The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Ten Years of Trudeau -- Will There Be Eleven?

Episode Date: April 14, 2023

It was ten years ago this month that Justin Trudeau became leader of the Liberal Party of Canada.  He's been prime minister for almost eight of those years.  Is it time to go or is there still "gas in the tank"? Chantal and Bruce have their thoughts on the meaning of the anniversary, plus some comments on Pierre Poilievre's latest attack moment with the media.

Are you ready for Good Talk? And hello there, Peter Vansbridge along with Chantelle Hebert and Bruce Anderson. I can tell you're ready. You're ready for Good Talk. And Good Talk this week, we're going to start off on a subject, I don't know know some people might say we've done this one to death over the last couple of years but it keeps coming up and it's one of the most common questions i'm asked whether it's in person or whether it's in emails it's what's justin trudeau gonna do is he gonna can he win again is he he going to run again? Should he run again? It's a common question.

And I know we, as I said, we've done this more than a few times, and some of us are on record, like Chantel again last week. She's on record. She's firm. She's not collapsing. She knows. He's staying. He's going for another election.

She's never going to change your mind. That's locked in. Chantel Hebert. Well, the one thing I learned doing what I do is if you're going to make a call and you want it to be credible, stick with it until you're proven wrong. Otherwise, you can't ever be wrong because you will have said one and the other. I know. Listen, I don't blame you. I just want to see you wrong once. You know, we'll just take it. Well, I'm sure you will. I'm not saying necessarily on this. But yes, there is no doubt that if we keep on doing this, you will find.

Wait, no, but I've got a list of four times that she's been wrong. Have I not? I mean, I didn't think when Stephen Harper became leader of the Canadian Alliance, I didn't believe that he would ever become prime minister. I changed my mind over the next three years. But at first I thought this guy from the Reform Party, how the hell would he ever do well in Quebec? Then in 2006, he got 25 percent of the vote. So it's not the question isn't whether you're right. It's whether you keep on looking for signs that you're wrong and are able to change your mind rather than just bury all your wrong calls

and learn nothing from all those mistakes you make. All right. Let's back this one up on Justin Trudeau for starters because this is the 10th anniversary, right? Since he became leader of the Liberal Party. And when he did 10 years ago, I'd suggest that most people thought of him and talked of him in terms of son off. Right? When they were talking about Justin Trudeau 10 years ago.

Today, it's a much different story. Obviously he's made a name for himself, good and bad, on various subjects and issues over the years. He's been the prime minister. He's led three governments. And the question becomes not how different is he from when he came in because everybody changes, but is the time time up we've watched other leaders say you know i'm out of gas the tank's empty it's time to go we've seen that in a couple of different places in the world some of them uh you know colleagues of uh justin trudeau there's no sign from him

at least directly that uh he's a run out of gas. He keeps saying, I'm in it. I'm in it. He said it again recently, although we all agree he can't say anything else. As long as he's prime minister, he can't say, well, I'm probably going to quit. But what is our assumption here about the future for Justin Trudeau. Has the 10-year clock on his leadership, you know, a little more than seven, into the eighth year of his prime ministership, is the clock running down? Now, I'm going to let Bruce start this week.

See what he has to say. Well, I don't think, well, the clock for all of us inevitably is running down. If we take an Uber kind of approach to that question, is there a day upon which he will no longer be prime minister? I can guarantee that there is. Whether or not that is at the hand of voters in the next election, I think, is still an unknown. Whether or not he decides finally and finally that he will run in the next election, I don't think is a certainty. I think that it's still more likely than not. It's still the case that his party feels enough affection and support for him that that would be their preference. It's still the case that the point that Chantal has made regularly, that it's hard to imagine the Liberals in Quebec are doing as well in Quebec with another leader.

And so there are, you know, there are reasonable arguments and pieces of evidence to suggest that he stays on and that he will be competitive in that election. On the other hand, if one wanted to kind of analyze the reasons why maybe it's time for him to think that the string is running out. I tend to think of looking at voting intention data right now is looking at my TV screen before I turn the TV on. There's not much happening. People aren't paying that much attention other than the roughly one third who vote in every election and generally vote for exactly the same party. It's that next third who vote, but who compare and contrast. And for most of those people, most weeks, their TV is not tuned to politics. I don't think that we know exactly how Justin Trudeau's opponent will campaign, whether he'll be effective or not.

