Transcript Season 5 Episode 33

THE WEST BLOCK
Episode 33, Season 5
Sunday, May 1, 2016

Host: Tom Clark

Guests: Bruce Bartlett, Jonathan Powell
‘Plane Talk’: Tony Clement

Location: Ottawa

Tom Clark: On this Sunday, the U.S. is inching ever closer to the possibility of President Donald Trump. A Republican insider is here on why the rise of Trump might save the Grand Old Party by destroying it.

And then, is saving one life worth risking many more? That’s at the heart of the debate over paying ransom for Canadians kidnapped abroad. We speak to one of the world’s most experienced negotiators.

And, “We’re going to kiss the sky”. ‘Plane Talk’ with Conservative MP Tony Clement. What is next for the former cabinet minister, a leadership run, or maybe a music career?

It is Sunday, the first of May and from the nation’s capital, I’m Tom Clark. And you are in The West Block.

***

Tom Clark: A year ago, not many people would have taken seriously this phrase: President Donald Trump. But the blustery business mogul has almost completed his march towards the Republican nomination and the road to the White House. It’s a journey that has caused violent protests and arrests at Trump rallies right across the United States. Trump’s candidacy has the GOP establishment in fits.

Donald Trump: “Because of me, everyone now sees that the Republican primary system is totally rigged and broken.”

Tom Clark: Joining me now from Washington is Bruce Bartlett, a long-time Republican operative who literally wrote the book on Ronald Reagan’s economic policies and he served in the Reagan and the first Bush White House.

Mr. Bartlett thanks very much for being here. I’ve got to get something straight here. You think that Donald Trump is one of the greatest threats to the Republican Party. You live in Virginia and yet in the Virginia primary, you voted for Donald Trump. Square that circle for me.

Bruce Bartlett: Well the reason is because I think the Republican Party is sick. It’s been taken over by crazy people who believe you should never compromise on anything, who have ridiculous principles that they insist on standing for, even to the point of defaulting on the national debt, shutting down the government, things that I think are simply crazy. And I think that the only way to fix this problem, which is deeply ingrained at the Republican base, is essentially to kill the party and I think that Donald Trump can do that. I think he will, if he gets the nomination, which he probably will, will cause the party to have a historic defeat. And my hope is that in the ashes of that defeat, the party can re-establish itself as a normal, sane, functioning party as it was up until the George W. Bush administration.

Tom Clark: Well take me through that process because by blowing up the Republican Party, are you talking about literally disbanding the party or are you saying that it’s got to go through a process of rebuilding but still as Republicans?

Bruce Bartlett: You know, as you know in our history, we’ve only had one situation in which a major party simply disappeared and was replaced by another, and that was in fact the Republican Party. I think that’s unlikely to happen. What I think will happen is that the people who have gotten control of the party, who call themselves the Tea Party, will be so embarrassed that they will slink away and cease having a major influence in the party. And so, the party can restructure itself, reform itself; have new leadership and move on to a different course. That’s what I think will happen. But the other is a possibility.

Tom Clark: Well okay, but what we do hear though is that if Donald Trump gets the nomination, which you say seems very likely at this point, there’s all these other stories or rumours around that maybe they’ll try and get Paul Ryan in to run as a candidate at the convention against Donald Trump, the possibility of a third-party entrant in order to blunt Donald Trump. What do you think of those plans?

Bruce Bartlett: Well from the point of view of the party insiders, the party establishment, the most important thing they are concerned about, if Trump loses, is to not also lose control of the House and Senate. And it’s possible he would lose so badly that he might cause the Democrats to gain control, at least of the Senate, and possibly the House. And what they’re afraid is that the way a lot of Republicans will react to Trump at the top of the ticket is not to vote for Hillary Clinton, the putative Democrat, but rather, to not vote at all, to stay home and therefore not vote for House and Senate candidates. And so, from this, some people are talking about the idea of—as ridiculous as it sounds—of running a Republican third-party candidate against the Republican Party. And this has only happened once before that I know of in American history and that was in 1860 when the Democrats split into two parties and the result was the election of Abraham Lincoln.

