The Paul Wells Show - Special mailbag edition

Episode Date: December 11, 2024

Paul answers questions from readers (and producer Kevin Sexton) about the state of Canadian politics, Trump, journalism, and more! Season 3 of The Paul Wells Show is sponsored 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. The one thing I can't figure out, Kevin, is are you the guest or am I? You're the guest. You're the host. It's all about you, Paul. It's actually all about the readers because this is a very special mailbag issue of The Paul Wells Show. I want to talk a little bit about why I'm doing this. You were around when we launched this podcast. We did it really fast, and I was still kind of traumatized by having quit McLean's. I kind of pushed away any sort of long conceptual debates or meditations about what the Paul Wells podcast was going to be. Paul Wells podcast was going to be.

But something weird has happened this season is that the damn thing is catching on. I only look at the statistics for downloads that are native to the, my sub stack site. So there's, you get to see all the statistics for the entire rest of the podcast universe. I only see what's happening on my website, but what's happening on my website is that downloads have quadrupled from a year earlier. Word is starting to spread. And

every week I tell myself, well, it's just because this was an unusually interesting episode, but it's been growing every week. And so I think it is fair to hear from some of the listeners about what they want to hear from the podcast. And I think it's fair to sort of shake it out after two and a half seasons and finally get around to thinking about what it is I'm trying to do here. And since you're with me every week, I thought I'd ask you to join the, join the fun. So you put out a call asking for some questions and I think you've seen some of them, but I curated them so you don't exactly know what's coming. Good stuff.

I'm going to start with a question from Mary P because I love the energy of this question. Lots of my most insulated, uncomfortable friends often say, we are so lucky to live in Canada. Are all Canadians lucky? And are we sleepwalking to this tune as our luck runs out? And does luck have anything to do

with the good fortunes of the past several decades? Are there potentially better places to live? What is this great place called Canada? And how do everyday citizens preserve the best of it? Well, it's good that we're starting with an easy question. I think luck has an awful lot to do with how good life has been for most Canadians. Emphasis on the has been for most Canadians. Emphasis on the has been and most Canadians.

And the main part of our luck is where we are in the world. We're surrounded on three sides by ocean-sized moats. And our southern neighbor is exuberant, weird, huge, kind of all-consuming, but not antagonistic. When I started traveling in Europe, I started to really dwell on the fact that Canadians think that they've got a dangerous neighbor. And this makes no sense if you spend time in Poland, which has Germany on the one side and Russia on the other. That's a dangerous neighbor. So Canada is lucky because of where it is. And historically, the worst things that Americans do are things they do to themselves or to one another and not to us and not at least for

200 years. And we've got a lot of space. So a lot of the conflict that comes in more crowded countries we get to avoid. And because the Americans have built such an extraordinary military power, we have almost always been able to sort of free ride on their defense, which gives us leftover money for things like social programs and government waste, which we're very good at. things like social programs and government waste, which we're very good at. Now, I said most Canadians, and I said have been, because there have always been people who've been left out, who've been pushed out, who've been shut out, and Indigenous Canadians first among them. And I think one of the undercovered stories of 2024 was that life expectancy receded, and not by a little bit, life expectancy for Indigenous Canadians in British Columbia receded by a lot in the last few years due mostly to opioids

and partly to COVID and partly to sort of declining social conditions in general. And that's something that I think we need to focus on more as a country. And then finally, the has-been. I think it's been a tough year for, you know, millions of Canadians because the cost of living has been increasing. And that's provided a lot of opportunity to the opposition leader, Pierre Poglia, who's simply doing what opposition leaders always do, which is find out what's not working in the country and announce that he's going to fix it. And since there's more not working in the country than there has been in a while, that gives him more room to run. But that's a political question. I think we'll get to it. But is Canada a lucky country? I mean,

historically, compared to most of our peer nations, just absolutely. historically compared to most of our peer nations, just absolutely. And we have to make sure that that good fortune doesn't make us complacent, I think would be my sort of top line message. You mentioned our proximity to the US, which is obviously on a lot of people's minds, got a lot of questions about the US election. So here's a two-parter from Eric Dufresne. One, what lessons do you feel Canadian politicians should have learned from the recent US election? And which lessons do you feel Canadian politicians have not learned from the US election? So there's a few things. I should emphasize that I'm pretty close to a never Trumper. I would not ever vote for the Republican ticket as long as Donald Trump is on that ticket.

