The Paikin Podcast - Justin Ling: The 51st State Votes and Canada’s Existential Election

Episode Date: September 29, 2025

Journalist Justin Ling joins Steve to discuss his book “The 51st State Votes,” how Trump turned Canada’s 45th general election on its head, Pierre Poilievre’s “campaign malpractice,” whether Canada can survive as Trump's economic punching bag, and how Mark Carney’s “elbows up” approach is going today. Then they consider Chrystia Freeland’s exit from cabinet and what an increasingly unstable and chaotic America means for Canada. The 51st State Votes book:  https://sutherlandhousebooks.com/product/the-51st-state-votes/Follow The Paikin Podcast: APPLE: https://apple.co/4m81G7KX: x.com/ThePaikinPodINSTAGRAM: instagram.com/thepaikinpodcastBLUESKY: bsky.app/profile/thepaikinpodcast.bsky.social

There's a lot of people writing books and columns about what's going on in Ottawa these days, and today's guest is someone who I think deserves your attention because, for me, he's one of the best. He doesn't work for any particular legacy media. He is a freelancer, so you can read his stuff all over the place. And if you have an appetite for a bit more, he's got a new book out. It's called The 51st State Votes, a behind-the-scenes look at our national election earlier this year. Provocative title, you think? The Paken Podcasts one-on-one with author and journalist Justin Ling, coming right up.

Delighted to welcome Justin Ling to the Paken Podcasts one-on-ones. And, Justin, as I welcome you, I do want to ask you about this title right off the top. The 51st state votes. Justin, what are you doing here? Well, I mean, first off, thanks for having me, obviously delighted to be chatting about it. What am I doing? I'm being provocative, right? Of course.

The title is entirely my own creation. I know some authors kind of go, oh, you know, it was a title by committee. My publisher wanted no, no, no. This one was all me. My publisher, I think, even tried to talk me out of it very briefly. But I wanted a title that emphasized what's at stake, right? I mean, you know, I think we've had this inclination over the last year to sort of have a minute of panic and fear and anxiety about the extent of the threat and the existential threat facing us. And then we sort of pull back and go, okay, well, everything's got normal.

Everything's fine now. We can all chill out and calm down and sort of deal with some of the other stuff. But the title of the book is really meant to kind of grab you, shake you and go, no, no, listen. the threat that was put to us early this year is still there. It is still as terrifying and serious and imminent as it's ever been. And it's not going to go away. If we don't make a bunch of decisions now and make the right decisions critically, we do genuinely risk being the 51st state.

I know none of us want that. That's why we have to. I don't think none of us wants it. I know there's some people who want it. Well, and I honestly think those people should come out and be counted. I think they should be a little more upfront about what they walk. I think there are some people in this country. Some of them have registered political parties in Alberta, which I applaud because I appreciate

the degree of transparency to that. There are people in this country for sure who want to be the 51st state. They should come out and be a little more honest about their views, I think, but the overwhelming majority are horrified by the concept, left, right, centrist, whatever. And I really think it's important that we keep in the center of our minds the fact that this is a real possibility, real threat being made by a real president who is really trying to break American democracy. And I think trying to downplay the extent of that threat is a huge strategic mistake. To that end, let me read an excerpt from your book and then we'll come back and chat. You write, while the prospect of a U.S. invasion is still remote, we have to concede that it has become a lot more likely over the last year.

It is still wildly unlikely that tanks are about to roll across the border, but Donald Trump had, by the time of our roundtable, spent weeks reiterating his honest desire to expand his territory and make Canada the 51st state. Quote, we wouldn't have a northern border problem. We wouldn't have a tariff problem. He hasn't talked in quite an explicit way as this lately. Do you take any comfort in that? No.

It's because we haven't asked him recently. The last time Donald Trump or the White House in general talked about the 51st state, I think was during a briefing in the White House, Leavitt, his press secretary, got asked, do you still want to make Canada the 51st state? And she basically said, yeah, of course we do it. Nothing has changed. We just have other priorities at the moment. And I thought that was really telling because the reality is people have stopped asking him about it because he's been giving the same answer again and again and again. So it does not come up. Obviously, what he was in the room with Prime Minister Mark Carney at the G7. I think he sort of downplayed it because clearly he's quite smitten with our new Prime Minister, but asked in the abstract and when the PM isn't around, he keeps saying, yeah, I'm still serious about it. And also, you know, you can point out that he hasn't talked about Greenland in a while. And yet, people around him are still saying quite emphatically Greenland's independence and then affiliation with America is a priority. And you you actually saw the U.S. Ambassador to Denmark getting recalled recently or getting called

to basically getting a dressing down because there was evidence that Americans potentially with ties to the White House were in Greenland fomenting kind of anti-Danish sentiment. That is a really terrifying thing. There is so much stuff happening right now. I think it is easy to get lost in it and to not notice the little things that are in fact pointing to there being this threat that is not just existential and ephemeral, but actual and imminent. And I think we have to remember we still have more than three years at least of this left. And to think that this threat, this possibility has got away. I think it's unbelievably naive.

