Do we believe in celebrating all diversity?
Rosemary: When Jagmeet Singh was running to lead
the New Democrats
he confidently and carefully took on an angry heckler...
- We welcome you. We welcome you.
Rosemary: ..giving Canadians a glimpse of the
savvy politician he might be.
[cheering]
Less than two months later he became leader of the NDP
and was seen as a fresh, charismatic voice.
One that could possibly rival Justin Trudeau for that young
progressive appeal.
Crowd: [chanting] Jagmeet!
Rosemary: But in the 16 months or so since then
it’s been a bumpy ride.
Reporter: Tell us whether or not your caucus is behind you
in supporting this bill.
- At this point, I'm --
Just give me a moment. I’m going to clarify.
[indistinct conversation]
So yes, right now our caucus is in support of this bill.
Rosemary: Singh has struggled to find his place
on the national stage and though born in Ontario,
he chose to run for a seat out West in Burnaby South.
- Hey, how’s it going?
Rosemary: He's now busy trying to win what many are calling
a do or die by-election on February 25th.
And with just nine months until a federal election,
he also needs to prepare to lead an entire party,
one that's had at least eight MPs either resign
or announce they’re not running again.
- Hey, how's it going?
Rosemary: I met up with Jagmeet Singh earlier this week
in Burnaby.
Has the job been harder than you anticipated?
I knew it was going to be a tough job.
I knew that getting into this role it would be --
It wouldn’t be an easy walk.
I had a bit of training as deputy leader in Ontario,
seeing the work that Andrea did as leader,
and I knew that there was a significant gap
between being a deputy leader and being leader.
And then the heightened intensity
of being a national leader,
so I knew that it was going to be difficult.
What do you say to people who say that there've been times
where it seems that you’ve been unprepared?
You know, that famous Guy Caron moment where you're like,
"I don't know",
and there have been a couple other moments like that.
Did you maybe not realize the preparation it was going to take
that you really have to do a lot of homework
when you want to be a federal leader?
Well, I know it takes time to do preparation.
Throughout my life
all of my studies have required lots of prep.
I was a defence lawyer for a number of years
so it takes a lot of work to prep for cases so
there’s a lot of work involved in everything that people do.
And it's a learning curve
and there's things that I'm going to improve on,
and I look forward to those opportunities to improve.
But did that surprise you
when people sort of called you out for maybe not being
as well briefed as you should be for this job?
On the idea of receiving criticism or feedback on that,
I can take that.
I know that comes with the territory.
It comes with being a national leader, and that’s okay.
At one point it was reported you weren’t making any money
because the party's having some issues and so you said
I’m not going to take a salary. Has that changed?
No, I’m not taking a paycheck from the party.
Are you taking a paycheck from anywhere?
- No, I've got support from my family,
I've got support from friends. I'm doing alright.
I've got a lot of resources and
a lot of people that help me out and support me.
So let's talk about how the party is
struggling a bit financially.
People say it takes maybe 40 million bucks to run a campaign.
You’re a far cry from that.
We've got challenges of course,
but we are seeing a positive upswing
and we're going to see more and more of that.
We're seeing people that are let down on things like
commitments to the environment, and to reducing our emissions,
and to tackling climate change, who are not feeling that there's
a Liberal party that's actually connecting with them,
or a Conservative that cared about this concern,
and they're looking at us as leaders on this file.
I want you all to know that I intend to run
in the upcoming by-election here in Burnaby South.
Rosemary: Did you choose the riding to take advantage
of your pipeline position?
- I chose the riding because there's a lot of passion
in this riding on the environment,
and people want to see us use our public dollars to invest in
the green energy of the future and clean green renewable jobs
that are available, and a sustainable economy.
So there’s a lot of support for that position.
But the pipeline too. You knew that you were --
you had come out against it,
and you knew this was like the epicentre of that debate.
So you knew that was going to
give you an advantage, certainly.
- Well, I know that I've taken a position on that,
but broader than that, people are concerned about
the pipeline, but they're actually
even more so concerned about what we're doing as a nation
and how we’re spending our public resources.
That’s what I’ve heard at the door again and again.
People want to see us commit to a transition to
a greener economy where we actually create great jobs
and supports for communities that don't have those jobs,
and also reduce our emissions, and that’s a really big thing.
I hear that across the riding.
If you don't win,
and obviously I know you don't want to think that way,
but will you stay on as leader? Are you committed to that?
I will be the leader that leads
the New Democratic Party into the 2019 election.
I’m confident we're going to do well in this riding.
Tom Mulcair says you can’t stay.
What do you say to him?
- What I'm concerned is not about my future.
I've never been concerned about my own future.
I’m concerned about the future of this country.
