The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Good Talk - On The Road At The Chateau Laurier Hotel in Ottawa

Episode Date: March 29, 2024

Chantal and Bruce join Peter on location from Carleton University in Ottawa answering their questions!

Are you ready for Good Talk? Thank you. Thank you very much. Well, we're certainly ready for Good Talk, a very different kind of Good Talk this week. We're in Ottawa. We're in the Atom Room of the Chateau Laurier, and we're looking forward to a great discussion with, well, we'll let you explain who you are because this room is full of really talented people who've been through the university process, some of them still a little bit,

but most of them already in jobs that reflect their understanding, their knowledge, and their learning of the political system in Canada. They all have questions. That's the idea, and that's why they are gathering at the microphones now to ask some questions of our panelists. And who are those panelists? Well, you know them if you listen to Good Talk. We have Chantal Hébert, one of the finest journalists in Canada, political journalist in Canada, normally in Montreal, today here in Ottawa. We have Bruce Anderson, one of the country's leading research analysts, polling,

has a background in politics, has worked for politicians, has worked for both conservative politicians and liberal politicians over the years, and has an understanding of some of the things that go on in the background, and is still very knowledgeable and topical, obviously, on things that are happening right now. So let's get to the first question. So it's great because every week I have to come up with these questions for them. But this week, I'm just following the puck. And right now we go to this microphone over here and our first question for today. Hi, thank you guys so much for being here.

I want to start off with a pretty general question, but clearly we're in an era where politics and journalism is changing, and you all have very much experience and expertise in that, and I was wondering if we could start in the next two to three years, where do we see the field going? I know, a huge question, but just to start. So where are we heading? It seems to me we're heading on a pretty interesting journey on the political landscape. Chantelle, why don't you start us? Where are we heading?

I knew that was going to happen. It tells you a lot that we do this with no costs, no infrastructure every Friday. Get an audience. We sit wherever we are in front of a computer, and we talk about politics. And that's great for us. But what it also means is that if you're starting off in journalism, and one day you're gonna be

like me who started off when I was 21 but eventually you're gonna have to pay a mortgage, have kids, that's not a great model. There is nothing that we do on Fridays that's gonna pay a mortgage or send kids to universities. And that is kind of possibly the worry, that journalism, political journalism or journalism of any kind will become something that you do before you become a grown up. And then you have to move on to something else because life happens. And I'm not going to tell you that I have an answer for that. But I am going to tell you that I totally believe there will be new models that will allow people to do what I did. It's going to take a while. It's not happening now. I'm not one who believes that we can save

the old model and make it into something that works in the digital age. So it's still a work in progress, but I do believe totally that in as much as there is an audience, and it is there, I think we've seen it, then there will be models that work. They will not involve building big newsrooms and great buildings at One Young or wherever in the city. But I think there will still be people covering writing stories. I think

society does need it. And I believe your generation is going to have to invent that model. The challenge for the journalists of today and the journalists of the future is exactly what Chantal is talking about in terms of we don't know what it's going to look like a couple of years from now. We didn't know what it was going to look like today two or three years ago. Things have advanced so quickly. I hate to use the example, but when I started in television, the film was black and white and it was film. You physically had to cut it and stick it together to make an item. Look how fast things really have changed

over the last half century and the last five years. And we can only imagine what it's going to look like over the next five years and how that changes the journalistic foundation for organizations in the future. Okay, the next question is for Bruce Anderson. Go ahead. Wait, didn't you introduce the internet? Didn't you tell people that the internet was bad? I did introduce the internet. Right. I didn't say it quite like that. Well, it was a very serious moment. I do remember seeing it, and it's out there on the interwebs so people can see it. I think you should tell us more about where we're going now. I don't want to. It was the early 90s, and we had, back in the days of the National and the Journal, and I was doing both of them that night for some reason,

and we had a feature story done by Bill Cameron, who's a great journalist, he's passed now. But he was going to explain this new thing. And it was new to most of us, and to me. Just Al Gore. Yeah, just Al Gore was the only one who understood it. But it was up on the prompter and I was reading it and I said, now here's Bill Cameron to explain to us this new thing called the internet. That's how you say it. And that's just how the way I said it. And it's out there now and it provides great laughs.

