Juno News - April 15, 2024


Former Thatcher adviser predicts Canada’s Conservatives will govern for a long time

Topics
sleepwalking into wokeness
Mentioned
John O'Sullivan Andrew Lawton Show Preston Manning Stephen Harper Margaret Thatcher Scott Morrison Boris Johnson Pierre Poilievre Viktor Orban Tony Abbott Rishi Sunak Ken White Mulroney Wokery Burke Whigs Pope
Conservative plan could lower immigration levels Governor General shills for Liberal ＂online harms＂ regulations

Episode Stats


Length

14 minutes

Words per minute

155.85

Word count

2,304

Sentence count

168

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, Andrew Yang meets with John O Sullivan, former editor of the National Post and founder of the Danube Institute, to discuss the challenges facing Canada's Conservative Party, immigration, and the future of the Conservative Party.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Well, the questions that are facing attendees here at the Canada Strong and Free Networking Conference are mostly of a domestic nature,
00:00:16.160 but occasionally we can look to our friends and colleagues abroad for best practices, things to do, and in many cases, things not to do.
00:00:24.300 I referenced earlier the rather lively discussion between Tony Abbott and Boris Johnson, which was moderated by the always convivial John O'Sullivan, who joins me here today.
00:00:34.740 John, great to see you. Thanks very much for coming on.
00:00:37.220 Very good to see you, Andrew. Nice to be back together again.
00:00:39.820 Now, you're not just some foreign interloper in Canadian politics. You actually have a Canadian connection by way of the National Post.
00:00:46.860 Yes, I lived in Canada for three years, almost four, helping to launch the Post under Conrad, its founder and owner, and under Ken White, who was a brilliant editor.
00:01:06.700 And my publisher now, to give Ken a plug there.
00:01:09.380 I think Ken is the most brilliant editor in North America, and I'm always amazed why he hasn't been lured down to take over the failing enterprises there and give them some vim, you know?
00:01:19.920 Yeah, so you've obviously, by virtue of being involved in the National Post, you've seen actually some of the critical steps in the development of the modern Canadian conservative movement.
00:01:30.080 I mean, Canada, as you're well aware, has obviously taken its cues from the old British Tory tradition, but we also had this Western populist revolutionary party that has really, I think, become the senior partner in this merger with the current conservatives.
00:01:44.680 And I was wondering if you could situate that in a global context, because there seems to be a shift in conservative parties around the world, not even just in the Anglosphere, that is moving towards what the media would call the far-right populist view.
00:01:57.140 But it's a lot more nuanced than that.
00:01:59.340 Well, yes, it's much more nuanced than that.
00:02:02.360 I would say that conservatives throughout the world are now a divided group, divided parties or divided into two different parties.
00:02:13.060 That was the situation of Canadian conservatives back in the, well, I'm trying to think of the dates now, but something like that in the 80s and later.
00:02:21.920 Now, what happened in that case was that two very brilliant entrepreneurs, Preston Manning, who started reform, and Stephen Harper, essentially campaigned against the Brown Mulroney's conservative party.
00:02:40.240 Well, Mulroney had actually very serious achievements to his credit, but he'd lost touch, really, I think, with the conservative rank and file, well, outside Ontario and to the West.
00:02:52.620 So, you know, that led to the complete implosion of the conservative party here, which, by the way, is likely to happen, maybe not quite so dramatically to the British Tories now.
00:03:05.740 And so, looking at the, so to speak, wreckage, Harper and Manning created a party which combined the conservatives of the East with the reformers of the West.
00:03:19.580 But I don't think, I mean, populism is a misleading term, in my view, because it tends to be the view of the left about the democracy of the right.
00:03:31.100 And essentially, what Harper and Manning did was to create a new conservative party that represented the conservative voters of the entire country.
00:03:43.340 And that's not a majority party, but it is now, in the last two elections, it gets most votes, more votes than any other single party.
00:03:54.420 And it is plainly destined, I think, only a huge traffic accident can prevent the conservatives winning the next election.
00:04:04.020 And that means that they will have been in power a significant part of this new century.
00:04:08.460 And I think that they are a serious governing party, probably going to be the governing, the main governing party for some time to come.
00:04:19.020 And I think that the conservatives in the rest of the world have got to look at them and say, how did this happen?
00:04:25.200 Because we need to do the same thing.
00:04:27.500 There are interesting dilemmas in Canada, which are really across the Western world in terms of population.
