The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - The Erin O'Toole Exit Interview

Episode Date: June 19, 2023

The former Conservative leader is leaving politics softly but not quietly.  He's making appearances, speeches and giving interviews and they all are chock full of his concerns about the current state of politics and some hints of what went wrong for him in his short term as leader.  It's a straightforward and honest look at himself and his party.

And hello there, Peter Vansbridge here. The Monday show. The Monday feature interview show. It's an Aaron O'Toole day. We've got the former Conservative Party leader who's wrapping up his final time in the House of Commons, having chosen to leave politics and enter the private sector. So we'll talk to Aaron O'Toole about that experience,

and that will be in just the next few minutes' time. A couple of things of note. This is the final Monday episode of The Bridge for a little while. We're taking our summer break starting next week, and just to keep in mind what that means, each Monday there will be an encore edition of some of the best of the bridge from the past year. A couple of times, once in July and once in August, we will have new episodes of Good Talk with Chantal and Bruce.

So we'll be keeping, we'll touch base with the two of them a couple of times over the summer. But we're looking forward, everyone's looking forward to a summer break of some sorts. It's been a great year for the bridge, and thanks to you for making it a great year. We have far exceeded the numbers we were expecting in terms of doing this podcast. We're very, very happy. But we are looking forward to a break. But not until we get through five episodes this week,

and we're looking forward to all of them starting with today's episode with Aaron O'Toole. But before I get there, somebody asked me the other day, I'm over here in Scotland for a little while Heading back next week actually Because I've done a lot of work on the new book That Mark Bulgich and I are hoping to unveil this fall Thanks to the publisher Simon & Schuster So I'll be back for final editing on that

But somebody asked me the other day, what's the difference between the Conservative Party of the United Kingdom and the Republican Party in the United States? And they asked that question because both parties have had similar leaders over the last little while. Boris Johnson here in the UK, Donald Trump in the United States. So the question was, what's the difference between the two parties?

And I said, well, you know, obviously there are a lot of different policy issues. That's normal. But I said, when it comes to leadership, they're actually pretty different in terms of how they deal with their leaders. Both Johnson and Trump are proven liars. Johnson was caught out lying on a lot of different things in terms of his handling of the COVID situation and his private actions during COVID. Trump has been caught out lying on, well,

you name it, he's been caught out lying on it. But here's the difference. In the UK, lying, especially lying in Parliament, is unacceptable. You can't get away with that. And Johnson didn't. They tossed him as party leader. It was kind of a little drawn-out battle, but there was no doubt which way it was heading. And now they've tossed him out right out of the House of Commons. He's had to vacate his seat, and there'll be a by-election in it. So that's one way of handling leaders who lie. The other way of handling leaders who lie is like the Republicans. Whoa, lying? You're kidding. Did he really? Well, I don't know. I don't think he lied.

He didn't lie. If I say he lied, he's going to come after me and all his supporters will come after me. So I'm not going to say he's lying. I'm not going to say he should resign. I'm not going to say he shouldn't run for the nomination of the party for the next go-round. No, no, no, no. In fact, if I'm going to say anything, I'm going to say I'll pardon him. He should be pardoned for lying. And, you know, breaking the Espionage Act if the special prosecutor's charges ring true. So there's your difference.

Two proven liars, one giving the hook, the other, oh, no, no, no, no. What are you talking about? We can't give them the hook. There's your difference. You can decide which one you think is more appropriate. All right. Aaron O'Toole. Leader of the Conservative Party of Canada through one election.

They've kind of had a routine in the last couple of, you know, one and done. You get one chance to win. If you can't win, you're gone. And while both Andrew Scheer and Aaron O'Toole won in number of votes, they lost in number of seats to Justin Trudeau. And they both got tossed. Or as Aaron O'Toole says in a phrase that he uses, he was shown the door by his own party.

So how does he feel as he leaves, accepting a job now in the private sector? How does he feel about the process, and not just his experience within his party, but his experience as a politician who came in wanting to change things. How does he feel as he's leaving? That's kind of the basis of the interview we're going to do. It's kind of an Aaron O'Toole unplugged interview. And there's some interesting moments in it.

And we'll talk about those after the interview. So, you know what I'd like to do with a feature interview, I don't like to interrupt it in the middle. So we'll move the message for the day to right now and when we come back right after it we'll start our interview with uh with Aaron O'Toole so we'll be back right after this and you're back thanks for being here with us on The Bridge for this Monday, an opening of a new week. You're listening on Sirius XM, Channel 167.

