The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Moore Butts: What You Must Have Before You Call An Election

Episode Date: September 29, 2026

When David Eby called an election in BC, he seemed to be missing one thing -- a reason. James Moore and Gerald Butts are together again for another conversation and this is a natural, Conservative James knows BC and Liberal Gerald knows elections. 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 another Moore-Butz conversation? You better be, because there's one coming right up. And hello there, Peter Mansford's here, along with Gerald Butts, James Moore. Another one of our conversations that we have every second Tuesday. Looking forward to this one. James, you're in BC, obviously. And I've been trying to sort out, you know, what exactly happened last week. I mean, I think we kind of know what happened.

But we're into an election now, and a conservatives who didn't have a leader in the moments the election was being called, have one now. And if you believe the polls, he's already leading in the polls. Tell me what all this means and whether it was a stupid move by the incumbent government or what. Yeah, I mean, the non-NDP coalition or cohort of voters in British Columbia has always been loosely assembled, fractiously assembled, and they seem to gallows. together either because they need two things have to be aligned historically. One is there has to be a real sense of momentum to get rid of the incumbent NDP. There has to be a real problem and at a real dislike for the incumbent government. That wasn't there in the past under Mike Harcourt, for example, when he was premier,

people disagreed with the NDP because they didn't, they're not new Democrats, but he wasn't a super unlikable premier. He wasn't a particularly successful premier, but that doesn't make, that doesn't galvanize people to come together. by the end of the fast failure fiasco and Glenn Clark and a lot of things that happened with the New Democrats, that was there. But the second ingredient that has to be there is you have to have a real momentum for change and then a leader who gets the context of the broad coalition that is the non-NDP universe. And through the sweep of British Columbia's history and confederation, the non-NDP vote has come in the form of the conservatives, the Socrates, the B.C. liberals. It's come under different banners over the years.

and there's not a lot of loyalty to brand in British Columbia, right? Federally, people have voted progressive conservative, conservative reform, NDP. People are not super stuck into loyalties. I think it's fair to say that in a lot of provinces, particularly Ontario, elsewhere, and elections Canada did a study on this one, so they said that if a young person in their first three elections votes the same way, three elections being federal or provincial, if they vote liberal, liberal, liberal, or conservative, conservative, conservative, the odds are over 80 percent that they're going to vote that way for their entire life.

Like you just kind of lock into being a Habs fan or a Kinnock's fan. You get my point. But in British Columbia, that didn't exist because, but in British Columbia, that doesn't exist because the vehicles haven't existed. So people are kind of free agents. The NDP vote has a hard floor of the mid-30s, but also a hard ceiling of the low 40s, mid-40s-ish. So they're in that window.

So if the other side can coalesce and come around that, then they can do that. So the free enterprise vote because of the rise and fall of sort of the conservative of popularity in 2024. Gordon Campbell goes away. Christy Clark goes away. Galvanizing leaders that brought people together have gone away. They've experimented with people that didn't quite work. And

now the energy for change is at the necessary quotient that you need on that side. And then the leadership question with Carolyn Finley out of the way that Lauren Dersen, this guy who is completely inoffensive, completely seems to be in the early days,

completely normal to the average voter and substantive enough and credible enough to be worthy of being premier that people seem to be coming together around him. And it might be good enough in order to beat the MVP. And also people like an underdog. And people like to go after a bully. And David E.B. looks and sounds like an, he's acting like a bully by calling a campaign less than two years into his majority. He has a majority government. He's no confidence votes that he's lost. There's no confidence votes on the horizon. He passed his budget this spring. There's exactly, there was exactly one piece of legislation before the BC legislature between now and the end of the year. There's no reason, literally no reason to have an election campaign, but he called one because he thought

it could be cute and get away with it and trap the conservatives either with no leader or with Carrie Lynn Finley. And voters see that and they just kind of go, that's not cool. And so conservatives are being a big, given a big opportunity to bring together the broad free enterprise coalition and make a go of it. It hasn't happened like this much before in Canadian history. I do remember one, telling the people on Good Talk on Friday. That's how Ed Schreier got elected in 1969 in Manitoba. Walter Weir was the premier conservative. He'd only been in two years and they thought, man, the NDP doesn't have a leader right now.

