The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Good Talk -- Did Joe Biden Just Save Himself?

Episode Date: March 8, 2024

Is he just too old, stumbling and incoherent? Not last night it seems. Joe Biden's energetic State of the Union address last night is getting mostly positive reviews and may have given him at least temporary relief from the wolves that seemed poised to ruin his re-election bid.  Bruce and Susan (filling in for Chantal) start with that and quickly move into Canadian politics -- a convincing Conservative by-election win, and how long can the government sustain increased spending? 

Are you ready for good talk? And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. I'm in Stratford, Ontario today. Susan Delacorte's in Ottawa. So is Bruce Anderson. Susan filling in for Chantelle Hebert, who's off, I think it's Iceland she's in. She goes to Iceland all the time now. She loves to hike and travel around. I think it's just twice. Three times.

At least three times that I know of. And there are all those secret weekends she goes to, Iceland. She goes to Latin America, too. Like, she moves around. Oh, she definitely gets around. No doubt about it. Anyway, thank you, Susan, for being here again this week, filling in for Chantal.

It's a hard job. Bruce and I know that every week. It's a hard job. There are not shoes big enough. That's right. Okay. I would, you know, I was planning to start Canadian as we usually do, but I'm not going to. I'm going to start this way.

Last night I sat down to watch the Leafs play Boston, which is always agony. And it became agony like two minutes into the game. It was not good. And they won the fights. Toronto did, but they lost the game convincingly to the Bruins. Again, yet again. I think this is like the eighth straight loss. I don't know how I didn't pay attention to this. Yeah.

Anyway, so I said, okay, to heck with this. I can't watch anymore of this game. And I switched over to the State of the Union, which I've, you know, I don't know how many of these things I've seen over the years. And I find them often incredibly boring. And they take too long to get going. It's always kind of parade in and out of the place. Anyway, so I watched it all.

And you know the Republicans had a bad night when you watch the morning after and they've already got ads out and they got nothing from the speech. So they had to create these ads of Biden stumbling on an airplane step or something. It was saying, can he really last until 2026, 27, 28? And then they cut away to Kamala Harris laughing. You know, it was kind of pathetic, as was their performance during the State of the Union. Not Joe Biden.

He seemed, at least to me and to most of the commentators I've seen this morning, to have hit it out of the park. When people were expecting him to stumble and fall all over the stage last night, he didn't. He went right at them and took them on in every form. So it was quite a night for them, for the Democrats, and especially for Joe Biden. And you wonder whether, was this enough? Does this turn the corner for him?

Does it move the age issue off the stage? I don't know. But I would love to hear your thoughts. Bruce, why don't you start us? Yeah, Peter, like you, I generally have thought over the years that these events, the State of the Union, as a piece of production or entertainment, have gotten worse and worse and worse,

just to the point where even somebody like me who loves politics and feels kind of compelled to watch that event in American politics, it's one of the most important events in terms of drawing American public attention and sort of setting out what it is that the White House is trying to say. Even I was having trouble deciding to watch it not because of the Leafs because I have other choices that are more interesting than that but I did watch it I was stunned as many observers were at how the term raucous was used how provocative it was

how punchy he was how much he stepped outside the normal scripted, overwritten, and dull to the point of just excruciation. He touched on all of the major issues that he wanted to touch on. He said what he had to say in very punchy style. He referred to his predecessor, I think it was 14 times. He never named Trump, but he didn't shy from drawing the contrast between him and Trump. But I think the more important part for me, the more interesting part was the repartee. Because yeah, he showed a lot of energy and he kind of challenged in the way that he delivered the speech, the idea that he lacked vigor. But I kind of feel like anybody can do that for a period of time. But when people

are heckling you, if you decide that you're going to respond to the heckling, that's a bit of a high risk situation, especially if you're somebody who's been coached that you got to stay on a script, you got to show high energy, you got to deliver these messages, but he didn't hesitate. He got into it with the hecklers and he got the better of them, I thought overall. Last point for me is after months of feeling more pessimistic, because I don't like Trump, obviously, I don't think he'd be a good leader for America or for the world. I'm starting to feel a little bit more optimistic that Trump won't win. And the reason for that is the independent voters. I'm, you know, I think a lot of us have become just gobsmacked by why do so many Republicans like this guy?

