EP. 52 audio

The host discusses the upcoming 2024 election in Ottawa and the potential players involved. There is speculation about the NDP's role and whether Jagmeet Singh is the right leader for the party. The guest, Dr. Laurie Turnbull, explains that the NDP often doesn't receive as much attention as other parties because they are not seen as a viable alternative to government. The NDP's decline in popularity provincially is also discussed, with Rachel Notley being seen as a more pragmatic leader. The existential crisis for the NDP is whether they should focus on staying true to their values or becoming a more competitive electoral machine. The party experienced success under Jack Layton in 2011 but has since struggled to maintain momentum. welcome to the bill kelly podcast critical discussions in critical times here's your host bill kelly hey welcome back to the bill kelly podcast i am your host bill kelly good to have you with us today as i we look ahead to a twenty twenty four there's a lot of prognostication about what's going to be happening uh... in ottawa federally and of course there are still people if you look at some of the pundits and some of the uh... columns being written these days whether or not there's going to be an election i think one of the other questions we might want to add to that discussion is do we know who the players are going to be in that election uh... is justin trudeau going to be there are peer paulio certainly is uh... but there's some interesting uh... observations and some some rumblings going on in the federal n d p party i want to bring that to our attention of our next guest and get her read on this too she is doctor laurie turnbull a professor and chair of public and international affairs at dowhouse university uh... laurie great to have you on the program thanks so much for joining us today thank you for having me bill it's always so nice to talk to you as is with us too i want to swing back to something that just seemed to be brewing and this is basically something anecdotally that i'm hearing from some friends i've talked to over the last couple of days media people that are hopefully still keeping their ear to the ground about what's happening politically uh... and we know that when you look at some of the projections and there's a poll that just came out again today that that says that uh... that justin trudeau is probably about eighteen to twenty points behind paulio uh... right now but of course the election is not now uh... but then they talk about uh... where the liberals might be and where the bloc might be uh... there's very little talk about the nbp which is very troubling to people who support the nbp federally uh... and uh... i i i suppose the concern here with a lot of them in the party is jogging sing the guy who can actually get this this party moving again uh... something they've been asking i guess it's uh... probably since jack layton uh... left the party because with his untimely death uh... and there's an interesting piece by a tumble care sure you were a couple days ago uh... where he talked about the the political landscape in mind happened in the name that keeps popping up uh... in this conversation and hushed tones at this stage is rachel motley uh... the former premier of alberta uh... and that that's still by the way of great answer to a trivia question i know well who's an nbp premier in alberta people just shook their heads and said oh my god it it happened but she's not your grandfather's nbp here uh... and and there's a lot of people in the party right now the seem to be saying maybe that's the kind of nbp we should be maybe maybe this this old-fashioned way that uh... that you know the traditional in the peers have the uh... did the tommy douglas is and even the ed broadbent so and others uh... maybe that's yesterday's news and maybe we need a more progressive andy pierre and maybe jackie sing is not that guy what what what you're hearing a lot of okay i i i think part of the reason that we don't hear as much about the nbp is polling numbers is everybody always focuses on who's going to win the election and the nbp typically have not been at the federal level k i think it would be good jackie and the nbp formed official opposition in twenty eleven apart from that i don't think people and and generally not thought about the nbp is being an alternative to government whoever's gonna win it's not gonna be done and so they don't get the same play which is probably you know in terms of the coverage of their popularity things and they have to be out of the ordinary right like if they rise really high in the polls and they get much coverage collected it's almost a self-fulfilling prophecy i think to a certain extent and that if the people aren't if we're not talking about them as much it's harder for them to climb in the polls people a lot of people vote strategically and so if you're thinking the nbp are not going to win they're probably not going to win the electoral system is no friend to them they end up coming second a lot of times of the liberals come first and they're just kind of not getting over that hurdle that gives them as many seats in the house as their share of the popular vote might suggest they should have like it that i think it is self-fulfilling at a certain point but i think also uh we've seen the decline of the ndp provincially in some parts of the country like we mentioned rachel notley and that i'm really looking forward to digging in digging into this that was a time where the ndp were really doing well in in alberta for her to actually be premier and even in the last election they did quite well it's just the seat breakdown was not to their to their favor but i mean did really well in calgary and like there's certainly reason to think that that party is very competitive there but if you look in atlanta canada it's there you know it's not life support in atlanta canada there's they barely cover the ndp's leaders speeches after an election kind of thing right like it's you know so asking