The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - The Bridge: Encore Presentation - The Moore-Butts Conversation #3 -- Are We Electing Leaders The Right Way?

Episode Date: August 29, 2022

Today an encore presentation of an episode that originally aired on June 6th. James Moore, Conservative and Gerald Butts, Liberal, continue their very special conversations on The Bridge.  Special because they've agreed to keep partisan shots out of the discussion! Today the topic is leadership and the way parties choose their top person.  Is it good enough?  

The following is an encore presentation of The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge, first aired on June 6th. And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge, The Moor Butts Conversation No. Monday. Welcome to another week. The purpose of today's show is the Moore-Butts conversation number three. And for those of you who have been with us for a while on the bridge, you know what that means. James Moore, the former Conservative cabinet Minister under the governments of Stephen Harper, currently a Senior Business Advisor at the multinational law firm of Denton's, and a Public Policy Advisor at the global firm Edelman. James lives in beautiful British Columbia.

He's in Vancouver. Gerald Butts is in Ottawa. Gerald Butts is the former Senior Policy Advisor, Principal Secretary to Justin Trudeau. Now, these two fellows who've been at each other over time, one a conservative, one a liberal, have agreed, they both have a lot of respect for each other, that's clear, and you can see that and hear that in these conversations we've been having. They both agree to try and deal with some major issues that confront politics and the people in a non-partisan way. And that's worked really well through these

conversations. Today is the third one. And the issue on the table is leadership and whether or not we in fact have the right method to pick our leaders. So this is an interesting discussion and let's get right to it. The Moore-Butts conversation number three. Here we go. All right, well, there are more than a few leadership races going on at different levels of government in Canada right now, federal and provincial, and different systems use different techniques in terms of how they pick their leaders. But generally, in a general way, do we in Canada pick our political leaders in a way that delivers the best?

James? I think so. You know, there's no system that is entirely bulletproof. Electoral systems for leaders within political parties, like electoral systems for countries or provinces in general, all of them have their flaws and their merits. When you're designing a system, for example, for a country,

if you have a new emerging democracy or a political party that's just being founded, what you do typically is you sort of rank the virtues that you want to see come out of a system. Participation is a virtue. Diversity is a virtue. Prop come out of a system. Participation is a virtue. Diversity is a virtue. Proportionate engagement of membership or the public is a virtue. You know, you have all kinds of virtues that you aspire to.

You know, strength of mandate, all these kinds of things. And, you know, you can have first past the post, all that. So you try to assert, and you can have fundamental debates about what the most important virtues are, and the system should align with those virtues when the conservative party was formed um coming out of 2002 2003 and stephen harper's election as leader um you know there was there was a great debate within the conservative party because the canadian alliance which was which brought a massive membership base particularly in western canada and big bases in the province of Ontario, was seen to be subsuming the Progressive Conservative Party. And so the party designed our leadership process at the time to have, at the time, 308 ridings

across the country. Now there's 338 that's going to bump up to more in the next campaign. But 308 ridings across the country, all of which would have 100 points. And so if you have a riding association in downtown Montreal that might have 17 members, or if you have a riding association in Lethbridge, Alberta that has 1,700 members, they would all get 100 points. And so the party leadership candidates would invest their time in those parts of the country that are the weakest because you get the highest rate of return relative to your investment of energy. Well, there's a virtue in that. But there's also a virtue in recognizing that one member, one vote. So these are tensions that exist within the party, and the party had fierce debates about it. Famously, Peter McKay and Scott Reid, you know, from different backgrounds coming into the new party. They had real of Canada, the CEO of a G7 country, if you're worthy of that title and worthy of that office, whatever the system is, if it's one member, one vote, 100 points per riding or a delegated convention, if you are worthy of governing this complicated country with its myriad of challenges, you will find a way to responsibly and effectively succeed in whatever the system is that's in front of you in order to earn that mandate that's my view wow that's quite a belief but whatever the system is

