The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Good Talk -- Can Hockey Canada Survive? Should it?

Episode Date: October 7, 2022

Chantal and Bruce on Danielle Smith's win in Alberta and what it means for Canada.  Plus, is Pierre Poilievre's social media out of control and if so, who's to blame? Also, the mess at Hockey Canada and will it ever be cleaned up?

Are you ready for Good Talk? And it's a Friday Good Talk day. Bruce Anderson, Chantelle Hebert are both with us today and we've got, I don't know, I guess we've got kind of a full agenda. We're going to start with the story out of Alberta last night. Danielle Smith. Now, if you're not from Alberta, that name may seem familiar to you. That's because she's been around in one form or another, either in or covering Alberta politics over the last, well, more than a decade. And there was a time at which she was expected to be the next premier when she was leading the Wild Rose Party.

As it turned out, that didn't turn out for her. But she's back now. That's what she was saying at the podium last night after six ballots in the Alberta UCP race, the race to replace Jason Kenney. How did she win? Well, let me just read you the first line from the Globe and Mail this morning. Danielle Smith won the leadership of Alberta's United Conservative Party in a campaign that was driven by COVID-19 grievances,

disdain for the federal government, and opposition to Jason Kenney. Sounds like a real positive campaign, a real vision for the future. But she won. It was closer than a lot of people thought. And it raises questions now about what that relationship is going to be and how it's going to impact the national debate. Because clearly Alberta and Ottawa

with Danielle Smith at the head is on a collision course. So Chantal, you start us. What does this mean for the national fabric? Okay, well, let's start with what does it mean for the Alberta Conservatives? It took six ballots for Danielle Smith to prevail over competition in the leadership vote.

In the end, she won with a few points over 50%. That, for the record, is only a few points more than the number of members who supported Jason Kenney in a confidence vote a few months ago. And back then, Jason Kenney looked at the results and said, this is not a strong enough mandate for me to continue. So with about the same score, she is now the new leader of the Conservative Party in Alberta and will be the premier by next week.

It does something to your moral authority when you win with such a narrow margin at the end of a campaign that was made divisive by her main campaign promise which is something called a sovereignty law that according to her but not to people who actually are versed in constitutional law would allow alber, through a bill, to just decide which federal laws are going to apply on this territory. Before people start thinking, what will this do to the national fabric, a few points. The first is that this is, and this is pretty rare, this is a new premier who does not have

a seat in the legislature. So, first order of business, she actually needs to get herself elected in a by-election. That should be no problem, but it is what it is. Second, her main opponents, who did fairly well since it took six ballots, said that they would never vote. And they do have seats in the legislature, they would never vote for a sovereignty act as she has put it forward, which begs the question, does she even have the support on the government benches to go ahead with her main promise? Even more importantly, this is a party that is now looking at an election next May.

That's tomorrow against the former premier who has experience in office and at a time when the economy in Alberta is doing fairly well. So the debate is going to be very different from the past two provincial elections in Alberta. So all this put together, I suspect the federal government and the parties on the opposition side of the House of Commons are more likely to take a wait-and-see attitude to what happens going forward in Alberta between now and next summer than to suddenly start saber-rattling. And by the way, this election and this Sovereignty Act would be an issue in the wrong sense of the word for Pierre Poiliev and his conservatives. Because if there's one thing we've all learned, it's that Ontario voters, the ones you really need if you're going to make government, are really spooked by aspiring prime ministers who cozy up to people with projects that have the word sovereignty in it.

They do that, that's for sure. So the picture you paint is one of a party in as much chaos as it was when it dumped its last leader. So it's an interesting picture. Bruce, how do you see it? Yeah, I think it was a bad night for the Alberta Conservative Party. I think the big winner was probably Rachel Notley. Time will tell. But, you know, the points that Chantal was making about the lack of unity around the choice of Ms. Smith are really trenchant. I think that if I read the numbers correctly, she won with about 45,000 votes of about 85,000 total ballots. But her growth over several ballots was really quite marginal, which suggested a lot of the people who did participate in that vote really didn't want her to win.

