The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Good Talk - Is it Treason or McCarthyism?

Episode Date: June 7, 2024

There are big issues for Bruce and Chantal to handle this week. There are good conversations on these three issues: whether certain unnamed Parliamentarians have been dealing with foreign actors and what should be done about it; an interest rate cut and whether it is a signal of a changing economic outlook; and, as Pierre Poilievre takes one of his MPs to the woodshed, he's getting great reviews for doing so.

Are you ready for Good Talk? And hello there, welcome to Friday, welcome to Good Talk right here on The Bridge on SiriusXM channel 167. I'm Peter Mansbridge, Chantelle Hebert, Bruce Anderson with me and we've got we've got a fair amount to talk about. So why don't we get started? The headlines today, as they have been for the last couple of days, are somewhat the same. And they all revolve around the story about MPs or Senators in Parliament, and whether or not some of them have been, I don't know, playing with the certain foreign actors. All kinds of terms are being thrown around.

You've got headlines today. You've got Wesley Wark, who is, you know, a respected security analyst, works out of the University of Toronto. Wesley Wark writing today, the headline on his piece in the Toronto Star, Canadian politicians who commit treason should go to jail. You got Andrew Phillips,

also in the Toronto Star. Canadian politicians stand accused of colluding with hostile foreign governments. We deserve to know which ones. You've got Dominic Leblanc from the government, the public safety minister, accusing the conservatives of theatrics as they push for names of MPs

in what is a concerning story that's out there. But I'm trying to decide where this is between, you know, talk of treason and treachery, or are we looking at or smelling a kind of whiff of McCarthyism through all this? Some context on this story for us. Chantal, why don't you start? So this is a report that comes from a committee made up of senators and representatives of all parties. So the NDP, the Bloc Québécois, every party and groups in the Senate have, among them, people who know what the names of the people who are alleged to have crossed lines on foreign interference by becoming themselves participants. In some cases, willingly, apparently, and in other cases, semi-willingly, i.e. either through willful blindness to what they were doing or maybe cluelessness. I don't know. I haven't seen the report. These MPs and senators are sworn to secrecy until the end of their lives. They saw

the raw reports that they produced. The prime minister then, with obviously Privy Council and National Security help, decides what makes it stand up in the House of Commons and using the shield of parliamentary privilege, revealing those names. And if they did reveal those names or they were found to reveal them to someone else who then used them, they would be liable to go to jail. So those are the terms of participation in that committee. But beyond that, and what the report says is a number, there is no number, but a few parliamentarians, which suggests that we're talking about both houses of parliament, have been willing or semi-willing participants in trying to interfere in the political directions of the country. China and India in particular are singled out. And there is also an inference that India and China made various attempts at the writing level or at the time of the past two conservative leadership battles to have some influence on the outcome.

And as we already know, there were suspicions that some foreign governments alleged to have committed offenses to the same level. There seem to be cases that clearly, clearly cross the line into what Mr. Wark is describing. But others are from the influence in another category. The conservatives in the House of Commons have taken as a position that all of the names should be made public. The government has answered this is not something that we can do. And the kind of evidence that we have makes that list not necessarily reliable. Why? Because it's got, you know, all those categories. Now, if you want to add complications to all of this, the government initially said, just let the RCMP handle it.

Ah, wait a minute, said the RCMP. Sure, we can handle criminal behavior, but we cannot act on information that we get from intelligence services in many instances because by the arrangements with our allies, CSIS will share information with us on the basis that it will not be public. So if you're the RCMP and you're looking into this and you find something via those death information, the intelligence gathering information, you may not be able to go any further because you can't use the evidence in court. The RCMP also rightly pointed out that the line on this should not be criminal behavior. It should be higher.

And this is not something that the police can resolve by we're charging these people, so deal with them. The suggestion is that party leaders have to take their responsibilities and decide for themselves how they are going to deal with whatever culprits. Which brings us to the last twist in this. Party leaders can and the prime minister obviously has knowledge of who is involved or whose names are on that list. If other party leaders want to have access to those names,

the entire list, not just a list of those in their own parties, they have to sign off, get security clearance, which is not a big issue, and then sign off to not reveal the information for the rest of their lives. Also, Jagmeet Singh has already agreed to that. The Bloc Québécois leader, Yves-François Blanchet, has said that he's now considering doing so. Pierre Poiliev, so far, has declined.