Can I take a crack at that question or is that not part of the deal? Well, we want to keep moving. No, no, no, you don't get a crack at it because you talk about the video. We can come back to it if they run out of questions here, which I'm sure they won't. Go ahead. Hi there. I think this might be a question for Bruce and also any of the other panelists.

I was, in light of the late Right Honorable Brian Mulroney's passing, I was wondering if you could share a few, if you experience with the Right honorable my own molaroni um in news media or just in your personal life and any good stories or that you've uh in your experience with him well thank you so much for that question i'm really glad that uh that you brought that up and i'm gonna do the thing that peter never

likes us to do if we're taping before the actual release, which is I'm going to timestamp this by saying today Mr. Mulroney's body is lying in state just down the street and as my wife Nancy Jamison and I were walking over here, we were talking about him and talking about the meetings that we had been in in this building with him in this room. In fact, some people would feel shame about this, but I changed parties a couple of times. And he was one of the people who convinced me that it was important to change parties because I believed in some of the policies that he was championing. And I got to know people like Mike Wilson and Lowell Murray. And I spent time in the Progressive Conservative Party in this hotel,

including with my old friend Bill Fox, who I see here. Good to see you, Bill. But I also did debate coaching with Joe Clark on his return to politics and with Jean Charest in the leadership race of 1993. So this building has a lot of, has abundant political memories for me. Brian Mulroney in a room just across the hall from here, I remember this was the meeting where I was being encouraged to help the Conservative Party after spending 10 or 15 years in the Liberal Party. And I was really quite tempted. I was pretty committed to the idea that I should probably do it. And I went to this meeting, and it was a breakout session after a big party planning session that

was held here. And it was a cocktail thing. Anyway, there's this big long lineup, and Nancy and I were at one end of the room, and Brian was walking through this long lineup with Mila, and he was meeting everybody the way that he did, and he was very physical. You remember that, right, Peter? He was always one of these guys. Before Bill Clinton learned the art of the two-hand handshake, Brian Mulroney was all over this,

and he had grades of affection that he was going to show. And people in the room were so attuned to how he conducted himself that I see Bill laughing. He knows what I mean. You could tell the difference in the grades of affection by how much physical touching there was, how long the stop was, whether there was a little bit of a hug and a huddle. Brian Mulroney was the best I've ever seen in Canadian politics about that and I say that in part because he did give me the hug in the huddle and after that I was with the party for a number of years and happy to be in support of some of the policies.

But the other thing I should mention is we put out a poll today that if you haven't had a chance to see it, again Peter let me say this, we put out a poll today that if you haven't had a chance to see it, again, Peter, let me say this, we put out a poll two days ago, which showed that 83% of Canadians asked today feel that Brian Mulroney did a good job as Prime Minister. And those of us who were there during that time, and Susan Delacorte sent me a note today saying something like, I think my 1984 or 1988 brain is kind of blowing up at this evidence. Some of his policies were controversial, but in hindsight, people look at what he tried to do, and the measure that they took of it now is that he tried to do important things, he was well-intentioned, and some of those things turned out to be extraordinarily helpful to the country.

So I'll leave it there. Okay, let me reassure you that Brian Mulroney was not that physical with people like me. So we can clear that off the stage right away. No hugging. No, I think Susan would agree with me. That did not happen, so don't walk away from here thinking that you judge. Also, Mr. Mueller only had a fair dose of respect for the distance between journalists and people who are politicians. He was the first prime minister I covered from cover to cover.

But he was also the most interesting in the sense that the issues that we covered back in those days were real issues. They weren't who he said, she said, which is frankly not terribly interesting. But I mean, free trade, the Constitution, abortion rights, which he didn't want to go into but fell on his lap. You go down the list, it's really impossible to imagine how interesting all those issues were. And he did something else for us. In those days, we had to follow the prime minister wherever he went.

