The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Good Talk - What Does The Trump Indictment Say About America?

Episode Date: March 31, 2023

Lots to talk about today ...we lead with the story that's the lead almost everywhere in the world this weekend -- the Trump indictment.  But then the mess around the RCMP, the mess around Danielle Smith, and finally the NDP in a post-budget world. Chantal and Bruce continue their trash the host talk!

Are you ready for good talk? And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. Chantal is in Montreal, Bruce is in Ottawa. I'm in Scotland and where I was reading the papers today, and one story dominates a lot of the papers literally around the world. But here in the UK, there's another story that's got a bit of a headline. And it's the first kind of first day on the job of the new first minister, as they call him here in Scotland. Hamza Yousaf, who takes over from Nicola Sturgeon. And the headline in The Spectator, now The Spectator is not a big fan of the Scottish First Minister or his party,

but the headline is, Yusuf does his best Justin Trudeau in a public spectacle of embarrassing smarm. Here's a couple of lines here. I love this because, you know, it's rare that a Canadian politician gets any play outside of their own country. And I guess the two that have got the most play over the last 50 years have been the two Trudeaus. Here's this one. The first minister, that's Yusuf, started as he meant to go on with an empty platitude,

acting as a kind of Caledonian Justin Trudeau. He professed his delight at appointing the cabinet with the most number of women in it in the history of devolution, featuring a number of members under the age of 40. Then he burst forth on an ooze of meaningless smarm that the Canadian parliament could only dream of. Buzz phrases like unlocking green potential and a well-being economy, whatever that means. Yusuf might as well have promised a marshmallow economy, a bollard economy, or a Loch Ness Monster economy. So there you go. We're not forgotten.

There we are out there. Thanks to Justin Trudeau making a name for us around the world. And I can see both of you are fascinated by that, so I'll keep moving here. Well, I think the Prime minister of Scotland will be lucky if, like Justin Trudeau, he gets reelected to a second and a third term, which sounds a bit dicey. But otherwise, it does say something. And I say that as someone who watched the first cabinets wearing in of Justin Trudeau in a coffee shop in London, in the UK, where other people who were having coffee next to me came and looked at my iPad because they were so enthralled with the notion of parity

around the cabinet table. Maybe Joe Biden should visit Scotland and have a talk with people who do not like parity cabinets, since he also has one. Do you want to say anything there, Bruce, on this? Well, my thought went directly to the same point that Chantal made, is that there is a segment of society that has a problem or gets frustrated with the idea of gender parity. But for the size of that segment, there is a larger segment, in my view, that feels like it's a better way to approach achieving a more equal society. So whoever this writer is, obviously they are on one side of the question, but I think there are lots of other people who read gender parity differently.

And by the way, the segment of society that tends to dislike gender parity is usually the same segment that never objected to regional representation within cabinet and never believed we should make people who represent regions and often are in cabinet just because they do pass a competence test. The idea that this was a meritocracy before people thought of making it gender balanced was totally wrong. That's totally wrong. It was always a confection of regional considerations and other considerations. So I don't have any patience for that argument either.

Look at Stephen Harper's last cabinet, by the way, had almost every, I think, all but one of the Quebec MPs who were elected in his last campaign in 2011 in cabinet. Now, given a larger choice, I suspect Mr. Harper might have left more than one on the back bench. I know you probably want to move off this, Peter, but you don't. It's your fault. We got the engines going. I just want to hear one of these people say, you know, men had the run of everything forever and didn't everything turn out fine. Now, if somebody wants to make that case and make the case that it was that everything is fine and that

men are responsible for that because they ran everything forever, I'd like to hear the case because I think a counter case could be made. But I don't hear anybody saying that. I think I hear them just kind of whining a little bit. Okay. Well, I think you two read into it differently than I did. First of all, it was written by a woman, Madeline Grant. She's what they call at the Telegraph a parliamentary sketch writer. I've never heard that term, but the sketch she wrote was that. And what I read into that paragraph

or couple of sentences was her comparing the Trudeau style and the Yusuf style on the first day. The vendor thing is the hook, though. Well of style on the first day. And, you know. The vendor thing is the hook, though. Well, that was the first of a half a dozen different things, you know,

from gender balance to the way the economy was running. But nevertheless. But the only solid fact she brought to that paragraph was gender parity. Everything else is kind of a color judgment. I think that on a good day, Mr. Trudeau would give any leader in the world a run for his or her money for platitudes. when he testified at the Rouleau Commission, for instance, where he seems to reconnect with facts and smart answers. But her only point in that paragraph was gender parity. That's the hook to link the two, because otherwise platitudes, do you know any political leader who did not utter them?

