The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Good Talk -- Trump, Trudeau and the Meat Loaf

Episode Date: December 6, 2024

A week after their Mar a Lago dinner what was actually accomplished by the Trudeau-Trump dinner? Is Canada now dancing to the Trump tune or is there a chance for a meaningful all-Canadian approach to dealing with the new President and his agenda?  Bruce and Chantal join in for their assessment of the new top line item on the Ottawa political calendar.

Are you ready for Good Talk? And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here, along with Sean Talley-Bear and Bruce Anderson. It's your Good Talk Friday, and lots to talk about today, as there always seems to be on Fridays. We'll start, obviously, with a week since the now the now famous dinner at Mar-a-Lago. You know, I'm puzzled about a few things about that dinner. But one of the ones that I, one of the first things I thought, really? Meatloaf? You go to Mar-a-Lago and, you know, you're on the oceanfront.

You've got the possibility of lobster and crab and tuna and all those wonderful things you get at the ocean. And they serve meatloaf. Who doesn't love meatloaf, though? Meatloaf is great. I love meatloaf. Have you ever had Mary Trump's meatloaf? There was a menu, so there were other choices,

but I'm not sure that the other choices were from a family recipe of Donald Trump. So diplomatically, you would want to order the meatloaf. Exactly. Yeah. I didn't hear anybody talking about it in the post-dinner scrum. You're going to get so much mail about your meatloaf hate. I don't want to defend you on that. You said I was going to get mail last week because I call Winnipeg Winterpeg,

and all I got was wonderful letters from the people of Winnipeg saying, yes, that's us. Yeah, all the people who are mad, they wrote me and Chantal, and they said, talk to him. He's got to stop with that. The Laurentian elite calling people things, dismissing meatloaf as lobster. How can you? I actually like meatloaf is lobster. How can you? That's right. I actually like meatloaf, but I just found it surprising that it would be right up front there on the menu.

However, enough about meatloaf. I've had shepherd's pie or pâté chinois at your place many times. I love shepherd's pie. That is a food of meatloaf. But I am a shepherd at heart. If you were the president, that's what would be on your winter White House menu, for sure. We're not going to have to worry about that possibility, are we? Okay, let's get to the hard content here. A week

later, and there's been a lot of back and forth on this, and kind of a slightly changing back and forth of positions, and kind of a slightly changing back and forth of positions too uh at least on the canadian side what's our assessment of that uh of the dinner where where do you stand on good thing bad thing canada look good canada look bad what have you. Bruce, you start this week. Well, you know, I think it's the first minute of what's going to be quite a long movie, and it's going to have a lot of twists and turns, and it's going to be mostly a bad movie.

I'm hoping that it's not a horror movie, but I feel like there was a bit of a collective sigh of relief from people who on the part of people who were anxious about Trump's predatory attitude towards his trading partners. And it makes sense that people would feel some relief seeing a face to face encounter that had that kind of social aspect to it. There was a bit of jollity. There was the playing of of music, kind of an odd playlist from my standpoint, but there was the playing of the Trump playlist. And people seemed to be, you know, kind of enjoying each other's company. It was like after the fact, we heard about him kind of joking about, you know, taking over Canada. but, you know, it had to feel like a good thing in the

moment. Nothing I've heard since makes me feel better about Trump's ideas for his trading relationships with his partners. I think he remains and maybe is even more reinforced in the idea that predation rather than cooperation is the right way to go in terms of dealing with the rest of the world. And I don't think he sees Canada as a particular friend or ally. his career, according to all of the accounts about how he conducts business, except the ones that he had ghostwritten for him, his approach is to be abusive of the people that he does business with, to think of all of these transactions as a zero-sum game, so that if he can give up nothing and get something in return, that's what he would like to do. And I think that I am worried, based on everything that I've been hearing, that that is the approach that he's going to take.

