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The Trudeau Formula
60 Plays5 years ago
Justin Trudeau sucks, folks. Author Martin Lukacs' recently released book The Trudeau Formula: Seduction and betrayal in an age of discontent, is a fantastically written and well reported exploration of how Justin Trudeau's style of individualized, hyper image-driven, symbolic statecraft is just a fig leaf for maintaining the status quo for Canada's rich and powerful. From Trudeau's complicity in the genocide to Yemen, to the Liberal Party's history of corruption and deep financial connections to corporate Canada, to the details on how Justin's "reconciliation" agenda was derailed by Indigenous folks this book is a must-read for when anyone tries to guilt you into "strategically" voting Liberal because the Conservatives exist.
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Transcript
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00:00:00
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Introducing 'The Trudeau Formula' with Martin Lukach
00:01:13
Speaker
Friends and enemies, welcome to The Progress Report. I am your host, Duncan Kinney, and we're back here in Amiskwatiwa, Skigan, otherwise known as Edmonton, here in Treaty 6 territory, and we have a fantastic guest today to speak with us. His name is Martin Lukach. He is a journalist and writer who has covered politics for more than a decade from a refreshing and unapologetic left-wing perspective.
00:01:37
Speaker
You can see him most often in The Guardian, but today he is with us because of a timely new book that has been released during election season. It's called The Trudeau Formula, Seduction and Betrayal in an Age of Discontent. Martin, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Duncan. So we're recording this the afternoon of September 11th, I believe. I didn't see you at the Climate Strike March, but I understand you were there. I was there. I was there.
00:02:01
Speaker
I know you're from Montreal, which is apparently just going ham today, like hundreds of thousands of people in the streets. I've heard about half a million people. But here in Edmonton, we also managed to get thousands of people in the streets. What were your kind of initial impressions? I mean, I was at the legislature for about 15, 20 minutes before I rushed off.
00:02:20
Speaker
for an interview with the mainstream media. But I was surprised and really pleased with the turnout. It must have been four or five thousand people, a ton of young people, a ton of radical signs.
00:02:34
Speaker
Capitalism mentioned more than once socialism as a response mentioned more than once as well. So It was nice. It was nice to see especially in the heart of you know, supposed oil country and there is the growing kernel of resistance my favorite sign so far of any of the climate strike events has been the Leonardo Leonardo DiCaprio's girlfriends need a future sign. I don't know if you've seen that one But there have been a ton of great signs and the kids are a super funny and creative and awesome
00:03:05
Speaker
But that's not why we're here today, Martin. We are here today to talk about your book. And I have a two-year-old. I read a lot less than I probably should to keep my brain kind of ticking. But I have to say it's extremely good, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Thank you. That kind of you. It's not just polemic or political theory. There's actual reporting in there. You've kind of traveled all over the country to do the work for this book. And I think it shows in the perspectives you're able to get in there.
00:03:30
Speaker
Thank you.
00:03:35
Speaker
I know it just kind of recently came out. I don't know if you've had a chance to kind of check out the reviews, but I did pick out a lovely review from Amazon. The Amazon review comes from someone named Health Professor. He gives it a five out of five stars. And we're just gonna leave with a review just so people, I mean, we're gonna give you the chance to give your thesis of the book and what it's all about in a
Analyzing Liberal Party Strategies
00:03:56
Speaker
second. But this review is actually like quite a good encapsulation of what the book is all about. Let's hear it.
00:04:03
Speaker
It starts off like this. This is a devastating analysis of how the Liberal Party, under Justin Trudeau, continues to be even more popular with corporate Canada to the detriment of most Canadians than were the Harper Conservatives. On every issue that is important to Canadians, pharmacare, childcare, climate change, precarious work, and others, the Liberal Party agenda under Trudeau is closely aligned with the interests of the rich and powerful. When will Canadians ever learn?
00:04:28
Speaker
Sounds like I might have written it, but I definitely didn't you did not you're not you're not like salting false reviews on Amazon not yet Okay, well good, but but like I mean I'm that was the health professor's take on your book. Why don't you give our audience your kind of like? Capsule review your your like brief thesis of what your book is all about Well, he did a pretty good job, but
00:04:51
Speaker
The Trudeau formula to me distilled is the way the Liberal Party under Justin Trudeau was able to talk this very good game about transforming society on behalf of the 99% while quietly reassuring the 1% that things wouldn't fundamentally change.
00:05:14
Speaker
And in many ways, you know, under Trudeau, this was a kind of Instagram era adaptation of a very long standing liberal formula. The Liberal government, the Liberal party in many ways has operated as this kind of
00:05:33
Speaker
you know, managerial establishment party that is able to kind of like absorb whatever rising discontent there is in Canadian society. Yeah, I think we called it off pod like a shock absorber. I call them the great establishment shock absorber.
00:05:52
Speaker
you know, when necessary, especially when pushed by social movements or by a much stronger NDP, they make selective concessions, you know, adopt, you know, symbolic postures, co-opt the language of social movements. With the ultimate aim though of only giving as much as the system can manage and no more. And you know, this, this, this,
00:06:20
Speaker
technique of rule dates back really to William Lyon Mackenzie King and has had since then really the aim of Basically stealing the political oxygen from the left, you know Mackenzie King talks in the 30s about
00:06:35
Speaker
to talks with Winston Churchill about how he just can't let the CCF steal the, quote, ground of the left. And this is like a reoccurring theme in Canadian politics, where liberal prime ministers and their preferred strategists are highly attuned to that progressive hunger in Canada and have kind of cannily channeled it, played to it,
00:07:04
Speaker
operate as a kind of safety valve, but ultimately they operate as a kind of bulwark against any of the kind of fundamental change that I think majority Canadians want. And this isn't, I mean, this is a feature, not a bug of pretty much all kind of liberal democracies, right? You can even go to not even democracies. Let's go to 1830s France, like the July Revolution, Les Mis, right? That was a popular revolution uprising in the streets that essentially got
00:07:31
Speaker
corralled and directed into installing a new king from like a minor line, right? And it was, this is, I mean, history keeps repeating in this case.