Now's the time to pull the plug. We'll get a bigger majority and be all set for the next four to five years. Didn't work out that way. They elected Ed Schreier in the middle of the campaign. He was premier for the next 10 years. Jerry, you know, you're looking at it. at this from central Canada. And looking at BC, which we've always looked at those of us who haven't lived in BC.

Well, I lived there for three months, once. And it was great on Vancouver Island. But we were constantly told it's different on the West Coast. And the way James just outlined it, it's different. Yeah, oh, it's very different. I mean, I think BC is in some ways the Anglophone version of Quebec. It is the most unique of all the provinces. It's the most unlike the other provinces.

And I think where James started is the right place to start. It's that there's no partisan adhesion in British Columbia at all, in my view. And having run or played a part in running three federal campaigns where the party that I was working for had to win a bunch of seats in British Columbia. to form a government. And back in my days at the World Wildlife Fund, I spent a lot of time in British Columbia. Our second biggest office was in Vancouver,

and I was there every month and worked with a lot of people in British Columbia. So, you know, I think that it's always weird. It's always weird if you're looking at it from the outside. I think there are lessons in this that can probably be applied to other jurisdictions that calling an early election, unless you have an absolutely clear reason that takes less than five seconds to explain is a bad idea. And I think it's especially a bad idea for people on the progressive side of the ledger. Like, Doug Ford got away with this, but people kind of expect Doug Ford to pull a little fast one from time to time. David Deby tried to cultivate an image

of himself as kind of, you know, a progressive leader who listens to people. And it looks like he's trying to pull one over on people. And I think that's really tough. I think Justin Trudeau had the same problem in 2021 when he called an election that people didn't want and he didn't have a clear reason for having one. And it's especially true of these politicians who have cultivated an image and like to think of themselves as kind of straight talkers. I think it's really, really tough to justify having an election in British Columbia right now. It just seems odd to me that he couldn't put the brakes on, James. Now, Listen, we may all be proven wrong at the end of the campaign,

but it looks like in this moment, they couldn't put the brakes on. When the conservatives had their leader, Finley, the feeling was, got to pull a plug now. She's in trouble. She's in trouble with her own caucus. She's in trouble with the people.

And then he couldn't stop. He couldn't stop it even after she'd quit. I think it's almost, sorry, James. No, go ahead. I think it's worse than that. He couldn't put the brakes on and he couldn't press the accelerator at the right time. So had he been able to get their act together to call the election on Friday or Saturday before Kerry Lynn Finley resigns, then we're having a very, very different conversation. But the fact that they gave her that space to do what she did and then called the election anyway, they ended up with the worst of both worlds.

the other thing too is that you like it's there's still a month in the campaign so so things are obviously subject to change in british columbia can can go back and forth like a whipsaw as good as any other province so things could change Lauren Dorson is untested it's you know he wasn't elected through a broad grinding process of a leadership campaign he's never run for a leader before either but he but he is the leader and he has the confidence of the party he has the confidence of the caucus it was unanimous and all that and everything that I know about him and those who know him better than I do all say that he is a substantive, thoughtful. He's a good guy. He's just a good, earnest, honest guy.

For those who are from British Columbia, maybe his best proxy might be Ed Stelmack from Alberta. Like somebody who's just a good, sturdy guy. No flash, but, but, and all that. The other thing, too, about David Eby and the NDP as well, is that, you know, by calling the campaign in the way that they did, and then you have, they stumble out of the gate, there's no real narrative.

all that. And then you have a really good poll for the conservatives right out of the gate. Then all the opportunists are coming out of the woodwork now, right, for the conservatives. And Jerry will know, like we all know in politics, when a campaign comes around, there's sort of two cohorts of people, the idealists and the opportunists. The idealists are always there because they want to fight the fight and they hate the other side. And they, you know, as soon as they hear gunfire on the horizon, they want to ride to the sound around their horse, take on the enemy. Right. So the idealists are always there. Maybe Jerry's one of them. Maybe I'm one of them from time to time. That's fine.

the other group are the opportunists. Now, the opportunists you need, because the opportunists are the margin between the idealists and winning. They're also the first people to leave when things get bad. But you want them in the room because they're the canary in the mind that tell you that things are going okay. So the campaign happens. The NDP are 10 points up.

