The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - The Changing Mood In Ottawa

Episode Date: November 15, 2023

You only have to be away from Ottawa for a few weeks to sense things have changed.  Like the mood and the tone of the Parliament Hill community.  It seems the polls have had an impact on the feel of the place.  Bruce joins for SMT and there's lots to talk about.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. It's Wednesday. Bruce Anderson's here. That means smoke mirrors and the truth. We're coming right up. And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. Bruce Anderson's in Ottawa. You've actually been away for a couple of weeks, and I want to get a sense from you. First of all, how long have you lived in Ottawa? Oh, gee, you know, 40 years, maybe? Yeah, you weren't born there. You weren't born there, but you've been living there for decades.

And I spent about eight years in Toronto, but the rest of my life here. Yeah. Right. I, you know, I wasn't born in Ottawa, but I, my childhood was kind of in Ottawa and I went to school in Ottawa, at least as long as they would let me go to school. You're a bubble guy. It's fair. Yeah.

Yeah. So I've been in, but you know, and then I, then I went out west, lived in the west for 10 years. And now I'm in southern Ontario. But here's the reason for the question. As I said, you were away from Ottawa for a couple of weeks through this fall. And the thing I've always found about that city, I love that city. It's a great city. But it's pretty transparent when you're talking about the sort of the Parliament Hill crowd,

whether that's people who work on the Hill or work close to the Hill, whether they're in government or work for one of the parties. You can get a sense fairly quickly of the mood in that community. When things are up for the government of the day, when things are down, when, you know, all kinds of things can impact a mood. But I'm wondering, because this fall seems different to me than I've witnessed for a while, but during that period you were away, between when you left and when you came back, did you sense a difference in the mood, the tone of the place?

Not in the direction. The direction was kind of heading to where it is today, and it could continue to go in the same direction. But the intensity of some of the feelings, and in particular, I guess I would say a couple of things, Peter. One is that there's no question that conservatives in the town feel like they're headed towards a victory in the next election. And they're doing the work of preparing for what they would be like in government if they were elected in the next in the next election, which

is a good thing because you want them to think about that. You want them to develop policies, to have relationships with stakeholders, to kind of to help nurture the talent that they got in the front bench and to not be about politics all the time. Now, I can just imagine the letters that you're going to get about that paragraph that I just said there from people who think that I'm heaping praise on Pierre Polyev and the Conservatives. I'm not. I am, though, saying that compared to at many points in the last several years when the Conservatives didn't think that they were on the cusp of winning election. Now they do seem to be paying a fair bit of attention to some of the trickier policy issues and how to develop policy around them and not only doing harsh partisan stuff. That had been the direction that I sensed before I was away, and it's even more so now.

Second thing is the Liberals. The Liberals have, for the last year or so, been growing increasingly anxious about whether or not they're connecting with voters, whether they've got an agenda that is really resonant with voters, and whether in their leader they have somebody who's an effective communicator. I don't want to overstate that. I know that he has a lot of support in the caucus. I know that the majority of people who say that they're going to vote liberal still want him to lead. But you know what? Many times in the past, the level of support for a leader has been higher than it is for Justin Trudeau right now. And I think that those anxieties on the liberal side have intensified a little bit

in the last little while, in part because I think that as a group, they've been kind of saying, well, we need to fashion a clean agenda, set a new direction, establish a connection that's stronger with the public. And they've tried a few things to shuffle that kind of thing. Housing accelerator announcement, a carbon price change. And I think of those, the housing accelerator thing has been helpful, but I don't think the other two were. And I don't think that there's been anything else that the liberals could look at and say, if we just give this time, this is going to help us recover our position in the polls. So they're watching on the one hand, the clock tick down towards the next election,

and at the same time, wondering what it is going to be, if anything, that they can do to start to turn around what is a widening gap between them and the Conservatives in the horse race polling. And I know a lot of people don't care about horse race polling two years out from an election, but a 16-point gap, if you're an elected official, you have to care about it. And if you're not caring about it, well, I don't know what you're thinking is going to happen after the next election if you're one of those liberals whose seat is vulnerable. Well, one of the things about polling of late is that, I mean, how many polling operations are there in Canada? There are a lot. You know, there are quite a few different companies.

