The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Good Talk - Conservative Chaos Hurts Poilievre, Helps Carney

Episode Date: November 7, 2025

Budgets, especially minority government budgets, always bring a degree of parliamentary drama. That and a lot more with Chantal Hebert and Bruce Anderson joining Good Talk for their weekly commentary. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Are you ready for good talk? And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. It's your Good Talk Friday. That means Sean Telle-A-Bear and Bruce Anderson are both here. So tell me, you two. This was the week we've been waiting for for weeks, months, more than a year, actually, for a budget. much expectations surrounding it, generational budget, big, bold, all those different things that are being said was going to happen this week.

So here we are at the end of the week. What are we talking about? We're not talking about the budget. We're talking about chaos in the Conservative Party. Will somebody explain to me what the heck happened here? How did we end up at this point at the end of the week? Chantal. I do think that this.

the events accelerated, starting with this podcast that Pierre Puellev went on, where we talked about Justin Hoodo, jail time, criminal, the RCMP. Why do I think that was the straw that broke the camel's back? It's not just because of the content of that podcast and the way that the man who aspires to be the prime minister talked about very lightly about putting his opponents or seeing his opponents in court, if not in jail, and the RCMP is being a political police that doesn't do its job, but because it convinced many conservative MPs who had been biding their time, that Pierre Puellev was not going to change, that the default mode was what they saw in that interview.

and that in their assessment the likelihood that he could lead the party to a victory was one slim, but the likelihood that they could dispose of his leadership and the leadership vote set for Calgary at the end of January were also not optimal. At that point, a number of conservative MPs started reaching out to the liberals. And when I say a number, it's anywhere from a three to half a dozen. Some of them met with very senior people in the government, including in some cases the prime minister himself. Come the budget, it's kind of make or break time. If you're going to cross the floor, and Chris Nantremont did cross the floor.

He was going to use the budget to cross the floor in the sense that this budget by Thursday, would have been good enough for him and then he would have crossed except that for some reason he confirmed not off the record to political that he was thinking about doing that and once you have said that you kind of have to go and so that happened and it derailed obviously completely derailed the conservative game plan but there are and there were others and if I know about this obviously Playa Pia Poyev's leadership, they even would have heard about this. And what followed was kind of a, well, I call it, you know, the hunt for the fox that's hiding in the henhouse. And so you go to every hen and you look under the feathers and shake them down.

And I think they did find at least one person who was about to walk, which would be match in a route. everyone has heard on Parliament Hill about, you know, the blackmailing techniques, if I can call it that, as in pressure, if you do this, we're going to do that. Don't even think of crossing the floor. And that has been confirmed in conversations with the number of conservative MPs who are still biding their time. In any event, this MP resigned yesterday. How often does an MP give up a seat six months after an election?

without giving more reasons than wanting to spend time with family and adding eventually that he will actually only leave in the spring. Apparently, sources told other media that he had not been attending caucus meetings for a couple of weeks at least. I don't think it's the end of the story, and in the middle of all this, and we will get back to it, just to compound a chaotic week with a lot of toxicity. inside the Conservative Caucus, notwithstanding all the pretense,

Mr. Poiliev does deliver, because that is his job to deliver the response of the official opposition to the speech from the throne, which he does, but forgets to move the official opposition amendment that comes at the end of the speech. And so it's not important in parliamentary procedure to tell you the truth, that the conservative amendment is now a sub-amendment. Let me spare you all those details. But what it betrays is panic and chaos. Especially if you were Mark Carney and you'd forget something like that,

people would say he's a rookie. But we're talking about someone who knows parliamentary procedures inside out, who is advised by a former speaker, Andrew Shear, all of which to say, I taught the week of the podcast about the RCMP was Pierre Pahliav's worst week, but I think this week has managed to beat that bad week. Bruce, how do you explain this? I think the role, the life of people in politics really comes down to,

it's a hard life. People outside politics from some distance look at it and say it's a charmed life. It's full of air travel and, you know, fancy meetings. and being celebrated. But that isn't what it feels like for most MPs. For most MPs, in order to feel like they want to continue after they've served a certain amount of time, there are two criteria.

