The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Good Talk -- Will The Leaders Survive?

Episode Date: September 24, 2021

All the leaders. fell short of their hopes, so will any lose their jobs.  That's the focus for Chantal and Bruce on this week's Good Talk.  

Are you ready for good talk? And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. I'm in Toronto today. Chantelle Hebert is in Montreal and Bruce Anderson is in Ottawa. Welcome to you all. The way I was thinking of this is, over time, I've noticed noticed whenever there's a big event, a big national event, usually a big national political event, it could be an election, could be a leadership convention, it could be a budget, a speech from the throne, you name it. There's always a buildup and there's a degree of excitement and interest in terms of what may happen and then almost immediately after that's happened whatever the event is interest disappears like overnight and i you know i've witnessed that by watching uh among other things the you know ratings on the television networks for newscasts

and the same thing happened uh over the last week a lot of interest over the final weekend because the race was so tight. And then once it was over, even though there's still some counting going on, once it was over, interest waned, to say the least. And ratings dropped, and you're left with what you're left with. Well, where I don't think it has dropped is in terms of some reflection and in some cases self-reflection on the part of the different parties and their leadership, because you could make the argument that, you know, none of the leaders got what they were hoping for out of this election.

And so it's only natural that they and perhaps some of their supporters may be thinking about, well, you know, what do we think of this leadership? So that's what I want to discuss today. That's a long winded way of getting about it. But let's start with the big three national parties. And we'll work from the bottom up on those three and and and take it one at a time so let's start with the ndp who you know the last time i saw the count and as i said counting is still going on in some areas because of mail-in ballots etc and very close races they were up one seat from where they were the last time around and up almost two percentage points from where they were last time.

But having said those two ups, they're still in fourth place. And they may well have been hoping for a lot more than what they ended up with. So what does this do to the leadership of Jagmeet Singh? Is there any discussion out there? Are you hearing anything in the back rooms and the corridors of power inside the NDP about Jagmeet Singh? Chantal, why don't you start us? The NDP has the flip side of its third place in the way that it is covered in the sense that the leadership machinations, for instance, of the conservatives will always attract more attention from the media and from anyone than anything happening to the NDP. Just because you're not seeing a lot of public questioning of Jagmeet Singh, I am sure that there are new Democrats who are looking at this thinking, is this good enough?

Two campaigns in a row, 24 seats, no significant gains in the GTA area, which was one place where Jagmeet Singh's event as the NDP leader created a lot of hope initially that it would generate more interest in the 905, where he used to be elected and his brother is elected provincially. But the truth is that when all this thinking takes place behind closed doors, NDP strategists and others will have to start thinking about whether their current leader has enough depth to be more than an also-ran in an election campaign, because this campaign was run almost strictly on congeniality rather than credibility. And Mr. or Ms. coneniality rarely comes first.

That is kind of a consolation prize. It's not the prize. And I figure, because I know a lot of New Democrats who do too, they're not dumb people. They're very smart. That if they crafted the campaign that way, they crafted it to suit the kind of leader they have. And one thing you could say about Jagmeet Singh at his first campaign was that he lacked policy depth.

The excuse for that or the explanation was he was a rookie leader. The transition, and that is true, is never easy from provincial to federal politics, even if you come from Ontario, the center of the universe in the minds of many in the political arena. But on the second campaign, the same lack of policy depth was in evidence, and it was only hidden by the congeniality attack of the NDP campaign. Bruce? I think that in the months running up to the election, Peter, that liberals were really worried about what they were seeing in terms of support levels for the NDP, which were running at about 21% nationally. And if they had been able to get 21%, the election outcome would have been quite different.

Probably the Conservatives would have won the election, but the NDP definitely would have won more seats. I think that whether the NDP does a kind of a sober analysis of its leader and what they did in this campaign has got more to do with the DNA of the party and its willingness or unwillingness chronically to do that kind of thing than it does whether it should be done. I suppose that if it's reasonable for the Conservatives to ask themselves these questions about leadership, it's even more reasonable for the NDP, arguably, to look at what they did and how it worked out and to ask some hard questions. Especially when it comes to urban progressive voters, where it looked like the NDP was going

