The Paul Wells Show - Is Canadian politics actually getting nicer?

Episode Date: May 8, 2025

Today, we're sharing an episode from our friends at the podcast WONK, which Paul appeared on this week. Paul talks to host Amanda Lang about some surprising shifts in the wake of the federal election, including an easing of the 'ever-deepening animosity' that’s become a trademark of politics, evidence of a common understanding of what's good for Canada and why we should be grateful Trump isn’t better at his job. 

Hi everyone, it's Paul. With the election over, we're going to throttle back on this podcast for the summer. We're going to bring you a mix of the occasional new episode and some old episodes that you probably didn't hear the first time. And today I'm going to bring you someone else's podcast that I'm on. This is an episode of Wonk, which is the podcast from the Public Policy Forum hosted by my friend, Amanda Lang. And she asked me to come on and talk about the election and what it means for the future of our politics

and all of that good stuff. So here I am on WONC with Amanda Lang, enjoy. ["WONC on the Road"] Amanda Lang. Enjoy. Welcome to Wonk, a podcast about big ideas in unprecedented times. I'm your host, Amanda Lang. The ever deepening animosity that we had all gotten used to in Canadian politics is not necessarily a trend that's

fated to continue. And I think you hate to make optimistic predictions in this town. Cooler heads might prevail. It's tempting to see Canada's new parliament as a fractured one and one that might be ripe for disarray. What can a minority government achieve unless it can gerrymander some form of a coalition? Well, history would tell us quite a bit if the governing liberals can win over some of its political rivals.

Our guest this week has spent decades covering politics, policies, and politicians in Canada. At McLean's, he became the de facto dean of political journalism. Now at the top of his own little media empire, you can find him on Substack and a hugely popular podcast, The Paul Wells Show. Paul Wells is with us now. Thanks for being here, Paul.

Hi, Amanda. Thanks for having me. So this was obviously a super dramatic race. Much has been said about the comeback. I want to know what you're thinking about what is next in the sense that there's still a lot to unfold in days and hours. I mean, things are all kind of moving fast and we'll get to what poor peer probably have having to get into parliament, but it's a minority government.

Are you optimistic that things will get done? That they'll even survive their first confidence vote? So almost the thing I'm least concerned about, almost the thing I take for granted, is that this government will be fine in terms of it standing in parliament for the next couple of years. 168 or back to 169, anyway,

a few seats short of a majority is a majority, functionally speaking. Any group of MPs can support the government from one bill to the next. It plans to do a bunch of different things and therefore should be able to find support from the NDP rump or the block or the conservatives depending on the file. And honestly, no one's in a mood for an election now. The conservatives got the largest share of the popular vote that they ever have in the history of the modern party since 2003. But Pierre Pauliev's position at the top of that party is unsettled.

And I expect that he's going to want to sort of calm the waters a bit. The NDP is shattered and the Bloc Québécois is not going to be leading anything in Quebec politics in the foreseeable future. Plus their ten seats short of where they were a couple months ago. So nobody wants a fight. The fight's gone out of this parliament. And so whatever it is the Carney plans to do, I don't think that parliament is going to be a substantial obstacle.

So on election night, I observed on CTV special that when Canadians sent, and it's rare to see, right, the vote split this equally between the two main parties, we usually have, right, a third, a three and a half in the mix. It sort of feels more democratic to me that you would expect them just to work together. Just go there and represent all the Canadians that sent them there. And I was kind of laughed out of the room a little bit, because that's just not how things get done. You can't expect the main opposition party to line up with the governing party and vice versa. Are we in a kind of a big thanks to Donald Trump, thanks to what's happening with federal provincial politics, are we in a place where we at least have a shot at that? Or is it hopelessly naive and something a business journalist would say? It's interesting that the

conservatives have spent the day or so before. So we're talking on the day that the conservatives had their first caucus meeting back and on the day that Prime Minister Carney is in Washington meeting the American president. And since the weekend, there's been a couple of indications from the conservatives that they would consider supporting government legislation on a case by case basis. If they've done any kind of introspective read of their performance in the campaign, and it's a big if, because honestly the conservatives did quite well, and then they might just say we just have to keep pushing and we'll get luckier next time. But if there's any adjustment they want to make, it's reasonable to think that part of

