The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Good Talk -- Is The Revolt Over or Just On Pause?

Episode Date: October 25, 2024

So, did he dodge the coup?  Does Justin Trudeau now have a clear path to the next election?   After weeks of rumours and coded, secret talk, the plotters had their say in the caucus, and then it seemed everyone moved on.  Or have they?  Chantal and Bruce are here to chat about all this and more because there's always more!

Are you ready for Good Talk? And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. Welcome to Friday. Welcome to Good Talk. Chantal Hébert, Bruce Anderson, Peter Mansbridge here. Well, why don't we get right at it. Is the coup over or is it on pause? Bruce, why don't we get right at it? Is the coup over or is it on pause? Bruce, why don't you start? The coup. Well, the coup is a strong word to use for something like that. What happened this week, I think, is dramatic.

And good for you to start with a dramatic question. Everybody loves it when you do that. Here's what I think, Peter. I think it was a better day than some people thought Justin Trudeau was going to have, and maybe it was a better day than he thought he was going to have, at least in terms of the outcome. It could have been worse, I suppose. I think it would be a mistake for the Prime Minister to think that it was a big win or, you know, a hugely successful day. I mean, anytime you have a situation where an incumbent who's well behind in the polls has a significant proportion of his caucus,

making it clear that they want him to stay, that's not an easy situation. It's a difficult situation. And so what's clear coming out of it, I guess, is this. The party is probably not going to get to decide who the leader is unless Mr. Trudeau resigns soon. And he doesn't sound like he's going to do that. So it will be up to the caucus. conversation has another chapter to it, or whether or not having said their piece and walking out of that caucus room the way they did the other day, they basically left it to the prime minister to decide whether or not he's going to do certain things that will help improve their electoral prospects and prove their confidence in him personally. And so it remains to be seen. How will he respond? How will Pierre-Paul Lievre fare? He's under more pressure and scrutiny now than he has been lately. I think that's a healthy thing. How will polls evolve? There are some people who think that the polls are narrowing. If they do narrow, I think that will help strengthen the prime minister's case and reduce

the chances that this kind of conversation keeps coming back. But in the past, it has been, I think, often the case that once this amount of energy pointed towards that particular outcome of changing leaders before an election, once it establishes itself, if there's a critical mass of it, it's hard for it to completely dissipate. So the Prime Minister has his work cut out for him to reassure and lead the party that he wants to lead into the next election. There's some things that he could do, but I'll leave that for the next round of conversation. Okay. Chantal, coup over or on pause? I mean, I'm like Bruce, when you say coup, I'm thinking, did I miss something?

These are people who signed a letter and then handed it to the prime minister, but didn't show him the signatures, with other people circulating a petition with the same purpose, from the rank and file of the party, so they say. But they've already said in advance that they will not share whoever signs it with anyone except two officials of the Liberal Caucus and the Liberal Party. So you kind of go, but they will tell you how many people signed it. Well, great. So what do you call it then?

I mean, let's face it. You can question the turmoil. I mean, yes, if you want to have a coup, do not telegraph it in advance. Be upfront about it and have a leader, someone who actually have a substitute, an alternative solution. I'm told that over that caucus meeting, a couple of names of people who were not caucus members came up. One of those names was Kim Campbell. The other one is obviously John Turner.

Both got to lead parties at the same juncture very late in the game. And both, when they became leader, were greeted with a big boost for the party in the poll. Pierre Trudeau's liberals were number one when John Turner went into a campaign. And Brian Mulroney was all but forgotten over the summer that Kim Campbell was prime minister. And then the fundamentals reasserted themselves. And we know what happened to both of them. To this day, I still believe, and I'm sure he will be glad to hear it from wherever he's following politics. I still believe Brian Mulroney would have done better than two seats, which was Kim Campbell's score. But going back to that day and what happened afterwards, I think that once the meeting

was over, the notion that there was now a deadline for the prime minister to kind of revisit and hopefully, in the minds of those who want him gone, change his mind, that kind of led the news. Suddenly, it was the prime minister as until the 28th to decide to leave, basically, because he doesn't need until the 28th to decide to stay. He's been saying that for a couple of years. I think, rightly, people around Justin Trudeau understood that he who commenced the narrative wins the day. And that narrative around some deadline on Monday kind of opened the door for what, four or five days of speculation. Will he? Won't he? And came to the decision in the face of Mr. Trudeau, I think, obvious unwillingness to reconsider his determination to lead the party in another election, decided that they had to kill the suspense as quickly as possible.

