The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Good Talk - From the Aga Khan to the Convoy to Climate.

Episode Date: April 29, 2022

Bruce is away this week and Rob Russo joins in with Chantal on what was a very interesting week.  What did those three topics have in common and why were all three important?

Are you ready for Good Talk? And hello there, it's Friday, that means Good Talk. Bruce away this week, Chantel though is here. She joins us from Montreal as usual and joining us from Ottawa on this day is Rob Russo, former Bureau Chief for, well, Canadian Press in Washington and in Ottawa, former Bureau Chief for the CBC in Ottawa. He's now kind of playing the semi-retired act. Well, he sorts out what may be next, but he's still plugged in and he's still watching things

in the nation's capital and beyond. So welcome to the program, Rob. And let's get started. I'm going to work kind of backwards in terms of things that happened this week because it was an interesting week and there were three topics that I find that I'd like to expand on a little bit. So the most recent one actually deals with an old story. The 2016 visit by Justin Trudeau to the Aga Khan's Caribbean island.

And it was a big deal at the time, a bit of a mini scandal, if you wish, because it cost a lot of money, all of which the tab was picked up by the Aga Khan. The ethics commissioner looked at this and decided this was a breach of the ethics guidelines. And the prime minister was at least tapped on the wrist. The opposition made some hay out of it at the time. And then it kind of disappeared, although it's always lingered on as one of those kind of mini scandals that has impacted the prime minister's reputation. Well, this week, the story comes back. And basically, the story this week is that the RCMP at some point during this process had investigated what happened and thought there might be a case of fraud,

but they decided not to charge the prime minister with fraud. Now, it's not the first time the RCMP investigates someone, thinks they might have a case against them, and then decides not to pursue it because they don't have the evidence or they don't think they can get a conviction. That's one part of the story. But the part that intrigues me is the way the story came out this week. And you tell me, I mean, I'm not naive. I understand things work in ottawa in terms of the circulation of information but the story was actually discovered this rcmp angle apparently by the conservatives but they decided not to announce it or question it or make a big deal of it in the house of commons initially they instead flipped it to the Globe and Mail.

And the Globe and Mail did a story. They included the fact that the Conservatives had given it to them. And then the Conservatives, after it had been in the Globe, then they went on the prowl in question period. So my question really is about the process as opposed to the augur con it's about is this the way things work is this the way things should work in terms of how stories are developed where the opposition party doesn't do it themselves but sort of gives it to the media to do it at least the initial go-round on it what do you make of this chantelle uh that there is nothing new under the sun, that this strategy of trying to sell a mainstream media that has influence on a story before it's developed in question period has been used by just about every opposition party that I've covered over the decades. And why do they do this? Because when it is laundered through the process of legitimate news, which it is, by the way,

the impact is bound to be more important than if it just comes out in the lobby of the House of Commons and is carried with partisan intent, obviously, by one party or another. So, I don't find the process surprising. I think at the end of the day, the value of the story, whether it's presented by the official opposition on the floor in question period or whether it is in the Globe and Mail or the Toronto Star, the news value and the spin on it that the opposition parties would like to put on it will still be evaluated for what it's worth

and not necessarily because it's in the newspapers, so it's a big story, so you should worry about it. I was interested this week to see that, yes, a lot of people read it with interest. Yes, the Conservatives spent the week on it, but it didn't become the kind of story that everyone jumps on and wants to match. And one of the reasons for that is that when you look at the story,

you see that the RCMP expected these discussions to come to light one day. I believe that in every high-profile case, there will be a conversation where someone says, what if we do this? What will the outcome be? Some of those conversations in the past might have been worth stretching on a bit longer. I'm thinking about the RCMP investigation and the leak that they were investigating insider trading and the Minister of Finance, Ralph Godale, in the middle of an election campaign, possibly. That's a conversation that might have gone on for longer. Or I'm thinking about the abject failure of the RCMP

to make the charges, the many ones, that it put on Mike Duffy, Senator Mike Duffy, and the spending scandal that were all thrown out in court. So those conversations and those decisions are also quite common. But the fact that the RCMP had that decision reviewed by two independent bodies before it became final and it came out also suggests, as most of those who read the story, that this isn't the RCMP fishing for more evidence against the prime minister.

