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

Episode Date: August 27, 2021

Two weeks in to the campaign and there's a sense that the Liberals are struggling.  Are they?  Chantal Hebert and Bruce Anderson on that and a lot more.

Are you ready for good talk? And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here in Toronto, back from the Arctic, back from the pure air of Arctic Canada, back into the kind of hot, muggy, yucky southern Canada. Got into Toronto late last night. Waited for an hour and ten minutes for my bags, which was not bad. I felt blessed. Some people had to wait three hours.

It had been a thunderstorm of some kind. And when that happens around Pearson Airport, everything shuts down. And I'd never seen so many people in the sort of baggage area. But, hey, we're not here to talk about baggage. We're not here to listen to Mansbridge whining. Chantelle Hébert is in Montreal. Bruce Anderson is in Beach Meadows, Nova Scotia, one more day, having his holidays.

Actually, Peter, I'm going to Beach Meadows shortly. I'm in Port Medway, which is very close. And it also happens to be the place that Jagmeet Singh is coming to today. Later on this morning, he's going to be on the wharf at Port Medway, which I can see from my window. He's obviously there because he's trying to impress you. I don't know how he found out I was here. It might have been the social media, but I guess that's why.

We're going to talk about Jagmeet Singh in a minute. I'm sure, well, we're going to talk about all of them over the course of this. But this is the way I want to start. I mean, I have been out of touch for 10 days for the most part, spent a good chunk of yesterday trying to get back up to speed. And in terms of the election, I can tell you, I mentioned this to Bruce yesterday,

nobody on my whole trip talked about the election everywhere. I went to all the different, you know, remote Northern communities. Nobody asked about the election. But nobody asked about it in the Ottawa airport where I was for a couple hours yesterday. And people tend to come up to me, as they do you guys, and often talk about politics. Same in Toronto while we're all waiting for bags.

Nothing. Nobody. And yet I have this sense from what I have read and what I have listened to, and I want you to try and tackle this one for me. And Chantal, why don't you start? Are the liberals in trouble? They are stated or no, unstated goal of a majority, which remains the only real reason we are having this campaign. Yes, they are in trouble. Their path to a majority, which you could chart relatively easily on the day of the election call, has become littered with obstacles over the course of the first two weeks of the campaign. They are also momentum challenged, i.e. both Eran O'Toole and this one. And I'm not talking majority. I'm talking about re-election. Bruce? Yeah, I think I agree with that. I think that the only thing I would probably do is add the caveat that I remember when I was a young man, the first time I went to horse races, and I haven't been to horse races very many times, but I do remember going to watch these sulky races in and around Ottawa. There was a couple of racetracks then. And how, you know, the first few bets that I made, I would kind of watch as the horse that I picked

and the rider, they would kind of scoot out to a lead. And I would realize that it's kind of a long race and a lot of stuff happens in those sulky races. And it's almost as though you could turn your head away until they come around that last corner. And then all sorts of stuff happens and it's kind of unpredictable, or at least it was to me. I gather there were some betters at those places for whom it was more predictable, but we don't need to get into that. And so I do have this feeling of, you know, it's good that we're talking about it. I enjoy talking about it. I wrote another piece for McLean's today focusing on the thing that I think that is most interesting, but I also feel like, just like 2019 and a little bit like 2015,

we don't know really how voters are going to kind of narrow their focus and their minds until at least a week to two weeks from now. It seems to me that's when it's going to start to come into shape. And I know Chantal said this the last time we got together. But it's certainly, you know, there's no evidence in the data that the Liberals have an easy path to a majority and they may have a difficult path to another win. It's all to play for right now.

The only point I'd make about the horse race comparison, the sulky race, is in a horse race when one horse kind of breaks out to a lead early and they lose that lead, it's very rare that they come back and win it. They sort of like drift off into the background um now political races are different than that we've seen movement back and forth uh on a variety of things here's here's one thing i know is i just noticed it this morning you know i i woke up i was still on kind of arctic bay time where the sun never sets. And I got up early and there was a political ad running. It was a liberal ad.

