The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Good Talk -- Call The Election Soon?

Episode Date: November 15, 2024

Donald Trump's win has changed everything so why not change the Canadian election timetable?

Are you ready for Good Talk? And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here with Chantal Hébert and Bruce Anderson. It's your Friday episode of The Bridge, which means good talk and lots of good talk to come. And we're going to start this way. You know, we have assumed for, I guess, the last three and a half years that the election would be in the fourth year. Next year, that's when it's scheduled. That's when most of the talk is about. But now, one of the esteemed members of this panel is suggesting,

no, let's get at it. Let's get at it now. There's lots of reasons to get at it now. There should be an election now. And there she is to explain her theory on this one, Chantal Hébert. So calendar-wise, I am not suggesting a Christmas election. It's still 2025. What I am suggesting is to have an election sooner rather than later in 2025. And to have that election happen on a call by the prime minister

and not on the eventual day, which most observers expect to happen after the next budget when this government is defeated. The reason I got to that reasoning, I have absolutely no religion on the election date, and I have none until the presidential election. Then I started to think in terms of public policy. I listened to Mr. Trudeau and his ministers explain that they'd seen this before, that they were going to tackle it again, and that they'd done rather well the first time that Donald Trump was president of the new hires for the Trump cabinet And I came to a couple of conclusions,

and this has been, you know, my thinking on this has changed from day to day this week. The first is from a public policy perspective. We will have an election in 2025. There is no getting around that. It will, at the latest, take place next October, meaning we would be in a campaign at the end of the summer. Most of us expect that that will come earlier. It will come in the spring. So there is're accelerating, changing our calendar here. That is the reality of the calendar. Until that election takes place, there is absolutely no reason why people in Washington who already think that Justin Trudeau isn't such a great person would want to take him seriously. He brings to the table for the challenges that will be coming our way soon very, very little political capital.

I'm trying to say politely that the inclination for anyone who is called upon to interact with the current Canadian government or its prime minister is going to be to wait Mr. Trudeau out and see what happens to him in the election. That's already the case in this country, where provinces, premiers, groups are waiting him out. They're basically saying, well, you know, if you show up again this time next year, maybe we'll talk to you and see where we go from there, which puts him and puts the country in a very weak position. I'll give you one example of that weakness.

Canada is host of the G7 next June. That's luck of the draw, put it this way. It will also be most likely Mr. Trump's first visit to Canada. To prepare to host the G7 summit requires having public servants, high level diplomats lay the groundwork for the agenda. That is very much tied to the prime minister's vision and strategy going into a G7 summit. The way that the calendar is working out politically at this point, we could be in a days or days before that summit takes place in June. And the prime minister who might end up chairing that meeting might not be the prime minister that any of the civil servants and diplomats picked by the current prime minister prepared for.

So that, from a public policy perspective, I came to this, we would be better served with an election earlier rather than later, so that whoever shows up in June, and I'm not saying Pierre Poiliev would be better than Justin Trudeau or the reverse, shows up in June as someone who has a fresh mandate, not someone who is either just coming in and improvising, or is someone who is at the very end of his or her shelf life as leader of the current government because an election.

Then I started thinking some more and I thought, OK, but wouldn't it also be to the liberals advantage to actually election happen sooner rather than later? Oh, yeah, the polls are really bad. For two years, Justin Trudeau has been trying and failing to find a rationale and a narrative to bring to Canadians in an election. He has one now. One of his larger successes, one that no one quarrels with, has been his handling of the Trump administration in that first term. And for sure, one of the ballot box issues in the upcoming Canadian election will be who do you want to lead Canada and face the challenges that the if he wants to be on the offensive

and be the one who frames the electoral conversation, it would actually be to his advantage in the circumstances to be the one who actually takes the initiative of calling an election rather than going on that campaign as the lame duck whose government was finally defeated in the House of Commons. And that's basically where I'm at. Public policy, good, and eventually politics from the liberal perspective, better than the alternatives.

