[Tickets are still available for The Paul Wells Road Show — Toronto! I promise you it’s not sold out yet. And I guarantee you my prices are better than FIFA’s. Coming Saturday, June 20 at Hugh’s Room Live in Toronto. Tickets are available for purchase at this link. Come see me in person. I’ll have a stellar list of guests, including the mayor, the newspaper editor, the rapper, the playwright, and the guitar-slinging kid. After three sold-out shows in Ottawa and one in Vancouver, this will be my first live Paul Wells Show event in Toronto. Come on out. Tell some friends.]

I’ve seen some online snark about Pierre Poilievre skipping the installation of Governor General Louise Arbour. I’m for not worrying about it. I do think the Conservative leader has made a conspicuous point of not endorsing Arbour’s rise to the viceroyalty. He maintained radio silence when Mark Carney announced her nomination a month ago, for instance. But that silence makes Poilievre measurably less critical of Arbour’s rise than this columnist and this one and this one.

Meanwhile the King had no objection, and apparently that’s what settles it, so Arbour gets the job. I think she’ll be a fine governor general, but then again, I liked the astronaut at first. What I don’t need is for anyone to be shamed into joining some enforced chorus of praise.

While Arbour was settling into her new role, Poilievre was speaking up for a united Canada in Calgary, as he had promised to do. Again, this is better than speaking up against a united Canada. Ezra Levant, with whom Poilievre has had many adventures over the years, is campaigning for independence. I’m not aware that the two have spent much time on opposite sides of any question. This can’t be easy for them. I prefer Poilievre’s stance to Levant’s.

On the matter of timing, Poilievre even argued that he’s way ahead of Mark Carney. “When is Prime Minister Mark Carney going to make his speech to Albertans? When will the jet-setting prime minister touch down here and make his pitch to Albertans?” Wait — I’m not actually quoting Poilievre here, or not yet. I’m quoting Rick Bell, a Calgary Sun columnist who is even better than I am at serving up beautiful lobs to whoever he happens to be interviewing.

And Poilievre knocked this one out of the park! “He should have been here a long time ago to denounce his own personal policies the Trudeau government implemented on his advice,” the Conservative leader told Bell. “Mark Carney founded a banking alliance to defund oil and gas. He said we should keep half our oil and gas in the ground. He advised Justin Trudeau against approving the pipeline to the Pacific.”

I think it’s reasonable to predict that if Albertans vote in October against a referendum on secession, as seems likely, Poilievre will say it’s because he was out there fighting for Canada while Carney was in Ottawa attending fancy ceremonies. And who would I be to argue otherwise?

What kind of argument did Poilievre make? Here’s a transcript, here’s a video. The speech can be divided into three parts that make two arguments, verse-chorus-verse: Canada is great, Liberals are terrible, Canada is great.

This wasn’t the speech I’d have given, but then, nobody asked me. Was it a useful contribution from Poilievre? Absolutely.

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[Tickets are still available for The Paul Wells Road Show — Toronto! I promise you it’s not sold out yet. And I guarantee you my prices are better than FIFA’s. Coming Saturday, June 20 at Hugh’s Room Live in Toronto. Tickets are available for purchase at this link. Come see me in person. I’ll have a stellar list of guests, including the mayor, the newspaper editor, the rapper, the playwright, and the guitar-slinging kid. After three sold-out shows in Ottawa and one in Vancouver, this will be my first live Paul Wells Show event in Toronto. Come on out. Tell some friends.]

Tyler Dawson’s editor Ken Whyte, no fool, commissioned an essay on Alberta separatism that would be hitting bookstores just as the debate over Alberta’s future began to pick up. Dawson is an editor at The Globe and Mail. Before that he was Alberta correspondent for the National Post. His essay, The Republic of Alberta: An Idea That Won’t Go Away is part of the Sutherland Quarterly series, with whom I published my own two latest short books. It’s a reported history of autonomist and separatist movement in Alberta, which started to appear almost as soon as the province joined Confederation in 1905. Dawson spoke to me from Edmonton. The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

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Paul Wells: It must be a writer’s dream. You’ve got a book out about Alberta’s separation at the time that the Premier calls the referendum question. What kind of response are you getting? Are people eager to read some more about this issue, or are they more eager to hide from it?

