The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Good Talk -- The Re-Emergence of Erin O'Toole

Episode Date: January 6, 2023

The former Conservative leader is back and he's got people talking.  Bruce and Chantal have their views on that. Plus, are government-paid consultants taking the place of public servants?  And, is there going to be a cabinet shuffle, and if so, why?

Are you ready for Good Talk? And welcome to 2023 Good Talk. I mean, this is a whole year's improvement of Good Talk right here in one show as we launch the first one for a new year. Chantal's in Montreal. Bruce is in Ottawa. I'm in Stratford, Ontario today. So here we go. It's not normal, or let me put it this way.

It's unusual for a former leader to take kind of center stage. Not trying necessarily to get center stage, but end up on center stage. And the former leader of the Conservative Party, the one who was pretty well knifed right after he lost his first election, was a strange loss because they won more votes than the person who ended up winning, right? Justin Trudeau had the most seats, but not as many votes as Aaron O'Toole had done on the Conservative Party. But that wasn't good enough for his party. They wanted him out, and now they have Pierre Pelliev to take the next run. So Aaron O'Toole kind of disappeared into the background, which is not unusual. But over the Christmas holidays, he kind of wrote a blog that's received a lot of attention,

where he went after those in the system, and including in his party, who were doing the F. Trudeau flags and the aggressive nature of what can be seen as the political back and forth, and said this is bad. This is bad for us, this is bad for the country, and it shouldn't happen. Now, that's created a bit of a stir within his party, who have banked on the support they've had from many of the people who have conducted politics and life in that kind of style in the last year. But Pierre Polyev has sort of taken a, well, I don't know, I'm against bad language, but people are hurting. They've got to take their frustrations out somehow. So what's going on here? Is there more to this than it seems? Is there a difficulty

happening within the Conservative Party as a result of something like this? Chantal, why don't you start? There are a combination of things. To start with the end, Pierre Poiliev's comment that he has never in his lifetime seen people hurting as much as they are hurting now. He's either very young or he is very sheltered and has led a very

sheltered life as an Ottawa MP or has no sense of history because and should spend more time perhaps looking at the French television as you can not to name it so you would have seen over the New Year's Eve La Bolduc singing a song from more decades ago that describes exactly what happens when inflation hits you and it and what I see here is yes people are not where they would like to be economically, but I am not seeing a link between their feeling uncertain about going to work for the conservatives to create hate or to foster hate stimulated against Justin Trudeau as a way of getting the conservatives to government. He's basically saying stoking anger of that kind and the F. Trudeau flags.

I have not seen any conservative MPs flagging those flags. But I have seen the social media feed of many conservatives, including that of Aaron O'Toole when he was leader and when I suspect he was not running his own feed, which basically put everything that was wrong on the planet, including being in Jamaica for a while, someone is held up at an airport at the feet of Justin Trudeau, who is responsible for global inflation. He is trying to make you poor and basically accusing Justin Trudeau of wanting to do bad things to Canadians.

And in the result, having created what Mr. Poitier describes, and what he says is, well, you know, this is so terrible that people are entitled to have cross lines like this, introduce violence in the public sector and the public debate, or yes, to remind them that we have elections for a reason that we did have one a year ago, and that a dictatorship is not in place in Ottawa. So I believe that O'Toole's message was primarily, and he does say that he sees this problem as a more conservative problem, even if there is extremism on both sides. It has become more of a feature inside the conservative movement than inside other parties, and that that is the opposite of conservatism. So it comes late in the game.

I think it reflects Aaron O'Toole's actual character. I also have to note that he managed to keep that character somehow away from the spotlight for the time that he was leader. Well, it's great to see you both again, by the way. Last year, doing this every Friday was one of the most enjoyable things I did. I'm really looking forward to having the same experience this year. On the O'Toole piece, a number of things struck me. One is I'm happy to see MPs putting longer form thoughtful pieces into the market. He used Substack. Michelle Rempel-Garner is using it now.

