The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Good Talk -- It's Not Over Till It's Over

Episode Date: December 15, 2023

As the year closes some Liberals seem to have their bounce back, while some Conservatives are a bit anxious. The CPC still has a double digit lead in the polls which is more than enough for a majority, but as Yogi used to say, it certainly "ain't over till it's over". Bruce and Chantal have lots on this and more.

Are you ready for good talk? And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here in Toronto, Bruce Anderson's in Ottawa, Chantelle Hebert is in Montreal, and we're ready for a little good talk action today. And as usual, we got lots to talk about, so we'll get right to it i i'm going to venture into this first conversation by um referring to something that i did last night and i know both of you are constantly making fun of my admiration and at times upsettingness to the toronto maple leaf so i was at the game last night. Big game.

But it taught me a huge lesson. So here were the Leafs at the end of the second period. They were down 5-0. And they just stank the joint out. I was tempted to leave at that point, but I thought, well, we'll see what happens, you know. If they can get two goals in the first five minutes, anything's possible. They got two goals in the first five minutes, anything's possible.

They got two goals in the first five minutes. Then they got three more. They tied the game. They lost eventually in overtime, but they tied the game. They got five goals in the third period and made it, you know, they got a point out of a game that they were totally run out of the building on. So what was the lesson for me? The lesson it was, as you will know, that you're never really out of it until you're out of time. And now hockey and sport isn't the same as politics,

but sometimes you can take from one and use it in the other. So given the summer and the fall that the Liberals had, which was disastrous and we're behind by 20 points, according to most polls, anywhere sort of 18 to 20 points. In the last couple of weeks, something seems to have been happening. It's hard to tell. There haven't been enough polls to really judge it, but the one that has been out has suggested that the Conservatives have

or the Liberals have been cut in half. But it's more than numbers. It's more than what's happening in the polls. It's sort of a sense that some of the things that were and still are a problem for the Liberals, internal divisions, have been cropping up of late inside the Conservative Party. So here we're going to try to judge, we'll get to the Liberals in a minute on their issues, but I want to get it started on the Conservatives and get a sense of just how serious are these divisions that have cropped up for the Conservatives, at least publicly, in the last little while. Chantal, what do you want to say on that? I think they stand to become more serious

if the trend in the polls starts to go downward and keeps going downward. For sure, the Conservatives have a great parliamentary fall until fall turned to winter a few weeks ago. And they self-inflicted wounds on themselves over the past three weeks that have made them mess up the end of the session. And almost all of what has happened has been a result of conservative decisions and Pierre Poilievre's decisions, including, for instance, the vote marathon, the promise to ruin Christmas and keep the house tied down. Credibility matters on all kinds of scores. Mr. Poiliev is now considered, and the polls show that's legitimate, as a prime minister-in-waiting. The optics on his performance have changed. And at some point, it was inevitable that the focus would shift away from Justin Trudeau, a known quantity with faults and warts and all, to the person that wants to replace him. That shift did happen, possibly early for the CPC, but still it has been happening over the past three weeks. And

Pierre Poiliev and his party have failed to rise to the occasion. I'll give you a couple of examples. They go to policy and they go to politics first. When you say you're going to tie the house down until Christmas, having said that about working through the summer and having not done it, you need to mean it. I went back to Hansford to check at what time the House of Commons stopped for the night last night, and it looked like it was around 7 p.m. As far as I can tell from looking at today's agenda, which is supposed to be the last day, the House will be rising for the Christmas break until the end of January.

And not a moment too soon for many conservatives, by the way, who really want out. But in the process of promising this vote marathon, the Conservative Party ended up voting line by line on a number of issues that will come back to haunt them. The striking one is the Canada-Ukraine free trade agreement. And the Conservatives have kept insisting that they didn't want Canada to impose carbon pricing on Ukraine, a sovereign country that has ratified this deal and that, as far as I can tell,

is adult enough to decide for itself what it will accept. And they have kept voting against this deal repeatedly in the face of the Ukrainian embassy, the Ukrainian community saying, please stop. One of those line items also went to support military support for Ukraine. The conservatives voted against that in the vote marathon. I suspect that this kind of acharnement against carbon pricing in all its forms has actually mitigated the damage that Justin Trudeau inflicted to himself when he carved out carbon pricing for home-eating oil, in the sense that the Conservatives played on this so much and so hard that they managed to turn the lights on their lack of anything that resembles a climate agenda, and in the process mitigated the damage. So Israel, I went through all the question periods that took place this week after Canada voted for a ceasefire resolution at the United Nations.

