The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Moore Butts Conversation Encore - Is Ottawa Ready For A Possible Two Front Referendum Battle?

Episode Date: August 12, 2026

Encore Episode. James Moore and Gerald Butts are back with another one of their highly anticipated "Conversations." This time it centres around the possibility that the near future could see two referendums, one in Quebec and one in Alberta. Is Ottawa ready to handle that fight? Who would Captain Canada be if it came to that? 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. Welcome to the summer of 2026. With the bridge taking a break for the summer on hiatus, as we say, each Wednesday we will be airing an encore episode of our very popular Moore-Butts' conversations with former Stephen Harper Cabinet Minister, James Moore, and former Justin Trudeau-Aid, Jerry Butts. The idea of these chats is not to have a partisan bun fight, but to give us a sense of what happens. happens behind the closed doors in Canadian politics. So throughout this summer, some of the best from the 25-26 season. Hope you enjoy. And hello there and welcome to Tuesdays. It's a more buts Tuesday. Notice we don't say the number anymore because one of the audience quite rightly wrote in, say, man, sir, you can't keep track of which number it is anyway. What difference does it make? just say it's a Moore-Butz conversation and we'll be listening.

So that's what we're doing starting today. James Moore, the former cabinet minister for Stephen Harper and Gerald Butz, the former principal secretary to Justin Trudeau after the 2015 election, are both with us again for another one of their riveting conversations. And this one is an important one. It's an interesting one. I mean, think about it this way. If the Parti-Kiqwa wins the next election in Quebec,

which is due in the next year, their promise includes a promise to hold a referendum. There hasn't been won, of course, since 1995, and it looked like the federal government wasn't really ready for that one. They almost blew it. So that possibility exists that there could be a Quebec referendum, but there also could be an Alberta referendum. Both of these on separations.

secession, call it whatever you want. So could Ottawa handle a two-front referendum battle? As unlikely as that seems, it's a possibility. So we decided, let's ask the boys the question.

Is Ottawa ready for something they weren't ready for in 1995? I think you're going to find the answers quite interesting. And we'll get to them in just a moment, but first of all, we have to remind you of the question of the week for your turn on Thursday along with the random

ranter but the question this week is well it's a nice kind of classically Canadian one you know we've had some heavy-duty questions this fall so this one's a little easier to handle the question is simple are you looking forward to winter are you ready for winter do you want winter are you excited about winter any of those could be the possible question, but it's basically about winter and how you feel about it. So here are the rules. As always, for the question of the week, 75 words or fewer. And where that's a hard condition, you've got to meet that. Anything under 75 words. You write to the Mansbridge podcast at gmail.com. You include your name and the location you're writing from,

and that's your full name and where you're writing from. And you have your answers in before 6 p.m. tomorrow. 6 p.m. Wednesday is the deadline. That's Eastern Time. 6 p.m. Eastern time tomorrow. Look forward to reading your answers. Read them all every week and look forward to it as well. So you can start writing now.

As you're listening to the Moore-Butz conversation, Let's get at it right now. So it was a little over a year ago that a piece ended up in the Walrus magazine. And the title was The Quebec Secession Crisis is Coming and Canada isn't ready. Who wrote it? Well, one of our panelists today wrote it. Jerry Butts wrote it for the Walrus. It was an interesting time because back then nobody was really talking about.

a new era of secession coming in Canada in terms of the possibility coming out of Quebec. Well, here we go a year later. And it seems much more likely that we could be ending up in a referendum situation in Quebec, but also perhaps in Alberta as well. So in a year it's gone from nobody talking about it to people talking about the possibility in two different places. Is that a kind of accurate reflection, Jerry, if we start with you? Well, I think there was a bit of conversation about it at the time.

I think that everybody was sort of afraid to talk publicly for obvious reasons because you get accused of bringing up ghosts, and I sure did when I wrote that piece. But I'm one who believes that forewarned is forearmed. and hopefully that contributed to making people aware of something that I think is inevitable if we get a PQ government in Quebec. It's certainly a much greater prospect than it ever has been in Alberta, although it's certainly hardening to see federally minded, not federalist-minded Albertans starting a grassroots movement of their own to counterbalance. what they see is a fringe movement. But look, you know, maybe it's the fact that I was a terrified

grad student at McGill the last time this happened. And everybody in Ottawa assured us that there was no chance the no side was going to lose. We started the campaign with a 12 or a 15 point bleed. And then there we were on that horrible October night hanging onto the country by our fingernails. I guess one of the things about the article is that it's not really saying that Canadians at large didn't, weren't thinking about it.

