The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Good Talk - Will The Grocery Price Ultimatum Work?

Episode Date: October 6, 2023

Ottawa plays hardball with the grocery titans but will the strategy pay off for consumers? Plus the latest on India and Ukraine. 

Are you ready for Good Talk? Ah yes, the Friday Good Talk session is about to begin. Chantelle Hebert is in Montreal, Bruce Anderson is in Ottawa, I'm Peter Mansbridge in Toronto. Okay, so there was only a couple of weeks ago when the Liberals gathered in caucus to talk about their plight in the polls, which was pretty bad after a summer,

that showed them almost universally down in double digits or worse. And so what are they going to do? I didn't see any triple digits. No, you're right. I guess what I was trying to say, it was 10 points and more in some cases. Low double digits or high double digits. That's what you were –

Okay, or medium double digits. Yeah, the math thing, it's challenging, right? It is challenging. Whatever the case, everybody's in double digits now, even Nanos after hanging back for quite a while with, you know, five, six, seven points, now he's up, I think, at 11 points. So everybody is in double digits now. Nevertheless, the Liberals decided that they needed a new position

of policies that was going to make Canadians perhaps reconsider their position in terms of abandoning the Liberals. And one of those pillars of the recovery was to do something about grocery prices. And so they said, we're bringing in the big grocery stores. They're coming into Ottawa. They did. They demanded they do something, and they gave them a deadline. They had to do something by Thanksgiving.

So yesterday, on Thursday, they did something. They promised a number of things that they were going to do to bring prices down or at least freeze them. So the government calls this the first step, but they're sounding pretty triumphant about having achieved that much. Have they achieved much at all in what they've got the grocery companies to say? Chantal. How would you know?

I mean, like all of you, I go to the grocery store. Some things are on sale. Some things are not. But there is not a little label that says François-Philippe Champagne was here, and this is why you're getting a break on pasta this week. So I guess time will tell. But bottom line, it's impossible to know whether the grocery stores are bringing down prices on some core issues.

I have this vague memory. Maybe it's me that's just daydreaming. But I seem to think there was an era when we had the average food basket and some measure of how much it went up or down or whatever. And that's a long time ago. I don't think we have that. I'm not sure how you get back to that. But short of some measure, how would you know?

My grocery store did have p pasta on sale this week. They have things on sale every week. I'm not aware that that doesn't mean that they would be rising prices on other things because I'm not going to start walking down the aisle. So I think for now it's mostly good theater on both sides of the aisle. How much are you going to pay for your turkey? Maybe not $120. But bottom line, I don't think Canadians can ever get an answer for Thanksgiving

as to whether they're paying a little less for that can of peas than they would have if François-Philippe Champagne had not stepped in. You know, the food basket idea is a good one. I'm not sure it was done by Stats Canada beyond what they normally do. I think it was done by individual media organizations. There was some measure, though, because it's vague. It goes back decades. The average food basket, i remember writing you know those

texts that you write when you start off in journalism went up went down i guess at some point we dropped the average uh food basket whoever was doing it yeah i think media well media organizations were one who did do it, different ones. And then they kind of stopped, I guess, for some reason, one or the other. Maybe people weren't paying much attention to them. They probably would now. But on what we saw yesterday, Bruce, is it going to change our world? I don't know if it's going to change our world. I do think that if I were looking at it from the standpoint of,

has the government achieved something that it wanted to do from a political standpoint? I think the answer is yes, at least for the moment. The conversation has become somewhat more about whether grocery retailers are doing the right thing by Canadian consumers. I could look at it and say maybe the grocery retailers allowed themselves to become more in the crosshairs than perhaps they should have or could have. But I don't really know what the truth is in terms of whether or not they, whether they've been profiteering, whether their business models really require them to price the way that things have been priced. But I do think that if the liberal government agenda was simply to move the focus exclusively away from whether they had been responsible for sitting on the sidelines or governing through a period where prices of groceries were running up,

