The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Good Talk -- Crazytown in Ottawa.

Episode Date: December 13, 2024

The minister of finance prepares her Monday Economic Statement while rumours fly, again, that Mark Carney is about to join the cabinet.

Are you ready for Good Talk? And hello there. Good Friday. Good Talk. Chantelle Hebert, Bruce Anderson in the house. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Good to have you with us. Lots to talk about today. It's been another one of those kind of crazy weeks where nothing when you really look at it seems to make a lot of sense. I want to start with this one because I find this a puzzle. It's not necessarily the most important thing of the week, but this is another one of those like crazy Ottawa stories. We're coming up in literally a matter of hours, Monday, for the fall economic

statement. The finance minister of the day usually has like two big days in the year, the budget day and the fall economic statement day, which is kind of in some ways kind of like a little mini budget. But it's a big deal. It's very important. And you've heard the finance minister and others kind of floating rumors for the last few weeks of what might be in this FES, the Fault Economic Statement. And here we go, like a couple of days before it, and suddenly in the, I guess the Globe is kind of the preeminent

English-language newspaper in the country. You get an argument from some quarters about that, but carry on. All right. Go feel free to. We'll save that. I'm a prickly balloon of self. I'm not going there. Okay, we'll save that argument for another day.

Let's just say in one of the country's leading newspapers, how's that? Sounds good. It gets leaked, this story, that Mark Carney is being courted yet again by Justin Trudeau to join his government in some official capacity, whether it's in cabinet, whether it's as finance minister, whatever. This happens just before Chrystia Freeland is about to do this thing.

Now, I look at that and I go, this is crazy. Like, who's stabbing whom in the back here? Or is it a stab at all? What do we make of this? Who wants to give it a go? Chantal? Okay. It's a good question. Is anyone stabbing

anyone in the back? And why would you want to be doing that? I guess we should provide some background to why this Mark Kearney story, which might sound to normal people, like a Back to the Future, we're recycling, yet again, a story that we've read maybe what, twice, three times over the past two years? At least. It's kind of, you know, and when the story is not around, we raise it ourselves. So, and Mr. Carney himself is responsible for that because he has been toying, flirting, doing everything to show that he is to a point interested in politics. But this comes at a time when the Globe and Mail also published a story that documented something that everyone on Parliament Hill already knew, i.e. the conflict or a battle

of wills between finance and the prime minister's office over that Christmas GST holiday. And over those checks that I'm about to predict will never materialize in your mailbox even after the postal strike. So, and the story is kind of positioned, rightly so, as a defeat for finance. And the argument that this is not a good way to be spending public money, that it will have little or no impact on affordability. It will mostly look wasteful. It comes at a cost and it should not happen. While the more political side of the government would be arguing, this was an idea that Aaron O'Toole started off with in his last campaign. And we need to do something to show Canadians that we're really there for them. In any event, the PMO wins. Why does the PMO win? Because the PMO usually wins. And if you want to talk about Chrystia Freeland and her faith in this conversation, then we're going to have to talk about Jim Flaherty,

finance minister to Stephen Harper, who opposed income splitting, even said so publicly, and it still happened. We could talk about Paul Martin, who wanted to do something about the CPP and old age pensions, and was told no by Jean Chrétien in 1995, took it really hard, but still did what he was told. Or should we talk about Ralph Goodale, Paul Martin's finance minister, who came up with a budget, great budget, he said. A week later, he went back to the drawing board to rewrite his budget under the dictation of the NDP and Jack Layton.

So finance ministers typically fight their battles and as often as not will lose them. The Mark Carney story comes upon that. If you put the two together, it's kind of clear that we are getting rid of Chrystia Freeland. She will sink with the ship on Monday. She will be presenting a fiscal economic, a fall economic statement that will show that we've gone through the ceiling of 40 billion for the deficit, maybe by a lot of money for all kinds of reasons. You do not schedule the fall economic statement on the day before the House goes away for Christmas and the holidays, if you have great news to share. But is it really a play to say the days of

Chrystia Freeland are counted and she's going to be fired? I don't know. What I was told was that Mark Carney was offered a role in cabinet, but that the role would have seen the creation of something, Canada-US ministry, to handle what is going forward, not finance. There are issues with such an offer. If you create a ministry out of thin air, it doesn't really exist. It doesn't have a place in that chart of the government. It doesn't have a real department. It's like being deputy prime minister. There's no such department. And my understanding is that Mark Carney's answer was that he didn't want that kind of a portfolio for all kinds of legitimate reasons. And then you get to the rumor that all he really wants is finance. I don't know that. But I think it's a bit more complicated than just the play to get rid of Christopher Linn. Okay, Bruce, what's your take?

