Nuanced. - 280. Andrew Coyne: Globe & Mail Journalist on Media Bias and Government Subsidies

Episode Date: October 1, 2026

Globe and Mail columnist Andrew Coyne joins to discuss Canadian media subsidies, political bias, Mark Carney, Pierre Poilievre, BC’s election, Kamloops reporting and free speech with host Aaron Pete.Send us Fan MailSupport the shownuancedmedia.ca

My name is Andrew Coyne. I'm a columnist with a global male. You've criticized David Eby's decision to call them early election. What makes this more than just ordinary political opportunism? There's limits, and I think there's a pretty broad feeling that this was pretty shameless. Robert Fife also acknowledged that there is probably unfair bias against conservatives in Ottawa coverage when he joined the show. Do you agree? Yeah, I think that's probably true. You signed the Ottawa Declaration opposing journalism payroll subsidies.

what convinced you that those subsidies threaten the independence or credibility of the press? I think the whole idea was misconceived to begin with. We did that to ourselves. We gave our critics that stick to beat us with, and we never should have done it. When Rosemary Barton pressed Kearney... No possible conflict of interest in your assets.

It's very difficult to believe. Look inside yourself, Rosemary. Do you think he meaningfully addressed the concern around Brookfield and conflicts of interest? Not in that answer, certainly. The Globe and Mail's editorial, there is no reconciliation without truth, described the initial Camloops coverage as a failure of journalism. Do you agree with that assessment?

Andrew Coyne, it's an honor to have you on this show. Would you mind briefly introducing yourself for listeners who might not be acquainted? My name is Andrew Coyne. I'm a columnist for the Globe and Mail, and I'm honored to be on the show. Well, we appreciate you joining us. I'd like to start with British Columbia. It's the province that I live in. You've criticized David Eby's decision to call an early election.

What makes this more than just ordinary political opportunism that we've come to expect from party leaders? Well, it's a question of degree. You're right to say that we do expect, unfortunately, political opportunism. I wish we didn't, but that is often the norm. but this is really pushing it. I can't find an example in Canadian history of a premier or a prime minister calling an election with a full majority, no danger of falling on a confidence vote, when the opposition party, the main opposition party didn't have a permanent leader. In fact, it just lost their leader. It's hard to find examples anywhere in parliamentary democracies.

It's a very rare thing because I think people rightly view it as dirty pool. You know, we all understand, as your question alluded, that politics can be a rough and tumble business and people are always seeking advantage. But there's limits. And I think there's a pretty broad feeling that this was pretty shameless. What do you react to David Eby's argument that the conservatives have been struggling to find their footing for since the 2024 election with having an interim leader. removing John Rustad, having an interim leader, Trevor Halford, then going through an election, having Carrie Lynn Findley, then having Carrie Lynn Findley, lose many of her MLAs, and then entering this election that they have just not been able to find stable footing throughout this process. That's a perfectly valid point. That is a point that you would, you know, if you were the opposite, their opponents that you would make. And it is telling about some of the difficulties the party has had and some of the divisions within the party. You can make that point without timing your election to the absolute maximum advantage,

at least seemingly so. Now, it's interesting that it seems to be backfiring on them in a couple of ways. One is that, as I said, off the top, people are viewing this as dirty pool. Secondly, that behind the scenes, as it were, while the Conservative Party in some ways was at its lowest ebb under Ms. Vindley's leadership, the forces of what I might call normalcy were reasserting themselves. And the party showed a surprising ability to pull itself together and to put, I think, more reasonable people in positions of leadership for the election campaign.

I mean, as they always still say, has it, the prospect of being hung in the morning tends to concentrate the mind. So clearly the party membership and the leadership could see that they were heading for a disaster if they didn't do this. but it has added to the sense of this whole thing kind of backfiring on Eby. So, as I say, the travails of the Conservative Party are absolutely legitimate fodder for the NDP to point out and to raise questions about, but you don't need to do this kind of shenanigans to make that point.

And of course, that comes back to a point, which is it's not supposed to be within the purview of the Premier to do this. all of the provinces in the last 20 years at one point another passed legislation saying we're going to move to fixed election dates and for the very reason that people had seen premiers and prime ministers timing elections to their advantage and quite rightly people said wait a minute why should they get to do that this is supposed to be a fair fight we don't let the one side in the Stanley Cup final decide where the game's going to be played and how long it's going to last why do we let the leaders of governments do that So they all passed this legislation and asked to be congratulated for their fair-mindedness in doing so. But they inserted this little loophole in it saying, oh, nothing in this actually constrains the power of the lieutenant governor to call the election any time he or she sees fit, i.e. on the advice of their first minister. At the time, this was, we were all told, this is just pro forma.

We have to put this in because otherwise we'd be vulnerable to a constitutional challenge. But since then we've seen in virtually every province snap elections being called after we were told that they were a thing of the past. So if you want something that breeds public cynicism, it's when governments refuse to be bound by the laws that they themselves passed. May I ask on a broader scope, my other fear with this election being called is it feels like leaders are no longer viewing it as their duty to really provide a clear vision for what the problem. province or the country looks like in a really deep manner in the previous election with Mark Carney and Pierre Polyev, I criticized the fact that platforms came out, I think it was like 11 days before the election and not giving citizens time to review that. I know we can be cynical and say people don't read that. I have a lot of people who listen to the show who are very engaged

and do a lot of research on these things. And I just think just out of respect for human beings and the democratic process, a clear vision should be put to the electorate. decide what direction we're moving in and I'm having trouble figuring out from all parties. They have policy prescriptions, but they do not have a vision for where our province is going to go. And that sort of concerns me because, as you might imagine, people need to make investment decisions. They need to decide what province they're going to live in over the next 20 years. They need to decide where they're going to live, how much groceries are going to cost. And when we don't feel like we have a clear path forward, I just worry about the health of our democracy when we're not

giving clear mandates to people. What are your thoughts on that? I agree with that. To some extent, we're kind of regressing to a period maybe a politics of 40, 50 years ago. So it was actually fairly recently that manifestos became part of Canadian politics. You probably could date it to the liberal red book in 1993, which impressed everybody because it was detailed and it had costs attached to everything and it was quite new. But that was sort of in the air at that time internationally. But prior to that, you know, people said, I'm running on my record or my policy is prosperity. You know, it wasn't very detailed. We grew used to it after the Red Book and every party felt like they had to be, had to have something like that. But now we're seeing people trying to wriggle out of that. And, you know, the smart political operators will always tell them, well, don't get tied down to this or that promise or this or that vision statement kind of thing.

