The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Good Talk - Is Canadian Politics Becoming More Progressive?

Episode Date: November 12, 2021

Is Erin O'Toole trying to shift his party more to the centre?  Did local elections in Alberta and Quebec this month also signal a shift?  Lots of Good Talk to be found here with Chantal and Bruce.��

Are you ready for Good Talk? And hello there. Chantal Hébert is in Montreal. Bruce Anderson is in Ottawa. I'm Peter Mansbridge in Stratford, Ontario. Edition of Good Talk and you may be listening to it today. You may be listening to it today, you may be listening to it Saturday or Sunday because it plays throughout the weekend obviously on any podcast platform you've got but also at different times on Sirius XM Canada Talks channel 167. All right I want to start off, I know this has been kicking around for a little bit and we actually talked about it briefly last week and that's the decision on the shadow

cabinet by the conservative party and i like this topic because you know we always make fun of the actual cabinet when it's it's made that most of the people you hear announced into cabinet are never heard from again unless their ministry gets in some kind of serious trouble most of them are kind of incognito for the the following couple years the shadow cabinet gets even less coverage these are the the mps in the conservative party who are appointed to shadow a particular cabinet minister and with there's been much discussion this week of Pierre Palliev going back into the shadow finance portfolio and what that means or doesn't mean for the leadership of Aaron O'Toole, what the whole shadow cabinet means for the leadership of Aaron O'Toole.

So this is our opportunity to actually talk about the shadow cabinet because it may not get talked about again in the next months and years. Who knows? Shadow cabinet actually means something for an opposition party. It doesn't mean any extra money, like cabinet ministers get paid extra money and they get a car allowance and all that. Shadow cabinet ministers, if you want to call them that, get nothing extra except prestige.

And that counts for something, especially at a time when the Conservatives are trying to find their way with the Canadian public. And so some of these people should be front and centre in the way the Conservatives are portrayed to the Canadian public. So when we look at this list, and we've heard everything this week from, you know, Aaron O'Toole has abandoned all those who were on the wrong side, at least for him, of the vaccine debate, to this is a real red Tory shadow cabinet. That's been one criticism, which up until the last little while is perhaps the worst thing you could ever say about a conservative shadow cabinet since the days of joe clark and brian mulrooney red toryism is not something they like to hear about so let's try and

analyze what we've actually witnessed in terms of the parade of shadow cabinet ministers who were put into their positions by Aaron O'Toole in the last week. What do we make of it? What does it mean? And how is it likely to play out? Chantal. Well, Aaron O'Toole is a leader on probation, whether he would admit it or not. At some point, there will be a vote on his leadership and it will need to be a strong vote. And he will also need to keep caucus on side as MPs have given themselves the power to have a vote to house them and replace him with an interim leader. So first point, which I found interesting, is he's actually managed to craft a shadow cabinet that is larger than the actual cabinet.

There are more MPs that will be critics of ministers than there are ministers. And he's added another layer to that by appointing deputy critics. So in total, he's probably given titles to about 80 of his MPs, which leaves about 40 offside. And that probably reflects his impression that those 80 MPs would likely back him in a leadership vote, at least in the near future or going forward, and that he can have the malcontents sit out his shadow cabinet. Now, he has left malcontents that are significant sitting on the benches, and he's used, I think, in part, the vaccine issue to say, I'm not going to be appointing people who have had views about vaccines that go against science or go against

the party's policy and go against science. I'm thinking Leslie Lewis, who ran for the leadership, who is seen as one of the flag bearers, main flag bearers of the social conservatives within that caucus, and who said parents who wanted to have their kids vaccinated, if and when we get vaccines for the 5 to 12 years old, were using their kids as human shields. Marilyn Gladue, who started this famous civil liberties caucus, and who apologized this week for spreading misinformation about COVID-19, a number of people like that. I'm not sure that those choices reflect a tilt towards red Toryism as much as a balance for one. I don't see Pierre Poilievre's appointment at finance as a sign of red Toryism, frankly.

But I do see it as a preventive measure. This is someone that if you're Aaron O'Toole, you want to keep inside your tent and not outside the tent. And you go down the list. If you're going to start making your shadow cabinets on the basis of who's not a red Tory, you're probably going to have to exclude every Quebec MP, because by and large, to a man and a woman, they are more likely to be red Tories than anything else. So an interesting balance, but I think a clear message there that he's going to try to keep caucus going and his leadership going on his own latest terms, which are closer to the center than when he campaigned for the leadership. Bruce? I thought it was an interesting selection.

