The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Good Talk -- "Toxicity, Lies and Misinformation"

Episode Date: May 3, 2024

A Liberal MP says she's had enough. After nine years as an MP Pam Damoff says she won't run again because she simply doesn't feel safe anymore. She afraid to go out. Lots more on this and more as Bruce and Chantal have their say on the life of a politician in Canada.

Are you ready for Good Talk? Well, of course you're ready, because it's Friday. Good Talk, Shantelle Hebert, Bruce Anderson, Peter Mansbridge here to talk about a variety of things that we often do on Friday, and there's some interesting ones. I want to start a little differently. Well, I guess we always start differently. We don't talk about the same thing every week. Sometimes, but not often.

This one is as a result of a headline I saw on the Toronto Star. I think it was yesterday. Alex Billengel wrote the piece, Pam Damoff won't seek re-election, citing fears for her safety and disgust with toxicity in politics. Now, if you've never heard of Pam Damoff, you're not alone. She's not a well-known Liberal MP around the Oakville area in Ontario. But she's been an MP since 2015, so a three-time MP.

She's decided she's not going to run again whenever the election's called. Later this year, next year is more likely. And she goes out with a memo to her caucus colleagues, which sounds pretty blunt. I mean, keep in mind, at a time like this, especially if you're in a party that's not doing well in the polls, a lot of people may decide, you know what, I'm out of here before there's an election. I don't want to go through all that if we're going to lose anyway. This doesn't sound like

one of those, but let me just read you what she said, just a couple of lines from it. While I know that I still have something to offer Canada, Ontario, and my community. The hyper-partisan nature of politics today is not the environment that I see myself serving in. The threats and misogyny I have experienced as a member of parliament are such that I often fear going out in public, and that is not a sustainable or healthy way to live. Politics is no longer for me. Basically afraid to go out of the house?

Is that how bad things have got? For some people, clearly women in politics in Canada, in Ottawa, I guess. Not in Ottawa, or not just in Ottawa, I guess. Not in Ottawa, or not just in Ottawa. Quebec has seen a number of mayors step down, mostly women, using the same rationale. I'm not interested in working as toxic in an environment, ergo I'm leaving. It's probably more tempting to do,

that being said, when your prospects of re-election look like a very uphill battle. And that's also been true of some of the mayors who have resigned on the same basis in Quebec, that they were facing an opposition around, they were unable to craft consensus around the municipal council table.

And they were getting nowhere with their projects, not because they were women or not because the atmosphere was toxic. So there is a bit of one and the other. Has it gotten much worse? Yes, probably. And the difference, I'm guessing, and you've seen it from female journalists who have also reported the same thing. The biggest difference, I think, between female journalists and female MPs or female ministers or mayors, etc., is that we don't have to read all the comments. And people who are elected, in theory, should, because that's in part how you interact with voters.

So, yes, I believe that there is some of that out there. I don't think it's limited to liberal MPs or NDP MPs. I think that conservative MPs, mostly women, could report much of the same thing. And anyone who is openly LGBTQ and in elected office these days would certainly say that they are facing a significant amount of abuse versus what used to be the past, mostly because of social media? Does it actually threaten one's personal safety to the point of not getting out of the house? I don't know, but you've heard after an episode in the Senate earlier this year, where the conservatives went really aggressively against the female senator and a female speaker, that the kids of one of the protagonists

ended up hearing about it in the schoolyard. And I guess at that point, when your kids come home and say, Mom, what did you say that has brought this about? You start thinking more seriously about personal safety. I think most of the people who rant on social media do not mean to do anything. But to bring you back to an episode that happened to me when I was working for Le Devoir after Meach, and we were getting a fair amount of threats. And one day the threat was not against us, but it was against a store and gets known that the prime minister, Brian Mulroney, had used in the speech,

just the slogan that was well known in French. So we did call the RCMP because we talked, if this place gets bombed, we want to not think we could have given a heads up. And the person who came to give us advice, all kinds of useful advice that I still use to this day. But at some point, my researcher asked, so should we take these threats seriously? All these, you know, anonymous phone calls, anonymous notes. And he said most people who write those never act on them. But almost everyone who acts on them has started by writing them. Very reassuring.

