The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Good Talk -- Is Mark Carney Getting A Free Ride From The Media?

Episode Date: February 21, 2025

Blaming the media is a common tactic when you feel your competition is getting better coverage than you are.  Is that why some Conservatives are saying Mark Carney is getting a free pass from the media in his campaign for the Liberal leadership?  

Are you ready for Good Talk? Of course you are. Coming right up. And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here, along with Rob Russo and Chantel Hebert. It's your Friday Good Talk episode. Now, I know Chantel never likes me to talk about sports. I'm making an exception. Oh, you are? Oh my gosh, good for you. So look, it was a great game.

There's no doubt about it. I was helped by the fact that Canada won, so Canadians are pretty happy about that. But beyond a great hockey game, does it have any real impact on you-know-what, the other story that kind of dominates our thoughts these days? Is there any real impact from a win like that, Chantal? Yes.

Yes, and I don't mean, oh, yeah, we beat the U.S. team, so Donald Trump is going to go hide forever and forget about tariffs. But I think it does matter for the country's morale. And that comes at a good time. This isn't going to be won on a hockey ring, in a hockey ring, but it will require self-confidence. And what happened last night goes that way. And if you're going to go into a war, everybody knows that morale matters almost as much as anything else. So I think last night, the other result would have found Canadians really depressed this morning. But from what I heard

on radio and elsewhere, since I've been up, people are in a better mood than they have been since January 20th and the inauguration of President Trump. Rob, your thoughts on this? Well, the moment the president tweeted what he tweeted before the hockey game, He made it more than a hockey game. It was more than a hockey game. The prime minister's reaction after the game, where he said that they cannot steal our country, they cannot steal our game, tells us all that it was more than a hockey game as well.

I'm not sure that that kind of fervor was on the ice. Everybody knew that the players were treating this far, far more seriously. I mean, let's get serious. The Russians weren't even there. Some of the best hockey players in the world were not there. This was not about hockey, but it was about a national conflict with a country that used to be seen as our ally and now is seen inside and outside of government increasingly as our adversary. And I think that was what was reflected on the ice.

Had we not prevailed, had Canada not prevailed, I have no doubt whatsoever that there would have been more than chirping from Donald Trump and the people in his administration. We saw it from the podium in the White House briefing room as well. And that would have been used in some way to try and further the interests of the United States. I think it would have had a far greater impact on Canadians if we'd lost. I don't think Americans would have perturbed them particularly, but they're not as perturbed about what Donald Trump is doing to Canada than Canadians are.

So, yes, it's not just a hockey game. It's far more than that. And I think that that was reflected in the way the politicians at the leadership level in particular inserted themselves in what was supposed to be a sporting event. It wasn't only the politicians who inserted themselves. When that game was played in Montreal and people sang a national anthem and then booed, it was the people inserting themselves in a way that we haven't seen.

It's a memory that will linger. I say that as someone who is not a hockey person, but I remember sitting in a classroom in university when the Canada-Russia final was settled by that goal because the wall shook. We were in a poly-sci class, but we knew that Canada had just won. And I didn't stay up to watch all this last night, but I sleep with my window open.

At some point, I worried about the outcome because usually in Montreal, when the home team wins, you hear noise. And I was hearing no noise. I have to say I dreaded opening my apps this morning because I thought, for sure, the snow is the reason. But I discovered that this went into overtime. So I think by then, most people were either inside and drinking or at home under blankets. You know, I got to say, I found it, I think Rob touched on it a little bit.

On the ice, there was a different kind of thing going on in last night's game, certainly different from the Saturday night game. But at the end of it all, you know, the devastated look on the American players' faces, I mean, they were crushed. I mean, they really, really wanted to win that game. And not for the Trump reasons, but just for the fact.

You know, they've always been second to Canada in the series between Canada and the U.S., with a couple of rare exceptions. They wanted to win. And the Canadians were like a bunch of little kids. You know, I've coached kids you know, kids hockey in my day, and, you know, it was similar to that. I mean, they really looked so excited, so happy,

and so much of a team together. You know, these guys will be playing against each other by tomorrow night, the Canadians and the Americans. Some of them are on the same team, you know, arch rivals and then suddenly teammates within a matter of hours. So it was quite something, and I agree. I think it was good for the soul for a lot of different reasons last night, and now we move on.

