The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Good Talk -- This is Not Our Normal Conversation

Episode Date: November 17, 2023

We have set the normal political conversation aside for the first segment of Good Talk this week. Instead an emotional discussion about the loss of a Canadian cultural icon. His name -- Karl Tremblay, and for many Canadians they may not have heard of him, but today we'll tell you why he's someone, if you didn't know about, you should. Chantal and Bruce have their memories. Plus more potential splits in both the Liberals and the NDP, and  what to expect with Pharmacare next week.

Are you ready for Good Talk? And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here with Bruce Anderson and Chantelle Hebert. It's a Friday Good Talk session. And we have, you know, this program has been based on our discussions around politics, usually Canadian politics, sometimes provincial, sometimes federal. Sometimes we go outside of our boundaries, talk about American politics, talk about UK politics. And all of those would be good to talk about today, any one of those areas, and we'll probably get to some of them. But that's not how we're going to start.

We're going to do something a little different today. I want to talk about Carl Tremblay. Now, I'm not sure how many Canadians outside the province of Quebec have heard of Carl Tremblay before. But he passed away this week on Wednesday. Prostate cancer. 47 years old. Cultural icon for French Canadians

and English Canadians inside Quebec. He's the lead singer of a group called Les Cowboys Francons. Extremely popular. Sold 16 albums over the last 20 years, performed in front of tens of thousands of fans. Last night at the Bell Centre in Montreal, where the Canadians play, they kind of raised a sweater.

Well, they actually hung a sweater with number 76 on it, a Habs sweater. And 76 was the number that Carl Trombley used to wear when he played hockey, and he played a lot of kind of beer league hockey. And the arena was quiet. They sang his songs. They had a kind of light parade. It was very moving to watch it. But as I said, most of Canada never heard of this guy. But he's being compared to, and perhaps unfairly, in the sense that he may even have been bigger than Gord Downie was for a lot of English Canadians.

So the province of Quebec has been devastated by this news. Lots of things happening over the last 48 hours. Chantal, tell us why this fellow was so connected to that province. Oh, boy. I guess I'm going to start with an anecdote of where I was when the news broke. So I was sitting on a bus on Park, big street in Montreal, at rush hour. And everyone is on his or her phone, as is the fashion. And I'm looking at my phone, and the news breaks. And instantly, I text a friend to say, Quebec is in mourning.

This is happening. And then I looked around, and I saw people's face change as they were looking, scrolling down on their phones. It's really a strange thing to watch. Why so instantly? And everything that has happened since then, there is no surprise. It's like being told René Lévesque has died, for those of us who are old enough. You know what's going to happen next. People will be crying.

I sit in a radio studio every morning. And yesterday morning, the host started the show Open Donna Song by Les Cowboys Fringants. And then he said, for the first time since I've started hosting this show, I've had to ask the assistant producer to bring a box of tissues in the studio because this is what is going to happen. I heard him this morning listen to what was happening or what had happened at the hockey game. Then when he picked up again, his voice was breaking. He said, I can't get over this cold.

My voice is never completely coming back. Well, I was sitting at home. I've worked with this guy for a number of years now thinking, no, no, no, no, no. That is not why your voice was breaking. You're just trying to get over this moment. Intergenerational would be the first thing you would say about it. I listen to Les Cowboys Fringants, especially when I'm down, and I need to be picked up by songs that actually make sense of what you see

in the subtext of all of the things that you see when you cover politics, but you don't talk about because we are not here to deliver emotion. We're here to deliver facts and analysis. My son, whose generation is very much the generation of Les Cowboys Fringants, listens obviously to them. My grandson, who is 10 years old, has gone to a show of Les Cowboys Fringants and sings those songs. So that's a very large band. Now, people outside Quebec are probably used to the notion that when something like that happens and the singer is in play, they think of Gilles Vigneault,

they think of Mon Pays, songs that are nationalistic in a very Quebec sense. This is different. This is Quebec in modernity. Anyone – and those songs are universal, even as they are obviously based on a Quebec flavor. I was listening yesterday to Jean-François Lisée, a former journalist, but former leader of the Parti Québécois, who said the first time he heard the song called L'Amérique Pleure,

which is America in Tears, he was driving and he had to stop his car to listen to it. Well, I wasn't driving, but I just played it over and over and over again. This song came out during the pandemic towards closer to the tail end in the beginning. It was written over that time. It's basically a truck driver who is describing his experience of driving on highways between the U.S. and Canada. And he describes the America he sees, and it puts him towards so many thoughts that you have when you watch what's happening, not just in the U.S., but also in Canada. But in very everyday terms, he talks about the chicken soup at the truck stops that is no longer homemade.