they succeeded in at least establishing that the eyes should be turned on this industry and these key retailers. And now we've got a conversation which is about, let's look at their flyers from week to week. Let's look at what's happening to a basket of key prices. There's apparently a task force set up within the federal government to communicate regularly with the grocery retailers about the basket of key items. So in public positioning terms, they've achieved something. And probably if there was any possibility that the retailers were padding their profits a little bit, they'll be less likely to do

that with this amount of scrutiny. And so I think that potentially that's an area of success as well. And I'm not saying that to polish the government on this. They should have been on this issue, in my view, at least a year ago. They were late to engage on it, late to come up with what appeared to be a bit of a slapdash approach to it. On the defensive all week long in the House of Commons, as Pierre Poliev prosecuted this largely fake $120 turkey. I mean, the turkey is more expensive than it was, but $120 is a bit, it's hard to find that $120 turkey. I mean, the turkey is more expensive than it was. Um, but $120 is a bit, it's hard to find that $120 turkey. It's very organic. It's very organic. And I think you know, to be, to be fair, his, his term was up to $120. He said a hundred once. And then he went to 120 within the same question period, I think.

I may have that wrong, but I think he did that, which is a lot of inflation. Well, that's how fast prices are rising, like within one question period. It does make you wonder, though, where Mr. Poitier shops for food, if he does shop for food himself. But Bruce says they're late to this game. Yes, the NDP has been on to this game for a year. And suddenly, it's become a liberal game. What that tells me is not just that they're stealing ideas from other parties, which they are, but that they are out of fresh ideas for themselves. But it still goes back to the core issue. If you think that pasta is costing too much and chicken is costing too much, it's probably because your housing costs have gone way up. And at that point, you have little left to buy that grocery or that turkey, whatever its price is. So, yes, we're playing on the edges here of an issue that is really serious for many people,

and that is the housing issue. And why we're playing on the edges is because the liberals cannot, even if they wanted to with a magic wand, resolve the housing issue. So better to focus. And I agree with Bruce. They did well on that in the sense that it gave them some answer. You've got François-Philippe Champagne giving interviews this week saying, when I talked to them at first, they were really hostile.

Now they're really playing nice because they saw my big stick. I don't know. And I don't know how much he's happy with. But it's better than saying we can't do anything about this and letting Pierre Poitier rip into you. I agree. The answer can't be pandemic, post-pandemic supply chain, Ukraine war. At some point politically, however meritorious those

arguments may be in substantive terms, politically they're disastrously bad. You need to be acting as though you are looking for better solutions than that or solutions to those problems. And you need to be more energetic than the government was. And so they've made some improvements. But to the question of whether or not people who are trying to make ends meet, and I agree with Chantal, the cost of housing is such a big part of the monthly expenditure arrangement of most households that you can't have pressure on that. You can't have pressure on mortgage costs without it also creating real scrutiny on all of the other things that people spend money on, whether it's food or holidays or medicines or everything else.

And so it all fits together. And the government is definitely going to continue to be on the defensive, even if they found some way to deflect some of the sense of blame or frustration that exists out there. I wouldn't overstate how much success they've had. They've had a miserable couple of weeks. They've done less miserably on this issue in the last four or five days than they were doing before, but they're still doing miserably. Are they making any headway on the housing front? I mean, you see the prime minister, it's been a couple of times now, he's popped up in some community where they've made an arrangement to build whatever, a thousand homes, and put out X millions of dollars

to help build them on this new arrangement between communities in Ottawa. Are they making any real headway? Or are these kind of the occasional one-off, grabs a headline and move on? Well, at least they're talking about stuff that other normal people are talking about. So that's one. But in the end, I mean, they can't square the circle. And it is the circle of how many immigrants you want to bring in the country at the same time that you cannot provide housing. And that is no matter what you say, it's a question of numbers. You bring in more bodies. It's not being anti-immigration to say simple math suggests if you can't house people who are here affordably and you're set on bringing a lot more people,