And we'll get to that issue in a minute, but I want to start on another one um and it's a result of a of a comment that james moore the former conservative cabinet minister you know a member of the uh the bridge team here for conversations with more and butts uh every few weeks and we just had one this week but. But James Moore was on one of those partisan panels the other day, and the quote from him was, three great love affairs in history, Romeo and Juliet, Will and Kate, and the national media and Mark Carney.

The national media really likes this guy, and they're giving him a free pass so far. What do we make of that? Is that true or is that just what happens at a time of, you know, a clear competition between two parties that you start saying stuff like that to try and get the edge or trying to get the media not on your side, but in your view. Get the media on your side when you're the leader of the official opposition and you hold a news conference and you will only allow sympathetic right-wing outlets to ask you questions with the exception, notably of Razzou Kaneda, because there was no one. We do not have all these outlets in French that cheer for the right.

So to get a question in French, they had to allow one mainstream organization. So if the point is that Mr. Poirier is open to taking questions from people who cover him and who he is called government spokespeople talking about members of the press gallery on Parliament Hill. It would probably give him a bit more airspace. But I'm reminded of a sentence, forgive my language, but winners don't bitch about their media coverage. And when you start doing that, it's because you are losing.

I've looked at the stuff that I've been reading about Mark Carney and his campaign. It was only a few weeks ago, I think, Peter, that you were questioning why he was avoiding the national media and going all over the place but not giving interviews to, you know, Rosie Barton or Patrice Roy or TVA, which he has been doing these days. But before he started doing those interviews very recently, he did get a lot of local coverage. And I spent time reading columns, local columns from Winnipeg and from places in BC. These were not national media people,

but those columns were all pretty positive, which is why I was reading them, because it doesn't really matter. The view from Parliament Hill in an election matters less than the view from the ground. And it struck me because I thought, well, when Kev Goyev had a shot at talking to local media, people who are not the nasty people from the press gallery, he used one of them in a famous video to show his contempt for the questions that he was getting. So pick a lane here. You either want to have a professional relationship with the media or you don't. And in this case, I'm sure Mr. Moore would handle his media relations differently if he were the leader of the Conservative Party than his current leader has been. Okay.

I hear all that, and I don't disagree with any of that. The question remains, is Carney getting a free pass? It's not like he's been error-free on his campaign. There have been mistakes, but the coverage on it has been... If you know that, it's because... But if you know that, it's but if you know that it's because it was reported on exactly it's reported on but whether it's pursued or not i guess that's the question let me ask rob what he makes of this you know i've run a few newsrooms and i uh i get a lot

of complaints about coverage almost inevitably those are about, why aren't you cheering for my team? Why are you cheering for the other team? And a lot of the time, if they left a name and number, I would call them back and we would talk about it. And sometimes I would even say to them, if they were from out of town come on in come on and have a look at our newsroom and have a look at our news meeting and see how we run a news meeting and why we choose to cover what we do and and that's often illuminating um often when it comes from politicians who do know how we run our newsrooms it's it's it's because they're feeling the hot breath of the opposition, their opponents on the back of their neck. And to stay with the sports analogy, they're working

the ref. They're trying to get a better call the next time, better coverage the next time. Not only did we talk about how Mr. Carney needed to try to articulate a little bit more policy and that they were low bridging him. I think it's fair to say that people have begun to report some of the inconsistencies or lack of precision in some of what he's saying. For instance, this week, he was cuffed in the ear for saying one thing in English about how he would be prepared to use emergency measures in order to get natural resources projects

like pipelines and other infrastructure built, whereas I think in French, he said that he wouldn't do it if it went against the will of provinces and indigenous communities. So he's getting that kind of coverage. I think he's getting, I think, tougher coverage about his plans, his economic plan to run a budget. Because initially, again, because of a lack of exactitude or precision,

he talked about balancing budgets within three years, and he was flushed out and then said no. In fact, he's going to try and split those two things between an operating budget and running deficits in order to finance large capital projects. So people are asking him more pointed questions. He's not as probably as available as we'd like him to be in terms of answering these pointed questions. But he did go on a couple of shows with a couple of pretty savvy interviewers in Petri Srois and Rosemary Barton. But, you know, that complaint is as old as politics is itself. And people need to understand and reporters need to understand that our job isn't to cheer for anybody.

