The Paul Wells Show - Wells on Trudeau with guest host Vassy Kapelos

Episode Date: May 8, 2024

The tables are turned this week! Guest host Vassy Kapelos interviews Paul Wells about his new book on the Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau on the Ropes. In the book, Paul chronicles how Trudeau came to ...power, how he's held on for eight years, and how his approach to governing has changed over that time.  Vassy Kapelos is the Chief Political Correspondent at CTV News and the host of CTV Question Period, Power Play and the Vassy Kapelos Show.

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 The tables are turned. The hunter becomes the hunted. I've got a new book and you better believe I'm going to sell it, which means this week I'm the guest and that means I needed a host. Fortunately, I found the best. I'm Vashie Capellos on the Paul Wells podcast. And I'm Paul Wells, the journalist fellow in residence at the University of Toronto's Monk School. Welcome to the Paul Wells and Vashie Capellos Show. My new book, Justin Trudeau on the Ropes, went on sale on Tuesday. It's a fun little book, I hope, about how Justin Trudeau came to power, how he's changed an office, and how it's going for him. You can get it anywhere books are sold. I thought people might have some questions about it, so I figured I'd use this episode of the podcast to answer questions, which meant I needed somebody who was really good at asking questions to fill in
Starting point is 00:01:05 as the host. I'm really glad I was able to get Vashie Capellos, the host of CTV's Question Period and Power Play, and of the Vashie Capellos show on iHeart Radio. Everybody in Ottawa hopes they'll get on one of her shows, and everyone's a little scared of what she might ask. I figured it was my turn. Paul, I'm very happy to be subbing in to interview you about your new book. Thanks for filling in. I'm flattered. I'm very honored. The book, I'm sure your listeners will know by now,
Starting point is 00:01:41 Justin Trudeau on the Ropes, Governing in Troubled Times. I loved it. I mean, I loved it for the content, but also for the speed with which I could consume it. It's not an opus. No, it's 100 pages. That's the format for this series of books that the publisher Sutherland House is putting out. I didn't have 103 pages. I tried to get away with writing a little extra when I wrote one of these things a year
Starting point is 00:02:01 ago about the convoy and no, it's capped. So it's nice to know what you can get away with and what you can't. Was it hard to put it into that much space? Like there's a lot to say about nine years. It's unbelievably hard. It's harder than I ever would have expected. So the publisher, Ken White, wrote to me last September and said, the guy's been prime minister for almost a decade,
Starting point is 00:02:25 and we still don't really have a theory of Justin Trudeau. We still don't really understand what he's trying to do. And he kind of dared me to write that. And I decided pretty early that I would do very little reporting that I was essentially going, it was an essay. And when you've got a hundred pages, that's less than a quarter the length of my big book about Stephen Harper from 11 years ago. Every page, I was struggling with how to squeeze everything I thought and everything I had noticed about this guy into that format. And I was not at all sure that what was left was worth reading. But I'm hearing good things from people who have read it. So what you get is condensed. It's kind of all killer, no filler.
Starting point is 00:03:09 It is definitely that. If you went in with the publisher saying there's no theory of what he's doing or what he sees the purpose of what he's doing is, did you leave knowing what that theory is? Yeah. So the short answer is it's a book about how Justin Trudeau changed or how he adjusted. It's not a book about Justin Trudeau as a sort of evil genius or brilliant genius. He's very much a product of his times and he's very much operating within the constraints that are imposed by the times. So short examples. At the beginning, I think it's very important to remember that his triumphant 2015 win comes after the worst decade in the party's history. Almost all the experienced members of parliament were defeated or walked away. Almost all the
Starting point is 00:03:58 institutional memory in the party walked away. And so he comes to power with the least experienced And so he comes to power with the least experienced government politically in memory. These are people who had done impressive things outside of government. They didn't know where the bathrooms were. They didn't know which way to face when they were talking to the speaker. And that matters. And then a second thing that matters is all the chaos in the rest of the world. Trump, Brexit, a belligerent China, COVID,
Starting point is 00:04:29 any prime minister would have had to deal with that. Third thing is the polarization, the increasing polarization in our politics, which he didn't create, but he had to deal with. So if you were to contrast who he came across as in 2015 versus now vis-a-vis the things you just laid out, what would that contrast be? This was not something I remembered. It was something I rediscovered when I went back and read his campaign discourse in 2015, the promises he made, the things he said in debates and in his