So we're two weeks in. So I don't know how often they change their ads. But they're two weeks in and they're doing the move forward thing in terms of their ads. And the punchline, the key line, is we don't leave people behind, which really seems odd right now in light of the Afghanistan story, which is all about leaving people behind. So when an ad like that comes out of a news item like Afghanistan,

it kind of clashes. It makes you go away wait a minute maybe it's time for a new ad uh now i'm sure that you know all the parties have a number of ads planned and they have different directions to go and if they want to they can you know stay positive they can go negative they can be kind of neutral um and maybe it's, you know, two weeks in, it's time you start deciding which direction you're going to go. But I got to tell you, that felt a little bit odd, and it raises the question of, and I know we've all talked about this,

because you never know how long a story like Afghanistan is going to continue on. I mean, we've got whatever it is, three and a half, four weeks to go before the election. And whether or not this will linger, whether or not it's really having an impact right now, you know, I'm not sure. Chantelle, you've got thoughts on that? If it's having an impact, obviously, it's not having a positive impact on the liberals. You can feel sympathetic if you're more or less liberal friendly to the plight of the government trying to get people out. And what is obviously a logistical and a security nightmare. But you are not going to be going around saying no one else could have done better.

Even if the answer is what else would you have done differently is not forthcoming. The fact is that the person sitting in the prime minister's chair was called Justin Trudeau. And this is not the backdrop you want for an election, because it goes to the issue of competence. I am surprised, and I have been for the past two weeks, that the prime minister, not as liberal leader, as prime minister, did not feel like putting on this prime ministerial suit at some point and saying, I'm going to take a pause on the campaign trail here to try to coordinate this, because this is so important. In the same way that a tsunami would cause a prime minister to have a cabinet meeting to talk about what Canada can do in a crisis. And I'm not sure that the Liberals, I'm not saying it's going to impact on the vote on September 20th, but I'm surprised that the Liberals in their war room do not see the disconnect between the Prime Minister glad-handing voters and announcing $42 a month or whatever they amount for seniors if he's re-elected,

and the pictures of what has been happening in Kabul, there is a disconnect. And he wears it because he is the prime minister and he is the one who called a campaign that he has so far failed to provide a rationale for it that is easy for voters to understand. Navigating current events during a campaign is really tough. And all the onus is on one side, it's on the government side, they're the ones who are going to, you know, navigate it. I mean, you know, I saw the Aaron O'Toole stuff yesterday, when he was pressed, what would you do? And he didn't really have an answer. You know, he just said, you know, we wouldn't have got into this situation. And they explained how he wouldn't have got into it. But you're right.

I mean, you know, the pressure, if there is pressure, it's on the government of the day. Bruce? Well, I want to be careful how I put this. I obviously think that this is a tragic story and very dispiriting and distressing for Canadians who tune into it. I have trouble believing that it's going to have a significant impact on the political choice that Canadians make in this election. And the reason for that is, sadly, most of the time, the news cycle moves us past issues pretty quickly. And after the US and all of the other countries pull out, will we be getting as much news about what's happening on the ground there?

It seems unlikely to me. And I say unhappily because I do think that it would be better were we able to, as a society, stick with issues that matter longer. But I think the other reason, and maybe the more important reason, is the one that you touched on, Peter, which is that for the average person, they may hone in on in the relatively short period of time when it became clear that there was going to need to be a massive evacuation effort. Could more have been done more efficiently, more quickly? Could the prime minister look like he was more focused on it? Some voters might focus on that, but I think for many people, it might just be a more, a kind of a 20,000 foot level. This is an area that's really been a challenging area in terms of human rights for a long time. What is the origin of us being there? How long ago did

we leave there? What really are our responsibilities there? I think all of that is kind of unclear to people, which isn't the same as saying they don't feel a strong humanitarian urge to help. I think the question of whether or not governments did the wrong things or did things too slowly or were bureaucratic, it just doesn't feel to me likely that those issues are going to become that prominent, but I could be wrong. You know, Chantel's point about maybe you should have shut things down for a couple of days and put on the prime ministerial suit and saying, I'm going to manage this. I'm not sure exactly what they can do in terms of managing it. I mean, it is a kind of on the ground thing, but I understand the optics of something like that, but they can also on in terms of managing it i mean it is a kind of on the ground thing but i i understand

the optics of something like that but they can also cut both ways remember who was it john mccain in the campaign against obama shut his campaign down for three or four days around the financial crisis and it just totally backfired on him because there was basically nothing he could do. He wasn't in power, and he was just sort of sitting there on the sidelines. But Justin Trudeau is in power. Right. You always do risk the idea that there's something performative about it, which is, I think, what got McCain into trouble and I think is one of the things that is often a weakness for Justin Trudeau is that he strikes some people as being kind of empathetic and dynamic when he does things like that. And other people just find it kind of, you know, a performative political maneuver that they find distasteful.

