The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Lloyd Axworthy: Memoir of a Social Justice Liberal

Episode Date: November 26, 2024

Back in the day, the bird that was Liberal Party of Canada had two wings: a social justice wing and a business wing. They co-existed pretty well and kept the Liberals balanced, and in power, for the lion's share of the last hundred years. One prominent Liberal has never been under any illusion as to which wing he preferred, as you'll hear from Lloyd Axworthy, who spent more than two decades in public life, working for three different prime ministers. He joins host Steve Paikin to discuss his new book: "My Life in Politics." See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Exciting, isn't it? Visit tvo.org slash Giving Tuesday to make your donation today and discover your 2-Point TVO. Back in the day, the bird that was the Liberal Party of Canada had two wings, a social justice wing and a business wing. They coexisted pretty well and kept the Liberals balanced and in power for the lion's share of the last hundred years. One prominent Liberal has never been under any illusion as to which wing he preferred. As you'll hear from Lloyd Axworthy, who spent more than two decades in public life, working

with three different prime ministers, his new book is called My Life in Politics. And we're delighted that it has brought the former MP from Winnipeg to our studios. Great to have you in that chair. Thanks, Steve. Good to be here. Let's, you know, I, of course we're going to talk politics both during your career and present day as well. But I really want to start at the beginning because you had an experience at the beginning of your life that I suspect our younger viewers and listeners

will have no comprehension of how that happens. You met your father for the first time when you were six years old. How did that happen? It's, well, actually there's a family story I tell them about. It's that he had joined up at the outset of World War II, did his training in Camp Dundurn. I was born in a hospital in North Battleford because my... Saskatchewan.

In Saskatchewan, just down the road. And the story is he was being shipped out, came to see me and didn't come back for six years. He loved you that much. Yeah that's right. I think as I look back that experience of being a toddler, a namp maybe, during wartime and just feeling all the vibes and the feelings of concern and anxiety that were always below the surface, I mean, clearly had a big impact. And I think there's a generation of Canadians who still remember that.

Do you remember your first meeting with your father at age six? Yes, I do. I remember sort of in the old CPR rail station on Main Street. And we were in the rotunda, and the soldiers came marching off, lined up. station on Main Street. And we were in the rotunda, and the soldiers came marching off lined up.

And my father kind of looked around, and my mother recognized him. And he came over. He was a little unsure. He saw this sort of six-year-old kind of brat standing beside him, like, who is he and what am I? And there's no question that he went through quite a period of adjustment. I mean, we now talk, we understand that people in war

come back with some serious sort of issues. But there's no therapy, there's no program, except this. The federal government at the time built right across Canada about 60,000 housing units, peacetime housing, which meant veterans and their families were living together in the same measurement. You can still go to any town, any city, and you'll see those houses still there.

And we were part of it. And it became a self-help group. They helped each other, which maybe is the best therapy. So the federal government has been in the housing business for well more than 80 years. Well, right now, we play around with interest rates and incentives there. They basically constructed and went to the municipalities

and said, here's the model. CMHC would supervise. basically sort of constructed and went to the municipalities and said here's the model, CMHC would supervise and it was a life changer because really you had, we had a million Canadians in the war. I mean people don't understand that was a huge coming of age of the country but when they came back they were all out of the depression and all of a sudden they had a house that they could go to. It could be converted into capital because the rent was transferable.

They had a chance to go to education. I say in the book that that was really the beginning of a significant middle class in this country, was in those years from 1945 to 1950. The fact that you are here is really quite extraordinary because the circumstances under which your parents met were one in a million, if not more. How did that happen? Well, my mother had contracted tuberculosis.

