The Paul Wells Show - Election week 3: The Age of Coercion

Episode Date: April 9, 2025

We are living in "the age of coercion," says Michael Wernick. The former Clerk of the Privy Council talks about what the civil service (and the government) will be up against after the election. Geoff Meggs, former Chief of Staff to B.C. Premier John Horgan , weighs in on drug policy on the campaign trail and the unique politics of British Columbia. You can hear more of Geoff Meggs on the Hotel Pacifico podcast.  And Shannon Proudfoot, feature writer in the Globe and Mail's Ottawa bureau, trades notes with Paul on the first few weeks of the election. Is Poilievre failing to respond to the moment? And how much can Carney separate himself from Trudeau's legacy? Season 3 of the Paul Wells Show is supported by McGill University's Max Bell School of Public Policy.

The Paul Wells show is made possible by McGill University's Max Bell School of Public Policy, where I'm a senior fellow. What are you going to do, make me? If you're looking for a label, I think I'd call it the age of coercion. This week, three more fresh looks at the federal election campaign. We can't make the damn thing stop, so we might as well talk about it. I'm Paul Wells. Welcome to the Paul Wells Show. I've started thinking about what's going to happen after the election campaign is over.

It's just human nature that we concentrate on the horse race, especially while the polls are a bit scattered and it's still not clear who's going to win. But while it always matters who wins an election, their victory won't be the end of their problems this time, even if the victory is clear. Which, well, in a country that's proved itself perfectly capable of electing one minority parliament after another, there's never a guarantee of that. I've got three great guests to help me puzzle through all this. First there's Michael Wernick, the veteran civil servant who

capped a long career as clerk of the Privy Council during Justin Trudeau's first term. It's Wernick who called the current moment an age of coercion when important international figures, especially Donald Trump, seem to have given up on cooperation and are trying to lay down the terms of their dominance. Then I've got Jeff Meggs, who served as Chief of Staff for John Horgan when he was the NDP Premier of British Columbia. Jeff's one of the best observers of politics in BC where three-way races always put a lot of writings into play. Finally, I'm joined by Shannon Proudfoot, the excellent political journalist from the Globe and Mail.

Shannon is a sharp observer, an original thinker and a good friend. We talk about politics all the time and I'm glad to share one of those conversations with you. First up, Michael Wernick. Michael Wernick. Michael Wernick, thanks for joining me. Thanks for the invitation. You and I first started talking shortly after the referendum in Quebec in 1995.

So between us, we've seen a lot of history and it feels like we're seeing more of it now. Have you given some thought to what Liberation Day means in a kind of a historic context? I have and I know there are people that have big theories. We actually met during the campaign which I guess was the last extinction level event for Canada where the, you know, the further existence of the country was in doubt for a while. Yeah. I think if you zoom back a bit, 2025 will go down as one of those signature years in history, like 1989 or 2001 or 1945 years, that absolutely pivot the arc of history.

And I think a lot of people have come to the conclusion we're entering a new period, a little murky what it's gonna look like, but if we're looking for a label, I think I'd call it the age of coercion, or the rules-based multilateral, the rule of law kind of system, as imperfect as it was, did hold for quite a while, and people were eager to join institutions like the IMF and the World Trade Organization. We seem to be slipping into a period where, just raw exercise of power and coercion of the smaller

by the bigger in all kinds of issues is being normalized. That's a huge waste of human energy. One thing I've learned just in interpersonal relationships is if you paint somebody into a corner, you might get some kind of result, but what you won't get is the result that you could get when people put their whole heart and their imagination into a solution that works for everyone, right?

Like bullying works, but it almost never produces the best result. Yeah, there's an old adage that people may not remember what you said, but they'll remember how you made them feel. And if you make them feel bullied and anxious and uncertain, that stays for a long time. It's a little different, I think. I mean, they're having these conversations

in Berlin and Paris and Singapore and so on. But for us, it really is existential. I take him completely seriously that he would like to hobble us with a butah annexation. And in the middle of it, you plunk necessary, I think widely desired federal election campaign, but one that does tend to put a lot of processes on hold. What are campaigns like for the public service?

Yeah, it's an interesting question. Let me run through some of the basics for your listeners. I mean, I won't go into the political science, but one in five Canadians is a public sector worker, if you add up all the levels of government. It's a lot of voters with a high propensity to actually turn up. So somewhere in there, it's part of the campaign itself. Let's talk about the federal service, of which about 40% is in Ottawa, 60% spread across the country. This is the fourth election in a little under 10 years.

The muscles are well practiced. About half of the public service would have joined during the Trudeau years, so they haven't gone through a change of government. It's kind of new and exciting for them, or unsettling. And a double transition, where you could have three prime ministers, old people like me have been through before, 1984 and 1993 were like that. I would think about the public service in sort of three tranches. The vast majority just go into work and do their job, keep calm, carry on. They're involved in program services, transactions,

and unless and until a government changes laws or policies. They just keep doing what they're doing There is a slice that's active in current events the trade warriors and maybe a few others that you know have to keep going With current events and serving government decision-making during the campaign period and we could go off on the caretaker convention And then there's a very very small slice of people in the sort of policy planning world who are basically getting ready for the post-election environment. This was always going to be an election year. It was going to be in October. Now it's in April.

