The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Good Talk -- Poilievre's Terrible Day

Episode Date: March 28, 2025

It was bad enough last week when Doug Ford told Pierre Poilievre he didn't have time to campaign for him.  But now Ford's top strategist says Poilievre is heading for defeat unless he changes his campaign. And he has the polls to back that up. What's really happening -- Chantal Hebert and Rob Russo have their say.  

Are you ready for Good Talk? And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here, along with Rob Russo and Chantelle Hebert. It's your Friday Good Talk. Glad you're with us. Lots to talk about, as always. Here's the way I'm going to start. On the face of things, you would say, well, the Conservatives got off to a fairly good campaign. Sure, the poll numbers have shown a leveling off. It's kind of a real close race, if you believe in the polls. But if you look at

the crowds, almost since day one, one the conservatives are packing them in for Pierre Polyev he's getting huge crowds in fact I'd be willing to say I can't remember when there's consistently been this size of crowds for a national leader in an election campaign in quite some time but apparently in the background there's a degree of well chaos in terms of what's happening with that campaign and it kind of broke out into the open started last week on the ford um polyev relationship front and then in the last 24 hours, the conservative strategist, top strategist for years now, Corey Tenike, was a big Harper guy and now is a big Ford guy, came out and said and had the poll numbers to prove it that the conservatives are heading for defeat unless they change their strategy.

Now, that's a bit of a shocker for a lot of people. Not that they seemingly have lost support, but that they're heading for defeat, and that's coming not from opposition to a conservative, but a conservative himself. So, Rob, you start us off this week. What's going on here? Well, a little context first. The Conservatives, many polls have them around 40%. The last time they were around 40% was in 2011, and Stephen Harper won a majority government. So they're not only holding their vote, they are attracting some new voters.

And I suspect those are younger and some of the unionized voters that Mr. Poiliev has gone after. They are, I think, showing organizational and enthusiasm strength as well. Those rallies are a reflection of the muscle and sinew superiority they have. And then I'll turn to Ian Brody's assessment of that advantage. And remind us who Ian Brody is. Yeah, he was chief of staff to Stephen Harper. For most of Stephen Harper's time in office, he was chief of staff. And both he and Corey Tanik are friends of many of the people, Jenny Byrne and others, who are running this conservative campaign. So what did Ian Brody

say on Twitter when he was asked about how impressive it was that they were drawing 4,500 people to some of these rallies? He said that anybody who has actually run a national campaign knows that getting people to show up at rallies is not actually a reflection of how that campaign is doing. It's nothing more than a reflection of just what I said, the organizational muscle and sinew. That threw a little ice water on some people's veins, I imagine. And now, as for Mr. Tonight, Corey and Jenny Byrne have probably been friends close to 30 years. This is not a guy who wants the conservatives to lose. Actually, you know, he runs a business, government public relations. That business would probably do much,

much better with a conservative in office. So the motivation for him saying this or going public with this, it certainly isn't to boost his business. It's probably going to hurt his business. What he's saying in public is what a lot of conservatives are saying in private. And I think the essence of what he's saying is there's only one issue. He's looked at the numbers, and I spoke to him for a piece I did for The Economist. I spoke to him earlier this week. He said, if you look at the numbers, he says he's never seen anything like this in 25 or 30 years of being in politics, where about 30 percent of the electorate has stampeded. They've all stampeded in one direction, it seems, and together their campaign, failed to actually make that the priority. In his words, there's only one issue, and that's the Trump threat.

And you're not taking advantage of that one issue. And his prescription for taking advantage of it is to really come down on Trump and really wheel on people like Danielle Smith. And I assume we're going to get to her later on. And that's a really difficult prescription. At the same time, the Conservatives are laying out some very interesting strategy. Interesting strategy on the province of Quebec in terms of its culture, in terms of its immigration, things that Stephen Harper would not have said and didn't say when he ran and got in trouble for not saying. But none of it seems to matter with people who aren't committed to voting for conservatives.