for the most part i mean you know we have we hammer these things on on the margins but for the for the most part i mean i you know if the conservative party for example went to a full delegated convention now that would maybe crowd out somebody who is not it has as many financial resources like if you had to physically get all your delegates in, obviously that tips the scale towards people who have deeper pockets. That's a problem. But if you want to peer one member one vote and only digital voting, well then that opens up to somebody who could flood the party

with instant members who are not particularly committed to the cause. So you have a problem on that end. So the parties could put in guardrails. But broadly speaking, if you look at the differences in the systems that we have federally in Canada, or even the provincial ones, for the most part, the correct, it's almost without exception, the correct person in the moment wins the leadership race. If you look at it, in retrospect, you know, some of us who are actors who have been disappointed in races can disagree with that. But it's rare that the person who wins the race, a leadership race in almost any political party, wasn't the person who probably should have won all things considered.

Yeah, you've got to sort of dig deep into history to find perhaps something that would counter that. And you look at 76 and the conservatives and how Clark sort of came up the middle or the outside or whatever you know example you want to use but nobody was picking him going in nobody thought of him that way I mean he ended up winning anyway let's bring Jerry in but I hear what you're saying James Jerry where are you on this well excuse me sorry Peter I certainly agree with where James left off. I think that when you conceive of leadership, when you think about leadership candidate campaigns in the context of the political party that is fielding it, it's usually the question on people's minds is, is this structure purpose built to serve whatever the political party needs at the time right and uh i think that's the most important thing in the minds of of uh voters within these contests themselves i do think that by the nature of the diversity of types of leadership

uh processes we have in different at different orders government amongst different parties sometimes even i talk sometimes even uh within the same broad political tent there are different very different processes to elect leaders uh for instance for the ontario liberal party than there is for the liberal party of canada so i think we're served by that diversity and we learn from our mistakes and we adjust as we go along. I, for one, am a big believer in open membership. I'm a big believer in casting the net as wide as possible to create a political party that's as as close a representation of the public at large as possible. And I think, frankly, the change in the leadership process within the Liberal Party of Canada is what saved the party in the 2012-2013 party process where, you know,

it was a reasonably foreseeable conclusion that the Liberal Party could have disappeared. And it didn't largely because of the leadership campaign of 2013. The reason I mentioned 76, and we could all three of us mention other examples that were similar, where we were surprised. We may have felt the person who won was certainly entitled to win, but we may have been surprised by the result or the way it unfolded. And I'm just wondering whether the current system, does it take surprise out of the equation? I mean, obviously, I like surprise as a journalist. You're trying to make it interesting, and there's nothing better than a long, drawn-out day on the convention floor where things happen that you

weren't assuming might happen. But in terms of today, general way and once again i know as you've both pointed out that systems are different for different parties and and different levels of government but in a general way has surprise been taken out of the equation i don't think so peter when you look at the last couple of conservative leadership races i don't think that those were foregone conclusions from the outset. And as much has been written about how obvious it was that Justin Trudeau was going to be the next leader of the Liberal Party after he became the leader of the Liberal Party. It certainly wasn't obvious at the beginning of that leadership campaign that it was going to happen. We ended up with a process in that campaign that battle tested Trudeau as a leader because he was put through his paces for a good, it feels like it was 10 years long, but I think it was something like 10 months long. It was a very, very long leadership

campaign. And I think it was a relative surprise how easily he won. And I, for one, was surprised that Andrew Scheer won. I lost an office bet on that. I think that there was a reasonable outcome where you could see Peter McKay winning the last conservative leadership. have a process in most political parties that put the guy or gal through the crucible so that the first tough fight you have isn't with your primary opponent in an election campaign. James? To be fair, within the Conservative Party, I don't think any of our races have been, you know, huge surprises most recently. If you go to the provincial side, though, I think there are a couple of examples that are sort of better surprises.

