The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - The Prince - The Book. - Encore

Episode Date: October 16, 2024

An encore of Author and Journalist Stephen Maher joins The Bridge to talk about his new book, The Prince, which is all about Justin Trudeau. 

And hello there, Peter Vansbridge here. It's Wednesday, it's Encore Wednesdays, and today's Encore goes back to June of this year, when we had Stephen Mayer on. Stephen's a well-known journalist based in Ottawa. He wrote the book The Prince on Justin Trudeau, and it was released in June of this year. So we're lucky to have Stephen with us again for this Encore edition, especially on a week where there's been lots of controversy attached to the subject of that book, Justin Trudeau. So here you go, our Encore edition with Stephen Mayer. Hello once again, Tuesday, welcome to Tuesday, right here on the bridge. As we've done a couple of times in the last few weeks, we've got a new book on the market, a new one that fits right into the bridge's kind of area of discussion. That's Canadian politics. This is the second book, although it's really the first book.

The first one was kind of an essay by Paul Wells on Justin Trudeau. And that, of course, was Justin Trudeau on the ropes. This one is called The Prince. And it's about Justin Trudeau. Both these books, very timely, given the events of the day and kind of where we are in terms of the length of time in office for Justin Trudeau and the likelihood of an election. Well, it's more than the likelihood.

The fact there will be an election at some point in the next year and a half. Will Justin Trudeau be in it? Well, he says he will. And, well, we'll take his word for that at the moment. So, Stephen Mayer will be along with us. Stephen's a well-known reporter on Parliament Hill, works out of Halifax. Well, he's from Halifax. He works out of Ottawa, but he's back and forth in Halifax. A career that has broken a lot of stories over time. And he's well-respected, well-regarded by

his colleagues in the parliamentary press gallery. So we'll look forward to talking with Stephen here in a few moments' time. So let's get to the meat of the issue here, which is Stephen Mayer, author of The Prince. Are we going to take a break now? I'm not going to take a journey interview. We want to keep that interview intact. So we'll take it right after the interview. Here we go. My conversation with Stephen Mayer. So Stephen, a couple of

why questions first of all. Why the Prince? The title. Why the prince? The title. Why the prince? I first started thinking of him as a prince when I met him before he went into politics at Darcy McGee's. I don't know if you ever found yourself there or a pub in Ottawa. Oh, yeah. I remember. And I started talking to him, struck about conversation, and mentioned his father in passing at some point.

I stopped myself and said, oh, that's weird. I realize I'm talking about your dad. He got a kind of regal look and said, I never forget I'm a Trudeau. As I started researching the book, I always thought, this guy is not like most of the people I've met. He has a different sense of himself and a different background. And as I started working on the book, I came across quotes from his wife, his mother, and his brother calling him a prince. And I think it fits as a sort of way of thinking about him, a sort of frame, neither positive nor negative. But he's a sort of princely character with princely courage,

princely charisma, princely capriciousness, princely vanity, that it sort of suits him, I think. Do you think most people think of him that way? It's interesting that clearly his family, as you say, had this name for him, thought of him that way. Do you think the average Canadian thinks of him that way? Well, I think there's something about that early career in politics where there was this kind of yearning to him, yearning for him among the public

from the time of the eulogy on, his eulogy for his father, where there's a feeling that the Canadians wanted Pierre Trudeau's son to come and lead the country again. You know, it was in the air, which I think is a sort of princely feeling. It's almost a sort of restoration story, right? Or like Aragon in Lord of the Rings the the once and future king right i i really do believe that in the public mind not now but at that time there was a sense of him as the rightful heir uh being returned to the throne it's ironic really because you know as someone who

who covered both of them as they were prime minister and obviously Justin Trudeau still is but there was this yearning for them at the beginning right 68 was all about Trudeau mania and the country was kind of crazy for him 2015 I'm not sure they were crazy for him but they were yearning for him as you said they don't like we're ready for a trudeau again trudeau too but by the time pierre trudeau left office they they wanted him out you know they they they were they got mad at him a couple times they got mad at him in 79 mainly because of wage and price controls and they felt they'd been lied to but by the time 84 rolled around move out like we want you gone um and now we're seeing the same kind of thing with justin trudeau where it was like that at the beginning and here nine years later almost 10 years later uh there's a sense anyway uh if you