It's up to them, of course. I mean, you can't compel it. But it's up to us as voters, I guess, to reward the parties that do present a clear and coherent vision and punish those that just try to get by on a wink and a smile. Of course, part of the problem even with the Red Book is, you know, half the stuff in the Red Book was complete fiction and they never had any intention of doing it. So there's also this problem that we have, we've had parties of various stripes over the last. last 30 years, federally and provincially, have run, and going back even further than that, have run on one thing and then done diametrically the opposite when they got into power. Famous example in BC, Gordon Campbell on the sales tax harmonization.

These are not slips of the lip. This isn't, you know, the sort of calculated ambiguity that I think is part of the warp and wolf of politics. This is very clear, you know, black letter promises that are intense. to be believed that they then get in power and don't just do something five degrees off of it or don't fully complete it, which again could be forgiven, but do the opposite. And that has also, I think, bred enormous public cynicism. If you cannot attach any significance to what people promised to you, then what are you basing anything on? How can you make an informed vote?

May I ask on a note kind of tangential to that is around lobby. and as you described political operatives. As I've kind of gotten into this sphere and started to understand how people operate, I've realized that many of the people on CTV, Global News, are actually lobbyists or work with some sort of organization that is compensating them for their opinion and views. The most like kind of, I think, known on Twitter is Corey Tenaic and his involvement and he's been criticized harshly by many folks. And I just wonder, is that healthy for our democracy to have people who work

with an organization coming on the news and giving their opinion when they're connected to an organization that's either funding their position or supporting them in some way or they're leading that organization. I just don't know if British Columbians, Canadians, understand their role, how they're operating and that they aren't just thoughtful individuals, journalists, kind of giving their opinion. There actually have other interests kind of tied alongside that. In British Columbia, we had Caroline Elliott who had gone on global news several times kind of offering her views on DRIPA, and then she's looking to lead a political party. And what a great opportunity to be able to build your brand through that way and then go out and try and lead a political party.

What are your thoughts on the role of lobbyists? Well, without getting into the particulars of any individual case, it is a problem if people don't declare. Now, if somebody is just building their profile en route to what they hope is a political career, I don't know how exactly you would police that. That, to me, is sort of part of, you know, ultimately, whether you have, it depends on whether you have thoughtful and interesting things to say. But if you are literally, as you say, taking somebody shilling to basically plead their case publicly, you should, at the bare minimum, should certainly be declaring that. That should, or it should be declared by the news organization that employs you. You probably shouldn't be commenting on things. They shouldn't be dragging you in if it's, if it's completely a,

conflict of interest where it's just, you know, there's just no possibility for it to be viewed as being independent or impartial. I'm not sure it's hugely better that we, we, we, we, um, we, um, have so many party strategists on. Um, I'm not saying we shouldn't have them on. That should be part of the coverage. Uh, but we, we devote way too much of our coverage of politics to the game, to the horse race, rather than to the underlying issues. It's worse, particularly at election time, when we mostly cover the campaign and very little about the election. We're very entranced by the positionings and the strategies and the tactics. And we're entrenched with our own role as the people who will pierce the veil for you

and will explain to the game that these guys are playing. Again, there's a role for that. There's a, that is part of what should be covered. We do learn things about the parties from the strategy and tactics that they, employ. And it's interesting and even fun for some people. I'm not saying there shouldn't be coverage of it. It's just the proportions. The amount that we actually covered to, who are these people and what are they going to do if they get into power versus, oh, they made a clever, you know, attack ad and let's get on three strategies to talk about how effective the ad is.

I just think we just need to dial that proportions a little differently. How do we take Trump's threats seriously without allowing Canadian politicians? politicians to use them as a shield against scrutiny of their own records? Well, that's a fair point is, and we've seen premiers and prime ministers attempting to use Donald Trump as a punching bag with varying degrees of success. And the fact that it doesn't always succeed is important. It shows the public is not so easily bamboozled as all that. you have to actually have a credible case to make.

Now, you know, in in April or May of 2025, it was pretty logical that that election would be, a lot of it would turn around. How do we deal with this guy? What's our strategy? Who's the best person suited to it? That's fine. By, you know, September of 26, the Premier British Columbia, without a whole lot else to talk about, tries to say you have to elect me to keep Donald Trump out of your, you know, your front porch.

I think people had a hard time stretching their minds around that. We should certainly be taking seriously what Trump says because he's not always joking. You know, I think the people of Greenland and Denmark certainly learned that that wasn't all just a joke. In fact, at one point there were European armies mobilizing to, to, to, deal with that. So he is a very strange individual with very strange views on things. And he's already done all kinds of crazy things just to do with this country. So nobody should be, should fall into the trap of trying to put him into a box, you know, of any politician we've ever seen before. He is a bizarre individual, and he wishes us ill.

And there's a lot of people around him who wish us ill. A lot of people in the MAGA universe have convinced themselves that Canada is a security threat. That we're this, first of all, that we're this woke liberal dystopia, where no conservative can say boo. And B, that we're sort of the handmaidens to China. And they've taken that argument to such an extent that some of them, Some of the, quote, unquote, think tanks are publishing pieces about how we can break up Canada, the better to absorb the pieces of it that we want to absorb. So we should certainly take that deadly seriously.

