Juno News - December 24, 2024


Former Liberal MP says Trudeau has DESTROYED party brand (Ft. Dan McTeague)


Episode Stats

Length

15 minutes

Words per Minute

200.58376

Word Count

3,207

Sentence Count

138


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Justin Trudeau will be spending his Christmas holidays reflecting on his future and whether
00:00:06.060 he should stay on as leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. Christmas truly is the season of hope
00:00:12.420 and optimism. Joining me today to discuss is former Liberal MP Dan McTagg. I'm Rachel Parker
00:00:19.000 and you're watching The Rachel Parker Show.
00:00:30.000 Hey everyone, welcome back to The Rachel Parker Show and Merry Christmas Eve. I am very impressed.
00:00:44.760 You guys are obviously my most dedicated and diligent fans if you are spending Christmas Eve
00:00:51.280 day watching the latest episode of The Rachel Parker Show. So thank you very much all for your
00:00:57.620 support over the year. Today we are going to be talking to former Liberal MP Dan McTagg about his
00:01:03.360 thoughts on what went down in Ottawa last week, obviously with Christy Freeland resigning and
00:01:09.740 knifing Trudeau in the back on her way out. Dan, thank you so much for being here today. I just
00:01:15.920 super quickly want to get, if you just have to sum it up in a few sentences, what are your thoughts
00:01:21.320 on what happened in Ottawa with the Liberal Party of Canada last week?
00:01:25.340 Well, they finally stepped on a landmine and has left the Prime Minister and the caucus in a complete
00:01:32.580 tizzy. I think it's clear that the end is near. If not for Trudeau, it is over. What really matters
00:01:39.000 now is whether the Liberal caucus will have enough members of Parliament who will actually not show up
00:01:43.260 the next non-confident vote or whether Jagmeet Singh will turn his back again and renounce what he says
00:01:50.320 one week with his desire to maintain and stay in power as long as possible. I think for the Liberal
00:01:56.160 Party, the damage isn't just about what happens in the next election where it's going to be slaughtered.
00:02:01.260 It looks like it's going to probably have the effect on the Liberal Party for a generation to come.
00:02:05.240 A lot of people will not vote for that party again, especially when they start to see the telling
00:02:08.340 details of the carnage that has been brought about by having reckless and irresponsible and
00:02:14.580 inexperienced people running the country.
00:02:16.500 So it sounds like you're saying there is no path forward for Justin Trudeau. He cannot continue. We
00:02:22.740 won't see him again when the House returns.
00:02:25.860 None whatsoever, Rachel. I mean, if he does show up, it's pretty clear to me that he won't have much
00:02:30.900 time left. There continues to be no business done in the House until the Liberals come clean with their
00:02:37.140 $400-plus million green STD slush fund, production of papers. I know about that because I had done when I
00:02:45.220 was a Liberal member of Parliament in the Harper government and they produced it. They have to.
00:02:48.980 You're required to do that. That shows the supremacy of Parliament. But I think for Justin Trudeau,
00:02:54.500 the question now is how many weeks between what happened last week when it came to
00:03:03.460 Chrysia Freeland resigning and being able to say, you make a graceful exit. I doubt he can do that at
00:03:08.260 this point. The damage is done and we're too far deep into this that he can extricate himself from what
00:03:13.380 has been very bad public policy and very bad acting in this period of time.
00:03:17.940 When we talk about what you said about the Liberal Party has been essentially wrecked for a
00:03:22.820 generation, Justin Trudeau not being able to have a graceful exit. Do you think, at what point do you
00:03:29.700 think would have been better for him to step down to keep the Liberal Party intact? Because it sounds
00:03:34.420 like that's no longer possible. We're too far gone at this point. So when should he have stepped down?
00:03:38.900 Summer of 2023, when the polls start to show a pretty significant surge for the Conservative Party
00:03:45.940 and a precipitous drop for the Liberal Party, NDP is the same as well. I think that would have been
00:03:52.100 the writing on the wall for him. But for whatever reason, he can't understand the possibility that he's
00:03:58.660 being rejected or that the King, the Emperor has no clothes. Whatever the case may be, he stayed in far
00:04:04.340 too long. The damage now for the past year, almost a year and a half, has been such that it was at
00:04:10.260 first a 10% decrease, then the 15%, now 20%, even 25% gap between the Conservative Party and the Liberal
00:04:17.540 Party. And the most telling part of this, I'm going to talk to my own children, and they're not children
00:04:22.580 anymore, they're young adults, who see that their future has been compromised by very bad public policy.