And I could not find, it's always possible that I missed it, but I could not find a single conservative question to the government on the issue, which is kind of striking. It's a foreign policy issue that has dominated conversations throughout the week. I could go on, but I'm going to let my friend Rose take over from me, except my conclusion is Pierre Poiliev has not yet learned how to take a win, and in the process, he squanders the capital that he earns on the way out the door. Okay, Bruce, you're on. Well, the problems facing the Conservative Party, Peter, aren't as serious as the ones that have chronically plagued the Toronto Maple Leafs,

but they're not nothing. And I think there's a few reasons for that. One is that this version of the Conservative Party, as far as I'm concerned, is not settled work. It's not a stable coalition. It looks more unified than we've seen it in a long time. But anybody that spends any time up close with this Conservative Party knows that there are simmering factional divisions. There are people who are in that party from the province of Quebec, often have a very different point of view on social issues than people from other parts.

There are people who are attracted to the Conservative Party because they like small government and lower taxes and stronger economic focus. And there are people for whom they accept that the party doesn't talk about abortion very much, but it's a very important issue to them. So those divisions stay undercover when everybody thinks they're on a roll, when everybody thinks that a win is coming, and when there's a strong leader who knows how to manage those divisions successfully, which I think has been mostly the case for Pierre Poliev. Chantal's point, the story is you. The focus is you. That's where everybody's looking for the mess up, the bobble, the error, the mistake. And all parties make them, all leaders make them. But right now, it feels as though the conservatives, maybe especially with Pierre Pauliev, I don't know him personally, so I don't know if this is really true or not. But if a politician thinks that they're so successful because they're so good,

and they're so good because they just don't know how to make a mistake, they're that clever. They're that adept. They're so fluent in explaining their policies. And if you look at Pierre Polyev some days, he does look like that guy who thinks he can't make a mistake because he's that talented. He's kind of the Wayne Gretzky of modern Canadian politics or something like that. But they have made mistakes. And I think that some of those mistakes, you hear the rumors pointing the finger at Andrew Scheer as the House leader. You know, I think the only thing, the only good thing about Andrew Scheer being the House leader for the Conservatives is he's not the leader leader. But this whole notion that they were going to kind of block everything until they got their way on carbon pricing, which they could never have achieved anyway, even if they had done the organizational work to get that filibuster right, which they didn't,

which is what a lot of people are blaming Andrew Scheer for, kind of set themselves up for failure on that and a distraction away from what I think. I agree with Chantal. I think that when the Conservatives were saying, ask the tax, it's raising the cost of everything, I think they were on a bit of a winning roll there. They made some progress in convincing people, I think incorrectly, that for very many people, their cost of living is going up. But I think they highlighted some weaknesses in the policy, especially when they talk about farmers who have no choice but natural gas to dry their onions or, you know, grow their mushrooms or what have you.

I think the biggest problem that they've got themselves into, because it has tapped into the who are we, is the position that they've taken on this Canada-Ukraine trade deal. As recently as last night, it seemed having voted against it twice, they were now slamming the liberals for not letting them have an opportunity to vote for it before the House rose. It's incoherent. And you can feel in the House of Commons, because I was there the other day, as I mentioned to you, the discomfort on the conservative benches when the liberals stand up and say you're walking away from the fight with Putin you're turning your cold shoulders to the Ukrainian people a lot of conservatives don't like that position and they'll be going home after today and licking their wounds and wondering how to get back on on a more winning trap the worst part is they should have had no big wounds to lick over the course of the holidays. But there are decisions looming. There was an announcement on dental care this week

from the government with a schedule for implementation, a big deal for the NDP and part of the agreement with the liberals. To this day, there is no position on it. Israel, I already mentioned, I scrolled through Mr. Poiliev's hyperactive social media feed on X, and I could find nothing there. There is the anti-strike breakers legislation, another concession to the NDP by the liberals. A debate started yesterday. I read the leading Conservative MP on the file. He skated his way to having no position. Mr. Poitier has been courting workers' votes and trying to get them away from the NDP. This legislation, obviously, has been in place in Quebec, so it's popular with the Quebec MPs. It may be hard to convince caucus to support it,

