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Front Burner Transcript for October 28, 2024

Host: Jayme Poisson

JAYME POISSON: Hi, I'm Jayme Poisson.

[Music: Theme]

JP: Picture this: It's 2002. A Liberal prime minister who successfully won three federal elections is facing record low popularity, and a growing number of people in his party come out against him. They want him to step down. Does this sound really familiar to you? Well, that is because the leadership crisis surrounding Prime Minister Justin Trudeau really is not the first time that the federal Liberal Party has had a mutiny. A little over 20 years ago now, Jean Chrétien was dealing with a revolt of his own and it eventually led to his resignation. His successor: longtime political rival Paul Martin. Today, I'm talking to two of the backroom strategists who were pulling the strings on his leadership change. And I'll just say, I'm not sure that is how they would characterize themselves. But David Herle is here, political consultant and partner at Rubicon Strategy. I also have Scott Reid here, Martin's former director of communications and principal at Feschuk, Reid. They are also the co-hosts of the podcast Curse of Politics: A Herle Burly Political Panel. And we're going to talk to them today to get some insights on what it takes to take down a prime minister, and how party politics have changed since then.

[Music: Theme]

JP: David, Scott, hello. It's such a pleasure to have you on Front Burner.

DAVID HERLE: Hey, great to be here. Thanks for having me.

SCOTT REID: Absolutely.

JP: So a good chunk of our audience was probably in grade school or high school in the early 2000s. So I want to start, I'm hoping actually you can both walk me through what happened within the Liberal Party and take me through the events that eventually led to Jean Chrétien's resignation in 2003. And David, perhaps I could start with you. Can you remind us where Chrétien stood in terms of popularity and public perception at the end of his second term before the 2000 election?

DAVID HERLE: Okay, Jayme. I mean, we need to go through a little bit of history, so I'm just going to take a couple of minutes.

JP: Please.

DAVID HERLE: It's really important to remember the political context of the 1990s. The Liberal Party was winning massive majorities and winning, for instance, almost all the seats in Ontario. Even seats that, you know, you look at them demographically and the Liberal Party has no business winning them. And we were winning them for two reasons, one of which is that the 1993 election had blown the Progressive Conservative Party to smithereens.

SOUNDCLIP

NEWS PRESENTER: It was a humiliating blow for a party that headed into the election with 154 seats. It came out with only two and will lose official party status.

PETER MANSBRIDGE: The Liberals have a huge majority government. I mean, this is 180 seats. It's one of the biggest majorities the Liberals have ever had.

DAVID HERLE: Taken off their Quebec vote and sent it to the Bloc Québécois. Taken off their Western vote and much of their Ontario vote and sent it to the Reform Party. And that, that situation existed right through the 1993, 1997 and 2000 election campaigns where there was no party on the right challenging the government. At the same time, the NDP were at historic lows in support. [JP: Right.] So the Liberal Party had the field all to itself.

JP: Super weak opposition.

DAVID HERLE: Super weak opposition. Field all to itself through the 1990s. By 2000, that was starting to shift. You could tell that the Conservatives were starting to get their act together and there was starting to be some real rust accumulating on the Liberal government. It was starting to accumulate scandal: spending scandals at the HRDC department, ministers resigning over personal scandals. And then looming in the background ever larger was the sponsorship program and the investigations, both criminal and otherwise, that were going on into the sponsorship program.

SOUNDCLIP

PETER MANSBRIDGE: "Unacceptable." That was just one of the words used today by federal Auditor General Sheila Fraser in describing three government contracts she investigated. Contracts worth over one and a half million dollars, awarded without competition, Fraser says, by public servants who broke nearly every rule in the book.

REPORTER 1: The contracts in question went to Groupe Action. The agency was asked to deliver three reports in the late '90s on how Ottawa should promote itself in Quebec through the sponsorship of festivals and sporting events.

