The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Good Talk - Have The Liberals Given Up?

Episode Date: February 23, 2024

Little things can make a difference is the old saying. And this week a little thing seemed to have some people wondering whether the Liberals have given up any chance of winning the next election. Chantal and Bruce have their thoughts on that and a lot of other things from Ukraine, Pierre Poilievre to walks in the snow.  

Are you ready for Good Talk? And hello there, welcome to Fridays, welcome to Good Talk. Chantelle Hebert, Bruce Anderson, Peter Mansbridge here to talk about, I guess, a number of things in terms of how the week has unfolded and what we're looking on the horizon, the political horizon for Canada. Now, as you two both know, I'm often easily impressed. And after all, I like the Leafs, so I'm easily impressed. But this is different. This was a week where what struck me involves a Liberal MP by the name of Lawrence McCauley. You both know him, have covered him, you've witnessed him.

I mean, he first was elected in 1988, so he's been around the block a few times. He's no stranger to politics or the way it should work. He's a Liberal cabinet minister. He's the agriculture minister. He's from Prince Edward Island, and he loves the island, as anybody who's ever been there would love the island. And he loves lobster, and he loves talking about lobster and its importance on the foreign trade market, which it is. Canadian lobster is a huge deal. Hundreds of thousands of pounds of lobster shipped out of here every week. However, monitoring his social media channels this week, there's a picture of him on his Instagram account.

He's in a T-shirt in what looks like a swanky restaurant in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. And he's wolfing down a big plate of lobster. And he talks a little bit in his post about the importance of, you know, the trade of lobster. But it just seemed to me to be tone deaf in terms of where we are right now in the political cycle. Here he was in a swanky restaurant chomping down on lobster and putting it on his social media channel.

And it left me with this question kind of lingering, because this guy's, you know, this is not an amateur in politics. He knows what was going to happen. I'm sure he knows what was going to happen. It left me with the question, have they basically given up? The Liberal MP sort of said, we're 17, 20 points down the polls. Nothing's changing. It's been this way for months.

There's an election in months or at most another year or so. Have they given up when you see stuff like that from a veteran campaigner? Chantal, why don't you start? Well, I spent time in a previous life in KL. I lived there for a number of months with family. So the T-shirt thing is totally understandable for anyone who's gone to KL. It's always very, very warm, as in humid in KL. There is not a breezy day to be had, even in what would pass for the winter season.

But I too, when I looked at it, it looked obvious to me that this is a picture that was taken by or with the support of a lobster industry group. And lobster is important to PEI and Lawrence McCauley is from PEI. I'm not sure if the liberals have given up. I'm convinced that the people who saw this in the PMO went, oh, no. What in the world is going on? But at the very least, we are in a time when it's increasingly every MP to himself or herself. And while that picture certainly sent the wrong message to voters outside of PEI, it probably did Mr. Macaulay no harm in PEI itself,

where he would be seen to be fighting the good fight for a local industry. There are many times in the life of an MP, especially on the government side, where your own interests collide with the larger interests of the party. And I think the larger interests of the party at this point is no longer uppermost in the minds of most liberal MPs. Why that is, is because as opposed to the last three elections, but in particular 2015, Justin Trudeau is not going to be lifting all boats. It's the opposite. All boats are dragging Justin Trudeau with a look to the upcoming federal election. So on that basis, most MPs expect no help from the leader or the center in getting

reelected. And I think you will see more of those scenes that are at odds with the overall message, but probably helpful to the actual messenger on a local basis. Just to back you up on KL, I lived there for three years in the early 1950s. And I was just a kid, but I do remember how hot it was and the huge thunder and lightning storms that would pass through. On Macaulay's thing, I'm sure it does him no harm at home, but there are only four seats in PEI, of which he has one. Yeah, but one of them is his seat. It's his seat, right. But take it beyond Macaulay, Bruce. There just seems to be a feeling settling

in, and Chantal hinted at it on the part of a lot of mps that it's uh you know it's every man or every woman for himself or herself at this point well before i do that peter i need to take it back to lobster because uh as you as you know and chantelle knows we've had a chance to spend a lot of time together over the years and have cottage in a similar part of Canada. I think my kids still think of you as Grandpa Lobster because you're so known for your love of lobster. So I'm not surprised that you wanted to talk about lobster today. It's a passion of yours. So look, I think that the picture, first of all, I don't think the Liberals have given up. I think they're very worried about their situation. The MPs are.

