Mark Slapinski

00:00:00.000 Mark Carney has been doing such a terrible job as Prime Minister that even the CBC, yes the CBC, is turning on him.

00:00:07.960 Let's watch this brutal takedown together.

00:00:10.400 I'm Rosemary Barton, here to break it down tonight, Chantal Ibert, Andrew Coyne, Althea Raj.

00:00:15.420 Andrew, let's start with you. We've got a date now, perhaps a little bit later for the budget than we anticipated on Monday, pushing into November.

00:00:23.000 But all those things that I mentioned there are factors that are making it difficult to come up with, I guess, that's what the government says, a budget for right now.

00:00:32.640 What do you make of where they have landed on the date?

00:00:35.760 Well, it may also be because they're struggling to make the numbers add up.

00:00:40.160 Look, the situation is deteriorating.

00:00:43.180 This time, the last budget, which was 18 months ago, the budget for this year was supposed to be $39 billion.

00:00:49.320 The budget deficit for this year was supposed to be $39 billion.

00:00:51.860 By the last spring, a liberal platform, it was $62 billion.

00:00:55.420 The C.D. Howe Institute in July said it's $92 billion.

00:00:58.560 But the economy has shrunk since then.

00:01:00.440 It's shrunk certainly three months in a row, maybe six months.

00:01:03.640 So we could be looking at a number over $100 billion, for all we know, by this point.

00:01:07.100 Now you know you're in trouble when Andrew Coyne, of all people, is bad-mouthing you on CBC and you happen to be a liberal.

00:01:14.120 But just wait.

00:01:15.260 The news for Carney gets worse as the video goes along.

00:01:17.940 So we've had that message, that letter from the finance minister to his colleagues saying you've got to cut spending by 15% over three years.

00:01:24.940 But then we find out that doesn't apply to about two-thirds of federal spending.

00:01:28.880 When the C.D. Howe Institute looked at the numbers, they said that adds up to about a $22 billion cut over three years from a budget of over $500 billion.

00:01:36.920 With a deficit of $100 billion, with all the defense spending coming down the road in years to come, I don't think we're close to coming to grips with the fiscal situation.

00:01:47.360 The prime minister said the other day that they're still going to just achieve cuts in the federal payroll from attrition.

00:01:53.580 I suspect that they're punting a bit.

00:01:55.500 I think they're going to try to put off the really hard work until after the next election, if then.

00:02:00.980 Did you see that?

00:02:02.560 They're all laughing at Carney because they know.

00:02:05.060 They know his plan makes zero sense.

00:02:07.980 Part of why Mark Carney is down in Mexico is not just, you know, to make sure the relationship is good.

00:02:12.680 But it's also because, obviously, the numbers are in part that way because of what has happened with the tariff war.

00:02:19.780 And in part because, as Andrew points out, some of the big spending promises the government made.

00:02:24.960 Is that something that you think, Chantel, that Canadians are going to buy?

00:02:28.520 That, as Mark Carney says, we are in the worst economic crisis of our time?

00:02:34.660 I don't know if they're going to buy that we are in the worst economic crisis of our time.

00:02:39.320 So let me get this straight.

00:02:40.760 Even a Toronto Star columnist, the far-left communist star, is calling Carney out.

00:02:47.020 Carney lied to Canadians.

00:02:48.960 He misled his voters.

00:02:50.880 He said that Canada was in the worst crisis it has ever seen thanks to Donald Trump.

00:02:55.600 That was before he went on vacation.

00:02:57.780 Now the CBC is calling him out for it.

00:03:00.660 You hate to see it.

00:03:01.480 They will certainly buy the fact that we are in the least predictable and least positive juncture in a long, long time.

00:03:14.720 And in a situation where we lived through the 90s and the deficit wall then and Paul Martin doing what he had to do.

00:03:23.960 But at that point, we mostly had control over what we were doing.

00:03:27.820 Other things were stable.

00:03:31.140 We didn't have this tariff issue.

00:03:35.600 We kind of knew where all the marks were.

