The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - SMT - The Claim That Trudeau Is A "Dictator"

Episode Date: March 30, 2022

It's a perfect Smoke Mirrors and The Truth topic -- a relatively unknown Conservative MP quotes from a dictionary to claim "many people" believe Justin Trudeau is a dictator.  Bruce Anderson on that plus, another SMT topic, is there anything but "smoke" behind Trudeau's promise to cut carbon emissions by 40 percent by 2030.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. It is Wednesday. It is Smoke, Mirrors, and the Truth. It is Bruce Anderson. And hello there, Peter Mansbridge in Toronto today. You know, I love the title of this Smoke,, Mirrors and the Truth, the Wednesday episode. Bruce actually came up with, well, most of that title. Two-thirds of that title. But it was his inspiration that drove us to Smoke, Mirrors and the Truth. And the reason I love that is it gives us such a wide open space to talk about stuff.

I mean, we could talk about one of the great smoke mirrors and the truth artists, Vladimir Putin, who yesterday left everybody with the impression early in the day that they were going to be backing off. And then by the end of the day, he was pounding Kiev from the air. That was a lot of smoke. Those were a lot of mirrors. No question about what the truth was there. We could talk about that, but we've talked about Putin, Ukraine, all week.

So we're going to move on. We're going to move on. There's definitely things to talk about here. And here's the first one for this week. Have you ever heard of Rachel Thomas? I don't know. I'm not sure too many people have probably heard of Rachel Thomas. She's a Conservative Member of Parliament from Lethbridge, Alberta.

Won election three times in a row with considerable majorities. One of them was like over 60% of the riding voted for her. Not unusual in Alberta for that kind of support for a Conservative. But nevertheless, she's certainly got the backing of her riding. Well, this week she got up in the House of Commons. We're going to run this little clip. And she had this to say about the prime minister. So I'm just going to run it.

It's only like 30 or 40 seconds. So let's see what Rachel Thomas had to say. Dictator. I just did a quick review in the dictionary. So according to the Oxford Dictionary, a dictator is a ruler with total power over a country, typically one who has obtained control by force. There are many Canadians that would believe, that would hold the view,

that this does apply to Mr. Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada. And it is up to, I apologize for using his name, to the Prime Minister of Canada. And it's actually up to the Canadian people to determine that. And they'll be determining that at the next election. So there you have Rachel Thomason. First of all, she said, I apologize for using his name. Not because she was withdrawing her claim, but it's because in the House of Commons,

you're not supposed to actually use somebody's name who sits in the House. You can use their title, as she did, about Prime Minister. But that's kind of irrelevant to what the main issue is here. Rachel Thomas, who was elected just most recently, a couple of months ago, in the same election that Justin Trudeau was elected, has decided that Justin Trudeau, in fact, is a dictator. We know what a dictator is.

We've been dealing with one for the last couple of months. And we've seen lots of them in different places around the world. But Justin Trudeau, a dictator? People have strong feelings about Justin Trudeau, no question about that. But dictator? People have strong feelings about Justin Trudeau, no question about that. But dictator? She's getting hammered. Not just from opposition benches, but from inside her own party. Bruce.

I tried Peter yesterday in the spirit of trying not to be, I don't know, negative, not to be, you know, I hear when people talk about cancel culture and how we really do have to make sure that we kind of are open to hearing other people's point of view and all of that. So reflexively, I, you know, I had a really bad reaction to that clip. And I tried to think about, well, was it lazy? Was it devious? Was it stupid? And in the end, I just decided it was all of those things. And there's no way to sugarcoat it. I think that if you're an MP, and she's not a new MP.

She's been in the House for several years now. Three-time MP. Three-time. She's got her pension. She's already won her pension. Yeah. Well, you know, you have a responsibility not just to pursue the partisan argument that you want. And she was making a speech about the government's current bill. And there are people of good faith who disagree

with what the government wants to do with respect to the Broadcast and Telecommunications Act and regulation of content on the internet. And some of the arguments that I think she makes, I don't agree with them, but I found that they're reasonable arguments for people to make and they're important arguments to be heard in the house of commons but you also do have a responsibility to look at the role that you play in a democracy you put your name up to be the candidate for a party you run an election you win an election you expect that people looking at that will not decide that you won that election by force and that your role in the House of Commons is illegitimate. If somebody had said that to her or about her, she would have had the same reaction that I'm having to her saying it about the prime minister.