And so there now is, I think, an open schism in conservatives. There are some very tense discussions happening in the war room a few kilometers east of me here. And it's not the debate that the conservatives want. They didn't want to debate among themselves. The effect this has had as well, it's very interesting. It's going to be interesting for political kind of geeks and nerds like us to watch canada has essentially become as a result of this um this issue uh a two-party state you know particularly outside of quebec the bloc has had a very good week i think but outside of outside of quebec um it's where you have a two-party race something that canada hasn't had for a long, long time.

Yeah, listen, you're right about where the conservative numbers kind of remain sort of in the high 30s up to and bordering on the 40 mark. But the Liberals are ahead of that, and they're ahead of that because, as Chantelle has mentioned, the collapse of the NDP has forced us into a two-party race. Chantal, what's your opening gambit on this course? First, something about rallies to go where Rob has gone. I remember the 2006 campaign.

For those who don't remember all those dates, this is the year when Paul Martin lost to Stephen Harper, the first of those Stephen Harper victories. In the last week of the campaign, I was on the Paul Martin tour and we went to Hamilton and the numbers were really not great. And that room was packed, totally packed.

It didn't mean anything. And everyone knew that on the plane. The people at the front of the plane, that would be the leader and his entourage, while journalists were sitting back, were usually supposed to be the party people, sitting back, kind of, can we get home, please? Because the room in Hamilton was large, it was overheated. There had been some people fainted. But the people at the front of the plane so wanted to show that they were still in the game that they found a ghetto blaster. And they started dancing in the aisle at the front of the plane. Think of this picture of journalists exhausted thinking, can we just

get to our beds? And people in the front of the plane certainly as exhausted. My memory tells me that Mr. Martin for that very overheated rally was wearing a leather jacket. So, there is no way that they weren't as exhausted. So, I see those rallies and what I've seen all week is no way that they weren't as exhausted. So I see those rallies. And what I've seen all week is an impression that Pierre Poilier is having last fall's election campaign. He is in an echo chamber. The problem is that out of that echo chamber, we are now hearing conservative voices that are saying, and it's just not Cory Tanik, saying this is all wrong. We are not in the right campaign. We're not registering. I spoke to conservatives in BC and Ontario this week. Real conservatives,

people who have voted conservative all their lives, but who are not in the war room. I heard attempts, and many told me about attempts they'd heard about or that they'd done personally to the conservative war room to say exactly what Tanik was saying. You guys are out of the loop on this. You're not having the right campaign. And the result for that is that they have all been frozen out by the team around Mr. Poitier, as in do not call us anymore and we won't call you. You talk about organization. I spoke to someone in BC yesterday who reported that in BC,

the pamphlets that the candidates have received from party headquarters are still axe-to-tax pamphlets. Apparently, they're now suddenly, one weekend, deciding that they need new ones. But in BC, the tax that was asked weeks ago by the leading candidates for the leadership of the Liberal Party has never existed in any event. And this is the pile of literature that candidates have been receiving. That does not speak to a campaign that is nimble or quick on its feet. It speaks to a campaign that believes that it can turn back the clock, which I guess was easier to believe for them until the tariff that allowed Mr. Carney to get back in the suit of a prime minister,

which he's not going to be leaving easily because it suits him better than the campaign stuff. As for the interesting Quebec stuff, well, let's not go into culture because it's really hard to say that the Conservatives have a better track record on Radio-Canada, the CBC, or culture in general than the Conservatives. So this is playing defense. It's not going to do anything for the Conservatives in Quebec. They have made some promises that have pleased the Premier on temporary immigration. I'm not sure that the Liberals can't match the temporary immigration promises, but in any event, what we have learned over the past elections is that François Legault's pleasure

at the A party does not translate into votes, especially now that he's the least popular premier in the country. To say that the Conservatives are registering in Quebec, forget that. Le Bloc has had a decent week, but that being said, I was, well, the first thing that sounded good for the Bloc this week was Mr. Carney's refusal to participate in the TVA Fuhrer died hours after it started. Because outside of TVA, there are not very many media that are going to say we're going to deprive francophones of a chance to have more than 50 percent of the debate time in this election campaign. Why Mr. Carney said no to the TVO debate? He's used all kinds of reasons. Many journalists would tell you that one of the good reasons he should have used more is the fact that TVO wanted all parties

to pay $75,000 each to go on the debate podium. That's kind of weird to start with. So that was that. But the Polytechnique, so Mr. Carney names his good candidates or his star candidates and one of them in Quebec is a survivor of the Polytechnique shooting, Nathalie Pauvau, who is running for the Liberals. It's a catch, especially since the group from Polytechnique that she leads has criticized the Liberals a lot in the past

for not being aggressive enough on gun control. So, one, he messes up her name. That happens. It can happen. He said Pronovou instead of Provo. It happens. But then he says a survivor from the shooting at Concordia. Whoa, Polytechnique is where.