And certainly that was the case among the people who she was running against several of whom all decided to join forces last week and say please don't do this um what does it really mean i you know if i thought that she was going to turn that win that she got into a a big win with the alberta electorate next year i think what it would mean is that it would be the only other province beside Quebec that had a separatist premier. I think it's not wrong to say that what she's advocating is a form of separatism. It's certainly in the same neighborhood as Sovereignty Association that was originally proposed by Ren ronnie levec in the

sense that it's uh it's suggesting that our province wants to have the ability to not participate uh to not abide by federal laws well i i don't know what more you need to define someone as a separatist so i i think it's reasonable to call her that i think the uh she's the second leader uh in a little while in the conservative movement to have mined anti-vax fury uh as a way to win the leadership pierre poliev being the other one um she's also got in common with him the idea of pitching ideas that sound simple but where you know people put a little bit more scrutiny on the ideas they don't look like they're really going to work. And certainly the Sovereignty Act is one of those things.

Opting out of the Canada pension plan is probably one of those things. Dreaming about setting up your own police force sounds simple and maybe appealing to some people. But there's a lot of complexity to these things. There's a lot of downsides. And I suspect that as she goes forward, her biggest challenge, as Chantal suggested, might not be convincing Albertans. In the near term, it might be holding her caucus together.

And Jason Kenney, up until even last week, was maybe becoming even more eloquent on how COVID was a buzzsaw cutting through the conservative constituency and how how much he feared that the Alberta Conservative Party would become torn asunder and I think that's that's really challenge number one and she did nothing yesterday to suggest that she thought it was a problem. If anything, she put her foot on the gas pedal. I must say that Jason Kenney is far from standing in the background, has been very much in the foreground in these last couple of weeks, especially not shy at all in attacking some of the stands that Danielle Smith was taking.

Chantal, you wanted to make another point there. A couple of points. First, yes, Quebec has had a variety of sovereignty-led governments, but none of those parties has ever proclaimed laws that actually said we're going to pick and choose which federal laws we are going to apply. What they did properly was bring the issue to the people and say, do you want to give us a mandate to negotiate our way out of Canada?

People who look from a distance may say, yeah, well, what about Bill 21 or Bill 96 on language? The use of the notwithstanding clause until the courts weighed in is a legitimate part of the Constitution. It may be that the Supreme Court will find that it was abused in one or the other case. But at this point, there has never been a sovereign government in Quebec that has said, well, if you elect us with less than 50% of the vote, we're just going to declare ourselves sovereign within Canada. Didn't happen. And if they had campaigned on that,

if René Lévesque or Jacques Paguzot or Lucien Bouchard had ever campaigned on that, they would all have been defeated because they all won despite the fact that they wanted to promote sovereignty because they were promising something that people looked at and thought this is a good government offer. So, we're in new untested waters here. And if I can just say a word on Jason Kenney, I believe he's going to be missed, not just by Albertans, but by the

conservative movement in general. This is one of the most experienced, with a foot in the most conservative neighborhoods that I've seen. An Alberta premier who is sensitive to Quebec and understands what makes that province sick. How many premiers do you have, one with federal experience, one with strong links to diverse communities. And he had some advice in an interview in French for Pierre Poilievre this week, and that was to appeal to the mainstream and leave aside French groups, which was interesting as a piece of advice. You know, politics is a strange game. And it's interesting to watch, as we do over the years, how some leaders who are kind of

cast aside by their parties or by the people somehow, over time, kind of make a recovery and are looked at very differently. I don't think I've ever seen anybody, I don't know whether he's recovered or not, Jason Kenney, yet, but he's certainly recovered to a degree in Chantel's mind. And I'm not sure that many that we can look back in the past at and say have come back that fast in terms of the way they're viewed. Just one other point, and Bruce, I know you want to say something here.

Just let me make one other point. And it's about the close nature of that race last night and the six ballots. That really doesn't augur well for the future for Danielle Smith, no matter which way you look at this thing. When you go back in history, it looked like in the 80s when Turner was supposed to win in a walk in 84. It was much closer.

