The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Good Talk — Everything Points to Monday.

Episode Date: September 13, 2024

Monday is a huge day for all political parties in Canada. Parliament returns but two key byelections, one in Manitoba and one in Quebec, could impact everything.

Are you ready for a good talk? And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here with Chantelle Iber and Bruce Anderson. I was laughing because I don't know what's happened with the buttons on this little machine that plays the music. But whenever I push the theme on this computer, it comes off sounding like somebody is sitting on a tuber or something. It doesn't sound right. It gets better as it goes along. Anyway, that's just my little thing. Here's my situation today, or our situation. I mean,

I think there's a lot of things to talk about. But it seems to me every time I start thinking about them or reading about them, everything suddenly kind of points to Monday. Because Monday's a big day, Parliament reopens, and there are two key by-elections, one in Manitoba, one in Quebec, which could change the fortunes of a number of people, but also could change the dynamic on some of these issues that the country and the politics of the country are facing right now. So it's almost like we've got to start by talking about Monday before we can get into some of this other stuff.

First of all, am I right, Chantal? Is Monday sort of key to a lot of the discussions that we want to have here today? Yes, and it's also key to a lot of the stuff that we've seen over the past two weeks, including the NDP so-called tearing up the agreement with the liberals, or Mr. Poirier giving what look to people from the outside,

like the same news conference he'd given a week before, with the liberals or Mr. Poiliev giving what look to people from the outside, like the same news conference he'd given a week before, daring the NDP and the Bloc to join him in defeating the government at the first opportunity. All of those were kind of props designed to have some impact on those by-elections. And let me make a prediction. Yes, the House will come back on Monday and the question period will likely take place in the usual, rather toxic way that it does these days. But really, everybody's mind is going to be on the outcome of the two by-elections,

the one in Winnipeg, Almud Transcona, and the one in Montreal, La Salle et Mar-Verdun, and the stakes are not only high, there are also lessons and messages for, I would say, all parties in whatever happens in those by-elections because some proposals were tested in one or the other, and we'll see what the outcome is in real time, not in a poll for future use. It's funny, you know, because over the years,

the three of us at different times have often said, you know, by-elections, they're fun to watch, but they don't really mean anything in the long run. Nothing's really going to change as a result. This seems different, because the stakes are so high that things could change, not necessarily will change, but they could change as a result of what happens. Bruce, your thoughts on this? Yeah, they could change, and I agree with Chantal.

I think Monday is a really important inflection point. When I think about the combination of the St. Paul's by-election earlier this year and the one that's coming up on Monday, the Liberal caucus meeting that was held this week, the way that the NDP seemed to be kind of approaching their politics in terms of their relationship with the Liberals and so on, it feels to me like we're in that in the last part of a regular season, just before the playoffs, where teams are really kind of taking the measure of how well prepared they are, whether they're doing all of the things that they need to do to succeed. And, you know, I don't always like to lean on sports metaphors here, but to some degree, politics at the end of the day isn, it's not engineering, it's not medicine, it's kind of human chemistry.

It's about whether people who are working together on a specific idea or an issue or support for a policy or support for a leader, a kind of a party that they've been associated with for a good portion of their life, whether they kind of in the locker room feel confident, whether they believe that they can succeed, whether they have confidence in one another. And those questions are really profound in the Liberal Party right now. I think they're somewhat there in the NDP as well. I don't think they're there really in the conservative movement right now. So I think Monday will be a huge day in the future of Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party for sure. And it might turn out to be something pretty important for the NDP as well.

But we'll have to wait and see. Okay. Well, I just want to scratch out that for a minute because the Liberals obviously hold the Quebec seat, the Montreal seat. And the NDP holds the Manitoba seat in Transcona, just the edge of Winnipeg. For things to change as a result of what happens Monday night in Parliament, do both those seats have to fall to new parties? Does the NDP have to lose?

Do the Liberals have to lose? I mean, if they both hold onto those seats, I'm assuming nothing really changes. I don't know what Chantal thinks, but for me, the Montreal seat is the one that has the most potential impact on the political dynamic in the country. I don't want to minimize the stakes in Manitoba, but I think it's pretty clear that among the liberal caucus, there is a significant amount of anxiety about these by-elections and what they portend and whether or not the leadership of the party is doing everything possible and necessary to put themselves in a competitive position. And so this will be one more important milestone in the conversation that the liberals are having about their leadership, I think. I think they both matter for different reasons. And what's interesting about those two seats is that they were both lost in 2011. They were lost in the case of the Montreal seat to the NDP at the time of the Orange Wave and onward Transcona to the Conservatives.