I would have in some previous elections in my adult life considered voting for the Republican. There's a good chance I would have voted for George W. Bush over Al Gore in 2000, for instance. But I think Trump is a fool and worse. What are the lessons? Well, I mean, so one of the big ones is if all the people who don't like someone say a thousand times that they don't like them, they still can't make them go away. So that imposes on the people who'd like someone else to be president to be better at winning elections than they were. I understand the necessity for negative campaigning. I don't get particularly upset when parties engage in negative campaigning. I don't get particularly upset when parties engage in negative campaigning. I actually think negative campaigning has a basic morality to it, which is

since this is what they think about their opponents, they might as well say it out loud. Like the liberals always go through this dance of spending years insisting that they're not going to say anything bad about the other side. And then they say all the worst possible things about the other side in a panic at the last moment. I'm like, man, if you run into these people at a bar, if you go to Darcy McGee's, if anyone still goes to Darcy McGee's and you talk to a liberal about their conservative opponents, they think they're awful. So they might as well say it, you know, and the conservatives, I don't get too fussed when they, when they say bad things about the liberals. All that's the long way around to saying what we saw from the Trump-Harris election is

dumping on your opponent does not fulfill your mandate. You also have to make a case for why you should govern. And the case for why you should govern can't simply be I'm not the horrible other person. It has to be I have these ideas for what I would do with this awesomely powerful job, and here they are. And the, the, the, the timing was bad for Kamala Harris and there's a, you know, but the extent to which she did not make the case for a Harris presidency was amazing to me. And I think it sends everybody in Canadian politics, or should send everyone in Canadian politics, back to the drawing board and say, you know, to the Liberals, why do you want four more years? What would you do with four more years except not be Pierre Poiliev for four years?

And unlike a lot of my colleagues, I think Pierre Poiliev has begun to sketch out the case for a Poiliev government more than opposition parties sometimes do. But between now and election day, he's going to have to fill in more of that. So the first lesson is make your case. The second lesson I would say is be more like young Joe Biden. I emphasize young Joe Biden because old Joe Biden was a wreck and should have quit earlier. But as a younger politician, Joe Biden was a classic American 20th century senator. He was happy to work with anyone. He disagreed with a lot of people, but he was happy to reach across the aisle and to compromise, put water in his wine, find a path that would work, even if it was slightly less than pure, rather than stake out a terrain of moral certainty that produced no results. I think Canadian politics has gotten way too far down the road of moral certainty in the last several years. And that has a lot to do with why we aren't seeing results.

And that's got to change. And what won't change, I believe none of that will change in the short term. I believe our politics is going to stay polarized for a while. It's going to stay on the ground of assertion rather than accomplishment. And it's going to have to get worse before it gets better, I'm afraid. So I have not been around as long as you. No one has. I'll tell you. I've really been paying attention for two governments.

And I really wonder, was it not always like this? Was there more respect across parties, I guess, in previous eras? Absolutely. I mean, look, Canadian politics at its worst has often looked like today's politics at its worst. I mean, the Ku Klux Klan helped the Conservative Party in Saskatchewan win an election in the 1920s. A guy blew himself up with a homemade bomb outside the House of Commons in the 1960s. I had a summer job at the National Assembly in Quebec quite shortly after this crazy guy came in and shot up the National Assembly in the 80s and killed some people.

I mean, and I once spent a lazy afternoon Googling fill-in name of prime minister burned in effigy. And I was able to get back to Diefenbaker and Saint Laurent. I mean, some Canadians have been burning prime ministers in effigy since long before we started to worry about the state of our politics. But I also saw a picture of Trudeau and Tommy Douglas showing up at Diefenbaker's birthday party at the end of the 60s. And I know that it used to be really common to have a few MPs from a few different parties over for dinner at the end of a workday. a workday. And I heard from a colleague who was on Parliament Hill talking to an opposition MP. This is much more recent and it shows how much things have changed.

