The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Good Talk -- Is Three Days A Week At The Office Too Much?

Episode Date: May 10, 2024

Lots up for discussion on Good Talk this week -- public service unions are fighting Ottawa over remote work, Mark Carney's view on carbon tax, more on Pierre Poilievre on the "notwithstanding clause" and how the issue of abortion could be involved, and the CBC and its executive bonuses. Chantal and Bruce join me for all that and a few words about Rex too.

Are you ready for Good Talk? And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here with Chantelle Hebert and Bruce Anderson. It's our regular Friday Good Talk. I want to start off with something that's not necessarily good talk. He was a special guy, Rex Murphy. There's no doubt about that. All three of us worked with him at different times over the years. It's been a few years, actually, since I think we've worked together with Rex.

But he passed away yesterday, and so we're all feeling a little sad. He was a very, you know know he was a special character it was like a walking thesaurus i mean you could sit down with rex and he could quote stuff from books long since uh published and have a good conversation about various things um he was very strongly held in his views and that's why he did a point of view with us on the CBC for many years. His views got even stronger after he left the CBC and wrote first for the Globe and then for the National Post. Upset some people and the things he was writing. I thought Kathleen Wynne's remarks today on the passing of Rex Murthy were pretty good. She said, you know, Rex didn't like my politics and I didn't like his politics, but he was a special character and I enjoyed reading him and enjoyed talking with him.

So, you know, it's always hard to lose somebody who you've worked with. And Rex was special. And that's why you're hearing a lot of people talk about him in this way today. And a couple of brief comments from you too, Bruce. Yeah. You know, I remember the days when I was doing at issue with you guys and Rex would be in the makeup room or getting ready to go on and we would chat a little bit and sometimes we went out for dinner afterwards and I always enjoyed the conversations with him a one-on-one I found him to be incredibly intelligent to very obviously very articulate and really quite curious in fact I remember we were having dinner one night and he in the course of he said, oh, I'm reading a book that you'd really like.

I won't try to do his accent. I'm reading a book that you would really like. And I said, oh, yeah, what is it? And he said, well, it's actually a series of like 14 volumes of the history of the Church of England in the Middle Ages, or Church in England in the, you know, in the Middle Ages, or Church in England in the Middle Ages. And I looked at him and I thought, I don't think you really know me. But I, you know, when somebody says that I've got this book that you'd really like, you know, I didn't know whether to be flattered or, or challenged or embarrassed. I'm never going to read that. But he was a very erudite person. And so I do have some, some fond memories of those conversations, but I also,

you know, I do feel like some of the things that he wrote in recent years and the ways in which he expressed himself on issues that I feel quite strongly about and quite differently about. It made me sad because I honestly felt like Rex at his best was the Rex who was taking calls from Canadians and hearing their point of view and kind of melding it all together in a form of discussion that I quite liked. And that's not what I saw from him and his work in latter years, but I do have those fond memories as well.

Chantal? Well, it was always fun when you would invite him, I think twice a year, to do kind of session-enders or year-enders on that issue because no one else was more likely to break all your rules than Rex. As in, keep it short, don't make two choices. He just did whatever he wanted.

It was totally entertaining to be on. And that is the first time I met Rex Murphy, I was just starting off doing public speaking. And it was the Charlottetown referendum, and we had this crowd in BC BC and he was speaking before me. I knew I was never going to match his mastery of the English language. But the one thing that he did that I was watching and I thought, and I can do that too, was he made the audience laugh. And I figured I can do that too. And once you've made them laugh, if you do it early enough, you've got your audience. You actually can go wherever you want to go, be serious, whatever. And on that, we gave a good one-two show. We should have gone

for a comedy show instead of at issue well he could certainly fit that bill i mean he was a funny guy when he wanted to be a bit of a curmudgeon as we all know but uh but could be quite funny and for those of us who you know kind of travel the speaking circuit in in canada you could always tell when you were arriving at a place where Rex had been the last year, a couple of years before, because they always said, you know, Rex Murphy was here and he was great. Are you going to be as good as him? You're going, oh, pressure's on. Anyway, we'll, we'll miss him, but we won't forget him. Okay. Topic one for today. well, I guess Rex was topic one, topic one in the conventional sense that we deal with here on Good Talk. For, I don't know, I guess everything changed work-wise

and the way people thought about work as a result of the pandemic. A lot of people were instructed to stay at home, work from home. Many of them decided they liked that a lot. And so they negotiated ways of staying at home once the pandemic started to ease. Now, the public service unions of Canada are in the midst of trying to force the issue on remote work, in other words, working from home, and they want three days a week to continue that way. The public service union, if I understand it correctly, is offering two.

