The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Good Talk -- What Happens Now? - Encore

Episode Date: December 27, 2024

An encore of can a  pre-Christmas cabinet shuffle save the government or is it just another delay to the inevitable?

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. Time for your holiday edition encore episode of The Bridge. And for this, we go back just one week to last Friday's Good Talk, worth listening to again. And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here, along with Chantelle Hebert and Bruce Anderson. Another exciting day in the nation's capital. And we're trying to make some sense of all of this. Let me start this way. I'll be careful how I say this, as Bruce pounced on me last week. But like many Canadians, I begin my day scanning the papers, and the Globe and Mail

is often one of those. And I've noticed in the last while on this story that the Globe is, you know, the rules used to be, well, rules, the way journalists sort of went about things is if you had at least two sources, you were probably pretty good on the information you were about to move forward. If it was really important stuff and really challenging stuff, you'd go to three sources, maybe even four. But lately, the globe has had as many as 10 sources on things. And I'm going, 10 sources? Like, that's a lot of information that's floating around out there. Anyway, they had a piece today which included sourcing on, I don't think it was as many as 10,

might have been as many as six. They had one particular piece of information that I found intriguing. And that was that the Prime Minister's Chief of Staff, who we talked about before, Katie Telford, she's been there since 2015. She's been there all along. She's smart. She's, you know, tough. She has a lot of the attributes that one would want in a chief of staff, but she's also been controversial at times, and there's no doubt about that.

According to the Globe, she's screening those who are trying to get through to the prime minister. If you are one who is considered asking the prime minister to stay, you get through. You get to talk to him on the phone or in person, perhaps. If you're not one of those, you don't get on the phone call. You don't get to talk to him on the phone or in person, perhaps. If you're not one of those, you don't get on the phone call. You don't get to talk to him. And I found that interesting, not surprising necessarily, but interesting at a time when he's supposedly contemplating his future. And one would assume

if you're contemplating your future, you want to hear all sides of how different people feel about this. So what do you think? Is this me or? I have a lot to say about all of. I love this snort. It was like, yeah, stop. Let's go. Just stop.

Listen, I could go. First of all, because I've been spending the week watching people on X and people not in politics saying, how come some liberals still talk to Bob Fife at The Globe with all the terribly nasty stories that he's been writing? Let me tell those people that these days to get liberals to talk to you against or for another liberal is like fishing in a goddamn barrel. It's just too easy. I read the same story you are referring to, and I'm going to get to that, and I could put a name on at least three of the sources because they had told me exactly what I read. On that basis, I'm not going to tell you which sources

I could identify or who those people were, because that is how it works. When someone talks to you off the record, you are right, you can check that information. Obviously, the information about calls being filtered to the prime minister by his chief of staff so that only those who want to convince him to stay, as accurate as it may be, comes from people who are of the opposite persuasion, i.e. that they would want the prime minister to leave. We are in that kind of environment. There is a tug of war for Justin Trudeau's psyche ongoing. But all of that being said, I reread the quote, and I thought, as our prime minister being taken hostage, is he locked up in the Canadian equivalent of the Tower of London, that he cannot pick up a phone and get a variety of views by dialing

the numbers in his Rolodex, that he is at the mercy of his chief of staff, a witch, I guess, who can decide who gets into his head. And I found that incredible. I know Brian Mulroney is not around to talk about this, but I'm sure he'd have a lot to say about how prime ministers have enough free will to call people up. And we all know Jean Chrétien could say that too, having received calls, as you probably have too, from Jean Chrétien, unprompted, because he just wanted to vent about something. So,

when Justin Trudeau comes to a decision, if he decides to stay, it's not going to be because he was brainwashed by his chief of staff into only hearing one side of the question. It will be because he didn't want to hear the other side. Okay, Bruce. Well, there's irony in the idea that we should be shocked that calls are being filtered. And the irony for me is that before the filtering, the calls were just blocked. Like this is not a prime minister who is really open to a lot of outside inputs. His office made it their habit and were proud of the fact that they did not need outside advice. They did not want it. They did not welcome it. They did not allow it to prevail. And that was true whether you're talking about people

