The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Good Talk -- Erin O'Toole's Two Log Theory

Episode Date: February 3, 2023

Chantal and Bruce have a lot to talk about this week starting with the former Conservative leader's not so flattering description of the split within his own party during his time at the top. Plus, are the Liberals' cratering and what is the problem?  And did the opposition parties botch the committee hearing into consultancy arrangements?

Are you ready for Good Talk? And welcome to your Friday. This is the Good Talk episode, the Friday episode of The Bridge. Chantelle Hebert, Bruce Anderson are both here. I'm Peter Mansbridge. And as we always do on Fridays, we've got lots to talk about. We're going to talk, for starters, about somebody who's supposedly from the past, a voice from the past, but really he's very much a voice of the future and the present. Because we're talking about Aaron O'Toole, the former leader of the Conservative Party. This is the one-year anniversary, actually, this week,

of his departure from that leadership role. And he signaled that anniversary with a bit of a bang, giving an interview to Politico. And some of the stuff in this interview is quite reflective of what he thinks he went through in the final days, months as leader of the Conservative Party. He still sits in the caucus. He still is a member of parliament.

Here's what he said about the split in his caucus during the election campaign. Okay, I'm just going to read two sentences here, two or three sentences. There was a section that went right down the rabbit hole of COVID. Ivermectin, remember that? That was a horse drug or something. The whole nine yards, he says. I'd always try to inspire and convince, but in some cases that was not possible. If some people have a bit of an agenda or want to be at this epicenter of power and they don't think they are, their ambition may eclipse the well-being of the team. I was the lumberjack. I love this last sentence here. I was the lumberjack riding down the river, but on two logs. And over time, the logs were getting

further apart, and I was trying desperately to keep them from getting too far apart, not just for me to stay dry, but because I do worry about the increasing kind of, whether you call it polarization, whether you call it division, that we're seeing not just within the country, but within parties, organizations, and businesses. Well, that's quite a condemnation of the supposed tight team that is supposed to operate during election campaigns. I mean, we saw some of this. We talked about some of this during the campaign.

But a year later, for him to be that descriptive, well, you wonder why. What's the end game here? Chantal, why don't you start? I think as any previous leader, Mr. O'Toole has more freedom to speak his mind than the average MP. It's rare, but not unheard of, for a former leader to run again. Andrew Scheer is a case in point. He doesn't seem to be going anywhere. Stockwell Day, who was the leader of the Canadian Alliance, stuck around and became a minister in Stephen Harper's government. Whether Mr. O'Toole will run again and would have an interesting spot in Pierre Poiliev's cabinet, the jury is out on that.

But I found the interview interesting and also what it didn't say. And I'll come to your lumberjack image or his. Aaron O'Toole's real history is that he jumped on one log to become the leader of the party and then tried to jump on another, the more centrist log, which is where he was in his comfort zone, to be truthful, after he was leader. The problem is, and you'll remember Brian Mulroney sang on that, in politics you dance with the ones who brought you to the ball. And Mr. O'Toole was brought to this dance by dancing partners that were not the right ones in his mind, at least, to win an election and to win over centrist voters. So yes, he ended up straddling both. But in the end, it wasn't just that he was straddling both. It became a question of who he really was. And that is a problem. You have to be, at some point, people have to know who you are.

And he seemed to be able to bend to the wind on more occasions than most leaders of the opposition will do. As for the rabbit hole theory, I believe he's right. The conservatives have more people who have gone down that rabbit hole. And I would argue that many of them are still there. Bruce? Well, I think it was a very useful contribution for Mr. O'Toole. My own interpretation of it is it's the kind of thing that you say just before, in an interview that you give, just before the interview you give saying you're leaving politics.