believe in polls that um that they want him gone so there's a there's, if you believe in polls, that they want him gone. So there's kind of a parallel track when the two of them really are very different. We're very different kinds of people. When people talk to me about the feeling of divisiveness in the country now, you know, which is part of the legacy or the current situation of justin trudeau that that uh uh society is intensely i would think unhealthily galvanized around feelings about this person um such that he's kind of a barrier to to achieving things politically. And people say that it's unprecedented. And I didn't really cover Pierre,

but I remember the feeling of, I would say, exasperation at the end of the Mulroney era, right? There is a thing at the end of long-running governments. I don't think we saw it with krechen uh as much his persona was such that people never really seemed to get um but now with justin i think it likely is worse likely because the media environment is different social media the algorithmic anger machines are such that um you know a lot of people really can't believe that this man is still running the country,

this man who they despise. And I don't know if, can you remember, was it like that with his dad? Was it quite as bad? There were times when he was despised, especially in certain parts of the country, namely the West, right? So, but there was, and know, and you still feel it.

You still see it every once in a while when there's talk of Pierre Trudeau. But nevertheless, you know, we're talking Justin Trudeau. So let's deal some more with that. I mean, you've covered him, as you say, since before he'd be, certainly before he became leader and prime minister. So in a sense, you would assume there are no surprises when you start to dig into a book like this, but there always are. So tell me something that surprised you,

that you learned about Justin Trudeau researching this book. There's a lot of little things. I had the sense, for instance the aga khan uh business that his people had advised against him taking that trip uh and i learned through the research that they had done so with some enthusiasm and he was not interested in hearing them and that that's also true of later trips he takes these vacations that are uh impolitic um you know hard to justify out of tune with the canadian political culture and it's pretty clear that all along everyone who works with him is saying well it'd be better if you didn't do that

you know uh so that's kind of interesting when you start to think about it, that he insists on all that. One little tidbit that I learned is that early on, when Sasha was still part of the leadership team, that there was some kind of a dinner at Mama Teresa's in Ottawa, where Dominic LeBlanc was trying to convince people that they were picking the wrong Trudeau, which was interesting that at that late stage, when he was getting ready to, to you know, take over the party that there were still people who thought that he was a lightweight or not as strong as his brother.

So lots of little things like that. I was struck. I managed to interview him and I asked him about the moment during the leadership campaign when La Presse endorsed him. And I had heard that he started to weep. He was on the bus in southwestern Ontario.

It was such an emotionally intense moment to have the emprunteur of André Pratt and the editorial board of Le Presse give him this warm blessing, compared him to Laurier and said, you know, which kind of gave permission to a certain part of the Quebec electorate to vote for him. And he was so overwhelmed that he cried. And then when I asked him about it in February, his eyes welled up again. So I thought that was interesting that it showed a sense of how much the approval of Quebecers meant to him and that he would be so emotionally attached to that.

Did you ever think he was a lightweight? I did. Yeah, I did. I thought he was likable. But I write in the book about how when I went to Papano for post-media, when he declared, I didn't get it. I didn't get Justin Trudeau. I was impressed by Thomas Mulcair and by Bob Ray at that time. Right. Both. I mean, you cover the both. You could they could debate you about anything.

You know what I mean? They're they're deep grounding in the way the country is governed and careers where they had faced obstacles and overcome them and a sophisticated understanding of Canadian political system. And Justin Trudeau was a former high school teacher. When you look at it, his resume, I think he had the thinnest resume of any prime minister to that point. And at that time, stephen harper was second thinnest resume and um you know so but what i didn't get and gerald butts tried to clue me in that day i had a chat with him uh his advisor and he kind of laughed at me and said, you don't understand.

Canadians want this guy, right? And why? Why did they want him? I mean, it had to be more than he's the son of another one. Oh, it certainly is, because otherwise, Catherine Clark would be on her way to 24th Sussex, right? Like, you know, and she might do a splendid job actually my the little that i know of her i think she's an impressive person uh but justin had a tremendous drive tremendous um

commitment once he decided that he was going to do it, first run in Papineau, he did not shrink from those things that a lot of politicians try to get out of, going to the park, cleaning, shaking hands, door knocking with strangers. I've been covering this business for a while and you hear stories from strategists about how they'll send a candidate out with a bunch of literature to deliver in a neighborhood. And they'll find out later the guy just put it in a dumpster and didn't do the door knocking. Right. Like, you know, that stuff is hard.

