The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Moore Butts #18 -- Is Canada Ready for the US Election Result?

Episode Date: November 5, 2024

Today, it's a nailbiter in the final hours before Americans decide on the outcome of their presidential election.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You're just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. More Butts Conversation number 18. The U.S. election. It's tonight. Is Canada ready? And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. It's U.S. Election Day. Voters are going to the polls across the United States. Everybody says it's going to be close, really close. Either side could win. We could be looking at a President Trump again.

We could be looking at a President Trump again. We could be looking at a President Harris. So what are the stakes for Canada? How ready is Canada for what happens in the U.S.? That's the root for our conversation today. The Moore-Butts conversation, number 18, the latest in a long string for going back a couple of years now, of great conversations with former Stephen Harper Conservative Cabinet Minister James Moore.

He joins us from the West Coast. And Jerry Butts, the former Principal Secretary to Justin Trudeau as Prime Minister in 2015. He joins us from Ottawa. So I'm looking forward to this conversation. I'm sure you are too. Quick bit of housekeeping. First of all, remember the question of the week this week.

It's pretty straightforward. At least I think it is. It's about Remembrance Day, which we'll all be celebrating. Celebrating is the wrong word. We'll all be remembering next week. Remembrance Day. Last year, we did a program for your turn with your memories based on your family or friends

about Remembrance Day. What's that one moment that sticks in your mind? We had lots of wonderful letters last year. And I want to try it again. I want to look for your thoughts, your memories of Remembrance Day, why you remember, and what it is you remember. So keep writing. Send them in to themansbridgepodcast

at gmail.com themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com you've got until 6 o'clock tomorrow evening to get in your answers remember to include

your name and the location you're writing from and you know keep it relatively short. I can understand how this may take a little longer than a few sentences, which is the usual rule. So go ahead and write what you can, but remember the longer you go, the less letters I can get in. So let's hear what you have to say on this question.

The Remembrance Day memory that you have for you and your family. All right. Let's get to our More Abouts conversation number 18. The whole issue of Canada in preparation for tonight's decision by Americans about their next government, who's going to lead it. Let's get to our conversation then with James Moore and Jerry Butts. All right, gentlemen, I'm going to begin with you, Jerry. I want to try and get an understanding of what it's like at the highest

levels of the Canadian government on the day the U.S. votes, especially in an election like the one we're going to be witnessing today, where it's unclear in the final hours what's going to happen.

But take me back, as I said, Jerry, why don't you start us? Take me back to happen. But take me back, as I said, Jerry, why don't you start us to take it, take me back to 2016. Because that must have been an interesting time inside the Prime Minister's office. I don't know where you were that evening, but I assume you were in some contact with the Prime Minister. Set that up. What was that evening like as the votes started to be counted? Thanks, Peter, and happy U.S. election day to all your listeners. I understand this will be airing on Tuesday, so we don't yet know who won, but I'm sure everybody's, by the time they listen to this, at peak anxiety about it.

And the first thing I'd say is it strikes me that this is the third straight election where Donald Trump could end up being president. So one would hope that the Canadian government has some practice at it by now. But back in 2016, to answer your question directly, the Prime Minister had asked his senior staff to join him for a watch party. So we were in the basement of, uh, of, uh, Rideau cottage watching this all together. And I'm sure you journalists and former political leaders like James have had watch parties like this for elections where you get around with some of your closest friends and you have a witty banter about how this is all going. You make fun of the people on CNN, et cetera, et cetera. And that was the way it was going for most of

the first half of the night. And then I remember this so vividly, almost like it was yesterday, sometime around, it was somewhere between 9.15 and 9.30 that evening where I realized nobody had spoken for about 15 minutes, which is an enormously long time. We were all just sitting there watching the returns come in. And it was that moment when Broward County just wasn't turning over the votes for Hillary that people expected to come back from that part of Florida. And at a certain point, we all realized that Trump was going to win. And the prime minister stood up and he looked at us all and said, well, I'm going to get some sleep and you should all too, because we've got a lot of work to do. And that's how our evening ended. We expected to be there till 11 o'clock or so. And I think we left by 9.45 and we all went home and started preparation.

