The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Good Talk --- Treason, Traitors or Not?

Episode Date: June 14, 2024

Who to believe? Who would you believe if you had a choice between believing Jagmeet Singh or Elizabeth May? That question is being asked now concerning the whole "is there a traitor or traitors in the House" issue. Singh and May certainly sound like they disagree. Bruce and Chantal have their thoughts on this, plus, the capital gains tax may be flopping for the Liberals; and, who will young people vote for -- you may be surprised.

Are you ready for Good Talk? And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here with Chantelle Hebert and Bruce Anderson. It's Friday, that means Good Talk and well we've got, I hope, an interesting Good Talk for you today. Lots to talk about, some of the main stories of the week haven't really changed in a week. Certainly the lead one hasn't. It's kind of, I don't know how many of you remember the old Mad Magazine. They used to have like a kind of a cartoon section that was called Spy vs. Spy. You know, it was a good spy, it was a bad spy.

And that's kind of like what seems to be going on somehow. You like that? It's somehow like what's going on in the House of Commons. You know, there's the good traitors and there's the bad traitors. There's treason or there's not treason. And it really depends on who's doing the investigating of the report to determine, you know, what's exactly going on. You have Elizabeth May from the Green Party.

You have Jagmeet Singh from the NDP with two very different versions after they've read the secret report as to what may or may not be going on in the House of Commons and in the Senate. Are there traitors? Is there treason? Is it spy versus spy? What exactly is happening? Do you remember Boris and Natasha? Do you remember that cartoon?

I think it was Rocky and Bullwinkle. Anyway, Boris and Natasha were these two spies in it. Just if we're looking for other cartoon references, that was one of my favorites that dealt with spies. You understand that you're outside my culture field here. So before I start going on about Tintin and the many spies he encountered, let's move on. All right, we'll move on.

Chantal reads a little deeper stuff than a lot of people. Yeah, like, hey, hey. I thought you came across her TV story. I never spoke enough English to read it until I was 16. Well, Bruce, you start us off this week. What are we supposed to believe on this story? If ever there was a week when I love our standard, well, Chantal, why don't you start us off? Because I've been thinking about this since you said, oh, we should talk about it, which you said last night.

And then, okay, I stopped thinking about it because it was just flummoxing me. I was trying to figure out what the heck to make of this and you know how i always have felt like there should be a little disclaimer on a podcast that says uh what we say may not be accurate and i shouldn't apply it to chantelle because it's almost always accurate i'm sure but sometimes i feel like we have to say things about a subject matter where you go i don't know if this is right or not so anyway with all of that, here's what I think. I do think that it is, you know, it's been another episode where the government hasn't been able to really kind of grapple with how to communicate about this in a simple enough way so that people understand the basic precepts which they're working with, which on the whole, I think the position that they're taking is probably the right position. It doesn't look good politically because you end up having this conversation that's out in the wilderness with people, some people saying, I haven't read the report, but here's what it makes me feel. And other people saying, I read the report and here's how I interpret it.

Elizabeth May, and I'm not that concerned about it. And Jagmeet Singh yesterday saying, I read the report and it's devastatingly disconcerting. So I do think the government's going to have to do more to not do what Jagmeet Singh says necessarily, but certainly to try to explain this discrepancy to people, try to explain the reasons, again, why the government can't do what might seem to regular people like an obvious thing to do might not want to do that in particular, because it could reveal to the people who are doing nefarious things, either those who are trying to influence and interfere in our democracy, or if there are some bad actors in our parliament, those bad actors, when in fact it might be better to monitor, to develop information that might lead to a prosecution,

and then to proceed with the law as the law permits you to. That, to me, is the most important reason, perhaps, for not revealing that. Second, obviously, and not notably less important, is if the intel comes from our allies and is part of an agreement that we have with them about how we would ever make such information available to the public, then I think it's a better idea for us to abide by those constraints than to break those constraints. But it is always going to be a judgment call, I think, by the Prime Minister of the day or the government of the day. And in a situation like this, the government ends up feeling that it kind of has