There's not a love that goes into it anymore, he says. And then he parks his truck and sits and looks in his rearview mirror and cries. It's a really, really great song, but it touches so many things. I think it, and you say outside Quebec and not too many people, I would say most Francophone Canadians know Les Carbouilles Fringants as do, because they were a big thing in France too. People couldn't understand some of the references. One of the songs about shooting stars, Les Etoiles Filantes, kind of told me what was going to be coming in my son's life. You know, the kids, the belly, the mortgage, and Passepartout, which is the Quebec's Sesame Street for my son's generation. So in France, they wouldn't know about Passepartout.

But they knew all the words when the Cowboy Fringants were giving a show in France, audiences knew the words to the songs. That's really rare. And I don't think they treated the Cowboy Fringants like this curiosity as they often do from our Quebec cousins. So I'm going to leave the musical expert on this panel to pick up from there. We will. We'll get Bruce's thoughts on this. It was the Les Etoiles song that they sang in the Bell Centre last night, the crowd. Bruce, you are kind of the musical expert of the three of us, if we can use that term of any of us.

That might be a low bar, but I'll take my shot at this. I grew up in a little town called Valleyfield, not far from Montreal. And despite the name, it was a very francophone community. It remains a very francophone community. I grew up surrounded by francophones, learned to speak French. But it was in my early teen years, I think, the first time, maybe mid-teens, the first time that I went to what's been called in Quebec a boîte à chanson. There aren't really analogs in other parts of the country, at least not like those. And these are bars, pubs, basically, where a series of musicians typically will take the stage and sing. And the most impactful thing for me then was the style of of music it was so it was political it was funny it was culturally kind of derived it was really about how quebeckers felt it employed what some people dismiss as um

joao a slang version of french but which i love i I find quite unique and something that Quebecers take pride in, I think, especially when it's put in the form of popular music. And by popular music, I mean music that resonates with people. That phase, which was in the 70s, is often described when people are talking about Les Cabois Fringants as the traditional, and they're the neo-traditional. They took that style of music and added a little bit more rock influences to it. But for me, when I was listening to it yesterday, I found myself drawn more to the traditional, of the neo-traditional versions that they have. Those songs are still so remarkable. And as Chantal said, multigenerational. I sent my kids, my grown kids, some clips yesterday.

One of them was to Chantal's point about the fame and the popularity of this band in France, in Belgium as well, I understand. But I sent a clip of a concert that they gave in Paris, and they were singing a song called Le Tune d'Aton. Beautiful song. I think I'm going to tweet out a link to it, including the lyrics, so people can, it's often political, it's very human. And I think those are the things that make it so universally popular for people who can get inside the lyrics and understand and get past the Joao references. And also to the individual Eric Tremblay. When you see him singing this song on that stage in Paris, and people are so into that music that he feels obliged to turn the mic back to the crowd, not just as some musicians do sometimes for a phrase or a couple of words, but they're frustrated if he's not giving them the right

to sing almost that entire song and just be a backing vocalist for the audience. You really don't see that very often. In English Canada, you would sort of look at Blue Rodeo and the Tragically Hip as examples of musicians who come from a similar style and have that similar cultural connection with Canadians, in part because the stories that they tell feel Canadian, feel local, feel like they're told in the language and the dialect of people who live here. So it's a great loss for that style of music, obviously for that band, but the body of work that people can listen to and hopefully will listen to.

I listened to La Chaca Hector this morning, just a very funny song that kind of reminded me of growing up in Quebec and drinking beer and thinking about the moment and not thinking too much about the future. There's lots that people will get to continue to enjoy in the music from that group and the stylings of Eric Tremblay. Chantal, can I ask you, you both mentioned how, you know, he didn't ignore politics. Politics was in his music, but was he political? Well, not in...

I'm guessing if we lived in a very political era in Quebec, I would describe a very political era as a time when the future of the province, the political future of the province is in play. The Cowboy Fringant would have been part and parcel of the fabric of that conversation. That is not the era we live in these days. They have a song, though, that many Quebecers know, that is called Letra à René Lébec, which is a letter to the former premier.