Yeah. And he did it. And he's better at it. Especially hard if you tend to be a bit of an introvert, which it's clear that you think he is. Yeah. I don't think there's much out of what it is, but he does get energy from interacting with the public on a significant scale, you know, and the people who traveled with him on those tours said he could do two or three times as many events as a normal politician, right? He'd wake up in the morning, go to the gym, show up at 7 a.m., having exercise and fed himself and ready to go and could go hard all day.

So I give him a lot of credit for the commitment that he brought to it, not just at the street level politicking, but also the work that he did with Katie Telford and Gerald Butts and Robert Eisland, you know, the, um, uh, inner circle, the, the inner circle in, uh, on his, um, Alex Lantier, uh, I should mention on improving his communication skills on learning discipline. He was a very undisciplined politician. He would say whatever popped into his head, basically. He got, if I'm not mistaken, he got in trouble in one interview with you

having to do with the Boston Marathon. Yeah, the day after he was elected leader. It was the first interview he gave, and it just so happened to be on the day of the Boston Marathon bombing. And so I said, okay, so you're prime minister. What would you do? In this case, what would you say? And he came out with a line about trying to understand the root causes

of why these people, it was unclear at that point who'd done it, but obviously somebody had, and he wanted to, he thought what was important at that moment was to try and understand the root causes of their motivation, which he just got absolutely clobbered for. You know, you mentioned butts. I can remember Jerry standing in the corner, almost put his hand in his head knowing this is not the answer we want,

and he kind of lived with that. But, I mean, listen, he was definitely politically to a degree naive about how to handle some of these things when he first got in the job. So there was a lot of on-the-job training. And listening to others, which has been an issue that some feel that he's not good at in, you know, in listening to advisors on certain things. You know, you talked about the various holidays, whether it was the Aga Khan or whether it was the India trip, whether it was Tofino. I mean, we can rattle him off, especially when it kind of becomes clear that he was basically advised, don't do this.

Like, this is going to backfire on you. And he goes ahead and does it anyway. So the question would be, does he take advice? Does he listen to advice? Because there's kind of a conflict on what we're saying clearly he learned how to handle things a little better uh politically but some of these other issues not so much um and and not not only advice but does he have friends are there people close enough to him that could say to him hey you, you know, Justin, this is not working?

He does. And that story where he talked about root causes, I'm told that as soon as that interview was over, he said to his people, I was too hippy-dippy with that, wasn't I? I said, yeah. You know, so that he wasn't so egotistical that he would get stick to his positions. Right. Like he would learn as he went and apologize for dumb things that he said. And people I mean, we get journalists get kind of we make more of that of those gaffes in a way than the public. The public will say, oh, OK okay he said something stupid and corrected himself you know uh uh i think um but i think so what made him remarkable and able to learn and change so quickly was that he could work very very closely in work doing doing that

kind of difficult thing where you're admitting that you suck at something or said something stupid it's hard on the ego you you would know about the kind of media training they do uh i've had public speaking training before and people cry right it's hard you know it's gets at your ego and uh uh so he but he would keep doing it and he still does, right? Like he, his natural speaking, uh, and communications approach is not what we see. And so he's, it's a constant work in progress and I give him credit for taking advice and doing all that stuff. Um, but the vacation things are different in that. And in the book, the most recent vacation, uh uh i did some research and then talked to him

about what i'd learned he'd been going to this place in um jamaica since he was uh in diapers with the green family they are very old family friends and it means a lot to him and uh he wants to his life is difficult his His family life is difficult. He doesn't get to spend time with his kids. And he wants to share that special place with his children as his father shared it with him. And I think what happens is the staff says, well, we don't think that's a good idea. And he says, I'm not really asking for your advice. This is my vacation with my family and i'm gonna do it

and on one level i understand it on another level i think well why are you making so many headaches for your team for your brand right don't do it don't do it but that's not how he sees it i guess and so i want to stay on this scene for a little bit because it's interesting, especially in light of where he is at in his career and where his party is at right now in terms of who he listens to, who's in that real inner circle. Clearly it's Katie Telford who's been with him since the beginning, which is unusual enough in politics. People tend to change those kind of senior advisors.