I'm not sure that the level of concern about their situation is consistent, clear across the caucus. And sometimes it does seem that at the center, there isn't as much preoccupation with what are we going to do about this 17 or 19 point gap. The implication of what they're doing sometimes is if we just keep on saying the same kinds of things, but maybe do it with a little bit more vigor and wait for inflation to come down and maybe for interest rates to come down, that we'll end up seeing this situation right itself. And, you know, add to that the idea that as people come to know more about Pierre Poliev, they'll turn away from him and turn back towards the liberals. I think these are all the kind of hopes that people cling to

if they don't have another alternative, another plan, another sense of energy or an idea about how to come out of the situation they're in. And I don't think that those are safe bets. But that said, I don't think that the average MP has given up. I think a lot of MPs that I talk to are fully engaged in thinking about how can they protect themselves from what they fear might be a wave that's coming. But as we all know, we've watched a lot of elections. When a wave comes, there's very little that a lot of MPs can do. Now, turning to Lawrence McCauley and the picture, I don't think there's anything wrong with him promoting lobster as part of his job. I think that all makes sense. I do think that every time a minister of

the crown posts a picture on social media, whether it's Instagram or Facebook or X, the choice of the picture and what you say with it requires some care. And I don't think that that standard of care was applied in this case. I think there was a way for him to have a picture taken that illustrated that he was helping promote the lobster trade that didn't make it look to doubtful or skeptical eyes as though he was enjoying some sort of a sunny vacation. And so I think that's where the problem lay. And I think it invited criticism, especially in the middle of February in Canada. But I don't think it was a more serious error than that. I do think the broader question of how ministers use social media to describe what they're doing with the images that they choose is an ongoing problem, not just for Canadian politicians, but for other politicians as well. There's this instinct to kind of post pictures in informal situations. And I think that it would probably be in their interest if politicians took a hard look at whether or not

those pictures tell a story that's useful for the politicians or simply kind of frustrate people or make people wonder if these people are living you know better lives and lives that are that are that don't involve the same standard of hard work let's say as uh as the average person does i think you're i think you're being generous, I think, doing backflips to try and give some. I mean, listen, we remember what a glass of orange juice did for the Tories. I know the situation is a little different, but these are the kind of things that stick in mind, right? And if you're otherwise inclined to say these guys don't care about how they spend the public dime and they're living in the high off the hog on my money and blah blah blah um you know it all plays in into that hand now some of those people are

you're never going to turn them anyway because they're against but the fact that you you just know you're going to see that picture again it's going to. If I didn't say clearly it was a bad picture, it was a bad picture. I'm sorry if I… Oh, finally you get to it. The fact is that it has not the same impact on caucus morale and liberal morale as the holidays that the prime minister took in a swanky place. But it is in that same category. And I agree with Bruce that most members who are thinking of running again for re-election, government members, have not given up because if they were giving up, they would not run again. So they will do whatever they think that they can

do to be re-elected. But we've also seen governments that look like they were going down. And usually a government that looks like it's drowning is going to try to do something about it and try to show that it still has ambitions. If you don't like the leader anymore, maybe you're going to give it that leader or that government credit for at least having ambitions that you can identify to. Brian Mulroney was going down and even as he was going down, he was doing the GST. He tried to do the Charlottetown Accord and fix the Constitution. He was working on NAFTA and fighting the liberals on NAFTA. These are big items for a government that has lost currency with the general public. And poll after poll would show that both Brian Mulroney and the

conservatives were in deeper trouble, I would argue, than the liberals should be, because they were losing their two pillars to new parties. That's a much more complicated proposition than anything that's been happening to the liberals. Jean Chrétien knew that he was gone in a year, and he used that year to introduce political financing. He used that year to say, I'm not going to take Canada to Iraq with George W. Bush. He used the time that he had left to leave something for people to look back on and say that year was not a wasted year. He didn't spend the year floating from place to place cutting ribbons. He actually put government plans. He signed on to Kyoto over that last year. This government, it's hard to find something that they are giving Canadians a cause to