in the party or people in the caucus, and in many cases, people in the cabinet who would say, I've been in the cabinet for years and have never had any one-on-one time with the prime minister. I've never had the prime minister reach out to me to say, what do you think about this? Or what do you think about that? Some of the people who've departed the cabinet and written about their experiences have been vivid in describing that sense of, you're not really part of a team, your views aren't welcome. And so, you know, there was a period of time in the life of this government in the very earliest years where the talent around the PM was strong and the talent in the cabinet was new. And so

there was a kind of an imbalance that was built into the experience and the judgment kind of chemistry of the cabinet that led more naturally to central control. But that's not now. Now you've got elected people who are in their constituencies who understand what Canadians are feeling and saying the anxieties they have. The feeling that the government is out of touch, is on the wrong agenda, isn't doing the things that make them feel confident about the future. And they can't tell that story to a prime minister who doesn't want to hear it, surrounded by staff who doesn't want him to hear it. So what is creating is this appearance of a group around the prime minister who like the status quo, who want to defend the status quo, who feel that the status quo is in their self-interest.

And it looks like that to the outside world. And the outside world says the one thing we know we don't want is the status quo. So this is the dilemma right now. And, you know, I was reading in that piece, I think it no doubt in my mind and I've heard from people that there's a lot more of them who feel that way and have just been kind of hesitant to say so and some people say well they lack courage and I think there's some that probably do lack courage some of them are kind of going well let's give them a little bit more grace let's let's let him make the decision that we think he's going to make to step down. But even as they're thinking that, they're worried that the people around him

who want him to stay, who see that as being the best thing for themselves, are going to prevail in that conversation with him. So there's a lot of anxiety in the Liberal ranks today and a lot of tension about what should happen in the next seven to 10 days. Yeah. And my main point was that there is only one person who is the prime minister. He's not a child being kept in the nursery. So if the prime minister is so weak in his capacity to want to get in touch with reality. I'm not going to blame his palace guard. I agree with you. I mean, I have covered a number of prime ministers, as you have,

and no one would ever have said that Jean Chrétien, Brian Mulroney, Stephen Harper were kept out of touch by reality and allowed their staff to do that. But Bruce is right. That has been par for the course over the past almost decade that Justin Trudeau has been prime minister. I, for one, was once asked by someone, and I did what I had to do because it was an easy ask, to find a way to have someone run into the prime minister on a social occasion so that this person who was part of the government in a position of relative authority could get to talk directly to Trudeau about an issue, which is kind of odd because I don't even work on Parliament Hill, but it had reached kind of that level. But that is something that Trudeau is allowed to happen. He has not brought

new people who would push back against the people who have been there since day one, just to have the sparks of conversation. That's not being encouraged. It's basically, you see it my way or you keep forever silent. And I don't think that's made the government or the prime minister better. No, and I would add another thing, which is it has been clear from the reporting that we've read that there have been people close to the prime minister who have told him that he should not stay on, that he cannot win, that it would be damaging to the legacy that it's important to him, for him to try. And what has been the result of people close to him speaking up they're gone and uh i think that's you know to chantal's point he's not a victim in this he's responsible for this he's responsible

for the political management of his government even if he has delegated that to a single person for the entire life of the government at some some point, you're still the boss. You're accountable for the performance of the political operation of your government and the political fortunes of the party that chose you to lead it. And these habits form because people at the top feel comfortable with these habits. And yes, I agree with Chantel. Other prime ministers had different habits, but those were habits that they felt comfortable with

and that they decided were going to be part of how they approached the job. And that has not been Justin Trudeau's habit. And so did it start with him? Did it kind of develop because that's what he wanted? Or did the people around him decide that it was easier to do their jobs and live their lives without a lot of people kind of phoning in ideas and second guessing and all that kind of thing? Probably a combination of both. But he is where he is. And he now needs to understand the country's mood on a personal level. And if

he chooses to stay, he really does need to understand that the only version for him of his politics that might have a chance of success, and I don't think it really does, is one that doesn't sound like the status quo. It sounds focused on the hundreds of thousands of jobs that are in peril in this economic situation with the United States, rather than sounding every day like, who do we blame for the latest visit to the ditch that our government has had? Can we blame Mark Carney? Can we blame Chrystia Freeland? Can we blame fill in the blank? That has been their habit. And that is part of what is fueling some of these stories. It isn't, you know, it isn't just intrepid journalism, not to be unkind to the journalism. Let me let me say this.

