The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - How Deep Is The Unrest In The Liberal Party?

Episode Date: November 3, 2023

It's been a disastrous week for the Liberals and equally so for Justin Trudeau. How deep does the problem go, and what may happen as a consequence?  Some things that were held private are not being hidden anymore.  What happens now? Bruce and Chantal are here to give their thoughts.

Are you ready for Good Talk? And hello there, Peter Vansbridge here with Chantelle Hebert and Bruce Anderson. It's our Friday episode of The Bridge, Good Talk. And as always, I don't know what it is. Fridays, there's always something to talk about. And it certainly is again this week. So let's get at it. I mean, it's been quite a past seven or eight days,

ever since the Prime Minister announced the heating oil issue. And it's been bubbling up. Lots of reaction to it. Not surprisingly, as we suggested there probably would be last Friday. Lots of reaction across the country. Lots of people feel that, why not me? Why don't I get the break? Same break that heating oil customers have.

So that's been at play, but it's deeper than that. It's more than that. In the last week, we've seen a Liberal senator tied closely to the Jean Chrétien days raise questions about the Prime Minister's leadership, even suggesting that, you know, really it's time to step down. There's been lots of comparisons to the old walk in the snow stuff from the Pierre Trudeau days. Um, we've had, we even had actually yesterday, and I want to be very careful about how I described this, but you had Mark Carney not saying he wanted to be leader or he was ready to run for the leadership, but saying someday in the future, it's possible that I might want to be running for the leadership. So not a definitive like right now, but certainly throwing his name more convincingly into the circle of discussion that he's been a part of for quite some time, part of in the sense

that we've talked about it, a lot of other people have talked about Mark Carney's potential if the leadership spot ever came open in the Liberal Party. So you have these things happening, and quite frankly, I don't think we've witnessed in the eight years that Justin Trudeau has been the leader of the party and the Prime Minister of Canada, I don't think we've witnessed any kind of discussion out in the open like this. We've certainly heard the buzz around. That's been a given in the last couple of years.

But here it's like kind of on the table now, a discussion about his leadership. How's he reacted yesterday? He was kind of laughed it off, pretended he didn't know who this guy was, the senator. And he was just pretending. It was clear he knew who he was and knew what he'd said, but he kind of laughed it off.

So where are we on this story? Not the heating oil story, not the climate change story, not the carbon tax story, but on the Justin Trudeau story. Where are we, Chantal? It's impossible to divorce the acceleration of the chatter about leadership of the Liberal Party from the events of the past week and the announcement on heating oil and climate change. Because what did that show? It showed a prime minister who at this point would not stand up to his Atlantic caucus and under duress made the announcement on heating oil. And when I say duress, let me define it.

Under threat of the resignation of some of his Atlantic Canada MP. This is a prime minister who is now operating under the threat of another resignation, that of his minister of the environment, Stephen Guilbeault, who has made it quite clear that if there is another carve-out and the pressure has been mounting, he will resign. So what we have witnessed in public over the past week is a weakening of the prime minister's leadership position vis-a-vis his caucus, but also vis-a-vis the country and vis-a-vis his allies in the House of Commons, who will on Monday vote against the government with the Conservatives on a motion to extend the carve-out on heating oil to natural gas, etc.

The leadership stuff. Well, yes, Percy Down, I don't think, goes to Christmas parties at Rideau Cottage since Justin Trudeau was elected prime minister. He is part of the group of liberal senators who were unceremoniously phoned the door when Justin Trudeau said, I do not want to have senators in the caucus. He has since then never been anything close to an insider in liberal circles. But as you and I know, having watched these kinds of events and other circumstances, the people who usually come out in public, show their face on leadership issues,

are usually people who have little or nothing to lose. Few people have less to lose than a senator from a has-been era whose main impact or main claim to fame is to have been the chief of staff to Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. But what that does, a couple of things. There was the timing of this open, this op-ed from Senator Down and then the interview in the Globe and Mail and the statement by Mark Carney that he was not ruling out a leadership bid.