It's saying that those who should have been thinking about it, especially in the federal bureaucracy in Ottawa, weren't thinking about it. That's right. That's right. And I think, again, there's a lot of PTSD, depending on the generation of the federal bureaucracy you're talking about. I think that if you were a young bureaucrat in the mid-90s,

you're probably a deputy minister or assistant deputy minister now, and you would have lived through that as a formative moment. And so I think, I do think this has changed, by the way. I think that the federal bureaucracy is thinking more about this now than it was this time last year. But I think most people in positions of leadership in Ottawa just did not want to entertain the notion. And it's a very real one. James, what do you think of this? Yeah, I mean, I sort of cast ahead.

You have an obligation as a political leader and as a government to imagine the possibility that imagine the reaction to the possibility, then imagine the reaction to the reaction. Like that's part of your responsibility as government, right, is to think about the unthinkable, not to dwell on it obsessively because you have to deal with the here and now. You have to deal with, you know, the mess that's at your feet. But you have to sort of look on the horizon a little bit and imagine and think about it. And so, you know, one year from right now, we could have a Pacekibok government in the province of Quebec, sure. But a PQ government doesn't necessarily mean a referendum.

We've seen that multiple times, right, in relatively recent history. there's there's the threat of it but it didn't happen Pauline Merwad didn't do it I mean there was a majority minority dynamic there and all that it's true to say that Quebecers I remember I remember something once said about the Reform Party they said I'm not I'm not a I'm not a right winger and they may be bastards but there are bastards they're from the West and they're going to stand up and fight for us and I think there's an element of a lot of Quebecers to just say

they'll go to Ottawa or they'll go to they'll go to Quebec City they'll make some noise and they'll shake their fist and they'll fight for us and you know if they threaten, they threaten, but I don't think they'll actually do it. And in the end, it'll be a referendum, and I don't really want it to happen. So I think there's a lot of that. But you have to be careful about what you unleash, if you unleash the beast, and that things could spiral out of control. And so I do imagine a scenario, a worst-case scenario where you have a government in Quebec

that is elected, that is Palsic-Kibiqua, who has a portion of its base, who have an expectation, who are absolutists, that the goal is to get to that sovereignty moment or some kind of Sovereignty Association. And then frankly, in terms of federal political leaders, you have an NDP leader who is not bilingual, not Francophone, not Francophile, in either of the two frontrunners who are currently leading the conversation for NDP leader, Pierre Pollyev, who aspires to do well in Quebec, but is not doing well in Quebec. And a liberal prime minister whose French is very, very rough and who relies on others to tell

him what to say in order to be seen to be empathetic and supportive of the province of Quebec. That's not a great combination, just at a high level to say that we have those personalities, the charisma, the charisma in the sense of appreciation for the frustrations that Quebecers have of staying in Confederation. That creates anxiety for me. Well, and I'd add to that, of course, that by Quebec law, the leader of the no side would be the leader of the opposition, right, in the National Assembly. And that currently is Pablo Rodriguez and many of your voters, voters.

Peter, you, if you were running, you'd have lots of voters, but your listeners, not voters. Many of your listeners will probably be unaware of the current traviles that the leader of the Liberal Party of Quebec is enduring. I'm not sure I would want to have that person as the spokesperson for the country, the one in only legal spokesperson for the country during the campaign. But I will say, Peter, that one of the reasons I wrote that piece, in fact, probably the main reason I wrote that piece was what I was seeing in my day job at Eurasia Group. And just how porous the current communications environment, the information ecosystem, has made

everybody's borders that I was worried that what little thinking was happening about the prospect of a referendum was drawing too close of an analogy to. to what happened in 1995. Whereas if it happened now with the chaos that's going on in the United States and the adversarial nature of the geopolitical environment, remember 95 was just post-Cold War. The biggest problem we all had geopolitically was how we were going to organize ourselves to divide up the spoils of the victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War.

And in this case, we'd have at least one, probably two, maybe three, very sophisticated active participants from outside the country that would love to create chaos on a 9,000 kilometer border with the United States. And I just don't think that we think about that very much in this country. We think of ourselves as kind of a refuge from the geopolitical electrical storm out there when we'd become center stage if we had a referendum in one of our provinces. And by the, if you're fueling my view that you have an obligation to think about what could be possible and sort of seeing around the corner, what if, you know, like the United States can say that they're going to supply the Canadian steel with the U.S. steel. They can't do that with aluminum.