the weight of this decision on its shoulders and very little ability, it feels like, to kind of debate its choices publicly or explain its choices publicly. But in the end, I think they are going to feel like they have to say more about this because of what Mr. Singh said. Last thing for me on Jagmeet Singh's comments were, he threw around the word traitor a little bit. And he said there are, you know, things that seem to be crimes and should be prosecuted. And I just feel as though political leaders need to be careful how they use those words. If they're I think that the proper setting for a political leader is to say there are things that look quite troublesome. And I hope the police evaluate them and to see if there's room for a prosecutor, if there's reason for a prosecution and if so, to prosecute. I don't think that people should toss around the word traitor without understanding, as Chantal has kind of raised in past conversations, the weight of that word and what it means. Because it's kind of stoking the fire here a little bit. And I'm not sure if that's the right thing to do, because we, in the end, don't know what's in the report. Chantal. To start with, I know that Bruce doesn't mean to say that in the name

of protecting intelligence operations, the prime minister or other leaders should refrain from taking actions against those MPs, because that is where that logic leads. If you're not going to want to unsettle ongoing intelligence investigations, then you do not want to be kind of agitating the weeds. But if you push this to its ultimate logic, then you don't do anything and you don't say anything to the MPs, because they're going to find out that they are being under surveillance, possibly for bigger fish. I'm not sure where that really leaves the government. By the way, Yves-François Blanchet is the next person who is going to be reading this report.

And it will be interesting to see his take on this. But I believe overall that this week, the two leaders most likely to lead this country, i.e. the current prime minister, who is in the chair, and the leader of the official opposition, Pierre Poilievre, who is leading in voting intentions, both let Canadians down for different reasons. Mr. Trudeau has had this report since March. My understanding is that he had a say as prime minister in what was going to be redacted and what was going to be made public. Yet he has provided zero context ever since the beginning of this story in public, zero context of the kind that both Jagmeet Singh and Elizabeth may It should have been on him to do so. Between March and now, the dog that did not bark is any sign that what Mr. Trudeau saw in this report troubled him enough to make changes in his caucus, try to encourage some MPs not to run, do something about whatever findings are in there, which, you know, if we're going to be the blind, and we're all blind as voters, we are being led by one-eyed kings and would-be kings.

Looking from the outside, you'd say, well, if nothing happened since March, Mr. Trudeau must be closer to Elizabeth May's stake on this than to Jagmeet Singh. Otherwise, would we not have seen some inkling that he has found serious grounds to do something about it within his own ranks? But they are, after all, the government. Mr. Poilier is now the only leader who will not read the report, doesn't even want to be one-eyed. He wants to remain blind to whatever is in this. It doesn't wear well on a would-be prime minister to engage in willful blindness about the state of things on an issue as serious as that. And it would be important to have his take and to know that he is asking questions and yes, he can still ask questions.

Having seen what we saw this week, it's hard to see how constrained he would be for having read the report. But to not want to know the lay of the land looks worse this week than last week. The reason why I think they have ended up in this position is that initially this started, remember, when David Johnston's first report came out. And I think, partly rightly, both the Bloc and the Conservatives back then said

we are not going to want to have a briefing about more stuff we can't talk about, Mr. Johnston. Nothing in there will convince us, and nothing he could say that there shouldn't be a public airing of this issue. And I think by reflex, the Conservatives stuck to that position, but events have moved way past that. And that leaves Canadians, I agree with Bruce, that the government, and by the government, I do mean the prime minister, is going to have to provide more context and account for his actions, because by not saying anything, Justin Trudeau is actually on this, Jarkmeet Singh is on solid ground. He is escaping accountability by putting himself in a silo of silence. And I don't think that serves either the issue or Canadians well.