I'm interested in your use of the word smitten. You say Donald Trump is smitten with Mark Carney. Why are you saying that? I mean, it is relatively rare that Donald Trump uses such effusive phrasing for for leaders that aren't autocrats, right? Like, and we're recording this, Donald Trump was in the White House, at the Oval Office, with Erdogan, the president of Turkey. And there's a really funny moment where he turns, you know, to Erdogan and says, you know, we're old friends. This guy knows a thing or two about rigging elections, which is just a deeply funny. and terrifying thing to know.

Nevertheless, President Trump clearly has a thing for a certain type of leader. Now, what do a lot of those leaders have in common? They tend to be men. They tend to be autocrats, though not universally. And they tend to be kind of business-minded professional. And they tend to know how to walk the right line between independence, sort of, you know, a strong negotiating position and a degree of flattery. He really likes Mark Ruta, the former Prime Minister of the Netherlands, who's also the head of NATO now.

And I think him and Carney have a similar kind of cut of their jib, so to speak. So I think Trump just likes the guy personally, but also you can look back through the history of Trump and find a lot of people for whom he had a lot of affinity, who he turned on incredibly quickly. There will be a point where Donald Trump and Mark Carney are going to come to college. conflict, right? It will probably, I'm just going to guess here, say it's going to be around the renegotiation or the review of USMCA, where we're going to find out that both sides are actually very far apart and that what America wants to transform and deform this deal into does not work for us. We are facing the possibility of a total rupture on North American

trade. When that happens, I can't imagine that Donald Trump's going to keep up his sort of flowery praise for Mark Carney, but, you know, trying to future cast what Donald Trump is likely to do is always a Mug's game. Not a good idea. I want to take you back nine months. Mark Carney is running for the leadership of the federal liberal party. And after he won, he gave a speech in which he said, we are a country that demands respect. And he was clearly aiming at the White House when he said that line. And that morphed into the general election to come into, I guess a phrase that kind of summed up the liberal campaign, which was elbows up. And I want to know from you how much elbows up you're seeing these days.

Yeah, it's a good question. In the book, the book sort of ends on a note of saying the big challenge for Mark Carney is going to be in the expectations he set for himself, right? I kind of pick up on it throughout the campaign. I noted again as the G7 happens in Kananaskis over the summer. But Mark Carney did this very, I think, unwise thing where he convinced the public that a deal with Donald Trump is possible when I think it never actually was. He convinced the public that he could get Trump to sort of abandon, not just sort of stop talking

about, but fully abandon and maybe even apologize for these attempts to take over Canada. And also that Canada's recalibration on the world stage would be seamless and quick. And of course, all of that stuff is just wildly oversimplified. It, of course, is the byproduct of election campaign massaging, right, where you kind of need to make things palatable to the public. And also, given that he had kind of a shorter runway than a normal party leader, I think there was a real attempt to just kind of lacquer up this message and present it to the public in a simplified form and then kind of figure the details after I got elected. But I think even after he won the election, you know, with a strong minority, not quite a majority, but he won. I think there was still this inclination to present a rosier picture than they really ought to have. And I think that set them up for this problem, which is that they were not ready to impose the costs that would come with actually fighting this trade war, right?

So elbows up comes with the cost. And this is, you know, my point is he should have been honest about this from the very beginning. I think he still would have likely won the election. It would have been more tough, I think. But I think he should have been upfront from the very beginning. elbows up will probably mean a more painful recession than trying to appease Trump's, you know, mercurial nature. I think he should have been upfront that elbows up, probably would have hurt Canadian farmers and fissures. It probably would have led to some factories idling, and it would

have led to potentially inflation in the short term. I think you can justify that by saying, this is all for long-term gain. This is all in hopes of forcing America not to continue its tariff regime, in hopes of creating stronger domestic industry that can then link up to Europe or Australia or New Zealand or wherever, I think there's a lot of good justifications for why it would have been short-term pain for long-term gain, but because he never actually conveyed that to people, I think he didn't have the political capital to do it. So that's, I think, why you saw that retreat.

on the retaliatory tariffs. I think that's why you see this constant insinuation that a deal is around the corner. I think it has become, it's not an elbows down. It's like elbows midway through. Like it can't quite figure out what it wants to do. Let me gently push back against some of that, only in as much as if you're a brand new leader in politics and you've won this massive mandate, first of all, from your own party to win the leadership. And then you find yourself into an election campaign where let's remember, he was kind of making mistake after mistake after mistake. until he finally sort of got his win behind him. He's a rookie politician after all. He'd never

run for or won anything in the past. You're now seriously suggesting he should have taken a tougher road in order to try to secure victory after his party had been in power for 10 straight years and looked as if had they kept the previous leader that had been reduced to two seats. Really? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, listen, why did people like Mark Carney? Like I was I was on the plane with them, I was, you know, wandering around meeting these liberal voters, many of whom were non-voters, former conservatives, or, you know, identified progressive conservatives, former new Democrats. Why were people lining up behind this guy, right? Like, he was basically the new face for a party that they had come to despise.

He was the, the, he had assumed control over a government that had, I think, regardless of how you feel with the liberal party in general, led to mismanagement of immigration, which had been kind of blithe to the economic pressures facing the country, which had screwed up on housing and foreign policy. Like, I think you can go to the list. In the opening chapters of the book, I go down some of the list of things they did screw up. Why is it that people put all that aside and said Mark Carney's the guy? It's because he himself projects competence, right? Like he himself. The room. Exactly. And I actually use that phrase in the book. And I think that gave him license to tell some hard truths, right? Like politically unpopular, politically otherwise, you know, impossible truths.