to eat the Liberal Party's lunch. And then in the end, it was just a fairly significant failure, I think, for the NDP looked at from that standpoint. And one of the reasons I think for that is that Chantal used the word congeniality as the kind of the driving message of the campaign. I think that's right. I think it was really about one man and it was believing maybe a little bit too much in the idea that he was the most popular leader and that would matter, even though polls told us consistently that if you gave people a choice between an O'Toole government and a Trudeau government, it was 60-40. People wanted a liberal over a conservative government. And when I thought about the NDP message, at its best, it's an anti-conservative, anti-rich, pro-environment, pro-feminist,

you know, just this side of radical maybe, but enough to make people pay attention to it. And I didn't hear very much of that from this party this time. I heard a lot about Trudeau. I heard very little about conservatism from them. And I think that's demotivating in terms of their vote. And I think that anti-conservative rhetoric from the Liberals really was the only anti-conservative channel in town. And so it rallied more votes than the NDP did. And I think that's a failure for the NDP. You know, I remember interviewing Jagmeet Singh before the campaign started, and I asked him, where's your base? Like, what's your power base as you go into this election? Is it the West? Is it Labour? Is it Central Canada? And he said, no, no, no, it's none of those anymore. It is youth. It's the youth vote across the board, across the country.

Now, I haven't seen the full breakdown yet of the youth vote, but what I have seen would indicate that the Liberals, once again, outgunned them on the youth vote. So one would assume that was, you know, I don't know whether you classify that as a failure. They did well in the youth vote so one would assume that was you know i don't know whether you classify that as a failure they did well in the youth vote but i don't think they you know it wasn't their power base bruce i think that's right can i just add one one other thing i'd love to hear what chantal thinks about this too because we did talk about it before which is the there was a moment uh in rosie

barton's interview where jagmeet singh was asked about tmx and i feel like if your whole campaign is the other guy is just a talker and you can't trust him um for jagmeet singh not to have an answer uh to the question what are you going to do with TMX for Jagmeet Singh to also have the weakest rated by some people anyway, a climate plan. Major policy failures, at least in terms of preparedness. And I think that has to be on the kind of the list of what went wrong too, especially with young people for those things. Right. Chantal? The NDP used to be known for heavy policy lifting, and some kind of intellectual laziness is set in at the top of the party, and in particular,

on the environment and climate change. That does not start necessarily with Joknytsing. It starts with the rise under Elizabeth May of the Green Party and the notion of many new Democrat strategists that they couldn't win on climate change. It couldn't be a big card in their hand anymore because the Green Party was the climate change option if that guided your vote. The problem is that since those days, the dynamics have changed. A lot of voters have this box that they will tick when they look at a government or a government-in-waiting that is called climate change. It's no longer, I'm worried about climate change, so I'm going to go to the fringe or the margins of the political landscape.

It's front and center. I find it mildly demeaning to young voters who are particularly preoccupied with climate change that you could think that you were going to win their votes by doing headstands or rollerboarding on the tarmac of an airport or dancing on TikTok rather than being the most serious person in the lineup on climate change. And I say that, frankly, as a parent of people who are no longer 20 but who are still young voters who would think this is just not a serious offer. And I would be insulted to be told that because they're younger voters, they should be entertained rather than led to where they want to go.

You know, nothing focuses the mind on leadership more than a challenge. Is there any challenge out there? Is there any talk of someone else or something else? There's always talk of A.V. Lewis, who, as you know, did not win a seat in BC and was running in a seat where it would have taken a major change in the normal local dynamics for him to win. My test is always the same.

I figure over all these years, if A.V. Lewis is interested, surely he's been taking French lessons. And we don't know whether he has or not. There is no evidence of that. But he is the dream candidate of many. And I'm convinced that his presence on the ballot helped NBC in the sense that with his ties to the anti-globalization movement and his name, it made it easier for some green voters to cross over to the NDP in that province.