We take our eye off those independent voters in America who look like they haven't decided that much. But if you sort of dig into it, and the New York Times did an interesting piece on this not very long ago, what you realize is that they're not completely undecided. They've mostly decided they don't want Trump back. And so what they're really doing is looking for evidence from Biden that he's an okay choice to make. I think a lot of those people got that last night. In fact, there was a CNN poll after the speech was done that signaled that those independent voters came away with a significantly better impression of, of Biden than before the speech. Susan, your thought. Yeah. Full disclosure. I, I, I was one of those aged people,

not as old as Joe Biden, but who, who did miss the last little bit because I fell asleep, but same rate, same reactions as, as you guys, I thought he was a lot more energetic and sharp and snappy than I had expected. And I went this morning, looked up some of the reviews, and predictably they were going to be okay. And the New York Times called him forceful. The Washington Post called him forceful um the washington post called him fiery um and the best that fox news could come up with was that it was too partisan you know that it was um which reminds me a lot of what is said here too in the back and forth the um i think when

you've got nothing you would be accused the other ones of being too partisan. And that seemed to be what the Republicans were complaining about. And they didn't get any material for an ad. I did not envy Joe Biden going into that thing. You know, the pressure on him and people kept saying this isn't an original observation, but people were not watching that speech or listening to it for substance or even a grocery or laundry list of what they'd accomplished. They just wanted to see Joe Biden. They, I don't think there's ever been a president who's been under more pressure to prove that he just can perform. So as a performance, that's about as high wire as it gets.

And I thought he did okay. I thought he was fine. Will it be an... Like Bruce, I'm feeling a little bit optimistic. And I think it was after Nikki Haley, oddly enough, after she stepped down, and we saw all the people who had voted for Nikki Haley and you can't help but see that as a protest vote and people who have serious reservations and I keep going to this

there's an article David Brooks did it in the New York Times I think late last year where he talked about how people are using polls in the united states now to vent not vote to explain this difference between why americans the republicans are supposed to be doing really well but every time people get into the ballot box democrats do well even in the uh the recent special election for george santos so i think as everybody said, Americans are going to stare down the choice, and Trump looks more deranged every week. I can't, that sounds biased, but it is biased. I think he'd be seriously dangerous, and I think he proves every day how dangerous he would be. Yeah, it does seem that way to a lot of us but clearly

there are still a lot of people millions of people tens of millions of people who don't see him as deranged or they see him as the same as them which may be deranged um deplorable or whatever those various terms that have been used to describe some of his supporters, but there are a heck of a lot of them. And that's what gives a lot of people pause in terms of how this may unfold. I don't think Biden hurt himself last night. I don't think there's any chance that he hurt himself last night. So I don't think he lost support last night, whether he picked up support from whether it's the independents or Democrats who hadn't been planning to vote.

That'll be interesting to tell, and perhaps we'll see that in some of the polls going ahead. Can I just on that, Peter? I do think that I'm thinking about Susan's comment about the pressure on him. And I agree with you that I don't think we're going to see much evidence. Maybe we will. Sometimes you see a little bump, and Americans are always kind of watching for that one-point or two-point movement in approval. And maybe it'll happen, but I don't think that that's likely to be the most important outcome, nor should we expect, even if we think he did well, to see much evidence of it in the polls. But Democrats were so anxious about him, have been so anxious about him. the vote numbers don't change materially, I think he has probably succeeded in shoring up confidence

in him as the candidate and putting to bed some of the issues of should he go in July, that's maybe the latest he could go, that kind of thing. I still don't know if that's the right decision or not, but I think that he won that battle a little bit inside the mind of the Democratic Party. How do you feel about what Susan quoted David Brooks as saying, the vent, not vote sense? Yeah, I think there's a measure of that. I think that polls have become so commonplace in media coverage that people understand how they're used as a way of affecting the way that politicians react.