And I'm not as familiar with it as with some other songs, but I understand that it says, you know, did you think we would turn out to be kind of so not necessarily up to what you hoped for? And that doesn't really mean sovereignty because the Cabo-Franc-Gueux were very much into issues like very early on climate and the environment, but also social justice and social inequalities. And that shines through a lot of their songs. Now, remember, Quebec lives in a different place economically than it did when I was a kid, and probably when Bruce was growing up in Valleyfield. But it's not that long ago that Quebecers remember how tough economically life was and how collectively their economic standing of

francophone Quebecers was low. So the social justice themes still resonate, even if our kids are a lot more comfortable than my grandparents, who were blue-collar workers, would have been. I think their work superseded those differences, as do the work of others in Quebec, between federalists, no one was claiming the Cowboy Fringal for any camp yesterday. That wasn't happening. This is not they belong to everyone and it's a part of

everyone's soul that was lost. But this was also something that Quebecers knew was possibly coming. In the sense that all summer they had had to cancel some concerts, maintain some. They gave an extraordinary one at the Festival de Tite-Québec

on the plains of Abraham, where thousands and thousands of people were. And it was just a love fest, very bittersweet. It made you wish you'd been there. And they also gave one concert where he was really not feeling so good. And so all members of the band, he had to sit to do whatever he was singing, he had to deliver. And all members of the band just took chairs. And they gave the concert on chairs saying, you didn't come here to watch us dance, did you? So it's news no one wanted, but it's not news that took people by surprise.

And I think somewhere there is a sense, you know, when people die and you think at least I spent some time telling them that they were important in our lives. I think most Quebecers would feel they had time to send that message. But the premier offered a state funeral, which is something that all opposition parties support. The family will have to decide. It may be that François Legault was not as much in Les Cowboys Fringants as many other Quebecers, but he certainly totally got that he had to make that offer.

And we'll see where it goes from there. But I think, you know, I've been humming Cowboy Fringants songs for the past two days. And every time I turn the radio on, there's another one. And I think that's going to continue. There were last night, on top of what happened at the hockey game, there were gatherings at the foot of Mont-Royal, in L'Assomption, in Quebec City. And I'm guessing the weather helped.

Let's be serious. Here we're having a nice spell, which is good. But I think we're going to be into this probably for a couple more days. And then those songs and what the band does going forward will be something we'll all see. You know, you've both touched us with your, not only your stories about Carl Tremblay, but also your sense of the emotion of all this and the impact it's had on the soul of,

well, I guess the soul of a people, as you say. It's mainly Quebec, but Francophones outside Quebec are feeling the same thing, and some clearly in Europe, where there was a strong fan base. You know, I read about how at 8 o'clock yesterday morning, on the Thursday morning, all the radio stations in Montreal all played the same song at the same time. You know, it's quite remarkable.

And in some of the ways you've described it, it's kind of similar to that last year with Gord Downie. You know, he was sick. He was very sick, brain cancer in his case. But they went on that final tour, and it was unbelievably emotional. And the final concert was in Kingston, the hometown of the Tragically Hip. And, you know, there were 12,000, 13,000 people there, and it was televised nationally, and it was quite something.

Anyway, I know this is not what we usually do on Good Talk, but I'm glad we did this because you gave us a sense of parts of this country that I wasn't aware of, and I'm sure many of our listeners weren't either. Okay, we're going to take a quick break, then we'll come back and we'll talk what we usually talk about. We'll talk a little Canadian politics right after this. And welcome back. You're listening to Good Talk, the Friday episode of The Bridge. I'm Peter Mansbridge.

Chantelle Hebert and Bruce Anderson are with me. You're listening on SiriusXM, Channel 167, Canada Talks, or your favorite podcast platform, or you're watching us on our YouTube channel. Glad to have you with us, whatever platform you are plugged into right now. Okay, back to the reality of Canadian politics. And, you know, there are a number of issues that we could talk about. I want to start on kind of where we are in the Canadian position on the Israel-Hamas war, because it seems to be causing serious disruption within two of the three major parties.

And those are the two who are kind of holding the liberals in power, the liberals, obviously, and the NDP. And both parties seem to have a dividing line within them about issues, whether it's the war itself, the ceasefire question, and the divisions are strong and could cause real problems. And that's what I want to get at. So, Bruce, why don't you start us on this in terms of what you're hearing, what you're seeing, and how difficult a situation this could be for those two parties to manage the situation and, in effect, keep the Liberals in power.

