The Paul Wells Show - What's Andrew Coyne so worried about?

Episode Date: February 14, 2024

Paul's former sparring partner Andrew Coyne joins us to discuss the state of politics, the media and the “difficult and dangerous” times we're living in.  These days, Andrew Coyne is a columnist for the Globe and Mail. This episode was recorded at the Munk School. Subscribe to Paul's Substack for a premium version of this show: paulwells.substack.com

So, Andrew Coyne, how's your week going? We're in a very difficult and dangerous world. It is the most dangerous situation that I can recall since, you know, the Cuban Missile Crisis. Today, two pundits, no waiting. My conversation with the Globe and Mail's Andrew Coyne about mayhem and dismay. Thanks to everybody for coming out tonight. This is going to be so relaxed and simple. Andrew Coyne is one of my oldest friends in this craft.

I met him in 1994 or 95 at the National Newspaper Awards. He was up for one. I was freeloading off of the work of a colleague at the Montreal Gazette, but I kept the certificate when we won. I ran into Andrew at a reception afterwards. He was a bit of a controversial figure at that time. He was at the Globe and Mail, and he had started to make a name not only as an editorial writer, which is an anonymous craft,

but every once in a while as a polemicist under his own name. And he was suggesting crazy things like government should balance their budgets and things like that. So he was seen as quite a hothead. So I ran into him at this after party and I said, you're Andrew Coyne. I'm a big fan. I bet you don't hear that very often. And of course, he had no idea what to make of that. Soon after that, we were colleagues, first at Southern News, then at the National Post, and then at Maclean's Magazine, where we used to get together once a week on Skype and bat around the issues of the day under the rubric Coin versus Wells. It was occasionally antagonistic and

usually just silly um we're going to do some of that tonight he's back at the global mail now where he is of course one of the country's leading commentators you see him every thursday night on at issue on cbc's national news unless you're watching me on Le Téléjournal on Radio Canada. But on a Thursday night, you'll see one or the other of us on TV. I'm told he's a nice guy. Andrew Coyne, thanks for joining us. Nice to be with you. We were podcasting before podcasting was cool, I think is what you're saying.

Absolutely. These kids, they don't know. Way back then, we were pioneers. I believe we powered up the Skype machine with hamsters in a wheel. A couple of tin cans and some string. Budget of $0. Absolutely. And it was fine, fine programming. Andrew, what do you make these newfangled internal combustion engines?

Catch me up on the story before i met you what uh how did you uh a guy from a decent family with a decent education uh fall into newspaper writing that's a good question mostly my ambitions when i was younger was not to be a lawyer because i had three older siblings all of whom become lawyers and it just kind of seemed like it had been done. But I didn't actually have a plan B other than, you know, I was going to win the Rhodes Scholarship. And by some unaccountable clerical error, I was denied what was rightfully mine. And so I went over to LSE because that was in England, and that's kind of like that. And I came back from that, and that's kind of like that. And I came back from that,

and that's where I finally learned some economics. And I'd been doing journalism through school. I started out at the University of Manitoba, and I wound up working for the Manitoban, a fine student newspaper there. And I'll just give you a quick story as to how I got involved in that. The guy editing the paper in my first year was a revolutionary Trotskyist or Trotskyite.

One of them's a grievous insult and one of them's what they like to be called. And he wrote an editorial entitled, Revolution May Be the Only Answer. It was a note of doubt, maybe. And I read this. This was a soul that needed saving. So I wrote a long letter to the editor explaining, you know, perhaps Mr. Nixon is unaware of this or that. And I went into the paper to type it out,

as one did in those days. And he was there, and we got into a five-hour-long argument and became fast friends, and I joined the paper. So that's how I got into journalism. And then I just kind of kept doing it while I figured out what else I was going to do.

And here we are. Someone once said that journalism is the last refuge of the vaguely talented. Now it's not even that, really. No, it's overworked and underpaid. And before you were at the Globe, because you were at the Globe as of the early 90s, but you were at the Financial Post before then. Yes.

When it was independent, when it was out. When I started out, it was a weekly. And it was a lovely, gentlemanly, if I can use that word, place. It worked at its own pace. This seemed perfect for me. And there were lots of real old veterans there who kind of taught you the trade and edited your copy pretty closely. And it was a great way to get in.

