EP. 8 LORI TURNBULL

The podcast discusses recent developments in federal politics, particularly the conflict between Canada and India. The Prime Minister revealed that he had credible intelligence suggesting the Indian government's involvement in a murder in British Columbia. This has led to escalating tensions between the two countries, with India accusing Canada of harboring terrorists. The situation is significant for international relations and raises questions about how countries manage values-based approaches to global trade. The frosty relationship between the leaders of Canada and India has become apparent, and recent actions, such as India suspending visa services and raiding journalists' offices, highlight the differing approaches to government and transparency. The discussion also touches on the changing attitude of Canadians towards foreign affairs, as global events have shown the interconnectedness of countries and the need for Canada to be a player on the international stage. You're listening to the Bill Kelly Podcast. Here's your host, Bill Kelly. And welcome to the program. This is the Bill Kelly Podcast, critical discussions for our critical times. I'm your host, Bill Kelly. And we're going to, focusing on federal politics, there's so much going on in Ottawa these days, so much speculation about what's going to be happening in Ottawa in the next little while. And to do that, we're so pleased to welcome to our podcast today an old friend of the program who's been with us for many, many years and offered some incredible insights into the political goings-on in our nation's capital. She is Dr. Laurie Turnbull, Associate Professor and Director of the School of Public Administration at Dalhousie University. Laurie, it's great to have you on the show. Thanks so much for taking some time for us today. Anytime, Bill. It's so nice to talk to you. Yeah, it's been a while, but we're ever-changing, I guess, as things are in Ottawa these days. In our last episode, when you and I were talking together, there was some concern about the new session of Parliament, what legislation was going to be introduced, whether or not they were going to have any success at all, trying to deal with the inflation numbers that were coming out and were very scary in so many different circumstances. I don't know that we ever saw any of this stuff coming on the horizon about the conflict with India now and the, I guess, kind of the second version of this concern that we seem to have in Ottawa over the last couple of years now about national security and political interference from other countries. Oh, yeah. It's been quite the session, and we're hardly even into October yet, and I don't think anybody saw this situation with India coming, I mean, not in the public anyway, but the first day that the House was back in session, the Prime Minister typically does not come to the House on a Monday, but stood up after question period and said, this is the concern, right? I have seen credible intel to suggest that the Indian government was involved in the murder of this man in British Columbia back in June, and so that clearly, for a Prime Minister of a G7 country and a Five Eyes country to come out and say that, even though we don't know what the intel is, people take that seriously, people, you know, really kind of snap to attention, they did globally too, then India responds with, you know, we're not the ones with the problem, Canada's the one with the problem, Canada's the one that's been harboring terrorists for years and, you know, not playing fair, and so this then escalates, right? Because, of course, India is a country that many are hoping will be a force in counterbalancing the rise of China, and so it gets complicated really fast. But to your point, Laurie, about we don't have all the information, will we ever have all the information? I mean, because, as the Prime Minister and others have told us, this is classified information, there's concerns about national security, I mean, we all know, you know, the justification for these sorts of things, will this ever see the light of day? We'll never know the whole story, I don't think, no, we typically wouldn't, and I mean, the thing about intelligence too, and we talked about this when the foreign interference story really took hold earlier this year, it's not all right, it's not all good, it's not all correct, right? Intel is a whole big mess of things, and that's one of the reasons they don't want to share it, is because what if a piece of intel that was not totally true affected things, affected the actions of other countries, affected our relationships, and so you don't want the whole intel piece to be all out there. And even some of it that is true would be damaging to national security. So I can't imagine that we'll ever get the whole picture, however, you can see there's been, ever since the Prime Minister spoke in the House of Commons, you don't want the Prime Minister to be the one that comes out and starts laying out the groundwork of that intel, but we've heard from, like, there have been a bit of dribs and drabs, leaks from officials that they've talked about, for example, when