So I think there's always risk in that. But I also feel that the government, through ministers like Marco Mendicino, was pretty active on the file. And fair enough that people will make judgments about whether the government could have done more or should have done some things differently. But it does feel to me that the government was pretty active in communicating through ministers as well as the prime minister about what it was doing during this period of time, if unwilling properly, in my view, to discuss the details of the evacuation You froze up, Bruce. Your Zoom call froze up.

I can't say that there were some hot takes from the media about this. I think at some point we are going to have to remind Bruce of something he knows, i.e. that we are not the media and that it's to do bad things to Quebec and doesn't actually exist. And it's not just you, but the media thing is much like the rest of Canada. It's talking about something that actually is not monolithic and does not exist as that big blob. Let me be more precise about it. And the next time I say anything critical of the media, I will try to be more specific about some in the media, and I will also not bother with the preamble at the risk of

offending. But I don't want to agree not to offer any criticisms of any media coverage. So let me be more precise. I read a number of prominent journalists and columnists whose take on what was happening in Afghanistan made me feel as though it was rushed, it was premature, it was overheated, and it would be better for everybody involved if it was a little bit more patient and, you know, awaited a little bit more evidence. And I think that in the course of time, some of that was proved out. So that's not meant to be a blanket condemnation of the media, but maybe more of a reminder of what happens in situations like this in the age of Twitter as a platform for instant journalism and the way that it can color political events, including campaigns. So apologies for the blanketness of the comment and the implied responsibility on the part of you two for it.

That wasn't my point. And I'll just leave that there. I think the real risk or the point of all this is not necessarily that if Aaron O'Toole had been prime minister last week, things would have unfolded a lot better or Jock Mead saying. way over the past few days that while Canada could have prepared for this, because yes, the Taliban entered Kabul much earlier than any intelligence agency had warned they would, but it was still going to be happening. And the government was receiving letters from, and not exclusively, the opposition parties in July.

The inference is that the Liberals and the Prime Minister were so busy planning an election campaign that they did not see to planning for something that was looming. And I think that hurts because the Liberals in two weeks have not managed to get rid of the debate over the timing of the election. You know, there have been so many things in the last 30 years where intelligence agencies have not predicted or not warned of what might be coming. Interestingly enough, yesterday, they were kind of on top of their game around the Kabul airport because they were suggesting hours ahead of time that something might happen. But in terms of the big issues like this one, you wonder where they were because this, I still maintain, was absolutely predictable. You could see it coming for years. That once they'd cut this deal with the Taliban through the peace process,

it was going to happen very fast as soon as there was a date. But, you know, 9-11, the fall of the Soviet Union. I mean, you can probably name a half a dozen to ten different major things that have happened in the last 30 years where it seemed to come out of nowhere to intelligence agencies. Or if intelligence agencies were warning of them, governments were doing nothing. And that too is possible.

Let me, I'll only make one comment on Bruce's comments about the media. I'm lucky, I'm happy that I'm just now a retired pensioner and I'm sort of not in anybody's camp anymore let me before we take our first break i i've heard some um some different data on on the gender split on this election uh is it significant is it any more significant than it than it's been in the past the way women are voting versus the way men are voting or at least their their choices, preferred choices at this point in the campaign. I guess, Bruce, you crunch these numbers more than anybody.

So what are you seeing there? I think there's actually a lot of flux right now, and I think that's the most interesting thing for me, and it's the thing that I focused on in the piece that I was writing this morning. I do think that we see right now a generational kind of a difference where among younger voters, it looks like a fight between the NDP and the liberals. Among older voters, it looks like a fight between the conservatives and the liberals. And normally there are stronger gender influences than we see right at the moment. And those are stable, but I don't think they're necessarily stable now.

