The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Good Talk -- Playing Hardball and Pointing Fingers.

Episode Date: October 23, 2026

Lots of finger-pointing as the week comes to an end -- Danielle Smith tells separatists to get out of her party and Pete Hoekstra tells Canadians to stop interfering with Washington politics. Quite the week for Chantal and Bruce to sum things up on this week's Good Talk. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Are you ready for good talk? And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here, along with Chantelle-A-Barre and Bruce Anderson. It's your Friday Good Talk. Glad to have you with us. You know, there's always lots to talk about on the kind of political front in Canada. And this week, there's even more than a lot. There are a lot of different things. So I'm going to do it a little differently here.

I'm just going to run through a bunch of stuff that happened this week. And then you can pick the one you want. to start with. I mean, as we speak, the prime ministers in Turkey, maybe a free trade deal in the offing there at some point. But the big headline of the week was obviously Monday, Tuesday, the referendum and then the results that trickled they know through Tuesday. In fact, they're still counting the last I looked at on some of these questions.

But it was a big defeat on the main question for Canada. So much so that you have the Premier of Alberta who can say that support in her caucus over the last couple of years has come from separatists, that she's now saying, separatists have got to say this is time now to fight for Canada. You want to fight for separation, then get out of the party. That's the message she's delivering. PC election this weekend.

Pete Hochstra still at it. Nothing changes his mind. he just wants to dump on Canada whenever he gets the opportunity and he was at it again. So there's a whole smorgas board of stuff to go here that I didn't even mention, you know, Mark Carney talking about the Balbara result gives us the opportunity to talk more about immigration. And even the phrase constitutional reform came out, but I don't want to misquote him. Go easy here. Go easy here.

Very careful. Anyway, so there's a smorgas board of stuff here. Pick one that you want to start with, Chantal. Well, of course, I'm going to pick the Alberto referendum. Big call. And if I, Enrausset started, he would have picked it too. I would have. So you're right, they're still counting ballots,

but something has happened between Tuesday morning and today. On Tuesday morning, we, to no one's surprise, found out that the vote to remain, i.e. not go down the path of separation. It carried 75, 25. So major victory, decisive numbers. But what this happens, there were nine other questions. Those questions were of the making of the Premier and her government. She was asking for a mandate. from Albertans to undergo a number of moves. To those nine questions, four dealt with constitutional reform, which is why I told you, go easy here.

Because as the counting progressed, she lost all four. Right. A majority of those who voted, and I always use those who voted because I don't believe that all Albertans voted. the turnout wasn't 94%. That would have been the turnout from the Quebec referendum in 1995. But from those who voted more than half said, no, we are not interested in you pursuing the abolition of the Senate

or pursuing some mechanism that would make provincial laws prevail over federal laws. We do not want to be able to opt out of federal social programs with full compensation. It's where do you go when you have a referendum to shore up your hand to demand change? And your own people say, yeah, we're not going there. We're not interested. Indeed, on those nine questions, the only one that kind of received more than 60% so far was a question that asked, should the government or sure the elections, Alberta, to ask for people to show proof of citizenship to vote.

I call that a nothing question, and why do I call it that? Because to be registered on the voters list in Alberta, as in Canada, you need to be a Canadian citizen. Suppose I'm just going to use the federal example. Suppose you tick that box on your income tax that asks you, do you want to be registered on the voters list. Well, it's not good enough that you are saying that you want to. elections Canada will match your demand with lists from immigration and refugee Canada

to check that you are qualified as a voter. So the idea that we have had free for all and everyone has been going to vote in Alberta, Bruce can just show up from Scotland and Ottawa and say, I want to vote. That never happens. And you have kind of a mandate now to put in a law that would force every Albertan to find, is or her passport or birth certificate to vote. Okay, good luck with that. So me, I'm going to close on this.

I have looked at what happened in Quebec on October 3rd and what happened this week, October 19th, by almost the same percentages. Voters in both provinces have been 70% of them plus have been reluctant to give a mandate to their government to kind of shake up things on the constitutional front in the federation. That would be, there are two different votes, but the stakes, the underlying stakes were the same.

