The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Moore-Butts - How Did Immigration Become a Dirty Word?

Episode Date: March 31, 2026

There was a time when immigration was seen as not only important to Canada but something that was a major part of what made Canada great. Has that time passed, why and at what cost? Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Are you ready for the latest Moore-Buts conversation? It's coming right up. And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here, along with Gerald Butts and James Moore, for their latest conversation. Today we've got a couple of subjects in mind. We're going to talk about polling, but that'll be second up after the break. First up, I want to talk about immigration. I mean, there was a news story last week about, you know, the auditor general. not very happy with some of the way the accounting was being done in some areas on the immigration front. But I want to talk about immigration kind of in a broader way. Because it would seem to me that immigration in Canada has become a dirty word. And given the history of immigration in Canada and what it's meant to us as a country,

I want to try and understand why it's become a dirty word and what that actually means. James, why don't you start this week? I was a member of Parliament, elected at 24, started the year 2000. Last was a member of Parliament in 2015. In those 15 years that I was a member of Parliament from suburban Vancouver, no exaggeration. Nine out of ten times the phone rang in my constituency office in Port Moody. So about half an hour east of Vancouver, nine and a ten times it was an immigration matter.

everything from passport to immigration paperwork to wire their delays. I've got a family member who's here. We've got a wedding that's coming in. Things like to the most complicated dynamics with regard to becoming a Canadian citizen. Immigration has always been a challenge. In British Columbia in particular, you know, our economy has been struggling for a long time. And for basically the past 10, 15, 20 years or so, it's been artificially juiced by massive immigration inflows, real estate speculation and selling, reselling, and renovations.

Like, we've, we've had this sort of false economy, particularly in the lower mainland, that has altered things. And when the economy is strong, it papers over a lot of the divisions that exist in society. And when the economy starts to falter and people start having angst about things, you saw this in 2008, you see it now with regard to the sort of the broadly phrased, you know, crisis about the cost of living and so on in real estate and these things. A lot of repressed anger and frustration about other things start to come to the surface. And sometimes they come forward in a thoughtful way.

Sometimes they come forward in a pretty ugly way. And I think you're seeing a real mix of that. The immigration dynamic in Canada was unsustainable for a really long time. We just refuse to have a, refuse to have a conversation about it. And now we're there. I think we're generally having a conversation in a helpful and a thoughtful way. I think it's helpful this past week that the, that it was, it was, the conversation was kicked off by the auditor general coming forward with some quantitative, substantive data, 150,000.

They sampled into that in 23, 24, 150,000 student visa applications of which I think less than 3% were scrutinized. Of the of the 3% that were scrutinized, I think it was more than a third of them were bogus or didn't even respond to the scrutiny because the department didn't have enough staff, even though the federal civil service has ballooned by 40% in the same time. It's very frustrating for a lot of people who have angst about this. So what's my summary here? immigration is we've kicked the can down the road on this for a long time because we've had the

upside of immigration for a really long time. Now we're seeing the downside of it and it's being quantified in a reasonable way so we can sort of start attacking it and dealing with the question appropriately. But I think there are a lot of really hard feelings because the negative side of immigration of what it means economically, socially, politically is really, really dark and really complicated. And we're going to have to start unpacking that. And I think it'll take 10 or 20 years to sort of re-rationalize things in a way that Canadians start feeling net positive about broader and expanding immigration inflows into the country. Okay. Let me get your opening thoughts on this, Jerry. Well, look, I think James, the arc that James traces is a true

and tragic one. And we have a lot of things going for us in this country in Canada. A lot of countries would trade places with us. And one of the reasons was because of our bipartisan, non-political openness to immigration for a very long time. And I think people underestimate, because it was kind of the air we breathed for a long time, how important it was to the economy, how important it was to a general sense of growth

and well-being in the country. And I think, you know, my former colleagues and the coming out of COVID, the provincial governments, the business lobby, the universities and colleges, they all went to the well one too many times on immigration. And like many files, actually there aren't many files in Canadian history, maybe health care is another one, that has broad support across partisan bounds. People take their pet issues to it. So if the provincial governments weren't funding universities and colleges appropriately,

