The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Good Talk -- Reflections on a Week of Horror

Episode Date: October 13, 2023

How does one describe the past week -- the hatred, the images, the response, the fact all could go on indefinitely? Chantal is in Banff this week, Bruce is in Ottawa.  Their thoughts on the dominant story of the week and their expectations for the weekend's NDP convention in Ottawa.

Are you ready for Good Talk? And hello there. Friday's episode of The Bridge. It's Good Talk. It's hard to actually call it Good Talk after the kind of week we've had. But we're going to try and... I'm not sure whether we can make any sense of it at all, but we're going to try and think through the week and the impact it's had on all of us. Chantelle Hebert is in Banff, Alberta today, and Bruce is in Ottawa. I'm in where am I? I'm in Stratford, Ontario

today. I had to check the map. Okay, and when I say a difficult week to describe, I think we all know what we're talking about. It's been a traumatic week on a lot of fronts. And as we get near to the end of this week, with the situation still very much on edge in the Middle East, and especially in Israel and Gaza, I'd like to try and get a sense from each of you of, you know, based on where you've been, what you've seen, what you've heard, I mean, it's awfully hard to go anywhere this week and not, at least for me, not end up having a discussion with somebody, strangers, friends, relatives,

about what happened in Israel last Saturday morning and what's happened since in both Israel and Gaza in the war between Israel and Hamas. I try and get a sense from each of you on what you've been thinking, what you've been observing on this subject over the last days. Chantal, why don't you start? Okay, so obviously I was in two different places this week, Montreal and then on my way to Alberta. Found the same consternation in both places, obviously. But I also found it interesting, as you know, there has been this social media, you can call it a conversation if you want, I would call it dialogue of the depths between various academic institutions in this country, some unions

engaging on their definition of what they believe resistance is supposed to look like. And apparently to some of them, it looks like some of the things that have happened in Israel last weekend. I have not found that discussion at street level, on the ground, with people going about their daily lives. What I found instead is a collective sense, not only of dismay or horror, but in the case of the Jewish community, a lot of sorrow. It is not very hard to find people that you know that actually know or have family or friends somewhere in Israel stuck in this or whose faith is not known. But after, at the end of a week, this quiet has been joined by a collective sense of insecurity in the Jewish community.

I'll give you just one example, which is a Montreal example. Montreal's Jewish hospital today is operating on the basis of emergency surgery only. Everything else has been cancelled. Its daycare centre is shut down. Why? For fear that calls for a day of anger on the part of Hamas will translate into acts of violence in this country. And I think that those measures hopefully are not necessary, but the fact that they are being taken just illustrates the collective sense of insecurity that sees a community. I have family that lives in the Outremont.

There is a very strong and very visible Jewish community there. I think everyone is kind of wishing they had eyes behind their backs this week, looking out for their kids and looking out for their families and their institutions. Bruce? Well, I think the first thing that I've been thinking is that the world is a less safe and secure and stable place than it has been. And it wasn't particularly safe and secure and stable before this attack. We'd been seeing a trend line of growing anxiety about whether or not the mechanisms and the relationships that had kind of kept the more confidently that the world will find its center again and to the degree that the United States has typically tried to play over many decades in the past, it can't really be counted on to play that role. Not because there aren't some good Americans in leadership positions who would like to have a more stable and clear position taken by the United States, but because there are too many others who don't want that,

who don't see things the same way, who pursue a political agenda of disruption, who've adopted ideas that don't, don't lend themselves easily to America playing a stabilizing role. On the positive side of that divide, I watched Anthony Blinken yesterday, the U.S. Secretary of State, and in his press conference, you'll see a relatively long clip where he's describing how he reacted to the facts and the images and the pictures that he saw.

And it was very personal. It was, I thought it was very powerfully articulated. It seemed very authentic to me. And it seemed like the kind of leadership that people expect from someone in such an important position. And in part, I say that to go to the point that Chantal was touching on, which is that there are obviously a lot of people, the majority,

I believe the large majority who are horrified at what happened. There are also a very large number of people who believe that the problem of antisemitism is real. It's growing and needs to be taken more seriously. But we're finding out in the way that some people have reacted to this situation, that there are people who want to use this moment to litigate their frustrations with the Netanyahu government or their worries about the Palestinian people.

