The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - The Binders Waiting For The Winner

Episode Date: April 28, 2025

Whoever wins will be greeted with binders prepared by the public service with briefings on every major issue facing the country.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You're just moments away from the latest episode of the bridge tonight. You get the result. Then what happens? We'll talk to Janice Stein about that coming right up. Are you excited? You got to be a little bit excited. It's election day in Canada. Now I know millions of you have already voted. You voted at the advance polls. But there are millions more still to come. And if you have a neighbor or friend who hasn't voted yet, encourage them to vote. Doesn't matter who they vote for at this point.

It's democracy in action. This is when you vote. This is when you take a stake in the future of your country. Convince your friends to get out there and vote, take part in this situation. Because it's important. It's consequential. You can't sit around next week and say who are these bums? Throw them out. If you didn't vote, this is your chance to have a say in the

future of the country. And I guess in some ways that's what we're gonna talk about today. I'll get to that in a minute with Janis Stein. A reminder though that Thursday is still gonna be your turn day. So by then obviously we'll know what the outcome is. And the question at that point now is very much what do you expect? What do you expect's gonna happen? And what do you want to happen with a new government and a new makeup of parliament?

It could be very different than the one we last saw. One, it could be a majority government. Two, the power of the third parties, the NDP and the Bloc Québécois, could be much diminished. So what's your sense of the landscape? You want to fight the old battles of the actual campaign, but your thoughts once again in 75 words or less of what happens now. All right? That's how we're going to kind of frame it, loosely frame the question for this week. So for Thursday's your turn, that's it. Your turn, your letters plus the random renderer, of course.

I'm sure he's going to have something to say, but whatever happens tonight. So 75 words or less, write to themansbridgepodcast.gmail.com. Have your answers in before 6 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday. Include your name, first and last name, and the location you are writing from. Those are the conditions, so please meet them, and you may end up hearing your letter read on air. We're getting more letters on air than we ever did before, ever since we instituted the 75 words or less. It's worked out really well. I know some of you get are getting your thoughts down and you're framing them within that 75 word thing.

Okay, that's it. Tomorrow morning, the plan at this point, the plan at this point, it may change. The plan at this point will be smoke mirrors and the truth, a special day after the election issue. At this moment, it'll probably just be Bruce. Fred is up to his eyeballs in commitments to various news organizations all through today, tonight, and very early tomorrow morning. So he's going to be bagged. So he's gonna be bagged. So that's the plan at this point. We'll see how that turns out.

But there will definitely be a smoke mirrors in the truth tomorrow, one way or the other. Okay. Wednesday will be an encore edition, but given this week, I'm not sure what that may be. We'll think about it. Thursday, your turn is just explained and Friday, end of the week, there'll be lots for Rob Russo and Chantel Lebert with Good Talk, another record. Good Talk over this past weekend, huge numbers on both the podcast, the regular podcast, the serious exam edition here on channel 167 Canada Talks, and then on our

YouTube channel. Last time I looked, it was like 150,000, which is huge. I tell you, it's, you know, it's nothing fancy our YouTube channel, but 150,000 there are television shows that don't get that. Don't get anywhere near that. Anyway, enough bragging. Let's get on with the program. Janice Stein is the director of the monk school at the University of Toronto. And Janice has been an advisor to governments of all political stripes and not just in this country. And as you know, from listening to this program for the last couple of years, she's constantly traveling, adding to her knowledge and her contactless around the world. She's amazing. Where she gets all the energy from, I do not know, but

she does get it. And then she shares her knowledge with us. And as we've often said, and as she's often said, you know, I was going to agree with her. That's okay. Makes us think. And this will make you think because this will give you, at least for some of you, an idea of what happens in the prime minister's office and in the government of Canada, whoever's there, it'll give you a sense of what happens as of tomorrow morning when we know the results. So listen up, here we go, our Monday episode of The Bridge with our regular Monday guest,

Dr. Janice Stein. All right, Janice, you know, no matter who ends up winning today, All right, Janice, you know, no matter who ends up winning today, the new prime minister, because it will be a new prime minister. I mean, if it's Poliev, it's first time. If it's Carney, it's not the first time, but it's really the first time, you know, after just a couple of months and he's been campaigning the whole time. So in terms of international affairs, in terms of foreign affairs, in terms of being prepared for that element of what's going to be on his desk. What happens? What happens with the new prime minister? How does he deal with that? And who is there to help him?