Tyler Dawson: You’re right that the timing could not be better, but one of the great tragedies of writing a book is that you can’t update it in real time like you can a news story. So, it’s out in the world, but the news keeps happening. In terms of feedback… I’ve heard from a handful of people, and there’s been a lovely review that’s been written, as well. I get the sense that [Alberta separation] is something people really want to talk about, and people are hungry for some contextual information that maybe rises a little bit above the noise of the daily news file. All in all, I’m pleased with how it’s turned out.

PW: What are you trying to tell people about Alberta separation?

Dawson: A couple of different things. I’m trying to place this moment in the grand historical trajectory or narrative, and to make the point that this is not particularly new. There’s been this sense in the last year that this was started in 2015 by Justin Trudeau and Bill C-69 and Bill C-48, and that the sort of depredations of the last 10 years are the causes of this [conversation about separation]. And that’s not really true. I mean, this goes back a really long time. It goes back more than a century. You have this sentiment floating around in Alberta, and you have this grievance culture, grievance politics going back even further, back before Alberta even became a province.

I also wanted both sides of the debate to come out of this with a little bit better understanding of the people on the other side. In the journalism world, we’ve thought and talked a lot about what went so badly wrong with the first Donald Trump victory, and the journalistic failures that led to that sense of shock that people had. This idea that journalists were maybe not talking to the right people, were not communicating to people on both sides. I tried to approach this book with an open mind. Obviously, I’ve got my views on separatism, but I tried to approach writing the book in a pretty old-school, journalistic way. I thought, let’s talk to both sides, let’s put those views out there, readers can figure out what they think from all of that, but hopefully, at the end of the day, everyone understands the other person a little bit better.

PW: One gets the impression that separation is something that people have warned about in Alberta forever, but that it’s much more recent that people in a position to do something about it, decide to do something about it. It seems to have gone from threat to menace in the last three or four years, as it were.

Dawson: If you look at some of the polling data out there, I would actually say that the high-water mark of Alberta’s anger towards Ottawa was 2018-2019. Environics has some really good polling on Alberta, and if you go back to 2019, I think it’s 71% of Albertans who say that they felt that their province was disrespected by the rest of the country. That’s a huge proportion of people. And that number has dropped off precipitously since then. I think it was about 50% in 2025, and then they just had updated polling last week, that had it down into the 40s or low 50s, I think. So, the breadth of the anger in Alberta has actually diminished a little bit in the last 6 or 7 years.

But what has totally changed is the depth. The people that are mad about Alberta’s place within Canada are madder than ever before. They also have some institutional power and some institutional mechanisms that they’ve been able to take advantage of. To take this from just a fringe idea that is never going to go anywhere — the political parties that are separatist parties get a fraction of 1% of the vote in provincial elections— but something has materially changed that has allowed them to get more power to get into the mainstream of Canadian or of Alberta politics in a very different way.

PW: Some people say that if they have tools now that they didn’t have before, it’s because Danielle Smith gave them the tools.

Dawson: Technically speaking, Jason Kenney did it first. He created the Citizen Initiative Act, but he had a very high threshold. It was Danielle Smith, about a year ago, who dropped the threshold. At this time that people started talking about separatism again, it had been a little bit more abundant for a couple of years. Everyone thought that Pierre Poilievre was going to win last year’s election, and that was going to do away with the anger that Albertans felt towards Ottawa. But when that didn’t happen, the separatist menace pops back up again, and yes, Danielle Smith does make it easier. We would not be in this position had Danielle Smith made a different decision a year ago.

PW: Do you think she’s trying to surf this sentiment until it subsides? Or is she trying to goose it along?

Dawson: I think she probably sees some tactical advantage in this sentiment existing. I mean, I think there’s an impression in Alberta that Quebec has held a gun to the federal government’s head for 50 years, and that’s worked out splendidly for Quebec. I think probably all of those points are debatable, but there is that sense that it has worked really well for Quebec, and that Alberta should try that in some form. Various ideas have come up in the last 10 years on how to do that. Jason Kenney had a whole panel that studied some of these ways that Alberta could maneuver itself vis-a-vis Ottawa. Danielle Smith took that a step further with the Alberta Sovereignty Act.

There has been a sense that this sort of politics could benefit Alberta writ large — but also benefit the Premier of the day and the political party of the day, because it’s a potent position to occupy: defender of Alberta against the federal government and against the other provinces.

In that sense, I think it’s part and parcel. I think Danielle Smith probably is aware that the threat of separatism could mean good things for Alberta. You could argue that this threat of separatism is behind this new openness to a West Coast pipeline from the federal government. I think that gets the timeline slightly off on that, but you could make that argument.

