The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Good Talk - Jagmeet Singh, Sellout or Mastermind?

Episode Date: September 6, 2024

A quiet political summer in Ottawa turned very different with Jagmeet Singh's decision to "tear up" the deal between the NDP and Liberals. That has led to all sorts of fallout so time to analyze what's what on the national political landscape. Chantal Hebert and Bruce Anderson are here with lots to say on all this.

Are you ready for good talk? And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here with Chantelle Hebert and Bruce Anderson. You know, a week ago we were worried that there'd ever be anything exciting in Canadian politics this year. I mean, especially after a summer of watching the Americans have lots of excitement in their political scene. And here we were, you know, snoozing our way through another barbecue summer in Canada until this week when the NDP, Jagmeet Singh, tears up his words. Apparently he never actually tore anything, but ripped up the deal between...

Ripped up. Ripped it up. Yes. They should have given him a prop. It might have helped. Yeah. He could have torn it up right there in front of the camera. Polyev would have done that if he was tearing up deals.

Yeah, he would have stomped on it and lit it on fire afterwards too. Malroni famously did that with the charlottetown accord speech to show all that you will lose if you don't vote for this accord he actually was holding it and nancy pelosi remember standing behind trump ripping up his speech yeah i mean nevertheless i'm on her gesture a really, you know, it's a big gesture. Nevertheless, you're going to say 50 times that you've ripped something up. You should probably do better. Rip it up. Yeah. Yeah. I've titled this show for any number of reasons.

I've titled this show. Good talk. Jagmeet Singh sell Sellout or Mastermind? So I put that question to you, and not entirely with a smile on my face, because I think it's interesting. It's an interesting discussion. Was this, at the end of the day, was it either one of those two things

or was it neither of those two things? Or was it even close to either? And this week, because he always whines about, you know, Chantal gets first go and, you know. Oh, but then he complained last week when I said, why don't you ask him first? So he doesn't really know what he wants. Well, we'll put it to him now.

Let's see what he grips up. What am I going to do with this opportunity? You can tear up your notes. You can do that. Okay, tell us what you think on this. Well, look, I don't buy the sellout thing. I don't buy the mastermind thing. I think it's somewhere in between.

I think it's entirely predictable or was entirely predictable that at some point along the path to the next election that the NDP was going to need to unhook itself from the more formal aspect of this arrangement. Why? Lots of reasons, but I think the most important reason is probably just in terms of internal party morale. There comes a time when if you're an NDP member and you're watching policy unfold in Ottawa and you think, OK, we're getting a lot of the things that we wanted in terms of public policy because of this arrangement that we have with the liberals. But the liberals are a very unpopular party, and we don't like the feeling that we are attached at the hip and can't escape the conversation with constituents or friends or acquaintances about why are you supporting the unpopular public policies of the liberal government. So it was to me only a matter of time

until Jagmeet Singh decided that he needed to take this action. I'm not in the consensus that you sometimes hear around Ottawa in the last 24, 48 hours, which is this is going to be really difficult for the NDP to manage. It's going to, you know, just put so much pressure on them on a day in day out basis. And people will ridicule Jagmeet Singh for doing this, because then he's going to end up still supporting the liberals on confidence votes. I don't think it's going to be that difficult. I think that the pressure that it applies is much more on the Liberals. It presents them with a really difficult and set of urgent fork in the road type questions. They're heading into a fall session without the reset that many people expected that they might have had, a policy reset, cabinet shuffle, anything like that, with a caucus that is still largely unsure that heading into that election with Justin Trudeau is the right idea, with Justin Trudeau continuing to

say it is the right idea. And now the NDP has kind of put a clock on it a little bit, I think, in the sense of if the liberals were to start a leadership race now, I think the conventions, and you can't always count on conventions, but the convention might be that there wouldn't be, that the NDP wouldn't force an election to happen while a liberal leadership race was underway. They could, but would they, I guess, is a separate question. And I think rather not. So if the liberals wanted to really did want to change leaders, they probably have to start doing that now. And if they don't do that now, it becomes harder to imagine that they could avoid having an election with Justin Trudeau as the leader,

if what they're really hoping for is sometime between now and next fall, let's say that Justin Trudeau decides on his own that he should go. So I think it's going to put increasing pressure on the Liberals and Justin Trudeau, including on policy questions, just as the Liberal Party says to win or have a chance of being competitive in the next election. We need to be closer to the center of the spectrum. Jagmeet Singh and the NDP are going to be standing by saying, we need you to do things that align with our agenda on the left, or else there could be an election sooner than you want. Well, I find that an incredible answer, and I think it probably covered all the ground, leaving nothing left for Chantal to say. Okay, well, next question. Isn't that the way to answer these comments?