So this process of getting a new prime minister ready starts months before the election. prime minister ready starts months before the election. There's usually a sense among the senior civil servants when an election is coming and they will start six months before Peter, the clerk who's our most senior civil servant, the clerk of the privy council and the privy council office is what reports the Prime Minister. But every deputy in the government as well, right across all the ministries, commissions what they call transition box, and they're binders. Three ring binders, like we all remember from school, and you can fold these three whole pages. This is the age of advanced technology, but there they are binders and they're classified and they provide briefs on every issue in

that file that the prime minister might want to know about. There are a lot of work. They actually take over the federal civil service for the months preceding an election. That's what they work on. Do you want to take that home at night to read for fun? You do not. This is not best-selling fiction. I can tell you it's not exciting. And if anything, part of it is

it's so bulky that you wonder sometimes how carefully ministers and prime ministers read that. Whoever the prime minister is, whichever man it is, he's going to get a binder, a big transition binder on Monday morning that has been prepared for that person. The fact that one of them has been prime minister for eight weeks doesn't really matter because he was in office for one week. And then as soon as the election rate was dropped, all politics stops. The government can't do anything. They can't initiate any new actions. So they'll update these transition binders, but nothing of consequence will have happened during this whole election period. So the first job for the prime minister is to read that transition binder. Well, let me ask about that. Are we talking about briefings in the sense of this is the

background to the issue, you know, say it's Ukraine. Here's the background that Canada's had involved in this particular issue, or is it a briefing that includes recommendations as to what should happen? So it's definitely the first, here's where we are in Ukraine. And by the way, we have Canadian Forces personnel deployed in Latvia as part of our NATO commitment that was a result of the war and here are our responsibilities. And then what it will do is two other things, Peter. It will say what's likely to come up in the near-term horizon because some decisions are predictable. You have to renew your commitment too. And then it doesn't make

recommendations, but it outlines options or choices that you may have to make. Because the recommendations will come only after a prime minister is fully briefed. And then the next stage is conversations that they have with their deputies and their senior officials. They literally sit down and their transition meetings and they get orally briefed on what they think is the most important thing and what the choices are in front of them. And then either a prime minister says, here's what I'm doing, because this is an issue that they ran on, that they feel very strongly about. They'll listen to the briefing, but they know what they're

going to do anyway. Or they'll ask the senior people in the room, what's your advice? What's your best advice? And then there'll be a recommendation. Will they, in preparing these books, take into account what the potential prime ministers have said about the particular issue in the past? Yes, they have to. What the prime minister has said, and most recently what the prime minister has said during election campaign, what the

platform is. But that's not binding. Because it's in your party platform, frankly, doesn't as funny as that's going to sound to listeners, because it's a platform commitment, doesn't mean you're actually going to do it. And part of the reason you're not going to do it is because when you read these transition blinders, especially if you don't have a lot of experience, there could be a whole bunch of stuff that you've never thought about.

And so you pull back because you're getting expert advice. And I think we both can count many times that a platform said one thing and a prime minister goes and does something else, take electoral reform by the federal government. There was a strong platform given, but life got more complicated once they were inside government. So how many people are involved in this process and what level are they at? So it depends on the prime minister, right? After, once they become prime minister, right? After, once they become prime minister, they are certainly going to

meet with their deputy, the clerk. We should just explain that. The clerk being the clerk of the Privy Council, who is, you know, some people describe as the highest unelected person in government, because they're basically responsible for everything. And they're, they're, they're senior to all the deputy ministers, all the other top bureaucrats. Not only do they senior to every other deputy Peter, but they choose the deputies, believe it or not.

So you might think that if you're a minister of foreign affairs, you put up your hand and you say, I would like to work with X. I have a lot of regard for her. Doesn't work that way. The clerk tells you who your deputy is going to be. In this case, it's a man right now, John Hannaford. He might take into account what a minister asks for, but fundamentally it's the clerk who appoints every senior deputy across the government. So the clerk is a really powerful position and supports the prime minister. Reports to the prime minister, supports to the prime minister. That is going to be the closest professional relationship that the prime minister will have.