Well, I think there are a couple of things going on at the same time. You guys are journalists, and so maybe you read this differently. But if I read a story that goes out of its way to say there are 10 sources for this story, I think the journalists are trying to tell us there is an attempt to stab. This is a stabbing that is happening. And we want you to know that we're not in any doubt about whether or not that's the case. Now, whether this will end the way that story predicts, I think is a very open question. I think Chantal exactly makes the point. So these are a number of different moving pieces. Is there friction between the finance minister and the PMO about spending. I, you know, I heard yesterday that Kreskin, the great mentalist who I went to see when I was seven, he passed away.

He lived a long life to 89 or something like that. You don't have to be a mentalist to think that there's friction between Chrystia Freeland and the prime minister's office about spending. And I think, you know, personally, that's a good thing. I think that there's friction. There was already going to be friction. And then recently there are some stories about what the feds have estimated would be some of the costs associated with some of the legal cases that

they're dealing with. And so I think we're headed for a bad news story on Monday about the fiscal situation of the government. And in the past, it's probably been fair to say that this liberal government has not cared very much about bad stories about their fiscal performance. I think they care more about it now. I don't know that they care enough about it, but they care more than they used to. They now look at public opinion, which is categorical in showing that even people who didn't used to think about the fiscal issue when it came to the federal government are now saying the reason our taxes are so high is because the government keeps spending money on people that aren't me. So there's a bigger political risk for the Liberals right now than there has been in the past because of the way people are thinking about the deficit. And they have no time on the clock. They don't have another two budgets after the next one to right the ship. And they don't really have too many more chances to say okay we know that we said we

were going to stay within these guardrails okay but some other things have happened now and we can't but we will the next time there is no room for that argument to land and be credible and mr trudeau has no real credibility on this issue i think think it's fair to say that liberal leaders in my lifetime have been a bit of a mixed bag in terms of their credibility as fiscal stewards. Mr. Trudeau has not been a mixed bag. He has not been somebody who shows much interest in that issue. And I think it's fair to say that many people in his caucus wish that he would show more interest in it and are probably pulling for Chrystia Freeland if there is a Chrystia Freeland-Justin Trudeau fight over this.

So I know you want me to get to the... Yes, we're waiting for this. We're going to get time for our first break. I want to know how many stabbings constitute the real deal. Like how many sources constitute a stabbing? I want to know who's really being stabbed here. Look, I think it's fair to say that that story in the Globe and Mail, one of Canada's most remarkable news organizations,

it's a... The PR side of him can't help itself. It did not look to me like it came from somewhere outside the government. It looked to me like it came from a very astute building downtown. Can we get to Carney? And that it might have been constructed to send a signal to both Ms. Freeland and to Mr. Carney. And in that sense, I look at it and say, you know, despite the troubles, they're managing things well.

They've got a kind of a plan and they're executing the plan. Putting a plan on the front page of the Globe and Mail, it looks ham-fisted and I don't know what the outcome will be. As for Mark Carney, I don't know whether or not he's interested in hearing an offer. He's always seemed to me like somebody who's interested in making a contribution in terms of public policy. Oh, come on. You don't know whether he's interested in having an offer pitched to him?

I mean, sure. He's talking to them. There is no one who has gone out to say we don't know what this story is made of. Even the prime minister's office has kind of moved off the we want to engage in speculation to say things like we believe that he would be a great addition. That's not what you say. I think he would be a great addition. When you invite a guy to a dance and he turns you down.