You know, some are given more credibility than others, but there are a lot. And the thing that I found interesting this fall is that they're almost all the same. We're in the same ballpark, especially in the last month or so. And it's that double digit lead and it's you know anywhere from uh you know 12 or 13 to what was the one there's one out today of abacus one that's around 16 um that's a huge lead you know i mean i i can't remember the last time we've seen that kind of a lead uh in canada for either of the parties uh we've seen it end up that way on Election Day, but in the run-up, man, that is a wide gap. And it clearly says something about the state of play out there right now.

The Abacus one that I've mentioned, I haven't done a deep dive on it, but I've looked a bit through it. And if you are a liberal, there isn't a single thing in there that you can say, well, this could be promising. This could show where we have a chance to come back. I mean, it's all bad. All bad. It's grim.

The regional breakdown is bad. The government performance is bad. The prime minister's performance is bad. I mean, it's all bad stuff. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It is effectively a memo from the public to the liberals saying, we're not happy yet. You know, if you want our support, you need to do some different things. Now, you know, one of the polls that the Leger won today talked about the thing that we had published the other day about how many people are saying that they're not necessarily disliking Trudeau, but they're tired of him.

And Leger picked up on that as well. And that to me is the is the big x factor here is is there a way for justin trudeau to connect with people again or are they just tuning him out um i watched yesterday uh he was kind of prominent in the news for two things one was he was in british columbia and he was announcing support for a new e-vehicle battery factory, which normally would be quite a positive and well-received announcement. And I'm sure it was locally, but I had this feeling of, are people going to notice that this is something that the government is doing more and more?

Or is this just being missed? Because as you know, Peter, there have been a number of announcements the government has made about investments to support e-vehicle manufacturing and batteries and that sort of thing, all of which aligns nicely with public opinion, but which in the math of the polls isn't showing up. And so it tells me that people aren't kind of paying attention to a lot of the substantive policies of the government because they're kind of tuning the government out. And sometimes it's because the government steps on its own message, has too many different things that it's trying to say at the same time.

And so the other thing that the prime minister was doing yesterday was talking about the Israel Palestine situation and he got a lot of attention for that but I'm not sure that the effect of that will be to make people happier with his leadership and I you know that's not purpose of of saying something on that but I think the challenge that he's got is that when he presents his point of view on that, it might sound to are morally important to say and sounding like you're telling people how to think. This is obviously an extraordinarily complicated situation. little bit to find a way to say the things that he wants to say and have it not seem as though he he's he's occupying some sort of higher moral ground than everybody else who who might be struggling with um these two competing thoughts which is those hostages need to be released and israel needs to be defended and jews need to be um defended against the rise of anti-Semitism.

And at the same time, nobody wants to see pictures of babies in hospitals that are, whose lives are at risk. You know, if I was, once again, if I was a liberal looking at all these numbers and today's data, and I assume it's probably the same in luxury, although I haven't looked at the Lesley numbers but the abacus numbers the the stat that would bother me the most is the one about um do you want to

change in government and it's the majority say yes we want to change It's like over 50%. Now, what would worry me most about that is once that feeling takes hold, it's awfully hard to shake it. It's actually over 80% now. But the 50% number that you cited is the number who say, I want change and I'm comfortable with the alternatives. But the number who also say, I want change, but I'm not sure I'm comfortable with the alternatives adds another 30 to that. So really, the value of incumbencies right now for Trudeau's liberals is a negative value. It's smaller even than the number of people who say that they're intending to vote liberal today, which is at about 26 percent in the in the advocates number. So that mood for change. I don't think I've seen worse numbers for any incumbent party since Brian Mulroney in the latter days of his administration. And you and I've talked about this before. When he was polling at whatever that that horrible number was, 15% or something like that,

even then, because of the relationship that he had with his caucus and party, people were ready to go into another election with him. I don't think Trudeau has the same level of support in his party right now at the numbers that he's at, which isn't to say that he'll be replaced. He's going to decide that, I think. Maybe he already has. He says he already has. But numbers as bad as these for an incumbent government, they don't come along that often. These are worse numbers than Stephen Harper had, I believe. And part of the challenge is for the liberals is to look at the comparison between Justin Trudeau and Pierre Polyev. And I think liberals in the town, they don't really see a lot to admire

in Pierre Polyev, except his political acumen. They're coming to admire that now. But otherwise, they don't think he has a lot of experience. They don't think he has particularly good ideas. They think he should be vulnerable in a political campaign. But now they're wondering if he really will be vulnerable because they're not sure if they can make the case against them because they haven't been making the case against them particularly effectively. And partly because they're wondering whether for reasons that aren't necessarily his fault, Justin Trudeau just doesn't have that connection with people anymore,

