Juno News - March 07, 2022


Preston Manningļ¼š Trucker Convoy was a legitimate expression of concern


Episode Stats

Length

31 minutes

Words per Minute

173.29413

Word Count

5,462

Sentence Count

252

Misogynist Sentences

4

Hate Speech Sentences

3


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.240 In today's political lexicon, populism is now synonymous with Donald Trump,
00:00:04.880 with Brexit, with right-wing politics, and with an undesirable rebellion against stable
00:00:10.080 political institutions. But is populism always a bad thing? My guest today rejects this basic
00:00:15.680 premise and has been working his entire political career to try to understand and harness the
00:00:20.640 potential good side of populist movements here in Canada. I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The
00:00:25.280 Candice Malcolm Show. Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for tuning in today. It's a pleasure and
00:00:33.760 honor today to be joined by Mr. Preston Manning. Preston Manning is one of the most prominent
00:00:39.120 conservative politicians and political leaders in Canadian history and has a thorough understanding
00:00:44.720 of the rise of populism in Canada and around the world. He's often called the father of modern-day
00:00:50.480 Canadian conservatism. Preston was a founder and the only leader of the Reform Party of Canada,
00:00:55.440 which became the Canadian Alliance Party, which eventually merged with the progressive
00:00:58.720 conservative parties to form the Conservative Party of Canada, which was led by Stephen Harper
00:01:04.080 and was held government for nearly a decade. Although no longer a politician, Preston remains a prominent
00:01:09.920 voice in Canadian politics and is in promoting Western Canadian interests. In 2005, Preston created the
00:01:17.440 Canada Strong and Free Network. Well, it was called the Manning Centre before and now it's called the
00:01:21.200 Canada Strong and Free Network. The group has helped shape national conversations around conservatism,
00:01:26.720 influence government policies and helped create a university program at Carleton University, the first
00:01:31.680 program aimed at political management. So Preston, thank you so much for joining us. It's an honor to
00:01:36.320 speak to you today. Preston Manning Well, thank you very much. It's great.
00:01:40.480 Okay, well, I want to I want to first start off by talking a little bit about just what just happened,
00:01:45.920 what just happened in our country with the trucker convoy, the sort of political uprising against the
00:01:50.720 Trudeau government, and how was handled by both Justin Trudeau, his government, as well as the media
00:01:56.160 here in Canada. I think the audience knows my position on this issue thoroughly. But I'm wondering
00:02:01.600 what what what is your take? How do you think it folded out? How do you think it could have been
00:02:05.440 handled differently by the politicians and the media in this country?
00:02:08.080 Well, I think I know some truckers, independent truckers. Our family has a small ranching operation.
00:02:15.920 We use truckers to take cattle to community pastures and to processing plants. But I felt this
00:02:24.240 truckers conflict was a legitimate expression of concern by people who were affected by the vaccine
00:02:31.760 mandates. In their case, it put some 15,000 of them out of work. And I feel it was a legitimate
00:02:37.760 bottom-up political protest. It had these populist dimensions. And the sad thing was the way the
00:02:44.000 federal government responded to it. They wouldn't even meet with these people. And the prime minister
00:02:51.840 immediately characterized them as extremists and that this was financed or originated in the United
00:03:00.400 States, which is completely false. So I think it was a legitimate expression of political concern by
00:03:07.680 a legitimate group of people and that the Ottawa government responded inappropriately.
00:03:13.520 Well, I mean, just beyond that, if it was a legitimate and peaceful movement, a group of people
00:03:20.560 who just wanted their demands to be heard, and the response wasn't just to dismiss them, smear them,
00:03:26.880 refuse to meet with them, but actually use an emergency act that had never been invoked before,
00:03:32.800 was created in 1988 with the desired impact of use only during severe national emergencies and
00:03:40.800 potentially war. What kind of precedent does it set as a government who was so unwilling to talk to
00:03:46.480 a group of people that he would take such drastic action against them?
00:03:50.800 Yeah. Well, I think it was an enormous overreaction. And the question it raises is the question you're
00:03:57.520 raising if the Trudeau government would overreact to legitimate protests like that by invoking the
00:04:05.040 Emergency Act, on what other occasions would they do the same thing? And I feel that the justification for
