The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Good Talk -- Who Cares What Happened in Ontario?

Episode Date: June 3, 2022

Are there lessons about Doug Ford's second majority government win?  Bruce and Chantal have their thoughts on that. And what's the real reason former finance minister Bill Morneau is dumping on the Trudeau government?  Plus, what's behind Pierre Poilievre's twitter finger?

Are you ready for Good Talk? And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here in Toronto. It's a Good Talk Friday. Chantelle Iber is in Montreal. Bruce Anderson is in Ottawa. And, you know, back-to-back majority governments they don't come often back-to-back majority governments where the second is an increase on the first they come even less often but hey that's what happened in Ontario last night Doug Ford comes crashing home with a second majority government and a big one. And I know in many parts of the country they're saying, so what? Who cares?

It's Ontario. Well, we're going to try and take from last night's voting results and try and figure out, you know, what lessons can we take from what happened in Ontario? What lessons can politicians take from what happened in Ontario? What lessons can politicians take from what happened in Ontario? Remember, this was a guy who, a year ago, two years ago, looked like there was no way he could win re-election. Things had gone sour in Ontario, the handling of COVID, all that was not good. But somehow Doug Ford, and if you can imagine this, was doing backflips last night because he'd managed to turn everything around. So what are the lessons of the Doug Ford victory? Chantelle, why don't you start us? I'm still trying to get my head around the Doug Ford doing backflips.

The image, it's early in the day. I'm sure he will too, will be trying to see how that would have worked out. And I can't do a backflip for the record. A number of things. A lot of people saw that election

as the first test of the electorate's mood towards incumbent in a time when inflation is becoming a major issue. I don't buy that. I don't believe that the inflation issue has coalesced into a ballot box issue yet. That may happen, probably will happen. But at this point, the negative feelings that would come from it towards incumbent gets mixed up in the post COVID relief for the many who feel that we live a better life than we did a year ago, but also the job numbers, which point to a fairly vibrant job market. So if there are incumbents elsewhere in the country looking at this thinking,

gee, you know, it's not hard to campaign in this troubled economic time. People are not willing at this point to take it out on us. They should think again. I note also that in Canada's largest province. This campaign did not revolve around Justin Trudeau and all the bad things that he's doing, which was basically part of the theme of the previous campaign in Ontario and subsequently of the resistance, that so-called movement of conservative premiers

who put their names on the line to say don't vote for Justin Trudeau as opposed to François Legault in Quebec last fall Mr Ford did not need to go try to see if he could just lose votes by doing it and not be heard and it looks to me like the people who voted for Justin Trudeau I mean mean, most Ontarians didn't vote. The turnout is dismally low. But and that suggests that a number of people have voted for Justin Trudeau to stay at home rather than vote for the Liberals or voted for Doug Ford. And both have as polarizing figures or with a potential for, have managed to depolarize each other by hanging out. Remember all those announcements, Justin Trudeau and Doug Ford, just prior to the election.

I also suspect the federal liberals, or at least the prime minister, is not totally sad to see Doug Ford reelected. They've managed to work together together and it's always good for the party in power at Queen's Park and federally to not have to blame the same brand for whatever people get angry about over time. A final note,

again, the gap between what people say about how concerned they are about climate change and how they vote for governments that don't offer much of a solution to climate change is pretty obvious. You can promise to pave the southern part of what's left of it of Ontario and win a big majority victory even in 2022.

All good lessons there. Bruce, do you want to add to that? Yeah, it's always, again, I'm always reminded how good it is to go after Chantal. She gets to raise a bunch of points that I didn't quite think of. Maybe I can elaborate on and add a little bit of color, but there were a couple of things that despite all of those great observations that that occurred to me as well. I mean, the first thing that I would say is that there was a big lesson in last night's outcome for the Trumpist style conservatives in Canada. Kenney in politics as a conservative premier and the life of Doug Ford couldn't be more stark for people at the federal party level who are trying to figure out what do we make of the interest level in a different type of conservative leader. For me, Doug Ford got himself into deep public opinion trouble the more he looked like Trump and sounded like a Trump-style politician, and he started to heal his problems and develop a, I don't want to say popularity, because I don't think that's what it is, but I think an acquiescence to the idea of a conservative

