The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Is It Time For The Liberals And The NDP To Talk About A Joint Future?

Episode Date: April 6, 2023

For years this has been a topic of conversation for political junkies.  It drives some partisans on both sides crazy, but not Good Talk.  Chantal and Bruce are all in for the discussion about whether it's time the two parties made their current arrangement a little more permanent.  

Well, it's the first time I've said this on a Thursday. Are you ready for Good Talk? And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. And it is Thursday, but it is Good Talk. It's our Friday tomorrow, Good Friday. So we decided to move up, Good Talk, delay we decided to move up. Good talk. Delay your turn for next week. Good talk. If you miss it today, it will be around and repeat on Friday, so it'll still be available to you.

Alright, enough explanations, although I guess I can give one more. I'm in Scotland. Chantel's in Montreal. Bruce is in Ottawa. It's National Tartan Day. I'm wearing my tartan, right? Very impressive. I didn't know it was National Tartan Day until I picked up my phone this morning.

Very fetching. We were thinking we were going to see some legs. Yeah, it's going to change the whole flow of the letters that you get next week. Yeah, I mean, you're hiding. So you're wondering whether I'm wearing a kilt, are you? No.

Of course I am. No, I'm not. Well, no, Bruce doesn't want to see that early in the morning. You'll be happy to know that I was, or not happy to know, I was in a little town called Lergue, which is kind of inland a little bit from where I am on the North Sea coast here. And they have a great little store there that sells Scottish clothes. And they had a rack of kilts. And I

was tempted until I looked at the price. And this was in the sale area. Kilts are really expensive, just in case you were wondering. So I put that expenditure off for now. I'll work at saving up for a kilt for the future. Now we know he's also cheap. Sales section, too pricey. I'll just get the scarf.

Can you cut it out of the kilt so I can say I got a piece of it? Yeah, right. When you went in the store, did you say, show me your Scottish clothes? Because I think they just think of them as clothes, right? They do. They have great stuff. It's a great little store. It is.

You know that store. Okay. it's a great little story you know that story okay here's discussion topic number one which I would like to spend some time on I think we deal as far back as I can remember like every 10 years we kind of have this discussion I think the first time I ever

heard it before your times was when David Lewis was the leader of the NDP in the early 1970s and successfully pushed the government into doing Petro-Canada to keep them alive. And it was the first time where there was a kind of serious thought about, well, maybe there should be something more formal in terms of this arrangement between these two parties. Anyway, it didn't go anywhere, and the Liberals won a majority coming up in the next election. Then in the 80s, the 90s, the 2000s, and then again in the 2000-teens, there was this, you know, discussion sometimes, you know sometimes in a more serious way than other times, but there's always this discussion, would it be appropriate? Would it be right? Would it make sense that the parties of the center-left got together as one?

Whether it was a formal merger or whether it was a coalition of some kind, would this be the smart way to deal with the going up against the conservatives? Now, I never got anywhere, but those, you know, this past year of the formal arrangement between the NDP and the liberals on keeping the House sitting has made people think again. At least some people think again. Would this be appropriate? Is this something we should be seriously looking at?

Is it something that would be good for us as parties? Would it be something that would be good for the country? So I want to have that discussion and see where your head's at on this stuff right now. Not only whether there's anything serious going on, but really whether it is an appropriate discussion to be having. Chantel, why don't you start? Well, for some reason we're not hearing Chantel. I don't have an answer for that.

Is there something else I can help with? Somehow we've suddenly lost your audio, Chantal. Don't have. Oh, there you are. You're back. Yes, but Alexa, which is not part of my household, was suddenly talking to me. Yeah. But I do not have Alexa.

And I don't have Alexa either. At least you didn't think you did. Boy, now I'm feeling paranoid. Alexa McDonough, perhaps. I don't know where Alexa came from, but nevertheless. Anyways, let's go back. Let's just not keep saying the word. Alexa was answering your question, apparently,

and she said she didn't have an answer for that. I do. First, it is appropriate to discuss this. There is nothing inappropriate about the notion of coalition governments. It doesn't mean we have to go there, but it is not in any way, shape, or form undemocratic to consider the possibility when you take into account that if that were to happen more than 50%, by far, of voters would have voted for one of the partners in that coalition. It is even more democratic to have the conversation now, because if all was perfect in the democratic world, parties would be open on the election campaign trail to the possibility.

