The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Moore Butts #28 - How Do You Explain Last Week?

Episode Date: November 12, 2025

Last week was quite something, even for Canadian politics. A big-time Liberal budget with a huge deficit, while chaos ruled in the Conservative opposition. How do you explain that? That's the question for our extremely popular panel feature, a former top Liberal advisor and a former Conservative cabinet minister. Strap in for this one. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You're just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. How do you explain what happened in Ottawa last week? We'll ask Moore and Butts, that question. Coming right up. And hello there. Welcome to Wednesday. Peter Mansbridge here.

No encore today. seeing as we had an encore yesterday for Remembrance Day. Today is Moore Butts' conversation number 28. And the question is a good one to them, which is, how do you explain what happened last week in Ottawa? You know, the budget, the chaos in the Conservative Party, it was quite something. A week unlike one I've witnessed in the nation's capital in many a year,

Okay, we'll get to that in a minute, but a reminder of the question of the week this week for you and for your turn, which will come up tomorrow. We've already had a lot of answers to this question, but I'm asking for more. You've got till 6 p.m. Eastern Time tonight to get that answer in. You send it to the Mansbridge podcast at gmail.com. Includes your name and the location you're writing from, and please. no more than 75 words. You have to fit the bill on all those conditions. The question, what was it again?

What do you think when you hear about an MP or any politician in a provincial legislature crossing the floor to join another party? What do you think about that when you hear about somebody crossing the floor to join another party. Okay, there's your question. Look forward to your answers,

and we'll have them tomorrow on your turn. Okay. You heard the question for the Moore and Butts. Episode number 28, their conversations, and this is a good one, I promise you. So let's get it started. All right, gentlemen, this is going to challenge your abilities that you should,

shown so well over the last couple of years in staying as non-partisan as possible. I'll understand if you fall off the log here at some point, but let's give it a go. I'm trying to understand. I mean, it was supposed to be budget week, and yes, there was a budget, but there was so much other stuff that was going on in the background of Ottawa last week that I'm still trying to understand it. What happened there last week? James, what don't you start? Well, yeah, you start with talking about partisanship and all that.

I think the truth is it's not a really, it's actually not a very partisan or frankly even ideological budget. Because like if you look at the sweep of the analysis, and there's a lot of an analysis out there from left, right, the center, the banks, economists, you know, the freelancers and all that. If you look at it, you take it all net net, a lot of, you know, most of the analysis will say, well, they did this, but then they also did that, but then they did this, but then they also did that. So like from a, from a center-right perspective, you go, oh, my God, look at the deficit. Then you say, yeah, the deficit is high. It's historically high. But on an inflation-adjusted

basis, it's actually about the same or slightly smaller than what Stephen Harper's was in the two-year budget cycle where we increased our deficit spending to fight the global recession in 08,09, and 10. So you say, well, there's that. And you say, well, but still a lot. of spending they haven't really had a lot of cuts but you know they're they're suggesting to cut the federal public service by you know 30 000 people well if you're the conservative that's good well they're increasing spending well 81 billion of the new of the net new spending of 130 or so billion 81 billion of that is to the military well that's good and a quarter of that is to salary increases retention and recruitment well that's good and the other three quarters is for more more equipment well that's

good and it'll it'll allow us the window of saying that we're us aligning with our debt or our military to GDP spending for NATO commitments. Well, that's good. But it'll allow us to decouple from the Americans because we can do procurement in such a way that'll diversify our kit. Well, that's good. So you kind of start piling it all up and like the narratives can take you in places. So it's, it wasn't a particularly partisan budget and it wasn't a particularly ideological budget. And I think if you want to, you can absolutely find things that you don't like and think that these are things that are bad. But if you really want to, you can find things in there from the left, the right in the center and say, well, I think that's reasonable and I think it's credible

given the circumstance that we're in. It's sort of my broad takeaway. We can get into a little bit more, but that's kind of my high level first thing about it. Okay, well, from that high level, Jerry, you were out of the country, but you were plugged in. Would you agree with that assessment that James just made? Yeah, and I guess I'd summarize it that the prime minister tabled the budget he campaigned on, right? And it seemed to me that it wasn't one designed to trigger an election, and we've all seen those in different minority parliaments in the past. It certainly wasn't that.