I thought it was a little bit clever. I thought it was a little bit gutsy. I thought it was a little bit evidence of kind of a sound management approach. And when I say a little bit, I think it's better than it might have been anticipated to be. But it lacked a kind of a breakthrough orientation. It was more, I think, a balance of managing the downsides for Aaron O'Toole of

internal party dynamics than it was saying, I'm going to put my leadership to risk by putting my complete stamp on what kind of a party I think we should be. And I'll give you some examples that sort of relate to that. First of all, I think it was clever for him and sound management for him to put some McKay supporters in his shadow cabinet. I think it was smart for him, a little bit gutsy probably internally, to give Michael Chong the foreign affairs shadow portfolio, who I think to, you know,

to people outside the Conservative Party has always seemed like an interesting and effective politician, but to people inside the Conservative Party has seemed a bit out of place, I think, in the modern Conservative Party anyway, would have been more comfortable, I think, in an earlier version of the Conservative Party. I think it was gutsy and smart for him to exclude the anti-vaccine voices. And I know they're not complete anti-vaccine voices, but they are effectively the voices within his party who raised doubts about vaccines. So Mark Strahl and Marilyn Gladue being out, those were really smart choices.

And alongside that, leaving out Lesley Lewis, I think was gutsy and smart. But there will be people who will say, was it really smart? And this is, I think, the balance question, right? Did he completely defuse the other power sources that were developing within his caucus, or did he only partially defuse them? I don't think we all know the answer to that. Putting Pierre Pelliev back into the finance critics role, gutsy, and we'll see if it's smart. Gutsy because it is hugging somebody who has been the biggest apparent threat to your leadership. Whether it's smart or not depends on whether or not you kind of go with the view that I

read from one respected columnist today who said, you know, an effective performer in the house. And I think that that's true, but it's also kind of the fool's gold of politics these days. It doesn't really matter to be an effective performer in the house unless you're an effective performer outside the house with people who aren't playing the game of house politics, but are actually interested in what you have to say. And so for Pierre Polyev, who has been running videos about the Bank of Canada's bond buying program, his videos are effective in the sense that he's kind of jumping around and arm waving and his use of language is compelling and it's clickbaity, but

I don't think it created any uplift for the Conservatives. And I think the question with Pierre Paulyab is, can his tools as a communicator, as a politician, be deployed by Aaron O'Toole and him in a more effective way to serve the party's interests as they approach the next election? And I think that he is potentially one of those people who could be a much more effective performer, not in the house, but outside the house. But I don't know that he's ever shown that he has that aptitude. There were other smaller changes that had, I think, good management on them, but also with a question mark. Michelle Rempel-Garner from health to natural resources. I think that if I were her, I would not want to be the shadow critic for health. Every time I get up and ask something, I would be reminded of the things that I said about

vaccines and the pandemic. So putting her in resources is better than that however with and this is the last point i'll make within the resources sector there's a big change going on the biggest oil companies in canada are embracing net zero targets they are not arguing against carbon pricing they are looking for ideas that will help transform those companies, not for a voice from the opposition benches that say all liberal climate policies are bad. It's all an attack on Alberta. And that is the kind of vitriol that she seems in the past to be most comfortable with. Now, if I'm her, I'm thinking this is an opportunity for me to turn

the page and to represent some ideas that really do go to the heart of, as I see it anyway, the economic interests of Albertans, which is how will this economy transform itself over the next 20, 30 years? And I think the Conservatives would be well advised to get on that page, and she can be quite an effective spokesperson when she points herself and the party points her in the direction that's strategic for them. Okay. I want to tell you a couple of points. Let's go to best case scenario for Aaron O'Toole. Pierre Poiliev and Michel Rempel, who are both popular in caucus in different ways, do a kind of Nixon to China exercise and contribute to bringing caucus and eventually the party on side with policies that are less designed to help the party's fundraising and

