The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Good Talk -- Game On! Carney versus Poilievre is The Main Event

Episode Date: March 21, 2025

The election will be called this weekend and the country's voters will be determining Canada's future.  There could be as many as six main leaders but the main contest will be between Mark Carney and Pierre Poilievre.  Chantal Hebert and Rob Russo are here for some Good Talk on that.

Are you ready for Good Talk? Of course you are. Coming right up. And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here with Chantal Hébert and Rob Russo. It's your Friday morning Good Talk. Friday afternoon, for some. We've got all the bases covered on the time zones today. And here we are with, well, just days away from the election call. And I guess it's time to have a look at the situation in terms of the two main protagonists. Of course, you've got Mark Carney, the new Prime Minister, and then you've got Pierre Pogliev. There are others in the race, of course.

But those are the two main ones, and it's game on starting this weekend. Neither one has led in a federal election campaign. And we should remind everybody these are

not easy moments. Federal elections can be really tough. They can be brutal. They can be tense on leaders. Are these two guys ready for that kind of action over the next, whatever it's going to be, five or six weeks? Chantal, why don't you start? I would answer no in both cases, but for different reasons. In the case of Mr. Poiliev, I guess the biggest sign that he's not totally ready for what is usually a Canadian election campaign is the decision to not bring journalists on his campaign tour. So to clear up a few concepts to easily get out there, journalists do not get on campaign planes to get a free ride. It's the opposite of a free ride. We pay for those seats. This year, it costs to go on the tours of the liberals or the NDP, it costs around $35,000. That gets you a seat on the plane. It doesn't get

you a hotel room. You pay for the hotel room also, and you pay for your meals. So it's the opposite of a free ride. Why do we go on planes? One of the main reasons is logistical. If your organization wants you to follow a leader, as you should during a campaign, it's really hard to follow them without being on the tour. I'll give you an example of stuff that happened over campaigns that I covered when I was on tour. In 88 with Brian Mulroney, the last 10 days of the campaign, which I spent on the conservative tour, Mr. Mulroney was behind after the last debate. He was trying to cover as much ground as possible to do that. He would take his first event in Atlantic Canada and then fly to Ontario and then fly to Manitoba or Alberta and end the day with an event in BC. What was he doing?

He was using the time difference between the regions to pack in as many events as possible. If you are a journalist and you're trying to cover this, you cannot possibly, even if your organization had money for all these plane tickets, you couldn't possibly keep up. By the time you get to the airport, find your way to the event, back to the airport, get on the plane. That's one thing. Another example, you get on a leader's plane that's off to Sudbury.

It's fairly easy to get to Sudbury by plane from Toronto. But then the leader is off to Timmins. So you rent a car and you follow the leader to Timmins. And then for some reason, that same leader decides to go to Capus casing. And I realize if you're from Northern Ontario that I'm making a very strange tour of Northern Ontario by this order of destinations. I went to all those places on campaign trails. And then the leader, because he is in a small plane, manages to take off from a small airport.

You are in Kapuskasing at that point. You need to drive back to Sudbury and then to God knows where. So if you're going to try to follow a leader and have some consistency in seeing, you know, how the campaign speech evolves, but also who is in the room? What's the mood in that room? How do people feel? What's the mood at the front of the plane? The front of the plane is where the leader sits. You can't do that by being told two or three days in advance where the leader is going to be. Now, what does the leader lose by not having this gaggle of journalists on the plane? Well, it's easier to diffuse a bomb when you actually see it

than when you don't. If you do not have the national media in any way, shape or form on the plane, and some bad story is going to break, you have to reach out somehow from wherever you are, maybe in places that are remote, to try to react, shape the narrative. I'll give you an example. You were a player in that one. So I'm with John Turner at the beginning of the 88 campaign. We travel all the way to Vancouver. It's Friday night. We're off the clock, really, because by the time Turner is going to speak, all deadlines will have been killed.