look to and say this is a really interesting thing that they're doing. They've been doing dental care and now they may do something on pharma care to perpetuate an arrangement that keeps them in government, as opposed to something that they really, really want to do. Their legislation or their moves over the past few months have involved going backwards on stuff. They carve out for home eating and for the carbon tax. That's stepping back. There is also some stepping back on some of the regulations that Minister Guilbault was trying to put in place. The main piece of legislation the government desperately needs to get through over the next week is to back off on MAID and offering medical assistance to people who want to die and who only suffer from mental illnesses. So when you look at this and you think,

this looks like a government that is in relative retreat on its own ambitions and is not giving anyone more reasons to say, wouldn't we be sorry if they didn't get a chance to finish this? Because it doesn't look like they're in the process of doing anything that is particularly compelling that voters would want to see true. So that does lead me to think that somewhere, somehow, there's been a big loss of drive for a government that is facing a tough election campaign and that likes to pretend that it wants to win it. Bruce? Yeah, I just wanted to jump in. I agree with Chantal on the sense that the government has been a bit in retreat,

a bit on the back foot. Maybe I'm, again, being too kind, saying a bit. It's been a bad run for sure. And by run, I mean a lot of months now. I did notice that the prime minister did a talk show in Alberta this week with Ryan Jesperson, who's got a kind of a popular conversational talk show. Anyway, the prime minister went to Alberta and he decided to do this. And the clips coming out of it, you know, show the kind of the dilemma I think that the liberals have, which is that the prime minister, when he's in a conversational mode, he's lucid, he's smart, he knows the details of all of the issues that his government has been working on. He's got a case to make that people should be more aware of

and give some credit to the track record of his government, which I happen to think in many respects has been a good one for the country. But looking back at past accomplishments, it is never going to really pay the dividends that politicians wanted to. It's proven so often in the past, yet it's hard for incumbents not to want to reflexively do that. Why don't you remember what I did that was so meaningful to you at the moment that I did it? It's just not a conversation that draws a crowd. And so the prime minister seems stuck in either talking about past accomplishments or talking about what Pierre Polyev means to the country or kind of implying, sometimes saying that he's the only person who can beat Pierre Polyev. Well, I think the problem with those two propositions is that so far, Justin Trudeau criticizing Pierre Polyev has not really done anything to diminish Pierre

Polyev's public opinion numbers. Now, Mr. Polyev is not loved by Canadians, but his popularity has grown over time, and the prime minister's has declined, which brings me to the second proposition that the prime minister seems to feel is the main reason why he should stay, which is that only he can beat Pierre Polyev. And I just don't think there's evidence to support that thesis. I think the prime minister knows he can be an effective campaigner, but sometimes you have to have an audience that really wants to hear what you have to say. And I know there's a tendency sometimes for them to brush that off, that people may be bored and they don't want to hear me, but I'm going to make these points and eventually people are going to pay attention maybe closer to an election people will be more dialed in i think there's a very very risky bet i think it it is it is it is hard to square with the evidence available so far this idea that the

prime minister is the only one who could beat pierre polly f and give liberals a chance at uh at another term in office i'll take this a step further. There was a time, possibly this time last year, where you could argue that Justin Trudeau was the person who was the most likely to limit whatever damage comes the way of the liberal party in the next election, which is not saying that he was the only person who could beat Pierre Pallier, but that anybody else would probably get a worse result for the Liberal Party than Justin Trudeau.

I don't think that's true anymore. I think there has been a lot more wear and tear on this prime minister accumulating over the past nine months that is becoming increasingly impossible to fix. And I no longer think that Justin Trudeau is the best possible leader in difficult circumstances to help the liberals arrive at a not too devastating finish in the next general election. That's a shift. And I think that's a shift that you also find in the thinking of many liberals who for a long, long time talked, well, you know,

Justin Trudeau is better than any of the alternatives. A number of liberals have now moved on to there are alternatives that are not as bad as Justin Trudeau leading the party in the election. I'm not convinced that the prime minister understands that. The other issue I have is tone. Clearly, central casting has suggested to the prime minister that he should use more forceful vocabulary when he talks about, you know, what happened with Bell Media and the layoffs, he's pissed off, etc. I don't believe that works. It looks contrived. It also probably works for someone who is an opposition politician, but it doesn't do very much for people who are losing their jobs and or for transgender kids that the prime minister is saying that he's pissed off.

