Full Comment - Preston Manning on the broken state of Canadian politics

00:00:00.000 Hey everyone, welcome to the latest episode of Full Comment with me, Anthony Fury. I'm

00:00:09.560 really excited about our conversation today and chatting with our guest today, Preston

00:00:14.220 Manning, a populist before it was all the rage, the original bad boy of Canadian politics,

00:00:19.740 founder of the Reform Party of Canada and leader of the opposition back in the late

00:00:23.280 1990s. We're doing it all today, folks. We're having all the conversations, breaking down

00:00:27.660 all the topics, big government abuses during the time of the pandemic, whether or not

00:00:32.240 politics is really speaking to the people today. Do we need some sort of a political revolution

00:00:36.960 in Canada, or at least, I don't know, Alberta separating? How seriously should we take that

00:00:41.580 issue? What's going on with Western alienation? What about the green agenda, reconciliation,

00:00:47.080 the tearing down of statues? What do we think about all of that and more? What does Preston

00:00:50.980 Manning think about that? He joins us now. Preston, sir, welcome to the program. Great

00:00:55.400 to have you here. Well, thank you very much. How are you doing? How have things been for

00:00:59.660 you of late? Well, I'm doing well. Yeah, I'm keeping busy. I was trying to retire, but that's

00:01:05.640 sort of hard to do. But yeah, trying to cope with the aftermath of the COVID business and

00:01:13.000 the impacts on the economy like everybody else. But I'm doing well. Thank you for asking.

00:01:18.240 Yeah, I know you've been offering your insights in the pages of a couple different papers here

00:01:21.640 across the country. And when we talk about the idea of the state of the nation, I mean,

00:01:26.180 what is the state of Canada right now? Canadian politics, how we are feeling as a country,

00:01:32.280 unified or not unified? What's your sort of big picture sense of Canada at this moment?

00:01:38.060 Well, a couple of things, Anthony. First of all, I do think there is a growing disunity, which

00:01:45.060 is worrisome, particularly if you're in the federal political arena, this polarization over virtually

00:01:52.820 every issue, the use of fear as the main motivator for getting people to support a particular

00:01:59.800 public policy. And then as you already referred to the regional tensions, there is this growth of

00:02:07.980 Western alienation. It's not just confined to Alberta, just Western concerns and aspirations

00:02:15.620 and the feeling that the current federal government, the federal parliament is simply insensitive to

00:02:20.400 those and not addressing them. I worry more about probably the unity problems than anything else.

00:02:28.180 And I think one of the challenges for the federal political parties is each of them, in my judgment,

00:02:37.000 should have a section in their election platform addressing Western alienation and proposing measures

00:02:45.920 to deal with it. And they're going to be asked at the doors when candidates knock on the doors,

00:02:51.360 they are going to be asked by an increasing number of voters,

00:02:53.960 what specifically do you propose to deal with some of these Western concerns? So that's a big feature of

00:03:03.160 the current political landscape in my judgment. And Preston, when you say fear out there, fear

00:03:10.300 mongering, I mean, what do you mean? Justin Trudeau, he first ran on that platform of sunny ways,

00:03:14.920 it's all going to be positive. But to your point, we're actually hearing a whole lot of negative from him

00:03:19.280 of late. Well, yeah, and I worry about this, that the cheapest, easiest way to motivate people to

00:03:27.520 support a public policy these days, and there are consulting firms that make no bones about

00:03:32.040 employing this as a strategy is to scare people that this has been done on the climate issues to

00:03:39.160 tell people that the planet's going to come to an end in x years, unless they do this and support that.

00:03:46.080 A lot of the government messaging on how to respond to the COVID crisis was fear, using fear as a

00:03:55.700 mechanism. And that's, again, it's a negative approach. And I think it's dangerous that there's

00:04:05.720 got to be more positive ways of encouraging people to support a particular public policy than just

00:04:10.320 scaring them to death. Now, is it just the liberals and Justin Trudeau who are bad for that? Is this

00:04:14.940 sort of a broader rot that we have right now just in Canada or North America?

00:04:19.240 Yeah, I think this is a general thing throughout the Western world. It's very prominent in the

00:04:24.900 United States. I mean, their last presidential election was just fear, fear, fear, fear. If you

00:04:30.720 elect the other guys, this is the disasters that will happen. It was employed by both sides.

00:04:36.260 So I think it's a general condition. And it's not good for democracy. If the only reason people

00:04:41.780 support a public policy is because they've been scared into doing so, that's not a very

00:04:47.120 solid basis for a public policy.

00:04:50.880 I mean, I guess there are a lot of things that people are genuinely afraid of out there,

00:04:54.220 whether or not their fears are warranted. What would be the counter to that? I mean,

00:04:57.840 what would you say are the positive things that should be said and should be kind of embraced right now?

00:05:03.300 Well, I've just been reading a book on Churchill's first year in office where

00:05:11.640 almost the opposite tactic was taken. You're in the middle of a war and people have a right to be

00:05:18.400 afraid. But what he was promoting was fearlessness. He was promoting the exercise of courage and

00:05:26.640 fearlessness in the face of a disaster rather than cowering in fear. You had Roosevelt's famous

00:05:34.620 speech to the U.S. after Pearl Harbor that Americans had nothing to fear but fear itself.