So we're having a dinner in a nice Japanese restaurant. And this is pre-technology day. The CBC radio guy goes to call his newsroom before they all disappear while we're still working, comes back to the table and says, Peter Mansbridge and Graham Fraser have broken a story that members of the liberal executive want to get rid of John Turner as leader and replace him for a week in the campaign. Do you think John Turner did not benefit from having all of us on hand to push back on that story? Rather than sitting on a Friday night somewhere in Vancouver wondering what the journalists who are all in Ottawa or Toronto or Montreal

are going to make of this story. Same with the blackface issue when Justin Trudeau, when that story broke, Justin Trudeau went to the back of the plane to address it as quickly as possible with the journalist covering his campaign. So it cuts both ways. I understand why Mr. Poiliev does not want journalists. I believe that it wouldn't take very long for the mood on the plane to become toxic considering how he treats journalists, but I'm not sure that it wouldn't take very long for the mood on the plane to become toxic, considering how he treats journalists, but I'm not sure that it's the best possible decision for both voters, but also for Mr. Poitier himself and his narrative in the campaign. I'll get to Mark Carney once Rob has had a chance.

Rob is certainly sitting there waiting. Before he gets going. Let me just say, because you raised it, the Turner story in 88, yes, they did push back on it that night. Let's not forget that six months later, the chief of staff for Turner admitted that the whole story was true. Oh, there was no doubt the story was true. Yeah. Okay, there was no doubt the story was true. Yeah.

Okay, Rob. The sound you heard was me nodding vigorously. I was on the Mulroney campaign the last week of 88, and I remember a wonderful little town, a little village in Saskatchewan where we touched down on that final sprint, and people from the town realizing that there was no restaurant open all got together and made us a lovely kind of barbecue basket of food

and local corn, a whole bunch of things. It was a fabulous thing. Look, you began by asking us about the fact that we've got a couple of neophytes here. And I think that it's related to the issue that Chantal raised about Poiliev deciding not to have local media with them. You're in a steel tube hurtling across the country at 35,000 feet. You're doing that every day.

You might have one day off a week. And if you're a politician, particularly one who's been doing this for the first time really ever, and I'm speaking of Mark Carney, I think this is one of the tests for him. Can he handle the pressure of the national media, I think he actually thrives on it. I thought he thrived on it, but clearly this is a decision to cut them out. The reasons for it are specious. He said that it was so that regional media could have a chance to ask some questions. Every single stop that I was on as a reporter included a section of the press conference when they had them for regional and local media. They've always had a chance. So why? Why do you not want the parliamentary press gallery around? Well, it's because of some

of that pressure that I was talking about when you're hurtling across the country through several time zones. Clearly, they don't want to deal with the additional pressures of having hard-nosed and skeptical media. We saw what those pressures were like for those in conservative land who think that everybody in the gallery is in the bag for the liberals, we saw that pressure on Mark Carney when he was in London. He was asked some pointed questions that he didn't really feel comfortable answering. And he made the classic mistake of telling reporters to look into their souls, but not realizing we don't have souls in fact. Soulers, that's us. Yeah. What we have is we have a responsibility to ask the questions that those who pay our salaries,

and I'm thinking of those of us at the CBC because it's taxpayers who pay our salaries. If they were sitting there, what questions would they want answered? And journalists were asking those questions. It's not comfortable. It's not comfortable for anybody when, and this has happened to all of us too, when you ask those questions and then you have to get on a plane and you're sitting a few rows away from the guy that you just roasted. But it's part of it all.

You know, being prime minister is a tough tough gig being prime minister of canada can be very very difficult being prime minister of canada at this moment given the challenges we face internally and externally is a very difficult job this is part of the on the job. You should be able to handle this. So what's the bottom line of what we're saying? That neither of these two guys are campaign ready? No. I think Pierre Poitier has been practicing for this moment since he was 17 years old and reading Milton Friedman.

I don't think they're, and I don't think that they're not campaign ready, but I think that they will both face challenges because it is their first campaign. As journalists, by the way, do face the same challenges. Rob talks about the fact that you have to get back on the plane after you've done whatever you've done. That is totally true. You write a story that is really negative. It's not just the leader on the plane that is looking at you. It's all of the staff that is around you and you're sitting. And then suddenly someone comes and asks if it's okay if they can sit next to you, someone from the front of the

plane. And you know that they're going to try to tell you how wrong you are. But I'm with Rob. What I saw this week, Mr. Carney's European visit and then he can whip, I guess or I hope he realizes this is more akin to an election campaign than anything he's done during the leadership campaign. He didn't have to put up with a bunch of journalists on a stale morning, noon, and night when he was campaigning for the leadership. And every time he entered the room, it was mostly friendly territory. I guess he should understand that we are all trying to know that there are no stupid questions, just stupid answers. It is not a test of our intelligence to ask intelligent questions. It's a test of their intelligence to answer with intelligent answers.

