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

Episode Date: June 6, 2022

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?  

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge, The More Buts Conversation Number Three. That is just ahead. And hello there, welcome to Monday, welcome to another week here in early June of 2022. Special show today, before we get there, it's June 6th. That is an important day in the history of our globe. It's an important day in the history of our country. June 6th, of course, is the day that the troops landed in Western Europe on the Normandy shores of France to begin the liberation of a continent,

really, from Nazi tyranny. And Canadians were involved in a big way at Juneau Beach, of course. 14,000 Canadians landed on Juno Beach. All that began in the early morning hours of June 6, 1944. 78th anniversary on this day. And we remember all those 14,000 who took part in that operation, and especially so the hundreds who died on those beaches, and the more than a thousand who were injured, wounded, on that day. It was an incredibly important part of the liberation of Europe.

Canadian troops, along with their British and American allies who landed at the other beaches in Normandy worked their way through Normandy, parts of France, liberated Paris later that summer, then began the push through Belgium and the Netherlands, the bloody bloody bush that lasted months on end, cost thousands more lives. And eventually, by April of 1945 and early May of that year, those troops ended up in Germany and Berlin, and the Nazi tyranny ended. But it started in many ways on June 6. So June 6 is

an important day and one to remember as we do. I mean, just think when they hit those beaches after literally years of training, they were told there was going to be resistance from the Germans, and there was vicious resistance. And they were told, when you hit those beaches, you keep running up the beach. You don't stop.

You don't stop for anything. And that includes your buddy who's beside you. If your buddy's shot, you don't stop to help. You keep running. You have to take the beach. And that happened. That happened in many cases. All along the Normandy coast.

At the American beaches. Omaha and Utah. The British beaches. Gold and Sword. And the Canadian beach. Juneau Beach. So don't forget those guys. And the men and yes, women

who followed in the weeks and months ahead. People tend to forget that there were women involved in the liberation of Europe as well. Not on June 6th. Those were all men. But what followed fairly quickly,

my aunt was one of them. She was one of those young women who worked in the Royal Air Force. Have you ever seen those old movies where they're on a huge map and the women are surrounding the map and they're moving planes back and forth on it as various air formations are put together and confront the Lefava. She was one of those. And initially she worked in southern England, and then once the invasion had taken place and they'd taken a land hold, they moved many of those operations into France.

And she was part of that. And there were nurses and, I mean, the list goes on. There were men and women who were part of that. And there were nurses and, I mean, the list goes on. There were men and women who were part of that liberating force. All right. It's hard to go by a June 6 and not remember it. But that's not the purpose of today's show. The purpose of today's show is the Moore-Butts Conversation No. 3. 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 agreed 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. let's get right to it the moore butts conversation number three here we go all right well there are uh there are more than a few leadership races going on at

different levels of government in in 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 if you have, you know, 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. Proportionate engagement of members, membership of 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 first pass these kinds of things and you know you can first pass the post all that so 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 brought a massive membership base, particularly in Western Canada and big bases in the province of Ontario, seemed 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 Reed, you know, from different backgrounds coming into the new party,

they had real public debates about the merits of these systems. In the end, though, I think that if you are worthy of being the Prime Minister 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 hammer these things on the margins. But for the most part, I mean, you know, if the Conservative Party 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 are who have deeper pockets that's a problem uh but if you want to pure one member one vote and only digital voting well then that opens up to to some to somebody who could flood the member with instant 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 the correct it's almost without exception the correct person in the moment wins the leadership race if you you look at it in retrospect, you know, some of us who are actors who have been disappointed in races can 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 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 uh you know example you want to use uh 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 uh 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 leaders 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 i think that's the most important thing in the minds of voters within these contests themselves i do think that by the nature of the diversity of types of leadership processes we have in different orders of government amongst different parties, sometimes even within the same broad political tent, there are very different processes to elect leaders, 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. the net as wide as possible to create a political party that's 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 you know mentioned 76 and we could we could all all three of us mention other examples that are were similar where we were. 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 know, they're trying to make it interesting and there's nothing better than a, you know, drawn-out day on the convention floor where things happen that you weren't assuming might happen. But in terms of today, in a general way, and once again, I know, as you've both pointed out, that systems are different for different parties 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 when 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. So I don't think surprise is gone. But I do think that we 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 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 Olympics, had some tough 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. Alison Redford 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 a pretty organized campaign by public sector unions, particularly teachers unions, 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 because they had some collective bargaining on the horizon and they thought that should be a more peaceful alternative and at that time of course it was hegemonic power in alberta so so systems can be influenced and parties do try to guard against that so there have been some surprises uh on the provincial side but federally it's more complicated