I spent too much time in Baie Combeau, I have to admit. And we never stayed in the same hotel as the prime minister, so I let you imagine what happens when you stay in the second or third hotel. They were good. I don't want the Baie Combeau people to write nasty things about me. There was no shacks.

But we also got, from Meach to the end of the Charlottetown referendum, we got to travel the country and hear the perspective of all kinds of Canadians, premiers, but also normal people. And if you're going to learn Canada, it's probably the best school you can go to and the tuition was paid by the federal government

in a sense because you ended up in places where you would not have gone on holidays. I'm not gonna name those places. I'm in trouble enough with Becomo. But I think those of us, and we know who we are, who covered this era, know more about Canada than we ever knew going in. And that is on that prime minister.

He was my best story. Nice. You know, I followed Mulroney from before he became opposition leader. So in the early 1980s, through the leadership convention in 83 and then his first election in 84 and then second one in 88, we had the proper kind of relationship that journalists should have with politicians. Combative at times, always kind of demanding accountability and understanding on government policies. In his earliest days, when he was running for the leadership, he was not very accommodating and hadn't himself sorted out what that relationship should be.

But over time, in terms of my relationship with him, it became, close would be the wrong word, but respectful of each other's positions. And after he retired from politics, after I retired from journalism, we talked more often. And there were some great conversations and real learning experiences for me, especially on international affairs, where he was a wizard with deep connections all over the world and understanding things. But if you've followed the last few weeks, you hear constantly these stories about how he reached out to help people at difficult times.

And he clearly did that a lot, a lot more than I think any of us realize. But we're hearing about it through these stories. I'll just tell you one little one on my case. We were talking a few years ago when my son was going through his final years of political science at U of T, and he was writing a paper on free trade. And I told the former prime minister on the phone that he'd been in there. And he said, he interrupted me, he says, Peter, get me that paper. Let me see that paper. And I thought, oh, you know, he's just being Brian

Mulroney. And I said, fine, I'll get it to you. And so when he finished it, I sent it to him. And a couple of weeks later in the mail to my son came this letter from the former prime minister. And it wasn't just a one-pager, an acknowledgment of, well, I was very interesting. I thought it was interesting. He made some good points and then signed it off. It went a number of pages, detailing certain things. And now he didn't need to do that. He didn't, you know, he wasn't trying to impress my son.

He wasn't trying to impress me. It was too late for that. He was doing it because that's the kind of guy he was. And I think we, you know, we've learned a lot over these last couple of weeks by listening to stories, because there's nothing unusual about that. That was Brian Mulroney. 100%. And the kind of things that he did.

Okay, next question, right here. Perfect, thank you. So, since we're an event from the Mastering Political Management in Carton, the Mastering Applied Politics, most of us and the alumni, they are working politics now, or are going to be working in politics. So as people who have core politics from a journalistic perspective, what kind of advice would you give to future political operators or current political operators?

You want to try that? Advice for political operators? You want me to do that? Forget that. Why don't you try that? Advice for political operators, you want me to do that? Forget that. Why don't you try that before we give it to the former political operator? So I'm kind of in a room where they're training people I would be up against in all kinds of ways. And you will lose up against me. And why you will lose is because I have context

and you don't. And I'm happy for all of you who want to try this to get some experience in politics, but you will all move on to something else for a while because whoever you work for is gonna be defeated. That's normal and that's actually totally healthy. You will learn a lot from doing this. It's gonna be really tough.

And possibly you won't know as much as you know until you move on to something else. And if you are, I'm not sure I would say lucky, probably unlucky, you will come back to it because it's like a drug. And you will want to be back in because the only place when I first came to Parliament Hill I couldn't figure out as a journalist you know this place is kind of complicated but it's also not very

nice every day and why would I want to be here it's a bubble and someone who was older than me and a journalist told me because this is where every current in Canada comes to meet. There is no other place where that happens. So I wish on you as you do whatever you do with staffers that you realize that what is happening that is not whoever your workforce wish is also really important and interesting because that's where the country comes to meet and over my time, you know, you first come here and you think this guy is right and this guy is wrong. Then you realize that what makes this place worthwhile

