The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Good Talk - Is Canada Really Broken?

Episode Date: January 27, 2023

For months, Pierre Poilievre has been saying Canada feels like it's broken and it's all Justin Trudeau's fault. Is it?  Chantal and Bruce have their say.  Did Trudeau's cabinet retreat make a difference for that party's future?  And Danielle Smith makes an opening to Ottawa - what to make of that.  Good Talk for this week!

Are you ready for good talk? And good morning from Stratford, Ontario. For those of you who are watching on our YouTube channel, I'm wearing a toque. Yes, I am wearing a toque. And that's because it's been snowing here for the last couple of days. And it feels like that's what you should do, you know. You should wear a toque, even though it's not snowing inside our world-renowned bridge studios. Oh, what can you do? It's a terrible choice. A terrible choice to wear a toque?

It doesn't make sense. It's not snowing in your office. It's not snowing in my office. That's like not opening an umbrella inside because bad things will happen to you. Terrible. I hadn't thought of it that way. Well, we'll see what happens. If things start to go bad, I will remove the tube.

As long as you promise in the summertime not to wear a bathing suit, I'll be all right with this. You can be sure of that, my friend. There'll be no bathing suits on this show. All right, let's get going. Let's get serious because we have some things to talk about today. Starting with this question, well, it's really a statement that Pierre Polyev has used almost daily for the last, I don't know, six months, that Canada is broken and that Justin Trudeau is to blame for all of that.

But the main line is Canada is broken. Now, the fact that he keeps using it must suggest that he either thinks it's working or he's being told by his people that it's working or they're seeing data from whatever polling groups or focus groups saying that that's a good line to use. You should use that line. But it does beg the question, is Canada broken? So let's start from that starting point. Is the country broken, Chantal?al well i should qualify before we we get all those emails that he says it feels broken which is a way to say maybe it's not but it just

you know it does feel like that uh it is probably a sentence that is in sync with the mood of the times, i.e. inflation, the war in Ukraine, climate change, go down the list. It doesn't feel like we are in a sunny times period, to go back to Justin Trudeau's initial sunny ways campaign in 2015. And I am guessing that Pierre Poilievre's attempt at saying it feels broken is to say the current government is part of the problem and not part of any of the solutions that you are looking for. So does it reflect reality? Well, it's hard to say that people are walking out there. This week in Quebec, the Minister of Education announced a series of plans to try to fix the education system. There's going to be a meeting to deal with health care. The system does feel broken if you've had to encounter it. So it is impossible to argue that the Canadians are not feeling gloomy. Whether they are willing, as Mr. Poiliev is inviting them to do, to connect the dots between all those issues and Justin Trudeau, one, remains to be seen.

That could happen, but it hasn't yet. And second, whether having connected those dots, they will feel that Pierre Poiliev is offering a remedy rather than a promise to make things worse. The jury is also still out on that. I can tell you that, boy, you know, you're probably wearing that toque because you think it's going to snow inside,

but I'm not going to offer you any solutions to deal with that snow. I'm just going to say, Peter, you've been such a bad homeowner that you have to wear a toque inside. It's on you, but I'm not going to say, here's what you could do to be able to do what we do, Bruce and I, and not have to wear a toque to bed and to have breakfast, et cetera. So it feels a bit, I used on that issue the term,

it feels at this point like Pierre Poilievre is rubbernecking on public policy. You know, it's a good thing I wore this toque today because you'd have nothing to talk about if I didn't. I guess the issue is, you know, feels like it's broken is certainly one thing. But, you know, let's face it, we are facing challenges. But facing challenges isn't the same as being broken. So I guess that's what it comes down to in the use of that term. And I have other thoughts on it first, but I do want to hear from Bruce before I say anything more.

