The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - SMT - What’s The Price Of A Back Flip?

Episode Date: November 1, 2023

The reverberations of the Trudeau carbon tax decision continue inspite of the PM’s own denial that there will be more changes in other areas. Was this a really bad move on the part of the government or one from which they can recover? Bruce is here for that.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. It's Wednesday. Smoke, Mirrors, and the Truth. Bruce Anderson, all coming up in just a moment. There you go, the familiar strains of the SMT, Smoke Mirrors and the Truth, for Wednesday. Hey, Bruce Anderson, how are you doing, my friend? Hey, Peter, I'm doing great. I'm doing great today. Been looking forward to talking with you today, just like every Wednesday and Friday. That's good, because we've got a show to fill and we've got things to talk about, so let's get at it.

You know, sometimes you can't make this stuff up. The Liberals trying to dig themselves out of a hole, a big hole, given the way the polling data looks. And they decide, okay, here's one way to pull ourselves out of this hole, is we'll give kind of a freebie to Atlantic Canada, which usually starts us off on election night with, you know, 32 seats or a good chunk of those 32 seats in Atlantic Canada. And they're desperate for a break on home heating oil, so let's do that.

And let's try and ignore the fact that it's kind of a backflip on our carbon tax policy. So they did that last week, and as we talked about on Good Talk, you and Chantel were out there kind of leading the parade like this. This is a real backward step. And now they're at the point where the prime minister yesterday saying, we'll never do that again, or at least we'll never do it again on any other carve-out, on any other heat issue across the country because we're firm on our carbon tax plan.

So was this whole past, whatever it's been, five or six days, been a disaster for the Liberals in terms of the way they did this and tried to defend it, even had, what, one MP out there saying or one cabinet minister saying, you know, if other parts of the country would just vote Liberal, they'd get the same kind of breaks, which is like, you don't say that. So as I said, it's hard to make this stuff up. What's your take five or six days later?

You were pretty harsh last Friday. Where are you today? Yeah, I don't think disaster is too strong a word to describe this. And I know that liberal supporters who listen to this podcast will probably find the next couple of minutes uncomfortable and maybe you'll get letters. And I'm sorry if you get letters and if they're a little bit florid, but there are a lot of things that are wrong with the announcement that was made. And the evidence of that, in part, is the rather shambolic way in which the government responded to the questions that were raised

and the fact that the government's kind of on the run and the prime minister's getting scrummed about where more carve-outs, you know, why, if the point was to help people who are suffering, you know, the term that people are using is energy poverty, which basically means that their incomes are strained enough against their cost of living. And energy is a big part of their cost that they need help. Fair point. However, the measures that they announced last week will particularly affect Atlanta, Canada, as everybody has been saying. But they help people who aren't suffering energy poverty, just as they would help those who

do. So whether you're rich or poor, you're going to get a break from this government, which does fly in the face of everything that they've been trying to communicate about how they feel about rich versus middle class versus people who are struggling. The second thing is that people can be suffering from energy poverty in other parts of the country, regardless of what kind of energy they're using, but because the circumstance of the economy and global energy markets is causing that hardship for them. So to avoid the conversation about how you're going to help people who are suffering from energy poverty but are using other forms of energy, that's hard to square with the idea of fairness to introduce policies that are going to be helpful to people who aren't suffering energy poverty, but because they happen to be using that particular form of energy in

Atlantic Canada, for example, that's hard to square with their underlying philosophy of we don't help the rich who don't need help. We help people who need help. And the last part for me, and I think this is the part that's probably causing the most angst within the Liberal Party right now and within the caucus, is that if you believe in the idea that you should put a price on carbon emissions if you want to have less carbon emissions, and if you believe that the climate change issue is still a problem and getting worse, then you don't tinker with that principle.