I'm taking lessons from U.S. politics here. I'll come back to the liberals. I think we will come back, except to say that I agree with Bruce that this was totally predictable and became almost inevitable once the rail workers were forced back to work in the way that they were. Not that Mr. Singh will ever really tell you that because he doesn't want to be using that as a hook as the decision by the government is largely supported by public opinion. And the courts will decide whether it was constitutional or not. But inside, it's part of the DNA of the NDP to defend collective bargaining. And from inside the party, with a caucus that already

wanted out, it made that decision something that had to be taken sooner rather than later. The problem for Mr. Singh is that this leaves him with a big move that is unsupported by a credible narrative. And some of the people who are pointing out that the emperor has few clothes are people who used to be fairly close to the party. Thomas Mulcair in a column this week, in two columns, basically said, well, you know, why now and not back in June? Nothing has happened between the two.

And was corporate greed ever a part of the agreement between the NDP and the liberals? This notion that the liberals would end corporate greed if you can find a piece of paper and a copy of the agreement that's not ripped up or shredded, you won't find that there's an obligation on the liberals to do away with corporate greed. It also comes with what I call a major test for Mr. Singh, because beyond the fact that this narrative and that press conference yesterday and the interviews since then up to now

have done nothing to shore up the narrative. It's been mostly talking points pulled out of a bit of thin air in the sense that if you didn't know that the NDP had just spent a couple of years supporting the government and getting policies out of the government, you wouldn't know, listening to Jagmeet Singh, that this happened. Because the liberals are so bad and everything they've done is so useless that you kind of wonder in what universe was that other Jagmeet Singh, who was the partner of the liberals, evolving. But the test he set for himself is he's basically told voters, Justin Trudeau is too weak to stop

Pierre Poilievre, but I'm not. Okay, I am waiting for that poll that will show that the NDP is the serious contender to government that will block the path of Pierre Poilievre to a majority government. But there will be an early test of that contention. Because if Mr. Singh really is that stronger person, then he must keep the Winnipeg seat that is in play on September 16th, because you can't say that you're going to block someone when you're losing seats. And he must win the Montreal seat that is in play because you cannot possibly block Pierre Poiliev's path with only one MP in Quebec. And that seat would give him two. It's not enough to block Pierre Poiliev, but at least it shows that someone somewhere in Quebec is going to give you a hearing.

So that test is coming quickly. I'm not sure. I mean, I understand that the NDP believes that having done what they did this week rather than wait for the caucus meeting next week they believe they have helped themselves in both by-elections maybe but I

mean we pay attention to these things on a daily basis I'm not sure the voters of those two ridings are as fascinated by everything that's been happening between the liberals and the NDP. We'll see. I don't really know. Just one note on the government. Yeah, it was predictable.

You could see it coming. Kapoliev saw it coming. He set Joknytsing up last week by saying, leave the liberals, you're a sellout. And he did that in the full calculation that the NDP was about to leave the agreement. But the only people who seem to not see it coming are the liberals themselves. I was having talk with senior people in the government over the past week, including on the day when this happened.

And, you know, Mr. Trudeau's Quebec lieutenant, Pablo Rodriguez, was on air yesterday on Radio-Canada, and he was asked on a scale of 1 to 10, how surprised were you? 10 being the most surprised. And his answer was 10. And he added, and I'm a member of the group that is supposed to interact with the NDP to avoid surprises. So it's hard to imagine how they could not have in their minds figured out that the NDP was on the breaking point with them.