It's to hold people to account. And that's beginning to happen with Mark Kearney. One of the other ways of looking at that is, is the coverage of the race, the liberal leadership race, is it even in the sense that others who are considered frontrunners or close to being frontrunners are getting similar coverage, are getting their stories, speeches, rallies, whatever, mentioned the same way that Mark Carney says?

That's a different way of looking at the same question in terms of free pass. Are they? Well, that's like saying that in an election campaign, you will treat the Bloc Québécois in the same way as you will treat the two parties, the two main parties who are vying for government. We report in a live world. I would say that one of the problems of this campaign is that it has not shaped up in the way that people expected when it started, i.e. that it would be a very competitive campaign between Chrystia Freeland and Mark Carney. That has not been happening.

And why I say one of the problems is I believe because of that, Mr. Carney is not being tested in the way that a more competitive campaign has been tested. But it is not for us to pretend to level a playing field that clearly is not. And we are very close to an election. Let me say a word, for instance, about next week's leadership debates. Yes, they come late in the game. There will be one in French on Monday night, one in English on Tuesday night. I don't expect that the people who are competing will take a strip off Mark Carney in the sense that you do not start to break the legs of your future leader if that's what's going to happen so close to an election. But what people will be, if there's still a high risk exercise, why? Because even if you're assuming that at this point, Carney probably has a lead that will not be

taken away from him by two debates. He is performing on the election stage next week. He's not performing just on the leadership stage. If he doesn't meet expectations, as he has not on a number of occasions, it will go in the ledger of the election tally. So those debates will matter. But to go around and say there are at this point two front runners would be a distortion of reality. It would have been like saying that the liberals were really doing well when they were 20 points behind because we need to treat everyone fairly. That's not reality.

You want to tell me where the debate's from? I think they were treated equally at the beginning. If you look at the way the networks, for instance, television networks covered their speeches, the first three to launch, Karina Gould, Christopher Freeland, Mark Carney, all got ample television time, kind of wall-to-wall coverage. And I think that they all met with fair assessments. And the assessment, for instance, of Mr. Carney was not dazzling. I think I said that he got a sitting ovation and he earned it. And so since then, what's happened have to, if you're in the reporting game, you have to look at data and empirical evidence. And if you look at those data, you look at money, you look at

endorsements, and you look at polls, because we don't know how people are going to vote in the liberal leadership race. But on all three of those standards, Mr. Carney leads. He's raised more money. He's got far, far more endorsements than his rivals. And polls that put him atop the question that's posed to those responding to surveys have him within striking distance or even of the conservatives. So by any objective measure, I think that the coverage has been fair. It will get more pointed. And his stumbles are being noted when they happen.

But so is the phenomenon, right? There is a bit of a phenomenon happening for a guy who has absolutely, you know, zero political experience, little in the way of political chops. All of that is new. All of that is novel. And yes, yes, reporters do like a race. They would rather have a race than a snooze. but we're not manufacturing this race. Something is happening out there, and it's the same sort of thing that we see and we've cited in grocery stores and in hockey arenas and in the political arena as well. You know, we talked for a moment last week about signs of nervousness or fright on the part of the Conservative Party as a result of what's been happening with Carney.

Did we see any more evidence of that this week? You know, you had the sort of non-pivot pivot on the part of Polyev and some of the things he said, which, you know, Chantel's referred to already. And then you have things like what moore said and and you know keeping that in perspective i mean it was on a partisan panel they were all taking shots at each other so it's not surprising that kind of thing happened but did we see any more evidence this week that they're starting to feel the heat of the you know the the various polls and this week you know angus reed had them very close we have lege still showing some interesting results on uh in the lege polling um well i think i think the the uh rally that while you have had uh at the beginning of this week is a reaction to what's happening with the polls.