One is that it has to feel like some form of success is either being achieved or about to be achieved. And the second is it has to feel satisfying. There has to be an aspect of the work that you enjoy, that you feel good about. And I think Pierre Polyev has been very, to deliver those experiences, those two criteria for his MPs for some time. And I think that the challenge comes down to this, that in his mind, or at least the way that

he explains what's happened in Canadian politics, he's had a really successful year. He took his party from where it was to a place with more seats, a better share of the vote, almost to victory. but for other people in his party, they're looking at it and saying it was a failure and it was a failure that has to land ultimately at the feet of the leader. So they're not measuring it the same way as him. And he may be, he may in his heart of hearts know that it was a failure. But from their standpoint, they were all expecting to have that feeling of success and that

enhanced satisfaction of having spent the time on the planes, having gone to, all of the meetings, having done all of the work, now you get to make some decisions. You get to feel as though the effort that you're putting into this work is paying off, that you're influential in a way that you weren't before. And so it's normal that they would feel dissatisfied. Normally, in a situation where this kind of circumstance occurs, leaders understand what they need to do. They need a charm offensive. They need to prove to doubters that they're capable of taking the party over the line the next time. I don't think that Pierre Poliyev has put much effort into that.

He's put a little bit. We see fewer T-shirts, more suits. We see less apple chomping. We see him on more CBC TV talk shows. But wherever we see him, he still comes off as bitter and charmless. And that's not just me saying that. I think that is probably most of his caucus, would say, if they were being honest with each other, he's too bitter and charneless.

And what he lacks, I think, is credibility as a potential prime minister. I think that the polls have shown that Canadians just don't, like he trails his party, significantly. So if the ballot question is who should be prime minister, he's on 20 to 25 points behind. If it's which party would you like to see form government? His parties maybe, some polls say that it's tied or they're two points ahead. I think it's more like they're five points behind. But my point is, Pauliev is an anchor on his party's prospects now,

and his members and his candidates and his party workers all can see that in plain day, every single day. And it hasn't changed in the months since Mark Carney has become prime minister. He lacks credibility as it relates to the big honking U.S. Canada issue. He doesn't sound like somebody who has an answer for that or who could form a strategy that would be more successful than the one that's being tried now. And the last thing that he lacks is he lacks an opponent

that he can beat up on easily. And it's not to disparage Justin Trudeau, but Justin Trudeau was so unpopular by the time that he left office, it was pretty easy pickings for Pierre Polyev to sound like somebody who had more that you wanted to listen to. Let me put it that way than Justin Trudeau. But that isn't the case with Mark Carney. So Polyev will probably persist in doing what the rumors are that he's been doing,

which is to try to use the iron fist. but an iron fist in a situation like this usually pushes it usually creates the opposite of the desired effect a continuation of this dissatisfaction even if it doesn't mean that there are more people that cross the floor but just a roiling sense of how are we trapped in this situation which we don't feel like we can get out of but we don't feel very happy about in the conservative caucus all right let's cut to the chase on this one because

You know, last night with the second caucus member, and as Chantel outlined, stepping aside saying he was going to resign his seat, not cross the floor, but resign the seat doesn't help things for the conservatives in the vote totals for sure. But as soon as he did that, all these different caucus members came out and said wonderful things about him and wonderful things about their leader and all that. and all looked very forced, but nevertheless, that's what they did. But when I say, let's cut to the chase, this has been, I agree with Chantelos, been the worst week for him to come at this time

and, you know, with the budget and all that. Is he on the ropes? Is Pierre Pollyov on the ropes? Two weeks ago, most people were saying, including this panel, that he was probably going to, you know, drift through January and the vote. I'm wondering, do you still feel that way? Or is he literally on the ropes here right now? Increasingly on the ropes, yes.

The problem is he is and has been treating people, including his own staff, as if he were still 20 points ahead. What Bruce explained is obvious to all. He's a drag on the party. And the past three weeks have been a wake-up call. I'm told on many riding associations who were prepared to give him a new lease on life in January and who are now rethinking this.