One was asked directly, do you want us to start a referendum process? That's Alberta. And Quebec was, do you want a government that will undertake a referendum process? 28% in Quebec said yes, and about 25% said yes to that in Alberta. And I think the message from this election is there is no real appetite for those kinds of confrontations in this context. Okay, Bruce, I want you to, I know you've got things you want to say on the points that Chantel has addressed, but just explain to me the turnout story because it kind of factors into this as well.

On the main question, on the separation question, the turnout was out. actually very high, around 85% or somewhere in that neighborhood. But the other ones, not so much. Before you say that, because I got caught in that trap, that is only because they were not counting, they were slow counting the responses. If you look today, you'll see the total numbers for the answers to the nine questions. Pretty much matched the numbers of those who responded to question 10, the one about separation. Okay. But because they were going slowly,

there was a big gap for most of the week. It looked like, you know, 25% of the people who voted to that separation issue had taken a pass on those questions. The numbers today do not match that. It's not abstention. It's slow counting. Okay.

Yeah, look, I think there's still some vagueness about the numbers, so I want to be careful about it. I mean, what I've been seeing is that the turnout is about on question 10 was more like 66%. But I don't know if that's changed in the last number of hours. So I'm going to dump that question and just kind of dodge it and kind of go with what it is that that occurred to me coming out of this. The first thing I think is that a lot of people, including me, criticize the fact that there was this referendum, see the value of it, thought it was politically motivated. We had one, though, and it was pretty much an exercise in our democracy working the way you want a democracy to work. People

were sent ballots. They had an opportunity to vote, including in person. Lots of people chose to take that opportunity, not as many people as one might hope perhaps, and not as many as happened in Quebec. But they had the option. It wasn't hard for some groups in the population to vote versus others. It wasn't a case of a whole bunch of jiggery-pokery around the way in which the ballots were going to be counted. You don't have this kind of aftermath that we see in the United States after every major election now, which is like people claiming that there was a lot of, well, a lot of rule breaking, a lot of ballots that should have been counted that weren't, that sort of thing. Our democracy worked pretty well.

It has consistently worked pretty well. It's still a good model, I think, for other countries to look at it and say, Canadians, if they have a conversation that they need to have and try to settle with a referendum, which in my view is never that good an idea, at least they can do it in a way that allows them to come up the other end with a sense of, here's where we are. This is what was decided. Let's move forward. Second thing for me is that Canadians generally err on the side of kind of cautious and wisdom and pragmatic choices. And I think that's what I saw in these results. Even something like abolishing the Senate, which has been pretty popular as an idea in Alberta for a long period of time. Failed to motivate a lot of people to get

out there and say, yes, let's knock the Senate once and for all. And it reminded me of the work that Bill Fox and I did around the Charlottetown Accord referendum, where we looked at referendums around the world, and we found that the no side tended to win more often than the yes side, because sometimes people think an idea might sound like a good idea at the beginning. And then you think about it as you get closer to voting day, and you start to think about, well, what are the things that could go wrong if I say yes to this idea. And when I look at some of those other questions and how the constitutionally oriented ones, for example, flipped to the no side in the last number of hours, why would people be voting no to those? It's because yes is mystery meet. Yes is a little bit

uncertain. What is it really going to do that I haven't really thought about or I haven't really been told about? And so if I don't think the status quo is horrible and most, don't, then I either don't vote or I mark a no is a default position for a lot of people, and I think that's part of what was happening here. The third thing, and I've only got a third and a fourth. So just bear with it. I should have known there was a fourth hiding there. There is a fourth hiding, but it's a short one, and I think you're going to agree with me.

So you can come back in and say, Bruce made a great point. Okay. message received. Okay. In the polling business, you're very acutely aware that question design has an important impact

on how people respond. And I was looking in particular at one question, which was the one about immigration. And I want to go back to the exact wording of it because it fell into the trap that poor question design can fall into in the polling business. So it is, do you support the government of Alberta taking increased control over immigration for the purposes of

decreasing immigration to more sustainable levels, prioritizing economic migration, giving Alberta's first priority on new employment opportunities? The point I want to make is that the question is meant, I think, to ask about Alberta taking increased control. But it's attached to how about decreasing immigration to more sustainable levels, prioritizing economic migration, giving Alberta's first priority in jobs. People may read that question and go, I like those three outcomes. I agree with those three outcomes. I'm not focused on what giving Alberta increased control really means.