Peter, if I can, just for a second. First of all, thank you, Chantal, for clarifying that I wasn't saying that the prime minister should interpret what I said as being a license to do nothing. And I do think that the burden on him is increasingly to show that he took these concerns seriously, that he did something as a consequence, or that he at least is now going to, although even just saying that that way is probably part of the conundrum. They feel like they're so far behind the curve again

on this issue by looking as though they had a report didn't take it seriously enough to uh to want to raise alarm bells uh to situate what was ultimately going to come out in a way that people could understand uh to explain enough times with enough clarity the choices that they were making and why they were in the public's interest as opposed to in their own political interest. The same burden, I do think I agree with Chantal completely, is now on Mr. Polyev. The question that starts to develop over time is, is the reason that you're not wanting to get this briefing to get clearance so that you can read this report, is it because you will find it uncomfortable if it says something about members of your own party? That question was always going to be a bit legitimate. And the

answer that I think has been used is always, well, you don't want to put yourself in a situation where as official opposition leader, you can't really criticize the government. I think the burden of evidence right now is shifted more towards get the briefing if you want to be seen as a serious contender for the office of prime minister. And for Mr. Trudeau, I think you're going to have to step into the middle of this. You're going to have to clarify where you're coming from and what you did or didn't do or how you reacted that we didn't know about and why people should have confidence that the government is taking this issue seriously enough.

All right. Well, there are two points that you're both sort of coming down to. One is the Polyev position. I find it interesting that while Singh took the briefing, Tom Mulcair is saying, the former NDP leader, is that Polyev shouldn't take the briefing, that he supports Polyev's position as it is, that they will put him in a box in terms of asking questions.

Now, I think you both address that in terms of what he can ask and where he can go, but I found it interesting that Mulcair would do that. We've talked about Mulcair a number of times in the last few weeks. He's kind of bopping back and forth in terms of his feelings about Polyev, but on this one he seems to be saying Polyev is doing the right thing, which I don't know whether that's more supportive of Polyev than it is not supportive of what his successor did. There is a thread here.

And by the way, with all due respect to Mr. Moncler, he is not the arbiter of what is right and wrong in the House of Commons. He's just one of many. And in this case, a bit of a lonely analyst to have come to that conclusion, which actually serves his favorite team, which is how bad Justin Trudeau really is. But the thing is, here, just to pick up, Thomas Mulcair was probably the best leader of the official opposition that we saw in decades. And part of the reason why he did so poorly is that he spent most of his time auditioning to be leader of the opposition. In giving Pierre Poiliev that advice, he's actually encouraging Mr. Poiliev

to go down the same path he did. That is, not hamper his capacity to be an effective leader of the official opposition in favor of becoming a better prime minister, if that is going to happen. And I find that really interesting and not totally surprising. Why would you advise your successor as leader of the official opposition to take a path different from yours, which might bring you to admit that maybe you didn't take the turn towards being the prime minister and waiting early enough and ended up in the campaign being rewarded by losing both jobs. The other point that I want to raise that you both have raised is this issue of the report itself. Now, I understand there were all kinds of conditions placed

on the secrecy surrounding that report, what can be said about it, what can't be said about it. But I think it seems to me, and tell me if I'm wrong, that we've reached a point on this story where it's awfully hard now to keep that thing totally secret. That the only way out of this is going to be in some fashion, and with all the proper conditions placed around the naming of names, but at least the basic report.

Have we not reached a point where the only way to clarify this story in terms of the Canadian people and possibly some of the MPs themselves is to make it public? What's the downside here? Well, the downside is, for one, and I say this from anecdotal but real evidence, is that if you do so, you will have, I understand that there are names in there, obviously, and that will happen. I know of two persons that I'm not going to name who were once tagged as

possible security risks by CSIS and then were not because it was based on a lot of associations. And in the end, it turned out that whatever smoke CSIS and others thought they saw was a cloud that the wind took away. So, the risk is, and that is the same risk with publishing the names, is that you will forever have this over your head, even if it's not founded. And that is a real conundrum. Yes, if you put the names out, these people will be able to defend themselves. But against what? When you're fighting security services intelligence, you're fighting ghosts. It's not as if the person across from you in the House of Commons wants to debate whether you're a spy or not or a traitor.

It's who is saying that on the basis of what? I'm not sure you can get due process to work in this particular instance. Okay, well, I'm not suggesting that the name should be handed out. I'm talking about, like, I still don't, like, understand, what the hell are they talking about? Like, were people taking money to give secrets about our, you know, our defense capabilities or whatever the thing is? Would it not be, would it not give us some indication of how serious the situation we're talking about if there was some,

given where we are on this story, right? I understand a month ago, not, but now, given everything that's being said, that there is some clarity brought to the situation as to what, in fact, we're talking about. Not names. But I go back to my old question, Peter. Have you known many backbenchers to have state secrets to solve?

