The Dispatch Podcast - California's Fiscal Future

Episode Date: April 27, 2022

Lanhee Chen is running for state controller in California, but what does a state controller do? Steve gets that answer, plus Chen’s thoughts on California’s fiscal state and his plan if he wins the election. Chen also discusses his experience running Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign’s policy shop.   Show Notes: -Chen’s campaign website -Los Angeles Times endorses Chen’s campaign Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. We're joined today by Lonnie Chen, who is running for controller of California. He has worked in a number of senior policy positions for Republican presidential candidates, Mitt Romney's chief policy advisor in 2012, Marco Rubio's policy team in 2016. Mitt Romney in 2008, Bush Cheney in 2004, a long list of senior policy positions in 2012. Republican presidential politics. He's also the Diane and David Steffy fellow in American Public Policy Studies at the Hoover Institution and Director of Domestic Policy Studies and lecture in the public policy program at Stanford University. He's on leave from Stanford now while he runs as a Republican statewide in California. In our conversation, we talk about

his run for controller, whether it's a suicide mission, what the controller actually does on a day-to-day basis in the general state of fiscal health in the state of California. Lonnie, thanks for joining us. Great to be with you. Thank you. Thank you. I think we first met when you were, Mitt Romney's policy director back in 2012. And I always wanted to ask you this question. What did you do all day, every day, as policy director? And what would it take for somebody on the campaign to say, shit, get Lonnie?

You know, it's one of those things where now that I look back on it, many years after, it was a little a cliche to say at the time that there were no two days that were the same, but I really think that that was the case. And really, the job of policy director is more than anything, you're a process manager, which doesn't sound very glamorous and at some measure of it, it isn't. But actually, what I've reflected on is that a lot of great jobs in government and politics are really processed jobs. They're making sure that you are furnishing your principal and your colleagues on the campaign with really the information they need to make informed decisions. And when it came to being policy director, yes, I was sort of the chief policy advisor in the sense that, you know,

oftentimes I'd probably be the last person to give Governor Romney to give Mitt sort of counsel on how to handle a particular issue. But really, when you're talking about a presidential campaign, in particular in the general election, there's so many issues that come across your desk and so many different things that candidates expected to know about. I mean, everything from ethanol subsidies to Ukraine, right? I mean, a candidate can get asked about any of it. So my job was to make sure that we had a process in place to get good thinking and good answers to give to Mitt to make sure he felt comfortable taking a position on issues to make sure that the campaign felt comfortable with what it was doing. And we had a literally a cast of

thousands helping us, you know, people who were not on the campaign full time, but had committed to help the campaign in some way. And it was my job to make sure we marshaled those resources correctly. So, for example, if there's a question about the law of the C treaty, is one I remember very vividly. We need to make sure we understand, okay, what is it, first of all? What are the implications in this race? And what would the best and most thorough policy position be? And then that recommendation would come to me and I would give it to Romney. But really kind of day-to-day, it was about interfacing with him, interfacing with external constituencies, but also interfacing with my colleagues on the campaign, working with our communications team to understand, make sure they

understood, you know, here's how you need to talk about this issue so you're not mischaracterizing Romney's position, you know, working with our finance team to raise money, working with our political team to make sure we were deploying issues in the field to garner support for the campaign. And really, it's a combination of all of those different things. In terms of what it would take to get people to say they needed me, as you can imagine every single day, there's some fire alarm being triggered on a presidential campaign. And so there wasn't a day that went by where we weren't involved in some issue or something that the campaign needed to handle. But it was really an opportunity of a lifetime. And I'm grateful to Romney for bringing me in, but also just the

colleagues and relationships I was able to meet and relationships I was able to make during that campaign were crucial and have been really valuable to me over the years. He was regarded as a rather wonky candidate. And you all had, I think, what was it, a 59 point policy plan or something, that he took some grief, 57, 59, took some grief for, is, is, did that hurt him? Was there, do, do American voters want, wonky people? Boy, that's a tough one. I mean, I, in a presidential campaign, really, there should be more room for policy conversation. And, you know, it all seems kind of quaint now.

