The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Good Talk - Teaching Politicians to Be Politicians

Episode Date: May 19, 2023

Thursday night was a big night in Alberta politics.  It was debate night in the province's election campaign.  But it was also the same day that Alberta's Ethics Commissioner came down with a report on the behaviour of Premier Danielle Smith.  There was a lesson in her report that could and maybe should affect all politicians in Canada.  Bruce and Chantal have their thoughts on that.  Also some good talk on Pierre Poilievre's decision not to meet with special rapporteur David Johnston. 

Are you ready for Good Talk? And hello there, Peter Vansbridge here. The end of yet another week. The end of the week means Chantal Hébert in Montreal, Bruce Anderson in Ottawa. This is Good Talk, and we've got a number of things to talk about today, so let's get right at it. Last night was the debate night in Alberta, with the Alberta election now just about 10 days away. And often, you know, there's a lot of hype around debate nights. You build it up, this could be a turning point hype around debate nights. You build it up. This is going to be, could be a turning point, et cetera, et cetera. Most of the analysis in Alberta would suggest that it was

basically a draw, as these things often tend to be, or there was a slight edge to the UCP leader, Danielle Smith, that if Rachel Notley was to perform a knockout, you know, the big defining moment of an election debate night. That didn't happen. But it's the people who decide these things. I'm going to get the take from Chantel and Bruce now. I mean, the first take I had was looking at the evening, and it looked like they were having this debate in a shoebox.

I mean, debate nights used to be a big deal. You know, they would look really, you know, quite special, the big studio, lots of stuff in it. This was a very small studio with a lot of people crammed into it, you know, three questioners, two moderators, and just two leaders. And the two leaders part of it all was interesting, that they decided that just two, the main two. Chantal, take it away. What did you make? Okay, yes, two leaders was interesting that they decided to just two, the main two. Chantal, take it away.

What did you make? Okay. Yes, two leaders was interesting. And the way I think they came to that decision is they invited leaders who had seats in the legislature. So forget about this being a precedent for inviting just, for instance, Pierre Poiliev and Justin Trudeau. It would be really hard to justify in a parliamentary system that you would be able to say we just want the two frontrunners. Although that would be interesting for a debate commission to find a way to do more than the usual five or six minutes

one-on-one between each of the leaders. But I admit that if I were around the table of a debates commission, I would have to say it's easier said than done for all of the negotiations that take place for having leaders on. I think it's the first time in this country that two women are having a debate one-on-one for who will become premier. I'm not saying there were not, obviously there were women on debate sets, Pauline Marois, Kathleen Nguyen, also in Alberta.

But in this case, we know for sure that the next premier of Alberta is going to be a woman. It always pays off to go into a debate being underestimated. Think of Justin Trudeau in 2015. Who was it? Which conservative organizer who said if he shows up, I don't know what his pants on or his shoelace tied, he's going to do fine. Well, I think the underestimated one was Danielle Smith for cause of her own many

repeated gaffes, mistakes, statements. She went in there under the shadow of an ethics commissioner report that found her guilty of ethical breaches because she had tried to interfere in the justice process. And that's just one of the many things that have led up to the debate. It pays off if you can hold your own to walk in there where everyone expects you to once again put your foot in your mouth.

I don't think that happened. I think her talk radio experience last night really paid off. I found Rachel Notley to be solid, but more nervous for the bits that I watched than I expected. And also having to dance a lot more over her record as premier than one would expect from the outside. And I think there were moments when she looked on the defensive when there was an expectation that she would kind of clean up the shop and wipe, you know, you would wipe Premier Smith off the floor after the debate.

I don't think it necessarily changed the course of the election, but if the NDP desperately needed a decisive win last night, that did not happen. Corey Tonight was the name you were looking for, the former Harper. I was trying not to embarrass him. Well, he lives with that one on a record, which has a lot of pluses on the other side.