They've been assuring their caucus as of that meeting of the cabinet in Halifax, that all was good and the relationship was solid until the end of the expiry date of the agreement in June. Really? Okay. All right. Bruce wants in,

but just before he does on the, the matter of the by-elections, if they hold on to Transcona, which seems, when I talk to people in Manitoba, seems unlikely at this point that Conservatives made a real push there, which is ironic in a way. Manitoba's just tossed out the Conservatives provincially, like big time, and replaced them with the NDP. And now, a couple of months later, you've got a by-election, a federal by-election, not provincial, where the opposite may be happening, may be happening.

But let's say the NDP win that seat, hold on to that seat, and that they win in Montreal, in Verdun. It's a tight, Chantel, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems at the moment to be a very tight three-way race. Yes. But if the NDP win that and hold on to Manitoba, he will look like a mastermind. He'll go, look. I think those are two big ifs.

Oh, yeah. So, yes, I didn't answer your question. Neither mastermind nor sellout. I'm like Bruce. I don't believe that Jacques Mincing was ever a sellout, but I have yet to see. I mean, this is a guy who's managed to lose ground in 21 of 22 by-elections on this watch and is threatened with losing a seat he holds in Manitoba. So I'm not going to spare him the mastermind title until I, I see some masterminding.

Look at that, Bruce. She just copies you all the time. So I agree with Bruce. I'm trying to keep him happy for the next 40 minutes. I like this new world order. It's great. I know it's just for today. So I'm not going to get carried away.

Oh, no, it's just for now. Just for now. Just for the first part of today's conversation. Montel's point about how unaware most in the liberal universe seem to be about what happened, how much it caught them by surprise, is to the extent that people care about what the kind of the chattering bubble is saying, that is, you know, a huge topic of interest here is how did this how did the cabinet have a two-day retreat and talk about their fall and winter plan and part of the conditions that were established as the parameters for that conversation seems where this deal is going to hold so that in and of itself really goes to the the sense that a lot of people have developed that there's a, I don't know if it's lethargy or if it's just kind of exhaustion or missed

signals or the whole idea of the political management of the government is called into question I think in part just by this very fact that they've been planning their fall and winter with that big assumption as an established fact, and all of a sudden it was gone. So I think it's going to raise some questions as it should at this caucus meeting that the Liberals are holding in Nanaimo in the next few days. I also wanted to touch on the whole question of, is the NDP legitimately positioned as the strongest alternative to Polyam? Because I thought it was interesting in Jagmeet Singh's video that he talked about that. He said that, you know, the liberals are too weak to beat the conservatives and we're not or I'm not. I forget exactly what he was saying, in part, was a reflection of the fact that if you just look at the two individuals leading the Liberal Party and the NDP, there are favorability, to use that kind of polling term that a lot of people focus on, is minus two. Justin Trudeau's minus 35.

So if he was really just talking about which of me or Justin Trudeau seems to have more public support as a competitor or challenger or a critic of Pierre Pauliev, he's not wrong to say that he's in a better position. I don't think he's in as good a position as he was. I agree with Chantal's observation about the degree to which he seems to have lost political skills, I would say, over time rather than gained them. I don't want to be overly harsh about that, but I did find it interesting that what he seemed to want to do at the moment where he was grabbing the microphone and the stage in Canadian politics was do it by putting out a video that had been recorded sometime before, which really reduces the risk of you having a difficult question that you answer poorly or, you know,

failing to kind of repeat exactly the message that you want to deliver because you get asked it too many times and you're not sure exactly how you want to say it. So to package that moment that way is what you could look at and say, well, it was more polished, and it was. But you could also say it was born of a risk of doing more poorly if you did it in a live situation. And that sort of struck me as being kind of important to see as well. Sure. Just before I go back to Chantal, what's Pauliev's net favorability number? Oh, he's not in great shape. He's plus five. So he's more popular by a lot than Trudeau, more popular by a little bit than Jagmeet Singh.