So you can't ignore that reality that you are at the mercy of someone who wants to take this to the real world thing rather than the social media bubble. I guess what I'm getting at, and I want to hear what you're thinking here on this, Bruce, but I guess what I'm getting at, and I want to hear what you're thinking here on this, Bruce, but I guess what I'm getting at is, is there something particularly toxic about the political atmosphere that's creating this across the board? I agree with Chantel, it's not just Liberal MPs. We've heard from Conservative MPs, and we've talked to some of them,

who've been in similar concerns about their situation. But is it something particular about politics, the political atmosphere, and why, after all these years and build-up on this kind of thing, has it not been addressed, or has it not been resolved? Or can it be resolved? Like, I mean, that's what bothers me most about this. Has it not been addressed or has it not been resolved? Or can it be resolved? Like, I mean, that's what bothers me most about this.

Bruce? Yeah, it isn't only politics. I think that's absolutely true. If you're somebody in the public eye, in sports, for example, in the media, what we've seen is a real coarsening of how people feel they're entitled to go after individuals whose values they don't like, whose opinions they don't agree with, whose point of view they just feel like they want to trash. The question of, is it getting worse? Absolutely, it's been getting worse. It's been getting worse in society in general. And so what we see when we see a story like Pam Demoff's story is an illustration of what the consequences of that are that's high profile because she's

somebody in the public eye in elected office. But there are millions of people every day, I would say, who are being damaged by things that are being said and trafficked in social media. And so we shouldn't, in my view, make the mistake of thinking this is really a problem that needs to be dealt with because it's affecting politics. It's affecting society as a whole. The question of what, if anything, we can do about it is a giant question for which there is obviously no answer yet that's working. And I would have wanted to say sometime in the last few years that maybe there's a little bit of momentum with the social media platform companies towards solutions that will be meaningful. But every time I think that, I kind of see more evidence that that's just me being optimistic. I don't think that there are realistic solutions that are gaining any momentum right now. I do

think the damage is significant. I don't know what the long-term consequences of it will be for society, but there's no question for media if we want to have quality people. And I agree with Chantal that it isn't only women who face this, but women face a particularly awful version of it. And that is not really just a question of, is there a social media platform? It's a question of misogyny in society. I don't think there's any question about it. There's obviously homophobia as well, and there's anti-Semitism.

And the social media platforms create a sense that it's safe to say the things that you wouldn't say otherwise that you're entitled to do it and maybe even expected to do it and somehow rewarded for doing it it's a it's a bad situation i guess the uh we're having a couple of hits sorry bruce we keep uh well not keep it a couple of times we've lost your signal. You've sort of kind of frozen up. But I hear your point on that. I guess what I'm trying to get at in terms of the, you know, effective politics is communication

with the public and understanding what your public and what your community is saying. And that's why this stuck out at me when you read her phrase about, I often fear going out in public. I mean, that's how politicians are supposed to be able to operate, that they are dealing with their public, usually in a, you know, in a very open way and, you know, community meetings and weekend visits at the, you know, the riding office, et cetera, et cetera, with constituents. So that to me is like a really scary part of what we're going through in terms of the political system, the political community, and how it operates. Forget about what party you're talking about.

It's the whole thing. So that's what, you know, that's what bothers me. Did you have something else you wanted to say on this, Chantal? Well, to bring it back to the misogynist aspect, it's not an accident that a few times that it became public, and I'm sure we don't know about every instance, we found that there were threats directed or comments directed at Pierre Poilievre's wife and not him, which kind of tells you a lot about the kind of people who make such comments,

that they go in a schoolyard, they would go for the weakest kid or the person that they can beat up. I'm sure Mr. Poilievre feels that he can defend and speak for himself, and he certainly can. But people who indulge in this do not care about going after little kids or families. That's not totally new, and the unsavory contests that became public matters back then. The creeps have always been around. They just have a larger platform. Now, I think what you're trying to get at is, are politicians creating or contributing to the toxicity? And up to a point, yes, the way that they talk to each other.

