The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Good Talk -- The Gloves Come Off

Episode Date: May 6, 2022

If you were looking for a hockey brawl kind of debate amongst those who are competing for the Conservative Party leadership, well then you got what you wanted last night.  Bruce and Chantal have their views on what was accomplished and what was not. Also more on the potential Canadian fallout to a major pending US court decision on abortion.

Are you ready for Good Talk? And of course you're ready. You're ready for Good Talk because it's Friday. I'm Peter Mansbridge in Stratford, Ontario. Chantelle Hebert is in Montreal and Bruce Anderson is in Darmock, Scotland. And we're going to start with an event that happened last night. And we're not talking about the Stanley Cup playoffs, although in some manners, it kind of resembled it. This year's hockey playoffs have been rough and tumble in a lot of the games. There have been, I think I've seen more fights than I saw throughout the regular season. Well, there was a fight on stage, a fight of a verbal nature, on stage last night at the first of the conservative leadership debates. Not an official debate.

I don't know what was unofficial about it. It was that they had all but one of the candidates on stage. But they were really going at it. And I want to try and understand what we think that says about the race. Because usually in these races, there's somebody who's described as a front runner. And Pierre Palliev seems to have been handed that position by most analysts. And usually when there's a front runner, that front runner is very careful in a debate. They're not trying to, you know, they're prepared to be attacked.

They're prepared to defend themselves. But they don't usually go on the attack. Well, Polyev certainly was not held back last night. He was going on the attack, mainly against Sean Charest, but not exclusively. And the other candidates were certainly coming after him and coming after charret it was unlike well it was you know we've all seen a lot of leadership debates and sometimes they get a little edgy

but this was this went beyond edginess they they were calling each other real bad names. Liar, criminal. It was pretty edgy stuff. So what does that say about where we are in the race? The race which has just started. Chantal, why don't you start? Well, it may have just started, but it will actually be close to an end in about a month when the membership sales closed in early June, June 3rd. After that, whoever is going to vote in just to be a tourist and to do window shopping over the few months between the moment you are a member eligible to vote and September 10 when you

actually vote. I guess the first conclusion from last night, I have a couple, but I'm not going to go in winner and losers, although I do think that the Conservative Party did not do itself a lot of good last night. That booing candidates who argued that the blockade, the truckers' blockade was not a cause or a hill to die on, but was something that went against the law, sends kind of a weird signal. Candidates who are fighting with each other

as to who brought the most donuts to the truckers who held Parliament Hill hostage and who came to Ottawa under a manifesto that involved overturning the government. Whether you take it seriously or not, that was the aim. So I don't think we got last night the best image of the Conservative Party. I also don't think we will ever see Jean Chagrin and Pierre Poilievre

sitting in the same caucus room. It is impossible to imagine one serving under the other. After all that was said, that has profound consequences for party unity. To lose the group that supports Jean Chagall, and it is a significant group, especially in markets where the conservatives are weak, as was pointed out last night, or to lose the Poirier side of the party would be tragic for the conservatives and really, really great for the liberals. And the final point, and it's about the frontrunner, Pierre Poirier has never been very familiar with the high road in all his incarnations in the House of Commons on the streets. And it was obvious last night that he is not terribly interested in the high road. I don't believe over time that that kind of approach to politics,

which he has now applied to fellow conservatives, will be a turn on for voters who may or may not be considering switching from another party to the conservatives in the general election it's interesting that you were wondering aloud what either one would do if they lost the race to the other uh i can certainly see charrette not running um i'm not sure he's been asked that directly yet if he hasn't he's about to be um on the polyev side of the equation that would be interesting the guys that's all he's ever done right in his adult life is is he i think he's won like seven elections in a row that's what he's been uh he's been an mp and a cabinet minister

and now wants to be a leader it would be interesting to see if he said i'm out of here if i don't win he wouldn't be the first conservative frontrunner to start a party of his own. And in his case, he might have had more success than Maxime Bernier is having. Wouldn't that be something if there were three right of center parties out there? Bruce is in Scotland, but through the magic of of the internet was able to watch bits and pieces of the debate so what's your sense of what you saw a lot of what chantal said i would echo i think there were two possible versions of a tv show that the conservative could conservative party could have put out yesterday.