And so when you have a question that has that many aspects of it, in polling, anyway, you would kind of go, we don't really know what people were answering there. And the fact that they didn't answer in huge numbers is to me a measure of how limited the mandate that Danielle Smith got, even from those questions where she got a narrow majority of the people who voted. Because, again, you might have a whole bunch of people saying, I want immigration at more sustainable levels,

but I thought we were already going there. I want to prioritize the economy, but I thought we were already going there. And if they're answering that, they may not be actually conferring much in the way of, I want Alberta to have more muscularity in that relationship. And number four, people don't want constitutional reform. They want cooperation.

And in the way in which I think the prime minister responded to this, he didn't say, hallelujah, the separatists got beat. He said, you know, the things that people want. to see improvements on, those are things that we should work on improving. And I thought that taking that temperature down is a really good thing. And it's a measure of what people wanted. Sorry for all four points, but I think they hopefully made sense. Are you sure you don't have any more?

I mean, no, I don't. You don't even have half as many as there were questions on the ballot. Look, I had a fifth finger. I could have gone for a full of five, but I didn't. I'm still going. Okay, here's what I want. I just want to make a point about the Senate and the note to the abolishing the Senate. What I found really interesting about that one is this is one that comes close to matching the NDP's traditional position in a province where the NDP is strong, i.e. abolish the Senate.

So if there was one question in that list that could have secured support from new Democrats who otherwise said no to, the immigration or, you know, opting out of social programs, it should have been the question about the Senate. And my last point, I don't have five, is if you're serious about any of those issues, you should not be having a referendum where they're all piled together in one list of nine questions. And you should have a debate about what they mean before people actually go to vote, which never happened because it's completely overshadowed by the referendum on separation question. And that also diminishes whatever mandates someone might be able to find them there.

All right. Because the counting is still going on, literally, as Shuntel mentioned, I mean, it's a hand count on all the stuff and it's complicated that way. But it's, you know, stretching through the week. but here's my question based on what we seem to know now, and there have been a number of ups and downs on what we thought we knew as the week went on. But given what we think we know now, what's changed? Has anything really changed as a result of what we saw on Monday?

I think the position of the Premier has been weakened by the exercise. and for as long as she is the Premier of Alberta, her capacity to bring demands of constitutional change or whatever change, as will have been undermined by the fact that she couldn't secure a strong majority, the vote of confidence on her issues. Forget the separation issue. And I'm not sure that it's going to be easy to put the pieces back together or that she has. as much moral authority on her party going out as she might have had going in before this very strange adventure. But I know of no politician who would be happy with those results and who wouldn't want to find a way to move on to other things.

The fact that she's now blaming the separatist, the federalist camp for having brought the issue of separation to the four kind of tells you, hard she will try to walk away from this exercise, but otherwise, did it advance Alberta? I'm using Quebec terms. If we've done that in Quebec, and with results like that, 75, 25 against separation, and no to constitutional change on issues that have been pursued by the Quebec political class for decades, I would think, why did I ever ask? Yeah, yeah. I think that's right. I think that before this referendum has, happened, Daniel Smith's wind in her sales was that she was the champion of the grievance sentiment in Alberta. And after the referendum, it's not clear how much grievance there is.

It's not clear that she will maintain that position as the champion of the grievance movement. In fact, it's more obvious that she now is trying to separate herself from people whose sense of grievance is so strong that they might have wanted a referendum. So she finds herself in a much more precarious position on a number of levels. And part of that, I mean, I think to be to be fair to the circumstances is that I think she was trying to use the threat of this referendum as a way to gain leverage in conversations around policy issues with Ottawa. I think Ottawa changed a lot of policies in ways that reduced the sense of frustration that Albertans had and made the grievance. conversation feel more like a conversation about the past rather than the present. And I think that

took a lot of wind out of the sales of some of these other questions. Also, even on things where I think she thought she was going to be able to kind of galvanize this kind of anti-immigration sentiment, I'm looking at that question where it talks about charging a reasonable fee or premium to individuals with non-permanent immigration status for education and health. Inserting the word reasonable there kind of defangs the question from the thing that I think she was trying to get at, which is, are you mad as hell that people who are here as refugees, for example, are able to get education and health without paying for it? It was a defanged question.

