The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - SMT -- Polls, Pandemic and Campaign Hiccups.

Episode Date: September 1, 2021

Bruce Anderson takes a close-up look at what the polls are saying, and what they are NOT saying.  Also, how big is the pandemic as an issue and could it get bigger.  

Hello there, Peter Mansbridge here with the latest episode of The Bridge. You're just moments away from smoke, mirrors, and the truth. It's Wednesday. That means Bruce Anderson. All right. Now, you know what? We haven't touched on this for the last couple of weeks. Peter Mansbridge here in Stratford, Ontario. Bruce Anderson is in Ottawa after a couple of weeks in Nova Scotia. You know, what little I know about farming is farmers don't go away in the middle of the summer when the crops need tending.

But when, you know, the serious farming is going on. And I noticed you were on a beach in Nova Scotia. And I don't know what was happening with the radishes. But clearly the radish farmer wasn't near them. So how do you explain that one? Well, Peter, thank you for asking, first of all. I'm not embarrassed at all by the question. The intensity of our farming operations in the pre-farming season was really impressive because, of course, we were basically using pandemic time.

We needed things to get out of the house with, so we planted stuff, and then there were two or three frosts. But we put a lot of front front end time and human energy into the garden the farm and uh and it paid off with early crops and some crops didn't do so well but of course by the middle of the farming season my wife and i were pretty anxious to get outside of our little 10 kilometer radius that we lived in for a year and a half. So we split for the East coast and it's been really clear. We'll go back to the farm and we'll check on everything and we'll send

pictures and harvest. But you know, it just had to be. The bottom line is the bottom line is you have no idea what's happening on your farm. For all you know, the place has been overrun, infested with whatever bugs. It's organic.

That's the way I think about it. What's happening there is purely organic right now. And I'll go back and have a look at it this weekend. And then bring the crop duster out. You'll be flying in over that, coming a couple of feet off the ground. We're going to stay full on natural. Yeah, that the ground now we're going to stay full on natural yeah that's the way we're going to do it and it was very clarifying to have that fresh salty ocean air in my lungs and to look at all the great farming in atlantic canada i see how people are

doing things there at the annapolis valley and then over on the south shore it's been uh it's been a great couple of weeks i'm glad to to be back. Beautiful part of the country, beautiful part of the country, Annapolis Valley, man. It's hard to beat that. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I guess we better talk business. Um, we're in that kind of middle of the campaign, right? Um, I don't know. There's like three weeks to go. We've been through a couple through two and a half weeks. So we're sort of at the halfway point.

And I like to lecture about polls and how not to get carried away by them. But I look at them every day. I know you look at them every day. And quite frankly, I don't know what to think after having looked at them the last little while. I know that no big event has happened yet in the campaign. It might be tomorrow with that TVA debate in Quebec, and Quebec is critical for all the parties in terms of what may happen on election night. But nevertheless, the numbers really seem to jump around.

A month ago, the Liberals had a significant lead in most polls you looked at. As soon as the election was called, it tightened up, and it's been tight, but it sort of bounces around, like up and down, like the proverbial, well, there's a saying about what goes up and down a lot, and they do. Polls do. what goes up and down a lot and and they do my polls do like you know i know i've asked you before you know what we should think about all that and what what plays into the equation right now so give me your uh give me your answer for this point well i'm glad peter i'm so glad that you you said you know you're reluctant to lecture about polls or criticize polls because.

