The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - SMT -- What Are The Polls Telling Us?

Episode Date: March 18, 2025

There seems to be a poll a day recently and while they're each a bit different, there is one common theme.  The Liberals are back and the race between them and the Conservatives is very tight.  So how are the political pros responding to this?  That's the question for Smoke, Mirrors and The Truth panelists Bruce Anderson from the Liberals and Fred DeLorey from the Conservatives.

Smoke, mirrors, and the truth. Delorey, Anderson, polls, election. We've got it all coming right up. And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here with your Tuesday episode of The Bridge. And that, of course, means smoke, mirrors, and the truth. Bruce Anderson is with us. Fred Delorey is with us. And, you you know i want to start by talking about polls i know we've kind of

talked about polls before but every day it seems now a new one comes in and they're just as remarkable as the one before it and i and i need to know and this will be harder for you fred than it will be for bruce uh given the alignment of the parties on this but i want to know, and this will be harder for you, Fred, than it will be for Bruce, given the alignment of the parties on this, but I want to know how much you guys pay attention to the public polls. This is an Angus Reid poll. It just came out, well, it came out actually yesterday. And when you look at these numbers, they're showing the Liberals at 42, the Conservatives at 37, and then they show the NDP

at nine single digits for the NDP. I mean, there's been a lot of talk about the Tories and the Liberals, and they're kind of bouncing back and forth. They've been running neck and neck for the last week or two, partly because the NDP has collapsed, but 9%. I love your fascination with the NDP. That's clearly the headline that we should focus on in this poll. Fully agree. Well, they're all headlines. All three of those are headlines to me.

But the NDP, that's quite something. You were doing the news lineup today and you were going what what is our opening sentence about this poll is it the ndp's at nine maybe but well in some ways in some ways in some ways it would be because it kind of explains everything else not quite but anyway carry on well you carry on You give me your you're the pollster. No, like you said that this will be, you know, harder for Fred than for me. But everything that Fred is so good at what he does, everything he does seems easier. Everything for me is harder. And I would like Fred to talk about this poll first and just the slew of polls that he sees out there and what he makes of it, because I trust his analysis even more some days than my own.

OK, do you want to just put the shovel over there in the corner and we'll ask Fred to give his assessment now of what we should take from all this? Well, Peter, you phrased it in an interesting way when you started about what do I actually look at when it comes to polls, public polls, because as a campaigner, I don't actually look at public polls at all because they mean nothing to me because it all comes down to seats. Where are the seats? What seats are we winning? What seats are we potentially losing? And that's where I'd be more curious. But if you're looking at the public polls, the regional breakdowns are, of course, interesting and how that's playing out. But at the end of the day, if you're looking at the NDP at 8% or 9%, that is a story because that is a collapse. But who's the party that's competing with them for most of their seats? It's the Conservative Party. So there's a lot of blue

seats that could actually switch despite those numbers going to the Liberals in those regions. It could help the Conservatives a lot across the country. But of course, this is a campaign where I think we're going to see a very volatile electorate. I think we're going to see people all over the place. And I'll just, I haven't seen these numbers before. I haven't actually done this research, but I'd be curious to know, and maybe you know, Bruce, has there ever been a time when a prime minister has been sworn in that they haven't gone up in the polls for a few weeks anyway, after that swearing in period? And that's where we're at right now, where it feels like this manufactured, perhaps honeymoon period that hopefully runs out in a couple of weeks time as we get into the election.

Yeah, it's a good question, Fred. And I don't know off the top of my head. I people are kind of, if not polarizing, they're thinking that this is a really consequential election. And the notion that you could park your vote or place a vote for a party that you don't think has any chance of winning the election, and that you do feel like one choice between the two larger parties would be better than the other, this could be one of those rare elections. And, you know, I think both of the larger parties often imagine in the past that the NDP vote will collapse, and it usually doesn't. It usually stays in a range that's fairly consistent and produces a similar framework of seats, not always the same number.

Those numbers can bounce around a little bit, the Quebec orange wave being a bit of an anomaly, I suppose. But the kind of the general notion that the NDP vote is really soft is more often than not proven not to be true, in my experience, than to be true. In this situation, I think it might be a little bit more or somewhat more vulnerable. And part of that, I think, is Jagmeet Singh has just really seemed to lose the connection that he had with voters not that many years ago, seems to be struggling to find a place where his voice matters in the kind of crushing debate about the U.S. tariffs and what are we going to do about that. I think the second thing that is really apparent to me, and it's quite unusual, is in the Conservative Party vote, as I've seen it in the past, and you would know this better than me, there's always been a portion of that vote that held opinions quite stridently that were not that saleable to mainstream voters. But maybe that number was like 20% or 25%.