questions about where the existential purpose of the party is um even though federally again like they're they're not seen as an alternative to government they're doing better federally than they are in a lot of provinces but that's i guess the question is is okay what are the ndp and what do they want to be what do they need to be uh and i and i agree with you i mean you go back to jack layton's uh and the ndp's uh a performance in that particular election but i i kind of put an asterisk beside that for two reasons uh first of all the huge gains that they made in that election were all in quebec uh and and that was essentially the quota voters say michael ignatief are you kidding uh and they were pretty disenchanted with the block at that time oh yeah and that was a one election thing and plus the fact that jack layton was a very charismatic guy i knew jack from provincial politics here in ontario and he he has that way even if you weren't a party supporter you kind of like jack so i think all of those things played into it and i think the true proof of that was in the next election they lost all those seats uh for a variety of reasons uh and i feel bad as much as you can in politics for paul tolmo care in 2015 i'm sure that in his mind he thought he i'm going to be the next prime minister uh they can't stand steven harper you know he's he's toast uh the trudeau guy yeah but he's in third place this is this is mine it to lose but he did lose it and then of course a couple of months later they pulled the trapdoor around him and he wasn't even the leader of the party anymore but notley seems to be different um you know it's not surprising that the province swung kind of back to the right wing and and to where they eventually ended up now uh first of all jason kennedy now with smith uh but the fact that there was a presence there and the questions that the people were asking when when she got elected as premier of alberta was well wait a second it was just a couple of years ago at the the alberta it was in alberta as a matter of fact when they had their policy convention uh when they adopted the leap manifesto which basically said shut down the oil industry altogether people like abby lewis and and other voices were kind of the ones that were pushing the agenda there uh and then she comes along and says no no no no no we need this in other words she she basically said forget about all these ideological things that you as mvp has said we've got to be pragmatic uh and i think mocaire tried to do that too to a certain extent are the mvp ready for that or are they simply comfortable in their own shoes here being the third or fourth place party okay so that is the question that is the existential crisis that the ndp faced for and have faced for decades now they have a particular decision to make and it seems like that decision keeps coming to the party over and over again whereas the liberals and you know the conservatives now was the were the progressive conservatives and some iteration of that beforehand these parties have um have been seen as the ones that are the alternatives to government and so they have choices to make about how focused they want to be on different aspects of their support base and how true they want to be to preferences that then principles and values that they articulate because there's always this tension between are you a party that speaks directly to the values of your that your base and you you're very true to those and you don't compromise or are you more of an umbrella electoral machine party that takes in all kinds of people and then tries to kind of aggregate those interests and be competitive because you need lots of people to vote for you if you're going to win the election the ndp comes at that in a different way because it's almost like yeah they can decide we are going to be this grassroots party that is going to be true to those values even if it means that we don't get we're not competitive for the big chair but we're still going to be true to that or do they want to be that electoral machine that is actually you know vying for that for that vote and vying for a bigger share that would put them in a much bigger position in terms of of power and so with jack layton in 2011 they got a taste of that they got a taste of the oh we hold on here right like now we're we're serious like we're we've got over 100 seats for the first time and i think when you have a result like that it changes the frame of reference in people's mind it changes what party people think the party might be able to do but then they go right back to the other way around right where it's like the next election they're back to i think it would have been third place at that point mulcair kind of swung and missed in the 2015 election because he was the only one talking about living within our means even stephen harper was saying we need to spend some money we need to grow things and mulcair was kind of cranky about it and so i think that's one of the reasons that he became not the change candidate the way that trudo did but now yeah here we are it's it's interesting because every time i hear these stories uh with mulcair and and layton to a certain extent and even with rachel lotley in alberta i i hearken back to to tony blair the former prime minister of the uk uh he was the labor party which is pretty much the equivalent of what the ndpr here and in his autobiography i'm sure you read it it was rather long and tedious and a lot of self-love there but but there's an interesting political story too uh because he took that party from that ideological labor party and and basically convinced them you want to win you you get a taste of it you want to win then you've got to be more pragmatic and he moved them a lot more to the center and he did win a couple of elections actually that he ended up winning and i'm wondering if that battle is going on with the ndp here and and uh if it may be happening behind closed doors because we're not hearing a whole lot about it uh but i guess you you know