And here I was. I'd come back. I'd done a master's in economics and I'd come back and we're in the middle of the free trade debate and the GST and balancing the budget and the inflation, but all these huge, huge economic issues. And I got to apply what I'd learned in college,

how many people get to do that right away and sort of figure out, okay, I've been taught the theory. Now, what do I think about this applied situation where it's a real live world example? And so it was a wonderful, it was like doing another degree. Every week you had to write a little essay based on what you'd been learning in school and now applying it to real world. So I'm so grateful to it. It was just a wonderful way to get started. Was it William Thursell who brought you to the globe? Yeah, it was actually Eddie Greenspawn, who was then a reporter and who I'd known at LSE. I had left the Post and gone off to freelance and starved.

I think I imagined I was going to be Christopher Hitchens and I would have my column in about six different publications around town and there weren't, first of all, six publications. And if there were, they weren't interested in publishing me. So I was starving to death. And he said, oh, come on over. They need an editorial writer at the Globe. And I said, yeah, OK, fine.

At some point after, I said, well, how much would I be making? And he said, well, he said, a first-year reporter makes, I think it was something like $50,000. And I said to him, well, of course, I wouldn't be making anything like that, would I? And he looked at me and went, yes, you would. But, you know, the Post, I think the last year I was there, this was a national newspaper. I was writing a weekly column. And I think the last year I was there, I made $34,000.

So it was a different time in our trade. Which actually happens to be near the top end of salary scales for working journalists. Today. Today. That's right. That's touche. Touche. I mentioned Thursell because when he was the editor of The Globe, which was from 1989 to

1999, kind of, it became a bit more of a sort of a salon rather than a hard grinding news breaking organization. As a matter of fact, some of the old hands of the globe thought that it's news metabolism slowed down quite a bit too much. But it was the kind of place where ideas were welcome.

And you actually got a Monday column when Jeff Simpson was off for a while, I think. Something like that. So after I'd been writing the editorials for a while, I think? Something like that. So after I'd been writing the editorials for a while, I pushed and shoved. Because I'd been a little hesitant, believe it or not, to take the job because I thought, oh, I had a column before and a byline and now no one's going to know who I am. And so after I'd been there for a couple of years, I pushed and shoved and I got a weekly column out of it. What's the main difference between newspapers back then, essentially half a decade before the

internet showed up, and newspapers since then? Well, I mean, one of the things I wonder is how on earth we got anything done. How did we research anything? I mean, I felt this way during that 18-month period when the fax machine came in. Thursday, there was no such things as fax machines. Friday, they come in and you go, what on earth are we going to do with these things? Then they're ubiquitous, and then they're gone're gone. Somebody should do a movie about the short life of the fax machine. But I remember thinking, how on earth did we get anything done without a fax machine? And now I look at it and I go, I have no idea how we got any interviews done. I think, again, it was a good time to start as a columnist, as you were kind enough to say a polemicist,

because it's so different today in terms of your exposure, for good or real. So in my day, if you wrote a controversial column, maybe four people wrote a letter to the editor. Otherwise, you might hear about it. But you weren't sort of feeling, as I think people sometimes do today, where you write a piece and the internet goes aflame. And especially if you're new to the job, you may feel, oh my God, my life is over, my career is over, et cetera. So as a place to sort of grow up, if you will, in the trade and learn the art of argumentation and learn what lines to cross and what lines not to cross and

all those kinds of things, it was probably a safer, you know, environment than today. I call them a story on today, I think they better develop a thick skin in a hurry. But the upside of it is, you know, probably have to be a little more properly sensitive about issues you might have been a little too jokey about, because, haha, it's just you and your friends talking about it, you're not going to be quite as aware that other people may not find this quite such a laughing matter. So finding that right balance between, you know, not just shutting down everybody, whoever puts their head above the parapet on the one hand, or on the other hand, you know, sort of a white boys club where you all just joke around because you all share the same assumptions. Somewhere in the middle there is probably where we want to get to.

It's funny you talk about how you can sort of sneak your opinions out and not have, well, really not know what effect they'd had on the culture. Because lately, I mean, you and I were on Hurley's podcast last year, and I was complaining that there's no commons, there's no meeting place where the whole culture shares the same information, reads the same opinions, and has, you know, so. I think it's just different. And I think we'll find an equilibrium eventually. So as you were saying that, I was saying, yeah,

so we weren't getting hammered by the mob, if you will. But at the same time, we weren't going viral. You know, like if I wrote my column for the Financial Post, as it then was, there would be a certain number of people in the Financial Post who read it. But there weren't many people who were photocopying it and then sending it to all their friends, I'm going you know so it there's two sides of that so you know arguably there in a sense there's more of a commons in that sense and it's just it's not

institutionalized it's informal it's unpredictable it's ad hoc it's every every column rearranges the the commons in its own image, if you will. And sometimes it goes viral and you get a large audience. Sometimes it doesn't and disappears without a trace. I was thinking this other thing is those of us in the journalism trade, we all, in our dark night of our souls, we go, what on earth does it all add up to? I write this column, it disappears the next day.