Peter, I don't know whether there is or there isn't, but I wouldn't be shocked if there was some restiveness on the part of Ontario New Democrats in particular. I think that there are at least a couple of ridings in the GTA, which I'm pretty sure the Liberals had thought they were going to lose, almost sure to lose to the NDP. And I think that there hadn't been as much satisfaction with the outcome of the leadership change when Jagmeet Singh took the reins of power. And so I feel like there had been some difficult feelings, maybe with people who supported another candidate like Charlie Angus, that sort of thing. And so it wouldn't surprise me if those feelings

are still there. And then we heard about these stories about the central campaign, taking money, essentially, that normally would go to get out the vote efforts by the grassroots workers of the party in ridings where they had a chance to win. And the one thing that I think the other parties all kind of envied and admired about the NDP is they had a good, they could focus their resources, their people, their small army would go to where they had a chance to win and get out the vote where they could get it. And they didn't seem to do that this time. And there is some suggestion, I don't know how much merit there is to it, but that the flow of funds went more toward the advertising,

national advertising, TikTok advertising, that kind of thing. And I agree with Chantal. I think that some of that might have felt good by the campaign at the time, but it doesn't look that good in the cold light of day after the election outcome, especially relative to the get out the vote effort in winnable ridings and whether or not there was a misallocation of resources. All of that being said, it probably didn't help the NDP that there were no polls on campuses this year. It's one thing to say your base is the youth vote, but you do have to find them. And the first place to find them at this time of the year is usually on a university campus. If you look at this province, for instance, and Quebec Solidaire, which is as close to the NDP provincially as you could have in Quebec.

And you look at where they won their seats in the last election, a fall election. Every single seat is in a city that has a major university campus. True, true. But here's another little bit of tiny bit of math here, which is the Green Party, the latest count I'm seeing is it lost almost 800,000 votes over its 2019 result. The NDP picked up 114,000. Every poll I've ever seen says half of the Green Party vote that leaves goes to the NDP. That didn't happen. Those people are not impossible to find on campus or otherwise. And I think that that has to look like a big math failure for the party. Yeah, it does look like a big math failure.

And, you know, there will be studies done into what happened to that big chunk of Green Party votes. They didn't go to the NDP. Some went to the Liberals. Some went to the Conservatives. Some went to Max and Bernie. And some went to Max and Bernie, exactly. Okay, we spent a lot of time there on the NDP, partly because when we get to the Conservatives.

Well, it's interesting. Well, it is interesting. It's probably the least talked about part of the post-election analysis. And the most talked about is where we are now with the Conservatives because, as Chantel mentioned earlier, no party has a history of sticking a knife in a leader better than the Conservatives. The Liberals don't have a bad history on that, but in a leader better than the conservatives the liberals don't have a bad history on that but it doesn't match what the conservatives got game they do

have game they have game on that on that front but um the conservatives had a lot of a lot of game and it was interesting to see because right out of the gate on election night there were you know well-known conservatives suggesting that uh there'd been big errors made by aaron o'toole and he may have to pay the price they slowly you know what was it yesterday i think mike harris came out and and said this is not the time uh to do in aaron o'toole he was actually a smart guy and a good campaigner etc etc it's time to rebuild the party and decide on the image of the party and what you want the party to stand for

more than be fiddling around in the leadership game. Having said all that, the numbers show the Conservatives actually lost votes. They still had more votes than anybody else, but they lost some votes. And at best, they have the same number of seats as they had going in so uh where are we on Aaron O'Toole what do what what do we what do we think is happening there that we haven't already said in the in the last week or so Bruce

well since you threw in that caveat of haven't already said, I don't have anything to say. Oh, my God. Oh, fortunate. Let's move on to the next party then. No, look, I think the Conservative Party wasn't united before the election campaign. And the election result will reveal how disunited it is or isn't. I think that it wasn't united because I read a quote by Mark Strahl, the MP from BC, which I thought, you know, put the dilemma succinctly that there's, in his view, there's no point in a Conservative Party that's

not Conservative. There's equally no point in a conservative party that can't win enough votes to form a government. That's been maybe the eternal dilemma for the conservative party, but it is no less evident today, maybe more evident, especially when they look at their results in the GTA and other urban areas of the country. They had a chance to do better. They could have done better. Why didn't they do better? Those are good questions to ask themselves. And part and parcel of that is, you know, the evidence. And we, you know, we have to be careful about assuming that statements by unnamed people about what Aaron O'Toole chose to do or didn't do are completely accurate. That happens when people are trying to remove a leader and news stories welcome those kind of comments,

even though they're sort of unverifiable by their very nature. Having said that, the idea that the platform didn't chart a steady and convincing course either for conservatism or for mainstream centrist voters. It wasn't credible enough on guns to survive a stress test on that. It wasn't powerful enough on climate change to knit both the interests of urban climate concern voters and traditional conservative voters who didn't like the idea of any kind of price on carbon because it felt like it was liberal light. So I don't think there was a deafness to the platform. But I also and I did say this before, and I'll touch on it again. I think that if you're a leader in the Conservative Party today and you don't do a lot of the kind of.

