The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Good Talk - Are The Liberals In Serious Trouble?

Episode Date: June 16, 2023

On the verge of four federal byelections on Monday, there's a lot of Ottawa bubble talk about the problems facing the Liberals.  Bruce and Chantal wonder just how serious things are and if the byelection results will tell us anything meaningful on that question.  Also, what really led to the layoffs at CTV News?

Are you ready for good talk? And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here, along with Chantelle Hebert and Bruce Anderson, and I'm feeling really good today. I'm feeling like totally refreshed. It's the middle of June. I'm in Northern United Kingdom Kingdom I'm up in north Scotland up in the Highlands and I swam this morning in the North Sea like right under head under the whole bit

so I'm feeling pretty good it was spectacular actually the weather here has been unbelievable for the last couple of weeks but I felt pretty good about that so given that I'm ready to talk. I'm ready for some real good talk.

And you two guys are the guys that give good talk. So let's get it started this way. The Liberals can hardly say they've had a good run for the last, you know, few weeks, few months, really. There's sort of careened from one crisis to another, and they've been in yet another one in the last few days around the public safety minister, Marco Mendocino, and the decision that was made by Corrections Canada,

independently, as it should be, independent, to transfer one of Canada's most notorious prisoners, Paul Bernardo, from one jail to another. And the minister seemingly not to know anything about this until the last minute. Now, as I said, it's sort of been one crisis to another, calls for resignations on a number of different fronts, and some people saying, ooh, man, they are in serious, big trouble, the liberals,

and they've got to decide something to do, there should be a shuffle, a parochial parliament, new people in, all kinds of different things being said about staffing, et cetera, et cetera. So the start of this conversation is, how much trouble are they really in? Or do we know? Or does it just look like this?

Is this the normal, you know, last minute before summer starts? Let's trash the government. Leave them on a bad note. All of those things seem to be happening. But they've contributed to some of this themselves. Bruce, why don't you start us on this? Wow, I'm excited about that. I always like to listen to Chantal go first on all of the questions, but here's my crack at it, Peter. I mean, I don't think it's,

I wouldn't characterize the things that have been happening in the last little while as crisis. I take your point that other people do, and that it is the kind of the preference of the commentariat to kind of't have done it, but I don't think it became a, oh my God, how could these people be so incompetent moment? I also don't happen to think, and maybe this is going to be a controversial opinion, I don't happen to think that this Bernardo thing is all that shameful and horrible an incident. I do think Bernardo is the symbol of evil for most people who know who he was, but I do think that there's something to be said for the fact that a lot of younger people probably don't know who Paul Bernardo is. But ultimately, what happened here was not that a dangerous offender was released into the broader population, but rather that an independent agency made a decision, made an attempt to inform people in government whose political antenna should have been up and scanning and who should have dealt with it better, but they didn't. Is that a mistake?

Of course it is. Is it an embarrassment for the government? For sure it is. But to me, it forms more of a pattern of thinking about, I like the metaphor of a car, maybe even a race car. If you're driving that car, that are breaking down in it. It is poorly managed. But it's still moving along at a reasonable pace. It still occupies the position of government. It still could be competitive in an election. But if you're the people running the Liberal Party, thinking about what kind of a campaign you need against Pierre Poliev, steady as she goes, is not the right answer. This government is committing far too many unforced errors and is ripe for the picking for Pierre Poliev, unless they start to seriously think about getting their act together and stopping all of these management foibles.

And this week was another example of that. But it wasn't more of a crisis as far as I'm concerned as another major warning signal for the government. Chantal? Well, let's agree that the most polite word one could apply to the government's performance over the past six months is underwhelming. And let's agree that the management of the Chinese interference file kind of speaks to, if not incompetence, at least an incapacity to think ahead and to plan accordingly. And no one is going to say that this is just a distraction at the office on the scale of pictures in the passport. On the issue of this week, I strongly believe, like many others, this should

