Tale of the TLMEP

Carney and Poilievre visit Quebec's most important TV programme

It’s debate week on the Chaos Campaign, but arguably the most important conversation of the campaign transpired last night.

Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre and Liberal leader Mark Carney visited Radio-Canada’s nouvelle maison to participate in Tout le monde en parle, the wide-ranging panel show hosted by comedian Guy A. Lepage, and watched live by at least one million Quebecers every week.

While not a political show per se, it has grown to become a pivotal moment of the campaign ever since NDP leader Jack Layton’s appearance on the show in 2011 helped catapult the party into first place in the province.

For the past decade, every major federal leader (sauf Stephen Harper) has appeared on the dais to chat, pitch themselves to Quebecers, and field some of the tougher left-field questions that they’re likely to get at the official debates.

So, no pressure.

Going into this interview, Carney is in the pole position, though he is at constant risk of falling on his face. Quebec’s sudden infatuation with the former central banker seems to have occurred entirely despite the quality of his French. A pretty brutal interview with Radio-Canada last week may have tried their patience. As I understand it, Carney cleared off his campaign schedule this past weekend to work on his French. That could prove very wise: If he can crack a few jokes or just generally stay with the banter, that's going to prove he is serious and capable of speaking Quebec’s language (on every level.)

Meanwhile, Poilievre’s numbers are dire in Quebec. The theme of his campaign and his personal style is just fundamentally mismatched to the province, and his campaign has always known that. To some degree, they’re still pitching the same message to Quebecers despite the fact that Quebecers don’t like it. It’s something between honesty and trolling. If Poilievre comes on the show tonight and rants about woke culture and the lost Liberal decade, he's just going to irk Quebecers even more. But if he can surprise them — not just by softening his tone, but by actually showing that he’s capable of hearing and responding to peoples’ concerns about him — he just might set himself up for success.

The show is about to start, so let’s get to it.

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First on the dais is Pierre Poilievre — because the Conservatives were first to RSVP yes, he got to pick the order. And he opted to go first.

The conversation begins where you’d expect: Since Donald Trump sparked a trade war with Canada, your numbers have dropped like a rock. What are you going to do about it? In response, Poilievre says the same thing he says every day at his press conferences, although he said it much slower.

“Isn’t it frustrating,” Lepage asks, “to be displaced by Mark Carney, who has zero experience as a politician — whereas you have lots?”

Poilievre has his hand at cleverness: “Evidently, if I can go face-to-face with Guy A. Lepage, I can face Donald Trump.”

Now, listen, Tout le monde en parle is filmed in Montreal, a city that is not exactly receptive to the Conservative message. But when I tell you that the audience is silent in response to that little quip — you can hear only a confused “eughn?” from someone in the stands — it is silent. (“Me, I don’t have any tariffs!” Lepage responds, to genuine laughter.)

With that dud out of the way, Poilievre has the floor to give his well-rehearsed pitch: Nobody can control Donald Trump, we don’t have the power to stop this trade war, all we can do is try to make a deal and improve the fundamentals of our economy. You’ve heard all this in English.

A thing to know about Tout le monde en parle is that there’s often a real theme to these interviews that isn’t always obvious until the interview is over. And here Lepage starts building out that theme.

“You haven’t attacked Donald Trump much before this moment,” he asks. “It’s a strategy that seems to be a source of tension within your party. Are you holding back to avoid alienating part of your political base who like Donald Trump?”

“No,” Poilievre responds. “In fact, I’ve ferociously criticized Donald Trump. He’s done a lot of damage to our economy. He’s attacking the United States’ best friend.” In the face of Trump, he says, we’re “weak” but we could be “self-sufficient.”

Jean-Sébastien Girard, Lepage’s sidekick¹ on this episode, jumps in with the direct question, citing a pretty well-established narrative around Poilievre in Quebec: “Are you a mini-Trump?” Poilievre shrugs, purses his lips, says “no.” Girard continues: “A medium-sized Trump? A large Trump?”

“I’m about 180 pounds,” Poilievre responds. Again: Dead silence.

Here, Poilievre pivots to his origin story. Trump “comes from a rich family — millionaire parents. Me, I was born to a single mother and raised by two teacher parents who gave me a modest upbringing. That upbringing gave me the capacity to understand humanity.”

“To be more empathetic than Mr. Trump?” Girard offers.

“Yes, absolutely,” Poilievre answers.

Lepage jumps in from the other side: “Over the years, Canadians have known two Pierre Poilievres.” There’s the “abrasive,” “bellicose” leader of the opposition and, more recently, there’s the more moderate leader with the beautiful smile — “like that one,” he adds when Poilievre starts to grin. “Which of the two is the real Pierre Poilievre?” Lepage asks.