as you say is this party going to be sustainable or are they going to start to say what do we need to do to win because i don't know that they're asking that question a lot i don't know either and this kind of brings me back to um some of the like the initial conversation we were having about jagmeet singh because sometimes it strikes me and i could be wrong about this that he seems quite happy to put one foot in front of the other every day and do what he's doing i don't get a big like with mulcair he wanted to win you could tell he wanted to be prime minister he wanted to build on what jack layton had done in 2011 he really wanted to do that and he wasn't successful at it but there was no doubt that his mind was pragmatic and i mean he was somebody who came from quebec politics as a leader of the liberals he was not he's he's not a steeped in partisanship guy he is not somebody who insists on things being a certain way he is a very pragmatic person love him or hate him that's the way he thinks about things i think he's a that's you know much more his political game than um you know some sort of like faithfulness and fidelity to parties core values and never shifting so um i think jagmeet singh seems to me that he wants these things that he wants to do with the liberals and he's kind of happy enough to agree to support the liberals if they get things done and it's not that he's not um concerned about the the progress of the party it just never seems to me that that political hunger kicks in for him and he's going to now you know kind of go for the jugular with his confidence and supply agreement and find a way to wrench this so that the ndp gets something more out of it like there always seems to me to be ways for him to jam the liberals and he doesn't and maybe it's because he just wants to stick this out because he really wants to get pharma care for people like in some ways like he might actually be a policy oriented person who wants to do the right thing and i'm complaining about him because he's not particularly he's not politically cutthroat enough but i i just find that there's something there that i i think he's okay with the ndp in the position it's in however he's got a problem because the liberals are crowding him on the left and so he doesn't like at a certain point even if he's if he's happy kind of doing this policy more policy oriented and values oriented approach and caring a little less about the pragmatism that might make them win more seats you gotta still win more seats right eventually he'll run out of time to do what he wants to do because the party will say dude we haven't this has been three elections and we still only have 24 25 mps and i haven't happened in the past the way the ndp has gone uh where they basically uh they elect a leader and i'll even go before you know jack layton for uh you know audrey mcdonough and others that have been and basically it says how many elections are they going to have before they turf them because they are not going to win uh say okay fine we gave you a shot and it's not happening uh and i'm wondering what they're going to do but you've interest you raised an interesting proposal that's a nice segue into what i wanted to ask about uh first of all i agree with your perception i don't think there's going to be an election this year however you never can tell the way things are going but i don't see jack meeting pulling the plug and even if he does that doesn't necessarily mean that we'd go to the polls but you talked about ideology and clearly one of the things i think that's bothered an awful lot of liberal supporters that maybe even voted liberal in 2015 is that as you mentioned trudeau has moved that party totally uh not left of center but left uh and and is shoving the ndp even further left if that's possible but that leaves a big opening in the middle and pierre pauliev since he's taken over the conservative party uh whether he sees that and doesn't give a damn or whatever there's a huge opportunity for him here to to to bring in disenchanted liberal supporters in the past yet he seems to be going the other way uh he seems to be basically uh emulating uh you know bernier and others he looks like i want people's party the people that left the party the extreme right wingers i want them back he doesn't need them to win but he does need that middle of it he doesn't seem to be doing anything to appeal to them yeah yeah and so like i wanted to make a point too about the different ways that the ndp's fortunes in different jurisdictions often depends on the rest of the political climate and the rest of the political um you know atmosphere and where the other parties are and what space there is for the ndp to fill so in alberta where you don't see a particularly vibrant liberal party in the same way as you would in ontario or something there is this and and the the conservatives in alberta are actually or are obviously quite far to the right there's a space to be pragmatic there's a big space for rachel notley and whoever her successor will be um to appeal to more centrist voters you don't have to hit far to the left in fact it would be politically disastrous to do so i would think there's a space there whereas in a province like ontario you've got the ndp and the liberals fighting for the center and center left space meanwhile and then as doug ford raises his hands and says look i just want to make your life better and i want to have you give you your money back and you don't have to pay for your license renewal and like it's a very strange way that these these different ndps are competing in different political environments but for the for the federal ndp yeah i mean we've got the conservatives pulling to the right the liberals pulling way to the left no nobody's meeting the centrist voters in the middle which most people say they are and i think it's hard for jagmeet singh it's going to be hard for him to explain you know where's where's the vote for the ndp that makes sense if what you really want is to avoid a poly of