And I think people would have appreciated it, right? Like people are, I think, waiting to be asked what they can do to help. And what I think Mark Carney internalized from his advisors who are not inclined to do this was that he should just project confidence and that he should project optimism. But that's not what we need right now, right? Like, we are in a. really really, really tough spot. And I think if we keep stumbling ahead, pretending like things are going to work out if we're just happy and smiley enough, I think we're going to wind up feeling that pain and then being shocked by it. Well, let me see if I've got this right then. Are you suggesting a more Stephen Harper-like approach, which was, and here I'll reference, I guess he was caught on a hot

mic at a private event during an election campaign, during the campaign, but in a private event, saying something along the likes of, I love Canada so much, and I think what the Americans are doing is so awful that there's basically no expense I would not be prepared to assume were I in charge right now in order to push back at all of this nonsense. You'd like to have heard more tough talk like that from Carney? It's funny when I saw those comments from Harper, I thought to myself, that's it. Like that is the message. Like that is, and you know, Stephen Harper also sort of defies over the course of his time in office defies all the expectations of how a politician is supposed to speak to the public, right? And you can say, well, he's conservative. He can get away with that.

But I don't know. I mean, Stephen Harper governed through a real economic crisis, the likes of which I think normally would have led people fleeing into the arms of the liberals or leftists. And he managed to convince people that they had to stay the course on a degree of austerity, that his sort of tough medicine approach, that his sort of reticence towards, you know, inflationary spending or infrastructure spending was the right way to go. And it worked, right? You get a majority out of it. Exactly.

Like, he did prove that if you're just upfront with people and you ask them to make the sacrifice, that though more often not going to say yes, what people really don't like is being told they don't have to make sacrifices only to learn later they do. Right? Like that to me is really the inflection point here. And I think it really did this whole decision, you know, this, this sort of smiley have it both ways approach that Mark Carney took, I think robbed him from policy flexibility in actually pushing back. Like, regardless of what he does, we're going to be in a recession. I think we're probably in one right now. Regardless of what he does, farmers are going to hurt, manufacturing is going to hurt, you know, the auto sector is

going to hurt regardless. So why not, you know, acknowledge that fact. Why not give yourself the flexibility to, to, you know, keep up those retaliatory tariffs to put that revenue towards helping workers laid off and businesses shut down and give yourself that flexibility of kind of maximum reaction and response. All right. Let's move the spotlight from Mark Carney onto Pierre Pahliev. And I want to pluck another quote out of the book to start that. right here, it has been suggested that Pierre Pauliev's predicament was unpredictable, that Trump's return to office and his wrecking ball routine were so unexpected that Polyev and his team couldn't have seen it coming. On the contrary, you write, they had been warned about this for years

and they refused to wrestle with it. Obvious question. Why? Because it was going to work, right? Like, it was always a gamble. And so listen, I'll tell you what, a couple years ago. Not long after, I think it was when Pahlia was still running for the leadership, he was going to win it, but he hadn't won it yet. I was talking to a certain conservative MP, he was very close to him. And I say to this MP, are you not making a gamble here? Like, are you not leaning into a segment of the population that is kind of beholden to whether it's rebel news, whether it's influencers in Trump's orbit, or people who just kind of generally have become so disillusioned with politics that they, have taken refuge in conspiracy theories and misinformation. I basically said by trying to win their support so emphatically and steal them from Maxine Bernier's People's Party, are you not

kind of assuming a lot of risk that you're going to be let down some weird garden path of nonsense or one of them is going to do something stupid or say something stupid and you're going to have to wear it? Is it not a risk? And that MP said to me, yeah, it's a risk. It's a gamble. But also, we have tried the other thing so many times now. We've tried stealing votes from the NDP, they're union members. We've tried stealing votes from the liberals. We've tried winning votes from the Block Quebec. We've tried it again and again and again and it hasn't worked. So it's time to change the script and do something else. Is it a gamble? Yes, but doing the same thing again as a gamble too. And there is a certain logic to that, right? Like all else being equal,

if Kamala Harris had won the election, Paulyev strategy almost certainly would have worked. But he, but she did win the election. Trump did. And that should have been the big blinking indicator for them to go, okay, wait, we are going to receive a lot of unflattering comparison to this guy. We're going to wear every nonsense thing he does. We are going to be running on policy that is very similar to his in some regards, at least in language. Well, the slogan, too. What was our slogan? Well, I mean, they didn't say Canada first often, but I mean, you know, it was sort of almost implied there. I mean, you can almost, I mean, the fact that I think certain polyie of endorsers were inclined to say make Canada great again, I think was all the

proof of me. But I mean, yeah. And I mean, you know, they were promising cuts to foreign aid using the exact same verbiage. They were promising the same degree of cuts. They were promising the same, you know, warrior military, not a woke military. They were promising to use the federal government to go after universities who were deemed overly woke. I mean, the parallels. He boasted about his crowd sides, which is something the president does all the time. session with the crowd size, right? And even talking to some of the same people, like Jordan B. Peterson, like the similarities were there. So that should have been, when he won, that should have been the moment where they said, okay, listen, time to throw out this campaign and do something different.