Okay, Bruce, what do you make of that argument? Well, first of all, this is an example of why I love this format more than I used to love at issue. No disrespect to at issue. That's a very, very interesting set of thoughts that Chantal put on the table. And when you wrote me yesterday and said that this was something that Chantal wanted to talk about, I thought, yeah, that was an interesting idea. You first said she wants an election now or she's going to advocate for an election now. And then I was thinking, well, I don't know about that timing.

That doesn't make that much sense to me. And of course, then she just defused that right out of the gate. But I'm still not quite on the same page as Chantal. But I do think there's a lot in what she says. And let me start by saying I completely agree that Justin Trudeau has been searching for a narrative for two years. He has not found one. I absolutely believe that the risks that Trump 2.0 poses for Canada are by far the biggest risks that I can recall in the Canada-U.S. relationship. They are

many times greater, as I see it, than the risks in the first Trump term. It is like 5x Trump in terms of the direct challenges that this administration will pose to the way that things work in Canada. And so it's a huge, huge political question. What kind of leadership will Canada want? This is where I think the argument that Justin Trudeau could find some traction both has merit, but also it's kind of hard to see him being able to do something with it. It has merit because I think Canadians are uncertain at this point whether or not the best approach with Trump and his cabinet picks, very, very controversial ones. We'll get to that, I'm sure, is to show strength or to show a spirit of compromise. Let me put it that way but essentially i think people

are going to be looking at it and they're going to go is our best posture to go in there and draw some lines and use some clear language to be crisp not just to say you know we'll figure it out we'll get along we'll find some way to paper over our differences and arrive at a point where not very much changes i could make the argument based on historical Canadian public opinion that that is what people will want. But equally, the more disruptive Trump's cabinet ministers are, the more disruptive the Trump administration is, you could make the case that what Canadians will rally around is a more vigorous and forceful and crisp defense of Canada's interests, even if they know on some level that that's a bet that could lose, that Trump could overwhelm that language with actions that are harmful to our economy. So I think there's the potential there. The question for me is whether

or not Justin Trudeau, at this stage in his political career, has the agility, the boldness, the ability to speak in compelling ways to take advantage of that opportunity. Most of the evidence to me so far is he does not, is that he's got energy, but he doesn't take bold action. He doesn't have agility in the context of recognizing what a pivot really looks like for a population that is screaming, we want something different. Every time he reads that, he delivers something that sounds more like the same, to the ridiculous point that, by some measures, Donald Trump is more popular than Justin Trudeau among Canadians. I don't want to go too far with that. But Donald Trump, when we put that ballot of would you vote for Trump or Harris got about 35, 36 percent among Canadians.

Now, that's a different ballot question than who would you vote for in Canada. But Justin Trudeau's favorables are more like 35, 65 in Canada right now. So I think there is an opportunity there to have a different discussion about what the country wants. I don't think that this is that the way that Trump 2.0 is turning out is as much opportunity for Pauliev before these cabinet nominations as after. And what I mean by that is I think that if Trump was going to be what people kind of expected of Trump, pushing for tariffs, pushing for economic advantage, acting like a predator. But kind of predictably, that probably would have worked significantly to pure Polyev's advantage.

People would have looked at him and said, you know what, he'll speak the same language. There won't be this kind of personal tension. He'll be in favor of deregulation just like Trump is, and maybe that'll be a good thing. Maybe they'll find some common ground together. With the kind of shocking appointments that Trump is making, I don't think this is clear an opportunity for Pierre Poglieb. I think it could become a situation where Canadians start to see this Trump administration unfold and say,

what we don't need is somebody who sounds like a junior version of Trump or somebody who kind of admires Trump or somebody who's going to go along with Trump. And I'm not saying that it's clear that that's what Poliev would do. But I think that the chemistry and the dynamic and the political calculus has definitely changed in the wake of those appointments. Okay. I know that Chantal wants to get in on this. If you're watching on YouTube, you now. I'll let you in here in a moment. I just want to say on Bruce's point that I talked to, you know, his last point, I talked to, you know, a number of conservatives before the U.S. election, and almost uniformly they said the best thing that could happen for Polyev is that Trump doesn't win because it's just going to be one problem after another.