Hey, let's rally everybody together visibly. Make sure that if something goes wrong, everybody feels like they're obliged to stand by me again, at least for a little while. And I don't think Aaron O'Toole did that very much with his former leadership rivals, with his front bench, with other influential people in the party. And so the saying I learned first in my political life, I don't know who said it, and it wasn't only from politics, what goes around comes around is a real truth in politics. And if you treat people with a bit of distance distance or maybe even disdain, when you feel like you have the opportunity to do that, don't be surprised if things go wrong, and there's another kind of agenda that starts to be discussed if you feel some backlash because of that. Chantal. There's another saying that is one familiar to Brian Muller,

and it is that you dance with the one who bring you, which in the case of Aaron O'Toole, he could not do because he literally spent the campaign as a prime ministerial aspirant campaigning against Aaron O'Toole leadership aspirant a year before. He seems to have chosen which of the two he wants to be on election night. I thought his election night speech was actually the most authentic speech that he delivered over the past two years. And there is plenty in the election results that shows that there is contention that the party needs to be repositioned closer to the center is the right one.

Those results in the large urban markets of the country speak volumes about that need. And also, the fact, and one of the first things that happened this week was that the Quebec caucus, possibly to a man and a woman, including the Senate, rallied behind Erin O'Toole. One of the reasons for that is not just that Premier François Legault found in Erin O'Toole a rare conservative leader since Brian Mulroney that a Quebec premier would want to back. But it is also that the campaign has exhibited a fundamental weakness in the Bloc Québécois' base of support. That fundamental weakness was obliterated in large part by the English language debate controversy, but it remains there. And that's a major opening for a leader who does not inspire fear or disdain in Quebec. And Aaron O'Toole may not have won much in Quebec, but he certainly does not inspire that.

The fact that all those MPs still want to fight another battle under his leadership kind of speaks volumes about that. So it's going to be interesting to watch going forward, but I do think that the conservative base, and we always talk about those factions, the social conservatives, the libertarians, etc., that in the case of the social conservatives played a major role in O'Toole's ascent to the leadership, as if they were all single-issue people, which is not the case. Yes, they have reason on that basis to be unhappy with Aaron O'Toole, but this is the party that turned its back on Stockwell Day, one of their own in the case of the social conservatives, to pick Stephen Harper, who was campaigning for the leadership, telling them he would not pursue abortion restriction policies if he came to lead the party, because they wanted

to win and they could see that or believe that their chances of winning were better under one than the other. So it's simplistic to say, well, you know, 30% of the people who vote or the majority in caucus may be social conservatives, so Aaron O'Toole is toast. I don't believe that. I believe that there will be more thoughtful thinking beyond the knee-jerk, we're unhappy with the result. I think it was wise of him to use that election night speech to signal that he was not going to leave without a fight.

If there is a fight, it will take somebody to fight against or a collection of people to fight against. The Conservatives always seem to have people standing in the wings, if not capable, certainly are willing to be in the wings and want to run. Have we seen any hints from that group this week that they want to fight? They're all at the mirror shop buying those mirrors that are special in politics that make you look bigger than you actually are. And yes, there have been rumblings from a variety of quarters, but no one seems to want to come out of the shadows. I think they're still rightly feeling the ground to see if they have a shot at it. They might look at what the NDP did to Thomas Mulcair.

Can we seriously argue that the NDP would not have done better if they'd kept Mulcair against the weaker Trudeau in 2019? He would have been the stronger of the three main leaders, Andrewir against the weaker Trudeau in 2019. He would have been the stronger of the three main leaders, Andrew Scheer, Justin Trudeau, and Thomas Mulcair. He left with 44 seats. That's 20 more than Chuck Meatsingh this year. There is a bit of a lesson there. If you're a party based that wants to be comfortable with your leader, then go the NDP route. If you're a party that aspires to make changes, then work on your policy between now and the next election so that you craft an

