The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - The Good Talk Assessment of “The Deal”.

Episode Date: March 25, 2022

Chantal and Bruce have their say on the new Liberal/NDP arrangement and how it impacts just about everything political in Canada.  Also, do Conservatives have to change to win, and Jason Kenney "unplugged".

Are you ready for Good Talk? And yes, of course you're ready. Good Talk, Chantelle Hebert is in Montreal, Bruce Anderson's in Ottawa, and Peter Mansbridge in Toronto, Ontario. And lots to talk about this week. This was a busy week. And I'm going to actually start with the most recent because I've been trying to find out kind of what happened on

Thursday night. Jean Charest had his first big rally in Quebec. And a lot of attention was placed on how he would do it, something like that, as he runs for the Conservative leadership two weeks in Raleigh and Quebec. So I looked through the – I scanned the English language papers, the national papers. I couldn't find anything today. It doesn't mean it's not in there somewhere, but I couldn't find it. So, Chantal, you're in Montreal. I don't know whether you were at this thing or not,

but my betting is that you have, if you weren't there, you had your spies there, and we have probably got some sense from you as to how it went. And there was some coverage in the French language media to compliment it. So no, I wasn't there. I was at issuing and then took a pass on driving to Laval to get there late for a speech.

By all accounts, those of the people I know were there and who know about things, politics, and the people who have been reporting on it, it was a good crowd, 350 to 500, depending on who you talk to and who you listen to, an enthusiastic crowd mixed in. It wasn't just a meeting of the old friends of the Quebec Liberal Party and Jean Charest's former colleagues.

There were plenty of conservatives there, including one from Alberta that the Charest camp was boasting about earlier in the afternoon, Ron Liepert, who's an MP, but who used to be the Minister of Finance, among other jobs that they held in the Alberta government. So a significant catch, I think, for the Chalet camp. I would call what happened last night a relaunch of the Chalet campaign because it kind of started and stopped. It started not on a big bang in Alberta.

Remember that basement launch? It kind of looked – well, it didn't scream momentum, put it this way. And then Jean Charrette caught COVID and was in self-isolation, so he was doing whatever it is that leadership candidates do via Zoom and other means. So this was his first real performance. And as opposed to Alberta, where he spoke without notes in a casual way about why he was running, he had a more extensive speech, which seemed to hit a lot of right notes as to why he should be a conservative leader.

It talked quite a bit about Stephen Harper, by the way, saying good things, talked about fiscal discipline, and how he had imposed it in Quebec when he was in office, and talked about how he had gone to Quebec at a time of existential crisis over the unity issue, and he felt that this was a good time to return to federal politics at a time when, at least in his view, the country is very divided. So, overall, a good outing. The real important thing, I think, from Quebec's standpoint was whether he would have a crowd that looked more sizable than Pierre Poiliev's crowds in Quebec last weekend, which were also respectable in size. And what both of those visits tell me is that Quebec is really in this leadership campaign in a way that it has not been since the party

reunited a couple of decades ago. All right you know I'm looking at the the pictures sir he tweeted himself some pictures from the from the rally and it's definitely a respectable crowd it's not like it's an arena full of people but it's definitely a you know banquet hall or something like that and there's there's a lot of people there wedding hall i think by the way mostly used for wedding receptions i'm told not been too many in the last few years but uh nevertheless um you know it's crowd size really you got to be careful and we all know that uh about those you can you can stack a room you can make a small room look like it's packed because it's small and you can make a big room look like it's empty because you can't pack it um so you have to be careful on these things but it interesting to see that

he's a kind of he must have acknowledged himself that calgary didn't go that well if if he's prepared to it's going to reset up, relaunch. In your words, I don't think he probably described it that way, but nevertheless, that's the appearance of it. Bruce, you got any thoughts on this opening? I'm going to get to a bigger question on the Conservatives, but just on this, first of all. Yeah, I think if you roll back the clock a few weeks, the real question