happen, this should not happen, and second-guess Corrections Canada. But I am troubled by the fact that the minister in charge of this file, rather than make that case, which is the principal case, came out in public on day one to say how appalled he was by the decision. To me, Mr. Mendicino has brought trouble upon himself, either through hypocrisy or through an outright lie because he was feeling like he was waiting in hot water. I don't believe that when the prime minister's office, having been given a heads up by Corrections Canada, which I believe was proper, it means where you're not going to be blindsided when this happens. When the prime minister's office reaches out to a

minister's office to say, this is coming, which is the proper thing to do, to delegate it to the minister of public safety and give that heads up up and that apparently does not reach the minister that tells me a couple of things one of those is that their staff don't believe that he's part of the solution to anything that's coming his way which is really bad why do I tend to believe that he that Mendocino was not warned about this? Because he's a former Crown prosecutor. Anyone who has any experience with the justice system would have known right away what Paul Bernardo's move meant politically and how sensitive an issue. But to go around expressing surprise rather than explaining principle, and then to be caught in the who knew what when is not only a self-enforced error, but it's an

accumulation in this case of such errors on the part of this government. Bill Blair, public safety minister, apparently never saw the memo from CSIS about Michael Chong being targeted by China, although his staff or someone in his ministry was handed that file. Arjid Sajjan famously did not read his emails over the course of the Afghan refugee crisis. I don't think people outside of the political bubble are paying attention to all those details. But the danger to the government is that the picture it paints is of an incompetent government. And that is more deadly than any of these single events, including the Chinese interference story. Well, one of the things that makes all those events that you listed similar

is the fact that the minister's staff in each case knew about these things. In the latest case, in the Mendocino case, it appears that some of the staff members in his office knew about the Bernardo transfer weeks, if not months, ahead of time, and never told him, which is puzzling enough. You know, maybe it's, you know, as Bruce suggested, some people, you know, the Bernardo case is, what, 25 years old now, which was a story that dominated the news for certainly a number of generations,

but perhaps not the one that is staffing in some of the office structure on Parliament Hill. I'm not sure. That would be a generous explanation. But my question is, whatever happened to the theory of ministerial responsibility and accountability, that whether they knew it or not, if their office bungled it, and if it was considered to be an issue of major importance, then the minister would take the fall for it. They'd be accountable for it.

Yes, but you're assuming that there's ministerial responsibility to be had over the transfer by Corrections Canada of Paul Bernardo to what is a prison for those who have never visited Le Macazeur where he is. It is made to sound like a country club. I think a minister who interferes with the corrections system or the justice system is the minister who needs to resign. In this case, the message I get is, come on, when the PMO calls a ministerial staffer and says something is coming, that ministerial staffer, even if he's 18 or she's 18, will at least Google the name to say, gee, you know, the PMO has sent me this heads up. So I don't buy that people were ignorant. What I'm starting to suspect is that people high up in the PMO

are running part of the cabinet with people high up in the cabinet staff, on the cabinet staff of some ministers, and are clearly bypassing ministers on their way to running whatever they are running to preserve the government from embarrassment. Okay, I want to let Bruce back in here. But first, just to clarify my remarks, I wasn't suggesting that Mendocino should have interfered with what Corrections Canada was doing. All I was suggesting is the fact that he didn't know what his staff knew. Like somebody was at fault for that. It's possible it had nothing to do with Mendocino.

It was all a staffing problem, or perhaps there was more to it than that. But in either case, somebody's responsible. Somebody's accountable. Nobody's been fired. Nobody's resigned, as far as I know. We don't know that, though. Okay. If they have, nobody said they had. Let's put it that way. Bruce, you wanted to get in here. Yeah, I think that your point about ministerial accountability, I agree that it's a very

important thing, but I think that we need to make a distinction between ministerial accountability for things like lying to the House of Commons or, you know, a major program failure or something like that versus his staff probably didn't tell him what they should have told him. Is that a dismissal offense in the context of the tradition of ministerial accountability? I don't think so. But I do think that there needs to be some sanction for it. Now, personally, I think the sanctions, and I think it's probably, it's always difficult, I think, for ministers, if their staff mess up, to say, my staff messed up. It doesn't, it doesn't come off well. It doesn't sound like it's taking responsibility. It sounds like it's pointing blame. It's bad for the ability to recruit and retain staff who do do a good job. But just piecing together the pieces of information on the public record so far lead one to the conclusion that there were staffers in the PMO