Oh, no, no, no. I didn't say I'm reluctant to do it because I do it all the time. That doesn't stop me. Well, I know you do. When I said what I said last week with Chantal about journalism and how I didn't really want to disrespect journalism but and then i didn't even really have a chance to finish the sentence before she she clobbered me correctly for implying that all journalism was the same and that kind of you know drive by giving you guys ownership of the of the problems that might exist in journalism today so i really enjoyed that conversation with her, by the way, and I and and we've talked about it since. But, you know, to your question about polls, I look at them

as somebody who sees polling data every day and has for most of my 40 years in the business. And so I see movement all the time and I'm used to seeing movement that's within the margin of error and understanding that it might mean something, but you need to see two or three more pieces of evidence in the same direction before you know whether or not it is. So I always find it frustrating when in an election context, people pay a lot more attention to polls and the coverage of the election reflects whatever new or more interesting slash shocking piece of evidence in polling data emerges. And so a couple of days ago, there was a poll that said a massive conservative lead. And I was looking at our

data, and I was looking at Nanos data, and I was looking at a couple of others, and they were all sort of showing the same thing, which is it's kind of a tie right now. Just as almost all of them were showing about a five to 10 point lead for the liberals a month ago. And so when we first talked about this in the run up to this election, I said to you, I think people who want to make sense of this should look at the range of polls and decide that the consensus of the numbers is probably where the truth lies, because no individual company really knows. I know one of our friends and one of my friendly competitors loves to get on the Twitter machine late at night

and talk about how sure he is about the way that things are going to go. And he's a good guy and he's very accurate, very professional, very knowledgeable guy, but nobody can predict this election in my humble opinion, certainly not me. And right now I just see us being almost at the starting gate. And I know people probably get frustrated who are listeners of this podcast and who pay a lot of attention to politics saying, well, Bruce, how can you say that we're just at the starting gate? Because we've been showering in information about the campaign since it started. And I'm looking at people who are finishing that last week of summer,

looking forward to that last long weekend of summer. And to me, that's the point at which people are really going to start paying attention here. You know, I'll just ask one more question on the numbers, because I agree with you. You know, I think it, you know, as Chantal said, you know, three weeks ago, the campaign won't really start until Labor Day. And that's, you know, we're just a couple of days away from that. There'll be the fallout from whatever happens in the Quebec debate tomorrow.

And then we're into Labor Day. And then, bingo, the race is really on the stretch drive the final two weeks. And the English language debates next week, and another French language debate next week. But just before we close out on polls, the thing I have to keep reminding myself that impacts the numbers is the Liberals traditionally have a healthy lead in Atlantic Canada, and that seems to be the case,

even though there was that surprise in the provincial election, you know, last week of the Conservatives winning in Nova Scotia. But they have a healthy lead, and it does have an impact when you, you know, total their numbers up. But the Conservatives have a huge lead like it's a mad it's like a 50 point lead on the prairies mainly built up in alberta and saskatchewan but it's you know i think it's the three prairie provinces that you know manitoba saskatchewan alberta that those numbers are based on and that has a huge impact on obviously their national total and when you factor those

couple of things in you know you have to keep remembering that because it it impacts the final numbers as we saw in the in the 2019 election campaign we you know we tend to forget at times that the conservatives actually won that election if you only count votes and they won it by a couple of points and part of that was based on their huge lead in a in the prairies um so yeah i keep kind of keep trying to keep that in mind well it's really good that you you raise this peter because um pardon me in the u.s presidential election everybody's comfortable accepting that there's six to eight states that really matter because the outcomes there could go one way it could go the other way and ultimately are the states because they're swing states that will decide who sits in the in the oval office after a presidential election here we we seem culturally

uncomfortable saying bc quebec and ontario are going to decide the outcome of the election and of course those are three provinces so it's a bigger proportion of our country it's not quite analogous but it's similar in the in the in the sense that if you're a party strategist and you're planning a tour you're going to send your candidate everywhere but you're going to make sure that they spend more time in bc in quebec and Ontario, because that's where the seats are at play. Maybe for the NDP this time, less time in Quebec than back when they went all those seats under Jack Layton. Maybe for the Conservatives as well, less time in Quebec, more time in BC and more time in Ontario. But that really speaks to the fact that the parties know that that's where change could happen.