It just sounds like we are slowly but surely getting closer to the schoolyard conversation rather than a natural debate and statesmanship in action. And I heard some of his quotes, not in the interview that Bruce talks about, but some of the clips that came out of his Alberta visit. And frankly, he was too hot for the good of his message. It just came, it just sounded more like a political tantrum than a reasoned argument.

So I guess go back to the drawing board, the central casting, and reflect on the fact that people like the prime minister to look competent, not excited. Okay, I want to take a quick break and then come back and talk about the other side of this coin, and that's the Polyev side, because I find what's happening on that front pretty interesting in itself. And I want to try and get either one of you to, or both of you, to explain how he's succeeding in what is a tricky political game. And I'll explain it, and we'll get to it right after this. And welcome back.

You're listening to Good Talk for this Friday. Chantelle Hebert, Bruce Anderson, Peter Mansbridge here. You're listening on SiriusXM, Channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform. Or you're watching us on our YouTube channel. Wherever you're joining us, we're happy to have you with us. Okay, here's what I find interesting. It's a tricky balance that any political party has to do,

which is kind of protect what you've got, keep saying things that your base is comfortable with, and yet at the same time kind of explore the outer edges of your support to try and bring in people from outside. So in other words, for the Conservatives, for Polyev, he's protecting his own base. He's trying to assure that he doesn't lose stuff to the right of his base, to the People's Party, while at the same time trying to ensure that those who are abandoning the Liberals or appear to be abandoning the Liberals don't get so scared of him that they'll move back to the Liberals. So that's a challenge, pretty straightforward.

But what I've noticed in the last, certainly in the last couple of weeks, that he doesn't seem to be worried about losing some of that newfound support that he might have in the middle, on the fringes of the Liberal Party. That he's saying things that are comfortable with his base, and certainly comfortable to the right of his base. And yet he doesn't seem to be losing anyone, if the polls are accurate, on the edges and we saw it again this week with his uh you know his comments on uh id for uh for porn sites uh and and other issues so how is he managing to walk that line and stay apparently comfortable with not only where he is but what he's witnessing around him in terms of voter support. Bruce, start us. Well, I think he starts with an analysis of the situation

similar to the one that we just gave, which is that against Justin Trudeau, he's going to continue to hold a certain measure of support that would otherwise normally go towards the Liberal Party, simply because those voters are frustrated with what they see as the version of the Liberal Party on offer right now. So I don't think he's too worried about those votes drifting away as long as his rival is Justin Trudeau. Now, whether that turns out to be as safe a bet as he thinks that it is today, I suppose for him, that's a problem for, that's a future problem. He does have to, as any conservative leader does, have to manage the different factions that make up the conservative movement. And how he does that, I think, is really what you're driving at in terms of this conversation, Peter.

You know, my colleague, Fred Delory, who you guys both know, is really interesting in kind of describing what it is that's underneath the hood of the conservative movement today and how many different layers or subdivisions there are of the conservative voter pool. And we've been around long enough to know that Pierre Polyev isn't the first conservative leader who's had to figure out how to tend to the various instincts of social conservatives, of libertarian conservatives, of fiscal conservatives. And I think that what Polyev has shown over time is that from time to time, he will do certain things that make sure that those parts of his constituency that otherwise might drift away, hear something from him that resonates for them. So for social

conservatives, who might not hear as much about abortion, for example, as they want, hearing things about gender ID might make them feel like, okay, he's still in touch with the same value system as we are. Now, as I'm describing that, I wouldn't want anybody to think that I think he made a good decision there or has taken a position that's anything other than dangerous for people in society. I don't agree with his position on it. I think it was disappointing that he took it. But I think that's that he's taken on ID for porn, the idea that the people who want to consume that online have to somehow show who they are to the providers of it. I think that's going to that will play badly with the libertarian part of his coalition. But he's made that calculation that he wants to send that message again,