They want three. And they seem to be willing to go to the mat on this, whatever the mat is. And they're trying to enlist the help of the NDP to support them on this as well. I'm not sure. Well, let me listen to what you guys have to say, first of all, in terms of how this is going to play out and who's it's most difficult for i mean public service unions you know work for the government the government the government can be thrown out the public service unions they can't be right um they can't they're not going to lose

their jobs politicians could lose their jobs so this is is an interesting dilemma. If you're wondering what do these people do, they do everything from your taxes to your passport. Passports, right. Exactly. So tell me what you think. Chantal, why don't you start? So let me step back a bit from the public service versus Justin Trudeau's government to say

the pandemic went on for too long and remote work was tested for too long to go away. It's a new reality. We're doing this from wherever we are. I do some regular TV shows where I have never gone back to studio since the pandemic ever. I regularly do at issue from home. It would have been unimaginable to not go in a studio anywhere in Canada before the pandemic. But now it's routine. If you can't make it to a studio, you do it from wherever you are. A lot of younger workers who are entering the workforce, and I was struck by conversations I heard over since the pandemic, who, you know, kids out of university applying for jobs for the first time getting introduced because there are labor shortages, and how many

of them were saying they would not consider a job offer that did not include some hybrid form of work, i.e. working from home. So knowing all this, it seems to me that the way that the government has gone about this in the public service, Treasury Board, is kind of we're fighting an evil that is remote work and we're slowly but surely crawling back to what we think is normal rather than try to figure out what is the new normal does it work are there there are advantages to it just think about climate change and traffic jams and productivity and spending two hours in your car to get to work uh work and what it does to a city core when all those cars suddenly arrive. What troubled me about the government's move this week is that, you know, the answer from Minister Annan was,

well, it's not in the work contract that they can work remotely. Well, what I wanted to hear was we have looked at productivity and we have found that remote work is lessening it. And hence, we need them to come back to the office more often. But that didn't happen because by their own admission, they did not look into that. They just feel that they would rather have the people sit one more day in the office with no productivity rationale to show maybe it is more productive. Team building does not go well when you're always working remotely. But it seemed like they were only responding to pressure from the Premier of Ontario, the Mayor of Ottawa, who swears he didn't lobby the government on this, but that they wanted more people back downtown in Ottawa because downtown Ottawa is usually quiet, but it's even quieter when people are working remotely. And that doesn't help restaurants, the service industry, etc.

The unions are probably pushing their duck too far. The language, it sounds like they've been suddenly threatened with dire less work 24-7 consequences. But they do have two handles. One, they're putting pressure on the NDP, which matters to the NDP big time because those unions are allies traditionally of the NDP. They're putting pressure on the government. The Ottawa area tends to favor the liberals and the liberals do not have any votes to waste at this point. risk to the government is if it starts to translate into work slowdowns, thousands of grievances, etc. In the current mood, and I'm sure Bruce has numbers to show that, Justin Trudeau's government will be blamed for mishandling the issue and causing service slowdowns. Because these days,

anything that goes wrong is always Justin Trudeau's fault. All right, Bruce. Yeah, you know, when I knew that we were going to talk about this, I did a little bit of research to try to find out what amount of relatively conclusive evidence there is on the productivity impact of a two versus a three-day hybrid workweek. And as near as I can tell, it's inconclusive. It depends entirely on the workplace. It depends on the kind of workforce and it depends on the situation of the workers and the whole degree to which chemistry inside a workplace matters. So I don't know whether or not the government was motivated by, you know, feeling as though when they're in downtown Ottawa that it is a bit of a ghost town relative to, you know, what you might want or what you might have seen before. People say that that hasn't, you know, that Mayor Sutcliffe says he hasn't lobbied. I think it's relatively apparent to anybody who's in federal politics that the Ottawa city government and the provincial government for sure would like to have more workers in