She didn't get the kind of outpouring of frustration that she probably imagined that she might get. when she was kind of designing this exercise. And again, I think it kind of speaks to the fact that people, I don't think people want these divisive debates most of them to. Certainly there's a core group in Alberta that does, but I think the measure of the results is that most people are saying, work it out. Let's not use these kinds of devices to further divide people and antagonize where we don't need to.

We've seen Alberta leaders brought. down by their own party, especially in the UCP. You know, obviously Jason Kenney was defeated by his own party in terms of the leadership vote. Is she in trouble as a result of this past week? Is that why she moved so quickly or tried to move quickly? Or was even that move, you know, to tell separatists in the party, you know, now's the time to get out if you're not going to support Canada? How do you tell who's a separatist member that is coming to vote you out on the way into an AGM,

which the party is going to be having next month? Is there a blood test for that? There are 7,000 people, I understand, that have registered for that meeting of the party. And those that I've met on both sides were not going there to troll flowers at the premium. So we'll see with the internal dynamics, but they are a year away from a provincial election. And if the party implodes or kicks out the premier and then can't agree on a leader that suits both sides, they're basically opening the door to a new Democrat victory in that election.

So are people more angry at Danielle Smith than they care about the party remaining in government is going to be a question that a lot of those members will have to ask themselves. But as for the notion that you can just decide who is a separatist and shouldn't be there and who three weeks from a meeting sounds a bit difficult to put in practice. I think it can't be possible that she's not in trouble in the sense that she forced people to pick a side. between a nationalist Canadian idea or a separatist idea. Now, she won't acknowledge, I think, that that's exactly what she was doing, but that's what she did.

And so then people picked aside. And I'm reminded of the fact that she is less popular in Alberta than Mark Carney is. He has been making a lot of effort to signal to Albertans that he understands their frustrations and he wants to meet them with policy solutions. and she has generally endorsed those policy solutions. So what she does now, what she does next, is it going to be that she's going to fight down that separatist sentiment even further? Is she going to try to maintain her leadership by saying,

well, we didn't get the vote that you all wanted, but I'm still your champion against Ottawa? Being a champion against Ottawa doesn't have the same cachet that it did a year ago, a year and a half ago, let alone two or three years. ago. And so I think she's faced with some really hard choices, and so is her party. I wonder how much value it has from even a week ago. I mean, being a champion against Ottawa, it looks like the more you hear about this vote, and the more the votes are still being counted. There's more in favor of Ottawa than none.

97% has been counted, and at this point, she is, with every count, losing those those constitutional questions more decisively, which... There's no mandate to continue the kind of advocacy that she has been using for the last couple of years. If anything, it's a signal to her that the province isn't really with her on that in any really vocal way. And that's what the rest of the polling has been telling us now for several months, is that that sense that...

everything would be better in Alberta if only Ottawa got its butt kicked. That's not the mood of the province right now. All right. That's not to say, but that's not to say there's not a deliverable that was put in the window by Mark Carney, and that deliverable is not constitutional change, which doesn't elicit a lot of appetite. It's a pipeline called Pacific Link. And that at some point will take us to another topic. You mentioned the BC election.

Right. But before I get there, just one last question on Alberta. One of the great fears leading up to this referendum was that if there was a vote that approached a number that looked like it was going to be a serious threat to the unity of the country, that that was going to be a serious threat to investment in Canada, investment in Alberta, all of that. Are those concerns now put aside as a result of what we've witnessed in the last week? I think so. If you look at the breakdown of where did the vote for option two, i.e. a referendum on separation, where it came close or I think maybe in a couple of writings at one, it's rural Alberta.

