The Paul Wells Show - Bill Morneau's wild ride

Episode Date: January 25, 2023

Former finance minister Bill Morneau joins Paul to talk candidly about his life in politics, his resignation, and his vision for the future of the Canadian economy, from pension reform to green energy. His new book is called Where To From Here: A Path to Canadian Prosperity.This episode was recorded live at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.

I'll tell you, if you cover politics long enough, once in a while you run into a natural. Somebody who was born to this life. Somebody who could do it in their sleep. Bill Morneau is not that guy. This week, my interview with Canada's former finance minister, Bill Morneau. Change happens, but it only happens if people question the way we're doing things right now. And in some ways, right now, the things we're doing are not leading to good outcomes. I'm Paul Wells. Welcome to The Paul Wells Show.

Happy New Year. We've got some exciting stuff coming up for you this year. Authors and artists, leaders and thinkers. So please smash that subscribe button and tell some friends. We're going to start off with an interview I did at the Munk School at the University of Toronto with Bill Morneau. You've been hearing a lot about him lately. A symbol of the government and famously loyal. And yet, in the first summer of COVID, he had a very public falling out with Trudeau that ended with Morneau resigning from the government. All of this is the subject of Morneau's new book, Where To From Here? A Path to Canadian Prosperity. It's extraordinarily blunt. He says Trudeau's management and interpersonal communication abilities were

sorely lacking. That the prime minister's office often told him to give his cabinet colleagues something to keep them happy, so that money became a means for the PMO to manage egos and relationships between cabinet ministers. He's also worried that this matters because Canada's prospects for long-term prosperity are sagging. And for the life of him, he couldn't get his own government to care about that. He has ideas for improving Canada's prosperity. The reaction to Morneau's book in Ottawa has kind of amazed me. A lot of people seem to think that because he wasn't great at politics, he doesn't get to criticize Justin Trudeau.

And I mean, it's true. Bill Morneau was never a born politician. He can be stiff. He can be naive. But I must have been homesick from school the day they taught that only smoothies and sophisticates get to have opinions about how we're governed. Morneau had a better look at the inner workings of this government than anyone. He's sharing what he saw and what he wishes his government had done differently.

I figure the least we can do is hear him out. After the break, my conversation with Bill Morneau. Do you remember the day you first decided to enter federal politics? I don't actually remember the day, but I remember the era because I was being recruited to consider the job. And my wife and I were actually away on vacation and we were pondering whether our family life was ready to take what we assumed would be the challenging reality of being in political life. And actually at that stage, we concluded we weren't quite ready. So I deferred it for a year following that and then took the plunge. Whenever I hear a friend saying I'm getting into politics, my first reaction is concern for them.

What did you hear from your friends? That's a great way to start today. So, well, I should actually start tonight by saying I'm really happy to be here. It's great to have the opportunity to speak about what was a pretty exciting adventure. It was for me and for our family a period of ups and downs, but frankly, more ups than downs. And the opportunity to, I think, you know, make an enduring difference on issues that I really cared about and that I think are important. So this is an extension of that opportunity. But as you correctly asked, many of my friends and my family didn't see it that way when I first announced that as something I was thinking about. They thought I was crazy. I do think, though, that after they challenged me on it, when I said, you know, I want to do this because I have the opportunity to make an impact.

I think I have the opportunity to bring a skill set that's not in that much in display in public life onto the scene. You know, I'd had business experience. I didn't presume that that meant I would be a good politician, but I did presume that that meant I would have a different perspective than some others. but I did presume that that meant I would have a different perspective than some others. And so once I said that to my friends and family, I think they still thought I was crazy, but they accepted that it was an honorable thing to do. And now to bookend the rest of our conversation, do you remember the day that you decided to leave federal politics?