There's a lot of the energy grid that exists in the northeast of the United States that comes from Quebec. What if three months, six months from now, maybe after the midterms, I don't know, something. But Donald Trump does start doing sectoral deals with Canada and the lead up to Kuzma. And what if there's a carve-out that is very accretive to the province of Quebec on those core elements? Part of the agreement that I think a lot of Quebecers have, which is I'm comfortable with in Canada so long as there's cultural accommodation. I'm comfortable within Canada so long as the sum is better than the whole of its parts. I'm comfortable and I'm happy to be in Canada so long as I have the passport to dollar, the trade agreements that are all net benefit to Canada. But if each of those things one by one is not better that my cultural accommodation is being threatened because the CBC is going to get blown up or there's,

There's not a sensitivity to the uniqueness of the Quebec nation and this North American footprint of all English that, like, and those things aren't being recognized or understood. And we have a prime minister who doesn't speak French very effectively. We have an official opposition leader in Ottawa who wants to blow up cultural institutions that protect my culture. And then on top of that, the Americans are going to give us these trade access dynamics that will protect the, and make Quebec whole in a way that Ottawa is not protecting us, but America is offering it. And if you get my point, that if these things start and start wrapping together, then you start thinking, well, maybe there is a dynamic here that'll be better off and maybe we can be better off. And that creates real concern for me as well. Like that really starts to weaponize the not just the emotional dynamic of having been respected by the, you know,

lack of respect by Canada because of the failures of Meach and Charlottetown or lack of respect from Ottawa coming out of the 91 recession, which goes into the 95 referendum. But now there are clear sort of tectonic shifts here in the dynamic between the United States and Quebec, that'll be safeguarded, that are we better off actually still being in Confederation? And who's going to articulate the case in favor of it? You can think about in 1995. You have Cretchen, obviously he didn't run a particularly strong campaign. However, he was a son of Quebec.

He had been fighting for Quebec for one third of Canada's history at that point, right? He comes into federal politics in the 1960s, all through the 1990s. By then, that was about a third of Canada's history. So you have Cretchen, and then you have Chalet and you have Dillon and you have others who are passionate believers in Canada, who are pure Lentfancophone Quebecois in French, in the French language, taking the fight to them. Who is that in Canada now?

Who is the Francophone? Like, who is the, there are some people whose names will come to mind, but, you know, the A team is quite the A team that was the A team. And even back then, the A team was shaky. These are all reasons to be anxious, I think. Well, this idea of whether or not

there's a Captain Canada this time round, if in fact, this is the road we end up going down. on. You know, that is kind of a 30-year-old play. Is that still the kind of play that you would need at a time like this? Like a kind of a central figure or a couple of central figures. Chantelle and others would be better suited to answer that question. But, you know, but I don't know what the answer is,

but I see the holes in the game would be what I would say, right? Yeah. Yeah. And you talk about Captain Canada. I'm a little more worried about Captain America in this case, Peter, because you'll recall that on the eve of the referendum, the then-President Bill Clinton took it upon himself to do his own press briefing in the White House press office press room.

And all but said, we really hope Canada hangs together. They're great allies, great friends, great partners, et cetera, et cetera. Who knows whether that moved any votes and came back on the eve of the referendum? We can debate that until the cows come home. But at least we knew that there was a major trading partner, the largest military in the world, was in favor of Canada remaining one country. I don't think we can take that for granted now.

I honestly think that if, especially when in light of the foreign policy statement that the government of the United States put out just two days ago, where it said one of the biggest problems in the world is civilizational suicide in Europe. It's kind of insane what's going on there. And it's perfectly foreseeable for me that Trump and MAGA America would be active participants in looking to see Canada be broken up from the inside out. I don't want to focus this all on the potential threat in Quebec.