there will be a gap between whatever you're announcing, which will, in the end, deliver housing. I totally agree and deliver people that Canada needs to work. But there is a gap, and that gap cannot be addressed by just saying we're going to build more houses in five years. You're going to have to step back and say, how do we make this notion of bringing more people into Canada, which we need to do with the fact that we can't house them? Because it's a bad deal that you're offering people, telling them, come here, but then good luck with finding a place to live. And they can't square that circle because they're looking at all this, you know, grocery

prices, but not looking at houses in the grocery prices equation. They're still looking at immigration, which they really don't want to talk about. And on this, I think they're safe from the conservatives. But it all somehow meshes together. You cannot ask people to come here and then tell them, good luck with finding a roof. When you say that they don't have a problem with the conservatives on this, are you saying that because the conservatives have the same promise on immigration? The conservatives do not want to go there. I totally understand why they would not, because the liberals would be waiting for them at the corner saying you're anti-immigration.

I'm totally pro-immigration, but I cannot square the circle of not having places where people can live and families can live and bringing more people until we make the housing supply more responsive to realities in the market. And at this point, we're not. Bruce? Yeah, I tend to look at this as having two parts to it. One is the rearward looking part. How did we get into the situation that we're in? And I think the federal government was pursuing a path of increasing immigration, which many, many, many stakeholders and provinces included agreed was the right strategy. The levers that had to do with the construction of new housing were not really in the hands of

the federal government. In some cases, not really even the provincial governments, but they were definitely not a matter that the federal government could do very much about. So you could look at that and say the federal government was to blame for the fact that more thinking and wiring wasn't done between the levels of government to make sure that the housing was going to be made available in a timely fashion to accommodate the immigration levels that were going to grow. Fair point. You could also, if you were the federal government, say we were pretty transparent about where we were going. We were expecting that cities and provinces would accept that that was the new reality and would figure out how to change their zoning and other barriers to housing. There's at least a debate there.

On the going forward part, I think the question is, what should the federal government do now? And the answer for me is kind of the things that they're doing. They're trying to create financial incentives to unlock construction that has been locked up a little bit because of rising interest rates and kind of uncertainty about whether or not municipalities will accommodate the building more housing. The specific measure that I think is the most promising is the accelerator program that Sean Fraser has been talking about a lot, where basically the idea is that you will tether or tie federal financial support to the willingness of a community to build more housing more quickly. I think it's the right idea. People can say, well, it should have been done before,

fair enough. But I think that's a separate debate. I think the question of what should be done now is that's probably, they're probably working the right areas of public policy. People will argue that maybe they should do more, more quickly. But I don't think that they've kind of capped their involvement in it, the federal government. I think they've sort of said, hold on this and we will support it. I think that's right. Politically, though, and this is my last point on it, the federal government is going to be in a period of pain on this for at least a year. And they needn't expect, shouldn't expect that they're going to see any improvement in public satisfaction with this issue or approval of what they're doing. For as long as interest rates continue to be at these kind of elevated levels and people are in

this mortgage renewal cycle, once that starts to go down the other way, anxieties will dissipate. At that point, they'll either have a story to tell about how many communities have scaled up their ambition in terms of housing, how many new shovels or more shovels are in the ground. But that won't happen in the next month or two months or three months. It'll be more of a 12-month story. And in the meantime, the federal government is going to take a beating on this issue, no question about it. They just need to know that they're on a path that probably will work,

and they need to have some confidence in it and be able to tell that story to people simply. Do those two issues, housing and grocery prices and interest rates, which are part of both of those stories, do they trump everything else that we tend to focus on? And I'm talking about the collective we of the media, especially the last couple of weeks, the whole issue in the House when the Speaker

