Juno News - Melissa Lantsman on Carney's caucus crackdown

00:00:00.000 some recent polling suggests the federal liberals are riding high with 50% support but behind closed

00:00:15.900 doors nobody in Mark Carney's caucus seems to be celebrating cracks have developed in party unity

00:00:22.440 the image some Canadians have of the prime minister is one of an open reasonably approachable leader

00:00:29.100 This week, a much darker picture of the man has emerged from his own caucus with anonymous leaks to the media.

00:00:37.280 Reports the PM has a short fuse and is condescending that he ridicules MPs who disagree with him.

00:00:44.140 Here's what CBC pundit Chantal Hebert had to say.

00:00:47.120 But what I do find striking goes back to this notion that you're at 50% in the polls and you've got MPs who are going around saying he's not nice.

00:00:58.380 What will happen when you're at 27% in the polls?

00:01:02.800 I've watched Brian Mulroney at 20%,

00:01:06.160 and no one was going to journalists to say things like that,

00:01:09.720 to Jean Chalier in Quebec.

00:01:11.300 So yes, there is a message there about caucus management,

00:01:15.240 but I'm not surprised that this is happening

00:01:18.260 because I have this quote, a public quote from the Prime Minister,

00:01:21.900 who says, I don't want to hear what people are against.

00:01:24.800 We want to hear what they're for.

00:01:26.340 I have translated it now into what they're for if it happens to match what we're for.

00:01:34.100 That was at the Vancouver Board of Trade where he said that publicly.

00:01:38.040 What I'm for, really.

00:01:40.400 I kept it because I believe it's a defining quote.

00:01:43.700 And when I read Althea's column, I thought, yep.

00:01:47.640 Others point to Carney's authoritarian streak, his insistence on things being his way or the highway.

00:01:54.600 There is trouble being stored up here for Mark Carney. We've already discussed many times in

00:01:59.640 this program his authoritarian streak. He also suffers, I think, from smartest guy in the room

00:02:04.840 syndrome. And if you've always been the smartest guy around the table, or at least think you are,

00:02:09.800 in his case, probably with some justice, it can impair your judgment. You're not able to see

00:02:14.760 other points of view. You're not able to hear signs of trouble brewing, not just in your party,

00:02:19.560 but in the country, you're not getting all the facts, and you can be too locked up in your own

00:02:24.600 brilliant schemes and not see the flaws in them. So sometimes the smartest guy in the room doesn't

00:02:29.380 necessarily have the best judgment. And so the image emerging of the Prime Minister this week,

00:02:34.640 at least according to some, is one of a Jekyll and Hyde character joking with reporters and smiling

00:02:40.300 when he's on camera, but of a short-tempered demagogue behind closed doors. Our guest today

00:02:47.000 Melissa Lansman, MP for Thornhill. Welcome to the show, Melissa. Thanks for having me.

00:02:52.120 Tell me, what do you make of some of the reports coming out of media regarding these caucus

00:02:59.000 meetings and some of the behavior that we're hearing about as far as the Prime Minister goes

00:03:04.520 towards his MPs? I think you're seeing exactly what we've been talking about for months and

00:03:11.720 months and almost, you know, more than a year now since he's been elected. There is the reality

00:03:16.440 And there is the illusion and that that's true in all of the policy announcements that he's been making versus the actual delivery of results.

00:03:26.360 And it's also true, it turns out, in his personal character.

00:03:29.640 But more than just personal character, I think it says something about him that the people should pay attention to.

00:03:36.940 You see, MPs are there as a conduit, as representatives of constituents, of real Canadians on the ground.

00:03:44.920 We hear these stories day in and day out. And to have a guy who just doesn't want to hear any of it, I think tells you everything you need to know about the world that Mark Carney lives in, like the high-flying sort of Davos speeches versus the everyday pain that Canadians from coast to coast to coast are feeling on groceries, on gas, on the price of homes.