It's just not reasonable to think that you can hold that office and you can make that sort of statement. And I know she'll probably say today that, well, she said it's going to be up to Canadians to decide whether or not Justin Trudeau took power in the country by force and has total power. So it's a debatable thing. It's not a debatable thing. He didn't take power in the country by force. He doesn't have total control. And he did win those elections. So that really troubles me. And if anything good has come out of it, it's that, you know, I looked at her Facebook page, because that's how a lot of this stuff can become a bigger problem, right? Is that these things get posted on the internet, different platforms, and all of a sudden, more people hear it. And a lot of people are susceptible to believing something like that. Maybe they haven't studied civics.

Maybe they don't know very much about what happens in elections. And maybe they trust only the people who share their partisan leanings. And so we have to be really careful about that. I looked at the post on our Facebook page, and a lot of people were commenting on it. A lot of people who were followers of hers were consuming it, and many of them were cheering her on. And I'm not suggesting that that kind of comment be censored. That is not where I'm coming from on this. I think it's good that she can say that. I think it's good that the rest of us can look at it and say that's shameful.

And that's what a lot of people are doing today. And then the larger question and the last point I'll make, Peter, and I'd love to hear what you think about this, is that we are watching every day what happens when a dictator who does have total control in his country, who holds that control on the basis of the exertion of power, putting people in jail in large numbers for having a different point of view. Vladimir Putin is a daily reminder, a hourly reminder of what actual dictatorship looks like and how many deaths it's causing and how much havoc is wreaking in the world how much disruption we're all feeling because of it and so we shouldn't be using that term lightly we shouldn't be throwing it around as though canada's become a dictatorship we need to kind of reckon we need to be real in our partisanship, not use these terms that are designed to kind of inflame people can start to believe things that aren't true

about the functioning of their democracy and how much civil unrest, how much distress and pain and suffering and distraction it can cause. And, you know, so I hope that the conservatives that surround her in the House of Commons take her aside and say, look, that's not helpful. It's not helpful to you. It's not helpful to the party. It's not helpful to the country. And we've got to stay within some guardrails in how we talk about public policy issues. Well, if you think in this climate there are going to be members of her party who take her aside and say, this is harmful. You shouldn't be doing this. I think you're dreaming in colour.

Because that's not going to happen. Because we live in a climate where, you know, claims and counterclaims firing back and forth across the floor of the House of Commons are nothing unusual. This is unusual for a number of reasons. And I think, you know, she's getting attention, which she's never had before and may well never have again in her political career, no matter how long it goes. But she's certainly being talked about as a result of saying what she said. Now, look know as you mentioned as i've mentioned we're in

a climate where deep strong feelings against the government against the prime minister in particular um are have been evident for some time i mean let's face it the you know his party won what 32 percent of the vote leaves a lot of room to criticize from the other two-thirds of the population. And he personally seems to draw a degree of hatred. I mean, there is no other word for it. We saw it through the convoy. That wasn't just a couple of people that was a you know a somewhat significant number of people who chose to show their feelings about him in the most obvious and direct way through their banners and flags

and shouts and etc etc so as you say there will there will be some there will be some attraction to her her comments as as ridiculous as they seem to use that word i mean there's lots of words she could use about justin trudeau and and nobody's going to say boo but to call him a dictator to call him a dictator after going to the trouble of looking the word up in a dictionary and reading the dictionary definition of dictator and still sticking with it. You know, I mean,

it's like, I'm going to read this thing that is so clearly not this other thing. And I'm going to say, these things are the same. That is lunacy. Absolute lunacy. Now there's another thing that she did in that statement, which she's not alone in doing. happens a lot and this this takes it away from this discussion

about dictator and about justin trudeau but this claim that she prefaces the whole thing with many people say right you know um which is know, a common term used by the lazy. Not just politicians. Journalists. I've used it myself. You probably have used it as well. And advertisers use it. You know, I saw one, you know, last night.

