The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Encore Presentation - Moore Butts Conversation #15. Democracy versus Autocracy

Episode Date: July 31, 2024

Today an encore presentation of an episode that originally aired on April 23rd. The latest version of our Moore Butts series has former Conservative cabinet minister James Moore, and former Trudeau principal secretary Gerald Butts on a topic of our times. Democracy versus autocracy -- why is it such an issue today, what are the real differences, and can democracies slide into autocracies without even realizing it? 

Hello there, I'm Peter Mansbridge. Welcome to the Summer Wednesday Encore episode of The Bridge. It's More Butts number 15 from April 23rd of this year. And welcome to Tuesday. Peter Mansbridge here. Looking forward to this latest conversation with, well, you know them. James Moore, former cabinet minister for Stephen Harper. Jerry Butts, former principal secretary to Justin Trudeau. These two have been having conversations on the bridge for the last year and a half or so.

They checked their partisanship at the door, which is hard for both of them. Occasionally, sometimes it kind of sneaks through, but rarely. For the most part, we have benefited from these conversations because they take us behind the scenes, inside some of the rooms where the big decisions in politics in Canada are made. Today, we elevate it to a bigger discussion that's about one of the topics that kind of exists out there. You hear it often, and you hear it in places you never thought you would hear it, and that is, tell me the real difference between autocracy and democracy. What should I understand about these two ways of governing?

Well, we're going to have that conversation today, and they're going to be as they often are with these two guys. Anecdotes, things they've seen, they've witnessed over time. Let's get to what's at hand, which is the Moore-Butts Conversation number 15. Are you ready for it? Because I sure am. Here we go.

All right, gentlemen, and I want to start with you, Jerry, because you travel more than certainly the other two of us. And as a result, you see a lot of things out there. And here's my first question. I want to try and understand, and without overstating it, what the relatively recent attraction to the idea of autocracy is. Why is that happening? Well, I think it's happening first and foremost because of, and maybe this is a chicken and egg argument, Peter, but people have lost faith in their national institutions and democratic

countries around the world. Canada, though you wouldn't know it by our national discourse, is actually near the top of democratic countries that retained faith in our national institutions. And the United States is near the bottom. This has been a long, slow erosion. It has a lot to do, I would say, it's been accelerated by the inflationary period, which tends to be murderous for incumbent governments and murderous for institutions that we depend on to serve as nonpartisan stewards of our economies. Like central banks have been taking a beating everywhere and they've become obvious targets for populist politicians, not just in Canada, but around the world. And it's all creating this sense out there that maybe for a critical mass of people that democracy is not delivering the goods anymore. And I think that that's a, that's of

all of the things that we ought to be anxious about in the world. That's near the top of the list for me. James, do you want to add to that? I think all that that's true i think you have to uh that there's a uh there's a spool of ingredients in different areas that that result in different attractiveness to all this but i think that's right and i and i you know i know that often on this podcast we talk about donald trump a lot but he's been such a lightning rod but but i think you can't leave out the ingredient of you know the country that certainly since the Second World War that has been a forward leaning advocate and through the Cold War, the expansion of democracy, the expansion of liberal democracy. And then within the United States, you have when Donald when Donald Trump wins an election, the those who oppose him say, well, this this is our system is broken. The Russians corrupted it. Our system doesn't work.

Democracy has failed. Democracy has resulted in this guy becoming president of the United States. The Electoral College needs to change. None of this works. It's all broken and corrupted. And then when Joe Biden wins, then the incumbent president says the system is all corrupted. Joe Biden stole the election, stormed the Hill, and he tries to spur an insurrection and a storming of the Capitol to try to intimidate the vice president to not validate that. So you have in two elections back to back, half the country saying the United States threatens to not leave office and try to stay in office in a way that was insurrectionist and treasonous to the United States by trying to foment that. And so the country that has for so long been the standing argument for liberal democracy, at least rhetorically around the world and the virtues