Bruce. Well, I think we can knock off early for the weekend because Chantal said everything. It was all perfect as far as I'm concerned. The way I would rephrase essentially the same points is I think the world feels broken for a lot of people. And in fact, when we measure in public opinion, is Canada on the right track or the wrong track? What about the U.Ss what about the world um there's a relatively elevated number of people who say canada's on the wrong track it's not the highest i've ever seen but it's definitely been sustained at a relatively high level for a while no big surprise really

but the numbers for the u.s are even higher where people say, well, something's gone wrong in the U.S. And they're often higher still for the world. And I think that this is the point that I really agree with Chantal on, is that people might feel quite gloomy about the state of things that surround them. But most people, if you extrapolate from those numbers, are essentially saying as bad as things might feel here some days, they're worse in other places. And the rest of the world is experiencing more division, more polarization, more trauma, more poverty, whatever more challenges due to climate change, war in some cases, that things are worse somewhere else. So why is he saying that and what political purpose is it serving for him, I think is the right question. I think that he does want to convey the sense that whatever is broken here,

Justin Trudeau broke it. And the implication is that elect me and I will fix the things that he broke. And I think that for his base, and I don't mean all the 35 or 36 percent who say that they would vote conservative tomorrow, I mean, call it 15 to 20 percent who want that red meat message that angry message they want to hear him say essentially everything in canada is broken and justin trudeau did it i think that when he says that it does create a bit of a challenge with a broader group of can who might be looking at him and the conservative party, say, I'm a tired of the liberals. Is he a better choice? He probably to them sounds like he's overstating the state of things in

Canada. He's under-representing what solutions that he would bring. And so I don't find him saying it quite as much because I kind of feel like he needs to say it to his base every once in a while. But he knows it's a bit problematic with everybody else, especially since my last point for a lot of kind of mainstream non-aligned voters. If they're wondering what parts of the world are broken and who broke it, they tend to look more at the far right. And, you know, I listened to our friend Andrew Coyne give a really interesting speech about this the other day, the misinformation, the effort to undermine credibility in institutions and in a news media. It's not coming equally from the left and the right as far as most people are concerned. And so if politics is broken, it's probably not the left that broke it. Let me leave

it there. You know, one thing about politics is there are a few things that are new in the political game. Politicians and political parties and strategists like to steal things from other successful campaigns, whether they're of the same ideology or not. And you have to look at this line, at least I look at it, as one that implicit in the line, the country's broken or feels broken or whatever uh implicit in that line is this sense and you kind of touched on it there is that only i can fix it right and also implicit in it is i can get you back to a better time i can make canada great again now none of these lines are new people started like to think oh that was you know that's

all trump he started those but they didn't those have been around for years uh you know i can remember joe clark saying let's make canada great again in in 79 and it goes back deeper than that um but we're using that line the broken line is it implicit in that that you're using all these lines that it is basically part of the political game in the run-up and I hate to use the word game it's driving makes people upset when I say call it a game but is it a part of the political strategy when you use a line like that, that you're trying to connect through to other lines, whether you say them or not? Chantal. Well, if you're going to take us back to 79, you might have noticed that Justin Trudeau wasn't very far from the land is strong this week in his rhetoric to his own caucus and cabinet saying Canadians know that we're

going through hard times, but they are tough. They can tough it out, etc. We all remember the outcome of the 79 campaign. So it doesn't, it puts, that rhetoric is certainly borrowed from previous playbooks. Every time that we have had regime change in this country, the person who won built in part on the fact that voters were starting to think that the current team had run out of steam and run out of ideas. ideas and there was time to send them somewhere to become more resourceful. Just in passing, I reminded myself that Stephen Harper did not lose the 2015 election because the economy was in poor shape and Canada felt broken. He lost because people felt that he was gloomy and his government felt broken. He lost because people felt that he was gloomy and he felt and his government felt broken. So this is the time in the cycle where there is an audience, a larger audience than at any other time since Justin Trudeau took power.

And that makes, forget Pierre Poilievre, at some point he may sink himself because he will have to put forward solutions and people will say, I don't trust this guy. At this point, the polls show that people are feeling uncertain about Justin Trudeau's government at this point, but also equally uncertain about the conservatives and their capacity to be the kind of government that they think should be in place. So there is a lot of flux there. But for the liberals, I would argue that this is a dangerous time, not just because of the cycle, but because they lack something that was in the shape of something terrible, a gift to them in the past three elections. Well, the first, obviously, fatigue with Harper and Justin Trudeau connecting with that fatigue in a significant way. But then there was a renegotiation of NAFTA, a file that allowed the government to show

