The Paul Wells Show - Ukraine: Mr. Thorsell dissents

Episode Date: March 13, 2024

In the two years since the Russian invasion, there's largely been a consensus in Canada about supporting Ukraine. Debates in Parliament and the media focus almost entirely on how to best help Ukraine, and not whether we should be helping in the first place. William Thorsell thinks that's a shame. He also thinks it’s time for the West to withdraw from the war and concede defeat. William Thorsell is the former Editor-in-Chief of The Globe and Mail and CEO of the Royal Ontario Museum. He’s currently a distinguished fellow at the Munk School.

Is it time to throw in the towel in Ukraine? If you don't have a reasonable prospect of reversing the front where it is today, and I don't think there is one, then you've got to start figuring out what your interests really are. Today, William Thursell on drawing a line and letting Russia keep everything that's on their side of it. I'm Paul Wells, the Journalist Fellow-in-Residence at the University of Toronto's Munk School. Welcome to The Paul Wells Show. All right, gang, this one's going to be a little different.

All right, gang, this one's going to be a little different. I've been thinking about the people out there who we love and respect, but who disagree with us about something big. We all know people like that. Maybe they don't believe in vaccines. Maybe they still won't take their damn face mask off. Maybe they're on the other side of the crisis in Gaza. Maybe they're a liberal.

How do you talk to somebody about the really big thing you can't ever see eye to eye on? For me lately, that guy has been William Thorsell. He's been one of my role models for a very long time. He was the editor of the Globe and Mail during my favorite time to read the Globe and Mail. And then he ran the Royal Ontario Museum. If you're still angry about that big crystal thing jutting out of the ROM on Bloor Street, you're angry at Bill Thorssell, but that's okay, he's kind of used to it. These days he's a fellow at the monk school, like me, and he likes to email a bunch of friends about current events every once in a while. For two years, almost all of his emails have been about the war in Ukraine. He thinks the West can't win it. He wants a

ceasefire he has from nearly the beginning. More generally, he wants a world with a lot less American influence. I'm not going to lie to you. I don't agree with almost any of this. But my side of the argument, the side that wants to stand with Ukraine, well, we've had a lousy year or so because Ukraine has had a lousy year. Ukraine. Well, we've had a lousy year or so because Ukraine has had a lousy year. So just as an experiment, I asked William Thursell to come on the podcast and talk about this stuff. We began by catching up on his former career in newspapers and his old friend Brian Mulrooney. Then we really got into it. I should note that we've been trying to figure out some technical problems with my microphone for a bit. We finally fixed it after we recorded

this episode. So you'll notice my sound isn't as good as usual. That's okay. Thursell's the guy you want to hear anyway. William Thursell, thank you for joining me. My pleasure. I noticed over the weekend that your old paper, The Globe and Mail, has been celebrating their 180th anniversary. And I remember when you were the editor that you celebrated the 150th anniversary with a glossy supplement that had a photo of you on the cover with the gun that was thought to have killed George Brown, the Globe's founder. I was at the Montreal Gazette at the time, and I remember a very serious colleague who was outraged that you were advocating gun violence. What were your thoughts about the Globe then, and what are your thoughts about newspapering now? Well, then was 1995, and that was pre-internet, pre-email, really. And the Globe was in sort of a golden age then of journalism in the sense that we were earning a lot of money through the vast pages of advertising that we had for real estate and cars and fashion and everything else.

We had a growing newsroom. We had a very strong circulation across the country. And we had bureaus all over the world and across the country. And we were having a great time. So, you know, many of my colleagues from the Globe and Mail years keep saying to me, I left there in 2000. Wow, what a great time to leave, because that's just when the economics were changing, and they were changing rapidly. We always used to have these charts about the website stuff, and I used to call it the hockey stick graph,

because the revenue was flat, flat, flat, but it kept saying it would go up in the future. And eventually it did go up. So the Globe and Mail is one of the few major papers that we know of that has got across the bridge, if you will, into the digital age. I think in good part because we have the enormously good fortune that it is privately owned by the richest family in Canada, which has a deep emotional and family connection to the globe. and family connection to the globe.