And that's why prime ministers often change clerks because they want somebody that they have confidence in that they can and there's personal dynamics that always go into this. Who do I think I can work with? Well, who doesn't bug me? Because there's going to be a lot of hours and hours together and each person has to trust the other, frankly, in these relationships. Who's got the most power? Obviously, the new prime minister will have the most power, and then the clerk is after that. But within the bureaucracy, where does the power exist on international affairs, on foreign affairs? Is it just the foreign affairs department, or does it go beyond that? Well, it's changed so much in the last 20,

25 years that I always say it's hard any longer to separate domestic affairs from foreign affairs. What's not international today? Foreign investment is international. Tariffs and trade is international. Climate is international. Energy and natural resources is international. Even indigenous peoples, we know in our indigenous brief there there is a detailed discussion of certain polar relations among Indigenous peoples. So you have to have an understanding of Australian policy, Danish policy, Norwegian policy, Greenland. So there are international dimensions now literally across all our big ministries. But Foreign Affairs has, by far, it's not a large

bureaucracy. It's small in size in comparison to other departments, but it has three principal wings, foreign policy. What do we do about this issue generally? Trade and our most experienced trade negotiators are in the Department of Foreign Affairs. And I will tell you, Peter, they're the best in the world. It's amazing how good these people are. And if somebody listening to us doesn't believe me, when the British government decided that Brexit was going to happen, a mother country reached out to Ottawa and said, can you send your best people over to brief us on how trade negotiations go? That's how good Canadians are. We don't say that probably often enough, but so when there's a good story

we should tell it. And then there's eight, which we used to have an independent agency, eight agencies, CEDA, and is now part of the department of foreign affairs. So they are really, they have the daily operational responsibilities. So for example, if the prime minister wants to talk about what are we going to do? What are our big priorities going to be in foreign affairs for the next two years? Who would he put in the room? Well, every Canadian prime minister that we've ever known has run the Canada US file. And it's inconceivable in the present world that that would not happen. But beyond that,

well, do we want to tighten our partnership with Europe, for example? So you'd have the deputy in the room, but you'd also have the head of the Europe desk inside foreign affairs, they're closest to it. And it's really interesting. They brief the prime minister directly. It's not, doesn't go through the foreign minister. They get the chance 15 minutes to brief the prime minister directly. If it's Ukraine, I would imagine that would be a meeting.

Foreign affairs minister, defense minister, their deputies, but then go down a level to get the people who had operational responsibility and are closest to the issue. The two men who could be prime minister after today is over. Well after they're sworn in, whoever wins. The two men are both very strong-willed people. They have a point of view and I'm not sure how easily either one of them gives that up. How difficult can that make it in this kind of arrangement where so much is working its way up through the system

to get to the top? You know, it's really challenging. You know, the creed of the public service, kind of the model is you tell truth to power. is you tell truth to power. You, if you're not giving your leader unvarnished truth, whether they want to hear it or they don't want to hear it, you are failing in your responsibilities. And I've known many of our senior public service,

they really take that seriously. The best of them will walk in, they're always polite, but they will say, Mr. Prime Minister, they might say, Mr. Prime Minister, I know you don't want to hear this, or this is not what you expect me to say, but here's what you need to know. Then it's up to the prime minister. How patient is that prime minister? Generally speaking, no matter how strong will the prime minister is, they can't know everything but everything. They just can't. And even the things they feel very strongly about, there's details, there's complexity

that really matter. So it's a virtue of a prime minister, if they're patient, and they can hear somebody out who disagrees with them. Because if they don't do that, Peter, there's a subtle chill, right? It gets tougher to summon up your courage and walk in and say something you know that he doesn't want to hear. And ultimately, that's when prime ministers make big in and say something you know that he doesn't want to hear and ultimately that's when prime ministers make big mistakes when they're not hearing what

could go wrong. Somebody's only telling him what could go right and they haven't really been forced to consider what could go wrong. That's when they get into trouble. Who ultimately who shapes whom in this relationship between a prime minister and his senior public service? Is it the prime minister shaping the public service that he wants or is it the public service having enough influence that it, I don't want to say shapes the prime minister, but influences the prime minister in a direction that he may not have been thinking. We've seen it all in Canada, okay, frankly.

