The Paul Wells Show - The Justin Trudeau interview, sort of

Episode Date: April 10, 2024

What does the Trudeau government have to show after eight years in power? Reporter Justin Ling makes the case that the government is deeply dysfunctional on a wide range of issues, and that the Prime Minister is in denial about it. Ling brought those claims to an interview with Justin Trudeau himself. He shares the highlights of that interview with us.  You can read Justin Ling’s profile of Justin Trudeau in The Walrus. 

So, Justin Trudeau, how's it going? If standing up for what you believe in fundamentally, standing up to defend people's foundational rights, is then a way to accuse people of being divisive, well then we've entered a very different kind of politics right now. Today, journalist Justin Ling on his feature interview with the prime minister. We've got tape. I'm Paul Wells, the journalist fellow in residence at the University of Toronto's Munk School. Welcome to The Paul Wells Show. So a few weeks ago, I got a call from Justin Ling. You've probably read his stuff, even if you don't recognize his name.

He is one of the country's leading freelance journalists. He's published in all the big papers. He's done stuff for Vice and Canada Land. And he has his own sub stack, Bug-Eyed and Shameless. So when he wants to talk, it's usually about something interesting. This time he was calling to tell me he had a profile of Justin Trudeau coming up in the Walrus magazine. As a matter of fact, it should be online today. And he said he'd interviewed Trudeau for the profile. And did I want audio from the interview? I sure did. This is a crucial moment in Justin Trudeau's political career. He's well behind the conservatives in the polls. Pierre Poiliev has been defining the terms of debate.

Trudeau has less and less time to turn that dynamic around before he has to call an election, probably next summer. So what's going through his mind these days? What Justin Ling found is a prime minister who thinks he's underestimated and misunderstood. He was in a scrappy mood when they met. He thinks he has a good story to tell. To Justin Ling, it was all a bit jarring. A lot of people think big things have gone wrong with public life in Canada.

A year ago, Abacus found that 65% of their respondents agreed that a lot of things feel like they're broken. Majorities think that health care, air travel, and government services in general are worse than they used to be. Justin Trudeau wishes that people weren't so down. You'll be hearing what he told Justin Ling directly during this episode. But first, we'll hear from Justin Ling. Justin Ling, thanks for joining me. Paul Wells, thanks for having me. This is weird.

I did not talk to the Prime Minister, but you did. So I'm going to just blatantly pick over the carrion of your interaction with the prime minister. Tell the people why you got an interview with Justin Trudeau, why you wanted an interview with Justin Trudeau. It is a thing that I've asked for, I think now several times over the years and have never gotten, but I've been working on this piece for the walrus. It was an assignment that I gave myself. It was an assignment to try and understand how this government works, or maybe more particularly why it's not working, right? We've heard it a thousand times. Pierre Poliev has repeated it

ad nauseum, but also polls show Canadians overwhelmingly agree with it. Canada is broken, right? I was talking to some colleagues of mine, some friends who are on the conservative side of things. And they were repeating this mantra. And I kept kind of poking them, you know, saying, why do you think this is? You know, what do you actually think is broken? What is actually sort of not working? And they kind of had an inability to explain it, right? Because no one really knows how things are working in Ottawa these days. It's a bit of a black box. No one's quite sure how things are broken, what's not working,

where the breakdown actually is. Everyone's just sort of seeing the results and seeing it not working and are sort of frustrated with it. So I gave myself this assignment for the Walrus. I want to understand exactly how this government has sort of seized up. And as part of that, I thought there's no way to do this without sitting down with the prime minister and asking him directly. And so it took, you know, six or seven months, I think, in the end, before they finally sort of

got around to saying yes. I sort of explained to them a few times that for a story about why the government's not working, their inability to answer a simple press request seemed to be kind of emblematic. But eventually they did say yes. And eventually we did sit down in March and sort of hashed through it. And I can't say it was an edifying or encouraging experience, but I'm glad we finally got to do it. I would agree with you that this illustrates a kind of a particular pathology of this PMO. Like just make a decision. Tell me to go away or give me the interview, right? Except that I have lived through this before.