Of all of those you covered, they were all really in the paddock. I am going to be sorry I ever brought this up. But she did talk about the green economy. She did talk about the well-being. Also important. Also important. Yeah. If that makes you someone weak to talk about the green economy, I think a majority of Canadian voters vote for people who actually talk about it.

I don't know whether she was saying anybody was weak. I think she was making a play on the style of this guy copying justin trudeau and you know well that doesn't have to be a negative or a positive it just happens to be what she thought what she took oh i don't know change the name in there change the name in that paragraph to peter mansbridge and tell me that it doesn't have to be negative or positive what's being said, I go back to my initial argument. The person she describes, re-elected twice, and any person who gets three terms as a prime minister anywhere is more than an empty shell.

And that goes for whoever or whatever party they lead, conservative, New Democrat, liberal. So Justin Trudeau has nothing to prove to the sketch writer in Scotland. I'm not sure she was asking for him to prove anything. Anyway, moving on. I'm glad you guys are in a good mood. Let's hear you now defend Donald Trump. Wait, wait, wait, wait.

Final point. What she was doing was going for the easy hit in the same way that people go for the easy hit when they say Pierre Poitier is the new Donald Trump. Or used to say about Premier Ford, it's called going for a cheap but easy hit. Well, you better be careful because you're going to be offside with Bruce now. He loves to do that. Chantel said a lot of important things and I have nothing to add. He doesn't want to get into that. I knew he was going to

walk away from that one. Okay, well, we'll set that one aside. Let's see how we do on this one. Trump's indicted. That's the main headline around the world, right right it's all over the place and as it should be that it's history no no former u.s president has ever been indicted it's not like other leaders in other countries haven't been indicted and not just third world countries uh there have been uh you know issues in other countries with with former leaders on

various subjects nevertheless donald, after much consideration, a grand jury has recommended indictments on him, on the porn star, Hush Money, whatever, in New York. Now, I don't want to get into the particulars about the case. I do, though, I'd like to hear from each of you for a moment on what this says about the times our closest neighbor is going through. Because we seem to have this argument that's developed overnight very much between the kind of the rule of law and the rule of celebrity. The Democrats are talking about the rule of law.

The Republicans seem to be talking about the rule of celebrity in Trump. And he somehow managed to get all the people who were running against him for the nomination out in favor of him today, defending him, which is quite an achievement when you consider the situation. But nevertheless, forget about all that. What does it say about our neighbor and the times that the U.S. is going through right now? And Bruce, why don't you start us on this round?

Well, I think for all of the time that Donald Trump was president and since then, he's done so many things that have broken the sense of norms and potentially the laws as well. And for all of that period of time, America seems to have found itself in a situation where a very large number of people believe that the application of the law to him, either as a sitting president or after his time in office, is a question of what does it feel like? Does it feel like something we should do or something that we want to do? And I found that to be really revealing and distressing watching our neighbor that so many people, even now, and we don't know what the charges are. We know that there's more than 30. And now maybe they're all related to the payment of this present hush money. But there's a lot of people weighing in who you wouldn't expect to question the application of the law unless they have a strong legal argument that they've kind of built or consumed or worked

out with lawyers. But I don't hear that. I just hear people say, well, it's a rinky dink charge, or it's not the most important bad thing that he's done. And I have a feeling that if I did something that violated the law or any of us did, and we lived down there, there wouldn't be a whole bunch of people saying, well, you know what? I like him, I like his style, I like his swagger, I like the porn stars or whatever. There wouldn't be that qualification of whether the law should apply, and there shouldn't be in his case, at least until somebody wants to come forward with an argument that's rooted in some sort of law that exists on the books, or even legal precedent that is compelling, that says, if he broke the law, and prosecutors have spent months looking into it, and they determined that he broke the law,