And, you know, coming after journalists will not do anything except make all of the other journalists think this guy is trying to intimidate us. And it's not going to work, not in a campaign setting where you're paid for that. Now, to give you a taste of adversarial relationships, when we run those tours, journalists always go to the front of the plane to come out of the plane first, including the cameramen, women on offer. The reason for that is you want to take a shot of the leader going down the stairs of the plane. It's a nice opening shot, sometimes for news reports,

but it's also, what if he trips? You do not want to miss that picture. And that kind of tells you what the point is, like what our job is. We are there to see everything. I went to listen to a speech that Jean Chrétien gave the prime minister at that point. It's not an election campaign. It's the referendum campaign. It's when things are still going well for federalists and for the

no side. And Jean Chrétien is giving a speech in his own writing of Seymour's, where people in the room presumably not only voted for him, but are inclined to vote no. And on the way out, I start listening to the conversations of the people who are going out. And what I hear is disquiet, people telling each other, I'm afraid he's going to drop that ball. I think this could still turn out poorly. If you're a journalist, that bit of insight is worth a lot more than sitting at home and looking at the speech on CPAC. You go home thinking, this was a strange place to pick that up. For the record, Mr. Chrétien's writing, the majority voted yes on referendum day. So it's not just to trap leaders into banana peel episodes.

It's also to see what the body language of the audience is like. A winning campaign has a wonderful aroma if you're a reporter, and the stench of death comes off a losing campaign. And you'll sense it when you're in the room. You'll sense it when you're on a bus. You'll sense it when you're on a plane. You won't sense it sitting in a studio or sitting in a newsroom a couple of thousand kilometers away.

You've got to be there. When those stenches take hold, they're awfully hard to shake. They have been shaken. 88 was an example. But usually when the stench takes hold, it's brutal. It's not a good time for anybody. And all that being said, there is only so much avoiding of parliamentary journalists, even if you don't have them on your plane.

90% of the campaign these days takes place around Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. So if you post a national reporter in a hotel room in any of the, in all of those three cities and rent a car car you're going to be able to get to a number of i've covered campaigns that way when i was at the start when when the tours became a bit too pricey for columnists to be taking a seat uh that so i would base myself downtown toronto in a hotel and i just circled around, I got a lot of insights from it. So the notion that Pierre Poiliev will completely avoid scrutiny by doing what he's doing,

the answer is no. But still, if a bad story breaks, I'm not sure that they won't come to regret the fact that they don't have journalists on hand. Well, they will have at least one set of journalists. The irony of irony is that given the media landscape these days, the only news organization that is going to be able to cover him in every hamlet, every village, every town is going to be the CBC and Radio-Canada. And we all know what

his plan is for the CBC. So the irony is they're the ones who are going to be covering him full time and probably as much as possible with a seasoned reporter. Because, look, our friends in local journalism do great work, and I always consulted with them when I went into town. Tell me what the issue is. Tell me who I should speak to about the issue if I had time. But they don't know the details.

And often they don't know when they're facing a blizzard of bullshit, if I could say that. And that happens on a campaign. That sometimes they'll try to baffle gab and buffalo. That's just the way it goes. And you would hope that there would be somebody there to challenge them. That's not always the case. All right.

And to Rob's point about Radio-Canada, there are no French-language media outlets anywhere outside Quebec and Ottawa that are not Radio-Canada. It doesn't exist. So if you want coverage on TVA, the big private network in Quebec, or on Quatre Vingt-Cent, the big radio private station, well, you're not going to get it. Don't count on them to just take translations of CP stories to illustrate the campaign.

They will venture out on their own and do their own thing. They were not necessarily always on the plane. But at this point, you're not even going to have a Price Canadien person covering Mr. Poilievre. Okay, let me make a couple of points here um i i think as you've both expressed the constant challenge for journalists on on campaigns is trying to stay at least partly outside the bubble which you're kind of forced to be in as a result of flying in that steel or i would argue aluminum tube that rob talked about flying across the country um and we you know chantelle talked about how she would try to stay outside the bubble i can remember in the 79 80 84 campaigns the one of the ways i did was i would try

when traveling across the country on the campaign plane to in the mornings or in the evenings when i had a moment is just go out and do a little door knocking in the neighborhood of wherever the hotel was and just hear what people were saying. That's, you know, a pretty small thing, but it's something. Here's my question, though, from the there are no, there's no such thing as a bad question, Chantal. Remember that when you try to answer this. Seeing as you said it.