You know, he obviously is the campaign manager, was for Doug Ford in the last provincial election in Ontario. But that one is one of those phrases that will live in infamy from 2015. Bruce, your take on last night. Yeah, just a quick point. First, Pete, on a fake news item, I think you said Bruce Anderson is in Ottawa. I think you meant to say Bruce Anderson of Ottawa, but I'm not in Ottawa. You are quite correct. He is of Ottawa, currently in Scotland. is in ottawa i think you meant to say bruce anderson of ottawa but i'm not in ottawa you are quite correct he is of ottawa uh currently in scotland but nevertheless was able to monitor this

but nevertheless able to monitor the debate as you know our worldwide communication system now is frankly quite astounding you can do almost anything yeah i was able to pay pretty close attention to uh what was going on. I agree with a lot of what Chantal said. I love the idea of a two leader debate and I agree that it's difficult to figure out how to do it, but boy, as a contrast with the the road blocking and the sense of a traffic jam that is, has become almost a norm in our national level of political debates.

It was quite quite refreshing to see how something like that can really sharpen the focus and give people a little bit more of a sense of who these people are and what they represent. Chantal used the term expectations. I think that's always a kind of a crucial factor here. I think what expectations do is it helps determine what kind of pressure each individual is going to be arriving at the debate with. And I think what expectations do is that it helps determine what kind of pressure each individual is going to be arriving at the debate with. And I think from my standpoint, I sense that Rachel Notley must have been coached to understand that she really needed to overperform almost, become really, really make it a success story. And that seemed to generate a level of nervousness.

I wouldn't overstate that. I thought she was solid. I agree with Chantal. I thought that her command of the issues is very strong. Her kind of tone and her description of what an NDP government would be is kind of stabilizing and thoughtful and reassuring. It's not really what the NDP brand tends to look like or sound like in many other jurisdictions or political contests, but I think it was right for her. And she delivered that idea, I think, quite well. On the other hand, but I think that the pressure was on her to find some forward momentum that maybe the polls are suggesting she doesn't have right now and still needs in order to win. And so maybe that created a little bit more of

anxiety as she went through. I think for Daniel Smith, she was probably brief to understand that if she didn't have a solidifying, a sense of kind of command and control presence in the debate, that she was in danger of leaking oil and losing the election. And she came with that in mind and I think delivered on that particular pressure, which I agree with Chantal has something to do with what she spent much of her professional life doing. And I do think that there's a difference between the skill involved in talking fluently

about issues and deciding well about government. And as long as Daniel Smith is in a mode where she can talk fluently about issues, she's going to do relatively well in the minds of most people who don't have the immediate ability to fact check her, to stress test what she's saying, to compare and contrast with things that she's said before, all of which Rachel Notley tried to do. A last point for me is that I felt like Rachel Notley was most effective when she characterized the risks for Albertans in education and health care. And I still think that that might be the thing

that if she's going to win the election becomes the most important substantive set of issues. For Danielle Smith, I still think that she likes to make the case for the UCP essentially as the champion of the right side of the culture war, if you like, and a little bit more of a champion for the oil and gas sector. And so those two competing visions, health and education, culture and oil, might be the kind of the dividing line that ultimately settles how this contest is going to work out. The landscape going into last night pretty well had, you know, if there was an agreement upon

those who were not only covering the election, but doing research on voters' intentions. The landscape going in was rural Alberta is very much for the UCP. Edmonton, very much for the NDP. Calgary, the main battleground. It's been that way since before the election was called. Throughout the election, did anything change last night for those in Calgary, the main battleground. It's been that way since before the election was called, throughout the election. Did anything change last night for those in Calgary?

You've heard both Chantal and Bruce talk about the main points that came up, and you see how it kind of fits in. It's been, you know, it's a virtual tie in Calgary, or at least has been in some of the polling data, one side going up a little bit at times, the other side bouncing back and going up there that could be the battleground actually for the next couple of days chantelle mentioned something in her preamble there that i think is important the debate last night was set against the background

of the same day the ethics commissioner i don't know how this worked out, that this came out on the same day, but it was an ethics commissioner's report into a conversation that the premier had had with her, was it the attorney general? I think. Yes. About a situation in Alberta that was deemed to be inappropriate. And the ethics commissioner agreed with that.

So this was not a good day for the premier on that front. But here's what I found most interesting in that ethics commissioner's report. And this could apply, one assumes, to anywhere in the country. It had nothing to do with the issue at hand. It instead had this conclusion that all new members of a legislative assembly, in this case the Alberta one, attend mandatory training upon election about the structure of Canadian government and the roles of the three branches of government. Now I found this quite remarkable that this is like after an election you're kind of told what your role is supposed to be.