And we can talk about that once Bruce has had a shot at this. Okay, you've set the table for us. Bruce, take it away. Yeah, you know, this is an interesting issue, and it's quite natural, I think, for people who consume a surface-level coverage of it to be anxious about what's going on. But it isn't entirely rational for people to come to that conclusion if they dig into the details a little bit.

I'd just like to say a few things. First of all, I think it's a good thing. It's a better thing than not that we have a committee that operates in this way. It can be frustrating for people to say, well, this committee can meet and it can digest information and it can offer up a report, but it's limited in what it can tell us, and that's frustrating to me. On the other hand, if we didn't have a committee that was operating under those terms and conditions, we probably would be more

susceptible to the kind of foreign interference risk that was the reason for setting one of these up. And it does bear questioning whether Pierre Poliev, for example, would, given the fact that he hasn't agreed to take a security clearance and expose himself to this information, is he really saying that if he were prime minister, he wouldn't have a committee like this, or he would try to design a committee that didn't have these kind of protections in terms of how it operates? How would he approach the relationship with the other allies with whom we share this kind of information? Does he have a magic solution that's better than the one that is on offer? Those are all very, very legitimate questions to me. Second thing I want to say is that in all of the stories that you read about this, the word intelligence is thrown around as though it is

the same as fact. And we had this discussion, all of us, last year about this. Intelligence is not the same as fact. Intelligence might be fact, but it might also be rumor. It might be speculation. It might be an idea that somebody said to somebody else that hasn't properly been stress tested. Sometimes when there's smoke, there's fire, but sometimes when there's smoke, there's really just smoke. And I think that the more mature people involved in this issue know that. And so it is frustrating for me sometimes to see people who should know better in the commentary act to kind of light their hair on fire. So there's no possible rationale for all of this information not being in the public domain. Clearly, there is.

It doesn't take that much digging to understand the reasons why there are guardrails over how this information is used. Now, that's not to say that we shouldn't be concerned about whether there's treason. But if you ask me, does this feel more what's going on right now, more like theater or more like treason? It feels more like theater. And, you know, I do want to come back to this question of Pierre Poliev and his responsibility in this. He's been leader of the Conservative Party,

the leader of the official opposition for, I think it's just about 635 days. I think it probably takes about 10 days to finish the process of getting a security clearance. He's had plenty of time to do this, and he's chosen not to. And I think it's a very legitimate question why he's chosen not to. It feels as though it's not that he's too busy. It wouldn't take a lot of his time. If he's chosen not to, it's probably because he's reasonable to speculate. Maybe we should put this in the category of intelligence, smoke. But the speculation that one could come to is that he prefers to be able to do theater around this important issue. And I don't think that's right. And I, you know, if I were the

prime minister, which is just a scary thought, so I probably shouldn't frame it that way. But what I think the prime minister might do about this is just say, look, you should come and meet with me. I'll be in my office next week, the week after, the week after, the week after, the week after. You can just come into my office, get that security clearance done, and then let's talk through the redactions in this report. Let's hear what you have to say about what exactly we should count on as fact enough to put it in the public domain or not. What exactly you think about those guardrails that we have in place with our allies around the treatment of this kind of information? I think that's a very legitimate debate.

And in saying all of that, I'm not for a minute discounting the possibility that there is nefarious behavior, that there is risk to our democracy if we don't pay more attention to it. I think all of those things are true. But I see more evidence of theater this week than I have seen of treason, I guess is how I would put it. One of the problems with a story like this, and I can understand some of the security and intelligence arguments for not releasing names, certainly at this point, because it's not fact in many cases. But at the same time, because this much has leaked or has been put in the public domain,

there's kind of a tainting of everybody with the same brush, right? So you don't really know, although the impression is being left, and correct me if I'm wrong here or if I'm getting the wrong impression, the impression is being left because the conservatives are on the attack mode on this, that it's none of their people, that it's all liberals, or it's liberals and NDP, but it's not conservatives. Now, if only the people who are on that committee know the actual answer to that question, then I guess we've got to be very careful about assuming anything that's being said

or asked through the questions being thrown out by opposition members of the government. Peter, can I ask you a question on that? Sure. by opposition members of the government. But Peter, can I ask you a question on that? Sure. I think this is a really interesting point because I've seen, you know, Mr. Polyev asking questions about it, but I've also seen him pivot to other questions pretty quickly, right?