But if, and this is the point that Chantal is making, I think, is that if you sort of ask which party is better positioned to challenge the Conservatives, it is still by a comfortable margin. Well, comfortable is probably not a good word to use because of our first-past-post system. So, you know, we do have a situation where you can be at 26% in the polls compared to 17%, and it might not turn into that big a difference. And there is a risk that the Liberals fall behind the NDP in the number of seats in the next election based on some of the current numbers. But the Liberal brand looks like still the

competitor brand to the Conservatives, much more so than the NDP does on most days. All right. Chantal? About the use of a video, I think you saw yesterday when that press conference took place in Toronto, I believe, not near the press gallery and the more pointed questions that would come from journalists who are in the bubble and cover parliamentary matters. But still, Mr. Singh could not escape the question, the first question that was going to come his way if he'd have a news conference to announce what he did on the video, which is, so having said all this, are you going to vote non-confidence in the government. And yesterday, everything was about suddenly how the NDP is really no longer the ally of the liberals. And there's all these things to say

about the liberals, but it's not saying we need to go in an election. We're bringing in, we've lost confidence in the government. And that, to many people on the outside, sounds like a contradiction. I understand why the NDP is taking its distance from the liberals. I understand that it needs a bit of time to establish that distance, given the past two and a half years. But if you're looking at it from the outside as a voter, you're saying, well, you know, you're ripping up things. You're saying, I don't want to be with these people anymore.

But yet you're going to go back to the House of Commons and you're leaving yourself open to supporting the government just as you were last spring. And I think they wanted to get that first day where he looked decisive because that second day was not a good day for him. It kind of showed, I agree with Bruce that it's not going to be torture to decide whether you back or don't back the government. A lot of this is inside the bubble stuff. Minority rule works that way. You don't have to have an agreement to agree that if you think this is okay, you vote for it. And if you don't, you vote against it. But the message was, these guys are no good. And for a normal voter, there would seem to be a contradiction between having said all that and then not being able to say, yes,

I will use the first opportunity to get rid of these people because I'm the strong person who will be to care for you, of which he is not. Just one more point on the NDP. I've been thinking about it in the last 24 hours. You know, any NDP leader these days, and probably for the rest of our lives, will always be held up in comparison to the success of Jack Layton, 2011 election, where he won so many seats, the NDP won so many seats that they were the official opposition. And I noticed today, and I think it was in the Globe, there was a piece saying,

you know, he's trying to position himself with this strategy the way Leighton did in 2011. And that may well be true. But he could also end up finding himself positioning himself the same way Jack Leighton did in 2006, which led to the defeat of the Liberal government of Paul Martin and the beginning of a nine-year run for the Conservatives. So Jack Layton was an extremely popular figure, and there's no question that he had enormous success, especially in that 2011 election, and we're all pained by what happened shortly after that.

But he wasn't perfect in terms of strategic moves on the NDP side in Parliament. And it's worth, I guess, remembering that, although I know both of you are going to tell me I'm wrong about bringing that up. But I would note that 2006 was not the third campaign of Mr. Leighton. Mr. Singh is going into his third campaign. So he has had more than one shot to establish himself. And Jack Layton did establish himself over that time. I also will point out, regardless of the outcome of that by-election in Montreal,

that Kex will be the NDP candidate who is a municipal councillor, and by all accounts popular in that area, is not province-wide Thomas Smallcare in any way, shape, or form. Okay. Peter, have we got another minute before the break? Yeah, sure. No, go for it. A couple of things I wanted to pick up on.

I mean, one of the challenges that sits underneath the surface level of interest or support for the NDP is that the country – I don't think it's fair to say that the country has been moving to the right, but it's been showing less enthusiasm for what some would characterize as further left ideas, right? And so I tend to think of, if you believe in asking people wherever they fit on the political spectrum, and there's a debate about that, but I think it's been roughly kind of accurate in describing where we are as a country. 10 years ago, if I gave people in a poll a choice of are you center, left or right, what I would get is 60% or so saying I'm on the center, 25% saying I'm on the left, 15% saying I'm on the

right. Today, those last two numbers are reversed. There are fewer people saying I'm on the left and more people saying I'm on the right. There's still a majority on the center. But that gravitational pull has been an important thing for the NDP and an important opportunity that the conservatives, at least under Pierre Polyev in particular, I would say, have picked up on. They've been pulling votes away from the NDP by presenting themselves as a party of the working class, a party of voters who are struggling with the cost of living, who might be members of unions. And so this is part of the backdrop, I think, here, is that the NDP is not, no matter what Jagmeet said in his video, they're not really in a position of strength. They're only in a position of strength relative to Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party that he's leading right now. They're actually in a position where water is running out of their bucket towards the Conservatives, and that will continue to be a risk for them

as long as Pierre Poliev does what I think he's doing. Maybe the only thing I would say he's doing better than Stephen Harper did is he's more committed to this project of connecting with people, that kind of enthusiastic human campaigner. I'm not saying that because I just can feel the emails you're going to get and then you're going to send them on to me. I'm not saying I love it. I am 100% not saying it works on me. Okay. I am saying that there's a, there's a bountiful amount of evidence that he's winning some voters. He quit while you were ahead. And by the way, Stephen Harper couldn't have done the reaching out to people thing that Pierre Poglieb does. It was just not in his persona.