That MP got a text message from somebody who was watching from an office somewhere, said, get away from that reporter. And so that little conversation was over. I think the level of mistrust between parties, between parties and folks in my line of work, it spills over into the rest of their work. That's the thing. If they were just dickish to me, I could live it. I could live with it. But that's not actually what happens.

Different government departments don't give each other all the information because they're so used to hoarding information that they can't even share it with colleagues in other government departments. Parliamentary committees are usually badly dysfunctional because everyone is going in now looking to collect video for social media rather than to learn more about, uh, the issues that they're legislating on. I mean, I could go on. I think it's, I think it's not only worse than it used to be. I think it's, um, fairly recently become much worse than it used to be. fairly recently become much worse than it used to be.

It's also weird that, like the fact that this week aside, parliament hasn't been able to do anything for over two months. I don't know if a lot of people even know that. Yeah, so that's the thing. It's not just that this conservative filibuster has shut parliament down. It's that no one cares.

Yeah. You know, when we were at the national post in the early days, so kind of like 99, 2000, there was some fuss in the house of commons that led to the house of commons, not sitting for a while.

So, uh, we just had daily debates that we convened virtually. We got MPs from every party on a conference call and we said, okay, let's talk about housing today or let's talk about ports or whatever. And they all yelled at each other and we ran a transcript. And it was fantastic reading. It was actually a display of collegiality because at least they took the request seriously. And it's a relic of a time when people noticed the parliament wasn't working and they missed it.

And so they were happy to get some kind of substitute. I'm not sure we're there now. I think most of the people who've noticed that Parliament is in a kind of suspended animation are kind of relieved. Okay, I've got another Trump question. Last one, I promise. Given Trump's overtures towards Canada,

51st state, our giant water faucet, tariffs, etc., and considering his previous overtures towards Greenland, it seems likely some desire of Putin's has lodged itself in Trump's brain. Likely the Arctic and our sovereign water rights are in play. Any thoughts on Canada's future in this new reality and America aligned with Russia? Because this stuff is keeping me up at night.

There's the tiniest bit of something to Trump's joking about Canada being a next and stuff like that. I do think that he picks up on the instincts and habits of dictators. And he notices that Putin's geopolitics are built on the notion of a near abroad that a country gets to own and dominate. And it's not just Ukraine, it's Georgia, it's Moldova, it's all those kinds of frozen conflicts all around the rim of Russia. And

I do think there's probably a part of Donald Trump that says, well, why can't I play in that world? I can pretty much flat guarantee that there will not be any concrete project to annex Canada into the United States. But it doesn't have to be for it to be a problem because if a president of the united states starts to talk about canada as essentially a failed national project a lot of americans

will believe that and i think a lot of canadians will come to believe that too i mean i was remember that show the o'reilly factor that was that was on Fox News like 20 years ago? I was actually on The O'Reilly Factor shortly after the first anniversary of 9-1-1 because John Kretchen had been critical about the way Bush was handling the aftermath of 9-1-1. And so Bill O'Reilly was going to line up a bunch of guests to yell at John Kretchen in absentia. And for my sins, I landed on the left-wing seat on the O'Reilly show one night. And O'Reilly was perfectly courteous on air

and before and after. His producers were lovely. But I said, well, you know, prime minister's got this much of a point. With great power does come great responsibility, yada, yada, yada. Somehow in those early internet days, a bunch of people found my email address and my email was essentially unreadable for weeks after

that. And what that was, was a manifestation of the sense that essentially how dare Canada exist? How dare there be these people masked on the northern border of the United States who have the gall to have different opinions about things? That sentiment is stronger when it's even a little bit legitimate. When Canada doesn't take care of its own national defense, when Canada has a barely functioning polity in a bunch of different ways, it encourages our neighbors in the belief that we're not a real country. And so, I mean, this is, you know, this little reverie of mine is going in a weird direction, but I kind of hope that a future government will have a sort of a secret cabinet committee on fundamentals, that they don't have to admit it exists, and they don't have to tell people what they're talking about. But it would simply say, do we have a functioning economy?