Because I haven't. No, I haven't either. And I think that, so I keep vacillating between wanting to give the prime minister the benefit of the doubt on this and sort of say, let's walk through the logic of what he was presented with, what he knows about everyday occurrences of foreign actors trying to influence our and intervene in our democratic activities, which is probably a lot and probably quite worrisome and probably has been for his entire term as prime minister, a mixture of facts, speculation, rumor, guilt by association, all the things that Chantal alluded to. And if you've known that has been going on, and if you know that the information is of questionable quality sometime, but still you'd rather know it, you'd

still rather have it be shared with you and collected by our intelligence services. But you also know that there are real world consequences for making the choice to kind of blurt that information out. And I do think that if you blurt the information out, the cry for the names just becomes almost overpowering. And so on balance, and I'm sort of laying out this logic of what would be in the prime minister's mind to have taken the positions that he's taken or the decisions that he's taken so far giving him the benefit of the doubt you would you would come to

the conclusion that to chantal's point this is about conversations that foreign actors are having with backbenchers how much risk is there to national security in that now i say that i know there are people who are going to kind of howl with outrage at the cavalier way I put that, but I think Chantal is right, that if there was evidence that state secrets were being passed to other governments, that there would have been more evident reaction by the government so far. Instead, I suspect that the prime minister is looking at information that he sees as a mixed quality around individuals

that have done some things that test the limits of what's acceptable, maybe go beyond it, some of which he wanted to make sure that the police were looking at from the standpoint of, is there a rationale for a prosecution here, or at least the reason for further investigation and surveillance? I heard Jagmeet Singh say that he thought that putting the names out would put people on notice that they were being watched. If I understood his comment correctly, well, I happen to believe that if anybody is doing this kind of thing right now, they're already on notice that this is being observed.

Those names don't be out there. And I completely agree with Chantal that we've seen, we've known of situations where intelligence agencies, in good faith, suggested that there might be a problem with an individual here or there that turned out not to be real. And the consequences for those individuals are something that have to weigh. You want a prime minister to weigh those consequences in making this decision and err on the side of not implicating people who might not be guilty of anything

in a way that might tarnish them for life. Just back to my point for a moment. If this is ever going to end, it's only going to end with some kind of clarity as to what was really going on. Because nobody's going to believe anybody saying it wasn't bad or it was bad, because we just don't know what it was. And given that, politically, I almost get it why Polyev is doing what he's doing because this just keeps going on. And I don't think it's hurting him. Everything that happens these days only seems to hurt one party.

You're shaking your head, Chantal. Well, I would like to have Mr. Foye of stake on this report. I would like him to tell me that he's comfortable with this caucus and comfortable with his colleagues or not. And if he wants, he can do what Jagmeet Singh said yesterday. We understand that there are conservatives and liberals in there. That's clear. After two weeks, that much information is not a state secret. Some of them are past parliamentarians.

But I would like, as I will be really interested in Yves-François Blanchet's take on the report, and I'm pretty sure there won't be any bloc en piece in there. But at some point, you do want gross negligence has been allowed to unfold. He wasn't in government over the past eight or nine years. If there are people in his caucus, in a larger sense, including senators, doing things that cross the line, someone should have told him or told Erin O'Toole so that they could act or and nothing happened apparently Mr. Polyev is not acting as if he ever got a heads up from anyone that be careful stuff is happening there's also stuff in there about the media I'd really like to know

what this committee really means about the media. You know, Bruce knows my obsession with the notion that the media is kind of a catch word for just about anything. The media is being targeted by foreign interference efforts. And as who are we, what organizations are we actually talking about here? Is it the entirety of the media environment, or is it a couple of publications? I don't know that. The leadership campaigns of the Conservative Party, the past two, were the subject of efforts of electoral interference from India and China. Okay, that's possible, knowing what happens when you kind of sign up members.