offer to Canadians that is more credible and less all over the place than the offer that Aaron O'Toole put forward. And when you say go the NDP route, you're talking about a leadership review soon. Well, you can see that the NDP is totally comfortable by and large, the base with the directions that Jagmeet Singh has put forward versus those of Thomas Mulcair. The only problem is the roadmap he is giving them, the one they like, leads them straight to opposition benches. So yes, you could replace Mr. O'Toole with someone who looks more like the base. And then you could maybe replace those chairs on the official opposition side with more comfortable seats, because you'll be using them for a long, long time. Yeah, I think that's right. I think that parties aren't usually test masters

when it comes to making these calculations, because if they were and they were conservative, they would assume they won't have Justin Trudeau to run against the next time. And so what will they run for or what will they run against becomes a pretty important way of starting the process of thinking about what they should do. But I was going to say, Peter, that one of my favorite political songs is the sound of people who really want something to happen, but want to use words that make it ambivalent or sound ambivalent or oblique about what they want to have. I was reading a story this morning. I think it was a Canadian press story, and it quoted a couple of people, Leslyn Lewis and Michelle Rempel-Garner.

And the quotes sounded to me very, very, very tepid in their support of Mr. O'Toole. But they were presented in this context of the story as being supportive of him because the words used, the phrase was, well, I take him at his word when he says that we're going to have a thorough review. And so if you just say, I take him, if you just focus on, I take him at his word, you can say, well, that's an expression of support for Mr. O'Toole. But if you're Mr. O'Toole, you don't know that that's really a measure of support. It's basically somebody saying, well, we'll have to talk about this later. And Leslyn Lewis, I think, was the other one who said, well, you know, what was done with Mr. Scheer was too hasty, or I'm paraphrasing a little bit,

and we shouldn't do that, which isn't the same as saying we shouldn't replace Aaron O'Toole. It's entirely plausible that what a Lesley Lewis was saying was, if you're a conservative who voted for Aaron O'Toole but considered me as your second choice last time, I want your support if there's another race and I'm going to run. So sometimes people use language like that to send out signals that they can then continue to work as things develop. And then the final version of that is that caucus member who has self-chosen or been delegated by others to be a little bit the stalking horse for the hard message. In this case, I think it was Chris Wharton from Saskatchewan or Alberta. I should know that. But anyway, his language was really, really rough. And sometimes you can read a story like that. And if you're maybe just a casual observer of politics, you go, well, that's just one person. But, you know, more often than not, that's not the case.

That's the one person who has been sent out to throw the heavy artillery out. And there's usually a few more, maybe more than a few more. think that this vaccination question kind of landed squarely in the middle of this party unity question in a way that really perplexed the campaign. I think you can't be so pro-vaccine in January, February that you're beating the Liberal Party up every day. And then come election time in September, you're the take the vaccine, don't take the vaccine, we'll take it or we won't take it, but we won't tell you and not have people wonder why there seems to be that kind of inconsistent level of belief in using science to solve this pandemic. Anyway, I'll stop there. I saw Chantal picking up her pen

like she wanted to kind of riff off some of those. Also because I have to write a column and I'm going to forget anything I say. But Bruce said something about fighting the next campaign against someone other than Justin Trudeau and who you're going to be fighting at that point maybe is where you need to get your head around. But the other notion about the next campaign is what you are going to be fighting on.

And some of the issues that really divide the conservative movement will be largely non-issues come the next election. And let me name just two. By in two years or three years or maybe four. We're not going to be having another debate over carbon pricing and the carbon tax. It will have been a fact of life for five, six years. It's going to be in the system. That is not where the debate is going to be.

We will not be debating Trans Mountain and pipelines because TMX will have been done and no other pipeline will have gotten off the ground. That is going to be a fact of life. Childcare, we are not going to have the debate over the liberal childcare initiative because it will be a done deal. What happened this week? One of the first things that happened this week was Premier Ford resurfacing in Ontario to have a news conference and say, by the way, I would like to sign one of those childcare agreements. Well, in two or three years, the money will have been spent and no conservative leader, whoever he may be, is going to go around saying, I'm going to dismantle all that. It's going to be too late.