And associated with that, if you believe what you've been telling people all along, which is that the price that they're paying for the carbon emissions through the carbon tax is being rebated to them almost entirely, then removing or pausing that tax measure isn't going to reduce their energy poverty. All it's going to do is raise questions about the need for the carbon tax. I haven't seen an answer to the question, and maybe I haven't sort of looked hard enough for it yet. But if you pause the carbon tax, are you pausing the rebates as well? Because the rebates are tied to the carbon tax. They're meant to return the money to people that they paid in that carbon tax. So there are so many aspects of this, Peter,

that seem to me that they could have and should have been thought through more carefully. The point for me is not that nobody who is suffering from energy poverty should be getting some relief from the government. I think that's a reasonable starting point. But to do this in this way definitely opened up more questions, more political exposure, more flanks to try to defend against than needed to be the case. And that's probably more than anything else. Why I think that the liberals are feeling the pain of outside criticisms, but probably feeling almost as much pain from inside criticisms from people whose names will be on ballots in the next election and who are going to be hearing from

constituents about this and for whom the answers to this point in time anyway, and who knows whether or not there'll be some changes in the policy. I heard the prime minister say there won't, but it doesn't seem obvious to me that there won't be some, that that's the case. It seems more likely to me that the pressures will build up and there'll be some amendments to this, which again, kind of goes to the, what's the management system in place right now around the prime minister? And is it doing everything that it should be doing? I, you know, I wonder like how this got to the point of an announcement. I guess it was last Thursday night at some kind of a campaign rally that the prime minister was at. Now I get it. I understand how Atlantic

liberals must be, you know, quite fearful of what they're seeing in terms of the polling it. I understand how Atlantic liberals must be, you know, quite fearful of what they're seeing in terms of the polling data. I mean, they basically owned Atlantic Canada for the last few elections. It's, you know, it's a lead that's been slithering a bit. I think they won all the seats in 2015, and it's been dropping since then. But a lot of Atlantic liberal MPs must be going, I'm going to lose, we need something. So it must have been, the assumption is that it was a push

from some Atlantic Liberals. We've got to do something, here's an idea, there's a lot of home heating, all the customers in Atlantic Canada, this would be good for them um and you know hopefully in return it'll be it'll be good for us uh but you know the the genesis of an idea like this which did not seem to be clearly thought through on the kind of bounce back it was likely to get do we do we know anything beyond what I just outlined as to how this came about? Do you think it was as simple as something like that? You know,

a plan scratched on the back of who used to say scratch on the back of a cigarette pack, you know, and then the next thing you know, it's, it's policy. Do we know anything about how, where this came about?

No, I don't know the details of how this idea moved from being there's a political problem that's evident in the polls in Atlantic Canada. the conservatives have been making about tax the tax and the carbon price is uh is kind of ruining your household finances had landed enough and effectively enough uh that liberals felt like they were heading into a winter where the pain of those heating oil bills was going to accumulate more scar tissue for them politically because, as I said, I think that it's relatively clear that Mr. Polyev has effectively convinced enough people that the carbon price is the problem for them in terms of their energy poverty, even though I don't think that the evidence is there and experts who are more knowledgeable than I am on this say that's not the problem. And of course, if you just look at the simple math of

people pay a carbon tax on the price of the energy that they consume and there's a rebate that covers the amount of carbon tax that they paid for almost everybody. So I think that the issue, the idea that they were going to want to do something to attenuate that public anxiety in Atlantic Canada or that public frustration with the cost of living, the cost of energy and the association that Polyev made successfully with the carbon price. I think that's that's kind of messy, but logical part of politics. This is hardly the first time that government would have looked at a situation and said the public is convinced of something that we may not think is true, but is is threatening to ruin our political opportunity in the next election, we better do something about that. People can feel like that's cynical or it's not really sound and stable

and thoughtful and future-oriented leadership. Sure, but politics isn't only ever about those things. Sometimes it's about politicians smelling the coffee and saying, what is it that we're going to need to do to address this misinformation that has transpired into negative public opinion or to address the substantive issue that people are really hurting for a variety of reasons that may not have anything to do with the carbon price. My assumption is that both of those were kind of part of the calculus. But I don't think that

when people decided that something needed to be done, that's kind of where I think the ball dropped. And I don't know how, and I don't know why, and I don't know really who dropped the ball, except to say it feels to me that with the combination of experts in the public sector, whether in the political side or the public servant side, to end up with a policy that is so vulnerable to criticism implies that people didn't really evaluate the risks of those criticisms or really explore what the vulnerabilities would be and come up with ideas to offset those criticisms.