00:04:26.740 And for that reason, they will never ever support that party again, that brand, given that it could bring
00:04:31.940 about that kind of public policy, and is determined, you're likely to bring it back, should they have
00:04:36.980 that opportunity. I see the Liberal Party merging with the NDP. And I think the Liberal Party's time,
00:04:42.020 as the real party in my time, as it was before me, is over and done with for the foreseeable future.
00:04:48.100 Yeah, it's really interesting to hear you talk about the Liberal Party in these terms, obviously,
00:04:52.020 being a former Liberal MP yourself, you were a Liberal MP from 1993, which by the way, was four years
00:04:58.180 before I was born. I was born in 1997. So I am the oldest generation of the Zoomers, and very proud
00:05:04.420 to be so. And then you exited politics in 2011, which I was still quite young at the time, just
00:05:09.700 entering high school, just starting to pay attention to what was going on, especially in Ontario, where
00:05:14.980 you had Kathleen Wynne, she created a lot of problems with hydro. That was when I started to pay
00:05:20.580 attention to politics. Actually, the story I always tell is that the Avondale, which in Ontario,
00:05:26.660 is a convenience store, which was essentially the local candy store closest to my house,
00:05:31.380 walking distance from my home, actually closed because it could no longer afford to pay its bills
00:05:36.660 as hydro prices, which is what we have in Ontario, went up. And that was for me, that was really the
00:05:41.860 nail in the coffin. I said, Okay, we got to do something about these Liberals. And that was really
00:05:46.500 the thing that made me pay attention to politics was the local candy store in my neighbourhood closing.
00:05:51.860 But you've obviously, you know, you're you've spoken, you seem to think very little of
00:05:55.540 Justin Jo. Was there ever a point when you did support him?
00:05:58.660 I think at the outset, there was some promise that he could perhaps turn the things around for the
00:06:03.220 party. I had no expectations of the Liberal Party coming back to power. I thought going from third
00:06:07.220 to second would be quite a significant step forward for the party as it began to rebuild. But it was about
00:06:12.900 2015, 2016, when I was working at GasBuddy and doing a lot of my work in the United States that I
00:06:17.780 realised that what was happening in Canada was far more serious than concerns Americans have with energy
00:06:23.780 prices. It was that we had a party that was no longer listening or connected to interests of
00:06:28.580 ordinary Canadians and was prepared to heap on green policies through the so-called net zero programs
00:06:36.740 that now we see are in full bloom. But at a time, it was four or five cents a litre. No one paid a lot
00:06:41.700 of attention to it. I saw this display coming a long time. And what gave me that instruction was that
00:06:46.980 for the longest time in the Liberal Party, I was the consumer critic. I was the fellow who carried consumer
00:06:50.900 issues, not just with energy, but also with food. I did a massive study on the grocery concentration.
00:06:57.140 I went after the Competition Act. And I didn't, there were no holds barred. There was a different
00:07:01.300 parliament where we could actually talk to each other, even though we may not have the same partisan
00:07:04.900 backgrounds. We did have a means of communication. And I was very successful in getting a lot of my
00:07:08.980 points across at the time. What I recognised is that this Liberal Party was more of a cult.
00:07:14.260 It was, the narrative was you could think only a certain way, you could only challenge a certain
00:07:19.060 way. And while the prime minister kept saying, well, my members of parliament are free to do
00:07:22.260 what they want, say that's baloney. He handpicked them so that they wouldn't have different positions
00:07:27.220 or different ideas and what he had put forward. And of course, the discipline has been extraordinarily
00:07:32.580 stringent, a discipline that no longer makes the role of the member of parliament one of being able
00:07:37.460 to represent your constituents. Bottom line, the Liberal Party detached itself from common concerns
00:07:43.860 that people would ordinarily have in favour of things like, you know, politics of diversity, equity,
00:07:51.060 inclusion, ESG, you know, politics that really have nothing to do with the dynamic and the diversity
00:07:59.140 of the country. And I think created a scenario where it was us versus them and created significant social
00:08:04.820 and political divisions of this country, the likes of which I've ever seen, the likes of which your country
00:08:08.260 wasn't able to survive in the past. You've touched on this a little bit already, but I want to ask you,
00:08:13.460 if the Liberal brand is destroyed for a generation, where are those boats going to go?