I won't name which one it was in case they're a sponsor on this program. But this preface to claims that many people say, blah, blah, blah. Trump used to do it all the time. Still does it all the time. People are saying. People are saying. People are saying, or many people say, with no evidentiary base to the claim. No, as Stephen Chase of the Globe and Mail pointed out, they didn't quote a poll there to back up or claim that many people say this. But it's one of those phrases that should, as soon as an audience hears it coming out of the mouth of anyone, politician, journalist, business person, whomever,

the red flag should go up and say, this person is just BSing us here. They don't have the facts to back up their claim. It's a little thing, but there's so much little in that 20 or 30 seconds from Rachel Thomas. That was the comments this week. That blows this thing up and should put everybody on some kind of guard about what they listen to and who they're listening to it from. Yeah, I think that's right. I think that the sloppiness of the many people say,

and this is what I'm hearing and everything else. I mean, these are terms and features of marketing, as you say, and advocacy that have been used for a long time. I think what's different now is that pieces of advocacy or marketing or political argument get weaponized and multiplied and spread so quickly and people live within these kind of bubbles that are self-perpetuating and self-supporting and so they share this kind of thing and all of a sudden it becomes if not an article of faith, it becomes a dominant part of the conversation in a way of thinking about things. And I think your point earlier about, you know, that Trudeau and how many I don't know if I mentioned it in our conversation last week, but I look back over 10 years, I guess, maybe 12 of our polling on how people feel about him. And the number of people who really like him has been in the 10 to 13% range consistently through that

period of time, with the exception of a year and a half after the 2015 election, where it spiked up to about 20, 22, 23 percent. These are people who say, I really like this guy. The number of people who really don't like this guy has gone from 13 percent in 10 years ago, called 10 years ago, to 30 percent now. So that's significant growth. And 30 percent is about 9 million adults. But it's 30% who really don't like them. And to your point, if we're trying to understand how the prime minister figures into this, that's a big well of public opinion to tap into if you want to say something negative about him. But if you say, literally, there's a menu of 150,000 different things that you could say negatively about Justin

Trudeau before you say something that's untrue about our system of democracy. And that's really the issue that I take with this. was making an argument about his his public policy choice and she she decided that she was going to kind of wrap her arms around the phenomena of people willing to believe that something is being done to them and the way that it's being done to them is illegitimate uh and shouldn't be trusted. And what we know about that blockade that happened, which she also was a very vocal supporter of, is that people believed that they weren't breaking the law because they thought that the law was illegitimate. And that's just not how it works. And it's just not what members of parliament should do, or if they're determined that they're going to do it,

they should campaign on that basis. They should say, vote for me because I don't trust the laws. I don't trust the democracy that we have. I'm going to use my voice if you elect me to call down the institutions and say they don't work, they're broken, they're corrupted. She's not doing that. She's sort of in there, you know, kind of playing on a policy argument, and at the same time, kind of rallying to her cause, people who are given to these conspiracy theories. And that's a really unhelpful thing. These conspiracy theories are going to undermine our social fabric. They're not just a question of should you be able to believe that climate change isn't happening? People obviously

can believe that. It's really a question of whether or not we're basically going to try to traffic in facts as well as arguments, or we're going to use arguments that are based on facts rather than mistruths. And so, yeah, very worried about it. And maybe we shouldn't sound like we're picking on this one person, but it was a kind of a moment. And a lot of a lot of people, to use the expression, have been commenting on it. And I think it's a useful conversation to have. And people who listen to this conversation will come to their own views about it, hopefully. Well, at least on the bridge, she has now had her 15 minutes of fame. And whether it carries on from that or not, well, I guess we'll just have to see.