But does that mean it impacted on the results? I went through the last leadership campaign of the conservatives, looking for signs that an organized Chinese effort that helped one of the two main candidates, Sean Charest and Pierreierry Poilievre, writing by writing, taking the 20 writings with the largest Chinese communities. And I found absolutely no discrepancy between the results of the two main candidates and those writings versus comparable writings. And you're left with all those questions and no answers. And it's a pretty broad attack on just about everything that happened in this country over the past five to eight years. So I do think that Mr. Poitier, for the sake of his stature as a future prime minister, should be speaking on the basis of knowledge about this issue. You get the last word if you have one, Bruce, on this subject.

Well, I do think it's incumbent upon Mr. Polyev to, you know, to do more on this issue, to explain his position on, you know, if he really believes that the right choice is to not avail himself of this information so that he can remain in the role of critic of the government. You know, he should own that choice and step up to the mic and explain it to people rather than have people kind of do it for him and have people kind of surmise that this might be the reason. I don't think it's a good enough answer. I think he should enter into a conversation with the government about what to

do about this. I think that's the serious response to this. But there's no evidence that he's going to take that. And there's no real evidence that, to your point, Peter, the only people who ever seem to get hurt these days are the incumbents, whether it's in Canada or somewhere else. He might not be paying a price for it. He might not pay a price for taking that position. There's no evidence that he has so far. But I do think that the biggest burden right now is on the prime minister to step into this mix and try to put this issue to bed by explaining what the choices are that he made and why he made them and why he thinks they're the right choices and, and to try to move on.

Okay. On that note, we're going to take our first break, come back with a different subject right after this. And welcome back. You're listening to Good Talk, the Friday episode of The Bridge with Chantelle Hebert and Bruce Anderson. 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.

We're glad to have you with us. Topic number two, capital gains tax. How long has it been since the budget? Six weeks, something like that? It's been a while. It's been a long time ago. So long ago, I can't remember when it was. But one of the things the Liberals were so proud of themselves

for slipping into the budget was new rules around capital gains, which they felt put them on the side of the little person and up against the fat cats. And they wanted that same split to happen for the conservatives, except the opposite of theirs. But the conservatives, through Pierre Polyev, took his time of deciding what exactly he was going to say about this, what position they were going to take.

And it's gone on and on and on to the point where a couple of days ago, the finance minister who was behind the whole idea on the capital gains, Christopher Freeland, gave a speech and some comments about where they were on this that did not come off well, to put it in its mildest terms, didn't work at all.

And she's taken a bit of a thrashing in the media for her positioning on this. And once again, Polyev is over in the corner kind of smiling. The delaying reaction has actually worked in his favor. I mean, we'll see eventually when the people speak on it, but... Have the Liberals lost this fight on the capital gains tax, or are they losing it? Chantal? I wouldn't go hunting with Chrystia Freeland, or at least not trap hunting,

because I would be afraid that I'd have to call an ambulance when she got her foot stuck in her own trap, which is basically what we witnessed over the past few weeks. For one, the Conservatives, yes, did feel that there was a trap in the making in the budget. And it was kind of obvious to everyone the morning after the budget that the plan was to force Mr. Poirier to either side with so-called fat cats or damage his brand as an everyday person, or else vote for a tax that the liberals are putting in place. And then to be even more clever, the Liberals decided to have separate legislation on it so that the Conservatives couldn't vote against it in the budget as they were against the budget. So as part of their being against the budget, they would have voted against the change. And it took six weeks to come up with the legislation until this week. Well, six weeks is a long time to allow a bear to go through the forest to look at where you are setting up your traps. And Mr. Poiliev did exactly that.

And what he did this week is actually turn the issue into an issue of liberals taxing people. Now, over those six weeks, there have been plenty of stories of people who own a cottage, a family cottage, and have had for decades, who will be caught in this and who are hardly fat cats or doctors or small business people. Real people come out, and public opinion so far is divided on this issue. Me, I think that the liberals lost the debate, one with over-the-top rhetoric, as in pregnant teenagers will be desperate if we don't have these tax changes, which is almost not a caricature of what Christopher Lannes argued a week ago. But I also think that when it comes

to voting, people who are angry because they think they'll be paying a tax or they will be paying a tax are much more likely to go vote than those who are not touched by the notion of a tax. It brings back memories of the vaccine mandates that became the wedge issue that the Liberals thought would win them a majority a couple of years ago, and only ended up dividing Canadians and creating real wedges, but did not result in what the Liberals hoped. Except this time, we're going to have a class war on behalf of middle or moderate income Canadians are not Chrystia Freeland and Justin Trudeau. That's not the first thought that comes to your mind when you look at them. These are people who are like me struggling at the grocery store and who are fighting a class war on behalf of little people. Bruce.