So, there is an opportunity to craft a forward-looking platform that walks past these internal dissensions on those issues because they will no longer be in the picture. That would also be true, by the way, of medical help in dying. And vaccines. The regime in place. We're not going to be revisiting in three years. Not happening. And the other thing that may help Mr. O'Toole, and that's my final point, is a lot of conservatives are going to say, we've lost power federally. We have two big battles coming over the next two years. The first is in June, and it's keeping Ontario. And if we want to keep Ontario, we cannot afford to have every party activist

lined up in a war to the finish to decide the fate of Erin O'Toole. And the second is Alberta, where Jason Kenney may not be safe, but government is in play in Alberta. And it is totally possible, and that also goes for the NDP because of what's happening in Alberta, that the NDP can come back to power with Rachel Notley. So for many conservative activists, keeping those two big provinces in the conservative fold should be more important than having a war over Eranotu. I love the way you describe what things could be like, you know, two and a half, three years down the road, and what won't be at play. You can add, I think you can add, safely add vaccines to that. God, if we are not through all this by then, we're in a lot more trouble than we think.

But, you know, what will still be there, which they didn't play on this time around, was, you know, the state of the economy, the national debt, the deficit, all of that will still be around, inflation, you name it, which are more traditional conservative issues where they normally fight. That's usually the battleground. Without dividing over the issue internally. I think that one of the great vulnerabilities for Aaron O'Toole in this next period is probably

that his fiscal approach didn't sync up with the view of the vast majority of his party. And so whether or not they would have actually run on something different or can just use it as an excuse to beat on him a little bit now, I think it is going to be, along with carbon pricing, one of the biggest themes among those who say this wasn't a conservative platform, that the cost of the platform was going to be the same as the liberals and left people wondering, well, is that conservative enough? And if we're spending all of that money, what are we getting for it? So I think that's a big vulnerability in terms of bringing the party together. And if I'm Mr. O'Toole, and I'm thinking about if I'm going to defend successfully, I'm going to need to explain that and describe what my platform will be in the next election campaign, at least to some degree, to start to reassure people

who might be inclined to support him that they'll know which Aaron O'Toole they're going to get. Well, if there's one thing he's proven in a couple of years is that he can change positions, and one assumes he's going to have to do some more of that in the next little while if that is part and parcel of holding on to his job. Okay, good discussion. That does leave us with Justin Trudeau. And we're going to do that after this quick pause.

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All right, back with Good Talk. Chantelle Hebert is in Montreal. Bruce Anderson is in Ottawa. I'm Peter Mansbridge. I'm in Toronto today. I wasn't sure where I was. Anyway, that's where we all are. You're listening to Good Talk on Sirius XM Channel 167 Canada Talks,

or you're listening on wherever you get your podcasts. And we appreciate your support over these, especially over this last five weeks of the campaign. The numbers for Good Talk and all the other programming which falls under the bridge has been just terrific, and it's good to hear from so many of you. Okay, we've dealt with Jagmeet Singh, and we've dealt with Aaron O'Toole. Their situations are resolved.

They just have to listen to what we said and they know exactly what they need to do. So let's talk about Justin Trudeau for a moment because he didn't win a majority, but he did hold on to what he had and actually added a couple of seats. He did not finish on top of the vote- a poll but uh nevertheless as we said he's still prime minister now all three of us have said at one point or another before the campaign or before the voting day that we did not think he would run a next time that we've just seen justin trudeau in his last election campaign, that'll be a decision he needs to make. What do we think?

Let's start from this. Have your views changed at all on that, you know, since we've been going through all the election results from the other night? Nope. Okay, go ahead. But that is not because I think there will be a movement to house justin trudeau it is because i i think that uh this is a term where he could set his legacy all these issues we just talked about that won't be in the picture of the next election

they will be his legacy in three years there is not a case of a fourth consecutive victory under the same leader to be found anywhere in recent times. Yes, Pierre Trudeau had a fourth mandate, but he had to lose to win. So the fourth consecutive one was Paul Martin's to Jean Chrétien. And we know what happened after that. And possibly if Jean Chrétien had And we know what happened after that. And possibly if Jean Chrétien had run and led the party, he might have won, but that didn't happen. So prime ministers have two choices.

They can retire and let others deal with the mess, and it's usually a mess once they do that. Think Kim Campbell, Brian Mulroney, Trudeau and John Turner, Stephen Harper, or they can choose to have voters fire them. I think if Justin Trudeau thinks long and hard about his options, he probably would relish having his hands freer of electoral calculations so that he can get down to those legacy items and possibly enjoy it. I'm going to say something that has nothing to do with political analysis. Those kids on election night, they've grown up a lot. Yeah, they sure have.