I hope more of them do. I think it's a unique opportunity for them in this digital world that we live in to put a more thoughtful and considered piece of advocacy into the public sphere so people can consume it, can think more about what it is they have to say. Second thing I would say is I agree with almost everything in Aaron O'Toole's piece. He went through a number of themes that we three have talked about a number of times over the course of the last year. So I'm not just liking it because I agree with it, but just to highlight the things that struck me. He talked about the risks of normalizing rage, of desensitizing ourselves as a society to the kinds of things that people are now able and willing to say in the public sphere about each other.

He talked about the risks of these extreme views being amplified. He used the influences of the US, of algorithms and social media platforms, of the pandemic and the stresses that it caused, and globalization, all of which I think are incredibly rational arguments for describing what has created this situation. He talked about the complacency of the majority to kind of watch this happening and to sort of shrug and say, well, maybe there's nothing we can do about it. So we have to just try to ignore it. Those are really timely, really important arguments separate and apart from whether there's any internecine conflict within the Conservative Party. I do think, though,

he was talking also about a challenge in the Conservative Party in I do think, though, he was talking also about a challenge in the Conservative Party in Canada and the conservative movement in other parts of the world, too. And we're seeing some of that play out in this endless kind of stalemate over the choice of speaker in the in the Republican Party, which is partly, yes, about Kevin McCarthy, but partly also about kind of rage farming politicians wanting to just be able to rage farm rather than to participate in a democratic exercise that requires you to kind of water down your wine every once in a while, or maybe more regularly than that. Last point I will make is that to the extent that there's a pointed, I don't even think I would call it a barb, it's carefully stated, but he contrasts the idea of ordered liberty, that's the term that he used, where people kind of exchange acceptance of a certain order of how you do things for the liberty that they want. He contrasted that with this idea of untrammeled freedom,

which is, I think, not so veiled a reference to what Pierre Polyev campaigned on. And he says this untrammeled freedom thing is a mirage, basically. I'm not using the language that he used. He said, but it won't exist. It won't work the way that people think. And we shouldn't assume that it's a conservative thing because in his from his point of view, it isn't. I think he's right about that. And I think he put that point to his party in a not in a gentle way, but not in a terribly opaque way either. So good for him for doing it.

OK, let me just pick up on two things. First of all, your comment about the situation in the States and how they've gone through 11 votes now as of this moment, and they're going to be trying another one in the next few minutes, actually, when this program is on the air. But 11 votes, Bruce, let's not exaggerate. 11 ballots. That's nothing. I mean, that doesn't even rank up with Canadian stuff. I mean, what was it? Andrew Scheer took 13 ballots? 13. 13 to get his leadership, which was bizarre as well.

I know it was different, but I just wanted to have fun with Bruce. Okay. Let's get back to the Scheer thing, because I appreciate everything both of you said, and I think you've gone into detail on not only what O'Toole said, but what he was expressing and the different channels that he was navigating on that. But I get back to my original point. Is there more going on here than we think

in terms of the debate within the Conservative Party about how they move forward and how long that'll even be allowed? You know, you talk about how encouraging it would be if more MPs would take the sub-stack route and get their feelings out there. It'll be interesting to see how long they're allowed to actually do that because some parties, as we've witnessed in the past,

including the Conservative Party, the leader's office will crack the whip and say, you don't do that unless we approve it. It'll be interesting to see if that happens. I don't think that will be a problem. I don't want to interrupt your flow peter but i i i find it hard to imagine that backbenchers are going to be told that they can't do that on any party side i think that on you know on the conservative or the ndp side there's always going to be a certain amount of if you if you write things that are that feel harmful to the party's political positioning,

there's going to be some form of sanction, but I don't think it'll be a gag order. I think cabinet ministers won't be encouraged to use Substack, although for some of them, sometimes it might not be a bad idea. But liberal backbenchers, I don't know why they wouldn't. And I don't think they'd be gagged. I'd be surprised. Well, we're talking about the conservatives mostly at this point. And those who are using this freedom to express themselves, Aaron O'Toole, Michelle Rempel-Garner, Michael Chong on occasion,

are people who have an option coming up in a year or a year and a half or two, which is not to run again. And in each of their case, it would be Pierre Poiliev's loss. So, yes, you can always intimidate an MP into towing the party line by saying, well, you're not going to be in my cabinet. Well, if I'm not going to be in your cabinet, I'm going to keep having a personality and raising the issues that I think are important because I don't really need to run for you again, especially if I think that you are going to borrow a Brian Mulroney face, going to dance with the ones who brought you to the leadership. If many conservatives have no appetite with dancing