but it will be a problem to not support it. Bruce, the other structural problem I believe they've bought themselves over the past few months is the capacity of Mr. Poiliev to treat everyone who is not on his side as an enemy, which may be viable and only maybe if you win a majority government. But if you've managed to make enemies out of your fellow opposition leaders, and they certainly have. Pierre Poiliev was routinely insulting Jagmeet Singh and Yves-François Blanchet in the House over question periods. You've made enemies in the Senate by treating all the senators who were appointed as independents, as sellout to Justin Trudeau.

You are going to have a really hard time governing and keeping the House of Commons and your agenda on track unless you win a majority government. And I don't think majority governments are ever in the bag with the number of parties we have on the ballot. But finally, Bruce talks about Pierre Poilier thinking he's so good he can't make mistakes. It's not just an opinion that Bruce has. It's borne out in fact. And here's my illustration of it. Earlier this week, all Conservative members got an email asking them to pick a new logo for the membership card of the Conservative Party. This is a party that has had a number of distinguished leaders, Stephen Harper, Brian Mulroney, go further in history. It's a success story. The way the email is phrased, you have three options.

Pick the one you like best. All three membership cards, think of this, feature a picture of Pierre Poilievre. And one picture is eating that apple. He doesn't have his mouth full. That's kind of nice. But he's sporting sunglasses and he's got the apple as in, look at me, how I crushed that journalist. This is going to be your membership card. The other shows him and his wife, presumably after he won the leadership as they're on a stage.

And the third, while I was looking for words, but I picked what sounded neutral, a liberation fighter with his fist up in the air, sporting sunglasses. In clear, the Conservative Party is telling its members that it is now a personality cult and that that will be apparent on every membership card. If you have a membership card now, you're going to have one that has the face of the esteemed leader. I don't think that in this country, any mainstream party, provincially or federally, has ever told its members that Justin Trudeau is so great, or Daniel Smith is so powerful or Jason or Peter Lohy that we should forget about what the party is about and its long history to have the picture of the current leader on the membership card and God help them the inevitable day when Pierre Poilievre will not be popular anymore because that is what happens to every leading politician. But is it not the case that in the past that the

parties have often aligned themselves in a campaign with their leader that the leader is being kind of up front on the posters and all that kind of stuff but a membership card i mean how far can you go what's the distinction tell me the difference here It amounts to a cult of the personality. I think you probably would find cards like that. Fidel Castro probably would have liked to have them, single parties. But a party with a long history. The liberals certainly loved Pierre Trudeau for a long, long time, as they did Justin Trudeau.

But I don't think the idea of having membership cards with Trudeau's face on it ever made it to a vote. Members aren't being asked, would you rather have the party logo or Pierre Poilievre? They are being asked, which version of Pierre Poilievre do you want on your membership card? Yeah, I think it's important to remember that in his leadership campaign, his slogan was pure for PM. It was not Conservative Party for government. It was pure for PM. Still is. Still is. His logo. Still is, right? So he's been kind of riding that this is me horse for a good long while. I think I I wish I'd tell, I think this is an interesting thing to try to do with the party to say, we're going to make our paraphernalia be

even more about me than is already the case. Why do I think it's potentially problem ridden? Or why is it maybe riskier than the people around Pierre Poliev are thinking is this. I think that if Pierre Poliev's best chance at winning the election is an election about Justin Trudeau. I don't think there's any question in my mind about that. I think Justin Trudeau's best chance of winning an election is if it's an election about Pierre Polyev. Pierre Polyev is out polling Justin Trudeau right now, but it's not like he's super popular. His negatives are the same as his weaknesses. Trudeau's negatives are two times his positives. So Trudeau is definitely in a deficit. And if you just looked at this from a math standpoint, if we ask chat GPT,

go back in the history of time, chat GPT robot, and find out whether or not it's better and tell us whether it's better to run against the person who's got twice your negatives. I think we know what the answer would be. So doubling down, tripling down on look at me, and I'm looking at these three pictures, and there's like Tom Cruise, Apple, and sunglasses version of Pierre. It kind of feels a little bit like if anything goes wrong, these turn into Ken doll kind of jokes. I wouldn't do it if I was them,