it is that they were not seen as a party and a parliamentary delegation with any interest in governing, that they only wanted to oppose. And that that ended up putting a cap on Canadians' ability to imagine Pierre Poilier of leading a government. And so they might come back more conciliatory. You know, we'll see. It's interesting also, I think that the returns, in terms of numbers of seats won by the different parties,

it looks more polarized than ever. You know, it's half liberal, half conservative, but really in terms of the tone of the campaign, little things like the way that the leaders were chatting among themselves after the English language debate, things like that, the relatively smaller number of effective protests on the road and the slightly milder tone of those protests. It was already a better campaign than 2021. And I've seen some academic research that suggests

that a long-term progressive polarization in Canadian political attitudes has actually come to a halt. And so the ever deepening animosity that we had all gotten used to in Canadian politics is not necessarily a trend that's fated to continue. And I think, you know, you hate to make optimistic predictions in this town.

Cooler heads might prevail. Well, I love the optimism. I think one thing a lot of Canadians, especially Paul Canadians who aren't steeped in every kind of twitch inside Ottawa, were struck by in the tone of some of this past campaign and election, a small vocal group, especially on the right, if we can say that, but I think it happens across the spectrum, but small vocal groups get outsized coverage and attention,

and it makes it feel as though, I think, a lot more anger, a lot more separation between us than there is. I mean, one of the things I've always kind of prized about the two natural governing parties of this country is how similar they are. You're kind of okay no matter who wins. It's not, you know, we've never had a crazy

departure one way or the other. And I take great comfort in that as a Canadian. It feels though like these small vocal groups though are kind of taking center stage. Well, we do have serious things to think about as a country. I mean, not only did the Trudeau government systematically denigrate the legal and useful

product that was generated in the, in the resource hinterland of Saskatchewan and Alberta. They had a lot of company. I mean, the Trudeau government had fierce and enthusiastic backers in, you know, essentially improvising a regime where nothing that was dug out of the ground in the middle third of the country had any hope of finding a market. It's an interesting test of Mark Carney's control over the quote unquote new liberal party,

whether he'll be able to get everyone in the party to forget that just six months ago, they had a completely different attitude towards a lot of these energy and the environment issues. And that's only on their side of things, you know, like change in attitude includes a change in position on substantive files. And it's not obvious to me that either party has a lot of license from their own partisan base

to change their position on these files. I mean, at some point, a detail of a different kind, but Carney in his news conference the other day said that he has promised gender parity in cabinet. Well, he just named a cabinet that didn't have gender parity. So I, like, it sounds like he's trying to put some toothpaste back in the tube,

and he's trying to return to the ways of the liberal party beforehand because an amount of latitude that he thought he had turns out he doesn't have it. On a bunch of other issues, including a bunch of frankly, Thornier issues, is he going to discover the same thing that, you know, his ability to put Carney's stamp on what's still effectively Trudeau's party is limited. I think a lot of us will be in this next parliament

certainly will be absorbed with a massive shift in our trading relationship with our most important trading partner and rightfully so and all of the many things that we need to take care of. And I'll come to your thoughts on the federal provincial tension at the moment. But I just want to dwell for a second on something you know really well and anybody who's read Mark Carney's book knows really well and anybody who's been following him since he was especially governor of the Bank of England, and that is he believes in his soul, I think, that climate is an issue and that it's best solved when we price the real cost of climate and you force the world's

biggest institutions to price it and then regulations and laws follow. He was the one who forced the insurance industry and then banks. All of that's kind of unraveled, Paul. And I've wondered, I haven't, I don't know. I've wondered how it sits with him, with any real believer that this is the world we're in. We're now we're drill, baby drill again, for now, till we won't anymore.