and staffers in Mendocino's office who understood what was being discussed, what was being planned by Correction Services Canada, and who, while some of them may not have understood exactly how symbolic Paul Bernardo is, they knew who he was. They knew there was a reason they were talking about this one individual and the proposed transfer. So they had some sense that there was a reason why this had some political electricity to it. And yet they let their minister, they let this minister make a public statement, which was not consistent with what his office knew. It was consistent with what he knew. I think Chantal's right, that anybody who's got his background isn't going out and

making public statements that could easily be contradicted, let alone just on the basis of kind of being a good faith person, not going to go out and lie about something like that. Did he intervene in a way that was inappropriate? Chantal makes a good point about he established that he had some emotional reaction were not considered in this and that he asked that the decision be looked at again. Maybe that's a reasonable standard to apply in a situation where we're talking about what is essentially a singular case. I think Chantel is exactly right that you don't want politicians looking at every case of transferring of a prisoner and having something to say about that. But Paul Bernardo is a bit of a unique case. I think there's something to be said for that. Last point for me is information flow is, for me, the big story here. And I remember as ministerial offices developed over the last five years, 10 years, and seeing all of these positions created as directors of issues management, I think is kind of the term that's used the most these days. And wondering, well, back in the day when I worked in a minister's

offices, which is, you know, ancient history, everybody was in the business of issues management. Everybody was up and scanning for something that was going to go wrong. And you didn't have one person or one part of an office whose job it was to watch for incoming, everybody did. And I wonder if there aren't some dysfunctional kind of structural things that have developed over time so the information, and I think Chantal was really alluding to this, gets passed around and maybe overmanaged by different layers of political operatives. And somewhere along the way, they've removed the ability of the politicians to do politics with that information

to protect their government and to advance their case by keeping them out of the information loop. And I think there's been enough examples of that for people in the PMO or the prime minister in particular to take a hard look at this. It doesn't speak to a strong minister when the minister is to say in public that he has instructed his staff to keep him in the loop of the affairs of his own ministry, to start with. Second, I look at where Bruce draws the line for ministerial accountability and resignation.

And I also note that we are talking about a minister who actually meets both of these criteria. Major legislative failure. Can we talk about the gun control bill and what happened and how the government had to clean up a major mess on that front coming from that very ministerial office? Or can we talk about the statement lying to the House of Commons? I'm not going there, but can we agree that it was mildly misleading to the House of Commons to be assured by the same minister that all the Chinese police operations operating in Canada had been dealt with when that clearly turned out not to be the case. So if those are criterias for ministerial accountability, leading one to say, I'm taking responsibility,

I would argue that this particular minister has by now met the criteria, not over the Bernardo issue as much as on what has been happening over the past year with his handling of his own department. And at some point, I totally expect the prime minister in a shuffle to throw him gently or brutally under a bus. And I guess we'll know about that if and when there's a shuffle. I want to just back up for one last moment on the Bernardo case. Just the straight case of the transfer. Because

I'm a little confused, not by what either one of you are saying, but I'm kind of confused about what my own position is. I mean, Bernardo was a special case. We've all said that because of his horrific past. But this question of whether or not a government should have the ability to interfere with a decision made by corrections canada on in this case his case on the transfer should i guess the question is what would be wrong wrong about a precedent set there, I guess, on this particular case? If they said, you know what, you can't have that transfer.