One sector after another in Canada looking to find advantage for American interests. Maybe it will turn out better than I fear, and it will really put on Canada the pressure to come up with a really novel approach. And I don't know that my last point, and then I'll stop. I want to hear what Chantal thinks. The instinct to say we need a Team Canada approach, I get it. It feels politically consistent with tradition, but not everybody is going to do the math the same way in Canada. There are going to be some sectors

that will say, well, we are going to continue to sell our stuff to the United States because they need it and can't find any other way to get it. Other sectors are going to feel like they're, they're punished. Oh, I said last thing, there was one more thing. And I, the posting of, of kind of joyful pictures about that dinner on Instagram. I know, you know, politicians need to use Instagram to get their point across to reach a big audience,

but I really feel like the Trudeau government needs to stay in the lane of we're serious people doing serious work. If they have any hope of recovering from this very, very deep hole in public opinion, they should avoid any leaving any impression that that it's all a game or it's all uh you know it's it's everything's going to work out fine that's the other kind of implicit aspect of the way that they post about this sometimes so the narrative is either this is a serious issue and we're working on it hard or don't worry, folks, we've got this. And I think the first is the right position to take in terms of how to talk with the Canadian public about this issue. All right, I want Chantelle's view,

but I just want to say on the 51st state thing, I know everybody's portraying it as a joke, and maybe that's the way it was initially intended, but I don't for a minute think that Donald Trump doesn't in his heart think Canada is the 51st state. This is the guy who tried to buy Greenland, right, or cut a deal for Greenland in his first term. So I don't dismiss that. And, you know, I wouldn't just portray it as a joke. I would portray it as.

No, I think he thinks that way. Yeah. Okay. Chantal. When I was a teenager growing up in the 60s, we all already talked that the U.S. believed us to be the 51st state. And so no surprise there. Mr. Trump says all kinds of things that make more or less sense, like buying growing land,

green land, I guess, in English. So I somewhere deep in his mind is probably a thought that he thinks is somewhat serious. But I don't think that's our main challenge going forward. Plus, I guess if someone chose him polls in Canada, he might realize that his movement would struggle if Canada were in the electoral balance in the United States. It might be more complicated than it has been for him to come back to the presidency. I'm going to look at it from another angle.

I agree with Bruce that this is just the first minute of a long movie. And it will fade probably in memories in two years, except for this is how it began. And this is where we are at. And I don't know where we will be two years, except for the, this is how it began. And this is where we are at. And I don't know where we will be two years from now, but I know that we will still be talking about what's happening in the White House and what Trump is doing in science. That's the only certainty. So guys, if you want to continue to do good talk and talk about Trump,

we've got a four-year contract. Here we go. And if you're sick of us talking about Trump I'm sorry but this ain't gonna go away but from the Canadian perspective of our political dynamics I think it was a good thing I'll start with the

the so called national interest before this dinner our political leadership was all over the map. And this is not a call for people to get a songbook and all sing the same song. It's a call for people to have constructive discussions, but to not be taking shots at each other amongst political leaders that will provide ammunition to Donald Trump and his people on the other side. I'll give you an example of something that was done.

It's not pertaining to Trump at all, but wasn't the smartest thing that this person did. It goes back to when John Hussein decided that we were not going to join the Iraq, the US and the Iraq offensive. The first instinct that Stephen Harper had was to go give interviews in the US to say how terrible this decision was and how he disagreed with it. Eventually, you never heard a peep from Stephen Harper about this for obvious reasons. He was way off. He misjudged the Canadian public opinion, believed that the public opinion, which was very divided at the time, would tilt towards his side because of the decision. The opposite happened. But it wasn't helpful to take that disagreement, fundamental disagreement to the US, to propagate it. What we saw after the dinner, as opposed to before the dinner, was not a coming together.

Daniel Smith is not going to go have a Christmas breakfast with Justin Trudeau at Rideau Cottage. But at least some sense that the message was becoming more efficient. I believe it was a good thing that Premier Ford went on Fox to talk about Canada's case. I think he is perfect for this job. He's got the profile, much more perfect than just about anyone, with the possible exception of Dominique Leblanc from Justin Trudeau's cabinet. Why? Because he doesn't look like the caricature that you might want to make of the woke Canadian government, almost communist in its stance. You look at Premier Ford, it goes the other way. Same applies to Daniel Smith.