This is a closed file that was reviewed and considered rightly closed. And in fact, they said yesterday that the file was closed and they weren't pursuing it any further. But once again, I would, you know, and I get Rob now on his thoughts on it. My question is about the process and whether the media gets used in a situation like this. I agree with Chantel. It's not the first time it's happened. As I said earlier, I'm not naive. I understand the process. But I'm just wondering, is this a good thing for the system to have a process like this, Rob?

Well, I mean, all of us work for serious news organizations, and there's a process like this, Rob? Well, I mean, all of us work for serious news organizations, and there's a process. There is a process, kind of a checklist that any responsible journalism organization will look at when they're evaluating this kind of a thing. First of all, is it an anonymous? Is it a brown envelope kind of thing? If it is, then what is the motivation? I mean, what is the motivation of people purveying this kind of information? You have to determine that. News value is, you know, primord party or a political party saying, we have this information. We are prepared to give it to you under the following conditions. Sometimes they set conditions. And those conditions can be anything from, I'll give you an example.

A political party came to me and said, you cannot go to the opposition for reaction on this story. We want a clean shot at it. And under almost any circumstances, I just cannot see a serious news organization agreeing to any conditions. So there is all these checklists that you have to go through to determine motivation, to determine news value, to determine whether or not it's a smear, to decide whether it's in the interest of the public to actually see this, particularly if there are any conditions applied to the quid pro quo. And there's always a quid pro quo. In this instance, this was not anonymous. This was a Conservative Party saying, okay, go ahead and use us as the source of the information. It was based on a document. It wasn't based on anybody's necessarily interpretation of the document. It looks like the Globe free uh to interpret it the way they want sometimes uh you know we've both been involved peter in situations where people will say to us

where is it going to be in the lineup because we wanted number one in the lineup uh sometimes right and you can't you can't make that kind of a deal either right so in this instance you you could you could imagine the conservatives would say we want want it at the top of the page or the web page, which is where it ended up. But also in this instance, I do believe it met the threshold of national news. I would have displayed it prominently as well. I do believe that the RCMP, considering investigating the Prime Minister, met that threshold. I do believe that the Conservative Party being identified as the purveying source of the information was prominently displayed as well. So I don't know that I'd have very many qualms unless,

of course, there was any kind of quid pro quo. And we don't know that. But even if there was, I would have put the story pretty much where it is. I do think that there is an element of this story that merits further work by journalists and by the government, quite frankly. And that is the reason why the RCMP opted not to pursue the charge. And that is because there's a provision of the act that allows the prime minister some leeway in determining whether or not he can give himself a loophole, whether or not he thought he thought it was okay to accept this gift. And I think that that merits a review by by government lawyers and by ethics people in government who keep a check on government officials. So I do believe that it's worth some of the follow-up examination that the Globe is doing. On that point, I would note that

Justin Trudeau would have saved himself a lot of trouble in this discussion if he'd asked the ethics commissioner for advice on whether to take this trip or not, which he did not. And that process, which does not require legislation or the kind of charade that the prime minister give himself permission. And if not, will he hand himself into the RCMP, which is what we heard in question period this week. The best way to kill a good opposition story is to go overboard with it and make it so that any reasonable person from the outside would say this is Kafkaesque. Justin Trudeau has just admitted he did not give himself permission to eat the chocolate cake. And he stole the chocolate cake.

