The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - The Right Honourable Podcast -- Brian Mulroney Joins Bruce And Me For The Race Next Door (#16).

Episode Date: October 30, 2020

A fascinating conversation with the country's seventeenth prime minister -- he's pretty blunt about the stakes in the race next door!

and hello there peter mansbridge here with the latest edition of the race next door bruce anderson will be joining us from ottawa as he always does and we have a very special guest on this weekend before the big day tuesday of of course, is the U.S. presidential race. And we have been doing special broadcasts, as you know, for the last couple of weeks on various topics associated with the election. Well, now it's really sort of get ready time for the big results. One assumes we'll start pouring in on Tuesday night. We may know on Tuesday night.

And again, it may take a while. But our special guest, and that's why I'm calling this the Right Honourable podcast for this day, because we are lucky enough to be joined from his home by the Right Honourable Brian Mulrooney, the 17th Prime Minister of Canada. And Prime Minister, it's great to have you with us. Thank you, Peter. Happy to be with you. Let me start in a kind of a very general way, because we'll get to the nitty-gritty of this particular campaign in a moment, but you're one of those few people who has led a country

into a couple of election campaigns, 84 and 88, where you get to the crunch time like this the weekend before, and no matter what your advisors and what your pollsters may be telling you, you don't really know. So I'm wondering how comfortable is that final weekend before the election? Well, you know, Peter, even if polls say that you're going to win big, as I was fortunate to have happened to me, you don't take that for granted at all. I never did. I was really quite terrified right until the polls were closed on that night. You know, there's a lot of uncertainty. You hope for victory, but you have to also at least mentally consider the possibility of defeat, that's for sure.

And that brings with it a wave of questions and answers and so on. So for me anyway, I was pretty much of a happy warrior in some ways. But for me, there was a lot of doubts in my mind and uncertainty about the future. And until I heard someone on the news say that I had won, I remained... Someone on the news? You must have been watching us. Yeah. Go back to my memoir, Peter, and you'll see what I said about the CBC announcing my victory.

And I turned to one of my friends and said, I always told you that the CBC was a brilliant outfit. But no, for me, Peter, it was a period of uncertainty and concern. And I had trouble sharing the enthusiasm of our guests or our colleagues who were with me because of that. Is it a lonely feeling on those final nights or final hours before you actually start to see results? I mean, I know you're with people and you're with advisors and obviously you're with your family. But in a way, you know, the leader, whoever that person is, is in some ways kind of alone on that in that moment.

Well, let me go back to 84, Peter, and tell you that we had the Progressive Conservative Caucus met in Saskatchewan before the anticipated election. When everybody had left, Joe Clark and I went to my hotel room to talk about some things. I remember Joe standing up, really on his way, and he's paused to look out the window, and I can still see him in my mind's eye when he said, you know, Brian, I think you're going to do pretty well in this campaign. But he said, never forget the following. Once the reader's issued, it's entirely on you. You're going to carry the weight of this whole campaign,

success or failure. I think it'll be the former, but it's all on you. I said, thank you, Joe. Well, we're going to hear Bruce laughing there in the background. So Bruce, jump in. He was 100% right. And so that's the kind of feeling that I had on those two nights that I won those elections. And I wasn't certain. The first one, pretty well, yes. But the second one, so many ups and downs in the campaign that I was never

certain of it and always worried about it right to the very end. Ms. Mulroney, it's Bruce Anderson here. It's great to hear your voice again. And I've been looking forward to the chance to connect with you about this campaign, which is really fascinating for me on a number of levels. And I'm interested in your take on it. And maybe just to kind of put a question to you that you can weave into what I know. You've kind of prepared some thoughts about the campaign. And I think the question I was going to ask you is that I remember quite vividly that I had worked for the liberals up until about 85. And I got to know you a little bit and know some of the people in your cabinet.

