The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Good Talk - The mood of the country is...

Episode Date: June 23, 2023

For our final Good Talk of the season, Bruce, Chantal and I talk about the mood of the country and how it's changed in the last couple of years.  Then we talk about the politics of the country and how it has changed in the years of the Trudeau government. Lots for everyone in this conversation.

Are you ready for Good Talk? And here we go. Final Good Talk of the season before we take our summer break. We will be back a couple of times during the summer. Last Friday in July, last Friday in August. So be looking for us on those days. Actually, I think it's the second last Friday in July, last Friday in August. So be looking for us on those days. Actually, I think it's the second last Friday in August. But nevertheless, we will give you lots of advance warning on that.

Chantelle Hebert is in Montreal. Bruce Anderson is in Scotland. And I don't know, I was toying with the idea of like, what can we talk about on the final one of the season, as opposed to something that may have just happened this week know that's the that's the kind of question the reporters ask other reporters when they're you know they've arrived on some spot to cover some big story they've been there for like three hours and the the anchor says so what's the mood there where you've located the person's just sort of arrived just got off a bus or a plane or what have you and it really doesn't know anything other than whether their microphone is properly attached um but nevertheless this is different because mood is something that well bruce gauges through his polling chantelle gauges through her travels

and her discussions with all kinds of people um who are either on the front lines of a story or are in the observing of a story, witnessing change that's going on in their community or their country. So it's a big, wide open question. And Bruce, I guess I'll get you to start it. Mood. What is your sense of the mood out there as we hit the summer of 23? You know, I think that, Peter, it is the most interesting thing for me is sometimes when we have these conversations every week, we can lose track of what some of the medium and longer term trends have been. So I went back and looked at the mood of the country indicators that Abacus has been tracking. Typically, the most important or commonly used one is that do you think the country. Typically, the most important or commonly used

one is, do you think the country is going in the right direction or the wrong direction? And I compared two years ago to today. And there are three questions that David Coletto and I have been using for a long time. How do you think Canada is going? Right direction, wrong direction? What about the US and what about the world? All three of those indicators are about 20 points below today. They're about 20 points below where they were two years ago. And you can't, in my estimation anyway, understand the mood of the country without realizing that that is a very precipitous drop. So what's going on to cause that drop? First thing is, it's not just that people think things are going badly in Canada.

All three of those indicators have moved down in almost exactly the same proportions. Canada is usually considered to be the one of those three that's the best situated, and that's still the case. But the world and the U.S. indicators are also going down. So people see problems here, but problems in the U.S. and problems in the world to a significantly greater degree than they did just two years ago. Now, two years ago, we were coming out of the pandemic. The pandemic made us feel gravely threatened in a lot of different ways, a sense of concern about health, concern about politics and democracy and information and trust and mutual respect and all kinds of aspects of

the pandemic that visited our sense of political well-being. But as we were coming out of the pandemic, I think you could make the case that people were feeling, if not buoyant, then at least more inclined to feel better than they did during the depths of the pandemic. But it's almost as though with the passage of time since the end of the pandemic, some economic indicators have gotten worse. Cost of living is definitely a giant factor for part of explaining part of what's going on with these numbers. But here is my list of the other things. And then I'll be anxious to hear what Chantal has to say. Climate change continues to be an important, huge, maybe growing issue for many people. Wildfires this year add to the sense not just of the risk of harm from the wildfires, but the sense that we're burning up the planet and we're not making progress fast enough to

address that issue. The geopolitical situation in the world is complicated and not looking like it's getting solved anytime soon. The role of Russia, the role of China, the stability of the EU and the UK, all of those are questions that are bigger questions, more problematic, more stressful than they were 10 years ago, let's say. There's the sense of the removal of guardrails around information, fact, political discourse, the breakdown of the media platforms that people share in common. You've got people who have invented artificial intelligence who are telling us it could be the end of humanity. Long story short, there's no shortage of things that are making people feel less confident about the future. And I was really struck by that one question that David Coletto published a little while ago

that said, would you rather be born now or born 70 years ago or even 40 years ago? And the vast majority of Canadians say, I'd rather be born 40 years ago than be born now, which tells you something about the sense of relatively pervasive anxiety about the future. Well, if I wasn't depressed before, I'm depressed now. That's quite the list and quite a sense of what at least the polling and the researching is showing in terms of mood. Chantal, what's your sense? Well, as someone who was born almost 70 years ago, I know the difference between now and then.

