The Current - Which will matter more in this election, policy or vibes?

Episode Date: March 28, 2025

Promises and policies will matter in this election — but in the face of threats from U.S. President Donald Trump, could a strongman persona be more important? CBC's chief political correspondent Rosemary Barton, senior reporter with The Globe and Mail Stephanie Levitz, and Toronto Star political reporter Ryan Tumilty are here to discuss that and break down the first few days of the campaign.

How are Canadians bracing for a full-on trade war? Without U.S. buy-in, can Canada really help Ukraine? And is Canadian patriotism messing with conservative strategy? We explore questions like these on Power and Politics, CBC's only political daily. I'm David Cochran. I speak to the key players in the political stories everyone is talking about. You'll hear from those who've got the power, those who want it, and those affected most by it. You can find Power and Politics wherever you get your podcasts,

including YouTube. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current Podcast. Tariff turmoil, tax cuts, TFSA top-ups, and Donald Trump. That's a lot of alliteration, and it's only week one of the federal election campaign. Our national affairs panel is here to unpack it all. Stephanie Levitz is a senior reporter in the Globe and Mail's Ottawa Bureau. Ryan Tumulty is a political reporter with the Toronto Star. Rosemary Barton is the CBC's chief political correspondent and host of Rosemary Barton Live.

Good morning, everyone. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Happy Friday. This is week one of the campaign. We'll get to the specifics in a moment. But Steph, what have we learned this week? That's a great question, Matt.

I mean, it's hard to think about what we've learned when we were in an election that is so topsy-turvy. I mean, think about, you know, the move that Donald Trump made yesterday with the tariffs on the auto sector and how that you know, you see Mr. Carney the both the prime minister and running for election as liberal leaders sort of pivoting off a campaign But he's still campaigning. So I think what we learned this week is where the ballot box question really is For these campaigns they have been trying to roll out policy announcements But every question is about Donald Trump the the the sort of zeitgeist in the air is about Donald Trump.

It's a vibes election more than policy X or policy Y is the thing that's going to sway people's votes at this moment in time. At this moment in time, which could change in the next moment. Ryan, we'll get to the tariff announcement in a moment, but you were with Mark Carney for the first three days of the campaign. What do you think broadly we learned this week? You know, I think we learned a little bit about Mark Carney as a politician. He says he's not a politician, but he definitely is one now. He's not getting a choice in the matter, and we're seeing sort of what his political skills are, and we've seen a few foibles, frankly.

He got the name of one of his own candidates wrong and misidentified her backstory, placing a very important cultural moment, historical moment in Quebec, the Polytechnic shooting Concordia. He stumbled in other ways, but he's also attracting big crowds. He's polishing that stump speech.

It seems to get better with every giving. I think Steph is right. This is a vibes election. Canadians are concerned about Donald Trump and they are casting for the person who they think is best suited to take him on. Rosie, what are the vibes you're picking up in this first week? Yeah, I mean, very similar. I would also then flip it on the other side

to look at Pierre Poilier and the conservatives. And what I think is a remarkable stubbornness to proceed with a campaign strategy that had been designed before, perhaps before Donald Trump, certainly before Mark Carney. Again again today, they are out talking about crime. They dropped their policy in the morning on Twitter and there's this sort of fear-invoking

campaign-style video that he has posted that feels like it is for a different campaign entirely. So what do you make of that? Because people have said, he gave a speech earlier this week and it was kind of the greatest hits in some ways. Axe the tax, talking about the World Economic Forum, defund the CBC, etc. The suggestion is that he is fighting a campaign that he hoped to fight in the fall of 2024, not 2025. Yeah, I mean, I think that's fair. I mean, I'm sure my colleagues here have also heard stories of some

Challenging moments in the war room the conservative war room We saw yesterday Cory tonight Ford's campaign manager and former Harper director of communications Talk about what they needed to do and to try and to shake them into action and and jolt them out of this Kind of paralysis in terms of where the campaign is. I don't know if that's going to happen. I think that this is partly because Mr. Poiliev is very much behind some of these ideas and policies and he's committed to them. It's partly because they believe that that is where their base continues to be. And it's partly because if the ballot box question is only Donald Trump, that is a very big problem for them.