That day I remember pretty clearly. It was actually the culmination of a weekend of angst, honestly. I had been debating what was going to be the next step and trying to figure out exactly how I should think about that and exactly what the best way to talk about it would be with Canadians. I think, I like to think at least, that I left respectfully to my former colleagues with a sense that I had been part of something that was important and they were going to continue trying to do something important

and I wasn't going to be part of that. So I wanted to leave in a way that left them the opportunity to continue to make a difference. Now, the first full chapter of your book is an extended portrait of that meeting with Prime Minister Trudeau when you told him that you were going to be leaving. You had already informed his office of that. Tell us a little bit about that meeting. I explained it in the book, and I explained it from a couple of angles. One thing that is certainly unique to me from my

business career is that there was not on an ongoing basis, regular interactions, one-on-one interactions with me and the prime minister. So that was not a regular feature of our working relationship. So that's made that day, you know, one of the rare occasions when we actually had a one-on-one. The meeting itself was like all meetings I'd had with him. It was cordial. Certainly we had a respectful relationship. He's a respectful man. He treats people one-on-one in my estimation well. We talked about the things that we'd done together. I reminisced on some of the things that I thought were particularly important that I'd had a big role in. The Canada Child Benefit was something that I was always particularly proud that we had put in place because I think it's made a big difference for

a very large number of Canadian families. The Canada Pension Plan expansion was something we talked about and something that I think is going to be much better understood as the people in this room age and see that they'll have a better retirement than they might have otherwise had. And there's other things that I also think were pretty important. The carbon price was a very difficult fight, putting a carbon price across the country. And he, I think, is rightly proud of that effort. And I certainly was too. At the time of that conversation, you and he were both facing serious accusations about a decision to contract out management of a volunteer program to the WE

charity. Did that come up in the conversation? I can honestly tell you that it didn't come up. And it's important in that to recognize context. I mean, we had been working really hard to try and deal with the pandemic and trying to figure out a way to a conclusion that while not subject to the conclusion quickly. But I do think that in the longer term, we'll look at the kind of response we put forward in COVID and say that we did an awful lot of things that made a really big difference for an enormous number of Canadians in a very short time period. I ask about we in this context because I got criticized after I wrote about your book and about that meeting by a bunch of readers and some of my friends who said, Paul, you're a moron. He left because we had become embarrassing and they had to throw off some ballast and that ballast was shaped like Bill Morneau. What should I tell my friends?

I obviously wasn't in the rooms that I wasn't in, so I can't tell you that I know something that I don't. so I can't tell you that I know something that I don't. What I can tell you is that the pressure of trying to figure out how to deal with the response to COVID was intense and that our perspectives, which were very aligned at the beginning, they're very aligned. I mean, we recognized the need for massive support for Canadians was absolutely necessary. We had a different point of view as we got farther along,

and I was much more concerned that we were trying to taper that support in a way that would allow us to come out of COVID appropriately. And that pressure and that intensity, I think, drove us to be lacking in alignment, drove me and the prime minister's office to different conclusions on what the right answers were. And when the finance minister and the prime minister's office to different conclusions on what the right answers were. And when the finance minister and the prime minister or the finance minister in the prime minister's office don't get along, typically it's the prime minister that wins in that equation. And so that is the reality. And so the conclusion, I'm sure, was a mutual one. From my perspective, there had always been tension. The need for tension between a finance minister and a prime minister is really clear. I mean, you need to have that if you're

going to get to good public policy outcomes. But if it gets too intense, you know, you do have to think about whether you're going to be able to continue to work together. You write in the book that one thing you did discuss was a series of articles in wire services and newspapers to the effect that you were not with the program on COVID relief and that you had become a drag on the government's response. I know you were at least as astonished to read those stories as the rest of us were, and that you asked the Prime Minister about those leaks. How did that go? He was pretty clear that he was not the architect of those leaks. And so I, at that moment, and in the entire five years that I worked with him was, you know, respectful of what he said, appreciate his perspective. But it was a difficult time. I

mean, clearly, it was a time where there were stresses and strains that were leading to people talking about things that I thought would be better talked about in private rooms. And you know, these things happen. There's a policy context within which just about everything we're going to discuss was set. And you refer to a study published for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development near the end of the book. And in that study, there's a chart. And one of my big rules is that when you're running a podcast, it's good to have visuals. So I'm wondering if we can have that chart up. So it's my responsibility as the participant here to describe the chart.