So I'm not going to say that you should wish you were born almost 70 years ago, especially if you're a woman or not part of the white male majority that controlled everything. And should I add, from a Quebec perspective, the church that dictated women's choices and people's choices. So good morning, nostalgia, but you have to be there to know that it's easy to say, oh, I wish I were born. Yes, great. I would not wish it on my granddaughters to have been born when I was born.

So that's one. Two, my impressions are more anecdotal than measured by polls. But I totally understand why we are more pessimistic about the state of the world or the United States than we were two years ago, because two years ago, Russia was not at war with Ukraine. And with the risks to the rest of the planet that are attendant to what has been going on for many of us, especially those born 70 years ago, the notion that Russia would be in a European war on Ukraine was always a worst case scenario, something that shouldn't, couldn't happen. I think we have passed that on to people who were born since those years. And what has happened in the United States over the past two years, basically the Trump

story coming back two years ago, we were still basking in the relief not only of the potential end of the pandemic, but of the advent of a different administration in the US and the disappearance of Trump from the White House. And now what Canadians are watching is not only a return of that, but some of the progress that the extreme right has been making in the United States and a number of states on abortion, but not exclusively on abortion. We live next to a country that has returned to book burning and book banning. And the teaching of basic stuff has suddenly become something that a good parent would want to avoid in the education system. So watching that, how could you feel that things are headed in the right direction from almost any perspective that is Canadian?

The mood of this country, and again, it's anecdotal, but I would say there are people who say Canadians are angry that is not what I find I find that Canadians are rattled which is a different feeling they're rattled as Bruce pointed out by what is happening on climate change and I think for many people it's only now sinking in that climate change doesn't just mean that you shovel less snow in Canada in winter. It means that we are standing on the front line of consequences because we are a northern country. That wasn't obvious to many people five, 10 years ago, but I think increasingly that's becoming really obvious. Cost of living issues, yes, every time inflation shows up, and we've all seen a few cycles of those, they do become major issues. But in this case, I think the housing issue

is the most serious that we have seen. And I say that before people write in to say I had a 16% mortgage. Yes, I did too. But this is different because not so long ago, old days, you could always move out of city centers to cheaper places for housing. This crisis is not limited to big cities. It's not limited to downtown cores where it may be fancy to live. It's widespread. It's a problem in small areas where there is no housing for people who actually need to work in those areas. It is the first time that I've seen where the housing issue is not a location issue.

It's an issue in itself to get a roof over your head. And it's hard to think of a quick fix for an issue like that. So a permanent problem in Canada, but that never seems to get fixed and seems to be getting worse is the state of the healthcare system, which is a concern for many people. This morning, I woke up to headlines about warnings about how bad it was going to be in emergency rooms this summer. That really makes you feel secure in the next coming months. What if something happens to you and you can't get care? Governments have been throwing money at it, but people are not seeing the results for the money that's being thrown at the healthcare system. And I think

that is increasingly a concern. And it is a concern that stretches again from coast to coast to coast. Okay. Well, you know, accepting exactly what you said about the difference between now and 70 years ago, in terms of what, you know, the list of the current issues that contribute to that mood swing downwards. Let's deal with a couple of those. Let's start with the housing issue because it's not like it's come out of nowhere. We've seen this. We've heard about this, you know, for quite some time now. And certainly from younger generations are saying, you know, for quite some time now, and certainly from younger generations, they're saying, you know, I may never own a house. It's just like, it's totally out of my

ability to consider even owning a house at some point in my lifetime. What is our sense here? Who has acted upon this? And I don't mean who in terms of an individual, but have governments understood this housing issue as well as they should in terms of what it's doing on the mood of the country, on the mood of a new generation? Bruce? No, I don't think so. And I do think that we've got a problem that we're

compounding. And I completely agree with Chantal about housing. This is unlike any other version of the housing issue that we've seen in the country, including the super high interest rates of many years ago. And the reason is that then, you know, the economy looked like it worked in relatively predictable cycles of economic growth and economic recession. And we have not really been in that pattern for a good long period of time. There have been these shocks to the economy in 08, for example, but people have grown accustomed to the notion that the economy remains relatively stable. Inflation remains relatively low.