Luckily for Mr. Carney, this happened on budget day provincially in Quebec. Also, there was a shooting at Concordia. So it's not as if he was completely missing in the field. But I retweeted that story on social media, and I also listened to people. I was amazed at how little resonance it had. There was very little appetite for going after Mr. Carney for doing this. He apologized really quickly.

She gave him a pass very gracefully and very quickly. She also said she was the one who had reached out to the Liberals to run for them. Not that Mark Carney had spoken to her and twisted her arm to run. But still, I'm not saying that things are as good as they could have been in Quebec after this first week for the Liberals. but you do not yet feel that the ground is starting to shift in favor of the Bloc. And for sure, the NDP and the Conservatives have had events here that have gone okay, but nothing unexpected. To have a rally in Quebec City for the Conservatives is to have a pumpkin at Halloween in front of your house.

Okay, let me go about the tonight Conservative situation in another way. If he had said what he said in the final week of the campaign, it would be seen as, okay, he's just, you know, he knows they're going to lose. And he's just saying what he said. Here he does it in the first week of a five-week campaign. So one assumes that he does it with the purpose of trying to change things, trying to change strategy. And I appreciate, Rob, as you said, he and Jenny Byrne go back a long way, but it's not always been close between those two.

There is a rivalry and a disagreement on strategy at different times. But one assumes that Polyev and Jenny Byrne and others have heard what Tanik is saying, probably privately, before they heard it publicly yesterday. And the question becomes, are they going to do anything? Are they going to do anything about it? Are there indications that they're going to do something? I can address that. They've heard this. They've heard this from across the country.

I think Corey gave a speech last night or the night before at the Empire Club where he foreshadowed a lot of this, and he said, I hope that some of what I'm going to say does get through to the war room, which means that his earlier efforts haven't. My indications are that it has, that they were hamstrung a bit over the last couple of days because they've been in British Columbia. And in their calculus, the support that they're losing most rapidly is boomer support. People over 55 have deserted them. One of their traditional constituencies over the years, by the way.

And boomers, people like us, we watch newscasts still. And if they're in BC and they make those remarks at a rally in BC, it's not going to catch any of the newscasts. So I'm told that it begins today, that they are going to turn it around in the next few days and do some of what people have been saying they should be doing for some time now. You know, he used the example, and I think it's an excellent example. He said, just look at the slogans. We've all seen the slogans on the front of podiums, right?

There's supposed to be a pithy description of the message of a campaign. And it's confusing. It is confusing. First of all, the conservative slogan, Canada first, period, for a change. Okay, well, the for a change part, that's their old campaign.

They're looking backwards. They're saying, you know, these guys screwed all kinds of things up over the last decade. The problem with that for a change thing is Mark Carney has adopted almost all of their principles, jettisoned all of the Trudeau policies. And so that for a change is harder to get across right now. OK. And by the way, if you're looking backwards in this election, you're losing. You've got to look forward and you've got to look southward.

So then there's the Canada First part. And who does that sound like? What is that an echo of? You know, it's an echo of America First. So they're trying to do two things at the same time. And that sums up what their campaign dilemma is all about. You look at the liberal slogan. It's right there. It's in all their ads. It's it's on the podium. It's Canada strong. You don't need to say anything more. It's like what it

it's what Carney Carney said yesterday when he was asked about Trump's threat to double down on tariffs if the EU and Canada join together against the United States. He didn't need more than that quote as far as I was concerned. He said he took note of it, but he takes no directions from the president of the United States. Drop the mic, walk away. Okay, I want to pursue the slogans and whatever the thinking was. Have you guys looked at the conservative campaign plane? You have seen a lot of campaign planes over the years. Have you ever seen a mainstream party's campaign plane in this country that has in huge letters the name of the leader? I haven't. On this campaign plane, there are pictures going around where Pierre Poilier is with his family, nice family. He's standing at the top of the steps to the plane. It's in huge letters.