There is a point where you say, how much of my kids growing up do I still want to catch up to before they're gone? And when you look at how big and tall they are, you think, as a parent, I don't know. That being said, there is a widespread assumption within liberal ranks that what I'm saying is true. If that assumption turns out over the next year and a half to look like it's wrong, I'm not sure whether there might not be pressures on Justin Trudeau to think of taking a walk in the snow. Parties work like that. And as long as you think the person you want to see leave will do the right thing, you're not going to be proactive.

But if you start thinking that's not happening, You might feel otherwise. A few points also. The prime minister as a leader is hardly a spent force to lead this party. I can't think of a successor that could do better than he could or he has in Quebec. So no one's going to say he can't win in Quebec anymore. No one's going to say he can't win in Ontario. He's won seats that Premier Ford will want for the Conservatives a few months down the line. And no one will really be saying he can't win seats in the West because he actually managed to win seats in Alberta. So for a prime minister running for the third time, his national representation looks pretty good and better than Stephen Harper's at the same time, his national representation looks pretty good and better than Stephen Harper's at the same time, who could hardly get the time of day in Quebec, for instance.

The Liberals are well positioned in every large urban market, including Montreal. You look at this and you think, who would replace Justin Trudeau and do as well across the board. For all of the awards of the prime minister and the wear and tear, the answer is not readily available. You know, before Bruce jumps in here, two points. You're right about national representation. I mean, the only province that didn't elect a liberal, or at least one, was Saskatchewan.

And, you know, that does say something about any party on election night. If they can have representation to some degree in every province or almost every province, you know, that gives them some credit on the national front. The other point was your point about the kids. I noticed that too. You know, man, they've grown up fast. And I found it interesting that he was with them quite a bit in the end part of the campaign.

The last few days in anything that was in the neighborhood of Ottawa or Montreal, they were there with him. And I thought, you know, I'm not sure if that's more than it had been in the past, but because they've so grown up, because they look almost adult, it did leave you going, well, you know, maybe exactly what you said. Maybe he's thinking at some point here I've got to spend more time with these kids who've grown up so quickly because they'll be gone soon.

As parents, we know that. Yeah, exactly. Bruce? Yeah, well, I think 100% it's the case that if Justin Trudeau wants to run as leader of the party in the next election, his party will be behind him. They may not be as enthusiastic as they have been in the past, but they will not challenge him. There's a lot of affection between him and his party, which isn't to say that the natural course of things means that people in the party who have ambition, who want to get on to what's next, they want their turn to write that page. And that's a normal and I think quite healthy thing. And I think he probably

thinks that it's quite healthy as well. So I wouldn't be surprised to see him appoint a cabinet that gives significant opportunity to people who might want to run to replace him. I think he's not that leader who will go, how do I keep the pretenders to my job at bay or diminished or hidden from public view? I think he's going to do exactly the opposite of that. And I think so we'll see in his cabinet appointments an indication of whether or not I'm right about that. But he feels to me like a guy who is going to enjoy the custodial responsibility of turning over power in his party to another

generation of people, rather than gird himself up for a fight against that inevitable kind of process that takes root within parties and i think that's to his credit that he thinks that way and one of the reasons you mentioned kids and and that sort of thing and i think that probably is an important care aspect of it but the other is it it's a it's a garbage job now uh I mean, I think it's easy for people sometimes to look at it and say, well, you know, you've got all the accoutrement of power, but it's not a pleasant job. You take an awful lot of deeply personal criticism,

much more, I think, than has ever been the case because of the role of social media and some of the other factors that we've talked about. But also, if it was already getting to be a very unpleasant job, and you add a pandemic that sucks all of the available joy, you know, the human interaction, the chemistry aspect of politics, if all of that goes away and all you have are, I think I'm going to have to spend $250 billion. I think I'm going to have to try to find a way to get vaccines from somewhere around the world.

I have to try to figure out how to recover the economy and not make epic mistakes without a playbook really to follow. He's a, you know, he's a chemistry kind of leader. Whereas you look at Harper and say, well, I mean, he probably didn't really love the chemistry part of the job very much. He liked the kind of the more cerebral use of power, the structural use of power. I think Trudeau likes ideas, but I think he loves the chemistry of politics.

