The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Encore Presentation - Moore Butts Conversation #11 -- Crisis Management

Episode Date: July 3, 2024

Today an encore presentation of an episode that originally aired on October 17th. What happens behind the closed doors when a government faces a crisis -- who says what, and what are the do's and don'ts of crisis management? Former Harper cabinet minister James Moore and former Trudeau principal secretary Gerald Butts take us inside with their latest "conversation".

Hello there, Peter Mansbridge here with your latest Summer Encore Wednesday edition of The Bridge. This week, more butts number 11. We go back to October 17th of 2023. And hello there, Peter Mansbridge in Toronto with today's program. And today's program, it being Tuesday, I know some of you are going to go, well, it's Tuesday, where's Brian Stewart? Well, if you're one of those people and you probably haven't been listening for the last couple of days, Brian is on a bit of a hiatus because of the book he's writing. He's writing his memoirs, which involves a lot of time and a lot of work and a lot of energy.

And so he's applying himself to completing that book. He started it some time ago, but he wants to complete it now. So he's begged me for a little time off from his Ukraine beat. And I've said, absolutely. Hey, you're the man, Brian. And if you want to take some time off, you should take some time off because that is a very important venture, one that's going to benefit all of us when we see the final product,

which should be late next year, okay, late next year. The big book that's coming out late this year is, of course, How Canada Works by one Mark Bulgich and one Peter Mansbridge. That's coming out November 21st. You can pre-order it now at any bookstore, or you can go online to Indigo, Amazon, any of those places and pre-order. It's going to be a good one. You're going to want to watch it.

You're going to want to read it. You watch it, you watch the cover, and then you'll read the book. We're going to talk about that when we get a little closer to the actual release date. I'll have Mark on the show and we'll talk about it. Anyway, so today, as I, yesterday, Janice Stein was with us and talking about, you know, primarily the Middle East situation. But she's going to fill in for Brian at times over this next while, while he's off writing.

But today, we're doing a special Moore-Butts conversation, and it's number 11. And I think you're going to enjoy it. There are two elements to it today. James Moore, the former Conservative Cabinet Minister in the Harper years, and Gerry Butts, the former Principal Secretary to Prime Minister Trudeau.

So the deal with both these gentlemen, and they've been great at it on the previous 10 episodes, is trying to move as much away from partisan politics as they can. It's hard for them, let's face it. They're two heavily partisan guys. One's a liberal, one's a conservative. But they've done what I think is a really good job in trying to explain to us what it's kind of like behind the scenes on some of the major issues that impact leaders of political parties and their ministers. And so that's what we're doing today with a special two-part More Butts conversation.

In other words, two parts, there's two different elements to it. One of them is an element that was sent in by a viewer. So we'll get a listener. Old habits die hard, right? A listener sent in an idea for a More Butts segment, and you're going to get it today. All right, enough from me. Let's get into number 11, the More Butts conversation number 11. Here we go. All right, gentlemen, two segments today. We're going to start off with crisis management, which is actually a topic that James suggested,

and it's a good one, especially right now. It seems we have a crisis every week. Some of them are local, some of them are national, some of them are international, as we've watched in the last week. But what we hope to get from you two, as we do whenever we have these conversations, is to try and take us behind the closed doors about how, in this case, you manage a crisis. Because often the public doesn't see that part of the crisis, how they're trying to manage it and get out of it and get past a crisis. So why don't we start, I guess, in general ways,

and James, since this is your idea, why don't you start the conversation? I think the truth about crises in governments is that they happen all the time and the public sees maybe 5% to 10% of them. And that's just the truth, right? And so often the stuff that comes out in the public that you see that are crises or scandals or that are problems, it's kind of often surprising that those are the ones that got through that became a story because I was sure that this other thing was going to become a bigger thing. governed with an effective board, you will have a risk management function within every organization, a member of the executive team and a member of the board, because you want to cover off different perspectives in terms of fiduciary obligations, sort of internal, external, but you'll have proper crisis management. And I think any effective organization understands that when you get to a certain size, maybe it's more than 50, more than 100 employees,

for example, that in any organization, somewhere, someone right now is doing something that they should not be doing. Whether it's spreading rumors online, whether it's saying something hateful, maybe in their private life, there's something going on with drugs or alcohol or something sexual or something taking money from the company or taking advantage of access to information within government in nefarious ways to advance agendas. But somewhere, someone is doing something they shouldn't right now. prepared for if and when that becomes public in order to make sure the public knows that we have the safety valves within government to protect the public interest and to hold people accountable? And politically, are we prepared as an organization to communicate what we're doing internally that should give the public reassurance that their interests are properly safeguarded?