I think, to social conservatives, that this is something that, you know, he's concerned about children consuming porn. I don't think either of those things rise anywhere close to the level of importance for most Canadians that this is what they're hoping for a change in government to bring. But I don't think that's what it was about. So that's what I think he's doing. I think he knows what he's doing because he does the math pretty well in terms of the politics. And I don't think he'll, I don't look at those two decisions and anticipate that he's going to keep on doing that.

I think instead what he likes to do is this episodic base touching with key ideas that resonate within certain subgroups of the conservative movement. I just think we should mention that Fred Delory, who you mentioned as part of your answer, ran the last conservative campaign. So he comes at it from that side. Chantal? I think I don't disagree with a lot of what Bruce said, but I think it gives too much credit to planning on the part of Pierre Po that is supported by the NDP, the Bloc Québécois and the Conservatives and basically calls on Pornhub to check to ensure that. I do not for a second believe that a conservative government would introduce a digital ID or force you to enter your passport number or any personal information to access Pornhub. And Mr. Poitier, even as he has shown support for the bill, has basically not come up with how do you ensure that kids who can do math know better than to write their actual year of birth if they're not 18.

I'm sure that most math classes would lead you to know that it's better to just answer 1990 when you're asked your year of birth and then move on to the second slide. There have been musings about this digital ID. My understanding is that Mr. Poirier himself has ruled out those mechanisms for obvious reasons. I don't think it's just libertarians who would have serious reservations about the notion that to access a porn site, you have to give whatever that porn site is some private information and not know what happens to that information going forward,

who it's sold to, who it's passed on to, et cetera. The other issue that came up this week was transgender people using women's washroom. And Mr. Poiliev sensed that a woman's washroom should be reserved to people who are female at birth. This isn't something that Pierre Poiliev wanted to talk about. This is a question that came up over the course of a news conference that he ended up answering. And interestingly enough, he also went out of his way to point out that all that being said, and whatever his opinion is, this is not something that the federal government has any leverage over. No prime minister is going to shepherd the bill in the House of Commons about who uses washrooms in public establishments where.

That's way beyond the scope. He'd have to do it through the criminal code. It sounds very, very strange idea. So up to a point, he is also answering questions that have ended up thrown his way by the initiatives of a number of conservative governments, but that when they have been tested, and I'm going to use Quebec as an example, the provincial Conservative Party led by Éric Duhem, who has been in the past close to Pierre Poilievre, was looking for an issue to kind of move on from the pandemic and the health restrictions that allowed the Conservative Party in Quebec to get a boost in the polls, and decided to move on to transgender kids and this entire issue that is now part of the landscape in New Brunswick, Saskatchewan, Alberta, to name three provinces. Well, since Mr. Poitier ventured down that path, Mr. Poitier, Mr. Duhaime, he has become the least popular political figure in Quebec. There is a message there.

There has been a test of this, and the results of the test is go down this road, at least in Quebec and probably in Ontario and BC, and you are going to lose a lot more votes than you will win. So I believe that Mr. Poiliev's brain trust do not want him to be embracing too much of that narrative. And that whenever it comes up, it's because someone is raising it at a news conference conference and he has to answer. Okay. Yeah, look, I agree with Chantal that these things weren't part of a planned agenda on the part of Mr. Poliev and that his strategists don't want this to be too big a part of his pitch to Canadians.

But he is fairly adept at saying, I don't want to talk about something if he doesn't want to talk about it. And I do think that in this case, he knew that the positions that he took were going to spark howls of outrage from parts of the political landscape that he likes to spark outrage from because it tends to rally people on the conservative side. So I think I'm more, I'm a little bit more in the world of yes, things happen, but he doesn't, you know, in these particular instances, he saw some usefulness in taking the positions that he did. But I completely agree with Chantal on the likelihood that he would ever do anything if he was in office. It's possible. But these ideas feel incredibly fraught. And the kinds of things that if governments

are elected and start trying to do these, they quickly find out just how difficult it is to manage. So not a great week for him. And whether or not it was more he was kind of forced to address these issues, or he had some instinct that he wanted to kind of resonate with certain parts of his base. The fact that it won't cause him too much trouble right now might might help him a little bit i think goes back to what we were talking about before which is you know it's hard for the conservatives to lose support right now because people just aren't that interested in the liberals okay um a couple of important anniversaries coming up in the next few days. The first one's tomorrow. I want to talk about that for a second here.