that there was an adult government and that basically forced a lot of forces to come together behind the government to achieve that renegotiation an existential threat that that justin trudeau countered efficiently then kovid came along and here again you have an existential threat that allows people to not look at all the small stuff that's not getting done in a proper way, and that forces political forces, provinces, others, to unite behind the government of the day, because that is what you do in an emergency. This is the first term that Justin Trudeau is into,

where he does not have that larger issue. And the war in Ukraine isn't going to cut it. And inflation did that, for instance, in 2008 for Stephen Harper. But why? Because it allows Stephen Harper to be out of character, to pleasantly surprise voters by opening the taps and spending. Now we have a government that has no problem with having taps open. They've been open since 2015, so no one's going to say they're rising to the challenge of inflation. They're only going to say, oh boy, are they sinking us further into death? I think, bottom line, the existential reality of a third-term government

is probably a much more or bigger danger than any conservative rhetoric. And at this point, I don't think the liberals have figured out how to combat that efficiently. All right. But Bruce wants in. But before he gets in, you have to be really careful if you're going to challenge chantal on anything and that's why you probably saw me on my handheld if you were watching youtube because i i wanted to go to google just to check one fact about the land is strong by because i did this but unfortunately i'm old enough to remember that. I know Chantal was probably still in school. And diapers. 72 was the land of straw.

But same outcome. Absolutely. In fact, you know, it was a catastrophic. Same outcome, not quite. Yeah, well, it was a catastrophic night for the Liberals. They held on to power by like one seat or two seats. Yes. But it also came unexpected. saw it coming right i mean it was just so he'd had a majority

government 68 trudeau and then suddenly in 72 stanfield almost beat him but his slogan had been the land is strong and people rejected that i said no it's not strong uh for a number of reasons which we won't get into now. Also, inflation, price, wage, and price control, the parallels are actually striking. They were a lot higher, though, I think, right? I mean, the inflation rate was... 74. Wage and price control's idea was...

Anyway, you'll get on the Google and find that out while I'm giving my... I'll stay off Google now. I'm going to take my one victory in whatever number of years this has been that I've held Chantal to account. So go ahead. You can take that toque off now.

The ceiling won't fall on you. It's the toque. It is obviously the toque. You gave me that wisdom. Okay. Shoot the puck, Bruce. Yeah, look, I think that this conversation about what Paul Yeff says about Canada's broken is an interesting one for me. It reminds me that in the run up to every election, parties generally are searching for that, that theme, that statement that creates an electrical current,

a reaction that you can feel from the market that you're trying to reach. And you know it when you have it and you also tend to know it when you don't have it. And so you try different things out. He's trying this out. He's going to keep trying it out for a while. I'm not sure it's working. It wouldn't surprise me if it starts to get retired at some point. But it strikes me that what he's doing is arguably better or more likely to be close to the mark than why does he wear those silly socks and look at his hair and he's not ready, which have been some of the earlier efforts that conservatives have made to try to take down Justin Trudeau. Those were uniquely focused on mocking Justin Trudeau, and they didn't find the electrical current beyond the base that the conservative leader was looking for.

Canada is broken. It's a surrogate for the world is broken, really. And in a time where we see really record numbers of people saying, I'm experiencing mental health issues. I see it around me. I feel it some days. He's speaking about something that isn't really just about politics and the choice between conservatives and liberals. I don't know whether or not he's going to be able to make a meal out of it politically. I sort of doubt that that's the way this is going to go, but I understand it in its design. And I think it is not just incrementally better than what Andrew Scheer tried.

I think it's substantially a more effective effort, whether or not I think it has a merit as separate issue. But I think Trudeau is searching for what's the electrical current as well. I think Jagmeet Singh doesn't know what his message is. So I think all three party leaders are in that quandary of with the mood that there is, with the economy that there is, with the economy that there is, it's neither fish nor fowl. We can't sort of look at it as just another recurring version of historical cycles.