And here's why I say that. For as long as the three of us probably have been covering politics, one of the, certainly my evidence in studying public opinion over that period of time is that the, you know, people talk a lot about the base, but it's really switchers that make the outcomes happen in elections. And the biggest pool of switcher voters historically has always been liberal conservative switchers, meaning you'd either vote liberal, or if you didn't, your second choice was conservative or the reverse of that. And this week in our polling, we actually see that as only a 10% segment of the population, 9% actually, whereas liberal NDP switchers are 21%. So that's a much bigger pool of voters relative to the liberal conservative pool. And that's a big difference from elections

past. And I think it has also had the effect of making the liberals a little bit more preoccupied with those votes on the left of the spectrum, including women, including younger women, particularly, which is probably from their standpoint, a really important thing to do, because Jagmeet Singh and the NDP was eating into their support pretty aggressively. And we pushed out numbers for much of this year telling that story. However, the downside potential for the Liberals is that if they had decided that there wasn't really that much risk on the right or the center from the conservatives, I think Aaron O'Toole is writing a new playbook. I think that we don't hear from Jason Kenney. He won't campaign with Doug Ford. Pierre Pauliev has disappeared, along with several of the frontbenchers who tend to be those people who kind of drive liberal voters nuts. And the O'Toole campaign isn't as much about don't you hate

Trudeau as the pre-campaign conservative messaging for the last several years has been. So whether it's because he's got a different strategy in mind than Andrew Scheer or Stephen Harper had, or because his birthplace is a place where you have to fight for that liberal conservative voters switch. I think that's the thing I'm most interested in right now. Will O'Toole's effort increase the pool of accessible voters who are liberal conservative switchers? And will that have an effect on how the liberals campaign so that they're less fixated, maybe on the left side of the spectrum and fighting two fronts. You got thoughts on this, Chantal?

21% switchers, NDP to liberal is also something. I agree with Bruce's analysis of O'Toole's first two weeks, the tone that he's chosen. Actually, he's chosen to present himself as an aspiring prime minister-in-waiting as opposed to the leader of the official opposition, which is what you should be doing if you're not auditioning to be the leader of the official opposition again. He is more experienced and has more intellectual texture, put it this way, than his immediate predecessor, so he wears it better. It's easier to watch, for instance, the social media video about Afghanistan and Erun O'Toole this morning and think, if this guy were prime minister, he would look like that. He doesn't look like he's, you know, reaching for something that he cannot attain. So it suits, to have a campaign that works, it has to suit your personality. And in part, that is Justin Trudeau's problem in this campaign.

They have him doing the negative stuff and it doesn't fit his brand. So it always looks a bit, well, it looks a bit desperate, to tell you the truth. But can you? Voters, non-conservative voters have spent the past months assuming that their choice in the election would be between a majority and a minority liberal government. With every poll, it's becoming clearer that that is not the choice. At that point, those switchers who are now with the NDP, will they be reconsidering their options, thinking, whoa, this is a very different ballgame. I'm not getting Trudeau or Trudeau.

I'm getting Trudeau or O'Toole. And if I don't want to get O'Toole, do I have to switch my vote? I'm not sure that Jagmeet Singh's decision to imply that he could back an O'Toole government really preserves the NDP from that kind of movement. And I'm not sure that the Liberals want to be suddenly trying to appeal to conservative voters rather than bringing home those switchers. As many people have said, that is the traditional Liberal game when they're in an election campaign, when they're in some sense of potential trouble is that they appeal to that vote that switched to the NDP

to try and come back into their camp, because if they don't, they're going to end up with a conservative government. That has worked many times. It hasn't always worked. It didn't work, as you know, Chantel, because you were covering closer than I was, but when Bob Ray won, the Liberals went on a massive campaign in the last

um you know a few days of that campaign to try and communist scare it so you know it's going on terror is going red it'll never happen and can't let it happen uh didn't work uh didn't work at all but it was the ndp leading so if you were a progressive liberal and you thought the liberals were going down it was easier to just switch than if you had looked at a Tory government in the making. Yeah. Peter, I know you want to take a break, so I'll try to be really quick with this point, but I want to pick up on what Chantal said. I do think that the liberals probably presumed that either this was going to be a relatively easy and stable kind of from start to finish, or it was going to be a fight like they had to fight before.

