The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Good Talk - Could There Be Real Movement on the Health Care Front?

Episode Date: January 13, 2023

Chantal and Bruce explore the new hints that there could be progress between Ottawa and two key provinces on finding a deal on health care for the future.  And, an intriguing new idea from BC on a key issue concerning housing.  Two huge issues for Canadians that register much higher than many of the other topics we often discuss.  Also, Bill Morneau's new book -- is there anything to learn from the former finance minister's criticism of his former boss?

Are you ready for good talk? And hello there, Peter Mansbridge in Toronto, Chantelle Hebert is in Montreal, and Bruce Anderson is in Ottawa. Lots of highfalutin stuff happened this week. Not sure how much of any of that we're going to talk about. And I guess what I'm saying there is I don't really want to talk about summits. I have this thing against summits. I know there was a big one this week in Mexico. But summits have always been for me this issue that's hard to grasp as journalists because you can't really cover them. You know, you're not in the room when the summit's taking place. You only get briefings later on in the day from the various delegations. I thought you said that we weren't

going to talk about them. No. But he meant that he was. Ah, that's what I get. I get to just don't understand how this works yet. Yeah, that's right. I just I just get to ramble for a minute. You guys aren't going to talk about them, but I have a few things to get off my chest. That's right. Listen, I'll tell you, one of the first summits I ever went to was in Mexico, of all places, with Pierre Trudeau. It wasn't the first one, but it was one of the first ones that I went to. And because you never got anywhere near the thing,

I don't remember a single thing about that summit except the pool and the beach were great. Well, that grievance has lasted a long time it has you know it shows just how shallow i am but nevertheless it just shows how i i totally subscribe to the notion that covering summits is a pain in the neck for a journalist because uh your neck is going to get bored from trying to keep your head up or not going to sleep while you wait. Fair enough. But you notice that Peter went from it's a pain to cover summits to summits are a bad idea.

And I think that's a bit of a stretch, I'll be honest with you. Did he say that? A bad idea for journalists, I said. Maybe some real things happen at summits. I think they're just a... All right. I'm not... Anyway, I didn't mean to interrupt the monologue off the top

about the history of this. Yeah, go ahead. For people, real people, the issues this week are still, they're not about what they talk around the summit table about. They're about whether it's inflation, the cost of living, cost of groceries, whatever, and they're about health care. I mean, you're the expert on the polling data, Bruce, and you know, as all the different research firms come out,

when they kind of rank the top issues, it's either number one or number two, always, it seems seems is health care and can governments get their act together to figure out a way that we can have better health care in a country that has pretty good health care to start with but has got real fault lines in it right now now i raise it because there are hints and perhaps no more than hints that the long debate and differences between different levels of government over health care funding, there may be some cracks in there that could lead to some kind of a solution. And those cracks or hints seem to be coming from the two

of the most powerful populated provinces in the country, Quebec and Ontario. Chantal, how serious should we be looking at these? Well, first, let's agree that the easiest thing to solve in the current health care quote-unquote crisis is funding. Someone will write a check and someone will spend it. That will not, as a miracle, resolve. It's not like growing your vegetables. If it rains more after a drought, you're going to do fine. You're going to get a lot of tomatoes. The structure of the system and the structural issues that have become more acute because of labor shortages basically mean that more money may be a part of the solution, but it is not capital S solution.

Now, the politics of it, and that doesn't mean the politics of it are not important, seem to be shifting. I would trace that shift back to a meeting that François Legault and Justin Trudeau held just before Christmas, which flew almost under the radar because it was just before Christmas. And unless you believe that those two political personalities, who are usually not on terribly warm terms, had an attack of a Christmas spirit. François Legault surprised everyone by coming out and saying that he was leaving the meeting with the prime minister with a lot more optimism about the health care discussion that was underway via the media between the premiers saying we want more money and the federal government saying, yeah, but we want

to know what you're going to do with the money, which is basically where this has stood for two years. Now, François Legault even added that he could understand that the prime minister would not want to have a meeting unless he was reasonably assured that it would end well with some resolution of the discussion, which was surprising given who was speaking. At the same time, remember a year ago at this time, Justin Trudeau was going around talking for long-term care. You never hear those words, especially in French, cross his lips anymore. Yesterday, he gave a news conference where he was asked about healthcare and the state