and the guy in the gallery and then the India-Canada situation. Do those things trump everything else right now? Chantal? Cost of living issues, for sure. I watched this week a government that has a relatively good standing in public opinion, i.e. the CAQ government of François Legault, go into a by-election and a riding that it owned with a decent candidate and get beaten by the last place party in the National Assembly two to one, that party being the Parti Québécois in a riding that is federalist and has always

been federalist. And while the Premier is focused on bridges and tunnels, the fact is that cost of living issues and the notion that, you know, the school system, the hospitals, nothing is working out the way it should, is what accounts for this two toone ratio on voting night. So imagine, take now the federal liberals who are not ahead in the polls, do not have good ratings as a government, who are facing these same issues. And look at what happened in this by-election. And if you were a liberal MP, you would be going home at night and crawling under your bed. Because those issues, they're out to kill you. And why, you know, this notion that's

about the third link or whatever transportation issue, every single person who is reported from this writing in Quebec City has come back. It's a very middle-class writing, almost between middle class and wealthy, not an inner-city writing. They've all come back with the same finding. The issues were cost of living, health care, education. Oh, wow. So if you think that the federal liberals are in trouble, just look at what happened this week to François Legault.

Was that a shocker on election night? I mean, did people see it coming? It was always supposed to be a very tight result. It wasn't tight at all. It was two to one for the Parti Québécois. And it is not because we are having a resurgence of a Sovereignist feeling. And if we were, it wouldn't show in that writing the opposite would have happened.

It was shocking enough that François Legault was completely off his game all week and rightly said to the candidate on that night that this is not your defeat, it's mine, and it's my government's defeat. Totally true. But people are not happy about where they are, and they are showing it in all kinds of ways.

And this, I know it put the fear of God in the number of liberal MPs to watch that happen. Because if you can't, I mean, François Legault provincially is leading 20 points in the polls. No one is close to him. And he lost that by-election. And now he's totally spooked. So imagine a liberal MP on Parliament Hill. Well, I imagine any incumbent government anywhere must be spooked by that kind of stuff. Manitoba. People are saying that the right-wing thorn of the conservatives at the end of the campaign caused them the election.

I don't think that's true. I don't even think that we know whether it helped or hurt. It's really easy to say, oh, well, they went for these advertisements. If you're not, you can be ashamed of voting for us, but you can still do it. But there is no proof that it hurt them or that it helped them. They still did fairly well. But at the end of the day, incumbents going into elections this year, maybe Daniel Smith is the last lucky one. You got any thoughts on this before we move on, Bruce?

Yeah, I think there are two things to think about at the federal level. One is change. Sometimes people want change in an election. The second thing is it's crappy times for a lot of people. They're feeling distressed, depressed, unhappy with their economic situation. They see the world as a more fraught with problems place. And if we separate those two things for a moment, it's possible that the feeling of frustration with the cost of living and with the sense of how are we going to get out of this funk that we feel like we're in,

it's possible that in a year or a year and a half, that dissipates somewhat, that changes. But what's harder for Trudeau, for the prime minister at the federal level, is when people want change, it comes for you, even if the mood on the crappiness index, if I can put it that way, improves. So some incumbents can survive the doldrums of a not quite a recession, but it might as well be a recession because it's a mood recession for sure. But I don't think that Justin Trudeau can. I think that when I look at some of the numbers that were published this week about his, the preference for him as prime minister compared to Pierre Polyev, I don't remember, he was behind Stephen Harper a little bit for a little while. Maybe there were one or two months there when SNC-Lavalin happened where, you know, there might have been. But generally speaking, he was always kind of ahead on that indicator and he's not now.