And you convinced me to support your party because it was a progressive conservative party. It was looking to win votes right across the country, essentially a party that aspired to be a government for all Canadians. And I liked a lot of the agenda. And the reason I'm raising that is I want to, I'm really curious to hear how you see the conservative movement worldwide these days and how do you think it's been influenced by the Republican Party under Donald Trump? There's a kind of a big question for me and what happens to conservatism after this election campaign. So let me just put that there and ask you to kick off maybe with your thoughts about this campaign overall. Well, there is no Republican Party left. The one that has been known in the United States for at least 100 years is now the Trump party. As his son-in-law inadvertently mentioned, Jared Kushner,

very good man, by the way, but Jared mentioned the other day that this, in fact, was a hostile takeover of the Republican Party by the Trump forces. And I think it'll be some time before the traditional views held by, for example, President Reagan and President Bush and so on,

will return to the scene. Donald Trump has taken over the Republican Party, warts and all, and he has conducted himself in such a way as to redefine the Republican Party, for good or bad. And I'm not sure that the people on the down ballot, in running for office in the states today, on the Republican ticket, are very happy with where they are, what they find themselves in.

So, you know, he has run essentially a provincialist and protectionist administration. And in contrast to Reagan, who had a sunny disposition and cooperated fully with the allies to ensure that their support for his leadership internationally that's gone and um you know bruce um trump didn't steal the 1916 election you know he won it fair and square and but you remember from his inauguration speech inaugural speech uh when he spoke of a carnage in the streets and that kind of stuff uh americans have gotten it on pretty well and the allies like us too and he has developed i think almost a cult-like loyalty from his supporters. He has accomplished with that attitude and comportment, he's accomplished things of

some significance of course. For example, most recently the Enhanced Middle East Peace Initiative. But you know I've learned over the years that leadership is really, in some ways anyway, is really about two things, substance and style. And you know, one achievement explains both, I think. Trump quite properly set out early in his mandate to get his allies to meet their 2% commitment for defense spending. A lot of them had become laggards, including Canada by the way, and did not meet the 2%. If I may say, 30 years later, 30 years on, the last government to meet its commitment of 2% was mine. And that's a hell of a long time ago.

So it tells you something of the frustration of the Americans with the allies. But, you know, that commitment, you know, he raised money from the allies, you know, by really, in some ways, personal attacks and attacks upon their statesmanship and leaders. That process, I think, showed his style. Verbal brutality with the Allies, personal attacks against Trudeau, Prime Minister May, Chancellor Merkel, President Macron, real serious vindictive attacks against them. And his threat, as you know, to pull out of NATO if he didn't get his way.

Well, what's held the alliance together since the end of the Second World War is NATO. It's the most effective instrument ever utilized to combat the Soviet Union and to keep the peace and security in Western Europe and now throughout Europe. And so he did this, but he almost destroyed the United States' relationship with allies with these insults and attacks. Now, I know, as you're aware, I know Mr. Trump quite well. for example, he would change and evolve in the Oval Office once he became aware of the extent of his authority, but his need to cooperate with the alliance. But I was wrong. As time went on, he became more strident and america came to mean from america the leader of the alliance came to to mean america alone so i thought he was going to carry that bellicose persona he thought as well about but that persona would lead him to victory because of the sharp divisions in the country.

And of course, he had an opponent who had something to say about this. And so Biden's own strategy, it seems to me, was in light of that, which he knew and everybody else knew, was they made a wise choice. And I think the choice was to turn the election into a referendum on Donald Trump and to focus on the pandemic as the number one and only issue of the campaign. And to do that, I thought they got smart again down there. And the Democrats, knowing Mr. Biden's strengths and weaknesses, and given their objective, I think was to low doing his thing. And the other thing they did very silently, nobody figured it out, and I certainly didn't, is that they're fundraising. You know, you can stay in your basement if you've got a billion dollars to spend carrying your message out across the airwaves every night.

And when they announced in September, it went fairly unnoticed as well. They announced in September that they had hired the time necessary with $250 million for the last two weeks of the campaign.

I've never heard of that before. And so I think that the maxim for Joe's campaign probably was the following. Sometimes in politics, you win by not losing. And here was Joe Biden, a gentleman, soft-spoken, not a bitterly partisan guy, up against Donald Trump. And I think that's what is in the process of happening, although you never know until the last ballot is counted. So this is not a prediction. But if Joe wins, this will have been a brilliant strategy. He was sort of written off last year, wasn't he?