You know, that rally was in some ways planned, in other ways it wasn't. Just based on people that I spoke to that were urged to come to the rally, gather as many friends as they could to fill the room at the convention center in downtown Ottawa. You know, just call everybody, get everybody here. That had the feeling of something that was rushed together. And I don't call it a pivot as much as I call it an evolution, because a lot of the main planks of what will be his platform remain there. But the first 15 minutes of that speech,

the first 15 minutes of a carefully planned but hastily planned appearance made it clear that the game has changed, that it is a new game, and that he needed to respond to the circumstances of a new game and adjust his message from one of Canada being broken to one that Canada will be unbroken, Canada will be unyielding, Canada will not take a knee. And that suggests that the game has changed. And that was a reflection of it, as was the kind of hasty nature of getting this thing together and cutting ads very, very quickly, cutting ads out of what were parts of that speech and getting those ads ready for a campaign. I think that part of the reason for doing with this rally, given that they did very little to build on it, and this week, Mr. Poiliev was basically back to last week's Pierre Poiliev pre-speech, was to generate clips. And the audience was basically being used as the backdrop for those clips. They used to use the question period in the House of Commons to generate all those videos.

Of course, they don't have that stage. But what I saw happen this week, which I find more interesting and possibly problematic for Mr. Poilier, is an increasingly obvious divergence between Stephen Harper, who remains the biggest influence on the conservative movement in this country, and Pierre Poilievre, who is nominally the leader of the political branch of the conservative movement in the House of Commons. Now, I'll give you the main example. On Saturday, Pierre Poilievre said there were two options

facing the US and Canada in the current circumstances. The first option is this war that will, trade war that will hurt everyone. And then he said the other option, the one he prefers is we trade even more than, I'm quoting here, we trade even more than we do now. We team up against the unfair trading practices of other countries. Both our countries end up safer, stronger, richer, and clearer. We come closer together to fight everyone else in the world. Yesterday or this morning, depending on where you get your news,

Stephen Harper posted a fairly lengthy open letter in French and English. It's really interesting. It does start off with stop trying to figure out what Trump is up to. It's really interesting. It does start off with stop trying to figure out what Trump is up to. It's kind of a waste of energy. But in there, he writes his prescription. Given a contrary American perspective, our focus now should not be on pursuing a deeper economic and security partnership. At this stage, whatever comes next from the president, Canada must avoid further dependency on the United States. This is not Mark Carney facing off against Pierre Poiliev, almost black and white. This is Stephen Harper's words and Pierre

Poiliev's words, and they go in opposite directions. I would argue that Mr. Poiliev's words and they go in opposite directions. I would argue that Mr. Poiliev at this point is not being, well, he is being overshadowed by the rise of Mark Kearney, but at this point, he's starting to get overshadowed by his predecessor and mentor, Stephen Harper. And I think that kind of sends a message that the Polyev team at this point may understand that the game has changed, but they are still partly in denial, and they really want the old game back while Stephen Harper has moved on. And that is a really bad place for Pierre Polyev to be in.

You know, he has the loyalty of his caucus, but most of that caucus is really loyal to Stephen Harper still. And, you know, credit him with the formation of the party and the successes that it's had since. So, I mean, I'm glad you mentioned that point because, you know, Stephen Harper's words are much closer to Mark Carney's words and Justin Trudeau, for that matter, than they are to Pierre Palliev. And, you know, it's not like he didn't know what he was doing or saying.

He always knows what he's doing and saying. This is not someone who just goes off message from what he wants to do. You mentioned that Harper and Carney, their positions might be closer than Harper's position as to Mr. Poirier. The interesting bit of news, also out of one of the interviews Mr. Carney did, was that Mr. Harper wanted Mr. Carney to be his finance minister. It was not denied because it's not deniable. Right. He has said that the conservatives tried to get him to run for them.