00:04:12.180 that stuff's uninteresting for him and he's dismissive of that and that's that's exactly

00:04:17.000 what i think when he's dismissive of an mp yeah the sense that he's this plutocrat you know

00:04:22.640 completely bubble wrap uh as far as the pain that canadians are feeling it also if he's showing

00:04:29.220 this level of disdain towards his own members of parliament i mean imagine how little he thinks

00:04:33.980 about the rest of us well that i mean that's it's it's it's one in the same right like you're there

00:04:39.380 really as, first of all, privileged position to be there, but you're there really as a conduit

00:04:44.480 for the people that you represent. And you're supposed to go to Ottawa with the voice of those

00:04:48.840 people. You're not supposed to be the voice of Ottawa in the constituency. And I think he's got

00:04:53.540 it all wrong. And I think it speaks to his character. I think it speaks to the type of

00:04:59.060 prime minister that he is. And when you see the amount of money being spent on these in-flight

00:05:04.500 meals when you're talking about two hundred thousand dollars for three flights i mean that

00:05:10.740 kind of money is going to jump out it's going to make people's a hair curl because they themselves

00:05:19.060 have been suffering i mean no doubt look it's eight hundred and thirty four dollars on orange

00:05:24.260 juice for for a single flight thirty eight hundred dollars on chocolate mousse like i don't even

00:05:30.100 think chocolate mousse is very expensive. So $3,800 of it is like, you might as well bathe

00:05:35.220 in a tub. But to your point, it's exactly, you know, it's exactly at the time where Canadians 0.79

00:05:41.380 are tightening their belts. We have the highest food inflation in all of the G7. Grocery prices,

00:05:46.900 another thousand dollars per year for a family of four. So at a time when Canadians are tightening

00:05:54.100 this belt, we think that Prime Minister should just be doing the same thing. 3,400, you know,

00:05:59.220 We've got stories of luxury buttercups or luxury butter, and I don't even know what kind of buttercups are.

00:06:08.220 They're not on my menu, so it's hard for me to understand.

00:06:11.000 And I think it's hard for every Canadian to understand that a time of an economic crunch,

00:06:16.200 at a time where Carney is the only G20 leader that has put this country into a recession,

00:06:21.120 he's driven the economy into decline three out of four of the last quarters,

00:06:25.760 and new data says that it's getting worse.

00:06:27.980 at that kind of moment in our present day experience as Canadians. It doesn't look good,

00:06:35.860 it doesn't smell good, and it shouldn't be happening. Yeah, I mean, we did get some good

00:06:39.540 news in the way of job creation today with 88,000. I want to get to that in a minute, but

00:06:44.800 a lot of the polling that we've seen, it was the Leger poll, it has liberals upwards of 50%,

00:06:51.020 percent but the prime minister's own level of support is 56 but these are unheard of numbers

00:06:58.620 and so it really makes you wonder about this massive gap between the perception assuming these

00:07:04.460 polls are correct of the prime minister for whom they think he is and what's going on behind closed

00:07:10.700 doors and whether or not these types of stories are going to continue and it'll also be interesting

00:07:16.300 to see how Kearney handles this now because now he's got leaks right he's got a leaky boat he's

00:07:22.460 got people inside there giving little notes and giving calls to people at the Toronto Star on the

00:07:28.300 CBC about this so does the Prime Minister get angry does he lower the boom on people that he

00:07:34.680 thinks are responsible what do you think happens now well look I you know I think the the internal

00:07:40.160 politics of the Liberal Party is is something that's so uninteresting to me and it's so

00:07:44.840 uninteresting to the everyday Canadian that is struggling with food prices and getting into

00:07:51.980 housing. We have the second highest unemployment in the G7. We have a youth unemployment crisis at

00:07:58.320 13% even after today's job numbers. This is like inside baseball. But what I think Canadians will

00:08:05.360 be looking at is how he responds to actually turning his economic credentials into results

00:08:13.460 for Canadians. You know why this is so damning for the Prime Minister, these economic numbers