I went through just astonishing maneuvers to try and get Stephen Harper to talk to me for the big book that I wrote about him. They ended up having a senior staff meeting devoted entirely to whether Harper should talk to me. They agreed at senior staff that he should. And his chief of staff stopped me in the street a little later. This was Ray Novak. It said, hey, congratulations on talking to the boss. And I said, well, except he hasn't talked to me. So there's something about late stage prime ministership that makes all of this harder than it needs to be. For the purposes of pitching your piece in the Walrus, do you know what the headline is? Do you know what the cover line is for that piece? I know the headline I pitched for it, which was

Justin Trudeau's reality distortion field. I suspect it will not end up being the headline, but in my head, it will always. That's how it's going to appear. If you're really lucky, the cover line will be the resistance because that one did great for me. And you cannot only have spoken to Trudeau. Who else did you talk to in that world? I spoke to a lot of people and I gave everyone the exact same offer, which is that you were going to be anonymous and referred to in only the most abstract way. But I would go so far as to say the collection of people I spoke to for the story represents an incredible cross-section of people who have worked for this government, in this government, people who were with it from the very early days, people who joined a bit later, people who left,

people who came back, people who have had to deal with it. You know, I spoke to one premier for the story, I spoke to indigenous leaders, but it was really supposed to be a sort of funnel into my brain, right? Because I'm taking ownership for the story, right? This is not, you know, former staffers say government is broken. This is not MPs unhappy with the direction of government. This is me trying to explain to you what I think is not working about this government. And all of those people are informing my take here. But if you don't like it, you know, this is fundamentally a position that I'm sort of owning up to. Okay.

So we've got some audio from your interview with the prime minister in his office, in the middle of the day sort of thing. Yeah. Yep. And let's go to the clips. The first one is about divisiveness. The fact that there's people who ascribe the most astonishingly evil motives and actions to him out there in the land. And then there's people who would still cheerfully jump into traffic for him. And you asked him about this sort of divisiveness

that he's come to represent. One of the things that I am grappling with constantly is the very deliberate strategy by the right to accuse me of being divisive. When my own personal approach to politics has always been about trying to pull people together. But they say, well, when you stood up and said unequivocally that no one can run for the Liberal Party if they're not pro-choice, or not going to defend a woman's right to choose, well that's just completely dividing people and writing off a whole sector of the population for who that's... If standing up for what you believe in fundamentally, standing up to defend people's foundational rights is then a way to accuse people of being divisive.

Well, then we've entered a very different kind of politics right now. But do you think the way you talk about these things can be harmful? You know, I remember being on the streets down here during the occupation, and your quotes would be the ones that would be shouted through a bullhorn. You know, he calls us a small French minority. He says we're all great. And I know you can say some of these are taken out of context, but I've even spoken to, you know, indigenous leaders

who would say, like, you know, people in our community would hear some of the press conferences you would give, would hear, you know, would see that clip of that interview with the Medicare, yeah, exactly. And it stuck with them. They really didn't appreciate it, even if they were already vaccinated, even if they didn't necessarily identify with the convoy types do you think the way you communicate

these things can be sometimes reckless or dismissive or just poorly phrased do i think that my choice to actually speak my mind in an open way can easily not be the perfect right thing to say? Absolutely. Do I think that sometimes I've said things that I wish I'd phrased differently, that I wish people couldn't then take out of context and use? But what's my choice? Either it's be so carefully scrubbed and scripted

that I never say anything that anyone could ever take out of context? Or do I show a little bit of passion? Do I show a little bit of ability to use colorful language when I'm upset, when I'm pissed off, when I'm frustrated? Even if I know that I'm frustrated a very narrow band of people and get that conflated to anyone who's hesitant about vaccines is suddenly a Neanderthal or whatever. Like, I've had to make a choice. Because if I allow that to second guess who I am, then my opponents win. Because either I become so scrubbed that nobody can, you know, connect with anything I'm saying, or I start second guessing myself and don't trust my own instincts. And then, you know, hold back from actually sharing with people what I actually feel about any given thing.

That's really interesting because it does sound like it is a real and sort of ongoing arbitrage that he and the people around him have to deal with. Right. Because we've experienced times when he sure does sound scrubbed. And clearly he's got some awareness that that can't be the only Justin Trudeau that people ever see or they get sick of that. But then he, he wings it and we jump on him for that. Yeah. I mean, I think you'll hear me not have a lot of sympathy for the prime minister later on, but I have a lot of sympathy for him here.

Like I do because he's right. You know, what makes him an actually effective communicator when he is effective is his ability to speak off the cuff his ability to kind of be a little flippant a little funny i mean paul you know the guy a little bit i mean he is just sort of naturally a class clown like that just just when you you know you where he's at the bar in ottawa or you know he's at a reception or an. He just has this instinct to sort of clown around and kind of be off the cuff and be kind of funny and personable in a way that a lot of other politicians, even in sort of comfortable settings, are not.