We saw some examples this week in the House of Commons. If they were your kids, you would rein them in. I'm not just talking about the wacko comment by the leader of the opposition. I'm also talking about the prime minister and the tone that he believes he needs to take to respond to questions and the veering off into accusation, which I find not particularly productive for him. But I think a lot of it comes from the Trump experience, liberation of the world by having someone who has consistently over the past almost a decade, we're going to get to, said things that would normally have disqualified that person, not from the highest political office in the US, but from elected office period. And that did not happen. Not only did that kind of behavior not disqualify him, in some respects, it qualified him for the Republican nomination a second time around after losing. And remember,

he never went to a single debate with any of his opponents in the second time that he went to get that nomination. And why? Because he didn't feel he needed to. And if we go back to how he won the nomination the first time, the single probably most powerful thing that he did was come up with names for all of his opponents, derogatory ways of describing them that were so childish and immature sounding. They were so potent because they broke the mold. They basically said, I'm going to do something that you've never seen before. And if you think I'm not going to get away with it, you're wrong. I'm going to get away with it.

And then he used that line, I could shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue and I would get away from it. And by all the evidence, he was right. Now, he horrifies a lot of people, but he sure doesn't horrify everybody. And his behavior entitled other people to do the same thing. And it qualified him for political success in a remarkable and unexpected and awful way, in my view. Now, me, I think that and you're going to find that this is a really lame suggestion.

But I think that if you're going to fight back against this, it doesn't work to get on a pulpit or on a panel and say this is really wrong and this is really bad. But it is a why it's appreciated is in part a byproduct of fatigue with those prepared inane lines that politicians mouth off. And if you're going to fight this, you need to fight this by becoming more authentic, by making people want to listen to you because they know you're not BSing them with stupid catch-all slogans that someone taught about and put in your mouth. It shows when that happens. And there is a solid section of the political class that is being too chicken to speak its mind. And speaking one's mind is not the same thing as insulting the person you are debating.

But if you're given a choice between what we call in French la langue de bois, a wooden tongue, and someone who is saying wacko, you're probably going to end up liking the wacko. I really agree with your point that you're making, but I have a question for you, Chantal, and I've been thinking about this a little bit because Mark Miller, the minister of immigration in the federal government, the other day he was scrummed outside of the House of Commons. And he was asked a question by a journalist who I think essentially said, you know, Mr. Polyev being kicked out of the House, does that sort of support the narrative that he's got out there that he's being silenced right and miller it was i found it quite a an amusing clip i liked it i thought it was authentic i didn't think it was rehearsed but it was personal um miller answered the question by saying, first, wait, who's being silenced? The reporter repeated the question and he said, that guy never shuts up.

And that clip made its way to a lot of people because it was, again, outside the norm of what talking points sound like, I thought it was effective. But I wonder whether you think that it was kind of across that line or more in the authentic category. I would be surprised if Mr. Poirier found it offensive. It's close enough to the truth. It wasn't a bad line. And I didn't find it terribly offensive to Mr. Poiliev. There are many, many ways you can say offensive things about someone. But if someone says that about me, I'm going to shrug it off. I'll probably laugh it off. Like, Peter, you're

trying to silence me? You know, I got to say, I know we've drifted into what happened last week. I was puzzled by the whole fuss about the wacko thing. I got to tell you. I mean, wacko is not the kind of word I thought people would go to the barriers on. You know, you look it up in the dictionary, it's basically defined as eccentric. It's a word that came out of the 70s from a guy who wrote Get Shorty, Elmore. Did you really look it up in the dictionary? I did.