So, Steph, you've hinted at this. Mark Carney is kind of juggling a couple of different roles. He's leading the Liberal Party, he's also Prime Minister. And as Prime Minister yesterday, he kind of gave a breakup to the United States, saying the US is no longer a reliable partner. What do you make of how he has responded to US President Donald Trump announcing this 25% tariff on cars made outside of the United States? I mean, one of the things that I thought about right away was when he was up, I guess in

Europe just a week ago, really, and he was asked, you know, is there a limit to what we're prepared to do? And he said, yes, there is a limit. There is only so far we can go in responding to Donald Trump before whatever measures we take end up being more punitive on us, Canada, than they are on the United States. And it struck me yesterday, he'd sort of dropped that tone a bit. Nothing is off the table. We're going to wait to see. And he keeps getting asked for a plan and he keeps not really giving Canadians one except for

a promise that we're going to fight. But what that looks like in practice and what it means for this country, that should be the central thing of this election. That is the, you know, Mr. Carney is saying similar things to Mr. Poliev. We need to rebuild our own economy. We need to focus inward so it becomes more about us and less about how we're responding to Donald Trump, which is kind of ironic if we take that the question on voters' minds is, how are we going to respond to Donald Trump? It seems like Canadians are looking for an outward

answer. What is the Prime Minister or Mr. Poliev or Mr. Singh going to say? The politicians are trying to drive an inward answer about how they're going to change our country. I find that juxtaposition interesting. Ryan, if the question is about how this country is going to respond to Donald Trump, what do you make of what Pierre Poliev has done? If Rosie's right, that the pivot that people have been looking for perhaps is not coming or not coming as aggressively perhaps as some other people in the conservative ecosystem might want. Yeah, I mean, I think Rosie's right. I think you haven't seen a pivot here.

The conservatives have spent the last two years winning, basically. Poll after poll showed their lead only getting bigger and bigger. They were headed for a supermajority. The metaphor I'm using is that they have been for the last years playing hockey better than anybody on the ice, getting better and better and running up the score against their opponents in exhibition games, and they showed up to the big match and everyone's playing basketball. And I think that is going to be a continuing challenge for them.

He is certainly talking about Donald Trump and talking about being stronger and more aggressive. He is talking about the liberals having poorly set us up for this moment. But even yesterday when Donald Trump took a huge attack on our um, uh, Mark Carney was talking about, uh, Donald Trump, as he has said in many speeches now, trying to destroy Canada so America can own us. That is really strong rhetoric and Pierre Polly is not matching that yet. Rosie, we're learning this morning that, um, the

call between Mark Carney and Donald Trump, which has yet to take place, is apparently going to take place this morning. His, his public calendar is empty, which given the short campaign is rather unusual. What are the stakes for this call? I think they're pretty high. The advantage of being prime minister during a campaign is that you're prime minister and you can do things like Marc Arne did yesterday.

You can stand behind a lectern, look Prime Ministerial because you are, and talk about the kinds of action you want to take. The risk is that you actually have to do it. And you have to be able to prove to Canadians that you are able to do it. I think Mr. Carney tried to manage expectations very much yesterday by saying, like, it's not one phone call,

it's not one thing that's going to solve this. This is part of a broader negotiation. He has previously said that we need to wait it out, that this is going to take a long time. But getting on the phone with the president is important. They do know each other. They've met at G20s and other things. So they're not going in cold. You wonder whether he'll call him prime minister or governor? I don't know. But knowing Mr. Carney a little bit, Steph and I traveled to Europe with him last week. I don't think that would go over particularly well. He can be a little bit prickly when you push on things that he doesn't like, as I understood myself. So I don't think that's going to go over very well. But listen, the phone call has to happen.

He needs to lay down some markers as prime minister for the first time, and he was criticized by his opponents for not doing this before now. So the phone call has to happen. We, of course, will only get readouts. My guess is Donald Trump might post something on social media if he's, you know, not happy with the way things went or he wants to denigrate us further. But frankly, denigrating Mark Carney would probably help Mark Carney during this election campaign, right? Like that is only going to add to Canadians' fear about what they're feeling from the president. So it's only if, you know, the president the next morning wakes up and says something even worse or puts more tariffs on us.