Starting point is 00:04:56 campaign literature. He ran as an economic moderate. He ran as a guy who criticized Stephen Harper for delivering eight consecutive deficits. He seriously underplayed his climate policy. He ran as essentially a nicer, more competent Stephen Harper. And very soon he started to veer away from that. But the guy who crowded Bill Morneau out of his cabinet in 2020 would eventually have crowded 2015 version Justin Trudeau out of his cabinet because that guy has no place in this government. But your point about how like when you look back and started doing research,
Starting point is 00:05:39 you had almost forgotten that was exactly the feeling I had when reading your references, for example, to how little in 2015 he said the word carbon or it appeared in their campaign or in their platform at the time. I had almost completely forgotten that kind of messaging coming from him as a politician because it's so different now. Yeah. So the word, I mean, I ran a debate for McLean's magazine in 2015 with all the leaders and the word carbon was pronounced 17 times in that debate. He only pronounced it once. And his line at that time was all the big provinces have already got serious climate policies. So all Ottawa has to do is get out of their way. It was never a question of Ottawa imposing climate policy on the provinces. I think he believed that he would never have to do that. He certainly claimed that he would never have to do that. It would all be so easy. What do you think it is that moved him so far from the middle? Do you think ultimately it was COVID? I was trying to think about that
Starting point is 00:06:41 as I read your book. Maybe a conf it that, maybe a confluence of factors, but when I really think back, it seems to me like on the other side of COVID, when he secured that deal with the NDP, it was like almost a pronouncement. Like I have moved from what it was at 2015. I think that marks the culmination of that process, but he started at the end of 2018. And I think it's a reaction to Donald Trump more than anything and to Brexit
Starting point is 00:07:09 and to the sort of yellow vest movement in France, the populist right of center uprisings that led to early kind of convoy-like activity. that led to early kind of convoy-like activity. Remember the trucks that rolled into the Capitol and Scheer addressed them? That's when the Liberals start to think, A, that side feels more like Trump than what we're used to, and B, Trump won. And so there's a moment at the 2018 liberal convention in Halifax,
Starting point is 00:07:46 where he essentially gets permission from a leading American Democrat, David Axelrod, who ran Obama's campaigns. And he comes to Halifax and he says to liberals with Justin Trudeau sitting in the front row, we ran on hope the first time, we ran on contrast the second time. Contrast is an inherently polarizing activity. It says there's us and them, and you can't risk letting them win. And so from mid-late 2018 on, Trudeau decides he needs to be a polarizing candidate. And then he takes those habits. You think that's like a conscious decision?
Starting point is 00:08:23 Yeah. And then he takes those habits. You think that's like a conscious decision? Yeah. You know, the, the liberals, kind of everyone in Canadian politics sort of wishes they were in American politics. Liberals love to think of themselves as Democrats or as extras on the West wing. And the Democrat who was on everyone's mind in 2018 was Hillary Clinton because she seemed kind of to have her stuff together and
Starting point is 00:08:45 she lost anyway. They were horrified at the thought that they might wind up like her. There's also, I mean, there's lots more questions I have for you about kind of what he does as the prime minister and all that kind of thing. But I thought also that your book did a really good job of looking at his own motivations and his own like his own personality which is the subject of a lot of focus and scrutiny among people but not really in like a at the at a at a germane level and I thought you did a really good job of that even for example in evoking or talking and writing about how much he was um you know he thinks about that fight with Patrick Brazzo and how much it sort of defines the fighter kind of attitude to have in difficult moments and things like
Starting point is 00:09:32 that. How did you come across that information? Like, how did you reach that conclusion? So the central metaphor for the book is that boxing match with Patrick Brazzo. That's why the cover illustration is a sort of a Lego. Boxer. Boxer Trudeau caricature. I sure wouldn't have picked that,
Starting point is 00:09:56 but I've been told by people close to Trudeau that he keeps that idea close to his heart. He's not an idiot. He understands that politics isn't like boxing, you know, but there was a time when he was literally on the ropes and that everyone had him written off when Sun News broadcast that boxing match coast to coast because they absolutely were sure he would lose and look ridiculous and they loved that.