You know, if you believe the announcements from the prime minister's office in the last 24 hours, the prime minister himself is not going to say anything on this day, where he's shuffling a bunch of names around in his cabinet. He won't, as has been the case in all the previous cabinet shuffles, he won't be holding a news conference and explaining himself. Because he knows what the questions are going to be. They're not going to be about these, some of these faceless cabinet ministers. They're going to be about his own future. Having said that, there seems to be an increasing feeling around, including by some of his own people, that he's made up his mind,

that in fact, he is going to leave, and early in the new year, like within the next couple of weeks. Are you hearing that at all? Well, as the Globe story accurately reflected, yes, you hear one and the other. Some of the other, as in he's staying, is inspired in part by fear that he will stay. Many people fear that. Others are saying he's only looking for an orderly process or a way to expedite a leadership campaign.

Because there are realities that are very practical in the constitution of the party, that unless there is only one candidate standing there, and there is a contest, the timeframe that the party's constitution seems to suggest is the minimal timeframe is four months, which sounds really, really long in the circumstances. So I understand that there are conversations. I'm not sure that they're initiated at Mr. Trudeau's request, but internal conversations about the succession process. It's kind of a unique situation in the sense that we are not only in the last year of Justin Trudeau's current term, that's happened before, but he leads a minority government. Pierre Trudeau and Brian Mulroney were not in that situation when they resigned close to an election deadline. So that gave at least the government leeway to keep control of the House of Commons. It's hard also to imagine that Parliament would be, it could be, but it's hard to imagine that you could actually prorogue Parliament

until the end of June or until after the G7 in June because you're having a leadership campaign for the job at the top. So those considerations are all there. I think what Bruce was talking about when he talked about the path to staying is a path where Trudeau argues that we need stability because of what is going to be happening in the U.S. on January 20th, i.e. the inauguration of the new administration. And on that basis, that's the

only rationale for his staying. I'm not sure that it's headed in that direction in the sense that the prime minister has not been making that case. He's let all the opportunities this week pass him by. The year-end interviews were all canceled. Today, again this morning, it was confirmed by his office that he will not be taking questions and will disappear from sight. But let's talk about the cabinet we're going to see today, and I don't mean who's going where. If Mr. Trudeau is to announce that he wants the party to select a new leader, but as soon as possible.

And we're going to have a leadership campaign with many contenders. So two ifs. Then some of the top ministers appointed today might be withdrawing from cabinet within weeks to run leadership campaigns. So if you think that the cabinet you see today looks a bit like a caretaker cabinet, with people pulled from every section of the backbench to kind of make something that looks like it's going to get you to the election. Imagine what happens if you take out of that mix people like François-Philippe Champagne, Mélanie Joly, Dominique Leblanc, all people who may have an interest in running.

And then what do you do? So the I'm leaving conversation is more complex than it may look at first glance. And the I'm staying conversation to me is very, very difficult. There are no easy choices here. If he's leaving, though, he doesn't really have to worry about what that next cabinet is going to look like. I mean, he may still be prime minister for a while while they sort out the leadership thing, but he doesn't have to worry about it as much as he has in the past. That would be true if Trump wasn't arriving. That's true. But two things are certain, I guess, up to a point. Donald Trump becomes president in a month,

and there will be a federal election in 2025. Those are certainties. But this isn't the usual context where Canada is doing all kinds of things, big and small, before an election campaign. It's a major challenge, one of the biggest challenges the government will have faced in decades in this country. And that changes the optics on a weaker and ever weaker cabinet, including one that is lost now, it's number two person. I'm surprised that you actually think Donald Trump's going to become officially president