By shooting the messenger is okay on this panel. That's right. You know, we talk about the campaigns we covered 10, 20, 30 years ago. We all know the landscape has changed considerably for the media, for politicians. And I'm just wondering whether this latest thing, this attempt by the conservatives to block out the media, for politicians. And I'm just wondering whether this latest thing, this attempt by the Conservatives to block out the media, and who knows what the Liberals are going to do, for sure, yet.

Whether that's just a part of this changing landscape, and this, you know, there's no doubt there's a trust factor in terms of the public versus the media these days. And so it'll be interesting to watch how this plays out in this campaign and what the changing nature says about the relationship. Who wants to tackle that? There's already been a move away from, you probably remember, I certainly do,

when every network brought a crew on board for sound and pictures. That's disappeared. It's a pooled photo image-taking endeavor to cut costs. There are media, I talked about Francophone media, let's be serious here, La Presse, major paper here, has not been staffing tours for entire campaigns for a while for budget reasons. This morning, we learned that TVA wants the parties to pay $75,000 each to participate in the TVA debate. And if one of those parties declines, TVA is not staging a debate. So economic concerns have meant that there are smaller contingents riding on those planes.

At the same time, I've covered them both before and during the social media era. There was a time, and it did happen to me, covering an Ontario campaign in the early 80s, where if your leader really screwed up, you could prevent the journalist on tour from reporting it for enough hours to fix it by sending some ministers to fix it. Because we were completely cut off. Once you got on the plane or the bus, you didn't know what was going on somewhere else until you hit a phone. It was Frank Miller's campaign, the Conservatives in Ontario, that brought us in the boondocks outside of Kingston for a very nice barbecue in a place that featured no phones. And nothing within a 10-mile radius that you could walk to to find a payphone.

Until the Attorney General kind of fixed with the premier itself. You can't do that today. That basically means that even when you're in the bubble, you know what's going on outside the bubble. That picture, I'll give you an example. That picture of this Syrian child who drowned and was on a beach, hit all the campaigns within seconds of making it on the news. That wouldn't have happened in the 80s or 90s.

We would all have had to stop and be told by our newsroom. And the same goes for the people at the front of the plane. And then Stephen Harper and others were asked to react cold on this, that this just happened with the consequences that we know for the conservative campaign. So it's already a different ballgame. I can, from this desk, see everything that those leaders are going to be saying and doing all day, just by clicking on the right links at the right time. It basically means that newsrooms also need to rethink. We've always covered elections, not just on tours.

But what you do on the ground has become more important. Would this experience make the tours disappear? I can't answer that. I guess it depends on whether it turns out to be an asset or a liability for the Conservative Party. I want to make a comment on this, Rob, before we say our first break. When I was running newsrooms, I always used to say to people, you can never go wrong going against the PAC. If everybody in the PAC has got the same thing, look for something else.

Tell me something I don't already know. Because if the PAC is all reporting it, it's not really news at that point, is it? I can't tell you how many stories I got because I stopped listening to the politician and started talking to the guy that was standing beside me leaning up against the wall. Or when I went for a walk outside of a newsroom along the Spark Street Mall and I bumped into somebody. You have to be there in order to get those stories. I'm reminded of the

trip I made with Mulroney to the Vatican in 89 or 90. And he came out of the Vatican. He was obviously chuffed to be there, Catholic boy from Bay Como. And he told us a great story about his meeting with John Paul. I managed to pull away during that meeting and met one of the Pope's counselors who was a fellow Sicilian. I got his contact information. Afterwards, he and I chatted and he told me that the Pope went up one side of Mulroney and down the other over Canada's treatment of its first peoples. And nobody would have gotten that story if you follow the pack. It's due the pack, but you got to show up. You got to show up to get those stories. You got to be there. And if somebody, when I was at CBC, didn't have the story that the pool, the network pool all had with the same stand-up, they were never going to get any kind of criticism from me,

as long as they were out there looking for something that the politicians didn't want you to know about. Tell me something that they don't want you to know about, and I'll tell you whether or not it's news, and almost always it's news. The irony of that story you just told about Mulroney and the Pope is, of course, that today the opposite would be the case. It would be the Prime Minister of Canada or some Canadian leader going up one side of the Pope about their treatment of Indigenous people in Canada. But anyway, that's going to close out this discussion on the media issue surrounding the campaign.