And the future of this country will depend on having a strong
support or voice in the corner of people
saying, hey, we need to have medication coverage for all,
we need to make sure we invest in housing.
There’s got to be a better way.
Are you surprised that Tom Mulcair feels the need to
comment on what you’re doing so often?
I mean, that’s not what I’m hearing at the doors.
I knock --
He’s doing a lot of backseat driving.
I knock on doors every day. It's my job right now.
I'm hearing people
and that is not what they’re concerned about.
They're concerned about -- they're not saying --
But I’m not asking what the people at the doors are saying.
I'm asking you --
But that’s what I’m worried about.
- That's fine, but I'm asking you, you see the
former leader of the party who got dumped
talking and criticizing things that you've said and
your position going forward.
That doesn’t bother you, or you don’t think that's strange?
Again, I really am focused on how do I help people?
And that’s not something that I’m hearing at the doors.
That type of criticism is not relevant --
What he says you’re not hearing at the door’s?
That’s not what people are talking about.
And you don’t care? You don't care that he's saying that?
People can, you know, raise concerns if they want.
I'm worried about what
people who are struggling are telling me,
and how I can make their lives better.
Mulcair, he won 44 seats in the last election, Tom Mulcair,
and he was pushed out.
So what do you have to win then? Because that was decent.
It was a decent performance and he couldn’t keep his job.
For me, I'm looking at my performance
and how can we make peoples' lives better.
That’s my metric.
What can we do to advance
the conditions that people are living in right now.
But that’s not the metric that the party has used in the past.
The metric is performance-based.
It's not whether people are listening to you talk about
issues that I agree are important.
So how do you deal with a party who has previously said
44 seats isn’t good enough, you're out?
My metric is going to be how we make peoples' lives better
and that’s what I’m going to focus on.
I can't predict the outcome.
- No, I know that, but --
- I can predict the outcome in terms of the work we put in.
But you have --
-- what we're going to raise as concerns and issues.
Sure, but you have evidence of a party that is impatient
when you don’t do well.
So I think it's a legitimate question to say
if you don’t do that well,
are you concerned about what the reaction might be?
No, I’m not concerned, again, about myself.
It’s never been my concern.
I got into this gig
in a riding that had never voted NDP
in the history of the country.
So I didn't get in this gig
because I was worried about that.
I got into this role, this important role,
because I want to use the platform that I have
to advance a better country.
Okay you want to talk about some issues, and I do too.
So let’s start with the pipeline.
How would you get more oil to market or would you?
In our country right now we've got two failed processes
that this government has continued to use.
One is the environmental regulation process is failed
and it's proven to have failed
because the courts have found that it failed.
Sure, but they have since revised it.
They've come up with a new process
for pipelines going forward.
They recognize that.
- There's some serious concerns and we pointed those out
and the court supported our concerns.
Secondly --
Yes, and that's why they've gone back
and they’re doing further consultations.
Well, now here's the second concern.
On their further consultations,
they’ve already prejudged the outcome.
This government has said
we are going to build this pipeline, no matter what.
Now, that does not really bode well if you want to respect
Indigenous communities,
if we want to really follow through on the United Nations
declaration on the rights of Indigenous peoples.
We can't start off saying we're going to meaningful consult you,
but we’ve already prejudged the outcome.
That is not honest, so those are problems.
Are you saying the United Nations declaration
gives Indigenous communities in this country
a veto over those projects?
I'm saying that we can not proceed forward
with any project in this country unless we
obtain free, prior, and informed consent,
unless we have buy-in and partnership.
Reconciliation requires hard work.
- Sure. - It requires respect.
It doesn't mean we can say we're going to build something
but then we're going to go out and consult afterwards.
It means accepting that a project may not go ahead.
You are though undoubtedly aware of the Supreme Court decision
when it came to what
a federal government is allowed to do with these kinds of lands
and it says when adequate consultation has occurred,
a development can proceed
without the consent of an Indigenous group.
It is only the Crown’s duty to consult and act honourably.
It is not the Crown’s duty to say you’re right, we’re wrong.
They are arguing that this is in the national interest.
This pipeline is critical.
So how do you reconcile those things?
Reconciliation requires us to go beyond that.
It requires us to re-examine the way we’ve done things.
We've got actually --
What does that mean though? What does that mean?
- We've got to be committed to doing more than just
checking off a box. That's not enough.
That’s not actually going to be reconciliation.
If you just go say, look, I’ve done this and I’ve done this.
I've checked off a box.
That’s not meaningful reconciliation.
But so then what should they be doing right now
that they’re not doing?
Be open to know.
I mean, the communities that are impacted, the lands,
the sovereign nations that are impacted
may not accept that this is a project
that they want to support and that is
something that the government has to be prepared to accept.
Our public dollars should not be spent on a project
that the private sector does not see any profitability.
