The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Moore Butts Conversation Encore -- Does Elon Musk Have The Answer To Government Waste?

Episode Date: March 12, 2025

The Moore Butts combo is back with a big question -- how do you cut government waste and does Elon Musk have the answer?

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You're just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge and it is an encore episode for this Wednesday. We go back almost a month to the last Moore-Butts conversation. It's all about government waste and welcome to another week of The Bridge. Yesterday was a holiday in some parts of the country, not all parts of the country, as Family Day is marked in different places at different times but it was in Ontario among other provinces yesterday and as a result Sirius XM was was allowing its staff a holiday and it was a holiday weekend which was punctuated certainly in this province and other areas as well of the country,

by a lot of snow, heavy wind. It was a nasty kind of weekend. And it was exemplified in that accident that happened at the Toronto Pearson Airport yesterday with the Delta jet that literally flipped over. They're still trying to figure out exactly what happened there. And as these things go on aircraft incidents and accidents, it usually takes a while. There are lots of rumors around, but it usually takes a while before you nail things down firmly. Now, what else can I tell you about the long weekend? Well, I can tell you this,

and this is really a tribute to all of you who have made this an exciting little venture, a venture called The Bridge. It's been five years now, almost a full five years, since we started this program. First as a little podcast, and SiriusXM was very interested. And so it's now on SiriusXM every day, Monday to Friday. It is also on YouTube.

And the YouTube version has become this huge success. Last week's Good Talk, which we put on YouTube every Friday. Last week's YouTube version of Good Talk had over 100,000 views. That's the most we've ever had. That's a lot of views. I've seen television programs on cable TV that don't get that many views. So we're proud of that fact.

But we're proud of the fact that you enjoy The Bridge, or many of you do. And it's placed The Bridge as a podcast consistently over the last few years as the number one Canadian political podcast in Apple's ratings of Canadian political podcasts, or at least podcasts that are of a political nature that are listened to in Canada. Of the top 10, I'm kind of sad to report that most of them are U.S.-based podcasts. Not all of them, but most of them. But the top Canadian one, and right now it's sitting at number two, is The Bridge. The House from CBC is, I think, number five the last time I looked at.

And Althea Raj's Toronto Star podcast is number 10. I think that's what I saw the last time I looked at the ratings. But consistently, we've either been number three, number two, and occasionally number one. The rest of those top ten, as I said, are all American-based. But what am I saying here? I'm saying that's a tribute to you as those who listen to our program and support it.

And you support the Thursday program in huge numbers too, and that's because it's your turn. And that's when I get to hear from you. Now, this week's a short week in the sense that there was no program yesterday. There was a repeat, an encore edition. So this is the one day I get an opportunity to tell you what the question of the week is. So write this down,

because this will be your opportunity to respond to it. Remember Joe Clark? Of course you do. Former Prime Minister, former External Affairs Minister in the Mulroney era. He was on the CBC the other day. And one of the things when the conversation got around, what can the ordinary Canadian do about this whole issue with the United States,

the tariffs, the 51st state, all of that stuff? Well, Joe Clark had a good idea, and we're stealing it. Joe Clark said Canadians should write to Americans that they know and tell them what's going on. Tell them what they should be thinking about what is happening here between our two countries. Now, I'm sure many of you have friends in the United States, acquaintances, people you see on holidays,

people you've met over at the time, perhaps some former Canadians who've moved to the States. So that's what we're going to say this week. This is our question of the week. What would you write in one paragraph to an ordinary average American about the situation that is perplexing us in terms of the relationship between our two countries. Canadians are angry. We've heard your letters, your responses,

just a couple of weeks ago on that question. And you were not shy about telling us how you feel. But this is a different kind of question. It's what would you write to an American? Somebody you know, somebody you've met over time. Somebody who you want them to know what's happening here. Because the odds are they don't know about it. It's not like the American media is covering this story like the Canadian media is.

So there's your question. What would you write in one paragraph to an ordinary, average American about this situation? Here are the rules. You write to themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com. themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com. themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com. You have your letter in, your email in, by 6 p.m. Eastern Time tomorrow. No later than that.

Later than that, it's not going to make it onto the program on Thursday. You include your name, and you include the location you're writing from. Those are all important. The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com, 6 p.m. Eastern Time tomorrow. Your name, the location you're writing from. Keep it to one paragraph. All right?