Indian officials were pressed in a private conversation, they didn't deny this, there's intel from five eyes, and so we're getting a little bit more meat on the bones in terms of why the Prime Minister said what he said. Well, and I guess some support also from President Biden, who has talked about this, Anthony Blinken, of course, his Secretary of State has also made it, and those who are responsible have to be held accountable for it. I would think, and I guess we're kind of into the speculation mode here, though, Laurie, if there was some falsehood there, or some concern about that, you would think somebody in the five eyes would have said, no, no, let's not go there, but they seem to at least sign off on this anyway, if not endorse it. Yeah, and it was interesting at first, when in the early hours of it, the Washington Post ran an article that was suggesting, you know, that America's not really on side with Canada kind of thing, but then they took it back, and the American government actually came out and made a point of saying, like, there's no light between the two countries, and we are committed to getting to the bottom of this so that we can understand what happened. But again, like, this is a huge moment for international relations broadly, if India as this growing superpower is challenged by a middle power about something that relates to rule of law and sovereignty. And if we are saying to China and everybody else that we want to take a values-based approach to global trade, and our government has said that multiple times, we've got a problem if we start to take issue with countries on the basis of their human rights record, what do we do with India if the intel says they've murdered a Canadian on Canadian soil, or they were involved in that? And so it starts to get, of course, the values-based approach is going to be complicated anyway. And you're in a real-life situation where how do countries manage these things and work together, and what is some, and India's obviously clearly happy to throw it back at Canada and say, what about your values? Well, yeah, that's as the Chinese did about, you know, aboriginal rights in this country, of course, as well. It does sort of explain, though, the rather acrimonious byplay between Modi and Trudeau at the G20 just a couple of days before that, wasn't it? And as we found out after the fact, the prime minister did raise the issue at that meeting, certainly not in front of anybody from the media. But it was pretty frosty between the two. It probably always has been. I don't think these guys really like each other a whole lot, do they? Well, I'd say their politics is very different. And I think, yeah, we could see the frostiness that was happening and the kind of awkward body language between the two of them, and the bilat didn't happen. And a lot of people at the time, I can remember, were blaming Trudeau for that. And, you know, why didn't the prime minister get a win out of this meeting? And now, for the benefit of hindsight, we're like, oh, now we can see what the problem was. And so, yeah, I mean, and this morning, it escalates. It's getting worse, right, where they suspended visa services, they're saying, get your diplomats out of here, like, you've got a week, it is not getting better. And at the same time that they, the story broke about the diplomats being asked to leave India was the Indian government, I guess the Indian army specifically, raided a number of journalists offices and looking for materials. Now, they haven't explained exactly what they were looking for. But it just, I think, underscores the two very different approaches to government and to transparency, aren't there? Oh, absolutely. Yeah, and I mean, we can see, I think, what happens, again, when a middle power like Canada challenges this global superpower that's emerging to be a major player in how geopolitical relations take shape over the next number of years, again, particularly as the power relationships have been shifting, and you see this growth around China, and the US especially has been vocal about how it's managing relationships with China, is looking to India to be a trade partner, again, as a kind of a global counterbalance. And so there's a lot of attention on this issue. It's not when when Canada challenges India, it's not just Canada challenging India. But of course, that's what multilateralism is all about. And that's how we work with partners. In past elections, I can remember for years and years, the conversation we usually had was look at when Canadians go to vote, they don't really pay a whole lot of attention to foreign affairs. We know what's going on in the world. But we realize that, you know, Canada is not going to be at the front of that pack round. It's the United States and Russia and China and the UK. Is that attitude changing? I mean, whether the prime minister likes it or not, we are sucked into this vortex right now of, you know, company spies versus spies, you know, that old sort of thing. India with their actions here, China with their actions here, all mixed into this right now and our response for it. Are we ready for it? And is this government ready