The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Good Talk - Is It Just "all politics"?

Episode Date: May 26, 2023

You could be excused if you thought all the posturing this week from the two major parties was all "just politics".  But was it?  Chantal and Bruce have their say on that plus, who is Michael Sabia and why does he matter to so many people?  

Are you ready for good talk? And hello there, last Friday in May. I like saying those words because it just gives you a hint of where we're heading. It'll be June next week. Summer's on its way, we hope. Chantel's in Montreal. Bruce is in Ottawa. So everything's normal this week.

At least for us. Not sure it was too normal in Ottawa. It was a very strange... Oh no, Bruce isn't in Ottawa. He's in Scotland. Why do I keep saying that? It just looks like Ottawa in that background. It's bland.

It's pale. Stop insulting Ottawa. You make our living off it. Yeah, no, I know. It's not really. It's not Ottawa the city, which I love. And, you know, I grew up there. It's Ottawa the story can often be pale and bland. Anyway, this week, I was going through my mail this week following the Johnston report,

and there's a lot of mail, and most of it boils down to either you're in the Trudeau camp or you're in the Polyev camp. Some in the NDP, the Singh camp, and as Chantel mentioned, I think, the other day, he may have been the only one who acted like a statesman through this week. I assume that's debatable, but nevertheless, that's the point on the NDP. But crowded amongst these different letters was also a couple of letters from people who didn't have a particular view one way or the other on the outcome of the Johnson Report. But their conclusion was, after watching all of this in

Ottawa over the last few days, their conclusion was, it's all politics. It's just all politics. Now, I don't know how fair an assessment that is, but I would assume that a lot of people probably agree with that after having watched some of the news conferences and statements that came out during the week. Nobody's denying that this isn't a serious subject. I mean, one's country's security is obviously a very serious subject. But the way it was handled this week, not in terms of the report, but in terms of the reaction to the report, whether or not it was all politics.

So I want to have a little discussion around that and wonder what this week has said about politics in Canada as a result of what we've witnessed. Chantal, why don't you start for us? Well, I'm going to start with the various camps you talked about and say that, yes, I am in a drug-need-sting camp. Why? Because I think you can totally disagree, as he does, with the recommendation and still agree that it is part of your job as an opposition leader to be questioning that decision or questioning the government on the basis of facts and not on the basis of fabrications that you weave together from fragmented information,

which is fair game when you don't have access to the big picture, because you're basically going around in the dark trying to find your way. But that is not the case. There is now an overture to access to the full picture and a chance for opposition leaders to make up their own minds. I don't see how looking at the big picture would mean that you would necessarily endorse the notion that there shouldn't be a public inquiry. There are reasons for a public inquiry and a public airing of some sorts that go beyond the, it would only result in the same thing that you've already seen and that Mr. Johnston have seen. Sometimes going through the motions matters when you're trying to build trust and confidence.

And I think most people, and I'm not a fan of a public inquiry. I never was. But I think Mr. Johnston's report fell short on the airing and the going through the motions side of things. I think the camp that's got the least people in it actually is David Johnston's camp. Not because people all disagree with this recommendation or don't think that he did a thorough job. I read the report. It is being presented by some opposition parties as a can of white paint. That is not what I found. But Mr. Johnston has many qualities, but he's clearly not good at reading the political room.

And even people who think that he did a decent enough job believe that he's not the person to push this file forward. Now, what does it say about our politics? And I also agree with the many people who say this is all a political game. And I suspect that the way it is being played by both sides, but mostly by the opposition parties, because the government is in defense mode, means that people are just turning it off. Like, sorry, keep on doing whatever you're doing. And I would describe it as a serious subject that is being discussed by unserious people who happen to be the leaders of some of our national parties.

And that is a loss to them as much as it is a loss to Canadians in general. Bruce? Yeah, I definitely agree with a lot of what Chantal said, probably all of it. I don't know if I associate the ultimate solution with Jagmeet Singh necessarily, but that's not to say that I think his position is wrong.