Sure, we can use the economy as a template for predicting certain outcomes. Sure, we can say incumbency at this length of time creates a dynamic where, you know, the challenges are in. But both of those ideas need to be challenged against the backdrop of the world as we see it today, where people, you know, would normally be flipping madly towards the conservative option. As far as the history of my observation of politics in Canada would be, is that I would expect the conservatives to be ahead by like 14,

15 points just because of fatigue, but conservative doesn't look to a lot of voters today. The way it looked in 1979 or 80 or 84, 88, so on. It looks different. It feels more worrisome. And ultimately, right now, if I had to say, if an election did happen right now, it would turn on some combination of, is this guy too annoying for you? And would that guy be a better choice? And I think that nobody's going to make that call until we get closer to the election. But it's more likely to be about that,

as far as what we know now is concerned, than is Canada broken. Last thought on this, Chantal? To the notion that normally in Canadian politics, voters would be flocking to the Conservatives at this juncture. I'll just mention, living dangerously, that Brian Malroney, Jean Chrétien, Stephen Harper, and Justin Trudeau all came from behind in an election campaign.

They never started the campaign with voters having flocked to them over the course of that third term or second term government, for one. For two, why I think the liberals have a larger problem than the conservatives at this point is because for the first time, it seems to me that their main strategy, which is borrowed from Andrew Scheer and Aaron O'Toole and Stephen Harper, is that Justin Trudeau is not Pierre Poiliev. And I don't think that's going to be good enough to secure a fourth term. But there is a lot. And if you talk to liberals, at some point, it's almost,

well, it's more emotional than strategic at this point. And they say, in any event, there is no way he can win an election. Well, I've heard that before, and so have you. And the next outcome was regime change. And that's what I mean by the liberals not having, and Bruce is right, they are looking for the current, the electric current, and they have not found it. But it's a lot harder for an incumbent after three terms to find. And the, I think, misguided notion that just being not Pierre Poiliev

will be good enough is something that makes the liberal base feel good, but may not necessarily be of much use in an election. You're right about flocking, because in modern-day Canadian politics, the flocking that has gone on for the second party, not the incumbent, the one that wants to reach power, has usually happened in a campaign. And when it starts to happen, it can go big. Don't make me make the point that the Conservative Party

in a lot of those situations was really split into two and that if you added up the number of more Conservative-inclined voters, you would find a shift. But, you know, I take the loss. Only in one of those situations, by the way, that's called Jean Chrétien. The Conservatives were not split in two, and Brian Mulroney came from behind, or Stephen Harper or Justin Trudeau came from behind.

All right. And Kim Campbell was well ahead. And no one... I mean, having spent a summer looking like I was a doom sire about the Conservative prospects under Kim Campbell. And the answer always was, but look, she's leading in the polls. Yeah. She's making a comeback. Bruce,

Chantel is making a comeback right here. Look, I think what I was trying to describe in artfully and using the wrong statistical base. Other than that, it was back on. The oldness to the conservative idea should be higher than it is right now because historically when conservative meant not the liberals, a little bit more conservative, not radically less progressive, there was more interest and there has been a brand gap

in terms of accessible voter pools for some time, and it's still there. And I don't know that it's – I think Aaron O'Toole made a significant effort to try to narrow that gap. I think Pierre Polyev doesn't know if he wants to. I think nobody knows whether Trump is coming back and is going to create a problem for Canadian conservatism. I looked at a poll this morning that showed that he was ahead by some 19 points over Ron DeSantis,

who only a couple of months ago we were saying DeSantis is going to clean Trump's clock. So I think there's a lot of variables out there that affect what conservative means to Canadian voters, and they're different now now from what they were but I take the beating and I'll move on okay we're going to take a quick break when we come back we're going to talk about the Liberals and whether this week has meant anything to them in trying to confront that Canada is broken and it's all Justin Trudeau's fault or or appears broken or seems broken and it's all Justin Trudeau's fault or appears broken or seems broken and it's all Justin Trudeau's fault.

We'll find out about that right after this. And welcome back. You're listening to The Bridge on SiriusXM, channel 167, Canada Talks. This is the Friday episode, Good Talk. Chantelle Hebert is in Montreal. Bruce Anderson is in Ottawa. I'm Peter Mansbridge in snowy Stratford, Ontario.