So people have been thinking about transition and onboarding issues for quite some time. And then there's an even tinier, tinier which are the people close to privy council office who will be working already with Pauli Avankarney's transition teams about the initial booting up and starting up of a new government. It's fun this time because I think a fair reading of the polls would say that this thing is not yet cooked and we don't know which of the polls would say that this thing is not yet cooked and we don't know which of the parties is going to form government. And both of these prime ministers would be new prime ministers. I mean, Carney had a couple of weeks of dry run,

but their styles, their preferences, their ideas about governance are untested. Does that complicate the exercise? Being there, done that. I mean, the first time that Justin Trudeau or Stephen Harper chair to cabinet, was in the cabinet room, was to chair a cabinet meeting. They were rookies, they were green. It is possible to come in from outside and be

prime minister or be a cabinet minister. I think that, you know, one of the more interesting questions is one I know you've been talking about. Is there going to be a clear parliamentary majority or are we going to have a more complicated outcome? We end up with minority parliaments in different configurations to form a workable government. We end up in the space the Germans are in this week. That's a whole different world. But let's assume one or the other is going to win and then they will you know They will be eager to get on with their agenda

You talked about the sort of policy generation Function I've heard it argued that that function has been allowed to atrophy over time and as a matter of fact almost forced to atrophy because political parties come to power with Far more elaborate governing agendas and they basically drop their platform book on the clerks desk and say, do this. Is that, first of all, do you buy that? And secondly, if so, is it a problem? Well, I mean, I don't think there ever was a golden

age where the best policy ideas came exclusively from the public service. You know, the big broad directional choices about the country come from ideology and politics as they should and government set a direction. Most of the conversations, you know, with an incoming government are not about whether to do something, but how.

There are different instrument choices, pace sequencing, some of the issues about implementation, international relations, federal, provincial relations and so on. You know, the public service didn't recommend cannabis legalization. That came in from the Liberal platform in 2015 and then it started a conversation about how to do it. And so, I mean, I think, you know, what happens in the public service is you pay attention to the campaign platforms, the promises, the statements, because that's the sort of foundational layer a government will be measured by. Did you keep

your promises? And you'll have conversations about sequencing and implementation of those. But you'll also be culling through all of this wave of policy entrepreneurship that's going on. You know, there's lots of stuff coming out of the think tanks, the op-ed pages, the stakeholders, and so on, saying, here's what we should be doing. And you have to sort of pan for gold in there and look for useful ideas. And then there'll be just a whole bunch of things

that the public service says, minister or prime minister, you probably need to know this. You know, legacy issues from the previous government and parliament, known things like, oh, you're going to host the G7, you're off to the NATO summit, you'll have to have something to say, known unknowns like, you know, court cases that are coming up, you know, Auditor General chapters that are going to be tabled as soon as parliament resumes. It's a lot of lists and calendars. And what happens is a sort of a blending of all of those elements into the sort of opening moves

of a government, but no plan really survives contact with events and politics. It gives you direction and intention and mandate letters have become a tool, you know, by provincial and federal governments to try to keep some traction. But it won't be long before they're blown off course. I've been speaking to diplomats from G7 countries

and there's a level of consternation at how the host country's eye is off the ball when it comes to this G7 summit. It's in Kananaskis in June, six weeks after the election and there's a vacuum where some of the prep work should be. And for that matter, Canada is chair of the G7 now. And we're in a world where the G7 could

usefully weigh in on some events. Is that just, sorry, like we're in caretaker mode, we'll get to you when we can? Well, I think a couple of things there. I mean, one, I would not overstate the importance of G7 summits and their communicates. They're very topical of whatever is, you know, in the minds of the leaders at the time and current

events in Ukraine and Gaza and the trade war will, you know, will unfold between now and mid June. And it's an opportunity for conversations, but G7 sherpas and diplomats give them more weight than I would. And the issue is really going to be Trump, Trump, Trump. What's on his mind and what's going to, what is he going to do? I don't think the G7 in any way sort of constrains him. And I guess the last thing to touch on is

one of the first things that Mark Carney said in this campaign, which is that the framework that has governed our relationship with the United States for essentially all of our lives, ever deepening commercial and security partnership is over. Is that just a rhetorical flourish or does that send signals about new directions in governance for Canada? Well certainly in terms of policy and delivery, yeah he's right and other people have come to the same conclusion from Friedrich Merz in Germany to

the Prime Minister of Singapore that we're entering a new era. It's different for us because of the threat of annexation and because the relationship is so broad and deep. There's something like 700 international treaties between Canada and the US on everything from migratory birds to search and rescue and on and on. And we've built a lot of our policies and delivery on the assumption of cooperation with at least a benign United States with a relatively small number of irritants and friction points. All of that goes out the window. So I mean, the ripples of this into policy and

delivery are going to continue for years to come well beyond just the immediate tariff issues. for years to come well beyond just the immediate tariff issues. You know, there are just so many practical issues where we're in the North American economic and technology and security and defense space, and we're just going to have to, you know, work our way through, you know, the sort of how much can we do by ourselves. Most countries are looking for more autonomy. They're looking for more resilience. We have four more years of Trump left and then possibly Rubio and Vance and The American media is training a lot of Americans to see Canada now as a hostile power Like those things don't reset. There's no relief coming in the midterms or a Democratic presidency The relationship is fundamentally

