The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Good Talk -- As The Liberal Race Begins, Has Trump Changed Everything?

Episode Date: January 10, 2025

Liberals are gathering at the gate, with some entering the race for leadership. Most eyes are focused on Trump's threat of tariffs.

Are you ready for Good Talk? And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. It's a Good Talk Friday. Chantelle Hebert, Bruce Anderson in the house and you know it's only been a week, not even a week, five days since Justin Trudeau quit. But there's a lot to report today and there are a lot of different angles to go on. And so let's get started in no particular order, as they say. March 9th, circle that one on your date book, because that is the date that the new leader of the Liberal Party of Canada has to be announced by the party itself.

They're starting to flush out the details of how this is all going to work, but March 9th becomes the date, which is not that far off. It's just a couple of months from now and a couple of weeks really before the House resits after prorogation. March 9th, does that work for anybody in particular, or what do we make of that particular date coming back or else, alternatively, the beginning of an election campaign probably to be called on the week of March 24th. So one way or another to push it off any further would have been really hard, but to bring it forward would also have been difficult, given that you do need to give people who want to run a fair shot, they're going to have to raise $350,000. For those wondering, that is not money you can go

to your savings account for, not because some of the candidates might not have $350,000 in their savings account, you must raise it. So you need to at least, you know, get the fundraising going really, really at top speed. And the party also needs to vet the people who sign up to vote in this process. And by the way, if you do want to participate in the choice of that leader, you have until January 27th at the latest to sign up and earn the right to be someone who will be voting. So when you put all of that together, it basically means that if you are coming basically from nowhere, not very well known, not a big network across the country, you probably should take a pass on this because you're not going to go very far.

Why I say that is because this isn't a contest that you can win by being popular in your own neighborhood or writing. To win, you need to win in a lot of ridings across the country because every riding is worth the same number of points when they tally up the votes. That means you need an organization that can allow you to do well in Nunavut and in Mississauga, to do well in Quebec and in Alberta. So unless you have a really solid organizational backbone already in place,

and you have a name to go with it, you will not be the dark horse that comes from nowhere and obscurity today to prime ministership and liberal leadership on March 9th. That's not happening. Okay. I want to get to these, who this likely benefits and who positions themselves well for a race in a second. But I just want to clean up a couple of things. The $350,000, and Bruce, you can respond to this. The $350,000 cap on the campaign. It sounds like... It's not a cap. It's an entry. I'm sorry, the entry. But is there a cap on what you can actually

spend during these next two months on the campaign? I don't know. I don't think we know that yet. Okay. But what there is in place is a prevention for like an Elon Musk type, as we watch in the States coming in, dropping $150 million into the Trump pot for his campaign. You can't do that here, right? No, and you cannot also be Elon Musk and give it to whoever you like. There are limits to how much you can give a candidate.

Yeah, there will be rules. I don't know what they are, but no, that's not a cap. That's an entry fee. And you can't finance yourself. So suppose you're a millionaire and you're running. Well, we have resolved that some time ago that a candidate with deep pockets cannot just finance himself or herself. You have to go through a process of contributions. And there is a cap on how much one individual can give to a campaign.

I feel like you're letting down our role as detail nerds about how this campaign is going to work right out of the gate. Okay, I'll say out of the money, what about the people who actually vote? What's clear about that? Because there's already all kinds of stories floating around about pets being registered. Don't tell them, you go. As opposed to when Justin Trudeau was chosen, when just about anybody that could come up with a driver's license that showed a Canadian address, this is going to be a bit tighter

in the sense that you must and the party must verify, and they will spend a lot of time doing that because you're talking thousands and thousands of people to vet, but you must be a Canadian citizen or a permanent resident. You can still be young, 14 and up, but you can't be a foreign student, for instance, in this one to register. The way the process worked last time, you could just go online and register to vote and you still can,

but you still had to go, the party still had to take your registration and then validate it. So for whoever has been signing up, that's not the end of the process, sorry. My cat is not probably going to get to vote. No, I did not register my cat. But there are stories, and you do read them, about foreign influence. Let's be clear about something. We are talking here about what's today the 10th, so there are 17 days to sign up people. Suppose you want to, you're some organization or lobby group or whatever and you want to interfere with the result of this as i explained before you cannot do it by doing well in a market where your members or your