Because there is a potential threat in Alberta. We can debate how extensive that threat is, but nevertheless it's there. and so it's kind of a dual threat at the moment in terms of the future of the country and what could possibly happen in terms of separation or secession. How do you deal with that as a central government? How do you focus not just on one area, but on the fact that you've got to be looking at two areas right now? I think it's a reminder that, you know, when prime ministerial

Well, Rune, one of the, one of the, um, his good deeds that he did before he passed was that a thumping point of his, I mean, he had a major health scare, about five, ten years ago before he passed. And one of the thumping points that he returned to kind of his, his, his parting reminder to the country was the number one obligation of any prime minister is national unity. Before you deliver a piece of mail, before you build an inch of highway, before you do anything. The first thing you got to do is be focused on national unity, um, as your, as your defensive strategy as, as a prime minister. he didn't take the second step, right, which is sort of concede his, the reason why he's arrived at that was because he had his own disappointments and failures as a prime minister, right?

Like he didn't say, you know, the way that Meach and Charlottetown were handled and his obsession about it led to the creation of the Reform Party and the Block Quebec qua. I could say that among the, frankly, the failures of Justin Trudeau is that we've now led to the dynamic in Alberta and, you know, possibly in Quebec, maybe an overreach some I think, but I think it's credible, certainly to say with with Alberta. But, you know, but it speaks to the fragility that exists in the Canadian Union. And I think Brian Mulroney's reminder of that, I think, is an important dynamic. And I worried that as we, in minority parliaments especially, everything is anxious about how do we get to the next vote? How do we get? How does the federal budget? So Matt Jennery abstained and conservatives were behind the curtain and Elizabeth May did her thing and some NDPers abstained.

And so we got through the vote, but we still have to go through committee. And what do we do? and how do we, like, that's like with your nose pressed against the glass trying to avoid an election this month and this quarter. Okay, can somebody look up a little bit and see the horizon? And minority parliament sort of arrest your ability to do that. And that is anxious, makes me very anxious. So you think about the MOU that was signed between Prime Minister Carney and Premier Smith is you think, well, this is good. But what I think among the things that it exposed is that for a lot of people, and Daniel Smith signs the MOU, goes into a party convention.

And there is a quarter, a third, I don't know, 40 percent, maybe more. who booed her. As she said, I hope people in this room think that this shows that Canada can still work and you have a quarter or a third or whatever of the room booing

their premier, live on TV. I think what the MOU exposed is that the fracture between Alberta and certainly regions of Alberta and the rest of the country are certainly Ottawa. Pipelines was a canary in the mind,

but it wasn't, it wasn't really about pipelines. It was about pipelines, but it wasn't really about pipelines. Pipelines is a symbol for a deep distrust between Alberta and the rest of the country. That, I think, is a real cause for concern. But there's not just a energy sector crack between Alberta and Ottawa, but a cultural, political one that is not going away anytime soon. Okay, Jerry.

So how do you deal with this dual threat? Well, the most important thing. And I think the prime minister won't surprise you to hear me say this, Peter, but I think the prime minister is doing a fine job of it is to consider. I consistently articulate the positive case for the country. And I said this in the piece last year that I thought one of the reasons I was worried about that prospect this time last year was the negativity that our politics seemed to have gotten steeped in. That both the then prime minister and the leader of the opposition for their own political reasons found it impossible or political constraints found it impossible to give a full throat. defense of the country. And I don't think Prime Minister Carney is going to let himself get put in that

position. So I think most importantly, it's that. I would also say, I mean, let's not overstate how many Albertans want to leave Canada or how many Quebecers want to leave Canada. My experience throughout my life in politics was that this is kind of, you know, irresponsible politicians like to play this card. to get what they want in the short term

and beggar the long-term interests of the country. And I am definitely more of a hard-ass on separatism than a lot of people in public life and in the party. I think, of course, the big thing that has changed between, from a Canadian legal perspective, between 1995 and now, is the advent of the Clarity Act, which requires a clear question.

I mean, my view is that that's cold comfort because I'm not sure that we would ever end up, if there were a serious threat to secede from the country, I'm not sure they would let the Clarity Act and its parameters guide their question designed. And then we might end up having a referendum about whether or not the question is fair and that could end up in a lousy place. So I, you know, there's no substitute, I say this in the piece, Peter, there's no substitute for the vast reserve of goodwill that fellow Canadians feel for one another. And ultimately, that's the ballast we have whenever irresponsible politicians of whatever political persuasion want to pull at the fabric of the country. And I have a lot of faith that people will stand up to any serious attempt to do that wherever it may happen. But I also think it's important for us to realize that's, you know,