Paint us a little word picture. Thousands of people who aren't going to have the opportunity to see it. Maybe I can help. This is a projection of economic growth for several jurisdictions across the developed world over the next four decades. We've simplified the chart a bit so it'll be a little less utterly indecipherable. What you see is the tall bars represent jurisdictions that can look forward to quite a bit of growth over the next 40 years. And the shorter bars are the ones that can expect less growth. And the one that's highlighted in yellow is the shortest little bar of all. And that's the one that represents Canada. That according to the study for the OECD,

Canada can look forward to less change in real GDP per capita over the next 40 years than anyone else. And you think that's a problem. Why did you mention this study? And why does this sort of thing weigh on you? That was a pretty good description of the chart, by the way, which is complicated. But it's not complicated to think about what the challenge is. The challenge is that if we want Canadians to feel confident about their future, if we want all of us to feel good about having children and raising children, we want to know that they're gonna have good economic outcomes not only tomorrow but in the next generation. And so from my perspective going into public life this

issue was one that worried me pretty much all the time and certainly was the most important issue from my perspective. And that is that Canada is falling behind. Industrialized countries broadly over the last couple of decades have not had the same increases in productivity as they experienced in the few decades before. But Canada has been worse. Canada's productivity has not grown as rapidly as other countries. And worse than that, our expectations are, based on how we're doing things right now, that it's not going to get better. It's going to be challenged in the next couple of decades. So it's quite clear that when things aren't going well, you need to think about how to do them differently. And that, for me, was the main reason why I got into public life and one that continues

to be something that I'm worried about. And I think there's an opportunity to change those outcomes. We don't have to accept that what the OECD might assume is going to be the outcome back in when this was done in 2021 is necessarily going to be the case. We can change our outcomes by doing different things. This is a ghost of Christmas future that represents what may be, but not necessarily what must be. If I remember my Dickens correctly, I'll trust you on that. Okay. Um, and this becomes a kind of a leitmotif in your conversations with your colleagues. Sure. It would be nice to do X or Y or Z, but we need to make sure that investors invest. We need to make sure that we can afford to roll these programs out over

the long term. We need to make sure that we're not going to be concentrating so much on redistributing wealth that we forget to generate wealth. Well, yes, is the answer to that. But I think I'd have two important takeaways from this. One is we always need to recognize that if you don't focus your activities on the things that are going to have the biggest and most important impact, then you're unlikely to have that impact. If you spread your, whether it's your spending or your efforts too broadly, then you're not going to be able to have the outcomes that you might want. And so in the case of government, if you have too many priorities, or if you're trying to fund too many things, then you're just not going to be able to focus on those places where you might have the

biggest and most important impact. People in this room may agree or disagree with how important it is to have an industrial policy, but probably we can all agree that there are certain places in our country, certain parts of our economy that are more likely to be successful in the long term than other places. Let's just use one that's not very controversial, agriculture. You expect that Canada, with our landmass, with our opportunities, with some of the ramifications of climate change, it means we're going to have big opportunities in agriculture. So if we don't focus on science and technology and agriculture, we're just not going to have the same outcomes as we would otherwise. So one takeaway is you really need to think about

focus and you need to think about discipline in not spending in places that you don't necessarily have the big outcome and spending in places where you are going to have the outcome. The second takeaway for me is how you do it. Because if you think that you're going to have those sorts of outcomes in a country like Canada, you're not going to have them unless you think about the people that are going to make them happen. And we live in a country that's the most decentralized country among G20 countries. I mean, we're very decentralized, which means we need to work together with provinces to get to outcomes that matter, which translates into the importance of developing and maintaining and nurturing relationships

with the provinces that get you to better outcomes. And similarly, it's the case with the private sector. If you want to have the sort of investment outcomes in any sector that you aspire to, you need to have those really positive relationships with the private sector because as big as the public sector is, it's not as big as a private sector. And you're going to need to have that to drive outcomes that matter. So it's how you do it is the place you focus and how you do it is the way you have those relationships and nurture them. And that's what I'm advocating for in my book. I'm advocating for that approach to focus, to thinking about the long-term, to recognizing that when you wake up every

morning in government or in business or in the provinces, you need to be thinking about how those relationships are going to make those things work. Now, these preoccupations lead to some perhaps surprising decisions and preferences. You write approvingly in the book of Stephen Harper's decision to move the retirement age back from 65 to 67, eligibility for OAS and GIS. That's a move that your government reversed early on. And if I understand correctly, you would rather it hadn't. Well, that was a decision that I disagreed with. It probably won't be a surprise to anybody who knew me before I went into public life because I ran a large human resources firm and we had a significant pension consulting