Christy Clark in British Columbia had effectively no caucus support coming on the heels of gordon campbell three majorities in a row big strong governing existing caucus coming out of the 2010 uh olympics um had some tough you know issues with regard to harmonized taxes and all that and christy clark came off the radio show she was formerly in the caucus but had no caucus support at all kevin falcon had the bulk of it and she won uh allison redford uh in alberta at a time when the party was being seen to be too elite and corrupt and insular and all that they decided to open up a little bit and i think with reasonable evidence there was you know a pretty organized campaign by public sector unions particularly teachers unions to, to flood the Alberta Progressive

Conservative Party at the time with basically single-issue members for a one-time vote to get Alison Redford in over a more conservative alternative because they had some collective bargaining on the horizon and they thought that she'd be a more peaceful alternative. And at that time, of course, it was hegemonic power in Alberta. So systems can be influenced and parties do try to guard against that. So there have been some surprises on the provincial side, but federally, it's more complicated. all P provincial dynamics that do inflict themselves on our politics that are hard to sort of paper over and not have to wrestle and earn a reasonable mandate. And if you do become leader of a party with a support base that is clearly levered in one direction over another, then that makes your ability to position yourself as a pan-Canadian leader afterwards particularly challenging.

You know, you made the interesting point about Christy Clark that she did not have any caucus support. And I'm wondering not how important caucus support is, but whether caucus alone should be the one making the decisions. You know, in Britain, that is part of the process there where the caucus basically elects its leader. And there are some who argue that that should be the way, that it's a more natural way that a caucus should determine who the leader is. Well, the British Tories pare it down to two candidates, and then they go to the members for the final vote.

So you can have a suite of candidates. But, of course, there's virtues in that system sure because you're you're leading a parliamentary faction but the problem with another problem the difference is between canadian politics and the uk system um what is that that would obviously uh create a perception bias about the virtues of being an elected member versus being an outsider um you know brian mulroney was an outsider stephen harper wasn't a member of the canadian alliance caucus before he ran so you know that that would create real problems for him in terms of leverage plus if you are like stockwell they was versus stephen harper pre-merger in the canadian alliance he had sort of some tools at his disposal to sort of sweeten the deal to

make people be more favorable to him so that's one problem the second is the nature of canadian political culture it's not just systems the canadian political cultures we have a parliamentary system but we have american style presidential politics so our campaigns are presidential where was doug ford today where's del duca where's justin trudeau where's stephen harper so our our politics is all about where is the leader and what's the leader doing and the camera follows them around but at the end of the day five of the last seven elections federally in canada have yielded minority parliament so you have a you're electing somebody who needs to lead a parliamentary faction but the but their mandate is is derived out through a presidential system of

of of campaigning so so our our political dynamic is unique relative to other countries does our system work against um the true outsider somebody who has no connection at all to paul you rattled off a bunch of names most of them had some connection they may not have had a seat but they had some connection to the party and were kind of known even with the rise of some populism right jack you know jack layton boasted that he was uh one of the top voting getting city councillors in the biggest city of canada that sort of institutional anchor which is i'm an outsider and i represent real people and i'm on your side but but don't worry i still get the institutions and i and i i have a little bit of an anchor there that you can don't worry don't

have to worry too much about christy clark ran again ran as an outsider but she was a former deputy prime minister um you know stephen harper i remember his campaigns and he came from the outside tried to sort of fix the parties and all that but he was a former deputy prime minister. You know, Stephen Harper, I remember his campaigns. He came from the outside, tried to sort of fix the parties and all that, but he was a member of parliament for three years prior to that. So that benefit of having some roots is really important. Now they can get exaggerated. You know, Andrew Scheer being Speaker of the House, for example, is not necessarily a particular skill that's beneficial to being prime minister and sometimes people alternatively boast about their private sector capacities and in ways that are um insincere well then we have the ultimate outsider pierre poiliev careful let's not let's not cross into the partisan lines here that's a sad joke um i i think i think there are a couple things i want to say with this