Starting point is 00:10:19 And he confounded all the skeptics. And then he did it again in 2019. And then he did it again in 2019. And then he did it again in 2021. He was not in any kind of dominant position in either of his reelections. And even now, and including in public as recently as this week, he talks about how he doesn't mind being underestimated because he thinks that he is – he's got more on the ball than any of his critics believe. And then the other thing I get into, this stuff doesn't come automatically to me. I'm not sort of a naturally empathetic guy, but it's the work, right? Like you watch a guy for 20 years, you have to put some effort into thinking what it's like to be him.
Starting point is 00:10:59 The thing about Justin Trudeau is everyone has been looking at him for as long as he's been alive. He was on newspaper headlines the day after he was born. He was, you know, Pierre and Margaret Trudeau's miracle Christmas baby. And so he has been juggling expectations all of his life. He knows what it's like for people to look at him and say, what an ass. He knows what it's like for people to be ecstatic, to be in his presence for no reason of anything that he's done, just because he was someone's son.
Starting point is 00:11:32 And so he has been manipulating expectations all of his life, the way you and I use a knife and fork to eat lunch. Is it conscious or is it unconscious by this? It's often conscious. So there's a bunch of little throwaway anecdotes, you know, from my occasional interactions with the guy where he's clearly aware of the effect that he has on someone. Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up because I want to ask. There's a few that you detail in the book that are kind of fun. Okay.
Starting point is 00:12:00 Like which ones? Like at the debate, prior to the debate. Yeah. So, uh, like the damnedest thing happened in 2015 and I wound up nationalized, uh, uh, moderating a national leaders debate. And there was a lot of Twitter chatter about whether this guy, Paul Wells deserved to run a debate, especially cause I just published a book about Stephen Harper. And especially because people close to Trudeau were going around town
Starting point is 00:12:28 complaining that Stephen Harper's biographer wanted to moderate a debate. Like they were actually feeding that chatter. And a lot of people said a lot of nasty things on Twitter. So we get to the day. I'm wandering around the city building in downtown Toronto, which I don't know very well. And the leaders are also wandering around. I bump into Trudeau and his crew.
Starting point is 00:12:49 And he goes, you know, I know you've, I've been seeing the stuff that people are saying about you on Twitter. Like, how is that affecting you? And I kind of brush it off. I say, look, I've got the easy job. All of you guys are on the griddle tonight. And he goes, no, I mean, I know you brush it off. I say, look, I've got the easy job. All of you guys are on the griddle tonight. And he goes, no, I mean, I know you feel things deeply. This must be
Starting point is 00:13:10 really hard for you. And I kind of stammered some kind of reply and moved away. And that was the end of that. What an eerie interaction with a politician on what is inevitably going to be one of the most important days of his life. He is clearly someone who talked about that stuff on the campaign plane or it was in a briefing book or something. But it's not everyone in public life who would even make a theatrical effort to show that kind of empathy to somebody during the day. It's a weirdly emotionally intimate way to interact with a journalist. And honestly, like, I mean, I put it in the book. I don't, to this day, I don't know what the hell one is supposed to think about that. I was kind of impressed.
Starting point is 00:14:03 It's like somewhere in there, there's some kind of human being. On that note, I was curious actually reading when I came to the end, if you think he is someone, because at some points you seem to think this is the case and at others you don't. So I want to know for sure. Do you think he's really self-aware? Do you think he's really self-aware? Yeah. I mean, I would say part of the disappointment of following this guy for years is that he seems to have become less self-aware. Because when I first started having conversations with him, and I should probably define that. I mean, because there was, early on,
Starting point is 00:14:49 there was some kind of attempt by his detractors to put the idea about that he and I are buddies or something. I certainly knew Justin Trudeau less when he became prime minister than I knew Stephen Harper, and less than I know Pierre Polyev now. You know, I probably had three or four conversations with him before he became prime minister. And what was striking about the guy was that he was very aware of the effect that he has on an audience. He was very aware that he got young people excited about him, but that young people are the least reliable voters. So he wasn't sure whether that would help. He was conscious and kind of playful of being Pierre Trudeau's son
Starting point is 00:15:33 and how problematic that is in the history both of Quebec and of Alberta. And so he wanted to kind of cheat people's assumptions about a Trudeau in Quebec and in Alberta. In passing, I say that a lot of the things he did when he was coming up weren't attention-getting exercises. They were attention-using exercises because he knew he already had the attention. And then it was he would kind of mess with people's baked-in assumptions. And now, well, this week he made an appearance before construction trades in Gatineau and among other things. I don't think it began to occur to him what a motormouth he was being. I think the job and the people around him have dulled his sense of himself rather than made
Starting point is 00:16:22 it more acute. I was going to ask you that because I get asked that a lot. Like, is he aware of why there is so much malaise in the best case, disdain in the worst case among the Canadian electorate for him? And my impression is, speaking to people around him, that their tendency is to brush it off. And that might be necessary in order to be able to do the job and to function and to keep putting forward a vision that is in line with your instincts.