On that, let me tell you that if I ever gave an interview to say, well, if Peter is going to step down from his job as host of Good Talk. I'm not ruling out applying for it. It would presume that I want your job. Because my normal answer, since I don't want your job, would be, I would be sorry that Peter steps down. End of comment. So you don't usually say you're not ruling something out when you're applying for a job unless you want the job. So I believe Mark Carney does want the job. Of the two things that happened, the Percy down and the Mark Carney, the one that drove the PMO crazy this week was Mark Carney. Not just for the expression of interest, which is a way of putting someone who is an outsider to the Trudeau years, who has a record on the fiscal side as a former bank governor,

and who happens to have serious thoughts about climate change, putting himself in the window as in if this guy is now blinking on climate or on fiscal responsibility, there is always me sitting there. And it didn't help the PMO feel better to think of a couple of things. The first was that Mark Carney did say also publicly that he would not have done a carve-out on heating oil. He would have found another way to help. And in this, he was supported by former Federal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna, very publicly. But there's also paranoia that sets in, and the notion that maybe Percy Down is doing the bidding for his former boss, Jean Chrétien. Something that I don't find particularly

credible, but it does tell you that we have reached the stage where the way that people around justin trudeau think is that even paranoid people do have actual enemies all right chantelle set the table bruce what are you going to pick off that table well i'm disappointed that if you just decide to give up good talk that chantal isn't interested in it i i had been kind of counting on that just in case you know we need that um all right i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna get over it uh you're not ruling out applying is that what you're saying i would i would rule it out i want to be clear. Because I do think that not ruling something out is an expression of interest. I don't think there's any other way to interpret it.

But let me go back to the starting point. What's been happening in the last couple of weeks? I think that when we talked about the aftermath of the 2021 election, not because we're clairvoyant necessarily, but because we've just seen a lot of politics that we could imagine that we were going to be in a series of events that feel like the events that are happening now, except if Justin Trudeau and the people around him took that December, that 2021 outcome as a real warning sign that they needed to rejuvenate,

that they needed to establish a kind of a stronger agenda, more effective communications program, more effort to reach the kind of voters who looked like they might drift away if the conservatives ever got a leader that they felt good about or a program that didn't make people anxious. And here we are. I think it's reasonable to say that the liberals have struggled to establish an own an agenda of their own. they've been on the defensive a lot of their communications programming has not been what it, um, could be or should be if they want to, uh, to get off the, uh, the defensive, uh, the big reset plan for the shuffle in the summer, um,

didn't take, uh, that's maybe putting it, um, mildly. And so they find themselves having another chapter of the same story. And I always felt that it would be inevitable, just given the ticking of the clock, that at some point, in a party as dynamic as the Liberal Party, filled with a lot of people who have a lot of energy to try to get things done, a lot of people who feel as though their seats might be in jeopardy in an election held anytime soon, that people were going to start to ratchet up the pressure on what's generally called the centre. Now, the centre can be the people around the Prime Minister, it can be the people running the campaign. It can be the prime minister himself. It's all of a kind, really, at this point. And I think it's a mistake for people in politics who are in the incumbent's to be either shocked or overly,

to be shocked by that is a mistake because it happens and it's going to happen and you have to know that it's going to happen. And part of the job of managing in a situation like that is being able to kind of observe, attend to, defuse, you know, shape the way in which you're doing things so that you're not, to Chantal's point, at risk of defections or resignations or public outbursts, that kind of thing. I think that this may be the moment, the last week or two, where that sense of risk has fully materialized for Mr. Trudeau and the people around him. And so it'll be interesting to see how they deal with these kinds of pressures,

whether it's Senator Downs' comments or more people talking about whether there, you know, if there was a leadership race at some point in the future who would be interested or not. I didn't find there was anything surprising or inappropriate about what Mark Carney said in response to questions about either the carbon pricing decision that the government made or the possibility that he might enter politics if there was an opening at some point in the future. The fact that he's not in politics or in government right now and felt like it was appropriate to help people who were suffering energy poverty, but not to unwind or to call into question the government's commitment to carbon pricing, perfectly understandable, logical position. I happen to think that his position

