WATCH: Full broadcast of The West Block with Tom Clark, aired Sunday, June 28, 2015.
Host: Tom Clark
Guest Interviews: Jean-Pierre Kingsley, Jeffrey Simpson,
Marie Vastel, Mark Kennedy, Margaret Trudeau
Location: Ottawa
On this Sunday, American style political action groups take to the airwaves in Canada to influence the vote. Is this now unrestricted political warfare?
Then, we’ll unpack the politics of this week, including Harper’s former parliamentary secretary being sentenced to jail time and what we can tell about the campaign so far.
Plus, a one-on-one interview with Margaret Trudeau on her new book and why she says she might be forced to call the Queen.
It is Sunday, June the 28th and from the nation’s capital, I’m Tom Clark. And you are in The West Block.
Well they’ve been around the American political scene for a very long time: political action committees or PACs. They’re secretive groups that raise and spend money to elect or defeat politicians. Like zebra mussels, they’re now in Canada.
He said he admired China’s basic dictatorship. Income for the wealthiest 5 per cent has increased 20 per cent…
Tom Clark:
There are two major Canadian PACs: Engage Canada on the left and Working Canadians on the right. Another Conservative group called Harper PAC was suddenly shut down late last week when the Conservative Party complained about them using the prime minister’s name. Except during the usual 36 official days of an election campaign, there are no limits on how much they can raise. No limits on who can contribute and no rules on how much they can spend. And, they don’t have to reveal anything to anyone. Not the names of the donors, foreign or domestic and not how much they gave.
And joining me now is Jean-Pierre Kingsley. For 17 years, the head of Elections Canada and also by Jeffrey Simpson for more than three decades a political writer in Ottawa: the Globe and Mail. Thank you both very much for being here. Mr. Kingsley, let’s just start off with your general reaction. For 17 years, you tried as best you could to administer a level playing field. How does this fit into your view of election fairness.
Jean-Pierre Kingsley:
Well, it doesn’t fit into a view of election fairness at all. This is exactly the contrary. What we’re attending and what we’re seeing now is effectively no law abides concerning all of the ads that we’re seeing out there by whatever, by whomever. Whether it favours one party or another or whether it’s against one party or another, you know, I denounce them all because this is effectively a free-for-all. In effect, we’re going back 40 years. It took us 40 years to get where we are. We had the best regime for controlling money in politics in the world, second to none, and I’ve looked at them all. Money is the toughest nut to crack and here we are having to re-crack it again because it’s an open field now.
Tom Clark:
But Jeffrey was it inevitable that we would end up here when we put in a fixed election date? Is this at the heart of why we’re seeing this now?
Jeffrey Simpson:
I don’t think anything is inevitable. I would say that it made it more probable. And we see the evidence of the Fixed Election Act, what’s it’s done is elongate the election campaign de facto, right? The actual campaign will start when the prime minister goes to the governor general but once you know when the election date’s going to be you start campaigning months and months in advance, which is what’s happening.
Tom Clark:
Or years in advance.
Jeffrey Simpson:
Or years.
Tom Clark:
It’s a perpetual war.
Jeffrey Simpson:
Oh yes, that’s right. So, building on what Jean-Pierre said, we don’t actually know who’s behind these ads. We don’t know where the money’s coming from. We don’t know how much money it is, whether it’s on-shore or off-shore and that’s something that we got rid of in the actual Elections Act that we have on the financing of the elections and that’s all out the window now.
Tom Clark:
I want to talk for a second about how this can distort I mean both of you, and Jean-Pierre in particular, have said that this takes us back 40 years in the question of fairness. I just want to run for you in a second, one of the most notorious PAC commercials. This is from the United States. That’s the standard we have to go by. This is in 2004 and it was the Swift Boat Veterans PAC and it was aimed at John Kerry. Just take a small look at this.
Commercial: John Kerry has not been honest about what happened in Vietnam. He is lying about his record. I know John Kerry is lying about his first purple heart because I treated him for that injury.