00:08:19.860 Well, look, they're going for the Conservative Party first and foremost. I think most people are
00:08:23.940 realistic about this and saying we cannot afford to have more social left-wing experimentation. And
00:08:30.740 with that, the green catastrophism and alarmism that goes with it, which is nothing more than just
00:08:36.020 green grit for folks who come out there and espouse their nonsense. We have to do something about the
00:08:41.780 foundations and the charities out there that are giving money to these organizations. We have to
00:08:46.420 look at the fact the federal government gave $2 billion to green municipal funds, something that
00:08:51.460 Paul Martin started way back in my time wasn't meant to, you know, have municipalities start to pick up
00:08:56.500 the green agenda. We have now, I think, a very clear path ahead in which we are going to have to
00:09:01.860 look at Canadians from the perspective of middle-of-the-road consensus building. There's a word you don't hear in
00:09:07.060 politics these days and certainly you don't hear in the Liberal Party trying to find the genius where
00:09:11.620 Canadians are at and have them more included in public policy decisions rather than engineering
00:09:16.180 elections during a so-called pandemic, engineering elections in which you offer to buy people and
00:09:22.660 unfortunately turn a lot of people into parasites, mooches, because the only thing they want is give
00:09:27.140 me some free stuff and I might vote for you. That doesn't work anymore. Not when you have a government
00:09:30.980 that's ran up the the tap which we have a massive multi-trillion dollar deficit, a debt of which
00:09:37.780 we have, you know, nearly 62 billion bucks in deficits. These are things that have alarmed the
00:09:42.660 Liberals of my time. Jean-Cretzel doing everything they could to ensure that the country's financial
00:09:48.580 future looked a lot brighter, including the sustainability of social programs. So I think for the
00:09:52.420 Conservatives, there's an opportunity to get back to the centre. It's sure if they ain't conservative, they can
00:09:56.900 behave a lot like the Liberals were in the 1990s. Obviously last week Chrystia Freeland tendered
00:10:03.140 her resignation, did so in a way that seemed to knife Trudeau in the back. She seemed to be doing
00:10:08.980 her best to preserve her own political career and certainly we're hearing that she has leadership
00:10:14.420 ambitions, that she was intentional in distancing herself from the Prime Minister so that she would not
00:10:19.460 be pulled down with his unpopularity. Obviously last week there was also the Liberal Party of Canada
00:10:24.180 Christmas party and we heard that Chrystia Freeland showed up with more supporters than Trudeau,
00:10:28.340 that the lineup for photos with Chrystia was longer than the lineup for photos of Trudeau.
00:10:33.380 You know Chrystia Freeland to me, she seems really completely tied in with the failings of the Trudeau
00:10:39.060 government. I think it'll be difficult for her to distance herself from Trudeau to Canadians writ large,
00:10:44.660 maybe not the Liberal Party. If she, you know, if she proceeds with intentions to run for the Liberal
00:10:49.380 Party leadership, do you think that she has what it takes to become a Prime Minister of Canada in the
00:10:54.260 future? Definitely not. She's tainted not just with the Trudeau agenda, she went along with it.
00:11:00.180 She ushered other, you know, very capable cabinet ministers out of office, not just cabinet ministers,
00:11:05.220 but also women cabinet ministers. You know, we all know Jody Wilson-Raybould, we know about Jane
00:11:09.460 Philpott. She greased the rails and was very much a part of this, which is what a real problem for this
00:11:15.140 Liberal caucus and its ministers is that they're seen as being part of the reason the party has
00:11:21.140 fallen apart. They gave Trudeau the standing platform on which he could continue his stuff.
00:11:27.700 And so I don't see any of them being successful. I think it'll be an outsider that takes over the
00:11:32.100 Liberal Party. And ultimately, as I said, the Liberal Party may very well be relegated to a position it
00:11:37.780 hasn't been very familiar with, at least in this century, being one of the most successful political
00:11:41.860 organizations in the world up until very recently. It's likely that the Liberal Party will cease to
00:11:48.020 function for a period of time in which the, you know, the totality of the damage has been done,
00:11:52.740 the lack of credibility, the concern about corruption and bad behavior and overspending,
00:11:58.980 as well as ethical breaches left and right by its ministers. I mean, I don't think we understand
00:12:04.500 exactly what's happened yet because the government's been able to keep these all
00:12:07.300 hampered down and frozen. What's going to happen in the new government is that these things will now be
00:12:11.460 allowed to, you know, to the light of day while campaigns to say, yeah, we've already made our