different and we're going to have to make all kinds of adjustments in terms of defense, security, economy and so on. And I don't think we're getting a lot of clarity out of the election campaign so far on how that's going to roll. Do you think it's reasonable to think we might get more clarity or is this just something that a new prime minister is going to have to work through once they know that they're prime minister? Well, I think the biggest problem will land on the Department of Finance and the budget that we can expect, they may call it an economic statement, but late May or June, you have to put the numbers out. I think there's probably a lot of pressure to put a budget out before going to the NATO summit. And neither side is being very candid or realistic about the

fiscal situation or the numbers, you know, particularly defense and security. I mean, 3% of GDP is $90 billion a year. Where are we going to find that? Are we going to borrow it like the Germans? Are we going to tax for it? Are we going to cut something else? What else are you going to cut? There's been no candor in that. And meanwhile, both sides are sort of punching holes in the revenue base by promising tax breaks and tax cuts.

So the math is going to come crashing in on them in the first budget. Well, so we've got that to look forward to. Let's talk about it when it happens. Michael Wernick, thank you so much for your help today. Thanks for your interest. Coming up after the break, Jeff Meggs on the turbulent politics of British Columbia.

I want to take a moment to thank the people who support this show. Tackling the complexity of global challenges demands a different approach to public policy. The Max Bell School of Public Policy's Teaching, Research, Policy Engagement and Public Outreach develops the skills and understanding to solve the most important issues facing Canada and the world today. They offer several public lectures and conferences throughout the year on current policy conversations and provide an 11-month intensive master's program to prepare the next generation of policy leaders. Learn more at mcgill.ca. maxbellschool. Jeff Meggs, thanks for joining me. My pleasure, Paul. The campaign has kind of come to British Columbia this week in Mark Carney's case for the first time

and for Paul Yev, we're having a hard time remembering, but he's doing a couple of events in British Columbia. And my look at the seed projections is that British Columbia has kind of been all over the map in recent months when it comes to federal politics. Well, it performed a lot like the rest of the country, but it was always seen for months and months and months and months as how many of it, of the existing NDP seats can the NDP hold.

And this is the place where the NDP has the most seats. It has about 16 of the total in count caucus here. Like it's the biggest share by far. So a lot of vulnerable seats and vulnerable to conservatives, it was thought that the liberals were a gone, a gone game and that the conservatives would pick up some of theirs as well.

But with the rise that we've seen right across the country, all those calculations are shifting. And the liberals are now competitive in a number of writings, more than competitive. And the conservatives I think are hanging on where they wanted to be, but we're hoping to gain more. So there's quite an interesting battle here, whether it's big enough to affect the outcome. We won't know until election night, but different and critical for all three parties. Provincial politics was a little unsettled last year. There was an election. David E.B. ended up hanging on to power after a strong challenge from the BC conservatives and the BC United Party, the former liberals essentially vanished. Has any of that had an effect on the federal race?

Well, it will be interesting to see. I don't think we know yet. You mentioned the BC United Party, which was the name that was given to the BC liberals who have been very effective for many years. It was the strangest event in recent Canadian politics because as his support plummeted, Kevin Falcon who was head of the BC United Party, seeing the conservatives take off, basically decided to kill his campaign and remained leader but withdrew the vet or the approval from every one of his candidates. And so we still have a BC United party but in a zombie fashion in a crypt somewhere run by Kevin Falcon. But the conservatives took off from basically

early spring, started to climb from single digits in the hands of a brand new group and skyrocketed up to the point where they very nearly took a majority away from David Eby and formed one themselves. So since then, and I think this is the question for Poliav, they've had some real difficulties and three of the MLAs have de-capped, one was thrown out, two left with her. So there's already been a fracturing in the conservative caucus, which is very very helpful to EB. But the federal party, the conservative party is a magnificent rocket ship compared to the rickety contraption that the conservatives put together last year in spite of the near success they had. So we'll see how it performs. But it's critical to them to keep the seats and

gain more here. And at this point, they look in pretty good shape to do that. The question is, will NDP voters who are terrified of Prolyev and therefore sheltering behind Mark Carney start to feel safer and come back to the NDP and protect that NDP group, which is quite significant. So a lot of people writing obituaries for the NDP,

I'm not one of them, but it's going to be a very rough ride. There's no question about that. What Mark Carney is doing with the federal liberals is not that far from what Falcon did with BC United in the sense that he's jettisoned a decades worth of brand equity. He's running as kind of trust me and the only difference is this is going just a hell of a lot better for the federal liberals than it went for the disappearing BC liberals so far. Yeah, the other difference was that the shift from Trudeau to Carney was executed quickly and nobody really knows anything that's really bad about Mark Carney. I hope we don't find anything out, I'm not looking for it,

but in the case of BC, there was a very long leadership race in the BC liberals, which rather than settling issues, amplified the differences inside that party and made it harder for Falken. If he could have prevailed, I don't know. So he changed the name and did a bunch of other things. So he did a very slow pace, what the liberals have done in a matter of six to seven weeks.