And that anniversary is the second anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. I appreciate they'd gone into Ukraine earlier in 2014 on the Crimea front, but we're talking about the invasion of Ukraine proper from the north by Russia. And a fight that was supposed to last a couple of days has lasted a couple of years, and there were ups and downs, and things have not looked good for Ukraine lately, but the fight is still on, and most analysts say it's going to be on for a long time yet, which raises the issue of Canadian support. And it appeared that Canadians were drifting away from the idea

of kind of full-throated support for Ukraine in terms of more armaments, more money, et cetera, et cetera, over the last little while, over the last few months. And clearly the Conservatives raising some caution about how far they were willing to go in supporting Ukraine. Bruce, you're just out of the field with new data on Canada and Ukraine. What's it telling us? Yeah, people can find this survey.

We posted it on National News Watch. It shows that most Canadians continue to believe that without help from the West, that Putin would win that war. So to your point, Peter, I do agree that most people thought this was going to be very quick, that Russia was going to have its way in Ukraine. And here we are a couple of years later, and that hasn't yet been the case. And so I think people are of the view, mostly, that support by the West has been really quite helpful in resisting that Russian aggression.

But the other things that this poll showed, which I think are interesting to me, is that most Canadians also think that if Putin succeeds in Ukraine, it won't be the end of his ambitions, his territorial ambitions in Europe. And so they do see that there is a geopolitical risk that's bigger than the question that has been at the heart of this two-year conflict. And most Canadians also believe that Canada has to do what it can to support our allies in that situation. So for all of those people who have been of the view from the beginning that Ukraine deserved, needed some slippage, you know, sometimes that happens because people are fatigued with it, because they see the cost of it, because they wonder whether or not it's going to work. And I don't doubt that there's probably a little bit of that, but this poll probably made me feel there was less of it than might have been feared by those who back Ukraine. But there is within the conservative voter pool,

a larger instinct to move away from this. It's still a majority of conservatives who say we've got to be there. 59% though, isn't the same as 67% or 75% in case of NDP voters. And it tells us something about this undercurrent of isolationism that we see in the United States Republican Party. It's there a little bit in the Canadian conservative movement as well. And it probably accounts to some degree for the tension that existed within the conservative party around this Canada-Ukraine free trade agreement that we were all talking about last month. Any thoughts on this, Chantal? Still, 59% of conservatives support a policy driven by Justin Trudeau is quite a number. When you think of the government's situation, by far, and Liget-Paul showed much the same

trends a couple of days ago. When you look at those numbers, by far the Ukraine policy of the government is its most popular policy, the one that enjoys the most support. Go down the list of, you know, you're not going to get 59% of conservatives supporting dental care, child care, et cetera. So it is pretty striking. And it goes back to, and yes, I understand that

the MAGA-style conservatives, obviously, the MAGA-style Canadians are to be found mostly in the Conservative Party and the People's Party. But it still goes back to the notion that we may have regime change, but in the end, our foreign policy doesn't change that much from government to government to government. Yes, there are differences on climate change. That's obvious. But if you think back of that great campaign that Jean-Claude Sein had in 1993, when he was going to renegotiate NAFTA. Whenever now the Conservatives say we will renegotiate the Ukraine-Canada trade deal, I think back to, do you remember the renegotiation of NAFTA under Jean Chrétien? No, you don't, because they negotiated a side deal in the environment, and that was the renegotiation.

So we emphasize Welsh issues between parties, but when it comes to larger issues like foreign policy, I'm not convinced that there would be a dramatic change in the course of Canadian foreign policy under a conservative government based on, you know, those numbers and that level of a consensus within the Canadian electorate. I think the other thing we have to keep in mind in terms of the Ukraine issue is what a political force Ukraine is in Canada because of the Ukrainian-Canadian population. Much of it based in Western Canada.