of it coming out of the Cold War and Soviet and communist authoritarianism internally says our system doesn't work in back-to-back elections from both sides of the spectrum from the two governing parties, then it's no wonder that other countries around the world start having doubts about democracy and what it means when these are the principal cheerleaders and have been for a couple of generations about the virtues of liberal democracy. I'd just add one more thing to that peter and it's it's playoff season though not sadly for my beloved montreal canadians but uh i was wondering how you're going to work the habs into this conversation but well i'll i'll be a rent a fan for whatever canadian team is playing so i'll be cheering for james's Canucks or your Maple Leafs,

especially as long as they're playing the Boston Bruins. But James mentioned the Russians. I do think that conspiracy theorists have overblown the degree to which the Russians are solely responsible for the disruption of democratic institutions in the West, but they are on the ice. And we should not be, we should not kid ourselves about that. They were on the ice in the Trump election. In the United States, they were on the ice in the Brexit campaign in the United Kingdom. And if Nikita Khrushchev were alive today, and realized how much havoc they could wreak using the internet, something called

the internet, compared to the billions of dollars they spent on their nuclear arsenal during the Cold War, I think he'd be quite jealous of the strategic position that Vladimir Putin has had to operate from from the past 25 years. These are real things, just because they're not the worst version of those things that you hear from conspiracy theorists. It doesn't mean that they aren't important and that they need to be counterbalanced in democracies where they're deployed. Certainly a powerful weapon. I remember George Will when he was asked, you know, why is it that conservatives in the United States are always complaining about the, quote, liberal media in the United States. And he used to say, it's not that the it's not that the quote liberal media gets on and tells you what to think about things.

It's they tell you what to think about. And otherwise, the prioritization of their stories, they get to, you know, it's they don't tell you what to think, they tell you what to think about. And when the and the obsession is skewed towards issues that are not favorable to conservatives by and large, that's how they sort of softly bias the narrative. That's what conservatives have often believed. Well, that has now been weaponized times a thousand to Jerry's point, right? When you have an entire generation of young Canadians, young people around the world, who in their pocket have a device where algorithms are pumping them all kinds of streaming content that is clearly deliberately to the benefit of political movements, ideological movements. And you see this with regard to Israel-Gaza.

You see this with regard to American democracy, memes and lies about political leaders in the United States and Canada. And it's extraordinarily dangerous. And it is absolutely a tool for the destruction and degradation of democracy and civil discourse. What in real terms would be different between an autocratic government and a democratic government? Jerry? Well, the most important difference is freedom, the freedom of individual citizens to pursue their own political beliefs, to assemble all of the things that we say we hold dear as democracies are put in peril by as individual citizens of democracies are put in peril by autocracies because they are, by definition, the framework in which you live your life is defined by a person over whom you have no control and you have no say and who occupies the highest offices in the land. I think that there is, in my view, an incorrect assumption that in the short term, autocracies can deliver specific, more efficient outcomes.

But I don't buy that in the long term. I think AI is a big challenge to this in my view, and we can talk about that if you want. But I think historically, at least, it's been proven over and over again that democracies deliver market economies, they deliver better economic outcomes, they deliver a lot more for their citizens across the spectrum, whether we're talking about economics or in my view, more important civil liberties than autocracies do. You know, you kind of touched on it there for a moment, but I mean, democracies depend on people participating yes spectator sport famously right it's not a spectator sport famously um but in terms of um autocracies

are people involved at all do people participate in an autocrat yes yes and it can be of course about consent if you look if you look at the at the sweep of sort of say the last hundred years of history the rise of autocracies are often very much associated are much more common and find more saliency in nation states where where a country and a nation are one in the same uh you have to be Japanese to be in Japan. Chinese, you get my point, where the body politic, the people are culturally, linguistically, ethnically, religiously aligned or common, and you have a nation state.