One was a TV show really aimed to entertain the base of the party, and the other aimed to create interest in the party among people who might be open to voting Conservative but hadn't been recently voting Conservative. The show that I saw was a show decidedly built to entertain the base i don't think that that was necessarily by grand strategic design by the party i think that's just what this race is turned into and there's no sign that it's becoming or even interested in becoming something other than that there were a few candidates last night who talked about that, including Scott Aitchison, who was fairly eloquent on the subject, basically saying, look at us. We're just fighting with each other about things that most people may. He didn't put it this way, but most people may not care about. very interesting show for potential conservative voters is that if they were interested in the

Harper version of conservative party or even the Mulroney version, as far as I could tell, neither of those two were mentioned. And those were the two most successful conservative party leaders in my lifetime, and not by a little bit, by a lot. And so, you know, reference points to what those parties, what those versions of the Conservative Party had done successfully, I think would have been an interesting part of the storytelling that candidates could have used. If you're a voter who believes climate change is an issue, a serious issue, and many Conservatives and many many potential conservatives obviously believe that, you didn't really hear anything about it last night. If you're worried about Putin or Ukraine, you didn't hear anything about that. If you're really

worried about the deficit, nobody really talked about a strategy to reduce the deficit. If you think healthcare is the biggest issue in the country, most polls show that most people or many people do, including across party lines, there was no conversation about healthcare. If you care about Indigenous reconciliation, there was no conversation about Indigenous reconciliation. What you did here is that this pandemic that transfixed and immobilized the country really comes down to a question of whether you were with the truckers or against the truckers or for vaccine mandates or against vaccine mandates and the idea of vaccination was positioned as a question of freedom rather than health. And so it really didn't feel, and it wasn't much about abortion, which was really one of the biggest issues that landed on all of our desks this week.

So I just didn't see much in it that would make a potential conservative voter say, this race is developing in a way that's really appealing to me. And the last thing I'll say is if I were Jeanan charre who was put on the defensive last night all night long and this is a skilled debater a highly qualified politician who has useful and interesting things to say in this race but chantal's point about um polyev he's not a high road politician he just wanted to keep going at charre and at Charest to entertain, I think, the people that are supporting him, not because I think he necessarily needs to grow that number, because by most accounts, he's well ahead. And if I'm Charest at some point, I wonder, do I really want to persist in this race? If the outcome doesn't look like it's going to be a very positive one or even a close race what is that going to feel like well one way for him to look at things as of last night was that at least the attention is on me they're all coming after me especially polyev and that may be better

than being ignored at least at this point if he's in that kind of decision process this makes people think about how they want to feel about Jean Charest. A couple of other points that I'd like to raise, too. But first of all, I'll let Chantal in. One point to start with. We should make it clear that this was not held under the auspices of the Conservative Party. This was held by an organization that is associated with the Conservative Party, but the party had no say in who was moderating the format of the discussion. And that is why one of the candidates, Patrick Brown, decided that he was better off selling membership cards than showing up there.

So that would be one point. And Jean Chagall being on the defensive, I totally agree with Bruce. I believe sometimes after June 3rd, perhaps before his birthday on June 24th, he should or would have to reflect long and hard as to whether he wants to cut this short or not. But it would be sad for the Conservative Party if that were to happen, because he did make last night a lot more interesting than if the bickering had been happening in his absence. And I don't know. I mean, Bruce knows him, known him for a long time. You've covered him. I've known him too for a long time. I think he was having fun at some point. This is someone who actually likes to mix it up. There are other former premiers who would have walked away from there saying this is not all worth it, all this push and shove and attacks. But this is a guy who campaigned against some of the most brutal, verbally, sovereigntists in the province of Quebec.

He has had debates with the likes of Bernard Landry, Jacques Paguesot, Lucien Bouchard. So the stuff that Poiliev throws at him actually pales in comparison to some of the stuff that he's been told that he is in his own province where he actually won. I also looked at Poirier and someone pointed out this was his first rodeo of that kind. And in being so aggressive, I think he was on the defensive. He looked nervous and he looked like he desperately needed a kill, which, as Bruce points out, is not necessarily the case.