Change for the worse. If you're liberals and you're hoping to be reelected, change for the better. If you're the conservatives, you're hoping to defeat them or for the NDP looking to grow their caucus. And underneath the surface of the tie that most polls seem to be pointing towards. And I say tie and I know, you know, some might write and say, well, it's not a tie in every poll, Bruce. Some have the Conservatives two, three points ahead. Some have them dead even. For me, that's all kind of a tie right now. But the Conservative number can go up, and if it only goes nationally, but if it only goes up because the Prairie numbers and the Atlantic numbers for them are going up a little bit, it might not give them any more seats

because they'll still be too far behind in Atlantic Canada to convert that increase into seats. And because they'll get almost all of the seats in the provinces where in the Prairies, where they're already very strong. And I'm not saying that that's where that's happening or exactly what's happening now. But I'm saying that's kind of what I'm watching, because I think if you're the Liberals, you're going to be looking at that Ontario number first and then the Quebec gap to the bloc. And if you've got a five to ten point

lead in Ontario and you're even or a little bit better than even with the block, you think you're going to win. You don't know how much you're going to win by, minority probably. But those are the key things to look for in the regionals, those three provinces. And then BC, if you're going to, you know, if they're in the position you just talked about a second ago, bc becomes critical as to what kind of government it could be absolutely more critical uh maybe than than than ever with each passing election it looks like a three-way race and unpredictable to the end it might be the the thing at the end of the election night that decides the outcome um okay now i want to talk about something we at least on this program we haven't talked about much in the last few weeks that's the pandemic i'm sure it's talked about every day in most households

in canada in one form or another it must come up in the topic of conversation and including you know when when the topic is centered around the election, somehow the pandemic squeezes in there. So I wanted to see where we are on that in terms of a campaign issue. I see today is the day that Quebec's vaccine passport goes into effect, and that's an issue that everybody's facing. Ontario was said to be about to do the same thing after weeks of saying they wouldn't. And, you know, other parts of the country already have. But overall, in terms of the pandemic, numbers have been rising because of, you know, the Delta variant and people are extremely worried about school, which has already started in some parts of the country.

It will be fully underway next week in other parts of the country. So that's going to be on the minds of a lot of parents. You know, and I've had, I don't know about you, but I've had a lot of parents tell me in the last few days how, you know, tense they are about the pandemic because of school and how in a way they're they're no longer jealous of their neighbors and friends who've been off on holidays like you have been like i have been those who don't have small children but they're kind of like, it's more than jealousy. They're kind of mad about it. And that unhappiness and degree of tension, how that is all going to factor into the play in the next couple of weeks.

What are you seeing on that? I think it's a factor in this election, unlike anything that I've ever seen before. We haven't had an election in my lifetime that had this big, unique kind of issue sitting in the middle of it, surrounding it, basically. And so I think it's hard to know which way it's going to go. But here's a couple of things that I'm thinking about. One is that almost everybody really, really, really psychologically and otherwise wants the pandemic to be over. We would rather not be thinking about it. We would rather believe that we've been vaccinated. We're able to go back into society wearing a mask,

go to restaurants, that kind of thing. And life is not normal, but it's not as different from normal as it has been for a long time. And just that collective stress and the desire to be out of it is a factor that probably has helped make more opportunity for other parties than for the liberals. Right. In other words, if people are thinking, you know what, I might think they did, the liberals did an okay job during the pandemic, but I don't want to think about the pandemic anymore. I'm done thinking about the pandemic. So why don't I think about what about Justin Trudeau annoys me or do I trust the conservatives on health policy or I like the way Jagmeet Singh comes across on issues of diversity and social justice so all of those other ways of thinking about the electoral choice

become more prominent and real when people think less about the pandemic. I think that's a thing. I don't think there's any doubt in my mind that that has been part of what's been going on in the last couple of weeks. But I don't know how traumatizing the return to school will be for people. I don't know whether the case counts are going to continue to rise to levels where we're seeing more mask mandates. We're seeing a tougher conversation around vaccinations. It feels like that's where we're going. And if we're going into a world where there are more cases,

but not more hospitalizations not more deaths what's the effect of that psychologically will people say well you know the vaccines are working and enough of us are vaccinated and so we don't really need to think about it or will they say no we really really really have to stamp this thing out before another variant comes our way and wrecks the progress that we've made. And that's why I actually think that the vaccination conversation, which is, in my mind, at least been the most heated part of this election so far, might become the thing that ultimately makes people go, you know what, we're not done this thing yet. And if we want to be done it, we have to stare it in the eye. And we have to, we have to support policies that we think are going to do the best job of it. Now, right now, anyway, when we ask the question, which party has the best approach on vaccinations? The Liberals on that have a 20-point lead over the Conservatives.