How he's going to manage through that kind of, I'm asking you, I guess to get personal about a guy and I don't know whether you have this, whether you've had insight from him, but I'm curious about how he's managing through that kind of, I'm asking you, I guess to get personal about a guy and I don't know whether you have this, whether you've had insight from him, but I'm curious about how he's managing through that. So Canada would not be the first large country to be for effective climate action in principle, but also for substantial carve outs retail, like

when it comes to our own domestic situation. I mean, one of the things we missed when we didn't have a sort of steady running conversation about how to reconcile energy and the environment imperatives in Canada over the last decade. One of the things we missed was that we missed that Japan pulled back pretty substantially from an earlier green transition stance and Germany

pulled back pretty substantially from an earlier green transition stance. And Germany pulled back pretty substantially from an earlier green transition stance. And all of Europe had been proclaiming clean transition virtues, but getting cheap natural gas from Russia until they decided they couldn't do that anymore. And Canada had been proclaiming a sort of a perfect virtue on this front with the exception

of the Northern gateway pipeline, which the Trudeau government sort of a perfect virtue on this front with the exception of the Northern Gateway pipeline, which the Trudeau government sort of purchased under duress. But apart from that, natural resources minister did not want to export our natural resources. The Western Canadian caucus did not really have any solid relationship with Western Canadian politicians and so on. And with the result that the Liberal Party ended up just sort of swallowing itself whole from one day to the next when Trudeau was replaced by Carney. Because Carney didn't even do that.

It was sort of done by a consensus of the leadership candidates in the Liberal leadership race. That's not a great way to have a conversation and a debate. And it's actually not healthy for the long-term success of the Liberal Party of Canada. If it stands for one thing on Tuesday and then something completely different on Thursday, that's not ideal. And so one of the things I'm looking out for from Mark Carney is, is he going to be able to have, or even to tolerate more robust conversations on sensitive policy files like that.

Or is it going to be my way or the highway as it was with Justin Trudeau until the day the highway changes? Well, so then let's get into some of the details because, and this does bring the provinces into it because you could argue that that shift by the liberal leadership candidates and I think you're absolutely correct to say

that's where it happened, is actually a direct reaction to this sea change in our economic outlook because of Donald Trump. Our trade relationship that we've depended on, the manufacturing base that's at the heart of that trade relationship, which is mostly autos, but also some other industries, we need to rethink everything. And when I talk to people about what that looks like, our future prosperity depends on what our initial prosperity was, which is the rocks in the ground, the trees in the woods. We're right back to where we started, but we should do it with a 21st century

bent and make this our own. You actually have to lean right into this. Can you do that, Paul, and also tax emitters for carbon? Be mindful of indigenous participation in our rights, which is something that's not a nice to have. Our courts have said that's what we're doing in this country. So we have this new kind of our economic reality points us in this direction. There are some frictions to it. Is he the guy that can get us there, I guess? Well, the early signs are encouraging to this extent, which is that Carney at least talks as though he understands that there are multiple stakeholders with multiple inputs in any of

these decisions. And, you know, he's not super interested in only hearing the ones who agree with him, you know. This is not just a problem within the Liberal Party in recent years. It's a problem within politics and just the way we talk to one another in society. Another example was how Pierre Poliev saw a fit to never meet with the conservative premier of Ontario until very late in the game. So, Carney represents a break from that sort of

cloistered view of our current politics in a way that's both refreshing and kind of old fashioned. I mean, until about 2013, 14, 15 in this country, people understood you had to talk to people who disagree with you. And in his big news conference in Ottawa at the beginning of May, he said, I want to have robust relationships with the premiers and indigenous leaders and business leaders and labor unions. And the Trudeau government had decent relationships

with most of the above at the beginning of their decade, but very strained relationships with most of those groups by the end. So, you and I both sometimes talk to CEO groups and stuff like that. And it's kind of amazing how the biggest business owners in the country feel like orphans because they can't get the liberal or the conservative leader to talk to them. And similarly, we built up a whole sort of elaborate ritual system to involve indigenous leaders

in important federal provincial meetings. And then, ha ha, we stopped having important federal provincial meetings, which meant we didn't have to invite the indigenous leaders anymore. And yet, there's real problem when you don't invite them. So richer, more complex conversations are not only something that sort of pleases us wonks, there are actually things you can't skip. And Carney at least talks the talk of being somebody who recognizes that.