And I can't help but feel that if the only names that were in that original report were liberal names, do we really think that conservatives would be talking about anything other than this right now? I guess that's my question to you. As you think about that from a journalistic standpoint, wouldn't that make you wonder? A partial answer to this.

Early on in the week, as with the U.S. Commission report, the conservatives wanted to just whistle past this, not because they had so many bodies in the graveyard, which I believe they have some, but because they wanted to stay on the track of the cost of living issue that they believe pays off. They don't believe that outside of the bubble, Canadians engage to a very high degree on this issue. It is, why do we talk about liberals and conservatives? It is totally possible that there are conservatives in that list, former or actual, in the Senate or in the House of Commons. But those two parties, because if you are a foreign entity and you want to have influence, you're much more likely to look for it in the two parties that have governed the country forever than in the Bloc Québécois or the NDP. And that's where it stands. Mr. Poiliev's status, because I always see on Twitter that he's not

getting a security clearance because he could not. Let's be serious here. Mr. Poiliev is a Privy Council member because he was a minister. So he has already a high degree of security clearance. I don't think that's the issue. I think where he has so far declined has been because he likes the capacity to shoot at all that moves. And if he has knowledge, he will be more restricted in his capacity to shoot at everything. Suppose, I don't know this, you don't know this. Suppose that in there, there is a sitting cabinet minister.

And I have no indication that that is the case. But suppose that you're Pierre Poilier and you read the report and you see this. If you ever stand up as leader of the opposition and you ask, can the prime minister vouch for all of his cabinet ministers, Pierre Poiliev will be very, very close to the line where he can face criminal penalties because it will look like he's actually breaking confidence once he has knowledge. Now, let me explain to you why I totally believe that at week's end, the ball is still in Pierre Poiliev's court for the foreseeable future. For one, as the leader of the opposition and someone who is well ahead in the polls and could be governing Canada within a year or a year and a half, he should want to see for himself how deep this is in this parliament. the intelligence that is involved and see if there are discrepancies between the worst case scenarios

in some instances and the more innocuous ones. But also Mr. Poiliev, at some point, if he wins the next election, is going to have to craft a cabinet. He's going to have to decide who does what in his caucus. He should want to know and not be blind to whether there are clouds over some of his members. I'm not even saying he should not sign nomination papers. I'm not going there. But I don't think that this blindness, voluntary blindness, serves well someone who, in theory, is preparing to become prime minister. It's not a serious position.

I understand that it curtails some of its capacity to attack the government, but since the conservatives, by their own admission, want to stick to cost-of-living issues, Mr. Poitier can probably dispense with a few bullets that he can just shoot at will on the government on foreign interference in exchange for knowledge that would be really useful to someone who seriously aspires to be prime minister. I don't know where Mr. Jeuny will come to,

but I think he needs to know this. And the rationale for this is the Bloc Québécois leader, who is probably going to sign off on the secrecy issue because he wants to know where his caucus stands. And I think that's a responsible position. He needs to know it. And Canadians need to know what kind of prime minister he would be. We are closer to the date at which he would become prime minister than we are to the date that he became a leader of the conservative party so that clock is ticking

down and it you know it's maybe all in the game to spend that first year thinking i'm not going to curtail my ability to shoot at everything that moves so use your your your phrase, which, as always, I like. But we're now in a situation where it is reasonable for voters to say, look, you're 20 points or so ahead in the polls. We need to stress test the idea of you as prime minister. We need to know, would you do something different from the approach that's taken? Or do you just want to be able to cherry pick the flotsam and jetsam that is allowed out of a document like this for partisan political purposes? If he has a better approach, we should hear about it. Voters should hear about it. I don't think he will, because I think that at the end of the day, it's still better to be able to have a system that allows the collection of fact, rumor, speculation. And, you know, put it in a category called intelligence if you like, but then not to just dump it all out in the public domain as though no harm can come to it, including in our relationship with our most trusted allies.