I saw some quote in there, I think, about you know whether or not his time in politics would be over in 10 days or 10 years. If you put that kind of time frame on it and include 10 days as an option, it is signaling to some degree that it might be 10 days or a matter of days rather than a matter of years. And I also think that he's describing, I think there are two things that stood out for me. One is that he's describing a problem that exists within the Republican Party in the United States that befell Jason Kennedy's leadership in Alberta, and that is a problem for the Canadian Conservative Party, which is that there is a segment of the party, the first 20% of their current 37% vote, if you like, which is pretty far to the right

of where most mainstream Canadian voters are and has become more heavily influenced by conspiracy theories of one sort or another, whether it's COVID-related or something else, and is kind of disinterested in the idea of finding a bigger tent or creating a bigger tent or creating bonds of agreement or compromise with a larger cohort. And that that is a real challenge for some of these conservative parties. Now, I happen to think that Doug Ford has managed it

differently and well. And I think the thing that Aaron O'Toole and Jason Kenney have in common, and this is to Chantal's point a little bit, is that both of them signed up for the two-log ride. And in a way, they were nurturing the two-log party. They chose one path when it seemed like the path necessary to get them to the, you know, to use the American vernacular, the primary, the nomination, the leadership. And then they thought that they had the political gifts and the skill set that would allow them to pivot, bring their party along with them and appeal to more people.

And, you know, it's a dilemma. I mean, I think that it's probably necessary to, if the conservative parties are going to become more mainstream competitive, then it's necessary for both those factions to find some common ground. But I think both Kenny and Aaron O'Toole have proven that it's a lot easier to think about and to imagine in a strategic backroom than it is to execute. And so partly Aaron O'Toole was saying this was his failure. And I appreciated that he said that because I think too often

that's not said. He did blame some factions of people who were out of power and I think those were fair comments, but that is true of almost every leader that gets ousted in any party. And, you know, to a degree with every party, as you say, any party, because all parties generally speaking, have these differences within the parties, left and right usually is what it is,

and sometimes that was come to a head in a big argument. This was different. I mean, this basically ruined their campaign, or at least Aaron O'Toole thinks it did. When you look at the Conservative Party today, Chantal, how much of the two log theory still exists? It's still there, but I think Pierre Poiliev, for all of his polarizing campaigns, still did not play one log against the other in the way that Aaron O'Toole did, and is in a better place to recast the priorities of the party along mainstream lines, i.e. in this case, the economy. I note that he did not give much of a nod, for instance, to the religious right go after those issues that are dear to you.

To go back to Mr. O'Toole, the fact is that if he had wanted to be the leader that he tried to be in the election campaign, he would have had to secure a mandate to be that person in the leadership campaign. And I go back to Stephen Harper, ran against Stockwell Day for the leadership of the Canadian Alliance. That was the beginning of his ascent as eventually the leader of a United Conservative Party. Stockwell Day, a candidate of the religious right, the anti-abortion movement, etc., a friend of that family. And Stephen Harper campaigned in that first campaign by telling members, if you pick me, I am not going to be pursuing those battles. That is not what we will be doing. And by winning that leadership, got himself a mandate based on reality, not on a wink and a nod, and we'll see one time prime minister. And that served them well,

really well in subsequent battles on the larger election battlefield. So if you're not going to get that mandate, or if you get, I would argue, Aaron O'Toole won that leadership on false pretense, in the sense that the person that campaigned was not the person that he was politically. And that is... Especially on climate change, would you say? Especially on climate change, that was... On climate change, but also, I mean, he presented himself as not being Peter McKay. Frankly, if I put Peter McKay and Aaron O'Toole side by side politically,

I would find twins, almost Siamese twins on positions. But that is not the campaign that they are under. So he didn't present himself as a better Peter McKay. He presented himself as the anti-Peter McKay, hinting that Peter McKay was a soft conservative and he wasn't. The fact is, they're

both the same. On this, the criticism that Aaron O'Toole was a red Tory or somewhere close to that family was totally founded. That's not necessarily a bad thing. But it is if you showed up in blue clothing and you were hiding red clothes under all of that for the entire time that you were saying elect me because I'm blue look because it's friday and i know that you're a generous soul on friday especially um i just want to take one issue with one thing that you said and and and see if it resonates with you caution listeners and viewers yeah ruse is entering the chantal zone this can always be

dangerous i understand but you know the point that you made about pierre pauliev and how he Chantal zone. This can always be dangerous. I understand. But, you know, the point that you made about Pierre Polyev and how he campaigned, I do remember some of the ways in which he characterized Jean Charest's candidacy, and I thought it was a bit running against the other