I wouldn't overstate it, but I do think it's more the case than it was 10 or 20 or 30 years ago. I've been kind of watching this for a long time. And in that sense, it's kind of similar to special elections or by-elections, that kind of thing. Those are opportunities for the people who are kind of highly motivated to say something to have their say. But again, I think that the more important nuance is always in American politics and to some degree in Canada's now, is trying to understand who's going to turn out, who's motivated to turn out and who's not. And, you know, those of us who kind of feel the way that we do about Trump are massively impressed and a little bit terrified of how motivated the Trump voter is. And we're very worried about how unmotivated the Biden and

Democratic voters seem to be. But Susan's right, and others have made this point, that in the ballot booth, more people are doing more sensible things. And I think that is partly a function of turnout of people who haven't been all that engaged, but do decide that they're going to go in and cast a ballot in those situations. And they tend to do more centrist or reasonable things, less polarized people as the general rule. That's what they do. You know, the most remarkable thing I found watching that last night, after it was clear that Biden wasn't going to fall on his face, and that became clear fairly quickly because he started with a great deal of energy, and he didn't, you know, sort of beat around the bush

as to what he wanted to talk about. He got right to it. But what I found amazing to watch through the whole thing was the speaker's face, Johnson's face, trying to decide, do I smile? Do I frown? Do I clap? Do I stand up?

Do I sit down? What do I do? He looked like he was totally caught uh that who would ever however he'd been briefed could not handle the situation that he was presented with because he looked at best awkward he did and at times he looked like a fool yeah i mean he really did just like you, and I tried to imagine past vice presidents who were caught in similar situations, but pulled it off. You know.

They could be stoic, yeah. They could be stoic. They could be polite, but still make their point. He was out of his depth last night. If we're going to talk about the comedy event last night, we have to talk about the Republican rebuttal. Oh, yeah, that was, you know, it was a Republican from Alabama, and she was in her kitchen, which had the hidden message

that this is the place for women in the Republican Party is to be in your kitchen. And she had this voice that she just seemed to be on either the verge of tears or the verge of some kind of breakdown as a result of Biden's presidency. But her best line was trying to steal that line of Reagan's that was so effective in 1980 against Jimmy Carter, which was, listen, it comes down to one thing. You're better off today than you were three, four years ago. She tried to use that. Seemingly forgetting that three or four years

ago, there were a million Americans either dead or about to die from the mismanagement of COVID by the American administration. And an economy plummeting, jobs being lost, you know, debt being astronomical. It was odd, but you didn't want to say any of that, Bruce. You were going to praise the Republican response last night. Well, no, I want to hear what Susan thought about it if you watch clips. Because if you fell asleep for the last part of Biden's thing, you probably only saw clips this morning. For some reason, I turned it on or eyes off it because I'm somebody who has at various points in my career done a little bit of presentation coaching, let me say. And this will be a master class tool on what happens when that idea goes wrong. when somebody just can't get in their head that you can't go from, you know,

serious and stern and deeply concerned to cheerful, to joyful, to just like the range of emotions and the way in which it was delivered. I had this feeling like I'd be a terrible actor, but what if Hollywood called and said, can you come and act in a big blockbuster movie, but you need to shoot your first scenes tomorrow. And there's going to be long periods of dialogue and you'll be up beside Robert De Niro or somebody like that.

I'd be freaking awful. Well, that's what this was like. And so people want a little bit of, of kind of, maybe it's not nice to make fun of people. And so maybe I shouldn't recommend this. But if you need a little levity in your life today around politics, watch some of the clips of this. Because it was embarrassing for the Republicans. And I gather they're all over X this morning saying it was a bit of a disaster.

A bit would be an understatement. Did you see any of it, Susan? Yeah, the clips. I'm going to be contrarian just for a second. Because a couple of things have hit me this week. Matt Gurney and I are writing a regular feature in The Star. We've started having this conversation. It was Matt who put this to me, and I guess I should know this. But we keep thinking, and I was at an event

yesterday with Canada 2020, where a former Obama speechwriter was there talking about the American election. And in Matt's comments, and also at this event, the very real prospect is raised. It's not just Trump Biden has to worry about. It's Trump's supporters. And it's the people who believe in Donald Trump and believe that election. And that no matter what, things may not be settled in November. If they didn't like the last result, they're not going to like this one. And every time I watch Trump, he's setting it up that the system is rigged against him. You know, the justice system, that's going to be a

problem in November. And that put the fear of God into me. I lost count yesterday about how many times this Sarada Perry said the word worried, doom, and I'm nervous, etc., etc. So I think this all goes to the ridiculous response. For other reasons this week, I was looking into tom flanagan's book which is i you all remember that book harper's team it had so much information about the creation of stephen harper and i forgot about a very clever thing that harper did in the early days which was to make these cheesy looking commercials you know those ones that looked like he was talking to a cable show host and people loved them because they were so bad you know that that if he was a slick politician he wouldn't have done