more designed to help voters take them as a serious alternative on issues like climate change, natural resources, and finances. You can't set aside the background against which this shadow cabinet was announced. The Léger poll this week showed, you know, usually you look at the first few polls after an election, not because it tells you much of anything about the next election, but about whether there's a honeymoon for the winner. And to no surprise, there is not a big honeymoon period for Justin Trudeau. Third term governments do not routinely get that. But it does show that there is a hell of a lot

of buyer's remorse among conservative voters, where, and this poll shows the conservatives down from election day eight points. Now, that's not within the margin of error. Interestingly, the liberals go up two and the NDP go up four. But the People's Party, Maxime Bernier's party, does not benefit from that drop. So these are people who have just said, I voted for Aaron O'Toole and this is what I get. And that's that. And they will need to be won back even before you win back anyone else.

Yeah, we're seeing the same drop, by the way, in our polling. Yeah, well, and you see it in anecdotal evidence. People who are actually telling you that they're not sorry the party they voted for did not win. And that, beyond caucus politics and beyond making yourself happy by going after Justin Trudeau, that does mean that the Conservative Party really needs the smart people in caucus who were appointed to that shadow cabinet. There were quite a few of them to kind of shake their heads and say, we need to move forward. Michael Chung, by the way, was reconducted in the Foreign Affairs Critic Post, and has done well in that post and has managed to make the Conservatives look like a serious party on foreign affairs.

So good decision to reappoint him. People don't pay a lot of attention to these things outside Quebec. But two points. Reappointing Alain Reyes, who used to be Andrew Scheer's Quebec lieutenant, as Quebec lieutenant. Overdue move. He should never have been moved out of that position. He probably lined up the best team of candidates for the Conservative Party in decades when he was the Quebec lieutenant for Andrew Scheer. And he was replaced because Richard Martel, who was appointed and supported O'Toole for the leadership. And the

other point is someone from your area, John Nater, is now the critic for Heritage. That's right. He's got a lot of cultural landmarks in his writing. But big question mark. This is the issues surrounding Heritage play no more loudly than in Quebec. And the question is, does he speak French? And does he speak serviceable enough French to make an impression? Because the C-10 debate over the new Broadcasting Act probably cost the Liberals some votes outside Quebec, but in Quebec, it was a big vote winner. Right. Okay.

I don't know the answer to the question on his ability to speak French or not. I do know that he's very well liked in this riding, which is a pretty heavily conservative, long-time conservative writing. But he's well-liked and well-respected by people on different sides of the political fence here. It is going to be interesting. You're right, this writing has things like the Stratford Festival, which is a big buyer from the heritage department, if you want to use that term. But there's a lot more to culture and heritage in Canada than the Stratford Festival.

So it'll be interesting to see how he does in that role. You're quite right. Let me, I was, you know, we heard somebody's bell going off a lot. I know it wasn't mine. Mine goes off a lot, but it doesn't sound like that. But it hasn't gone off for a few minutes, so hopefully whatever that problem was has been corrected. Let me just leave this topic on the shadow cabinet with this question.

I find all the comments you've both made, you know, fascinating and give a real um context to the decisions that were made but what is the bottom line was this a shadow cabinet that was that was picked to protect the leadership of aaron o'toole or was this a cat was this a shadow cabinet that was picked to start to move the needle a bit on where the Conservative Party of 2021-22 actually sits on the spectrum? Are they trying to move it closer to the centre with these appointments or not? Or was it strictly something to try and protect Erin O'Toole? And please don't give me a little bit of both.

It's impossible not to give me a little bit of both. It's impossible not to give you a little bit of both. Well, which was the more dominant of the two? Counterintuitively, I would say it's about moving the party forward. You cannot protect Aaron O'Toole's leadership unless you fix those eight point drops in the polls for the Conservatives post-election. And you're not going to be doing that by being aggressive and playing to the base in question period. So you can't, if he were totally embattled, the bad thing, what Bruce rightly points was avoided, he would have appointed everyone that is kind of a champion of positions he

doesn't want to defend to some role to keep them quiet. And so that message that he's keeping all those people outside of his shadow cabinet in the larger sense of the word is not just a message to caucus, it's a message to voters, and it is meant to say something. Some have said he's trying to run the social conservatives out of caucus. Lesley Lewis, Mark Strahl was not reappointed in the shadow cabinet to name two. I don't think that that's the real point. I think the real point was that there is an intersection between people who are social conservatives and who often are the vaccine reluctant or the disclosing your status reluctant MPs rather than a deliberate move to say I'm showing the door to the social conservatives. Bruce, I know you don't like the both answer, but I don't mind the both answer, but one must be more dominant than the other. I'm guessing. No, actually,