What's on the plane is Pierre Poilier. It looks like Donald Trump on his way to something. Why you would make it a me, myself, and I campaign to that level is fascinating, but it is a major problem. All week we have read in Quebec, in Ontario, in Atlantic Canada, and in BC about nomination processes being bypassed to disqualify candidates or to appoint candidates in every region. but none of those candidates actually stands out as someone that is such a must-have as your future Minister of Foreign Affairs of Finance, that you can understand why that would happen. It is a duty of a federal leader who aspires to be Prime Minister to assemble the best team possible. So fine, you get a bit of a pass for that, but that is not what has been happening. I told you about those conservatives I spoke to.

Possibly the most troubling thing that I heard from all of them this week is that they and people in their entourage were increasingly convinced that at the end of the day they would be quiet about it but they would vote for Mark Kearney. I have never seen something like that at the beginning of a campaign. People who have deep roots and associations with one of the two main parties telling people like me that what's happening in their heads, in their minds, is that they are looking at Mark Carney. And I get the change in tone that Pierre Poitier wants to have, possibly, we don't know. I mean, we've been talking about a change in tone, a pivot ever since Justin Trudeau quit. And he always goes back to his former lines. It's like it's his comfort zone. But if you looked at the events of yesterday,

once Mark Carney goes back into the person of the prime minister, then Pierre Poilievre is no longer on stage next to him. He's at the back of the room with the NDP and the Bloc. And look at the coverage. We didn't start off by talking about how TSFAs maybe would be boosted by $5,000, which was supposed to be the day for this on the Conservative campaign. Mr. Poiliev's pictures, notwithstanding the time difference, is supposed to be the day for this on the conservative campaign. Mr. Poilier's pictures, notwithstanding the time difference,

he was standing in front of a mic. It was early enough to make the newscast, by the way, to talk about the U.S. and to get into the news stories about the tariffs with this big, huge sign about TSFAs. Even the image sends the message that they are talking about something which, by the way, is not of major interest to the majority of voters while there is a huge crisis that is ongoing. So the Corey comments stem from numbers and polling done by Nick Kouvelis. He's the conservative poster for Premier Ford. And those numbers have been going around the conservative war room and the larger conservative family since last Friday.

They keep getting worse. There's a 15-point spread, according to Mr. Kouvelis, between the Conservatives and the Liberals in Ontario. Donald Trump, by going with tariffs on the auto industry, has actually sent an arrow in the heart of the main battlefield of the election campaign. The NDP, the Bloc Québécois, the Liberals changed their campaign plans on Thursday to their affections, is nimble enough to do what it needs to do, or maybe it waited much too long to do it, to get where it wants to get. You know, you can get trapped by a speech

that goes over well in the room, and that looks like what he's done. He knows the speech works in a partisan crowd. It's not working outside of that room. And that looks like what he's done. He knows the speech works in a partisan crowd. It's not working outside of that room. At least that seems to be what the numbers are showing. And, you know, I get mail saying, oh, you guys, you always focus on Ontario and Quebec. We don't always do that.

But let's not kid ourselves. Ontario is the big player in an election night that's where most of the seats are and these numbers if it's really a 15 point spread would show that the Liberals are going to take most of these seats in Ontario and if you win most of the seats by a considerable margin in Ontario you're going to win the. So that's why the stakes are so high in Ontario. But let's move on. Let me just say one thing about the plane. The plane and the speech and the slogans on the podiums look like they were designed six months

ago and nobody's changed anything. And now they've got to scramble to change. I want to see how long it takes them to change the plane, the paint job on the plane. We'll see what happens, if anything happens on that front. And one irony, Rob talked about Canada strong. The last time the Liberals had the word strong in their campaign slogan was 1972, the land is strong.