So there you go. There's your question. Now to today's program. Sorry for the long introduction. Today's program is the Moore-Butts Conversation number 19. Moore-Butts, of course, James Moore, the former cabinet minister in the Brian Mulroney government. No, excuse me. I don't think James was even born during the Brian Mulroney government.

Former cabinet minister in the Stephen Harper government. And Gerald Butts, the former principal secretary to Justin Trudeau when he became prime minister in 2015. Those are our, those are the two people on the Moorbutts conversation. And it's been great as I've, you know, this is the 19th. They are very good at trying to keep

their partisan nature out of the conversation, but to give us a sense of what's going on behind the scenes in government, how things operate. And the question this week is a really good one. We all know about government waste, and we all know about the constant attempts to try and cut back on government waste. Usually they don't work.

They're trying something different in the States right now. I'm not sure whether there's something we want to learn from it or not. There are not a lot of big fans for Elon Musk, but he's the guy who's running this department of government efficiency where he's slashing and burning and getting rid of jobs, cutting people loose, cutting back budgets and different things, all in an attempt to try and save money on cutback expenditures. Is it a good idea? Is it going to work? So that's our focus today in the Moorbutts Conversation number 19. So enough from me. Let's get at it. Get this conversation going.

Here we are. All right, James, I'm going to start with you. What is it that is so elusive for governments about cutting government waste? Sometimes elusive, sometimes not. In 2025, I think governments are cautious about the unknown unknowns about budget cuts. I'll give you an example. In 2008, after the recession, Stephen Harper, our government, we put in place record spending at the time to try to protect the best elements and the riski to get back to a balanced budget because we believed that going into 2011 and 2015 that if we spent sorry if we got back to a balanced budget without raising taxes that canadians would think

that we were really great and would re-elect us we'll leave how that went but we believed that that was going to be the formula so but what what happened was in order to get back to a balanced budget, we said that every every crown, every agency, every department, every minister, you had to do a 10 percent across the board cut in spending. And what happened was a lot of cabinet ministers decided, I'll just cut everybody 10 percent equally. I'll just use that blunt instrument and everybody will get to cut 10% equally. I think more engaged ministers, put it that way, sort of looked at their portfolio of crowns, agencies, their department internally, all of their spending and all that. And they said, well, if I net 10% at least, then I will be contributing to the formula that gets us to a balanced budget that'll get us reelected. So within my portfolio, I think some things can be cut 23%. Some things can be cut 2%. Some things actually

might need more money. But if I shift the money around, do my homework, and use this crisis as an opportunity to be creative and governing, then net net, we can find the savings and we can actually rebalance our portfolio and communicate really clearly why we're doing this things that were things that we're doing. And some people did that and some people didn't and then people who just did a blunt cut across the board uh ended up frankly falling on their faces with no communications exercise because just saying we're going to cut 10 and everybody has to do their part yeah but if you cut 10 on something that's already down to the bone you're actually cutting into the bone and then the thing collapses and so you know different governments when it comes to rationalizing

spending down to where it needs to be, have different trial and error. And I think in order to do it well, you need to be very up on your files, very motivated, clearing your communications and explaining why you're doing what you're doing. And when you don't do that, then even small cuts of $50,000, $100,000 in the grand scheme of things are small. But if they're very personal and easy to explain by your political enemies, it can blow up the entire enterprise of billions of dollars in savings. That might overall be really important and really well done. But if you don't think it through, you will blow up the process. Okay, Jerry, what's your opening argument on this?

Well, I'll do something that may surprise both of you guys and also many of your viewers, and I'll start by quoting Preston Manning. Here, here. One of my favorite political quotes in Canada, actually, is something Preston Manning said at the end of his career, and he was asked, I won't get this exactly right, but I'll hopefully capture his sentiment. He was asked if he could leave one piece of advice behind

for everyone who came after him. He thought about it for a second and he said, I would carve into the middle of the cabinet table, this is not your money. And I think that that is an incredibly important, simple, and almost always forgotten piece of advice. That while I do think that in some cases, government waste is sort of the snuffleupagus of public policy, nobody's really seen it in the magnitude that people think it exists. It is true that having worked in the private sector and the charitable sector, which is a lot more disciplined because you're going out and raising that money every year, you just don't have the same natural checks

on people's impulses to spend money in government. That's just the way it is. And unless you have people around that table with an extraordinary sense of that value, you're always going to end up spending too much money on things that people are not attached to because it's always easier to spend it when you're not having to raise it let me let me ask the question this way because i think you know there's clearly governments have been focused for for decades i mean in this country and trying to

deal with the deficit and then as a result of the national debt. But there seems to me that there's a difference in the way you go about these things in terms of attacking the deficit and looking at programs that aren't necessarily needed anymore or working properly or what have you, and attacking government waste. I mean, the public sees government waste differently than they do, or at least I think they do, differently than they do attacking the deficit in reducing certain programs or changing certain programs.