they let them open the sluice gates to foreign students who paid two, three, four, five times as much as domestic students did. And they were used as a cash cow. For the business lobby, if you couldn't keep wages to a degree that you felt was affordable, then there were always temporary foreign workers that you could bring into the country to help suppress wages. And I think coming out of COVID, the federal government, along with the premier, And let's remember coming out of COVID, you had Doug Ford and Daniel Smith writing hotly worded letters to the government of the day at the time telling them to increase immigration levels, not decrease immigration levels. They got genuinely worried that if they didn't bring an extraordinary number of people into the country, then inflation was going to take back off. And this is, of course, what the business lobby was telling the government.

So you ended up with all of these pressure points on what had been a positive file. The government made a series of errors in letting too many TFWs, too many immigrants, non-economic class immigrants. And they turned a blind eye, governments of all orders, turned a blind eye to what the universities and colleges were doing. And then all of a sudden when people started to freak out about it, everybody was like the Spider-Man meme. you know, everybody was blaming everybody else when the truth is, this is, in my view, what's happened to immigration over the past five, six years has been the biggest public policy failure of my lifetime. And I've seen a few of them in my day in politics in Canada. And I think there's enough blame to go around. So I hope James is wrong, though I'm worried he's not,

that it's not going to take 10 to 20 years to rebuild the cross-partisan consensus on immigration, because now it's just become too tempting a political issue at both the provincial and the federal level and to a certain degree in our big cities for the mayoral campaigns that are coming up. So I'm really worried about that because I think, you know, Canada stands out like a sore thumb amongst developed democracies and advanced economies as the one place where the clear majority of people supported immigration year after year after year after year. And now that is no longer the case. and it's a classic, it's a classic case of not appreciating what you have until it's no longer there.

And I think it's going to be a long time in rebuilding it. And that's a real tragedy. It was, I think in the next five years, I think one of the things that that will be a virtue to us and be helpful to us is that obviously in a recent memory, we've had a majority conservative government and a majority liberal government or at least decade. where both parties have had clearly both hands in the steering wheel in terms of doing stuff on immigration that can be scrutinized and be compared apples to apples from which we can draw. And that's helpful because both parties have learned a lot about actually governing the file. And this is where people like Jason Kenney and Chris Alexander on the conservative side, on the liberal side you have experienced ministers who have been there,

I think about Mark Miller and so on, who have been there and had their hands on the file. And if they have a full moment of honesty and transparency and they can demonstrate a little bit of vulnerability and in good faith try to have a conversation about this, I think we can get a long way to sort of rationalizing something that is problematic but isn't really ideological. It's tense. There's a racial component. There's a language component. There's all kinds of things like that that are right beneath the surface that can really blow up and be exploited in a bad way. But hopefully the two governing parties of Canada, if they come to this in a thoughtful way, current and former. ministers, I think you can actually have a pretty informed dialogue about it.

Second virtue that we have and the challenges that we have is actually the language that we use about this. And sometimes it's coded. Like we talk about temporary foreign workers. We talk about student visas. And sometimes we have a virtue of having sort of this layer, this veneer of talking about programs and cohorts as opposed to groups of people from different parts of the world. If you get what I'm putting out here, we can have a kind of.

conversation about how programs have failed, how things have been exploited, how things have gone badly so we can fix programs such as that we can protect the integrity of the system and where we want to be as a country. Without stuff getting super inflamed, frankly, like you see in the United States vis-a-vis to Mexico, like you see in Germany and in the UK and France with regard to immigrants that came across as a result of the fallout from the Iraq War and then knock-on effect of the migration crisis from east to west, the southeast to to. to Northwest through the sweep of Europe.