about this peter and in general i agree with uh james's points i i'm struggling to think of a liberal leader who was not first a member of the liberal caucus. I don't think there has been one. I could be wrong about that, but I don't think I am. Certainly going through the ones in my living memory, they've all been members of caucus before they became leaders. Is that a good thing? At the point in our history where just about everybody who was elected leader of the Liberal Party became Prime Minister of Canada, you could say that was obviously a good thing, raise Hips Lockwooder and all that stuff. I'm not so sure it is anymore. I think that there's a big difference between being the leader of a parliamentary caucus and being the leader of a political party,

and having the smaller group choose the representative for the larger one is fraught with a bunch of problems. For instance, again, appealing my personal experience in this, we had a caucus of what, 34 people when we chose our leader in 2013 in the Liberal Party of Canada. I'm not sure that caucus would have chosen Justin Trudeau in a private ballot. Maybe they would have, maybe they wouldn't have. I'm not insinuating either way. I'm just not sure if that's the case. I do know that they would have been voting on behalf of a caucus that turned out to be 184 people strong. So by virtue, almost by the math of being in a small minority party status, when you're seeking to grow into a majority party or a governing party,

it's very difficult to say that the smaller caucus has the interests of the larger one, or adequately represents the interests of the larger one that you want to see materialize in the future. I think it's really difficult. Well, yeah, and if you have a smaller caucus, or if it's 34, or for example, the pre-governing model of the Conservative Party from 2004 to 15, 34 Liberal members of Parliament, they were largely conscripted to the urban centres of Canada, particularly Toronto and Montreal. Well, that's not reflected in the rest of the country. The Conservative Party, prior to the genuine efforts of broadening and having a sort of a pan-Canadian footprint, you know, if we were heavily weighted in Western Canada, you know, you would have people who become very sort of parochial in their interests about,

you know, having a leader who's from their region or from their province because you do do better in Canadian politics if your leader happens to come from your own province. And also if you have, you know, three quarters of the people who are weighing in on who the final two people should be on the ballot, for example, inish tory model imposed into canada um you might if you're from estevan saskatchewan and prince george british columbian and i'm on bc you might not rank you know capacity in both official languages higher on your list than um you know fluency

and sort of populist politics and and coalition building in western canada well that's good for you in terms of winning maybe your seat and holding your nomination. It's probably not the best, you know, ranking of virtues for a leader in order to win the country. And the most one last point on that, Peter, because I think that's an excellent point about regional representation. It's also the case that almost by definition, your watershed leadership campaigns are when you most need a transformational leader. And those tend to happen after you've had some form of cataclysmic loss. The kinds of politicians that survive those circumstances are not necessarily the kinds that are going to be effective at putting together a large governing parliamentary caucus or be representative of the kind of campaign you want to run. The people that we had

in almost by definition, they survived the political version of a nuclear holocaust, right? You think about the people who made it through the 2011 election for the liberal party there were people who almost by necessity had to ditch the party brand and campaign on their own local popularity that's not necessarily a cohesive brand or be the kind of constituent parts you want to build a bigger political movement out of. Okay, I want to pick up on a couple of these points. We're going to take a quick break. Back in a second.

I'm just going to let my dog get home. And we're back. Welcome. Peter Mansbridge here in Toronto on this day for The Bridge. And we've got together for the third time now in these conversations. And they've really been well received on the part of listeners to The Bridge. We've got James Moore, the former Conservative cabinet ministers in Vancouver, and Gerald Butts, former principal secretary to Justin Trudeau in the prime minister's office. He's in Ottawa. I want to pick up a little bit on this theme about

the trouble I think everybody agrees that exists in Canadian politics, and that is bringing new people into the system, getting people to run for politics the right kind of people the kind of people who could be leaders one day not necessarily of a party but of a a major department in in government um and you know this has existed for a while now occasionally there's there's some interesting people come in, but overall, I when I listened to both of you, there seems to be this, you know, this pull towards caucus experience, or at least some caucus experience. Does that work against this idea of bringing people who've never been a part of the system into the system? James? would say no when people are thinking of running

for office there are a bunch of other things but i i sent along a lot a big part of my mandate frankly with prime minister harper was to try to recruit candidates you know the further you get from physical down physical ottawa the harder it is to get good quality people to run for office my riding was suburban vancouver and i And my riding was typically the beachhead between my, like right in the balance of the swing ridings in the Fraser Valley and downtown Vancouver and the suburbs of Vancouver. And so, you know, to draw in candidates in the Burnabees and the new Westminster's and all the