Well, I haven't really thought about it in the context of keeping liberals in power or maintaining the relationship between the parties. And maybe I will now that you've asked the question, but I tend to think that all parties are struggling with a combination of reflexes and understandings of what's happening in in the in the region i think that part of the struggle that they have is linked to the fact that um it wasn't very many years ago that what was really in prominence in our political conversation was a real rise in Islamophobia. You will remember, both of you, I know that 2015 wasn't that election, but 19 was an election where there was quite a conversation about Islamophobia and the treatment of Muslims in the country. And so I think for a lot of voters whose history, their knowledge of history and the history in particular of anti-Semitism,

they have developed an understanding of the history of Islamophobia and that that is something that's very prominent in their minds as they think about what's happening in Gaza. For people who are perhaps older, so I am speaking about a generational difference, there is a deeper and longer understanding perhaps of anti-Semitism. And they see lots and lots of evidence of a rise in anti-Semitism, which, given their knowledge of the Holocaust, is something that isn't more important than Islamophobia, but provokes much deeper feelings of fear and anxiety and a sense that things can go terribly badly very quickly. So I do think that there's an intergenerational difference in the connection to Islamophobia and anti-Semitism. Both are important issues to be dealt with. Both are prominent in the way in which politicians are being urged to act, urged to speak, and both

influence the way mainstream voters are thinking about what's the right thing to do in this situation. The second thing that I think is really challenging for people in politics is if you're not one of the politicians who can make a difference in the resolution of this conflict, but you still feel like you should opine on it, it can really sound like people offering platitudes, but not much of real value in terms of saving lives, in terms of solving these perpetual conflicts. And I suspect there are people who feel quite deeply about this who are kind of getting tired of hearing politicians talk about it if they don't really have any material ideas on what to do to save lives that are being lost now and prevent more murders by Hamas of Israelis. And the last thing I think is that the Jewish community in Canada

and broadly sees this as a situation where Hamas murdered and took hostages among their population. And that that is what started this. And the release of those hostages and the eradication of that particular threat, Hamas, is necessary to their safety. And so when they hear politicians say Israel has the right to defend itself, but then there's a but after that. Their instinct, not unsurprisingly, is to say, but why is there a but after that? On the other hand, there are many people of good faith who want Israel to feel protected,

to feel supported, and to defend itself properly, who see these images of death of innocent civilians in Gaza, and they want that to stop. So it's a paralyzing problem for a lot of people. It's perplexing for politicians to know what to say that might be useful. And probably it's the case that more of them are talking about it than are being useful on it. And that's causing some friction in politics. But I think they all feel it. I don't think it's a partisan divide, particularly, at least I haven't seen much evidence of it at this point in

time. Chantal. I'm going to bring it back to the political arena, because I believe that as this conflict goes on, it does have the potential to affect the dynamics in the House of Commons to move the debate from the streets. And those statements, I agree with Bruce, there are days when you could dispense with spreading your wisdom about the news in Israel, on the streets, on the ground, are becoming more entrenched. Anyone who looked at the pictures of Justin Trudeau's visit to Vancouver and the kind of reception he got in not one but two restaurants at the hand of pro-Palestine demonstrators, speak to that. Looking at both events, it felt to me like positions here were even more entrenched

in a visceral way as over the course of the debate over vaccines, which actually affected people in a real factual way, not as part of a larger debate. And for obvious reasons, the Jewish community is feeling very targeted. Justin Trudeau's comments this week, and the tone that he used to warn Israel, were widely seen in the Jewish community in this country as insensitive in the sense that the general feeling was that the prime minister had, at the end of the day, for political reasons of trying to balance both sides, painted a larger target on the backs of the Jewish community here at home. That his tone implied that the war crimes were being committed, which is not what he said. But if you read the transcript of the remarks versus the delivery of them, tone does make a difference.

And the tone was striking. How it plays out on Parliament Hill. members who are uncomfortable, I'm going to use that word, with the notion, increasingly uncomfortable with the notion that the NDP should support the Liberals' unconfident vote on the basis of the refusal of the government to call for a ceasefire. The NDP was the first party in the House to call for a ceasefire. The Bloc has now joined the NDP, but it's not playing out inside the Bloc Québécois in the way that it plays within the NDP. And we've seen it in some of the events surrounding the NDP caucus at Queen's Park, for instance.