Tom Clark:
Well that pretty well effectively destroyed John Kerry’s presidential—
Jeffrey Simpson:
I remember I was covering that campaign down in the United States. Look, in Canada we have two sets of laws. If you try to put that ad on your network or I put it in my newspaper, we could be sued and the advertising authorities, the councils that we use to patrol what we’re doing, they’d be all over us. But political advertising is considered free speech, fair comment. So these PACs that are being created can say things about other parties and candidates and leaders for other parties that they would not be allowed to say if they were commercial enterprises and that is what they are definitely going to exploit.
Tom Clark:
Let me ask you this though, and Jeff let me throw it to you. I mean is there not though a question here of balancing out the idea of free speech that anybody can enter the political debate in an advertising way and the idea of fair elections and finding that balance. I mean we could say get rid of PACs but what would that do for that?
Jeffrey Simpson:
If that is the issue, if it’s a question of free speech, and you want to take an ad out and make a view on Tom Clark or Shaw TV, Global Television, that’s fine. Then we know whose speaking. But here we don’t know who is speaking except this entity which was been created just for the purposes of this advertising. So yes, it’s free speech but it’s not identified with any person or any entity that is a known entity and that’s very dangerous.
Jean-Pierre Kingsley:
Plus, we’ve done, under the Canada Elections Act, circumscribed the activities or what we called third parties. They’re entitled to say what they want, but there’s a limit to how much they can spend. There’s a requirement that they divulge the contributors for the six months before the event, up to six months before the event. They must tell us how they spent the money as well. All of this is audited. They also have to tell us who is organizing this event.
Tom Clark:
But that’s only within the writ period though, right?
Jean-Pierre Kingsley:
That’s right.
Tom Clark:
Yeah.
Jean-Pierre Kingsley:
That’s right. So, we have addressed the issue. All we have to do now is bring it forward from the date of the election. Bring it forward six months before the fixed election date and if ever that is different then let’s live the consequence of that rather than live with the consequence of what we’re living with right now.
Jeffrey Simpson:
We live now; in it was the Harper government that brought in from the States the idea of the permanent election campaign. One element of that is that you use, I don’t know how much. I would say over a $100 million dollars of taxpayers or what they call hard-working taxpayer’s money to advertise their programs on television and the buys they have are the most expensive on TV. As you would know, the Stanley Cup Playoffs, the Academy Awards, the Super Bowl, this is all our money advertising their programs, brazenly, systematically in a way we’ve never seen before. So now you add in allies of the government and of the Opposition too, to this sort of free-for-all that’s going on. So after this is all over, I hope that the next government, it won’t be if Harper’s re-elected, looks at all of this and says look, shouldn’t there be some limit or a complete ban on all of this use of taxpayer’s money to advertise government programs, which are not information giving ads, they’re just brazen political ads. And these PACs that have grown up associated with, and look, he and I weren’t born yesterday and you weren’t either. The notion that these PACs are somehow at arm’s length from the parties is crazy. They’re talking to each other. They come out of the political parties. They can talk strategy together—you do this, we’ll do that. That’s going on and we know it.
Tom Clark:
A lot to talk about. Jean-Pierre Kingsley, former head of Elections Canada and Jeffrey Simpson of the Globe and Mail and the dean of political writers in Canada. Thank you both very much, I appreciate your time.
Jean-Pierre Kingsley:
Pleasure.
Jeffrey Simpson:
Thank you.
Tom Clark:
Well still to come, we’ll unpack the politics of all of this and the other major events of last week. And then later: Margaret Trudeau’s new book and her advice for other mothers for kids considering life in politics.
Break
Tom Clark:
Welcome back. Well time to unpack some of the politics of this past week. Joining me in that task, Marie Vastel of Le Devoir, and as always, Mark Kennedy Parliamentary Bureau Chief of the Ottawa Citizen. Good to have both of you here.
So, I think it’s fair to say, that politics and especially campaigns, is all about images and imagery and we’ve had a lot of that this week. Probably the most striking one was Dean Del Mastro being led in chains, leg irons out of a Peterborough court to serve at least one night in a maximum security jail. He got out on bail on appeal. But that image first of all, how damaging do you think that image was to the Conservatives? I’ve never seen anything like that in all the years that I’ve covered politics.