And he lets some of that bleed through when he does press conferences or interviews or whatever. And frankly, that's a good thing because people really are sick of politicians who sound like they're chat GPT generated. But on the other hand, he doesn't seem to appreciate that the way he communicated with people in 2015 is just not the same today. The context has shifted, the tone has shifted, people's appetite has shifted, and he doesn't seem to want to sort of offer any understanding or empathy to that. He just sort of wants to say, you. And I think it's really, it speaks to this reality distortion field, this sort of bunker mentality where he thinks it is very much an us versus them thing and that they're just sort of being propagandized to.

Moving on, you asked him about the access to information regime, the law and the administrative apparatus that is supposed to produce information about how the government works to anyone who asks for it. And it's a valued tool for a lot of journalists. Why have you been on Trudeau about this for so long? I really started my career using this thing initially to sort of terrorize the Harper government as often as I could. This is a system that was created as an act of kind of radical transparency, and it helped inform how other governments around the world adopted freedom of information laws. And for a long time, it was really a powerful tool to getting at the heart of government decision-making,

to exposing wrongdoing, to you know, doing good financial journalism around how the government spends their money, all manner of things. And I was so sort of obsessed with it under the Harper government that Trudeau's team actually reached out to me in 2015 before the elections and said, you know, would you like to sit down and talk to the liberal leader? He has this, you know, new platform plank we're releasing all around democratic reform and transparency and accountability and yada, yada, yada. And we know you're obsessed with it. Do you want to kind of be our exclusive interview around the launch of this platform plank? And you might recall those days where everyone kind of was looking at liberal polling numbers

and going like, the guy has a famous name, but he's going to be relegated to third place again. And I sort of wringed my hands and eventually said, OK, fine, fine, fine. We'll sit down. So we did. And this is actually the last time I interviewed him before this most recent one. And he does this whole tap dance where he says, you know, access to information is radically important. If I get in, I'm going to make it so much better. And I sort of, you know, expected this to be one of those flashy promises that goes

nowhere. But he very pointedly said, if I'm elected, you'll be able to get my emails. I believe it's really important. He even had this little flippant line where he said, if I'm writing anything in my emails that I don't want the press reading, well, then I shouldn't be writing them. So you can put your faith in me,

that in my first term, I'm gonna make my own email account accessible to journalists and the public. And he shook my hand and said, just you wait and see. And now, eight years on, it hasn't happened. And in fact, the system is beyond repair, it's broken. The government hasn't just presided over decline on it, it's actually helped strangle it. The Information Commissioner agrees with me, anyone who uses the system agrees with me, there is nobody out there who uses the access to information system

who will say it's gotten better. Over the last eight years. The consensus is it's gotten much, much worse. And it's hard to look at it as anything other than deliberate. So let's hear how the Prime Minister feels about it. We took over with a very different approach to governing than the previous government. We were very much focused on trying, well well deliverology was a part of that of showcasing for people not here we're making an announcement of 20 million dollars invested in this but here we're actually going to build this or impact this many number of people with this positive change we're going to lift these numbers of boil water advisories whatever it was was actually getting the system first and foremost to focus on what it's actually doing and as you change that well then it makes a lot more sense and you're a lot more able to be open about what you're doing

and you know share the numbers on it and everything like that. But when you have a system that is not focused on that, it remains extremely difficult to showcase what we're doing. We're constantly seeing reminders of that. But even you were underlining the fact that self-grading, a government self-grading, self-releasing information can't be the benchmark. You need independent oversight. You need journalists verifying that information.

The access to information system was the great tool to do that. It's gotten worse by every metric you can use over the last eight years. Do you think that actually hinders your ability to govern effectively because the people covering you, keeping you accountable, have less access to information than they did eight years ago? I would actually sort of take issue with that in that, yes, the access to information regime specifically still has challenges, and that's why we're still working on it. But to say that that's the only way people covering government can actually see what government's doing carries a bit of cynicism with it, that because you can't believe the press conferences, because you can't trust the announcements, because the backgrounders and the transparency and the technical explanations and all the open press conferences and coverages we have, that, I mean, you were around before we got elected.