Well, Peter, you started with today's good talk with a reference to a cartoon, a spy versus spy. And as I was listening to Chantal talk about the laying of a trap, I was reminded of Wile E. Coyote in The Roadrunner. You remember how this coyote always thought he's going to lay this diabolical trap and the roadrunner was finally going to be captured by it. And always it was so obvious that the roadrunner figured out what the trap was and how to avoid it. This is absolutely a terrible political miscalculation on the part of the Liberals, not the policy itself. I'm not enough of a policy expert to know whether this was a really important tax change.

And to some degree, I'm a bit agnostic on the money that they raise and what they spend it on. So if we just talk about it from the standpoint of is it successful political posturing, it reminded me of the Liberals first drumming around the small business tax changes early increasing taxes sounds to Canadians. It doesn't sound to Canadians like an overdue reconciling of a class divide. It looks like government taking more money out of the economy. And so if you're going to do that, don't imagine that you're going to convince people that you're only taking it from the bad people who aren't paying their share because you won't probably convince them of that, especially this far into your mandate. Maybe earlier on, there was a chance to do that with the small business tax changes. But even there, like now, the next thing that happens when you say we're just going to extract a little bit of money from

this one part of the economy because, well, you probably didn't know it. These people weren't paying their share while you were all along. What happens is then everybody says, well, actually, you're doing the numbers wrong. You're miscalculating the impacts. They're much more severe and widespread and long-term than you're making that out to be. And all of a sudden, the public is like, you know what, that sounds more persuasive to me, especially when you say it's gonna raise this much money from this small a number of people.

So where did the liberals go wrong on this? You know, my view is that if they felt like they needed that amount of money, whatever it was, $19 billion that this measure is gonna generate, because they wanted to buy these things for the economy or for people. They should have stayed focused on what the people were going to get for the money that was being raised, rather than put so much emphasis on the most important thing here is that there have been people among you who have not been paying their

share and we're going after them on your behalf because you're trying to introduce an issue where people might legitimately go, well, if this has been going on for eight years, how come you didn't notice? And if you're describing people who've been paying the taxes that they were required to pay, should you be using that kind of language to demonize them? And then the last part of that is that if you look like you're losing that fight, should you dial the rhetoric up to 17 on the dial by saying things like, these people, if you don't agree with us on this tax measure, you're the equivalent of somebody who wants to live behind a gate in a gated community while

people outside are starving. There's no breakfast for kids that unwed mothers are going to have babies because they can't afford contraceptives. It was ludicrous in my view, because I think they just keep on doubling down on this idea that they can get the conservatives, they can get Wiley Coyote as a conservative leader instead of an actual conservative leader. He's pretty wily politically and doesn't have much trouble figuring out how to dodge this particular trap. So the more they try to prosecute this class war, the deeper in the hole I think they will get on it. I don't think people are going to come to the conclusion that, thank God, Justin Trudeau is finally trying to deal with all of this tax avoidance by super rich people. I'm old fashioned.

I tend to think that the finance minister should defend tax measures on the basis of finances and not on the basis of throwing stones at the official opposition. It doesn't really convince me of anything except that the finance minister is using the budget to score political points at the expense of governance and proper communication with Canadians. And how well is that working? Not so well. Here's what I don't understand.

They make a decision to put a free loan out front on this issue with this argument, which they probably could have been told is going to fall flat given everything that's happened, while at the same time their best communicator, or at least in my view, on the topic that supposedly is the major topic for most Canadians, that's housing and Sean Fraser,

you don't hear from anymore. It just seems to me if you're going to make a decision to go out front, to try and change the dynamic out there, you put your best person forward. This is where I'm coming from. If you need this money for housing, which was the first line of argumentation that we heard, keep talking about it.

