The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Good Talk -- Is Justin Trudeau Going Out With A Win?

Episode Date: March 7, 2025

In two days, Liberals will have a new leader, and the country will know who their next Prime Minister will be. It's a huge decision and the consequences for the party and the country are significant.�� That and a lot more on this week's Good Talk.

Are you ready for Good Talk? And hello there, good Friday morning. Peter Mansbridge here with Chantal Hébert and Rob Russo. Got a whole action-packed hour of Good Talk for you right now. Let's start on this. You know, in sports they like to say that, you know, when you retire from hockey, say, in your last game, it would be great to score a goal.

Baseball would be great to have a hit in your last game. So here we are, just days away from Justin Trudeau departing the scene as leader of the Liberal Party. And one assumes hours or days later as Prime Minister of Canada. So he's in his final week. And to some, it looked like he had a win in his final at-bat against his nemesis Donald Trudeau, or Donald Trudeau, Donald Trump, who seemed to be scrambling all week trying to figure out

what his tariff position really was. Do we give him a win? Do we give Justin Trudeau a win on this in his final days in office? Rob? I think we give him acknowledgement that he's achieved moments of grace, that in the face of profane, sulfurous attempts at intimidation, goading suggestions that he was trying to hang on to power,

the Prime Minister kept his cool on the way out the door. I think it'll be for historians to judge, not just this week, his entire legacy, but there was a clear dichotomy between the way Canada and this prime minister handled Mr. Trump and the way the Mexican president handled Mr. Trump. Mr. Trump said wonderful things. He was clearly charmed by President Scheinbaum of Mexico, but the results were effectively the same.

He might have been charmed by the Mexican president, but he still slapped tariffs on them. The reprieve, such as it is, is temporary. The fate of our economies still lie in the pudgy palms of an octogenarian who acts like an adolescent. But in terms of Justin Trudeau, I think that he can say that he united the country on his way out the door, a country that he had divided while he was in office. But he leaves with the country more united than it has been in a long, long time. And that's no small achievement. Chantal?

Yes, they've all divided the countries over their time in office. I can't think back to a prime minister, and I've covered a few, and you have two that left on a united country. But a bit like Jean-Claude Zin with George W. Bush in Iraq, Donald Trump has given Justin Trudeau a sense of purpose over two months when he would have been, you know, basically a ribbon-cutting prime minister. And those two months since his resignation, the government has been laser-focused on the issue of tariffs and the Canada-US relationship. And in the process, Mr. Trudeau has probably done a lot of good for his party looking at an election. It's the second time that we go through this.

This time is worse. But the one success that Justin Trudeau had with the first Trump administration was that he had managed to avoid having Canadians negotiating with each other as opposed to negotiating with the United States. he is handing not only his successor, but whoever is the next prime minister, is a pan-Canadian consensus on we hold tough. Now, it should be said that the reason why this consensus is so strong is not so much because politicians are adept, but because that is what Canadians want. And they say it loud and clear. It's impossible to ignore that what has been happening and the tough line taken this week is what Canadians have been demanding. And the absence of a strong voice arguing for appeasement kind of speaks to death. I want to come back to one thing that Justin Trudeau's government has done that is also reaping profits. And that's an unlikely thing. Sometimes politicians build relationships

because it's convenient or because it happens, unlikely relationships. And then one day you say, wow, this is paying off. And I'm talking about the relationship between this government, a liberal government that is being described as woke, left, right and center, and the Conservative Premier of Ontario, Mr. Ford, who would be the opposite of what you would describe as woke. It's not a natural relationship. In the Jean Chrétien days, the enemy was called Mike Harris, a Conservative Premier of Ontario. But because that relationship has been so strong,

it has allowed Canada to have a unified position. It is very hard for anyone in the Conservative movement to take shots at the strategy that the federal government has been undertaking without taking shots at the most influential premier in the conservative movement and someone who is going to be around for the next four years and who commands significant support in the province that matters most to the next federal election outcome. And I think that's not just on Justin Trudeau, but it's also on Dominique Leblanc, the current minister of finance, and Christia Freeland, his predecessor, who both made sure that the channels were open between Ford's Queen Spark and the federal government. I think it's paying off these days in space and not what you would have expected from the liberal government that Justin Trudeau led on so many other fronts. In some ways, it is a return to the days of Trudeau the Elder and Bill Davis. Yes. There was always a historic connection between Ottawa and Ontario,