to understand that they're going to have to be a player in this, whether they like it or not? I think that we are because of these, particularly because of the events of the last number of years, COVID, the war on Ukraine, the reality of the interconnectedness of countries with respect to how we're going to manage climate change, those issues have become so front and center and they have shown how connected we all are. And I think they've also shown that the dichotomy between international global issues and domestic issues is a false one, because what's happening in global supply chains, for example, when they get interrupted, when there is a shock to the economy because of a global pandemic and there's reactions by way of economic strategies and then inflation crisis and all those sorts of things, we're seeing that we can't, A, we can't solve these problems alone and B, we can't pretend that domestic issues are not totally related to that. So I think people are going to, the voter is going to expect more coordination between a government's global foreign policy and what we're doing at home. Because again, even when we've over the past couple of years, when we've talked about trade with the US, even things like whether Canada is going to have exemptions from some of the strategies that Biden is doing, like things like that, that directly goes to the auto sector in Ontario. And so I think we're going to see more of a fulsome conversation about that. That said, yes, elections tend to be about domestic issues, even and I think that once we do see a campaign take off in earnest, I'm not sure when that will be, but when it is, I think you'll see the dialogue will be pushed toward domestic issues, even though Canada's place in the world is definitely a huge factor. Well, it certainly changed the focus, hasn't it? I mean, we thought going into this session, cost of living, inflation, housing prices, housing supply, were going to be the issues that Pauliev and the opposition were going to hammer the government on. You hear nary a mention of it now over the last 10 days or so simply because of this and the implications of it. How's this playing out in the nation's capital right now? What's the word behind the microphones here? Is this an issue that's got legs that they're going to have to deal with or are they going to get back into dealing with, as you've mentioned, some of those domestic issues that are bothering Canadians so much? I think there's a couple of things going on here. For one thing, I'm not sure yet how the Conservatives in particular are going to play, how they're going to manage, what their strategy is going to be around the escalating situation with India. I'm still not sure what they're going to do about that. Some in the Sikh community are pressing the parties to take a united front on this. They don't want to see the back and forth. They don't want to see this being politicized between the parties. I think there's a lot of pressure for a kind of unified Canadian approach to this. I don't know if we're going to see that or not. I think there are risks to a really aggressive strategy on the part of the Conservatives against the Prime Minister's handling of this. I think that could be very risky for a number of reasons, but there it is. This is Speaker Day in Ottawa. What it does on the Hill today is that we're choosing a new Speaker. There are eight candidates running. The reason that we're choosing a new Speaker is because Anthony Rotahad resigned because of this issue where this man was recognized and celebrated in the gallery during President Zelensky's visit. As it turns out, this guy fought on the Nazi side of World War II. So that's what's going on now. I think the Conservatives know that they are making a lot of traction on the issue of affordability and housing and cost of living. I think the NDP know that they're resonating on the cost of groceries issue. They are going to keep those issues front and centre, absolutely. But the Conservatives also know, I think, that they are resonating on just really taking the shine off of the Trudeau brand. And so something like the government's going back and forth with India. Now we lost the visa services and students are going to be affected, families are going to be affected. That combined with the screw-up on Parliament Hill over this guest of Rotah's and why wasn't there more scrutiny. Even if it was all Rotah's fault. I think the Conservatives will sort of, they want to press the government on that in terms of competence, in terms of trustworthiness, and then that speaks to the Trudeau brand. So I think we're probably going to see them play both of those lanes for a while because they're both paying off. Let me ask you about the role itself. I mean, we don't pay a whole lot of attention. Question period can get a little out of hand from time to time. And I guess we just kind of figured, well, you know, politicians will be politicians. But it just seems this time around, and not just because of the incident, of course, with the recognition when Zelensky was here, but the decorum or lack thereof. And I know when you start talking about parliamentary