And they didn't. They just were incapable of changing their strategy. Well, I like this part of the book where you said, you ask somebody, what do you do if Trump wins? And the response was always some iteration of a shrug and a hope that things would work out all right in the end. So the question becomes, I mean, Corey Tonight, who's Doug Ford's campaign director, very famously said at a luncheon speech that he thought that the federal conservatives during the election campaign were practicing, quote-unquote, campaign malpractice because obviously the facts on the ground had changed, but their campaign strategy did not. What did you think of that characterization of what the conservatives were doing? I mean, you have to go and read the entire remarks that tonight

made at that lunch, and I can't even remember all of them, but it was just so rife with the most kind of damaging political metaphors, I think I've ever heard a strategist say openly, especially targeting their own party. Yeah, exactly. He was bang on. I mean, he was 100% right. And tonight knows full well what he's doing in this space. I think he kind of openly offered to help.

And he was rebuffed. And there is kind of a side part of the conservative story arc. in this election, which is that maybe they could have made this work if they brought in the right people to modulate, maybe soften, maybe sharpen in other respects this message, to appeal to people who were feeling this anxiety in a real way. And tonight is one of them. Tim Houston, Nova Scotia, I think is another. Doug Ford, obviously, the prime choice for Ontario. And these people were cast aside. They were called, you know, conservatives in name only. They were made fun of and belittled by people around Polyev who were so arrogantly assured of their victory they thought

they didn't need the help. And to my mind, that was a huge strategic blunder. They all won and he didn't. Yeah, exactly. Bottom line. Okay, I didn't, I'm sure, go to as many Pierre Poliiev news conferences during the election campaign as you did, but I did go to my share of them. And I was really fascinated to read the part of your book where you talk about how stage managed all of the press conferences were that the communications handlers around Pierre Polyev basically selected who was going to get to ask the questions, that they would get to ask very few questions. There would be no follow-up questions.

And it was really, I mean, the stranglehold on their attempt to sort of stage manage these things was really quite breathtaking. In your view, if they had to do it again, should they have done it differently? Because they certainly thought that they were stage managing the thing to their benefit at the time. Yeah, of course. I mean, listen, I think whenever you try and impose central control on the message of going out to the public, you're almost always asking for pain and misfortune. Because you know what? The public doesn't really like being spoken to like a toddler. But let me take a wider look at this. Because to some degree, like I do think this was exceptional, right? Like this has been a this was the most controlled and sort of tin pot dictator routine in least in terms of media. relations i've ever seen in canada this was a new level of obsessive behavior but it's also kind of the end point of where we've been going in general right like the quality of information that has flowed from both political parties and the government to the media and by extension

the public has gotten thinner stupider and more kind of tightly managed and and full of just vacuous messaging than never before. It has been a slow slide, but I think it has increased in velocity over the last number of years. And Pierre Polyev's campaign is sort of the extreme end of that. But it is not an aberration. It is just more of an indication of the trend. Like, it's not as though Mark Carney's campaign was providing, you know, wonderfully detailed policy briefs to us. It's not like Jugmeet Singh was holding huge press meleys with every reporter who showed up. There has been a trend towards micromanaging media, towards dumbing down information going to the public, and to round all the edges off of speech to make everything sound kind of drab and unimportant.

And I think it is contributing to part of the reason why people hate politics so much these days. They no longer feel like politicians even are capable of speaking like humans. They no longer feel like if they read a news story, they're going to actually get much information from it. And I think that is the strategic mistake that everybody is making. Pierre Pollyev just made it more intensely than everybody else. One more question on the Palliev campaign. And to this end, obviously, we all look a lot smarter in hindsight that we would have at the beginning of the campaign. But I'm betting, I am betting you, Justin, that if before the campaign began, I said to you,

if Jenny Byrne went to Pierre Polyev, his campaign director, and said, Pierre, Pierre, I can get you 41.5% of the total vote. I can run a campaign that'll get you 41.5% of the total vote in this election. Will you take it? 10 times out of 10, he would have said, Jenny, you do that because that's enough for me to win a majority government. They happened to get the one time where 41.5% wasn't enough to get a majority government. So are we being too tough on them in hindsight, given that? he got a pretty darn good number at the end of the day. Yes and no. So listen.

So yes in the sense that that strategy, that get to 41% strategy, was always, and they knew this, was always going to send a green, new Democrat, and block voters fleeing to the liberal party, right? Like there was always, if you try and ratchet up that polarization where you're creating kind of forces amongst the right, you're going to get everyone the left coalescing around one party. That was always going to be the electoral calculus that went into this, and that's exactly, there's other stuff going on, but that that is what happened, right? So I think it was always a mistake regardless.

But, but, you know, the other part of this is that they did get a lot of stuff right. Like, I'm pretty hard on Pierre Pahliav's kind of approach to politics, you know, the sitting down with the conspiracy podcasters and the engaging in this rampant misinformation and talking to people fundamentally like they're stupid. and I think, you know, descending into the muck of whatever they can find on Twitter as opposed to stuff that's supposed to actually fix the country. Like, I think that is really offensive to our political system. And I've said that for a very long time. But, and here's the big caveat, he got a lot of stuff right, right? Like his message, which I think if they'd honed this, could have been much more effective. They tried and they didn't really commit to it.