And he should go to the police and report himself as a thief, most people will look at this and say, this is a construct that even if you push it and push it and repeat it, does not really stand up to scrutiny. To go back to the... Well, we've seen on that point, Chantal, that the prime minister does have a problem when it comes to his vacation. Tofino reinforced that. Yes. And we do know that Justin Trudeau doesn't think that there are many rules that apply to him. We've seen that too. And all of those things, and it comes up time and again, the Tofino thing was not an ethics thing. It was a judgment call, as was in part the Aga Khan vacation. To go back to your larger issue of brown envelopes, I'll give you one example that I was involved in, and it goes back to the 1995 referendum, or a few months before it. I found a brown envelope in my office. I worked for La

Presse then. It was a memo from External Affairs that related a conversation between one of the European Union ambassadors and an official in the Canadian government, where the ambassador was revealing that Premier Jacques Pagu, it said in the memo, it answered, well, ha, ha, ha, they're not going to be able to back out because they're going to be in a lobster trap. Now, looking at the memo, I have to say your first temptation is to spare yourself a lot of journalism trouble by throwing it in your trash can and moving on. It's July. in your trash can and moving on it's july but we worked from there uh talked to the ambassadors who were attended that meeting got it confirmed by ambassadors on the record that jack peggy zoe had actually said that and it became a front page story now all this time there was never any doubt and it was also confirmed afterwards, that this brown envelope came from the unity organization of the federal government trying to score a hit, an early hit, on Jacques Paysot in the lead-up to the referendum, which we also found confirmed on the record and

put on the front page. But to ignore what is, I think, of public interest, I think it's important in the lead up to the referendum for Quebecers to know the terms of engagement here. If you vote yes, there is not a turnoff in the highway to go back to where you came from. And that overrides whatever motives the people who are giving you the information may have as long as you can actually verify it for yourself we did not go to print with just a memo which would which which would have been really sloppy journalism i worked on it for four or five days we held off you always fear some competition will break the story before you when you hold off, but then it's less costly than going with a story that will fall under your feet

and make you look like some agent of one side in a debate versus another. That is part of the process. Rob is right that when the information comes your first test is this of public interest and then how do I go about making it a solid story? Can I or maybe not? What do I know that this ambassador said that? Did he really hear that? Were there others? But the other condition is that you accept no conditions. Right. But, of course, if Jacques Paisot says you're going to be in a lobster trap, it's bound to end up over the fold on the front page. Yeah, exactly.

Okay, before we leave this topic, let me just throw one thing out that kind of returns to the the initial question that i was asking and trying to understand in this case why parties do this in the first place i accept chantelle's point that it's decades long history um and that they've all they've all done it um but i and she gave a you know a couple of examples of why but i still you know you know, I hearken back to, I hate to date myself again, but, you know, in the 1970s when Peter McKay's dad, Elmer McKay, when he stood up in the House of Commons, which wasn't often, but when he did, you knew he was going to drop a bomb of some kind. That he had a big story that he was going to break. He didn't break it through the newspapers. He broke it himself in the House of Commons, and it had a huge impact. But those days don't seem to be the case as this other method has been developed.

And I just want a quick answer from each of you as to why the parties would favor this over their own people, their own leader, getting the bounce from it. If, in fact, it's a legitimate story. I'll start with that. Look, Barack Obama had his own YouTube crew. So does Justin Trudeau. There are myriad platforms now. They can do this on Twitter. They can do it in so many places. What they want is a guaranteed bounce. They want a guaranteed bounce. And if

they're smart, they want to do it in a way, communications people, that they get a two-day or a three-day bounce out of this. And to stand up in the House of Commons is not a guarantee anymore that this is going to get prominence in a way that has measurable impact and there are many many ways to measure impact Chantal was saying nobody really followed it that's one measure of impact but if you can get that pride of place at the top of the the Globe and Mail and the print edition still means something to a lot of people. That's really good impact for a political party in this day and age where there are, you know, multi channels out there, multi platforms out there. And a politician getting up in the House of Commons, even a serious politician getting up and making this accusation is no longer a way for

a story like that to have impact. I think Rob used the right words to describe what the main goal is, and that is to get a clean hit, to for a second get above the noise. This week, we have two provinces, the two bigger provinces, on the verge of an election, a major Ontario budget, a war in Ukraine, still some pandemic stuff on the horizon. Go down the list. And Parliament Hill in question period, when you consider the magnitude of the issues that are or take up the political pages virtually or not in the media, question period is kind of a tinier bubble than in the noise, outside the bubble, you would probably want to proceed the way the conservatives did rather than stand up in question period, which, by the way, is less watched at a time when the government seems to be in the saddle for three years. When the political action is on the conservative leadership, there's no permanent leader there. So up to a point, covering question period sometimes

feels more like a death watch than a news watch. And I'm a mere stripling compared to you, of course, Peter, but I would hazard a guess that when Elmer McKay stood up, and if he did drop a bomb, all of the networks, all the news agencies, all the newspapers covered it. They would have all put it out there, and that's just no longer the case anymore. Okay. I'm going to leave it at that. We're going to move on. The trucker's convoy.