And I don't know whether or not that's because of fatigue in the system or they didn't allow themselves enough time to work through some options that might not have been so politically controversial. But either way, it comes back to the same kind of thing that you and I have been talking about a little bit over time, which is that the question of whether the management system in the government is working as well as it should to come up with ideas that deal with current problems to understand the risks and other scenarios associated with those ideas and to really kind of button them down before they are taken out publicly. And I don't think that that happened in this case. And I don't think this is the only situation that feels like that in the last several

months. You know, I was watching one of the political panels, I think it was yesterday, on CTV, on their Power Play show with my friend Vashie Capellos. And she had three MPs on there, you know, the traditional political panel, you know, a Liberal, a Conservative, an NDP, on this issue. And the Liberal was Adam VanCouverton, the former Olympic champ, distinguished Canadian in that right, put in the position of trying to explain, defend this announcement. And it was interesting watching him

because now Adam VanCouverton does not represent a riding in Atlantic Canada. He's in Ontario. He's in rural Ontario around Milton, the Milton area. And he made the point in defense or in – I think he was more trying to explain the policy than defend it. But the point he made was there are more people on home heating oil in Ontario than there are in Atlantic Canada. Now, obviously, it's a much different sized province in population, but this assumption that

it's designed to only benefit Atlantic Canada, he's saying there are a lot of people on home heating oil in Ontario, and a lot of them are in my riding. And so, you know, he was basically saying there, I'm having trouble. I'm having to explain this to people in my riding who are on home heating oil. And the only way I can do it is this is the start of a process to get people off home heating oil because it's dirty and he was doing the dirty oil thing all the way through his answers. But I found it, you know, this must be where it's really difficult for,

in his case, you know, a backbench MP is put in the position of trying to defend this, which now the prime minister is saying it's a one-off, it'll never go anywhere else. a backbench MP is put in the position of trying to defend this, which now the prime minister is saying it's a one-off, it'll never go anywhere else. It must be tough. He's not the first guy to be put in a position like that by various governments over the years, but it must be difficult. Yeah, I'm sure it is. Adam is an excellent, excellent member of parliament and very capable of explaining public policy to people.

And I'm sure that this is one of the more challenging policies that I have no idea what, you know, columnists will write negative pieces about them because the impact of columnists is I've, you know, I've kind of measured it over time. It's not what it used to be. Even though I read a lot of them and I happened to read Andrew Coyne's today, I thought it was a pretty good summary of the criticisms of this initiative. It isn't, you know, what people will say on TV panels or even, you know, on great podcasts like yours. It's more a question of... Plug, plug. Thanks for the plug. Right? It's more a question of for those MPs and those candidates

who are going to run with the liberal banner the next time, they need to know that they have something that they can not only defend, because ideally you're not just having a good defense. They need to know that they have ideas that they can take to people and say, we've got a new idea. It's better than what the other guys have on offer, and it'll deal with something that's important to you. If you don't have that, and I think we talked last week about the absence of those kinds of ideas at this stage, and some people might say, well, you know, if you have some big ideas, you hold them until later. But later, for me, if I'm looking at the Liberal Party circumstances, somewhere between 10 and 18 points behind the