They wouldn't say, I will never do that, and then turn around and do that, so that voters voting for one or the other of the two parties would be doing so with their eyes wide open. So that's kind of the setup for why we're having this discussion. To the specifics of the situation and what has changed, and you're right, the NDP-Liberal Non-Aggression Pact, as I call it, is kind of new territory, not because there were not implicit pacts in the past, but this one has a timeline.

And I think that distinguishes it from what we saw with the Ray Peterson Alliance in Ontario, formal alliance in the 80s, or what happened more recently in BC, and that its timeline extends to the end of the natural life of a government, i.e. four years. Usually, those agreements lapse after a year or two years. That was the case in Ontario, two years. It would have been the case in BC, and then you have an election. But the other factor that you did not mention that makes this conversation relevant is where the Conservative Party has decided to go with the election of Pierre Poilievre, a leader who is clearly more identified to a brand of conservatism that really bears no resemblance to what used to be known as progressive conservatives in this country.

So you've got Justin Trudeau who has brought the liberals closer to the center-left since 2015. And at the same time, you've got Pierre Poilier, which has brought the Conservatives further to the right in the American sense of the word. Donald Trump said America is broken. Well, who's been saying Canada is broken for the past few months? That's basically where this is going. And so it is increasingly difficult to see how any of the other parties could ever come to terms with the agenda of a conservative government in the House

of Commons. It is also increasingly hard to imagine that we will sail from majority to majority to majority, as we used to do five of the seven last elections, resulted in minority governments. So at some point, we've talked merger after 2011 between the NDP and the Liberal Democrats. Some people ran on that platform for both parties. They were all defeated. We talked electoral reform, which was the other solution, possibly the most logical. We all know where that went to, and it's not coming back anytime soon. So I'm guessing we are increasingly edging closer. The other option to emerge would be, depending on the results of an election, a possible coalition government, and I say this knowing that a lot of NDP MPs are finding it rewarding to be at the table rather than sitting outside looking in.

They have found the experience of this non-aggression pact and having input on a day-to-day basis rather than just once in a while on a confidential. They have found this rewarding. I am convinced they would find it even more rewarding if they were in opposition or the liberals to have a seat at the cabinet table. Okay. I've got a number of questions on things you said, but I want to hear from Bruce first of all before we get into that. Bruce? Well, of course, as is so often the case um i have to find some other things to say because chantal said all the good things i agree very much with the with the way that she assessed the situation i do have some

uh kind of other points that might be pardon me might be worth um adding i think the i certainly agree that this is a useful discussion and an entirely legitimate discussion. And it doesn't, saying that doesn't negate the fact that there will be partisans who hate the fact that we're even talking about it. And this sort of brings me to my first point, which is that there's no problem with this idea and theory or the discussion of it at the general public level. It only ever runs into problems at the partisan level, the active partisan level, because people who work in parties develop thick skins,

they develop scar tissue, they develop a sense of animosity sometimes towards rivals, even rivals who share a similar ideology as between the liberals and the NDP. You can find some pretty strong feelings sometimes. So there are problems from a partisan standpoint in a left side coalescence. And there are certainly problems, as we've seen manifest in public many times, if we imagine a right-side coalescence. Why is it more pertinent now than it might have been at some point in the past? I think that the right is more fear-inspiring to the left than has ever been the case in my lifetime, and the left seems more infuriating to the right than has ever been the case in my time.

