Juno News - February 04, 2022


Leaders fail when they lack authenticity

Topics
authenticity problem authenticity challenge
Mentioned
Erin O'Toole Donald Trump Justin Trudeau Barack Obama
True North speaks with Quebec Pastor Carlos Norbal at the freedom convoy Politicians are afraid of the freedom convoy

Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

201.44

Word count

589

Sentence count

51


Summary

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

Aaron O'Toole was a Conservative Party of Canada politician who served as Prime Minister of Canada from 2011-2015. He served as the party's leader from 2015-2019, and is now serving as a professor at the University of Toronto. In this episode, I discuss the reasons why he failed as leader, and how his lack of authenticity led to his downfall.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
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 If I had to summarize the main challenge that Aaron O'Toole's leadership faced and why he
00:00:10.300 ultimately lost the confidence of caucus and it seems a lot of grassroots members is that he
00:00:15.640 suffered from a major authenticity problem. What do I mean by that? Well, when he ran as
00:00:21.320 conservative leader, he said, I'm going to stand up to cancel culture. I'm going to say no to
00:00:25.820 carbon taxes. And then he got into office and he started behaving very differently. A lot of people
00:00:31.820 felt like he went along with at least some forms of cancel culture. He introduced his own form of
00:00:37.340 carbon tax. He also never really said no to lockdowns. He never said, even in the third
00:00:42.980 lockdown, even in the fourth lockdown that Ontario and Quebec went under, maybe we perhaps shouldn't
00:00:47.660 be doing this. And it was suggested to me by a number of people that, well, polls show this and
00:00:52.860 polls show that. And he has to be careful. He has to balance this. He has to balance that. Okay,
00:00:56.300 fine. I get all of that. But maybe you're personally thinking these things aren't good.
00:01:01.220 So why don't you speak out on them? Well, because a lot of politicians say, you know what? I'm not
00:01:06.740 going to lead. I'm going to follow. I'm going to look at the polling numbers. I'm going to try to
00:01:10.580 appease Toronto Star readers who don't live in swing writings. They're not going to vote for me
00:01:14.820 anyway. They're not donors to the party. They don't believe in the same things I believe in, but
00:01:18.980 let's try and play that game. Let's try and create an argument in a way that will appease these
00:01:24.440 individuals. And I think a lot of people, they kind of can see that about a leader and it doesn't
00:01:30.760 inspire confidence. I've always believed that the politicians that win that do best are conviction
00:01:36.640 politicians. I mean, look at the two previous American presidents, Barack Obama, Donald Trump,
00:01:41.940 two different figures. Sure. But I believe they're both conviction politicians. They planted their feet
00:01:46.380 firm. They said what they believed in and they didn't back down. Both of them won. No, Donald
00:01:51.240 Trump didn't win re-election, but still, I think people felt that these were people who stuck behind
00:01:57.220 their principles and were fighting for the things that they believed in. I got to say, Justin Trudeau,
00:02:02.160 I mean, this is a guy, he actually does not really flip-flop. He is not wishy-washy. He goes out there
00:02:07.280 and he just says stuff. And I think that resonates with some people, with the people who vote for him.
00:02:13.380 With Aaron O'Toole, you can tell he was going to change his positions. Who's the real Aaron O'Toole?
00:02:17.920 What does he stand for? That doesn't inspire confidence. It doesn't inspire respect. And
00:02:23.240 clearly it creates problems within your own caucus, among your own party. And that was ultimately,
00:02:29.400 I think, a major challenge. If you want to put all of the challenges with Aaron O'Toole's leadership
00:02:33.060 together, it's that one, the authenticity challenge. And I think those who are considering running for
00:02:38.280 the conservative leadership next, well, they should keep that in mind as well. Because
00:02:42.020 whatever positions they're going to hold, wherever on the big blue tent spectrum their views are going
00:02:47.780 to be, they got to be true to themselves. So they can say, I'm standing firm on my convictions. And I
00:02:53.160 think that will ultimately resonate with a lot of people.