So you have to have the functions within government that protect the public interest and hold people accountable. And then you have to have the communications and the public facing side to explain that in a way that reassures the public that the things are happening that are right. At the end of the day, there will be some kind of an audit function that will examine both of those things. And people will be held accountable in the fullness of time, you hope, and that should typically happen. But governance structures internally and public facing need to be constantly examined because it's not a question of if a scandal will happen or if a crisis will happen. It's a question of when and the scale of it. And sometimes it's something relatively small that can blow up because of the mismanagement of it or because

it's a particularly tasty topic or what have you but sometimes it's massive and tectonic but they're gonna come in any organization in any government of appropriate scale and in a democracy when it's your government and your politicians and your leadership that's doing it it's extraordinarily important that you have those functions and public facing communications chambered ready to go go and properly prepared well ahead of time. Jerry, your opening thoughts on this? Yeah, thanks, Peter. And I it won't surprise you to hear that. I agree with much of what James had to say there. One of my favorite people I've ever worked with and for Dalton McGinty used to say all the time that it's not whether crises happen, it's how you deal with them when they do.

That's how people judge governments, right? Because people are not stupid. They know governments are big, unruly beasts. They know that, as James said, there's always something going on in some dark corner that you don't know about and how they judge you is how you deal with it when you do become aware of it. Right. And I would also agree with kind of the iceberg principle that James articulated, that the public sees about five percent of the crises or potential crises that are going on inside any government or any large organization. And it's incumbent upon the people at the cabinet table and in the top staff positions and ultimately also in the public service to have a really efficient function for surfacing those crises, taking whatever remedies need to be taken, and when necessary, explaining it to the public in the most forthcoming way

possible. Because I found in the crises that I've been either involved in directly or have had to manage in my life in politics, it's the management of the crises that always gets people into trouble. They either refuse to see the obvious point and go there before the public gets there. And I think that's the most that's the best way to manage a crisis. If you have the experience and depth of knowledge of any given issue to know it's headed in one direction, then get there. Whether that's asking for a minister's resignation, resigning yourself, taking some other course of action. And this, of course, is related to the accountability discussion you want to have in response to the letter from your viewer. Just get there first has always been my way of dealing with crises. And the quicker you can put

it behind you, the quicker you can focus on the things that people elected you to do in the first place, which is not to manage a crisis, but to not allow crises to get in the way of your core mandate. It's kind of like the, I was going to say, it's kind of like the Watergate lesson, really, in some fashion that, you know, it's not the problem. It's the coverup of the problem that gets you into real trouble. Same here on the crisis management. Get to the solution right away instead of taking a variety of different courses to get there. Sorry, James, go ahead.

Well, a contemporary example that I was part of, not on the scandal side, but on the dealing with side was the mike duffy issue with the spending in the senate right and so the public says well there's this big story so you know michael mike duffy had expenses that were not appropriate and the the rcmp is investigating maybe they were illegal and the chief of staff to the prime minister prime minister stephen harper paid it back what kind of like is this this smells like cover-up like what is going on here and of course over the fullness of time we know what actually happened, right? Mike Duffy spent money that was not illegally spent, but it was inappropriately spent.

But I think by the public's expectation of proper expenditure, Nigel Wright was acting in good faith and just trying to pay back the taxpayer because he had the means to do so. But it all sort of smelled as not the way in which you would actually do it. But Nigel Wright was acting in good faith.

Mike Duffy was probably not in the way that he was spending the money. And Stephen Harper was kind of caught not knowing that this transaction was happening and had to get rid of his chief of staff. That's what we now know happened. It's a very awkward situation, inappropriate, not illegal, unethical, not really, but just not in the way that governance should be done. However, when this all happened at the time, Nigel Wright was the chief of staff to Stephen Harper. Mike Duffy was an independent senator and out. And there was a massive investigation going on. And when Stephen Harper found out that Nigel Wright had tried to make the taxpayer hold and pay this money back, he fired Nigel Wright as his chief

of staff. So now Nigel Wright is out. And this is a big story now because now it's blowing up. Now this has touched the office of the prime minister's office, that there's an RCMP investigation into a senator. His chief of staff has had to resign as part of the payback. What is going on? So what is going on is the totally reasonable question that the public would want to know. Well, in about two hours, we have a question period. Stephen Harper is not in town. John Baird is the foreign minister and Jason Kenney and I are the three cabinet ministers who typically replace Stephen Harper in question period because we're bilingual and we were senior cabinet ministers. Well, John Baird's the foreign minister. He's not there. Jason Kenney wasn't in town because whatever. I was there. And don't forget, Thomas Mulcair is leader of the NDP. So the first five questions are all