So, like, and also we don't, we don't call people aliens. Like, we don't try to dehumanize people who are trying to migrate and immigrate into different parts of the world. So I think we've got our language right. We have this context where we can talk about programs and cohorts and timeframes and systems that have failed, such that we can fix it without exploiting and chastising and being excessive in our rhetoric with regard to groups of people, regions of the world, ethnicities, and dehumanizing people.

so we can actually have a proper dialogue without having this stuff get super exploited. That can go sideways fast, but we're not there now. And I think that's a benefit to Canada that we can wrestle with these issues. You know, you did mention there's a certain racial element to this. And I want to try and get a sense of how large that element is, how significant that element is. I mean, when immigration was a part of like who we are, as Canadians and was something we were proud of and bragged about and we're looked upon by the rest of the world is that, hey, that's quite something.

Those were mostly Europeans, right, coming into Canada. It was mostly kind of a white thing. It's clearly changed to a degree over the last generation in terms of those new Canadians who are coming into the country. How much is that an element? When you say there's a racial element, is that a major element or is that kind of a minor element? We want to tackle that thorny one. Very wants to go first.

I mean, who wants to jump on the question of race and immigration? I would say, Peter, as someone who's on one hand, proud Ukrainian-Canadian and on the other, a proud Irish-Canadian. my dad used to joke with me all the time that his parents would be shocked to find out they have a bunch of white grandchildren because, you know, Irish and Ukrainian people were not white 100 years ago, maybe Irish a little longer than 100 years ago. So it has a, the ethnocultural background of immigrants has a way of changing over time, right? And there was a time I grew up in a town where there was a Protestant high school and a Catholic high school, and that divide was as sharp as any divide you'll see in any group of communities anywhere in Canada.

But I do think that it's less a question of race and it's more a question of otherness, if I can sound like the grad student I once was at the time. It's strangeness. It's people feeling like they are being beset by cultures and norms and values that are different from theirs. And the irony of it, of course, is that, the farther you are in terms of physical proximity. Like if you have a bunch of neighbors who are South Asian and Filipino and, you know, non-white from across the board,

you can't really, I used to say that Jody and I used to say this about our kids. They went to High Park preschool. And you couldn't explain the concept of race to my kids, right? But it's the people who are removed, aggrieved, and are susceptible to finding someone to blame for their problems. And I think you've seen that play out.

We thought, I think there were certain people in the country who thought that somehow we were exempt from that because of the tradition of immigration in the country. But you've seen it play out mostly in housing prices over the past five years in Canada. It was, people were very quick to blame the increase in immigration for the run-up and housing prices. And I've read a bunch of different studies of it. Yeah, it's partly to blame for it, but it's certainly not the major issue.

It is in pockets, but not really when you look at it nationally. So I don't think it's a race issue in Canada. I really don't. I think it's more an issue of, are people comfortable with difference at a time when the economy is not churning out the growth that it once did? And James, you made this point already.

I think it's a really important one. I used to work at the World Wildlife Fund, and there was this wise old conservationist who used to say to me all the time that Monty Hummel, for some of the voters who would know, some of your viewers who would know who that is, he said, just remember, when the water gets lower in the forest, all the animals start looking at each other a little differently. And I think that's true, the broader economy,

that people are just worried. anxious and therefore their their instinctive response to issues is not to be overly generous. Do you want to take a run at that, James? Yeah, I mean, I also think that that technology allows people to sort of keep to themselves more. So sort of, for lack of a better phrase, the friction between others and all that is not what it used to be. It's not as strenuous. Like, you know, it's not as though parents are staying on the sidelines. I'm trying to be delicate with what I'm saying here, but you know what I'm trying to say is that is that in a lot of ways.

the way our society has evolved, it allows you to sustain your sense of identity and who you are without having to be annoyed or bothered or frustrated by diversity that's coming at you a little bit more than I think you might be prepared for. That said, you know, we boast about Canada's diversity and it's true, but in a lot of ways, like I think about, you know, in Vancouver, are we diverse? Yes. But are we like in the sense that we're quite balkanized? If you look around the GTA, if you look around Greater Vancouver, we're diverse from 30,000 feet, but from 10,000 feet,

it's not really that diverse because we really have quite segmented communities that often have fences against each other culturally that are not super transparent unless you've lived here for a long time. If you look around the lower mainland, you see the Persian community in the North Shore, the Cantonese and Mandarin-speaking communities