We want you to turn that back. We want him back in the maximum security jail he was in. What would be wrong with that? To me, that's an interference in the administration of justice. And if that were to happen, I would want the government to provide me with non-political advice as to why that veto was applied. Was it for political convenience, which I suspect it would be, or was it for systemic reasons, as in they know better than Corrections Canada? La Macasa, for those who don't know,

is not just a medium security prison. It's a prison that does specialize in people who have perpetrated crimes of a sexual nature. And it is a place where you do some people that you are trying to rehabilitate. I'm not saying that Paul Bernardo will be walking the streets of Mont-Tremblant anytime soon. That's not what I'm saying. But this second guessing, because that's what will be popular, is dangerous. In the same way as it is dangerous to pick and choose how the justice system should work, that's why ministers resign when they call up a judge. And if you think that's acceptable in one case, then you are forever opening the door to

other cases that suit the political agenda of whatever government is in place at that point. If I were Corrections Canada, I would find that a serious political interference and decisions that should be taken by people who are paid to be at arm's length and processes like that. Yeah, I think that I agree with that. I think that the two points that stand out for me are there's intended to be a professional level of knowledge and competency in what is the best way to organize prisoners and incarceration facilities. And I think that we should, without suggesting that we should be treating prisoners better, the point for me is wouldn't it be a good idea to run these on a professional kind of knowledge-based system? And that's why you have that independence.

But the other is that if you took the logical extension of saying ministers should be able to decide what happens to Paul Bernardo, if you took it to the extreme, you could imagine a government at some point wherein the justice minister or the prime minister decided that he or she wanted to make a political point of identifying certain prisoners and moving them to more secure facilities simply to look like they are more of a law and order politician or something like that. I could see the politics of that, and I don't like it from the standpoint of is it a good way to run the administration of what is essentially a public service. Okay. Thank you for those answers because it wasn't just me. I've had a number of letters this week from listeners who are kind of puzzled by it, not sure where they stand,

how they should feel about it, but because this came out of the blue for many people who don't understand the way these things operate and the relationship between Corrections Canada and the government of Canada, I think these last couple of minutes have been well worth it to explain at least some theories behind it. We're going to take our first break.

When we come back, we're going to talk about if the Liberals are, if they're in trouble, will Monday give us an indication of how much trouble they're in? It's by election day, four of them in different parts of the country. We'll talk about that when we come back. And welcome back. You're listening to A Good Talk, the Friday episode of The Bridge.

Chantelle Hebert, Bruce Anderson are with us. I'm Peter Mansbridge. You're listening on Sirius XM, channel 167. Canada Talks are on your favorite podcast platform, or you're watching us on our YouTube channel. Monday is by-election day in Canada. There are four by-elections being held, federal by-elections. There is one in Quebec, in Notre Dame de Grasse-Westmount. In Ontario is one in Oxford.

Oxford is kind of centrally located in southwestern Ontario. It's actually just the riding south of Stratford, where I live when I'm back home. And Manitoba has two. Winnipeg South Centre, so very much an urban seat that the Liberals are trying to maintain their representation there. And Portage-Lisgur, which has a lot of people looking at it. This was Candace Bergen's seat, the former interim Conservative leader, and is, you know, assumed to be a strong Conservative

hold. But Max Bernier is running there from the People's Party of Canada, the leader of the People's Party. He's running, and his candidate last time around in Portage-Lisker got over 20% of the vote. So will he do that well, 20%, which I think was the highest percentage they got anywhere in the country. So there's a lot of interest in that. So the breakdown on that currently, you know, from the old, the last election, where

two liberals, one conservative, sorry, two liberals and two conservatives represented in those four ridings. So when the votes are all counted on Monday night, I know it's by-elections and we tend to overstate the importance sometimes of by-elections, but when the counting's all done, will it make any difference where the Liberals sit on that night in those four ridings, given their current state of affairs? Chantal, start this time. It's not just the liberals. It will matter where the conservatives sit. And the first place where it will matter where the conservatives sit for obvious conservative family reasons is Portage-Lisgur,

where it may have been the second best result for Maxime Bernice, People's Party. He was trying to check that. His best result might have been in second best result for Maxime Bernier's People's Party. I was trying to check that. His best result might have been in his own writing of both, which he lost decisively, by the way. But that was the best place for sure outside Quebec for the party. And what the Conservatives need to do to get this party off its back is to marginalize Maxime Bernier. And so the number was 22% in the last election, and success for Pierre Poiliev would be for the conservative candidate

to at least bring that to half of 22%, and ideally under 10%. I'm not sure that's happening. We'll see on Monday, but that is the first challenge. I'm going to set aside quickly NDG Westmount. It would be a political earthquake if the Liberals did not keep that seat. It's basically Mark Garneau's former seat, but also a seat. When you say Westmount, you're not saying this is a test case for how the Liberals or the Bloc Québécois are faring in Quebec. That's not happening. The Bloc does not really have a dog in that race.