of play on that front. And he was very careful to use the word parameters, not conditions, not national standards. It seems, and François Legault has been saying, well, you know, if they want to share data, our data is available. There's no issue with sharing data. Now, this week, Premier Ford has added this voice to this by saying, well, yes, I do believe there should be some accountability. That's not my biggest problem. So both sides have kind of walked back some of their stated positions or red lines on this. I think from the outside that the federal government has walked back more distance than we are actually talking about versus the provinces. But I think there is a realization politically on both sides, provincial and federal, that some kind of resolution has to come because people are rightly becoming terribly impatient with the

state of the health care system. And the impression increasingly has been that while it's burning down, our governments are fiddling and trying to sound louder one than the other rather than playing together to try to contribute to a solution. Where are you on this, Bruce? Well, Chantal, I think, has it exactly right. I think my perspective, looking back on 40 years of doing polling, is that almost every quarter where we would ask the question, what's the most important issue, the one that concerns you the most, the number one answer is almost always health care. Now, that doesn't always mean that people sense a crisis. Sometimes they give that answer when there's no other issue that they're preoccupied with. It's almost like the

normal because what it really speaks to is that there's no more important area of government or public service on offer to Canadians than the health care system. It's the most important thing in people's lives. What's different now, I think, is that we have a sense of accumulation of pressures on the system for which the system is not adequately prepared and not responding well. And so in real time terms, we've got provinces that are feeling a different kind of stress about this political stress.

If you're a provincial premier and you've got a problem in the education system, that's code red. You've got a lot of parents who are really unhappy. And that's an important that's going to be an important part of the test that you face at the next provincial election. But if you've got a real problem in health care, that's code purple. There is nothing that's more politically deadly than something like that, where you look like you're not doing enough to try to solve it, to find innovative ways to respond to the pressures. And I think that's a big part of what's going on. I think it's really great, very encouraging or, you know, fight for some sort of political win at the expense of the other stakeholder and instead roll up their sleeves and figure out what are we going to do that's going to actually help people from the pretty dire situations that we read about or hear about or experience or know friends who've

experienced on every single day. So it's going to be a long road from here to a better functioning healthcare system. But it will start, I think, with this notion of, I don't even know if the point is accountability as much as outcome focused. Accountability is the way that the conversation has to go in order to unlock the funding solutions that everybody's looking for. But the point isn't to establish that one level of government is more accountable to the other, but rather that and not even that the tax dollars spent are perfectly well accounted for, but really that people start to see some sense of alleviation of those pressures and have more confidence that their health system will be there for them in the future.

Well, yeah, go ahead, Chantal. If I can just add a point about, you know, the limits of the levers that the federal government has, and we just, you know, Bruce just mentioned accountability. The first line in accountability in the health care system, as he rightly pointed out, is you and me as voters, provincially and federally, and not some government over some other government. Which is why covering this issue as a point scoring exercise in politics is a bit of a fruitless exercise. Think of the Canada Health Act allows the federal government to punish a province that is not living up to X, Y, or Z. But think of the politics. For instance, in this current situation of a federal government waking up one morning and saying, I don't like what you're doing, BC, so I'm going to take money out of your healthcare system.

Oh, yeah? Good luck with that. Who are you punishing? And who stands to have a big hole in his or government's foot? Certainly not the province that is being punished. That's the first problem. The other problem with accountability is you will hear a lot of talk about how the federal government spends billions that it sends to the provinces, and then the provinces take it and spend it somewhere else. Well, if you're a provincial premier and you're looking at 50% of your provincial budget increasingly going to health care or more than that, some other missions of the government, like education, are getting shortchanged.