00:05:42.460 So I think the advocating the need for fearlessness and for courage in facing these problems

00:05:49.160 and approaching them and being motivated to deal with them out of courage and fearlessness

00:05:55.660 is an alternative to being motivated simply by fear.

00:06:01.260 Now, I know we're talking more kind of long-term issues and broader politics, but everything you're

00:06:05.220 saying, I can't help but of course think about what's going on in the pandemic right now, where

00:06:08.620 all of the news we hear, all of the items we're supposed to focus on are kind of the bad news,

00:06:13.560 how things can go awry, how, you know, maybe cases will go up, maybe hospitalizations will go up,

00:06:18.260 vaccines won't work, etc., etc. You know, lots of bad news, lots of fear. We found that thankfully

00:06:22.980 this virus is not as severe as people thought it may have been when it first cropped up, but we

00:06:27.660 still had to kind of ramp up all the potential negatives. I guess fear is, you know, the issue

00:06:32.840 of the day. We did a recent episode on the podcast with an infectious disease doctor saying, look,

00:06:36.760 we got to stop fearing every aspect of that. You know, in what way have the fears around COVID

00:06:42.400 caused ramifications here in Canada?

00:06:46.720 Well, I think, again, you've cited just another example of fear being the main

00:06:51.320 technique used to motivate support of a particular public policy. I do think that there's going to be

00:06:59.740 a wholesale evaluation of how the governing parties in particular have handled the COVID crisis.

00:07:08.200 And I think it's going to reveal some pretty serious flaws in that management.

00:07:15.280 I wondered right from the beginning, why on earth the federal government decided to assign

00:07:20.340 the management of the response to COVID-19 to the health department bureaucracy?

00:07:28.520 And I think the fact that they did it then encouraged the provinces to do exactly the same

00:07:34.400 thing because federal money was tied to whether you went along with the federal government's general

00:07:40.000 approach. And I don't think bureaucracies are well equipped to handle emergencies. And in fact,

00:07:50.200 the emergency measures organizations which exist on the federal level and in every province,

00:07:55.360 they were set up in the early days precisely because it was determined that the health care

00:08:01.220 bureaucracies themselves could not handle emergencies. And if we get into that investigation,

00:08:08.540 it's going to raise some pretty pertinent questions. One of them is, why did the

00:08:14.120 health officials, and I'm not criticizing them as individuals, I think they're well-meaning in doing

00:08:19.540 what, you know, the best they could do. But why was there no assessment of the impact of these

00:08:27.220 health protection measures on the rights and freedoms of Canadians guaranteed by the Charter?

00:08:33.360 There's been hundreds of thousands of violations of those rights and freedoms, everything from freedom of

00:08:37.500 association, freedom of assembly, freedom of movement, etc., etc. And if you put that question

00:08:46.740 either directly or indirectly to the health care officials, basically their reply, whether they do it

00:08:53.100 directly or not to say, that's not our department. We're just in charge of the health. The rights and

00:08:59.140 freedoms aspect, well, that's the Justice Department, the Attorney General of the Human Rights Commission.

00:09:04.580 If you ask them, why was there not any assessment done of the economic impacts of health protection

00:09:12.180 measures that killed jobs, killed incomes, killed small businesses? Again, the bureaucratic response is,

00:09:19.260 well, that's not our department. We're the health people. That's the responsibility of finance or the

00:09:24.540 economic development department. This is one of the problems of assigning crisis management to a

00:09:30.720 bureaucratic system that departmentalizes the solution to the problem and the dealing with its

00:09:37.220 secondary impacts. So I think there's going to be a lot of assessment has to be done after as to

00:09:43.280 why did we do it that way and was there not a better way to proceed. The other consequence that I think

00:09:50.680 will come out of the evaluating the COVID response is the need for health care reform, that our health

00:10:00.060 care system is simply not robust enough to handle both the consequences of COVID-19 and all the other

00:10:07.720 health challenges that people have. There's some people have speculated that there will be more deaths on

00:10:12.800 the waiting lines than there ultimately than there will have been from COVID-19. And I think what this

00:10:20.560 will suggest is that Canada's got to follow the same path that most of the other Western countries,

00:10:26.720 including the Scandinavian countries that used to be at the forefront of this towards a mixed public and

00:10:33.760 private healthcare system with universal coverage and timely access. All of these things are, I think,

00:10:40.880 specific ideas and consequences that will come out of an evaluation of how we have handled the COVID crisis.

00:10:48.640 One of the things that I find remarkable is just how little real sort of public debate there's

00:10:53.200 actually been about this whole year and a half and what we've gone through and all of those liberties

00:10:57.040 violations that you've spoken of. It's just kind of been an assumption that, yes, you know, this has to

00:11:02.440 happen. And I guess any voices who want to complain about it either didn't get an opportunity, they didn't

00:11:07.100 get much of a public airing. And yet, you know, I'll say for myself, this is definitely the most wildest thing I've

00:11:12.640 gone through in my lifetime, you know, other than people who've gone abroad to war or what have you.