We've got to take our first break, and when we come back, I want to talk about something that happened this week that may, in fact, have the most consequence of all the other things that happened this week. We'll fact have the most consequence of all the other things that happened this week we'll do that when we come back and welcome back you're listening to uh the bridge the good talk episode for this friday chantelle a bear rob russo with us i'm peter mansbridge you're listening on Sirius XM, channel 167 Canada Talks, or you're listening on your favorite podcast platform, or you're watching us on our YouTube channel. We're glad to have you

with us, no matter what platform you are connecting with us on. Okay, so yesterday, Robert Benzie, who is the Queen's Park reporter for the Toronto Star, and a good one, has broken a lot of stories over the years. He had a great story yesterday. At least it was great for readers. It may not have been so great for Pierre Poliev. The story is basically this, and we've talked kind of about this over the last few weeks, that there's no real relationship between Doug Ford and Pierre Polyev, but this really sealed that story in the sense that what Benzie reported was that Polyev had come to Ford

and asked for his help in the campaign. And Ford basically blew him off, said, I don't have time, I'm too busy. Now, that could be a huge factor, one that Polyev had to come to him in the first place, after basically their relationship has been shot for the last couple of years anyway. But that gives you a signal of the way things stand at the moment. But that Ford dealt with it that way. What do we make of this story? Rob, you start on this.

Well, it's no surprise that they would try for a rapprochement. People around both leaders have known each other since really they were kind of tiny reformers. We think of Corey Tanaik, who's run the last three campaigns for Mr. Ford, and Jenny Byrne, who's running this campaign for Pierre Poiliev. They go back to when they were very, very young reformers, decades. So you would think that they would try and get their two leaders together. But it just tells you the details in Rob Benzie's stories were tremendous. Mr. Poiliev hadn't reached out to congratulate Doug Ford. It's almost three weeks since Doug Ford, I think, won his election campaign. And there was no congratulatory note, no tweet, nothing. And my understanding is that Mr. Poilev is doing this in terms of candidate recruitment as well, trying to get some people to come out and run for him

who are bigger names, but he's doing it very, very late in the game. And it tells us, I think, that there was some supreme overconfidence up until now. Perhaps Mr. Poiliev felt like he didn't need to reach out. It wasn't necessary. I've certainly heard some of the people around Mr. Poiliev say, we don't need to do that. Look, we're at 200 plus seats.

Well, things change as we find out in politics. And if you want to hang on to your advantage, you've got to cement those bonds that you might have with people and with voters. It also raises, I think, a really important issue that we need to watch for in this campaign, and that's the role that provincial premiers are going to play. In the last campaign, François Legault endorsed Erin O'Toole. Is he going to do the same thing with Pierre Poiliev? I'd be very, very surprised, given that Mr. Poiliev, I think, is the third or fourth most popular politician in the province of Quebec. Is Wab Kanu, who is the most popular politician in the province of Quebec is Wab Kanu, who is the

most popular politician in Canada, I believe. Is he going to try to help his federal cousins, Jagmeet Singh and the NDP? Or is he going to stay out of it? Again, I'd be very surprised if Mr. Kanu did too, too much to help Jagmeet Singh. And I think one of the most worrisome developments has been the specter raised by Danielle Smith in Alberta of a looming national unity crisis. I think she called it an unprecedented national unity crisis. If five or six conditions she laid out for Alberta's resource development aren't met by the next prime minister within the first six months. So provincial premiers are going to play probably a larger role

than they would have otherwise in this campaign. Five or six conditions. It looked more like a dozen to me. There was a long list of things that she wants addressed immediately by whoever the new government is. And to fulfill them, I'll come back to Ms. Smith, but to fulfill them, the next prime minister would have to tear apart the constitution and the division of powers that actually govern federal-provincial relations in this country.