I'm convinced that the NDP government of David E.C. is also feeling those strains. So there could come a day, unless you assume that this event, this war is going to come to a quick end, which I'm not convinced will happen, there could come a day when there are NDP MPs who, on principle, for pro-Palestine reasons, are saying, we don't want to be seen as supporting this government that's not calling for a ceasefire. On the other side, you have a very deep red line on the part of some members of Justin Trudeau's caucus who are from or in contact with the Jewish community, that the word ceasefire, are they to be pronounced

by the federal government, absent a large international consensus? And by that, I mean, if the US in particular, but other allies see a change in padding that leads them to call for a ceasefire. That's a different issue. But absent that, I think there is a real possibility that should Justin Trudeau cross that line, there will be resignations from inside this caucus. That is going to happen. And the prime minister knows it. And I think if he didn't know it before his statement this week, he would have caused to totally know it now. Because the backlash reached all the way inside this caucus

on those remarks. What that means is, if you look at the dynamics in the House of Commons, it means that it's another complication, but it is one that neither the NDP nor the liberals have any control over. There is very little that either of them can do to bring their parties closer. Yes, our MPs were unanimous in supporting a number of resolutions, but there are increasingly more entrenched positions on both sides. And I think it's only going to get harder and not easier over the next few months. You know, and if you don't think this can cause problems inside a political party, then you need look no further than the United Kingdom. I've been here in the UK for the last little while, flying back this weekend. But, you know, Keir Starmer is the leader of the labor party and is miles ahead in the polls

at least was uh is now confronted with real problems within inside his labor party and people are you know they're not threatening to resign they are resigning um And so, you know, that kind of, that can really throw a spanner in the works, as they say over here. And that, you know, you kind of look at that situation and wonder whether that could impact what's happening in Canada or whether something similar could happen in Canada. What about the Conservatives? Yeah, so go ahead. One of the ways to avoid it, I think, is for politicians in Canada, leaders in particular, to recognize the limits of their moral authority to opine on this, which isn't to say that they shouldn't offer moral opinions. But to Chantal's point, the tone with which the prime minister talked about his expectation of Israel, maximum restraint, the way that he delivered that message, couldn't help but ignite frustration within that part of the caucus that Chantal was referring to, who either are from or very close to the Jewish community.

Can we just be clear on this? We're talking about tone. We're not talking about the words he said. No. But it's the way he said them, right? That's right. And I think this is the thing, is that if you just wrote what the statement was and what the uh what the proposition of the government was in terms of how you would get to um a peaceful solution or a

solution that worked for um the survival of both uh communities involved in this conflict, I think people would welcome that. It's when politicians feel drawn into debating the hourly or the daily events and then putting a finger up tonally on one side of the conversation or the other, that they're asking for problems that they can't really manage. And I think that this is, you know, we've seen it a couple of times for the government. When the foreign affairs minister last week called for a ceasefire and seemed to be implying that there might be a day when there would be Hamas at the table with Israel and other stakeholders. I don't think that's exactly what she was implying, but it not surprisingly made folks who see this from an Israeli standpoint and the Jewish community say,

well, how does a group that is declared to be a terrorist organization get to sit at a table and negotiate with the targets of their terrorism? So it's an argument for caution in the presumption of some sort of moral high ground and an expectation that people want you to opine on the morality of what's happening day in, day out. There is a measure of that for sure. And if you're only on social media, you feel that the demand for a response and a posture extremely strongly. But at the end of the day, articulating what your position is in defense of Israel and around the eradication of Hamas is a pretty important one to the Jewish community, and I understand why. Expressing your views on the defense of civilian life is a very important principle, and I understand why. After you've said those things, if you have something to say about how to get to an endpoint that's better than where we're at today, say that. But it is,

to Chantal's point, going to come about because stakeholders other than Canada are going to find that path. And so supporting and working with those other stakeholders rather than leaving anybody with the impression that our kind of voice as a country is really going to be influential in this. I don't want to say safer because I don't believe in telling politicians to do safe things necessarily, but I think it's maybe a wiser path in this particular instance. Before we leave this, do the conservatives agree with or not agree with their position? Are they speaking at least from the luxury of a united caucus on this? So far, the party that is overtly more pro-Israel in the House of Commons is the Conservative Party. And that was also true of Stephen Harper's government back when the Conservatives were in power. And there has not been, in public at least, a sense that the tensions within the Conservative caucus are at the same level as within the liberal caucus, although there is diversity and certainly diversity of perspectives inside Pierre Poiliev's caucus as well. But it's