And what they said in those interviews was a lot more efficient and constructive than before the dinner. Now, I believe that on this file, to continue after the next federal election, regardless of who is elected in that election, because it doesn't serve us to be at war with each other when we also reminded a lot of people that there is only one prime minister and the only person who can pick up the phone and speak to Donald Trump quickly and make our case at his level is still Justin Trudeau. And it sent the message, you know, is it pleasant to watch these pictures and think, what a way to spend a Friday night eating meatloaf with Donald Trump, who gets you to pick music on his iPad, and you've got to make good picks. It's like the menu. Probably not. But in the real world, it did send the message that the government is on this file.

And for the first time in weeks, Justin Trudeau had some control over the national conversation in this country. And that's a big change from prior to November 5th. It's in part because Pierre Poiliev kind of left him the field by deciding that he was just the leader of the opposition. He said it himself and decided to act just like the leader of the opposition and not a prime minister and waiting. But still, for the liberals, I think this has been a decent week. My final point, and it goes to domestic politics, there will be a host of confidence motions that could see the government fall over the next week. And we are barely talking about them because there is no real momentum behind the notion that the government should fall

next week and that we should go in an election. Now, I believe that an election at some point is really necessary, that we need a prime minister with a fresh mandate, whoever he is. But the fact that this Trump threat, his re-election, did not give political momentum to defeating the Trudeau government, I think is something for all opposition leaders, but in particular, Pierre Poilievre, to reflect on. Can I just follow that up briefly? Are you suggesting that any of these confidence motions in the next few days,

as there are a bunch of them, could result in an election? I would be amazed, judging from the mood on parliament hill there is and you've been there from what 1979 on you know what happens what kind of fever takes hold of the place when that happens more recently when paul martin was brought down this time of year uh both joe clark and paul martin were defeated around the same time. There is no sense of that. I just want to pick up on it. No, I would be amazed if the government went down between now and next year.

Something that Chantal said really kind of struck me. I've been thinking about this a bit, that the events, I agree that it allowed the government a degree of control over the conversation that they didn't have before, and they might not keep for more than another few days. Who knows? It will depend on the degree to which they start to talk about what kinds of alternatives are available for Canada. If they start to talk about what kinds of alternatives are available for Canada. If they start the conversation about countermeasures and that sort of thing, people will be interested in it and they will be setting the conversational agenda. And I think that conversation, should it start to take place in public, will be shocking to people because it

will bring to the fore the idea that we might not be able to solve this through nice conversation. We might not be able to solve it by kind of reminding people of the facts of the relationship, the bilateral benefits, the mutual benefits, and everybody kind of coming to, yeah, it was kind of fun to speculate about all of this, but we don't really want to do it. It might be necessary to put forward ideas that sound shocking for the purposes of making everybody on both sides of the border understand how real the economic consequences would be if these tariffs come down on top of us and there's no obvious path for them to be remediated or removed in the near term.

So, yeah, I do think the government has a chance to maintain control over the conversation, or at least to set the conversational content, as to what it does to the feelings that people have about Pierre Poliev and Justin Trudeau. It is a reminder to me that it didn't do anything to make people, I don't think, say, we just have to get on with having Pierre Poliev become our prime minister. But I don't think it did anything to make people say, I'm so happy that Justin Trudeau is our prime minister either. In effect, I think it just reinforced the sense that a fair number of voters have, which is that, okay, we'll have Pierre Poliev as prime minister,

but we don't feel amazingly good about that. But we'll do it because we really don't want to have Justin Trudeau anymore. That remains, I think, the basic dynamic. And to a certain degree, the events of the Mar-a-Lago dinner and the week that follows kind of reinforce that. If I can just build on some of the things that Bruce said about having some command over the conversation going forward. I think that if the prime minister wants to be seen as the prime minister and not the embattled liberal leader that his party and the country possibly want to

get rid of in short order, he has to stick to the high road. I think when he goes down the other road, which he did this week, when he said Pierre Poilier was suggested, Pierre Poilier was being un-Canadian. He is pushing his luck way beyond where he can afford to go. And he's not scoring points because he is putting the mantle of prime minister, I'm the great unifier, aside to try to score some fairly cheap political points. And if the liberals don't have the discipline to stick to the road and look at, keep their eye on the ball. The ball is not in the House of Commons in QP. Despite the polls, they need to keep their eye on the ball on The ball is not in the House of Commons in QP. Despite the polls, they need to

keep their eye on the ball on the Canada-US front. That is the best way forward for the country, but it is also the best way forward for the Liberals. If there is a very narrow path to either holding Pierre Poiloev to a minority in the next parliament, hard-to-work minority that would be, or even to keeping him in opposition. It is along that path. And I'm not saying it leads to that destination, but I'm saying this is a rare path forward that could work, but only if you have the discipline to make it work.

