Gerald (Jerry) Butts

speaker

396 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 5 Aug

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

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.

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The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge · Encore Episdoe: Moore Butts Conversation #28 - Why Are Pipelines So Hard To Build? · 5 Aug 2026 podcast

And what I learned from that is it's not enough sometimes to do something.

You have to talk about it consistently in the same way.

You have to remind people why you're doing it.

And maybe by the time you are going to be physically ill because you've said something for the 10,000th time, people are hearing it for the first time.

So I think that the Trudeau government

we were a little, you know, I wouldn't say we were bashful about the pipeline purchase, but I would say that we did not consistently articulate the rationale for doing it to the people who disagreed with us, frankly.

And it cost us in both British Columbia and Quebec in the 2019 election.

Well, I couldn't agree with James more on the empathy point.

I think it's in increasing vanishingly short supply these days in our public discourse that people reach across from their own perspective and try and put themselves in the shoes of people who disagree with them and disagree.

It's always, I guess, convenient not to do that because one of the most precious commodities in government is time and you certainly feel it go by faster.

You certainly feel it go by quickly every moment you're there and you think, how can I afford to spend the time to try and appreciate where other people are coming from?

So I definitely empathize with that instinct, but

ironically, I think it takes you longer to get stuff done when you don't take on board points of view that are different from your own.

Uh, I would just say that while I agree with all of that, we also have to, and I know James, you would agree with this.

you have to be cognizant that there are people who are looking to weaponize empathy and there are people who are looking to take advantage of people who want to see the world from their fellow citizens' point of view and just ram through their own perspectives and point of view.

So balancing all those things is the art of government.

And I think James is right that

you're always going to win if four of ten people agree with you on any given day.

I would just add to that that maybe I'm thinking about this because I was looking into the history of these debates.

Sometimes you can have four of ten people agree with you for a very long period of time, and then everybody disagrees with you in the end because of the way you've assembled that coalition and the history books are not kind to you.

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