particularly when national unity was threatened. I'm struck by what's happening in the province of Quebec, where we're also seeing a kind of, I'm not sure if we would call it a surge, but there is certainly a reawakening of the importance of the federal protection. And we've seen a blunt in support for that, blunting support for independence in the province of Quebec as well. I'm not sure we've seen a concurrent increase in popularity for Francois Legault, but he seems a little bit more surefooted these days as well. And we've all seen over the past week what happened with Danielle Smith as well. There is clearly been a change in tone from her. She now refers to the Trump administration as a foreign government that's trying to threaten our national unity,

as she has now, I think, realized that this is not just about fentanyl and about increasing our security at the border. And that's heartening to see. There does remain a very bright line in the sand for Danielle Smith, and she hasn't hidden that at all. That hasn't been a complete sort of embrace of Team Canada. She still represents her provincial interests very, very strongly when it comes to the use of resources in Alberta

as a potential terror threat. So there remains, I think, distrust between Danielle Smith's government and the government in Ottawa under Justin Trudeau. We'll see if that changes once Mr. Trudeau leaves. But for now, Daniel Smith has now come to realize that Donald Trump means harm to the independence and the sovereignty of our country. It's a long way from those moments at Mar-a-Lago when she was standing there with Kevin O'Leary and looking like she was very much on bended knee to the Trump administration. One quick, I know Chantal wants to get back in here for a sec, but just one quick irony on the Ontario situation especially. When you talk about Trudeau, Leblanc and Freeland all having a very close

relationship with Doug Ford and that's been clear not just through this but for months now if not the last couple of years the name you never hear mentioned of any kind of relationship with Doug Ford is Pierre Polyev

and heading into what could be days away from an election, that is not a good place to be for Pierre Poliev. Just to say that the Conservatives are very irked by Doug Ford. They think that he's after Poliev's job. There's a one and done policy now for Conservative leaders or has been since Stephen Harper. And if Pierre Poitier does not form a government this time, they believe that Doug Ford will come crashing through the door. OK, so let's not talk about Premier Ford's federal ambitions until he gives a full news conference in French.

So set that aside. We have seen Premier Ford alongside Justin Trudeau repeatedly over the past two and a half years and almost at every turn getting along. We have never seen Premier Ford with Pierre Poiliev. Of course, he never asked Pierre Poilievre's help during the campaign, and that has serious repercussions for the Conservatives in the federal election. They can have all the hate they want, but he is in office. He runs the government. He has jobs to hand out, and he has an organization that can sit on its hands while the federal election takes place at cost to the re-election or the election odds of the party. I'm always struck, I was there for the Davis era. I remember the Davis Trudeau getting along. I'm sure Joe Clark, who was the conservative

leader back then, also remembers how Bill Davis teamed up with Pierre Trudeau, not only on the Constitution, but on the National Energy Program, which basically tore at the heart of Joe Clark's attempt to build a coalition. But I also remember a defining moment for Joe Clark's successor, Brian Mulroney. When Brian Mulroney early on came to Ontario after he became leader and Bill Davis showed up. And that was a big deal because basically what was then called the Big Blue Machine, which was the Ontario provincial organization, was put at the service of the Mulroney campaign in 84.

And I totally believe that it made a huge difference to the outcome of that election, which Mulroney started from behind newly chosen liberal leader John Turner. So to make light of Mr. Ford's absence of interest in the fate of the federal conservatives by dismissing him as someone who wants the job, kind of maybe would work with a smaller province. But in Ontario, it's going to hurt. And I don't believe that there will be a change of heart coming from Queen's Park towards Pierre Poilievre or a warming up between now and the federal election. You know, I agree with Chantel on this one, Rob, because, you know, I think ever since Doug Ford's been around as Premier, including beyond, you know, past the last election, not even just this one.

