The Candice Malcolm Show - March 07, 2022


Preston Manningļ¼š Trucker Convoy was a legitimate expression of concern


Episode Stats

Length

31 minutes

Words per Minute

175.2055

Word Count

5,499

Sentence Count

266

Misogynist Sentences

1

Hate Speech Sentences

1


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 In today's political lexicon, populism is now synonymous with Donald Trump, with Brexit,
00:00:05.840 with right-wing politics, and with an undesirable rebellion against stable political institutions.
00:00:11.460 But is populism always a bad thing? My guest today rejects this basic premise and has been
00:00:16.580 working his entire political career to try to understand and harness the potential good side
00:00:21.860 of populist movements here in Canada. I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.
00:00:30.000 Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for tuning in today. It's a pleasure and honor today to be
00:00:34.680 joined by Mr. Preston Manning. Preston Manning is one of the most prominent conservative politicians
00:00:40.440 and political leaders in Canadian history and has a thorough understanding of the rise of populism
00:00:46.160 in Canada and around the world. He's often called the father of modern-day Canadian conservatism.
00:00:52.220 Preston was a founder and the only leader of the Reform Party of Canada, which became the Canadian
00:00:56.660 Alliance Party, which eventually merged with the progressive conservative parties to form
00:01:00.500 the Conservative Party of Canada, which was led by Stephen Harper and was held government for nearly
00:01:06.480 a decade. Although no longer a politician, Preston remains a prominent voice in Canadian politics
00:01:11.500 and is in promoting Western Canadian interests. In 2005, Preston created the Canada Strong and Free
00:01:18.580 Network. Well, it was called the Manning Centre before, and now it's called the Canada Strong and Free
00:01:22.260 Network. The group has helped shape national conversations around conservatism, influence
00:01:27.260 government policies, and helped create a university program at Carleton University, the first program
00:01:32.120 aimed at political management. So Preston, thank you so much for joining us. It's an honor to speak
00:01:36.640 to you today. Well, thank you very much. It's great. Okay, well, I want to first start off by talking
00:01:43.260 a little bit about just what just happened, what just happened in our country with the trucker convoy,
00:01:48.560 the sort of political uprising against the Trudeau government, and how it was handled by both Justin
00:01:54.120 Trudeau, his government, as well as the media here in Canada. I think the audience knows my position
00:01:59.080 on this issue thoroughly, but I'm wondering what is your take? How do you think it folded out? How do
00:02:04.960 you think it could have been handled differently by the politicians and the media in this country?
00:02:09.200 Well, I think I know some truckers, independent truckers. Our family has a small ranching
00:02:15.480 operation. We use truckers to take cattle to community pastures and to processing plants. But
00:02:22.060 I felt this truckers' convoy was a legitimate expression of concern by people who were affected
00:02:30.860 by the vaccine mandates. In their case, it put some 15,000 of them out of work. And I feel it was a
00:02:37.200 legitimate bottom-up political protest. It had these populist dimensions. And the sad thing was the way the
00:02:44.200 federal government responded to it. They wouldn't even meet with these people. And the prime minister
00:02:51.800 immediately characterized them as extremists and that this was financed or originated in the United
00:03:00.340 States, which is completely false. So I think it was a legitimate expression of political concern by a
00:03:07.960 legitimate group of people and that the Ottawa government responded inappropriately.
00:03:14.540 Well, I mean, just beyond that, if it was a legitimate and peaceful movement of a group of
00:03:20.440 people who just wanted their demands to be heard, and the response wasn't just to dismiss them, smear them,
00:03:26.920 refuse to meet with them, but actually use an emergency act that had never been invoked before, was created in 1988,
00:03:34.520 with the desired impact of use only during severe national emergencies and potentially war.
00:03:42.120 What kind of precedent does it set as a government who was so unwilling to talk to a group of people
00:03:47.720 that he would take such drastic action against them?
00:03:50.920 Yeah. Well, I think it was an enormous overreaction. And the question it raises is the question you're
00:03:57.320 raising if the Trudeau government would overreact to legitimate protests like that by invoking the
00:04:05.080 Emergency Act, on what other occasions would they do the same thing? And I feel that the justification for
00:04:13.000 invoking the Emergency Act was never really proven by the government. They very hastily retreated from it.