is the right policy position. But I think he said it in a very respectful way. As I recall reading his comments, he said that he thought that no government or no prime minister of Canada had done as much on climate change as Justin Trudeau in this liberal government. He just took issue with this one particular decision. As to whether or not it's wrong to say if the job opens up at some point I'm interested in, I think it's probably prudent to do that if you are interested in it, because Chantel's point, I think, is also that people are planning, organizing, imagining what their runs might look like. And, you know, if you are interested and you don't communicate that somehow, that can be a mistake too.

All right. You know, obviously, if you're interested and, you know, you want to start off with a seat somewhere, there are openings for a seat. So it's not just the prime minister's job if it ever becomes open. So it'll be interesting to see what he does in that vein. Let me ask, there's a couple of points, more than a couple actually, that the two of you have raised that I think are worth, you know,

at least a moment or two on. Chantelle, the vote on Monday, if it's Monday, that the NDP have signaled they're going to support the Conservatives. Should we look at that as any more than just one vote on one issue and then move on? Or could this lead to the fall of the government? It's not a confidence vote unless the government wakes up on Monday morning and declares it to be. But otherwise, unless the government does that, it's a non-binding motion on the government.

So even if it passes, it does not mean that the government needs to do anything about it. There is, so far, at least this time today, I do not know what the Bloc Québécois will be doing, whether they will vote with the Conservatives or not. But the story is playing out really differently in Quebec in the sense that Quebec runs its own carbon pricing scheme as part of a cap and trade system. And so there hasn't been, you know, and a lot of people heat their homes with electricity. So the debate this week is mostly being about the future of Hydro-Québec and how much it may cost down the danger to the government is also that what the conservatives are going to do with this vote is they're going to point at every MP

from Ontario or Alberta or BC and Manitoba who have voted against the motion to say, look at how your MPs have refused to extend the same benefits to you as they have accepted to extend to the people who use heating oil who are massively concentrated in the Atlantic provinces. And that's the real danger to the government. More internal divisions and more turmoil internally. Because I was listening to Bruce, and I was thinking about all the things I heard this week. There are now liberals in private who speak more harshly of Justin Trudeau than conservatives in public. And one of them, and not someone who has spent the past decade in the penis gallery throwing stuff at Justin Trudeau for not doing the right thing, but one of them said, at this

point, they only think we were talking about legacy and how Trudeau has actually damaged this climate change legacy by what he has done. And he has sacrificed the moral high ground on the conservatives on climate change. This will always be thrown back at him in the next election campaign. And this person said the only thing Justin Trudeau cares about at this point is to remain prime minister. And I am thinking the liberals, when I look at them, there are exceptions, ministers who are doing their job and trying hard, but by and large, the liberals are now consumed with two things, Justin Trudeau with trying to win an election or secure his position, and other liberals increasingly discussing leadership and how to position themselves both for the election and for a possible leadership campaign.

And in both cases, not counting on Justin Trudeau and that mix in a positive way. Bruce. Yeah, I was going to say that I think the motion is almost as though we're watching the conservative script, another television ad, and they've created an option for the NDP to play one role in that ad or another role. And the NDP chose what I think if any of us were advising them would say is the smart role for them to take. The, you know, I think that the reason I say it's an ad is I think that the conservatives, obviously you can just tell from the body language and the sense of enthusiasm they have about the way that this carbon price issue has evolved is that they