Thomas Mulcair. At least two of the five are going to be in French. Then it's the Bloc Québécois. They have four. They're all in French. So you've got two thirds of the questions in French right up front probably and so what happened well we're not talking to mike duffy because we don't talk to mike duffy we don't talk to nigel wright because he's gone and we can't talk and we try to talk to nigel right that's not going to go well because now we're part of the cover-up in your extent so we can't talk to him won't talk to him he won't talk to us because he's i assume lawyered up stephen harper's not there i'm there you got the short straw correct uh jenny burn uh was i believe the deputy chief of staff at the time and nigel right or ray novak right

rather who worked for stephen harper's there so i literally remember sitting in the in the the ante room to question period and i'm there and i'm going to be doing question period we found out about this 90 minutes before question period and it's jenny burn and myself and ray novak and three of us are sitting there looking and you can hear the buzz outside the door as the media are gathering at four times the number of journalists who are typically there and we would literally sort of peek over the little the little wall that are from the third floor down to the second floor looking down at the media and you can see them all looking up, trying to capture and see what's going on, full-blown crisis. And we're in the rooms like, what do we say?

Like, we can't, like, what do you do? And the public rightfully has expectations of an answer at that moment. But we don't know because we can't talk to Nigel and he won't talk to, and so there's this crisis. And so people say, they're not coming clean, they're not coming clean. My point is, governments are populated and housed with human beings. Human beings are failed and challenged in some of the most difficult circumstances. We weren't evading accountability. We were just in a moment where the public demanded accountability appropriately so but it's really hard to deliver what the public expects and people need to understand that our governing institutions are more fragile and more susceptible to the human frailties and difficult moments that people realize and the anthony rhoda speaker situation is an example of that is what we now know what right, that these things can happen and our government is imperfect.

And the ability to for people to maneuver within a circumstance is often much more challenging than the public expects in terms of clear lines of accountability. Our systems are more fragile than people understand. Got an example for us, Jerry. Oh, I've got a couple swimming around in my head. Probably one that's analogous to James. I'll keep the names under wraps to protect the innocent, but I think your viewers will understand the example. They'll get the example I'm talking about. Similar sort of situation. We were about to prepare for question period. And I got a phone call from a chief of staff who in a very desperate tone of voice said, I need to talk to you right

away. And I said, this person happened to be chief of staff to the fisheries minister to give it away at the time. This is the early stage of the government and the Trudeau, the first term of the Trudeau government. And I said, okay, well, come over to my office right now. We're all in center block. And I just happened to be in the room with Zita Astrovus, who was the head of issues management in PMO at the time. And I looked at her and I said, George Young just called me.

Do you know what it is he needs to talk to me about? And she looks at me and says, is it the shrimp quota issue? It might be the shrimp quota issue? It might be the shrimp quota issue. So George comes over and of course unfurls this tale. He's as white as your, George is like the steadiest old hand in the liberal party at this time. He served every leader since Turner, I think. And he's the color of your sweater there, Peter. And he unfurls this tale of wo uh, of woe that I don't

think most of the details have become public. So I won't reveal them on your podcast, but suffice it to say the outcome was relatively obvious what had to happen that his minister had to resign. And, uh, uh, he had to, uh, he had to move on. And that's when Dominic LeBlanc became, became fishing fisheries minister for the first time. Anyway, long story short, throughout the rest of my time in government, whenever someone would raise an issue with me, I'd look at Zeta and say, is this a shrimp quota issue? It became shorthand for something that was really ungovernable and difficult to deal with. The worst situations, I find Peter to just elaborate on that,

are when you really don't know and you know that you don't know the details and you suspect because of all the incentives involved that the people involved in the situation are not telling you all the details. And you always know when someone's not telling you something, but it's very hard to get to the bottom of it. are not telling you all the details. And you always know when someone's not telling you something, but it's very hard to get to the bottom of it. And then some poor senior minister like James has to go out and reassure the public that you're on top of it, when you're really not on top of it, because you're at a stage in the development of the issue where you just don't have all the details at your disposal. That's the single toughest position to be in, in issues management,

when you really don't know what happened position to be in in issues management when you really don't know what happened. And it's always great when you're a minister in question period and you look over to the press gallery and you see the entire row above the speaker just jammed with journalists. And you see them sitting in the second row behind that first row. Those of you who've been in the House of Commons know the entire first row is taken out. the second row behind them is taken up and sometimes that little third row that was sort of up in behind where the school groups go there's a few in there and they're thinking oh my god it's a two or three row day this is not good no this is not good i looked down the road to my other cabinet colleagues and all their binders are closed and they're just sitting back and just