And this is creating a bit of a divide. It's creating friction. It's, um, and we're finding, and I'll stop on this point. We're finding that, uh, social media in particular can't be trusted in terms of the quality of the information, uh, that is conveyed, but also doesn't do much to help bring people together. And requires it almost, it seems, of politicians that they react more quickly, sometimes more hastily than is advisable to situations. And I'm not saying that in respect of any particular one. reaction syndrome that is built on social media, I think, is very difficult if what we're looking for is a way to stabilize a difficult and unstable situation. You know, I totally agree with both of you on the social media question, but I also want to put it in this context. No other story that I've covered in my, you know, 50 years in the business has developed the kind of discussion on the part of viewers. Discussion is a polite way of putting it on the part of viewers and listeners and readers.

Then the Middle East question and specifically the Israel-Palestinian question. Now, I know the week started with this being an Israel-Hamas question, but it's once again developed into the Israel-Palestinian question for a number of different reasons. But in all the coverage that I've been a part of, and both from the region and from here, there's no win on this story in trying to cover this story, whether it's traditional legacy media or social media. It is, you are constantly criticized from one side or the other, that you're biased. It's really, really hard to cover and to tell a story,

especially now in this era of mistrust of institutions, including and perhaps especially so the media. So I think we need to continue to place it in that context too, this story, and you watched it over this last seven days, how quickly it moved from the initial shock story to what has been the issue for decades. And there are two very, very different sides on this. And as Chantal mentioned in her first answer, it's playing out now in universities and unions, you know, across the country. And I assume we'll talk a little bit about the NDP in a few moments time, their convention, it's likely to come up there as well. Chantal, you wanted to make a point here. I think the experience has been that the Israel-Palestine story was always a no-win story for anyone to cover that for a long time.

But the social media and the internet has made it easier for the mistrust to target the people who are covering the story. I have a friend who once served as an ombudsperson for one of large Canadian media organization, who told me afterwards that no issue brings more complaints than the Israel-Palestine issue, no matter what is being broadcast. It brings a flood of complaints from both sides. And the social media, Bruce was talking about accelerating divisions. That is exactly the mechanism that we saw in play over the pandemic with the social media accelerating divisions. You cannot replace talk and conversation by messages and gut feelings on the social media. And it is happening unsurprisingly to this story in a way that sometimes makes you wonder whether the social media allows people

to completely leave aside their humanity. It is a no-brainer to know that there is absolutely no but in a sentence that is about children and innocent people being killed. Or no, they asked for it, or they're getting back what they did. Because when you talk about terrorism, and this is terrorism, there is no cause that has ever been advanced by terrorism and by a lack of humanity. And that is increasingly what we're going to see in this conflict.

I'm not sure that Canada's institutions have really been doing efficient work in encouraging dialogue over screaming matches. I'm struck by the fact that it is within institutions that the conversation is the least productive. It's much more constructive, I've found, at ground level, and much more reasonable than within institutional channels who should know better. And I find that very troubling on both sides of the conversation. You know, we talked the other, you know, two weeks ago about the kind of lack of understanding of our own history on the Second World War as a result of the guy in the gallery story. And, you know, what I've witnessed this week, and I include myself in this at times, an appalling amount of ignorance of the history of this story. You see it especially so on social media when rants start.

And, you know, it's just they don't understand. They don't understand that this has been at play for a long time and why it's been at play and what's happening. But I agree with you. There is no but in the sentence that describes last Saturday morning. I think if I can, Peter, I wanted to pick up a couple of points that Chantal has raised that really resonated with me,

elaborate on them a little bit from my standpoint. I think that what you describe as being a history of difficulty for journalists to cover this particular situation, this conflict, I think is absolutely right. But it also seems to me that we've seen that with the rise of social media, and I think it probably bears mentioning that X or Twitter is worse than other social media platforms in terms of its impact in this way. But we see other situations where humanity seems to be replaced by a rapid, angry response syndrome. We saw it elevated to a political art form by Donald Trump. You remember the whataboutism in Charlestown? That was shocking to many people that he could have reacted to the situation that was going

on there by saying the good people on both sides. And I remember thinking that we'd crossed a line at that point as a civilization or a set of societies that observed things that we should be horrified by. And all of a sudden there was a political argument that intervened and said, yeah, but you don't have to be horrified by this because of that. And there has been more of that since then. We saw a dynamic around COVID and vaccinations and masks that became everything became politicized to the point where people would do harmful things to their health and the health of their loved ones, because they've been told that these ideas were the ideas of a politician that they don't like. This bill is going to keep on coming due unless we find some way to solve it. And the costs of that are going to continue to get higher. I think the other thing, to take it back to the role of the media, the challenge for journalists that's been growing for a long time is if you do more than just report the facts that happen, if you add color and commentary, if you have a social media account wherein you express opinions about things, then you train the audience to look for your opinion every time you're covering something.