I do think on balance that reasonable people could hold the view, obviously, which I disagree with, that it would be better to have a public inquiry than not. I understand the argument for it. I understand the way that Chantal framed it as well. And I agree with that, that there's a measure of a need for the public to be more fully informed, more fully engaged. And a public inquiry is one plausible way to do that. On balance, why I sort of end up not thinking that a public inquiry was that promising an idea is that what would it be about? Not so much the argument that David Johnson made about whether people could get real hard information out of it. But if it's a public inquiry that examines whether the Liberals were incompetent in their handling of foreign interference, my jury's in.

There has been a pretty significant level of incompetence in handling that issue. And so I don't know about the expense of time and energy and money to further explore that, but I can understand why political opponents of the government would want to do that. If the idea of a public inquiry is to examine whether the Liberals did things that were worse than incompetent, in other words, that were corrupt in their intent, then people who believe that that's plausible or happened, I can well understand why they're outraged at the idea that there wouldn't be a public inquiry. I don't happen to believe I've seen any evidence that suggests there was more of a corrupt set of behaviors rather than an incompetent or a less than competent set of

behaviors. And so on balance, I end up thinking that some other form of public transparency and continued dialogue is a better way, as David Johnson offered up. Now, I think it's possible that the government, in the way that it handled this or mishandled this, ended up getting to the right solution, but in, I don't know if it's the worst possible way, but not in a great way. I mean, I don't think on balance it was a good idea for David Johnson to be asked and assigned this responsibility. I think it was probably done in haste. It was probably done because there weren't an awful lot of other names on the table that looked like they were ready to handle something like this in the political firestorm in which it was. But on balance,

his appointment allowed too many questions to be raised about whether or not he was impartial enough. And I think that he did a reasonable job of trying to dispel those things. And it's unfortunate that his integrity is called into question. But it's on the government, ultimately, that they appointed him to that job and created problems for him and for the credibility of the solution that he put on the table. Last point for me on your question about politics. I think that the poor management skills at the center of the Trudeau government right now are becoming kind of chronic. I think that it means that the government is so often on the defensive, always kind of making one move at a time rather than thinking how the chess game ultimately of politics is supposed to end.

There's no real sense of what the purpose of the government is other than to win another election or put phrase somewhat differently just to beat Pierre Pelletier. And when governments as incumbents end up at that level of strategy, which is our existence is really to win another one or beat the other guy, that's usually not a good recipe for political success going forward. And so I think the government has some broader lessons to take from the poor management of this situation. I want to get back to this, the politics of it all in a moment. But first of all, just, I mean, in what you said about David Johnston, I mean, that was phase one. Phase two starts now and it's long. It's much longer than phase one. It goes right through until October and he's in charge. Should he reconsider that role for himself?

Yes. I think so. Absolutely. Absolutely. I don't believe for a second that David Johnston is not a man of integrity. But I do believe that there is the matter of trust and reality. And political reality means that he is now a hindrance to the exercise that he is wanting to lead. I'm not saying that's right, but I don't think you make it right by saying I'm going to stick to my guns and see this through. He does a disservice to the work that he's done to date. It also makes it sound like, you know, I've seen it, and it goes to what the opposition is trying to say about this

report. I've seen everything, and I'm the one that you need to trust until the bitter end of this exercise. And Mr. Johnston, I'm trying to be fair here, did propose some tests of his finding by saying two committees should look at this and the leaders of the opposition. And if they don't come to the same conclusion as I did, let them say so. OK, so what happens if Jagmeet Singh and if the others had said yes, the other two had come out and said, we've seen the same evidence, but we don't come to the same conclusion. What would Mr. Johnston do? In theory, he should at that point say, I'm going to leave and leave the rest to someone else. I think he should, having seen what happened this week

and how many of the good things and the interesting things in this report got drowned out by who he is, I think he should ask the government to find someone that has some measure of opposition support. I say some measure because I've come to think that even Stephen Harper wouldn't be acceptable to the conservatives at this point. But some measure of opposition support to do the second half of Mr. Johnson's mandate. I'm not even sure that the government has taught this through. Because if they had, they could have asked David Johnston when he presented these conclusions to him, we think that it would be a good idea for you to at the same time say, I'm going to hand this over. Clearly, that wasn't said. I think if it had been said, probably David Johnston would have said, fine, I'll do this and I'll do this gracefully. So that goes to Bruce's point. It's daily management of what was the prime minister