I think that's the problem with it. In my view, if I, if I were advising him, I would say it's a little bit like going to the casino and betting on the black and the red. You're not going to come out ahead necessarily. You're going to end up wondering whether you should have made a choice. And it may have been, from his standpoint, the only way to get through the next six months. I happen to think he's in real trouble. I happen to think that the simmering factions within his caucus and party might well eat his leadership before easter so he may have he would know more of those facts uh obviously than we would and on the basis of his knowledge he might have decided that the best thing to do was bet on

red and black but even from an outsider standpoint i think that if chantantal's right, that's the right bet. The right bet for him is to try to move the party forward because you'd rather lose on the basis of having tried to do that than lose on the basis of not picking a lane, not picking a color, not making a call. And I kind of feel like the Polyev appointment is the marquee for it's both. If Pierre Polyev becomes a more effective advocate for Aaron O'Toole's agenda, which should be the role that he plays, then it will turn out to have been a good move overall for Aaron O'Toole and move the party forward. If all he's really done is ended up giving more profile and legitimacy and prestige, to use your term, Peter, to the person who is the most visible alternative to him, then it will turn out to have been a bad bet. The people that I talk

to in the Conservative Party say the reason if Aaron O'Toole survives this next six months or a year, it will be because there is no evident alternative, not because people have decided that he could make, but he left some degree of ambition behind in making those choices in terms of setting a different direction for his party. I'm not sure how he could have not done what he did with Pierre Poiliev. And as much as when he did replace him as finance critic, Pierre Poiliev continued to act as the finance critic from the sidelines and completely overshadowed Alphast, who was his successor, to the point that if you ask people who are watching this with interest from the outside, some may be surprised to learn that Pierre Poiliev was actually not the finance critic the entire time. So if you're going to have him crafting the party's fiscal and economic policy on Twitter while the party is trying to find a direction that possibly

makes more sense and does not lay global inflation at the doorstep of the Canadian prime minister, for instance, and does not diminish the party's credibility, you probably need to, one, bring him inside the tent, and two, possibly convince an MP who is intelligent and hardworking that it would be in his own best interest to come across as someone who is serious enough to serve as minister of finance in a Canadian government. Can I just add one last thing, Peter? I don't know if you want to go on, but I think that's right. And I'm glad you raised the point about Ed Fast and Pierre Poliev

because the other thing that occurs to me about Aaron O'Toole is he suffered a lot of criticism after the election campaign about the fact that during the election campaign, he never really gave much oxygen to his candidates and the leading figures in his party. And the thing that felt missing to me from the announcement of his shadow cabinet is an explanation of why he made some of the choices, what the direction is that he was carving out for his party. And maybe also a little bit about who these people are so that the folks who don't know them could hear him say, I love Pierre Pelliet. Here's why I think he's so

good in this role. Here's why it's so important to have his voice. Now, maybe he did some of that and I didn't catch it. But it felt to me like an important shift in the way in which Aaron O'Toole had approached leadership politics relative to his supporting cast, if you like. And maybe that was a bit of a missed opportunity to extol the virtues of the choices that he was making and the individuals themselves. Last point before we take a break on this. If the question I get asked, perhaps more than anybody else, by just, you know, the so-called person on the street, is where's Peter McKay in all this? Now, I've, you know, I've been out of the country

for most of the last month. Is Peter McKay either a player, you know, in front, out front, or in the background at all on any of this right now in terms of direction of the party direction of the leadership i don't hear it um i don't hear it either and i don't see you know i when you talk about conservatives in quebec you never hear that the uh always only peter m McKay were the

leader, it would be so much more interesting. In the way that you would hear about Paul Martin, for instance, at a certain point in time, or Jean Chagay in the time of Kim Campbell, that's not happening. But if I can just say, out of having covered Peter McKay as a leadership candidate twice and as a federal leader and as a federal minister, he has never struck me as the kind. He's got many political qualities. He's a top-notch, you know, presenter. He communicates well, but I have not found him to be very fascinated by ideas and directions for the party. And I would venture that if it came to a rematch with Peter McKay versus Pierre Poilier, for

instance, I would probably, if I were McKay, take a pass on that because he, on the field of debate and ideas, he'd probably get beaten. His references are also out of date after almost a decade out of politics. Things have changed quite a bit, not only federally, but provincially and at the municipal level. And we saw some of that in Montreal over the past week with Denis Coderre being rejected. It does not take long for a politician who is out of the game to become past his due date and not able to make a return to a scene. Remember John Turner?