quite isolated in certain parts, the lower mainland, the Italian community, maybe that's always been the case for a sense of transition and comfort and cultural alignment and all that. But I think when the economy does start to go sideways and people start getting frustrated that some of the worst elements of our frustrations with one another can come to the surface and it can make things really gross and uncomfortable. Fortunately, again, I mean, we're talking about politics here is that none of that has sort of

spilled into the political sphere. We do talk in coded language, right? We talk about temporary foreign workers and that language can get torched up. And people kind of know what some people are saying when they really emphasize certain words or they talk about, you know, the housing crisis and the empty home tax and who that's about. So it can get it can get a little rough. But I think I agree with Jerry, though, that it's not sort of the racial component of it hasn't sort of been institutionalized politically in a sense. But but there are. And but and also political parties, as I said in the beginning about how the two governing parties of Canada, liberals and conservatives, where we're also very sensitive to that, I think, in a very positive way. You know, like it's it's very hard to be, and we found this in foreign policy when we were in government. It's hard to be anti-China without being seen to be anti-Chinese when you're dealing with countries that are nation-states. And so when you're critical of the Chinese government and China, you can't say the, like you have to find a language about it. And I think both political parties and most people who are serious in Canadian politics understand that you have an obligation to recognize the diversity that's in front of you electorally.

and the language that you use is because there's a backside consequence to not talking about these things in an honest and a responsible way. Well, it really helps too, Peter, just to sort of finish up on James's point, that you can't get elected without winning seats in the GTA and Greater Vancouver.

And while it is, there is some truth to the cliche that recent first generation communities tend to be susceptible to being anti-immigration, which sounds counterintuitive to people, but it's always been the case. It's been the case in the United States since the early 19th century or the middle of the 19th century with Irish immigration. They were first generation Irish people in the northwest, northeast were amongst the most anti-immigrant populations in the world at the time.

And you can see the logic there as well, people trying to close the door behind them. But I think it's super helpful that it's hard to form a government without getting broad support. And I would say maybe this is too far in the weeds for our viewers, but there's a big difference when you go city by city. And Toronto is, I don't, when I say Toronto, I mean the greater Toronto area. I don't think many people appreciate just how diverse Toronto is. It's not just diverse. It's got a diversity of diversities, if that makes sense. It's the only city in the world that has more than these are old numbers.

So they may have changed. They may have even grown. But 10 years ago, when I looked at this in detail, Toronto had 20 communities of 10,000 or more who were not born in the country. That is very unique. And I think that in some ways, because there wasn't one group that could be pointed at and scapegoated for all the problems facing the greater Toronto area, that it's somehow been able to manage this challenge a little better than certainly our sister cities to the south. You know where you hear that a lot from in terms of just how diverse Toronto is at times. You hear it from baseball players. Totally.

Seeing as Jerry you're wearing your, that used to be a team, right? Stop it. Too soon, Peter. But they, baseball players come to Toronto and they end up saying, wow, I can't believe it. Especially, you know, baseball players who are from the deep south, or from the Caribbean or from South America. And they talk about the diversity of Toronto and how at home they are as a result of it.

And it's, you know, it's real. It's not just some of the things they say to try and make everybody feel good about the team. So that's interesting. Here's my last question on immigration. And I guess it relates in many ways to things both of you have been saying that part of the issue that we're facing now is a result of the economy,

It's lingered on now for, what, almost half a dozen years. With no immediate end in sight. But when that time comes, how much of that is a part of, James, what you're saying, it could take 10, 15, 20 years before we can fix this feeling about immigration and the system in itself? How much is a rebounded economy, which is, will come at some point. everything turns around at some point. How much will that be a part of taking sort of the dirty word aspect of emigration away? I think the negative steam, the momentum on it will probably half go away.