I've seen days where I thought absolutely effective, delivering messages about powerful paychecks and fixing the health care system and finally getting some affordable housing for young people. And then I've seen days when he's completely lacking in gravitas and his tone and demeanor is the kind of thing that likely will turn people off. I don't know, come election time, what kind of Pierre Palliev we're going to see. And on the liberal side, I see days where Justin Trudeau has flashes of brilliance. The less packaged he is, the more effective he is. But he's been subjected to a few years of pretty intense packaging. And the nature of the packaging of him is that his reflex is so

much oriented towards, I know you want to talk about other things, but I want to talk to you about my social justice agenda. This is a huge challenge for the government. They keep on thinking they need to talk more about economic issues and bread and butter issues and the price of groceries. But they keep on flexing back to that social justice agenda. And I'm not saying that as someone who's uncomfortable with their social justice agenda. I'm just commenting on the politics of always seeming that you want to talk about that to people who are, we get that you have that agenda and we mostly support it, but could we talk about other day to day concerns?

So I think there's a lot to play for and a lot of unknowns, to be honest. Chantal. First question, is he going to run? I can see scenarios where he would decide not to run. I can see the potential for internal crises within the government between now and whenever that election comes that would, in the end, cause really bad things to happen and Justin Trudeau to reconsider. I also think that despite what you said about my certainty that he was going to run, that if Pierre Poilievre had not become conservative leader, Justin Trudeau would probably be contemplating

transition and retirement at this point, that he would have felt that leaving his party to a successor, but also leaving the country to a conservative leader like Jean Charest, to name him, or even Aaron O'Toole, were he still around, was okay. That, you know, Aaron O'Toole had started to bring, for instance, on climate, started to bring the conservative party under the larger tent of addressing climate change, carbon pricing, etc. Jean Chaguet would have done that, too, on indigenous reconciliation. There is no doubt both men would have felt comfortable, I think, leaving it to a successor to either keep

the party in power or to see one of these two men become prime minister at the head of a conservative government. I think that Pierre Poiliev's victory and the style of it, and his style since then, have made Justin Trudeau want to stick around to fight him. And that Justin Trudeau, it has energized him in some ways, but it has also convinced him that he's the better person to beat Pierre Poiliev. Not that that is a judgment on his cabinet, on his part, as in they're all no good. But to Bruce's point, it does make the liberals and the prime minister look evasive rather than communicative when they constantly take questions, set them aside, and say, let's talk about our justice, our social justice agenda. It no longer looks aspirational. It just looks like you want to avoid the tough questions that come up on a daily basis. And that is ready to continue to meet the challenges that are coming the government's way and the way that they need to do.

I know that over the past few months, they have underestimated the issues, reacted poorly and made issues worse, mismanaged a lot of issues. And that goes directly to the PMO. I'm not talking about ministers not doing their jobs here, but for the most part, they have. And that is a sign of fatigue that could become a huge issue for the prime minister, but also for the country if he is reelected, that he would bring a tired, intellectually tired, naturally tired crew back at the head of the government. The other question I would have is, have the liberals run out of an agenda, of a vision for where they would want to take the country beyond staying in power to keep Pierre Poiliev out of office.

And I say that because I've been watching since the budget, Justin Trudeau and others in the Liberal Party embraced dental care as if they had been dreaming of it for all of their lifetimes, and it come to office to grant this to Canadians when it never even made a platform program. It's totally a new Democrat idea. It's all good. I mean, if you like dental care and you think the NDP should have a role, you can say this is great. But it also sends a signal that we are now out of fresh ideas.

And thank God we have a partner to give us something to go on. And that also does not go the way of, do you want four more years of people who are intellectually tired, not terribly reactive, and very repetitive in the message that increasingly comes across as evasive to Canadians. Wow. That's quite a bit from both of you. Chantal, the main argument you seem to be putting forward is that this guy wants to run again because he wants to stop Pelliev. It's like two boxers in a ring, and we've seen him on that situation before. It isn't about necessarily, well, I guess in some way it's about policy because he's so in disagreement with the policies that Paulieva's putting forward.