with the fringe of the Poitiers base that is very loud and very engaged in this, then Pierre Poitiers has a problem. They'll be happy never to dance with them and what has been happening on Capitol Hill sends a powerful message on that score to the Conservatives it's not the first message this year

of what happens to how you win and what language you use to win the Canadian message the powerful Canadian message was what happened to Jason Kenney and subsequent events that led to Daniel Smith's election. There comes a point when conservatives, and I believe the vast majority of conservatives, are not into the F Trudeau flag and don't even think in those terms.

And I never believed Aaron O'Toole did. But if that's you, who you would be associating with, and you're a conservative, and you have reservations, imagine if you are a liberal or a new Democrat supporter who is looking to switch. And that is what you see. A party that is kind of controlled by a fringe that makes your life or your work difficult or that wants to call the shots and ultimately destroy the institutions. So there is a message here from both Washington and Alberta that if you want a Conservative Party that Canadians who are not Conservative members will consider fit for office, you cannot go down that road. So that's the bad news for the Conservatives. I believe this week's events in Washington are bad news for the Trudeau Liberals because they may lead the Conservatives to think we need to get our act together and stop indulging in this,

because that spectacle basically says not ready for prime time. We can't afford to be giving Canadians a spectacle like that if we want to form government. And if that is what happens to the Conservative Party federally, well, that's bad news for Justin Trudeau, because a Conservative Party that plays at the extreme and flirts with the extremes is a Conservative Party that will not win the next election. So do we assume that Aaron O'Toole could come out of sort of the background and become this voice of, I don't know, reason within the Conservative Party? Do you think he's going to take a bigger position? No, Bruce? I can't imagine.

I mean, I can't imagine. I think that Chantal's put her finger on the problem. I think it would be, you know, it's maybe a little bit of an optimistic scenario to say that this could be what's happening in Washington could be bad news for the Liberals, because it presumes that the Conservatives here in Canada will self-correct based on looking at this TV show of chaos. And maybe that will be true. But in the near term, there's still fissures in the Conservative Party. And I did a little bit of looking into the math of what that cohort is that perplexes the Canadian Conservative movement. It's about 8% of Canadian voters

who think climate change is a hoax. 9-11 was an inside job. The moon landing never happened. The World Economic Forum is a strategy to kind of run the world. And those voters will either vote for the People's Party or for the Conservative Party. As long as that number, 8%, is kind of on the radar screen of the Conservative Party, it's a source of fundraising, it's membership. It's crowds at rallies. It's hard to ignore. But part of the point that Aaron O'Toole was making is you're going to have to choose. And I think the Republicans have not made that choice. And they cannot make that choice as long as Trump is kind of out there rabble-rousing.

The most encouraging thing, I think, in the U.S. this week has been that Fox News has finally sort of said, this doesn't look like it works for us. If we really do have to pick between the five never-Kevins and the 200, we don't like Kevin maybe, but we've got to get on with Republican business. They want to go with that more mainstream view, and they have not had to make that choice, I don't think, up till now.

So it's kind of sobering for people who want to have conservative parties in office, and maybe Chantal's right. Maybe it will work out to be such an important jolt to the system that the conservatives here take it on board. Last point on the gag order thing. I guess what I was referring to, there was a time in the early days of the Harper governments where MPs and cabinet ministers basically were not allowed to go on television programs,

on political shows, unless they had the approval of the leader's office. And if they got that approval, they also got a piece of paper that told them, okay, these are your talking points, and stick to them. Don't go beyond these talking points. Now, how unusual that was in the political circles in Ottawa, I'm not sure, but it was very evident in those days. And so that's why I was wondering whether or not there could be some movement towards preventing MPs from doing the, you know, whether it's Substack or what have you. But I hope you're right, and I certainly think you're probably right about the people we talked about, whether it's O'Toole or Rempel Garner or Michael Chong.