Tom Clark: Exactly. Now, your whole theory though or the premise of what you want to do by importing Donald Trump into the heart of the Republican Party and blowing it up, giving you a chance to rebuild the party, relies on one thing. And that is that Donald Trump loses the general election to Hillary Clinton. What happens if he wins?

Bruce Bartlett: Well, I guess we’ll simply have to deal with it. It isn’t as though I have any control over this process. What’s going to happen is going to happen. The question is how do you react? And right now, we simply don’t know how the Republican Party is going to react because up until right this minute, they still haven’t accepted the legitimacy of Trump’s campaign, the possibility that he will in fact be the nominee of their party. And up until now, they’ve been concentrating on stop Trump efforts, the possibility that Ted Cruz could win. And so they’re really just now coming to grips with the possibility and it’s not clear what they will decide to do.

Tom Clark: You know Bruce, almost under any scenario here, the problem as I see it with rebuilding the Republican Party is that you’re still going to have, as you call them, “the nuts, the kooks, and the crazies, and the Tea Party” and all those sort of fringe players, they’re not going away. They’re still going to be around. How do you hive them away from a new Republican Party? You said that they’d simply be embarrassed. I know a few of them. They don’t embarrass easily, to say the least.

Bruce Bartlett: Well, I think what will happen is what happened after the big Republican loss in 1964, is that party pragmatists—I won’t call them moderates, but just pragmatists—professionals, the pollsters, the consultants. The people who simply get paid to win will have an increased influence in the party and be able to say to the Tea Party people, yes, your principles are correct, I agree with them 100 per cent. We should be doing everything we can. But the problem is they cannot win. And so we have to compromise, no matter how distasteful it is, and nominate somebody in 2020 who has the possibility of winning because victory is everything.

Tom Clark: Bruce Bartlett joining us from Washington. Boy, are we in for some interesting times, and I certainly appreciate you being here today to fill us in on it. Thanks very much.

Bruce Bartlett: Thank you.

Tom Clark: Well still to come, ‘Plane Talk’ with Conservative MP Tony Clement. What does he miss most about being in power? But first, we talk to a top negotiator about the tough realities of freeing hostages abroad. That’s next.

Tom Clark: Welcome back. It is a wrenching question: should ransom be paid to kidnappers or should hostages be left to die? The debate reignited last week in the wake of John Ridsdel’s murder by the militant group Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines. Now, here’s what Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had to say about ransom, followed by a clip of Gar Pardy. He was the retired director general of consular affairs for Canada who was involved with resolving dozens of kidnappings. First, the prime minister:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau: I do however want to make one thing perfectly crystal clear: Canada does not and will not pay ransom to terrorists, directly or indirectly.

Gar Pardy: Because if you take the position here that you want to get your person back, your citizen back alive, then you’ve got to negotiate in one way or another how you conduct those negotiations becomes the issue. But at the end of the day, any time that you hear about somebody being released, in some way or another, a ransom has been paid.

Tom Clark: And joining me now from London is Jonathan Powell. For 13-and-a-half years, he was the chief of staff to British Prime Minister Tony Blair. He was chief negotiator on Northern Ireland and today he is the U.K. envoy to Libya. Mr. Powell, thanks very much for joining us.

Jonathan Powell: Thank you.

Tom Clark: You’ve just heard these two comments; one from the prime minister, one from the retired senior civil servant. Who’s right?

Jonathan Powell: Well it’s a horrific problem and a horrible problem to face, and most of all of course for the families. And one can only feel for the families of the poor man who was killed and of course the remaining hostages. But I think that Prime Minister Trudeau is clearly right. If you pay ransoms, if governments pay ransoms, you’re simply inviting people to come back and take more hostages to make life more difficult for your citizens. So it must be right for governments around the world to come together and say they will not pay ransoms. Only in those circumstances can you stop this happening.

