00:01:27.140Well, for the Premier, this comes amidst sinking poll numbers,
00:01:30.840the embarrassing sell-off of a government plane,
00:01:33.700and a legal setback in his bid not to release private records.
00:01:39.520Conservative Party leader Pierre Polyev has restated his position on sex change operations for kids.
00:01:46.620He says his party came out against the idea three years ago and nothing has changed.
00:01:51.120The policy of the Conservative Party as adopted by our national convention in Quebec City three years ago is that there should be no irreversible sex changes for kids, period. That is our policy. And I support that policy.
00:02:06.500Polyev has also come out against biological males competing in women's sports. He says it's a matter of fairness.
00:02:13.060MP Nate Erskine-Smith has lost his bid for an appeal following a failed bid for a provincial
00:02:20.440nomination in the riding of Scarborough Southwest, that's in Ontario. In a letter,
00:02:26.220the Liberal Party of Ontario dismissed a complaint, his complaint, alleging voting irregularities
00:02:32.740during the nominating meeting earlier this month. Erskine-Smith lost to pizza entrepreneur
00:02:39.100Abjinal Hafiz by 19 votes. It's time to modernize Canada's rules on nicotine.
00:02:45.760Alternatives to cigarettes like heated tobacco vaping products and oral smokeless products
00:02:50.560don't burn tobacco or produce smoke. Now, they aren't risk-free, but the growing body of
00:02:56.640scientific evidence shows that they have the potential to be substantially less harmful
00:03:01.640than smoking cigarettes. Now, despite this, Canadians are banned from accessing this
00:03:07.780critical information and sometimes even banned from the products. Nicotine pouches remain banned
00:03:13.200in convenience stores across the country and current laws ban communication about the risk
00:03:19.140of these products compared to cigarettes. It's absolutely ridiculous. The evidence is here. The0.91
00:03:24.660tools exist. Canadians deserve to have the freedom to know about them, to learn about them, to even
00:03:30.300just understand them. It's a free country. We should be able to have this information. So learn
00:03:36.060more about this campaign and our friends over at unsmoke by visiting their website unsmoke.ca
00:03:42.600and thank you so much to unsmoke for sponsoring this episode our guest today is toronto sun
00:03:47.220columnist brian lilly who can also be found on substack at brianlilly.com check it out today
00:03:53.760welcome once again brian oh thanks for having me mark all right premier ford losing a key member
00:03:59.260of his cabinet caroline mulrooney announcing that she's going to be leaving her post as a treasury
00:04:05.420board president. That's going to happen on June the 5th. There's going to be a by-election, I guess,
00:04:11.440in the writing of York Simcoe. What can we read in there about her departure at this particular
00:04:18.760time? Well, I could be a dupe once again, which I have been in the past. Often you hear politicians
00:04:24.440saying they want to leave because they want to spend more time with their family. And I'll admit
00:04:28.800I was duped by Sean Fraser when he said that, you know, when he was leaving the Trudeau government,
00:04:33.880then he suddenly decided he didn't like his family and was running again. But, you know,
00:04:38.300I looked at Fraser and he had a couple of young kids and it's hard being far away.0.90
00:04:42.620In the case of Caroline Mulroney, I don't think this is a woman that has leadership ambitions at
00:04:48.040the moment or at all. She ran for the leadership with some pressure on her back in 2018 for the
00:04:55.280Ontario PCs. But since then and since the election, she has just been content to be a quiet team
00:05:02.520player inside the Ford government. She is regarded as one of the most competent ministers.
00:05:08.800She is incredibly well-read on her files and everyone else's. When I talk to, you know, fellow
00:05:15.880caucus or cabinet members, when I talk to bureaucrats or political staffers about her,
00:05:21.680they've always said the same thing. This goes back years. She will be the most well-read,
00:05:26.360well-briefed minister in the room. And that's really important for Treasury Board because most
00:05:32.660people who don't work in government don't know what Treasury Board is. You know you've got the
00:05:37.020finance department that puts out the budget, but to get something in the budget, you've got to take
00:05:40.820it to Treasury Board. And Treasury Board is literally a board, so she's the president of
00:05:45.380the board, and there's other members of cabinet and caucus in there, and they will examine things.
00:05:50.540And if you show up with a half-baked idea while Carolyn Mulroney is chairing a Treasury Board
00:05:55.320meeting. Good luck. You're going to get grilled and you're going to get bounced back. You're going
00:05:59.320to be told no or come back when it's ready. So in that sense, Doug Ford is facing a big loss here.