00:04:33.540 We have in Canada a dismally low birth rate.
00:04:35.540 I know in Hungary, where your Danube Institute is headquartered, this has been an issue that has been really front and centre for the government there.
00:04:43.000 But it's not one we hear Western conservative leaders talking about.
00:04:47.740 I've never heard Pierre Polyev talk about birth rate.
00:04:49.780 I've certainly never heard Rishi Sunak or Scott Morrison or any of these guys talk about it.
00:04:54.820 So what can they learn from Orban's party, or even in general, some leaders that have taken up this question?
00:05:01.900 Well, you say that you haven't heard them talk about the birth rate, but you have heard them talk about immigration.
00:05:09.180 Yes, yes.
00:05:09.840 And those two issues are closely related.
00:05:12.960 If you don't have, if you don't produce your own population, then other people are going to come in to fill the gap.
00:05:20.140 And I think that that's something which obviously has been most clearly realized by Viktor Orban, but is also now being seen by British conservatives looking at the prospective defeat and saying to themselves,
00:05:34.000 look, we've made a mistake in trying to replace our own people who are more and more likely to be not working, to be receiving different forms of social and medical benefit and retiring early.
00:05:52.140 One of the themes of British life at the moment is where are our own people?
00:05:56.700 Where do they go?
00:05:57.460 They don't come to work anymore.
00:05:58.880 Well, that's an exaggeration, but there's obviously a trend there.
00:06:03.680 So what I think now is happening is serious conservatives are saying, for some years now, we've been quite complacent about treating our own workers, offering them low wages.
00:06:19.120 If they didn't take those low wages, we'd bring in cheap labor to pay, to do the work. 0.98
00:06:26.200 And meanwhile, we would pay them through the welfare system one way or another to stay at home.
00:06:32.660 That's not a sensible way to run a country.
00:06:35.960 And that's obviously that's going to be the number one problem to face any government, but particularly the conservative party in opposition.
00:06:47.300 And remember, they're likely now to face another competitor on the right in the form of the Reform Party, the equivalent of the Canadian reformers.
00:06:56.780 And that's going to make right-wing politics much livelier, much more competitive.
00:07:03.220 And with competition, they're going to have to pay attention to their markets, in other words, the people who vote for them.
00:07:10.320 And I think they're going to have to turn to the issues that reform is preaching.
00:07:16.080 And the conservative party cannot really write those voters off.
00:07:20.080 I wanted to, on the note of the UK Tories, help see if you could help demystify this, because every now and then people will send me something and say, oh, you won't believe what the UK Conservatives are doing.
00:07:29.860 And usually I'd say, yes, I can believe it either way.
00:07:32.240 But they've been very strong in some ways on resisting some of the transgender wokeness and on migration. 0.99
00:07:39.680 Every now and then they say the right thing and do the right thing.
00:07:42.260 It never seems to last.
00:07:43.140 But then on the other hand, this is a party that went all in on the very worst aspects of the COVID era.
00:07:48.300 It's a party that has gone all in on the very worst aspects of the climate discussion.
00:07:53.040 And I'm wondering if you could explain this, how they can be so strong on some issues and so terrible on others.
00:07:59.500 Well, I...
00:08:00.800 Maybe you reject the premise that they're not strong in any of them, which is an option.
00:08:04.600 No, I would say that the problem is, in politics, when new ideas come forward,
00:08:11.380 they often come in a deceptive guise as simply reasonable, reasonable attempts to deal with social problems.
00:08:20.240 For example, the transgender issue is a very serious issue.
00:08:24.740 And at first, if you don't really look into it, anybody who said, look, these poor kids,
00:08:30.120 they have, their minds are in a mess because they think they're in the wrong body.
00:08:38.060 Well, we have to really hand them over to the doctors and let them sort their way out to a mental health.
00:08:46.060 And one way forward is to carry out, give them drugs and so on.
00:08:51.660 I think most people look upon this as a policy of kindness.
00:08:57.100 That's the problem.
00:08:58.500 The fact is, it is not kind.
00:09:01.260 It is creating circumstances in which we encourage children to take actions in terms...
00:09:08.340 Or to accept actions by doctors in terms of drugs or in terms of surgery
00:09:13.300 that are going to completely alter the rest of their life in ways that 5, 10, 15, 18-year-olds cannot conceivably understand.
00:09:27.240 And that realization did not come quickly.
00:09:32.460 And it hasn't come to everyone on the right or the left, of course, to everyone still.
00:09:39.840 But we are now realizing that this was a mistaken policy.