Starting point is 00:16:49 But I found that so curious because it feels so overwhelming outside that circle at times. There are things that if you admit them to yourself, then you might as well call it quits, right? Yeah, that's a much more succinct and better way to put it. Canadians have hung up on me and I'll never get them back is not something you say a year before an election that you plan to run. But maybe, I guess my surprise is more that
Starting point is 00:17:12 there's not even a middle ground. Like there's not even a like, okay, we acknowledge this, but, and there's some who do say they've tuned us out, but like, you know, there's certain attributes I employ that have prompted some of that reaction, including the fact that I don't answer a question very often. And when I do, it's like sometimes a nine-minute answer. And there's no augmentation of behavior to recognize that.
Starting point is 00:17:35 Yeah. That's why two years ago when I was still in the business of publicly giving these people advice, I was writing stuff about how I thought they could turn it around. And I said they should really install some kind of serious red team function internally. Some people whose job was to tell them why they might be wrong about stuff. But almost nobody in power ever installs that kind of function because it can really sap your will to proceed. And typically the liberals that I've spoken to who understand that they're in rough, they've got two or three answers that they keep falling back on. Like in the second or third sentence of that conversation, they'll say, well, what can we do? Misinformation. Or how can we have a normal conversation with Pauliev yelling at us, you know? And look, there's a lot to that, but to me, that's another reason
Starting point is 00:18:21 to pack it in. Like if you honestly think you can't tell people what you think in a coherent way, because somewhere out there, there's a thing called misinformation, then that's the game. Like you're done, you know. After the break, Vashie and I will talk about the Liberal Party after Justin Trudeau. I'd like to tell you about a podcast called Higher Ed Spotlight, hosted by veteran journalist and higher education policy expert, Ben Woldawski. In each episode, Ben engages the brilliant minds of the people shaping the future of academia. It's now in its third season, which features guests such as New York Times bestselling author Ethan Mollick and the vice chancellor of Australian National University, Genevieve Bell.
Starting point is 00:19:11 Whether you're an academic, student, parent, or policymaker, if you care about higher education, this show is for you. It's sponsored by Chegg's Center for Digital Learning. Subscribe to Higher Ed Spotlight anywhere you get podcasts. The other interesting part is the degree to which caucus remains largely on side, even on conversations behind the scenes. I mean, they acknowledge his unpopularity,
Starting point is 00:19:39 but there is no willingness to, you know, prompt any kind of public mutiny of any sorts. Like often they, again, same like with you, will reference other external factors of having fed and exacerbated the prime minister's lack of popularity. And yet he's also being criticized for his caucus management skills. But clearly they aren't that bad because they're not publicly calling him out. They seem pretty, you know, until he makes the call, it would feel to me, and I don't know if it does to you, like he's there. So whenever I write one of these books, whether it's 400 pages on Harper or 100 pages on Trudeau, I try and think like a historian.
Starting point is 00:20:18 I try and think as though I'm writing 20 years from now when all of these fights are lost or won and nothing I say is going to change what happened. It's a way of calming myself down and producing something that is a little less overheated than a column in this morning's paper. And one thing you notice as a fake historian, as an imaginary historian, is that these people are different one from the other.
Starting point is 00:20:43 They do have peculiarities that people will be talking about a long time. And the extraordinary control that Justin Trudeau has over the Liberal Party, and he's going to have it, I believe, until very close to the end of his tenure, whenever that comes, is something that's – look, Jean Chrétien, for all of his skill, had nothing close to that ever. I used to run into conservators around town who would make sure that they were in quiet corners of the town
Starting point is 00:21:13 and they would complain about Stephen Harper. They don't really do that about Justin Trudeau. Like, not to, especially, like, for me, it's a surprise because of where they are in the polls, because of the, you know, the direct line between his own polling numbers and the party's polling. But they, they are not, and not, they're not sycophants behind the scene, but they're just not willing to say we're ready to kick him to the curb. And I think it's because of that decade before he came along.