We're going to take a quick break. Then we're going to come back and we're going to call out the same thing, Smoke, Mirrors, and the Truth on Justin Trudeau. That's right after this. And welcome back. Bruce Anderson's in Ottawa. I'm Peter Mansbridge in Toronto. Today you're listening to Smoke, Mirrors and the Truth on The Bridge, on

Sirius XM, Channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform. I should just add one more thing to the Ukraine story that we touched on or I kind of half mentioned right

out of the gate here today in terms of Putin's reversal on, well, not necessarily reversal, but a sort of a claim in the morning from Russia that they were, yesterday morning, claiming that they were backing off from some of the encirclement of Kiev and then hammering Kiev at night. It always reminds me of one of the great smoke mirrors in the truth quotations. It's more than 100 years old. It was from a British general, not a Russian or an American or a Canadian.

It was a British general who, during the Boer War, in a briefing with reporters, somebody challenged one of the facts he was using and the guy leaned over and he said listen I will never lie to you but don't assume that means I'm telling you the truth. I love that quote and it still applies today on so many things so keep that one in mind. So here's the question about Justin Trudeau and trying to determine what's smoke, what's mirrors, what's the truth. I don't want to fall into the trap of the minutiae of energy policy. But we've all heard promises from governments before, including this one, about where they were going on emissions targets. And they dropped another one yesterday.

Big one. 40% cut in carbon emissions by 2030. Now, when I say we've all heard these promises before, different kinds of promises on carbon emissions, and they've never been met. They never get met. So was this smoke? Was this all just mirrors?

Was there any truth? I guess 2030 will determine how true it was. But I think Canadians have a right to look at this with saying, oh yeah, here they go, another promise. Why should I believe anything on this file so as i said without going into the minutiae of energy policy and environmental policy what do you believe here i remember i think it was not long after the 2015 election and you and I and Chantal and Andrew Coyne were talking on that issue one night. And we were talking about whether pipelines were going to become one of the more controversial issues facing the government,

dominating kind of politics of the coming years. And I remember feeling that that was the case, that there was so much pressure building up in certain parts of Canadian society with concern about climate change and at the other end of the spectrum there were people who basically made their living and built their political careers around the heaviest emitting sectors of our economy and it felt to me that this rising global concern about climate change was going to kind of eventually run more directly into conflict with the forces that have the interests in not attenuating those emissions or saw the reduction of those emissions as being really, really difficult to do in an economically sound way, and threatening as a result. And that has been the

story for the last number of years. And so when I think about what governments can do, I think the first question that comes to mind for me is governments don't make these emissions. Governments are elected with a mandate that's always a little bit vague and uncertain you mentioned the point about how many people actually voted for the government in the last for the liberals in the last elections south of 35 so somebody could look at that and say well they said that they were going to cut emissions by this much and they won the election therefore they have the mandate to do that i happen to believe that's true but I also recognize they live in a world where not everybody consumed the minutiae of those policy promises or understands exactly what it is going to take, what sacrifices might be involved,

what opportunities might present themselves as the country grapples towards that. So I have a lot of respect for politicians who've been trying to move the yardsticks on climate change because I understand how fragile that political consensus is. In the 2019 election, Andrew Scheer, leading the Conservatives, said, if I'm elected, bill number one will be to cancel the liberal carbon tax. And you remember, Peter, that Doug Ford campaigned against it. Jason Kenney and others took it to court, lost those court cases. So I happen to feel carbon pricing is one of the more important policy tools, whereby if you increase the cost of using carbon intensive forms of energy, eventually there will be less use of those.

And I think the government did a smart thing in providing people with rebates as they put that pricing into effect. But, you know, for everybody who might say, well, how come we haven't hit the targets then? I think there needs to be an understanding that it is that we're not going to start seeing emissions go down immediately upon flipping some of those policy switches. They're going to take time, and that's why the targets are a little further out, and that's why the discussion yesterday talked about the acceleration of emissions reduction eight or nine years from now, I think it was, or towards the end of that process, because,

and this is kind of the last point i wanted to make is that at the center of it for the first time you have the biggest oil sands companies in the country all have in in the last year really committed to achieving a kind of a net zero place which basically means that the production of their barrels of oil, which carries some greenhouse gas emissions, is going to be offset through a number of different means, one of which is this idea of carbon capture and storage, which the government said yesterday. We will announce more policies, probably in the budget next week, which allow companies to figure out how they can make investments in these technologies, which will take time to build,

