The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Moore Butts -- Why Does A Majority Make Such A Difference?

Episode Date: April 14, 2026

For a year the Liberals have been trying to cobble together a majority out of their election night minority. Now they seem to have attained one. What's the big deal? James Moore and Gerald Butts have their say on that and more. 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 more Butts, their latest conversation. That's coming right up. And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here, along with Gerald Butts, James Moore, and our regular, well, every second Tuesday conversation with these two esteemed gentlemen. It's been another interesting week. And Jerry's been in Montreal, still in Montreal, actually, as we record this, after the convention by the liberals as they keep moving, towards their majority position.

In fact, you could argue they already have it now, but it may be enhanced by the Monday night by-elections. We're recording this before those, but I think we all assume we know where those by-elections are headed towards. James is in his regular haunt on the West Coast in Vancouver. Do you actually say Vancouver, are you outside of Vancouver?

When I'm in Canada, I say Port Moody. When I'm outside of Canada, I say Vancouver. Okay. Here's the question for this week. You know, we either are or we aren't in a majority position for the liberal government. Most likely we are as Tuesday sets. But having said that, what real difference is there between a majority and a minority? James, why don't you start? It's actually pretty huge. It's tectonic.

It's not, you know, from the outside, people say, well, they have a majority. now, well, that's interesting. The government can do whatever it wants. The truth is a switch gets flipped. A light switch comes on and it's a massive cultural shift in a government because the expectations around you go through the roof. And so I think for Prime Minister Cardi and for liberals who think that now that they have a majority government, that everything is smooth sailing, it's just the dynamic is very different. Provinces become, the expectations get much higher. big city mayor's expectations get higher. The base of your party, which might have been a little bit more sanguine and prepared to put some water in their wine and compromise, say, well, if they had a majority, they might, no, they now expect you to deliver something significant to a part of the reason why that they're a member of the party.

The Liberal Party and the Conservative Party, when they're at the peak of their powers are both brokerage parties and they're made of constituent parts. And those constituent parts expect deliverables. They expect either, you know, conservatives that want lower taxes or tougher crime or something related to. of families or whatever the code of the day is. And liberals have their version of that, either expanded social services or something specific on official languages or go a little further on gun control or whatever it is. And those constituent parts just say,

especially in the current context with Prime Minister Carney, they say you've got, you know, your 10 points up at the national polls, your 15 points up in Ontario, you're 20 points up in preferred prime minister, you now have a clear majority in the House, you have no provinces fighting you, you have no reason to not deliver.

So where's my thing? thing and everybody's going to start looking for their thing. The fangs and the teeth, the media get a little bit sharper. Even independent media, you know, conservative media, they get a little bit more aggressive and they start hunting down cabinet ministers in airports and at home and in community events because the official opposition has sort of, they've lost seats in parliament and they've lost momentum. So we need to do our part to stand up for the conservative cause and they're going to get a little bit more aggressive. Everything actually gets harder. The only thing that gets easier are committees and your ability to pass stuff through the house.

But everything else takes on a different shape and a different perspective. So you buy yourself more time. Fundraising gets harder because you don't have to sort of scare the base with the dynamic that we have an election in 90 days. We have a confidence about coming up. Look out. So you have to find different ways in order to appeal to get your $50 checks and $20 donations and $100 donations.

So you have to reimagine that a little bit. You also have to make sure that your caucus doesn't say, oh, we're not going to have an election until 20, 29. we're good. No, no, stay on your toes, keep leaning in, keep showing up, keep being aggressive. So I think actually everything gets a lot harder and the expectations get a lot harder. So when you get a majority, congratulations. But I hope the switch is flipped in your brain in terms of how you're going to approach government because it gets harder. Did the switch flip in your brain? Like in 2011, the conservatives of which you obviously were

a member of that cabinet, you know, achieved their majority after a number of minorities. what, you know, were you ready for it? Did you see all that coming when you became a majority government? I'd like to say yes, but you hear the energy in my voice is because I learned through the some of the, some of the searing experience. But for us, I, I mean, the origin story goes back further, right? It goes back actually to 1993. It wasn't 2004 when Stephen Harper won a minority, not a majority.

But 1993, yes, the progressive conservatives crashed down. But I was on the Reform Party side of the family. I first came into politics. as a volunteer for the Reform Party in 1993 is a 16 year old. And so for us, it was 52 seats. And then in 97, it was 60 seats. And then it was 66 seats in 2000. And it was kind of this, you know, let's go, adding a dozen seats and like,

keep moving, keep moving. And then 100 seats in 2000, 124 in 2022 and, and, sorry, 100 and whatever seats in 2024, 124, 124 seats in 26. So it was like, come on, come on. And it was, by then it was like five elections. So then it was 2008. We won a minority. We hoped to get a majority. The bottom fell out in Quebec on culture files.