You know what a secretive government looks and behaves like. Yes, access to information continues to be an area where governments of all different types are struggling. But we have been a lot more open and engaged and available and engaging with experts, with media, with journalists, with all that than previous governments. There's a few things going on here. First of all, there's the absolute conviction that his government's better than its predecessor, which is what it is. There's the absolute conviction that his government's better than its predecessor. Yeah. Which is what it is. There's the strong sense they had that they inherited essentially a broken bureaucracy and

they were so busy trying to get anything out of that machine that they didn't have time for the rest of us to get a look in. And that's enough to pick apart for now, I think. Yeah. I actually think that's a really excellent point because people hear me talk about the access to information and I know they don't care

because it's a system they've never used and they're not familiar with. They don't really understand the importance of it. Fine, I totally get that. But what I always tell people is the access to information system helps us understand what's broken about the system we're living under, right?

It helps us understand how the bureaucracy is working or not working, how the political level is directing or not directing. And the fact is, the federal bureaucracy is broken. It's unbelievably broken. And it's funny to hear the prime minister talk about deliverology, because deliverology was actually, or whatever you want to call it, the results in delivery unit. Its former head, Matthew Mendelsohn, hated the word deliverology was actually, or whatever you want to call it, the results and delivery unit. Its former head, Matthew Mendelsohn, hated the word deliverology.

But the results and delivery unit was actually a really good thing. It actually did the things that Trudeau was talking about. It did connect data and results and kind of objective, you know, expected results with the policy that was trying to be implemented. The problem is deliverology is dead. Every one government will tell you this. It's not really been a functioning thing since about 2019. The results in delivery unit is basically hollowed out. The government's not tracking data in the way that it once promised it would. And it has very little visibility on the civil service. The civil service is not fit for purpose right now. They've hired a huge number of new people, and yet they're performing worse than they were under the previous government, I think, in a lot of ways.

And I spoke to many civil servants who said that explicitly. And so it's really frustrating to hear the prime minister say, oh, well, we're giving you all the information you need. Everything's working fine. We're following the data. Don't worry. You don't need access to information. You have these press conferences. Yet you go to one of these press conferences, you send emails to the department, you ask the ministers and their offices about some of these issues, and you get a wall of just absolute garbled nonsense that doesn't respond to any real world issue. So there's a huge disconnect between how government's working or not working and how this government is kind of willing to

actually engage with that issue, both privately and publicly. There's a moment a little bit later in this exchange where he gives his own version of this sense of a disconnect, which is this idea he has that government is doing fantastic things and they just can't manage to tell Canadians about it. One of the criticisms that I'll have for how we've behaved as a government is we've always done a better job of doing things than of talking about the things we're doing. job of doing things than of talking about the things we're doing. We foundationally changed the Canada pension plan for the better, secured it within a few months of getting elected to transform it for the better and yet nobody knows we've done that. We never spend enough time talking about that. We never spend fairly any time talking about it. The Canada Child Benefit we did

do a good effort talking about but But take just last week, for example, where we had pharmacare, we had childcare, we had the online harms bill. Like three massive things. And our ability to get people to know about that and to communicate what we've actually done. Well, communicating what we're doing is actually often been second to this government and actually doing the big things and getting big things done has always been what's driven us golly uh this is a complaint no one's ever had about this government that they don't talk about themselves enough the problem with this government is that they've spent just too much time hiding their light under a bushel and if they could just get out there and tell us what a great job they're doing.

I mean, the only thing I can say about this is this is exactly what the student council at Western thought when I was a news editor at the student paper. So maybe it's universal in democracies, the sense that how come I'm not reading in the paper all of the things I'm doing all day long? I guess that's what I would chalk that up to. I'm doing all day long. I guess that's what I would chalk that up to. One of the frustrating things about this is that they become obsessed with the idea that this message is not getting across. And yet at the same time, they're often incapable of actually communicating with journalists or the media effectively. They still kind of hearken back to their first mandate and

sort of lecture us on why we're not talking more about the things that they completed six years ago. In some cases, the very things they point to that are supposed to be these great resources for us are broken or not working. So there's this one part in her interview that I thought was incredibly emblematic of kind of everything, where Trudeau says, you know, as part of our ability to sort of track data and do the sort of analysis of our own decision making and results, we set up the mandate letter tracker. And it followed all the things you promised to do. And it showed Canadians how far along we've gotten on all those things. And I said, you know, Prime Minister, the mandate letter tracker, it still has a big message on top of it that says it'll be updated once the pandemic is over.