I don't know that that's so much a function of policy as it is a function of the chemistry of the times in which we live, the way that we communicate with each other. But it seems to me that if ever there was a time when the left might not just decide to vote for the same party to avoid the worst outcome, but they might actually say it's time to end the risk of a conservative government. Now is a more logical time for that kind of thinking to occur than I've seen before. But the partisanship will generally get in the way, absent some leadership aspirant who has an uncanny ability, and I don't know who that would be, to kind of rally people to a point of view. I think the last thing I would say is that the math of a party on the center, where you would take the progressive part of the conservative movement and the more conservative part of

the liberals, has a bigger potential market than a party that groups the liberals and the NDP. Maybe by 10 points, maybe 15 points in English Canada. The math depends in Quebec on exactly what that kind of looks like. And BQ obviously represents a bit of a challenge there. But both have potentially access to pretty big pools of voters. So there's nothing in the math of public opinion that says don't consider this. There's a lot in the chemistry of partisanship that I'll deal first of all with the numbers on this. Making assumptions is always dangerous, as we all know, about how many people could be attracted to such an idea.

Chantal, you tossed out a number that's sort of somewhere approaching 50%. No, actually, I was talking about the percentage of voters that would have supported presumably the NDP and the Liberals, and Bruce can correct me if I'm wrong, but it's not 50% plus one. It could be closer to 60% or more. But is that not operating under the assumption that all those Liberal voters are going to stay with the liberals? No, so I think that that's a good question. And I think you can't sort of pin people down to a hard decision on a theoretical idea. So all you can do is sort of ask the question, is this something that you would lean towards or might be open to or not be open to?

And so I measure the size of wouldn't consider it and consider it on the center version of a progressive conservatives and conservative liberals is about 80% in English Canada anyway, and is about 65% to Chantal's point, if we look at that left side option. So there's a lot of distance between those numbers and what would you get in an election. However, people have to vote for somebody. And if those become the options on the table, then people are expressing a degree of comfort, which is typically more centrist. But there's no question that if the choice is between right and left, the balance tilts more towards the left in Canada, the progressive.

Let's be clear here. What we're talking about, or at least what I'm talking about, is not an electoral coalition, i.e. you only run a liberal or a new Democrat in every riding. What I'm talking about is an after the fact, in the same way as this pact between the NDP and the liberals, an after the fact arrangement that would go a bit further than the current arrangement that we've seen. That being said, I find it hard to believe that the Liberals in the end can go in an election in a year, 18 months, and tell Canadians it's terrible to think about coalitions and know they wouldn't

ever consider it, given what they've just done for the past two years. Their arrangement kills their capacity to pretend that the Liberals are not acceptable to the new Democrats or the new Democrats are too extreme or too irresponsible to be part of a government. was that the liberals in particular would not be open to any of those considerations because the NDP and the liberals fight each other provincially. And that was true for a long, long time. But have you seen what's happening to the liberals provincially? Have you seen what happened to the liberals, the alternative to the government in PEI forever in Monday's election. They came out of it. They were ahead of the Green Party. They won three seats and the Greens won two. That kind of tells you something about a brand in trouble. The Saskatchewan liberals are dropping the name. The BC liberals have dropped the name. Why? Because when they took it, it was a brand that could bring people.

Now they would rather get rid of the brand. Let's not get into what's happening to the Ontario and the Quebec Liberals. So the argument that provincially your partisans are so numerous that you wouldn't consider dealing with the NDP or vice versa because they are two rivals is increasingly less and less of a consideration. And as Bruce says, you've got to vote for somebody. You wanted to make a point here, Bruce. Yeah, I did. I thought Chantal made a really interesting point saying that, you know, parties can't pretend that they won't cooperate in the next election, because everybody who's paid any attention knows that there has been a working

cooperative agreement, which, you know, people in politics tend to bristle if you say it's effectively a coalition, but they should stop bristling because it functions kind of like the idea does. But the other thing that I see in that is that if partisans have in the past taken comfort against this idea by saying the public would never go for it, the evidence of the last couple of years is completely the opposite, that people have frustrations with the government. And certainly the conservatives at a political level make the case that this is, you know, the work of the devil, these two parties combining together. But there's very little evidence that the public has been uncomfortable with that. In fact, the latest

numbers I've been gathering now on the budget show that 28% say it's a bad budget. Most people say it's a reasonable budget in the circumstances. And that's the mindset generally that I've seen over the years among Canadians, is that they don't really get pulled too much towards these partisan edges. They generally are looking for more centrist, pragmatic policies. And what they have tended to see, most of them, obviously not conservative voters, is a government that has pursued some ideas that they like, probably spent more money than they wanted, but isn't offensive as a way of governing, I guess is what I'm trying to say. All right. There's more to ask on this than I'm going to ask it,