which will take a little bit of time to create the kind of momentum that everybody's looking for. But if there's really good news yesterday, it's that we're not having a huge national energy plan style fight about that today. The oil sands companies are saying, we hear you on the targets. We believe in this technology. We want to invest in a net zero future. We're going to get there. There are skeptics about it. But this is the first time where we haven't had a kind of a liberal government on the one hand saying we're going to do this and the oil patch on the other hand saying there's no saying we're going to do this and the oil patch on the other hand saying there's no chance you're going to do that when all of the other politicians

on the conservative side side saying we're going to stop you from doing that certainly there are some who are still saying that but the consensus is moving in a positive direction i think as somebody who cares about this issue um i guess the question of whether whether it's all just blowing smoke or not, I don't think it is all just blowing smoke for the reasons you just said, because so many of the big energy companies are, if not 100% on side, are certainly more than halfway on side, they're doing things to to head in that direction so there's going to be some accomplishment whether it's reaches 40 or not by 2030 who knows plus you know there's like two or at least two maybe three elections before then

any number of different there are lots of other moving parts too right it's not just what they do it's whether we use electric vehicles. It's all kinds of things in the buildings and that sort of thing. But one other thing. You're listening to the guy who ordered his EV and then canceled it because he didn't like Elon Musk, right? So he's still pushing out oil-inspired cars. I'm going to get that EV, but in the meantime, I'm going to walk more and drive less. But here's the thing, though, Peter. You mentioned what the companies are going to get that. Oil-inspired cars. But in the meantime, I'm going to walk more and drive less. But here's the thing, though, Peter.

You mentioned what the companies are going to do. And I think the important distinction that's only come to the fore in the last four or five years is that whatever they do, they're not going to do it just because Justin Trudeau wants them to do it or passes a law that says they should do it or provides incentives even, those incentives will help them do it. Dictator. Forcing laws, pushing laws, making them do things. Dictator. Yeah, dictating things. No, but the biggest reason is that the investment markets have shifted. And the biggest pension funds in the world, the biggest investment pools in the world are all saying we want to invest in a net zero future. And so if you're an oil company and you want to attract investment so you can continue drilling and exploring and producing oil, you need to live within the marketplace for capital as it exists now, which is very different from what existed five years ago.

And it's that force, plus the idea of, okay, there's a technology that we've been working on, and that the government is going to help fund the exploitation of those two things together are different. And they have something to do, obviously, with politics, but it's not because of a politician that these choices are happening, or at least not only because of a politician. Okay. Last area in the last couple of minutes we got. You did mention how some conservative politicians are still against these moves and promising to stop them, or at least try and stop them. And the trio of Conservative premiers in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba are part of that. And it was interesting this week to see how our favourite Alberta premier, who makes it somehow onto our programs every week, Jason Kenney, has reacted to the latest moves on the part of the federal government in terms of energy.

Jason Kenney is a formidable user of social media. He always has been. He was when he was a federal cabinet minister. He trots his stuff out all the time on Twitter or Instagram. He's like there all the time. And every day he has something that he's pushing. How successful that's been, I'm not sure, because he seems to be in an enormous amount of trouble all the time. Anyway, this week, where does he go to? What's the card he pulls out of the deck to play on energy in his fight against Ottawa? He

pulls out the Chris Rock story, the King William story, the slap. That is his big move this week in comparing not himself, but certainly his views, along with the slapper. It was a strange decision on his part, especially seeing as that whole thing has blown up into a much bigger thing than it was just on Sunday night at the Oscars. You know, I feel like I'm handing you a softball. There's a big, fat one right over the plate. Well, there are only two possible explanations for it.