That story's been around, and federal conservatives have been worried all about Doug Ford running for it. He's never taken up the opportunity, seems happy where he is, and he's on a real roll here right now. He's a Trump against a Trump, is what it looks like to a lot of people. He's out-Trumping Trump in this debate. Which brings me to this. You know, all Canadian politics aside for a moment. Where are we on this story? Because I am, after especially this last week, I am thoroughly confused about what the,

and I don't even think it's the American position anymore. I think it's one guy's position, which seems to change every day, which only works to our advantage. I mean, let's face it. With him, with this moving target of what it is he's doing, it looks like we're stable, we're solid, we're saying the same thing every day. They're not. What is going on? Can somebody explain this one to me?

Or can it be explained? Rob, you look serious here. He's ready to give it a ride. Explain it. I'm not sure that we are okay. I think that it's already having an effect on investment in Canada. It's certainly having an effect on people's plans, you know, retirement plans, vacation plans, housing plans in Canada. I do believe that he is, as I've said before, I've talked about the doomsday digital clock stopping and starting.

He's playing a game of brinksmanship with the North American economy. And it's already having an impact. I do think that there are, as I've said, serious people around Donald Trump who believe that even before this started, the United States was in a trade war that it was losing with China. And as a result, they need to do something different because they're losing that trade war. Their fantasy is, as always, a return to a Norman Rockwell America of people going to work in factories, you know factories close by and taking their lunch buckets and coming home with decent paying jobs that pay benefits and provide pensions. That era is gone,

but they would like to go back to that. And while they're trying to engineer that, an entire service economy that's been created, a digital economy, continues to churn on and continues to churn out jobs in the United States. But those jobs at a certain point might leave. There's a jobs report coming out that I'm sure everybody is going to watch. This one's not the important one. It'll be the one six months from now. But here in Canada, what this has done, we have a pause.

It allows us to catch our breaths. It allows the new prime minister, and we may have two in the next few months, to assess the situation and decide on what posture Canada is going to have. But it gives us a little bit more time to do what we need to do, which is, again, to begin to restructure our economy to try and take into account the reality that we cannot rely on the largest source of prosperity and security in Canada that we've had over the past decade, century, century. But do you think that the strategy that we've watched, I get it. There's no strategy, Peter. Well, that's what I mean. That's what I'm getting at. A strategy would actually be comforting up to a point because we would be able to figure it out. But what's the first lesson you

learn when you go to Parliament Hill in this country and you're a journalist? You arrive at on Parliament Hill and you believe that there's a plan. It's like a treasure map. You're going to find it. It's hidden somewhere on an island. And once you find it, everything will make sense to you. And then at some point, it dawns on you that there is no plan, that if you cannot figure out what's happening, it's not because you didn't find the map. It's because there's no map. You look at the kind of week that we've had and what's been happening south of the border,

it's clear that there's no roadmap. If only there were, you could bring the Canadian economy probably to its knee. But over the past week, I have noticed a significant difference between Canada and the U.S. And I'm talking Canadians and Americans. What has happened over the past two months is that Canadians have basically accepted that they will pay a price to fight this trade war. And they've been told by Stephen Harper, by Justin Trudeau, by whoever have been leading voices, Premier Ford, Premier Legault,

this will be rough. And there is a consensus that it's worth going into that war and accepting the hits that will come with it. What we saw this week is that no such thing is happening in America. That the first thing that happened when the first shots were fired, even before return fire came, the screams that made their way to the White House were all from Americans and American industries saying, we are not willing to pay the price for a war that we didn't sign up for. I think in the end, that's going to make a difference. the Americans that this was what they were signing up for. Sure, a trade war with China, but when do you go to war

and antagonize all of your allies on the way to the battlefield? If I were sitting in Beijing, I'd be laughing my head off at this military approach to a war by the Trump administration. But beyond that, to try to figure out where this will go and the chaos of this White House, I agree with Rob that we are paying a price for this, that investment is on pause, that everyone is holding their breath,

thinking who knows what the future will bring. But this week, and it wasn't a win it was a loss for the White House and that loss was incurred on their own ground and not as a result of what we've been doing because never forget that those tariffs that he puts in place in the end it's the American consumer that pays for it