now that's not the final word on it. The judge or the jury is the final word on it. But I don't think it's really up to pundits or pollsters or journalists or partisans to say, well, sure, there's the law, but there's my feelings about how the law should be applied. And I think that's the quandary that America looks like it's in right now. Chantal? Three things. It is something pundits can do to ask themselves whether this will actually help rather than hinder Donald Trump's return to the presidency. I think the jury isn't totally out on this. At this juncture, the majority seem to lean towards the, this will help Donald Trump and not hurt. The fact that all his prospective rivals for the nomination have fallen in line behind him says something about what has happened to the Republican base and where it is at, that there is a sense, even a decade ago, I think some of those, among the more serious

aspirants to the nomination, would have known that there were enough Republican voters in the base to say, we don't want all this legal mess, trouble, and we want a party that runs clean and free on issues against an aging Democrat president. That's not what's happening now. And it speaks to a dramatic change in the base of the Republican Party. Seen from here, the combination of the two is a matter of reflection for two reasons. One, if it helps Donald Trump, that's the obvious reason. Then it increases the odds that in a year and a half, two years, we will again find ourselves with a Trump White House to deal with. And that's a prospect no one in this country is looking forward

to. Second, among those who should not be looking forward to that, at the top of the list is not Justin Trudeau, but Pierre Poitier, because the more likely a return of Donald Trump, the more Canadian voters are going to look for someone who is as far away from him as possible. That would not be Pierre Poitier, and no, I did not just call Pierre Poiliev a Canadian Donald Trump. But I will note from anecdotal evidence from people who actually are in the conservative movement in this country, and some of them in caucus, that a similar transformation has been ongoing with the conservative base in this country. And there is no room for complacency here, either for the conservatives who want to run government in the future

or for Canadian voters contemplating this morphing of the conservative base into something that is closer to the Trump elements of the Republican Party. Why should it be a concern for a liberal voter or a New Democrat voter who can just say, this is great? Because like the US, we need a serious, solid alternative government to the one that we have at this point. And as those options vanish because a base elects leaders and leaders reflect the base, they have to, it makes the opposing party, the Democrats in the U.S. or the liberals, it makes them weaker to not be challenged on governance grounds. And that is what's happening in the U.S., and that is what stands to happen here, unless good, solid conservatives wake up and say, this is our party, and we want it to reflect mainstream conservatism

and not the extreme elements that are tearing apart the Republican Party and the United States. Yeah. Okay. I just wanted those kind of opening statements on that because, you know, we're trying to deal with Canadian issues on Good Talk, and we do, but it's hard to pass up on having a few comments on that one. I'll only say that of all the things I've watched in the last 24 hours on this indictment,

the most pathetic was watching Lindsey Graham, who used to actually be a senator that you occasionally wanted to listen to. But there he was last night, eyes bloodshot. That could be for any number of reasons. Maybe he was crying. He was so emotional about it all. But he was begging.

He was literally begging people to send money last night to Donald Trump to help him defend himself. Now, this is send money to the self-proclaimed billionaire, multi-billionaire, he claims. Send money. You get a free T-shirt. But he needs your help. He needs your help to fight these outrageous charges. Yeah, it's an expensive T-shirt.

The other thing that I know you want to move on, but the other thing that should feel more shocking than it is, is that to Chantal's point about the corruption of the Republican Party by those elements. And I don't mean corruption in a legal sense, but the erosion really of that kind of sense of the fiber of the Republican Party that we were used to, is that Ron DeSantis, who's the putative alternative to Trump, if the Republicans were to choose the next most popular candidate, his contribution to yesterday's news was to say, I don't think I would extradite him to New York, which technically I don't think he does have the power to do, but he certainly has the power to rag the puck for a long period of time. But it would be one of those things that would mark another step down in the functioning of the democracy according to the principles that people like us and others around the world would have thought

was in place and unquestionable to some degree in the United States. So it's a discouraging day to watch what's happening there. As far as DeSantis goes, he has no grounds to be able to insert himself into a debate over extradition. That's totally against the Constitution. One state can extradite from another state, and that just is the way it is. But further evidence of DeSantis showing ignorance of certain ways the federal law works in the United States, just surprising for a guy who claims it.