i mean this is a continental nation uh that is you know second largest country in the size in size 37th largest in terms of population with all kinds of small 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 leading a parliamentary faction. But the problem, not the problem, the difference is between Canadian politics and the UK system, one is that that would obviously 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 day 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 politics is all about where is the leader and 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 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 campaigning. So our political dynamic is unique relative to other countries. Does our system work against 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 well 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, again, ran as an outsider, but she was a former deputy prime minister.

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 member of parliament for three years prior to that. So so that 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 in ways that are insincere. Well, then we have the ultimate outsider, Pierre Poiliev. Careful. Let's not cross into the partisan lines here. That's an inside joke. I think there are a couple of things I want to say about this,

Peter. And in general, I agree with James's points. 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 uh 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 of its 34, or for example, the, you know, pre-governing model of the Conservative Party from 2004 to 15, you know, 34 Liberal Members of Parliament, they were largely conscripted to the urban centres of Canada, particularly Toronto and Montreal. Well, that's not reflective of the rest of the country. The Conservative Party, prior to the genuine efforts of broadening

and having 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, in the British Tory model imposed into Canada, you might, if you're from Estevan, Saskatchewan, and Prince George, British Columbia, and Nanaimo, 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 was probably not the best you know uh ranking of virtues for a leader uh in order to to win the country okay and the most the 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. Just going on a nugget. 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 major department in government. And, you know, this has existed for a while now. Occasionally there's some interesting people come in, but overall I think it's existed for the last 20 or 30 years where we have trouble convincing people that they should perhaps run for public office in terms of their public service. Does the leadership method, the method of determining leadership, which seems, I mean, 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 i would say no that when people are thinking of running for office there are a bunch of other things i i spent a long 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 and my riding was suburban vancouver and i'm and my writing was typically the beachhead between my like right in the balance of the swing ridings in the fraser valley and downtown vancouver in the suburbs of vancouver and so you know to draw in candidates in the bernabees and the new west ministers 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 there are ridings that we were not likely to win they're still the face of the party and they can step on landmines and all candidates debates and they're still putting up signs and all that stuff so you need a good group of people um just 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, the grind that you're about to put them through. You know, assume you're going to win in all of that. Be very clear that this is a, 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 with, you know, that if you're running,

that you have absolute confidence in the person who is the leader of the party. You know, 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 it'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 the prime minister of this country, and I'm going to put my personal credibility on the line. 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,

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 have had people who ran in, I won't say 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 and they really believe in certain policies they want.

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, 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 you should you 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 because you're gonna you're gonna 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. 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 had nothing but opportunities for people. You can put it that way. 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 there are precious few 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 a, you have to have a pretty centered sense of yourself and you have to have um 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. 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 you know young turk full of energy ready to go i was elected with a group of people you know brian palester was a rookie vic taves was a rookie james rajat myself uh you know we came to ottawa 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 or 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 if to me to realize sitting in a bunch of caucus meetings that stock will they 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 than my mindset might have been a good cabinet minister in alberta but he mindset. He might have been a good cabinet minister in Alberta, but 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 someone I did believe in, which is Stephen Harper. And I did. caucus at the time you know leaning on what what i said earlier about the biases of 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 cycle where it didn't look like Stephen was going to beat Stockwell Day for the Canadian Alliance leadership. And I remember sitting in Parliament one day with James Rajot. 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 fielding questions in both French and English 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 responsibly. Men might not agree with him, but it was just like, yeah, there's just a sturdy, smart guy who's just leading things effectively.

