The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Good Talk - Emergencies Act, Interest Rates, Elon Musk

Episode Date: October 28, 2022

Bruce and Chantal with their take on this week's hearings at the Commission of Inquiry into the use of the Emergencies Act; how to fight inflation, the nuclear rebound, the monarchy in Canada and Elon Musk.  A busy, busy lineup!

Are you ready for Good Talk? And hello there, it's the end of the week. It's a Friday and that means Good Talk. Chantelle Hebert and Bruce Anderson are with us. And there's lots on the agenda today, so let's get right at it. The Commission of Inquiry into the Emergencies Act is, well, it's well underway. It started in mid-October, so a couple of weeks ago. It's going to run through until November 24th.

A span of about six weeks, they could hear upwards of 65 witnesses and it's been interesting listening on a day-by-day basis to the reports coming out of the inquiry as to what's being said because they seem you know one day one angle is taken in terms of whether or not the emergency act was needed to end the convoy in Ottawa in February the next day you hear a contrary view, and that's very much the way this thing is going, not surprisingly, because there are varying opinions about whether or not the government should have used the Emergency Act, just what powers they used from that act,

and whether they could have ended this thing without the act. So that's, you know, basically what the Commission of Inquiry is going to try and determine. It has a very short reporting period. Commissions of Inquiry in Canada usually go years. This one goes months and only a few months. It's expected to report, It's been tasked to report by February. So it's about four to five months, um, commission of inquiry. So they're churning out, uh, the witnesses. They're going through it, uh, day by day.

And this week's been no exception. And there've been some, you know, headline making moments, Doug Ford saying he's not going to appear before the inquiry, even though he's been asked to appear. You have Peter Slowly, who was the former Ottawa police chief. He's testifying today, actually, but a lot of what he said in preliminary interviews with the commission is now available, slowly, of course, being attacked, basically, by a lot of different people as having acted too slowly in terms of the Ottawa police forces at the beginning of all this. So that's kind of setting the groundwork.

I want to get a sense from each of you. And Bruce, why don't you start us this week in terms of what's capturing your attention from what you've witnessed of late at the inquiry well peter i i should start with an admission that i was wrong because the last two times that you and i have spoken you started with an admission that you were wrong and i felt like it was getting a little bit repetitive to hear your apologies all the time. But here's what I think I was wrong about. I thought that this was going to be a commission of inquiry that was going to be boring to me because my mind had been kind of made up about what had to happen, what did happen, how it went down, that it was probably messy and confusing

behind the scenes, that when we would see the detail of the conversations and the documentation of what was decided and how that there would be some interesting bits, but not very many. And I end up feeling actually this is a more interesting exercise. I think that it's obviously we've talked about before the fact that it's a good thing that if we're going to have an Emergencies Act, we are obligated to have this kind of inquiry. Second thing that's great is that it's fast. There's a pace to it. It's happening in the same calendar year as the event. It's got a deadline.

It's not caught up in procedural wrangling all the time. The evidence is shared with the media so that the stories around the testimony are often kind of richer stories. They're more involved stories with a greater sense of context for understanding what's happening on the witness stand. So, all of that from a process standpoint, I was wrong, and everybody who thought this was going to be interesting was more right than me. On the substance... We will accept that admission on your part.

Thank you. That you were wrong. I guess that we, a royal we, I'm guessing. Maybe not. Sounds like not. Is there another kind? Okay, go for it. Okay, on the on the substance of it i can't i can't help but come away feeling less confident in the competency of the police services at the at the city level and at the provincial level as you read the the evidence that's presented

and you observe the testimony the sense that you have is that ottawa's police was led by somebody who really made a lot of bad judgment calls i don't know him as an individual i can't i don't want to comment on him as an individual but nothing in the testimony so far has made me think anything other than he was, he had very poor judgments about this, about the occupation that was coming. He thought the trucks were going to be there for a weekend. He had been advised or informed or encouraged to understand that that might not be the case, that hotel rooms were being booked for longer periods of time and so on, but he didn't choose to take that. So if you unwind the problem that led to the imposition of the Emergencies Act to the very