And I'm not sure that they do. I agree with Bruce. You can either say this is an existential challenge or you can be on TikTok with feel-good videos. But if you're going to try to do both, you just look unserious and you just make people say, you're still the same not serious people. You talk a good game.

You can't walk the talk i will also note that if we are facing as most observers agree an existential moment and one that will last beyond it's not even 9-11 9-11 was an existential moment, but it was easier to see what you could do to preserve the relationship because we were dealing with a predictable adult White House. We're not there. But if you're going to do that, then you're going to have to show it when you do that cabinet shuffle that we all expect to see happen between now and when the house returns in january how long i've been hearing about the captain's shuffle yes but it is going to happen be it only because too many people are not running are still carrying briefs but and it is an opportunity for once uh for the government to use but it's going to have to send some message.

The initial plan, from what I understand, was just a minor shuffle, you know, a few chairs. You won't know who the people are because by the time the election comes around, you will not have had time to notice whatever their mission is. But I don't think that Trudeau can get away with a minor shuffling of the decks when he does shuffle his cabinet. And I don't believe he can keep his cabinet in the shape that it's in, given how many people have announced that they're not running again until the end of the spring. So there is an opportunity there, but it is also a moment for judgment. Okay.

Let me, we got to take our first break in a second, but let me just ask this because it intrigued me when you talked earlier, Chantal, about the role that Doug Ford played this week and the role that Danielle Smith played this week, because I heard somebody who doesn't have a political horse in this game to ride in the last couple of days suggests that you know if trudeau's trying to put together this kind of like national team team canada call whatever you want uh that he could do worse than to say but let doug ford chair some

committee on the the automobile industry and the relationship between can and the U.S. on that and how it plays into this conversation. And yes, let Danielle Smith chair some kind of energy committee with the same goal in mind. Does that make any sense or is that too far removed from the political realities that we live in today? Bruce, why don't you try it for a sec? Well, yes and no. It makes sense in the sense that it is a, you know,

in another time faced with a different version of this threat and in a different domestic political context. So in other words, no. Yeah, so yes in theory, but no in practice right now i think that's the reality is that the american politics are different from what we're used to when we fought on softwood or even kusma the last time in the sense that trump winning the trifecta and having so much control over the entire political apparatus. It used to be the case that you could find governors and senators and congressmen, congresswomen, who would go, you know, my district really cares about this relationship. It really matters to us. And so you could create

a different conversation in the United States in the hopes that it would end up softening the edges of these initiatives. And that isn't now. So U.S. politics makes it really hard to know what we can do that isn't changing Trump's mind. And, you know, yes, you can see lots of evidence that Trump can change his mind, but you can also see evidence that facts don't matter to him and that his kind of basic zero-sum game attitude is something that is hardwired into his way of thinking. And probably J.D. Vance and all of the other people that he's been putting in place might have the same point of view as well. And the second complicating factor, Peter, I think is the domestic political situation, which is that there are a lot of politicians who would rather stand on the sidelines than stand

beside Justin Trudeau, if it, in part because their own voters, their support base would not like to see them too close to the Prime Minister, in part because they kind of feel like, well, maybe there's an opportunity for me. It's not, it wouldn't be the first time that people wondered if Doug Ford wanted to be prime minister of Canada someday, for example. So no, yes, in theory, but no in practice is my short answer. I don't, for one second, believe that it's a major problem for Doug Ford to stand next to the prime minister. I think actually that even as Ontarians want to vote him out, Justin Trudeau, they are also

more likely than many other provincial group of voters to want to see some kind of conversation between Queen's Park and Parliament Hill, but a conversation that is not based on people being under the same tent and so being compliant to each other. And you saw that this week when the Ontario Liberal leader, Bonnie Crombie, decided that Justin Trudeau's carbon tax was a bad idea. I'm not sure that this will help the liberals. But I see problems for other reasons.