which isn't to say that I wouldn't promote him. He's more popular than Aaron O'Toole was. He's more popular than Andrew Scheer was by quite a bit. And he's playing a rallying role, I think, for many voters and certainly within his party. But there should be some cautionary kind of limits that parties apply in these situations, especially, as I say, if their best campaign opportunity is talking about the other guy rather than theirs. If they were convinced that they were going to win 210 seats, they were sure of it and they were guaranteed it, then this probably makes sense. But there's no guarantees. There's never any guarantee on anything. You just draw more attention to this fellow and all that's going to happen inevitably is people sort of spot the things that they don't like. It's true for every politician, just a matter of time.

I'll give you an example of things that can backfire, even if they are, at first glance, really smart things. This lengthy ad that Pierre Poiliev put online, the 15 minutes about housing issues. Well, first, to the suspicion of narcissism, it's awkward to have the leader of the official opposition stand up in the House of Commons and spend part of question period saying, did you see me in my infomercial as a question, as a serious question to the government? Teenagers do that when they're trying to kind of woo the rest of the class and become more confident. I love that phrase, suspicion of narcissism, by the way. I'm going to take that one.

I'm trying to be moderate on this. But what this infomercial did is that it also opened the door to some very serious, lengthy reporting and fact-checking. Probably longer and probably watched by more or read by more people, because so many people had seen the video, than if he'd only stuck to housing is doubled under Justin Trudeau, and that's why you can't find a home. And some of the people who were rebutting Pierre Poiliev were not rivals. They were experts, economists, some of them of a conservative tendency, pointing out the glaring fake facts that were part and parcel of all the emissions. As in, did we forget there was a pandemic and it cost a lot of money to try to see people through it.

So every strategy has a downside. And Bruce is right that Pierre Poilievre is popular among conservatives, but he is asking people who did not vote for the conservatives to vote for him. And I'm not sure that he is the answer to the dreams of people who in the past voted for Jagmeet Singh or François Blanchet or even Justin Trudeau. A lot of people, I'm going to draw a strange parallel. In Quebec, François Legault has been going down. The party that has been coming up on top is the Parti Québécois. I don't believe the Parti Québécois is back on top because its leader, who is very efficient and young, is impressing voters to that degree. I think it's coming back on top because people figure the Parti Québécois is a safe option. They've been in government in the past.

They have a record. How bad can they be? I think a lot of voters who are thinking of leaving the liberals or the NDP and think it's time for a change are looking at the conservatives and not the NDP because the conservatives have a record in government. How bad can they be? They are not doing it because, oh, Pierre Poilievre is such a magnet, I want his picture in my living room. And the more they play Pierre Poilievre at the expense of the party, the more they are diminishing the baggage of experience that they do bring to their quest to become the government.

All right, we're going to move on here. I want to get at the liberals too, but I want to put a little meat on the bone. If there is any meat for the bone on my original question, which is… Will the Leafs win the Stanley Cup? No. We'll save that for another day. No, the original question was, are these issues that you're raising that could potentially haunt the Conservative Party, are they coming forward in any kind of movement within the caucus or within the party of saying, wait a minute,

this is not the route we want to go and why are we going this way? Is there any dissension within the ranks that is visible or audible at this point? More audible, yes, but I don't think it's reached that point. Many conservative MPs will tell you that so far they feel hostage to that 10-point lead in voting intentions. I think the Conservative Party, by its nature, has a little bit more... I don't want to say it's a more cantankerous party, but cantankerousness is more common

within the conservative tent than it is maybe in the liberal tent. And so I think it's more audible inside their conversation. I don't think it's particularly visible or audible outside, although on the Canada-Ukraine free trade agreement, you could see it piercing the tent, coming out, people being

frustrated. You can see in the way the Conservatives were trying to turn the tables on the Liberals yesterday that they were not happy with their strategy and their positioning. And so it's a it's a less. I don't think that Mr. Polyev is heading into the Christmas break with a party feeling as good as it was two weeks ago. So that's probably as far as I would go on that. Let's just keep in mind that it is the party that, you know, put the knife in the back of its last two leaders with only letting them run one election campaign. So when they do start to move, they do move. But neither of those guys had a 10-point lead on the liberals.