00:03:41.640 This isn't the case.

00:03:42.960 There is a lot of things we don't know.

00:03:44.800 We don't even know if in six months the U.S. will still want to renegotiate KUSMA

00:03:50.860 or just say we don't really care about this deal anymore unless you sign up for more concessions that will cost.

00:03:59.720 But I agree with Andrew.

00:04:01.020 The economy is deteriorating fast.

00:04:04.920 Unemployment is going up quickly.

00:04:07.140 And that's not going to stop.

00:04:08.800 And I'm starting to think that maybe in hindsight the government regrets not having brought in a quickie budget last June.

00:04:17.620 And I'm not sure if we're hearing the same things here.

00:04:20.440 But did CBC just call out Mark Carney for failing to deliver a budget?

00:04:24.900 Because that's what I heard.

00:04:26.540 Yeah.

00:04:27.240 Rather than half this situation, especially since last June, no opposition party, including the conservatives, would have felt like bringing down the government.

00:04:37.860 But the more the weeks go on and the situation deteriorates, the more that temptation will be there.

00:04:45.740 I'm not predicting an election on that basis, but still it becomes more complicated.

00:04:52.340 Then the other question the liberals have to ask themselves is, if it's going to get worse, do we want to survive the budget and delay it until we're weaker in an election?

00:05:06.380 Those are all questions to which I don't have answers, but they're all facing the government at this point.

00:05:12.340 Yeah.

00:05:12.880 And I mean, the other question they could be asking themselves, Althea, is, is there any promise or thing we should be scaling back here because we're in such dire straits?

00:05:22.160 And it doesn't seem that that is a consideration at this point.

00:05:24.920 But you have to wonder why that's not also on the table.

00:05:27.940 Well, it seems like climate change has definitely taken a back seat, I would say.

00:05:32.980 It's interesting that Jean-Tadde mentions, like, maybe the liberals would want to have an election right now, because that is certainly the sentiment among the opposition, i.e., nobody wants to vote for this budget because everybody fears the sticker shock on the size of the deficit.

00:05:49.720 And there seems to be poison pills for every opposition party in this budget, either too much spending or too many cuts or cuts that are, that we're told will happen later, to Andrew's point.

00:06:02.840 Right. So I find that very interesting.

00:06:06.440 The other point I think that's worth mentioning, I agree with everything my colleagues have said so far, but that the prescriptions that Mark Carney has outlined for this moment in time are prescriptions that he talks about in his book, Values, which is from 2021.

00:06:21.580 And a lot of these prescriptions sound pretty similar to Canadians if they paid attention to what Justin Trudeau was saying, especially in the early part of his mandate.

00:06:28.960 It's just that the price tags are a lot bigger now.

00:06:31.760 So I think at some point the government is going to have to explain why it thinks it can succeed with similar policies, at least similar philosophically endued policies.

00:06:43.740 I'm thinking of, like, the housing spend, for example, where Justin Trudeau failed.

00:06:48.540 That, I think, is a reason why perhaps not just the opposition, but the liberals might start thinking about going now rather than going in the spring on the spring budget.

00:06:57.840 Andrew, how long, you know, how long will people, do you think, give the prime minister to try and turn things around?

00:07:06.180 Now, I honestly can't believe what I'm hearing right now.

00:07:08.920 Althea Raj, far left Althea Raj, is calling out Mark Carney on CBC, admitting that Trudeau is a failure and Mark Carney is even worse.

00:07:18.820 Now, this isn't just speculation.

00:07:20.200 If this is what Mark Carney's propagandists are saying on live TV, you know he's in trouble.

00:07:26.120 And this whole episode shows that Polyev was 100% right.

00:07:29.780 And the left owes Polyev a massive, massive public apology.

00:07:34.220 Will they ever do it?

00:07:35.440 No.

00:07:36.260 But that's what they owe him.

00:07:37.160 It hasn't been very long, to be fair.

00:07:39.780 And, you know, you would at least get a budget to sort of see, I think Canadians would give him a budget to sort of see where are things at?