I remember because I remember sitting on this campaign bus for the leadership. And I remember him looking at that bus, which featured all kinds of parliamentary journalists, but a lot figure it out because he had left an old boys club and came back to a very much more gender mixed mix of parliamentary journalists. as party leader, because the way that John Turner had been doing business as a minister with the press gallery, you know, and the boys and all of this era, and the way that you were supposed to interact in that newer era was a difficult transition. And these are things that happen when you leave, and it doesn't take, you know, decades and decades to happen when you leave and it doesn't take you know decades and decades to happen to you and you're right about that it can happen almost overnight and it uh it really did for Turner I mean let's face it he you know he left in 75 76 he was back in in 84 it's yeah that's not a huge period of time and yet everything had changed and uh and he was confronted with it immediately and he didn't handle it well.

Okay, we're going to take a quick break. And then I want to pick up on something you just said as we shift topics. Back in a moment. Looking for a way to zhush up your dinner options? With 21 flavorful recipes every week, Chef's Plate ensures dinner time will never be boring. Our menu includes easy and quick 50-minute meals and favorite classics, including vegetarian options and more. dinner time will never be boring. Our menu includes easy and quick 50-minute meals and

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Bruce is in Ottawa. Chantel, you just mentioned Denny Coderre, and I don't want to get into the Denny Coderre story, but I do want to get into this whole sense of local elections because they happen in a number of different parts of the country. Quebec and Alberta, two of the ones that got a lot of attention in this. And we talked about it a little bit about a month or so ago in terms of the Quebec local elections. And there were a lot of acclamations because people weren't running. And we got into that discussion about what all that meant. Well, now they've actually happened.

And some of the results, you've been going through them, Chantal, and some of the results are interesting in terms of talk about a shift in the way voters are looking at candidates and gender and everything in terms of the people they've ended up picking. You're seeing a shift there. Tell us about it. Big shift. You have to know that in Quebec, as in Alberta, the major cities, and I don't just mean in the case of Quebec, Montreal and Quebec, Gatineau, Longueuil, Laval, incumbents, with the exception of Montreal, were not running again, as was the case in Edmonton and Calgary.

And what we have witnessed is really a generational change in all those big cities. I'll give you just a couple of numbers that do show that. Quebec's top 10 major cities, five of them, half of them, are now going to be run by female mayors, including Montreal and Longueuil, which are fair-sized cities. If you looked at the makeup of the people who were elected who are not mayor, you would find that there is a lot more diversity in the results of the election. That is particularly striking in Alberta, Edmonton, and Calgary in particular. Younger mayors, the mayor of Longueuil is 29 years old. So, in one place, Chapay, which is not a major city, the 21-year-old is now the mayor, a young woman. But what seems to link

these results in both provinces is that these are mayors whose narrative gives a much larger space to the issue of climate and climate-driven policies to an extent that we haven't seen before. It goes beyond promising more parking spaces or no raise in municipal taxes. The new mayor of Calgary, Gioti Gondek, used her first move in office to proclaim a climate emergency. And when you look at that picture in both places, what you see are mayors in major cities where there are lots of voters whose values, by and large, seem closer and more progressive than those of the governments

of the provinces that they sit in. And I think that's significant for Justin Trudeau, but also for the NDP in the sense that it's another way that voters in provinces that will or would elect more conservative governments in Quebec. The Coalition Avenir Québec of François Legault is way ahead in the polls with an election coming in September. But that there is this pool of voters, of progressive voters, who probably find it easier to see themselves in the kind of values and branding of the federal liberals and the federal NDP than in anything that is conservative,

including the mild conservatism of the Quebec government. I don't want to put you on the spot, but did you get a sense of turnout when you were doing that look around? Yeah, and turnout is low. The combination, I think, of the pandemic, which is still in play, and the federal election. I mean, those signs came up for the municipal votes just as the signs for the federal election came down. So turnout, I think, in both places is at best 40% and below. Yeah, I mean, municipal elections don't usually gather great turnout numbers.