Or just trying to fish for those Trump voters. Well, maybe, but I don't know. I'm continually not impressed by him. I thought I was going to be, but I'm not. Nevertheless, moving on. We're going to take a quick break, and then we're going to come back, and we're going to talk about the RCMP for a moment. That's right after this.

And welcome back. Peter Mansbridge here with Chantelle Hebert and Bruce Anderson. You're listening to Good Talk on Sirius XM, Channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform, or you're watching us on our YouTube channel, whatever platform you use. We're glad you're with us. RCMP.

The spring of 2020 was an awful moment for the spring of 2020 was an awful moment for the people of Nova Scotia in rural Nova Scotia and it turns out it was a pretty brutal moment for the RCMP as well and the report that came down yesterday is evidence of that not one of the three of us are experts on that particular incident, but we have been covering or talking about the RCMP for most of our lives.

And I would say certainly for the last 20, 25 years, there has been this constant concern about the Mounties, that there's something rotten inside the way the Mounties operate. You can go back, I suppose, further back into the, you know, the FLQ days and the barn burnings in Quebec and all of that. But in terms of the leadership of the RCMP and the kind of the way they all kind of look after each other or don't like outsiders coming in to tell them what they do, that's been a hallmark of this organization for decades.

And in spite of governments and new commissioners saying, we're going to clean this up, it hasn't happened. And this is clearly the most brutal evidence of that happening and the way this story unfolded in Nova Scotia, brutal in the sense of so many people dying. What, you know, are they ever going to be able to clean up the RCMP? Is this just something that we're going to have to live with, that there is something rotten inside the National Police Force?

Chantal. Chantal. The first answer is I don't know. And I don't know how. See, when we've dealt with issues that were not necessarily those issues, but with an organization that you needed to take down and start from scratch. Take the regiment that was involved in Somalia, for instance,

that you disband. That's one thing. And then you rebuild. But you cannot just disband the RCMP and say, we're going to rebuild the force. That is not how it works. The RCMP provides an essential service across the country. In many provinces, it is also in charge of policing.

But also, it exists for a reason. So you are left, if you're the government, you're left with very few options, and none of them promise success. The first obvious one is, I think we discovered yesterday why Commissioner Brenda Luckey decided to retire a few weeks ago. If she had not, the opposition rightly would have called for her head and she would have had either to resign in disgrace or be fired immediately on the spot by Minister Mendicino. So the job is open. What you also saw yesterday in the shape of an astounding news conference from the interim commissioner was basically a body language that said, I'm not going to use the language

I would use if we were in private, but basically he said, nothing to see here. And we'll look at this report whenever we have time. This is an interim commissioner who has handed the executive summary at some point before the news conference that he gave. And his reaction was to say, well, I haven't gotten around to reading it, which I don't think is an accident. I think that's the message. So the current team in place clearly is not up to the job. So the government has the opportunity to appoint someone and hand that person a big broom. But it's going to be impossible to do that if the infrastructure under that person

is not willing to participate in the exercise. And that news conference yesterday sent the message that you can send whoever you want, but we are not into this broom cleaning exercise. The commission talks about an independent review, possibly, but that would take time, take us beyond the next election. I'm not sure that we would not be back to where we are today at the end of that exercise. So I see people saying, well, you know, a minister, the minister should, or whoever the minister is, this one isn't strong enough.

We need a stronger minister. I'll just remind people that you can appoint whoever you want, but a minister is not going to change the RCMP culture. That's way, way outside of the purview of a political appointee. So I'm curious to see where the government will go with this. I'm not sure there is even a consensus at the cabinet table that something needs to be fixed, which would explain the reluctance of both Nova Scotia and the federal government to initially even call a commission of inquiry to look into what happened on that day. Bruce. Commission of Inquiry to look into what happened on that day. Bruce? Yesterday's press conference by the RCMP Interim Commissioner was nothing short of disgraceful.