Kraytchen was very, you know, just snapping at his heels in that convention. And it eventually, you know, was part of the reason that Turner fell and Kraytchen took over. You know, Kim Campbell, that was supposed to be a walk in the park. It didn't happen that way. Jean Charest came very close to beating her in 1993. And she eventually, as we all know, her term ran out fairly quickly. There are other examples in the 20-teens, Andrew Scheer, Max Bernier. That never worked out. So this doesn't look good on the face of it um for a start for daniel smith

bruce you wanted to make another point well you're making the point about some politicians who get turfed by their parties or by the public and then have some sort of redemption phase and and come back to popularity daniel smith had a uh turfing out out moment not that many years ago. And what's interesting in a way, interesting maybe being the most optimistic word I could put on it, is that she was, if I remember correctly, she was kind of tossed from a radical version of Alberta conservatism for not being sufficiently or consistently radical enough. And she won this leadership by being arguably the most radical of the alternatives on offer. So, you know, the math, I think, of how these parties are organized has changed. Unifying those

two parties created the opportunity for somebody who wanted to champion the Wild Rose kind of ethos, whereas that wasn't really the case before. But if she learned anything, apparently the lesson that she learned was be more radical, be more strident, take more hard-edged positions, even if they don't hold up to much scrutiny. And the only other point I wanted to make, and I was listening to Chantal, contrasting how Quebec sovereignist-oriented leaders approach their responsibilities. And I was thinking about all of the stories I read during those years of legal scholars that Quebec had sometimes in its own cabinet and the idea of respecting the importance of good legal advice strong public service and I read a quote from Danielle Smith I don't know if she said it yesterday or just recently but that she would fire any public servant that didn't want to do what she wanted them to do.

And I think that's another kind of an important marker, which is that public service does exist to support public services and good governance. And we really are better off if our politicians don't start by ripping it down, by tearing it down, by implying that it's there to do something other than serve the public interest. And I didn't like hearing that comment from her. I think it was a bad way to start. Well, it'd be interesting to see if there's a pivot in the works there, given the background, as you pointed out. I mean, when she was the leader of the Wild Rose Party in Alberta, that was supposed to be, you know, the radical alternative to the Conservative Party.

But then she ended up crossing the floor with her party and supporting, who was it, Jim Prentice? Jim Prentice. The Conservative leader. And that's what put her in the doghouse with a lot of her, you know, original supporters in the Alberta, from the Alberta Conservative Party with the Wild Rose Party. Anyway, just one last quick question on this. I mean, what we witnessed at the beginning of the, you know, Harper years was this, or sorry, the beginning of the Trudeau years was this united opposition by Conservative premiers to Trudeau and that famous Maclean's cover of the Trudeau years, was this united opposition by conservative premiers to Trudeau

and that famous Maclean's cover of the resistance. Well, that didn't turn out that way either. Does she fit in? Does a Danielle Smith-led Alberta Conservative Party fit in at all with the other Conservatives? I see Saskatchewan is kind of on side. Premier Moe is kind of on side with what she's saying. But this is not going to play with Doug Ford, one assumes.

Doug Ford has decided some time ago that he's playing, he doesn't need to play with that section of the party or the federal party. And it has served him well he's made friends with francois legault and i expect that friendship to continue and when ontario and quebec tend to speak with the same voice it is a problem for the others and not for them so i i don't expect the premier ford to call up daniel smith and say why don't you come to Queen's Park so we can have a Fed bashing session together at a news conference. That's just not going to happen. The fact is that most governments, and I'm going to include Saskatchewan's government and that, do not want to be doing business with someone who is leading a troubled party and is the premier at the same time. They tend to watch from the end, keep their distance. And I expect that's going to be happening until she secures a mandate from

Albertans next spring. All right. If she does. Yeah. Look, Peter, on your question, I think the more radical prairie conservative leaders sound the less radical doug ford seems uh so in effect it's useful for him in a in a very pragmatic sense to have more radical leaders elected out there people don't really have to work very hard to see the distinction between how he approaches

governance and and how they do the other thing though, though, that I think Mo and Smith have in common, which I think they may come to regret, I know that Jason Kenney did come to regret some of the positions that he took on investment in the energy sector and public policy around climate change. It took Kenney some time to arrive at a point where he understood that the real pressures on oil and gas were not just from the Trudeau government in Ottawa, but from international investment flows and so-called ESG influences. There's now a pushback

within certain quarters of the conservative movement, some in Ottawa and some in Alberta and Saskatchewan for sure that are saying they don't want any woke investment or ESG influenced investment and I think that's a that's going to be a hard horse to ride for the premier of a province that relies so heavily on inbound foreign investment as Alberta does and as Saskatchewan does because that investment isn't going to isn't going to suit up for those kind of political sentiments. It doesn't really have the people who are running those investment funds don't have the instinct or the ethic or even the flexibility to do that.