00:11:16.560 I mean, this is kind of it. And yet we've spent far greater energy debating or, you know, nitpicking

00:11:21.920 the nuances of some little tax policy or what have you, that has much smaller consequences on our

00:11:26.960 lives than on this, than the prolonged, you know, locking down of society and so forth. I'm just still

00:11:31.680 perplexed by that, by that aspect of it.

00:11:33.680 You know, I think that this points to a danger and a weakness in democracy. If people won't engage

00:11:43.120 in debate on these major issues, they just get tired of it, or they don't want to be attacked

00:11:49.840 for taking a position different than somebody else. That's not, doesn't speak well for the future of

00:11:56.640 the democratic process. There's a number of people I meet that just say they're turned off by the whole

00:12:02.240 thing. And I always remind them what I call the iron law of democratic politics. If you choose

00:12:07.200 to not involve yourself in the politics of your province or your community or your country, you

00:12:12.160 will be governed by those who do. So, you know, you don't like what's happening by those who do.

00:12:18.000 Staying quiet, not saying anything, not doing anything, opting out is not really a viable,

00:12:23.840 a very wise option.

00:12:26.080 Well, Preston, let me get your take then on what people who are thinking about whether or not they

00:12:29.840 should run for politics, what you would tell them or what you tell to young people who do come to you

00:12:33.840 for advice. Because I hear, and I don't know if this is true. I mean, tell me if you think this

00:12:37.760 assessment is correct, that things are more brutal than it's ever been in terms of just digging up

00:12:42.560 dirt on people, dirt that, you know, go back into their high school years, what have you, or just

00:12:47.200 saying extremely nasty things about people just to sort of shame them out of the political arena and

00:12:51.120 so forth. The basic idea that, you know, good people are looking at what's happening now and

00:12:54.880 they're saying, yeah, you know what, I'm going to take a pass. I don't want to subject me and my family to this

00:12:58.800 and so forth. It's just not worth it. Is it different than than it was?

00:13:02.480 Well, that's a very, very good observation. And I've been involved in candidate recruitment ever since

00:13:10.720 1968, either at the provincial level or the federal level. And I've never found it as difficult as it is

00:13:21.280 today to persuade a competent person with experience and capability to put their, to throw their hat

00:13:29.520 into the political arena. A number of years back, the biggest single reason or the number one reason

00:13:36.320 why people wouldn't do it is to say they couldn't take the hit on their personal financial situation.

00:13:43.120 They weren't in a position to put their assets in a blind trust. They couldn't take the drop in income,

00:13:48.720 for which many competent people it would be a drop in income to get into the political arena. They

00:13:53.520 couldn't do that. But today, the biggest single reason is exactly the one that you mentioned.

00:13:58.800 People say, I will not submit myself. And more often they mention their family. I will not submit

00:14:04.400 my family to the abuse that I will be subject to if I get into the political arena. And that's become

00:14:12.720 the biggest single reason for not being able to get competent people. Now, there's a way to

00:14:18.640 cope with that. You can give people training on how to live with that kind of abuse. I'm a great

00:14:25.840 believer in the need for more training for people getting into the political arena. You know, to become

00:14:31.280 a barista at Starbucks, you need 15 hours of training to know the difference between a mocha and a latte.

00:14:37.280 You can become a lawmaker in the parliament again without one hour training. Is that wise?

00:14:43.520 But one of the things you can tell people, I grew up in a political family. So I grew up with

00:14:50.720 just knowing the kind of abuse that you took. My father was premier in Alberta for 25 years.

00:14:57.200 And so that kind of abuse never bothered me much. I basically would ignore it. And you can teach

00:15:07.280 people how to do that. But even that has its downside. One of the worries is you build up a

00:15:13.920 shell around yourself that you don't let any kind of message that would hit you emotionally to get

00:15:23.440 through. And it's a great defense against abuse in the political arena. But sometimes that shell can

00:15:28.960 become so hard that other messages, maybe family messages or messages from constituents that ought

00:15:36.160 to get through, don't get through either, because you've just learned to ignore a whole bunch of

00:15:40.800 signals. But you put your finger on the biggest single reason why today it's extremely difficult to

00:15:49.840 get competent, experienced people to run for public life. What do you think about how the regular

00:15:54.240 person, the individual is feeling about politics right now? I know we hear, oh, folks are tuned out

00:15:58.240 of politics, but we hear that sort of perennially. That's a common complaint as well. But I don't

00:16:02.560 know if it's getting, if people are more tuned out than ever before. I know the sort of team sport

00:16:07.280 debate on social media, in some sense, people are more engaged in politics than ever. We call it the

00:16:11.520 politicization of everything. What's the general sense that the sort of non-politician person

00:16:18.640 is feeling right now with politics? Well, I think the danger in the

00:16:23.920 phenomenon that you're referring to there is that there's a tendency today to substitute the discussion

00:16:30.160 of political issues and issues in general for actually doing something about them or participating

00:16:37.600 in a way that will institute changes. Particularly young people, I noticed that they'll discuss an

00:16:46.240 issue, they'll blog about it, they'll tweet about it, they'll network about it, but it's all a

00:16:54.080 discussion. When you ask, what did you specifically do to advance a particular position that you hold,

00:17:02.000 they almost think that they've done something by just discussing it.