but we're going to take our first break. Back right after this. And welcome back. You're listening to a Good Talk, special Thursday edition, as we get in here the day before Good Friday, this edition episode of Good Talk, though, will be repeated through the weekend. So you can find it, of course, on your podcast platform or you can find it on Sirius XM. You can also see it on your or our YouTube channel. And more and more people are taking that option because they heard it was National Tartan Day and they love looking at my tartan scarf. Scottish clothes. That's what they like. Don't go to the pictures hoping to see legs.

You won't. Not yet. We're working on that. Okay. Here's my second question. It was prompted by one of your, well, your initial answer, Chantel, which I was not aware of, so I'd like to hear a little more about. You talked about how some members of the NDP have really felt like they're a part of this deal,

that they have a seat at the table. And I guess sort of watching from a distance, you just sort of get, you hear Jagmeet Singh talking about on special days, budget days and days like that about we like or we don't like. But there's no sense, at least that I've had, that they're actually at the table, so to speak, in some of these discussions. What do you know? What can you share with us on that? Okay, so to be fair, it's not obvious, even when you look up close, as I do, and I only realized it when I listened and watched and read some of the reports on the one-year anniversary of how the parties were assessing how the arrangement

worked. As you know, the basic rule of this deal is no surprises. And it almost founded on what was the biggest unpleasant surprise from the standpoint of the arrangement, which were those amendments that suddenly appeared on the gun control legislation, and which resulted in the NDP ending up on the receiving end of a lot of backlash from hunting circles in areas like Timmins, for instance, where the NDP has a seat and where there are plenty of people who go hunting and who did not like those amendments. To avoid surprises, you can't just say, I'm not going to surprise you. You have to open up to others and you have to have the discussion before it becomes public. So they have set up a process that has people from the PMO

and people from Singh's office, but also MPs and ministers, MPs on the NDP side that are part of the shadow cabinet, presumably of Jagmeet Singh, but also members of cabinet on the other side of the table. And they hash out issues and iron out possible kinks before bad things happen in public and lines get drawn and paint gets expended. And then nobody wants to walk over that paint. Really important, of course, has been to not embarrass Jagmeet Singh himself, who has to sell this agreement and what happens with it to his own party and to his own members and to many constituencies on the left.

So he's got to have something to show for what he's doing. But what I, you know, we always talk about things in strategic terms that allows the liberals to push off an election. The NDP has no money, so it allows them to escape the inevitable day when bad things will happen to them, etc. But we forget that it is also part and parcel of the agreement that it means that Parliament functions differently for a group of opposition MPs who have a lot of opposition experience. And it's in reading their comments about how they felt that their input mattered, that they had a say on things, that I realized that, yes,

there are reasons for new Democrats to be nervous about this arrangement, what voters will make of it afterwards. Pierre Poiliev making a play for blue-collar votes, which the NDP needs in many areas to sustain its caucus. But in the day-to-day work-life satisfaction thing, a number of NDP MPs feel like they're bringing home things. They can go home, especially after this budget, and say this dental care program, which is really popular based on the early polls, we did this. It's been a long time since the NDP has been able to say, we got Petro-Canada done, or we were the

party of Medicare. And it's one thing to win small victories in the bubble where you say, well, the NDP got what it wanted on gun control, the amendments were withdrawn. Nobody cares about that in the larger world, the day-to-day battles. But it's another thing to be able to say, we made this arrangement and we forced the liberals to do something that we can claim as our legacy, even if we don't form government. And I think that's made a difference to the way many new Democrats look at this arrangement and the usefulness of maybe keeping it going for a while, because they can still say to their constituents, we are getting things, real things for real people out of this deal. But it also underlines your other point, too, that the deeper into it they get, the harder

it is to campaign against it when eventually they may have to. But that's going to be my next question. But first, I know Bruce wants to say something. Yeah, I just wanted to pick up one thing. I mean, one of the ways to observe Ottawa sometimes is to challenge yourself to think, well, what music am I not hearing that I used to hear? What things that used to be normal don't seem to be part of the mix? And Chantal touched on the point that has occurred to me, which is you really don't hear liberals criticizing New Democrats. And it's not because they don't have strong feelings. I've always heard a lot of them.

