The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Trudeau Faces A Grilling -- A "bridge daily" Special On The WE Controversy

Episode Date: July 30, 2020

Bruce Anderson is back to help guide us through today's extraordinary parliamentary committee hearing where Justin Trudeau was the star witness.

and hello there peter mansbridge here with the latest episode of the bridge daily here we are thursday of week 20 and we got a special edition today and it's not on COVID-19. Well, it's kind of related to COVID-19, but it's not about COVID-19. It's about the prime minister. It's about Justin Trudeau appearing today before a parliamentary committee and that doesn't happen every day. In fact, it's only happened a few times in kind of recent memory. And this one is as a result of the whole controversy surrounding the WE group, the WE Foundation, and the money that the federal government had planned to give, in fact did give to WE, but then the money was pulled back. There are all kinds of questions raised about the Prime Minister's role in that money going to we which would have been eventually distributed

to students across canada and whether or not he was influenced by the fact that a number of his family including his wife his mother and her brother have given speeches for the we foundation in different parts of the country and have accepted money in some cases for those speeches and have had their expenses paid. Anyway, the parliamentary committee asked for the prime minister to appear. He agreed to appear. He appeared for 90 minutes and was kind of grilled in a Zoom committee hearing.

So it had a lot of kind of weird things going on as a result of what we were watching. But it was fascinating nevertheless. And I want to talk about it with my friend and old colleague from the ad issue days when I was at the CBC, Bruce Anderson, who's the chairman of the Abacus Data Group, who do a lot of research and polling in the country. And it's interesting to talk to Bruce on this day because it's the same day that Abacus has come out with a sense of how Canadians feel about Justin Trudeau's

handling of this WE controversy. So Bruce joins us on the line from Ottawa now. Bruce, good to have you with us, as always. Great to talk to you, Peter. Great. Well, let's first of all kind of set the table a little bit by getting a sense of how Canadians feel about Justin Trudeau's handling of this before he actually spoke in front of the committee today. What are the headlines out of the survey that you've done? You should tell us, as we always do, how many people you've talked to and when you

talked to them. Yeah, this was a fairly significant size, the national survey. I believe the sample was 1,500. It's on our website, abacusdata.ca, so everybody can download and look at the details as they want, but it's very much in line with our regular tracking studies. The headlines really are that, you know, this is a government that, once the pandemic arrived and became the focal point of politics and public opinion and daily life for all of us, the government saw approval ratings for what it was doing shoot up and stay up for weeks on end. And really, it's only been in the last 10 days that we've seen significant deterioration in the approval level

for the federal government, seen deterioration in feelings towards the prime minister, and we've seen a shrinking of the number of people who say that they would vote liberal. So just to kind of give a sense, Peter, of how sizable that movement has been. Approval of the government is down four points in 10 days and 14 points since May. Negative opinion about Mr. Trudeau is up five points over the same period and 11 points since May. So those are pretty significant shifts. Now, on the overall kind of so-called horse race number, the Liberals still have a four-point advantage over the Conservatives. And it does look as though what's going on is that some of the people who voted Liberal last fall aren't really happy with the way that this issue has emerged and been

handled by the government. It's not that they're fleeing to other parties or that they see other things that other parties are putting on offer that are appealing to them. In fact, we don't really see an improvement in the fortunes of anybody else. But it's definitely the first time since the pandemic arrived that we've seen a real softening of the support that the government has enjoyed. All right. Well, those are interesting numbers. Do you get at what Canadians feel the actual issue is? Like, them feel as though it was about corruption, that it was about the prime minister and the government making a decision that was intended to line the pockets of their family or their friends in politics.

And obviously, people who feel that that was the motivation of the government, they're pretty unhappy at that. Now, a lot of those people are naturally partisans of other parties. That's what we see in our poll. But there are some people who voted Liberal in the fall who also believe that that was the fact of this situation, that it was about corruption of a sort. There are other people, though, who think that this is really about sloppiness, that the government was dealing with a lot of different things, that a decision of this

sort or size or dimension or risk required greater diligence than was applied. And so while they're not saying that the government did something corrupt, it's not exactly praise to say that the government handled this badly because it was sloppy. And so that's a second cadre of voters, if you like, many of whom might have voted Liberal in the past or might be considering voting Liberal in the future. But nonetheless, look at this situation, Peter, and say, I don't like the way this is done. There's something about this that doesn't please me. And I guess the last part of it, and I don't know that there's been that much public focus on this, and maybe there won't be, I guess is really about the kind of the management

discipline of government. How did this happen? What were the systems in the government that kind of broke down and who was responsible for the breakdowns in those systems? Whether or not you think it was corruption or just sloppiness, either way, you have to believe that systems broke down. And so that really comes to a question about, is the prime minister, is he surrounded by the right people? Are they doing the right things? Are they putting in the appropriate diligence? All right. So when he walks, or I was going to say when he walked