One of those is that my understanding is that Doug Ford wants to have an election campaign sooner rather than later to kind of have it happen before Pierre Poiliev becomes prime minister. Why? Because you tend to be, if you're the provincial premier in Ontario, you tend to end up paying the bills for a prime minister of the same political color. And so I can't see that you can do both, be the person who kind of chairs something like this, which is going to be a complicated task and run an election

campaign. And do we actually need the two main under that scenario would be Justin Trudeau and Doug Ford, the two of the main players in the midst of preparing or fighting an election, even as they handle this file. It sounds a bit shaky. In the case of Danielle Smith, it would be really hard for a premier of Alberta to chair such a committee even as she's fighting the energy policies of the federal government that she's working with. It would take, you know, there's something schizophrenic about her notion that she could have two sides of her brain and do one without doing

the other. So I'm not sure that's terribly workable. And I'm not sure that it would be terribly productive. I do believe the premiers have a role to play in this, obviously. But to that level, given the timeline of the current federal government, I'm not sure that's really workable. You know, Pete, I know you want to take a break. But the thing about the Ford idea for me is I agree that he is kind of cast from central casting well to have this kind of conversation. One of the complicating factors, and obviously it would apply to Daniel Smith, is that if one of the countermeasures that the Canadian government is going to start to put on the table is an export tax on Canadian oil, even Doug Ford probably doesn't want

to be very associated with that idea. It might be the right strategy for Canada to take into that conversation, but it would be divisive for sure. And it would put to rest any notion that it'll be easy to have a team Canada approach here. It might be necessary to have a strategy for Canada that more or less stakeholders can agree with. But to the extent that it has to be a bit bare-knuckled, it's going to be divisive if it's bare-knuckled. Because it will imply that we use some areas where we have leverage or advantage to protect others where we don't. And if you're going to go out of the box for ideas,

you might as well go right out of the box and then use that cabinet shuffle to craft a quote-unquote unity cabinet. It would be easier to manage. Bring in players that are not necessarily identified to the liberals inside cabinet. As, for instance, I couldin, although he denies it, was thinking of doing on the day after the Quebec referendum in 1995. He was going to bring in people like Frank McKenna, former Premier of New Brunswick, Bob Rhee,

who was then not where he is, obviously, to craft a unity cabinet. So if you're going to have a shuffle, you should try to drag some of those players inside rather than try to give titles to premiers who have their province's interest and their own political interest to defend. Look at all the ideas we're coming up with today.

Yeah, well, that box is in chatter. There are pieces of box at my feet here. Okay, we're going to take a quick break, and then we come back. Still one more thing on this story that I want to deal with. We'll do that right after this. And welcome back. You're listening to Good Talk for this Friday. Chantelle and Bruce are in the house.

I'm Peter Mansbridge. You're listening on Sirius XM, channel 167. Canada Talks are on your favorite podcast platform, or you're watching us on our YouTube channel. And however you're getting us, we're glad to have you with us. So tell me, am I wrong? Yes. Okay, sorry. Moving on then.

Right. Was Pierre Polyev looking a little, you know, upset, I was going to say pissed off, last week when this dinner happened. I'm assuming that Trump wants Polyev to win. I'm assuming that the people around Trump want Polyev to win. And that they've probably... I'm not. Yes, you're wrong. I'm not. Okay. All right. Let me finish.

Yeah. I can't win with this woman. she's just all over me every week bruce started this i don't think you should say this woman i don't think that's the right okay all right the this meatloaf lover how about that i'm the only one who didn't say I like meatloaf. You guys all swore loyalty to meatloaf. Okay, let's talk about the post office then. Okay. Go on. Let me finish on the Pollyann thing. Yes. It just looked to me at times, especially when he kind of got angry again in the House of Commons and going after the way he was going after Trudeau and the Liberals, that he was kind of caught off guard by all this thing.