I think those are questions that Mr. Polyev is well overdue in answering. I should point out that the Conservatives signed off on this process. It would not be happening. It took a while. It was complicated. There was a lot of debate. The notion of waiving parliamentary immunity was an issue not just for the Conservatives, but for a lot of parliamentarians. This is not the usual way that things work. And you're always wary of curtailing parliamentary privilege

and forcing MPs to not speak till the end of their lives. But they did sign off. And that's why they have representatives on the committee. And in both houses of parliament, the senator that was appointed, the senators appointed from the upper house, I believe, or not from the conservative caucus, but they participated willingly. I have, since Mr. Poiliev likes common sense question, I have been asking myself a common sense question.

It's not related to Pierre Poiliev, but knowing all that we know about the centralization of power in Parliament, how much confidential information do backbenchers actually have to trade off with foreign powers? This Parliament, the previous one, the ones we've covered since Brian Mulroney, who did give his MPs more leeway than those that came after him, Jacques Litsi and Stephen Harper, and now Justin Trudeau. There have been times, and even under Brian Mulroney, when cabinet ministers have called media, I have received those calls, to find out what the prime minister's office was thinking or doing with their department's files. And I'm sitting looking at this thinking, so in the routine course of a day, seriously, the caucus that takes place, the meetings on Wednesdays, do not involve the prime minister sharing state secrets with MPs. So how much do you actually have to trade? Is this based on the fact that you go and meet diplomats from foreign countries?

And if it is, well, can we get some sense of the basis upon which we conclude that there are trade-offs? Because I'm just curious. I don't know if it's been your experience, Peter. It has not been mine that we have a lot of MPs who have state secrets that could endanger national security in their knowledge base. But that's just me. No, I agree in terms of backbenchers. Cabinet ministers, maybe some parliamentary secretaries. How about senior bureaucrats and senior advisors?

Well, they would. They would know. Let me ask this as a kind of final question. Bruce, I know you want to make a point here, but maybe you can include an answer to this in there. Are we, you know, given the conditions that that committee operated under and the limitations of what they can say ever in their lives about what they saw, given the fact that the RCMP is going to say, we can't charge anybody because of where the information is coming from, is anything ever going to happen on this? I know it's the firestorm issue at the moment, certainly around certain elements of Parliament Hill, but will we ever know who these people were,

who these parliamentarians were, short of them stepping forward to a microphone saying, I'm one of those? But there doesn't seem to be any process. This story doesn't go anywhere because nobody's ever going to know. Yeah. Yeah, well, look, it isn't a perfect process from the standpoint of will people hear things coming out of a process like this

and feel like they've gotten enough transparency? I take that point. And that's why I think the proper debate ultimately is if the conservatives have or the liberals come up with a better idea for how to do this, then that should be the focus of the discussion. But for now, it is something that, to Chantal's point, the conservatives signed off on the liberals put in place, along with other measures to try to deal with this conundrum of how do you how do you have intelligence services, both ours and our allies that will share information that might be helpful, that might be reliable or that for which the reliability be some anywhere from 10 percent to 100 percent so that you can sift through that information and come to some reasonable points of departure not necessarily conclusions in our system which does have to have a

you know more than i think parliamentarians looking at this kind of information and saying let's put the names out and see if anything bad happens. Maybe something good will happen, but that's the end of our responsibility. I don't think that works. So I don't love where we're at in terms of a process. I understand the politics of it become really difficult for any incumbent government. But until somebody comes along and says, here's a better way to do this, I think it's the best thing that we probably can have. And I would add one last point, which is that if you're the conservatives, you need to have a point of view about our national security that extends beyond this. You need to be approaching the world as we see it today. And I

think the D-Day ceremonies yesterday really reminded us all of how fragile the world is right now, how important our alliances are, how we're probably all, you know, all of the countries in the Western alliances are going to have to spend more on defense. If all of that is true, and maybe more particularly a conservative government should be thinking about that, then now is not the time to be just playing political games with the systems by which we share intelligence with our allies and share it with the public, because there have been, you know, comments, reasonable comments made by people on the government side saying, look, if you just put this information out into the marketplace, you could end up helping the people who are trying to interfere in our electoral system, in our democracy.