So it would be no surprise that some of the new funding would end up shoring up other envelopes that are the mission of the government, housing, which we will talk about later. Provincial governments do not only run health care systems, which they do, they also have to run decent education system. And you cannot forever ask Paul, who is in elementary school, to pay for aging Peter who needs more health care. Thank you for that. I do. I forgot that Paul existed and Peter does. Let me, you know, if there's reason to see, you know,

a glimmer of optimism in what's happened in these last couple of weeks, throw the dose of reality at us here in terms of, you know, there are obviously other partners in this package. And where are they? And how are they likely to respond to what seems to, I don't want to overstate it, but what we discussed in terms of Ontario and Quebec and Ottawa. Bruce? Well, you know, I'm kind of optimistic about this. I think that the reasons why I'm optimistic have to do with the degree to which the system is under pressure. So it's not a happy

news story that we've arrived at what is for many people effectively a crisis in the healthcare system. But having been said, if I look for the normal points of cleavage or friction around this kind of agenda of innovation and information sharing and collaboration on outcomes, I would say, well, who are the provinces that would normally be the most important threats to progress in that area? And I think Chantal, talked about two of the most important and they both seem to be saying, let's keep rowing in this direction, at least until we find that we can't. And that's usually a very calculated decision. And so that's encouraging.

I think the Premier of Alberta has said some things that are sort of a bit mixed in the sense of how she would approach it. But there's at least some signals that she would want to improve the health care system in Alberta and would want to do it to some degree in conjunction with the federal government. But she has a very particular approach to how she advocates. And so she might be a bit of a threat. But I don't think it would be. I don't think that whatever she decides to do or however she decides to prosecute her case will undermine a collective progress if there are more provinces involved. And then you look

at the federal political system and say, well, what about the right and what about the left? And you know, I think for the most part, what the Trudeau government has done with Jagmeet Singh's NDP on pharmacare and on dental care suggests that, you know, on any given day, Mr. Singh is going to say something a little bit critical of the government. But on the whole, there's a meeting of the objectives and the minds that's going to stay intact as the federal government pursues providing more funding with more outcome parameters and guarantees or at least undertakings. So I don't think the threat will be there. And recent history anyway is that the federal

Conservative Party does not want to weigh in very much on these issues because if the federal government says we're going to put more money into the health care system the conservative party knows that it's death for them politically to sound like they're against that they also know that with conservative premiers in some provinces they don't really want to raise the stakes of give the money but with no conditions. The premiers aren't asking for that. And it sounds like a kind of out-of-left-field argument. So I suspect that conservatives will probably sit on their hands for this debate, for the most part, in Ottawa. They have done that in significant measure on the pharmacare question.

And I think the left won't really fight this fight. So that's why I'm optimistic that the political consensus point that we seem to have arrived at might be fairly durable. So in order, provincially, I agree that some provinces, because of their population, way more than others around the provincial table. But I also believe that the two provinces that would be maybe among those most reticent to do business with Justin Trudeau, that would be Manitoba and Alberta, are looking at provincial elections this year. And I think Danielle Smith is going to come to realize, if she has not yet, that acting like a bull that just runs for every red flag because it comes from Ottawa is not going to pay off,

especially on health care. She has no interest in not bringing a deal home in time for the election, especially running against a strong NDP opposition. And the same is just as true, or perhaps more in the case of Manitoba, a province that does not bring the leverage to the table that Alberta or BC or Quebec or Ontario, by virtue of their size, would bring. Now, on the federal politics of it, Jagmeeline Singh has been making all the right noises in the sense that he's telling Justin Trudeau,

you're my partner and you won't be unless there's progress on health care, which is the NDP message. It's fairly typical. The Bloc Québécois will be neutralized by any decision that Legault makes to play along. But when it comes to the Conservatives, I think Poilier has a roadmap that worked in the past that he will probably follow. And that is that Stephen Harper was in opposition when Paul

Martin made that 2004 deal with the premiers, a 10-year-long deal. And what did Stephen Harper do on the morning after that deal was struck? He said, if I become prime minister, I'm just going to live by that deal. And in so doing, took health care off the table for all of the federal elections that he ran in. Because he actually extended a bit the 10-year deal so that he didn't have to bring it to an election campaign until 2015. So it's the easy path, the path of least resistance. And judging from the silence from the conservative benches, the relative silence, I assume that that is where the party is going on this. All right. You know, you can say a lot of things about Stephen Harper, but one thing he was pretty good at, not 100% of the time, but quite

often he was good at taking things off the table that politically were a potential problem for him and his party, and sometimes to the upset nature of many members of his caucus when he did that, but he did it. Okay, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, Chantal mentioned a moment ago housing, an intriguing new idea coming out of British Columbia on the housing front, which is equally a problem for so many Canadians in today's world. We'll get to that right after this.

