certain degree to which the US political scene was going to influence the Canadian scene. And we're not really seeing the evidence of that yet. But obviously, in what Trudeau was trying to do yesterday in his press conference, where he talked about Roe v. Wade and what's happening in the United States and said that it was influencing or could influence the way that conservative politics would develop in Canada. He's looking to try to draw in some of that anxiety that Canadians might have about Trumpism into a discussion of whether or not with Polyev you get that. I happen to think that depending on who is leading the Liberal Party heading into an election with

Polyev, that could well, this whole idea of what kind of right do you, you know, what kind of right would you get with Pauliev would become a more engaging conversation. I just don't see much evidence that Justin Trudeau is able to connect with that kind of theme right now. Okay. If I can just add, I'm, you know, I've watched the let's have an election on charter rights. I believe there are more traps there than there are opportunities. And it is a slippery slope to go to. I also don't believe that a lot of people standing by the coffee machine are debating charter rights and notwithstanding clause issues. But I do think people are craving something that looks like a serious politician,

and that they don't find that in Trudeau at this point. That may be unfair, but that's their perception. I think the biggest risk to Pierre Prolieb is not the discussion on rights or on abortion or on climate change. It's a perception that he's more into politics than policy. He's not a serious politician. He's not articulating serious policy versus someone who is perceived as doing that. Now, whether that's going to happen or not, I don't know. But on that basis, I suspect many liberals have to be hoping that if Trudeau goes, Mark Carney turns out to have some political skills beyond being a serious person. Okay.

We've discussed Mark Carney the last two weeks, so that's going to be the extent of what we discussed about him on this week. But yet another kind of player on the field, and what he does, there was some talk, remember, a few months ago, that when St. Paul's actually came open as a riding, that he might run in it, even though he lives in Ottawa, but he might run in Toronto. But I think that was more at a time when it was felt to be a safe liberal seat. He also is said to want an Ottawa seat.

Right. Anyway. But, you know, I'm quoting rumors from people who talk to people who talk to people who don't. How many people have they talked to? A lot of people seem to want to talk about Mark Carney, and all of them are liberals. I don't know why.

Well, we've seen that movie before, too. So, I mean, it's going to be interesting to watch this play out. It's a fascinating game, and our lives have been watching that fascinating game for many years. Okay. I actually think there would be quite a good field of candidates if Trudeau does step down. I think Mark Carney would be, you know, from my standpoint,

probably the most interesting one. But I think there would be a good field. I think there's something that sometimes parties don't really – Pardon? I think there will be a good field initially. Parties don't really... Pardon? I think there'll be a good field initially. And then at a certain point, they start to realize how serious they personally are in the race and how much money it's costing them, et cetera, et cetera.

And it tends to weed out a little bit. But we'll see. We're not there yet. We're not even at the race factor. I got to take a final break because there's one more thing i want to talk about and uh it's equally as interesting back right after this and welcome back final segment of good talk for this week. Bruce, Chantel, Peter, all here. Interesting thing happened in the U.S. this week.

Trump and Biden agreed to a debate. A couple of debates, actually. And this without the normal kind of bureaucracy of debate establishment, you know, debate commissions, et cetera, et cetera, all kinds of negotiations. There were, you know, we'll see whether these actually happen. There's some talk that, you know, things may fall apart over time.

But they basically set the rules for themselves, you know, very simple rules, no audience in the room, mics cut off once their time limit expires, no cheering from whoever is in the room. So we'll see where that goes. But the fact was that they established this basically themselves and individual networks that they established this basically themselves and individual networks that were doing this,

which raises the question that we seem to have every election time in Canada is these rules and the way the thing is organized is crazy and doesn't deliver, in most cases, not all, but in most cases, good debates. So do you think the parties are watching what unfolded in the U.S. in the last few days? And could this be a model that could be followed, such as it is, this model, could be followed here. Chantal? To understand the context, in the U.S., basically both presidential candidates, or would-be presidential candidates, to be technical about it,

are basically told the Debates Commission, there is an official Debates Commission, thanks for the advice, but we're not coming to your debates. If I were sitting in Canada's Debates Commission, I would look at that as a strong possibility for the Canadian election campaign. And why do I say that? Because we have had a Debates commission only for the last two elections, 2019 and 2021. And it's fair to say that the experiment, at least when it comes to the English language debate, has been less than a total success. The first one was a cacophony of people asking questions