Now, is it fair to assume that you all assumed that Hillary Clinton was going to win that night? No, we had certainly talked about Trump's. Katie and I had had Katie Telford, the prime minister's chief of staff, then and now. We had had dinner with John Podesta around the United Nations General Assembly about a month earlier in New York. And it was pretty clear to both of us that they were not confident they were going to win. John, of course, being the professional he is, wouldn't tell us that he thought he was going to lose. But it was just reading his body language and his answers to questions about key states, which then included Ohio and Michigan, that they just were not at all confident they were going to win. So we took that

very, very seriously. Did you, had you done any prep for a Trump win? Oh yeah. We had, we had the whole thing ready. You know, there was two sets of letters, two sets of scripts for phone calls, two sets of everything. So there were lots of people within the government who didn't think Trump had a chance. But the prime minister definitely was not one of those people. James, give us your story, your anecdote. Would it have been 2012 when you guys were in power? Yeah, I mean mean generally speaking i think for canadian conservatives the stakes are way lower because that sort of the canadian political

universe and the culture of canada is is such that it's it's more accommodating if a because we've had you know republicans the white house democrats the white house liberals in government canada conservatives in government canada and so the matching and the crossover can be frankly, all over the road. And you know, in the time that I was in office, I observed all of that. I mean, I saw the tail end of Clinton and Khrushchev, and then the coming over of George W. Bush to and, and Prime Minister Khrushchev, the Prime Minister Khrushchev was elected, and then 9-11 happened after that. And so all of the consequences. So election night in the US and what its knock-on effects into Canada are pretty low. And for the most part, except for let's say 2016 in the Trump era is so unique. For most of the elections, frankly, since 2000, going back 24 years when I

was in public office, almost every election was relatively predictable. I mean, Clinton-Gore was very close, but both of them were at the time, pre-9-11, were kind of cookie cutter, relative Republican, relative Democrat within a margin of what you would expect those kind of presidencies to be. You kind of knew that mid-war, beginning of the Iraq war, mid-Afghanistan war, at least in our minds, mid in 2003, going into 04, that George W. Bush was probably going to beat John Kerry, and he beat him quite soundly. And then going into 08, you kind of knew, frankly, after Sarah Palin's choice as vice president, and you know, the expectations have changed the crash of the economy in October of 08, going into Barack Obama, that Barack Obama was probably going to win. There's going to be this big culture shift. And then 12, you kind of knew that Barack Obama was going to get reelected.

Mitt Romney had a moment after the first debate, but it was kind of a, and that's why 16 sticks out as such a dramatic surprise because it wasn't just a, you know, Democrat Republican shift. It was a massive shift because Donald Trump, he didn't, he didn't defeat Hillary Clinton. He defeated the Republican party and then he defeated Hillary Clinton. He defeated two political parties in that campaign. And the shift and what that means mentally was so overwhelming and dramatic. You know, and so as a as a conservative, for the most part, I think it's certainly I think it's fair to say when Stephen Harper was prime minister, if Barack Obama is elected president of the United States, that's that's frankly has its challenges. We saw that with Keystone XL Pipeline and a few other items. But I think more than anything, because of Barack Obama's massive popularity in Canada, it was an opportunity to get as close to him as possible on a lot of

issues. So you could sort of say, I mean, the number of times that we had conversations with our government, I mean, I know it's true on climate change. I know it's true when it comes to Afghanistan and a few other things where we could say well is barack obama doing that well then just say that barack obama is doing that and how dare you criticize barack but like we just you just instantly align and it was it became sort of a tonic over a lot of the criticisms that you get on a lot of stuff okay we didn't enjoy that luxury, Peter, with Trump. Exactly. You had to scramble.

I assume you had to scramble to figure out how that relationship was going to work. Because there were kind of two levels to it, which is a little different than most American administrations. There was sort of the Donald Trump level, and then there was the everybody else level. You had to figure out how those relationships were going to work to make the overall relationship with our biggest trading partner, et cetera, et cetera, work. Yeah, that's true. And as I always do when this topic comes up, I want to give a shout out to the late former Prime Minister Mulroney,

who was an essential ingredient to this. Mr. Mulroney made his entire network and all of his time available to us to help introduce us into Trump's circle. And that was incredibly helpful, you know, because Trump is a relationship person and getting, developing relationships with the people around him was the secret to keeping a very rocky process, the NAFTA renegotiation, on track over and over and over again as the next two and a half years went by. Explain to me how the system works in terms of getting ready