This was the year not only of the Orange party that can hold back Pierre Poiliev, you need to be able to show that you can keep a seat that is considered solid. That's Anwud Transkona. going to be an interesting place to gauge how much real success Pierre Poiliev has been having in making appeals to blue-collar workers and unionized workers. I'll have you note that over the course of this by-election campaign, and I don't think it's an accident, Mr. Poiliev went to mute on the railroad labor dispute, completely mute, including his party, not a peep. And this week he was asked about the Air Canada negotiations and the possibility of a strike next week. And he basically said he didn't believe that at this point there should be any government intervention, despite what business groups and Air Canada is asking the federal government. So whether that does translate as many suspect and gains on the NDP,

this is no longer about eating Justin Trudeau's lunch. It's about going after Jagmeet Singh. We will be able to judge better in Elmwood Transcona. And by the way, regardless of what happens in La Salle-et-Mars, and it will have an impact on Justin Trudeau or the perception of his leadership, the next election is more likely to be won if the Conservatives win it in Elmwood, Transcona and places like that, than it is ever going to be won or lost or decided in ridings in downtown Montreal. La Salle des Morts, Verdun. I think the Bloc went into that campaign, and I think most observers would have agreed with the Bloc, with very low expectations of anything happening there. But they would run a campaign, a pro forma candidate,

but they didn't have really a dog in this battle. Here we are at the end of the campaign and Mr. Blanchet went to the writing this week and said, and that's an expression people use in politics in Quebec, when the wind is suddenly in their back, and it amounts to saying, it smells good. It smells really good. And there was Mr. Blanchet, someone who never brags about, you know, I'm going to beat this and that, going to this writing that this party has not really held over in recent history. Believing, and I know that others should accept,

but the former Bloc leader has been very active in the riding. Paul Saint-Pierre Plamondon, who is very popular, the PQ leader also was in the riding. And I think the Bloc believes that it has a shot. and that belief was certainly reinforced by the two polls this week that showed the Bloc now in a decisive lead in Quebec, 34%, mostly at liberal expense, by the way, meaning that Quebec has now joined the club of those who believe that Trudeau should go, but has not joined the Pierre Poiliev fan club. So for the NDP to not win, they put a lot of work in there,

would also go to Mr. Singh's proposition that he's so strong that he can beat Pierre Poiliev and the Liberals can. And I don't believe that the Liberals can lose two downtown seats in Toronto and Montreal. And we should just the next day say, moving right along here, unless you're moving right along by whistling past the cemetery of the Liberal Party. All right, let me cut to the quick on this. Is there anything that could happen on Monday night in those by-elections that would lead to an election before the planned one of, you know, later next year. I don't believe that for a second. It's not suddenly going to lead to the fall of the government. No, not in the immediate.

For one, whatever happens to the NDP on Monday, they are not going to be working to campaign while BC and Saskatchewan are going to the polls and their campaign workers are hard at work on the ground. And the Bloc Québécois is not in a hurry. There is no, the province that where people least, based on poll, least or least in a rush to have an election is Quebec. There's a sizable number that says, let's go to the polls. But if you really look at the numbers, there is not here a big appetite for an election anytime soon.

Plus, I don't see the Bloc ever voting for a conservative motion that basically talks about carbon taxes and a battle against carbon pricing. They were willing to support the Liberals when the NDP and the Conservatives both wanted the exception for home-eating oil extended to natural gas, and the Bloc supported the Liberals. And that is at no cost in Quebec because the Quebec carbon pricing scheme is divorced from the federalals. And that is at no cost in Quebec, because the Quebec carbon pricing scheme is divorced from the federal scheme. Bruce, I think that's right. I think the Liberals don't want an election, obviously, and I think the NDP don't want one. And so I think that the chances of one are almost zero. I also feel like, well, those of us who follow politics really closely like to