And sometimes you'll talk to liberal caucus members who say, the people that I get the most frustrated with, and I'm using softer language than they might, are the New Democrats sometimes more than the, and the reason is that there's a kind of a holier than thou sense. There's a feeling like, okay, these folks think that they're morally superior to us and they castigate us for being kind of imperfect progressives. And that's very frustrating for liberals who, you know, most people, when they hear an argument that might feel like it has a

little bit of truth to it, that's the argument that bites the hardest. And so I think that's there, that's changed. And I think that makes it harder, again, at some point, to reanimate that instinct to fight against the other party. Because if you turn it off or turn it down, I don't know that it comes back as readily or as easily. It sort of maybe seeps away as a form of energy over time. Second thing is that both the NDP and the Liberals went on tours to promote the budget. That was pretty interesting. And the Liberals didn't look like they were bothered at all by Jagmeet Singh going around the country saying, look at what I did. Now, there was a day when that would have resulted in some friction, some sparks flying, that kind of thing.

But I didn't see any of that. It was almost as though, to Chantal's point, the liberals were going, yeah, go tell that budget and we'll figure out how to fight with each other if and when we need to do that at the time we're in the run-up to the next election. And the last point for me is that liberal politicians and NDP politicians share one thing in common. Typically, they want to be influential on the course of the country. It's often been more challenging for NDP politicians to feel as though they're accomplishing that goal. And they are now. There's no question that they are now, and maybe more so than at almost any time that I can recall. Liberal politicians want to be influential, but they also want to win elections. And that's not always been as prominent a factor in the minds of New Democrat politicians.

So that's the thing I'll be watching over the coming months is does the do the do the New Democrats start to become satisfied that they can be influential and focused on the winning elections, which probably takes them more towards let's not fight with each other so much, let's describe the risk that we see on the right. That's what I'll be watching. Okay. And of course, the liberals can be easygoing about the NDP selling the budget, because if it comes to that, and they, as they usually do in every election, decide that they try to coalesce the anti-conservative vote behind them.

They're going to be able to say to NDP voters, we are the friendly place to come to. Look at all that we accomplished with the NDP. We are a friendly haven in a possible conservative storm. So please come to us so that we can keep the big bad wolf out of our cozy little house. And so if I were a liberal, I certainly wouldn't be going saying, look at those new Democrats, what they're making us do, because those NDP voters are the voters that the liberals will need to court to fend off the conservatives in the next election. So in any event, everybody is finding something to be happy about. I just want to go back to the point Bruce made about voters who voted liberal or a new Democrat

not being terribly frustrated by the arrangement between the two parties. They are certainly no more frustrated than the average voter tends to be when a majority government is elected with 38% of the vote and then gets to do whatever it wants for four years. So voters are frustrated by election outcomes in this country, but the level of frustration with the arrangement certainly is at least not higher than the normal reaction of a voter that did not vote for the party that has a majority and that now has to put up with it for four years with very little that anyone can do to hinder its policies. I feel somebody somewhere is picking up a Sharpie and scratching

out the rough outlines of a storyboard where the cozy little house is threatened by the big bad wolf. Reading too many children's stories. I have a grandchild who's practicing a play that does involve little pigs and a big bad wolf. Okay. Here's my final question on this, and I guess this is where the whole conversation was bound to end up. The deeper you go into this, why not go the whole nine yards or the whole nine meters or whatever the expression is these days? Because the picture you're painting is unlike anything we've seen before in terms of the depth of the arrangement here, how the way Chantal just described it,

the conversations that are going on, the dialogue that's happening, the progress that's being made. I'm not sure how you end up in an election campaign running against this government when you're in effect almost a part of the government in terms of the conversations that are going on. So why not take it the full distance, which has always been the discussion point, right, for the last 50 years? Why don't they just merge?