for a change of administration in the United States. Because it's not just sort of, you know, how the politicians feel about this and what they're going to do. It's also, you know, you have a bureaucracy that is working towards trying to prepare for some of these situations, I guess. Not only on the diplomatic side, but the foreign affairs side, the trade side, you name it, industry and commerce. How does that work as you're preparing for an election campaign, in election results? Well, the bureaucracy will sort of, it's sort of like they match up with their counterparts in the other country. So in this case, Canada-US, it's an enormously complex bilateral relationship that involves aspects that most Canadians would never even think about. I know I certainly didn't

before I was in the prime minister's office, that you just don't realize the connectivity between the two economies is as deep, vast, and comprehensive as it turns out to be. So you've got everyone from the standard setting bodies within the Canadian government to the Department of National Defense reading and combing through everything that both candidates have said, plus everything they've published in their platform to try and figure out where it is that Canada fits in to all of their various policy pronouncements and their rhetorical flourishes. So you end up at the end of a presidential campaign with gigantic briefing binders about everything that they

have said and what it could possibly mean for Canada. And then at the top of the house, it's sort of your responsibility to figure out what's really important in all of that. And that's how you try and construct the parameters of the relationship. About transitions, we have a mindset in Canada where it's like, you know, so Doug Ford gets elected Premier of Ontario. How does that work? And there's sort of these overlapping relationships

with the provincial and federal government. What does that mean? But the truth is that the Canada-US relationship is it's more economically intertwined, you know, than I think a lot of, frankly, since the War of 1812, it's sort of like there's a fence line and there's two big oak trees and the branches start to overlap at the top and the root systems kind of overlap underneath. And there's an integration that happens there in a way

that goes far beyond politics, right? It's more than the Ambassador Bridge. It's more than the Gordie Howe Bridge. It's more than the Blue Wall. Like it's more than that. We have migratory birds policy. We have the Columbia River Treaty with the United States. The fuel that animates every airplane coming out of Pearson Airport originates in Canada, passes through a pipeline in the United States, reemerges back bit by bit, those root systems are sort of intertwined in ways. It's funny, in preparation for this conversation, time was asking Stephen Harper, you know, are you worried about Canadians losing sovereignty because Canada and the United States are getting so close on this document sharing beyond borders, nexus expansion thing? And is that good for Canada to not have as much, you know, independence from the United States versus, you know, the threats that, you know, Jerry faced and Prime Minister Trudeau's government faced of the threats of the President of the United States legitimately threatening to abrogate NAFTA, walk away from NATO's, you know, commitments of attack on one is an attack on all.

So the transition that happened inside of eight years between the two is so dramatic. But underneath it all, in spite of that stress of a change of president, you know, lines of engagement in North-south economic cooperation, you know, supply chain engagement, cultural engagement. Go to Seattle Seahawks football game at Lumen Field in Seattle on any given Sunday when they play. About 20% of the entire stadium are Canadians going down to the United States and watching football. You know, the cultural integration, social integration, economic integration is kind of happening and politicians can say and do whatever they want. But these are two countries that get along and like each other on a personal basis, and politics kind of can't destroy that very easily.

That Seattle situation is kind of similar to what happens in Buffalo too. A lot of people from southern Ontario go down and watch the Bills play. Yeah, Minnesota Vikings, lots. Yeah, a bit more of a haul of a drive from Winnipeg to Minneapolis, but nevertheless, it does take place. Okay, tell me more about the relationship between, because I want to get at this, and Jerry, you can start us on this. I want to get at more of what this relationship is like on the political side

between the two offices, the Prime Minister's office, the President's office. How that relationship works and how it doesn't work. What do you need to make it work? Because quite often the philosophies aren't the same, right? And the theories about how to move forward on the economic front aren't the same. So how do you make it work? So, Peter, I think it's a really interesting question.

I've always felt that governments have more in common than political parties do, which is the secret to making federal-provincial relations work in our great federation. And it's also the secret to making complex bilateral and multilateral relationships work with other states, because at the end of the day, there's an enormous overlap between the complex problems you're trying to deal with. If you're trying to run the office of the President of the United States or the Prime Minister of Canada or Great Britain or the President of France, they're all very similar problems. So my approach, at least when I was in one of those roles, was to try and find as much common ground, especially on issues of substance with our opposite numbers.