So they were able to carry it across that bridge. And now it has developed a much stronger base in its online subscriptions and advertising and some subsidiary operations that it does online and for consulting for others. So it is one of those papers like the New York Times, the Journal, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times that are able to now function, I think, going forward. Not at the same level of income, not at the same level of staff, but a reasonable level where you maybe have to focus your content a little more tightly because you can't do everything anymore. But still an impressive story of survival and maintenance of the mission.

Could you have had as much fun running the Globe this year as you did in 1995? Definitely not. For one thing, you're really running a radio station or a television station. The Globe that I had, we had two deadlines a day. One was at 6 o'clock. One was at around 11 o'clock for the national edition out west. Now your deadlines are every five minutes. You're basically broadcasting because I check the Globe site all day long

and there's something there all the time. Everything is measured. There's a big screen in the newsroom to see who's most popular, who's not getting read, and people start changing their writing to get on the screen. The other thing that I would find difficult there, as I would at the ROM, is the change in HR context, where we have, you know, DEI everywhere, where we are into identity politics, so for whom you hire, whom you speak to, what you say, these are not compatible with my sort of traditional liberal values, I guess. And I think that managing staff and managing the landscape of identity politics would be extremely difficult for me.

The current generation seems awfully preoccupied with metrics, with what will draw eyeballs, reach the largest audience. They have sophisticated software for analyzing and predicting that and more power to them. I mean, I look at my metrics too all the time and I'm just, I'm basically one guy selling electrons, but it seems less fun and it seems less, it seems to place less value on one's gut. Yes, I agree. And I, you know, I know from talking to my colleagues there that they're, you know, the metrics are up live for everyone to see who's working at the paper. It's really nice to be in the top 10 and you wrote your column or you wrote your story and you're not in the top 10 week after week. You might start altering your appeal.

You might start altering your opinion. I guess that it's not all bad in the sense you want to see what's connecting to people, but what connects to people? If you look at what's trending, all these lists on various papers, what's trending? the horoscopes up there pretty high real estate is up there pretty high with this the condo sold for x dollars etc so how do you keep your balance in terms of what your fundamental mission is as you define it and what your audience is saying they're interested in look what the new york times has done you know you can get down one third of their page and you run into the games, the games and the wire cutter and the advice columns before you can get back to the news. That's a reflection of the marketplace that now can be seen live. And then I think the last piece of sort of continuing business I wanted to get to was

the recent death of Brian Mulroney, who was a friend of yours and was a friend of yours at the time you were editor of Globe. And I think that might have sometimes required a little bit of juggling. And I give an understanding that you were in contact with him quite recently. What are your thoughts as he passes on? He did call me from Florida in his last week, essentially to say goodbye. We had a brief and rather touching farewell conversation there. He used to call me quite regularly when I was at the Globe and Mail

and talk about what was going on internationally as well as nationally in the party and all the rest. I always answered the phone when he called. I never gave him any advice, but I was certainly interested in hearing from him. After I left the globe, we continued to have a strong relationship on the telephone. I read some of his speeches that he was going to give, for example, eulogies for the death of two presidents. He sent me them in advance. I read them through and gave him some thoughts. So we had a good

close relationship and he continued to call and talk to me about what was going on in the world. You know, I'm very happy with the reaction to his passing, in the sense that there is suddenly an appreciation across the board, in a way I haven't seen before, of what he actually achieved in his 11 years as prime minister, both domestically and internationally, across many files from the environment to the economy and so forth, social policies. And so he's getting his due.

And as many people have said, we haven't had a great prime minister very often. And they use that word carefully. But I would think it applies to him and not to many others. He was such a divisive man in his time. Keith Spicer, who also passed on last summer, wrote in his Spicer Commission report, there's a rage in the land against the prime minister. Is that the only way to get things done? I mean, Mulrooney would, to some extent, lecture his successors and say, look, you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs, essentially. Do you buy that?