that you know that and i i remember talking to our friend alan Gregg about Rob Ford in this same context. I used to be constantly surprised by Rob Ford. And I'd go to Toronto and then watch these streeters where people are saying they loved him. And Alan Gregg told me that basically, I hope Alan's not okay with me saying this. People thought Rob Ford was too stupid to lie. No. And that's what hits me when I see things that we laugh at. You know, for a whole bunch of people, the worse it is, the more unprofessional it is, the more authentic it is. And that's the worry is,

I think we see the world and this is, you know, this has been true for five, six years anyway. We who cover politics and been watching it for a long time, know what's ridiculous and know what's not. But out there, there's a lot of people. I think that's a good cautionary tale. And I think that the choice good cautionary tale and i think that the good the choice of her and the kitchen and the and some of the things that she was saying

i thought i i think fit very nicely into that um be careful you know not to be critical of people talking the way people talk about the things that they talk about i think what what struck me was the toggling uh emotionally was so uh performative it was like it was very acty and and in that sense it you know they really should have shot it again uh because you know what movie i watched before i uh before i sat down to state of the union and not being a hockey um watcher i watched bulworth as my yeah i love that movie it still is okay and it's it starts with um it starts with bulworth, the character. I'm blanking on his name, Warren Beatty. Warren Beatty, yeah. Yeah, Warren Beatty practicing a ridiculous talking point speech.

And we are on the edge of a new millennium over and over and over again. And it's an instructive movie to this day. Yeah, there's some good instructive American political movies. The Candidate was still. Oh, yeah. You know, with Redford in it. It's still a great movie. Primary Colors. I just told the younger folks.

Primary Colors. Before we move on, I just want to underline one thing that Susan said when she talked about this issue about how Trump will act if he loses.

And it's true. I mean, even in 2016 when he won, he tried to set it up in the final weeks of the campaign that he was going to lose because the vote was rigged and everything was crooked and everything. So he's done that. He's a constant on that. And so I totally agree with you. And there are sometimes, you know, I mean, it's done that. He's a constant on that. And so that's, I totally agree with you.

And there are sometimes, you know, I mean, it's no secret. We're no fans of Trump. But I've said more than a few times, I'm actually more worried about what will happen if he loses than if he wins. For the very reason that you're suggesting, Susan. It's not just him. It's that those tens of millions of people who will vote for him. And what are they going to do?

And how are they going to act? And what's going to happen to America as a result? So I don't know. There are times in our lives when we're really happy to be living on this side of the border. And this is one of them. Okay, we're going to take a quick break, and then we'll come back and we'll talk about Canadian politics

and something that happened this week and try to read the tea leaves on that one. But first, we'll take a quick break. And welcome back. You're listening to the Friday episode of The Bridge. It's good talk, of course. Chantelle Ibera is away. Susan Delacorte is sitting in for Chantelle,

and Bruce Anderson is here. I'm Peter Mansbridge. You're listening on SiriusXM, channel 167. Canada Talks are on your favorite podcast platform. Or you're watching us on our YouTube channel. And yes, that is quite the shirt Bruce has got on. It's a very nice shirt. It is a nice shirt. It is a nice shirt.

I say that seriously. I wish I had that shirt. I can help you out with that. One of the big bonuses you get by watching us on youtube um all right so there was a by-election this week in these past few days in durham in ontario now with all the normal cautions you can't get too carried away on on by-elections in terms of trying to determine what they mean and the impact on the national political scene, especially in one which the incumbent party holds the seat, especially in

one when the incumbent party for that seat is also riding extremely high in the national polls, anywhere from, you know, 15 to 20 points. So it should be no surprise that the Conservatives won and held on to their seat. But there are a lot of people who are surprised, mainly because the Liberals, for some reason, thought they might be able to win it and poured a lot of energy into that riding in the weeks leading up to the vote.