I thought that was over. I thought that was all in the past. It bounced back this week, too, with a new inquiry. We'll talk about that when we come back. All right, you're listening to Good Talk right here on SiriusXM, Channel 167 Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform. Welcome to you wherever you're listening from. Chantelle Hebert is in Montreal,

and Rob Russo is in Ottawa sitting in for Bruce Anderson this week. The trucker's convoy made a comeback this week in terms of, as a news story, there's all kinds of investigations have been going on ever since the convoy ended, which is a couple of months ago now. But this week, a new investigation was added to the list appointed by the prime minister to look into the use of the Emergencies Act. Because if you recall back in the day when the Emergencies Act dropped, there were these hints that something terrible was going on behind the scenes. We can't tell you what it is, said the government, but it's not good, it's bad. And that's one of the reasons why we've got to use this Emergencies Act, which they used for whatever it was eight nine ten days and the whole thing kind of wrapped up but we still don't know what

that was and i don't know whether this inquiry is going to find out what it was what the government used to persuade themselves that they should bring in the Emergencies Act, what was it, and how did they find out what it was? There are all kinds of speculation surrounding that question. And in the end, was it the right thing to do in response? So another investigation, another inquiry gets added to the ones that are already going on. So Rob, you start us off on this topic. What do we make of this? Well, look, again, there are manifold processes going on to try and determine why

the government brought in the act. Just a little context to start us off. First of all, this is the first time a government has used this act. This is the first time that any government has used extraordinary powers since the War Measures Act was brought in in 1970. It's different, substantially different than the War Measures Act because civil liberties cannot be suspended. All kinds of other provisions like this automatic inquiry, like renewals, regular renewals on short intervals for this act. But it was still an extraordinary thing for any government to do.

I can't count. Let's see. Mulroney, Campbell, Chrétien, Harper, and then Trudeau. Martin, I'm terribly sorry. Six governments have come along. And I was here too. It's sad. Six governments have come along and never used this act until the Trudeau government decided to use it. So we have to tell people this is extraordinary. On the surface, yes. I mean, it looks like it was an extraordinary time. I'm in Ottawa. Basically, the government had lost sovereignty over the parliamentary precinct,

an extraordinary thing. The most important trading corridor, North America, was shut down. Now, by the time they brought this in, it was over, but it was shut down for a period of time. And our biggest trading partner was losing confidence in our ability to keep the economy going. So across the country, there was this threat of commercial trade being shut down and people being thrown out of work as a result. There were people who were laid off on both sides of the border because of that. So that's the context. Extraordinary law, extraordinary time. But we need to know more.

You don't bring in a law like this that comes in every 50 years, as it turns out, without the public being told why. The government has hinted at the reasons. They've hinted at intelligence. They've hinted at knowledge that we don't have. We're not going to get answers, it seems, from the parliamentary committee that's looking into this. The two ministers involved, Justice Minister Lamedi and Public Safety Minister Mendocino, were in front of this committee. We just got very broad, vague answers pointing to, again, dark recesses of activity, but no real answers. There's a court challenge. I think that the government is going to be able to bat that away. Most of the lawyers

that you consult on these issues say that the government will be able to bat this away. But the inquiry headed by Mr. Justice Rouleau, former Mr. Justice Rouleau, he's our best hope for getting answers. But there are problems with some of the provisions of his mandate that might prevent us from getting answers. So I just wanted to set that context before we got there. And what are those provisions? Well, he can't have any impact, his investigation or his findings can't have any impact on current criminal proceedings. And we know that a lot of the leaders involved in this are not in front of the courts. He cannot in any way endanger intelligence or other information from foreign sources or other