This is pretty interesting because Poilievre himself has hinted at this dichotomy.

Conservative ads in Quebec feature Poilievre conceding “there are people who find I have a style that is too direct, too frank.” He follows it up asking those people: “If we should be cute, more docile, when we negotiate tariffs with Donald Trump?”

I’m kind of a dick, but that’s what we need right now is a very clever message that Quebecers are certainly receptive to. It does directly contradict his “nobody can control Trump” line, but still. There’s something to it.

We never quite get there. Poilievre off-handedly mentions that he’s sought advice on this question from former Bloc leader Lucien Bouchard, a politician who certainly rubs some people the wrong way. I’d be curious to know what Bouchard actually told Poilievre, but instead the current Conservative leader uses that anecdote as a springboard back into his “modest” origins. He says this “air of aggressiveness” comes from a place of wanting to “fight for those who deserve better from our country.”

It’s a perfectly predictable answer. But Lepage isn’t done. He pulls up a clip of Poilievre repeating some of those lines verbatim, but ending it with an appeal to the “Canadian promise, where everyone who works hard will have a beautiful life in a beautiful home, on a safe street protected by our proud soldiers under our Canadian flag.”

“This promise of Canada, it’s a bit like the American dream — a dream that was never consecrated — no?” Lepage asks.

“I see a difference,” Poilievre says. The Canadian “contract,” is more accessible than the American dream. Public healthcare, for example, lets the hard-working poor achieve whatever they want.

Again, there was a litany of directions he could have gone with this answer. Lots of chances to subvert expectations. But he doesn’t.

He’s given more chances to do that. Asked about refugees from America, Poilievre talks about the importance of coming legally as opposed to “fraudulent asylum-seekers.” Pressed about banning journalists from his bus and limiting questions from reporters, Poilievre tries his hand at outright lying when he insisted “we take fewer questions from national journalists and more from local reporters.”

“We’ve showed a huge openness,” Poilievre insisted, wrongly. Nobody looks impressed.

As a final question, Lepage asks: "Do you still want to close the CBC? And is it a financial decision, or an ideological one?”

Poilievre, no doubt, anticipated this question. And so he launches into a pretty inspired, if slightly pre-packaged, defence of Radio-Canada, insisting that its shuttering would be a real loss for francophones across Canada, that it would be a blow to Quebec identity, and that its cultural contributions justify its expense.

English Canada already has enough news and culture, Poilievre insisted, so the CBC isn’t needed.

Out of time, Lepage has no follow-up. But he ends the segment with a quick swat on Poilievre’s nose: “Public television is important for a country,” Lepage begins. “There’s none in the United States, and that is a gift to private interests who finance their politicians.” That’s bad, Lepage points out.

And with that, Poilievre is wrapped.

That’s what was said. But the subtext of the whole conversation is actually quite interesting.

Poilievre was invited to explain what differentiates his brand of small-government, libertarian-coded, free-enterprise, ambitious and hard-nosed conservative politics from American politics broadly and the MAGA Republican playbook specifically.

Poilievre wasn’t obscenely bad in this regard. I think he’s tried to highlight the very best aspects of the American dream: Ambition meets compassion, Wall Street meets Ellis Island. But, in refusing to directly criticize the active harm that Trump is doing (beyond how it impacts the Canadian economy) there’s just not enough in Poilievre’s rhetoric to suggest that he’s aware of the dark center of that dream — how ruthless competition breeds cruelty.

But he had ample opportunity to provide some more concrete distinctions and he just totally failed to do so.

If I can generalize about the entire nation for a minute: Quebec has always been rather Americanophilic. It is, to some degree, because Quebec sees itself as a fully different place than the United States. There is no inferiority complex because it has no desire to be like America. This is particularly true right now.

The Liberals are currently making the case that Poilievre is Trump-like — that he uses the same slogans, talks to the same people, and thinks the same thing. But what I think Tout le monde en parle coaxed Poilievre into admitting is that he sounds American in a way that many past Conservative Party leaders didn’t.

In March, Leger polled Canadians on Trump: Just 12% had a positive opinion of the president. That number falls to 9% in Quebec.

The pollster went further, asking Canadians what Trump policies they disliked. Just a single policy — forbidding trans women from women’s sports — had a net positive rating. A clear majority of the country is against abolishing DEI, ending birthright citizenship, banning trans people from the military, suspending aid to Ukraine, withdrawing from the World Health Organization.

In the month since that poll was taken, Trump has only veered into strange and terrifying new places. Leger did not ask, for example, about the growing trend of disappearing legal American residents to El Salvadorian black sites.

Poilievre could have taken aim at any one of those policies as a way to differentiate himself from Trump. But he didn’t. And it’s no great secret why: Because he, or his supporters, agree with many of those policies.