And it's that waste factor that I assume, well, James, I mean, you were door door knocking you must have heard that you must have heard this waste argument and that i guess is what i'm trying to get out of how elusive is it to get into you know the the the 900 hammers and all that kind of stuff you know the stories i'm talking about but but it's uh i mean it can be. But I mean, departments, how do I say this? People are very self-aware. Like when you when you deal with the Department of Motor Vehicles in British Columbia or ICBC, if you deal with face to face with government, have you ever gotten gone to get a passport? You think, why am I filling this out in triplicate?

Why is this so? Why is this so slow? Why do I have to navigate through the French and English? Like what? Like, this is crazy. When I go to have any kind of transaction with the private sector, I pick up my phone, I hit one button, and my grocery order from two weeks ago comes again. Why the hell can't the government do that? And just that layer of burden that you're faced with as a consequence of government, that's just waste because the private sector has figured that out and the government hasn't. And so, and so they say, well, if that's what I'm seeing, then the machinery behind the scenes, my God,

I can't even imagine what that looks like. And so there's this, because the private sector certainly with digital technology has, has gone so far so fast and making things so seamless and so, so clean and simple and efficient. Then you look at government, you just think, my God, and you're standing around and we, we've all seen, you know, one guy shoveling the hole and four other people with you know high vis vests standing around looking at him shoveling the hole and they just think oh well there you go that's what happens with everything and it just becomes endemic i mean how you confront it i mean

it's it's a challenge because again the, the dirty interface between government and citizen is not as good as the private sector. And it, frankly, probably never will be. You got a thought on that, Jerry? Well, your viewers are going to get tired of hearing me say this, but I kind of agree with James on that. different experience that you have when you're interfacing with government services and it's laden with all of the negative attributes of that brand that have been injected into it by politics over a very long period of time. I think what we're living through now in Canada, at least, you know, my formative experience in politics that a week after I started as policy director and then leader of the opposition,

Dalton McGinty's office at Queen's Park, Walkerton happened that May 24th weekend. And that sort of woke people up a lot about the Harris era of cost cutting in Ontario, at least. And I think it actually made a difference in the rest of the country that people also know somewhere in their brains that what the government does, much of what the government does that they would never think about on a day to day basis is really important. And it protects people's safety. It protects their health. It protects their lives. And if you indiscriminately cut those things in the way that James described, but didn't endorse, of course, then you're inevitably going to hit some services that are going to hurt people. And I think that has made governments really gun shy about these across the board cost cutting

measures because nobody wants to be my carers at the Walkerton inquiry explaining why a six month old child died because a couple of bozos took over the water system in small town ontario here's an analog of a real world example that happened under the harper government that bled into the trudeau government uh stephen harper we ran we won a minority in 06 minority in 08 we didn't get our majority got our majority in 2011 we did because we won a handful of seats in bank right near vancouver including vancouver south and etc we did well in the 416 in toronto and all that and that was the margin between minority and majority uh we did the cost cutting that i described in the beginning 10 across the board so the department of fisheries and oceans

said in part of their cost cutting measures they looked at their portfolio of their footprint at the at um at uh at the Coast Guard and they said, the Kitsilano Coast Guard station doesn't make any sense in Vancouver. It just doesn't make sense. We have 293,000 kilometers of coastline around Canada and Vancouver is well served and we're good and it's redundant and it doesn't make sense. So $850,000, that's for sure part of the 10% of the least efficiently spent money that we have. So they got rid of that. Well, of course, Vancouver and Kitsilano and all of the area around there that they serve, that's where all the swing ridings are. That's West Vancouver, North Vancouver, Vancouver South, Vancouver Granville, all those swing ridings. And they said, yeah, but it doesn't make sense.