So the Conservative Party is going to have to look at all this and decide whether it wants to have someone who is only comfortable going for the juggler as leader within his own party as well as on the larger stage. And if that's the case, whether there is a way to make the frontrunner grow into something that more Canadians would be comfortable with. You know, I agree with you in terms of the way things looked last night. I did think that Charest, even under attack, looked comfortable under attack. And that's why I sort of wonder whether he might have actually preferred it the way it turned out last night. Because it gave him a different kind of opportunity. It doesn't mean he can turn things around. you know if there was a scenario in which he felt um that he could look uh interesting on that

evening it was the one that uh that played out i think now having said that i am i gotta say i'm puzzled and maybe somebody can explain this to me um about the decision to go so heavy uh in support of the truckers on most of those at the uh at the in the debate not shiree clearly polyev and leslie lewis who we should talk about as well because she was really interesting last night too but the um here's an issue where what is it, 65-70% of the country was not on side with the truckers and was on side with vaccine mandates. And yet here is the party wanting power standing, you know, as firmly as they could be given their past on the issue, with the truckers.

I don't quite understand that. Why is that happening? Bruce? Well, a couple of things. First of all, just on Charest and the way he came across or the way it looked like he was enjoying or not enjoying. I remember in the 93, in his leadership campaign for the Progressive Conservative Party way back when, I helped prepare him for debates. And,

you know, Peter, you made the point in the introduction that there's a difference between a friendly debate within the confines of a party, where you expect that there are certain parameters that will be observed because people need to put a good face on the party for others and because you may need to work with somebody else afterwards or just because it feels really awkward within the party to have a kind of a bloody brawl and and so it was a challenge for charrette who started that earlier campaign well behind kim campbell to know exactly how to um to kind of critique her approach or suggest that he might be a better alternative without sounding like he was a you know a real negative person towards her uh but he mastered that i don't and i so i generally think that

he came prepared for a debate that felt more like that uh and less like uh pierre poliev saying to him every two seconds how much money just tell us the dollar figure that huawei paid you how much money the way that he does sometimes in the House of Commons when he's heckling. And I think it kind of shook Charest. I think it, you know, I generally agree, look, he's happier in the political mix than outside the political mix. So there's a certain part of me that looks at his face and says, yeah, this is, this is relatively speaking fun for him. But I don't think that the debate felt like a debate that was as meaningful on the range of issues. And part of that has to do with the point that you were raising, Peter, which is that he, as an experienced former premier of the province of Quebec, might have expected that he needed to be prepared to talk about a variety of different issues from a substantive standpoint. And really what the debate seemed to want to keep going back to is the vaccination, trucker, all of the stuff that relates to the

most animated, most right of center voters in the country. And I think the lesson that the conservatives have been learning recently is that if you want the clicks and you want the dollars and you want people to turn out for meetings and you want them to go to protests, talk about how you hate Trudeau. Talk about how vaccination mandates are the work of the devil. And, you know, hint at some of the conspiracy theories that we know that upwards of 15% to 20% of Canadians believe in, and that's a winning formula for animating those participants, even if it could become toxic as you try to turn it into an election campaign down the road. It is possible, but not necessarily a certainty.

In the next election, people will ask themselves if there is still a pandemic or if there is another pandemic, crisis of that magnitude. Do I want a Poitiers-led Conservative Party to be at the helm or a party or a Liberal Party that has seen the country through the pandemic and COVID-19. And at that point, all those statements about vaccines and vaccine mandates versus freedom will come back to haunt the conservatives. What is popular now, what is drawing people to the party now,

because there is, and it is a minority but that they are very engaged the anti-vax movement is probably something you want to tap in to win a leadership campaign or so it seems but it does come at a cost and i would argue maybe at an even higher cost than uh courting anti-abortion sympathizers by saying, if you want to bring in private members, Bill, I will let you, although I will not do anything about them. So there is a real danger in the kind of language and the kind of tone that this leadership campaign has taken. Whether the party can do something about it

when it does have a sanctioned debate next week is another issue. It's also, you know, you watch someone like the MPHs who I don't believe is going to win this campaign and who, as far as I know, does not speak French, which is a bit of a non-starter, frankly.