But he hasn't. He's extremely loyal to her, and obviously she's loyal to him. But it also becomes at this time, because one assumes she's not telling him, you know, really maybe it's time to think of moving out. But he has friends, you know, I assume he has friends in the cabinet, in the caucus, outside of politics, and what they must be saying. Is there that small group of people he talks to? Yeah, so I think that Tom Pitfield, you probably knew his dad. Sure, yeah.

Dominic LeBlanc, Mark Miller, I think he's friendly with Seamus. So there are, I think he's still somewhat friendly with the Gerald butts, you know? Right. Uh, but, um, uh, you know, and obviously he's close to Katie and some other people in the PMO, but that's, you know, they work together, but I, the, um, you know, uh, Mark Miller and Seamus and Gerald butts, we're all in his, his his we're all groomsmen for him when he got married so he's known these people for a long time and and uh the way these

things work that i think the friends you make before you become prime minister are different from the friends you make after you become prime minister um so you know and those are some pretty savvy people right you know they're they're um they would not be sycophantic with him i wouldn't think and i think and i've had some indication just gossip but that you know they're uh some of them may be saying well it's been quite a run hasn't it justin what's next for you? Yeah, right. You must be so pleased with how everything's gone and you're still a young man, right? What do you think he's really thinking right now? I mean, I know that's hard to ask you that question,

but in this moment, from outside the inner circle, circle you're probably because of what you've been doing researching and preparing and talking to a lot of people about this book you probably know him as well as anybody outside the inner circle um what do you believe when you hear the things he's saying about staying right now do you think he really means that uh i don't think i basically don't listen to that uh when i interviewed him in february and he said you know look this is why i got into politics uh polyam and i have completely different views of the country and i'm here for the big fights and that's why i want to do it and you know you've been around him he's a persuasive charismatic sort of figure and i left the room room thinking, gee, well, I guess I was wrong in thinking he might leave.

You know, he kind of does the Star Trek mind meld thing on you or, you know, affects your thinking. But with greater distance and also the fact that things continue to do worse and worse. Right. He brought out a budget. I was waiting for that. Let's see if he can get a couple of points in the polls. continue to do worse and worse, right? He brought out a budget. I was waiting for that. Let's see if he can get a couple points in the polls. Let's see if he can sell a product again, right?

Maybe he can, but he hasn't been able to. So he looks like a spent force. And I know that he's a smart guy. And I know that the people close to him would be telling him it's a difficult position. And I know that behind the scenes with his advisors, he speaks frankly about the political difficulties that they're in. He's not living in a world of make-believe. He knows that they're in the soup, right? So you look at all that and you think likely it would be better for the Liberals to get someone else in there and try to get a bit of a

new start before the next election. And likely it's better for Justin because it'd be better for whatever he does next if he hasn't had the uh his nose bloodied by pierre polio right however i don't one other thing i know about justin trudeau is that he is very controlled undisciplined message communicator now and he is able uh he is not going to show his true feelings oh not all politicians are like that but he can put on a mask uh and one example that really made me see that side of him is it looks as though he knew before the rally in truro in 2019 for lenore Zan that Time magazine was about to drop the Blackface story. And he gave an exuberant speech

and high energy when inside he must have been awaiting the what might be like a political death sentence. So he is resilient and has a remarkable ability to project the emotion he wants to project. That's a long way of saying, I don't know, Peter. I don't know what he's thinking. Well, one thing you do know, and I know, and our friend Paul Wells writes about in his essay on Trudeau right now, is that the fight is always something that inspires him,

whatever that fight may be. He uses the example, obviously, of the fight with Brazeau, the actual physical fight, the boxing match. Do you place as much weight in that as others do? I do, yeah. And I see that as an example of his extraordinary confidence. He told his stepfather, bet on me.