00:08:18.220 that we're talking about, is because he promised Canadians that he would be the sound fiscal

00:08:23.600 manager. He was the guy you hired in a crisis. He was the guy to get a tariff-free deal with

00:08:29.540 the US. He was the guy to bring our economy back into the black. And instead, he's the only one

00:08:36.320 out of all of his peer industrialized countries that has put us in the red. And that speaks

00:08:41.180 directly to the credibility of the of the prime minister so i think he's got a number of problems

00:08:45.780 on his hands one of his one is this caucus one is uh one is canadians uh the other is the economy

00:08:51.500 and uh and they're all going to catch up to uh to the prime minister when uh when you see that

00:08:56.860 the illusions of of what he's promised the canadian public just don't match the results yeah maybe his

00:09:02.640 lack of political experience coming in might be starting to be reflected in his behavior and

00:09:09.040 maybe the fact that he's getting stressed out as as he you know encompasses the kind of opposition

00:09:14.580 that he never used to he didn't he didn't get a whole lot of opposition as the central banker

00:09:17.900 did he it was what he says goes he has staff right yeah you never question the central banker but

00:09:22.780 look this is this is also like let's not your viewers cannot forget that this is the same

00:09:28.340 minister sitting in the same uh you know in the same seats oftentimes in the same portfolio that

00:09:33.340 have brought us into this disaster that are still responsible for shepherding the country

00:09:37.520 through this turmoil.

00:09:40.260 So, you know, you've got a minister of heritage

00:09:42.720 who wants to, you know, ban verses from the Bible,

00:09:46.720 still the minister of heritage.

00:09:49.060 You've got, you know, the minister of jobs

00:09:51.880 who spent time in other portfolios,

00:09:55.140 like destroying the economic output of Canadians

00:10:00.100 via productivity.

00:10:01.520 You've got a minister of industry

00:10:02.880 who's a failed minister of foreign affairs.

00:10:05.060 Everybody there just keeps failing upward.

00:10:06.940 So if that's going to be, you know, if that's going to be the future of the Kearney government, then I don't think it's going to last that long.

00:10:14.620 Yeah, well, we've also got this advisory council, you know, that's supposed to be helping ease the situation around anti-Semitism made up of, well, quite possibly anti-Semites.

00:10:25.460 But we've also learned that the Kearney government has blown past its deficit targets by about $7 billion.

00:10:31.680 dollars so even as we're handing out checks to 12 million people we're seeing where it's coming out

00:10:36.880 it's just more debt really it's an inflationary isn't it yeah well this is this is like this is

00:10:41.840 interesting news so yesterday the pbo reported that there is a one percent chance that the

00:10:46.400 government is going to to to meet their what's called a fiscal anchor and that's the debt to to

00:10:52.320 gdp uh ratio it'll be missed by the liberals as uh as canada's interception and the economy is

00:10:58.320 projected even to be weaker than expected. The PBO projects it. We have a spring economic

00:11:06.640 statement where the economic growth will be weaker, and that was revised. So this year and

00:11:12.480 next year it was revised down to 1.1% and 1.6%. That's down from 1.3% and 1.8%. The downgrade

00:11:24.240 doesn't even include the most recent GDP number. So we're going into weaker economic growth. It's

00:11:31.920 not just the PBO saying it. It's Scotiabank. Their forecasts are about at 0.8% growth for Canada.

00:11:41.200 That's less than half of what they projected before and BMO projecting even worse growth

00:11:46.960 numbers at 0.5. We continue to see, despite the gaslighting, we continue to see a productivity

00:11:55.680 crisis in this country and business investment being weak as companies postpone their plans to

00:12:01.840 grow because of the uncertainty. And look, you don't want to be ever cheerleading the economic

00:12:12.960 situation that we're in because this is very real costs for a lot of people but you can't ignore the

00:12:18.400 situation either and that's you know our job is to to call it out and shine a light on the on the

00:12:24.400 very reality that so many millions of Canadians are facing whether it's through their own cost