But what he incarnates is what people want to see in the Conservative Party. Someone who has views, strong views, but who is able to also have strong views as to what debate means, as opposed to scorched earth and bridge burning. And if you don't like Jean Chaguet or you believe that he's too soft to be your leader, then you need to look at someone like that and say, is this not the kind of person that would inspire confidence in voters, that the Conservative Party in power would be run by adults who are reasonable and not looking for enemies

and anyone that is not them. And he gets lost in that shuffle. But frankly, this is a party that is going to need unifying voices. And throw away Jean Chagas if you want, or Patrick Brown, but still give this MP a look and wonder whether this is the kind of material

you would really want to put forward and whether these kinds of people may not find that they have better things to do at other levels if that's going to be the way that the party goes. All right, we're going to take a break and come back on a version of the same topic, but advancing the story a little bit. Let me just say one thing, and it brings back the hockey analogy.

When you're in the playoffs, when you're in a best-of-seven series, game one usually sets the table, and you try to look faster, you try to look stronger, you try to look faster you try to look stronger you try to look smarter than the other team so in many ways the first debate does the same kind of thing the second debate may be a lot different than what the first one was like or you know who knows maybe it'll be the same but if you use the hockey analogy, it would suggest that things will settle down a little bit. They'll learn their lessons from the first debate. They'll feel they made their points in the first debate about the differences between themselves and other candidates.

We'll see whether that analogy holds true next week, as Chantel says, when the second debate, the first one of the official nature of the party, takes place. Okay, quick break, then we're back. And welcome back. You're listening to Good Talk on Sirius XM, Channel 167, Canada Talks. Or you're listening on your favorite podcast platform. Either way, we're glad you're with us. Chantelle's in Montreal, Bruce is in Scotland today, and I'm in Stratford, Ontario. What's interesting about the way this is playing out, in spite of everything we said in the first block, the Conservatives, if you go by a couple of recent polls, Nanos and Main Street, seem to have had a bump at a time when I'm not sure a lot of things have been going on that would suggest a bump in the last couple of weeks. But they've had a bump. A bump significant enough to call it a bump. That their popularity has risen. So what do we mean?

Is that all about a leadership campaign, attention being brought to them? I mean, the last few have received no attention. This one is receiving attention. Is that what this is about, Bruce? You're the polling expert. I'm not sure whether your data is showing the same kind of thing, but what do you think is happening there? Well, you know, the trading range for these two parties isn't that different from the numbers that you're referring to. So I'd be a little bit hesitant about describing it as a bump, but I wouldn't say that it's impossible that it happened. I mean, the latest numbers I think that you were referring to is kind of a 35-30

for the conservatives. And I'd probably want to see a couple more illustrations of that before I decide that something happened. But let's work with the thesis that something is happening that's a little bit better for the conservatives and a little bit worse for the liberals. I think there could be a couple of reasons for it. One is the absence of a leader who had become unpopular, second in a series that had become, or maybe third in a series that had become quite unpopular, replaced by the idea of a party that could be the party that you want it to be. Generally, that kind of creates some openness to the idea of voting conservative, maybe that wasn't there before the leadership race was called. It could also be that some people who

weren't thinking that they would vote conservative are hearing Pierre Pauliev's message of freedom and saying, that's appealing to me. Some of our research has suggested that his message has more resonance than people in the kind of Ottawa area who've watched Poliev very closely and don't really enjoy his style you know there's a chance that that people who who kind of fit that that characterization don't know how well his message might resonate outside that Ottawa bubble. People might also be looking at Jean Charest and saying, well, that would be an interesting leadership choice. And so there are a number of reasons why those conservative numbers could bump up a little bit, even if, as we were just discussing with respect to the show last night it's not necessarily an