You would probably have a much better fix on exactly how large it is. And you probably wouldn't characterize them that way. I take that point as a given. But when I was looking at some numbers, I don't know if it's this Angus Reid poll, there was another one yesterday that said 41% of current conservative voters think Donald Trump is doing a good job. That's a really unusual factor. Because it isn't just people saying, I don't like a discussion about transgender or same sex marriage. And I believe that we should do culture tests with immigrant minorities or any of that kind of thing. This to me is this existential threat to our country caused by one individual. 96 and 97 percent of liberal and NDP voters are kind of horrified by Trump. But 41 percent of conservative voters think he's doing a good job.

I think that's a unique problem for the conservatives that Conservatives that I've never seen anything quite like before. So I don't know how this is going to turn out. But I do think that the numbers in that poll that say Canadians have generally decided so far that Mark Carney is better positioned to handle that issue than Pierre Poliev is not just a reflection on Mark Carney. It's a little bit of a reflection on the Conservative Party as it is today, and maybe Pierre Poliev as well. Do you want to respond to that, Fred? Well, I'll just say, I mean, we don't really know who Mark Carney is yet. Canadians don't know who he is. So it'll be interesting to see how he performs during the campaign, to see how he actually presents himself. He's taken very few questions from media. And when

he has, he's been a bit prickly in that. So it's going to be interesting how people actually perceive him and how smart they think he actually is and if he is actually capable. On Polyev's side, I agree. We have a narrative issue right now where we're not, it's not clear to me exactly what our message is and how we're navigating this. And I've been thinking about this for the last number of days. And I think Pauliev needs to, he's an authentic scrapper, and I think he needs to get scrappy. And I think he needs to go after Trump. I think he needs to be more aggressive on that front. I think that's his path. And if he does that, one, it should alleviate any fear that there's any kind of ties or any kind of similarities. But at the same time, I think that's what Canadians want is someone, a scrappy fighter, and he can do that. And I think he needs to do that. I think almost he needs to double down in his ways, the more I've been thinking about this this you know the the irony about what you suggest about carney which is true that he's not necessarily taking a lot of questions um is exactly the end that he's prickly is exactly the way polyev was in

the first year of his leadership didn't take a lot of questions. Jumped on journalists who did challenge him on stuff. You're shaking your head. Well, look, I mean, I think that, first of all, I saw the scrum after the swearing-in ceremony. One person's prickly is another person's kind of, it was a back and forth. I thought it was kind of fun in spots, actually. I didn't think that there was any disrespect shown to a journalist. On the contrary, I thought there was a little bit of an effort to show respect. I thought those things are night and day. calling out journalists saying, if you work for CP, you're in the pay of the government because

you get money from CBC or something like that. Much more Trumpian. So I didn't see the prickly. Now, both of you guys saw it that, you know, maybe that means that's what it was, but I didn't see it that way. I too tend to think that he, maybe he could answer more questions, but it isn't as though he's not willing to answer questions. Polyev, on the other hand, I think sitting down with people like Candace Malcolm, who I'm not even going to repeat what it is that she's talking about today. I think this is a choice that Polyev is making. I think it's a choice to, you know, be associated with rebel

news coverage. And I think it, you know, conservatives may convince themselves that it's in their political interests. But I don't think it, I don't think it will be, at least I don't think it will be at this moment in time. What is the, at this point, and we're probably literally just days away from the election being called, whether it's later this week or early next week. It seems that that's when it's going to happen. What's the ballot question in this moment? Fred? I mean, all indications are that it's Trump.

But at the same time, affordability is still the top polling issue, the inflation crisis. Now, I understand how Trump is probably driving that as well. When you're thinking of affordability, you're worried about tariffs and what that's going to do to you. So maybe that's the same. So by all accounts, it should be Trump. And if that's the case, then the Conservatives need to change their narrative to address that more aggressively than they have been. And I'm not sure they're going to do that. Yeah, I think Fred's got his handle on it there. The idea that it might feel inconvenient to try to take on Trump or, you know, it might alienate a part of the base, that's a bet that you have to make in this circumstance.