I'm not really talking about Canadian journalists necessarily. I'm just talking about the way in which the media come across to the consumer now has legitimized consumers saying, well, I wonder if they're really if they really want to fight anti-Semitism enough, or I wonder if they've got a perspective on this that's opposite to the one that I should think, rather than I'm just going to consume the facts, I want to trust the media for the facts. And I don't know that there's any real blame placed there. I think it's just a series of dynamics that have developed over time that have put us in a

situation where even the most traditional media that try to hew to that line of fact reporting are struggling with the choices. I've seen people on social media in the last 24 hours talking about why won't CBC or CTV call this a terrorist group, Hamas? And I think that those organizations, as far as I can tell, they haven't explained why they won't. Probably they should, because at some point, if people hear that, it does erode trust in those media organizations,

because they can say, well, look, I think it clearly was terrorist action. And regardless, to Chantal's point of whether you feel that the Israeli government has been doing a good job or the right thing vis-a-vis Palestine, it doesn't change whether or not that was terrorism. So I think there are questions for the media to grapple with that have been going for a long time. I don't know what the answers are, but I think more transparency and some kind of hard choices are in the works for them going forward too. A couple of points here. Yes, I believe the BBC.

I don't believe I have retweeted the BBC explanation for its stance, you can agree or disagree with it, but it's historical and the person writing pointed out that they also declined to bow under the pressure of Margaret Thatcher to describe IRA

activists and militants as terrorists back then when the troubles were ongoing in Ireland. I think the CBC has also provided an explanation. You can accept it or not. You can argue, I believe, that you would have a point to say, given that Hamas has been labeled a terrorist organization by the government of Canada some time ago. It would be totally possible to mention that when talking about these events.

But both organizations and others, because that is also the practice, I believe, on CNN and in a lot of mainstream media outlets that cover conflicts. But as to the notion that mistrust has been built by opinion or that it has been increased by social media, possibly. But those of us who covered news, and I did that for a long time before I became a columnist, and polarized situations in this country know really well, and I think Peter would know that too, that when you cover a polarized situation and you are saying things that displease one side, even if it's totally fact-based, you will be shocked as the messenger. And I'll just go back to the years

when I covered the constitution and the Quebec sovereignty debate. Alternatively from one week to the next I was either a sovereignist or a federalist. I've also been a liberal, a new democrat, a right wing person, a lefty. So this tendency has always been there, to not want to hear things that you don't jive with your sense, or to label as opinion what is a fact. Someone

yesterday responded, I merely posted the BBC article about not using terrorism. I didn't express an opinion. And someone retweeted that I had given CBC a break to do fake news. There was no mention of the CBC in any way, shape, or form in the message I put online. But it was just a rejection of even the title of the story, which said the BBC explains why it's not using the word terrorist. So there are people who will not hear. I've had the experience prior to the last referendum of doing briefings to give my sense from what I saw on the ground that maybe it was going to be a lot closer,

the result of the 1995 referendum, than people on Parliament Hill and around the federal government believed. What was the reaction to that? The spin coming from that government was that I was a Sovereignist. Yeah. Look, I agree with you, Chantal, that that has always been a thing. I think what may be different, and you might or may not agree about this, but it's two things, really. One, we're sitting now in the middle of a culture war

that has taken on a dimension and a speed of sound that it didn't have before. So that every single issue, whether it's gender pronouns in saskatchewan or these horrible attacks in israel or fill in the blank it it all becomes um compressed into this are you on my side of the culture war or on the other and so there are more issues around which people make that simple calculation chantal is um on my side of the culture war or on the other side of the culture are you trying to avoid saying that i may be woke i'm saying that i i can live with any view about where you are on the culture war whatever you want and i think that you know but but the other thing is that your point about, um,

so the linkage for me is social media is, is really evident when I see things happening, like if Peter will put a question into a promotional piece for the podcast and he gets trashed for being, um, something that he's not for the assumption that for being something that he's not, for the assumption that he said something that he didn't. And this has happened now three or four times in the last month, and I'm watching it a little bit with amusement, and I can tell by the look on your face, Chantal, that you're a little bit amused by it too.