is not who's right or wrong, it's that shock of ideas and the sparks from it. And I hope you treat it as an interesting experience and then move on to something else before you come back to it. Bruce. I think it's a great question and I'm so happy that we're here at this event and I'm so happy that we're here at this event,

and I'm so happy that this program exists. I say that in part. I mean, it's terrifying to have all you smart people here, in addition to my wife, who's the smartest person I've ever known about politics. But part of the reason I say that is I was an extraordinarily undistinguished student at Carleton when I went there. And part of the reason why I was so poor as a student is I was in the journalism program, and I was working part-time for $5 an hour for an MP on Parliament Hill. And I would go to the MP's office and work as many hours as I could,

because $5 was a decent number at that time, and I needed the money. And then I would go to listen to a political science lecture. I won't name the professors. But they would tell me things that didn't sound like what I was experiencing. Let me put it that way. I know that's changed a lot, and that this program, had it existed, probably would have been the program that I should have gone into. And I probably would have been a better student, although there's no guarantee of that. I was pretty distracted by politics. But what have I learned about what makes for a good political operative, I guess I would say a couple things. One is that for at least about a 20-year period,

there's been a currency associated with the more hard-edged, partisan, relentlessly ruthless that you can be, the better you are at that job. Don't take that bait. don't take that bait. Don't pursue that course. It does present the idea of rewards, notoriety, some celebrity. There's the idea that if you're that ferocious pugilist, you'll be on one of the talk shows, you'll be quoted by journalists,

not to be unkind to journalists, but... Not me, though. No, not her. Not her. But there is that, there has become that competition for who can be the worst junkyard dog in politics. And it's a bad way to build your life. But it's also a terribly corrosive part of political life in Canada. And I can't tell you how many times since we started talking about Brian Mulroney's passing, I thought about, you know what, he was a partisan. He liked to drop the gloves. He said some pretty hard-edged things, but he also championed really important ideas. And to Peter's point, he was a kind person. He maintained a humanity about it it there were limits to what he would do and when

those limits come down we all suffer and we don't know what the price will be until much later but in my experience that price is very high and be part of the reversal of that trend would be my advice. Okay, we're going to take our first break. That was very good, but I'm going to ask you to clap again in a second. We're going to take our first break, but we will be right back. And welcome back. We're at the Adam Room in the Chateau Laurier Hotel in downtown Ottawa for the Riddell reception. And we thank, as we will a lot, we thank Jennifer Robson and the staff of the political management

program at Carleton University for arranging all of this will a lot. We thank Jennifer Robson and the staff of the Political Management Program at Carleton University for arranging all of this tonight. We really appreciate it, and we're looking forward to hearing more of your questions, starting with this one right here. Hi there. Thank you for being here tonight. 50 years ago, people would never discuss politics. It was like salary. You just didn't really talk about who you were voting for. To this day, my dad has no idea how his 81-year-old mother has ever voted in an election and refuses to tell him. Nowadays, it feels like you can't get through

a conversation without someone telling you who they're gonna vote for. What do you think has influenced people's level of comfort in sharing their voting information and intentions? And do you think this has positively influenced society? And do you think this has positively influenced society, or do you think this has contributed to the polarization we've seen today? Wow, that's a great question. You know, we tend to, in these kind of things, hearing versions of different questions over and over again. I've never heard that one asked as directly as that. Bruce, you study these things.

What do you think the answer is to that? First of all, do you agree it's an issue? Or not an issue necessarily, but that it is the trend now where people aren't shy about talking about where their vote is placed and why? Well, I think there's been an evolution. There may be two waves to it, and we don't know where it's going to end up. I think when you said 50 years Well, I think there's been an evolution. There may be two waves to it, and we don't know where it's going to end up. I think the, when you said 50 years ago, I remember the first time I was in this building. It was even more than 50 years ago, and I was here campaigning for the legalization of marijuana as a young liberal. It took a long time to happen, but I was, you know, I was four square into this is who I support and I'm happy with that. But my parents' generation were for sure people who felt like you didn't really share that.