00:04:19.800 But again, it's just an extreme overreaction and a misunderstanding or deliberate misunderstanding of
00:04:25.960 what these people were trying to do and what they're trying to accomplish.
00:04:29.160 One of the things that was striking to me about the people who were behind the trucker convoy,
00:04:34.280 the people who characterized the protests in Ottawa, was sort of the difference between them
00:04:39.160 and the normal people, the normal type of people you see in Canadian political life, the normal kind of
00:04:43.400 people that you see protesting. It's usually sort of aggrieved left-wing people who protest, who go out
00:04:49.080 and gather on Parliament Hill and who occupy. The whole Occupy movement came from Occupy Wall Street,
00:04:54.600 which was an anti-capitalist left-wing movement. What do you think about the idea that many of these
00:05:03.000 truckers were sort of apolitical or not necessarily politically engaged and the action of them coming and
00:05:12.280 becoming political, coming to Ottawa, was met with such scorn and name-calling? How do you think that'll
00:05:18.920 impact those individuals or the individuals who supported them?
00:05:22.040 I think it shows to Canadians the contempt that the Ottawa elites have for just ordinary folks and the
00:05:29.960 fear that they seem to have of them. And then the inconsistencies when left-wing protesters shut down
00:05:38.840 rail lines that carry 20% of Canada's exports to Asia over them. The government almost sided with the
00:05:45.800 protesters and didn't regard this as an emergency. But somebody shuts down the bridge at Windsor and this
00:05:53.720 is a national catastrophe calling for the invoking of the Emergency Act, the inconsistency in that response
00:06:01.880 in addition to its overhandedness and inappropriateness. I think all of this, the net
00:06:06.440 effect of it, is to reduce the confidence of Canadians increasingly in the Trudeau administration.
00:06:13.080 This is just one of a number of things, but it adds to the list. It adds to the list.
00:06:17.960 What do you think of the sort of class divide that was on display? I know that many people in government and
00:06:23.720 media have dismissed this idea that what we saw was a sort of working class uprising that was dismissed
00:06:29.800 and disregarded by a group of elites in Ottawa. But you can't help but notice the idea that there's
00:06:37.320 a New York Times op-ed that put it really well and it sort of talked about not necessarily a class divide,
00:06:41.560 but the difference between people who live their life virtually, whose jobs can be done remotely,
00:06:47.160 can be done on a computer. COVID didn't really have a huge, huge impact on them versus people
00:06:54.120 who lived in the practical world. So they had virtuals versus practicals. People who lived in
00:06:58.360 the practical world are the ones that own small businesses, that own restaurants, that drive trucks,
00:07:02.680 that work at the frontline workers. The people who've been harmed disproportionately by COVID were many of
00:07:09.320 the sort of loudest voices praising and pushing the trucker convoy because they've gone out to the
00:07:16.280 real world and lived in COVID and they're ready to move on. Whereas the people who are kind of
00:07:20.360 sheltered behind their screens haven't had to have the same interaction and many of them are
00:07:24.840 legitimately and reasonably perhaps afraid to go back out into the world. And so you kind of have
00:07:30.280 these two different camps of people that are very much have different interests and perhaps it's hard
00:07:35.240 for them to understand what it's like to be on the other side. But certainly the sort of virtual side
00:07:40.520 of the elites disregarding the the working class for the practicals was really quite stark. Did you
00:07:48.280 did you notice a sort of class element to these projects? I don't think the establishment even
00:07:55.560 understands how its messaging was impacting or being received or even being considered relevant by those
00:08:04.600 people. I mentioned the ranching operation. You have guys that are looking after cattle sitting in a
00:08:11.320 mobile home on a wintering quarter that I know of is watching this nice lady on TV in a warm studio in
00:08:20.040 Edmonton or Ottawa telling them to stay home and be safe. These guys start to laugh. If we stay in here,
00:08:28.360 those cattle won't get fed. You know, our job by city standards is never considered safe.
00:08:36.440 But so that just a complete lack of resonance of that message with people that were in those
00:08:43.160 situations. And this is true for thousands and thousands of workers, particularly in the resource
00:08:48.680 sectors that are out there doing something, whether it's agriculture or energy or mining or
00:08:54.360 forestry or the fishery. You take Aboriginal people. I mean, I think the mining sector in