I think that's a valid concern as well. Last point, Chantal. We've all read John le Carré's book, so how about sting operations where you make someone look like that person is compromised, etc. Journalists, I'm sure you're one of those, read a lot of those books. And we have a lot of imagination, which is usually really useful. That being said, I do believe this is a teaching moment for members of parliament and senators. And the sense that I'm sure a lot of them are revisiting their exchanges or in some cases their notion that making deals to get people to show up at

their nomination meetings or otherwise could come with significant risks to their career prospects and if they come to the attention of the security services. But I also believe, again, that this is one more warning to parties to clean up their nomination process. And that speaks in particular to the liberals whose rules are particularly loose. Because you're not going to have an MP that is influencing or trying to influence on behalf of a foreign power until that MP is actually nominated as a candidate for the party. It starts often, not always, it starts there. If you're not going to clean up in this week, I think it was the Globe and Mail asked every party, would they be reconsidering or would they be changing their nomination process? And none

of them would commit to that. And everyone understands why, but it cannot forever remain the weakest spot to enter the Canadian political system for lobbies, including foreign players. All right. Good discussion. Let's move the topic on. But first, we'll take this break. Be back right after this. And welcome back. You're listening to Good Talk on the Bridge on SiriusXM, Channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform. Or, because it's Friday, you're watching us on our YouTube channel. I'm glad to have you along wherever you're following us.

Chantal mentioned a little while ago that the topic that conservatives wanted to focus on was cost of living, basically the economy. Remember James Carville in the, what was it, the 92 U.S. election for Bill Clinton? Kept having to remind people, including Clinton, it's the economy, stupid. It's not all this other stuff.

It's the economy. So we may or may not be at that moment. Again, I know that the people I talked to this week weren't talking about foreign agents running around the Senate or the House of Commons. They were talking about the expectations surrounding the interest rate cut and whether or not that was going to signal something for the future because as homeowners, in many cases young homeowners,

they're really worried about losing their homes. They have a mortgage. They negotiated back when, you know, in the good old days when the rate was like 2-point-something percent. Now they're looking at 6, maybe just under 6 now as a result of this quarter percentage drop the other day by the Bank of Canada. But where is it going to be in a couple of years when they renegotiate? And many people are renegotiating starting, I think, the end of next year.

So the question becomes then around the Bank of Canada's decision this week to drop a quarter of a percentage point. What does that say? What do we take away from that moment in terms of the overall strength of the Canadian economy right now? Is this, you know, it was only a quarter point. No guarantee there are going to be more in the near future. But what is it telling us and what should those,

the kind of people I talked to this week, and I'm sure you talked to some as well, who are faced with that dilemma of literally losing their home because they won't be able to afford a huge increase in their mortgage? Bruce, why don't you start us? You know, obviously it's welcome news for virtually everybody, I suppose, to see the first rate cut since the pandemic. And people are desperately hoping for more.

The impact that it's going to have, that rate cuts are going to have, remains to be seen as to whether or not we're in a higher for longer scenario. And I guess it'll be a U.S. decision shortly that we expect some more economic information out today. The European Central Bank made a rate cut yesterday, if I'm not mistaken. So if people do start to see some rate cutting that feels as though it's going to be persistent into the future, even if rates don't come down to where they were pre-pandemic, I think that is going to create more flexibility within the marketplace for people to arrive at solutions with their mortgage lenders that allow them to stay in their homes. I don't want to sound overly optimistic about this. I agree with your starting

point, Peter, which is there are a lot of people for whom there won't be a viable solution. And that has something to do with the frothiness of the housing market before the pandemic. And it also has to do with what I think is the economic factor that has a much bigger part to play in the political mood of our country and the political mood in the United States and other places, which is food prices. People talk about inflation. But I think if we strip away, what does inflation really come down to as a meaningful political issue? It is really about the bill when you push that grocery cart through the checkout at the grocery store right now. So people have a situation where

they have housing costs, either rent or mortgage, and those costs are higher than they used to be or longer than they perhaps expected if they're in a mortgage market situation. But they can't renegotiate those particularly. Most people can't. You they can't renegotiate those particularly. Most people can't. You certainly can't renegotiate your rent in most cases. And so then you go to the next kind of most important expenditure in the sense that you need shelter and then you need food.