sympathizers are well represented you have to be able to organize so that you have influence in a hundred or more writings at a minimum. So the notion that a 14-year-old living somewhere will in the end determine who's the leader in a tight race, that's kind of hogwash. If this were a free-for-all, you know, the one with the largest number of votes just wins, it would be easier to interfere with the result. But in this case, it is really hard because there aren't very many organizations of all kinds, constituencies, lobbies, call them what you want, that have the organizational infrastructure to be present on the ground in as many ridings as that. I personally went through every riding result for the last conservative leadership vote,

and the same rules applied when it came to counting the results. And I matched that with, for instance, the last census to find out where there were large pockets of communities that have been associated remotely or not to foreign interference. And I could find no evidence that had there been attempts, it was significant enough to tip the balance for one candidate versus another. In clear, Pierre Poilievre would have won regardless of whether anyone tried in any of those writings. And I didn't see any result that seemed terribly out of whack with the general picture of the results across the country in those writings.

So yes, foreign interference is a serious issue. But if I were wanting to do foreign interference, it's much easier for me to pack a nomination meeting. I only need to sign up X number of members in a given writing and show up on that night than to pack a leadership vote. And I think people who are writing about that should be a bit more sophisticated about the mechanics and the realities of the conservative or the liberal leadership votes. Okay. It's so unusual to hear Chantal criticize that some parts of the media that are writing about this this way, but I agree with her criticism that there's a rush to decide that this is going to be completely compromised. And I think that Chantal is absolutely right, that there are some, you know,

some pretty reasonable guardrails around it. And also there's just the facts of it's 58 days. You know, that's, that's both the good news in terms of people worried about the thing being compromised and it's bad news in terms of it. The 58 days is a reflection of the fact that Justin Trudeau left the party a needle in a thread and said, here, do what you can. And so far, I say so far, I mean, we still need to hear a little bit more from the Liberal Party about these rules. But so far, that thread is going through that needle now where it all ends up uh in terms of does it improve does anything

in this um setting of the rules and in the 58 day campaign will it improve the fortunes of the liberal party that's a separate question i don't think we know the answer to that for me peter i think the the election that we were going to, if everything stayed the same as it did, as it was last month, is a potentially different election from what we will have now. I say that because Justin Trudeau isn't the liberal leader, which was a huge factor in the in last month's election, I say. And because Donald Trump is doing more Trump stuff that is very, very, very directed at Canada. Will he keep on doing that? Who knows? But, you know, I was watching CNBC this morning, and it's a big topic down there. Greenland is a big topic down there. Panama is a big topic down there.

And the more that American media are covering the idea of this manifest destiny that Trump is planning out, you know, increasing America's footprint, the more we'll hear about it in Canada for sure. So I'm absolutely of the view that we don't know what kind of an election this is going to be, even though it might start not long after 58 days from now. Now, the last point for me is that you say, even though it might start not long after 58 days from now. Now, the last point for me is that you say, who does it help? I think it probably is already helping focus the mind of people who thought that maybe they could be part of a 10-person field or something like that, as these races sometimes turn into. I'm not sure that the money is going to be a big discriminating factor, but it will be for some, for sure.

The number of signatures that you need to get from different categories, that will also be a discriminating factor. There is always, in a party like this, going to be, in a short race, a rush of people to pick their favorite frontrunner. Sometimes in longer races, the opposite occurs. People go, well, if I join a giant campaign full of notable people, I won't be influential in that. So why don't I pick one of my favorite middle of the field candidates? Because maybe I'll have more influence and I can make a little bit more of a name for myself or I can feel like I'm being more useful. I don't think that is this. I think the biggest hard question for some people who might be considering it is, can I win? If I win, will I have a successful election campaign? Or will I end up being that person who delivers for the Liberal Party a really

crushing loss? I don't think it's easy to answer that question. It felt a lot easier for people in the cabinet in particular to think about doing this six months ago, nine months ago. It didn't feel as though it's imminent. You win the leadership and you're plunged into an election campaign, the result of which might be the loss of party status for the Liberal Party. That's a big, that's a much bigger risk calculation to take in terms of what the rest of your life feels like if you are that person. And so I think that's narrowing the field somewhat. But, you know, I did see that there was a Liberal MP, Chandra Arya,

and a former Liberal MP, Frank Bayless. I'm sure they're both, you know, quality people, but the Liberal Party will only have so much share of voice with the Canadian public over the next 58 days. The more of that share of voice that is taken up by candidates who do not have a chance to win this, that's a bad scenario for the liberal party they don't need more candidates in this race that cannot win they need the maximum amount of time for people who uh we hear might run uh people like mark carney or uh christian freelance we don't know if they're running but we think probably assume that they're running. I think that's what the Liberal Party needs. It needs to use its share of voice extremely effectively over the next 58 days.