And I'm not sure what that says about, you know, the struggle that we've often talked about on this program of getting people into politics. If the ethics commissioner, at least for one, is saying, you know, they're coming in, they really don't know how the system works at all. And there should be some kind of mandatory training. What I found most interesting is this was a report into a premier who had previous experience. And they still, the ethics commissioner still felt that was important to say. What do you think about that? Are you as surprised, may not be the right word, but are you as interested in that as everything else that came out yesterday? Chantal? Well, let's not be hypocritical. We are more interested in where the debate leads when people go to vote in Alberta on vote 29. We are horse

race fans, even if we also are interested in the quality of the horses and what goes into feeding them. And what goes into feeding them, I found covering politics is that many, many, many politicians who are newly elected come to politics with very little understanding of the interaction between government and the courts. I don't mean those who are lawyers. And for a long time, we had a lot of lawyers in politics. And of course, they understand the dynamics. But a lot of people come into government thinking that governments can basically tell the justice system what to do, that they don't understand the kind of balancing role that one has versus the other,

which is really important. Many voters share that absence of understanding the dynamics. And what I find interesting is that, yes, I see the ethics commissioner's note. I wish I could say that every politician who seems to bypass that reality is doing it out of ignorance or innocence. But sadly, there is a school of politics in this country where it pays off to not tell people about that, to walk all over the lines between the rule of law and legislative duties, because it helps to get votes. So you go in a campaign and you are promising to do something that you know full well you will not be able to do unless you circumvent a charter of rights and freedom by using the notwithstanding clause or by putting in legislation that will not stand up in court. And that happens in almost every government in this country. So, yes, training politicians would probably help. I'm not surprised that Daniel Smith was in part ignorant of those realities.

But yes, it would also help if politicians decided to be more educational than feeding ignorance in the way that they present legislation. You'll notice that I've steered

clear of offering examples. I figure at some point you may be asking, so I'll leave Bruce to come up with examples. Okay, there you go, Bruce. Well, look, I think there is a question about the lack of knowledge of people entering politics about the various aspects of how government functions and what the norms are and what what behaviors are appropriate and not. But yes, so there's lack of interest or lack of knowledge, which can be attenuated by training and counseling and, you know, whatever. But I'm more concerned about the lack of interest that some people show in those norms. And I think that, you know, if we look at the question of Danielle Smith on this and the report of the ethics commissioner there,

which I thought was on the whole a little bit gentle towards the premier, perhaps. I mean, she was able to kind of claim that it was a bit of a victory because there had been no discovery of the specific emails that the CBC had reported existed. But that was one aspect of the Ethics Commissioner's report, which was hardly overall an exoneration of the behavior of Premier Smith.

It was instead more of a critique of her behavior. But it was styled in a way that didn't sound overly inflammatory. And I'm not sure that the timing had anything to do with the debate, but it was certainly something that didn't add to the problems that Daniel Smith had in the hours leading up to the debate, even though one could have surmised that it could have. So I think that you can solve lack of knowledge a little bit, but you can't solve lack of interest. And, you know, Donald Trump kind of showed what the world looks like when people get elected, who both don't know what the rules governing their behavior should be,

but also don't really care that they believe that their job is to be the leader. And that they refer to the judges as their judges and the generals as their generals and the understanding that they want to have and want other people to believe is true is that they sit on top of government and can command with their own personal agenda exactly what they want government to do. And Chantal is also right that that only works when there are too many people among the citizenry who don't know what those norms are or don't care enough about what they are

so that there's no political consequence for those who decide to run roughshod over them. Well, you know, I find it interesting because I got a feeling that there was a little bit of a warning shot there from the ethics commissioner that we are, that we're reaching a critical point in how you just described, Bruce, the situation out there among the electorate at large, the population at large, and how they regard politicians? Well, I think there's too many people that are sort of tempted by the rhetoric that they hear, the social media content that they consume,

to believe that, you know, if a politician who is your brand of politician says something that sounds like a simple answer that can solve a problem that you feel is a priority, you don't want to be bothered with the challenges that the system kind of puts in place in order to stress test that kind of politics, that sort of, uh, uh, high rhetoric, low, uh, thoughtfulness aspect of politics. And, um, we do, I think we are in a, I don't know if we're at some sort of breaking point. I think we've been kind of on a downward glide path for a long time. And, uh, so it's a, it's a good conversation to have. We should have it more. Any last thoughts on it, Chantal, before we move on? I think I agree on setting aside this notion that we are going to train politicians.