Canada Talks are on your favorite podcast platform. And you're listening today to hear the exit interview with Aaron O'Toole, the outgoing leader. Well, it's been a while now, almost a year, since Aaron O'Toole was shown the door, as he says, by his own party as leader of that party. He's been sitting as just a regular MP for the last year, but he's leaving now to enjoy a new job in the private sector.

He'll talk a little bit about that in a moment. But here's my discussion with Aaron O'Toole. Hope you enjoy it. There's some interesting things in it, so have a listen. Aaron O'Toole. Let me start by asking you, you know, when you arrived in 2012 on Parliament Hill, the feelings you had coming in, compare them to the feelings you have going out in general ways. We'll get into some of this in specific, but generally what you were thinking when you came in compared with what you're thinking as you go out.

Well, that was a special day for me, Peter, because I was a by-election winner led in by Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the late Jim Flaherty, who was a bit of a political mentor. My father was in the gallery. My father had been a colleague of Jim Flaherty's at Queen's Park, a friend, and my one-year-old son and our daughter, Molly, were in the audience. So for me, I remember that more than anything. But I will say this, compared to the speech I gave last week, I posted that video on my Facebook page of me walking into the house. I probably at that time would have gotten three likes mainly from my family and a few friends and Facebook was just

really about broadcasting positive things like that and not much two-way communication. Today, I don't even look at what's posted after my speech because I wanna keep my mental health in check. And so that would sort of underscore the big changes in the time. I think Stephen Harper had just really gone on a lot of those platforms. I went in the last sitting day of 2012. So really my start was in 2013.

And by the time we finished in 2015, Harper was trying to use YouTube, doing something called 24-7. And it was widely mocked at the time. But people weren't sure how to adapt to social media. And my message now, comparing to leaving a decade later, is we are now conforming too much to social media. And that was part of the message I tried to send. I want to get into that in a minute, but let me just dwell on this business about what was going through your mind when you came in, because a lot of MPs I talked to over time, over the last, you know, 20, 30 years, you know, as they arrived on Parliament Hill, they had great expectations of what the job could be, what it could mean, how they could

make a difference, how they can, you know, change lives for the better as a result of their moment in politics. And then they, when they, by the time they left, they were disappointed that, you know, that it hadn't lived up to what they thought it could live up to. Does any of that run in with you at this point? Absolutely not. It was an incredible privilege. I'm not 100% gone, but I won't be back in the house. And I used that privilege and that platform I had from day one.

And so, you know, there's a great song I love by a band called Talk Talk, Life's What You Make It. It's like that on the hill. If you want to get swept along with the current and get frustrated and say, oh, I should have been promoted into this or I didn't get my bill passed, you can dwell on the negatives. But I haven't been leader for over a year, Peter. And every day I open the globe, there's an issue that I've talked about.

The Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank, Christian Freeland just pulled out of it a few days ago. I pulled out my old letter that I sent to Justin Trudeau in March of 2021. I've been advocating on that issue since I was foreign affairs critic. And so sometimes that's a democracy. The opposition will have to point, prod, and applaud the odd time of the government to make the right decision. But that's how a democracy works.

So I'm leaving with mental health being talked about a lot more than when I first got here and talked about it in the context of veterans. You know, reconciliation with Indigenous peoples is something I've talked about, concerns with China. So I think I've made a real difference. I didn't get the final job I was running for, certainly, and there's some disappointment. But I used every moment, every ounce of fiber while I was in the arena to go to the Teddy Roosevelt, daring valiantly, as he said in that great speech. And sometimes I felt short, but the critics who are not in the arena, it's easy to be a critic. It's tough to be in there. So I think politicians

that leave embittered haven't taken full advantage of the privilege they have. So tough to be in there, but still, as far as you're concerned, an honorable profession. 100%. And I leave with tremendous friendships and respect for the people still there. I was tough with politics and our polarized time in my speech. But I left with the message I had faith in everybody in that room and that it was an honor to serve with them that was the last two lines of my speech so while i'm hoping some of them listened on all sides um i do think all of them are there for the right reasons thinking that they're going to get canada to a better place in the future we just all have