Carolyn Finley leaves. Lauren Dirkson comes in. The band on the center right and the Free Enterprise Coalition comes together very quickly. Angus Reid puts out a poll showing the conservatives, you know, whatever it was, seven points up in the first week. Peking out over the parapet, all the opportunists are now looking, oh, there's an election, you say, right? So they all start coming out and start, but it was good because there is literally only a handful of days left. Like this week, they have to solidify the nominations. 93 ridings in British Columbia, 93. Conservatives hold, they elected 44 MLAs,

then a bunch of them went away and all that. I think they have about 35 incumbent MLAs. They need to find 60 candidates about that. So 60 candidates across the riding, most of those are going to be some of the weaker writings that they're probably not going to be competitive in. So you need to find 60 people you do criminal background check and a credit check and phone their best friends and phone their worst enemies and scan their social media footprint and all that to see if they've ever said or done something odd and smoke it all out. Because if you have one or two or three who validate this sort of thin veil of a narrative that the NDP have that the conservative party is not ready to govern or they're too far right.

you're going to have problems. So there's a real sprint to get the idealists and the opportunists and to make sure you sort of soak through those opportunists to make sure that they're the ones. Jerry, the idealists and the opportunists. You see all campaigns come down to that. And it shows up across the campaign and staffing levels and people who want to be publicly associated with the campaign once it's doing well, et cetera, et cetera. but where I found in the past, Peter, that it shows up most, obviously, is in candidate recruitment, right? So when Trudeau won the leadership in 2013, I guess it was April of 2013, and he was performing well in the polls, we made a very conscious decision to lock in a bunch of candidates who were interested then,

because you never know what happens. And lo and behold, when Rachel Notley won the election in the election, in Alberta and the NDP for a pretty scary couple of months, if you were on the Trudeau campaign, jumped ahead of him in the polls. Then suddenly all these people that we were talking about the value of public service to were less interested in having their name on a lawn sign.

And I saw the point that James made that I think is interesting to viewers, to your listeners, is, you know, most of us observe, political campaigns the way we observe hockey games. Right. We watch them. They're a sport and it's kind of interesting. But the people who actually have to manage and run them, the number of tasks that have to be squeezed into a small period of time

and executed flawlessly so they don't derail the campaign is something that people who've only ever, as James had, been a marquee member of a campaign team, would understand. And I remember when we started putting the Carney campaign together, and that was a compression like you would not believe. Because I think we, if I remember my numbers correctly, Peter, I think that we vetted something in the neighborhood of 200 candidates in about 30 days. Right. And also to my recollection, I think we had only one of them blow up. And that person came to us from the provincial NDP in Alberta. It was a person when we found out had a social media.

It's not funny, actually, but he had a social media post where he was wrapping an homage to Hamas on the steps of the Edmonton City Hall. And that somehow slipped through our vetting process. So whenever I see something thrown together at the last minute as the campaign, you can expect stories like that to come out. And the people who are running the opposition research shops in both campaigns are very, busy and having a lot of fun right now. And two things about that in BC is that because the sloppy way in which David E.B called the campaign and the way in which it happened, it's not just that he called the campaign early.

He called the campaign early with no conservative leader and he knew it. And the public knows that he knew it. And the public knows, and the public goes, this is, that's not cool. I genuinely want, this is an awesome power and responsibility. You're asking me to bestow upon a group of people to govern this problem. in a time of crisis, and your police kind of... We're losing you here, James.

Here's the question. The question is sort of what's the issue in this campaign in BC? And if you listen to David Eby, the campaign issue, at least initially, was Donald Trump. Yeah. Now, does that fly?