And he will be seen as a partner of Trump's, not as an opposition to Trump. Anyway, that's history now. That's not the case. We want to talk about the appointments in the cabinet and how those have affected them. One of the big key issues, immigration. But first, Chantel wants to respond to Bruce. Well, a couple of points. First of all, my premise is not whether Justin Trudeau would have the advantage over Poirier or Poirier over Trudeau.

I think that's something for Canadians to decide in an election. That election is inevitable. And whether it is Poiriev or Trudeau, I believe that we should select whoever will be doing this sooner rather than later so that that person is prepared to handle those challenges.

I am also not saying that I'm taking for granted that Mr. Trudeau is staying. I think we should walk away from that conversation at this point because there are larger fishes to fry than forever speculating about whether he's going to take a walk in the snow on his birthday at Christmas. I am also not saying that a liberal campaign that would be designed to equate Pierre Poilievre with Donald Trump would be successful.

I believe that would be a recipe for disaster for the liberals. I don't think they can make that stick, especially after what we've seen over the past two weeks, the differences between Pierre Poiliev and Donald Trump, if anything, are becoming more stark as a result of all those appointments. What I was thinking about is something that we all saw, which was the free trade election, which was the one election where Canada-U.S. relations dominated the conversation to a level that I have not seen since and I had not seen before. Now, that election wasn't about John Turner is bad and Brian Mulroney is good. But I spent that campaign, I spent two weeks with John Turner, the first two, then I spent 10 days with Ed Broadbent. And then after the debate, I spent the last end of the

campaign with Brian Mulroney. I have a good memory for stuff that I've covered. After that first week with some mishandled announcements from the liberals on other issues, I can't remember anything except free trade as a debate. Whenever I look at excerpts of that leaders' debate, the only excerpts I see are all about free trade and the free trade deal. Now, what were other issues that did not get discussed because of the free trade thesis? And why Brian Mulroney should have been happy that they were not? One of those was abortion rights. The Morgan Teller ruling came in January 88. We went to the polls in the fall of 88 with the situation unresolved by the government.

The other issue that was very little discussed is the Meech Lake Accord. There was an asset in Quebec, but was it debated in the election campaign outside Quebec? No, it was not because we were talking about the FTA. That was good for the government as it turned out. And the third issue that was not much discussed was the incoming GST. When the election was called, we already knew that the manufacturer's tax was going to be phased out and the GST was going to come over the course of that successive mandate. So all those issues that were troublesome to a degree for the government

kind of faded away because of the larger discussion. Now, the FDA may have justified that conversation, but looking at what's going to be dominating political news over the next six months, I suspect that the Trump challenges will eclipse in the Canadian conversation many, many, many of the other issues that should have been front and center in the Canadian election. Okay. Bruce, you have one minute. All right.

Yeah, that's kind of where I'm coming from. I'm not sure that it would work out well for the liberals or poorly for the conservatives, but I do believe that there's every evidence that this issue of how Kennedy deals with the United States can become the compelling issue in the coming year. In fact, I think it's almost certain that that will be the case because there are so many aspects of it.

And because the pugilistic approach of some of the early cabinet appointees is going to put some issues squarely on the table. And I think that I don't imagine a situation where everybody's going to immediately go, well, we need these guys to handle this, or we need those folks to handle that. But I do think that if politicians don't, if politicians kind of firm up their positions,

Trudeau and Polyev in particular, then people will have a choice that they'll find quite compelling and interesting. And it might not mean that the election is only about fatigue with incumbents and the price of food and fuel and housing. I don't know what the right policy approach is. And so I want to be clear that this is above my pay grade to say we should draw a line and say we'll never talk about water as opposed to, well, maybe there is a hundred year long contract about water that helps us with the defense

spending commitment or who knows what, right? So I'm not trying to weigh the policy choices, but I do believe that there will be an appetite on the part of a significant number of Canadians. And if you look at the math from the polls, all you're really saying is Justin Trudeau just needs to find one in seven Canadians who isn't prepared to vote for him now and get them to say, I'm going to put a vote for him, even if I don't like him, even if I'm tired of the government, because I'm more confident in the approach that he's presenting. My question for him in that context is, most of what the government has been doing so far has been to say, just cool down, everybody. There's not a big risk here. I don't think that's the right approach if you want to campaign for a renewed mandate of leadership in the next year around these Trump appointments and the Trump administration. I think it requires ringing the alarm bell and saying, here are the issues at play.