When you look at Edmonton, Calgary, the numbers in the cities, it's 85% no. that means it's going to be very difficult for anyone to start a full-fledged political party that will actually have a shot at government anytime soon in Alberta. It also means that it's a conservative problem because those writings are writings that have never elected provincially or federally anyone except someone associated with the conservative movement. So in no place is perfect. for investment.

But on the scale of what we see next door to the south, I think Alberta comes across as a pretty stable place. Okay. We're going to leave that aside. We're going to take our break. Come back. And we'll do, you know, just

do a few moments on the BC election, which has been kind of strange since the beginning. We'll see how it goes into its final hours. We'll do that right after this. And welcome back. you're listening to The Bridge, the Good Talk Friday episode with Bruce Anderson and Chantelle-A-Barre. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Glad to have you with us. You're listening on Sirius XM, Channel 160, or on your favorite podcast platform, or you're watching us on our YouTube channel. As I said, we're glad to have you along.

All right. Coming up in not many hours, actually, is Saturday election. They don't happen often in Canada, but BC like Saturday, provincial elections. What do we make of this? This was the election that didn't need to be called. The government was only into its second year. And as a result, the opposition party didn't even have a leader the day it was called. Now, not only did they have a leader, but they have somebody to the polls suggest that can win this election. Anything you want to say about the BC election? I mean, it is into the final 24 hours of the campaign,

but there are impactful decisions that are being made by British Columbians impactful for the rest of the country as well as a result of this. Who wants to start? Bruce, you start this one. Yeah, I think that as an idea, Premier E.B. spent some political capital, and he may win yet, but he will not come out looking like a stronger, more admired politics.

than he was before, he might lose. I don't think the polls are consistent and clear enough, and I don't think the measures of who's likely to turn out are reliable enough at this point. But, you know, I know there are a lot of people who have been saying the conservatives look like they're ahead that they pass the NDP. I'm a little bit more hesitant about that based on what I've been seeing. And so I think all I would say, though, is that E.B. comes away from it looking like he did a very cynical thing. For no purpose that was really easily understood throughout the course of the campaign. I don't think he made a case that he absolutely needed that mandate. I think it was what it looked like

it was, which was an attempt to take advantage of dysfunction, division among his opposition. party and the opposition party actually scrambled in anticipation of that election call and has put together a pretty credible campaign so far. So we'll see how it turns out, but it won't turn out to be one of the better chapters in David Eby's life as a politician, I don't think. Chantown. Well, we'll escape the faith of the other Premier who believed Chiefs. could write back to government by using the Donald Trump, Canada, US front, would be Christine Frasette, who has led her party to zero seats. That's not going to happen. But I think

if you're looking at this BCO election from Parliament Hill and from the government offices on Parliament Hill, you have cause to be concerned. And why do you have cause to be concerned? Because you have a big pipeline project that will be going through BC to the shore at Vancouver. And to make that project succeed, you need to have a solid relationship and a solid amount of confidence among the leadership of the First Nations in BC.

The Conservative Party of BC is nothing like that. One of its promises is to walk back the idea that BC should align its laws with the United Nations' on the rights of indigenous people, which immediately will set such a government on a conflict, confrontation, collision path with the First Nations of the province.

It's not good enough that Mark Carney builds a political capital to spend on First Nations in BC if the government of BC is at war with the First Nations. Then the project and the federal plans, tend to be collateral damage. At the same time, you've got some pretty interesting signals coming from the municipal elections, including the election of the first green mayor of a major city in Canada in Vancouver. Usually people who like pipelines or are willing to accept them do not tend to vote for the Green Party.

I may be understating my case here. So you've got a recipe where you could actually have the city of Vancouver at war with the provincial government that is conservative and not on board with the pipeline project that is supposed to end up on Vancouver shore. So when you look at all that, it's, I think, much more complex and much more risky and much more rise on the outcome than ever rode on the outcome of the separation question in Africa. Alberta, where there was not a single poll that shows that it was going to surge on voting day. And it's going to be interesting. For the record, I understand the new mayor of Vancouver, Mr. Fry, is the son of Hedy Frye, who is a liberal MP, the liberal MP, one-seated Kim Campbell way back in 1993.