But the other half that's come to the surface does actually require some reconciliation. I think parents, they are frustrated when your child goes to public school. and the and the playgrounds are are segregated socially between people of different backgrounds. That's a problem. And that's not an easy fix overnight. And a strong economy doesn't sort of smooth that over. Linguistic barriers in the workplace, linguistic barriers in interactions when you're going to a restaurant or you're dealing. Like those kinds of problems which are exacerbated and I think weaponized in some ways and become what used to be kind of.

sort of part and parcel of living in a diverse country become real annoyances when you're frustrated and nervous about your job. Those kind of social graces sort of have to be maybe reimagined for some people. Maybe they never will. I don't know. I hope I'm overstating the problem. But I get a sense that when you start to get angry and frustrated with the economic part of your life, which is the main tent pull of most people's existence, because it's your ability to provide for your parents and your kids and to have stability and to have certainty in case. you have a crisis in your life on the health front and have some sense of retirement and all that and it's a marker for success.

When that center tent pole in your life gets cracked and kicked down and becomes unstable because emotions can get the worst of you. And I think the worst temptations about scapegoating can get really bad. And I think in a lot of ways you're seeing a lot of that. And does that get put back in the bottle overnight? I don't know. There's some things that can't be unsaid. There's some attitudes that can't be re-corrected.

And that concerns me. I hope I'm overly concerned about that, that that sort of Darwinian impulse in our brain to look for challenges and risks on the horizon is over-emphasized. But I think that will linger for some time for a lot of people who, because if you're set back at 10 years in your life, if you're in your, if you're between, say, you know, 20 and 35 for the past 15 years over your life, you've known the 08 economic crisis, the end of the Afghanistan war, you've known COVID, you've known sort of the Donald Trump era, the uncertainty about tariffs, now we have the Iran war, and you've had a housing crisis. the cost of living crisis. You've gone through a lot, for lack of a better phrase, you've gone through a lot of shit. And you start to look for people.

You want to, you want to, like, you're frustrated. And sometimes that comes out in very ineligent and tough ways. And, and I think there's a generation of canines

who've been through a lot. And I think they're owed, they're owed a bit of, I don't know, deeper understanding and sense of empathy. You get the last word on this subject. Oh, amen to that, Peter. I think that there's such,

I saw this during the campaign last year, and I don't think it's resolved. Maybe we'll talk about this when we talk about polling and the current polling. But there's such a divide between people under and over 50 in this country. And it's almost like they've experienced for most of their lives completely different worlds. I think the recitation of Soros that James just listed there is a lived reality for people. And I think as some of us get, well, we're all getting older, but some of us there are. older than others. It's really important to look back across that generational gap with kindness and empathy because it's been, to use James's word, it's been a really shit century for a lot of

people. It started, like if you're born in 1990, if you're kind of a core millennial, maybe the first real public event you remember is 9-11. And then after that, they had the great financial crisis. And then after that, they had Donald Trump. get elected. And then after that, they had COVID. And by the way, there was the Iraq invasion involved there. And after that, Donald Trump got reelected. And now there's another war, two of them. So if you're, if that's all you know, if that's your lived experience, you just don't, you're not open to arguments that your perception of the world is wrong. You're just thinking that the people who are telling you that are not seeing reality clearly. And if you,

you've been convinced that Canada's extraordinary immigration policy has been part of and parcel of creating the problems that you face on it every day, whether you're trying to pay for your groceries or afford your house or stop at the gas station, then that's going to last. And I'll tell you, you know, one of the painful lessons I've learned over the years in public policy is that the overhang on issues is always longer than you think it's going to be. that, for instance, lots of polling came out this month talking about how concerned people are about immigration. Well, the new government has practically stopped immigration. But they're going to be living with the legacy of the previous five years for a long time.

And on top of that, stopping immigration will create problems as well. So, you know, it's these issues, it's like a Faberje egg, you know, it's very easily broken. and I think the consensus on immigration is broken and it needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. Okay. Well, we're going to leave immigration and move to polling, as Jerry just suggested a few moments ago. But before we do that, we'll take this break. We'll be right back after this. And welcome back.