And it turned into a disaster for them because it wasn't strong. There were all kinds of issues and they ended up clinging to power with what a one or two seat majority. That was a Seinfeld election. It really was about nothing. There was no driving theme to that election.

72? They ignored some of the problems that were emerging in Canada. It was about cereal boxes. It was about B&B. It was a crazy election. It was my first one that I was involved with. Anyway, let's take our break and we'll come back.

I want to flip the tables a little bit here and talk for a second about where the liberals are at. But we'll do that right after this. And welcome back. You're listening to Good Talk for this Friday. Chantel and Rob are here. I'm Peter Mansbridge. You're listening on SiriusXM, Channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform, or you're watching us on our YouTube channel. We're glad on Sirius XM, channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast

platform, or you're watching us on our YouTube channel. We're glad to have you with us. You know, our old and good friend Alan Gregg, I think, was the one who kind of coined the phrase or the comparison in the kind of in the mid-80s, when the Conservatives were always looking at the Liberals, and initially in campaigns, the Liberals were ahead, certainly in 84, and in the middle of the 88 campaign, they had a bit of a surge too. But Alan used to say about the Liberals, they're actually skating on top of the ice, there's no doubt about it.

But the issue is is how thick is that ice and when when could they fall through so here's my uh here's my question to you and i start with chantel this time how thick is the ice for mark carney right now um thicker than it would be in a normal election, because the dynamics of this election is really different from both 84 and 88. Why do I say that? Because in the rush to support the liberals that have brought them to the leading position

in this campaign, there has not been the conservative vote, notwithstanding those people I spoke to who are now saying that they would vote Carney. The story is not that the people have run away from Pierre Poiliev and are going to go back to Pierre Poiliev, which is what happened to the liberals when they peaked early or in the middle of the 88 campaign. They come from the NDP, for the most part, and the Bloc Québécois in Québec. People say we always talk about Ontario.

There's a reason why I've been making calls in BC. The Liberals, when you look at the numbers from the previous House of Commons, the Liberals actually need to win to hold the seats that they had going in, which they are in the process of doing with gains in Atlantic Canada, by the way, and possibly elsewhere, and win half of the NDP's caucus. That's it. There is no, we need to take on Fortress conservative-based Poiliev. And the NDP campaign, so far, is not getting off the ground. So, when you look, for instance, at what has happened in BC this week, the liberals turned down the candidacy of former Premier Christy Clark, who used to lead the liberal government in BC, which is a way to say a semi-conservative because there is no provincial liberal party in BC, they turned her down in part because they know that Christy Clark,

who has fought the NDP provincially all her life, would turn off NDP switchers. And those seats of the NDP that they want, they tend to be in BC. That's where half of Mr. Singh's caucus, including the leader's seat, is located. So paying attention to BC is actually important if you want to know how the election will turn out. For the Conservatives, that means that they need Mr. Singh to do well. They have the votes, but they need Mr. Singh to come back. And if there is something that this campaign about tariffs and Trump is not doing, it's helping the third parties, both the Bloc Québécois and the NDP. Now, the Bloc Québécois has an easier task.

It's operating in a microclimate where the argument, vote for us because you want someone to be safeguarding Quebec's interests and supervising that government as it goes forward on finding a way out of those tariffs is an argument that makes sense. Singh is campaigning on a, when I'm prime minister, I'm going to cut your taxes, which takes them completely out of the credibility arena, because there is not a soul in this country that believes that Jagmeet Singh is going to be in a position to present the federal budget after April 28. But that is where the game really is. And what makes it also different is that for many NDP voters and Bloc voters in Quebec, Pierre Poilievre is a lot less acceptable than Brian Mulroney used to be to those same voters in 1984 and 1988. The NDP leader in both those campaigns who was a stronger person, frankly,

at broadband than Jagmeet Singh at this juncture, had better arguments to hold this vote. But at the same time, Brian Mulroney, a man who as prime minister would not cross a picket line to deliver a speech in a hotel, also had enough credentials, union credentials, to not spook the NDP to the level that Mr. Poiliev does, because he is seen as so more likely to work in tandem with Donald Trump. And by the way, every time he says he's going to rid Canada of these woke people, many new Democrats are thinking, I'm going to block you guys from becoming my prime minister. All right, Rob, going back to the question,

how thick's the ice for Mark Carney? Well, let me just say something about something that Chantal said about the NDP. I'm reminded of how Stephen Harper worked with Jack Layton to bring down Paul Martin. They formed alliances. They talked. They schemed. They plotted. There was respect. There are many in the conservative war room right now who are cursing Jagmeet Singh for not bringing down Justin Trudeau last year.