I think the polls are saying Canadians are transfixed by that issue. They weren't three months ago. There's no real case that you can make that Trump is going to disappear as a threat within the period of time between now and the likely next election. And so you have to decide whether you're going to, if you're Pierre-Paul Lievre, you have to decide whether you're going to, if you're Pierre Poliev, you have to decide whether you're going to expend any of your communications energy, any of your political capital on anything other than making the case that you'd have the best way to deal with that. Even if you understood at this point now, Fred's right, a lot of people still don't know Mark Carney. But in the Angus Reid numbers, Poliev have is falling 15 points behind Mark Carney on who could best deal with Trump.

Even if you look at that as a conservative and say, well, maybe that'll never be a sword issue. It's a shield issue. You still have to fight back something closer to even on that and then have people say they maybe would be a little bit more aggressive at balancing the budget, there'd be some more tax cuts. Those other promises that make conservatives stand out from the liberals start to become more relevant if they're not losing on the big issue of the day by as much as they are right now. I guess one thing that surprised me about the conservatives this week, just in the opening, literally the opening hours of the first day of the week, you have Pierre Polyev in a news conference where he's answering questions to journalists, and his focus seems to be still on the carbon tax. And I don't know if this is what you were getting at, Fred,

but at some point you've got to kind of move along, but it's also the focus of a lot of their television ads, which I assume were made in the weeks leading up to this, so some excuse for that. But it really is, like, is the carbon tax still an issue out there? Well, it can be if you're tying it successfully successfully to affordability which again remains a top issue the problem with it though uh the liberals uh took it off the the table in many regards last friday when the you know when prime minister carney signed it away um or at least the increases

or cut the consumer portion the conservative point, and it's a valid point, carbon tax is still here. It's going to be an industrial carbon tax. It's still going to impact our cost of living, but it's a real hard message to sell and to communicate, particularly when Carney and the Liberals got a lot of press for celebrating the defeat of their own flagship policy, which was quite something to see. But people are confused by it. So it's very hard to communicate. One of the issues and one of

the things Paul Yip did was he did it near a plant or in the steel plant in Lorrainelle in eastern Ontario that just lost 150 jobs because of tariffs, a steel plant. So it's one of those things, trying to tie it together, it sounds like the right thing to do, but it's very complicated to message, and I'm not sure it's punching through if people quite understand what we're talking about here. Bruce, what are you seeing in the early days of the TV ad campaigns? What are you noticing? Well, you know, I can't quite figure out what the conservative approach is going to be.

And I think it's probably because they can't, they haven't quite resolved what it's going to be. And maybe they'll keep on trying a bunch of different things. And maybe they'll need to keep on doing a bunch of different things because there are some people who became really attached to their party and their leader on the basis of his axe the tax message. And it was specific to the carbon tax, but it sounds like he's a tax fighter. And so maybe they'll want to keep on doing that. But I'm kind of where you are, I think, both of you, that trying to litigate the carbon tax now feels like you're trying to

avoid the elephant in the room, that you don't want to talk about the other things. And so that becomes not disqualifying. I don't mean that in the sense of politicians getting canceled or anything like that. I just mean that if people are kind of sitting around their dinner table, the proverbial dinner table talking about this election, if it's a table full of people who are already fully decided, it doesn't matter. But if it's a table full of people who are saying, you know what, I wasn't going to vote for Trudeau, but now I'm not sure, the carbon tax is not, in my estimation, going to be anything that makes them feel like, well, I better pay attention to that. And so watching the Conservatives last week actually repost pictures of the piece of paper that Mark Carney signed and saying either it's shameful that they've repudiated this policy that we told them they had to repudiate, which is a kind of an interesting

tactic in and of itself. Or it's a zombie move. This tax is not dead. It's going to come back. Or it has no effect, this piece of paper, even though everybody on balance, I think, has said, well, the tax is coming off on April the 2nd and the price of gas is going to reflect that. So those arguments look flailing to me. They don't look like they're part of a concerted strategy, except a strategy to avoid addressing the big issue of the day, which.D. Vance and Alex Jones and Jordan Peterson and Kevin O'Leary and Conrad Black. I mean, this is not the endorsement stage that you want behind you. And I'm not suggesting for a moment that I think Pierre Polyev designed it that way, but it is what it is. And he, the sooner that he, if I were trying to advise him on how to win this, I would say, you need to get