Are we feeding our citizens? Can we defend our borders? Do we contribute to international relations, or do we simply pontificate? And there'd be like a half dozen ministers who meet once a week and basically say, is Canada bullshitting? And how can we bullshit less?

I think eyes would roll around the world a little less often when Canada's mentioned if we had a secret cabinet committee on fundamentals. A secret anti-bullshit committee. Yes. We don't have to admit that it exists because everyone knows that the bullshit

is much more popular. But anyway. Yeah, the bullshit committee will be the public facing one. Yes. I want to say a word about the people who are supporting this podcast. McGill University's Max Bell School of Public Policy offers more than just a master's program.

They strive to bring together different perspectives and disciplines through public lectures and seminars, strike a better balance between theory and practice in their research, and emphasize the various complexities of the policy process in their conferences. and emphasized the various complexities of the policy process in their conferences. But if you are interested in earning a Master of Public Policy with global reach in just one year, applications are open now for next fall. Learn more at mcgill.ca slash maxbellschool. Okay, we got some more Canada-facing questions here.

Jim Menzies sent this absolute tongue twister that I'm going to try to read to you right now. Okay. I would appreciate a Pierre Paglio prognostication. As our next PM, what would be his priorities beyond his political platitudes? How well would he play with the premiers? How will he perform versus the president? For the record, there were 11 P words in that question.

So let's get your Pierre Paglio prognostication, Paul. I saw Jim Menzi's question, and since I didn't read it out loud, I didn't realize what he was doing with the plosives. I'm going to take a step back and say I was having, I was at a social event the other night with a bunch of conservatives who want there to be a poly of government, wish him well, basically like him, and worry that he's getting way too deep into some cheap habits,

blaming the liberals for everything. Blaming the liberals for Donald Trump. I mean, it's hard to explain that because Donald Trump's campaign started before Justin Trudeau was prime minister, and he was kind of Trumpy back then. And I'll repeat, I don't think that Polyev is unusually reticent to explain his governing plan. I think, as a matter of fact, he's been unusually forthcoming in explaining his governing plan, but he doesn't really seem to have his heart in it. What are the first day priorities? What are the 200 day priorities? What's the 10-year point on the horizon that he wants to steer toward? And how is he going to accomplish that given that the prime minister of Canada doesn't

have all the power that premiers, including sometimes maddeningly liberal and socialist premiers are going to have their say, municipal administrations, mayors and town councils. And the civil service, like I see him sometimes, he doesn't like something the CRA does and he calls it, you know, Trudeau's tax department. Yeah. Like you hear that kind of language a lot. Now one hears, and this is true, that he got along fine, not fantastically, but fine with his department when he was in,

when he was a government minister. And he lives in a riding with a lot of public servants. So, you know, but his shtick is not going to wear very well if he becomes prime minister. When the guy's in the chair and things are not going great, it actually doesn't help to say, well, the problem, your problem is that the mayor of Vancouver is incompetent. That's going to sound like passing the buck.

Yeah. incompetent. That's going to sound like passing the buck. And I think he has an intellectual awareness of this, but I think it's going to whack him hard if he gets the big job. And yeah, at one point he said, I meet all the time with people I disagree with. Really? When? When do you ever meet with people you disagree with? And even to the extent that he meets with people he doesn't disagree with, it's pretty clear that the point of a poly of meeting with anyone is not the meeting. It's the video that he puts out afterwards in which he says that the other person thinks he's right about everything or which he says the other person's a complete jerk. And people are going to notice that. If I'm the premier of any province or if