majority and it starts to look like you know the liberal vote's gonna maybe collapse and poly of might actually be be attracting some people who used to vote ndp who are listening for some messaging for working class people who are working really hard and can't make their mortgage and can't make the rent and so i'm i i think there is actually space that the ndp are leaving on the table that would have traditionally been their vote that might actually or poly have are labels bothering people and maybe mixing the people's minds up here because we keep lowering those labels you know who's the liberal who's the ndp yeah that kind of varies from party to party doesn't it laurie i mean we talked about quebec politics as we often do uh tom mulcair was a liberal in quebec politics so is jean charret the liberal party in quebec is not a liberal party uh you know they're filling a void there just as when christy clark was the premier of bc the bc liberal party is not liberal in the traditional sense they're conservative party uh and of course you know that there was no conservative party per se there and they filled that void but it's a very right of center uh party when when christy clark was there uh just as charret was was a conservative uh premier in alberta under the guise of the liberal banner so you're right i mean those labels uh they really vary from part of the depending on what part of the country you're in oh 100 and in nova scotia when we had stephen mcneil as a liberal for years he was not a left guy at all and even now the new leader zach churchill is proposing uh two points off the hst if the liberals form the next government and so you don't hear the same messages from liberals across the country at the federal level the liberals are being criticized for having vacated that space that used to be the fiscally responsible liberal right like there used to be blue liberals there used to be people in the party like paul martin who would sacrifice um you know make the kinds of decisions that were difficult to make and difficult to tell people about because he wanted to come back to some economic balance and the liberal liberals under christian and martin did that for years i mean to the point that there was even though nova scotia is a place that likes a lot of liberals 1997 not one not one liberal mp and so like but you see now like with trudeau the party has really moved out of that space which i think in you know going back to that existential crisis that the ndp has to begin with this makes it even worse if there's something else happening on the left that there might be another party that actually you know can can pick up some of those votes when people are concerned about progressive issues i'm not sure um to me it's a lot of this is going to come down to trust issues it's going to come down to who do if you are a progressive voter you don't want polio you want to vote who do you vote for trudeau or sing because and that's the question because i as i look at where we were and and where we are right now where are those crechin liberals those paul martin liberals those john manly uh liberals i mean these were as you say conservative liberals you know conservative fiscal policy uh i mean just to remind people i mean you know when when kerchan took over in government when he won that election beat king campbell sadly uh by such a huge margin uh the united nations declared us as almost a third world country i mean our economics were in in the the toilet uh you know then paul martin comes along becomes the the finance minister and we have 11 years of of of actually surpluses i mean a lot of pain i mean it didn't happen easily but i mean that was how you manage the government of course harper takes over and bingo we're right back into deficits again but there still are those people that said look at you can still have a heart and be passionate at the same time be fiscally responsible uh we seem to want that message right now i think that's what we're hearing as canadians i don't hear anybody in ottawa singing that song yeah and so and it's it's true like there's there seem to be no more blue liberals there seem to be no more red tories at the federal level this whole community of people who even though on different in different teams wearing different jerseys still would have had a lot in common it seems like there's been a hollowing out of that space and we see more on the extremes of of things we see more on the left right as opposed to people occupying different spots in the middle um so i like for right now i i wonder um i think one of the key questions is going to be whether polyev is able to connect on any of that because even though i think he's like he's trying i think he's aware that there are votes to be to be harnessed in that center and i think sometimes when he when he appeals on the basis of like hey your dollar is not going far far enough we we should be calibrating um various policies so that we don't continue to have this this housing crisis we need to get more money back into your pocket we need to figure out the inflation crisis like i think he's trying as much as he doesn't want to isolate the conservative base he's trying to say things that will appeal on the basis of just some sense of fiscal anchor because even like the liberals are losing their own base whenever christia freeland comes out with a budget or a fiscal update you can hear liberals on all all the political shows saying this she talks about spending more responsibly and then you don't see it and so there are votes to be to be won there there are more rooney conservatives there are crechen liberals and as you say paul martin liberals that are they seem to be the ones that are saying right now who's who's listening to us who speaks for us uh and i think that's the that great mass of disenchanted voters that are out there right now and they're looking for a champion and and i they don't see one in ottawa right now uh you know that's the pauliev thing is a little bit too extreme uh the the trudeau