And we had in the entirety of the nine years of Stephen Harper's government, by the way, we never had a fisheries minister from the West Coast, always from the East Coast. And so the literacy of the sensitivity, like in Vancouver, people live, play and invest heavily and they're heavily indebted because they want the privilege of living on the water. It's where they whereas in Atlantic Canada, there is that. But there's also a much more economic relationship with the water and it's much more transactional. But in British Columbia, it's more emotional. And so when you get rid of a Coast Guard station, people get their backs up and they say, wait a minute, you're the party of public safety. I thought you were like, what are you doing? And so there's a massive public outrage. But a minister did a blunt across the board cut at 10 percent. They found the 10 percent that was

least efficient, which at the time the Coast Guard was. And I remember we brought in the head of the Coast Guard to our British Columbia caucus meeting. And I said, if we were to reinstitute all the cuts and bring back 10% and you were to spend that 10% of funding the most effectively and efficiently for the true benefit of the public safety and public interest, in other words, evidence-based governing that the Liberals talked about, would the new 10% of spending go back to the Kitsilano Coast Guard and they said absolutely not that is not the most efficient and most we have vulnerabilities elsewhere around spill response and public safety and uh and and habitat protection this is not the most efficient we would not reinvest it there and we got killed for it we got clobbered by it because the when people say governments should act like business business would say don't spend

that money it gets coast guard but the public and two out of three british columbians live in and around the lower mainland they want to feel extra safe and you need that extra coast guard station because the public really wants it and the incongruity of what is clearly and demonstrably objectively not the best spend versus what the public really wants because it makes them feel better about where they live and being safe on the water. You have to spend that money. You have to find a way. So if you just sort of put in like a French-Cartesian model of design of what the most efficient business-like relationship of government to citizen would be, it would be don't spend on Kitsilano Coast Guard. We didn't.

We followed that rule and it cost us seats all around the Lower Mainland. We lost West Vancouver. We lost North Vancouver. We lost Vancouver South. We were seated in every single riding that touches the water. And as a matter of fact, we lost every single coastal riding in all of British Columbia, except for one, Richmond, which has just a piece of the airport. Prior to that, we had 90% of all the ridings in British Columbia that touched the coast. After that one decision for 850 grand, we had one rodding that touched the coastal waters after the 2015 election. That's how big a bad decision can have, a big impact a bad decision can have. Well, and I think that's the example of the other category

where politicians touch an electric fence without knowing it peter and that is the first one i talked about was very safety oriented health practical issues but they're also symbols right not many people would know this but the department of fisheries and oceans as james just described has to manage three oceans three coastlines they're all very they're each very different places i I certainly agree with what James said that on the West Coast, this is a bit reductive. Some salmon fishermen friends of mine are going to be angry at me for saying this, but on the West Coast, the ocean is nature. It's a playground. And on the East Coast, it's a workplace, right? So they're just looked at

very, very differently as someone who grew up about you know 200 meters from the atlantic ocean and i remember you know i remember the event we did in the middle of the 2015 campaign promising to reopen the kitsilano coast guard if we were allowed and the reason the reason we were able to do that was because we had people around from british columbia who understood the symbolism of it. Right. And I do believe that the public is always right at the end of the day. And they were certainly right about that because it was all about the government of Canada and Canada's presence on the West West Coast. And it was something that just not only made people feel more secure, but made them feel part of the country.

It did gall me. i could tell you in person prime minister trudeau great event let me get let me let me get my revenge 10 years later yeah what liberals would come out and say we've got to get rid of stephen harper because he doesn't believe in evidence-based governing we believe in evidence-based governing let's bring back the kids card kitsalonga coast guard station well but but that said it to your point right that it does show that if you don't tend to your needing if you're not very careful if you don't think it's true if you don't have a comms plan comms plan that leans on our genuine understanding of stakeholder relationships then you're going to get into all kinds of problems and so you know we'll maybe pivot the conversation to elon musk and what's happening

in the united states one more point I want to make one more point. Yeah, sure. What preceded the reopening? I'll never forget this. What preceded the reopening announcement of the Kitsilano Coast Guard in the 2015 campaign was conservative headquarters did a kind of mini B.C. platform. And they put out this social media post that had a poster on it with a salmon and maybe this is my Atlantic background or my WWF days I remember clearly taking one look at that poster and saying that's a goddamn Atlantic salmon

and it's indicative of the kind of symbolism that James was just talking about if you don't have deep roots in the soil that you're trying to represent, you're going to make huge and embarrassing mistakes. You know, we are going to move to the musk example now of how to deal with waste. We're going to take our break, but before we do that, James mentioned as he began that story that it had been quite some time before the last previous conservative fisheries minister.