00:04:13.040 invoking the Emergency Act was never really proven by the government. They very hastily retreated from it.
00:04:19.280 But again, it's just an extreme overreaction and a misunderstanding or deliberate misunderstanding of what
00:04:26.160 these people were trying to do and what they're trying to accomplish.
00:04:29.120 One of the things that was striking to me about the people who were behind the trucker convoy, the people
00:04:34.560 who characterized the protests in Ottawa, was sort of the difference between them and the normal people,
00:04:40.160 the normal type of people you see in Canadian political life, the normal kind of people that you see protesting. It's usually
00:04:45.280 these sort of aggrieved left-wing people who protest, who go out and gather on Parliament Hill and occupy.
00:04:52.000 The whole Occupy movement came from Occupy Wall Street, which was an anti-capitalist left-wing movement.
00:04:59.600 What do you think about the idea that many of these truckers were sort of apolitical or are not necessarily
00:05:05.840 politically engaged? And the action of them coming and becoming political, coming to Ottawa,
00:05:14.160 was met with such scorn and name-calling. How do you think that'll impact those individuals or the
00:05:20.880 individuals who supported them?
00:05:22.000 I think it shows to Canadians the contempt that the Ottawa elites have for just ordinary folks
00:05:29.680 and the fear that they seem to have of them. And then the inconsistencies when left-wing protesters
00:05:37.680 shut down rail lines that carry 20% of Canada's exports to Asia over them, that the government
00:05:44.720 almost sided with the protesters and didn't regard this as an emergency. But somebody shuts down the
00:05:52.240 bridge at Windsor and this is a national catastrophe calling for the invoking of the Emergency Act, the
00:05:58.160 inconsistency in that response, in addition to its overhandedness and inappropriateness.
00:06:05.280 I think all of this, the net effect of it, is to reduce the confidence of Canadians increasingly in
00:06:10.560 the Trudeau administration. This is just one of a number of things, but it adds to the list. It adds to the list.
00:06:18.000 What do you think of the sort of class divide that was on display? I know that many people in government
00:06:23.600 and media have dismissed this idea that what we saw was a sort of working-class uprising that was
00:06:29.200 dismissed and disregarded by a group of elites in Ottawa, but you can't help but notice the sort of
00:06:35.760 the idea that there's a New York Times op-ed that put it really well and it sort of talked about the
00:06:40.400 not necessarily class divide, but the difference between people who live their life virtually,
00:06:45.120 whose jobs that can be done remotely, can be done on a computer. COVID didn't really have a huge,
00:06:51.600 huge impact on them versus people who lived in the practical world. So they had virtuals versus
00:06:56.880 practicals. People who lived in the practical world are the ones that own small businesses,
00:07:00.960 that own restaurants, that drive trucks, that work at the frontline workers. The people who've
00:07:04.880 been harmed disproportionately by COVID were many of the sort of loudest voices praising and pushing
00:07:13.360 the trucker convoy because they've gone out to the real world and lived in COVID and they're ready to
00:07:18.160 move on. Whereas the people who are kind of sheltered behind their screens haven't had to have the same
00:07:23.120 interaction and many of them are legitimately and reasonably perhaps afraid to go back out into
00:07:28.880 the world. And so you kind of have these two different camps of people that are very much
00:07:32.960 have different interests and perhaps it's hard for them to understand what it's like to be on the
00:07:37.280 other side, but certainly the sort of virtual side of the elites disregarding the working class or the
00:07:44.160 practicals was really quite stark. Did you notice a sort of class element to these products?
00:07:50.560 I don't think the establishment even understands how its messaging was impacting or being received
00:08:01.040 or even being considered relevant by those people. I mentioned the ranching operation. You have guys that
00:08:09.680 are looking after cattle sitting in a mobile home on a wintering corridor that I know of watching this
00:08:17.200 nice lady on TV in a warm studio in Edmonton or Ottawa telling them to stay home and be safe.
00:08:24.960 These guys start to laugh. If we stay in here those cattle won't get fed. You know our job by city
00:08:33.360 standards is never considered safe. So just a complete lack of resonance of that message with
00:08:42.080 people that were in those situations. And this is true for thousands and thousands of workers,
00:08:47.520 particularly in the resource sectors that are out there doing something, whether it's agriculture or
00:08:52.560 energy or mining or forestry or the fishery. You take Aboriginal people. I mean I think the mining sector in