They're not going to take that kind of instruction from anybody at this point. They know what they want to say, and they're probably going to say it, and they've proven that in the past, certainly in the recent past. Okay uh okay we're going to move on we can take quick break when we come back we're going to talk about something that's not just peculiar to canada um but it is happening here as well and that's the the rise of consultancies consultancy um operations and consultancy fees as opposed to relying on your own bureaucracy to come up with strategies and programs. I want to talk about that. It may sound very administrative to you, but it's a huge deal in other parts of the world right now and could be coming this way if it's not already. So we'll be back with that right after this.

And welcome back. You're listening to Good Talk on The Bridge, Sirius Channel 167, Canada Talks, on your favorite podcast platform, and because it's Friday, on a YouTube channel near you. Just go to the link on my either Twitter or Instagram site, and you can watch us in production. It's a really exciting moment in television history. It's some TV here. It's a really exciting moment in television history. It's on TV here. It's exciting.

There's so many things going on in our respective offices. We're reenacting the model here. Okay. Consultancies or consultants are not new to politics anywhere. But what is new, it appears, is in the last few years, the last five to ten years, the number of consultants who are used, especially by Western governments around the world, has risen at an extreme rate. it went from single digit in Canada, millions of dollars of consultancy fees each year to well into double digits and approaching triple digits in millions of dollars. So what is going on here? Is there a belief on the part of governments that, you know, the bureaucracies, in some

cases, huge bureaucracies in various departments just aren't good enough anymore and they've got to go outside? Or is there, once again, more to this story than that? Bruce, why don't you start on this one? I think the thing that caused us to want to talk about this was a story that cbc or radio canada put up online and perhaps they broadcast it as well about the rise in consulting fees paid to a particular company mckinsey by the government of canada over the last several years and as i was reading that piece i didn't have the same sense of is this a big kind of transformative issue in terms of how government works? It was a little bit like, you know, I like to cook, but I'm not a very good cook. And when I

try to make soup, I make soup by throwing everything that's kind of around into a pot and hoping it turns out okay. And often it doesn't. That story felt to me a little bit like that. It seemed to be born of a couple of unnamed sources in one department whose noses were out of joint because this consulting company was brought in to provide services and these individuals didn't like that. Now that happens in every organization that I've ever worked with in the private sector. It's a normal kind of friction. It's a gnashing of gears. Sometimes it is true that the consulting services aren't everything that they're supposed to be. That, you know, like a client buys a kind of a vision for how a consulting relationship is going to work. And then it turns out that maybe more junior people are assigned, maybe the end product isn't that good. But we don't really know that from this story. And then the story goes on to make some sort of a link

between Dominic Barton, who used to be the head of McKinsey, and who has advocated for higher immigration rates, and the fact that immigration rates have gone up and McKinsey's fees in the area of immigration have gone up as well. And I think that's a tenuous link, because there are a lot of people, including people on all sides of the house who think that immigration levels need to go up. And I think that's a very thin line of reasoning in that story. So I'm not really trying to dump on the story. But just to say that one story doesn't have as much perspective on what's happening, as I would like it to have in order to come to the view that there's been a big change. But, and this is the last point I want to make is

a lot of the references to the work that McKinsey is doing are references to digital transformation, process transformation. And I do see that requiring on the part of governments outside consultancies, whether they pay too much, whether they contract them right, whether they hire the right firms. I don't know anything about that, but I do think that you cannot expect, and this is true in private sector organizations, it's very hard for existing resources inside an organization to be as aware of the potential transformative technologies and solutions that consultancies sometimes can be because they invest in figuring those things out because they work across a number of different categories and sectors and clients. And so it doesn't surprise me an age where digital is becoming the way more and more things are being done, that that would require governments to outsource some of that work and maybe to see those costs increase over time relative to internal costs. Chantal.

A bit of background on the Radio-Canada story, which was not done by the Parliament Hill Bureau of Radio-Canada, but that stems from the revelation before Christmas that the Legault government used McKenzie extensively over the course of the pandemic. And that kind of put a target, not to say that the journalists were out to take down McKenzie, but it did make McKenzie a sudden object of interest. The next question, if you're a good investigative journalist, is, well, what about the federal government? The numbers involved are really minuscule. $66 million in the federal budget is a drop. It's not even a drop in the ocean.