beginning, it was allowing all of these trucks to situate themselves where they did. Once that happened, it became really, really difficult to imagine a solution, especially when you have a local police force led by somebody who I guess wanted to believe that his early assessment was right. So there's a lot of chaos evident in the Ottawa Police Service and in the communication between the Ontario Police and the Ottawa Police is a very dispiriting kind of conversation to watch. In hindsight, looking through the documents, it feels like the coordination wasn't there. Maybe the cooperation wasn't there. Maybe the spirit of we're all in it together wasn't there, which brings me to my last point, which is Doug Ford. I don't know for a

minute how Doug Ford can feel good about saying, I shouldn't have to go and talk about this. This is a policing matter, not a political matter. Everybody who spent a minute looking at the imposition of the Emergencies Act and the debate and the division that's followed it knows that it's inherently a political question. Yes, it has policing elements, but his voice needs to be heard. And it's shameful, frankly, that he's not, that so far he's unwilling to be heard. All right, Chantal. Okay, a couple of points. In a general sense, I'm sure that if Justice Hulot was on,

he would say that the timeline is really tight and probably too tight for his comfort to be given this little time to come up with final conclusions in February. But if you look at it from the outside, having watched all those commissions that dragged on forever and required extension after extension, you kind of say there's a model here that might be useful going forward when we set up those commissions of inquiry of putting them in the straight jacket of a tight deadline. Because one, it makes for more compelling testimony, that's for sure.

But it is also that there is something about setting a firm deadline on these exercises rather than allowing them to get lost in the weeds over the course of so many extensions that in the end, we've had commissions in the Jean Chrétien era that had so many extensions that the prime minister ended up managing to shut them down without much of a public outcry, because that's how long they had gone on. And some of the best commissions with the best recommendations, I'm thinking of former Justice Louise Arbour's report on the prison for women in Kingston, were to the point produced in a timely manner and resulted in concrete change. So, I kind of like the model that Justice Hulot probably dislikes intensely. On substance like Bruce, I am stunned by the mixed messages coming out of the various police authorities, and I try to put myself in the seat of a minister around the cabinet table, getting all these conflicting messages and watching the gap between what they see when they go to work in the morning

and what the police keeps telling them about having a plan and having a situation in hand. I think this week, the fact that the officer who was ultimately in charge of what he said was a plan to clear the streets that was short-circuited by the use of the Emergencies Act, seemed to learn, understand that the contract he believed he had with the tow truck drivers to get the trucks out, had fallen apart and was only resuscitated because of the use of the Emergencies Act. And you think you're finding this out from the federal government's lawyer on the stand. That's really interesting. It seems to suggest that there was not much of a postmortem within the police ranks as

to what went wrong and what they should have fixed. The low level of some of the intelligence that they were getting, the way it's drafted. I'm not saying anything about my colleague Rex Murphy, but when that is part of an intelligence report, a quote from a column, I would be not flattered, but totally disquieted if one of my columns ended up in a police intelligence report, because I think, what do I know that is so worth using to inform police officers about the situation? And why would they think that I know this better than they should. On the politics of it, I think it's clear in hindsight, and I'm talking about Doug Ford and his refusal or the lengths he's willing to go to to not testify. I think it's clear in hindsight that Premier Ford did not want to step in front of the parade

last spring in the lead up to an election, in part because some of his base was more sympathetic, as was part of the Conservative base to the convoy and its aims. And he probably would have a hard time for a couple of days in front of the Commission trying to account for that kind of laid back, this is a police matter and as the Premier of Ontario, I don't need to step in, although I support Justin Trudeau's decision, which is basically where he is. But I also suspect that he's putting a lot of energy into not going there because he's been re-elected with a majority in four years, that's not going to be on the ballot. I think he's had a lot of pressure from not only

federal conservatives, but some members of his own caucus and party to not go kind of dig Pierre Poilier into a bigger hole by being the most prominent conservative and the premier in the country going to the commission to say, I support the decision by Justin Trudeau to have used the Emergencies Act, which is exactly the opposite of the position the federal conservatives have taken. And to Bruce's admission of having been wrong, I do note, and it's not just Bruce, but I listened to the entirety of what he explained. I do note that a lot of people are at this point shoring up their opinions over the course of that process, whether it's for or against them. Bruce did not change his mind on the use of the Emergencies Act. He was wrong that it's not boring.