Those companies are committed to achieving sustainability goals and sometimes decarbonization goals. That's not going to change. companies are committed to achieving sustainability goals and sometimes decarbonization goals, that's not going to change. But Alberta, if it sticks with Daniel Smith, is going to be led by somebody who's even more against that kind of investment influence than Jason Kenney was, especially Jason Kenney at the end of his time in that office. All right, we're going to take a break right now. and when we come back, we'll shift focus to Ottawa, where the long-awaited shootout between Polyev and Trudeau took place, at least for a while, yesterday in the nation's capital. We'll get to that right after this. And welcome back. You're listening to The Bridge for this Friday.

That means good talk. Bruce Anderson and Chantelle Hebert are with us for our discussion. We shift now to the Ottawa scene and something that happened yesterday as a result of a story that was broken by Global News. And, you know, it seems like every day we learn something new about how social media, how technology of today works online. And I certainly, it was something new for me. But it turns out for the past four years on Pierre Polyev's YouTube channel, whenever he put out a video, there was a tag

attached to that video that is not necessarily seen by everybody, but it directs traffic to certain areas that you put with that tag. And in this particular case, it was a tag that directed followers to a site that was misogynistic, to say the least. Now, Polyev says he knew nothing about this. This is the guy who is known to be very active on his social media outlets and to do most of the work himself. But he says he had nothing to do with this, and that's entirely possible, and that he stopped it right away. That did not stop the Prime Minister

from going after him big time in question period yesterday. And the two had a heated exchange on the issue of misogyny and who was where on it. Polyev took the whataboutism approach by saying, yeah, well, what about your black face and brown face? What about Jody Wilson-Raybould and you fired her and et cetera, et cetera.

Anyway, it was for those who have been expecting fireworks from these two, they knew they were going to come at some point. And they started yesterday. But the question is, on this issue, was this a one-day wonder? Or could this actually lead somewhere? Bruce, why don't you start this round? Well, I think the underlying questions are more than a one-day wonder. It remains to be seen where

the story goes yesterday was it was fast breaking and good for alex boudelier and global to to put this story into the marketplace whether or not mr polyev knew about it i guess we'll time will tell he said what he said but for sure this was no accident. What was done, not to make it sound too technical, there was a choice made by people working on his behalf to reach out and target voters who hate women. I mean, a lot of people use the term misogyny, and maybe everybody knows what that means. But basically, it's finding those people who use the Internet in ways that express their hatred of women. So that was done deliberately. And if Mr. Polyev is to be believed in that he didn't know that it was happening, he at the very least has an obligation to find out who did it and to sever his relationship with them, because presumably they were in his office or in his campaign. Now, Alex Boudelier, the global reporter who

published this story first, gave an update in which he said that the conservatives have decided to call off the investigation into who did this. Well, I don't consider that to be a reasonable proposition i think that if that happened in mr trudeau's office or mr singh's office that that wouldn't be considered an acceptable response that people would say no you actually have to even people in their own caucus would say you have an obligation to find out who did this and to get rid of them. So I think that part of the story, I think it will have more oxygen. I think it deserves to have more oxygen. And I think it deserves to have more oxygen because hating on women is not a small issue in society. And for Mr.