So it wouldn't really take much at this point. I'm not saying predicting it's going to happen, but it would only take two MPs come spring, maybe one, to make Kearney a majority prime minister. This has its own drawbacks, by the way, if you're going to have a majority with one seat. But once that happens, then the secure knowledge that they may be in opposition for three and a half years,

his position becomes almost untenable. If you're the prime minister and you want to rule your caucus the way that they are, that Puelevin's team are running the conservative caucus, you can probably get away with it for a while because you have carrots to offer and not just a stick. But if you're the opposition leader, there is only so much strengthening about mistreating people if they dare cross you by crossing the floor or sitting as independence that you can use. I was on Parliament Hill when Deborah Gray, the first reform MP to be elected and a few others, Chuck Straw, among others, left the Canadian Alliance caucus in protest over Stockwell Day's leadership to sit. with Joe Clark's stories. I went to Edmonton

in the weeks that followed that to a constituency meeting in Ms. Gray's writing. It was horrible, Peter. To watch what the kind of people who had been sent to take her down and shovel

insults at her. It was really horrible. You don't think that people treat each other like that in public, but it was horrible to watch. But having done all that, what happened to Stockwell-Day? And is anyone saying, oh my God, how terrible that these people cost Stockwell-Dy? So you can only do so much. You can say what you want about Chris D'Anne crossing the floor and call him an idiot. But at the

end, it does reflect on you. And it reflects on the style that the leader likes. And I am not convinced that the people who have remained or still conservative MPs to a man and a woman are going to put up with it until who knows when. We'll see, but you know how loyalty is built. People, Marroney was in trouble and most people in his caucus would have gone through fire for him because he had built loyalty. Jean Charray was the same Pierre Paulyev as the the opposite. And what he hear about caucus management, even before this series of event, is just brutal caucus management. If Pierre Poiliev does not hear what he wants to hear from a caucus member, he shuts out that caucus member. And that's been true of people in positions and his

leadership team. It's an ugly place to work at at this point is basically what you hear. And they can issue with many press releases to say how nice everything is and how, how they love each other. Nobody who spends, I'm not even on Parliament Hill and I've spent a week hearing about all this. Bruce. You know, I'd love to pick up on a couple of points there, Peter, if I can. This idea of how you deal with leadership challenge, which is a normal part of politics. It needs to be a healthy part of politics where people go through these cycles and they kind

of go, this isn't working, why isn't it working? What should we do about it? and the leader is usually, comes with the territory that you have to be part of fashioning that conversation, and you have to do it in a way that makes sense in your situation. And typically, those who approach it from the standpoint of this is an opportunity for me to flex my muscles, as opposed to embrace my critics, the flex the muscles crowd usually end up regretting that strategy. Not always, but Chantal mentioned Brian Mulroney.

I remember when Brian Mulroney embraced Joe Clark, there were a whole lot of people who said, well, how can that even be possible? But it was very smart for Brian Mulroney to do it. He created more bonding within that party, more of a sense of, well, we know these people don't agree on everything. And in fact, they may not be great personal friends, but they decided that they're going to work together

and they're going to be constructive about it. I think Jean-Cretchen with Paul Martin did something. something similar. I think Paul Martin did the opposite in some respects and created more of tension and friction in his party. So when you fast forward to Pierre Poliev and you say, well, you know, him losing his own seat might seem like just one seat in the larger, you know, table, but if you're a caucus member, you're looking at that and you're going, how did you lose your seat? You held that seat for a number of years. That's really almost a unheard of for the party to increase its support, to lose to somebody who was an effective

candidate, but hardly a household named nationally. There was hardly really a crisis in terms of the voters in his riding worrying about what he would do. I know some people say, well, you know, those voters were worried that he, if he won the election, was going to cut the public service. And yeah, that may have been part of it. But this is a function of a guy who has a leadership style that he got so invested in. It took so much satisfaction in that apple-chomping kind of derisive treatment of others. And then he surrounds himself with people who emulate that style like Andrew Shear and Melissa Lanceman.

And if you're in that caucus and you feel like, well, this is the leadership cadre. I have to go home. I have to tell the people in my writing that this is the way that we're going and it's going to win. and you're listening, you're looking at them and they don't really think that's the way to go. You know, Chris Don't Drummond made the point that he was a red Tory, and that's almost a statement that you're not allowed to say

in today's conservative party, but you should be. You should be. I mean, it's perfectly fine, I think, for the leadership of the party to say, we're not going to be a red Tory party, but we welcome red Tory. Big parties have this conundrum right now,

which is if you say there's a purity test and everybody who doesn't hit every single mark of the purity test doesn't belong, well, you're probably going to end up losing more elections than you win. And so that's a calculation for a pure polyev whose whole pitch was, I'm a winner. And now he's in a situation where he's, I don't know if on the ropes is the right metaphor, because on the ropes either is a rope to dope and then you find a way to win, or it's a precursor to hitting the mat. And I don't know how that's going to turn out.