And so they put the prime minister out to make that immigration announcement. I'm not sure you actually needed Justin Trudeau and all those people who were designed to show the diversity of the liberal going to be able to kill any notion that he was taking the weekend to rethink his future plans. And that, to me, signals, and it should signal to those who have been trying to house Justin Trudeau, that he feels he has enough support to go on, and he has no intention of going anywhere. Okay. Let me, I'll get to the immigration stuff in a minute, but I want to stay on this for a moment. You know, I tried to play with you on this last week,

both of you on this issue of like, who are these people? You know, the 20 or the 25 or whatever it is they are. And I want to pursue that a little more. I mean, that is not an insignificant number. And I guess it's, you know, Bruce tended to agree with that. I mean, 2025 is a lot. It may be a small fraction of the caucus, but it's still a lot of people. And the very fact that they're not willing to stand as a group in front of the cameras or in some fashion go public with their issues, I think is interesting and it doesn't help their cause.

And I think it helps his cause. I'm not taking sides here, I'm just saying that if they're hiding their names, even when I would assume a lot of people know who they are, and some have come public to give them that. But do we know any more about who they were, who they are, this week than we knew a week ago? Well, it depends on who we is. I mean, I think that your question comes quite naturally, I think, from the standpoint of a kind of a journalistic interest. Their decisions, these individuals, aren't intended to satisfy that journalistic interest. They're intended to deal with their own circumstances. And so as members of parliament and members of a party, what they want to do is not rip their party apart. They want to solve a

problem that their party has. And so their calculation right now is that they're more likely to solve the problem that their party has if they do it as discreetly as possible, rather than as publicly as possible. So I get that it can be frustrating for people who aren't in politics to say, but wait, it's not serving my need to have, you know, some big explosion and names and blood on the floor and everything else. But they're not going to do that just to satisfy that need. And nor do I think they should. I think the other thing I would say is that I've heard no account that the number of people who took the mic at the caucus meeting the

other day who said, Justin Trudeau needs to lead us into the next election, was anything approaching the number of people on the other side. Now, I may be wrong, but I haven't heard an account that said that there was a lot of people. I know the cabinet has been encouraged to say what they say in support of him. And that's logical in our system. The cabinet is pretty much obligated to offer its support to the prime minister if he wants to continue to lead the party. But my suspicion is that 24 is the smallest number if one really wants to understand how much discomfort and how much confidence on the part of that Liberal caucus has been shaken. And so it will be necessary for the Prime Minister, if he wants this conversation not to keep coming back,

to do more things than to have just stood down this conversation this week. He's going to have to show more action that's more compelling, more steps that are more likely to inspire confidence than those people have seen from him so far. And I don't think he's got a lot of time to do that, but I do think he has some time to do that. Okay. I think you make your point. I do think that if you're going to be discreet about it, they wouldn't have leaked so much stuff in the days and weeks before the caucus meeting. But I hear what you're saying. Chantal? I don't really think that a lot of people are hunting for a list of names,

because for many people who are journalists, what matters more than who they are is who they are not and who they are not are prominent members of the government now i i i get what bruce is saying about ministers having to show solidarity but those i talk to are convinced that justin trudeau is the best of all of the bad options that the liberals have at this point. Some probably because they're thinking of their own leadership prospects, but others have not been shown or convinced that there is someone out there who will do immensely better than Justin Trudeau will. And they would be the ones who come up with the names like Kim Campbell and John Turner. And those are real things that actually did happen. With the exception of Pierre Trudeau, I didn't cover a substitute or a successor to a successful prime minister who improved this party's fortune in an election. And I include in that Paul Martin. Remember, his prospects looked great

when he took over, and he did take over a party that was leading in the polls. When John Clayton left, the liberals were well ahead in the polls. So Mr. Martin could do no better than turn out a minority government. So if Justin Trudeau is way down and you apply that principle, then you really need to make history for someone to do not as bad as Justin Trudeau looks like he's going to be doing. I also have spoken to a number of MPs who feel the same way as cabinet ministers, and they're not saying that because they want to be appointed to cabinet tomorrow morning or because they're unhappy. So I think that in the end, the pro-Trudeau faction, if you want to call it that,