Think about China, think about Japan, think about first quarter of the last century Germany. So therefore, the ability of people to surrender to measures that are authoritarian, undemocratic, illiberal is often is not just because people necessarily want strongman leadership against external threats, but often because there's an ethnic nationalist part of it. And ethnic nationalism is an extraordinarily toxic thing. Again, going to the United States, there's a commonality of strain of the demographic of the typical Trump voter and a Trump attendee at a red hat rally. There's a commonality of people who would go

and attend a Berlusconi rally. There's a commonality of the prototype and archetype of what a Vladimir Putin supporter looks like and sounds like. And so often authoritarianism, how it creeps forward is because people either have given up on democracy or don't believe in it. And they come together and they rally together under strong leadership who wants extraordinary powers and measures to be illiberal and maybe suppress the other. Because our common community is being threatened by the exterior. And that's why nation states historically have had found more success with people who aspire to be authoritarian leaders. So what that means for us in Canada is that among the virtues of a multicultural society is that the diversity that we have in Canada means that we have a lot of people who come from diaspora communities around the world who can push back and say, I know what this feels like

and what it looks like, and I've seen this elsewhere, and this is not what Canada should be about. It's less about homegrown Canadians saying our democracy that's stood for generations is threatened by this. It's actually the inverse. It's people who have come from elsewhere who want to see the toughness of democracy sustained because the alternative is not something that was hospitable to where their families came from. You know, we tend to, we've always tended to have this kind of discussion when we have it sort of generally.

And I mean, the collective, we, in a kind of, you know of white hat, black hat thing. The Democratic people, they wear the white hats, and the autocratic people wear the black hats. I don't know whether that's a fair way to look at it or not. We seem to have painted it that way already a little bit. But is there anything that's good about an autocratic government? Well, yeah, not by my books, Peter. I think, again, there are those who argue that,

for instance, the Chinese government can deliver projects more efficiently and at a larger scale than can the United States of America. My view is that that is misunderstanding what's really important in the life and lifeblood of a country. So I think you can make a straw man argument that autocracies, because they don't have to worry about trivialities like consulting people before you bulldoze their homes to build a high-speed rail line, can get stuff done more efficiently. And there are those who look at that and say, I'd like to have a lot more of that. I am not one of those people. I think that in the long run, and democracies are also always, in my view, preferable to autocracies in the long run. Those issues work themselves out in democracies. And I'm a real Democrat in the small d sense that

maybe it's because of where I grew up on the margins of Canada, so to speak. I just don't believe that people in Parliament or government or Ottawa or Bank Tower in Toronto know better than I do what's good for my community. I really don't believe that. And I don't believe that they know better than my neighbors or the people down the street. I can't remember. It was one of the great American conservative thinkers of the mid-century. It might have been George Will, but I don't think so, who said that he'd rather be governed by the first hundred names in the Boston phone book than the graduating class of Harvard. I'm kind of in that class because I just I think that people who don't spend time in the communities that they govern are ultimately bad for those communities.

And that, by definition, is what happens in an autocracy. It was William F. Buckley who said that. William F. Buckley. Thank you. And it was, you know, so how does authoritarian then creep in? And frankly, you see this through different times in recent history right 9-11 happens well then we need to then people are scared then do what you've got to do if you is that if that means i can't say goodbye to my loved one at the gate and we have to be in this side of security and that means i have to take off my shoes and that means i have to surrender to

identification uh uh and and you know sort of exposure of who I am to more authorities that are not just domestic, but also foreign, I will do that. You see this in the debate right now in the United States over the US border. You know, you see the Daily Show and others who interviewed some supporters of the former president, you know, who just say, you know, the border situation is so bad, we have such an invasion, it's threatening our communities and fentanyls coming in and thugs and murderers are coming in and all that you know if it requires a dictatorship to build the wall and put down your foot and stop this invasion of aliens then then let it let it be so if people start feeling that democratic institutions aren't working that the mandate of the president is too short and he's being

handcuffed by congress to actually get the funds necessary but the crisis is so bad we need a strong man who will have the funds and have the authority and have the timeline in order to get this thing done then damn it given the power and let's get this thing done and then comes in of course that so what weaponizes all that of course is the the spread of misinformation the capacity of people to dial up fear the the the usual and authoritarianism one of the defining characteristics of authoritarianism is lack of accountability and lack of checks and balances against that power. And sort of the pushing away of the normal expectations of accountability, of barriers to spending, barriers to legislative power, barriers to the enforcement of power and authority. And so you get to brush that away because the crisis is so bad. But often then, of course, the crisis goes away and the powers endure. And then that's how you

get sustained intergenerational and leader to leader authoritarian powers. You see that in Russia, you see that elsewhere. So how it creeps in is often a legitimate anxiety by the public that is not being addressed by status quo democratic institutions. And therefore, let's have extraordinary powers to meet an extraordinary problem that was not dealt with by the status quo structures. You've both used. Go ahead, Jerry. Well, I was just going to say, I think James just raised maybe the most important point, which is power.