Marie Vastel:
I haven’t been here as long as you, but I’ve never seen it either, even when I wasn’t covering Parliament Hill. I think it’s very damaging. I think there’s a difference between, and unfortunately for Mr. Del Mastro, the leg shackles were maybe a bit much, but anyway. There is a difference between seeing your former MP, your former prime minister’s parliamentary secretary in shackles and an obscure in and out scandal or another obscure alleged misspending during an election campaign, like Peter Penashue weighs in Newfoundland. And I think that image in people’s minds will be way more striking than some scandal they read about in the paper. And in that sense, I think that it could hurt the Conservatives way more because the scandal is also a build-up. The Senate was a build-up. It was case after case of abuse and I think this, if the Opposition parties want and they probably will, repeat their line about how they have allegedly cheated every election, I think this would add to the build-up and then you show footage of Mr. Del Mastro defending the government in the House of Commons and then you show him walking to his police truck. It’s pretty—it speaks volumes I think to an average elector sitting in a living room. Yeah.
Mark Kennedy:
Oh it’s a nightmare. Listen, for Stephen Harper it’s a political nightmare. It’s the last thing you want just at the end of June as we head into a summer—head into a summer season of barbeques where leaders are going to be there and Stephen Harper now has to explain why it is that a couple of years ago he stood up in the House of Commons and said this man was an honourable man. He had been serving his constituents honourably. Well now we have a judge, not a political foe, but a judge saying that he was deceitful and that he cheated and then he lied.
Tom Clark:
Are we going to see a lot more of this footage during the election campaign?
Mark Kennedy:
Oh absolutely. If you’re an opposition party why wouldn’t you do that because what it does, it goes right to the heart of the ammunition that the opposition parties will throw at them and Mr. Harper. And that is, we can’t trust you because you are a bunch of cheaters. What you do is you break the rules time and time and time again. You break democracy to get yourself re-elected and they will go with that issue of trust because that is what is dragging Stephen Harper down now.
Tom Clark:
I want to go to one other really quite striking image of this past week. And it all started with Justin Trudeau repeating his position that he, if he was in power, he would end the Canadian bombing campaign in Iraq and Syria. Well the Conservative Party responded with an online ad and I just want you take a look at this for a second.
Tom Clark:
Well that went on for quite some time. That was a Conservative Party ad using ISIS images, the ISIS song. Who knew they had a song but apparently they do. This would seem to be the very thing that Bill C-51 was trying to stop.
Marie Vastel:
Yes exactly. And that’s what’s quite frankly appalling about it, is that the government made a big splash about this Bill C-51 and wanting to act against terrorism and now they’re pretty much giving a terrorist organization munitions by, you know, reproducing their own propaganda materials.
Tom Clark:
Are we making too much of it, Mark?
Mark Kennedy:
I don’t think so. Listen, you know, this is wedge politics at its worst. What we’re seeing is the government trying to remind Canadians that they are the party that wants us to go in there and bomb ISIS. The other two parties are not but they’re using with an ax, a method of reminding people that way. Those are gruesome and horrific images that I think most Canadians would say to themselves, we don’t need to see Mr. Harper and yet you are throwing them in our face.
Tom Clark:
Well Jason Kenney called it basically a snuff video, these images.
Mark Kennedy:
Yeah, the other problem is, I mean this could—listen, who knows. It could work for the Tories but it could backfire remarkably because if it leads to the perception that this is a party that is desperate and will do anything to frighten people. It could blow up on them the same way in the 1993 election campaign in which Kim Campbell was prime minister. They put a horrible ad on television making fun of a facial deformity of Mr. Chrétien.
Tom Clark:
That I didn’t know.
Mark Kennedy:
That blew up on them. They had to withdraw the ad and they were reduced to two seats.
Marie Vastel:
And it could quite frankly anger electors that they’re basically helping a terrorist organization by trying to get votes. I don’t know, to me, that makes me angry but I don’t know about other people.