Do either of you remember who that was? Herb Dalywell. Was he fisheries? Conservative. Conservative. John Fraser. That's right. And we know what happened to him.

Because, you know, he was a West Coast fisheries minister who got trapped in an East Coast fishing problem, the Tunagate problem, right? Yes, of course. And it cost him his job. It brings back memories from my childhood, Peter. I remember Tunagate very well. Yeah.

Well, so do I. I remember that. I mean, that was the first cabinet, I think it was the first cabinet loss for Mulroney. I think it was before Robert Co loss for uh for mulroney it was even i think it was before robert coates yeah i think most of yeah most of british british columbia voted uh majority seats to conservatives in 84 in 88 the majority of the seats went to new democrats british columbians were ahead of the curve and not supporting mulroney in 88 over free trade actually and even

to this day less than half of british columbia's trade is with the united states so so that the importance of that relationship as opposed to our importance of domestic spend and all that but yeah john fraser he uh he was vulnerable for a long time because a lot of those fights um all right we remember john fraser for a moment who was also a great speaker that was a comment um and a really good guy really good gentleman all right uh we're gonna take our break and we come back and we'll come back, and we talk about Musk and does he have the solution to dealing with government waste.

In some ways, you know, I mean, James pointed to examples between the private sector and the government sector on how to deal with cost-cutting when it comes to waste. This is supposedly what they're trying to do in the States right now, and we'll talk about that right after this. And welcome back. You're listening to the latest of the Moore-Butts conversations. James Moore, former Conservative Cabinet Minister, and Gerry Butts, the former Principal Secretary to Prime Minister Trudeau. With us once again, and I forget which number this is, I think this is number 19 of the Moore-Butts conversations.

We've certainly had a lot of success with them. The topic this day is how to deal with government waste. And we're talking about this because it's always an issue on the one hand and on the other hand quite apart from everything else that's going on in the United States and their relationship with Canada we are watching closely how this department of government efficiency that that Elon Musk has been asked to contribute to in terms of cost cutting and going after waste. I mean, the Americans have a problem in terms of a deficit. There's no question about that.

And they're dead. It's whatever it is now, $37 trillion or some unbelievable number. And so he's slashing and burning in a way we've never seen before. So I want to get some sense from the two of you as to what you make of that. And is this idea something, this idea of bringing in somebody from outside government to basically establish, in some ways, a government department to slash and burn? Is this something that we could end up looking at here in Canada or should end up looking at here in Canada?

Jerry, why don't you start this time? Well, I'll start with, I mean, I think like so much of what Elon Musk does with his fortune, it's kind of a dishonest joke on the public, what's happening in the United States. And there are a lot of terrifying things going on in the world these days. The one that terrifies me most is this actually, because I think the United States government, the people who elected Donald Trump think the United States government doesn't do anything worthwhile. And so he can rely on a deep well of people cheering on whatever it is he cuts.

But the United States does all kinds of things that are really important, not just to the United States, but if they're done badly, can affect everybody else. And I'm thinking here in particular of this week, we learned that they fired 400 nuclear scientists in the Department of Energy who are responsible for securing the United States of America's nuclear arsenal. And they didn't realize until after they fired them what these people did for a living. Now they're busily trying to get them all back and half of them are like, screw you guys, I'm not doing this anymore. So I think that, you know, he, when he did that very, very strange press conference in the White House with his child and Trump just sort of sitting there silently for half an hour, he said, when someone asked him about mistakes, he said something like, well, nobody bats a thousand. Well, you know who does bat a thousand? Nuclear scientists bat a thousand. Because if they didn't, the half-life of plutonium