Polyev, this isn't the first time he's been questioned about how he handles that issue. His criticism of a global news journalist not very long ago was clearly the kind of thing that he could have anticipated was going to lead to a lot of abuse in a world where there's already so much abuse aimed at in particular female journalists that it's an issue that every reasonable political leader should be concerned about so it was a bad day for him he has a chance to to try to do something to make it right i hope he does chantal um it's a it's it's a serious choice to decide to to put a tag like that on an mp because uh qualia was just an mp at point in opposition, but it is still a serious decision. You would expect normally,

and MPs' offices are not full of dozens of staffers, and those staffers have a pretty close relationship, obviously, with their boss, so you would expect whoever did that to say, boss, I've got this idea. What do you think? or to ask someone in authority would also go to poiliev and say we think this is a good idea we're running this by you so i'm convinced without proof that uh uh there were enough people that were aware of that choice and

some fairly senior people had to approve it. I'm not saying that's necessarily Pierre Poiliev, but it should have been given the circumstances. They called off the hunt for whoever did this. It's possible that it is someone who is not there anymore. Those things also happened. There's quite a lot of turnover in MPs' offices. They go on to more interesting jobs, maybe, or they move on to something other than Parliament Hill. But I do think that they're probably spending a lot of energy trying to scrub their social media feeds

for any similar stories. Because while Mr. Poiliev seems to feel that it's good enough for him to tell you that he's not like that and I don't for a second believe that Pierre Poiliev is a hidden woman hater who thinks anything good of these networks the leadership campaign has demonstrated that he's quite willing to flirt with all kinds of groups that do have unsavory views until he is found out. And the until he is found out, I think, is the real cause for concern, because if global found this story, you can bet that there are scores of journalists and other researchers for other parties who have who are looking at every single uh output from the polyev camp to see what else they can find in there and that should be a concern for pia poliev now what does it do for Justin Trudeau? Well, as Mr. Poitier knows, whenever your answer starts with what about you,

you basically have already lost the argument. Because it will get you nowhere to say what about you X years ago, especially since voters seem to have moved on from those issues. They cost what they cost to the prime minister, but they have moved on. But I do think Justin Trudeau's main advantage in exploiting this is to boost caucus morale rather than score big points in public opinion on Pierre Poiliev. You could see that his MPs, Mr. Trudeau's liberal MPs, were overjoyed by the fact that they had turned the tables on Pierre Poiliev. To me, it's the kind of issue where the liberals have a tendency to overemphasize how happy they are. I don't think it's wise on their part to send scores of female

ministers to the fray behind Justin Trudeau to make the same point. I think that once in a while, they should let people being presented with all this come to their own opinion, because it doesn't take long for it to become so obvious that you're looking for partisan gain at any cost. And at that point, most people turn off and move on because they say, here we are. They're playing this game, the schoolyard game. And I'm not terribly interested in this. It doesn't advance my priorities and my concerns, which are larger than a website and a YouTube channel for Pierre Poilievre. So maybe some balance or some subtlety, if that word exists in English on the part of the liberals, would get them further with that strategy.

You know, I think you've answered my question because the next question I was going to ask, which was, do you think it was right for trudeau to enter the fray on this and not have somebody else do it for for the liberal party you know when you when the prime minister weighs in on something like this it's quite a statement in itself but i think you i think you've handled that because it was as much as attacking pierre pauliev as it was boosting the morale in his own his own party Bruce you were waving you wanted in on that well I think that I don't know the answer to the question about whether the PM should have weighed in on it or

not I definitely agree with Chantal that the more politics looks like a pantomime, which is basically how I interpret what she was talking about, that politicians looking as though they're acting a part of politicians being outraged, the less people are likely to be moved by the underlying act that caused the, it shouldn't cause some outrage. And, you know, the,

I guess maybe I don't want to misinterpret what chantal said i do think that it is an extremely serious context that we live in all of the hating on women uh that is going on and so i don't think the issue deserves to be underplayed because there's some political risk to the liberals by looking like they overplayed it. But I do agree with the point that making it look like a performance of politics is not going to advance the issue and is not going to serve the liberals well. And maybe there was a little bit of that yesterday i didn't watch it that closely it's also that uh and and we all know this it's a lot more efficient to let so-called independent agents do the work than to be standing in the way of them doing the work i'll give you an example completely different the quebec's immigration ministers' outrageous comments on immigration