I mean, it's always useful to provide elected people with information they might not have come across in their daily work before entering politics. So that's important. But increasingly, we are hearing proposals. It's not new, but there are more of those. And you've seen it in the use of the notwithstanding clause in the Charter of Rights and Freedom, proposals that would require suspending the application of the Charter or that require suspending fundamental liberties to be applied. And the fear is that as we go down that slope, it becomes the new normal. Well, you know, you want to have just this week a conservative proposal by Pierre

Poilievre to deny bail for anyone who is accused of a second violent offense. That basically says we're going to throw out the presumption of innocence. We are going to jail you without even giving you a hearing. There is a fair chance that that's not charter proof, just because Pierre Poilievre says it's charter compliant does not make it so. But too often, it's, you know, you go for the bright, shiny policy. We're not going to let these people out without mentioning one that judges already have discretion on this that 70 percent of the people in jail in Ontario are awaiting trial so they were denied bail and that the presumption of innocence is a fundamental pillar of our justice system which all begs the question would Pierre Pierre Poiliev use the notwithstanding

clause to have legislation like this and ensure that it survives a charter challenge? No answer. I think that it is incumbent on political leaders who have easy solutions to propose to walk the walk of their talk. Sure, tell me. I'm going to suspend civil liberties and I'm going to jail you. But tell me. Stephen Harper, when he came to government, had promised to revisit the issue of same-sex marriage and have a vote in the House of Commons to see if it should be reversed. Well, Mr. Harper would never answer really the question of what if the vote is yes?

Where do you go from there? Because the only way you can reverse same-sex marriage is to suspend the civil liberties, the Charter of Rights of LGBTQ people. And his answer was, well, the judges will look at this, they will comply with the political will of the majority. That's not how the system works. He was saved by a no vote. But you, in the process over the past decade, we have found this impression that there's an exit, a get out of jail, charter jail card that can routinely be used without your rights, just those of others that you don't like being taken away. And that, I find, is a dangerous path.

And clearly one of those parts that needs to be, that some people need to be better educated, if you will, on how the system works. Just one last point before I take a break and come back on a different topic. Chantal earlier was using a number of comparisons with horses in terms of the election process. I didn't mean to insult horses. We do sell horse meat in this province. That's a French thing. Well, let me just tell you that one of the first election nights where I hosted, I think it was 84, we were in the election night studio for a couple of days beforehand rehearsing possible outcomes and how we were going to deal with certain situations.

And because it was my first time, they were watching closely how I did all this. And at one point, my boss, the big Supremo, Vince Carlin, came down onto the rehearsal studio floor and said, Peter, you've got to stop referring to this as a horse race and how close it is. These aren't horses we're talking about. These are people. These are people who've put forward their lives in front of their fellow citizens to ensure that their vision of the future works out. They're not horses, they're people, so stop calling them horses. I've never forgotten that. And I'm sure he'd jump through the speaker if he was listening today

when he heard all the comparisons that even I didn't make about politicians and horses. So there you go. And no rebuttal from Chantal on that. She's going to just remain silent. That was a stretch. It was a stretch. But no neighing. Let's move on.

We'll take a quick break, and we'll be back. Talk about shoehorning an old story into a conversation. They love the old stories. They love the old stories. So he's got it done. We're okay for the next half hour. Okay. Back in a moment.

And welcome back. You're listening to The Bridge, the Friday edition, which of course is a good talk with Chantelle Hebert in Montreal and Bruce Anderson in Scotland. You're listening on SiriusXM, Channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform, or you're watching us on our YouTube channel. So next week, when we get into next week,

the talk is going to be, you know, I assume it'll be about a lot of different things, but it will definitely be at some point a lot of talk about the special rapporteur's report, because that is to come out next week, David Johnson, the former governor general. Interesting point, as this past week concluded, was that Pierre Polyev let it be known that under no circumstances was he talking to David Johnston. He'd had the opportunity. He'd said no, he wouldn't do it. So the leader of the opposition, who's been highly critical of the government's handling of the China affair, if that's what you want to call it, and has also been critical of the special

rapporteur appointment. He just wants to get on with the public inquiry. Right thing, wrong thing, good thing, bad thing, that the leader of the opposition says, I'm not talking to the person who's going to recommend this decision. Bruce, you start. Well, I think on the substance of it, it was a terrible choice. i guess the question in my mind is will he pay a political price for making such a difficult such a bad choice and i say it's a terrible choice because um you know there is a government and the government was challenged by the opposition party and lots of other outside stakeholders to get more serious about what was happening with respect to Chinese interference and to get to the bottom of some facts that were leaking out.