00:06:06.080This is one of the more competent people on his team, very loyal to him, also very loyal to Pierre
00:06:12.900Polyev and the Federal Conservatives, despite that rift between the Ford team and the Polyev team.
00:06:17.460so it's a big loss for her but I don't believe that she's you know exiting to you know go on
00:06:25.360people keep saying that you know it's either going to be Ben Mulroney or Mark Mulroney or
00:06:29.200Caroline Mulroney is going to try and run to take out Pierre Polyev all three of them are extremely
00:06:33.920loyal to Pierre Polyev to the federal party Mark Mulroney was one of the biggest fundraisers on
00:06:39.260Bay Street for him. So will one of them run if the job's open one day? Maybe. But she said in
00:06:47.320her statement that, you know, her dad died two years ago. Her kids have left the house. Her and
00:06:52.040her husband are empty nesters. Her mother's moved from Montreal to Toronto. And my understanding,
00:06:57.560you know, I haven't talked to her about this. I haven't talked to her siblings about this.
00:07:00.860My understanding is that she's looking after her mother a lot more. She's in her 80s.
00:07:04.540um we all know what that's like right we all we all deal with this uh as your parents get older
00:07:10.680so i i truly do think that she is leaving to spend time with family she told reporters at
00:07:16.400queens park earlier today maybe she'll be back in a few years but right now she wants to go and
00:07:22.060spend some time she had a good eight year run i'm going to take her at her word on this
00:07:26.900right maybe i need some clarity here however and i take your point about her mom coming to live
00:07:33.640there but she says that her and her husband just became empty nesters isn't that when you have time
00:07:39.640on your hands i mean you want to spend time with your family and you know this is apparent when
00:07:45.240your kids are home because of course you have access to those people not when they're away
00:07:50.360living their lives so i i found that sort of interesting but but but i think it's more on
00:07:57.240the side of looking after her mother okay so you know that that that's how i'm reading it um i
00:08:06.280haven't seen any public statements no one's been whispering about oh she's organizing and i know
00:08:11.560all of her team who helped organize her 2018 campaign and none of them are saying hey we're
00:08:16.200getting the band back together but the premier is having his difficulties right now so if people
00:08:23.160are going to start leaving you know it's not hard to read certain things into it i mean he's got
00:08:29.240sinking full numbers numbers are not that great haven't been good for a while now maybe you've
00:08:34.760seen some better ones recently but i haven't you've got the embarrassing sell-off of the
00:08:39.560government plane you've got his uh this legal setback uh not to release private records and i
00:08:46.600realize that's a global news uh issue which i know you want to address but the premier himself is not
00:08:52.680going through a great time right now and he's undoubtedly facing some pressure from inside his
00:08:58.040own party is that fair or not so here's what i'll say about this he has had some really rough weeks
00:09:05.480the whole plane fiasco uh was not good and yet i'm just pulling up 338 canada.com the polling
00:09:12.760aggregator and you know the fact is if an election were held today doug ford would most likely win
00:09:19.080another majority. So yes, his poll numbers are down, but he is three to five points ahead of
00:09:26.720the other guys. And that's the leaderless liberals. Once the liberals get a leader,
00:09:31.340that changes everything. We saw this. We've seen this in the past with during the Harper years,
00:09:36.540when the federal liberals didn't have a leader, they become more popular suddenly. Oh, you don't
00:09:40.900have that Stefan Dion Bozo in there anymore. We like you again. You don't have Michael Ignatiev
00:09:45.720in there? We like you again. You get another leader? We're not so sure. So this is a fairly
00:09:51.220common phenomenon in politics that I've never fully been able to understand, but it happens.
00:09:57.540I thought Doug Ford's poll numbers would have taken a bigger hit. These problems with freedom
00:10:04.540of information, FOI, being a drip, drip, drip, I wonder if that's going to wear on him eventually,
00:10:10.700but it hasn't so far. He's down from 44% in polls earlier to 39% now, and 39% still gets you
00:10:24.080a majority. He seems adamant on running for a fourth majority for a fourth term.
00:10:29.860I would advise against it, but Doug Ford doesn't listen to me. His wife reads my columns all the
00:10:36.740time and leaves them on the kitchen table for him, especially the ones where I criticize him.
00:10:41.800But, you know, Ford's not listening to me. Well, 41% didn't get your Polly Eva victory.