I also think she’s very aware of the sentiments within her own party. You do not have very many premiers in Alberta who have lost their jobs in an election in the last 30 years. Jim Prentice and Rachel Notley are the only two. Usually premiers lose their jobs because the party gets sick of them, and the Conservative Party specifically gets sick of them and gives them a boot. I think [Smith] is very aware of what those sentiments look like within her own party. She’s aware of the fate of her predecessors and knows that she has to try and control this in some fashion. She has to try and give the separatists what they want to some extent, while also keeping in mind that she has to face the electorate next year, and 70% of Albertans don’t want any of this.

PW: What did you find when you went looking for the historic roots of this? I mean, despite everything that we hear these days, the separatist sentiment in Alberta seems to pre-date two guys named Trudeau.

Dawson: You don’t really have an organized separatist movement that I could find until the first Trudeau comes along. I think that’s probably fair to say. You do have, in the early 1900s, though, Alwyn Bramley-Moore, who’s a Liberal politician, who’s writing this book [Canada and Her Colonies; Or, Home Rule for Alberta] about natural resources. When Alberta and Saskatchewan become provinces, they don’t have control over their natural resources like the older provinces do. This causes all sorts of disagreements between the Alberta and Saskatchewan governments and the federal government for almost 30 years. Alwyn Bramley-Moore writes this book about this predicament, and basically says, look, if something doesn’t change, people are going to start talking about seceding from Canada.

You see that again in the 1930s in the middle of the Depression. The Social Credit government of Alberta has this big feud with the federal government over the regulation of banks, which is basically under federal powers. The federal government threatens to use its disallowance powers and it’s a whole mess. William Aberhart’s the Premier at the time, and people in the Social Credit Party said, ‘We will support you in any strategy you take to deal with the federal government, up to and including talking about secession.’ So, you do have murmurings of it quite a long way back.

It’s really not until the late 1970s, early 1980s that you start to see organizations emerge. You do have some Western anger. The Official Languages Act, for example, causes a bunch of angst out West. This starts to percolate around the late ’60s through the ’70s. But you don’t really have proper organizations — namely the Western Canada Concept Party and the West-Fed Association — emerge until the National Energy Program blows everything up in terms of relations between Alberta and the Ottawa government.

PW: Even though I said it predates the Trudeaus, the Trudeaus sure seem good at goosing this sentiment along. And then by the end of the second Trudeau government, you’ve got Preston Manning — of all people, because Preston Manning founded the Reform Party as a way of integrating Western sentiment into the national political landscape — but then he’s writing in the Globe: “A vote for the Carney Liberals is a vote for Western secession, a vote for the breakup of Canada as we know it.” Things had become extraordinarily polarized and confrontational by the time Justin Trudeau left office.

Dawson: Yes, I think that’s fair to say. You know, along the way, Justin [Trudeau] said no government would leave hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil in the ground. He tried really hard that time, and arguably also with the purchase of the Trans Mountain Expansion Project. But you do have this very widely believed sense in Alberta that the Trudeau government’s main objective was to destroy the Alberta economy, and that it exhausted itself doing that. It pursued all these different ways of diminishing Alberta, and putting Alberta in its place, and keeping the economy tamped down. Whether or not any of that is true is a little bit beside the point — which I think is a potential mistake that federalists could wind up making in the next 5 months of this campaign. People believe this, and they believe it very, very deeply, and as I mentioned from that Environics poll, you have this incredibly broad and deep sentiment that Alberta’s disrespected by the rest of the country.

There are, I think, a bunch of reasons unrelated to Trudeau why that is the case, like the international politics of the right. But you have this incredibly thorny relationship. I do think in the past year that Mark Carney’s done a pretty good job of bridging that divide in a way that certainly Justin Trudeau couldn’t, and that Jason Kenney couldn’t quite make happen either, for better or worse. I’m not sure he tried very hard. But that relationship almost seemed irreparable. But it does seem like Mark Carney and Danielle Smith are getting along rather famously right now.

PW: And yet, you say that one of the drivers of this sentiment is that Albertans feel disrespected by Eastern Canadians. I think it’s arguable that one reason they feel that way is because they are disrespected by Eastern Canadians. I mean, as a pundit in Ottawa, I hear all the time from some of my own readers that Alberta’s not a real place, it doesn’t have a real culture, they don’t even have their own opinions, they’re just poor victims of misinformation and American bot farms. That they’re avatars for a global disinformation war, rather than feeling what they feel and seeing what they see. I take it you’re not a full-time separatist, but that must be hard even for you to read sometimes.