And you'd think that would be even more true in this digital age, but in fact, it's not. It remains on the internet. It used to be you wrote your column, it was published in the paper, and other than a few copies in the library, that was all that remained of that, however long you spent working on that column or that piece.

Fish wrap by morning. Fish wrap by morning. So now it's digital fish wrap, but it's still around, at least as long as the internet will be, which I don't know how long that'll be. Yeah, it's now part of the infinitely long tail. That's right.

There are six people who could look up what I wrote about something in 2002 if they felt like it. So it's just different. It's like if you look at radio and music, it used to be there was Top 40, and Top 40 was this amazing platform to deliver a talent to a mass audience if you happened to get on the Top 40. So it had its pluses and its minuses.

And now there's no real Top 40 in that sense, but there's how many downloads did you have? And so it's not as regimented. It's not controlled by a few DJs, but it still exists in its own way. There's still ways in which you can reach that mass audience. Now there's a top one and her boyfriend plays football, if I'm not mistaken. That's right, exactly. So I sent him a note. I said, here's what I want to talk about.

What do you want to talk about? And I'm just going to go through some of these topics. There was a lot more sort of transparent fear of looming doom in your list. The first thing on your list was the international security situation, Ukraine and security threats to Canada. Why on earth would that be preoccupying you these days, Andrew? I don't know if you've been following the headlines recently, Paul, I don't know if you've been following the headlines recently, Paul, but quite apart from Russia, Ukraine or Israel, Gaza or China, Taiwan, I keep seeing stories with senior military people or senior defense department people in G7 countries saying effectively war is coming.

Are we prepared? The top general in Britain just talked about how they needed to start talking about a citizen's army, which is not the same as a draft, but it's something. So it sounds far-fetched, but these are not far-fetched people saying this. So we are facing, certainly in Eastern Europe, where I've been recently, In Eastern Europe, where I've been recently, they are deadly serious about the consequences if Russia is not confronted and beaten in Ukraine. And certainly China is watching it very closely. And we're seeing in the last few years this emerging alliance between Russia and China and North Korea and Iran. And it's not a joke anymore. It's a real thing. So it's deeply concerning. And as we've been seeing, and this week, we're getting underway with the Foreign Interference Commission of Inquiry.

These things are not just abstract, remote things that might happen one day. In their own way, they're manifesting itself on our shores. These dictatorships are becoming increasingly aggressive and increasingly unconcerned with how they're perceived and whether, you know, and sort of normal laws of civilized relations between states. And so they're going around and messing with our elections and in some cases messing with the health and safety of our citizens. So we're in a very difficult and dangerous world. This is certainly not any original insight on my part, but it is the most dangerous situation that I can recall since Cuban Missile Crisis. I'm not sure we're aware of it yet.

There's a Washington NGO called Freedom House, which produces an annual audit of democratic freedoms around the world. And by their count, freedom has been in decline, democratic rights, whatever you want to call it, has been in decline basically since 2005. And a few years ago, I was struck by the title that they gave to their report in, say, 2019 or so. It was called Freedom of the World 2019, a leaderless struggle for democracy. And what they said was the people who are supposed to be the good guys, the pluralistic multi-party, freedom of press, market-based economies are where a lot of the trouble is.

Obviously this was in the late stages of at least the first Trump presidency. Hungary, Turkey, lately Slovakia, Poland, with some recent encouraging signs, haven't really been beacons of hope. And the last time I interviewed Justin Trudeau in 2018, I said, what can democracies do to increase the chances that there'll be more democracies in the future? And to say the least, he didn't have a sort of a ready answer.

I don't know what obligations that puts on all of us, although I have some ideas. Well, first of all, you know, we have to believe in ourselves. And there's really alarming data about young people's attitudes, particularly in the States, but I think elsewhere as well, that they're not as instantly in favor of democracy as we might have assumed. And not just young people, but in the population as well, there is a certain, extraordinary to me, but a certain hesitancy to sing democracy's praises and to understand its virtues.