Conservatives. Later should probably be now, should be soon, because I think there is a risk for them that at some point in the process, if the NDP think that the Liberals in their current incarnation are so vulnerable, they might decide that it's time to end the relationship with the Liberals and to cause an election to happen. Because while they'll understand that Pierre Poglia will win that election, that the NDP might end up in a better situation than the Liberals. So I think the Liberals can't afford to put off to the day after tomorrow, things that if they have in the pipe that they think might be appealing to voters, they should maybe bring out a little sooner than that. But if you don't have those, then you do spend most of your time explaining what you

already did and hoping that people will find that interesting or answering questions and criticisms about things that you've done and hoping that people will find that interesting, or answering questions and criticisms about things that you've done and hoping that those answers reduce the amount of scar tissue that you're accumulating. I think that's the challenge for that Liberal caucus now and for the people that the Liberals might be trying to recruit as candidates in the next election, is that people in those situations are going to be wondering, how am I going to rebut Pierre Pauliev and how am I going to represent the next phase of liberal activism or liberal thinking on public policy?

On that point, I don't know if you saw a clip that Mark Miller did outside the House of Commons. Peter, did you see that one yesterday? I did. Is this the one where he's going after Polyev? Yeah. What do you think about that? Well, he's toned down his language a little bit i mean he was the one who called um uh you know and you know warning we're going to use a bad word he he said a few um a few weeks ago this is the only podcast that i

know of that issues a warning a warning for a bullshitter for a you know a medium quality bad word but he called he called called, uh, um, Polly have a serial bullshitter, um, and that he's, you know, trying to take advantage of people by constantly spinning, uh, stories and, and, and lines and mistruths. Um, yesterday he seemed to tone down that, uh, rhetoric a little bit. He didn't use the bullshitter word, but he basically did the same, you know, it was the same

theme that you can't believe what uh polyev is saying he's trying to take advantage of canadians etc etc so you know listen you know if we're in for an election fight there's going to be some strong stuff said and if you think you have a case and you can back it up from either side, you're going to use it. I mean, you know, we often talk about it at cabinet shuffle times. You're never going to hear of half these people ever again. You know, their name is going to come up on a cabinet shuffle, like a new portfolio, and you'll never hear from them again. I'd never heard of Goody hutchings who's like the

rural economic affairs minister i'd never heard of this person until the words were uttered if you want to get these things for yourself in ridings especially on the prairies that aren't liberal you got got to vote liberal. Yeah. Now. Yeah. So Goody, far from the, Ms. Hutchins, I should say, is far from the first politician who has ever had that thought or uttered that thought. But it does have the quality of the inside voice

rather than the outside voice is that if you're in politics, there are days when you will think about this stuff that way, where you'll go, you know, the people here have a relationship with us. And as a consequence of that relationship, we are really attentive to the concerns that they have, and we acted on them. It doesn't work to say that publicly. It doesn't work to disclose that degree of political calculation, even though it would only be really naive people who would think that that isn't part of how politics works, is that there are people sitting around a caucus room or a cabinet table and they're talking about the things that are in their ear more often than they're talking about things that are a cause for concern for people who

don't communicate with them or who they're not close to. That's kind of a normal chemistry problem in politics that governments at their best try to overcome. So very, very unfortunate because it opened up another flank for criticism of this measure. And there were already enough problems that the government was going to have to deal with on the substance of the measure before they had to deal with that. And it's a throwaway criticism. And I can imagine that the ad is already made that the conservatives will devote some of their money to. And I saw the fundraising statistics yesterday in the last quarter. They raised a lot of money again, a lot more than the liberals did. So it's going to come back to haunt them. And to go back to Mark Miller for a minute.

Okay. Just before you get back to Mark Miller, can I just say something? To be fair to her, as you said, she's not the first person to do that. And sometimes it's seen as a smart move. I can think of Mulroney, even Harper to a degree in 2011. But Mulroney in 84 and 88, we're going to form a majority. And if you want to be part of this train and get the benefits of it, you got to vote conservative as you go into different ridings and have that message.

So it was, you know, during an election campaign, it's a little different. But at the basis of it, it's kind of the same thing, right? If you want to get the benefit of such and such government, you've got to vote for that government. Anyway. It's one thing to say it when you're campaigning for votes. I think that's basically what campaigning is.