That does not make sense for us
to use our public dollars to do that.
Well the private sector didn't see profitability
because it was caught up in the courts and they were worried
that it would just be endless, which is a legitimate concern.
The private sector pulled out.
The public dollars, Canadians' dollars should be spent on
investing in our country in a sustainable way for the future.
But are you then suggesting that we're going to get off oil
in a 24-hour period? I mean, there are --
I’m actually making a clear suggestion.
I’m saying that with our public dollars
we should be investing in the green economy of the future.
So we should have just let that pipeline go.
With our public dollars
it should not have gone towards that.
Yeah, absolutely. I've made my position clear.
So what do you say to all the oil workers in Alberta?
- They need help. It's not their
fault that they're in a sector
that's subject to bust and booms,
they're in a sector that's so unpredictable.
They deserve a lot better.
They deserve us to invest immediately and aggressively
in a future where they have sustainable jobs,
not just for the next couple of years, but for the long-term.
- But that transition, that takes time
and you have to move in that direction over time.
It sounds to me like you’re saying, well,
too bad, you guys are out of luck because this sector
is becoming antiquated.
We don’t want to be using oil anymore.
That's a fair position but is that what you're saying?
That we shouldn’t be investing in the oil sector anymore?
Let’s be clear.
There is a resource sector in Canada
that is going to continue.
But I’m saying with our public dollars
we’d be doing a disservice as a country
if we didn't say, hey,
we acknowledge the unpredictability
these folks are going through.
These people are going through hardship.
They just want to be able to work
and earn a good living for their family.
Let's invest our public dollars into something that will be
long-lasting and sustainable,
and not subject to the same volatility.
Okay, let's talk about the other part of that
and that’s climate change.
The United Nations says that most large emitting countries
are not going to meet their targets, their Paris targets,
including Canada.
Even though that's the Prime Minister
and the Environment Minister seem to think that we will.
I’m not sure how.
So that's not going to happen, even though the government has
various plans in place to reduce emissions
and a carbon tax that's going to take effect.
So what would you do more of
to try and get us to the Paris targets?
Well first of all we need better emissions targets.
Secondly --
Tougher emissions targets, is that what you’re talking about?
We do. We need better emissions targets.
Right now the emissions targets are still essentially targets
that are Harper era targets, targets that, again,
as you noted, and as we all know,
will not get us to the Paris Accord target levels.
I know, but we're not even going to meet those,
so you want to make it harder?
We should make our levels more ambitious, absolutely.
But what we need to do is
if you look at the current approach this government's taken
to the carbon tax,
they're putting the burden on everyday families
instead of the biggest polluters.
The biggest polluters in our country are essentially exempt.
We've got coal based burning --
a coal based energy plant in New Brunswick
that will be exempt almost 90 per cent.
Well, at the beginning. It changes over time.
- The current approach this government has taken
is effectively the biggest polluters are getting
a free ride
and everyday families are going to have to shoulder the burden.
That is a very skewed approach.
On China.
There's a Canadian right now who's been convicted
by a Chinese court to a death sentence
for alleged drug smuggling.
How would you deal with a situation like that
if you were Prime Minister?
You've got a country where we seem to be in this
terrible diplomatic, retaliatory actions, well they do,
while we're trying to do things
by due process, and they keep escalating things.
What should the government be doing in that instance?
Just the first moment, we've got to think about
what that family's going through right now.
That is just horrible,
the fear the family must be facing right now.
So what we need to see happen is we’ve got to stand up to China.
We have to be ready to stand up
to anyone that we need to stand up to.
What does that mean though, stand up to China?
- We’ve got to say, listen, what you’re doing is just wrong.
You can't take individual people and use them as political pawns,
detain people without due process, revise --
But that's essentially what the Prime Minister did the other day
and then the Chinese government basically told him to shut up.
We can’t stop raising concerns.
Canadians expect that we take care of Canadian citizens,
and right now we've got
Canadians that are being detained
and they don't know the reason why,
they’re not being afforded due process,
they don't have access to lawyers.
They don’t know the charges against them.
I mean, these are basic things that we should demand.
I covered the NDP for a long, long time. [laughs]
And there was a shift at one point with Jack Layton where
he decided he wasn't going to
just say, I’m going to do the best I can in the election.
He said he would start every speech by saying,
"I’m going to be Prime Minister".
What is your goal in an election?
Is it to do the things you've said for people,
get issues on the table? Is it to win more seats?
Is it that you really want to do that job, to be Prime Minister?
Absolutely. I want to be Prime Minister.
That's the goal during the election?
You will say that to people?
I want to be Prime Minister
because I want to make people's lives better.
And my paramount goal is to make people’s lives better.
It’s to improve our country on all fronts.
Thank you.