And maybe he would have been better off doing what they're doing. Even since before he was the conservative leader, when he was just a candidate for the conservative leadership, Pierre Pauliev essentially traits British Columbia as a failed state, as ground zero for all the wacko policies, especially on drugs, that the rest of Canada would be well advised not to follow. And his big announcement on the weekend in British Columbia was on essentially importing Alberta's approach to drug policy to British Columbia to the extent the federal government

can influence that decision, make those choices. Do you think he's got traction? Do you think that the sort of anti-EB constituency is robust enough to give Pauliev wings federally? Well, it's been a big problem here. No one would deny it, that the policies that were adopted and I was very much in favor of some of them myself, I've got to say that

straight up, including decriminalization, which meant that we weren't going to charge people here in BC who had small amounts of fentanyl and other stuff for personal use turned into a disaster was linked in the public's mind with a huge upsurge in street disorder. People just stoned or out of it asleep on the sidewalk and in the public's mind a big spike in crime. And David Eby had to roll that back. He was a strong supporter of that. He had to roll that back. And so there's no question that the public is fed up with that back. He was a strong supporter of that. He had to roll that back. So there's no question that the public is fed up with that approach. What I think is different,

is harder to understand is whether the offering that the conservatives are making is going to have a lot of traction. They've sort of separated their issues in half and put the enforcement issue in one corner and saying if you're trafficking fentanyl, we'll give you a life in jail, you won't come out alive according to Poliev. It's doubtful whether that's constitutional to do something like that, but it scratches that edge that's certainly there in the public to punish people at the top, not small dealers necessarily, who are driving this. And he's kind of alone in that. The other parties don't talk too much about that. On the harm reduction side, he's totally opposed to it.

So the second part of the narrative is we have a huge problem because of the wacko drug policies of Justin Trudeau and the BC people, whoever he wants to name that day. They're giving free drugs to addicts and those drugs are now being sold off to teenagers and we have a surge, a tsunami of overdoses as a result. Almost no part of that is factual, but there was a program until EB cancelled it as well that allowed about 4% of people with diagnosed substance use disorder to receive prescribed opioids to try to manage their addiction and get to recovery. And that came under incessant fire from Polyev, the National Post, writer at the Post, Adam Zivo. And they perpetuated a narrative

which convinced a lot of people that the problem really wasn't organized crime, it was the EB government giving drugs to people who were then selling it onto teenagers. It was one of those myths, it's very hard to stamp out, it has enough truth to it to ring true. So this was again, what we were hearing from Poliyav yesterday, really much harsher in my

view than Alberta, which has spent a ton of money and there's a lot to be said for what's going on in Alberta. Yeah. But the Poliev approach would be to basically deny much help to anybody. I'll use one number and then I'll stop. But he proposed to provide treatment for 50,000 addicts, which is a wonderful thing to do, I'm not against it, but just to put that in perspective, we have 125,000 people in BC with a substance use disorder that we know about, and then at least another 125 according to experts who are using, but we haven't figured out they have a substance

use disorder and neither have they. So the total program proposed by Polriab would only handle a share, a small share of BC's problem, just in BC. Yeah, I've got a lot of concerns about Paul Yev's announced policies. He said that he wants, he calls them drug dens, supervised injection sites to be more than 500 meters from schools and parks and old folks homes. And I looked the supervised injection site that I visited last year in Edmonton that has been running with the full support of Danielle Smith's government is less than 500 meters from a

school and a park. And so, Pauliev would, I guess, have that site be moved somewhere where the clientele is not, forcing the clientele to move to some new neighbourhood. But before I get too far down that road, I must say this, he's got an opioid policy. I don't know what Mark Carney's planning. I haven't heard whether Jagmeet Singh has any

modification or improvement to suggest to existing policy and at least Paulie was putting his ideas on the table for guys like you and me to disagree with. It feels like opioids continue to be an insoluble problem, no matter who's in charge. I agree. It's surprising because in BC and I suspect in parts of the country, it's the leading cause of death.

Like five British Columbians a day, in spite of a slight decline in the last few months are dying of an overdose. So that doesn't consider all the people who have an overdose but don't die. So the magnitude of the crisis is really staggering and you and I probably, and I don't think either of us would wish this on anybody else, have attended debates among premiers about the distribution of federal health money. And it's a nightmare. Health is actually a provincial responsibility. And even getting money through for things like seniors care can be a project of two or three years. So for Ottawa to step in on this as it is on a few other issues is surprising and difficult to imagine because this sounds like a large sum of money. Actually, regrettably, it's not for the challenges there and it makes for a good photo up.

But I agree with you. I can't tell you exactly what the NDP policy is and I haven't heard anything on this topic from Carney, although Carney and one of his star candidates, Gregor Robertson, who was mayor of Vancouver for 10 years, are playing defense today in the face of Polial's announcement yesterday because they're being blamed for skyrocketing death rates and so forth, which is all nonsense. But this is another thing that's a problematic issue in this whole question is that people say, well, he was the mayor, overdose death rates went up, therefore he drove up overdose death rates. When in fact, some, a little bit of organized crime selling going on there that also played a big role.