Oh, that's right. Although they did have a bit of a lead, a little lead. And they ended up with a lead. But it didn't translate into seats. So I think Poiliev is putting a more attractive proposition, despite all the bumps of the past few weeks. I know you want to move on, Pete, but the one other thing, Chantal is listing the way in which Mr. Polyev has approached his opposition leaders.

And that is a bill, if you're hostile to everybody, it's a bill that comes due at some point. And I just wanted to put a pin in that he spent so much of his political capital, a mining dislike for the media. That, too, is a bill that comes due. When things go a little sideways for you, you know, people are people. It's not that journalists will be biased against you, but they will be happy to report on the things that go bump in the night for you. And I think that if I were the Conservatives and I were having a serious inside discussion

about what did we learn about the year that was, one of the things I would probably take a beat on is do we need to be beating on journalists as much as we have been? Or does it just feel good and delight our base, but there's some risk associated with it? You've got to be careful when some journalists who are considered or columnists who are considered to the right of center on their writings and their opinions are also part of the criticism on the way things are working. You've obviously got to be careful of that.

Anyway, I'm going to take a quick break and come back and we'll talk about the situation on the on the liberal side of the house and the question of uh uh whether there's you know open dissension on some of the policies especially the middle east one we'll get back to that right after this and welcome back. Peter Mansbridge here with Chantelle Hebert and Bruce Anderson. This is Good Talk for this Friday. The second last one before the Christmas break. The holiday season is upon us. You're listening on Sirius XM channel 167.

Canada Talks are on your favorite podcast platform. Or you're watching us on our YouTube channel, whatever platform you have chosen to be a part of this program, we're happy to have you with us. Okay. Topic two. And it's the Liberals. After spending all that time on the Conservatives, let's get back to where we've talked about the Liberals a number of times, quite a few times actually in the last couple of months, most weeks really, in terms of the problems they've had.

This issue of whether there's a split in the party over the whole Middle East situation, Israel-Hamas and the new position that the government has put itself forward in terms of using the C word, ceasefire, humanitarian ceasefire, they call it. And there's clear open criticism of that move by some liberal MPs. How serious is that? How concerned do you think the prime minister is about the divisions that have been exposed within the party? Exposed is probably too strong a word. We've kind of known about them all along, where the dividing line was in the caucus. But nevertheless, more obvious this week than in the past.

Who wants to start this one? I think that the Prime Minister and his team wisely decided that on this issue they are going to give MPs a lot of leeway to express discomfort or unhappiness on both sides. And they have come rightly to the realization that there will not be a consensus position that works for everyone on the sides. And they have come rightly to the realization that there will not be a consensus position that works for everyone on the issue. There has never been in my time a foreign policy issue that has played out and raised so much passions

on the ground among voters. And that is a fact of life. So there was no surprise that the MPs who spoke this week, many of them from the Jewish community or from writings that have a strong Jewish community, would have been at the microphone expressing dismay at the fact that Canada voted with 152 other countries for a resolution calling for a ceasefire that did not mention Hamas and the need to eradicate Hamas. Where I think what struck me this week was more the dog that didn't bark than the sounds that I heard. And why the dog that didn't bark in the night? Because if Justin Trudeau had had this government support, the notion of a ceasefire three weeks ago,

there would have been resignations from his caucus. And that has not happened. Why it has not happened is because the situation has evolved. It is not just that Canada is flipped for reasons that are domestic. It is that the international community is increasingly critical, people say, of Israel, but I will say of the current government of Israel. And I found it fascinating that when that vote took place, only nine countries stood with Israel in the United Nations. And one of those was the United States, the only G7 country to vote with Israel on this. Others abstained, like the UK. Others, like France and Japan, voted like Canada, New Zealand, Australia, etc. But what happened afterwards was not that Joe Biden went and took a microphone and said, I will always support Israel. It was the President of the

United States went to a microphone and said, the Netanyahu government is overreaching, and it is losing the support of the international community. In clear, the Canadian vote and New Zealand and Australia illustrated what Joe Biden was trying to tell the Netanyahu government. It was more of a supportive move of what the U.S. wants than a difference of opinion between the United States and Canada on the need for a ceasefire. And I think those Joe Biden remarks probably helped Justin Trudeau to, yes, see the obvious and predictable discontent within this caucus, but to avoid breaks and resignations. Where the story goes from here, we live, you know, in kind of a bubble, but there were massive demonstrations in Israel this week calling for Netanyahu to step down and someone else to take over this operation.