When there's a really good, trusting relationship, when the clerk and the prime minister really respect each other. You start with the prime minister's priorities. That's the obligation of the senior public service. And you're, you know, I've heard them say, we don't run, we don't put it all on the line. They ran, they're elected, their priorities shape policy. Our job is to make sure that they're getting the best information about how to execute on the priorities that are important to them. So clearly the political priorities shape what happens. So that's the theory. Okay. The practice is there's an ongoing conversation and prime minister, good prime ministers

are good listeners. They really are. And when they hear something, they adjust, they change. And that's so then it's mutual. They're each shaping each other. That's when it's really working well. I've also seen prime ministers lose confidence in the bureaucracy in a department, for example, and in private just throw up their hands, say, I can't get anything out of that department and move outside and pull in people that they like

and trust because they frankly just give up. That's not a good situation when it happens. It's demoralizing for the senior and for the deputy in that department, for the senior bureaucracy in that department. And you don't get that challenge function, which is fundamentally the response to the senior civil service. There is a story about Ottawa Peter

that people have been telling for, actually it goes back 20 years, but people argue very strongly now that it is more pronounced, that the senior civil service doesn't have what we call policy chops anymore. It's not the source of new innovative policy ideas. That's coming from outside the government now. It's coming from think tanks, coming from universities. Some of it's coming from the private sector when it works well. I think there is a difference. I think that has declined. So there's a bit of a spiral here where prime ministers have had less respect for some of the key departments as a result. These people feel it, don't try as hard and frankly, get pissed off. And by the way, I mean, there's one other thing we should say, and you know

this too, boy, you have to be careful if you're a prime minister with a bureaucracy, because if you make it clear that you don't like them, they will not like you back. And boy, do they have tools at their disposal from leaks. And we've witnessed some of that just in the last couple of years, especially on the security file. It's been unreal. It's been unreal. And it's directed against ministers, and it's directed against prime ministers, and that's when it's all gone back. Yeah. Well, let me ask you this and it's related

to what you've just been saying. And you're in some ways in the perfect position to answer this question, yet for you it's the most difficult to talk about because you have and have proven to have had great relationships with governments of both political stripes of the two main parties and their leaders and prime ministers. And you have great relationships

from within inside the bureaucracy. The question is this, and I'll, you know, see whether you want to answer it or not. But when you go back to the kind of the 50s and the 60s, Canada's public service was known kind of around the world as one of the top public services in the world, whether it was on foreign affairs or domestic affairs. These were dedicated public servants, civil servants who did the job for the government of the day, but for the people of the day.

Then it's kind of started to slide in the 70s and 80s, and then we've been through these different periods that you just talked about a few moments ago in the last 20, 30 years, where there have been open questions about just how good Canada's public service is anymore and what reform is needed if that's what the answer is here. You know, what is your sense at this point as a new government arrives on scene, whoever it is, at a consequential time for the country

with big changes possible that are going to happen on the economy, on the international front, on the trade front, all of this, in terms of the relationship that will be needed to effectively pull this off? Is the public service of this day capable of doing that? That is a tough one. Um, I think some, don't let me be too cautious here. Peter push me. Uh, okay. Um, I think some changes have to happen. First of all, one of the big things we have not talked about is the political staff that prime ministers bring with them and then ministers bring with them. So the political staff, except for the chief of staff. He's usually more experienced, you hope. And the senior policy advisor, whom you also hope, has seen several movies before. The political

staffers are young people in their late 20s who are given enormous responsibilities. They're supporters of the prime minister. People know them. And they have access to their minister or the prime minister, their next door or down the hall. And their power has grown enormously over the last 15 years. It's really, it was 200 Harper. It's even was more true even under Trudeau. And so, I've seen where a minister has to clear their speech with a political staff in a PMO.