We should certainly take, at the bare minimum, the trade war seriously, and judge both incumbent leaders and opposition leaders by their proposals for dealing with this. And it's certainly a very important issue. It's not the only issue. Nothing is. You recently wrote a column titled it's not disloyal to criticize the government's handling of Trump, but it can be. Where exactly is that line from your perspective?

Well, that's a good question. It's one of those things perhaps you know when you see it. I'll preface this by saying I was mostly quoting conservative people, people in the Conservative Party who were very concerned at where some of their alleged compatriots want to take the party, want to take the country. And the degree to which some small C, large C, conservative influences online seem prepared to parrot the Trump line and not just online influencers, but the odd MP, it goes beyond just legitimate criticism of the prime minister, which is absolutely not just legitimate, but to be welcomed. and to be sought after. As patriotic Canadians,

we should want the most searching and constructive criticism to be made of the people who are governing us at all times, but especially in a crisis. So there's no requirement that everybody hold their tongue just because, you know,

we're in this sort of quasi-wartime atmosphere. But, and there's, and you can, you know, you have free speech. You can make any argument you like, and I'll defend to the death, your right to make it. But if you make really stupid, basically apologies

for Donald Trump's view of the world. If you blame Canada for every problem within between Canada and the United States, then people are going to judge you and they have a right to judge you as well. So you can't, you know, you can't claim free speech for yourself, but then say, oh, it's so unfair

that people are accusing me of this, that, and the other thing in criticizing me. You've got to take your lumps the same way as you give them out. So that, that's where I draw the line is, is, are you basically not offering constructive alternatives to how to deal with Donald Trump, but making apologies for him and basically taking his side of these debates? Again, you have a right to do so, but I'm going to judge you if you do. When Rosemary Barton pressed Carney about potential conflicts arising from his private sector

interests with Brookfield, he told her to look inside yourself and suggested she was approaching him with ill will. Do you think he meaningfully addressed the concern around Brookfield and conflicts of interest? Not in that answer, certainly. They have set up all kinds of screens that he is supposed to observe, and I don't have any evidence that he's not to do with his different holdings. This is an imperfect way of going about these things. We've dealt with these kinds of issues before, and we've dealt with them very imperfectly. So when Paul Martin had, you know, was Prime Minister and still owned Canada,

steamship lines, supposedly he put them in a blind trust. But, you know, he knew what was in the blind trust. One of Joe Clark's greatest lines was he said, it's a Venetian blind trust. You know, you can peek into it any time you want to, or you know what's in it. You know, in the United States,

at least before Trump, there were much more stringent rules or at least expectations that you divest yourself if you've got significant holdings. I know that's a lot to ask of people, but you are asking for the privilege and the power to run everybody else's affairs and to pass laws that will compel obedience to people. So I don't think it's unreasonable to ask people in those kinds of positions to divest themselves. I have no reason to doubt Mark Carney's integrity on any of these things. I don't have any reason to doubt Paul Martin's integrity. But the point of conflict of interest laws and these kinds of measures is

so that the public never has to wonder, never has to depend upon, oh yeah, it looks weird, but I'll trust him to always do the right thing. Trust is one thing, but to earn that trust, you should be going out of your way to allay, suspicions. They'll lay reasonable suspicions. You can't relay every, you know, conspiracy theory. But so it's, it's not a very good situation. And, and I think we need to have a stronger set of rules about the holdings of people in executive office. Would you have preferred he divest? I think so, yeah. I mean, you know, I have to look at the particular details of this thing, but as a broad principle, I think it's a better situation. don't think these blind trusts and screens, it seemed to me to be very elaborate ways of

trying to avoid divesting. And divesting seems to me to be a better approach. Can you see why some Canadians may be skeptical or distrustful of Mr. Mark Carney as a consequence of his decision to hold this? I'm sure you've seen Pierre Pauliev make those visuals on X and on different social media platforms showing Canada's growth versus Brookfield's growth since Prime Minister Mark Carney's taken office. How do you take that in? I'm not sure I find that terribly persuasive. As I say, people can draw their own conclusions.

I think the public has drawn their conclusions about whether they think Mark Carney is just in it for himself. So I don't think it's a particularly effective thing. So on the one hand, there's an obligation of public office holders to go of their way to allay reasonable suspicions. On the other hand, the people who are their critics have to be careful that they're actually raising reasonable suspicions. And if they're just kind of flinging stuff to see what will stick, again, they've a right to do it, but they may find the public doesn't find that terribly persuasive.

Robert Fife joined the show and he told me, Mark Carney has had a remarkable year. As a chief, I'm still dealing with people struggling to afford food every day and I'm seeing that get worse for every day. Canadians. What is the strongest evidence that currently deserves that assessment and what might be missing? That's a broad question. He's about a year and a bit into the job, a year and a half now. It's been dominated by this one file. Now, this one file has a lot of portion, you know, sections to it. There's the, there's the, defense buildup. There's the trade diversification. There's, you know, forming new types of alliances

with other countries. There's trying to build up our productivity. And all those things fit together in a broad strategy of trying to make the country more resilient to Trump's threats, making us harder to coerce, partly by building up our own strength, partly by diversifying our trade and making ourselves less reliant in the United States. So I would, I would expect, frankly, any prime minister in the situation he was in that that would be a big part of his focus. And I think, I think on that file, I think he's made a fair bit of progress. You know, what somebody else have done a better job and made more progress, perhaps. But, you know, trying to, trying to assess it against that counterfactual, I would say he's done a reasonable job on that

file. I'm not as persuaded that he's made much headway on, if he even intends to, on dealing with the deficit and debt on the broader productivity agenda. We've started to see that the measure that was announced to coincide with the investment summit of cutting or allowing 100% expense of investments for most investments is by common consensus among the policy community, a major step forward. Far too, you know, we should have done this years ago, but you got to give them credit for doing that. But there's so much more we need to do on the productivity front. So much more we need to do to encourage more competition in this country rather than having these sort of cozy cartels running everything. So much more we can do on the tax reform file things, and so much more