around the idea of Jean Charest as a candidate, would it really gain any kind of traction, or would he be kind of expelled at first sight by the party? And I think that question has been answered now. That doesn't mean he's going to win. That doesn't really have much to tell us by way of how is this fight going to evolve. But at the same time, I think he's managed to create a sense of, okay, he's an alternative to Pierre Poliev, who otherwise was looking like he was going to be the runaway leader of this race. And he's got a different pitch. And I think that what's been happening, and I take the point that I think that Calgary meeting looked bad as a first step because maybe people who knew him, like me maybe, would look at it and go, go well as the first event to mark the kickoff of a campaign uh it didn't have the pizzazz that one might have hoped for and i so i started thinking about that and i think well why would that be and first of all i think the question of whether he should have gone first to calgary i think is a question of is that a genuflection in the direction

of this is the power base of the party probably probably. Is it going to be tough to draw the kind of crowd that a Pierre Poliev could have drawn? Probably. So who turned up is probably people who are from different parts of what used to be the Conservative Party under Stephen Harper or even before that. And that's not going to look like the razzle-dazzle kind of event that maybe is what you really want to kind of kickstart a campaign where people are wondering if it's going to take root. So I think the Quebec thing is a very important, almost a relaunch in effect, as Chantal was indicating.

More importantly, I think, in terms of what this means for him, is that he's carving out a way of describing what he would want to do and what kind of conservative party he would want to lead. And I think that the question that he's answering isn't just the one that he uses as a tagline, which is this built to win idea, the idea that a party led by him could win a general election. I think he's describing a party to a lot of voters who've wondered if they could associate with the Conservative Party in recent years, because it has kind of moved in directions that made them feel uncomfortable associating with the brand. I think he's saying, I want to be the leader who makes it comfortable for you to say in the company of friends and family and neighbors and co-workers

that you're joining the Conservative Party or going to support the Conservative Party. Now, that might sound a bit like an insult to people who felt really good about the direction that the party has taken. But, you know, arguably in Ontario and Quebec and maybe in parts of Atlantic Canada anyway, there may be a lot more people who are who are kind of sitting there going, I don't know, liberals went a little bit left for me. I don't know if I could trust the conservative brand to be consistent with my values. Maybe I should take a look at this guy. So I think he's actually got, you actually got an audience for his message now.

Well, that's what I want to get at in terms of what the message can be, should be, will be if the conservatives are going to have a chance of becoming the next national government. And I was reading a piece this week by somebody who you both know, Ken Bozenkul. Most members of the public may not have heard of that name before, but he's well known within the party. He's been an aggressive organizer for years. He doesn't like liberals, but he admires liberals. He knows that liberals know how to organize and know how to position themselves for

election campaigns. And he clearly is worried that the Conservatives are not on the right path, haven't been for some time, and may not be again this time. So here's the conclusion of a piece he wrote for The Line this week, a couple of lines from it. Conservatives need to do more than just rail about balanced budgets, lower taxes, free trade, and smaller government, though they should do those things. They need to provide conservative solutions to today's most pressing problems. And so when conservatives consider who to vote for in the coming leadership race, two of the principal questions they should ask are, which leader can win 40% to form a majority? He figures they only have a shot at forming government if they form a majority, that a minority wouldn't do it for them.

And the corollary, which leader is promoting policies that can get our vote from the low 30s to the low 40s? Conservatives need policies and a leader who can expand their coalition and grow their vote. Because if Conservatives just focus on issues that make Conservatives feel good, Canada will be governed for a very long time by the two parties, possibly joined by the Bloc, who this week did a deal to make Canada a much less Conservative country. What do we make of that? Is that the signal that needs to be sent inside

the Conservative Party, even by, you know, some of its most staunch supporters, and people like Bozenkul, who have fought really hard against liberals over the years, you know, from positions that are not necessarily the same ones he's talking about right now. A few points first, and I need to quarrel with some of the predictions and their BQ is not going to be joining a federal government tomorrow or in two years or in five years or in 10 years. If it still exists, that is not going to happen. Just having the BQ in a support role the last time the Liberals tried to craft a coalition government, a real one with the