And I don't think he's going to be again. And so he's got a different problem from other incumbent governments. Some of them may have the same problem, but he's got a double problem, which is that I don't think, you know, maybe it's not going to come as a shock because I've alluded to this, I don't think he can win another election leading the Liberal Party. And I think that's because, in part, people have just decided they don't really want to listen to what he has to say about the future anymore. And I think that even if for him, the economic circumstances, interest rates come down, there's more houses built, food prices do stabilize or get better. I still don't know that he'll be able to mount a victory in the in the next couple of years

shanta you guys will remember that the charlottetown referendum uh that brian malaroni was and all of canada's premiers were trying to sell and this notion that if the blue jays won uh the title which happened on the night before the vote. It would have helped a yes vote to the Charlottetown Accord, which obviously it did not, because that's not how things work. I'll go with Bruce's sense that things are going to get hard to fix, because I believe that we are moving from a, I think it may be time for a change mood, to a really hard question, which is, do you really believe that the liberals under any leader, including Justin Trudeau, are fit to handle a fourth term. And I fear that when that hard question is being asked by voters

in their minds, the answer increasingly is no. It's not a matter of the economy has improved, the interest rates are down. It's just a matter of saying, I don't think they're up to a fourth mandate. The fourth term, they need to take a break and go replenish somewhere. And that is usually how governments end up getting kicked out. Because at some point you think, yeah, the alternative is really not what you want. But I don't think I can sign up for another four years of this. And I fear that they are slowly but surely edging toward that. I would add to this that nobody wants Justin Trudeau to stay in his job more than the conservatives right now, as far as I'm concerned. There may be some in the Liberal Party who want that quite a lot.

But I think the conservatives want to run against him. I think they feel that the easiest chance to the Canadian centrist voter is I will vote conservative rather than liberal, A, if I'm tired of the liberals, and B, if the conservatives aren't too scary. And so if you tick both of those boxes, one ticked for them and the other ticked by them in terms of the positioning of Pierre Poliev over the summer months and into the fall, you've got a pretty strong winning formula. And the Liberals, as I think we said last week, it's a five alarm fire. They have to take it far more seriously as a political risk if they're going to try to mount some sort of an effort to capture another mandate.

Okay. Well, we've resolved that question then. We've settled on what's going to happen to this. Positive thoughts, yes. No, but here's something we did resolve. Chantel argued for the return of the food basket index. I think that's a good idea. And Bruce has called for the establishment of a crapp basket index. I think that's a good idea. And Bruce has called for the establishment of a crappiness index.

Well, I've also said, though, that I think that there's some good policy on housing. And as much as I've expressed some concerns about whether concerns on behalf of the liberal family out there, whether they can win another mandate with Justin Trudeau, it's more like I think competition is doing what competition does in politics, which is that the losers learn from losing,

and the winners need to learn from the sense of risk. And I think that's what to watch for in the next 12 months. Or 24. Or 24. I still don't think they have enough risk in them. Well, we're going to find out. We're also going to find out what else is on tap for discussion here. But first, we'll take this quick break. and welcome back you're listening to the friday episode of the bridge it's called good talk

chantelle and bruce are here chantelle's in montreal bruce is in ottawa uh i'm in toronto today all right here's topic two uh ind India is playing hardball with Canada. They basically want to toss pretty much all of the diplomats out of the Canadian embassy in India. And Canada, it's unclear to us what Canada is going to do, if anything, in retaliation to that move. But if this was looking like it was heading to some kind of resolution between Canada and India, since the Prime Minister's remarks two weeks ago,

it hasn't yet, and it seems to be getting uglier, not easier. What do we make of this? Where is it going? Bruce? Ever since I started doing at issue with you guys, whenever that was, way back in the 2011 period or something like that. Nice. Be nice.

The one thing that i really really never liked was being asked to offer an opinion on an issue like this and the reason is there's so much more that we don't know than we could ever know and to kind of opine about behind the scenes facts and information and diplomacy and effort and all of that as though either it's a political game. And that's the only importance of it, or that we have some sort of natural instinct for understanding the puts and takes. Chantal can disagree with me if she wants to, and she's smarter than I am, so maybe she does know better. But I don't feel like I know what the right answer is. So when I hear the federal global affairs minister say words that sound like, we're going to try to maintain diplomatic engagement with India.