But I don't see much evidence that he's got a strategy to reposition himself and to build more confidence in his party, at least not today. But he'll have a hard weekend, I think, to think about it. All right. He's going to have a hard week because there is nothing worse for a leader who is in that situation than to have all these MPs go home for a week. That's right. Is they're off now for 10 days?

Yeah, it's not what you want because, you know, you cannot keep watch on all those MPs. Some of them will have conversations with families. Bruce talked about this. Do not discount the impact of being asked by your kids or by your spouse. How do you feel about your job getting up in the morning, having watched what's been happening all week, and thinking, I can't do this anymore. It's becoming difficult for many MPs. And at some point, some of them are going to think,

you know, so they're going to go after me if I make a move. But what do they have to go after me? Once they're finished, calling me names. So what? I was listening to Alain Raels, who was the Quebec lieutenant for the Conservative Party under previous leaders and who left the party after Pierre Puehliev won. And when he left the party,

they fired off emails throughout his writing to take him down and describe him in a very demeaning manner. Well, Mr. Reyes is not only doing fine, doing a lot of media stuff, by the way, probably the main conservative presence in Quebec with Zimitri Sudas, and neither of them has a... minute for Pierre Puelev, and both of them are still very much conservatives. So I'm thinking, how does it help the larger issue of the conservative movement to drive people away in such a way

that they will just basically be telling voters with former Trump staffers who are telling voters in the U.S. a year ago, do not vote for this guy. Our party is worth something, but this guy doesn't work. And the more you do this, the more you're going to get those echoes, because it's not as if, I mean, Quebec is in a place of its own, but the Quebec MPs are not a presence here on the media scene. They're not standing up to say, here we are, they go to question period, dutifully asked questions. Some of them, a bit out of left field, one this week to prove loyalty, I guess asked about the carbon tax and the industrial carbon tax, only to be told rightly that she had been part of a Quebec liberal government

that had actually put in place carbon pricing. But once they get home, they kind of fade in the woodwork until they get on their feet again to ask a question that someone asked them to read. Okay. We've got to take a break and we've got to get to the budget. but let me just a quick last question before we take that break as it relates to this. At the end of this week, was Pierre Pollyev hurt more by the chaos in his party than Mark Carney was helped by it? I don't think you can separate one from the other. I think Mark Carney is fortunate to have Pierre Polyev as the leader of the opposition

and responding to his questions. But we're going to talk about the budget. I don't think the budget gave the conservatives this flashy thing that you can go after a government on in a way that they needed. So the conservatives only looked like they were run by incompetence who were worried about keeping their jobs. Bruce? Yeah, I did something that I don't often do, but I went down to watch the budget in the chamber.

And one of the things that occurred to me as I was watching it is when the finance minister finished his speech, the conservative seemed to not know who was going to stand up and say something. Like I was sitting literally just over Pierre Polyev, and he was looking around to see who is going to stand up. It was like they were trying to decide that in the moment. And then they lost the moment. Some other MP stood up and spoke. And it was chaotic. And the chaos really stood out for me because it spoke to both this tension, simmering tension in the party

and the inability of it to kind of work as a cohesive unit, but also, and this is to your point, Peter, that this budget is not an easy, budget for a lot of those conservative members to say, this is the worst piece of public policy ever. And I think they've got that challenge. I think they've got a challenge of a, of a more centrist, a liberal prime minister who's doing a lot of things that would be part of their policy mix if they were in government, maybe not the kind of things that Pierre Pauliev particularly enjoys. But I think it's, it's definitely a more difficult week at the end of the week for Pierre Pauliev, and that has to be better for an incumbent leader of a minority government.

