Juno News - January 09, 2025


Former Liberal MP on the difficult path ahead for the Liberal Party


Episode Stats

Length

18 minutes

Words per Minute

179.08328

Word Count

3,278

Sentence Count

152


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 You know, there won't be a Liberal Party vying for public attention or having a credible chance
00:00:06.680 of coming back as a government for several terms, which means another generation.
00:00:13.080 Joining us now on the Faulkner Show is longtime Liberal MP Dan McTeague, who served in the 90s
00:00:21.620 and early 2000s. Dan, thank you so much for joining us. The Liberal Party is now trying
00:00:27.980 to find a successor to Justin Trudeau. You were a longtime Liberal Party member. Who do you think
00:00:35.240 is going to come out on top? Well, I think for the shortness of the campaign, it's really down to
00:00:42.980 a group of just two, Freeland or Kearney. I don't see any others really making a valued effort at
00:00:50.760 trying to overcome and try to create a name for themselves. I mean, the party has clearly
00:00:55.600 indicated interest for both of those individuals. But frankly, I don't want to jump to any
00:01:02.780 conclusions. It probably doesn't matter. Either one is almost certainly going to lose the next
00:01:07.900 election. And the closer they have been to the Trudeau regime in terms of policymaking or advisory
00:01:14.080 or as ministers, as MPs, the worse it's going to be for them. And I think at this stage,
00:01:18.760 it's not about Justin Trudeau leaving that will suddenly get Canadians excited. It's that the party
00:01:23.800 has taken a serious hit to its brand by waiting so long and having stood behind this man,
00:01:30.140 Justin Trudeau, and all his bad policies, Foursquare.
00:01:33.980 So when you were a Liberal MP, the Liberal Party was always, up until that point, and really up until
00:01:40.840 the point of Justin Trudeau's leadership of the party, a centrist party, right? It was a party that
00:01:46.700 that had respected and understood the importance of fiscal responsibility. It didn't go ever too
00:01:53.240 far left. It didn't ever go too far right. It billed itself as a centrist governing party,
00:02:00.540 a pragmatic party. What happened to the party that you were a part of for so long?
00:02:05.700 The party of consensus disappeared after the significant defeat in 2011. Most members were
00:02:12.120 defeated, including myself, although just barely so. And what emerged from that was a recognition
00:02:18.560 that we needed several terms to rebuild. And of course, we've been out of power since 2006. So 2011
00:02:24.560 rolls along, we're out of power, and we wound up in third place behind the NDP, just ahead of the
00:02:30.220 bloc. And, you know, the Liberal Party got a quick fix. It got the name Trudeau. And as a result,
00:02:35.900 many people, you know, fondly remembering the good old days, if they could be seen as that,
00:02:40.700 depending where you are in the country, thought, well, this is a name. They liked the socks. They
00:02:46.440 liked the sobbing. They liked the selfies. And they went for it, not just once, not twice,
00:02:50.220 but three times. Not everybody, of course, but in declining numbers. So I suspect that what happens,
00:02:56.120 the Liberal Party didn't have a chance to redefine itself, reinvigorate its policy, reinvigorate its
00:03:01.680 organization. But it did have that magic. It had the name and the culture of personality prevailed.
00:03:08.200 It now appears that with that individual out of the way, not being popular, the party's back to
00:03:14.140 where it was in 2011. That's a rump of its former self and struggling to remain relevant, much less
00:03:22.200 account for the damage that's inflicted on Canada through recklessness, through poor policy decisions,
00:03:28.760 through virtue signaling. And to some extent, revelations, hints, very strong hints of what could
00:03:35.020 be political malfeasance, otherwise known as corruption on a number of fronts. So for the
00:03:39.820 party, it's a long, long road to getting back to where they were. And it certainly means that
00:03:45.920 it doesn't matter who the leader will be. As I said at the outset, it's not going to change,
00:03:49.800 I think, the public's perception that these people need a serious, long time out.
00:03:53.560 And so how long do you think that's going to be? It could be, it sounds as though you think it could
00:03:59.120 be several, several years, definitely more than two terms, I imagine.
00:04:05.200 Yeah, Harrison, I participated in a debate with three former, very good friends who I've known for
00:04:11.700 many years, Jack Siegel, Stephen LeDrew, former president of the party, longest serving president
00:04:17.340 of the party and Mark Keeley. I took the position that the Liberal Party as an entity will die.
00:04:23.540 There's already evidence that from a policy ideological perspective, it had done so.
00:04:28.400 The word consensus had completely disappeared. It became one of going after those who disagreed
00:04:34.940 and treating people as if those who would disagree are to be repudiated. I suggested that the idea