I'm the president of the United States, one of the things in my briefing book, if I don't just know it from observation, is going to be that this guy's not actually going to be listening to you at the meeting because he's going to be thinking about how to turn it into a social media product after the meeting. And that's absolutely toxic to your ability to do real work. And I wonder whether he understands that. The way I boil it down is, does he understand that the future exists and he plans to be in it? because he's setting himself up for a lot of self-inflicted difficulty by the fact that he plainly believes that just about everything is a show. I don't usually say it that bluntly, but I think about it all the time. This is not a listener question,

but I'm just curious what you think. Do you think that the liberals have a path to victory for another mandate? Polyamory and the conservatives just seem so overwhelmingly likely to win the next election in every single poll that comes out. I believe anything can happen. I have been wrong about enough elections. And I have seen people get the smirks wiped off of their faces in enough elections. I have seen people get the smirks wiped off of their faces in enough elections. In British Columbia, a decade and more ago, there was a kind of common knowledge that Adrian Dix and the NDP couldn't possibly lose Christy Clark's last election. And then he lost and she stayed on as premier for a couple of weeks. It happens.

That being said, I don't see it happening. I don't see them preparing the ground for a victory. Again, they're just hoping that Poiliev implodes and they are being extraordinarily half-assed in trying to help him implode. You know. But again, that's the Kamala Harrisris thing your case for you being in power cannot simply be that you're not the other person because it doesn't matter how bad the other person is

that still sounds lame to too many voters um and when i see you know justin trudeau coming out with new firearms regulations a day before the anniversary of the Polytechnique massacre, when I see this GST holiday, which is horribly botched. How so? Well, ask any retailer. I mean, I went, I was in a bookstore run by a guy who I promise you votes liberal with both hands every time he gets a chance. And he was just furious at how many judgment calls he's going to have to make at the cash register over whether this is GST billable or not.

And he's essentially running a one product shop and it's still going to be hard for him. I've thought about, I guess I live in, I live on the Quebec side of the border here. So you guys in Ontario will get the whole HST taken off. We just get the GST taken off. So we still pay almost 10% sales tax. So I wonder how these Quebec retailers are feeling about that, that everyone living around where I live is going to go over to the Rideau Center. It's just, I mean, it's a gigantic... So at first people,

the first criticism I heard was that it was cynical and I had a hard time understanding why that's a problem. Like just like 80% of what I cover is cynical. Like he gets to be cynical too. But then when people said, it's just a gigantic administrative problem and they're going to have to undo it a month later. Yeah.

And then, oh, okay. But that's, it's not a unique thing in itself. What it is is a symptom of a government that doesn't, it seems to have a very hard time planning for next week and seems to be making no effort to plan for four years from now. So do they have a path to victory? Sure they do. They get unbelievably lucky. Do they have a strategy for victory? Not as far as I've seen. They don't have a strategy for later today, as far as I've seen. Next question. One unidentified Stubstack user says, I would like to know more about the caliber of conservative candidates in urban areas of what was once strongholds of liberals and the caliber of liberal and NDP candidates from BC, Alberta, and Saskatchewan rural areas. Just how qualified are these people? And I think what this person's getting at is, can a strong candidate move the needle in a riding that's firmly aligned with a particular party, with the other party? Yeah. So it's kind of one of the five things that everyone knows about Canadian politics

is that a local candidate accounts for about 5% of the vote. And I think that's probably true. I think it's mostly waves. I think get out the vote efforts are over emphasized in Canadian politics because I've seen parts of the country where there was no local machine. Like Quebec in 2011, when the NDP had that astonishing orange wave, there was nobody

getting out the vote. The vote was getting out. And a local candidate, well, we've seen terrible local candidates with huge amounts of baggage who still get elected because their party is doing well. And I've had friends running in every party who I find to be extraordinary people who can't get elected because it's not the time for their party. On the first part of that question, a current member of the Conservative caucus pointed something out to me that I think is interesting, which is that when the Conservatives lost in 2015, which is that when the Conservatives lost in 2015, they overwhelmingly lost local races in liberalish parts of the country. They lost in big cities. They lost in central and eastern Canada. They lost along the BC coast. And they've spent a decade winning in the most rock-ribbed conservative parts of the country.

And so the current conservative caucus is largely people who watch Fox News, distrust globalism, supported the convoy, are suspicious of vaccines and all of that stuff, don't really believe there's such a thing as global warming, or at least don't believe that humans are causing it. Or, you know, if they pick up 70 seats in the next election, it's just overwhelmingly going to be in the places that they haven't been winning. Big cities, central and eastern Canada, along the BC coast, with people who have substantial community experience, have office jobs rather than sort of country jobs, and belong to places like the Albany Club in Toronto rather than scrambling their own damn eggs in the morning.