All right. Let's take a break. We'll come right back and we'll talk about the budget in a little more detail right after this. And welcome back. You're listening to Good Talk for this Friday, Chantelle-A-Barre, Bruce Anderson, Peter Mansbridge, all here for you. You're listening. You're listening to a good talk for this Friday. You're listening to us on SiriusXM, Channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform, or you're watching us on our YouTube channel. And our first airing of the program is at noon hour Eastern time on Friday,

and therefore it's before what is likely to be the second vote on the budget later this afternoon. I don't think anybody really thinks it is in trouble, but you never know, especially never know this week. Okay, this budget was the one everybody was kind of waiting for to see how Mark Carney and his team were going to deliver on the promises they made during the election campaign and the turn in terms of how the government is positioning the Canadian economy for better things in the future. You know, budgets can take a while before you can really pass judgment on where they, was that a good budget or was it a bad budget? sometimes it can take weeks, months, sometimes even years, before you can come up with that kind of a conclusion.

So trying to make a decision within a couple of days as to whether it was good, bad, or indifferent, can be difficult. However, having said that, a lot of people were doing just that this week, including in a way, and I found this kind of surprising, was the governor of the Bank of Canada. Mackham. Now, I was, I guess, I was surprised. He didn't come out and say I support this budget, but he did say positive things

about the potential of this budget. When you look at the kind of reactions that came on this budget this week, what do you point to? And I don't want a whole raft of things, but, you know, give me one. Give me something that you point to as saying, okay, this has potential or it doesn't have potential. But that's the strength of this budget politically is you can't really do that. It's more of a whole than the sum of its parts, which is politically very astute up to a point because you can say you dislike the budget, but what if the criticism mostly focused on? You asked, is it good, bad, or indifferent? I use markers that are totally on scientific, but talking about voters in public opinion. On the day after the budget, I went

in the afternoon on the Globe Mail and on La Prés's websites. And you know that they racked the stories the most read on both websites. The budget did not come anywhere near number one or two. It was in fifth place. And the budget story that was in fifth place was, you know, the usual story, would this the budget mean for your wallet? That tells me, and the official opposition's first round of question was the budget because there was no choice and quickly switched to mandatory sentences for juvenile pornography. And when you put all that together, you think what voters are saying is, in the best case scenario, La Chance O Corolla, let's see where this leads.

Nothing made people say, wait a minute, who are these people? What I found most striking, and unlike everyone, I found that corporate reaction was on the whole positive. I did not hear many premiers go to the stage to say this is a terrible budget. That also did not happen. There was more silence than anything else. What I found was probably one of the bigger faults of this budget, because it will take a while to see where it leads, is that it was overhyped before it was delivered. And the result, obviously, was that it didn't pack as much of a punch

as most people had been led to expect. And I believe that's, I mean, what we saw was a Mark Carney budget. It's kind of boring. But being oversawled by an hyperactive finance minister called Champagne, and that kind of discordance doesn't really work well. I think Mr. Champagne would be wise. to speak of his budget in terms of the reality of his budget rather than the lofty rhetoric that he's pulled out somewhere

to talk about the fall of the Berlin Wall. Nobody is really buying that. And he only looks like he's trying to sell you a used car. I'm not trying to insult used car salesman. But it comes across like that. But otherwise, really, really tough budget for the opposition, but also a really tough budget to campaign on. If you absolutely must, you would still be campaigning on the character of the prime minister politically and economically rather than on many parts of that budget.

Okay, I've had my fun. Thank you. Gross can be serious now. Well, I think the first thing for me, Peter, is that, you know, when you're saying, well, we're all, we were all really anxiously awaiting this. And I think that's true about us and the people who are listening and the people, who are watching, but I don't think it's true about, you know, almost 80% of the, of the population. I think there was a large segment of the population that knew a budget was coming, but there is a kind of a way that we who kind of work in and around this area fashion

our description of it that presupposes that everybody is as keenly focused on it as we are, and that just isn't true. So the amount of expectation where people were on the edges of their seats and rushing to get home so that they could watch it kind of live, this is like 30 years ago there was some of that,

but there's been less and less of it each passing year. And some days I think that's a bad thing. Some days I think it's just the way that things are and people will consume the information about it over the ensuing two or three days. in the mix of other content that they're consuming about everything else that matters in their life. And so that's thing one for me, which is I don't think the public expectations were as enlarged as some of the commentaries suggest that they were.