Forget about a coalition. Why don't they have a real merger, like the Conservatives did? Yes, but the Conservatives used to be together, and these are two different families. Plus, frankly, if I were a new Democrat voter, I'd like the knife at the throat approach of keeping the liberals in line by being able to pull out of any arrangement, including a coalition government. I certainly would find that more respectful of my

sense of purity, which Bruce was alluding to from the New Democrats, than the notion of a merger. I don't see that either party would want to go down that road. I think we would deprive ourselves of different talents. There is diversity in having two parties on that side of the ledger, two parties that could presumably form government, and it would be probably sad to turn them into homogenized milk. Yeah. A hundred years ago, they were all in the same party.

Yes, but we're not going back there right and we don't see nor exciting to have only two options on the ballot right the conservatives aren't going back either but i don't know i don't remember what it was like are you sure but what's your theory on this i mean clearly chant clearly Chantel doesn't think it's a live option. Well, I like, it's a little bit like the table games that I used to play, including with other partisans, like democracy or risk or those kinds of games. Risk is the one that I remember. Actually, when I was working on the Hill way back when,

and I was working for a liberal MP then, a few of us used to get together with conservative assistants, and on a Saturday, that's what we would nerd out to. But in theory, or in a board game, you can put pieces together. You can decide that you're going to take over this country, or these two things are going to work together. But in reality, these organizations aren't so ready to do that. They're built up with an awful lot of muscle memory that is about if the Democrats basically saying liberals are lazy progressives or fake progressives or, you know, that kind of thing. And and we're progressives in a hurry. We're used to saying things that sound like liberal Tory, same old story, right? So there's a lot of energy and training that is

in the mindset of the NDP activists that doesn't make it easy for them to say, oh, some higher ups have decided we should put these two organizations together and we should all get along. I don't think it works that way. The only scenario where I could imagine that happening, and I don't wish it on the country, is such a crisis that the fear of the right becomes something more than a reason to kind of motivate your own base and turn out the vote, but to recognize something that feels existential as a risk. And I don't predict that that will happen, and I don't want it to happen, but that circumstance, I think,

would be needed in order for it to happen. But I do think that we have to, and this is probably where this coalition, informal coalition question comes into play, is that every one of the last minority government scenarios, as we get closer to election day and we wonder, well, which of the two main parties or the biggest parties are going to end up with the largest number of seats? We have this question about, would it be legitimate for the party with the second most seats to form a government? And I think public opinion is a little bit more

flexible on that question than we sometimes imagine. And the reason I say that is that the Conservatives have won more of the popular vote a couple of times and not formed a government. And so the question of would a Pierre-Paul-Lievre Conservative Party that won a handful more seats than a Justin Trudeau-led Liberal Party automatically be judged by Canadians to be deserving of forming a government. I think the efforts of the Liberals in the NDP over the last couple of years have made that a more questionable starting point. And I'm saying that without taking a hard point of view on it. I just think that we're sort of getting closer to

not believing that the highest number of seats means you have to form the government or you're entitled to form the government. That proposition, by the way, was tested in real life. It's called Ontario 1985. The Conservatives won 52 seats. The Liberals won 48 seats. The Conservatives formed the government. It was defeated at the first confidence vote by a combination of new Democrats and liberals. The liberals became the government with the support in an alliance of the NDP led by Bob Ray for two years. And voters must have liked it because when the election, the next one came around in 87, well, David Peterson won a majority government. He wasn't

punished for having led an illegitimate government. There is an example along the same lines in BC more recently with the Green Party and the NDP. And what happened at the first election after that experience, Mr. Horgan, who was then the premier and the leader, one a majority. So in two of Canada's larger provinces, the evidence has been that voters do not think that such arrangements are illegitimate. Now, to go back to the coalition or a pact or whatever, it satisfies the most primal need of both the NDP and the liberals. In the case of the NDP influence, which has been their game for their entire history federally because they never managed to win power. And then the case of power. So you're giving each of their members the thing they crave most, which is a lot easier than

telling all those members your party is suddenly going to disappear and become some other creature with people that you have never wanted to spend much time with because the liberals have better parties or the new Democrats are too pure. So I don't see how any NDP or liberal leader could think that it's a better option to go to his or her members and say, no, we're just going to merge here. Because they were never together. And I know about 100 years ago, but the NDP was created. We are now talking about half a century and more. So it's not a new kid on the block here.