that people are tuning him out and that he can keep on making good policy announcements and saying things that people might agree with. But if at the end of the day, they're tuning him out, the result's going to be bad. And so I think the liberals have a lot of hard work to do, either to amend their situation and improve their political effectiveness, or to figure out what else they're going to do before the next election in order to be competitive again, because right now they don't look competitive based on the numbers that we're seeing. I should just mention that the listeners are probably hearing this beep every once in a

while. I'm not sure if I knew how to stop it i would it's funny because it this happened you know a couple years ago when we first started the podcast that way it was happening and then it just disappeared i you know clearly i've pushed the wrong button somewhere but it keeps happening and i can't see why and i don't know how to stop it so uh for the purposes of today anyway we'll we'll just have to live with it. And just back, a final thought on this situation, because, you know, we had that senator, Percy Down, the liberal senator, used to work for Chrétien.

He spoke out against, Trudeau said,au, said he should really move on now. And there have been more than a few columns written about that in the last little while, but I haven't heard anybody from the actual Liberal caucus of MPs, members of Parliament. And you've got to think that the unrest feeling must be quite high on the unrest meter. I think it was David Coletto from Abacus who did the breakdown earlier this week on what these numbers would mean about seats. And you've got conservatives over 200 seats, which, you know, we haven't seen that since, well, you've got to go back to the Mulroney days. That was a huge majority in 1984.

And obviously, if the conservatives are going to get over 200 seats, that means a lot of liberals are going to lose their seats, lose their positions, lose the possibility of pension by winning another election for those who haven't already been sitting long enough. So there must be a real edginess within that caucus. But so far, publicly, at least, they've held together. Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. I think um you know people in politics generally they don't i find that for the most part they have thick skins they don't panic easily they're used to being criticized they see things come things go they watch the news cycle move in its ultra rapid fashion and they see that all the time. And so that's a good thing. It kind of conditions them not to overreact to periodic or episodic situations.

At the same time, it can lull people into feeling like nothing can change. They've got their jobs, they're doing their work. People always debate different things. We'll get to the next election when we get to the next election. I think that the liberals are now, by and large, kind of in between those two feelings. And the next six months are going to tell a tale as to whether or not people are going to start to look at Pierre Polyev and say, do we really want him as prime minister? Um, you know, my sense is that that doesn't usually happen unless his opponents take a pretty hard run at raising that question and do it with advertising and, um, and are very assertive about it.

But if they don't, the current numbers on who would you prefer as prime minister show Trudeau well behind Polyev on that. And I don't think two years ago, many would have predicted that that would have been the situation, especially Trudeau did it. Maybe everybody won't agree, but I think he did a pretty good job through the pandemic. I think he's done a pretty good job in handling our relationship with the United States. The economy isn't everything that everybody wants it to be. And inflation is a problem, but inflation is a problem in other places, not just here. And the economy has produced a lot of jobs for a lot of people. Yes, there are problems. But if you look at the balance sheet of Trudeau's government from a

policy standpoint, directionally aligns with what most Canadians want and circumstantially helped people through some very difficult things. The problem is. Income is are never rewarded at election time for what they've done before. That's more of a myth than reality in politics. Every time you go to the polls, it's about what's next, what's coming next. Do I like the sound of you? Do I like the sound of the other person? Do I think you've got the right idea. And so for me, the Liberals, if they're going to get back to a position where they're on their front foot, where they're connecting with people again,

they need an agenda to rally around, and I don't think that they have it right now. Next week is the finance minister's fall economic statement. Usually that's one of a couple of periods in a year, the other being the budget where the government can use its, um, its share of voice to sort of hit a reset. Uh, we'll see if that happens. Um, the fiscal situation for the government isn't, isn't going to make everybody happy. I would expect, um, on the other hand, if the government announces a whole bunch of spending on things or tax measures to try to deal with some of the deficit issues

or cuts, all of those are not necessarily winners from the standpoint of public opinion. So the fall economic statement may not be as effective as people might hope on the liberal side that it will be. But it'll be the next moment in time where the caucus will get a chance to say, all right, the leaders of our of our side have put their heads together. They've come up with a thing that they think is going to connect with people. And now we're going to see what it is and and that will affect the chemistry for sure how much time is two years for a situation like this i mean the elections not expected for or could be two years away i think technically it could even be three years away if you stretch out the old five-year mandate. It's been a long time since we, well, I guess Mulroney, 88 to 93.