it's the auto industry in the US that was about to grind to a halt. It's farmers who do not have fertilizer at a decent price go down the list. And here we have convinced ourselves that we will get hurt, but we will do what we do. But no one has sold the Americans on this. Would it be fair to say that Canadians as citizens woke up to this very quickly and we watched them get on board and the whole patriotism thing, all of that, that there's been a much slower awakening in the US,

especially by those who aren't directly affected. And eventually everybody will be. But, you know, I just see it in the mail. We actually have a fair number of listeners over the SiriusXM network in the United States. And, you know, they've been writing and saying, you know, they were shocked. They didn't understand the depth of this.

And they were really upset about, you know, the kind of way Canadians are reacting to this, understanding why Canadians are reacting the way they are, but not sort of being aware of it, and that there's kind of a slower awakening happening in the U.S. Is that fair? I think what's fair is to say they've been misled. They were told that tariff the tariffs

were a beautiful word that tariffs were going to lead to the sound of foreign currency pouring into the huge vats of u.s reserves they were told that in effect the United States has neither friends nor allies nor enemies. What they have now are partners that they can plunder, who used to be their friends, and people that others might see as enemies as potential deal partners as well. So I think we can say that Americans were, to a certain extent, misled. And you began to see that. You know, certainly it's true that they didn't have a plan to execute this thing. It doesn't seem like they did. But I think there was a plan.

And you listen to somebody like Scott Besson, who is now the treasurer, former Wall Street guy, worth close to a billion dollars, saying, listen, I hear the complaints, but access to cheap goods is not the American, shouldn't be the American dream. Easy for him to say. He's, like I said, worth nearly a billion dollars. But so they're beginning to understand that they probably didn't heat the pool before they went for a dive in it, and they might not have even put water in the pool before they went for a dive in it and they might not have even put water in the pool before they went for a dive in it americans are suddenly calling up people like chuck grassley republican senator from iowa like a stalwart trump supporter and saying wait a second how am i how am i going to bring in a crop if i don't have potash from canada

and you hear people calling up radio stations in Nebraska, in Iowa, in Oklahoma, even in Texas, complaining about what's going on now. People are genuinely surprised. And I think that that's a failure of the Trump administration to either communicate properly or they were misleading people about how this would be. And unlike Canadians, Canadians, I think, were told this is going to be tough. We had, I wouldn't call them Churchillian moments, but fairly direct warnings from our politicians

that we were going to be in for some very tough times. And Canadians said, bring it on. I think on that score, Donald Trump probably helped unite Canadians with his 51st state stuff. You say, really? At first, you know, you think this is just an old man making a bad joke and you pass it off. It happens. But at some point, I think Canadians decided that this guy means it. And that led to how strong the current position in Canada is. But, you know, I don't know about a strategy emerging from that White House. What are we supposed to think when the president of the United States is so blatantly ignorant of Canadian politics that he believes that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who will no longer be liberal leader by the end of this weekend, is using this tariff issue to stay in power? on what planet is this possible?

Or someone who has a senior role in his cabinet explaining on television that the auto industry exists in Canada at the expense of the U.S. because it is not unionized. Really? Well, that's someone who covered the split between the Canadian auto workers and the United Auto Workers, I know, like everyone else in the auto industry on both sides of the border, that one of the reasons why the auto industry in Canada and having employees lower than if you're doing it in the United States. You kind of learn that in school if you cover the auto industry. It's an easy one. Same with the dollar is lower.

But the end, the just-in-time delivery from southern Ontario to the plants in the United States has created this integrated industry. But to hear so-called serious people say things that are so ignorant, I'm not going to go to the fact that, what is it, Mexican gangs are controlling the country because it borders on ridiculous. Or how about the statement that if we only have enough tariffs, then you will never pay income taxes again. Really?