She never lets me get away with anything. Sometimes, you know, your absence of a kilt. Everybody loves it when we tease you. That's the only reason we do this. I know, but this is called good talk. It's not called let's trash the host again this week. It's not trashing. It's not trashing, but we can't, you know, I'm slightly younger,

so I can't remember what happened 100 years ago. I loved the Peterson story of what happened in 85, and it keeps getting interesting, right? Because eventually Peterson loses, and who does he lose to? He loses to Bob Ray. And the Conservatives are, you know, shut out again, as they were for, what, 10 or 12 years, which was, you know, considering they'd been in power for more than 40 years at that point. That was uninterrupted power.

Uninterrupted. Okay, we'll take our last break. We'll be right back after this. And welcome back. We're into the final segment of this week's Good Talk. Chantelle is in Montreal. Bruce is in Ottawa. We're going to leave that fascinating discussion because we've exhausted it, I think, for now anyway.

And we're going to have a few words in our remaining few minutes about the latest situation in Alberta. Danielle Smith, the Premier, has announced she's going to sue the CBC over its coverage of her discussions with somebody who was being charged with a criminal offense around the convoy situation. She talked to this person for about 11 minutes. It's a fascinating conversation. We've talked about it before and what was said and what wasn't said.

But Danielle Smith says the CBC has gone beyond reality of what was actually said in the conversation and is saying things about her that she feels are worthy of taking to court. Now, that's not all she said. She says now that she won't answer any questions about that whole incident while it's before the courts. So there are lots of people trying to ask questions about it, not just the CBC.

The opposition is trying to ask questions. All the other media organizations are trying to ask questions. It's being commented on by political science professors, analysts from all kinds of different places. But she's not going to take any questions and use that excuse of it's before the courts. I don't have to talk about this. And they're on the verge of an election campaign where one assumes this could possibly be an issue. Who wants to go first?

Bruce looks like he's pawing at the ground here on this one. Go for it. Well, I'm really fascinated by that. I'm fascinated by how this Alberta election will turn out. I think it's one of the most consequential elections that we've seen in that province in a long time, and in part because I think that the province's population, which generally does tend to want conservative governments, also wants a different style. Many voters who have habitually voted conservative in the past have been signaling in the last few elections that they want a different brand of conservative

than people in rural Alberta perhaps want. Daniel Smith, I think, has found herself in an extremely uncomfortable situation, which I think she's handled regularly quite poorly. The uncomfortable situation is that she arrived in that position as leader and premier, having built a reputation for being a bit of a firebrand for championing ideas that seemed outside the mainstream a little bit, or if not the mainstream of the Conservative Party in Alberta, the mainstream public opinion. And so she's had to walk some of those back, and that creates some frustrations within her own party.

And so I think she's got a difficult problem maintaining party unity. And it's a problem that she has that somebody in that office would be trying to have the conversations that she was trying to have about somebody who was involved in some activity that really doesn't hold up to very much scrutiny. But she's got this idea that if she says, not because I'm suing the CBC, but because I'm contemplating suing the CBC. I contemplate lots of things every day. But if my wife said to me, I want to ask you about this thing that you don't want to talk to me about. And I said, well, you know what? I'm contemplating not answering that question. That wouldn't work very well. I don't understand the logic other than I'm so desperately interested in not having my election campaign be derailed every day by this. So I'm going to try this

Hail Mary thing. I don't think it's going to work. I understand those who, and you're going to get letters, and I'm going to get comments in a Twitter feed that say, ah, yeah, you know, the news cycle always turns, and people will forget this, and this ploy will work, and maybe it will. Maybe it will. But contemplating a lawsuit against the CBC for a story that seemed to be the thing that she said she did and that the tape clearly showed that she did, I find it so ham-fisted and so poorly thought out that it's kind of remarkable as a measure of political strategy in and of itself. So that's my take on it.