Yes, up to a point. I think, you know, my experience then with my friends and colleagues was often, how can we be supporting all these policies? We dislike Brian Mulroney intensely, and I used to say, well, you may have reason to like him, his personality. His personality really grated at a lot of people. But what about his policies? Well, it was hard for people to dissociate their reaction to him personally. He seemed to be ingratiating and he seemed to be needy and he seemed to be materialistic and all this kind of thing. And they would get confused between their reaction to the man, the style of the man, and the nature of his behavior sometimes, and what he was actually doing.

And so, yes, I suppose when you look, for example, at free trade or the tax reforms in particular, that caused a lot of upset and opposition that was real in the country, and he was able to get both of them done, and they were both very smart things to do but uh i think again you know history is the judge as i used to say he used to say that hopefully and i think hope has been borne out because uh through all of the personal fog and emotional reactions when we look back and see how things have played out what he tried to do and what he achieved it's pretty remarkable and we were lucky to have and we had a role in the world

then because of the way he related to other leaders and all these clubs we belong to that we've never had since and it takes a person of a certain you certain nature to be able to get out there and become indispensable in the G7 and beyond, which he did. Now we get to the other thing that I wanted to talk about, which is your emails. For nearly as long as I've known you, I sometimes get an email from you, which you send out to other people, and it's your thoughts on current events. out to other people and it's your thoughts on current events. I remember in 2015 I actually published one that you sent when you had decided that you had had just about enough of Stephen Harper and it was time to turn the page and that drew an extraordinary response. I think it helped to consolidate a certain moment in the zeitgeist. More recently you're clearly very concerned about what's been going on in Ukraine and you've been sending out an awful lot of emails

to your sort of friend list. At a certain point, I told you to stop sending me the damned emails. But I think it's time to hear you out. What, I mean, if you can encapsulate it, and we'll spend some time on this. What has you so concerned about what's been going on in Ukraine? Well, you know, we're, I thought the war was unnecessary to start with. We don't have to go into a lot of the history there. But the war to me is an outcome of American policy on NATO. Even the Secretary General of NATO will say that. And major American intellectuals,

there's a whole group of people who have analyzed the cause of that war. It was basically American policy towards Russia starting around 2008, particularly leading to the crisis of the coup of 2014, where the elected government of Ukraine, it was from the Donbass, Russian area of Donbass, was overthrown one year before the election with the great visible support of the United States and of Canada and so you know this war was provoked the reason they kept saying was unprovoked is because they knew it was provoked and it could have been avoided the second thing is that the effect on Ukraine over any any medium term is going to be devastating for Ukraine. It's just going to be irretrievably devastating.

Four million people have left the country. Half of them won't come back. Another seven million are out of their homes in that country. Many careers and educational careers and so forth are gone forever. There's been enormous destruction within Ukraine and, of course, the loss of significant territory. So it's a disaster for Ukraine above anybody else. The third thing that's very concerning is the efforts by Zelensky,

President Zelensky, has hoped and effort to try to involve NATO directly in the war. We are fighting the war as a proxy, but we don't have boots on the ground. That would cause direct confrontation with Russia and it could be extremely dangerous for world peace. Zelensky has been, initially it was pushing, pushing, pushing, using every argument he could to get NATO directly directly involved we're very intimately involved but we're not directly involved and even recently president macron of france suggested maybe we should get woods on the ground and was roundly defeated on that by most of our allies so the threat to a much wider war which has happened in the first world war the first world war started

with the with the events in the balkans and then spread all over europe and to the united states canada and this is similar we we have an event in ukraine that could spread and we we must allow it to spread finally we've had now the war for two years and we know where it is, where we've landed. And as the just fired head of the military in Ukraine, the general said, they were in a stalemate last fall. There may not be in a stalemate now. They may be losing more. It's very hard to see military progress from the point of view of Ukraine going forward. So I thought the Pope was kind of amazing this week when he called for the courage

of negotiation when you see the facts on the ground. He's being completely repudiated by Zelensky and most of the NATO people so far. But the facts on the ground will speak louder than rhetoric or hope or resentment. So I think we made a mistake in managing that relationship with Russia off the top. We are now seeing enormous costs to Ukraine primarily. We still live with some risk of expansion of the war into Europe and the United States, which would be just disastrous. And we have this tenacious denial of reality on the ground. So all of that together is not encouraging. So there's a lot to unpack there.