Details, details. Yes, we know someone else who's into the details that don't matter out of us. So let me take them in order. Premier Ford in Ontario, leading conservative premier by the size of his province, where it will be decided one way or the other in the end. If you can't win Ontario, you're not going to win an election. There is, I think it would be wrong to assume that because Corita Knight and Jenny Byrne go back a long way that they have not along the way

become estranged. That would be more true than the opposite. There is no love lost between those two teams. No help was required from Mr. Poiliev over the Ontario election campaign. But Mr. Ford has shown no interest to develop a relationship with Mr. Poiliev since he became leader.

He's actually, from what I understand, encouraged Quebec Premier François Legault to keep his distance from Mr. Poilievre. And if there is a strong relationship between federal and provincial Ontario politicians, i.e. the premier and someone federally, it's a lot stronger with Dominique Leblanc or even Chrystia Freeland that Mr. Ford was very kind to on the heels of her defeat at the leadership. She showed up at his swearing in. Yes.

So if you can't read all those signs that are staring you in the face, you're not very good at this. It's not going to happen that whatever blue machine still exists provincially in Ontario is going to be at the beck and call of Pierre Poiliev's Conservatives, who did believe he didn't need it until recently. Now, Mr. Poiliev met with François Legault yesterday. He had only met once with François Legault, and that was because Mr. Poiliev's Quebec lieutenant, Pierre Poilus, had insisted that this meeting happen. Nothing came out of the meeting, and not much came out of yesterday's meeting.

But it's not just that Pierre Poiliev is not very popular in Quebec. He is terribly unpopular. And François Legault is not going to go there. Mr. Legault also met Mark Carney last week. And from what I heard, second-hand, Mr. Legault told some of his associates that for the first time he felt that he met the Prime Minister was in listening mode. In theory, he was basically saying, I like Mark Carney better than I like Justin Trudeau.

So no, I don't for a second expect Mr. Legault, who has diminishing political capital, to squander again some of it on telling Quebecers how to vote federally. Didn't work out the last time. Now, moving on to Ms. Smith, should Pierre Poiliev accept her list or even wink at it, he will be in huge trouble in Quebec and Ontario. Because what she's basically saying is she wants a guarantee that pipelines will be going through in Quebec and Ontario, as if it doesn't matter what other premiers are thinking, that there should be no equalization money for provinces.

Go down the list and you look and you say, well, this is a nice list, but unless Pierre Poilier wants to run for the next leader of the progressive Conservative party of Alberta, it is going to be a liability. And he will now be asked every step of the way, how much is he willing to give the province that gives him the most seats compared to the sum total. So 90% of the seats will likely come from Alberta. How much is he willing to give if he becomes prime minister? That's the last place he wants to be.

So between the news that Mr. Ford basically stuck to is, I don't have time for you, and Ms. Smith said, I want this list fulfilled by the next prime minister, I would think on the federal provincial front, this has been a pretty bad week for the conservative family. And an interesting week in terms of the way Rob put it is the injection of premiers in a federal campaign. I don't recall, certainly in recent times, anything like this.

There are subtle signs of that as well. If you look at what came out of the Legault-Carney meeting, I think it was François Legault who tweeted sort of lovely, beautifully staged pictures of the two men at the table smiling at each other, vast vistas behind them. I think it was the Montreal skyline. I didn't see any of those kinds of images coming out of his discussion with Mr. Poilier. Premier Ford paid Mr. Carney the ultimate compliment by inviting him to Wally's, the

breakfast diner in Etobicoke that's, you know, stones throw away from Premier Ford's home. Again, there's not that kind of meeting with Mr. Poiliev. And there are no images. So people have a choice when they put out photos and what kind of photos they are. And if everybody approves of the photos, the pictures are telling us a story. Also, it was François Legault who put out pictures of his meeting with Pierre Poilievre that featured Mr. Poilievre's Quebec lieutenant.

But Mr. Poilievre rarely gives a lot of space to anyone who is running on his team. So he had no pictures that featured his Quebec lieutenant with him. I am told Mr. Carnegie is meeting with the premiers later today. And many of them will be there in person. Some of them will be there virtually. Daniel Smith is one. Another is on a mission overseas. But a number will show up, including, I think, the premier of Manitoba, but also Ontario and Quebec. I'm told that it was Doug Ford who suggested to Mark Kearney

that this should be an in-person meeting in as much as possible. And the rationale offered for this is it will make for great campaign pictures. That's my case. Campaign manager Doug Ford. Yeah, well, he's just had a fairly successful. I know that the Conservatives in Ontario were hoping for more seats,

but I think winning a majority back-to-back in a snap election is good enough proof that you have the credentials to make suggestions that may be winning ones. Do you think this relationship between Ford and Carney is a sincere one? I mean, these are two very different people. It's not the relationship. I believe it's a comfortable relationship at this point. But that's not my main concern.