But in the end, he is finding much to consolidate his view. And others on the opposite side are doing the exact same thing. I suggested probably wisdom would suggest that one should wait for the report, for one, and two, as a political analyst, I don't believe the Justice Goulod's report, as useful as it will be, will change anyone's mind about the use of the Emergencies Act, whether you are for it or against it. Well, we live in that world these days where very few things change people's mind the those minds that are entrenched on various sides of big dividing issues let me make two points one on Doug Ford you know he clearly is trying to distance himself from all this and try to distance himself in a way

during this when it was going on but let me tell you you know chantelle lives in montreal bruce lives in ottawa i i live in stratford and in toronto and when in toronto there was the hint that toronto was going to be threatened with trucks downtown blocking the thing i don't know what ford had to do with, but it was police forces, including the OPP, moved in like that. And nothing happened. Trucks were moved out within minutes. So there was no distancing when it was on home turf in Toronto. So those who were saying this wasn't his fight, this wasn't his, this, that, the other thing,

I think that is not an accurate description of what happened at that time. The other thing I'll pick up on it, you know, Chantel mentioned, uh, the intelligence reports and how certain things got into them. Um, Bruce kind of touched on this a little bit.

The thing that I found most interesting this week was in one of those intelligence reports before the, Before the convoy ever hit Ottawa, long before it hit Ottawa, the hotels in the Ottawa area wrote to the, you know, the mayor of Ottawa, the police forces, and said, hey, you know, you should know, you keep saying this is a weekend demo, but these people have booked hotel rooms for 30 days. This was the hotels warning them, telling them what the plans were from what they could tell in terms of reservations being made. And nobody said boo. Nobody acted on that intelligence.

So I agree with Bruce's point earlier. It's quite something that how much information is being shared with the public. We'll see how that continues, especially as we get into the testimony later on by federal cabinet ministers about what they knew and how they knew it, how much information is shared then. But I think this whole sense of intelligence reports being shared with the public and, you know, journalists seeing them and reporting on them, I think is a terrific for the process. Where it'll all end up, I agree with Chantel, it's probably not going to change a lot, if

any, minds. Quick concluding thought on it. Bruce, with Chantel. It's probably not going to change a lot, if any, minds. Quick concluding thought on it. Bruce, I can see you, you don't have something else to apologize for or anything. No, no, no. I wanted to clarify my apology. No, seriously, what I wanted to say was pick up on Chantel's point about whether opinions change or at least mine. I expected through the course of the inquiry to end up feeling like it was a tougher judgment call for the federal government to impose this, that there was going to be consistent and thoughtful advice from the police that you don't need to do this and that it was going to be a kind of an uglier decision, but I was still going to think that it was the right decision. What's changed in my opinion, as I've watched this, is it does feel to me like it was

probably not as difficult a decision as I imagined it to be because the evidence of how the police were conducting themselves was kind of shocking in the sense of the disarray of it. And so my opinions have changed, but not the ultimate question of whether or not it was the right thing to do or not. You talked about Toronto not having been the center of an occupation, nor was Quebec City. Of course, knowing my premier's love for Montreal, we'll never know what would have happened if the trucks had headed to Montreal rather than Quebec City. Of course, knowing my premier's love for Montreal, we'll never know what would have happened if the trucks had headed to Montreal rather than Quebec City. So that remains a mystery. Although I do tend to think that the Montreal police, having had a lot of experience with all kinds of situation, would probably have, like the Toronto police, managed to not allow a camp of trucks to paralyze Montreal. But then, you know, I live in a city that how many years ago, 30, 30 some,

was paralyzed in part by a blockade on a bridge. So it's easy to close down Montreal. You only need to put a few trucks on bridges. You don't even need as many. So we'll not have that experience if at all possible. Okay. We're going to take a quick break. Our first break of today's Good Talk with Chantal and Bruce.

We'll be right back after this. And welcome back. You're listening to Good Talk on The Bridge on SiriusXM, Channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform. Chantelle Hébert, Bruce Anderson, with Peter Mansbridge here today. You know, there are a couple of phrases in Canadian discussion points that while they are actually really important to people, they do kind of make the eyes glaze over.