I think he would be a great addition. I think it's a time of crisis. I agree with Chantal though about don't take a fake job if one is offered. You don't have any influence and then you're trapped in the same political circumstance that everybody else in this cabinet is, which is not going well because primarily because the prime minister refuses to read the Canadian mood the way that everybody else can see it, about himself personally. Can I be a contrarian and just offer you, and I'm not saying I'm right, but a different reading of some of the events of this week. For one, backstabbing, yes, for sure. But the strength of the story, since it was widely known that this friction was happening, all rested on that sentence.

We spoke to 10 different sources and it keeps getting repeated. But in the end, it is an amplification on a story we have heard about. But if anyone is thinking that this is about backstabbing Freeland and that in the process, Justin Trudeau doesn't get his hands cut by that knife, they are seriously deluded. What's the end game here? One of two options. The first is already happening. It goes to the prime minister's credibility on fiscal issues. Most people who will have read those stories will think, looking at the reaction to the GST holiday, for instance, well, Freeland was right and Trudeau was wrong. And he's way, can survive a public rift that leads to the great for the prime minister or his leadership or his chances of making back some of the ground that he has lost to Pierre Poilievre.

Then I'm going to go back to that check, the one that I no longer necessarily believe you're going to receive. You could argue that the government is not found and is still struggling to find a way to deliver those $250 checks and to find support across the aisle. Or you could look at what was said this week, in particular by Freeland, and see a signal that the government is saying, you know what? And I'm almost quoting her here. We are in a minority situation. We need support across the aisle. We didn't find it. What's missing from that sentence is, and we are still actively trying to find it. So it could be that the government is walking back that part of the package and using the fact that there's no support across the aisle. We tried, guys, but we're not doing it.

And why would that matter? Because it would be somewhat of a win for Freeland. The biggest part of the package that was announced this month in spending by far is those checks. Now, it's still a mess. Not only did you promise money that you probably won't deliver, but if you don't deliver, you've also managed to make angry all the people who weren't going to receive it and are going to remember that you were the Grinch at Christmas for them. And they're still going to be angry at you forgetting them while everybody else is going to be kind of saying, where's my 250 bucks? But there are many ways to read this.

The bottom line where I agree with Bruce is it is a mess. And the prime minister looks like he's losing control over his own messaging and his own government. It was clearly a botched promise and now could end up looking even more botched uh than it originally was the the other thing and and bruce kind of hinted at it well you both did really is that uh you know of of justin trudeau's suits that are not strong uh the economy is sort of kind of leads the pack and And it's interesting because, well, much has been tried to be made over the years about, you know, is Justin Trudeau like his father? Are there similarities?

And usually the answer is no, they're not. They're very different. But on that issue, they're similar. It was Pierre Trudeau's weakest suit too, was the management of the economy. So it's interesting that Justin Trudeau seems to be looking at the same deck of cards, if you will, on the economic front right now. Well, we'll see how this all plays out over the next few days and where Mark Carney ends up, if anywhere. But Chantel was right. This story keeps coming back at us and has been for the last couple of years.

And it always seems to kind of fizzle out and go nowhere. But both parties are clearly interested in some fashion and for different reasons to try and make an accommodation. Okay, we're going to take that break, come back, and there's lots more crazy stuff to talk about. We'll get at it right after this. And welcome back. You're listening to the Friday Good Talk with Chantelle Hebert,

Bruce Anderson, I'm Peter Mansbridge. You're listening on Sirius XM, channel 167, Canada Talks or on your favorite podcast platform. Or you are watching us on our YouTube channel. Glad to have you with us wherever you're connecting to us. All right. Second crazy story that you kind of look at and you go, really? What is going on here?

And this is the Trump tariff threat. And the attempt by Canada, Team Canada, if you will, to have an organized front to deal with this. Well, what looked possible as an organized front a couple of weeks ago now has this kind of gang that couldn't shoot straight look to it, everybody going off in different directions, different premiers saying different things

with different plans, some of them crapping on each other for their suggestions. And meanwhile, if we're in this trade war, verbal trade war at this point, I guess, until the inauguration, if we are, you look into the states and you go, well, man, they must be in a shambles too. But no, what are they talking about? I watched their early morning programs today and the first 10 minutes is it's about canada no it's about a trade war no it's about tariffs no

it's about suv-sized drones flying over new jersey and everybody is into this is this really happening and what's happening and who's them, and why are they doing it, and is this the invasion of the aliens? You know, is Orson Welles going to read the script for this? If those drones were here, we'd be doing the same thing, though, right? We'd agree on that. If they were here, if they were here, if they were actually there, I mean, New Jersey?