NDP, actually went a long way to kill the deal. You do not give a sovereignist party a veto over the directions of the government of Canada and escape a price to pay in the ballot box now or later. The other notion I'm going to quarrel with, and it's not just his, is that conservatives cannot hope to ever form a minority government that will survive the first few weeks in power. And the reason I say that is because circumstances matter more than mathematics. If in three years, after a decade of liberal rules, the Conservatives win 39% of the vote, and on that basis, or 37, and end up with a minority government a lot of

Canadians will have voted for change and and I and that discussion you will remember it because we were on air together that night when Stephen Harper first won in 2006 a lot of punditry was wasted on how Paul Martin only needed to reach out to Jack Layton to stay in power. Had those two parties not made a deal on the previous budget? And did they not have a lot of common goals? And why that didn't happen? Not just because Paul Martin resigned. As you know, liberal leaders can resign and come back to be prime minister. It's been done. But because that would have gone against the spirit of that election. So I'm not treating this as a given that because the Liberals and the NDP got along

to ensure three more years of this parliament, that the Conservatives absolutely need a majority, or actually that Canadians would agree that this is the only way that the Conservatives could come to power. Now, as to whether this should impact the Conservative leadership campaign, I believe something changed for the Conservatives this week. And a gift was given to them, a gift that they will not talk about, but that some of them have seen. And it is that whoever is elected leader, Pierre Poilievre, Jean Charest, or Patrick Brown, to name the three main contenders, will have time to recast himself and the party based on policies to go forward rather than the knee-jerk minority rule reflex of saying, well, if the government says black, we're going to say white, or if they say white, we're going to say black. In three years, we will know if Justin Trudeau's climate change policy

is efficient. Something we haven't known from election to election because it would always give us more time, and you'll see that it's going to work. In three years, we will know whether a national childcare program was worth investing in and is working for parents in the provinces. We don't know that now. So, in that real life, there is, one, an opportunity to put behind a lot of the stuff that may be said or may happen over the course of the leadership campaign for whoever wins. But there is also a chance to start expanding the tent on the basis of policy for all. And I'm not saying any of those three contenders could not do it. They may or may not succeed. But this gift of time, I believe, is really important for the Conservative Party at this

juncture and probably is more likely to bring them back to power in three years than they would have in 18 months. Bruce? Yeah, I think there's a lot to be said for what Ken Bozenkul is arguing, that Conservatives need to kind of focus on what needs to change in their coalition. I think that his argument that there needs to be 40% support in order to have a majority because there's otherwise no way to have a conservative government.

I'm with Chantal. I don't think that's right. I think that's maybe a good way to enter the conversation with party members about the need to kind of reorient themselves. I think that if it works to create that conversation, then it's a useful tactic. But it is not obviously true to me that that's the only way that this can happen. I think that the, you know, there is always with those kinds of pieces, a certain amount of how do we just get victories as opposed to what do we want to do? And I think that the question of applying a conservative lens to the goals that many people or most people in the country have is probably a good starting

point. But you have to start with those goals. So you have to start with, is there a way to use smaller government, less regulatory, lower cost orientation to solve housing affordability, to deal with climate change, to deal with childcare? And I don't think that the work has been done yet to solve those problems within that party. What do they really want to accomplish? Is it different from what most voters want to see the country accomplish? In which case, just having, in quotes, conservative solutions to these problems, the issue is really, what are these problems that we're going to tackle together? And the last thing I'll say is that there's an implied, we just need to add a few things aspect to that argument. And the truth is that there

needs to be a subtraction to the idea of a conservative brand that hesitant voters will feel comfortable marking an X for has probably got more to do with, I don't want to see any evidence of Islamophobia. I don't want to see any evidence of climate denial. I don't want to see any qualification of, is everybody equal regardless of their sexual orientation. Those are issues where the party, if it's going to succeed in the long term, probably needs to, I mean, it could succeed without doing this by virtue of luck and circumstance. But to build a robust, successful long term thing, they need to sort of look at some of those attitudes and say, there's a people's party for those folks, or we just can't,

we can't sort of, we can't sort of welcome all of the stuff that we've got in our tent right now, and expect to be able to add other voters to it. That friction has been evident for years now, and it's growing worse, and it's going to grow worse unless it's dealt with at a leadership level, I think. All right. And in defense of Ken, I should say, in the full article, he does do the climate. He said they absolutely have to get a credible climate policy. He's a huge advocate on that issue. No, I like this piece, and I thought it was useful for conservatives to read.

