00:00:00.000some recent polling suggests the federal liberals are riding high with 50% support but behind closed
00:00:15.900doors nobody in Mark Carney's caucus seems to be celebrating cracks have developed in party unity
00:00:22.440the image some Canadians have of the prime minister is one of an open reasonably approachable leader
00:00:29.100This week, a much darker picture of the man has emerged from his own caucus with anonymous leaks to the media.
00:00:37.280Reports the PM has a short fuse and is condescending that he ridicules MPs who disagree with him.
00:00:44.140Here's what CBC pundit Chantal Hebert had to say.
00:00:47.120But 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.
00:00:58.380What will happen when you're at 27% in the polls?
00:01:40.400I kept it because I believe it's a defining quote.
00:01:43.700And when I read Althea's column, I thought, yep.
00:01:47.640Others point to Carney's authoritarian streak, his insistence on things being his way or the highway.
00:01:54.600There is trouble being stored up here for Mark Carney. We've already discussed many times in
00:01:59.640this program his authoritarian streak. He also suffers, I think, from smartest guy in the room
00:02:04.840syndrome. And if you've always been the smartest guy around the table, or at least think you are,
00:02:09.800in his case, probably with some justice, it can impair your judgment. You're not able to see
00:02:14.760other points of view. You're not able to hear signs of trouble brewing, not just in your party,
00:02:19.560but in the country, you're not getting all the facts, and you can be too locked up in your own
00:02:24.600brilliant schemes and not see the flaws in them. So sometimes the smartest guy in the room doesn't
00:02:29.380necessarily have the best judgment. And so the image emerging of the Prime Minister this week,
00:02:34.640at least according to some, is one of a Jekyll and Hyde character joking with reporters and smiling
00:02:40.300when he's on camera, but of a short-tempered demagogue behind closed doors. Our guest today
00:02:47.000Melissa Lansman, MP for Thornhill. Welcome to the show, Melissa. Thanks for having me.
00:02:52.120Tell me, what do you make of some of the reports coming out of media regarding these caucus
00:02:59.000meetings and some of the behavior that we're hearing about as far as the Prime Minister goes
00:03:04.520towards his MPs? I think you're seeing exactly what we've been talking about for months and
00:03:11.720months and almost, you know, more than a year now since he's been elected. There is the reality
00:03:16.440And 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.
00:03:26.360And it's also true, it turns out, in his personal character.
00:03:29.640But more than just personal character, I think it says something about him that the people should pay attention to.
00:03:36.940You see, MPs are there as a conduit, as representatives of constituents, of real Canadians on the ground.
00:03:44.920We 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.
00:04:12.180that stuff's uninteresting for him and he's dismissive of that and that's that's exactly
00:04:17.000what i think when he's dismissive of an mp yeah the sense that he's this plutocrat you know
00:04:22.640completely bubble wrap uh as far as the pain that canadians are feeling it also if he's showing
00:04:29.220this level of disdain towards his own members of parliament i mean imagine how little he thinks
00:04:33.980about 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
00:04:39.380really as, first of all, privileged position to be there, but you're there really as a conduit
00:04:44.480for the people that you represent. And you're supposed to go to Ottawa with the voice of those
00:04:48.840people. You're not supposed to be the voice of Ottawa in the constituency. And I think he's got
00:04:53.540it all wrong. And I think it speaks to his character. I think it speaks to the type of
00:04:59.060prime minister that he is. And when you see the amount of money being spent on these in-flight
00:05:04.500meals when you're talking about two hundred thousand dollars for three flights i mean that
00:05:10.740kind of money is going to jump out it's going to make people's a hair curl because they themselves
00:05:19.060have been suffering i mean no doubt look it's eight hundred and thirty four dollars on orange
00:05:24.260juice for for a single flight thirty eight hundred dollars on chocolate mousse like i don't even
00:05:30.100think chocolate mousse is very expensive. So $3,800 of it is like, you might as well bathe
00:05:35.220in a tub. But to your point, it's exactly, you know, it's exactly at the time where Canadians0.79
00:05:41.380are tightening their belts. We have the highest food inflation in all of the G7. Grocery prices,
00:05:46.900another thousand dollars per year for a family of four. So at a time when Canadians are tightening
00:05:54.100this belt, we think that Prime Minister should just be doing the same thing. 3,400, you know,
00:05:59.220We've got stories of luxury buttercups or luxury butter, and I don't even know what kind of buttercups are.