Vancouver and all that, I spent a lot of time in the 0408, 11 elections, even the 15 elections when I wasn't running to try to draw in good candidates to still carry the party banner. Because even if they there are ridings that we were not likely to win, they're still the face of the party and they can step on landmines in all candidates' debates and they're still putting up signs and all that stuff. So you need a good group of people to help the party and all that. And I can tell you, having had many, many conversations with people who are thinking of running for office, that's not really it. But I do impose on people who are thinking of running for office the question that and I strongly impose on them the filter that if you're thinking of running for office, make sure your family is fully aware and sober and clear about the grind that you're about to put them through.

Assume you're going to win in all of that. Be very clear that this is a short-term deviation from your regular quality of life and expectations into a new experience, but this is an experience. It's not a job. And also on the question of leadership, make sure that if you're running, that you have absolute confidence in the person who is the leader of the party. I am seen as a former conservative cabinet minister and that, and it is what it is, but, but also in particular, I'm seen as a former Stephen Harper cabinet minister. You might've introduced me that way. Jerry Butts is a former advisor to Justin Trudeau and a federal liberal. And that's, that's a particular moment in time. There are Dion liberals,

there are Ignatius liberals, there are Stockwell Day conservatives, there are Aaron O'Toole conservatives. And so that's part of the filter that you wear. And you will wear that for the rest of your life. And I do think it's really important for your sense of self-worth, for your sense of identity, for your sense of sort of ethical clarity, that if you're running for office and you're going to be going to your best friends, your closest friends, your neighbors, and everybody in your community, and you're going to say that person i believe needs to be needs to be the prime minister of this country and i'm going to put my personal

credibility on one now it may not mean much in terms of votes at the end of the day but when politics is over for the rest of your life you know people will look at you and they will judge you based on your judgment of people that they don't know that you assumed would be the best person to be the prime minister of the country that's an important personal burden that candidates need to think about because i i have had people who ran in i won't say that under which leader in which campaign but i have had people who ran for the party because it was the right time in their life and they were really passionate because they thought we needed change they really believe in certain policies they want and they and they believe in sort of the

veneer of what the party leader was and they would have run in any election but that person happened to be the leader but they chose to buy in and then the campaign fell apart didn't work out the leader turned out to be not what they thought the person was and then they're sort of forever embarrassed and they to this day still say to me say i can't believe i went around and said that guy should have been prime minister like my god And you don't want that burden. Like, you should, the timing needs to be right for you. You have to have a purpose of why you're in public life. And you have to believe in your leader. And it's because you're going to wear that association personally and with your small sphere of friends and family for the rest of your life.

So I think it really does matter. I love that story. Okay, Jerry, let's see you beat that one well it's a tough one to beat peter but i think starting with the personal is the right way to go not unlike james it was part of my remit uh and we had a lot of open seats to recruit for right at the time it was both the upside and the downside of having a small caucus we were we had no nothing but opportunities for people you can put it that way i I've been involved in recruiting, I don't know, conservatively speaking, 600 people over the course of my two stints in politics. And I always ask the same two questions. And one of them comes from my aunt, Sister Peggy, who you know quite well, I think, Peter, back in the day when she was in the Senate of Canada, and it's the advice she gave me when I told her I was thinking about getting involved in politics to work for Dalton McGinty back in 2002 or whatever it was. And she said, there's only