edifying conversation for people who are sitting outside the party tent wondering if they should go in the second reason why that gap could widen is that i think the liberals find themselves in a in a bit of a a difficult time in their life as a as a party in government they keep on putting out policy that they think both fits their value system and the agenda that they've set out and that they believe that canadians embrace by and large and may be wondering why each successive announcement isn't greeted with some sort of burst or bump or even slight ping of heightened popularity. But that presumes that people pay a lot of attention to the detail of what government announces, and they don't. Even the presumption that people pay a lot of attention

to a budget is really not held up by the numbers that we've seen over the years. So it's very difficult for government to actually be heard. And it becomes more difficult over time because people kind of hear the sounds and sort of discount the detail because they think, well, I know what these guys are about. And I'm sure that if something really, really meaningful were going to happen, that were going to affect my life, I would hear about it. Otherwise, I'm just going to tune it out. And so I think the liberals have trouble getting a real share of voice as opposed to theoretical share of voice.

They have all the mechanisms of government communication, but it's harder for their message to cut through and get people to pay attention to it. And so the substance of what they're doing is often lost on people. Meanwhile, the conservative conversation is pretty combustible, a little bit entertaining and somewhat 40, I think is really wrapped up in what Chantal was talking about before the break, which is where does this go after this leadership race is over? Chantal? Well, with two years to go in theory before the next election, it could go lots of places. There's a lot of time to recast whoever becomes leader and the party around other issues. I do think that some of those numbers are related to the liberals and to the fact that

they're flatlining. And why are they flatlining? They think they have a successful budget. And if the standard is that it didn't offend a lot of people, that probably is true. But I think a lot of Canadians believe or feel, rightly or wrongly, that they have a lot of questions and there are no answers coming from Parliament Hill, that they are worried about inflation, affordability, they are worried about labor shortages, the aging of the population, the housing situation, health care. And what they see on Parliament Hill with the day-to-day government agenda are, let me name two things that the liberals would really like to accomplish between now and the summer. A new Broadcasting Act and the new Official Languages Act. Both are interesting, debatable initiatives, but they are not an answer to the question

that is top of mind for many Canadians. At the same time, on the other side, you have a higher profile visible candidate for the leadership of the Conservative Party who is hammering on the theme of affordability. And the other candidates, Jean Chaguet is also doing that, they are talking, they are providing answers, whether they're good or not, to questions or at least they're having the same conversation as the vast majority of Canadians. And the federal liberals in the House of Commons do not feel like they are. You can support the contention of foreign affairs minister that it's important to have a feminist foreign policy.

But frankly, what that gets you around the dinner table is a big blank when it comes to your concerns, either about Ukraine or about closer to home issues. I think somehow the liberals are missing the point that they're not in the conversation. And in part, because some of, take housing, some of the measures that they've announced, you can have 60 news conferences to re-announce them. But in fact, what you need is to have an adult conversation with Canadians about the limits of government action. No one on the Liberal benches is interested in doing that. Instead, you send the prime minister to say to every question, we have your back. I think a lot of people, a lot of voters do not feel very many governments having their backs at this point.

It has become a tired strategy, an overworked phrase. You're back on everything and yet at the same time, for many Canadians, they're just not seeing the results of somebody at their back would hopefully deliver. So I can see all of that unfolding in terms of potential numbers that don't look good on polling. Bruce, you want to add a point there? Yeah, I just want to echo chantal's point which is that the and add one other element which is that everybody knows that cost of living is going up everybody knows that housing is unaffordable and the government can say that but if the government can't fix it then just seeing it and saying we are working on a bunch of things is not going to it's not going to change the natural

drift towards thinking that you know a government that's been around for a while is maybe kind of running out of energy and ideas and and so that's a natural gravitational force becomes kind of more problematic over time and becomes more challenging when the problems are really these kind of grinding problems that, you know, maybe reasonable people could look at and say, well, there are no easy solutions to those. But that brings me to the second point, which this is always a political operation, the Trudeau liberal government that was built on sweeping and grand ambition and if you take a machine that rhetorically is built to talk that way and then you say well actually what we have to do now is talk about gutting out a series of problems that are going to be challenging for a long period of

time and that what you really want is competency rather than this soaring rhetoric. And some of the rhetoric had a kind of a rejuvenation during the pandemic because people were worried and having our backs made sense rhetorically and also felt right emotionally. But I don't think there's an emotionally safe place right now for the liberals because they're stuck in this world of well if they if they go for soaring ambition and people say can you just keep the cost of housing under some kind of control and maybe the cost of energy and maybe the cost of food and maybe you, we can see that war in Ukraine. And those are not things that I think this government has been very effective at adjusting to from a communication standpoint.