at the end of January. I mean, we all know Elon Musk is the president. I'm not going there. Same. Bruce, your own question about do you think he's made up mind already? No, I don't. But I think that there are really three alternative scenarios. One, an orderly exit. Two is a kind of a strong revitalization. And three is

procrastination, accident, error, self-injury. To me, the one that feels the most plausible right now is the last. And then the next most plausible is a somewhat messy exit. But if I were Trudeau, I would look very coldly at those two options. An orderly exit, what does it look like? And don't give people the opportunity to say, I don't think he's going to leave, even though he says he's reflecting. Because that Charlie Brown and Lucy with the football syndrome kicks in where people go, if I stay silent to give him some grace, and then he just kind of comes back and sort of bounces around in early January and says, I'm feeling great, folks, and let's carry on. Then they'll feel as though they've squandered the opportunity to turn the page as a party, which

they clearly need to do with him or without him in order to have a chance of being competitive in the 2025 election. But also, to Chantal's point, there really are these two anchoring events. In one month, Donald Trump will be sworn in as the next president of the United States. Those, by all accounts, and I've been in meetings all week long about this with the business community, folks that I work with, who are planning their businesses as though these tariffs will be imposed very quickly and will have very material effects on their businesses. And so we know what that means for workers. We know what it probably means for Canadians more generally,

is that the anxiety level is going to go up. And if they don't have a government in place that they feel that they can have confidence in, they're going to be mad, and they should be mad. And that is what should be the focus of Trudeau as he thinks about this. So to meet that test one month from now, it's either an orderly exit and you move on it quickly, or it's a strong revitalization. So your party and your government has a chance to make the case to Canadians and to Americans that this is a government that's in charge, that has a plan, that is doing meaningful things to advance the case of Canada

in this situation. And nothing I've heard about the shuffle that we're going to hear more about today sounds like that. It does not sound like strong the election. If Trudeau decides to stay, to try to persevere, there will be an election sooner, not later in the year. That's been made absolutely clear. As many times as Jagmeet Singh can threaten one and then back away from it, I don't think there's any doubt that that will happen if Trudeau stays and tries to persevere, that there will be an election soon. And, you know, people say, well, things can happen in an election, it's unpredictable and everything else. When you start out 23 points behind and your leader has a minus 43 favorability rating, some things are relatively predictable. And I know people on

Twitter will say, pollsters, how can they tell us what's going to happen in the future? There is some evidence that some of these polls turn out to be accurate. And these ones are profound and consistent. It's not a 10 point gap, it's not 15, it's not 17, it's 20 plus. And a lot of that is him. And a lot of it is the status quo. And he has harmed his situation with a series of mishaps in the last little while. Okay. I know you want in Chantel, but I got to take our first break. I thought you'd say that.

Let's do this break thing. Right back with Chantel right after this. And welcome back. You're listening to Good Talk, the Friday episode. Chantel and Bruce are here. Glad to have you with us. You're listening on Sirius XM, Channel 167. Canada Talks are on your favorite podcast platform, or you are watching us on our YouTube channel,

which has been jumping by the thousands, the tens of thousands in the last couple of weeks. Obviously, this story has had an impact. Today, we'll probably do two YouTube editions, this one, and we'll probably do one a little later, a shorter one, with some emphasis on the actual cabin shuttle. Now, okay, Chantel, well, first of all, I just want to say I was only half joking about

the Elon Musk thing. I don't want to subvert this or move this into a conversation about Musk. But the fact of the matter is he hasn't moved away since November 5th. He's hanging around Trump, and he's having an impact on everything, including this file about Canada, mainly because he can't stand Trudeau, but also he seems to have a grievance on Canada all the time anyway. No, I don't disagree with you, but it's Donald Trump's problem, and the more people call him President Musk, the less that Donald Trump is going to like him. So I'm going to leave these two boys to whatever they get up to for the next and see where Mr. Musk is a year from now, if he continues to sound like he's the actual boss. Such a bad idea in politics when you're not the elected person to kind of say, you know,