feel as though they've actually had the single best gift from the government that they could hope to have. And when Pierre Poliev said, as he did the other day, let's have a carbon price election, I didn't see that coming two years ago. I thought the last thing that he's really going to want to do is say he's going to want to talk about acts of tax and all of that sort of thing for a good period of time. But eventually he's not going to want an election to be about carbon pricing, except now I think he does. Or at least he's saying he does conclusion, because the liberal position draws into question whether they really believe the carbon tax is working, whether they really believe that it was well designed, whether they really believe that it's essential as a way to fight climate change or whether there are other ways. All of which are serendipitous for Pierre Poliev and the conservatives. So they've been given a real gift,

which I think is probably the bigger issue for Justin Trudeau right now, is not the public response to this, because it will be the case that many people will not have even noticed this issue. Many people will not be doing any political math in their own minds in terms of their voting behavior on the basis of it. But within the liberal movement or liberal party, it's kind of shaken confidence in what it is that they're going to go to the people with next time and whether or not they can pull off a fourth victory by putting together a more compelling and convincing plan. The other point that I wanted to follow up on, Chantal, was the environment minister's position, Guilbault's position.

Because you seem to feel that any further carve-out and he's gone, which would throw a dagger into the heart of the Liberals' climate change policy overall and its environmental policy. Would that be why we saw the Prime Minister in his one truly vigorous moment this week where he said, that's it, there'll never ever be another carve-out on anything to do with our policy on carbon tax. Was that why he was so adamant? I assume they've talked this week, but both sides have made their positions very clear, at least for this moment. I don't feel that Stephen Gilbo could resign. I know that he would resign.

Why do I know that? Because I watched a show called L'Equilius du Pouvoir, which runs on Sunday. And last Sunday, Stephen Gilbo gave an interview about the announcement and said quite clearly that on his watch, his environment minister, there would not be another carve-out. The sentence was, for as long as I am environment minister.

Now, I did kick the tires of that statement, and it is to be taken at face value. I carve out in the way that it's not just the conservative premiers who are calling for it, which explains the NDP position. It's also every new Democrat leader west of Ontario that is asking for a carve out for natural gas heaters. Rachel Notley, an opposition leader in Alberta, the new premier of Manitoba, the opposition leader in Saskatchewan. So whether Justin Trudeau is reacting to that by putting that line in the sand is possible. But that basically means he's painted himself in a corner. And what would happen if Stephen Gilbeault resigned as environment minister? Seriously, what would happen would be that the last place

where Justin Trudeau's credibility on climate change is not in total shreds is Quebec. But the day that Stephen Guilbeault leaves, he takes with it that credibility that the government has enjoyed. And I don't know what happens after that to the liberals, but it is something bad. Because at that point, it's going to be open season from the Bloc Québécois on the climate change, pro-climate change measures front and from the Conservatives on the other front.

And it will be very hard to sustain what is left of liberal fortress in Quebec without Stephen Guilbeault, who two weeks ago, before this happened, told me, looking in my eyes, that he was committed to run again. But that is no longer a firm commitment because it is dependent on what happens between now and then.

Bruce, I want to check one thing with you before we take our first break here. A number of times on this program and others, the discussion is centered around the depth of feeling on the part of Canadians about Justin Trudeau. How is there a deep dislike of Justin Trudeau, unlike anything we've, you know, witnessed before, at least in the, you know, kind of modern-day politics.

And you decided to actually do a little probing on this in one of your recent research studies. And there seems to be a distinction in what you're finding. So can you explain that to us? Yeah, yeah. I'm glad you asked, Peter. I feel like the conventional wisdom for people who are really close to politics, or at least in the social media version of people close to politics, is that Justin Trudeau is widely hated, that the degree of which is that that's overstated. And I wanted to actually measure it to know whether or not I was, to understand why this exists and whether or not it's supported by the data

or whether there's something else that's going on. So I gave, we ran some questions at Spark about each of the three major national party leaders. And we asked people not just do you like or dislike, but the answer categories they gave people were, do you like him? Are you so-so on him? Do you dislike him?