It was in the Coppell Valley sanatorium. And my father, who was also from Saskatchewan, came to visit somebody else and met her there. And I guess whatever little click went on, eventually they got married in Sudbury because he ended up working in the mines. And she went to see my aunt, who was married to my uncle, who was playing for the Sudbury Terriers. So if your father doesn't have a friend in that same hospital, you're not sitting here

today. That's right. Me and my brothers have a lot of sort of, whoever that friend was, that anonymous sort of precursor is really, we honor. It's a beautiful thing. Amen. Your political life, your political awareness, I guess, begins when you're a young kid

and you go to hear a speech given by a Nobel Prize winning politician. Who was that and what did he talk about? Well, one guess. But just to give you again the preface, I can remember, we had a history professor named J.J. Phillips. Tough guy, but really a good teacher. And he announced to our history class that we were going to listen to a politician.

And you can imagine his grade 11, 17 year old moaning and groaning until he told us that 20% of our marks were at stake. If we didn't show, we would nothing like a little sort of educational intimidation to bring out the best of it. And then I went and I know this sounds kind of something out of an urban legend or something, but Mike Pearson was down there with his polka dot bow tie,

not exactly what you call a Hollywood casting character. But he talked about when it meant to be a Canadian. It talked about how over time we had sort of developed diversity with some respect. That we had a parliamentary system that gave people a chance to participate. We had an economic system that was a mix of government and the private sector.

But the important thing he said is that we have a foundation that's distinctive. Not better or worse, but distinctive. And we have to use that. And he wanted to talk about his Nobel Prize. And that's when he said that the great sort of vocation of Canada is to help build a world in which there is stability and security. And we do that by collaboration and cooperation.

I walked out of there. Did you walk out of there as a big illiberal as a result of that? I know it was a big illiberal. I walked out thinking politics? Interesting. Being a Canadian? Yeah. And the serendipity of history is that 30 years later,

I end up having his job. There you go, foreign minister. We'll come to that. You went to grad school at Princeton University at a very tempestuous time in the history of the United States. There were Vietnam War protests all over campus, all over America.

What impact do you think all of that had on your thinking? Well, there was various layers and they were all intermixed. I mean, everything from the fact that we lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis and you're into this sort of vortex of a great power having to deal with this ultimate precipice issue, existential issue. Do we go to war over it or not? And so you might imagine all the political junkies and studying politics at Princeton had a lot to say, but we were also frightened. I kept wishing I was back in Winnipeg in part. That was one stream. And then at the same time, there was the ongoing efforts on civil rights. And I was able to join up with a group of other Princeton

students. We had a demonstration against Russ Barnett. Remember that name? He was a Mississippi governor. OK, yes. Came there to talk about these things. And we all went to see Robert Goheen, who was the president of Princeton, to say, look,

this guy is kind of a little bit of a shameful presentation. He said, well, we're a university, freedom of speech. He said, I can let you have a counter-protest, and I'll give you a dill in gymnasium, if you promise when you march that you don't trample the grass and the flowers. Well, I have to tell you, sometimes you're good luck. But in the summertime, we all went down

to visit the Bayard Rustin School, the March from Washington Group New York. And all these guys said, would you like us to come and join you? And we said, sure. Well, we had that night of our counter-protest we were counting of four or five hundred we had four to five thousand you know here's this kid from his western cannibal little flashlights and go this this way people pouring by till what guys come over and say you like to some help their son oh yeah the

march went out beautifully. The flowers existed. And we got a story in the New York Times. How was that? That's not bad. But you were at an actually more impressive demonstration, if I can say. The Stars for Freedom rally in 1965 in Alabama. Joan Baez, Harry Belafonte, Tony Benner there, Martin Luther King. What stays with you today from that experience?

Well, it was really part of an introduction to this whole concept, which was really emerging in the 60s, I guess, which you call participatory democracy or deliberative democracy. It's not sufficient just to elect somebody to represent you. You have to feel that you're part of the system. And that was the age in which the civil rights movement really said that they had to bring in not just the participation but the respect that goes with it. And I mean the thing in going to Montgomery and being part of that thing on the St. Jude's church area was it was almost an epiphany. I think I mentioned in the book that I grew up in the United Church with a strong sort of flavor of social gospel.