00:06:08.220They're not on my menu, so it's hard for me to understand.
00:06:11.000And I think it's hard for every Canadian to understand that a time of an economic crunch,
00:06:16.200at a time where Carney is the only G20 leader that has put this country into a recession,
00:06:21.120he's driven the economy into decline three out of four of the last quarters,
00:06:25.760and new data says that it's getting worse.
00:06:27.980at that kind of moment in our present day experience as Canadians. It doesn't look good,
00:06:35.860it doesn't smell good, and it shouldn't be happening. Yeah, I mean, we did get some good
00:06:39.540news in the way of job creation today with 88,000. I want to get to that in a minute, but
00:06:44.800a lot of the polling that we've seen, it was the Leger poll, it has liberals upwards of 50%,
00:06:51.020percent but the prime minister's own level of support is 56 but these are unheard of numbers
00:06:58.620and so it really makes you wonder about this massive gap between the perception assuming these
00:07:04.460polls are correct of the prime minister for whom they think he is and what's going on behind closed
00:07:10.700doors and whether or not these types of stories are going to continue and it'll also be interesting
00:07:16.300to see how Kearney handles this now because now he's got leaks right he's got a leaky boat he's
00:07:22.460got people inside there giving little notes and giving calls to people at the Toronto Star on the
00:07:28.300CBC about this so does the Prime Minister get angry does he lower the boom on people that he
00:07:34.680thinks are responsible what do you think happens now well look I you know I think the the internal
00:07:40.160politics of the Liberal Party is is something that's so uninteresting to me and it's so
00:07:44.840uninteresting to the everyday Canadian that is struggling with food prices and getting into
00:07:51.980housing. We have the second highest unemployment in the G7. We have a youth unemployment crisis at
00:07:58.32013% even after today's job numbers. This is like inside baseball. But what I think Canadians will
00:08:05.360be looking at is how he responds to actually turning his economic credentials into results
00:08:13.460for Canadians. You know why this is so damning for the Prime Minister, these economic numbers
00:08:18.220that we're talking about, is because he promised Canadians that he would be the sound fiscal
00:08:23.600manager. He was the guy you hired in a crisis. He was the guy to get a tariff-free deal with
00:08:29.540the US. He was the guy to bring our economy back into the black. And instead, he's the only one
00:08:36.320out of all of his peer industrialized countries that has put us in the red. And that speaks
00:08:41.180directly to the credibility of the of the prime minister so i think he's got a number of problems
00:08:45.780on his hands one of his one is this caucus one is uh one is canadians uh the other is the economy
00:08:51.500and uh and they're all going to catch up to uh to the prime minister when uh when you see that
00:08:56.860the illusions of of what he's promised the canadian public just don't match the results yeah maybe his
00:09:02.640lack of political experience coming in might be starting to be reflected in his behavior and
00:09:09.040maybe the fact that he's getting stressed out as as he you know encompasses the kind of opposition
00:09:14.580that he never used to he didn't he didn't get a whole lot of opposition as the central banker
00:09:17.900did he it was what he says goes he has staff right yeah you never question the central banker but
00:09:22.780look this is this is also like let's not your viewers cannot forget that this is the same
00:09:28.340minister sitting in the same uh you know in the same seats oftentimes in the same portfolio that
00:09:33.340have brought us into this disaster that are still responsible for shepherding the country
00:10:02.880who's a failed minister of foreign affairs.
00:10:05.060Everybody there just keeps failing upward.
00:10:06.940So 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.
00:10:14.620Yeah, 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.
00:10:25.460But we've also learned that the Kearney government has blown past its deficit targets by about $7 billion.