we can do to cut business subsidies and as they bring deficit and debts in the care. So on the economic side of things more broadly, I would say they're only. only just getting going. And in their initial budget, I would say it wasn't a huge departure from what a Justin Trudeau government might have brought in. So not a huge amount of progress there. We will see what this upcoming budget, if they show a bit more sense of the gravity of that particular aspect of the crisis we're in, the productivity side of things. So, you know, it's a mixed bag as most of these people are. It's hard. You have to. You have to. suspend judgment a little bit when you're only a year, a year and a half into the, into a

government. You have to give us, give yourself, you know, to try to think, where do I think they're going in a future? What, do I have any expectation that they will do more or is this as good as it's going to get? And those are all very difficult judgment calls. So, you know, I tend to, I try to, certainly while somebody's prime minister, I try to avoid, um, too much in the way of an over overarching assessment. And even afterwards, they're always a mixed bag. People ask me, what do I think of Mulroney? Well, he did some good things, you know, free trade and tax reform. He did some not so good things, you know, on Meach Lake and Charlottetown and some of his ethical issues. And the same thing with Kretchen, you know, he had some major successes and some

really problematic issues. And I'm just always mystified by people who want to, who want to just say they're one thing or the other, you know, he's all good or he's all bad. They're all going to be, makes sure nobody's a saint, nobody's a irredeemable sinner. It's interesting that you say that because I always think about Pierre Elliott Trudeau and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Constitution being one of his most controversial.

And now if you ask people, do you like the Charter of Rights and Freedoms? Do you think we should have, like that's off the table to most Canadians now, but at the time was extremely controversial being brought in. Well, and it's certainly renewed controversy with the advent of the sort of almost routine use of the notwithstanding clause.

So that controversy at the time has continued on in certain circles. You're right to say that if you do polling of the general public, the charter is enormously popular, including in Quebec, by the way. But amongst some conservatives, it's always been a bit of a struggle with some contradictions. it was Stephen Harper who said a conservative is somebody who wants to abolish the charter, but also wants to add a property rights clause to it. So there's always a little bit of contradiction in some of these things. But what we've been seeing with various conservative premiers, invoking the notwithstanding clause, conservative with a small C, invoking the not with standing

clause almost routinely. I mean, I'm exaggerating slightly, but they're using a it much more often than anybody ever anticipated. I think it's pretty clear the agenda there is to try to make it, to normalize it, to reduce the political stigma associated with it, and therefore basically to make the charter live or die at the sufferance of the premiers. It applies unless the premiers don't think it should. And we have not resolved that conflict or that controversy yet. And in fact, we're heading for, it sounds like, for even more controversies to come. on that issue. Robert Fife also acknowledged that there is probably unfair bias against conservatives in

Ottawa coverage when he joined the show. Do you agree? Yeah, I think that's probably true. You know, one of the abiding afflictions we have in this country is what the journalist and author Richard Wynn called one and a half party rule. The liberals are in for so long periods and then they're briefly replaced by the conservatives and then they get back in for a while, that that has, I think,

fed into both parties' worst instincts. If you talk about the abiding sin of the liberals, it's arrogance, and I may say the abiding sin of conservatives is a kind of a chippy resentment that everybody's out against them. And I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that on balance, the Ottawa Gallery

tends to lean a little bit to the laughter. Somebody would say even a lot, that the academia does, that the bureaucracy does, that I don't think that's necessarily untrue. It's what do you do about that? And if you come into office with sort of feeling like everybody's out to get you and you can't make any headway, then you're going to, it's going to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The fact of the matter is most journalists, most academics, most judges, et cetera, are trying to be fair, whatever their initial predispositions. Not all of them. You're going to run into bad apples, but most of them are trying to be professionals. And if you appeal to them on that level, most of them will respond. If you really want to see when Ottawa was really a company town was in the 50s, you know, when the liberals under McKenzie King and Louis Anleron, I've been in for 22 years, you know, I could forgive John Defenbaker a certain degree of paranoia because it was quite overt in those. days. It's much more easily disrupted now. It's much harder for a really hardcore group think to set in in Ottawa the way it might have in the past. I remember even during the days of Meach Lake, for example, everybody in Ottawa had signed on for it. It was your badge of membership in the, in polite society. And, and I think that'd be much harder for that to happen today

because of social media, because of various other things. But it's still, yeah, it's still going to be a factor in any incoming conservative prime minister I think has to be smart about how they deal with it and try to win people over and try to show that you're not the, I don't have horns and they're not the bogeyman that some people might imagine you are. And just appeal to the professionalism that exists in most people.

And just out of curiosity, if a conservative prime minister had said the same things about their financial interests that they gave to Rosemary Barton, do you think the reaction would have been different? I think it really depends. You know, Carney has a long track record in public life. So people, he's not an unknown quantity. People can judge him based on his record in office as a governor, etc. So you earn a certain degree of credibility if you've been around for a while.

And I think, I'm sure that would be the case for a conservative as well. I don't actually subscribe to the theory that that any conservative would be treated differently. If a conservative came out of left field, if nobody had ever seen them before, and, and they, they had megabucks behind them. And, and people were just trying to figure out what is this person about? Where does, where does this money come from, et cetera? Then they might, they might run into something of that. But that is a say, that's more to do with conservatives typically being the part of the outs.