different paths on that same journey and the lovely notes i've received from uh or comments from ministers in the government who uh who don't need to take the time to send that so there's more it's not as toxic as sometimes it might seem peter but i do think over time if we if we don't recognize what social media is doing to the debate to frame it, it could continue to become more polarized in the future. Okay, try and square that for me, what you just said. It's not as toxic as we sometimes think, yet at the same time you've talked and others have talked about the polarized state of politics in general and Canadian politics in particular? I've talked about the polarized state and how it's really diminishing debate more than anything else. I wouldn't say there's as much animus between the principal players and the people and people might think there is. I still remember when we were in government after the horrific attack on Parliament Hill

and the killing of Nathan Serlo and we were all locked in various rooms. I remember Christopher Freeland being swept into our caucus and taken over the Pearson building. We were all comfort each other that night. Megan Leslie, the NDP deputy leader, was my friend from law school. And we talked about, you know, how are the mental health of folks in our caucus and in the staff ranks, because it was really shocking on staff. We do care about each other more than people might think. But the element of performance politics that I talked about in my speech,

you wouldn't know that because we're only talking to a slice of Canadians. And whether it's the left, the moaning, you know, the 1% or business or banks or whatever, they hold up as the boogie band or on our side, you know, the UN or World Economic Forum, kind of the things we see through our channels, if we're only going to respond to what our existing followers are saying, we're not actually talking to all Canadians. And that was kind of the heart of my warning.

But I would like people to see more how there is more respect and concern for one another than people think. Well, that's interesting. I mean, you mentioned what we witnessed that day of the shooting on Parliament Hill, and when MPs gathered back in the House of Commons later, there was a degree of affection for each other, hugging, outright hugging, tears. It was quite a day, and not surprising as a result of the emotions of that day and the horrific nature of some of what had been witnessed, and many of you had been a part of in the sense you could hear it going on all around you. But has there been anything like that in terms of the, you know, obviously nothing like that particular, but in terms of the camaraderie and the respect for each other and the feelings for each other since that day?

Yes. And it's hard to believe now, Peter, where we're at. But the early parts of the pandemic, the House all agreed not to sit. I think that was a well-intentioned but somewhat short-sighted decision. There were a lot of people checking in on one another. You know, Francois-Philippe Champagne would call me back personally when I was sending notes about my constituents stuck on cruise ships. It was a tough time. And, you know, a lot of us were pushing out Justin Trudeau's messages of the day because of real concern, of uncertainty. And so it's, I've seen it even then, and I've praised Francois Philippe and people like that publicly many times,

including his leader, for taking that approach in a tough time. As time went on, though, the politics descended, and whether it was how long the CERB was paid for or the vaccine mandates, the early part of that coming together in a crisis dissipated and I think that's too bad. I was at a conference on lessons learned from the pandemic this week put on by the IRPP and Institute of Governance and I said if only we could harness a bit of that. When I suspended my leadership race at the beginning of the campaign I quoted Robert Borden and I offered to sit in a COVID cabinet, which I think was a missed opportunity for Mr. Trudeau to have everyone in the room to avoid

any, you know, politics on essential questions of public health and pandemic response. So how can we marshal those, those working together approaches more? I've been calling for months to have an all-party approach on election interference. The whole episode with Mr. Johnson, someone I have great respect for, was a wasted exercise. We should have come together and said, we all trust our democracy. We all need to safeguard it better. Let's not make this political. So it's not as hard as it might seem at times to do that, because I've seen that quite a few times, Peter, in my 10 years in public life. Did you try at all during that period,

and I'm talking about the Johnson period, trying to push that message within your own caucus? Yes, yes, and within the Liberal caucus. You know, I have great respect for Greg Fergus. I said to him, you know, this shouldn't be just defend the PMO with all your gusto. Let's look at these issues, but we've seen a bit too much partisanship on both sides. I think Michael Chong, who I stay in touch with quite regularly on these issues, has been more balanced.