And it does put Mr. Poitier in a difficult position. They didn't try to shoot it out of the sky either. And it was one of the things Mr. Carney was preparing, I think, for debate. Essentially to say, if I was so bad, why did you guys want me to run for you? If I was so bad, why did Stephen Harper want me to be your finance minister, the successor to Mr. Flaherty? It's a powerful counter-argument. And it suggests that there was respect there

for not just his financial and economic acumen, but also for his political skills as well. And it's a tough one to try and negate. And so they call him Carbon Tax Carney now. And they don't really address this central question, which is if he was so bad, why did the Conservative Party of Stephen Harper try to do that? When I asked Carney who the politicians

were that he respected, who are the leaders that he respected? His answer was interesting. John Ketzing is one of them, and Stephen Harper is the other. And he respected them both for their discipline, their ability to have a plan and stick to that plan. And that might make some liberals uncomfortable. And you notice Justin Trudeau is not on that list, by the way. But it also reflects, I think, that the respect goes both ways when it comes to Mr. Harper as well. We got to take our break, but I'll just add one other note. When Harper made that offer to Carney, at that point in that majority conservative government of the day, Pierre Palliev was not in cabinet. He hadn't been invited in yet.

Eventually he was, but when the choice was what to do with his cabinet it was um mark carney that stephen harper was going after and keep in mind mark carney had been offered the bank of canada role by stephen harper not just once but twice on the second time the reappointment so um so that's interesting i mean it's there's so many angles to all these stories, and that's a good one. We're going to take a break, come back, and we've got a major question that's going to face Canada in the next little while, if it's not already facing it. That's coming right up after this. And welcome back. You're listening to Good Talk for this Friday.

Rob Russo, Chantelle Hebert in the house. You're listening on Sirius XM, channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform, or you're watching us on our YouTube channel. And I should mention our YouTube numbers have literally gone through the roof over these last few weeks. And I'm sure a good chunk of that reasoning is because of the issue that we're all facing.

And here's another angle to it. You know, the G7, the meeting of the seven most powerful countries in terms of the economy and the free world is set for June, as it is every year. This year, Canada is the host. The G7 is going to be in Alberta. The question becomes, will there even still be a G7 by June when the meetings are due? And especially after these last few days and some of the things that Putin has said

and Trump has endorsed and the whole situation with Ukraine leaves one wondering, and it must be something that those who are organizing this event on the Canadian side must be wondering, as to whether or not there still will be a G7 by June. What are you hearing, Rob? Well, lots of preparation work is going on. We're the host this year, so Canada has responsibilities. An example of how difficult those responsibilities are in the current environment emerged over the last couple of days.

One of the things that the G7 has done the last few years is note the Russian aggression in the unwarranted invasion of a neighbor, a sovereign neighbor that has dangerous precedents around the globe for those who value and cherish freedom. It's usually boilerplate. You can look at the last two and contention among G7 countries, because the United States insisted that references to Russian aggression, Russian responsibility for invading its neighbor in Ukraine be taken out. So where are we? Well, we've got the leader of the free world in Donald Trump and J.D. Vance and others going to Europe, essentially either failing to mention Ukraine or chiding Zelensky, who they see as a dictator now, it seems, while the man who jails his opponents, the man who poisons his opponents, the man who plucks them out of the sky to assassinate them, he is celebrated as somebody that they can work with and somebody who should

be back in the G7. So we all knew it was going to be, perhaps in living colour, in live time, the crumbling of the world order, Kananaskis, in June, it's beginning early. It's beginning now in February. And we got a very vivid look at that over the last few days. And when you talk to people who are putting some of this together, when you talk to public servants, when you talk to people who are in the intelligence game, they are beginning to feel that. They don't consider the United States an enemy, but there is a more adversarial posture that has been adopted. And there are questions. Nobody's doing it. You listen to the Chief of Defense Staff, Jenny Carignan, asked the question, for instance, can she still have a level of confidence and trust in her military counterparts across the 49th parallel?