Why New Jersey? You're going to invade the United States over some, you know. Anyway, I don't want to get into the SUV drones. But I do want to try and understand what's happened to our coordinated front, if there ever was one. Is this thing a shambles

too, as to the way we're prepping for this? Bruce, you start this time. Yeah, it's not good. It's not been a good week in terms of the management of the risk for Canada. I think to some degree it's a bit of a fallacy to imagine that there's going to be an absolute Team Canada approach, even in a situation where all of the politicians involved get along well or kind of align from a partisan standpoint,

which isn't obviously the case here. And the reason I say that is that the way that tariffs could work in order to imagine a Team Canada approach, it might be the case that, you know, the tariffs would hurt me in what I do, might not affect Chantal and what she does. But a Team Canada approach implies that she's supposed to accept some pain as part of a Team Canada approach because I'm going to have some pain. So if we think about that across all the different sectors of the Canadian economy, the different companies that have different relationships in terms of the movement of their goods and services across the border, the notion that everybody would come together and say,

we're all going to take the same medicine, which is going to hurt, tax, whatever it is, in terms of retaliatory measures, because it's important for the country to stand together as one. You know, I don't think that exists as a reality. There are too many people who have too much at stake. And I'm not minimizing what they have at stake. I'm saying they have lives to live, they have jobs to protect, they have businesses to have thrive. So the most that you can hope for is to be able to have a conversation where people try to find areas of common interest, where they have the instinct to try to work together to present the argument that this can be and is a mutually beneficial trading relationship. I think that's what the prime minister and the premier should be trying to focus on.

And I do think that there are people around the prime minister who believe that that's what they should be doing as well. I think it was terribly unfortunate that he made the comments that he made this week about the U.S. election being the second time that America had decided not to elect a female president. I think it was a bad interpretation of that election. Yes, I'm sure that there were some people who didn't vote for Kamala Harris because she was a woman, just as there were some people who didn't vote for her because she was black or because the economy wasn't working as far as they were concerned, or because they liked Donald Trump and what he had to say. There were lots of things that contributed to that election result. And the prime minister's interpretation of it

was overly simplistic to put the nicest possible language on it. Why does it matter? Well, just as the sheer politics of it, it was a terrible trade. There aren't many people in Canada who don't know that he's a feminist already. He didn't need to say that, but he wanted to say it because he was at an event that was about that. Fair enough. There were other ways for him to present his feminist credentials without saying, I'm going to characterize what America has done as a voting population in ways that reflect my

role as a feminist leader. It quite predictably made people upset, both on the Canadian side of the border who are trying to figure out how to manage these difficult economic and trade issues and south of the border people look at that and they're entitled to say well who is he to tell us how we voted we would we as Canadians would not want to hear a foreign leader describe the fact that we haven't had an elected female prime minister, evidence that Canadians have always voted against a female. And final point for me is, you know, if Mr. Trudeau did decide that he was going to give up the leadership and let there be a race, there'd be at least three qualified female candidates standing ready. But he's the one that's preventing that from happening. And I think he, I think it was a terrible, terrible mistake.

He could have started by standing by his finance minister. No kidding. Anyway, Chantal, you're on this. It's really kind of difficult to get into Justin Trudeau's head and try to figure out, does he see himself for what he is, a feminist prime minister that does not, by virtue of his feminist credentials, become a woman? So when he defeated some of his female rivals for the leadership, did he set back the cause of women in Canada? Because he did. If he were running against a female conservative leader and he won, would he have to say,

I'm really sorry that I set women back in this country by defeating someone who could have been the first elected female prime minister? It's just stupid. Whether you're a feminist or not, you look at this and you think, what was the point of this? And how could it be helpful in any way, shape or form? What it did is shake the rather fragile confidence that many had that on the Canada-U.S. file, Justin Trudeau would be a surer hand on other issues. He kind of thought, okay, here we go again.