thing is turned off an awful lot of liberals uh you know john crechen just recently celebrated a birthday uh you know him being chummy chummy with steven harper was an interesting picture at the same time but it kind of reminded us that there was liberal strength and some ongoing liberal support during those crechen years he wasn't perfect uh no premier and no prime minister has been but there was a certain charisma and maybe a confidence laurie that they okay i don't like that about him and i don't like what they're doing here but you know what in general life is pretty good uh and people aren't saying that anymore and it's going to be fascinating to see if anybody looks at that middle and says okay we have to make a concerted effort to try to appeal to them and i'm not so sure anybody does they'd be glad to welcome them into the tent but they're not doing a whole lot to bring them into the tent yeah yeah exactly and i think um the only i mean obviously given the state of the polls right now it would be hard to criticize pauliev's approach because it's obviously working right and he has listened somewhere along the way and done some things to change the way he communicates so that he's he's able even though he's still polarizing he's appealing more broadly and you know so this this is working i'm not suggesting that he's not doing the things that he needs to do but to me there is some limitation to his ability to appeal to that center who are looking for a home somebody like a christy clark to me would be able to come in and and and get a little bit farther with with that center crowd because that's where she staked herself out politically whereas pauliev in many ways is trying to manage the political career that he's always had and he's trying to kind of pull himself to a place where he's a bit of a different guy and he's appealing differently and i think that is working but there's there's a he's still a polarizing person and so the liberals i think the fact that they're still they still seem i don't know they still shouldn't be going ahead with trudo and okay but i think they this must be under the assumption that there's a limitation to how popular pauliev will get and i think trudo probably figures he can take him down a few points when they once the campaign actually begins in earnest okay i know we got to wrap things up in a second but just on the other side of that coin uh there's a lot of rumor and speculation right now uh about what's going to happen with justin trudeau and i'm sure you've read a number of the pundits who are suggesting he's going to all of a sudden make a quick announcement and he's going to step down uh and and one of the warren can sell i think wrote about this in his piece over the weekend as well that uh they're saying look at uh his dad did it february 29th that walk in the snow during cold winter night in ottawa uh and february 29th is coming up again uh does justin have any sense of history in anything he doesn't strike me as the sort of individual that would look at historical significance and say well this is the anniversary of this or that or even his dad's decision to step down he seems far more ideologically driven than he is by history and by uh by uh what's happened in the past especially politically yeah yeah the taking his own walk in the snow on february 29th like his dad that might be a little on the nose but um i don't know like i i still feel like they're actually if they want to go to election in october 2025 that's a long way away there's enough time for him to to do to spend even a little more time there's enough time for him to walk away and get somebody else in there i think um you know as much as i kind of felt i have felt about this like if he wanted to walk away he would have he would have done this by now why because even from his own perspective like if you're not going to stay till the next election then why on earth live this now right because it can't be all that fun to be in the house of commons every day like i you know if he's going to go why not just go but there's enough time for him to to step away uh for them to have a new process i think there's a lot of possible risk to that right like i can see all the same polls that everybody else can see that true that was part of the problem and a remake of the party a rebuild a reconstituted image a re re everything would be pretty well their only hope at this point and they could be looking at catastrophic results in the next election if they keep going the way things are going but it also could be the case that if the party doesn't really know where it wants to go you might have this mess where there's a leaders leadership race and nobody really seems to be gathering momentum and the party's not making that much money and nobody seems to want the job i mean it's prime minister so of course somebody's going to want it but i think finding right the can't finding the right candidate is key or else you actually look like the party is just in some you know kind of directionless mess so yeah there are risks well as we began the conversation talking about maybe some people in the federal ndp deciding what kind of a party do we need to be uh going forward i don't think the liberals in in the darkest hours ever thought that they'd have to have to have that kind of discussion about what kind of liberal party do we have to be or do we want to be uh because they're steady as she goes for the longest time right now but that's changed and that's that's an interesting discussion when and if it's going to be happening laurie always a pleasure thanks so much for this i really enjoy being on the program today thanks bill thanks for having me dr lori turnbull from downhouse university and that's it for the bill kelly podcast you can catch us anywhere where you get your podcast until next time take care bill kelly podcast brought to you by wizards law personal injury lawyers listen you didn't choose to get injured but you can choose the right lawyer wizards law 905-522-1102 or wizardslaw.com