You know, it's the power of the prime minister's office that has grown enormously. And they don't like that very much, frankly, when you're sending, when you want to make a speech and you're administering your own right, it goes past your own deputy, past your own political staff, and then it goes to the PMO and to the CISERN, comes back and there are three or four different versions of it. I think that's one of the power of the prime minister's office has to be pulled back a little bit if we're going to enable. It's too centralized and it's centralized around this dreaded world called comms, which is communications.

It's not, it's partly about policy, but it's so much about the way it's communicated that that takes over almost, except in a crisis of the coin that we have been living through. I think it's in the interest of the next prime minister to pull that back a little and give ministers and their deputies more scope. The last prime minister who really did that well was Jean-Claude Tint. He really got it. He let his ministers be ministers and they were very good at it, but that's a very long time ago.

The second thing I would say, and is civil service too large, it's too big. So 15 years ago, you needed something signed off, five signatures, now 18, because there's all those layers. So every time there's a problem and that department couldn't deliver, get new people. Create another this, create another that. And what you have now is a civil service that is slowed down, frankly. So I do think there has to be reform. I really do. There's not that same agility in policy that made the Canadian public service famous. Okay, I've got one more question, but I'm going to take our break right now and come

back with that question. And welcome back, final segment. Can I have one comment which our listeners might think about? We've all watched Doge, that apartment of government efficiency under Elon Musk and a bunch of young folks that he brought in, right? Wow, Peter, I will just say this, the closer you look at this, the more troubling that story is. That chainsaw is everything you should not do in a public service. You have to figure out what you want your public service to do and then work back from

the mission or the goal and see where it's too thick and it's too cumbersome and you could slim it down. And where you really need the best people and you have to figure out who the best people are. They went at this, frankly, with an axe. The damage that's been done inside is incomparable. It could take a decade to rebuild some of those core capabilities in the United States. So as we move into a period where I believe no matter who is the Prime Minister, we are going to make significant changes in our public service, it is we got a break that we watched the wrecking ball south of the border. And it's a cautionary tale about what not to do in Canada

to either Prime Minister regardless of who it is. Okay, um, I'm glad you made that point. I do still need to say you're listening to SiriusXM Channel 167 Canada Talks. You're listening to our Monday episode, which is of course, Dr. Janice Stein from the Munk School at the University of Toronto. You're also listening to this on your favorite podcast platform. So welcome in. Um, let me make the, uh, let me get to that last question. Uh, and I'll preface it with this, you know, you talked about how the

Cretchend government was perhaps the last one that had this relationship with, with the public service the public service down pretty well. The interesting thing, I mean, you've got to go back in the history books to see where there was this kind of melding of a public servant into a political servant. You got to go back, what, to the 50s, to Lester Pearson, who was, you know, a senior official in the foreign affairs department, you know, won the Nobel Prize, Peace Prize for his work on the Suez problem. In some ways, if it ends up being Carney, you know, Carney will be the first one since Pearson who have come out of a, and correct

me if I'm wrong, a senior public service role. I mean, he was governor at the Bank of Canada, which was kind of like deputy minister. Yeah. Before that, don't forget, and we forget this about Mark Carney, he was a senior official in the Department of Finance. Exactly. Right? Yeah. He was the deputy minister of finance. Exactly. Right? Yeah.

He was a Deputy Minister of Finance, wasn't he? Or an Assistant Deputy Minister. Or just below. One or the other. Assistant Deputy Minister. You know, he has a better and this nonpartisan factual statement. He has a better understanding of how the government works than almost anybody since Lester Pearson. None of those successors were ever inside government.

And he was in a pretty important department, finance. And then of course ran two big bureaucracies, one the Bank of Canada and then the other the Bank of England. So this is somebody who brings a lot of detailed knowledge about how government works. Your point about too much power in the hands of the PMO has been a constant basically for the last 50 years with that, you know, a bit of an interruption during the Kraytchan years. But it was also one thing that most prime ministers come into office and say, it's not going to be that way with me. And then of course, it turns into that. And it's partly because of that staffing issue around them. They take a lot of control away from