00:17:05.520 And so I think that's one of the liabilities of the social media. It gives people a sense that they've

00:17:10.960 participated and done something by talking and blogging and tweeting about it, but they haven't

00:17:15.840 actually done something. And I try to encourage the political people I talk to in giving speeches or

00:17:21.760 even in leading group discussions in small groups. At the end of your talk, whatever it is you're

00:17:28.000 talking about, give people three or four things they can do.

00:17:33.280 Say, okay, if you go along with what I've just said, or you agree with 80% of it, here's three

00:17:37.200 things you could do to advance this, to try to counteract this discussion. In fact, last year,

00:17:42.640 I put out a book entitled Do Something, 365 Ways You Can Change. And I ended every chapter with,

00:17:50.720 if you agree with half of this stuff, here's something you can do to advance it or counter whatever

00:17:56.800 we're talking about. What about people doing things in the civil sphere, in civil society?

00:18:03.440 One thing I've been concerned about now is just the erosion of civil society. I feel like now when

00:18:08.960 people say, I want something to be done, they just mean, well, I want the government to go and

00:18:12.400 do it for me. Stuff that a few decades ago, you go, that's not even the government's place to do it

00:18:16.160 for you. It used to be, you know, it's the old cliche that people would sort of build the farm

00:18:20.960 or the barn themselves and rally together as a community to do it, and now they don't do it

00:18:24.640 anymore, that kind of thing, based on, you know, real sort of community involvement.

00:18:31.040 Well, I think that is something that needs to be countered. This idea that if you've got any

00:18:38.960 kind of a problem, just the government should deal with it. That's a way to, A, surrender your

00:18:45.920 your freedoms. And it's also a way to just add enormous burden of cost because government doing

00:18:54.800 anything is not the least expensive way of getting it done. When my father retired, he was 33 years in

00:19:03.200 the Alberta legislature, say 25 years as a, as premier. And when he retired, one of the things he

00:19:09.360 thought he might do is, is put something around the cabinet in Alberta, used to meet in the cabinet

00:19:15.520 room, and there was a, around the top of the ceiling, there was a place to put, carve something

00:19:22.560 into it. And he was going to carve into it that when the cabinet was discussing something, they

00:19:28.720 should ask the question, is there somebody else out there who could do what we are talking about here

00:19:34.800 before we get too committed to it? Interesting. There's an onus on the government's side and the

00:19:40.000 political people's side too, to not encourage this, that some action by us, some action by the

00:19:45.200 government, some expenditure, taxpayers, money is the answer to everything else. And part of that

00:19:51.360 gets around to people understanding that there are certain things governments can do, but there are

00:19:56.080 certain things they can't do. And so asking them to do everything is not a wise course of action.

00:20:03.600 I shouldn't spend too much time on stories, but there was a young civil servant in Alberta way

00:20:11.680 back that was a very up and coming lawyer with the social development department. He ultimately got

00:20:18.880 so interested in the work of the social department that he switched careers to actually become a director

00:20:25.760 of a major social program. And Pierre Trudeau and Marc Lavon got to know him, and Marc Lavon swiped him

00:20:33.360 away and took him to Ottawa, where he became a very senior deputy minister. And before he left Alberta,

00:20:39.920 a few of us that knew him put on a little dinner to pay tribute to him and wish him well, but we composed

00:20:45.840 a poem for him. And the first verse will be familiar to you, but the second two won't. The verse went,

00:20:52.400 Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall, all the king's horses and all the king's

00:20:58.560 men couldn't put Humpty together again. And what is the moral of this little rhyme, a moral with meaning

00:21:05.040 for folks in our time? The moral is this, and its lesson is true, there are certain things that the

00:21:11.280 state cannot do. If all the king's horses and all the king's men cannot put an egg together again,

00:21:18.560 is it not a false hope and illusion of sin to ask civil servants to reconstruct men?

00:21:24.320 I love it. We complain today. I have small kids at home, and you know, we say, oh, all the movies

00:21:32.320 today are bashing corporations. And no, I didn't realize the original nursery rhyme we're telling

00:21:36.880 them is a libertarian nursery rhyme. That's good to know. I didn't really think of that lesson.

00:21:41.520 That's right. And this principle applies to the political parties too. I have in this book of

00:21:48.560 mine, I have a diagram where I have the, if you want to get into political action, I have the

00:21:53.760 sort of a pyramid with the political party, the people will actually get the elected people at the

00:21:59.360 top of it. But underneath it, I have what I call the movement. In my case, I'm talking more about the

00:22:05.280 conservative movement. But underneath the actual political activists that run for office, there's

00:22:11.200 a need for communications people, there's a need for policy development people, there's a need for

00:22:16.080 advocacy people, there's need for fundraising people, there's a need for candidate recruitment

00:22:20.800 people. There's a whole, in fact, these political parties are only as strong in many instances as the

00:22:28.160 movement and the structure beneath them. And these are all other ways of participating in the

00:22:34.640 political process without actually running for office. And I often encourage people, if you can't

00:22:40.400 run or won't run for office, can you play some role in the movement? Don't just opt out of the

00:22:45.280 political arena all together. Changing gears a little bit, the phrase populism, we've been hearing