And there was nothing there that they hadn't telegraphed ahead of time. There was nothing there that he didn't talk about at length during the campaign. So it seemed to me he was in a very kind of practical way saying, all right, this is what I said I was going to do if I got elected. I'm going to do it, and I have reasonable confidence that it'll pass. And if it doesn't pass, we just had an election six months ago. So they voted for it. The Canadians voted for this six months ago.

They're probably going to vote for it now. Well, those were some of the headlines, but most of the headlines last week weren't about what was in the budget. It was what was going on around the budget. You know, floor crossovers, resignations, you know, strong arm tactics there was all kinds of other stuff going on and you know i you know politics is a tough game and both you guys have talked about that over over the time we've spent together but i'm not sure i've ever seen anything quite like what we witnessed last week so give me your

sense of what happened in that aspect of the story and this time um jerry you start sure well i'm i'm probably as anxious maybe even more so than most of our audience, Peter, to hear what James has to say about this, but I have to say I've never seen a situation in a minority parliament where the government tables a budget and the opposition falls. It's quite an amazing set of circumstances. One of the reasons that keeps, I think, us interested in politics and democratic societies is just you think you've seen everything and then something like this happens and it's a whole fresh set of facts on the ground. So my view, and I listened to your podcast with Chantelle Iber and Bruce Anderson on

Friday, and as I often do, I find myself agreeing with Chantel. I think that this was sort of the third act in a play that started with the election loss, which was a shocking loss to Pahliav, and for Paulyev, I should say. And then the big question was, what has this guy learned from that election loss. And I think that the podcast, whoever he did it with, was with a right-wing influencer of some kind, where he started musing in this current context, i.e., everything that's going on to the Great Republic, in the Great Republic to the south of us. He started musing about things like the RCMP being politically corrupted by the government of the day, and maybe his predecessor should have gone to jail and, et cetera. I think for a lot of people, forget

the public at large, I think for a lot of people in the conservative caucus who had questions about whether this man could learn from a loss and grow started to gravely doubt whether he had taken the same lesson from the election. And then the budget, which as I think, James, you'll agree, well, you just did, was it wasn't designed to provoke conservatives by any stretch of the imagination. A lot of the people in caucus looked at it and said, I could see myself supporting that kind of policy. So in that case, maybe I should. And when Mr. Poliyev has been pushed into a corner in his career in the past, he's lashed out at the people pushing him. He's threatened them. He's called them names in public, et cetera, he and the people around him. And I think what

we saw this week was a repeat of that performance. So if I'm a quote unquote middle of the road conservative sitting in that caucus, I'm thinking, I don't know about this guy. Not only do I doubt whether he's going to be prime minister, even more importantly, I'm doubting at this stage whether he should be. There's a part of like when you decide to get involved in partisan politics to the point where you're going to join a party and give some money and volunteer a lot and maybe run for office and actually you get elected. Then you're sitting in that caucus. You know, you have an obligation to the country

to make sure that your party is putting its best face forward, its best leader forward, because you have a responsibility to all of our history and everybody who have given us the privilege of being Canadians in this moment. And, you know, as a lifelong conservative, when I look at certain things, that just kind of drives me crazy

and it hurts your credibility. For example, Chris d'Antreman crosses the floor and goes to the liberal party. So conservatives say, what like some of them calling him a coward in a scumbag and a dirtbag and a like all the language and all that stuff pours out it's like wait a minute say for a few hundred votes and a half dozen rottings pierre pauliev is the prime minister right now as of the last election campaign in a minority parliament what do you think the conservatives would be doing how do you think

that what would we be doing what would consider we would be trying to get every vote in parliament that we could possibly get in order to show solidarity behind the platform that the the plurality of Canadians voted for in order to elect the Conservative Party into a minority position. And we owe it to those voters and we owe it to the country to fight for the things that we believe in. And you do that by reaching out to people who might agree with constituent elements of your platform and your budget so that you can get the thing passed. That's what Mark Carney did. And in our parliamentary system, Chris Antoine can vote for it or not vote for it or cross the floor or not cross the floor. You know, in the Paul Martin budget in Parliament of