You're listening and watching the Bridge Tuesday episode. It's a more butts conversation. We just dealt with immigration. We fix that. It's all done. I want to look at polling. Advise everybody, first of all, you're watching on our YouTube channel. You're listening on SiriusXM Channel 167 Canada Talks

or on your favorite podcast platform. All right, let's get to it with Jerry Butts, James Moore. Polling, we've seen a lot of polling in the last few weeks. I mean, there's so many different polling firms now in the country. I mean, I used to remember when I started, it was basically just Gallop, right? And now there's, I can't even count them anymore. It's got to be into double figures now, the number of different polling operations in different parts of the country.

There's a certain degree of consistency to the results that are coming out in the last, basically the last month. And they show really good things for Mark Carney and for the Liberal Party with a significant lead. on a personal basis, a massive lead for Carney over Pahliav. On a party basis, what, 15, 16 points spread. This is roughly a year after an election and a situation where they may or may not have a majority government in the next few weeks after the by-elections.

I guess what I'm trying to figure out is, I mean, that kind of a lead says a lot, not just about those who are in the lead, but those who are kind of far behind? Or does it? Is it just simply too early? There is no election. Nobody's being forced to come up with a decision right away.

And they're going with kind of a gut instinct, kind of a feeling about how things are. And so much of that boils these days down to how are we dealing with Trump. Terry, start me off on polling. Oh, boy, Peter. Where to start on this one. I think it's the cliche that polls are a snapshot of an already vanished reality is a really important one to keep in mind. And as someone who's run a bunch of campaigns and was a senior person in a couple of first minister's offices,

including the last one, it's people just, it never ceases to amaze me how people overtrained on polling results, especially horse race polls. So everything you said is true, the 16 point lead or the 15 point lead, depending on the poll you read, the massive gap and best prime minister. But let's telescope out just a little bit there because 14 months ago, the conservatives had a 26 point lead. And that means that roughly 40% of the population has changed its mind in the past 14 months. and what's to say that 40%, that same 40%, or a different 40%, wouldn't change its mind over the next 14 months. And I think it's really important to put that in perspective. I said to people until I was blue in the face when I was doing politics for a living,

that polls are nothing more than either a nudge from the public that you might want to change course or a pat on the shoulder that you're doing a good job. That's it. And they can change dramatically. I've seen them change dramatically. Now, all that said, I think what's happening now, it's super clear. I'm one who always believes in simple explanations for these things. The country likes Mark Carney.

That's what's going on here. And I don't necessarily think it has much to do with Pierre Paulyev. My own view, and I'm going to get hate mail from my own team for saying that, I think Pierre Poliavs had a pretty good couple of months since his leadership. I think the floor crossings have been a problem for him for sure. But I think his consolidation is very muscular consolidation of his own party was a positive step for him. I think, again, I'm definitely going to have a hate mail for this. But his turn on Joe Rogan was a signal to his base that he's still their guy.

And I thought he did a pretty good job in a very difficult situation. nobody wants to sit down with the most popular, well, I shouldn't say everybody wants to sit down with the most popular podcaster in the world, but doing it for two and a half hours without really making a mistake, that's, as someone who has watched practitioners in this business over the years, I daft my cap to that. I think that was a pretty strong performance. And I think all this could pass very quickly. So I wouldn't be too excited if I were on the ice for my old team. and I wouldn't be too despondent if I were on the ice for James' all team. All right, James. Whenever I was in politics and I still hold the belief now that, and this two shall pass away. You know, nothing in life is ever as good as it seems or as bad as it seems, and that things are always transitory. Polls are the stock market. What matters is actually the broader quarterly numbers.

I mean, we actually get into the, you know, we actually get into the, you. you actually get into the weeds in the structure of political parties. How are you doing on candidate recruitment? How are you doing on fundraising? How are you doing in terms of the focus groups that you're doing? When Stephen Harper was in government, I know it to be true, that he was far more interested in the cyclical and the ongoing focus groups

that were done in key regions of the country than he was on the polling data. Polling data is about caucus management, fundraising inflows, leverage in a minority parliament in order to have some momentum to do some stuff, you know, making sure if you're going into a break week or two of parliament, like the federal parliament is now going into a two-week break. If you're Mark Carney, you kind of don't need to worry about your caucus because everybody's feeling

really good. You're north of 40, 45 percent. The best prime minister numbers, you've got a two-to-one advantage. So caucus will be fine. They'll be back home. They'll be doing their Easter. So for two weeks, I cannot think about caucus and I can focus on policy, proactive, dealing with Trump and all that.