Interest rates have been low for a long period of time up until the last year. And people were sort of building their lives around it. But underneath the surface, we weren't building enough housing and we were increasing our immigration rate at the same time. And so now that we've got a problem of rising immigration, still low production of new housing and rising interest rates, we've got a multiple whammy here. Now, I think Chantal also said she said she thought Canadians were rattled. I think that's a very apt term. I think one of the things that's happened is unlike scenarios in the past, maybe where people were, I think, more intensely focused on politics, they're not always that focused on politics now.

So being rattled isn't the same as being I now need to be be angry with Ottawa or Queens Park or Quebec City or what have you. It's just, I'm unsettled in my life. I'm worried about my life. And I don't know if anybody's going to be able to have the solutions to deal with it. It looks on the surface like a set of conditions that could be quite propitious for a Pierre Pauliev. And on those days when he says, I'm going to fix the housing problem, I'm going to make sure that more homes are built where people can live and want to live and can afford them. That sounds good, but the devil is definitely in the details here. Can he make that happen is going to be a question that's hard for him to answer. But the bigger part of that is people don't necessarily look at this

situation and say it's Trudeau's fault and Polyev is the answer because they don't necessarily see politics as being the be-all and end-all of how these issues get mediated. I do think the pressures are going to grow on the local governments and the politics of local housing policy really have to accelerate a move away from planning roadblocks and into the acceleration of the creation of affordable housing for people who want to live in there. And by affordable housing, I don't just mean housing for the unhoused or for people with very low incomes. I think we've got a problem there, but we also have a bigger problem in some respects in terms of the scale of it. Among that generation that you referred to, Peter, people who say, well, I've done what I

was supposed to do. I studied, I've got a job. I should be able to see a day when owning a house that I live in is possible. And right now, especially with interest rates having gone up the way that they have, that's becoming a more and more distant reality. Chantal, do you want to add more to the housing part of this? Well, just a word on the politics of housing. I found it interesting this week in one of the last question periods, Pierre Poilievre did change stack and went really hard on housing.

And I do believe that if there is a cabinet shuffle, it would probably be helpful to put in that portfolio someone who is identified as a really strong communicator and performer, because that will be needed. But I've also noted, by the same token, because Bruce talks about municipal governments, and I see municipal governments under increased pressure to deliver on the housing front. It's a big deal. But if you're going to be prime minister of this country and you're going to make promises that involve building more housing and removing obstacles, you will need to get along with Canada's mayors.

And I'm not sure it's terribly helpful that Mr. Poitier, over the past few months, has slagged the mayor of Montreal, the mayor of Quebec City, the mayor of Vancouver, now the potential mayor that will be coming to Toronto. How are you going to make this work with those municipal governments if you've already insulted them? That being said, if you are a mayor, and we're talking about this as if Pierre Poilievre and Valérie Plante and maybe Olivia Chow after Monday have divine power over housing and how it's going to be built. that there will be changes in the way that their neighborhoods are being developed, where the density will increase and some neighborhoods, some leafy neighborhoods of