00:08:59.720 BC is the largest single employer of Aboriginal people, but they're they're out there doing things.
00:09:05.640 They can't stay home and be safe the way this message is coming to them from the health authorities.
00:09:12.760 So that that lack of of resonance between the source of the message and the receiver is
00:09:19.720 part of the root of this misunderstanding, I think, over the whole COVID crisis.
00:09:24.440 That's such a good point. I want to I want to touch on populism because I know this is an area
00:09:29.000 that you've talked about and worked on a long time. I listened to your podcast with Jordan Peterson.
00:09:32.280 We talked about sort of positive populism. I hope you can sort of help us understand,
00:09:36.760 because usually it's used as a negative word to describe people who are trying to sort of undermine
00:09:41.720 the political stability. But but but you see a different side of populism. So I'm hoping you can
00:09:46.440 talk a little bit about what populism means. It's so unfortunate that populism is misunderstood by
00:09:53.080 Canadians. And I've argued, and I think I can prove it, that the Western Canada has had more
00:09:58.680 experience with populist movements, populist parties and populist governments than virtually any other
00:10:06.440 part of North America. And while populism has its wild and woolly side, our Canadian experience with it,
00:10:14.680 let's say in the 20th century has been has been relatively positive. And just to give a few
00:10:21.400 examples, the first woman that got elected to the Parliament of Canada, how did she get there?
00:10:27.320 Through what movement? She didn't get there through the Liberals or the Conservatives in that day. The
00:10:32.200 Liberals did everything in their power to knock her out of that parliament. And eventually they did.
00:10:36.360 She came up through the old progressive movement, which is basically a farmers movement, which was a populist
00:10:41.880 bottom-up party. The so-called Famous Five, the women that got women elected or recognized as persons in
00:10:50.120 Canadian law. All five of them were populists. Two or three of them were elected as populists to the
00:10:56.200 Alberta legislature. So populism can accomplish some pretty positive things, whether you agree with
00:11:03.720 Canadian Medicare or not. That came out of Saskatchewan through the CCF, which was a bottom-up populist
00:11:13.640 party, particularly at that time. It was the champion of that particular social reform. The constitutional
00:11:23.400 change that got natural resources finally, the ownership of natural resources recognized in terms of the
00:11:31.640 provinces, particularly the Western provinces. That was achieved by farmers' governments. The UFA in
00:11:37.320 Alberta, a small group of progressives in the federal parliament. So you can list off these positive
00:11:43.800 accomplishments by populist movements and populist government. Now, it doesn't mean they don't have a
00:11:51.320 wild and woolly side. And whether they end up making that positive contribution or whether they turn
00:11:58.760 negative, very much depends on the leadership and it depends on the reaction of the establishment.
00:12:04.840 Most of these populist parties and governments are a reaction to what was there before. Trump is the
00:12:10.680 legacy of Obama. Doug Ford is the legacy of the Catherine Ford in Ontario. So I argue there's a positive
00:12:19.000 side if they're properly led and properly understood. Well, so it's interesting now because you sort of see
00:12:26.040 different camps in the Conservative Party right now, you know, Erin O'Toole stepped down and without a
00:12:31.400 certain leader, there's sort of different elements of the party popping up. What would your advice be
00:12:36.520 to the Conservative Party and anyone looking to run it on how best to connect with the grassroots,
00:12:42.520 how to utilize the sort of success and the growth of the truck of convoy in helping to sort of steer
00:12:50.760 the party in more of a positive populist way that really connects with voters, connects with the
00:12:56.120 grassroots, understands their concerns and can relay those messages to Ottawa without the sort of effect
00:13:02.200 of being in Ottawa for too long, which is that you start to sound more like the establishment and less
00:13:05.800 like the people who sent you there. Well, I think you use the right word when you say connect. I think the
00:13:10.120 first step is to connect with them. And the first step to connecting with people is just to listen to
00:13:15.160 them. Just listen to them. And I use the analogy, and I think you've heard me on this before, of
00:13:24.840 in the oil patch, there's such a thing as a wildcat well that's drilled into a formation where you don't
00:13:30.280 know what's down below. And then there's such a thing as a road well that drills into a formation where
00:13:36.040 there's an enormous amount of oil or gas under pressure. And it can be very dangerous. You can blow the