Agreed. But there are things in there that reflect some of the blind spots of conservatives. For instance, that a deal between the NDP and the Liberals has made Canada less conservative. Is that the chicken or the egg? Because 50.4% of Canadians voted for the NDP and the Liberals, and none of those voters was surprised by the content of their agreement, because it was part and parcel of issues that are part of their brand have been part of it for three elections. If you add to those a fairly high chunk of black voters who certainly disagree with the notion that the federal government would impose conditions or put strings on health care funding, but who otherwise are on side with the climate change policies and the

child care policies of the federal government that are part of this deal, you have a fairly significant mass. And I think conservatives, many conservatives, have wanted to live in denial of the reality of where the real critical mass of voters is, it is not being denied its voice by a deal with the liberals and the NDP. The opposite is more true. And if you look at successful conservative small C premiers in this country, you will find more common ground between Francois Legault, Doug Ford, and Justin Trudeau than between François Legault, Doug Ford, and Pierre Poilievre, to name one. That also sends a signal. If Doug Ford wins a majority next June, it will be because voters who voted for Justin Trudeau last fall will vote for him. They are comfortable voting for both,

and they have been for the past few elections. I don't think conservatives have wanted to look that in the face. Okay, we're going to move on. I'm going to risk getting boxed around the years by Chantel. It's kind of a weekly event here. But let me just say one thing about this issue, about the Conservatives and the Bloc getting it together on something. You know, you're quite right what happened in 2006. But in 2004, at the end of that parliament you know gilles duceppe the block leaders sat down with jack layton and stephen harper and signed a deal that did some

changes to the parliamentary process but harper wanted to take it further than that he'd written articles in the 90s about the only way the Conservatives were ever going to defeat the Liberals was if they made a pact with the Bloc. So it was kind of out there, and that was kind of the first indication that there was some way to get some agreement between those two. But I'm not going to push it any further than that, because I can see the right hook and the left jab coming at me right away. If you ask the Quebec caucus of the Conservative Party, most of them will tell you that they're fighting and they're fending off the Bloc to keep their writings. That is where the battle line is between them. It's not Justin Trudeau that they fear most. It's the Bloc Québécois. Okay.

I don't know. We agree on that point. And can you imagine siding with a Jean Charest-led Conservative party? What that would do to Quebec politics? The former Federalist champion would find support. Okay. I'm done.

Moving on. We're going to take a quick break when we come back. I know that you're sitting out there going, are you ever going to talk about that deal that could make Canada a socialist state or already has? We are going to talk about that deal. In fact, it'll be the majority of this discussion. But before we get there, we have one little point to make

on our friend, the Premier of Alberta, Jason Kenney. We'll make that right after this and welcome back you're listening to good talk on the bridge you're listening on uh series xm channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform. Bruce is in Ottawa, Chantel's in Montreal, I'm in Toronto for this day. Jason Kenney.

Boy, it seems every week there's something that he serves up that we can talk about, and he didn't serve this one up. A good CBC reporter dug this up, found a tape, or got leaked a tape of Jason Kenney speaking at a party or a caucus function, not a public one, a private one, where he told his supporters, or at least those in the room, that, sure,

he thought at times of maybe he should step down, but he decided he was staying because somebody has to control the lunatics, his word, inside the party. Now, when I heard that, I thought, this guy sounds like that guy on Smoke, Mir Mirrors and the Truth on Wednesday on the bridge. He's just stealing his language. This sounds like quite something for a guy to say about members of his own party. Although Hillary Clinton said it.