Here's the position that we're going to take. You can be with us or you can be against us, but we're prosecuting that. And we're not trying to paint Poliev as Trump because that just sounds like political rhetoric, but you're forcing him into the town square. You're forcing him to get out of the position where he can even ignore all these calls for a security clearance. You're making him play like a grown-up.

And I don't think that that's really happened so far. Best evidence almost this week on the remembrance day ceremonies, which might come to. So yeah, I'm, I'm pretty much where Chantal is on this in terms of the way the, the mood of the country might go. All right.

We're going to take our first break. There's lots more on this to come and we'll get at it right after this. And welcome back. You're listening to Good Talk right here on Sirius XM channel 167. Canada Talks are on your favorite podcast platform, or you're watching us on our YouTube channel, Bruce Anderson, Chantelle Iber, with me, I'm Peter Mansbridge. Okay, you've both mentioned some of the cabinet choices that Donald Trump has made and have become clear in the last week, and others rumored to be. To say they're bizarre would not be a stretch. I think everybody was ready for something from Trump,

but this sort of one after another of strange choices, RFK and health, Tulsi Gabbard and, you know, in national intelligence, Matt Gates as attorney general. And the rumors, you know, those have all happened there. You know, they've all been, he has nominated them and they'll have to go through a,

one assumes some kind of a confirmation process that may not even, may not even happen, but let's assume it does. And the rumors continue. You know, I heard last night somebody suggesting seriously that Steve Bannon, who's just got out of jail, could be the next director of the FBI. I mean, really? What are these kind of choices due to this, the question that we're

raising, the Canada-U.S. relationship and what it means? Does it mean anything in particular to us as opposed to all the other countries that the United States is trying to have relationships with or does have relationships with? Bruce, you start us on this. Yeah, absolutely. I think it does. We have such a high degree of integration of our economy, such an important kind of security partnership, among other things, that these do pose much bigger risks for us. And they're more difficult for us to manage because I think the mood surrounding Trump's victory, even if one wants to make the case that he only won, you know,

a couple million more votes. And so lots of Americans didn't vote for him. It doesn't matter. He won the trifecta. He's got the house, the Senate, the Supreme court and the white house and in the u.s system it'll be two years before any material effort to just distract him or dislodge the path that he's on has any impact that's a long period of time in which are um the issues that matter to us are at stake I think that the appointment of Homan is a you know he's already started talking about Canada as an important security risk on the border he's talking about how many people have been trying to smuggle people into the United States across the Canadian border,

and how that's going to be an important priority for him. We haven't really had that situation develop in the past. We've had a spirit of, you know, these are difficult issues, let's try to figure them out together. That doesn't sound like this. And we also can imagine that as a woman tries to deport millions of people who are living in the United States, undocumented immigrants, that a good number of those people are going to try to come into Canada. And our immigration minister, Mark Miller has already had to be on the record a couple of times making it known that this is something that we're going to need to find out how to resist. I think that's an important one. I think that the defense secretary being somebody who really lacks

what you would expect to have in terms of the experience and the gravitas for that kind of role. That can be a combustible figure in the context of global geosecurity, Canada, U.S. and North American security. I think Ambassador Huckabee to Israel makes the Middle East situation and our position in it more complex than it was already pretty complex. I think Tulsi Gabbard is going to raise the eyebrows among the other four eyes in terms of the intelligence sharing agreements that we have, and so should be the case. I think RFK saying that he's going to, or at least he campaigned on the idea

of stopping research and development on new drugs for eight years. That's a huge and quite stunning idea that a president would put someone like that in charge of the massive apparatus of health and human services in the United States. It says that to me, sure, we need a cabinet committee. And it's great that that cabinet committee is meeting. But this is a prime minister level set of issues. This is not going to be dealt with. All of these things are not going to be dealt with on the basis of bilateral negotiations between our trade minister and the counterpart in the United States, our foreign affairs minister and Marco Rubio, presuming that he's going to be the secretary of state. This is at the absolute top leadership level, and it's a five alarm fire in terms of risks for Canadians and our public policy dynamic because of these appointments. And these appointments, make no mistake, in my view, they suggest that Trump is spiking the ball.