That he didn't want to see this happening. He didn't want to see Trudeau getting even the opportunity for a platform. Now, I am happy to say that I could be wrong, but it just looked to me like this kind of came out of left field for him and he wasn't that excited about it. And he was kind of upset by it. That I'm assuming that there have been at least some, I don't know, backroom discussions between the Polyev side and the Trump side,

going back some time about what could happen here and how the two sides should approach each other. I don't know. You obviously don't agree with that, Chantal. What I don't agree with is your assumption that Donald Trump wants Pierre Poiliev to win. And you are talking Trump's people as if suddenly we are gifting him with a strategic mind that sees a lot of advantages in having Pierre Poiliev over Justin Trudeau. Me, I think that Donald Trump is not unhappy to have Justin Trudeau because Justin Trudeau remains a celebrity.

It goes around the world when he has dinner with Justin Trudeau at Mar-a-Lago. Do you think that would happen with Pierre Poiliev? for this, but it is a reality that Mr. Trump gets more pleasure from taking hits at political stars than he does at people whose name most other leaders forget. And then there's this other thing. Of all of the leaders that Donald Trump interacted with during his first term, very few are still around. Mr. Trudeau is a rare survivor. Everybody else seems to have either gone down or may be going down. If you look at what's happening in France this week, it kind of tells you that story.

And that does earn you some respect from someone who believes in winning, that you are still around, that you have so far survived. So, me, I'm not taking this for granted, but I do agree with you that Mr. Poiliev this week looked like a very angry man all week. Did an interview in Quebec that has now become a poster interview for why he's having trouble in Quebec. It was very, very rude to someone who was interviewing him who happens. I don't think Mr. Opladiova understands the Quebec media system.

He thinks the dumping on media people here earn him some points it doesn't it's the opposite they are the home team uh and he's the visitor and every time he does that uh he kind of gets himself in trouble and but was he taken by surprise and unpleasantly surprised? I'm sure we were all taken by surprise. We did a show last Friday, hours before this dinner, and it never came up in our conversation because it was kept. I meant to bring it up, and I forgot. I just slipped my mind.

I'm not going to say anything except to note that the press gallery started realizing it was happening by tracking planes and i don't think that the press gallery on friday afternoon usually spends a lot of time tracking planes so i'm assuming someone gave someone a tip about tracking the prime minister's plane yeah but I read some really, that's completely off your point here, but I read some really funny journalistic reports the next day. One of them showed a picture of the dinner, where you see Trump and everyone,

and then said, wrote, sources say that Katie Telford and Dominique Leblanc were on hand. They're in the picture. So was that kid behind Trudeau and Trump, which was the best part of the picture. Yes. But in any event, yes, I totally get that Mr. Poiliev was not happy about this happening for obvious reasons,

but I don't think he handled it terribly well. Pete, on this, I'd just like to say I think that part of what really works for Pierre Poiliev in this political climate is that he runs hot, but it is also his kryptonite. If you kind of look at what it is that makes people kind of gravitate to him, is that he kind of throws punches, and he says things with a degree of frustration, energy, emotion, that feels authentic and resonates with people who are feeling really frustrated, especially with young people and especially with young men. And so his temperament is arguably the best thing that he's had going for him.

He's kind of picked up on the mood of the time and he plays it back to people. But it is also the thing that feels the most jarring for people who are asking the question, what kind of a prime minister will he be if he wins that next election? Because it doesn't make that much, it doesn't really make sense for him to be that hot all the time. He, you know, he gave a speech where he characterized all municipal governments as, you know, kind of horrible wasters of money, talked about don't listen to their bullshit. And it was really quite disrespectful towards an entire class of political stakeholders. And I don't get the math of that.

I get that he has a point that he wants to make about permitting being too slow for housing in municipalities and maybe he has other issues with municipalities as well. But it felt like a misplay in the sense of you can make that point without deciding to create more enemies. And so I do think it is both a virtue for him in terms of helping build some political support, but also a bit his. I also wanted to say, I think that there are lots of policies that Pierre Paulieff talks about, which I don't agree with. And I don't think are well thought out.

I also think he has a policy apparatus now that is putting together quietly, probably some pretty sensible policies. And so I wouldn't want to over characterize his kind of policy chops as being completely kind of rote and simplistic and rhetorically oriented. There's a lot of that. But I think it would be a mistake for his political adversaries to assume that there isn't good policy work going on within the conservative movement, especially in the context of a Trump administration in the United States. To your point, Peter. Okay. We're going to take our final break.