I agree. That's kind of what I'm saying. This is a person who had a hard time saying good morning to journalists on his own campaign plane, for God's sake. Yeah. But I feel like that has made a bit of a difference. hard time saying good morning to journalists on his own campaign plane, for God's sake. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like that has made a bit of a difference. The opportunity is greater because Trudeau is just not somebody that people want to listen to that much,

but he's done something with it that Harper would have struggled to do. The other thing Harper couldn't have done is like some of us, he could not have slipped into one of those black T-shirts and look like the physique that Paulieva has. He tried early on and got so much flack for wearing that. The sweater. Unflattering sweater. That was the end of that.

All right. I'm going gonna leave it to you guys getting yourself in trouble enough we're gonna uh we're gonna revert you know you guys talked about how surprised the liberals seem to be well they seem to be surprised about some things going on inside their own party too um we'll get to that right after this. And welcome back. This is the Friday edition of The Bridge. It's Good Talk with Chantelle Hebert and Bruce Anderson. Lots to talk about this week. You're listening on SiriusXM channel 167, Canada Talks,

or on your favorite podcast platform, or you're watching us on our weekend YouTube channel that features Good Talk, and you can see us not wearing black T-shirts. All right. Jeremy Broadhurst is probably a name that most Canadians have never heard of, unless they're deep into trying to understand the inner workings of the core group that's been around Justin Trudeau basically since 2015.

And it is a small, tight group that has been there. And they've always been considered tight close friends the whole bit so it was a bit of a shock it seems to some of them uh when althea raj reported yesterday i think it was yesterday in the toronto star um that jeremy broadhurst who was the National Campaign Director and has been around that office, you know, going back, I think, to 2015, known as a, you know, close friend of the Prime Minister, when she reported that he, in fact, told the Prime Minister in the spring that he was leaving. And that if you believe everything in Althea's report,

and I have no reason not to believe it, is that he basically told the Prime Minister he didn't think the Prime Minister could win again. And that he felt that if, as long as he felt that way, it's time that the Prime Minister pick somebody else to run their campaign. Well, apparently this came as a shock to others in that tight circle of friends, especially the chief of staff, Katie Telford. What does this say about what's going on in there? Chantel, start this one.

Okay, so there are some liberals who will tell you that it's possibly a good thing that Mr. Bruthurst decided to quit because it means there will be some change there is a sense that the message that there needs to be changed and then around the prime minister

has been received but that's I'm going to use a polite word, that's spin. It's trying to say that rain is good when you're already flooded. And why am I saying that? Because Mr. Trudeau did not fire Jeremy Broadhurst. He did not want him to go. This is someone who is part of that tight group who decided to go and told, not the first one, who is close to Justin Trudeau, told him, I don't think you can win.

And I don't think you are well served by someone who is going to run your campaign feeling that this is a lost cause. But it is the first big crack in the current palace guard armor that has been around Justin Trudeau. And I believe the shock was real. What makes it worse, well, one, you don't lose your national campaign director with experience less than a year before an election, probably at the time when the party is in trouble, without it meaning trouble, there is no silver lining to this, despite everything that you will hear over the next few days. Second, usually when that happens, the day that the communique is released, as Mr. Brouwer said yesterday, to say that he didn't have the strength or the conviction or whatever at this time in his life to continue, you usually step in to announce a

replacement. But it's becoming harder and harder for the liberals to recruit candidates, people in senior jobs. A lot of people are or have walked away. And this is probably the most significant walk away that we've seen in a long time. Now, think of these MPs who are going to meet next week in BC. They have been told by the party over the past few weeks that time was still on the liberal side to turn things around, that the NDP deal was safe and everything was rosy on that front, and that the party was slowly but surely moving itself into election footing. They are coming to this meeting with those first two propositions out the window, with a campaign director who is equipped with the narrative that surrounds it, whether you deny it or not, if you're the PMO,

