The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Good Talk -- Please answer my question in English not French.

Episode Date: December 1, 2023

A committee exchange in Ottawa brings back a debate that we thought was long over. What's the real reason behind the affair? Plus we start with allegations of rape and harassment inside CSIS and ask is this the last straw for CSIS leadership? If the spies aren't accountable who is? Bruce and Chantal have their thoughts on this plus a series of other issues dominating talk in Ottawa.

Are you ready for good talk? And hello there. I still haven't got rid of that beeping sound off this particular control knob. It just becomes part of the music now. You know, people don't appreciate what I go through i mean it's one thing having to you know keep you two in some sense of order but i also have to run the the board the the studio board it reminds me of what it was like when i started in broadcasting in 1968 where you did everything you you know you had to run that's why you get the big bucks you got it the big bucks This is where they all come. It's hard being a best-selling author again, right?

Oh, I didn't mean to mention that this early. Oh, you mean this book here, you mean? All right, now that's done. Let's go. Yeah, okay, let's go. Chantel, A. Bears in Montreal, Bruce Anderson's in Ottawa, and Peter Mansbridge, I'm in Toronto today. Okay.

Bruce, as opposed to Chantel and I, Bruce loves to get on X or Twitter or whatever we call it these days. And he gets in these, like, great little battles. They're fun to watch, you know? He goes after the trolls. The trolls go after Bruce. And it's all very interesting. Now, last night, Bruce had a very intriguing tweet. Not that all his tweets are pretty intriguing.

But last night's was intriguing, where he was calling for pretty much a full-scale house cleaning at CSIS, the Security and Intelligence Service. So tell us why you went to that, because that's a bit of an extreme position on a situation that's grabbing some headlines. Well, I read a story yesterday afternoon that was published by Canadian Press, and it was a horrifying story, basically, of systemic abuse on a scale and in a fashion within CSIS. It was really enraging for me. I just feel as though these things do happen. And I didn't want to link to the story because I almost felt like the story is so shocking and could be triggering for people to read it. But that people who care about decent public policy management and a sense of responsibility for people who run our public sector organizations.

This is a pretty shocking story. And I don't want to repeat all the details here. But I do think that for me, there were a couple of things about the story. There were women who had reported a series of acts of sexual abuse over a number of years. There were elements of in the story of people having gone through processes to try to deal with the abuse that they were being exposed to. And the system confounded their efforts to get some form of justice or fairness or reasonable treatment or accountability because of the secrecy rules that surround CSIS. And so that was bad enough that there's a management or the functional problem within

CSIS that doesn't allow people on the surface of it. If you believe the facts in the CSISA story, in the story yesterday, the CP story, which seemed to me a well put together story and not something that was written in one day. It was something that obviously had taken a great deal of time to work and put together. And so it had a very significant air of credibility from my standpoint, which isn't to say that everybody who reads it will believe it. And against that, the comments from CSIS for the story basically said, well, we'll take every allegation like this very seriously, but we can't say anything more because this is an ongoing legal matter. I didn't think that that was anywhere near an appropriate

response, given the severity of the things that were reported in this story, including allegations of rape, repeated rape. And so it did shock me. And it shocked me to the point where I felt like this is a moment where the prime minister has to hold the head of the agency accountable, who apparently, according again to the CP story, had said himself that there was a culture problem. He didn't allude to it specifically around sexual harassment, but he said a culture of intimidation, I think. And he said that a few years ago. The prime minister yesterday, when he saw the story, called it devastating and said that people can be assured that his government will get to the bottom of it very quickly. I hope that's true.

I hope that's true. And so, yeah, that's what I read yesterday and how I reacted to it. And I'm still enraged by that story. And I hope that there is accountability very quickly. Because you seem to be suggesting, at least in the tweet, that the time for accountability is now, that there should be a cleaning house now, as opposed to further investigations? Well, it seemed to me that there had been investigations of these allegations, according to the story, and that there had been some acknowledgement earlier by the director of CSIS about cultural problems in the organization. And so at some point, you have to look at that and say, if the systems are broken, if the leadership of the organization maybe understands that the systems are broken, is now the time for another investigation?