But I do think that a lot of the commentary that I consumed this week was comparing the budget to what it was presumed to be the week before. In other words, everybody was saying, this is going to be the biggest shock to everything. And then it didn't... Everybody, no, the government was saying that. They set themselves up for them. Look, I do also think that if you were sort of looking at Carney and Champagne and sort of looking for the harmonies there, they are not Simon and Garfunkel.

They don't harmonize that way. Well, they didn't harmonize for long. And I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but I do think that Carney's way of describing the economy and what he's doing about it does resonate for people. It feels serious but not depressing. It, you know, conveys a sense of confidence, building, and optimism that people are looking for without that extra dollop of that's a politician kind of talking their book. Historical generational, historical, and at some point you say, well, show me, show me. the historical here because, boy, it's not the 95 budget with Paul Martin. But I do think the way to compare it, to look at this budget is to compare it to the ones that

came before in the last several years in particular. The last few years of Trudeau budgets, I think, lacked a sense of urgency around the economy, lacked a sense of cohesiveness in terms of what the future plan for the country was, lacked an ambition for the country. and maybe it was a bit of an artifact of the pre-Trump 2.0 times. Maybe it was a bit of an artifact of Trudeau was just kind of running out of energy. He had personal ambition, but you couldn't really tell what his ambition for the country was. Whereas I think Carney is less about personal ambition, more about ambition for the country.

And the substance of his policies were really quite different. The last, well, a number of Trudeau budgets saw corporations going, oh my God, he's taxing us some more, he's making more difficult for us to invest in and succeed in Canada. This budget had the opposite reaction from the business community, and I spoke to a lot of people in a lot of different sectors. He also, with this budget currently did, get plotted from the head of the CLC and uniform, the big unions in Canada. In the past, it looked as So sometimes the Trudeau folks were saying, well, we need to pick between unions and corporations and we'll pick unions and will create a sense of friction rather than a sense of common purpose. I think Chantelle's point about not roiling the relationships with the provinces is also an important point.

It's rare to have a degree, especially in an economically stressful time like this, to have this much sense of, okay, maybe we're moving in a good direction. Some people will say we should move faster. We should go further. But the fact that the NDP said, you know what, two weeks ago they were saying, I think we couldn't possibly vote for this budget that we haven't seen. Today they're saying we're going to go and ask Canadians if they hate it that much or if it's going to be okay for them, which is usually what you do if you're going to come back and say, turns out they're not that angry about it. And so maybe we should just kind of let the government continue. And the last difference is under Justin Trudeau, the size of the government grew significantly. And in this budget, it's going to go in the opposite direction.

Now, those numbers weren't as big as some people were predicting. And I don't know whether Chantal's right, that there was a calculation about what is politically astute. But it was a politically astute budget, in my view, in addition to being one that on a substantive basis, did get pretty good support from leaders in the union movement and leaders in the business community. And it's quite different. I know, Chantelle wants to say something. Just before you do.

Go ahead. Just before you do. Yep. You dated yourself by your use of your term used cars. They don't call them that anymore. There are no used car salespeople anymore. There are pre-owned. Okay.

Pre-owned. But my comment, I wasn't looking to insult them. I think they understand that when they're selling pre-owned cars, they're not trying to make you believe that you're buying a brand new model, which is basically what Mr. Champagne was trying to emulate. I wish him look in that future. Bruce talks about comparing it to other budgets. If I were to compare it to other budgets,

both for the context, difficult context, globally and the spending involved in that difficult context. I would go back to 2009 and Stephen Harper's budget during the global financial crisis. I believed it in the same context. Of course, Stephen Harper wouldn't have delivered the exact same budget, but he could have delivered that budget. As opposed to Justin Trudeau, if you're going to set one next to the other, Stephen Harper much more likely to sign off on a budget like that than Justin Trudeau. I don't think it was so much lack of energy on the part of Justin Trudeau, those budgets, the last few ones that we saw, more that it wasn't his issue.