00:08:59.680 BC is the largest single employer of Aboriginal people, but they're out there doing things. They
00:09:05.760 can't stay home and be safe the way this message is coming to them from the health authorities. So that
00:09:13.680 lack of resonance between the source of the message and the receiver is part of the root of this
00:09:20.880 misunderstanding I think over the whole COVID crisis. That's such a good point. I want to touch on
00:09:27.360 populism because I know this is an area that you've talked about and worked on a long time. I
00:09:30.640 listened to your podcast with Jordan Peterson where you talked about sort of positive populism. I hope
00:09:35.360 you can sort of help us understand because usually it's used as a negative word to describe people who
00:09:40.160 are trying to sort of undermine the political stability. But you see a different side of populism,
00:09:45.680 so I'm hoping you can sort of talk a little bit about what populism means. It's so unfortunate that
00:09:50.480 populism is misunderstood by Canadians and I've argued and I think I can prove it that the Western
00:09:57.600 Canada has had more experience with populist movements, populist parties and populist governments
00:10:04.240 than virtually any other part of North America. And while populism has its wild and woolly side,
00:10:12.480 our Canadian experience with it, let's say in the 20th century, has been relatively positive.
00:10:19.920 And just to give a few examples, the first woman that got elected to the Parliament of Canada,
00:10:26.160 how did she get there? Through what movement? She didn't get there through the Liberals or the
00:10:30.880 Conservatives in that day. The Liberals did everything in their power to knock her out of that
00:10:34.800 parliament and eventually they did. She came up through the old progressive movement, which is
00:10:39.520 basically a farmers movement, which was a populist bottom-up party. The so-called Famous Five,
00:10:45.600 the women that got women elected or recognized as persons in Canadian law. All five of them were
00:10:52.400 populists, two or three of them were elected as populists to the Alberta legislature. So there's a
00:10:59.200 populism can accomplish some pretty positive things, whether you agree with Canadian Medicare or not.
00:11:05.360 That came out of Saskatchewan through the CCF, which was a bottom-up populist party, particularly at that time.
00:11:16.240 It was the champion of that particular social reform. The constitutional change that got
00:11:24.480 natural resources, finally the ownership of natural resources recognized in terms of the provinces,
00:11:32.160 particularly the Western provinces, that that was achieved by farmers' governments. The UFA in Alberta,
00:11:38.080 a small group of progressives in the federal parliament. So you can list off these positive
00:11:43.760 accomplishments by populist movements and populist government. Now it doesn't mean they don't have a
00:11:51.040 wild and woolly side. Whether they end up making that positive contribution or whether they turn
00:11:58.720 negative very much depends on the leadership and it depends on the reaction of the establishment.
00:12:04.800 Most of these populist parties and governments are a reaction to what was there before. Trump is the
00:12:10.640 legacy of Obama. Doug Ford is the legacy of Catherine Ford in Ontario. So I argue there's a positive side
00:12:19.280 if they're properly led and properly understood. Well, so it's interesting now because you sort of see
00:12:26.000 different camps in the Conservative Party right now. Erin O'Toole stepped down and without a certain
00:12:31.760 leader, there are sort of different elements of the party popping up. What would your advice be
00:12:36.480 to the Conservative Party and anyone looking to run it on how best to connect with the grassroots, how to
00:12:42.960 utilize the sort of success and the growth of the truck convoy in helping to sort of steer the party
00:12:51.520 in more of a positive populist way that really connects with voters, connects with the grassroots,
00:12:56.800 understands their concerns, and can relay those messages to Ottawa without the sort of effect of
00:13:02.240 being in Ottawa for too long, which is that you start to sound more like the establishment and less
00:13:05.760 like the people who sent you there. Well, I think you use the right word when you say connect. I think the first
00:13:10.480 step is to connect with them. And the first step to connecting with people is just to listen to them,
00:13:15.600 just to listen to them. And I use the analogy, and I think you've heard me on this before, of
00:13:24.800 in the oil patch there's such a thing as a wildcat well that's drilled into a formation where you don't
00:13:30.320 know what's down below. And then there's such a thing as a road well that drills into a formation where