00:22:50.320 it a lot the past few years, the past five years or so. Mid-1980s, you find the Reform Party of Canada

00:22:57.680 goes on to be the opposition party. But first you were, it was a fledgling party. You were out there

00:23:02.880 getting the word out. It was described as a populist party. What did that phrase populism,

00:23:07.040 what did it mean to you throughout your career? Well, it means a lot. And one of the things I

00:23:14.080 try to get across to Canadians, and there's a lot of discussion on populism these days,

00:23:19.920 particularly in the United States, and I often see Canadian commentators sitting on

00:23:23.280 panels or talking to think groups in the US. And many of even our Canadian commentators forget that

00:23:32.320 Western Canada has had more experience with populist movements, populist political parties,

00:23:39.920 and populist governments than virtually any other area of North America. And there are lessons to be

00:23:46.240 learned from that. And this goes a way back. The old progressive party, which was basically a

00:23:52.640 farmers party, was a populist party. The first woman that got elected to parliament, Agnes Campbell

00:23:58.160 McPhail, did not come up through the traditional party system. She was elected by a populist party.

00:24:03.760 The farmers parties that formed governments, not just parties, formed governments briefly in Ontario,

00:24:10.000 but certainly in Alberta and Manitoba, they were populist parties. They were bottom-up political

00:24:16.720 parties. The Depression generated two populist parties in Western Canada. The CCF, which eventually

00:24:25.600 morphed into the NDP, and the Social Credit Park. And then reform in the 1980s, early 1990s, it had a

00:24:32.720 populist base as well. So the West has had an enormous amount of experience with populist parties,

00:24:39.520 and lessons to be learned. And one of the lessons is that populist parties do have a wild and woolly side,

00:24:46.320 and they can be dangerous and get out of control. But if they're properly managed and led, they can

00:24:55.920 contribute, they can achieve positive and progressive objectives. And as I say, I mentioned,

00:25:04.480 the getting women recognized as persons in Canadian law, which was achieved by the famous Alberta Five.

00:25:14.400 Four out of those five women were members of populist parties or populist movements. The CCF, whether you

00:25:21.040 agree with it or not, Medicare came out of a populist movement, a populist party.

00:25:26.960 So populism is definitely a political phenomenon. Canadians ought to know more about it than virtually

00:25:36.800 anybody else. And the challenge is, how do you channel that political energy that populist movements

00:25:44.960 represent? How can you channel it into constructive objectives? And one of the analogies we used to use in

00:25:52.400 the reform days was from the oil patch. You know, in the oil patch, there's such a thing as a wildcat

00:25:58.080 well that's drilled into a formation where you don't know what's down below, so you're not sure

00:26:01.920 what you're going to hit. And then there's such a thing as a rogue well where you hit the pocket of

00:26:07.680 oil or gas under enormous pressure, and it can blow the drilling platform off the wellhead. It can catch

00:26:15.840 fire. It can be a very dangerous thing. But there's an enormous amount of energy there if you could ever

00:26:20.480 capture it. And one of the ways of harnessing that energy is to drill in a relief well from the side.

00:26:27.200 And the angle has to be right. If it's too shallow, it won't take off enough pressure. If it's too

00:26:32.240 deep, it can turn into a rogue well. But if it's just right, it can take off enough pressure, valves

00:26:36.880 can be installed, and that energy can be harnessed to useful purposes. And in many respects, what reformed

00:26:42.320 was a relief well in our day, there was a very major concern and interest in Western secession.

00:26:50.480 And it was broader than it was today. It went all the way from Winnipeg, which was matted and

00:26:54.400 boiled owl over losing the CF-18 contract to Montreal, to Vancouver Island. We won

00:27:01.280 all but one of the seats on Vancouver Island. And so what reform did was tap into that. We had to

00:27:07.360 identify with anger and with the frustration and the concerns and aspirations that were fueling the

00:27:15.360 rogue well. But then we took the approach, and instead of blowing everything up, why don't we

00:27:19.840 harness this to some objectives? So the West wants in. The West wants some changes. The West wants

00:27:26.480 Senate reform. The West wants balanced budgets. The West wants a greater respect for the energy sector. And

00:27:32.000 we drilled in the leaf well from the side. And I guess I'm rambling on here, but I think the

00:27:42.080 important thing for Canadians is to recognize one part of our country has more experience with

00:27:46.400 populism than virtually any other part of North America. And we should learn the lessons from that

00:27:51.920 and apply it to the populist movements of today. One of the things that I found interesting, you bring

00:27:56.560 up the pressure valve in terms of just, you know, getting some of that pressure out there, but

00:27:59.840 rather ironically, some of the people have been getting their pressure out by doing this vandalizing,

00:28:05.280 damaging, tearing down of statues, including one of the famous five, a statue of Emily Murphy,

00:28:10.800 who fought in that person's case, who fought to have women declared as persons in the 1920s,

00:28:15.040 was vandalized with red paint back the other month in Edmonton. And you look at that and you go,

00:28:19.920 wow, that situation, the tearing down of statues, the defacing of statues,

00:28:24.240 I really descended quickly to go from, you know, Sir John A. Macdonald or it have you to Emily Murphy.