But it's almost more of a personal thing than it is a political thing as such. And that's interesting. The other thing that's interesting is because it addresses this question about what's left in the tank it's not about one guy anymore it's about that group at least the way you're describing it um you know around him in the prime minister's office of various senior advisors that they're basically well some of the key ones are the same that he's had in there all along. Katie Telford, who's speaking as we speak at a parliamentary committee today. I mean, I think somebody, I read somewhere that she's been the chief of staff of a prime minister longer than any other chief of staff has ever been for a prime minister in Canada.

And, you know, it's a relatively new position in terms of the, you know, history of the country. But nevertheless, she's been there a long time. And we've witnessed in other leaders of both parties that they like to shuffle a deck every once in a while to get those kind of ideas flowing, those juices flowing, inside a prime minister's office, a leader's office, in terms of what they're going to push forward

in addressing the concerns of the country. So I find what both of you are saying, well, as I always do, very interesting. I'm not sure it leads us forward to where this is all going to end up. Bruce? Well, if I can just make a comparison, you're summing up what I said. Justin Trudeau wants the state to win the election. That's the main goal is the liberals in government. Yes, of course, it's policy related, because that is how he preserves and continues to move forward some of the big items on this agenda.

Climate change at the top of that list, but not exclusively. But if you want to compare it to something, it is Stephen Harper's quest for a majority. Stephen Harper really wanted the conservatives to have a majority government. And eventually the conservatives to have a majority government. And eventually, the conservatives did achieve that goal. But it seemed that once that mountain was climbed, there was nowhere else that the government really wanted to go. When you look at the last term of Stephen Harper, you think, why did you want a majority so much? And what did you do with it? And the answer is, not very much at all. Which is a question that it is fair to ask about the liberals winning another government, majority or minority. I'm not saying it would play out the same way. Jean Chetien at the end

did things, political financing, signing the Kyoto Accord, not going to Iraq, that were meaningful things, even as he was on the way out. So Pierre Trudeau, whether you agree with what he did or not, accomplished things in that very last term that have outlasted every government since then, mostly the patrician of the constitution. So I'm not saying you reelect the liberals and nothing happens for four years, but I do think there is a risk that that could happen. You're right about that. Yeah, sorry, Bruce. I was just going to say, I was thinking back to that early 80s government of Trudeau

and the things, because you quite correctly said, some worked, some didn't. The National Energy Program sure didn't work, and they're still paying the price for that in terms of legacy of the party. The world, what was it, a world peace tour? Oh, my God. Yes, I still remember that.

But you cannot say that this was a government that did nothing. Right. It was a big north-south victory. That's right. It was like Elton John's latest final, final, final. Really, this is the last. The Who's final tour. That I'm going to make.

Look, I think the point that Chantal was making about what is it that the Liberals are offering as an agenda is an incredibly important one, both in terms of rallying the rather fatigued cadres that they have in their party and in their government, who've been through a lot of things and just the normal kind of fatigue that sets in after being in office for a period of time and the instincts that it trains into you, which are, I think I wrote more like, you become more like administrators than people who are kind of imagining a better future and trying to think of ways to disrupt the status quo, which is what it is that voters are typically looking for when they tune and run up to an election. I don't think the liberals have figured out what it is that they want to fill that space with. And it seems some days, like at the center anyway, they haven't even started thinking about it. And I can see a number of things that they could focus on to some degree that are really important. Whether or not they can

be made politically advantageous or not is a separate question. But one of the ones that's on my mind is the effect of kind of disinformation and the sorts of communications that we see happening all around us in politics. And a couple of data points that I was looking at that we're going to publish next week, I think. 27% of Canadians agree that Justin Trudeau is a traitor to Canada. It's 51% among conservative voters. Now, we had a good conversation about the technical meaning of the term, and that's not what people are applying here. But 27% also agree that Canada has become a dictatorship under Trudeau. And that's 54% among conservative voters. When I look at those kinds of numbers, I don't just look at, I don't just see something that is the function