Now, to go back to the premiers, what we have, and it's totally understandable, but it is reality, is a black and white assessments of one, the nature of the tariff threats, and two, the way to address it. And those divisions are not just regional. Ontario and Quebec are not on the same page. Premier Ford is convinced the tariffs will be coming. François Legault is convinced that it's just a trap. They are both playing to their audiences and saying that. One of them is obviously right. We'll find out soon enough. Premier Ford would turn off the taps and shut down electricity exports. He would retaliate. The other energy producing provinces, Saskatchewan,

Alberta, Newfoundland, Labrador and Quebec are saying, no, we do not touch this. But there is a fundamental issue that gets lost in this. If tariffs do come and they're targeted, and they hurt Ontario a lot more than they hurt Alberta, everyone is going to hurt. You cannot bring down the economic powerhouse of the country without everyone taking a hit. If the tariffs and whatever happens in the tariff war wreaks havoc in Alberta and Saskatchewan, everyone will feel the pain. There is no

refuge from that pain by saying, then take a hit at the other guy. It may all be provinces that believe that they are kingdoms, but when it comes to the economic consequences of those tariffs, there is no shelter behind the fortress, Alberta fortress, Quebec fortress, Ontario wall. It's more complicated than that. And that is why they're going to have to do better at speaking with each other and coming up with more constructive attitudes than the not me, look at this other guy thing. Also, I mean, if you were sitting in Donald Trump's office looking at this, you would think these guys are going to, you know, they're all suckers. They're going to be easy to pick off one by one because they can't even have a phone conference together without coming out

all over the map. That's true. And, you know, there are a couple of ways to go out of this. I look at the situation right now in terms of the landscape. In a way, I haven't looked at it in, I don't know, 10 or 20 years, where it seems because of the issues and because of the weakness of the central government, the federal government, I see the provinces and the premiers in particular as powerhouses in a way they haven't been in years on the landscape. Doesn't mean they're necessarily right about the issues,

but they seem to have a kind of clout and a public space on a national level that they haven't had before? Is that just me? You know, it's an interesting point. I hadn't thought about it, Peter, but it's possible that that is in part the case because we are in a situation where the prime minister has such limited credibility. He has so little public opinion support personally

that there is an instinct to kind of look around to who else is saying things. I found myself reading Doug Ford's comments and thinking, you know, I at least feel a strategy that is organized around the economics of the issue. I don't know whether or not it's effective, but I feel like that's what he's doing. And I don't know that it's all that strategic. I don't know that the language is clever, but I find myself kind of paying attention to it in part because I'm not hearing things from the prime minister

that make me feel similarly kind of inclined to understand that he's got a plan and that he's executing on that plan. And maybe that's even more the case after, you know, he decided to opine on the US democracy. But I don't know if I go beyond that I saw that Scott Moe was calling for a Canadian election and I kind of feel like Danielle Smith talking about her own border plan there is more oxygen for that to your point we're hearing more about what they're doing and thinking but whether it is credible and thoughtful to the extent that I kind of remember an era where it did feel like premiers were a little bit more credible and thoughtful on the national issues and the national agenda.

And maybe that's just me showing my age and believing that things were better. Usually that's when Chantal says, yeah, I was always bad. But we'll see if she agrees with that. So it's impossible in the real world to divorce Premier Ford's front row seat, which he owns by the nature of his province, but also because he happens to lead the Council of the Federation. That's the name for the provincial premiers getting together as they are, I think, this weekend. But with this electoral agenda, this is a premier who wants to go to the polls

and actually is getting set to road test the ballot box question, who do you want to leave Ontario in the face of the challenges coming down, coming to Canada from the Trump administration? It's going to be interesting to see. But he is clearly positioning himself and by being so forthright and by saying, you know, I speak for Ontario, that is where this is going. A similar thing could be said on the other side of that same coin about Francois Legault, but I was struck this week looking at both premiers, these two provinces are fairly central

to this discussion. Angus Reid does a regular, every three months, report card on the popularity of the premiers. And both François Legault and Premier Ford, they have the last and the next to last place, the one and three, believe in each province that they're doing a good job. So this is, it's not just an opportunity for Justin Trudeau to kind of reposition himself in the national conversation. The Trump issue is an opportunity for premiers, like Premier Ford and Premier Legault,