They did nothing to work with him to make that happen. They insulted him on a regular basis rather than working with him and essentially plotting and scheming to do it. It would have been in both their interests, as it turned out probably, to do that, given the way things stand now. Now, there would be no Mark Carney candidacy that's as buoyant as it is now, or that's as confident as a skate blade kind of crisply crossed the ice without Donald Trump.

Donald Trump has made Mark Carney's candidacy not just viable, but has given him a wonderful, wonderful palette to paint. And that's the determining factor, because without Trump, you cannot tie Mr. Poiliev to Trump which is what they're doing they're essentially trying to portray Pierre Poiliev as Donald Trump with maple syrup in his veins that's what they're saying and you don't get that unless you have Donald Trump you know we've talked about this already but I've noticed that the mistakes that Mr. Carney makes are almost always in French. And he still, I think, grasps for vocabulary. I'm not sure he

understands the questions he's being asked all of the time. I'm not sure it matters. I'm not sure that it matters. There's nothing that I see in the polling that makes it matter. There is one thing that he did in French that might matter, that might suggest that one of his skate blades might get caught in a rut or even crash through, and that he shows impatience. And that impatience seems to come through more often in French, but it has happened in English with our former pal, Rosemary Barton. And I think he did that to Laurence Martin from Radio-Canada this week, where

she was asking him, when is he going to have a call with Trump? When is it going to happen? And in French, he said, ça suffit, that's enough, when she pressed him on it. And that tendency has existed in Mr. Carney for some time. People at the Bank of England used to call, they were getting tasered by him because he would turn on them very quickly. And he's got to be careful. That's the kind of thing that could crack the ice underneath him. By the way, Rosie is still our pal. That's right, she is is for the record former colleague i

say yeah um yes i did see that uh impatience it went it flew mostly under the radar because uh the tariff stuff and to tell you the truth not a lot of people care about how journalists are being treated in scrum. It's usually a vote getter, not a vote loser. was putting his campaign on pause to go back home and move forward or not on tariffs and do all the consulting that he should do, that he was very tense. And if this is what I talk to myself, not even a week of campaigning does to you, boy, you're going to need to go on Prozac before you actually do something that will resonate loudly in the way that you respond to questions. He was a lot more at ease and careful and very, very nice to journalists,

including, as you can, the journalist the next day on Parliament Hill. But bottom line, people who are looking at this, voters, they're looking for someone who is serious and not someone who is nice to journalists. And if they were looking for a nice to journalist, then Jagmeet Singh would become prime minister. Because it is not as if Pierre Poitiev, and every time I've raised this, you know, he was testy with journalists and I've raised it with people who live in Quebec who are Francophones.

They talked about Pierre Poiliev and the apple chewing video with that local journalist in BC. And I was surprised because this happened in English, but it stuck, those images are stuck in the heads of people who otherwise don't pay all that much attention to the coverage in the English language. So I don't know.

I'm sure liberal handlers understand that they need to keep Mr. Carney to his best behavior. I understand it's not always easy. And I also understand that nothing prepares you for spending your life with a bunch of journalists on your tail that are always asking you pesky questions, not all of them well phrased. And if they're asking in a language that you don't totally master, you may be losing the sense of this. But to go back to that news conference where he was testy, I thought the most important part of the visuals wasn't that moment. It was the fact that the president of Unifor, Canada's largest private sector union, was standing right next to him. Yeah, Laura Payne. Yeah, that's a big deal. And Unifor in past campaigns in recent years has mostly instructed its members to vote for anybody except conservative candidates. The word was vote for the candidate that can best defeat the conservatives in your writing.