Because I was worried about, like, why, you know, I've used the word wacko, and not in a way of trying to be insulting, but just as, you know, that's a crazy idea. He's a wacko. You know, sorry, go ahead. But I think the issue here wasn't so much. The word triggered the speaker because the speaker was already at the end of his wits. He was being echoed. He just named an MP to leave the House of Commons. And I think at first he wasn't sure about the name, the last name of the person he was naming. Anyways, it was a bad moment for the speaker. And you can hear him as soon as, as Poiliev says, you can hear him say no, like this is the extra drop that I can't take. I think if everything that had happened before, including the heckling to the speaker on the conservative benches had not, and he'd already had to ask Poiliev and Trudeau to rephrase things that they'd been saying, if this had happened at the top of question period, probably it would have turned out differently. Probably Pierre Poiliev would have said, I'm going to

change our withdrawal, WACO, and use extremists, which is what he proposed at first, and he would have gotten a pass. But in the context of the heat of the moment, I think the speaker felt that he was losing control of the house and that he couldn't tolerate it. Whether that's right or wrong, I don't know. But I was listening to that question period, just sound in the car, driving, and I was thinking, this is going to end badly, because you could see the temperature rising, rising, not between the two main parties, that was a given, but between the Speaker and the Conservative caucus. Yeah, it did seem like the Speaker lost control of that one. I mean, it did sort of head in a direction where you quite rightly,

as you were driving along, thought, this is not going to end well. And it didn't. And he's been kind of under the gun almost since the day he got the job uh so i don't know where all that's gonna end up you know i don't think there's any question that if you if you're the leader of the opposition or any mp for that matter and if the speaker says you have to withdraw a term and goes through the process of saying it the three times and everything else you have to do it uh now whether or not this was an example of um you know what uh what the people who like uh english football would call a a yellow card offense where a red card was handed out it does

feel a little bit like that to me i didn't um go into the urban slang dictionary or any dictionary, but it didn't make me feel like I can't believe somebody said wacko. I can't believe somebody called another person wacko in the House of Commons. It wouldn't have occurred to me that that was a line not necessarily to cross. But again, once the speaker says it's a line you shouldn't have crossed, there's only one way that that, well, there's two ways that it ends. You withdraw the comment and apologize or you get ejected. And I do think that Polyev overall loves these stunts, loves the idea of being the center of drama, loves the idea of being the guy who is challenging authority, who is challenging norms, who is breaking the politesse of politics. I don't think he's feeling a moment of unhappiness that he was caught up in that spat. I think it's entirely on brand for him.

Why should he feel that way, that he'd done something wrong? I mean, all these things, not all of them, but many of them seem to work for him to put him in on that side of the discussion where the majority sits. Well, you know, but here's where I was going to go with that, which is that he also gave a speech this week to police chiefs, it was police organization anyway, in which he talked about the fact that he was going to change laws that related to sentencing. It was an important subject for the audience. And he said, and I'm going to use all of the tools at my disposal to make sure that my changes, my laws are constitutional. And I think you know what I mean. By that, he was basically saying, I'm going to use a notwithstanding

clause, which has never before been done by a federal government. But then he went on to say this other sentence, which is that I'm going to be the democratically elected prime minister, which is not really how our system works, but I get the point. And I'll be accountable to the people and the people will decide whether my laws are constitutional. That is 100% not the way that our system works, nor should it. But the linkage between these things for me is this guy. It's one thing to say, I want to challenge the standard operating procedures of politics. But when it seems like it's so ego-fueled and it's so my government, remember, he always ran on Pierre for PM, that kind of thing. And when he starts talking about using public opinion that he musters as a way of defining what will be constitutional in the...

Look at that. He's frozen again, Chantal. It's this extra button I've got on my little control board here. When he goes on too long, I just freeze him. Are you freezing him out, Steph? Are you silencing him because he will not ever shut up? Yeah, gatekeeping him. He should shut up with that kind of talk for sure. We lost you again for a moment.