That was a five-year. Yeah. And Trudeau, 74 to 79 was a five-year one. I know the rules have changed a bit since then, the parliamentary procedure. But anyway, let's assume it's in 2025. Is two years a long time or is it enough time when you're facing an electorate that wants change? I think the question is, if the liberal fortunes are looking bad right now, is it a liberal brand problem or is it a fatigue with the prime minister problem? And the longer the longer polls are bad in the run up to an election, the less time there is.

If a leader were to change, for example, if it turns out that the problem is the liberal brand for enough people, they just don't want liberals anymore because they've come to associate them with maybe a little bit too much of a focus on social agenda or social progress and a little bit too little on the economic side, then two years isn't very much time. but you need to get at it if you're going to try to turn that around as a brand of the Liberal Party brand. Two years is possible, I think. will recognize what they need to do and decide to do it and whether Trudeau, as the main spokesperson for the Liberal Party, can deliver that message, that repositioning. Because right now, I think the positioning of the Liberal Party is, if I say too far to the left, it doesn't mean that I don't think they should be supporting the progressive initiatives. But it's too far to the left to win as many votes as they need to win in the center of the spectrum. I've always kind

of measured how liberals are seen relative to other parties on the left, on the center, and on the right. And for the last two elections, they've lost the vote to the conservatives on the center of the spectrum, the people who self-define as centrist. And in my earlier years in and around politics, that was never really a thing that the liberals allowed to happen. They wanted to own the center. They wanted to make sure that the conservatives were seen as a right of center party and they're facing somebody right now who in Pierre Poliev who's going right after those centrist voters um and he's winning a bunch of them because he's talking about working family issues blue collar worker issues uh economic issues the cost of living that sort of thing he's not talking so much about culture war with them, which would turn them off. The Liberals, on the other hand, kind of struggle to stay focused on that.

And I think that's been part of their problem. And I think it's partly a function of the fact that this government was built and fueled by energy to achieve important goals for progressive voters. And again, I think that, you know, just from my personal standpoint is a good thing, but it does expose you to disaffection among centrist voters over time. that that part of the agenda has been so dominant that the issues that are maybe a little bit more important to them on a day in day out basis aren't being addressed enough. All right. We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, something, well, something different. Well, why don't we take the break and I'll explain it when we come back. And welcome back.

You're listening to Smoke, Mirrors and the Truth, a Wednesday episode of The Bridge. Bruce Anderson's in Ottawa. I'm Peter Mansbridge. You're listening on Sirius XM, Channel 167 Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform, or you're watching us on our YouTube channel. Okay, I'm going to throw this out. Never thought I'd ask this question, but I think it is appropriate right now to at least ask it. Here's the question.

Has Canada given up and lost the fight against climate change? No. But the whole issue of climate change is complicated by the fact that it is a, you know, by the science, look back over time, it's a very fast moving threat. In terms of the things that worry people day in, day out, it's a slow moving threat. When there are lots of things that worry people day in and day out. The slow moving threats recede a little bit in importance, in sense of urgency, that sort of thing. For the government. And if you look at. For the government.

I hear what you're saying about the people. I get it. Yeah. But it seems to me in the last, I don't know, month or two. And it's, you know, the government, you know, the home heating oil thing, the carbon tax issue, when we start looking at the numbers in terms of where we are in the fight against climate change, we're not meeting our targets.

It kind of looks like government has said, you know what, let's back off on this stuff. Yeah, I don't think that's happened, but I do think that the whole business of targets for me has always been a bit challenging because to meet any of those targets, you have to ramp up technological change, infrastructure change, a lot of things that are slow to get started. And so if you sort of say, well, let's imagine that we have a target that's 15 years out and it's 30%. So shouldn't we be, you know, reducing emissions by 2% a year to get to that target. That's not the math that I think works. It is at some point, you get a critical mass of adoption of things like e-vehicles, of new buildings that

are being built to different standards from an emission standpoint, infrastructure for transportation that's different, clean energy technologies, the price of which keeps coming down. So at some point, the combination of those things will accelerate progress towards those goals, provided the policies that would trigger that are in place. And I think a very significant number of them have been put in place by this government. Now, we're only one player on the planet. Obviously, the question of we can't solve it ourselves is material. But as to whether or not we've stopped trying, I don't think that's, I don't see that. I think there are a lot of policies that are in place that people may not necessarily know about, some of which they like, some which they're a little bit

more uncertain about. But I do think that, you know, you're raising this question in part because it is the risk of that carbon pricing change that they made a month or so ago, that it could create the sense of we're throwing up our hands and kind of giving up on this agenda. I don't think that's true, but I understand that that could raise eyebrows a little bit. It's also, it's not what people are talking about, right? I mean, a lot of people talk about climate change and more than just environmentalists worry about these things. A lot of people, you know, worry about this.