easier to be the leader of the opposition or the leader of the Bloc Québécois and not to be asked daily. So what's your take on what's happening in Gaza today? That being said, we are all old enough to know what difference television and images made to the Vietnam War. And this war is unfolding live on many screens, fake pictures, but also real pictures. And for Canadian politicians, it's going to be a challenge not to not comment or not comment too quickly until they have some grasp of the hard to get facts as to what's happening on the ground to things that are going to be pretty horrible, I suspect. And that will be repeatedly horrible. So, you know, everybody wants to be on the moral high ground. It may be difficult to find going forward. Especially when you have this issue of what's real, what's fake misinformation. Every time you turn around, it's a, you know, it's difficult.

It's difficult just for the ordinary citizen who's trying to follow this story, understand it, try to put it in some degree of context. Well, and the broader rise of anti-Semitism, which isn't which was happening before this conflict, but which is really, really prominent right

now, and I'm talking not only about the horrible incidents of people shooting at schools in Canada. But, you know, some of the comments of Elon Musk on X or Twitter, which reached very, very large numbers of people. These are, you know, these are very, very provocative

and they're quite rightly frightening to Jewish people. Yesterday, I noticed that IBM decided to take itself off that platform from an advertising standpoint because it discovered that its ads were being associated or linked or put in proximity to anti-Semitic hate. And, you know, you look at that and you look at what's been happening on TikTok and, you know, you do have to recognize that separate and apart from the events that are happening right now in the Middle East, Jewish people have very, very good reasons to be concerned about rising anti-Semitism and to expect more allyship across the board in that regard, which is another layer of complexity and challenge. Go ahead, Chantal. Nor should we be surprised that Canadian public opinion or sections of Canadian public opinion are very polarized on

this. I have a friend and colleague who served as an ombudsman to Radio-Canada. So this is the person who gets complaints about unfair treatment of this piece or that piece of news or that interview and has to kind of look into it and answer or explain why the report was that way. And he was telling me, and this is in a time when things were, they are never completely quiet between Israel and Palestine, but we were not in a conflict like this. And he was telling me that one of the things he discovered was the one issue that draws, you know, if was the one issue that draws,

you know, if you had to make a percentage, the biggest percentage of complaints always dealt with the Israel-Palestine issue. Not with, you know, you get your share of, he's a Federalist, she's a Sorrentist, or this is tilted. Yes, par for the course. But even more so, even in a time when nothing exacerbates passions, this issue, whenever someone touches on it,

would raise red flags on both sides. So imagine now, there is nothing you can do now in a news report in Canada on this issue that will not draw complaints of bias from either side. I mean, the CBC was accused of being pro-Amaz by one of the leading political parties in this country, the Conservatives. So it's an untenable proposition. And my fear is that we are losing the capacity to have a conversation on this issue because both sides are becoming so entrenched. And I'm talking about in Canada that it's, you know, you can't even look for common ground because it's a non-starter to come from a different perspective in a conversation with the entrenched sides. And that is kind of scary.

I saw that claim by a conservative member, which to me just showed the basic ignorance of that particular person in understanding how a newsroom works, any newsroom. But in terms of, you know, the kind of community is split, but so, from what I've heard, so are many newsrooms are split on the way this story is being covered. And it's angry in there. And it's ugly in there in some places. And it's a tough story. And all I can do, Chantel, is underline what you said about there is no other issue that competes with this at any level.

And in all the years I was at the CBC, it was unquestionably the issue that prompted the most complaints, and it was always a tough one, always a tough one to deal with. Okay, we've got to take our final break. Come back right after this. And we're back for the final segment of Good Talk for this week. Chantal and Bruce are here. I'm Peter Mansbridge.

Okay, we've got a couple of minutes left. I mean, this potentially is a big week coming up. You know, economic statement, pharmacare, wither of pharmacare, is something going to happen on that? But in terms of those two, you know, like budget's always the big statement by the Minister of Finance each year and unveils all kinds of stuff. But increasingly over the last 10 or 15 years, the economic statement has played a big role too and is looked at by many as a kind of a mini-budget because things happen in it.