of pugilistic politics. I see the creeping effect of what the internet and the way that it distributes disinformation has done to people. And I think that's a huge issue for the future of the world. And it's the kind of thing that needs to be tackled more aggressively, not more sheepishly, which I think is sometimes the setting of the government now when it comes to even the legislative initiatives they've taken in that area. Others can say, look, there are lots of other things to worry about and focus on. But my view is to pick three. That last budget to me was really only about one thing. In addition to the dental agreement with the NDP. It was about clean energy and transition. Good, that's a good thing. But it was only about one

thing. And I don't know that that's all that much of an agenda, to be honest. And I think the last thing I would say is I'm testing these messages that Polyev is using. And one of the ones that resonates so well, including among the voters that the liberals need to win back or win, is this idea of just cap spending, cut waste and end inflationary taxes. If Pierre Polyev only says that every day and doesn't find himself kind of traipsing off

in the direction of let's crap on the CBC or what have you, if he only said that that he'd do better than what the liberals are doing with their messages right now and uh and that's because that message cuts across all regions different generations people with more money and people with less money okay i i've got to take a break um but i just want one last question before i do that break um this is what puzzles me about justin trudeau i heard him again this week saying But I just want one last question before I do that break. This is what puzzles me about Justin Trudeau.

I heard him again this week saying, you know, polarization in the country is a terrible thing. We've got to do something about it. He seems to be saying that at the same time as either he doesn't realize that part of that polarization is all about him, like him personally. I mean, we've talked about this before, but the kind of anger, hatred in some cases, of Justin Trudeau is unlike anything we've seen. And we've seen a few things over the years. But this is, you know, it's pretty bad out there right now. And it's not an insignificant number.

I know Bruce has talked about this before in terms of people who feel this way. But does he, of all the qualities the guy has, does he got a thick skin? Does he not see that out there? If you're asking that question, you could have asked it of jean christian brian moroni or stephen harper who at the same juncture were just as hated uh because that is really just as hated god no i know i listen they weren't popular i understand that the stuff the stuff about

stephen harper and by the way if you asked people, do you believe that we're running by a dictatorship under Harper, you would have had the same percentage saying yes, except they wouldn't have been conservatives, obviously. They would have been New Democrats. And if you would ask Quebecers, is Jean Chrétien a traitor? I suspect numbers on that would have been in at least the same category as Justin Trudeau. Actually, in Quebec, the person, the prime minister, who seems to elicit the least polarization that I've covered is Justin Trudeau. To the point where, and it's not because people plan to vote for him, but to the point where I went for another COVID shot this week. And the nurse who was giving the shot wanted to chat about politics. It's okay. And she said, I thought the question was really strange because I was never asked a question like that about another prime minister after 10 years.

Said, they don't seem to like Justin Trudeau out there. And by out there, she meant outside Quebec. And I thought, this is such a different question. I said, well, some people do and some people don't. I'm not going to go there, right? But yes, I totally get that people are saying terrible things about Justin Trudeau, more so outside Quebec than in Quebec. But I do not find that they are saying worse things about him than they said about Stephen Harper or Brian Mulroney, or I covered the tail end of Pierre Trudeau from Ontario. Or am I the only one who remembers David Peterson, liberal leader, saying I will never win a by-election in this province until that Trudeau albatross is not around my

neck anymore. This happened. It was real. It was on social media. So I don't know. We see the polarization more than we ever did because we are looking at social media. We didn't have access to people's hatred to the degree that we do but i am not convinced that any of those predecessors was as beloved as you guys seem to remember i don't think they were i don't think they were i don't think they were i'm trying to tease you into going crazy no i know peter wants to break and i'm gonna say let's do the break because i we're probably not on exactly the same page about this. Are we not?

I don't know. Finally, we have a coalition against her. We've got her. We've got her on the ropes. Yeah, right. We'll take a break while Bruce warms up in the bullpen. While you regroup. Back right after this and welcome back um you're listening to the bridge the friday edition good talk

chan telly bears in montreal bruce anderson is in ottawa i'm peter Mansbridge and we're having a real good chat up. Oh, we were. You're listening on Sirius XM channel 167 Canada Talks or on your favorite podcast platform or because it's Friday we are available on our YouTube channel. I should tell people that

we get a lot of comments on the YouTube channel and I have not figured out the technology to respond to some of them because some of them are bizarre. Some of them are great. Some of them are really good. Like, not necessarily good in the sense of us, but in terms of what they're talking about.