administration in Ontario over time, the more he stepped away from that kind of posture. You'll remember he was aggressive about Trudeau early on in his mandate. He was anything but aggressive towards Trudeau. He was Trudeau's friend. He was his objective ally. There were a lot of people during the pandemic in the federal liberal system who would hear criticisms from Ford about where are the vaccines and that sort of thing. And federal liberals would hate to hear that. And they counseled Trudeau to punch back, to escalate the fight, to really go to the mass with Ford. And Trudeau didn't do really any of that. He did it one or two times, but there was no sound that I could discern coming from the Trudeau Liberals in Ottawa that suggested to Ontario voters that they shouldn't re-elect Doug Ford, which had to be

kind of a bitter pill for Stephen Del Duca. I don't think it would have helped Stephen Del Duca particularly anyway, but I think it was a calculation on the part of the federal liberals that Doug Ford had turned into something closer to a Bill Davis-style Ontario conservative than to a Jason Kenney or Trump style. Effectively, I think what Ford did is he dismantled the anger and the heat that he had created around his own image as a politician, and he did it quite effectively. And you could see and hear the strategy in the margins of what he was doing. A couple more quick points. One of the things that he did that people are kind of fond of criticizing politicians for, but I can't help but think that it helped him, was that, Peter, you and I, anyway, we got checks from the Ontario government that we didn't need.

And they were reasonably sizable checks, hundreds of dollars, because Ford decided that this was a time to tell us that we didn't need to pay to have our licenses renewed. And he, you know, as far as I can tell, he kind of used the money that the Trudeau government had given Ontario to manage COVID to give that money back. And I think that that created the sense that this is a government that has had its ups and downs, that is managing through a relatively stronger economy and kind of understands that cost of living is a challenge

for us. So I don't want to be overly praising Ford. I don't think he ran a very good administration for the last four years. But I do think that the political operation that led to this result was really powerful. And on the other side, the Liberals and the NDP both are changing leaders. I think that's pretty clearly a thing that had to happen, especially in the case of the NDP. I didn't really understand why Andrea Horwath was running again, having had several years to prove that she wasn't really capturing the attention of Ontarians. All right. Let me make a couple of points before I throw it back to Chantel.

First of all, agreeing with Chantel, I mean, historically we've seen how both the Liberals and the Conservatives actually kind of prefer to have that balance between Ottawa and Queen's Park, more so than in any other part of the country. They like it in Ontario to have their opposite in power in the other government. It works politically for them. The other point I'm going to make is in terms of a lesson from last night, and this doesn't cut your grass on the political side, either one of you. It's more about the media, and it's specifically television.

Election nights are a big deal for television. That's their opportunity to, you know, show all their fancy graphics and fancy sets and trot out their best players on air in a live situation and handle the incoming results and analyze this and that and the other thing. There was a big difference last night. It's shown in a couple of places in the country.

It's not universal yet by any stretch of the imagination and there doesn't seem to be any interest in ottawa but they use electronic counting last night and that's why results came so fast right as opposed to by hand uh counting basically what happened here was you you voted during the day and you're you're you put your thing in the in in the slot and automatically it was tabulated so at nine o'clock when the polls closed it was basically one button pushed and bingo you you see the numbers immediately and that's why first results were out at 901 there was a declaration by one of the networks of nine minutes after nine as to who had won the election. And that was it.

It was like game over. Where was the excitement? It was like it vanished, you know, literally in seconds. Now, I'm sure most people say, well, that's fine. That's the world we live in today. And we just want to know who won. We don't need to watch you guys spinning your wheels for half an hour, an hour, or two hours with results. Now, it'll never take away from the close elections

when those happen, but on nights like last night, it is going to be, you know, what's the point? What's the point of fancy sets and big graphics and all that other stuff because it's over so fast? But that was, for me, I found that an interesting part of the evening aside from the politics. graphics and all that other stuff because it's over so fast but that was an it for me i found that an interesting part of the evening aside uh from the politics now chantelle i know you

wanted to jump in on something bruce had said yes uh on the point you were making you'll remember because we did those election nights federally together how it changed the pace of the evening the fact that we get now in the days, you got them by the hour, Atlantic Canada, and then you got Ontario and Quebec, and then you got the prairies and finally BC. And at some point they changed the voting hours so that we get now this big Ontario-Quebec batch with the prairies, which means that it all comes in and goes out really

more quickly than it did in the past. I would argue at the national level that the rationale was so that people in BC did not end up going to vote or going home where the government was already elected. The problem is that when that happens in the national election, the results and the voice of the prairies gets lost in that big Ontario-Quebec patch. So there was and there still is a downside to the way that it is done federally. It's like you fix a problem or you plug a hole in your boat and you, in the process, open a new one. So I don't know what Elections Canada wants to do about this, but it works more or less properly.