It's not so much a criticism of them. It's just an observation of it's almost like they're a typecast actor. They're built for playing certain roles rhetorically, and they're not particularly well suited to playing these roles. And that's the kind of adjustment that governments have to undergo sometime. And it'll be interesting to watch whether they can make that adjustment successfully, because separate and apart from how effective or not the Conservative Party is at reengaging with a broader coalition of Canadians, the Liberals are going to struggle, I think, with this question of soaring ambition versus a gutted out kind of scenario for the next couple of years. That's interesting. And it clearly is something that we've got to follow over these next couple of years. And as Chantel pointed out earlier, a couple of years is a couple of years.

A lot's going to happen. And a lot of moods can change and feelings can change and opinions can change. So we'll watch that. If I can just step back for a moment, there was something I mentioned in the first segment that I failed to follow up on. And that was watching Leslie Lewis last night. I found it interesting that she really made the decision to attack Pierre Poliev in a way nobody else did. She went straight after his credibility on the truckers

and said, you're a phony trucker supporter. You weren't really there at the beginning. You were off at some gas station far away from Ottawa. You didn't come in and stand with the truckers. So I question your loyalty on that subject and your right to be able to claim you were there. Now, that was quite a move on her part, clearly, to try and attract some of that support on that side of the party for that issue um she did very well last time right she finished second uh in in the race and you know she clearly wants to finish better than second this time and so this is her strategy. Can she be, you know, we kind of in some ways missed her story last time round.

Does the potential there exist again? You're saying no, Chantal. I don't see that we missed her story last time I find that kind of odd, considering the acres of ink and virtual and real that were expended on her candidacy, despite the fact that she'd never run for federal office, does not, and still does not speak French, and is a major representative of the social conservative wing of the party. I think her problem this time is that she is at risk of not doing as well as last time and possibly doing measurably less well than last time. And there are a couple of reasons for that.

The Campaign Life Coalition, which is the main anti-abortion lobby in this country, had a strategy. This is no secret. They put it on their website to have as many social conservatives on the ballot as possible. And what's the thinking behind that? You're thinking, won't they be splitting the social conservative vote when they have Lesley Lewis, who did do well last time? But the strategy, as they explain this, that this is a ranked ballot. So you vote for whichever social conservative you like best,

and then eventually you migrate to the last standing social conservative. And that person grows from ballot to ballot. And presumably that person is Leslie Lewis. What happened on the way to confirming who is a candidate is that a number, at least two of the other candidates that the anti-abortion lobby had counted on, and I believe also Lesley Lewis, were disqualified. They can't run. And that means that she either gets a really good score on the first ballot or she's going to be out quickly because her room to grow is really limited. You don't need to not want a social conservative as leader to know that her room to grow is limited.

You need to know that many conservatives, most of them, know that they need a leader who can actually speak French in Quebec in an election campaign and a leaders' debate. And that is not what Lesley Lewis can deliver. But why she goes after Pierre Poiliev? Well, I took the list of MPs who have actually already endorsed a candidate. And I looked at it against the list of the MPs who have the blessing of the Campaign Life Coalition, who they recommend social conservatives vote for in an election. And I found that 16 of the 39 MPs that are this religious social conservative wing of caucus back at Poilievre against seven for Lesley Lewis.