Oh, probably. Obviously, there needs to be some follow-up that sort of ascertains whether all of the facts as alleged are true. But there certainly was enough in there that you could look at it and say, I need to hear from the director, if you're the prime minister, I need to hear from the director of CSIS right away. As to what did they know at the senior management level about this, because the story alleges that this had traveled up the chain of command, these allegations.

And what did they do about it? And what did they propose to do about it? So I don't think that it makes sense to go further than that in the absence of understanding the counter arguments that might exist within CSIS. But they didn't offer any yesterday. And it wasn't as though that they were, I don't think, that they were confronted by a story that they didn't see coming. The way that you guys are journalists, the way these stories normally work, it seems to me, is that there would have been a series of exchanges between Canadian press and CSIS before this story ever went to print. And so on the basis of that, the response of CSIS to me was really quite lacking.

Okay, I don't know what the process was that CP followed, but clearly that is the process that you would like to think is followed by a major news organization of which they are one. Chantal on this? So since the CP story broke, I should say, because Bruce didn't mention it, that the allegations are centered around one specific operation of CSIS, that is the BC field office or whatever they call it in CSIS parlance. It's not headquarters in Ottawa. People are talking about stuff that has been happening,

apparently, for years in the BC operation. It's really hard to believe, even if or before the CP story, that this would not have moved up the ladder, because it's now a matter of court cases. And at least one case, as far as I read, is already on appeal. So to imagine that people at the top of the ladder, the chain of command, would not know about this is a bit difficult to imagine. Other media have picked up the story and up to a point have

confirmed the story, i.e. they are quoting, including the Globe and Mail to name one, and they're quoting people that they have talked to that have confirmed the gist of the story. You would think that given what's happened to the RCMP and the armed forces over the past few years, there would be a zero tolerance policy within organizations towards these kinds of things. Bruce said possibly another inquiry to see if all the information in the story is confirmed. Well, you don't need all the information or the allegations to be proven. If there is one that is proven, that's good enough. You don't get a pass for saying, well, you know, it's just one or two and not nine or 12, because the numbers in the CP story are really quite astounding. The reaction, and I agree with both of you that CP would have had some back and forth with the command of CSIS.

And I'm guessing that as opposed to the RCMP or the armed forces, CSIS is used to getting more of a pass by using secrecy. We can't talk to you because we're spies. And part of that culture of secrecy has actually made it more difficult for the complainants in these cases to get heard outside the organization. They keep being referred back to internal processes. They're not allowed to identify covert agents. For instance, if they go to the police to complain, they can't identify the person they are complaining against because it's a senior person who happens to be in covert operations and they are forbidden to identify people like that outside the organizations. It seems very Kafkaesque.

But I am assuming that given all the sudden publicity this story is getting, something is bound to happen. And I cannot, for a second, imagine that the government will be happy by having someone at CSIS reassure them that this is an isolated case, because even an isolated case in instances of sexual abuse within organizations calls for immediate action, not a, it's not so bad, don't worry, it's just one rotten apple, which we are keeping. in the CP story was how some of the women who talked to CP, who were not identified for not only for their own protection and because they're involved in litigation, but also because of their status within CSIS. One quote says, we told management to keep this person

away from younger women. That doesn't sound like much of a solution to me in 2023 that we're keeping that person away from younger women. It sounds to me like the answer should be that that person should not be on the payroll anymore. But without more facts, it's hard to go further than that. You know what isn't an isolated case surrounding, whether it's CSIS or one of the other security and intelligence agencies, is that they've been in the news a lot in the last year. There are questions on how they operate. This particular case is a result of a whistleblower complaint.