In which case, having it appear to progressive voters that the conservatives could win the election campaign is a precondition of a come from behind, if you like, victory, which they are familiar with, at least this version of the Liberal Party is familiar with. And it takes a, you know, I think it's a, it's kind of an awfully unpleasant thing for campaigners to go to, to realize that you have to spend a couple of weeks looking like you're losing support and maybe losing the election only to find yourself in the middle of a different kind of election campaign, which is a fight for those progressive voters to avoid a conservative government. I think that it's fair to imagine that Erin O'Toole has done a number of the things that would be useful to prevent that from that coalescence from happening,

including, you know, what may seem to some people a relatively small announcement this week, support for gig economy workers. That would not be part of a normal, or at least the recent normal, Conservative Party platform. So very much an effort to reach out to young, centrist, urban, suburban voters. Having said that, he also made it clear that effectively an O'Toole government would reduce Canada's climate targets, essentially burn the planet faster. And if I were the Liberals imagining that last two weeks of a campaign where I was going to rally those progressive voters, that's a huge tool. And so even though I want to be clear, I do think O'Toole has positioned the Conservative Party more effectively in the first going here.

I do also think the Liberals know how to fight that fight that Chantal was alluding to. And O'Toole has a caucus with substantial numbers of people who left to their own devices, would revisit a woman's right to choose, are a little bit waffly on some minority rights issues and this climate change issue is a is a giant target for that coalescence strategy well so far at least if that is the case they've they have not strayed to their own devices it hasn't popped up as campaign issues, the blow-up candidacies that we've seen before in different campaigns. It hasn't happened so far. Long campaign, could happen.

Could happen to them, could happen to others. Could happen on the Liberal side. Could happen on the NDP side. And I want to talk about the NDP when we come back and ask the question, is Jagmeet singh getting too easy a ride this is the bridge with peter mansbridge And we're back with Good Talk. Peter Mansbridge here in Toronto.

Bruce Anderson is in Beach Meadows, Nova Scotia, or close by. And Chantelle Hebert is in Montreal. So, Chantelle, you start us on Jagmeet Singh. Is he getting too easy a ride? He is getting the ride that is afforded to parties that are too complex to be solved by some of the platform issue. We will not be getting so much money from the ultra-rich, whoever they may be, to finance a lot of things in this country. I could go on. We will not be walking away from fossil fuels at the rate that the NDP says that we should. National Pharmacare will not be happening without some provincial buy-in, which at this point outside of British Columbia is pretty much in existence. But why I think it's going to get a bit harder is because of the positioning that has emerged,

which I find a bit unwise for the leader of the NDP to be going around telling people, if the government is a minority, we will decide then who we will support rather than just stick to the answer, I'm running to be prime minister. For one, because it tells you if you're an NDP voter or looking to vote for the NDP that you are not necessarily, you don't have a shot at forming a government of your choice. But second, because it does beg a host of questions. This is a party that has presented all of the good things, quote unquote, that the liberals have put forward, $10 a day childcare, more ambitious climate plans, et cetera, as a product of the influence of the NDP. It is hard to see how you make a rationale that having a conservative government that is in its platform, that it is going to get rid of the $10 a day childcare that the NDP

has pushed for years, and that it is going to be reducing the carbon tax and the climate change emission targets of the liberals, those that the NDP won, that you could support that or that it is a matter of indifference, whether it's Aaron O'Toole or Justin Trudeau, as long as the NDP is in a position of influence. I think that is where the going might get tougher because it does beg a lot of questions. I also believe that many of the climate change activists who, yes, say Justin Trudeau is not doing enough, would not be saying it's four quarters to a dollar, whether it's O'Toole or Trudeau. I'm not sure that the Indigenous leadership, by and large, is indifferent to whether it's O'Toole or Trudeau. I'm not sure that women who want more childcare and who have

not been getting it are indifferent to the notion that it's O'Toole or Trudeau, because we've seen this before. And why should we not just go back to where things were before the Liberals again decided to get serious about Cherokee? I think all those will beg interesting questions. Aaron O'Toole has done what he needs to do to look less scary, and I have anecdotal evidence that that is working. And we'll talk about that at some point, possibly. But I'm not sure that the NDP sympathizers are willing to give Mr. Singh a blank check. We're going to vote for you. We're indifferent to which of the two is prime minister. I don't see that happening when I talk to voters about their prospects.