things that would impact on the security of Canada and its ability to get this information in. So he's going to have to do quite a balancing act in order to answer questions that people clearly want answered without transgressing over some of the guardrails around this committee. Okay. Before we retire Justice Rouleau ahead of his time, As far as I can tell, he is still in office. So he's not doing this in retirement as opposed to some of our former Supreme Court justices. We get so used to seeing them in retirement having commissions that the assumption is that that's the retirement project of many distinguished justices. I think this inquiry is the most important, in part because Justice

Paul Rouleau has his reputation in the balance of his conclusions. Regardless of the terms of reference that the government has written, the act is clear. His job is to answer the question, was there no other way to deal with this than to use this extraordinary law, yes or no? If the answer is yes, he will not be able to just put in a redacted report to say, I'm not telling you why, but you're going to have to take my word for it. I would be very surprised will that involve context as in calling in people who were involved in organizing the blockades uh to find out more about their organization and their motivations of course it's it's relevant but at the end of the day they they there are many people who this week would be saying, well, you know, this ended, so we should be happy.

And that's kind of the government's response. We did this and it worked. There are some arguments on the other side that shows that maybe something else could have worked. The fact that the Windsor-Detroit link was restored without the use of the act does not help the government's cause. The fact that while, yes, I understand that if you live in Ottawa, the government lost sovereignty over the parliamentary precinct, but that's mitigated by the other fact, inconvenient, that parliament actually sat throughout, that MPs and ministers and others were free to go about their business. They were not sitting in trenches trying to talk on their

cell phones to have parliamentary debates. Life did go on in parliament. That's going to have to be countered by some rationale. Why does it matter? Well, it matters because the last thing you want is to normalize the use of the Emergency Measures Act to do away with inconvenience. As grave as inconvenience may be, you want the penalty for using the act just to, you know, this is a bother, so why not use this act? And for the many who are saying, well, you know, there were white supremacists in there, there were unslavery characters with views that we don't agree on, others who are saying they want to unseat the government and install some new government despite the fact that we've just

had an election. The reason why you don't want it normalized is that it has happened this time to people you don't like, but one day it could be happening to people you actually like. Indigenous protesters, environmentalists, people who were by large, on the other side of the blockades ideologically. And so I believe this commission is really important. I don't think that Canadians will exact a very high political price for the Trudeau government if it is found that there were other options. But I also don't think that the opposition parties will get a lot of mileage out of a conclusion like that. But I think the conclusion does matter because that is not the kind of government measure you want normalized. All right.

I would agree. And I would also say that this protest began because there are a lot of people who thought that the government was overreaching. And so if it was seen to be overreaching before this happened and it overreached in order to quell the protest, that's a really important thing for people to know. People need to know that a responsible government behaves responsible even in the most difficult times. And I think that it's really important at a time when conspiracy theory is, again, very, very popular, that that kind of notion that false beliefs that are often reinforced in echo chambers on social media platforms, that those things aren't allowed to thrive in this instance in particular, which is why transparency, sunlight, all of those things are really an important factor,

an important part of this process. And I hope that Mr. Justice Rouleau can get at that. All right. Well, here's where I see part of the difficulty that Rulo will face on this. If one of the eventual end products is understanding what that awful thing was that the government moved to the Emergencies Act to quell it, if the assumption is that that's going to be uncovered in this inquiry, I would be very, very surprised. And I'll tell you why. As pathetic as some of the policing was during the first three weeks of that protest,

and as questionable as the actions of not just the Ottawa police, but the OPP, even the RCMP were during that period. I've got to assume that it was like any normal investigatory matter that they had people on the inside, the police forces. They had people, moles, whatever you want to call them, inside the protest movement, inside the organizers, they knew what was happening. And that some of this information, rightly or wrongly, factually or not factually, got then passed on somehow to government. Now, if that's true, and I find it awfully hard not to believe that there's some element of that isn't true, if that's true, they're not going to unveil their sources in a public inquiry.