But I didn't talk about election interference, Peter, because I knew as soon as I said something, I would be compared to Donald Trump and election denialism. And that's exactly what Jennifer O'Connell, someone who lives not far from me and someone I've tried to work occasionally on a nonpartisan basis with, they went right to the default setting. And so, look, all sides have to pull up their socks a bit here. I tried to have that sentiment in my speech. But on something as important as protecting our parliamentary democracy, I think this could be a time where if we came together,

we'd actually help rebuild the trust of everyday Canadians in their institutions. And my goodness, we need that desperately. Do you have that conversation with the man who succeeded you? I've talked about concerns on China with Pierre on many occasions. In fact, you know, we're going to be talking later today as well. You know, I wish we focused on the terms of reference on Mr. Johnston and not really the personal ties he had to Mr. Trudeau. But there is kind of a myopic view sometimes by people in central Canada. And I say this as probably, you know, I'm a middle-class kid from Bowmanville, but I did work on Bay Street. I became a lawyer, served in the military.

I'm probably, in Bricker and Ibbotson's estimation, a member of the Laurentian establishment now. I don't have much money or anything like that, but I don't want to belittle people for having success in life or being part of an institution or something. But there is a kind of a myopic view. I don't think David, who I've gone out of my way to show people how extraordinary I think he is as a Canadian, he should not have accepted that assignment just because of the perception. And I sent notes to some mutual friends we have, and they almost all agreed with me. Why are you jumping in front of the truck? Now, I think in fairness, he thought he could divert the truck. But this is where some

people don't see, you know, in the case of Mr. Trudeau, the emperor is not wearing clothes and sometimes doesn't realize it. And it's same with the Kielburgers and the Weecher, like these things that sometimes get in the way of message control from the PMO ceased to exist afterwards. And so don't put your hand up so quickly. I also think the timeline he was given and the terms of reference when I saw them, I said, this is a PR exercise. And when they came into my office and acknowledged the report was already at translation, that kind of told me, oh, my gosh, I was one of the central targets of interference. I didn't deserve a courtesy interview. That was a real miss. And I think they realize that now.

You've done a great job of kind of skirting the issue that I was trying to get at, which was trying to understand what that relationship must be like between you and Mr. Polyev, the man who succeeded you as leader, especially when it comes around to the issue of your clearly strong feelings about the overly partisan nature of which Canadian politics the turn has taken. I mean, you're not shy about conceding that you've been pretty partisan at times and done some things you perhaps regret in your political life. But by your own admission, we're at a point now

where it's really ugly out there. And most people would agree that Mr. Polyev has helped that ugliness, not alone and not only conservatives. But I'm just wondering, do you ever have the opportunity to sit down with him, just the two of you, and talk about leadership and what it needs at this time? I've given my advice and he's open to it and I appreciate that. I've long told him

that some of the issues floating around now on social media, particularly within some conservative circles on the UN or Davos or things like that are destructive. And so I think he has tried to navigate that by saying, okay, we're not going to participate if vast groups of Canadians don't have confidence. But I've also wanted us to be sure to say, like, when Stephen Harper spoke at Davos, it was to sell our energy. And he had a speech where we were an energy superpower. not going to be at tables of decision around the world because of, you know, the polarized nature and a lot of Canadians not having faith in those institutions. I think part of the reason why we can say, okay, we're not going to participate, that's fine. But how are we going to make up

for that lost opportunity of talking to world leaders and capital markets? And so he knows that. And I do think he's going to try and bridge those issues. But in fairness, Peter, you know, each time in Canada deserves a leader with a different style and different approach. Maybe my bad luck was being the leader I was during the pandemic where I tried to bridge the importance of vaccination to the point that my wife and I did our vaccinations online and were very public. And Mr. Trudeau praised that at the time. And then months later, he accused me of supporting anti-vaxxers because I didn't think people should lose their job. I was trying to bridge a divide on an election that was built on division. The result is more polarization.

The trucks that pulled into town is around the time I was being shown the door were a direct result of some of the division of that election and making swaths of people feel demonized or forgotten. So there's enough, you know, I don't want to say blame. There's enough criticism to spread around here.

And I think Pierre is a very smart communicator. And I think he's going to bridge that gap. But that will be the big challenge for him in the next election, because I do think there's a feeling for change. There's almost a fatigue in some circles with Justin Trudeau, and I've written about how I don't like to see that bubble over on some occasions. But you have to marshal change in a way that makes sure all Canadians are brought along.