Look what happened to her. But Bruce, what's your take on this? Well, I felt like the unplugged Jason Kennedy was the most honest I've heard him be. And I know that he didn't mean for these comments to be made to be kind of aired publicly. But he was describing what those of us from a distance would have easily imagined was a very frustrating existence. Now, some of his frustrations in that job are entirely on him. It's completely erroneous, I think, for him to pretend that the only thing that's going right in the Alberta United Conservative Party is his leadership. And the only problem is that there's

a whole bunch of other people who don't understand the gift that he's brought to Alberta politics. He has, I think, on the whole, failed to articulate a more kind of optimistic, forward-looking, thoughtful policy agenda, which could have eroded some of the hyper-partisanship and the friction and the acid, really, in Alberta politics, because his natural setting often does veer in the direction of hyper-partisan himself. I think it's a bit of a caricature that he makes of himself sometimes, because those who know him from his Ottawa days know he's a pretty smart guy,ature that he makes of himself sometimes because those who know him from his Ottawa days know he's a pretty smart guy and he's capable of having a conversation that isn't all

hyper-partisan. But he looked like he wanted to play that game. And I don't think it's been successful for him. I don't think that the right likes him. I don't think that the center likes him in the province. And I think he's battling a pretty serious situation. And when you and I talked about this, Peter, the other day, I think I said that I'd be, I would not be surprised if he decided to bow out before this vote actually takes place. If he thinks he can't win it, then it doesn't make sense for him to let it happen. It doesn't make sense for him to say, I've done my best. I've tried everything I can. The problem is the deplorable is not me. I've got to move on to something else. I don't know whether

that's what will happen. I don't know whether the change in the format for the voting is going to actually materially improve his chances. But I've never seen, and we've all seen, lots of leaders under duress. This has been protracted. It's been vicious. It's been public. It's been hard to see how he can kind of come out of this. I don't remember seeing a leader under such sustained internal fire, and it's not even just internal. You got something briefly to add to that, Chantal? Oh, well, for one, the change from in-person vote to mail-in ballot means the calendar has also been altered in the sense

that those ballots will be mailed. The vote was supposed to take place on April 9th. Now those ballots will be mailed, and you need supposed to take place on April 9th. Now those ballots will be mailed and you need to send them back in by May 18. So that pushes off a result until late May, basically. I was struck by the fact that according to the CBC report, the premier was addressing caucus staff. So, someone in there was taping what the premier was saying at the staff meeting, one. And two, some of those caucus staff members must work for some of the lunatics that Jason Kenney was talking about since some of the members of his own caucus have been calling for him to resign. And third, at a time when Jason Kenney is fighting on two

fronts, he's fighting for his job, but he's fighting also to reverse a trend in the public opinion polls and in voting intention that favors the NDP. This sends the message that there are so many lunatics within his own party by his own admission that he needs to keep them at bay by holding his ground what does that tell you about a party when its leader fears it will be overwhelmed by lunatics he's basically saying there are many many many of them and i think that's damaging to the image of the party on the larger scale of provincial politics. Okay. Yeah, I think actually it's one of those moments where people who are wondering if conservative is in danger of becoming something that they can't really consider voting for, not just in Alberta, but maybe more broadly. You actually have the leader of an important part of the conservative movement in Canada, kind of confirming that that's what he sees up close.

And, you know, there is a silver lining in this, that he's giving oxygen to an argument that needs to be out there, that needs to be had, that conservatives need to confront if they don't want to end up with a Republican-style conservative movement in Canada with all of the awfulness that we see happening south of the border. We need people to call it out and less people like me and more people like Jason Kenney. All right. We're going to take our final break and then come back and deal with the the biggest story of the week and that's the deal between the liberals and the ndp and just exactly what it means back in a moment

all right we're back with good talk sean tells Tells in Montreal. Bruce is in Ottawa. I'm in Toronto. You know, it must have been a strange couple of days for Justin Trudeau because there he was standing in the European Parliament the other day, giving a speech and being heckled by three of the 705 or 805 or 808, whatever it is, number of European parliamentarians, the three being upset at the trucker convoy situation and that Trudeau was a dictator for the way he brought that to an end. So that was on the one hand.