once the puck gets dropped in that hockey game, very strange things can happen. And I use the example and the piece of the Brexit referendum as an illustration of that. When it started, there were no serious people, and you can trace this as one of the early examples of polymarket, the betting website that has become really fashionable in politics around the world. You can watch the gap between the expectations that Britain would leave the European Union yes or no. And it is like a 10, 15, 20 point gap for a year and then on the day of the vote it closes right and that just shows you that the market the political market in that case was not taking it very seriously and i for one remember the last week of

the referendum campaign in um 1995 when it felt like ottawa was frozen like a deer in the headlights you'll remember the the last minute attempts the pro canada rally mr crutchins uh broadcast all of that stuff like a team that was really worried about losing and they were pulling the goalie. And I just hope we don't allow ourselves to sleepwalk into that kind of situation this time because a lot of the things that we depended on externally to be reinforcing positive reinforcements for the country are actually going to pull in the opposite direction this time. Yeah, you're absolutely right. And especially in terms of what happened in 95 because you can argue all you want about the

question and what the question says and how relevant really. the question is, it comes down to yes or no. And everybody knows what that means. Yeah. And they did then. And the no side, scrambled at the last minute, looked like they were scrambling,

spent hundreds of millions of dollars, moving people in, buying flags, doing all those kind of stuff, which, you know, didn't necessarily work in their favor at the end. It alienated a lot of people. Nevertheless, getting back to this,

this point about you know how to how to deal with it, how to fight it, how to try to express the sentiments of the federal side at a time when you've got these kind of two situations in the air

at roughly the same time. Now who knows how it's going to play out as James said you know the promise is there on the part of the PQ leader that if he wins it will be a referendum referendum in his first term doesn't mean that's exactly the way it's going to play out, even that he could win.

If we learned anything in the last year, things can change in a hurry. I want to talk about the role that the new minister, you know, the new minister of, I call it now Canadian identity, culture and heritage of Mark Miller, who's in, is what kind of rule that's going to be

in the time ahead? but I want to take our first break or our only break, and we'll come right back and discuss that because James is the perfect person to talk about it because he was in that portfolio at one time. We'll be back right after this. And welcome back, Peter Mansport here, along with James Moore, Gerald Butts.

It's the Moore-Buts conversation for this week. And we're trying to get into the situation in terms of what is Canada really as it comes down to and how is Canada going to play out over these next months and years given certain threats that are facing the country, both from outside and inside. Mark Miller gets the job, the new job, new title anyway,

Minister of Canadian Identity. It's been around since, In modern politics, it's been around since the mid-90s. Sort of after the threat we just talked about in the first half of this program, after the 95 referendum, the whole idea to try and make things culturally better in terms of the unity of the country. And the focus has been a lot on Quebec. In fact, when you look at the lineup of ministers in the time that this portfolio has existed, most of being from Quebec.

The last five, I think, in a row, including Mark Miller now, have been from Quebec. Before that, the first time somebody came from BC into that portfolio, I think it might have been the first time since somebody had been from Western Canada in that portfolio was James Moore. And received a lot of high marks from around the political area and the communications area about his role in that job. So we're going to, we look to you, James, to tell us what Mark Miller's going to be up against. I promise you, lots of low marks from a lot of people, too.

So it's okay. But that's the, you live, you learn. Yeah. Minister of Heritage and official languages for about five years from, from the Harper era, I was appointed in 2008. remember that Stephen Harper was on, we went a minority government in January 2006, going to 2008 against Stefan Dion.

Stephen Harper, we looked like we were on the march to get to earn a majority government, to go from 124 to cross the line to get a majority government. And about halfway through the campaign, two things happened in 2008 that arrested that. One was a fraction between the, a fracture between the Stephen Harper campaign and Quebec over culture. At one point, we were looked that could get 20 to 30 seats and 75 seats of the. and 75 seats in Quebec, and we lost that over our arts and culture. And again, the sensitivity in the language about being seen to be not just a protector, but a celebrator and a champion for Quebec within the North American context in Quebec language arts and cultural communities.