at this soon. You need to figure out, and this is, I think the point that Fred is making, who are you in the mix? And how do we understand those relationships? So how do you get at that? How do you get at that, Fred? Because you're, Bruce is right. I mean, it's basically the first thing you said was he's got to change the focus of the things he's saying and doing. Well, the carbon tax is one thing that made me think of, you know, should he, and I don't know if this is the right answer, but should he have claimed victory? Should he have been out there saying, I got this done, I pushed for this, this is my win? And if it's true, and I don't know if it's true, but I've been hearing that gas prices are going to drop significantly on April 1st when the carbon tax is removed. That's going to be in the middle of the election potentially, and the Liberals can do another victory lap on that,

even though they're the ones that put the prices up in the first place, because we haven't gone and claimed victory on it. It reminds me of when I first came to Ottawa many, many years ago, I worked for a Nova Scotia member of parliament, Gerald Keddie, and he had a fisheries bill that was to defer capital gains for fisheries for boats. And he put it in as a private members bill and liberal MP for PEI, Lawrence McCauley, basically photocopied the bill and put it in as a private member's bill and liberal MP for PEI, Lawrence McCauley, basically photocopied the bill and put it in as well into the, into the system. That parliament was dissolved. We went to an election, we won and we put it in our budget and the first Harper budget and it passed and it was now law.

And I remember the full page ad of the Charlottetown guardian, Lawrence McCauley thanking us for adopting his bill to give capital gains deferral for fisheries. So this could have been a victory lap potentially for the Conservatives. When Fred was saying Gerald Keddie, wasn't Gerald Keddie a progressive Conservative at one point in time? Remind me, I thought what you were basically saying was there was a moment in time, at least, Fred, when you and I were in the same party and fighting for the same ideas. But I may have that. For the record, I worked with him when he was a conservative member of parliament,

not a progressive. Okay. Okay. Point the way ahead here. Campaigns take on a life of their own. You've both seen this. Things happen. Things can change the momentum from one party to another. How do you see, assuming it starts in the next week, what do you think the plan is going to be going into this on either side? What does each party have to do to kind of stabilize its vote,

to ensure that those who've been looking strongly at them stay with them? And for those who've departed the scene, how do you get them back? Give me a sense of what you think this opening week or two of a campaign is going to look like um fred you start well i mean the first week is one of the most important where you need to set the tone and what your narrative is um if in 2021 the liberals failed to do that they called an early election and never had a story to tell and And it cost them their majority, right? They were going for the majority, but they never had that full narrative mapped out until halfway during the campaign, they figured it out. So both campaigns need to come out of the gates with that clear message of why them, what they want the ballot question to be. The Conservatives, you know, to their credit, like they've been working hard,

they've been IDing vote, they have a good ground game, and they've unlocked new voters, people that have not voted in previous elections, or that certainly didn't vote Conservative in the last election with the issue set that they had. They need to focus on those people as well and continue. And that's why I think you're still seeing the axe the tax and build the homes and stop the crime and fix the budget type messaging, because it does work on that population and they need to really zero in on that. But ultimately, I think both need to make clear of the two leaders why they are the person to take on Trump. Back to your question about the ballot question. It's about who can take him on, who can do it. And it's going to be an interesting contrast. Again, Carney untested, Polyev's a scrapper.

And let's see who can really tell the right story here that will make us all feel better when we go to the ballot box, knowing that, okay, we need this person to lead us in what's ahead. Bruce? Yeah, well, I think Fred said a lot of things that I agree with about narrative.

I think the point that really caught my attention right out of the gate was that 2019 was a bit of a blank page that nobody really wrote on for the first while of the campaign. And sometimes elections happen in a context where there isn't a single pressing issue. I think the liberals looked as though they were asking for thanks for the way that they handled COVID, which I think is a terrible approach to, you know, planning an election and they paid a price for, for that. So sometimes parties do have a chance to decide and fight among themselves as to what the ballot question is or will be. I don't think this is that. I think the ballot question is already decided. I think that it's decided by forces beyond the control of Canadian politicians. And so the only

question is going to be, who is it that instills in the minds of Canadians a greater degree of confidence, both about protecting ourselves from the worst effects of what Trump might do and finding opportunity in the treatise that Trump might leave behind. Those are quite different tests than Pierre Polyev was gearing up to pass. And I think that that's, you know, if I were him, that would be the focus of my attention right now, because I don't think there's another way to, there's another path through this election. I don't think that trying to characterize Mark Carney as an unethical person or somebody who's in it for the money or any of those kinds of things. I think those are, you know, sometimes those have an impact in election campaigns.