Toronto and Ottawa, that affordable housing is going to maybe make your house a bit less promising as a bank to finance your retirement. because if there is more housing, your house value will probably not go up as much as if there is rarity. And let's be serious, people who are already homeowners have a stake in a market where supply does not meet demand. Because what does it mean? It means that this place here is going up in value because there are not so many other places that you can get into. So it's something, and again, to make voters believe that they are not part of the problem and part of the solution would be misguided. It will mean a change in the way that Canadians see homeownership. Owning a home or having a home does not or will not necessarily mean

in this day and age having a white picket fence in a big backyard. It may mean being next to a park. I think we're going to see programs like the one that has been tried in the UK, a help-to-buy program where people don't have to be able to assemble the financing for the entire purchase. I think we're going to see creative public policy in those spaces. And if I were advising any of the national political parties, I would say, get under the hood. And I think Chantal is completely right that you can't be credible simply saying where you're going to overrule the instincts of

local affected elected officials and you're going to force the building of condos by subway stations which i think is one of the versions of what pierre poliev has talked about the world is a more complicated place than that you need relationships and you need relationships with progressive politicians but there are so many angles to the story. You know, you watch the argument in the Toronto area, the debate and the controversy attached to, and there are many angles to this, to the Greenbelt story, and where new housing projects are being planned in an area that had been promised that it would never be for housing,

but it would always be for parkland, basically. When you look at a map of the Greenbelt around Greater Toronto, it's huge. It's a huge area that is protected. Now, there's controversy and a lot of it attached to the decisions made by the Ontario government to open up some of that land, and it's only going to get more controversial as more studies come forward about what actually happened in the decision-making process there. But it's also part of the angle to this housing story. You know, if you're going to have more housing, it's got to go somewhere.

And as Chantal says, you know, either cram it into existing areas or you start moving out into leafy areas. And it, you know, there are, there are going to be, you know, there are going to be a lot of debates surrounding this if, if it in fact is going to be attacked in a meaningful way. Let me just touch on the, on the healthcare issue for a second before we take our first break. You know, a couple of months ago, ago the the arguments were underway between the various levels of government especially the federal and provincial governments about uh costing and uh cost sharing and who where the money was coming from and uh it looked like it was going to be a long drawn out battle then it was resolved and there was an agreement and it was accepted by, is it all the provinces now or certainly most of them. But once that ended, so did the discussion about healthcare.

But once again, as Chantel mentions on the hospital floor, there's still a debate about what kind of healthcare Canadians are getting and how we're going to move forward on that and how that contributes to the mood issue as well. Bruce, do you have a thought on that before we move on? I think that the evidence for me is that the provinces are going to always make the big decisions about the allocation of resources. We're going to be in this endless conversation about how much money is going to be available to solve what problems. I think in an ideal scenario, we're going to have a federal government that has good enough relationships with the provinces where they can tackle emerging issues

that require or at least would be better served by a cross-cutting agenda. And the one that's very high on my list of presumed priorities is mental health. You know, if we talk about the mood of the country and if we look at the mood of young people and if we understand what's different now from what would have been evident 25 years ago, the incidence of people who say that they need mental health supports, that they need mental health services and who can't get them right now is through the roof. And it's not just in Canada that that's say, about what the health care issue is falling short of for them. It's probably for many people still finding a family physician, but it's for a lot of people, access to mental health supports. So that hopefully is one of those areas, and maybe the access to a GP is one as well, where good collaboration between the federal government and provinces can lead to more rapid and at scale solutions.

Because I do think we're experiencing a crisis in terms of the mental health supports, for sure. You know, on this issue of achieving the basics, having your own GP. I've been shocked, stunned really, the number of people that I've heard from in the last while who told me that simple fact. I cannot get a doctor. Every doctor I contact says they're overloaded, they can't take on new patients. It is stunning to think in a country like ours

that we're in that kind of a situation in certain parts of the country but I know certainly in southern Ontario I've had numerous examples of that Chantelle another thought on on the health care situation before we move on. To go back to your question, it's true that the political discussion on healthcare has abated, or the media interest in the conflict that was attendant to the politics of the healthcare debate has flagged. I, for one, have never thought that this debate was well served by a high media profile on the political front. On the contrary, it is tended to make people take positions and label positions in ways that curtailed discussion and meant that debate was not happening. I'll give you a few examples of provinces, mine, Ontario also,