You didn't talk about that with other people. It was kind of the notion of a private ballot, something that you did in the privacy of that ballot booth, was really an understood social norm. It wasn't that people were really unhappy if somebody did it, but it was just an accepted way of living your life and having conversations with other people. Fast forward to the last number of years, and maybe social media has been part of that, maybe the hyper-partisan effects that social media have had, and to some degree, the polarization within the media. I used to watch MSNBC quite a bit.

I can't really watch it that much anymore because I find I'm not feeling like I'm getting anything other than partisanship. It would be the same if I was watching Fox. So there are a number of things that are encouraging people to express themselves as adherents to a party rather than a set of ideas, or even to a number of individuals. And I think that's not a great thing. But whether or not it's going to continue in that direction, I don't really know, because I do find, and Nancy and I spent a little bit of time in the United States in the last little while,

and there were a lot of people that we ran into who said, we just don't talk about politics anymore because we can't. And I knew what they were talking about, as you do here. And I wonder if we're not headed more towards that, that polarization will create a social instinct to avoid those divisive and painful conversations within families, within circles of friends, within workplaces. Maybe that would be a good thing, although generally I think it's a good thing if people talk about politics. Partisanship has not been a particularly good thing in the last decade for sure. Okay, we're going to keep moving. A question right here. Thank you for being here. We've seen an increased politicalization of the media.

You know, we have the U.S. election, a former U.S. president calling the media the enemy of the people, and various different countries around the world restricting free press. I'm wondering, what direction do you see Canada's media discourse moving forward in the next four to five years, and how can you and how can we ensure that we have a free press in Canada? Can I just ask you whether, do you agree with either of those statements? One, the media is the enemy of the people.

I do not. Pardon people. I do not. Pardon me? I do not. And how about the first one? You suggested that an increase in the politicization of the media. With the, you know, certain political parties making the funding of the CBC a political issue? Well, it's a legitimate issue, you know, to have that discussion. Where

it ends up can cause certain divisions, but I don't think it's an illegitimate issue to discuss. But I hear your question and I know that Chantelle is eager to try and answer. I live in a different environment than many of the people in this room and so the notion that you are the enemy of one side or the other is familiar to me. When I worked for Le Devoir, I was considered someone who worked for a Sovereignist paper and then when I moved over to La Presse, I'd become a sellout Federalist.

So it doesn't really affect me one way or the other. Like Peter, I believe that the discussion on the CBC, like discussion on Radio-Canada, is legitimate, and if the people want it, they have a way to let it be known. But I don't think that, there are no sacred gouges. Or if there are, they're not good for the political conversation.

So it should be possible to have these conversations. And then usually institutions come out stronger from those challenges. And if they don't, probably they weren't meant to survive. But the notion that, you know, we covered the free trade election. It was clear that newspapers all had an editorial stance on this.

They were pro-free trade, the Toronto Star was against it, etc. Same thing with almost all of the issues that determine the future of the country in some way. That is the nature of the media. What you want is diversity of views, but the media is not neutral, pale thing that has no thoughts. Journalists do what they do. And when they're sick of them, they fire them, and they move on to some other place. I heard something else in that question, though,

at least to my ears. That question raised for me the concern I have about post-media, in particular in Canada. I love the fact that there were daily newspapers all across the country, and I believe that you could get different editorial positions taken in Halifax, from Ottawa, from Saskatoon, and so on. And so I find there's something lacking when all of those newspapers have the same editorial in the day before an election. I don't love the idea that they all sell their front page to a political party the day before an election. I respect that they have the right to do that. There's no law against it, and there shouldn't be a law against it. But if we want diversity, that's not what it looks like to me.

And so I do think that politicization, if it's intended to follow the cliques, especially if there's a rage farming aspect to it, it's not a healthy thing. And I wish that we weren't seeing as much of it. But then he's assuming that people read editorials. Most columnists would say that's an interesting assumption. And there's, you know, listen, there's nothing new about newspapers having an editorial position that goes back decades, if not centuries. It's when, and this is a kind of crisis that journalism faces on the part of some of its readers and viewers and listeners, it's when that editorial opinion, which is kind of

accepted as a place that should exist, bleeds into the news coverage. You know, Bruce talked about MSNBC and Fox, and they've become kind of the newspapers of our time in that sense. They have a kind of editorial position that is placed in their evening programming, which is all opinion stuff, and it leaves viewers worried about, well, what about their actual news coverage? Is it slanted along the same lines as their opinion coverage?