Okay, let me just make a couple of points before we move on, because I want to start putting some names, as you just did, to the things we're saying here. Your point about Trump, and we'll get to it in a more significant way after the next break, is really interesting because, you know, I think Trump, it seems, Trump seems to have given the liberals a whole different thing to talk about. You know, it's not about the carbon tax. It's not about this, that, or the other thing. It's now about Trump and who's best to deal with Trump.

It seems to be the way that the story is developing. And the access, wanting access into the American media, as you say, Bruce, a lot of talk in the States about the Canada situation as well as Greenland and Panama. I was talking to a friend of mine at Fox yesterday who says they have been swamped by Canadian politicians of all stripes wanting to get on their air to talk this story, which is interesting. I mean, I don't think that's ever happened before to the kind of extent it seems to be happening right now. But let's put some names to the things, to the suggestions that are being made here, which is a smaller race, likely developing as people start looking at what their real odds are, what their chances are. What's a smaller race? Aside from the also-rans, if you assume the also-rans

are the two fellows you listed there, Bruce, but we're talking about the name candidates of people that the Canadians have actually heard of. Who's in, who's out? Let's set aside the marginal candidates by warning them they won't get to be king or queenmaker in any event because this is a ranked ballot, So there will not be this dramatic moment when you take your 50 supporters on the floor of some convention to tip the balance. The liberals have a choice between deciding that this is a campaign about who can rebuild the party over a decade or who can be answering what I think is the ballot box question in the next election, i.e. who of Pierre Poiliev and Mr. or Ms. X is best placed to handle the relationship with Donald Trump? And I do believe that will be the ballot box question, are, of the free trade election. Not every party walked into that campaign wanting to campaign on the FDA.

But does anybody remember anything else from the 1988 campaign except the free trade agreement? I also believe that if the liberals want to show that they are capable of handling the Trump-Canada relationship. They need to show it in some cases by not running for the leadership. I think what Dominique Leblanc did this week was one of the appropriate things to do. A 58-day campaign cannot be run while you're the finance minister in this particular calendar period. But I also think he threw a wrench of sorts into Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly and International Trade Minister François-Philippe Champagne's thinking on this issue, because they both also have strategic posts in the current efforts.

And the first question that would be asked of them if they decide to run is, are you not chasing butterflies while the earth is burning between Canada and the U.S.? And I think Canadians will judge the Liberal government on both the quality of its leadership candidates and the quality of its efforts to ensure that there's not an empty space while this battle is starting to unfold between Canada and the U.S. on the economic and the trade front, which basically comes back to the notion that a limited race would normally feature for sure from everything we hear and see. Christian Freeland, who handled the file in the last Trump administration period, and Mark Carney, who does have a CV that matches the requirements of the task. Whether there will be others from cabinet,

well, I've named those who say they are still reflecting. I have heard people this week talk a good game about Karina Gould, who is an interesting candidate and a good minister, but I think more appropriate to a party that is looking to rebuild rather than a party that is trying to fill the box of who, of Pierre Poiliev and someone else can handle the Canada-US relationships. It will require economic credentials. You will hear from BC, a former BC Premier, Christy Clark. Me, I am waiting for Ms. Clark's first French language interview, because she will be debating if she becomes Liberal leader, Yves-François Blanchet,

the Bloc Québécois leader, and others in French in three months. If she's not up to that, I think she should save everybody time and money and go back to hit the books to do better maybe in a year or two when the liberals change leaders again. Can the other main two, Freeland and Carney, can they handle that situation? Yes. Mark Carney's French is, as the last time I heard, up to the job. I expect he's been brushing up on it and using it more. And Chrystia Freeland is also, every time we've had conversations, we spoke French. And I mean conversations that lasted more than five minutes.