But I don't think, you know, Fred's right. A lot of people don't know Mark Carney, but I don't think he's coming across like somebody who fits that bill or for whom that is a reasonable set of observations. And instead, I think people are looking at him and saying, well, maybe he does know some things about this. And maybe this is, you know, the thing that we should use to decide between these these leaders. So but I think that ballot question is for all intents and purposes locked in now? You know, I was thinking over the weekend that in some ways, you know, Carney has landed in the midst of all this in a nice position, not out of any skill of his, but simply because of events. With Trump being the issue that you've all explained, is likely to be the ballot question.

Being in the position of government gives you advantages over the position of opposition. We've witnessed it just in the last couple of days. I mean, he travels to Europe. He meets with other world leaders. He has major discussions with them on the issues of the day. Meets with the king. Does all that. Polyev doesn't get a chance to do that, at least in this moment.

He may well reconsider how he's used the last two years. But he doesn't have that advantage. I love this question. Can I go first? Bruce is dismissing it here like i don't want to like he doesn't but go ahead yeah do you want to go first you go first i do i want to go first on this one okay because i want to just say two things it wasn't very many days ago that's why everybody in the pundit world could only say one thing about incumbency was that if you're an incumbent, you're screwed.

You have no advantages. You have all of the disadvantages. So we all said that. The whole idea at times that for. Yeah, for sure. six days or four months, somehow turns into an advantage for Mark Carney against the challenger who's had two years plus of pounding away at incumbents the way politicians have around the world quite successfully. I don't really accept that, but I understand that that's a point of view and that there is an aspect of being in office. If you're new and people are interested

in what you have to say, that makes it look like it's an advantage. But I think it's the new and interested in what you have to say that makes it an advantage. Well, let me stop there. Let me counter no okay i would i would say for mark carney and i'm going to say this i also listen to a lot of people say this guy he can never decide whether to get into politics or not he's a ditherer he's got no political background he will have no skills he'll be horrible at this and he'll lose miserably well so far he's shown some skill at it that's all i wanted to add okay none of none of those were the point I was addressing, which was in some ways didn't matter who it was,

whether it was Mark Carney or somebody else. They arrived in a moment that really is a benefit to that, to the person who's in government, who's at the top. When you're into a, you know, a know a a mano o mano or whatever you want to call it fight with the leader of another country um it's not a bad position to start in that's the only point i was going to make it's a huge advantage and that's typically you guys are right and bruce you're right a lot of times government can be an albatross it's something you've you've got to deal with years of build buildup of things you've done and enemies you've made while in government.

But right now in the situation we're in, if we're talking about the ballot question, being Donald Trump and how to deal with them, being Prime Minister of Canada during the election, when you can take a couple of trips to D.C. to deal with certain things and really capture the imagination of Canadians while you're doing it, that's a huge advantage and nothing that the leader of the opposition can do. It really ties their hands in that. We saw something similar in the Ontario campaign that just unfolded where Premier Ford took two trips to D.C. to do important work as chair of the Council of the Federation. So this is a similar advantage know that advantage that uh carney will no doubt have going into this despite being only in politics for a week uh he has that

incumbency advantage now full respect guys those are sturdy sturdy counter arguments everybody on this panel this small panel would have boy, it would suck to be carrying the liberal brand. It would suck to have people say, well, you were the chief economic advisor to Justin Trudeau for five years, which is totally made up. So it isn't just the, you know, the moment. I mean, there has been some, you know, I think there's some effectiveness to what Mark Carney is saying to people. And I think that's part of what we're seeing in the polls. Okay. I just like to say one more thing on this, Peter, just about, I think people are still projecting onto Carney. I don't think people know who he is. I think they

want him to be something. And that's why the numbers are where they are. And I think as we see this campaign unfolds and his inability to give clear answers to it, but it does seem odd that he doesn't answer the question well. And if that keeps building up throughout the campaign, people will begin to question more his motives and who he is, which is going to be problematic. Okay. We're out of time. Emotions or anything. I'm not,

I wasn't doing anything. No, you weren't much. You know all. No, you weren't. Much. You know, there's whatever it is, five, six weeks until the election. Should we be prepared for this to be a much more, I was going to say exciting campaign. I think there's excitement in the air. You may describe, you know, define that word differently

because of the different situations and issues that are at play. But could we find these next five or six weeks a lot more interesting, exciting, surprising than we might think in this moment? Or are we into a well drip drip drip uh six weeks let's just move it up to the vote so like i don't know if the election is going to start in september or august or sooner than that but um what i think is that this is a really stressful time. I've not seen this level of stress in public opinion. So will it be exciting?