really one question you have to ask yourself. And that is, is this a guy who wants to be something or is he someone who wants to do something? Because politics is full of the former and their precious view of the latter. And if you decide he's the latter, then you should support him because people like that need support. So that's the first thing. And I've repeated anyone who I've ever talked to about running for office would tell you that I asked him that question. And then the second one, which I think is even more personal is, do you know who you are? Because who you are comes out in a political campaign, and you don't want to be the last person to know who that is, right? So you have to have a pretty centered sense of yourself,

and you have to have a pretty clear idea of what you want to do once you get there. And if one of those two things is lacking, then politics is probably not for you and it will make you really unhappy. I'll tell you another story. And then I'll, this one, I will name names just because why the hell not? What's the worst that could happen, James? Yeah, whatever. No, I was elected at the age of 24. Everything was going great. The Canadian Alliance, here we go.

The party falls apart. Like, you know, we're straight out of the gate. We go into the Civil War that, you know, political observers, you know, those who remember that time. It was really, really dark. And I was, you know, young Turk, full of energy, ready to go. I was elected with a group of people. You know, Brian Pallister was a rookie. Vic Taves was a rookie. James Rajot, myself.

You know, we came to Ottawa. We were ready to take it you know we came to ottawa we were we were ready to and we got to ottawa we found a bunch of colleagues who'd been there since 1993 who had now lost three like well effectively three elections in a row uh and were were just angry and ornery and they wanted to get rid of stock all day so then the you know but i was still optimistic about things i wasn't in revenge mode i was in hey let's build and move forward mode and it was it didn't take very long frankly for me uh even though he's a friend to me to realize sitting in a bunch of caucus meetings, that Stockwell Day was not suited to be leader or prime minister of the country.

I like Stock a lot. He might have been a good cabinet minister in Alberta. And my mindset might have been a good cabinet minister in Alberta, but he's not he's not ready to be prime minister of this country. So, I mean, I can either try to tear him down with no alternative or I can invest my energy into somebody I did believe in, which is Stephen Harper. And I did. And I remember at one point in the campaign, because Stockwell Day had the support of about two thirds of caucus at the time, you know, leaning on what I said earlier about the biases of that sort of institutional support from caucus for existing leaders, because these people in caucus got elected under that leader so therefore um so it's about two-thirds one-third stock will they support over stephen harper stephen harper was running from the outside comes from a very middle class background didn't have the office of the leader of the opposition and all that to support him he had to self-finance and all that so it was it was tough and there was a point in the in the cycle where it didn't look like stephen was going to beat stock all day for the canadian alliance leadership and i remember sitting in parliament one day with james rajat we were sitting in a we were sitting in the fourth row in the opposition benches,

and things couldn't have been more miserable. Stephen was not likely going to win. It was tough. Stock was signing up members. It was bad. And I remember looking across the floor of Parliament, and there was John Manley. At the time, he was the member of the Minister of Everything. I think he was Finance, Public Safety, Deputy Prime Minister, and all that. And he was field member of the minister of everything i think he was finance public safety deputy prime minister and all that and he was fielding questions in both french and english from from our side and he was answering questions about afghanistan and 9-11 and what's happening there marshals and all these questions and all that and he was just doing it really effectively and just just responsibly might not agree with him but it was just like yeah there's a just a sturdy smart guy who's just leading things effectively in the time he was going to be the principal alternative to Paul Martin.

And I remember looking at James Rajod and saying, you know, I can't. If Stephen loses or backs out and this doesn't work out, and if John Manley is the leader of the Liberal Party, I can't go to my friends and family in suburban Vancouver and say that Stockville Day would be a better prime minister than John Manley. Like, I can't say that. It's not true. Like, I might agree with Stock on more of the issues just on paper, but in terms of capacity and just ability to lead, it's objectively not true that Stockwell Day would have been a better prime minister than John Manley. So, like, if Stephen doesn't win, I can't run again.

I can't do that. And so, fortunately, things obviously turned out differently. Stephen doesn't win. I can't run again. I can't do that. And so, you know, fortunately, you know, things obviously turned out differently. But I remember that conversation. I remember James agreeing. And we were just like, yeah, like this is not, like there are some things that are more important. And, like, you can't just be a hack. You have to sometimes take off your lens and realize that in this moment, like this is the way this is.