DAVID HERLE: So going into the 2000 election, there was considerable restiveness in the caucus, primarily. Somewhat in the party, but in the caucus, primarily, about Mr. Chrétien's continued leadership. And the biggest difference... one of the biggest differences, because I don't actually think it is the biggest, but one of the biggest differences between now and then is that there was a tremendously popular alternative. Paul Martin looked like a political Goliath. He was massively more popular than Mr. Chrétien was already, prior to 2002. And so people were starting to look to him.

SOUNDCLIP

REPORTER 2: A whisper campaign says he could quit if he isn't given a shot at the top job and soon.

DAVID HERLE: That takes us up to where I presume you want to go, to the famous Regal Constellation meeting [JP: Yes.] before the 2000 election. And I'm going to give Scott a minute to-- a chance to jump in here in just a minute. What happened in that meeting was that we knew that the caucus was getting increasingly anxious to go after Mr. Chrétien. We in the Martin world did not think it was the appropriate time to do that. And we convened a meeting of the caucus to try to persuade them that we had a plan in place that would result in Mr. Martin being the leader, [JP: Mm-hmm.] but not in a run at him at this convention in 2000. And so we met with them, we presented polling data, we presented our strategic plans, etc., and we thought we had it all in a box. And then it turns out that the caucus didn't agree with our strategy, and they went out themselves and publicly started calling for Mr. Chrétien's resignation.

SOUNDCLIP

REPORTER 3: Stan Keyes is one of several Liberal MPs daring to raise questions about Chrétien's leadership. He says the message is coming from his constituents.

STAN KEYES: ...and they're saying, You know what, Jean? Maybe you should step aside. You've been there twice for us now, you've done great things for us. You're at the crescendo of your career... Pass the torch.

DAVID HERLE: And then, in the old terminology, we had people on the beach and we had to go save them. [laughs]

JP: And Scott... Let me bring you in here. Why did you think it wasn't the time and then why did all of these MPs disagree with you? I guess, like, why did they go out onto the beach? Would that be the right way to use that metaphor?

[David and Scott chuckle]

SCOTT REID: I'd say, I'd add a couple of things. One, the-- we didn't think it was the appropriate time. It's important also to put context around what was the Martin operation. People talk about it as though it had been something born years earlier, possibly as early as '89, '90; never gave up the ghost in the 1990 leadership and it sustained itself as this snarling, seditious beast. And that's not true, actually. It was a machine that was built for succession, and it had been built for succession. And as David said, you know, in many ways, 2000 was an enormous triumph for Mr. Chrétien. And he called an early election.

SOUNDCLIP

REPORTER 4: Are you going to run again, Prime Minister?

JEAN CHRÉTIEN: Of course. I'm in good shape, eh? Come skiing with me.

SCOTT REID: He really outplayed Stockwell Day magnificently. But the measure, as David was saying, and the reason all that context is so important about the electoral landscape then, is that that wasn't the-- winning... election victories was, peculiarly, it wasn't actually the measuring stick for Mr. Chrétien at that time. The measuring stick was, what are we going to do when inevitably these guys get their game together? And what is our plan for longer term and sustainable victory? So what happens after that? Is Chrétien going to be the leader again? So we had built this as succession. People didn't talk openly about running a leadership. That wasn't politic in Ottawa. Even among ourselves, we hardly talked about it. But now you have this moment with the March 2000 convention. And members of Parliament are out there and they're saying, we want him to step down. And a truly startling thing happened in March 2000 at that convention, and I stood beside Mr. Martin for it. After two, three days of turmoil and political coverage, and it looks like there's, you know, allegations of disloyalty, Mr. Martin did something that hadn't happened up until that time. He marched into the middle of the convention floor, stood there with the national media gathered around him, members of Parliament, party executive members, delegates -- I'm talking hundreds at this convention. Hundreds of people surround him in the middle of this sweaty bear pit. And stood there and declared to the national media two very simple things: one, I'm not trying to take Chrétien down. Two, when and if he leaves, I will be a candidate to succeed him. That simple, obvious truth, which nobody wanted to give voice to. People wanted to play this cloak-and-dagger, you know, palace intrigue game and nobody wanted to acknowledge the truth. So once he acknowledged the truth, once that was lanced, then everybody just kind of calmed down. And interestingly, at that point, I think Mr. Chrétien's position weakened discernibly and Mr. Martin's strengthened, because Mr. Martin was being straight, and at that point, Mr. Chrétien found himself in the position of looking like he was wanting to cling on in defiance of the party's wishes and the caucus's wishes.