The point I wanted to make politically had more to do with the opposition parties and in particular the Liberals. For a long, long time, and I've just spent time, so I was reminded of it in Western Canada over the past week. For a long, long time, we've become used to the notion that the Liberal Party as a force does not exist west of Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta. And then there's the Liberal Party in BC, which we all know, whenever we mention if, that there is someone that will write to say, you don't understand the Liberal Party of BC. It's not the same as a Liberal Party in Ontario.

And that is quite true. If you're a conservative in BC, federally, you're probably voting provincially for the Liberals because that is who they really are, not the Trudeau franchise of British Columbia. But now the Liberals are, from what you can see, in trouble in both of the central Canada provinces. The results in Ontario last night, I understand that a quarter of the vote went to the Liberals and they still ended up with a lot less seats than the NDP,

but that is twice in a row that the Ontario Liberal Party, more often, except for the Ray years, the alternative to the Conservatives in government in Ontario, do not manage to even win official party status, cannot even get their leader re-elected. And at the same time, look at my province where an election is coming up and where the Liberal Party, the one that Jean Chagas used to lead, is in huge trouble, like it has never been in its history. It is not a contender for power at this point. It is, I don't know, some 20 points behind, closer to the other opposition parties in the popular vote in polls than anywhere close to the CAQ. And I'm thinking if the liberal

brand provincially is fading in Ontario, Quebec, so anything west of Atlantic Canada, that could be in time a problem for the federal liberals because they do count on sharing the base or sharing in Ontario. They're actually sharing resources. They are one and the same party. They will need to think long and hard about this. People will talk about how maybe the two parties should come together in Ontario. I think at this point, it's the Ontario Liberals that need to think about this more so

even than the Ontario NDP. And given that they're both going to be changing leaders, one can only hope that that comes into the mix because this hating each other, which they spent a month showing the country, spending more time on attacking each other at times than attacking the incumbent that they plan to defeat, is clearly counterproductive. And it could restore what some in columns call an Ontario dynasty. That's how the Ontario Tories were in power for 40 some years unopposed, because the Liberal and the NDP would each take half of the opposition benches and then sit there, usually in front of a majority government, and have to wait another four

years to do it again for themselves. Bruce? people as possible. If it's clear that your leader is a bit of a lightning rod, and that things can go bad if they're exposed to too many people in too many conflict-oriented situations. And I think we saw a campaign that probably did more of that strategy better than any that I can recall with Doug Ford. There were not many debates. There were very few situations where he put himself at risk of being asked many awkward questions by journalists. I think that journalists generally, or a number of them anyway, did a pretty good job of trying to remind people or let people know that that was happening, which I think is important. But at the end of the day, it did kind of reinforce for those campaign managers who are inclined to see their situation the same way and use that strategy that it can work.

I mean, it really did reduce the number of people who felt like they were angered by Ford and needed to go out and mark a ballot. And I think just the last point is just to pick up on what Chantal was saying. I was talking to somebody, it's a friend of mine from Alberta the other day, and we were remarking on the fact that there are very progressive mayors in Calgary and in Edmonton. I'm looking at the Ottawa election coming up this fall. It's probably going to elect a very progressive mayor as well. And it tells us that that progressive vote in our biggest urban centers wants progressive politicians, and they don't really necessarily want middle of the road progressive politicians. And some will say that the genius of

Trudeau has been that he has co-opted a lot of the territory that the federal NDP would otherwise occupy. And some will say that the problem that they see with Trudeau is that he's too far left. And we'll probably come to that in our next item. But I do think there's something in what Chantal is saying, which is that a progressive voter in an urban place wants to hear real hard progressive ideas, not necessarily the softer version of them. And that's a big question for the Liberal Party in the longer term. Just a final point to build on what Bruce has said about municipal politics. Quebec has had its round of municipal elections last fall. And the new generation of mayors are the counterbalance to the Coalition Avenir