And those were all useful pressures and important for the government to respond to. When our system works like that, I do think there is a measure of responsibility for the opposition parties to contribute to the next step. I understand that what he's trying to do is to create enough distance from anything that the government does, that he never has to sound like he's in cahoots with them or aligned with them or agreeing with anything that they do. But that's a rather, it's a rather childish kind of approach to the function of government. And it's the kind of thing that if people were paying attention to it, they might judge him not terribly serious in terms of the manner in which he wants to have problems that he raises dealt with by the institutions that have some responsibility

to solve them. So I can't credit the decision. I can also understand that he may feel and may be advised by his political advisors that he won't pay any particular price for taking this position and that he might pay a price with some of his voter pool if he looked like he was working on a solution to this with Justin Trudeau. In the end, it might have been a difficult choice to make, but I think he chose poorly. And I hope people do pay attention to that because I do think it is a bit of a mark of character. He has had a habit of late of ferociously grazing on one issue after another and not really having a lot of stick-to-itiveness. I don't know if we're going to go back to the jail or bail question that Chantal talked about, but that pattern of behavior is designed to get clicks and money, make people irate,

and then move on to something else without necessarily really sticking with the path towards a solution. That's often an opposition strategy, though, right? It's not just a Pierre Pauliev strategy. Opposition parties will do that to try, you know, litter the ground with all kinds of issues that they can stake out in certain areas. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so within reason, I don't think it's necessarily bad political strategy. I think the question I have is on something like this, this notion that we're being infiltrated or spied upon or interfered with, and it's a national issue requiring a public inquiry, but you're not even going to meet with the person whose job it is to decide if a public inquiry is necessary or set the terms and parameters for it.

It feels like to me that there's at least a minimum requirement for the opposition to play a constructive role in that conversation and choosing not to fall short of that minimum requirement, in my opinion. Chantal. I don't believe that Le Quebecois leader Yves-François Blanchet or NDP leader Jacques Mad saying lost political points this week by having it known that they did meet with Mr. Johnston and that they had reiterated in person their call for or their sense that there was need for a public inquiry. And I've seen no evidence that anyone is saying that makes them complicit of the prime minister. I think it shores up the Lux call for not only a public inquiry, but for parliament to have a say in the choice of whoever leads the next step in this file, as opposed to saying, well, anybody that you suggest is unacceptable to us,

including the former governor general appointed by Stephen Harper. I also don't think that it hurts. And I see no evidence in the polls saying that I'm not a pollster. Someone else is on this panel. But I don't see any evidence that the NDP is suffering from supporting some of the government's agenda in the polls. And I certainly see no evidence that the bloc this week by voting with the liberals on gun control or voting with the liberals on an issue as sensitive as language legislation is losing points anywhere. On the contrary, I think people understand the role of opposition, but they also want a constructive opposition. And on the part of someone who wants to be prime minister, a sense that this prime minister would be a prime minister for all. That does matter to how much you want to absolutely go vote to stop someone from becoming prime minister, or whether you're willing to give it a pass because it's time for a change.

And these episodes do not cause votes to Mr. Bolliev within his base, but I suspect that they continue to build this impression that this is a government that will not be governing for all, that it is excluding or willing to exclude a large section of society. The other point is, this is not recent. There seems to be a tendency on the part of Pierre Poiliev to be really, really good at saying terrible things about people when he doesn't have to meet them face to face. And I go back to the decision to pay money out of his leadership campaign to avoid having a debate with his leadership rivals last summer. It's easy. And you must have noticed that when we do virtual panels like this one, it's easier to pick always happened online when we weren't in the same room. Because once you're in the same room, you tend to want to find common ground. You're all sitting around the same table. You're in the same place. I don't think Pierre Poiliev is very good

at finding common ground in any setting, but he is avoiding those face-to-face meetings with people about which he says otherwise horrible things. That's a really interesting comparison. Can we just have a moment just to reflect on just how, like if there was a Canadian championship for using body language to make a gentle point of disagreement, that one of the members of this panel would be the Canadian champion, the reigning Canadian champion. I can just remember all of those kind of like, these movements. You knew, oh, this is going to go badly the next few minutes.

