In the latest episode of Full Comment, host Brian Lylee Lilly is joined by National Post columnist Stuart Thompson and political writer Tasha Carradine to discuss the chaos in Canadian politics right now, including the non-confidence motion the Tories are bringing against Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
00:06:56.160I was at his news conference here in Toronto where half a dozen of us tried to get him to say whether he had confidence in the government or not.
00:07:07.400I asked him six times once in one question.
00:07:10.940And then I kept interrupting him because he wouldn't say Laura Stone from the globe tried David Aiken from a global tried reporter from Radio Canada tried everybody tried.
00:30:16.820The kind of big thinking that you can do in opposition is just almost impossible.
00:30:21.600And I think every government in the history of the Westminster system has had this problem where they try to create these different ways of getting big ideas into the government,
00:30:33.720So Polyev came with this fresh energy and a new kind of idea of what Canadians cared about and how to solve it.
00:30:40.100And I think that's what's propelled him.
00:30:41.660But the liberals are still stuck looking at the guy that they see across the house of commons that they really hate because Polyev is,
00:30:50.820he's a really good troll in the house of commons and he has been since he was about 25 years old.
00:30:55.300So there is this like partisan alternate reality where they're in there getting mad about comments during QP or like documents that were tabled,
00:31:04.560things that Canadians will never hear about.
00:31:06.240And it's as you go year by year in government, it gets harder and harder to break out of that alternate reality.
00:31:12.940And it's partly what the liberals are in right now.
00:31:15.620Every day in government, you put another pebble in your backpack and it gets heavier every day.
00:31:21.240After nine years, that's a pretty heavy backpack.
00:31:24.480So there was a bit of kerfuffle in the house over the conservatives giving nicknames to people.
00:31:33.020Carbon tax carny or after the news out of The Logic about Brookfield Asset Management trying to set up a massive pension fund with $10 billion from taxpayers.
00:31:44.860I think you could call them cash in carny as well as carbon tax carny.
00:33:20.300They don't like it because they don't do it.
00:33:22.920They can be just as obnoxious in their own way, but they don't do that.
00:33:26.820They don't say they think that is sinking to a different level.
00:33:29.680And I do think that some of the stuff we see on social media and some of the stuff from the conservatives is it can be very vicious from their proxies, extremely vicious.
00:33:39.100And that does take the level of political discourse down to a place that is not healthy.
00:33:43.520But the liberals, the reason that they're doing that is because the liberals have made that, you know, have made things kind of toxic, have wrecked the housing market, have let too many people into the country who now can't find a place to live.
00:33:56.400Like their policy decisions, on which they pride themselves, have created the mess we're in.
00:34:01.980So it gives an opening to a conservatives to make up all this funny stuff and go, ha, see, like with Carney and Freeland.
00:34:07.720I mean, if you make Freeland suddenly second banana to Carney, what do you expect?
00:35:45.200Have they lost the connection with the average Canadian?
00:35:48.200Yeah, this is kind of, you can understand how this happened with this liberal government, because when they first came to power, it was, you know, they were on the cover of Vogue and all those magazines.
00:35:58.240And they were swanning around, Justin Trudeau was swanning around the world, getting big receptions everywhere.
00:36:02.760And that was actually working in their favor with Canadians.
00:36:05.400Canadians were saying, this is actually kind of cool.
00:36:16.460Well, and you mentioned the Conservatives had trouble with this early on, that they hated Trudeau more than Canadians did.
00:36:24.200And that takes a while for Canadians to get where Conservatives are, but they're pretty much there now.
00:36:30.380And the problem for this government is that they lived in a different world.
00:36:33.800The things that used to work for them, I think, are uniquely bad to be deploying in this moment, where people are just tired, they're fed up.
00:36:41.740It's post-pandemic, interest rates are high, everything's expensive.
00:36:45.200And they just don't want to see this kind of stuff because it seems unserious.
00:36:49.460And I think they are kind of in a rut that, you know, unfair to them because it did work so well before.