procedures, that's right into your wheelhouse. And we're not seeing a whole lot of it. You know, there's a lot of yelling and screaming, some insults. You know, does the Speaker actually control the room? I know they're supposed to. But are they going to be looking for somebody that can bring some decorum and bring some sensibilities back to the question period in the way that they do business on a daily basis? I mean, all of a sudden, that's become a pretty important role. Oh, yeah. I mean, there's all kinds of things that the Speaker does in terms of the procedure and the administration of the House of Commons that we don't see a whole lot of, right? Like, question period is only one hour of the Speaker's day. But that's the one that we all think about, because it's the one that most people watch. It's the one that's picked up by the media. And we see this really loud, generally useless, you know, trying to score points kind of exchange between the parties with nothing particularly meaningful about the exchange. And sometimes we see it get personal, nasty, you know, and last week it got particularly bad. And it's funny to me, all of the Speaker candidates have to talk for five minutes about what they want to do as Speaker. And prior to that, they'll all go jockeying around and talking to people about, this is why I would be a great Speaker. And you would think that the Speaker candidates are saying, look, I know this place needs to be brought back to order, and I'm going to do that. I'm committed to making a more safe place for people to have a meaningful exchange. But the MPs are the ones who are escalating it. Like to me, yes, the Speaker has to find a way to be effective. But if the candidate for Speaker is saying to you, the MP, I'm going to try to make this better. I'm going to try to bring down the temperature in here. The Speaker can only do that so much. The person is only one person. The MPs are responsible for their own behavior. And the party leaders are responsible for wanting to encourage a certain type of behavior and discourage other types of behavior. And so no Speaker is going to have a magic wand, a mute button, unless you put it all on computer again. Like they are dealing with grown adults. And so the carrots and sticks that a Speaker has are limited. And there has to be, I think, some personal ownership on the part of MPs, every single MP, for the way you behave. The Speaker's not magic. But there's also pressure within the party, isn't there? I mean, I can remember talking with some some rookie MPs and MPPs in Ontario when they went into the Ontario legislature. And they were shocked, and it may be a little naive, but they were shocked when they were basically told by their party whip, you bang on the desk and you hoot and howl. That's how we get things done. And that's how you get their attention. And whether you want to do it or not, you're going to do it. That's that's how we play the game here. And I've got to think even these days, as you mentioned, I'm sure that even the backbench MPs, but certainly the ones in the front row on the government side are figuring, this is how we're going to get things done. I mean, as you say, it's all about the soundbite right now. So you want that 10 or 15 second soundbite, that retort or that that, you know, profound comment that somebody is going to make followed by cheering and applause. And that's the 10 second clip that's going to be on CTV that night. That's it. Yeah. And that's what you're there. I mean, I guess that's what question period is about. It's not about extracting any information. It's about getting that moment that the media are going to pick up. And then you you're seen to have got like you've got some line on the government. You've had you had like a shot that connected. There's some kind of wind that you're taking from it. And then, you know, to the extent that anybody picks that up at all within a matter of hours, they forget about it. Like for the most part, we're just talking about the same exchange day after day. And then like the prime minister goes one day a week, typically he goes on Wednesdays, takes all the questions and then that's it. So I think the way that we have seen question period transform over the years has been worked for the worst rather than for the better. It was never golden, but now it just seems to be ever so dedicated to getting that thing that you can use as a clip later. But I mean, our attack has really any difference. That's why, to be fair, what I do, I do think, and this will be studied for years, I think that what Pierre Polyev has done with the social media campaign is very interesting. He has in the process of telling Canadians who he is, he's published these long videos, these YouTube things where he's talking directly to you. He's talking about an issue. And some of them are snarky. Some of them are all about how Justin Trudeau is a jerk. You shouldn't vote for him. But some of them are just about Pierre Polyev and what he stands for. And it's interesting to me that he used that style of media and that sort of unfiltered. He's speaking directly to Canadians with no media as an interceptor kind of