You also could be watching on our YouTube channel. Okay. The Liberals go into a cabinet retreat this week. It lasts two or three days. The question is, as they come out of it, are they a government that's ready to face the challenges, which we outlined in that first segment? Are they a government that is prepped for the possibility

of being forced into an election campaign this year? Or are they looking at the long term? They're looking at the three years. What have they done this week? Are they in any more better position from what we've heard of what they discussed and how those discussions went? Are they in any more better a position now than they were a week ago? Bruce, you start this one. Well, I think they are if the question is,

do they kind of know what they should be focused on? I don't know the answer if the question is, if somehow there was an election next month, have they done anything that would improve their public standing? I think the answer to that is no, but I don't think that's what they should be doing. I think that the right position for the government right now is to do the work rather than to do the show. Now, you have to tighten up communication. It's not very good right now. I think it's not, you know, it's no great revelation to say that it doesn't seem like

um and this is always the refuge of people who who want to you know sort of say a government should be doing better in the polls is to say it's not the substance it's the communication that's not always true um but i do think that hearing the government say next budget is going to be about fiscal prudence, clean energy, and also we're very close to a really important health care deal. Substantively, that's doing the work. It's not always going to be showy. And sometimes you just have to sort of take that as for what it is that you'll spend six, nine, ten months gutting it out, doing the work. Hopefully the communications from the government will find a way to say, at the very least, we're just gutting it out and doing the work rather than 20 different things on 20 different, you know, channels every day. And so there's no sense of a kind of coherence or purpose or kind of unity of thought, which is a little bit what I see today. So I think that they are better positioned in the sense that I think

they're focused on substantive things that are important to the country. And we'll see whether they can turn those into political dividends down the road, but you can't convert them now. Chantal? I come at it from a different angle. I don't believe that the government really repositions itself in the public eye because we pay a lot of attention to a cabinet retreat that produces two or three newsers that may or may not elicit news and a caucus meeting.

And I want to preface this by saying I am not talking about the imminence or the birth of a leadership challenge, a challenge of just and true those leadership. But I do note mounting discomfort within caucus over a number of government positions or issues, some of which are closely tied to the leadership of the party and the government. And Blue Liberals, which we saw this week in action in the shape of a report by David Dodge, who used to be a deputy minister to Paul Martin, and others who were part of Bill Morneau's team, basically arguing that at this rate, the government was driving Canada on an unsustainable fiscal path. I'm not going to debate their conclusions, but I will note where it comes from, because

it resonates with the section of Liberal voters and the Liberal Party that feels increasingly orphaned, and those would be the Blue Liberals. And the report came just after Bill Morneau, former finance minister's book, that certainly did little to shore up the fiscal credibility of the government. So that's one constituency. I am noting, not just on the part of Ontario MPs, discomfort over the fact that the prime minister, in interviews at least with Susan de la Corte of the Star, seems to be willing to give provinces like Ontario a pass

for turning to for-profit private clinics to dispense public health care. And again, I am not saying anything about the substance of the issue, but I see that some of them are speaking out publicly. Judy's Grow, who's been a long-time GTA MP, called it disappointing in an interview with the Hale Times. Those are rare occurrences when you're talking about a statement by the prime minister. There's increasing unease among rural and indigenous MPs over what has been happening and the mess over the government's latest gun control bill. They didn't need that. And at this point, we are still waiting to see how the government finds an exit strategy to salvage a bill that was going to get a fairly

easy right, but that now has become a focus point, not just in the House of Commons, but in the Senate, for rural but also indigenous senators and MPs. And that is an enforced error. It didn't come from somewhere else, and it is yet to be, one, explained, and two, resolved. There is, and few people have talked about it, discomfort bordering on dissent on the part of the Anglo-Quebecer caucus of Justin Trudeau, which is the base of the Liberal Party in Quebec, over the new Official Languages Act. And as a result, it is creating divisions within caucus because some of the Francophone

MPs from other regions of the country really want that act to come into being, as do many of the Francophone ministers and MPs. For them, it's an issue of survival in the polls. And that has yet to be resolved. And finally, and in this province, it's big. Almost 40,000 refugees have come to Roxham Road over the past few years. That's an irregular border point. And the government is now saying,

well, Joe Biden's coming to Canada, but we're not going to be resolving this or having an agreement on this. We're five years in until when he does come. Imagine if 40,000 irregular refugees had come through some border crossing not too far from Toronto with the province of Ontario dealing with trying to figure out what to do with all those people. And you would understand the discomfort of many Quebec Liberal MPs over the fact that their government seems unable to offer the beginning of a solution to the issue. So I'm putting all this together to say there are more fault lines within caucus than there used to be.