Let's start almost a little artificially at the moment of the invasion. When Russian troops move in to Ukraine, move further into Ukraine in February of 2022, how should Ukraine have responded? It responded very well. I think it's been a heroic defense. And at the initial stage, the Russians were incompetent and arrogant and cruel, of course. And Ukraine got on its feet there and showed them, you know, what they could do. Of course, they had been trained for seven years by Canadian and American forces on the ground in Ukraine. We had a base in Ukraine. So Ukraine responded responded extremely well and also in messaging and inspiring uh you

know people to support ukraine there's nothing wrong with that whatsoever so they put up a very very good fight against an enemy that they were able to vanquish to a degree by pushing him back on the northeast particularly past Kharkiv. And that was inspiring. And that's, however, not the end of the story. The story goes on. And what I call sort of the Korean phase of the war now, the war in Korea in the 1950s, early 50s, the battles went back and forth.

A lot of territory went back and forth until they finally reached a stalemate around the 38th parallel. It took two years of negotiations facing each other at the 38th parallel to finally negotiate a ceasefire. That's all they did. They didn't agree to anything else. They didn't agree to recognize territory won or lost. They just said, we have to stop fighting. If you don't have a reasonable prospect of reversing the front where it is today, and I don't think there is one, then you've got to start figuring out what your interests really are. When Dmitry Medvedev, the former president of Russia and current sort of voice of Putin's id, says this whole notion of Ukraine is ridiculous,

we have to get rid of it. Is that the sort of sentiment that leads you to think that any internal line between Russia and the rest of Ukraine would be respected by Russia over the medium and long term? Yes, because I don't, you know, I understand that rhetoric. Both Putin and Medvedev have used that. There's some intellectuals, you know, because I understand that rhetoric. Both Putin and Medvedev have used that. There's some intellectuals. Because Ukraine was really part of Russia and the Soviet Union for a long, long, long time, so they have that view. I don't take that too seriously.

I think that if there were a negotiated ceasefire, they would be part of the negotiation. They've already outlined what they would probably accept, and they would accept that border, and they would accept Ukraine being part of the European Union, maybe not NATO, but a neutral, neutralized or not aggressive power. And I think then Ukraine could get back to the business of working on its own affairs. When we went into this war, Ukraine was the poorest country in Europe and the second most corrupt after Russia itself. That's an amazing situation.

That's 20 years after its independence. And Ukraine had significant problems internally to deal with. Now that, say, there was a ceasefire on the line today, they have lost Donbass, the Russian really ethnic part of Ukraine, and they've lost Zaporizhzhia and down to the sea there. They hope they don't lose Odessa. That's next if they're not careful. But they would be left with 82% of Ukraine and almost without its minorities. 82% of Ukraine and almost without its minorities. And there is an enormous amount of work to do to try to put that country back together and bring up standards, which cannot possibly happen at all as long as this war goes on.

Okay. I'm just not sure why a new border would be respected when the one that existed in early 2014 wasn't respected or when the border of the remainder of Ukraine wasn't respected in 2022? At what point does Russia start respecting borders? You have to, again, go back to where this war came from. And, you know, if we removed the deepest provocation, redline provocation to Russia in Ukraine by saying we're willing to see it as a largely demilitarized and neutral type power which was on the table by the way in March and April of 2022 just after the invasion and Ukraine was prepared

to agree with that at the time. Then the motivation for doing that would not be there besides there would be security guarantees made to ukraine by the united states and britain at least and i think the russians have been wounded by this war as well of course and i don't think they'd be much in a mood to push around anymore you know this whole domino theory that you know if we don't push the russians back they'll take over europe or something is extremely hoary and reminds me of the worst aspects of the vietnam period where you know if we didn't stop ho chi minh from taking over the rest of his own country uh he'd take over all of southeast asia into pacific i don't think that's the plan of Russia to come into Europe, and I think they would be accepting of that outcome.