I got three things I want to squeeze into the last 10 minutes. So get ready. Back right after this welcome back final segment of good talk for this week with chantelle and bruce um post office we're in the third week now of postal strike it's used to cripple canada and in some ways it is right there right right now. It's certainly crippling Christmas for a lot of people who are trying to get mail and parcels and everything else out for the holiday season.

The two sides, you know, perhaps are getting together in the next few hours again. The union appears to want to make a new offer. They're, you know, fairly far apart on the wage front, but it's more than that. The post office wants to go to seven-day-a-week delivery to try and increase revenues. I mean, you know, there's the same old story about the post office.

You know, they're trying to make money, and they're having a hard time on it. But it hasn't gripped Canada the way postal strikes used to. Anybody want to say something about this, the postal strike? Don't everybody jump at the same time? Go ahead. What's that? Go ahead. It would have been the case not that many years ago that a strike entering its 30th hour, let alone its third week, would have been the thing that Canada was talking about.

How are we going to end it? So there's obviously been a huge change in the way in which people relate to the post office, which is mostly about the way most people relate to letter mails. Second thing I would say, you know, they just don't use it. If you need to send something quickly, you send it by email or you send it by a courier maybe. But the notion that people are as dependent on putting stamps on mail or even Christmas cards, for that matter, is what it used to be, and that's understating that money is one thing.

Losing huge, huge sums of money year in, year out is what's been happening with the post office. And the reason isn't that they're no good at operating, it's that their service standards, which are legislated, are unreasonable in the context of how few people are using those traditional services. So the number of days that they're required, they have certain requirements to deliver mail from A to B within a certain number of days. If there's very, very low

mail volumes, the economics of that get worse and worse every year. So the post office needs to have a really fundamental rethink. What kind of post office do we need? And it's always been a difficult conversation for politicians. I guess it remains so. But solving this strike is probably not going to solve that problem. It should ideally be a step towards a more fundamental solution, but it'll have to be a lot different, I think, in the future, because I don't think people are up for subsidizing $700 million losses. Chantal. It's interesting that there's ultimately in the House of Commons very little pressure on the government to resolve the issue.

Earlier this week, Conservative leader Piotr Wajew offered the government two hours to bring in the fiscal update next Monday, an offer that was turned down. But he didn't offer to give them two hours to bring back to work legislation. And why is that? Because the conservatives are making a play for the union vote of the NDP. Don't expect the NDP or the Bloc to call for a legislative end to the postal strike. The government has not used the shortcut it found for itself when it came to the ports or the railroads. I think in part because of what Bruce has explained, if you go the route of forcing arbitration and back to work through the Canada Relations Board, you will get a collective agreement at some point, but you are not going to get the foundation of a rethinking of how you operate the postal service in this country. house will be rising within days. And I don't believe that this is a situation that can be

sustained until the house comes back at the end of January. It may not show for those of us who have direct deposit, but there are still seniors in this country that count on the mail to deliver their pensions. And there are many communities where you cannot get a delivery from a parallel service all that easily because there's not enough people and enough demand for it to happen. Someone came to deliver a package to my place. I live in downtown Montreal, a major urban center, and I ordered something on Amazon. And someone rang the bell. I opened the door and we rented a budget van that was sitting there. I said, why are you ringing my doorbell? And he was delivering for

Amazon. So that tells you how stretched the system has become that, you know, places like Amazon and other places are hiring right, left, and center. I think if you have a driver's license, you can get one of those jobs these days to last you till the new year. So I think increasingly the system with that strike is being stretched to the limit. And I'm not even mentioning charities that are taking a hit because of this, because they got a lot of their fundraising done via the postal service. And this is the prime season. It's like telling

a restaurant, we can't deliver whatever you need until January 15, which is basically a recipe for saying you're going to be on, you know, in huge financial trouble. Well, that is true of charities, too. So there are increasingly, I think, there will be outside pressure on the government to act on this. All right. Quickly on one of the other national institutions of the country, or Canada. They're going to charge now for carry-on baggage for a certain class of tickets in their attempt to try and raise a little more revenue. Carry-on bags. So you carry, say, a purse or a laptop, but you can't take a carry-on bag out of the plane unless you pay for it.