00:04:44.900 behind the party coming back to power or any way as a party anytime soon would be finished.
00:04:51.120 That lets me suggest that, you know, there won't be a Liberal Party vying for public attention or
00:04:58.860 having a credible chance of coming back as a government for several terms, which means another
00:05:03.700 generation. That could be 10 to 15 years down the road. Hard to say. At that point, I don't think
00:05:08.580 I'll be involved much with the political party. But the party I belong to for some 40 years
00:05:13.200 disappeared in 2013, 2014. And it's going to be a long time before it finds itself back to the
00:05:19.120 center. It appears as though Mark Carney is establishing himself as one of the frontrunners
00:05:25.720 here to take over the party. Are you talking with people inside of the party or have you or maybe you
00:05:33.260 haven't? But what are your instincts about Mark Carney? Is he a centrist, pragmatic capitalist?
00:05:39.700 Well, I think people are going to treat him as if, well, he's Governor of Bank of Canada.
00:05:46.820 Stephen Harper had appointed him. He later became the Governor of the Bank of England.
00:05:52.980 And those will, of course, be seen as very strong points for him. But his subsequent work, not just in
00:06:00.020 terms of working for, you know, for the company that Corner, I'm trying to think of the name, something
00:06:09.060 field, Brookfield. And of course, his work with the Glasgow Financial Assistance and towards our move
00:06:20.020 towards net zero G fans is certainly not going to help at a time in which I think many banks and
00:06:25.700 institutions are realizing maybe what's such a brilliant idea to choke off funding to organizations
00:06:32.580 that are responsible for supporting the Canadian economy in terms of revenues, in terms of economic
00:06:37.940 activity, something that in the 1990s and early 2000s, we as liberals understood as being extremely
00:06:44.020 important to getting the country's financial house in order. I think Mr Carney probably doesn't have
00:06:50.420 the common touch. I don't, that's not to take away from him, but he's too heavily invested. In fact,
00:06:55.540 he was an advisor, a significant advisor to Justin Trudeau on the green policies that I think are at the
00:07:00.660 heart of reducing, destroying affordability in Canada. That may be true of the rest of the world
00:07:05.300 and creating an era of a lack of prosperity for a lot of Canadians. And so there's a connection between
00:07:12.420 what Justin Trudeau did, apart from his own personalities, his own character and the policies
00:07:17.700 behind it, which Mark Carney had a very, very strong hand in advocating. So I don't think there's much
00:07:22.500 of a change as the famous band from the 1970s, 60s would have said, the who, meet the new boss, same as
00:07:29.140 the old boss. What made you want to be a liberal? Oh boy, that goes back to being a youngster in 1974,
00:07:40.340 12 years of age, licking envelopes and putting up a couple of posters to 78, working for Paul Cosgrove,
00:07:45.620 79, 80, 84, 88, finally running in 93 all the way to 2011. It was the sense of the party as always
00:07:56.340 struggling to find out where the average person was, the genius of the country, always putting
00:08:02.820 Canada first, putting the interests of Canadians region by region, where the priority was always
00:08:10.340 given to the idea of the whole, the centre. But also having a government that was committed
00:08:16.420 at the time, the constitutional fights, the fights to maintain unity in the country. I was fluently
00:08:23.300 bilingual, so it struck me that Quebec was prepared to take all its marbles and leave, leaving guys like
00:08:28.980 me who are French-Canadian outside of Quebec in a very odd position. The Liberal Party stood for consensus,
00:08:34.660 that is to try to find the middle ground while being mindful of a nation that is very much a
00:08:42.740 peaceful, peace-driven nation, but when the time came, willing to stand up and fight. And certainly
00:08:47.940 not a nation that was given to destroying opportunities for people or basically creating
00:08:51.940 an environment of individuals who, in my regards, have become mooches. Individuals who think that Canada
00:08:58.980 is all about what you can get out of it. There was a sense of urgency at the time for Liberal Party
00:09:04.180 was about giving and creating opportunities for people. And that wasn't just my time as a Member
00:09:08.980 of Parliament. It's also the same time of, let's you beat Pearson, where, you know, we rejected
00:09:14.500 socialism. We actually sought out a better social contract whereby people could create, invest,
00:09:20.820 and work, and there would be an opportunity for governments to help people better themselves and
00:09:25.780 so doing better the country. Those have all been lost to wokeism, to culture personality, as I
00:09:32.020 mentioned earlier, identity politics. You know, the whole idea that Canada would be a post-national
00:09:37.620 state as espoused by Justin Trudeau. Very dangerous comments for a country that came together under very