It's not that he gets along with Mark Carney and Dominique Leblanc. My main concern is that I, in our current circumstances, worry about having a prime minister who can't of Carnegie and the signals of Poiliev and Ford not being able to have a solid relationship at this juncture, considering the challenges that come from the United States, that does worry me. There is mutual distrust between Poiliev and Mr. Ford, and some of it is about a sense that Mr. Ford has ambitions outside of Ontario. But we've all been around a fair bit. And I think we all go back a fair bit. And I would challenge any of us to say when was the last time an Ontario premier sided with Alberta against the federal government, particularly a conservative one. I mean,

Bill Davis and Pierre Trudeau used to gang up on Alberta as well. Why? Because often it's in each other's interest. When there is a conservative premier in Ontario and a liberal government in Ottawa, it's in both their interests to keep the federal conservatives at bay. In this instance, it's because of some of the language that Mr. Poiliev had used about cuts in particular that Mr. Ford didn't want to be associated with. And so there are mutual political interests for Mr. Ford. And Ford and Justin Trudeau were not exactly kindred spirits,

you would think, and they got on very, very well, too. So it's all about political interest, too. All right. We're going to take our final break, come back, and we'll talk about what we're seeing in terms of the polls right now. We all have our hesitation about polls, but they're pretty dynamic at the moment in terms of what they're showing. And we'll talk about that and try and put it in some context right after this. And welcome back. Final segment of Good Talk for this week.

Chantelle, Rob, Peter here. Okay, there is a seemingly agreement in all the major polls that are taken in this country, and there are a lot of them. They come out almost daily now, of where things stand. And it may give you some indication of why the Conservatives and Pierre Polyev look so spooked at the moment because they're not good for the Conservatives

and they're very good for the Liberals. Rob, give us the overview first and then let's talk about the vulnerability of polls a little bit because we're just starting. Well, where we are is just politics has been turned on its head in the last seven, eight weeks. We have fresh polls, three polls that came out in the last day or two from Leger, from Angus Freed, and from Ipsos, and all of them have the Liberals in majority territory.

So that's where they are now. And I'll tell you what I used to say to people in newsrooms about polls, particularly outside of the rip period, but even at the beginning of the rip period, we studied them, we memorized them, and then we violently tossed them aside for a couple of reasons. I mean, one of the reasons we toss them aside is because I want to know about issues that are important to government in terms or to people in terms of public policy. But the other reason why we violently toss them out is that let's look at 2015, change election, 1993, 1988, 1984.

In all of those instances, big elections, the numbers on the first day of the vote had no resemblance at all to the numbers on the day when people actually cast ballots. So in this particular instance, there has been a rapid buildup of support for the Liberal Party. How solidly built is a foundation when it's been built very, very quickly? Most of the time, it's not that solid. So what we have, I think, is we've had the Conservatives unurally high for the last couple of years, the liberals unnaturally low. They're coming towards their natural sort of levels of support where they have been for the last couple of decades. And I would say jump ball with a couple of rookie leaders who each one, both Mr. Poiliev and Mr. Carney, have a chance to win a government, have a chance to win a majority government and have a chance to have a spectacular collapse if they don't run a good campaign. Chantal, just an overview first.

Yes, basically what you can take from the polls is we're going to have a competitive campaign. It would have been really hard for the liberals to take themselves out of a 20-point gap. And that would have influenced the coverage. The dynamics of that gap for the liberals were a dead spiral. Why? Because it kind of told NDP voters who did not want and still do not want, not all NDP voters, but those that do not want Pierre Poiliev or a majority Conservative government, that there was no point in looking at the Liberals for support or in that cause because the Liberals were going down. The same message went to Quebecers,

who by and large are probably the least, and have been for all this time, the most inclined to not want a conservative government led by Pierre Poilievre. And at some point, looking at the polls and the liberal numbers, sought refuge with the Bloc Québécois. So at this point, and that is problematic up to a point for Pierre Poiliev's team, what's been boosting those liberal numbers is not just liberals coming home, although some are, but it's also new Democrats and Bloc Québécois voters who are saying this is an emergency. We've got the Donald Trump thing, which overrides everything.