Economics, he wasn't fascinated by economics and fiscal policy, and in the end, that became a major flaw because at first it wasn't the most important thing about Justin Trudeau's tenure, but it became that, especially in the last two years. And Mark Carney is the opposite, which is why it's really hard to call this the Champagne budget as opposed to the Carney budget. And that is his strength. So a politician should play on his strength,

and you're more likely to believe him, as you would Stephen Harper presenting this kind of budget. And if it were Justin Trudeau or Pierre Puehliev coming up with a budget like that, I worry about the cuts to the civil service. Why? Because I see that to soften the blow, they've said we're going to offer early retirement to people we're going to do it through attrition. As you know, the experience has been that the people most likely to say yes to early retirement

are people with talent and skills that they can use elsewhere. And I worry that this drive to get to those cuts and that number are going to deplete. the public service or make it weaker not because there will be less bodies but because the bodies that opt to go that route are going to be the bodies that will be most missed and so I'm curious to see how

all this plays out I'm not so much into the union versus government thing and what it will really mean to the texture of the public service you know i i can vote for what shantels just said because i i watched it at the cbc when they went through some of these periods of early retirements and you know some of some of the people that took our early retirement uh that was a wise choice on their part others it was not a good choice on the cbc's part to let them go because it hurt it hurt bad um but the there is also another

difficult choices on issues like this. Sorry, Bruce. Yeah, no, I think they are difficult choices, and I see that risk. But I also feel like there are sometimes organizations where people are kind of staying for the last five years of pensionable work are creating, in effect, fewer opportunities if spending is tight for young people. And I think that is a problem that we need to be thinking of in this context as well. Renewal of the public service isn't always that easy if we're in times of fiscal limitations. And so, you know, some of that change probably be productive over time. Yeah. You're right on that score too. And I'm a perfect example. You know, I on until I was 69 when I retired and said I'd never

work with a seven in front of my age at the CBC. Here I am still working with two sevens, but nevertheless. You know, your point is right. Staying on after normal retirement age, if there's such a thing, is costing other people jobs. Do you? But if you're eliminating positions, you're going to be hard-pressed to be renewing the public service. You can't do both abolish positions and have a sudden influx of young, and the point of the exercise is not to renew it.

It's to slim it down by, what is it, how many, 40,000 people. So those are positions that won't exist. They're not just people who leave and are replaced. So I don't think the end result is going to be a younger, more vibrant, more energetic public service as a given. Well, we'll see how that plays out because there's no doubt there is a, There is a common feeling that the public service needs some kind of re-energizing on a number of fronts. So whether this does it or not, I guess we're about to find out. We're going to take our final break.

We'll be right back after this. And welcome back, final segment of Good Talk for this week. We kind of glossed over what the NDP is up to on this. We've kind of taken a swing at the other parties. Well, we didn't really talk about the block either, but I want to focus on the NDP for a second. Because, you know, clearly they can hold in these, and we'll see it later today,

and probably in the next couple of weeks, they hold in some ways the balance for the Carney government if they abstain or split their vote or what have you it's good enough for Mark Carney's government to hold on through all this

depending on how everybody else votes what can we tell about the NDP this week? I mean we had lots to say about it leading up to this week but what have we seen this week in their actions and their words. Well, can I just start on this one?

I mean, if the NDP were going to force a Christmas election, the most obvious thing to do minutes after this budget is the equivalent of break glass and set off the fire alarm, right? You need to start building the case

instantly about how horrific this budget is, and how there's no moral new Democrat who could do anything other than force the government down and give electors a chance to replace it. We didn't see that. And so is that a function of them not being organized, not having a leader, or is it a function of them not feeling it? Not feeling that the voters would welcome that,

not feeling that they would, you know, as somebody told me a couple of weeks ago in town, a new Democrat, said we have nothing to lose and we could win party status again, which was a calculation I did not agree with. I didn't sort of beleaguered the point, but I don't see it that way. I do see lots of evidence in my polling that voters do not want an election now. They do not think, and I'll go in the field tomorrow. I'd be very surprised if the reaction to the budget from the,

the average Canadian is, damn it, that was no good. We need to have an election right now. I think conservative voters mostly will say that, but I think most other voters will say, no, I don't think that's right. So the absence of their immediate outrage and signaling that they were going to vote against this budget, I think, was the most telling sign. It's still, and there is, it's early days, but there is a Lijipoll out today that does show that the appetite for an election is not grown substantially over the past week.