I'm the real thing. I want to go back to all week I got these emails from people of a variety, I would think. They were not partisan emails. I couldn't say if these people were conservative, New Democrats or liberals, but they were concerned. And they kept asking the same question. Is it possible for Canada to have a new prime minister in place? They didn't say which leader should be, or to have a new government in place in time for January 20th. So I got thinking about that. And I am saying this in the abstract because no one is talking about this and it would be terrible for the partisan interest probably of the Liberal Party. But yes, there are two ways that we could have a new prime minister or a new government in place for or around January 20th. The first one is very simple. Both involve the governor general. The first one is really simple. You actually call an election. If you're Justin Trudeau, forget about all the time to pick a new leader. Canadians need stability to resolve that is to actually ask Canadians and make your case

versus the other person's case to Canadians and let them decide, as they will this year. We are not talking about a snap election. We are having an election. The only issue is when. So that's one issue. The other proposition will make people who write on Twitter about Bruce or I being not nice people who don't understand how great Justin Trudeau is, is even worse. And it involves the prime minister going to the governor general, as he can, to ask the governor general to ask Pierre Poiliev to test the confidence of the House and replace the liberals in government without an election and until October when there will be an election. That is totally possible. If Diapoliev can get a majority of MPs to say, yes, we agree with this, yes, we can have a new prime minister and a new government in place for January 20th. Now, do you seriously think that Justin Trudeau is going to go to the GG and hand this job to Pierre Poitier? I don't. But it is an option. It exists. Both of those options, no one wants to talk about those within liberal circles with good reasons, look at the polls. But if your issue is really stability, there are two

options that would ensure that there is stability for the first few months of the Trump presidency. Neither, of course, involves the liberals being in government. I can't wait to see the comments. Oh, you'll get comments. You know, Peter, sorry, go ahead. No, I was going to say, I know Chantal has touched on this a number of times already in the program, but I've got to tell you, I'm still confused in terms of understanding what exactly happens if and when the prime minister says, I'm leaving, I'm stepping down, and I've called on the party to organize a convention or a meeting or whatever.

Choose a successor. What happens at that point? I mean, the Globe hints at this kind of four-week minimum rule, or no decision can be made for four weeks or something like that? The constitution of the Liberal Party prescribes all kinds of step-by-step moments. For instance, to qualify as a candidate you need x number of signatures from x number of writings and X amount of money, and you have 90 days to qualify for this. When you add up all the actual pieces of the timeline in the party's constitution, it works

out to about four months, which is a very long time considering the circumstances. Now, the Liberal Party took another route recently to a leadership change back in 2008. Remember the parliamentary crisis? Stéphane Zion was about to lead a coalition government that included the NDP. He was going to be the prime minister. And Stephen Harper prorogued the House to avoid a confidence vote that would have led to that, prorogued it for five or six weeks, not very long, over Christmas to the end of January. Now, Mr. Zion almost immediately resigned as liberal leader. And in what looked like what was about to unfold, the liberals were leaderless at a time when they were about to lead a coalition government. So they found a process that had Michael Ignatieff be nominated and appointed as leader,

for real, to be confirmed at the convention in June, but that Mr. Ignatieff, with support of caucus and the instances of the party, would be in a position to lead the coalition government and be the prime minister at the end of January. So they did short circuit all of that other process by making sure that no one else said, I want the job. And then what happened is that Mr. Ignatieff, once he was secure as leader, pulled the plug on the coalition and the rest is history. fashion in those circumstances. Is it possible to convince everyone who says or thinks that they want to be the leader of the Liberal Party to take a step back in favor of just one consensus person? I don't know. But if you didn't have five people who want the job and only one wanted the job, and there was a consensus in caucus that that's the way to go, I'm guessing you could do without the long leadership battle and maybe push it off once

you've seen the election results. One of the first things that my mother taught me that I remember, I think, is that phrase necessity is the mother of invention. And in all of my years around politics, nothing has seemed more true and consistently true that people in politics can and will come up with a new idea to replace a system that isn't working. And sometimes it's not obvious how that happens. Sometimes people need to kind of go deep into the minutiae of a constitution and find a loophole that allows for something to happen that nobody had been thinking of. And that is the kind of work that has always been not my pay grade. Let me put it that way.