imagine that the public is really attentive to there's a confidence vote proposed and where were parties on that? I don't think that's the mood of the electorate right now. I don't think people are paying that much attention because I don't think they want an election now. And I don't think they expect that they need to pay attention because one might happen rather suddenly. I also think that what the NDP are trying to do, at least if I try to give a charitable interpretation, at least from a strategic standpoint of Jagmeet Singh's latest comments on things like carbon pricing, it feels as though he and the NDP are very aware of the votes that they've been losing to the conservatives. This is a phenomenon that we see south of the border as well. The liberals kind of can see it in their

data, I'm sure, too, which is that there are a lot of people who are looking at the conservative party now, and they're not looking at it as a kind of a right-wing ideological party. They're looking at it as a party that really talks about the price of things and making life easier for people. And that used to be a zone thematically that was, if not owned by the NDP, significantly occupied by the NDP. And so the NDP is looking at carbon pricing right now and saying, do we really want to be on the other side of the axe, the tax campaign, if that's what this looks like it's going to turn out to be? Do we want to be saying it's a better policy than you think? And also, it's really important for fighting the climate crisis if the evidence in their data is that people just aren't

responding that well to that argument. Now, I'm not making the case that Jagmeet Singh should be doing this. I think that this is still a good policy. There may be better alternatives that are worth looking at. He said that he's going to come up with one. We'll have to see. But my point really is that I think he's undertaking some rewiring of the relationship between the NDP and his leadership and the potential NDP voter pool, that's going to take some time to set and he won't want an election while that is unfinished business. I'm not sure it's going to work either. But no, I think the only real impact is going to be what is the result for the liberals? And how does it relate to Justin Trudeau's insistence that he

is the right leader to stay on, that he wants to stay on, and whether his caucus will believe that that's the right answer for them as well. And I think the, I guess, anything other than a solid win for the liberals, I think is going to add to the questions that liberals have about leadership. Chantal, you wanted in there? Yes. I watched when some what bemused Jagmeet Singh talk about his carbon pricing model that he would come up with an alternative that put less of a burden on hardworking Canadians. I'm kind of quoting here. And I thought, so what scheme do you come up with that involves carbon pricing, that offers people a better deal

than one that gives them rebates that equal or surpass in many cases, the tax that they are paying on carbon? And if the answer is, we're just gonna shift the burden entirely to business, in what universe do you really believe that none of this will be passed on to consumers in one way or another? It's even easier to pass it on to consumer because it's virtually invisible. And no, I don't believe that there will be a price police federally put in place by an NDP government.

But it brought back to me, I looked at this statement and I thought, obviously, I agree with Bruce. This is a play to kind of play on the same field on this with the conservatives. I'll just note in passing that the NDP got worse scores from people who know anything about climate policy in general than the Liberals in the past two election campaigns. So it's not as if this is a party that has distinguished itself on climate policy. The opposite would be true. And the same has been true in the House of Commons. But it brought back this memory of last year. Remember last year when the Liberals decided they would exempt home eating

and the obvious hope that it would shore up their fortunes in Atlantic Canada where more people use oil for heating than other regions of the country? And what happened then? Well, one, people in Atlantic Canada seem to have told themselves, gee, we were right, so why go for this temporary exemption when we have a guy who's promising to get rid of the entire thing? Everybody else that's been using natural gas said, well, me too. Why am I not getting this exception? And I looked at Mr. Singer and I thought, well, maybe what you're literally telling people is that Pierre Poiliev was right all along, so why would you go to the NDP if Pierre Poiliev is very clear that he's going to get you rid of that tax?

End of story, no new program put forward. And at the same time, if you're thinking that you are appealing to liberals, telling them, leave your party because I'm the strong alternative, there happens to be a critical mass of voters in this country, many of them have voted liberal, who believe that carbon pricing and addressing climate is a priority. And the NDP basically this week took itself out of that mix. Last question about Monday night, and it's a quick one. Obviously, if Jagmeet Singh holds on to Transcona and by some miracle wins in Montreal, cleans up on the night, wins both seats,

he's riding high and looking good. What if the absolute reverse is true? He loses Transcona and he finishes third in Montreal. You know, we talk every week about Justin Trudeau's leadership, but is Jagmeet Singh's leadership in serious question if that kind of result happened on Monday night, Bruce? I think it's under some pressure, regardless of the outcomes of these elections. So I think he could secure victories in both of those ridings,