But one message that he did try in workshop was, we can't be strong against America if we're weak at home. And he tried to tie that into the fact that we have some of the most unaffordable housing in the world with the fact that our productivity has totally decoupled from Americas. It has stagnated as America's has increased. And this goes back long before Trump, you know, pointing out that our healthcare system is slowly crumbling that our cities are systematically under finance. There's a lot of stuff going wrong in this country, right? Like he obviously crystallized that into candidates broken, which he then sort of abandoned later on. But to some degree, people feel that because it is a lived experience for many people across the country. They feel like things are falling apart.

They feel like they have homeless, like their city is, you know, totally waylaid by the homelessness problem. They feel like the drug epidemic is everywhere. There are people who genuinely, crime, you know, and some of this is more experiential, some of it's driven by the Internet than actual. But, you know, nevertheless, people feel like there is something fundamentally wrong. And their logic is, I can't deal with that existential threat of America until we deal with the actual fundamental day-to-day problems we're facing here. That is a good message. His solution for that was totally anemic, totally off-based, totally lacking.

But it's a good message. And to some degree, I think that is what resonated. And it's another thing that Mark Carney has to grapple with, right? Sure, 43-some-odd percent of the country thinks America is the single most pressing threat to us, and it's one that we have to just be completely focused on. Another 41% of the country feels like we can't even begin to deal with that until we deal with the things here. And both sides are in their own way right. Okay, let me ask you one more question about Carney and then we're going to take a little

break to talk about beer. Stand by for that. But here's what you've got Carney saying. Carney would later say in private that he wasn't terribly keen on politicking. He is no natural politician. He's a technocrat perfectly at ease. he's talking to investors, bureaucrats, political leaders, and bankers. Foksy Charm isn't something easily learned. So the question is, has you now figured it out? No, I don't think so. I don't think.

So before he became leader, I went back and watched a bunch of videos on YouTube of Carney speaking at investor summits and thought leader conferences and all these places that I normally can't stand listening to. But it is really funny how good. good he is at breaking down complex topics, even that is kind of intelligible for both the investor class and also lay people. It is really interesting how engaging he can be. It is fascinating how much he can kind of tie together in just, you know, a 20-minute speech. And then I could have watched him, you know, get on the debate stage in the leadership brace, you know, go into the

campaign, ultimately win. And it does strike me that he has been convinced to squish, you know, his actual ability to communicate into this box that has been designed for him. That is sort of the, you know, the routine playbook for liberal leaders in North American abroad. And it dawns at me just how ill-served that, that sort of style is towards his actual skills. And on top of that, I think he's been convinced to sort of prioritize certain power bases in his party. And, you know, when he went to go make his cabinet, he appointed up several people who kind of checked those traditional boxes of regionalism, of power bases in the party, of being really good at organizing in certain communities. And I watch all of this

stuff. And I think to myself, you know, would Mark Carney be better served by just throwing out the playbook, throwing out the rules and the guidelines that serve liberal leaders and have served liberal leaders for a few decades now, and just trying to do something fundamentally different. He has carte blanche now. He is going to be prime minister for at least two years, maybe as long as four. There is, I think, an interesting opportunity for him to say, you know what, I'm going to get rid of some of the traditional expectations of what a liberal prime minister is supposed to do, is required to do, is expected to do.

And I'm going to try and be more like that guy who is wooing, you know, the plutocrat class back in the day because I think that's probably more effective than me trying to fit into one of Justin Trudeau's suits. Well, I don't know how much of a hockey fan you are, but when the liberal caucus gathered at Edmonton and the prime minister went to the microphone and said, you know, these are really incredibly challenging times. We don't know what our trade relationship with the United States is like. Our political relationship seems to be very confused as well.

We don't know if McDavid's going to resign with the Oilers. That to me was kind of the folksy charm that you think he doesn't do all that well, but I thought he nailed it. In certain circumstances, he's good at it. And listen, I also say in the book that he does get better at this in some regards, right? Like his stump speech got better and better and better over time, not because he delivered the lines better or he invoked some foxywitisms, but because he actually made space for people to sort of heckle him in good nature. Like speeches at a carney rally became a participatory event at one point, right? Like they would be yelling stuff out. They would be fielding new slogans for him. They'd be, you know, just responding

enthusiastically. And he'd really, he'd really roll with it, right? Like, it's not that he's a complete robot, right? It does not come naturally to him, as it doesn't for, I think, most people. And I actually think people find that quite endearing. Okay. Let us, I'll ask you to get comfortable for a second, because one of the ways we keep this podcast going is by getting nice organizations to sponsor us. And there's a group called Beer Canada, which represents all the brewers of this country and here is their message. So yeah, have a swig of water and here we go. Canada, as we all know, is in an ongoing affordability crisis that no doubt affects everybody listening or watching to this. And Canadians more or less have the right to know whether their governments are making