practice. Among the things we had done, and I don't think I've ever mentioned this before publicly, but we had been involved, my firm, in the helping to think about the CPP way back when Paul Martin was doing it. We had people that were working on that. So it had been a long-term issue of concern for me. And as we think about what are the most important issues that we're facing over the next couple generations,

many of us in this room would say climate change, and I'd certainly agree that that is a first most important issue. But demographics are also a huge issue that we're facing. And it's going to be a huge issue in terms of the number of people that are working versus the people that are retired, in terms of the capacity of our social systems to actually support the number of people who are no longer working. And so for me, that was a short-term policy or short-term reaction to a policy that was unfortunate. I think that there would have been other ways to think about that. There could have been ways to try and encourage

people to work longer if they wanted to work longer. There could have been another approach to doing that. I tried to work on that, but that was early days and I was unsuccessful in convincing my colleagues that that was the right thing to do. We'll come back to my conversation with Bill Morneau in a minute. I want to take a moment to thank all of our partners, the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, where this show was recorded, the National Arts Centre, our founding sponsor, TELUS, our title sponsor, Compass Rose, and our publishing partners, the Toronto Star and iPolitics.

Elsewhere, you talk about how in the face of essentially a nationwide chronic housing shortage, giving young first-time homeowners money one way or the other to encourage them to buy houses is simplistic. I should point out, this is not just a policy of the Trudeau government. It's almost endemic. Just about every government is trying some variation on helping homeowners buy houses. Why would you not want to do that? He said naively. You know, I think back to generations, a few before us, that decided that we were going to separate the central bank from government. We wanted to make the central bank

independent because that way we could focus on long-term issues that were going to help our economy and not do it with political machinations as part of the consideration. Housing is a tough one because obviously when you're knocking on people's doors, people want to know that you're going to give them more money so they can get into their first house if they're renting or they can find enough to save for their down payment. The challenge, of course, is when you do that, you end up pumping up the cost of housing. I mean, you end up making it actually more difficult for people, ironically, by pushing more money into that part of the economy. So being more careful means you need to think about how you can make housing just that little

bit more challenging to get so that people have enough of a down payment so they're going to be successful in the long term. You need to think about the things that are much, much more important like supply. And we're making progress in some parts of Canada right now thinking about that. But there's so much more to be done in thinking about whether we have the right amount of density in our cities to deal with the needs of housing and the real challenge of new Canadians coming and wanting to find a place to live. So it's a much more complicated challenge than just merely giving out money. It means, like I said earlier, making sure that you're working together with the provinces, making sure you're working together with the

municipalities to think about how you change those zoning zoning laws to find a way to coordinate that with the huge influx of people that are going into particular parts of our country so that the outcomes are not what we've seen which is housing that's you know completely out of the reach of young people and and a real problem a real intergenerational problem between those that have and those that don't the people that got got in early and they have the capacity to have a house or the people who are lucky, whose families are well-to-do enough that they can help them with the down payment. And those people that aren't in either of those two situations, which as you think about polarization in our country, there's many, many reasons, but certainly one is that some people have stuff and some people don't.

And housing is one of the big challenges that exacerbates that problem. You devote some time in the book to talking about polarization and the sense that it is driven by feeling left out. Were you surprised by the extent to which your own fortunate upbringing, your own fortunate circumstance became a motor for some of that polarization. How much resentment you got for being a rich guy? I guess they can't see me if I'm smiling on the podcast. You don't know what you don't know. So you go into public life and you don't know how you'll be received. And obviously, I am someone who has had lots of good fortune. I mean, I come from a family that was a loving family. My father was successful in business. I had been very successful in my

business career. I was very fortunate and am very fortunate. And that translates into me being, you know, different, like everyone's different for everyone else, but me being different in one particular dimension. I worked hard to try to make sure along the way that I was understanding the issues that I was facing. Like every other aspiring politician that really is trying hard, I knocked on every door in my riding. In fact, one of my staffers at the time, when I said that publicly recently, he said, well, no, we knocked on all the doors three times, Bill. But the point is you have to do that work. And I think our system drives people in the right direction that go into office because we all have to do that. Unless you're both in a riding where it doesn't matter. And I guess there are some ridings like that and you're cavalier,