is stronger than people are assuming. I also got the impression from some stories that I heard that a fair number of people went to the microphone to say they didn't believe it was time to rock the leadership vote over the course of the leadership meeting. I don't know what would have happened if they'd had that secret vote. You know what secret votes do. From Flora McDonald to Erin O'Toole, we all know that what you do when you are safe is not always what you say in public. But still, they still lack the essential. There is no Paul Martin leading them.

And when it came to a head with Jean Chrétien, Paul Martin was out in the open. He quit, was fired from cabinet. How more spectacular do you want it to be? There is nothing like that in the office. Bruce? from cabinet how more spectacular do you want it to be there's nothing like that on the often bruce yeah i i think chantelle makes a lot of good points there and i and i think that that default position of a show us what the alternative is is at least for the moment what it is that's keeping a lot of people from saying yeah let's rush into the unknown. And I think that makes perfect sense too, because this is not an opposition party that feels like it might have nothing to lose

because it's staring at an election ahead where it sees no prospect of winning. This is a party that doesn't know, in terms of the most, the largest number of MPs, what losing looks like. Party stalwarts know what losing looks like, and they remember 2011, but a lot of these MPs would not have that experience. And so their instincts aren't honed by all of that kind of hard experience that people in and around politics for

decades, like me, for example, kind of come at it. So in the absence of feeling confident in what the alternative, the great unknown looks like, this is the moment where Justin Trudeau gets to decide what it is he's going to say next or do next that's going to make them reassured. And I've been thinking, what would I do if I were in his shoes? And a few things come to mind, and I'd love to know what you guys think about them. Some of them will be familiar to you, and maybe your recollection of history will be a little bit different than mine. But I remember only two campaigns where a deliberate strategy of so-called low-bridging the leader was utilized. One was Pierre Trudeau in 1980, and one was Stephen Harper in 2011. Both resulted in success. Now, why were those strategies taken? They were taken because the incumbent leader

was not terribly popular, but the party still had things that it wanted to say that they thought would be competitive relative to their opponents. And in the end, voters did make a choice to reelect the liberals after having kicked them out with Pierre Trudeau, who they weren't particularly fond of at that time. But he didn't show up very much in that election campaign. And Harper chose a similar strategy, I believe, in 2011. Second thing is you need surrogates. When I look at the surrogates that Justin Trudeau relies on the most, principally people in his cabinet, and I look at the demographic profile of his support in the public right now, I say, well, he's doing, he's behind among young women voters, he's behind among all demographic

groups, but he's really, really behind with men and in particular young men. He's like 27 points behind Pierre Polyev there. He could use more surrogates like Mark Miller, for example, who can deliver a message with some political punch. He could look at the way in which he employs surrogates so that he bulks up in fresh faces and faces that can land messages that might resonate with those groups that he's really in trouble with. Third thing for me is everybody says it's about the economy. And so today, as I was getting ready for this conversation, I was looking at what is it really when people are saying it's the economy?

Is it productivity? Is it GDP? It's not those things. It's the cost of food. It's the cost of housing. and I'll put it out on Twitter to just show me a graph of what's been happening to those staple food prices for Canadian families in the period 2015 to now. And it shows that everything was pretty normal. It looked like it was keeping to that 2% inflation rate up until just before, you know, the pandemic and things started to go up and then they've gone up since and they're not really coming down. And that's the big weight when people say, I can't vote for these guys because the economy was better before and I need it to be better again. So if I were Trudeau, I would probably have a conversation about the economy every day. I'd monitor a basket of food products so everybody could see that this is a huge preoccupation. They're getting somewhere in some of these policy choices that they're making around immigration and housing. But I think it needs to be a lot more and a lot more politics around that

and maybe a lot less of the sound of government kind of slowly grinding its gears to come up with a grocery prices code of conduct or something like that when people just want the price of chicken to come down. Okay. I have one last question on this subject before we take a break. And I have one last thing. Okay. All right. Here's my last question.