I think it was a betrayal of the good faith that Canadians believe that they should be able to put in the National Police Force. I think the idea that we're supposed to believe as observers that the RCMP had that report for 30 hours, I don't think anybody can test that, and that he showed up at that press conference without having consumed the recommendations of the report, which is basically what he said, that we're supposed to believe that as a statement of fact is treating everybody as though we're complete fools, completely gullible, and that there's no accountability or there will

be no accountability on his watch. So in a way, he gave the government at least one useful thing, which is a signal that if they want to deal with the problems that they see in the RCMP, he's not the person who's going to fix them. And probably what's more is that at the senior level, any combination of circumstances and internal discussions that would allow him to show up at that press conference and believe that it was acceptable to say, I don't know what the recommendations are. All of the people involved in that conversation either had to be gnashing their teeth and pulling out their hair at the stupidity of that idea or be part of it. But I've worked

with so many organizations over the years, and it's inconceivable to me that he would have shown up at that meeting without having spent hours in discussions internally about what is it that we're going to say? What is it that we're not going to say? What are we going to acknowledge that we've learned from this episode or exercise? What is it in the report that we're going to reject out of hand or accept completely? It's impossible that that didn't happen. And so he found language to make it sound as though they just hadn't gotten around to it yet. And I found that insulting to kids and a revelation that, as they say, allows the government a freer hand if it wants to, to sort of look at the senior ranks and say, well, yesterday you kind of proved the point that there's something wrong in the leadership culture. If this is the way that you would respond to such a devastating report. All right. Let me make two points. One, this is the second commissioner or interim commissioner in a row who sat in a room, either at a news conference or in a hearing, an inquiry, basically saying, I got nothing to say. It was Brenda Luckey who sat there, right, and said, I didn't say anything. And if I had, I would have said, you know, you should use these powers.

But I didn't say anything because I didn't think it was appropriate for me to talk. This is the commissioner of the RCMP on a national security matter. But here's my take on yesterday and the interim commissioner's lack of knowledge of uh the the report that had been handed to him the day before and here i i guess i did i i think i understand what chantal was saying in terms of a minister can't do anything about the culture inside the cbc it's got to happen inside the RCMP. Also true, by the way. Yeah, the CBC one will deal with it another time.

But in terms of the RCMP, you know, I wonder about that. And I wonder whether, you know, as Bruce said, they'll take a signal from what what they saw yesterday but why didn't they take the signal like now why isn't that guy taken out of his job like today or yesterday i mean it was as bruce said disgraceful what happened there yesterday that his uh his claim that he hadn't read it, basically, after having it for 24 hours or whatever number of hours. It just seems to me that accountability stretches beyond just the interim commissioner of the RCMP. It stretches into the political space as well.

They can fire the commissioner. They could have fired him yesterday or this morning, and maybe they will. I don't know. It's only 7.30 as we're talking now. We do pre-tape, right? So a poor minister hasn't had a chance to wake up and find whoever he was. But he was around last night. You know, like, I mean, it's not like he wasn't aware of what happened. But, you know, aside from the particular points on this latest example,

is there not ministerial accountability to some degree in trying to make this happen? I mean, you know, in changing the culture. Now, I don't know what's happened in the armed forces yet, but there is a feeling that it's in a much better shape than it was a year ago um on the issue of uh you know of culture internally but it's going to take a while before we really know that but if it is some of that credit probably goes to the minister the new minister of defense who was put in there to clean the place up anita anand um she's sort of the trouble minister. She dealt with the vaccine issue to the point where it wasn't in the report this week, said that we were the best in the world

in dealing with vaccines. But you'll know if she suddenly moved into public safety spot why that's happening. But talk to me about accountability before we move on to the next topic. And should there not be some, I understand the separation on something like this between the RCMP and the government, but at some point, surely the accountability stretches beyond the RCMP top levels and goes into

the political space. I don't think so. It does. But you talk about the armed forces and the minister. It took forever for Arjen Sajjan to be replaced. It didn't happen one morning. And the same goes with the top levels of national defense and the commander of the armed forces. I try to apply to politics the same rules I apply to journalism,

and that is getting it right is more important than getting it quickly. And I'm not sure I understand the gesture you fire or the guy who gave the news conference before the sun sets on a new day. But me, I'm patient enough to think that I will hold the government and the minister accountable if no action comes within weeks, but not hours. And one of those, I know that the government knows that it has to decide who will be leading the force going forward. I think it's clear who will not from what we saw yesterday.