That's how small it is. What made the story was that $66 million is a lot more than what was spent by Stephen Harper over his time in office, around $2.2 million. Bruce has a point about digital services and the fact that the pandemic forced the federal government to get outside expertise on a number of those files quickly, if only because civil servants were totally overburdened with work, getting money out to Canadians and adjusting to the new realities of the pandemic.

And this wasn't a case where you could say, well, 9-11 happened, and we're going to tighten security at the airports and find our way to it. It's something that is X million of Canadians are without money to pay a rent. So focus on this. I'm not going to say that the results are unnecessarily conclusive. They possibly point to the necessity of creating inside the civil service a kind of IA digital force that can intervene and be there to give you what you need when you need it. The ArriveCam saga, which we don't know the beginning, the middle or the end of, is not particularly conclusive. And I'm not talking here about the choices of the government in using it, but in the way it was developed and the way it worked and how much it costs. So

it's not as if some miracle super workers showed up and gave the government something that worked really well for a price that was really competitive, which is basically what you would expect if you're going to go outside. Now, my problem as a journalist, I'm not a consultant, is that I understand that the public service at its highest level is there and has the security and theory to speak truth to power about some idea, some initiative, or some policy that the government wants to get off the ground. My concern is that if I were a consultant, and having watched consultants who are very competent otherwise, their primary goal is to satisfy the client. And that does not always involve telling the client, you are completely wrong and wanting to do this. It's

just not a good idea. The response is more likely to be, if that's really what you want to do, we're going to do something that works for you. And I think there is a peril there for governments to be farming out all this, and in the process, escaping the truth to power that they don't always want to hear. I like that point. Sorry, go ahead, Peter. No, no, no, I was going to say the same thing. I mean, it's a really good understanding, I think,

of the difference between how a bureaucracy serves a government and how a consultant serves a government, and the potential difficulties that exist because of that. But I guess I still want to get to that point, and I think you both kind of touched on it, because I don't think either one of you see, boy, there's a big transition happening here. They're moving away from, you know, civil servants and they're going to the private sector to help or more than help,

but to determine their policies. Neither one of you see that. There are some areas where certain kinds of jobs, more kind of routine jobs, processing jobs. There has been a move to use outsource agencies to find those workers quickly and easily so that you can bring them on when you need them and you don't need to have them on the payroll in perpetuity if you don't need them on the payroll. And I think that by and large, that's a market that has worked well for governments, not just the federal government. And so there has been some outsourcing of some of those jobs that has become more routinized. I think in general, it's also true. And we heard a fair bit about this in the very early days of the Trudeau government about deliverology, the idea that you look around the world for some best practices in terms of how to do things as part of how you figure out how to implement the vision that you have yourself. be those situations where, for example, if we're trying to develop a promotional effort to attract

investment to Canada, that it makes sense for us to look around the world to see who's competing to do that for the same investment dollars. And sometimes consultants are going to be far better equipped to do that scanning and analysis and to bring it forward so that it influences the policy just by nature of the work that they do and the skills that they have. And then the other part where I don't think you can really, you can't outsource it, but you can't do it all completely in-house is this large area called cybersecurity, where every day the risks continue to evolve and increase and the techniques needed to solve for those risks are evolving as well. So you need access to the best in class solutions in that space, but you can't outsource that. Government needs to kind of own how it manages

that problem. So I think that's a tricky area that didn't exist before. Like a lot of the challenges that I think are being met with consultants. I also noticed in that story, the reference to consultants can't really take on board the public interest in providing consulting support. And I thought it was an interesting point, because I do think there are some situations where that's true, that the DNA of the consulting enterprise won't come at solving a problem with the public interest really baked in, in the same way that somebody who's committed to a life in public service will. And I think that's an important thing for governments to think about. But I also think that

sometimes you get a big idea if you're looking outside more easily than if you only look inside. Do you have a final thought on this, Chantal? Well, Bruce raised cooking and his notion that he gets his results by throwing everything he's got left in the fridge. I'm guessing that there is a real peril to the quality of the public service if chefs are best exploited and best paid as consultants and public servants are left to be short-order cooks, with all respect for Bruce's cooking, which I've seen pictures of. It looks a lot better

than short order cooking. But still, if you develop an area of expertise, someone is going to come and offer in the public service, someone will come and offer you more pay to do the same thing and to have more resources to do it. So, I mean, it's public administration, and there are loads of people who are listening to us who know better. But, for instance, cybersecurity. Is there a reason why we need the federal government to be unable to have a hit squad on cybersecurity to operate within the public service?