People who are not part of the central Canadian elite, people who are not part of the liberal consensus on things are always going to be, to some extent, a disadvantage because they're coming from outside the circle. But I just don't think it's an impermeable, insoluble dilemma. It's just an initial thing you're going to deal with when you first come in. my personal belief, so I interviewed Pierre Polyev and my personal belief is that he is there in his role as the Honorable Opposition to offer criticisms of the government. And I approached the interview as such focused on what his feedback was, what he would do differently and tried to lay it out in that way. What is the strongest criticism Pierre Polyev makes of Prime Minister Mark Carney that you think deserves more attention? I think he's on solid ground in saying that they are not really fully versed in or fully approaching the economy the way they should be, that it is piecemeal measures that they're not really grasping the kinds of measures, the kinds of spending controls, for example, the kinds of tax reforms that are required. I think he is, it's fair game to say that however much he may have changed certain policies

of the government, that a lot of the same people are still in place. And people deserve to know that. That, I mean, it's certainly been a hundred and eighty degree change in a lot of policies. I think it's fair for people to say that they've basically stolen a lot of our policies, we are the conservatives. but that only gets you so far. It's always going to be a difficulty for anybody in politics. If your opponents are willing to swallow themselves whole and abandon all the policies you were criticizing them on and take your policies, you're going to have a tough time.

The game isn't supposed to work that way, but the liberals are an endlessly flexible bunch. in this particular moment in our history, with Trudeau having become so unpopular that anybody associated with and really couldn't put up much of a fight within the party. And you have this guy who's been the central bank governor for two countries, sort of ready and available

at a particular moment when the country is in a crisis. You put all those things together and Carney has been given kind of free reign to just completely remake the party in his image. And in the course of doing so, it makes it very difficult to be the opposition leader. You can absolutely point out that this is what's going on. You can raise questions about how permanent is this? Is this actually what the liberals are going to do in the future?

Or is this just a brief period during Mark Carney's crisis mentality and over time? You know, you can certainly point out the degree to which the liberals continue to cultivate client groups across the country. And I've often thought there's a fruitful line of argument for conservatives to get a hearing on themselves as an alternative in terms of economic policy is to look at all, is to frame a lot of these policies as not just bad policies for the country, but also the means by which the liberals cement themselves in power. So these tens of billions of dollars in business subsidies that the government hands out every year are really dumb economics. They distort investment decisions. They don't get people focusing on the real economic returns and benefits and costs and benefits of different investments, but just on the tax goodies or subsidies that are attached to them. They're really bad policy. But, oh, by the way, they also create dependencies and advocacy groups across the country that have a vested interest in liberal staying in power.

And there's a whole range of these kinds of policies that I think it's very fruitful for the conservatives to campaign on. But to come back to something you said at the beginning, yeah, if you're the opposition leader, your job is to criticize. Your job is to pull holes and to show the flaws in government policies. You can just do that if you want to. There's nothing wrong with that. But I do think if you want to get a hearing, you also have to say, what would you do differently? What would your front bench look like?

What would a Pueaever or conservative government look like? I do think there's an enlightened self-interest in presenting yourself as a government in waiting. And I think one of the things that has really hurt Pierre Pueva and hurt the party is people look at them. They say, well, I'd hire him to be the opposition leader. I think he makes a fine opposition leader, just not as persuaded that I can see him as the prime minister. And until and unless he and the party overcome that, I think they're going to. going to have trouble. Just to quickly follow up on that, you spoke at the beginning about how the liberals are now taking a lot of Pierre Pollyov's policy prescriptions, and then at the end,

you had just commented that he needs to put forward an alternative. And I'm just wondering if you can clarify that. It's a really difficult dilemma. The more that they take your policies, the more you've got to think about, okay, how do we differentiate yourself? You have to think about, frankly, why do I want to be a conservative rather than liberal? If Mark Carney is bringing in all the policies that I want to see done, what's my continuing reason to oppose them? Well, okay, it's, it's, I don't trust them. I think the overarching culture of the party will reassert itself over time. I think there's a bunch of issues that they haven't addressed. So I think you have to, when you're faced with that very difficult political dome of what do you do when you're up

against these shapeshifters who can adopt half your policies without blinking is where can we go that they can't go? What policies can we take, can we put in the shop window that they can't steal because they would just run into too much trouble with particular interests within the party, for example? You've got to be mindful of that you don't lose touch with the center ground of Canadian politics and so doing. So, you know, you don't want to just be extreme for the sake of being extreme, but you want to find points of differentiation that even Mark Kearney can't elide. And that's a difficult challenge. And the only thing I would say is, is be patient. The election's not coming to moral. You know, unpopularity comes for all people in politics.

Mark Carney is riding high right now, but there will come a time when he's not riding so high. when one thing or another, either bad economics or a policy that backfired or what have you, they'll start to accumulate. And, you know, every politician at some point or another comes for them. And so be ready and waiting and available and spend the time until then building up your own credibility as an alternative government so that when the time comes,

people will turn to you. You know, there's no reason in theory, in principle, there's no reason why the public shouldn't have turned to the conservative leader when the Trump threat emerged. It wasn't a given. It wasn't there wasn't some law of physics said that they would turn to the governing party. And conservatives have to think about that is why didn't they turn to us? Why weren't we the party that people wanted in the crisis?

Why wasn't Pierre-Poyev, the leader, that they trusted in that moment to defend their interests. And once you've done that kind of searching scrutiny, then try to act on it. In your 2021 conversation with Nigel Beale about your father, James Coim, you explored Canadian independence and economic nationalism,

growing up with a father who had publicly clashed with the prime minister. What did you learn about standing up to power? Well, certainly that it matters. It matters that one person can make a difference, that your conscience is, you know, has to amount for something. You can't just swallow yourself whole. You can't just say my way or the highway either.

There's got to be some reasonable degree of compromise. And people forget, you know, it tends to, the whole thing tends to be created a bit more than it actually is. But there wasn't actually a huge clash of policy vision. This was part of the game, the Defenbaker Conservatives were playing, was when it suited them, they would say, oh, you know, don't blame us for high interest rates. That's the independent Bank of Canada. Remember, the Bank of Canada was still quite new then. It was only about 22 years old or 25 years old.