There's a provincial government look at what is clear. clearly, you know, an international issue that, you know, that the federal government is kind of responsible for to try and make it a provincial issue. Can that work? Well, I think it can, whether it will, I'm not so sure in this case. I think that normally it doesn't. And it's an indication of how in touch you are with what's going on in the public. I mean, the big difference, as you know, Peter, and as many of our listeners will know, between the federal and the provincial governments,

is the provincial governments are ultimately responsible for delivering a lot of services that people depend on every day. That it's your kid's school, it's your hospital, it's your electricity bill, it's your local highway, it's all this stuff that seems pretty remote even at the best of times from foreign affairs, right? And I think if you're already predisposed, actually it's worse than this,

It's not so much if you're predisposed to see David E.B. as an opportunist. The onus is now on him to describe to people why this wasn't an opportunistic, nakedly political decision to call this election. And I think he's so far having a very hard time answering that question. And again, it is eerily reminiscent to me, and ultimately the liberals prevailed in 2020. But it's eerily reminiscent to the difficulty, the liberal campaign, had in 2021. You'll remember the day that Trudeau issued the writ or went to the governor general to have the writ issued. It was the day the Americans withdrew from Afghanistan and it was a

complete disaster in Afghanistan. And that dominated the news coverage largely because the campaign didn't have a good answer for why we were having a campaign and why they needed a mandate that they, that was different from the one that they already had. Okay. And the majority government it just makes it worse, in my view, that he's two years into a majority government and can't give people a good reason for why he needs an extra two years. Okay. I see James's back in. You can hear us, James?

You can hear you just fine. I don't see Jerry, but I hear you. I hear you. David E.B. was trying to make the issue Donald Trump. Now, maybe it'll turn out that way. I don't know. But what's the issue? Increasingly, the question for Canadians, for Albertans, for British Clubmen, the question now the ground has shifted to what Donald Trump is going away? What's the long-term plan here? What's the plan for the next two years of Trump and then beyond Trump? So as time is going by, people are less and less like, we need to have a government in order to fight Donald Trump. Well, you were the government. And you still had two years left in the mandate. And by my calendar, Donald Trump had two years left in his mandate. So if you wanted to be the guy to have the mandate in a majority of government to confront Donald Trump for the next two years, you had it. And you threw it away because you wanted to go around the province and give self-righteous speeches about what a bad guy Donald Trump is. We know what a bad guy Donald Trump is. He's been there for a decade.

Everybody gets it. We're all aligned. The question is, where do you want to go going forward? And he ought to have had something very quick and aggressive to say about it. When you go to the public early, you say, I know. know that I have a majority mandate, but there's a question on the horizon about a pivot point and a direction that the province needs to take. I think we should go this way. I really think we should go this way, but I need you to be with me on this because it won't be easy, but let me lay out why it is we need to go this way on this thing. And I need your consent so that I can do the

things that I need to do. And it's going to take a few quarters, maybe a couple years in order for us to get a momentum on this. And it might not feel right, but I need you to be with me so I can go down this road, none of that's there. I mean, and so he's really missed so far the moment. And if he comes up with something now, it really needs to be something precious because it's not obvious what that is. All right. I'm glad we've got our little technical issues to sort it out.

And as a result, let's take our break. I want to come back and talk about something we all like to talk about for different reasons. And that is the media's role in covering whatever the story has. happens to be, and we've had a lot of discussion about that in the last week or so after Donald Trump kicked off, or kicked out a number of journalists and journalistsic organizations from the White House. So we'll talk about that right after this. Okay. This is the point at which I remind everybody to listen to the Moore Butts

conversation for this Tuesday. We had a few little issues there in the first half, but that's Okay. It's all part of, it's all part of broadcasting. I remember back in Churchill, Manitoba, we used to have these problems. I was the only guy in the control room and never knew what I was doing. And so we had them almost daily. Here doesn't happen that often. Okay. I should remind everybody, listening on Sirius XM Channel 160, Canada Talks,

or on your favorite podcast platform, or you're watching us on our YouTube channel. Glad to have you with us. I should remind you of what our question of the week is for Thursday's your turn. Here's the question. Are you worried about the Quebec or Alberta referendums or votes that are coming up? The issue surrounding separation is on them.