04 to 05, you know, Belinda Strachan across the floor, got into cabinet, Chuck Cabman didn't cross the floor, but he didn't, but he voted for the, like, but minority parliaments yield all kinds of crazy circumstances. And this one, whether you have a 25-seat minority or a three-seat minority or whatever it is, it creates all kinds of circumstances to do things. Like, so as conservatives, again, where I began, like a scenario where we form government in a minority, you know, we had two minorities with Stephen Harper, six of the last eight elections in Canada have yielded minority parliaments. And we come into this minority parliament and say, oh my God, this is outrageous and crazy that people would try to yield a

little bit of leverage for themselves personally or for their riding or for their region or for an issue that they care about. No, this is actually how minority parliaments have always worked. And so we react in a way that is just so over the top that it kind of makes you think, like, didn't you kind of assess that this might be a possibility? And then our reaction and approach to it makes us look not credible or thoughtful. or reasonable because it could happen. We have an election in three to six months and it could yield a conservative minority government.

And now what we've done in the first six months of this parliament, we rhetorically set ourselves up with no margin to actually reach out and get people to cross the floor lest we be hypocrites and liars and frauds and bring in cowards and losers into our caucus because we want, like is there no capacity to see two chess moves ahead, let alone five?

I don't understand the management and the approach that the party has taken in response to this. budget tactically and rhetorically. And it's just this puritanical thing of just, you know, just overreaction in a really unthoughtful way. Whoa. I'm happy to add to that, Peter. I bet you are.

I'm sure you would. Well, no, and it's an interesting point because I am taking seriously, as I hope your listeners will agree, I always do the, I don't want to sound partisan on this. I think it's really interesting when you think about it from. an election strategy perspective. Two points. And the last point that James made really struck a chord with me because I've always found, you know, I've fought in my life five or six elections against conservative parties, many of whom included the characters that are currently around Mr. Poliyev and starring their supporting roles. And one thing I've learned about them over the

years is they really only have one speed, like one mode of operation. And, you know, in game seven of the World Series, not that I want to remind everybody about game seven of this World Series, but let's just say a figurative game seven of any World Series, you empty your bullpen, right? Your starters come in a middle relief. You do all kinds of crazy things to get the right pitcher on the mound because you know there may be no tomorrow. And the problem with Mr. Polio's people is that they behave like every game is game seven, that they're not going to have to think about whether or not they'd look like hypocrites in this situation if they find themselves in it six months from now or two years from now, as James just described. And I think that that's really poor strategy at the end of the day.

And then the other point from a political strategy point of view is I've often reflected on how leaders are covered and not just covered but talked about by politicos because this is certainly not something that's exclusive to journalists. And I find 90% of the time when journalists, pundits, political people talk about leaders, they talk about them in isolation from their specific matchup, right? If this were, again, a baseball game or we're talking about starting goalies or tennis players is probably an even better example, some people can beat player X nine times out of ten, but they just can't hit the fastball from that one pitcher. And if I'm a conservative right now and I'm thinking about what that matchup looks like in the next election, I'm forced to reflect on what it looked like in the last election. which was, it looked like a really good matchup going into the game. And then all of a sudden, the liberals changed their starting pitcher, and it was a really poor matchup. And there's very little that's happened in the past six months or eight months,

I guess really almost 10 months now, because you'd have to set the starter's pistol from when I'm mixing a bunch of sports metaphors here. I've lost track of which game we're playing now. I didn't play Jetlag, Peter. You know, very little has happened since the election to make me think that this matchup plays out any differently than it did last time. And that's certainly reflected in the public opinion of polls that have Mr. Poliyev trailing Mr. Carney by 20, 25 points as best prime minister.