having a talk because they know they're not getting a single question today and i'm sitting there not with a big binder to answer questions but with a sheet of paper because that's all we've got that's all i've got is my message box and you saw people saw again an example of that was karina gould you know this past couple weeks talking about you know trying to stay in her message box and all that but to jerry's point we didn't know on the night on the michael duffy mike duffy thing we didn't know we we were and so the it was just a really tough spot to be in so there you were it's almost comical you really have to take key when you're behind when you're actually behind the ropes trying to manage these you really do have to keep your sense of humor even when the subject is deadly serious. But it is a farce.

If someone could shine a TV camera and the people involved in managing the crisis were required to behave as if the camera weren't there, I think it would be amongst the funniest television ever produced. A different one that happened is when we were in opposition. And there's a long since, I think, forgotten member of parliament, Larry Spencer. Larry Spencer was a Canadian Alliance Conservative member of parliament from Regina. He came before Andrew Scheer. He was elected in 2000, a one-term member of parliament. I woke up on a Wednesday morning caucus day and the front page bold headline of the Vancouver Sun that day was make homosexuality illegal, colon, conservative MP. Fantastic.

So this is the headline. And Larry Spencer, that was sort of his view. It's a little bit torqued of a headline, but not inaccurate. And Peter O'Neill wrote the piece. And so I woke up to a phone call from crisis management in the leader's office. They called every single member of caucus saying, something has happened today. There's a headline. One of our members made a comment. We're asking everybody to avoid comment to media. Walk right past them when you go into caucus, do not talk to the media, do not make any comment. This will be dealt with immediately at the beginning of caucus meeting. The leader will speak to this, a decision will be made, but do not talk to the media about this at all. That was what I woke up to. Then I saw the headline, then I realized what was going on. But I had faith that the appropriate thing was going to happen, which was he was going to be expelled from caucus. But we had to go through a process in order to have the leader explain what happened

and why and why he took certain actions and what happened that moment. Like when he learned that Larry Spencer had said this thing, what he said to Larry Spencer is a consequence and what's going to happen going forward. We all got into the room and there was appropriate accountability. Larry Spencer was kicked out of the caucus. He's out of the party and we all moved on and people held their line and the spokesperson was the leader and the house leader about why that happened. And we kind of moved on. But there was a system that was in place that a crisis happened. Somebody said something outrageous and needed to be dealt with. And there was a process. Call everybody. Everybody know there's a system that's going to happen. it's going to be triggered when caucus meets, this will be dealt with, you'll have your say, and then we'll have a process and then there'll be an outcome that will then be communicated to the public. Just hold the line and just do that for an hour and we'll be good. And everybody did. And it was important that the leader's office had that sort of structure, which may have been constructed at that moment, but we had some structure that then set a precedent that if ever anything happens,

have faith that the caucus room and how caucus will be managed will deal with this issue. And that will give, more importantly than this issue, it'll express to the public that when crises happen, big or small, that we can take care of it because we manage ourselves. And how we manage ourselves is how we ask you to judge us how we will manage your affairs going forward so it's important that you manage these things well you you've given us a couple of uh great examples where movement has been very fast that you saw what the end point needed to be you got there right away um the duffy one is is kind of a situation of its own, and James explained it well. But in other ones that linger, like why do they linger?

Do they linger because it's bad leadership or it's bad crisis management by whatever the crisis management team is? But we've seen them, and we've seen them, you know, over the last not too many years where things have lingered for not just days, but sometimes weeks with much damage caused to, you know, whichever party's in power as a result of that. Why do things linger, Jerry? I think there are two or three reasons for that, Peter. The first one and the most,

I think, underappreciated is because of this dynamic that James described that the public only sees about 5% of the potential crises that any government faces. The first question you have to ask yourself when there's a leak or a news story or something on the national is, is this a thing, right? Is this going to be a thing? And I think that sometimes governments just misjudge how large an issue something is about to become. And therefore, they start off on their back foot and it takes them a while to catch up. And the people who initially made the judgment that it wasn't a thing are therefore invested in that judgment so they're in a state of denial that this thing has become a thing and usually by week three of news stories they look increasingly ridiculous trying

to convince their colleagues that you don't have to deal with that i've seen that happen many times that's that's one way The second is there's a legitimate disagreement within the people charged with managing it. And you want to have a strategy for managing these things before you go to the prime minister or the minister responsible with options. Because ultimately, notwithstanding the popular mythology, it's the politicians who ultimately make the decisions about what we're going to do, who's going to resign, what action we're going to take to hopefully end this crisis. Staff presents options, and obviously there are strong viewpoints. In my experience, it's when the people beneath the prime minister or the premier in my case,

or the minister in James's case, can't come to a consensus conclusion about the option. And that is almost always when there is a resignation involved or a demotion involved or some kind of human resource solution involved, because there are strong feelings about the people who you're going to be asking to take this kind of action. That's action. Those would be the two biggest things. And then I think you should never underrate the prevalence of general incompetence, to be totally blunt about it, that sometimes people try hard and they just fail.