It wasn't a scrum, like an hour's conversation. We never switched to English, which is very rare when you're speaking to an Anglophone and you are me, whose English is up to the task. It's interesting that both are from Alberta and both are bilingual, which tells you something about all those people who say, aye, aye, aye, it's so unfair to people from Western Canada that the leader of a national party has to be bilingual. Well, look at that.

We should do a podcast in French one day because you and I can handle that really well. I didn't know that we could do that. Peter, we can get you an AI translator in your ear or something like that. Oui, allo. Oui, allo. He would always be saying oui, oui, oui. Okay, Bruce, you want to get in on the names?

Yeah, look, I think that if people are saying that they're still seriously considering it, that's something less than it feels like the right thing to do and I'll make a final decision soon or something like that. There's a spectrum of hesitant comments. And on one end, you have comments that might naturally lead to a decision not to. And on the other, you're sending a signal out to organizers that this is a real race.

And I think that Christy Clark, for me, is kind of in the middle of that. I'm not seeing enough that makes me think that this is going to be a for-sure campaign. Melanie Jolie, I feel like that's probably the same thing. Francois-Philippe Champagne, I think that's the same thing. You know, I think for everybody last year who is thinking about doing this, and by last year, I mean, probably not December or November, but more June, you could imagine having a race where you could build familiarity and interest over time. At 58 days with the possibility of having to go into an election right after that, that's a very different set of calculations. And so if people who had been thinking about it decide not to, it's not a measure of their lack of ability or their lack of confidence in their ability.

It's really more a question of this needle and this thread. There's not much room for error. And there's a lot of things that could potentially go wrong. My expectation is Karina Gould will be in the race. I agree with Chantal. She's an interesting candidate. She's a good minister. But I don't see her having a chance to win this race this time.

It may be a question of her building some profile for herself in politics so the people in her riding kind of see more of her, and maybe for the next time. I also think that ministers who have incredibly important files as it relates to the Canada-US is important. And Chantal mentioned a couple of them, Dominique Leblanc and François-Philippe Champagne, and Jonathan Wilkinson is probably in that category as well. So for him, it might be a part of the calculation as to whether or not he decides to put his name in the race. I think we can be reasonably confident that we'll see Chrystia Freeland and Mark Carney in the race.

And I think it's reasonable to assume that those will be the two names that tend to dominate the conversation. Both obviously, I think, quite talented, very smart people, very knowledgeable about the world. But I think we know what the – they're not the same. And they're not the same in a number of ways, but maybe the most prominent way is that Ms. Friedland has been beside Justin Trudeau for a number of years, basically saying all the things that he stood for and decided to do, she agreed with and cheerleaded for. And I don't blame her for that. That's not a criticism. It's part of the job.

But, I mean, there's a reason why Pierre Poliev continues to try to link, to say they're all the same. They're all Justin Trudeau. And he tries to say that about Mark Carney as well. I think it's harder to land that when it comes to Mark Carney than it is Chrystia Freeland. And so I think that's part of the choice dynamic too. What I think will be really interesting, assuming we're looking at a race that has a shorter list than some had talked about even a week ago, with

a focus on Carney and Freeland, I think what will be interesting, really interesting, in the next couple of weeks, and it will happen very quickly, we're suddenly going to see these people not standing behind a microphone in a scrum in Ottawa, but in front of a crowd of liberals in a convention setting where anything can happen. And people will be looking closely as to how they perform, and the media will be all over it, pouncing on them.

Does Carney live up to the expectations? Does Freeland live up to the expectations does freeland live up to the expectations can she move a room can he move a room all that kind of stuff it's a whole different dynamic when that game starts uh and and people's opinions can change in a in a heartbeat in terms of how they want to feel about a particular candidate so that will be interesting to watch. Okay, I've got to take our first break unless somebody has something they want to say on any of this. No, I was going to ask you, aren't you going to take a break? Because I know that you like to chat.

You need that pause to brush up on your French. I was going to say, I've got to get the book out right now and see what I can do in the next few moments. We'll be back right after this. And welcome back. You're listening to the Friday episode of Good Talks.