Keep saying, you know what? Some people won't like any tax measure. This is the best one that we could think of because we need the money to make more housing happen will it work with everybody no but is it better than trying to counter that what we saw right after the budget in our polling was that 70 said this this this budget is going to tax everybody more they didn't believe that it was only going to tax a small part of the population. You're always going to lose that, I think, if you're an incumbent and you're trying to make the case that you found some sort of a tiny vein in which to insert the needle and extract the tax money.

So they would have been way better off to just keep on focusing on we're making houses happen more quickly. Sean Fraser in the window talking about it was a good solution for several months leading up to the budget and would be a good solution today. But, you know, they're like little kids playing with toys. They keep trying out toys. And when the outcome is not what they want, they move on to the next toy. So housing, all those announcements did not move the needle in the way that instant gratification would have called for. So, let's move on to some new ploy and put all our energies on it. I can't wait to see what the next shiny object

that they believe will change the dynamics electorally is going to be. Because at this point, you know, and that is the case often of governments that are in trouble, is their already short attention span becomes almost non-existent. And it feels like that when you look at this government. They have lost control of the conversation. It keeps going in places where they don't want it to go. They believe that silence or obfuscation is going to allow them to get away with it. Foreign interference is the case. The opposite is happening, and they are convincing more and more people that they have really lost it. Okay, we're going to take our final break.

I've got another subject that I want to talk and get your thoughts on, and we'll do that right after this. Hello again. Peter Ransford here with Chantel and Bruce. Final segment of Good Talk for this week. Interesting study done last week, sort of in relation to the elections that took place in

Europe last weekend. And the suggestion that we're seeing something happening that we haven't seen in, well, in generations. And that is a shifting of the uh political um dynamic if you will uh interest if you will on the part of young people from left to right i mean it's generally being accepted in most countries in the free world, that younger voters have been on the progressive side,

have voted center-left or further left than that, not just in Europe but elsewhere as well, in North America. But this study of what has been happening in Europe suggests it's actually quite the opposite. The younger voters are looking more attractively these days to the right of center. So I thought it would start with you, Bruce on this and,

and whether we're seeing anything like that here. Yeah, this is one of the most interesting questions that we're seeing in public different parts of the world. And there is some evidence of it here. I don't know if it's going from left to right or if it's going from more left towards the center. But the movement directionally is in the way that you've described it, Peter. And I think there's enough evidence to believe that there's not just a, there's not a rogue poll or a

rogue political event out there. There is some materiality to it. And so it's really worthwhile trying to understand it. To the degree that I've seen enough research to have a hypothesis about it, and it's just a hypothesis, what I see is that young people have tended for many years to believe that they can have their aspirational ideals and their values which tend as you say to tilt towards the progressive policy agenda, climate change, social justice, equity, diversity, inclusion and redistribution and they can hold those positions while at the same time experiencing a life which pragmatically is going pretty well that they're able to study they're able to develop

jobs or careers and pay their bills and live the kind of lives that they hoped that they would live. There was, in effect, no zero-sum game in the economy where you have to trade off some of the higher-minded ideals that you have for some of the everyday realities that you want. And I think that the way that the economy has been working, and in particular the cost of living and the cost of housing and the cost in some markets of student loans and student debt has created a different dynamic where young people are saying, look, we don't want to abandon our ideals. We're not changing our values, but we need better results in terms of the practical realities of our lives. And so if we believe, for example, that housing is a big problem and

immigration is part of that problem, then we should look at immigration again. If we believe that the balance of the conversation in our public policy sphere is about people who aren't us, we want to address that balance a little bit. And we want to, and this is particularly true, we're seeing among men, younger men, we want that addressed, we want to feel as though we're a focus of attention in terms of public policy. So I don't really want to go further than that, because I think it really is more in the area of hypothesis. And there are a number of threads that connect together there. But I wouldn't, I wouldn't say that what's happening is that young men are becoming misogynistic or young people are becoming more inclined towards racism. That's not what I'm describing. What I'm