And it's still about the group. Call them whatever you want. The coup group, the bad guys group, the good guys group, the whatever. After this week has gone by, do we know, do they reflect the Liberal Party across the country in terms of elected representatives, or are they just from one particular region? Do they have, do we sense that they have a leader?

No. But what we do know is that it started in Atlantic Canada, that it included MPs from Ontario and the West in the larger sense of the word. I think BC and I don't want to point a finger, but probably Alberta. And that there were a couple of Quebec MPs, but overall, the Quebec caucus was the least into this, let's have a change in leadership,

because I think the general understanding is when all is said and done and history has proven you're better off with a leader who is based in Quebec to save the furniture than with a leader who comes from, well, I'm thinking about Christy Clark, possibly, because I'm in BC. Quebec caucus knows that Christy Clark or Justin Trudeau, you're drowning, you're going to reach out for Justin Trudeau in Quebec and not Christy Clark, especially when you're told that she's learning French, which kind of sends shivers up the spine of anyone who's going to be campaigning in French in Quebec doing French immersion will not make you a great stump speaker in French. But I was thinking about Bruce's very practical solutions. You know, over the course of the past two weeks, Mark Carney has restated that he plans to enter politics someday. And Christy Clark, to name her again, said, I want to be part

of the leadership conversation. Frankly, if I were Justin Trudeau, I would tell both of these people that it's a fish or cut bait moment. If you think you want to lead the team and you can score big goals for the team and the team is going down, it's 20 points behind, then you're going to sit on the sidelines and say, well, if only I were on the field, you would be doing so much better. If these people are serious about this flirt that they're having with the leadership of a team that they're not a part of, well, let them put their names on a ballot and run for as MPs and earn the gratitude of the many liberals that they will need to vote for them

when the leadership opens up. I know it's not conventional thinking. You're not supposed to get your uniform dirty in a lost game because you want to be the shiny new player. But let's be serious. These are adults who keep flirting about this notion. They seem to have a lot of time on their hands. Let them use it to run an election.

I'm sure Mr. Trudeau can find seats for either of them. Okay. We're going to take our break. Take our first break, and we'll be back with more of our discussion about things national and the political landscape as we see it right now. Back right after this. And welcome back. You're listening to Good Talk for this Friday.

Bruce Anderson, Chantelle Hebert, Peter Mansbridge here. 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. We had good news on our YouTube channel the other day. Our program, which goes up on YouTube after you've heard it on SiriusXM or the release of the podcast,

it goes up on YouTube shortly after that, and we've got over 10,000 subscribers to our channel, and we basically just started that this year, earlier this year, so we're pretty puffed about that. Okay, next topic, and we had a hint of it a little earlier when Chantel talked about the immigration policy that was announced earlier this week by the Prime Minister now and the Immigration Minister. So here's the question. You know, desperate times often provoke desperate measures.

And when you're 20 points down or 13 points down, we've seen both those kind of polls this week, both are significant discrepancies for the Liberal Party in terms of their positioning. So you could describe that as a desperate time. So is this a desperate times, desperate measure in basically going back on your immigration policy in a not insignificant way?

Or is it a reflection of the times in which we live, not just in this country, but in other countries where immigration has been giving a hard look in terms of its contribution to some of those problems that Bruce was talking about earlier in terms of what people are seeing in terms of services and opportunities at the food counter. Who wants to take a run at this? Bruce, do you want to start again? Yeah, sure. Yeah. No, I don't think it's desperate times. And I don't really think that the measures that were announced were desperate either. I think they were sensible.

I think that everything I understand about this, and I'm not the world's biggest policy expert in this or any other field for that matter, is that we can't afford not to have a lot of immigration if we want our economy to continue to grow. We're not replacing our population. So eventually, our social programs that we care about as a country and the health of our economy will suffer if we don't increase our population. And we're not making enough babies, so we need that through immigration. The absorptive capacity of the economy, meaning the number of people who could live here comfortably without driving up the price of things like housing, was what it was a few years