And the last thing the Conservatives need is to fiddle with that, even with the huge lead they have across the West. I do think there is a kind of a growing challenge for Western countries, which will be made worse if Donald Trump wins the election, which is about how much money is being spent on military armament. The pressure has been there for some time, but I think the comments that Trump has made and the fact of Russia's aggression combined to create a situation where the conservative leader is definitely saying more aggressive things about growing the defense budget

than have been said in a long time. And I think it's hard not to see a situation where that sense of our need to do more to equip ourselves becomes a little bit more pressing, at least at the geopolitical leadership level. I'm not saying that it will become a thing where the public opinion in Canada tilts more in that direction. I don't think that will be the case. I think people still have a certain, if we have to, kind of grudging feeling about spending on a lot of large ticket defense items. But I think we're headed for a conversation where the expectation of Western countries is that spending will rise, and that will be particularly true for Canada if Donald Trump wins, and maybe even if he doesn't. And so I think that might become a

point of differentiation at some moment in the future between the conservatives and others on the political spectrum. Okay, we're going to take our final break. We come back, we talk about the other anniversary I was mentioning. That's coming right up. And welcome back. Last block, last segment of Good Talk for this week. Chantal Hébert, Bruce Anderson, Peter Mansbridge here. Talk about a second anniversary, and it's next week. I think it's next Wednesday.

Will be the 40th anniversary of the famous walk into snow by Pierre Trudeau. Jesus, I feel old all of a sudden. Yeah. 40th, eh? No kidding. 1984. Is that why one of my sons is turning 41 today? Oh, yes, I guess so.

I thought he was turning 30. But he was in the car in that snowstorm when we heard that on the radio. Right. Well, I don't know whether there's enough snow in many parts of the country to take that walk in the snow this year. But some would theorize, well, you know, Justin Trudeau's going to wait until the anniversary of his father's walk in the snow and deciding to quit, and he'll do the same thing on the same day. I don't think anybody thinks that anymore. Mind you, there are those who argue, well, he just wants to wait

until nobody's thinking it before he does it and then surprise everybody, like his father did. I remember we'd all become sort of resigned to the fact that, well, he's probably going to stick around. I remember he was doing the world peace tour, and he was traveling around the world trying to create a new era of peace. I don't know. If it's not on his mind for next week,

I assume then the next big moment is the budget, the pharma care, the this, the that, if he's looking for a legacy of some kind, before he exits the picture, if, in fact, he's even thinking of that. A lot of people want to do the thinking for him, and you keep running into people who are. And so let us engage in this thinking for him. You keep running into people who are... So let us engage in this thinking for him business, since it's now a February sport, apparently.

I don't believe that the prime minister is going to take a walk in the non-existent snow or will look for it maybe in Atlantic Canada to quit next week. I do believe that if he were to leave, the next window and possibly the last window would be once he knows that the government is safe after the budget, i.e. that the government won't fall over the budget,

that it has sufficient opposition support to pass this budget, which is basically May. And in May you quit and you could have a replacement in place in the calendar by the time the House comes back in mid-September. But once you're beyond that, you are really leaving it, considering that the government is a minority government, you're really leaving it to the very last minute. I don't know what Justin Trudeau is thinking. There are people who have advised him about the wisdom of leaving, job well done, three election victories, let's move on. There may be others, but I understand the diminishing crowd that is saying, please stay put.