00:28:29.760 What did you make of that episode? I don't know if it's come to a conclusion, there's still periodic

00:28:35.600 church burnings going on, but that series of headlines we had where people were pretty much

00:28:40.080 tearing down everything they could. Well, I think it's scandalous and that what it calls for from the

00:28:46.960 political people and all of the parties is a reaffirmation of the rule of law. The charter,

00:28:54.400 as you know, the preamble of the charter, says that Canada is founded upon principles that recognize

00:29:00.720 the supremacy of God and the rule of law. That's right in the beginning of the charter before it

00:29:06.000 even gets into rights and freedoms as a fundamental principle on which the country is built. And if

00:29:13.840 people don't like the laws or the policies that are supported by particular laws, the remedy is to

00:29:21.040 elect people to the parliament or the legislature that will change them in whatever way you wish,

00:29:26.000 provided they can get majority public support. The way of changing it is not to break the law,

00:29:32.160 which defeats the entire purpose. So I think there has to be the public authorities have to come down

00:29:40.560 hard on. If you just take the criminal code, the criminal code is a Canadian law. There's a section

00:29:47.360 in it that says if you destroy property, including public property, such as toppling statutes or defacing

00:29:54.400 them, it's an indictable offense under the criminal code. There's another section of the criminal code that

00:30:00.240 says if you burn down something, somebody else's property, that is a criminal offense. If you are part

00:30:10.640 of a group that plans a violent act, such as toppling down a statue or burning a church, you can be charged

00:30:18.080 under the criminal code with conspiracy to commit an indictable offense. If someone should happen to lose

00:30:23.600 their life in one of those set fires, you could be charged under the criminal code with second-degree

00:30:31.040 murder. These are laws, they're on the statute books, and the obligation is for the authorities

00:30:40.160 to enforce it. And one of the regrettable things that Mr. Trudeau did when there was this illegal

00:30:47.120 blockading of rail lines, for example, a short while ago, the federal government did nothing,

00:30:52.320 did not enforce the law. And in response to these church burnings, one of the Prime Minister's

00:30:58.400 advisors said this was regrettable but understandable. Well, not just understandable, it's illegal

00:31:06.480 calling forth enforcement by the authorities. So that's going to be a question, I think, in the

00:31:12.720 federal election. When the candidate knocks on the door of the voters seeking their support,

00:31:18.640 a fair number of people are going to ask, what is the position of yourself and your party on affirming

00:31:24.080 the rule of law? And what specifically do you propose in order to do that?

00:31:29.360 And yet there's an incredible divisiveness around this in Canada, because there are many people who

00:31:33.360 say what you've said, we've got to reaffirm the rule of law, why are people not being charged by this?

00:31:37.360 But there is a whole other cohort of individuals who were content to see this and wanted to see more

00:31:42.400 such incidents. Yeah, burn it all down. I believe there's one lady at a civil liberties association 1.00

00:31:47.680 who, I guess, lost her job or resigned or what have you, because she was basically goading this

00:31:52.320 on and somewhat applauding all of this. And there are, I think, a whole lot of people who would be

00:31:55.760 incredibly indignant if people did face legal consequences for doing this stuff.

00:32:00.800 Well, I think the only thing you can do there is point out to people, if you don't like the law,

00:32:04.400 there are ways of registering your protest, but it's not to break the law. It's to elect people

00:32:11.840 that will change whatever it is you find objectionable in the current law and get it changed,

00:32:18.400 if you can carry the judgment of a majority of Canadians. And I don't know why these people that

00:32:25.600 break the law, in order to try and get changed, don't see that that's a two-edged sword. So you get

00:32:32.080 the change you want, and somebody else objects to your law. And so what do they do? They go and

00:32:36.880 break that law. And on what grounds can you protest that? That's exactly what you said should be done

00:32:42.640 if you don't like a law. They just don't happen to like your law. So they're going to break that.

00:32:46.560 It's a two-edged sword that has no good consequences for anybody that wants either the status quo or

00:32:54.160 constructive change. Now, of course, the whole reason all of this flared up in the first place,

00:32:59.280 conversations around the history of residential schools, around reconciliation, around Canada's

00:33:04.320 first peoples. Preston, what should be done for this issue on this file for those first peoples out

00:33:12.240 there who want more prosperity, more success, and so on, and sharing in the spoils?

00:33:17.280 Well, I think this, again, is another issue that's got to be near the top as we

00:33:22.560 approach a federal election. It's not just the residential school issue. It's the broader issue

00:33:30.080 of the well-being of Canada's aboriginal peoples. And I think part of the root of the problem goes

00:33:38.640 away back to the Indian Act itself. The Indian Act of 1876 was first passed by Canada's first liberal

00:33:48.800 government, first liberal federal government, Alexander Mackenzie's government, 1876.

00:33:54.240 It had a philosophy around it, which you can understand by the standards of the 19th century.

00:34:05.040 The actual original Indian Act incorporated two previous statutes that had been passed by the

00:34:12.640 legislature of upper and lower Canada with the approval of the British government.

00:34:18.480 One of those acts was called the Gradual Civilization Act. And you even get from the

00:34:25.360 language, you can see what they were trying to do. You'd encountered these people with a hunting and

00:34:29.840 gathering culture. And the people of Canada, the new people and the new governments were going to

00:34:38.320 use, and they use the word, civilize them, or going to westernize them, and even Christianize them.