Or should we not do that because we didn't do that in 1921 and and where is the definition of a modern civil service that does what you need it to do if every time a new mission comes up you say well we're going to leave it to the private sector because it's a lot of trouble to develop this and that. Well, at some point, you're going to end up with a very skinny and possibly not imaginative. I'm being nice here to several servants. I'm saying they're imaginative and think out of the box. You are going to be discouraging that because people who think out of the box and help others do that are going to go do it for consultants for more money. You know, one of the things about outsourcing is if you believe, in fact,

it's necessary and it replaces something that you couldn't get from within your bureaucracy from whatever department or segment of the administration that was responsible for that. One of the things that time has told us is that it's awfully hard for governments then, who are always looking to save money, to pull back in those areas, to say, okay, you know what, we don't need that part of the department anymore. Unfortunately, we're going to have to let those people go because they've been replaced by outsourcing. I can remember even in the depths of the Harper years

when there were different stories going on about how certain things were being handled outside of the bureaucracy. And I can remember sitting across from Stephen Harper and saying, yeah, but here's what I don't understand. The number of public servants in your administration has actually gone up from the Martin Crayton years. So that was a puzzle to me. Anyway, it's time to move on. It's time to move on to our final segment,

which is about the cabinet shuffle. Or is there a cabinet shuffle? Or if there is going to be a cabinet shuffle, who's going to get shuffled? So we'll talk about that right after this. And welcome back. You're listening to Good Talk on Sirius XM, Channel 167, Canada Talks, or your favorite podcast platform platform or you're watching on our YouTube channel. Final segment for this opening Good Talk of 2023. January is always a slow month in Ottawa

because Parliament's not sitting. And so people have to, and journalists have to be at times imaginative about what they're going to write about. And I can recall from my days, maybe it's different now, but you might be having lunch with somebody or coffee or what have you, and they say, you know, a friend of mine who's a friend of so-and-so's, who's a friend of that person who was talking to somebody at the PMO, says that the prime minister's thinking about maybe doing a shuffle this month.

And that suddenly gets elevated to possibility of a shuffle. Who could get shuffled? Why would they do a shuffle now? Is this the right time for a shuffle? Does this tell us something about when the election may be? Anyway, so some of those stories are kind of going around now. Nobody knows for sure whether there's going to be a shuffle or even if it's being discussed.

But that hasn't stopped some of the speculation around a shuffle. So let's talk about that. Let's join in the speculation. First of all, what a slur on Ottawa to say that it's slow in Ottawa. Like, I don't know know people are out right now. They're running, they're cross-country skiing, they're doing all kinds of things. It's, you know, you from that kind of parliamentary bureau perspective

looking to have the goat fed every six hours or whatever, that might look like a slow situation to you, but it's not. It's not fair to say that. You've got to do your job or you could be outsourced. You've got to be there. You've got to be talking about something. Well, I think Peter was wrong.

He said it's always slow in Ottawa in January. I think it's always slow in Ottawa. Says the Montrealer. Yeah. You can talk abouter. Yeah. You can talk about goats. Yeah, I can see how that works. This clip is going to live forever. I just want you guys to be aware.