2011, we get a majority. Okay, here we go. But the big shift for us was we would, you know, we would do it if we were in government. We would do it in government say, well, we would do it if we had a majority. We would do it if we had a majority. Then you get into a majority. Then it's finally, okay, here we go. And then the expectations were there.

So by then some of the big cultural files for the conservative movement, particularly the long gun registry and other things. we had to move on like in the first quarter of that government. If we didn't, then all of our credibility would go with the base. All right, Jerry, your party witnessed the opposite, right? It went from majority in 2015 to a minority in 2019 now. You could argue that's because you weren't there anymore. Well, you could argue that. But what about the reverse?

You obviously see the difference in the reverse. Yeah. Well, I don't know. Listening to James describe this situation, I feel like I should call my friends and say, call off the by-elections. It doesn't sound like any fun at all. So I do agree with what James said, though.

I think that the pressure that mounts, you just have no excuses, right? So people get less patient with their demands. You've always got mouths to feed in government, whether it be traditional constituencies, the issues that a party will prosecute over time that James was talking about, every party has their version of those issues. But on the upside, and I think it is a really important upside, and I think in a strange way, they're about to generate what the public wants, frankly, because I think that the public wants

Prime Minister Carney to have the stability and the planning horizon that you get with the majority government, but nobody wants an election. And I think that that's true of the prime minister as well, without speaking for him. That's just my own instinct watching his body language. And I think in a strange way, and people have made this point about our parliamentary system many times over the years, the system itself is conspiring to give the public what it, wants. And I know a lot of people will disagree with that and we'll get some hate mail for it. But when my reading of the polls and how consistent they've been in support of the prime minister,

and let's be honest, this is support for Mark Carney and his government. It is not support for the traditional version of the Liberal Party. It is support for Mark Carney. I think they're going to get what they want. So if you're in the prime minister's shoes, you have the most suddenly you have the most valuable resource in politics and in life. And that is time. So instead of worrying about whether you need a scenario to go to the polls this spring and another one next fall and then one the following spring and basically every six months until usually unpredictably something generates an election anyway, now he gets to take a second. step back and say, okay, I've got three years. What do I want to accomplish in those three years? And for all of the reasons James described, that will heighten the pressure on him.

But I think there's no substitute for having that kind of time. And look, as someone who has been deeply involved with him and in this whole enterprise for certainly the first half of last year, it's impossible to describe guys the velocity at which this thing was traveling in terms of normal politics and I think as a consequence he just hasn't had a chance to take a breath I mean he he I think enjoys moving at this speed the system does not enjoy moving at this speed

and it's been careening and shaking on its on its rails for a while and I think getting a chance to take a step back point out to his team, make whatever adjustments he needs to make to his agenda and describe clearly what he wants to accomplish most importantly to the public over the next three to six months and then drive the system hard toward achieving those things. He'll get what you usually get as a leader going into a campaign before a campaign,

but that circumstances robbed him of the benefit of having that preparatory time and now almost miraculously he's probably going to get it well, Prime Minister. By default, our system is wired culturally and unstructurally towards majority governments, right? Like six of the last eight elections have yielded minority parlance, but culturally, frankly, whether it's through the French Catholic tradition in deference to church leadership or on the English side, through the Westminster model, et cetera, and the way in which things have been approached in it,

and also in provinces, every province in this country is a binary choice. And therefore, almost every provincial election yields a majority government of one color or the other. And they're all unicameral in their approach to things. Quebec has had a different tradition, but basically all unicameral. And so people are wired that if I vote a certain way,

that's what I'm going to get. And they're in control and they drive the car for a couple of years. And then I'll judge them and see what the alternative is. And federally, it's been starting to stop in 2011, If 2008 Stephen Harper tried in 2011, Stephen Harper succeeded. And really having to explicitly say to Canadians, because of the global recession and coming out of it, we will have a focused federal government that will, a steady, stable majority government that will focus on the economy. Like he had to beat that drum like very deliberately 20 times a day to every camera that would say it.

a steady, stable majority government that would focus on the economy. And it was because of the circumstances and because he had demonstrated that he wasn't a radical and reactionary prime minister that people said, okay, given the context, given what we've seen, and given that you've explicitly said that you're going to focus on the economy, I will concede to you a majority government. And that dynamic with Donald Trump, Iran, trade, all that sort of stuff. And Mark Carney's personality, as Canadians have now seen it, to Jerry's point, people go, okay, I will concede to you a majority government because it's very hard to earn a majority

electorally. The circumstances have to be aligned. You have to get that mandate. And Donald Trump and the way Mitch Mark Carney has approached it and culturally has aligned and approached things, Canadians seem to be prepared to say, please have that stability on this side so that we can deal with these crises. Jerry, you were at the convention over the weekend. And, you know, There was at one point the Prime Minister in his speech talked about, you know, a parliament of a degree of unity. The people ought to, you know, to pull together from all sides on this, given the situation the country's facing and the different difficulties and the changing world nature. How far away is that from a government of national unity? That's a good question.