And all of a sudden here I was sort of living it. And it was again one of those turning point experiences. Your actual connection to Ottawa and federal politics in this country comes after a guy named John Turner invites you to go to Ottawa and work for him. What was that all about? Well I guess when I I showed up at a liberal convention, those are the days you'll remember, this year I'll remember, when we actually had big conventions and great debates on the floor. And I remember there was a big debate at the Chateau L'Oreal and sort of smart ass graduate students like me and others, we were all Walter Gordon fans, foreign ownership and healthcare. We took on sort of the mandarins and the senior guys. And about two weeks later, I get a call

from Jerry Grafstein, who worked with John. And Jerry says, would you like to come and walk with John Turner? He's becoming the consumer corporate affairs minister. And he wants you to do his policy for him. That's in Mike Pearson's government. Yeah, that's right, in the last throes of it. And again, he was an individual who really certainly

shaped my political ethos. I mean, he was such a parliamentarian. He had a view that a member of parliament is not somebody who loses sort of 100 euros from the Parliament Hill. That's a calling. It's a vocation. That's something that you take as a real sacred trust that people have elected you to do it.

Plus, he was gutsy. And you've written a book about him, Seagunula. When he brought in the whole change on the generic drug law to enable us to actually provide an alternative to the fairly extensive patent protection, his constituency had the big pharmacists in it. He had a lot of people from the business community. But my job with him is to go out and talk

to the other side of the equation. And I learned from that is that you always have to have a sort of outreach, a connection. And plus, John had the best Rolodex in the world. That he did. You would know it, Steve, until I had such a phonest, Unless John had the best Rolodex in the world. That he did. You know, you would know it, Steve, but until I had such a phonous, because I know every day when my birthday came up, I knew there would be a call about nine o'clock in the

morning. Hey, it's John. How are you doing? Hanging in there? Yeah. Wonderful, man. You eventually decide to go back to Winnipeg. You get yourself elected to the Manitoba Legislature. You ultimately decide to seek a federal seat in 1979.

That's not a good election for you liberals. That's Joe Clark beating Pierre Trudeau. You're one of only two liberals elected west of Ontario and you barely win. Did you figure, I'm here for a good time but probably not a long time? No, no. I really felt that I really felt that we had roots. I, the gurus in Toronto who were running the campaign, I think Keith Davy called me to say, I hate to tell you, Lloyd, but you're 188 out of 240 possible elections.

And I said, Keith, you're basically full of you know what because I had my own pollster a guy named Angus Reed who would sociologist and he set himself up a little office of a sort of a 7-eleven and that's started his career as a pollster he said the guys in Ontario are reading the wrong kind of metrics he said it's going to be close you're not and that started his career as a pollster. He said, the guys in Ontario are reading the wrong kind of metrics. He said, it's going to be close. You're not running away, but you're in the game.

And he was right. And he was right. 1980 is your second election. And again, you're one of only two liberal MPs from Western Canada. This time, though, Pierre Trudeau comes back. He wins a majority government. You're in cabinet as the Minister of Employment

and Immigration. Your brother, Tom, is majority government. You're in cabinet as the Minister of Employment and Immigration. Your brother Tom is a top adviser to the Prime Minister as well. What was the most exciting thing about being in cabinet in the early 1980s with Pierre Trudeau as Prime Minister? Well, I'm going to provide a slight alteration. The most exciting thing is to meet the woman who became my wife for the next 40 years. And Denise, I would never have met her if I hadn't sort of in 79 got elected. You met her through politics.

I met her through politics. And it's been, well, ever since, one of those great moments. But going in the cabinet, there's two things I'd like to share with you. One is that without knowing going in, that I became part of a government that passed the Charter on Freedom of Rights, which to me is one of the most defining moments

in the history of this country. It identified who we were in a very kind of direct way and had been part of that process and all the debates that went on over two years. And the second part was that I was given two portfolios employment immigration which had a lot to do with human rights and also the sort of status of women which also I mean that was a powerful lobby in the creation of that charter. So talk about kind of getting sort of from the fairly calm fields of provincial politics.