I think when the Cold War was in full bloom, it was maybe a little easier to kind of rally everybody to the side because the bad guys were very clear over there, et cetera. So that's point one. Point two is we're dealing with this epistemic crisis, as they say, this ability to bamboozle at least half the population into believing things that are just simply not so, that people are trying to, quote quote unquote, do their own research. They're trying to figure things out

from the ground up themselves rather than the kind of sort of pyramid of knowledge that we grew up with where, you know, things are passed along from experts to lay people, from older generations to young generations, and people understand, okay, I'm fitting my own perceptions of the world into the perceptions of people who've come before me and maybe know a little bit more than I do about things and I'll try to learn from them instead what people are doing trying to do now is googling it themselves and re-litigating every known fact and and we just don't have the capacity as a species to to do that every. And so it kind of overwhelms people. They're taking in this stuff through a fire hose every day through social media. And I promise you, you can go online and find a dozen

well-produced videos explaining in all seriousness that the earth is flat. So we're in a certain intellectual chaos. And into the middle of all that, and into the middle of the kind of ongoing class war in the United States in particular, class not so much on money and income but on education and culture and geography and the divide that runs through that society and runs through all of our societies to an extent, into that walks this extraordinary figure of Donald Trump, who is unique in world history, in my view,

in no good way, and who represents, even to this moment, an extraordinary threat. I don't know if you read that book a couple of decades ago, I think it was The Plot Against America, Philip Roth's book about what if Lindbergh had won the presidency in 1944 or 40, I forget now. And it's this arresting thing where you think, my God, what a thing to imagine that, you know, we're fighting World War II and the president of the United States is on the side of the bad guys. Well, that's what we're living through now. I mean, potentially, if Trump gets back in, and certainly when he was there, that this is somebody who is so overtly now, not just an unhinged billionaire madman, but somebody who is campaigning on a platform of fascism. You know, elect me so I can break the law and imprison my enemies.

It's extraordinary. So yeah, I forget where I was going with this answer, but... Kind of where we're all going, I think. Yeah. It's not... So I guess where I was going is it's not just the outside threat of the Russians, the Chinese, et cetera. It's this internal threat where the democracies are really under trial and under pressure and under strain, the United States in particular. And if the United States goes down that path, good luck for the rest of us. So probably the latter part of 2019, I wrote a slow day column at Maclean's because two public figures in Quebec had in the same week been musing about the flatness of the earth. And like municipal officials, you know, I'm telling you the damn thing is flat sort of thing. So I wrote it like, what's getting into people? And I'm like, well, you know, I actually think

we're in a world where it makes increasing amounts of sense for people to just reject what their betters tell them, given that the world they've inherited from their betters. But anyway, that slow day column turned out to be my best preparation for a lot of what we saw during COVID, you know, vaccine hesitancy and so on.

Yeah. Let me fill out that maybe provocative thought. I've been thinking a lot lately about how as impressive a politician as Bill Clinton left behind a trail of wreckage. His dream of a global free trade and bringing China into the WTO helped to contribute to the hollowing out of middle America.

At the same time, his welfare reform, which was supposed to be a situation where if you could, you know, your benefits would be reduced, but you would get off welfare and make a better life, except often there was no way out of welfare. So all it did was put people on benefits into an extended grinding poverty. When you're poor in the United States, you physically hurt because you work in, you know, physical labor of one kind or another. And so a lot of people were in pain. And so a lot of people were sold opioids by the Sacklers,

which then when the opioids became harder to get, they just went straight to heroin and then to fentanyl. Al-Qaeda rose during the Clinton presidency and only at the very end for reasons of very mixed motives. Did he do anything at all about Al-Qaeda? And the longest uninterrupted period of economic growth in U.S. history was essentially a Wall Street banking boom that led pretty straight to the financial crisis, the banking crisis of 2008-2009.