00:13:41.480 the drilling platform off the wellhead. It can catch fire. It can be enormously dangerous. But
00:13:48.040 one of the ways of bringing a rogue well under control is you drill in a relief well from the side
00:13:54.520 and the angle has to be right. If it's too shallow, it won't take off enough pressure. If it's too deep,
00:14:00.120 it can turn into a rogue well. But if it's just right, it can take off enough pressure that valves can be
00:14:06.360 installed and all that valuable energy can be harnessed to useful purposes. But the important
00:14:12.440 thing there is that that relief well has to connect with that whatever is underneath that rogue well.
00:14:18.200 You have to identify with whatever is causing all this energy and all this activity. And that's the
00:14:25.800 first step. And in a sense, that's what reform was in the 1980s. There was a strong
00:14:32.120 anti-federal government, anti-federal party atmosphere in Western Canada. It produced separatist
00:14:40.280 movements, separatist party elected a member to the Alberta legislature. And what reform did was
00:14:46.280 drilling that relief well from the side. And so we had to identify with what was making those people
00:14:50.440 mad. We said, yeah, you've got a right to be mad. And we're mad too. But instead of blowing the whole
00:14:55.480 thing up, how about doing this, this and this? You know, Senate reform, balance the budget,
00:15:01.080 regional impact assessments, et cetera, et cetera. And I think that's the challenge for
00:15:06.040 as there's populism developing today. I think it's going to be very interesting whether this
00:15:11.480 freedom convoy morphs into a broader common sense movement of some kind. But the challenge for the
00:15:18.120 political leadership, conservative and others, will be to identify with the root causes of it and
00:15:23.400 and then propose better alternatives, perhaps, in how to achieve the objectives.
00:15:30.760 One of the things that I see as sort of a clash within conservatism, within the conservative movement,
00:15:36.920 is that conservatives by nature, the reason that they're conservatives is because they want to
00:15:42.200 conserve something. So they tend to be patriotic and supportive of our institutions and our networks
00:15:49.800 that have created this sort of very stable, prosperous society. But at the same time in Canada,
00:15:55.080 the institutions that we have are also built and crafted around sort of big L liberalism in many
00:16:02.120 ways, Preston. And a lot of the institutions are simply not holding up to scrutiny under the pressures
00:16:08.280 of COVID. The reality, for instance, of the media landscape, one of the things that was just so,
00:16:14.440 I observed it over the entire period of COVID, but during the protests, just so blatantly obvious
00:16:19.640 how corrupted and how focused on a narrative and not willing to look outside and not willing to paint
00:16:26.600 an objective picture to Canadians. There's so many examples, but to an almost partisan sense,
00:16:34.600 the media is corrupted. How do you think that this relationship between protecting institutions
00:16:42.600 and a need to identify and remove corrupted institutions or institutions that are no longer
00:16:49.800 serving their good, how do you think that conservatives can kind of approach and fix this issue?
00:16:56.760 I think you've got to make the argument, and it's not made much in the public arena,
00:17:00.520 that it's possible to both conserve an institution and to change it for the better at the same time,
00:17:07.240 that conservation and change are not mutually exclusive. In fact, you could argue that they
00:17:12.840 almost have to go together. Edmund Burke argued this, that he was all for conserving certain things,
00:17:21.000 but he advocated certain things had to change in order to conserve them. And I think that argument
00:17:25.880 needs to be refined. One of my own illustrations, I used to do community development work up in north
00:17:32.360 central Alberta, and there was a sign on an old road away back in the bush, and it was on a big post
00:17:40.760 and had a huge crossbar on it. It had one word on it, Saw Ridge, and an arrow pointing west. And it was
00:17:48.600 supposed to tell you how to get to the town of Saw Ridge. The only problem with it was if you followed
00:17:53.000 that sign, you'd never get to Saw Ridge. Well, why was that? The sign never changed. The sign always
00:17:58.200 said the same thing. It always pointed in the same direction. It was as conservative as you can get.
00:18:03.160 But during the years back, there was a flood that the town of Saw Ridge had to move its location. It
00:18:10.680 changed its name to the town of Slave Lake. The roads to get there had been changed half a dozen times.
00:18:15.800 So the very fact that the sign didn't change was a source of error rather than truth. And I think
00:18:26.840 there's a lesson in that, that you've got to have signposts and you've got to have them firm