to kind of find a new footing in there. The silence I'm hearing, loud silence, comes from across the aisle in the House of Commons from the person who would, if the polls are to be believed, be leading Canada through this within a matter of months. And I'm not hearing anything. It's radio silence on the conservative side. I think at some point, the conservatives will have to join the conversation in a way other than saying we need an election, which I happen to believe is in the larger picture, probably right. But to move beyond the,

it's all Justin Trudeau's fault and everything is broken to how are you going to live with your own assessments of where we are at if you take office and Donald Trump throws all of that stuff back at you. I want to get to that point on Polyev and why we're not hearing anything or not hearing very much from him in terms of how he would position himself and a government led by him with the United States right now. But let me just tie the knot on that earlier conversation. I wasn't trying to suggest that the positions being put forward by some of the premiers are credible or not.

I was just trying to say that they have a public position, perhaps because of the weakness of Ottawa, that I haven't seen for a long time. Even to the point of, you know, there was a time in the last 20 years where you could stop Canadians on the street and ask them to name, you know, half of the provincial premiers, and they wouldn't have been able to tell you. They wouldn't have got to five. They wouldn't have got probably to two or three um but we've we've witnessed a week where they were all quite dominant for a number of different reasons one being the u.s

issue but also you know we watched leggo and fury on the churchill falls and that was that was really quite something after literally decades of uh of getting nowhere on that issue and decades where the media sort of said, oh, God, none of those Churchill Falls stories. I don't want to talk about that. And here you have these two guys. I know it's tentative at the moment, but, you know, cutting a deal on a really important project that is important not just to

Quebec, Labrador, and Newfoundland, but, you know, to the country and to the Americans. Anyway, let's get to this Polyev thing, because I think it's really important, and it draws into issue to how he's able to get away with what is a pressing national issue. Every elected leader is talking about it and is developing plans and promoting them. And you have the person who could lead a government that has as many as 220, 230 seats in it just months away, who's not really saying anything other than, oh, those tariffs, that's not a good idea, is not detailing what he would do or his party would do

or a government led by him would do. Who should be pursuing this? I mean, obviously the media should be pursuing this? I mean, obviously the media should be challenging him whenever they have that opportunity. But is it possible that he could go through this period without answering in detail some of these questions? Yeah, it is possible. I mean, there's an old adage in politics,

which is, I forget the exact metaphor, but if your opponent, your political opponent is stumbling, don't reach out and break their fall. You let that happen. play out a little bit. I'm going to get a real bounce out of yesterday was calling him a fake feminist because he was preaching feminism about how the U.S. should have voted and at the same time appearing to undermine confidence in his female finance minister. And in the world of politics, that's a fair shot. It's not something that is kind of over the line, in my view, in terms of a criticism. It's part of the cut and thrust of politics. On Monday, he's going to get another boost of energy around the fiscal situation of the government. He might get a boost of energy around the GST check without ever having said that he was horrified by it. He made it clear that he didn't think it was a good idea for the government

to be spending this kind of money, which, you know, for most people, the polling that I've seen sort of says, yeah, if people are asked if they want the money, they'll say, sure, give me the money. But if you if you ask them, do you really think it's a good idea for the government to spend this money? They might say, I don't know about that. So he's taken a position that is relatively low risk on this latest round of spending. He's kind of avoided having to put himself in a situation where he says, well, it was a good idea when Doug Ford did it and a bad idea when Justin Trudeau did it. So if you're him, there's really no reason to rush to the microphone to talk more about this incredibly complex and tense issue around Canada-U.S. trade as long as Justin Trudeau is not doing what he could have

done, which is to say, this is a crisis. I'm going to be that person that people can look to as a voice of reason, energy, thoughtfulness, leadership, coalescence. And if Justin Trudeau is missing those marks, then it makes sense for Pierre Poliev to stand back and just let that happen. I totally agree. Justin Trudeau's benefit in this is that he is the front and center person. He can't be replaced by some other figure, be it theable or not, it will not matter. So if you are not on center stage, you're not really part of the conversation, because that's not necessarily the role of the leader of the official opposition. Well, then getting out of the way and allowing people to judge on its merits, the government's handling of the issue is almost certainly the smart thing to do. If we could use a time machine and go back to the day before the Mar-a-Lago meatloaf summit,