probably others, contracting out some surgeries to the private sector. And the speed at which this becomes labeled U.S. style medicine, you can't do this because if you do this, we're going to a two-tier system. I had a very minor operation under a deal between the public system and the private system. It got me out of the way of people who had serious problems that needed to be dealt with in a hospital. It didn't cost me anything. And as a patient, I got the care I needed on a timely basis. So it's good that politicians are engaged on this issue. And I know that in most provinces, the health ministers are struggling to find new ways to do things. But I don't think that the politicians over the past decades have served us well in the way that they've approached the Medicare issue. I may have told you this before, but it stuck with me and I'll say it again. A long time ago now, 20 years, I was asked

to moderate a panel, one of the last times I ever did that. And two of the panelists were Preston Manning and Jacques Pagasin, of all people, both of them very different politicians, one from the more progressive left and the other from the more fiscal right. And they were asked, looking back on your careers, both of them spent a lot of time on public policy, what was your greatest failure? And they both agreed that they had messed up their leading the healthcare debate. From both their perspectives, they felt that that

was the debate that they did the most poorly on. And what you got from their answers was that they felt they'd contributed to the problem rather than contributed to finding solutions. And that stuck with me because it kind of reflected on what happens when politicians seize an issue and want to make it a wedge issue. And that's happened with the health care issue, especially at the federal level. OK, we're going to take a quick break and we'll come back an extension of this discussion, but in a different direction. I'll be back right after this. And welcome back. You're listening to Good Talk for this Friday,

the final Good Talk of the season before we take a summer break. You're listening on SiriusXM, Channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform, or you're watching us on our YouTube channel. And us is Peter Ransbridge here, Chantal Hébert in Montreal, Bruce Anderson in Scotland. Okay, more on the big themes for our discussion today. And this one, it's not really related to the, well, it is kind of in a little way related to the first one about the mood of the country. Here's the way I'd like to frame it, and it is to try and understand, I mean, we spent the last eight years since the election of Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party, with basically one government in different forms, majority and minority. What I want to try and understand

is how politics in Canada has changed during those eight years. I think the general assumption has been that the left has got a little more lefter and the right has got a little more writer, if those terms make sense. But that may just be a very simple way of looking at things. Has our politics changed in the last eight years, the way we do politics in Canada? Has it changed? Let's go to Chantal to start this time. Well, politics and the way we do politics always changes

because the context changes. Over the time that we've covered politics, we've watched national governments lose their capacity to influence what were center stage events because a lot of center stage events now unfold on a global scale. You cannot solve climate change for Canada or for Quebec or for BC. You need to be part of a global solution. And the same has been true of the pandemic. The same has been true of inflation and cost of living issues.

You can't divorce yourself from the world anymore and say we're dealing with our own issues here and we're doing really well. So, and I do think that over the past decade and a half, one of the things that has changed, which is not the answer to your question, I say that right away, is that we have moved away from the central issue that was Canadian unity as in the Canada-Québec issue, that this has abated the notion that our governments, and they were consumed by the issue

until Stephen Harper became prime minister, that was the frontline issue. The Canada-Québec frontline was where governments were made or broken. And then the Quebec thing has contributed to it because Quebec has moved from you're a federalist or you're a sovereignist to you're a progressive or you're more of a conservative person. The CAAC is a small C conservative party. Most of its opposition parties define themselves as to the left of the CAAC. That's a different fault line and you see it on the national scene. But I think the evolution of the conservative movement and the conservative party towards a more hard conservative line, it could have gone differently after Stephen Harper, but that is not where the conservative movement now is, has had the effect of pushing the NDP and the Liberals closer together. We never talked about progressives versus conservatives until the Conservative Party decided to do away with the word progressive from

its name. And suddenly, in the process, not only created the new label to define Canadian politics, but eventually made that totally real. People who self-identify as progressives today probably didn't think in those terms, even in 2015, and certainly not in 2010 or the year 2000. And that has changed, and parties are trying to adapt to that, but that has changed the way that parties present their program. The Conservatives, I think, are struggling with this more than any other party. By-election this week were testimony to the incapacity of the current leader to unite the Conservative movement behind the single goal of

unseating the liberals to put in a conservative government. What happened in Portage-Lisgur was a fight on the right. What happened in Oxford was the product of fighting among conservatives. But what has happened to the conservatives certainly has impacted the way new Democrats and liberals need to interact and has pushed them to look for common ground rather than fight each other in ways that probably they would like to have avoided. And by the way, for all of those things that I've just said, I watched a unanimous vote in the House of Commons, unanimous of the parties this week, to support the public child care funding arrangements that the liberals have put in place.