But I'm not assuming that that makes him someone who will share his mother. affiliations and support for the pipeline project. You know, it's funny when you look at this situation that we've witnessed in a period, you know, in a matter of less than seven days, between the Alberta referendum and the BC election. We don't know how, well, we don't know with certainty how either one is going to turn out, because they're still counting in Alberta, but BC hasn't started counting yet. But the, you know, the phrase elections matter.

It has never taken more importance than we've witnessed in this week because the differences that could have happened may still happen as a result of these two votes in terms of the way the country moves forward. It can be quite dramatic. And there could be things that happen in this over these seven days that are going to surprise people in Ottawa as they're. They try to manage the bigger picture of all this. So it's going to, you know, as I said, elections matter.

This one, no less than there. Go ahead, Sean, Tom. But it does fit a pattern. And it is a pattern we've seen before, i.e., to secure political consent for something that you plan to do over a number of years has been the easy part in this country. Think back of meat with everyone around the table agreeing. think back to Justin Trudeau's first meeting on his climate policy and everyone but Saskatchewan signing off,

including back then Alberta under the NDP, and then consider what happens next. And what happens next in every case is think of Churchill Falls and the deal between the Coalition of Quebec government and the liberal government of Newfoundland Labrador. In each and every case, what happens next is an election that kind of, moves the pieces of the puzzle, makes them more difficult to hang together. Now, that doesn't mean they can't be made to hang together, but it means that in this country, big issues become electoral stakes. And when they do, then the players change, they campaign against whatever their predecessors supported.

We saw that with the Churchill Falls issue in the case of Newfoundland. that may yet result in a positive outcome, but we are seeing that now in BC, where there might be a reaction to the initial idea, for sure, and I'm like Bruce, I look at the BC polls, I'm too far away to know if I trust the numbers I see, but when I see that the Green Party is rising

at the expense of the NDP, I have to ask myself, are those voters who are unhappy with EBE having given consent to the Pacific? link pipeline. Is this where we're going? But it is, you know, when I gave that class, that master's class at McGill, I would show students pictures, the family picture at Meach, the family picture at the climate conference,

and then the picture of who the family was made of a year and a half later. And you could see how many players had been shifted and you know the rest. So I'm, I'm, it's going to be. a delicate job to keep all these interests aligned on big projects as it has been in the past. You want to weigh in on this, Bruce? Yeah, just a couple of thoughts. One is that as I think about the way that politics is working now, I'm mostly struck by the fact that people are trying to reduce the amount of polarization.

They're choosing options that don't increase polarization. And I say that even knowing that Quebec now has an avowed separatist government, but seem to do it with the least enthusiasm imaginable and no desire for a referendum and no desire for separation. And I see the same patterns in BC, which is historically from my standpoint, been one of the most easy to polarize provincial political cultures. people haven't in the province been particularly excited about EB on the left and they've been pretty excited against him on the right

but it was pretty clear that when the conservatives in BC were going to offer a leader that was likely to be quite divisive, quite polarizing they sent signals, voters sent signals to those parties that said we're not going to do that. Even though we're frustrated with some of the laws that EVE passed, we're not going to go in the direction of let's divide our province, especially around the indigenous question. So I think there's a calming effect in public opinion as people say,

yeah, there's a big threat with Trump. But as we talked about before, they moved into the, what are we going to do about it, rather than let's just kind of handring about it and kind of angst about it. So I'm more optimistic, I suppose, that people may choose to elect a green mayor. And I'm not saying I'm optimistic, but even though that they did that, I don't think that necessarily means there's going to be a ton more polarization.

I also look at data on pipeline. And I think Chantelle's point is well taken, that it's one thing for people to say that they support it or willing to go along with it. But then there are a whole lot of other things that happen after that, including litigation, including how it's managed and all of that kind of thing. But when I think back to Trans Mountain in the first instance, and what we're talking about now, you know, the public opinion looks more settled that finding other markets for our resources is a good thing. And maybe pipelines can be a safe thing if they were worried about that before.

And so I see less polarization on the horizon. generally and generally a fan of less polarization. Okay. Let's take our final break. Come back, talk Hoekstra for a minute. I know we've talked about this more than a few times. Rose wants to talk about that Uxtra. I know, but, you know, I...