He's saying, I won this election, and I'm going to run the table the way I want it, and nobody better stand in my way. The five-alarm fire description does lay weight to what Chantel was talking about earlier in terms of, you know, if it's a five alarm fire, it's time. We need to appoint a fire chief that's got water. Yes. Whoever that person is needs that mandate.

It's not the issue isn't we're going to change because we need to change the fire person. The issue is we need to give whoever is prime minister a full tank of water. And that only comes in the shape of a mandate to govern Canada for the next at least two, three years, if not four, in case of another minority government. We can't just sit and wait and say, well, you know, will they survive next week or will we be doing this and that? I think these cabinet appointments, let me speak to the big silver lining I see to them.

They bring clarity to the issue and kill the notion that many Canadians would have liked to have that, you know, this is Trump and everything he said in the campaign doesn't really matter because the last time it wasn't so bad and we did okay. This is not at all the last time. And any experience from the last time saying, but in his first term, that should be banned from the vocabulary of analysis because it is simply not relevant. That's like analyzing Justin Trudeau based on his father, frankly. It's not a relevant argument. It's ironic that one of the first things that happened was to see this administration gunning for the northern border, because in the end, I suspect that whatever flow of people who are using Canada to go to the U.S. that there is will slow down to a trickle. If you've got a head on your shoulders and you're an irregular migrant, is this really what you want to do? To risk your life to go over to Trampland? I suspect many will decide, I'm staying put. I'm not going to try. It may have been the plan to

come to Canada to cross, but I'm staying in Canada. It's a safer place for me and my family. We will see issues and a reversal. I do think that there will be a lot more people trying to come to us than the first time around. And it's going to be difficult to handle because even if you send signals that we're not open to welcome whoever wants to come, we have this long border that we cannot,

every single day of the week, police along every single kilometer. So yes, those issues, but they will be at our end. It's us who should be complaining that our southern border is not safe and it's not policed properly. Because I don't think you should expect this administration to spend a lot of money to keep people inside the United States. I think the way to go about this will be to have border people on the US side look the other way as people walk across to us. So that is going to be a major issue. Bruce talks about having a cabinet versus prime ministerial responsibilities. Well, here's one. For one, I don't think that anyone in that cabinet committee

has in his contact list the people who were appointed this week. I would be amazed that Chrystia Freeland, for all of our network in the U.S., has spent a lot of time with Kennedy or anybody else that's on that list. It's almost impossible to imagine. But the other consequence, we're very big on people-to-people relationship in governments. All these people that were appointed are now going to appoint other people like them. This is not the end. It's not we can go to the second or the third higher up to try to open channels of communications because they will be replacing anyone that we know that we've dealt with with people that we don't usually have had dealings with. And that has serious, serious consequences. But when you take it all together, you know, I see, you know, this notion that because of Kennedy's appointment, we could attract more

pharmaceutical R&D to this country, possibly, but on the scale of the havoc that is about to be wreaked on this industry in the US, there is a part in this that is an attempt at normalization. And we will see this as a great opportunity. I wish that were so. I am not someone who likes the chaos theory of politics, and I try not to sit there and say, oh, the end of the world will come tomorrow. But I don't believe that it's going to be just that easy. I just want to, just a sec, Bruce, before I get in there,

I just want to underline what Chantel is saying about the American public service. This time around, Trump didn't do it last time because he just wasn't organized, but he supposedly is this time, that they go much deeper down into the public service with their partisan appointments. Traditionally Americans, not just Trump. You can be sure that he will this time around because if he has an agenda, he wants that agenda to actually happen this time.