But other things are just crazy. Anyway, Bruce, you wanted to destroy Chantal's argument. Where do you go? I always enjoy Chantal's things always sucked kind of storyline because it makes me feel a little bit better about today to know that things always suck. And obviously, like with everything Chantal says, there's a lot of merit to it. And

I actually do remember the Trudeau, the latter Trudeau father years, and there was an awful lot of anger aimed at him. And I believe she's right about Mulroney. I don't know if Chrétien engendered that kind of animus. In Quebec, he did until the Iraq decision. And I heard you say in Quebec that people would have said bonjour and all of this sort of thing. But what's different about it now to me is, yes, we are more exposed to more people without any kind of parameters around the way that the disinformation that contributes to some of that hatred traffics. And when there wasn't the internet, the information that was trafficked was trafficked through professional journalistic channels in most cases. And so there were more safeguards against people becoming completely misinformed. So in addition to the numbers that I read about Trudeau the

dictator and Trudeau the traitor, it's 21% who think COVID vaccines have killed many people. And there's a correlation between those things, right? To me, it's the influence of disinformation and political animus together that is something new. And the second thing that's new is it translates into threats of violence more readily and more clearly. And I think that if I was Justin Trudeau, that would probably be the thing that would make me decide to leave office is the idea that there's danger out there. Not so much personally, but just the sense that what is going on is we've seen politicians experience that sense of anxiety about the threats to them. And you both, I'm sure more than me, I've seen people comment on social media at me in ways that are quite disconcerting. I've seen a lot more aimed at women journalists. And I don't think that's, I don't think that was there before. So I do think there are some things that are different and more worrisome and worthy of more effort.

But surely you wouldn't be recommending that I go back home and stop doing what I do in the face of a bunch of bullies, which is basically how Justin Trudeau must feel about all these threats, that you would be handing them a victory by saying, well, you know, I don't need this. So I'm just gonna shut up and go home. And it is something that people like me think about. And I've had many opportunities to think about over the years. And there are mornings when you say, I could just not do this. There are so many interesting things that I could be doing rather than look at this abuse. But I figure if people who are part of the national conversation, and I'm talking here about the prime minister, find that a reason to go. They are not going to be solving the problem in any way, shape or form. They will be empowering bullies to think that they can bully people out of

speaking out or being in politics. And that's damaging. Somewhere, somehow, not committed at war. We have never had a war on our territory, and we're all going to back off and become silent in the face of bullies, even if one of those bullies happens to be the leader of the official opposition. I don't think so. I don't think that's the point. I'm not suggesting that he should just throw in the towel and say they scared me. I am saying that it's not unreasonable to imagine that somebody who has been in office that long has endured as much kind of criticism and, you know, just the vagaries of the office. It's tiring. And at some point, especially if you've got children and family who are exposed to this, it's reasonable to imagine that you might ask yourself if you've

had enough, a belly full of it. And I wouldn't blame anybody for leaving for those kinds of reasons. And I wouldn't consider it an act of cowardice. So I think, you know, your point is well taken. We need to fight this. But it's also, I think, fair to say that people are entitled to feel fed up with it and to try to decide at some point they don't want any more. Except that, as far as I can see, Justin Trudeau is not showing many signs that he is tired of it, for one. And two, maybe power does use people up in ways that it did not in the past. But otherwise, this 10th anniversary does not make Justin Trudeau a particularly long-lasting party leader. Stephen Harper and Jean Chrétien were both leaders for 13 years, if you add in the Canadian Alliance leadership. His father was a liberal leader for 16 years. So I've been reading stuff this week that makes you feel as if being in office for 10 years is unprecedented as liberal leader,

not even in office. And that doesn't jive with anything that is pertaining to what the context of federal leadership has been in this country for the past five decades. It's kind of interesting. Plus, he is much younger than Jacques Chrétien, to name one, or his father at the same period. So he's hardly looking at his golden years at this point. Okay, let me ask just one last question on this. If, in fact, he suddenly decides to leave, there's no evidence that anybody's pawing at the ground to replace him, but I assume, and from what I've seen,

that there are more than a couple who are preparing for that possibility. Is that a fair assessment? Yes. And does that weigh, would that or should that weigh on him at all? No. No, that's normal. I think it's normal. We always sort sort of there's a tendency i don't say we always but there is a tendency to always feel like it's shocking that there's another generation of potential leaders who are thinking about becoming the leader and and it would be shocking if that