It's like if you want this thing that I'm promising to do that will help you, you have to vote for me and not for the other person. If you're in government and you've announced the expenditure of public funds and you say that if you're not included in this expenditure, it might be because you didn't vote for us, you're asking for trouble. And it's a, you know, it's just you have a very different set of responsibilities if you're having that conversation with people and people are then at some liberty to question whether or not they've got a government

that does govern for all Canadians, that does understand the challenges that people in other parts of the country are living with from energy costs standpoint. So yes, politicians kind of live with that calculation in their heads all the time. It's, you know, it's part of how you succeed in politics is that you try to be really attentive to the voters that you know in your constituency. So it's a benefit of our system that, that we have people who are elected from ridings and who experience on the weekends and during the break, the house sitting break weeks, what it is that people are talking about and want you to do differently.

But it is both a benefit and a risk that when those people come to Ottawa, they think about their constituencies and the people that they know and the people who they meet on the weekends who have specific concerns that they want to see addressed. And then maybe as a consequence of that, they don't think enough about how their words or thoughts might land with, with people who live somewhere else. Do you want to wrap that point up about Mark Miller? Yeah. Yeah, I did. I, I actually found what he said to be, um, part of a consistent, um, effort on his part to be more blunt in raising concerns about what kind of a leader Pierre Poliev would be for Canada. And I think it's something that the Liberals

need to do. I don't think that the, for all that his supporters want to say that in an election, Justin Trudeau will outbox Pierre Polyev. I don't think that's necessarily true. I think Pierre Polyev is pretty good at this. But I also think it's a terrible strategy to wait until an election to do it. And the Liberals have not, I don't think, done very much to kind of explore with Canadians what they think the weaknesses of Pierre Polyev would be as a prime minister, to put it nicely. I don't think they framed him in a way that makes him vulnerable to them in a campaign. And so the less time you spend doing that, the harder and more Herculean the task will be in that 37-day window of a federal election campaign. So they should do more of it

now, in my view, if they want to be more competitive. Mark Miller is not the only one who's doing it. I think Jonathan Wilkinson is often doing a pretty good job as well in the house in particular, and there are others. But Mark Miller speaks with a bluntness, and you and I have talked about this before, and a way of kind of measuring the weight of his words, not so that he removes the edge from them, but so that the edge actually gets through. And I thought what he said yesterday, I thought serial bullshitter got through the clutter, not just because it was a medium quality.

I like your phrasing, a medium quality cuss word, but know it's the kind of thing that people say to one another about a friend or somebody that they know and it sort of has meaning and to the you know the great um phrase that my daughter kate used to give to politicians when she was advising politicians you you know you want to talk like people talk. And serial bullshitter was that. And yesterday, Mark Miller said, he's the kind of guy who if you spend any time with him, you want to check your wallet. And I thought, you know, that's talking like people talk.

That's, you know, trying to deliver a point that doesn't sound performatively partisan. It doesn't sound overly sanitized or anything like that. It just sounds like this is what he thinks. And he went on to say he thought that Pierre Polyev would be quite dangerous for democracy because of misinformation and that sort of thing. And so I want to, you know, I just want to say about him that I think he is saying those kinds of things that other liberals might want to be doing more of as part of an effort to make their party more competitive in the election and also to highlight some legitimate gaps in the veracity of the information that Pierre Polyev is putting into the market.

All right. And that's the point where we have some difference on this issue because I love people who are blunt with their assessments, especially in politics of the other side, whether they're conservatives, whether it's Polyev going after Trudeau, whether it's Mark Miller going after Polyev, I like the bluntness, but I want to see the bluntness backed up with the facts, right? You can't just throw out the serial bullshitter, the line about the wallets,

or Polyev's continuing lines about Trudeau right up to the, you know, he's treasonous. You've got to back it up. You've got to lay out the facts to back up your case. And if you're unable to do that, then your original point is pointless. Like it doesn't carry veracity itself. When you say that, we don't quite see that the same way. Are you saying that you don't think he has facts to back up or he didn't in that scrum go on to say,

if you tell people that the carbon tax is the cause of your energy cost problem and it's not true i think that's legitimate as a way of saying you know this is a watch your wallet kind of guy he's telling you things that are not true yeah yeah i you know i i i hear that i accept that i just would like it in more when you make such a major pronouncement about your opposition, I think you need, and I think the liberals will need, just as the conservatives will need, the detail, show me the facts. I agree. I don't think one scrum isn't going to do it.