But you only get one shot and one chance to get it right when you appoint that next commissioner. so sure that taking down the interim one, replacing him with some other interim one who probably is part of the same team is the action I'm looking to. Yeah, especially if you stay within the force. You know, you can't go outside the force. They have tried that. Didn't Harper try that? It didn't quite work out well. But sorry, Bruce, go ahead. Yeah, I think that, but I think we're talking about the right point here, which is that this is not, obviously what we saw yesterday, both revealed in the report and in the conduct of the interim commissioner, was further evidence that there's a systemic problem of accountability. And so how are you going to deal that is not a question to be dealt with in the heat of the moment with the Twitter fingers at the ready. Yes, there does need to be a statement

that shows there's empathy for those who are feeling outraged by the report and by the conduct of the interim commissioner. But that's not the same as saying, and so within a very short number of hours, we figured out how to solve this systemic problem that you yourself, Peter, has said has existed for decades. And I agree with you on that point. So the question of how to solve it is the right one. And the only answer that we should be cheering for is good governance. What does it take in terms of thinking through the alternatives that will create the kind of catalytic change that needs to happen? And that isn't going to happen in 12 hours. I completely agree with Chantal about that. Okay. Well, we'll leave it at that then.

I don't know. Sometimes I think you, you know, acting with some immediacy is a good thing. But I, you know, I appreciate your arguments as well. We'll see how it plays out. They're not going to be, Bruce and I did not make the argument that's going to be popular on social media, where down with their heads, off with their heads is the default position. But I saw others around interim commissioner, and I'm not thinking that the government will suddenly be waiting in the leadership of the RCMP to find the perfect fit.

And for how long is the other question. Look, if I were the minister, I would call in the senior level and talk about the, the questions that naturally arise with the way that they handled this yesterday. And I would explore for, did everybody see this the same way? Did everybody think that it made sense to address the public and say, I haven't had a chance to look at these recommendations and to have that kind of sense of shrugging all of this off? So I'm not saying do nothing and just sit and contemplate.

And I don't think Chantal is either. I think that though, if you just decide that there's one person out there who by sheer force of personality and skills or experience is going to be the solution to this, how deep the change should be created, basically, and all within the context of how much the government, the elected officials should intervene in the management of the force. All right. We're going to leave that one where it is for now. I'm sure we're going to be returning to it because it would seem, the one area I agree with both of you on, there's no point in,

if you're going to pull the trigger, so to speak, on the dismissal of one, you better know where you're going after that. And I don't imagine they've been able to make up their minds on that in the last dozen hours or so. So we'll see where it goes. Okay, we actually have a couple more things to talk about and a little time to do them in. So we'll come back and talk about Alberta and Danielle Smith right after this.

And welcome back. We're into the final segment of Good Talk for this week. Chantel and Bruce are with me. This Danielle Smith story about whether or not she interfered in the judicial process in Alberta over the charges against at least one person involved in the convoy protests at Cootes, Alberta, has blown up again in the last couple of days. And it's blown up as a result of a video that surfaced where clearly Danielle Smith is talking to one of those being charged. This person wanted to have the charges dropped against him, and she sounded very sympathetic to his argument. You know, lines in the conversation like, you know, leave it with me, and I've been

trying. I've been talking to prosecutors every week. It's pretty damning stuff. And she's getting hammered on it in Alberta, not just by the opposition, but by some pretty well-respected columnists and commentators as well. What is, you know, one of the issues for Danielle Smith has always been,