Or are you tired of him? And what I was really trying to understand is, what is the comparative disadvantage right now that Justin Trudeau has with Pierre Poliev and Jagmeet Singh. Is it that he is more hated? Is it that he is more disliked? And the answer is no, he's not actually. It's only about one in five people in our survey who said, I dislike Justin Trudeau, which will come as a surprise, I think, to people who kind of traffic in the idea that Justin Trudeau is hated. But I believe it's accurate. What's a bigger problem for Justin Trudeau is hated, but I believe it's accurate. What's a

bigger problem for Justin Trudeau is about 36% who say, I'm tired of him, which is a much bigger number than it is for the other leaders, even though both of them have been involved in politics in a high-profile way for a good long period of time. And so when you put together, I dislike him and I'm tired of him, you get up to 56%. You have a, you know, it's like a politician carrying a bag of rocks on their back trying to enter into a race with others who don't have the same baggage in public opinion terms. Now, does it really matter if people are tired of somebody? Is that better than being disliked? Yes and no. I mean, I think at the end of the day, if people aren't tuning you in, they might not turn out and vote.

So I think that being a political figure that people are tired of hearing from can be a pretty serious political liability. But I did want to draw the distinction between do people really dislike this person, his character, his values, his policy agenda, most of which I would say no, most people don't. But does he have a challenge that's unique to him heading into this election? I think he does. One more thing, and I'm really curious to hear what Chantal thinks about this, is I was trying to figure out why

this might be a worse problem for Justin Trudeau than for, say, predecessors. And so I looked into data that others have gathered on how the public is feeling about news. And it was interesting to me. Reuters published a big study across several countries. And they documented the fact that more people are feeling stressed by news and they're tuning out news. They don't want to hear so much news. It's coming at them nonstop. It's stressing them out. It's making them feel like they should pay less attention to politics, too. At the same time, you've got a government that has been kind of creating a flood of announcements over time, very visible on social media. So you've got a market that wants less of

this kind of communication and a government that arguably has been doing more of it. And that's a process that could explain why tired of him or tired of them is a bigger factor for this government than maybe for its predecessors. I'll stop there. Okay. Well, thanks for asking. I want to get Chantel's reaction to that, but we're going to take our first break. We'll come right back on that point right after this. And welcome back.

You're listening to Good Talk, the Friday episode of The Bridge, right here on SiriusXM, channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform, or you're watching us on our YouTube channel. Glad to have you with us wherever you are tuning in from. All right, Chantal, Bruce mentioned this distinction between basically hatred of someone, in this case, Justin Trudeau, and just tired of him.

How do you see that? Well, first to Bruce's last point about people turning off the news and suffering from stress and news fatigue. That could go some way to explain why Pierre Poilievre's numbers started going up along with that of his party when the House rose last summer. And he was not the center of the news every day. He was still doing stuff, but it wasn't the same in-your-face stress about this kind of stuff because it was outside the adversarial venue of the House of Commons.

So that could explain part of it. As for the Trudeau haters and people who are fatigued, I don't think there are more Trudeau haters than there were Brian Malroney haters or Stephen Harper haters who all belonged in the category of Brian Malarone, they certainly were numerous enough that he decided to leave the scene. And Stephen Harper, of course, lost the election. But I think the fatigued people are the more dangerous people, not just because they're going to stay home, but because their fatigue, yes, stems in part from having seen too much of Justin Trudeau for the past eight years. I say that as someone who has had to have virtual lunches with the prime minister for almost two years during the pandemic, because his news conference was at 11.30, and he's always late. And I'd end up having to have Justin Trudeau across from my sandwich. And yes, it does build fatigue.

But I think that fatigue goes beyond the, you know, I'm sick of eating jam every morning. I want to change in the menu for my breakfast to a, this government is fatigued. It doesn't have the kind of spring in its policy step that it used to have. It looks like it's all used up. It looks tired. It's had a lot of crisis to manage. But at this point, it's a spent force. And so it's not just that voters are feeling fatigued because they're, you know, Justin Trudeau has your back thing.