One of them is when you hear federal, provincial arguing about health care costs and health care funding. That's really important. It may well be the most important issue on the plate right now. If it's not, it's probably crowded by discussions around inflation, which leads to a discussion about the Bank of Canada. And the Bank of Canada came in for a discussion again this week. And so that's the one I'd like a couple of thoughts on because it's a little different than the past.

We knew the, it's usually the opposition party of the day goes after the Bank of Canada when inflation roars its ugly head or when there's some kind of economic turn that the opposition party, and we've seen it before, the Liberals did it in the early 90s, kind of attacked the Bank of Canada's policies and the Bank of Canada governor. We're certainly seeing it again these days with Pierre Poliev and the Conservative Party

promising to fire the governor of the bank if they win power but this week for different reasons i'll acknowledge but this week the ndp jumped on board the let's trash the bank of canada angle um what what should we make of that and what real impact is that going to have on the fight against inflation the rising interest rates all of that um chantal rising interest rates well there are some who would argue that uh while every bank seemed to expect a three-quarter of a point rise this week. It ended up being half a point and that led some experts to say, well, it could be that this rising political pressure on the right and on the left is not only having an impact on the bank, but is also having an impact on the bank, but it's also having an impact on the government's willingness to whisper in the ear of the governor of the Bank of Canada.

Because while Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland, the finance minister, both came out to say the bank is independent, which is true. It is maybe independent, but it does not live in a monastery, and it is part of conversations with the government every day of the week. I think the liberals are starting to see it's not just the NDP and the conservatives each in their own way. It's more and more voices in the economic community that are questioning whether this is the right strategy or whether it is too aggressive and noting that Canada is the country among its allies that has had its rate go up the fastest over the past few months with consequences that we're see more of those. And for the liberals, obviously, if you're angry about your mortgage becoming increasingly unaffordable, or prices not coming down, despite the pain that

you're getting on the housing front, in the middle of a housing crisis, by the way, you're not going to get angry at the governor of the Bank of Canada, you're going to get angry at the government of the day. And I think the liberals increasingly are a feeling pressure be probably in hindsight, thinking that they took the bank's word for inflation being a temporary problem that would go away quickly and didn't need to be addressed in any aggressive way to the letter. And now regret not having questioned that further. Some countries did change the mandate of their central banks

to put in a few more caveats that prevents those central banks from going very aggressively on the interest rate front. It's too late for that. So I'm guessing Christopia Freeland and others are sitting with their fingers crossed that the bank and others are right that the inflation will abate at some point sooner rather than later because otherwise this is a really dangerous time for the liberal government. Bruce? I sort of agree that there's risks here for the liberals. I don't think that the risks come from them having either made or allowed to

be made by the bank inappropriate decisions. The reason I say that is that I think that we've, since the financial meltdown in 2008, 2009, we've been living in a kind of a unreal world of extraordinarily low interest rates and extraordinarily low inflation. And that has become kind of normalized in the public consciousness as the way that things kind of can be all the time. Whereas if you go back before that, interest rates that were in the range that they are now were more the norm. But people don't go back in time and kind of say, oh, you know, this is back like those old days. They go, why is this costing me more money now? And isn't there a politician somewhere has a better answer than the one that's on offer inflation it seems to me and i am the furthest

thing from an economist on this panel uh which is this isn't necessarily saying much but but just in general in my circle of friends and acquaintances that is not my area of expertise but i think i know a couple of simple things one is in inflation is the problem and interest rates are generally the solution to try to tame inflation and bring it down or at least that seems to be the consensus of the of the priesthood that practices economics or runs central banks whether the whether the medicine is being applied too quickly or over abundantly, I guess I think that we won't really know. We won't know ever because we're only trying it one way, but we won't know where we stand in terms of the effectiveness of this policy approach by the bank for some time, whether that's two months, three months, four months, a year, two years, I don't know. But I do agree with Chantal that the political fortunes of the liberals depend somewhat on if and when that policy direction turns out to feel like it's accomplished

what it was intended to do. Last point for me, as painful as it is probably for an incumbent government to watch this medicine be applied this way and to realize the political risks that they face as a consequence of it, it's a worse situation if everybody decides that politicians, frontbenchers, backbenchers, liberals, conservatives, New Democrats, should set monetary policy for Canada and set interest rate policy for Canada. That doesn't feel like a better solution. Let me just say one thing before Chantal jumps back in. Somebody asked me the other day about Pierre Poliev's position on inflation and said,

