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

Episode Date: October 17, 2023

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".

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. It's Tuesday, and today it's Moore Butts, conversation number 11. 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 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 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 More ButButts 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 a good job and trying to explain to us what it's kind of like behind the scenes on some of the some of the major issues that um 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 are 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 all, 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, seeing as 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. Almost all companies that are responsibly 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, you know, different perspectives in terms of fiduciary obligations, sort of internal, external, but you'll have,

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 a hundred 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. And internally, are we 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 going to come in any organization, in any government of appropriate scale and in a democracy. And 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 and properly prepared well ahead of time. Jerry, your opening thoughts on this? Yeah, thanks, Peter. And 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 people judge. 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 5% 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 end 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 is 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. I was going to say it's kind of like the Watergate lesson, really, in some fashion that it's not the problem,

it's the cover-up 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 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 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 coverup? 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 just 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 um at the time uh nigel wright was the chief of staff to stephen harper uh mike duffy

was a 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 he fired nigel wr 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 is 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 is 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 wright 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. Jenny Byrne was, I believe, the deputy chief of staff at the time. And Nigel Wright or Ray Novak, rather, who worked for Stephen Harper. 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 Byrne and myself and Ray Novak. And three of us are sitting there looking at it. 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 wall there 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? can't like what 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 happened right that these things can happen and our government is imperfect, and the ability 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. You got another example for us, Jerry? Oh, I've got a couple swimming around in my head uh probably one that's analogous to to james is i i'll i'll keep the names under

wraps to protect the innocent but i think your viewers uh will understand the 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 were 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. So George comes over and of course, unfurls this tale. He's as white as your George's 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, 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 he had to move on. And that's when Dominic LeBlanc became 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. 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 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're

sitting and you see the, you look over to the press gallery and you see the entire, you know, row above the speaker just jammed with journalists and they're sitting and, 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 it's 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 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 anduffy, Mike Duffy thing. We didn't know. We were. And so it was just a really tough spot to be in. So there you are. It's almost comical. And you really have to take it when you're behind it, 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 forgotten member of parliament got him Larry Spencer Larry Spencer was a Canadian Alliance Conservative member of parliament from Regina it's actually he was he came before Andrew Scheer he was elected in 2000 a one-term member of parliament and I woke up on a 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 so this is the headline. And Larry Spencer, that was sort of his view. It's a little bit a little bit torqued of a headline, but not inaccurate. And Peter O'Neill wrote the piece. And so it was, I woke up to a phone call

from crisis management in the leader's office, calling, 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 as 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, but why that

happened. And we, 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've given us a couple of great examples where movement has been very fast, that you saw what the end point needed to be, you got there right away.

The Duffy one 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 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 parties 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 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. 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 some people, sometimes people try hard and they just fail. There are, there are scandals that, that begin with media. And then there's, in my view that there've been two sort of, how does it all start? So therefore therefore how are your mechanisms of accountability triggering um it was it was everybody's surprise when uh when it was announced um maxine bernier 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 and in my view stephen harper's decision there was clearly appropriate um responsible and his 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 that's what gets you fired so just know that everybody else who's in the in the room who's in our cabinet operates at that standard or better and if they don't they there's that and then therefore it's a 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 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 happened 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, though, the second kind of crisis or scandal that can happen that you imagine can come from a journalist. And 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 in the past, whatever the story is. And you would say, 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 a journalist has an opinion that this is a story and then they publish something about it, I mean, Steve Chase and the Golden Mail and, and, you know, the Golden Mail, of course, has broken a lot of stuff in the last couple of years. They write, they write a piece. If, 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, then often the story stays a print one until it explodes over time. But if other news organizations start piling on, then that's, then now, you know, you have a problem, but if it stays in 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. Um, 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, you've got a problem. I should mention that that's so true. I mean, as somebody who's been in that gallery many times over many years, Most days, 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, the attendance has dwindled. And there are times when there are 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, oh, 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 just to get well and when you 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 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 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 gonna stay in here yeah good but they're gonna say i'm sneaking 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 gonna 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 or uh some you know there's a possible flood in the sagina three years from now that we need to have an emergency debate about so that we can extend the debate in parliament until midnight so i can just like you know not leave because i'm really i really care about the people along the sagina can can we do that like where's the house leader can we talk about this like i 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, 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 nine 11, it 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.

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 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 in 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, B.C. That's one of my favorite names. You know, one thing about Canada, we have some great place names, you know, from coast to coast to coast. Some wonderful ones. White Rock, B.C. is one of my favorite names. You know, one thing about Canada, we have some great place names, you know, from coast to coast to coast. Some wonderful ones.

White Rock, B.C. 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 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 um but i will say that and we've talked about this in previous conversations that the the new atmosphere fostered by the communications technology that we currently 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 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 Rota used a moment to bring a constituent into the gallery which humiliated the country and caused an international incident uh he asked he asked the all the parties of a minority parliament uh 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 i like steve or sorry like um like jerry like i see um accountability happening all the time um 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 um 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.

But 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 on the back end and the Senate as a second thought and public opinion. There are all kinds of filters against inappropriate government decisions. 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. 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 jerry 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 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 have 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 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, uh, 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 hard jade sejan uh cherries. A bizarre thing.

But he was at a cabin. He was on his way to a cabin. 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, parked 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 was 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 it in a cup next to him, but whatever. And somebody sneaks up behind him with a cell phone. And in a gotcha moment says, you're creating this mess out here. You're putting cherries in a parking lot in the Okanagan. I think you're going to find some cherry pits. Like it's not, you know. But it was a gotcha moment says you're creating this mess out here. You're putting cherries like in a parking lot in the Okanagan. I think you're going to find some cherry pits like it's not, you know, but it was a gotcha moment.

It was like in your face. And this video was put out there as you 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 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 there's assume that every literally everybody around you has a 4k high this camera in their pocket that can zoom in and capture you eating cherries in a parking lot or saying something inappropriate or you know scratching yourself when you have an itch or whatever or 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, and I could be wrong on this, I don't have any data to back it up, but it just seemed that resignations came easier, you know, a generation ago than they do now. It's kind of going to the point of the of the white rock ladder um that just you know can i deny and move on um 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 our government doesn't have its act together. And if you can judge our government by the fact that we've lost a finance minister or a foreign minister, 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. 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 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 uh 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 um jerry butts vice chair of the eurasia group now formerly the principal secretary of 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's it for this Tuesday. Tomorrow, on our Wednesday, regular Smoke, Mirrors, and the Truth, Bruce Anderson will be joining. Thursday is your turn, so get those cards and letters coming in,

themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com, themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com. And Friday, of course, Good Talk with Chantel and Bruce. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you again in 24 hours.