doing this week, beyond the usual prime ministerial things. He was campaigning in by-elections. He was campaigning in southwestern Ontario, where Oxford riding is up for grabs, and he was campaigning in Winnipeg. Basically, what that tells me is come June 19, if the liberals keep the seats that they have going in there and do a bit better in Oxford, a conservative writing, they're going to say or feel that they've been vindicated for their handling of this file, which I think is completely wrong. But that is the mindset that Parliament is in, not just the Liberals at this point.

Bruce, on David Johnson? Yeah, I definitely think that the right choice for Mr. Johnson, and maybe he will come to this observation, is not to have the good idea that he has put on the table, if people agree that it's a good idea, to think that it is, not have it become constantly freighted by questions about his role in it. And I think that's a similar imperative for the government. But I think the most important thing, I think if you're the government right now, like for him, if I was him, the last thing I would want to do is spend the next several months listening to the kind of things that I've had to listen to. He said about work that I'm doing that I'm trying to do in the service of the public. This is the point that Chantal was picking up on from what I said, too, which is probably the most important thing here is to have some idea of how this is going to end. Like, what does this look like?

What does success look like from the next round of activities, tactics in this whole file? And secondly, it raises so much the sense of urgency around what are we doing here what is the agenda what is the narrative why do you need this government what's the energy that the government is uh putting into from a policy standpoint that that it really wants canadians to pay attention to so don't just make a decision about the next phase of this. Make a decision about the next phase of this in the context of what are you trying to draw public attention to? Because otherwise, people are quite entitled, I think, reasonably entitled to say, most of this does look like just politics. And while it's almost legitimate and normal for opposition parties to just play

politics most of the time, I don't think it's great, but I do think it's kind of the way the world works. It doesn't work that way for governments. If governments look like that's all they're doing, that's how they get defeated. That's when people get tired of listening to them talk about their opponents without drawing attention to kind of higher order issues or agendas. So I think the Johnson question is one that should be relatively easy for the government to look at and should be easy for David Johnson to look at, but who knows whether that will happen. Of course, they will always do it a bit too late because they've been a bit behind the music since this parade started.

David Johnston's appointment two weeks before it was David Johnston's appointment would have come out much more proactively than whenever it was announced. And if they now say we're going to agree with David Johnston that we are going to part ways, it's going to look like they are caving to pressure from the opposition parties and the public again. But I still think, looking at this week, that Pierre Poiliev is Justin Trudeau's biggest asset so far.

Because this was an opportunity this week for Pierre Poiliev to look more prime ministerial than the prime minister. And he let that slip by taking shots at David Johnston. You know what? You know David Johnston. You're part of the bubble. But when I come out of my house and I talk to people, and I have had that experience all week, people say, the Johnston what? They don't have a clue what I'm his audience and must have made the liberals, who probably don't feel so good about all of this or shouldn't, probably made them feel that at least there was, you know, a silver lining here and a leader of the opposition who always wants to go. I mean, if the prime minister is not up to being prime ministerial enough, the job of the leader of the opposition is not to try to be less prime ministerial than the

not prime ministerial enough prime minister. I think of this, I agree with Chantal completely about that. I think that, you know, when I follow Pierre Poliev now, you guys probably remember CB radios. Remember CB radios when it was all the rage to have a CB radio in your car like truckers had in their trucks? And he makes me think of that person who's got two channels. And sometimes he turns on the channel where he really just wants to reach out to the other people who are doing the same thing as him thinking the same thoughts as him and just want to be uh given that kind of that rhetoric um and he's good at giving them that he's good on that channel he also can be quite good when he switches to the broader band um but this was an opportunity to be on the