Not to mention the increase in addiction in the province. Although to some extent, who do you blame if not the incumbent for circumstances? I mean, I feel the frustration of all the opposition parties when a liberal comes in and says, that wasn't me, so you can just ignore everything that happened under the liberals. It's fair to say to the provincial jurisdiction, you declared an emergency and the death rate went up. There's a sign that something's off there. The question politically that makes BC significant is that it's the leading cause of death. We were the first to have the emergency. We had it worse than many other provinces. That's still true in many cases and we're not really sure

why all that is the case. The issue has come on the scene as a crime issue, largely in a disorder issue about which people have powerful emotions, but no clear idea about what to do. This is going to be one of those things in the face of Trump and everything else that is not going to be really resolved or ventilated very much by the election. And I think that Pollyhough in his campaign is continuing, and this is discussed everywhere, but continuing to talk about issues that were important before Trump and downplaying Trump. And it may turn out later, especially in some of the cities in our province where there's real problems, like today, it may turn out to be wise on Pauli Ospart. Today, he's in Terrace where he's going to be meeting with a candidate who is a real coup for him, chief of the Heislan First Nation,

and Ellis Ross who's legitimately conservative in outlook, but a very important candidate up there going head to head against a successful new Democrat incumbent who has been in that region for years and years as mayor and now as MP, Taylor Bachrach. You can see that he's demonstrating that kind of connection to First Nations, although I wouldn't put Ellis as having mainstream views on this stuff. He's got his own views, but he's highly respected. This is where the conservative campaign gets real, I think, and we'll see how well they do. Be very important for the NDP to hold that seat, but I think quite difficult given the way the opinion's running in the rural BC. The one thing that always struck me when I went mostly to

Vancouver, but really anywhere in British Columbia to talk about federal politics, is that those Rocky Mountains feel about twice as high as they are and twice as broad. The isolation between British Columbia and the rest of the country on federal politics is really striking. For a decade we had a prime minister who was pretty good at feeling at home in British Columbia. Now you've got these two other characters. Does it feel again a little more isolated

than it was last year? I think that may turn out to be the case, particularly if the issues continue to be so focused on trade and the economy and things like that. I mean, BC has taken a battering on a third front that was aluminum and steel that everybody is going to feel some blowback from. But the softwood lumber dispute, which is a trade

dispute on lumber exports going on for 20 to 25 years, just took a huge lurch for the worse when the United States then jumped up the tariffs. So the countervailing duties on it as well. That's just a hammer blow to the BC economy. Forestry has been in difficulty, but this will make it just about impossible. So we produce a lot of aluminum. We're not a steel producer. We produce a lot of wood. It's important for the prime minister's office to have an understanding of what's going on here because these are longstanding issues in both cases and they're getting worse, not better. So I think it is important. We've got Jagmeet Singh here. He decided against many people's

advice to run here when he became NDP leader. And his writing is one in Burnaby where I think it's difficult for Jagmeet given that he's a national leader to function from BC. I have a lot of time for him, but he's not highly visible. How can he be? The National Press Gallery is thousands of miles to the east. In the case of the Conservative administration, if it's successful, there are a lot of senior conservatives, James Moore comes to mind and others who know BC intimately who presumably will be close to Prime Minister Poliev if that's how it turns out. But what that will mean, I'm not sure. I think they're already revising some of their positions on the fly. I haven't heard him meaning Poliev affirm that he will definitely cancel the CBC, which he was saying loudly four or five weeks ago, but it seems like an inconsistent message

when our national institutions are under attack and Cardi doubled down on the CBC, which he was saying loudly four or five weeks ago, but it seems like an inconsistent message when our national institutions are under attack and Cardi doubled down on the CBC. So I think it'll be interesting to see what happens, both sides are trimming their sales to this hurricane, that's for sure. It sounds like a half a campaign is still plenty of time for a lot of things to change on the ground and in what the parties are proposing.

I agree. And I think that, you know, that the NDP is not going anywhere. There's a solid base of NDP support. I mean, NDP is the opposition or the government in some fashion from Ontario West. And that comes and goes. Federally, I think the NDP has got to hang on to all

the furniture it can, and that may get easier because the campaign began, I started to see some NDP material, Jigmeet was more present. They're focusing obviously in the key incumbent writings. David Eby endorsed incumbent new Democrats the other day, leaving the others to their own devices. So I think if the NDP is able to shore up its situation here, it'll come out, but it will not be able to continue in the way it has been with, you know,

interesting and maverick members of parliament here, there and elsewhere, with cult-like following sometimes to each of their writings, but not knitting together a national proposition. And I think in this campaign, Jurg Meets, difficulty has been that the NDP in its size is not that critical, but the ability to, as you say, bring forward a policy, say, on opioids, or say something meaningful about national defense is critical to be fighting properly in one of these campaigns. It may, neither of those issues may be

vote determining, but you've got to be able to say something about them. All right. Thanks, Jeff Meggs for catching us up on what's happening out there. I'm greatly appreciated. Thank you, Paul. My final guest this week is Shannon Proudfoot from the Ottawa Bureau of the Globe and Mail. Greatly appreciated. Thank you, Paul.