I think when you say country jobs, I think you really outed yourself at which camp you fall into. I mean, yeah. I know what you mean. I know what you mean. I grew up in Sarnia, but I moved to a big city just as quick as I could. Yeah. Yeah.

You know. And that's going to be an interesting sociological change if the Conservative caucus doubles in size. And it'll be interesting to see whether that changes the voices that the leader hears in caucus meetings and things like that. I wouldn't put too much stock in that, but it's an element of the likely change in our politics that I don't think a lot of people, including I don't think a lot of people in the conservative caucus have considered, is that it's likely to be a slightly but noticeably different conservative caucus in its attitudes and background from what we've been seeing. That's interesting. I remember I produced an interview with the trade lawyer, Mark Warner.

Yeah. So I produced an interview with him a while back and he was talking about how he ran for the conservatives under Harper in Toronto. And he was saying like, what my constituents in Toronto want is not kind of the typical party talking points. And he kind of clashed with the party machine because he was saying like he was trying to respond to his downtown Toronto people. And they said like, no, these are our priorities. So to a large extent, that's really healthy. It's good to have a national caucus in which people disagree with each other

about fundamental things and have to figure out how to plan together. But Tom Flanagan, the Calgary political scientist who was a strategist for Harper until they had a falling out, he wrote a book once on game theory in Canadian politics, which is basically applying mathematics

and economics to political choice. One thing he pointed out is that if your governing caucus is too big, if your governing coalition is too big, in Canada, it almost never lasts very long. That the biggest landslide governments in Canadian history, I think Borden during the First World War and Diefenbaker at the end of the 50s, World War and Diefenbaker at the end of the 50s, and very much Mulroney in the 80s, those coalitions started to fall apart very quickly because the advantages of incumbency, the perks of office, are spread too thinly. So you've got fewer and fewer things to make people feel good about being on your side. And the internal divisions are more numerous and deeper because you've got a more diverse coalition. So Mulroney had one of

the biggest landslide victories in the history of the country. Within two years, the Reform Party was forming in Western Canada. And two years after that, the Bloc Québécois was forming in Quebec. that, the Bloc Québécois was forming in Quebec. And this is not an unusual thing. It's the usual thing when you win big, which is why Polyev must at some level kind of hope he doesn't win too big because caucus management immediately becomes one of the two or three biggest challenges if you've got a great big caucus and uh uh almost everyone always wants to run the table in every race they run you know let's get 300 seats and the lesson from tom flanagan is good luck with that if it happens okay i've got some questions about you and your process now we warren asks you've stated a number of times that you avoid certain topics in your writing because you don't believe you could,

quote, move the needle, end quote. What does moving the needle mean here exactly? And why is it a necessary motivation for your efforts here? That's a fair question. I think he's referring to this little bit of throat clearing I almost always do when I start to talk about Middle Eastern politics, Israel-Palestine stuff. I was an undergrad at Western writing for the campus paper during the first intifada, the first sort of modern confrontation between Palestinian authority and the state of Israel. And then I went to the Montreal Gazette, which has large historical Jewish readership and a growing Middle Eastern origin readership and where everyone took these issues deadly seriously and where everyone was always yelling. And the lesson I learned early was

nobody wants to hear me on this shit. And I have not just kind of a rote empathy for the various factions in this debate. I really feel for how lonely it must feel to be Israel in a region where, you know, most of the regimes and a large majority of the population does not believe that there should be an Israel. And it's a constant security threat, but it's also a constant sort of psychic drag. And I have many, many friends who are honestly outraged at Israel's response to the horror of October 7th. So like, man, who wants to hear a kid from Sarnia on this stuff? But Warren's question is a fair