describing is more of a search for practical solutions, even if it means you're looking at progressive parties that you might have supported before, and you don't feel that they're really speaking your language right now. And you probably saw, both of you probably saw what I saw yesterday, which was Keir Starmer, when he put out his Labour Party manifesto in the UK, was at pains to say, we are pro-business and pro-worker, we are the pro-growth party. And I found that quite interesting and instructive for progressive parties, that if you want those voters, you need to make them feel as though you're focused on the economy and making the economy work for people as well as pursuing those progressive ideals. Chantal. And of course, Labour in the UK is looking for

previous or past conservative votes. So it makes a lot of sense to appeal to that side. They're not going to win it on the left. They have to go take votes on the right, which brings me to my sense that you can't divorce those kinds of numbers with what is happening to incumbents these days on the left or the right. So we have polls in this country that show that younger voters are increasingly interested in the Conservative Party, walking away from the Liberal Party or the NDP. But in the UK, it's the reverse. course, the younger voter strata is shifting or has shifted to labor. So gone left. And what I read in that was that in both places, they're walking away from the incumbent and going to the alternative option. I saw some interesting numbers in Quebec recently, where people were asked,

and remember that we have a government that is more right of center than left of center, and very nationalist in its approach. And people were asked, do you believe that federalism has been more bad than good for Quebec? And in the old days, when we covered this debate, the three of us, the younger voters were always the most inclined to say, we're not getting a good deal in Canada, we should support sovereignty. And that shifted over the past 20 years. And in this poll, the highest proportion of people who believed federalism was more bad than good for Quebec were the 55 years old and over. And the group that was most likely to say, no, unbalanced federalism has been better than bad for Quebec were among the younger voters. Of course, that over 50 group were the younger voters in the day when they were first discussing this.

And it goes to the nightmare of the Parti Québécois and the sovereignty movement that in the end, this is a grown up to become voters, many of them, as being a progressive government, that of Justin Trudeau, and with all of the stuff that is said about federalism in Quebec, still unbalanced, like federalism, better than their elders. And I thought, this is really interesting. It could be the way we look at younger voters, is, and our measures need to be updated for an environment where issues like climate change, a war, et cetera, housing difficulties have become more important than flag wars. Bruce, you wanted to make another point. One is that those boomers were the surprise bonus voters that supported legalization of marijuana.

I remember seeing that in the numbers. And it reminded me that in 1978, I attended a liberal convention at the Chateau Laurier in Ottawa. And obviously, I'm a boomer. And one of the things that I was kind of working on then was trying to get the liberal delegates to agree to legalize marijuana in 1978. And so eventually, those things catch each other. But my main point was Chantal said that in the UK, the drift was more towards the right and certainly relative to more towards the left rather because people are moving from conservative to towards labor what i tend to see is more moving from ideological perspectives towards pragmatic perspectives that's i think the, the most common thread. But in a number of markets, it does have aspects that look as though it's adopting a more right of center ideological perspective because the issue of immigration working for me and I don't trust solutions that sound like they're packaged in ideology, whether it's conservative or on the progressive side. I just want people to tell me how they're going to fix the problem. And I think that is the success

that Pierre-Paul Lievre has been having to some degree in Canada, is that he does really well when he says, I'm just going to make there be more houses more quickly. And I'm going to fix this problem with health care as opposed to sounding like an idiot. All right. We're going to leave it at that for this week. A good conversation, as it always is. And I thank Chantal for joining us. She's in Ottawa picking up yet another one of her awards. And congratulations on that. And that's why you see her fancy hotel room suite in the background there.

Yes, taxpayers' money was not wasted on my hotel room. And for all those people who are going to write and say, Peter, you've got some kind of strange light pointing down on your head. I know. I tried to get rid of it. I don't know where it's coming from. But it's there, so it must be a sign of something. Bruce, just in his usual Ottawa haunt for this week.

Next week, our last good talk before we take a bit of a hiatus for most of the summer. Not all of it, but for most of it. And we'll have a chance to bring you up to date on whatever is worth bringing up to date next week, as well as maybe a quick preview of the by-election, which will take place the following week. May well be one of the most important by-elections, certainly in the term of this government. Thanks, Bruce.

Thanks to Chantel. And thanks to you for listening this week. Talk to you again in a couple of days. Take care, you guys.