Trudeau's Electoral Reform Promises
00:07:42
Speaker
Yeah, I tell a story in the book, which to my mind is a kind of distillation of this, you know, technique of rule. It's from a fictional book, The Leopard by Lampedusa. And he tells a story about 19th century Italy, which is at a moment of like great upheaval
00:08:00
Speaker
In fact, in many ways, the history of Italy and Canada are very similar in the kind of political formations that develop. But it's a moment of upheaval, and Lampedusa has his aristocratic protagonist, Tancredi, kind of conferring with members of his besieged class. And he basically tells them,
00:08:19
Speaker
If we want things to remain the same, things will have to change. If we want things to remain the same, things will have to change. And I think that's a kind of perfect distillation of the spectacle of bold pronouncements and splashy progressive postures that seemed to many Canadians to foreshadow this disruption of politics as usual. But in fact, ultimately just shored up
00:08:49
Speaker
You know the existing disparities in wealth and power in this country. I mean yeah my line around kind of liberal The liberal political project is that broadly speaking? It's just about you know enough social programs and enough enough gesturing to the people to keep the like pitchforks and the guillotines and the torches away And no more that's exactly it, and I tell a story in one of the early chapters where basically, it's almost as
00:09:16
Speaker
unvarnished as that in terms of the message that Trudeau has for the corporate elite. He gives a speech, which really wasn't reported by any of the mainstream media a few months before he was elected in 2015. And he's speaking at the Canadian Club of Toronto, which is like the ritziest luncheon speaker series of Bay Street.
00:09:37
Speaker
And he basically tells them, guys, look, we're in trouble. Canadians don't really have faith in the economic system anymore. Change is coming. If you guys don't settle for me as the most effective manager of that, then Canadians are, quote, going to begin to entertain more radical options.
00:09:58
Speaker
So that's definitely the pitch. It's either me or the pitchforks. And I think the corporate elite in this country has tended to oscillate between the conservatives and the liberals. And the liberals tend to be their preferred, more enlightened, responsible managers, as we saw.
00:10:18
Speaker
under Harper. And we can talk about that. There was just so much resistance that was provoked, much of which I think ultimately was muted and disorganized under Trudeau. And I think that is one of the ultimate hopeful outcomes of the aforementioned Trudeau formula.
00:10:41
Speaker
Well, I think one of the best parts of your book is is the work that details the kind of extremely deep relationships between kind of Canada's corporate aristocrats the billionaire class and The liberal party since I mean you kind of start at the lake late era Trudeau is Trudeau the elder is kind of where you start about all the way up to present-day right and the thing that
00:11:04
Speaker
Really stuck out to me was this organization that I mean I'd kind of dimly been aware of it formerly called the Canadian Council of chief of executives It's called something else now. What's it called business council of Canada? There's very anodyne named Organization, which is you can make a case has been like one of the most powerful political Organizations to have ever existed in modern history of Canada, but no one knows about it No one talks about it operates in the shadows
00:11:27
Speaker
What the hell are they? The founder of Davos actually calls it the most effective CEO-based organization in the world. So it is basically essentially a popular front of the biggest 150 corporations in Canada. And one of the requisites for membership, I don't think I mentioned this in the book, is that CEOs have to make themselves available for an in-person meeting twice a year.
00:11:55
Speaker
And so this is basically where the ruling class of Canada coordinates their politics. And the Business Council of Canada, for about three decades of their existence, was run by a guy named Thomas Dikino, who was like an incredibly adept lobbyist for this corporate fund. In fact, at one point when Peter Newman did an interview with him,
00:12:21
Speaker
He was asked if he was okay even being referred to as a lobbyist, and I think his response was, yeah, I'm fine with that. You know, the Pope is a lobbyist. So it kind of gives you a sense of his hubris, but also the sense of the power that he and the business council of Canada wielded.
00:12:40
Speaker
Yeah, they definitely maintain a very quiet presence. They have an office in Ottawa that doesn't have any of the imposing presence of Parliament, which is just a few blocks away. But they have been very effective at organizing not just to react to government policy, but to actually write it themselves. They usually set up
00:13:05
Speaker
CEO-based councils where they develop policy, and they often feed that to the federal government. It's literal stone-cutter shit from The Simpsons, right? They keep the metric system down. They made Steve Guttenberg a star. They brought in the GST. I think they claim credit for bringing in the GST. They brought in the GST. They literally, word for word, rewrote the competition laws in this country.
00:13:28
Speaker
basically turned the hand of Mulrooney and turned him from an opponent of free trade agreements to an untrammeled advocate for them.
00:13:38
Speaker
They helped bury and dismantle Trudeau's national energy program. Kyoto, they were instrumental in kind of... That was one of their few defeats. And that had in part to do because Kretien was just... He didn't care about the environment, but he was hell-bent on proving that he...
00:13:59
Speaker
was in front and ahead of the United States of America. You got to do that, if you're a liberal, you got to do the ceremonial image politics. Exactly. I mean, no, Gretchen in many ways predates and prefigures the climate kind of hypocrisy of Trudeau. But what was interesting is that under Harper,
00:14:22
Speaker
The Business Council of Canada was kind of dislodged from their position as the rightful arbiters of Canadian policy. Harper didn't give a crap. He has allegiances elsewhere. He didn't think he owed anything to Bay Street. And they were kind of frozen out. In the first few years of Harper's government, the Business Council of Canada basically had a meeting
00:14:48
Speaker
And they were discussing how to deal with the deficit. The room was canvassed. And basically, all the executives said, raise my taxes. So it was an interesting moment where a lot of the leading titans of corporate class in Canada were like,
00:15:07
Speaker
something probably needs to give. The financial recession has hit people hard. We could be in front of another housing bubble in Canada, another crash. And they had a very keen sense of the rising anger at the elite, at this hoarding class. And what was interesting is that they approached Harper, and he was just like, hell no. I have nothing to do with taxes. I feel like Walter Subchak here talking about denialists. I mean, Tony.