239 is 24,000 years years so that's how long we're dealing with mistakes on planet earth if these people make them so they don't make them and that really worries me the general point i think it's always good to get people who are not creatures of government in looking at government uh unfortunately there's been a professionalization of that function if i can be diplomatic about it peter and you have consulting firms that make a fortune present decks that they present to every government they've ever done that uh for and nothing ever comes of it except that the public gets more cynical about the whole exercise because i'm not going to name them because they're all you know um hard-working people but consultancy x gets paid 10 million

dollars to give government advice that is either unworkable unimplementable or ends up the whole exercise ends up costing more money than it saves and i think that cycle the public is on to and uh there's got to be a better way of doing it but i do think it's always helpful to get the private sector to look at government james so you i appreciate your cynicism on deliverology that's not that is the opposite of deliverology yeah but hiring people to do things that public servants should be doing and could probably do better yeah i mean there's a to your point peter about bringing in outside brains um paul martin did this when he brought in David Emerson. Right. But he brought him in.

We put him in a relatively safe level riding in Vancouver Kings. We brought him into cabinet, did all that. And David Emerson, I think, had far more wins than losses to the point where Stephen Harper invited him to come into cabinet and, you know, to help with that guy from Port Moody. But there you are. That's me, by the way. But no, but David, I learned a lot from David as he was a real mentor of mine as a cabinet minister when I was first elected into government and learning a lot about him and how he assesses things

in terms of value add. Then when Stephen Harper, we also brought in Gwyn Morgan, you may remember, to look at government appointments and how we can do them more effectively and efficiently. And we tried to make that work. It didn't work. But but I think the effort was there to gain the public's confidence into the private sector. But some of it is about the capacity to actually fix government and make it better. But I think a lot of it as well is to draw in the public that we have confidence in. So Elon Musk, in spite of all the conflicts of interest, in spite of the imperfections, in spite of the bluntness and the bravado around which he's doing it, and these sort of, you know, half dozen 23-year-old incels that are in some office somewhere trying to figure out how the government of the United States works and

just taking a hatchet to things. In spite of all of that of that you know I think for a lot of people who are who believe the government of the United States is grossly inefficient grossly overstaffed and grossly under delivering having somebody come in and sort of grab it by its ankles and shake it upside down I think will maybe reconstitute some confidence in the government of the United States going forward that maybe they have been made as efficient as possible. So therefore, what we've got is what we've got. We better figure out a way to pay for it or vote to not do certain things and actually have an honest conversation now. So I think there could be some pedagogy in the crazy appearing dysfunction of things that could result in some people having more confidence in the U.S. government than they otherwise might not have had. So that could be a benefit of this in sort of my most rose-colored analysis.

The magnitude of the issue in the United States is very poorly understood here in Canada. Like you hear lots of people even in the business community cheering on U.S. economic policy. Well, the United States is running a federal deficit that's about 7.5% of GDP, which is roughly the size of the Canadian economy. Deficit. And to the point... Yeah, so people wonder why President Trump

is bringing in tariffs because he believes that tariffs are a tax that foreigners pay for domestic priorities. Well, no, it's not, but it's what he believes. But the reason why he wants to do that, of course, as you said at the beginning, Peter, is the U.S., the debt in the United States is about $37 to $40 trillion.

When George W. Bush was president of the United States, the U.S. national debt was $5 trillion, and that was a lot. Now the U.S. adds $1 trillion in new debt every 100 days. The ski jump of debt in the United States is massive and unsustainable. And that's before President Trump does his tax cut. So if he thinks he's going to offset that with tariffs and of course, tariffs will get you a bunch of money early. But then the return on tariffs slides over time because people in the United States will adjust their spending. And then they realize what's being tariffed and what's not, what's more expensive and what's not.

And just as we'll have buy Canada programs and approaches, Americans will have buy USA. So anything that's coming in from the States will not be bought and therefore not tariffed and therefore no revenue. So at a certain point, these these lines in a graph are going to collide. And it's it's a similar problem in Canada, but in the United States, I might have my figures slightly off here, Peter, but I think it's something like two thirds of federal spending is either entitlement programs like social security or defense, right? So if you're trying to solve a seven and a half percent of GDP problem by

looking at 30 to 35% of the federal budget, you're going to have a huge problem. And I, and I think, I think that's similar to the problem we have in Canada, right? Like that the federal government having run a premier's office and a prime minister's office, the premiers, and I feel for them all, especially in this economic environment, they pay for real services, right? They pay for schools, they pay for hospitals, they pay for road repair, they pay for all the things that people think of as quote unquote government. Whereas the federal government, other than

direct spending on the military and important programs for indigenous people, what the federal government really tries to do is to use the weight of the federal purse to convince other people to do things, right? That's what the federal government does. It transfers money from the government of Canada to either provinces or other actors within the economy to try to make things happen. And that's super difficult.