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And they've got a website you can go to for more information. The site is hereforbeer.ca. That's hereforbeer.ca. And ask yourself, why does the best beer nation have the worst beer taxation? And that is a message in the interest of fairness and transparency from our friends at Beer Canada. Which always, when I get to the end of that ad read, Justin, I always like to ask our guests, given the choice if you've got an opportunity

to have a beer with any politician in the country today who's at the table with you? Ooh, you know who would be? Daniel Smith. I would love to have a beer

with Daniel Smith. And I say this because I used to be an occasional guest on Daniel Smith's radio show. I always thought her a really interesting libertarian-leaning

conservative in this country. Didn't always agree with her but did agree with her on some stuff. stuff. And I think she's one of those politicians who got turned quite squirrelly by the pandemic. And we all went scurily in her own ways. But I, you know, I wrote these, these newsletters when, before she became premier, kind of looking at, at this online community she had built during the pandemic and watched it. She was sharing stuff from like Russian disinformation

portals. She was reading this Holocaust denial blog at one point. Like she was reading and engaging with some of the looniest stuff online, and she disavowed some of it later, but it's hard to ignore that her politics have been sort of infected by a lot of the strange realities that have been built on the internet. And I want so desperately to sit down with her and like get to the bottom of some of this stuff. Like how much does some of this stuff actually impact her day-to-day thinking? How much of it changed her politics writ large? How does she decide to read certain things over others? And I think it would be a really interesting conversation, but I don't know. I don't think she'd want to have it. Well, you never know. She was actually

our first guest for the Paken podcast. The very first guest. We flew out to Calgary and did a 45 minute sit down with her, which was absolutely fascinating. And when you said, she's the one I'd want to have a beer with. I thought, well, I didn't have a beer with her, but I sat down and talked to her for 45 minutes. And yeah, she's, she is a fascinating politician with an amazing backstory considering she was kind of drummed out of Alberta politics for several years. And then look at her today. Anyway, let me, I want to move our conversation onto some other issues happening on the federal stage, namely, Christopher. I'd like to know what you make of the development that she is not going to run again in the next election, that her political career is, I guess I should say,

for the moment over, and that she intends to take on the role of being the prime minister's kind of Ukrainian reconstruction advisor. What do you make of all that? I mean, I'll start by saying I love that job for her. I mean, there's been just a litany of stories over the years of her contemplating other jobs. I think at one point, Secretary General of NATO, some European job, I can't quite recall. It's been floated for quite some time. Ambassadorships, I think we're on the table at one point. And it's clear that either she didn't, she decided not to pursue them or she didn't want those jobs. This job feels like a very good fit for her. And I'm actually really glad we have someone managing it. Both the challenge posed by the war in Ukraine, not just for Ukraine, but for

Europe, Canada, the whole world, is something that Canada likes to talk about, but it's still systematically underappreciates and fails to take seriously. And also the challenge and the opportunities posed by reconstruction after the war is over is going to be absolutely massive. And again, it's one of the things we pay lip service to and we're not doing enough to prepare for. So I actually really like that we finally have someone, and I really like that it's Christia Freeland. That said, not that said, in addition to that, you know, I think the leadership race made really clear that Christia Freeland's not a great politician. Like she just, and it's almost always bewildering to me that she chose to stick with it for

as long as she did. I appreciate that she wants to contribute to public service, to public policy, and those are really good instincts. there are other ways to do it. They're not in parliament. And the fact that I think she was just always so incapable of connecting to the political moment and the zeitgeist and with media and with voters, I think it was just always a sign that she's not that great at politics. Great of politics. Well, okay. Hang on. I'm going to push back on you here because I accept your evidence for what you say when you say

there's some things about politics that she doesn't do very well? Absolutely. The skill with which she resigned her portfolio and then put the shiv in the back of Justin Trudeau and basically brought his career to an end and gave her party

a new chance to put on a fresh coat of paint, find a new leader, and you know, stay in office was really skillful. You've got to give her that, don't you? You know what? I don't. Because I don't think it was a strategic move. I think it was a moral decision.

And it was the correct moral decision, right? Like she did the right thing. I really don't. I think it is, I actually would be really curious to know what she would say to this. I'm not convinced that it was some master play or some chess move. I think she was faced with a decision. She made one that corresponded to her values. I don't think it was even conceivable that she could have made the alternative choice.

Well, I'm not suggesting her values weren't. employed in making the decision, but to me, it demonstrated a level of political savvy and understanding of the status quo to be quite masterful. I mean, it's, boy, oh boy, I mean, she did it. I mean, you've got to give her that. She did it. Oh, no, I'm not going to take that away from her. I mean, she is the one that ultimately pushed out a prime minister who was digging his fingers into the wood paneling of Langevin block, right? Like, she's the one who got him to leave, and it seemed almost inconceivable that he was going to go at that point. But I don't know.

Like I look at her record, both in foreign affairs, in finance, her run for the leadership of that party. And she's just somebody who I don't think, and maybe you want to push back again, by all means, I don't know that she was all that good at getting either big projects forward through the bureaucracy and into parliament, through parliament, I don't know that she was really effective at even putting big ideas in the table in her leadership run. She was, I can tell you, emphatically,

and this is a consensus in the press gallery, was horrendous at communicating with both journalists and kind of the public writ large. And, you know, her skills lay elsewhere. And that's, I think that's not necessarily a dig at her competency. It's just, I think, a recognition that, that this this this was not the venue through which she can make the most impact no i hear you

and i i accept all of that evidence that you've adduced but i would i would add to it by saying she's also the person that premier doug ford called my therapist because the two of them had so many late night calls together and and when doug ford's premiership looked like it was going to be a one term and out phenomenon the two of them managed to find common cause to the point where, and I know this will drive conservatives crazy, to the point where it moderated and beveled Doug Ford's edges to get him to a place politically where he could be a more acceptable premier for a larger number of people. And I'm, you know, I'm going to give her some of the credit for that. So we have heard of blame. Okay. Depending on, yes, your point of view on

these things. I also think, you know, there's some things you can't take away from somebody. And the fact is, she's the first woman in the history of this country to bring in a budget. and she will always be able to say, I was the first ever female finance minister in Canadian history. Now, of course, you go on from there and you can talk about how big deficits were or how much of a hand she had on the tiller because after all, she had a prime minister who didn't seem particularly interested, like his father, in smaller deficits and more prudent spending and so on.