You have to be sober about the the people who are who are offering for prime minister now in every leadership race by the way stephen harper go went on to win the leadership and scott brayson crossed the floor of the liberals and john harron who is a progressive conservative he left the caucus and rick baratsik left and went back to manitoba and keith martin who was a reform party colleague of stephen harper's he left so a bunch of people still left because they maybe had a different perspective. But my perspective at the time was that, you know, you do have to believe in your leader. And when Stephen Harper, I'll end the story this way, when Stephen Harper won and then, you know, his political career ended after the 2015 campaign and he went to the private sector,

there was an event for Stephen on his going away. And I said to him, as I said, I didn't run for office. I said, I went to them, I said, Prime Minister, I said, I didn't run for office and you happened to be my leader. I ran for office because you were my leader. And I encourage everybody who runs for office that you want to be, believe me from my experience,

you want to be able to say that when you leave politics, that you're proud of what you did, who you did it with, and who your leader was. I'm really glad you told that story because I think most Canadians have no idea that MPs go through that process when big decisions like that in terms of the leadership of their party coming up and it's uh it's encouraging to know they do i'm not sure they all do but clearly you did and well about that but about that peter sorry to interrupt but full honesty james rajad at the time was i think 29 i was 25 26 not married no kid no no no son my son spencer uh you know i was still buying my first home so i didn't have any of those sort of pressures of sort of family obligation

mortgage. No. So, but if you take a member of parliament who's in their mid forties, late early fifties, and they're in that period in their life, it's easy for me to be righteous. Like I just said, but other people have other pressures that may cloud some of that, which is what it is. And it's not unvirtuous, but, but there are some real human elements here when people are in their prime earning years of their lives, and they're strategically making

decisions, not just about what's best for my party, what's best for my ideas and my ideology, but also what's best for me. And so these tensions do collide, and there's no clear, virtuous, singular path. But we have to be mindful that politicians are human beings who are under are under a lot of pressure from a lot of directions well now you're making a good argument for term limits and getting more younger people into into running for parliament interesting before i move on jerry do you want to add anything to uh to what james just said no i look i think that too few people realize that the politicians are people, you know, and they are at various varying different stages of life where they have different motivations. I think I'm one who thinks that I am not generalizing. I'm not being specific with my own party, most of the people that I've met who are elected officials, and I mean most

85-90% of the people I've met who are elected officials for all parties, are really good people who are in it for the right reasons. And you may differ with their perspective on any given issue or the overall direction of the country, but most of the people that i know who put their names on lawn signs do it out of a sense of community and public service and it's easy to take down a good living running down politicians but long term and maybe we can get into this in the second half of the conversation it's getting harder and harder to recruit people to run uh for office and that's because the public square, the town square, has been flooded with toxic sludge. And if we want a political culture that more closely resembles that of our neighbors south of the border, we should keep going in this direction. Because

almost by definition, you attract people uh sense of self is impervious to that kind of sludge so i don't think that's the direction we want to go and i don't want to be one of those people who used to be involved in politics it says there was a golden era where you know it was nothing but respectful disagreements on all sides of the house that's obviously not true but i think we can all agree that the turn that politics has taken in the last five years or so in this country um partly but not entirely due to the advent of social media and the targeting of politicians in their homes um it's not good for the country no it's not um you'll be happy to know we are already in the second half of this conversation.