And welcome back. You're listening to Good Talk on the Bridge on Sirius XM, Channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform. And also today, being Friday, you can see us on our YouTube channel. You can find the link to it on my Twitter or Instagram accounts. And if you are watching on YouTube, you'll notice occasionally there's a freeze frame, like things freeze up sometimes on the transmission, but it doesn't appear to be in any way affecting the audio of the program, and the hits are very short and last only a second or so

when they do happen. Okay, moving on. Housing. Chantal's in Montreal, Bruce in Ottawa. Bruce, I asked you to start this one for us because, as you well know, and you see it on your data, just like you see it in terms of health care for Canadians, that housing is a huge issue. So different governments have tried to come up with different solutions to how to deal with this problem. the new premier of British Columbia this week, trying to find an answer to the question of housing units, especially for lower-income people. And, well, why don't you tell us what you see in this and the potential for it? Yeah, I was really intrigued by the announcement by Premier Eby in British Columbia of a new fund that the provincial government was creating to support co-op organizations that wanted to buy housing that otherwise might be subject to renovation. of this term, reno-viction, whereby typically people who are either younger or relatively

lower income find themselves in a situation where the rental accommodation that they're living in has been bought by someone whose intent is to renovate it and then to reprice it, which can push a lot of people who otherwise are able to live in the part of the city that they want to live in, find themselves out in the cold. So any ideas in that area, I think are really welcome. I mean, I think that first thing I want to say about the housing issue is that it tends to get boiled down into this one term housing affordability when the politics of solving housing affordability are quite a bit more complicated than that. You have a

big chunk of the marketplace that says that houses are unaffordable. And at the same time, a significant part of the marketplace that says housing values have gone up so much and I've benefited from that. It's the single most important good thing that's happened in my financial life. So if you're a politician, figuring out the solutions to that, you know, you can't just go, well, maybe that the house prices should come down because that doesn't work for all those people for whom the accumulation of value in their home has been a really important and positive economic story. So you need to look for solutions that have to do with land development and how it's used so that the land that's released for use by municipalities or provinces isn't only going to be used to build the next batch of relatively

high cost housing. You need to also look for innovative solutions that work within the context of the existing infill areas in cities and the rental properties that exist within cities. So I've generally been, and you and I were kind of exchanging notes about this, I've been feeling better this month of January a little bit because I'm seeing policy innovation happen. And these are ideas that not everybody's going to go along with, or some people will look at them, and I read the story about the EB program, and there are always going to be people say, well, it's good, but it's a start. It needs to be a lot more. And I think all of that's true. But it's better that we're starting and pushing ideas that are like this, which will probably be

different from one market to the other. But I do think that there's the co-op housing segment in Canada is an important part of how we solve for affordable housing for people who are otherwise struggling to find it in our city. So good for Premier Eby to do it. He campaigned on that promise in his leadership campaign. And I think BC is obviously one of the areas in the country where this problem is most severe. So good to see it. Chantal? And not surprising that it would be something that would come from BC in the sense that housing is about more than housing. It's about your capacity to attract people to do the jobs that you need them to do on the money that they can reasonably expect to make. For instance, an elementary school teacher, someone who works in a hospital.

If you're not going to be able to get decent, affordable housing somewhere close enough to where you work, you will pick employment in this market and some other area of the country. And we all know people who make decent wages, but who have turned down opportunities in Vancouver because their standard of living was significantly going to be affected by the housing prices. So for a province that is dealing with issues like that, that is a problem you can no longer ignore because you are going to have a lot of house-rich people who cannot find public services that are staffed to the level that they need to be staffed. But Bruce is right.