And when you look at the data on why people have stopped trusting journalism, some of it is on that. It's on bias. It's on fake news. It's on disinformation, misinformation. And, you know, you see the concerns of people to the point where, you know, when people like Bill Fox and I joined journalism, and Bill was print and I was in television and radio, you know, among the most trusted professions in the country were journalists.

They were up there in the kind of mid-70s in terms of percentile or percentage and, you know, only beaten by, you know, kind of doctors and nurses and, pardon me? Bobby Orr maybe. Yeah. And Bobby Orr and look what happened there. Now, today, depending on which data you look at, research you look at, those numbers are down around 50%. Well, if we have that kind of level of trust in journalism, then democracy is in real trouble.

If we believe journalism is one of the pillars of democracy and only half the people trust it, what they're seeing, we've got a real problem. And everybody has to address it, and journalists themselves have to address it. And there are ways to go about that, but that's a whole other conversation. Before you do that. Okay. I'm all for all this trust in journalism in the 70s. Let me just note, though, that it was mostly male-oriented, unilingual on both sides of the divides, which allowed people to tell other people about how one half was versus the other

without any fact-checking. People like me did not exist in that golden era, and I'm not sure that that trust was warranted. So I'll just leave that there, but do not ask me to say that what happened in the 70s and the trust. And I'm not taking issue with Bill or Peter here, but I'm not sure that trust was heard totally.

And I do believe that the public should be skeptical of journalism and should not treat what happens on the front page of whatever national institution it is, be it the Globe and Mail, the Star, or La Presse, as gospel because my experience is that there has always been some editorial stance seeping into the coverage. But I do believe that diversity is really important. And that is what is threatened these days.

Not so much trust in journalism, but the fact that you get your information from a variety of sources. And those sources, the number of them are shrinking. And the means that they have, when I talk about Brian Mulroney covering him, there's no money to do that anymore. Political journalism is largely limited to Parliament Hill. That's not good.

And that is where I see the crisis, that when there is no money, and journalism is dependent on government handouts, the outcome cannot be good. I have never covered a government that was not tempted to control the press. And the people who sit in those offices over the top of us in the private sector,

they live by what they tell shareholders. So if they're not going to have good years because they're not getting enough government money, do you really think they're not going to be sensitive to government pressure? I don't. That's my experience in the private side of the media sector. See, it's great. We're having this debate inside our own profession, and we could easily fill our hour or a number of hours on that, because there are differences of opinion, and they're strongly held.

But it's good that we're talking it through or trying to talk it through. I think I'm on this side over here. Go ahead. We've got a lot of questions, so we will try to keep our answers shorter because we're running out of time. Hello. My name is Doris Ma and class of MPM 2022.

I wanted to just let you two know Peter and Chantelle, if I may call your first name. As a young immigrant, you two were my introduction to politics in Canada, so thank you. I have a quick question for you two, if you don't mind I ask. Can you share with us in your life, decades as a journalist, can you share with us one point in your life when you cover a story that changed your view about Canada's role in the world? You want to go first or you want me to go first? You're going to be good.

Well, Canada's role in the world, I mean, I've been lucky enough to do a lot of traveling overseas, a lot of journalism overseas, and whether it was looking at what we did as a country in the First World War, in the Second World War, in Afghanistan. You know, you see things. You see things in some cases you wish you'd never seen. But you see things where you see where Canada made a difference, and you're proud of what you see. Instead of talking about conflict ones, I'll just tell you one example of a different kind of conflict. 1979, exodus of the boat people from Vietnam. Hundreds of thousands of boat people came out of Vietnam. Persecuted because they were Vietnamese, Chinese.