offices in downtown Ottawa. I tend to come from the school of thought that, first of all, that going from two to three days is hardly the outrage and the injustice that the unions have characterized it at. I agree with Chantal that the language, and I don't mean to overstate what Chantal said, I have a stronger view about that language. I think that it's a poor way to start a fight if you hope to win it, as opposed to, you know, if you thought about it and you said, what are the risks of a backlash here where almost nobody wants to associate with our argument because the language that we use seems so over the top? I was reading some quotes in one of the stories today from some

of the union leaders who are essentially saying the workplaces are disgusting now. They're infested. It's horrible and hazardous to go there. And I was thinking, well, but people are going there two days a week. Why is it more hazardous to go one more day a week? It doesn't really kind of add up for me. And also, I don't think that it will sound all that credible. I mean, unless people want to post pictures like they do with those awful hotel reviews on TripAdvisor. Here's what my workplace looks like. Here's the garbage that's strewn all over the place. Here's the, you know, the unkept dishes in the kitchen room, all of that stuff. You sound like you're describing the old

Rattu Canada building in Montreal. Right, well, workplaces can be like that, but it doesn't feel to me that it's obvious that saying it's hard enough for people to spend two days a week in that filth to ask them to spend one more day a week would just be over the top. So I found that the argument that the unions were making might have some merit because everybody can understand now, I think, or most everybody can understand now the commute issues that you

talked about, how young families have been able to adapt their working lives more successfully with their family lives. I think there's a lot of arguments for a more flexible hybrid arrangement. I just don't happen to think that the unions made a very good first case in this particular instance. And you may be right, Chantal, that the government didn't make a very elaborate case in defense of the decision that it announced and maybe it needs to do more in that area. You know, there's a lot happening in the workplace, and it's not just government jobs, just the public service.

You know, downtown cores in a lot of cities, the office towers are, you know, as a result of remote working. In some cases, they're damn near empty, and they're trying to figure out what to do about it and, you know, how to use this space for something else, whether it's, you know, apartments, low-rent apartments or what have you. There's all kinds of different arguments on this. So, you know, what I think is happening here isn't just a public service issue. I think it's much bigger than that because there's so much is changing in the workplace. You know,

there's this issue, there's AI, there's all of these things that are kind of freaking people out as to where all this is heading. And the productivity thing is interesting. You know, I've been looking at studies since the middle of the pandemic, and most of the studies, not all of them, but most of the studies I see, not just in Canada but in the States as well, would indicate that productivity levels have not suffered. In fact, in some cases have gone up as a result of remote work. So this, you know, this is one of those kind of issues of our time, but it

goes much, much more than just, you know, unions in the public sector fighting for a position here. I think that was my main point. It would have been incumbent on the upper levels of the civil service and the federal government to take this seriously as a template for a discussion that is happening in all kinds of other places, rather than to do the 1950s, the father knows best, you will show up at 9 o'clock on Wednesdays now, not just on Monday and Tuesday or whatever days you are going to work. And the way it was announced, listening to the unions, there was very little consultation about this. It was just, you know, we're issuing this as of mid-September,

you're just going to show up, that's it. It's within our prerogative. It's not in your union contract. I think the government itself has made it a union management issue by using the argument that it's not even in your contract, that you can work remotely. So why should we give you any notice or why should we consult you? It changes the way of life. I think there are public servants all across the country. We have some in Montreal, et cetera, Toronto. But Ottawa is different. And this remote work has changed the character of the national capital region. I was born in Hall, well, across the river in Ottawa, but I lived in Hall across the river. And I still remember my mother and my grandmother saying, we're not going to go out to get something in Ottawa now because c'est l'heure des travailleurs.