As I look back at 2012, I think there was a fair amount of policy conversation compared to what we've seen the last couple of cycles. Absolutely. And we actually did, as you may recall, Steve, we got into a lengthy conversation over tax policy at one point during the campaign because we had a proposal to engage in a broad tax reform that would lower the rates of taxation and broaden the base of tax taxation as well, which I think is generally probably what economists agree we need to do with our tax system, certainly our personal income tax system. And we haven't had those kinds of conversations in cycles subsequent. So I actually think that the pendulum is swinging back toward a desire. I think people in the public want to know that their public officials and their

candidates actually stand for real ideas, you know, and I do think that there is an element of that that's returning to our politics. In 2012, it always frustrated me that there wasn't more of that, but in retrospect, there was a heck of a lot more than than there was in the aftermath of it. You know, Romney was a unique candidate in the sense that he was able to process large amounts of information and data and distill it down into kind of what he wanted to do. And I've had the fortune of working with him and also with Marco Rubio. And I think Rubio is uniquely able to take that information that he's distilled and communicate about it. That was sort of his very special talent. And certainly for Romney, it was just analyzing large amounts of data, but also instincts about

what the right policy prescriptions were and weren't. And so, you know, I don't know that I've ever really worked with anyone else quite like that, you know, in terms of his ability to distill that massive amount of information. I hope you're right that we're returning to that. I mean, we at the dispatch spend a lot of time writing and thinking and talking about policy because we think it's important. We hope it matters again. But there is, you know, there's a lot of talk about things that are not policy related these days. And it seems to, you know, particularly on the Republican side to animate the base, it has to be sort of cultural war type issues. So I hope you're I hope you're right that we're returning to this.

Well, let's jump to your candidacy. You are running for controller in California, which is nothing, if not a policy wonk job, right? Yeah. What does a controller do? It's a great question. So, you know, I joke that we actually had a survey recently where we asked people about this question

and something like 95% of people had no idea. And the conclusion I had from that is the 5% who said they did were lying. because really nobody, nobody should have any reason to know. The California State Controller is the chief financial officer of the state of California, the kind of independent fiscal watchdog as well. So we have this unique structure in California where we have eight statewide elected officials, including both a controller and a treasurer. The controller is responsible for accountability over every dollar the state spends.

And that's why it's such an important position. And it's why traditionally it's been thought of as the independent fiscal watchdog role in the state of California. You don't report to the governor. You report to the people of the state of California, which gives you a tremendous amount of ability to ask tough questions and hopefully to evoke tough answers. And that's not something I think over the last several years we've had in this role, probably not for some period of time, because of the way that the political system in California has frankly promoted an entirely kind of hegemonic composition of our statewide elected officials, right? We've had all relevant. relatively progressive Democrats, not even just Democrats, but relatively progressive Democrats, who by and large, have kind of stuck up for each other in my view. And so this is a role where an independent-minded outsider could really come in and shake things up. And I think that's why what we're doing here in California is generating a fair amount of interest. I think

that's why people out here are taking a hard look at voting for a non-democrat. And we haven't had a non-democrat elected statewide in 15 years. So it would be a major hill to climb. And it's something that, but something we feel very confident that, that, you know, we have the opportunity to get there. What makes you, what makes you think you can do it? I mean, I was going to ask the question. I mean, running statewide as a Republican in California, not sort of the easy path to success. Well, I think a few things. First of all, one of the things I've come to realize over the many years, and this probably is intuitive for you, Steve, is that so much in politics is outside your control, right? There is, there is the atmospheric kind of what I call the macro

environment, you know, how are people feeling about the economy, how are they feeling about government, how are they feeling about politics? And we just happen to be in a time and space right now in this election cycle where I think people are very frustrated with business as usual and they're looking for a change. And in terms of congressional elections, I think that will mean that you'll see a lot of Republicans elected because the party in power always has trouble in the first midterm. And you're going to see that probably in congressional elections. my race is very different. And I always tell people that the macro environment in my race, I'm far less worried about what President Biden and congressional Democrats are doing and far more worried about what's happening in the state of California. And specifically, as you look at the struggles we've had here with high prices for gas and commodities, things like milk. I talked to a single mom the other day in L.A. County and she was saying, listen, I'm paying $1.25 more for a gallon of milk now than I was a year and a half ago. And that's a very real. thing that they look at and they say, why is, why is that happening? And obviously no one person's