and with a Quebec lieutenant who's for the past two, three weeks has been giving scrums to say, I'm doing my job, but I can't say that I'm staying because everybody expects Mr. Lottegigais on the 17th, 18th, after the by-election, to announce that he's running for Quebec Liberal leader. If you were a Liberal MP already worried about the numbers and your re-election, you were coming to a caucus meeting in those conditions, you would either be inclined to think about moving on to other challenges or saying, can you please quit, sir, right away? And that's the hard part because there's no consensus within caucus as to who would be a better replacement than Justin Trudeau.

There are lots of people who think there should be a better replacement, but they don't agree on who that person is. And that complicates matters. There's not a Paul Martin standing by or a Jean Chrétien, and people can turn and say, well, you know, we've got a good solution with great numbers in polling. They don't have that.

So it's going to be an interesting meeting, and it may require a lot of whistling past the graveyard to make it a happy gathering. Bruce? Yeah, the first thing I would want to say about this is I've known Jeremy Brodgers for more than a decade, come to know him quite well over the years. He's an excellent fellow in my view. He's got a great mind. He's obviously had a deep commitment to the political party

that he's been part of over that entire period of time. He's played a lot of senior roles. He's, I think, really valued for his kind of sound judgment and his manner. I remember actually having a conversation with him more than a decade ago. I think he'd been in politics for a while and was thinking about whether it was time to do something different. And I think it's a measure of his commitment to the politics and the ideas that he believes in, that he stayed in politics for that long.

Because it's, as he said in his statement that he put out yesterday, an extremely demanding job at the best of times. And it's even more demanding at the worst of times. And liberals are going through some of the worst times right now. There's no question about it. And, you know, while those jobs running a national campaign for the party that's the incumbent party might look from a distance to be, well, what a great opportunity. If you posted that job on the internet and said, you know, let's see the applications, the number of people who would be qualified to do that job who would say,

that's the thing I really want to sign up for, would be really rather few. This is a very, very difficult situation. And what Jeremy Brodhurst said in his statement was, the prime minister deserves somebody who has that level of kind of energy and enthusiasm for this project. I forget the exact words, but that it's hard for me to find at this moment. He's got a young family. He's put in a lot of hours, a lot of years. And I take him at his word that his priority is kind of resetting the balance in his life. That doesn't mean that part of the calculus, of course,

isn't just how daunting this set of particular challenges is for the Liberal Party. I don't know what he said or didn't say in the room with the prime minister. I gather there's only two people in that conversation, so that's going to be between them unless one of them wants to clarify it. But it is unmistakable that this isn't a normal run-up. This isn't like the run-up to 2019 or 2021. This is a situation where almost the only conversation that the prime minister finds himself involved in day in, day out is, do you really want to stay? Should you stay? Is it the right thing? And I think take Chantal's point absolutely that people don't know what the alternative would be or should be,

but it doesn't make them feel good. The fact that they don't know the answer to that question doesn't make them feel good about the path that they're on. And so I agree that I think this meeting coming up in a few days in Nanaimo is going to be an incredibly important one in terms of the, is there a fork in the road for the liberals? What does it look like? What do the choices look like? What does the choice look like that Justin Trudeau is putting on the table in front of people? I think a lot of MPs are going to want more clarity on that than they would have been expecting. And they would have expected a lot before this week. But with the announcement by the NDP and the choice that Jeremy Brodhurst made, I think

that raises the stakes somewhat. You can't have a pep talk that will be credible for MPs who are going to be running for re-election. Sometimes, I think most of us now have come down to the notion that this parliament can't last beyond the end of the spring. So sometimes over the next six to nine months max, if you are in a three-way battle to hold a downtown Montreal seat. Regardless of whatever pep talk works or doesn't work next week, if on the 16th the Liberals barely hang on or lose that seat, it basically sends the message to MPs that after the next election, they may need a really, really small room to have a caucus meeting.