And people are looking at inflation rates that are coming down. But if the food is still 20% more expensive or 25% more expensive than it was a couple of years ago, that problem isn't going away for people. What it's doing is crowding out all of the other things that they would normally imagine that they could do with their money, put a little bit money away to save for their children's education, take a vacation, those kinds of things. And so when we look at the success so far of Pierre Poliev as a politician, I think it has been so heavily oriented. Yes, there's fatigue with Justin

Trudeau, and he's been able to take advantage of that. But the biggest part of his success after that or alongside that has been his ability to stay very focused on this cost of living question. And whether he's talking about housing and how he's ability to stay very focused on this cost of living question. And whether he's talking about housing and how he's going to try to bring down the cost of that or bigger paychecks, all of that kind of stuff, that's really where the rubber hits the road in politics these days. And the rate cut won't make a material difference in the cost of groceries. So I don't think it's going to have a near-term impact on the political dynamic, even though it is obviously some welcome news. Chantal?

So on the mortgage front, for now and for the foreseeable future, the rate cuts are not enough to make people who had those variable rates and who took the hit feel a hell of a lot better about their mortgage payments. And that would take a while. And there are ongoing mortgage renewals where people, even with the rate cuts, are finding that they're signing up for twice the interest rate that they've been paying for three or four or five years with significant impact, which basically means, and I was talking to some senior conservatives who were making that point earlier this week, with significant impact, which basically means, and I was talking to some senior conservatives who were making that point earlier this week,

the liberals may hope that these rate cuts are going to change the channel positively for them, but the conservatives by and large are not worried about that because it takes too long for the long-term impact of those cuts to remedy what has happened over the past three or four years to mortgages and to house prices. On the food price issue, inflation is way down. But the problem is, and it will become more and more obvious if we have a change in government. There will be no change in grocery prices. Climate change is going to drive up food prices for the foreseeable future.

There is no way to get around that. Because the case of olive oil is really interesting. Why has the price of olive oil gone so far up? It's not because it's a trendy item and you should not buy olive oil unless you're someone who's rich. It's because of climate change. And the fact that the harvest has not been in any way, shape or form up to the levels that it used to be. And you can go down the list. Why are Quebec strawberries so much more expensive this year? Because A, B, C, et cetera. So to expect to not see climate change on the grocery bill basically forever is to live in a wonderland and no carbon tax will not bring down the price of groceries,

and taking away the carbon tax will not prevent groceries from going up because of, in particular, climate change. So I think on this, the conservatives have it right. The cost of living issue is going to be with them in the next campaign. You've ruined Bruce's day. Olive oil? Olive oil. Olive oil, I know.

Yes. He's a big olive oil guy. Let me take a guess. People still love a good Italian meal, though, and there's a couple of great Italian restaurants in Ottawa. There are. There are. Yes.

One that promotes books, the other promotes olive oil-based meals. Yes. Let me ask. Let me take a gamble here and ask you this question. You were made, well, you two are too young. But I can remember a time when his father was prime minister. And he got trapped one day about, I think it was, and this is a common thing that happens to other political

leaders as well, you know, like, do you have any idea what a quart of milk costs or whatever the thing was? And he had no idea, none. Couldn't even, you know, he couldn't estimate within a dollar of what that cost was. And he had no money in his pocket. He didn't pay for anything, all of that kind of stuff. My question is this. Here we are, whatever this is now, 40, 50 years later,

and this has been a dominant issue, cost of living and inflation and interest rates for the last few years since, as Bruce said, since the pandemic. Do you see this government or its senior ministers, including the prime minister, do you sense that they actually feel the pain that people are going through? I mean, some people are going through like real pain and fear of the future because of the situation. I'm trying to think of a prime minister that gave me the impression that he was feeling the pain, and for some reason my mind goes blank. They didn't come across that way.

What strikes me more is not whether this cabinet or this prime minister sounds like they don't have to renegotiate mortgages that they can't afford or do not go to the grocery store and wince when they see the total on the cash register. And I know this is from left field, but in the past, the NDP leader has been the person that has kind of been the person that looked like the go-to leader on those issues, the person who felt her pain. I'm thinking about Brad Ben, I'm thinking of Jack Layton. I don't get that feeling when I look at Jagmeet Singh. And I think that's part of the problem of the NDP these days. Oh, he tries hard and he talks the right rhetoric. It just doesn't come across as this is the guy who has the success at eating the NDP's lunch in many areas of the country.