But if he doesn't go next week, basically, I would look to May as the last possible doable window to decide to leave and have the party select a successor in early September. Bruce? Yeah, I think that what the prime minister is saying, which is insisting that he's going to be there in the next election, is the thing that you say if you really need to keep and want to keep your options open. I don't think that it should be read as an absolute guarantee that that is his final decision on that. It may well be that that is, pardon me, his instinct, that he really does

believe that he can mount a successful campaign for re-election. Or it may just be that he's trying, as Chantal said, to create a space in which the decision that he makes, he can explain rationally and with some pride to people as he says, I've done a lot of hard work that I hope people appreciate, but now it's time for me to move on and to make some room for a successor. I tend to think because I think he's quite a rational person, that whether he already knows that that's how this story is going to end for him politically, or whether he'll come to that at some point in the future, I think he probably will come to that. Because I don't think that anybody with his wisdom really thinks that it's easy to overcome the kind of public opinion dynamic that exists right now, which is

to say still a lot of progressive voters supporting a lot of the pieces of the agenda that he's put in place, but just not really wanting to mark an X beside a liberal ballot with him as the leader of the party right now. And to recognize that that's not personal is a very, very hard thing to do for politicians. It feels very personal. I don't know how many people we've all met in politics over the years who talk about the fact that people cast a ballot in support of them. Now, they're all local MPs without it sounding like it's something very personal. And when they get beaten, it's taken very personally. So I think he's probably going to arrive at a point where he looks at the situation and makes a rational

conclusion about whether or not he's really seeing the evidence that he can be competitive in the next election. But it could be completely wrong, because as Chantal says, there are some people who continue to believe that that's the most logical and most likely scenario. I just don't happen to be one of them. I don't think it'll be next week, though, that that question is answered. I think that Chantal's time frame seems like the more logical one to me. Who's closest to him? If there's anybody that he'd be sharing his thoughts with?

If there's anybody who maybe could tell him that it's time to go and he might listen, because many who are close to him, my understanding is, have conveyed that message. And not as brutal a way maybe as I'm putting it now, but the person who would probably have a decisive voice on this is this chief of staff, Katie Telford. I suspect if she went and said, boss, we're done. We've done good, but we are done. That would have more impact than all of the dime-a-dozen analysis,

including ours, will have. I would also add one caveat to what Bruce has said about Justin Trudeau's wisdom and his thinking. This is a prime minister and a politician who is never lost. And that also has impact on your psyche, that you've always won. Everyone else, Brian Mulroney, Jean Chrétien, Paul Martin, Stephen Harper, they knew defeat. Pierre Trudeau also had lost. Justin Trudeau is never lost. Just because he's never lost doesn't mean he can't lose. But it certainly makes you more certain that you're seeing something in the mirror that others are failing to see, but that will become apparent. Then if you've had, you know, your hits and misses and those misses cost you. That's not happened so far. Yeah, I think that's a good point.

And I agree that Ms. Telford is the person who could have the conversation with him. And there's a part of me that thinks that this is just a normal kind of unpleasant period that incumbent governments go through before they end up figuring out what needs to happen. And in that sense, you know, politics, I think I've sort of said this in the past, can either look like a game, a business of math or something that has more to do with chemistry. And I think it's more often than not, it's chemistry. And I think what we're dealing with right now is a situation that's really quite uncomfortable for the Liberals. And the more that discomfort grows, the more likely it is that those conversations will happen and those choices will be made. And Chantel may be exactly right that somebody who's never lost, who thinks of themselves as the most effective politician in the political landscape may not come to that conclusion that they're going to lose that next election. I guess we'll see. We will see. And I, you know, I think it's interesting the way the picture that Chantel paints that the next kind of month to two months

is the window, perhaps the last window, if he's going to pull a plug and give his party some chance to reorganize and prepare for the next election. It's hard to say, though. We keep hearing in the U.S. that people think, oh, well, Biden could still step away just around July. I don't believe that. I don't think that's plausible. But people who want change to happen, who believe their needs will be better served by change, they probably won't stop thinking that in May, even if Justin Trudeau doesn't leave. Let me put it that way. I think that they'll continue and even more fervently believe that. All right. But wishful thinking, you know, is a currency that is always fairly widespread in politics. That's why people run. That's why they run for their leadership.

All right. Going to leave it at that. Good conversation, as always. Look forward to Chantel's away for the next couple of weeks. Susan Delacorte will be sitting in for Chantel next week We're looking forward to hearing from her And we're wishing Chantel the best on her mid-winter break Bruce, Chantel, thanks again

We'll talk to you again when we talk to you again I'm Peter Mansbridge, thanks for listening And we'll see you next week.