So I'm not saying I think they want that to be the question. I'm saying they think that it might be a conversation that needs to happen. And if it is the conversation for a lot of voters, it tends to be one that works to their political favor, I guess, in terms of those voters who say, if I'm worried about this and I really think we have to finish the job on vaccination, then I at least know that these guys are in line with my desire about let's get everybody vaccinated. So, you know, I don't know how the pandemic is going to play out, obviously, as I said, and I don't want to overstate, I think, the importance of the vaccination question, but it's hard for me to have looked at the last week and not wonder if that's going to be a more

important political factor going forward. Especially if the numbers keep going up. And you pointed, you know, the best case scenario, if the numbers keep going up um and you pointed you know the the best case scenario if the numbers keep going up that hospitalizations stay down deaths stay down but if if they don't um that's if they don't and also the question about children i i should have mentioned that because i do think that for many people it might be easy to say i I'm double vaxxed. I feel pretty safe. I wear a mask in a lot of places. I don't think I'm going to get it. Or if I do, I don't think I'm going to get that sick because there's a heck of a lot of evidence that would support that thinking. But with kids going back to school who can't be vaccinated yet,

with this kind of active debate about should everybody that are around kids be vaccinated or not, is that a choice? Is that a choice that we can kind of accept if we're concerned about the health of kids? I have to believe that there are a lot of young parents who see this pretty clearly as a question, not of the choice of the unvaccinated or vaccine refuser, but in terms of the protection of the health of their child. Yeah. And that's what I was getting at with the kind of stories I've heard in the last little while. I heard one yesterday from one parent. He's got two small kids, has had a relatively good summer, and they've been out a lot, did the whole lake thing. They spent a lot of time with their cousins, and suddenly they're now confronted because they go to,

these kids go to different schools. So it's a totally different situation. They're heading after this weekend into a situation where they are not going to see their cousins anymore because their cousins go to different schools, are mixed with different kids, different teachers, you know, all of that than they are. And so the odds of some kind of transmission within their group and then coming and mixing with their group and then, you know,

with this parent's kids and then those kids going back to their school and taking it with, it's just a, you know, it never ends. And the whole lifestyle for those small kids, the under 12s, and the parents who, you know, who look after them, and, you know, usually in our world today, both parents have jobs, so they're influenced too, where they can go, what they can do. I mean, you know, it'd be great to be young again, but then again, we're pretty protected as older. Certainly I am as a really old guy as to where I go

and who I see and what I do. But I don't know. That situation, I think over this next week to 10 days, it's already started for a lot of parents across the country, but it will really start next week in Ontario and parts of other provinces in the country. It's going to have an impact. I think that's right.

And I also think that video that we probably all saw the other day of that child being kind of standing in the line of spittle and venom of the anti-vaxxer. contrast, because it's one thing if you've got somebody who hates Trudeau and is yelling invective at Trudeau and you've got liberal partisans on the other side saying, you know, go Trudeau, go liberal, that sort of thing. People can look at that and they won't like it and they'll find it ugly, but they'll find it a kind of an ugly thing that will pass and will not have harmful repercussions on our culture more generally. And I think that that image with the child in the line of fire and listening to those words being said and those that that level of anger, if we're going to see more of it, it's going to have an effect on how people think. And they're not going to line up with the anti-vaxxers in my view.

I said, you can't predict very many things from polls, but there's a lot of people vaccinated and they got vaccinated for a reason. You know, I see Trudeau has made a statement last night. I think it was that he's not going to shy away from confronting those groups when given the opportunity, when his security lets him, I guess, but that he wants to take the argument to the core. So we'll see how that plays out. Okay, we're going to take a quick break.