and it wouldn't make people go, hallelujah, he's really figured this out, and he's got exactly the right path forward. I think this choice that he's made on carbon, to the point that Chantal just made, is a big deal in the environmental movement. It's a big deal among a lot of long-time NDP supporters. They are scratching their heads. That's maybe the most charitable interpretation I could make of it. There are going to be a lot of NDP supporters inside their base, inside their organization, who are struggling with that choice that he made. In part, I think they're not necessarily of the view that there might not be another alternative, but he didn't offer one. Remembering the Obamacare debate in the United States, repeal and replace was the only viable way for some politicians to

argue that they wanted to change Obamacare. They had to have an alternative. We saw that in the debate in the U.S. just this week, what happened to Donald Trump when he said, I don't have a health care plan. He didn't say that part. He said, I have concepts of a health care plan. Well, that's what Jagmeet Singh looked like on this issue yesterday. He looked like a guy who has known that the climate crisis is upon us for decades now and basically said, yeah, I think I'm going to walk away from this thing that has been at the center of the fight. And it's not even only the policy that matters. It's whether you believe that the climate crisis is important enough that you need to try some things that may take some time to work, that may cause some discomfort, that may be politically controversial.

And he's sort of signaled, I don't really, I'm not up for that fight right now. And that's, it remains to be seen, regardless of what happens on Monday, whether or not his party is going to stand with him comfortably on that. It could be that Mr. Singh is feeling the heat in B.C. as a result of what's been happening on the provincial scene, because that happened a few hours before the premier of B.C., NDP incumbent, David Eby, said, if the federal framework that sets floor price for carbon disappears, at this point, the federal government sets a price. If you do not want to collect a carbon tax or price carbon at that level, the federal government is going to come in and do it for you and send refunds.

The federal government has not been doing it in BC. BC was the first province to put a price on carbon. And that price on carbon was put in place by the liberals in BC. The BC liberals, BC United now, not in a relationship with the Trudeau liberals. And so there has been a consensus in BC about carbon pricing that has gone from liberal government in Victoria to NDP government, et cetera. That consensus is now broken. The BC Conservative Party is campaigning on a proposal to scrap the BC carbon tax and its BC carbon tax scheme. And its leader is not totally convinced that the humans contribute a lot to climate change. Mr. Singh's caucus, the largest part of his small caucus comes from BC, including himself, which struck me this week. And it could be just a one-off for provincial politics happening and, you know, leading into

a federal poll. But for the first time in a long time, a poll had the NDP in third place federally in BC, behind the liberals,, of course, behind the conservatives. And I thought, boy, this is different. I want to see more polls because for about two years, and I think Bruce can confirm that, when you looked at the BC column, it was always very problematic for the liberals. Even when they weren't 20 points behind, the NDP was above the liberals in BC. And now suddenly they would be 10 points behind the liberals, and I don't know how many points behind the conservatives. If Singh loses BC, there is not much left of that caucus.

Well, you've given us lots to think about on this section. We're going to take a quick break and come back. I want to bring up something that Chantal mentioned earlier on a different topic. Be right back after this. And welcome back. You're listening to The Bridge, the Friday episodes. Good talk, of course, with Chantelle Hebert and Bruce Anderson.

I'm Peter Mansbridge. You're listening on SiriusXM, channel 167 Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform, or you're watching us on our YouTube channel. Whatever platform you choose, we're glad to have you with us. Chantelle mentioned in the last block the possibility of the Air Canada strike next week. I want to talk about that for a minute because that can have a huge impact. Obviously, you've shut down a major chunk of the transportation within the country,

but also outside the country. Air Canada is a worldwide network. The issue in this strike, there are a number of things on the table, but for the most part, it's pilots' salaries. Okay? And you'll be a, some of you may be surprised by this, but Air Canada has offered, or at least the word is, that Air Canada offered the pilots a 30% increase.

Now, that sounds like humongous, and a lot of people would go, oh my God, 30%, I'm in, where do I sign? The pilots want a lot more than that, and the reason is it's been a long time since they had a salary increase, and they're way out of whack with their American counterparts, the big American airlines, who are in some cases making 90%, 95% more than Air Canada pilots. So there's a big gap there. But when you're saying no to 30%,

that would indicate that, excuse me, you're really going for the home run on trying to get a settlement. So this will force the government's hand. We know, as Chantel mentioned, they got the rail workers back to work by ordering them back to work. Will they do the same with Air Canada pilots? And what's the risk if they do? Bruce, you start us on this one. I don't know if they'll do the same.