They do have a candidate. But so I'm guessing the most interesting thing happening there is the co-leader of the Green Party, Elizabeth May, ran when she ran for her old job alongside Quebec environmental activist called Jonathan Pedneau, and he's running there. So his score will be of some interest. I do not really expect him to take a seat in the House of Commons on Monday night, after Monday night. For the Liberals, I think the two other writings, and for Pierre Poilievreiev are the really interesting ones. It's much more interesting than Portage-Lisger, which is a conservative sideshow.

Winnipeg South Center, yes, is a liberal writing or has been since Justin Trudeau became prime minister and has a fairly strong liberal history. But Stephen Harper won that riding in 2011. And if Mr. Poiliev is going to form a government, he has to start doing better or well in ridings that Stephen Harper managed to swing his way the last time the conservatives had a majority. The liberals, on the other hand,

need to show that they are strong in such writings as they did in Mississauga by election last December, because Justin Trudeau, remember, only needs to hold his seat, doesn't really need to add to his seats. And the NDP was just behind the Conservatives at 20% in that riding in 2021. If you think about Manitoba, and especially urban Manitoba, this should be decent NDP territory. If the NDP vote goes way down, as it did in Mississauga last year, that won't be a good sign for Jagmeet Singh. It will be a sign that some of his voters may be coalescing behind the liberals instead, or going to the conservatives. And then Oxford. Oxford is a mess. And it's a mess for a very specific reason. The outgoing MP, a conservative who sat for years in the House of Commons under various leaders, has a liberal sign in front of his house. He's campaigning for the liberals to take over the seat that he has left behind.

And why is that happening? by Mr. McKenzie, of having shown one of his preferred candidates from outside the writing into the mix and ensured that this person be the conservative candidate. So the liberals are hoping at the very least to increase their score. And I would argue that if the liberals' share of the vote in Oxford goes up, even if they don't win the riding, it's not going to be seen as a very positive development for Pyap-Valiev's leadership, because not only does he have to win seats, but at the very least, one would expect him to hold his own or at least do better in seats that the party has owned for years and years and years.

Okay, that's Chantal's take. What's yours, Bruce? First thing for me is that because so few people usually turn out to vote in by-elections, the actual relevance of what happens in these by-elections to understanding the broader mood of the public isn't all that important, but it will be interpreted and discussed as such. And it will have an effect on the morale and the level of energy in the parties, because it also will have an effect on the way in which the media approach the parties following the results of those elections. So there's a lack of reality to it, but another reality which is very important as the parties head off for the summer break and think about their political situations. Second thing for me is I agree with Chantal. In essence, for me, the most interesting writings are the two in Manitoba.

I think the interesting one that involves the People's Party and the Conservatives is going to give people a sense of whether, with all of the tools at his disposal, Pierre Pelliev is actually succeeding at creating interest outside of the hardest right or the traditional base of the Conservative Party. And if part of how he's doing that is stealing the lunch of Max Bernier and the People's Party. I don't think there's ever been a more interesting test of that. There certainly hasn't been in the time of Pierre Poliev as leader. So I'll be watching that one to see whether the Conservatives come out of it with a sense that they've accomplished that part of the mission that they've set for themselves, which is to kind of take over the People's Party vote. And I don't know if Chantal's thresholds for defining success are right. I'd rather just wait and see how the numbers fall and see if we can discern it.