Well, let me take the break and we'll come back and talk about it. Right after this. Why is you suggest you don't want to talk? You love to talk about him. Okay. Welcome back. Final segment of... good talk for this week with Chantelle and Bruce. I'm Peter. Good to have you with us.

Okay. The ambassador from the United States to Canada, Pete Hoekstra, has become a kind of regular feature on this program on Fridays. Because every week he seems to say something that causes a few headlines and a little friction, sometimes a lot of friction between Canada and the United States. And this week he came out with a list of Canadian politicians or Canadian, you know, significant people who said things or done things that he says have interfered with American politics. And some of those were, at least one was a federal cabinet minister. Now, you know, Bruce used the phrase a few minutes ago

on a different topic about what are we going to, what are you going to do about it? it. And this was about BC politics. What are you going to do about it? So what do you do about this? Do you do anything? Do you just sort of blow it off and say, you know, it's Pete Hoekstra, who cares? Or do you do something about it? Bruce has been the most vocal, as Chantal says, about Hoekstra. I'll try to contain myself. But here's the thing for me. Like this week, I've been watching, when I watch TV, I watch one of two series.

One is the diplomat and the other is the thick of it. And in the diplomat, for anybody who hasn't watched it, what you see is brilliant people in key diplomatic roles on behalf of the United States doing really clever things, well-thought-out things. And so it's amazing to see that idea of American diplomat. at its most professional. Yes, doing things that are bad in some instances and Corrine out of control, but brilliant people trying really clever strategies. And then I look at the thick of it, and it's incompetent people doing ridiculously badly thought through things.

And so when I see Pete Huxstra, I get none of the diplomat. I get a lot of the thick of it. He's a caricature of a diplomat. And honestly, at this point, I kind of feel like, let him keep doing these ridiculous things like putting out this list of Melanie Jolie went here and she spoke to these people. And I suspect that in her conversation she might have said, you should be better friends with Canada. And that's interference in our politics. It was minging, whinging kind of nonsense. And it looked like the most unprofessional piece of work, this document that they put out,

that you could ever imagine. I don't know how many people work at the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa now, but it's in the hundreds, I assume. And you have to wonder, did anybody else look at that? Did anybody put up their hands and say, if we put this out, people will laugh at us. They won't go, oh, my God, they caught us. They caught us because our people had a few meetings.

So for the course of a few years with Americans who they would normally have meetings. But anyway, enough said. Ridiculous. He should keep on doing it. It builds up our sense of confidence that we're actually more like the clever people doing smart things. You know, I don't know how many people work in the U.S. embassy in Ottawa or in the consulates in a number of different cities. U.S. consulates, a number of different cities in Canada. But because we know Oxtra from his past as a congressman,

as an ambassador in one of the European countries where he basically got asked to leave. The Netherlands, I think. But I get the sense that there are probably people in those embassies or consulates who look at this and go, this is crazy. You know, we can't do this, but he's who he is, and he's just going to do it anyway. It's a little like Trump.

you can't control the guy, right? So I don't know. Chantelle, I know you love to duck this, but I know you also love to get into it. But you see what you just described, you see some of that in the diplomat for this latest season, by the way, people who are seasoned diplomats from the courier's dream

who are basically trying to figure out how to get around irrational or not well-taught-out orders. So I'm sure there are people like that in the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa. I'm not saying, note to Pete Oxtra, I'm not saying that I've met them or talked to any of them or that I have names to offer. It's just an assumption that there must be people in there, because I know both places the consulate in Montreal and the embassy to be full of professional people who actually know a lot about Canada and know what they're doing.

But whenever Mr. Oxtra opens his mouth to do whatever he was doing this week, by the way, a Consul General in the United States that goes on a round table with Democrats is not interfering in politics. That person is just doing her job. But I figure that he's not talking to Canadians, really. I don't think that he believes that he's getting anywhere with those. arguments in Canada. He's talking to Donald Trump. That is how he keeps his job. Now, should we do something about it? Are you assuming that we would get someone smarter?