JP: Huh. That's interesting.

SCOTT REID: And the country's, for that matter. If you looked at when you asked the country, 'Who did you want to carry the country forward?'

[music]

JP: So, you know, as we've talked about, he wins that election in the fall of 2000, right. Chrétien, he wins a majority.

SOUNDCLIP

PETER MANSBRIDGE: ...the Liberals will form their third majority government in a row under the leadership of Jean Chrétien, which means the big gamble to go early, go for that majority, was a winner.

JP: But then, just two years later, he's facing this crisis of leadership again. And he fires Martin from his cabinet for campaigning to take his place.

SOUNDCLIP

REPORTER 5: A political drama that's been brewing for years has exploded. The bottom line: Finance Minister Paul Martin is finance minister no more.

JEAN CHRÉTIEN: This has nothing to do with the situation in the Department of Finance and the economic policies of the government. There were other problems that existed that was making it difficult for him and difficult for me.

PAUL MARTIN: Unfortunately, in recent months, and certainly during the last few days, the working relationship between myself and the prime minister had deteriorated. It was therefore, it was threatening to impede our focus on the very important choices that confront us as a nation.

JP: So David, what happened then? Like, what's your version of events?

DAVID HERLE: Well, I think that there was a general perception in the Liberal Party that the 2000 campaign was going to be Mr. Chrétien's last election. And there were a number of people, not just Mr. Martin, that were lining up, setting up campaigns to replace him. Alan Rock was doing that and Brian Tobin was doing that. And Mr. Chrétien, you know, wasn't going to resign. He was going to stay on. And so a couple things happened that led to the, that led to the crisis. One of which was that Mr. Chrétien's situation was changing rather rapidly from prior to 2000, after 2000. His popularity started to drop quite precipitously. There's polling that shows you that 70% of Canadians wanted a change in the Liberal leadership around 2002. So his situation was changing. Sponsorship was becoming more prominent. The government was looking older. And the government was-- and the opposition was getting its act together. Layton was on the scene and the Conservatives were getting their act together and so everything was starting to get real. And back in those days there was something called the Liberal Party, which was an actually functioning organization independent of the legislative branch of it. And it had a regularly scheduled leadership review vote coming up in February of 2003. It had been actually delayed for a year with our agreement to give Mr. Chrétien time to step down prior to it. But he wasn't going to step down prior to it. So he got tired of all the leadership machinations going on under him, and he told everybody that they had to stop. We did not stop, and that's when Mr. Chrétien fired Mr. Martin from the cabinet. But I do think it is really important-- if you're trying to compare to today, Jayme, here are what's similar and what's different. There is a strong desire in the country for change. Stronger now, I would submit, than was then. But nonetheless, a strong desire for change. Mr. Chrétien's favourability numbers had dropped 17 points from the 2000 election by 2002. And the party had moved on from Chrétien. A list of caucus members that he put out that were supporting him, could only amount to 50% of the caucus, including cabinet members. So there was a lot more caucus solidarity against him than there is now. There was an alternative who was clearly going to do better, and there was a mechanism imminent that was going to make that clear. Only one of those three things exist today.

[music]

JP: Given everything that was swirling around Chrétien at the time -- the low polling numbers, the sponsorship scandal, all of these people moving against him -- why did he want to stay on as prime minister? Like, why? He spent-- he had three terms, you know. You know, why didn't he want to go?