But certainly it's not acceptable today in Ukraine. Would Russia decline to invade the rest of Europe or gettable parts of Europe like Poland and the Baltics because NATO is there or despite the provocation of NATO? Like what role does NATO play in the recent history and the future of Europe? NATO went as far as Russia would tolerate before it went into Ukraine and Georgia, of all places in the Caucasus. It went into the Baltic states, went intokuses it went into the baltic states went into poland it went into the balkans it went as far as russia would tolerate and they did tolerate nato in in that regard they just couldn't tolerate either georgia or ukraine russia would i think not attack a nato country they know that it would just be disastrous for them to do that nat NATO works very effectively as a deterrent

alliance as long as it knows where to draw its own lines. It forgot to know where those lines were. There were lots of warnings about that. You know, the American ambassador in Moscow, Bill Burns, told the United States well before this period, don't pursue this policy of NATO and Ukraine. It's a red line for the entire establishment in Russia, not just one man. There were many major diplomats and intellectuals in the United States starting in the 2008 period, right up through, saying, don't do this. It's predictable what will happen. And it did happen, of course.

And it did happen, of course. So, no, I think that this idea that unless we keep fighting at enormous cost to Ukraine, Russia will suddenly sweep into Europe is just naive and self-serving for the people who want to keep this war going. One of Canada's first responses to the invasion was to bolster the Canadian battle group in Latvia. And at the time, you didn't seem very impressed by that move, that sending 450 more Canadian soldiers to Latvia struck you as kind of a non-sequitur, I think might be the best way to characterize it. How come? Oh, I just thought it was, it's not an effective thing.

It's a virtue signaling. I think it matters that a country like Canada has some force right up against the Russian border there, just as a statement of the seriousness that NATO takes for its commitments within NATO. So that's all right. we do militarily is so ineffective though our military is so ineffective is that it's almost laughable we say we'll send a ship to the red sea to help deter the hooties or something we don't have a ship that can get to the red sea to help the hooties we can't patrol our arctic we have no ability to have any effect around the maritime part of canada itself so it's all right it's all right i think to all right, I think, to be there and to show the flag, if you will. I don't think there's any threat to Latvia from Russia. But it's fine to just remind everybody that NATO is there. It could be us, it could be

some other country. But NATO, take NATO seriously. I think Russia does take NATO seriously. And in part, that's why it wanted to stop it from going into Ukraine. Should NATO be rolled back from the other parts of the front line that have now been established? Finland, Sweden, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland. If a Western-leaning Ukraine on the Russian border was a red line provocation. Are those other NATO members at or near the Russian border also provocations? No, they were provocative at the time, but Russia

swallowed them. They didn't like it. They weren't against it, but they swallowed them. Membership in NATO is irreversible. No one's going to roll back current members. The question is, you know, how much further do you push it? There was even talk during this war for a while, maybe we should include Japan or something in NATO. It's just becoming crazy. But no, the current NATO membership is irreversible. I think it is. It is credible. It's effective as a deterrent with the United States. It's powerful. Without the United States, it isn't so powerful. We'll see what happens there with the next election. But the situation would be quite stable there, I think.

I don't think it matters at all, really, to Russia. And you see this recently, that Finland and Sweden joined NATO, because Russia has no designs to invade either Finland or Sweden join NATO because Russia has no designs to invade either Finland or Sweden. And so... That's a nice change from when they actually did invade Finland a century ago. Well, they did in the past. Finland back in the Second World War, but the accession of Finland and Sweden are not...