broader band. This was a national platform issue where, like on housing, where I actually think he's been pretty effective. I'm not saying I think he's got great ideas on how to solve it, but I think he's doing quite well at talking about it. I don't think he's doing so well on the drugs and crime issue, but this was an opportunity for him to sound like a sensible, thoughtful person who is wading into a conversation where the government looked defensive and accident prone and potentially trying to hide things. And instead of presenting an alternative that people could say, I think he'd be a better manager of a situation like this. He just sounded like a guy that, you know, flipped to the wrong channel or you overheard the wrong channel that wasn't really for you. And over time, people just

get tired of that and they don't draw closer to it. So I think it was a big lost opportunity for Pierre Pauliet. All right. Well, you two aren't alone in that assessment, as we saw almost immediately after his first initial conference that were conservatives, and not just one of them, Fred Delory, who's the former campaign manager of the last conservative campaign, who were out saying exactly this,

had an opportunity to be a state when he didn't take it, and he should have taken it. But that returns me to my opening question, and I just want to close out this first segment on that, because I'm wondering if, you know, the times now that we live in basically call for this, or we've allowed the politicians to act this way, whether it's through social media or various different events of the last couple of years, that this is what we want somehow,

that the politicians, and not just the conservatives, but the liberals as well, are feeding into this feeling that seems to be out there that they want the political game. You know, as serious as an issue like this is, they like the back and forth. They like the jabbing at each other and the saying, at times, outrageous things that can't be borne out by the facts. I just wonder whether we're part of the problem here that has created the kind

of politics that we're witnessing, certainly from the main, the two major parties. Chantal. Okay. I tend to think there are two factors that go to making this more of a phenomenon. One of those, and I think I've talked about it before,

is collateral and unexpected damage from what was a sound political decision, i.e. to move to public financing of political parties. You and me finance parties now. The big banks, the big unions can't. That means I have to convince you to give me money, and you're not going to be looking for that money in your wallet

just because you're happy with me. I need to make you angry to get money from you. And parties did discover that that is how you get your base to fund you. David Johnston has been a financial gift to the conservatives this week because their base and look at that, this ski buddy and money has been pouring in. So that's first problem. And maybe we should rethink about per-vote subsidies, make parties less dependent on individual donations so that they don't feel the need to caricature each other

and using social media to do this. But the other one, and it's going to take some time to figure our way out of this, is that we are now in what I think minority rule by default. I don't think that this period that we're in now is an accident and we're going to be restored to normal with a two-party dominating a house where there is a majority. We've got five or six parties on the ballot. The odds of minority rule are much higher. What happens typically when it's minority rule, we have been used to the notion, and politicians have been too,

that you use the time, the short time that you may be in power, to basically run a permanent campaign so that you can win your majority, or the other guy uses the time so that he can be sitting in your place. That means politics all the time, 24-7. The arrangement between the NDP and the liberals has taken a bit of that out of the mix in the sense that this week, I don't think many of us spent a lot of time wondering whether we would be covering an election between now and July 1st, because it didn't look like the kind of issue Jagmeet Singh or the people who support him would want him to cause the government to fail. But nevertheless, a permanent campaign is not, not to quote Kim Campbell, it's not a great time to have serious discussions.

Yeah, that really worked for her, didn't it? You can think it and not say it. Yeah, exactly. Bruce? Chantal is right that the good intentions behind the change in the funding in the way that parties are funded has had some negative consequences and that those consequences get exaggerated and become more pernicious and persistent over time as you add in the ability to raise funds digitally instantly and so parties have become kind of addicted to the things that are necessary to raise money. And which takes me to my second point, sometimes we talk about the knowledge economy, and, you know, obviously, we've seen a big transformation of the economy with technology

at the heart of that. But within politics, um, there's a kind of an anger economy, uh, that is a subset of the knowledge economy, which is this, this notion that the algorithms, um, have proven time and time again, that the more that you can touch on things that make people anger, draw out their anger, enhance their anger. The more engagement you get, the more engagement you get, the more money you get, the more attention is drawn to what you're doing. And I don't know what the answer to that is, but I do know that it's a problem that didn't exist 20 years ago and that it looks more like a spiral rather than a blip.