Chantelle Hebert, Bruce Anderson are here. I'm Peter Mansbridge. You're listening on Sirius XM, Channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform. You're also watching us, we hope, on our YouTube channel. Glad to have you with us wherever you're connecting to Good Talk today. All right, let's get to the Trump factor. Does anyone in this conversation still think this is all just a joke?

Did we ever? I don't think so. I know I didn't. I've always thought this was more serious than trolling and joking around, that he actually believes this stuff. And he's trying to force it. He's trying to force the issue. He thinks we're in a weak position, Canada, and now's the time to move.

What is the impact it's having? I think you both agree, as do most people now, that it has the potential of totally changing not only this leadership race, but an impending election to this being the number one issue, as opposed to all the other things that even just a couple of weeks ago seemed to be at the top of the list. Is this the factor we think it is at this point? Of course it is. And by the way, we may be catching up, or the political class may be catching up,

the Canadians on this. Over the Christmas break, I was struck by the fact that while we were still asking ourselves, will Justin Trudeau leave or stay, the people that came to talk to me who weren't inside the bubble would not ever ask, is Justin Trudeau going to leave or stay? They assumed he was going to leave. They would always ask about Trump and tariffs, always.

So imagine if that was before the latest developments on the Trump front, how it is now a prominent issue in people's minds. And people will be looking, and you can see it even in some of the things that the conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has been doing. Yes, he is trying to repeat his ad hominem attack on the liberals, everything is broken, et cetera, et cetera. But he has had to add more constructive comments as to what he would do as prime minister. And he had a news conference yesterday. And the part that I found fascinating wasn't all the, you know, I'm going to be campaigning against Justin Trudeau no matter what, and we're going to have a carbon tax election.

You can say that till the cows come home. If voters are not looking for the answers you're providing, they're going to go look elsewhere. So you won't have a choice but to move off a bit the rhetoric that he had hoped to win on. But when it comes to dealing with the Canada-US relationship, it's very hard for Mr. Poitier to not end up close to the same page as the liberal government. A list of items that he would impose tariffs on, standing up for we're not ever

going to be the 51st state. There aren't 60 strategies on hand to deal with this that you can cite. There's a black and white choice between me and whoever that is. He's also shadowboxing for the first time since he became leader in the sense that he doesn't know who's going to be standing across from him. And this week, it was kind of interesting to watch Donald Trump's reaction to Pierre Poiliev saying we're never going to be the 51st state period. And Trump's answer was, I don't care what he says. One of the things that Donald Trump likes is to go after celebrities. Obviously, at this point, Mr. Poiliev doesn't quite rank enough of his attention on the star front for him to dwell a lot on Pierre Poilievre.

So it's, you know, impossible to see that not changing the conversation. And if you want an example of that, look at Premier Ford in Ontario, who's been left, right and center on the media. He is getting time on Fox and elsewhere. And it is obliterating the opposition parties in that province. They are completely cut out of the conversation. What can they say? The premier should not be going on TV defending Ontario and Canada every second day.

So, and if there is an Ontario election, I'm sure we'll come back to that when we talk about federal election timing, expect Mr. Ford to reap profit from what he has been doing over the past few weeks, which basically is what a premier should be doing in Ontario at this juncture, or look at Justin Trudeau's CNN interview and take away some of the child care, etc. Pierre Poilievre, in that interview, would have basically been saying, or making many of the same points as Justin Trudeau. He would have been saying tariffs will hurt the American consumers. He would have been saying, we're not, you know,

there is no desire on the part of Canadians to become American. It's a different conversation as it should be. Bruce, I find it interesting, by the way, that, you know, Justin Trudeau goes to Washington and sits down with Jake Tapper on CNN. He's not doing any interviews here. Now, he did a news conference the other day, and he took a fair number of questions, but he hasn't done a sit-down, face-to-face interview,

and he's doing them in the States, and he's about to do another one, I think, as well today. Anyway, Bruce, go ahead. Yeah, I think that's what I'd be doing if I was him, probably. I don't think there's what i'd be doing advise him probably uh i don't think there's a lot of a lot to be gained from uh having conversations in canada with media where you're going to be asked about you know regrets have you had more than that one about electoral reform what else you know who do you like in this race what should your ministers do how's it going

how does it feel or how do you uh what are you going to do about trump you know like why people with your background uh want to have those interviews but i don't understand why he would want to do them but look to your uh to your your question um i watched a good portion of the poly of press conference yesterday and i found it quite interesting as well first thing i say is that we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that this this individual knows how to deliver a message he is a very effective speaker he's not everybody's cup of tea but he lands a line and he lands it in french uh almost as well as he lands it in French almost as well as he lands it in English. Second thing I would say is that he knew last week that he could choose from any one of four or five ballot questions. And he was going to run up a big score against the liberals. The liberals had no ballot question last week.