There are scandals that begin with media. And then in my view, there have been two sort of how does it all start so therefore how are your mechanisms of accountability triggering um it was it was everybody's surprise when uh uh when it was announced um Maxine Bernie is no longer in cabinet why because he had cabinet documents that were stamped secret that were left at his girlfriend's house and um that's the standard. And in my view, Stephen Harper's decision there was clearly appropriate, responsible. And his audience for that decision to do that were twofold. One was to the public to say, just so you know where my line of accountability

and expectation and standard of professionalism and the handling of documents is, that's where it is. That's what gets you fired. So just know that everybody else who's in the room, who's in our cabinet, operates at that standard or better. And if they don't, there's that. And then therefore, so facto, the second audience to the message was to everybody else in cabinet that Maxine Bernie at that point was a rising star. He was an important person in the conservative movement, and he was seen as part of the future of the party but that didn't matter because there's

standards of public expectation so that's so so the sometimes this that quote scandals and the and the management of them happen internally because we didn't know if that was ever going to come out and become public but it was important that if it did we needed to be seen to be doing the right thing as soon as we knew that something inappropriate had happened, that the second kind of, to Jerry's point, that the second kind of crisis or scandal that can happen, that you managed can come from a journalist. And, you know,

the number of times you get a journalist or a news outlet that calls you and says, is it true that your government is about to do this with this, or that you've done in the past, you know, whatever the story know whatever the story is and you know you would say you would i would often have the conversation with my communications director or my chief of staff saying is this a thing is this a problem you know look into it like is this is and if if a journalist has an opinion that this is a story and then they publish something about it i mean steve chase and the golden male and and you know the golden male of course has broken a lot of stuff in the last couple of years. They write a piece. If it just stays in that one news outlet and the other news outlets observe that story and how it grows or

doesn't grow over time, if others start piling onto it, now that's kind of your tell that this is going to be a problem. And if it goes from print and jumps into television, because, you know, many of us know that, you know, television is an entirely different medium and video is a different medium and very often news directors will wake up in the morning they will see what's in the newspapers and say are there visuals that go along with the print story if there are then maybe we'll go that direction question period is the obvious place to get those visuals but if there are no visuals and often the story stays a print one until it explodes over time. But if other news organizations start piling on, then now you know you have a problem. But if it stays with one enterprising journalist who is really convinced

that it's a story, but nobody else sees it, then you can often box it off and kind of barge pull it away. But if you see the snowball effect happening and it's growing the momentum, you're getting more questions and it lasts more than one day then then you have to start preparing for a more robust and protracted conflict of engagement yeah when it goes from one journalist to two three rows deep and question period it's a problem i said i should mention that that's so true you know i mean as somebody who's been in that gallery many times over many years um most days since since the advent of television in the house and i was there before that when it was full every day but once television got in the house and journalists realized they could sit at their desk

in their bureau with their feet up and watch it um the the audio the attendance has dwindled and there are times when they're like only one or two people there. So James is quite correct. On the days that look like they're going to be a great crisis day, it gets packed very quickly. And the other truism is that there's real decisions made within different journalistic organizations where they're going to leap on a story that's broken by somebody else.

They sort of say, we don't want to follow the globe again or we don't want to follow the star or whoever it may be um but when they do start going and you've you you've named some good ones good examples uh it is it becomes a real uh a real uh food fight. And when you think through those crisis moments, right, that, you know, remember George W. Bush talking about his walk and how he walks, and he spent a lot of time as a governor and then president thinking about how he walks, which sounds trite and superficial, but no, it matters. If you walk too fast, you look

insecure and like you're hustling because you're either trying to physically evade accountability or because you're nervous and there's a nervous energy. If you walk too slow, you look like you don't care and you're not really engaged and you're kind of checked out. But there's a pace of walking that is just right when you walk up to a microphone, those long walks down the Hall of Honor and Centre Block and Parliament Hill, the pace at which you walk up to a microphone those long walks down the hall of honor and center block and in parliament hill how the pace at which you walk and how you swing your arms and how your shoulders are back and your chin is up your your body language the public sees that and reads into that about leadership and again it sounds superficial and trite but it matters those

little things matter in terms of expressing confidence in yourself your message and who you are and what you are and what the public can learn from that. Those things matter. So like on a crisis day that we're talking about, like the Mike Duffy thing in Parliament, you know, so are we going to go outside and scrum? No. Like I would say to my staff, how did question period go? Did I stay in the message box? Are we okay? Do we have adequate clips to sort of hold the line until we figure out what more is going on? And they would say, yeah, we're good. Question period was fine. Did well. We're good. Okay. So nobody's going to go out the front door and scrum, right? No. Okay. So I'm going to stay in here. Yeah. Good.