If that's what the best of American managerial talent could produce, first of all, no wonder people were a little leery about voting for his wife as his successor. And secondly, I think that leads to a world where people start to wonder what is right and what is proper. Yeah. I think, frankly, Paul, you could say that in a different way about every president, every age. We find new ways to make mistakes. So in the Clinton era came after the Reagan era, which came after the Carter era. So it came, you know, so first of all, we blew our brains out running high inflation. And so people, my God, we got to bring in Reagan

to get inflation back down. And we went through a thing where we tried to correct some of the excesses of the 70s. And Clinton was trying to correct some of the excesses of the 80s. And it's inevitable that different types of problems are going to, I think, fairly inevitable, that pressures are going to build because you can't keep every whack-a-mole down, right? You're paying attention to one set of problems, and maybe you're storing up other kinds of problems in the process. On the particular thing of the China and free trade, I think we would certainly say today, I'm not sure I would buy the whole hollowing out of America thing, but I think we would certainly say, and I may occult on this because I was one of them, that the theory that we were going to draw China in to the Western or

the democratic world and way of looking at things proved to be an illusion and a costly one. Because of course, in fact, what we did with both China and Russia was we made ourselves more exposed to them. I hope that the lesson that we learned from that is not let's all retreat back within our own national boundaries. And I see encouraging signs that that's not going to be the case. But the so-called friend-shoring of let's have free trade, but have free trade with people who aren't trying to kill us, I think is actually probably a good thesis and synthesis coming out of that. The proper lesson to learn is security matters. Trade does not trump security. Trade does not necessarily lead to more security.

So pay attention to the security. But you can pay attention to security without completely screwing up your trade and your economy. So that's for the big questions. For the local scuttlebutt, do you figure Justin Trudeau is still going to be the prime minister at the next election? I don't know is the correct answer to that question. You know, typically leaders stay one election too many, just like fighters fight one fight too many. They always think they're indispensable. They always think, you know, I'll wipe the smirk off of that young,

whoever it is, face, and I'm sure he would like to do that. I also think the party has a real problem on their hands of there's no obvious person to take his place and if this is a save the furniture election maybe better to go down you know have the captain go down with the ship maybe better to lose the election but not get wiped out. The argument is often made if Mulrooney had stayed in 93 the Tories would have lost they would have lost badly but they would not have gone to two seats I've heard that argument made by Mulroney I'm sure his argument would be they would have won but but uh uh so there's a case to be made

that he should stay uh because the situation is probably not retrievable and better to go down with with the old person and then the new leader can come in without the taint of defeat. So that would be my guess is, but also just the inertia. If he doesn't want to go, there's really no way I think they can get rid of him. He owns that party. You know, looking back at the particular way he was chosen, we've had the discussion many times, I think of, I think it's crazy the way that we elect party leaders nowadays,

because, you know, people sign up for one day as a party member and then disappear, and that's who chooses the leader. And the leader, once he's got that mandate, is really accountable to nobody. And with Trudeau, it was that time's end because you didn't even have to be a member of the party to vote. You just had to be driving by the poll station on the day, and you could sign up

and vote for the leader. And his whole campaign was, let's get rid of all the rivalries. Let's get rid of all the barons. Great, because when you do that, there's no hierarchy. There's nobody who can challenge you. And that's today's liberal party. So he's there for as long as he wants to be, frankly. I mean, I remember a conversation conversation i hadn't had many conversations with him before he became prime minister but at the convention where they made that rule change and his thing was that it would be fresh air but it was obviously uh also not incidentally the easiest way on earth for the popular guy to win the popularity contest right if anyone in canada who's sort of vaguely aware of politics can vote for the only candidate they've heard of.

With the name recognition. Then even the astronaut didn't stand a chance. That's right. That's right. Exactly. About that time I was walking through Byward Market, which is sort of the touristy district in Ottawa.

And I walked past the patio. It was a nice summer night. And there were And I walked past the patio. It was a nice summer night and there were like 20 people on the patio and they looked up from their beverages and they were looking my way as I walked past. And I thought, well, this is a fine, well-educated bunch. They must've seen me on the national or read

one of my witty columns or something. And then I realized that Justin Trudeau was walking the other side of me. And what they were thinking was, when is that dumpy guy going to get out of the way? Well, there was a time. I mean, you look back now, and I remember saying to people,

people fall out of love as quickly as they fall into it. This is dangerous for the party, that it should be so founded in this, we forget how cult-like it was, this leadership cult around him. It seems silly now, but it was eight years ago. But the fall from, he had approval ratings, I think, in the 60s at one point.

And it's just been downhill ever since. You know when I think it started, and you're going to laugh, but I actually think you can see some doubt on this. It was after he reneged on the electoral reform promise. And I think that, I do think that registered with people and not just with wonks like me. The reason they put that in the platform was not, Lord knows, because they had serious thoughts about how elections should be run in Canada. It was to signal.