On the other hand, he's looking out at this room of the various parliamentarians representing 27 different countries in Europe, many of whom depend at home on the success of their home governments based on some form of coalition or agreement between parties. Right? That's the norm in many countries in Europe. And so he had just orchestrated, along with Jagmeet Singh of the NDP,

an agreement on how to move forward and not have an election for the next three years. And he got hammered. He got hammered by the opposition parties, who called it the end of democracy, basically. Some of them really going the extra yard, saying we're communist. And some commentators falling in line with all that. So as the dust has settled over the last three or four days,

what is appearing there in terms of the future of Canada's political system? Was this anything really out of the ordinary? Has the system changed significantly as a result of this deal? Or are we just proceeding along with no threat of an election in the next month, which is always what seemed to be the case in past minorities of the last couple of years? Why don't you start us off on this, Chantal, and then we'll get into it. Well, a word on the heckling in the European Parliament. If you're Justin Trudeau and you're going to be heckled by members of far-right parties, extreme-right parties, you're much happier than if you were heckled by the Green Party

members who also sit in that Parliament. So given a choice of heckling, I think that was probably the best case scenario. As fundamental change happened, it's too early to say that. But I do believe that it could lead to change. For one thing, you mentioned all those European countries where coalitions are the rule because they have a different voting system. If you are a big proponent of electoral reform because you believe it's going to better reflect the voters and lead to parliaments that better reflect the mix in government and in opposition, then you should find this as close as you're going to come to that system, because under a more proportional system, coalition governments in this country would be the rule,

and by their very nature, progressive parties such as the NDP or the Green Party would be more likely to strike alliances with the liberals than they would with the conservatives. So that would be one. Could it change the way we approach? And I'm not saying this brings electoral reform any closer because I see no evidence of that. If it were successful and productive, I believe it might. And the reason I say that is that we have been using parliament in the way that we used to when we always had three parties in the House, two dominant ones and a third party. And at that time, minority governments were the exception, not the rule.

But over the past seven elections, we have elected five minority governments that lasted on average two years, which is not really seriously long enough to implement, discuss, debate serious policy. That is short change, a serious conversation about policy. And it is also meant that we're always starting and stopping and starting and stopping. And voters never get the chance to look at the entire picture and say, this was a good idea or this was mismanaged. Because parties are on a permanent electoral footing. You can bet the House that absent this deal, come next fall, once a conservative leader is in place, we would have been spending the next months, weeks, talking on this show about whether the government

would survive the next week or the next budget, and an election would normally have taken place, probably, if not at the end of 2023, certainly not in 2025. on their merits in the next election, it may go some way to change the way that we or the parties approach minority parliaments and what they try to achieve out of them. I was struck by how much of the commentary dealt with the game of politics and trying to game who wins and who loses. And by the way, not a single one of the commentators who didn't like this deal felt that Justin Trudeau was not the winner. So somewhere, somehow, there must be something in there.

But I was uncomfortable with how much time was spent on gaming this deal rather than on the substance of it. Because my experience, it comes from the Ontario agreement between the NDP and the Liberals in 1985, which from the conservative standpoint was much worse in the sense that it allowed the Liberals with less seats than the conservatives to sit in power for two years with the support of the NDP.

If Ontarians did not like the experience, they certainly did not show it in the subsequent election two years later because David Peterson won a majority government. And if voters felt that they should punish the NDP and Bob Rafe for doing that, they had a strange way of showing it by giving him a majority government a couple of years later. And what I'm trying to say is, the noise this week was disconnected from the experience. And if you want to go more recent, look at BC. I don't notice that British Columbians were so unhappy over the NDP and John Horgan striking a deal with the Green

Party to be in power for a couple of years that they chased them from power. On the contrary, they gave him a majority government. So we like to talk about accountability. In this case, I believe accountability will come in 2025 for better or for worse. And I am not saying this will ensure that the liberals are re-elected. I actually believe that by 2025, if the conservatives do their job of government and waiting rather than opposition, it will be 10 years since the liberals have first come back to power, and people will start to look to see if they have fresher options. Okay, before Bruce jumps in um on the gaming thing i i agree with you and it's basically lazy journalism right of which i you know i i concede

i've been a part of over the years myself but it's a lot easier to play the the who won who lost game than it is to deal with substance and actually study the situation and try to determine what could happen and why and whether it would be a good thing or a bad thing. It is one of the faults of political journalism. Same thing happens in election campaigns. We get all fixated on polls and we do the horse race stuff because it's easy. It's an easy story to tell.