It's kind of grating on their nerves. But it's also that they feel that the government is too fatigued to go on. And that impression is reinforced by both the narrative that is created by the polls. It's kind of a chicken and egg thing. But also by the government itself, since the beginning of the summer, what people have been shown of the government, the cabinet shuffle, last week's announcement, my favorite, the minister discovered that supermarket flyers existed and tried to tell shoppers this showed

that he'd been great at getting lower prices, which ridicule things will do more to undermine credibility than the alternative. I'll go to the sense that people who are fatigued are saying, we are right to be fatigued about this government because we feel that it is now exhausted its resources and it's time for a change. I just pull on one little point in what Chantal said that really does resonate with me based on all of my years of kind of measuring what makes voters kind of enthusiastic about a political choice, it almost feels as though the Liberal Party brand slogan has become, we'll have your back. And implied in that is you're going to need that.

There's going to be problems. And it communicates in a subtle way things that this government has been surrounded by headwinds, in addition to fatigue with Stephen Harper, he built enthusiasm around the better is always possible idea. And I can well understand why people who are inside the liberal tent can think, well, we better tell people that we'll have their backs and we better say it as often as we can so that they understand that we will have their back when the next bad thing happens. But inevitably, you're acknowledging that more bad things will happen. And the thing that I noticed about Pierre Polyev is that the mix of him saying everything is broken to everything can be great again, just like bring it home. That's his, I find that a little bit of a wonky slogan, but he's describing a future where there are no problems increasingly. And why is he doing that? Because I think he understands that that's the essential ingredient to create that kind of chemistry, that enthusiasm, and that he doesn't necessarily need

to always focus on everything that he thinks is broken because Justin Trudeau broke it. That sounds like I'm heaping praise on him, and that is not my point. My point is that politicians exist in a communications game or framework where you need to be careful whether you're communicating subtly, maybe unintentionally, things that are harmful to your prospects. And I think that is a little bit true with kind of the endless have your back sloganing by the liberals in the last few years. Yeah, the have your back from them and the common sense solutions from the other side. You know, I had a letter yesterday on the kind of your turn section of the bridge. And it was an interesting letter because it was saying, you know, if there were common sense solutions to everything, there would be no problems, right?

But some things don't lend themselves to easy, common-sense solutions. Racism, homophobia, the list went on. There was a few of them that the letter writer had written and said, get away from that kind of description of how you're going to solve everything. Let me ask this one last question on this point. And the answer may seem obvious, but as we've both, all three of us have learned over time, you get caught up in the moment. You tend to think, wow, this is the biggest thing that's ever happened.

But so let me ask it, given that in the background. Is the situation the Liberals are facing now the biggest sort of crisis of image and confidence that their government has had since first elected in 2015? And the same for Justin Trudeau and his leadership. Is this the moment, the biggest moment of challenge that he and they have faced? Chantal? Have faced? No, because they have faced situations like the pandemic, to name just one, or Donald Trump's hesitancy that were a serious challenge.

But is this the biggest crisis that they are undergoing or they have undergone? Yes, it's bigger than a Saint-Sylvain because the ties that bind that caucus have been unraveling. Because there's always a moment when you watch something happen to a government and you kind of feel like everything you assumed is no longer valid. That happened to me one day in the late 80s, early 90s, when I suddenly heard or overheard the same child dictating his resignation letter from the Mulroney government. And I was standing in a hallway when I heard this dictation and it felt to me like the floor of parliament, I was in the House of Commons building,

was kind of shifting under my feet because everything he was doing had such immense consequences for what would happen to that government going forward as it did for years to come, that this was one of those points of no return. I have, and I'm not the only one, a bit of the same feeling when Justin Trudeau went to the microphone last week and started carving out his signature policy.

This was a day that I never believed that I would witness. We talked about Pierre Poitier getting the best gift he could hope for. I don't think he ever woke up from a dream where he was getting that gift. breach of trust between the prime minister who campaigned in two elections, who went to the Supreme Court to plead the need for a national carbon pricing scheme, to be signing what he was signing and presenting it as a, this is great for the climate, what I'm doing using the heat pumps. The fig leaf of the announcement was a heat pump, not very comfortable, by the way. I believe that if Justin Trudeau goes down one way or another, that the point of no return will have been that day.