It's the hour of the workers, meaning all the people are either coming home or going to offices of the public service. Only one place in Canada is like that. So if in that one place in Canada, the main industry has suddenly disappeared into living rooms, kitchens, and home offices, for sure it changes the character of the area. Even the way you think about going from one place to the other has to be affected by it. That being said, I was in Ottawa a few times, downtown,

since the pandemic, and every restaurant I've gone to was full at lunchtime. So I'm assuming there are still people getting fed in this deserted wasteland of a national capital. There's some very good restaurants in Ottawa.

Yes, some very good ones. Should we name some? No. Last word on this, Bruce. Yeah, you know, I mean, I've heard the unions say that, and it sounds like I'm beating up on the unions here. I'm not trying to do that. I've heard them say that the issue was both, now maybe it didn't do a formal notice, but it said some months ago, like December, that this was their plan. And maybe there was some behind the scenes conversations that led the government to believe that they were going to end up in conflict about this anyway. So I don't know what to read into that. I kind of feel like at the end of the day, the government had telegraphed that this was something that they were going to do and that for the unions to react as strongly as they did, they're going to make their case and we'll see what their summer of discontent that involves significant disruption to public services, people are going to be unhappy about it.

The consumers and the taxpayers are going to be unhappy about it. But I don't think it's clear yet whether they will, if that happens, whether the blame will rest with the government or with the unions and by extension, I guess, the workers. Okay. We're going to take our first break. We've got lots more to talk about, and we'll do just that right after this. And welcome back. You're listening to a good talk. Chantelle Bruce are here. I'm Peter Mansbridge. You're listening on SiriusXM, channel 167.

Canada Talks are on your favorite podcast platform, or you're watching us on our YouTube channel. Whatever platform you've got us on, we're glad to have you with us. Okay, topic two. Mark Carney. Carbon tax. Here's the situation. For the last year, it seems that the liberals have changed their position on a number of key issues to adapt to, clearly, concerns on the public,

whether it was housing, whether it's even this week and the foreign agent registry idea that a year ago seemed to be it wasn't needed. Now it's needed, so they're going to do it. But the centerpiece, certainly of the prime minister's positioning on climate change has always been carbon tax. Now, they've fiddled with it a little bit for Atlantic Canada primarily, although others benefited from the idea of the home heating oil issue. But overall, the idea of carbon tax, that's in place, not changing, that won't change.

So Mark Carney, who is not a Liberal Member of Parliament, he may want to be. He may want to be the leader of the Liberal Party. In fact, he's basically said that if it came open, he'd be very interested in running for it. He's considered an expert internationally on the climate change issue. And he's obviously an expert on various forms of the economy as well, given his role at the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England.

So he has a speech this week where he suggests, you know, maybe it's time to revisit the whole idea. Well, not the whole idea, but revisit carbon tax and see whether there's a better way to do this. Now, you couldn't have said that if you were inside the cabinet or inside the Liberal Party without getting serious brushback. He's outside. Maybe eventually inside, but he's outside at the moment.

So he's saying what I think it's fair to say some people on the inside of the party, MPs, would probably find interesting or encouraging or agree with. So what's the plan here, do you think? Why is he saying what he's saying, and why is he saying it now? Okay, I have to say I didn't hear him say it in the way that you heard it. Okay. And what I heard him say is very, very close to what Justin

Trudeau and Stephen Gilbo and others have been saying. In a sense, he was speaking to a Senate committee. He keeps surfacing everywhere, by the way. If you were playing whack-a-mole, Justin Trudeau would be walking around with that mallet, trying to, you know, can you move on and go? Doesn't he travel outside the country, as many liberals through the loyalists must be thinking at this point. So he's speaking to a Senate committee. And yes, he did say that the federal carbon tax had served its purpose until now. That's a quote. But then what he also said is

if anyone wants to come up, wants to replace it, they need to come up with, and here's the quote, a credible and predictable alternative. Now, the economic thinking on the carbon tax is that it is the best bang for the buck measure when you're working on emissions. It's not the only measure, but that other alternatives have turned out to be less credible and less predictable than the carbon tax. And that is basically what the prime minister has also been saying. You say you don't want the carbon tax, or he calls it the tax on pollution, but then show me an alternative that for the same amount brings as much results. And the case on the carbon tax is pretty clear economically. So I didn't hear Mark Carney stray from the liberal mantra on carbon pricing. I heard

them say, I can't wait to see your replacement formula. I can't wait to see it either, by the way. Did he not suggest that it seems to the carbon taxes served a purpose until now. Yes, but you read it as until now, so now we can get rid of it. And I read it as so far it's worked. Let me show you what else you would do that has worked as well or better. Right. He's clearly saying, show me a credible alternative, if you believe there is one. And he's not suggesting one. He's not at the moment. You're right about that.