And it was to signal, this is not your same old power-mad, cynical, liberal party of old. We're kind of like the NDP. We're idealistic. We're naive. We're young. We want to change the world. And nothing could signify that more than, let's fix this electoral system. So when he just sort of went and said, nah, I don't think I will, you can actually start to see the poll numbers start to decline from that point. So say they decide it's time for real change and someone brings you into the PMO, someone has a stroke and asks you to come in and fix things.

What would you suggest? Don't. Then we really aren't sure. You mean policy-wise? Yeah, style-wise, since you're big on style in politics or whatever. I mean, well, I mean, so, you know, you were talking about how gloomy and doomier it was. The state of our economy in terms of growth ought to be causing everybody conniptions. You know, we used to worry that the economy was growing too slowly.

Well, now it's not growing too slowly. It's shrinking, or at least it's shrinking in per capita terms, and certainly it's shrinking in productivity terms. 12 of the last 13 quarters, productivity in this country has shrunk. We're back now in productivity terms to where we were in 2014. It's a whole lost decade. And the worst of it is you look forward and you don't see any signs it's likely

to improve. Well, economies that don't grow for a decade, or certainly don't grow in terms of living standards, that sets up a whole mess of troubles. I mean, we're talking about some of the impacts in the United States. So in terms of people's political views, in terms of whether they see hope for the future, whether they're willing to share, or whether they demand more from me and less from you, and you get more social divisions. When you look in terms of the existential thing of what's the country for, or do we believe in this project,

is this an exciting thing we want to be part of? All these things, if you don't have a growing economy, I think is really concerning. And it's only very recently that this government has even become, showed it's aware of this problem. I think it was the 2022 budget was the first one where they said, you know what, we've got a growth problem in this country. Yeah.

Because they'd had a merry old time for six or seven years redistributing it. And maybe those were all great programs, but if you don't have a pie to redistribute, you're in some trouble. So I really think, not that I expect anybody to get on this, because we're going to have an election that's going to be basically about, you're Donald Trump, ax the tax. There's not going to be a lot of substance in this election anymore than most, but there really ought to be because I think it's at the level where you would talk about a growth crisis now.

And certainly, if we're talking about the long run and the demographic changes in the country in terms of the aging of the population, I was worried sick about this 10 years ago because you just had to look at where the aging of the population was taking us in terms of costs. You know, healthcare costs per capita, healthcare consumption, the rule of thumb is for every decade above 55, you double

your per capita consumption of healthcare. Well, if you've got a lot more 65 and 75 and 85 and 95 year old people than we ever had before, and let me just stress that. We are about to enter a society unlike any that's ever existed. With 25% of the population over the age of 65, going back to the early 70s, it was 7%. And increasing proportions of that over 80, 90, the fastest growing cohort is now the centenarians. The costs of that, because God knows we're not going to be able to reform healthcare, are astronomical. You've got fewer people of working age to provide the revenues to do that so even 10 years ago you could see the only way we're going to fix this is if we have much more rapid productivity growth and that's precisely when productivity went in the tank so you know there

are credible forecasts or projections that 25, 30 years from now, you could see one or more of the provinces defaulting on their debts because it's the provinces that this falls upon, not the feds. Now, you can say, oh, forecasts of that length aren't worth that much because a lot can change. Except when you're talking about demography and health care, those are pretty baked in. Those are hard to change. And if any one of the provinces even comes close to this situation, then you start

getting the markets speculating who's next, and are the feds going to bail them out? And so you could get in some really, really ugly situations. It's basically, you know, we all had a good laugh at Europe's expense five or six or eight years ago, whenever it was, you know, when Greece was having its crisis, and it was causing a crisis for the whole continent. And people like me would say, oh, aren't you silly? You know, you've got a common currency, but you've all got independent fiscal authorities who can borrow as much as they like in any currency they like. Well, that's Canada, right? So we could have our own Greece and our own crisis on our hands, you know, not now, but some years hence.

And the good news is if we get started fixing this problem now, we can handle it. The problem is we'll never get in that fix. But human nature is, I worry, is that we won't do it until the crisis is on us. You ever spend time with Pierre Poliev? No. I've met him, I think, once or twice when he was much younger. No, I've met him, I think, once or twice when he was much younger. And to be frank with you, I don't have a strong urge to have a beer with him.