Yeah, you know, it's a bad strategy when a government tries to get itself off the hook and manages to make the story go on for longer. So here we are, in week two of talking about this issue, when we should, based on what the news cycle normally does, have moved on to other issues. But because of this, the threat of a lawsuit, if the threat of a lawsuit was cause for any serious media to drop a story, we would basically be printing out press releases every day, because that's just about the kind of story that does not ever get the threat of a lawsuit. Second, to say I won't comment on this while it's before the courts, well, it's not before the courts, and apparently it won't be anytime soon. So what does that make of that excuse?

And since the premier has developed this new respect for the rule of law and the distance between the state and the courts, then what was she doing on the phone with this individual talking about talking to our prosecutors about things that would have happened in the courts? She wanted to prevent, apparently. So when you put all that together, one, it makes the story go on longer. Two, I suspect there will be journalists who will make it a point to ask her every single day of the election campaign if she has now decided to once and for all clear the air on that conversation, which everyone I suspect now in Alberta has heard. And you can think she was just doing her job, being okay with the constituent or breaching and stepping over a serious line.

But basically, I don't think this does anything except prolong the agony of a story that the conservatives do not want to go to an election with. And by the way, for those who don't keep that calendar, the election is on May 29th, so a month and a half from now. I got to say, you know, sometimes the hardest thing for anyone really is to say, like, I'm sorry, I screwed up. It seems especially hard for politicians to say that. But I look at this one and I think, you know, like, what's the worst that could happen if she just said, look, you know what? I screwed up.

I shouldn't have made that call. I certainly shouldn't have talked the way I talked in that conversation. You know, some would say, oh, well, there's precedent here. She has to resign because there have been, you know, ministers, federal ministers, didn't Jean Charest resign over calling a judge, right? Yeah, he called a judge, though. Yeah, a little different. But I don't understand why. Well, I think there's a couple of possible answers to it, Peter.

I think that one is that her time in office, as short as it has been, has been marked by a series of fumbles and stumbles. It has not looked like she was really ready for this role or that she made decisions in a thoughtful way. And so the number of times where she has put herself in a situation by her own hand, that embarrassed the government and made her seem kind of awkward and ill-prepared is part of what she's trying to avoid. She doesn't want to have another situation where people will say she made a mistake, she stumbled and made a mistake. The second reason is that I think it was in the late fall when the CBC was saying, well, we have evidence

that she did try to put pressure on these prosecutors. And there are emails to that effect. And you remember that the defense of the premier's office then were going to examine for any emails that might have said something like this, and we're going to get back to you. And they went and examined, and they said, we didn't find any, this never happened. And they were so aggressive in their defense. I remember we probably talked about it, that they went further than I thought they would, because it felt to me from the CBC story that whether there were emails or whether there was conversations, there was probably something. Otherwise, the CBC wouldn't have said we're standing by our story at the time. And if you're in the premier's office and you're doing strategy around this at that point, you might stop short of saying not only are we going to let this issue die because we've said there's nothing there, we're going to push back further.

So she's now got that as part of the background that's a challenge for her. Okay. I'm going to leave it at that for this week. Fascinating conversation, as always, on Good Talk. I've enjoyed it. I want to briefly just correct something that i said yesterday um we were having this conversation around the 60 minutes piece the leslie stall piece on uh marjorie taylor green and in in my explanation of what could have happened

i talked about edward r murrow and the classic confrontation with Joe McCarthy. I got a couple of things a little mixed up in that description. One, he really did, basically disemboweled was the way people talk about it, McCarthy, and in the interview he did with him. But he didn't use that phrase, have you no shame. First of all, the phrase wasn't have you no shame, it was have you no decency. And second of all, it wasn't said by Edward R. Murrow, it was said later in a Senate committee hearing. And a number of sharp-eyed listeners and viewers noticed that and sent in comments for me to get it right, Mansbridge. So that's my attempt at getting it right.

So there you go on that. Thank you, Chantel. Thank you, Bruce. Another good day. Enjoy your weekend. Get your tartan out. Well, we're in this place. We're mostly trying to get hydropower.

Good luck on that. That's no fun. All right. Wrapping it up. Thanks so much to both of you. We'll talk to you on the bridge again on Monday. Thank you.