My final guest this week is Shannon Proudfoot from the Ottawa Bureau of the Globe and Mail. We worked together at an old magazine for years and we check in on each other regularly. Here's what one of those conversations sounds like. Shannon Proudfoot, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me. We have done this before in various incarnations, covered elections together.

We sure have. Let's write the history of this campaign before it's over. Do we have any sense of what this campaign is about yet? So a thing I've been thinking about, a sort of framing that would once have found home at a magazine where we both used to work, is to me the story of the last two years before December was the conservatives having a really great hand and playing it really well, and the liberals having a really crappy hand and playing it really poorly. And to my mind, those things have both inverted since December or January, where the circumstances have turned

in such a way that's disadvantageous to the conservatives, but they also have looked flat-footed in responding to it. And, ooh boy, Mark Carney must have a rabbit foot in his pocket somewhere. Like, when you play out all the different, not even just the different ways this could have played out, but what if Justin Trudeau had taken the hint last summer and walked? There's just so many sort of mental timelines that open up from the what ifs here if things hadn't gone exactly as they did, which so far looks kind of wildly advantageous to Carney or Lucky or something. So I've been thinking that if the Liberals win this, if the Liberals win this big, Liberals will be saying we played this exactly right. We got every drop of juice that we could get out of Justin Trudeau as a governing prime minister.

And then we switched him out like Darren in the second season of Bewitched. Then we got this new guy who before anyone had any fatigue or any skepticism, delivered us back to our rightful place in power. delivered us back to our rightful place in power. And the certainty with which that will be presented after the fact as a perfect strategy rather than just a bunch of stuff that happened will be annoying. If that's how it works. Yes, it will be.

And if it doesn't work out that way, that will not have been anybody's strategy, but I mean, we really do reverse engineer history to fit our turning points, right. But I just, I don't know, I find the change of fortunes here just fascinating and the elements of it that you couldn't really plan. As you say, I think the newness of Carney is really working for him here. It's it's sort of shiny object syndrome, coupled with

adult in the room vibes, which is, I'm not sure you could engineer a better combination for the moment and the public anxiety. And, like, I keep thinking about the very particular quality to the public anxiety people are feeling, in that this thing that might come and chew off each of my legs exists at a level so far above the heads of any of us, none of us can do anything. You know, we can buy Canadian groceries, we can trade funny memes that make us feel better, but

this is something that is so far out of our hands. And it seems like it is breeding this appetite to sort of hand over to someone else kind of this perception of you can handle it here, take the baton and run and see if you can. Yeah. I think of campaigns that have been entirely dominated by a big subject in the past.

And of course, that rarely turns out to be what the society is talking about for years afterwards. So 2021 was about vaccine mandates. And I mean, to some extent, that's still floating around today in terms of resentment and different conceptions of the role of the state.

But the actual policies that we were debating, the liberals implemented them and then jettisoned them within several months and we're elsewhere. I mean, I'm such a nerd that I remember watching the Kennedy-Nixon debate in 1960, because I wanted to see for myself, the legend is that Nixon looked like he hadn't shaved. Right.

And so he lost. The sweaty unwellness and the handsome hand guy, yeah. So he lost among people who watched the debate and he won among people who listened to it on the radio. They spent a lot of time in that debate debating the fate of two Pacific islands, Matsu and Quimoy and of course they just they were like well what are you going to do about Matsu and Quimoy and then even Kennedy and Nixon didn't care ever after about Matsu and Quimoy.

And I'm wondering, won't we all look silly if Donald Trump gets impeached in a month, or if he somehow credibly promises not to do this again, or if Canada's the next, next March, and then, you know. Although this current crisis does feel more like one that is likely to condition our politics for the foreseeable future. Well, that's kind of the thrust

of what Carney's been saying, right? He got a lot of international headlines two weeks ago when he sort of made that, it's one of those remarks that I feel like when the speechwriter writes it or when they practice it, they kind of rub their hands together and cackle and go, this one's gonna become a headline. When he said like the Canada-US relationship

as it was is over, he moderated that a little bit last week, right? I sent him at least lowering the temperature a little bit in his response to the US after things, we didn't get bludgeoned as badly as we might have. But he's been very explicitly flicking at that. I think Polly have maybe a little less. So the idea of like, look, we have to fundamentally reimagine things, whatever happens here, like whatever the orange man does next, we can't count on this anymore. There's lots of argument

to be made that Canada is attempting to do things now. Like I keep using this silly analogy that it's like that 10 pounds, we all just really mean to keep losing it, we're going to lose it before bathing suits season number four Christmas, you know, interprovincial trade, things like that, that we should have fixed or diversification. But there's a reason we keep saying we're going to fix it and attempting to fix it and not doing it because it's hard. But maybe an

existential crisis finally forces you to fix it and not doing it because it's hard, but maybe an existential crisis finally forces you to fix this stuff. You need to fix anyway. Although a sort of counterfactual example to the idea that sometimes the thing that is the hot thing right now is like not even, it's a too difficult trivia question in five years, is remember was it 2019 that we all, the pundit class, declared was the carbon tax election and that the verdict in that election was you best have a credible carbon plan or we don't want to hear from you and we're in a very different place, like a wildly

different place. So sometimes these things pop back up and get relitigated in a way you never expect. Yeah, I wrote a story about that for a magazine we used to know and that became the resistance cover story with the idea that Jason Kenny and his friends were going to come after Justin Trudeau and.