00:10:50.700You know, I mean, the NDP went down to 5% in Ontario in that election. The NDP in Ontario
00:10:56.420right now is at about 17%. And the Liberals are in the low to mid 30s. And if they elect
00:11:03.460Nathaniel Erskine-Smith as their leader, they will fall further.
00:11:09.200There is a matter of people just getting tired of you. And you know this, having watched
00:11:12.960politics for decades, people just, it's like what happened with Harper, right? I mean,
00:11:19.420he wasn't doing a bad job as prime minister, but people wanted a fresh face in there and they moved
00:11:24.740on. And so maybe that's a factor. And there are some conservatives, some PCs who feel that Doug
00:11:32.680Ford could be more conservative. I mean, he hasn't run a balanced budget since he's been in there,
00:11:37.520and he's had opportunities to do so. It's just the overall state of the finances in the province
00:11:43.260is a concern amongst some people. I'm just wondering if there isn't an element of
00:11:47.960disgruntlement amongst people who would like Doug Ford to be, quote, more conservative.
00:11:53.840So there's kind of two factions on that. There's this group called Project Ontario,
00:11:57.380and they keep saying doug ford isn't conservative enough and yet the issues that uh they tend to be
00:12:04.400very libertarian leaning and the issues that a lot of people that i hear from that want doug ford to
00:12:09.720be more conservative on like getting the woke out of the education system um they wouldn't want that
00:12:16.480they they just want like give us pure housing policy that allows a six-story building in my
00:12:22.540laneway. You know, so Ford's benefiting because the people that want him out or want him to be
00:12:30.180more conservative aren't united. His opposition is fractured. You know, there's no united
00:12:39.680progressive front against him. You know, you use the Stephen Harper analogy. By 2013, Stephen
00:12:45.700Harper was effectively done. We can see that in hindsight. And maybe we should have seen it at
00:12:52.320the time and didn't, the Manitoba by-election in Brandon Suras back in, it was late 2013 or early
00:13:01.2002014, the conservatives had to pour so much money into that just to hold on to a seat that should
00:13:07.260have been an easy one for them. That should have been a warning sign for Stephen Harper. So look,
00:13:13.560Doug Ford is one year into a four or five-year mandate. He got rid of the fixed election date
00:13:18.740law that, well, no government had to follow anyway, because it's not worth the paper it's
00:13:24.040printed on, doesn't matter who's in charge. Those, you know, the first line of them actually says
00:13:29.140that none of this changes the Constitution, which says you can go five years. So if in one or two
00:13:35.660years time, the warning signs are there, if he's not able to turn this around, then he should really
00:13:42.580seriously think about leaving. As I said, I don't advise going to a four-year term, another fourth
00:13:48.640mandate. I don't think it's wise. Leave on a high note, but he seems determined. So does it
00:13:56.240continue to wear? The Greenbelt scandal had him down at about 31, 32%. The plane and the FOY stuff
00:14:06.360has got him down to 39 in the most recent polls. I think the most recent Leger poll,
00:14:20.100But what I've been saying for a while is this seems and feels like a government without a purpose.
00:14:27.620And if he's going to turn it around, he has to find a purpose again.
00:14:32.140When he was first elected, he was for the people.
00:14:34.200Then he, you know, last election, he won on Protect Ontario during the height of mania over Donald Trump and the tariffs.
00:14:44.240That's still there to a good degree. And we see that in the federal numbers, like Mark Carney with a 12 point lead over Pierre Paulyov and the conservatives.
00:14:51.080What's driving that? Donald Trump. So, you know, can he ride that horse again?
00:14:57.580I wouldn't think so, but Carney's finding a way to do it.
00:15:00.320there's just so much uh influx in politics at the moment including the fact that merit styles
00:15:07.920has been the lead on this plane issue and on the foi she has been the lead prosecutor
00:15:13.120and there's some viewers right now saying who's merit styles she's the leader of the ndp she's
00:15:20.480the leader of the official opposition and you wouldn't know it we talk more about prospective
00:15:24.960candidates for the Ontario Liberal leadership. So she, despite being the lead on prosecuting
00:15:30.960Ford on these things that have brought him down in the polls, is stuck at 17%. And we don't know
00:15:37.480who the Liberals are going to add. Could it be Nathaniel Erskine-Smith? He's a maverick. He's
00:15:42.460more left than the NDP. Could it be Navdeep Bains? He's a good organizer, I'm told, but he would
00:15:50.300also wear some of the Justin Trudeau legacy. He was the innovation minister in charge of super
00:15:55.420clusters that were going to transform the economy. Mark, can you find me a super cluster, please?