Bruce? I think I generally agree with Chantal that it's not the biggest crisis in terms of what's an actual crisis that would have been the pandemic. In terms of the biggest political risk or the hardest one to manage, this is definitely that. And it's that in part because the Liberal Party is well behind in the polls. Their leader is trailing the other chief competitor in terms of who Canadians think would make the best prime minister. I don't recall that having been the case at any time in the last eight years after Justin Trudeau first won. And because the problem here isn't something that went bump in the night and that sort of emerged on the government's radar screen.

It's a choice that they made based on internal discussions that went on presumably for some time. And the outcome of which, I don't know. I mean, if you looked at it and said everything is a cold calculation of political upside and downside, it'd be hard to at this point say, well, we're going to get all those extra votes in Atlantic Canada in exchange for destabilizing our relationship with all of those who with us in business, in the voluntary sector,

who have stood with us and defended the idea of a carbon price, the idea of the carbon price that we put in place, where we said it isn't costing people money, it isn't destroying their cost of living because of the rebates that were going back to people. So you have all of those people who've invested some of their political capital, some of their share of voice behind an idea that didn't need to be undercut, as I understand it, really. There was a way for the government to have people's backs that didn't involve saying, this thing that isn't a problem with your cost of living, we're going to deal with it anyway, because it sounds like because the other guys beat us up in the public square. So it's the hardest political crisis. It comes at a particularly difficult time, deep into the, or well into the third mandate,

where they're behind in the polls. And it's something that they triggered, not that their opponents triggered. It also doesn't help that, from my understanding, a majority in cabinet actually believed that this issue or this notion had been rejected and that the debate had been put to rest and then discovered they'd been overruled by the prime minister. So when most of the members on your team have argued against something and it leads to a number of them having the really human reaction of saying,

we told them so. Nothing that has happened since this announcement was not clear from the moment that the prime minister opened his mouth last Thursday. It's not as if, oh, surprise, this didn't play out the way we expected. There is nothing I have seen that could not have been predicted and or was not last weekend. All right. We're going to take our last break and come back with our final segment right here on Good Talk for this week. Back in a moment. And welcome back.

You're listening to Good Talk. Chantel and Bruce are here. I'm Peter Mansbridge. We're into our final segment. There was a Leger poll this week on national institutions and the fact that Canadians, many Canadians, had lost trust in the whole idea of certain national institutions. We've talked about this

in some areas before. Bruce, I think you've even done some data on it in the past. Anything surprising in the direction that this is going and why is it going this way? Well, I hate to sound like the optimist here, but I thought given the kinds of things we've been watching south of the border, the fact that a significant majority of Canadians put elections Canada as the institution they trust most, despite the fact that more voters, as everyone knows,

voted for the Conservatives in the past two elections, who still lost the election, speaks to a degree of understanding in the face of populism and fake arguments that does honor not only to voters, but to the political leaders who have never played in the movie of the election was stolen from our party. I mean, the conservatives here. I also thought, given everything we've seen south of the border and all the commentary in this country, that for such a significant majority to have trust in the Supreme Court was really interesting. When you consider, for instance, that the Supreme Court is often described in Quebec, but not exclusively anymore, as always leaning the way of the federal government,

et cetera. It's not as if there have not been discussions as to whether the Supreme Court is biased in favor of federalism or in favor of the provinces, et cetera. And every government has taken hits in the Supreme Court for a variety of reasons. And to see that level of confidence, I think, says something positive about the way our court system has evolved compared to what we've been seeing, again, just south of the border. Bruce? I mean, there's clearly Chantal's right in those two,

certainly two high points in this survey, but there's some pretty devastating low points too. The media figure is way down, like way down, trust in media. You've outlined some of the reasons for that a little earlier about depressing news and people are tired of it all. But the trust factor, man, if you don't have trust in the media, you're really looking at a different world, potentially. But anyway, Bruce, go ahead.