I think that I'm glad you picked up on that, Peter, and I hope other. people did because I think that this has been like all successful strategies. I think Mark Cardius is relatively simple. And it's we need a bigger tent both within the Liberal Party and within the Parliament of Canada so that we can get through the crisis that the United States has visited upon us together. Like that's a strategy, right? And the people who are in the weeds picking on what one floor crosser, or another may have said on their social media

six months ago or can the Liberal Party sustain a right word tilt here or a more centrist positioning there or whatever your pet issue is are missing the point. And I think he has very deep

conviction that he needs to fashion a broader coalition to keep the country together through this challenge we're facing of an indeterminate amount a time. So I think what he's trying to do is to fashion a national unity government under the Aegis of the Liberal Party of Canada, which, you know, if you listen to his speech yesterday, it was very much about the country. It wasn't, it was a speech to liberals about what he's trying

to do with the party and why. And, sorry, James, go ahead. He also benefits from another cultural shift that's happened in our politics. And we've talked about it before, but it's worth reanimating here, right? Which is we have a parliamentary system, but we have presidential style politics. Yeah. So our system, you know, how many seats and which ridings and polls and how, you know, the pizza parliament versus like all that's true. But in part because of the diminishment of media capacity,

in part because of the the shrinking attention span, frankly, of the public and the scrolling and like all of that. When the campaigns come around, the cameras are pointed at one person. And so you ask people in the last election. Who did you vote for? Paul Yev, Carney, Singh. Who'd you vote for? For it. Like, people identify increasingly with leaders and personalities as a chapter of a political party's sort of long string of narrative as opposed to, I always vote for the Ontario Liberal Party. And there is some of that. There's the habit of voting for that party unless there's a leader that you find particularly distasteful. But for the most part, for the passive voter, for the people who kind of come and go and float in and out, but show up when there's a crisis when their parents tell them that, voter that elections really matter. We have parliamentary system, but we have presidential style politics.

And so when that's the case, and when you have a leader who is succeeding and seems to be the for lack of better phrase, man of the moment, that's extraordinarily accretive to them in terms of positioning themselves to build that bigger tent. Yeah. And if I could just follow up on that, Peter. You can always tell what politicians

really think by what they repeatedly say, right? I know that's very obvious, but it's amazing to me how many people overlook this. So the prime minister had a friend of his of 30, 40 years, write in this note after he won the election. And he quoted it yesterday in the speech.

And he's quoted it publicly and privately probably 20 times since the election. And this man, Bob Zettel is his name. He wrote the prime minister saying, look, everybody's focus on paraphrasing, everybody's focused on the immediate issue here, the threat of

the Trump tariffs, which is the way it was described at the time. But the real issue is what has always been the issue in Canada, and that is how do we foster a sense of national cohesion and stick together in the public interest and keep that in mind? And I think that that encapsulated in a really compelling way for the prime minister and for a lot of the people around him, what the main challenge is facing the country right now. It's sure Donald Trump, sure tariffs, sure, whatever,

the world, the global multilateral rules-based order crumbling. Like all of this stuff is really important and it has to be treated as a specific issue or a set of issues in its own right. But let's remember who we are here and where we get into difficulty is when we start shooting at each other as Canadians. and I think he's trying his level best to keep that from happening. He's asking liberals to take water in their wine on a bunch of different fronts to welcome people into the party who probably wouldn't have felt welcome in the party

a couple of years ago. And he sees all of that as in service of a broader national cause. And I know that sounds really obvious and straightforward, but it's amazing how little, at least of the coverage I've seen, how little is focused on that topic. And that, of course, will create problems. There will be disagreements over time. If any of these threats fade, I don't think they will personally,

because for reasons we've discussed at length in the past, I think these problems are structural. They're not idiosyncratic. But Mark Carney has taken a really careful, you know, careful, calibrated sounding of what kind of leadership he thinks the country needs at this moment and he's determined to give it to the country. So I, you know, I for one, obviously, I'm excited as a liberal and as someone who admires the prime minister a great deal. But I'm kind of excited for the country because I think the possibilities are really broad now. And I hope

that people who don't traditionally identify as supporters of the liberal party or haven't voted liberal in the past. And I suspect they are, given where he's standing in the polls, sort of looking at the prime minister saying, well, this is a really interesting moment and what can I do for the country. All right. I want to get to how far you take this idea.