The other situation is a result of leaks. And this has been going on for more than a year. If they know who the leakers are, if it's in CSIS even, they're not saying or doing anything about it. And these calls for a look at how our security and intelligence services operate may get louder and may be warranted. We haven't had a deep look inside the security and intelligence agencies

since, I don't know, was it the mid-'80s when CSIS was formed as a result of the Air India situation, the RCMP, and the CSIS had that split after various looks into how the RCMP was operating. But I just wonder whether this is all building towards something, whether it should be building towards something, or whether it's not even on the agenda for government to be concerned about it. When you look at this one, which has kind of been out there, it does make you wonder like who's watching the watchers, uh, on stuff as simple as that,

before we move on. And it's another security related issue that I imagine CSIS is involved in. Is there anything more you want to say on it, Bruce? Yeah, look, I think that there does need to be a degree of separation between our spy agency and our political apparatus. But it can't be complete. It can't be an absolute. The only way that the public can be confident that an organization like that is being administered well is that the leadership of it knows how to deal with situations like this and is willing to deal I felt like if I'm the prime minister, I can't spend any more time in a room with the leader of this organization without saying, what did you do about these allegations? And why didn't you do more? is having the right leadership in an organization that has the ability to shield itself from scrutiny is even more essential, I think, than having the right leadership in other

organizations, precisely because it can avoid accountability or scrutiny to a certain degree for reasons that are a little bit logical. But if you have a leader who's been in place and who has presided over this period of time where these allegations have been there, court cases have been there, and this story comes out, and the best they can do is essentially say,

we've got this covered. Don't meddle in our affairs, which is what it sounded like they were saying. Yeah, of course we take this seriously, but, well, there's no but. Okay. Let me pick it up on the situation involving India, because that's been simmering, as we know, for the last, whatever it's been, more than six weeks now.

And yet this week, it comes, I can remember when it first broke, and a couple of days later, the American Secretary of State, Blinken, said they were looking at things. There was a national security advisor said they wanted Canada and India to figure this out together, and that they were concerned about what was happening. Well, now we see why they were concerned because it turns out it was the same kind of situations are alleged to have been going on in the States where India was ordering up hits on certain Sikh activists. Not proven, but alleged and in pretty strong language

from the Americans this week. Does this, what does this do for Trudeau, who took enough heat, especially from the opposition, but not just the opposition, in announcing what he announced six or seven weeks ago? Does it, well, it appears to help his case and put him in a different light and his actions in a different light.

Chantal? I think it validates his actions. What's important to know about what was alleged in the U.S. is that it ties in to what has happened in Canada. There are not separate stories like India is doing it, is also what has happened in Canada. There are not separate stories like India is doing it, is also doing it in the US. It's what has been happening in the US is tied to what happened in Canada and to plans according to the allegations that were put forward as a result of U.S. findings, a plan for three assassinations in Canada, not just one. So I don't know that the prime minister knew all of this,

but his main point, he surely knew enough to know that he was on solid ground. But his main point back then was that he went public because the Indian government was not giving him the time of day on it. They were just from up and down, they were just brushing off Canada's calls for an inquiry and complaints about these events being micromanaged from India into Canadian domestic soil. The U.S. has kind of taken any cover off the Indian government on this. It would be very hard for anyone in this country to say Trudeau was speaking out of school. And actually, the fact that all these findings became public, has now forced the Indian government to say,

we're going to look into it, which was exactly what Trudeau was pushing for. It's easy to say no to Trudeau, but a bit harder to say no to Joe Biden and the White House. So I think on the whole, it was probably always going to come at some point, but it comes in a timely fashion for Justin Trudeau in the sense that it didn't take two years to come out. It only took six or seven weeks. It was September 18th, I think, the day the prime minister stood up the first day the House came back. So it's fairly recent. And I have noticed that there has not been a lot of debate about Justin Trudeau's actions on this file over the past few weeks, but especially this week, suddenly this is no longer a very political file. Bruce?