Québec government and the National Assembly. They are the way that Bruce describes them, and they are becoming quite a strong counterpower on the progressive side, doing a better job, I'd say, than the Québec Liberal Party, which is the party that is supposed to be the middle-of-the-road progressive responsible alternative and is going nowhere with ideas that I think most people would be at a loss to list. Okay, Bruce hinted at it a moment ago

in terms of what our next segment is going to be about. It's going to be about Justin Trudeau taking some incoming fire, not necessarily from inside the tent, but from just outside the tent. What impact's that going to have? We'll be back in a moment. And welcome back. You're listening to The Bridge. This is Good Talk.

It's Friday. Chantel's in Montreal. Bruce is in Ottawa. You're listening on Sirius XM, Channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform. If you can dial back either in your own talks or on your favorite podcast platform and if you can dial back either in your own mind or through your history books to the mid-1970s the liberals had this powerhouse majority government after the 74 election that pierre trudeau is prime minister john turner is finance minister minister until Turner quit and disappeared on a Bay Street.

He didn't say much on the way out, just that he wanted to, you know, spend time with his family and that, the kind of things you often hear when you really know there's more to the story than that. But nevertheless, he left active politics. And while he was pushed by a lot of his friends to say, you know, you've got to come out and attack Trudeau, pave your way for the leadership in the future. You don't agree with some of his economic policies and you should make that clear. But for the most part, John Turner remained quiet until 1984 when he decided to run for the liberal leadership. He won, he became prime minister for a couple of months, and that was that. Well, I was thinking of that today because we've watched this week Bill Morneau, the former finance minister for Justin Trudeau,

who didn't really decide to leave on his own, kind of edged out of the Trudeau cabinet, and then got right out of politics. But he made a speech this week where he was going after the Trudeau government. And while he wasn't naming names, he was clearly targeting Christian Freeland as well, his successor in the finance portfolio. And saying that the government was too concerned about progressive politics and wasn't concerned enough about productivity and having a relationship with the business sector in the country. So he's not holding fire. He's leveling his guns, so to speak, at his former colleagues and his former boss. Does this have an impact? That's the question. Bruce, why don't you start us this time? Well, I think it's definitely going to have an impact on the relationship between Bill Morneau and the people that he served in caucus and cabinet with, including the prime minister. And I think that's

already clear in the way that the prime minister felt like he wanted to respond to Mr. Morneau's comments. I don't think it'll have a bigger impact than that. It depends, I suppose, on whether or not this is the first of a campaign that Mr. Morneau is intending to run. And maybe what he's doing is setting himself up for a run at the leadership if it becomes available at some point, although I don't really think so. I think it felt more like he wanted to reestablish his relationship or the nature of how he's viewed in the business community in Canada by making clear that some of the things that he was involved in as finance minister, he didn't particularly enjoy being involved in.

Pardon me. On the question of what he talked about, I mean, he said, certainly to what the CD Howe group would have loved to hear, he said a thing that a lot of people have said, which is that Canada's productivity is lagging and government shouldn't do more about that. I've heard so many politicians say that with so much enthusiasm over so many years, only to watch that the public opinion kind of goes, well, we don't really know what that even means, let alone what we should do about it.

And so I don't know that they'll have an impact on public opinion. I think for him to say productivity is a problem and imply that Trudeau's the solution is a bit disingenuous. I think he was there long enough and had an opportunity to, especially with that first majority, to establish some change. And so he has to kind of own up to his share of the responsibility if some indeed does accrue to the Trudeau government on this. Two final points. I mean, when he talks about how the Trudeau government was more interested in redistributing wealth, there will be those in the Trudeau government who say, thank you for making that point. We don't see it as a criticism. We see it as something that is a logical, important, and politically quite popular theme in the times in which we live, when income inequality is considered to be a really

important issue for a lot of people. So it wasn't a cutting criticism when he may have intended it to say that, you know, they were more interested in redistributing wealth and growing prosperity, but some on the liberal side will see it as a reinforcement of the brand that they're trying to put forward. And on the last point, or on one of the other points that he was making that doesn't consult with business, I think there is room for the federal government to do a better job of working with the business community. And I think that it's not across the board. I think there are some ministers in the cabinet who do a really good job of being attentive to those conversations and the ideas that exist in the business community.