They have been working on the assumption that Trudeau would be in, and preferably if they're NDP sympathizers in a minority position. All right. I want to get to your anecdotal evidence on the Aaron O'Toole question, but let me give Bruce a shot at the Singh question. Is he getting too easy a ride? Well, yes, in a way. But I also completely agree with Chantal that if this election, she didn't say this, but I would say that if this election does turn into a narrowing of the choice of what government you're going to get, a conservative government or a liberal government, then that does set up better for Trudeau

than it looks right now. And part of that is because of the positions and the way in which Jagmeet Singh has campaigned. NDP supporters would probably hate me saying, using this kind of analogy, but I remember watching the rise of Donald Trump and reading about what was the essence of what he was doing. And it was, he was describing these, you know, really appealing aspirations and saying they were simple. And in a completely different, but also kind of similar way, Jagmeet Singh says, I'm going to solve all of the problems that you identify. And the solutions are going to be really easy. And yes, you're right, Peter, he is not getting all that much scrutiny. And so is that a free ride? Yes, in a way, but it also means he's not

really stress tested at this point. And those ideas, you know, might end up sounding like they're good aspirations, but you can't afford to vote for them if the risk is that you are going to get an O'Toole government. And I think that the thing that O'Toole has done for himself personally isn't the same as saying the conservative brand is somehow rehabilitated with a lot of those voters for whom Indigenous issues or diversity or inclusion or climate change or women's rights, that the conservative brand has a lot of repair work to do. And I think that O'Toole has started that process. But I think that, you know, if we were four days out from the election, I would have a different feeling about the dynamic that might lie ahead. But we're, you know, by Canadian standards, we've got a long election ahead of us, it seems.

And I think that a lot of that's going to come into focus. You know, I'll tell you one thing about Jagmeet Singh. First of all, I agree that he hasn't been stress tested yet. And I agree with both of you that that's coming. You know, it'll come at a certain point in these next couple of weeks. It may be in the debate when, you know, Trudeau especially may choose to go after him in some degree if if he thinks he needs to at that point um but i'll tell you one thing from the little i've seen when he is stress tested he's pretty smooth you know i i'm not sure he has the answers but he sounds like he has the answers um which can take you a certain length of the football field, if you will. And so it'll be interesting to watch when he is pushed,

how he handles things, because, you know, I'm not sure Tom Mulcair did that well when he was pushed. Jack Layton was Jack Layton, so he was able to handle these things. But, you know, it'll be interesting to see what happens there. I want to get to Chantel's thoughts on the anecdotal evidence surrounding urinal tool, but I'll take our last break before I do that. It's time to get back to the bridge with Peter Mansbridge. Back with Good Talk, Chantelle Hebert and Bruce Anderson.

Chantelle, you have anecdotal evidence for us. I love anecdotal evidence. I love stories. It is totally anecdotal evidence for us. I love anecdotal evidence. I love stories. It is totally anecdotal, very removed from anything serious that Bruce would come up with from his polling, but still interesting. And first, I'll preface this with memories from the 2011 federal campaign. That's the campaign that Stephen Harper spent looking for a majority, which he eventually obtained. And he had spent the first two weeks of the campaign hammering the message that Canada needed a strong, stable government, I'm quoting here. And because I was in hotels and traveling in Toronto and Ottawa, I talked to a lot of

people, restaurants, coffee shops, and they wouldn't say that they were looking to vote for X, Y, or Z, but often enough, they would say, we probably need a stable government, which was almost word for word the conservative message at that point. This week, I was talking to people who are not, definitely not conservative sympathizers or supporters. They don't know all of them are separate from each other. We weren't all sitting together drinking each other's bathwater. Three of them said, well, I'm not terribly scared of Erin O'Toole. If that's what happens, that's what happens. I thought that, for me, is the same sign as the, we probably need a stable government in 2011, that the Conservative campaign so far