If you are concerned, does one or the other worry you more? Or maybe you're happy about the prospect of one or the other or both leaving Canada. Or maybe you have another thought on Quebec and or Alberta tiptoeing up to a referendum on separating from Canada. It's not a clear-cut question that's not being asked as such in either one of these elections, but there are issues. The Pat the Quebec law, which seems to be leading in the Quebec Poll,

says they will have a referendum somewhere in their term of office if they win. And in Alberta, the question is, should there be a referendum on separation? So anyway, there's your question. What are your thoughts on either one or both, Quebec or Alberta? You have 75 words as a maximum to answer the question. You write to the Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. Have it in by 3 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday and include your name and your location. All right?

Good. Let's give that a whirl. Okay. There's a question for... James Moore, former Conservative Cabinet Minister and Gerald Butts, former principal secretary to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The questions about the media. We saw Trump last week kick out of the White House, MS now, CNN and Politico.

And once a judge overturned that order, he then tried to kick them off the airplane, Air Force One. We saw Prime Minister Carney in New York, talking to six New York Times reporters. While some Canadian journalists are saying, hey, you know, what's up with that? Why is he not talking to more Canadian journalists? Now he has, but it does look strange sometimes when this kind of thing happens.

Now, James, I saw your picture was frozen there again, but I think you got the gist of the question we're at. do you want to start us off on this? The relationship. It's not. Yeah. Journalists and governments and prime ministers, premiers and presidents and journalists can always have fractious relationships.

There's a interpersonal dynamic behind it that people often don't see. And often, you know, journalists, they ask, as you know, Peter, they ask nine or ten questions or they follow nine or ten leads. And they only actually ever publish one. But the other ones that they follow, then that they go down the road of can be, personal or uncomfortable or ugly or aggressive or whatever. So there's an interpersonal sort of professional, non-professional dynamic between political leaders and journalists. And those

relationships can be frayed in ways in which we never see that cause tension that is unexplained because why would you explain it? And it can lead to some heat and some interpersonal dynamics that are more aggressive than you would think just a journalist covering a politician. So that's part of it. The second thing, too, that I think is fair to say about Donald Trump is that, you know, John F. Kennedy had fights with journalists. Nixon did. Everybody did. George W. Everybody has everybody has fights with journalists. But no president of the United States has ever looked to the woman and called her a piggy. There's a level of ugliness and brutality around the way in which Donald Trump speaks to people who clearly thinks he's superior to, that we've not seen before

modeled in a leader in a Western democracy. Like, it's never been there. And even if some people think that they're smarter than a journalist, they don't respect the journalist or think a journalist is dumb or agendized or whatever, there's, it's always been the case. It's always been the case in my life. I'm 50, that everybody, you kind of couch that. You kind of couch your private thoughts about a person, about a person, you recognize that

you represent an entire country or a constituency or state or a province or, and that you have to carry yourself in a certain way with a certain nomenclature and a presence and an obligation to be respectful and thoughtful on behalf of your constituents. Donald Trump doesn't have that at all. And so that's completely blown away. And he's shattering old norms. And there will be copycats of him that will echo for many, many years to come. And I think that's the dark part of it. Because he has been a, whatever one thinks of Donald Trump, he's been a successful politician.

He's been elected president twice, almost three times. He's won every primary, almost every single primary he's contested, you know, three times in a row. And so a lot of people will look at him and say, that's what successful politics looks like, the style, the bravado, the aggression, the ugliness. And if I'm modeling and echo that, I will have something near what his success looks like as a starting point. And that's a tough spot to be in for quite some time in the way in which the culture about how politicians talk to journalists has shifted. Jerry. Well, I don't have anything to add to what James said about Donald Trump. It's one in a very, very, very long list of unfortunate consequences of Trump's success is that people are going to imitate it.

And hopefully the midterms and then the next presidential election at least start to help Americans turn the page on it. But I wouldn't count on it, you know. So I agree. on the Trump point. I think the question you asked about Prime Minister Carney and the New York Times editorial board, how can I put this? Journalists can be touchy, right? And I think that there's a legitimate question to ask, why would you do that? But I think it has an obvious answer, which is the New York Times commands a huge audience in a bigger one in Canada than most people want to recognize, by the way.