And there are others that aren't as oriented that way. But I think that's a criticism that we heard from business leaders in the last several months and is one that probably should be looked at by the government. Chantal. Okay, where to start? is one that probably should be looked at by the government. Chantal. Okay, where to start? No, it's something more familiar than a run for the leadership that this is a prelude to, and it's a prelude to what will eventually, I suspect, become a book tour since Mr. Morneau is publishing a book about the battle to Canadian prosperity in January.

So, this is laying down the groundwork. A generous interpretation would be that if he wants his book to be analyzed on content, he is getting rid of the politics that would inevitably surround the publishing of that book. You ask, will it have any impact? It would have more impact, or it could have more impact, if Mr. Morneau was painting in the picture an alternative responsible leader in the shape of the next conservative leader to implement some of his prescriptions. At this point, he seems to have at least as much to say about Pierre Poiliev without

naming him as he does about the policies of the Trudeau government. This was not an endorsement of a change of government under a Poiliev-led Conservative party, quite the opposite of it. And it does reflect, I think, some angst in the business community, not just towards the liberals, but also towards the conservative party and the eventual outcome of that leadership campaign. Now, it would have had more impact if Mr. Morneau had left the government on a matter of economic policy principle. But that is not the history of his leaving the government. The history of his leaving the government is that he had a tin ear for politics and for the optics of politics. And in the end, after a series of examples of that, he ended up being in the untenable

position of being the number two in the government and being totally wounded. I have rarely seen a minister of finance resign in the middle of a crisis. Remember, we were in the midst of the pandemic and so soon become forgotten in the heat of the action. And overall, I look, you know, Bill Morneau and Jane Philpott and Jody Wilson-Raybould, they all have different quarrels with the government that they left, but it always brings me back to the same thing. And that is particularly true in the case of Mr. Morneau. Justin Trudeau made history. He brought his party from third place to first place.

As a result, he brought in a bunch of people who had based on their record. He did not know them. They did not know him. And they didn't know politics. Bill Morneau was the first finance minister in decades to come to that job on the first day that he stepped in the House of Commons. If he'd served in a caucus, in opposition or in government previously, he would have learned the hard way, but he would have learned in a less public way the realities of politics. He would have understood how the center can try to dictate to a finance minister what to do and what not to do and when it is time to push back. And he would have learned the cut and trust of the House of Commons. Instead, he got to do all that, which is a steep learning curve as Minister of Finance.

And I think that experience was not particularly conducive to repeating the experience of plucking someone out of a corporate boardroom and making him a Minister of Finance overnight. A quick last point on this one. Justin Trudeau knows how to take a hit. He's taken lots of them over time as prime minister, and he seems to be able to bounce back. What about Chrystia Freeland? Because this is a hit on her too. Is this damaging for her in terms of the relationship she has to have with the business community as well as with Canadians in general?

Well, you know, as I see it, I mean, she, from what I can tell, she's been doing a pretty serious job of trying to have more outreach with the business community. I kind of hear tell of that quite a bit. And so I'd be reluctant to characterize her as having little to no relationship or negative relationship with the business community because I think it's always a moving target. I think part of the context for everything is the pandemic and what strains it's put on people's ability to do all of the things that are on their agenda to do. I think for Ms. Freeland, the argument about productivity isn't going to cause her too much of a loss of sleep in terms of her political fortunes or the assessment that maybe she's not doing enough, in part because that argument not only has trouble gaining traction because it's complicated and the average person doesn't know what it is exactly

that is expected of them if we're going to try to improve our productivity. It's more a discussion that happens among business people and economists, and so it doesn't really land with much traction. But it especially doesn't land with much effect when the economy feels like it's going well, when there are more jobs and there are people to fill them. It's not great to see inflation and the cost of living going up, but people don't associate that with a productivity problem. They associate that with a cost of living challenge that they're facing and the sense that they have that there are lots of people challenge that they're facing and the sense that they have