So on environment or other issues, we can't just speak for rural Saskatchewan or rural Alberta. We have to speak for the entire country. It's tough. I know that. The good thing is Pierre is one of the best communicators in the house, and I think he'll be able to do that. You know, the phrase you just used a few moments ago was when you were shown the door. You must have been bitter in that moment when you were shown the door how long did it take you to get over that? It was tough

that was the toughest day of my life Peter I've spoken openly about that with some people and some veterans that have talked about these challenges you have in your life the biggest challenge for me was my wife had just had serious surgery a few days earlier. So I returned home, you know, to someone who had sacrificed so much for everything I've done and was literally incapacitated at the time. And yeah, there was lawlessness in the city that is the antithesis to me of being a sort of Burkean conservative.

I've talked about that before. You can't let frustrations turn into lawbreaking. That runs the opposite of being a conservative, I believe. But you have to recognize the frustrations exist. So I wish my caucus had shown a little bit more fortitude perhaps to get through that tough period but literally there was horns you remember it and they were calling for my removal calling for my head and some people you know lost their nerves some people had ambition for the the next regime or the you know that they weren't happy with where i had placed them or what have you. Some were not happy with my climate policy or my move on banning conversion therapy.

So I think it was a ton of grievances, including losing, piling on top of a kind of mini insurrection or whatever you wanted to call that state of affairs on Wellington Street. And I've spoken about how much I dislike the flags about the prime minister. You know, I disagreed strenuously with him, but I think that type of vitriol can lead to a desensitization that, you know, all politicians are in this thinking they're doing the right thing. And if you're mad, knock on a few more doors. Don't participate in the decline of political discourse. And so that day was a tough day.

It took me several months making sure the family was moved and recovered and things like this. But I'm a positive person. So I focused on my mental health work, some work in the riding. Proudly, the first SMR and commercial operation in Canada project I've talked about and promoted for years is now in Darlington in my community. Focused on my podcast. No, I don't have as many followers as you, Peter, but that was kind of my goal. And I've supported some of the groups that I haven't had as much time to help, whether it's True Patriot Love or some of the things I was involved in before politics. And that has gotten my skip back. And then this great opportunity to work on geopolitical trade and risk and security issues for a Paris-based company.

All that work I've done on my French, hey, it might pay off after politics. So I'm very, very optimistic about the future. And I'm 50. I'm really excited about the next challenge. You're just a kid. 50. My God. I know. I've got a lot of years to catch up to your number of followers. Yeah, you've got a lot of years to catch up to my number of years. What was the biggest lesson of leadership for you? What did you learn that you can take forward in your new job and in the rest of your life? What was the one thing about leadership

that may have surprised you, but it certainly taught you something? Just how closely tied emotion is to decision making. And, you know, for lawyers, there's this great quote, I think you learned maybe from Aristotle in first year, that law is reason devoid of passion, and you come up with a good program or analysis. So I've been known as a bit of a policy wonk and a bit of a, you know, ideas person, I believe. And I spend a lot of time trying to say, how can Canada make its

Paris climate targets, get emissions down, while also getting our energy to market and having the least disruption on poor or middle class Canadians who will be paying more carbon tax in their consumption and are more price sensitive. We hired Navius Research, the best firm in the country. I talked to some of the leading climate experts. We spent a lot of time and money on a program. But at the end, I found some people just the emotion of being opposed to something, a price on carbon, for so many years that even when I pointed to them,

hey, here's John Baird's speech on pricing carbon. Here's Jim Prentice's speech on pricing carbon. Here's Jim Prentice's speech on pricing carbon. It became so emotional. And I would do Zoom calls with angry constituents of certain MPs. I'd talk to my constituents. And after a 40-minute Zoom, people understood. But I couldn't do a Zoom call with 30 million people. And so that's something that I think the pandemic heightened everything as well, Peter. So the emotions were even more extreme in that time. So I didn't make an emotional connection, I think on some of these issues that I

needed to do. I was trying to say, look, we can get our emissions down to here and get a pipeline built. And I thought people would say, hey, this is a smart, this guy's smart. He's got, he came up with a solution. No, it was emotion. So that's probably, I saw that as Veterans Affairs Minister and it took me time, you know, often getting yelled at from people and sort of taking their frustration before I could come up with a plan. So I should have learned that lesson earlier in my political career that most decisions are emotionally based,

but I certainly learned it near the end. Here's my last question. Part of the role of being a party leader is to encourage others to run, right? You're always looking for potential candidates for, for writings you want to win, or you need to win if you're going to assume power. And it becomes, it's not easy to convince people to give up the life they have to run for politics and everything that can mean. And as always meant in terms of the challenges and the difficulties, even more so today with the lack of respect some people have for the political life and for politicians in general.