You know, you've completely abandoned it. You promised to keep this thing updated. It's been three years and it's now totally defunct. So there's this complete sort of inability. It's not to communicate. It's to focus and to follow through. And they've sort of convinced themselves that communication is the issue, but it's not. The problem is they often don't have a thing to communicate. Let's turn towards something this government has talked a lot about lately and that they've

been talked at a lot about, which is housing. You asked the prime minister, essentially, you know, he keeps talking about fixing the housing crisis, but it's not fixed. I guess to some extent, that's what he's spending the last two weeks doing with his pre-budget tour. But anyway, let's hear what he said to you about housing. We've now had over three elections in a row. Each time, your party, the other party is a two, but your party was promising a transformative housing strategy, or what you said is that. You promised a huge number of new housing units. The actual number that have been constructed are pretty meager in comparison to the promise

you made. And we are now at a spot where there is a housing crisis that has been bubbling for a number of years and I think people feel frustrated that the thing they voted for three times in a row just has not come to fruition. I actually disagree with you again on that. Where in 2017, we put forward a national housing strategy worth $70-some billion, where subsequent to that, about 2.5 million Canadians got into new homes, or refurbished, or renovated, or new affordables, or new co-ops, or old co-ops that were fixed up. Whatever it was, that's the number we delivered on that. And we did that from a standing start. Because, as you remember, the previous government pretty much got out of housing, said, no, the federal government doesn't have any role to play in housing. So over the past years, and quite frankly, I believe it was in 2018,

was the first time I sat down with a bunch of stakeholders in Vancouver, for example, to talk about the housing challenge. We brought together province, brought together municipality, brought together the non-profit sector to talk about the kinds of challenges that we were already facing. And COVID hit and both exacerbated everything and slowed down a lot of other things. But we have done a really credible job helping with this building there, helping with that building there, helping this program here. What we've now done as well is say, okay, it can't just be the piecemeal, this program, this announcement, this thing. We have to change the way that's done in Canada,

which is where the housing accelerator came in, which is a change not to build this building at this address, but to make sure that every single lot within a municipality suddenly has totally different, more permissible rules to building more density, to moving forward, everything like that. So it's been a change that we have worked on to trigger in response to, yes, worsening situations. to trigger in response to, yes, worsening situations. But, you know, again, I'm familiar with the numbers,

but in 2019, the Parliamentary Budget Officer found that there was actually a decrease in targeted funding for especially affordable housing. When they looked at it in 2021, they concluded the federal government had built 67,000 homes since you took office. That number has gone up something like 200,000, if you include retrofits. We need two million homes in this country. You know, fair enough that the housing

accelerator is starting to make up for lost time, but what held you back from actually making good on the promises that you made in 2015, 2019, 2021? Why didn't those numbers come to fruition? Partially they did, but partially the federal government doesn't do a lot of building housing alone and directly. Like so many of the things that we choose to do and chose to do, they require partnerships with municipalities, with provinces, with indigenous communities on reconciliation. And it's the old saw, you know, if you want to run fast, run alone. If you want to run far, run as a team. And we knew that if you want to actually change the way things get done in a foundational way, you've got to do it working with partners. And some partners have been great. Others have been

more challenging. Yeah. This is the part where I lost it. So listen, let me start by saying this. I had most of my feature written by the time I did this interview, byproduct of them not giving me an answer about whether the interview was happening, when it was happening, whatever. So I had most of it written. And I had this conversation with the prime minister's office before we did the interview, where I said, listen, the thing is pretty much written, but everything the Prime Minister said in this interview can change my mind.

You know, I can see myself having to pull an all-nighter rewriting the entire thing because he gives me some incredible explanation, or he tells me some fantastic thing about his thinking, or about why stuff's not working, or he gives me some extraordinary insight. And what's really frustrating and funny and good for me, but also depressing, I think, for the country, is that I didn't have to really change anything about my story, because everything he told me reinforced the central premise of what I've been arguing, and what everybody has told me about this government, which is that they just refuse to accept reality. It is always someone else's fault.