So we lost that. Then the second, of course, was the falling out of the global economy, about halfway through the campaign in 08. So after that campaign, I was elevated to be the full minister of Canadian heritage and had a lot of conversations with then Prime Minister Harper, but what he learned in the campaign and what we learned from our first two years in government and where to go from there. As you say, the portfolio was created by,

and COPS was the first minister, going back to 1995. Before the 1995 referendum in Quebec on sovereignty, there was the 1995 federal budget, which created a lot of cuts to culture, including a 40% cut to CBC, the public broadcaster, which, again, if you're, frankly, we really blind about it. If you're an English-speaking Canadian,

certainly outside of the province of Quebec, the CBC's budget goes up, CBC's budget goes down, you might have the same view about that as if any other public broad TV Ontario's budget goes up or down. You might be disappointed, you might be happy, you might be angry, I don't know. But in Quebec, there's a very different lens put on that. The CBC, the public broadcaster, certainly in 1995, maybe less so today, was seen as Canada's commitment to physical infrastructure

that would protect the French language on the North American continent. Without the public broadcaster and its physical imprint, not just in Quebec, but across all of Canada, the physical commitment to the CBC is a physical and infrastructural commitment to the French language in North America. You destroy that, you destroy the sense of safety that the Quebec language has, which is why often the Quebec government will counterbalance those cuts with commitments to language and culture in terms of private sector institutions, language laws, sign laws and all that. There's a direct correlation between the two. And so when people just say defund or get rid of the CBC, there's a knock-on effect of what that means in terms of the sense. of cultural sovereignty of the French language in the North American footprint. I didn't know any of this going into the job of Kennedy Minister of Canadian Heritage in 2008.

You'll learn this over the fullness of time. So bridging our two conversations together, there's anxiety that I think that I have, and I think a lot of Canadians have, that if a government is sort of seen to be fumbling in the dark, because they have only a Quebec lens on the culture files, or only a sort of a soft understanding about the cultural dynamics in Canada relative to the beast of the United States and the beast of the English language

and what it means for minority communities in the country, I think we could be fumbling in the dark in terms of what the knock-on effects will be in terms of Canadian unity and so on. It's also, by the way, not just a social portfolio in terms of culture. There's a big economic component to this as well. You know, you think about Canada's film industry, video game industry, intellectual property law, where we're at in terms of film and television, creativity, and all that, it is a massive economic generator of the culture files.

And so to be a successful minister, you have to be mindful about the language about two and a half million French-speaking Canadians outside of the province of Quebec. And they're feeling at home within Canada where there's the Quebec dynamic, but also the French language dynamic outside of Quebec and balancing that, understanding that it's an economic portfolio,

understanding that we have an obligation to make sure that we're united as a country, but also respectful of its constituent parts. it's a big portfolio. It's a third largest portfolio in the government of Canada, by the way. Third largest in terms of the numbers of acts of parliament, its footprint, the number programs they're responsible for. It has a key role.

And this is where Mark Miller will learn has a key role as well in the Canada-U.S. relationship in terms of culture, protecting cultural, intellectual property law and all that. So it's a very big portfolio. And it shouldn't be sort of seen as one where you just kind of give it to somebody who should be in cabinet, but we don't really kind of know what to do with this person like I think they did with Stephen Gibo, which is we want to have him in cabinet. we want to fence him off from from environment but he's an important Quebec voice so we'll make him minister of heritage and for the first year or for the second bite of the apple that he's

had his heritage minister he didn't do anything and then now he got to do his grand exit and now you have a rift with Quebec so it's it's a delicate portfolio that I don't think people think about enough in terms of what it means for policy and a sense of Canadian unity well I'm going to let that pitch on Stephen just sort of float right by the plate there and keep the bat on my shoulder, James. But look, I think you articulated what made you a very good heritage minister, that you always have to keep in balance these conflicting views of what Canadian culture consists of. And as someone who, an Anglophone who grew up in Nova Scotia, went school in Montreal,

has lived in Toronto and Ottawa and spent a lot of time in almost every part of the country, because I've been blessed with careers that brought me to pretty much every town over a thousand people in the country from WWF and in politics. It's always easy in a country as large and diverse as Canada to find a fault line and pitch your tent there. Right. And I noticed that when Mark Miller was named Heritage Minister, some of the largest and most famous conservative super PACs, who I will not aim because they don't need publicity from me or you,

the first thing they did was send a message to Mark Carney that there's more to Canadian culture than Quebec, and we need a heritage minister from outside of Quebec. And of course, that's going to generate some likes on Facebook, and unfortunately from a lot of the people I went to high school with of my Facebook page is any indication. But I just don't think it's the way to build a country. And I've always been very, you know, I've worked hard to gain a certain proficiency in French myself.

It doesn't come naturally to me. I've always been very admiring of the singular fact that here we are in an ocean of very aggressive English media and culture. And we have somehow managed to create before going on, you know, 400 years longer now, depending on where you draw the beginning. We have this vibrant, innovative, thriving culture of French right in the heart of English, North America. So I start from the perspective of, well, we must be doing something, right, both in Quebec and in the rest of the country.