00:10:31.680dollars so even as we're handing out checks to 12 million people we're seeing where it's coming out
00:10:36.880it's just more debt really it's an inflationary isn't it yeah well this is this is like this is
00:10:41.840interesting news so yesterday the pbo reported that there is a one percent chance that the
00:10:46.400government is going to to to meet their what's called a fiscal anchor and that's the debt to to
00:10:52.320gdp uh ratio it'll be missed by the liberals as uh as canada's interception and the economy is
00:10:58.320projected even to be weaker than expected. The PBO projects it. We have a spring economic
00:11:06.640statement where the economic growth will be weaker, and that was revised. So this year and
00:11:12.480next year it was revised down to 1.1% and 1.6%. That's down from 1.3% and 1.8%. The downgrade
00:11:24.240doesn't even include the most recent GDP number. So we're going into weaker economic growth. It's
00:11:31.920not just the PBO saying it. It's Scotiabank. Their forecasts are about at 0.8% growth for Canada.
00:11:41.200That's less than half of what they projected before and BMO projecting even worse growth
00:11:46.960numbers at 0.5. We continue to see, despite the gaslighting, we continue to see a productivity
00:11:55.680crisis in this country and business investment being weak as companies postpone their plans to
00:12:01.840grow because of the uncertainty. And look, you don't want to be ever cheerleading the economic
00:12:12.960situation that we're in because this is very real costs for a lot of people but you can't ignore the
00:12:18.400situation either and that's you know our job is to to call it out and shine a light on the on the
00:12:24.400very reality that so many millions of Canadians are facing whether it's through their own cost
00:12:29.840of living whether it's through not having the confidence that they might have their job at the
00:12:34.160end of the year whether it's you know whether it's any of those things and making sure that
00:12:40.560we're doing what we can in Canada and what we should be doing in Canada to lower investment,
00:12:46.560attract, to lower sort of taxes and attract investment to make sure that the Canadians
00:12:53.600can see a bright future rather than a bleep one. And now we learn what a bubble the economy has
00:13:00.000been in probably years based on the immigration levels. I mean, all you have to do is pump the1.00
00:13:06.240breaks a little on immigration that that was enough for us to slip into recession that's
00:13:11.360that's how tentative the grasp on uh having a yeah but let's let's be very careful let's not
00:13:18.160you know like let's not just you know not let's not just use that as so as uh as a solution um
00:13:24.720there's no doubt that juicing the um the the economy through immigration numbers has been
00:13:29.600something that is happening for years and years in this country and anybody who sort of looked at
00:13:34.640the indicators can see that. But just pumping the brakes on immigration won't work either because
00:13:39.680our per capita GDP, that means how rich every single person is, regardless of the net number,
00:13:48.400has gone up only 0.2%. That's anemic. So if they think that they can sort of
00:13:56.960paper over their weak economic numbers by reducing immigration a little bit,
00:14:03.840But it's not going to work for everyday Canadians.
00:14:07.680In fact, it's not working for everyday Canadians, so that can't be the answer.
00:14:11.520I did mention the job numbers from today, 88,000 jobs created.
00:14:17.180This post by the Prime Minister himself, today, money is going into the bank accounts of more
00:14:31.580Well, 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?
00:14:40.520Yeah, 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.
00:14:55.220where we still have a youth unemployment rate that is almost double the national average.
00:14:59.300And there was 442,000 youth unemployed, you know, just last month.
00:15:06.420So having new benchmarks is not going to be the answer.
00:15:10.820And we've got to actually fix what's at the bottom of this.
00:15:14.200On the grocery rebate, the exact same thing, right?
00:15:16.740Like you can't, you know, you can't simply just provide an inflationary boost to groceries
00:15:24.560when grocery price inflation is the highest in the g7 when families will be paying a thousand
00:15:28.960dollars more um per uh uh you know per family of four next year than they did last year for for
00:15:35.840groceries like we've got to get to the bottom of this we've got to make it you know uh we've got
00:15:40.000to make it we've got to make energy um more more affordable we've got to cut the industrial carbon
00:15:44.800tax on the on the on the farmers on the on the on the truckers and at the end of the day on the
00:15:49.760consumers we got to get rid of a food packaging tax that's a billion dollars like there are real
00:15:54.720things that you can do without just pumping money into um into uh into the economy you're not getting
00:16:00.800to the bottom of the problem the bottom of the problem is that we have locked in our energy
00:16:05.280development we have low productivity um and uh and and we have an economy that's like feeble and weak
00:16:12.720melissa lansman thank you so much for coming on the show we appreciate it awesome thank you
00:16:16.800If you enjoyed this show, consider supporting great independent journalism by becoming a
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