So what happened in Durham? Susanan why don't you tell us aside from the fact that the conservative jamel giovanni won the seat what was going on there well nothing good for the liberals um really nothing good for the liberals i think they were being very careful about their predictions, but I think it's fair to say they wanted more than 22%. The reason I went back to Tom Flanagan's book, as I mentioned earlier, is because it was a by-election that prompted Stephen Harper to change his entire approach to leading the Canadian Alliance. And he didn't leave in a very different position than Trudeau. But as Tom Flanagan writes, it was the 2003 by-election in Perth, Middlesex, in your neck of the woods, Peter, that started the path to the uniting of the right, which Harper did and probably responsible for winning.

Pardon me. So I think the liberals have to, I'm not saying they have to merge with the NDP after this, but I think they have to take it as seriously as Harper did for middle sex in 2003. I'm going to stop talking because I've got a problem. Right. Well, you know, how many times have we heard that merger or formal coalition or something

story over, well, over all of our political careers and covering politics or being involved in politics? And it never happens. It gets close sometimes. There are often formal talks, but it never actually happens. Could this be the moment where it does? I tend to, having been led to the water so many times on this story and it not happening. I tend to be pessimistic on that, or at least I don't think it's going to happen.

But however, I'm sure it may be discussed. Bruce, what's your take on what happened in Durham? Yeah, it was obviously a bad night for the Liberals. They knew they were going to lose. But they knew they were going to lose. But they knew they were going to lose. Why did they pour so much energy into it? Well, this is the question. I think if you knew you're going to lose,

then you try to subtly set expectations where they should be so that you don't have this spectacle of the prime minister and ministers kind of showing up and making the case that people should vote for them, only to have a really low turnout and a really low share of the vote, both of which I think were reasonably predictable, simply on the basis of what the broader national polls are saying. And it sort of begs the question whether a part of the Liberal Party anyway, is overly optimistic about their current situation, right? They are 15 to 20 points behind. The argument for Mr. Trudeau staying is only he can save the furniture or produce another win.

I think it's a debatable argument. It's not one that liberals seem very comfortable or willing to debate right now. But people who are kind of outside the party looking at it, I think, are entitled to wonder whether that's a sound assumption. There was nothing that they took into that by-election campaign that would have alerted those local voters, I think, to say, well, you know what, in this instance, we were thinking maybe we would go conservative again, but we should rethink that. So I didn't see anything in the effort that might have been a kind of a point of dislocation of the broader trend, which makes me again think, you know, maybe to some degree, the Liberal Party isn't

fully seized with how difficult a situation it's in. And it's hard not to look at what happened to their share of vote. I know that the people who are saying, oh, you know, you shouldn't read too much into it. Conservatives won a seat that they've won many times before. But in 2015, in that riding, the Liberals got 36 percent. In 2019, they got 32 percent. In 2021, they got 29 percent and they got 22 or 23% this time. So if you're looking at the longitudinal record here, it isn't just a case of conservatives winning a riding that they won before. It's a case of liberals losing access to votes in that riding.

And I think that's a real cautionary tale for a lot of liberal caucus members, and I suspect a lot of them are looking at that result and wondering, what kind of a campaign are we going to have? How vulnerable am I going to be if we remain 15 to 20 points behind? And what is our strategy to close that gap, if we have a strategy to close that gap? That's a big gap to close. I don't think I've ever seen it done.

I'm challenging you two to tell me if you think you've ever seen it done. But it's a Herculean task, the idea of closing that gap. And I didn't see the strategy to do it in the by-election campaign that the Liberals waste in Durham. To me, it would seem to be the only way that gap could close was if there was some monumental blunder on the part of the Conservatives and Polyev especially that revealed a side of him that his supporters and those who were attracted to his party at this point had not realized.

But it would have to be monumental when you consider some of the things that have happened that have seemed to have not had any impact. With my voice back, first of all, on the uniting of the left, I don't know that that has to happen formally, but I think the Liberals have to remind voters that there is a progressive middle in Canada, that the Conservatives don't own the middle. And I don't know that people are listening to them on that, too. I think that's the frightening part about the Durham results for the liberals is that they, they don't seem to be seen as owning the middle anymore. And that's what,

how that that's what has sustained the liberal party. Um, you know, they can't say in this, um, in this instance that by elections don't matter because they have mattered to Justin Trudeau. Um,

the, he's used them as beta tests for campaigns. He is, they, Bruce will know this too, and is steadily in the lead up to 2015, they were doing all their data and all of, accumulating all the intelligence they did for campaigns by testing things out in by-elections. So whatever they were testing here, it wasn't working.