But once you start, once you open up those veins, it's very difficult to close them. You know, it was interesting, it was either yesterday or the day before yesterday, the Americans and Trump in particular said that in his conversations with Vladimir Putin, he sort of ventured the idea that they both cut their defense spending in half. Well, I want to think about that for a minute.

If they actually did, the Americans cut their defense spending in half. It's running around 3%, 3.5% right now. If they cut it in half, it would be basically the same kind of percentage that Canada has. It would also take a lot of money out of the American economy

because that's mostly procurement, right? That's jobs. So I don't know. Every time you think these things through or look at the different angles to them, you see potential problems. So I get it. This whole idea of trying to cut back spending, it's tough. There's all kinds of angles to it.

Let me ask this as a, in in a way a kind of concluding thought um and and you know perhaps i'm wrong on the assumptions based on here but it seems that most people feel that government only grows it never reduces in numbers whether it's in in the people who are employed by government or the amount of money that's spent by government. Is it true, and is there any way around that, or is that just life in countries that are expanding, more people, more programs, et cetera, et cetera?

Generally, yes, but you couldn't argue that the Canadian military has grown. You couldn't argue, like, there are certain parts. But we have an aging population. And as you get older, we need to take care of each other, right? As the body fails and the mind fails and our social systems fail, people, we rely on each other. Like, we do. And, you know, in a system where we believe in, you know,

an ethic of common provision when it comes to health care and social services and being decent to each other in our sunset years, then, yeah, government's going to get bigger. You can reprioritize and reprofile things. But, you know, as we go from 30 million Canadians to 40 to 42 million Canadians, government will get bigger. The question is, does it get bigger proportionally? And does it get efficient and effective with that spend?

And I think that's what people are looking for. And in a lot of ways, you know, that example that I gave of the private sector, where you can just sort of click on your phone and everything gets delivered to your house and all that, that's overall, that's a good pressure. It's a good pressure on everything, good pressure on governments to try to figure out ways to get it better. And a lot of ways the government has figured out ways in order to make it better um but where if government is sort of overall getting bigger and it's not efficient you know going back to the elon musk example is that the public starts to get very despondent and they start being tolerant of people who want to come in and take a hatchet to the overall enterprise of government because the people who want people

who voted for donald trump those bernie sand Sanders to Trump switch voters, those Midwestern people, they have real problems. They have real challenges in their lives, whether it's a spouse who has succumbed to the fentanyl crisis or it's not finding jobs, not being like, frankly, being too old to retool all their skills or learn a new capacity. The ability to buy a home and debt in a student debt, like they have real problems and real challenges. And if it's all just sort of being treated as sort of this big game by Elon Musk and the government, as opposed to finding ways to make government more effective to serve you, then I think they get equally as despondent with a government that is too big and too cumbersome to help them as they are with a government that, and actors who are being,

who are treating government as sort of this a government that and actors who are being who are treating government as sort of this play thing that they can just kind of make more efficient is almost like a, you know, an exercise of intellectual curiosity as opposed to making things better for you. And those people who voted for Trump expecting government will make their lives better. Are they're going to be really dissatisfied by the end of this process if it doesn't result in a better life for them? Jerry?

Yeah, look, I think that's a great note to end on, Peter. I think the debate about government waste in the United States is really a poor stand-in for what people really feel, which is that national institutions have failed them dramatically this century, right? what people really feel which is that national institutions have failed them dramatically this century right i think that we are and this would be a fun topic to get into as james james and i are both uh armchair american historians but uh uh this century if you put your shoes yourself in the shoes of a regular american it started with 9 11 which was responded to with a pointless war that killed tens of thousands of Americans, cost several trillion dollars, left families all over the country with people missing around the dinner table or coming back not themselves.