When you think back to those days where you were trying to convince people to run for parliament, how hard was that in, you know, in, in today's world? Because it is different partly because of the things you mentioned in your speech and about the impact of social media. Talk to me about how, how difficult that was to convince people to run. Wow. It must've been like you were eavesdropping on conversations I was having

with my team. Cause I've talked about that being one of my biggest challenges as a leader. We identified about 20 target candidates for us, you know, star candidates, or I was really trying to plan a future cabinet and to bring in some expertise. And not only I spent a lot of time talking to some of these people, a lot of my key, my campaign chair, my director of fundraising people in the business community and not-for-profit community. And out of these 20 amazing people

that we had significant conversations with, 18 to 20, two ran. And I wanna give them shouts out. Vincent Duemel in Quebec and Susan MacArthur in Ontario. Both incredibly experienced. Vincent's kind of like the French-Canadian Mark Carney. He's worked for Goldman's, worked around the world. An amazing guy.

Ran Fiera Capital. By the time he ran, we gave him a seat in the townships. That was tough to win, but Ryan Mulroney came out and supported him because Vincent was so good. And Susan MacArthur is an incredible leader. The others, almost all of them, Peter, pointed to social media as the reason. And I remember one who is this amazing woman

who works at an iconic Canadian company and she said to me, my husband and I were having a glass of wine and we looked through social media and we couldn't see our children seeing their mom being subjected to some of that and I'll never forget that and what could I say to them I couldn't say oh that's going to change that's temporary or oh that won't happen to you they knew I wanted their expertise and potentially future cabinets they knew they'd be scrutinized. Or if they had success and what type of car they drove, or would they be attacked for having worked for a bank or something like this? That is something we have to work on.

And it's also why, going back to your first question, Peter, I don't regret a moment of my time in Parliament. And I think, even though I didn't get to move the dial forwards directly on the SMR in Darlington, Mr. Trudeau adopted the policy I had in my platform and did it. And so I could say, hey, the opposition influenced, you know, my passion for the Arctic, Arctic sovereignty, I've been talking about it for years. It's now very hot, literally, with climate change. And so I think politicians like myself, John McKay, and some others have moved the conversation there. Anita Anand signed the North Warning System extension. It's going to be run by an Inuit-led business. There's a great story there. And I like to think, hey, our work over many years made a difference.

So to all those amazing men and women that want to potentially run, come and help elevate the debate would be my advice. But make sure you pack your armor and have it on occasionally because it is a tough business, Peter, but that's why I respect all people that get into it. You did mention that you've heard from a lot of fellow MPs from different parts of the House since your speech. Are they all sort of circling around that argument

about the impact that social media has had and how even they have had the temptation has affected them as well to get into it to get involved to be focused on on their followers and their followers followers uh and the number of likes they can get and all that way i mean what are they saying to you um as you as you leave the scene after that speech that's exactly what they're focusing it on um you know some you know in other parties have said to me that needed to be said and um they realized that um you know when why i quoted borden and saying you know the great national purpose and and putting the country first has to be before your own political ambition or

just the ambitions of your party. It is easy to think that if I don't do this and support this, I won't have success. And so it is sometimes hard to swim a little bit against the current, unless we're all swimming in the same direction. We don't have to have a synchronized swimming routine. We can have our different opinions. But I think if we all try and improve debate, more debate in the house, longer answers to questions, more sitting time in the house. In the UK, I like the benches.

People should go in and have to get their seat for a big debate, not sit there and write Christmas cards. I think we have to take the debate in the house much more respectively, whittle down the number of committees to a handful and say, you have to be in the debate and let the speaker recognize who speaks by someone who knows their stuff rather than someone who's going to read a prepared text. And so I think there's a lot of things we can do within a wonderful system.

We both like to talk a bit of Churchill, you know, we have the worst system of them all except all the others that have been tried or whatever he said. Let's recognize there's some challenges to the way it's structured. But even looking at the UK, they have more time for answers. They do things differently. They generally have MPs that build up subject matter expertise in areas without an official assignment of being a chair or something. Let's really encourage that more. And I think that would heighten the debate.