I mean, 40% would be considered a pretty good turnout number in many parts of the country. Montreal is below that as far as I know. Despite a very competitive race because it was the battle of Valérie Plante with Denis Coderre trying to make a comeback. I'll just say one word about Denis Coderre, a well-known person, he's been a federal

cabinet minister, been on the scene for decades. The first time I covered him running for something was in this riding, Laurier-Sainte-Marie against Gilles Decep in 1990 in a by-election after the Meech Lake Accord failed. So he's been running forever. And he was a former mayor of Montreal fairly recently, right? Yes, he lost. This was his comeback chance. But if I tried to imagine this morning Denis Coderre and the lineup of mayors that had been elected last Sunday in Quebec, and he would have stuck out as someone who came from another era, an old-style politician. That's how much we were talking about how politics changes and the

landscape changes over a very short time. Over those four years, the landscape has become less old-style politician-friendly at the municipal level in Quebec than when Denis Cotter was defeated four years ago for the first time. Bruce, are we kind of missing what's happening out there in terms of the voting public and the climate issue? Well, probably not, the three of us, no. But if the question is, is it a bigger issue than it has ever been, the answer is absolutely it is.

It's become an existential issue in a much more politically potent way among younger people, which isn't to say that older people aren't concerned about it. That's always been evident in our data, that older people are actually quite concerned about climate change. But for younger people, there's an impatience with the politics of incrementalism about climate change, which has kind of become more of a catalyst. But let me step back and just talk about two or three quick things,

Peter. I mean, I think it's really interesting, the point that Chantal made about progressive voters. We've been watching in the last while, last couple of years, a creeping upward of the number of people who self-identify as progressives. It's almost at 70% now. It was at 60% maybe five years ago. And that's meaningful in all levels of politics,

but it has definitely created this dynamic where the most obvious thing for the Liberal Party to do to win office again at the federal level is to look at those NDP votes rather than to try to take some from the Conservative Party. It's definitely the case that the issues that animate progressive voters, whether they're thinking NDP or they're thinking Liberal or maybe they're thinking Green, you know, they're easy to identify. Their income inequality, their climate change, their diversity and inclusion issues, their Indigenous relations issues. And so, you know, that's a real fact. And it is, I don't know if it's ever going to create a migration of those progressive

voters at the federal level towards one standard bearing party or not. But I do think it creates a shift in that direction at the local level. I think it's easier for people who decide to pay attention to local politics to look at a progressive politician and look at a conservative politician and say, I need less traffic and more green space. I need more services that support social needs in the community, those kinds of things. And so I think that's a meaningful trend that I would expect to see continue in the future.

When we ask people if they would ever run for office, 16% of Canadians say that they would, which is about 5 million people. When we say if you were picking where you would run, would it be locally, provincially or federally? And the top answer is locally. And I think for some people, that's just because it feels more accessible, but also it might feel more relevant to them. The things that matter that happen at the local government are directly impactful on their daily lives, whether it's transit or traffic or cost of living, or public services. So I think that's all to the good in the sense of that interest in local politics, and people might

feel differently about whether progressive is all to the good. but that happens to be my kind of leaning. So I think it's fine. But the other thing, the thing that kind of makes me unsettled these days is with the fragmentation of the news and information marketplace, the way that it is, I'm finding kind of shocking numbers of people who don't know some basic facts

about our political system. And at the risk of boring you, I want to give you a few numbers to react to. And I know Chantal is going to have something to say about some of these, and I'm looking forward to it. 40% of Canadians think that the NDP has formed a government at least once at the federal level, and that includes almost half of NDP voters. That's a pretty sizable number. A quarter of Canadians think the governor general, not the prime minister, picks the cabinet. And just as an aside, that's half of the Green Party voters who think that.

So those are two fairly, you know, interesting indications of a kind of a lack of basic knowledge of some of some things. Sorry, that's 26% who think the governor general sets the direction for the country and the prime minister must follow it. 29% think somebody other than the prime minister picks the cabinet. And that number is 48% among people under 30. So half of under 30 voters think somebody other than the prime minister, the queen, the governor general, the liberal caucus, pick the federal cabinet. And the last one is only 29% of women think that women make up 50% of the federal cabinet.