It's not the way to deliver the more elaborate, consistent. I saw a thing on, it was either Twitter or Instagram or one of the social media channels yesterday that was attributed to the liberal party. I don't know whether it actually was or not, but it took the, the famous orchard scene of Pierre Polyev a couple of weeks ago in the apple picking thing. And it,

and it, you know And where he was saying, I don't do this, I don't do that. I don't say this, I don't say that. And they put it back to back with him actually saying very similar things. Yeah, very effective, didn't you think? Yeah, it was very effective. But that's the kind of thing I mean.

If you're going to do it, you got to show it. You can't just say, oh, it was all garbage. That was all BS, what he said. Show why it was. And I think that's effective, and we'll see what kind of campaign this is going to be, when and if it ever takes off, or the pre-campaign, because people have been thinking of late that the Liberals have kind of slowed off the mark in countering the gains the conservatives have made,

a lot of it on social media. This kind of thing might make things more interesting. We'll see. Well, look, I take your point on this, Peter, but I also want to encourage you. You're not going to take my advice on this, but I would encourage you to ruin your you're not going to take my advice on this but i would encourage you to it'll ruin your day if you do anyway but for the record yes if you go on x

not always fun and if you go to pierre pauliev's feed and you look through the things that are posted on that feed every day, I want you to tell me next week on SMT, did he meet that test that you're saying? I just finished saying he doesn't meet the test. He does not meet that test. No, I don't think any of them truly meet the test of backing up their claims. And that's what I would like to see. I don't know how common I am in that thinking, but for me,

I would like to see when a politician makes a claim about their opposite, that they back it up with the facts. Fair enough. And if his social feed doesn't do that then then they i absolutely agree with you it's not not good enough it definitely doesn't do that and so fair enough um but there was a another politician who do we have to take a break or can we just we do have to take a break because we're almost out of time you know we've got to get a longer we've got to get a longer show because we have so much i don't know about that i don't know about that dear let's

take the break and then we'll come back on uh i think we've exhausted this angle unless you have some yeah you'd like to trash no i wanted wanted to talk about in the world of communications. I wanted to talk about another piece that I saw that really struck me, though, which was Sean Fraser and a post that he put out on housing the other day. Right. Well, that won't be in today's program, but we may we may find room for it because I have I have i want to elevate the discussion a little bit to to what has been the underlying theme of of of today's um conversation and i'll do that right after this i thought it was elevated but okay all right a little hurt you're just a serial bullshitter really know, and friends can say that about each other.

Anyway. I've said it. We'll be right back after this. And welcome back. You're listening to Smoke Mirrors and the Truth, the Wednesday episode of The Bridge right here on SiriusXM, channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform, or you're watching us on our YouTube channel.

We're glad to have you with us, whatever platform you are watching on. You know, I think I've said that medium term bad word more today than ever. You know, all those years at the CBC, you couldn't say damn. Even hell was tricky to squeeze that through the language commissioner at the CBC. same person who tried to get me to change my name from man's bridge to person's bridge true i don't know that didn't no it didn't happen it did i i believe they were serious you're bullshitting you're bullshitting okay here's my elevated discussion point because i guess the theme that was running through everything on our discussion about Okay, here's my elevated discussion point. Because I guess the theme that was running through everything on our discussion about a carbon tax was really sort of the fight on climate change.