I don't know the details of these constitutions and I never want to. It's just not something that interests me. The invention interests me. And so how does it happen? It doesn't happen spontaneously. That level of introspection into how you can use the constitutional loopholes or some points in order to create a scenario where you can make a change more quickly and with more efficacy than you might think on the surface. The first thing for me is that if Justin Trudeau wants this to happen, if he wants an orderly change in leadership and he wants it to be done efficiently, then he will have a lot of sway in that conversation with the party

elders and leaders. That's more about chemistry than specific constitutional discussions. It's more about him saying, can you find a way to make X happen? Because this is what I would like to see happen. And for me, when I think about Justin Trudeau in this moment, I kind of think when he was first elected, you know, the kind of the consensus about him was good politician, but might not be good at being prime minister. And I think over the years that some people will disagree with me, I think he's been a pretty good prime minister. I think there's been a lot of good policies that have been brought. And I think he started out as a good politician, but he came not a good politician. And that's me putting it nicely. In the last couple of years, he has not been an effective politician. He's kind of lost

his political antenna. He comes across as somebody who's kind of performing the role that all of the polling and all of the feedback mechanisms say people are tired of. And then he's making mistakes and doesn't know how to kind of cope with that. And so his political acumen has really, really been weakened over time. And I think the talent around him is also suffering from the same kind of thing. So this is a moment where his political judgment really needs to be supported by people who know him and care about him and say, here is the political circumstance you're in. Here is what your responsibility should be in your mind. And if you decide upon reflection that orderly exit rather than strong revitalization is the way to go, then you need to

roll your sleeves up and work with the party to find out what that mechanism should look like. And it should not, in my view, this is another thing that's been discussed a bit this week, the idea that the caucus should choose. I don't hate that idea. I feel like that's been discussed a bit this week. The idea that the caucus should choose. I don't hate that idea. I feel like that's time efficient and time efficient relative to the clock ticking in the United States is really, really important. But that secondary question of should the caucus only choose from existing caucus members? To me, that conversation should be shut down right away by the liberals. The idea that you would ring fence out a competition so that people like Christy Clark or Mark Carney

wouldn't be eligible to compete for that job makes no sense to me whatsoever, especially if you're trying to say, we need to present a different idea, an idea of change rather than a version of the status quo. But this is where I'm puzzled because Bruce keeps alluding to strong revitalization. That was the exact point of what that led to this disaster, that the prime minister was going to use the cabinet shuffle to do exactly that. And why do we know that? Because we do know, we believed Mark Carney was coming on board. And I'm told that Christy Clark was also invited to come on board, an offer that she declined. I can understand why she wants to leave the Liberal Party one day,

but I'm not convinced that under the Trudeau ticket, she would win a seat in BC in the next election. You don't want to start a leadership bid having just failed to secure a seat in the province that you used to run as a premier. But that's gone. I mean, what's happening today, this cabinet shuffle of necessity to plug so many holes is happening because the operation failed. Yeah, yeah. I think you're accusing me of describing a straw man. Well, you're describing it as an option.

And to me, that option is dead. That is what I'm doing. I am saying there are these two alternative scenarios, one of which to me has a 99.9% chance of being the better one, and the other has almost no chance well the other one the other one died on monday i mean i'm not going to be i'm going to need you on that right basically saying i agree with that you're the prime minister bruce and you say bring me

after this week a strong revitalization plan. I'm going to say, I'm sorry, boss. I have to go work for work. We're just killing some time here right now. You know, I'm not. Now, kids, let's try to get. Oh, I agree with Chantal. It's not a real thing, but it is.

I'm not sure people understand that the whole point of delaying this cabinet shuffle all fall, allowing ministers to have double or triple workloads while it was delayed, was to announce this week a strong revitalization cabinet. Yes. And that idea not only died this week. They crushed it, but it kind of blew up in their faces. They destroyed it. But remember, if we roll back the tape, we can see that moment where I said, there's three scenarios. The third one is procrastinate, suffer more injury, make mistakes, keep hitting the ditch. And I also said, I thought that one was the most likely one.