has achieved one important goal, and that is to make sure that some people who are spooked by the conservatives feel reassured that Aaron O'Toole is not Stephen Harper or Andrew Scheer. I don't think it's because they are aware of the gig economy proposal or the union-friendly proposals or the opioid crisis that should be addressed through health care and not through law and order. I'm not sure they're aware of all of those things, but the buzz that they get does not spook them. They're not going to vote for Erin to all those people. The other thing I thought was interesting, because I'd never seen it before, it may or may not work to those advantage. Usually, once pity sets in, it doesn't really lead to great success.

But two or three people on the bus, on the street, talk about the campaign, and they would talk about Justin Trudeau's decision to call an election. These people were not angry about the election. They were puzzled by how, since then, Justin Trudeau did not seem to be campaigning with gusto. But the word that kept coming back in all those chats was sad. It's sad to watch. I've never heard sad to watch associated with Justin Trudeau before. Whether that means that in the end, these people would give him their vote because they think that he's getting

a bit of a bum right to having managed Canada through the pandemic. I don't know. But those are not the kind of comments you usually hear in an election campaign on the streets in Montreal. You know, I'm not sure I would agree with sad to watch, but I do, I get your stuff about no sense of gusto. As I said earlier, I was, you know, up early this morning, I was watching some campaign footage from the last couple of days,

and the body language on Trudeau just wasn't what I was used to. It was like he wasn't into it yet. I mean, it's early. Maybe he's tired. I don't know. There was a sense there when I was watching that he hasn't hit game form yet, and you don't want to wait too long in a short campaign to hit game form,

if that's the case. What do you make of this anecdotal evidence, Mr. Anderson, media watcher? Well, I definitely, you know, this is the this is the the great journalism the you know the trained ear listening on the ground to the to the voter and hearing things that are reflective of a larger story and why you know in my experience the all the journalists I've known over the years who say there's nothing quite like going out and talking to voters. And I love that kind of journalism. I think it's really important.

And I think it would be great, which is demonize it. Jagmeet Singh doesn't do it because he's poaching liberal votes. Justin Trudeau doesn't do it because he's trying to win those liberal NDP switcher votes. And I think that, so it's not being done in any kind of routine way. Whether it will be done, to me, I do see that being the gravitational pull of the next few weeks where we're going to see polls likely that show a conservative lead, probably a small lead, but enough that it will start to change the conversation about, is this going to be a Trudeau majority or a Trudeau minority to, is this going to be a conservative government or a liberal government after the election? So I guess I think that the patterns that we're seeing

right now set up the come from behind Justin Trudeau, which is the version of Justin Trudeau that always campaigns better to me than the incumbent government version. And I think that when you're an incumbent government and you're running, there's always this kind of question, should you run on your record? Or are people going to say, well, that's what you did for me yesterday, and I don't want to hear it. I want to hear about what's next. And we can see that in the data sometimes. On the other hand, if you presume that people know what you've done, and so you don't

talk about it, there is a real risk in the day and age that we live in where people consume information in so many different ways that they might not know a lot of the things that a government has done on their behalf. And so there's probably more value in letting people know that if it doesn't come off as, you know, overly self-absorbed and rearview mirror kind of conversation. I don't think that this liberal campaign yet has figured out how much it needs to turn its attention to describing what a conservative government would look like. But I assume that work is kind of underway because they're smart people in all of these campaigns. move from a communications approach that feels a little bit government-y, if you know what I mean, in the sense of the cutting edge quality of it. When I see the O'Toole and the Singh materials, they feel more political and less official to me. And I think that works in a campaign. And I think the liberals need to challenge themselves to find that setting that is more like campaigning, more like campaigning from behind and definitely increasing the focus on what a conservative party led on that and maybe also make sure that those soft NDP voters who were thinking that Jagmeet Singh is promising to do things that have not been done at all, actually hear some of what the liberals have been doing on those issues differently, and in particular on issues like climate change.