When you have to sort of batten down the hatches and worry about the people sitting behind you in parliament, as opposed to people sitting across from you in parliament, that's really uncomfortable times, right? And so Mark Carney has that. So are polls helpful to the liberals? Yeah, because it allows him to actually focus on governing for a few weeks until the next batch comes out and shows a little bit of erosion of things or whatever. But I think smart managers of governments and prime ministers and premiers, they should spend more time thinking about focus groups. And focus groups are, you know, 10 to 20 people who sit in a room and they're shown a bunch of video clips and they're given some narratives. And like it's it's a more drawn out process. They'll spend. half a day in a room and they'll have a conversation with people who know how to how to lead these kind of conversations and dialogues. And what people think is a poll, how people think is a focus group, how people think about things is important because the language that they choose to use when they're describing a political leader or they're giving their feedback on messaging or they're

giving you your thoughts on things, how people think gives you a bit of a lead on how they're probably going to think and vote in the future. And so focus groups and having a genuine understanding of the pressures and contexts in which people are telling pollsters how they're going to vote is more important. So polls are market signals, but they're not economic analysis. It's the economic analysis that you should be thinking more of. I want to ask you a question about focus groups because I find we don't talk about them enough. I mean, focus groups are, as you said, James, 10 to 20 people. In some cases, there's simply picked right off the street and brought into a room for, for,

somebody to moderate a discussion with them and see how they feel about certain things. Other times it's more scientific's probably not the right word, but they're looking for a certain kind of grouping in a focus group. But you've both been the beneficiaries, I guess, of focus group results over time. Can you think of one where you were truly surprised at the outcome of a focus group that had an impact on the way things carried forward as, you know, Jerry is a, you know, principal secretary of prime minister and James as a former cabinet minister. What can you, can you think of one in particular that had that kind of an impact or surprised you the results?

Jerry, do you want to start? Oh, yeah. First of all, I agree with everything James said on focus groups. Anybody who's ever worked with me on a campaign knows how much I love focus groups. And certainly in the last one, I probably stayed up because you would do them in Pacific time as well. I stayed up every night watching focus groups almost during the campaign. I think you pick up stuff from people's body language and their interaction with each other that you just can't capture in a quantitative survey. So you have to have a balanced research platform, but there are too many people who, in my view, to their own detriment in campaigns who kind of poo-pooh focus groups is unscientific.

And I think that that's why they lose, or one of the many reasons why they lose campaigns. So I remember vividly, vividly, like it happened yesterday, the day we tested the opening ad for the 2015 campaign. And if you remember this, it was Justin Trudeau with the east block of parliament behind him walking toward the camera. And the first line of the thing was Stephen Harper says, I'm not ready. and he goes through what he wants to do as prime minister and concludes it by saying, if that's not ready, then, you know, I'm not ready to be prime minister. It was we basically broke every rule, right? It was don't repeat the charge, don't repeat the negative, don't take it head on, etc., etc.

And lots of politicos were making fun of us on Twitter for it. It turned the election around. Without a doubt, we launched it the night of the McLean's debate, which Trudeau did well in. and that coupled with that ad put us back in the game. Because as you'll remember, we were in third place going in. Some polls even had us in the teens, and it was going to be a two horse race between Tom Mulcair and Stephen Harper. So I was stunned.

I thought it was a good ad. I was stunned by the response in the focus group. Because in the focus group, and this is where you know your opponent's messaging is really penetrating. You get in a focus group, and people start repeating your opponents, messages without attributing them to the opponent. So this was a focus group in the GTA, the region you have to win in order to form a government.

And before we show the ad, uniformly people are saying, you know, I kind of like that Trudeau guy, but he's kind of young. And maybe he's just not ready for the job, right? It was basically the conservative ad repeated back to us without attribution to the conservative of ad campaign, which is a grand slam if you're running a political attack ad on your opponent. And then we said, okay, so we let them talk themselves out. And then we showed them that ad. And I watched their body language change as they were watching the ad.