And we have a chance to make sure that the person handling this is not Pierre Poiliev. And I believe that over the past two years, Mr. Poiliev has not worked very hard at expanding his pool of accessible voters. He believed that just having people being turned off by the liberals would be good enough. And he's coming late to this, to the notion that he needs to make a stand more welcoming to people who have voted differently in the past three elections. Can the NDP and the B I do believe that trying to tell voters this Mr. Singh is that he could be the next prime minister is kind of taking himself out of

the real conversation that voters want. They don't believe that. Even hardcore new Democrats do not for a second believe that Jagmeet Singh will swear in a cabinet in early May. So that positions him in a place that is, frankly, not terribly credible. Yves-François Blanchet has more solid resources. The fear in the bloc ranks is that Gilles Sepp was in a very solid position in 2011 when the orange wave came. And the kind of liberal numbers that we are seeing are mostly made up of francophone voters, which could open the door to a big liberal win in Quebec at the expense of the Bloc. But it's early days, and I'm like Rob.

I've seen all those campaigns where whoever was winning on day one was someone who was quitting politics on the night of the election. So these are interesting numbers, more interesting campaign than most people expected in the sense of competition, but don't take early polls to have any predictive values and seed projections even less so because they're based on non-predictive polls. A campaign is won and lost every single day until the day people cast their ballot. Let me ask you, I mean, you mentioned the NDP and Rob mentioned them earlier

in terms of what WAB Canoe may or may not do out of Manitoba in terms of support for Jagmeet Singh. What has to happen for the NDP to become a bigger player in this, over this next five weeks? I mean, we talk about this campaign in the sense of it's game on and there are two main contenders. And he barely gets a mention in the general conversation about the election campaign. If you look at the most successful New Democratic Party in the history of Canada, I think it would probably be in Saskatchewan.

And what marked those governments in the province of Saskatchewan was fiscal probity. They brought in balanced budgets. And there is, in a sense, among most people who consider the NDP, that the NDP would be fiscally responsible. Saskatchewan proved that they can be. There have been some fiscally sound governments in British Columbia as well, but Saskatchewan is a real example. And I think that that's what's held voters back. The only time there was an NDP government in Ontario, it was out of slack-jawed indifference with the offer made by David Peterson,

and I think it was Frank Miller, the Conservative Party as well. And so you need to be serious economic players with plans that are fiscally sound. And at the federal level, that hasn't been the case. Well, go ahead, Chantal. But the problem for the NDP is also that when it comes down to a binary choice, they get set aside. I'm going to bring you back to the 1988 campaign on free trade, which is the closest on binary choices. I believe the dynamics are different in the sense that there's not a yes and a no camp. It's a who do you want issue. But Mr. Hussein, frankly, is not in contention for the who do you want answer. But Ed Broadbent, remember, in the summer before the 88th election, there were polls

that placed him first on his way to 24 Sussex. And then the election turned to a free trade debate. And what happened? John Turner eventually became the leading opposing voice to the free trade agreement, and Ed Rodman had a good score, but he didn't even come close. The fact is that the federal NDP's lack of a record in federal office means that they can never translate even positive provincial experiences

into federal know-how. And I have to say, at this point, I think most Canadians do not see Jagmeet Singh as anything close to what Ed Broadbent used to be. Okay, we're going to have to leave it at that for this week. The last week before the campaign starts, who knows where we'll be seven days from now and what may have changed to alter the picture. I'll tell you one thing.

If things don't change, and I agree with both of you about being careful about how to read these early polls, but if things for some reason didn't change, there are parties, not just the NDP, better take a serious look at where things could end up for them. Some of them may not even make the debate stage because their percentage is so low in the polls that are out there right now. Anyway, we'll see. That's all to come.

Thanks to Chantel. Thanks to Rob. A reminder to you that The Buzz comes out tomorrow morning, 7 a.m. in your inbox. You can subscribe at nationalnewswatch.com slash newsletter. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks so much for listening.

Enjoy the weekend. We're getting close. We're in spring now. Enjoy it. Back on Monday.