I think we're all learning both his strengths and his weaknesses. He's clearly a very skilled communicator. I think he's caught on to a couple of things that are probably right, though I wish they weren't. For example, it's probably played out for them well that he, even though he ran that disgraceful leadership campaign where it was all about the World Economic Forum and Bitcoin, the upside for them is I think he has basically tamped down the People's Party. For that kind of voter, they can look at Pierre Poilievre in a way that they wouldn't look at the Conservative Party otherwise. They can say, he's my guy. He gets me. I'll stick with them.

Although there's a constant debate on Twitter, which I don't tweet, but I peek. And there's a constant debate about whether he's really their guy, right? Yes. Or whether he's actually a globalist in disguise. That's right. And if there weren't that debate, he probably would have pushed it too far. So the position he wants to be in is where people can see what they want to see in him. And right now, I think he's got enough of those kinds of voters who aren't as hardcore

as the ones who say, oh, he's just a wolf in sheep clothing. But he's got enough of those without completely turning off centrist voters who are looking at him pretty skeptically, I think. But I remember an old pollster telling me, you know, when people have decided to get rid of the government, it doesn't matter who the other guys are. So at this point, he gets a lot of latitude because there's enough voters who say, I'm just so sick of these liberals, I need to change. And I'm not happy about my choice, but I'll hold my nose and vote for Palletta. And so far, I he's, very clearly, he's been able to get the party up to 40% odd in the polls.

You can kind of hardly argue with success. It's a funny thing. I just find myself trying to imagine what his cultural policy will be the day after he shuts down the CBC. What's, like, what do you do for an encore? Yeah. And then, or his position on ports or his position on. Virtually anything. Yeah.

I mean, at this point now we're in fairness, we're a year or whatever it is, two years, year anyway, probably from an election. Um, but he will probably not want to unveil very much until the election time, if then, and it will enrage people like you and me. But if you're that far ahead in the polls, of course, you're unlikely to want to take too many chances. It's funny. So I went to his address to his caucus yesterday, Sunday, as we're speaking. And then I went to Ed Broadbent's memorial. That was a kind of a surreal day, although the two events had more in common than I think most people would have imagined.

Two different ways of just appealing relentlessly to the working guy. His pitch was just entirely bread and butter household consumer economics issues. There was no sort of ode to Bitcoin. It's not that different from stuff that Doug Ford used to win in 2018. That's right. And I think the liberals who are tying themselves in knots trying to make him into Donald Trump

are to some extent not going to know what hit him because... Yeah, I fear he will disappoint them in that regard. Every now and then he'll throw a bone to that audience, but the focus has certainly shifted. So every now and then, I mean, all he has to do basically is have a fight with the media, and he can get that voter back on side because that's their number one issue is nobody understands us,

the media are biased against us, et cetera. So it's pretty cheap politically, pretty easy for him to keep them on side and rev up the fundraising. All you have to do is just insult an Ottawa journalist. I'm going to keep talking. I'm going to look up his fundraising pitch today. Yeah. So I think he's smart to focus most of his message on those bread and butter issues. That's why he's at 40%. He's not at 40% because of Bitcoin. He's at 40% because of housing. And again, give him full marks. He was hammering on those issues way before the government seemed to be aware that they were issues. So he's earned that. I have to give him his due. So he sent this one out. I'm not one of these journalists who signs up to

fundraising email lists, but I have friends who send me their stuff. Here are three important reasons why your donations are crucial. Number one, we are facing an unprecedented amount of attacks by the mainstream media. Conservatives now need to fend off propaganda attacks from Trudeau and his media allies. As you read this, the legacy media is strategically launching attacks on Pierre and the common sense Canadians who support our movement. So, I mean, it's... If the legacy media were capable of strategic anything, they would not be the legacy media, right?

I mean, it's giving us vastly too much credit, it seems to me. The great thing is I am not part of the legacy media because I am funded by... You're the bold new frontier. Yeah, paulwells.substack.com. The expanding Wells empire. But what I have tried to urge colleagues to begin to understand is that, first of all, although the conservatives are the most repetitive about it, everyone takes a shot at reporters if they figure it can help them. Oh, yeah.