I think that the kind of pressures that lead governments to order freight rail workers back to work are different than the pressures that will be experienced if the Air Canada pilots go out on strike. There are so many economic interests that are profoundly impacted at a huge scale if freight rail shuts down, farmers among them. Obviously, there would be impacts on a lot of consumers and businesses for sure as well with an Air Canada strike. But there are some alternatives. In the case of the rail situation, there really aren't alternatives to get those products to market. There are competing airlines in the marketplace that can't offer the same scale of availability as would be lost with Air Canada, but it's not like

there would be nothing available to people. And it may well be that in the case of business travel, that has changed so much in the post-pandemic period that the pressure from the business community about the economic impacts will be less than it would have been in the case of a strike some years ago. I do think, though, that the general feeling on the part of people in politics right now is it's better if you let collective bargaining work these things out rather than intervene, in part because each of the three main parties doesn't want to be a foul of the union movement. All of them are cognizant of the three main parties doesn't want to be a foul of the union movement. All of them are cognizant of the fact that unionized workers don't want governments to intervene in ways that are against their interests and will take a dim view of them. Now, whether or not that's as equally true for Air Canada pilots as it is for building trades unions, for example, I think remains to be seen. Generally, I would have thought not, although I do think the pilots have done a pretty interesting job of laying out.

I didn't read so much the 30 percent, and I'm not sure how many years that's over, Peter, but I did read the story that said some pilots are getting paid $55,000 a year. And I think that as a frequent flyer over many years, when I heard that number, I kind of thought it was a little bit lower than I expected. And I think most people want to make sure that their pilots are well-trained, well-compensated, well-treated because of the importance in terms of the safety side of things. So I think there's a lot to play for in the way in which this comes out publicly, but I don't think it's evident that government is standing by ready to bring down the hammer and shut down the bargaining process. John, tell.

Well, interestingly enough, usually when the business community and employers mobilize to try to avert a strike, they can count on the voice in the House of Commons to echo their demands. That would be the Conservative Party. And that's not been happening at all. is very similar to that of Justin Trudeau, a rare occasion where he says, I don't think we should get in the way of bargaining to a resolution to this. The NDP is making a lot of noise about never voting for back-to-work legislation.

Okay, but they've never voted for any back-to-work legislation. So what's the news here? I don't think the Bloc is in the business of voting for back-to-work legislation on this anytime soon either. But what I found fascinating and totally predictable was that the federal government took a shortcut in the rail workers strike lockout by ordering the Canadian Labor Relations Board to order the end of the strike. And the board said, we don't know if this is constitutional or not, but we know that we're not the ones who can say this, and we cannot refuse an order from the federal government

along those lines. So complied, and the courts will have their say at some point. But no sooner had that shortcut been identified and used that the next big employer at the negotiating table, Air Canada, demanded that it be used in their case and started demanding it a couple of days before while they were still negotiating. And that kind of tells me that the liberals are on shaky ground. One, of course, the courts one day will say whether you can continue to use this shortcut, but they have opened a path that employers didn't think that existed. And you've got former Conservative Labour Minister Lisa Raitt saying, if someone

had told me I could do this in my days, I would have been happy enough. Now, to Bruce's point about business travel in the post-pandemic era, I do have a gig in BC that could be subject to the Air Canada strike. And I've known known that and the people that I'm speaking to have known that for a couple of weeks. But what was one of their first fallback solutions? If worse comes to worse, we'll do this virtually. So, it's not as if I'm going to hitchhike to Kelowna. And I noted that Air Canada, when it first offered to move, you know, you could change your reservations, said if you had reservations between the 18th next Wednesday and the 23rd, and I thought, why only for those days?

Do they really believe it's all going to be over after five days, that someone will force the end of whatever happens within that time frame? I don't know. But at this point, the government does not have support in the House of Commons for back to work legislation. That could well change. Mr. Poirier left the door open to that. But I, and the government does not seem inclined, as opposed to what they tried to do with WestJet earlier in the summer, does not seem inclined to intervene before possibly a strike is on. You know, for a person who rode her bike all over Iceland and where was it?