responsible for it, but that macro environment of great frustration with, with kind of everything that's happening. I think not just with respect to prices, but also in California, we have problems around public safety issues. Our communities feel less safe. We have a homelessness crisis that is affecting too many of our communities. We have a K-12 education system that at one point was the greatest in the country and now is probably one of the worst. And so those challenges are the ones that I think give us, give our campaign an opportunity to talk about how we can bring positive reform to California. And that's really what it is, is first of all, the macro environment's very good. But I'll also say, beyond that, we have built a campaign that I think is poised to succeed

because we have an understanding of what's happening in our state. We have raised resources sufficient to communicate a message about change and reform. And I think we've identified, frankly, a lot of voters in the state who are registered independence and Democrats who want something different. And, you know, as much as the coverage traditionally is about the huge registration disadvantage for Republicans in the state and make no mistake, it is a huge disadvantage. It is also the case that a lot of Democrats look at the composition of statewide elected officials. They look at what's happening in our state and they say, you know what, I don't know that I like business as usual. So we believe we have an opportunity to win. In my race, we need to win about two

out of 10 Democrats to be successful. And traditionally, Republicans have won, you know, maybe seven or eight percent. So we've got to basically double what Republicans traditionally do, but we believe that there is a constituency and an opportunity to do that. So the combination of the campaign we're building, the environment, but also the fact that this office is really a watchdog office where you want some fiscal independence, you want some separation from other statewide office holders. I think all those factors together give us a great opportunity to win this year. In terms of the functioning of the office, is it primarily a transparency function? I mean, you're not changing the way that the money is spent, correct? You're monitoring it. You're

providing accountability. You can sort of wave your arms and shout, look over here, look over here. But you're not changing the amount of money spent. You're not changing how it's spent. Is that, am I right, that that's the basic function? Yeah. Fundamentally, you can't reprogram spending. you can't say, hey, I wish we were spending more money on this, so let's go spend it. Obviously, the legislature and the governor have to make that decision. What you can do, though, is you have the power to bring transparency to spending, but also you have the audit power, which you can use to kind of dig into how we've actually spent money. And I go one step further, which is to say you also have the assessment power, which means you have the ability to assess how efficacious

of spending has been. And I think that's crucially important in a state like California where we're spending, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars a year overall. And on specific programs, you're talking about tens of billions, if not over $100 billion in the case of K through 12, you have the ability to really dig in and say, how smart have we been with our spending? And I think that is a very, very important factor. There are some limited circumstances where, as controller, you can say, you know, I'm not paying a particular bill because I believe it's based on an illegal contract or something that is a malfeasance that you see.

You know, one example that's been used as the current controller, Betty Yi, actually refused to pay a contract that Alex Padilla, who's now the U.S. Senator appointed a U.S. Senator from California when he was Secretary of State, he actually diverted money that was from the federal government designed to give local registrars of voters more money to help get people to vote, basically. He took that stream of money and diverted it to a democratically, a Democratic Party-aligned PR firm. And when he did that, the controller basically stepped in and said, you know, I'm not going to allow that payment. I mean, it's just that egregious. You're taking money that was intended for local registrars of voters and giving it to your friends and cronies. We're not going to pay that. And so interestingly enough, Steve, what happened was the legislature went and had to pass a law making that legal. And then the controller paid out the bill because then the controller had no choice. But as controller, you can sort of begin to see, you know, as these things that are just so egregious.

And the other thing I find egregious is how much Governor Newsom has used his emergency power to engage in a practice called no-bid contracting, where the state, instead of bidding out contracts to find the best value for taxpayers, basically the governor has used his power by declaring a state of emergency around COVID to get these contracts out the door. And the controller in that situation, I believe, could say, no, we're not going to do that. You have to go through a fair and full bidding process in order to ensure that the money is being paid out properly. So there are real opportunities, I think, for reform, but I'm also a constitutionalist, so I don't believe that you should exercise power that you don't have. And so one of the things you can't do is go

and say, you know, I think you ought to be spending more money on this homelessness program instead of that one. That's something I wouldn't be able to do. If you were to say, to do a deep dive into Medi-Cal and find a billion dollars worth of fraud, what would be your next steps? You make a big deal about it. You issue a report. You provide the details. And then can you do anything more? Do you make criminal referrals?