And that number is only 19% when we talk about women under 30. because of the importance that we all saw in the shift by Justin Trudeau in 2015, six years ago, to a 50-50 balance by gender in cabinet. And six years on, that's still the kind of the abiding thought. And six years on, 80% of women under 30 don't know that that's a thing, despite so much of the effort by federal ministers and others to communicate about that change. So why am I saying all of this? Because I kind of like some of the dynamics at local levels, but I'm really worried about the lack of a fact base that everybody kind of understands. And it's not that they need to all know those kinds of things about federal politics, but it sort of speaks to a larger question of, are we accumulating enough information and sharing it on a consistent basis so that we all have that kind of common understanding of what's at stake with the choices that we make?

I'm not sure that the fragmentation of the news business is responsible for those numbers. And I don't think that anyone has really polled about the political literacy 30 or 40 years ago, but I would suggest that the numbers would not be much better. And what that suggests, and that's not new, is that our school systems do not do a good job of providing students. And I don't mean once you get to university and you do like me, you pick political science and then basically I'm guessing you should be learning this stuff. But at the high school level, the teaching of political literacy is supposed to happen where in the curriculum? I'm not so sure. I see that there is mathematics and science and French and English and go down the list. But in what context is political literacy

taught? And should it not be taught at that level before kids leave high school so that you catch most of them because that ignorance i i watched uh there's there's a quebec he's a journalist comic uh he does social commentary and during the orange spring 10 years ago when the students uh students were in a massive uprising in Quebec over tuition fees and demonstrating every night, he interviewed people in a demonstration. A number of those that he showed did not know the name of the premier they were demonstrating against. We're talking university students here who are demonstrating against the government for 60 and 90 days, but they weren't sure if the prime minister was called Harper or the premier

was Chagat. They did not know. And that comes back again and again when there are demonstrations in Quebec. You discover that the people demonstrating have very little knowledge of what they're actually demonstrating against. And I think it goes to education and the need for political literacy to be taught. I agree with you about the education point. But just to be, well, at least just to make a point, I did start polling 37 years ago. Yes, but did you poll on them? I did ask those. No, not those questions, but I asked other questions

which helped me understand the level of literacy about things like the Gulf War or key cabinet ministers' names. And so in my experience, in my observation, there was never as much literacy as would be ideal. And it's not a criticism of the media that there isn't now. That wasn't my point. I just want to be really clear about that. It's like a combination of effects that people consume information that they want about the things that they're interested in.

And less of it seems to be about those kind of basic political facts. But that was always the case. I mean, if you bought a newspaper, you did not necessarily read the story about equalization. You maybe read the sports pages. People always made choices when they read newspapers. Yeah, but if you turned on this TV, there were only three channels for a good long period of time.

So the chances of you running into a conversation that had some basic facts that, you know, are better, was better in that kind of environment. And I'm not suggesting it's better that we go back to that. I'm just saying I don't know how we solve it. I think education is a part of it. But it's a challenge. Let me get in here for a minute. Yes, please. Let me give you an example.

It's not public policy or how Canadians perceive how their government operates or how Parliament operates. But it's kind of similar in a way. In 1994, I went over to Europe as part of the coverage of the 50th anniversary of D-Day. And we were shocked to realize, we did, you know, some surveys before we went over to try and get a sense of what Canadians understood about their military history. And, you know, 50 years is, you know, is a long time for some, not so long for many others, especially for the veterans, many of whom were still alive who were at that ceremony. But the majority of Canadians, young Canadians, had no idea that Canada was involved in the D-Day landings. They never heard of Juneau Beach. They didn't know anything about how

the Canadians went up through France and Belgium and the Netherlands and Germany were in Italy and Hong Kong and all that. They didn't know anything about it. And the direct link as to why they didn't know is because it wasn't being taught in schools. Right. That changed as a result of 94. And the expose really to many Canadians about the involvement, and they wanted to know more, and they wanted a better understanding

of the decisions that were made in Canada around military involvement, both in the First and Second World War. So it's kind of an example of how, you know, I think what we're discussing here, that there has to be, you know, sure, the media can handle its responsibility and should, and we're at a critical period in terms of the media. We've discussed this before. But the education system has to take some responsibility

in this lack of knowledge on some basic fundamental issues. I will give you this, though, Bruce, on the things you said in terms of understanding local. You know, all news is local and all that. We know the clichés. But when I'm asked by young journalism students, where should I go? I really want to cover Parliament Hill.