They literally, if they were plunged into an election and somebody asked me, what should they run on? I would say, I can't tell you what the idea should be because they had not been preparing in any way, shape or form to run an election. They were just trying to get through from one day to the next. And so the Liberal Party at least now has a chance to develop its own version of a ballot question. And Donald Trump's ambition and aggression is definitely pointing, you know, it's a pretty big billboard for what that could be. The things that Pierre Pauliev was doing yesterday that caught my attention, first of all, I remember the first number of months or years even that he was the leader where, you know, what you would really see in the in the visuals was this Pierre for PM logo. I didn't see that yesterday. Second thing that you might notice is that the colors would all kind of reflect a conservative blue. And the branding, I think, is pretty effective for a conservative party. Yesterday, you could not fit another Canadian flag into the setting that Pierre Polyev did. We should put up a picture of it on the YouTube channel if we can, because it would have looked completely at home as a Liberal Party backdrop for a leadership contender to enter the race. It was very much,

look at me, I am the Canadian that you want to hear these days in this time. And then the other things that I saw is that he did want to keep saying carbon tax, Carney, carbon tax, free land, carbon tax, carbon tax, carbon tax. But it felt like a guy who was kind of, he wanted to play his greatest hit, what tax. But it felt like a guy who was kind of, he wanted to play his greatest hit, what he thought his greatest hit was, but it was his greatest hit from 2024 or 2023. And I don't know that the listenership is going to be there.

I said something like this the other day, and I got a letter from one of our viewers who said, you're wrong and a few other choice words. But I know there are people for whom for whom this is the the issue. I'm not saying nobody cares about it, but I am saying in my experience, it seems unlikely that that is going to be the thing that people where people go, you know, I'm worried about the Trump stuff. But I just I just got to go and vote to get rid of this carbon tax and rebate. So I don't think that's where it's going to be.

I think he's struggling to know Paulieb, whether or not he can still prosecute this idea of we should be against globalism as though anybody other than that kind of hardcore base of people who do their own research about politics on Google and they chase conspiracy theories and that sort of thing. Like, I don't know that the average Canadian goes globalism. That's really what we've got to shut down, especially in the context of the destabilizing effect that the U.S. president is having. It feels to me that his positioning on that, which seems to be let's shrink Canada back to within our borders. Let's look out for ourselves. Let's not talk with the rest of the world.

By all means, let's not go to international meetings where people talk about the economy. That seems out of place in the Trump, in the new Trump world. He talks about chaos and chaos has been a great message for him. You know, in the last year, it was a great song in 2024 describing all of the different aspects of chaos. But yesterday he was sort of leaning hard into the chaos of the last 20 days and the next 58 days. And he wanted Justin Trudeau to go and call an election right now, which is a completely fanciful idea. And most voters would hear that and go, well, that's not going to happen. It probably shouldn't happen. We should find out who the liberal leader is and

then we should have a race and see what we think about that. So I'm not sure that him describing chaos is necessarily that great a strategy because if people believe that things seem chaotic they're more likely to think that it's a function now of the international pressure the u.s pressure and they're going to look for somebody who can help get us out of chaos and people who are kind of disruptive populists are going to have a hard time saying i'm the anti-chaos candidate i'm the stabilizing candidate i think that for him if i was him i'd be trying to figure out how do i move from being that person who says everything is falling apart to being somewhat more of a i can make things stop feeling like they're falling apart. And I know that's what he's trying to do,

but I think that the world has changed for him. It's definitely not a good world for the Liberal Party. I'm not suggesting that. But the world has changed for Pierre-Paul Lieb, and you can see some signs of it yesterday. It has also changed, by the way, for the other opposition parties in the sense that if this becomes a referendum, the election on who can

