Juno News - January 07, 2025


Fmr. Liberal MP General Andrew Leslie on Justin Trudeau's RESIGNATION


Episode Stats

Length

17 minutes

Words per Minute

148.84021

Word Count

2,541

Sentence Count

121

Hate Speech Sentences

1


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 All right, joining us now on The Faulkner Show is General The Honourable Andrew Leslie,
00:00:07.680 the former Chief Whip of the Government of Justin Trudeau from 2015 to 2019 and the former Liberal
00:00:13.840 MP for the riding of Orleans. Before entering politics, General Leslie was a decorated veteran
00:00:19.100 and commander of the Canadian Army from 2006 to 2010. General, thank you so much for joining us.
00:00:25.620 The big news today, of course, is Justin Trudeau's resignation announcement. You know Justin
00:00:30.780 Trudeau, you worked with him personally. What do you think is going through his mind today as he
00:00:35.760 made that announcement? Well, we're certainly not close now. I left him for some very good reasons
00:00:44.680 in 2019. I will point out, no matter what's going through his mind right now, I really wish that at
00:00:53.560 the top of his mind would be Canada and the looming impact of negotiations with President-designate
00:01:02.820 Trump on tariffs, trade, border security, defense and security. So here we have a prime minister
00:01:11.820 whose popularity is amongst historical lows, who has decided to essentially stop the machinery of
00:01:20.400 the government from working for three months. But he's going to maintain his position as leadership.
00:01:28.560 And he'll be initiating the negotiations with then President Trump starting in about 15 or 16 days.
00:01:36.080 Meanwhile, his juniors, his cabinet ministers, will all be off vying to compete to replace him.
00:01:44.480 So who's the strong, capable, knowledgeable team that represents Canada's interests that
00:01:52.960 arguably the single most important and economically fragile time we've had with the United States
00:02:00.240 in a living memory? And if that was not his first consideration, then shame on him.
00:02:08.400 Let's go through this upcoming negotiation with Donald Trump, just how important this will be
00:02:17.120 for the future of the country. Do you feel as though Donald Trump looks at the announcement today
00:02:22.480 as a personal victory and as a victory for his incoming administration, essentially being able to take out
00:02:28.640 a prime minister who they see as someone standing perhaps in their way when it comes to
00:02:33.280 the incoming administration's foreign policy? I don't think Mr. Trudeau had that much attention from
00:02:43.920 President-elect Trump's team. And I don't think they see it as victory per se because he's still around.
00:02:51.520 But Donald Trump's team are transactional in nature. A lot of them are very senior business leaders
00:02:57.920 or very experienced politicians. And when they see weakness, or nations that project weakness,
00:03:05.120 or fragility or instability or chaos, they'll probably try and get a better deal out of it.
00:03:12.960 So in my opinion, what the current Prime Minister of Canada has just done has not helped us in the slightest.
00:03:21.600 Before entering government, you were assisting the Liberal Party and Trudeau and being an advisor on
00:03:27.280 foreign policy. So you are closely aware of what Justin Trudeau's foreign policy was entering government.
00:03:36.960 How would you define Justin Trudeau's outlook on the world and his foreign policy?
00:03:44.080 I think his foreign policy will be remembered essentially as naive. I think he had great ambitions
00:03:51.920 to operate on the international stage, but a variety of interlocutors from his own team. And of course,
00:04:00.800 his efforts ended up more often than not in embarrassment in terms of losing credibility for
00:04:09.120 our nation. So I think overall, his tenure as 10 years on the international stage will be seen not as a
00:04:16.560 great success. And if anything, a significant amount of failures. Do you think he sees it that way? Or do you
00:04:23.200 think perhaps that he feels satisfied with his job as Prime Minister now that it's all coming to an end?
00:04:30.560 People change. His power changes people especially quickly. And in his case, he's been in power for 10
00:04:37.840 years. I think ever increasingly, he's been in a bubble, an echo chamber of those who
00:04:43.520 tell him all that he might wish he hoped to hear all the time. And the results, I think,
00:04:48.640 speak for themselves. A leader who is largely out of touch, who has certainly misread the United States,
00:04:55.520 our greatest friend and largest trading partner, who has misplayed his hand on several very, very
00:05:02.720 important international venues, be it dealing with leaders of large governments, or leaders of
00:05:09.200 coalitions are responding to the concerns of NATO members who criticized and are criticizing Canada
00:05:15.280 for their lack of defense spending, failing to take the hint of the current government of the United
00:05:22.000 States, President Biden and his vice president about border security, the United States concerns over
00:05:28.880 drugs coming from Canada down to the United States, about security risks appearing on their northern
00:05:34.720 border, to which they've allocated no new fresh resources. Now they've made promises over the