side of the party, the other log, if you like. Now, I do think, to his credit, in terms of the strategy, the other log, if you like. Now, I do think to his credit, in terms of the strategy, the acumen, he stopped doing it as soon, almost as soon as he won. And he's been working at repairing those and his appointments to his shadow cabinet reflected a different version of who he was. But it just, it seemed to me that he was a little bit, he was picking a side there. Okay, I'll just note that by being, and I'm not condoning in any way, shape or form the tone of the Pierre Poiliev leadership campaign, which I abhorred, frankly. But by keeping his attacks on Jean Chaguet so personal, he kind of avoided the, i'm not ever going to be talking to more progressive

conservative types because he made it all about jean charrette and made it really personal a fake conservative a guy who served as a liberal premier etc attacks that in the end je Jean Chagas took home, right? His attack on Patrick Brown is pretty harsh, too. But for me, I was wondering if he was going to be modeling everything after the Trump model, right? Where Trump just finds his way to personally demonize and belittle and criticize the others. And I think he did do a reasonable amount of that. But I think he's moved away from it now. Well, he's moved on to damaging the reputation of people like Dominic Barton and others. We will get to that.

Yeah, and we will get to it. You know, I don't think he's left the Trump playbook at all, but I think he's a much more sophisticated Trump playbook that the Polyev team uses, but there's a lot of things in there that he uses almost every day, certainly every week. Last point on Aaron O'Toole before we leave it. He doesn't really have a position within the Conservative Party right now, does he?

He doesn't have a shadow cabinet role or anything like that. He asked not to have one, I think. He asked not to have one, right. So he's basically the former leader who's trying to decide whether he wants to get in or out. And this would seem to indicate I should say that I corresponded with Aaron O'Toole about two weeks ago to talk about whether or not he was ready to come out and do an interview. And he said he still needed a little time.

Well, I guess he decided that the time was up and Politico did a great job. It's a fascinating interview. And if you should look at it, just go online to Politico and you can see it. Okay. Let's take our first break, and we'll come back, and we'll talk about the, you know, Bruce always says, you always preface whenever we discuss polls that you don't like polls. And so I'm not going to do that this time.

I will not say, in spite of the fact I don't like polls, we're going to talk about the latest bit of polls. You're not going to do that. I know. I'm not going to do that i know i'm not i'm not going to say that love bowls catnip coming up catnip coming up um okay be right back after this and welcome back. You're listening to the Friday episode of The Bridge. Good talk, of course, with Chantel and Bruce. You're listening on SiriusXM, Channel 167, Canada Talks,

or on your favorite podcast platform. Or you are watching on our YouTube channel. You can get the link at my Instagram or Twitter sites. There's no charge. You can get it free, and you will just be enthralled at the incredible production techniques that we use on the video version of Good Talk.

All right. Well, let's just say what seems increasingly obvious over these last couple of weeks, every poll that comes out shows the Liberals hammered by the conservatives conservatives had a you know basically the same lead they had in the last election campaign in terms of voter support not seat support but voter support about three two three four points It's now suddenly gone up to seven points. Seven touching, approaching eight. So that is a substantial lead.

And clearly it must have some Liberals worried, pacing the floor at night, saying, is this it? Do I start checking my pension numbers now? Are we toast? Or does a couple of years change everything? How serious is the situation? And how worried are they inside?

Chantal. Serious. Yes. Not just because the numbers show a solid conservative lead in voting intentions. But for other sections of that same Abacus poll, which I think are even more disquieting for the government, to the question, do you believe that the government is focused enough on cost of living issues, which are a daily preoccupation of most Canadians, 75% find that the government is not sufficiently focused on cost of living.

75% that's a hell of a lot of people who are still saying they'd vote Liberal, but they don't feel the government's priorities are in the right place. 66% say not focused enough on health care. Again, those numbers have to include a number of liberals. So yes, there are and there were, going into the new year, concerns in liberal ranks about where the party was headed.