thing. It'll be interesting to me to see whether that works for him, because certainly his approval ratings are he's still got a lot of negatives, but the conservatives approval ratings are way up and for his preferred PM ratings are way up. Yeah, they just don't seem to like him very much, but they don't like the other guy more. So it's going to be the battle of, you know, the lesser of two evils, I suppose, when they get down to it. How is this going to get played out though, Laurie? As we mentioned with the Indian government, there's going to be, you know, at 50,000 feet, he's going to have to deal with Modi and there are trade issues and so many other things that are tied into that. But at the political level here in Canada, on our soil, as you and I have talked about in the past, there's a huge Sikh population in this country. But I tend not to think that those whether you're talking about the Sikh population, the Jewish population, the Muslim population, I don't think they vote as a bloc. I think that was a perception maybe some years ago, but they don't do that anymore. So it's, it's not as if, well, you know, I've got to reach out to those. There are conservative, liberal and NDP, and probably green bloc members or Sikh members. So that's there. So it's not as if there's a political bloc to follow there. But you've got to be very careful. If you're Pierre Paulier or Justin Trudeau, especially how you handle this and the sensitivity and the perception that those people are going to be having. Some people that came to this country from India can't stand Modi. Others are supportive of him. Jagmeet Singh has been very quiet on this issue, too. And you have to wonder just how this is going to play out with those members. Well, exactly. And I definitely want to echo what you said. I mean, like, this is not a scenario where people vote as a bloc. Absolutely not. Issues are complex, people are complex, communities are complex. And there are several political parties to choose from, all of whom are going to say some things you like and some things you don't like. I think, to be honest, this is going to be a hard issue for the prime minister because if this is going to get resolved between Canada and India, it's not going to be in public. It's not going to be in the newspaper. It's not going to be something that the prime minister can come and report on. My guess is that the best way out of this and the most likely way out of this is that we're going to have a partner like the U.S. act as a broker behind closed doors, try to find a way to make this line up, try to get the two sides to talk. Because right now it's just, they're just completely opposed. And the language between India and Canada is very much not leading in a direction of reconciliation or common ground. So it seems to me that this is going to be something that we're going to need a broker to be able to sort and probably one as powerful as the U.S. And I don't think that they would be hesitant to step into that role. But it's not something that the prime minister is going to be able to easily walk up to the mic and say, okay, we fixed this now because I don't and I wouldn't expect that's going to happen anytime soon. Speaking of, every time something like this comes up, whether it's the inflation rate starting to creep up again, whether it's the Chinese involvement, of course, in our government and our politics, and now the Indian government apparently seems to have their hand in it as well. The rumor mill starts of course, and I'm sure you've heard it on the streets around Ottawa, that maybe it's time for Justin to take that walk in the snow. And the snow is coming to Ottawa, by the way, pretty soon. So it may accommodate him. He's adamant that he's going to lead his party into the next election. There were some people months ago, I guess, Anita Anand comes to mind and a couple of other cabinet ministers who seem to be, if not outrightly, but at least very coyly indicating that yeah, when and if there's an opening, I wouldn't mind taking a shot at the job. Anand got, well, some people think demoted in this last cabinet shuffle because she might have been a little bit too pushy on that. So they were quiet for a while. And I guess maybe that was the message. Don't try to challenge the boss here. But Mark Carney made some comments over the weekend, very much along those lines, thinking that maybe it's time for a change of leadership. Now, Justin Trudeau can't get at Mark Carney. He's not a member of cabinet. But Carney's indicated that he's kind of interested in this too. It's an issue, I guess, Laurie, that's not going to go away until he goes away, as long as he's in power. And I mean, there are still some people who don't think Peter Polio should be leading the conservatives. So when you put it into that context, but is there going to be pressure on the prime minister to step aside? I mean, when you see the popularity numbers and the polling numbers continue to slide for the liberals, the modus now is not just maybe he's worn out. It's looking, are you going to drag the party down or you're going to step aside for the good of the party? Does he see it that