one. Like, why should I let that stop me? I mean, when I write about, you know, issues I write about all the time, like productivity or the quality of our public debate. That doesn't change almost anyone's mind either. But it's just, I think these are kind of questions of life and death. And there are questions that are felt much more strongly by people who have a personal connection to the region. And since I don't, I figure I'm, I figure I owe that debate a little more humility. But this is, I mean, this gets a kind of the eternal question facing any writer, which is what am I going to write about today? At the National Post, I had a bit of a reputation, again, this is the early years of the Post, when I was just tremendously impressed with the sound of my own voice. I had a bit of a reputation. Again, this is the early years of the Post when I was just tremendously impressed

with the sound of my own voice. I had a bit of a reputation when there was a huge story that I would find an excuse not to write about it. Like I sure wrote about 9-1-1 when it happened, but if the fate of the Paul Martin government hung on a single vote, I would be writing about jazz that day or something. It's another peculiarity of mine.

I hate to be the 50th person writing about something today. I like when the ice is a bit more open. And I sometimes really have to persuade myself that today I need to write about the big story because it just feels kind of silly. I also have an opinion on Donald Trump. But I have, like in the months since Trump got reelected, we've put out five, I think, pretty strong pieces of journalism

on the Substack and on the podcast because I don't get to hide from this story. I've got to address it. Really, probably for the rest of my career, but certainly for the next couple of years. Yeah. Okay, and this is another processy one from Valerie Knight.

Like many Canadians, I have lost faith in legacy media and I've been searching for credible alternatives. Paul Wells was the first Substack slash podcast I've been willing to pay for, largely because I know his work. She notes she also follows Sam Cooper. And she says, how do readers determine who is credible

in their reporting? That's a good question. And like, I'm kind of a fun halfway house. You could pretend that you're being edgy and independent listening to me, but I've also got the habits that I had from 30 years of working, uh, in the big houses, you know? Um, I think the only way you can judge credibility is you judge it against results. It's one reason I spend less time than I ever have trying to predict the outcomes of elections, because

like if I had just written Trump is over at the end of August, people would remember that. And it would be hell on my credibility. I did say Trump is over in 2015 and there are people who still remember that. So you judge it against results. And I also think that it imposes a certain obligation on the reader or listener to mistrust the feeling that they have found somebody trustworthy. Because usually when you think you've found someone who's always right, what you've actually found is somebody who always agrees with you and someone who reinforces your sense of how the world works.

reinforces your sense of how the world works. So I think reminding yourself to have a little bit of doubt and a little bit of skepticism, even when you think you found the perfect news source, is probably healthy. I think the 2010s were a very fun time for almost all of us because we all spent a decade finding our echo chambers. And the 2020s have been about realizing that that doesn't solve anything. So what do you do next? Well, avoid finding a new echo chamber would be a good place to start. So one of the podcast episodes we had the most fun with was when William Thursell, the former Globe and mail editor uh disagreed with me about everything to do with the war in ukraine yeah and uh my god i was angry at him and i thought well what the hell let's just have him on and uh at least make his case and um i should probably do that more often. And one thing I like about our comment

board is that a lot of people come roaring into the comment board and then they realize that not everyone agrees with them. And then they have a decision to make. Do they stomp off in anger or do they learn to have conversations with people who in a lot of other contexts, they would just mostly make fun of. And that's a fun dynamic to watch. Yeah. I think both these last two questions get at kind of a bigger dynamic happening in journalism right now. I know there are a lot of journalists saying, what is my role? what is my role?

Because if the media ecosystem is so fractured, and I think for a long time, there was an idea that, oh, we just need to show people facts and then they'll come to some revelation that I want them to come to. And a lot of people are realizing that's not necessarily true. It's easy to find people who agree with you,

who share your point of view, who don't do that other thing that you just mentioned. And yeah, I think a lot of people are kind of having an existential crisis now. Like what is my role if I can't reach beyond the people who already are inclined to agree with me or to believe me?