Bruce? carry-on bag onto the plane unless you pay for it. Bruce. Air Canada is kind of a disaster at communication and has been for a very long time. If what they wanted to do was to say, we're going to offer a new super low price ticket, it will come with this requirement, people would have had a different answer. They would have said, oh, yeah, I hear that's happening in other airlines. Right. But Air Canada doesn't like the idea of offering a super low ticket price.

So instead, all it seemed like is that they were taking away something that people have a reasonable right to expect, given the prices that Air Canada and, you know, let's be honest, we have competition here, but we don't have enough. And so we don't have those prices that people in parts of the United States have, or certainly in Europe. And unless we have that expecting consumers to go along with it, because JetBlue or Ryanair or, you know, fill in the fly B or whatever. They're not around anymore. But those discount airlines, they do get away with it because people pay 50 euros to fly from, you know, Paris to Rome or something like that. That is not what is happening in Canada. And Air Canada was ridiculous to think that they could get away with this without attracting performative politics,

but useful politics, because this was a terrible decision as far as I can tell. Chantal, you've got one minute on that one. Okay, and the timing. Did they think they would find any friends on Parliament Hill? They seem to have blindsided the Transport Minister on top of that. And it came across, I read that, like everyone who travels, and I thought it comes across like we're going to punish you for giving us a lot of money for flying in this country,

and we're going to give you a seat, and it's going to be a middle seat, and you can just take it or give us more money. Air Canada goes out of its way, I suspect, to make Canadians unhappy with it. give us more money. Air Canada goes out of its way, I suspect, to make Canadians unhappy with it. You call it a national institution. I'm not so sure that it's still very much that. No, and I use that carefully.

I mean, both the post office and Air Canada and the CN, et cetera, used to be great national institutions, or at least regarded that way. I'm not so sure anymore. Actually, we actually do have a moment left. How did people feel about that puff piece in the New York Times the other day about the foreign affairs ministry? Well, I've gone there. Wrong timing. Bad idea.

Why is it a bad idea? Well, it's not great to have someone who looks like, you know, I'm putting her name on the list to replace Justin Trudeau. But the worst part is it comes at a time when Madame Jolie is under attack and has had sc reviews for her performance at something called the Halifax Security Forum, which is a place where you go by invitation only to talk about defense, international politics. It's very high profile. Journalists are invited. Three of them over there wrote skating columns. Two of them suggested she should be fired from cabinet immediately. But the thing is, without the New York Times article, most of us wouldn't have gone

back to these columns about the Halifax Security Forum. So in a way, it drew attention to some fairly, and there is, for those who are curious, it is available online, the panel that drew all these comments about how Madame Jolie needed to be reassigned. With the shuffle coming, I think she looks like she's in a fight to keep her job. Bruce, you got a minute? Oh, I thought we were out of time. Are we out of time? We're almost out of time, but we do have a minute i thought we were out of time are we out of time we're almost out of time but we do have a minute for you and yeah look i think that you when you if you're in cabinet and

you agree to do a piece like that it is a very deliberate choice the fact that it was done in a period of time when you know a fair number of people, myself included, expected that Justin Trudeau would leave. So I don't really fault her for agreeing to have a piece like that done by the New York Times. Any other politician in that situation who is interested in the job, and I think that she has been, you know, I think that they would have loved to have that kind of coverage. How does it look now in the context of Justin Trudeau having said, stand down everybody I'm staying, it doesn't look as good.

And, and I get that. And I, you know, I hear what Chantel is saying about the, the kind of conversation that's been had lately about her policy acumen and and uh the way that she communicates this about some of these issues uh that are they're really troubling in the world right now it's a real it is a problem i think she's she's facing some real headwinds as well all right we're gonna have to leave it there. Interesting conversation today. Lots on the table.

And thank you both to Bruce and Chantel for their contributions to the chatter that we had today. The normal Friday reminder about the buzz available in your inbox at 7 a.m. tomorrow. Go to nationalnewswatch.com slash newsletter to subscribe. No charge. Just Go to nationalnewswatch.com slash newsletter to subscribe. No charge. Just have to give us your email. That's out tomorrow morning. All right. I'm Peter Mansbridge.

Thanks so much for listening this week. We'll see you again all next week and, of course, next Friday on Good Talk.