In a margin of two to one, the social conservative caucus is already with Pierre Poilievre and will almost certainly be calling on other fellow social conservatives to come with them. That's interesting for two reasons. One, it speaks to why Pierre Poiliev was a bit discreet about his pro-choice position, which is real. I found plenty of interviews where he talks about his support for the right to abortion. But it also, and I know people tend to look at these numbers and will say, oh my God, you know, the majority of social

conservatives in caucus are behind Pierre Poilievre, so you do know what's going to happen if he ever becomes prime minister. But I think it also demonstrates the opposite, which is that you can be a social conservative and be in politics for reasons other than pursuing legislation on abortion. And on that basis, you can be under the tent of a pro-choice leader, even if you are someone who actually would rather see abortion eliminated or restricted. But so that's where that's why she focuses on him because the votes that she needs are at this point uh under his tent bruce yeah i think that's right i think that in fact i noticed that yesterday in her twitter feed i think it was yesterday might have been the day before she was complaining about the party having ruled out these other candidates,

which is kind of an odd thing to do, except if you understand the chess match version that Chantal has just described, that she needs those other social conservative candidates with lesser prospects to exist on the ballot in order to keep her on the ballot for more rounds. I think, you know, as I sort of looked at the conversation last night, it sort of felt to me like Pierre-Paul Lievre is scooping up the enthusiasm in the race among social conservatives and anti-Trudeau conservatives and conspiracy theory conservatives, and there's not very much oxygen for her campaign this time. There was more last time. She was a kind of a new figure in politics. And I don't know, to be honest, that she's done anything in the intervening months to really distinguish herself as a parliamentarian or as a contributor to the national agenda. When I look at her website and the policies that she talks about, there's obviously

a flavoring of that social conservative aspect. But there's also, you know, among the kind of high profile items that she's got something about no digital IDs, which is about, you know, traveling across Canada, she gets asked a lot about the World Economic Forum. We know what that's kind of code for that's, she's kind of playing to an audience that is worried about this kind of conspiracy, great reset. Bill Gates is trying to, you know, control us, all of that kind of stuff. So I don't see it. But at the same time, she says that the fundamentals of her campaign are hope, unity,

and compassion, but I don't, it doesn't look to me like a terribly coherent campaign and it doesn't look to me like a campaign that's really gathering much momentum whether or not um we whoever we is sort of saw that early enough the last time we can debate i'd let you and chantal debate it i'd rather not wade into that one. But I think in the end, this has been a bad week for her in the sense of that choice by the party, not to let those other candidates stand, puts her squarely in a situation where if she doesn't tackle Pierre Pauliev and try to strip away his social conservative credentials,

which is what she was doing last night um you know try to pretend or persuade people that he's a dishonest social conservative he's a kind of a um a guy who likes to talk up his social conservative skills but or bona fides but wouldn't even go and meet with the truckers in person which he countered he had but i found myself thinking i was living in a on another planet watching these two candidates talk about um you know the most important difference between them whether they were willing to stand up stand by the truckers knowing that most canadians felt like well the protests about vaccine, OK, but the truckers, maybe not the way that that was done. Anyway, I'm not a big believer in this Lesley Lewis campaign.

It feels to me like it's struggling right now. OK, just just just to be clear, Pierre Poiliev is not a social conservative. He is not recommended by any of those lobbies. I have watched interviews where he says clearly that he is pro-choice. He voted for a ban on conversion therapy, which was another dividing line between the true social conservatives and the others. So I think what she was trying to demonstrate was all these social conservatives that support you, they're the ones who are not being true to their principles because they support you when they should support me. But it's interesting that in this campaign,

the anti-abortion lobby does not have a front runner to back. Jean Charest, Pierre Poilievre, Patrick Brown, all unacceptable. Despite the fact that he's an MP, Patrick Brown voted for social conservative private members' bills. But when he became Ontario leader, he threw all that out the window and moved on and started attending pride parades and other such events that social conservatives frown on. It's also interesting that when they did have a social conservative leader, that would be Andrew Scheer, he also walked away and they ended up disowning him.