So there is the speech and there is reality. And this did not go to a, we're really split on our vision of the place of social programs in this country between progressives and conservatives. Bruce? The first thing for me is I think that over time, the audience, the attentive audience for politics has become smaller as a proportion of the population. I think that the conversation about politics has developed harder edges over that period of time. Those two things work in tandem. Harder edges make more people recoil

from wanting to pay attention to politics. They create more of a sense of this is a conversation among the most deeply committed and interested people. So it's a self-reinforcing dynamic that's not that healthy for the country as a whole. I think the second question for me is the culture war question, who started it? And I think that you'll find people on the right who say that it was the finger wagging and the moral superiority of the people on the left. I'm a little bit more persuaded that the finger wagging and the sense

of moral superiority was an effect that can be annoying for people, but it wasn't intended to offend or start a culture war as much as it was intended to create momentum around diversity, inclusion, equal rights, climate progress. So in my view, it is the right that is more responsible for having created what exists now as a culture war. They feel empowered by it, raise money by it, draw bigger crowds as a consequence of it. But the things that are said as part of the right of center version of the culture war make the left aghast, horrified, those who are paying attention and create, again, more of this sense of pessimism

about where is the world going? How do I fit into it? So the culture war for me is a big part of what's different now from 10 years ago. And it has raised in my mind three fundamental questions that I'll be watching as we head into the next election. How much are we unified as a country? And is the nature of our unity different? I think you could probably tell by the fact that I asked the question, I think that unity isn't what it used to be in the country. I think that there is some sense of unity in some parts of the right, some on some parts of the left, but a cross-cutting sense of what we stand for as a country and how we think about the rights of everybody as individuals, what kind of role we stand for as a country and how we think about the rights of

everybody as individuals, what kind of role we want for government and public policy, I'm not so sure. Are we pragmatic? You know, a lot of politics, Chantelle kind of alluded to this, is people talking about kind of high-minded ideals, but Canadians have always been very pragmatic, and they preferred pragmatic solutions to go with the high-minded ideals. In the US, we saw, and in the UK as well, we've seen politicians succeed by declaring that they can solve something with a simple slogan, rather than a pragmatic solution. And so I'll be watching to see if Canadians pull their political leaders back from rhetoric and towards those pragmatic solutions. I guess the only other one for me is are we proud of our country? Are people of different generations proud of the same things about it?

Are people in different demographic groups proud of the same things about it? Are people in different demographic groups proud of the same things? Do we have the same sense of what our country really stands for that we did 10 or 20 years ago? I don't think that we do. I'm not overly pessimistic about whether we can again. But yeah, hopefully over after the summer, I'll feel a little bit more optimistic about some of these things because you can tell I think there are a lot of things to be a little bit rattled about and concerned about right now. The suggestion that there is less attention put by, I guess, the media in general, news organizations in general, on the politics of the day in covering the political story. And I'm wondering whether that has contributed at all to the state of politics in Canada. Here's the example I'd use. I mean, we've got to go back some years, and I'm not suggesting in any way this was a golden age of journalism, but when I was in the Parliamentary Bureau in Ottawa,

it was quite common for there in the nightly newscasts on The National to have three, four, sometimes even five stories from Ottawa. Now, I'm not suggesting that was good journalism or good television. But today, you might have trouble finding one. So obviously, the information flow about what's happening in the nation's capital with the nation's business and supposedly issues that affect all Canadians is a lot less now than it used to be. And I'm wondering, does that contribute to a lowering of attention

or a lowering of interest or a lowering of even any desire to know more about politics in Canada. Is there anything in there to add to our discussion on the state of politics? Chantal? Yes, but all that attention to politics was also related to the kind of issues that were being debated on Parliament Hill. You covered free trade. You covered the abortion debate. You covered free trade. You covered the abortion debate. You covered the Constitution, wage and price control.