Welcome to the world of those of us who have had to live with titles that we didn't write over the top of columns and stories. But there are some things where Peter will say something and someone will misinterpret what he's saying because they're so enraged by the fact that's being discussed or the issue that's being discussed that they don't they don't hold back enough to to think about whether the words are actually saying the thing that they think that they're being said so the acceleration effect it's almost like um gasoline ready to be poured on anything uh that could be flammable um and that's not healthy and i don't know how we're gonna ever get out of that now that we're so deep into it.

But I do think I would make the case that those two elements are different from that truth, which has always been there, which is that if you're a reporter, you're going to be disliked by the side that is on the other side of the question about sovereignty or what have you. Okay, let me clean up a couple of things before we take our first break. I was just trying to help you a little bit. Yeah, that was good. You're welcome. Actually, I did research on those anonymous comments that came in, and they traced right back to your IP address there, Bruce.

Just trying to make a conversation. Yeah, right. What I was going to say is... Controversy. Yeah, what I was going to say was this whole debate around the T word, the terrorist word, is one, as Chantal mentioned, has been around for decades, literally. The BBC, the CBC have the same kind of policy, so do quite a few other news organizations in different parts of the world on that word. I can tell you that from, you know, I left the CBC many years ago now, but I can tell you that when I was there, there were many debates inside about the use of that word or the non-use of that word.

And, you know, in the end, you come to a decision as a news organization and you live with it. It wasn't popular on the part of some people. It wasn't popular on the part of some people. It was very popular on the part of some other people. On the basic question of this issue being a no-win situation, there were times in the heat of this story, which has burned hard a number of times over the past few decades, in the heat of it where you would take some comfort in knowing

that neither side was in agreement with the way you were doing the journalism. One day you were accused of a pro-Israeli bias, the next day you were accused of a pro-Palestinian bias, and you'd sort of sit back and say, well, you know, we must be doing something right because both of them are upset at us. Well, that's an oversimplification of the job, obviously, and what you're trying to accomplish. But as I said, and I think Chantelle agreed, no other story that we've faced in our careers has prompted the kind of backlash against the media on the way it covers it than the Middle East story generally, specifically the Israel-Palestinian story. There's more to say on this, and we're going to say it,

but we've got to take a quick break. And here it is. Okay, we're back. This is the Friday episode of The Bridge. It's Good Talk. Chantel is in Banff, Alberta today, looking out the window, I'm sure, at a spectacular site, which, you know, those mountains that surround Banff are the Rockies, obviously, but those particular views in Banff are something to behold, ones you never forget.

Bruce is in Ottawa. I'm in Stratford, Ontario. You're listening on SiriusXM, Channel 167 Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform, or you're watching us on our YouTube channel, whatever platform you're enjoying or listening or learning or mad at. We welcome you to this conversation. Okay, I want to bring up,

because this trust issue keeps bubbling along, and Bruce said at one point, we're looking for transparency on so many different levels, and whether it's the media being transparent about the way they do their job, how they get their information who they're talking to who they're not talking to in trying to transmit the story that's one thing but a very interesting thing happened yesterday and i want to give a bit of a shout out i didn't hear it personally but I've been reading about it today. Dylan Robertson, he's a reporter with Canadian Press, with CP. He was at the technical briefing yesterday that was given by Global Affairs Canada.

The ministers had spoken earlier in the day, and this was a technical briefing by officials on how Canada was trying to get people out of Israel, their flights from Tel Aviv to Athens and then onwards home. Now, technical briefings are common. They happen around lots of different things. And, you know, public servants usually give those briefings and their names, they're asked to be and the media agrees that they're going to be anonymous. They don't give their names.

So this was happening yesterday. We're talking about basically airline reservations, right? A little more complicated perhaps than that, but that's basically what it was about. So Dylan Robertson gets up in the technical briefing and pushes back against the sudden anonymity the Department of Global Affairs Canada granted itself. And he said, this is the way he's reported to have said, I just want to urge your department to stop with the business of unattributed sources. You're all people who testified publicly just yesterday. It's quite ridiculous.