And I, I too, don't expect to see, you know, it's not, there is no election fever. I feel it. I don't feel it on the hill. I don't feel it in real life. But there are complications for the NDP, and they are real. One of those is that all five leadership aspirants, including Heather McPherson, who is the only MP out of the five, so the only one who will have to vote, all said that if they had to vote,

they would vote no. And she added that she was not inclined to abstain, which is the default position if you don't want to bring down the government. Now, other NDPMPs, not all of them, have also said that they are not going to abstain. So at some point, you kind of need some people to do one or the other, vote for the budget or abstain,

because if everyone is going and that is the problem of this caucus is they are struggling to come to a common position on what to do. I don't think they really want to be the cause of an election. This week is the easy week for them yesterday. The bloc and the NDP voted with the government against the Tory sub-amendment. I expect this afternoon that maybe the conservatives and the NDP will vote against the BLEC's amendment. or else will be in an election. But I think they would really like, the NDP caucus would really like to vote against the budget

and they would really like to force Pierre Palliev to have some of his MPs abstain. And I'm not ruling out that that is the scenario that ends up playing out when the House comes back on the week of the 17th. Because the real confidence votes, the one that will close the issue of an end of year, beginning of year election,

those votes are not going to be coming until the week of the 17th. But, yeah, it's, you know, if your MPs are going around saying, I'm not going to abstain, and your leadership candidates are saying, I wouldn't support the budget. It kind of leaves you in a difficult place to suddenly come out and support the budget. And I don't think that they have finished trying to figure out their way out of that box. I don't know how many of our listeners have actually read the block amendment to the budget or sub-amendment or whatever they used to. It was the amendment because Mr. Poitjev forgot to present his.

I understand. I understand. But in terms of what it says, it would seem pretty hard for the conservatives to go to an election based on voting for that amendment. I totally expect two things to happen. Well, one, the block will bring all this. members to the vote, or electronically or in person. And there will be conservatives who won't be voting in the best case scenario for the amendment, and otherwise the conservatives will oppose it, because it's basically a spending amendment presented to an official opposition that is criticizing the spending that is already happening. But most of the benefits in that amendment are for Quebec. Not surprising.

Well, not necessarily. If you look at their key demand, this. really been to bring OAS payments for people over 65 in line to those offered to people over 74. So that is not a Quebec-driven measure. And if you're going to increase transfers to the provinces for health care, presumably it wouldn't be a Quebec-only demand. Yeah, I agree.

But they're all written in terms of Quebec benefit, right? Well, yes, but what universities would benefits, Quebec always not benefit the rest of Canada? Right. I'm going to let that one go. As you should, because you may be soon in that small section where you're not getting the same benefits as you would later on as an elderly person. Mind you. Also, I'm going to let that one go too. Okay, we've got two minutes left.

The black, by the way, never... We should spend a minute on this interesting set of developments in the United States. I think that the two that I spent the most time kind of looking at were the election of, well, the elections, including the election of the mayor of New York City. Across the board, these were mostly a repudiation. of Trumpism and the first sign of hope, I think, for the Democratic Party in a good long while. And the first sign I think that I saw Trump take seriously the fact that his political or his party's political fortunes, you know, we're facing some headwinds.

You know, his normal setting is we're doing great. The numbers are off the charts. There's never been a more popular a moment for the Republican Party. And he acknowledged that that wasn't what happened this week. So that was interesting. And the second thing that was interesting was the oral arguments before the Supreme Court on Trump's tariffs and the skepticism that was described in the way in which those judges queried the appellants or the lawyers who represented the two sides. Also, you know, tentative good news maybe for those who.

don't like the tariffs. Okay. I did watch with interest the way he reacted to the voting. He said, you know, I wasn't on the ballot. My name wasn't on the ballot. And many people are telling me if my name had been on the ballot, the results all would have been different. I think they should try that and see what happens.

I'll say. Okay, listen, thank you both. Thank you, Chantel. Thank you, Bruce. It's been an interesting week, assuming we'll. We all escape through this afternoon without an election called. We'll talk again in a week's time when all the MPs are in their homes. Talking to their constituents should be interesting.

Thanks again. Remembered stay Tuesday. Don't forget that. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Have a good weekend.