And she says, yes, yes, we can. She sees no difference. The fact that the question is being asked tells us where we are. And there are quieter conversations away from the microphones where people are saying, what if, what happens, what do we do? And those conversations, the fact that they're happening vis-a-vis our relationship with the United States, again, remarkable. It's something that we never would have seen. And another example of how the entire world geopolitical relations has been turned on its axis. Chantal. You have to have sympathy for the people who are sharpest. That's how they're called or delegated by the federal government to agree to lead the groundwork for this G7 meeting. They don't even know who will be in the chair as host as prime minister by

then, if we go into an election, and whether one or the other. We know it's not Justin Trudeau. So one or the other, will they want to pursue Justin Trudeau's policies, tweak them, change them, reverse them? First problem. Second problem, I think this whole meeting would probably get blown out of the water if Donald Trump comes back with this idea that he wants to invite Vladimir Putin and make the G7, the G8 again. It was for a number of years,

the G8. Russia was part of the organization. I don't believe that most of the members of the G7 that are not the United States would put up with that. I can't imagine that Canada would want Mr. Putin to come. But in the reverse, a number of countries, France, Canada, the UK, might want to invite President Zelensky to come and have a talk with them. I'm not sure that Donald Trump would put up with that. And then there are voices in this country that are arguing that we should straight out say that we are banning President Trump from coming to the G7 meeting. So when you look at all this, I looked at my calendar here, it's only a month in. Whether the G7 will still exist by early June, I don't know. But what we saw this week, I mean, you've got, think of this, the US administration actively campaigning for far-right parties in Europe,

in major countries like Germany and the UK. For sure, the time is coming when the US will be treated openly as an adversary and not an ally at this rate. But what's fascinating is at the same time, what's happening in the US, which is not foreign policy driven, is also starting to register. I watched Elon Musk with, how do you call that big electric? Chainsaw. Yeah, chainsaw.

And I was thinking, do people realize that whatever that chainsaw touches is going to end up percolating down to people who will be losing services, losing stuff, paying more. So one month in, that has not percolated. By June, it will have. So it's impossible to know where we will all be. But all these things, these questions, they're not normal. And what Rob has described about this communique that was a boilerplate communique that we barely noticed most of the time over the past two years, three years now, there's a reflection of something that we have not seen with the G7 since it was created. You know what else is pretty weird.

Or with the NATO alliance, which we've got to say is badly frayed and was tossed in an utter disarray by Mr. Vance and by what Trump did. And how did the Europeans react? Well, they had not one but two emergency meetings and tried to get some sort of cohesive strategy together as to how they might be able to defend Ukraine and then reality set in. And the reality is that without a U.S. military backstop, the Europeans could not defend Ukraine on their own.

And the end result is that we have both Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron, the leader of France, coming to Washington. Why? Because they still need U.S. power. They still need U.S. military might. And that's the reality. That's the hard truth. After two meetings that were crisis meetings, one almost after the other of European leaders, the United States remains the most effective military guarantor of peace and prosperity around the world. They just don't want to play that role in the same way that they've been playing. And to a certain extent, Canada and the Europeans have given Mr. Trump

and his supporters an opening that they've crowbarred open in terms of our failures to meet our NATO commitments over the last several decades. But we still need the Americans. I mean, a vital question for Canada, and it's one, again, that people are beginning to consider, is what would Donald Trump and the United States do if Canada were invaded across the Arctic Circle? Would they come to our defense? I don't know the answer to that. Would they be more likely to invade us than to come to our defense or defend us as a way to invade us? Are you going to play that game?

Just a sec. Let's be real here. I hear the question. But there are organizations and institutions like NORAD that are designed specifically for that. And your Chief of Defense staff's comments the other day about, I still trust and believe in the relationship and my counterparts. I believe her when she says that. I don't think there's probably any doubt about that. But if the signal comes to them, to the NORAD U.S. forces, that we're out of this and we're not going to take part in this,

then you've got a different story on your hands. But right now, as it stands, they're up in the air almost daily, preventing Russian infractions on the airspace in the north. But your point is exactly on. We're living through a time where these big institutions, international institutions and arrangements that we've been a part of, whether it's the G7, whether it's NATO, or whether it's NORAD, they are all kind of under the microscope with the trump people the trump people uh in in terms of

what to be still involved in what not to be involved in and you know while there's been talk of us sleepwalking into this arrangement uh with the americans not realizing what was coming with trump the the same is true as amer. They're waking up every day to realize, is this really what we wanted? Some of these kind of things. You know, Chantel talks about the different things that are percolating. The inflation is percolating in the States in a big way. I got a letter yesterday from an American in Arizona who said she'd just been at the grocery store and eggs were $13 a dozen. Eggs, which was his main campaign staple, right? Trump.