It is always some extraordinary act of God that stops them from succeeding. Or, alternatively, they have succeeded, and everything's been succeeding, but they could do a little more, right? And it makes it so hard to talk to this government, or to listen to them, I think, as probably most of your listeners are thinking right now. Because when you tell them, hey, you promised to build, what, a half a million new homes, and you built 67,000. Hey, you promised to build, what, a half a million new homes, and you built 67,000. Hey, you promised to increase investments into affordable housing. You actually decreased it over the Harper government, who you say is the great Satan

of the housing file. You keep saying that you needed more partnerships, but you actually weren't doing any partnerships prior. When you actually put this to them, they sort of say, oh, well, the numbers are partly true. Or, you know, you know, we actually have had great successes, or we started with a running start, or it was someone else's fault, or it was the province. The reality is, this government had years of people screaming about the housing crisis. This was not news to anyone.

This is not a recent thing. Provincial elections were won and lost on the housing file going back to 2017, 2018. You saw other governments in the G7, like Ireland, have elections almost entirely fought on the housing file. So you can't say it was not top of mind for most of their mandate. And yet, the government had no urgency on the file. It had no real direction. It didn't have enough funding. It didn't actually do the

partnerships we're talking about. And in fact, most of the things this government announced in terms of housing policy were inflationary measures designed to put more money into the market. So there is just an obscene disconnect with reality when the prime minister says, you know, we've been doing these partnerships, we've been doing this hard work, we built all these new homes and did these retrofits. It's not true. This government basically adapted the previous government strategy, decreased the funding, and got less done. It's wild to hear him talk like this. Now, the Housing Accelerator and this new Housing Infrastructure Fund and all this, it's actually good policy, I think. But it's basically a direct response to

Pierre Poliev, right? It's just cribbing his policy and making it liberal. Where was this government for the previous eight years? Nowhere. And this is why people are losing their minds with this government. Justin, I got to say, this is a conversation about the prime minister, but it's also a conversation between two journalists, two colleagues. I get the impression that you are just temperamentally a tougher interview than I am. I would not have been as persistent as you. The irony, of course, is that he hasn't given me an interview since 2018, but he got suckered into talking to you. I'm not sure what that says about him. But anyway, there is a point where he kind of starts to lose it a bit. This is

where you're asking about electoral reform. Let's hear part of that exchange. There's one, and I don't know if we've talked about it to death, you've talked about it to death. But there's one thing that I always fixate on, which is, you know, the promise that the degree of the promise to make 2015 the last election under first past the post. And then there's sort of the degree of the promise to make 2015 the last election under first-past-the-post. And then there's sort of the degree of the about phase. And I'm really intrigued by it. I mean, looking back, would you do it differently? Because how would you do it differently?

I would have said from the very beginning, it'll be the last one under first-past-the-post, but it won't be proportional representation. Do you not think you should have given people the choice? I did give people the choice and that's why this wasn't the last first past the post. You gave them a choice how? I gave them a choice in that even though I was a deep, deep and continue to be a deep believer in Canadians being able to rank the choices on the ballot. It would take, be no changes in the electoral district, no changes in even the way

people think. It's like okay this woman yes should be a great representative if not her I'll take him if not him then her that's fine I just really don't want the blue guy to be elected for example. That's how people think. That would have been a deep, powerful change to our electoral system. People within my caucus convinced me that if I wanted to do it, I had to leave the door open a crack to being convinced on proportional representation. And because I left it open a crack on that, there were too many people out there, including the NDP and others, who were proportional representation or nothing. And I got faced with a

choice. I had a majority. I had the theoretical ability to keep that promise and do what I wanted, which was bring in a ranked ballot, because I was not going to bring in proportional representation. I think proportional representation would be bad for Canada. And that's a debate I'm happy to have any time with anyone, if I ever have the time to spend on that, which I don't, because it's not an issue that matters to many Canadians. But I had to make the choice. Do I ram through the change that I want because I have a majority, or do I say if there's no consensus,

I can't move forward? One can tell when an interview subject is starting to get short with you. He was really not happy to even have to be discussing this, it sounded like to me. It's funny because this was actually towards the beginning of the interview. This was supposed to be a very short question.

We're going to move on, but I could not get off of it. And we spent more time on it than I wish we did. But that response is so telling. And he's talked about it so many times, and I know people don't care about this file. But I care about it in the sense that it is representative of how this government can gaslight people and I know that that word gets used a lot but I mean that in a very genuine sense here he's saying I didn't want to ever have to do proportional representation but I was convinced that I had to trick people

into thinking it was on the table just so that when we could get in, we could do ranked ballots. But then when we got in, no one would do ranked ballots with us. So we just killed it. Like, that is so—he accused me of being cynical earlier. That is such a cynical thing, right? Because you actually look at some polling. There's not great polling on this, but people actually tend to be more in favor of purport for representation than ranked ballots. You know, at least two of the parties in the House of Commons prefer purport for representation. This was never a secret.