00:34:44.880 And it was felt this was a good thing to do. They thought they were doing a good thing. It was a

00:34:48.560 better alternative than Americans declaring war on the aboriginal people, which was the American

00:34:55.360 solution. But that philosophy of, I think, permeates the Indian Act and its administration by

00:35:05.520 the governments, not just by what the churches did in the residential school question. And so,

00:35:12.320 if there's a solution, it's to move beyond the Indian Act. I think we need to do away with the 1.00

00:35:19.040 Indian Act and replace it with something else. And with something else that's derived this time from

00:35:24.160 very intensive consultation with aboriginal people themselves. There was no consultation with aboriginal

00:35:29.600 people at all on either the original Indian Act or a number of other versions of it. When I was in the

00:35:35.280 parliament on one occasion, I can't remember whether it was in committee or in the chamber proper,

00:35:41.280 but I asked the question, if the Indian Act did not exist today, is there anyone in this chamber who would

00:35:48.080 stand up and move its adoption? And there's dead silence on all sides. Nobody was proud of it. So

00:35:57.600 I do think that's part of the, what's the, if you replace the Indian Act, what do you replace it with?

00:36:03.280 What do aboriginal people themselves want to replace it with? But what would be something that the rest of 1.00

00:36:08.720 Canadians would support? The other big aspect of this, Anthony, and the way you touched on it, is that

00:36:14.800 the biggest tragedy for aboriginal people is the state of poverty among so many aboriginal people.

00:36:20.560 Right. And we have tried to fix poverty, not just with aboriginals, with others, by 0.96

00:36:26.080 one mechanism for the last 80 years, namely the redistribution of income through progressive taxation,

00:36:35.120 taxing the higher income people, taking the money and giving it to people that are

00:36:40.080 suffering from poverty and underdevelopment. And that has not worked very well. And it has not worked

00:36:47.200 particularly in relation to aboriginal people. Some reserves have done well, but others have not.

00:36:53.840 So what's the alternative to that? And the alternative that I've advocated for years, even when I was in the

00:36:59.760 private sector as a consultant, is a redistribution of the tools of wealth creation.

00:37:04.640 That aboriginal people need to be given the tools of wealth creation, not just

00:37:10.480 redistributed income, access to markets, access to capital, micro-capital, not just macro-capital,

00:37:18.320 access to technology, access to connections with other economic actors that they can build upon.

00:37:25.760 There's a whole screed of literature on this redistribution of the tools of wealth creation as

00:37:30.320 distinct for the redistribution of income. And it seems to me that that's an approach that

00:37:36.080 eventually has to be taken to get aboriginal people out of the poverty, which is the distinguishing 1.00

00:37:42.320 characteristic of so many of the reserves. Let's move on to western alienation right now. Just how

00:37:47.840 raw is it? What is the sense on the ground right now? I know we've had periods a couple decades ago when

00:37:54.480 it's been extremely raw. I hear some people say though it's almost worse than it was back then.

00:37:59.680 Well it certainly is a factor and I worry that particularly in central Canada there's no

00:38:06.080 awareness of this about how serious it is. Right now the most intense expressions of

00:38:15.920 western alienation in the form of people saying they would seriously consider secession are in

00:38:21.360 southern Alberta and southern Saskatchewan and the rural areas. But there's large numbers of people

00:38:28.000 people that are prepared to consider secession if the west's major concerns and aspirations are not

00:38:37.040 dealt with. And these concerns and aspirations have been articulated ad nauseam but getting no

00:38:45.840 reaction, particularly from the federal government. And some of the major ones is the west wants

00:38:51.280 unobstructed transportation corridors to the Pacific and the Atlantic and the Arctic so you can move

00:38:57.520 resources and goods from interior provinces to tidewater and world markets. And the fact that you can't

00:39:05.120 build a transcontinental, transprovincial, you couldn't build a rail line today, you couldn't

00:39:12.160 but you can't build a pipeline, you'd have trouble building an electricity transmission line. I heard of a meeting

00:39:18.080 where one of the Canadian companies, actually TransCanada Pipeline was trying to raise money

00:39:24.080 somewhere in the US and this is just hearsay so I don't know if it's how true it was but apparently

00:39:29.040 some American investor got up and mocked the name. TransCanada Pipeline, TransMountain Pipeline.