that there are lots of people buying lots of things and earning money in the marketplace. And that's not the kind of thing where you go, well, gee, I guess what we really got to do is deal with this productivity problem. So I think it will, I think Chantal's absolutely right that it must be more to do with the themes that he's going to be using in his book tour and the thesis that he wants to put out there and probably the idea that he wants to be understood, not as somebody who had a tin ear in politics, but as somebody who had a clear eyed view of what should be done to strengthen the Canadian economy for the long term. I'm not sure he's going to be successful at that. And I guess we'll see where it goes from here. Quick point from you, Chantal. About the damage to Christian Freeland, a quick point is that would have been a lot more damaging back in the days when Corporate Canada bankrolled the Conservatives and the Liberals, because then there would have been people inside both parties, in her case, the liberals, to say,

this is a disaster for our party finances. But in this day and age, and I know that corporate Canada is not yet adjusted to that reality, he who calls the piper, who pays the piper, calls the tune, and they don't. And that goes a long way to explain the populism streak of the Conservative Party, as it is, whether you think it's good or bad, but also Justin Trudeau's approach to economic policy versus, for instance, Jean-Claude Sien or Paul Martin. Yeah, there is absolutely no doubt that Pierre-Paul Lievre would not be talking about cryptocurrency the way he is if the old financing system was still in place. Well, funny you mentioned Pierre Polyev.

There you go. I'm Mr. Segway this morning. Mr. Segway. I hope you both have your productivity still going here for the next segment. We'll take a break. Be right back. And welcome back. Peter Mansbridge in Toronto. Bruce Anderson's in Ottawa. Chantelle Iberia's in Montreal.

Final segment of Good Talk for this week, and it's a major segment. We're reaching a key date in the conservative leadership race. The actual race isn't decided until September, but they've got to stop selling memberships. They have to have accumulated all their memberships in the next few days because the cutoff is coming which made yesterday's tweet from pierre polliev the sort of acknowledged front runner in the race although nobody really knows for sure right because nobody has a count actual count of everybody's membership status although i'm sure some of the part some of the candidates think they know where things stand um but as the acknowledged front runner you probably in the last few days try to stay out of fire but he dropped a tweet yesterday which surprised a lot of people. Basically, the kind of guts of the tweet

are that he's introduced a private members bill that would ban all mandated vaccines. All of them. Everything. Not just COVID. All of them. Every kind of vaccine that's out there, you can't mandate them anymore if his private member's bill is accepted. And people, a lot of people have been going, what? Did he really say that? Was that actually he who put that tweet out or him?

And it's left, as I say, people wondering and it's taken a lot of incoming seems to be one of the key words today who wants to start off this uh in terms of where we are on this race and what that tweet does to it. Let's start on the tweet. Chantal. So, whether it pays off or not, I can't answer, but it does seem that Mr. Poiliev was trying both to mislead his own supporters, those who are of the anti-vax persuasion, and throw a bill that is frankly of very little use and that will not come up for debate anytime soon or maybe in our lifetimes because private member bills don't come up just because you present them. And I'm saying that because you are right, this tweet basically said this bill will ban vaccine mandates. But what it really says is that it applies to COVID vaccine mandates in the civil service. So the tweet misrepresented.

It's rare, you know, in this campaign, we've seen a lot of camp tweets that misrepresent what their opponents are saying. But in this case, he's misrepresenting himself. And I would say deliberately and rather cynically to draw a line to people that he is trying to get to sign up as members to vote for him, but on false pretense. Even if he wanted to ban all vaccine mandates, he can't. It doesn't matter. You can't preventively or preemptively say future federal governments shall ban all vaccine mandates.

And besides, if the Quebec government, the Ontario government, or anyone else who is in government in this country wants to have vaccine mandates, an employer, the city of Montreal, there is nothing you can do about it. So it basically looked like a throw to the anti-vax movement, but a throw that is based on a falsehood about what the bill actually says. It's interesting that you would want to support someone who is ready to mislead you on his intentions and who is banking on your ignorance. You know, I've said it before, not to a receptive audience, but it's almost like either Pauliev or somebody close to him sat down two nights ago and said, what would Trump do here right now?