You could. That would require, of course, the California Department of Justice to be run by an attorney general who would be inclined to take those forward. You could also make referrals potentially to federal prosecutors, and that has tended to be more effective, I think, in the past. where you find the malfeasance. But look, in the case of most of this malfeasance, the bad news is you're not getting the money back.

In California, we had a well-known situation recently during the pandemic where we paid out between $20 and $30 billion in fraudulent unemployment insurance benefits. And we know already from some investigation that some of that money has gone to Russian and Chinese criminal enterprises. Some of it actually went to prisoners on death row. I mean, this stuff is, you can't make this stuff up.

Literally, this is wild what happened. And there's actually now an independent. prosecutor or an independent investigation being led by a former U.S. attorney from the Eastern District of California, which is in Sacramento guy named Greg Scott, who has a great, been a great federal prosecutor, you know, served in administrations, I think, of both parties. He's handling some of the clawback of this money, but we're not getting back anywhere close to what we paid out, obviously. So that's the bad news. The good news is a good controller could identify exactly what changes should take place and highlight specific policy reforms that the legislature should

consider and then hold them accountable against deadlines. That's one of the biggest problems we have in California is that we kind of know how to fix some of these issues. It's not rocket science, but we have no one holding the legislature's feet to the fire on these things. And the controller has the ability to do that. In fact, that's part of the controller's job description is to say, here are the specific reforms, here is why you need to get it done, and here is when you should get it done by. And if you're not, someone's going to scream bloody murder over it. And yeah, look, the bully pulpit matters in this case because you have an independent constituency and you can get out there and be the person who's actually being the pain in the rear end on the

legislature and saying, why aren't you getting this done yet? And that hasn't happened in California. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious. That kind of financial strain on top of everything else is why life insurance indeed matters. Ethos is an online platform that makes getting life insurance fast and easy to protect your family's future in minutes, not months. Ethos keeps it simple. It's 100%

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Yeah. How does that happen? I mean, that seems like just to a normal person who's not paying a ton of attention. You would think, wait a second, how could you spend that amount of money and not actually have to provide like a real accounting of what's going out the door? It's an amazing thing, Steve. So California is the only state in the country. that does not have that kind of line-by-line transparency, even in Illinois, as I say, where

former governors are in prison. They have a measure of accountability we don't have in California. It's unacceptable. So the current controller has given a litany of excuses and, in fact, has fought in court against line-by-line transparency saying we don't have the technological know-how to do it. We batch our payments, and so as a result, we can't pull out on a daily basis, what checks we issue. Whatever the technological excuses are, I'm quite sure they're excuses, because I've talked to a number of technology providers here in Silicon Valley, and they see no reason why we can't unbatch these payments and figure out where they're going. You know, if you think about your... It doesn't make, honestly, it doesn't. Sorry, it doesn't. I mean, it doesn't make any sense.

I mean, that's insane, really. We can't tell you how much money we're spending. That's great. I mean, it's, you know, as I say to people, I've used Excel and I've used, you know, program. Like, I'm pretty sure we can figure this one out. Like, we put someone on the moon as a country. We can figure out as a state how to have line by line transparency. We don't have, that we have in California this this almost comical tale of a program called fiscal f i s dollar sign c a clever idea 20 years we've been trying to put in place a financial accounting platform that would allow us to do this sort of thing the program is way over budget way late it's supposed to be quote complete next year but it's not going to have the capacity to show any debt

obligations at the state level so we have all of these things we've tried and it's i think it's time for finally someone to stop and say, okay, can we just do something very basic here, which is to figure out how we get these transactions, make them available in a machine-readable way to people. And why don't we have an app? We have an app for everything now. You can even order like, you know, you have lots of different ways to order food. Why don't you have an app that basically is a state transparency app where you can go on and look up whatever thing you want, right? I want to figure out how much we spent on paper last year. And up should come all the transactions, right? Other states have this. I've talked to state officials in places like Idaho

and Mississippi, and granted, none of them are as large as California, but it's a scale issue. It's not a fundamentally how do you solve the problem issue. And so one of the first projects I would engage in as controller is to figure out how do we provide this true line by line transparency so that we can bring California into the, I don't know, the 21st century and give people a sense of what our state is spending money on because that basic information, I think, would be very, very powerful. I mean, it is, it is the irony of Sacramento being not very far from Silicon Valley and yet not being able to do these things that one would think are sort of basic. I mean, stuff that's coming out of Silicon Valley every day, you know, is changing the world. And Sacramento can't