but I certainly wasn't the latter. So I tried my best, but continued to be obviously someone who had a different life experience than many people that I met. Now that said, people probably want someone in the finance minister's job who's actually made investments before in his or her life. They probably want someone in that job who does understand what an internal rate of return is. in that job who does understand what an internal rate of return is. They probably, they would like someone who actually has been either in a business career or in an economics role or deeply experienced in some way about how the economy works. So, you know, there are two sides to that coin. I got many people who said that is the right sort of skill set for the job that you're in, and others who thought that I didn't have a complete enough understanding. And that's fair.

It's a democracy. People are entitled to their points of view. I certainly tried to bring that expertise to work with me every day to make good decisions. Inside the government at which you sat at the cabinet table, did that business background and that wealth make you more credible among your colleagues and the people who were working for them? Well, let me just change your question a little. So we didn't talk a lot about

whether someone was wealthy or not, but the business experience, absolutely. So not on every subject. Certainly when we're talking about mutual assistance and dying, I mean, my personal feelings on the subject were not more informed than someone else's because I had a business career. But on issues like taxation policy, on issues like trade policy, on issues like how we should think about encouraging investment, of course, bringing those things

to the table, bringing that history to the table makes a difference. And I think it is important that we work to attract people into public life from different walks of life with deep and rich experience at doing what it is that they did. And it's not necessarily being in business as the only feature. Someone like Jane Philpott, who came in with a medical background, she brought something to the table, not only in that way, but also because she'd spent part of her career living and working in Africa. Patty Hajju, who brought to the table an understanding of some inner city challenges

that were real and some challenges among people in the city that she came from around indigenous challenges that I had no exposure to. So bringing people from different walks of life is critically important. And that, I think, is a message that I would want to push every government to think about. Because without that, how can you properly address the challenges that we're want to push every government to think about, because without that, how can you properly address the challenges that we're going to face? And yet, before the 2019 campaign began, you were hearing variations on, yeah, yeah, yeah, Bill, we'll get elected, and then you can do your math. And it actually led to a confrontation before the 2019 election that made you question whether you wanted to run for re-election even then. I think that story in the book was actually more about my concern that we had

an effective economic policy as the central feature in our election campaign. And I was worried that the kinds of tactics that people might take in election would not necessarily lead us to the right outcome in terms of the things that we would then necessarily do afterwards. It is obviously both hard and disingenuous to put things in an election campaign and then just abandon them afterwards. So when you see the campaign starting to develop with some obvious tactics that are going to lead to issues that you don't want to face, yeah, it's hard to take. And for me, having worked hard for the four years previously on trying to make sure that we came up with good economic policies, I wanted to see that continue. trying to make sure that we came up with good economic policies.

I wanted to see that continue. And then after that election, it's a strange moment. The Liberal Party is cut from a majority to a minority. There are outside thinkers brought in to help with the transition to a second minority mandate. And you and several of your cabinet colleagues are sort of left like Maytag repairmen waiting for some sign of what's going to happen next for quite a long time. What the hell was that about? Well, you did read the book anyway. Yeah. One of the things that I point out in the book, and one of the things that I think we would all appreciate, is that it's also important when you attract both people into public life and the people that are going to be around the politicians, that you make sure you have some people who have managerial experience and who have an appreciation for how it is that you best manage and motivate people. And so the reason I identify that in the book is because that's a challenge. It's a challenge that

I don't want to hang on the current government. I think I want to hang it more broadly on governments today. We are faced with this social media world where things come at us every hour. And if you're reacting to that social media challenge every hour, you lose track of the things that you need to do in order to sustain an effective long-term approach to getting things done. Whether it be relatively simple things like managing people or significantly more complex things like keeping your eye on the ball and the most important policies that can drive positive economic outcomes. I want to return to the kind of tour of policy files that are affected by this outlook from old age benefits to housing policy to one that isn't a binary choice where the government did

something and you'd rather something else happen, but just a big consideration that I hope we're going to be talking about on the podcast for some time to come, which is that only a few years ago, the resource sector was just the absolute champion driver of the Canadian economy and of Canadian economic growth. And if we are going to be in an energy transition, which means throttling down the contribution of the resource sector to just about everything and throttling up renewables, it's not as easily said as done. That there's going to be a lag in any economic benefits from the new economy,

while we sure notice the decline of the former economy. And that that is something that governments haven't given enough thought to. Talk about that for a bit. First of all, it's hard. It's hard for Canada in particular because of the nature of our economy. This is a very significant driver of our economic outcomes. It means that we need to be very conscious of the challenges that we're going to face. And the very big challenge that we'll face is not only an economic one, it's obviously one for people too, because there'll be a transition for literally hundreds of thousands of people.