I take that on the surface as being an expression of this doesn't feel great every day, but it feels like the right strategy for the country. And to me, over the long term, I think if the alternative is every time we get into a dispute, and I'm not meaning to minimize this one, if the dispute is let's erupt the relationship as much as possible, I don't think that's going to solve some of the problems of the world. So I tend to buy that. But all with a giant caveat of I don't know what I don't know, and I don't feel confident in expressing too many more opinions about it. Sorry if that leaves us a little short on content for the time available,

but I'm sure Chantal has more to say than I do. Listen, I think you did a heck of a good job. You ate up three minutes where you could have just said, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Can I just say, I don't know. And then we're going to move on. No,

seriously. I don't think that the prime minister can or would ever walk back a statement, which leaves us basically where we are. If India decides that it's going to kick out two-thirds of our diplomats in India, they're basically going to make it very hard for Indian students and others to come to Canada. Maybe that's the idea on a practical basis. The reason why we have more, because India is saying we'll have parity, the same number of diplomats in both countries. The reason why we have more is there

are more people from India coming to this country for a variety of reasons, business, work, student, than we have going the other way. So basically, India is making life more difficult on both ends. Same with the visa issue here. I went to get a visa to India some years ago, and the majority of people who were looking for a visa were people who obviously had family in India, and I did not. I was just a tourist. So I think it was wise not to pour any fuel on that fire this week. I also note that the opposition parties are not pushing the government on this,

which means that everyone is basically hearing the same thing. And I'm not saying they're hearing the same thing from the government, but they're hearing the same thing from inside their own tents, because the Sikh community and the Hindu community are well represented in Canadian politics. Now, how that plays out on the electoral field in this country. I don't really know. But the diplomatic games and the role that the United States is playing in it, whether it helps or whether it leads to Canada getting more punishment from India, because India is not going to punish the US for pushing on them to be more serious about the issue of the assassination.

I can't tell you that. But I am not unhappy that this is not being settled in public or unsettled in public. Because, I mean, except for political gain in this country, what is the advantage of making this dispute more public and pouring more fuel on the fire public? That's my way of saying I don't know. Yeah, no, no, no. And generous of you to chew up some minutes for Peter on this. Listen, I don't disagree with either one of you, and I agree with you in that obviously I don't know. I'd venture a guess that this doesn't get resolved

before there's a change in government in one country or the other. Are we saying that Pierre Poitier would suddenly say, let's wipe the slate clean and you can come and kill whoever you don't like? countries because that's usually what happens right even when there's it's not like we haven't had issues with uh india through the last 40 50 years um and they they seem to get kind of softened a bit each time there's a change in government on our side or on their side so we'll see but uh okay we'll move on because none of us know. I'm just curious about the conservatives, if we're going to go there. Because I do note that when he was prime minister, Stephen Harper had nothing but good words for Modi in India. He called him the greatest leader of generations, etc. And I'm wondering whether that will come in play if

there's a change in government, whether there's a go-between possibility there. But it is striking that Stephen Harper, and I'm not saying this, I know there are many Harperators who are going to say, well, yeah, right. That would be with the benefit of hindsight that they would say that, that where we are today is not where India and Canada were when Stephen Harper said that. But still, he did, you know, build a really solid relationship with the current Indian government and its leader. And I'm interested, going forward, wherever the next election needs us, to see whether that comes in play. There have been, to move to a different foreign policy area,

there have been a number of reports in the last week or so, week 10 days, that there's been a softening of the support for aid to Ukraine in a number of allied countries, not just the United States. And now that including a sort of a discussion among some in Canada as well as to whether or not it's time to start backing off and pushing for some kind of negotiated settlement. Are either of you reading that at all in terms of a serious move on that front in Canada? I don't see it. I don't see it. And I also feel like other than the United States, where it's out front as a matter of discussion among Republicans, I worry that the reports that I consume about whether European countries are softening their support are a product of disinformation or misinformation as opposed to fact. And I'm not convinced that there isn't any softening of support at all. I am convinced that Russia is