But that would definitely be – if he cut the People's Party vote in half, if I were Pierre Pallievre, I would claim that as a victory. He might even do better than that, I guess, is what I'm wondering. On the other hand, the Winnipeg riding, I think, is really a test of whether the Liberals will be able to kind of almost escape what many observers are starting to wonder might happen to them, which is that the Conservatives start winning back some seats that Stephen Harper won, as Chantal mentioned. Ben Carr is a good candidate. He's going to be an effective name in the riding for people who don't know him very well. And so I expect them to be competitive. I probably expect them to win.

And I don't think at the end of the day, they do win that riding it means that people are really happy with the federal liberals or more happy than the general mood suggests. I think it means that they live to fight another day because they ran a good candidate in a riding that they had good prospects of winning. I don't think we're going to be able to tell much about the riding in Ontario because of the reasons that Chantal raised. It's complicated. It's a mess in terms of trying to draw any learnings from it. Last thing I'd say is that, in a way, the worst thing that could happen to the Liberals is that they do really well on Monday because it might give them a sense of complacency about the situation that they're in. They need another reminder that they are not performing very well politically, that their tone and their messaging is lackadaisical at best, confused and self-harming at worst. And, you know, by-elections aren't always a good way of discerning that. So, liberals probably won't like hearing that, but that's how I feel. They

probably need to keep being reminded that they need to improve their political management quite a bit. I think by now, a lot of liberals are dispirited enough that the last thing they need is a bad night on Monday for the sake of the moral authority of their current leader and this decision to stay at the helm. I don't disagree with the notion that getting a bad night, and I think what Bruce said about the liberals could probably use a bad night, goes for Pierre Poiliev too. But let me bring you back, your memory may actually

be a lot better than me on this, but... It almost never is. Do you guys remember how many by-elections did Pierre Trudeau lose over a single night in the late 70s? 78. There were 15 by-elections. And he lost them all, right? I don't think he lost them all, but he lost 11 or 12 of them. But it was a masterstroke, really. So that did not actually translate into what the liberals needed to hear as they lost government about a year later. But what I'm trying to say is when people are angry in by-elections, and I agree with Bruce's take that by-elections,

because of who votes and low turnout, should not be used as a guide or a predictor of the next election, even in those writings. But people who are angry tend to go vote. And if they are just a bit as angry as Pierre Poiliev has been and has tried to make them over the past nine months, the evidence would suggest that the conservatives would see a lot of their voters use the opportunity to go send that message, as voters did against Pierre Trudeau back in 78. And that was widespread. I lived in downtown Toronto in St. Paul's writing then, which was lost that night to the conservatives. So by-elections may not change the shape of the House of

Commons at this point, but they do provide some measure of the success of each leader to either keep his or her take or to drive up his vote, in this case with anger, which I'm waiting to see whether it will translate in the ballot box in Oxford, in Winnipeg in particular. Let me tell you just a quick story about 1978, because it actually was a brilliant move on the part of the Liberals. 78 should have been a federal election, a full-scale federal election, and it had been planned for that fall. But the Liberals were going to get wiped out. They were still in trouble because of the broken promise

on wage and price controls. And people were angry. They were mad. So all these by-elections came up instead, and they ran 15 on one night and let the anger flow. And I can't remember exactly what it was. I think it was around 11 seats. They ended up not winning of the 15.

But here's the interesting part. When the federal election was finally called in the spring of 79, those 15 ridings were at play again. Most of them, not all, I don't think the one you mentioned, because I think it was Ron Antkey won that riding that you were talking about, and he won again in 79. But most of them that had flipped away from the Liberals went back to the Liberals.

They'd had their shot of anger. They'd had their punch. And if anything, that held the Joe Clark's Conservatives to a minority. Could have been a majority if they'd held on to all those seats they'd won in the fall of 78. Anyway, that's a little detour on history. The one thing that I find interesting in the St. James writing, have you looked at the list of candidates in St. James?

There are 50 people running. Well, that's the usual electoral reform strategy these days, that you swamp the ballot. I don't think it works, by the way, but you swamp the ballot with people. This is the second time that happened in Mississauga. I call it, and people who live in Toronto are living through that, it's like going to the polling booth and being presented with a roll of toilet paper with names on it. That's how long it is.