And that's way more important than the horse race polls, by the way, taken from someone pro-tip, as they say, as the kids say. I don't know, man. you'd ask me a month ago whether Pierre Paulyev had any trouble keeping this leadership. I would have said he's like an 85% lock. I'm not so sure anymore for the first time. I mean, I think by the end of last week, go ahead. It's a unique circumstance for Pierre, right? Because, you know, the party does better than any party does, has done since 1988. But he loses his own seat. So then he has to get a by-election. So then he has to

recognize that environment and win the by-election. And then he's got his leadership review coming come in January. Then you've got to corral the party together and you have Kearney with a personal advantage. Then you've got the Trump dynamic where Trump is, you know, overwhelmingly unpopular with Canadians, but there's a solid reserve of, I don't know, a quarter or a third of federal conservatives who still think that Donald Trump is good for, mostly cultural war issues. So Pierre has to sort of be anti-Trump on trade, but not anti-Trump, holos, because there's a bit of attention there and you kind of have to do all that. And then you have to go into the fall session of parliament, and then you have to get through Christmas, then get to your

leadership review, get the right kind of people to come up to the convention to support your leadership. And then after hopefully you secure your leadership, then you pivot back and then maybe speak to a broader audience after you've sort of done the by-election thing, done that. And then that's a lot of, that's a lot of this way, then that way, and then this way and then that way. And at a certain point, the public just goes, wait, we see what you're doing here. And this is a lot of changing of clothes and a lot of changing of emphasis. And I don't know. I don't know that I like that. And it doesn't even kind of really matter what you say. It's just your ability to kind of have to do what you have to do in politics is just so explicitly obvious that people can get

really tired of it. And that's a problem. And it's nothing, this is not a criticism of Pierre. It's just a criticism of the circumstance in which he finds himself fighting for retention of the leadership and sustaining the momentum that actually got him the best results of any conservative leaders since 1988 and coming so close and holding onto that to have the opportunity to get that final five points. It's a hell of a job. And I have actually real empathy and sympathy for them. You know, there's an irony in what's happened in the last year in Canadian politics.

And I would understand if for some Canadians, they're getting whiplash from trying to follow this. I mean, a year ago, a year ago right now, we were watching the internal disruption inside the Liberal Party. members stepping out, criticizing their leader, some calling for him to go, well down in the polls, you know, not doing well at all. It looked like chaos. It looked like the liberals could be finished for a generation.

And here a year later, just a year later, we're watching the reverse. We're seeing the same thing happening, different reasons, but in many ways, same thing. conservative party yeah go ahead i was just saying but some of some of it i have to say that that may come is not so i was live on ctv with with vashy and i was i was saying that we you know the first segment was about the budget then a commercial break and the second segment was going to be about christant tremont and literally we come back and they had the banner across the thing and it said

breaking news matt jenneroo has and i was like oh my god and so it was announced and then they turned to me from our reaction and i and i did my best to string together and something relevant to say And then when we did a lap around the other people on the panel, then it came back to me. And what I said was, there's a name that comes to mind when I think about what Matt Jenneroo has done and what Christartreman has done. And it's this, is that if one more conservative either quits or crosses the floor, that means that Elizabeth May has the balance of power. Okay. But what it also means, though, is that anybody else could have the balance of power in a 343 seat parliament. So the name that comes to my mind now is Joe Manchin.

Is there a Joe Mansion in the federal parliament, right? where Joe mentioned, people don't may remember. He was a Democrat elected senator from West Virginia. West Virginia goes whatever, 70, 30 pro-Trump. He's a blue-collar sort of old-school Democrat, and he decides to sit as an independent, and he has the balance of power. And he can do anything he wants,

and he control the U.S. Center for two years in this king of the Senate. And he can get any kind of project. He wanted an infrastructure piece of park over here, a tax code over there, whatever he wanted. And he was the king of West Virginia, and then he didn't run again. And then he just left, but he dominated and controlled one-third of the U.S. government or one-half of one-third of the U.S. government for the entirety of two years. So what if right now people are going into the breakweek and they're saying, well, don't come on whatever, January, whatever, somebody will write a piece saying that Elizabeth May plus one has a balance of power.