When we come back, I want to talk about another situation, a very different kind of situation. It's the kind of things that, unexpected things that can go wrong in a campaign. And sometimes they're kind of funny, but they, they all have an impact. We'll talk about that when we come back. This is The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge. All right, smoke mirrors and the truth. Peter Mansbridge here in Stratford, Ontario. Bruce Anderson is in Ottawa.

We talked a little bit about polls and smoke, I guess, and then tried to bring in some truths on polls and the way we can all look at them these days. We talked a bit about the pandemic. I want to talk about, well, there have been a couple of examples. One of them, I think the most glaring one, was earlier this week. Jagmeet Singh was campaigning in a particular area. I'll just give the highlights of this. And he was speaking to a group that seemed very encouraged by what he had to say. And then he invited to the microphone uh two indigenous

leaders uh from that area uh to speak as well and clearly he wouldn't have done that unless he thought these two people were going to say something nice about him um or his potential for um winning but they came up and you know the they just happened to drop the fact that they were both going to be voting for the liberal in that riding and the look you see this i mean the picture that i saw i don't know whether it was taken right at that exact moment but there seems to be a look of some degree of shock on uh jagmeet singh's, and he's probably wondering who exactly suggested this would be a good thing to happen for me today. But those are the kind of unexpected things that can happen that don't work out and certainly weren't planned,

at least by the party in the position to have that happen. I mean, these things do happen, but it doesn't help. Yeah, it's not like losing luggage on a foreign tour. Although that was, you know, even as I say that, Peter, I can't help but wonder how many listeners of this podcast will have any clue what it is that I'm talking about. Joe Clark in 1978. Yeah, it wasn't in a campaign. It was establishing his credentials as a potential future leader of the country and taking a trip in other parts of the world.

Then a bag went missing and the reporters who were traveling with him, which in and of itself is a sentence you wouldn't hear said now there would not be reporters traveling in that scenario now they made a bit of a deal about it and and you know again not to criticize journalism but probably they overstated how important it was as a as a factor that should affect jill clark's political career but um i digress your question about the sing i i was interested in i mean obviously i i feel for the staffers uh who organized that event or the local officials who organized that event inside NDP headquarters, I think they would be feeling pretty good about the start that they've had to the campaign and the appeal that Jagmeet Singh has been able to affect with most voters. But if they're looking at the two screens,

the what's going right screen and the what's not going quite right screen. What's not going quite right? I see three things that I'd be anxious about if I were them. One is this whole question of pipelines. And the fact that Jagmeet Singh, if I understand correctly from what I've read, has said that he wouldn't stop TMX from being completed. And I think for a lot of those voters who move from the Liberal Party over towards the NDP, the pipeline was an important part of that, especially in BC. And so if he sounds like he was really against it, but now

he's going to let it happen, I think that it might not turn those voters against him, but it might demotivate them somewhat. The second thing is that one of the most trenchant criticisms of Justin Trudeau by the NDP has been the idea that they're all talk when it comes to Indigenous reconciliation and Indigenous relations. And so that event, in addition to being a kind of an advanced failure, a failure of the advanced team to figure out exactly what's going to happen in that event, does put a hole in the argument that you can only trust the NDP to build strong relations with Indigenous communities. And so I think that's an important, that was an important thing over and above the bumpy campaign event aspect of it. And then the third thing, and the

last thing, and maybe the most important thing, is that when Jagmeet Singh was asked the question about whether he could support a conservative government, I think he implied that he could support either a liberal or a conservative government. Now, I think for a lot of progressive voters, one of the things that they like about the NDP and that they like about Jagmeet Singh is the idea that he gives no quarter on the progressive ambition side, that he is the most fierce advocate for progressive ideas and therefore the most effective foil to conservative thinking. And I don't know that those voters are indifferent to whether it's a liberal or conservative government. Actually, I should say I do know they're not indifferent. Three out of four NDP voters, if the choice came down to an O'Toole government or a Trudeau government, would want a Trudeau government. So I think he's going to have to be very careful if he wants to hold those