I don't want to leave this immigration border situation without more, more comment on it because let's face it, you know, Trump has said he wants to get rid of 15 million undocumented immigrants, 15 million. Now, where are they going to go? Are they going to go back to where they fled because of the abuses that were happening to them there? Or are they going to try and find somewhere else? And perhaps the easiest was some suggestions, as Chantel mentioned, easing the traffic flow.

Many of them could end up coming to Canada. And we do have this huge undefended border, which we've been proud to claim as part of the great relationship with the states for decades. We all learned it at school. But now it has the potential of being a huge problem. Even if a small percentage of these immigrants end up coming to Canada, we're talking tens of thousands here, versus where they would be going,

which is, in effect, concentration camps in the United States. So I don't know how ready we are. You know, Bruce, you talked about Mark Miller, who I think has, you know, people have a certain fondness for Miller, and I understand that. But I don't know how ready he is for this or how ready the government is or how ready the Immigration Department is or the Border Patrol, because it's an unbelievable task if anything remotely resembling a movement of immigrants towards Canada takes place.

Yeah. Also true for Mexico, by the way. They're not equipped. A lot of the people that Trump has in mind have come from south of Mexico. Mexico is not equipped to deal with millions transiting through its territory and maybe wanting to stay. Yeah, I'll come to your immigration question in a minute. I just wanted to add one last thought to what Chantal was talking about, which is I had spent my time thinking up until these cabinet appointments started, that we were going to have a big enough set of issues just with tariffs and with deregulation, that the risks to Canada of investment flowing not to Canada, but to the United States,

because lower taxes for business and less regulation would be real. And it would put some wind in the sails of Pierre-Paul Lievre and make life more difficult for incumbent governments who didn't want to move in those directions. But I'm no longer thinking that that is the scenario. I'm right where Chantal is, that this is not kind of a status quo ante and we'll try to figure out how to align around tariffs and regulations so we don't lose investment.

This is a lot more threatening to the idea of cultural norms, of institutional responsibilities and guardrails, and of the role of the institution of government. I think that really what Trump is doing, whether he intends it or not fully, is putting government more in the cross of government. I think that really what Trump is doing, whether he intends it or not fully, is putting government more in the crosshairs, the idea of government more in the crosshairs of the average American citizen and sort of making the case that you don't need it. It only gets in your own way. It only costs you more money. It only does things that you don't really care about or want to see happen. On immigration, I don't think if Trump modulates his position at all on the size of the deportation project, it won't be because he's concerned about the impact on immigrant families.

It won't be because he's concerned that it feels too brutal. But he might, if he's convinced by rich people and major corporations that it is extraordinarily harmful to their economic interests, that might mean that this becomes something like his wall was almost. You talk about it, you do some of it, but you don't really try to do 10 million. I think I saw a quote from Homan the other day where he said, well, obviously, the first thing that we're going to do is focus on people who have a criminal background. And he went on to say, but people who are here illegally shouldn't feel comfortable just because that's going to be our first priority. And it's the first time I kind of wondered, okay, do they have in their minds that they're going to keep talking tough, but they know that, as Scott Galloway said in his podcast the other day, that at some point, America will experience a gag reflex on this deportation program. If all of a sudden inflation starts to hit, small businesses can't find people to hire, services that people count on in a lot of parts of the country break down,

and everybody's looking at Trump and saying, well, we know what caused this. You took people out of the economy that we needed, and now wages are going up for the jobs that remain, and there aren't people that we can find. I think that this version of the Trump administration will be alert to that risk, again, not because they're prudent, but because the business community that fills their coffers and the billionaire donors will be alert to that risk and will be in their ear on it. All may be true. It doesn't mean we shouldn't be prepared for that not to happen. I agree, but I think what you guys are saying about the scale of the problem, given the nature of the border, yeah, that's an easy thing to say,

but it's an extraordinarily hard thing to imagine how to do. Yeah, exactly. I mean, just the logistics. Okay, so let's go to science fiction scenarios of the kind. We deploy our entire armed forces along the border. How does that work? There are, I'm sorry, it's my age, kilometers upon kilometers of places where there's no place. If you were deployed there, you'd need to set up camp in winter.