00:07:46.440 Can he make some improvements here with his economic vision?

00:07:49.520 Yeah.

00:07:49.880 I mean, I don't know how many months or years people will give him.

00:07:52.560 I think, as you say, they've given him the benefit of the doubt until now, probably rightly so.

00:07:56.840 The budget will certainly be a reckoning point.

00:07:58.960 I think with these things, there has to be a sense that you're getting your arms around the problem, that you're making progress against it, that you know what you're doing.

00:08:06.620 If you look like events are getting away from you, that you're running on the spot to catch up, then people can smell that.

00:08:14.400 They can smell when a government is losing confidence and competence in the face of large problems.

00:08:20.080 So that's the absolute lowest bar they have to get over in this budget is look like they've actually grasped the size of the problem and have a plan to get forward towards it.

00:08:30.680 As I say, I doubt whether they're going to execute the whole of the plan at this point because the spending cuts at this point, to me, look like they're going to have to be a lot deeper than what they're talking about.

00:08:38.840 We are going to have to, for example, to start talking about a reform of cuts to transfers to the provinces and transfers to individuals.

00:08:46.080 You cannot wall off such enormous parts of the budget from any cuts when you're engaged in this kind of exercise.

00:08:52.560 The other thing they have to be thinking about is how do we start grappling with the growth problem in this country?

00:08:58.220 You know, it really is true in the long run that if you want to get out of your fiscal hole, you have to get faster growth.

00:09:03.960 It doesn't solve things in the short run, but in the long run, that's absolutely key to restoring fiscal health to this country.

00:09:09.740 Oh, boy, you hate to see it.

00:09:11.480 It sounds like Carney is in some serious trouble right now.

00:09:14.400 But just wait, it gets worse.

00:09:16.980 The next part of the video talks about the chaos within the Liberal Party.

00:09:20.800 Althea, your thoughts on maybe you want to start with Chrystia Freeland or some of the other moves that we have seen or are expecting.

00:09:28.200 I think the general theme is that Mark Carney is managing disappointment.

00:09:33.600 Ms. Freeland, I'm told, has barely met with any of her stakeholders at Transport, so she obviously had her foot out the door for a while now.

00:09:41.940 So David Lometty was offered a job that was held by somebody who didn't leave the job.

00:09:48.960 So that was an interesting HR issue to resolve.

00:09:53.740 And David Lometty is a close friend of Mark Carney's.

00:09:56.520 Bill Blair, Jonathan Wilkinson is another name that's kind of been rumored to be headed towards the exit.

00:10:04.320 These are two former cabinet ministers who assumed that they would have a place at Mark Carney's cabinet table and there was no room for them.

00:10:13.600 So they, again, I guess, getting a nice little reward.

00:10:18.220 Now, there are others who expected to be appointed to cabinet and warrant.

00:10:24.760 Are they going to take their own leave?

00:10:26.700 There may be people leaving for policy issues as well in the months to come.

00:10:32.260 And there may be people who leave for the Ontario Liberal leadership.

00:10:34.580 I think what it shows, though, and to your point, there were talks in the lead up to the March, April election that there were people Mark Carney wanted to bring in, but they just didn't have time.

00:10:48.400 They had private sector jobs and they couldn't get out of it.

00:10:50.760 So there are some nice safe seats in Toronto that have opened up.

00:10:54.160 But I think part of it is not this grand strategy.

00:10:56.860 I'm not Justin Trudeau, although this government is kind of obsessed with that theme.

00:11:00.120 I think it's really like you have all these people who don't want to be here and could make my life miserable.

00:11:05.240 What can I do for them?

00:11:07.120 Chantal?

00:11:08.780 I also think the circumstances that brought Mark Carney, one, to the Liberal leadership and then to that quick election, did not allow him to build a team.

00:11:19.260 So we are seeing another thing that is unprecedented.

00:11:23.440 You do not usually see the parliament return for the first time under a so-called new government and see a leading figure of the government resign from cabinet and be replaced by nobody.