And this contributes to mistrust and misinformation. So I thought that was pretty good on his part. He didn't get them to shed their anonymity, but he made the point because it goes back to this issue of trust, mistrust, and misinformation that ends up out there. What do we think about that? Can you just add a little bit more, Peter? What exactly was he uncomfortable with that they were? I think that, uh, uh,

what he means is when you go through a technical briefing, the rule is, uh, and I'm going to use the language here, uh, not for attribution except to senior government officials. So you don't actually name the people. You know who they are. But when you report, you're always using senior government officials, senior government officials. And I'm guessing that his point was that not being able to put a name

to something as innocuous as the logistics of how we are getting people out of Tel Aviv, kind of threw a layer of opacity on the issue that was unnecessary. And probably went some way to say someone is pulling strings under the guise of anonymity and the media is playing along with it. But Peter, if I have not been accurate, go right ahead. No, no, no. No, no, no. I think that's exactly what happened. Well, I can think of some reasons on the other side. I mean, I'm not in favor of opacity for opacity's sake, but I do think that if we expect people to work in the public sector, first of all, it's not an easy choice for a lot of people to make for different reasons.

But let's set that issue aside. It is a more difficult choice if you expect people to have their names associated with the work that they're doing in their jobs to try to solve a crisis situation, especially if we know, as we've just been talking about, that the nature of how people respond to these things is they want to find out who's making the wrong decision that they can be harshly critical of. Now, I'm not trying to say that people who are making bad decisions should find opacity as a solution to that problem. But if the question is, is there any scenario where it would make sense not to require these officials' names to be used in news coverage, I can think that that could make sense, yeah. I would have two points on this.

The first is that I believe that if we went down that road, it wouldn't add very much except open up background briefings, which are basically about providing background to gotcha journalism, a bit of a sentence taking out of context. Because at that point, you would be using also clips, images, and I suspect it would lead to the disappearance or a reduction in the already not numerous enough background briefings. No question.

For instance, the Supreme Court of Canada, to take a different example, has developed a practice to have people from the court, not the justices, obviously, come and explain the rulings that they are about to give. Why? Because we would get those rulings at 9.45, and many of us, I work for radio, would have to be on air to say what the court had said at 10 o'clock. That's 15 minutes. The possibility of errors in reporting on the judgment became so great that the best thing to do was to

have people kind of explain in layman's terms, this is what you're going to be reading. I believe the public is better served by that practice. I don't for a second believe that the people who are giving that briefing want to be quoted as to their take of a ruling that has been written by their bosses, the justices. But the other point on this is, and Peter, I'm going to use you as an example. When you covered the Meech Lake Accord negotiations, you opened the National night after night, enough nights to give me nightmares with the words CBC News has learned. And if you had to say where you got that information,

you would not have been able to open the National by saying CBC News has learned because the only reason the people who talk to you talk to you was because they were sources and you were going to protect them with your journalistic life. Now, if you also are saying that to build trust in the media, we should stop having conversations with people who actually shed light on the things that we try to explain to the public, I'm bailing out of this ship because the reason we cover Parliament Hill is actually to have relationships and get an understanding

of why things are happening to then explain it. And the way that you get the why is not by shoving a microphone or a camera in the face of someone and saying, give me your name and your badge number. But that's just me. Okay. Peter. Okay. Peter.

Absolutely. I have no problem responding to both of you because I don't agree with either one of you. And I think you took what I said way over the top. We're talking about a number of public servants who came out to give explanations for their ministers who had just spoken. Everybody knows they're the ones who are accountable for the decisions the Canadian government is making.

And then they put over to the officials, give the details. Not be accountable, not explain why we're doing certain things, just explain where the planes are coming from you know where they're going let me let me finish um so that's what they were doing i listen you don't need to tell me that there's lots of things that uh you deal with uh public servants and politicians on a not for attribution basis uh that is part of the way we do our work and how we get information, you know, solid information and advancing stories.

This is a backgrounder, an explanation on stuff. It happens all the time. It happens around budgets. You know, they bring out the public servants that sit in the lockup and explain stuff. I get it. I understand all that. The issue here was, has it now gone too far to the point where this cloak of anonymity is draped over far too much of the process?