You sound like you're nibbling around the edges of suggesting the liberals need to go negative. Well, I never really love the characterizations of negative or positive because I kind of feel like if you're running a campaign and you're not prepared to criticize your opponent or call attention to their weaknesses, you're tying one hand behind your back and the others aren't going to do that. So why would you do that? So I don't consider it negative in the sense of it's an act of shamefulness or something like that. I just think it's part of the business of fighting an election campaign. There's a negative that's caricature of the other positions. I think there was a bit of that in the

attempts on healthcare and two-tier healthcare. You must have taught when you landed back from the North that you'd fallen back to the 2000 federal election when you saw those sudden assertions that the conservatives would bring in two-tier healthcare and stuck well there in that little sign that popped up at the end of the leaders' debate, no two-tier healthcare. It failed because there was a caricature and because in between we had a conservative government for a decade that did not introduce a two-tier healthcare system, and it actually pursued the liberal policy on healthcare that Justin Trudeau then pursued from Stephen Harper, including the rate of increase of the

health transfer. But I don't think it's negative to point out that there are choices, and those choices on climate change, on childcare, to name two, are real. And maybe on healthcare, would you agree? Do you think there is a choice on healthcare now? No, I don't. Okay. And maybe on health care, would you agree? Do you think there is a choice on health care now? No, I don't. OK. I think at the end, we always, I know this is going to sound cruel, but the federal liberals are never more interested in the integrity of the health care system than when they are campaigning and they're in a bit of trouble vis-à-vis a conservative contender.

Then they're happy enough not to talk about it for as long as they are in power. So, yes, they look like they are presenting different approaches. Me, I think that one way or another, health transfers to the provinces under either prime minister will increase, that those so-called strings attached will turn out to be, in the case of Quebec, not very stringy. And that both governments are going to want some of the money to go to long-term care, and most provinces will find a way to say that it makes sense because if you're going to

go in an election campaign and you're Doug Ford or François Legault, you're not going to want to be campaigning on not wanting more money for long-term care this year. All right. We've only got a minute or so left. So I got 30 or 40 seconds for each of you to point me forward. What are you going to be looking for in the next week, which I guess we'll be really halfway through the campaign? Bruce first, and then once again, just 30 seconds. Well, I would expect the Conservatives to look at what's been happening for the positive for them and to recommit to that. I think there was a risk going into the campaign

that the Conservatives might not see enough momentum early and they might sort of fall to fighting inside. And I think the signals are they're actually becoming more unified and his support levels among Conservative voters, O'Toole's that is, are going up. So I think they'll continue doing what they're doing. I think the Liberals will probably start to sharpen the contrast with the Conservatives and bring that to the fore, as well as try to describe their,

I don't think they'll attack Jagmeet Singh personally. I just don't think that math works. And I think Jagmeet Singh will start to face questions about the point that Chantal made about, are you really indifferent to a Liberal or a Conservative government? All right, Chantal. By this time next week, the liberal campaign could be in more trouble or not. And that's because next Thursday is the TVA, French Language Leaders Debate, featuring only four leaders, the Bloc Québécois, the NDP, the Liberals and the Conservatives, by the way. If Justin Trudeau comes out of there in bad shape, Quebec, which has been relatively stable compared to Ontario, and that's good news for the Liberals

so far, could start becoming also more fluid. That would be terrible news. I think the assumption that it's going to be as easy to box in Aaron O'Toole as it was to box in Andrew Scheer in that same debate last time is not an assumption the Liberals should be working on. All right. Thank you both, Chantelle and Bruce. Another great edition of Good Talk, keeping in mind that next week we'll start on Monday with the insiders. We get their sense from the kind of party perspectives as to the way things are going. Tuesday is the reporters.

We've got Rob Russo and Althea Raj. And taking a different kind of view of the campaign in terms of how some of the journalism is being done and what issues we should keep in mind while we're watching, listening, and reading to it. I'll have to throw Bruce in on that mix sometimes, or we can crap all over. Oops, sorry.

Now, now, now. Come on. I based myself and apologized. It's all good. Yeah, it's all good. Listen, enjoy the weekend to you both and to all the listeners. Have a great weekend. I'm Peter Mansbridge.

Thanks so much for listening to Good Talk. We'll talk to you again on Monday.