You talked about could another couple of years fix that? One question on everyone's mind is, do we have a couple of years? That's not a given. The NDP will ensure support for the liberals until 2025. So time may be of the essence. But the other thing that is and that has happened this week is for many, many polls and including this one, what has been keeping the liberals in the game really has been that they have a solid, solid lead on the Conservatives in Quebec, and that they are hanging on, or they were hanging on, to their support. Now, it may look like the usual Quebec storm what happened this week, if you're sitting in Ottawa or somewhere else in the country. But this past week, and the debate over the appointment of the anti-Islamophobia representative, the person, not the role, never played in the way that it played outside the province,

that people felt that Trudeau was doing his job in this province by protecting a major employer in the province. But this week, it's everywhere. It includes leaders of the Quebec Muslim community were saying, how could you appoint someone who is shown prejudice towards Quebecers in public to that degree as someone who can be part of the solution? Let me just give you a sample because there's a temptation out there to say, oh, it's the nasty bloc Québécois and look at François Blanchet, he's so not nice, or people who love Bill 21. Remember Thomas Mulcair, former NDP leader, lost a lot of ground in an election because he was consistently and unflinchingly against any hint of something that smelled of Islamophobia, the barbaric tip line of the conservatives, the notion that you would ban veils from swearing in ceremonies. He has continued to be one of the most vocal political figures in Quebec against Bill 21.

And this week, in his Montreal Gazette column, he wrote, wrong appointment, wrong appointee. Please go back to the drawing board because this will only undermine the very cause that this representative is supposed to advance. Quebec Liberal Party, the party that has fought tooth and nail against Bill 21. Same reaction and same position. Justin Trudeau's own Quebec ministers, not just this Quebec lieutenant, were up in arms. Why? People are focused on the misappropriation of a poll to advance a point, a poll that showed something that was the opposite of what was written about, i.e. that most Quebecers are driven by Islamophobia in their support for Bill 21.

Actually, that was not what the poll said. The poll said that people who are Islamophobic like Bill 21. That doesn't make them most Quebecers. But the reason why this won't go away has little to do with that column. And it has to do with something else that is a Twitter comment from the same individual to the assertions that French Canadians suffered discrimination under British rule. The comment was, that assertion just makes me want to vomit. I'm quoting here. You have columns today from the former mayor of Begetsnow, to name one.

The title is, she throws up on our suffering. I think if you remove the words French Canadians and put indigenous in the sentence that makes someone throw up, no amount of apologizing would get that person a role as a federal representative of bridge building capacity. And this is where this stands now. The hit is on Trudeau's liberals. And I'm curious to see what happens in the next polls to his Quebec support. Bruce. Well, I'm not going to get into that conversation that Chantal has just been having

because I'm not kind of knowledgeable enough about the various undercurrents and and i and so i kind of accept her her kind of point of view as uh as one that i want to think about and has read a little bit but to go back to the the first starting point about the polls um i i do think they are serious uh for the liberals i don't think that the you know terms kind of corkscrewing into the ground free fall getting hammer getting hammered, getting crushed, I think those are all a little bit overstated. Gee, who would have used those? Like nobody, no right-minded person would use those.

They're pretty bad numbers. He's in a fighting mood this morning, or Bruce. What was that term the liberals used about their own situation back in 2004? What was it? Swirling around the bottom of the toilet bowl? That was pretty bad. Swirling in the toilet bowl. That was pretty bad.

Well, in an election campaign, if these numbers happen, those words would be perfectly relevant and appropriate, in my view, in a 37-day campaign. And it may be an election campaign sooner than the two years that people have been talking about, as Chantal says, that's true. My point is only that if I wanted to understand these just from the standpoint of what does it look like in seat count difference, the difference between this poll and one, two or three weeks earlier is, you know, the problem in BC is still a problem in BC for the