00:13:36.000 there's an enormous amount of oil or gas under pressure. And it can be very dangerous. You can
00:13:40.320 blow the drilling platform off the wellhead, it can catch fire, it can be enormously dangerous. But
00:13:48.000 one of the ways of bringing a road well under control is you drill in a relief well from the side.
00:13:54.720 And the angle has to be right. If it's too shallow, it won't take off enough pressure. If it's too deep,
00:14:00.160 it can turn into a road well. But if it's just right, it can take off enough pressure that valves
00:14:06.080 can be installed and all that valuable energy can be harnessed to useful purposes. But the important
00:14:12.400 thing there is that that relief well has to connect with that whatever is underneath that rogue well.
00:14:18.240 You have to identify with whatever is causing all this energy and all this activity. And that's the first
00:14:26.400 step. And in a sense, that's what reform was in the 1980s. There was a strong anti-federal government,
00:14:35.280 anti-federal party atmosphere in Western Canada. It produced separatist movements,
00:14:40.640 separatist party elected a member to the Alberta legislature. And what reform did was drill in that
00:14:46.800 relief well from the side. And so we had to identify with what was making those people mad. We said,
00:14:50.960 yeah, you got a right to be mad. And we're mad too. But instead of blowing the whole thing up,
00:14:56.000 how about doing this, this and this? You know, Senate reform, balance the budget,
00:15:01.040 regional impact assessments, et cetera, et cetera. And I think that's the challenge for
00:15:06.080 as there's populism developing today. I think it's going to be very interesting whether this
00:15:11.440 freedom convoy morphs into a broader common sense movement of some kind. But the challenge for the
00:15:18.080 political leadership, conservative and others will be to identify with the root causes of it and
00:15:24.240 and then propose better alternatives, perhaps in how to achieve the objectives.
00:15:30.800 One of the things that I see as sort of a clash within conservatism, within the conservative movement,
00:15:36.880 is that conservatives by nature, you know, the reason that they're conservatives is because they want to
00:15:42.160 conserve something. So they tend to be patriotic and supportive of our institutions and our networks
00:15:49.760 that have created this sort of very stable, prosperous society. But at the same time in Canada,
00:15:55.120 the institutions that we have are also built and crafted around sort of big L liberalism in many ways,
00:16:02.480 Preston. And a lot of the institutions are simply not holding up to scrutiny under the pressures of
00:16:08.400 COVID. The reality, for instance, of the media landscape. One of the things that was just so,
00:16:14.400 I observed it over the entire period of COVID, but during the protest, just so blatantly obvious how
00:16:19.920 corrupted and how focused on a narrative and not willing to look outside and not willing to paint an
00:16:26.720 objective picture to Canadians. You know, there's so many examples, but to an almost partisan sense,
00:16:34.560 the media is corrupted. How do you think that this relationship between protecting institutions
00:16:42.640 and a need to identify and remove corrupted institutions or institutions that are no longer
00:16:49.760 serving their good, how do you think that conservatives can kind of approach and fix this issue?
00:16:57.280 You got to make the argument, and it's not made much in the public arena, that it's possible to both
00:17:01.760 conserve an institution and to change it for the better at the same time, that conservation and
00:17:08.480 change are not mutually exclusive. In fact, you could argue that they almost have to go together.
00:17:14.720 Edmund Burke argued this, that, you know, he was all for conserving certain things, but he advocated
00:17:21.840 certain things had to change in order to conserve them. And I think that argument needs to be
00:17:26.320 refined. One of my own illustrations, I used to do community development work up in north central
00:17:32.720 Alberta, and there was a sign on an old road away back in the bush, and it was on a big post and had
00:17:41.120 a huge crossbar on it, it had one word on it, Saw Ridge, and an arrow pointing west. And it was supposed
00:17:48.880 to tell you how to get to the town of Saw Ridge. The only problem with it was if you followed that sign,
00:17:53.360 you'd never get to Saw Ridge. Well, why was that? The sign never changed. The sign always said the
00:17:58.480 same thing, it always pointed in the same direction, it was as conservative as you can get. But
00:18:04.240 during the years back, there was a flood that the town of Saw Ridge had to move its location,
00:18:10.480 it changed its name to the town of Slave Lake. The roads to get there had been changed half a dozen times.
00:18:15.760 So the very fact that the sign didn't change was a source of error rather than truth. And I think