What should we expect? And once again, we don't have a lot of time, but we have some time. Bruce, you can pick one or the other. You can pick economic statement, you pick Pharmacare, or maybe they work together. I think they work together. I think the answer to, for the Liberals,

the answer to the NDP pressure on single-payer Pharmacare, which is a very expensive idea. What does that mean? Sorry? What does it mean, single-payer Pharmacare? What does it mean, single-payer farm care? Like Medicare. Yeah, so basically what our situation right now on the cost of prescription drugs is some number that's in the area of 25 million Canadians have, through group benefit plans, access to coverage for their prescription drug needs.

Some people don't. Some people have coverage under provincial plans if they're older, for example, that sort of thing. The NDP are pushing for government to replace the prescription drug coverage that people have through their group plans, their employer or their workplace plans with a government program that provides free drugs for everybody, regardless of whether they already have coverage under those plans. I think the liberals have been looking at it and others have been looking at it, and I've been doing work on that for the sake of disclosure for companies that provide those benefit plans. They look at it and say, well, why would you replace the coverage that people already enjoy, which seems to work pretty well. And these plans offer people eye care and dental care and

massage therapy if they need it, physiotherapy, that sort of thing, with a government plan, which would cost an awful lot more money and might actually reduce the number of drugs that people have coverage for because of the scale of the program and the cost of the program. So that's the single payer difference that the NDP wants is one program run by a government, paid for by a government that covers everybody the same way. The people who argue against that program say, why wouldn't you just put a program in place that covers people who don't have coverage right now? Helps them, saves a lot of money. The most logical position for the government to take in terms of its political circumstance right now and its fiscal circumstance right now is to say no to single payer.

But we can do more to help people who don't have coverage right now. The NDP has said publicly, I think, this week that they're drawing a line around this issue and they don't accept the government's proposals that have been made behind closed doors so far. But it remains to be seen how that will play itself out, either in the fall economic statement next week, or before the end of the year, which is the timetable for resolving this friction between these two parties. As we talked about this last week, I think it was last week, I can't imagine a scenario where Jagmeet Singh says, I've caused an election to happen over this division between the liberals wanting to do something that's more of a fill the gaps and our preference for a government covers everybody program, because I don't see

any real upside for the NDP in it, and also because the NDP would probably be held responsible by many progressive voters for triggering the election of Pierre Polyev as prime minister of the country. That's what the polls tell us would happen now. All right, Chantal, he's left you two minutes. I'm not sure in any event because of what Bruce explained about millions of Canadians having private coverage that it's such a vote winner on the ground. It's probably more important within the confines of an NDP gathering or a convention than it is in real electoral life.

When Medicare came in, it only came in because provinces bought in. There is not a lot of provincial buy-in coming the way of the kind of program the NDP is asking for. I'm not even hearing the NDP premier's clamor for it. So it's not just the federal government that needs to get into the act. Its province is absent that. It's not going to go anywhere. As for, I took Jagmeet Singh's newser this week a bit differently in the sense that he said we rejected the first draft of the legislation that the liberals presented to us.

But he also implied that the two parties were still talking. And I saw it as a preemptive move to say, that basically means it's not going to be much in the fiscal update. And we know that. And clear, we're not going to precipitate the parliamentary crisis the next day. But that being said, can the NDP even get an election over this? Because if that were the reason for the NDP to stop supporting the government, or even to move non-confidence on that basis, well, the Bloc Québécois is not going to support this idea of a new pharmacare program. Quebec has a mixed hybrid program, and no one is saying that the NDP is on a great path to replace it with some idea of its own

that involves the federal government. So I believe that what Mr. Singh did this week was basically to say, we're still working on it. Call me back later. But Tuesday afternoon, do not ask me to say I'm going to bring down the government over what is in the fiscal update. We'll see. I mean, we have a parliamentary crisis in 2008 over an economic statement that would have withdrawn some funding, public funding for political parties, no one had seen that coming. So you never know in a minority parliament. But in theory, I frankly am not packing my bags for a January election.

That 2008 thing was quite something. That was a real, That was quite a week. All right. We've got to leave it at that for this day. Good conversation. I'm really glad we had the conversation about Carl Tremblay at the beginning of today's show. Have a good weekend.

Take care, both of you, Chantel and Bruce. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks so much for listening. Grab your copy of The Buzz tomorrow, nationalnewswatch.com slash newsletter to subscribe. Costs nothing. And we're happy to bring it to you. Take care and have a good weekend.

See you on Monday.