Former prime minister Joe Clark visited UMFM last week to promote his new book, How We Lead: Canada in a Century of Change. The interview by program director Michael Elves will be aired on Turning Pages Dec. 4.
Since 1958, Clark has been actively involved with Canadian politics. He led the Conservative Party of Canada to victory in 1979, where his term as prime minister lasted nine months. Clark was 39 at the time, and historically Canada’s youngest prime minister.
During the interview with Elves, Clark discussed the collaborative nature of political parties in the past, versus the segmented nature of political parties today.
“[In the past] you were formed, before you got to the cabinet table, with a sense of appreciation of people who came from very different parts of the country.”
He referred to a case in which Brian Mulroney arranged for Donald Mazankowski , an Albertan, and Benoit Bouchard, a Quebecer, to work together. The two were able to learn about Canada from each other.
Clark suggested that present-day Canadian politics is tool-driven and mechanical, referring to robocalls as an example.
In 2011, automated phone calls were sent to individuals on Election Day, misdirecting them to incorrect polling stations. Conservative staffer Michael Sona was charged with purposefully preventing electors from voting.
“There’s been a lot of talk recently about robocalls. People assume only one party uses them. Well, that’s not the case. All parties, unfortunately, use them. And that means the human element—the dynamic of being part of a human entity—has dissipated,” said Clark.
“All parties” or select MPs associated with them—save for the Green Party of Canada and the Parti Québécois—have at one time or another been fined for violating Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission rules prohibiting the use of robocall technology.
Some present-day politicians, according to Clark, use a base strategy to maintain political presence and voters.
“If you come from a party where you know what your base is, you’re going to spend much more time with your base, and you are going to become, if not indifferent to, at least uninformed about, other Canadians. I don’t know that we’ll ever repair that, but it’s like so much: you don’t know what you’ve lost until it’s gone.”
“I think now, with the base, there is a tendency to say, ‘these are not my voters, I’m going to worry much less about them than I should.’”
Clark feels this strategy is dangerous, given that our country has been developed on people working together, such as during national conversations on confederation and medical care.
Although during the interview Clark was careful to say that the current federal government is “not particularly malicious,” in his new book he criticizes the current government’s foreign policies.
“This is not a priority for them, this idea of becoming engaged in other communities. I think they think that [Canada] has a major challenge [ . . . ] in developing our own domestic strengths. [The current government] sees the world [ . . . ] in terms of other developed countries and our capacity to be effective there.”
He commended the efforts of Canadians internationally—such as their aid to the crisis in the Philippines and famine in Ethiopia—but noted that this involvement is a response rather than an anticipation of disaster.
Clark added that the current government is inexperienced in terms of Canada’s previous impact on developing countries.
“A good part of the reason I wrote the book was not just to have it read but because I hope it may have an afterlife. I hope we may be able to take some of the ideas that I put forward and have them examined critically and constructively in public discussions to see if these things are really possible to do.”
To hear the full interview, tune in to 101.5 UMFM on Wednesday, Dec. 4 at 10:30 a.m