and immigrants did not need every other party to go out of their way to tear up their shirts over it. They did because they were asked. But the people who really did the number on the Coalition Amnésie Québec were columnists and reporters. And the story had a lot more legs because it was carried by people who did not seem to have a partisan

interest vested in the story. Sean, let me ask you a question. Now that we're into the next part of this conversation, which is really about, is it okay, is it sufficient to just shrug and say, well, I don't know who did it,

and let's let the news cycle turn? If media organizations don't, and I hope you're right that they're hard at work finding the next element of this story or pushing to get to the bottom of who did it and who sanctioned it, but if they don't do that, don't you feel that the opposition part or the government and maybe the other opposition parties have a responsibility to push to find that answer,

even if even at the risk of looking like they're kind of dragging out an issue that other people might not see as being as important? I've never seen opposition parties or parties get to facts better or faster or more efficiently than journalists. Basically, they would be mostly tarring Pierre Poiliev and his entire staff with this brush by pursuing this. But if you're interested in facts, then I don't see how in the partisan context this will advance facts.

What you want to know, and I don't think other parties will find out, is whether Pierre Poiliev's hands are on this. But beyond that, if I worked for Poiliev, I probably would want the person responsible to be identified so that I don't have to live under the cloud of possibly being that person. That being said, I am mindful of the fact that in the past, leaders have pointed the finger at staffers, sometimes ex-staffers, to get themselves off the hook and have done in the process serious, serious damage to people who, for the most part, tend to be young and sometimes not well advised.

And if that is what we're at here, an overenthusiastic staffer, I think the responsibility is for the MP to provide supervision of his staff rather than say, this is the culprit, let's hang this person out to dry. So it's not an easy call on the part of Poiliev himself, how he goes about this. The one thing that I can't remember which one of the two of you said it,

but the news cycle does turn. And part of that turning depends on who's pursuing and i where i agree with chantelle if you just leave it to question period it's not going to it's not going to uh develop into anything more than it is right now uh so whether it's journalists um who pursue it or whether somebody steps forward and said look i was wrong i did it i worked for pierre polyev, you know, whatever, 2019. Well, look, I think journalists have to pursue it, and I agree that they're the ones that will ultimately get to the facts.

But sometimes if politicians drop it, journalists do too. And so I think there's some – Especially if it's replaced by some other big story. You know, and that's the whole news cycle is turning thing, the 24-7 world that we live in. In the real world, let's agree that while the issue of who Pierre Poilier is wingtap

to become leader matters, but the notion that Canada's MPs and government would spend three or four question periods on the issue would probably boggle the mind of people who are watching what's happening on inflation, what's happening on Ukraine. I mean, and the real world. Sometimes you need to take the story. I think this is a real world issue. I guess I do disagree with you on that. No, it's not the issue, as I said.

It's the notion that political parties, including the government of Canada, would spend its time on the public stage and question period instead of answering comprehensive questions, for instance, on why we are not doing more on Iran. There are good reasons. How about spending a bit of time explaining that rather than having question period for the next few days and so on and whatever, what about? Because the what about goes both ways. I don't think, take it to people who aren't in politics as much as you and go through this entire explanation. And once you're finished

ask them how many days they want uh the opposition parties to repeat the same thing or the government about this yeah if it's the same thing they're gonna say move on um and so that's why you know i i'm gonna settle with uh i'm gonna settle with chantelle on this one and leave bruce somewhat isolated although i think the three of with chantelle on this one and leave bruce somewhat isolated although i think the three of us basically agree on the importance of the story it's how you pursue it from from here on in one thing i will say um in terms of the surprise that the prime minister took his uh took the lead on it yesterday was i don't think I've seen since he became leader Pierre Polyev look as rattled as he did in those few seconds as he was trying to get to his feet and come up with an answer he

looked rattled okay let me be cynical here if he he didn't know about this he had to look rattled that's cynical yes well one likes uh to be as cynical as the leader that is in question at this point well he knew about it in the sense of the story had already broken so i mean he knew he knew it was coming it was probably going to come from somewhere um but having said that he's he didn't it wasn't a good day for him he didn't look good on it i'm not sure how you look good on that um but he certainly didn't look uh you know i don't want i know you guys don't want to relitigate this so i'll be so let's do it no no i'll drop it i don't know go for it with you about whether this is a real world issue and if we're going to talk about um the plight of women in iran but we're going to say you know