You froze. Yes, that's why we're talking behind your back and your face. Yeah. Okay. Let's take a break, a quick break, while Bruce fixes his technical difficulties. No, just kidding. Don't start fiddling with anything.

We'll take what we can get here at this point. But I want to take our first break, which is well overdue. And we come back. There's a whole other issue on Mr. Polyev and his positioning. This is another one of these things where it's going to upset some people, but it's going to sound pretty popular to a lot of other people. And it's an interesting way that he tends to find these positions and go about promoting them.

We'll get to that right after this. And welcome back. You're listening to Good Talks. I'm Sean Talley-Bear, Bruce Anderson, Peter Mansbridge here. You're listening on Sirius XM, Channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform, or you're watching us on our YouTube channel. And if you are watching us on our YouTube channel, we apologize. We've had a few hits on the line. Gremlins in the system, as they used to say during

the Second World War when things weren't going right. When you were an adult? Yes, back in my earlier days. Anyway, it's on our YouTube channel and we hope you watch it. Bruce's picture freezes up every once in a while, but that's okay. Well, it's not okay, but it's better than my picture freezing up or Chantel's picture freezing up. Okay, here's topic number two. Related in many ways, because as I said before the break, it's an interesting way Polyev goes about making his point

and understanding that there's going to be some disagreement with it, but there's also going to be a fair amount of agreement with it. He's got in, if you pick up your copy of the National Post today or go online and see it, it's a little hard to find the copies anywhere, but online, the National Post, you will see an op-ed, an opinion piece by Pierre Polyev about lobbyists. Who wants to give us the concise, before we discuss it, a concise sense of what he says in there.

Okay, I'll try. Because I don't freeze, and it's kind of dangerous to set up something if you're going to freeze and stuff will be lost. And then Bruce can disagree with my take. It's a fairly long op-ed for anyone reading it. I suggest reading beyond the first six paragraphs. It gets even more interesting past that point. Basically, what Mr. Poirier has done is he's taken the debate over the capital tax gains, the tax on capital gains changes announced

in the last budget that many in the medical community, I mean doctors or others, dislike intensely because it would translate into a higher rate of taxing on their capital gains. And he's saying, well, you know, and he's talking to the business community. He's saying, you're all coming and saying, this is terrible that it's happening to us. And whenever I ask you guys or others, what are you going to do about it?

You're clueless. You say you possibly you think you're going to have a meeting with Christian Freeland or Justin Trudeau or some minister, and that's going to make a difference and it won't. And basically, there are lots of things in there that are very partisan and political about the Trans Mountain pipeline, other pipelines that were canceled, the companies that caved to the government. I believe is blunt but solid advice on at least one level is if you want to win battles against changes in legislation or policy, you need to win over people to pressure politicians. Politicians do not react to lobbyists or business lobbyists in the way that they react to voters saying, I'm not going to vote for you on this score. And he takes issue with very direct language.

You know, he talks about Chamber of Commerce meetings and others, and he says pointless Chamber of Commerce speeches, meetings, or giving interviews that no one will read, will never get you inside my office when I'm prime minister. It's not getting very many people inside anyone's office when they're prime minister, I would also add. But basically he's saying, and I don't think it only applies to a future conservative government. If you want to influence me, you're going to need to rally some voters and some constituencies and convince me that enough people care that it's going to hurt me not to listen to you. Which I think is basic advice. But for those of us who watch how the hill works, and I'm not saying that it's advice to fire all lobbyists

is necessarily sound advice to follow, but that the part about making other people care about your issue would work better than thinking you're going to get in a government's office and because of who you are, it's going to make a difference, is sound advice. Now, I would add that this comes about after almost, what, two decades of no corporate donations allowed to federal parties.

I don't think the business community in this country has ever adjusted to the reality that he who can no longer pay the piper has a harder time calling the tune. It doesn't seem to get through all those corporate lobbies that now that you can't write big checks to the conservatives or the liberals or the NDP, if you're a large union, you need to rethink the way you approach trying to yield some influence on political outcomes. Okay. Bruce?