00:15:36
Speaker
I mean, say what you will about the tenets of national socialism, but at least it's in ethos. Harper wasn't willing to raise, I mean, fucking raise taxes on the rich, obviously, good. But Harper refused because he thinks taxes are bad. I mean, he was just, yeah, I mean, he was just totally ideologically dead set against it. And, but what was interesting is the corporate class was like,
00:15:53
Speaker
This is what we need to manage discontent. And they actually came out at that point and started overtly grumbling about this fact, which you've never really seen. And then Harper responded by just completely rebuking these corporate executives. So at a certain point, many of them just started bidding their time, waiting for someone to emerge from the Liberal Party who could
00:16:21
Speaker
you know, make that pivot that I think a lot of the corporate class in this country thought that they needed, which was a politician who would have a kind of softer touch, who could speak to people's grievances, who could, you know, make an effort or make a affected effort at dealing with inequality, at addressing climate change, at making the semblance of moves towards addressing indigenous rights. And Justin Trudeau was definitely their man.
00:16:50
Speaker
Okay, so before we get into our next subject, I just want to play some tape for you. It is two straight minutes of Justin Trudeau saying that 2015 will be the last election held under First Past the Post. We are committed to ensuring that the 2015 election will be the last federal election using First Past the Post.
00:17:14
Speaker
We made it very, very clear in the last election that if we were elected, we would ensure that this would be the last election under First Past the Post. Mr. Speaker, in the last election, Canadians overwhelmingly voted for parties that had committed to moving beyond First Past the Post. The fact of the matter is we committed to making this past election the last one in this country under First Past the Post.
00:17:41
Speaker
Canadians heard loudly and clearly that we made the commitment that this was going to be the last election held under the first-past-the-post system and we are committed to doing that. We proposed real change that will make this the last election under first-past-the-post ending first-past-the-post. That's exactly the commitment we made and that's what we're moving forward with. This election will be the last one held under first-past-the-post. This must be the last election under first-past-the-post.
00:18:11
Speaker
But.
00:18:17
Speaker
Okay. So you get the point there. Yeah. I mean, I think, I think the NDP did account and it was upwards of 1800 times that Justin Trudeau promised that they would change the electoral system. Hand over hard pinky swear. Definitely going to be the last election under first pass the posts. I mean, I see this moment, like just Justin Trudeau's broken promise around electoral form as the moment.
00:18:43
Speaker
of the political awakening, really, where the scales fell off the eyes of so many well-meaning center-left people who paid attention to politics. This was the first really obviously cynical, deeply Big L liberal play that was just a slap in the face to people who had voted for him.
00:19:07
Speaker
Um, you know, especially with organizations like lead now or, or other similar organizations or even unions who had been like, well, I guess we'll hold our nose and vote for the liberals. Doesn't matter. We just got to get Harper out of there. We'll get electoral reform, whatever. I mean, you talk about it in your book, but this is essentially the like crassist political nakedly like opportunistic political move. Like he's kind of made. Would you, would you agree? Well, I mean, it'd be hard to pick hard to pick just one, but.
00:19:38
Speaker
It was definitely, I agree that it was definitely the one that I think shocked most people in the mainstream, soft kind of progressive voters who I think had been won over by it, sort of like lead now, which is quite activist-y. They had totally been taken in by it.
00:20:00
Speaker
And this is actually a policy pledge that the Liberal government, Liberal party has been making for 100 years, right? They've been walking it back exactly 100 years ago as well, I think in 1917 or 1919. But it's true that it was utterly cynical, the way in which they
00:20:20
Speaker
walked it back and we I think got to see some of the way they tried to manage. It's kind of funny because like
00:20:32
Speaker
I actually tacked it on near the end of the book, because I hadn't written it. For people on the left, I think it was not. I hate that phrase of the left not surprising, but it's one we often use. And I think it's good emotionally not to fall into that trap, where you continue being shocked by things as you should be. But I think it was clearly in the cards from early on.
00:21:01
Speaker
It would be so antithetical to the liberal government's interest to actually advance a policy that would so undermine their own standing in the electoral system. They had won so many elections under First Past the Post to think that they would get rid of the system. Yes, I agree. It's an interesting question though.
00:21:21
Speaker
this question of strategic voting, right, which I think was at the heart of why they made this ploy, made this pitch to this kind of broad center left soft progressive coalition, right, which is that like, you might not like us, we might not be your first choice, but we can beat Harper one, and two will implement electoral reform.
Critiquing Liberal and NDP Politics
00:21:39
Speaker
Though I think it was a bit more than that, because I think that the democratic reform piece of Trudeau's program was really the key way in which they won the mantle of the change agent, and were able to outflank the NDP alongside the tax hike on the 1% and the deficit spending maneuver. I think it was Paul Wells who said that there was not a single democratic
00:22:06
Speaker
itch, reform itch that the Trudeau government didn't scratch. The list was long, right? They also talked about reform within the Liberal Party, which I think was really important for progressive rank-and-file membership of the party. They talked about the reform that was gonna come for the civil service, which was hugely important for so many people who had suffered under the hand of Harper.
00:22:32
Speaker
But the way in which they tried to maneuver their way out of the promise was kind of astonishingly cynical. They kicked off consultations publicly, they kicked off the parliamentary committee hearings, and then they also had liberal MPs doing hearings of their own. And in all cases,
00:22:53
Speaker
there was an overwhelming consensus for proportional representation. And when that result didn't suit them, they just, like, restarted another round of consultations. It totally reminded me of this Bertolt Brecht quote, which is like, you know, it's basically like saying that Canadians had forfeited the confidence of the government and could only win it back with a more favorable consultation result.