Yes, but exciting kind of sounds like thrilling and, you know, enjoyment. And I don't think it's going to be that way for people. I think that the mood is serious. I think the issues people are fearful of are very, very serious. And I think that we've got this combustible president in the White House who's changing the rules of the game every day, sometimes several times a day. So I think it will make us hyper-attentive. That's probably the best word I can use to describe it. And probably stressed,

probably stressed. You're right. Stress is better than exciting. You get the last word, Fred. Well, I think the word interesting also works because this is going to be one of those campaigns where we, as of right now, I don't know who's going to win. And that's rare. Usually you have a good feeling of who's going to win this. But the Trump question just makes it so volatile and so unknown on how this will play out. Fred's right. Yeah. All right.

Well, thank you both. You'll continue to guide us. I think Fred's right at the end of every one. That's a good sign off. He'll take that. Thank you both. It was good. Good conversation.

And we'll do it again next week. Thanks, guys. Good to see you again. And welcome back. Peter Mansbridge here. Segment two, part two of The Bridge for this Tuesday morning. Hope you enjoyed Smoke Mirrors the Truth, which was also available on our YouTube channel.

Keep that in mind on Tuesdays. Smoke is always available on our YouTube channel as well as here on our regular podcast. And let's see, a couple of things. First of all, you're listening on Sirius XM channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform, wherever you're listening or watching. We're happy to have you with us. A couple of things of note this morning in our kind of end bits section. Starting with a piece by J.P. Tasker from cbc.ca

that's available out there this morning. The headline says it all. Tells you about the times we're living in. Cross-border trips to the United States reach COVID lows with nearly 500,000, half a million fewer travelers in February. Remember last week we were talking about, it'd be nice to see some stats on what this is all doing to us, how we are showing our discomfort with the kind of things that the

President of the United States has been saying. One is clearly in cross-border trips. You know, I know some friends of mine who normally go, you know, golfing in the States during the winter have canceled their trips. Others were kind of committed to those trips because of money they've paid already, have decided they'll do it, but they're feeling like guilty about going. But there's also the stats that I really want to see, which is consumer spending, the impacts having on grocery stores. You know, I don't imagine the bays situation, which is appearing on the precipice now of going under,

has been helped by these last month or two. I mean, their problems are much deeper than that, obviously, but I don't think it's been helped by the fact that Canadians are being very particular about what they're buying and what they're not buying. And those kind of statistics are going to be really interesting to determine and to see in the coming days, weeks. But that headline today says, you know, literally it says it all. You don't need to read further. 500,000 fewer travelers into the United States from Canada. Well, actually

it's cross-border trips, so I guess this in some degree is both ways, but it's mainly half a million fewer travelers crossing from Canada into the U.S. That's one story. Here's the other one. I find this particularly interesting. I mean, because it's also another comparison with COVID, really. Remember during COVID, how could we forget, how you stopped carrying cash. You didn't have cash in your pocket.

You didn't have coins. Remember those coins? Little pieces of metal that you kept in your pocket and you paid for things? Anyway, we'd already stopped using currency, change in your pocket. But it really hit new lows during COVID. Did it ever come back? Apparently not.