That's just not going to happen. So we're never going to hear the answers to those questions about what was the big fear. Well, that depends on how Justice Rouleau uses this leeway. But I have a really hard time reconciling your notion of awful things. I'm not saying it's yours, but the government's notion of awful things, capital A, capital T, with a situation that was resolved by having an order to get tow trucks and tow people away over the course of less than a week. Sorry, that's just me. And using common sense here. They were throwing people in jail too at the same time, right?

It wasn't just tow trucks being pulled away. But how many? Yes, and they couldn't throw them in jail before that order. Right. If I were sitting in the PMO and the Privy Council, I would be careful about the awful thing thing. Because the more you talk about it, the harder it is to reconcile with the reality of what we saw once the act was proclaimed, which was strong contracts to have tow trucks do their work and the police actually exercising the powers that they have.

If I stand in the middle of St. Catherine street today and I lie down on the ground and stop traffic in a pothole, maybe I won't get noticed. It's Montreal, but still I expect the police to have the power to remove me if only for my own safety, but also maybe to fix the butthole one lives in hopes. On the notion of tow trucks, Chantal makes an interesting point. During the committee hearing, the joint parliamentary committee hearing, Claude Capignon, a conservative senator, asked Mendocino, you say that you needed to bring in this act partially because you had trouble getting tow trucks.

Well, here's the auto trader and here are a whole bunch of tow trucks that you could have bought. You could have bought these tow trucks. So there has to be more than tow trucks. Now, Peter, you make the point, and I think it's a good one, that the government had to have people inside. Well, we know that those who organized the protest certainly had their own informants inside the police department. And the acting chief of police in Ottawa has essentially admitted that, that information was being leaked to the protesters by sympathetic police. We've seen videos of sympathetic Ontario police officers as well. These are issues that are worth looking at by any inquiry too.

And I'm also struck by Jody Thomas, who's the Prime Minister's National Security Advisor, telling that committee, and this is a quote, the people who organized that protest, and there were several factions there, there's no doubt, came to overthrow the government. Well, OK, we've seen the ludicrous manifesto that was going to have some sort of junta sit down with the governor general and decide how to split up power with the rule of the ruthless few essentially but when when somebody that senior in the prime minister's office uh leaves no shadow of a doubt that there were um there to overthrow the government um i think answers do need to be given and if they don't they don't necessarily need to identify

their informants but they can say uh you know person person X has these recordings, and we are going to play, or we're going to give you some evidence of these recordings. They have to provide some sort of evidence to back up a black and white statement that there's no doubt that these people came to overthrow the government. Certainly, there were incendiary comments by some of the organizers, Pat King and others in particular, who talked about solving issues with bullets. That's inc, got through armed and was stopped by the RCMP. So there is real danger there. But was there the danger of somebody actually seriously trying to overthrow the government? We have a senior official in the prime minister's office saying there was. We need evidence of that. And again, to go back to the fundamental question, this is an act that is to be invoked when all other recourses are insufficient for the task.

We live in a peaceful country, but when you look around the world, usually a serious conspiracy to unseat an elected government involves the armed forces, the military, the police. Some politicians were conspiring with the would-be insurgents. I don't really think that Pierre Poiliev's donuts qualify to make him part of a conspiracy to unseat the Trudeau government. So a lot of the elements that you would normally associate with a serious attempt at overthrowing a democratically elected government are at this point missing in action. So they're either, the government has uncovered a conspiracy that was so well hidden in plain sight that none of us saw any evidence of it, or else they eventually caved in to pressure to do something about this because the Ottawa police really messed up from the start. And at that point, no one could fix it without the use of the act. Could this end up being our January 6th moment, if you will?

And I'm not comparing the two incidents, but in terms of the potential value and highlighting of an incident by an inquiry. I mean, the January 6th investigation in the United States, which has taken a considerable length of time, is now going to go full public with hearings in June and with the hopes of making it some kind of a primetime event in the United States. If this inquiry is public, I'm assuming the media is going to want to cover it in some detail.