Yeah, I don't think that it will change Justin Trudeau's political fortunes particularly. In part, I say that because when we polled on how people felt that he had reacted to this situation with the Canadian killing, that most people, a majority, a reasonable sized majority if I remember correctly, said that they thought he did the right thing. I don't think the criticisms of him hurt his public opinion standing particularly, so I don't think that the validation of the position that he took will do anything to really kind of boost his fortunes. Having said that, I think it does leave some scar tissue on the opposition, or at least those opposition politicians who tried to make a meal out of this

idea that Trudeau was fouling up every aspect of our global diplomatic policy. And it should leave some scar tissue on an organization like PostMedia, which really spilled a lot of ink trying to make fun of the prime minister's treatment of this issue as though it was so obviously incorrect, a joke, a source of something that should be made fun of rather than a situation that should have been taken seriously. And I think cooler heads should prevail when these situations develop to understand that the role of a prime minister in a situation like this is a serious role. It's not something where you can go to the House, as some had suggested,

raise an issue with this kind of impact simply because you want to distract people from the debate that was being had on something else last week. I never thought that's what was going on. I thought it was an immature and inappropriate suggestion to make otherwise. So I think it does leave a little bit of scar tissue, but I don't think that the public will remember very much of the details around this. And that's, you know, that's part of the challenge for incumbents everywhere these days. There is also on the public policy front, something silver lining for Canada in the events of this week, divorced from the allegations and the targeted assassinations. And it is that it's going to be a lot harder to exclude Canada

from any Indo-Pacific strategy that the United States would be in because they are now standing Canada and the U.S. shoulder to shoulder on those allegations. So for the U.S. to be told by the Modi government, we are going to deal with you, but we don't want Canada on this, has become more difficult as a result of all the facts that have brought the U.S. or the alleged facts that have brought the U.S. into the same loop as Canada. And that Indo-Pacific strategy, which is meant to reduce the dependence of America as a whole from China, is for now not looking great. Let's agree on that.

But Canada has a large companion in misery at this point. And that's welcome news, I think, from the perspective of foreign policy. Okay, we're going to take our first break. We come back. Lots more to talk about on this week's edition of Good Talk, and we'll do it right after this. And welcome back. You're listening to Good Talk,

segment two coming up right now. Chantelle Hebert, Bruce Anderson here with Peter Mansbridge. You're listening on Sirius XM, channel 167. Canada Talks are on your favorite podcast platform or you're watching us on our YouTube channel. Whichever method you use to listen or watch Canada's number one political podcast ranked by Apple. We're glad you're with us. Okay, just before we move completely to a

different topic, I wanted to ask, you know, something Chantal said in that last segment about the whole India-US situation coming at a timely moment or in a timely fashion for the federal government here. It makes me wonder, I mean, we've all seen this play out enough times in our careers where a governing party is not just down in the polls, but has collapsed in the polls. Major double-digit differences between them and the major opposition party. Anywhere 15 to 20 points, pick your poll. At this point, can anything happen at a timely moment?

I mean, is it just so far gone? I mean, everybody seemed to agree that Polyev had a bad week last week on a number of fronts. It hasn't seemed. I don't know how many polls have been taken since then, but it doesn't seem like there's been any kind of a difference, a blip. If anything, it goes the other way. So is anything in a timely fashion working for...

You're speaking like a doctor who's got his finger on the pulse of a patient day and night, and you're saying, why are people who are walking on the street outside the window of the hospital room not reacting to the fact that this pulse is suddenly faster or slower? We are not normal people here. And we are watching a pulse at a time when we are not close to a life or death decision. Most people are preoccupied, as I have been this week, with how do you handle the kids when there's no school because the teachers are on strike?

Or if you're on the picket line, how do I get food on the table? So to say that Pierre Poiliev had a bad week over Ukraine or how he treated the media, yes, but these things pile up and they go to character. And I think most Canadians would say, we're not standing in the room with our finger on the pulse. We are going to wait and see if the patient is still alive by the time the election comes. We will focus on whether we make a decision on the character of the leader of the opposition. And we will take all of this baggage that he will have accumulated into account. But to sit there and say, why is there no reaction in the polls?

It's kind of weird to put it. Or when I get emails like that from people who are not you, I'm sometimes tempted to respond with, get a life. I'm just taking my pulse here. All's normal. Nothing's changing. Your answer didn't have an impact on me at all. I figure it wouldn't because you kind of knew what was coming.