The others are much harder all right bruce uh well i i do i noticed several times this week that chantal was making the point that about gaming and instead kind of can we just stop for a minute and say are these ideas that generally will be helpful for people who voted for one or the other of these parties, or even for people who maybe didn't vote for these parties? And that should really be our first question. And I know that it isn't always and we we talk about politics, but I think that is the most important kind of thing. And I think that the early sense that I have, and we're pulling on it, the reaction of people is that there's very few people who look at this and say, I'm horrified by this. There's more people who say, I'm kind of interested in this.

And maybe the best evidence of whether the conservatives' effort to demonize or villainize this accord isn't catching fire, not even close to catching fire. There's no sparks. There's nothing that looks like smoke. It's that within 24 hours, they weren't talking about it anymore. They didn't speak about it yesterday really in the House. They did use the terminology NDP liberal government all the time. And every time I heard that, I kind of felt like, is that a good idea for them to do that? Because this is where I want to go is I don't before in the direction of strategic voting for progressive voters who don't want a conservative government.

You should vote for the some on the liberal side saying, in some cases, just, you know, vote orange if you don't want blue. So I think there already is a certain amount of common feeling that the idea of conservative is the bigger risk for progressive voters. And maybe it grew out of the Harper time in office, but then it kind of accelerated, I think, with Andrew Scheer. I don't know what to make of the Aaron O'Toole piece. But it's also, and this is my last point, in the past, whenever parties might consider something like this, It would be because something was on the brink of collapse. There was the risk of an unexpected election. There was a sense of crisis in the air.

This had to be done, even though it was a kind of a hard pill to swallow for partisans of the red team or partisans of the orange team. But you had to do it because the alternative was more dire. This isn't that. This is two parties looking at an agenda. I went and looked at the agreement again today, and I didn't see anything other than two parties saying, well, basically, these are all things that we kind of aspire to. And so we're going to lay out a three-year work plan, and we're going to try to keep in close contact with each other so the thing doesn't break down for lack of attention to the human aspects of this, which is very important. But there was nothing of the holding our nose and doing this because we had to, because of a crisis. It really felt like it's an agenda that there's no real daylight on. And there will be some blue liberals who, and we have seen some of them publicly, making clear that they're not happy

with it, looking for something that they're calling unite the center. But there has to be another dance partner, I think think and i don't know what the liberals are going to do and if they have a leadership convention but without a with trudeau anyway the drift of the party has been so much more towards the progressive policy uh side of things that um he probably thinks that that he'll get as many center votes as he can or needs to because the Conservative Party is still struggling to identify itself as a choice for those centrist voters. Or maybe Justin Trudeau isn't thinking about all that because he now has three years and a partner to oversee that he sticks his nose to where it should be on policy rather than politics, because that is also something that the liberals will now need to learn to live with. And it is that they're not out to score a win to win an election. I do believe it makes the finance

minister, Christia Freeland's job and place as the frontrunner to succeed Justin Trudeau more difficult. For one, it plunges her into a long period of uncertainty. Will we be going to war? What's the economy going to be like? And two, she now has to find a way to juggle more spending without coming across as the finance minister who dug the biggest possible hole post-pandemic or absent a pandemic in Canadian history, which is not great if you're going to be campaigning as the leader of a party in three years. And, you know, not to also mention the, or actually to mention the other question about whether Trudeau decides to say, I mean.

I won that bet that we took at year's end. I need to remind you guys of that. The year's not over yet. Okay, but the odds that you will win, I think you should start setting whatever prize aside. We are getting slimmer. To step away from being the leader faced with the challenge of a potential war, the pandemic's not over, the economy has potential to go really into the tank, to walk away from those challenges would say something about a person. And three more years in power. Yeah.