He kept raising it every day. He was going to end inflation on day one. He was going to end the war on day one, everything. But, I mean, that's part of the Bannon strategy of throwing up a whole bunch of outrageous proposals in order for everybody to make sure that we're all paying attention to these huge, bouncing, shiny silver balls. Don't pay attention to inflation. Don't pay attention to the price of gas and groceries. We all know how that works.

It doesn't work. If we've learned one thing from the past three years, it is that people actually pay more attention to the fate of the price of groceries and the price of gas at the pump than they do in Arctic policies and the future of who's going to be defending it. So the notion that distracting the American consumer from those issues will work by opening all these foreign policy fronts, I don't really buy it. I've seen no evidence that consumers suddenly say, I don't care if, by the way, those eggs, they cost a lot because of avian flu. You know, the thing we're less guarded against now that the U.S. is dismantling its early warning system for pandemics. It's not just inflation that's driving up the price of their eggs. It's actually avian flu in poultry.

I'm not going to say the word pandemic again after this time, but a lot of things can go wrong when you're throwing all these balls into the air and you pretend you can juggle all of them and people will be fascinated. You're going to drop some. But he did say that if NATO countries don't pay their fees, Putin can do whatever the hell he wants to them. And I think we began to see this week something that I never thought that I would see in my lifetime, which is a pivot to Moscow from the president of the United States. And not in a way of detente, but they're talking about business deals and other things like that. And you can just listen to what's going on on the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg where they can hardly wait for Visa and MasterCard to come back

and Starbucks and some of the other companies to come back. I mean, you're rewarding somebody who invaded the sovereign territory of a neighbor in an unprovoked way. And that doesn't seem to be triggering outrage. There are some people, there are some who maybe have some influence with the president, raising flags of caution, Lindsey Graham and others. They're saying, well, he's not, that's really not what he's doing. Well, he said he was going to do it. He sent J.D. Vance over to say, we're not interested in defending Europe anymore. Or in their words, we're not interested in being suckers anymore. Even though prosperity in Europe was good for the United States, part of the Marshall Plan, the entire plan was for them to become more prosperous and trade with the united states i did not have pivot to moscow on my scorecard at this point in my life um on the provocation thing i mean trump buys the provocation that russia tries to sell which

the provocation was ukraine wanting to get into nato and. And so they had to move as far as they were concerned. Anyway, that's whatever it is. That's their argument. Going to take our final break. Come back, we've got one more domestic question. We'll do that right after this. Welcome back. Final segment of Good Talk with Robin Chantel coming right up now.

Here's your question. You know, we talk about is NATO dead? Is the G7 dead? What could happen to NORAD? All these things. Meanwhile, here at home where we could be into an election campaign, what, within a month? Is the NDP dead?

Well, it's on life support. That's for sure. Those numbers, they're devastating numbers. And this is kind of the worst. The conservatives always feared that they would lose Justin Trudeau on the way to the election. But it turns out the NDP should have been equally worried about losing Justin Trudeau. Why? of tariffs, Trump, etc., Kvaliev's personality, and the fact that there is someone else on offer is kind of creating a movement that the NDP has endured in the past, i.e.,

some of its base, not just sympathizers, some of whom had gone over to the conservatives, but part of the NDP's federal base is moving over to the liberal column at this point. I saw a number this week that kind of stunned me. I'm not sure if it was, there have been many polls. So I'm not sure if it was a Nanos or a Léger or an Angus Reid. That tells you how many polls we'd look at in a week. That's right.