Yeah, I'm going to bike to Kelowna. Goodbye, guys. I'll talk to you in October. I thought that was all just a warm-up for the Canadian bike ride. Right. Just on Polyev's current position on this, should we assume that that's also part of his reaching out to labor, which he's been doing for the last year, year and a half?

Because this could destroy some of that movement if he was suddenly a hawk on back to work legislation. Yes, no. I don't know. I don't know about that. I don't know if this union works the same way from the standpoint of that dynamic that he's worried about. It could be a little bit that, but it's probably more like he's got a certain discipline about staying out of fights that he doesn't need to be in that don't necessarily reflect his priorities. And, you know, I think there's also the dynamic around airline pricing, which is part of the cost of living pain point that a lot of people experience.

Not everybody does, but those who are fortunate enough financially to be traveling by air for vacations, there's a lot of sentiment about those prices. So when people who are worried about the price of air travel hear about significant potential increases in compensation for pilots, that can cut a different way for them. I think there are lots of reasons why it will feel like it's strategically more useful for Pierre-Paul Lievre to stay out of this fight. And I think that's what he's doing. He also, he did say in passing that he believed that Canadian airline pilots should not be paid, compensated less than their American counterparts. So it's more than a toe in this conversation that he's put at least one foot in it. Well, as I said, that gap is huge. So that's a lot of money we're talking about.

That's a big increase. Okay, change of topic. You know, for at least the last, I guess, eight to 10 years, the discussion has been willy-wonty, and we're not talking about Justin Trudeau here. It's been about Mark Carney. Well, in the last couple of days, Carney has sort of joined, well, not only the liberal orbit,

but in a way the Trudeau orbit by taking this appointment, if you want to call it that, or this new role of kind of being a sort of economic planning czar, if you wish. He talked to the Liberal caucus in Nanaimo this week. He is going to be coming up, drafting some plans, some ideas for the party. What do we make of this?

Is this like one step in the door, or is this staying on the outside, but having an influence and showing your concern for public policy, et cetera, et cetera? What do we make of this? Who wants to start here? Bruce. I can't tell.

Okay. He never wants to start when it's about Carney interesting I don't think it's the sidelines when you are actually working for the Liberal Party of Canada because that is what the assignment is

it's not I'm going to be giving advice to the Prime Minister once in a while we're going to chat on the phone or I'm going to join the PM, or I'm going to join the PMO, or I'm going to become the deputy minister to Christian Freeland. He is working for the Liberal Party. And in that role, I suspect that his main mission is to craft out a platform for the next election, a platform that, because politics being the way it is, would basically be presented to Canadians in the next federal budget. The expectation, I think, widely shared expectation, is that short of an accident,

it's more than likely that the next budget will trigger an election. And the Liberals, therefore, would be interested in putting their economic platform in that budget. Why? Because it always has more gravitas when it comes across as government policy than at the news conference with the Prime Minister and three candidates around him in some city in Canada during a campaign. I'm guessing the next question that, and many liberals were asking it this week, not just in private, is, well, now that you've done this, is this the lead up to announcing that you will be running for the party in the riding in that future campaign? And that question will be asked again and again. But bottom line, otherwise, I thought it was a,

I think it's a good thing for the liberals and a good thing for Mr. Carney that he took on this role. I think it's a good thing for Trudeau. Doesn't need to worry about Mark Carney pushing him out. This prime minister at best has one campaign left in him. If he wins, at some point, he'll retire. If he loses, he's going to be gone. So Mark Carney is not going to be sitting next to him with a knife waiting for his back to be exposed. It's too late for that. But it's interesting that he can still recruit people of that caliber to talk about economics and maybe change the framing or the channel on the government's economic discourse. But I think Mr. Carney did himself some good by accepting,

because the liberals are in trouble. And when they pick their new leader, if he wants to lead them, it's liberals who will be voting. And they are more likely to remember someone who didn't stay completely on the sidelines when they were way down in the polls, then someone who sat and crossed his arms and said, well, you know, look at them go. I also thought that scrum that he gave was interesting. And so in a life very long ago, I gave French conversation courses to adults, people who could speak some French but wanted to become totally fluent. And my assessment as that person of Mr. Carney's French is if he spent the next two weeks spending a couple of hours a day speaking only French to someone, his French would