It's not going to be fun. At least she could telegraph it so you could understand it was coming. But I thought that was a really good comparison. You can't always see them. Yeah. Which I tell makes a really good comparison. You can't always see them. Yeah. Chantel makes a really good point, Peter. I agree with you, Chantel. And I think it's a bit of a sign of the times.

It's kind of the extension of the fact that people on social media will say and can say a lot of more hostile things that they would not say face to face with people. And it is to his disfavor that Pierre Poliev, I think, kind of stretches the envelope in terms of how aggressive he is about his opponents. It is probably to Justin Trudeau's political disfavor now that he does not tend to go that far. I don't want the world to balance itself out by Justin Trudeau becoming like Pierre Pauliev in that sense. I would rather that it go the other way.

And I'm not suggesting for a moment that Pierre Pauliev is the only political actor who's ever done this, or that Justin Trudeau hasn't uttered some fairly hostile arguments against his opponent either. It's a balanced thing. But when we came, just my turn to put in an anecdote. When we came out of the pandemic, Canadians were very polarized. Those who were anti-vaccine, anti-measures were really cemented in that position. And on the other side, there were also really, really strong views. And one of the first things I discovered when I took my first real trip after the pandemic, which was in northern British Columbia, where the views were

decisively mixed about what we'd all gone through. The only lesson I learned from spending 10 days talking with people and having lunches and dinners and encounters is we need to talk to each other. It doesn't work to be in your silo throwing rocks at the other person's silo. And one of the reasons we emerged so polarized from the pandemic is that we couldn't talk to each other. So someone who wants to be prime minister needs to be able to talk to people who don't agree with him without shutting them out, making them sound ridiculed, treating them like they're nobodies, because that is how you, we're not ever going to agree on everything. That's okay. But if you don't talk, you will never get to understand the other's

point of view. And frankly, if you want to counter someone's point of view, it helps to understand where they come from. It makes it easier to kind of turn their arguments around. But this notion that it's okay to just sit in a tower and throw brickbats on everyone that criticizes you, I think is a losing formula over time and very, very bad for the national conversation. The way these things often go is that, you know, and you've heard us say this before, you know, so-and-so is protecting their base.

You know, at some point they'll pivot to go outside of their base. And the question is, when does that pivot take place? When you watch Polyev, it's obviously more than just his base that he's protecting. There's a significant number of people who tend, at this moment in time anyway, to be believing in the arguments he's putting forward. It's somewhere in the low 30% figure. But the way these things tend to unfold is when it starts to look like, in an election campaign, when it starts to look like one party may be winning,

then you start to see the pivot start to take place. One way clearly is the organizers are clearly telling Polyev, this is not the moment. You've seen some hints of pivot in the last while the last few months but not a big pivot so they're clearly saying keep feeding that the

chunk you have I try not to call it the base every time we'll worry about a pivot later may not be till the election campaign but we'll see how it turns out I think there's some great examples there i know i'm going to get you know i'm going to get that that segment of mail part of our base that says chantelle was so right there she was so right you guys you know you you guys are saying what

you're saying but chantelle is right so i guess you know the only solution for us Bruce is well let's kind of sit here base to this right Chantal Nation Chantal Nation that's right yeah right taking a leaf out of Premier Ford's yeah Ford Ford Nation Leaf Nation Habs Nation Euler Nation um okay so anyway Bruce what we have to do in the future is we just sit there and give a few naughties whenever Chantal's talking. That'll be our... Oh, yeah, right, guys. I don't think it's going to work like that,

but I do want to endorse the idea that there is a Chantal nation. Yeah. Very strange. There is. Okay, final break time, and then we come back with another topic. Here's that break. All right, back for our final segment on Good Talk for this week.