So it's not just that suddenly we've picked a different side. It is that the international community is terribly concerned about how the current government of Israel is handling this. And I suspect that the international community, by and large, and I mean allies of Israel, like the United States, would like regime change in Jerusalem. Bruce? Yeah, I'm going to just echo, I think, what Chantal's been saying about the Middle East situation as it relates to the unity in the Liberal Party, and then kind of switch to some other factors that I've been paying attention to that relate to that. I do think that the Liberals have realized that there are two legitimate ways for people to observe this situation. Both can be true at the same time. Hamas is evil.

Netanyahu is a huge problem. that I think has been developing around the rest of the world, observing this situation and trying to figure out how to advocate for a solution, is to recognize that those are two inoperable choices in a way. I mean, if you're in the West and you're looking for peace, you're looking for a two-state solution. And Netanyahu is not going to be an advocate for that. And so standing up beside him is something that made Joe Biden uncomfortable enough to say, I've placed the vote this way, but don't count on it as an expression of unbridled support. So I think that this debate has moved towards a place where it won't make everybody happy every day, obviously. Huge, huge, huge, huge, huge devastating issues there.

But the politics of it are starting to settle out a bit. On the liberals, the question of how unified are the liberals, I think that I don't find that the divisions are that sharp on this issue right now. They were, they have been. The feelings do run deep. But I think the Liberals were faced with an existential political risk for most of the last couple of months. It became more and more apparent to them that they were losing support. They were losing touch with Canadians, not just about this issue, but about many issues. They felt like they were losing the climate battle. They felt like they'd been losing the cost of living battle. They felt like they couldn't

really even muster an effective political argument against Pierre Poliev. They've got a little bit more spring in their step right now. There's a couple of reasons for it, and it's building a little bit of a sense of unity. I don't think it was ever really a problem, but I do think that confidence in their prospects had become a problem. And I wouldn't say it's completely recovered, not by any stretch of the imagination. They're still miles behind where they would need to be. But I think they feel that on the housing issue, they at least have a voice in that fight and a fellow who can put the idea forward that makes sense to middle ground Canadians who are saying, let's not just hurl kind of insults and anger and slogans, let's find some actual solutions. And I think Sean Fraser has done a pretty good

job of that. I think on the climate issue, they've decided that the right answer isn't to always try to explain their policies, their complex web of policies and exactly how carbon price works, but really to look across the aisle and say their choice is let the planet burn. And the more they get into that zone of saying, let's talk about the other folks, then they're using that 10-point disadvantage as a fulcrum. And they need to do more of that, whether it's on housing or on climate or on other issues. They need to be firing back. And I saw more of that in the last two weeks than I've seen in the last two years. And that's given them a sense that they should stick together rather than kind of look inward and try to figure out

who's responsible for the depths of the challenges that they have. You know, this time of year, as it is every year, brings forward this kind of parade of year-end interviews with the prime minister and the other leaders, and the endless panels of which we've all been a part of over the years. The first couple of the Prime Minister's interviews have been out, and they seem somewhat similar to what you talked about last week, Chantal, in the Prime Minister's visit with the editorial board of La Presse. There seems to be this clear signal from him, more than just a perfunctory, that he's staying,

that he's in for the long haul. Is that what we're witnessing here? He's also doing, in the process, because now there has been one with Canadian Press that I'm aware of. I think there may have been others. He's also doing something that Bruce has mentioned in the sense that he is starting to say out loud what I've suspected all along, that he is saying in no small part because Pierre Poiliev is a trap to his legacy and to a progressive agenda. He's not saying the Conservatives, he's saying Pierre Poiliev is a trap to his legacy and to a progressive agenda. He's not saying the conservatives, he's saying Pierre Poiliev.