You asked for it. And I'm not about to go to Ottawa anytime soon. I'll wear a mask and a toque. That's how Ottawa people dress these days anyway. That's true. How unfortunate that we had this conversation well I guess we have nothing to talk about then on the shuffle about the shuffle tell me about the shuffle why would you do a shuffle right now if there was going to be a shuffle why shuffle

that is one good question why because this cabinet has only been in place how long? One year. Since the last January when nothing was happening. Since the last line, nothing happened. There are ministers who have not performed well in their jobs. They are not, on the other hand, the line minister, the frontline ministers that you will be needing over the next few months. We all understand that the prime minister, unless she is leaving, and I have not heard anything like that, will not be moving Christia Freeland from finance in January,

she would have to be leaving for some other job. She's in the middle of the budget process. And she's his lead minister. By all evidence, he is not in the process of thinking of moving Mélanie Joly from foreign affairs, who has also gotten her feet on the ground and is into a complex job at a time that she herself in interviews said she never expected to be in foreign affairs at a time like this. Jean-Yves Duclos is the minister of health. He's the lead minister on the lead file on the social front that the prime minister is trying to get results on. He's not going to get changed, even if there is a shuffle.

So that leaves you with, if you're the prime minister, the option of moving. And while there are ministers that have not performed well and make themselves targets, Marco Mendicino is a case in point. He's had a bad fall. But none of the ministers that we are talking about has become an embarrassment to the government in the sense of corruption or under a cloud or something that is so grievous beyond what looks a bit like incompetence, that you would want to think, is it worth it?

If I'm not going to be changing my main players, the ones I really rely on, to go for a shuffle, do I absolutely need to do that? Should Charles Sousa, who was a former Ontario finance minister, who was just elected in a by-election, should he come to cabinet now? Justin Trudeau has kept talented people, tended to be male,

and not from Toronto or Ontario. He's kept them out of cabinet forever because of his gender-balanced agenda in particular. So in the end, you've got to decide, absent a really compelling reason, whether you want to create the kind of transitioning with people having to learn the ropes again and the number of portfolios that the shuffle involves. Now, I'll just put something, a bracket here. It is always possible that the senior minister in this government is having L challenges. These things happen. And they do trigger more changes than you

would expect. At this point, there is no evidence of that. That doesn't mean it's not a reality or a possibility. And in that scenario, well, then you do have to shuffle. So your answer? A shuffle is absolutely necessary, but a shuffle that the way the lineup looks would not really change much of anything to the directions of the government. All right, Bruce. Yeah, Peter, this is going to hurt a little bit.

Who's it going to hurt, first of all? It's going to hurt you a little bit as a leaf sand, right? Because you've politics for me is like part public policy and a big part chemistry. And the idea of a shuffle in this situation would either have to be born from a feeling that the public policy part of the administration of government has broken down, which I agree with Chantal, that is not the, there is no prevailing evidence to suggest that that's the case or because the chemistry of the people in government is, is requiring it, that they're feeling defensive, beaten down, pessimistic about their chances, angry or frustrated, that sort of thing. And there was a better case that could

have been made before the Prime Minister appeared at the Emergencies Act hearings, that the chemistry inside government was a little bit kind of shaky. There was a feeling that maybe, you know, Polyev was doing better than people had expected. And now I think the chemistry has shifted. I think both the liberals feel like they're actually in better position than the polls on the surface might give them credit for, and that the conservatives are more confounded by the challenge of if Pierre Pauliev can't get more share of voice or if he's a little bit kind of torn between

the freedom champion or a kind of a replacement prime minister I think those are those are legitimate things that have changed the chemistry and the reason I say it's going to hurt, and I'll finish on this point, is that you know from your long fan support of the Toronto Maple Leafs that the time when people talk about changing everything up or rebuilding program, you know, trading for new players, a new coach happens after a series of losses because you've seen that so many times. You know that that's what happens to change the chemistry and require that change. That's not happening in Ottawa now.

And that's why I'm with Chantal that barring the departure of Chrystia Freeland or some other extraneous situation like a health issue. I don't know why for a minute the prime minister would think about disrupting the assignments that he has in place and the people he's got running them. I watched the Leafs. All right. I heard what happened to the Leafs last night. They lost to an expansion team. Oh, sad.

To Seattle. So it's time to blow it up. You know, it's time to get rid of all these players. Start all over again. Here's my thought on shuffles i think we we in the we in the media uh tend to overstate their importance you know you could probably go through the shuffles of the last 20 or 30 years and and people wouldn't remember 95 of the names that were were shuffled and where they went and what they did as a result of that. Shuffles produce few big successes.