Kids worry about it. But overall, it seems in the last, you know, worry about this. Kids worry about it. But overall, it seems in the last, you know, basically since COVID, there have been other concerns and more front and center for the average Canadian, whether it's inflation, high interest rates, housing. You ran through the list. Climate's not one of them um i don't know that i think that's a little bit more black and white that i would say so one of the things i wanted to draw your attention to is the the polling in the abacus study that

shows the i remember when david Coletto and I started measuring the kind of the mood of the country. And I suggested that we ask how people think things are going in Canada, but also how people think things are going in the United States and in the rest of the world. And David published the world and the Canada line in today's release. And what you see is a trajectory downward over a number of years in both of those lines. And what that is, is telling us that there are a lot of things that people see going wrong in the world. Climate change is just one of them. The role of China is one of them. The war with Russia and Ukraine is one of them. The situation in the Middle East is one of them.

And in that context, any single issue is going to end up having attention to it dissipate somewhat. It'll come back to prominence the next wildfire season, the next flood season, the next hurricane season, the next heat waves and droughts and deaths from intense heat. All of those things keep on resurfacing this issue. And it's also fair to say that younger people are a lot more attuned to this issue. And people who live in places where it's hard to go outside in the summer are attuned to these issues too. So I tend to think of it as being the challenge for incumbent governments and many incumbent governments are having challenges right now. I think I tweeted the other day a list of 22 leaders from countries around the world and the favorability of each of them.

And 17 of them were underwater, meaning there were more negatives than positives about them. And among the G7 leaders, I think Trudeau was third. So there were four who were below him in terms of favorability. This is a little bit his problem is a little bit the problem of the times. He's had to contend with Trump, which is a giant wake-up call to the world about fascism. And again, I know you're going to get some letters, but... You know, we can handle the letters. And, you know, I see the comments, you know, when I look at some of them, especially on the YouTube channel.

The letters we get at the bridge are really good. They're thoughtful. And they clearly don't always agree with us. And I get that. But they make their arguments constructively. Some of the garbage I read on YouTube by the anonymous people is, you know, it's just, it's crazy. But so, you know, I don't mind the comments. I welcome constructive comments. And they're good. And we've based some shows on them. So I have no problem with that. I, you know, I'm, I'm a big believer in climate change.

I think it's a fight that we have to fight. The world has to fight. And I get, you know, I understand those who say, ah, yeah, but Canada, we're 1.0% or something of the climate change problem out there. What difference does it make if we do anything unless China does something or some of the other major polluters do something. It's irrelevant what we do. Well, you know, I've never gone for that argument. And I hope that what I see right now, this look, this appearance that we're somehow backing off, you know, what did Chantal talk about about the other week that Guilbeault, the environment minister, was clearly unhappy about what had happened

on the carbon tax front. A guy who's dedicated, you know, his life to, you know, fighting on this front. So anyway, I, you know, I, I'm in, I'm glad to ask you this question because you've made me think a little more in terms of where we are on this, but I don't think there's any doubt that there's, you know, there's some degree of feeling out there that there, there has been a bit of a backing away i mean yeah look i think that's i i understand that and i get the how hard it is to sustain interest in a fight that appears to have a cost associated with it and uh pierre pauliev um i i can think of a number of

things to criticize about what he's done, but the most dishonest thing I think that he's done that has had a material effect on public opinion has been to misrepresent the role of the carbon price in the cost of living. He made it his business to do that. He said it often enough. He did it in a number of different ways with advertising speeches and that sort of thing. And he created a situation where MPs were feeling that if they didn't do something to counter his argument,

that they were going to lose their seats. Now, I happen to think they fell for the trap then. I think they should have done something else rather than adjust the carbon price. They could have increased the top up that people get in certain areas. They could have done something that didn't adjust that. But look, I think that the change in that policy structured as a temporary change to deal with high energy prices during a period of high inflation. I can understand the rationale for it. I think the political calculus was wrong. I think there were other alternatives that would have been better, but I don't think that it unwinds the number of things that the government has put in place. I do think that, you know, I keep on