Apparently not. But there's an interesting question in the current Guardian. Here's the headline. Back to cash. Life without money in your pocket is not the utopia that Sweden had hoped. Now, this will sound familiar. In 2018, a former deputy governor of Sweden's central bank predicted that by 2025, the country would probably be cashless. Well here we are in 2025,

seven years on, and that prediction has turned out to be pretty much true. Just one in ten purchases are made with cash and card is the most common form of payment followed by the Swedish mobile payment system called Swish. However, electronic banking is now seen as a potential threat to national security. So, forget about going all through the examples of how there's less cash being used in Sweden, but in the context of today, with war in Europe, unpredictability in the U.S., and the fear of Russian hybrid attacks almost a part of daily life in Sweden, life without cash is not proving the utopia that perhaps it once promised to be. Such is the perceived severity of the situation that the authorities are trying,

once again I'm reading from the Guardian here, that the authorities are trying to encourage citizens to keep and use cash in the name of civil defense. In November, the defense ministry sent every home a brochure entitled If Crisis or War Comes. Can you imagine this? This is a brochure going around every house in Sweden. And the headline is If Crisis or War Comes.

It advises people to use cash regularly and keep a minimum of a week's supply in various denominations to strengthen preparedness. Yikes. In its report, the central bank says, measures need to be taken to strengthen preparedness and reduce exclusion so that everyone can pay even in the event of crisis or war.

For years, it says, efficiency has been the priority for payments, but now safety and accessibility are at least as important. In December, the Swedish government published the findings of an inquiry that proposed that some public and private agents should be required to accept cash, a recommendation that the central bank says the authorities should implement. This story goes on. There's a lot in it. And it's interesting to read it because these are difficult times. And, you know, our lives are changing in a way that even just a couple of years ago, we never would have suspected.

You want to read more on this piece? As I said, it's in the observer section of The Guardian. And the headline is, Back to Cash. Life without money in your pocket is not the utopia that Sweden had hoped. Miranda Bryant is the writer on that story. Let me just make one more comment about cash in your pocket,

because I can't remember the last time I had cash in my pocket. It was probably pre-COVID. I just don't have it. And rarely, if ever, do I wish I had it in my pocket. Well, it's not if ever, because there are times. You know, outside the kind of grocery store, convenience store that I occasionally use when I'm in Toronto, there's often a guy sitting on the sidewalk with a cup

looking for donations, right? And he's a great guy. He's always got a smile and he's, you know, chat him up. And sometimes I used to put money in his cup. But I don't have any money. And I'll say to him, I don't have cash. You've got to get one of those, you know, good card things so I can swipe.

And he laughs at me and he says, you know what? He says there is a, what do you call them? The mobile banks in the store. You can go in there and get some cash. This guy, this guy should be the governor of the Bank of Canada. Here he is sending people around saying, you know, I need some money in my cup. I know you don't have any cash, but there is one of those machines in there that you can swipe and get some cash. And you can bring it back.

You know, I've found ways to look after him on occasion. I don't do it every time, but I do it on occasion. Anyway, he's still there. You know, five years after it was common to have cash in your pocket, he's still there, so there must be a lot of people who still carry cash. Okay. The thrust of that article, though, was about civil defense, right? And I found it interesting that in more than just a few of the letters that we received for this current cycle of your turn,

which is what's on your mind, is this question of civil defense and people saying, you know, I need to take civil defense courses. I want to because I don't know what's about to happen. That's scary. But like in Sweden, they're thinking about it. Which brings me around to the next few days of the bridge. Tomorrow, of course, is Wednesday, and we our our situation on Wednesdays where we have encore Wednesdays and tomorrow is one of those days Thursday we're back with your turn and the random ranter and

your turn for this week is a holdover from last week it's still the letters that came in we've stopped receiving them so don't bother sending any more because we've had so many on the What's On Your Mind. And the What's On Your Mind is all in relationship to this situation with the U.S. So we'll have the second half of all those letters Thursday on your turn, and look forward to that. Friday is, as it always is, a good talk with Chantal Hebert and Rob Russo.

Rob, a couple of you have asked recently, I guess you missed the first few episodes. Rob is the correspondent for The Economist in Canada. He's Canadian. He's the former bureau chief for the CBC in Ottawa, former bureau chief for Canadian Press in Washington, and he's also spent time for CP in Quebec City in Montreal. So Rob's got a vast experience of covering this continent, and we've loved having him on Good Talk with Chantel.

And Chantel is Chantel. I don't need to run through her biography, her background, her resume. We know who she is and what she means to not only this broadcast, but to this country. Great Canadian that she is and what she means to not only this broadcast, but to this country. Great Canadian that she is. Great Quebecer that she is. Okay, that's the look ahead for the rest of the week. I hope you've enjoyed this day.

Have a good one. Encore tomorrow. Your turn Thursday. Good talk Friday. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you again in less than 24 hours.