00:23:19
Speaker
And then they had this absurd pop psychology survey in which they didn't ask people which system they actually wanted, but they asked them what values they ascribed to. And then when that didn't work to their benefit, then they just
00:23:38
Speaker
I think I think it was he just sent he dispatched one of his junior female ministers I think exactly to take that take the hit and just said go eat this in public I mean, this is all to say that strategic voting isn't real You know No one at the writing level has enough data to properly catch the knife and know who the best candidate is to beat the conservatives just simply go out and vote for the best left-wing candidate in your writing and
00:24:02
Speaker
God willing it's a new Democrat if it's not well, that's on the new Democrats, but like strategic voting isn't real It's it's it's just another way. It's just another it's just another way of saying voting liberal but preferring something else yes, but I think that I mean we another name for strategic voting could just be
00:24:21
Speaker
I mean, it's effectively a muzzle. It's a muzzle tactic, right? That's, I think, the more accurate way of looking at it. And it's a muzzle tactic that's deployed by liberals across the world, right? In situations where they have exposed themselves as corrupt establishment parties, they simply turn to their right.
00:24:42
Speaker
and invoke the specter of the threat of the ascendance of a right-wing party, and they just use that to bludgeon the left into not offering a full-throated critique. We saw this in Ontario, where in the two weeks before the provincial election, the NDP looked like they had a chance at defeating Nguyen.
00:25:04
Speaker
the premier and they, the liberal government embarked on this like smear campaign where they went harder against the NDP.
00:25:13
Speaker
than they did against the possibility of a Doug Ford government. And of course we got a Doug Ford government, and with all the disaster that has befallen the province since. But that to me revealed that ultimately the alliances of the Liberal Party are often closer to the Conservatives, the affinities are closer, and strategic voting operates as this attempt to
00:25:37
Speaker
kind of hem in and imprison, you know, leftists from developing ultimately an alternative that can defeat not just the right, but also the liberals. I think this politics of voting so that the people you like the least don't get in, that is unfortunately like a hallmark defining feature of our politics and one that essentially means that we don't actually get to talk politics when we do it. And it results in this kind of extremely stunted body politic where we don't actually get to talk about what it is that we fucking want.
00:26:07
Speaker
when an election happens. It's all about, well, these guys are bad, we gotta defeat these bad guys. And it makes me extremely frustrated. Okay, moving on. But last thing, one more thing too.
00:26:20
Speaker
I mean, I like this point that you make that it prevents us from thinking politically, because the dynamic that gets most missed in this talk about the liberals as a lesser evil, that you have to strategically vote for, is that I actually think that liberal politics are not so much a lesser evil as they are the pathway to greater evil, right? Like, their policies are the ones that pave the way for the right to come into power, generally. And especially in a moment of rising, you know,
00:26:50
Speaker
fascism and surging extreme right, as we've seen, the liberal center, as we saw in the 30s in Europe, just simply can't hold, right? So strategic voting is, I think, also effectively an alibi for paving the way for the right. That kind of politics can't be, on the right, can't be defeated by the liberal center. I mean, we're seeing, under the liberal government of the last four years, a spike
00:27:16
Speaker
in far-right, extreme activity. I think there's three times the number of white nationalist groups in operation since 2015, right? So I don't think the liberals have an answer for that kind of politic. And to double down on it, I think, is to only engender an even bigger explosion on the right down the line.
00:27:41
Speaker
One of the best chapters in the book, in my mind, is the Reconciliation Industry chapter, the one that's excerpted in the Walrus, right? If people want to go read this, by all means, just Google Martin Lukach's name, Reconciliation Industry Walrus, and you'll find it.
00:27:59
Speaker
I mean, Justin Trudeau says the word reconciliation an awful lot, but his government's actions on the ground belie the rhetoric. And I mean, that's a common theme in your book, but it's especially insidious in the context of, you know, Justin Trudeau's relationship with, you know, the various indigenous nations of Canada.
00:28:22
Speaker
I would say that in this case, it's not only that the, it's not just that the actions belie the rhetoric, but that reconciliation has operated as this elaborate symbolic ruse for a kind of shift in late stage colonialism in this country. And yeah, I think in many ways,
00:28:48
Speaker
the reconciliation politics of Trudeau throw into relief like all the favored tactics of the Liberal Party. I mean, basically all of Trudeau's personal skills have come to bear on
00:29:07
Speaker
the symbolic spectacle that we've seen. You've got a line in here. I think it's in the context of Justin Trudeau going and sitting cross-legged in a teepee that was set up in protest during the Canada Day celebrations for 150. Your line here is, reducing politics to the posture of an individual. The art of symbolic statecraft is a skill that Trudeau and his liberal team have mastered.
00:29:31
Speaker
Yeah, so that moment where he kind of took his shoes off. Of course, he showed up in a denim jacket, which he always does at any kind of especially sensitive political moment. Took his shoes off, sat in circle with these indigenous youth protesters, took the feather, told them that he was there to listen. And then after he stepped out of the teepee, of course, Gerald Butz, his BFF and
00:29:54
Speaker
prime adviser tweeted out a photo and said something like, you know, this is the first of many steps on this long journey. And then, of course, he co-opted the hashtag that these young protesters were using, hashtag reoccupation. And it was just kind of like one among many of these kind of moments that were offered to Canadians as this kind of like reconciliation reel, you know, where Trudeau was this living embodiment of
00:30:21
Speaker
like the changes that Canada was going to be making in terms of resetting the relationship with indigenous peoples. Of course, there were the tearful apologies. Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson has this great term. She calls him the weeper in chief. But when you got down to it, my argument is that what you saw from Trudeau and then basically the kind of woke
00:30:42
Speaker
kind of capital that got in behind him was less a sea change than a shape shift, right? So they recognized that Idol Namor had fundamentally transformed the cultural landscape of Canadian society. And it really required a shift in statecraft. I mean, I think the shift in reconciliation politics was in large part a response to the growth and power of indigenous rights, especially in the aftermath of Idol Namor.