I mean, it's not even voodoo economics. It's complete crass ignorance. And that is what one is discussing with. I rest my case here on a great strategy that will eventually emerge from all this. I don't think that he's finally attuned to the rules of parliamentary democracy. I do think, though, that it is part of an agenda to get rid of us, to break us up. I do believe that that's true. When he starts to say, you know, get rid of that line and you could have a great country. When he starts to say it's not viable on its own. When he starts to muse in telephone calls about the 1908 treaty that did solidify the boundary between Canada and the U.S.,

when he starts to talk about our water and how he should have access to the water, and when he starts to muse in telephone calls about the agreements over the Great Lakes. That, to me, is a man who has a concerted strategy to, as I said, profit by plundering his neighbors, and he's doing it with Ukraine. And so where are we in terms of rare earth minerals? We are number two behind China when it comes to the battery ecosystem. But if you want to build EVs or you want to generate electric power and store it in batteries, you're going to need Canada in this part of the world. I think he knows that. And I think he knows all those other things that he raises are aimed at trying to get us to give up our resources,

if not our sovereignty, in exchange for some sort of protection. I guess where I disagree... It's shakedown diplomacy. I guess where I disagree with Rob is that I see a big difference between an agenda and a strategy. I don't doubt that there's an agenda, but I fail to see a workable strategy. I think what he sees, he sees with dollar signs the worth of certain things.

What he doesn't see is any understanding of, well, as you said, how a parliamentary democracy works, and as Chantal said, how he could actually be in a conversation with Trudeau on demand of Trudeau, tell me when you're going to call the next election. Like, really? Jeez. It's a bit mind-boggling. Okay, well, we've certainly cleared the air on that. We know exactly where everything stands in terms of the negotiations on the trade war.

Let's move on to the next thing where I think things are a little clearer, or at least I want to kind of dig behind why we think they're clearer in terms of what's going to happen on Sunday when the Liberals decide who their next leader is going to be. And we'll do that when we come right back. And welcome back. You're listening to Good Talk for this Friday. Rob Russo, Chantelle Hebert in the house.

I'm Peter Mansbridge. You're listening on SiriusXM, channel 167, Canada Talks. You're watching us on our YouTube channel. Glad to have you with us there. And of course, you can download our podcast, which is available wherever you get your podcasts. Topic number two, and that is what happens on Sunday. I think it's sort of somewhere in the 5 to 7 p.m. Eastern time zone when the Liberals will announce who the successor is in the Liberal

leadership race. Although we are accustomed to these things taking a lot longer than they tend to, they love the sense on the one hand that they've got television time, which they will have via various networks, and so they tend to stretch things out, sometimes not deliberately, sometimes because the mechanism's not working that well. But here's my question to the two of you, and Chantal, you can start us off on this one.

Almost since the get-go on this, the assumption has been that Mark Carney is going to win. Now, there are 400,000 potential liberal voters, or should I say, there are 400,000 potential voters on this. It's clear some of them aren't necessarily liberal. But how do we, how will we reach this conclusion that it's in the bag for Mark Carney? Okay, so I'll quibble just a bit with the initial assumption that Mark Carney was going to win this. I believe that the assumption at first was that it was going to be a fairly competitive campaign between Christia Freeland and Mark Carney.

And then, as these things will happen, and in this case, it happened quickly, because this is a very short leadership race by Canadian federal standards, cabinet support and caucus support started to roll in. Now, it doesn't really matter. You can have the entire cabinet and all of caucus and still lose in the sense that 400,000, that pool is a large pool. But still, you did see right off the bat that the decks were stacked against Chrystia Freeland. That for a variety of reasons, and that surprised people, and it surprised many of the people who will be voting on Sunday, that she'd been described as

the natural heir to Justin Trudeau, that there were MPs who were grateful that she'd actually pulled the plug on Justin Trudeau by resigning, and that all of this did not materialize in the kind of overwhelming cabinet or caucus support that one would expect from colleagues having spent nine years working with them. Remember Paul Martin and his caucus and cabinet support. It was the flip side of what just happened to Chrystia Freeland. Her campaign, as of the beginning, always felt, and I was there when she launched it, and then in the days that followed, always felt like it was a plane that could never really lift off,

that she's been in that plane but on the ground using the wheels to move forward. And then the polls started to come out. And those polls, every single poll that we have seen has spoken to a net significant advantage for the liberals under Mark Carney, and not so much with Chrystia Freeland. Why? Because you cannot, in a resignation letter, erase so many years of proximity to Justin Trudeau and to the previous regime.