00:18:31.880 in the ground and everything else. But sometimes what's on them has to change in order to get to
00:18:36.440 the original objective. And I think that's true whether you're talking about how to conserve the
00:18:41.080 democracy or a viable private sector in the economy. And if conservatives could refine that,
00:18:48.040 we want to conserve, here's what we want to conserve, but here's the changes we want to make
00:18:51.960 in order. I think people could understand that. I think they could understand that.
00:18:55.880 And just going back to the point you made earlier about how when the Reform Party came around as sort
00:18:59.880 of a relief valve for those who were sort of fed up with the status quo, the result was very real and
00:19:06.440 substantive change. I mean, talking about some of the things that you mentioned, what the conservatives
00:19:10.120 stood for was, was really sort of an overhaul of, of some of the institutional decay that was
00:19:15.560 happening. Do you think we're at a time now, you know, this was 30, 40 years after the birth of the
00:19:20.600 reform movement, we're ready for another set of drastic reforms to our political system to save it?
00:19:27.400 I think you have to do this every so often. When the Reform Party was put together, the lawyer,
00:19:32.200 the lawyer that put this constitution together was a fellow by the name of Bob Muir, a real fine
00:19:37.000 lawyer in Calgary. And when we were talking about it, I said, Bob, I want a clause in,
00:19:42.840 a sunset clause in the constitution of this party. Well, he says, well, what do you mean?
00:19:47.880 I want it to come to an end in 10 years. If the party members decide to just renew it the way it is,
00:19:54.120 they can. But I want a sunset clause in it. And by golly, we had one in there. And it was to be 10 years
00:20:02.280 that the party would cease to exist unless the members re-instituted it and recreate it,
00:20:07.160 either in its original form or something else. And by golly, by 1997, it was clear that reform had
00:20:14.200 gone about as far as we could go with it. And we needed this bigger, broader thing. We wanted to
00:20:18.120 form an alliance with the particular provincial conservatives in Alberta, Manitoba, and Mike Harris
00:20:25.080 in Ontario. And that's what gave the opportunity to create the Canadian Alliance, which then morphed
00:20:32.280 into the Conservative Party of Canada. So you don't want to do this every day. You don't want to rethink
00:20:39.320 your fundamental principles or organizations every day. I mean, political parties have to have some
00:20:44.920 continuity and stability. But I think periodically, and particularly in the age in which we live,
00:20:49.400 when change is so fast, everything else is changing, that there should be a recognition
00:20:53.560 every so often, we've got to make some fundamental changes in order to be relevant or to be able to
00:20:59.720 address the problems that are confronting the country. The federal Liberals to do this is going
00:21:04.520 to end up being their Achilles, Achilles heel. And in a way, I think one of the consequences of this post,
00:21:12.920 of this COVID thing is there's going to have to be changes in leadership. There's rumblings
00:21:18.120 the federal Liberals already that Trudeau has to go, people looking for Mark Carney or somebody else.
00:21:23.160 There's rumbles within the NDP. You've got the NDP members that come from writings where they've
00:21:28.520 got private sector union members who've lost their jobs and their incomes. And these guys are starting
00:21:33.400 to resent the support of the public sector unions. There's other people in the NDP that support them,
00:21:39.960 who were not only protected throughout this whole thing, some of them got wage increases. So you've got
00:21:44.280 internal forces that are going to force the NDP to decide where it's going to go. So you've got
00:21:50.120 internal forces for leadership changes within the Liberals, within the NDP. It's already starting.
00:21:55.240 In this sense, the Conservative Party of Canada is ahead of the others. And that's one of the consequences
00:22:01.560 of this turmoil that's been created by the COVID crisis.
00:22:05.640 Okay. Well, let's shift and talk a little bit about COVID because when you look at the trucker convoy,
00:22:11.640 even though sure they got cleared out with excessive force by police, but some of the things that they
00:22:16.120 were advocating for, they started to see real impact almost immediately, Preston. Quebec reversed its
00:22:22.920 vaccine mandate tax, vaccine tax, anti-vax tax. If you weren't vaccinated, you were going to get an extra
00:22:27.880 tax. They reversed that almost immediately. Several of the provinces have since lifted most of their
00:22:33.320 restrictions. We have seen that the major points that the truckers were advocating for,
00:22:40.120 those goals were accomplished. So let's talk a little bit about the post-COVID agenda. What