Tom Clark:
Well, and I did ask the Conservative Party about this and I said will you be using more terrorist video in your future campaign commercials? And they said just wait and see. So, obviously at this point, they’re not too concerned about it. Marie Vastel, Le Devoir and Mark Kennedy of the Ottawa Citizen. Gosh, this is our final show for the season but awfully glad that both of you could mark it with us.
Marie Vastel:
Thank you.
Tom Clark:
Thanks very much.
Mark Kennedy:
Thank you.
Tom Clark:
Well coming up next, we’ll hear from MPs who won’t be seeking re-election this fall. Their regrets and some lessons learned.
Break
Tom Clark:
Welcome back. Margaret Trudeau has done a lot of things in her life and it’d be impossible to call her boring. Now her wild child days may be over, which could explain why her latest book is about old age. But true to her nature, she covers such things as senior dating, grey divorce, money, children, and of course, politics. We sat down with her to talk about The Time of Your Life.
Margaret Trudeau welcome.
Margaret Trudeau:
Thank you, Tom.
Tom Clark:
Good to have you here.
Margaret Trudeau:
Thank you, it’s an honour.
Tom Clark:
Talk to me about that moment when you woke up and you slapped your forehead and said I gotta write a book about this.
Margaret Trudeau:
I wished it had happened that way; eureka. Three happened that my darling mom passed and she was 92. It was inevitable and peaceful; no illness. But I felt like my sister’s did, very untethered suddenly, and like, uh oh, I’m the elder in the family. I am the eldest. And then there was one of my dearest friends for 40 years. I now visit her in extended care because she has Alzheimer’s and this has been coming, you know, the progression of Alzheimer’s is many years. And it just shocked me that my friend would become lost. And so I started asking questions of my other friends about their health, about their feelings about their future. And my book is about trying to not stave off the inevitable; we can’t, we’re aging. We are going to be and we’re the biggest group that’s ever aged in our country and we’re not aging like our parents aged.
Tom Clark:
But here’s one thing I was interested in, in your book. You say that—particularly women at a certain age—but everybody at a certain age.
Margaret Trudeau:
Yeah.
Tom Clark:
We’re talking 65 and older. You’re saying find your old activist self and rise up.
Margaret Trudeau:
I indeed.
Tom Clark:
Rise up.
Margaret Trudeau:
Yeah rise up.
Tom Clark:
Rise up and—
Margaret Trudeau:
Find our voice. I think I’m no political pundit Tom but don’t you think this demographic, these women have quite a bit of political clout? If we all got out and voted, we could change the government.
Tom Clark:
But the question is what should they be fighting for?
Margaret Trudeau:
Well, we should be fighting for the things that—I certainly make some suggestions—this book is more like a wakeup call. And to be mindful of all these things and find out—just look at what the situation is. One of my dearest—my godmother who is 95, she gave her family home to her eldest daughter and her family, put a granny suite on the side. She said you must have your own entrance. Of course you must. And she wants all of that of course, part of a tax break for the family. And we’re going to have to think about that more and more and more, but in a real way. Maybe we do have breaks for that. I don’t know. Well let’s find out. Let’s get together and really be a voice and be heard. It’s not enough just to have the tax breaks at Home Depot for the railings on the bath. Who’s going to take care of us? How are we going to—if we can’t go into homes—and we may be totally dependent and whose going to take care of us? So that we have to organize ourselves with a plan.
Tom Clark:
Have you been lobbying some people up here on Parliament Hill about this?
[Laughs] He’s read my book. And if you’re talking about—
Tom Clark:
And did he like it?
He did, except he’s so funny because the first page he opened he said oh good, my mom’s writing about sex and old age [laughs].
Tom Clark:
Just what every son wants to read, right?
Margaret Trudeau:
I know. Smashes it closed. Justin is a speed reader so he’s nipped through it in the next few hours and was really delighted that I’d been able to express or articulate the needs that we are all going to be facing. Of course, Tom, the most important is health and what I’m advocating for is that we keep ourselves so healthy and vibrant and alive by healthy food, healthy night’s sleep number one. Get your minds sorted. If you have to go out to a therapist and get rid of old grudges, old things that are burdening you down, get sorted. I suggest that at the beginning of the book.