00:09:45.660 And I think that's what's going to happen now is the Conservative Party is, in a way that,
00:09:51.080 much more united way than before, is going to row back from that policy
00:09:55.060 and look for ways of stabilizing and improving the mental health of these kids
00:10:00.500 rather than encouraging a mass mania that is going to damage them.
00:10:04.840 And I understand you actually talk about woke...
00:10:07.700 Well, you take on wokeness head-on in your latest book, do you not? 0.79
00:10:11.260 Yes, I think I do.
00:10:13.520 But taking wokeness head-on is really not a question so much of attacking it 0.98
00:10:17.860 as of trying to ascertain what it is and why it's a mistake.
00:10:23.940 I mean, there are so many different aspects.
00:10:25.820 The identity crisis, one, nobody expected that when the identity became a subject of political interest
00:10:35.380 that it would end up with political parties attempting to deny that there was such a thing as a woman 0.98
00:10:43.000 or there was a clear distinction between a man and a woman
00:10:46.360 or saying that some women in the Labour Party who believed that a woman was an adult human female.
00:10:54.080 Just imagine when you were advising Margaret Thatcher, having to, you know, sit her down and say,
00:10:58.220 now, you know, Prime Minister, you have to come up with a position on what a woman is. 1.00
00:11:02.640 Just that would have been such a foreign laughable, that would have been a British telly sketch back then. 1.00
00:11:07.380 Well, it could have been exactly that.
00:11:08.340 It might have actually been at the time.
00:11:09.540 I mean, it's a great pity that, yes, Prime Minister didn't, in fact, include that topic.
00:11:14.480 I don't think it did.
00:11:15.740 And I'd like to see a version in which it did.
00:11:18.660 But, yes, common sense is obviously generally a guide to policy most of the time.
00:11:30.200 But every now and then political manias occur.
00:11:32.900 And, indeed, in a way, my own view is that socialism, left socialism, is a kind of political mania.
00:11:40.880 And we're seeing that in British politics today and, indeed, in American politics.
00:11:47.040 When you have seen the actual consequences in practical life of socialism and communism,
00:11:55.260 nobody in 1990 thought it would be a good idea to continue with communism.
00:12:03.980 In the Soviet Union, you couldn't find a communist except in the party, and they were doing well out of it.
00:12:09.780 So, effectively, sometimes, and a very interesting example,
00:12:16.220 when Burke originally denounced what was happening in the French Revolution,
00:12:21.180 most of his fellow conservatives, Whigs and so on, they were, didn't agree with him.
00:12:27.720 It was much too excessive, exaggerated.
00:12:31.320 He was, he was not demented exactly, but he was taking things much too seriously.
00:12:37.440 A couple of years later, when heads started being chopped off by the guillotine,
00:12:43.500 they came round to seeing that he had realised from the very earliest stages where this kind of thing led.
00:12:52.680 And, essentially, that's a very common trend of events in politics.
00:12:58.420 Wokery is now understood to be something that is dangerous.
00:13:03.040 It has many, it's a hydra. 0.81
00:13:05.480 It's a beast with many dangerous heads. 0.98
00:13:10.380 But, obviously, one of them, transgenderism, is now coming under attack in a serious way 0.98
00:13:16.940 from both doctors, on the one hand, and also, most recently, from the Pope.
00:13:23.620 And we don't think of the Pope as someone who rages on about this kind of thing.
00:13:28.360 No, and to the contrary, you're, my favourite book of yours from nearly two decades ago,
00:13:32.720 The President, The Pope, and The Prime Minister, was of a pivotal time in history
00:13:36.740 when the Pope was part of this force-vanquishing communism.
00:13:39.400 And the current Pope could learn, perhaps he should read that book and see what he could be doing.
00:13:43.960 Well, I look forward to reading the new book.
00:13:46.160 John O'Sullivan from the Danube Institute, wonderful to have you on.
00:13:48.920 Thank you so much.
00:13:49.480 Very nice to be here.
00:13:50.340 Thank you, John.
00:13:50.820 All the best, Andrew.
00:13:51.060 Yeah, really good to see you as well.
00:13:52.720 Oh, let me give you the book.
00:13:53.780 Oh, oh, you brought, you brought a prop.
00:13:55.560 Okay.
00:13:56.120 There it is.
00:13:56.620 Sleepwalking into wokeness, how we got there.
00:14:00.400 Well, hopefully through that, we can learn to get out.
00:14:02.420 Thank you very much, John.
00:14:03.740 Always good to talk to you.
00:14:04.440 Wait, is this signed, by the way?
00:14:05.960 No, but it will be.
00:14:06.680 Okay, it will be.
00:14:07.360 All right, I'll give that back to you for now, and I'll pick it up after the show.
00:14:10.240 Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:14:12.620 Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.
00:14:18.060 Thanks for listening.
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