DAVID HERLE: Scott, do you wanna go first? 'Cause you know my answer.

SCOTT REID: And you know my answer. And our answer is the same answer. And it's, and it's...

JP: I don't know either of your answers. Yeah. [chuckles]

SCOTT REID: Well, it's damned obvious. The kind of people that imagine they might become prime minister, and who then organize their lives with all the work, all the sacrifices, all the blood and shoelaces that is required to actually become prime minister, are precisely the kind of people who have zero intention, no inclination, and actually can't even conceive of themselves leaving the job as prime minister. So that is a, that is a startling correlation between now and 2002. But to be fair to Mr. Trudeau and to Mr. Chrétien, that correlates with anybody and everybody who's ever held the position of prime minister. They do not wish to leave that post. If you're built to make politics the centre of your life and your ambition is to occupy the highest office, you're not going to want to willingly leave it, and nor can you imagine that anybody else, any of these pretenders and fools could do it better than you. So that's, that's why.

DAVID HERLE: There's an iron law of great power, Jayme. An iron law of great power. Nobody gives it up. They can lose it or it can be taken from them, but nobody gives it up. And nobody in the history of Canada has voluntarily resigned the prime ministership.

JP: I might put forward that perhaps there needs to be more women in... [laughter] in these positions.

DAVID HERLE: Well, that's, that assumes that women would change the position and that the position wouldn't change women. But we'll have to find out in the future, hopefully.

JP: I have a feeling it might be the former. [laughter] But anyways, it's a different-- I digress. Why is there no mechanism today, and why is there such weak opposition in caucus compared to what we were seeing in the early 2000s?

DAVID HERLE: The reason there's no mechanism inside the party is that when Mr. Trudeau assumed the leadership of the party, and then won the subsequent election...

SOUNDCLIP

NEWS PRESENTER 2: Global News is now projecting a Liberal majority government. Justin Trudeau is the new prime minister. It is the Liberals' first federal election win since 2004, the first time they will form a majority government since 2000. That was under Jean Chrétien...

DAVID HERLE: It was like a literal magic trick. It was like we had gone from assuming the Liberal Party might be defunct. [indistinct] the 2012 convention of the party was like a wake. It was like people who were seeing, seeing each other for the last time. And then, so, you really cannot overstate how dramatic Mr. Trudeau's resuscitation of the Liberal Party was and all the knock-on effects of that. One of them is that he had complete moral authority to do whatever he wanted. And one of the things that he did was bring in dramatic constitutional reforms to the party's mechanism, that turned the party basically from an independent organization -- that, as I said, was independent of the legislative branch -- into really an extension of the leader's office and what is effectively a fundraising organization as opposed to a set of riding associations that were independent power sources. And in the process of that, eliminated leadership review votes after successful election campaigns. And so Mr. Trudeau does not-- there is no, there is no party mechanism. Not just isn't there a mechanism like a leadership review vote, there actually aren't the centres of power that... Mr. Chrétien knew that the ridings were against him now. That the riding, the people that were presidents of the Liberal organization across the country were against him. Mr. Trudeau doesn't have any fear of that whatsoever.

JP: And so, just explain to me why they did that. What was the reasoning at the time? Were there objections from people at the time that perhaps this could result in exactly this, down the road?

DAVID HERLE: I think that there was this notion that they were creating a movement, not a political party. And so they changed a lot of things that were normal to political parties, such as having to pay money to become a member and being a member. They changed all that to a free supporter category. And so they did that, I think, probably for two reasons. One of which is political parties are annoyances to the elected executive, to the elected executive and legislative branch. And second of all, I think they were trying to replicate the Conservative Party, which had very successfully centralized their operations, centralized fundraising, centralized political operations, and that that was the current modern way to do politics.

JP: Okay. And then, Scott, what about the caucus?