Because he hasn't lost his mind. He's still a smart guy um so the only two possible explanations is that somebody had control of his social media platform and decided that this was funny and not enough people looked at it and said is it really though and shut it down before it got out there um and so he felt obliged to kind of support it, double down, say it's just a way of making a point, that kind of thing. But an accident is certainly one of the, and you and I have been around politics enough to know that sometimes the answer is somebody just screwed up. And I think that's probably the most likely scenario here. The other scenario is he's deep, deep, deep in trouble with the base of the United Conservative Party. especially those in Alberta who in the oil patch, as I've just been saying, are trying to attract investment and convince investors that they are interested in climate action, that they are

committed to reducing emissions. So those people were left high and dry by this message. It looked as though they had a premier who was contradicting the idea of Alberta becoming a greener place to invest, a cleaner economy in the long term, a place committed to environmental and climate change progress. But then maybe he wasn't, he was willing to live with their annoyance. Maybe he was willing to live with, I'm sure he was willing to live with the outrage of what he would probably call the woke. If only he could develop a little bit of a spark of more affection with those people who say,

climate change is a hoax. I don't want to see us doing anything in this area. I love the idea of smacking down the people who believe in green energy plants. But I don't know that he counted on if that was a strategy as opposed to just an accident. I don't know if he counted on what did happen, which is some of the people who've been really vocal supporters of Alberta's energy policy and Kenny's energy policies in particular, people like Vivian Krause and a woman who posted on Twitter who had been, I think, chief of staff to the energy minister in Alberta, both of whom expressed embarrassment at what Kenny's message was,

disappointment in it. So maybe those weren't, you know, the kind of the hardcore climate deniers on the fringes of the UCP, but they were part of the coalition that got him elected and supported him. And he damaged his relationship with them. And it remains to be seen whether or not that was a trade, if it was a deliberate trade, that will turn out in his favor as his leadership vote approaches. Okay, I've got one minute left. Let's see whether you can answer this one in a minute. We're going to see hundreds of polls between now and the next U.S. presidential election in 2024. We saw one this morning. Came out from Harvard and the Harris polling company.

So, you know, some credibility there on both those parts, especially Harvard, who now have three graduates playing for the Toronto Maple Leafs. So they're... Well, they've tried everything else. It's good that they're trying that. Well, remember what King Clancy said. If you can't beat them in the library, you won't beat them on the ice. So they've gone back a hundred years

for that theory. We'll see whether that works. You did the Boer War and King Clancy today. What's next? I know. I got a letter yesterday saying, stop talking about World War II. You sound old and you're out of date on theories. You get too much mail. Yeah, I know. Anyway, listen.

I'll eventually get to my question this poll shows trump beating biden so this isn't some flaky you know poll out there on the fringes it's a you know a legitimate poll yeah yeah yeah um what does that tell us? You know, honestly, we've had six years. The world has had six years to look at and evaluate the idea of Donald Trump as president of the United States. Six years. And I'm scratching my head wondering, what is it that over the course of the six years would possibly make that many millions of Americans say, let's have that again? Literally, I don't get it. It really speaks to what do we think people are looking for in a president and how different is it from what probably used to be the case because i you know had conversations with with clients

that i worked with yesterday about the real challenge that we have is towards the idea is around the idea of stability where historically you know in Canada, we've always had this kind of peace order and good government credo that we kind of like things not to be disrupted all the time, because we can plan our lives around it. We can build our businesses around it. We can, you know, we can imagine peace and safety. And we seem to have entered into a time when the value that's put on that isn't as great as it was, especially it seems by small C conservatives. Why else would small C conservatives in the United States want Donald Trump? That's not stability. That's disruption. That's a complete repudiation of the idea of America's historical place in the world, or at least post-World War II place in the world. But it's also disruptive in every other possible aspect, because as we know, he can't keep a plot straight. He, I was going to say something about his reported hole in one this week, which I don't know.

But anyway. Did I tell you about my hole in one? Yeah. I actually had one. But anyway, we're out of time. I think that it sort of says that too many people right now, for my tastes anyway, are saying, I just want to keep on disrupting things. And or I think it's fun to elect somebody who's so disruptive because I don't really feel the negative consequences of that. But I think if we look around the world, we know there are negative consequences for a lot of people when individuals like Donald Trump, and I say

that as though it's a category, and it's not. It is a little bit of category, but he's pretty unique. Unique, he certainly is. All right. Very good discussion on a number of topics on this day. Bruce will be back on Friday for Good Talk with Chantel. Tomorrow it's your turn, and I'm sure he got lots of comments. The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. Send them in. Remind me where you're writing from. And we'll talk again in 24 hours.

I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks so much for listening. Bye for now.