ago. But it isn't that now. And what's going on, I think, really, is the revelation that it's become too hard, too complex, too time consuming, too costly to build homes in a lot of parts of the country. A lot of that is not the responsibility of the federal government. It's local governments and provincial governments in some instances, which bogged down the construction of affordable housing in a million different ways. So yeah, we could look at it and say, could the federal government have anticipated the size of that problem earlier and done more corrective measures? Potentially. But it wasn't like they weren't dealing with anything. The pandemic was a fairly significant disruption factor in our economy and also added disruptions in the cost of everything else. So to find themselves in a situation where they could

choose to do nothing and let the immigration levels rest where they were, that wouldn't make much sense as far as I'm concerned. They have to look at the situation as it is and say, in addition to all of the other rising costs that people have experienced through the supply chain disruptions and the cost of food in particular, the cost of housing is too high for people. And one of the reasons is we don't have enough houses being built for the number of people who are looking for houses in the country. So the adjustments that they made, I think, were sensible, not radical. They said that they were temporary, not permanent. They articulated the idea that we're going to need to grow our population in the future and we need to build more houses for people. I thought it was well done and I thought it was the right thing to do.

Chantal? Okay. Well, this was the policy section of that segment. I am not going to argue that politics did not drive this. The liberals have been part of their brand to be seen as the pro-immigration party. And they reaped a lot of benefits from that. When Justin Trudeau became leader, a lot of voters would come in this country in the 60s and 70s, remember that it was someone called Trudeau who would open the door to them. And so, I mean, like China, immigration has been in the DNA of the Liberal Party for a

long, long time. And I think that until fairly recently, the Liberals believed that they could drive a wedge between themselves and the Conservatives by showcasing themselves as the pro-immigration party and suggesting that the conservatives, building on that rather disastrous 2015 campaign where the barbarian practices tip line came up, an issue over Syrian refugees, an issue over citizenship ceremonies in the place of the hijab, that they could build on that to say, you know, this party, the conservative party, is kind of in the wave of all those right-leaning parties or right-wing parties in Europe or even in the US that think badly of immigrants. Not that Pierre Poilievre gave them cause to make that argument, but just by distinguishing themselves.

I think they've come around and the polls do show that this is not a battle they want to have. What's happened over the past year and a half is that attitudes have increasingly shifted as people have made the link between housing and the rather high level of immigration that the liberals have presided over. months, walking back their entire, not just yesterday's announcements, their entire policy on immigration, throwing some challenges in the backyard of the provinces in the process on temporary foreign workers, because there is a lot of political hypocrisy in this file on foreign students. You can't be the province and say we want the federal government is allowing too many people to come in and in the same breath say

we really desperately need more foreign students to sustain our programs in the regions of the province, be it Quebec or BC or Ontario. Well, and to pay for post-secondary education as well. Exactly, because the provinces have been actually using foreign students who pay more to spend less on post-secondary education, which translates into a saving. history of the last years of this third term of Justin Trudeau and possibly the last years of the Trudeau era, how he ended up being driven to walk back a lot of his signature politics. At this time last year, we were discussing the liberal decision to exempt heating with oil from the carbon pricing policy of the government. And what drove that was politics. And back then, the liberals didn't figure that if you really don't want to pay carbon

pricing on top of your heating bill, you're probably going to vote for the guy who wants to take it off all heating bills and not just the guy that's taking it off oil eating. And this year, we're walking back the immigration policy. A few weeks ago, the prime minister said he was sorry he hadn't done electoral reform his way. It's kind of, you know, if you stay in government for too long, you kind of become the other guy. The good news is, though, that it probably means we're not going to have an election that is focused on immigration. And we do not want that. And I don't think the conservatives wanted that.

But the liberals have neutralized, blunted the edge of immigration as an issue in the next election. Yes, Pierre Poilievre will say they wrecked the system and now, look, they're trying to clean up the mess. But he is not saying I would do, I would cut more or they're wrong about cutting. All of this, by the way, leaves Canada's business community at a bit of a loss again, because on this issue, they are not in on these cuts to immigration or temporary foreign workers. And they don't have an ally in the House of Commons, the traditional ally of the business community, the Conservative Party, is not going to be playing in that sandbox, I don't think, on their behalf. I know Bruce wants to jump in here. I'm glad we're having this discussion,

because there's a lot it tells you about politics in the way these issues are being handled and having to be re-thunk, if there's such a word. I loved Chantal's line there about the longer you're in government, you become the other guy, because there's a degree of truth to that. And it is one of the frustrations that governments, you know, who are in for a long time are faced with and how to deal with that. Anyway, Bruce, sorry, go ahead. Yeah, I wanted to say a couple of things.