I think they strengthen NATO's military capacities, but they don't scare Russia. This is clearly an issue that has preoccupied you, I mean, for the duration. And you've been writing to a lot of your friends. And I think it's fair to say a lot of your friends have not been swayed by your arguments. Are you disappointed? No, I'm more surprised, I guess, by, in a sense, the silence in Canadian public life about the war in Ukraine. There's very little visible debate in this country about the war in Ukraine. There's much more in the United States, actually, than there is Canada. Canada. And the fact that we have an intellectual and media establishment that is very much on the American side, if you will, American view, government view of this war, without

a lot of debate in Canada is what I find amazing. There's none in Parliament, really. There's none in the media. You don't see it on the editorial pages, the op-ed pages. It's kind of silent. It's kind of amazing to me that that could be so. But otherwise, no, I respect that people have, you know, good friends of mine in the media and the academy. We discuss this around the dinner table here. You know, it's usually quite helpful to have a martini first. We pass it around the dinner table and they express very, very well what I would call the Neil Kahn view of the world, the liberal missionary view of the world. And I don't share that view, but I respect it.

And it's dominant in North America and most of Europe, I think, although that's changing. I think one of the biggest problems, more generally, is that we are now, in fact, living in a multipolar world, which is denied by the United States and some of its major allies. Particularly, the United States has not come to terms with the multipolarity of the world. particularly the United States, has not come to terms with the multipolarity of the world. And its job is not to deny, in my view, the multipolarity of the world. It's to figure out how to change its management analysis, its analysis of that world. How do they manage the arrival on the world stage, again, of a normal distribution of power, which is going to be for four or five major centers of power in the world,

not one. They're not managing that well. They're in the classic Thucydides trap, the book that was written recently about this, where denial and self-defense and all that are the prevailing American things. In San Francisco, when Xi was in San Francisco recently meeting with Biden, he said, it was a wonderful thing that he said at the table,

Sir, the world is big enough for both China and the United States. The United States' reaction to that was silence, was basically denial. The United States has more than 200 bases around the world, and several of them within 100 miles of the coast of China. China has three, none of them near the United States. This has to be recalculated. It's interesting, we're speaking about Mulroney. Mulroney spectacularly with his division with Thatcher and Reagan on apartheid, but also Kretchen with his decision not to engage in the Iraq war. And to a lesser extent, Harper with his feud with Obama over the Keystone XL pipeline.

We've got three of our most prominent prime ministers have written a chapter of their legacy by drawing a stark difference with an American president. Surely you would see some kind of advice for future prime ministers or for the current prime minister in that trend. Would I see again that happening? Yeah. Well, certainly with Trump, it's going to happen. If Trump gets back in, the whole trade issue will happen again. happen. If Trump gets back in, the whole trade issue will happen again. And we may have other issues of, you know, the alliances and security that will happen where we disagreed with him before, and we will disagree with him again. I think when we talk about those disagreements, you know, they were confined to certain policy files. They weren't across the board.

It's perfectly normal to have disagreement with the United States on this or that issue, the keystone or going into the Iraq war where the whole world basically didn't agree with the United States there. And with South Africa, you know, that's not a major concern of the United States. On the major files, we're very careful about disagreeing with the United States, those being economic and security files. We are not known to disagree with them there. And it would be just kind of artificial if we talked so much about one of the world's major conflicts. And I didn't ask you about Israel and Gaza since October. I've lately got the impression that you're awfully worried about what's going on there, as so many of us are. What do you make of the West's response, of Israel's response, and of Canada's involvement in that conflict?

Well, the consensus is growing even to the point of the United States president saying these things, that Israel's response to this horrible invasion of October 7th is entirely disproportionate to what happened on October 7th. It is incredible. It's the crime of the century so far in this century to purposefully attack 2 million people, most of them civilians, and purposefully starve them and so forth. This is their policy. It's stated as their policy. No one can really stop them except the United States, but the United States is enthralled to Israel.