But when it sued them, they would say, oh, but the Bank of Canada is run amok. The governor's doing all kinds of things that we don't agree with. The fact of the matter is there was virtually no. no fundamental disagreement on monetary policy. My father had made some speeches about what he viewed as being a kind of a crisis of dependency on foreign capital, foreign investment, foreign lending, that we were quote-unquote living beyond our means. And, and, you know, in current times, it has a certain resonance that I'm not sure I would

agree with it at the time he was speaking. and I'm not sure he necessarily held the same views later in light. But at that moment, that was certainly something that was concerned him, and concerned a lot of people. But he stopped making the speeches. So he wasn't trying to make himself a martyr. He wasn't trying to make him set himself up some kind of alternative government. What really happened was that the Deithenbeyer government decided they wanted to have a head on a pike.

They wanted to make a show of having a fight with him. And so in early 1916, there was this extraordinary meeting they had, my father and the finance minister, Donald Fleming, where the gist of which was, Fleming said, oh, we've got a, we've got a budget coming up. And there'll be some things in it we don't think you'll agree with. We can't tell you what they are, but we don't think you'll agree with them. So would you please resign? Which is preposterous. And no Bank of Canada governor could ever have agreed to that. You can't, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the. The. The. The. The. The. The. The. The. The. The... The position of the Bank of Canada government has to be sort of like a Supreme Court judge. It has to have a weight and a tenure to it that you don't just hire and fire them like any political appointee. And if it ever amounted to that, then neither of those institutions would amount too much. So I think he really felt he had to stand on that principle of the independence of the position and against the deepmaker government's attempts to demagogue that. So, you know, it, it, growing up in a household in the aftermath of that, I was very, very lucky in that I had a remarkable moral example to look up to in my own father. And I feel enormously blessed to have had that experience. And, you know, it's not coincidental. One of my favorite movies is a man for all seasons. I only figured this out much later,

because I used to love this film when I was like a teenager. And it was only later I figured out, I guess there's a certain weird similarity in those two situations. And so, as I say, I feel very fortunate. What do you admire most about your father? He was a man of great conviction and principle. He was utterly honest, without pretense, almost to the point of ridiculousness, He didn't think people should smile for the camera, for example. So he was very old school.

But his integrity was just beyond anything I've ever seen. You signed the Ottawa Declaration opposing journalism payroll subsidies. What convinced you that those subsidies threaten the independence or credibility of the press? Well, I just run the get-go. I think the whole idea was misconceived to begin with. You know, the problems of the Canadian media are to some extent self-created. We, you know, yeah, the internet came along. The internet's affected everybody's business model, not just ours.

But we didn't particularly handle it very well. We made every mistake it was possible to make. But at the same time, it didn't mean the death of the industry. It means that we're going through a big transition. So we're moving from a business model that was mostly based on advertising finance, where like 80% of the revenues were coming from advertising and only 20% from subscription sales and newsstand sales. We're moving from that model to one in which the reader is going to pay a lot more.

The advertisers have deserted us. You know, Google and Facebook made a better mousetrap. And there's just no two ways about that. But it took us a long time to figure that out. and instead of getting busy on making that transition difficult and painful, though it may be, we spent a lot of useless time whining and pleading to government in various ways, either to force Google and Facebook to transfer money to us because they hadn't, we didn't, basically the sum total of the argument, or direct subsidies from the government.

And I think it was, I think it's a real shame. The industry went down that route. But, you know, when the Kent Commission reported in 1980 on newspaper concentration and the state of the newspaper industry, one of their recommendation was that the government should fund newspapers, I think it was mostly for foreign bureaus, but should fund journalism. And to their immense credit, the entire industry rose as one and said, get out of here. We don't want your money. I think maybe the only industry in Canadian history that rejected a government handout. out. Well, they're singing a very different tune, unfortunately, today. And it's, it absolutely harms our credibility. I don't think for one second that anybody is thinking of ways they can, you know,

let's support the liberal government because they will give us money. But it, again, it's like any conflict of interest thing that we're usually the first to point out, if you're leaving position in the people in the position of credibly wondering whether that is affecting your coverage, then you shouldn't be doing that. And it certainly means that every two-bit critic online, that it has a criticism to make of anything that any of us writes, the first thing they say is, well, I guess it's just because you're getting money from the government. So we did that to ourselves.

We gave our critics that stick to beat us with, and we never should have done it. And my broader worry is not that it will align us with the Liberal Party per se, but that it will over time align us with the idea that, that government should bail people out, bail industries out. How do we credibly argue don't bail out the auto industry if we've just been bailed out? And over time, I don't think it'll even occur to us. We'll just internalize as every industry does this idea that, oh, the forces of nature have dictated that we can't possibly survive without government handouts.

People rationalize their own self-interest and they turn it into immutable principles. And for us to join that, I think is terribly tragic. I think it's going to be very difficult to get us off the public hook now that we're into it. I mean, it was supposed to be a temporary brief emergency thing. And here we are years later. We're still taking the money. I just think it would be better if we got out of it.

And I would just say that you take our earlier discussion about that there may be bias against conservatives in Ottawa coupled with the subsidies, and that equals the sense that the media is bias against conservatives and is pro-liberal. It's a disastrous combination in terms of how people perceive us as an industry. Absolutely right. I would just follow up and just share. One of my big concerns, and I'm sure you've noticed it, is here I am as an independent content creator, journalist.

I don't know what to call myself, somebody who likes to think issues through. And I don't have the same newsroom team you have. I don't have the same access to resources and experts in different fields. Guest Booker who's able to organize the most qualified individual. And I do think I have a lot of trust because I'll admit when I get something wrong. But I, of course, see this difference between legacy media that's existed for a long time that has checks and balances. Now people will say that that's not always properly followed. and fair enough.