wasn't the case and it would be a problem if that wasn't the case. How it gets managed is all in the, you know, is all about who's got the skills and what's the internal dynamic. But we've seen this same movie over and over again, and we will always see it, I think. Well, you were saying, you know, we talked about the clock and time, and it's obvious to Liberal Party members, as it is, I think, to most of us, that Justin Trudeau probably has less years as Liberal leader ahead of him than behind him. No one really expects, well, we won't be doing this for his 20th anniversary, I think. But it's- Wait, no, I think I think. No, I think I will. Well, I think you will be monologuing while we grow vegetables in one form or another.

But still, nobody is thinking we're going to be having panels on the 20th anniversary of this liberal win at the leadership convention. Agreed. So if you're a liberal member, you're starting to look at the options and the alternatives. You know you're going to be picking a different leader sooner rather than later. Okay. Before we leave the Trudeau name, let's deal with the Trudeau Foundation story. Again, we've done this before, but we should mention it again because it's not been a good week on the Trudeau Foundation story.

It's the Pierre Trudeau Foundation, right? Justin Trudeau hasn't been involved, he says, in any way since he became leader of the Liberal Party. But nevertheless, it's been caught up in controversy over, in particular, one fairly significant donation of $200,000, which apparently never reached $200,000. They've been trying to give it back to whoever donated it. They're not sure. They can't figure it out yet. It appears to be from China, but not an individual,

quite possibly the government of China. But it's a mess, and of course it taints the Trudeau name in the process. But at the end of the day, how serious is this? How serious is it for Justin Trudeau? How serious is it for this government? I don't want to dwell too much more on this. As I said, we have done it a little bit, but nevertheless, it's a question on the day. Who wants it first?

Bruce. Yeah, look, I think that the latest, the Trudeau Foundation, I'm going to use the only golf metaphor that I'll use today, I promise. Is that in the management of issues as high profile as that, you might get a mulligan, but you'll only get one. And I think the Trudeau Foundation now is in a situation where there is very little trust that is likely to be granted on a good faith basis. And people are fully entitled to say, we need to open the lid on that to get to the bottom of it. Not because it's the most serious form of Chinese interference, but because there's been enough mismanagement, to be honest, about

the way that this story evolved from the foundation that people are entitled to be skeptical about what information might come next. And I say that with a lot of respect for the work of the organization and the people running it, and I don't know any of them to be bad or nefarious people. And it does look on the surface as though they weren't trying to do anything on behalf of China, but it also looks on the surface that they haven't managed the situation very well. And one is entitled to wonder why some of the choices that they made, they made. And then the other thing that occurs to me is that the latest revelations about the donation to the Trudeau Foundation really put the rapporteur, David, it's almost impossible to imagine that he could say in the wake of these revelations that we don't need a public inquiry.

So whether or not he was going to say that, if he said we don't need one, the ball would be back in the prime minister's court. And it would be very hard for him to take that recommendation and decide not to have one because his name and the foundation name and the questions that are out there are pretty high profile and pretty damaging unless he is able to bring them to heel somehow. Yeah, I think he actually said when he announced it that whatever David Johnson recommends on that front, he will accept it if he recommends a public inquiry. So then the question is though, but would he accept it now if Johnson said, we don't need a public inquiry? I don't know that he could, to be honest. I mean, without incurring a lot of political risk.

One of the ways to look at the appointment of Mr. Johnston was that the government obviously doesn't seem keen to have a public inquiry. There was no reason that Justin Trudeau could not have called one. His NDP allies and the House of Commons are calling for one. So ideally, it fell to Mr. Johnston, if he so found, to make the case for not having one and to make it more easy to sell to Canadians because it wouldn't have come from Justin Trudeau. I don't think that the recommendation not to have a public inquiry can be sold by David Johnston anymore. And that is Bruce's point. I think that it will only compound the problem and the impression of stonewalling if now Mr. Johnston were to say we should know all is good. That's not to say there aren't all kinds of options like a judicial review, etc., but