And again, in my case, early on, I dealt with Steve Bannon a lot. Laterally, I dealt mostly with Bob Lighthizer. And when you're looking for common ground, you can find it. If you're looking for a reason to have a debate with people, you can usually find it too. The important thing is to keep your personal feelings about the agenda of your opposite number aside and just remind yourself all the time that you're trying to act in the best interest of the country and that the job you hold is a lot more important than

how you feel about things. You know, when you mentioned, you know, having to deal with Steve Bannon at times, you know, when you, if you listen to his podcast these days, even the ones he occasionally did from jail, it's hard to imagine how you and he got along. Well, I mean, at the end of the day, it was my job, right? And I took that job very seriously while I had it. And I just refused to allow what I felt about their agenda to get in the way of my doing it as least as much as I could. So it didn't really matter. I mean, I didn't choose who Donald Trump's staff was and I didn't make Donald Trump president of the United States. The American people did that and we just happened to be there while he was how'd you get along with your counterparts james i mean i didn't obviously work at that at that level but it's it's interesting how

that there is an element of american politics that i think we uh maybe forget in canada which is there's a dynamic certainly on capitol hill which is no matter who's the prime minister of Canada, if you can't get along with Canada, then you're not going to be able to get along with anybody. If you can't make something work with Canada, after all this integration, we speak the same language, we've fought in the same wars, we're broadly on the same side when it comes to values and expectations, the limits of the government and so on. They have a charter of of Rights. We have a Bill of Rights. They have commitments to infrastructure. We have our own.

Yeah, we have different variations on some issues. But if you can't make things work with Canada, then you must be a really incompetent president. You must be a really incompetent administration. So I think there's an incentive to make things work in that regard. The challenge, I think, often that happens with conservative governments, and certainly I think it was true with Prime Minister Harper, is actually more on the social side. And I think that, you know, aside from the Keystone XL pipeline, aside from, you know,

the Iraq war, but the Iraq war was, the decision was made under Prime Minister Kachan by the time Stephen Harper became Prime Minister, that position was seen as the, obviously, the clear majority position of Canadians. And, you know, that decision was not going to be revisited. Aside from that, there were kind of mostly just tactical issues. And maybe the biggest challenge that we had as a government was when George W. Bush called Stephen Harper, Steve. You remember that? Right. And at that point, the valley of George W. Bush's popularity was at its lowest point. He was at that point, the valley of George W. Bush's popularity was at its lowest point. He was at that point probably more unpopular in Canada than Donald Trump is today, which is to say very unpopular, like literally 90 percent unpopularity in Canada.

And I've known Stephen Harper since 1996 when we first met at the Reform Party convention. Nobody calls Stephen Harper Steve. Lorene Harper calls him Stephen or my husband in a public contact. Nobody calls him Steve. And so and nobody has ever heard him called Steve. And you know what? And you know what President Bush was trying to do, which he's trying to break down the barriers and sort of send a signal to Canadians that we get along in an informal way that

will be accretive to you on policy. And so, you know, we do get along. You know, this is, you know, so Steve, you know, Steve and I, we were talking, it's like, and everybody's eye roll was like, wait, what? This is not good. This is not good. This is, he's, this is not good. He is not Steve. And so, and, and it was a big story in Canada because there was like, what is this? And it of course found its way into liberal NDP ad campaigns and Steve and look how close they are. You know, nobody calls him Steve. So if you like George W. Bush, you're going to love Stephen Harper. I remember that ad campaign and my riding. And so sometimes it's those little informal things that

create problems. And, you know, but there you are. But the inverse is equally true. And despite what some people may think about, you know, differences of opinion, the Barack Obama, Stephen Harper relationship was very productive. It was very good on cross-border infrastructure. You look at all of the, you know, the big border crossings from Peace Arch in British Columbia to Windsor, Detroit and all that, like big infrastructure projects were announced to modernize those crossings and to double the border crossing with the U.S. That, you know, that ground was that this was begun to be softened under Stephen Harper dramatically. You know, integration on Afghanistan, the expansion of the nexus pass, the extension expansion of of passports being seen on boats like a lot of really good stuff happened. And and so, you know, I think if you deal with the relationship more on a tactical basis, recognizing that the Americans, if they can't get along with Canada, they can't get along with anybody is sort of the,

you're really going to be a foreign policy failure as president if you can't move the ball forward on some things with Canada. And I think the relationship worked incredibly well. Okay, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, I want to push it into today, into these final hours before they start counting votes and what's at stake for Canada from your sense, from the two of you, what you're thinking on this day.