SCOTT REID: Caucus, I think, is a super interesting question, because the premise of your question is that there was a far greater expression of discontent in 2002 than now, and I'm not entirely sure that's true.

JP: Oh, that's interesting.

SCOTT REID: I think that what's... You had a larger number of members of Parliament by some point. Certainly after. When Mr. Martin was fired from cabinet and the Globe and Mail ran a front page with a photograph of Mr. Martin, a headline that said "Fired," the disruption that caused, the backlash that ensued against Mr. Chrétien was enormous. And so you had many, many members of Parliament stepping forward saying they felt this was a mistake. Even cabinet ministers at the time saying it's a mistake looking for change. So in that sense, it's a greater expression. You also had people, obviously, that wanted-- they had a vested interest in Mr. Martin becoming leader. They thought that meant that they would find themselves politically promoted and they would replace some of Chrétien's cabinet ministers and so on and so forth. In some ways, I think what's happening to Mr. Trudeau now might be more alarming. Because Mr. Chrétien could always point to caucus members who were speaking out and say, Well, those people are just serving their own self-interest. They think that they're going to get a car with a flag on it. They're going to get a staff, you know. Mr. Trudeau can't really do that. Because there is no alternative, that's not motivating them. It's in some ways a more damning, more fundamental judgment just on his leadership. They're not saying, We want you out for this person. They're just saying, We've come to the view that you simply are a barrier to future success, and we can think of no alternative but to voice it. So when you get 24 members of Parliament who are willing to say that, on the one hand you can say it's weaker. On the other hand, you can say it's alarming because it isn't actually part of some centralized, organized, candidate-rooted sedition. The other thing I would say is that it's an iceberg rebellion. Twenty-four are what we can all see above the waterline. But Mr. Trudeau knows and his team knows, and I think we all know, that beneath the waterline there are many, many, many more members of his caucus who feel the same way and just haven't summoned the courage to go to the microphone, and maybe for good reason. But it is not as though 24 is representative of the entirety of the opinion that change needs to occur.

DAVID HERLE: No, but these caucus members under Mr. Trudeau have a very different sense of who they are, what their relationship to the leader is and what their authority is than people did in those days. These people were all elected, almost, for the first time under Mr. Trudeau. They think [indistinct] owe their seats to him. They think he is the Liberal Party. He has defined the Liberal Party, and he, from the beginning, put them in a smaller role than caucuses have traditionally been. When he went to the very first caucus and brought his staff with him, which had never been to caucuses before in the Liberal Party, and brought his staff with him and said, They speak for me -- in other words, You deal with them -- that was the most significant downgrade of caucus I have ever seen.

[music]

JP: You know, I take your point that 24 is a significant number, but it's really unclear what might happen now, right. I just want to read you guys a quote from New Brunswick MP Wayne Long, who's one of the only MPs to actually come out publicly, right, and say that he would like Mr. Trudeau to step down. This is what he just told my colleague, Rosie Barton. "Every MP is in their own kind of space."

SOUNDCLIP

WAYNE LONG: I'm not sure what people expect us to do. Like, we went in, we expressed our opinions to the prime minister. Strong opinions. We asked him to step down. You know, those that think that we're going to like, you know, storm Parliament or block the gates or whatever. It's like, a lot of it is up to each individual MP. [ROSIE: Sure.] I'm going to keep talking...

JP: So they, I mean, they have a deadline of Monday the 28th, and you could possibly make the argument that it seems like kind of a disorganized effort at this point that seems like it's fizzling out. But, you know, I say this with the caveat, what do I know?

DAVID HERLE: I mean, I think it will do exactly as Wayne Long said. I don't think they have a leader amongst them who's driving this. I don't think it's a tremendously co-ordinated effort and I think there's a lot of trepidation. I think that the dissidents sense that maybe the rest of the caucus is in some middle position, who might be alienated by a full frontal assault in the public on Mr. Trudeau, which would be kind of the next step. I mean, the real missing thing here -- and I think it's fatal to their effort -- is the mechanism. They have no "or else" to say to Mr. Trudeau.