Anyway, we'll see. I'm not backing away yet, but here's one thing I would like to pick up on as kind of the last area. Because I listened closely to what you were saying, Chantel, about the Bob Ray experience, about the BC experience, and I totally get it, what you suggest on both sides of the equation about whether there's lasting damage to a party as a result of entering a deal like this. Let me give a couple of other examples on a different take. You know, you have Tommy Douglas as the NDP leader in the 60s through majority governments of Pearson, and out of those majority governments getting

something that gave him the legacy of being the father of Medicare he lost not only election but his own seat I think after that but nobody thinks about that they think about the legacy of what he meant in in similar ways not quite as grand but David Lewis propping up Pierre Trudeau in the early 1970s in an informal arrangement that everybody knew was more formal than informal. And his legacy is intact, not known for losing elections, but for getting certain gains in social policy areas. Jack Layton could have had that in 2004 by supporting, making a deal with the liberals on childcare and Kelowna, whatever it may be. Now, his legacy was protected because he instead became the opposition leader with over 100 seats, which was an amazing feat.

So the issue for Jagmeet Singh may be, and it's kind of sounded like it when I was listening to him the other day, is that what he sees as the wins for people will be his legacy as opposed to any potential win on the national scale, either as government or even as opposition. I don't know. That's a pretty rational thought that he has, I think. And I actually found myself listening to him articulate it and thinking, this seems more comfortable coming out of his mouth than some of the

performative partisanship that he's had to do in the past. I think both Trudeau and Singh got something good for themselves, for their agenda, for their sense of purpose in politics out of this accord. I don't think Trudeau gave anything up. I don't think Singh gave anything up. And I think that's really unusual for us to be able to see a situation develop like that. I mean, I'm sure that people will pick nits with that, you know, till the cows come home, but that's my sense of it. But one of the things that Jagmeet Singh did get, in addition, is the ability not to have to say, Justin Trudeau is a horrible human being and to do all of that kind of stuff, which he never seemed very comfortable with, which didn't really sort

of strike a resonant chord with very many members of his voting coalition. And I think that's a constructive thing for him. Whatever happens to him, maybe he'll emerge as a more interesting and persuasive and powerful leader. And maybe the NDP will be the brand that rises to the to the forefront for progressive voters. I don't really know how that's going to go. I think that there's a lot to play for with. We've talked about it as 65% of voters who are more interested in the progressive style of government that we're talking about. But I think it gave Jagmeet Singh a chance to have a different job in politics. And I think

that's a good thing for him. I think he's right to identify that it's a good thing for the, for the ideas that he believes in and the people who want to see them. Are we sliding dangerously close to the who won, who lost? I just think it's a, it's about taking some of that kind of weird partisanship out of the conversation. So that to me is a win for everybody. But it's also a win for the person who leads on it. And I think in the case of Jack Layton, the perception that he had been an honest broker certainly helped him on the way to bringing the party to official opposition. People tend to forget that Jack Layton was the leading

voice in the coalition crafting efforts of 2008, that parliamentary crisis. He certainly reaped rewards for it in the 2011 election. He didn't get punished. It was the opposite. But beyond who won and who lost, there has been a lot written about how Jack Mead saying is a cheap date and Trudeau got the better of him. But I do think what he was saying this week and what he decided to do is in sync with what most NDP voters feel the NDP should be doing.

That they want their party to have a role in pushing issues that matter to them. And this fits how the NDP has traditionally been effective in the House of Commons. Now, let's be clear. A week ago, no one was talking about the NDP. And that had been going on for weeks and weeks and weeks. And without picking winners and losers, it is much better to have some reason for people to look at you when you're in parliament than to just be the fourth party that is kind of stuck supporting the government without any role because you don't want an election. All right. We're going to leave it at that for this week. A fascinating discussion.

A lot of, really, I mean, it was a big week, and we didn't even touch really on, we didn't touch at all really on Ukraine. And it continues to be a big week on that. If you are one of those who enjoy Good Talk every week and it's your main episode of The Bridge that you listen to, you should track back and listen to a couple of the earlier episodes this week uh tuesday margaret mcmillan on the war and she was as she always is um terrific the uh former prime minister of australia was on monday talking about china's role in all this

and that's fascinating too uh but. But nothing beats good talk. Thanks, Chantel. Thanks, Bruce. Listen, everybody, have a great weekend. We'll be back with another full week of episodes on the bridge starting on Monday. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Take care. Thank you.