So he is shifting the attention on Pierre Poiliev. I was listening to Bruce and I thought, this is really interesting. Over the past four months, the liberals have kind of moved away from telling us how great they are, which didn't work for them at all, but which they kept doing. And it was quite irritating to hear. And while the official opposition has moved to telling people how they are great, which doesn't really work for them either, by the way, because I believe voters want to see some sense of humility. They equate it with a capacity to listen and to react to changing realities. And I think the liberals, yes, have gotten better at that. It's a tone issue.

They don't sound as superior as you don't understand how fortunate you are that we have your backs instead of the tone that they are using now, which works better for them. I think those interviews, I'm guessing La Presse was kind of a rehearsal for the interviews. It's a good setting to do it in because Quebec is a different environment where the prime minister is not as much of a lightning rod than other areas of the country.

But I think those Iran interviews so far have worked well because he's not pleading. He's just saying, you know, this is who I am and this is why I'm staying. And I think a lot of voters do connect with fears about what happens to a progressive agenda. And I've watched the last episode on the climate change exchange with the government coming up with a cap on emissions from the oil industry, which was the approach that Canada used for acid rain, by the way, it went to emissions and it did work as a solution that is not a cap on production. It's considered it came out as a milder version of what could have come out. The Conservatives immediately ruled it out. Liberals are slowly but surely putting middle-of-the-road proposals to the conservatives, ensuring that by the time we get to the election, there will be nothing that Pierre Poilievre will not have rejected when it comes to a climate agenda. I saw that as a sign that there is some intelligence left on planet liberal. rule. There's no doubt that in the summer, by the end of the summer, there was a lot of uneasiness

inside the Liberal Party concerning the continued leadership of Justin Trudeau. Do you think his, Bruce, do you think his comments, which appear to be starting to come out here now in these year-end things, rest well inside that Liberal caucus? Are they still a little uneasy about it? I don't think that question is going to ever be fully resolved until we're a lot closer to election day. I think that for the moment, I think that most of those liberal caucus members anyway, and probably by extension, those party members who are paying attention to politics will look at what's been going on in the dynamic of question period and in the margins of news stories about politics in the last couple of weeks, and they'll take some heart. But the reason they'll take heart has more to do with the idea that this is a party that has not completely lost the ability to be political, to take the fight to

the other guys, to deliver an argument in a sentence, in a few blunt words, rather than with a kind of a lexicon of bureaucratic terminology that has been their habit for the last several years. And without what Chantal referred to as that tone problem of liberals who always seem to want to tell you a little bit about how you should live your life differently to better align with their values, rather than they're there as servants of your interest. They want to know what you think. They want to help you with what you need.

And that's really been a zone that they've kind of vacated a lot. And Pierre Polyev has stepped into. As to whether or not Justin Trudeau can find that way to position himself as the right leader of the Liberal Party, for those who have doubts about that, I think people will be looking at these interviews carefully. If I'm him, I probably want to do more to emphasize the strength of my front bench. Everybody says that almost all the time,

but this is one of those times where there's a lot of talent on that front bench. And when I was in question period the other day, Mr. Trudeau was there for the first few questions and he answered them relatively well, but they sounded like him, except for when he did one thing where he went through a litany of when we, you know, when we put on the table funding for childcare, what are the conservatives do?

And his entire backbench said, vote it against. And he went through a bunch of those things. It was a little bit of a call and response thing. And so he is able to kind of light up a little bit that argument against the conservatives when he wants to do it. But once he left, I watched the rest of that front bench actually kind of raise their game as individuals. It's a little bit like, OK, it's on us now. And then you start to see them say, well, you know, the conservative policy has let it burn. The conservative policy has let Putin

win. And the more they get into that mode, the easier it will be for Mr. Trudeau, I think, to maintain his leadership and not have people question it, because it'll look like a fighting force that has a chance of winning again. It also helps that the liberals who think that they should have a new leader do not have what they could perceive as a safe harbor to get them out of the election storm. They may think this guy is interesting or this person would be great, but there is absolutely no Paul Martin standing in the wings, allowing people to dream of safer tomorrows. They're all untested quantities, including, for instance, Mark Carney, who's never

been elected for a day in his life. So that does help Justin Trudeau, the absence just behind his shoulder of someone who looks bigger and more likely to do better than him. There are, in politics, no guaranteed safe harbors with anyone or any plan. Ask Paul Martin. Yeah, we know that. I should also say that if a new poll comes out tomorrow and it shows the 19 or 20-point lead again, then just delete this podcast from today's bank.