actively always on trying to sow disinformation and disunity into Western countries. And I think they've succeeded a great deal in the United States. I don't think they have in Canada. And it's one of the things that makes me feel good about our Canadian politics right now is that we don't have skirmishing on that. At least I haven't seen it. Maybe you've seen some, maybe Chantal's seen some, but I haven't seen it. Maybe you've seen some, maybe Chantel's seen some, but I haven't seen any. And I feel like where I was really struck by, it's adjacent. But when a story was published by

Murray Brewster and CP, I think it was last week, about the possibility that the defense budget was going to be cut. The federal government took quite a beating for a number of hours before it went out there and said, no, no, no, no, no, no, we don't want anybody to have that impression. Now, I can't remember the last time that a federal liberal government would have been so concerned at the apprehension that they were going to cut the defense budget. Literally, I can't remember a time in my life when that would have been a matter of such concern as it was last week when they sent the defense minister out, Bill Blair, or he chose to go out publicly and tweet why this was not an accurate assessment. And part of it, I think the reason is the prime minister, the foreign affairs minister have been really clear and consistent that we are going to back Ukraine and we're going to continue to back Ukraine.

And we're going to do as much as we need to do for as long as we need to do it. I think those were the specific words of the prime minister. And you can't square that with but we might also look for some economies on the defense budget. So, no, I don't see it in Canada. I do see it in the United States, and I'm questioning whether or not it's happening at all in the European allies. Yeah, I mean, I haven't seen it either, and that's what surprised me about these stories, because there have been a number of them. But if they're all falling victim to disinformation from the Russians, that's entirely possible. The situation in the States is a mess. We might get to that in a second. But first of all, on Ukraine, Chantelle,

anything you want to add on that? Well, it's always a bit flavor of the month. Something is happening in the U.S., and then we try to find evidence that it's happening here. That doesn't mean that the evidence you find is mainstream in any way, shape or form. I happen to believe that our consensus on Ukraine politically is fairly solid and that every party that I see in the House of commons is bought into it to various degrees but has bought into it i also happen to think on a more cynical basis that electorally there is not a party in this country including the conservatives has any interest in playing the let's not waste money on ukraine anymore game the Ukrainian vote is a significant vote in the prairies,

but also in some areas of Ontario. Strong. It matters. So I'm not seeing anyone back off thinking that they're going to collect from whoever wants to vote for Maxim Belny and it's going to make, offset whatever they lose with the Ukrainian community. But I don't agree with Bruce that the government equates helping Ukraine with having a strong

defense budget. And I found that there were interesting weasel words and what Defense Minister Bill Blair had to say about that. And clearly he was saying, we are not going to be cutting, we are going to be slowing down the rate of increase of the defense budget. Well, yeah, that's what Paul Martin used to do when he was finance minister, and he talked about the health transfer. He wasn't cutting the health transfer. He was slowing down its rate of increase. The problem is if you're slowing it down and it's not keeping up with inflation,

as we saw with health care, you are basically gutting the system. And if you're not keeping the rate of increase up with the armed forces, you're basically impoverishing the defense budget and making it harder and making the armed forces weaker. So I saw and I noted, like Bruce, that they rushed to say whatever they did say. But I also see more weasel words than anything else. And I believe that most Canadians will buy into that because they divorce, like the government, the aid to Ukraine from the state of our defense budget.