OK, well, I've heard what he says about the Bank of Canada, and I've heard him blame them for where we are and what the situation is on inflation, but I haven't heard him answer the question, what would you do to curb inflation? And I said, well, one of the reasons you haven't heard him answer that question is because he won't take any questions. It's been something like 40 days since he's taken a question from the 300-odd members of the parliamentary press gallery. But I don't know the answer to the question. I don't know what his solution is to dealing with

inflation, which is a worldwide problem, as we know. We know what he'd do about the Bank of Canada, or at least what he claims he would do if he was in the position to do something like that. Chantal. Well, the last conservative leader in opposition who proposed a solution to inflation was, I believe, Robert Stanfield in wage and price control. He was killed in an election by Pierre Trudeau,

who then turned around and did exactly that. So I'm guessing Pierre Poiliev, who knows his history, is not going to be offering himself up for that kind of immolation. The absence of a solution, that's part of what one could describe as the unbearable lightness of being in opposition. You can be on the attack on both the left and the right without offering much of a solution because you're not facing voters anytime soon. You're

basically weakening the government's position. I just want to come back to what Bruce called the consensus of the priesthood, talking about the the economics to note that that consensus is not as solid as it was even two or three weeks ago. And that I'm sure Bruce did not want to suggest that the Bank of Canada is infallible. Because if it were, we would not have inflation, it would be gone already. That's basically what the bank was saying. So I I I agree that the opposition parties should not be dictating the monetary policy of the of Canada but I think that there it is not a dogma whatever that bank says that should not be a matter for serious conversation between people who actually know what they're talking about, which Bruce made clear was none of us. Not me anyway. No, I certainly don't know whether

it's going to work out. I tried to be clear about that, that I don't feel that I'm in a position to opine as to whether or not it's the right medicine delivered in the right way. But I think that's generally my feeling is that I haven't heard politicians give me a compelling argument other than, you know, compelling in that sense of people who are empathizing about the rising cost of living and food. That's compelling political theater sometimes, and it's important, but it isn't necessarily a better policy solution argued in a in a manner that can make me go well yeah maybe you know a half a point less yesterday or something like that or over the last three weeks would have been better so i i don't know i remain kind of hopeful like probably like most people are, but waiting to see.

The other truth in what you said, Bruce, earlier is that we have been spoiled here for the last decade more, more than a decade really, with incredibly low interest rates. And a generation has grown up of young families and homebuyers thinking that was it. You know, like it was going to, that was going to be the forever way we deal with interest rates. When economists, of which none of us are, were warning, be careful. Don't make your decisions based on that being the forever rate. And a lot of people are now finding themselves in a crunch because they did believe they would always have those very low interest rates. While they are now finding themselves in a crunch with interest rates which

you know historically are not that bad i mean we you know we're old enough to have lived through some certainly i am some really rough times on very high interest rates you know double digit interest rates upwards up near close to 20 so um there is a truth in what you say, and this discussion about the Bank of Canada and interest rates in general is going to continue. Okay, we're going to move on. So let's take our last break, get it out of the way now, so we can take a deep run on a number of other issues

back right after this and we're back for the final segment of good talk for this friday chantelle a bear bruce anderson p Peter Mansbridge with you. There used to be a program on the CBC in the, I guess it'd be the 70s. Maybe it touched into the 80s as well. It was supposed to be a kids' program, but it was really more than just a kids' program. It was called Reach for the Top, and top smart kids from various high school classes and i think there was a front a version of this on roger canada as well uh where um they it was like a quiz program they were thrown certain questions and you had to you know answer them

to to gain points and there was a section of this called the short snappers and that was always my favorite point where you had to go bang, bang, bang with the answers. Well, we're now into the short snapper section of good talk. Just a long intro to the short snappers. Yes. And for the record, it was called Génie en Herbe, which translates into young geniuses, which is neither Bruce nor I.