So, okay, that's all part of the record. Let me ask you this, though, do you think, I mean, the announcement was made that she's standing down from her political career to take on this new assignment. Do you think she made the decision to stand down as transportation minister to take on this assignment? Or do you think somebody came to her and said, Christia, time's up. Let's find something else for you to do. Yeah, it's a good question. And I don't really have the answer to it. Because the reality is, too, like Freeland, I think maybe even more than many other ministers in cabinet, is kind of inscrutable for a lot of us who follow this. Maybe there are some

colleagues of mine out there who have the inside track. But I feel like I haven't heard it. It is often a mystery what Christia Freeland wants to do and what she's being asked to do. We've, over the year, like, we still don't know what the story was behind her pursuing the Secretary General role for NATO. Like, that was a story that was clearly very well-sourced, that was basically being floated as established fact in Ottawa that just sort of all came to nothing. So it has been kind of clear that for a while, and, you know, and the other kind of famous one, the one that, to some degree, led to her resignation.

You know, the Prime Minister Trudeau was basically trying to get her out of the job so he could bring Mark Kearney in, right? A thing that she very famously rejected emphatically. There has been a lot of efforts to get her to take another job, right? And she's always reacted to them quite violently. And understandably so. You know, she's elected, you know, for University of Rosdale. She's the decider of her future. If they want to fire her, they should fire her rather than trying to do this, this.

sort of wallpapering job. I totally respect her her instincts there. But now that she's finally leaving, it does make the question. And did it become a question of you're either taking this job or you're getting fired? Did it become a question of it's finally a job that is real, that is tangible, that she can do and that she could do real kind of good with? Or is it just a level of fatigue, right? Like she's now been in politics for quite some time. She's held a lot of roles, and I think from the last leadership race, it was kind of clear that she's not going to get the top job of leader of liberal party. So this seems like a good avenue for her. I don't know. I really don't know which of those things it is. But I do know that if I were her, like,

yeah, this is a job I would take. This is going to be a very important job. And again, I'm glad she's in it. Yeah, 12 years is a pretty good run. And especially if you can if you can certainly appear to time your departure on your terms, that's a good thing in politics. That's always better than having people throw you out. University Rosdale, which is her seat, is a very coveted position now within the Liberal Party family. And I wonder what you're hearing in terms of who's kicking the tires on wanting to run there. Yeah. I mean, listen, thus far, nothing. But there has been this mystery. And I've heard it repeated by liberals, I've heard it repeated, I think maybe even more often by conservatives, there's this mystery of where are all Mark Carney's buddies? And I mean

buddies in the very general sense, right? Like his former colleagues, his former employees, people who he rubbed elbows with, whether it's in Bay Street or Ottawa or elsewhere. And it is a really enduring mystery because there's a couple of examples of, you know, Tim Hodgson being a really good one of people who he's recruited in from the business side, people who used to work with. There's some people in his office who I think he would have dealt with at the Bank of Canada or the Department of Finance, but there's not that many of them. People have. have fielded explanations for this, one of which is that he's hard to work with and for, which is a degree to which is true, but I think it's probably way, way overstated.

There is a going theory that people did not want to sign up because I still did not believe he was going to win government and are now sort of, you know, reconsidering. But we still haven't seen it. Like, I really did expect there to be this, you know, cadre of really competent, capable people who would come in and who would kind of stout. the front benches and the high offices of this government, and they're just not there right now. I don't know if they're waiting in the wings. I don't know if their paperwork is being held up at HR, but it is, it's weird. Like it is decidedly weird. University Rosdale, I think,

will be that first test of can he get someone whose name inspires confidence, somebody who will be a natural finance minister or foreign affairs minister or what have you, because it is still weird that he's relying on many of the Trudeau era ministers to staff these really high-profile jobs. And it is far from clear that those ministers are really up for the degree of the challenge and the degree of the opportunity being posed by the next few years. Gotcha. All right. In our remaining moments here, let's circle back and we want to hit the Canada-U.S. thing again.

And I want to use this line that Robin Williams famously said once upon a time when he said, living in Canada is like living in an apartment above a meth lab, you know, which most days when you watch the news seems to be true. If the United States descends further into political chaos and who knows, maybe even civil war, I don't want to be, you know, overly alarmist and provocative about that, but you see stuff on a daily basis, you know, with 300 million guns down there that suggests that civil war is not impossible. Are we in Canada prepared for? for what happens if the meth lab explodes? No, simply no.

There is kind of two parts of that answer. One is how would we be prepared, right? Like the things you have to do to prepare in that scenario are either so sort of unconscionable or provocative, you know, like what are we going to do, build a wall, right? Like some of these things are sort of so sort of unimaginable that doing them will be an a problem onto itself. Like, we can't rip up NORAD. Like, even canceling the F-35 deal feels like a really shaky premise for a next step here.