00:18:26.880 there's a lesson in that, that you've got to have signposts and you've got to have them firm
00:18:31.840 in the ground and everything else. But sometimes what's on them has to change in order to get to the
00:18:36.720 original objective. And I think that's true whether you're talking about how to conserve democracy or
00:18:42.160 a viable private sector in the economy. And if conservatives could refine that, we want to conserve,
00:18:49.120 here's what we want to conserve, but here's the changes we want to make in order. I think people
00:18:52.960 could understand it. I think they could understand that. And just going back to the point you made
00:18:57.360 earlier about how when the Reform Party came around as sort of a relief valve for those who
00:19:01.520 were sort of fed up with the status quo, the result was very real and substantive change. I mean,
00:19:07.840 talking about some of the things that you mentioned, what the conservatives stood for,
00:19:10.880 was really sort of an overhaul of some of the institutional decay that was happening.
00:19:16.000 Do you think we're at a time now, you know, this was 30, 40 years after the birth of the reform
00:19:21.040 movement, we're ready for another set of drastic reforms to our political system to save it?
00:19:27.520 I think you have to do this every so often. When the Reform Party was put together,
00:19:31.520 the lawyer that put this constitution together was a fellow by the name of Bob Muir, a real fine
00:19:36.320 lawyer in Calgary. And when we were talking about it, I said, Bob, I want a clause in a sunset clause
00:19:44.080 in the constitution of this party. Well, he says, well, what do you mean? I want it to come to an end
00:19:49.280 in 10 years. If the party members decide to just renew it the way it is, they can. But I want a sunset
00:19:55.920 clause in it. And by golly, we had one in there. And it was to be 10 years that the party would cease to
00:20:03.440 exist. And that's the members re-instituted it and recreate it, either in its original form or
00:20:08.560 something else. And by golly, by 1997, it was clear that reform had gone about as far as we could go
00:20:15.600 with it. And we needed this bigger, broader thing. We wanted to form an alliance with the
00:20:20.640 particular provincial conservatives in Alberta, Manitoba, and Mike Harris in Ontario. And that's what
00:20:26.720 gave the opportunity to create the Canadian Alliance, which then morphed into the Conservative
00:20:34.400 Party of Canada. So you don't want to do this every day. You don't want to rethink your fundamental
00:20:40.640 principles or organizations every day. I mean, political parties have to have some continuity
00:20:45.680 and stability. But I think periodically, and particularly in the age in which we live, when
00:20:49.760 change is so fast, everything else is changing, that there should be a recognition. Every so often,
00:20:54.480 we've got to make some fundamental changes in order to be relevant or to be able to address the
00:21:00.240 problems that are confronting the country. The federal Liberals to do this is going to end up
00:21:05.040 being their Achilles, Achilles heel. And in a way, I think one of the consequences of this post,
00:21:12.880 of this COVID thing is there's going to have to be changes in leadership. There's rumblings within the
00:21:18.080 federal Liberals already that Trudeau has to go, people looking for Mark Carney or somebody else.
00:21:22.480 There's rumbles within the NDP. You've got the NDP members that come from writings where they've
00:21:28.560 got private sector union members who've lost their jobs and their incomes. And these guys are starting
00:21:33.440 to resent the support of the public sector unions. There's other people in the NDP that support them,
00:21:39.920 who were not only protected throughout this whole thing, some of them got wage increases. So you've got
00:21:44.880 internal forces that are going to force the NDP to decide where it's going to go. So you've got
00:21:50.160 internal forces for leadership changes within the Liberals, within the NDP. It's already starting.
00:21:55.200 In this sense, the Conservative Party of Canada is ahead of the others. And that's one of the
00:22:00.560 consequences of this turmoil that's been created by the COVID crisis.
00:22:06.400 Okay. Well, let's shift and talk a little bit about COVID because when you look at the trucker convoy,
00:22:11.600 even though sure they got cleared out with excessive force by police, but some of the things that they
00:22:16.080 were advocating for, they started to see real impact almost immediately, Preston. Quebec reversed its
00:22:22.800 vaccine mandate tax, vaccine tax, anti-vax tax. If you weren't vaccinated, you were going to get an extra
00:22:27.840 tax. They reversed that almost immediately. Several of the provinces have since lifted most of their
00:22:33.280 restrictions. We have seen that the major points of the truckers were advocating for,