I could be that plus one. That might be interesting for my regent. That might be interesting if I'm the member of parliament, just randomly. If I'm a member of parliament for the UCon, I could be the king of the Yukon, or I could be the king of Nineveit, or I could be the king of P.E.I. or I could be the king of whatever, our queen. And that's interesting. And that's how this parliament can get really dysfunctional, really fast. So it's my way of St. Peter, that not all of this is about leadership politics

reacting to Pierre in the next election. Some of this could become a very personal sort of small P provincial and about my ability to carve a legacy. Here we are 20 years later, still talking about Chuck Cabin and still talking about individual personalities in those minority parliaments and the kind of power that they yielded, right? And somebody right now could be sort of mapping out and doing a long walk with their dog and thinking, you know what? I think maybe I'm not, I know I'm never going to be in a Peer-Polyev cabinet or I'm never going to be in a Kearney cabinet.

And I think I actually kind of want to have a bit of a legacy. And there's a thing that I've always wanted to do. And maybe so these dynamics and the fragility of this parliament could be more consequential than we realize. It's not just about Pierre's leadership. And it's not just about Jenner. Okay. I accept that. And I understand what that could mean to an individual member of parliament.

as they're thinking through what's going on here. But help me go back to the distinction between what we saw a year ago and this year and what it says to Canadians about kind of where we are in Canadian politics right now because, I mean, the Liberal Party was in chaos a year ago, and it would seem, at least at the end of last week, that the Conservative Party is in chaos right now too. Jerry, what does it say to Canadians about the state of politics? Oh, that's a great question, Peter.

I mean, I'm thinking back to this time a year ago, and really this time between now and January, we're very consequential for the Liberal Party in my view and for the country. The first thing, it should bring to everybody's attention, and maybe this is a proviso against making too many bold predictions of what's going to happen, you know, as Yogi Berra probably didn't say the problem with the future is it hasn't happened yet. And we should all be humbled by the things we thought were going to happen in the past that did not,

or things that we did not expect to happen that did. All that said, I think, you know, you should look at it and say, if you think a year is, if you don't think a year is a long time in politics, imagine explaining this week's events to Pierre Paulyev and his team at the end of November in 2024, because it would have seemed like a far-fetched science fiction novel. So one lesson is to be humble about how little you know about what's going to happen. But I think the bigger picture issue is about change, right? And as someone who was intimately involved in the last campaign, I expected it to be the ballot question to be about what kind of change

people wanted. And the conservatives making the argument that no matter if they have a different leader, the liberals are the same old liberals and the Carney team of which I was a large part, as you know, making the argument that it's really about what kind of change you want, that Donald Trump has changed and do you want that kind of change, right? But it didn't quite work out that way because I think Mr. Carney established himself as a change agent a lot more quickly than the conservatives expected him to. And it showed that the conservatives, at least their current iteration, a bunch of people asked me this week, for instance, they'll pay a compliment to Mr. Harper, what this reveals about the differences between Pollyev and Harper. And I think

that the biggest one, and there are many, the biggest one is that Mr. Harper could pivot. Right? If the circumstances changed dramatically and required a change in his posture or his tone or, most importantly, the substance of his policy, and James mentioned the two very large deficits that he ran, which if you'd known Stephen Harper before politics, you would have thought that he would rather resign than do so. But to his credit, the circumstances the country found itself in called for them and he ran them. I'm not so sure Pierre Polio is that kind of guy. And I think that's something that voters can sniff out because they see it displayed over time. And the signal the Liberal Party is sent to Canadians is that if you need change, then we can change, right? And the conservatives have not quite shown that yet. So I think, look, I'm a firm member of the people that are not stupid school of politics. I don't think they make snap decisions based on one policy or another.

I don't think they think about politics the way that those of us who think a lot about politics think about politics. I think they make considered judgments over an extended period of time based on pretty careful observations of the way people behave. And no, they don't always listen to political podcasts every week or watch power in politics every day. but they pay enough attention to form considered judgments. And in my experience, they do it slowly over time, but once they do it, it's very difficult to shake their opinion. And if I were Mr. Polyev, I'd be worried that that view of him is crystallizing right now. Okay.