Liberals. But I don't think that's the right way to, and the Ontario numbers are sort of consistent with what happened before. And the Quebec numbers, barring some collapse based on what Chantal is saying, are not that different from before. But that isn't my point. My point is the liberals should take these numbers very seriously. They should take them very seriously for a couple of reasons. One is they have the ability to do the things that they want to do and are doing a lot of them and are basically able to spend money on whatever they want to spend money on. And despite all of that, despite all the latitude that that offers, they're not connecting with

people. So it's one thing to look at the number of people who say, I really want to change in government and say, well, that number is not higher than it was in the last two elections. But the more compelling number, I think, for liberals should be the number of people who say it's really important to me that the liberals get reelected. That number has dropped. And, you know, if you're having a polarization scenario and you want that to win for it, be a factor that contributes to victory, you need your end of the poll to be strong and growing maybe and i'm not suggesting that that's the right strategy i'm just saying the opposite is happening is that support for the liberals is drifting away it's drifting more to the

conservatives and the liberals are not attracting those soft ndp or progressive voters. And in my view, and I tweeted about this yesterday, I think a big part of it is, you know, the solution to it isn't to find another 10 policy tools that nobody has thought of before and announce them and expect that the public opinion dynamic is going to change. They've got so many messages on every single day. Nobody really knows what they're about. And when they communicate all of these different messages, they use a tone and a language and a structure that either bores people or alienates people or puts distance between themselves and people. And I know it's fashionable from time to time to say, well, the problem is, is comms not policy. And it's not

always true. But comms is a huge problem. Communications is a huge problem for this government. And it's been a problem for a while. And it's getting worse. And so there needs to be more discipline in how they approach the narrowing of the focus, the sharpening of the message, the improvement of the tone, if they're going to be competitive with this leader in the next election campaign. Because we all know what word comes to mind when you say, well, just keep on doing the same things and expecting a different result. And so that's not a recipe. It's just wait for these polls to change back or come up with another five or 10 ideas that you roll out in the hopes that somehow people will notice those, even though they haven't noticed so many of the other things. In many cases, very good policy

that the Liberals have put in place, but which have failed to attenuate this leakage to the Conservatives and failed to do anything to bring soft progressive voters under the Liberal banner. Go ahead. Just to build on that, part of the reason why polls show the liberals to lack focus on the main issues is not so much that they lack that focus. I'm sure that Chrystia Freeland is hard at work trying to figure out a way forward that makes governments part of the solution and not part of the problem to the cost of living crisis. And I'm convinced that a lot of energy, continues to have its eyes not on the ball.

Rather than they are everywhere and they're being focused on things that actually don't matter to me in the immediate, in the larger scale of things. They're all over the place, but they're not in the right place. And at this point, they face an acute problem in parliament in that their legislative priorities, if you've looked at them, are completely divorced from health care and the economy. It doesn't make them useless bills, but the firearms legislation, messed up as it is, or the new Broadcasting Act, or the new Official Languages Act, they're all interesting.

They're interesting conversations but seriously they are not the conversations that canadians are looking for at this point they can continue to have them but the central message is that they are fiddling on all those fronts while the economy is burning is and and basically what bruce is saying contributes to that there's one other thing that occurred to me earlier this week. Chantal highlighted the advocacy data that showed where people want focus and where they think the Liberal government has focus and the lack of connection on the cost of living, on the economy, on health care. It's absolutely palpable. But how government spends money is never very far below the surface. The number of how big the deficit is and what direction it's going in

doesn't usually preoccupy people that much. But what does get to preoccupy people is if they think they have a government that doesn't care about whether it's wasting money. And so that story that Michelle Rempel-Garner put out this week, I'm sure others have covered it, about how the government was paying a lot of money to rent a hotel for COVID quarantine when virtually nobody was in it, sounds like a story of a government that doesn't have somebody whose job it is to watch the spigot and to turn it off when it needs to be turned off.

And to the point that we're talking about, about are you in the moment politically that Canadians are in, not having an answer to that, even if the answer is ugly. Sorry that happened. Shut it down now. We've got somebody in cabinet whose job it is now to look for these things and snuff them out before an AG finds them two years later. You've got to be on the ball in the conversation that people are having. Otherwise, you will end up with this wounding of many, many, many dozens of cuts.

Okay. I want to, just before we move on to a different segment, I want to just go back to something Chantal dropped in her first answer in this segment, which was the, you know, don't put all your eggs in the basket that the NDP are going to be there, you know, for the next couple of years supporting the government. You know, we've said this before, but is there a different tone to it right now? I mean, I hear Jagmeet Singh saying often, you know, we're looking at it, there are certain things we want, we're not getting them, and nobody should take us for granted.