Your question bagged that kick in an open door. I've seen this movie before. And a Bruce is now, we'll say. You know, that's exactly what I was going to say. But I agree with Chantal. She's right. Is that what you're going to say? No, not exactly.

No. No, well, they're putting out polls every second day. My polls just picked up don't you usually wear one of those rings that measures how many i do you know times you blink i wear it right here you can see the indentation and everything else it's getting charged right now yeah well look i'm just you know i'm i'm entering the numbers in it right now. So it all looks good. Nothing's changed. It's only one in three Canadians who say that they pay attention to the news all or most of the time. And about 90% of those people, their opinions are fixed in place.

Everybody else who doesn't pay attention to politics all the time or most of the time, they probably won't have noticed what happened last week. In fact, I should probably amend my sentence and remove the word probably. They will not have noticed what happened last week. And that's always a source of frustration for some and elation for others in politics, but it is nevertheless a truth. And it's a truth that is growing stronger over time, is that people have other preoccupations and they're flooded with content about everything in the world that isn't as stressful or sometimes

trivial sounding as what comes out in the political world. A good example of the trivial is if you had said, well, Bruce Chantal, what do you think about this fight over is Christmas being taken away by the Human Rights Tribunal? There are politicians who are expending hours of energy trying to gain some upper hand in this conversation. And I find it ludicrous. But I also know that very, very few people, especially almost no people whose opinions are not fixed in place, will have paid any attention to it whatsoever, because they're quite right to realize that Christmas, if they care about it, is not under any kind of systemic threat. Will anything change? I think Chantal is right about this, Peter. Thank you for teeing that up.

I think that it's the accumulation of experiences that people have with a political leader that allow them to come to an evaluation of that person, a glimpse into the soul here and there, does create an aggregate sense of the temperament, the value system, the kind of comportment that they could expect. And I think I remain of the view that it was not a good week for Pierre Polyev last week because the glimpse of people got into his soul, his judgment, his instincts, his character. It was a bad one.

I don't expect to see it show up in the polls anytime soon, which brings me to my last point, which is I think the reason it might not look like it's having any effect is a dominant feeling that people have is that the country's not working as well as they want it to. Not broken, but not working as well as they want it to. And they're putting that on the feet, fairly for some, unfairly for others. They're putting that at the feet of Justin Trudeau.

And as long as he's the leader of the Liberal Party, and he's the story in politics most of the time, the Liberals are, I'm afraid, going to have trouble. I know there's a lot of Liberals who believe that he is the right choice for them to continue to lead into the next election. I can only look at the numbers and say, in 40 years, I've not seen a gap this wide that anybody was able to overcome. Of course, if Brian Mulroney were here, he'd say, well, if I tried, maybe I might have.

He doubted he would. I would have doubts about that because I think we talked about how structural what happened to the conservatives back in the mid-90s was, it was well beyond the repair or even a skilled politician like Brian Mulroney. But to go to the point about aggregate and how it's underground, but you're paving the way for things that can happen in a campaign. I'm going to go to the flip side of how you build trust rather than unbuild it and take you back to Jack Layton and the beginning of the 2011 campaign. There was not a sign in the polls that the NDP was going to have this orange wave in Quebec when the election was called. It was seen as Jack Lytton's last campaign, in part the timing motivated by the notion that if it did not happen that spring,

he might not be leading the party in the fall in an election, and there would be an election at some point that was bound to come. But over the course of those first few weeks, what Jack Layton had built, the capital he had accumulated as leader, suddenly came in really handy. Without that capital, the orange wave would not have happened. It's just because you don't see it. And it's the same. I mean, we're getting into winter. It's December. When you look at ice, you know the difference between ice that has become really thin and ice that is solid.