It's a complex issue, and the problem is different in various regions of the country. In Quebec, for instance, affordability in Montreal is deteriorated, but not to the point of Toronto or Vancouver by any standard. And as you know, the density in this city is spread a bit differently. The single house with a white picket fence thing is probably the least likely model in Montreal as compared to major Canadian cities. But since the pandemic, because people are increasingly being able to work at the distance to work from home, the housing crisis has spread to other regions in Quebec, where people have moved because it was more affordable, and they could now

continue to do their work without having to commute in and out of Quebec City or Montreal. And that's put tremendous pressure on the housing that is available and the services that are available in areas where no one ever really worried about finding housing. It's a bit of a, remember the times when people would go work in Fort McMurray and they would say that they would all share a trailer or a house because there wasn't enough housing and it was so expensive? We're not there, but it's that kind of problem that is now materializing outside the larger cities. And that basically means it's a problem for not just big city governments,

which it is, but also for all provincial governments to try to figure out how to handle the spread and compound that with an aging population that is looking for cheaper housing costs, tends to move away from the city cores that have become very expensive, but need the medical and the health services that those big cities have been able to provide, but smaller centers do not have. I know you want to get back in here, Bruce, and I'll let you just let me make one point. The thing I'm most attracted to about this BC program of

Premier EBC is this, what did you call it, Renoviction? They call it different things in different parts of Montreal. What is the term they use in Montreal? Renoviction. Okay, but there was another term as well that was used in certain areas of Montreal. Anyway, it doesn't matter. When I was there during, I think, okay, but there was another term as well that was used in certain areas of Montreal.

Anyway, it doesn't matter. You know, when I was there during, I think, the 2019 campaign, in Justin Trudeau's writing, it's a big issue where they're knocking down, you know, old buildings, which have been rental homes, and creating, whether it's new condos or new homes or what have you. Gentrification. Gentrification, exactly. And so I like that. And, you know, I'm wondering, you know, you can only take that so far, but development is, you know, like in this city, in Toronto, like it's out of sight in terms of stuff.

Even through this, you know, the post-pandemic era and how they're dropping condo prices and all that, they're still knocking down houses and putting up huge condos, very expensive ones, in their place. But, Bruce, you wanted to add a point. Yeah, just a couple of points. I mentioned that I thought that education and health care were the two most kind of third rail type highly charged issues for provincial governments. But housing in some provinces has definitely become kind of in the same zone, especially for the much prized younger voter segment that is really kind of struggling either with the cost of rental accommodation or the cost of getting into the housing market for the first time. And so solutions in that space are now a subject where you might find less partisan disagreement. And a good example of that is that the B.C. Liberal Party, which, as we all know, is kind of more the conservative party

in B.C., their response to EB's announcement wasn't to say, this is a terrible idea. We should let the market kind of work itself out. They were saying this isn't enough money being put in this direction. And I think that is an indication to me that when you have that kind of cross-partisan instinct to all be kind of running it towards similar solutions, it's because they're all reading the numbers more or less the same way, that finding solutions in this area is a kind of an 80% issue rather than a 40% or a 45% issue, which sometimes is the way that partisan matters are looked at. And then the second point is that I don't know if we're going to talk about immigration today,

but our immigration level in Canada hit a new record high in the last year. And we do know that a significant number of immigrants to Canada at least start their lives in Canada, in our larger cities, which adds extra pressure to the housing market and which some people are saying, well, we need to solve for that. There are some things that are in place that help solve for that, but a big part of it ultimately is going to be creating affordable housing inside those cities, but also encouraging people to live in other places where availability of land and the opportunity to have housing built like that is important, which is my last point is probably the if you ask me what's the most threatening political issue

for Doug Ford in Ontario right now, I might say it's this green belt thing where he's kind of talked about opening up some land that people thought shouldn't be opened up. Most people thought shouldn't be opened up because it was kind of greenbelt land. And he makes the argument that it's for more housing. But the critics of what he's done are worried that what that housing is going to be isn't what is going to solve the housing affordability problem for people. And there are also questions about which developers knew about this and did anybody take advantage of that information? You know, he uses those immigration numbers to add to his argument, right? And, you know, if they were record highs this year and last year, they're going to keep going with record highs with new limits of, what is it, half a million new immigrants a year for the next while coming in.

You know, when you listen to these two issues, housing and health care, in today's world, you assume that any politician running anywhere right now ignores those two issues at their peril. And if they want to talk about other things, which they often do, and we've witnessed it this week, they're blind to what real people are talking about and real people are making their decisions. You talk, Bruce, about the encouragement of ideas coming up, coming forward from a new

generation of politicians and leaders. And that's all good. But if there's, you know, if action doesn't happen on these issues, people are going to pay a political price. It's not like, or at least I don't think it's like what we used to witness that we talked about these things, but nothing was ever really accomplished. Nobody really paid a price on it i think right now there's a real demand on health care for sure as chantelle has mentioned and housing um so you know it's an interesting time to be watching this and it's a difficult time for politicians who ignore uh whims of people on two issues like this. Chantal, do you want to make the last comment on this before we move on? When is it not difficult to run a government in any event?