I also think that based on all that has happened this week and what it does to the credibility of the person appointed by the prime minister to make a recommendation, true or no fault of David Johnston himself, by the way, he was a governor general when that donation was made to the Trudeau Foundation. He wasn't at the table when questions were raised in the House of Commons way back in 2016. But having said that, the next question is, if we are going to have an inquiry of any kind, the opposition parties will be asking for the person appointed to be appointed by Parliament and not by the Prime Minister's office. And I think that call was reinforced by the events of this week. And the fact that not only did Justin Trudeau reach out to someone who was on the board of the Trudeau Foundation,

but that he also asked the former CEO of the Trudeau Foundation to report to the government on Chinese interference in the electoral process. The person who did that report is the person who was running the foundation when the donation was given. I've gone back to what was going on in 2015-16. Remember, we were in a new era of China-Canadian relations. Justin Trudeau had an overture to China agenda. It's not the same context as today. But when suddenly the Chinese want to give you money, when they have not in the past expressed any interest, you cannot just sit back and say,

this must be a coincidence that they finally discovered us when Justin Trudeau is prime minister. And when you are asked to write receipts, different names than the names on the check for tax charity purposes, you kind of should be asking yourselves all those questions. But in the House of Commons, for those who want to say no one asked questions before the Globe and Mail suddenly published this information recently. The conservative leader who was asking questions of the government on this was called Ronald Ambrose. So it goes back. And those questions were asked of the government and should have told people at the Trudeau Foundation that they should do more due diligence in 2016.

Here we are in 2023. I'm not sure how the Trudeau Foundation survives this, because they rely on people to serve on their board. Would you agree if they came to you this week? You might have agreed six months ago. But this week, he probably would have said, I'm not sure I want to go there. I'm not sure I want my name associated with this. And I think that's going to be a big problem to find non-liberals, non-aligned political people to agree to serve on the board of the Trudeau Foundation going forward. All right. We're going to leave it at that. I will add, because I know I'll end up getting the odd letter on this from people who haven't done their research, but Chantal has said before on this program and others and in her column that in the early days of the

foundation, she was- Before Justin Trudeau was a liberal leader. Right, and before any of this China stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And not as a board member, but as a mentor on the student relationship program that the foundation offers. So that should be noted. Okay, we're going to take our final break. And when we come back, we will find something to say about Pierre Poliev.

That's right after this all right final segment of a good talk for this week Chantel and Bruce are with us And the topic for the final segment, and we spent, you know, I don't know, 75, 80% of this program talking about Trudeau on the 10-year anniversary. For Pierre Polyev, he's not got to the first anniversary yet of his leadership of the Conservative Party, but he seems to be doing pretty well. He's leading in all the various polls and research studies. But he has a particular thing about journalists and the media. You know, some people say, oh, he's using the Trump playbook.

Well, not really. Like, Trump actually loves journalists. He spent most of his career trying to massage that relationship with journalists to get them to write things about him. It's not a great relationship right now, but he still has a relationship with the media. Pierre Poliev, not so much. And he has used the opportunity throughout his leadership campaign to attack,

especially the CBC, but not just the CBC. And again this week, just in the last couple of days, he went after a CP reporter, aggressively went after a CP reporter. We've discussed this before. Does this work? Is attacking the media, is that a good way to attract support out there? Some cases, obviously, it does. But whether it's a good strategy overall is a question mark. But Bruce, you go forward on this. We've got about five or six minutes left here. Yeah, look, I think that two things. First of all, I do think that in the era that we live in, it has become a little bit fashionable to kind of understand

that the way the public sees journalists has changed, I think a lot more because of the influence of opinion into reporting. And so that if a politician wants to try to make the case that journalists sound hypercritical, morally superior, expert on everything, there is an audience for that message that will feel a little bit dialed into it, will feel a bit kind of rewarded hearing that message. And I'm not saying that those are statements of fact, but I am saying they are statements that rally partisans and even sometimes soft partisans to a view that journalists don't have all of the answers.

And so in these exchanges that sometimes happen between politicians and journalists, there are some people who are cheering for the politician to be a bit pugilistic with the journalist, cheering for the journalist to be pugilistic. Setting that aside, I think that the challenge for Pierre Polyev is he looks like he wants to have a fight with journalism, not because it's an important fight, but it's because it's his chocolate. It's the thing that he likes to have as a guilty pleasure. You can almost see in his face that it is a thing that makes him happy if he can do it. And there's a condescension and an anger in the way that he manifests it. So it's not a light touch thing. It looks like a thing that he's a little bit addicted to.