where perhaps you can argue that it should be placed. But we're going to find out how this all plays out in a short while. I don't think this, whoever wins, this is not going to be a government that kind of sits by and does the normal sort of Canada in the summer thing. I think they're going to hit the ground running. There's lots to try and achieve on so many different fronts that I think we're going to have a good idea, whoever the government is, of the kind of direction they're taking and they're giving once they take office. Would you agree with that? I think it's going to be slower than you think, Peter. First of all, I think it's going to be slower than you think, Peter. Okay? Okay. First of all, I think it's going to be slower than you think. And why do I say that? First of all, the G7 is in Kananaskis in Alberta,

and the prime minister has to focus on that, not much time, six weeks, and they're going to be busy getting ready for that. Again, they've done the transition work, but there's still work. Secondly, they've done the transition work, but they're still worked. Secondly, and it may differ here, I think Pierre Pauly have probably thought more about a cabinet than Mark Carney because he had no time. He had to form his first cabinet in a week, been on the campaign trail. He's going to probably take a little longer to choose his cabinet. And that takes

us till the middle of June, frankly, by the time the G7 is over. That doesn't mean there won't be teams working on big initiatives, but it's conceivable that it'll take, that the summer might be the summer with a whole bunch of announcements about what's once the cabinet's up and running, about what's coming in the fall. If it's Pierre Poliev, these are all new ministers. They've got to learn, right? That takes time. If it's Carney, there may be different people in some ministries than we currently have. I would expect he would make some big changes to his cabinet because this really is his, not his predecessors.

So I think it'll be, we know that there, because it's public, we know that the election is today. We know the first meeting with Donald Trump's team on trade is Friday, which is remarkably fast. And we don't want to think about Donald Trump. He likes to get stuff done in two months, but there are no records so far that he's able to do that. I would bet that we slow walk that file. We probably don't want to be the first country to do a trade deal with the president of the

United States. We might be better off being third or fourth in line. Let the Japanese go first, but South Koreans and a little bit of a sobering up effect there. So I wouldn't be surprised if the pace is a little lower than this crazy pace that we've been living through suggests. Okay. Well, all I know for sure then is that somewhere tonight

in Ottawa, there are a bunch of binders lined up. Yes. Ready to hit the desk of the new prime minister. 8 a.m. 8 a.m. tomorrow. Okay. Thanks for this, Janice.

It's been a great conversation and an important one to have today. Give some people something to think about as they make their final decisions if they haven't already. Thanks Janice. Your welcome. Dr. Janice Stein from the Munk School at the University of Toronto with her regular Monday conversation with me and I love these conversations. I learn stuff in them every week. And I hope you do as well. You know, I had to think about what to do today because there's this thing about election day.

You don't want to get into a conversation that kind of leads you into trying to predict what's gonna happen or suggest to your audience that you think you know something about what might happen, while many people still haven't voted yet. And this is a day to don't be influenced like that. So, you know, Janice and I talked over the weekend about, you know, what can we talk about? And we came up with this, because I think this is something I mean as I said you know I've been covering federal politics for you know like 50

years and yet there are all kinds of things I learned in that conversation that I didn't know I didn't know before and so hopefully you did as well about the kind of things that are going on in preparation for whoever may win today and how soon they're gonna be ready. They're probably ready already. They're sitting on those three ring binders and they're ready for presentation tomorrow morning to whoever the winner is, to whoever the winner is and that person's team. So there you go. Okay, you know, earlier when I talked about the question for your turn this week, you know, I was kind of rambling. I mean, I think all the suggestions I made are right. But basically what it comes down to is what's your reaction tomorrow when you wake up or late tonight before you go to bed and

you know the result what's your reaction what's your basic reaction to what's happened that the decision the country has made what's your decision what's your reaction to that? That's kind of the question. So I don't expect many of you will write till tomorrow. So the flood of mail that I get on Mondays is not going to happen because if you write today during the day, you obviously don't know what the result is. So those won't count.

So think about it tonight, right tomorrow, 75 words or less, the Mansbridge podcast at gmail.com. Have it in before 6 p.m. Wednesday night. Include your name and the location you're writing from. And I look forward to seeing what you have to say. All right. Today's going gonna be a long day. Enjoy the coverage tonight. We'll talk tomorrow morning with a special smoke mirrors and the truth.

That's tomorrow right here on the bridge. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you again in almost 24 hours.