I was right in the midst of the cyclone, but boy, it was a great moment. And it's when I still cherish. Didn't last. Four years later, Brian Mulroney comes in, wipes you guys out. Only a handful of liberal opposition members survive. You're one of them. They create something called the Rat Pack. There's a small handful of them who are taking politics

to a whole new level of, I don't know what you want to call it, but it's very in your face. It's very obnoxious. It's very tough stuff. Very, very robust. Robust is another word for it. But you didn to call it, but it's very in your face, it's very obnoxious, it's very tough stuff. Very, very robust. Robust is another word for it, but you didn't join it. You didn't like it, eh? It wasn't I liked it.

I had a couple of other ambitions. One, after four years, I thought I needed to refresh myself. And I wanted to think a little bit more. I mean, clearly, we lost not just because we had run out of our cycle of time but also I think the presentation of the Liberal Party had become a little stale. There's some comparison between what we have now and what was happening then. And I felt that I had to kind of refresh my thoughts. And so I spent a lot of time internet going to Central America and going to Iraq

and going to Africa. And the other part was that I just really felt that these young MPs, the Sheila Copps and the Don, but I mean. Copps, Boudrea, John Nunziata. John Brian Tobin. Brian Tobin from Newfoundland. I mean, they cops, John Nunziata, Brian Tobin from Newfoundland. Well, I mean, they were zingers. And I just really thought I wanted to hold back a little bit.

And then I think John, who was our leader at the time, said, Lloyd, I know you want to do international stuff. How about you start going across the country and just talking to liberals and others about what Canada's foreign policy should be or what our trade policy should be. So I really had a sort of a mission of a kind of grassroots discussion, consultation. And again, I owe that a lot to him because he, in many ways, he helped prepare the Liberal Party for the next round, not only in the

people, but bringing in people, bringing in ideas. And I think that to me really should be a lesson there for what's happening to the Liberals today. We're going to get to that, don't you worry. We're going to get there. But you're right. Brian Mulroney wins the second consecutive majority, then he goes, you know, retires. Kim Campbell comes in. Jean Chrétien leads the Liberals to a big majority in 1993.

You're back in power, you're the human resources development minister, and one day you get pelted with eggs and boxes of craft. What was that all about? The specific issue, and it's one that I felt disturbed by. This was a protest by the Canadian Federation of Students because I had brought in legislation to change the whole student loan program to what you would call sort of basically an income based one. So if you graduated and became a downtown Bay Street investor, you could pay the loan back.

If you became a social worker or a care worker, you only had to pay 30% back. In other words, I thought, here's a, well, they just, I think the eggs in the Kraft dinner came because they were at that stage where they just wanted to. They wanted free tuition. They wanted free tuition. They weren't interested in this paying back loans.

They wanted free tuition. They wanted free tuition. And I think they also just liked the idea of having a kick up and being able to pelt a minister with a Kraft Dinner. They showed up at your house. Yes. You had to fight them away with a hockey stick. Right.

Did you genuinely fear for your safety at a moment like that? Not that time. There were other times when we had. What I was really mad about was that my son, who was about 11 years old, was coming from hockey practice. Denise was there. We had a small townhouse in Ottawa. And that invasion of our privacy, I simply said, look, you can go after me, you can pelt

me with Kraft dinner on the steps of the parliament, but don't come at my house and start throwing Kraft dinner. You're taking the step too far. That was the red line. People of a certain age will remember that in Canada we once used to call it UI, unemployment insurance. Oh yeah. You're the guy who changed it to EI, employment insurance.

What's the difference? The difference was that when I inherited that file, it was generally known as the POGI. It was almost a guaranteed income. And that if you worked for 10 weeks, and various provincial governments would hire you for 10 weeks to clear scrub off the provincial roads, then you got the rest of the year full payment. That was not doing anybody any favors. I mean, sure, it was income support. But people wanted to go back to work. They didn't want to simply sort of be on the Pogi because it was becoming generational. And so what we tried to introduce is things that would help people get re-employed. Training, sort of, we started doing shared sort of wage payments.

We started working on investing in smaller enterprises and also beginning to really set up good conversations between labor, business, the educational system to help people sort of. And at one point, here's an example, Steve. I know it's a small thing, but I can remember being in the airport one day, and somebody came over me and said, I want to shake your hand. I said, yeah.