There are a number of interesting things about this, and hopefully I'll get through them all without freezing again. But the first thing is that, like a lot of what Polyev does, it's an exaggeration. He uses colorful language to land his point and to make some noise and to create a sense of energy around his leadership. And in that sense, it's effective politics for him to do that. The second thing that occurs to me, though, is that he is essentially saying, if it's not popular, I'm not going to do it. Because not everything rises to the level where corporate Canada will say, if the government made this particular policy change, we would have more success in this area, which would be good for

Canada. And if his answer is going to be, well, you need to run advertising campaigns so that millions of Canadians become familiar with that and decide that they want that, that's not good government in my view. And it's not, practically speaking, reasonable advice. There will be some situations, you know, if a big issue like free trade comes along again something like that but it won't be the everyday work of stakeholders outside government dealing with people inside government that work is about a lot more mundane things and the reality is is that people in government need to know what outside audiences. It's easy to demonize people, use this category term called lobbyists.

But if government didn't have the opportunity to talk with people outside government, broadly characterized as lobbyists by Pierre Palliev in this op-ed, they would make a lot of policy mistakes. They would not understand exactly how some of the changes that they put in place are going to affect people. So those conversations, it's easy for people to sort of chip at them and say that they're corrupting politics. But in my experience, sure, there's some of that, but there's an enormously important flow of information that happens that government, without which government will do a worse job. So I think in signaling that he wants to run a populist government, he's also, he's basically laying out a situation where for the first time that I can think of,

the Conservative Party, the Liberal Party and the NDP will all be to different degrees, not really the friend of corporate Canada. And I think that's going to land with a thud in the corporate community. I think it should, not because they should feel entitled to any special treatment, but because the reason that they get in touch with government isn't to isn't always to or even mostly to make bad public policy happen to improve their bottom lines. Sometimes it's just to help government figure out what good public policy would look like. And if there's a choice between policy A, B, C or D, what the different consequences of those will be. So I found it to be, I don't think he's naive, but I think it was creating a kind of a false argument because it sounds popular to be communicated with more by outside government interests, less of it in recent years. There we go, freezing again. But you were really good in the unfrozen part.

And a bit of sensationalism to it, but not great. Okay. Just to add to what Bruce was saying about corporate Canada. I mean, previous governments always had someone. This is beyond lobbyists, someone in cabinet and finance, actually, who acted as kind of a bridge to the business community. Paul Martin for Jean Chrissé, Michael Wilson for Brian Mulroney, Jim Flaherty for Stephen Harper and eventually Minister Oliver. I think corporate Canada at this point is looking at the conservative offering and not too sure who that friend would be.

And that goes beyond the lobbying industry and who gets to talk to whom. This notion that there is someone out there, Bill Morneau tried to be that for Justin Trudeau with very relative success. I think in part because he was so green in politics that he had trouble bridging his two roles effectively. But I think they're looking at polls that tell them the next government is going to be conservative. And yes, I can report from having been told by various constituencies that when Pierre Poiliev writes that he won't take meetings with many of these groups, it has been the experience of many of these groups that they can't get meetings with Mr. Poitier or his advisors. And they are disconcerted by that. They don't know

who the go-to person for them will be in cabinet. I'm not sure that's healthier than making policy based on talking to lobbyists and not going out in the public. You need a mix of both. And there are questions, and those questions will become more pressing as time goes on if the polls hold. It's hard to think that there is more pressure than what can come from people who are deprived of social programs, as in cuts to the public child care initiative that the liberals wake up in the morning thinking their child care spots are being threatened and there's an election campaign on, it is not good news. Here's my problem with this. And it's not directed at Paul Lievre or the Conservatives or any one particular party. It's kind of directed at all of them. We have seen over the decades in this kind of last year before an election, all kinds of promises that are made about how things are going to be different and the structural way government operates. And then when it comes around to that party actually in power,