One more thing. I am old fashioned enough that I do not believe, and I have said this directly to Trudeau. I do not believe prime ministers should be campaigning in by-elections. He's he's one of the first to do it. I don't think Harper ever did. And I know that Paul Martin and Chrétien didn't for the reason that is, once you are, it seems kind of archaic now, this idea, but once you are a prime minister, you're a prime minister for all Canadians. And in between elections, you shouldn't be out there doing

really partisan things like campaigning. Trudeau has no time for that. Trudeau says Trudeau was shocked by Bolivar not going in and campaigning in Mississauga last year. Every by-election, he's gone in there quite forcefully because he believes that by-elections matter. And that's, I think, what they're staring at this week. If by-elections matter and they're used to test out what a campaign is going to be like, Durham's not a good beta test for them. Can I add one point, Peter, to what Susan was talking about at the very beginning of that? The most voters are centrist in Canada and they want a centrist option. A Canadian version of a centrist option is pretty progressive on social issues and in favor of a

bigger role for government than centrist in the United States might be. But the market where the most voters live is on the center of the political spectrum. And I think the challenge that the Liberals have created for themselves, exacerbated by their supply and confidence arrangement with the NDP in the last while, is a lot of those centrist voters don't see the Liberal Party as a centrist party anymore. They see it as a party of the left. And so in some respects, the worst possible thing that the Liberals could do was over index some more towards the left. What they really need is to find a way to own the center the way they did through most of my adult life, and which they haven't really been for the last few years. I don't know if that's an agenda that

that this prime minister, this leader of the Liberal Party will really embrace. The budget coming up will probably tell us something about it, but it is a little bit late, I think, to try to recapture the centre using the same kind of messages and the same policy framework that Mr. Trudeau has been using for the last several years. Just before we leave the Durham story, the new Conservative MP for Durham kind of raised a few eyebrows as well, well not just this week, but he said it before, earlier during the campaign, clearly implying that there was a rift between the federal Tories and the provincial Tories,

talking about the elites that run Queen's Park. They are conservatives, by the way. There's always been this sense that Polyev and Ford don't get along and they're not campaigning together. Is this a problem, this quote? Or is it just kind of expected? I love this story. My colleagues, Rob Benzie at Queen's Park and Stephanie Levitz here in Ottawa,

Deputy Bureau Chief, have been watching this rift with some fascination. And it's real. It's very real. Doug Ford is not Daniel Smith or Scott Moe. Doug Ford is not an ally of Polyev's. It comes out every now and then. You'll see it. Doug Ford is more willing to work with and appear with Justin Trudeau than he is with Pierre Palliev. I don't know that that's going to matter. You know, people kind of keep, especially

Ontarians, as you know, are able to keep those two things in a box, federal and provincial, almost exclusively so. But I am fascinated with the difference between a Doug Ford type of conservative populism and the Pierre Polyev one. And I think that's a story that we've got to keep our eye on. What's the difference? Aside from the fact they don't like each other? I think one is more of a happy populism and the other one is more of an angry populism. You know, that sounds really shallow, but Doug Ford is more of a happy warrior. He wants to be liked. Often, I think that Pierre Polyev does not want to be liked at all, or he wants to be liked by people that I don't know. But yeah,

I agree with that. I think that Ford actually started with a more radical sounding version of populism, more of a flip the table over kind of guy. And it's kind of to his credit as a political operator, I think that he, you know know he bumped into things and public opinion um and he changed uh and his his kind of positioning since then i'm not gonna defend some of the policy choices that he made it's really we're just talking about

political tone uh his political tone changed it adapted it became more of a, I'm not going to scare the pets. I'm going to make life continue to go in the direction that you would expect me to continue to go, but I'm not going to try to make you excitable or excited every day with that. I think Polyev is in a slightly different situation, but he's also a different person, I think. He regularly loves the feeling of saying, I'm going to flip over the table. I'm going to change things more than you ever thought they could be changed. If he wins the election, it remains to be seen how that works for him, whether he'll learn the same lesson that Doug Ford learned and whether if he did, he would adapt in the same way. But right now, I do think that is an important difference between them. And I think it's probably good for Ford that he doesn't look like,

