Gerald Butts

speaker

1,669 appearances 11 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 15 Sep

Gerald Butts’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 11 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 3.

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The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge · Moore-Butts: What Happens "Inside The Room"? · 15 Sep 2026 podcast

Like Bob used to complain about Steve Verhul all the time.

Steve Verhul is one of the most accomplished Canadians.

puck raggers to use james analogy um that the country has ever produced he knew how to kill time and bob knew that time was on our side and not uh steve's side so he would get you know furious behind the scenes about steve verhul and why is he here i know what he's doing and you guys are playing games that's the kind of uh um strategy that canadians would deploy and we take

maybe a little bit of joy from watching the Americans get uncomfortable with that situation, but we're just not, we don't have that need to be heard loudly and to watch ourselves on TV.

And James's point about how we've, over the past 25 years, fostered a highly skilled and educated class of public servants who know how to do these kinds of deals is a really important one.

But I also want to get to the point that you were alluding to, James, and that you made earlier, because I have this conversation.

It's an occupational hazard for me to talk to a lot of Americans.

And a lot of them say, oh, come on, you know, Carney's just playing to the polls here and everybody's really angry.

So Carney is giving voice to their anger.

And I say to them, look, as someone who advised the guy all the way through the campaign and through the transition campaign,

He was the person keeping a lid on this stuff, right?

There were lots of people who thought that Mark Carney should have been a lot more vocal about the way the United States was treating Canada and how it would have been more advantageous to him politically to add a few rhetorical flourishes.

And he...

it was his own, dare I say it, to use the word governor, that kept a lid on all of this.

So while I do agree with James's analysis that you always, as a political leader, and it'd be naive not to think, as a political leader, you have to be in the same octave, so to speak, as your voters.

And if you happen to have the privilege of serving the government of the population at large, and those are two different things.

But I really do believe, and people are going to say, oh, well, Jerry's in the tank for Carney.

But I really do believe that if Mark Carney thought a deal was on the table that was in the interest of the country, he would have signed it and then gone out to make the case for it.

fact that he didn't sign it will tell you above all else he didn't think there was a deal there that was in the canadian interest and um james's point about not allowing a snapshot to be taken and exposed publicly it's exactly the right point nothing is agreed in those deals until everything is agreed in those deals and sometimes you put things on the table you want to take away sometimes you keep things off the table that you want to put on at the last minute to get something that you would want

The people claiming, show us a deal, show us a deal, show us a deal, either have no sense of how negotiations work, they're just trying to score cheap political points, or they can't think of anything else to say.

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