it kind of drifts back to exactly the way it was on certain elements. I know there were some differences in 2015 about how they, sir, was it earlier, was it the Harper coming in, about changes on the way sort of look at this and I think, okay, show me in real terms when you have the opportunity that things are going to change. You know, like what did Trump promise? It was going to be the end of the swamp in Washington of lobbyists and consultants. So that was all going to change when he got power. He got power and it got swampier. You know, and here what we've talked to within the last 40 minutes,

we've gone from MPs who are supposed to listen to the people who would direct how a government, what they want from a government, MPs, or at least one anyway, saying, I'm afraid to go out. You know, it's just too toxic out there, to a promise that, well, we're also not going to listen to lobbyists or consultants about change. We'll sit here and we'll just determine the way it should be. So maybe I'm cynical and I probably am cynical about all this stuff I, I hear you on what this op-ed says. I'm going to be interested to see how much of it is actually.

He, he, let's be clear. He will not be able to, and you know, on today's numbers against today's opponent, he'll win that election and he'll have a big majority and he will be beholden to nobody. But he will not, even if he thinks he will, he will not be able to operate an effective government with the description that he put into that op-ed. And it's not because dark room lobbyists, the kind that people kind of conjure up, are the problem. The problem that he would run into is if you think that you have an idea of how you're going to reorganize the Defense Department and make procurement choices and how you're going to figure out what to do about artificial intelligence or what you're going to do as it relates to changes that you want to make happen in healthcare. It almost doesn't matter. The

consequences of government not having conversations with people who are involved in the other side of what happens when government puts a program in place is, it's unbelievable to me that anybody would imagine that you could run an effective government without all of those kind of contacts, whatever baggage they bring with them. And I accept that people see the baggage rather than the hard work and the effective work, but government would make a lot more big mistakes if it wasn't stress testing its ideas, if it wasn't hearing from people about ideas that they have that might make government better, that dynamic is as important as anything in our political life

and in terms of the effectiveness of our public policy, I think. Chantal, any last word on that? If not, we'll go to our last break. I'm waiting for, like you, for what happens if Mr. Polyev becomes prime minister and where we would be, maybe not us, in eight years on talking about his government. A lot of the stuff I read today I thought we should hang on to because it may be that those quotes will be remembered as the words of a previous Pierre Poilievre if he does become prime minister. We're so cynical.

I mean. Of course we are. That's part of our charm. You'd think that they'd never delivered on electoral reform after 2015. Oh, didn't you notice we have been voting in a different system for almost a decade now? Absolutely. Okay, we're going to take our final break,

and we'll be right back after this. And welcome back. Final segment of Good Talk for this week. Chantelle Hebert, Bruce Anderson, Peter Mansbridge here. We've got a few minutes left. So I'm going to throw one wide open here to you because there's not enough time to get into anything really substantive, but there's enough time to get into stuff that in fact is, well, it could still be

substantive, but we can deal with it in a couple of minutes, so to speak. So here's the question. What did you learn this week about the country, about politics, about any political figures that you didn't know going into the week that you want to share with us. Got anything there? Got anything that you want to tell us?

Bruce, you've seen, you were talking about it the other day. I listened to an extraordinary, I listened to an amazing podcast. I mean, it, you know, it's subject matter that I thought I knew a fair bit about, but it was an Ezra Klein podcast on sustainable growth. And he was interviewing a woman who was an expert in it, happened to live in Glasgow. And in the course of that, she provided some facts and figures about what would be required to achieve certain goals and how different systems of energy, you know, all of the land that's used for corn to produce ethanol. If it had been if it were converted to land that hosted solar panels, the effect on climate mitigation would be yay big. There was a whole lot of stuff in that that really opened up my mind to, you know, again, feeling a little bit optimistic that there are technologies and changes that we could make that wouldn't require the world

to all agree of this podcast was to beat this problem, is everybody going to have to sacrifice more than people are generally willing to? And so I came away with more knowledge and more optimism, really, that there were things that could be done that don't involve that. Okay. Chantal? Okay. I'm not going to be as elevated. As you know, I am from an era where Canadian history was taught in a rather haphazard way. And I have been doing homework with an elementary school child for a number of years.