and this predates her time as Premier, is about her judgment at certain times. And this raises that question again. On the edge of an election campaign, what, it starts in a couple of weeks in Alberta. Is that her, is judgment her Achilles heel? Chantal. Well, I hesitate between judgment and abysmal ignorance of how things work in the country where she has been a journalist, a political leader,

and now the premier of a province. It boggles the mind to hear someone who is a premier tell someone that she didn't know, that she didn't have the power to pardon offenses. It never struck her that she didn't know anyone anywhere who had been pardoned by any leader of a government in this country and that maybe it wasn't because we are not a forgiving people but because that power is simply not a power that exists in Canada. So that is kind of a stunning admission of ignorance. Then she goes on in that same conversation to agree with the person who is charged with offenses that the charges are politically driven. In clear, she is basically saying the government I am a part in, because it is the same government, Jason Kenney's government, used the justice system for political end to persecute people. Well, a lot of the members of her cabinet are from this government that would have stepped all over a fairly sacred line

between the justice system and politics. So what is she saying about the people around her who now are going to be asking for a term to do what? And she doesn't say I'm going to end political interference in the justice system by all the people around me who were waylaid into this behavior by Jason B. And I'm taking a part in it. I'm calling the people who administer justice repeatedly, almost every week, to tell them to do something about these charges. In clear, she has now become the interferer-in-chief of a politicized justice system. is that she does not even grasp what's wrong with all that. And that this episode is going to be a vignette for other things that will lead the national conversation in places where time will be wasted on, frankly, stupidity. Like, if you elect me premier, i will get rid of the equalization system maybe uh it should become a requirement to become a premier in this country that you take politics 101 the one they teach in high school not the one they teach in university bruce i was worried that

chantal was going to stop at the polite term adherence and that i was going to stop at the polite term ignorance and that I was going to have to introduce the less polite term stupidity into the conversation. But she didn't. And so thank you, Chantal. But let me associate myself with that thought. Peter, I think your question of judgment is the, if we rank these terms by politeness, they're all on a string. She's shown incredibly poor judgment on a range of issues consistently over time, only marginal evidence that when she bumps into something because of poor judgment that she learns from it. There's been a little bit of that evidence, but very, very, very much at the margins. And I imagine that her political staff and some of the people in her caucus and

cabinet are really not happy with the situation that they find themselves in with repeated errors of this sort. So judgment is a question. Ignorance is its sibling and a very important question. And there's no doubt that it was stupid for her to say the things that she said, to have the conversations that she had, and then to imagine that she could defend herself aggressively against the criticisms of those, which is something that she did when she knew that the story was coming out. She tried to get out in front of it and say, how could all of you people think that I've done something wrong? It was ludicrous as a piece of political strategy. Maybe ludicrous is also a polite word for a stupid political strategy. But, you know, Chantal made the point earlier in today's podcast

that we need to be careful about whether or not we see something similar developing in Canada that we see in the United States, which would be people kind of looking at that behavior and saying, oh, well, you know, she believes strongly in the idea that there shouldn't be an overreach of the state. And that's important, too. Or finding some ways to kind of equivocate around her involvement in this conversation that excuse it somehow. There's no good excuse for it. It was incredibly bad judgment. And it also, the last point I'll make is,

there's a truthfulness question here. I mean, she said in the legislature that she did not involve herself in conversations that crossed the line. Well, in this recorded conversation, she said she did. So what are we to believe? That she was lying to the guy that she was talking to, or that she was lying to the legislature? But she was not telling the same story to both, and reason people could come to the conclusion that one of them was a lie. One of the things that I took from this, as Chantel pointed out,

she left the impression in her conversation with this guy that she didn't realize you couldn't pardon in Canada. I mean, it's mind-boggling that she said that. But nevertheless, that is what she said. And as Chantel quite rightly points out, there are no pardons in Canada at that level coming from a political leader in the States. Obviously, there are.

And we watch a lot of that happening, whether it's the President of the United States with his annual or her annual pardon list or a state governor with his or her annual pardon list. That happens. It reminded me of something else that a lot of Canadians are actually ignorant of. And it's because we watch so much American TV and we're governed by American culture in certain things.