We don't talk about power very often in our political discourse in Canada, but it's a common thing to discuss elsewhere because political systems are really all about how you distribute power within a given society, a given country. And I quoted a conservative, so I'll try and balance that by quoting an Italian communist. And this is one of my favorite quotes of all time, which is when he was in jail, Antonio Gramsci wrote that the old age is dead and the new one is yet to be born. Now we live in the post-war period via multilateral institutions that were fundamentally the creatures of the victors of the Second World War, whether it be

the UN Security Council, the IMF, the World Bank, you name it. Those were all institutions that were built to govern a world that was defined by the power structure that came out of the Second World War. And most of what most of the turbulence we're dealing with now is that the world of 1946 is not the world we live in anymore. And 80% of the population is tired of the planet is tired of being governed by 20% of the population. And that big macro transition has its own reflection in all of our countries, right? So when power is very loosely structured, when it's sort of up for grabs, you get monstrous individuals. They take the opportunity to seize as much of that power for themselves as possible. And that's what you're seeing with Xi Jinping. You're seeing it with Vladimir Putin. You see it with Donald Trump. I would argue you

also see it with Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel. I think you have a bunch of individuals who are serving their own interest because the opportunity to grab more power than would be customarily available to them is there. That's going to take us into some interesting areas. And I want to get to that a little later. But let me just first ask this, because you both talk about, you know, you use the term strongman. And that has been, you know, a classic term that has been used for ages in terms of autocratic governments. Does it necessarily mean you need one person to create an autocratic government? The strong man theory, does that have to be? Not necessarily, but strong charismatic leadership.

If you're strong and worthy of this extraordinary power that in the back of my mind i know i'm surrendering for you to have the authority to fix the problem that's in front of us then why do you need help you know donald trump i alone can do this you know these these types of things you know so if you if you say i'm you know i'm strong but i've got a finance minister for the money stuff. And I've gotten it. So, no, I'm I'm uniquely smart. I've got this. That is typically the form in which it happens. It's not quite so much political parties and movements. It's a person of charismatic distinction or credibility who is an outsider, who represents a large ethnic bloc, who has particular unique source credibility, who is who is the person who typically galvanizes these things.

Che Guevara, Mary Le Pen, Silvio Berlusconi. You know, wealth equals success. Success equals smarts. Smarts means it's transferable from business and media over to government because governments are really stupid. And you just get a smart person in there who's shown success by virtue of their of their money then things will be all right and he's sound he's talking my language and he uses my vocabulary and he looks like me then let's let's give him a little more power than is normally the case and let's get things done okay um you've both

because you've sat in uh you've either been in government or advised government, you sat around tables with a mixture of governments, both democratic and autocratic. What did you see there? Can you tell us any stories about, because I get to this area where I'm really trying to understand the difference in real terms. So do you see them in a situation like that, at a meeting of world leaders on whatever the topic may be, and you have that mixture in that room? Or, James, you as a cabinet minister on trips in different, on trips in different parts of the world, meeting your counterpart in an autocratic government. Well, what do you see? A different version. I do have a story.