But it also commands a huge audience in the United States at a time when it's important that Canadian leadership get across its point to the people of the United States and not just the government of the United States. So I think we've tried very hard, we being Canadians, to keep separate our beefs with Donald Trump. And the point James made that he's been, you know, 77 million people voted for Donald Trump. most of them three times. So it's not just Donald Trump. That's the problem here. It's a huge swath of the United States that wants to see their president be a belligerent bully to even their most important allies and friends. And I think what the prime minister is doing, not that I'm speaking for him or the office, but I think what he's doing is connecting directly with the people who will ultimately shape the next government of the United States.

I think the point James made about BC is a really, in the context of BC is a really important one, we should be talking more and more about what we want to do after Donald Trump. Because, you know, I called this back in the spring when we last talked about Trump before the summer. I thought he was a dead man walking now then, and I certainly think he is now. And I think they're on their way to getting thumped in the midterms. and what will happen to him is what happens to every president in the last two years of their second mandate when they're not running for re-election. Even their own party starts to run away from them when they're unpopular. You know, John McCain famously said about George W. Bush toward the end of his mandate that when you get down to this level of approval, you're talking about blood relatives and paid staff.

I think that's what we're going to see with Trump over the next couple of years. So urgently starting a conversation with Americans who are not either a Donald Trump, supporters of Donald Trump, or have their commercial interests closely associated with Donald Trump, I think is a really important thing for the Prime Minister to be doing. Is it, let me put it this way, is it more important that he's reaching out to an, and not just an American audience by doing the New York Times. Oh, yeah. You know, it's a world audience.

Is it more important that he's reaching out to that audience, trying to explain what he's doing and what others have a like mind in other countries are doing than it is, I don't want to say he's not accessible in Canada because he has been. Yeah. But it appears because he's doing more American media and world media than any Prime Minister

can anything else go wrong in our recording today now we get an alarm going on. Where was I? Yeah, but Peter, I don't think, I don't think people who are absorbing the information,

Canadians, I don't think they're just saying. The New York Times has people in Ottawa, right? You see a headline like the one this past, you know, a week about Canada being prepared or having thought about or mused about internally, some plans about if America were to show hostility towards Canada, you click on that headline

and then you read the piece. And then, you know, on an iPhone or whatever, you know, the logos don't present. It doesn't take you, doesn't say, by the way, this, you know, data is data, information's information, quote to quote. And whether it's, you know, people take in the sources of information. So I think that the boundaries of Canadian, Jerusalem, American journalism, BBC, whatever. I think that doesn't really matter. If you're in Quebec, if it's Agenres France Press or if it's a Reservant, it's whatever. It comes in. Now, it's fair to say that

he's talking to somebody from the New York Times. He's not going to get challenged on some domestic stuff or he brags about the things that he's doing in domestic policy, Bill C-5, C-39, the legislation to try to get his infrastructure going. He's not going to get the follow-up question about the domestic pushback and all that and get into the details. That's fine. He'll he'll get those questions at home. But I think there's virtue in having people with different perspectives on the Canada-U.S. relationship and have a different emphasis on the strengths and weaknesses over the relationship, loading up their questions and throwing them out at the prime minister in a way that's not wrote, whether it's the American perspective or a Canadian

perspective. I think that's good. I think diversity is good. I still wonder whether, I don't want this to sound critical. I actually. I'm asking it as an attempt to a thoughtful question, whether it's, this is a moment where getting that kind of interest from news organizations around the world is more important than getting it at home. Well, I think it's a great question, Peter. If you take for granted, the prime minister is nothing, if not a very methodical thinker, right? and it will have occurred to him that if his strategy is to build a new set of alliances for Canada

to open up markets that have not previously been open and to make sure that the path is laid for Canadian businesses to do business in other places, his own presence in those markets explaining his rationale and making the case for it is vitally important in my view. It's a new world out there, right? And we are, in my view, obviously, I'm a supporter of the prime ministers. We're lucky to have a person in the office who commands attention because globally, we live in an attention economy. And if nobody wants to hear what you have to say, then it's going to be a lot harder to get

important things done in other markets. And the truth is that Mark Carney commands an audience wherever he goes. And he will ultimately be judged by Canadians rightly on the basis of the degree to which he uses that attention for the national interest of the country because that's the prime minister's job. But the idea that it's somehow gauche for him to be in foreign media making the same case that he's making at home, I think is really provincial. and small-minded. And if we've learned anything over the past 10 years, it's that Canada needs more friends in the world and Canada needs more markets in the world.