And that happens over the course of what leads you to an election campaign. So if Pierre Poirier wants to have weeks like that repeatedly, he's only chipping at the ice that he will be skating on to try to get to a majority government in an election. And in the case of Justin Trudeau, I think Bruce feels that the ice is no longer strong enough to sustain him in a campaign. I don't know about that. My question always is, sure, maybe,

but is someone with skates going to do a lot better and have better ice or just be the next Kim Campbell? But I do believe that last week mattered, and weeks like that are not good for the Conservatives, but I do not expect to wake up in the morning anytime soon to see a poll where the liberals are in the lead. I may never see a poll like that for a long, long time. I figured out what it is that I'm going to use chat GPT for next, which is I'm just going to go and ask. Give me a metaphor for something, whatever it is that I'm interested in,

in the voice of Chantal Hébert, because I struggle to come up with metaphors as good as hers. And maybe AI will help me. Yeah, well, you can dispense with the voice or the accent or whatever. I just want to thank the two of you from these last five minutes, because I've really enjoyed how you've sort of come around to my position. I like that. I appreciate that. Then you have a position.

I love the way you strung together your arguments to get there. So, you know, I'm pleased with that. Okay, before we take our final break, the carbon tax issue, which rose to the top of the charts again after the carve-out for heating oil in Atlantic Canada, is still around, and it's still being discussed and debated and argued, and the impact of it in certain parts of the country

is still very much there. Bruce, you've been monitoring the situation as it relates to farmers, and you see that as yet another thing that could be a major problem for the Liberals. Yeah, I don't know if it's a major problem, but I think that the conversation about the carbon tax has become a challenging one for the government. I think they contributed to the challenge when they made the change on home heating fuel a little while ago because they opened the door to the idea that there might be some flaws in the original policy that they had in place. The more recent version of this, not to get into the details of a conservative bill that was passed in the House of Commons and is in the Senate now. And for me, it's less a parliamentary procedure, this specific bill question. But there have been a couple of instances in the House in the last few days where Pierre Palliev has been able to stand up and say, here's a farmer.

He grows mushrooms south of Ottawa. Here's what the carbon price is doing to his business, where he uses natural gas to heat the inside of his mushroom operation. And he doesn't have a mitigation opportunity. In other words, there's not another source of energy that he can use. And so all that's really going on is that the costs of the carbon price are going to keep on going up on his business. And Polyev is making the case that this is impacting the cost of food. Every day now, Pierre Polyev stands up and says Canadians can't afford to buy the groceries anymore. I think it's a huge exaggeration for many people. It's not true. And I think it's a

huge exaggeration to suggest that the carbon price is creating this giant effect on food inflation. I think the government has answered by saying, well, 97% of the fuels that are being used aren't affected by the carbon price. But it does raise anxiety, I think, among people who generally believe in carbon pricing. I am one of them. I think this is a good policy that the government has put in place. I think it's a mistake what they did with respect to the treatment of home heating. But I think that they're vulnerable on this argument precisely because they're hearing these situations in the House of Commons that are hard to contradict. They're hard to say, no, no, no, that's not true.

It's not happening that way. And instead, I think the prime minister the other day said, well, we'll get in touch with that farmer. And it's been so long since I worked in politics, many, many, many years. But I do remember if you were an assistant and you were sitting in the gallery overlooking a debate and that's what a minister felt obliged to say, well, we'll look into that and get back to you. That's usually not a good day. That usually means that there's something that you've got to challenge with respect to the best answer possible. So I think there's been a little bit of vulnerability created on this food cost and carbon price

issue in the last little bit. And I think it's posing some perplexing problems, especially for rural MPs on the liberal side of the House. All right. Briefly on this. I'm going to give you two examples of what Justin Trudeau's decision to offer that carve-out has resulted in. And both of them are serious and more serious than any skirmishes between the two houses over a private member's bill. Saskatchewan announced yesterday that it would stop collecting the carbon tax on electric and natural gas heating.

That's clearly not constitutionally viable. It's clearly a defiance of federal power. If provinces start deciding that they're not collecting federal taxes on whatever policies they don't like, I'll let you imagine where that would actually lead. But at the same time, also very serious, 133 First Nation organizations got together in Ontario to challenge the carbon tax.

