Juno News - June 29, 2024


Will Justin Trudeau resign?


Episode Stats


Length

12 minutes

Words per minute

182.15294

Word count

2,193

Sentence count

5

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

On this episode of The Andrew Lawton Show, host Andrew Lawton is joined by journalist Paul Wells to discuss the results of the recent election and the implications for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 you're tuned in to the andrew lawton show
00:00:05.920 there are liberal mps that were just elected for the first time in 2019 or 2021 and they're kind
00:00:16.840 of in the position now of saying i haven't really had a chance to do anything but already i'm about
00:00:22.800 to be shown the door and this happened to a lot of conservative mps in 2011 when harper won his
00:00:28.000 majority they were elected in the greater toronto area and places such as aurora and oshawa well not
00:00:34.840 oshawa that's a conservative writing but aurora new market and markham and mississauga and you had
00:00:40.180 all of these one-term mps that they got in they served one term and then they were out the door
00:00:45.180 because harper couldn't hold on to his government when 2015 came around so that's where you have i
00:00:51.880 think this looking really bad for liberal members of parliament and will they decide once and for all
00:00:57.820 it's time to start calling for justin trudeau's political head on a political platter i don't
00:01:04.460 want anyone to get any ideas about you know me suggesting something you know untoward but that's
00:01:09.400 effectively the decision going on here so look we can go and talk about oh this poll went this way or
00:01:15.840 maybe this sign did this or this canvassing did this but there's a bigger picture here that we should
00:01:21.500 not lose sight of we'll be talking in a little bit with rahim muhammad in the national post who
00:01:26.580 has uh had some well he has interesting thoughts on pretty much everything but definitely some
00:01:30.940 interesting thoughts on this but i i want to welcome in to talk about the the the psychology
00:01:36.600 of justin trudeau on this almost uh it paul wells because journalist paul wells wrote a book that was
00:01:43.340 very fascinating and we actually share a publisher in ken white of sutherland house and he wrote about
00:01:48.760 this called justin trudeau on the ropes governing in troubled times and he joins me now paul it's
00:01:54.380 good to talk to you thanks for coming on today hi andrew how are you i'm i'm doing well i i'm you
00:02:00.120 i should just say to hit this you know right out of the gate you had done what i think a lot of people
00:02:04.500 did which is like you went to bed thinking the liberals had won and then you woke up in the morning
00:02:08.680 and had to write a mia culpa on this and i just get away from that by not making predictions because
00:02:14.180 then i i don't have to be wrong ever whereas you take the swing but before you saw the vote
00:02:20.020 yesterday what did you think was going to happen before you saw the numbers come in and kind of
00:02:23.940 concluded it was over so i happened to be in the writing i'm not in front of that often but i happened
00:02:29.400 to be there a couple weeks ago and i ran into a bunch of liberals who were really nervous uh and a
00:02:35.140 couple who reading between the line were not super interested in voting liberal they they thought it was
00:02:41.300 time to send uh justin trudeau a message and i was at a fancy ottawa garden party just before the
00:02:49.200 returns came in and i ran into a former senior public servant now retired who i believe has voted
00:02:56.620 liberal in most elections in their life and and they said i wish i lived in toronto st paul because i
00:03:04.600 would use my vote to send trudeau a message and uh so i knew they were heading for trouble but they
00:03:11.480 would have to have a lot of trouble before they lost and and so i was open to the very strong
00:03:17.820 possibility that uh it was going to be um tight but not lost for the liberals and that's that was
00:03:24.680 that was why i believe the early returns the way i do justin trudeau has in the past been incredibly
00:03:30.440 dismissive of anything that everyone else kind of uses to say that he's in trouble i mean pool numbers
00:03:36.120 are a great example of this and obviously you you should be aware of polls and and not give them too
00:03:40.840 too much stock but there was that line he gave to david cochran not that long ago about how canadians
00:03:45.960 aren't in a decision mode right now and that's why they're saying they'll vote for poly ev and then
00:03:50.200 yesterday in toronto st paul's they are in decision mode and he he's not really ever shown any overt
00:03:57.240 sense that he gets it and i i'm curious what your take on that is what would it take for him to
00:04:02.120 really realize hey i'm the problem so when um magazines started publishing photos of him in
00:04:09.960 blackface he's he this is now five years ago but he suddenly uh had to admit that in fact he had 0.51
00:04:15.720 worn blackface so that was a that was a mistake uh uh confronted with absolutely stark evidence um
00:04:22.840 uh you've been on the air i don't know if you saw he put he sent out a a communicate uh less than an
00:04:29.880 hour ago in which he says uh okay i get it this was bad this shows that we have work to do but it's
00:04:37.160 very much uh classic first draft trudeau it's it's like the statements he made after the snc lavaline
00:04:43.080 story broke he uh understands our concern and he promises to do better and i think uh a lot of people
00:04:51.480 including some liberals are saying no we don't need you to do better we need you to go and uh
00:04:58.440 i my hunch is that he's not rejecting that he's processing it and trying to figure out how much
00:05:06.280 maneuvering room he has from your knowledge i mean you they pick up your i don't know if they pick up
00:05:11.800 your calls still but i think historically you've had relatively good access to the liberals certainly
00:05:15.640 better than i have because i don't think they've ever thrown you out of an event but
00:05:19.000 the i'm curious insofar as you've learned from your contacts and sources in ottawa
00:05:25.080 does he did they have a plan for this did they have a plan for what does he do if don stewart wins
00:05:34.360 it's funny that was i was chatting with my wife who's a consultant and uh conservative and uh