I said, OK. He said, I'm from Sudbury. And I was one of the people who worked for Inco and was let go. And he said, I worked for the next year and a half sort of planting trees in the outer green belt of Sudbury. And he showed me a picture. He said, look at it now. Okay.

So the greening of Sudbury is one of the great success stories of all time. That's right. Yeah. That's right. Okay. So the greening of Sudbury is one of the great success stories of all time. That's right. Yeah. That's right. Okay. Prime Minister Kretchen eventually shuffles you to become the Foreign Affairs Minister. And to that end, you have, I gather from reading in the book, on your shelf, in your home office, a diffused landmine.

Right. Why is that there? Well, when I came into the office, there had already been a really Canadian, the Foreign Affairs, External Affairs Department had already started becoming engaged on the movement of ban land mines. And my predecessor, Andrew Gallaudet, and the Prime Minister, but a really smart group of public servants, were already engaged in discussions in Geneva about this. But what they said is that we're being stalled.

I've often described the disarmament meetings in Geneva as a place where a good idea goes to die. And there was a frustration. So they recommended to me, I was kind of just new in the job, that we invite a group back to Ottawa for a little sort of confab. How do we break the stalemate? Because the big guys, the big powers were saying, oh yeah, we'll tweak a little worder here, but we all need our

landmines in order to protect ourselves. At that meeting in Ottawa, again, it's one of those things that there's a form of luck or serendipity that happens. But I was asked with my staff, who came on a Friday night up to the office at the Pearson building, and said, look it's going nowhere. I mean it's really stuck in the same rut. And I said, so what are we doing? And they all looked at each other. There was about four or five of them. They all were playing sort of body language things. And one of them said to me, well, we've discussed that what would happen if Canada invited

all these countries to come back and sign a treaty? To ban landmines. To ban landmines. And I said, well, has there been done before that way? He said, no. So I said, well, let's check it out. I still had some caution. But we did.

We got the secretary general, the people in the prime minister's office, they basically said, it's your call. Well, we called it. And we said, it was one of those moments that I do cherish because we were meeting in the old railway building right on the opposite of the chateau l'Oreal and I did the normal salutation. I'm glad everybody came. I'm glad that you all think land mines are terrible. But there's an ending that hasn't been written.

And that's, what do we do about it? I said, therefore, on behalf of the government of Canada, I'm inviting you to come back a year from now to sign a treaty. There was a very long pause. Three things happened. One is the NGOs, the civil society groups, started to cheer. There was a lot of scowling on the behalf of some of the Americans, the big guys. And the media thought I'd lost my mind.

But what happened a year from then? A year from there we had 120 countries to sign the treaty. You also had a tremendous ally in Princess Diana. How well did you get to know her? Well, it was a little bit more detached. She clearly had become involved. We had our high commissioner working with her office. Actually, the day that she was killed in the car accident in Paris, I had written her a letter inviting her to come to the Ottawa meeting

with the signing of the treaty and to actually have a rule in it. And it does demonstrate that in the beginning, in this world that we live in, that if you have that kind of outreach through television and radio and now social media, and you have a following, I don't know what Taylor Swift's cause is going to be, but I got to tell you, Princess Diana really, what she did, she brought the issue into people's living rooms. People could see it. And they also could see it that this was not another kind of top-down government thing.

They saw that the pushing force were tens of thousands of people around the world, many of them who were victims, many of them who were out there. Again, it was a chance for Canada to forge a new kind of diplomacy based upon partnership with the civil society groups. I put these numbers on the record. In 1997, 25,000 casualties because of landmines. In 2022, 4,700. That's right. 240,000 saved over the years because of this treaty.

And you represented our government at Princess Diana's funeral. Right. Yeah. Okay, where are we going next? Want to see Canada's Foreign Affairs Minister in action almost 30 years ago? Watch that monitor over there. Sheldon, roll it if you would. It would allow any force to be able to present a strong, robust rules of engagement against any attempt to intimidate.