One is that I think we're really, for the first time in a long time, I remember one or two examples maybe years and years and years ago where the politics of prices, consumer prices, was a really, really significant factor. And this is that. There's no question in my mind that, you know, every day that the government gets up in Ottawa and announces 30 other things that have nothing to do with consumer prices, maybe in the hope that people will pay attention to them and say, well, these are good things too. It doesn't work that way.

When you have this many people who are feeling that they cannot imagine taking a holiday because the combination of what it takes to eat and what it takes to shelter themselves and what it takes in terms of fuel is just too much, it's depressing for them. And the only solution for incumbents in that situation is to solve that problem as much as you can and be seen to be working on it day in, day out. The second point, and I don't think that that has been as evident from a government with this much scale and this much interest in so many other issues. So they really need to narrow the aperture quite a lot. And that takes some pretty radical political management surgery, if you like. Probably does take a change in some personnel, too.

The second thing, though, is to recognize, and this is where I thought Chantal was kind of touching on something that I really come to see. And it's not that I'm going to try to praise Pierre Poliev here. So I've got kind of issues with a lot of the way that he conducts himself. Just a minute. I just want to make sure we've got the recording going. Yes, I was going to say, do you have the timing on this? We're going somewhere. This will drive mail. I can see it now. Okay. You have the microphone to yourself now, Mr. Anderson. Oh, shit.

Are we out of time now? Here's what Pierre Polyev is not doing, which he could have been doing, and which would have made him more vulnerable. Compared to what MAGA influences can sound like from the United States, he is not saying blame the immigrants. He is not saying women to the back. He is not saying burn the books or words to that effect, culture war, stoking. He's saying ax the tax, build the houses, cut the crime, fix the budget.

Wow. That was very good, Bruce. Where are you running? Yeah, exactly. We've got a campaign sign in the back there for you. But the point is that people in Canada would not go near

in the numbers that Pierre Poliev is seeing right now, they would not go near a U.S. version of republicanism that is seeing right now. They would not go near a U.S. version of republicanism that we're hearing now. And it is to his credit as a political strategy that Pierre Polyev has deliberately chosen not to do that, and he's tamped down whatever influences there are

within his caucus or his party on that. And so it allows people who otherwise might not consider the Conservative Party to say, well, he's talking about the things that I care about. And that's a very powerful tonic for him in this situation. And the one last point I would make is that this is the first time that I can remember where young people under 30 put lowering taxes high up on their priority list. In the past, that's really not been their preoccupation because they tend to be earlier in their careers. Their place in the kind of the how much you earn and how much you pay spectrum is different. But what they're saying now about taxes is that we can't afford to pay the taxes

that we have and pay for the food and for the lodging and for the fuel and maybe a holiday or a or a night out. And so that dynamic has really worked to the advantage of any politician who can say, here's the pragmatic solutions that I'm going to bring to the things that are causing you the most pain. And day in, day out for the last while anyway, Pierre Polyev has been more effective at that than Justin Trudeau has been. That's where they need to strengthen. Well, I'm hoping that they are not counting on tax cuts making a huge difference because the difference between the 30-year-old and us is we have seen tax cuts.

They have not yet. We know that it barely registers. When you look at your pay stub, you go, okay, I've got $2 more. I don't think that's the answer either. And now there is also the fact that if you're're 30 and you are having a family or planning on a family, you're going to save a hell of a lot more money if you get affordable child care than if you have to pay a second mortgage and child care fees. So when I moved to Quebec from Ontario as a taxpayer, I got the tax shock. Obviously, you pay less taxes in Ontario than in Quebec. But in exchange, my sons got to go to university for a really competitive price. And my kids have had access to childcare at a price that I could only dream of when I was raising children in Ontario.

So there are trade-offs. And I'm not too sure that the crowd that is signing tax cuts totally understands that you can end up losing from a tax cut rather than feeling that you have a bit more money in your pockets. Bruce mentioned, starting off this latest bit, that he couldn't remember a time at which there'd been so much focus on prices or that you've got to go way back to think of what that time was. I can think of what it was. And, you know, I'll just tell you a brief little anecdote about it. Early 80s. Wage and price controls.