You can't police the border from a comfortable, well-heated infrastructure because that's not the nature of the border. So how in the world would you arrive at trying to keep it controlled enough to avoid these things? And then I don't know how Canadians would react to the sight of families being put in camps, kids separated from parents. How supportive would Canadians really be about, you know, shutting down the border as much as possible? That's very much an open question too.

It is. It may be polarizing. And I think that's, you know, maybe that is part of the master plan, if there is one that you can describe as being a master plan for Trump. Yeah, I think that's right. I don't know how Canadians would react to it. I think that we've discovered in the last seven days that we're entering into some pretty uncharted territory.

And I think our major allies in other parts of the world have probably come to the same conclusion. It's a good thing that so many countries are meeting, the heads of state are meeting in the coming days. Sometimes these meetings have a kind of a performative and routinized aspect to them, but it can't be a bad thing that they're getting together and they're going to talk about what they're going to do

and maybe share some ideas and strategies. You know, just to add to Chantel's point about using the military, if it ever came to that, across the border, got to keep in mind how long our border is and how reduced the Canadian military is in numbers. They can't get people to join, and they're equipped so poorly, so poorly on all fronts, Air Force, Navy, Army. We gave away all our sleeping bags to the Ukrainians.

I mean, things are tough out there on the military front. And then expecting them, if it ever came to that, to have to guard the border. Sounds a bit, could well be a stretch. Anyway, we're going to take our final break and we come back. We haven't mentioned one name who's actually really running everything south of the border.

If you listen to him, that's Elon Musk. What are we going to do about him? Or is there anything we can do about him? Back to that right after this. And welcome back. Peter Mansbridge here with Chantelle Hebert and Bruce Anderson. This is good talk for this Friday.

And man, this hour has gone quickly. But we do have time to talk about the richest man in the world and how I think Trump even said this week, we can't get him out of Mar-a-Lago. He keeps hanging around. I think he was, like, joking because he kept inviting him into every possible meeting that he was having this week. What does this mean to us? I mean, listen, he has a Canadian connection.

What his mother, I think, was born in Saskatchewan. He went to Queens. But he also is not shy about dumping on Canada and certainly dumping on Trudeau. What is his influence, his clear influence, would Trump mean for us? Chantal. A short answer, I don't know. I'm curious to see at what time Mr. Trump will decide

that Elon Musk is like guests that overstay their welcome, like fish in the fridge that's not being consumed. I don't think that Donald Trump is the type to want to share the stage for very long with someone who believes that he is just as much of a star as he is. So I really can't answer that. I expect that Mr. Musk will soon be consumed with a lot of pushback from a machine that he does not really know well. I also understand that he has predicted Justin Trudeau's demise, and I'm not sure that that hurts Justin Trudeau in this country, to have Elon Musk suddenly order Canadian voters to dump the prime minister, maybe a step too far. So the real answer, my answer, I don't know. There are so many appointments to worry about that I have to say that for all the fascination about Elon Musk, it was not the one that attracted

my attention the most. I'm more concerned about what happens to Ukraine, what happens to Palestine, what happens to health care if there's a pandemic than I am with what I believe will be passing influence on Donald Trump. So, Bruce, you know, Chantal's obviously just trying to protect her ex-account, her Twitter account. Of course I am. She had a good day. And I plan to, for now, stay on X

because I am not about to leave the place to the crazies. Well, you may be severely outnumbered. That's okay. I'm used to them. He's had a caffeine this morning. I like it. Look, I think on a good day, I think of Elon Musk as a kind of a Dr. Evil who got lucky and made a lot of money, but is a cartoonish character. And that's when I'm feeling good that he won't ruin the world. But there are other days where I go, he's ruining the world.

And he's going to continue in that direction because I don't, you know, Chantal can say, I don't know what's in his heart or, you know, what's in his DNA. And I think that, you know, for me, I've seen enough evidence. What I see is. No, it's, I don't know how long he's going to have influence. With someone whose DNA and mind, I can't fathom either.