I'm going to beat this guy. Right? He knew. He knew he was going to win. Everybody else thought Brazile was going to win just by looking at pictures of the two guys. But Trudeau knew. And his stepfather took his advice and won some money.

The other moment like that, I don't know if you'll recall when he rolled out his Democratic reform package at a time when Tom Mulcair was way ahead in the polls. You'll remember that was when he first promised we'd had our last election with First Past the Post. Mulcair had been ahead in the polls for ages he looked like he was you know surely the alternative to harper and i was amazed by how buoyant and cheerful and optimistic trudeau was he has a profound confidence one former cabinet minister said it's like a superpower if we all had that goodness knows what we could accomplish so he may actually think now that he's going to shock everyone and beat polyabs but i i you've been watching the game for a long time have you ever seen anyone come back from this kind of position

no no but everything's changed about everything's changed about politics everything's changed about the media. I mean, there used to be a saying that if you went into a campaign 10 points down, you couldn't recover. You just couldn't recover. And that's when it was a 60-day campaign. Going into one, if it remains more or less the same, 15 to 20 points down, you'd say, man, that's impossible.

But, you know, things can happen. But it seems very unlikely that anything could happen to change, you know, those numbers, but we've witnessed it. We've seen change. Look what just happened in India. Modi was supposed to win in a walk, right? He didn't. He still won, but he ended up in a minority

when he was fully expected to get a majority. Things can happen. True. I also, though, not just the polls, but talking to people. I was at the Greek Fest in Halifax last night, a fantastic thing and that and i was talking to like second generation greek and lebanese people who have had it with trudeau if you're losing the halifax greeks and lebanese people uh you know and they're saying i don't

like polyeth but i'm we got to get rid of trudeau. That may sound stereotypical, but there are voting patterns, and those communities are traditionally among the strongest liberal supporters in the country. So that kind of thing, you hear it all kinds of places, and he's got an uphill climb to change those minds, I think. This year, I read something you said to Susan Delacorte a week or two ago, that your sense of where he was when you began this project is very different from where you see him today.

Do you want to talk about that for a minute? Sure. So when I started working on the book in October 2022, when I talked to people for my interviews, I'd say, look, I think it's been a very successful government. I think that they got elected to tackle inequality, reconciliation, climate change. Those were three important files. They did make progress on all of them, not without difficulty. They managed COVID very well.

They managed NAFTA very well. Trudeau changed the country. He legalized marijuana. He improved or changed or reformed a lot of things. But since then, you have a housing crisis that is largely linked to federal immigration policies that didn't make sense. I don't think they knew what they were doing. And this foreign interference thing that it's hard to have faith in the people running the country and you

end up with this story this past week with the committee of parliamentarians revealing that we've got uh what sounds like traitors in the house of commons right and uh i have never had a sense throughout any of that that there's a clear message and a clear plan they're always dragging their feet they're not wanting to admit it's a problem uh there's a i find it somewhat mysterious why you know uh it's as though sticking up for canada is somehow gauche it's almost like that right like well we we don't want to make a fuss about this kind of thing um so it's hard to end up uh it's shaken my confidence in him during that period when i had a generally sort of nuanced but positive view of him and i'm finding it harder to maintain that

it is um the foreign interference thing is it's interesting because when it started, I'm not sure it really galvanized the Canadian people. They were like, there was other things on their mind, whether it was COVID or inflation or food prices or whatever it was, housing prices. But of late, as soon as you start throwing the T word around, whether it's traitors or treason or what have you, even when you try to balance it off with the potential of McCarthyism

at the same time and some pre-judging some of this stuff, it's still ugly. And you wonder why it has hung around so long and that they haven't been able to deal with it. Look, we're almost out of time, Stephen. Let me ask you just a couple more questions about the sourcing for this, because you seem to have done a tremendous number of interviews in the last couple of years. I think I read somewhere 200 that you'd said something like that. Yes, sir. Yeah.