And the chemistry of politics has completely gone, what's the technical term, to rat shit in the last couple of years. Pardon my language. We're going to take a quick last break here and come back just a bit on the cabinet making but i i just want to say i i on your what you raised i found particularly interesting is it was a reminder of the last liberal leader who did two minorities in a row and that was lester pearson 63 65 what did he do he brought in new blood and he gave them opportunity gave them cabinet positions and the ability to you know basically run for the job because he knew it wasn't going

to be staying forever and one of them of course was justin trudeau's father um so that's interesting i like the way you put that okay quick last break and then uh come back on the uh the question of cabinet making this is the bridge with peter mansbridge all right back for final thoughts with uhantal in Montreal, Bruce is in Ottawa. Cabinet making, you know, there was all the fuss in 2015 about a cabinet that was half female, half male, because it was 2015. It's 2021. What, aside from what we just mentioned

on what the potential for the cabinet could be, what are you looking for? Is the big portfolio to come, as we talked about a moment ago, is going to continue to be finance? Do we see change there? Foreign affairs, do we see change there? Some of the big portfolios. We've only got a couple of minutes, so be quick.

Chantal. So think of Justin Trudeau as a man who is at this point wearing a double straitjacket. His first straitjacket is his imposed straitjacket of gender parity. He has lost four female cabinet ministers, three to defeats and one to retirement, Catherine McKenna. So he's got to find that balance by appointing new women to cabinet. But he also has won seats in Alberta, and it's unimaginable that there would not be seats at the table for Alberta now that he's got MPs, and they happen to be men.

That will make all the calculations even more complicated. I don't believe he can walk away from gender parity. He's made it too much of a branding issue, so he can't back off. Finance, you mentioned, it would be the biggest news of this new cabinet if Chrystia Freeland, after only one budget, is the first female finance minister, were suddenly not the finance minister. It would be amazing in the wrong sense of the word. Many women voters would look at that and see that as a way for Justin Trudeau to try to stop Christian Freeland from being a strong contender for his role. I don't believe that's in the cards. I would not

be totally surprised if Mark Garneau, the current foreign affairs minister, were reappointed, but only for a brief time and went on to a diplomatic posting sooner rather than later, especially since he is in a safe seat in Montreal, and it would be easier to run a by-election in that riding and keep it liberal. So I keep an eye on whether Mark Garneau is back at Foreign Affairs, and if he is, whether we are not talking about his replacement in six, seven, eight months. A couple of things, Peter, that stand out to me. There are two Liberals elected in Alberta.

I wouldn't be surprised to see both of them in the cabinet, one from Edmonton and one from Calgary. I think that would be an interesting dynamic. I think I agree with Chantal. It'd be hard for the PM to move away from gender parity. So he's going to have some knitting to do. The other thing I would probably look for him to do is sort of do the lineup of who's been punching above their weight or playing particularly well or kind of improving their

game and what kind of role do you want to give them? And my list would be Anita Anand, who, you know, very successful, I think, in the vaccination procurement side. But other than vaccination procurement, it's not a high profile role. And she's in a riding that could be vulnerable. So it would be a good idea probably to give her something that gives her more protracted visibility. Marco Mandesino, I think, has been a kind of a rock for them in Toronto. Mark Miller has done a fantastic job, in my opinion, with the very difficult Indigenous services role. I think Jonathan Wilkinson has been a great steward of the environment file. And I wouldn't, I wouldn't be surprised if they moved

him, because it's a complex file, he handles it well. And, and he, you know, there's contingent policy work to do. And then the last person for me, that's interesting is Melanie Jolie, who I think has, has convinced whatever number of skeptics there might have been about her political acumen and her ability to kind of become a more effective spokesperson for the government, that she has been a more effective spokesperson for the government. People think that she has ambition. I don't know whether that's true, but... This is someone who ran cold for mayor of Montreal. Let's answer that question. They all have a degree of ambition.

I'm going to have to cut you off there because there's hardly anybody left in that caucus. Arjit Sajjan, yes. Defense minister. Big question mark. Yeah. Question mark there. Okay, listen. This was a fascinating.

We never got to the other leaders, but we did circle on the big three. And I think that was an interesting way to go. Listen, try to have a relaxing weekend. We could all use one of those. We'll be back on Monday, by the way, with a special edition, Isaac Bogoch, Dr. Isaac Bogoch. We're going to get back into the pandemic in the sense of trying to understand exactly where we are. So big questions for him on Monday's The Bridge.

Chantel in Montreal, Bruce in Ottawa, thanks both very much. We'll talk to you again next week. Thank you.