But they're going to say I'm stinking out the back and I'm avoiding accountability. Right. Maybe, but who cares? That's not the story. The story is the story. Don't worry about it. Okay. So I'm going to, I have duty today, right? Okay. Okay. So I have duty, which means you have to stay in the house the whole day. Good. Can we have like an emergency debate tonight on like, you know, hoof and mouth disease or something something or some, you know, there's a possible flood in the Saginaw three years from now that we need to have an emergency debate about so that we can extend the debate in Parliament till midnight. So I can just like, you know, not leave because I really care about the people along the Saginaw.

Can we do that? Like, where's the house leader? Can we talk about this? Like, I am not going to go out there and scrum on this because I'll either be stuck standing there for an hour answering questions I can't answer, or I'm going to hustle past them and look like the George W. Bush thing. Like I'm panicked and avoiding accountability. And they have a physical image to represent that dynamic. So every little thing from how you walk and present and the visuals that come across matter as much as what you say and proper crisis management thinks about all these things. Now, you're going to tell me next that you actually, you guys actually practice walking.

So you get the right pace? No, but George W. Bush did. And it says a lot about sort of that high level, you know, when you're responding to 9-11 was the context. And it was actually, I think it was the interview I saw was him walking out to the mound to throw the pitch at the Yankees game where he's wearing his flak jacket just that was anyhow but you do you take my point that yeah how how you say or what you say and how you say it matters enormously in a moment of crisis and staying cool under fire is is critical okay we're

going to take a quick break come back and deal with the second segment we've eaten up a lot of time because of our pace but we will we'll get to the second segment. We've eaten up a lot of time because of our pace, but we'll get to the second one right after this. And welcome back. You're listening to The Bridge Tuesday this week with the Moore-Butts conversation. James Moore, Jerry Butts with us, going behind the scenes on a couple of different segments here. You're listening on Sirius XM, Channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform.

We're happy to have you with us, however you are listening to us. Okay, we got a letter from Bill Bishop in White Rock, BC. That's one of my favorite names. One thing about Canada, we have some great place names, you know, from coast to coast to coast. Some wonderful ones. White Rock, BC is one of my favorites. Okay, Bill Bishop writes, and I'm just reading a part of it here. Do we live in a post-accountability world where personal integrity is a political liability and never admitting fault appears to make you faultless. It seems that if you apologize,

you're just giving your critics a video they can play over and over to remind voters of your failure. You give your opponents proof that they are right and you are wrong. But when you dodge, deflect, and distract, you give your critics nothing and you keep your base happy. You can even flip the narrative and cast yourself as the victim. So is the loss of political accountability a symptom of polarization, or is it the cause? This could be a good more butts conversation. Well, you got it, Bill Bishop. Here's the conversation. Jerry, why don't you

start with how you feel about that? Well, I think it has gotten more tempting to evade responsibility for things, for exactly the kind of communications dynamics that Bill describes in his letter, Peter, that, you know, I had two, two tours of duty, so to speak in politics, one before social media and one after social media. And the sense that you're in a panopticon where everything that you're being, everything you're doing is being recorded for use in an attack ad at a moment's notice was definitely more acute in the second. And I think that that does create some perverse incentives for people to take any step they can to evade accountability or responsibility, more importantly to, or more precisely to Bill's question. That said, I think that people have been trying to evade responsibility

for things for a very long time in politics. I suspect that you could cast your mind back to your time as a cub reporter and think of lots of examples where people who should have taken responsibility for things did not. I don't believe in the general thesis that the world is getting worse and worse and worse. I think that what we're seeing most people have seen before. But I will say that, and we've talked about this in previous conversations, that the new atmosphere fostered by the communications technology that's currently ubiquitous has made that temptation a lot greater. The criticism of people not taking accountability I find is typically associated with people I don't like didn't get brought down that temptation a lot greater. The criticism of people not taking accountability,

I find is typically associated with people I don't like didn't get brought down by this. Therefore, they've evaded accountability. So let's calibrate this appropriately, right? But there are all kinds of... Rod Phillips. Rod Phillips is a good man. He was the finance minister of the province of Ontario.