What would he do to, you know, to deflect everything else, bring the attention back to me, and we do something in such a way that'll, you know, make the base solid, or what we think is our base. But really, it doesn't mean anything anything and i'm not held to anything i don't know maybe that's far too cynical oh it's you pushing that trumpian argument every chance you get well i think it's don't you have a book that you want to peddle no but he does trump and mean, he does have a playbook. And you see it being used in different places all over this continent and beyond. But we just spent 15 minutes talking about how Ford won because he didn't use that playbook. While Jason Kenney is contemplating retirement and trying to say he was a victim to the anti-vax movement. I just came back from Calgary. That's not what people are really saying. It is only suddenly Jason Kenney has discovered that it's not freedom that was his problem. It's the anti-vax movement,

and he's a martyr to the cause. But he was the person who played the most to those feelings and to that crowd. And that tells me that there is a significant, significant section of the Conservative Party and an even larger one in the electorate that looks at those strategies and does not feel like the people who voted for Donald Trump feel the opposite because they do not really want to have a Canadian version of Donald Trump. It's not one of those things we envy from the U S. So if that's their thinking, have at it, but it's at cost to the reelection chances and the recruitment possibilities of the conservative party. I don't disagree. You shush for a minute. I don't disagree with Ch. Just you shush for a minute. I don't disagree with Chantel at all on this point.

But we remember, as she remembers, that Doug Ford actually started by playing the Trump playbook and quite enjoying people saying, oh, he's a mini Trump. That was ages ago. I spent too much time defending Doug Ford when it was fashionable to say that about him to let this pass. I spoke to audiences and asked them to show me where Doug Ford was not someone who courted diversity in his support in the same way as Justin Trudeau does. Donald Trump was not just someone who would say any stupid thing that came to his head and believe people, enough of them would be stupid enough to follow him. He was also someone who was campaigning on an anti-immigration, the others are bad for us platform. There is nothing and anything that Doug Ford did from the moment he became leader to today

that goes anywhere near that kind of rhetoric, and he wouldn't be premier this morning if he had. I didn't say that he mimicked everything Trump said. Yeah, but they all say stupid things. Even Justin Trudeau does. everything trump said yeah but they all say stupid things yeah they do but he enjoyed in his initial time in office being constantly compared by the canadian media by the american media they did whole takeouts on this here's the mini trump here's the canadian trump blah blah blah anyway he whether he accepted or didn't accept it he he managed to ditch that image over these last couple of years

very effectively. And on the diversity stuff, absolutely, you're right. And he spent a lot of time talking about it last night in his acceptance speech. But he and his family have kind of played, cards is not the right word but they've they've used that for their success uh over time in both municipal politics and now in provincial politics uh and are always um surrounded in key positions uh with a sense of what the country actually looks like these days. Just one final point before Bruce gets in.

Bruce is going to come in and totally 100% support you. If I were to call Pierre Poitier or compare him to anyone, I would call him a mini-Maxime Bernier and not a mini-Trump. He'd probably prefer Trump. I'm sure. ahead bruce well yeah i i love this about and i i expect it to continue in the future and uh and i'll enjoy it always i i remember a couple of weeks ago i we had a conversation about poliev and I tweeted something afterwards, kind of promoting our podcast. And I said, you know, in which I say the conservative party had its best week in a long time.

And Chantal, of course, then covered my tweet reaching out to her giant Chantal army on social media and said, which I don't completely agree with. Fair enough. I like this better. The theory for me is that nothing is more important for the Conservative Party than to have oxygen and daylight into this fight that they're having right now. They need to decide whether they really want this guy, Pierre Polyev, to be their leader. And if they do, God bless them. I think they'll regret it forever.

And if they don't, now's the time that they need to really study this. And the risk in politics so often these days is that people tune out. They don't pay attention. They don't see the risk coming or they see it coming and they go, oh, somebody else is going to solve this and prevent this bad thing from happening. And then the next thing you know, they wake up and there's, or there's Trump. And in that sense, I do think Polly follows that line. I also want to completely endorse Chantal's point about mini Max Bernier. 89% of People's Party voters do not believe government accounts of events. They don't believe the media.