They were young geniuses. Some of those kids were unbelievable. Anyway. But we didn't compete is what I'm trying to say. Bruce, you never went to reach for the top. When I say short snappers for good talk. And I was too busy skipping classes to be selected so i'm talking about four or five minutes rather than nine or ten minutes we're trying to kill your clock

that's right okay here they are let's let's get so i like this one and this lightning round lightning round this one was suggested by chantal and it's something I did not realize had gone through the, or was discussed in the Canadian Parliament this week. And that is the future of the monarchy. Do you want to lay that one out for us, Chantal? What happened and how did it resolve itself? Okay, so the Bloc Québécois, unsurprisingly,

since we're having a debate here over the members of two parties who were elected in the Quebec election and do not want to swear a no to the crown to be allowed to sit in the National Assembly, brought this to the House of Commons in the shape of a motion that says Canada should break its ties to the British crown. And I'm quoting the British crown is the wording of the motion. Obviously, and hence that debate ensued. Mr. Blanchet, the leader of the Bloc, made it clear in his statements that he did not really mean any allegiance to the crown when he had to swear allegiance to take his seat in the

House of Commons. Some liberals, I would say unwisely, immediately got up and asked the speaker to unseat Yves-François Blanchet and others for not having meant that they were swearing allegiance to the crown. That kind of died down when the liberals discovered that some of their own members are uncomfortable with the oath of allegiance to the crown. So I'll give you the vote, and then I'll talk about what was interesting about it. Obviously, that vote was defeated, and the motion went down.

44 MPs voted for it, and this is where it gets interesting. 31 of those were Bloc Québécois members. Set that aside. But it's the others that are interesting. 10 new Democrats. Jagmeet Singh is not one of them, but he abstained and he had his office let journalists know that while he would not support a motion that says cut ties to the monarchy, he himself is not comfortable with the oath of allegiance to the crown and probably would be happier if it were optional. An Acadian member of the government caucus said, as an Acadian, I'm not comfortable having this oath imposed on me to a crown that deported my people. The Minister of Northern Affairs, who is indigenous, said there is an indigenous perspective on it, meaning that does not go the way of feeling good

about having to swear allegiance to the crown. Forget whoever is king or queen at any given time. And that, to me me means that the perspective on this oath of allegiance has changed, not only because the queen is no longer there and she was an iconic figure, regardless of how you felt about the monarchy, but also because increasingly you are seeing legislatures try to deal with the indigenous reservations about an oath of allegiance to the crown. And if the indigenous elected officials have a problem with that, how could Acadians not have one? And if Acadians have one, I would say in Quebec, if you asked, at least 80% would say they have a problem with the oath of allegiance to the crown, and that 80% would be massively francophone.

So I know the main parties want this conversation to go away. They feel it's a waste of time. But I'm not sure that there will not be some accommodation on at least the oath for elected officials down the line at some point, making it optional. If you want to do it, you can do it. But if you don't want to, you can just swear allegiance to Canada, Quebec, Ontario, whatever. I think Ontario has moved to remove the oath of allegiance to the crown for municipal elected officials a few years ago. Well, that was a short snapper. Yeah, I tried hard, but you did ask me to run you through what happened.

No, you didn't. I'm glad you did. Do you want to add anything before I throw your short snapper at you, Bruce? Thing one, no, we should not be swearing allegiance to the crown. We should swear allegiance to Canada in some form. Thing two, I agree with Chantal's point that, you know, politicians just like me anyway, when I'm wrapping up the day and doing my dystopian doom scrolling, I see 99 other more serious problems and I don't really want to dwell on it.

But we should get on with it and we shouldn't sort of have ourselves caught up in a long debate about it. All right, moving on. There used to be a time in this country when, and not that long ago, when the word nuclear would, the next thing you'd hear about was some demonstration somewhere that would be taking place in the streets or in the parkland or around a potential reactor site of people who said in absolutely no way it's not going to happen here. That doesn't seem to be the case today. We'll see how things develop. But I mean, this week it was announced that the Canada Infrastructure Bank is going to help Ontario Power Generation build a new nuclear reactor, a Darlington 300 megawatt nuclear reactor, for Ontario's energy needs. And just a couple of weeks ago, the Ontario government, which was supposed to be shutting down the Pickering nuclear power plant because of its age, has asked the regulators to say,