Yeah. You know, it's kind of operating together, working together, you know, having a parliament that is kind of together. You know, when we've seen governments of national unity in the history books, they're actually that, you know, like people literally get together. You take the opposition leader and put that person in the cabinet. You know, we saw it in the First World War,

second World War, times of national crisis. Are we talking that? Are we talking that that's as far as it could go or it could go that far? I would say no. Because Donald Trump is so caustic politically and problematic to the Canadian economy, I think you'll see the opposition parties, they will tools down. And Pierre Pollyab has effectively done that, right? So when it comes to Kuzma and the reconsideration of Kuzma this summer, going into the fall, we'll see what happens in the midterms and how bad it is

for the Republican Party, what that means in terms of boxing in Donald Trump, you know, at least legislatively, but he may become therefore more belligerent with his rhetoric and we'll see. And the world will continue to triage the Trump presidency and mitigate against it as best they can. But I think so I think that's I think is about as aligned as they will be. But it'll be reflected more in the rhetoric of things. But to Jerry's point, though, that it's good to come together. And everything I said about the challenges of majority still, Stephen Harper would take 2011 to 2015 over the previous minorities every time

for all the reasons that Jerry said, because you can do forward planning. You can stage things and all that. There are seeds of problems that are sewn into all of this that are echoes of the past and what frankly Prime Minister Paul Martin had. At one time, Paul Martin had former NDP Premier Ujaldosange

sitting next to former Reform Party member of Parliament Keith Martin, sitting next to former progressive conservative leadership candidate, Scott Bryson. And they were expected to get along on everything. And the only thing they really got along on was they didn't like Stephen Harper. But, you know, they could get along on some other things, but eventually when those things ran out and you run out of those things pretty quickly. So when you have in this coming week,

or a coming couple of weeks, you're going to have the former deputy leader of the, Ontario NDP sitting next to Maryland Gladu in the same desk, expecting to have them agree on child care and taxes and pipelines and all that. I kind of think that that's going to be a bit of a short runway. They will both agree that Mark Carney is great and Donald Trump is bad. That's great. And they'll agree on some major projects, but things will run out.

So when things run out is when things get a little more difficult. And about that, I have to tell my favorite John Cray Chan story because it's pertinent to this about the end of majority governments. 2011, May 2nd, 2011, Stephen Harper, we finally win our majority. I'm in Ottawa a couple weeks later for the swearing end of cabinet. I'm on Spark Street in Ottawa with my father and a reporter. And we're walking down, like out of a sitcom, we're walking down Spark Street right in front of,

I remember right in front of the RBC building. And like out of a sitcom, Jean-Cretchen was walking by. I said, Prime Minister, how are you? Good. And I'll do my Craig Chan, spare with me. And he said, hey, James, how are you? And I said, I'm well, Prime Minister. How are you?

He said, congratulations. You finally got your majority. I said, thank you. You know, I got three in a row. Yes, I know Prime Minister. three in a row. And he said, and then I said, well, I said, do you have any advice? Majority government versus minority government? He said, well, you know, majority governments are very good because you can plan for the future. You can start, you know, taking a longer view of things. You're not worried about a confidence vote all the time.

You can be more reflective and you can think about policy and then maybe even actually think about legacy a little bit and do all this. And so majority governments are very, very good because you can really do, take show real, uh, uh, opportunities of leadership. And the person who was next to me said, but Prime Minister, you know, I noticed that you had, yes, you have three majorities in a row, but I noticed in each of your majorities, you basically left a year on the table. You're elected in 93 and then you had election 97, but you lost a year, basically, because you called a quick election, the 97 to 2000. You lost a year. You sort of took advantage of Stockwell days, you know, weakened leadership. And then you left because Paul Martin and all that, but you could have had like an extra two or

three years of a majority government. You're talking about how great majorities are. And he said, let me tell you something, majority governments, that last year of a majority government can be tough because you're backbenchers who aren't getting in cabinet. They start thinking who is this old guy and they start leaking and being unhelpful. The cabinet ministers who think they can do a better. Cabinet ministers who think they can do a better job than you start planning their leadership and the bureaucracy. You know, the bureaucracy who thinks that maybe you're not going to get back, they start getting lazy. And the opposition knows when the election's coming so they can plan that. That last year of a majority government can be very tough.