I mean, all those issues were of major interest to a very large audience, whatever their views of the government or the country was. We are not at this point having these kinds of debates. There are important debates on Parliament Hill, but not these kinds of debates are unfolding on Parliament Hill. I tend to think that the parliamentary press is too confined to Parliament Hill or in provinces to the parliamentary bubble for budget reasons as much as anything. I would never have gotten all the knowledge I got about Canada had I not been on the road during the constitutional road trips, where you got to hear people who were not politicians talk about the country. Now, to some of Bruce's points, we never did share the same vision of the country.

I probably don't share his vision of the country. But as far for the course, it's really hard to praise diversity and everything and not to think that it's healthier to have a diversity of views, including in politics, rather than some unity. I think we still have a unity of purpose when you scratch all the political discourse. I'm not terribly concerned about Canadian unity at this point. And every time I hear people say, oh, we're on the verge of a unity crisis.

Well, we've seen those crises. We're not that fragile. We're still there. It's a fight national tomorrow here. In other parts of the country, it's called Saint-Jean-Bethisley. We're all good. It's fine. And in a week, people will be celebrating Canada. In many parts of the country, we'll be celebrating National Moving Day in Montreal, because July 1st is moving day. So does that make us a weaker country or just the country that is diverse and has quirks and features that actually make it less boring than

if it was all the same and all worked out to, you know, this is how we all see things. So I'm not concerned about the right having different takes than progressives on many issues. I've discovered over the years that, you know, the Reform Party was having extreme views when it wanted to balance budgets or put conditions on Quebec sovereignty until those became major progressive accomplishments of a liberal government. So I'm careful with the labels about, you labels about views that should be reined in. And as for culture wars, I don't think the liberals would have liked to fight in culture wars as much if they did not think that they were going to profit from them. Or was it so long ago that the prime minister of the country,

one called Paul Martin, wasn't sure that he wanted same-sex marriage to be the same as marriage for heterosexual couples. That's not in some distant history. That happened. It was called the Liberal Party. Strong section of it used to vote against anything that pertained to abortion rights. Same Liberal Party. So I'm guessing there was some benefit beyond principles to be had from engaging in culture wars. All right. I know Bruce wants to add to this, but we'll take our final break. So we'll be back to Bruce right after this.

And welcome back. We're into our final segment of Good Talk for this season, really. We take the break for the summer after today's Good Talk ends. We'll be back end of July and end of August with special summer editions of Good Talk. And then we're back at it again after Labor Day. All right, Bruce, you wanted to add on that discussion. Go ahead. Well, first, I just wanted to add a kind of an agreement with Chantal on the whole question of what's been happening with the media and their ability to resources included in that question, their ability to cover politics, including politics from Ottawa or politics from the road about national policy.

I think that has contributed to it, Peter. I think there has been, you know, the less interesting content there is about politics, the less interested people will be in following political news. I also think that politicians are part of the challenge there because they have decided somewhere along the line, different measure maybe for different politicians in different ways in terms of how they execute it. But politicians have been looking for ways to have their messages delivered more directly to people and rather than exclusively through the filter of news organizations. There's a long conversation that could be had about why and whether that was a smart thing to do or a good thing to do or good for them but bad for society. I could argue both sides of that, I think.

But as I heard Chantal talk about whether or not we were unified, I just wanted to add a couple of points. One of which is when I speak about unity in that context, I wasn't really speaking about the sense of our constitutional arrangements or the ability of our governments to function as part of a federation. I agree that that does not appear to be at any material risk. It is more about whether or not we connect around the same subjects with the same sense of kind of emotional interest as Canadians. And maybe, you know, Chantel's right that maybe we never did that much. But I do disagree a little bit on the question of whether there are really important tensions that have been developing. I think I do disagree on the question of whether or not if I were in the LGBTQ community, I wouldn't feel that there's a growing backlash against the idea of my rights

and that that is being empowered by really, really powerful voices and institutions, not so much in Canada, but it's happening in Canada as well. We saw that the NHL made a decision yesterday that I think that community would be very well entitled to understand as a setback against a history of decades of progress. Why is that happening? It is this sense that

extremism is more common and validated, and that polarization is its consequence. And it may just be that Chantal and I don't see that the same way, but I see that as a huge and growing problem in our times. Do you want to respond to that, Chantal? Well, I'm always struck when Bruce says things that I agree with about the LGBTQ community for sure. But when he says, but not so much in this country, well, we can't have one and the other.