no, we'd like to keep that open for a couple of years because of the need for more electrical, or the tax being put on new on electrical generating stations in in the province that needs more help and and as a result Pickering needs to stay open and both these announcements have have met nearly a ripple of protests at least that I've seen or heard of. So what's changed about the nuclear word in terms of the reaction on the part of some members of the public? Bruce? Well, nuclear has gone essentially from a conversation

about nuclear waste and the hazards of nuclear waste to a conversation about climate change and what are we going to do if we're going to get off fossil fuels and reduce carbon emissions. And serious people who study the what are we going to do to get to a net zero world more quickly have generally, not unanimously, but generally come to the conclusion that we can't be looking to use more electricity without creating more clean electricity. Alongside that, there has been in the last 15 years, a lot of technological development around the idea of small modular nuclear reactors. That's what the Canada Infrastructure Bank is getting

behind in this most recent announcement. It's happening a little bit in other parts of the world. And what's different about these small modular nuclear reactors, and I'm not a scientist either, so I'm not going to get into the deep details of the difference. But when in the past there's been discussion about creating infrastructure to make nuclear power, we've been talking about these massive construction projects that go on for incredible amounts of time. And that's not this. We're really talking about technologies that if they prove themselves out, could be used in remote communities to help provide clean energy and clean water and power to sustain a quality of life and a cost of living that don't exist in some of those communities.

Now, there are lots of potentially interesting applications. And that has meant that the environmental activists who were so dug in against nuclear power, but who are so preoccupied with climate change, have had to temper their criticism of nuclear in many cases and be open to the question of maybe this kind of technology is part of what we need. Do you want to add on that, Chantal?

Oh, of course I do. I'm going to go to politics because Bruce is making such a good job of demonstrating why we're not competent to do A, B, or C, but I'm competent on that. Ontario could meet some of its increased demand for electricity, because that is the whole point, is demand for electricity is going to go up. And we need to have more of it if we're going to meet our climate change plans, because once you transition from fossil fuels, you are moving on to something else that is electricity. It could have met some of that demand by buying more power from Quebec, and it's going the other route, actually.

It's terminating or not renewing an existing contract with Hydro-Québec. From the federal perspective, I would say that what has also changed is the optics on getting hydropower from mega-dams, as Quebec has been doing. And the reason for that is it is easier to spend $1 billion to help Ontario do more with nuclear energy than it will be to decide whether to approve François Legault's new dam projects that will come down the pipeline and that will have to find social acceptability

among Indigenous communities, environmentalists, and climate change the politics of sending money down the nuclear path is a lot easier than all of the obstacles that will be in the way of the building of new dams. And that debate will be with us within a couple of years. It will be really interesting to see if we do better than we did last time when the last big Quebec project died because of indigenous opposition. And environmentalists who are today more influential than they were back in the 90s. So if you're an environmentalist, you've got to pick your battles. Maybe you don't want to fight this nuclear deal because you need to keep your powder dry for a larger battle. Okay.

Next short snapper is about the Navy, the Royal Canadian Navy. And I'm going to be careful here because I'm a Navy guy. Like, I like the Navy. I'm a booster of the Navy. He likes the Navy. He's probably an astronaut at heart. Blue Navy planes. I don't know if a lot of people knew that.

And I keep asking you, can you get a plane and let's go for a ride somewhere? But no, nothing. What's a Navy plane? We're killing the clock here. Okay. Here's the story. A parliamentary budget officer testifies this week, says that the latest estimate on the cost of the warships that the navy is bringing online first announced 10 years ago that would be the harper government at a cost of 26 billion

dollars the latest estimate on this is finally finished. Now, there's a kind of familiar track record in this. Whenever D&D buys stuff, the cost is never what it seemed to be at the beginning, or is rarely, if ever, what it seemed to be at the beginning for a variety of reasons. But this is like triple. And it's a big number and it is going to keep getting bigger. To the point that when these things are actually finished and on, you know, in the water,

people will be wondering whether we even needed that particular vessel. The times have changed, demands have changed, et cetera, et cetera. Nevertheless, that's the facts. Those are the numbers put down this week. Bruce on this. Well, I find it very hard to understand because nobody ever really, in my experience anyway, and it doesn't matter which government, has been able to give a clear and concise explanation of why this happens in the procurement process. And