One was when Prime Minister Harper did his famous trip to Israel, when he spoke at the Israeli Knesset. One of the side trips that we did when we went on that trip was we went to Jordan. And we had lunch with king abdullah of jordan and i sat next to him uh at the dinner or at the lunch that we had was um prime minister harper and then i sat next to him uh as a chance had had it uh he the summer before he he loves motorcycles bmw motorcycles and he spent a summer riding his motorcycle off to the okanagan british columbia and i had no idea and so we had a big conversation about motorcycles in British Columbia and all that conversation that pivoted at some point through it to political science and democracy and how things are going. And of course, in Jordan, the King of Jordan is not a figurehead. The King of Jordan has

power to veto legislation, to call elections, to suspend parliament, to trigger parliament, to move things around. And he talked about the need for sort of preserving the institution that he represents as the king while also allowing democratic reflection, diversity to express itself in the legislature because the legislature is a mix of appointed and elected. And he talked about how in the broad Middle East and certainly parts of Africa, he said the challenge that we have in Jordan is to get people who want to speak for their communities or speak for their regions or speak for their views to come forward and put forward a manifesto and to say, I'm a Marxist and here's my plan. I'm a green and here's my plan. I'm a conservative and here's my plan. I'm a conservative and here's my plan. But put your ideas for solving contemporary problems on a piece of paper, found them on an ideology or even a religion or what have you, or a perspective, and get people to rally around ideas for solving the problems in

this next timeframe, as opposed to, I will represent you and I will be a strong person and then I will defend you against your neighbor. And he said, you know, one of the things that they've done is they've taken pictures off of ballots because very often a lot of emerging democracies, people are not, they don't have the literacy and they don't have the background and you can't present manifestos. And so you have the political parties have strong physical symbols and you put the pictures of leaders on ballots and you get people to rally around leaders who look stoic and strong with big jaw lines and facial hair and toughness in order to represent your people in the names of parties he said he said no if you're a marxist be a marxist don't you know and and he said that he said just that basic pivot of getting people to see democracy as an opportunity to rally

around ideas as opposed to rallying around basically my boxer who's going to knock out your boxer. He says it's a very hard hurdle to climb in much of the emerging democracies in the region. And he says they try to do everything they can to get people to focus around building platforms as opposed to building personalities. But it's an enduring struggle. Jerry, you got a story for us? Sure, sure. Two quick ones.

I remember one of the most, I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, but one of the most physically surprising things for me was I think the first multilateral meeting I attended after the 2015 election was the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Malta. And seeing people who were heads of government show up in military uniforms is quite, it's quite different than what we experience here in the West needless to say, but the one that will always stick out in my mind, Peter, was at the G20 in Argentina, which was in December of 2018, late November, maybe of 2018.

And I won't say who said this because he's not quite a household name, but he's a household name for the politically observant. So I will just say a close American counterpart of mine came over while we were sitting in behind our respective leaders in the plenary room. And it was this magnificent room in Buenos Aires. Everybody was seated in a circle arranged alphabetically. China was right next to us. So Xi Jinping is like two seats away from me when he comes over and says this. He comes over and he kneels down beside my

little chair and he says, Jerry, look around this room. How many people in those heads of state seats do you think, and I mean personally, do you think are responsible for the murder of another human being? And it didn't take long to get up to six or seven. And I think that's a fundamental difference between, again, it's about the concentration of power. And if you have power, too much of it for too long, you end up doing really abhorrent things with it. I think it's a definition of power itself. So for me, that was a stunning kind of realization that I'll keep with me for the rest of my life. That is stunning. I guess what I wonder about is when you're in that room, when you're having the discussions that you as a group are having, how hard is it to keep that in mind

while doing with the general discussions that the group is having about, you know, whatever the issue is? Well, I think you just always have to keep in mind that you have obligations to your citizens if you're lucky enough to serve a role like the one James served or the one I served, that the people across the table may not feel the same weight on their shoulders. And that's something you have to keep in mind, no matter what issue you're discussing, in my view. Okay, we're going to take a quick break. I've got lots more, and I want to bring it home a little bit here in the second half. But let's take the break first.

We'll be back right after this. And welcome back. You're listening to The Bridge for this Tuesday. It's another more butts conversation. We're dealing with the issues of democracy versus autocracy, trying to get at what the real difference is here. And some of them are obvious, as you all know, but it's been a fascinating conversation so far, and we want to keep it going. You're listening on Sirius XM, channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite

podcast platform. All right. I run the risk here of the two of you getting mad at me here, so I'll run that risk anyway. Here's the question, because you've both been, well, you're both students of history, so you understand our history and the terms in office for a variety of different leaders and parties over the years. But you've both been involved in a government that has lasted beyond one term.