Starting point is 00:21:38 Right. It's like in a New Orleans funeral parade, the, the, the, the band plays a very sad sad mournful tune at the beginning. And then they play a happy tune later, which was that life goes on. And Trudeau is the happy tune that you can only understand correctly if you understand the band spent a decade playing that slow mournful tune. The Liberal Party died and then he resurrected it. And liberals who are new to the party never knew a party without Justin Trudeau. And the older liberals remember the period when it was effectively dead. And so they do feel like they owe him. reference combined with where he's taken the party from where he articulated it would be in 2015 will ultimately inform the shape the party takes going forward like do you think they're forever
Starting point is 00:22:31 changed yeah or that it's going to take a series of events at least as significant as as significant as the ones we've lived through to change things i mean he has defined liberalism. And say there's a campaign to succeed him in the next few years with several candidates, which is not guaranteed. If there is, there will be people with a more business-oriented approach. There'll be people with a more climate reconciliation, diversity approach. Pointless to raise this, but I've long believed that if Catherine McKenna were to run for the liberal leadership, she'd be hard to beat because liberals talk the way Catherine talks, you know, and that really matters. It's how Paulieff became the leader of the Conservative
Starting point is 00:23:17 Party. But I don't think there'll be anyone who rejects the notion of diversity as a strength, the notion of reconciliation as an imperative, and absolutely the notion of the green transition as the major business of Canada in this first half of the century. I don't think you can come in as a liberal who says, ah, screw that, you know, because it will continue to be his party after he's no longer leading it. because it will continue to be his party after he's no longer leading it. You write at one point, he can be as callous as anyone and more so than most. There's some good parts of this book that go through some of the stuff that we'll remember over the last nine years as headline generating. And I thought that was interesting because I don't necessarily ascribe and I don't think you do a negative connotation to that because I think in politics, it's also about like doing what has to be done ultimately in order to keep things going. And some of the examples you reference, I mean, he got a lot of flack for them, but ultimately he wasn't afraid to get rid of cabinet ministers who were creating a whole bunch of problems from that kind of thing. So even more than you, I've been covering politics for a while before this guy came along. And it's always been a kind of a party game.
Starting point is 00:24:29 Why don't you just have cabinets where people can drift in and drift out and the prime minister can make people ministers and then remove them from cabinet and it's not such a big deal. And Trudeau has actually acted like that. And the reason nobody ever did it before is that when you do it, it just seems unbelievably cold. Like Mark Garneau, who was Canada's first astronaut, who there are schools named after him, who was a leadership candidate, represents one of the strongest liberal writings in the country, and was getting old, like could walk away.
Starting point is 00:25:06 But he ran for re-election again, won re-election, and then Trudeau kicked him out of the foreign minister's job and out of cabinet altogether. You must be, it takes incredible courage or incredible lack of human empathy to act like that towards one of your parties, one of the most prominent Canadians that there are. And I don't really have an explanation for it, but I think it's worthwhile just standing back and going, wow. I have a little theory that I – and you're right. I have definitely not covered this as long as you have,
Starting point is 00:25:46 but I've covered the entirety of the Trudeau years. And I had this one experience years and years ago when I interviewed him for like a Christmas interview. So at the end of the interview, it's like, oh, this is airing on literally Christmas Day. So I'm like, you know what? It's the holiday spirit. What's one good thing that you would say about your opponents at the time they were Jagmeet Singh and Andrew Scheer?
Starting point is 00:26:04 what's one good thing that you would say about your opponents at the time they were Jagmeet Singh and Andrew Scheer? And the most awkward 60 seconds of my entire interviewing career ensued where he just looked at me with a blank look on his face. And then finally – and I was just sort of confused because I was like, wait, this is up his alley. It's like good times for all, sunny ways, like something nice, positive to end the interview on. And he said, well, I guess Andrew – and I'm paraphr paraphrasing but from what i remember it was like eight years ago i i guess andrew sheer is a good enough guy and jagmeet singh essentially is you know an example of how uh we're a diverse society and you can have success uh in that vein and i just remember my producer and i just sort of being shocked like that's the best you could come of it. But I left that deeply impression that he is so underestimated for the political animal that he is inside. Like, it's not an, like, he wants to win. And actually,
Starting point is 00:26:56 when you look back at stuff with that lens, including the story that you just told about the cabinet ministers, it's not that surprising that he acted in that way. It's just so different and antithetical to the image that he tried to protect, particularly back in those days. And to me, it's remarkable because that's like 2019 one assumes. And, you know,
Starting point is 00:27:18 or 2018, it's when he's starting to get his game face on in this polarized environment. And contrast that with the Justin Trudeau, who's been a close friend of Ben Mulroney's all of his life, who absolutely is comfortable around an earlier generation of people who were his father's opponents. So he didn't grow up in that kind of polarized environment, but now he's in it, and by God, he's not going to drop character.