They feel that they are advancing the cause for electoral reform by using what I call a gimmick. I don't think it's actually doing much of anything, but I leave it to them to assess their strategy on this. Well, we'll leave that image of the way the names are listed. We'll just leave that hanging there, so to speak. Okay, we're going to take our final break, and then we come back on something totally different right after this okay we're back for our final segment a little uh smoke mirrors and the truth music there by by accident but it's still very nice we like like it. Final segment of Good Talk for this day. Chantel and Bruce are with us. We have talked often

over the past year, past couple of years, about various problems, economic and editorial within the journalism business. This week, we saw a number of our colleagues, in some cases, a number of our friends, close friends, in some cases, lose their jobs when CTV, because of its parent company, Bell Media, decided to cut back, cut back, you know, drastically.

And some familiar names, faces and voices in the Canadian media were pulled off the air and have lost their jobs. I won't go through the list, but I'm sure you've seen it. It is a tough thing to look at when you're in the business. and especially so because you know that your own organization is probably having similar issues about trying to determine what the future is for the news business and what the proper format should be for the news business, whether it's television or radio, online, print, you name it. But this was a bit of a bloodbath at CTV. It was a bloodbath at CTV. It's affecting television, radio services right across the country.

And I'm just wondering whether either of you have thoughts on this, because it's something that's close to us. Some of these people are close to us. And what it says about what all news organizations are going through right now and what the future may hold. Bruce, you start us off this time. Well, it's very worrying, but I think it's not worrying for me in particular to see that a large corporation found itself losing money in a part of its business and decided that it wasn't going to keep on doing that. I think that's an entirely predictable scenario, and we see it playing out in other media enterprises, whether it's the Toronto Star or Post Media, corporations are going to act like corporations. And inevitably, that means if you can't make money in journalism, you're going to

either weaken and weaken and weaken the journalism and ultimately, probably pack it up. Or you're going to do that more quickly. Now, I really take issue with the, um, way in which this was explained, um, or how the company involved tried to excuse itself for this decision to eviscerate its news service. I mean, I, I'm sure that they will say they didn't eviscerate their news service. They just trimmed it back a little bit, but it was a lot of gutting. But what they said about it, in essence, was that they had to make these cuts because Canadians were unwilling to pay higher wireless prices. They blamed the government for putting so much pressure on them to keep wireless prices coming down that they couldn't make enough money in that business. They couldn't get enough certainty that they could make money

in that business. And so they had to look at their $40 million a year losses in the news business and say, we can't subsidize our news business with higher wireless prices any longer because the government won't let us do that. I found it a cheap tactic, to be honest. I mean, I think they should just have owned up to the fact that they didn't believe that they could make money in this business and they didn't want to keep on putting money into that business. But to kind of blame government for not allowing them to continue to charge as much as they want to charge in wireless, I think was shirking that sense of accountability that I would have looked for. Last thing I'll say is that I do feel that journalism has been heading for this problem and continues to head for this problem. And we need solutions in Canada that are unique to our market. Our market size isn't such that we'll be able to create

a version of the New York Times that will produce fantastic journalism at a scale that makes somebody a reasonable profit. So if that's true, what is the version that will work for Canada is a conversation that we need to get on with. And it's very tricky because who leads that conversation ultimately has to be people who are interested in journalism from a public interest standpoint, rather than the hedge fund in the United States that owns most of our daily newspapers. So we need to break that conversation out of the industrial mode that it's in now, replace it with a conversation that absorbs the reality of this is difficult in a highly partisan and polarized world, but we're going

to need some journalism and we're going to need models that allow it to thrive and flourish, especially reporting news. Make a distinction between the kind of journalism that, well, opinion journalism, if you like, and reporting. There will always be enough of a market, I think, for opinion journalism, for quality opinion journalism. But we're going to need that basic news coverage. And I don't see how it's going to, I don't see a model emerging where it will be done at sufficient scale to meet what our needs are and our expectations are right now. I hope we find one soon. Sean Donnelly An aside on opinion journalism, of course, there will be a market for it. Let's talk real things here. It's a lot cheaper to throw a few hundred bucks at the at-issue panel panelists than to hire someone to be a chief political correspondent or a chief political analyst for a network.