00:22:45.800 should it look like in Canada and how can we get there? Well, I think one way to come at the agenda is
00:22:51.480 to look at what has the COVID crisis, what weaknesses has it revealed in our systems that are going to have
00:23:01.320 to be addressed. And one of them is just the whole way the thing was managed. So I think one of the
00:23:07.800 things on the post-COVID agenda is going to be an investigation into law. It probably won't be done
00:23:13.800 by this government, but if it's the government, the federal government's replaced, I think that'd be one
00:23:17.880 of the first things any new government would do. It'll appoint a commission of some sort to get at
00:23:22.040 what went wrong in the management of the crisis. And then what was another weakness that was revealed?
00:23:28.840 What was the weakness of the Canadian healthcare system? That the Canadian Medicare is 60 years old
00:23:35.880 and was simply incapable of meeting the surge in demand that the COVID crisis feels. So what are we
00:23:42.680 going to do about that? What changes, healthcare changes are we going to make? And we have to look at
00:23:46.760 other countries, the countries that had mixed systems, public and private systems were able to
00:23:52.120 cope with the surge in demand better than our system. So that's going to be another, I think,
00:23:57.800 another missing on the agenda for the post-COVID period will be that sort of healthcare reform thing.
00:24:07.240 And then a third thing will be what has to be done to better protect the rights and freedoms that people
00:24:14.840 thought were guaranteed by the Constitution. It was clear that the government could override those,
00:24:19.720 that there were literally millions of violations of the so-called sacred rights in the Constitution.
00:24:27.080 And so what's going to be done to address that? I think one of the areas you're going to get into there,
00:24:34.840 and you're familiar with this, there's a test called the Oaks test. It comes out of a legal case in
00:24:40.840 1986, where the Supreme Court of Canada said, if you're going to limit the rights and freedoms that
00:24:47.160 are guaranteed in the Constitution, you have, the government has to demonstrate, it's the government
00:24:52.040 that has to demonstrate it, has to demonstrate that the benefits of the limitation outweigh the negative
00:24:58.680 impacts. Now that was never done in this case. If you want to show that your limitation outweighs the
00:25:05.880 negative impacts, for one thing, you've got to measure the impacts, or at least try to estimate.
00:25:10.360 There was never any impact assessment made on the health protection measures as to what their impact
00:25:16.440 would be on the health system itself, let alone on the civil liberties of Canadians. And there was never
00:25:22.360 any economic impact assessment done on those health protection measures. And so I think that's
00:25:29.560 something that's going to have to be written into law. You want to limit those rights in the Constitution,
00:25:33.560 you've got to show that the impacts are, that the benefits outweigh the impact, and you've got to
00:25:40.520 make an assessment of the impacts, or else the courts will declare your, whatever your health
00:25:45.000 protection measure is, your protection measure is as unconstitutional. So there's, I see this list,
00:25:50.600 an investigation into what went wrong and what went right with respect to the management, what has to be
00:25:57.800 done with the health care system, because this crisis proved it to be inadequate. What are the additions to the
00:26:03.240 the, what has to be done to strengthen the limit, the protection of rights and freedoms, because
00:26:09.480 obviously the, whatever we had before wasn't sufficient. And I can see a list of about eight
00:26:16.600 things being not part of the, the post COVID agenda that somebody is going to have to get after. And
00:26:23.240 one of them is even that thing you mentioned before is leadership changes, what changes have to be made
00:26:28.360 in the leadership of the federal political parties in order to make some progress on that agenda.
00:26:34.200 One of the things, I mean, we've been talking about populism and the sort of
00:26:37.320 rise of the anti COVID mandates and practices, you know, that we saw with the charter convoy.
00:26:43.960 One of the things I was, I was talking on a panel earlier with John Williamson, who's an MP out in New
00:26:48.920 Brunswick. And, you know, I hear a lot of people criticizing the conservatives for not standing up
00:26:54.360 against these abuses against our charter for not standing up and talking about the healthcare
00:26:58.680 issues. And, and, and he mentioned that, you know, at the time during the kind of height of COVID. And
00:27:04.520 for the last two years, public opinion has not really been on the side of freedom. People were afraid.
00:27:11.720 People were very worried. They wanted, they wanted lockdowns. They wanted mandates. They wanted,