best handle Trump, it kind of takes a lot of oxygen out of the room of, for instance, the NDP or the Bloc, who are kind of vying for influence, but they're not, you know, the main choices. I'm sorry if Jagmeet Singh wants to claim that he is a choice for prime minister. He's going to have to do a lot better than anything that I've seen over the past few weeks. Just a reminder that prior to the free trade election, the conservatives, Brian Mulroney's conservative, introduced the concept of the GST in a budget to be introduced and put in place after the election. And clearly it was on the ballot. But it was never a big issue in that election. It was always all about, we did have eventually a GST debate. But in the election when the conservatives were putting it forward,

it did not become a major issue because it was completely eclipsed by the FTA conversation. Just one word about Mr. Poiliev in closing. It is also a bit of a problem for him, and it could become a larger problem as time goes on, that people like Stockwell Day, who was a minister under Stephen Harper, who was the leader of the Canadian Alliance, and it was the main right of center party in the House of Commons, has been shown to come down on the merits of becoming the 51st state, or that Kevin O'Leary, who ran after Stephen Harper left, and eventually, through his support to Maxime Bernier, has been going around saying how great it would be.

The only figures who seem to think that it's a great idea are identified to the conservative movement in this country. That's not great. I think if I were Pierre Poilievre, I would also wish that Elon Musk went on to praise someone else very, very quickly. Yes, indeed. Yeah. I want to talk about the Musk thing in a minute.

We've got to take a final break before I get there. The one thing that is a potential issue for the Liberal Party over these next few weeks as the campaign unfolds, I would guess, is that Justin Trudeau is still the prime minister. He still leads the government. And he still leads the fight against Donald Trump, in a sense, in terms of the response to tariffs and whether we're going to put tariffs in of our own and when that might happen. And, you know, the possibility exists that you're going to have the liberal leadership contenders offside with what the liberal government is potentially doing in this fight.

I mean, they're going to be tied. If they're united, they're going to be tied to Trudeau's decisions on that fight. And if they're not united, it's going to look like what the heck's going on inside this party. So that'll be interesting to watch as well. There's a lot of things about these next few weeks that have potential for not only interest in terms of the campaign, but sparks within the campaign itself.

Okay, let's take the final break and come back and talk about Elon Musk right after this. We're back for our final segment on Good Talk for this week. Bruce Anderson, Chantelle Hebert, Peter Mansbridge. Okay, Elon Musk. You know, I think a lot of people and perhaps those closest to Trump are still a bit puzzled as to what exactly is happening with this guy. Richest man in the world. Obviously, he's had successes in a number of different areas of technology.

But also can look like a bit of a wingnut on some things and the stuff he says and the actions he takes. He has taken a very active role on this, you know, let's get Canada into the package here, was never a fan of Trudeau's and certainly hasn't exhibited any like for him over the last few weeks. Is Musk a player in what's happening here? What do you think of that, Bruce? Well, I think that sometimes the importance of X as a platform is overstated in terms of the mass numbers of people who have an open mind and can be influenced by what they see.

Those are two different things, by the way, that kind of reduce the amount that he can have influence just on the basis of his use of his platform. However, media do use the platform a lot to acquire information and to follow kind of storylines. And so I think that there is a larger role for X, whether that's good or not, that's very debatable. I'm kind of a free speech advocate generally, but it's, you know, definitely been the case that you can see signs that the algorithms are, are, are creating different effects in democracy than if it was just a reflection of what people want to talk about. I think that's fair to say. And I don't think governments or politicians really know what to do about

that. So they probably won't do anything about it. But the larger issue of Elon Musk isn't so much the X platform. It's the thought that he is by a country mile now, I think, the richest person in the world. And he seems completely preoccupied with influencing politics. And in one particular direction, I was looking at his Twitter feed this morning and it's a lot of reposts about the alternative for Germany party, which is a very right-wing party. And the things that he's retweeting is a conversation about Adolf Hitler. I don't know, you know,

maybe he's trying to find a way to make some sort of subtle point about the AFD is not the Hitler party, but it feels to me like if you're talking about that, no mainstream politician in Canada wants to have anything to do with you. This is not a conversation that you want to be associated with at all. You do not want Elon Musk to be your running mate from a messaging standpoint to seeing Justin Trudeau. As much as a lot of Canadians want to see Justin Trudeau diss,

they don't probably want to see the kind of posts that Elon Musk put out about Justin Trudeau. And the more that he does that, the more that he intervenes in support of far right parties in other countries, and the more that he then goes on to say, I like Pierre Polyev, he's the next prime minister of Canada, that can't be a good thing. All those people who want to know what does Elon Musk think who I should vote for, and I'll just vote for that person. Those people are voting conservative already, as far as I'm concerned. So his visibility is potentially a significant risk factor for Pierre-Paul Yeff.