Yes, I just, you know, every time you talk about strong revitalization, if it's not the option, I'm thinking, that's like talking about, you know, last summer's holiday. You know, in politics, people inspire themselves in a lot of different ways. All I can say is, you know, I love it when Chantel beats up Bruce instead of me. I'm not beating him up. I'm trying to make a point that we don't send us emails about strong revitalization. It was in action this week. It's the train that crashed.

Let me change the subject for a second. Actually, let me take the last break and then I'll come back with something that's a little bit different. Anyway, that was good. I really enjoyed that. It was nice being a bystander for that one. Back in a moment. And welcome back.

Final segment of Good Talk for this free Christmas show. It's funny. It hasn't felt like Christmas this week. It's been quite the week. Let me ask you this. As both Bruce and Chantel, everything changed on Monday with Christian Freelance announcement. At this point, and from everything you've heard, everybody you've talked to, do you think that we do? know the whole story of what happened over those couple of days, I guess, between last Friday and Monday. Do you think we know what really happened? You're shaking your head, Shantel.

Because I was given three versions, and none of them match. They're black and white and gray, but there's no one or the other is wrong. One version says, and I'm not saying which I prefer, I'm just going to tell you the versions, and I'm not the only journalist who was exposed to many versions. One version of the story says, when the prime minister called Chrystia Freeland on Friday, he had not spoken to Mark Carney in eight days, and he had not offered them finance, and Mark Carney did not decline finance. That's one version. The other version that is being offered is when the prime minister called Chrystia Freeland on Friday, Mark Carney had not only accepted, but he only chickened out when he discovered on Monday that she'd resign.

And he was even offered on Monday to present outside the House, of course, the fiscal update. And he declined. Those are two stories that you cannot reconcile. He either was talking to Mark Carney, who was even offered to deliver the fiscal update on Monday and chickened out at the last minute because Freeland resigned, or he had not spoken to Carney for eight days and had not offered him finance.

And I have not been able to find which of those stories is accurate. Then there is something that people saw publicly, the people who cover politics or care about it. Chrystia Freeland's news conference last Friday, where she was asked about her future and looked very, very shaken. Presumably that happened after she had spoken by Zoom with the prime minister who had told her her days were done as finance minister and she was becoming this new minister without real portfolio for Canada-U.S. relations.

But then the other story that you will see in some reporting that I also was served via someone else is that Chrystia Freeland sent a text to the prime minister's office to say she was looking forward to a new role. In one version, she sent it on Friday. In another, she sent it on Sunday. That's the one that CTV is reported on. Again, it's very, very hard to match this notion of text to say I'm excited by my new role with the body language in public on Friday after the phone call with the prime minister and the events of Monday morning. So I've looked at all those versions, and I've decided that one,

we're way beyond who did what when, because the fact is Mark Carney is not coming and Chrystia Freeland has walked away with, you know, shooting from both barrels at the fiscal course of the government that she was a part of. But I'm not sure we'll ever get to a definitive version because it's not just a question. What I've just told you are things that one or the other is right. It's not just the perception of one is different from the other.

It is really black and white. And from what I read and see in the news reports, I'm not the only one who's being served all kinds of versions of what happened. What do you think, Bruce? Yeah, like I think all of those versions are out there. I agree with Chantal completely about that. And maybe we never will know the absolute truth. And so in the end, those of us who care enough to kind of pour into the details of this

will come to the conclusion that we come to about what is the most likely scenario. And so for me, the most likely scenario is this. It starts with the fact that the prime minister holds all the cards, really, in terms of the design of the strong revitalization to return to the thing that got kicked around pretty good before the break. And as I understand it, and I believe it because I heard it from enough sources that that the prime minister had intended or hoped to bring a bunch of people into cabinet. Rachel Notley, Christy Clark, Mark Carney, and there were other names as part of that, which would have, in my view, still not changed his political trajectory, but at least would have passed that test of, is this a serious