Bruce? Yeah, look, I think that a lot of the MPs feel a certain pain associated with this, but it's more the pain of the conversations that they're having with their constituents and i think the ones that i talk to to an individual uh recognize how people are feeling that's not the same as uh with their incomes are they feeling the same food insecurity or anything like that i think your your question is it's kind of well put in that sense but um to the extent that the that the lives of ms do involve significant contact with constituents, I think most of them, if not all of them, have a feeling for what kind of pain exists in the marketplace. I don't know that the same is true for ministers or for a prime minister. Minister. I think the nature of their jobs sometimes gives them the luxury of not being exposed to that to the same degree. They spend their time more often in meetings with officials

talking about the underlying policy choices and maybe the broader political scenarios, but maybe don't feel as close to the heat that comes from the public on some of these issues. I also think that for incumbents, this is a particularly challenging moment because it's not really clear what the answers are. You've got incumbents in a bunch of countries kind of saying, we have a plan, it's working, you just have to wait it out. And that's just not a very satisfying political theme from the standpoint of the public. And it's not working very often for incumbents who try it. We don't really see any evidence that it's working for Rishi Sunak, who's trying to use it in the UK right now. There are probably some solutions

that need to be looked at and maybe acted upon, including how do we drive more competition into the marketplace where it feels to consumers as though prices are kind of stuck at too high a level because there aren't enough competitive choices. We talk about that a fair bit in Canada, but we maybe haven't taken as much action in that area. But even for a government to decide at this moment to do it, which is not an argument not to do it,

how long would it take before that would start to have an impact and whether that would change the political calculation? This is obviously something separate as well. You mentioned Sunak, and he's getting hammered today in the UK for having... Justifiably. Justifiably. Walked away early from the D-Day celebrations, you know, to do a television interview or something.

While his rival was on site. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Which actually makes it worse. Everything that he's... Seemingly everything that he's done so far in this campaign, which is just through you know almost two weeks now has has gone against him and on mostly self-inflicted errors he can't

be blamed for the fact that rained on his parade on on day one but uh but a lot of other things have not gone right for him at all um and nothing seems to indicate that that 20-point lead that Labour has over the Conservatives in the UK is changing at all. But as Chantelle often reminds us, it's not over till it's over. You mean miracles do happen? That's the one I would go to at this point. Right. Okay.

Final break and then final topic coming right up and back with our final segment for good talk for this week chantelle and bruce are here uh final topic um we've actually mentioned pierre polev quite a bit in today's program. He took one of his MPs to the woodshed this week, having that MP been on a liberal podcast talking about his views on abortion and on gay rights. Polyev didn't like what he had to say, and neither did some members of their caucus, although he probably speaks the same kind of tune

as some of his fellow caucus colleagues. But nevertheless, the action was in Polyev doing what he did, and very quickly after it became clear what had happened, even to the point where our friend Tom Mulcair, who we talked about a couple of weeks ago, was spending a lot of time praising Mark Carney and at the same time going after Polyev, wrote a piece this week praising Polyev, basically praising him for his quick action on this thing. Your thoughts? We've got five minutes or so. We talked about teaching moments on foreign interference.

I think Pierre Poiliev on this one definitely turned something that was negative for the party, i.e. more ammunition for the liberals and others to say that there's a hidden agenda on the part of the Conservative Party to do away with abortion rights or even same-sex marriage, took that and turned it into a teaching moment to the significant section of this caucus that is of the same persuasion as Arnaud Viersen, i.e. would turn the clock back on same-sex marriage, but also on abortion rights. And in the process, Mr. Poliovy issued what has to be the clearest ever statement on the issue of one legislation will not go forward on abortion. And yes, I know it's possible to have private members' bills, but governments do not need to push private members' bill

to royal assent. And on same-sex marriage, the issue is closed. It's there to stay, period. I thought that that was a move that sounded like it came right out of Stephen Harper's playbook, which was to say, we're just not doing that, people. That being said, if we are having this little episode on abortion, it is on Mr. Poiliev's rather reckless idea of going to a police convention, I believe, to say, if I become prime minister, nod, nod, wink, wink, I'll become the first prime minister to use the notwithstanding clause of the constitution to pass my law and order agenda. Totally useless when it comes to