And at the time, he was going to be the principal alternative to Paul Martin. And I remember looking at James Lejeune 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 and serve them in vancouver and say that stockwell 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 it's

objectively not true that stockwell day would have been a better prime minister than john manley so like if steven does if steven doesn't win i can't run again that's i can't do that and so i've you know fortunately you know things obviously turned turned out differently but i remember that conversation i remember james agreeing and we were just like yeah like this is not um like 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 this is the way this is. You have to be sober about the people who are who are offering for prime minister. Now, in every leadership race, by the way, Stephen Harper went on to win the leadership.

And Scott Brayson crossed the floor of the Liberals. And John Heron, 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, and 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 looked at him, I said, I said, Prime Minister, I said, I didn't run for office and you happen 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. that MPs go through that process when big decisions like that in terms of the leadership of their party is coming up. And it's encouraging to know they do. I'm not sure they all do, but clearly you did. Well, but about that, Peter, sorry to interrupt,

but full honesty, James Rajod at the time was, I think, 29. I was 25, 26. Not married, no kid 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 40s late early 50s 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 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, you know, there's no clear virtuous singular path. But we have to be mindful that, you know, politicians are human beings who 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 running for parliament. Interesting. Before I move on, Jerry, do you want to add anything to uh to what um 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 um different motivations i i think i'm one who thinks that I'm 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

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 whose 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 that 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, partly but not entirely due to the advent of social media and the targeting of politicians in their homes.

It's not good for the country. No, it's not. 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 partisan roles here. But are there lessons for all of us in the way that current leadership at the federal level of conservative leadership races is unfolding. Are there lessons about the system in what we're watching right now?

James, do you want to try that one? No, I mean, I think it's generally working well. The system that we, the system has been modified, right? So we don't have just purely 100 points per audience there's a floor that writings have to have for old ones but but 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 you know but i mean at in the 2017 leadership race um there were at i think at 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 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 Scheer won a 51-49 final ballot. So that's a tremendous amount of stress on the party, its membership, its infrastructure coming out of a defeat in 2015. 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 Jean Charest supporter and a staunch Pierre Polyev 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 the liberals. But between them, there's not a lot of heat. So the party, I think, has learned. And the dynamic within the party right now

is the party just really wants to win, which is feeding the heat, which is feeding the heat between the candidates, but the party is pretty united on the ground. 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,

and 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's signed up 150,000 party members. If that's true, then he's trying to win the leadership in a different way. So there are tensions, but I think the party, the Conservative party, I think will survive those tensions on the ground. The tensions between the candidates may be a little bit harder to

mend. We all got to be careful with these numbers as they start to roll out, because as you pointed out earlier, the numbers are one thing, where they are from, which province, etc., etc., 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 i said look my 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, would be how do we grow beyond the space that is self-evidently not enough to win

government in the country? And it remains to be seen whether this leadership process serves that, but it has certainly attracted 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 positive note, we'll end this conversation between the two of you which as I said earlier is the third one we've had and they get better every time 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, into the process. But for this, 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 butz 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 in really in the best interests of the people or is it in the best interests 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 um a quick heads up about uh the days ahead tomorrow brian stewart will be by with an incredibly important discussion about the ukraine story in terms of the impact it is having on the global food supply we've touched on this a couple of times in the past, but we're going to touch on it a major way tomorrow. So be with us for that. Wednesday, Smoke Mirrors and the Truth.

Bruce will be by. Thursday, your turn, your opportunity for your thoughts. The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com is where to send them. And Friday, of course, is Good Talk with Chantelle Hebert and Bruce Anderson. Hope you join us for, obviously, for all these programs this week. You've been listening on SiriusXM, Channel 167, Canada Talks, and on your favorite podcast platform. I'm Peter Mansbridge.

Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you again in 24 hours.