And then when the great financial crisis happened, the Obama administration bailed out the wealthiest and allowed regular Americans to lose their homes by the tens of thousands. And I think that those two things together have a very long tail that we're still living with in the way that the United States is currently at war with itself. And that Donald Trump being elected right after those two things happened the first time is not an accident at all. I think regular Americans feel that their country has failed them and that that is embodied in the national institutions that no longer enjoy the support of the majority of Americans to understate the point dramatically. And Elon Musk is sort of taking advantage of that sentiment, and he's dismantling institutions of the federal government

in order to enrich himself and his business partners. Did something have to be tried, though? Absolutely. I mean, you know, it's a very depressing picture you're painting here in terms of where we could be heading. I'm very worried, Peter. I think I've said this in the past. You know what I do for a living these days?

We kind of worry about these things professionally. So maybe it's the old story that if you've been fighting crime long enough, you see everybody's criminality. But I think that we are in a very dangerous moment with the United States right now, both its proximate neighbors and erstwhile friends and allies. But the United States is no longer a dependable dance partner for anything. Well, the thing about domestic spend in the United States, the biggest terrorist attack since Pearl Harbor happens on 9-11. So Americans consent to all the spend go to war. There's four or five trillion dollars was spent on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined. And it comes out of it in the public.

Generally speaking, the United States thinks both of those were a waste of time, treasure and soil and blood rather and all that. Then the 08 recession comes and there's all this massive spend. As Jerry said they bailed out all the bigs all the banks were made whole and everyday americans were left you know losing their 401ks losing their real estate assets and being really despondent about their economic future well then as a response to that donald trump's going to come in and bring in elon musk and sort of right the ship and all that if this fails what else is there right we tried the big spend. We tried all that. We tried that. And then we brought in a guy, the richest man in the world, who's built SpaceX, who's built Tesla, who's built the boring companies, built all these things, Neuralink and all that.

And he's going to come in. Well, if he can't fix it, nobody can fix it. He's not going to fix it. So then where are we at? Then where are we at in terms of and because the Elon Musk approach is laced with all kinds of conflicts conflicts of interest he's one of the biggest in his company has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of government spend and military procurement like how is he going to properly assess nasa relative to the competitor of spacex how is he actually going to when it comes to spending in the auto sector and and the you know the greenfield investments that have been made in tennessee

and and across the midwest of the united states and south carolina to make him like the federal government investing in competitors to elon musk he's going to put well like it's just it's laced with self-evident problems of confidence that the public can have in this process so if you can't trust obama and you can't trust george w bush you can't trust donald trump and you can't trust elon musk you can't then forget it forget it and you throw your hands up and you say there's none of this works. And I'm still worse off. And part of this is frankly, part of this is what in some ways makes me a lot of ways a small C conservative is that maybe I have the luxury of being able to say this. But like, you know, if you're dependent on politicians and governments and electoral outcomes in order to determine your health, safety and security in life, then you're you're never going to be satisfied because they will never satisfy you. And I'm again, I'm privileged to be able to say that. But people who aren't in that spot. Yeah, they're going to get really, really angry. And I don't

know how you sort of bring them back to the table to say, no, vote in the next election to elect the next crew of people who will fix it. And they're like, well, we tried George W w bush we tried barack obama we tried donald trump none of it seems to work and i'm not better off like then where does that leave you in terms of people thinking what the solution is and i don't know the answer to that but but it leads one to think dark things all right what a place to leave it um but uh that is where we've left it. Another fascinating conversation, another fascinating more butts conversation. Thank you both gentlemen. We'll talk again in the future.

If it is our 19th, James and I, our conversations are now drinking age, so we can have a beer. Absolutely. Always a pleasure to bring darkness across the land. Take care to both of you. We'll talk soon.

And yes, that was Moorbutt's conversation number 19. It goes back, we try to do them once every six weeks or so. And I know from your letters that you find them really interesting. And I think for the most part, you can go back to any one of those 19 and you will learn something about how government works, how political parties work in the system. And that was the whole idea behind getting James Moore and Gerald Butts together on these conversations.

Because I think, as you see from that one, the partisan nature of what these people normally do does not come up. They really have taken this seriously in trying to give you a sense of what it's really like behind the scenes. And this one was equally interesting in terms of trying to understand how governments deal with cutting and finding waste and dealing with that. At a time when governments are growing, population is expanding, extra services are needed. It's all, you know, it's a constant challenge.

But certainly dark horizons, if you believe those two guys, in terms of what we may be looking at as we move on into the future. That was our Encore Edition for this Wednesday. I'm Peter Mansbridge. We'll see you tomorrow with your turn and the Random Renter.