And then afterward, they completely changed their minds. And this was a group of swing voters. All they wanted to hear was directly from Trudeau what he was going to do in a high conviction pitch and he nailed it. And it put that's we didn't win the election on that, but it gave us chance to win the election, which put it, you know, we eventually did. I've never seen anything like before or since. James. Yeah, I'll give you two examples. One, I know to be true. So, and going in the way back machine, October 2008, conservatives, we get elected a minority in 2006. We get reelected, but still a minority, but 20 more seats in 2008. We come back to Parliament. The

bottom falls out of the global economy halfway through the campaign. Stephen Harper, we were hoping to get a majority, didn't for a few reasons, but we come back and we have to deliver an economic update in the fall. Finance Minister Jim Flaherty delivers the economic update, and it didn't go well. And so Stefan Dion, then liberal leader, gets in line with Jack Layton and then a sister with the Block KVCa and they have a governing coalition and they're going to go to the Governor General and overthrow our government less than a month after we got reelected as the government of Canada. The Puritans in the parliamentary system,

and Stephen Harper, a lot of them said, look, we have a minority government. If they want to govern, let them govern, and they'll crash and burn, they'll fall apart and it won't work. And there were some, you know, our house leader at the time sort of thought, you know, this is, we're kind of stuck

because they do have the seats. We know what to do. Of course, the out was to go to the governor general and say, look, progue parliament, we just had an election, let us come back in the new year with a proper budget and we'll address the concern, but this is not the time.

And the governor general sided with the prime minister at the time. And we came back and went on to win a majority. So it was the right call. It's solidified the country. However, in the interim between when they came together with their coalition and then the prerogation of parliament, a lot of conservatives said, well, there's not a lot we can do. There is a process here. But Canadians were way ahead of us.

They said, no, this is garbage. This is nonsense. We've just elected a government. We just had an election. And you guys didn't say you would get into a coalition. You explicitly said you wouldn't get into a coalition. And the fact that you're going to be boosted and government by the Block Quebecois separat. That was out of line for Western Canadians,

Ontarians, even Atlantic Canadians, and the data quantitatively and focus groups apparently were way hotter, way hotter than people in Ottawa understood that while a lot of people in Ottawa and Paul and frankly political reporters who cover Parliament Hill and they say, well, the Block Cabot is just kind of a regional expressive voice. No, Canadians don't see them that way and didn't see them that way at the time. They saw this as a as a sneaky trick in order to lever and to hurt Canada in a way that would not be accretive and that if the block is part of this, then you need to fight it with everything that you've got. And I think Stephen Harper sort of found himself in that moment. And it led to the prerogation, which led to the new budget, which led to

the demise of Stefan Dion. Then in comes Michael Ignatiof. And then on comes a conservative majority. It was a, it was a pivot moment in the narrative arc of Stephen Harper's time as conservative leader. That's only one part you skipped over there. Well, he didn't skip over it, but you didn't really, you made it sound like it was all very normal and processing quick. Yeah. That's the Stephen Harper and the Governor General of Rita Hall discussing on how to do or whether to do prorogation. Right. Which we still don't know the story.

And we won't, but I don't think it's a mystery. I don't think it's a mystery, right? I mean, you know, it's, you know, we just had an, I don't think it's a big mystery. So, I mean, yeah, I mean, people. I don't know. The only thing I'd be fascinated in knowing, maybe one of the two of them will tell the story someday is what the hell do they talk about for those? It was a couple of hours. Well, the only mystery is how David Johnson went from being that governor general to a toadie for Justin Trudeau according to the consumer. No, but it wasn't David. It wasn't David Johnson. Oh, of course it wasn't. Yes. Yes. Anyway, that is one of the mystery still from that moment. But listen, a good, a good, a good, conversation, as always, with James and Jerry, and we're glad to have had it, and we'll talk

to them again in a couple of weeks. So enjoy the Easter break while we're away from you. Thanks, James. Thanks, Jerry. Take care.