Tom Clark: And yet, you have the testimony from many civil servants in this case who have been involved in these situations who say, well hang on a second, hostages don’t get released just out of the goodness of the hearts of the kidnappers. They get released because some deal has been done, perhaps indirectly by a surrogate, rather than directly by the state. Does that make sense to you?

Jonathan Powell: It certainly is what’s happened quite a lot around the world, particularly in the Sahel and in the Maghreb where you’ve had lots of money being paid to al Qaeda in the Maghreb by foreign governments who’ve wanted their hostages back. Over one period of I think it was 18 months, something like $20 million was paid to AQIM and the result of course of that is that it encourages them to take more hostages and it encourages them to make more money so they can take more activity. So there’s a ghastly prisoner’s dilemma here. If I was the individual who had been kidnapped, I would of course want someone to get me out. I’d want someone to pay the ransom. But as soon as you pay one ransom, as soon as a government starts paying a ransom, then you’re putting your people at risk right across the world.

Tom Clark: And that’s exactly the point that you’re making, that while you—and we know openly some governments like France and Germany actually openly pay ransom, others perhaps do it through surrogates. But how do you break out of that cycle because kidnappers would not kidnap unless they thought that there was a business model that made sense for them. So is there a way of chopping this off, or in fact, do we have to look at an entirely different model going ahead, because I imagine this problem is going to get worse before it gets better.

Jonathan Powell: Well actually at the G7 meeting two years ago in Northern Ireland, all the leaders of the G7 countries agreed that they would not pay ransoms, so that included France and Germany. So if they are paying ransoms thereafter, they’re breaking the word they made at that summit. And the whole point of the summit was to try and get everyone to sign up to not paying ransoms because if one country pays ransoms of course then that makes it worse for everyone. But I think you’re right, you’re going to have to find a new way of dealing with this. It’s quite interesting what happened in New York in terms of dealing with hostages in New York. You had hostage-taking situations. You used to always be met by SWAT teams and usually the perpetrator and the victim would die. Now it’s psychologists who turn up and talk to them and usually get them out. Now I’m not saying that the same method would work with terrorists, but you have to be prepared to engage with them. But paying ransoms and letting it be known that you pay ransoms is definitely a mistake.

Tom Clark: And that’s one thing that you did in Northern Ireland with a hallmark of what you did in your time in dealing with that problem was that you met with the IRA, something that was anathema really to British governments prior to that. So are you saying then that when it comes to, especially radical Islamist groups, as we’ve seen in the Philippines, that we should be talking with them? Is that your advice?

Jonathan Powell: Yes, you should talk to those groups who have genuine political support. Now Abu Sayyaf, the group that took these men and executed this poor individual, they are not a group with political support. They’re a rag-tag army of largely criminal individuals. But right next door to them, controlling most of the territory in that part of the Philippines, Mindanao, there’s a group called the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and there have been over a decade of negotiations with them, so in other words we were talking there to an Islamic group for a long period of time and it worked out. It came to a peace settlement which is at the moment going through the congress in the Philippines. So where there’s a group that has genuine support, you’ll need to engage with it as we did with the IRA, as we have in the past with the PLO, and as we will with other groups around the world.

Tom Clark: You know we’re looking at it from a state point of view, but as you said right at the beginning, it’s a horrible dilemma for the families and the loved ones of the kidnapped victims. What sort of position are they in, especially if the G7 countries, which includes Canada, says we are not going to pay ransoms. What is the family to do under a situation like that?

Jonathan Powell: Well President Obama made it clear in the United States last year that they would not prosecute families who choose to pay ransom. So he recognized the situation of families in those circumstances and I think everyone does. It’s a very, very difficult situation. But the point is that government should not be offering to pay this ransom. If they do, and they’re the ones that can pay these millions of dollars, you’re simply funding more terrorism and making your own citizens more at risk.