Because if you can't hold seats in downtown Toronto and downtown Montreal and you're a liberal, where are you going to hold them? Good point. And you're not holding them in Atlanta, Canada, which was a bastion. You know, in the last couple of weeks, Trudeau had a cabinet retreat. He seemed to breeze through that. Now he's got a caucus retreat. Is a caucus retreat going to be any more difficult than a cabinet retreat for him?

I mean, are they more? Tell me about it. Well, you know, it always depends on the on whether, you know, individuals feel like there's a point to speaking up. And when they do, then caucuses can definitely be more challenging because you have people who feel like they have nothing to lose from speaking up. They're not in cabinet. They're not held to a standard of cabinet solidarity that ministers are. And the closer you get to an election, the less there is room for a leader to sort of leave the implication that people who are with him might end up being in cabinet or having some other kind of role that they cherish having, committee chair or something like that.

So the rewards that leaders can use to incentivize overt or latent loyalty are fewer over time as you get closer to an election. I think that's part of the dynamic. And also, you've got a lot of people, current models suggest, you know, 70, 80 of that caucus would look at today's numbers and say, I'll be out of the job next year. So I have some additional incentive to say what's on my mind. And this might be the last opportunity I have to be blunt about that. Now, what those observations might be or what the calls for action might sound like, whether they touch on leadership directly or they do what normally happens, which is people kind of

throwing darts in the vicinity of leadership rather than directly at leadership, that remains to be seen. But I'd be surprised if there isn't more of that in this caucus meeting. And so it's raising the stakes for the prime minister to find a gear that he hasn't found, I would think it's fair to say, in this late summer, early fall period, to reassure his party that the choice that he's making on their behalf is the choice that is the best choice in their interest with all the uncertainty that Chantel mentioned about. What's the alternative course look like? Okay, we're going to have to take our last break.

But Chantel, do you want to say anything on this point? No, I'll hold my fire. Hold your fire. Okay, here we go with our last break for this edition of Good Talk. We'll be right back. Back with the final segment of Good Talk for this week. A reminder that The Buzz is available to you. You can sign up at the nationalnewswatch.com.

There's no charge. It's my weekly newsletter. It comes out Saturday mornings directly to your email inbox. Okay, I'm going to throw a scenario at you here. Up until a couple of days ago, if you were a potential liberal leadership candidate sort of waiting in case the current leader decided to step down, you could look at the situation and say,

well, you know, I could step in here and at least I've got a year to show my leadership style, my policies that I would bring forward, and how I'd separate myself from the outgoing leader. Now that all changed with Singh's decision not to support the government anymore. In fact, as unlikely as it seems, it could be an election now at any time. So I'm wondering what it does for those people, and one of them in particular. Like, why would a Mark Carney, if he so desired, come from the outside to come in,

where he could be facing an election in a month, never having had an opportunity whatsoever to show how he'd be different. And without a seat. And without a seat. Does it change the dynamic on that front? Not just Carney, but anybody who might be considering this. Chantal. I think so.

So I'm going to give free advice here to people who want to be a leader of the Liberal Party and eventually Prime Minister of Canada. And it goes for Mark Carney, Chrystia Freeland, go the whole list. At this juncture, I'm not saying it's impossible to replace the leader, but at this juncture what would work best is if the party focused on holding the conservatives to a minority government and then changing leaders and eventually bringing down that minority government to stage a comeback. I don't believe that the change in leadership or a Kamala Harris scenario will really change the optics of the next election, in part because we're not in a two-way battle. Up to a point, Jack Mead is saying it's right.

So if François Blanchet, if you are sick of the liberals, you do have other options. And if you do not like Pierre Poiliev, as 91% of those who are not voting conservatives in Quebec feel about having him as a second choice, you have options. It's not either Trump or Harris or either a liberal leader and Poiliev. It's more complicated than that. And I do not believe that Jagmeet Singh or whoever is liberal leader can put enough fear of Pierre Poiliev in voters' minds to make them coalesce in droves around a liberal alternative.