On what basis? They're saying that carbon pricing, although they're not opposed to the principle, the way that the federal carbon pricing system works puts a heavier burden on their communities than on the average Ontario community. Those two events, Saskatchewan and the First Nation Court Challenge, are both a direct result of a domino effect from the decision to offer a carve out for people who heat their homes with oil. And in either case would not be happening if that decision had not been taken.

So bottom line, the prime minister has opened a real can of worms. I don't think he can put all those worms back into the can now that he's done that. And I'm not sure it's just rural MPs. I think it's liberals in general that are facing a serious challenge as to the consistency of their own policy, one that was central to their climate agenda, and that they still claim is central to their climate agenda, but that has big cracks in it as a result of their own actions. All right, we're going to take our final break, come back and talk about a situation some see as rather bizarre that happened in a committee room on Parliament Hill this week, and it had everything to do with the use of language.

And we'll get back to that right after this. And welcome back. Final segment of Good Talk for this week. Chantel and Bruce are here. Okay, what's the fastest way to set this up? And welcome back. Final segment of Good Talk for this week. Chantelle and Bruce are here. Okay, what's the fastest way to set this up? A committee hearing with the Heritage Minister in the hot seat being questioned by MPs from all parties, but Rachel Thomas, a Conservative MP,

was looking for an answer on the online bill. And when the minister answered her question that had been posed in English in French, she asked the minister, I understand we're a bilingual country, but I want your answer in English. Now, that immediately set up an uproar over the use of the two official languages in the House of Commons. But it also initiated a discussion about something else, which I hadn't realized was going on, which on the part of a lot of MPs, not just opposition MPs, but government MPs, are looking for a soundbite for their

social media feeds, more importantly to some, perhaps, than the debate around whatever the issue is. Is that really what it's come to, Chantal? Well, question period has become literally a stage for Pierre Poiliev to produce media clips that will then go on the social media feed, regardless of the answer. And if he can get an answer that sounds hapless, he's going to put it on. Now, what happened in committee or her right mind requires a francophone minister, Pascal Saint-Ange, to give an answer in English, or at least until it is compulsory for ministers to be bilingual, English and French. One cannot or should not even think that a Francophone should defer to the language of the Anglophone asking a question

without triggering what was a massive backlash in Quebec. And by the way, MP Thomas apologized in writing, which was really interesting, because when you read the apology and it looks like it was written by the leader's office. It's literally the kind of apology that gets written and handed to an MP to apologize for. But I don't think that she was trying to say, I speak English and I don't speak French and you should be speaking English to me. She noted in her question that Minister Saint-Ange had been answering in English to some of the questions from the Liberals or the NDP and said, could you answer

me in English too? But the only purpose of having that is not that she couldn't understand the answer from the Minister. Simultaneous translation was available. Everyone has it. The interpreters are well up to that job. It's kind of routine on Parliament Hill, which he was looking for, really. It was an exchange that she could use on social media. And this has been figured out. It's a no-brainer for the government to figure this out and to tell its Quebec ministers, in case they hadn't noticed, that they should always answer in French when the Conservatives are asking questions and deprive the Conservatives of the opportunity to say, look at how I skewered this person. Now, what made this a bit worse in the central casting effort of Rachel Thomas

is that, of course, it begs the question, do you really think that since you're asking for an answer in English from a Francophone minister, maybe that person will look even more foolish because that person is answering in a second language? There was nothing smart about this entire episode. And certainly every MP that was not a conservative there jumped in with glee to say how outrageous this was, which was another kind of theater that did make it on social media very, very rapidly. But the damage in Quebec is real, by the way. And why? Tell me about it. Well, I tweeted, your first reaction,

and anyone who is a Francophone will have had the first reaction to say, what is this? Like, who the hell do you think you are? When my tweet said, when was the last time Rachel Thomas answered the question in French? And I saw how it traveled on social media, this entire story on the French side of the social media at the speed of light. You know when you tweet something, Bruce would notice since he does it more than I do.