Tom Clark: So by extension, you’d say don’t even use surrogates or third-parties to handle these negotiations.

Jonathan Powell: Well this is a classic prisoner’s dilemma. For the individual, if it was me, I’d love someone to get me out of there and to pay a ransom. But the consequences of doing so for everyone else are very serious indeed, and that’s why governments have to take this very hard line on paying ransoms.

Tom Clark: We had assumed, or I had assumed, that this is a situation that is going to get worse rather than better in the years to come. First of all, do you agree with that? And secondly, if it is going to get worse, are there any parts of the world right now that you would advise, especially young people, backpackers, not to go to because of what’s going on?

Jonathan Powell: Well that’s very difficult in those circumstances because as I understand, these hostages were seized from some way away, from Sulu. They weren’t taken from the island where Abu Sayyaf operates. They were taken from some distance away, so you can never be sure where you’re going to be safe. But this does tend to go up and down. If you think about the pirates for example, in Somalia, they were a great threat. People who were going in yachts around the Indian Ocean were being kidnapped from a great distance away and that’s now stopped. The problem of piracy in Somalia is largely finished, and actually, if you think about kidnapping in Syria that is much reduced now. There are no people kidnapped in recent times from western press agencies or NGOs, so these problems do go up and down. And I think if you take a firm line on the kidnapping and ransom issue, you’re prepared to talk to the kidnappers, but you’re not prepared to pay a ransom, then you can gradually bear down on that problem. It won’t solve the problem of terrorism, that’s a much bigger problem that requires a political solution and that requires talking to the terrorists as well as having a military campaign.

Tom Clark: Jonathan Powell, a great pleasure talking to you today. Thank you so much for your time.

Jonathan Powell: Thank you.

Tom Clark: And coming up next, a soaring ballad with Conservative MP Tony Clement on ‘Plane Talk’.

Tom Clark: Welcome back. Well in his more than 20 years in politics, Conservative MP Tony Clement has won a few, lost a few. The former cabinet minister joined me recently for some ‘Plane Talk’ to muse about what comes next. Here it is.

***

Tom Clark: Tony Clement, welcome to ‘Plane Talk’. Good to have you here.

Tony Clement: It’s nice to be on your show and in your plane.

Tom Clark: Be honest now, what do you miss most about not being in power? Is it the ability to change things or the car and driver?

Tom Clark: So obviously I have to ask you, are you going to run for the leadership of your party?

Tony Clement: You know, I haven’t made the definitive decision, but things are moving along quite nicely.

Tom Clark: Look, you could use this moment right now to announce your candidacy.

Tony Clement: I’d like to announce my candidacy … for the leadership of this airplane.

Tom Clark: So you’re probably going to do it?

Tony Clement: I haven’t definitively decided, but we’re moving in that direction, sure.

Tom Clark: Okay. You have an interesting background, personal background. Tell me a little bit about it.

Tony Clement: I was born elsewhere. I was born in the U.K. My mom was born there, I was born in Manchester. My dad was Greek Cypriot and he emigrated from Cyprus to U.K. and then when they got married had me. They decided they wanted to move to a place of opportunity and they saw Canada as that place of opportunity. And I’m just so grateful that they made that decision. So we came over when I was four and went to Hamilton, Ont. and lived there for a few years. My parents split, so my mom was a single mom for a lot of my upbringing. And so that’s part of my background too.

Tom Clark: And that’s when your stepfather, looking forward, John Clement, who was a minister in the Ontario government back in the day.

Tony Clement: So yeah, he was an MPP for Niagara Falls and he was attorney general and solicitor general and consumer minister in the Davis cabinets, Bill Davis, and was summarily dismissed by the population in the 1975 general election. So I got to see that side of it too though. The winning side and the losing side, which is always important to have that perspective, I think.

Tom Clark: Did he shape your politics or were you Conservative before you met your stepdad?