Tom Clark:
You’re also a mother.
Margaret Trudeau:
Indeed.
Tom Clark:
And that has dominated a lot of your life. One of your sons is about to enter the battle of his life.
Margaret Trudeau:
Ohhh, which one?
Tom Clark:
You know because of one part of your life where you saw sort of the meanest part of politics and now as a mom you know that your son is going to facing that.
Margaret Trudeau:
Oh bullying, bullying, Tom. And I was—
[Laughs] You don’t sound worried about that.
Margaret Trudeau:
I used to have to go to the principal’s office and talk, you know if one of the little ones was being bullied to sort it out with the other mothers and everything. And I don’t know where I should go about this one. Is it the Queen of the governor general?
Tom Clark:
What advice, if any, would you give to another mother whose son or daughter is thinking of going into politics, going into—
Margaret Trudeau:
Oh, I’m going to say first of all, well done. You’ve raised a good son or daughter because it’s to serve to be in government and people should understand that no matter what we think in a partisan way about one candidate or the other or one leader or the other. They’re all serving and they’re all trying to build this country and make it and keep it as the freest country in the world. We have—the Charter of Rights has given us the most freedom anyone in the world. Yay, what a country we have. But we need good governance. Now what Justin would like me to say is, oh, participate. Find out who is running and what they stand for and get involved. It’s our country.
Tom Clark:
Margaret Trudeau it’s always a pleasure talking to you.
Margaret Trudeau:
Thank you, Tom.
Tom Clark:
Thank you so much.
Well, as Richard Nixon almost said once, we won’t have nearly 50 MPs to kick around anymore. They’re the ones who have had enough and are getting out of politics. And as they left the House for the last time, our producer, Janet Silver, asked them for a few last words.
MPs Farewell:
Diane Ablonczy: “It has been an honour and privilege to serve.”
Peter MacKay: “I will remember first and foremost the people.”
Gerald Keddy: “My name is Gerald Keddy. I’m Member of Parliament for South Shore St. Margaret’s. You know the first day that you are elected, you are green as grass. You know most of us, there’s no course out there, it’s about communication and I have often said it took me awhile to figure it out quite frankly that, you know, one of the best skills is to be a good listener.”
Ted Hsu: “The best political moment I had, I think was, I had a private members bill to restore the long form census, bill C626. That extended campaign, I think was one of the best moments of my time here on the Hill.”
Shelley Glover: “Hi there, I’m Shelley Glover, Member of Parliament for Saint Boniface and I’ve been an MP for seven years. I have never had the opportunity to introduce a private members bill. I came directly from being elected to being a parliamentary secretary and of course parliamentary secretaries and ministers are not allowed to introduce private members bills, so I missed a whole piece that I’m really not able to redo now that I’m leaving.”
Jean Crowder: “My worst political moment is a series of moments. Minority governments for the seven years that I was in a minority government, I think we lost a huge opportunity to work together collectively on things that all parties could agree to in the interest of all Canadians.”
Libby Davies: “I’m Libby Davies and I’ve been a Member of Parliament for 18 years. Just that I have loved being a Member of Parliament. It’s the most amazing experience and part of what I have done is I think help mentor, particularly women, to become involved in politics and to break down the barriers that politics isn’t accessible to people. I think our Parliament should reflect the diversity of our country.”
Irwin Cotler: “I was first brought here by my father when I was 11 years old and he looked at the House here and said son this is vox populai, this is the voice of the people. And when I look back I understand exactly what my father meant at the time. I have the sense of respect and deep reverence for Parliament. It was the right decision to leave at this point but I regret that I will not be with the family.”
Tom Clark:
Well, that is our show for today and in fact for this season. We’re off for the summer, back with some great election shows in September. Meantime, a big shout out to my awesome team led by Jennifer Madigan, our executive producer. Have a great summer. See you in September.
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