We'll get to that right after this. And welcome back. You're listening to the Tuesday episode of The Bridge. This is, of course, the Moorbutts conversation, the latest one, and happening in, you know, in the final hours as Americans vote in terms of who their next president is going to be. We know it's going to be a new one. Will it be Kamala Harris?

Will it be Donald Trump once again? So technically not a new one, but new in the sense of replacing Joe Biden. Okay, we have us our guests, Moore and Butts. James Moore, former Conservative Cabinet Minister, and Jerry Butts, the former Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau. You're listening on Sirius XM, Channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favourite podcast platform. We're glad you're with us.

Gerry, stakes for Canada in this, in terms of this result tonight. If it is tonight, it may be. I was just going to say that. Tune in on Friday. Yeah, that's right. John Tell and Bruce will still be talking about who won Pennsylvania. Yeah.

I don't think the stakes could possibly be higher for Canada and for the rest of the world than they have been. It's certainly higher than any presidential election of my lifetime. The choice is extraordinarily stark. And a couple of things are very different, importantly different than they were in even 2016 when Trump was elected president. The first and most important is that the world is just a much more dangerous place than it was in 2016. That we have really important

geopolitical conflicts, live kinetic wars, a much more distended relationship between the United States and the second largest economy in the world, China. The prospect of expanded conflicts in the Middle East and Eastern Europe and potentially one in the Northwest Pacific, if you're looking at it from Canada's point of view. It's a very troubled world out there. And at the best of times, the United States president has a thousand insoluble problems on his or her desk, this president will inherit more difficult situations to resolve from a security perspective than any president in the last 40 years since the end of the Cold War. And so having someone in charge of that situation, of the temperament and predisposition of Donald Trump, I think is quite

alarming. And then the second point on the economic relative economic policy of both presidential candidates, I really wish more attention had focused on the economy in this campaign. But as is often the case, when the American economy is doing relatively well, it doesn't feature as prominently as it does when it's generally apprehended to be doing poorly. Donald Trump's tariff policy will more likely than not create a global recession, and probably a deep one. And the inevitable retaliatory actions from other important economies for levying across the board 10% tariff will potentially start an escalatory cycle on tariffs that who knows where it ends. But if you look at its historical antecedents, it never ends well. So I think that Trump's economic policy is particularly troubling for Canada, given how exposed we are to the U.S. market and how dependent we are on access to that market for our own prosperity here in Canada. relax economically if Kamala Harris is elected. Because if she does get elected, she'll get elected because a bunch of blue collar Democrats in the Great Lakes voted for her and independents. And they also elect with them politicians that tend to be more protectionist.

And that old paradigm of everybody supports free trade and what's not to like about bilateral trade with Canada, that era is over. And we are going to have to fight for every clause in the NAFTA agreement, certainly if Trump gets elected. But don't be surprised if we end up renegotiating it if Harris gets elected. Well, that's a pretty stark look james do you see it the same way or where do you differ yeah i mean the march of protectionism in the

united states has been going on for some time it's just less dramatic in the democratic party and it doesn't come with the sort of the fangs and teeth that donald trump has has laced his with his with um the isolationism of donald trump and and and that element Trump has laced his with. The isolationism of Donald Trump and that element of the Trump party is, frankly, less about economics and saving jobs in the Great Lakes, although there is some of that. And that's how he discovered trade back in the 15-16 campaign. But I mean, if he becomes president of the United States, if he's elected, then, you know, it's not just the trade file, but it's also the threat of mass deportations. And if you think you and your family or your extended family are going to be part of that,