00:12:29.840 of living whether it's through not having the confidence that they might have their job at the

00:12:34.160 end of the year whether it's you know whether it's any of those things and making sure that

00:12:40.560 we're doing what we can in Canada and what we should be doing in Canada to lower investment,

00:12:46.560 attract, to lower sort of taxes and attract investment to make sure that the Canadians

00:12:53.600 can see a bright future rather than a bleep one. And now we learn what a bubble the economy has

00:13:00.000 been in probably years based on the immigration levels. I mean, all you have to do is pump the 1.00

00:13:06.240 breaks a little on immigration that that was enough for us to slip into recession that's

00:13:11.360 that's how tentative the grasp on uh having a yeah but let's let's be very careful let's not

00:13:18.160 you know like let's not just you know not let's not just use that as so as uh as a solution um

00:13:24.720 there's no doubt that juicing the um the the economy through immigration numbers has been

00:13:29.600 something that is happening for years and years in this country and anybody who sort of looked at

00:13:34.640 the indicators can see that. But just pumping the brakes on immigration won't work either because

00:13:39.680 our per capita GDP, that means how rich every single person is, regardless of the net number,

00:13:48.400 has gone up only 0.2%. That's anemic. So if they think that they can sort of

00:13:56.960 paper over their weak economic numbers by reducing immigration a little bit,

00:14:03.840 But it's not going to work for everyday Canadians.

00:14:07.680 In fact, it's not working for everyday Canadians, so that can't be the answer.

00:14:11.520 I did mention the job numbers from today, 88,000 jobs created.

00:14:17.180 This post by the Prime Minister himself, today, money is going into the bank accounts of more

00:14:22.580 than 12 million Canadians.

00:14:24.700 That's the new Canada Groceries and Essentials benefit at work, giving a boost to Canadians

00:14:30.380 who need it most.

00:14:31.580 Well, we all know that a lot of Canadians need a boost, but what they really need is lower prices, not just a periodic handout. What do you make of this?

00:14:40.520 Yeah, look, two things there. On the job numbers, we're very happy to hear that there's some rebound in the job markets, but that's not going to erase the more than 112,000 jobs we lost since January.

00:14:55.220 where we still have a youth unemployment rate that is almost double the national average.

00:14:59.300 And there was 442,000 youth unemployed, you know, just last month.

00:15:06.420 So having new benchmarks is not going to be the answer.

00:15:10.820 And we've got to actually fix what's at the bottom of this.

00:15:14.200 On the grocery rebate, the exact same thing, right?

00:15:16.740 Like you can't, you know, you can't simply just provide an inflationary boost to groceries

00:15:24.560 when grocery price inflation is the highest in the g7 when families will be paying a thousand

00:15:28.960 dollars more um per uh uh you know per family of four next year than they did last year for for

00:15:35.840 groceries like we've got to get to the bottom of this we've got to make it you know uh we've got

00:15:40.000 to make it we've got to make energy um more more affordable we've got to cut the industrial carbon

00:15:44.800 tax on the on the on the farmers on the on the on the truckers and at the end of the day on the

00:15:49.760 consumers we got to get rid of a food packaging tax that's a billion dollars like there are real

00:15:54.720 things that you can do without just pumping money into um into uh into the economy you're not getting

00:16:00.800 to the bottom of the problem the bottom of the problem is that we have locked in our energy

00:16:05.280 development we have low productivity um and uh and and we have an economy that's like feeble and weak

00:16:12.720 melissa lansman thank you so much for coming on the show we appreciate it awesome thank you

00:16:16.800 If you enjoyed this show, consider supporting great independent journalism by becoming a

00:16:22.160 premier member of Juno News. Please go to junonews.com backslash straight up. You can

00:16:27.520 find the link below. It helps us do what we do. Thank you so much for tuning in. We'll see you

00:16:32.240 next time.

00:16:41.200 All right.

Juno News - June 08, 2026

Melissa Lantsman on Carney's caucus crackdown

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