And I think we all benefit from it, obviously, right? it's always easy on any given Tuesday to pick on well the CBC gets too much money or rad can gets too much money but at the end of the day look the results speak for themselves we have an incredible vibrant unique culture and there are very few examples of it anywhere in the world where a minority culture and language is surrounded by such an aggressive majority more in the United States than in Canada and yet here we are I think it's one of the most admirable things about Canada and about Quebec. When I think about, frankly, the conservative universe in Pierre Palet, and how close he is to being prime minister, and he still is close to being prime minister, right?

Is that one of the things that one of the hurdles he needs to jump over, Canadians are going to trust him to be the prime minister of the country. He needs to be seen as one of the most voracious fighters on behalf of Canada. I'm hopeful that once he gets past his leadership review and the conservative, serve a party and he's won his by-election now in Bo River in Alberta that he will then pivot and become an aggressive like as a British Columbian as a non-Albertan I want I want my future prime minister to to stare down the threats to Canadian unity because of Donald Trump because of the global dynamics because the frail for fragility of the Canadian economy and the

anxiety that a lot of us feel I want my prime minister to be the most aggressive pro-Canada person that there could possibly be and that means you stare down Canada's enemies. You stare down the Donald Trump responsibly. I don't mean belligerence and being aggressive, but you stare down in terms of your robustness and substance in the way in which you engage the administration and you're thoughtful about public policy.

But also you stare down the people who are threats to Canada within our own borders. You know, Peter Loheed, I'm an Albertan, I'm a proud Albertan, but I'm a Canadian first. I want to hear it. We need to hear Daniel Smith say that. And she said that last week with the MOU. She said that in substance. And we need to see Pierre Pahliav

and anybody who aspires to be Prime Minister to be Canada's greatest defender. You don't get the privilege of being Prime Minister unless you are Canada's absolute greatest defender. And that doesn't mean you just champion Canada and wave the flag, but you stare down our enemies and you square off with them and you take them in a really responsible

way. And the role of Canadian Heritage, I mean, I get anxious. I get in about it is in the sense that if it's only seen as the job of the Minister of Canadian Heritage is to fund Canada Day parties, stand up for free speech, quote, and defund the CBC. That is insufficient to the moment.

And the Trump effect and its aftershocks will long outlast however long he's president and whatever happens in 2026 and 28. And Canadians have now set the bar very high that if you're going to be the prime minister to this country, you better have a vision for Canadian unity that goes far beyond just infrastructure bills, lower taxes and being tough on crime. And the role of Canadian heritage and culture policy is fundamental to that. That you have to have something to say about what does it mean to be Canadian? And it doesn't just mean that we share low tax rates. It's that we have a sense of identity. Can you share with us without breaking too many confidences?

What Prime Minister Harper said to you when he asked you to be the Minister of Heritage? Yeah. I mean, look, I came in again at the end of the 08 campaign where it was seen to be that we lost the seats that we needed to get a majority because the bottom fell out of the Quebec campaign over arts and culture. And I remember he asked me, he knew the answer, but he wanted to make sure that I knew that he knew the answer. He said, how many, how many Francophones and French-speaking Canadians are there in your riding? And I remember I literally said, I said, I don't know, like five. And because now, Mallardville, which was the largest French settlement west of the Red River,

Malardville is in Coquitlam. And that part of Coquillum was not wasn't in my riding, but it was adjacent to. But I was in French immersion all the way through school. I'm an Anglophone, but I'm a Francophile. I speak French. but his point was you're the first heritage minister from outside of the Toronto, Ottawa. I mean, she'll the cops from Hamilton, but let's say Toronto, whatever. But outside of that access of central Canada, of Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal,

you're the first from outside of there. And because you don't have a large francophone constituency in your riding, there's, has often been, especially with official language policy, attention between standing up for French language as Quebecers see it and standing up for the French language as the two and a half million French-speaking Canadians outside of Quebec see it. And often those, the larger francophone diaspora in Canada, whether it's Acadians or, you know, people of St. Boniface or people in Edmonton or people in Mallardville, they think, well, official language and language and culture policy is just all about Quebec when it's

not. It's much more than that. And because you don't have a large francophone footprint in your constituency, Quebecers won't be suspicious of you because you're not in that group of the French universe. And non, and francophone non-Cubeckers won't be suspicious of you because you're not a Quebecer. So therefore, you might be able to have an opportunity to sort of bridge the gap and come in fresh and say, I will do my best to be empathetic and support the French language within the North American context because I have no bias against you and I'm trying to do my best. And I have no, I'm not coming to the fight with Quebec with a sword because I'm from St. Boniface or I'm from a Francophone community outside of Quebec. And I'm trying to defend French against the Quebec obsession about language and culture within Canada, as some people see it. So, yeah, so his goal, his view was, you have no tethers, you have no bias.