where do you think you're going to quickly migrate to in order to avoid that? I mean, Canada has to be prepared for that. You know, if you're one of the 10% of Albertans or 15% of Manitobans or Saskatchewan residents who who has family lineage in Ukraine, you're probably pretty worried about your extended family. So I think for a lot of Canadians, this election is not just sort of macro in terms of Canada's positioning in the world relative to the United States and the relative peace and security that we've had historically. But this is deeply personal, right, in terms of your family members and all that kind of stuff in the way in which Donald Trump has approached all this. And by extension, the arguments for that, that those in the sort of Steve Bannon isolationist world of the Republican Party currently under Donald Trump,

all the arguments for abandoning Ukraine and abandoning NATO obviously puts Canada at risk. But those arguments can all very easily be transposed over to Taiwan. And by the way, they can very easily be transposed over to Israel as well. And, you know, the only hope is that, you know, if you're a friend and ally of Israel, is that the evangelical voice within the Republican Party will assert itself so aggressively that will not allow them to transpose the anti-Ukraine, anti-Taiwan argument over to Israel as well. So the knock-on effects of this foreign policy are hugely problematic. Add to that the fact that we have no idea who would staff a Trump White House. We didn't know Rex Tillerson was going to be there or John Kelly or Bob Lighthizer or any of these people. And

some of them are known and well-known or relatively predictable sort of on the sort of center left, right, sane and sane, thoughtful, not thoughtful spectrums of public policy. But in a Donald Trump White House 2.0, we have no idea where that's where those people who they're going to be or where they're going to land. We suspect the worst and we're probably appropriate to do so. So, you know, all this stuff is going to be would be enormously challenging. And, you know, that's why I think a lot of Canadians as we're going into, you know, election night in the days and perhaps weeks that follow it, I think a lot of people are in the crash position, let alone the knock-on effects of huge chunks of the American political universe just refusing to accept the results, refusing to accept because so many people

are so isolated and siloed in their worlds of influence and friend groups that nobody can penetrate that with an alternative perspective and talk to them. You don't do it through media, you don't do it through social circles, you don't do it through familial circles, and everybody's isolated in their red-blue worlds. That how in the world could it possibly be that the other side wins? And you see this, whether it's people who are just gobsmacked that Donald Trump could have any support or people who are just gobsmacked at the idea that Kamala Harris could ever be president. And that knock-on effect of an America isolated and divided against itself internally and the spillover effects that happens with the world, an isolated and broken America that's divided internally has huge global consequences, as Jerry described.

Well, yeah, Jerry, you wanted to say something there? Well, I just say I think that last point that James made is so bang on, because no matter who wins the election this week, half of the United States is still going to hate the other half of the United States. And I think that that's a factor, and it's going to be a factor in U.S. politics for most of the rest of your listeners lives. And adjusting to that, I was struck by James's description of the difference between getting asked whether we're getting too integrated with the United States in 2009 to then fast forward less than a decade later, and the US president is putting 232 tariffs on the Canadian steel and aluminum industry, declaring them a national security threat to the United States. That's an incredibly rapid change.

And unfortunately, I think it's probably the new, if there is an equilibrium in U.S. politics, it is the new equilibrium for the foreseeable future. You know, we listen to American journalists and broadcasters prefacing their discussion about the election by almost unanimously saying this is the most consequential election of our lives. The way you two are putting it forward is that it's not just consequential for the Americans. It's consequential for everybody else, and Canadians better, if they hadn't already realized about how consequential it could be for us. Both of you are making that pretty plain. And quite frankly, you know, it obviously matters which side wins, but both sides present issues that are going to be consequential for Canada. Well, let me move the goalposts down the road 12 months.

Now, Donald Trump could be defeated on Tuesday, and we'll have a very different conversation about President Harris, President-elect Harris, and what that means. Because she was also one of 10 senators to vote against the USMCA and there are some challenges there as well. But the conversation about Donald Trump, let's move in the goalposts 12 months down the field. You have a prime minister, Pierre Poliev in Canada, Donald Trump in the United States. There are two things that have sort of papered over the divisions that Donald Trump and the culture politics on the right-wing world that have sort of isolated the Canadian conservative movement from that. One is the unpopularity of Justin Trudeau and the heat that he brings amongst right-wing,