So I got rid of it. He should have got rid of it one more, one more time in 2004. God, what would we do without John Crechan? There's never been anybody like that, the stories we could tell. But before we take our break, Jerry, your thought on this, how far do you go on looking? for unity. I think you go as far as necessary, right? And I think you go as far as you think is going to be in the public interest. I think the challenge with this, and I said very nice things, and I did get the

predicted hate mail last week for saying a bunch of nice things about Pierre Pollyev on this podcast. But I'll say, you know, you alluded to earlier, Peter, this newer kinder, kinder, gentler, Pierre Pauliev. I think he's disappeared already. I've seen his last couple of press conferences where he stops just short of calling the Prime Minister corrupt and the Liberal Party of Canada criminal operation. And I think that he's having trouble staying in the zone where he knows he needs to be in order to be successful, which we talked about when he attempted that pivot. My joke to Jody was that, It's like we're watching Pierre Pollyov's Euras tour every day that he's suddenly gone back to his old album very quickly.

And I think he's going to struggle in this period, man. He is really going to struggle. And if there were a different, if someone like James or someone, not that there's anyone like James, if James were a leader of the Conservative Party, I think there'd be a much more constructive spirit in Parliament. But I just don't think, I don't think Pierre Poliav has that equipment. And I hope I'm proven wrong for the good of the country.

I hope I'm not as a liberal. But I just, I have seen too little evidence that that man can approach public life in a spirit, in a generous, expansive spirit. And like I said, I hope I'm wrong about it, but I don't think I am. Yeah, my last word on this, because I know we're going to shift, is that there will be a domino effect of cultural change for everybody, as I said in the beginning, right? And I even think premiers who are, they look at Mark Carney and they don't know if he's going to succeed. He's new to politics. Now they see it a year in, he has succeeded.

So therefore, well, now that you've succeeded and now you have command and control, now we know, it's my bridge. Where's my pipeline? Where's my train? Where's my whatever? And there's the height, like, let's go. Where is it? So there will be that. But I think Jerry's point is apt, right, which is the cultural shift as well, for lack of better phrase,

the NDP have every reason to be even more aggressive and elbows up and to be even more, you know, they don't have party status. They're far from it. Obelos doesn't have a seat in parliament. So they're far away from it. But they can be really aggressive and really destructive and set a really high bar and really try to cleave that progressive vote back. Pierre Paulyev, to Jerry's point, he does have to really do how think about this because there's comfort in the base. There's company, you can tell in that press conference, there's comfort in the 87% number.

There's comfort in the people who really like you. But the people who really like you are not going to get you more than what you've got. And you need to deliver. You need to show results. You need to show quarterly growth. In the business, where's your EBIT? Show me your numbers. How is it moving up?

And so he's going to have a pressure because if Mark Carney has a majority and he can do whatever he wants, well, then the job of the opposition leader is to be that much more aggressive and to do all that. But being more aggressive puts you further in your box. And so how does this help and what do you do? So they need to find their. footing in the new dynamic because they do have an obligation to be a stern opposition, but does that negate your capacity to build those bridges? It's, you know, it's the beginning of a new chapter of the Carney era for sure. Okay. We're going to take our break, but I guess what

you're saying is we shouldn't expect anytime soon that PR Polyev is going to be like the Minister of Finance in some kind of new unity government. That's not, that does not appear to be on anyone's bingo card at this point. Okay, we're going to take our break, come back, switch topics. I think you'll enjoy this one too. We'll do that right after this. And welcome back. You're listening to The Bridge this Tuesday. It's the Moore-Buts conversation with James Moore, former Conservative Cabinet Minister and Jerry Butts, former senior Liberal Party advisor to a prime minister and to a number of premiers, one in particular in Ontario. You're listening on Sirius XM, Channel 167, Canada Talks, are on your favorite podcast

platform or you're watching us on our YouTube channel. A reminder, this week's question of the week for Thursday's, your turn, is about airlines. What is your current sense of feeling about airlines and the service they provide? And obviously, we're talking mainly about Canadian airlines, but airlines in general. Are you satisfied? Are you happy? Are you unhappy about the service you get from your various airlines? That's the question.

You can write to the man's brief. podcast at gmail.com. Have your answers in before 6 p.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday. Include your name, the location you're writing from, and keep your answers under 75 words. Those are all the conditions. Okay. topic number two for this second segment, gentlemen, and Jerry will ask you to start here.