be totally at the level that he needs for a federal politics and a federal leadership role. That's interesting. Bruce, what's your take here? Yeah, everything she said. Okay, a couple of thoughts from my standpoint. Obviously, you know, somebody with Mr. Carney's skills and experience, he has three choices. He can just stay, you know, some distance from politics, just kind of focus on his life and his business career and the other things that he's doing that are in support of the public policies that he cares about. Second choice is he can speak out publicly, but not get involved in politics more than that. And, you know, writing a book and giving speeches and that kind of thing is one

form of that. And then the third thing is volunteering to put his shoulder to the wheel with a political movement that seeks to be elected. And that's the, you know, that in some ways is the most difficult choice for people to make because it comes with a lot of, it comes with a lot more obvious downsides in terms of just the amount of time, the kind of the pushback that you hear constantly, the knowledge that the people who are in politics on the other side of the fence are going to say all kinds of nasty things about you. So it's a hard choice to make. And I think that it's always a good thing when people who have something to bring to the conversation decide to do it. And so good for Mark Carney to decide that he was willing to attach his name to the Liberal Party, to volunteer, to provide some ideas that can help fuel the Liberal Party's thinking going into the next election. And I think that he, you know, he could have had the choice, I suppose, to decide to do it later, but he decided to do it now. And obviously, this is not the most auspicious time

for anybody to say, why don't I go and see if I can attach my name to a party that's really struggling in the polls. And so good for him and good for the party, the Liberal Party, and good for, I think, the country for people like Mark Carney to join whichever party they decide to join. And the only other thing I would say is that for the longest time now, it seemed as though the only ballot question was going to be change. And you almost didn't have to have much to offer, except that you were going to be different from the current version of the Liberal Party. And to the extent that the announcement this week and what Mr. Carney said and his scrum and what's been said about his role signals that the Liberal Party is looking for new ideas.

There's at least a chance then that the ballot question won't just be change. It'll be better or what's better than what we're doing right now. I think that's the challenge the Liberal Party has to take on itself constantly to sort of say, we can't let ourselves be in an election next year that is about change or no change. We have to be in an election where somebody is saying change, and we're saying change for the better, and describing what that better version of change is. So I think it was an important week in terms of how that manifested itself and remains to be seen where it goes from here. But I agree with Chantal completely that Mark Carney is not getting involved in this to be part of some effort

to accelerate a change in leadership. I think he's said he's there to help. We will watch that one too. See how that unfolds over the next months. At least the next month. Okay, we're going to take our final break and when we come back we've got to talk about it at some point. U.S. politics. That debate. The whole bit. We'll be back

right after this. And welcome back. Final segment of Good Talk for this week. Chantel and Bruce are here. So the Americans have had two political debates this year, both consequential, certainly the first one, because it basically lifted Joe Biden out of the race, and the second one just a couple of days ago where, you know, aside from Sean Hannity, just about everybody has said Trump was a disaster, worst debate ever, and Harris was, she performed.

But it was quite a spectacle. It's unsure what overall difference it'll make. The early polls after the debate in terms of trying to assess where things stand don't show a lot of change, which just underlines how close this race is. But in terms of a debate, in terms of something that you sat and watched, or at least I think a lot of people sat and watched, 67 or 68 million

in the U.S., which is biggest audience of the year on television outside of the Super Bowl. What did you two make of it? Chantal, why don't you start us this time? I thought you were going to ask me about Taylor Swift. Well, that too. Yes, that too, because up to a point, the debate was great to watch. It was great for political junkies and for people who fear Donald Trump

because they didn't look like someone that should be feared as a political force, and yet he still is. Those post-debate polls kind of suggest what we already know in Canada. Debates make a difference, but the debate impact can fade. Remember when John Turner beat Brian Mulroney in the free trade debate, and I think they came out of there with the liberals 10 points ahead with 10 days to go, and Brian Mulroney secured the majority government. So you cannot bank on debate performance to win an election. But you can possibly, in the case of Kamala Harris, you could have banked on it to lose an election because she needed that win, absolutely needed that win to get rid of all kinds of

deserved and undeserved predictions about who she was, her performance, how strong she really was. But I also thought that the Taylor Swift endorsement that came right after the debate, and which I believe would have come win or lose, but in this case, amplified momentum, and sent thousands of people to register to vote. I think that may be more important than the people who watched the debate and said, well, I was undecided, but now I'm going to give her more of a hearing before I finally make up my mind. Yeah, you know, listen, that sending people to register to vote, a normal week in the U.S. is 30,000 to 35,000 people registering.