He got caught sending out bogus videos, you know, looking like he was hard at work. And meanwhile, he was vacationing and avoiding the public good and mandate to not travel outside of the country. He got caught, he resigned, he's no longer in politics, and he's moved on to the private sector. And Anthony Rhoda used a moment to bring a constituent into the gallery, which humiliated the country and caused an international incident. He asked all the parties of a minority parliament, do I still have your confidence to be speaker? They said no. He resigned. Accountability. It happens all the time. So, you know, so I like Steve or like Jerry, like I see accountability happening all the time. But, you know, we have to sort of calibrate when when we people who we don't like sort of get away with it.

There are circumstances where, you know, you know, that a weekend is coming up or a break week is coming or we're about to go into the Christmas break. And, you know, there's, you know, the news dump on Friday afternoons at four o'clock after all the politicians are sitting on a plane at 30,000 feet going back to their roddings where you can kind of sort of push some bad news out the door and kind of evade a little bit of accountability because the news cycle, like those things still happen. But, you know, you have to manage government responsibly and effectively and not treat everything like it's a five alarm fire because everything just kind of arrests. And you have to have some flex in government for human imperfection. The fact that things will be held accountable in the fullness of time and you have to manage responsibly and effectively and transparently. But you can't also just lock up and not do anything because you're afraid you're going to upset some people who may disagree with you. And that disagreement will say, well, they'll say, well, they don't believe

in democracy. They don't believe in accountability. They don't believe in transparency. No, of course we do. And there are all kinds of layers of transparency and accountability in our government, from reports to parliament, to third parties, to provinces, to media, to NGOs, to opposition parties. There are all kinds of layers and filters of accountability and responsibility, let alone the entire court structure in the back end and the Senate as a second thought and public opinion. Like there are all kinds of filters against inappropriate government decisions. Just if something nobody ever really gets away with anything in a properly functioning democracy. So I think the public generally has confidence that that's the case with it. I think the public generally has confidence that that's the case.

I think the public is more concerned about a shift of government, not rot, but a shift of government sort of blindness to the issues of dominant concern for the public and ignorance and blindness to the things that matter most to the public. That shift in the macro of talking about things that the public doesn't care about,

there's more of that that is a drift that creates a gap between the public than there is sort of evasions of accountability do you do you agree with that terry that nobody really gets away with anything anymore i mean i know we're talking about canada so we won't we won't bring in all the trump examples of what he's got away with but but in a general way, do you think the system works to ensure that people don't get away with whether it's lies or issues where they've clearly defrauded the public of the truth? I think on balance, it does work. I think the media is a very strong check on that. I'd add that to the list of institutions that James enumerated, but it's also elections, right? Ultimately, it's never the case in our personal or professional lives that

we get everything we deserve. And that may be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on which person you're talking to talking about. Right. I don't think that accountability works as an account, so to speak. It's not a line item where you did 25 things and you received the appropriate amount of admonition or praise for each of those line items. But the magic of, I think, democracy, and it's chiefly why our system of government is better than any other that's ever been invented, as has been famously said, is because people at the end of the day

get a chance to weigh those accounts and freely make democratic choices about whether their incumbents have lived up in the broadest sense of the term to the promise they made when seeking a mandate in the first place. So I think government's not that different from any other kind of institution that the accountability mechanisms are not grant, not so granular that people can't do their jobs because they're always wondering whether this thing I did is going to be seen in the appropriate light. And I have to look at it from 80 different angles before I take an action. That's a rep that's, that's a recipe for paralysis. And I, and I think that the, for instance, the Federal Accountability Act,

such as it is called, that we have right now, has created a bunch of perverse incentives for people to not act, not make decisions, and frankly, not serve in the public service to begin with. So we could have that conversation another day, probably. But do I think that on balance people are held accountable for the things they're responsible for for the most part yes that's certainly been my experience in both the largest province and the federal government do you think it's it's a high stress and a high and a high bar like your listeners will you know go to youtube and look up Harjit Sejan eating cherries. A bizarre thing. But he was on his way to a cabinet, and it's online as sort of a gotcha video.