it's very frustrating. I think it's got to be frustrating for regular Canadian observers of politics from a greater distance than us to look at this and say, why do we not seem able to understand what's going to happen with the cost of these procurements, move more quickly, find ways to keep them from getting out of control? What is going wrong in that whole business? And so this is the latest in what feels like a 50-year story to me. I also find sometimes the coverage of these stories isn't particularly enlightening. I saw a headline yesterday in a story, I think it was the CBC story, that said the cost of these ships was going to escalate to $300 billion. Now, how they got to that number, and I guess the PBO,

the Parliamentary Budget Officer, contributed to this, was by this trick of including all of the operating and the maintenance costs of the equipment over, I think it was 65 years. But if you say I'm going to buy a car and it's going to cost $35,000, you don't say it's going to cost $35,000 and then tweak that number up to include all of the costs to operate it for the 10 or 15 years that you might use it. You say it costs $35,000. So I worry that there's too much game playing in some of the conversation around this. And I think at the end of the day, the larger issue, other than the financial one is what equipment will we need for the next 25 years in the world that we will have with the alliances that we may or may not have. And I find that's also a very, very gray and less certain area.

And part of the reason it's gray is we don't know what the world is going to be like 25 years from now. So there is a challenge, a real challenge in trying to determine what kind of, you know, weaponry and warships, airplanes, you name it, you're going to have. Chantelle on this? Do you have a thought? Like Bruce and like you, I can't think of a government that signed off on a deal like that and that did not know the history of what had happened to the previous deals. This is not a one-off. This is par for the course when it comes to military procurement in this country. What troubles me is we do not, usually when you see cases like that, you have one instance that you can use and say,

this is a template for what worked. And no one ever seems to have one to offer in this case. I suspect defense minister after defense minister has struggled with the issue. I think why this is allowed to continue to happen is in part because the people who are behind the initial decision, by the time those numbers come out, have long retired or moved on to other positions and are no longer around to account for themselves. I think that is part and parcel of the problem. Many of them.

Maybe put a timeline like on the Rouleau Commission. Hard and fast, you're fired if things go wrong. There's also the regional development trying to have, you know, each region of the country get some share of those big contracts, which probably does not necessarily lead to efficiency. You talked about those who'd moved on from those jobs, who'd made those decisions. Some of them have moved on under the rules, but still had moved on to the contractors or building the ships or the planes or what have you.

And, you know, that raises all kinds of questions of its own. I've got a minute left. Anybody want to weigh in on Bruce's favorite, Elon Musk? He's been a big supporter. Bruce wants to. Bruce wants to. He's been a big supporter of Musk. He's a Musk guy.

I am not a Musk guy. I had ordered a Tesla and then canceled the order because I became less and less a Musk guy. So I say this with some hopefulness more than confidence. I read the statement that he put out yesterday as he completed his acquisition of Twitter. And what he wrote was what I would hope he does. I haven't heard him say things that made me think I would agree with him in quite some time. So I was a little bit surprised.

He talked about the need for a public square that was less full of hatred and people spewing at each other. And that's obviously something that we all care about whether he is anywhere close to the kind of person who can engineer that seems uncertain except for last point he changed the automotive industry uh i almost single-handedly caused a huge catalytic change in something that looked like it couldn't change and so he's some force to be reckoned with sounds to me like he could become a must guy after all with that. But good points. And, you know, he didn't waste time, right? He took over control overnight.

And what did he, the first thing he did was he fired the three top executives of Twitter. So he's going to bring in a new team. And when you bring in a new team, it's probably because you're going to do things differently and not just let Trump back on the, on the site, which is one thing he's promised. He's got spaceships and satellites up and he's

done a lot of things. So, you know, if he's got the right idea here, maybe I'm going to invest a little bit of hope, but I'm not going to be a Trump, a Musk guy anytime soon. He said hope and not money. Yeah, that's right. Hope is cheap compared to

investing, for real. Okay, listen, you guys, thank you very much, and thanks for doing the whole short snapper section. That was just a mere 20 minutes. It just moved along. Good discussion, as always. Don't make fun

of us now. We're i'm not good discussion bruce anderson shantelli bear thanks so much for listening to good talk on this week uh we'll be back obviously next friday but we'll be back with the bridge on monday have a great weekend