That's exactly right. And you, and you do win. If he does it, he is winning by not losing, which I think is a brilliant strategy. Can I, can I back you up just a little bit? Because you listed off the names of all the different leaders of the traditional alliance, whether it was Germany or Britain or France, Canada, and so on. Do you think, given the events of these last four years, that there's a single one of those leaders who would like to see Trump re-elected?

None. There wouldn't be one. Now, I can't speak for them, but I know them all and know what they think I think. And so I wouldn't bet a whole hell of a lot of money, Peter, one of them, supporting him. Look, at the G7 meeting in Charlevoix, my old riding in La Nerve a couple of years ago, he attacked Trudeau personally. And then he sent his two top people to go on the Sunday morning shows and say that Trudeau had stabbed Trump in the back, that he was a terrible ally, a non-friend. And this, of course, was never in modern history

has any president of the United States ever spoken like this about an ally and certainly not a close friend like Canada. So that kind of thing has, I think, distorted some of Trump's real achievements, one of which I mentioned earlier, the Middle East affair, which is very, very good. But if you don't have that personal relationship with the President of the United States and your Prime Minister of Canada or Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, I mean, look, he said in the middle of the Brexit problems over there, publicly,

what Prime Minister made to the effect that she's pretty weak and she's losing because she did not follow my ideas. She didn't follow what i told her to do what the hell is going on in an alliance that relies basically on trust and and mutual respect when the president of the united states says that about about allies so i think this is all if all of this stuff was baked into the cake some time ago, and Americans are deciding, do we want to be led by a man who has very significant strengths and accomplishments, but whose persona, whose style is so off-putting that we're going to replace him with a more modest and thoughtful guy called Joe Biden. Well, there are a few people who know the American psyche and the American people better than you do from this side of the border.

So how do you answer that question? How are they going to come to grips with the puzzle that's before them on Tuesday? Well, my guess is that I hear a lot of people say, both to me privately, both prominent people and ordinary people that I've met

in the last four years, that a lot of them say that, look, I liked him in the beginning and he's done some very good things i like his tax cutter i like the israel thing or what have you but as americans this offends us and it deeply offends me to know that as an as an american, my country is seen by the allies as now unreliable and a place

of insults towards me and my country or someone else's country, rather than the peace and prosperity kind of thing that we knew under Reagan. Bush was a gentleman. Reagan was a gentleman. And Bill Clinton was a gentleman. Those are the three with whom I served. And moreover, they respected Canada. They admired Canada and treated Canada in that manner.

And this is no longer the case. And what could be said of Canada in this role the American citizens know that everybody's getting the hell kicked out of them on different days and I think that's at play down in the United States today although I wouldn't count anybody out, obviously not but that's playing big and I'll tell you where. He's playing big, particularly with, he needs it to get to his cult like supporters.

But it doesn't play well. He pushes a lot of people away, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's very divisive. So, Mr. Mulroney, I wanted to ask you another question that's been on my mind. I listened carefully to how you were describing Joe Biden's campaign. And I think I very much agree with you that he kind of recognized that an election that was ultimately about Donald Trump was the best chance that he had to win. I remember you in the, you know, I got to know a little bit more about how you operated and thought about your electoral chances in that 88 and beyond

period. And I was struck by how strategic you were about the management of an agenda and the presentation of ideas to people and organizing a party to develop a sense of what was on offer for Canadians. And I thought you were so good at that, especially the kind of the party unity thing that I remember. I don't know if you're going to be happy with me saying, but I remember you were pulling at one point around 14, 15 percent for the party was. And that if you had taken if I had taken a survey of your caucus members, they would have said, we'll go to the polls with Brian Mulroney whenever he wants to go. They had that much confidence in you as someone who could frame an. Does Donald Trump have a strategy for this campaign? And maybe, you know, part B of that is the COVID pandemic is on everybody's minds right now.