as people start looking at Polyev more, that people don't say, oh, Ford and Polyev, they're the same. Because I don't say, oh, Ford and Polyev, they're the same. Because I don't think that's what most Ontario voters want, even if they look like they're going to vote for Pierre Polyev. I think it's a fair bet that many of those voters who will cast a ballot for the Conservatives, if it's Trudeau versus Polyev next election, aren't super excited about the flip the table over version that Polly is offering. Okay. What was that tweet this week that Polly have said that it's been a great year. Trudeau's years in power have been great unless you're a,

but only if you're a sadistic murderer, like what, what was that? You know, that that's what I think. I don't know doug ford really well um but that's the kind of stuff that ford does not like and does not practice in as bruce said okay we'll leave that um we're going to take our final break i have one more thing to do we're

going to solve the national debt crisis in 10 minutes or less that's coming right up after this. And welcome back. Final segment of Good Talk for this week. Susan Delacorte, Bruce Anderson in Ottawa. I'm Peter Mansbridge in Stratford, Ontario. Okay, final segment. I will sound like a raging conservative here for a moment, at least for a moment.

We always knew that. Yeah, didn't you say you were friends with Brian Mulroney? Yes, I became friends with Brian Mulroney in the post-politics era, although he was never out of politics. Here's where I would sound like it. We seem to be spending money from a bottomless pit. And all that we see is, you know, the national debt going up and up and up. I don't know what it is now, a couple of trillion dollars. And we're now in the run-up to the next budget as bruce mentioned a moment ago usually you

only get kind of 10 days or two weeks notices when the budget is here here they're telling us it's a more than a month away and there's all kinds of rumors around a big big spending program is going to be dropped in the budget because we're a year away from an election or so. And then you have, at the same time, the Minister of Defense basically pleading with money for the military. Some of Bill Blair's quotes in the recent interview with Mercedes Stevenson at Global are quite something. Talking about the military being in a death spiral in terms of recruitment, that they're losing more people than they're attracting,

that they haven't met their 2% target and they're trying desperately to meet it for NATO requirements. A lot of the equipment in all three forces is run down and basically unusable. It's a pretty sad story. And defense budgets are huge to start with. To fix this problem is going to take billions. So in this next month, what are we going to hear? Are we going to hear stories about trying to restrict government spending? Are we going to

hear stories about, we've got to put more money into this and we'll find the money somewhere? What do you think we're going to hear? Bruce, you start us on this one. Well, I think to some degree, this is still to be decided. I think that this is, for the Liberals, a super important budget to signal to Canadians what their take is on the state of the economy, on the priorities for the federal treasury, and on are they concerned about the size of the deficit and the size of the debt. I think that is always a tension within the government, but it is more the case now that people are wondering, well, if we think about our 20-point or 15-point lag to the Conservatives, are we more likely to close that by spending more money on things that people care about? Or are we more likely to close that by spending more money on things that

people care about? Or are we more likely to close that gap by looking like we're not going to spend as much money as we feel like spending? I don't know that there's a simple answer to that. But I would say that most of the time when politicians feel as though if we spend a bunch of money on something, it will translate into political upside. It doesn't turn out that way necessarily. Some programs are important, obviously, and they require spending regardless of whether people notice them and appreciate them and give government credit for them and give them votes at the next election. They're just the right thing to do. But my point is really that it can be a losery for incumbent governments

to think if we announce X billion dollars on something, whatever that something is, that voters will go, thank goodness, that's what I was looking for. I think they'll find out, the Liberals will find out that pharmacare is that kind of a thing. So this isn't an argument as it relates to defence. I think defence is kind of a unique question right now for Canada. The size of the requirement to participate in our alliances,

to represent the country well from a defensive preparedness standpoint is so large in part because the geopolitical situation is so destabilized and the questions that surround us in the world are not receding. They're growing. I think it's a real question for the government as to what's the right thing to do from a defense standpoint. And I think they should do that irrespective of what it means in terms of the near-term fiscal picture. But as a general rule, if I hold to my, they should try to regain the center. They should be careful about looking like they care more about the fiscal situation

than has perhaps been perceived in the past. Susan. Yeah, I don't want to give a journalistic, weaselly answer, but I think there are sort of two theories on what this budget is going to be like. My colleagues have been asking around, too. One is hold back and let next year be the big election budget, you know, the one with all the goodies in it, and use this one to demonstrate restraint. I find I've been intrigued with, as an aside, too, don't you want to be a fly on the wall of a conversation between Anita Annan, the former defense minister, and Bill Blair. She's now at Treasury Board and the one ordering that don't call.