He's not in that list that I looked at to figure out who was supporting who. So I'm thinking the anti-abortion lobby maybe needs to have a talk with itself about how its strategies in the end are always ending in the same dead end. Okay. I will crawl back under my rock for bringing that up. What I will say is if you finish second last time and you're running a struggling campaign this time you could you could argue that last night was a good night because you at least managed to expose the differences and put them out there they may not accomplish anything in the long run, but at least

you accomplished that. And just hearing what the two of you said on the issue might back that up. But as I said, I will crawl back under my rock. We're going to take our final break. Come back. You both may raise the abortion issue after Roe v. Wade, and I'd like your thoughts briefly on what that may mean in Canada in the days, weeks, months ahead, of course, good talk. Chantel and Bruce are with us. We're in our final segment. We've got a couple of minutes to, you know, the bombshell in the U.S. this week

was the draft opinion leaked from the U.S. Supreme Court that would suggest the Roe v. Wade impact on American society. Those days are numbered. And for most Americans, it would mean that abortion would no longer be a legal option. What could that mean for Canada? What could it mean on Parliament Hill? What could it mean for the Conservatives? There's a lot there with a little time to discuss it,

but why don't we give it a shot? Chantal. It's not good news for the Conservatives, because they are the only party that is really divided over the issue of abortion, and it has been a hindrance to their national prospects and their prospects of winning enough seats to form a government. There is not, outside of the Conservative Party, a large constituency for restrictions

on abortion, and the Conservative Party itself knows that so well, that leader after leader, the party commits to not introducing any legislation on abortion if elected. Now, for those who don't keep track or may not remember, when the Supreme Court in 1988 threw out the sections of the criminal code that dealt with abortion restrictions, the court never said that Parliament could not legislate on abortion. It said those dispositions were not charter proof. So when you look at the conservative promise, they're clearly trying to get away from an issue that has been hurting them. And the resumption of this debate in the wake of what's happened in the U.S. is bad news.

This week, the Journal de Montréal, which is the most read tabloid in Quebec, put the faces of the 39 MPs who are anti-abortion on its front page. I'm convinced that few conservatives believe that that was a great development. The Bloc Québécois must have been laughing all the way to the back. No Quebec MP was in the picture. But it does allow the parties

that fight conservatives in Quebec and elsewhere, the Liberals and the Bloc, to say, look at these people. They can be trusted to safeguard abortion rights, even if over a decade in power, Stephen Harper was true to that promise. Even if he appointed the majority of the current Supreme Court justices, that will end in September with a retirement. So a Harper majority on the Supreme Court,

a Harper majority in the House of Commons, you would think are token enough that the party means not to be going down the road of restrictions on abortion. But it is always really hard to shake that off. I suspect in the case of Pierre Poilievre and Jean Chaguet, that if one of the two won a first ballot victory, the payoff would be to say this is the leader that did not achieve his position as opposed to the previous two with the help of a social conservative wing. Bruce. Yeah, three things, Peter. First of all, I think that what's happening in the United States, not just on abortion, is shocking to a lot of Canadians, and it has significant potential to become a political factor in Canada. of money and political activism around a whole series of rights limiting democratic rollbacks as far as i'm concerned looking to reduce the ability of people to vote who don't tend to vote republican looking to restrict the ability of women to get an abortion it's part of the whole mixture of measures that we see creeping

across a variety of state legislatures and threatening to become a bigger part of the national policy fabric in the united states and and you know trump and trumpism became more visible more organized more effective in canada as a consequence of what was happening in the United States. And so I think it's safer to assume that this isn't a one and done situation with abortion. It's going to persist as an important and divisive and high profile debate in the United States for years to come now. And the way that it plays out in the United States is going to create more visibility and more legitimacy, as Chantal was saying, for those who oppose conservatives in Canada to say you can't trust conservatism not to try to take away your rights. The second thing is that, and I'll make this the last thing because I know we're almost out of time. Is it the women that I've talked to about this are angry? Now, that's not every woman, and I don't have polling data on this, but there's an anger about this issue that is born in part of this is a debate that has been going on too long, but also in part because a lot has happened to the empowerment of women in recent years, whether it's a consequence of democratic reforms or the Me Too debate. Women don't feel as though there's

any reason to listen to men opine about what to do with their bodies, and they're angry about this. And I think that anger is going to be a challenge for the conservative party or conservative politicians going forward as well. And we'll make that the last point. Thank you both, Bruce and Chantel. We promise good talk. Good talk is what you got. We'll see you again next week. Thank you.