But it showed, well, for one, it showed that Mr. Poilier's negatives have never been higher. What does negative and positive mean? Because I realized whenever we talk about this, people don't know what we're talking about. You ask someone, do you think Peter Mansbridge is doing a good job? And if the answer is yes, you put one.

And then if the answer is no, you go to the other column. You do the math. If you have more pluses than minus, you have a favorability index of plus something. If the negatives outweigh the column of the positives, then you're done, basically. So Mr. Poitier's negatives are really going up. That's not a surprise. He's a polarizing figure. But the only federal possible leader, prospective leader,

who has a positive favorability number is Mark Carney at this point, plus nine. But the one who had the lowest, lower than Pierre Poitier, lower than Justin Trudeau, I think at minus 25 was Jagmeet Singh. Now, usually, the NDP leader may not get your vote, but he gets your sympathy. That was the case with Jack Layton at broadband, Alexa McDonough. That is not happening. And what that suggests to me is it's not just the conjuncture, so progressives coalescing behind what now looks like the stronger option to stop the conservatives. But I think the NDP also has a leadership problem

that it will not be able to solve in time for the election. Rob? Yeah, I believe that the NDP will rue the day that they did not bring down the government last spring or last fall when they had opportunities to do that. It's not just the conservatives that wanted to run against Justin Trudeau just the conservatives that wanted to run against Justin Trudeau. The New Democrats wanted to run against Justin Trudeau as well. And they had a chance to do that and bring them down. And they didn't do that. They'll rue the day. So much has changed since since the fall. The election of Donald Trump hurts them as well. The New Democrats are also people who have a lot of support among working people, working people whose jobs are on the line,

working people whose jobs may disappear as a result of Donald Trump and tariffs. And so they are also gravitating. It's not just liberals going back to the Liberal Party. It's New Democrats going to Mr. Carney because they believe that he represents a chance at coming up with a plan to either save their jobs or attenuate the loss of jobs. And this is fatally undermining the chances of new Democrats. And a lot of them are seeing that even with the change, there is still a very strong likelihood of a majority conservative government. And that is something that completely sidelines new Democrats as well. So I think that there's some of that going on in the psychology of their support, and quite frankly, abandonment of Mr. Singh and their own party. They're trying in their minds

to also deal with the reality of what a majority Conservative governor under Mr. Poiliev would represent. So the last few polls seem to have shown some stability in that the conservatives are still in majority territory. And Mr. Carney is within shouting distance, but not not threatening to win right now. And the sad thing for New Democrats is it appears to be baking in the fact that they are now far behind and losing seats to the liberals. I'm not reading the polls quite the same way. The Angus Reid and the Lizzie polls had the conservatives almost tied with the liberals with a very, very small margin, 40 to 39 in one poll. And seriously, what that shows is a minority government for one, and two, a minority liberal government. Why? Because the

liberals' vote is much more efficient than the conservative vote. But I will say this, I am going to take all those poll numbers more seriously once the Ontario election is out of the way. Because I do believe that what's going on there provincially is probably contaminating the federal sample. And once it's out of the way, we will have a better sense of the real strength of the federal conservatives in Ontario. We know the NDP is not having that great campaign at this point provincially in that province. But the province where the plates move in a way that changes the outcome of the election is Ontario. Quebec has shifted. Atlantic Canada has shifted. There are some movements, but it's minor in BC. But everyone has to keep their eye on Ontario. Second question, if I'm right, and we are looking at minority governments, more the rule than the exception over the past two decades, is a minority poly of government sustainable? I'm not convinced, considering he went out of his way to bomb his bridges to the Bloc Québécois and the NDP over the past year and a half. Okay, we're going to leave it at that.

But your caution note on polls, we're going to see a lot of them almost daily over the next couple of weeks, and then probably over the next couple of months because of the election campaign. But the Ontario factor is a really big factor. Not only is it important, but also the Ontarians are voting now, and so when they do polling in Ontario, some people sometimes don't make the difference

between federal and provincial, so it gets kind of messy. Anyway, that's going to wrap it up. Thanks to Rob Russo, Chantelle Hebert, another great good talk for this Friday. Have a great weekend. We'll be back on Monday.