Now, is he saying that because he woke up one morning recently and said I better start saying that, or is he getting pressured from within his caucus, within his party, that, you know what, this is not doing us any good. What do we know or do we know anything on that front? Chantal, you brought it up so you can answer. Well, we do know based on polls that the NDP would be unlikely to do immensely better and could possibly do worse if an election took place between

now and, I don't know, July 1st or the fall. Because while the polls do not show at this point that the soft new Democrats could move to the liberals, they well might if the reality of a majority Poiliev government starts being in the picture of an actual election campaign. And we also know that many new Democrats are otherwise occupied installing, if they can, a government in Alberta and in Manitoba. So that is basically the calendar year. But I believe that this is the last full year that this parliament will last at best. That Jagmeet Singh has to be saying these things because he has to build a narrative for waking up one morning in 2024 and saying enough is enough.

I don't see how the NDP would want to go to an appointed date in 2025 to have an election. So they need to build or give themselves a rationale for pulling the plug on that agreement. It's not an easy job because as you're building it, you're making it harder to justify staying within the confines of that agreement. That being said, on a number of issues that Jagmeet Singh is pushing, I'll take health care and private health care to ensure the delivery of public services. Should Mr. Singh find that there is a deal with the premiers next week and that does not involve conditions on devolving public delivery of health services to private health care and wants to fight that in the House of Commons. The government can turn to the Bloc Québécois or even the Conservatives for support because any deal that pleases Doug Ford and other Conservative premiers

and François Legault is bound to find support across the aisle that is not the NDP. So there is room in that agreement for the NDP to fight some of its own chosen battles without breaking the deal. But I can't see how that goes beyond 2023. Bruce, your thoughts on it? Yeah, I'm pretty much in the same place, although I don't know that I – I generally think Chantal's right about the timing, but I'd be a little bit more – who knows, really? Who knows what the end of next year will look like?

Who knows what the dynamic will look like? I think Pierre Poliev is a big part of this equation because I think that ultimately how progressive voters react to him in the next election campaign will be the most important thing for the NDP and the Liberals. And I don't think we know yet how that will play itself out. I think as of now, I would say that if you're a progressive voter in Canada, of all of the conservative leaders that have been on offer in my lifetime as a voting adult, I can't think of one who would be more worrisome for a progressive voter than Pierre Pauliet. He is a flip the table over kind of guy. And he has said a number of things about how he feels about social issues

and the role of government that are far more potentially divisive or disturbing anyway for progressive voters than what his predecessors. And now I'm looking at Chantal and I'm going, she's got that name of that one other conservative leader that maybe Stock Day or what have you that would be in competition for that or Preston Manning at a certain point in time, but he wasn't the conservative party leader. Anyway, my point is that Pierre Pauliev will be a big factor. On the question of what to make of what Jagmeet Singh says now, for me, it's a little bit like you're the party leader

in the third party in that situation. There's only one song for you to sing. And it's a song that is basically intended to make it say, to say we're relevant, we're influential. Please note our influence. But after a while, it sounds like one of those songs that gets in your head and you sort of take it for granted and maybe you wish it would go away, like that Baby Shark song or something like that.

It doesn't have the same sense of, trust me, I'm actually going to do this right now. It's more just the noise that you expect in that situation. And so that's what I think it is right now. Okay. Well, time will tell us, I say. Very brave of you. I always remember my, my old friend, my old friend and a somewhat mentor when I got to Ottawa, and both of you two will remember this guy, John Drury,

who was this flamboyant, flashy, former RCAF officer who was a reporter on Parliament Hill. And he used to get thrown these stories all the time where one side would say this, one side would say that, and you've got to reflect both sides. Well, and one day he to reflect both sides well. And one day he finally had enough. He did his whole item, his television item, doing that, saying, you know, here's the conservative, here's the liberal, here's the NDPer,

and then he came on at the end where you're supposed to sum things up, and he just looked into the camera and he said, who knows? Who really knows? John Drury, CBC News, Ottawa. Loved it. There's so many stories like that right okay we're going to take our final break when we come back we will talk consultancy doesn't that sound exciting way we will make it so Okay, we're back for our final segment of Good Talk for this week. A little coughing in the background. A number of us are suffering the coughs these days.