would we say now, oh, if Pierre Pallietto could go to that dinner, if he was invited to that dinner, that he should have gone to that dinner? We wouldn't'd say no he's better off not having done that in retrospect because he doesn't have to then be part of the subsequent management of the issue by the government and uh i don't i i'm that putting that kind of weird proposition on the table i'm sure it never was on table, but it kind of goes to the point we were talking last week about this being the first minute of a long movie. And so now maybe we're in minute three or four. But if you're Pierre-Paul Lievre, rather than feel this week as though you're left out of the most important conversation, you might feel like you safely avoided a series of mishaps that the prime minister has been kind of navigating or creating. Okay, we're going to take our final break. I want to play out this story a little more because it's such a great story. I can't seem to miss

with this one. We'll be back right after this. And welcome back. We're into the final segment of Good Talk for this week. Chantel and Bruce are here. Reminder, the buzz comes out tomorrow morning, 7 a.m. That's our newsletter. And you can, if you don't already subscribe,

and we have record subscriptions, it's free. And you can get it at nationalnewswatch.com slash newsletter. Okay. You know, Bruce mentioned the movie. We've mentioned that a couple of weeks, that there's a movie running out. We may be at the three or four-minute mark of that movie. We don't know how long it's going to be. But here's my question.

Do you think Donald Trump is still watching the movie, or is he satisfied with just kind of throwing the firebomb at Canada on this and watching with a certain degree of laughing, I guess, at what's happened since he did. Because I keep arguing with myself about whether or not he's serious about some of the things he says about Canada beyond tariffs the whole 51st state thing etc etc because he doesn't let it go he just keeps going at it and whether he's just trolling or whether he's partly serious or what I can never quite come to grips with that Chantal what are you what are you making well I think he's mostly having fun, and it works.

Every time he says something, everybody in Canada just jumps out of their chairs. The media runs around asking premiers, prime ministers, party leaders, etc. If you're a bully in a schoolyard and no one is paying attention to you, everyone is playing their own games and you will find a way to attract attention and you will be happy for it. How serious is anything that Donald Trump says is way beyond my pay grade. I don't know. But I do understand that at this point, it looks like we are entertainment. Mr. Trump has a share of other issues to deal with,

including his nominees, the Republicans that he leads and imposes his will on in Congress. There are other things happening. It's tempting for us to see everything that he does pertaining to Canada is central to everything that Donald Trump does. But that's not reality. If we were in the US, we wouldn't be hearing about this 51st state thing more than in passing. It might be the kicker to a newscast because it's kind of entertaining to watch. So we are not at this point in the substance of a real argument, but we are certainly dancing to his tune.

Bruce? Remind me of the name of the desk that the U.S. president sits behind. I was trying to remember that. It's named after a ship that was found in the U.S. president sits behind. I was trying to remember that. It's named after a ship that was found in the Arctic. All right. An old Royal Navy ship. If it comes to you, then let me know. But I want to believe in a world where the president of the United States

is sitting behind that desk, buried in the most important geopolitical and domestic, economic and social issues, trying to figure out what the right decisions are to make for the betterment of the planet and all the people on it. Unfortunately, I don't think that is how Donald Trump works. I think that all of the available evidence is that he will have noted very carefully what Justin Trudeau said about his election victory this week. And there'll be not just one price to pay rhetorically, but probably multiple prices to pay. We saw that his kind of de facto vice president, Elon Musk, came over the boards yesterday with a tweet criticizing Justin Trudeau for that comment. That's somebody with a giant audience. So the repercussions are not just one person, one tweet. They're large, large blocks of the U.S. population. And I also kind of have the view that for the people in our diplomatic corps

and the people in our companies and labor unions that are trying to figure out how to strengthen relationships across the border, every person in that Republican conference and the incoming ones too would have noted that the Canadian prime minister said the Republican victory was about rejecting a woman as president. And so, yeah, the notion that Donald Trump didn't notice it, won't pay attention to it, won't exact some price, I don't think that's who he is. I don't think that's how he operates.