What would you have done if you were campaigning in this situation with this pandemic raging the way that it is? And how would it differ from what Donald Trump has done? Oh, well, look, at the first hint of this, in January, I would have brought in both the Democrats and some of the independents, the best minds in the United States, and a first-rate scientific and medical group of advisors and say, people, we're all in this together. This is a calamity and I'm going to put politics in the deep freeze and this is my mandate in life and if I get through it, fine, for electoral purposes. If I don't, quite frankly, I don't give a damn, because this is the challenge of my lifetime and of my presidency. And I am going to construe it

in that manner. And if you want to vote for me at the end of it, if you think I'm doing a good job, I'd be delighted. But if you don't, that's good too, because what I'm going to be doing now, I was a politician, and I've taken some shots and given some shots, but not anymore. And so as a result of which, you know, whatever you get, whatever you deserve at the end of it. But his conduct of this, I think, was a plan simply to run on a good economy and to defeat his enemies. And that was it. But the whole world changed in January when the first signs of this emerged. Yeah, yeah.

Well, I'm also interested in the whole question of the media. In 1984 and 1988, in your time in office, you had a particular knowledge of the media. I'm sure some of them you like better than others. Probably you like Peter a lot. Most people do, but I wouldn't put words in your mouth about that. But when you look at how the media are... Bruce, your last comment, I wouldn't bet my mortgage on that. I do want to know what you think about how the media have evolved and the role that cable networks are playing now and the role that social media are playing now and the way that Facebook is playing and how different that is from the context from a media standpoint when you were in politics and what you think might need to change in the future for the good of democracy generally? Well, the world has changed. It's no longer, hell, when I was prime minister,

and that wasn't back in 1854. It was 1984. But there was no internet then. There were no cell phones to speak of. So the world has really changed in terms of communications, 24-hour news works and so on. But what has to remain constant if you want to be successful at it, and I had two terms of very strong majority governments, and I got kicked around quite a lot by the media. But the trick is, of course, is not to complain about it publicly. You're not going to change it. You can't fight who it's been set off and you can't fight with

somebody who buys the ink by the gallon and paper by the ton. You're not going to win that battle. In fact, an illustration of that is one day I'm at the White House with President Reagan, and we're going up to the residence to have lunch, just the two of us. And I say on the way up, I said, well, Ron, did you see the bloody stuff in the New York Times about you today where they were actually trying to impeach him again? And it was pretty brutal stuff. And he said, no, I didn't. And I said, you didn't see this? He said, an awful personal attack on you. He looked at me and he said, Brian, I don't read the news.

I make the news. So because of that, it would never have occurred to him to get into a, he would have considered it undignified and unpresidential to get into the equivalent of a tweet or a fight against the media. I think the only way to do it in whatever circumstance, it's the leader who has to change and accept the fact that this is not going away. The media's job is to correct and challenge and sometimes attack the administration.

You have to know that and roll with it and let go of this vindictive spirit that appears in some of these tweets that the president has gotten himself into. I know that on the one hand, that helps him reach his base, but on the other, it calls into question his judgment and his personal qualities. If he loses this election, it will not be because that he was not a strong president in some important ways. He was and is. It will be because of the personal side of the nature of his personality and his persona that has been put in the window,

and Americans have looked at it, and many of them don't like it at all, and will vote against him in concert. You know, you've mentioned the tweets a number of times already in this conversation. I just wonder, because I know you weren't shy about going after people who went after you back in the 80s, and I'm just wondering if that platform had been around in the 80s, if there had been such a thing as Twitter, if there had been,

this is all very hypothetical, but if there had been, you know, the access to a platform like Twitter through smartphones and what have you that we have now that's kind of second nature now, 24-7, do you think you would have fallen prey to some form of that? Well, I've made a lot of mistakes in my life, so I probably would have done that too, Peter. But knowing what I know now about social media and so on, I would hope that I would have been very restrained in my use of that, very restrained.