Because he's not going to give Pierre Pallief a way to respond to that question, which is why I don't see him as off the Trudeau page on this. I think it was an interesting intervention. I think that Chantal's right that it's important to recognize that this wasn't a kind of a crafted speech. It was in answer to a series of questions from a conservative senator in this particular instance who I guess three times asked him, do you support Justin Trudeau's carbon tax? Obviously looking for that kind of clip that politicians like to use in social media now. Now, that doesn't mean that Mark Carney wasn't prepared to answer that question or that he would be presumably uncomfortable with his answer. I thought his answer was an interesting one. I didn't hear it exactly the way that Chantal did either. I'm somewhere in between you and her interpretation of it.

I don't think he challenged them so much to come up with an alternative as to say the quote in the story is, I think one can always look for better solutions. And as a country, we should always be open to better solutions. And as a country, we should always be open to better solutions. I interpreted that as being, this is somebody who's obviously a huge advocate for climate action. There's no chance that that can be understood as let's walk away from our climate ambition as a country. I would assume that what it probably implies is that he thinks that there's some sort of solution is going to be important, is going to be necessary, but maybe this one isn't the only one that we could look at. And then he tied it to another issue, which I found particularly interesting and relevant, because I do think it's important from the standpoint of attracting investment to any country to have a carbon scheme that makes sense for those who would consider investing in a particular jurisdiction. So he talked about the fact that Canada is going to need $2 trillion of investments over the next 25 years.

I think that's an interesting point. It's an interesting counterpoint to Pierre Poliev's argument that we can just ax the tax and be done with it and nothing bad will happen to us. Maybe the only thing that we'll feel is that the cost of living will go down, which I don't happen to think is true. But I do think that there are other knock-on effects of removing carbon mitigation policies from Canada, because I think there are a lot of companies that only want to invest in places and a lot of institutional investors that only want to invest in companies that operate with net zero undertakings and strategies to produce them. So good for Mark Carney to talk about it as an investment criteria.

And I don't think there's anything wrong with being open. If you're in the Liberal Party and you're staring at a 20-point gap, it might be a good time to think about what's an alternative to that one particular aspect of climate policy, which has really been beaten up pretty badly. And the public opinion on it has changed over time. People don't want the removal of climate policy, but we've got two thirds of the public who say, I want climate policy, only one third of whom say, and it has to be a carbon price as I see it today. So there's kind of a lot of opinion that's looking for an option that's not the one that Pierre-Paul Lievre is putting on the table. I'm going to take issue with the notion that there's been a major

shift in public opinion. I think the mainstream, and if you ask about specific measures that are unpleasant and have the word tax, you're probably going to get an answer that's not terribly positive, which is why the prime minister keeps talking about the price on pollution to avoid the T word. But I think, and I'm not happy about that, but I think it's a fact that a lot of Canadians tell pollsters that they want action on climate change, but they don't tell pollsters this as long as it doesn't cost them or force them to do anything. And I don't think advocates for climate change policies have managed to shift that axis in large part because

they have been willing to indulge people in the notion that adapting to climate change will not cost them a dime. They won't have to change anything about their way of life. We're not going to tell you that, yes, these things will happen and you're going to pay through the nose because your insurance costs, blah, blah, blah. Politicians have not been doing that. They've been indulging people and believing that, you know, we send rebates to people who pay the carbon tax. That tells you how much coddling is involved to just introduce, and still people are unhappy.