00:11:36.980 And that's the tell.

00:11:38.900 We did not swear in a new transport minister to replace Christopher Wieland this week.

00:11:44.080 We added our portfolio to somebody else's job.

00:11:47.540 Same with internal trade.

00:11:49.800 And that kind of tells you that they are keeping those seats open, not for people who are currently in caucus, but because they hope it's going to have, I suspect, a bunch of by-elections to bring in the people that Mark Carney would have if he'd had months to prepare for an election rather than a couple of weeks.

00:12:10.240 Whoa, Mark Carney is getting ripped to shreds by his favorite propagandists, just ripping, ripping, ripping him apart.

00:12:17.380 So what's going on right here?

00:12:19.000 I have a theory and I can explain, but you have to wait till the end of the video.

00:12:22.540 Now, that being said, the list that Althea gave you mostly involves what would be considered safe liberal seats at this point.

00:12:32.760 So if you're going to talk someone into coming, you basically can say, well, you know, you probably will win the election.

00:12:40.580 It's not going to be a huge fight to win a by-election.

00:12:43.020 We'll see.

00:12:44.700 And that presumes the government survives.

00:12:47.240 That should, that's probably plan A.

00:12:49.580 Government survives budget, then does this.

00:12:51.960 Plan B, we go in an election and all these star candidates show up.

00:12:57.060 It is, it would be hard not to be a little bit cynical watching this though, Andrew.

00:13:01.400 You know, people who just wanted an election, either leaving.

00:13:04.860 A little bit cynical?

00:13:05.180 Yeah, a little bit.

00:13:06.200 I'm just speaking for myself.

00:13:07.420 Leaving cabinet to get these positions that the prime minister has come up with, be appointed to diplomatic positions.

00:13:16.000 And, you know, we might find ourselves with three, four, maybe more by-elections in the new year right after having an election.

00:13:22.140 I don't know.

00:13:23.020 I don't know what that tells us about the people that chose to run again, the importance of being in cabinet.

00:13:30.060 I don't know what it tells us.

00:13:31.240 I don't know either.

00:13:32.180 But while we're being cynical, I can't help noticing the timing.

00:13:37.660 Maybe it's coincidental.

00:13:39.300 But Ms. Freeland leaving right after it's revealed that she may have misled Parliament, inadvertently or otherwise, in the matter of the B.C. Ferries contract,

00:13:47.400 where she told the House that the federal government had no involvement in it, even as liberal officials were meeting behind closed doors,

00:13:54.280 discussing how they could spend a $1 billion loan for the purchase from the Canada Infrastructure Bank.

00:13:58.880 So, maybe that's coincidental, but it's awfully interesting.

00:14:02.280 We've got committees clamoring for her to appear and explain herself on this. 1.00

00:14:05.520 So, maybe a good time to get out of Dodge.

00:14:08.000 Oh, dear.

00:14:09.200 Coin just ripped Freeland to shreds right there.

00:14:11.760 But rightfully so.

00:14:13.040 What can you expect from the granddaughter of a Nazi propagandist?

00:14:16.540 I'm not making that up.

00:14:18.000 Krista Freeland literally descended from a Nazi propagandist. 0.59

00:14:21.700 Her grandfather wrote propaganda for the Nazis.

00:14:25.140 And I wrote an article about this, which I'll attach in the description.

00:14:27.600 And while we're here, if you like this video, don't forget to like and subscribe.

00:14:32.140 It means a lot.

00:14:33.740 Maybe.

00:14:34.440 Although she was looking for a way to get out of Dodge before that, I would say.

00:14:37.700 The timing is interesting.

00:14:38.620 Sure.

00:14:39.760 But look, any prime minister is going to want to put his own stamp, his own style,

00:14:43.360 particularly when he's coming in, replacing a very unpopular predecessor.

00:14:48.660 And yes, one does hear that he wants to bring in some people from the corporate sector.

00:14:52.240 I've heard a couple of names in the last couple of days.