00:09:44.420 difficult circumstances. A neighbour of the South that was hostile, you know, the British influence in
00:09:50.980 Canada in terms of our institutions, but having to break away from that and to find our own way with two
00:09:55.620 cultures often warring at the centre of a nation. Those are the things that impressed me about the
00:09:59.540 Liberal Party is its ability to bring people together in the kind of way which many other
00:10:06.020 nations had experimented with and didn't do so well, not without war or, you know, internal strife.
00:10:11.460 We've managed to create consensus in this country and build, you know, a country, as you mentioned
00:10:17.380 earlier, a pragmatic approach to our problems and a way in which to use and harness our energies,
00:10:23.140 our resources, the goodness of what we produce to create a better standard of living, not just for
00:10:27.860 this generation, but for generations to come. I think a lot of that has been challenged and,
00:10:31.860 dare I say, even lost. Well, yeah, and it appears as though Justin Trudeau has taken the Liberal Party
00:10:37.540 in such a place that has no semblance of the old party that it had been for so long,
00:10:46.180 that kind of traditional governing party of Canada, that it's hard for many Canadians now to remember what
00:10:52.100 the Liberal Party was like before Justin Trudeau because of all the changes that he's made to the
00:10:56.820 party, to the position and to the country. I'm worried about this question having too long of
00:11:02.020 an answer, but we're going to ask it anyway. I have to ask you, you know, when you look back at
00:11:06.660 Justin Trudeau's time as Prime Minister, these nine years, what are some of the biggest failures you
00:11:12.980 think that he was responsible for that led the country to the place that it is now in?
00:11:18.020 Justin Trudeau I think it's taking for granted the financial position of the nation, taking for
00:11:23.620 granted those things which make it unique and prosperous. I don't just mean the energy sector,
00:11:28.340 but I think manufacturing. I think he's involved too heavily in ideologies that are extraordinarily
00:11:34.660 pernicious to Canada. Attacking our energy sector is ridiculous. Canada has, and as I mentioned for
00:11:40.500 several years, and very much president of the Canadians for Affordable Energy, if you start messing
00:11:45.140 around with the things that start to make prices and things much more difficult for people to make
00:11:50.660 ends meet, whether that be transportation, whether that be heating their homes or driving up the cost
00:11:55.220 of things like food because you impose, you know, ideologically driven ideas around climate that, you
00:12:01.060 know, somehow have to punish people because of the way in which they live without having the technology
00:12:05.940 to back it up. And then committing to things, this is the danger of committing to things that we don't
00:12:10.900 haven't developed yet, especially on the side of new technologies to replace oil and gas,
00:12:16.180 transportation to replace internal combustion engine. That's not working out very well, not
00:12:19.780 with a massive subsidy. So now it comes back to not having a better understanding of the fiscal nature,
00:12:27.380 the importance of ensuring that the country can afford the things that you want it to seek. And
00:12:33.540 there's nothing wrong with saying, hey, we want to have good social programs and a great standard of living
00:12:36.980 for everybody. But you have to incentivize those industries, those sectors which are doing very
00:12:42.420 well, whether that be agriculture, mining, whether that be energy sector, manufacturing,
00:12:46.260 I think all of those sectors have been severely challenged by a government that says there's no
00:12:51.620 business case for oil and gas, or maybe we just, you know, too bad manufacturing is leaving. We can,
00:12:57.140 you know, another factor, we can go and print money or we can, you know, advocate modern monetary
00:13:05.620 theories in which you can spend without, with abandon and without any due regard to who's going
00:13:09.940 to pay for it. I think it's, it's completely lost on the Trudeau liberals of this generation,
00:13:17.940 that the hard fought attempt to try to create some balance between our monetary and fiscal policy has
00:13:22.740 been lost. And as a result, Canadians are suffering. Nothing seems to have worked. These people have the
00:13:28.580 Midas touch and reverse everything they've attempted has wound up a foul. And as a result, I think more and
00:13:34.580 more and more people have become not just upset with this government, but upset with our institutions.
00:13:39.940 And I think the institutions that govern this country are also afraid, we need to get back to
00:13:45.380 where we were before, not hire a lot of civil servants to say that that our employment picture
00:13:50.260 looks very good in this country, while at the same time borrowing massively to maintain their standard
00:13:54.500 living. I have to ask you a foreign policy question, as you were the parliamentary secretary to