into the committee room today, of course, he didn't walk into a committee room. He was sitting at home, as were many of the MPs who were on the committee, were sitting in their offices or in their home ridings because it was a Zoom call doing the questioning. So when you move aside the kind of technical issues, and occasionally those happen this afternoon, but overall, it was a pretty good grilling over 90 minutes. There are three or four particular areas I want to get into. But before we deal with the substantive issues, on a straight performance basis, how do you think the Prime Minister did? And how do you think the MPs did in challenging him? You know, I think the Prime Minister was okay in representing himself and the decisions that he made. I don't think I could say I thought it was stronger than that. I think that he was helped somewhat by the fact that the MPs

who were questioning him weren't necessarily on their game as well. I kind of feel like there were moments wasted by people asking exactly the same question over and over and over again, even though it became clear after the first two or three times that they were going to ask that question, they weren't going to get a different answer. And so in that situation, when you know that you have the prime minister there for 90 minutes, every second that you squander, getting the same thing repeated is kind of wasted time and doesn't really serve your purpose. In terms of why I think the prime minister was

all right, did okay, but maybe not better than that, there was a central part of his argument today that I think maybe people will think about a little bit more and kind of wonder a little bit more about it. And that's when he basically said that there was a point in time in the process leading to the decision to award this contract that he recognized that there would be a lot of scrutiny and that he was concerned about that scrutiny. And so he pumped the brakes basically on the decision and caused the cabinet to not consider it for an additional two weeks so that more, presumably more work could be done to inoculate the government from the kind of criticism that ultimately has arrived. And I think that sort of begs the question. I think

the prime minister did a good job of kind of refuting the notion that this was really about lining the pockets of his family or friends, the notion that he's got a relationship with this organization. Yes, he does. But I felt that he did a good job on those first two versions of what is the problem here that I laid out before. On the third one, on the whole management of government side of things, I think that's maybe where the opposition didn't impress him very much, but maybe where his argument wasn't as persuasive for some people as he might have wanted it to be. All right, let's break some of that down. Because the first point about this whole sense that he pushed back,

this is early May we're talking about, that he pushed back when he first heard that we was involved, recognizing that there were issues with he and his family and their relationship with we, and perhaps somebody should be taking another look at this. That was, you know, that's almost three months ago, certainly two and a half months ago. Why are we just, doesn't it make you kind of wonder,

why are we just hearing about this now? Because this has been an issue for weeks on end now, the whole WE controversy. One would have thought that if they had a defense, an early defense, at least he did, that he was pushing back. Why are we just finding out about it now? That sounds odd to me. Well, it was a little bit of a surprise, I think, to people watching, and maybe they had said some version of it before, and collectively, none of us had really noticed it. So it did seem like it was a revelation that they decided to make today. But the revelation, to me, helped absolve the prime minister on the question of

corruption to some degree. But it made maybe the problem a little bit more intense on the question of management of a complex decision, a major financial decision by the government, and then also the political management of it. So if you took the two weeks to make sure that you were going to be bulletproof, and at the end of the day, you still made the decision because you presumably that time had been spent doing something to evaluate the level of political risk or program risk. I think that's where, you know, the prime minister helped himself in some respects, but maybe raised some other questions. I think also there does remain a question about accountability. And, you know, I saw in some of the opposition members questioning today that effort to say, well, does anybody bear responsibility for this in another than I'm sorry with? And I think that those questions probably aren't over yet, but it's not also clear what the forum is for them to continue to be prosecuted.

So we'll have to wait and see whether or not the issue fades. Well, you know, in any scandal or any issue that is being portrayed as a scandal, as this one is, it usually ends up or often ends up in somebody taking the fall, somebody having to resign, somebody being fired. And when you look at the potential for that happening on this story, there are not many bodies sitting there that have that potential. There's the prime minister. It seems unlikely that that's going to happen, that this is going to cost the prime minister his job,

at least before an election. The finance minister, that's possible. That is possible because his tentacles on this story run deep because of his own family connections to the WE organization. And then I guess there's the chief of staff. We've seen chiefs of staff go before. We saw Jerry Butts go, the principal secretary to Justin Trudeau, on the whole scandal of two years ago, I guess almost two years ago now.