Aaron O'Toole, thanks for doing this. I know everybody has wanted a piece of you in the last few days as you prepare to leave Parliament Hill. In fact, a number of us have said it's probably the best orchestrated exit anybody can remember between the experts exit speeches exit interviews exit appearances uh it's been quite something but your message has come across loud and clear appreciate the time i appreciate the friendship you've always been good to me and uh and accepting the opportunity to do interviews over the over the years appreciate it i'll miss. But I do wish you lots of luck in your new venture. Well, listen, I want to thank you, your coverage of our veterans and our Canadian story, Peter. I remember with my son watching the 100th of Bimmy Ridge, and you had some students with

Sam Sharp T-shirts from Uxbridge, that World War I MP that I've talked a lot about on Mental Health Files. You've really helped tell the Canadian story. So it's been a real pleasure. And this exit, part of it was planned. I guess part I have to thank Beijing for a little bit more attention on me. So maybe they helped my exit in more than one way, Peter. Well, I'm sure they'll grab that and run with it if they can. Thanks again and take care.

Look forward to speaking again. Bye-bye. Aaron O'Toole, the last interview as a Conservative Member of Parliament that he'll be giving to The Bridge, but just one of many interviews he's given over the last week. As I said, he's been on the sort of exit interview tour. He had a big exit speech in the House of Commons last week where he really went at the subject of the impact social media has had on the political dialogue in the country and the polarization

that it's led to in different parts of politics and the country at large. So I appreciate Aaron O'Toole's time and hope you did as well. I mean, there are a number of themes there that he's touching on in all these interviews. He's touching on the social media theme, obviously. He's touching on, and you can tell in the different ways he talks about various issues, that he'd like to see his party closer to a moderate approach to a number of issues rather than the extreme approach that some say the new leader is pushing for.

So it's interesting that he's laying that out there. I found that his relationship with Pierre Poliev, obviously it's not great. Poliev in many ways led the charge to push Aron O'Toole out of office and create the vacuum that eventually created his own leadership bid and his success as being the new leader of the Conservative Party.

But he was very careful on how he described that relationships as they do talk and that he does make his case on certain things. But I'll tell you of all the things he said, the thing I found most interesting, because I've often thought about this and talked to other leaders of other parties about the challenge of recruiting candidates

to run an election, has just got harder and harder and harder in the 50 years that I've been covering politics in Canada, to the point where, you know, to me it was quite an admission. You know, Aaron O'Toole took some, you know, he almost sounded proud of the fact that they got two of the 20 candidates they were targeting to run. To me that sounded like, wow, two out of 20, that's the best we can do and we can be happy with that i mean that says something i don't think that says anything with the conservative party or

aaron o'toole it says something with the state of politics in canada the example he used of the the potential candidate the the woman who sat with her husband and went through social media and said, we don't need this. We don't need our kids to have this in their lives. And they just said, I'm out of here. I'm not going to do it. Now, a lot of good people want to run for politics, whether it's federal, provincial, municipal, school board, you name it. But it's getting harder and harder to convince them that it's worth it, that it's worth what they're going to have to go through to make the changes that they want to see happen. And that's a sad commentary on the state of politics in Canada.

So I appreciate that Aaron O'Toole told us that story. And for me, I think that's going to be one of the ones that will live with me for quite some time because it is exactly what's happened. You know, if you can't get the candidates you really want, that you've circled for, you know, potential major roles within your party, that means you're going to have to, in most cases, settle and be satisfied with something less. And that's too bad.

All right. Enough for today. Tomorrow, Brian Stewart will be by for his final Ukraine commentary as we head into the summer break. Interesting things happening there with the Ukraine offensive and trying to figure out exactly how it's going. Wednesday is Smoke, Mirrors, and the. Now Bruce is away this week, Rob Russo, and my good friend from Ottawa will be sitting in for Bruce on Wednesday. Thursday is the final your turn for the week, so if you have some thoughts on anything, especially, you know,

what Aaron O'Toole just talked about, let's hear from you the mansbridge podcast at gmail.com the mansbridge podcast at gmail.com if you didn't hear the random ranter last week on bike lanes uh you might want to listen to it uh we've had a fair number of comments both pro and con uh which is not unusual on the uh on the the ranters take on bike lanes. And Friday, of course, is the final good talk of the pre-summer season. So Chantal and Bruce will both be here for that. That's it for now. I'm Peter Mansbridge.

Thanks so much for listening. We'll talk to you again in 24 hours.