And it is lacking the kind of serenity or whatever it is that people might look for in a prime minister. And if he keeps on doing it, I think it will cost him a lot more votes than it will earn him. That's my take on it. I watched that scrum, which took place in what is usually friendly territory, i.e. Edmonton, and not at the hands of the press gallery, but local media. And the conservatives always tend to think the press gallery is an axe to grind with Pierre Poiliev. Well, these journalists were not. The exchange with the CPU reporter was, I mean, it made Pierre Poiliev look like a bully,

basically telling a Canadian press reporter, doesn't your agency get a lot of business from the CBC? And we should ask the ethics commissioner if you agency get a lot of business from the CBC? And we should ask the ethics commissioner if you're in a conflict of interest, which is totally asinine. There is no factual basis for what he was saying, but he was avoiding a question that will keep coming back. And the question was very factual. Mr. Poiliev wants to wind down the CBC, but not Radio-Canada. He would have to change the Broadcasting Act. And the question was, are you really, would you really, as prime minister,

offer Canadians who are francophones a service that you would not offer their English counterparts? It's a legitimate question that will have to be answered at some point in the future. And instead, this happened. But in the bigger picture, because over the course of the next few minutes, when the issue of the day which was law and order came up, Mr. Poiliev managed to slag the mayors of Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver, Montreal, the NDP government of British Columbia, presumably the Liberal government of Newfoundland and Labrador. That's a lot of people in one, calling them all woke

politicians who were responsible for the increase in crimes. One, he was off message because he wanted to blame Justin Trudeau for all of it. But two, how many enemies do you need to make in one encounter with the press? Forget having a tense relationship with journalists. Two things. One, I don't think you can sustain a six-week campaign and find people who say, I feel comfortable with this guy with scrums that happen at that level. But two, I don't think it's journalists. I think that Pierre Poiliev can't handle pushback. He's always in the role of attack dog in the House of Commons.

He's very bad at pushback, at handling it, which is why he paid his way out of having a leadership debate during the leadership campaign. One of the debates, his team paid a fine to avoid having it happen. And that begs the question, how in the world will he perform on the leaders debate stage, where he will be getting pushback from Pierre Poilier, from Justin Trudeau, but also from Yves-François Blanchet, Jagmeet Singh, Elizabeth May, go down the list. If you have a leader whose skin is so thin

that he can only go in rabid attack mode whenever we go back, you may not come out of those leaders' debates looking like anything but someone who is auditioning permanently for opposition. Last minute, Bruce. Yeah, I think Chantal is absolutely right about his thin skin. And it shows when he's put in a situation where somebody is going to say something that annoys him,

he doesn't come off very well. And it is a cue for Justin Trudeau. I know that some of the people who've kind of guided him have always said, you know, stay out of the fray, you know, keep on the high ground, you're sunny ways. I think that Pierre Palliev is showing a bit of a glass jaw and that Justin Trudeau, if he wanted to animate more people to kind of look at him and understand the point

that he's got to make about Pierre Palliev, he should do more of it. We've seen a little bit, some clips on social media where he's doing that. And if I were him, just from a political standpoint, I'd do more of it. I'd take the fight to Polyev because of exactly what Chantal has said. Well, we could be a couple of years away from an election campaign, but that would, you know, debate nights are always fascinating. It's usually the focus is on the current leader, right?

Everybody attacks that current leader. But if somebody else is way out ahead in the polls, that can change on the night of a debate. If you wait until an election and a debate night to do all, there's a chance that it won't happen. And that's the risk that the liberals take in getting too high road on time. And don't forget to turn the debate. The enemy of Pierre Poilievre in Quebec is not just Justin Trudeau.

It's actually mostly Yves-François Blanchet. Exactly. Le Québécois. Okay. All right. We're going to leave it at that. Great discussion, as always. always good talk as we say thanks bruce thanks chantelle we'll see you again in a week i'm peter mansbridge guys thanks so much

for listening we'll talk to you again with the moore butts conversation on monday