You know when you write something that takes off and something that is just par for the course, social media, the usual suspects are having a conversation, pleasant or not. But this one just went. And I saw other colleagues, Daniel Leblanc, who is also a Francophone who worked in English, was really quick off the mark

to draw attention to this. Now, it's one of those, it's not on the scale of stomping on a Quebec flag in an Ontario train station, Brockville, not to name it, which was in a context like lighting a match in a barrel of powder. But it is something that does damage to a party that will be fighting against two, at

this point, Quebec-based leaders in the next election. Bruce? The fact and the pace of the apology, I think, affirms what Chantal has described as being the sensitivity for the conservatives of saying something like what was said. For the rest of the country, it falls into the category of kind of silly, almost to the point of kind of a trivial, clumsy mistake, I think, which is not to diminish the impact in Quebec, but everywhere else. I think that when people sort of take a pause and look at what happened, it was far from the case that this was some sort of part of the secret dog whistle strategy of the conservatives to belittle the French language. This is a person, this MP, who there's a very real chance is going to be a minister in a couple of years, answering questions probably in French as best she can. So the idea that she was tasked with pushing this little torpedo out

to rally the base and say, aha, we gave it to the French speakers, I don't buy that at all. I don't think that's true. I think the pace, as they say, and the fact of the apology really reinforces the fact that people are looking at this and going, wait, that's not a thing that we're going to do. And so, well, I'd say good for them for tidying it up because sometimes cleanup in aisle five takes too long, but it didn't take very long in this particular case. I think the bigger point about how political communications works is a really interesting one.

I think I agree with Chantal that Pierre Polyev is creating clips that his apparatus doesn't wait to see if the media will cover what happened in question period today and take a clip from him and put some context around it in a minute-long piece or a two-minute piece. He just pumps it out. And the way that it is consumed now is most people will see it on Facebook or some other social platform, but more particularly Facebook. And it doesn't have context. It basically just is his point delivered in a format that people had become used to as seeing as kind of a news item. So I think this is the way politics is done now.

Increasingly, I don't know that it's, well, it's not better than when journalism was the filter and the structure within which political commentary like that was trafficked. But it is where we're at right now, for sure. Of course, the advantage to opposition leaders who communicate that way is that they do not have to come out of question, period, as in the old days, and scrum with the journalists to cover Parliament Hill. And in the case of Mr. Poiliev, we'll run into trouble because he does not handle pushback very elegantly. Okay. We're out of time.

A couple of quick clarifications on my part. Wait. We didn't talk about the book yet. Okay, sorry, go ahead. It's coming. It's coming. First of all, I may have left the impression that the carve-out on home-eating oil was just for Atlantic Canadians. It's not. It's for anybody who's using home-eating oil. But politically, it was clearly done because of the overwhelming numbers,

the percentage of the population that use home-eating oil in Atlantic Canada. That's one. The second one's a little more serious. The other day on smoke, I was wrong on the number of MPs who were involved in that trip to the Middle East, sponsored by a Jewish organization in Canada. I said there were, I can't remember, 50 or 60 MPs. There were five. There was the delegation in total was 53. I don't think it takes away from the argument that we were having about whether it was appropriate that any MP

should do it on somebody else's hook as opposed to either their own or their office's hook. That was the point I was trying to make clumsily, but there you go with the correction. All right. Thank you both, Bruce and Chantel, for today's conversation. A good one, as it always is. If you need to see it again or didn't see it at all, you can catch it on our YouTube channel. And a quick plug for The Buzz, which comes out tomorrow morning, 7 a.m. It's a free newsletter.

You can subscribe at nationalnewswatch.com slash newsletter. And of course, that book. Hot off the press just this week. How Canada Works. Mark Bulgich and I have written this. I've been on a book tour already and heading off this afternoon to Sarnia

and then Halifax and Ottawa and Winnipeg and Calgary and points in between. So looking forward to that. Thank you all. Have a great weekend. And we'll talk to you again on Monday. Thanks, you guys. Take it easy. Bye-bye.

Have a good weekend. Yeah, you too