To me, the idea of transition is the only way to think about it. The government has to be encouraging both the right decisions around what new sources of energy we use, but also the right decisions on how we can decarbonize the sources of energy that we have right now. I am one of those people that believes that we need to find a way to make our energy sector, our current energy sector, vastly more effective at reducing their carbon emissions. And I'm convinced that they actually have the capacity, we broadly have the capacity to do that by thinking about all the technologies

that are available right now, by putting in place opportunities for people to make investments that they wouldn't otherwise make, to make investments in decarbonization that they might not otherwise make if there weren't government policies supporting them. So when you say we're going to be transitioning, the question is how that transition actually happens. And if it happens that we are the country that continues to be able to produce oil and gas because our industry has become that much more effective than other places in the world, well, that would be a huge win for our country. It's not that easy, obviously.

It's challenging, and there's certainly no reason to expect that we can be assured that we will be the last country producing oil. But I would want us to aspire to figure out how we can reduce our carbon emissions as much as humanly possible. And I know that there's government policy that can help that. If you put in place a price on carbon, and the firms that have to deal with that price do not trust the price on carbon because they think it can change, then they are less likely to make investments. If you find a way to ensure that that price on carbon is actually real for them, then they're more likely to make investments.

So government policy can make a difference. It can make a difference in actually having better outcomes in terms of carbon emissions, better outcomes in terms of people having jobs for longer, especially people who can't transition to new jobs, because there will be people who just can't transition to new jobs. That's a reality. And it will also give us the time to build a renewable sector, to build our capacities in places where hopefully we can be at the front and hopefully we can be a leader.

So doing those two things at once is hard. And I come back to what I said earlier. If you have a few things that are going to make a really big difference, then you can't be doing 50 things. You have to find those few things that are really going to make a difference and focus on them. And this, you know, I identify, you know, focusing on economic growth with every single decision, thinking about that long-term challenge we have in terms of our healthcare system

and how we're going to deal with the energy transition as the first order issues that I would have in thinking about the decisions that the government needs to face. And there are myriad others. That's the way the world works. But you've got to think about what's most important. And I put those three at the top of the heap.

When the governments of Germany and Japan both say we need more natural gas and we could be thrilled if it were Canadian natural gas, should they be getting more encouraging answers than they have? Obviously, it's complicated. It's complicated because starting up new LNG facilities means that those facilities might be around for a long time. And people are worried that that means the transition will be more challenging. My answer to your question is yes, we need to think about how we can be part of that energy transition globally, not just in Canada. And I think natural gas has an important role to play. But I do acknowledge that we need to think about two issues at the same time. Certainly when countries like Germany and Japan

are so interested in getting resources from us and so willing to pay for it, if we put some things as part of the deal that require them to potentially pay more or pay for things that would be part of the transition, maybe it's possible. And I don't want to say that people aren't working on this because I'm not there right now.

I do think it's important that we're part of that transition though and not just within Canada hey I've been on book tours too and I used to sit through long interviews and wonder when on earth the host was going to mention the name of the book the book is called where to from here the path to Canadian, and it's everywhere on ECW Press. And I reminded myself to mention the title of it. It's called Where To From Here, because I was frankly taken aback by some of the reaction in political Ottawa to the first news stories about your book. Pundit panels on CTV Question Period, our friends on the Curse of Politics podcast, who went up one side of you and down the other on the thesis that Bill Morneau doesn't know politics,

so therefore he's the wrong guy to criticize Justin Trudeau. Were you surprised by that? And what would you say? I wasn't remotely surprised by that. I've been doing this for a little while now, Paul. And it's a bad scene where I'm the naive one. Look, it is really important that people that are not lifetime politicians get into politics. It is important for us to bring people in who say, but it doesn't have to be this way.