00:39:36.240 You Canadians can't trans anything. You can't build across three or four provinces. The Chinese 1.00

00:39:42.560 are building a silver highway across 10 countries. You guys can't even build something across your own

00:39:48.720 country. So that's something that simply has to be addressed. And again, I think when the candidates

00:39:54.320 knock on the doors at the federal election in Western Canada, they're going to get a lot of

00:39:58.880 people are going to say, are you or are you not committed to using the federal power to create

00:40:04.480 unobstructed transportation corridors from the interior to tidewater? And if you aren't committed to that,

00:40:11.440 and you don't know how to do it or won't do it, you're not going to get our support. And then there's

00:40:18.240 other issues. The need to recognize the resource sectors, fisheries, agriculture, mining, energy,

00:40:28.800 agriculture as foundational building blocks of the Canadian economy, not relics from the past,

00:40:35.680 but fundamentally important to the country, including the energy sector. There's a desire

00:40:41.200 to see that recognized. There's a lot of Western Canadians cannot understand the foolishness of a 0.98

00:40:47.920 federal government that here you have a country, Canada, that has the second or third largest petroleum

00:40:54.720 resources in the globe. And you have a demand situation where the world is still using 100

00:41:05.280 million barrels, almost 100 million barrels of oil a day. And the choice is whether that oil is going

00:41:11.200 to be produced by people that are environmentally responsible and sensitive and sensitive to human

00:41:16.000 rights, or whether you're going to get it from other sources. And the fact that Canada, the federal

00:41:20.000 government turns its back on that industry, turns its back on that resort, is just considered

00:41:25.920 inexplicable. And so you're going to get again asked at the door, are you or are you not committed

00:41:32.480 to recognizing and supporting the resource sectors of this country as fundamental building blocks

00:41:39.360 of the country? And if the federal party can say yes, and demonstrate how they're going to do it,

00:41:44.400 they're going to do better than ones that ignore that. And there's a list of these concerns and

00:41:48.720 aspirations that if they're not met, they will fuel the secessionist argument. If they are met,

00:41:56.480 that these can be met within Confederation, then that will abate.

00:42:01.200 But aren't we at the point where they have not been met for so long? This is why we're seeing

00:42:06.320 things like the Maverick Party materialize. I mean, we remember that old liberal slogan,

00:42:10.080 the liberal saying years ago, you know, screw the West, we'll take the rest. And it seems like that

00:42:15.040 calculus in the liberal war room is playing out right now. I mean, they know that they don't get

00:42:19.440 many Alberta seats, and it seems like they don't really care.

00:42:22.240 But they'll have to then decide how are they going to handle a full-blown Western secession movement,

00:42:28.400 and it'll be different than the Quebec movement. And I was in the parliament when my worst night in

00:42:35.040 parliament was the night of that secession referendum in Quebec, where the country came within a hair of

00:42:42.160 actually cracking up. But the liberals have no idea what they will face if there's a full-blown

00:42:48.720 secession movement in the West. The economic arguments that your independent country will

00:42:53.760 not be economically viable, which was one of the main arguments used against Quebec, cannot be used

00:42:58.880 against the West, because you can't make that argument. It doesn't hold true. So the liberals can

00:43:04.080 ignore and ignore and ignore. But the result could be faced with a full-blown secession crisis. And how

00:43:11.520 would the next liberal prime minister like to go down as the prime minister that presided over the

00:43:16.800 crack-up of the country? Talk about a national disgrace, that that would be the ultimate disgrace.

00:43:24.720 Preston, we began our conversation talking about divisiveness, fear, obviously a lack of unity.

00:43:31.520 After everything we've talked about, Alberta, the other issues, are you an optimist that we're going to

00:43:36.800 find some unity? Or are you concerned that we've got further splits to go?

00:43:41.520 Well, you know, you've heard this old joke about the definition of a Canadian optimist is somebody

00:43:46.480 that thinks things could be worse. I'm optimistic and that's it. No, I believe, and I've always

00:43:55.040 believed this, I think none of these problems, the ones we've talked about, health care reform,

00:43:59.760 dealing with the bureaucracy, the finance of the federal government, the aboriginal well-being. I

00:44:07.520 don't think any of them are insoluble problems. But they do require a will on the part of political

00:44:14.720 people to address them, to address them in new ways, not just keep doing what we've done in the past.

00:44:20.080 And the need for issue campaigns and advocacy campaigns to get public support for particular

00:44:24.960 solutions. So I think these things can still be done, but they have to be attended to. And I would

00:44:33.920 say, when I say these have to be attended to, I'm talking about something more than discussion.

00:44:39.040 I'm all for discussion. You and I aren't having a discussion. But at the end of the day, I'd say to

00:44:44.240 people that are listening to this podcast, if you are exercised about any of these issues,

00:44:51.280 try to figure out one or two things that you can actually do. And with the federal election coming

00:44:58.000 up, one of the small things that a voter can do is you have a list, maybe it's a very short list,

00:45:04.000 of when that candidate, no matter what party, any party, knocks on your door. You say,

00:45:11.040 here's something, I want to know what your commitment is. And you should understand that

00:45:17.280 my support for you and my opposition to you will depend on what you are committed to do on this

00:45:23.280 file or on this issue. Preston Manning, thank you so much for your insights today. It's been a great

00:45:27.920 conversation. Well, thank you. I enjoyed it. Full Comment is a post-media podcast. I'm Anthony

00:45:33.760 Fury. This episode was produced by Andre Pru with theme music by Bryce Hall. Kevin Libin is the executive

00:45:39.680 producer. You can subscribe to Full Comment on Apple Podcasts, Google, Spotify, and we're now on Amazon

00:45:45.600 Music. You can listen through the app or your Alexa enabled devices, and you can help us by giving us

00:45:50.320 a rating or a review and by telling your friends about us. Thanks for listening.

Full Comment - August 16, 2021

Preston Manning on the broken state of Canadian politics

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