Did you have trouble getting people to talk? And I mean really talk, because the problem with these kind of books sometimes can be it's hard to find somebody who's willing to go either on the record or even off the record and tell you stuff that doesn't paint the subject of the book in a pretty good light. It was exhausting, to be honest with you. Just like sustained effort trying to get people to talk. I've been covering politics for a long time, and I've tried to develop a reputation of somebody who knows how to keep his mouth shut. You know what I mean? To be that source work where I don't talk about who talks to me under really any circumstances. So that's a thing that I can say to people is, you know, that you, that I'm going to be quiet about this, what you tell me. And so it required a lot of patient, persistent work,

but people still don't have to talk to you and they, and they're nervous. And so that was, it was exhausting, but I was really pleased in the end with how many people were willing to talk to me. And I found it admirable in a sense, because what it is, is they like to read political books. They think there should be a record. So it's not all people who have a bone to pick or a score to settle and i would not indulge in any score settling or bone picking with people you know what i mean i'm not that's not what i'm here for to help somebody get back at somebody who uh myth them um but i i found that

uh touching at times the way people would say well you know you know, yes, I will talk to you, but let's be careful about how we're going to do this. And including a whole lot of impressive people whose names do not appear in the book, you know, that those were nice moments when you get them. And, but it's a lot, it's, it's very demanding and sort of, you have to be persistent and polite. And, you know, I think my next book, I,

I'm tempted to write something about the beginnings of the RCMP so that I don't have to interview anyone. Yeah. Well, that's a hell of a book. Yeah. Listen, good luck with this.

I know you've, well, you've done yours kind of two-week flogging the book in different parts of the country and on various shows like this, which can be exhausting in itself. I've written a few books, nothing with the kind of weight of what you've been dealing with. But sometimes the work after you finish writing can be just as hard, if not harder,

than the actual sitting down and writing the book. And it's a different skill set, right? It uses different parts of your brain. You're used to being a little hermit sitting there typing, and then suddenly you've got to be the guy standing there with a box of soap. Hi! Yeah, exactly. Well, listen, good luck with it. I'm sure the timing is interesting. Well, thank you very much. It's an honor for me to be on your podcast, Mr. Ransbridge. Thank you.

Oh, geez, Stephen. Really? I bet you say that to all the interviewers. Anyway, good luck. Take care, and thanks for doing this. Thank you. Well, there you go. Stephen Mayer, the latest of the authors we've been talking to

about the political scene in Canada. His new book, The Prince. It's available out there right now. You can find it in bookstores or online. So don't be shy about grabbing a copy of that. Sounds more than interesting, right? Okay, we're going to take our one break and come back with a few notes before we leave you for this day.

So we'll be right back after this. And welcome back. You're listening to The Bridge right here on Sirius XM, Channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform. We're happy to have you with us. Yeah, you know, I was mentioning that of late we've done a number of political books as they relate to the country in this moment.

It is a fascinating moment to be in. We're a year and a half at the most away from an election. You have one party, the opposition party, with a huge lead in the public opinion polls, for whatever that means. And then you have the governing party that's been in power since November of 2015. So almost nine years. By the time there's an election, it could be almost ten years,

which is a long time for any government to be in power. It's a time when people are looking for options. And so helping you make those choices around options are some of the books that are out there right now in the last few weeks. We've done, obviously, what you just heard with Stephen Mayer on The Prince on Justin Trudeau. Last week was A Political Life about Pierre Pelliev with Andrew Lawton. And a couple of weeks ago, we had Paul Wells on with,

it's funny, you know, some people calling it a book. He calls it a book at times. At other times he calls it an essay. It's about 100 pages long. But it's Paul Wells' view on Justin Trudeau. And the book is titled, what is it titled? Something about a rope. Anyway, Justin Trudeau's book by Paul Wells.

So you've got three of them right there, right? So a bit of summer reading there for you. Because if we're going to make this choice next year, we should make it with some knowledge of the people we're dealing with. And those are a couple of the possibilities. Conservatives, the Liberals, obviously. There are other choices as well. The NDP and Jagmeet Singh. Le Québec, if you're living in Quebec, the Green Party,

which will be running in various ridings across the country. So there you go. Lots of study to do, lots of choices to make. Well, thanks for listening today. That was our Encore episode with Stephen Mayer, the journalist who wrote The Prince, the story of Justin Trudeau. We'll be back tomorrow with your turn, part two of our special on your answers to the question, if you could sit down with any Canadian in history, who would that be and why would you want to talk to them? That's tomorrow along with the random renter on the bridge.