We're either having this significant difference of view or we are seeing it more on the surface because of things that are happening elsewhere. But I'm not sure that the core mainstream Canadian view on social issues is shifted as a result of all of the things that have been said. The unity of purpose or the sense that we see a number of things in the same way. Listen, you're talking to someone who was raised in French in this country, and I watched how the Conservatives pointedly attacked without saying so.

Maxime Bernier and Portage Liske were by underlining the fact that he was a Quebec politician. What do you think that is, except one of the oldest dog whistles in Canadian politics. The good thing is that over the years, we've all become more tolerant of the notion that there are a minority of intolerant people in this country. I think they will always be there, whether it's Quebec, whether it's LGBTQ community, whether it's women. Some of the comments that you see about female journalists tell you all you need to know about this, whether it's the fact that in the business community, no one talks about it openly, but the fact that our federal finance minister is female somehow makes her a bit less of a finance minister than if she were a male counterpart. These things exist. They have always existed.

And we have managed to actually win more people over to views of equality than the opposite over the past decades. But I think any society is a work in progress. And it's normal that there are challenges. I also think the challenges to equality issues actually force people who defend it to make the argument, and I think that's important. I think you strengthen a sense of support for equality issues by having those discussions rather than by saying we can't have this discussion that's not politically correct. So on that score, I'd rather have these groups and

these feelings out in the open with some pushback than have them hide in some corner because the public censor will stop them from trying to make faulty argument. But that's just me. You know, maybe we should leave it there. I mean, I don't I'm not saying that they should be censored. I'm saying that the nature of them and the way that they traffic today causes more harm. Maybe that's where we disagree. I think that there is real actual harm as a consequence of the degradation of that debate. And when I see Ron DeSantis and others competing for that Republican nomination, a championing language that does do harm, that puts people in jeopardy, I don't think it's about whether we should have government censorship. I think it's really about whether or not we've got a problem that we don't know how to... I don't disagree, but your examples are always south of the border, a country where they have no consensus on abortion rights, no consensus on LGBTQ rights.

And I reject the notion that what happens in the U.S. is something that is happening in a microcosm in this country. I believe we're fundamentally different places. All right. There are examples in Canada as well that are being pointed out by our listeners. On the same scale? Not on the same scale, but it's a scale that starts somewhere. We've seen it in New Brunswick recently.

We've seen it in Alberta recently. And you could point to others as well. Not the same scale, but they do exist. You've seen it in New Brunswick. And if we were making predictions as we use in the old days, which premier is most likely to not survive the summer, which premier would we pick? The premier of New Brunswick. Right. But that's the system working. That's the system saying we don't find this acceptable.

If you just lament it and don't fight it, then you're basically just wasting time. Okay, but I guess the point is there is a fight going on over this issue. Well, there always was. That is my point. Right. Okay. Always. All right. There always my point. Right. Okay. Always. All right.

There always will be. This is great. We get to leave out of time on a contentious issue and with some disagreement, and I know I'll hear about it from our listeners. Listen, thanks to the two of you for another great year of discussions on Good Talk. Both Chantal and Bruce will be back end of July, end of August

for special summer editions of Good Talk, and then we'll be back at it in the fall. Who knows where we'll be and what we'll be talking about at that time. Everybody have a great summer, you too especially, and to all our listeners. Thanks very much. Yeah, that was a good talk. Thank you, guys.

Good to talk to you again. Have a good summer. Okay. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks for listening. Talk to you again, well, at least another month.