I think we'll get into the unmarked grave story in a few minutes where checks and balances are incredibly important for the health of the nation and us understanding issues. And I don't have somebody holding me to some sort of account other than my audience, which I would say is a huge risk. Like I should have some sort of code of conduct and some sort of review process to make sure that I'm holding myself accountable. And I know that a lot of people doing what I do don't follow those things and have realized

that there is a real business in, if you want to, call it clickbait, finding the most controversial take, having the hottest take, and kind of putting that out there. And I just, I fear that the investment in the legacy media didn't allow for adaptation. So now you have this new form of media growing. And there's nobody kind of steering it or supporting it or helping it develop in a really thoughtful way. So my only opportunity to hear from journalists like yourself who've been in the game for a very long time, Tara Henley, Holly Donne, Robert Fife, and get kind of insights is through hosting the show. getting your thoughts on what I'm doing and on where media is at.

But I see this complete disconnect. And there's just no guardrails on the independent media side right now. And people will welcome that. But I just don't know how long we can kind of have these two kind of modes of being existing and not really communicating or working with each other. Yeah. I mean, I think over time there's a certain amount of blending and melding that goes on. We're in the middle of a transition, and part of that transition, I fervently hope, and we're seeing it to a greater or lesser extent, we're seeing more of it in the United States than here, is that new media, new organizations come out of humble origins where they don't necessarily have a lot of money, but they build readership, they build a followership, and hopefully they do it in the right way by being credible and truth-oriented and professional and fact-checking, etc.

But over time, they build up businesses and they build up new contestants. And again, one of the worst aspects of subsidy is it's basically telling the legacy media to go back to sleep. You don't need to change your business model. You don't need to adapt to the times. You don't need to be entrepreneurial. And not only does that hold us back, prevents us from adapting in ways that we might, but it locks a lot of resources and manpower, frankly, in industry. or in firms, organizations that may or may not be around for the long run, rather than releasing them to work for new startups.

So there's, there's, the American media is, has a lot more problems in a lot of ways. And there's a lot more just overt, awful propaganda stuff. But there's also much more in the way of green shoots of new professional news organizations starting up. So I hope we don't fall in the trap of thinking it's, either a choice between sort of deadwood news organizations that may be professional and devoted to fact-checking but are kind of slow and dumb and not with the times versus new startups that are fast and loose with the facts and basically just want to be propaganda outfits for one side

or the other and those are the only choices. I think there's lots of opportunity for to blend the best of the old model with the vitality of the new. and go forward. Now, the guard relatively on that is your readership and your audience, is do people find you credible? Do they, you know, people of goodwill, people who are trying to figure things out and haven't already decided for themselves.

You know, you get people saying, I just don't trust the media. And anytime somebody says that in a broad-brush sense, obviously you should be skeptical of everybody. But skepticism is different than just blanket rejection. And when you ask people about this, oftentimes what you find is there is a media that they trust implicitly, that they follow, they swallow every line they say. It's just a different media. And what they mean is, I don't trust people who tell me things I don't want to hear. And while I'd be the first to criticize our response to the Internet and the mistakes we've made, I don't think we should be, you know, turning ourselves inside out and committing, you know, ritual. suicide because somebody somewhere says, I don't trust the media.

There's always a human tendency to want to hear only things that we agree with. That's as old as human beings. And the trouble is it's way easier now for people to do that, to go online and find people who will just tell them exactly the stuff they want to hear. So we've departed from the old gatekeeper model for Guitaryl. You know, the gatekeeper model had many failings and lots of voices that should have had more amplitude that weren't amplified and that's too bad. But it also kept the Nazis and the crazies out and kept oxygen so that actual reasonable debate

could take place between, you know, it was the old line about reasonable people can differ. And, you know, both halves of that sentence are important. It's okay to differ. It's okay to have vital disagreements about important issues. Nobody should feel like they all have to line up on one side. But you also have to be kind of reasonable about it, not as a matter of law or anything, but just in terms of, you know, if you want a mass audience and the credibility that goes with that, then you have to kind of earn that by being somewhere in contact with reality

and not just throwing out crazy conspiracy theories or, you know, blatant propaganda. So all of us, whether we're old media or new media, we have to kind of earn the confidence and the trust of the readership in the audience. And the best thing the government can do is get out of the way of that process and let it continue. I couldn't agree more. One of the greatest compliments I've received is interviewing people and seeing the comments go, Aaron, I don't agree with the person you had on. Like our ideologies are completely different, but I know I need to hear from people I disagree with.

So I'm going to listen and push through. The Globe and Mail's editorial, there is no reconciliation without truth, described the initial Camloops coverage as a failure of journalism. Do you agree with that assessment? Yes. I mean, to the extent that people were flat out saying that these were unmarked graves, and to the extent to which the facts don't support that, then there was a rush to judgment.

And that sometimes happened. You know, sometimes people, a herd mentality clicks in and people fall all over each other and don't take an independent line and look and say, okay, does this actually stand up? Now, the question is, what do you make of that? I have a little bit of trouble with the emphasis that's put on it, as if we could draw all kinds of other conclusions beyond this. So if there weren't bodies in these unmarked graves, or they weren't unmarked graves, is that to suggest that nobody died in residential school? Is that to suggest that residential schools weren't a terrible, awful policy that we should never have been pursued? There just seems to be almost a suggestion hanging around here that, oh, we can just put all these issues to one side now because of this particular journalistic failing. I'm not saying every critic who points this out has that agenda or anything, but it's just, whenever I see people place undue emphasis on something, I always wonder.

The thing may be true in itself, but the weight that's put on it beyond just the media got a little bit over their skis on this question and didn't really check their facts, that's the only part that I find a little troubling about the whole thing. I would just follow up and appreciate your feedback on the fact that, so I've spoken to individuals like Nigel Biggar, Francis Widowson, some of the loudest critics, Candace Malcolm, who helped get the book published grave error, to see what their arguments were. And many of them go, well, what was the undue influence and the impact of the story being written as such,

which resulted in millions of dollars flowing to First Nation communities? We have National Truth and Reconciliation Day coming up in a few days, where that became an enshrined day of reflection as a consequence of that. And we had a whole movement through Justin Trudeau and provincially here in BC through John Horgan and David Eby of let's go all in on reconciliation. Let's put the pedal to the metal, full throttle, we get it now. There are dead children in this apple orchard. And so, Mia Coppa here is everything, no checks and balances. As you know, the government was not forthright about what was going on with the $12 million that Camloops received.