It turns out Mark Carney and his friends came after Justin in the exact same way. Exactly. Hey, did you notice Carney mentioned Justin Trudeau for the first time in my memory today? He might not have watched. He did a little presser in BC and I actually wrote it down in my notebook, Justin Trudeau in quotes. He was trotting out. It was a weird kind of message event today. I admired it as a feature writer who sometimes when I get deep in the

weeds on a story and I just can't anymore, I have one graph here and one graph here and in between the notes, I write transition which just means here you will join these two ideas. I expect you do the same or some version of it. So his theme today, he managed to make sustainability and he was roping in these announcements on guaranteed income supplement and RRSP withdrawals like measures meant to support seniors

through economic stormy seas. And he said, you know, that's a version of personal sustainability pivot. Now, onto like environment sustainability and trees and water and whatever. And he referenced a just and true government decision. And the idea, remember the 30 we're going to protect 30 percent more water, 30 percent more land. Forget if that was in the last budget. I don't even remember where that came up. But it was the first time I've heard him utter

Voldemort's name voluntarily, which I thought was interesting. Because it's, it really is remarkable that he mentions him because until now it's, it's not as though he's running as a different kind of liberal leader. Mark Carney is actually trying to present himself as the first liberal prime minister Canada's

ever had. Yeah. Like, there was, I've never heard of this Trudeau. Who is this Trudeau of whom you speak? I'm looking up a quote. Franklin Roosevelt had a campaign operative named Sam Rosenman. And Sam Rosenman was the Jenny Byrne of his day, the sort of

all-knowing campaign guru and before Roosevelt was president he ran on a promise of fiscal rectitude that he would by God never run a deficit, he would always stay on the right side of budget balance. And then he gets elected and of course he runs up gigantic deficits and he's wondering how he's going to get re-elected given that he made this promise. And he made the promise in his speech in Philadelphia. It was the famous Roosevelt Philadelphia speech. And he said, what am I gonna do about the Philadelphia speech?

Sam Rosenman said, deny you were ever in Philadelphia. Uh, and Mark Carney has spent so far half of a month denying that he was ever in Justin Trudeau's Canada. I mean, and to some extent that's accurate. He was mostly in New York. is ever in Justin Trudeau's Canada. I mean, and to some extent that's accurate. He was mostly in New York. And it's gotta be frustrating to be Pierre Poliev

and to have everyone asking him about his record and about his stance with regard to this existential menace from the states because as Poliev keeps saying, I've been telling you what I would do as prime minister For years now at least in in hints and and outlines and Suddenly that's a bad thing to do suddenly I have to replace Pierre Pauli of with some imaginary Pierre Pauli of You can sense his frustration at this pivot mandate that the framers are putting on him. Mm-hmm. Yeah, he must be enormously frustrated. I mean, this thing he was doing that was working

beautifully for two years suddenly is not working. But that's why events, my dear boy, is a shorthand for things. You know, life happens. Events move on. The framing it keeps making, or the phrasing it keeps making me think of is when we talk about a news story that you sort of got in the works and it's taking a while to put together and then events overtake it and the story becomes dead, where it's just that story doesn't exist

in this plane of reality anymore. And that happened with remarkable speed here. And I do, it's hard not to sort of marvel at it for some human sympathy for the frustration that must be there. I've been doing a fair bit of sort of internal at it for some human sympathy for the frustration that must be there. I've been doing a fair bit of sort of internal thinking gut check, maybe I'll throw it to you, about how much it's fair to say Poliev has sort of resisted in or failed to make a pivot. I've really been trying to think of this because he is really a masterful communicator. He does not love subtlety. He loves, you know,

really hammering at home. And so I've really been trying to separate that from, is he responding to the moment? I think we saw a fairly major tweak, at least I can't use the word pivot, partially because I hate friends. And it makes me think of that stupid scene with the sofa and the stairway. But anyway, that's neither here nor there. Like I've been thinking about, because to my way of thinking, like my top line, the way my brain reacts to it, when I hear him sort of talk about Trump a bit, like he did in that speech on Tuesday, Wednesday, and then he goes back to, I mean, he explicitly said one day last week, it turns out the solution to all of this is what I've been saying all

along. I mean, I take your point that he's actually putting in the window, he's emphasizing policies that are very close to what Carney is talking. Like they're both talking about, hey, we need to shore up our economy either way. Like, if things are getting bad and it's going down the tubes, like, we've got to be stronger. They're just taking two different doors into that room. I wonder though, like when Polyev says it, it has a way of sounding like I was right all along. It doesn't end up sounding like what I have always brought

to the table is a response to this moment and here's how it works. It ends up sounding like more of a stubborn digging in of heels. But again, I'm trying to interrogate that. I also think part of the problem with a more of a stubborn digging in of heels. But again, I'm trying to like interrogate that I also think part of the problem with a perception of him sort of meeting the moment and and Adjusting and all the screaming we heard which bubbled up I have to say remarkably suddenly two weekends ago all the consternation from within conservative circles and then kind of simmered down like almost to

The point it almost felt like everyone needed to vent and then kind of calm down because the bigger landscape hasn't really changed. I think one of the problems, and this is more a style than a substance thing, although you know what, I guess it's both, is I still think he prosecutes Mark Carney and the ghost of Justin Trudeau as his primary enemy, not Donald Trump, that that's where he puts the most rhetorical energy. That's sort of where I've come down on diagnosing like what I'm reading as a lax pivot. I don't know what you think of that. Yeah, I have written to conservative friends of mine and said, why is it that Pierre Poliev of seems angrier at David Eby and Jean Charest and Dave Cochran at the CBC and you my conservative interlocutor than he is at Donald Trump.