And we saw the same thing happen in the Stephen Harper government with Nigel Wright. So Katie Telford has the potential of being fired. But it seems to me that the opposition, as they always do in a situation like this, they want blood. And blood can often end these things fairly quickly, like can kind of end the story to a degree. Is somebody, you've been around long enough, Bruce, is somebody going to swing for this? You know, I think that there are elements of this story that at different times in the past would have led to somebody

paying that kind of price, for sure. I don't think they are elements that have to do with corruption. I do think that they're potentially issues of, did you put yourself in a position where the perception of a conflict was too great? And that's a little bit of a judgment call, right? But we know that this prime minister, like prime ministers before, established the language about how ministers should conduct themselves. And the language set a high standard. And I think that, so separate and apart from the question of should people be expected to pay a price for the maladministration of choosing this

organization over another solution. It's hard to see that being the kind of thing that goes beyond mistakes were made, corrected before they became a bigger problem, were sorry about the way that that was handled. On the question of should anybody pay a price for using public funds to line the pockets of family and friends, it doesn't look to me like that's the kind of thing that's going to rise to the level of people saying, no, no, this is really bad. It just doesn't, you know, the questions about Mrs. Trudeau and that sort of thing, I don't think have kind of touched that nerve

in exactly that way. And then I do think the only other question really is, probably got to do with the finance minister. We asked the question in our poll whether people thought that he should resign. And, you know, I think it's important to note that a lot of people don't follow the issue so closely that they can have an opinion about that. And many people, in fact, wouldn't know who the finance minister was. So we have to take these results with a real measure of salt. Across the country, 35% say that Bill Morneau should resign, 16% say he

shouldn't, and 48% say they don't know enough about what he did or didn't do to have an opinion. But what I drew attention to in our poll this morning, in our release this morning, Peter, is what do those 2019 Liberal voters think? And there I saw 21% of them. These are people who voted Liberal last October, saying that they thought that the finance minister should resign. And I don't know whether that, you know, I don't really know whether this is going to go anywhere, whether they've had that kind of conversation, PM and the finance minister, to discuss whether or not the intent of the mandate letter language on appearance of conflict was met or not. But I think that if I were looking just from a political management standpoint, that would be a number that would catch my attention and say, well, whether we do or don't do something more on this now, we probably can't do very many more things that look like this to people who voted for us only a few months ago.

Here's the one other area I want to get at. And this surprised me. I don't think I've ever heard a prime minister do this to the extent that I watched Justin Trudeau do it today. And that is, on the one hand, saying, I screwed up, I should have recused myself from this decision. And he should have, there's no question about that. He probably wouldn't be in as much trouble here right now, if he'd done that back two months ago. But while he was saying that, on the one hand, on the other hand, he kept returning to the fact that, hey, the public service told us this is the only way we could go. This was the decision we needed to make.

It needed to go to we. There was no one else who could move the money to those who were in need as well as we could do it. That may have been the recommendation from public service, but public service makes recommendations all the time. And then cabinet, government, makes a decision whether or not they should do that. And, you know, they don't, every time they make a bad decision,

they don't blame the public service for giving them a recommendation that actually, you know, perhaps didn't turn out. But today, he did that a lot. And that kind of surprised me because the, you know, the Canadian public service kind of recognizes me because the Canadian public service is kind of recognized as one of the great public services in the world. And yet today they were really singled out, not for the first time on this. It's consistent with the story the Liberals have been telling.

But he kept returning to it continuously today. Yes, I think there is something really unusual about this situation, which required him, as he thought, to do something a bit unusual as well. And so because the suggestion is that his government awarded this contract to We Charity in order to continue to see money put into his family's pocket or to reward his political friends with public money. It was extraordinarily important for him to say that he was not the driver of the decision to isolate on them as the organization delivered that. So I don't think he was necessarily intending to throw them under the bus, as the term goes. I think he was intending to make absolutely sure that everybody heard him on the question of where this idea originated and the fact that he had reservations about it from the standpoint of the

appearance of a conflict of interest. I think he also, because he knew he had to do that, he had to separate the idea from himself and articulate it as an idea that came up from the professional public service. He also felt an obligation, which I think he did repeatedly live up to, to say he has a lot of respect for the professional public service and a lot of regard for the work that they're doing, especially in the pandemic context. I think it was a fine line to walk, but that part of it, I guess I felt you could listen to it and say, all right, he's making a reasonable point that this wasn't his idea, and therefore the argument that it was a corruption falls flat. And to do that, he has to pin the idea on them, okay.

But he wanted to make sure that he didn't disrespect the work that they're doing at the same time. All right. So I think on those points, he navigated relatively well in extremely treacherous waters. Well, they are treacherous because people are looking for accountability. And he seemed to be suggesting the accountability was on the public service head, not his. Yeah. Yeah, you could listen to it and sort of say, well, he said I'm sorry, and he said it was their idea, and it wasn't his idea, and he pumped the brakes, but it was ultimately their idea. And you could hear in that if you felt inclined to

or if you listened to one aspect of that sound enough to say, it doesn't feel like he is accepting an appropriate amount of accountability for this. And I guess if I felt that there was one kind of exposed blank coming out of this episode today for the Prime Minister, it was this idea that he asked his government effectively to spend another couple of weeks exploring the risk that he saw and making sure that the risk was minimized or eliminated. And then they went ahead with the decision and the risk actually did transpire. So on some level, that is a decision that isn't really about the public service. It's about, you know, how his government responded to his direction to stress test this

idea. Last question, and it goes back to the way we started with your survey. I don't expect that a lot of people watch that today. You never know, but it was daytime television on a weekday. A lot of us are at home these days anyway. But nevertheless, people will tend to be influenced, if not by having seen it themselves, by the coverage that it eventually gets. So what I'm wondering is, in terms of your survey results today, do you see anything that happened today that would fundamentally change the kind of results you saw?