That would be certainly part of the resolution and it also means that it provides for good security for the forces there. That's you at talks in France on the future of Bosnia. You're a part of a decision-making apparatus that decided to bomb Serbia 30 years ago during the Balkans War to protect people in Kosovo. A few years ago, at an anniversary get-t together, you asked the Kosovars who were in attendance at that event a key question. Did our bombing do any good?

What was the answer you got? The answer was half of us wouldn't be here if it hadn't happened, which is about as clear an answer. And it's one of those moments when you're in politics, you don't often get to see the consequence of what you've done. And that just struck me, is that the ability to intervene, to stop a humanitarian expulsion or execution, was something that was going to be a new challenge for the world.

And that really led to something called the Responsibility to Protect, which probably was still, to me, is a hallmark of Canadian diplomacy. Well, yes, the notion that a government should not have immunity in terrorizing its own citizens. There was a lot of momentum behind the idea back then, not so much today. What do you think happened?

Well, what happened, of course, was the commission that we had established reported within weeks of the sort of 9-11 disaster. And terrorism became the mantra. Everything had to be about protecting, sort of seek out these terrorists, get rid of them. So it sort of changed the dialogue, changed the conversation. However, to the credit, I think, of the Morton government and Alan Rock was our UN ambassador,

they kept it alive. And so we were actually able in 2005 at the major UN assembly for summit meeting for leaders, we got the Responsibility to Protect passed as a major protocol for the Security Council. But again, we kind of mustered up by over selling and over engaging. Libya was a turning point. Even the Russians and the Chinese went along, as long as they were there to stop the killing. Then we start, we're going to get rid of the leader, that changed the argument.

And they basically, well, we know now. I mean, all of a sudden Putin and Xi and all these other guys are basically saying the Western law and order thing no longer applies, they're hypocrites, etc. And that was a turning point. I want to go back to the Balkans situation because there was some significant fallout at the time from the decision to bomb Serbia to protect the Kosovo Albanians. And here's an excerpt from your book describing it.

Sheldon, want to bring this graphic up here? One Sunday afternoon, I was on a bicycle ride with my wife and son when we were accosted by a group of Serb-Canadian demonstrators leaving Parliament Hill. It was an angry confrontation and we were fearful for our security at the time. A few members of the protest pulled back their more combative colleagues and we continued somewhat shakily on our bike ride. The incident brought home to me again the possible fallout when controversial decisions are required of a politician and the personal risk associated with public life. Over the years there have been other such incidents when I feared for their safety. All to point out that the discomfort and

unease of a politician's family is often overlooked as a feature of public calling. I guess the question I want to ask, let's stipulate no politician should should be attacked in their home obviously by members of the electorate, you know, at demonstrations, this kind of thing. But I wonder if we are seeing this stuff because increasing numbers of the public feel they don't have access to you anymore. They can't call their member parliament anymore because all they get is voicemail or they get an automatic email response and for whatever reason the connection between the governing and the governed has broken down. What do you think?

Yeah, it has. There's no doubt. I mean I think I go back to in the book right about kind of when I was elected in Fort Rouge my provincial riding and I went to on the night of the election after you after hustling people to and fro the polls, I went home to have a hot bath and a glass of McAllen. And I was struck by saying, there's thousands of people out there who are walking or driving to the polls to put a vote, a check mark. It's going to determine my employment. But more importantly, It's going to determine my employment,

but more importantly, it's going to determine fundamentally what does Canada do, who we are. And it seems to me that there's a word there that is often overused, still applied, called trust. And if those people give you the trust, you return the trust back. And that is that they become your primary interest and concern. We changed that.