And sometimes you can look at a government that's been in power for, you know, say, 10 years and wonder about whether there's a drift. And I don't mean in a malicious way, but is there a point at which a democratically elected government starts to act in a way that is more autocratic? They believe they're right all the time, this is the only way to go, and they're kind of dismissive of other options and i was at a breakfast i was at a breakfast uh the day after gordon campbell resigned as premier of british columbia three-term premier of british columbia majority

majority majority he started his first mandate he won 77 of 79 seats in the bc legislature and of course over time that eroded but he was still a strong leader, well-regarded former mayor of Vancouver. He knew every mayor. He knew all the Reeves. He knew all the, like he knew the province because he ran for, ran for premier and lost to in 1996 and lost to Glenn Clark. So, you know, he aspired to lead the province for a long time. Finally got, then he was in office for three majorities in a row. Then he finally lost power, lost control of his government rather. And I was asked at a breakfast by, when I was in cabinet by someone who said, so what happened, what happened with Gordon Campbell? Like, why, why did he resign? Like what happened in the end? And I said, at the time I said, well,

you know, his, his cabinet started to resent him a lot because, you know, he was, he was into every portfolio and he was telling all the ministers what to do. he was you know he didn't give them their own room to sort of develop their own personalities and to pursue the things that they cared about he was just really kind of really kind of had a within the cabinet whether it's real or not they felt that he was just a little bit too controlling and then um somebody from across the room heard me say this is someone who knows what they're talking about when it comes to governing and the history of politics. And he said, James, you need to understand that in our system of government, there are two kinds of leaders, dictators and failures. And the expectation of the public in our system is that you are given a lot of power and a lot

of control. And everybody talks a big game in our election systems. And if you're the premier or you're the prime minister, people expect you to be in control. And other people may not like it, but you have to be in control and you have to know what your ministers and all your portfolios are doing. Otherwise, the public will lose confidence in your whole government and the minister doesn't get fired. You get fired as the leader. So democracy is for other people within government. There's free flowing conversations about ideas, but the leader needs to be in control because if you're either in control or you're not. And I thought probably true because the way our political system, we have a Westminster model, but presidential style American politics on top of it.

It used to be for most of our history, people would say, well, I vote progressive, conservative, or I vote liberal, or I vote conservative, or I vote reform, or I vote NDP. Increasingly, you hear people now saying, well, I voted Trudeau. I voted Harper. Why don't we like Harper back, right? I remember Mulroney. Yeah, it's sad that he passed. So I voted for Mulroney. And people now identify with leaders. They identify less with ideology, less with movements, less with parties, more with individual leaders. And this messianic sort of culture that we've built around leaders is in part because our system has demanded so much expectation from our leaders. And it's a weight and a burden on leaders that is very hard to manage. Because in politics, you're not judged

by the things that you do, you're judged by the pile of things that you screw up and then the public reaches a breaking point and so as a leader you have to be in control or else you're failing you know it's a you're making the line separation between these two sound much closer than i thought it was by that description just went well the the difference between you know a democratic leader and autocratic leader and the way they manage leadership. Can be. You know, I remember times going into cabinet where we had an issue and two thirds, three quarters of the room is like, we should go in this direction. And then the prime minister speaks and says, we're not going in that direction. We're going to go in that direction oh okay um we have and then the explanation was made it's like all right well

there you go you're the i was on the ballot in my riding there are 338 members of parliament in my last term i i have one 338th of one half of one third of the federal system that mandated me you're the prime minister you campaigned in every third of the federal system that mandated me. You're the prime minister. You campaigned in every region of the country and you got the mandate. I will express my view. That's my privilege. I will tell you what I think behind closed doors aggressively. That's my opportunity as a cabinet minister. But at the end of the day, we will govern collectively. You will give us your view and your perspective is pan-canadian and maybe more broad than mine i had my chance to change your mind but if that's the way you want to go sir