It's like someone who goes to a showing of Othello and can't really work it up to get angry at Iago. And it's like Iago is really the bad guy here. Well, we have a regime here that is against free trade, is pulling books by the hundreds out of military libraries that will help military libraries to be able to get free trade. And so, I think that's a very interesting point. I think that's a very interesting point.

I think that's a very interesting point. I think that's a very interesting point. I think that's a very interesting point. I think that's a very interesting point. I think that's a very interesting point. that is against free trade is pulling books by the hundreds out of military libraries that will help military commanders understand their world better, has gone to the Supreme Court to keep from having to bring back from an El Salvador torture prison somebody that they acknowledged having sent there without evidence is using every power of state against its political opponents.

And Freedom Guy can't really seem to get excited about how bad all of that is and how it's a bad influence for Canada. And he does say that the tariffs as such against Canada alone are unjustified and unjustifiable. But my God, that's not the way Pierre Polyev would have reacted in 2010 if you had told him that an imaginary democratic president was acting the way this one is. And I think that's the hollowness of the response that people have questions about.

Hollowness is a great word. And I mean, of course, the sort of common understanding of that or explanation for it is that he's trying not to tick off some percentage of his base that thinks Trump isn't that bad, that he's trying to sort of split hairs. I have to admit, I have a bit of a strange reaction to that argument. I think maybe it tweaks in me the same thing when people say that he's MapleMega and I just don't, I think you have

to be not watching very closely or have a very particular like partisan lens in front of your eyes to think that. Like I get where people are coming from, it just doesn't work for me. So I don't know if I react to that argument about him sort of like, trying to keep some amount of his tent happy by not, you know, sticking up a no Trump's here sign. I don't know, I just have some weird mental block about it. I even think of it in terms of like, like very clumsy math, where else are those people going to go? Who are they going

to flock to? Are they going to abandon him? I don't know. But but there just seems to be this sort of foot dragging reluctance. It's like when you make a kid apologize and they go, sorry. And you're like, well, that one didn't come from your heart. Like, it just has that feeling of me. I have small children. This is my frame of reference. Anyway, it just doesn't. I don't know. But maybe some of that, like like again, I tend to analyze all these things through like human psychology. Maybe some of that is just that zero, what is going on in this campaign that he has been wanting to happen for two years, like zero of where we are right now resembles any possible permutation he could have run through his brain. And maybe it's just sort of like the little wheel is just trying to buffer and make sense of what is going on. I don't know. One of the many reasons it's a hard time to be a politician is that no one gets to run their prepared plays. Like every politician

in the world, whatever they are planning to do in 2020 and 2021, COVID wasn't it. And, you know, Keir Starmer, whatever vision he had of himself as a British prime minister, now he's trying to decide how nice to be to this guy across the ocean. And you know, it really does depend more on improvisation than on planning, which is a large part of what makes it fun to cover, even though it's pretty rough to live through.

Also pretty good rehearsal for governing. Like when I've reported on the PMO sort of as an organism, the thing that I've consistently heard in all different ways from people of different eras is that the hardest thing to do is to kind of keep your eyes, it's like a bifocal thing to keep your eyes on, uh, the things you said you would do, the things you wanted to do that you

campaigned on your platform, your dearest held ideological projects, the kind of way you think you need to shift the country, you know, very subtly a little at a time, and then to keep your other eye on like the windshields or something doesn't smash through it and take your head off. And and that it's very, very hard to keep the first set of those priorities moving forward incrementally, no events just keep you have to respond to them. So I guess in that sense, this campaign in all

its wild unpredictability is sort of pretty good training for the job of whoever ends up with it. But there is sort of an exhausting, constantly expiring quality to this version of reality, I find. Like just this morning I was doing edits on a feature that I finished sort of a draft of maybe a week, 10 days ago, and there were little lines in it that kind of didn't hang in. And I was going back and fixing them.

That's a little weird because they were, these were broad strokes. These weren't like incremental news things. This was like the state of play. So yeah, it's that curse, you know, made them in interesting times. Sure do. And we need a nap. Okay. Shannon Proudfoot, thanks for joining me and sharing your wisdom.

Thanks for listening to the Paul Wells Show. The Paul Wells Show is produced by Antica and supported by McGill University's Max Bell School of Public Policy. My producer is Kevin Sexton. Our executive producer is Stuart Cox. Laura Regehr is Antica's head of audio. If you subscribe to my Substack, you can get bonus content for this show as well as access to my newsletter. You can do that at paulwells.substack.com. If you're enjoying this show, give us a good

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