They get money back. How many taxes do you pay where you get money back? This morning, a leading politician in Quebec, a mayor, explained that she wanted more public transit in her small town, but she didn't want to tax for it because not everybody would use it. Well, a lot of people don't use roads. We all pay for them, but we don't drive on them. So this notion that Canadians were very,

very into, we're going to do something about climate and we'll give something to that cause, and they're not anymore. I don't buy that. I think they were never there. That wasn't the point I was making, though. The question of are people willing to sacrifice, make financial and other sacrifices, I think is a really important question. And I generally think that the evidence lines up the way that Chantal has described it. What I was saying, there was a point at which more people said, and the specific idea of carbon tax I can go along with. Right now, if they're given that third option, which I take your point is maybe a coddle option of what about climate action, but not this, this thing that's called a tax, lo and behold, public opinion gravitates there.

I was just making a comment about how challenging the politics of selling the carbon tax has become for the liberals in the last year, year and a half, and whether or not if there is a, if there are alternatives that have the chance, if you're a progressive voter or progressive politician, and you really believe that the country is at risk of having an election that's won by somebody who would probably dismantle most of those climate policies, then to me, the logical thing is you can look at it and say, well, let's just keep on saying the same things about the same policies that we've been doing for the last few years and hope that it will work better. Or let's kind of, you know, put our thinking caps on and see if there's a better way to do both the politics of it and maybe even the substance of it too.

Of course, if there was, we would have invented it already, would we not? So the day that Justin Trudeau or any liberal leader goes on a stage before the next election and says, well, you know, let's forget about the carbon taxes, the day that they lose their credibility with people who are committed to climate change policy. It's the day when they become more like the conservatives, not less. I don't see Justin Trudeau doing this. I agree with you. I don't expect that he would do that. So this has been a great conversation. At the end of the conversation, is there daylight between Justin Trudeau and Mark Carney on this issue? I think there is more daylight between Mark Carney and Justin Trudeau

on fiscal management in general than there is on carbon pricing. Bruce? What was the question? Is there daylight between Trudeau and Carney on the issue of carbon tax? I guess we'll see. Thank you for that. Oh, yes. Time will tell.

Time will tell. John Drury, CBC News. It's a story to be followed. Who knows? Who really knows? Who could ever tell? Okay. Actually, I want to try and squeeze this in before our final break.

Last week, we had a discussion, short discussion, on the issue of the notwithstanding clause and the fact that Pierre Pelliev said, I would use it if I needed to as prime minister. I'd be the first prime minister in the history of the country to use the notwithstanding clause that had to do with justice issues. Well, it kind of disappeared off the discussion pages shortly after that, but it's back up again yesterday, and not on a justice issue, but on an issue in terms of abortion. Chantal, can you bring us up to speed on this and why this could present a problem for the conservative leader?

Well, as predictable as the night following day, there was never any doubt that Mr. Poiliev's statement about using the notwithstanding clause to restore some of the policies that were found to offend the Charter over the Harper era was going to reopen the entire notion that his party has an agenda on abortion rights. And so that is exactly what happened. I think this week was the week when the anti-abortion movement makes a show of force by going on Parliament Hill and elsewhere to call for restrictions or for forbidding abortion,

turning the clock back on the Morgan Teller Supreme Court ruling, the only way you could do that is by using the notwithstanding clause. That is not to say that the government, if it's so wanted, could not legislate on abortion. If you wanted to legislate, you could within parameters. The Supreme Court never wrote, it actually said the opposite, that Parliament had no right to have a say on access to abortion, that it could not set limits. The Kim-Campbell bill that was defeated in the Senate decades ago now was meant to put a framework around access to abortion. And there is no reason to believe that the Supreme Court would not have found it constitutional. You could also put

restrictions on abortion without the notwithstanding clause by recognizing that the fetus is a person. As of that moment in legislation, the fetus has rights that have to be balanced with that of the mother. And that changes the entire equation. At this point in Canadian law, a fetus is not a person. The only person involved in an abortion decision is the woman. So there are all kinds of avenues. What Mr. Poiliev did this week, a number of things, because the issue obviously, and the liberals have gone out of their way and the other parties to show it, is he has said, his office has said, yes, he did mean the notwithstanding clause when he talked about those justice bills that he would like to restore. We, the conservative government under Pierre Poiliev,