But this wasn't an endorsement, but it did send a powerful message to union members that she was standing shoulder to shoulder with the prime minister on this issue. She was, and he said at the beginning of the news conference, you're going to hear from Laura Payne. And we didn't. And then he said what he was going to say, and then he stalked off, and we never heard from Laura Payne. So, I mean, that's not, he was clearly on track. But what I think the people around him have said is that sober,

almost lugubrious, yesterday I would say lugubrious is the word that I would use, Mark Carney, that cool Mark Carney is what they want. The hot Mark Carney, they don't want. The cool Mark Carney, to the point of being separatist, as I've said, that works. That's what people are looking for right now. You know, he dropped a big kind of hint as to what might bridge the gap between him and Trump right now. You know, he dropped a big kind of hint as to what might bridge the gap between him and Trump right now. Yesterday, when he said a comprehensive trade agreement might be the thing that restores some confidence. You know, what he's saying is let's renegotiate Kuzma now, is what he said.

I thought that that was a significant hint, something that the people in officialdom have been resisting, because that would be a concession to Trump. And we all know what Trump thinks of negotiated trade agreements. Well, and Trump would have to find another idiot to sign it. Yes. Since he signed the last one, it doesn't exist in his psyche. And he called whoever signed it an idiot. So anyway, I've got to take our final break. I want to come back.

I've got another question on the Carney situation. We'll do that right after this. And welcome back. Final segment of Good Talk for this week. Chantel and Rob are here. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Looking forward to this last segment. And I'll tell you why. Because any way you look at the things that Mark Carney says about our relationship with the United States, progressively over the last month, the statements, some would call it rhetoric, but the statements have got tougher and tougher by the day, including this week,

that it's a totally new relationship unfolding between Canada and the United States. This isn't just something for the moment, something in response to Donald Trump. It is the overall relationship. And he must be looking at some numbers, not just polling numbers. I mean, we saw the numbers from some of the airlines this week.

But, you know, travel from Canadians to the U.S. is down 70%. 7-0. You know, I was talking to the major shareholder of one of those airlines yesterday, last night, who told me, look, I said, God, you must be losing a ton of money. He says, no, they've shifted to the Caribbean, but they're not going to the States, and we're having to adapt as a result of that.

But clearly there is a feeling in the country, this relation, and it goes beyond airlines, it goes to fruit and vegetables and things we're buying in the store in Canada, made in Canada, produced in Canada, labels that are everywhere, or produced not in the United States labels. But he's really, you know, unless this is going to be brushed off as campaign rhetoric, this is a real sea change in what's going to be the relationship between our two countries going forward, depending on who wins. And if Daniel Smith is right, who spoke in Florida to a right-wing crowd last night, talking about how there's a bit of Trumpy in Polyev.

And we're thinking, you know, conservatives are thinking alike with Republicans on some of this stuff. But go back to the Carney remarks. If he wins, which according to the polls, he would if the election was today. It's not today. It's four weeks away. So anything could happen.

But we're talking about a major difference between the relationship between these two countries, between our two countries. Who wants to deal with that first? Well, it's not just, and I think on this, the liberals and Mr. Carney are being as responsive as they are leading the charge. That is what is happening in Canadians' minds. Those airline figures speak to that. This is not some debate that's happening in the bubble.

It's from the ground up. We don't often have from the ground up election conversations, but this is one of those. I covered Ontario for a long time. And when I was a rookie journalist, I was fortunate enough to be assigned to cover the auto industry in Ontario and the auto negotiations, the birth of a separate union from the United Auto Workers in the US, the battle for those plants that came to Ontario, not Quebec, not the US, the introduction of just-in-time parts delivery,

which basically means that's why those parts move across. It wasn't always like that, move across the border so many times because it really over time became an integrated market. But what Canadians who have not lived in Ontario or who know downtown Toronto well, but not the rest of southern Ontario don't realize is that the auto pact is part of the political psychology of Ontario. That back in the days with William Davis and others, an election campaign was often a tour of successful expanding auto plants.