But still, again, in no way do I see that that is somehow a disadvantage for Carney. That is the advantage of being prime minister. I'm Zing Singh. And I'm Simon Jack. And together we host Good Bad Billionaire. The podcast exploring the lives of some of the world's richest people. In the new season we're setting our sights on some big names. Yep, LeBron James and Martha Stewart to name just a few.

And as always, Simon and I are trying to decide whether we think they're good, bad or just another billionaire. That's Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service. Find it on BBC.com or wherever you get your BBC podcasts. Can we just talk briefly about the role of the premiers in this? People have wondered what the premiers would do given their active role on the Trump file. Before the election was called, Steph, you have the Ontario Progressive Conservative Premier, Doug Ford, who tweeted that he'd spoken with Prime Minister Mark Carney. He fully supports,

in his words, the federal government preparing retaliatory tariffs to show that we'll never back down. Toronto Star has suggested that in their first call, Pierre Poliev had asked Doug Ford for some support. Doug Ford said no, and then said that his MPPs would be absolutely swamped, just too busy to possibly help with the conservatives in this election. What do you make of that? The bad blood between the Ford Tories and the Polio Tories dates back a very long time and has to do with sort of the cross pollination of the conservative operative universe and

who got along with who and who was held responsible for what. It's silly. It's a grudge match. And it is also, you know, neither side has been helping each other for quite some time. In this environment for Doug Ford, and now, you know, one of his chief strategists to sort of so publicly diss and disavow Mr. Poliev, I know in the conservative family, as they like to call themselves, they hate it. When dirty laundry gets aired in public, this is very dirty laundry, and it will probably have repercussions in the conservative movement that are far longer than whatever happens

in this election. The challenge here, of course, is for any premier, and they always have this issue, they need to get along with whoever's in charge. Right now, Mr. Carney is in charge. And one of the challenges the premiers have had was this period of time, sort of when things were going totally off the rails for Justin Trudeau, where it felt like there was a leadership vacuum and all the premiers were saying, why aren't we doing anything? Can we please do something? And so they started doing their own unilateral things. And that may or may

not have been a success. I mean, if you think about Mr. Ford and his threats to put tariffs on electricity and shut off the lights in Michigan, he got a meeting with Lutnick, the trade secretary, right? So that leverage works, but we're at a point where it seems that all the premiers are inching towards accepting this has to be a unified national response and not just a piecemeal one. Ryan, the Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has also been in the mix here. She did an interview three weeks ago with Breitbart News, the American conservative media outlet, said that among other things, in her words, the prospect of having Pierre Poliev in government

perhaps would be more in sync, in her words, with the new direction in America. What do you make of Danielle Smith's involvement in the campaign? She's also said that she's not going to stop speaking out on behalf of her province. Yes, which I imagine fills through the conservative war room when she said it.

Everyone is trying to distance themselves from Donald Trump. And I think Daniel Smith hurt Pierre Polyov's case there. Daniel Smith and Pierre Polyov, unlike Pierre Polyov and Doug Ford, do seem to get along. There does seem to be some affinity there. And her saying that, when she said that, I think it was about six hours after she said that that it landed in Mark Carney's stump speech and it has stayed there ever since. So this election is a lot, is obviously basically entirely becoming about Donald Trump and sort of any positive association with him,

any suggestion that you as a political candidate align with him is gonna be a real problem. I think so. Is this likely to continue? There's a conservative candidate in the NDG Westmount in Montreal who said that Pierre Poliev is perhaps respected by the Donald Trump inner circle, the people close to Trump respect someone like Pierre Poliev. Is that going to be an ongoing problem, do you think?