00:14:00.260 the foreign affairs minister. The situation with the United States now appears to be in a place that
00:14:07.220 it hasn't been for decades, if not even over 100 years, we now have a president that is relentlessly
00:14:14.420 taunting, not just the outgoing prime minister, but the country threatening to use economic force to
00:14:20.500 essentially annex this country. When you look at this situation through your experience, what do you
00:14:26.260 think Canada's response should be here? Well, I think it should be a forceful rejection with a plan
00:14:32.820 to respond. And the response can be positive and negative. We know how Donald Trump behaves. He's
00:14:41.220 experienced in this area. He's a deal maker. He sees weakness. He sees weakness with our institutions,
00:14:46.660 with our government, and certainly with the prime minister. Although we can't change that,
00:14:51.220 and he's now clinging to power for the next 77 days. It's a very critical time. I think the country
00:14:57.620 has to be prepared to respond in kind and to continue as Alberta's doing, for instance, which is
00:15:05.140 to remind the Trump administration and those around it that you can't do without Canadian heavy oil and
00:15:11.300 you can't do without natural gas. You're a country that produces 13 million barrels of oil. Much of that
00:15:16.420 can only produce gasoline. It can't produce diesel. How do you run your military? How do you run your mining?
00:15:20.900 How do you run your transportation sector? You need Canada as much as Canada needs you. It's a
00:15:25.460 symbiotic relationship. I think there's some people who are, you know, who are hawks on this and have
00:15:30.340 been very, very good. Again, Daniel Smith being an example. I don't think it was great for Doug Ford
00:15:34.820 at the beginning to start to threaten energy. Much of the energy we sell, by the way, in terms of
00:15:39.220 electricity to the United States is because we have spillover from green energy, which of course,
00:15:44.820 you know, it costs us, you know, a lot to produce and we get nothing for it by selling to the
00:15:48.900 Americans. But I think there's a way of responding to this and that's to also recognize there's some
00:15:53.540 things that Donald Trump is saying that actually makes sense. Getting electric vehicle mandates
00:15:57.780 means that we've basically committed about 50 billion dollars of money we don't need to spend now
00:16:01.940 because Americans won't have to buy electric vehicles. Some do, but they certainly won't be in
00:16:06.180 that kind of buying mood. So we should stick with what we have. I think we let this thing play out,
00:16:11.940 but we also have to have a, you know, a game strategy by the prime minister. If he's decided
00:16:16.340 he wants to resign, he doesn't have a game plan, then he ought to leave right now, decamp, send it
00:16:21.220 over to a temporary leader of the government so that they can have a strategy in place as opposed
00:16:27.700 to sort of just winging it, spending time on a, you know, on a ski hill somewhere, contemplating his
00:16:34.660 life. We don't need conversations. We need action. And I think we need a new prime minister and a new
00:16:39.540 cabinet and a new team to advocate for that. We don't have a lot of time, but I think we may very
00:16:44.660 well find ourselves in a very tough situation until that election takes place, my guess,
00:16:48.580 sometime around the first week of May. And you think Donald Trump is serious about the 25% tariff?
00:16:54.740 I think he's serious about illustrating that there's some problems that he wants addressed,
00:16:58.660 but if he does that, it's tit for tat. It's just as bad for Americans. I think there's probably about
00:17:04.020 20 to 25 states that would be affected as well adversely by Canada leveling back a similar tariff.
00:17:11.140 And, you know, what does this do? Is it touch off a war with other parts of the world? Would the
00:17:15.140 Americans now tariff everybody? If that's the case, access to their market may be one thing.
00:17:19.540 Americans have to be mindful of the fact they have massive debts. They're holding on to, what,
00:17:23.620 a six, seven, eight trillion dollar debt, although they are a reserve currency. You know,
00:17:29.220 you can walk tall and carry a big stick and tell the world what you think. But there comes a point
00:17:37.300 where I think we thought very similar of Mr. Trump and his comments about the last round of negotiations,
00:17:43.300 that there were going to be some real problems. There are problems. We have to take them very
00:17:46.420 seriously. But we also have to be in a position where we can remind President Trump and his
00:17:51.860 administration that without Canada, the greatest creating relationship in the world will dissolve.
00:17:56.740 And that's not in anyone's interest on either side of the border.
00:18:00.100 Well, we've covered a lot of ground and that's all the time we have. But Dan McTeague,
00:18:03.860 thank you very much for joining us on the show. We hope to have you back soon.
00:18:07.140 I'm looking forward to that. Thanks for having me, Harrison.