Tony Clement: I was already on that path. Let’s not forget it was the mid-to-late ’70s. The time of Pierre Elliot Trudeau, let’s bring up that name. And a lot of status policies, left-wing policies and like anything, you kind of react to that, and so I became a Conservative and I believed in more freedom and less government, and lower taxes not higher taxes and things like that, and so that stuck with me.

Tom Clark: Have you ever flown a small plane before?

Tony Clement: Yeah, with my stepdad. He was an avid pilot.

Tom Clark: Did he let you fly the plane?

Tom Clark: Do you want to try now?

Tony Clement: Okay, sure.

Tom Clark: Alright. So if we go left, it’s a little left pedal.

Tony Clement: Yeah.

Tom Clark: And a little—you see, just a little tiny bit.

Tony Clement: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tom Clark: Then you just straighten it out, a little bit of pedal.

Tony Clement: Yeah.

Tom Clark: A bit of that.

Tony Clement: Okay. Yeah, not much. Not much.

Tom Clark: Not much at all. And if you want to go up, you just pull back.

Tony Clement: You pull back a little bit.

Tom Clark: Like that. And if you want to go down—

Tony Clement: Okay, okay. I got it. I got it. Yeah.

Tom Clark: It’s okay? Alright.

Tom Clark: Now, I happen to know that besides being an MP and an ex-cabinet minister, you’re also a DJ.

Tony Clement: I am.

Tom Clark: What’s the name of the show?

Tony Clement: ‘Tony Clement’s Rockin’ Shindig’.

Tom Clark: Okay.

Tony Clement: Absolutely.

Tom Clark: We haven’t heard that expression for a number of decades.

Tom Clark: That’s interesting. So you’re into music, everybody knows you play the guitar.

Tony Clement: Yeah, I try. Yeah.

Tom Clark: All the time.

Tony Clement: Yeah.

Tom Clark: At parties.

Tony Clement: Yeah, you know, I’ve got about seven or eight gigs already lined up for the spring and summer in Muskoka and Parry Sound.

Tom Clark: Playing?

Tony Clement: Yeah, I’ll be playing. Yeah.

Tom Clark: Favourite song?

Tony Clement: Oh, it depends on what sort of mood I’m in, but I could go with U2 Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For. I like that soaring kind of ballad.

Tom Clark: Well, we’re in a plane; it’s kind of a soaring ballad.

Tony Clement: That’s true. That’s true.

Tom Clark: So give me a couple of bars of that.

Tom Clark: You’re not bad.

Tony Clement: Well you know, I’m still practicing, but we’re getting there.

Tom Clark: Well that’s alright. Okay. And now these gigs are they paying gigs?

Tony Clement: I’ve had one paying gig so far at the Bracebridge Beer Fest and I got paid 100 bucks.

Tom Clark: Did you declare that on your income tax? Seriously, honestly.

Tony Clement: Honestly, I haven’t cashed the cheque. I’m thinking I’d get it framed.

Tony Clement: Because you know, if things don’t work out in politics, you know—

Tom Clark: Exactly. What is your greatest vice?

Tony Clement: If Lynne were here, my wife, she’d say why are you buying another guitar? Don’t you already have a guitar? And then I’d say well this one has a bit of a different sound to it, so I’m building up the guitar collection right now. So that’s sometimes going over, sometimes not.

Tom Clark: So you spend a lot of money, you go into deficit a lot.

Tony Clement: I make investments—make sound investments that will be appreciated later on.

Tom Clark: That was fun.

Tony Clement: Yes, this is awesome.

Tom Clark: Well that is our show for today. We leave you now with the sound of 100 violinists playing at Rideau Hall for the Governor General last week. The ‘play-in’ kicked off the country-wide 40th birthday tour of violin virtuoso, James Ehnes. If he comes to your town, go and see him. Thanks for joining us, I’m Tom Clark. See you next week.