00:12:15.380 decision, let's move on. No, I think this is the extent to which this government has misbehaved,
00:12:19.940 miscalculated the public and taken their role in institutions and abused those roles. I think
00:12:28.100 it's going to leave not only the opportunity for the next few years to shift through the damage that's
00:12:32.580 been done, but also to ensure that that party in its current form, the cult that I believe it is,
00:12:38.020 remains in the penalty box and never seen for quite a few elections away. I won't have to worry
00:12:42.980 about that when I'm 80 years of age and the Liberal Party reconstitutes back to the center of the
00:12:46.740 political spectrum. When you talk about the fact that the Liberal Party will need to rebuild and the
00:12:52.660 party in its current form will be done away with this entirely, one of the issues that I've had,
00:12:57.620 obviously I got my start as a reporter in the mainstream media, I've now moved to independent media,
00:13:01.940 over, you know, me over here at True North, we've got very little access with the Liberal Party,
00:13:08.500 they're not too keen to speak with us, rarely agree to do interviews with us, if at all.
00:13:12.980 If this party does indeed rebuild, as you predict it will, how do you see the opportunities for new
00:13:18.820 media? How can we bridge that gap between new media and the Liberal Party so that we have a working
00:13:23.860 relationship, a functioning, adult, healthy, professional relationship once again? Or I would
00:13:28.420 actually for the first time. Well, let me get out of the business of politics and talk about my own
00:13:33.300 experience with energy. You know, there was a time where what day wouldn't go by where I wasn't doing
00:13:36.900 20 or 30 interviews on energy prices that are important to Canadians. I'm lucky to have five
00:13:41.940 or six now. And that's because mainstream media, the legacy media has completely gone the same
00:13:46.740 direction for no and forgotten the very people that want to watch, listen, or read their work. If it's not
00:13:51.860 relevant to the bottom line for Canadians, chances are you're going to make yourself as irrelevant as the
00:13:58.100 federal Liberal Party is going to be in the next federal election. And as I said, for some time
00:14:01.540 to come. So I use my own experience of saying, you know, here, there's something in terms of energy
00:14:06.340 prices, all the things that we predicted that people thought were very terrible, especially the
00:14:10.020 media said, No, no, we don't. We don't talk about that. Well, you have to talk about inflation being the
00:14:14.820 result of higher energy prices. And when you put a carbon tax and other measures that weaken the
00:14:19.620 Canadian dollar, it adds not only the price of everything we consume in this country, it diminishes the
00:14:24.820 value of the Canadian dollar, which erodes the purchasing power. The fact that many, like
00:14:29.060 basically media, have refused to understand that and think, well, you're not being, you know,
00:14:33.220 you're not being trendy, or not being liberal, you're not being with the times. I mean, shows the
00:14:37.620 extent to which they have divorced themselves from from reality. That's why I think new media is,
00:14:42.980 in fact, going to be the standard media going forward. And those who did not follow this, especially
00:14:46.740 with the government being forced now to say, Hey, we can't spend a billion bucks throwing money or
00:14:51.060 whatever amount at failed journalism, we're going to have to look at a new brand, you're going to
00:14:56.340 sink or swim. And unfortunately, that kind of circumstance, those who've said, well,
00:15:00.100 we can still do the woke agenda that the Prime Minister's cultural identity and political,
00:15:04.580 you know, nonsense, if they believe they can go down that road, good luck,
00:15:08.100 try to get the funding for it. That was a different matter.
00:15:10.820 Well, I certainly hope you are correct in your predictions, a that the Liberal Party brand will
00:15:16.900 need to completely change what we're seeing now the call will be done away with and also
00:15:21.220 that new media will become the standard in the future. Dan, thank you so much for your insight
00:15:25.220 today. Great to be here. Merry Christmas to you and Happy New Year to all your viewers.
00:15:30.020 Thanks so much. That was Dan McTague, a former Liberal MP, giving us his take on what's gone
00:15:35.220 wrong with the Liberal Party, what we can expect to see in the future. Okay, everyone, that wraps it up
00:15:40.900 for the Rachel Parker Show for today. We won't have an episode tomorrow because it is Christmas Day. I hope that
00:15:46.260 you guys will be enjoying your turkey or your ham with family or friends or whoever you want to
00:15:51.620 celebrate with. I hope that you guys have a very Merry Christmas. God bless you all. I will see you
00:15:57.780 just before the end of the year.