Yeah. Wage and price controls, yeah. Well, you know, it was around that time, but in the late 70s and early 80s, the focus on Parliament Hill, I was a young reporter on Parliament Hill at that time, and of all the stories that happened each month, there was one every month that got more attention than anything else. I remember that. And this was a CPI, the Consumer Price Index. It would come out in the morning. It was released at like 8 a.m.

And it made a huge deal, had a huge impact, not only on Parliament Hill, but across the country on whatever that number was. And it was basically, you know, the cost of a bundle of everyday goods for most families and whether the price was going up or down. It was always going up in those days. But here's the story. Every month, that number, which wasn't released, held under whatever secret confidential means, the story broke at least an hour before it was supposed to come out and who broke it mike duffy mike duffy was the guy i you know and i worked with him he was in our bureau i i still to

this day i have no idea where he got it from but he'd get it every month duffy had come out he'd have it on the 7 a.m. newscast before everybody else would get it at 8 a.m. But you're absolutely right in terms of everybody, the whole, you know, bag of wax. The politicians, the journalists, the people would hang on that announcement once a month to guide them as to which direction the economy was going on. Now you don't even hear it. I know we're feeling it, and there's different ways of seeing it,

but you don't hear it that same way in terms of that monthly CPI. I run into people who are fierce advocates for climate change policy, and they'll say, well, why don't people care about climate change anymore? And I say, well, they do care about it, but they care more about whether they're able to afford everyday life now. And that's just human nature, I think. And a big challenge, I think, for the liberals is to get really focused on that, not just for political success, but because to Chantel's point, it will otherwise lead to people making choices that are not necessarily in their interest. But the old paradigm where you could just say conservatives will cut taxes and they'll cut services and expect everybody in the population to kind of hear that and say, yeah, that's a thing that we should avoid.

That's not the dynamic that I see right now. Okay. Time for our final break and then we'll come back. We've got a few minutes left and we'll talk about another issue that's out there to play with right after this. And welcome back. Final segment of a good talk for this week. Bruce Anderson, Chantelle Hebert, Peter Mansbridge here. There's one thing political analysts

around the world have talked about for at least the last year, it's that being an incumbent government is not a happy time. And there have been lots of examples of incumbent governments that have gone down to defeat at the polls or have faced a situation much tighter, much closer than they ever thought it was going to be. Macron in France, the situation in India, there have been others. But mostly it's been an incumbent government gets tossed.

And often for reasons that we've just explained in terms of everything from food prices and housing along those lines. So we've had a couple of provincial elections in the last week or so. We've got another one coming up. The BC one, which was last week, still hasn't really been settled. It could be by the time you listen to this um but other than breaking down the individual uh situations in the different provinces what are the what are what are the lessons about the political atmosphere beyond the the the one i just mentioned about incumbent governments what are the lessons about the political atmosphere in this country based on

what we've seen you you know, so far in those elections. Bruce, you analyze the numbers, so why don't you start us? Well, I think that the biggest transformation that's going on has to do with where people get information, what information they consume, and how radically different it is now compared to five years ago, let alone 10 years ago. And the fact that it's really uncertain where it's going to be going forward. I was listening to some podcasts about the US election earlier this week. I think you and I talked about it a little bit, Peter. The idea that Kamala Harris went on Fox News, everybody paid a lot of attention to that. It seemed like a fairly bold strategy and people were wondering whether or not it was going to

work or not. But one of the podcasters I listened to covers the US political scene pretty well, said the choice to go on Joe Rogan, if that happens, and I think it will happen, is a much more material choice. Millions and millions and millions more people will hear what she has to say on that platform. And this analysis was making the larger point, which is that the intermediation role that media have historically played in how politicians present their case to the voters and how voters receive and interpret it is a fraction of what it used to be and there are so many other ways in which people are accumulating information there are so many who are either distracted or deliberately ignoring information about politics