00:31:11
Speaker
And I think that, you know, the kind of organic intellectuals in the Liberal Party and in the state realized that they couldn't continue with the status quo when it came to Indigenous issues. Like, you know, even 10 years ago in the last Liberal government, the Minister of Indigenous Affairs had gotten memos that said to the effect, like, you know, keep a low profile on Indigenous issues because that...
00:31:38
Speaker
creates an environment for reasonable policy approaches. Basically, they were saying, like, keep the Indians out of sight and out of mind, right? And that was completely shattered by idol memoir. So there needed to be a shift. And the shift was, OK, we'll accept a new kind of public consensus when it comes to indigenous issues. Like, we'll leave behind kind of overt racism. We'll change the names of institutions. We'll like smudge before every board meeting or committee meeting.
00:32:06
Speaker
But fundamentally, when you look at the actual policies, very little to nothing has changed.
00:32:15
Speaker
What the liberals did to disguise that was just this frenzy of activity. So there's a stat from the Yellowhead Institute, which is this terrific new indigenous rights think tank, where they calculated that if all the bills and legislation that the Trudeau government was preparing had passed, it would represent 40% of all legislation relating to indigenous peoples since 1867. So there was just this dizzying amount of activity. But the end result of it was
00:32:43
Speaker
to actually deep six the land rights, the treaty rights of indigenous peoples and basically accomplish what the Canadian state has been trying to accomplish for 140 years, which is consign indigenous peoples to postage stamp size land bases and give them effectively the rights, the self government rights to administer their own poverty.
Indigenous Rights and Reconciliation Politics
00:33:07
Speaker
That's the model, right? Well, and you've got a line in here that I think kind of
00:33:12
Speaker
really sums that up, right? Reconciliation wasn't the unfinished business of confederation, it was the unfinished business of colonization.
00:33:20
Speaker
Yeah, and I think all of the energies of Trudeau's team and the Liberal government and the state was brought to bear in terms of using reconciliation politics as a way to manufacture the consent of Indigenous peoples for this agenda, and also more broadly to try to win Canadians over to support this agenda, which ultimately was very different from what Harper was trying to do. Harper was just a lot less successful at it.
00:33:50
Speaker
Yeah, and ultimately all this talk of reconciliation, all of these bills, all this activity has not resulted in giving land back to indigenous people, right? No, and that's the point.
00:34:05
Speaker
It was intended, I think, it is intended to act as a kind of preemption of the kinds of changes that we need fundamentally to achieve decolonization in this country. So nowhere in the legislation is there talk of restitution of land, of reparations, of the sharing of resources. The thing that is always sought by the government and the agreements they sign with indigenous peoples is what's called certainty.
00:34:35
Speaker
So basically, the certainty of control over land and territorial jurisdiction. In fact, there's a speech from Jodi Wilson-Raybould, who in many ways was the architect of this incarnation of colonial policies, where she gives a speech to the Business Chamber of Commerce in BC, and she's like,
00:35:04
Speaker
She repeats the word certainty 24 times in the span of a short speech. And that's basically the money line for the corporate class. Indigenous rights pose this.
00:35:17
Speaker
fundamental threat to certainty for corporate resource extraction, for accumulation, and the end goal of the state, the Canadian state, for 130 years has been to ensure the extinguishment of land rights and ensuring Canadian control over, Canadian certainty over the land.
00:35:37
Speaker
Well, this question of manufacturing consent and is a thing, you know, a question that that's at the heart of, you know, a major political issue that has not gone away over the past however many years, and that is, you know, the Trans Mountain pipeline. And, you know, the question of consultation versus consent is one that has not been resolved, you know, in the courts or in the streets. And, you know, I think Canadians have
00:36:08
Speaker
to learn that at the end of the day, if an indigenous nation says no, that means you can't do this project on their territory, then ultimately you can't, or you have to do it somewhere else.
00:36:19
Speaker
But I think Canadians are starting to learn that indigenous communities and nations saying no is actually to their benefit. It's not like indigenous communities anywhere really are opposed to bad projects. They're overwhelmingly opposed to precisely the kind of projects, mining, oil, and gas, clear-cut logging, that Canadians increasingly themselves realize are not the path forward for this country.
00:36:45
Speaker
And I think there's a great deal of fear-mongering that happens, not just from the right, but also the liberal center when it comes to what might happen to our economy if indigenous peoples actually were granted the right to say no. So there's a, you know, I spoke to a source, an environmental lawyer who was lobbying the liberal government to do precisely what they said, which was implement the UN Declaration on Indigenous Rights.
00:37:14
Speaker
And when they were passing this environmental bill, C-69, when they were writing it, excuse me, she was lobbying to ensure the inclusion of the right to free prior form consent over decisions on their territories. And the minister, the chief of staff to the minister of the environment basically told her, no, we can't do that. It would be unworkable. We wouldn't be able to get a single project built.
00:37:43
Speaker
Right, which is just, I mean, it just goes to show how deeply entrenched, not just among the right, but among liberals, is this notion of, you know, the
00:37:56
Speaker
the savage Indian basically standing as an obstacle to the progress of civilization. But I think Canadians thankfully are completely moving in a different direction. I also think that in your book, a bit of analysis
00:38:14
Speaker
that I have not read anywhere else in kind of the Canadian discourse is your analysis of Jody Wilson, Ray Bold, and the reason for her eventual decision to split with Trudeau over SNC Lavin and to defy the liberal and break with the liberal government. And it does go back to this indigenous governance stuff. Can you kind of walk us through that as well? I think that's something that more people need to know about. Yeah, so it's interesting that in this country,
00:38:43
Speaker
unlike saying the states, we have not been able to have, I think, frank conversations about
00:38:53
Speaker
someone like Jody Raybould Wilson. I think to the debate in the US Democratic primaries, where a figure like Kamala Harris has been totally open to critique about questioning whether she, in fact, was a progressive attorney. And it's interesting that Jody Wilson Raybould herself comes from
00:39:20
Speaker
a very similar background, right? So she worked as a Crown Attorney, right, in the Vancouver, Downtown Eastside. Essentially, like, you know... Locking people up for drug use and stealing and stuff. Yeah, for petty crimes, you know, primarily Indigenous peoples. So she was, you know, working from the beginning of her career aiding and abetting the state agenda.