00:05:40.560 recent weeks, but nothing's actually happened. So his legacy will probably be in his own mind as
00:05:47.280 good as he might make it. But to the rest of us, I think his standing in the national polls short of
00:05:54.320 quite to what the rest of Canada thinks.
00:05:55.600 And so with that, with the idea that there will be a new Liberal leader, and that process will commence
00:06:02.480 shortly, who do you think will lead the party? And who do you want to lead the party? Perhaps those are two
00:06:09.520 different answers, but maybe we'll start with who you would like to see become the next leader of the Liberal
00:06:14.800 Party.
00:06:15.120 Well, after 10 years of producing the results that the Prime Minister has produced for Canada, and of course,
00:06:25.440 depending on your point of view, some people probably think he did a great job. I happen to think he hasn't.
00:06:32.480 There are many millions of Canadians who think the same way that I do.
00:06:36.880 So I would argue deep down in the interim, it probably doesn't matter who leads the Liberal Party,
00:06:43.040 just so long as it's not Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. And I'll explain why.
00:06:48.000 It's because it's time for a change after 10 years,
00:06:52.080 and the vast majority of Canadians are telling all of us, you, myself, Mr. Trudeau,
00:06:58.800 that the change is now. So really, deep down, it doesn't matter, which is why it's so painful
00:07:05.760 to see that Prime Minister Trudeau chose this prorogation issue. He selected that, he recommended
00:07:12.880 to the Governor General, it's been approved. And now, at a time when we need a functioning government
00:07:17.840 most, there's no tools to draw on, especially when all the senior leaders will be off trying to
00:07:24.800 replace him, they're chasing his job. So all the experience of the public service of the sitting
00:07:31.840 Parliament will not be available. So it's essentially going to be a one man show with Mr. Trudeau in
00:07:39.360 Washington. How's that going to go over? Well, it's certainly going to be very interesting to watch.
00:07:45.920 You were, you were involved in the government in the early days of the majority government mandate.
00:07:52.480 I want to ask you, in that time, what were some of the accomplishments that the government can look
00:07:59.440 back on and say, that was something we can remember as a positive? Because so much of the coverage today
00:08:05.040 and over the next few weeks will be negative, and not for not for bad reasons. There's plenty of
00:08:10.720 negativity, and plenty of negative angles to cover this story. But I want to ask you, what were some of
00:08:16.080 those accomplishments that Canadians can look back on with this government?
00:08:21.280 I would think they had a, they had ambitions about the environment, which they started.
00:08:28.720 Unfortunately, Canada's emissions have grown over the last 10 years, carbon emissions, but they started
00:08:36.400 a process. They went too far in many cases and made it too expensive too quickly. And they didn't do a
00:08:42.080 good job of explaining why they were doing it in terms of the intricacies. I also note that there's
00:08:47.920 a variety of municipal or provincial programs in which they dipped down and started to meddle in those
00:08:55.120 waters, specifically pharma care, assistance to Medicare, dental care, which, as you know,
00:09:01.040 in the division of responsibilities and charter documents, that's the province's responsibility.
00:09:07.200 Nonetheless, that's where they like to play. And in that context,
00:09:10.800 they probably did some good there in terms of social development and pensions for the agent.
00:09:16.640 But I think their gallop to the left was very, very precipitous. Don't forget they ran originally
00:09:22.240 in 2014, 2015 as a centrist liberals. Right after they were elected, they went to the left of the NDP.
00:09:30.720 And I think we're seeing some of the results of that in terms of Canada status in the world,
00:09:35.440 our trade deficits, how the list goes on and on. So I won't bore you all with the detail you know already.
00:09:44.080 Let's look ahead now to what some of these major foreign policy challenges are going to be for
00:09:50.560 a new Canadian government. Of course, we understand that there are situations all over the world, but
00:09:55.920 when it comes to Canada's role in those situations in Ukraine, in the Middle East, and perhaps in other
00:10:03.120 areas. What do you think Canada should do now to put itself back in what I consider to be put the
00:10:10.560 country back in its rightful place of the hierarchy of nations? Well, I agree with you there. I think the
00:10:15.680 first thing that has to happen, we have to rebuild ourselves. We have to rebuild ourselves, not only in
00:10:20.800 terms of a nation, but it takes pride in its accomplishments, pride in its past, pride in those
00:10:26.720 activities that the men who win them in uniform and do and do on our behalf, not only in national
00:10:32.000 defense, but in the policing forces and border security. Then we have to pay much closer attention
00:10:38.000 to what's going on with their biggest friend and trading partner. They've made it pretty clear
00:10:43.040 that they want our borders a lot tighter than they've ever been in the past because unpleasant people
00:10:48.000 are coming in from their north, Canada, into their country, staying and causing mischief.