And so I'm very, very worried about that. I also think that parties, the structural problem that parties tried to solve of too few people being involved when they went to a one member, one vote choice for leaders. And that sort of became the default setting for how democratic is a party um again uh you know a well-intentioned idea but with some negative longer-term consequences where the level of kind of attentiveness to the choices that are being made by parties uh either on a riding level or at a leadership level, isn't everything that you would want it to be. That's not an argument to go back to some sort of a backroom old boys network,

but it is probably an argument that the pendulum has swung a little bit too far in the other direction. And again, I think it would be great if we went through in the next 10 years a process of parties kind of rethinking what it takes to get back to some more fundamental truths about what they're in the business of doing and how to make choices for leaders. I think to some degree, the thing that's playing out in Alberta with the number of leaders that the UCP has had and the conservatives have had is a good case study. It's not the only one. But, yeah, no, there's some fundamental problems in the structure of our funding and our political systems and how our parties govern themselves. Not all of them, but most of them.

Okay. We're going to take a quick break and then we're going to shift topics. But that was a good discussion, one that gives us fodder for discussions in the future, too, on both those fronts. But I'm glad we had it. Okay, we're going to take a quick break, and we'll be back right after this. And welcome back. You're listening to Good Talk. It's the Friday episode of The Bridge for this week. Chantelle Hebert is in Montreal,

and Bruce Anderson is in Scotland this week. Okay, you're listening on Sirius XM Channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform or you are watching us on our YouTube channel wherever you're getting us we're glad you're with us. Can I mention a name here that I'm not sure how many of you know but this person is probably in one way or another over over the last 30 years, I guess, has had an impact on your life, whether he was working at the time in the private sector or the public sector.

He's been in both multiple times in senior positions that have probably affected your life, certainly have affected your life at different times. The name is Michael Sabia. While he's had many different jobs, all in very senior positions, his last job was as Deputy Minister of Finance. So he was the number two behind christian freeland and worked on the last budget uh he's now accepted an appointment as a head of hydro quebec and we'll get we'll get chantelle to explain why that is such a powerhouse in in that province but the the issue around michael sabia uh is an interesting one because he's had so much influence, because he's been so coveted by so many different branches of our economy, basically. The fact that he keeps moving around just only increases his impact.

It doesn't lessen it. So there's the one story about Michael Sabia. The second story is, you know, a lot of people were so happy to see him go into the finance department as deputy minister because they thought that would really, really add to the forward thinking of the finance department at a time that we're going through, obviously, various economic challenges. But he's gone from there now. What does that say for Christopher Freeland? What does that say about the immediate future? So, Bruce, why don't you start us on Michael Sabia?

Well, I met Michael Sabia a very, very long time ago, and I was trying to remember whether or not, I think what he was doing at the time was working on Parliament Hill, same time I was there, would have been in the late 70s. And I believe, I could be wrong, and I know you'll get letters that'll tell me if I am, I think he was working as an assistant to the defense minister at the time, whose name, if I remember correctly, and Chantal, maybe you will, Alan McKinnon, is that, anyway. Conservative, conservative defense minister. I remember him as one of the brightest.

I used the conservative defense minister for Joe Clark, right, so that would be 79, not for a long time, but that's why. I wasn't born. But I remember him well at the time as one of the smartest high energy individuals that I'd come across. And then we connected again when he was an assistant deputy minister at the Department of Finance. And his role there was to shepherd the development of the GST. And I did some work around that and found him to be a kind of a superstar in the public service, even at that rather young age and handling an incredibly complex file and a politically charged file as well. I've known him over the years when he was at CN and BCE. Always found him to be one of the one of the smartest, most thoughtful people. People may not know that his wife is Lester Pearson's granddaughter, Hillary Pearson. And so he's always kind of had a really good understanding of politics and public policy. And he's also had, obviously, jobs in business at the highest levels of some of the most important companies in our country. And with the Caisse

de Depot in Quebec, one of the most important enterprises in that province for decades. And so his track record of senior accomplishment is really, I think, unrivaled in the Canadian marketplace. I think he's been doing an important and influential job at finance. I think that if you sort of ask people who was the most important person in the civil service in the last few years, his name would be at or very near the top of the list of people in the civil service in the last few years, his name would be at or very near the top of the list of people in the know. What does it mean that he's leaving now? I mean, one thing that it means is confirmation that the business of Hydro-Quebec, like other electrical utilities, is some of the most important and interesting and dynamic business challenges or has some of the most important and interesting and dynamic business challenges or has some of the most important and interesting challenges that you can find in the corporate landscape. So in a way,