We're going to have to take a break here. But before we do, James, you have the last thought on this? Yeah, there comes a point where, I think this is another way of saying what Jerry said, I agree, is that you can only, once the public has made up their mind about you, they've made up their mind about you. And that's it. You can't move it. And that happened to Justin Trudeau. And it didn't really matter. Shuffle your cabinet, do a different budget, meet with certain people, you know, push, pull on Trump, whatever. But once it's crystallized and it's locked in, you are what you are. And that's it. and um you peer probably have still has very high levels of support especially in the conservative

party is is it is it capable of becoming prime minister i do think he can absolutely does it require resuscitation of the ndp and the maps and all this or stuff i suppose but um but the window for him is challenged because when you're such a strong personality people are forced to have an opinion about you and if it crystallizes and locks in and there's no movement there's no movement so so i I think how he handles this past week, this coming week, and the rest of this session is, I think, we'll say more than the leadership review at the convention. I think the leadership review of the convention will be a judgment of how he handles the next few weeks. Okay. We're going to take a break.

We'll be right back after this. And welcome back. You're listening to the Moore-Buts conversation. and it's a good one this week. Couldn't ask for more material to work with than what we've witnessed in the last week to have a conversation this week. You're listening on Series XM, Channel 167,

Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform. All right, I want to close this out by giving you the ability not to talk about internal politics for a moment and to go back to the budgeted itself because I guess one of the big promises of the election campaign from the carniside was that we're there's a new Canada developing we're going to see a real difference in the way the country's economy operates and works we're going to see a

new relationship with the United States we're going to see a new relationship with Europe things are going to be different with those Those broad strokes delivered in this budget. Who wants to take a run at that first? James? Sure. The way I sort of see the dynamic that we're in right now, you think about the rest of calendar 25 going into calendar 26, Kuzma and all that, midterms in the United States.

Everything that's in this budget, it's a race against time. It's a race against time for Canadian companies to hold on by their fingernails to what they've got, given the pressures of tariffs, the pressures of the Trump threats to repatriate their auto plants and their auto mandates and other jobs and they're steel and aluminum supply chains and all that. And so can Canadian companies, mills, sawmills and all that, can they hold on through all of this and can the government provide supports and can we find other markets for their goods and products and supply chains such that they can absorb this Trump dynamic and find sort of a new normal going forward? also on the negative side there's the chill on investment in Canada because the uncertainty about kuzman trade in the long term the chill about tariffs in the long term also the Canadian economy has been artificially been pumped up as a consequence of too many immigrants frankly coming into Canada that we can't sustain it's a level of immigration that we can't sustain that is artificially

bumped up the GDP and per capita GDP basis we are in a recession we have been for a while but overall our GDP is floating at about one, one and a half percent. That's artificial because of inflation numbers. Those numbers are all coming down. And that's going to have a drag on our GDP as well. So while that gets absorbed into the system, the uncertainty about tariffs, the uncertainty about trade, the uncertainty about Kuzma in the longer term, those consequences are going to start crashing into the Canadian economy and the tax revenue, all that sort of stuff.

So to counterbalance that, what are we doing? cash into the economy to build local infrastructure, national infrastructure, trying to build broader market access in the rest of the world. We have a major project's office in Canada. We also have sort of the rethink of the way in which we're approaching global market access around the world and trying to capitalize and push money in that. $81 billion over the next five years in military spending, you know, three quarters of that on capital spending infrastructure, trying to get some industrial benefits to hold some of that

capacity in Canada. So there's a, there's a pump cash into the economy, support the businesses like this, but it's a race against time. And I don't know, I don't know when these things are going to, I mean, also the tax measures on capital cost allowance to try to encourage people to spend and invest more in their companies. But so my, this is a budget that was written by an economist on the, on the timeline of having a majority. And only half of that is true. If the politics gets in the way of this race against time, that could be catastrophic for the country. And that could be bad. I mean, so therefore, the obligation of parliament to try to get it right, forget red team, blue team, to try to get right, the formula in this race against time is a complicated one.