would only use it in matters pertaining to law and order issues and not on abortion. More importantly, later in the week, Mr. Poiliev went back to what was Stephen Harper's commitment that a Poiliev government would not legislate on abortion, which I think is actually a commitment that matters more for the reasons I stated above than just saying I wouldn't use the notwithstanding clause. The reason why it's not going to go away easily, and it may end up dogging a Poiliev government if he becomes prime minister, as it did Stephen Harper, despite those commitments, is that a significant number of his caucus members, maybe a majority, are anti-abortion. And they will keep pushing and bringing in private members' bills

to try to force the hand of the government. I don't believe that the prime minister who doesn't want to go down that road will go down that road under that kind of pressure. Governments have all kinds of ways to not take a private members' bill and make it law. But still, it has reopened this issue, and you can expect the other parties to talk away about abortion rights and the conservative party because every time capo adef says something he makes part of his party unhappy in the extreme and some of key allies of his mps who are in the anti-abortion lobby bruce yeah i think that the I agree with Chantal that he's opened himself up to a debate about this, that did he need to have that happen? Did he need to

catalyze that? Was he at risk of not having a good reception from the chiefs of police meeting that he was speaking at? Did he pick up more votes from people who thought he was going to be soft on crime and on punishment? I don't think so. So I think there was a political math calculation that ended up with more downsides than upsides. But I also think that the question of using a notwithstanding clause and the way that he framed his argument raised a little bit bigger issue, which is he kind of laid out a philosophy that I don't think makes any sense if people stop and think about it, except in an autocratic world where he said, if people vote for me, by definition, my laws will be constitutional. I thought, well, that's that. No, the Constitution is a separate thing from people voting, especially, you know, when you think about our first-past-the-post system. So if I were on the other side of politics from Pierre-Paul Lievre, I'd be looking forward to taking that thread and pulling

on it over and over and over again, especially as the world heads into a whole series of elections where the kind of the higher order conversation is, are the autocrats going to win or are the Democrats going to win? And I don't mean Democrats like the Democratic Party, but are the people who want to say constitution, schmonstitution. That's not really how I intend to govern. I intend to govern based on my own instincts. That's a real issue in the world these days. And I think Mr. Poliev has kind of put his foot the wrong way on it. At least that's the sense that I would have if I was on the other side looking to campaign against him. Well, we'll see how that one plays out over the next little while and whether, just like the Conservatives have glee in going after the Liberals

when they make a trip on policy, excuse me, or something that divides them, the Liberals now have something to go with on the Conservatives. You know, it's been around for years, decades, but other leaders have managed to stop it cold like Harper did. But we'll see whether this opens up that division. All right, we're going to take our final break. Back right after this. Okay.

Welcome back. Peter Mansbridge here with Bruce Anderson and Chantelle Hebert. Final segment of Good Talk for this week. You know, one of the great things that I got liberated from after I retired from the CBC was I was able to actually talk about the CBC on programs like this. And so

here we are with our final segment, and guess who it's about? It's about the President of the CBC who decided again this week, or decided, took the invitation to speak on Parliament Hill to committee members about the situation of the CBC. And we all remember last fall when she got in trouble on talking about bonuses to certain executives at a time where jobs were being slashed and whether or not they were going to continue with those bonuses.

And she said, well, we're working on that, and we'll have an answer for you soon. Well, she didn't have an answer before the end of last year. And apparently after this week, here we are in May, she still doesn't have an answer about whether or not she'll be accepting a bonus this year. This at a time when the government is trying to decide what to do with the CBC.