00:39:43
Speaker
And so to a lot of people who have worked as activists in Indian country, her rise to the top of the Liberal Party was not entirely surprising. They saw her as someone who would work closely with the Crown's agenda vis-a-vis Indigenous peoples. And in many ways, she had developed this blueprint for
00:40:08
Speaker
a very narrow kind of affirmation of indigenous rights that to many indigenous activists, land rights activists, effectively aided and abetted the long-term goals of extinguishment of land rights and of gaining certainty over land, right? Would it be fair to characterize that as the like the municipalization
00:40:29
Speaker
Yeah, the turning of indigenous nations into ethnic municipalities with fourth order kind of powers delegated by the state, but having no control over their traditional territories. So she was very much a part of that.
00:40:45
Speaker
kind of policy worldview. And it was for that reason that she was, you know, initially scouted by Paul Martin, then mentored by her, then recruited by Justin Trudeau. And she was in some ways kind of like the crown jewel of their reconciliation agenda. She was the one who helped them burnish their image as
00:41:06
Speaker
as progressive on this issue. And she was the one who actually often carried water for them. She was the one who kind of delivered the harsh news. So for instance, when Trudeau won all this praise internationally for promising to implement the UN Declaration, it was her who was sent to an Assembly of First Nations meeting to tell the chiefs that actually implementing the UN Declaration is unworkable, and it's not going to happen, guys. You get to eat it, essentially. Basically. And what I think is fascinating is that
00:41:36
Speaker
the liberals had, not just with her, but they had cultivated the alliance of several high-profile, establishment-friendly indigenous leaders, like Phil Fontaine and Willie Littlechild and Mary Ellen Terpell and John. And these people were part of manufacturing this consent among indigenous peoples, but when
00:41:59
Speaker
resistance started to build up to Trudeau's reconciliation agenda and the legislative aspect of it, which she had had a hand in writing. It was interesting how it played out.
00:42:12
Speaker
through the summer of 2018, Russ Diboe and many former Idle No More Activists ran this campaign that basically turned the tide. And it got to the point where many of these establishment-friendly indigenous leaders themselves distanced themselves from the Liberal government. So what we had in the fall of 2018 was basically Jody Raebold Wilson, Jody Wilson Raebold as the last high-profile indigenous person standing next to Trudeau's agenda.
00:42:39
Speaker
I think that she realized that she had to rehabilitate her image. It's interesting how when the SNC-Lavalin affair broke in the winter of 2019, a lot of the mainstream media kind of scoured her statements that she had made in the fall of 2018 to find the first inklings of criticism of the liberal government. But what's interesting is that the first day that she criticized the liberal government was the day after
00:43:06
Speaker
Basically, her legislation had been defeated at a meeting that I attended and described in the book, an AFN special assembly meeting where Carolyn Bennett spoke to a room full of assembled chiefs, and literally you could feel in the room a kind of revolt brewing. It was akin to what we saw in 2012 when chiefs marched on Parliament Hill and the mainstream media realized finally that
00:43:33
Speaker
something was happening, namely, I don't know more. And it was the only, there was a conspicuous absence in the room that day at that meeting. It was Jody Wilson-Raybould. And the next day in Saskatchewan, she started distancing herself from the, from the, from the liberals. So I think that her eventual stance, independent stance on SNC Lavalin had everything to do with
00:43:55
Speaker
the way in which she realized that she had to rehabilitate her image in Indian country. And what she did has effectively done that, right? So she's been really romanticized and heroized, especially among white liberals in this country, but among a broad sweep of indigenous.
00:44:13
Speaker
peoples as well who were confronted with the choice of like, okay, like Justin Trudeau or Jodi, right? And so of course many went with her. But it just goes to show I think ultimately the lesson of all this is that indigenous resistance to the Trudeau reconciliation agenda didn't just defeat that agenda, but also I think ultimately led to the revelations that we know about SNC-Lavalin.
00:44:39
Speaker
Exactly. And that is, I think, something I've never read anywhere else, something that other media figures don't have the sources or relationships to actually talk about in a kind of real way. And that's something you're going to get in this book that you're not going to get
Canada's International Role and Policy Critique
00:44:54
Speaker
anywhere else. There's also a couple other really good parts of your book that we don't have time to talk about. But that is the stuff on foreign policy, Saudi Arabia, Yemen. I'm just going to read out a quote here just to tease it a little bit.
00:45:10
Speaker
This is speaking about arms sales to the Middle East under Justin Trudeau's kind of tenure as Prime Minister. There was such a boom in business, in fact, that Canada under Trudeau had become the second biggest weapons exporter to the Middle East after the United States.
00:45:25
Speaker
And that broadly speaking, the kind of Canadian media has just largely ignored Canada's, how complicit Canada is in the ongoing genocide in Yemen. Yeah, I was actually suppressed. Yeah, and that's just like a great part of the book. Read that part. The other part, again, we don't have time to dive into is
00:45:45
Speaker
something that again speaks to Justin's passion and for grand sweeping gestures without any actual fucking follow through is his tweet on refugees and essentially everything that his government has done on refugees. He has cowardice on the safe third country agreement, how much he is fucked with refugees from Haiti. There's so much focus on- Yeah, I mean Canada, Canada under Trudeau actually beat
00:46:09
Speaker
the Trump administration to lifting the ban on deporting Haitians back to Haiti. So when Haitians started fleeing the United States and trying to make asylum here, Canada had already been deporting Haitians back to Haiti.