I think Chantelle actually hit on one, and I'm not saying there was just one in the last shuffle, or in the last couple of shuffles, but Melanie Jolie, who had had kind of a rough start as the environment minister, right, when they first came in, and people were writing her off, and her political future were writing it off. And she worked her way back,

and then even when she got the foreign affairs portfolio, most people were going, really? You know, Melanie Jolie? But they're not saying that anymore. She seems to have done pretty well in that post, well enough to the point where some people are talking about her as future leadership potential. But this point about whether or not we overstate the importance of a shuffle, especially in the public eye. Maybe internally they're important and they can work.

But do we tend to really overstate the importance of these? It becomes just a story that's kind of like one of those stories that we all talk about within the circle, but nobody outside is talking about it? Well, a successful shuffle should not be a story for three months. So I'm guessing the typical unsuccessful shuffle was the idea of pushing Jody Wilson-Raybould out of justice only, what, nine months to an election. Oh, that was a shuffle.

So if you really mess up in your shuffle, you're opening yourself up to leaks and subsequent stories and often scandals. Successful shuffles will usually, well, when Bill Morneau left, it's quite extraordinary for a finance minister to resign in the middle of a big crisis. And Chrystia Freeland stepped in. It was kind of a seamless transition. I'd say that was successful. It didn't produce a raft of stories. You and I remember one of the best shuffles was Brian Mulroney suddenly showing up at Rideau Hall to swear in Lucien Bouchard,

who was the ambassador, and to Paris. That is a shuffle that changed history in all kinds of ways, but we didn't know that that day. You only look back and say, wow, that was something. But I'm with Bruce, I don't see the need for the government to that are required absent circumstances that I'm not aware of. So then that would be a really boring shuffle. I mean, I can write a line to say X was demoted and X was promoted. And most people you are right outside of this bubble will not even know who we're talking about. Right. Yeah. Look, I think that it's logical that journalism likes events like that. It's news.

And it's got the kind of the human drama aspect. And, you know, it's a change that has some requirement to report on it, to dig around it, to find out interesting storylines, including the human dimension. But if you're in government, in the political apparatus of government, a shuffle is a misery. It's a misery of hard choices. It doesn't feel like this will be fun. Let's figure out who, you know, which two or three people are going to feel better and which 40 are going to feel worse and how we manage the 40. Because the upside of the two feeling happier is going to be so great in the polls. That never happens. That never, ever will happen as far as I'm concerned.

So it's destabilizing if you've got mandate letters and you're a year in and people are working on files and you've got a legislative agenda. And I was looking at the government's legislative agenda for the coming year. And it's, you know, it's out there for people to see. Why would you change who's doing what unless you really felt you needed to or you saw some incredible upside, which has never really materialized for any shuffle before. Or unless someone like Aaron O'Toole wants to do a Belinda Stronach and cross the floor to join your cabinet. That's the picture that we're going to use to promote this podcast right now. That's a good one.

I will just close by saying that the shuffle that I remembered most was in the latter years of the Pierre Trudeau 1970s government. When the government was in trouble, they needed something, they wanted to jumpstart their image. And he shuffled, I think it was in the fall of 78 or 77, somewhere in there. He shuffled 20 ministers. And it was a surprise. We expected, you know, three or four. There were 20 of them, and the list came out, and we're looking at it, and we did all these new people and who got moved to where, and suddenly somebody said, and I was just at that point a cub reporter

in the Ottawa Bureau, somebody said, geez, Bryce Mackis, he's not on this list. He's been dumped. And he was the labor minister and had quite the kind of following um and uh he said we got to get him we got to get him on the air like right now uh into the national was live at 11 o'clock or something in those days and um they said you go find him and i i didn't know where to look for him and duffy said to me go find him he'll probably be in this office.

And he pointed to one. And I went over to this office. And there he was with a bunch of his friends. And he was well into celebrating being dumped from cabinet. And I had to put him on the air. And it was incomprehensible. And finally, I heard them pull the plug in Toronto. That was it.

Anyway, that's my cabinet shuffle story. That's it for this week on Good Talk. Chantelle Hebert in Montreal, Bruce Anderson in Ottawa. Thank you both very much. Have a great weekend. We'll talk to you again on Monday. Thank you.