I want to get to Ottawa. And I tell them the reverse, actually. I say, no, you don't want to go to Ottawa. You want to go to some smaller community or a suburb in a city and cover City Hall, cover school boards, cover the kind of areas that directly involve people, that's what they care about. As you said, they care about their sewers, their roads, their property taxes, the school system in their community. Those really directly relate to how people feel. politics when you move if you choose to move to a a different level whether it's provincial or or federal you'll be in a much better way because you'll recognize how some of these things actually mean something to people and some of them really don't um anyway i i i'm fascinated by the the discussion we just had on you know on on on this level of literacy on the part of people. I think we all bear some responsibility on this,

and we can all perhaps do a better job. We're rapidly running out of time. We've got like two minutes left. We're going to take a final break. I want to come back and ask you whether the Biden-Trudeau relationship, which we will see unfold in the coming days when the two men meet also with the Mexican leader, whether that relationship, Biden-Trudeau, is anything like Trudeau-Obama. And what Canada is getting out of this relationship with Joe Biden.

So condense your thoughts. We're coming at you right after this. Our Black Product Sponsor is The Economist. If you don't already know, its expertise lies in making sense of the world's most important developments. It offers completely independent opinion and analysis, giving you a balanced global view of an issue instead of a biased or politically motivated opinion.

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Go to chefsplate.com, click the sign-up button, and apply the code THEBRIDGE. That's one word, THEBRIDGE, to get 50% off your first two boxes. We'll be back for a quick final word from Chantal Hébert in Montreal and Bruce Anderson in Ottawa. You're listening to Good Talk on The Bridge on SiriusXM, Channel 167 Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform. All right, Trudeau-Biden. Is Canada getting out of this relationship anything like

what they got out of the Trudeau-Obama relationship? Bruce, you first. It's too early to tell whether this is going to be, whether the divisions in the Democratic Party become a huge problem for certain parts of the Canadian economy, but that's the threat. That's the big risk. Obviously, it's better for us to be having a conversation with Joe Biden than with Donald Trump, who made absolutely abundantly clear

that he didn't care about any other country in the world, let alone the jobs or the economic interests of those countries. And Biden is not that guy. On the other hand, Biden is under a ton of pressure to make sure that the one and a half trillion dollars or whatever the ultimate number is that gets spent on infrastructure, on things that support, for example, electric vehicles, is money that supports American jobs. And that's the fight. And that's the conversation, I'm sure, that the Prime Minister wants to have with the President. And it's encouraging, I think, that the President wants to have a conversation with the heads of government in

Mexico and Canada. But we'll have to see how it turns out. I'm not sure that Justin Trudeau got much of anything from Barack Obama, except for great pictures and good feelings in the sense that by the time he became prime minister, Obama was in the lame duck period of his presidency and was soon gone. I think the measure I would use, and it's like Bruce, I think it's too early to tell, is more the Christian Clinton relationship, which was ongoing for a number of years and did yield some interesting results for both sides, I would argue.

I don't think we are anywhere close to that. I don't think that Joe Biden is in a position where he has as much room to maneuver as Bill Clinton used to have. But I do know that if, as I suspect, Canada stood down a bit in Washington and in the US after Donald Trump was gone, it's time to kind of line up the troops again because this is not the unicorn and rainbow era that some believed would come once Donald Trump was gone. The unicorn and rainbow era. I like that one. That's a good one.

Okay. That was great. Fascinating. 52 minutes and 30 seconds of good talk. That was fun. It was fun. Mostly it was fun. Which is why we do this.

Yes, it sure is. That's right. All right. Bruce Anderson in Ottawa. Chantelle Hebert in Montreal. I'm Peter Mansbridge in Stratford, Ontario on this day. You've been listening to Good Talk and we'll be back on the bridge

on Monday. Isaac Bogoch will be joining us on Monday. It's time for a COVID update and we'll have it with the good doctor. Talk to you soon.