In fact, we're almost at the end of the second half of this conversation. But those points are all good ones and may well form the basis of our next conversation when we get together the next time. Here's my last question, and I raise it carefully because I don't want either of you to have to fall into any, you know, partisan roles here, but are there lessons for all of us in the way the current leadership at the federal level, the conservative leadership race is unfolding? Are there lessons about the system in what we're watching uh right now james do you want to try that one no i mean i i think it's generally working well the the system that we it's the the system's been modified right so we don't have just purely 100 points per audience there's a floor that

that writings have to have for old ones but but i i don't think and we've gone under a pretty significant stress test the Conservative Party has with leadership races because we're getting really good at it. But I mean, in the 2017 leadership race, there were, I think at the peak, in terms of people who sort of were thought about running and didn't run, but sort of tested the system, there were probably 18 or 19 people thought people thought about running and of course the final ballot was a little bit less than that but it went to what 12 13 ballots and andrew sheer won a 51 49 final final ballot so that's a tremendous amount of stress on the party its membership its infrastructure coming out of a defeat in 2015 um you know we had good ballast obviously in the parliamentary side with ron ambrose, for sure. But that's a tremendous amount of stress, particularly because people were running from different ideological and regional perspectives. And then the following one, you know, Peter McKay versus Arnold Toole versus Lesley Lewis.

And there were other candidates who thought about running. That also created its own stresses and its own aftermath. And then this race as well, which has become rhetorically more divisive. I think on the ground amongst party members, there's actually probably less division than there is amongst the candidates. I mean, on the ground, I mean, I talked to people who are just yesterday. As a matter of fact, I was at an event at the Vancouver Board of Trade. And there was a staunch John Sheree supporter and a staunch Pierre Paulieff supporter. And they were really good friends. And they were saying, well, my guy, your guy. And it was like there wasn't a lot of heat because they just have different views on who the best person is to unite the party and defeat defeat the liberals but but between them there's not a lot of heat so the party i think has learned and um and and the

dynamic within the party right now is the party just really wants to win which is feeding the heat which is fitting the heat between the candidates but the party is pretty united on the ground so so i think through the races that we've had, because we did go through a big dry spell between Stephen Harper's leadership in the mid aughts through until 2015, but now we've had three leadership races since 2017. So through that sort of muscle memory, I think the party has learned to sort of absorb the tensions of a leadership race. And now we have candidates who have differing levels of caucus support. Patrick Brown just put out an email just right now saying that he signed up 150 000 party members if that's true then that's you know he's he's trying to win the leadership in a different way so um there are

there are tensions but i think the party the conservative party i think will survive those tensions uh on the ground um the tensions between the candidates may be um a little bit harder to to to mend. We all got to be careful with these numbers as they start to roll out, because as you pointed out earlier, you know, the numbers are one thing, where they are from, which province, et cetera, et cetera, can make a big difference. You get the last word, Jerry. And whether they actually vote, and that's, of course, the most important thing.

Look, my own diagnosis of the conservative party's challenges are that it's become captive to its relatively small non-representative base of donors so the issue for me if i were thinking as a conservative uh would be how do we grow beyond the space that is self-evidently not enough to win uh government in the country and it remains to be seen whether this leadership process serves that but it has certainly attracted um candidates with the potential to broaden that tent so i think you have to give a provisional vote of positive vote to the conservative leadership process because it's attracted a good quality of candidates well i think on that uh that positive note uh we'll end this uh this this um conversation between the two of you which as i said earlier is the third one

we've had and they get better every time um I love this one. I love the stories you guys told. And we will keep it going. We'll try to come up with something during the summer that can perhaps expand on this whole issue of trying to get somehow more people into the process. But for this time, thank you so much. Enjoy the summer as you see it unfolding now. We're in June. Great to talk to you, James and Jerry. Thank you. Always a pleasure, Peter.

Well, there you go. The third installment of the conversations between James Moore and Gerald Butts, a conservative and a liberal. And talking in a constructive way about the process that we see around in this particular case, the leadership of the political parties and how that decision is made and whether it's really in the best interest of the people or is it in the best interest of the party or what is the mix that is appropriate anyway i hope you enjoyed it uh just along with the other two conversations uh so far between moore and butts and there will be more uh you can be sure of that because they've been extremely popular you've been listening on sirius xm7, Canada Talks, and on your favorite podcast platform.

I'm Peter Mansbridge. first aired on June 6th.