And Mark Carney may not have had the kind of campaign that a rock star has. But if you look at previous campaigns and previous winners of incumbency, he has had a better campaign than John Turner against Jean Chrétien. Or Jean Chrétien had a much better campaign as the runner-up than Christian Freeland has had. He has also had a much better campaign than Kim Campbell at the hands of Jean Charest. So there were no significant events. Yes, the debates, but our opinions and our dissecting of the debates, I have noticed, are a lot more specific to this and that than what I have heard from normal people who watched excerpts of the debates and said, well, you know, it's fine. And basically, he's not Pierre Poil the end, which still makes it a lot of people. But every meeting I was watching last night, Mark Carney had an event in Montreal.

There was a huge lineup to get into the place. I can't remember very many liberal leaders who've had lineups for events in Montreal over the past decades. And it's not because this franchise is so great, but people wanted to be there. I don't think from looking at social media, I have not seen those kinds of full rooms with Chrystia Freeland. Often you see maybe 20 people. This week she had one caption about keeping the momentum going, but the people around her were, that's okay, but they were people who worked in a plant.

That doesn't make them voting liberal sympathizers or members. So I think it's been clear from the outside that the momentum has always been on only one side since the beginning. Rob? Yeah, I mean, the data points you look at are the ones Chantal mentioned. I'll throw in money as well, right? It starts with caucus support. And I think there was, up until Ms. Freeland's launch, there was some caucus support that was on the sidelines waiting to see how she was going to do. And once she launched, they had determined that as a communicator, she couldn't connect with Canadians. And those

were people who weren't sure she could connect, given her connection to Justin Trudeau. So caucus support went, then money went, and polls went as well. So those are the three data points I would use. In terms of the race itself, such as it is, I found it bloodless. Breezy, yes, very quickly, but bloodless. There have been no new ideas. Some old ideas that have come back, old liberal ideas about building the country, building infrastructure.

As one smart liberal I was talking to yesterday, it's like, you know, another era has come back. The previous era before Justin Trudeau. I think what we've seen in terms of policy is a lot of the candidates probably have very sore backs from their aggressive swiveling when they turn their backs on Justin Trudeau's legacy. That's been the noticeable policy frontier that's been breached here. I think we can say that Karina Gould has demonstrated skills that few people thought she had. And she has planted her flag firmly as a standard bearer

of the progressive wing of the party. The problem Karina Gould has right now is that those ideas are not in vogue right now. And that being said, she's got, she clearly got a bright future. I think we can say that Mr. Carney has not soared. He's shining as a result of his CV, but he hasn't stumbled either. He remains untested. I'm not sure that we can say that he has been fire-tested in the hothouse of the bloodsport of politics. I don't think we can say that at all. He's tried to turn that into a virtue, the fact that he's not a politician. I think his line in the opening speech he made in Edmonton was, I'm not the usual politician, but it's no time for politics as usual.

I think that is his appeal, that and his background. People are looking for the antidote to Donald Trump. And as a result, the Liberals are in a fight that, quite frankly, most of them didn't think that they would ever be in seven, eight, nine weeks ago. They didn't think they were going to be in. And now they're in a fight. So you ask them, if you would have asked them two months ago, would you be happy with 65 seats in the next election? They would have said yes. Now they want more. Now they're competitive. They've chosen a candidate,

not fire-tested, certainly not a soaring rhetorician, but somebody who they think has made them competitive again, and they're excited about that. And can I go back to my favorite theme, because my obsession really came back to the surface this week when I watched the Conservatives decline the candidacy for a nomination battle of a former finance minister of British Columbia, Mike De Jong. And I again thought, what is this team that Pierre Poilier, because for all that you can say about the liberals, there are strong voices that are part of the current liberal team.