They are not directed just into those leadership, but there is a lot of unease about where the government is at and where it will be going, looking at possibly an election this time, well, close to this time next year. Okay, I just want to get you to explain one thing, because I think a lot of Canadians have no idea what we're talking about when we talk about that road from the U.S. into the States. This is, by the way, it's not going to happen near Toronto unless they know how to walk on water.

But in terms of that road from the States into Quebec, it's literally a walk-in point, right? They don't drive in. on the U.S. side, and they walk across where the RCMP greets them and takes them to, well, as you can see from volume, there was a bit of a break or a pause during the pandemic, but it has resumed with a vengeance since then. So you've got to find accommodation. Not all of them are going to settle in Quebec, obviously, but when they do arrive, they're not.

What are you going to do? And we are not talking about a few hundred people anymore. We're talking about thousands with no end in sight. We're in winter and the flow is quite significant. So imagine what happens whenever the snow melts. Plus, there is traffic both ways, so a man rather tragically died of exposure to the cold trying to cross back into the U.S. to try to reach his family.

It's a human but also a political situation that is festered. And this week, the Quebec Minister of Immigration said she hoped that when President Biden visited Canada, there would be the elements of a solution to this. And the answer from the federal immigration minister, Sean Fraser, was don't count on it. And at some point, many, including liberal MPs, get the sense that bottom line,

it's not a real priority on the Canada-U.S. agenda, and so it's not getting dealt with. But these issues and all of the issues that I mentioned are kind of still festering after this week's cabinet retreat and the caucus meeting that is taking place at the end, at week seven. And did you say 40,000 a month right now? No, no, no, 40,000 altogether is my understanding. Not a month overall.

All right. Bruce, do you want to say anything about those points of unease within the Liberal family about what's going on inside the party? Well, I think that the, I generally think that it's not surprising that at this stage of the political cycle, that there are going to be some of those things. Some of that is about people who, you know, feel like they need to be heard a little bit more. And that's normal. And I'm not suggesting that's the case with Judy Scrooge or any individual.

It's just the chemistry inside a political caucus. Three turns in starts to get a little bit frayed because people, you know, they have constituents that have been kind of loyal supporters who are in their ear every day saying, I don't like this. I don't like that. Why don't you speak up about this? Why don't you speak up about that? That's normal. And it's kind of productive. The Judy Scro comment about health and the question of whether or not some shifting towards private sector delivery of health services is going to be characterized successfully as innovation or as a shift towards for profit.

I think that's federal government really has much choice to say we need better service delivery by the provinces without the involvement of more private sector participants and expect that that will work. There's a crisis in health care of several different varieties of crisis, if you like. And I do think that for most Canadians, they don't necessarily want for-profit healthcare, but they do want better solutions and innovation. And if the end of the day is that there are non-government agencies delivering things, but they don't have to pay for it with their credit card to use the phrase that Doug Ford has been using.

I think they'll want the innovation more than they'll want the purity of the system, but we'll see. And I think it's a legitimate debate more than they'll want the purity of the system. But we'll see. And I think it's a legitimate debate for the Liberals to have internally. You know, and it's not just Judy Scrooge, right? I mean, it's also the provincial Liberals who are desperately trying to rebuild their party. And this was one of their major planks. And they feel like that's been torn away from them and that the feds are, you know, Justin Trudeau is siding with Doug Ford,

which makes their problems even greater. We're about to move on, but Chantal, you wanted a last word on this? No, I just want to be more precise about Roxham Road. So the 40 plus thousand is for the year 2022. It's not the sum total, which is even higher, probably maybe closer to double that, take some off for the pandemic. But still, for 2022, the federal government was forecasting 50,000. I think it came in just under that number. I can't do the math on my head,

but it sounds like that's somewhere around 100 a day. I mean, it's a lot of people. It is a lot of people. It's not a small thing. You've got to give them social services, health care. I mean, you're not going to leave them out. It's more than 5% of our immigration number per year, closer to 10. Wow. Yeah, that's right. That's right.