that's the way we're going to go that's the best definition of cabinet consensus i've ever heard yeah i i come at that question a little bit differently, though. I think I end up in the same place for the same reasons, which is I've developed this pet theory of power that it's like carrying around a nuclear fuel rod, Peter. And while you have it, you better have a very thick hazmat suit. You better only use it for its intended purpose. And maybe most importantly, you better put it down as soon as you can. Because if you keep it too long, you're going to get irradiated, and as is everyone else around you. And I think that that is the fundamental problem

with democratically elected governments that stay in power too long, that power is way more definitional than any individual who happens to have the privilege of wielding it at any given time. And its characteristics overwhelm the identity of that person. And I think it's, and I want to be explicit here that I'm not talking about anyone in particular, because I think it's part of my definition is that it happens to everybody over a certain period of time. It's almost like it's almost like a natural process of decay. And if you don't, I think one of the hardest parts of it is you're the last person to see it while it's happening to you. That you think you're just going along doing what's right for the country and the best way that you know how to do it while it's happening to you. That you think you're just going along doing what's right for the country

in the best way that you know how to do it. And then maybe six months after you leave or five years after you retire, you can see more clearly your actions in the context in which they happened at the moment where you acted. And then it's too late, right? It's just, it's too late, right? It's just, uh, it's power, power is intoxicating and

it is, uh, it's way more powerful than any individual who happens to wield it. You sound like you're making an argument for term limits. You know, it's interesting. I've probably,'ve probably flip flopped on that question four or five times over the course of my adult life. I do think that they have they have almost irreplaceable virtue in democratic systems. So I'm probably on the side of term limits these days. Yeah. And so the quote that gets often overly used, right, is power corrupts. And the actual quote is power tends to corrupt absolute power, corrupts. Absolutely. In other words, if you had the more power you have, the more because of the distance that you have and the burdens that you have of exercising that power and your distance from those who are affected by it. And the longer that you're there, the more you think of yourself as being indispensable. And as someone once said, all the graveyards of the world are filled with indispensable men. So, you know, people come and go in politics, but often when you're there, you just think nobody can do this job as well as I have nobody. I mean, do you know

how hard it would be for somebody to get to know all the stakeholders that I know and to be on a first name basis with the world leaders that I know and to know the business community like i do and get to know the bureaucracy and you know be able to send a couple messages and have a quick meeting and have a four corners and make sure treasury board understands and finance finds the funds and then have a comms plan like nobody like you know how hard it is to stand all that god damn like you change governments now it's going to be three months until they're on their feet six months before they can walk a year until they can run we have real problems we're changing. Are you out of your mind? Come on. And if you don't believe any of that, just ask my senior staff. They tell me how great I am all the

time. Exactly. Exactly. So, you know, among the parts of our democracy, it's important to be humbled. I remember door knocking, I think was because my last election campaign and you know you think you're hot stuff and you're a county minister and you have lunch with the with the king of jordan and you're traveling the world you're doing all these things and i remember knocking on the door of this house in port coquitlam and then the door opens and he tells a young boy he wants the door he's like 11 or 12 right at that age where the attitude is starting to kick in and he looks up at me and he says yeah and i said hi are your mom or dad here and he said uh yeah sure and he was mom the door it's for you and she was well who is it and he peeks around the door and he says some fat guy selling something all right all right

yep you know it's okay well uh thank you um yes i'd'd like to, yeah, there you go. I'll take it from here. Thank you, son. And I don't think authoritarian, all that. So in a democracy, whether it's people throwing a bird at you as you walk down the street or whatever, there's an accountability, humility, and I think that's an important measure of keeping your feet on the ground. You know, I can remember once when I was back in my regular journalistic days,

a new young journalist came in and was being sent off to interview a politician, cabinet minister, I think, and was nervous. The person was quite nervous about it, and I said, don't get nervous. I said, if you stick in this business you're going to be around a lot longer than that cabinet minister's going to be around let me long gone and last quick question uh do you think we as we as canadians appreciate the system we have appreciated along the lines of understanding the difference between these two ways of governing.