I think that's a fair point. And really what I was, I think what I was trying to say wasn't that the liberals were so committed to increasing the defense budget that they needed to make it clear that they were, but rather that they felt vulnerable for professing at the same time a story that suggested that they were trying to find savings in that area. And so that, well, in another time, absent the Ukraine situation, a story like that would have probably made three quarters of the liberal caucus happy and the other quarter bored um it didn't have that effect on them this time it made them want to say something interestingly enough the conservatives didn't go hard on the liberals on it which i think if i were someone in the defense department

worrying about cuts but i would find that ominous. Interesting, yeah. Interesting point. Okay, we're going to take our final break, and then we'll have time for a couple of thoughts when we come right back. And welcome back. Final segment of Good Talk for this week. Chantel and Bruce are with us. While you're getting ready to carve up your $120 organic already cooked turkey. Oh, I'm messaging it. You know, it's playing around in my backyard.

I'm playing music to it. Mine is watching TV. It's the same thing, though. It's very relaxing. We've got a couple of minutes to talk about or have a couple of comments on our neighbors to the south. I don't know. I've given up trying to understand what goes on in Washington.

You know, as I head into this weekend, there's even talk, this talk of, you know, maybe Trump could be the new speaker. Can't have somebody have one of their own caucus in a position of power in the Congress who is indicted, under indictment. But I guess, you know, rules are made to be changed, I guess, especially for the Republicans. But I don't know. Can you figure out what's going on there? I mean, really? Between all the court cases and the speaker craziness. When I watch what's going on down there now, I'm reminded of a late mutual friend of ours, a guy named Peter Donaldson. Remember, Peter was a very successful and renowned actor in Stratford and did TV series and everything else.

And I didn't know anything about the acting business, but we would spend time with him. And I remember him telling me that the thing, the worst thing that was happening to the business that he was in was the growth of what he called unscripted content. And I didn't know what he meant by unscripted content. And I was like, what is that? And he said, well, it's all these reality shows, shows, and they obviously are more scripted. Well, actual unscripted TV is what's U.S. politics right now. It's completely unpredictable except an extended period of time. I have no idea how it's going to end. There's no possibility that I can see of there being a final season of it wrapped up with a bow.

And it's very worrying. So then I turn it off and I kind of go, I hope they figure it out because it's a mess right now. I don't know. That's what I have. I don't think they can figure it out. They've been trying. Chantal? We complain in this country about, you know, the leadership.

It's not quite what we used to know. Or maybe the people who are leaders aren't as outstanding. They always look better in the rearview mirror, by the way. or maybe the people who are leaders aren't as outstanding. They always look better in the rearview mirror, by the way. But when you look at what's happening out there, you think the definition of a leadership crisis is incarnated. I don't want to insult anyone on this program, by people who are the age that they are, being what stands for leadership in that country.

Surely, the American political system would be able to produce leaders of a different generation than the two characters that are on offer. And beyond that, I still think that the Americans have accumulated so many irreconcilable differences over so many issues that we have not, that I can't begin to understand how they get to reconciliation. A word we use a lot in another context in this country, but the lines are drawn so deep that the capacity to have a conversation and a give and take conversation, because does, once in a while, I just decide to ignore it because the other side to this is we're sitting next door and we are helpless. There is nothing we can do about this. There is nothing anyone here can contribute to make this better.

We can just watch and go, I hope it doesn't become this. And when people say we've become like the US or Pierre Poilier, Donald Trump, you kind of want to push back just to be a contrarian and say, wait a minute, we're somewhere else here. You cannot use them to tar the people you dislike in this country. It's too easy, and it's, at this point at least, completely different. Now, if Maxime Bernier were leading in the polls, I might be saying something else. Well, all good reasons for us to be thankful this weekend that as much as there are challenges in our country on a lot of different fronts, including the political one, there's nothing like we're witnessing the chaos

that's going on in Washington on a daily basis. And instead of it getting better, it just seems to get worse. So this weekend, it's Thanksgiving. Choose your thanks carefully and enjoy it. So both Bruce and Chantel, you have a good weekend this weekend and we'll talk to you again

in a week's time. Both of you as well. Okay, bye-bye. Thank you.