Artificial intelligence. Every day you pick up yet another piece about how how the world really isn't ready for AI in terms of, it's not in the mindset of most people. A lot who are going to lose their jobs, a lot who are going to have to be retrained for new jobs, a lot who will never be in a position to work in a field where AI dominates.

And so the question that's asked increasingly is how ready are we and how ready are governments to handle what is, going to be a very, and it's already a very basic shift in the way our world works. Well, I think the direct answer to your question, Peter, is not very at all and what you're feeling in both in Canada, but also everywhere. You know, everybody's wrestling with this issue because we have this technology coming. Well, it's already here, really. That is disrupting just about every way in which people communicate with each other.

They consume information. They relate to their governments, how governments are making and enforcing laws. It's changing everything. And I think that there's a lot of hype generated around this. A lot of hype attached to this that's being generated by people who stand to make or lose billions and billions and billions of dollars. and often from our clients at ERAGE group

we get the question of is there a market correction coming? Is this just a hype bubble? Or is it as dramatically transformational? So the word of the day, I guess, that people are making it out to be. And I think the answer is both. I think that we're into a period, not unlike the build out of the railways

in the 19th century, where we're going to overbuild, there's going to be a lot of, shady activity, people are going to make and lose fortunes, but we're still going to end up with infrastructure that's really important at the end of the day. And maybe even a better, more recent example is the build out of fiber optics

to support the growth of the internet that we, all these companies that look like they were going to be what companies like meta, Google and Apple became, they died, right? but to use the overused organic metaphor, it's like when a giant redwood falls in a forest, it creates nutrients for everything else around and other things grow in its place.

And I think that that's the period we're going to go through. But that just adds to the disruption, right? And I think that from a government perspective, you're looking at this as an issue that's starting to take shape as a salient political issue in the country. And let's treat AI the way its boosters want us to treat it and call it a person, right? If AI were a candidate for public office, its current brand is, okay, Canadians, in the short term, I'm going to increase your energy bills.

And in the long term, I'm going to take all your jobs. So why are people anxious? about the advent of AI. It's because those are the two messages that they're getting told all of the time about it. And by the way, it's inevitable. There's nothing you can do about it. And, you know, I had a conversation

with a very, very senior Canadian CEO about this last summer. And we were both, we have kids around the same age. And we were both reflecting, he said something to me that has stuck with me all the time, ever since. He said, my 22-year-old, son tells me,

Dad, I feel like I'm just two steps ahead of the machine. That's the robots. That's the way I feel about my life. And I certainly have, my son feels the same way about it. And I think about if people with our means, his are much greater than mine, but mine,

you know, I'm not mining coal for a living. It makes me really wonder what people who are struggling out there are feeling about this technology. And even people who are getting by paycheck to paycheck, it's kind of frightening.

And I think that what the prime minister tried to do yesterday was to reposition this whole issue as less about a terminator coming to take your job and more about something that we can manage and steer into the public interest. I actually think on top of dealing with Donald Trump and the changes in the world order that he has eloquently described.

Those are the twin issues that are going to cost him real difficulty. And I hope that they get managed, as political issues, I hope they get managed in a relatively nonpartisan way, because I think there is a space for that. Because it's like one of those issues. I mean, you look at, I think the only other comparable impact on employment by technology is actually farming technology in the 19th century. You look at where North Americans worked

in at the beginning of the 1800s, everybody worked on a farm, right? Absolutely everybody worked on a farm. And by the end of the 1800s, 5% of the workforce worked on a farm. I think that's the magnitude of the change we're about to go through. And of course, famously,

that generated a lot of conflict and war and problems and it's going to it's going to be of that scope and scale and it's going to be difficult to manage all right James where are you on those yeah I mean it's it's hard

to disagree with any of that or or rearticulate that in a different way because I think all that is true it's a wait and see space but obviously there's a lot of anxiety I think if the pushback comes from the public on this in a political sense it'll be because of the job destruction and or it'll be because of some social

crisis that we don't know. Massive privacy breaches, massive data breaches, like things like that that I think that people are quite anxious about. I think for a lot of people, when they look at AI, they don't know. I made it a mission for me in the summer of 25 to actually take a lot of courses online and to try to capture AI as a tool and a weapon to be used in my life for, you know, my personal growth and job opportunities and to get a real handle on this and what it means. And I found that frankly, half the stuff that I've learned is our, already shifted and it's now new stuff and there's new tools. So the ground is shifting so dramatically and all that. But I can tell you that, so I worked at a law firm where like one of the