00:22:40.080 those goals were accomplished. So let's talk a little bit about the post-COVID agenda. What should
00:22:46.080 it look like in Canada and how can we get there?
00:22:48.000 Well, I think one way to come at the agenda is to look at what has the COVID crisis, what weaknesses
00:22:57.120 has it revealed in our systems that are going to have to be addressed. And one of them is just
00:23:05.280 the whole way the thing was managed. So I think one of the things on the post-COVID agenda is going to
00:23:09.600 be an investigation into it. It probably won't be done by this government, but if it's the government,
00:23:15.440 the federal government's replaced, I think that would be one of the first things any new government
00:23:19.360 would do. It'll appoint a commission of some sort to get at what went wrong in the management of the
00:23:25.680 crisis. And then what was another weakness that was revealed? What was the weakness of the Canadian
00:23:30.560 healthcare system? That the Canadian Medicare is 60 years old and was simply incapable of meeting the
00:23:38.880 surge in demand that the COVID crisis feels. So what are we going to do about that? What changes,
00:23:44.400 healthcare changes, are we going to make? And we have to look at other countries. The countries that had
00:23:48.240 mixed systems, public and private systems, were able to cope with the surge in demand better than
00:23:55.280 our system. So that's going to be another, I think, another missing on the agenda for the post-COVID period
00:24:04.640 will be that sort of healthcare reform thing. And then a third thing will be what has to be done
00:24:11.760 to better protect the rights and freedoms that people thought were guaranteed by the Constitution.
00:24:17.680 It was clear that the government could override those. There were literally millions of violations of
00:24:22.160 the so-called sacred rights in the Constitution. And so what's going to be done to address that?
00:24:32.480 I think one of the areas you're going to get into there, and you're familiar with it, there's a test
00:24:37.520 called the Oaks Test. It comes out of a legal case in 1986 where the Supreme Court of Canada said if
00:24:44.480 you're going to limit the rights and freedoms that are guaranteed in the Constitution, you have, the government
00:24:50.560 has to demonstrate, it's the government that has to demonstrate it, has to demonstrate that the
00:24:54.640 benefits of the limitation outweigh the negative impacts. Now that was never done in this case.
00:25:02.480 If you want to show that your limitation outweighs the negative impacts, for one thing you've got to
00:25:08.000 measure the impacts or at least try to estimate. There was never any impact assessment made on the
00:25:14.080 health protection measures as to what their impact would be on the health system itself,
00:25:18.160 let alone on the civil liberties of Canadians. And there was never any economic impact assessment
00:25:24.640 done on those health protection measures. And so I think that's something that's going to have to be
00:25:30.560 written into law. You want to limit those rights in the Constitution, you've got to show that the
00:25:35.280 impacts are, that the benefits outweigh the impact, and you've got to make an assessment of the impact,
00:25:42.080 or else the courts will declare your, whatever your health protection measure is, your protection
00:25:46.560 measure is as unconstitutional. So there's, I see this list, the investigation into what went wrong
00:25:53.760 and what went right with respect to the management, what has to be done with the healthcare system,
00:25:59.040 because this crisis proved it to be inadequate. What are the additions to the, what has to be done to
00:26:06.000 strengthen the limits, the protection of rights and freedoms, because obviously the, whatever we had
00:26:11.600 before wasn't sufficient. And I can see a list of about eight things being not part of the, the post
00:26:19.920 COVID agenda that somebody is going to have to get after. And one of them is even that thing you
00:26:24.960 mentioned before is leadership changes, what changes have to be made in the leadership of the federal
00:26:29.520 political parties in order to make some progress on that agenda.
00:26:33.280 Amy Quinton One of the things, I mean, we've been talking about populism and the sort of rise of
00:26:37.760 the anti COVID mandates and practices, you know, that we saw with the charter convoy. One of the
00:26:44.240 things I was, I was talking on a panel earlier with John Williamson, who's an MP out in New Brunswick.
00:26:49.680 And, you know, I hear a lot of people criticizing the conservatives for not standing up against these
00:26:55.040 abuses against our charter, for not standing up and talking about the healthcare issues. And, and he
00:27:00.160 mentioned that, you know, at the time during the kind of height of COVID and for the last two years,