Well, I was really up for Chantal to take us out on an optimistic note. And so I don't have anything to say. Be careful about the media. Here's what I would say. Look, I think there has been a long-term decline in how people answer that question about trust in a positive way I think about it being healthy that people are skeptical of whatever any institution might say to them on any given day when I think about it and I put on my dystopian hat which as you know I wear regularly I think that it is a signal of a growing and corrosive cynicism. And I don't think that we know whether or not there's a certain kind of trajectory that goes through healthy skepticism towards corrosive cynicism.

But it's a reasonable hypothesis, I think, especially when we see how it plays out in conversational terms on social media platforms. I do think that the question of trust in the media is a slightly more unique question, because we have watched in the last couple of decades the development of these extraordinarily high-profile media platforms, which if you were a conservative-minded American and you turned on MSNBC, there would be reasons why you might not trust that they were giving you all of the information that they should give you. And the same is true for liberal-minded viewers who might watch Fox. That's not an indictment of MSNBC or Fox. They both have their flaws.

But to me, it's been clear that people aren't wrong or as wrong, if they ever were wrong, to imagine that there are political agendas within media enterprises and that sometimes that affects the way in which news is packaged and presented to them. That's not about the individual reporter or the idea of journalism as a profession. It just seems to me that we traveled some distance there, and that if people don't necessarily have an automatic trust in media, that's not necessarily a bad thing. But it is something that hopefully media organizations will take seriously and try to work on. Yeah, but then look at the question.

If I were asked, do you have trust in the media? I'm not sure I'd answer yes. What do you mean? Agreed. Would you answer yes to this open-ended question? Do you trust the media? What am I saying here? What do I trust?

That I trust Fox or that I trust? To me, the more interesting question is to ask by putting labels on what you call the media, not just this open-ended question to which, no, I mean, for many people, the media includes something called social media. Yes. Yeah, I agree. I find the question meaningless, so I'm not paying attention to the answer. But otherwise, I'm with Bruce on the yes good if people come to the media with some version of skepticism because we are not infallible and we should not be followed blindly. I've got two minutes left which is probably unfair

to raise a whole new topic but let's but let's just take a run at it. For the last, I don't know, half dozen years, we've looked at the Legault government in Quebec as perhaps the most stable, the most popular, the one doing, you know, clearly not in trouble. Now, all of a sudden, in the last little while, that's being reassessed. What's happening till ago, Chantal? Governing is hard. And the Coalition Avenir Québec came to power as a rookie government, first time in power, just before the pandemic,

and basically ran Québec over the course of the pandemic and did a decent job. And then an election came and the party was re-elected. But now the normal things of governance, having to fix health care, making sense of your education policy, there's a negotiation ongoing with the police sector. The teachers are about to go out on strike on Monday in Montreal.

They may all go out on strike forever as of November 23rd. All these things are unresolved and at the same time the Premier has been it's really hard to describe how François Legault has been coming out with policies contradicting himself on issues.

It's been all over the map over the past two months, ever since he lost the by-election in Quebec City to the Parti Québécois. I think part of what's happening is, one, François Legault thought he walked on water, and now he's got wet feet. But the other thing is he is in fear that this coalition is going to split apart. If the Sovereignist members of it go back to the PQ and he tries to keep them, the Federalist members of the coalition will go back to the Liberals. He is in a really fragile spot.

And at this point, he is in his head in a place where he listens to no advice. So he gets the numbers he gets. And he's three years from an election. A lot can happen, good but also bad, in three years. Yeah. Governing is not easy, as you say. And nothing's forever. All right.

Chantelle, Bruce, thanks both very much. Good conversation as always. And thank you out there for listening. I'm Peter Mansbridge. We'll, we'll be back with the bridge on Monday.