seeing pieces of evidence that, I think I saw something this morning that said 13% of all new vehicles sold in Canada last year were e-vehicles. You know, five years ago, that number, I don't know what it was, but it would have been a lot smaller than that. So there's a trajectory there. We're, as a country, looking more and more at how do we create more clean power in more places more quickly so that we can help industries decarbonize where they want to do it, but they lack access to the clean energy that would allow them to do it. on the climate change issue because I do see policies that have been making a change. And because even the International Energy Agency says peak oil, they can see it, I think they said, in the next decade or so. And they keep on adjusting that because the world keeps on changing. But it wasn't that long ago that people were saying oil is going to be, the peak of oil is going to be 50 years from now. And I don't think that's the consensus now. Here's our last topic.

Because people love when we talk about Trump. Some people love it. Others hate it. Well, we're not going to talk about trump but we're going to talk about something that's probably caused by trump have you been watching the the latest version of friday night fights in the u.s congress this is like unbelievable just bizarre yeah look it's a, I was watching a little bit of a morning Joe this morning,

the MSNBC show, and they were showing clips of this, this elbowing kind of situation where Kevin McCarthy elbowed one of his colleagues in the house of representatives. And then the guy ran after him and, you know, called them names and said, why did you do that? You're a pathetic man. And there was this kind of.

And they're both Republicans, right? Yeah. This is kind of a schoolyard kind of scuffle exchange. And the analysts who were talking about it, we're talking about how this is kind of emblematic of the, of the kind of the low level of self-respect, mutual respect,

whatever you want to call it that exists in that house. And then we saw a thing in the Senate where there was a representative, I think of the Teamsters who was giving evidence as a witness. And one of the senators challenged him to a fight, stood up, looked like he was starting to take off his rings so that he would have a fight with this guy because they disagreed about some issue. And Bernie Sanders had to hit the gavel and say, no, like, stop it. That's enough. You're a senator. And I just find the coarsening of politics in the United States has been one of the most distressing things to watch. It was always rough and tumble. There was always stuff that, you know, where people played hard and went into the corners and that sort of thing.

But this is kind of vulgar some days. And Trump makes it more vulgar all the time. On Veterans Day, the tweet that he put out, talking about the lunatics on the left and all of that sort of thing, just he is so connected to this idea of rage farming. And he seems filled with rage. And he seems to be the he's like the Taylor Swift of rage farming. He's so powerful at it, so dominant at it, that it.

It's taking American politics to a new and low place almost every week. Well, let's hope if they're going to do it, it stays south of the border and doesn't come up here. I mean, things get tense at times in the House of Commons between the various parties. But we haven't seen anything like that. Not like that, but it is. Things have been coarsening here, too, and social media is a big part of that. And you alluded to it. It's definitely hard for people to find a place where there's a reasonable,

rational discussion of people who have mutual respect for each other about politics in the social media sphere. And I don't know how we're going to get back at it, but we certainly won't unless we have leaders that embrace that. Well, let's leave it at that and see where we get to in debate in our country, and not just at the political level, I mean, not just in the House of Commons, but with the people as well. At some point there is going to be an election,

and that is the people's opportunity to take part in it in a meaningful way. And, you know, what's the old saying? You get the government you deserve, and you get the government you end up voting for. Although, as you said the last couple of times, most people voted for the conservatives and they got the liberals. We'll see what happens this time around, whenever that is. But plurality anyway.

Plurality. Not maybe most. Well, the most votes. Yes, but not most of the votes. They got more votes than the liberals by three points, I think. Right. Yeah. But it wasn't the majority.

Right. I don't know. You can argue this one out. In the polling business, you get very careful about most and many and the plurality and the majority. Those words have a particular, you know, we're fussy about that. Okay. Like Hillary Clinton in 2016. She had accumulated more votes.

Yes. Than Donald Trump. Quite a few more. Two or three million. In that case, you could say most people voted for her, I suppose. I'm trying to remember if there's a third party candidate. There was. Jill Stein, Green Party.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. She's running again. She's running again. Okay. All right. Good to talk. Oh, yeah. Yeah, she's running again. She's running again. Okay. All right. Good to talk to you, Peter. Good to talk to you.

You'll be back on Friday with Chantel for Good Talk. And tomorrow, it's your turn. So if you have something to say, get it in, like, now. And the Random Rancher will be by tomorrow as well. I'm Peter Mansbridge for Bruce Anderson. Thanks so much for listening. We'll talk to you again in 24 hours.