I'm not surprised that he found himself interested in that role. And I think good for Hydro-Québec that they have somebody with that kind of range of skills and depth of experience in him. So I think it's a loss for the government. I think it's a gain for Hydro-Québec, and I look forward to seeing what he does in that role. Chantal? Well, we were talking about politics and what it's doing to people. You have to think in this day and age that for someone to be someone that Justin Trudeau and Christia Freeland would really love, would have loved to keep, and someone that François

Legault wants to have leading his biggest signature policy is quite an accomplishment, that same person on both sides. I believe Michael Sabia played a critical role in Justin Trudeau's government and that he was Christia Freeland's deputy minister in a way that goes beyond the chart of who does what in a department. And I am convinced that she would have wanted to finish her current term as finance minister, assuming that she would have wanted to finish her current term as finance minister, assuming that she will be delivering at least one more budget with Michael Sabia at her side.

And whether that makes the job of finance minister even less attractive to Ms. Freeland is a possibility. It's certainly less fun if you think of your budget tracking that your key player is going to be playing in someone else's sandbox. In Quebec, and it's an appointment that was well received in the sense that Michael Sabia is everything that Bruce has said, but it also raised questions in the sense that Hydro-Québec is transitioning to a green economy in its own way. There are opportunities, but as the Premier keeps reminding Quebecers, suddenly we don't have enough hydropower. We need more dams or we need more something. And there are people who are saying, well, Michael Sabia is ultimately someone who is considered from the business side of this endeavor, as is François Legault, as is the minister in charge, Mr. Fitzgibbon of Hydro-Québec. And maybe there will be too much. It's going to become an echo chamber for let's build more dams.

Let's do this. Let's do that. As opposed to thinking it through, how do you go about increasing hydropower, even if it's clean power, in this day and age? So it will be interesting to see what kind of people Michael Sabia attracts around him, because at this point there is a chance that they will reinforce each other's ideas about full speed ahead to dams. And I would predict that it's going to be at least as hard to build new dams in Quebec as it would be to build new pipelines. And no amount of Quebec patriotism is going to make that easier. But it is an interesting appointment. What it does show also is the transformation of our premier since the last election is nothing short of amazing. We have now gotten rid of the plan for this tunnel between Quebec and the South Shore. That was a signature project.

Yesterday we've announced a new immigration policy, completely different from whatever Mr. Legault was saying when he was on the campaign trail. And now we have Michael Sabia coming back to run Hydro-Québec, which at least means that there will be someone strong at the head of Hydro-Québec to take on the strong minister who is in charge of Hydro-Québec. It will make for an interesting time. One kind of question mark, and people have raised this, there are people who know more about this area than I do, have pointed out that whatever Hydro-Québec is getting into, it's not a two-year thing.

It's a decade-long thing. And Michael Sabia is my age, which means that in 10 years, he's going to be closer to David Johnston's age. And so people are saying, well, we're going to have him maybe for three or four or five years. That's not long enough. It would have been better to have someone who's got a longer work timeline. I'll leave that to Michael Sabia to decide. But it is an argument that you could make, by the way, about François Legault, Mr. Fitzgibbon as minister, Christian Dubé as health minister, all of which leads me to say, guys, it's all nice to be here doing all this, but who's coming up? And when do they sit in those chairs that the baby boomers occupy because we're not going to live to see many of those projects

through as people who work. And that goes for all the people I named in Quebec politics. It's funny because we as baby boomers, we didn't wait until we were in our 60s tos to say hey we got to move up the ladder we were doing that in our 30s right um let me just uh just one last comment on on michael sabio that you may or may not want to um react to when you look at you know it used to be when you looked at somebody's resume or their cv you would say, well, I don't know. This guy, he's been in like five or six different jobs.