00:27:05.360 public opinion has not really been on the side of freedom. People were afraid, people were very
00:27:12.640 worried. They wanted, they wanted lockdowns, they wanted mandates, they wanted, you know, people who,
00:27:19.920 the example that John used, were that people who refuse to get vaccinated, they shouldn't just
00:27:24.720 lose their job and their pension and their EI, they should also get removed from our healthcare
00:27:29.600 system and not be an NB like denied access, if they needed healthcare. And I saw a lot of that
00:27:35.120 sentiment in the media as well. There's a infamous Toronto Star front page, it said, let them die,
00:27:40.560 I hope, I hope unvaccinated people die. And that was sort of the, the narrative that we're hearing from
00:27:46.800 media and the sentiment. And I personally noticed a lot of sort of adversarial combativeness among
00:27:53.840 Canadians that frankly struck me as un-Canadian people fighting on social media, fighting with
00:27:58.720 their families, disinviting people to Christmas dinner. What could be done about the sort of,
00:28:07.360 I don't even know how to describe it, like a totalitarian impulse of people when it came to an
00:28:12.320 emergency to just use every law possible. And how can we mend these, you know, it's a divided country
00:28:19.520 right now. How can we start to mend some of these divides that have been really, really evident
00:28:25.040 throughout the pandemic? Well, I think there's a couple of things that can be done. One is that
00:28:29.760 there has to be a discussion on the appropriate, appropriateness of these measures. And this business
00:28:34.240 of the cancel culture, we can't talk about that, because it's already been decided, whatever, I think
00:28:38.880 that has to be very strainlessly resisted. And the way everyone resists is by insisting that it be talked
00:28:44.160 about whether it's in your own family or in your own circle or in your own company or in your own
00:28:48.400 community. The second is to take some of these polls with a grain of salt, because a lot depends
00:28:54.000 on how you ask the question. If when at the height of the controversy over the truckers, the only
00:29:02.720 question you ask is should the emergency act be invoked in order to make these people adhere to the
00:29:10.000 vaccine mandates. And all you've heard is the propaganda from the government when it introduced
00:29:14.320 this. It's not surprising that 50% of Canadians would say, yeah, I guess that's what you should do.
00:29:19.120 If you ask the question, which of these two options would you prefer? Stopping the truckers by simply
00:29:24.640 canceling the vaccine mandates, which caused the protest in the first place, or invoking the
00:29:30.560 emergencies act, which came out of the war matrix act, which of those, I think a lot of average
00:29:35.760 people said, no, just cancel the mandates that caused this. Other countries are already doing
00:29:40.880 it. The provinces are already doing it. So it very much depends on how you ask the question.
00:29:45.840 And then the third thing is that polls will give you a measure of where the public's head is at
00:29:52.240 today, but you don't have to assume that's where it's going to be for three months or four months from
00:29:56.080 now if you work on trying to change it. And I recall back in our day when the Charlottetown Constitutional
00:30:03.920 Court came out and it was announced by the prime ministers and all 10 of the premiers said it was
00:30:08.000 the greatest thing since sliced bread. And the first polls have said, well, the public said,
00:30:11.840 I guess it's a good thing. Everybody else thinks that they had 65% support. But after a debate,
00:30:20.080 because that had to go to a national referendum, that side lost. People changed their minds. And
00:30:28.400 the people that want to oppose that accord, which included ourselves,
00:30:31.920 that became what the majority position was, but it took some time. So I think there's things that
00:30:36.960 can be done, but somebody has to do, institute the discussion, the counter discussion,
00:30:43.200 frame the questions in some different ways that reveal some different options,
00:30:47.200 and then persist if you really think you're on the right track and eventually you can bring people
00:30:51.200 around to it, persist on that until you do. Well, I think that's very good advice. Hopefully,
00:30:57.120 the future leadership of the Conservative Party will take note and try to lead rather than just
00:31:03.680 following the polls. Unfortunately, we've seen too many politicians who govern that way, Preston. Well,
00:31:08.000 I really appreciate your time. It's so delightful to speak to you and hear your wisdom on Canadian
00:31:13.600 politics. So thank you so much for joining us. Well, thank you, Candice. It was really a pleasure.
00:31:17.200 All right. Thank you so much for tuning in. I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.
00:31:27.120 Thank you.
00:31:29.600 .