00:46:25
Speaker
Yeah. And there's kind of so much focus in the Canadian discourse on the horrors of the US concentration camps and the kind of child kidnapping and rendering that's happening there that there hasn't really been any self reflection on what Canada's militarized border regime slash like refugee regime has done to human beings. And it is like there's a huge cost to human lives there that we just have never really reflected on. And it is touched on in the book. So please go buy it and read that part.
00:46:55
Speaker
But the part that we are skipping ahead to is the final chapter. And that is, I mean, I would characterize it as both, you know, a critique of the NDP and kind of what is to be done, you know, broadly speaking, by social movements and the left to, you know, ensure that these these kind of like smooth talking, marketing, slickly marketed kind of faces of neoliberalism are defeated.
00:47:25
Speaker
And you make the case that the Leap and the Leap Manifesto, much maligned here in Alberta, was actually the beginning of a movement that eventually got boomerang and eventually back to Canada, but inspired Alexandria Otecasio-Cortez and the Green New Deal and all of the organizing energy that went into that. Yeah.
00:47:51
Speaker
The leap was the first signs of nationally organized cracks in the neoliberal edifice in Canada. Whether it happens under that name or whether
00:48:08
Speaker
whether it happens under the Green New Deal, I think it definitely shows the pathway to overcoming and supplanting liberal rule in Canada. Canadians, as we know from that forum, there was a forum research poll just a few weeks ago, it showed that 60% of Canadians
00:48:30
Speaker
are... have an open and positive attitude towards socialism, right? Like, that's huge. I'm, like, old enough to know that, to remember when, you know, like, we would wis... We... It was like socialism was a dirty word, that we would, like, whisper in hushed tones at parties, right? The corollary to that, though, is that the exact same polling numbers favor capitalism and disapprove of socialism. Yeah, yeah, I think that probably speaks to Canada as Canadians, like, being too polite.
00:49:00
Speaker
But it just shows that there is a huge openness and hunger for vastly more ambitious politics. We see those kinds of numbers showing up in support for taxation on the wealthy, similar kinds of numbers, if not increased numbers, supporting a Green New Deal style program that brings back redistribution.
00:49:24
Speaker
you know, hikes taxes on the wealthiest, invests massively in the public sphere. I mean, people are ready for it, right? We're seeing it around the world. And I think that the NDP, as was evidenced in their response to the leap when it basically won the convention in 2016, and since then,
00:49:44
Speaker
has not really read the political temperature of the country. They're kind of missing it. Well, the federal NDP are always just kind of like seem to be five to 10 basis points behind where Canadians are on kind of social policy.
00:50:04
Speaker
And we should say up front that you were involved with the formation of the LEAP. I don't know how you characterize yourself as a co-writer. Yeah, co-author and one of the organizers. Yeah. And so just so that that's clear, you're not just speaking about the LEAP academically. You were involved in its promulgation. And we were both at the 2016 Federal NDP Convention, where both the LEAP was discussed and mall care was turfed.
00:50:28
Speaker
And that I mean, I probably wasn't very old at that point. We don't do federal politics. I was there either as an observer or journalist. I can't remember. And
00:50:39
Speaker
It was an interesting moment. It was an exciting moment. You could feel on the convention. It was my first NDP convention, but what I heard from elders of the party is that there hadn't been this kind of intellectual political buzz since the Regina Manifesto. That's what some of the elders told me.
00:51:00
Speaker
For so long, these conventions have been just these quietly choreographed affairs, where no ideas were actually debated. And there was a real sense on the floor that
00:51:11
Speaker
the rank and file of the NDP, we're hungry for a kind of like Bernie Sanders-esque turn for the party. Left-wing populism, baby. Left-wing populism, if you want to call it that. Socialism, if you want to call it that. Revitalize social democracy. I mean, whatever we call it, it's just evident that it's not just within the NDP, but across this country, people are ready to leap at those kinds of ideas.
00:51:37
Speaker
Yes, and the reaction from both the kind of federal NDP firmament as well as the Alberta NDP was, what's the best way to describe it? It was like an immune system reaction. Shitstorm. They tried their hardest to kind of kill these ideas and this manifesto and its crib.
00:52:01
Speaker
And on the reasoning that this would hurt the Alberta NDP's eventual re-election, that the leap was far too radical a document for the pragmatic Alberta NDP to get behind, blah, blah, blah.
00:52:16
Speaker
But when you actually could crack open the leap, it's like 1,200, 1,300 words or something. It is like motherhood and apple pie stuff. Stuff that, again, if you poll on, and you kind of talk about this in the book, if you poll on raising taxes on the wealthy, returning land to indigenous people, et cetera, et cetera, these ideas are quite popular and things that we should be doing. Again, like motherhood and apple pie stuff.
00:52:40
Speaker
this is a common feature on the left. And I think you mentioned it in the book, like the maintenance of power, right? Like the people who tend to be at the top of these organizations aren't necessarily there for a wider political project. They're there because they're interested in maintaining the positions and power that they currently hold.
00:52:58
Speaker
Yeah, some people call it the iron law of organizations. People who run the party are more invested in maintaining the power that they have in the party than they are in building the power of the party without. And that was a big, I think, part of why we saw that reaction from the NDP establishment, who I think share more with the establishments of the other parties than they do with
00:53:22
Speaker
the majority of people in Canada, that's my sense. And class is a big part of that, and being in the political bubble in Ottawa. So many of them were, yeah, but they were more ready to
00:53:34
Speaker
I think, destroy the prospect of us handing to them this recipe for electoral, majoritarian success. I mean, Milton puts it this way. He says, like, better to rule in hell than to serve in heaven, right? Like, these people were more interested in maintaining control over an NDP that would be like, you know, a marginal political force in Canadian society than they were to,
00:54:02
Speaker
potentially open the party to social movements and a much more unapologetically left-wing agenda. Well, and to build a big, broad, popular political party. Exactly. I think they wouldn't have the control they have in the party that they have now, right? And I think for the Alberta NDP, I think in part it's this legacy of the Cold War whereby Social Democrats
00:54:25
Speaker
are just utterly terrified of anything from their left. Like they haven't learned the lessons that the right wing has, which is that it is always good to have someone to your right to act as a kind of stalking horse for more radical ideas. And that's how you shift the political spectrum, right? You shift the gravity of the center. And the right wing has been very effective at doing that in this country for 30, 40 years.