Chantel and Bruce are with us. Stellantis is a name that, you know, we haven't talked, I don't think we've talked about it once on this program in the past, but it is a topic of discussion these days because it involves billions of dollars and, you know, thousands, if not tens of thousands of jobs. And Stellantis is a company that's building a huge battery plant in southwestern Ontario near Windsor.

And they seem to have the government, two governments really, Ottawa and Queen's Park, Toronto, over the barrel on this one because those two governments have just supported the new Volkswagen plant in St. Thomas, Ontario, also in southwest Ontario, to the tune of billions of dollars for the good of thousands of jobs. And Stellantis, which is also in the battery building business, is saying, we've got to have the same kind of deal, and we don't right now. So if you don't give us the same kind of deal, we're out of here. We're moving south. We're going to leave the plant we're starting to build, and we're going to go to the U.S. where they'll give us these subsidies.

So what's going to happen here? How is this? Do we assume that they are playing a winning hand here and that some kind of a deal has to be worked out between Ottawa and Queen's Park? Bruce? Well, I don't know the details of this, so I'm only consuming it as a consumer of the news stories about it, to be honest, and trying to interpret it from the standpoint of the things that I've learned over the years

where I've worked with different organizations that have issues like this that come up in their businesses from time to time and people in government who try to figure out how to how to kind of blend those different pressures um so with that large amount of salt what seems to me to be happening is all pretty normal that a company is thinking that these governments want this kind of investment to happen pretty badly, badly enough that maybe there's more money that could be found to offset some of their costs, to improve the rate of return that they would get on their investment. And so they're asking for it.

They're asking for it publicly. And they're asking for it publicly in a way that applies political pressure. Probably that only happens when asking for it quietly hasn't turned out to work. Normally, that's not the first stop, the public threat to leave. It's well into the process. On the federal government side, I'm kind of encouraged that the federal government is, in this instance, because they haven't always taken a firmer line with the Ford government, saying, you've got a pretty big interest in this. We're going to put the ball over on your side of the net to solve it.

And the Ford government is doing what you would expect it to do, which is to say, well, we've already come to the table. We've done our part. The feds have to do, well, we've already we already come to the table. We've done our part. The feds have to do more. So we are where we are. If I had to bet, it will still happen because it seems like the governments and the companies probably originally all wanted it to happen. And I don't really have a sense that the Delta is that insurmountable. So it's probably a negotiation behind the scenes that will solve it if something does it, but I suppose it's also possible that the investment does go away. I just don't think that's likely at this point based on anything I've consumed.

Chantal? Well, first, I guess what you are seeing now in vivid colors is the impact of Joe Biden's massive green subsidies. That is what it means, that if you want to keep what you have in Ontario or to bring something to Canada, you're going to have to compete against mega dollars that no government has in this country. And the best you can hope for is to kind of seed some kind of a green economy and a transition to it and hope that it blooms over the years. But this is a real example of what that means. A deal that was struck before the announcement of those massive subsidies

is unraveling because of this announcement. It's not just us. The same company is strengthening the UK to up the ante or else see it go. It has succeeded in driving a wedge between the two main political players in the saga, Premier Ford and Justin Trudeau. And that's never really good when you go to a union negotiation and two union leaders are fighting in public over what they want from management and who's going to concede what. You kind of think your side is probably so busy scoring points off each other that maybe they're not going to get you the best deal. So that is not good news. What we learned from the episode so far is that the federal government is increasingly under pressure

to demonstrate that its industrial strategy is not a made-for-Ontario strategy, that there are other regions of the country, and that if the... I'm not going to say the biggest share goes to Ontario, because Ontario is the biggest province, so it does get a larger share in those circumstances. I'm not saying a strategy should mean every province gets exactly the same amount versus its population, but there has been a sense that all these announcements have been in Ontario and that the Ontario government has benefited immensely from this strategy and its good relationship with some of the Trudeau ministers. Remember that there are other regions watching this saying, what goes on here?

And are we only developing or transitioning Ontario's economy with federal dollars to the green economy? So I'm like Bruce, I suspect there will probably be a resolution because if there is not then you will have lost one plant over giving billions of dollars to another i.e volkswagen and that i think in any government's book fiscal or political is called a loose loose okay well seeing as you are both in the mode of kind of looking forward and not predicting, but suggesting where you think the outcome may be, let me throw this one at you, not on that subject, but on the one we just talked about before. This time next week, what are we going to be discussing? What's the headline going to be on the special rapporteur's case?