It also struck me that this was, really, the first time on the campaign trail that we’ve seen someone really criticize Poilievre to his face. That’s a strange recognition, in and of itself.

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Onto Carney.

Let’s just deal with the obvious bit right off the top: Yes, his French is getting better, but it’s still pretty bad. A weekend of intensive practice likely helped. But clearly his staff also gave him some much-needed advice: Keep your sentences simpler and keep your answers shorter.

In decreasing the square footage of his conversation, Carney manages to avoid falling on his face. But that’s a trade-off. Carney sounds stilted right out of the gate. His answers are quite limited, sometimes confusingly so.

From the top, though, the opening minutes are spent getting the usual lines out: Before we negotiate, the United States needs to respect us. We need to make our economy more self-sufficient. We must find new trade partners.

“So you agree with Pierre Poilievre, then?” Lepage interjected, prompting a look of confusion on Carney’s face. “He just said the same thing a minute ago.”

“Oh, he’s listening to me,” Carney joked. He got some chuckles.

Lepage asks: Isn’t it easier, more fun, to be prime minister than to be a candidate?

Carney responds: “In a sense, it’s easier in a crisis. I have a lot of experience with crises. In a crisis, you have to act. You have to have audacity. To be a candidate, it’s different. We make speeches, we shake hands, we look at cows. We do other things. So in a sense, it’s easier. But it’s also essential to be a candidate. We have to have peoples’ confidence.”

But when I say that his responses were kind of awkward, this is what I mean. It makes sense, but it feels dumbed-down to the point of stupidity.

Lepage perfectly crafted a question that we’ve been dying to hear Carney talk about for awhile now. I’ll transcribe the whole thing:

Lepage: When you worked at the heart of Brookfield Asset Management from 2020 to 2025 — that’s really not a long time — three investment funds were registered in two tax havens. It’s perfectly legal, but recognizing that this practice loses billions in tax revenue annually from the Government of Canada. Do you plan on reviewing these tax haven rules?

Carney: I’m proud of my record in the financial sector, and it’s useful for this moment. Secondly, concerning the structure you’re talking about: The impact of this structure is that people pay taxes here — not in Bermuda or the Cayman Islands. So it’s a structure that benefits retirees, teachers, our armed forces, people who work here in Canada. In this case, it’s better for Canada and people who work here, to keep this structure. But when it comes to the tax system, we have to make changes, that’s clear.

It’s not the world’s most satisfying answer. But I’ll have more to say on that later this week.

If the unofficial theme of Poilievre’s interview was his similarities to Donald Trump, Lepage set up Carney for a different type of subtext: Do you understand Quebec? On several occasions, Carney illustrated that the answer is not really.

He decided, at one point, to invoke his much-used line that we don’t need 13 economies in Canada, we need just one. I think Quebecers are perfectly supportive of the idea that the rest of the country needs to knock down needless red tape and outdated interprovincial barriers, and that there are some areas where Quebec can better integrate with the Canadian economy — or vice versa — but the idea that Quebec needs to surrender its economic autonomy is not exactly a winning line here.

Lepage went on to highlight the lack of attention the Liberal campaign is paying to environmental issues — yet another spot where he seems out of step with what Quebec very much cares about. Carney talks frequently about fast-tracking pipelines (“not necessarily pipelines, but maybe pipelines” he offered Sunday night), he’s cancelled the carbon tax, and he’s cancelled a planned hike to the capital gains inclusion rate.

“Certain commentators,” Lepage notes, “have argued that you’ve put your hands in the Conservatives’ cookie jar. Does he have some good ideas, Mr. Poilievre?”

Carney insists there’s a “huge difference” between himself and the Conservatives. What that difference is, though, gets lost in some confusing verbiage around carbon markets — an attempt, I think, to highlight Quebec’s still-going cap-and-trade carbon-pricing scheme? It isn’t terribly clear.

Sometimes his newfound brevity is an asset. Lepage asked Carney the mirror-image of the one he posed to Poilievre — asking him to define the big differences between himself and the former prime minister. Asking, in essence, are you a mini-Trudeau?

Carney prefaces his answer by saying “we have the same values” — solidarity, the environment, reconciliation, etc. “But,” he says, “I put the accent on the economy. I put the accent on fixing this crisis. I put the accent on building our economy.”

“Mr. Trudeau is,” Carney takes a beat. “Less interested in that.”

I’m not sure if that was intended to be savage, but it was. Maybe appropriately so. Carney can’t be afraid to hurt his predecessor’s feelings.

But Carney struggles when he faced questions around Bill 21, Quebec’s ban on religious symbols; and Bill 96, its draconian language law.

Carney gave a perplexing — somewhat condescending — answer in insisting that the only problem with these laws is the pre-emptive use of the notwithstanding clause, giving a rather facile explanation of the tension between positive and negative rights.