winning votes. Frankly, the conservatives have the law and order issue. It's not a shield issue for them, but it's totally opened up the debate and gave the liberals an opening in the sense that if you're going to be the first prime minister to suspend the charter to have your way, why wouldn't you do it on abortion or same sex marriage? I think this week, Mr. Poiliev started managing to put a lot of that toothpaste back in the tube. Thanks to that MP. Yeah, Peter, this is really interesting to me. I think probably when the Liberals first saw the Nate Erskine-Smith podcast episode, they looked at this and said, this is a gift for us. And in the end, and no disrespect to Mr. Erskine-Smith for doing it, I think it was an interesting thing to do.

But in the end, it ended up looking more like a t-ball episode for the Conservatives, that if they could have this happen all the time it would be better because it gave pierre pauliev the opportunity put out a statement that i want to read it's not that long but i i read it and i thought wow he probably really liked the opportunity to say this in quotes canadians are free to love and marry who they choose same-sex marriage is legal and it will remain legal when I am Prime Minister. Full stop. To be clear, there will also be no change to the legal status of marijuana. Under a future Conservative government, I will lead a small government that minds its

own business, letting people make their own decisions about their loved lives, their families, their bodies, their speech, their beliefs, and their money. We'll put people back in charge of their lives in the freest country in the world. That's a pretty strong set of words put together very well that you could have taken many of those words and said, if a progressive leader says those things, that works for progressive voters. He's managed in this one instance to use language that allows people to hear him say things that make him not only sound less scary, but actually sound more like a change agent that they might find appealing. Now, I don't want to over adorn this, but I have been critical earlier in this podcast about him on some things. I think this was an opportunity that ended up being

one that was golden for the conservatives and that he took perfect advantage of if we're just looking at the political dynamics of how that worked and that statement in particular. How do you think, I mean, clearly, as you said, a progressive statement that should go over well with progressive voters, some progressive voters. How do you think it's going to go over inside his own caucus and inside his party membership? I think it was a real opportunity for him to say, I'm in charge here. And nobody said anything different after he put that statement. Also, I mean, not every social conservative in the caucus has gone to Parliament Hill to repeal the right to abortion or same-sex marriage just because it's your belief that there shouldn't be abortion. It's not necessarily the only reason you participate in public life.

This is a point in time where Mr. Poitier doesn't absolutely need social conservatives to get to where he wants to go, for one. And two, when MPs have to be on their best behavior, because one day they're all hoping to be in cabinet. And I don't think you will see Mr. Veersen's name in that list if Pierre Poiliev becomes prime minister. Although I, like Bruce, believe that Pierre Poiliev owes him one for giving him that opportunity. Yeah, remember, Mr. Veersen said in the exchange with Nate Erskine-Smith, he said, well, let me just say it's not a lonely fight. He was referring to the idea of, well, it turns out it seems like it probably is a lonely fight, or it's a lonelier fight this week than it was the week before.

So have we heard the end of those issues being used against the conservatives? I mean, it's always going to come back. And if you are a partisan liberal, you will always want to say that there is a hidden agenda. But it's hard to argue with the fact that this is a pro-choice conservative leader, openly pro-choice, who has laid down the law in the manner that Bruce read. What he said about marijuana was an interesting tale, too. This is a party that not very long ago said this is reefer madness and stuff like that, right? But I mean, to your question, Peter, I think if this was a two-point difference between Liberals and Conservatives, not a 20-point difference, yeah, I do think this issue would be back on the front burner. All right. We're going to leave it at that for this

week. A really good conversation. We've only got a couple of weeks to go before the summer hiatus starts for the bridge and for good talk. We will appear a couple of times during the summer as well to keep you up to date on where things are going and how things are looking. Especially probably somewhere around that by-election. We'll see what happens on that one. And the U.S. party conventions, I think, as well, will be an interesting opportunity. All guys, I hope you'll find me on a bicycle somewhere. We will. We'll track you down.

We will. I'm the one who's going to be in Scotland, finally. We're going to stick one of those air tags on your bike fender. Yeah, right. Okay, that's good. Thanks so much to both of you, and thank you to the audience. We'll see you again in seven days. Bye.

Bye. Bye, Luke.