00:14:54.040 This is a business liberal.

00:14:57.540 He reminds me more and more of a kind of an early 60s Pearson liberal in style and in content.

00:15:04.600 And that would be in keeping.

00:15:07.660 Chantal?

00:15:08.060 I hope he has noticed that since the Pearson 60s women have taken seats at the table, 0.97

00:15:14.260 that they're not planning to give up to return to that golden era.

00:15:17.540 And let me be uncynical for two seconds.

00:15:22.800 Please.

00:15:23.620 I think Chrystia Freeland's talents are better used in those new endeavors than they were sitting back at transport.

00:15:31.200 It does make sense after 10 years in the business to look around and say,

00:15:36.040 held all the top jobs.

00:15:37.640 I'm not going to become the leader in the prime minister.

00:15:40.380 And she does have talents that can be more productive for Canada on the Ukraine front

00:15:47.420 than sitting, trying to figure out what Air Canada is trying to get itself into.

00:15:54.440 Yeah.

00:15:54.640 And we're also told she's got other things that she's considering internationally and otherwise.

00:15:58.640 So that won't be the only thing, probably, that she ends up doing.

00:16:01.940 Althea, last word to you.

00:16:03.440 I was going to bite on your cynical comment and just say,

00:16:06.860 this helped explain why Mark Carney was so eager to have a by-election to get Pierre Poeliev back in the House of Commons

00:16:13.200 and why you heard no liberals complain about the price tag of that by-election.

00:16:18.220 Because he knew he was going to have to do it soon himself.

00:16:20.640 Is that what you're inferring?

00:16:23.480 Yes.

00:16:23.880 Does it tell you something, though, about the way he formed that first cabinet,

00:16:30.660 that maybe he knew what he was doing, that he had part?

00:16:34.640 I think it's very clear that he did not, really.

00:16:37.520 I'm sorry.

00:16:38.320 Like, the immigration minister needs to be shuffled.

00:16:40.880 I don't know what happened with that vetting process.

00:16:43.600 And there are other people who, it's not just the opposition who has that viewpoint.

00:16:47.800 So I think that there will be, there would have been a cabinet shuffle even without these departures.

00:16:53.020 This just makes it a much wider, a wider one.

00:16:56.580 And I'm not sure that, frankly, she can survive until 2026.

00:17:00.840 I think there's a lot of questions around the public safety minister as well.

00:17:04.880 The public safety minister.

00:17:05.960 All right.

00:17:06.360 And Chantal, last word there. 1.00

00:17:08.680 No, I think you can figure that this cabinet is like the one that we saw just after the liberal leadership,

00:17:15.300 not meant to go to this.

00:17:17.160 Now I know, you're all just as surprised as I am to see the CBC rip Carney apart.

00:17:22.700 As far as I'm concerned, that's it.

00:17:25.240 Carney's career is dead after this.

00:17:27.520 So what's going on?

00:17:28.640 This is my theory.

00:17:29.820 The CBC knows that the Carney government is a sinking ship,

00:17:33.340 and they want to save face before the whole thing completely implodes.

00:17:37.200 They're also likely trying to play nice so that Pollyev doesn't completely wipe them out,

00:17:41.980 which we all secretly hope he does anyway, because they deserve it.

00:17:45.020 From where I'm sitting, it's only a matter of time before Pollyev becomes prime minister,

00:17:49.540 and Canada gets on track.

00:17:51.620 That's the only thing I can see happening.

00:17:53.560 And maybe I'll be wrong.

00:17:54.800 We'll have to see.

00:17:55.700 There is the possibility of a no-confidence vote,

00:17:58.420 and it's something I'll be covering tomorrow, so stick around for that.

00:18:01.300 Pollyev has seen a massive rise in support in the recent weeks.

00:18:04.780 I believe it's only going to get bigger the more time he spends in parliament,

00:18:08.420 and the more time Carney spends in Mexico.

Carney Gov. Gets CALLED OUT During CBC Live Panel

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