It's interesting that you say this, Paul, because a business leader literally was reminding me yesterday that Jim Flaherty used to call her monthly to check in literally on how her business was doing across the country because it was a retail sales business and he wanted to know how sales were doing. We've come a long way since then, right? Politicians do kind of, I worry a little bit that because Prime Minister Carney might fear being tarnished with a pro-business brush because he comes from, you know, Brookfield and there's all of the kind of conflict of interest

that people want to stir up that he might avoid. But I hope not. I hope actually he's somebody because he understands that world as well as the public sector, he can actually bridge this divide. Yeah. I mean, you know, CEOs of large companies aren't right on everything.

And as a matter of fact, sometimes the way they're, the ways they are not right are kind of obvious and easy to make fun of, but it doesn't hurt to hear people out. Just as it doesn't hurt to hear out your constituencies and your writing, even if you know that they are, they tend to vote for the other candidates or whatever, you know.

When we just got out of the COVID lockup, I was thinking there were so many problems in Canada's big cities, that it would be good to have like a national conference on the future of downtown Canada. And we could have mayors and premiers and business leaders and social services. And somebody I know and respect who worked for a large company said, you couldn't do that in today's Canada because everybody would go in with a mandate from their organization to push their organization's message and nobody

would have any bandwidth to hear what anyone else was saying. That's a problem. It's a dumb way to have a conversation. And the days I'm less excited about Carney are the days when he seems to resist the obligation to be accountable for his actions. You know, he took nearly a week to meet with the press after the election.

The days when I'm more excited is when he shows up and he talks and he sounds like a real person. He sounds like a real person who is granting others their right to be real people. That used to be just the bare minimum expectation of people in public life in Canada, but these days it's so rare to be kind of refreshing. I think one of the biggest challenges facing our country right now after Donald Trump and dealing with that kind of existential threat is keeping this, the kind of, at least the supposed or vocal

cohesiveness of our provinces. And we already, of course, have Alberta out front, Quebec's not far behind if you pay close attention, staking out territory in this coming discussion. I don't know about you, but anytime somebody talks about wiping away inter-provincial trade barriers, I get super skeptical because we've known about them for my whole career. I've enumerated them time and again.

They're there for very human reasons. And unless provinces are going to run rough shot over some of the human reasons, which is in some cases organized labor, some of their biggest businesses, whatever it is, it's hard to see us getting to agreement. But I do want to know what you think about kind of, do we have a moment where the provinces could work together instead of pulling apart? So a former premier of my acquaintance said one thing you learn in politics is don't ever waste a crisis. When there's an atmosphere of crisis, you can get things done that you couldn't do ordinarily. And I think that the prime minister was consciously reflecting that sort of

advice when he repeated sort of out of thin air the other day, you know, I want to emphasize that this is a crisis, that we're in a real crisis, it's a real crisis. You know, what he's saying is business as usual won't quite hack it for now. We actually have to think about, you know, we all got really scared before Christmas because it felt like we hadn't been taking care of some important priorities and now we have to take care of them.

Internal trade, you're right. I mean, most internal trade barriers are not identified. They're not in the book of internal trade barriers on some premier's desk. They are labor practices and rules of origin and preference, hiring preferences and purchase preferences that to get rid of them, you have to

get up, you know, from one day to the next and say to your local office supply manufacturer, we're going to let people from other provinces bid on that contract next year. And that makes it a lot less thrilling than it is in the abstract. And I mean, only in Canada could you even be thrilled in the abstract.

So we'll, you know, we'll see it. What Carney is actually proposing from the feds is carefully, I think, kind of limited. He's going to eliminate federal barriers to internal trade by Canada today. And he's going to wish the provinces, the unspoken part is that he's going to wish the provinces the best of luck among themselves.