00:54:50
Speaker
And on the other hand, the NDP tends to perceive anything to their left as this childish threat that needs to be spanked out of existence. That will hurt their chances to get reelected. You're not taking politics seriously, et cetera, et cetera. We actually had this conversation, I remember, right after the NDP convention.
00:55:08
Speaker
Avi Lewis got a call from Brian Topp and he was Brian Topp was just like screaming his head off about how they were gonna destroy the Leap Manifesto, right and the pitch we made to him is we said just why don't you think of us as like the radical poll and you guys can be the reasonable ones in the center and together we can shift the sense of what is politically possible and that included like we could
00:55:33
Speaker
you know, help you bring in experts from Germany, right? Where a comparable industrialized country like Canada has overseen the expansion of renewable energy to the point where you have a thousand co-ops providing local benefits, you have 400,000 jobs in green energy, and you have 30 to 40 percent of electricity being provided by renewables, right?
The Leap Manifesto and Political Incidents
00:55:56
Speaker
And they were like, no.
00:55:57
Speaker
We'd rather double down on pipelines, try to out-tory the Tories, and we know what the consequences of that were.
00:56:05
Speaker
Yeah, and it's funny, that split between the Alberta NDP and the federal NDP still exists, they still hate each other. You know, Rachel Notley is not a door knocking for the federal NDP candidate in her writing. It is a split that still exists these days. And I think this last chapter of yours does have some words that Alberta New Democrats need to read. So I mean, everyone should read the book, go and read the last chapter, especially it means you're gonna complete the book. But that last chapter is incredibly important.
00:56:35
Speaker
Okay, I think we got to end it with this final discussion point Martin you just wrote a book on Justin Trudeau Did you not have him in blackface like there's like 18 photos of him in blackface apparently you spent a year and a half writing a book What do you what do you what's your excuse?
00:56:52
Speaker
I actually had heard of the Blackface episode. Which one? Good question. It's one I think that hasn't necessarily been reported yet, though it probably is related to the third one where he's dressed fully in Blackface and in a costume that he hasn't admitted to yet.
00:57:14
Speaker
That one has the least amount of reporting and context around it. I don't know when that was. I don't know where that was. I don't know why. So what I know, what I heard from a source about a year and a half ago was that Trudeau had for a time worked at a white water rafting outfit in the Laurentians, about an hour north of Montreal, and probably in the 90s, late 90s when he was in his 20s.
00:57:40
Speaker
And this place was like a real party, Mecca, where they used to have parties every weekend in the summer. And if you, oh, I should say, too, that it kind of has a kind of totally fitting colonial name. The place is called Nouveau Monde. So for your non-French listeners, that's the New World. And I was told that if you kind of got in with the guys who work at this Outfitters,
00:58:08
Speaker
On certain nights, you would be led to a back room at this place. You'd have your phones and any recording devices confiscated, and they would slip in a video into the VHS.
00:58:21
Speaker
and you would get to see Trudeau in blackface at one of their parties. And I'm not just saying this is like, maybe it's just sour grapes, but I made some effort to try to get a hold of this video and couldn't manage it. And so ultimately I kind of dropped it and I'm glad it's out.
00:58:43
Speaker
because it does reveal important connections between the kind of elite culture in which he grew up that totally countenances making a mockery and disparaging marginalized people's cultures and identities. But it makes the connection to the deeper racial structural inequalities that Trudeau's government has entrenched and advanced.
00:59:11
Speaker
He's always been very enthusiastic about costumes. Yeah, that's his line.
00:59:17
Speaker
Uh, I mean, I laugh about it. It is obviously an intrinsically horrific that this like clueless, privileged, dumb fucking jock has dressed up in blackface multiple times and it, and never, and knew that this was coming. Like from what I understand, this had been known, I think since June or July that this, this was in the hands of, of opposition researchers. Right. I mean, if someone has as much an outsider as me had caught wind of it, I'm sure there were hundreds, if not thousands of people who knew.
00:59:47
Speaker
Yeah, and so it's, yeah, yeah, it's terrible, it's messed up, it's the politics of 2019. Okay, I think that's the entire show. I want to thank you for taking the time to be with us. Martin, how can people find you online and where can people find the book? I'm on Twitter, sporadically, and they can order the book online at a reduced price at www.tudoformulate.com. Cool, and how can people find you on Twitter?
01:00:16
Speaker
Oh, Martin, and because I'm old-fashioned, underscore Luke Hatch. Sweet. All right, well, thanks so much, Martin. If you like this show and want more people to listen to it, go out and please share it. You know, leave reviews at whatever kind of service you think needs to hear about us. Just text the show to your friend. Just be like, hey, I just listened to this awesome show with Martin Luke Hatch, John Kinney. Just text the podcast to say, listen to this. You know, we're in September. It is still September.
01:00:45
Speaker
We are still in the middle of our fundraising drive, so please go to theprogressreport.ca slash patrons if you want to support the work that we do and if you like us. And also, if you have any notes, thoughts, comments, you think I need to hear, I'm on Twitter at Duncan Kinney. You can reach me by email at DuncanK at ProgressAlberta.ca. Thanks so much to Cosmic Family Communist for the amazing theme and goodbye.