But it's a lot of interesting stuff here. You know, it may at some point turn into an exciting situation, whichever way it ends up going. But it may become a lot more interesting on the Canadian political front. Okay, time for our last break and then a quick thought on a policy that a lot of people are waiting for. That's right after this. And welcome back.

Final segment of Good Talk for this week. Glad to have you with us. Chantel and Bruce are here. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Okay, so there has been a lot of talk for the last, well, ever since the deal between the NDP and the Liberals to keep things going about a pharmacare plan. And there was expectation that it was going to happen probably this month or maybe even last month.

It didn't happen. And this week they've announced a deal between the Liberals and the NDP that they will extend the deadline on pharmacare until what, is it March? I think it's end of March. March. March. Yeah.

What do we take from that? They say, you know, we're working, we're working well together, trying to come up with the right plan. Should we buy that? Should we believe that? They are, but first I'll challenge your sense that a lot of people are sitting on the edge of their seats waiting for this pharmacare policy. I think that is obvious to both the liberals and the NDP.

But the NDP has put a lot of political capital on the table on this, its members find the pharmacare idea totally compelling. Again, provincial buy-in, which is essential, has not been easy to find. And a lot of people who have private insurance or who have provincial clients that work for them are not really interested in the program. So where I think we're going, first, I think the schedule we saw this week for dental care, allowing people, in case you're interested, 87 and over to register for it. That's a low cost option those first few months. How many Canadians are 87 and over have filed an income tax report last year, make less than $90,000, and want dental care tomorrow, basically? But it's a slow rollout, but I believe the rollout,

which will expand between now and July 1st, was meant to give the NDP something to take home because they were not getting pharmacare. But I also believe that the pushback to March means that, at best, this parliament may leave behind a framework for a possible pharmacare program. But that is as far as it will go. Bruce? Yeah, I think that's right.

I guess I feel as well that if the NDP were really being kind of rational and they went back to the drawing board and they said, if we could design this parliament and our having to come back to talk about to make the, to leave the impression that we're putting pressure on the liberals. And I don't think that they would, because first of all, the price tag is enormous for this. The demand is minuscule. And so if you're the liberals, there's no end of reasons not to do this. Your deficit numbers are not great. And if between now and the next budget, the NDP push them to a situation where they're supposed to commit to something that'll look like it'll cost $40 billion, that's only a world of trouble for the liberals, they're not going to do it in my view because it would be stupid politically to do it. And the program would never actually happen. To Chantal's point about the most that would happen would be there'd be a framework, the conservatives would get into office or the liberals would come back and still not do it because the economics don't make sense for them, for the country, given the fiscal situation,

and the political demand is really not there. The other reason why the NDP might rethink it is that if you're looking at the world from the standpoint of what's the perfect socially progressive policy mix to have, maybe policies like this feel more appealing. But if you look at union members, which is a really big part of the NDP coalition, the very large majority of those have programs that are better programs from a pharmacare standpoint than this one would be. So, yeah, I just don't,

I don't see it being a matter of great public interest. Okay, we're out of time. Chantelle? I know Chantelle had her hand up. But I do think the problem also is that if you measure the success of the NDP by pharmacare, they are self-effacing their own gains, significant gains on the anti-strike-breaking legislation or the expansion of Medicare to dental care. The metrics show lack of progress on something

when they have achieved tremendous progress on two files that the NDP could only dream of five years ago. All right. We will be back next week with our kind of year-end show. The MPs, the politicians, they're out of here, out of Ottawa for the next six weeks, and a lot of people will say hallelujah to that. We'll see what the break does because stories still come up

and good talk will still be here on Fridays. We'll take Christmas week off, but that'll be it. All right. Thank you, Chantel. Thank you, Bruce. We'll talk to week off, but that'll be it. All right. Thank you, Chantel. Thank you, Bruce. We'll talk to you again in a week's time.

I'm Peter. Thanks. Podcast Santa. We get a week off. Excellent. Hey, how generous Scrooge is. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you again. Talk to you next week.