Does it have the potential to be a, I hate the phrase game changer, but you know what I mean in terms of the kind of landscape of issues that the public is facing. The January 6th story is what makes it compelling is that the outgoing president or his associates were involved in it. it to to compare it you would have had to have erin o'toole unlikely rebel uh standing up on a truck saying i actually won the election uh and these people are here to make sure that the the rigged election no one has argued that we even had a rigged election amongst anyone that is in the political process we we are not there in any way, shape or form. Yes, it will be covered. But I don't believe that this is the same kind of issue. In this case, if there is an abuse of power, it's not the outgoing prime minister that is guilty. It's the current prime minister

for using his power to curb a demonstration, not some other politician using this demonstration to undo an election result. So it's kind of the reverse. The difference is also cultural, Peter. I think that our investigation is being led by a court judge who is going to be operating largely by himself with investigators. He's going to probably need to get into cabinet confidences. That's not something that will be aired in public.

And he's going to have to get into international intelligence. Intelligence was shared by US authorities with Canadian authorities that allowed money to be tracked, that allowed everything from travel to be tracked as well. It'll be difficult for a lot of that to be made public. So it doesn't lead to the same kind of attention-grabbing nature of an event like an open hearing. But, again, I go back to Jody Thomas. She has made a very serious charge. If it turns out that there was any kind of serious attempt to overthrow the government, I think that that's a potentially very important moment in our history and recognizing where we are in terms of extremism in this country. The head of CSIS was up before the committee as well. extremism now takes up more of their time and worry, about half, than what he referred to as

religious extremism, which was a threat in Canada and around the world after 9-11. So the principal security threat to Canada, domestic and international now, is political extremism. So things have changed in some ways. I'm leery, though, I am leery of making any kind of sweeping judgment until we see any kind of evidence, because I'm old enough to remember the phrase apprehended insurrection, which is what Pierre Trudeau referred to during the October crisis, when he was sure that there was an organized effort to overthrow the government during the FLQ crisis in 1970. Well, there was nothing of the sort. Almost 500 people were locked up for no reason.

And ironically, many of them ended up being in the Passe-Québec cabinets that followed in the later 1970s. So when governments make these kinds of sweeping statements, our obligation is to be skeptical and to demand evidence of it. All right. I'm going to leave it at that. I want to get to our final topic, and we've got a few minutes for it. It's about climate change right after this. And welcome back.

The final segment of Good Talk for this week, Chantal's in Montreal, Rob Russo filling in for Bruce Anderson. Rob is in Ottawa. All right. If you are an advocate of doing something about climate change and you were hopeful and excited about some of the things you'd been hearing over the last months and even years, you probably didn't have a very good week because a number of things happened.

First of all, there was a sense that the government's plans on climate change are not moving anywhere near as fast as it claims or hopes they would be. And in the leadership race for the main opposition party, the Conservatives, two of the prime candidates, gave a sense that they weren't quite in line with what the government was doing, and they were backing off some promises that their own party had made in the last election campaign. So what does all this mean about a future of concern about climate change?

Chantal, start. It was not a week where developments suggested that we are having stars aligned towards progress in a variety of venues. I'll start with, and I'll set aside the Environment Commissioner's reports because what they point to are, you're right, some failings in the federal plan, and they do suggest there is a lot of work to be done to achieve the targets the government has set. But his advice is not just criticism. It is also something that the government can do something about between now and 2030. And so it is constructive advice rather than dispiriting findings. The glass half full is more interesting in this case,

but on the rest of it, let's start with the conservative leadership. I think we can now say that Aaron O'Toole's timid attempt to bring the party under the tent of carbon pricing is now dead and buried. Aaron O'Toole's acknowledgement that the carbon pricing and a carbon tax was a useful, possibly essential tool in achieving Canada's objectives is now being rejected by the leading contenders for the Conservative Party leadership. No one will be surprised that Pierre Poilievre does not, in theory, necessarily plan to come up with a policy

on climate change until before the next election, so maybe not over the course of this campaign. As for Jean Chaguet, whose record until this campaign included the fact that he was an early on convert to the need to address environmental issues and climate change. He has walked back some of this, or at least decided to forget a lot of realities on the way to trying to woo enough conservative members to elect him as leader. And one of those, this week, Jean Charest said he would, well, he would roll back most of the climate change policies of the current federal government when it comes to environmental assessment, etc. He would also get rid of the carbon tax.