Fair enough. But the question of his longevity with Trump, for me, I'd love to think that. And I'm speaking as somebody who has been wrong because I've been optimistic on every single location since Donald Trump got into politics. So I am trying to teach myself not to be an optimist and not to say, oh, at some point, this thing that's happening in Trump world will stop happening because Trump will get tired of it or Trump will, you know, whatever the reason is for hoping that it goes away, that it'll go away. I don't know. And the reason I don't know is Trump loves rich people. He loves having the richest person in the world work for him. He loves having the richest person in the world

jump up and down on his stage and wear his paraphernalia. He loves the fact that Elon Musk and Twitter, Twitter anyway, kind of made Donald Trump a much bigger phenomena than The Apprentice made him. And that X as a platform is now dominated by Trump voices. I mean, I think the three of us are all on it. And every once in a while, I'll just run a little poll just to see what kind of numbers come out. And it's like 75% Trump opinion, at least, that I see. And that's even among people in my feed, which doesn't make any sense, really. So I think this is a great courtier for Trump, the richest man in the world doing his bidding.

And I would add that Trump has always had, since he got into politics, an eye on another price, which is how do I get richer? How do I profit personally and my family profit from my time in public office? And I feel like it was kind of quaint that we were wondering, well, how can he not put his assets in a blind trust? Remember that conversation that went on for months? And he finally said, no, I'm not doing it. And everybody said, all right, I guess that's the way that's going to work. And then we said, how can he have people visiting and doing

business with the U.S. administration staying in his hotel? And he was like, well, that's life. Get on with it next. So for me, he's appointed Trump and Vivek Ramaswamy to do this thing on reorganizing government from outside government so they don't have the same scrutiny and accountability but they will have a lot of authority and is there any chance that that's going to be done in a way that's going to create economic opportunities for donald trump is there any chance that we're going to see that is there any chance that we're going to see a debate about that are there any checks and balances about that? And so if you happen to believe, as I do, that Donald Trump always has his eye or one eye on that question of how can I get rich out of this? And I'd like somebody to challenge me on that assumption. Then this has to be an Elon Musk's role in the government has to be part of that equation. Can I just say on Twitter, on X, I've got a piece tomorrow in the buzz

about how people are in fact fleeing X or leaving X in significant numbers, not overwhelming numbers, but they are leaving because of Musk. And the way that social media file has kind of bent towards the Trump agenda. Even to the point where you're right, Bruce, the three of us are still on X. But I, at least this week, was looking around. You know, I looked at this blue sky model

and trying to sort out whether that's... I signed up, by the way. The hardest part is the CAPTCHA thing. It's almost impossible to get through and prove that you're a human. Well, we've often thought of that about you, Bruce, but that's okay. That's an interesting test.

Maybe we should do it every week now. Maybe we should. You every week now. Maybe we should. You know how things have changed in the time that we've been covering sort of politics and life in Canada? If you can imagine 20 years ago or 25 years ago, the post office going on strike, that would be like the number one issue in the country, right? Everything would come to a standstill while we discussed the union demands, the impact on the country, the impact on trade, the impact on people being able to talk to each other.

So the post office is on strike. And are we talking about it? No. Who's talking about it no who's talking about it i'm not sure too many people are talking about it which underlines kind of what's happened with the post office um in terms of our lives it interconnects with the the whole issue that we were just talking about in terms of social media but it is rather remarkable, that change, because I remember those days, as you do,

where everything revolved around the issue of the post office being on strike or having labor problems. Anyway, we're up. Our time is up. Another good conversation. Single focus today, really, and I think importantly so. I'm glad we had this discussion, and I'm glad that Chantel pushed to have it in terms of what all this means,

perhaps in terms of our election cycle here in Canada. Anyway, thanks to you both. Thanks to Bruce. Thanks to Chantel. Have a great trip. Chantel's going overseas, but she'll be back in time for next week's program. I'm Peter Mansbridge.

This has been Good Talk. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll talk to you again in seven days on Good Talk. Take care, guys.