JP: But they could. They could come out publicly, more of them could come out publicly. Wouldn't that be quite something to see? They could, I've heard they could sit independently in Parliament. Would any-- do you think any of that?

SCOTT REID: I think that they made a tactical error in proposing this October 28th deadline because they don't have an answer to their own calendar. What are they going to do on Monday night? Are they going to move? Are 20 of them going to move and sit as independents? I will bet not. Will they start voting against the government and their own careers and bring down the government? I do not believe that. But if I'm Mr. Trudeau, that's cold comfort. Even if there's no TV movie of the week moment where you go, bom bom bom, and now they've lowered the boom, you know that this broad attitude of discomfort exists within even your own caucus. You know that there's polling that shows you're trailing badly. And you have to face the prospect, maybe not on the 28th of October, but November, December... you're sitting around, you know, when the fire is burning high and the scotch is getting low, and you say to yourself, I might end my political career with a catastrophic loss that could be made more catastrophic. 2011, maybe 1993-scale loss. And in part, it's because it's so damned obvious that I don't enjoy the support of my own team. And everywhere I look, there are people that would, whether they'll say it or not, prefer I leave. And I just think the weight of that at some point starts to really, really affect his thinking.

DAVID HERLE: You know, I remember, I remember, Jayme, that I remember thinking that the arse was really out of the Chrétien thing when his brother came out against him. [JP: Right.] When his brother, when his brother said he should step down.

JP: Right.

DAVID HERLE: So Sacha, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

JP: [laughs] Sacha Trudeau? Yeah, okay. [laughter] Let me ask you guys finally, just about that one final ingredient that was present in the early 2000s that seems to not be present today, which is the existence of a likely successor, right. And you hear people talk about this a lot -- well, who would it be? Who could it be? And I just would love to hear your thoughts, both of your thoughts on that. Do you think there are people, legitimately, or do you think that they have a point, that there is not a very obvious candidate?

SCOTT REID: Well, in terms of leadership aspirants and the effect in the near term on Mr. Trudeau's position, I think that's an interesting question. There is clearly no alternative. There's no Paul Martin. There's no Jean Chrétien to Turner. There's no Turner to Pierre Trudeau. It's like that doesn't exist. And around that, you therefore don't get this congregation of opinion and political courage and activism. So that's to Mr. Trudeau's great advantage. On the other hand, there is an enormous cloud of uncertainty over what will happen and what comes next. What does that mean if you're one of the four or five people that would like to succeed the prime minister? It means that you don't know if there will be a leadership race, which means you can't afford to not prepare for that option. And so in a strange way, what you might see is this uncertainty and this doubt that's created, and doubts as to whether or not the prime minister can hang on despite his intention. You might see that it forces a number of leadership aspirants, even those who are in his cabinet, to begin to quietly and maybe not so quietly organize for the possibility of his departure. And that again kicks off another source of tension and pressure on him. You know, Champagne doesn't want to just abandon the field to Mélanie Joly. Joly doesn't want to abandon the field to the prospect of Mark Carney. Mark Carney's thinking about a couple of others. Christy Clark's banging the cymbals as loud as she can. And so you start to see people teaming up, lining up. And all of that puts Mr. Trudeau in the rearview mirror, which is a bad place to be when you're the sitting leader and prime minister.

JP: Okay. Gentlemen, I could really, I could keep asking you questions all day. This was such a pleasure. I really want to thank you so much for coming by. And I do hope that you'll consider coming back on again soon.

DAVID HERLE: Any time. Thanks.

SCOTT REID: Absolutely. Would love to you. Thanks so much.

[Music: Theme]

JP: All right. That is all for today. I'm Jayme Poisson. Thanks so much for listening and we'll talk to you tomorrow.

Lessons from the last federal Liberal mutiny - Transcript

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