because everyone who was part of the consortium, including written media, suddenly had to dispatch someone to ask the leaders a question. Some of the people who were asking questions were not TV personalities. I can testify that the star asked me to go and ask a question. I threatened them with resigning the next day rather than go on a debate set and pretend that I could do anything in a debate except watch and write about it. So that was the first time. The second time, well, we all know how the Bloc Québécois leader clashed with the moderator, which caused quite a bit of backlash against both the moderator but the other party leaders in Quebec, not a satisfactory result when it comes to debates. The French language debates have turned out to be better.

They've worked out relatively well. But the fact is that in Quebec over that period, TVO, the main private network in the province, has been holding its own debates parallel to that official debate. And every leader has agreed to go on. So there have been two French language debates. Me, I suspect that at least two parties, the Conservatives and the Bloc Québécois, will be inclined to accept, at least on the English side, an invitation from some organization that offers to put together,

or a media that offers to put together an English language debate outside of the purview of the official commission and its rules and its forever quest for a formula that, who knows. So I suspect we're going to have another debate over the debates that the experience in the debates, especially on the English side. Yeah, we should rip it up and start over again. I think that's right. that what happened is that with a lot of good intentions, we ended up creating layers of considerations and stakeholders who all had to have their interests satisfied to the point where these, which should be really important and engaging moments in time in our political life as a country have become exhibitions of performance skills that are either media performing or brands of media organizations having some prominence. And on the politician side, they just become more trouble and easier to spend your time trying

to figure out how to avoid trouble and maybe find those one or two moments in an hour or an hour and a half where you land something that hopefully people remember. But when I think about all of that and I think about, well, I remember watching not that long ago, it's out there on the internet for anybody that wants to watch it. Some of the original footage from the Kennedy-Nixon debate, and it would have been 1960. You remember all of the conversation about Nixon, he didn't shave late enough in the day and the lighting wasn't favorable to him. But apart from that, it was a very literate conversation between them. It was a very, you know, polite, but it was pointed.

It was interesting. And so when I saw what Trump and Biden were doing, I thought, boy, it would be great if we could do something like that. And I know that that's two people and there's's more than two leaders, and there needs to be those considerations. But more debates would be better, and less structure around them would be ideal too. I thought the 2015 format, which accidentally happened to feature a lot of debates, the campaign was long, but Stephen Harper wouldn't go to the consortium. So there was a Maclean's debate.

There was some, I thought that- The Paul Wells one was great, yeah. I thought that that featured a higher number of debates, different formats, and it was certainly a lot better when it comes to outcomes for voters than anything the Debates Commission has managed to put together 100 you know uh the mentioning the um the kennedy nixon debates it's interesting

because the studies that were done after that because you're quite right i mean they kennedy was kind of proclaimed the tv winner more on appearance than on content because the lighting because of the you know the of the, you know, the five o'clock shadow on his beard, et cetera, et cetera. But they did, it was broadcast both on television and on radio. The television audience declared Kennedy the winner. The radio audience declared Nixon the winner. They thought he was handling of the the issues was much stronger, and they weren't distracted by the visuals of the moment.

So I've always found that fascinating. It's never changed anything because that was sort of accepted as the first televised debate, certainly in North America, and there's been one almost every year since then, whether it's the American or the Canadian. I think 1980, there was no debate in Canada. The Trudeau people was kind of pushed aside. They weren't risking anything that year.

Low bridging, I think, was the strategy. Low bridging and kind of flying over the country without stopping anywhere, sort of waving from 30,000 feet. Anyway, it worked. They got their majority back. Anyway, fascinating conversation, as always. Thank you both to Bruce Anderson, Chantelle Hebert. A couple of reminders.

Monday is a holiday. It's Victoria Day. She's no longer the queen, is she, Victoria? I don't think so. I don't know why it's not Charles Day anymore, but what have you. But Victoria Day is a holiday, and so there will be an encore edition of this very program on Monday. And we'll be back Tuesday with the Janice Stein's regular weekly appearance to give

us all things we need to know about the Middle East and the Ukraine-Russia story. But that's it for today. Thanks so much. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks for listening. And we'll talk to you again coming up next week. Take care, you guys. Bye-bye.