Not sure what that means. Not going to jump to any conclusions. Feeling fine other than a little cough here and there. Okay, for the last couple of months, the Conservatives and to some degree the NDP feeling fine other than a little cough here and there. Okay. For the last couple of months, the Conservatives and to some degree the NDP have been threatening to expose the rot of consultancy on the federal government. And they've used Dominic Barton,

who is the former managing partner of the McKinsey Group, as an example. And they say, we've got to have a committee hearings. We've got to bring them in. We've got to grill these guys. We know stuff. And then we're going to let it all unfold in these hearings. And you had the impression that when the hearings finally decided to go ahead

and Barton was very quick off the mark to say, I'm happy to come and talk. So the hearings happened this week. And I don't know about you two, but I was severely disappointed with watching the opposition. I mean, they look like other than calling for the hearings, they had not given much thought to what they wanted to get out of the hearings or what research they had on the subject. They all have research departments, and your money goes to support those research departments.

So I don't know what their game plan was, but nobody was left on the floor gasping for air after it was over in terms of the witnesses, at least from what I saw. Certainly not Dominic Barton, who's a pretty smooth character to begin with, but he seemed to handle it all, for the most part, with ease. And we don't seem any closer to saying,

okay, something really terrible happened in one of these situations involving Canada, the advice to Canada from consultancies, or really getting to the kind of nub of the question, which is, is there too much money spent on consulting services when, in fact, we have a huge public service, one that's growing, I might add. Every year, it grows a little bigger. So was all this sort of poorly thought out, poorly strategized on the part of the opposition parties?

Did they get anything about what they were trying to accomplish? Bruce, you haven't started one of these conversations, so go for it. We have about eight minutes on this. Well, look, I think that, you know, it me of the the adage about in in law anyway in courtroom dramas never asked the question that you don't know the answer to uh came to mind and i think there was a little bit of that um i think at a high level uh mr polyev is is trying to make a bit of a meal of saying you know price consultants, that's what the liberals do with your money. And, you know, probably a little bit of that sticks in part because the people who are spending the money on consulting services aren't doing much

to explain, here's how it saves taxpayer money, the thing that we bought from consulting company X or Y or Z, or here's how it improved the functioning of the public service or the delivery of a program. And I think all of those arguments are available. I don't think the money that is spent on these companies is inherently wasteful. I don't think that it is better spent internal to government in many instances. I think that these are organizations that are buying services that are not available within the ranks of the public service because they require an outside expertise, perhaps. And sometimes because it's about outsourcing functions that you don't really want to hire long-term permanent staff for because you won't

need them in that way for that long. So I think there are good rational decisions for a lot of these contracts. I think the committee thought that simply by saying Dominic Barton and Justin Trudeau are friends, that this would be, you know, some sort of political revelation that would be very damaging to the liberals. I think Dominic Barton said we're acquaintances, we're not friends. And, you know, I don't know, you know, how much further it can go than that. McKinsey is one of the most successful consulting companies in the world, not without a blemish on its record, but it hardly is the case that people would say, well, why would you ever hire them to give you advice about X or Y or Z?

Major blemish, but it had nothing to do with Canada at that point involved, as you know. And why would they need $100 million from Canada to stay afloat? Or why would Dominic Barton need McKinsey to be getting $100 million to pay for his mortgage, which is probably non-existent in any event. You talked about, you know, no one was on the floor gasping for air. I would say the conservative narrative was a bit in that position after that hearing. hearing that if the hope was that Dominic Barton would bring a smoking gun to the table that could then be turned on Justin Trudeau in the House of Commons, it didn't pan out in the

sense, not just because Dominic Barton is able to handle issues like that, but because close friends tend to be people that you at least partake a meal with once in a while. I'm not saying exchange Christmas cards because I've never sent you guys any Christmas cards. I think that's going out of fashion. It's not a test of friendship anymore. But clearly what was and the reason why the conservatives are so focused on trying to build the narrative that Justin Trudeau is rewarding his friends and liberal insiders is because they're not interested in drawing attention to the fact that Stephen Harper also called for advice on Dominic Barton and also called on consultants in his day, less so to a lesser degree, but the times and the issues have been different.