Stephanie Levitz has a great story in our paper this morning about Bill Blair being told not to call cuts. But leaving that aside, I have, since 2015, been intrigued with this idea of, are we still in the same world about debt and deficits that we were in the 1990s? And you'll remember the bow risk that the Trudeau team took in 2015 was they're not going to promise a balanced budget. You know, somewhere down the road we will my bruce will know way more about public opinion about this this is my own private theory i think our generation sort of i'm at the tail end of the baby boom um came into a world where debt was a problem nobody wanted to be in debt you you know, that, um, and that it was possible to live your life without debt. I didn't come out of university with any

big debts from tuition or going there. In fact, I, you know, I had no debts. Uh, that's not the case for most young people now these days that huge debt is part of their lives. And I think there's a tendency maybe for younger folks to say, yeah, debt, everybody's in it. It's not that big a deal to me, you know, or they, they don't see any real world consequences of, of debt. I don't know if that rings with what you're saying, Bruce, but that's not an argument for government to go crazy because i don't i think people are going to be really keen to see value for money spent this is why pharmacare spending would be better than defense spending because people see the results in in savings in their hand um as opposed to defense which is some sort of, or climate, which are big things they can't see progress on day to day.

But so I, that's all to say, I don't know whether this budget is going to be, is going to be a sober second thought about spending or whether it's going to be, we got to get those young people back and we've got to give them stuff. Yeah. This idea of austerity being a bad word politically, I think is to some degree there. But I think the big change since the 90s has been partly that, that people sort of became, a certain amount of deficit spending became more normalized. And I think the United States political discussion had a lot to do with that. We used to have this kind of conversation about, is our debt to GDP ratio so

high that the world bodies, the IMF in particular, are going to come in and they're going to run our budget? You remember that conversation? Oh, yeah. Nobody talks about that anymore. Now, our ratios are better. But the idea that the rest of the world is watching to make sure that Canada doesn't kind of overspend is never really something that you hear spoken of anymore. To Susan's point about how do people relate to debt personally, I think they do. There is some normalization of that, and maybe more particularly among young people. I think, though, the way that they look at politicians has always been they don't know what the number should be. They know what the attitude should be.

And that's what they watch for is does this government feel like does it government sound like it cares about how much debt it's accumulating or does it not? And I think that if I were advising Chrystia Freeland and the prime minister on this, I would say you do need to reinforce for people that there is some limit to what you can do. And I know they say that from time to time, but it's kind of the balance of the commentary uh that can lead people to believe that it's a government that is maybe too willing to to spend on too many things part of that is the the the notion of what government does every day is make announcements and they popularize these

announcements the announcement first line is always today we're giving X million of dollars for something. And most of those things for most people are, well, they're spending some of my money on something that's going to help somebody somewhere, but it won't be me. Okay. Again, I don't want to be at the risk of bringing Stephen Harper up way too often. You can do that, but you have to do it in 15 seconds. Okay. Harper had a great rule, which was don't start announcements with those big dollars. They don't mean a thing to people.

Don't use dollar ones. And I keep wondering why the liberals are falling into that trap all the time. Okay. Same, same. Good conversation. Good discussion. I'm old. I'm at the front end of the baby boomer generation.

Susan's a couple of years ahead of you. But I can remember when we kind of broached that $10 million annual deficit mark and people thought the sky was going to fall. And now we're, what, 40 times over that. Times have changed, and acceptances have changed, and the debate surrounding it all has changed as well. Listen, great conversation. Thank you to Bruce. Thank you to Susan once again for filling in for Chantel this week.

Chantel should be back next week. And you can pick up your copy of The Buzz tomorrow. It'll be in your inbox if you subscribe at nationalnewswatch.com. A sense of some of the stories that I've been following this week. That's it for now. We'll be back on Monday

with The Bridge. Good to have you with us for the journey, and we'll talk to you on Monday. Thanks, you guys. Thanks, you guys. Thanks, you guys.