This budget, I think, is a credible effort to try to do that. Will it work? Nobody really knows. Jerry. Yeah, well, I'm not sure I could add much to that, Peter. I think going back to what I said earlier, I think I said it in more long. winded way, but this is the budget that people voted for, really. And it's not as if Mark Carney hid his true intentions during the campaign. And I think that people voted for it because, and it's

a bit of a circular argument, that because of his economic credentials, he appeared to be the guy who would craft the right strategy for the moment. And I think he takes that very seriously. So the budget he crafted is the one he thinks is going to work. So I think that's the most important thing. And I think that we, James and I would agree on that. And I think that most Canadians are giving the prime minister the benefit of the doubt on that. So this is the budget he believes the country needs to get us through these extraordinary times and to come out of it stronger. Now, the question, I guess, is whether he's right. And that's always the question in politics.

And in this case, there's a lot riding on it because he, he's essentially saying, look, I believe firmly that the election turned on his more astute observation of what was happening in the United States, how serious it was for us, and what that required us to do us as in Canada, not us as in the Liberal Party of Canada. And his answer is, I'm not sure what the economy is going to look like, but I know, and these are my words, not his, this is my analysis, not what he said, but I know that we're not going to be able to build anything if we don't know how to create our own assets in this country.

So essentially what he's done is fashioned a macroeconomic policy that makes it easier for Canadians to build our own assets in our own. country. And if that's successful, then, you know, we'll be talking about Mark Carney the way people talk about Lester Pearson and Wilford Laurier. And if it's not, we won't. So I don't have a crystal ball. I don't know how it's all going to turn out. I don't know how the politics that James mentioned, which are always, you know, not remembered very clearly as time goes by, but extremely material and sometimes lethal in the moment. But I do think that the country is giving them the benefit of the doubt, and I do think that

he believes that this is the right strategy for the country. I'll give you one example where I think it's, you know, this isn't a peacetime decision that we're going to attack one way or another. This is we're under threat, and this is our big shot to get ourselves through this in some some way that leads to prosperity in the future. Take the big ticket item in the budget, that $82 billion that James talked about on defense. Well, what I'm sure my colleagues are learning, if they didn't know going in, is the macro problem of Canada's dependence on the United States is 45,000 times worse

when it comes to defense. that our, I wouldn't put it this way, but as one former colleague put it on charitably, the Department of National Defense is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Pentagon. And our people are educated at their schools, we train with them, we envy their technology and their infrastructure, we envy for all of its faults, the universal esteem in which their military is held by their general public. And generally, the Canadian Armed Forces, this is an overstatement to make a point. Generally, the Canadian Armed Forces would love to trade places with Pentagon. And that has taken on all kinds of really practical

realities over the years, the most obvious of which is whenever we need new stuff, we buy their stuff. And if we're lucky, they put a bit of their supply chain and one of our towns and it's still their company, but we get some of the spin-off economic benefits. If we're trying to craft a policy that's less dependent on the United States and our big spend is in the military, that's going to be really difficult for all of those institutional and historical reasons. And I, for one, will be watching really closely on this. I think David McGinty has a huge job in his hands. I think that Doug Guzman, who's been brought in from Bay Street to run the procurement, very decorated private sector career, has a huge job on his hands. Because crafting

an independent policy, when all we've really ever done over the course of my professional life is buy stuff from the Americans, it's going to be really hard. On the other hand, though, Jerry, if you think about the gulf that's now been created between Canada and the United States. If there, if there was sort of a rebuttressing of the alignment on national security reasons because of whatever's happening could happen in the Arctic, whatever it may happen with won't name the countries, but you get the point, is that if there was to be some national security crisis on our continent, if there's anything that would actually rapidly increase in a post-Trump era, the reconciliation between Canadians and Americans, it would be solidarity over a

security threat. And that is, and that thread starts with some of the procurement stuff and realignment and like politics aside bluster aside tariffs aside you know all this nonsense aside uh when a core is core um we need to protect ourselves from external threats we we actually do stand up and align with each other and that and this is good and so um you know there's a bigger conversation to be had there yeah um we're at time but let me let me ask this quick last one uh are either of you surprised that the kind of loose coalition of first ministers still basically seems to exist here after six months of this new government. No, it does.