It was a particularly stunted answer given Poilievre’s full-throated rejection of Bill 21 just last week.

Lepage gets to the real rub of the interview in the last few minutes. Pointing out that Carney has made gaffes and slip-ups on the campaign — confusing, for example, the mass shootings at L’École Polytechnique and Concordia University, despite the fact that one of his star candidates is a survivor of the former tragedy. Lepage points out “we’ve had the impression, occasionally, that you’re missing some of the sensitivities of Quebec, that you know little about it at all.”

So Lepage gives him a challenge: “What do you know about, or what is something you like about, Quebec? A singer? A town? A characteristic? A cheese?”

“A show?” Carney attempts. “Like Tout le monde en parle?” Wrong answer.

“I know a lot,” he continues, but confessing that his French isn’t perfect, that he makes gaffes, “I’m trying to be transparent.”

Lepage interjects: “A singer? A cheese?”

Carney laughs. “Coeur de Pirate.” A pretty safe answer. (“Ok, good. That’s a cheese,” Lepage joked.)

Girard jumps in with the real test: “What’s the name of the musical-comedy group of the host, Guy A. Lepage?”

This is a prime spot to say, dear reader, that I didn’t grow up in Quebec. I’ve lived here off-and-on for more than a decade, and I consider it a second home. My French isn’t perfect either (though I can now claim it’s better than the prime minister’s) and I don’t claim to be an expert on Quebecois culture. I confess that I could not tell you, off the top of my head, the name of Guy A. Lepage’s band.

But Carney, without missing a beat, responds: “Rock et Belles Oreilles.”

The audience audibly gasped. Girard, visibly surprised, exclaims “ouais!” Lepage gives him a “bravo.” One member of the audience shouted “Woooo!” I’m told that Liberal campaign staff were high-fiving each other in joy. (Liberal staff apparently insisted that he knew this fact all on his own.)

“I know!” Carney says, visibly pleased with himself.

Was he being graded on a curve? Yes. But he aced the bonus question.

Carney may have exceeded expectations, but he by no means put to bed the idea that while he may be well-suited to the current crisis, he remains ill-prepared to handle the uniqueness of Quebec.

Just weeks earlier on the programme, ex-Conservative communications director Dmitri Soudas went on Toute le monde en parle to kick Carney in the shins for not improving his French earlier.

“I deplore the poor quality of Mr. Carney’s French,” Soudas said. “Speaking French isn’t just the language. It’s not a linguistic question. Speaking French is understanding Quebec.”

Despite what he says, I’m just not sure that Carney understands Quebec like he ought to. To date, that’s not been a serious problem. But it is a liability.

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A word about Jagmeet Singh, who appeared on the programme last week.

A show like Tout le monde en parle should be a huge gift to someone like the NDP leader. It certainly helped propel Jack Layton into hero status in Quebec. But that really only works if you’ve got something genuinely interesting to say.

Through the interview, Singh was just reheating old talking points that he’s been serving to Quebecers for two elections in a row. He pitched the entire worth of his party on its ability to achieve programs like dentalcare and pharmacare.

“In Quebec, you had 59 MPs. Now, 14 years later, the NDP has only one MP in Quebec, Alexandre Boulerice,” Lepage asked. “Why is it that the NDP message isn’t reaching Quebec anymore?”

“A single MP in Quebec delivered a dentalcare program, a program that helped 50,000 Quebecers,” Singh said.

Now, here’s the problem: Singh didn’t bring pharmacare or dentalcare to Quebec, which already had provincial-level programs in place. I have no idea where Singh got this 50,000 number, but it is a meagre figure just the same. What’s more, Premier François Legault is actively trying to opt out of the dental program.

Believe me when I say: Quebecers are not tripping over themselves grateful that Singh managed to launch multi-billion dollar national programs to provide services that Quebec was already doing.

“Imagine what we could do with more MPs!” Singh continued. And it was, perhaps, the most infuriating answer of all. We shouldn’t have to imagine what you’ll do with more MPs: You have to tell us.

I have to imagine that Singh’s appearance on the show may have actually hurt the three or four high-quality candidates he has in Quebec. What a shame.

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That’s it for today.

If you’re wondering where your Chaos Campaign dispatches have been, it’s that I’ve created a bit of a bottleneck for myself: I’ve got a number of interesting (I think so anyway) pieces to come, and they’re each 50% completed. So expect to get a significant dose of analysis and updates in the closing weeks of the campaign.

I’ll be back tomorrow with more!

Edit: An earlier version of this dispatch named Justin Trudeau instead of Mark Carney. I invite you to make fun of me for that.

1. If you’re a casual Tout le monde en parle watcher, Girard is filling the role once played by Dany Turcotte.