He obviously can't hold a job. Why would we want to hire him? people look at his resume and there are way more than five or six positions that he's held over the last, what, 30 or 40 years, both inside the public sector, outside the public sector, and in a variety of different companies. They look at it as experience. And it hasn't been that he's, or at least it appears, that he hasn't been looking for a job. Others have been looking for him.

So it was never a question of a race for who's going to get this job. It was they were begging Michael Sabe to join. That appears to be what's happened here on Hydro-Quebec. But it does point to this whole other issue, especially for the public sector. We've often heard people say you know the problem the problem with the the civil service if you wish is that there aren't enough people in it who have had the experience outside of it to bring to the fore and to use that experience to help make the public service run better now i know that runs counter to a lot

of people including my father who spent his whole life in the public service. But nevertheless, it's an interesting argument, and Sabia in some ways is a good exhibit of that in terms of the desire to have him as part of your team because of the incredible experience he's had. Quick comment from each of you on that? But he did start off in the public service, and I do believe it's useful for people to go in the public service,

go out, breathe some different air, and come back. I started off at Radio-Canada, and then I left to go to print. I'm always on Radio-Canada, but it pays off that I know what the culture of that place is, that I learned it early on. I have no desire to re-become, and I never wanted to come back. I wanted to do all kinds of other things, but it's been an asset. I think the reverse proposition, someone who's really good in business suddenly goes into the public service is a more difficult hill to climb. Because to be effective and to make your private sector experience pay off in the public sector, you first need to understand the public sector. And it is a learning curve. So me, I think the ideal track is Sabia's track. He was

a protege of Peltelier, who was clerk of the Privy Council, and spent a lot of time in the public service machinery before he ventured out to all those other jobs. Increasingly, it's possible to have job mobility like that, without people saying you're unstable and you can't keep a job. But I'm not sure that the public service is yet to come to the 21st century in that way of thinking. And of course, one of the problems going from the private sector into the public sector is cash, money, salary. So it's got to be interesting, right? Sure.

For you to want to do it. We don't. Years and years ago, to aspire to a career in the public service where you would end up being an assistant deputy minister, a deputy minister was considered to be prestigious and financially rewarding enough. The combination of income and a good pension system made those jobs competitive for the best talent that we could find in the country. And that's not true anymore. I do think that we need people in public service who believe in the virtues and value of public service. So we shouldn't just be looking for people who are coming for better pay if we decide to change the

pay structure. But increasingly, I think we also need people in the public sector who understand what happens in life outside the public sector, in the private sector, in civil society. And you see that writ large, or maybe more properly described as in the subtext of this conversation about the use of consultancies, there are some big gaps that accrue over time in the public sector, if they're not doing some of the kinds of things that businesses in particular are required to do to stay abreast of technology and so on and so forth. And so I see a widening gap there. And I hope that leadership takes it seriously in the next kind of cycle of leadership change at the federal level to look at this, because part of the problem that we've got is not just a structural pay and kind of flow of workers back and forth idea, is we did build in

some rules around accountability that further exacerbate that sense of you can't cross over one way or the other. And some of that for very legitimate reasons around lobbying, but there's more of it than is useful. And it's counterproductive ultimately in terms of the quality of the public service too. Okay, we're going to have to take our final break here. I should declare my conflict on Michael Sabia. Of all the different places he worked, the one place he worked, I think the shortest amount of time was at the monk school of global affairs and public policy at the university of toronto i think he was there for two months i drove him out right i drove him out yeah i said come on get out of here buddy

i was a distinguished fellow and still am am actually, at the Munk School. I don't know why I'm a distinguished fellow, but I am. And as I was told, I had a number of conversations when he was the director of the Munk School for that couple of months before he took off, I guess, to finance as a deputy minister. I think that's where he went from there. Okay, we'll take our final break. We'll be right back after this.