So part of it is the actual steps you need to do to prepare, we just really can't take right now, but we have to start considering them. The second part of this is Canada can have an impact on whether or not America descends into further chaos. Maybe not the biggest impact, right? But we can have to some degree an impact. Like what? And the retaliatory terrorists, I think, are a great example. Donald Trump, the American people need to understand the economic consequences of Donald Trump's actions. To this point, Europe, South Korea, Japan, the UK have all conspired with Donald Trump to try and paper over those economic realities with short-term sugar rushes, right? Like, Donald Trump

is convinced Europe to buy hundreds of billions of dollars worth of American gas that it doesn't actually make sense for them to purchase. They probably can't consume transport anyway. South Korea, hundreds of billions of dollars in tech investments, Taiwan, hundreds of billions of dollars in chip fabs that will probably never work or get built. Japan's the same deal. These things are all designed to subsidize Donald Trump's complete a liberal fanciful economics. Why is anyone doing this, right?

why is anyone creating the conditions that will allow him or his party to stay in office long term? We should be resisting that. We should actually be forcing increase in costs and decreased in production, much in the way he's trying to increase costs and decrease production to us. There's supposed to be a quid pro quo here. This is how the sort of balance of trade and strategic diplomacy works on the world stage as it always has. Now, that's one piece of it. The other part of it is, you know, dealing with this does also have to be a level of self-assurance and self-improvement, right? The bigger risk to my mind is not that Donald Trump invades Canada. It's that Donald Trump's movement invades Canada that he convinces our politicians in one way, shape, or form that it would be better off replicating him and becoming like him than it would be to resist.

Is it a mega approach could work in Canada? I don't think it could work right now. I think in a world where Donald Trump has been back in power for three, four, five years or where J.D. Vance is president? Yeah. Where they control the levers of information, where they control the newspapers and the TV outlets, where many Canadians get their news, where they control the facets of culture, where they are capable of sowing misinformation on an industrial scale.

Do I think it's possible? Yeah. You'd have to be so unbelievably naive to think it's not. No, I take your point, but, well, I don't see it, but I'm prepared to be told that I'm wrong about this. I don't see the kind of 50-50 polarization in this country that I see in the United States. Am I wrong about that? No, you're totally not wrong. And to be clear, where we are right now, we're in a pretty good spot, right?

Like, Canadians still, by and large, have this reflexive opposition to being Canada, sorry, to being America, and particularly to being this version of America. And that is probably our most effective defense mechanism at the current moment. but you always have to remember that things can slide awfully quickly. The United Kingdom is currently in a position, the election probably is some ways away, but if you trust the polls, they're currently in a position to give Nigel Farage and the Reform Party a massive sweeping majority, right? Germany is seriously considering voting for a far-right former neo-Nazi party.

France is on the cusp of electing a neo-fascist party, right? Like, these things were... If you like liberal democracy, it doesn't look great out there right now. These things were all unconscionable just a few years ago. Yeah. To think that Canada is somehow innately immune to this, I think, is very wrong. And I think the only way to prevent that from happening is to continue to actually try and own our own information system, to own our own political system, to make sure

it is resilient and national and sovereign, so that America can't infect it with its own kind of brainworm. let me ask you two last rather personal if I may say questions number one you are able to articulate a political vision and you have views which you have very strongly put forward here during our conversation have you ever thought about running for politics yourself I've the idea I find the idea very attractive the idea of joining and being a member of a political party makes me break out in hives if we if we had a democratic system where independent candidates could actually field serious campaigns and be relevant in parliament. I think I'd feel differently. But I think until we live in that world, no. Okay. Last question. And this one's really out of left field. But, you know, I know you a little bit. And I'm very curious about your last name. What's your ethnicity? You know, this is great. I mean, I've had an experience of meeting a lot of Asian people over the years who have never seen me in person. And when I show up, look visibly disappointed.

And to that I say, I'm sorry. I actually do have a very good answer to this, which is that it's, so I'm originally, I hail from Cape Breton Island, you know, but largely Irish lineage, you know, basically coal mining family as, you know, we basically left the coal mines of Ireland to come to the coal mines of Cape Breton. We're very one-note family that way. We were formerly the Olings with a Y of vaguely southern Ireland. And I guess in some, some, you know, misguided attempts to Canadian.

that name thought dropping the O and the apostrophe and the Y would make a sound a little more North American. I have to guess that my ancestors were not super familiar with Chinese surnames at that point. I thought for sure there was some Asian blood in you somewhere along the way. But no, that's a very logical explanation, which you've just put on the record. So thank you for that. Yeah. I'm happy to clarify. Great. Justin, this has been a delight. I'm so glad you could spare so much time for our listeners and viewers. I'll remind people, the name of your book is the 51st state votes. And it's one of these, you know, some people write books that are 500 pages long that sit in the corner on the coffee table and never get read. Yours is a nice, slender volume

that people can get through, and it's got a lot of good behind-the-scenes stuff about the year that was. So good on you for getting it done. And thank you for coming on the Paken podcast one-on-ones. Thanks for having me. And with that, I say peace and love, everybody, and we'll see you next time. Thank you.