We've lost a little bit of moral high ground in the conversation, I don't think that's who he is. I don't think that's how he operates. It's, it's, it's kind of, we've lost a little bit of moral high ground in the conversation and our positioning as best friends and allies and people who respect each other. I went down a notch. Okay. Here's your history lesson for today. Here's the resolute desk. Resolute. Did you Google it? You did, right? I just, you know, I just sat here thinking. Oh, yeah, you sat and thought about it. No, I Googled it.

And, you know, I feel bad because it's a great story. The Resolute was Her Majesty's Ship Resolute. It was the Royal Navy. It was up looking for the Franklin Expedition. They got trapped in ice. People abandoned it and were rescued. And the assumption was it would break up and sink. Well, the next year, I think it was the next year,

it was found by whalers, I think, floating in Arctic waters, unmanned. And the whalers took it to the U.S., towed it to the U.S. And the Rutherford Hayes, or let me look at Google, I think it was Rutherford, yeah, Rutherford Hayes, said, okay, it'll never work again as a ship. We'll turn it into, we'll carve it up and make desks out of it. And one of them will go in the Oval Office, and the other one will present to Queen Victoria,

which is what they've done. And now many presidents, not all, but many presidents have used that as the main desk in the Oval Office. So it's the resolute desk. I knew you'd rally to that story, and I'm glad that you did. Well, I love that story because it's got the Franklin connection on the Arctic

and everything. You've got a little anchor on your hoodie today. I am. This actually was from the Resolute desk. They found this hoodie in the Resolute desk and said we should give that to Mansbridge. Okay, guys.

All right, Chantal's fascinated by this story. No, no, I watched the documentary on the Shackleton expedition on my way back from Toronto yesterday. I was glad for its existence. It took my mind off the Trump-Trudeor-Free-Lamb-Boy-They-Have-It treadmill. Yeah, and it's a good thing to do that on occasion. That's a great story too, the Shacklin expedition, the other pole,

Antarctica. But anyway, I've got two minutes left. Where's all this going? Where's the story heading? Well, you want to end with a simple one. Yeah, you got a minute each and no more. Well, we're going to see this fiscal update, I suppose. From everything we hear, it's going to be brutal. And the question is, I guess, since there is a shuffle coming, who will still be in those key positions in cabinet by the time we resume in 2025? But the story is still playing out. And when personalities are involved, actual people, you can't just predict behavior. But if Chrystia Freeland should throw in the blanket, I suspect the government cannot even begin to measure how much trouble it would be in. You mean if she was replaced in a shuffle?

No. Well, it depends. There are many ways to do things. Me, I don't believe that Mark Carney is best placed at finance. And post-November 5th, I think he could be more useful in another capacity. And I don't believe his sheer arrival would change the perception that Canadians have of the fiscal management of the government. It's too late for that. I don't know why they don't think of him as foreign affairs minister. Apparently, the suggestion was put to the government more than 12 months ago and here we are still blah, blah, blah. Okay, Bruce, your turn to blah, blah, blah for a minute. Well, look, I think if Justin Trudeau persists in the idea that he's going to stay and run in the next election, then Pierre Palliev is going to win a massive majority. I think that the period between now and then is going to be ugly,

brutal for the Liberals. And I think many of them are hoping that he changes his mind still, even if they don't feel like there's very much time. They just don't see a scenario based on who they talk to in their ridings where this will turn into anything other than a kind of a political disaster for the Liberal Party. But he does appear to be convinced against all the evidence that he's the best person to lead the Liberal Party. And he has at this point, anyway, all of the power to kind of continue down that road. But I'm a little bit with David Hurley, my old friend and business partner.

And David, as many people know, is a lifelong Liberal. But this week, he kind of offered the opinion that nobody runs when they're this far behind. It just doesn't happen. So we would be having a leadership battle within the party and government plus a federal election over the first 10, 12 months of Donald Trump's presidency. Yeah, great, great positioning. Terrible positioning. All right, you two.

Yes, there is a word for that. It's called we you two. Yes, there is a word for that. It's called worst crude. Yes. Thank you both. Have a great weekend. There's so much good things to be thinking about. Okay, Bruce, Chantel, enjoy the weekend. Take care, you guys.

Thank you to everyone else out there for joining us. That's it for this week.