I'm wondering if that's something that you think about. Yeah, I mean, I think a large part of our societal problem now is that we don't have a commons. We don't have a newspaper that most educated Canadians have read by noon. We don't have a nightly newscast that everyone agrees is a good basis for an understanding of what happened in Ottawa today. There's always people who will say that's the fault of the newscast and the fault of the newspaper. And I didn't leave the CBC, the CBC left me, you know, and I'm not going to debate that. I think, uh, I have felt that too from time to time, but the effect is the same when it was

three television networks and in any given city, two or three newspapers and the local radio station, then when you all got together on Saturday night, you all had heard mostly the same stuff, and then you could debate what you thought about it. That's gone away, and it's not ever coming back. So what do we do? Well, try to have the broadest possible understanding,

try to read source material as much as possible. When there's an interesting political issue, try and watch some of the speeches that politicians give with your own eyes rather than relying on somebody's account of how that event went, things like that. relying on somebody's account of how that event went, things like that. It's funny, I just started reaching for almost schmaltzy things. I think we should cut each other some more slack. I think we should stop looking for the reason why the other person is wrong about everything and start looking for the one thing, like the one kernel of truth in the lake of bullshit that is that other person's life. And work with that and see if you can make something out of that.

And understand that that's how they see you. And just be a little bit less judgy. Let's get another speculative one here for you. Okay. Who was one person that did not win an election that you would have liked to see win? I could give you this guy's answer first if you want. Okay, sure.

So this is from Mike Pasma. He says, one for me is Aaron O'Toole. Not that I agree with everything he stood for, but I'd be interested to see if a moderate brand of conservatism could have stood up had he managed to win in 2021. That's a pretty good answer. I mean, Erno Tull is funny. All he wanted to do was to be a conservative in political life. He came to the Harper caucus late through a by-election, and I think he was surprised at how hard it was to fit in

and how hard it was to lead. I mean, I've got friends who've run locally for a bunch of different parties, and it's a drag when they don't win. This isn't quite what the questioner's looking for, but part of me wishes that Stephen Harper had managed to win in 2015. Not because he was such a dynamite prime minister

at that point, but because the period from 2015 to 2019 was an extraordinarily eventful time. And I would have liked to have seen how Harper handled Brexit, Donald Trump, the rise of a more belligerent China. I've always believed that Trump would have been very difficult for a conservative prime minister to handle, will be difficult for the next conservative prime minister if there is one. But that's not about who I think is a

fine person or who I think was the wrong person to win. I just think I found Harper one of the most interesting intellects, interesting and frequently flawed intellects and personalities I ever covered. And I would like to have gotten the chance to cover even more of Harper as prime minister. All right, last question from Stephen Kelly. What are your 2025 plans for Wells Inc.? I think the first one is you should,

instead of calling it Wells Inc., you should call it the Ministry of Bullshit. Yeah, that's right. The Secret Ministry of Bullshit. Yes. Although after this episode, we're going to hear from the small number of readers who get sad when I swear.

I'm sorry. You can blame me. Yeah, that's right. I want to concentrate on the Substack and the podcast more. I want to push aside some outside projects and do real good work. I want to get out of the country. I want to spend real time in the United States. I want to spend real time in Quebec. There is a young Russian dissident who I hope to visit early in the new year to write a piece about what it feels like when your whole country has gone mad and you don't have the luxury of following along. I want to live up to the potential of this weird hybrid that we're building here. The amount of trust I get from the audience

here is just a huge luxury and a formidable challenge because I, you know, it's again, it's going to sound corny, but I, I, um, I want to keep earning that trust. I was not supposed to be having as good of a late career as I'm having. And so I just want to live up to it. That's all. All right. We got some other great questions, but I think that's all we've got time for. Thank you, Paul, for being on The Paul Wells Show. Thank you, Kevin, for making The Paul Wells Show.

I literally couldn't do it without you. And this was fun. Let's not do it too often because I think a show usually works pretty well when someone else is doing most of the talking. 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 Reguer is Antica's head of audio. Kevin Bright wrote the theme music, and Andy Milne arranged Kevin's tune for the closing theme. If you subscribe to my Substack, you can get bonus content for this show, as well as access to my newsletter. You can do all of that at paulwells.substack.com.

If you're enjoying this show, give us a good rating on your podcast app. It helps spread the word. We'll be back next Wednesday.