They paid exorbitant sums to get their families out, all with the express purpose of trying to find a better place to live and somewhere that the hopes and dreams for their kids could be discovered. I was over there. I went out in the sea, in the South China Sea. We saw boats coming in. We talked to some of these people. And it was all about that. It was about how are my kids going to grow up. And I can remember being in a refugee camp in Hong Kong, and a woman tried to put her child in my hands. I was, you know, doing, you know, we were filming stuff and doing interviews.

And she just wanted me to take her child, her baby, take it to Canada where they'd have a chance. Now, of course, you know, I couldn't do that. It was very emotional. But what did happen as a result, and this is a good marriage of, you know, journalism and government, because of the journalism that was done through that period, the summer of 1979 especially,

by correspondents from around the world. They convinced governments, including this one, Canada's government, at that time it was Joe Clark, but Trudeau carried it on in the year following, to bring these people here. Tens of thousands, in the end there was like 120,000, came to Canada, made their lives here, gave those opportunities for some of those kids,

some of whom I met later, not the same ones, but who came through that process. That's where I saw a true side of Canada, through moments like that. You know, I've seen some ugly sides of Canada, but I saw that in that moment. And it made you feel very proud to say you were Canadian. So that's my little anecdote on that. Do you want to try something, or should we move on? I think we should move to the next question. Okay, we're on this side now, right?

We're running out of time. Yes. Sorry, I won't say any more. Politics and security are so intricately woven together. I would argue war is the most intimate experience a human could go through. Whether through a journalist's perspective or a political perspective, how do you approach a situation that has validity on both ends and the real

cost of life throughout the whole situation? I haven't covered wars, and most of us don't. So I'm going to let Peter try to he's gone to war since I have not. Do you want to try in a general way first?

Yeah, on the question of what's the political response, I think one of the things that we're all learning through the tragedy that's happening in the Middle East now, or it has been happening for the last several months, is that at the end of the day there's no substitute for using a moral compass to identify the things that are wrong and to do everything that you can to eliminate them. And I know what a delicate subject this is, and every time we've had to talk about it or had the opportunity to talk about it, we've been very aware that feelings run very deep about this. But I can't help but feel that the lessons from the past about what constitutes good leadership

are the ones that should guide us. And those, in the end, come down to if humanity is suffering, people need to deal with that. And that means hard decisions. It means really thinking hard about how you communicate about what you're doing, because people will understand different things from the nuance, from the words, from the order of things that you talk about. And so sometimes communications can seem like a way to obfuscate or to overly manipulate. I think in cases like war situations, speaking with honesty and a real sense of moral compass and deliberation, that's the most important thing. I think we'll just keep asking

questions here because we've only got about five minutes left. Yeah. This evening we've been talking a lot about how people are a lot more open about their political stances, but how they're also more polarized. I think as a result we're seeing an increased amount of cynicism where the level of political engagement isn't translating into voter turnout, which is stagnating or decreasing across the country. So what do you think needs to happen in order for voter engagement really to go up and for democratic engagement really to increase in the next few years? Well, the experience has been that if you give people clear choices, they will show up at the polls.

90 some percent of them in a Quebec referendum, one of the highest turnout in this country was the free trade election. And if you're just doing party lines, or if people don't feel that there is a choice to be made, they won't show up because one and the other, one of my first essays in university was the Conservatives and the Liberals,

and it was in French, bonnet blanc and blanc bonnet, blue white hat and hat white. And there's been a lot of that in Canadian politics. So the fact is that polarization is not great, but it, in theory, drives turnout. You know, if I can on polarization, I was just looking at some data today about this, and I see, you know, friends who are in the polling field or have been around it, like my friend David Coletto here, who knows this as well as I do, that polarization can seem like a really large phenomenon. But if you kind of break it down to how many people actually say, I'm right of center, and I only want right of center policies, and how many people say,