Yeah, I think for the most part we do. And I think that I'm kind of a, maybe a little bit overly optimistic, but I think our institutions are amongst the strongest in the world. And I think while it can seem when we only pay attention to our own country, that those institutions are decayed. Compared to other democratic countries, we still retain a broad consensus that our national public institutions, democratic institutions work. And it's the job of the people who happen to be lucky enough to occupy those institutions at any given moment to continuously refurbish them. So it's, I do think that Canadians are pretty clear eyed about the difference between the way we govern ourselves and the way countries like China, Russia govern themselves, they know there's a big difference and they value the difference. And I think it's sadly become drawn in sharper and sharper relief over the past few years. Peter, I was thinking as you were asking about stories, this is obviously not one I was personally involved in, but you remember that kind of Keystone C cops attempt at a rebellion in russia by vladimir prokosin was there anybody in

the the rest of the world that doubted as soon as that happened that that man was going to be murdered i don't think that's the kind of country that that most canadians want to live in, and they're pretty sure that they don't. James, final thoughts? Historically, I think the balance that we've struck in Canada has served us well because you have to operate between electing governments that can get things done within a system of checks and balances versus the checks and balances overwhelming the democratic desire of people to see governments get things done.

And so you have to have checks and balances so that you don't have carte blanche. But you can't have so many checks and balances that nothing can get done. And often when you see your values and your opinions being blocked by processes that are beyond your understanding or control and it frustrates you, then you can overcorrect and say, well, then we have to give extraordinary powers and just build an energy corridor across the north of Western Canada and just get it to the Port-au-Prince River. Let's just get our products to the global markets and we'll compensate Indigenous communities somehow. Or you can say, well, we are so intolerant to people who disagree with the AI and just don't understand the concept of gender identity, that if you express views to their traditional values about only there only being two genders, then we're not going to let you be a professor. We're not

going to let you be a student. We're not going to let you have a student group and you're going to be ostracized and called a bigot in our university campus. But no, we have to have dynamics where we have the ability to get things done. You have an ability to express your views and you're not going to be cancelled or pushed away. And you don't have to overcorrect and overreact in order to get your way. And so far in Canada, it's still a tradition where every election night, the person who wins stands up and says, I respect a thank you to the Canadian people for giving me this mandate, respect our democratic process.

Thank you for participating. And I just want to let everybody know that I have all of Canada in my heart as we move forward and build a better country. And I think a lot of people, when they hear people say that, they think, well, bullshit. But I think it's been true, whether it's been Justin Trudeau or Stephen Harper or John Diefenbaker, Brian Mulroney or Jean-Claude Chien, that when they get up there and they say that, that they actually believe that, that they know that in our democracy and people want to see governments act responsibly judiciously within their mandates get things done

but be reflective of their responsibility to the other and to regions that didn't vote for them uh to their obligations of the charter to their in you know obligations to do to have an appropriate indigenous consultation etc etc. These things matter. And I think so far the safeguards we have around us, multi-party system checks and balances, have served us generally well. But we have to be careful about people feeling as though their views are never reflected,

their views are never heard, their outcomes are never possible, because that's when authoritarian sentiment can catch root. James Moore, Gerald Butts, another great Moore-Butts conversation. We thank you both and look forward to talking to you again before summer is upon us, which is getting closer every day. Thanks again. It's always a pleasure, Peter.

Thank you. Thank you. Great. There you go. Moore-Butts conversation number 15 in the history books. You know, it's funny because I'm sure when you first heard this, oh, they're going to talk about the difference between autocracy and democracy. I know that.

I don't need to listen to that. But I think the last 40 minutes or so has given you a reason why. It's a fascinating conversation. It's a lot more involved than we tend to think it is. And, you know, I found it interesting, especially the second half of that. I thought it was, like, really, really good. Anyway, that's just me.

Well, that was your summer encore episode of The Bridge for this Wednesday. It was the More Butts episode number 15 from the 23rd of April of this year.