give a straight accounting of how the money is spent. Would you say you're, would you, would you say you're running as a fiscal conservative? Yeah, you know, I have, you know, it's a, the, the labels are always something in politics these days, which I know people are keen to apply to people. I want to bring fiscal responsibility to Sacramento. If that makes me a conservative, I suppose I'm running as a fiscal conservative. But the reality is that we don't have accountability and responsibility for spending. The other thing I talk about is we don't have a balance sheet as a state. We don't actually put out a unified statement of what our assets and liabilities are. And that's particularly important in the pension setting, right, where we have massive off-book pension obligations

in California, which have been understated for many, many years. We have two state pension funds that use these return on investment assumptions that are so unrealistic. They haven't been met half the time over the last 20 years. So the state, for example, assumes we're going to get an 8% return on investment for our state pension invested assets. And we don't reach that benchmark, like a lot of times. So why do we keep using that number? For many years, the state assumed that we'd have a 12.5% return on investment. It's like, where do I sign up for that? Why don't make it 30? Yeah, I mean, but, but, but, but, But that's the problem, right, is we need a realistic accounting because somebody is going to have to pay for this, right?

I'm a big believer. If you make a promise, you should keep it. And so we got a lot of state employees who've been made promises over the years. We need to be able to keep those obligations. Unfortunately, with business as usual, we're not going to be able to do that unless we have massive tax hikes on a broad number of taxpayers, right? As much as our friends on the left sometimes like to talk about a wealth tax, that's not going to answer the problem. That's not going to solve the problem we have in California of our long-term pension obligations. So we just need to be honest with people. And I think that is the fiscal, the sort of fiscal responsibility element of my platform. And if being a conservative means having accountability and some measure of independence from all the other state officials who are unwilling to tackle this problem, then sign me up for that. But I, again, I'm not, I'm flabbergasted at the fact that it's come to this, that this is

what we need in state government. Yeah. Yeah. When you think about the amount of money that Californians spend, that the California government spends, there's not really much hope in reining that in. And that's not your job. I mean, as you say, that's not your function. Your function is much more to see that it's spent well or spent responsibly. Is that, am I understanding that right? Yeah. I mean, it is. It is important for us to understand because we do have big problems. I talk to people who are self-identified Democrats, progressives all the time, and they said, listen, I'm supporting you because I do believe we probably have different views when it comes to the right public policy prescriptions, but we want to figure out what's actually happening in the state so we can make intelligent decisions about doubling down on spending that is working

and pulling out a spending that's not. I don't think any reasonably minded person should oppose not spending money on programs that aren't working. And when I look at the homeless, this is one example, the homelessness crisis. In the city of LA, there's one program where they're spending $800,000 per unit of housing to construct for the homeless. And they can't keep people in this housing, right? Because there are predicates for why people are homeless. Yes, in some cases, it's because they can't find economic opportunity and we need to help them with that. But in other cases, there are behavioral health issues we need to be addressing. There are physical health issues we need to be addressing. So why don't we solve those problems first and then figure out how do we

make sure we get people housed in an appropriate way. It's just remarkable that we keep spending this money. It's throwing good money after bad. And I talked to people all across the political spectrum who are like, just solve the problem. Right. Let's just solve the problem. Right. What do your campaign look like?

I mean, I'm picturing a huge rally. You're up there in a Navy sport coat and a red tie and the crowd. The crowd is chanting, no more fraud. No more fraud. are you doing I mean do you do rallies is it is it lots of meet and greets nothing nothing quite so glamorous I would say I mean we are we are doing the hard work of meeting voters all over the state and and and we have groups of 15 and 20 we have groups of a couple hundred I mean we're really getting up and down the state I mean the thing Steve I tell people and they're

like well yeah no does Sherlock it's a big state it is a really big state you can be in Sacramento which is pretty far north and still have several hours to drive north before you get to the northernmost border of California and you can go down to the Mexican border and you go east and you go through vast, massive expanses of Imperial County and you're still in California. And so we are doing our best to reach as many voters as we can. Our campaign is very lean. You'd probably be shocked at how small it really is, but I believe as control or I should have a campaign that reflects what I would do as control. Yeah, odd if it were bloated. No, no. We have a very, very lean campaign and we're going to devote as much of our money as