Dominique Leblanc plays well in Ontario, in Quebec, and in Atlantic Canada. And there are others. But when you look at Anita Anand, who is going to be staying, is one of the few ministers about which, when I speak to groups, I've heard giant groups of her portfolios say that they hope to keep her as a minister. It's very rarely, as you know, that you hear something like that about any minister. And then you look at Pierre Poiliev's theme. I was reading an interesting piece

about the relationship between the business community and the conservative leader this morning. And towards the end of it, it said Andrew Scheer, according to sources, could become Mr. Poiliev's finance minister. Really? That's the team? Because if that's the way it's going to go and people start looking leader for leader,

team for team, they're going to be faced with a team of former staffers with very little private sector experience, all backroom politics and then frontroom politics, and one that has people with business experience or actually hands-on government experience. And that, I think, is an advantage that the liberals could not tout under Justin Trudeau because he was so not identified to economics and to an economic portfolio. Yeah, you do hear rumblings from the liberal side that they've got some people who are going to declare their intention to run if Carney wins. We used to call them star candidates. I don't know how much these will be star candidates, but they are their new blood coming in with proven backgrounds in the private sector. I wonder

though, Chantal, you know, you have been on this issue of team and the lack of it, or at least the lack of using a team on the part of the Conservatives and part of Pelliev and just centering on him alone. Do you get any blowback? I mean, I hear you on the sheer comment that you got, but do you get any blowback on that at all, saying, you know, saying, wait, you're going to see, we've got a team, blah, blah, blah, any of that? We may be in an election in two weeks.

And at this point, all I have read over the past week have been nomination battles where people with business backgrounds have been eliminated in favor of insiders to the conservative party machine. So if there are great people standing in the wings, and the same has been true in Quebec, you do hear names, but they're not big names. Mr. Poitier said he is not interested in having anyone from François Legault's cabinet, the closest thing to a conservative in Quebec, join his team. The Quebec finance minister was interested and basically was told, we don't need people like you. So if there are people who have been talked into running by Pierre Poiliev,

hopefully they didn't change their minds now that the battle is more competitive, but I have seen no evidence of that so far. And it is getting a bit late in the game for having those prime seats. The seat in BC is a good conservative seat. It used to be a seat that Ed Fast, who was one of Stephen Harper's ministers, held. And it is now coming down to a battle between staffers or former staffers, whatever their status. And at least two BCCs, they have excluded candidates with business and

political experience. And those are not the only instances where this has happened. So I don't, I'm not too sure what the thinking is. but I do remember that Stephen Harper sold himself by also highlighting the three ministers or former ministers from Ontario, Tony Clement, John Baird and Jim Flaherty. And I remember that Jacques Chassin, to his last campaign, always showed up standing next to Paul Martin. And that was no shame on either of those leaders. It was a sign that they were building a serious theme for a serious government. I'm waiting for that signal from Mr. Poliev. You know, John Baird, who you just mentioned, was at least at the early part of the Poliev regime,

a Poliev supporter. still is i think and still is so it'll be interesting to see what what he says and what he does uh in this next little while we're going to take our final break when we come back we're going to talk about what happens immediately after the decision is made on on sunday in other words how quickly are we going into an election campaign most people think think very quickly. We'll talk about that when we come back. And welcome back. Final segment of Good Talk for this week. Rob Russo, Chantelle Hebert, Peter Mansbridge here.

You know, when you get close to an election campaign, you start to see them working on their kind of slogans, the different parties. The Conservatives were very much into the sort of carbon tax carny slogan some time ago. And then they kind of drifted away from that, thinking that's not going to work anymore. But they're back to it now, and a lot of their television ads especially are using the carbon tax carny line. I see the Liberals have trotted out something, at least on social media, that they're playing around with, which is Convoy Conservatives, which is an interesting play on an older. She will see how that one, whether that gets formalized or not.

Anyway, Friday, or it's Friday today, by within 48 hours, we should know who the liberal leader is, the new liberal leader, who will then have to decide how quickly they want to become prime minister. Is it going to be immediate within a couple of days? Forming a cabinet, making a decision about whether or not to have the House come back, or whether to get right into an election campaign. What is the latest we're hearing on all those things?