That's all he was raising. And he was connecting it to this issue that clearly he feels and many journalists feel, and we've all talked about it, about whether it's mistrust or misinformation and disinformation that the public feels. You're getting sucked in. You don't even tell us who told you that. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

That kind of thing. And so I think that's all our friend from cp was trying to raise he was not saying throw out all anonymity throw out all and all no but that argument a little bit um the value of knowing the name of an associate deputy minister or assistant deputy minister whose job it was to take the direction of the politicians and to put it into practice i don't know that i'm better informed or more trusting if i know the name of that person i do wonder especially on issues as controversial as this what the impact might be on the life of that individual to have their name uh kind of put out in public and have people kind

of assume that they have a level of responsibility for the choice that they don't have, in fact. So I'm kind of looking for the upside in knowing the name of these people, and I can see the downside. So that's really where I'm coming from on it. Chantal, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to jump in there. No, it's okay. I'm totally with Bruce on this. Not only do I not see the upside, but I believe that this is like putting a Band-Aid on a scrap on a knee when actually your arm is bleeding. The reason why people say you're saying all these things

and you won't even tell us is not about the logistics of how a plane is going to be leaving Tel Aviv for Athens. But the odds that by putting names, you will suddenly be telling people, well, if the plane doesn't land on time, it's this guy's fault is really high. It's not journalists who are going to briefings who are disinforming. It's people who are using any names and any information that they see to twist it into something that it is not. And I just don't see this as a remedy to transparency. What if the senior government official that's speaking on behalf of the ministers

is the minister's chief of staff or policy advisor or whatever. Yeah, but that's not who gives those briefings, as you well know. No, no, no. These technical briefings are technical. Okay. Right? I get it. briefings that are given at different times on different issues by whether it's a public servant or or whether it's a one of the staff of the prime minister's office or a minister's office

should there be a difference then i have not attended very many briefings given by chiefs of staffs of ministers staff or staffers but political staffers by and large, if they're talking to you, they're not talking not for attribution at the briefing. They're talking to you off the record. Off the record or for background, but the... Yeah, but I've also been at ones where they stand at the microphone, whether it's a G7s or what have you. And, you know, it happens.

I mean, basically what you're saying. I think we're kind of into the weeds of the nuts and bolts of factual reporting rather than into the malaise over so many times you read this line, sources told whatever media uh and we cannot tell you who they are because they were not allowed to talk about whatever issue this has become a common sentence it has it never refers to yes but those are not the people that you would be naming as the result of a briefing they are the people that you were not naming back when CDC had learned stuff. Okay, well, we'll agree to disagree.

I'm not shifting my opinion on this because I think it's an issue out there for consumers of news. They want to know where it's coming from. They want to be what Bruce talked about earlier about transparency. And they want more transparency on the part of everybody. You're going to keep going on this, then it's not going to be the last word. I got the last word. I always get the last word. And we're not going to change our minds. None of us are going to change our minds.

Okay. Well, glad we settled that. And I'm feeling very good about how it was settled. So let's move on to a different topic, the NDP. We'll get to it right after our last break. Okay, we're back for our final segment of Good Talk for this week. Chantel's in Banff, Alberta. Bruce is in Ottawa. I'm in Stratford, Ontario. Final segment is about the NDP. They're having their convention this week.

This is, you know, all the parties have had some form of convention or caucus in the last few weeks, and it's been interesting watching how they put their strategy together. So Jagmeet Singh arrives. I'm sure he wished it hadn't been this week, as it turns out, because of the situation in the Middle East, which is always an issue at NDP conventions and get-togethers because there can be a real difference of opinion on this, and it's exhibited at the NDP.

So he's got that. He's got a leadership review vote coming up this weekend. What is, and the constant discussion about whether or not they should have done this deal with the Liberals to keep the Liberals in power until the next election, if it lasts that long, the agreement that is. What is your take? Because I have no opinion on this, one way or the other. Really?

I have nothing to say about this. Because having won one argument, why would I want to get into another one? Chantelle, what are you looking for this weekend on this subject? I'm convinced that the people around Chuknitsing when they saw the events last weekend were, like everyone else, horrified.

But then consternation set in as to the timing of the convention. What are the odds that you are going to have your first face-to-face convention in years? And it's going to happen in the middle of this crisis. For people who aren't familiar with NDP conventions, the Palestine issue is to the NDP, with the abortion rights issue is to the conservatives. A really divisive issue where people think we have strong views about whether you should name public officials. It's nothing compared to the strong views on opposite sides within the NDP on Palestine and Israel. And it goes the full range of the stuff that we saw this week.