possible into reaching actual voters and communicating about what it is I want to do with the state budget and showing people transparency and what that actually means. So what we have done is we have been very judicious in terms of spending money. And actually, we're just, in fact, I'm looking now at some things we've been doing around our campaign finance reporting, which in California, we have weird deadlines. We don't have a quarterly deadline. We have a, we had April 23rd was our last reporting deadline. And so we're going to put out a report today that shows that we have a very healthy balance sheet. We have raised a lot of money for a race like this, over $2 million. And we have most vast majority of in the bank still. We have a high cash on hand

number, and we've kept our burn rate particularly low as a veteran of many campaigns. I know where campaigns get into trouble is, you know, maybe they can raise the money, but they don't spend it wisely. And so we want to show people that we are not only raising money, but we are conserving it to make sure that we're spending it in ways that actually will help us move the needle in terms of winning this election. So it's a pretty lean staff. You know, I've got a campaign manager. I've got an operations person that goes around with me. I've got a lot of friends who are helping me for free, basically, you know, they're putting their time and energy into this because they care about the state. I got a great team of people who are working on policy, which, you know, if I weren't doing

this, I'd be working on policy, right? And so it's, that's something that I'm very appreciative of is that there's a number of people over the years in both state and national politics and policy who are, who are signing up to help because they believe in the cause. And let's add down on an optimistic note. You said earlier that you're sanguine about the prospects of the country returning to a more policy-focused debate, a more substantive debate. What makes you optimistic? You know, just in the people I meet and talk to. And I'm not, you know, meeting people who are, you know, who are leading political figures or leading media figures.

I'm meeting everyday Californians. And I'm hearing them say, you know, we're saying. of people just not just kind of spouting platitudes. We actually want people who are people of substance and ideas and people, frankly, of some measure of thoughtfulness and maybe even moderation. You know, I think that they're, that they see the extremes and they're sick and tired of the yelling and screaming. In fact, this morning, I didn't get my car fixed. And so a guy gave me a right back to my house and we had a long conversation. You know, he's a student in community college. And he's like, yeah, I'm just sick of like people screaming at each other. And

I just want people who are going to go and solve problems. And I think that is the, that is the thing that I find most encouraging. And, you know, it's also bubbled up, I think, in some ways to, to, you want to call them elite levels, I guess. You know, I got the endorsement of the Los Angeles Times recently. And, you know, they're not exactly a paper that's known for endorsing a ton of Republicans. In fact, I don't think they've endorsed one statewide in a decade. That's an understatement. Yeah. And, and I think that while they made clear that we probably don't agree on on public policy, what they agree on is the need for somebody who's going to go and solve problems. independently and really be able to be an independent voice. And the challenge we have in our state is that we've been electing the same kinds of people to the same kinds of jobs for too long. And they all take care of each other. And the one thing they forget to do is to take care of taxpayers. And so that is something I am focused on. I'm committed to. And that's what gives me hope is that people will understand and hear that message and be able to cut through all the partisan politics and cut through what they usually see in races in California. And, you know, I know that my opponents will, will say, oh, look, he's a Republican.

Don't vote for the Republican. And usually that's their argument. Their argument to people consists of first name, last name, Republican. And they think that's going to be enough. And I got news for them. And this campaign is not going to be enough because we're going to present a positive vision for how we make California better. And yes, it's wonky.

Yes, it's technical. We're talking about the finances of the state. But everybody gets it because everybody who's a taxpayer understands that the money they pay to Sacramento, particularly in this day and age, is so precious. given how bad inflation is, how many things are going on, I believe we can make the case with everyday Californians. And I'm confident, actually, that we're going to have a great campaign and hopefully we'll be successful come November. Well, Lonnie, thanks for coming and talking to us here on the Dispatch podcast. Best of luck to you.

Great to be with you. Thanks, Steve. With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot trackside. So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Pre-sale tickets for future events subject to availability and varied by race. Terms and conditions apply. Learn more at amex.ca.ca slash Y-Amex.