I'm not. So keep Mr. Rockstra. It keeps him busy. There must be some poor people who have to put together that rather ridiculous list. It's not even worth answering point by point to that list because even less, I don't know, about a dozen people, 11, I think Canadians who were found guilty of interference, no definition of what that means in the electoral system in the US. My God, are we ever great? If only a dozen of us can change election outcomes. And where were we in the last presidential election? If only 12 apostles from Canada could have changed the outcome. So at some point, you kind of say it's not worth, you know, the expression in French tearing up a shirt over because it would be a waste of a good shirt. Okay, I won't bring it up again.

You never know. He was lucky this week because as stupid a thing as he did, this Whitkoff fellow who went to Moscow to tell Putin that he was an even greater humanitarian than Donald Trump or something like that. I mean, that that's a stupidity on a scale that has, you know, that obviously puts lives at risk and everything else. But it's a, it's such a clown show, the American diplomatic effort right now. It's sad to see. You know, I've been watching the diplomat too. I think a lot of people do because it's, it's very well acted. I find some of it a bit of a stretch in terms of what some of the bureaucrats get away with in terms of

things they say and do. But nevertheless, can you imagine if those scriptwriters for the diplomat had dreamt up a White House series and had done some of the things that we're watching Trump do now, Whitkoff did? It's more like deep, yeah, it's definitely like comedy. It's a comedy of it. It's comedy and it's outrageous and it's, It's criminal and it's, you know, there's everything about what's going on in there. If you wrote that as a script for a television series, it had never got to prove.

People say there's no way. That could never happen. I like that whenever you bring Hoxtra up, you go, we have to do this because Bruce wants to do this. But I've noticed that you have a certain passion for this topic too. No, no, I know you love to do it. You love talking about Hoekstra. I just want the one week for you to say they should kick him out. But I think you like Keekman Amin because, you know, you're able then to talk about it.

I don't think you want to give him the opportunity to say I was denied the chance to say what I should say on behalf of my country. I think that he does his country a disservice, even if he is doing the service, as Chantel points out, of his boss, the president. And in that sense, you know, the more people are reminded in Canada that the U.S. is not an honest broker. It's not a reliable ally. It's not a truth teller in the form of this Trump administration, the better. And so he's good at that. This may be the thing he is good at. Well, if he, you know, if he wants the ability to say what he needs to say or thinks he should say,

then why is he saying Doug Ford shouldn't say what he thinks he needs to say or do? You're looking for logic here. Oh, boy, we are going to be here forever, and we will not find it. Okay, got a minute left, which is less than I usually give you to give that one other thing you wanted to say about what's on your mind this week. And what would that be? Everything we talked about has been on my mind all week, but I, and I haven't checked what I'm going to say, but I believe that every elected Quebec MNA this week, who was sworn in, forewent the oath of allegiance to the king. My understanding, there might be one or two that slipped by, but I think they would have been reported.

This is a non-story. The story would have been that one party would have said we stick with the oath of allegiance. So where that takes this conversation with the courts and beyond is an open question. But it was an interesting development that all liberals swore to Quebec, all conservatives did the same and the two separatist parties, obviously, also. Bruce. There are 10 days away from the midterms. I was watching the clip of Donald Trump in the Oval Office the other day. and he was hissing at journalists and he was saying, are you sick?

It was just, there are so many of those that have been bad. I think this was the worst that I've seen where his temper was clearly getting the better of him. And it was a remarkable display of no class and no regard for journalism and no regard really for how he comes across to the world. So it feels to me like he's sensing a real setback in the midterms. And, you know, personally, I hope that it is a terrible setback, Warren. Well, as big a setback as it may be, he'll still be president the day after the midterms and for another two years and we'll all have to live with that, with whatever, you know, new Congress has formed as a result of it all.

But it has been a bizarre, actually the last couple of weeks to work. watch him not only what he says, what he does with reporters, but what he does on the international scene, the whole thing with Putin over these last couple of weeks has been beyond understandable. Okay, we're going to leave it at that for this week. Thanks to both of you, have a great weekend, and we'll talk again in seven days' time, Bruce Anderson, Shuntelli Bear. Have a great weekend. Talk to you soon. Have a good weekend. Bye for now.