I think it might be. I mean, Jamil Javani, a prominent conservative candidate, well known, is good friends with JD Vance. There are other connections here. Pierre Poliev also frequently mentions the interview Donald Trump gave in which he identified Pierre Poliev as, quote, not a mega guy. This is going to be an ongoing game of who's closer to Donald Trump, who's more likely. But Donald Trump is so toxic in this country to voters, especially voters who might vote a different way than they had planned at the start of this, that it's gonna be an ongoing issue,

I think for all the parties, but especially I think for the conservatives. Rosie, can we talk about what happened this week in Quebec? It seemed to some people like Mark Carney had a rough week in Quebec. He made some gaps, refused to participate in the Tevyea debate. He got the name of one of his star candidates

wrong and also got the name of the school that she survived the mass shooting at, called Polytechnique wrong. Are there going to be issues for this campaign in Quebec, do you think? I actually don't think those issues are going to hold. The Tevyea story, think, probably lasted 24 hours in

Quebec, in part because that would have meant that Francophones and Quebecers got two debates as opposed to the rest of Canada. So, you know, they're getting the same as everybody else. I think the mistake around the politique technique was much worse because, as Ryan alluded to, that is such an important historical, cultural touchstone for people in Quebec and right across the country. The thing is, Mr. Carney the next day, not only did he call the candidate and apologize, he also owned it the next day in a press conference. So like that was the right way to handle a mistake like that.

I just don't know that in Quebec people are, it feels to me like they're willing to look the other way with mistakes like that. I mean, we've talked about what's going on with the Liberals and the Conservatives, but what's going on with the Liberals is in large part because of what is happening to the complete collapse of the NDP and the cratering of the Bloc Québécois. It is stunning. And that too speaks to the moment that we are in, that people are looking at those parties and saying, well, they're not gonna be able to help me face off with Donald Trump, so I don't know that I wanna support them.

I mean, early days, liberal support seems a little soft, but that is what people are thinking. They're thinking, it's not Jagmeet Singh that's gonna help me here, he's not gonna form government. Steph, let me ask you about that. We were in British Columbia earlier this week in Burnaby, where Jagmeet Singh holds a seat. And we spoke with a number of NDP supporters.

Some of them are sticking with the party. A number of them said that they couldn't stick with the party because they felt that the stakes in their words were too high. Where does that leave Jagmeet Singh? Oh, it leaves Jagmeet Singh in a heap of trouble is where it leaves him. I mean, if he can't politically articulate a message that resonates with his own voters, I mean, think about who

makes up the NDP base, union workers, auto workers, progressives, you know, so divide those into two camps. You have the working class voter who has long been a bedrock of support for the new Democrats for quite quite some time the conservatives were very successfully plucking up those voters and bringing them into the fold. Jugmeat can't get them back because now they're either still with the conservatives or it's the liberals and preparing to help out workers in a different way that Jugmeat can't break that through. Then you have the progressive core of voters, which is so interesting to watch them still flock to the liberals when Mark Carney has basically abandoned most of the progressive

policies. I'm not saying he's going to cancel childcare, but he certainly doesn't talk about it. The sort of progressive era of inclusivity that was the Justin Trudeau era that saw so much of the New Democrat support go to the liberals. So how Jagmeet Singh finds a new voter base and reanimates them in this moment in time is very interesting and one wonders if both Mr. Singh and Mr. Poliev are rethinking the fact

that they hated each other in the House of Commons. I mean, imagine if the two of them had months and months and months ago gone to each other and said, it's never going to get any better for either of us, let's go to the polls now. We're out of time almost, just 90 seconds. So this is not a normal race, even in the first week. What is one thing, Steph, that you're looking for next week? If the conservatives decide to reframe their message to be even stronger against Mr. Trump and whether also Mr. Carney campaigns on anything but Mr. Trump.

Ryan, is there one thing that you're going to be watching out for? Yeah, you know, this campaign was rushed, especially for the liberals, which is strange because they called it. I'll be interested to see if they get all their candidates in place and if we discover that maybe their candidates' resumes should have been more heavily scrutinized. Interesting. Rosie, what about for you? Last word to you. April 2nd, the tariff day. How big and how damaging is that? And how much does that sort of blow up the week and knock everybody off message or in the case of Mark Carney, help reinforce his message? It's been quite a first week. We will talk again as this unfolds.

It really has. Hang on tight. Thank you all. Thanks. Thanks. Stephanie Levitz is a senior reporter in the Global Mails Ottawa Bureau. Ryan Tumulty, political reporter with the Toronto Star. Rosemary Barton, the CBC's chief political correspondent and the host of Rosemary Barton Live.