00:05:40.600 very politically engaged as i left the house this morning and i said i wonder whether they had a
00:05:45.560 contingency plan you know it turns out so emmanuel macron the president of france had a very bad uh
00:05:51.560 election 10 days ago in european elections and he had been discussing the possibility of a of an
00:05:57.080 electoral route with his closest advisors for a week and they came out with an audacious plan to call
00:06:03.320 new legislative elections and like it's not at all clear that it will work but macron had a what if we
00:06:10.360 have a bad day plan uh i don't know whether the liberals did i have begun to put that question to
00:06:18.120 liberals um but if they did it would be out of character because they tend to uh hope for the
00:06:25.240 best and they corner very badly when when uh when things are now less than the best i mean i expect
00:06:33.400 what i expect is uh several days of confusion during which everything the prime minister says
00:06:39.880 can be uh treated as a curiosity rather than than as the final word because it's going to take them
00:06:46.200 days to figure out what what they think and what they want to tell us there's been from the liberal
00:06:52.760 party i mean really going back to 2015 i'd say a public caucus unity that you know the past two
00:06:59.000 conservative leaders would have killed to have in the sense that you don't see the knives out for
00:07:03.480 justin trudeau in the way that uh conservatives have historically for their leaders and i i'm
00:07:08.680 wondering if you think that will change now will will you start to get liberals that are are speaking
00:07:13.400 up a bit more publicly about their concerns or do you think that the same pattern we've seen for the last
00:07:20.040 nine years will will continue to hold there so now i i know someone who has an uh appointment with
00:07:26.280 christy clark today a pre-long-standing appointment with christy clark social thing uh who says the
00:07:32.760 day just got complicated because christy clark's phone is ringing off the hook uh i expect you can
00:07:37.320 multiply that by about seven because uh i expect anita nan's having a complicated day and sean fraser
00:07:43.800 and you know um i have no idea who's making those calls or what the content of those calls are but i
00:07:50.920 think that that's kind of happening um in a lot of corners one level of taboo has fallen i i there
00:07:57.880 hasn't even been much informal discussion about next time uh uh post trudeau leadership in the liberal
00:08:06.600 party and it hasn't been enforced by above it's been consensual liberals have not felt that it was proper
00:08:13.240 that uh uh a leader who gave them a decade in power or nearly um owes is owed some deference on these
00:08:21.800 questions um that's gone at least privately they are now talking um the next question is you know is
00:08:29.400 it going to is there going to be public uh statements um will any sitting member of caucus will any of the
00:08:36.840 the half dozen cabinet ministers who left on more or less peaceful terms people like navdi baines and
00:08:42.600 and uh mark carno and um will they start to say something and my hunch is they won't not immediately
00:08:49.640 but like this look new mps are are dragged up the house of commons by the their own leader and by the
00:08:56.920 the prime minister does justin trudeau really want to be the the prime minister who drags the new mp for
00:09:04.520 toronto st paul's up the center aisle of the house of commons like man you know yeah some decisions
00:09:10.760 to make pretty fast yeah i know i think you raise a valid point there and i'm also curious and again
00:09:16.600 i i never like the armchair psychoanalysis of politicians but with justin trudeau i do find
00:09:21.720 it fascinating because there's there's something that i've suspected and i'm curious if you agree or
00:09:25.880 not that he doesn't really care what party he leaves behind that he's okay if it sort of is a
00:09:32.200 sinking ship and he takes it down and i'm not convinced that he's as focused on legacy for the
00:09:37.640 party and i i wonder how if you take that to a context of the next election if that weighs in
00:09:43.880 because i do think the party would have a better time rebuilding they're certainly not going to win
00:09:47.960 the next election at this stage even if they have an interim leader but uh the reality is they would
00:09:54.600 probably set themselves up a little bit better to start having those succession discussions now instead
00:10:00.520 of you know the day after the 2025 election but but i'm curious if i'm projecting something on him that
00:10:05.880 you don't necessarily see i had a really chilling moment uh in conversation with um a member of
00:10:13.720 trudeau's caucus uh probably five or six months ago where i said i have always thought that trudeau
00:10:21.400 the day he leaves will be the day he stops caring about the future of the liberal party
00:10:25.480 and he just decides that he has to make a decision for himself and um this mp said do you think he
00:10:33.160 has ever cared about the liberal party it was shattered when he came along and he used it as uh
00:10:41.080 uh a vehicle um or a you know a kind of a hitching post for uh for a very personal movement
00:10:50.040 and that there was never a time when concerns about the future of the liberal party without trudeau
00:10:58.200 weighed much in his own career decision um it's one thing for me to say that but for me to hear that
00:11:05.560 from somebody who uh sits and hears from the prime minister every week and in in liberal caucus
00:11:11.720 meetings was a different was a different moment and um uh but i i do think that um his
00:11:26.120 the final calculation the decision to leave will be based on whether he's done
00:11:29.560 not on and and there won't be a lot of bandwidth for thinking about what's going to happen liberal
00:11:34.600 party next i thought my thesis was kind of snarky but it's not even as audacious as or as radical as
00:11:40.680 the one you got from a liberal member of parliament uh paul wells you can catch him on substack many
00:11:46.440 other places but i love his substack i'm a paid subscriber it's at paulwells.substack.com
00:11:51.400 thanks for listening to the andrew lawton show support the program by donating to true north
00:11:56.040 andrew lawton show support the program at www.tnc.news