Or when the reverse happened, there was a time in Ontario where people who worked in those auto plants would look to see if they had co-workers who drove Japanese cars because those were seen as a threat to the auto industry in the province. So when Mr. Trump picks that target, as he did this week, he is going after something that is not just economically existential for Ontarians. I think Premier Ford captured that totally when he campaigned. He's going to, you know, it's like in a relationship when your partner destroys the thing that you see

is the most symbolic of the strength of your relationship. It's hard to think, yes, aluminum, yes, steel, yes, oil, yes, potash. But the auto industry and the auto pack, which proceeds by decades, NAFTA and whatever came after, that is the sign that your partner is really breaking up with you. I think one has to agree with Mr. Carney's assessment that you need to take stock of the fact that it ain't coming back this relationship. You may become friends again in the future, but the divorce is going to happen. And many Canadians feel that way. And that is what made Mr. Poiliev's attempts to dodge the

question about the Daniel Smith comments that he was in sync with so many things that Donald Trump wants to do, so devastating out of the gate for the conservatives. He should have walked away from those comments in a decisive way, and he did not. And this is not a good time to let some light shine between you and the Canadian mood on this issue. Rob. As long as Donald Trump represents and articulates a threat to the sovereignty of Canada, there can be no relationship as it used to be. It's just impossible. I thought the success of the liberal campaign this week was right out of the gate. And this is something that I think Jerry

Butts is particularly good at. He's very good at constructing a narrative arc, a story that unfolds during a campaign. He starts with a string and he puts pearls on it. The first pearl was Sunday on the day the campaign was launched, where Mark Carney came out and said, the United States wants to break us so they can own us. Setting the groundwork for the rest of that sort of pearl necklace. The next day, he was in gander and what did he say we helped the americans when they were at their lowest point uh and this is how they treat us a reminder of it's not our fault it's their fault uh and we were kind to them the day

after that we need submarines and icebreakers not just to defend against the Chinese and the Russians, but to make sure that we can assert our own sovereignty in the north, in the Arctic. So you see that narrative arc. You know, that being said, I know he said that he's going to do this. I know he said that he's going to try to do this to the auto industry. But we're not there yet. It'll be interesting to see if he actually does this. It takes years to unravel and untangle what Chantal has just described. Years.

You want to build an auto plant? Let's go find some land. You've got to find some land someplace close to a labor force. That's going to take six months, a year. Then you got to decide what you're going to build there. Six months to a year. Then you got to train your labor force. You got to build.

It's five years before you can get an auto plant going. Five years. Donald Trump is gone by then. In the meantime, if you actually go through with this, yes, you're going to devastate an integrated North American auto industry. Let's see if he actually does that. The people around Trump who really think about tariffs and really think about re-industrialization don't think about it in Canadian terms. They think about it in terms of China more than anything else.

And you wonder when those people, people like Oren Kass and others, and at times, if you listen to the Ontario premier, Howard Lutnick makes this case as well. This is not really about you guys. It's about the other people. We're going to cut you a break. Well, we'll see. Because it will take years for this to undo, and it will take

years for this to show any kind of fruit. And Donald Trump, unless we believe that he's going to ignore the Constitution of the United States and run for a third term, Donald Trump will be long gone before any of the benefits or the harm that this could cause is fully known. If he's going to break the Constitution, he won't run for a third term. He'll just take a third term. Yeah. Anyway, we're out of time,

but let me just underline the point that Chantel made about when she used to traipse around Ontario covering Ontario politics and seeing southwestern Ontario especially. I mean, I lived there. I live in Stratford. And I'm telling you, in communities like Stratford, right across southwestern Ontario, there are people trembling.

And, you know, men and women awake at night trying to figure out what the hell they're going to do with their families if they lose their jobs because the plant shuts down i mean we're talking thousands and thousands of people um sure their hope is that this won't happen and he'll change his mind in the days ahead but he might not and when you're uh you know when you're a family in southwestern Ontario these days, hope is not a strategy. These next few days will tell us the story, I assume, at least give us a good indication of it. Thanks to Chantel.

Thanks to Rob. Another great conversation here on Good Talk. The Buzz is out tomorrow morning, 7 a.m. in your mailbox. You can subscribe at no charge at nationalnewswatch.com slash newsletter. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks so much for listening today. Have a great weekend. We'll venture into next week and see what happens then. Coming right up. Take care.