00:10:54.240 As well, narcotics are flowing in from Canada to the United States. There's some trade issues that
00:11:00.560 are looming large. There's the potential of tariffs, of which President-elect Trump has spoken many times.
00:11:07.920 After a while, you tend to believe that he's actually going to do it, and I think he will,
00:11:12.480 which means we're going to have to have robust teams ready to respond to the detail because it's
00:11:18.560 in the detail where we sort of drew to a draw in the last NAFTA discussion with the United States,
00:11:25.520 of which I was a member. I had to speak to 33 state governors visiting a whole bunch of states with
00:11:33.200 information on how many Canadian businesses, who they were, how much money flowed into the United States
00:11:40.720 from Canada that helped sell and close the deal. And of course, defense and security.
00:11:47.440 The United States is increasingly serious and angry at us for failing. They call us laggards in defense
00:11:53.520 spending. And by the way, you'll hear a lot of nonsensical numbers from existing Liberal cabinet
00:11:59.280 ministers about how much we've increased defense spending. Here are some facts. Between 2015 to 2024,
00:12:07.840 if you look at the defense budget, it has gone up, but it has not kept pace with inflation.
00:12:14.560 So that means that every dollar D&D spends in the equivalency is less than that which they had
00:12:21.360 in 2015. Our equipment really hasn't been touched at all in terms of replacement. There's a whole bunch
00:12:27.600 of vague promises of future stuff arriving, but we don't have it. And the need is now. Meanwhile,
00:12:33.760 internationally, we have predators on the prowl. Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, I could go on.
00:12:42.400 So Canada has to do more in terms of international commitments and at what cost?
00:12:48.160 Meanwhile, the public service has grown by 42%, which far outstrips the increase in the number of
00:12:54.960 Canadians who've come, of course, rely on the public service to provide them with social assistance.
00:13:00.800 So there's some tough work ahead. I haven't really touched yet the enormous debt that Minister Freeland
00:13:11.440 cheerfully grew to unprecedented levels, wherein during her tenure, more debt was added to Canada's
00:13:19.840 or taken away from Canada's piggy bank than in the entirety of our cumulative history.
00:13:26.560 And that's going to take many years to pay down and pay off while tough decisions are being made on
00:13:31.280 reinvestment. So the next government has has a lot of work to do, a lot of a lot of really important
00:13:38.880 work to do. And all Canadians are going to have to pull together on that.
00:13:42.240 General, I have to ask you about the state of the Canadian Armed Forces. We know that there is an
00:13:48.080 attrition crisis, a morale crisis and a really a real difficulty at recruiting young members to join the
00:13:57.040 forces. You've played significant leadership roles in the military. I want to ask you what you think
00:14:02.800 it'll take to get the military back to a position where it is a capable fighting force and it is, again,
00:14:10.400 feared by the enemy. I would argue that though there are problems across the Canadian Armed Forces,
00:14:18.320 almost none of them are the making of the actual Canadian Forces. The way that the government supports
00:14:25.760 their armed forces is through money. And if there's not enough money to hire troops, that's how you end
00:14:32.880 up being 16,000 short. An interesting fact is that last year in 2023, 70,000 Canadians applied to join,
00:14:41.760 but only 5,000 made it through the recruiting process because it took too long to do the medicals,
00:14:47.280 it took too long to get them physically fit, it took them long to get the boots, the uniforms,
00:14:51.760 the capacity to train. All that boils down to money and leadership. And so the three things that the
00:14:59.280 government of Canada has not provided to the armed forces is leadership in terms of political and
00:15:06.560 public service leadership to actually solve problems. The second thing they haven't provided is enough
00:15:12.640 money to replace old equipment, to allow them to train, to have adequate quarters they can live in,
00:15:18.400 to get new vehicles, new ships, a new aircraft. And the last thing is tender loving care. You can track
00:15:27.680 a prime minister's interest by where he spends his or her time. How many times did this prime minister
00:15:36.080 visit an army base in his 10 years? How many times did he visit an air force base? Now, if you go to
00:15:44.400 Halifax or you go out to the west coast, it's pretty easy to visit a naval base, but just add up how many
00:15:50.800 specific times they actually went to visit large armed forces bases. Now you compare that with the public
00:16:00.400 records available on the British, the French, or the American. I think you'll find it to be interesting
00:16:07.120 reading. Interesting indeed. Well, General, thank you so much for joining us and giving us your insight as
00:16:13.920 someone who worked alongside Justin Trudeau at one point, who was there at the decision-making table
00:16:20.320 for some very important moments in recent history. We really appreciate the time. Thank you once again,
00:16:25.840 General, for joining us. Thank you, Harrison. Great work.
00:16:38.320 Thank you.
00:16:40.320 He was STAWED