That's a lot of people. Okay, we're going to take our last break break and then we're going to come back. We're going to talk about, is there a thawing going on in the Danielle Smith, Justin Trudeau relationship? We'll ask that question when we come back. And welcome back here into the final segment of Good Talk for this week. Chantel's in Montreal. Bruce is in Ottawa. I'm in Stratford, Ontario. You know, you have to be careful with politicians, any politicians,

because sometimes they'll say things and a couple of days later they kind of, you know, if they don't kind of flip that original statement, they kind of condition it somewhat. And we've seen that a number of times in the new regime in Alberta with Premier Daniel Smith. So when yesterday she said, I want to go to Ottawa and going to Ottawa, we're probably going to have a premier's meeting, a first minister's meeting on health care. I want to also have my own private time with Justin Trudeau on the energy transition issue about moving people from jobs in certain elements of the energy sector into new jobs that talk about the new times.

And she's definitely against transition, at least in the way they've been using that phrase. But she seems to have come around to the idea of, let's talk about it, let's see whether we can have a common approach between Ottawa and Edmonton on this issue. So what do we think of that? Because that's clearly not what she was saying a month ago. But she is saying it now.

And I guess what matters is what you say now and things like this. Bruce? Well, you know, it's funny because we've been talking about this schism in Alberta for a while, going back through Jason Kenney's time. And I understand that you're always a little bit sensitive when Eastern Canadians or Central Canadians talk about Alberta. You get letters. You don't like the letters. I get it.

I love letters. You get letters. You don't like the letters. I get it. But I love letters. I love I've sort of seen public opinion in that province for many years now saying, look, we may not like to hear this from the federal government. We may not trust somebody with the last name Trudeau to talk to us about what our energy sector should look like in the future. But we also do get that the world is changing and that the different kinds of energy that the world is going to use are changing as well. So we need a plan. And as long as conservatives provincially and to some and to considerable degree federally wanted to campaign on the basis of, but we don't really need a plan or his plan is awful and we're not going to bother to show you one.

The Conservatives have been on their back foot. So I think this is an important shift for Danielle Smith. I don't think that she would have come to it easily. I'm sure that it's going to be uncomfortable in her cabinet and her caucus. But it is the right thing to do for the people of her province, and it is probably the right thing to do to try to win more interest among those urban voters in particular in Alberta who are saying we can't just be against something that we know is important for us economically because we don't like Justin Trudeau or we don't like the phrase just transition. I don't like the phrase just transition. I think it's a it sounds like a soft landing when really what people are looking for is a let's rewire the economy to take advantage of the new opportunities that our skills and aptitudes are presenting. So I'm fascinated by

it. I think it's a good move by Premier Smith, and it'll be interesting to see how the conversation goes. Chantal? Well, it is quite a change from the Premier, who only a few weeks ago was predicting that Justin Trudeau would never come to the health care table or was at no interest in striking a deal on health care with the provinces, and has cast Just Transition, which, like Bruce, I dislike that label intensely. I think it's one of those bad ideas that probably sounded good in some government room at the time. But it's not a program to, as Premier Smith initially tried to cast it, a program to phase out the fossil fuel industry. It's a program to put in place some kind of a safety net for workers who may well be affected by a decline in demand for fossil fuels going forward, which is not a bold revelation.

It's basically what is being predicted left, right, and center. And when you consider that the oil sands, for one, are not the most economical or environmentally clean way to get oil, you have to think that expensive oil will decline before cheap oil does, basically. And what we have in Alberta is a lot of expensive oil and gas. So I think this comes from the realization by Daniel Swift that she didn't have a leg to stand on. In a few weeks, Minister Wilkinson, Natural Resources Minister, will unveil legislation

for the so-called just transition plan. And it will be mostly a package of carrots and no sticks. And then what does Daniel Smith say? I'm allergic to carrots, as all Albertans should rightly be. So I think somewhere, somehow it dawned on her government that maybe in this case, it would be a good idea to be associated with the carrots rather than look like you didn't like to eat them. And that would be the point of that meeting. Now, I think most Albertans, like Ontarians, like Quebecers, want governments to defend their interests, but also to get along. At some point, the vast majority of voters do not see how it helps anything

to just be at war with the other level of government. And that has been true even in Quebec, where people are even more inclined to look to the Quebec government to kind of balance out the federal government and whatever initiatives come from there. And I think Danielle Smith's overtures to Justin Trudeau are actually part of a larger shift in emphasis on her part. Go ahead, Bruce.