And to drop the, if you look at the tweets that are floating around, most of them are personal in nature. The president attacks his own cabinet members. He attacks his opponents. He attacks fairly inconsequential people who made a comment about it. And so the statesman part of the president is obscured by this constant war of words going on, which are vindictive in many times, many ways, vindictive, sometimes careless and reckless, and sometimes untrue. And so that gets the public perception as well. Now, Joe Biden, for example, is not a perfect guy. As you know, Peter, I've been friendly with him for 30 years. You know, when I was in office, he was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations

Committee and Judiciary Committee and so on. And so we had all kinds of opportunities to meet and discuss. He's a great fellow, but he's not a perfect guy. In fact, he won't run a perfect government. In fact, no government is perfect, with the possible exception of my own. Of course. But you're not going to get any tweets of that nature from Joe Biden. Not at all. And I think people in America seem to want some reassurance of their leadership, of their strength, but without the vindictiveness that accompanies the message

or the messenger these days. And I think Americans who love their country, and they all do, they're very patriotic. That's a great quality in America. But I think they're kind of tired and exhausted by the constant to and fro of attacks from the Oval Office and the White House. I think you're on to something really important. At least I hope so, Mr. Mulroney, in terms of how Americans come to judge these two candidates. I wanted to ask you, I had one more question for you. I could ask you questions all day. I'm really appreciative of the time you've given us so far.

But I remember watching this last debate and hearing these candidates, you know, call each other crooked and racist. And I remember maybe the sharpest thing that you said in the debate. Maybe there were others, but the you had a choice, sir, line comes to mind as a moment of great kind of pugilism. And when I think about that compared to people calling each animated by the vitriol that he puts out. And of course, there are people on the Democratic side who are pretty animated by the vitriol as well. And I guess from my standpoint, it's probably a little bit more understandable to have that reaction. But as you watch it and as you think about Canadians, is there a fundamental difference between Americans and Canadians when it comes to this question of politeness and civility and what our standards are? And is that a little bit more evident now if it is the case well very much so i think that's a very profound observation bruce because first of all the democrats uh you know they've got their share of vindictiveness in them too anyone who doubts that should have watched the the

kavanaugh hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee. I mean, the comments about him, unfounded by everyone from Kamala Harris to Booker to anyone that appeared on that scene that day, was extraordinary, malicious and vindictive and unfair and unjust. So, you know, the Democrats don't have any monopoly on truth or conduct or fairness at all. But I think that it permeates their society, as opposed to Canada, where there are certain guardrails of conduct and the politics of personal destruction that one sees so often in the United States of America is largely absent from our discourse and from our view of parliamentary procedure and civil conduct. So I would say, yes, there's a major difference in that

and it's evolved in different ways. But given I've participated in politics for a long time in Canada and I've had my ups and downs and my good days and bad ones, but I have never, ever seen anything like that in Canada or any other country, civilized country in the world. You know, on the one hand, the American politics is serene. Look at the Sunday morning shows. All of those fellows there are women who are there. You know, they conduct themselves well, and they've got a lot of interesting things to say. But you unleash them on a campaign and these nice lambs become absolute enraged wolves out there on the trail. And Canadians, not only does this not happen in Canada, but if you try to do that, you would be dealt with. Look, to give you an indication, you'd have to go back to the 84, 85, and 86 kind of thing.

But do you remember what Preston Manning and the Reform Party said about immigrants and French Canadians and the insults and the attacks? We'd never seen that before in Canada, to my knowledge. But look what happened. Look what happened to them. They left no footprints whatsoever in their political lives. And Canadians dealt with that in their own way. They shut them out. Anything east of the Manitoba-Ontario border was all for naught. That was the end of it.

And that's the way Canadians, I think, view politicians generally. They'll tolerate a lot of vigorous back and forth, but the politics of personal destruction are unacceptable to the Canadian people who are repulsed by this kind of conduct and simply won't vote for them. That's the way they shut them down. They won't vote for them. That's the way they shut them down. They won't vote for them. You can't survive. So you better make up your mind. If you're going to be the leader of a political party or a participant in a political party,

is to conduct, try always, to the best of your possibilities, stick to the high road. Let me close this out with two quick questions. And the first one is, you talked a moment ago about how Trump was appealing to his base. In fact, the way I've looked at his four years, he's never stopped appealing to his base. I mean, traditionally in politics, there's a certain degree of that. But the closer you get to an election, you try to expand your potential for votes because the base is not going to get you there alone. I've never seen a candidate who never strayed from that path of only appealing to his base and yet thinking that somehow he can win that way.