I don't know fundamentally. And I do think that if there were those Liberal voters that I mentioned before from last fall who were feeling a little bit uncomfortable with what they had to say and what they were hearing from the government about this issue, they might well have been reassured by the Prime Minister saying what he said about putting distance between himself and the organization, describing his relationship with the Kielberger brothers as a relationship, but not a deep friendship or anything like that. I think he probably handled the questions about his mother and brother and his wife and expenses as well as could be done. I think that it was probably material for those voters to have heard that if they listened to it or if they pick it up in the coverage afterwards, to hear him say that he sensed that there was a problem potentially, in appearance anyway, with going ahead with this contract and he hit the pause button. As they say you know

depending on where this goes they may still wonder well with that pause what work was done and and um and how did there still seem to be a few accidents along the way here but um i i do think at the end of the day and i i we sort of mentioned this in our poll, that most people will look at this long enough to decide whether it should distract them from the coronavirus and the economic issues that are very, very perplexing to a lot of people, or whether or not they can kind of tuck this away and say, this was an unfortunate chapter in the life of this government, but I can go back to being preoccupied with those other things. I think on the basis of what I saw so far today, people are maybe a little bit more likely to say, I can go back to my other concerns.

There was a bit of a stress test of the prime minister's argument today and he gave answers under pressure from opposition politicians that maybe they'll move on but i don't like to predict that kind of thing because in situations like this as you know peter we don't know what we don't know and we don't know uh all of the elements of story, and we've been surprised already by a few elements in the last couple of weeks. So, as I say, I don't really think it's prudent to go further than that. Good points, all of them. I'll say one thing positive about today, and that was that we actually saw it. The prime minister didn't have to go to that committee.

He could have said no, he could have stretched it out, he could have argued about whether or not he'd appear, whether he'd appear for 10 minutes or half an hour or an hour or 90 minutes as he did, or not go at all. But he went, and the opposition was there, and they grilled him. And there's no doubt about it, some of them really went after him. And that's great for the system, that we can have a situation like that. You look south of the border, can you imagine Donald Trump sitting before a committee hearing

and the House of Representatives or the Senate being grilled that way? No, it'll never happen. It won't happen. He wouldn't even let his cabinet ministers go in to answer questions on the issues surrounding Russia and Ukraine and other issues. So on that side, you know, good for them, good for all of them that we have a process like that that does challenge the people in the positions of power on the accountability question. You may argue about the kind of answers we got, but they were, it did happen. We saw accountability taking place or attempts at accountability taking place. Bruce, listen, thanks so much for doing this. Did you want to make a quick point on that?

Yeah, I just want to completely agree with that. We, you know, every jurisdiction probably wonders whether it has enough checks and balances as it needs from time to time. And every once in a while you'll hear people describe our system as being, you know, dominated by prime ministerial power. But I do agree with you completely that what we saw today is evidence that our system actually can function. We've got the prime minister's chief of staff taking questions for a good length of time, the prime minister taking questions for a good length of time. And when we look out to the border and we see how that system, which supposedly was the most perfectly structured to have checks and balances, has kind of broken down. We do have some things to be grateful for here, including the fact that

if all of the opposition parties decided that they wanted an election, we'd have an election and people could make a decision again. So, yes, I saw a lot of good at that. And I thought, you know, for people like the Prime Minister and the Chief of Staff, dealing with a situation like this, to suit up and go in there and take those questions, it's not an easy thing to do, and it was good that they felt the obligation to do it. All right. Listen, Bruce, thanks, as always, for helping guide us through one of these situations. And this was a good one today. So thank you. It was great to talk, Peter.

Thanks for calling. Okay. So listen, that wraps up our special edition of the Bridge Daily today as we looked at the Prime Minister's appearance before a committee hearing in the Canadian Parliament on the WE controversy. Tomorrow, end of the week, it's the weekend special, so get your questions or comments or thoughts in. This is the last night I'll be taking them in for tomorrow's podcast, so don't be shy. The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com,

the Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com, and all those fawning comments about, oh, it's great to hear Bruce Anderson on the program. Again, you don't have to send those in. That's, that's obvious. Everybody knows that anyway, we will look forward to talking to you tomorrow. I'm Peter Mansbridge. This has been the bridge daily. Thanks for listening. We'll talk to you again in 24 hours. Thank you.