00:36:56.000But you kind of have to develop a new strategy.
00:36:59.100Let me ask you about their housing policy.
00:37:00.800Stuart, you mentioned earlier housing's one that Pierre Polyev jumped on right away.
00:37:04.900And he's been pushing this idea, we'll sell off 15% of government buildings.
00:37:11.580I think it's 6,000 government buildings.
00:37:14.700And trust me, there are plenty of surplus buildings.
00:38:38.820You know how much it would cost to retrofit that into housing?
00:38:41.420It would cost probably more than knocking it down and building on land that is extremely expensive.
00:38:45.780I think that the whole idea, you know, what are you going to put people out in Tunney's pasture outside of Ottawa and build, you know, on the farmlands there like that they have, the experimental farms, whatever, buildings that aren't used.
00:40:14.300Stuart, my ears perked up when I first heard Polly Ev say he'll cap immigration and tie it to housing.
00:40:19.880And I thought, well, one, finally somebody's saying something that makes sense.
00:40:24.100But two, I think that'll be politically popular.
00:40:27.720You can go to areas of Mississauga and Brampton where everybody is an immigrant and you raise this issue and they'll say, yeah, there's too many people coming in.
00:40:36.400This is a universal view now because we've all seen what's happened to the housing supply, the health care crisis, jobs.
00:40:45.280Stats Canada has been screaming at the government for 13, 14 months that you're bringing in people faster than we can create jobs.
00:40:54.020So when I heard Polly Ev say, well, cap immigration, we'll come up with a formula, tie it to housing.
00:40:58.640I thought that should work both for votes and in dealing with the supply issue.
00:41:03.000Yeah, I think there's two sides to this.
00:41:06.400One is that I think probably given the state of affairs, it was necessary and we just had to get there.
00:41:11.320And if you look at the polling numbers on how people feel about immigration, it's getting bad.
00:41:17.280People are not happy about the immigration system right now.
00:41:48.100The number got a little higher, but not by much.
00:41:51.280And never did immigration become an issue in a political campaign.
00:41:55.360And I think that Pure Polly Ed will be responsible about it.
00:41:59.460I think that's why he's tying it to housing and health care and all these things.
00:42:02.780But we all know, we've all seen the politics in Europe.
00:42:06.060This can go to an irresponsible and a dark place if it gets mishandled.
00:42:10.800And I know if you talk to Justin Trudeau in 2015, the idea that that would become his legacy, I think, would be almost unbelievable to him.
00:42:19.440But this is the kind of thing we were talking about, governmental complacency, where things are just ticking along.
00:42:24.460You're making kind of glib decisions without really looking too far ahead.
00:42:29.360And if the immigration debate goes sideways, it's because of that.
00:42:33.880They just turned on the taps too much.
00:43:04.560Carl Belanger, former advisor to Jack Layton and Tom Mulcair, and I know you know Carl well, Tasha, he said straight up, Jagmeet Sane ripped up the agreement because they were hearing at the doors in Winnipeg how angry people were.
00:43:21.180They had to get out of the deal before the by-election to save the furniture, and it was still 48% NDP, 44% conservative.
00:43:30.780I think we're going to see more blue-orange switcher ridings across the country in the next election.
00:43:38.540And while it seems like a bit of bravado for Jagmeet Sane to say, oh, the next election's between me and Pierre Polyev, in some areas it will be.
00:43:48.820And for areas where they have a Liberal MP and they're looking for an alternative, that'll be the battle.
00:43:54.780So what are your thoughts on, one, the by-election, and two, a battle between Sane and Polyev?
00:44:31.620But I think the NDP vote held for particular factors there, too, including Wab Canoe, who's a very popular NDP Premier in Manitoba.
00:44:39.160So that's not going to replicate itself elsewhere.
00:44:41.120I do agree with you, however, that the NDP and the Conservatives are going after the same voter because the NDP has abandoned that voter.
00:44:49.760They're both going after the Union blue-collar voter.
00:44:52.520The NDP has veered off into the progressive fantasy world on so many issues and too far to the left and not the priorities that those voters have.