center-right conservatives, big C, small C conservatives, is that he is a unifying force within the conservative movement to get all on board, be unified, be smart, be disciplined, raise money, get good candidates, do all that stuff, because we got to beat Justin Trudeau. Like he is that white, red-hot force. Fine. The second thing is that, at least in the last year, is that Pierre Polyev has been such a successful conservative leader in fundraising and marshalling the message and unifying people, you know, being everywhere, his tireless work and all that has unified. So those two things have unified the conservative movement. If Justin Trudeau goes away and Pierre Polyev is now prime minister, we own it. And if Donald Trump is the president of the United States, the challenges

that that has in the Canadian conservative movement and for a prime minister, Pierre Polyev, knowing that the base of the conservative party, about a quarter of them, maybe a third of them like Donald Trump and what he's saying and doing, that pull and tear on the conservative fabric of how we react to that and what we do is problematic. We know that immigration, for example, is rising as an issue in Canada, right? And that when Angus Reid asked, of those Canadians who are voting conservative, what are your top three issues? Immigration is now number two. Cost of living is number one. Immigration is number two. It doesn't, it's not on the top five list, by the way, for anybody who votes for Liberal, NDP, Green or Bloc, but it's number two for conservative voters. So Donald Trump gets elected, starts

doing mass deportations, building a wall, doing all kinds of stuff that is sort of out of the historic norms of the policy framework of Canada. There's going to be a chunk of people in the conservative base who are going to turn to Pierre Polyev and say, where are you doing? Where are you? What's going on? Why aren't we being as tough? Why aren't you showing leadership like he is? Now, it'll be politically impossible to do that in Canada, but there'll be voices out there for that. So the pressure, I mean, as a lifelong conservative now at the age of 48, I can probably count five to 10, maybe good friendships that I've had for 20 years in politics that will never be repaired again, because I'm a non-Trump, never Trump conservative. And those are friendships

that are permanently broken. And just because the way that Donald Trump talks about politics, and they made fun of a disabled reporter, I've got some disabilities and I can't I can't abide by that. And I can't I can't don't understand people who can tolerate that. And like you get my point. And those tensions within the conservative world are real. And so Donald Trump were to be elected and Pierre Polyev becomes prime minister. The ability of Pierre Polyev to manage the conservative base and their expectations against the backdrop of whatever Donald Trump's doing in the United States and shifting the goalposts on foreign policy with Ukraine, with NATO and defense spending and all that, it's going to be really problematic. Donald Trump gets even more aggressive on 2% of NATO

spending for GDP. That's $65 billion. That means you have to 100% privatize the CBC every six days in order to fund that increase in spending. Like, where are you going to find that money? And Donald Trump is demanding it and the base is saying we should do our part. So the policy consequences for a Pierre Polyev government with Donald Trump are pretty massive, let alone the cultural impacts of the divisions that exist in the conservative movement that have been papered over by Justin Trudeau and Pierre Polyev's leadership so far. You want to pick up on that at all, Jerry? We don't have Jerry. We've lost Jerry. He's there.

No, I'm here. Sorry, Peter. I was just thinking as I look at the maple trees losing their leaves that Halloween is just over, but I kind of feel like we're scaring the bejesus out of your listeners. Well, you are, because both of you are, you know, so much of what you're saying is based on the possibility that Trump's going to win tonight. Right, and I think that history tells us that most U.S. elections these days, because of the structural polarization of the electorate, are a coin toss. Right. I would add one more element that I think makes the situation even scarier, and that is if we have a sovereigntist government in the province of Quebec.

And I wrote about this for The Walrus to plug The Walrus and my own piece a couple of weeks ago. And I know you've spoken with Chantal and we kind of alluded to it in our last talk. That's right. We depended on stability in the United States the last time we had a referendum, right? We'll all recall Bill Clinton basically asking Quebecers to vote no without coming right out and saying it from the podium in the press gallery of the White House. We're not going to get that with Donald Trump. Right. We're not going to get someone who I mean, he would. It's it's anybody's guess what his orientation toward a Quebec secessionist movement would be he may just love the chaos of it all. He may see it as a comeuppance for an ally that hasn't treated him as well as it should have. And forget about what he thinks about it.