But that's just me. So me, at this point, I'd say, can we focus on whittling down that conservative lead so that at the very least, he doesn't have a majority control in the House of Commons. Bruce. Well, I think the, I don't think it's possible to say now whether the liberals have no chance of winning the next election. I do think it's possible to, or it's reasonable to say now whether the Liberals have no chance of winning the next election. I do think it's possible to, or it's reasonable to say now that with Justin Trudeau as the leader, there's very, very little chance of winning. And so if Justin Trudeau is the leader, then I probably am where Chantal is, which is that then the focus should be on what's the best losing outcome.

But the reason I'm not sure if he did leave, whether or not there would be another set of possible outcomes of that next election is simply that I think so few people pay as much attention to politics as we do. And as, you know, that 30% who follow politics closely do. There's, you know, there's a whole bunch of other people who vote and for whom all of the day-to-day shenanigans and the drama and everything else, they don't even notice it. They're not aware of it.

We're going to have, in the course of the coming months, even more high-profile indications of what right of center means and what conservative means coming up from the United States. It is a political scenario that people in Canada do watch pretty carefully. It's hard to ignore it, hard to miss it. And it plays out with huge drama, huge combustibility, and a real sense that there are stakes for the world involved. That generally doesn't work that well for conservatives in Canada. The current state of the Republican Party, the MAGA movement, all of that, even though there are more MAGA voters

in Canada than there used to be, it still is a worrying kind of thing for a lot of Canadians. So if you ask me, is it impossible that we could have a situation six or nine months from now where Canadians are going, you know what, it's a different sounding Liberal Party. I'm interested in what they have to say. I'm also more anxious about what small c conservative means. I don't know if I can really trust Pierre Pauliev that much. I would rule out the possibility that that is the scenario that would exist. But I do think that the challenge for the Liberals with Justin Trudeau as leader is, and we've had this conversation so many times, people just aren't listening to him with an open mind right now. You're kind of ducking the question.

Why would any potential leader, whoever that might be, why would they, you know, if Justin Trudeau, for some reason... Oh, public service. Public service is the only... I mean, there are people who do it for personal ambition, and that will always be the case, and it's one of the idiosyncrasies of politics, is you just find people who will do something that, by any objective measure, you know, the rest of the world would look at and say, well, that's kind of a foolhardy thing to do. Right. Politics attracts people who do that. And leadership races attract people who do that. And we've always kind of seen these lists of candidates where we go, well, why is that person entering that race? They've got they appear to have no chance of doing it. So those are personal chemistry choices that happen in politics because the pool of humans that occupy those roles in politics is a little bit different from the pool that doesn't. times people just decide to get into it because they feel like it's an obligation or something

that they feel that they want to contribute. And God help us, we should want a lot of that. But I also think there's a lot of denial and hubris, hubris as in thinking yourself when you see in the mirror that you are superman or superwoman and that you will make a big difference just by the sheer fact that you are you and denial about the state of the liberal party after a decade in power and the need to rebuild some of its foundations after a term spent spending more time thinking how do we re-secure at least the majority or government, and instead asking how do we keep the NDP happy so we can last a few more months. The voters that Bruce talks about who are not political junkies,

really like John Turner and Kim Campbell at first, but the fundamentals of their campaign came back to the fore really quickly within a matter of the weeks of a single campaign, and sometimes with great strength. So there is no history of a savior in the dying days of a parliament actually changing the fundamental trend of where public opinion is going. But for those who are ambitious and want to be prime minister, I submit that they should look at how many liberal losers got a second chance. And I would ask them to consider that John Turner's life of pulling out knives from behind, from his back,

for four years after he lost the 84 election should make them ponder whether the timing would not be better after a defeat than before a defeat. And for John Turner, not all those knives were in his back either. No. It was a brutal couple of years. Let me just end with this observation. Big debate coming up on Tuesday night in the United States.

People will be watching all around the world. Harris versus Trump. If Harris ends up winning that election, that'll be two of the three leaders in North America, elected leaders, women. And Canada will remain then the only country in North America that hasn't had an elected female leader elected to the position of prime minister. In fact, one of the few countries in the world, not the only, but one of the few that will be standing there without having had a woman as an elected leader.

It's an interesting thought. Anyway, that's going to wrap it up for this week. Bruce and Chantel, thank you so much for your contributions. Have a great weekend. Safe travels to all of us, and we'll talk again in a week's time. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks so much for listening. Take care, guys.

Have a good weekend. Bye.