And he pointed out, rightly, that when he was premier, he set in place a cap-and-trade system and so addressed the issue of carbon pricing without a carbon tax. That is totally true, which is why the federal carbon tax does not apply in Quebec. But when former Premier Chahé says, I would do away with this carbon tax on consumers, what he's not addressing is what does he do about the provinces where it applies, Ontario and the Prairies, where governments are not doing the equivalent. And how, by leaving this to the provinces, would he ever get to any target on reducing emissions? Which, by the way, he would roll back those targets to Stephen Harper's targets.

We're going back a decade. Then you look at the Ontario budget that paves the way for an election in Canada's largest province. It's virtually silent on the environment. You could call it the pro-car budget. It's about building highways and helping you to buy electric cars, not for the environment, but because the auto industry in Ontario, central to the province's economy, is switching to e-vehicles. And then you look at Quebec, came out with also going in an election statement

of intent from the government yesterday, which commits Quebec to achieving 51% of the target that it needs to achieve in 2030. And if you look at all this, and my conclusion is that if the federal conservatives, the incumbents in Ontario and Quebec are proceeding in those directions, they are willing to bet their future on the fact that voters are not willing to put their money where their mouth is on climate change.

And I suspect they may be right. All right, Rob, you have a couple of minutes for the closing argument on this. No argument at all. I mean, look, there are a couple of realities, broad realities, apart from the details. Climate plans have tended to be lethal to conservative leaders, federal conservative leaders. Andrew Scheer didn't have one, paid a price. Aaron O'Toole had one, paid a price by flip-flopping on a carbon tax that he wasn't for it, and then put one in. So it's one of what they used to have sword issues and shield issues. This is a shield issue for conservatives. They

just depend on it. They can't really make yards on it. The other thing is, in general, bolsters will tell you that Canadians want to lower greenhouse gases. They want to do it as fairly as possible. They want to do it at the lowest cost possible. But the truth is, Canadians are among the least virtuous virgins when it comes to the environment and climate change policy. We say these things, but we drive SUVs in grand numbers. We have to heat our homes because we're cold most of the year. We have to drive great distances.

We're a great big, broad country. And we do the kinds of things that negate our kind of pristine wishes for a pristine environment. So, you know, environment is an issue that also tends to be top of mind when things are going very well, when we can afford maybe to take a hit on cleaning up the environment. Well, right now, things are kind of very uncertain. And I suspect that conservative leaders in Ontario, in Quebec, and those vying for the leadership federally know that. They know that people have other priorities and those priorities may supersede the environment. And they're taking advantage of all of those factors. Our less than virtuous virginity when it comes to the environment and our other priorities economically. Let me let me close with this one little anecdote about a former

conservative leader, Stephen Harper, of all people. His first major speech that he gave after becoming prime minister in 2006 was in Berlin. It was at a big international conference. And he'd already done a lot of things in the first opening weeks and months of his term, including being in Afghanistan. And he had a lot of action around things. And somehow this speech floated up, I think probably from inside the bureaucracy. And he found himself saying in Berlin, that the greatest threat the world faces right now is climate change. And he must have paused after those words came out of his mouth because he never said them again.

And I can remember asking him, gosh, you've changed since that speech. And the look he had on his face was, you don't know the half of how that came out. Nevertheless, it's there. It's there in the history books. And it's one to remember. Listen, Rob, it's been great to have you with us today. And I'm sure there will be other times because Bruce is overseas enjoying a bit of a break.

But it's been great to have you. And Chantel as always. Thanks, Peter. We'll be back next week, obviously, for with good talk, but the bridge is back on Monday with a collection of stories throughout the week. Should be a good one. Um, I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks so much for listening. We'll talk to you again on Monday.