To win the election or to explain Pierre-Paul Yeff's lead in the polls, you need to look at the liberal column from past elections from 2015 on, and then the math is easier that if people who voted liberal in those elections have switched to the conservatives. The stars aligning to give them a choice other than Trudeau and Elon Musk backing Poiliev so openly, the risk to the conservatives is that some, many of those voters might decide to reconsider with Trudeau gone, to say, I don't really want to be voting for a party that is being praised by someone like that.

I'm thinking, for instance, of the stance that Pierre Poiliev and the Conservative Party traditionally, but even more so in the past year, have taken a pro-Israel stance. I'm not so sure that the voters, many of them liberals, as we saw in St. Paul's, a writing that has a significant Jewish constituency and that went to the conservatives in a by-election early this summer. I'm not sure any of those voters were in part of the Jewish community and care about this debate, how they would want to vote for a party that looks like it's associated with someone who is promoting what is described in Germany as a neo-Nazi party. And so to wish Mr. Poiliev well is to wish for Elon Musk to cease and desist and go wreak havoc somewhere else, because at this point he is becoming a liberal asset.

There's a line that conservatives, I think, need to be careful with here in Canada because of the way that it's being dealt with in the United States. And it has to do with this term woke that we've heard a lot of over the last few years, right? I hear Pierre Polyev say wokeism is a problem and I know that that resonates with a fair number of people, but,

and mostly it resonates not because people want to reject diversity and inclusion and equity, but because they feel like they've heard more of it than they wanted to relative to what they were hearing about the cost of eggs and milk and whatnot. And so it was really about where the dial needs to be set. And I think that I don't think we hear quite as much of that from Pierre Polyev on a routine basis. There was a little bit yesterday, but not that much. But where I'm going with this is I was looking at, again, Musk's retweets and comments

and watching some of the reaction to the L.A. fires, Donald Trump Jr. was going on about DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion, should be called D.I.E. After a week wildfire response, the department had fired several white male firefighters to boost inclusivity. This kind of rhetoric, which was, and he says the results speak for themselves, and Elon Musk retweeted that and said, yes, they do. That is a, that's well over the line, I think, of what most Canadians would consider to be a reasonable comment around this whole question of diversity, equity, and inclusion. It's weaponizing that idea in a way that could create a backlash if Pierre Poliev finds himself kind of ensnared in that. And I say ensnared if he chooses to ensnare himself in that as well, because he could well do that. He has shown an interest in

that before. All right. We're almost out of time. In the minute I have left, when we meet a week from today, are we going to be looking at a lineup, an announced lineup in the Liberal Party for Justin Trudeau's job? It's not going to be a lineup in the sense that to have a lineup, you need more than a couple of people, more than two or three. But yes, I believe that by this time next week, we should have, it's going to be the 17th, right? They have until the 23rd to declare it. So I'm assuming we're going to have a pretty solid idea of who's not running and who's

running. Agreed. Bruce? Yeah, I think we'll, you know, if I use Chantal's numerics for defining a lineup, I think we'll have a lineup, but it won't be a long lineup. It won't be a big queue. It will be maybe like four people, maybe five at the outside. Not like passport control on a bad summer afternoon. No, no. And I think that anybody that tries to wait beyond that is not looking at a viable candidacy would be my guess anyway, because why would you in a 58-day window that would be 51 then, why would you squander any more of those days?

All right. Well, we won't squander any more time because we've reached our limit for today's good talk. Thanks to Bruce, thanks to Chantel, and thanks to you for listening. The buzz will be out tomorrow morning, 7 a.m. in your mailbox, if you subscribe at nationalnewswatch.com. There's no cost. Just give us your email and we're here on your way. The bridge will be back as of Monday.

Janice Stein will be back with us on Monday after missing a week with all these political developments. So let's talk about with Janice as always. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you again in a couple of days. Take care of you guys.