Since Taylor Swift did that announcement on Tuesday night up to last night, half a million. Half a million. In an election that can swing on a couple of thousand votes here or there, especially in the swing states, half a million voters who hadn't been planning to vote. And they're Taylor Swift fans. And she's just endorsed Kamala Harris.

That that's a big deal. So you're right there, Bruce. Yeah. I look, I find that the conversation always about what are the polls show is a little bit, you know, I love conversations about what are the polls show, but there's um you know i love conversations about what the polls show but there's this frustration part for me that um you know to your point peter when we're talking about an election that might turn on 70 000 votes within seven states polling is only going to have a slight chance of ever showing us uh where what what's happening there um That's because the size of the samples aren't really capable of measuring the effect on that small number of voters in those very few places that are the swing voters who will

make the difference. So we'll start to see whether or not there is any evidence in the swing state polls when the first round of what we would call quality polls comes out starting probably this weekend and people will want to watch them. I'll consume them and I'll kind of come to my own judgment about whether or not whatever movement they show is a reliable enough within the margin of error and is indicating something meaningful. For example, if swing state polls are able to break out suburban women and compare a pre-debate to a post-debate, then I'll be looking at those numbers to see whether or not that's meaningful. Because I do think some important things happened in the debate,

and I think one of them was the conversation about abortion. And I'm interpreting this partly because I was listening to some U.S. podcasts yesterday. There were dial groups being done by a super PAC. And dial groups are when you've got a group of people watching the debate and they're telling a computer how they're reacting to the debate as it's happening in real time. And the statement that I heard was that six of the seven most impactful statements were made by her in the course of that full debate were made by her and were about abortion. And there were some very trenchant moments there. And I think Trump looks confused and vulnerable on the abortion question relative to where Kamala Harris is. The last thing I'd say is that the impact of the debate, you know, if there were that many people watching it on TV, that's one thing. But everything that happened since then, the traffics on TikTok,

on Twitter or X, the traffics on Instagram is having an even bigger impact. It's manifesting a sense of how this race is going. And a lot of that, to me, I probably see more of this than the other. A lot of it is saying, she raised $50 million. Taylor Swift came out and endorsed her, and that resulted in 400,000 new voter registrants. She wants another debate. He doesn't. I heard him say that you only want another debate if you lost, but that actually wasn't what he did after Biden, and that's not what's going on here. She wants another debate because she had a great night. He doesn't want to have another debate because he had a terrible night. So the momentum in the conversation and the social memes and so on is pretty much heavily with her, as I see it. And that's going to be a knock-on effect that if it does manifest in a voter shift, even to the extent that we can see it,

will only be seen over time. All right. You know, I don't believe anything the guy says ever anymore. So when he says he doesn't want and won't have a third debate, let's see. You know, there's a long time to go yet. We'll see what happens on that front. Bruce mentioned, you know, his his analysis that he likes to do, especially over the weekend when he sees lots of new polling data come in. Bruce sent me a link to a piece in the New York Times the other day, which I'll include in tomorrow's edition of The Buzz. It's really interesting because it kind of breaks down

not only what the current polls show, and I think there's an update button there that you can continually be updating that link. But it goes through more than that. It goes through what to watch out for, how to be careful in reading polls and all that. It's a good piece, important piece, and one for those of you who have feelings about polls,

both good and bad, it's a good thing to read. So that'll be in the buzz tomorrow. And if you don't already subscribe, you can get that at nationalnewswatch.com. It doesn't cost anything. You just need to put in your email so it'll be delivered to your inbox by 7 a.m. each Saturday morning. So enjoy that. Next week coming up, Janice Stein will be by on Monday with,

I think we'll do a sort of what are we missing section on the different things that are happening on the international front that we haven't been talking about because of the dominance of the Middle East story and the dominance of the Ukraine story. Tuesday, Tim Cook, a military historian, incredible author with his latest book, which comes out on Tuesday.

It's about the relationship between Canada and the United States on the military front. I think you'll find that fascinating too. Thanks to Chantel. Thanks to Bruce. Good conversation. We'll see you both in a week's time. Thank you guys. Nice to see you again. Yep.

Bye.