way? I don't think so. He is. Yeah, there's a lot to unpack there. Like he's an, I think he is a national campaigner. I think he's inclined to want to campaign against Peter Polio. I think he wants to beat Peter Polio. I think there's something very personal in that specific competition. And I think they both want it. And so I would be surprised if the prime minister stepped aside. And it's a risk for them. If he does, right, like as much as I can see the polling numbers the same as everybody else. And yes, there is, he has now hit a point where his negatives, depending on what poll you look at, are higher than his positives. And he's as much of a, you know, there's there's reasons to think that maybe another leader would do a better job. The problem, I think, for the liberals is that if they went with somebody that was lesser known, you run the risk that the conservatives are going to do something that they are absolutely skilled at, which is defining the other candidate before they can define. You like Trudeau, you don't like Trudeau, whatever he is who he is. They run the risk if they went with somebody else that the conservatives would completely brand that person and then they'd be a free fall. Somebody like Mark Carney has a different story. I think if the liberals were going to switch candidate, they're going to switch leaders. You can't go down this road of, okay, we're going to have a leadership, we're going to open it up, and maybe these people will run, maybe those people will run, and maybe they won't, and we're not really sure. No, no, no, they will lose the narrative altogether. You need someone to come in who's going to blow the doors off the place. And somebody like Carney might do that. But I can't imagine him doing this unless he was like sure he was going to win. I can't imagine him doing this to lose. And that's not an insult, or a compliment. It's just, he's done a lot of things in his life, right? Like, I'm not sure he's going to take this on if the trajectory looks like the liberals are going to be, you know, on the backbench for a while, because they've been in government for years. The liberals seem to have a hesitancy to accept outsiders anyway, to the full, don't they? It seems loyalty, party loyalty seems to be paramount among the upper echelons in that party. You know, I've been with the party, I sold memberships, I knocked on doors. I've been a liberal, my father was a liberal before that, yada, yada, yada. The other parties not so much. I mean, if they see a superstar in the in the, in the wings, you know, they don't mind opening the doors and saying, let's see what you got. I mean, you know, Brian Mulroney didn't serve years and years as a backbencher. He just kind of came in there and, and was the star and got the leadership and of course, eventually government too. I agree with you totally. I don't think they would allow or they wouldn't like an outsider coming in to their party right now. But and again, it may still be a moot point, because I don't know that the NDP is going to withdraw support. It kind of looks like for better or for worse, these guys are going to stick around for at least another couple of years, don't you think? Yeah, and honestly, even since Trudeau has been leader, like, you know, I'm thinking of liberal leaders before him. You know, they like honestly, liberals got burned when they they let Ignatieff come in and try to do things and he was the conservatives to find him in 20 minutes. And it worked. And so I can't I can't blame him for being hesitant. But that said, politics has changed a lot in the last 10-15 years. We are in a world of celebrity brand politics, where you know, people like Trudeau, people like Ford, people like Trump, have a different kind of cachet. And it is an outsider coming in. We are in a world where outsiders come into political parties. We are in a world of entryism. We're in a world where the role of the political party to choose the leader has been democratized to a certain extent. But instead of it being the die hard liberals who go to the convention and vote like and paid the money to get there, and they're totally invested. Now, it's just whoever can sign up as many people as they possibly can, whoever signs up the most people wins. That's a totally different style of party politics. And so leadership politics, too. So I and people like to win. And so I think that if they thought that Carney was going to get them through the next election and beat Pierre Paulieff, loyalty is something different now than it was before. I don't really know why that's the case. But I think it's shifting. It's going to be rather tumultuous winter. I can see that happening right now up in Ottawa. And we're so glad that that we can use you as a resource to try to sift through this and try to make some sense out of what's going to be happening. Laurie, a pleasure to have you back on the show. Thanks so much for this today. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. Take care. And that's it for this edition of the Bill Kelly podcast. Thanks for listening. And thanks for subscribing as well. 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