00:45:01.720A lot of very woke issues, also on the Israel-Palestine or Israel-Hamas conflict.
00:45:07.120So you have situations where the NDP is talking about stuff.
00:45:09.840The average working person is like, that's not my problem.
00:45:16.340That is where I think he can make gains.
00:45:18.360But I don't think this rioting actually ended up being that.
00:45:21.360As someone that grew up in a home with an NDP sign on the front lawn and a dad who was in a private sector blue-collar trade union, I can tell you there's a lot of those guys available.
00:45:32.340And that is the battle because the NDP has abandoned the Union Hall for the faculty club.
00:45:39.960So, Stuart, as you look to what Doug Ford did in Ontario, winning in places like Hamilton, Windsor, Timmons, Pierre Polyev's trying to run the same playbook in this election, whether it's in Ontario or in British Columbia, to try and peel away some of those votes.
00:46:00.780Yeah, I think it's really interesting.
00:46:02.020And the little bit of reporting I've done on this, I'm pretty confident that this is a real thing to Pierre Polyev.
00:46:09.340Like, this isn't something they're dabbling in and they're going to do a Labor Day speech and that's about it.
00:46:13.800They are very committed to this and they're going to take some hard votes in the House of Commons to do this.
00:46:19.940And, you know, there is a faction of free market conservatives who, if you say we're going to ban replacement workers at federally regulated workplaces, they're going to say, why are we doing this?
00:46:34.320But as Doug Ford has shown, the sort of ideological, philosophical free market conservative, they exist in the newspaper columns, but they aren't a huge faction of voters out there.
00:46:45.180And I think that Polyev has realized this.
00:46:47.940They sent, we did a story last week about Polyev's, he actually wrote us a comment personally saying, here's how I evolved my opinion from a sort of libertarian free market guy to someone who now believes that, you know, unions are great.
00:47:11.400I think Polyev is going to hold that line.
00:47:14.000He may get some grumbling on the right, but I think, as you can see, it's not going to matter too much to him.
00:47:19.540Well, it worked previously for Boris Johnson before he imploded for other reasons.
00:47:24.660If you, I'm sure you both watch parts of the Republican National Convention in the States, they had the head of the Teamsters Union speak.
00:47:32.520This is a movement in conservatism throughout the Western, at least English speaking world, isn't it, Tasha?
00:47:41.960Well, sure, because union jobs have disappeared and the left behind class, as people are calling, you know, there's left behinds and the laptop class.
00:47:50.360And the laptop class, especially during the pandemic, had it easy.
00:48:01.460People who are on the lines, manufacturing, people who were working in construction, working in difficult environments where they actually had to be around people.
00:48:10.320They suffered because either they couldn't work, they weren't allowed, or they could get COVID if they were there.
00:48:15.280So those folks had a much different experience for that span of time.
00:48:37.380He won the leadership with those folks, with the support of people across the country who sympathized.
00:48:42.520And he's taken that, and he will run on that, because that is right now, there's this populist anger around the world of people who were hard done by globalization, hard done by the pandemic, who say, those elites in government don't listen to me.
00:48:57.240And so he's going to be like, you know, I'm fighting for the people who don't, Trump says the same thing.
00:49:02.000I'm fighting people who don't get listened to.
00:49:39.740Anything that these guys rely on for their jobs, the NDP and, to a degree, liberals, who identify as progressives rather than as liberals now, they say no.
00:49:50.780And conservatives, you know, at the provincial or federal level are saying, yeah, we've got to build.
00:49:55.840And if you build, these guys are employed.
00:49:57.740So it's in their best interest, isn't it?
00:49:59.980What they need is an old socialist running that party.
00:50:02.640And I don't know if they exist anymore.
00:50:05.160But you can see, I will tell you, at least somebody in that party is aware that this is going on because they've started to edge away from the carbon tax.
00:50:14.160And, you know, Bernie Sanders, someone like that, would have said, we can't put the burden of fixing climate change on workers.