disappointed with Trudeau progressive voters. He's going to have to be very careful about how he manages the next several days in this campaign because he's laid a few traps for himself in terms of the affection and the motivation levels for those voters. It is a tricky question to throw at him, though, because on the other hand, he's got to be careful not to just look like a lackey for the liberals right yep so i you know i'm not sure what the right answer to the question is well i think the right answer is you'll only support the progressive ideas that you're campaigning on and stay away from names of parties.

Yeah, I mean, I think you got to sort of, you got to say in effect that if a conservative government ends up wanting to do progressive things, you're for the progressive things. Right. But I take your point. I don't think it's an easy question, but I think that appearing ambivalent to the outcome is different from saying

I'm not ambivalent about the outcome. The outcome has to be progressive change for women, for people of color, for minorities, for the poor. Yeah. You know, I think the way to – I take your point. I think that was the right – what you're suggesting would be the right answer. I will support the progressive ideas that me and my party have stood for throughout this campaign. And then the reporters will say, oh, that means you'd support the liberals.

And he would respond by saying, that's not what I said. I said I'll support the progressive ideas that we've campaigned on. And that's the end of my comment on it. Yeah, there's no blank check for anybody. That's the bottom line. And, you know, vote for the progressive ideas and mark a ballot for us. That's an entirely legitimate thing to say, even though it's the job, I suppose, of reporters to ask that question. Sometimes I wonder if it's the job of the reporters to ask the question 150 times in a row, because at some point you kind of go, well, you might be mad that he's not answering it the way that you want him to answer it.

But he's entitled to answer it the way he wants to answer it. And then the voters will decide. Again, not a shot at journalism. No, no, no. I tend to agree with that, and we've had, you know, it's interesting because on the reporter's section of the podcast, that issue has come up a couple of times from people who've written in, and we've had a good discussion about it because there is i mean i totally agree

with you at a certain point after you've asked it asked asked asked it you've got the answer you've got you know and people will judge by that they'll either say he's ducking it or she's ducking it or or fine okay i i hear what they're saying um just before we leave it and wrap it up here, have you seen any moments like that one with the candidates for Singh? Have you seen any moments for either O'Toole or Trudeau that weren't exactly what they were hoping for? I guess you could say in some ways in some ways you could call that friday demonstration although it seems to cut both ways uh on trudeau as that was unexpected it played out

uh in a way that wasn't uh scripted in any back room um but anyway either that or O'Toole? You know, I actually think that for the most part, the Liberal and the Conservative campaigns have been performing relatively well. I certainly think the Conservative campaign looks like a different sort of conservative campaign than we've seen. And it's to their credit that they didn't really telegraph that that much before the campaign started. But what we're seeing now is a guy who's kind of energetic, who's positive, who isn't surrounded by the kind of voices and personalities that make people shy away from the conservative brand. We don't see Jason Kenney. We don't hear much from Doug Ford. I think Pierre Polyev is trying to get into the picture on social media sometimes,

but he doesn't seem to be a big part of the formal campaign. And I think a fair bit of the conservative platform has been designed to take some of the sense of edge off what people normally associate with conservative platform. Now, I think it's going to be the job of the liberals if they want to succeed in this election to underscore a few what I see as being political weaknesses or exposure points in the conservative platform. He would rip up those $10 a day child care deals. That's what his target for climate change action for reducing emissions is essentially a policy to let the planet burn faster. And I don't think that a lot of voters, if their attention is drawn to that, will feel very good about signing on for that.