Rob, why don't you start? Sure. Still no final decision, but what will probably happen will be the victor will be sworn in very quickly. Two, three days is what I'm hearing before the new Liberal leader goes to see the Governor General and Justin Trudeau leaves. A cabinet is probably going to be announced. It'll be about half the size of the current cabinet. The only person who is for sure

going to stay in his job, I'm given to believe, is Dominic Leblanc, who will stay in finance, particularly because he has relationships inside the Trump administration. Dominic Leblanc, who will stay in finance, particularly because he has relationships inside the Trump administration. Howard Lutnick comes to mind, but he has other relationships as well. He's played a very important role at the intergovernmental affairs level in Canada as well. A wholesale change in the prime minister's office, maybe one person stays behind. The name I'm hearing is Brian Clout, Deputy Chief of Staff, stays behind to provide some continuity. And then the decision becomes, do you unveil your new

cabinet and do you include either cabinet designees or you point to some of the new people we were talking about earlier as people who will play prominent roles in that cabinet? And that'll be a decision based on whether or not they decide to bring the house back. But almost everybody I talk to says it makes no sense. You go now. You've got, if you're Mark Carney, you clearly have some momentum now. Don't allow for that momentum to be stalled. You blunt the financial advantage that the Conservatives had in terms of fundraising because of the restrictions on advertising during the writ period.

They have a policy book ready to go. If anybody has read Mark Carney's last book, they might know he's got another book coming out in two months. His policy book is essentially there. He has some other detailed policy that he's ready to go. He's basically been writing his policy book for years. It's in his head. One of the problems they have with him sometimes is that he,

it is in his head and he doesn't always want to hear the advice of others, but he's ready to go. So I'd be very surprised if two weeks from now, we weren't in the middle of a campaign. Chantal Chantal Salter On all those details, I'm hearing all of the same things. From chief of staff on down, very few people in the current PMO would still be around a new cabinet with, in theory, outsiders to parliament, which makes a return to parliament highly unlikely. But on a more fundamental basis,

we need to resolve who leads this government sooner rather than later. The question is not just, is there an advantage to the conservatives or the liberals in having an election as soon as possible? It's an advantage to us to make that choice. And the usual, I think it's going to be a very unusual campaign. I don't think we will be covering a daily announcement about public school lunches and etc. Because this is going to be a campaign about, it's kind of a job interview.

We, the voters, will be interviewing the main leaders to see which of the two we want to lead the country and to get the job of taking on the Trump era. And that's the bottom line for most voters. I did note that the only party who is totally insisting on parliament being called back is the NDP. I find that kind of funny in a sad way

in the sense that we're way beyond that. This notion that the NDP will be in the House of Commons and be again setting conditions for its support next week or the week after, I don't think that's going to happen. I don't for a second imagine Mark Carney calling up Jagmeet Singh to say, will you support me until the fall so I can call back parliament? So me, I think an election that would give us a government by mid-May probably is plan A. But as you know, when you become leader, suddenly all kinds of things happen that you didn't foresee.

Things that you expected to be ready aren't. It's nice to have ministers who don't have seats, but you've got to make sure they do have nominations wrapped up really quickly and seats lined up. That also goes for Mr. Carney, who has yet to say where he's going to run. And on that, I've heard that if possible, not in Ottawa. I'm hearing Northwest Territories, where he was born. I think that idea was killed.

As I said, I was hearing it, and now it's dead. So a little bit south of there. Maybe he'll go in Alberta. Maybe he'll go in BC. I've also heard maybe a bit south in a straight line from the Northwest Territories. Right. Okay. We're going to leave it at that for this week.

All these things will become clearer, not necessarily clear, but clearer starting on Sunday evening. Remember that old phrase, events, my friend, events, they can have an impact on all kinds of things. That's going to wrap it up for this week. For Good Talk from Rob Russo and Chantelle

Hebert, it's great to have you with us as always. We'll be back next week with lots more on the bridge starting on Monday where Janice Stein will join us and give us the latest on the foreign front, which changes on a daily basis as well. I'm Peter

Mansbridge. Thanks so much for listening. We'll talk to you again in just a couple of days.