biggest law firms around. And I can tell you that they have regular meetings about what this means for example, in the cannibalization of the legal industry in this country. Because what used to be, you know, get a lawyer, a smart lawyer, who you trust and sit down and bounce some questions off them, have them on a monthly retainer can now, you could throw in, you know, ask a whole bunch of questions. What would the Ontario Securities Commission think about the transfer of share units from this person to that person and this ownership structure, et cetera, and you can enter it, and it'll give you an answer. And it might be right, it might be wrong, but it'll generally give you an answer that's in the right direction. You can throw in all kinds of legal questions into AI into a

couple of different engines and you can get back a bunch of answers and then you average out those answers and you would, you kind of for free get what would cost you probably $50,000 in legal advice in a month. Like that kind of cannibalization of the of the legal service sector is massive. And law firms are struggling to try to find that. It's happening with accounting as well. It's happening with all kinds of things. I know companies that I work with who take their entire, you know, report from their independent auditors and put the entire report and drop it into an AI engine and say, what are the flaws and the weaknesses in our analysis? And it'll spit out, you know, 45 deviations that you need to address. And then you, then you, you, they,

you get the new report and you put the entire report into an AI engine and it'll spit out a new analysis that will get you closer to the exact science of where you are on your metrics. Like, it's dramatic. So you think about the entire savings on the one hand and the opportunity and the other and the risks that are associated with all of that. So I think people are right to be nervous. We're, you know, in the mid-90s when, you know, the full access of the internet, people were really excited about what it meant.

but now here we are 20, 30 years later and people are realizing that, oh, that's what it did to retail. Retail's gone, empty malls and on all that because it's been completely cannibalized. So I think we need to think about what the social contact is with all of this and what that destruction will mean and therefore what the associative political

consequence and government expectations will be to mediate that risk. So I mean, it's an open field in front of us. One of the, Yeah, and if I could add just a couple of things to that, Peter. It's happening at a time where people's belief in technological progress has been shaken, right? That for a lot of different big macro problems, climate change, lack of cohesion, socially, income inequality,

what our recent experience with social media, as we have talked about many times, has done to our politics and our kids. All of this stuff has shaken the public's kind of default position that technological advancement is an advancement for society at large. And I think that coupled with, to be diplomatic about it, the questionable moral compass of the leaders of the companies in this sector, it's like these are not people you want your kids looking up to, right? they kind of make the robber barons of the 19th century to go back to that analogy

look pretty damn good and I worry about all of those things coming together for a generation that is already struggling for reasons we've discussed many times affordability worry about anxiety about climate change all kinds of things and now they're having this thrown on what is already a very full cart and they're just like how do I manage my how do I how do I think about my future and you know i've kids who are in university and they're already thinking that the things they're studying are obsolete and they're not even finished yet so i i think that we're going to need to be in we're going to it's going to test our canadian capacity for generosity intergenerational

uh to to deal with this situation because um our kids are going to need a lot of help well it's going to test government too early through this i mean it's This government, the one elected a year ago, the prime minister decided to have an actual cabinet position about AI, and that's where we see Evan Solomon. We certainly has a background for being in a position like that. But the demand is about regulation, and, you know, one of the demands is about regulation.

And you wonder whether that's like an almost impossible position for a government right now, given the things that are changing so rapidly and the power of those tech bros or whatever you want to call me. Yeah. Yeah. Well, my wife is wiser than I am on most things, but especially this because she's a governance expert, right? And she reminds me all the time that this argument from the industry that this thing is too big and complex and therefore can't be regulated is just spent. It's an advocacy argument.

and, you know, pharmacology is big and complex, but we regulate that. The automobile industry is big and complex, but we regulate what kinds of cars can be on our roads, et cetera, et cetera. It's really a question of what things the government is going to pick to demonstrate to the public that as a society, we actually have power to shape the rules that govern these things. You know, my own pet view on this is that, and you know we could probably go down a rabbit hole on this but all of these LLMs have a default setting where you can strip it of all of its quasi human language it's veneer that you're talking to a person they're called harnesses right and if you make the default harness that it's just going to give you in as clinical a way possible an answer to the question that you're asking it you're less likely to be led down a garden path where suddenly

you're asking this thing how to 3D print and gun. You know what I mean? Because this is the problem. The problem, and we've seen this with YouTube especially, but we've seen it with all social media, you start and you ask a basic question, and then you strike up a conversation with these things. And then it gets to know you,

and it starts to understand your motivations, maybe even if you're a young person, a little better than you do, because it's comparing you as a use case, quote, unquote, against a big pool of data. And suddenly it's telling you to do things that are against your interest and in extreme cases maybe cause you harm. And I think that making sure that people don't get led down that garden paths