But I agree up to a point in the sense that if you do have a roof over your head and your house has been appreciating or whatever your lodgings, it's not going to be a big issue for you until they, as Bruce pointed out, until the government is suicidal enough to come and say, well, we're going to make sure your house is worth less, and then all hell will happen. But when it comes to health care, yes, it's not good, but it has been bad for so long that I think many voters now take every promise on health care with a huge grain of salt. And for the federal government, for instance, it's relatively easy to get off the hook

by sending a check to the provinces and taking itself out of that discussion. Because once you've done that, it's not you that is running the health care system. And every time the provinces remind people of that to get more money from the federal government, it may help them win that case, but it could come back to haunt them in a subsequent provincial election. I'll just note in passing that according to Léger Marketing, we have an end of year, who are the 10 most appreciated politicians in the province, Quebec politicians, federally or provincially. It comes at the end of Health, Christian Dubé, which is credibility that could turn out to be really useful going forward over the next two, three years, because it's rare that you see a Minister of Health on his own rise over and above

party leaders, the Prime Minister, the leader of the Bloc Québécois. I think that's a pretty unique situation. I'm curious to see if it does translate into leverage to force the system to change. Where was Trudeau on that list? A very interesting list in the sense that I'm just going to walk you quickly through the 10 top posts. The most, the federal politician who fared best, who had, when it comes to the percentage of people who appreciate him, is Justin Trudeau in the seventh position, followed by Mélanie Joly, is Minister of Foreign Affairs, the only cabinet minister who made the top 10. Interestingly enough, Yves-François Blanchet,

the leader of the Bloc Québécois, came in 10th place, so after Justin Trudeau. But Yves-François Blanchet is also no longer the leading sovereign in the province. That is now the leader of the Bloc Québécois, who with three seats kind of won the miscongeniality contest of the election and captured that spot. But I should say about, because Bruce is a pollster and he would have noted that, that when it comes to weighing your positives versus your negative, Trudeau stands out for being in negative territory. Despite his good positive numbers, he is a lot more polarizing than François Legault or Yves-François Blanchet

or anybody else on that top 10 list. Any thoughts, Bruce, before we go? Well, I remember before Justin Trudeau was the leader of the Liberal Party, there were noted political analysts and columnists, forgetting which ones, but I know it wasn't either of you, who said that the Trudeau name is poison in Quebec, and that he will never succeed in the province of Quebec. And I, you know, grew up in Quebec, and I sort of always feel like there's going to be a favorite sun thing that's going to kick in somewhere along the way it does it's how people react and um and so uh you know i think that you we we've been having a

little bit of a side conversation about this whole question of um what to make of justin trudeau and reading the excerpts of morneau's book and has he been a consequential prime minister and i'm with john ibbotson i think he's been been a consequential prime minister. And I'm with John Ibbotson. I think he's been quite a consequential prime minister, which doesn't mean that people have to agree with everything that he's done, but he's done things. And so if I look at his current level of polarization, if you like, relative to where it was before he got into politics, I don't see him having significantly increased hostility towards him. Sean tells me this point quite regularly and quite healthfully.

And I also know that the number of votes that he needs or the percentage of votes that he needs in Quebec to help assemble the majority that he wants across the country is more or less where he's at right now. So, you know, if I'm him, I'm looking at that seventh place finish and I'm thinking that is not the worst thing I have ever seen. And also, it's probably good news for the government that Melanie Jolie is on that list. And they probably only want to have Francois-Philippe Champagne and Jean-Yves Duclos on the list as well. But sometimes share a voice is hard to achieve. They are further down, mostly for lack of being known, because it's, you know, like, dislike. And then there's this gray area and the gray zone becomes greater as you go down. Pierre Poilievre was not in that contest.