And Canadian businesses need to be doing business in places other than the United States. Not that we're ever going to get a market that will replace the United States. There is no market that will replace the United States for Canada or any other country. But if his strategy is to be successful, then he has to be present in those communications ecosystems around the world.

The observation that you make, though, Peter, I think is an important one that people who consume this podcast and think about this, who are thinking about the way in which they collect and disseminate and draw in information in the coming years is going to be important to broaden your aperture from actually Canadian sources. I actually think it's an important point. Because if you think about the next five years or where Canada is going to be engaged in big moments of discussion that it will have domestic consequence, the Ukraine war. We have 2,500 Canadian troops currently stationed in Latvia and the belligerence

of Donald. I mean, it's clear that Vladimir Putin wants to have an hot test of Article 5 of NATO and to see whether or not people will have each other's backs. That's coming. There's no question about that. Canada, Europe, free trade. What is an associate member? What does it constitute? How does that work? What's happening with Canada and the United States on tariffs? What's going to happen on Kuzma, and the broader trade relationship that has a 16-year time horizon on it? What's going to happen with the Asia Pacific? Prime Minister, Carney says he wants to have a revamped free trade or trade agreement with India. What does that look like?

What's he saying over there? And how is it different from what he's saying over here in all of these different theaters? And look for contradictions. Look for emphasis. How is he selling Canada to these other parts of the world? And what kind of security and economic commitments is he making about access to our market? So you can't get all of that from a reporter who's sitting in a cubicle in Ottawa and going to and from question period and who's trying to surveil social media.

people who are on the ground there are going to be assessing Prime Minister Carney what he's saying and what they're saying to those audiences so that an activity of Canada and the world is going to be a mature real real quick and I think Canadians who are assessing the efficacy of this government

and the responsibility of this government in their duties should draw in those other sources. Let me ask one last question because I think it fits in with exactly what you said to James and to a degree what Jerry was saying as well. You've both had

a lot of experience with dealing with journalists in the nation's capital in Ottawa. Are they up to the game? Do you or maybe let me put it this way. Do you trust them with this kind of hinge point in history

and the nation's history to be able to do their job? And I'm talking about the national media, not just Ottawa, but all of us, including, you know, podcasters, whatever. Or is the international media a better judge of what's going on? There's a hot one for you. Yeah. Well, Jerry, you go.

I just went. Oh, thank you so much, my friend. By the way, I think we've both been invited to the press gallery dinner coming up, so we've got it. Exactly. I haven't been to the press gallery dinner in many years. I think that they've got a really tough job ahead of them. Do I trust our, all joking aside, do I trust our national media?

Absolutely, I do. I think that they are going to have to develop new muscles and use them in a high performance display of athletics. that they haven't had to in the past. But I do think they're up for it. And I think that's especially true of the younger journalists. I'm not going to single any people out by name. But I think, look, I mean, I spend a lot of time consuming media and other countries for my day job.

And there's no better ecosystem than Canada's. And as you know, and as we've talked about many times on this podcast, the whole industry is going through a structural, a wrenching structural dislocation that started with the internet, accelerated with social media, and is now someone's pressed hyper speed on it with AI. So I think you have to cut the individual journalists who are trying to do a very difficult job, a lot of slack, if there happened to be living through that environment. You know, back in the day where you knew everybody was going to be watching Peter

Mansbridge on CBC News, it was a relatively straightforward proposition how you were going to get a message out and what communications ecosystem you needed to be a native of. And now that's just not the case. You don't know where people are getting their information. Journalism means a very different thing in a world where someone on TikTok, who's not necessarily Canadian, commands 10 times the audience of any Canadian journalist. So I do think they're up for the challenge. I hope, however, that on both sides, the political leaders and the journalists, they treat each other with mutual respect because there are a bunch of pseudo-journalists, and I won't give them the publicity of naming their outlets, but I think we all know them, who have dawned the mask of being a journalist, have been given all of the privileges that are traditionally granted to the press. with the full intent of destroying the estate itself.