There are others, but those are the two that are maybe the most prominent. And I guess the vaccination question, where does he really come down, is going to be something that we're going to see featured in the debate. I would assume that. So I think they've done well, but they've got some exposed flanks. For the Liberals, if they made a mistake, it was probably in designing a campaign that looked from the outset a little bit more about Trudeau than maybe was intended,

certainly then would be ideal. I think that there's a risk with any incumbent that people after a certain period of time get tired of hearing them. They want something different. They want to hear a different sound, a different voice, a different way of articulating the vision of the future. And I think the liberal default setting sometimes is, hey, we've got another giant idea with a giant price tag because we're really well-meaning, well-intentioned people. Remember that term virtue signaling that we heard some years ago? I mean, there was a reason that that phrase caught on, is that it spoke a certain

truth about how liberals can come across if they're not careful to remember that people don't in Canada anyway, we really value humility. We, we kind of consider it to be like the beaver. It's a, it's core to who we are. I don't know why we love the beaver so much. It's a hard working and all that kind of thing. But anyway, I think that's been a challenge for the liberals. And I think the conservatives have had a pretty good campaign because they

focused on O'Toole. The liberals have had maybe not exactly the start they wanted because they focused a little heavily on Trudeau. But on the other hand, it's hard to run an incumbent campaign without, without the prime minister being at the front and center. Before we wrap it up, give me 20 seconds or 30 seconds on the importance of that French language debate tomorrow night on TV. The first of two French language debates, but it is the first one. It's the first time we'll see at least four of these leaders on the same stage. Tell me what you think is the

importance of that. I mean, on the day after, on Friday, you'll be back with Chantal on Good Talk, and we'll obviously talk about what happened. And Chantal will give us that kind of perspective from the ground in Quebec. But your take on the importance of what could happen tomorrow. Well, I think there's two issues to watch. One is the impact in Quebec, and the other is the echo effect of the debate in terms of how the parties and the leaders

approach the English language debate to follow. In other words, on the second point, if they come out of the Quebec debate feeling good about the way that they handled themselves and the likely impact on voters, that will make them feel more confident, less anxious going into the English language debate for sure. They're human beings. I've seen that up close. That's the way it works in Quebec. I'm going to be watching for the Blanchette-Rudeau dynamic. I always think it's going to be hard for English speaking leaders to really participate to the same level as those who are fluent in French in the French language debates. And also the race between the Bloc and the Liberals in Quebec is the dynamic that will have the biggest impact on seats.

No question in my mind about it. And Blanchet, for me, is not a rookie. He's not new. There's a strong Quebec premier arguing on behalf of Quebec, who's actually developed a pretty good policy relationship anyway with Mr. Trudeau. So watching that dynamic and, and will Blanchette be as effective as he has been in the past of prosecuting the case against Justin Trudeau and for a block vote, I don't know. And how will Trudeau do remains to be seen. But that's the thing I'll be watching for and how they do will then affect the psychology

of those leaders coming into the English language debate. And if you're wondering who the fourth person is on the stage, it'll be Annamie Paul, the Green Party leader. The People's Party leader will not be there because that party does not have any seats in the House of Commons. Annamie Paul has been basically in Toronto for the whole campaign, trying to win her riding of Toronto Centre. And that's a challenge for her. And so are the numbers right now.

Terrible numbers. These are the worst numbers I've seen for the Green Party since there was a Green Party, I think. The People's Party is ahead of the Greens Party. The last numbers I looked at, the People's Party was ahead of the Greens. Yeah, and it's certainly not because there are more people who believe in what the People's Party is offering than believe we need to fight climate change and protect the environment. There's never been an election where more people are preoccupied with environmental issues and this is the going to be

if the numbers hold the worst outing for the green party in its history yeah that's ironic to say the least okay we're going to wrap it up we back on back with you and Chantel on Friday. Tomorrow it's your voice, the people's voice, the mail that we've had on the Mansbridge podcast at gmail.com. So write again today if you have something you want to say. And we'll dedicate

tomorrow's program to you and what you're thinking, both in terms of the election and there was a lot of mail on the Arctic as well. So I'm glad to respond to some of that on air as well. Thanks, Bruce. I'll let you get back out there to check the crops. The organics.

The organics. And we'll talk again later in the week. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks for listening. We'll talk to you again in 24 hours.