And yet he went into that election vowing with no qualifiers, with no sort of caveats, it will be the last election under first past the post. He gets in, he's pressured on all sides to hold a referendum on it. He won't do that. He pretends as though the only option was ever ranked ballots, which I think everyone thought was a surprise, and then sort of told us that we were wrong for ever expecting otherwise. It is a maddening exercise to try and talk to him about this, because it just so does not connect with the real world. And I don't think anybody came away from that election with the idea that the liberals

would only ever do ranked ballots and that was the only option on the table, right? People thought they would have a choice or a vote or options. People thought that there would be a debate and a conversation about it. And there wasn't. It was just shut down by the liberals

when they didn't get their way. And I think looking back at that moment is indicative of how they've dealt with many things since. There's an element of revisionist history, too, in his account. Because in the summer of 2016, when I started a brief stint at the Toronto Star, I interviewed him about electoral reform. And he said, I am more willing than ever to follow any emerging consensus, even if it's not what I would have preferred in the past. And then six or seven months later, he whacked the whole program. So you did talk a little bit about Ukraine, where you, between that interview and now you've gone on another trip to Ukraine. And you asked about

Canada's ability to be a steadfast ally, and especially with regard to defence production. That led to this question about the defence industry. The defence industry in this country has been grumpy for many years, feeling like they're not getting the export permits that they've wanted, and feel like the barrier to sending that stuff

has gotten higher. Do you envision a world where the next couple of years we'll be producing significantly more, whether it's 155mm shells, whether it's drones, whether it's offensive drones we can make here? Will we be producing that here in the next couple of years? I have heard from a lot of members of the defence industry that it's a shame that we have such rigid expectations

around human rights and around where and who gets to use Canadian equipment. And that's a choice that we've made. That's a choice that other countries don't make, which sometimes puts Canada at a disadvantage, I guess, when it comes to cold, hard arms sales around the world. But I am confident that that's where Canadians want us to be. And if another government wants to try and get elected on saying, well, we're not going to put protection of civilians and human rights and supported democracies as preconditions for selling Canadian-made weapons, then let them argue that with Canadians

because I'm not going to. That sounds like the kind of answer you'd give when you have not been talking to people in defense production in Canada because that's not their complaint. Their complaint is they sure want to help, but they need some kind of planning timeline, some kind of predictability

so that they can tool up factories to make this stuff and send it across. But that's not how he's hearing it. No, it's an interesting thing because I think they're actually right in some respects. You know, they came in kind of vowing to continue this ridiculous arms sale to Saudi Arabia, which I think we can look back on now and agree was a terrible idea in many ways. And it wasn't there they inherited exactly exactly and they came in kind of vowing to to do the deal but to to upgrade

our oversights and protections to make sure we never do that sort of deal again um okay great you know i think most people do agree with that but when it comes to helping out allies the kurds who we've all but abandoned, the Ukrainians in particular. These aren't bad guys. These aren't autocratic regimes, right? These are countries that we're supposedly, you know, steadfast allies of and want to help in any way possible. And yet, it does seem like there is a real frustration amongst people in the defense industry in their inability to connect directly with Ukraine, to get firm answers from Canada, what they want and need, to make those expert permits kind of speed along. I actually spoke to Bill Blair, our defense minister, while I was in Ukraine. And he sort of slightly offside the prime minister, I think, on this, where he repeats some of the same phrases, but also says, you know, we do have to figure out how to expedite some of these processes, get stuff to Ukraine more directly and more quickly.

So I think this work is going on. And, you know, I hope it is in many ways, because it does strike me that this government is sort of loathe to remove needless, onerous, burdensome regulation because they like the value statement of it. But this seems like a prime place where you can do a really limited, thoughtful, discreet change and make a big impact. So let's wrap up. This was kind of a legacy interview. Look, unless he wins another majority, you're probably not going to get another interview with him anytime soon.

What did you make of Justin Trudeau at this moment in his career? I think he's in a tough spot. I think fundamentally, he's actually pretty close to where the mood of the country is. And he has been his entire time in government, right? I think Canada goes through deeply conservative trends. I think it goes through deeply kind of socialist I think it goes through deeply socialist trends in terms of just public desire. And I think we have been in a pretty liberal mood over quite some time. Maybe inflation is sort of nipping at the edges of that.