And the costs have also been different. What I found ineffective but interesting is how every party brought their own partisan battle to the table. And they were not the same battle. The NDP wants to expand that to the reliance on all consultant services. The rationale for that is really easy. One, it allows them to say liberals and conservatives are both the same, but also it puts them on the same wavelength as the public service unions who dislike the use of consultants. And the Bloc Québécois has a different angle.

It wants to go after Dominique Barton and McKinsey and mostly Justin Trudeau for recommendations on immigration that Mr. Blanchet and the Bloc Québécois argue did not take into account the language picture in Canada and the fact that opening the doors to scores of new immigrants would diminish Quebec's way in the Federation. So it put those three together, and you get the kind of session that we watched, which was all over the map and, frankly, going nowhere. You know, I wonder, and I was wondering this week watching this,

is how common is this that committees, and there are lots of committees, and they're meeting all the time, right? And usually with witnesses that they've demanded or requested to be there. But how well prepared are they for these hearings? I mean, we've all been to some of them. I mean, when I was a reporter on the Hill, I think I we've all been to some of them. I mean, when I was a reporter on the Hill, I think I went to Public Accounts Committee all the time,

but mainly because that was one of the big issues of the day. But, you know, there's lots of other committees' hearings, and they're usually not attended by journalists. I should be careful saying that. Generally, they're not. But, you know, I guess what I'm asking is, are the opposition parties who want witnesses of committees prepared to actually tackle the real issues with them when they get them in there? Because this was not a good advertisement for such a thing. I guess it depends on the political cycle.

I think what we saw in committee this week is fairly typical of what we will see in Parliament going forward, and that is the fact that there is a diminishing well of political cooperation or wanting to tackle complex issues if you can advance partisan interests, because we are in that part of the cycle of a minority parliament. It's a very short cycle. That first year, you get to do things. That second year, the well starts to become poisoned.

By the third year, you accomplish nothing. We're basically on the way to you accomplish nothing, as long as you can score points off the government on on perception and every government that i have covered that was closer to that the end of its productivity on that score has featured those kinds of committees on issues that by the way, we rarely hear about once the election is over? You know, I know the system is different, but what you've just said is sadly similar to what we witnessed in the last couple of years in the States from both parties in committee. And especially so now, it's like so driven by politics and partisanship.

Bruce? Yeah, I just wanted to add maybe a couple of things. I think that the Conservatives asked for this hearing perhaps on the assumption that between when it was decided that they would have it and when they got there, their researchers would show up, would turn up, would help them reveal some really important kind of fact base that nobody else had seen before, that would be shocking to people, that would be an insinuation of some sort of corruption involving the prime minister and his friendship. And the fact that they didn't have any of that is partly a function of the fact that when they asked for

the hearings, they didn't really think there was anything there. They were just, you know, doing it because what else can you do at some point between saying we want, you know, a few rounds with a high price consulting leader and maybe some others. But the level of preparation was not great. But I think partly that's true because the fact base isn't great. Anybody who thinks that these contracts are given out on the basis of not much process and a lot of favoritism isn't paying attention to the process these days. And I definitely agree with Chantal's point about the NDP wanted to reinforce their relationship with the public sector unions. Everybody has an agenda, right? They all go into these different things with a number of agendas.

One, trying to assume, I assume, seek the truth, and the other to back up their own agenda in terms of what works for them in terms of their party and their future. Okay, we're going to leave it at that for this week. Chantelle and Bruce, as always, thank you so much. Look forward to next week and the continuing excitement surrounding our… But no Christmas card this year again. I know.

I was going to bring that up, but I felt… Yeah, right. It's been a long time for some of us. But I still get cards, and it's always pleasant to read them, but I just don't send it, which is bad. Okay, Bruce, thank you. Chantel, thank you. Have a great weekend.

And out there, thank you for listening. Thank you for watching. We'll talk to you all again on Monday. Thank you.