women hating groups being targeted by leading canadian politicians isn't an issue that's somehow related to that i don't get it but i you know i i hear you well the thing is you don't know that they are targeted by this leading canadian politician who was not a leading canadian politician four years ago but has been for the last year and that's still been pumping out every day but at some point i just want to get to the bottom of it that's all i'm saying i think we deserve to know more than we know and i hope we do and i'm just saying if it's not the the liberal party of canada that's going to get to the bottom of it it's going to be journalists if they can and if they can't the liberal party and justin trudeau certainly are not well you want to be cynical i mean there's lots of ways to be cynical on this story

about how this story bubbled up it's hard to believe that nobody on parliament hill knew about this that this was going on you know the you know the security services have warned about this element of tagging i didn't know that until I read these stories yesterday but they've warned about it before. And it so happens that the journalist who broke that story is a journalist who actually knows more about all these issues than any of us on this panel. That wouldn't be hard. Yes, it is totally possible that this journalist, armed with covering that beat of security services,

would be better equipped than most to look into issues like that and to find it. Right. Well, you know, every day, quite apart from the legitimacy of this story, which I think is a legitimate story, how long it goes on or not, I don't know. But every day, we learn more about the methods that are used by whether it's politicians or businesses or you name it,

to advance their cause with their followers or with who they think are their followers. So there's been a real eye-opener for me on this story. It's not the easiest one to understand, the process, but, you know, we've got to sort of get with the program here that there's a lot of stuff going on that is beyond our ability to comprehend initially and how different aspects of our life are trying to influence us on different topics. Anyway, enough of that.

We have time for one more subject, and it's going to be Hockey Canada. And we'll be right back with that. All right, you're listening to Good Talk. It's Friday. Good Talk on Sirius XM, Channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform. Bruce Anderson, Chantelle Hebert are here. All right.

This story has been, to say the least, mind-boggling for months now. The standby Hockey Canada to basically say, you know, we're getting hammered here, but it's going to go away and we're all right and nobody's going to resign. We're not going to have mass resignations on our board and we all know how this story started it hasn't got better in the months that it's been going on the government threatening now to you know set up its own you know set up some other kind of organization that would be responsible for hockey in Canada. What do we have to say about this? I mean, it is beyond belief that we're still at the same

point of no resignations, nobody stepping down from Hockey Canada, the government seemingly mattered in hell. The sports, amateur sports minister laying into it, the prime minister laying into it, the opposition parties laying into it. How do you look at this? Chantal.

I don't think I've seen very many examples of the prime minister in public calling for a cleanup inside an organization in the way that Justin Trudeau has over this story. And I don't think that I've seen the opposition parties and the government on the same page on this issue to the degree that we have seen this week. And why this week? Because Hockey Canada representatives, they went to a parliamentary committee for the second time, knowing the environment. They brought a shovel and they dug themselves into a bigger hole than they had been in before they walked into that parliamentary room. And not because MPs were aggressive or, you know, had added in for them, because they offered themselves up as a bunch of disconnected from reality group to a degree that left every MP in that room completely astounded. To go to a parliamentary committee and to be asked how would you rate how you handle this

controversy, which involves young hockey players gang raping a young woman and other instances of the kind and to answer and hockey Canada trying to make sure that the story doesn't come out and that no one's career is damaged by having done all this and to answer we give ourselves an A for handling this issue. It kind of tells you all you need to know. You don't even need to get the transcript of anything else that was said because at that point, it was game over. And the gap, it was between Hockey Canada and the entire political class, but also many sponsors had become unbridgeable.

I'm guessing, and maybe Bruce can explain it, I'd like to throw him a challenge once in a while, that the most surprising thing about this is given all this, all these people are still in place and feel that they still have some moral authority and some credibility this late in the week. But Friday is young. Who knows? They may come to their senses over Turkey. But at this point, I'm not going to go the Turkey route, but their goose is cooked.