We'll see whether he can even deliver the first part, but what I hear is they're sure giving it the call is dry and they are, there's a sense of urgency and a need for demonstrated motion on these files that we hadn't seen for a while. I am curious for your view, cause into all of this, of course, which we hope will be a spirit of cooperation,

the feds could certainly lead the provinces somewhere. They could, you know, convene them, but it'll be up to the provinces to agree, internally, as you say, and amongst each other on some of these issues. The premier of Alberta is not wasting this crisis either, and is kind of, well, let me ask you what you think her aim is.

I don't think it's Western separation, Alberta separation, but it's not clear to me what the goal is. What do you think it is? I think to a large extent, it's political survival. I've got more sympathy for Danielle Smith than most Ontario-based pundits do. She has her job today because Jason Kenney allowed room on his right within the Alberta political ecosystem and the room on his right ended up destroying his career. And so I think just a basic principle of hers is she's not going to allow movements or

factions to rise up the challenger from her right. And so three days out of the week, Danielle Smith says stuff that makes a reasonable amount of sense to me. And then two days a week, she says stuff that makes a reasonable amount of sense to me, and then two days a week, she says stuff that I don't, I can't follow. You know, we're going to consult on Alberta's

place in Canada and then have a referendum. And then, whereas only a few days earlier, she was insisting that she had no control nor any prediction about what the referendums enabled by her government would be about. And you know, that's one week and then the next week, they're going to be about getting Alberta out of the confederation and it's going to happen next year.

You know, I think she's pretty clearly improvising. I think she's improvising because the guy before her didn't improvise, the guy before her stuck to a few principles and ideas about what a government in Canada is for, and suddenly he was out of a job. And so I'm agnostic at best about whether this is going to be good for her even in terms of Alberta politics, but I think that helps explain why she's doing it.

And for the rest of us, I mean, the beginning of my career was all about Quebec separation. And I learned a few basic principles. First of all, people are just going to disagree with you on fundamental things, and you're not going to get them, you're not going to change their minds. Secondly, freaking out probably doesn't help.

You just patiently make whatever case you have to make, listen in case your opponents sometimes have a point, try and address their legitimate concerns, and then have the big debate, the big confrontation and hope that things fall your way. One, I mean, I want to introduce a thought, which is, I think should always be with us. And I don't know to the extent to which you carry it with you now, but I grew up in the West.

So Western alienation is a thing. It's a political reality. The way we elect governments mean it's probably not going anywhere. And then the last few years of, you know, disenfranchisement of our oil patch didn't help. So I think that's, I think there's, there are legitimate feelings here that we ignore at our peril. Same with Quebec. But we know that we're being manipulated politically, socially by forces. So if you were, I'm going to sound like I'm wearing a tinfoil hat,

but I think this is legitimate. If you're Donald Trump or somebody who works for Donald Trump and you want to weaken Canada to a place where we're in disarray and some of us might actually think joining the US makes sense, you would, right, foment these kinds of voices. So I guess the question I'm asking you is when you cover these things now and you, you know, they're out there, you know, they're real. Do you know the extent to which they are manufactured or that algorithms are

pushing things that are over-representing, I guess, a point of view? What do we do about that? On this has on a few other things. I think we might actually be in a better place than we were a few years ago. I think Elon Musk has essentially wrecked Twitter, including in its ability to rally like-minded people to common causes. I think it's a less congenial home for conspiracy theorists than it was five or six years ago.

Similarly, while the Trump White House is in interesting ways a more effective agent for its own agenda than it was during his first presidency. If these guys really attached a lot of importance to breaking Canada up and were bringing their best strategy minds to it, I think they could do a better job than they've been doing. I mean all it would take would be J.D. Vance to, I mean they got elected in November and the Calgary Stampede isn't until July so there's a bit of a delay there.

But he could show up at some other event short of the Stampede and say, the United States is happy to offer statehood to the great province of Alberta and leave the rest of these losers behind and come join us. I don't think even then he would be able to gather anything close to a majority of the population in support, but it would be a much, like that would be a much more delicate day for national unity and for a Canadian government than the sort of distracted blanket offers, you know, the, I mean, what Trump had to say about it when Prime Minister Carney was in the Oval Office was disjointed and lackadaisical and, you know, not very interesting.