Everybody works the ref. if they figure it can help them. Oh, yeah. Everybody works the ref. The president of Queen's University today was blaming reporters for quoting his provost accurately about the... Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Provost said, by God, we're going to go under. And then the president of the university says, unfortunately, people have been inaccurately saying, well, no, yeah. Your vice president academic is one of them. The flack I take from conservative crazy Twitter

is, I would say, vastly outweighed by liberal crazy Twitter, the fabled true and on. And I'm not sure exactly what explains it, but they are even more insane than the populist pop cons. Yeah, so first of all, anyone's going to take, like nobody benefits by making friends with the reporters. And secondly, boy, there's a lot to be upset about again, including the current regime of subsidies

from the federal liberal government, which puts all of, me to the extent that I'm on CBC once in a while, and everyone whose main source of income is from a, like you at The Globe, we're in an objective conflict of interest. It's a disaster in any number of ways. At the very moment when we should be moving away

from the subsidy model generally. I mean, I've been arguing, as you know, Paul, I've been boring everybody to tears talking about how we need to move the CBC off of public subsidy for 30 years. Because the world in which the CBC was created has completely changed. All the things that made the CBC was created has completely changed. All the things that made the argument for it don't exist anymore. And the corporation itself, I think, would benefit from having more direct connection.

I've always been arguing you should move it on to user-viewer pay and it would have a much more direct relationship with its audience and get itself out of a lot of the problems. The very worst reason to do that with the CBC is the reason that why ever is propagating which is the CBC said mean things about us So let's take away their funding. That's a Abominable basis for any kind of public policy is let's settle scores It's like saying, you know, let's reform Medicare so we can get back at those doctors, you know, it makes no sense Whatever but to be moving in the direction of basically putting the the rest of the media now on public subsidy and in Quebec now you've got both the provincial government and the federal government

and my understanding is that that Quebec journalist labor costs are now more than 100 percent covered by the subsidy so you're basically making money off the government uh every time you hire a journalist it's bad because it it basically Do you wonder why I'm on Radio Canada? Getting ready for the next wave. It basically tells our industry, stop making whatever lame attempts you were to try to fix your business and fix your business model because we'll come and catch you, so you don't need to worry. Go back to sleep.

So it doesn't fix our problems. It makes our problems worse and it doesn't mean we're suddenly going to all you know say you must vote liberal because the liberals gave us money uh but certainly it it at a time when our credibility and our independence is being questioned it's the very worst thing that could happen it's an absolute gift to every crackpot online and everybody who follows them to spread that belief. But I do think over time it will make us more inclined towards government solutions to things. It's kind of hard to say, why on earth are we bailing out

the auto industry if we just bailed out the media industry? And over time, I think it won't even occur to us. We'll just sink further and further into this idea that everybody should be subsidized. Well, that was the argument when I started to see, when I saw this stuff coming in 2018, 2019, and I started to go to liberal acquaintances of mine and say, what are you doing?

It's going to cement the appearance of a conflict of interest. It's going to tranquilize the incumbents and do nothing for innovation and so on. The answer I frequently got in so many words was, every sector gets subsidized. Why would you be any different? Yeah.

Because we are different. You know, there was a glorious moment in the early 80s when the Kent Commission, which was the last for the younger audience members, was a royal commission that looked at the state of the media industry in the early 80s. And the Kent Commission, way ahead of its time in all the worst ways said well we should have subsidies to newspapers to so they'd have better foreign news coverage etc and the publishers of

the country and i think this is maybe the only example in canadian history of an industry rejecting subsidy the publishers rose up as one and said, get out of our newsrooms. We don't want your government dime. And boy, have they changed their tune since then. And I think it's sad and disgraceful. And I think some of our news coverage, frankly, of the issue, certainly the news coverage of the should we shake down Google and Facebook to support the news media has been disgraceful. Because every news story I see or practically basically takes it as read that Google and Facebook have been stealing our content or using our content

or something that would make you think, oh, yes, well, of course, they should compensate us for that. And of course, they haven't been. What they do is they link to our content. They send readers to our pages for free by the millions at enormous revenue advantage to us. And the gall of our industry to say they should have to pay us for sending those readers our way is beyond belief. But that's how our coverage is all too typically portrayed it.

Super good to catch up with you, Andrew. Yeah, I enjoy that very much. Let's do it again sometime. Okay. Good night, Andrew. Yeah, I enjoyed that very much. Let's do it again sometime. Okay. Good night, everyone. Good night, everyone. Nice to see you, old friend. Good to see you.

Yeah. Thanks for listening to The Paul Wells Show. This episode was recorded at the Munk School, where I'm the journalist fellow in residence. Andrew Coyne is also a senior fellow there. They get all the cool kids. Thank you to them and to Phil Wilson at Antica for handling the recording. 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. We'll be back next Wednesday.