Bruce. Well, look, I, in case any of our listeners aren't familiar with exactly what happened here, the shortest possible version of it is that somewhere along the way, several years ago, Hockey Canada decided that there were enough. enough allegations of sexual violence by hockey players that they needed to create a fund that would pay settlements to various women that came forward with these claims in order to make the problem go away and have it disappear from sight and And so the original sin is obviously the rapes and the sexual violence. But the original sin committed by the people leading this organization was the idea that you would create a fund for this. If we heard this story about any other organization in society, we would think it disgraceful. It is disgraceful. It's a disgraceful choice. It's a disgraceful defense. It's disgraceful to this day that in one of the most high profile case, there was a certain roster of players. There were only so many players who could have been

involved in this gang rape. And we don't know the name of one of them because the organization says well we couldn't figure that out and apparently in the course of saying we couldn't figure that out they originally said the woman in question didn't want to share information with us and then later on they backtracked and said well yes i guess she did but know, thank God the scrutiny and the pressure is continuing to pile up on this organization. In a way, I'm thankful that the woman who's the chairman of the board went and made such a mess of her defense in front of this parliamentary committee to say that, you know, who knows what would happen if the leaders of these organizations left their jobs would the lights stay on in the rinks we don't really know absolutely ludicrous people who say such stupid things in front of parliamentary committees on national television in the public square they should be ashamed of themselves.

And I don't think they'll make it to the weekend. I really don't. And the one source of additional pressure, Peter, that you didn't mention when you went through the list is the corporate sponsors. The Canadian Tires, the Imperial Oils, the Teleses, they're all coming to the same same conclusion loud and clear saying sweeping changes at the top culture change now no more money from us until this gets dealt with and now some of the provincial associations including ontario new brunswick and nova scotia are saying we're not

sending our money in so that financial pressure will create a crisis that will tip this eventually i guess the question is will these people these individuals who cannot own up to the mistakes that they've made make this last longer and further soil the reputation of the organization and themselves or will they get on with doing what we all know is going to happen here here's um here's what I think about this. There's a huge problem in hockey, the culture of hockey, and this is bad enough, but it goes deeper than that. We saw, and I will you know, will declare my, you know,

conflict on this one because my son was involved in this film that came out at TIFF. There was basically dealing with the issue of colored hockey players going through our history. And there's stuff in there I never had any idea of

from the early days to the present days about what's happened and happening to young kids off to perhaps their first year of hockey. Their kids have wanted to do it, the boys and girls. It's a big, you know, both boys and girls play hockey in big numbers still. And they're sending them off into a culture they don't realize is there. Now, that's not going to be seen in every rink, on every team, but it is part of the culture

of hockey that hasn't been corrected. And whether it's Hockey Canada or the NHL or the various leagues before the NHL, there are big issues out there that haven't been dealt with, haven't been corrected. And the dreams of families and especially those young kids are going to be dashed with the reality of what they see. Now, once again, I don't want to overgeneralize,

but it's big enough of a problem at different levels of hockey that it ends up blowing up into what we're witnessing now in these parliamentary committees and you know it is a sad commentary on what's happened to what has traditionally been felt as canada's kind of national sport and the thing we rally around from the flag to the puck. And it's just devastating what's happened, and somebody has to take control in trying to determine what to do about fixing this because it's a problem. It's a national problem.

Okay, I'm sorry I ran out the clock on you two. I know you both had more things you wanted to say, but we're going to wrap it up with that for this week. Another great, good talk. Some really good discussion points there. So Bruce, Chantel, thank you both very much. Thank you, Peter. Thanks, Chantelle, thank you both very much. Thank you, Peter. Thanks, Chantelle. Have a good

Thanksgiving weekend. We will. We'll enjoy it and hope all of you will as well. Next week, the normal lineup of stuff, plus I've got a really important interview with Lloyd Axworthy, the former Foreign Affairs Minister

in the Trudeau government, the Pierre Trudeau government, and later in the Chrétien government. And he has some very important things that you may want to consider about the nuclear issue and Canada's role. So that's coming up next week. That's it for now. This is Good Talk. I'm Peter Mansbridge.

Thanks for listening. Talk to you again on Monday.