They don't. And so when Polyev says things that sound like nobody in regular society would ever say anything like this, they go, aha, he's talking my language. He understands the world the way I understand, which is that you can't trust the gatekeepers. You can't trust the elites. You have to believe in things that are so outlandish that it's a kind of a sign of this is the group that I should huddle with because I kind of I revel in these outlandish theories now. So it's outlandish as a policy idea to say there should never be any vaccine mandates in the future. It's it's absolutely nuts from a public policy standpoint. So for Pierre Poliev to stand behind that idea, and he didn't just tweet it out. You know, he had a bill developed and Chantel's right to say it's not all in the bill, what he put in the tweet. But he had signaled that he was going to do this a little while ago. And so he was following through on the last day that people could see a tweet from him about this or watch a YouTube video about this and hit a button and buy a membership to support him. And he was definitely pitching that crowd that otherwise is a Max Bernier

People's Party crowd. And I don't think there was any doubt about that. However, for him to do that is equipping his opponents with some of the best ammunition I've ever seen to go after him between now and September when these votes happen. And I think Jean Charest has started to up his game quite significantly. He doesn't spend any time on anything other than criticizing Pierre Polyev and talking about some of his policy ideas, which sound to many people, I think, like more rational, public policy, mainstream conservative ideas with a touch of innovation and that sort of

thing and creativity. So I think it's shaping up to be the fight that the conservatives need to have. And frankly, I think that Polyev gave Charest a huge gift yesterday. I think he gave the liberals a huge gift if he ends up being the leader of that party. I can't imagine that all of those caucus members in the conservative caucus who've pledged their support to Pierre Pauliev enjoyed watching that play out yesterday, because they have to go back into their communities and have people say, why would you support somebody who would say that they're going to ban vaccine mandates forever first of all if you could do it it's a stupid idea secondly you can't do it it's like saying i'm going to ban pizza with pineapple you you can't do it it doesn't matter what you think today that people

shouldn't do in the future they're going to decide whether they want that frigging pineapple on the pizza at some point, and they're going to choose their own course down the road. So it's outrageous what he did. And it's taking people for fools. The question is, is he deliberately taking people for fools? And I think the answer has to be yes. Finally, an issue that I can understand. I'm glad we brought the debate around pizza with pineapple because I love that. It's really good. Why am I not surprised? I've only got a couple of minutes left.

Do you have an assessment of where things are on this kind of membership count? But first of all, in terms of if you buy a membership in support of Pierre Polyev, does that mean you have to on the first ballot vote for Pierre Polyev? You buy a membership, you buy a membership. You don't buy it on behalf of anyone and no one can pay for it except you with a credit card that's got your own name on it. You are free to do with it whatever you want. So the race is still very much on then even after you want. So the race is still very much on then, even after they've stopped. The race is still very much on. You will hear numbers like half a million members, 500,000.

That would be a record, almost double the last membership role a couple of years ago. And certainly that would make it the biggest pool of member or voters within a party ever that's not that says nothing about the liberals since they have not had a liberal leadership campaign for quite a while and those numbers could be matched if they had one but there are things people need to keep in mind about those numbers. You can have 100,000 members in Alberta and 8,000 members in Quebec. And if you were to choose and someone told you, which do you want, the 100,000 in Alberta or Saskatchewan or the 8,000 in Quebec, you would pick the 8,000 in Quebec.

Because as long as there are 100 members in every one of Quebec's 78 ridings, so that works out to about 8,000, you get full points or points for every one of those ridings. If you have 100,000 or 150,000 members in Saskatchewan, you still only get 100 points per writing and there are 14 writings so it's really hard looking at those numbers to know whether they translate into a an easy win the first strong first ballot showing for polyeth that will be irreversible or not because it's not just the magnitude of the bomb in this case, it's the location of it that matters. And we don't know that. So before being amazed by numbers,

and any campaign that says we sold 200,000 of those, keep that in mind. Also keep in mind that the last time, a couple of years ago, out of 270-something thousand members, 100,000 did not vote. Okay. You've got 20 seconds if you want it, Bruce, but only 20 seconds. I just want to say I agree with so much of what both of you said today that I'm really looking forward to the weekend now because I'm better not to. You are. You're a piece of work middle of the road will get you crushed on any highway enjoy your pizza so good enjoy your pizza

yeah okay we're gonna wrap it up for this day that's that's good talk such that it was for some of us thanks chantelle thanks bruce good always to talk to you too and we'll see you again a week from now i'm peter mansbridge this has been good talk on the bridge talk to you again on monday