Starting point is 00:27:47 Do you think he's going to run in the next election? What do you think? I know that's like a million-dollar question right now, but what's your gut telling you? I mean, it's getting to be a bad time to make predictions. Look, I'll tell you, I think he absolutely intends to, and I think he probably will. I mean, I he, I believe,
Starting point is 00:28:12 what's a good way to chicken out of this? When the story is told, I think the story will say that in the spring of 2024, he still intended to run again. Like he, I don't think he now has a secret plan to drop out that will be unveiled in the next few months. And how much of that do you think is informed by, or whatever ends up happening by his own. And how much of that do you think is informed by, or whatever ends up happening, by his own view of so much of what you account for in this book, the degree to which polarization has informed how he conducts himself, how the party conducts itself, the sort of political enemy that they view. How much do you think that and Pierre Palliev, kind of at the finer point of all of that will inform what he ends up doing. Part of why I think he plans to run again is that, um, it's very similar to why Stephen Harper had such a hard time walking away from a fight with a guy named Trudeau is, um, he's
Starting point is 00:29:02 not sure of victory. Well, odds are getting long, but he thinks he can do it. And at any rate, he doesn't think he has the right to not try. And again, that's something he has said several times in the last several months in different contexts, is especially against this opponent, I figure I have a duty to bring the fight to them. What do you hope people walk away from this book with?
Starting point is 00:29:33 Two answers. One, I hope colleagues walk away from reading this book with an appetite to write other essays about other contemporary topics at this length for the Sutherland Quarterly series that this is part of. I think it's a really exciting format for writers and for public debate. And so one reason I've written two of them in only a year is because I'm trying to get colleagues to pay attention to this as an option. What other readers take away from it, look, actually I would like for the people
Starting point is 00:30:14 who are angriest at Justin Trudeau to come away with some sense of why he's done the things he's done that isn't nefarious or doesn't, you know, I hope they come away with a better, with some sympathy for the guy, whether they think he's done the right thing,
Starting point is 00:30:31 whether they think he's been good for the country. I hope they come away understanding that all of us are doing our best. And it's possible to have a pretty good understanding of Justin Trudeau, starting from the assumption that he's been doing his best. I like the way that you put that. And I also, if I could add one thing, having read it, I'm always conscious of the degree to which we operate in this world that exists outside of, you know, not a single one of my real friends knew what wacko was this week type of thing.
Starting point is 00:31:00 It can be very insular. And I have already bought your book for my sisters and for like lots of people who have a sort of tangential interest in politics, but have too busy a life to consume it in the degree to which we have to. I think it's such a great book. If you just want to like read something in one day or two days and know more than you could have doing anything else and learn more about why this guy has done what
Starting point is 00:31:26 he does, why he leads the way that he does and why the government is doing what it is right now. It is very digestible. You're totally not condescending in any, you know, I just think it's such a, and I hope it's okay for me to say, like, I just, I think that it should be almost like required in some ways because it's not going to take up your entire life to do it. And you're going to enjoy it as you read it. And it's, I think, going to leave you with way more information than you could have received in any other way. So it's a great book. Well, I could not have hoped for more.
Starting point is 00:32:01 So thanks for saying that. It's worth every cent if you buy it because it's available everywhere. I know that you'll have hoped for more. So thanks for saying that. It's worth every cent if you buy it, because it's available everywhere. I know that you'll have that all over. I'm going to leave it there, Paul. It's been an honor to fill in on your podcast. Long-time listener, huge fan. You've done good.
Starting point is 00:32:18 Thanks for filling in. My pleasure. 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 Thank you. to subscribe to my newsletter. You'll also get a premium version of this show with bonus content. We'll be back next Wednesday.

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.