The liberals are trying to make hay out of the fact that conservatives don't really have a policy. Whatever it is, it's not the one they had in the last election campaign where they were kind of supportive of some of the positions of the government of the day. But here's the question. Where are we on the net zero question? Is there an easy answer to that? Well, I think we're at a point, especially with the conversation recently about carbon pricing, where I hope that in the next election campaign, the Conservatives and the Liberals will both have the ability to say, in our country will to some degree be affected by our commitment to net zero because companies and shareholders want to invest in places that have that ambition that,

that both of those parties have practical plans to accomplish that ambition. I don't think that it's been, well, it hasn't been the case so far that the Conservatives have come up with a plan. It was the case that the Conservatives were pretending that that was not a real factor in the investment marketplace, pretending that it wasn't something that was going to create opportunity for Canada. And I think they paid a price in the last couple of election campaigns because they looked like they didn't care enough about the climate change issue. But also to some degree, because it looked like their kind of passion for defending the oil and gas sector in Canada made them seem like they weren't that attentive to the evolution of the industrial and business marketplace and the way in which investment flows are being affected by this idea of achieving net zero. My sense, given what the conservatives under Polyev have said, is that they've been moving away from not the defense of fossil fuels,

but moving away from this being positioned as not taking net zero seriously or not believing that it's going to affect our economy if we don't have ambitions in that area. How am I seeing that? It's more the things that they're not speaking out against, like EV battery manufacturing in Canada, some of the changes in the direction on critical minerals. And they're specifically opposing the carbon tax. They're not saying climate change is not serious or we wouldn't support some of the policies that have already been in place or we'll dismantle the e-vehicle charging stations that are being assembled or anything like that. They seem to be trying to put themselves in a position where they're at least competitive on the question of industrial reorganization for the purpose of decarbonization, which is it's hard to thread when you've got so many seats in the western part of the country that is very connected to the fossil fuel marketplace.

But so far, I think it's fair to say the Polyev group have done a pretty good job of avoiding that particular criticism, whether the Liberals have done enough to push on that and say, where's your plan for net zero? Are you sufficiently seized with the fact that investment flows into Canada will require there to be comprehensive and pragmatic and realistic plans to decarbonize? What's your view about the amount of clean power that we're going to need in the country to support decarbonization? And where's that power going to come from? I don't think that I think there have been some in the government who've been doing it. I mentioned Jonathan Wilkinson before, but I don't think that across the government there has been much effort to really

prosecute that case and challenge the Conservatives to explain their lack of policies in that area. And now I think the Liberals have got themselves in a situation where they've made carbon price seem like it's amendable based on circumstances, which I think is not a great signal to send if you want businesses to say, the thing that you can count on with Canada is that it's not going to be that volatile from a public policy standpoint.

There's going to be some stability in certain policies in Canada. And investors like that. Investors want that sense of stability in the public policy that affects whether they open a mine or whether they want to build a factory or whether they want to do more business in Canada. And I think that liberals have raised some questions about a core policy in the last little bit, and they haven't probably done enough to force the conservatives to declare what they would

and what they wouldn't do as it relates to net zero and decarbonization. Fair enough. I think that's a good overview of where we are and the challenges that those who believe in net zero and want to see us get there are going to be glad to hear. It's a real economic question, I think. It's not principally now a climate question because I think that the politics of the climate change issue

are largely settled. I know there are people who will kind of howl at that assertion because they don't accept it. But the vast majority of people do. And so for a lot of people, the question is now is what economies are going to find the smartest path to that? And I think that's where the challenge is for the conservatives and how the liberals have to go after this issue.

Well, on that note, we're going to close it out for Smoke Mirrors and the Truth for this week. Good conversation, as always. Bruce will be back on Friday with Chantel for Good Talk. Tomorrow, it's your turn. So if you've got thoughts on any of this stuff, the Mansbridge podcast at gmail.com. Send it along. The Random Renter will be here as well. That's it for this week.

I'm Peter Mansbridge for Bruce Anderson. Thanks for listening. Talk to you again in 24 hours.