But Éric Duhem is best pal in Quebec, the leader of the Provincial Conservative Party was, and he didn't do so well. Majority do not think well of him, and he is well-known, but his base likes him. So Pierre Poilievre has a choice. He can go and get himself a base that will like him, but that will not get him the seats he needs.

All right. Well, before we get into the 20s of most popular Quebec politicians, let's move on. We'll take our final break. We'll be back with the aforementioned Bill Morneau. We'll talk about him right after this. And welcome back. Final segment of Good Talk for this week. You know, we love watching American politics, or most of the time we like talking about it. Occasionally we like talking about it.

Okay, let's agree on that. And one of the things that we've witnessed in these last couple of years is the former cabinet members for, whether it was Donald Trump or, you know, back in the old days, whether it was George Bush, W. Bush, or Bush Sr., or whatever, former cabinet ministers who had an axe to grind would not say anything right away when they got out of their office but they would say something around the launch of a book

because that would help promote the book they'd earn a little money on the book now nothing wrong with that we've got at least two authors of these three people who understand what book tours are like and like and selling important elements of your book. But it's not always been the case in Canada. It has been a little bit. It has been in this particular government. Jody Wilson-Raybould had a very successful book where she aired a lot of her grievances against, in particular, Justin Trudeau.

Now Bill Morneau, the former finance minister, is doing the same thing. He's been out of office for a couple of years, said a few things along the way, but he's got it all put together in a book. And there's a lot of stuff about the way Justin Trudeau leads that government that he never said at the time. He never raised those questions. I don't know whether he raised them privately, whether he raised them with Justin Trudeau or not, but he is raising them now.

So what are we making of that? Who wants to go first here? Who raises their hand quickly? Ah, Bruce, you go first. Well, Chantal, she was a little bit slower with the hand, but she always... She's on a delay. Okay. Arrested development is the next thing you're going to say.

Let's agree as authors that there's not a lot of money in this business in Canada and that Bill Morneau certainly is not doing it for money he actually has no need for it it would be pocket change knowing what we know of his financials

and we know a lot because he was a cabinet minister and had to disclose so that's not his main purpose I think his main purpose is to kind of recast his own political experience in a light that is more favorable than at the time of his resignation, which for those who have forgotten or were away on a summer trip, no, impossible, it was the middle of the pandemic, happened as he was under the cloud of a controversy

of his own making over the We Charity issue, not because the We Charity issue was a huge scandal, sorry opposition parties, but because Mr. Morneau traveled at the expense of We Charity and did not fully reimburse the travel costs for himself and his family until the story became a political story. And I'm not saying he was trying to save pennies. I'm just saying that he was not particularly rigorous

in making sure that all the T's and the I's were dotted and the T's were crossed on small stuff. And he swept a lot of small stuff in the wrong way as a politician. I make a difference between Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott and Bill Morneau in the sense that whether you agree or not, Jody Wilson-Raybould resigned on a matter of principle. If Bill Morneau resigned on a matter of principle, as he now seems to be arguing that he had become a mere figurehead, a rubber stamp for whatever the PMO wanted to do, he certainly kept it to himself until this week. And there have been in the past finance ministers who have resigned and were so convinced that they had to go because the public interest was not being served

that they wanted the public to know that. And that did have an impact on policies of the government they left going forward. That is not the sequence of Bill Morneau's departure from government. He told the country, although no one believed him, that he was leaving to pursue an opportunity to head an international organization. And that did not pan out. So the book and whatever he has to say about Justin Trudeau, by and large, seems to me to put a gloss on the fact that he and politics did not gel. I would compare him to Michael Ignatieff. People who had a lot to contribute but maybe did not know enough or were not suited to politics. And the fact that it's one thing to have good policy ideas, but it's another to have the skills to build the consensus that you need to advance them.

And I think he was lacking on that front, and that the book does illustrate that. You know, history can always use as many different voices in it as possible to talk about a particular time and era, in this case, in Canadian politics. So we don't want to knock that. But it's the motivation and the timing for the book that I find interesting. Bruce, your thoughts? Well, you both are bestselling authors.