where they start to believe that they have a friend and they realize that they're just talking to a line of code, that I think would be a great public service. And there's nothing that prevents us from requiring that as a condition to have your product be offered in Canada in virtual or in regular space. You get a last word on this, James. Yeah, I mean, my last word is obviously a huge space to watch. And Evan Sullivan is a person, but I do think all parties and provinces and everybody needs to be seized of us,

including private organizations. And there's a coming huge tug of war, frankly, between Europe and the United States over. And it's not dissimilar to what we saw in my view than what we saw. what it came to intellectual property standards and expectations. We're in the United States, in the early days of AI so far, like inviting GROC in to be a filter and to have them access to national security is just bizarre, beyond bizarre. The fortunate thing is that I think in the politics of this,

in terms of what the human consequences are on the economic side, is that both the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party, both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, both the UK Tories and the and the Reform Party, and Labor and Lib Dems, all parties are now fully entrenched in trying to be sympathetic and earn the votes of people whose jobs are the most vulnerable, people who are, you know, blue-collar working people and all that. There isn't sort of the historic divide. And therefore, I think all parties have a sensitive and intuned ear to the sort of the thin edge of the destructive edge of

the worst iterations of AI, what it means for jobs, employment, security, people's sense of sort of solidarity in the status quo and in the future. And I think that's a good thing. People will be attuned to the dangers as they present themselves. Yeah, and the technology itself needs a win, Peter. You know, it actually has to solve a problem that can rally people around. And I don't know what that problem is, whether it's protein folding or cure for cancer or, you know, a breakthrough and renewable energy tech.

Like, who knows what it is. But right now it feels like, and I'm dating myself. with this. It feels like that moment in The Terminator where you know like the robot's in the building, but it hasn't walked down the hallway. It's kind of scary for people. A cure for cancer would be a good start. Cure for cancer would be a great start. Okay, we're out of time, but I do want to quickly touch base on one thing. James, when you were telling the Craychan story, this has got nothing to do with any topics today, but when you were telling the Cray Chan story and you'd bumped into him on the street, you called him prime minister.

And I've always wondered about this, because it's clearly, you know, the Americans do that with presidents, cabinet secretaries, senators, whatever, they carry that title with them for life. In Canada and under our system, not so much. But you do, or you did, at least with Crecheon. Yeah. What are you, what's your thinking on that? I do that with Stephen Harper, and I've known Stephen Harper for over 30 years.

I say, Prime Minister, how are you? And he goes, Stephen. And I said, okay, but he's earned it. They've earned it. I do it with Christy Clark. I say, Premier, how are you? And she'll sort of, and I've known Christy for even longer. I just do it by default.

I think the esteem of public office matters, and particularly people who have been in the chair of being Premier and the first ministers of this country. I think it matters. I just do. I'll let them wave it away and be, you know, the humble Canadian thing. I just think it matters. I think they've earned it. There was a story when Kim Campbell went down to two seats and she was seen on a bus and didn't have security around her and all that.

And people thought, oh, it's just a little, it's just a little thing. I think it matters. I think it's a precious office few people get to occupy. And I'll let them wave it away, but I'll keep doing it. You know, I've always felt the same way. But, you know, if I do it, I get mail. saying that's not our way. We don't do that.

Yeah. That's fine. But yeah, that's me to me. I mean, but what's the inverse of that? Stephen, Jean. I saw Paul or I saw Justin. Yeah, we might do that in conversation. But in a public space, in a public moment, great to see you, Prime Minister.

I just think it's appropriate. Jerry? I agree totally. I think that everybody who has the the enormous privilege to serve in these offices should be conscious every single day that you're a temporary custodian of it, right?

And that's especially true for the people who have the highest title. But once they've served in that office and went through the absolutely unique trials and tribulations that that small handful of Canadians get to go through, I think the least we can do for them is respect their contribution to it

by continuing to use the title after. word. Okay. On that, we're going to leave it for this week. And it'll be interesting to see what Jerry's wearing a couple of weeks from now because, you know, for the last few appearances, he's been wearing this HAB stuff all the time.

And James and I, James, stop having the Kinect stuff everywhere. And, well, okay, almost everywhere. There's certainly no leaf paraphernalia around me right now.

They reminded me of a politician last night, Peter, because it felt like the Habs had been reading their own press clippings for the last couple of days the way they played against Columbus. Well, it's going to count a lot more in the weeks ahead. So we'll see. We wish them all like. All right, gentlemen, thanks so much for this. It's been another great conversation. We'll do it all again in a couple of weeks' time. Until such a moment, bye for now. Thanks for listening. Cheers. Thank you.