Yeah, I was intrigued when Chantal was making that point about governments getting along. I think that, you know, I noticed a quote in the story about this yesterday that Daniel Smith said, you know, people want us to work together and not look like we're politically sparring. And it reminded me of the fact that from my perspective, if you go back to Pierre Trudeau, the thing that I think got Pierre Trudeau into more trouble than anything else was the sense that he was always fighting with a variety of stakeholders, that he was a source of conflict and friction and tension to a degree that made people feel like this is

tiring. I'm not sure this is helping. I'm not sure we need this much stress and friction in the country. And, you know, maybe the most, I mean, he had a lot of debates that were fractious around the Constitution. But the NEP, the National Energy Program, was the granddaddy of friction causing initiatives from that government. And when you look back on it now, you could reasonably wonder if it had that been done differently, what would the last, what, how many years would that have been a lot of years, 40 years, 50 years, 40, 40, 40, 40 since the national energy broke with the politics of the country have been significantly different. I think the answer is probably yes. And so I do see this as being an opportunity for Justin Trudeau to

to kind of recalibrate I do think that Chantal's point about his caucus and cabinet and party they're going to have expectations but as long and so they're going to be watching this to see that there isn't more accommodation made to a kind of a climate denial instinct or you know that sort of thing the devil could be a little bit in the details but i think at the heart uh of what the federal government wants is they want emissions down they don't necessarily want to demonize fossil they don't want to demonize fossil fuels they don't really think of fossil fuels as a problem inherently.

They think of emissions as the problem that needs to be solved. And what I saw Daniel Smith saying was that's what we need to solve for. And I think that is the meeting ground for potentially for political adversaries. That's the whole carbon capture issue that she was talking about yesterday. It's part of that, but also yesterday, Imperial Oil announced a $750 million plan to produce renewable biodiesel that would help them offset emissions in their operations. That's real money put into a transition initiative, if you like, that's designed to get Imperial to a place where

its net emissions, she used that term, are more in line with the goals that have been set for Canada and for Alberta as well. So what we're looking at then, we've just got a couple of minutes left here, but is a real possibility, I don't want to overstatestate it but the suggestions out there these two get together and they talk about it try to find some common ground or where common ground may be possible it's a real opportunity for both of them right i mean she's on the verge of an election in what may uh in alberta and the numbers have not looked good for her. They could look, one assumes, better if there was some kind of acceptable deal there. And obviously the same goes for Trudeau. So this is a real opening here, the possibility of an opening.

And we've been let down on these kind of things before. But the possibility exists. the move made by Danielle Smith yesterday could actually open the door to some real positive possibilities. Last word from you, Chantal, on that. That's because we're taking Danielle Smith's overture on faith, right? Which we should. But we do not know which Danielle Smith is showing up, the one that wants to show Alberta, and she's standing up to Justin Trudeau to his face.

Or the one that actually wants to recast the relationship. Jury will be out on that until the meeting is over. There is one section of our agenda to convince Trudeau to push for more LNG development, which is not going to be happening. Why? Because if you want more LNG plants and projects and pipelines, et cetera, you're going to have to convince the government of Quebec and its voters and those in BC that this is where this is going. I don't think the liberals are going to be doing that. So it depends if Daniel Smith and Justin Trudeau are happy together to celebrate the half-full glass, or whether one or the other,

or both, call it half-empty. You have 30 seconds for a last word, Bruce. Well, I agree with Chantal that we'll see what happens. And if if Danielle Smith has become known for anything in the relatively short time that she's been in that office, I would say unpredictability. But that kind of describes it as though it's a positive. She has looked inconsistent and her posture of I'm here to do battle with Ottawa because Ottawa is the source of all evil for Albertans is a weird starting point to then create this conversation. I'm hopeful I take it on faith important sources of political division in the country. And I really do believe that politicians should try to figure it out so that it doesn't persist because it's good politics for it to persist.

We should solve it policy wise. And next week, we'll list the 50 Canadian politicians who've always shown consistency in their positions. Can we talk about the news media? It's a matter of degree here. Yes, I know. Exactly. All right, listen, Chantel in Montreal, Bruce in Ottawa, thanks for this as always.

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