Hello and welcome to Inside Briefing the podcast from the Institute for Government. I'm Catherine Hadden.

It's election day, it's May day, but which party will be sending out the distress signals

once the votes are counted? Well, we won't actually know by the time we reach the end of this podcast,

and there's plenty to count, with elections for four regional mayors, more than a thousand councillors,

and the Runcorn and Helsby by-election.

But there is lots to discuss, and we're going to be exploring what the results might mean,

how significant they could be for the parties, and their impact on the government's so-called

devolution revolution.

We'll also cross the Atlantic to react to an election that has already taken place and

that's in Canada.

Mark Carney, remember him, has won the general election and in doing so turned around months of terrible

polling for the now still ruling Liberal Party. So how did he do it and what can we learn from it?

And then we'll turn to this week's new IFG report. It's on school absence, a complex policy

challenge that the Blair government had sought to tackle, but one which has got steadily worse over the last decade. The report's author, Moira Wallace, who used to run Tony Blair's

social exclusion unit, will be telling us what Keir Starmer needs to know. All that to come.

Joining me throughout, two top IFG program directors, and that's Alex Thomas and Akash Bourne. Hi both. Hello. Hi,

Cal. So let's start with the election in Canada. Alex, you were over there last week and you went to

an election morning breakfast back here at the Canadian Embassy. So for today only, you are

IFG's Canada correspondence. Congratulations.

Give us a sense of the mood in Canada.

Was this a result people saw coming?

Yeah, dubious responsibility.

...