And welcome back. Final segment of Good Talk for this week. Chantelle's in Montreal. Bruce is in Scotland. Okay, we've, you know, here we are near the end of May. It's only going to be another couple of weeks, three weeks, I guess, before the parliamentarians take their summer break. And usually it's about this time of year we all say, man,

they need a summer break. We should keep in mind them you know we tend to think oh wow what a great job they get like two or three months off before they have to be back well actually sometimes that's the harder part of their job because they got to go back to their writings and answer to their constituents and for a lot of mps that can be a tough slog but how you know to circle back in a way to our opening conversation about the politics of all this, how desperately is this parliament in need of this break that they see just a couple of weeks away? Chantal? You're probably going to discover over the next three, four weeks how desperately you

probably will want them not to have that daily question period meeting because even before the break, the climate was becoming increasingly toxic to the point where you'd watch it and think, do I absolutely need to subject myself to this spectacle every day? I watched the speaker, who is normally pretty much on top of things, just, you know, with calm calls to order, threaten MPs repeatedly with naming them or cutting off their questions because they were not, they were saying things that were unparliamentarian or they were ignoring the speaker. And I think you're going to see more of that over the next few weeks, I think on both sides. I have rarely seen a relationship as acrimonious between an official opposition leader and a prime minister

as the one that I've been witnessing between Pierre Poiliev and Justin Trudeau. I find it hard to imagine that they can be in the same room together easily. I don't think that they can have back-channel chats because their relationship is so poisoned. And that basically is what makes the atmosphere the way it is. If you'd watched Question Period over the past few weeks, you would have noticed that the prime minister himself and the liberals are becoming a lot more verbally combative than you've ever seen them in the past since 2015. It's not a happy place.

And the bad blood between the prime minister and Pierre Poiliev kind of spreads over the entire house. I think, I don't know if they'll be happy to go, but I think many of us will be happy to see them go at the end of June. Bruce? Yeah, I think that the broader public, you know, probably has tuned out most of the stuff that Chantal's alluding to, and I agree with, is very toxic, unusually toxic for a thing that is most often toxic. And I think she puts her finger on something that I think is also unusual, which is that in the past, if you look at the relationship between opposition leader and prime minister, sometimes you'd have to scratch well under the surface,

but there usually is a filament of mutual respect underneath there somewhere. I don't see that with these two individuals. I definitely don't see either the prospect that it will become developed. Pierre Pauliev looks like he believes that the best thing that he ever, the best idea he ever had in politics was to say the worst possible things about Justin Trudeau and to live like he believes that every day. And that distinction for me is important because we've seen people in politics say the worst possible things about each other, but not actually to live like that. But I do think Pierre-Paul Liev probably, I don't know if he truly believes all of the things that he says about Justin Trudeau or the way in which he characterizes Justin Trudeau. I don't know whether he believes that. I don't know

what he really believes. But I know he kind of embodies that role uh pretty consistently or entirely consistently and i think that on the other side justin trudeau is um is i think generally somebody who who kind of likes most other people but i don't see that there's any prospect of him feeling any positive goodwill towards this particular opposition leader and And I would say that there probably was some for Stephen Harper and for Aaron O'Toole. And I have a question in my mind maybe about Andrew Scheer. I don't know the answer to that one. Okay. You know, one thing that I'll want to talk about at some point in the weeks ahead, because I haven't done enough research on it yet, but I just noticed that this week in watching Polyev and some of his news conferences and statements and speeches.

He never talks about the conservative government when he's talking about the future. It's always the Polyev government, and that's it. Here for PM. He rarely mentions the name of his party. And I'm just wondering what the strategic analysis of that might be. But as I said, I want to check some more on that. Okay, that's going to wrap us up for this day.

Appreciate your time, as always, Chantel and Bruce. And your time, our audience, who love Chantel Nation and Anderson Nation. Oh, please. They love them both. You wouldn't believe the number of letters I got this week on that. Okay. Thank you both. Okay.

And thank you to the audience. Thanks for listening. We'll talk again on Monday. Take care. Have a great weekend. Thank you.