What do you think? What would you assume at this moment will be the headline? I'm assuming that there won't be a recommendation that says, let's just continue to do business as usual. Everything is fine and all this is noise with no substance. I don't think that's happening. I think some kind of process is going to be called for. I'm not sold on the public inquiry thing.

Having seen, for instance, this week, MP Michael Chong go to a parliamentary commission to talk about the threats he'd been exposed to and revealed that he'd met CISIS three times over threats that he felt were coming from China. And then when asked what the nature of those threats were, having seen him decline to give any information about those threats, I'm not criticizing Michael Chong.

I'm saying this is the way a public inquiry stands to go. Every time you think you're going to get some hard facts so that you can assess for yourself how serious something is, it will either go in camera or the person will say, I'm sorry, I can't answer. So I'm hoping that whatever process it is, it in the end gives us an outcome that, you know, judicial review, whatever, that sheds light as opposed to shows us that the magic marker has managed to take out all the good bits

and we are no further ahead. But I'm not in David Johnston's mind. So obviously that is just, you know, suppositions on my part. Nothing that I know from leaks or anything like that. He's not a declared member of Chantel Nation. I did get the order of Canada on his watch, although he's not the one who decides necessarily these things. But the one thing I wanted to add, I do think that whatever we do going forward, a section of it should be devoted to what is happening at CSIS and how does our security apparatus function. And I say that

with some trepidation, because when we looked into the armed forces or the RCMP, we did not like what we found. We didn't. Bruce, you have a minute or two to give your side on this. What's your thinking? I wouldn't be surprised at this point if David Johnson recommends a public inquiry. I don't tend to think that there's been anything that's happened in the intervening weeks that makes me more convinced that a public inquiry would be a really urgent and useful thing. If anything, I feel like the whole question of the Trudeau Foundation has started to look more and more like one of those idiosyncratic things that happen. It becomes a political sideshow, but isn't really that material to the question of Chinese interference. Thing two is I absolutely believe that the government will

need to, in the going forward sense, do more to prevent interference, manage the relationship with CSIS differently than it has been doing, and provide some greater degree of transparency and information to Canadians about the involvement of foreign interests in our democracy, what that needs to look like, what the process is to get from here to there. I'm looking forward to David Johnson coming up with some thoughtful ideas in that space. If I'm right about where he nets out, I'm sure Pierre Pauliev will say this is all a scam. He was a friend of the Trudeau family, so he was never going to look at a public inquiry, and we should all be outraged about that. But if he holds true to form, he'll be mining that for rage for a limited time only. Because I think that the other thing

he will have observed is that I don't think people are as freaked out about this issue as they were four or five weeks ago. I don't, and I think he is loathe to pursue issues where he thinks the level of public ire that he can generate is very – if he thinks the public ire isn't there, he walks away from issues pretty quickly. And this might be one of those that he does that with as well. All I'll say about this whole past few months is if there's one unfortunate part about it, no matter what you believe in terms of the management or mismanagement of how this was handled by CSIS, by the government, by the prime minister, whatever, the unfortunate thing, at least for me, has been that David Johnston's name has been kind of dragged through the mud. This is a guy who has spent his life in public service to the country in a lot of different fashions in education and, you know, in overseeing a number of different parts of the country's life. And it's unfortunate that that's happened to him. Hopefully that will, that will end soon. Okay. We're going to leave it at that. Thank you, Chantel. Thank you, Bruce.

And we'll see you all again. Wait, aren't you going to predict whether there's going to be a public inquiry or not? He always cops out. I side with Chantel Nation. I'm all in on that side. That's what's going to happen. And we'll determine that next week.

Whatever it was that I said. Whatever it was you said. Chantel Nation. Yeah, that's it. Go Leafs go. Chantel Nation too. All right. Take care. Have a great it. Go Leafs go. Bruce Nation too. All right. All right. Well, take care. Have a great weekend. Monday's a holiday.

So we'll be repeating the Moor Butts conversation number eight on Monday. It's a great conversation. Hope you get a chance to listen to it. Thanks for listening. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Talk to you again next week.