And in courtrooms in the United States, they use gavels. The judge sits there with a gavel. Most courtrooms in Canada, that doesn't happen, if not all courtrooms. Judges don't hold gavels. They don't smack the table. Now, that's a pretty innocent way to make a difference. But pardons, really? I don't know.

So you've just made an argument for allowing more cameras in Canadian courtrooms so that civic education will be advanced. Well, that would help. Yes, because as you know, we don't and they do. That's right. you know, within the early 90s, people watched from all around the world, you know, Judge Ito on the O.J. Simpson trial, and based a lot of their knowledge of courtrooms activities on that. But I was thinking, you know, movies as well, you know, and all that, and television programs, that type of culture. I've watched my share of Law and Order, so, you know,

I can relate to what you're saying. Okay, I've got a share of Law & Order, so I can relate to what you're saying. Okay, I've got a couple of minutes left, and I know that Chantelle especially wanted to have a couple of comments about the budget from earlier this week, and the main one being about the NDP. Bruce and I had this out on Wednesday, and had this discussion on Wednesday about who really wrote the budget. Was it Krista Freeland or Jagmeet Singh?

But you wanted to weigh in on that score as well, Chantal. So where do you go? Because I think beyond the – we've always talked about this NDP-Liberal agreement as something that helps the NDP avoid an election, gives it a bit of a voice in the House of Commons, and in return, the liberals get to also avoid an election and get some stability out of it. But I think the importance of what happened to dental care and the budget politically needs to be stressed. People who looked at the budget noticed that suddenly we were, or the government was putting more money up front, moving this closer to completion than anyone

really expected. And the conclusion politically was to say, well, the liberals were in a weak position and the NDP drove a hard bargain. But if you believe arrangements like that may be the way of the future in a country where the default government increasingly is a minority government, this particular piece of the budget is strategically really important. Because what does it do? It allows Jok Mee Ts Singh to have something real to show for his agreement, something beyond the parliament lasted longer and we managed to change a few lines in a bill on climate change. This is real. It's also not something that the liberals had yet put in a platform like Pharmacare and could say, well, you know, we would have done it without the NDP. The NDP owns that piece. And it's interesting to watch, you know, Mr. Singh go from a victory lap on budget day to now a victory tour about the budget. But it does send people

who vote NDP a rather powerful message that although they don't win election and they likely will not win the next election based on any of that, cooperation between parties in the House of Commons, the government and an opposition party, can lead to progress on issues that matter to you. I'm not casting a judgment on whether it's relevant to have dental care now, but I did note that the leader of the official opposition, Mr. Poitier, would not be pinned down on whether he would take it away if he became prime minister. And the reason for that is because of this advanced timeline, it will be real enough to enough voters that probably you do not want to be campaigning if you're a conservative saying, you know, those dental care, the more affordable dental care you're getting.

If you elect me, I'm going to take it away. I look at all that and I look at the evolution towards minority governments and the satisfaction that many NDP MPs have gotten from being at the table rather, but at some point of a federal coalition government, more natural than it would have been without this parliament and the way that it has evolved. I just want to throw that in because I think it's an interesting development. We're not paying enough attention to how what it could mean, what that precedent could lead to at some point. Okay. Bruce, you had your shot on this the other day, but I'll give you 30 seconds. The short version for me is I raised the question, I guess, about coalition governments the other day. So I kind of agree with Chantal that we need to kind of imagine that that's something that could happen. I think the other thing, though, that I'm interested in right now is that we have all three major parties essentially pitching for what we would have euphemistically called blue-collar

votes now. The Liberals had been positioned as the party that pitched to the middle class, and I think that lexicon probably doesn't work that well anymore. It just doesn't feel like an economy that has that sense of you're in the middle class as opposed to you're dealing with some economic challenges. The NDP obviously pitched

that so-called blue collar vote, but the conservatives, their message under Pierre Pauliev is increasingly targeted towards people who feel that they've been left behind economically. And that's a different scenario than we've seen in the past. Got to leave it at that. Thank you both, Chantelle, Bruce. Have a great weekend. We'll talk to you again next week. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks so much for listening.

Talk to you again on Monday.