Go into this with a fresh mindset, try to grasp the whole dynamic that we're dealing and rustle this portfolio to the ground. It's become, it became a burden for our government. It became a stress on our government. It became a vote loser for our government. And we need you to wrestle this back to neutral at minimum and try to gain some victories for us in a way that would be not only good for us politically, but good for the country. because this got unleashed on us and cost us politically. And if it continues to spin out of control, it'll cost us as a country.

And I need you to try to wrestle this to the ground because it's getting out of control. And that was my broad mission. And I did my best. Well, no one can ask for more than that. You do your best, right? Jerry, I've only got a couple of minutes left. But, I mean, over the last decade,

you were, you had influence on, on the decision on the choice to who would go into that portfolio a number of different times. What were you and I guess Justin Trudeau and to a degree Mark Carney, what were you looking for? Well, all the same things that James just articulated. And just to be clear, I'm, and I was an advisor in that process. And as Dalton McGinty used to say to us all the time to think about you advisors as you get to go on to other advice, we have to live with whatever we take from you and whatever we turn it into. So I've certainly seen this up close and personal with two prime ministers that all of the dynamics

that James articulated were certainly not unique to Mr. Harper. You want people who are broad-minded in that portfolio who understand that it's, yes, integral to cultural vitality in Quebec, but also that you represent the, culture of the country as a whole. And just because you're a francophone from Quebec doesn't mean you can't represent people in Edmonton or Glaze Bay or Coquitlam. In fact, I think that Mark Miller is an ideal person for that role because he is a native English speaker who is probably the most fluently bilingual anglephone I've ever met.

And he has spent time in Halifax when school in Montreal and knows the country really well. from his previous exposure to indigenous people in his previous portfolio. So I think that we've got a person in that ministry now who speaks French, English, Cree, and a little bit of Swedish, which I think is reflective of how, and I'm not unbiased, I went to university with Mark. I've known him for 35 years. He's a very balanced, broad-minded, generous, kind person. And he's nobody's fool.

and I think that that's exactly the kind of temperament you need in that role, not unlike our colleague here, James. Okay, we're going to leave it at that. It's a good discussion and an important one of which I think we're going to have, we're likely going to have more of over the next year. It's a challenging year coming forward in a number of fronts, and this is just one of them. By the way, Peter, if you're right, and if Jerry is right about his piece,

we will beg for the glory days where we were just talking about pipelines. I mean that. I mean that half jokingly because the viciousness and the cruelty and aggression when it comes to protecting your culture as opposed to fighting for your access to global markets for energy products. When people are judged about their capacity to speak French, whether or not you're a sellout to your people, whether or not you can be an honest broker in a sincere act. advocate for your language and culture that goes back hundreds, indeed, thousands of years. Now you bring in the indigenous peace as well.

We will beg for the peaceful days of talking about pipelines, tax cuts, and U.S. tariffs. If this gets unleashed, it'll be a very, very tough fight for Canada. You know, I was saying the other day it was Harold Wilson, I believe, who had the great quote about, you know, a week in politics is a long time. And this last week has really been that in the sense of how. thinks because pipelines was all we talked about a week ago. And now it's like it doesn't even exist. It does, of course, and there will be other issues coming up around it, including climate,

which, as you pointed out in that article a year ago, Jerry, if there was going to be another referendum in Quebec, it was probably going to be about climate more than anything else. And that still kind of holds true right now as well. Sure does more so than a year ago. Yeah. All right, gentlemen. and good to have you both with us.

All right, that was an encore episode of a Moore-Buts conversation from the 25-26 season. By the way, we'll have two new Friday episodes of Good Talk this summer to keep you up to date with things going on in the world of politics. June 17th and August 28th,

Chantelle-A-Barre, Bruce Anderson, Peter Mansbridge, all with you. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Have a great summer. And see you back with all new episodes right here after Labor Day.