Well, I was going to say, it does, frankly, in part because there isn't an election campaign and Prime Minister Carney is still personally very popular, right? So I think that's it, right? You know, they say you can only win at the negotiating table what you can win in the battlefield. And so, you know, the battlefield of politics is Mark Carney would still win a plurality of seats and in the areas that matter most to the premiers that are up for re-election. But, you know, the next big campaign in Canada is fall 26 in Quebec. So there's a window here where Prime Minister Carney is still personally popular.

And he still holds the pen over a budget, which can release a lot of money, which would be super accretive economically and politically to all these premiers. So they want to play nice. They don't want to be blamed for blowing up the Trump thing. They don't want to be blamed for not getting enough benefit for their province in a budget. And they don't want to be offside with the prime minister is still personally popular. Those three elements keep everybody in the tent so far. One thing about the budget that I think is notable, it's not just what people say, but what people don't say.

You don't see an army of mayors, premiers, indigenous leaders, business leaders, union leaders. You don't see a stream of sort of consistent thought leadership in any one envelope of the universe coming out against this budget. It's just not there. So the effort to sort of dial up to 10 opposition to this budget is not there. There's not a ton of enthusiasm about the budget, but there's not a lot of, there's not a ton of heat in the other direction as well. There's a lot of wait and see extraordinary circumstances. We don't know, you know, as the race against time that I described, we'll see. We'll see, I think is what most people are saying.

You've got the last word, Jerry. Yeah, I think we can do a whole podcast on this, and I think we tried to a couple of episodes ago, Peter. But it's a really important point because if you want to get big things done in this country, you need federal provincial cooperation to do it. And ideally, you need federal, provincial, indigenous, municipal cooperation to do it if you want to change something big and hard that's going to last for a long time. So I would certainly agree with James that it's always easier for the prime minister to be friends with the premiers when the prime minister is more popular than the premiers. And right now, he's more popular than, I think, nine of ten of them in their own provinces. So that's a pretty advantageous position for the prime minister to be in. And I watched, as I'm sure a lot of your listeners did, with real interest, that little tussle about Doug Ford's ad in the United States.

Because that's the kind of thing where knowing a lot of the personalities involved, it could have gone sideways in a big way, and especially given the circumstances. Prime Minister's on his way to APEC where he hopes to meet Trump. you know he's away he's got a long time to think about this on a plane premier of another party his team has fought campaigns against the prime minister's team it had all of the makings of a combustible event right and at the end of the day they both kind of went you know what this isn't worth having a fight over let's hose this down and move on and I saw that as a real sign of maturity from both camps. So I think that the government and I think that most of the premiers, in fact, all of them as far as I know, are still seized with this moment that we're in a

pretty significant crisis in the country and that the public, even if they wanted to fight, the public's not going to tolerate them getting away with it. So I think the structural incentive is there to get along with the prime minister. And I think the politics are all in favor of Fed profit cooperation. Jerry Butts, James Moore, Moore Butts conversation. Another good one. Thanks, gentlemen.

Talk to you in two weeks. Well, there you go. Moore Butts, conversation number 28. And it was a good one. And, you know, I thought they still manage somehow not to fall into the partisan

trap. But to discuss it, the way you want to hear it discussed about what goes on, what goes on in parties, what goes on in individual minds of MPs when these kind of issues come up. So it's an interesting time, it's not over yet. As we've witnessed in the days since last week, there's still rumblings about different things that may or may not be going on. So we'll keep following this story. see where it ends up tomorrow it's your turn and you heard the question of the week

if you missed it go back to the top of the program it's all there and what you have to do to put your entry in and the random ranter will be back he took last week's off because of the remembrance day uh theme that was in the program last week and uh but he's back he's back with more on AI I think you want to hear this one too. That's it for now. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks so much for listening. We'll talk to you again in 24 hours.