And he had a project to do about the advent of the prairie provinces, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. But he was told that he could not touch the Louis Riel stuff or the railroad. So he was a bit discouraged, grade five. And I said, well, you know, it's the job of a journalist to take any story that looks boring and find the interesting stuff. I hadn't realized in 1867, when Confederation got started with only a few provinces east of Manitoba,

that it was Alaska being bought by the United States that prompted Canada to really want to create provinces in the West and to buy from the Hudson Bay Company the territories that became in part those provinces, because they feared that the Americans who had tried to invade us in 1812 were going to buy everything west. They had the means, everything west of Ontario. And Canada, the Confederation, would have been Ontario and whatever was east. I actually didn't know that. And the child loves wars. So it allowed me to talk about 1812. And then he said, with Donald Trump, do you think they'll try again? I didn't go there. But it was an interesting week,

which goes to show that sometimes you can learn stuff by helping a grade five kid figure out what to do with the topic. That was pretty elevated. The future is going to be all about, as much of the past has been, the future is going to be all about resources and where they are. Who's got them? Who doesn't? Everything from water to lithium to oil and what have you, liquid, natural gas. Who's got it all?

We got a hell of a lot of it. And successive American governments, whether it's Trump or somebody 50 years down the road, will look back at their history books and say, why didn't we move back then? Because we're a pretty interesting target, and we, you know, as Janice Stein and a couple of other bright minds were arguing in the Globe last week,

you know, we've got to get our act together in terms of how we position ourselves for the future, not just for Trump or Biden, you know, we got to get our act together in terms of how we position ourselves for the future, not just for Trump or Biden, whoever wins, but in the medium to longer term as well, because we've got what a lot of other people would dearly love in terms of resources. I'll just quickly on, you know, on my week, the question of the week this week for the podcast was name a teacher who had a great influence on you. And it was interesting because we've often talked about stuff like that about teachers. We talk around the dinner table, et cetera, et cetera. But I got lots of letters, like lots of letters.

People emotionally and passionately talking about, you know, their teacher from grade four or grade eight or what having the impact they've had on their lives and remembering stories about them. I was amazed. I mean, I didn't do that well in school myself. I do remember a couple of teachers who tried to help me along the way. But some of these stories that people wrote from, you know, coast to coast to coast and, you know, everything from small one-room schoolhouses to more modern-day efforts in just the last couple of years, it was impressive. You know, teachers take a beating from a lot of people over time,

and sometimes it's great to hear from just ordinary people who are telling stories about the impact, in this case, teachers have had on their lives. Okay, thank you both. Great to talk to you. Bruce, we've got to work on trying to figure out what that issue is because we get – it's almost like there's a clock on it saying, okay, he's gone long enough, freeze him.

And, you know, I'm watching Chantel closely. She doesn't have a finger on a button to do that. No, but I could do that, manage that if you give me one. Anyway, we'll try and have that sorted out by next week. Thank you both. A reminder that the buzz is available as of tomorrow morning, 7 a.m. If you want to subscribe, it doesn't cost anything. Just go to nationalnewswatch.com slash newsletter.

All you need to put in is your email address, and you'd have to do it today if you want tomorrow's edition. And that is that. What is this called again? It's called Good Talk. Good Talk will be back next week at the same time. And our friend Paul Wells is going to be on the bridge next Tuesday. He's got a new book coming out on Justin Trudeau,

and it's published on Tuesday. He's going to be on the bridge on Tuesday to talk about it. It'll be interesting to see what he has to say and what predictions he might have. And you'll be happy to know we've gone through this whole hour this week and not once did we ask you, what's Justin Trudeau going to do? So I'm assuming your minds haven't changed since last week,

and we'll let it go with that. Thanks for listening out there, everybody. Thank you for your attention, and we will see you again in seven days.