I'm left of center, and I only want left of center policies, it's pretty small. You're talking about between 10 and 15% on both sides. Now, right now, you've got the plurality of people saying, I'm a centrist, but I want to lean a little bit more to the right on fiscal and taxation issues or economic issues, let me put it that way, and a similar size number, maybe a little smaller, saying I'm a centrist, but I lean more progressive on social and environmental issues. But what happens when parties need to get the clicks and raise the money and campaign and get the campaign workers out is that they tend to reach first for the people who have the strongest feelings in the marketplace and are most likely to respond. And that's part of, you know, the way in which

algorithms are distorting our society, maybe not for the better in some instances, let's be honest. But it doesn't reflect where the public is. And you see the same thing happening in the United States, where so many people wish that they had a better choice than the two that they see on offer right now, which is not to disparage Joe Biden. I don't have anything to say about the other fellow. I'll stop there.

Go ahead. I am an international student, so my question is nothing related to Canada. In the UK, they are going, very likely to have the general election later this year, and the UK share a lot of similar problems with Canada, like housing problem, the housing price, interest rate, and talent issue. I wonder if you have any insight about the politics in the UK that can share with us in Canada.

Well, they also have something we don't have, which is called Brexit. And the costs and the not really happy outcome from it. I think looking from the outside, that is pretty clear that the UK will go for regime change and the labor government will be in place. But this is, yes, there are parallels. And yes, most incumbents in most countries are in trouble, left, right, and center,

by the way. But in the UK, I don't think you can take Brexit out of the equation and dissatisfaction with, you know, this great thing that was going to happen if they voted yes, which obviously is not happening. I have one very small story that I want to, and I hope Dr. Fox won't mind me telling this, but for me, Brexit is the thing that I focus on. And the act of choosing to have a referendum by David Cameron was one of the most foolhardy mistakes that I think I can imagine anybody making. And hopefully, if there are any aspiring future political leaders, please don't ever do that. That's like a terrible idea.

And I raised Bill Fox's name because he and I did a little bit of research on referenda and petitions prior to the Charlottetown Accord. And we looked at how they work. And we were a little bit horrified by how bad an idea it was. It didn't stop the late Prime Minister Mulroney from going ahead and having one, but we could see at that time it was probably not a great idea. It's a terrible way to turn over responsibility for decision making, in my view. We have time for one quick last question on this recorded portion. We're going to keep talking to some of our guests in the room here following this, but this question first. I have a question that's a bit beyond political theory. I'm originally from

Prince Edward Island and I've been here for about 32 years. I have Parkinson's disease and I am concerned about the crisis in Canadian health care. Now, I'll tell you why. In Prince Edward Island, it's a small province, and there is about 138,000 people. There is pretty much no health care there. In the Western Hospital in Albert and Prince Edward Island, there's no doctor. So in Summerside, there is a big hospital there and there's very few doctors. I think there's two. And I went to the emergency room at Kenfield General Hospital a month ago and I waited for

12 hours. There was a lady sitting next to me who had blood coming out of her ear and I was wondering, what do you guys think is the solution to what is beyond political ideology and what is a real crisis in this country today? It's the health care system. Well, a lot of Canadians agree with you that health care is, if not the number one issue, it's one of the healthcare system. Well, a lot of Canadians agree with you that healthcare is, if not the number one issue,

it's one of the top three. I hate to do this because we've only got 30 seconds left. There's no easy answer to this, obviously, but what would you say? He does that to me. 20 seconds. I think I would say that we should devote a good talk to the issue. Yes. We should what?

Devote another episode of good talk to the issue, because we can't do justice to this question. And the time, I see the timer here. Yeah. I'm sorry we can't give you a better answer than that. But I think it's safe to say it's a huge issue. It has been, not just for the last couple of months or even the last couple of years. It's been a continuing issue for the last 20 or 30 years.

We pride ourselves on our health care system, and yet here we have the kind of stories like the ones you're telling. And how to get it up front on the agenda of the political parties to talk about substantive real change. It's going to make a difference to people like you, those in PEI, but right across the country. So I appreciate your question, and I appreciate all the questions tonight. We're really grateful to Carleton University for organizing this through the political management program and Jennifer Robson for getting this all organized tonight. Thanks so much for your time. Good Talk will be back in seven days.