recharge of the government? Now, nobody's talking about the fact that none of those people are reportedly going into the cabinet today. What I think happened is probably closer to version one of Chantal's, which is that this prime minister and his office is lousy at the chemistry, is lousy at the planning, and didn't realize that if you're going to try to make something like that happen, you have to be on it nonstop. You have to be constantly in contact with all of these people. You have to be building the case to all of them that this is coming together and how it's coming together, not, you know, occasional contacts, broken telephone, long silences, all of that kind of thing. I am persuaded because it is like this prime minister's office and like

him to operate that way, to assume, because it's more convenient to assume that he had a good conversation with Chrystia Freeland. Even though you might imagine, if you're really thinking about this carefully, that you tell Chrystia Freeland something like that, is she going to blast you on the phone? No, she's a serious professional person. She's going to exit that phone call with some dignity. And then she's going to go away and think about what just happened. And Chantal's point about that clip from her on Friday afternoon that sort of was making the rounds on social media where she was practically crying that was a big tell and if I'm in that prime minister's office and I'm 72 hours away from this shuffle and I know the rest of it has probably fallen apart

I'm on it that is that is work that I need to be doing. I need to be in touch with Chrystia Freeland all through the weekend. So there is no chance of what happened happening. Because if you're Justin Trudeau and you tried this revitalization thing and you saw it kind of falling apart, it should be telling you something that everybody that you might think should come on board to take on these important positions in your government is kind of looking at your political lifespan or life uh life cycle and saying i don't think this is going to work and that should tell you something so i think they they kind of messed this up. And if I'm looking at the different scenarios, for me, that version one of Chantal's is the most compelling and logical scenario. Chantal's not in bed.

I feel good. I feel like I've recovered. I totally agree. believed that Christia Freeland was really excited about her new role on Sunday night, and then suddenly, and she didn't look excited last Friday in any way, shape, or form. And yes, people in the PMO and in other places should have paid attention. But the notion that you call your finance minister, and you tell her you're going to deliver this really not great fiscal update with this massive deficit and then we're going to replace you a couple of days later the inferences with someone who's going to be appointed to clean up your mess and let you carry the the fact that this

is your mess anyone who would have received a phone call from the prime minister along those lines would have reacted not by sending a text to say, I'm so glad to get this brand new role. But there's also, you know, the entire construct. This is a government that has been very strong on representation, i.e. I appoint the first Indigenous justice minister, I appoint the first female finance minister, etc. But it's not really often taught beyond that. It's kind of putting labels in the right boxes because it makes Canada look more progressive. And I'm thinking this notion of putting Mark Carney in charge of finance, there's not enough runway left for anyone to come in and change the fiscal course of this

government in a way that Canadians would appreciate by the time an election comes around. It's just not possible. This other notion of offering a Canada-US file that doesn't really exist, why is no one offering to replace the Minister of Foreign Affairs? That is from where this operation was led the last time. It doesn't seem to ever come up in conversations. It looks more like, I'm going to borrow a word from Ms. Freeland, the entire thing looks more like a gimmick than serious policy and serious directions for the government going forward. I think we're going to leave it at that for this week. As I said a few minutes ago, it feels odd to know that, you know, the holidays are only a couple of days away. I mean, they basically started for most Canadians, no matter what faith they may be,

they're different faiths have different holidays that they're going to be marking over these next couple of weeks. Next week is Christmas. It's also the first night of Hanukkah on the same day. That doesn't happen very often, but it does happen this year. Anyway, people's minds, Canadians' minds are around the holidays now. And yet we have witnessed this remarkable scene in the last week or so in Canadian politics. Unlike just about anything else we've ever witnessed. I got a great letter, which I'll talk about in the buzz tomorrow, from a fellow in BC, reminding me of something that happened in the early 1960s, which in many ways was very similar, in many ways,

to what's happening and what we've witnessed in the last week. Hope you enjoyed that Encore episode of Good Talk from last Friday, December 20th.