So, always be grateful when your opponent is not good at their work. Ha ha. Ha ha. Words to live by. I'm intrigued, actually, by what you said about Elon Musk. It sounds to me like you feel like he was

successful in his desire to make X more. Anyway, it's a bit of an aside, but one of the things that you deal with and definitely the people you cover deal with is the incivility of the public square, right? It's relentless, it's terrible, it's hateful. And it's leeching into all other parts of life, by the way, one of my neighbors is under the

most horrific attack because they want to build a wall in our neighborhood. And it's brutal. This stuff, you know, we, our behavior has, has worsened. How do you deal with it? I mean, first of all, you must deal with it directly. You must get some of the broad sides, I imagine.

Well, so I left Twitter for the second time and sort of definitively in 2018 because I couldn't believe how terrible people were being to one another on Twitter. I have, let's, you know, during the 2021 account for internal McLean's reasons, I started a burner account. So I have an account on Twitter that I don't

tweet from and that just allows me to read what other people are saying. But I spent about 10 minutes a day looking at that stuff. I left Twitter as it then was essentially for self care reasons. tweet from and that just allows me to read what other people are saying. But I spent about 10 minutes a day looking at that stuff. I left Twitter as it then was essentially for self care reasons. And I really think a lot of the worst things about Twitter and Facebook in the middle part of the 2010s was, this may sound naive, I don't think it's entirely stuff that the people running those platforms intended.

The way Facebook probably started a civil war in Myanmar. Oops, I don't think that was the goal. I think that was just sort of unexamined algorithms, massing and encouraging factions in debates. And one thing we haven't noticed in Canada because the online news Act has led to meta barring any manifestation of news from Facebook in Canada, is that actually Facebook is substantially out of the news business around the world in less kind of brutal ways. And that's

not sort of mustache twirling. That is Facebook waking up one day and thinking, man, that escalated fast and we had a role in it and it doesn't make our users feel happy. So let's find a hundred ways to be less of a news platform. And so Facebook is a hard place. If I'm mad about something, I want to get my gang together. Facebook is not as useful as it used to be.

And I don't think Elon Musk wanted his platform to be less effective, but I think he's just run it so poorly that it is less effective. And so, I mean, I've published stuff, you know, I had Musa Algarbi, the American sociologist who wrote the book, We Have Never Been Woke, as a guest on my podcast. And he's a center, very sort of mildly center right

intellectual critic of wokeism. And we had quite a low key conversation, drew a good audience. And if I had hosted that, if I had platformed an anti-woke activist in 2018, platformed an anti-woke activist in 2018, hundreds and hundreds of people would have worked very hard for weeks afterward to ruin my life. And this year, nobody noticed. People were busy with their stuff. And so I think the worst accesses of social media are actually behind us.

And we're back, we're kind of stuck back just being neighbors and we have to figure out how to be neighbors again for good or ill. Like if I wanna round up a bunch of villagers with torches to get mad at someone, I have to put real work in it because I can't just, a flame war on Twitter won't do it.

So that's, I think a decent segue to, here's Mark Carney, anybody who survived, of course, the Fleet Street press through Brexit should have a tough skin and know how to deal with the most excessive responses by humans to things. But we're in a kind of a post, I don't know how to put it, but I think that partly what

happened to the Justin Trudeau liberal government, and that's a distinction I'm making intentionally, is people got tired of being lectured to. And the unfortunate thing for Trudeau is he came out every day for more than a year and wagged his finger at us. And some people liked it and some people didn't,

but eventually most people got tired of it. Do you think that tone is gone? I don't think it's in Mark Carney's nature anyway to behave that way, but in general, do you think the kind of notion that we know better and we're here to tell you what the path is, is gone and that that'll be a healthy thing in our discourse? Well, that's an interesting question because of course, Mark Carney is only one person. And a lot of people who thought that was a great way to run a governing party for a decade

are still around. That includes certain cabinet ministers who are comfortable taking kind of a hectoring tone. It includes the sort of volunteer auxiliary to the liberal government. We used to call them shamrock Twitter. People who just are sympathetic to the liberals are not great at Marcus of Queensberry rules when it comes to carrying on an argument and just like to attack people. And it includes a decent number of almost exclusively male MPs from Ontario who learned early that they're never going to make it into cabinet.