But I mean, fundamentally, this country is at a crossroads. We need to build up. There's a real desire to fight climate change. There's a real desire to be part of this liberal order. There's a real desire to have Canada kind of of back on the world stage all the stuff that trudeau has talked about since he was first elected you look at opinion polling people agree with the prime minister on a ton of stuff and yet over the last couple of years there has been this widening gap between what he's actually able to achieve and his ability to sort of admit defeat or mistakes or lack of progress.

And I think it's making people crazy. If you actually ask me the reason why people are abandoning the liberals and droves, yes, it's because Pierre Polyev has managed to kind of connect his message to a real desire out there. But I think fundamentally, more importantly, it's because people just do not see Justin Trudeau actually kind of responding to the problems that everyone else sees in this government and this country. Right. I can rattle off a thousand examples. I mean, whether it's, you know, Quebecers who are terrified and horrified about Bill 21, watching the prime minister sort of dawdle on it. Ditto for the rights of LGBTQ people in Alberta, New Brunswick, and

Ontario. You know, whether it's people in Vancouver, Halifax, who are sort of losing their minds at the state of homelessness, and who are deeply worried about the future of their city. People, you know, who care about climate change, who aren't seeing the green energy projects come online. People who work in the energy sector, who aren't seeing some of their projects kind of come to fruition, and who are just seeing the government move at a glacial pace to deal with this and watching the prime minister sort of refuse to accept reality on a bunch of these things i think that is really a fundamental problem facing this government and i don't think they're acknowledging it you know acknowledging it would mean not just hiring a few new comms people or shuffling around some ministers, but fundamentally talking to people like they're adults, admitting where you've screwed up, actually opting to change course and fundamentally doing things differently.

And I don't see any indication from our conversation that the prime minister has even started on the journey to get there. And frankly, I think even if he wins again, it will be more dysfunction going forward unless he's willing to do that. Let's spend the last couple of minutes indulging in kind of a fairness doctrine. When's the last time you interviewed Pierre Polyev? I've asked many times, but I think the last time I interviewed him, he was still the Democratic reform minister. I'll tell you how long ago that was. Do you think you could have spent this much time with Polyev, pressed him as hard as you pressed Trudeau, without Polyev at some point

simply dismissing you as a paid agent of some nefarious government or private sector force? I actually think so, yeah. Because people are very accustomed now to these interviews where it's mostly televised or on podcasts, where there's a lot of finger pointing and, and sort of jousting and sort of quasi yelling. But when I said that with the Prime Minister, we talked for about an hour. And I tried as much as I could, you know, not to get too punchy, because I was trying as much as I could to give him the latitude and the space to explain himself and to offer insights that we wouldn't have heard otherwise, right? And I think that's the benefit, the huge benefit of a long-form interview.

And a long-form interview, as you know all too well, Paul, is about sort of dancing and sort of moving around in such a way where you can press a little bit and then pull back and then press a little bit and then pull back and find ways to sort of needle, but also to provide space. And I would love to do that for Pierre Polyev. I think it would be a really, really fascinating conversation. And if he's listening, I'd still like to chat Pierre, because I actually think there's a lot of really interesting things about what Pierre Polyev is proposing. I think there's also a lot of really terrible things about what he's proposing. I think many of the indictments you could say about Justin Trudeau also apply to Pierre Polyev in different degree and different measure. But no, I'd really love to. I mean, interviews like this, I think, used to be a critical component

of how politics works in this country. And the fact that it doesn't happen anymore, at least incredibly rarely, is a damning indictment of how sort of insular and secretive and difficult many of our politicians have become. Well, tomorrow is another day for both of us. Both of us would talk to both of these gentlemen, I believe, anytime they feel like talking. In the meantime, thanks for sharing your interview with Justin Trudeau with us. Justin Ling, thanks very much. Thanks for having me. Thanks for listening to The Paul Wells Show. You can read Justin Ling's profile of the Prime

Minister in The Walrus. The Paul Wells Show is produced by Antica in partnership with the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. Our producer is Kevin Sexton. Our executive producers are Laura Reguerre and Stuart Cox. Our opening theme music is by Kevin Bright and our closing theme music is by Andy Milne. Closing theme music is by Andy Milne. Go to paulwells.substack.com to subscribe to my newsletter. You'll also get a premium version of this show with bonus content. We'll be back next Wednesday. Thank you.