Indeed, some of the comments on social media that what happened last weekend was a positive sign of resistance. He's since tried to reshape his words, but the impact was strong. for the writing where the meeting is taking place in Hamilton, who is an NDP MPP, who has been staring down her leader over a tweet that went along the lines of whatever happened there, shows what happens when settlers force people to live in the way that people live in Gaza, etc. So clearly there will be a discussion there, and clearly there is a risk for the NDP and the tenor of the discussion. And the clips, it's always the clips that kill you.

If you're the NDP, that's not what you want the convention to reflect. But sadly for the NDP, this is the top of the news story, and anything related to it, there's a peg there. And the main peg from the convention risks being its divisions over the Palestine issues and whatever is set on the floor of the convention. I'm sure organizers of the convention understand that well. But the other issue, which has nothing to do with Israel, has to do with the supply agreement that the NDP struck with the liberals to keep them in place, possibly up to 2025, in exchange for some concessions.

This is the first time that NDP members get to talk about this at the convention since the deal was struck. There are and there will be resolutions that basically call on the NDP members get to talk about this at the convention since the deal was struck. There are and there will be resolutions that basically call on the NDP to become more threatening, put an ultimatum to the government, i.e. if we don't get the pharmacare bill by the end of the year and the way we want it, we want the NDP to pull the plug on this parliament and trigger an election. I'm guessing that what Jagmeet Singh and his advisors are hoping is that he manages to come out seen not a single poll, as far as I know, that shows that the NDP would do better or much better in an election anytime soon than it has in the past one. And its position of influence, which is great for a fourth party,

is going to be in the balance of the next election. There is no way that the NDP in the face of a majority government, especially conservative, will ever have an ounce of the influence that it currently has under this agreement with the Liberals. So, two issues on which I think by and large Mr. Singh is playing, is using a shield rather than a sword to try to emerge from the convention in good shape. Okay, you got a couple of minutes there, Bruce. I think the NDP is either at a moment where there is a bigger existential risk than I've seen for that party in a long time, or a once-in-a-generation opportunity

to leapfrog the Liberals in terms of seats in the House after the next election. And the reason why I think the existential risk exists is that a lot of voters who would have generally been more open to or supportive of the NDP have started looking at that party now as not really speaking for them, not really talking about the priorities that they care about. Maybe it's a function of looking like the most woke of the woke politicians or the people who want you to hear that they have the best values on offer as opposed to the best practical ideas. And we talked about this before. The mood of voters is, I don't want to change my values, but I don't just want to talk about values. I want to talk about practical ideas. And the NDP,

when it talks about practical ideas, sometimes sounds like it takes the most idealistic or ideological version of an issue and turns that into an idea. And I think that's out be allied with the NDP, moving more towards the conservatives, moving over the consideration of the liberals. And I think this is a big part of Pierre Pauliev's strategy. He's talking to working people, especially working men. And by working, I really mean kind of blue collar or unionized voters. And he's talking about very practical issues.

He's not inviting them to join his side of the culture war. He's talking about cheaper houses, cheaper food, more doctors, that kind of thing, less government and maybe lower taxes too. So I think that's the, that's the risk that the NDP has, is how do they manage not just this current issue and the fracture that you see in the NDP on how to deal with Israel, but how do they deal with that drift of those progressive voters?

The opportunity, I think, lies, and I see you signaling that I have very little time left, so I'll be really quick about this. Very little. Lies in the fact that even though Jagmeet Singh is not as popular as he was a few years ago, he's not really disliked that much, but he does have an advantage over Justin Trudeau. Justin Trudeau is not hated by very many people, but Justin Trudeau finds a much bigger number of people saying,

I'm tired of him. And I'll put some research together on that next week. But that's a point of clarification, which makes Jagmeet Singh have a little bit of opportunity there relative to the liberals that wouldn't have existed in the last two elections. OK. And just as one quick point of clarification, was that for attribution or not for attribution, what you just said there? You see my face? Here it is. Can you see how we can't give up on this? We won that one, though. It's over. I'm not going there.

Okay, listen, great conversation. Parts of it were outstanding. Parts of it. Two thirds. Yeah. We'll talk again in a week's time. Have a great weekend, Chantel and Bruce. You too. Okay.

And thank you for listening. We'll talk to you all again on Monday. Bye. Bye. Bye.