And so they spend their days shitposting on Twitter, if I could be blunt, the Mark Garrison's and Chris Biddles and Adam van Covertens of this world, who were still doing that through the campaign. And we don't know whether when they get back to parliament, whether they're going to, you know, and someone's going to say, Paul Wells blames liberals for political polarization. No, there is an awful lot of conservatives and

conservative sympathizers who do all of that and worse, but it takes two to tango and the liberals for a decade have been pretty happy to tango. Meanwhile, we've got serious things to talk about and people should be free to disagree among many other reasons so that a liberal government doesn't have to swallow itself whole every decade to survive. So that we can course correct a little more elegantly as we go the way complex societies sometimes need to do.

Okay, so let's finish with a big ask and that is for you to tell me if we believe that this federal government, this liberal government, should reach across the aisle, as it were, and incorporate some of the desires of that other party that represents such a massive proportion of voters. This is my little pipe dream, right? That we actually get the liberals and conservatives to come together. Are there issues you see that really did galvanize the right in this election that the liberals could adopt? I mean, I guess resource extraction is one of them.

We all agree. We all agree. Canada is going to get back on that train. But are there other things where it might be more of a stretch for this government, but that they should consider doing it? Yeah. I mean, so, Pierre Pauliev has already made it clear that he's never gonna take an inch when he can ask for a mile.

So, it's not just reducing, I mean, for two years, he was against the consumer carbon tax and then the liberals got rid of that and suddenly he also wanted to get rid of the cap and charges against large emitters and any price signal for any carbon burning behavior he's against now. I think the liberals can't follow him that far.

But we have an emerging consensus that looks a little bit like what the Coalition for a Better Future that was set up by the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, the Business Council. It looks a little bit like what Anne McClellan and Lisa Wraite were advocating for that group, which is a candidate that shows a little bit like what Anne McClellan and Lisa Raitt were advocating for that group, which is a candidate that shows a little bit more attention to fiscal discipline, that exports its resources, that participates in a robust way in global security and defense.

It looks like we do have the elements of a consensus on that basket of issues. Probably fleeting, probably not complete, but it's not a problem if you still have politics. As long as Canada can step up more than it had in a bunch of ways. And at least in theory, over the medium term, that's gonna contribute to a prosperity that can also help Canada afford to be a more generous country to those Canadians who need more help.

It's a strange time to be optimistic, but I think there's room for at least a kind of a reasoned and partial optimism in terms of our public life improving over the next little bit. Well, I'm happy to hear optimism, Paul, and I know we will keep hearing your insights on these things as we come to rely on them and appreciate it and appreciate your time here today. Thanks. Thank you. We've been speaking with Paul Wells. Before you go, here are three things we think are worth watching this week. Mr. Carney goes to Washington. Okay, he's the right honorable now, but it doesn't

have quite the same ring. Most agreed it was a good showing, respectful but firm and his meeting with the president set the tone for a decent start to a bigger conversation about what Carney called an economic and security partnership. We might not be there yet but sure feels like we're on the road. Meanwhile we got another reminder that tariff madness may continue with President Trump musing about a hundred percent tariffs on films produced outside of the United States, something the industry said would bring productions to a screeching halt and generally screeched in response to the idea.

The president verbally walked it back within a day or two, but it's a reminder that unpredictability will continue to weigh heavily on us all. Speaking of which, Weight Watchers filed for court protection from its creditors this week. The balance sheet being a little top-heavy, the company said it hopes to carry on business and that its more than 3 million members should not be affected. It's no secret what ails it and other weight loss plans though.

Diet pills like Ozempic aren't just distorting the faces of movie stars, but the outlook for anyone in the old-fashioned business of losing weight by eating less. That's WONK for this week. I'm Amanda Lang.