Any intervention on either side at any time will be radioactive in Canada and have consequences that are impossible to predict? It's not unfair to say that Donald Trump views countries as competing casinos on the same strip. And what's bad for you is good for me. His inability to understand the overlapping mutual self-interest dynamics of things is just not there. So if you're divided and broken and chaotic, then we just look better by extension and people are more likely to want to invest in us and come stay at our resort than stay at your resort. And that's good for us. So who cares? And, you know, Fortress America, you know, build the walls. And he's riding on a wave of, you know, 20 years of American cultural and political and military exhaustion of the war on terror,

Afghanistan and Iraq, of people in the center-right military voters and soft progressives and blue collar voters who just think that the global economy has been bad for them. Global engagement has been bad for them. Wars have cost my buddy his leg and the Veterans Affairs is not taking care of us and screw the world. They don't like us. And by the way, they're coming to the country, taking our jobs. Screw the world. Fortress America, let's go. You guys are divided. Good. We've been divided because of you. Go away. And that snowball mindset is so profoundly toxic, especially again in Canada, where one in five Canadian jobs is dependent on trade with the United States. We depend on the United States for so much of our security and our prestige in the world.

And our association with them is fundamental to Canada's economic and social future that it's a real and present threat that you just frankly don't have with Kamala Harris. All kinds of reasons that Kamala Harris could have a bunch of policies that would be bad for Canada on the trade side and resources side and, you side and all these things. And all that's true. But that's tomorrow's problem. Today's problem is a possible reanimated second lap of a Trump administration staff with people like Stephen Miller, who have just such a toxic view of America's place in the world. That's really a profound threat. And by the way, 45% of Americans will continue to hold that view for a number of years going forward. And that will infect politics, including on the Senate side, congressional side, gubernatorial side.

So the long tail of the Trump world doesn't end on Tuesday. Whether he's successful or not, it's going to be around for a long time. So Jerry, if, if Trump wins and if Polyev wins, what do you think? Wouldn't James make a great ambassador in Washington to smooth all this over? I think James would make a great ambassador to Washington, no matter who is prime minister, whether it's Polyev or somebody else. But I do hope it gets to the point though, and this was, and James was a key part of this in the last time Trump was elected. I do hope if that situation materializes, that the people

around Polyev take the same bipartisan, cross-partisan approach to this issue that we tried to in the 2016 to 19 period, because that was absolutely invaluable. You know, I love James's oak tree analogy there. Sometimes what the politicians have to do is get out of the way and let those connections at the crown and in the roots do their work magic. Because so much of the success of the NAFTA agreement came from Canadian business people, Canadian third sector leaders, just Canadians with family in the United States, talking to each other and realizing how much was at stake. And in some ways, the agreement got done despite not because of the politics and geopolitics

of the situation. All right. We're going to have to stop there. It's been a fascinating conversation, as you two always deliver on. Of course, tomorrow we'll all wake up, one assumes, and we'll have a better idea of what the result is and we'll know whether or not all the things you've got us quite scared of are going to be confronting us or not. That's assuming we go to sleep, Peter.

Yeah, I think it's going to be an all-nighter for a lot of us. Thank you, James. Thank you, James. Thank you, Jerry. Great to talk to you both. Thank you. Always a pleasure. There you go. More Butch Conversation number 18.

And listen, there were moments there that are pretty scary. Now, at this point, we don't know who's going to win. Maybe we'll know today. Maybe it'll be tomorrow or a couple of days down the road this week, depending on how the results come in. So nobody knows right now who's going to win. We all have our theories. I've expressed mine for the last year.

We're about to find out whose theory is the correct one. All right. Thanks for your patience today. We had a few technical problems, a couple of hits on the line during the program, but hopefully that didn't interfere too much with the learning that we all did through the experiences of others, which is one of the great benefits of the War Butts conversations, hearing their anecdotes about past times

and how they relate in many ways to the present. Tomorrow, I know it's an encore Wednesday day, but the plan at this moment anyway is to do a live show tomorrow. Get Keith Bogue, Bruce Anderson, we'll see who else, into the mix for tomorrow with our reaction to whatever happens tonight. So that's the plan at this time for tomorrow. That's going to wrap it up for this day. I'm Peter Mansbridge.

Thanks so much for listening. And we'll talk to you again one way or the other in almost 24 hours. Good luck tonight. I'm sure many of you will be up most, if not all, of the night watching, listening, reading about this one. Take care. Talk to you soon.