The opposition has made it clear what they'd like to do with the CBC. But here we have a president whose time is limited anyway. They've said she'll be replaced by the end of this year. Still letting this thing hang around her neck as she goes to testify in front of Parliament. Bruce, your thoughts on the situation for Catherine Tate? She's the president of the CBC. Yeah, I've just never been anything but disappointed

in the way that she represents the organization and its aspirations for the future and the way that she handles choices like the choice to do layoffs and bonuses. And this week was no exception, really. I feel badly for the people who work in the CBC that she's the figurehead. She's the person who, you know, is captured saying things that are meant to represent the organization as a whole. The feeling that I had from her testimony this week was,

you know, she was saying, well, there's a crisis in media and entertainment in Canada, and you shouldn't be asking me these questions endlessly about bonuses and layoffs. And instead, you know, I'd like you to focus on solving the larger crisis. And I don't know, maybe she said it to some other part of her testimony,

but I would have thought that she, you know, a better approach for her would have been to, first of all, I don't think that it is a reasonable practice to do bonuses while you're laying off lots of people. I just don't think that you can do that in a public sector organization and expect people to consider it to be, you know, appropriate management. The second thing is, I think that if you have the control over, you know, one of the largest investments that the federal government makes in the area of media or culture, and you're there saying there's a crisis rather than here's what we're doing. Here's how it's going to work. Here's where we, you know, I think that the organization should go next after I leave. To me, that was the opportunity that was missed.

And so we ended up back in the same conversation where her answers on the more salacious questions of bonuses relative to layoffs were surprisingly disappointing again. Chantal? I'm not sure how or why there are bonuses and based on what performance, how it's measured, worked into people's contracts. I totally understand that this isn't a, the board sits around the table and selects those who win the first, second, and third prize,

that it's kind of written in your work contract that you will be up for a bonus if you achieve this or that goal. I'm not sure how it became such a common practice. And I do not understand how someone who works for me, the president of the CBC, gets a bonus on top of a salary that, as far as I know, exceeds that of the prime minister to start with. And who measures what when it comes to bonuses. I've seen bonuses in journalism. And what actually happens or used to happen, because they've mostly disappeared, by the way, because there is a crisis in the media, hello, CBC. What used to happen is if you didn't get a bonus, even if you worked hard

and your bosses were happy with you, it meant that they weren't. And clearly you have to give people bonuses. Otherwise, you might as well have told them to look for a job elsewhere. It's kind of a systemic downside to bonuses. But setting that aside, I mean, it escaped notice on the English side of the divide, but Catherine Tate and the CBC are actually embroiled in another fairly lethal small controversy in the sense that it has come to light that the upper echelons of the CBC are undergoing a review of how they could optimize the coming together of Radio-Canada and the CBC, which immediately raises the specter of, one, the CBC milking Radio-Canada for revenues, because Radio-Canada is actually pretty successful. It's got audiences to show for it, and so it sells commercials more easily. But also the notion that the CBC's very successful programming gurus

would have a say in Radio-Canada's programming, which you might as well just call for the separation of church and state. And so she had to spend time listening to the Black Quebec West questions and saying, no, no, no, no, no. We don't mean for her to bring Radio-Canada and CBC together under one managing structure, et cetera, et cetera. This is a board and a president who keep walking into or on banana peels of their own making, that they throw in their own path. And so, yes, this appearance, like the previous one, did not feature any vision of any kind. It was strictly a defense exercise, a poor defense exercise on the part of someone who

is going to still be around until next January. So whoever is going to take over, one can only hope that the current government that has been so slow at appointing people will try to think of appointing someone before they're not in government to do so. You know, I worked at the CBC for 50 years, 5-0. And I'll tell you two things. I can't remember a year where we didn't have some kind of a discussion about Red Jack Canada and CBC and how they could work better together. Not physically together, but cooperated better together.

It never worked out. it never worked out it never worked out i mean i did a lot of great shows especially with the benadurum at different times where we shared expenses on on stuff in terms of production but that's as close as it ever got the other thing i'll say that is in 50 years i had one bonus one bonus in those 50 years. Everything else was negotiated by contract, right? And my bonus, I think it was around 1981 or something, was for $1,000. That was my bonus. Oh, sounds like the election bonus at the Star

also disappeared now, by the way. Well, anyway, but those aren't the bonuses they're talking about. They're talking about these executive bonuses of the top. Yes. Anyway, we're going to leave it at that for today. Another great conversation on a lot of different fronts. Thanks to Bruce and Chantel, and thanks to you for listening. Check out The Buzz if you haven't already.

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in 7 days bye bye guys. Bye-bye.