Is that as unique to you as it is to me in terms of watching? Very much so, Peter, because it points out the basic maximum, fundamental maximum of politics. Politics or leadership should be a game of addition, not subtraction. And he is in the process in appealing to his bases constantly and as vocally as he does every day. And he adopts positions as well that are hostile to the interest of any other person in the United States. But this is a violation of that fundamental rule of mathematics.

You add and you don't subtract. Last question. You mentioned already that you were close to a number of U.S. presidents, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and I guess Bush Jr., W, as he's called. But I'm just guessing here, but I'm assuming you were closest perhaps with George Bush Sr., a man who had had many different roles in the American government over time, and of course was a war hero in the Second World War. But he is one of those few presidents in recent modern day US politics

who only served one term. He lost when he tried to seek re-election, as he did in 1992. And because you were close, I ask you this question as a final question. How were you able to determine how that impacted him, George Bush Sr., losing that chance for re-election in what was obviously a difficult campaign against Bill Clinton, but that must leave scars. It did with George, and it wounded him badly. And because it wasn't so much the defeat by Bill Clinton, but the manner in which it came about, Clinton's victory was largely accomplished because of the intervention by Ross Perot, who took, I think, 19% of the vote.

And that vote, in his absence, would have gone essentially to the Republicans. And Perot was really from his own area in Texas. And there was a lot of vindictiveness in his Perot's move because he felt that Bush hadn't listened to him on some important matters. But I was with him and I can remember many times it took a couple of years for this to wash over him. He felt a great sense of shame and a sense of pride lost and worried about the future. And it changed. As I mentioned, Peter, in the eulogy I delivered at his funeral, it began to change with the election of George W. as governor of Texas, followed then by the election of Jeb as governor of Florida.

And that kind of started to change. And of course, he was, within another couple of years, he saw his son become president of the United States of America. And then he was back in business full time. But it took its toll. And some loneliness as well. I used to see him. I saw him in Houston. I would see him at Kennebunkport often, as you know.

And I used to spend some time in the aftermath of the defeat. I was still in office, of course. I would call him from the road and say, you know, I'm here with the president of France or what have you, Chancellor of Germany. We just wanted to call you, George. And I have a helmet to tell you how things are going on in Germany and that kind of thing to keep him in the loop. Although he didn't need that. I mean, he was quite capable, of course, of keeping himself in the loop.

But he felt he felt an estrangement from the American people who had defeated them. But he came around in his usual graceful and gracious manner. And he lived, as you know, a very productive life for many years, dying at 94. But I'll tell you, they were bad days, very tough days. And he wasn't a, there was no braggadocio in him at all, so he rarely spoke of his own achievements. And, you know, a lot of people have done a lot in a term. The Canadian experience, for example, is Mike Pearson served five years in two minority governments, and he was one of the most accomplished prime

ministers in the history of Canada. And so, you know, history looks after a lot of things, and I think that President Bush knew and felt, and he could with the passage of time. He saw the changes in people's understanding of him and appreciation of him. And he was delighted with it. I saw him in Katabunkport in September, the end of September, and he died in December. And so that last time, you know, he knew and I knew that he was at the end. And in the summing up of his life, I think he got very happy and very pleased to know that the view of that last and only term of his was going to be appreciated in history much more than it was the day after his defeat. Well, history now stands waiting to see what judgments are placed on Tuesday night and how various people will react to the decisions made by the American people. Prime Minister, we really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us. It's been fascinating listening to you and some of your recollections of the past,

but your understanding of the present and what it could mean for the future. We really appreciate the time you've taken with us. Thank you so much. Well, thank you, Peter. Happy to be with you and Bruce again. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Mr. Mulroney. Great to talk with you again. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Mr. Mulroney. Great to talk with you again. So that wraps up our special, yet another special

edition of The Race Next Door. It has been fabulous to have the former Prime Minister, Brian Mulroney, with us. We'll be back on Monday. I think we'll have something special in store on Monday, which of course will be the night before the election results start tumbling in. I'm Peter Mansbridge with Bruce Anderson. Thanks for listening. Talk to you again on Monday. © transcript Emily Beynon