And even now, with the very visible frustration of President Biden and other members of the administration with Israel's activities, Israel is basically telling them, you know, get out of our face, leave it to us, even as the United States funds Israel for all of this. It's a human tragedy that's just incredible to watch in our current age when we're causing it, in a sense, the West is causing it. And it will forever, I think, change the view and the position of people in the world toward Israel and to a degree toward the United States, not for the better. Do you think Canada should break with Israel and with the Americans over this issue? Canada has been almost entirely silent.

It's been less critical of Israel than the American president has been. We seem to be caught in some kind of stasis. Before the World Court of Justice, many countries went, including the United States, and made their case for or against what was going on. Canada said, we didn't think it should even be before the World Court of Justice, so we'd say nothing. On the case of UNRWA, you know, we suspended our aid. Thank God we've started it up again and we've stopped the suspension of the aid.

But we have not made any real statements about what israel is doing at the united nations our votes are very closely calibrated to be pretty close to neutral i don't think we have to go out and break relations with israel or something like this but you know the british foreign minister is far more critical of Israel than we are. And now even the Secretary of State of the United States is. So again, I'd go back to earlier statements, silence in our country about these major world issues is deafening, as we say. It's incredible that there are such big things happening in the world where Canada, it's incredible that there are such big things happening in the world where Canada whether it's the government or even within civil society ourselves we seem mute we seem we seem

out of it we used to be pretty vigorous commentators on world affairs and within our country at least we're not that's the mystery to me. When I do all these emails, they go out and they're met largely with silence, and you don't see it picked up anywhere else in our intellectual and political life. It sounds like this is something that you don't just lay at the foot of the prime minister or the current government. It sounds like something that you perceive as more cultural. Very much so. As I said earlier, where are the journalists? Where are the academics? You know, where are the civil society groups? Where are their voices? Where is the debate? I'm not looking for agreement. I'm looking for reaction, debate, argument, intelligent argument. The government is reflecting this division, certainly within its own caucus.

The opposition in parliament is basically on the side, the other side with the United States on these issues, so there's nothing for them to criticize. You know, we're a small country anyway, but we have sidelined ourselves even within our own country when it comes to international affairs in general. There is just an amazing, there's an amazing passivity in Canadian society when it comes to international affairs. And it's not always been true. It's true now. It's a remarkable paradox because since the days when you were at The Globe and I was at The National Post, the number of potential outlets for anybody to make a fuss and to draw a crowd has multiplied beyond our imagining. And yet we seem to talk less than we used to. It's incredible. Your point is very important, Derek Paul, in the sense that the avenues for expression

for debate, given the internet and sub-stacks and everything else, including emails even like mine, is enormous. And voices can be heard, but we're not even hearing them. In the United States, you can find both on YouTube channels and on substacks, very vigorous debate about these issues within the United States that leak up and reflected to a degree in Congress. It's just not here in Canada, there's something about our society, maybe that plays out in the economy as well. We're just we have a lassitude in society in general here about

so many things that we just tolerate and just accept and shrug I guess we it's sort of the old Trudeau shrug except it's become a national shrug it is disappointing those of us who grew up in journalism and intellectual life in a much more raucous engaging world of the 80s and 90s when the debates were enormous and passionate, town halls were held about things. We're kind of lonely now because there's no resonance to that anymore. I guess that's as good a place as any to wrap it up.

I hope you were a little surprised when I asked you to come on my podcast. I'm glad that we've had this discussion because it's contrary to what's generally going on out there. At least we're talking about these things and we have some views and we can have some things to think about when we go to sleep. I'm not going to lie to you, Bill.

I had to talk myself into inviting you. But I'm glad I did. You're a smart guy. You know, you make good decisions. We will see who agrees. William Thursell, it is always good to catch up with you. You know, I'm a fan from way back. And thank you for sharing your thoughts with us. Thank you for what you do there. Thanks for listening to The Paul Wells Show. 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. 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.