And I say it because it actually supports Minister Sejan and the kind of scrutiny. He was sitting in a parking lot in the Okanagan, eating cherries, talking on a cell phone, on on speakerphone doing his business and he was eating cherries and dropping the pits out the window and he was clearly off duty i think it's a memory service he's wearing a t-shirt he's just sitting there just kind of eating cherries putting the pits out the window maybe he should have put in a cup next to him but whatever and somebody sneaks up behind him with the cell phone and in a gotcha moment says you're creating this mess out here you're putting cherries like in in a parking lot in the okanagan i think you're going to find some cherry pits like it's not you know but but it was a gotcha moment it was like

in your face and this video was put out there as you know look at this arrogant entitled cabinet minister no he's just a human being on a on a phone call eating cherries in a parking lot like what are we doing here and so i think people going into public life need to know that the measures of accountability, whether it's a Peter Mansbridge, or if it's a Donna Friesen on a national newscast, or Kevin Newman, or Vashti Capellos, doing a big story and a piece on it, or the ad issue panel analyzing, or just some guy with a 4k iphone in their pocket coming in and putting it in your face and getting it trying to jam you for eating cherries in a parking lot the brackets of accountability from the top to the bottom are everywhere and i always

say to people who are thinking of running for office just so you know you roll out of bed you get yourself prepared for the day as soon as you walk out the threshold of your front door you're on you're on. You're on. Assume that literally everybody around you has a 4K high-vis camera in their pocket that can zoom in and capture you eating cherries in a parking lot or saying something inappropriate or scratching yourself when you have an itch or whatever or having a conversation with somebody, maybe you shouldn't, or being rude at a counter, all of it is being recorded at all times. And that pressure on a public person wears over time. And you eventually, I can tell you, you want to push away from it and just kind of go dark and go home and live on the top of a mountain somewhere. But while you're in the business of public service, have that expectation that the people you were always going to be observed.

And it's not always thoughtful, big, big picture intellectual observation. Sometimes it's people who just want to destroy you because they disagree with you. And the best way to stop you is not to disagree with you and to raise an army politically and fight against you and to beat you politically. It's just to destroy you and to embarrass you and to make you look like less than and to dehumanize you and to make you to do that. And as a consequence, you crumble and go into a fetal position and just stay home and quit politics. That's usually a quicker way to defeat your enemy than it is to actually compete democratically. And that's a very scary thing. So accountability comes in different ways.

Sometimes it's measured and responsible and systemic, and sometimes it's really ugly and brutal. And the ugly and brutal part, I think, is the worst part that people don't prepare themselves for when they go into politics. We're out of time. But I am going to ask the last question anyway, and just a short answer from each of you, short.

And it doesn't relate to the cherry pits or any of those particular examples. But in a general way, on what is a, not necessarily a major issue, but an important issue, are resignations harder to achieve today than they were 20 years ago? It just seemed to me, I could be wrong on this, I don't have any data to back it up, but it just seemed that resignations came easier a generation ago than they do now. It's kind of going to the point of the White Rock Ladder.

That just, you know, can I deny and move on? What do you think on that? Briefly, Jerry. Yes, I think they have been because people can depend on a really crowded media cycle overwhelming the attention span of the public. Okay. James?

Agreed. Agreed. That is true. And also, you know, a minister resigns, which says to the public, not just the substance of that issue, but it says to the public that just the substance of that issue but it says to the public that our government doesn't have its act together and if you you can judge our government by the fact that we've lost a finance minister or a foreign minister what happened and then it opens up a pandora's box of doubt about the whole enterprise of the government over something that

could be quite small you know we talked about the mcduffie thing in the beginning so it can be an overreaction that creates doubt about a whole government that is unworthy of the crisis at hand. So you deal with it more appropriately, maybe in a more narrow scope, and maybe somebody just doesn't run again, or maybe somebody will be shuffled in three months. But you deal with the issue and the incompetence or the inappropriate behavior or whatever internally so it doesn't happen again, which is the main thing. And then you protect your government and its reputation with the public by doing the right thing internally so it doesn't happen again, but not overstating it so that you cause greater collateral damage.

Don't have the medicine kill the patient. All right. Good conversation yet again. Always enjoyable talking to you two guys and we'll do it again, possibly, well, I'm sure, before we get to the end-of-the-year holidays. So, Jerry, James, thanks very much. Well, there you go. Conversation number 11, the Moore-Butts conversation number 11.

Jerry Butts, vice chair of the Eurasia Group now, formerly the principal secretary to the Prime Minister, and James Moore, now the Senior Business Advisor at Denton's in Vancouver, formerly any number of different cabinet positions in the Harper government. And we are extremely grateful for their time and their anecdotal evidence of some of the issues we're trying to put forward for you to hopefully have a better understanding of how things work behind those mysterious closed doors. That was your Summer Wednesday Encore Edition of The Bridge.

More Butts, number 11, from October 17th, 2023.