and there's so much disinformation and misinformation that kind of flows as though it kind of looks like news, it looks like fact, it looks like reliable information, but we know that it isn't. That's the biggest thing from my standpoint. And for a while there, I think we were only worried about whether or not it, I shouldn't say we, maybe I was more worried about it, whether or not it was about geopolitics and other countries interfering and trying to shape what we knew or thought about our own domestic politics. And I don't think that's the risk now. I think the risk is much more pervasive, and I don't know what the solution is, but it isn't

going to be as simple as politicians saying, we need more press conferences with the press gallery that's a fraction of the size that it used to be be and an audience that's, in many cases, a fraction of the size that it used to be as well. Chantal? Okay, so let me bring it back to specifics. We've had three provincial elections so far this year, Manitoba, BC, and New Brunswick. In all cases, the incumbents were shipped off to opposition. It's the only thing they have in common. In Manitoba, the NDP formed a government.

In BC, there has been a, regardless of the eventual outcome, the story has been a major surge of the Conservative Party of British Columbia. And in New Brunswick, it's the Liberals who came back with a very decisive victory. Saskatchewan might break that pattern when it goes to the polls in a few days. But overall, there is fatigue with, I think, the governments that people rewarded in some instances right after the pandemic. But now voters are coming to think now that they see a fuller range of policies from all those governments, they're having second thoughts about just how good they are or how good they still are. I look at what's happening in Quebec to Premier François Legault and his sharp decline in popularity and in the polls. And that also tells me that he is outlasting his welcome, that his fatigue with him has

now reached possibly a point of no return. But I don't think it says something about the ideological mood of the country. I don't find that the NDP result in Manitoba or the liberal result in New Brunswick is driven by an embrace of populism, for instance. You could say that about BC, but we all know that BC has had these moments in the past. And often, it's a very polarized province. People from the outside don't totally realize how polarized it has been between left and right for a long, long time. So there was a pause in the normal pattern. And rather than this is something brand new under the sun in BC, it doesn't bode well, obviously, for Justin Trudeau. It also makes you understand why Premier Ford in Ontario would really, really like to go to the polls while the going is good rather than wait out. And the same is happening in Nova Scotia, where the conservative incumbent is thinking,

maybe I should call it earlier, because the going is good. But looking at those patterns, I mean, the BC New Democrats did not imagine the campaign that they lived through six months ago. So, and the message is, things can change so dramatically, that if you think the going is good, please, you know, take advantage of this moment. And since we always talk about election timing federally, I would think that the experience in B.C. probably has made the federal NDP even more gun-shy about precipitating a federal campaign. Does Jagmeet Singh really want to ask campaign workers in BC who have just had a really tough fight to fight to wake up tomorrow and go into another campaign that will be difficult, knowing that some of the conservative success is tied to Pierre Poiliev's popularity? I don't think so. So maybe we can book plane tickets for January and worry about the election for next spring only. I just want to make a couple of quick points then, Peter.

I don't know that there would have been another Saskatchewan election that will be as closely followed by politicians in Queen's Park as this one. Because if I'm Ford, the feeling I had before the New Brunswick election and before the BC election was different from the feeling that I have now. That sense of uncertainty where you kind of look at the polls and you go, we're invincible. We might as well call it and rack up another win. And then all of a sudden you see the polls kind of jumping out against incumbents when you didn't see it coming. And I think that's the big X factor there. And then the other point for me is that we didn't have a chance to talk about it yet today, and we probably won't, but the Liber liberals are in a race against time a little bit

and a half point interest rate cut this week is good news for them. If they can see a situation where they can convince people that they're helping make the cost of living better, a little bit more time on the clock could help. Inflation is down, interest rates are coming down. Those are both good indicators for incumbents that don't want to meet that incumbency popularity test anytime too soon. Okay. We're going to leave it at that. All good comments and good discussion, as always, here on Good Talk. Bruce, thank you.

Chantel, thank you. Chantel's out in BC, so she'll enjoy that for a couple of days. I've got to get a hat. We're going to wear hats next week, right? Don't you like that? That's my Scottish cap, but unfortunately unfortunately it has not improved my golf game. Okay, we're going to leave it at that for this week. We'll be back next week.

The buzz is available in your inbox. Subscribe at nationalnewswatch.com slash newsletter. That comes out 7 a.m. Saturday mornings. You can get it there. And as I said, our YouTube version of Good Talk is available to you later on today. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you again early next week. See you later, guys.