We don't cost anything. We're pennies thrown in the ocean. This expansion of opinion politics is, with all the respect that I have for punditry, it's driven by cheap economics. I don't mind. I'm having fun doing this, but let's agree that we don't impact the bottom line of any news organization in a significant way. So when the lights are turned off in those newsrooms, we'll still be there with a vengeance, filling time for small amounts of money. What happened this week, and I'm more interested in the results, and they are real, and the consequences of what happened this week, and what it bodes for the future than whatever lame excuse

Bell and CTV put forward to explain it is there are now fewer boots on the ground, as there have been fewer boots on the ground for a long, long time. That impacts, and I'm going to talk about what I know about, which is political coverage. That impacts political coverage. We have just talked about the by-elections. Seriously, in the not-so-old days, we would have had eyes on the ground in those writings. We would have seen news reports about what people were saying about the by-elections and what the stakes were locally.

We didn't see very much of that on the national scene. Why? Because increasingly, and as opposed to us, parliamentary reporters are mostly confined to the parliamentary bubble. And that impacts coverage. It mattered that I got the opportunity when I was covering Meach and Charlottetown to travel the country and to actually talk to people about the Constitution, not just the people who were spinning, whatever they were spinning on Parliament Hill. It certainly informed my coverage. That's internally. But then if you look at international coverage, CTV shut down its London Bureau. It shut down its LA Bureau. It's scaling back its Washington operations.

That basically means we have less eyes, ears on the ground at a time in world affairs where it does matter that you have people from Canada speaking to Canadians about what is going on. This is a major time in history. It also leaves mostly the CBC, when it comes to English broadcasting, in a very, very dominant position. And that's not great, because competition matters when it comes to coverage. And what motivates networks to do better in their news coverage is the notion of competition. And by reducing the capacity of private networks for economical reasons to do this coverage, you are impoverishing not only the people who are watching the news, but you are impoverishing the competition. You don't need to raise the bar here. Why would you? There's no one else in London

except you and a freelancer that someone calls once in a while. And then I take this a step further. And I imagine a journalism scene in the English broadcasting world in this country, where Pierre Poiliev has put his threat to close down the CBC to execution. And where does that leave us when it comes to news reporting and broadcasting? In some kind of a desert where you are between freelancers who are also cheap and pundits who are cheap, but you are not getting what Bruce talks about, which is the basic coverage, competent basic coverage that comes from strong journalism organizations. So one way or another, we're on a slope where we are cheapening our information fabric,

and that will be at cost. I was listening to Erin O'Toole this week say we are about to have a generation of young people who have never heard an opinion that was contrary to what they think. I do believe that news like this week, and it won't be the last week where we will hear such news, are driving us to silos. And those silos are going to impact the national conversation in ways that we can't quite measure yet, but will not be positive. Can I ask both of you a question? You're going to have to ask it very quick, because we're basically out of time. Is the idea of public funding to support journalism something that's anathema to you,

or is it something that you think is awkward but we're going to have to find a way to do it i can agree with both but i have never seen a government that funded something that it did not want to influence so you're saying we're going to find a lot of managers in news with backbone and the backbone to say no man allow me to doubt it. Yeah, allow me to think there are managers with that backbone, but they're not necessarily throughout. So I take a little bit of both. And of Bruce's choices, I'm more with the latter than the former. We're out of time. Great conversation.

If I have one fear about what happened this week at CTV, is that other news organizations who are tempted to do the same thing will now do the same thing in cutting, and we're going to see more. I don't know anything in particular about that, but I fear that that is what's going to happen. That's it for this day. Thank you very much for listening. We'll be back next week with our last good talk

before the summer break. Hope you'll join us. For Chantel and Bruce, I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll talk to you again on Monday with a special interview with Aaron O'Toole. That's Monday on The Bridge. Thank you.