And so you know a lot more than I will ever know about this business. And I'm finding myself looking at these things and going, I'm finding the excerpts from Spare very salacious, almost tempting me to hit that buy button on the computer and say, I should probably read a little bit more of this very gossipy, awful stuff about the royal family. And I know, Peter, you always love it. If I don't bring up Trump in the course of a, it's like a drinking game. If I don't bring up Trump once in the course of a podcast, it's a mistake. But the Trump books, including the ones written by or including significant contributions from people who were in his cabinet. John Kelly, I guess the most recent one.

Those are some real stories of trauma inside the decision making apparatus of government. When I compare those with what Bill Morneau is saying about Justin Trudeau, I kind of think, well, you know, I've had business partners in a variety of businesses over the years. And if they all decided to write a book about me, I would hope that those are the worst kinds of things that they say about me. Because we all got flaws. We all got things that we could have done differently. Or had we known then what we know now about how to make certain decisions would have done differently. So for me, reading that Bill Morneau thought that Trudeau wasn't as committed to fiscal prudence as he was, no big surprise. Maybe that wasn't knowable before they arrived in office together because they didn't actually expect to win that election in 2015.

Justin Trudeau wasn't actually preparing to be prime minister in the sense of really had fully fleshed out his priority list and how he was going to govern. And so he was kind of learning on the job in year one, year two, year three. So the fact that Morneau, from a business background, with that sense of fiscal prudence, felt himself a little bit at sea from some of the decisions that the government was making, doesn't surprise me. And that's the natural friction or tension that you want to have, frankly, in a liberal government anyway. You want a different one, but similar in nature if the conservatives are in power. And the last thing I'll say is that he was critical of Trudeau's management style. And there seems to be a couple of elements of that. One was that he didn't feel like he had a good personal relationship or a meaningful personal relationship

with the prime minister. And sometimes that's just about the people. I think it's better if they do have those, but I know that a lot of effective politicians don't have those kinds of relationships, and it doesn't keep them from doing their job or having the impact that they want to have. But I generally think that the criticism that he levels about Trudeau's management style or approach is maybe the more important one. And if I were the prime minister,

that's probably the only one that I would sort of look at and say, it's good to have people who've seen you up close say some things that maybe you need to read and think about because management of government, especially through the crises and the different issues that we're talking about trying to deal with as this world becomes a little bit less stable and predictable, that's a really important challenge. And Trudeau's years into the job, and so the management of his government will be a more important thing for him to focus on. But generally, I thought it was as friendly a trashing book as I've seen in a long time, to be honest. A little more than a minute left, Chantal.

Does Trudeau lose any sleep over this? I don't think so. Have you listened to what Mr. Morneau has to say about Pierre Poiliev? If you think that he didn't find there was a cozy relationship with Justin Trudeau. He clearly has zero time for Pierre Poirier, who he feels is not qualified to be prime minister and who he suggests is not a good human being, period. And remember that Pierre Poirier tortured Bill Morneau. It was almost unfair to watch in the House of Commons, so I can understand where he comes from. But if prime ministers and ministers of finance had to have a strong personal relationship in the positive sense to do productive things, then Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin would not

have endured for all of the years that they endured. So that's not a precondition to being an effective minister of finance or an effective prime minister. Yeah, when you think of the different combinations over the years, you know, Harper and Flaherty, you know, I don't think they were close personally, but they had worked out an arrangement. They knew each of their territories and what they had to do. Yeah, that one, the Trudeau-Mornell one never seemed like a marriage made in heaven of any political heaven. But nor in hell, right? And I mean, I was reading a piece in the Globe this morning that said his big criticism of Trudeau, such as it was on the health care system, was there needs to be more accountability for outcomes if there's going to

be more money. Well, that is effectively the position of the prime minister right now. So it's hard to find that kind of gritty, edgy, competes with Spare or the Trump things in any of this, as far as I'm concerned. It also brings back the notion that Monday morning quarterbacking is almost always a lot easier than being on the playing field. That's true. Okay, we're going to leave it at that. I know Bruce has got to go.

He's got to get down to Indigo to join the line for the spare book, and we wouldn't want to hold him back. I'll pick you up one for your next book. It could be inspirational. That's right. Alright gang, thank you much. Chantelle in Montreal, Bruce in Ottawa. We'll talk again in a week's time. I'm Peter Mansbridge.

Thanks for listening. Talk to you again on Monday.