Part of the centralization that's going on in our governments where everything is centered in prime minister's offices and they choose candidates and they make decisions. So the whole idea of having a constituency-based party where people have a right to make choices, to hold leaders accountable, to put in resolutions governments may not like, and that control I think has really increasingly shrunken the role of our political parties. And as a result, I think Canadians are reacting saying well what's the alternative? You go in the street and that's why the thing I argue in the book is that if we want to refresh our democracy we have to begin to look at some other models. A new election model of how we elect people

and a model about how we get people directly involved through citizens assemblies, deliberative areas. I'm going to do something. I've been asked by the Premier of Manitoba to do a study on relocating railroads. Well, one of the major sort of options that we've discussed is sometime when we've put together enough facts and figures and options, we're going

to have a Winnipeg deliberative democracy forum in which people, broad cross-section, will have a right to comment what they think the choices should be. I want to circle back to something you have referenced a couple of times already in our conversation and that is the notion that in the mid-1980s the liberals seemed out of gas and needed some refreshing. And here we are in 2024 and you have made the comparison that it may not be dissimilar. In fact, can I put it this way, towards the end of your book you have a chapter on

Justin Trudeau's broken promises, lack of interest in foreign affairs, indifference as you call it to poorer countries. You say he has basically gone AWOL on the world stage. This is very tough stuff. Yes it is. For a current prime minister, liberal, to hear from a former liberal cabinet minister. Why did you put all that in there? Because I was hoping that as the prime minister and his cabinet and the other liberals in the caucus do some reckoning

about where we're at right now. They realize that there has to be some real change in the way things happen. It's not just the policies, it's how you get there and how you arrive at choices. I believe, I was asked the other day at a vid I was at, how are you going to vote this next time? I said, I'm going to vote for a liberal because we want to ensure that whatever happens in the election, win, lose, draw, you want to have good liberals left to help redefine the party, to start thinking about what liberalism means. And that means that the ministers are individual MPs who really deserve to be returned,

or new people should be brought in. This is a chance to revive and start. You talked about the Rat Pack in Post 84. I think we need a similar kind of transfusion of new ideas and blood. And there's certainly enough young men and women out there who could do it. Well, what happened to the 2015 Trudeau liberals who said Canada's back? Well, we're not.

I mean, socially, I think the government, as I say, has done some really good things. Internationally, I mean, we no longer are engaged, as we had been since 1945, on the issue of nuclear proliferation. We always said that we can speak up for the countries who aren't nuclear powers because we were once a nuclear power, and we decide to abrogate that. We didn't want to be part of that. So we've always had a kind of legacy we could bring to bear.

There's been a major development, a treaty that arrived to the abolition of nuclear weapons. We don't even send people to attend the meetings. We don't have any, I can't think of anybody in our government who speaks out on that fundamental issue. Well, we've had five foreign ministers in the last six, seven years. How long did you have the job for? Going on five years. Okay. So something's changed.

Yeah. Well I think that's partly that revolving door. I do think that the present foreign minister, Melody Jolie, is going on her third year and I think she's kind of getting some footing. She's beginning to try to put some new sort of statements and sort of, I guess what you would call a paradigms into our discussion. But there's not a lot of support and what is missing, Steve, is that we spent a lot of time working with Canadians to have them feel that they were involved in making those

decisions. Right now there is virtually, it's all top down interest and we're missing a huge amount of energy and plus I think as you know, we may get to this in the question, we're not really leading with our best strengths. I mean we have an opportunity to in this new world order that we're in, to really challenge on some very major issues like water and climate and things like that, bringing our indigenous people much more actively into our foreign policy, but we're not doing it. Well, I'll ask about another, maybe the number one foreign policy issue for the government of Canada today.

Donald Trump's going to be president again in January. What do you think they should do about that? I think that they clearly have to be very wary. There are some very deep economic issues. I wish to hell some of these premiers would shut up for a while and stop talking about kicking Mexico out. That's Doug Ford's position. Yeah, Doug Ford's position and Smith, and he's out there bragging all the premiers.

Look, if you take Mexico off the table, you're left one on one with the Americans. You want to negotiate one on one with Donald Trump rather than having the two most important trading countries together? Come on, that's bad politics. And secondly, Mexico is becoming an important customer for Canada. But we've got these guys who kind of, I don't know, what they do in their provincial capitals. Do they sort of put tar paper over the windows or something? There's not much light getting in.