And so those arguments, I think, also need to be put back to us. And I guess I feel, as the First Nations chief myself, that I am carrying the load of that story each time I speak, each time I go out, because I had nothing to do with that story. It broke news just to me as it did everybody else. But First Nations across Canada are now carrying that story on their back. And I'm sure you saw the news of white supremacists being outside of Camloops. I condemn that completely, but you can see how it took the Globe and Mail very long time to come out with the honest reality that that story was not verified and confirmed. And I think media more broadly, like the CBC has just even recently, like a month ago, came out with a podcast saying that residential school denialism is afoot.

And it's like they're kind of tying in this story with like I have not heard Francis Widowson, Candace Malcolm, Nigel Begar, any of these prominent figures ever question whether. kids died, whether or not there was horrible abuses, but it's kind of put in all in one. And then you kind of amplify the feeling that this is a fight to the death if we're going to like not kind of own the story as is. And I'm getting concerned at the rising tension of the events that just took place. And this is not kind of calming down from my perspective. Yeah. And so I think we should stipulate no good comes from propagating a lie. or certainly not on balance. You know, it is, I think, in my opinion,

it's a good thing that people are taking seriously reconciliation. We can debate about exactly what it means, but that I think there has been a kind of a massive national ownership of the fact that the residential schools was a disastrous policy that went on way too long. and that a lot of us, including me, were far too complacent about. We're not as seized as we should have been with what a terrible wrong had been done in our name as a country.

And as I say, way past any period when you could say, oh, this was the folly of the past. So some people might be inclined to say, well, maybe this was a lie, but if it helped, you know, create awareness, then that's not too bad, is it? No, for the reasons you're saying is that then anything, anybody, is saying around it is going to be suspect. And people are going to be rolling their eyes and not listening to things that are fact-based and are true and really do need to be said. So there's no justification, should be no situational justification of, well, at least it

advanced awareness. And I hope nobody would try to make that case. And which is basically the flip side of what I was saying earlier is, I hope nobody's going to say, well, because that wasn't true, then there's no issue here. And as I say, the people you're talking about, I know have not said that, but there are people in the, in the, in the ether, in the community who would be only too willing to say, oh, well, this whole thing was a fuss over nothing. We can, you know, we don't have any further work to do as a society in trying to better

the lot of all of our people, including First Nations. And so there's sort of type one and type two errors. that you can make coming out of this. And the long and the short of it is, you know, get your facts straight. Leah Gazan, MP Leah Gazan, has recently come out again and said, we should criminalize Indian residential school denialism. And I imagine she would include this type of discussion on what happened at Kamloops as part of denying residential school abuse.

How do you take in that legislation? It's an appalling idea. Nobody should want to criminalize. debates about things, even if, you know, even if errors are involved, even if lies are involved, it's not a helpful way to address that, to have the government weighed in and penalize people for being wrong. So even if, even if I thought somebody was a residential school denial us, and I do think those people exist, and not any of the people you're talking about, but I do think it exists. I don't think there's any benefits of society from criminalizing that. You know,

We have evolved very tentative, careful, cautious limits on speech over the centuries through trial and error. And they should be very limited. You know, libel. Even that on its own is a really tricky area of getting that right. You know, there's one or two other things, incitement to violence where you're so, you know, the connection between the word and the deed are so close that the word is on. almost akin to the D. What you're standing with a riled up mob and you say, let's go burn that

house down. These kinds of things we've developed, we don't need to add new things on top of that that we haven't thought about, about issues that are still live issues. You know, I have some sympathy if you're in Germany with the history that they've had, that maybe if I were in that particular context, you know, denying the Holocaust, even then I'd be really leery. I don't think there's any benefit to be criminalizing one side of a very live, recent debate where the facts are still being nailed down. It doesn't lead anywhere good, in my view. If you're going to take the enormous step, the enormous step of criminalizing speech,

you better have the most airtight case that there is harm, irrefitable, identifiable harm that any individual person could agree, any reasonable person could agree was harm. So things like incitement to violence pass that test. But it's got to be the highest possible bar. And, you know, criminalizing a live debate like this is an appalling idea. And I do not believe we will ever go down that road. I am grateful to hear that because it is,

I think I've taken a lot of negativity from all sides for speaking with people that I disagree. with on a lot of the aspects of the arguments they put forward. But I just, I think that's the best path forward is to speak with people we disagree with, to try and understand their perspective. You don't have to agree with it. But it just brings the temperature down in the room. It makes people feel like it's okay to have an opinion. Like, I just don't think that should be the defining aspect of who we are as Canadians, is what you believe. And if we disagree, then we can't be friends and we can't talk and we can't have lively discussion. I just don't think that's an interesting country to embrace. I

I think it's far more interesting to speak with people across the spectrum, try and hash out ideas and see what is the best path forward and to assume some good intent. So Andrew, I really appreciate you for being willing to do this. I know you take a lot on X and people giving their viewpoints, but I really appreciate this conversation. I think there's value in kind of hearing from different people, but also I just think it was good to ask you some questions that I don't hear sometimes in your parents. panels, and that's not your fault, but sometimes you don't get asked questions. I'd be really interested in getting your take on. So it was a real privilege to speak with you. You're like a legend in Canadian journalism. I followed you since I was a little kid, started reading the Globe and Mail and the National Post, and just becoming really interested in these...

No, no, no, no. But just your decision to leave the National Post over the controversy, like, that was all very interesting to me, because again, it just spoke to your principles of not wanting to be tied to a political party. And I just, I really appreciate you being willing to share the time. Oh, it's very gracious of you. Thank you very much. I enjoyed this.