There might be another way to do it, that there are approaches that maybe haven't been used that could be considered. It doesn't mean that the person coming into politics with a new perspective is necessarily right, but that questioning is critically important to getting to better outcomes. So I don't accept the frame that because you weren't here before, you don't know how it works. It works this way and it's always going to work this way. It doesn't, in my estimation, work that way. You can't have change if you don't have people coming in and saying it can be done differently, it can be done better. And I don't believe that everything that is in my book, my views, are necessarily

going to be adopted. I'm not naive, but I do think that questioning the way we're doing things is important. I do think that if I can encourage other people to take the same approach and think about whether we can do things differently, that's going to be a positive outcome. Change happens, but it only happens if people question the way we're doing things right now. And in some ways, right now, the things we're doing are not leading to good outcomes. I mean, it's demonstrable that our healthcare system is cracking all over the place. I mean, it's anybody who goes into a hospital right now, anybody who tries to get a doctor's appointment knows what I'm saying.

They understand that. And so we do need to think about more than what's the funding agreement. It's a bigger issue than that. We know that part of the polarization issue in our country is because there's 5 million people in a part of our country that are really, really worried about their job and their children's job because they know that the sector that they're in is going through a transition. That's really important. Maybe we need to do things differently. And we know that things like the OECD report that tells us that our economic results have been subpar for the last generation now and are likely to be subpar for the next generation,

we know that for the people in this room and the people listening to this podcast, that's not good enough. My main message, I hope, is an optimistic one. We have this great country. We have this ability to bring immigrants in from around the world. Not many countries have that right now. We have this ability to compromise. Even if it seems difficult here, all you have to do is go to other countries and realize that it's worse in other places. We actually can compromise. So we have these great attributes that can get us to a better place. And we also happen to have really great resources, whether it's agriculture or other resources that can make a big difference for us. So let's use that good fortune and let's

not accept that because somebody says that's not the way it was done before that we can't do it. It's not a good enough answer. I find myself once again being the ambassador of my friends in Ottawa who say he wants back into politics so bad you can taste it. Are they right? They are wrong. So I will tell you that I loved being in politics for five years. If there are people in this room or people listening to this podcast that have the idea that they can get into public life and they can bring something and they can make an impact, I heartily encourage them to think about it. They will need to develop a tough skin. That's part of the deal. You have to do that. But it's a worthy

and important endeavor. But for me, I'm now quite happy to be on the outside of politics. I'm quite happy to be trying to do things that I hope will make a difference in a different way. So it's a long life. Maybe we'll have different chapters that I can't predict right now, but I'm certainly not looking to get back into politics today. Do you have a plan or a notion for what comes next? The long life will take care of itself. So where to from here? Is that what you're asking? Where to from here, Bill Morneau? I'm trying to do a few things. I'm trying to be engaged in the energy transition. I've been engaged in efforts around decarbonization. I think that's something that hopefully my experience in business investment and being

in government might be able to help me to have an impact there. Hopefully, I'll also be able to continue to have the opportunity to talk about public policy issues that matter to Canadians. That's something that I aspire to continue doing. We'll see how well this podcast goes. Maybe it'll be an indicator of the potential success in that regard. I'd also like to continue to be part of the economic thinking in the country. So that's a longer-term goal that I aspire to continue doing.

You've been very generous with your time tonight. And I'll be honest, you and I were never that close when I was covering the government, even in the early days. I thought we were. I had no idea. If there was a day in those five years when you thought at least Wells

is giving me an easy ride, you must not have been reading it right. And so in that light, I'm grateful for your decision to spend some time answering my questions tonight. Bill Morneau, thanks very much. Thanks for having me. Thanks.

Thanks for listening to The Paul Wells Show. The Paul Wells Show is produced by Antica in partnership with the National Arts Centre and the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. It's published by the Toronto Star and iPolitics. Thanks to our founding sponsor, TELUS, and our title sponsor, Compass Rose. Our senior producer is Kevin Sexton. Our associate producer is Hayley Choi. Our executive producer is Lisa Gabriel. Stuart Cox is the president of Antica. If you're enjoying this show, spread the word. We'll be back next Wednesday.