00:27:17.960 you know, people who the example that John used were that people who refuse to get vaccinated,
00:27:23.800 they shouldn't just lose their job and their pension and their EI. They should also get
00:27:28.280 removed from our healthcare system and not be, and, and be like denied access if they needed
00:27:33.320 healthcare. And I saw a lot of that sentiment in the media as well. There was a infamous Toronto Star
00:27:39.000 front page that said, let them die. I hope, I hope unvaccinated people die. And, and, and that was
00:27:44.120 sort of the, the narrative that we're hearing from media and the sentiment. And I, I personally noticed a
00:27:49.560 lot of sort of adversarial combativeness among Canadians that frankly struck me as on Canadian
00:27:56.120 people fighting on social media, fighting with their families, disinviting people to Christmas
00:28:00.760 dinner. I do, what could be done about the, the sort of, I don't even know how to describe it,
00:28:08.840 like a totalitarian impulse of people when it came to an emergency to just use every law possible.
00:28:15.640 And, um, how can we mend these, you know, it's a divided country right now. How can we start to
00:28:21.080 mend some of these, uh, divides that have, that have been really, really evident throughout the
00:28:25.480 pandemic?
00:28:25.960 Well, I think there's a couple of things that can be done. One is that there, there has to be a
00:28:30.440 discussion on the appropriate, appropriateness of these measures. And this business of the
00:28:34.520 cancel culture, we can't talk about that because it's already been decided, whatever. I think that has
00:28:39.320 to be very strainlessly resisted. And the way one resists is by insisting that it be talked about,
00:28:44.440 whether it's in your own family or in your own circle or in your own company or in your own
00:28:48.440 community. The second is to take some of these polls with a grain of salt, because a lot depends
00:28:54.040 on how you ask the question. If when the, at the height of the, uh, of the controversy over the
00:29:01.480 truckers, the only question you asked is should the emergency act be invoked in order to, uh, make
00:29:08.840 these people adhere to the vaccine mandates. And all you've heard is the propaganda from the
00:29:13.000 government. When it introduced this, it's not surprising that 50% of Canadians would say,
00:29:17.400 yeah, I guess that's what you should do. If you ask the question, which of these two options would
00:29:21.800 you prefer stopping the truckers by simply canceling the vaccine mandates, which caused the protest in
00:29:27.400 the first place or invoking the emergencies act, which came out of the war measures act, which of
00:29:33.560 those, I think a lot of average people said, no, just cancel the mandates that caused this. Other
00:29:39.800 countries are already doing it. The provinces are already doing it. So it very much depends
00:29:44.040 on how you ask the question. And then, then the third thing is that, uh, polls will give you a measure
00:29:50.760 where the public head is at today, but you don't have to assume that's where it's going to be for three
00:29:55.080 months or four months from now, if you work on trying to change it. And I recall back in our day,
00:30:00.680 when the, uh, the Charlottetown constitutional court came out and it was announced by the prime
00:30:05.880 ministers and all 10 of the premiers said it was the greatest things in sliced bread. And the first
00:30:09.960 polls that said, well, public said, I guess it's a good thing. Everybody else did the thing.
00:30:14.760 Had 60, 65% support. But after a debate, because that had to go to a national referendum,
00:30:22.760 that side lost, people changed their minds. And, uh, the, the people that want to oppose that
00:30:29.880 accord, which included ourselves, that became what the majority position was, but it took some time.
00:30:35.880 So I think there's things that can be done, but somebody has to do, institute the discussion,
00:30:41.400 the counter discussion, uh, frame the questions in some different ways that reveal some different
00:30:46.280 options and then persist. If you really think you're on the right track and eventually you can bring
00:30:50.920 people around to it, uh, persist on that until you do. Well, I think that's very good advice.
00:30:56.600 Hopefully the, uh, the future leadership of the conservative party will, uh, take note and, uh,
00:31:02.120 try to lead, uh, rather than just following the polls. Unfortunately, I've seen too many politicians
00:31:06.280 who, who govern that way, Preston. Well, I, I really appreciate your time. It's, it's so, uh,
00:31:10.200 so delightful to speak to you and hear your, uh, wisdom on Canadian politics. So thank you so much
00:31:14.680 for joining us. Well, thank you, Candice. It was really a pleasure. All right. Thank you so much
00:31:19.000 for tuning in. I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.