Since you are not holding back and giving advice to the current federal government about what steps forward it should take, let's see how far I can push you on this. Should Justin Trudeau lead the liberals into the next federal election? That's his choice and it it should be the choice of the Liberal Party but it's not because the tools and levers that were once there were sort of scoured out in 2016 when our constitution was changed from being a party to a movement. And so the ability of constituencies or provincial groups and so on to hold accountability is

gone. And so it's been left up to a group of MPs who have no corridor. There's no rules along which they have to play it. And I would think if I had to give some advice, which I'm going to do because you invited that, I think what the Prime Minister should do is say very clearly, we're returning to a Liberal Party which has a strong constituency-based mandate to choose candidates, not to have them imposed from Ottawa, to make real decisions about some of the key policy issues, and to invite a much stronger sense of accountability for those who are holding office.

That would require giving up some control over the process. Yes. Which they don't seem quite enamored with the idea of doing. No, no. Well, and I think they'll pay a price for that. But if the Liberal Party, I mean, I think it's true that politics has a certain cycle and your shelf life runs out.

But come back to a point I made early. When your shelf life runs out, you don't throw away all the elements. I think what we really should be as liberals working towards is how do we use this period to make sure that we have the right people and some good ideas to bring forward into that election and out and help rebuild and restate, redefine liberalism that really connects with a large group of people and doesn't leave out almost 60% of Canadians. If Justin Trudeau were not the leader of the liberals today, whom would you prefer to see

in that position? I don't have a choice right now. I mean, I think I go back to the lessons a little bit that the American Democrats are learning that sort of having sort of a chosen sort of a dolphin doesn't work. I think you have to open it up and let's see who in the rough and scrum of competing for office. And that means you also have to put some limits on the amount of money you can spend because our leadership saying we control finance at the election level but the party level your

big donors you know can really buy a lot of support. Okay a couple of minutes left and I want to ask you a few a little off the beaten path questions here. As we sit here recording this on November 24th, 2024, the Winnipeg Jets are the best team in the National Hockey League. Do you think this is their year for the Stanley Cup? I sure hope it is, but I want to go back. I think the Jets have always had, in the last two or three years, pretty good seasonal records. When it gets to the finals, they collapse. Excuse me, we know all about that in this town.

I know you know about it. Maybe this isn't just a Winnipeg syndrome. No. Maybe, okay. But I think that Scott Arneal, the new coach, is really smart. I think he's got the backing of the owners. I think they need to bolster a couple of their key areas, but there's surely a very different vibe coming out of

them. And I have to say, I mean, Winnipeggers, at one point you realize that we were on top of the sports world. We had the Bombers for the Stanley Cup, not the Stanley, the Great Cup, and we had the Jets, and I think it was 16 to one at that point in time. Well. 16 wins, one loss, yes. Yeah, so things are changing, but sports are important to the Winnipeg Town.

Well, okay, so that's the second question, which is how devastated were you when the Blue Bombers lost their third consecutive Grey Cup, this time to the Argonauts? I drowned my sorrow. Last question. You're about to turn 85 years old in less than a month. Right. How do you feel?

I feel pretty good. Not quite as zippy as I did maybe 10, 15 years ago know, I have a good family life. We've moved to Ottawa and we're with grandchildren and stuff. So I have to pace myself a lot better, but I'm also realizing that doing the book and going back and discovering things, I think my head's working really good these days. And what I really enjoyed about this exercise is going from different towns and different venues, universities, book clubs and stuff, is to have a conversation with Canadians. I really feel, to me, that really is a real boost and a jump to hear what people have to say. Their anxieties, their wishes, and their... We have the base in this country of a wonderful civic society.

And we're just not making the best use of it. You're still going to vote liberal next time, though. Yes, I am. You are, so you said. Okay. The name of the book is My Life in Politics, and we're delighted that it has brought Lloyd Axworthy, former federal cabinet minister, almost a leadership candidate once upon a time, but not quite, to our studio once again.

Thank you, Mr. Axworthy. It's been a pleasure. It's been great to be here. Great to have you here. Thank you. Thank you.