So I think we've got, I think we, I hope we have learned a bunch of sober lessons about how important journalism is, how important it is to have it owned by Canadians and have Canadians reporting on Canadians. So yeah, I think they're up for it, but it's, it's, it's going to be harder than anything they've ever done in their careers. You get the last word, James. I think we, yeah, I think we, yeah, I think we, yeah, I think we, I think we, rely less on journalism for facts checking than we did before and more for perspective and context

framing in the sense that you can take a complicated background or from a government or from a corporation. You can take a quarterly report from any company, drop it into Claude or chat GPT or whatever and say, give me a summary. What were the profits and losses? What were the earnings ratios? What's going on here? And you can do that with a government press release. And you can get the facts through all kinds of modalities that are far more efficient, frankly, and often more accurate than you do through journalism where budgets are small. They don't have time to fact check all these things and pour through budget documents and get through the nitty-gritty of procurement processes for F-35s and all the kind of stuff.

But you can do that. What's relevant for people who are busy with their everyday lives is to understand the context of why what's happening matters. And therein lies the subjectivity of journalism that can be problematic where people can say, they're emphasizing this, but they're not emphasizing that. They're going after Trump or they're not scrutinizing that. And Trump is pro-terrorist, but the Democrats are pro-terrorism. And the new guys aren't necessarily better than the old guys. And so the debate about the interpretation of the facts and the obligation on the chroniclers of things to frame things in a way that will be a void of scrutiny, that's going to be more and more difficult.

But just sort of saying, here's what the government announced, these are the details of it. People can fact check that and get that out very, very quickly and sort of from themselves. The number of times I've been on shows or done stuff with clients, and I do Zoom calls and things with clients. and I'll sort of turn my camera off and go on the side and say, say, is it true that in the last quarter that expenditures were greater than they were in the quarter, last quarter, year over year or whatever? And you can get that quick data and then pop it up and re-engage the conversation. People do that all the time, but the context of things and why things matter is going to be

a subjectivity bend that journalists and others are going to have to be very, very mindful of their biases. Did you notice how James skillfully avoided answer? your question about whether you trust journalists. Oh, I do. No, no, generally I do. Look, we won't, but but there are some people who I know who have, you know, who have, you know, all that, but I trust Canadian journalism,

in the aggregate. And I think that's the thing. Like, there are people who are, there are some people who can be bad actors. There are some people who have biases. There are some people who emphasize things. And they expose them, frankly, many people, expose themselves all the time on Twitter or X social media all the time with their

likes and their reposts and their inflammation and the things that you can tell what their biases are. You can tell by their choice of adjectives and how they describe peer polyiave versus other. Like it's super painfully obvious that they're not fans and that clouds my judgment of their judgment of others. So yeah,

but in the aggregate generally I do. Yeah, absolutely. Twitter was really bad for journalists. It was so bad. Yeah. Well, I still can't believe so many. many of them are on it. Well, we all know your biases. And I'm not talking politically.

I'm talking. I mean, look at Jerry's wearing a Habs t-shirt. I am worried, though. James is probably wearing Kinnock socks. Yeah, I am. For sure. Home opener. I, of course, have no team that I cheer for.

Just a humble servant of the sport, right, Peter? That's right. It all starts this week. Let's hope hockey can be more fun than, baseball was in the last little well for Blue Jay's fans anyways. All right gentlemen, thank you for this. Sorry about all the technical

issues. We're trying to clean up as much as we can in the post production process. We'll see how that works out, but I'm sure there's a lot of good content here too. So thanks for that. See you again in a couple of weeks. Bye for now.