Dawson: Yes, I think you’re right. A relatively good example of it recently was Avi Lewis saying that, look, Quebecers have every right to talk about separation. They have a distinct culture and language, and religious history that binds them together in a way that’s very, very different than what Alberta has. That’s not totally incorrect, but it’s certainly speaking down to a population that is not in a particularly good spot. It is frustrating, and I think that there is a bit of a communication error between Albertans saying that they feel this way over the past 10 years, and the government in Ottawa going, “Oh, but we bought you a pipeline,” as if one pipeline is good enough to keep everybody happy over a decade.

I think there is an element of that. It’s interesting you mentioned the misinformation, bot-farm stuff. I think that’s going to be a significant part of this campaign. But one of the things that really struck me when I was working on this book is when I asked some of the normal people why they were separatists, they said, “I look at my paycheck every two weeks, and I look at the amount of money that comes off in CPP and EI and federal taxes. Then I look at my spread of bills, and those numbers don’t square up. But if I did not have to pay all this money to Ottawa, if my taxes were much lower, I would not be in this situation.” It is a relatively common view among separatists that they think that their lives, and the lives of their neighbors, and the lives of their family members, and the people they love, will be better off if Alberta was a separate country from Canada. And that really struck me, because I think there’s so much noise in this debate, and a lot of it is, frankly, kind of crazy. But you do have normal people who believe this passionately, because they really, genuinely think that they will be better off. And I’m not sure how you reach those people, but I think it’s a question that the Federalist camp needs to be asking itself. How do you reach out to those people and say, no, actually, you will be better off still in Canada, even though you’re paying 30% of your paycheck every two weeks.

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PW: Do you think the October referendum is going to settle this question?

Dawson: No, I don’t. I think there is the possibility that the separatists lose so embarrassingly, so thoroughly, that they can barely show their faces in public ever again. I think the much more likely scenario, the much riskier scenario, is one of two things, or possibly both things.

The first is a decent, but still minority separatist showing. That means around 35% votes in favor of having an actual referendum. That gives them enough power, I think, to continue demanding it, to continue demanding a proper referendum, and that just drags this whole thing out further.

The other scenario that exists, which could be simultaneous with that one, is that the separatists have a decent showing, or even a poor showing and say, “Look, Danielle Smith is not giving us what we want. We are a majority of members in her party, despite what this provincial referendum showed. We need to have an actual referendum to settle this once and for all. If Danielle Smith is not the person to do it, we’re going to remove her as leader of the UCP and put someone in place who is going to do it.” There are murmurings within the party that that is already being discussed. It is not particularly difficult for the party apparatus to remove a sitting leader. I think they need 21 out of 87 constituency associations to vote in favour of it. It’s not a particularly massive ask to get there. That’s what brought Jason Kenney down. I think that is a very real possibility for Danielle Smith’s future, that she faces a leadership review on this specific question, either before the referendum happens, or in the immediate aftermath of it. Both of those situations are risky because one of the big arguments against all of this is the investment uncertainty, the way that this is going to affect business investment, business spending, and business expansion. The longer this goes on, I think the more acute some of those problems become, and the more obvious some of those problems become. Either of those scenarios, I think, raises the likelihood of there being economic consequences from this.

PW: I do get the impression that Premier Smith has sort of decloaked as a real federalist in the last couple of weeks — and that it’s not going down very well in some corners of her party.

Dawson: I think that’s fair to say. She really tried to have it both ways for the last year. A “Sovereign Alberta within a United Canada” was sort of her line. The closest she’d come over the past year was to say, “It is my job to convince Albertans to stay with Canada.” But in the last 3 or so weeks, she came out and said, “I am a federalist, I will be campaigning for the pro-Canada side.”

When Danielle Smith became leader of the party, she was basically brought to power on this wave of discontent with Jason Kenney. We’re talking the “anti-COVID” people. The new adherence to right-wing politics in Alberta. The people that hadn’t really thought about politics until COVID. They joined the party in great numbers. They ousted Jason Kenney, and they are in many ways, responsible for Danielle Smith’s ascension to the leadership.

It’s probably stating it a bit too strongly to say that she’s beholden to this faction, but this faction certainly feels that they have some power over her. This faction feels that their loyalty in getting her elected, in being members of the party, means that she should be responsive to their demands. And that’s obviously not really how the political system works, but it is a little bit, you know? The party members do have sway over the policy of the government. They feel that Danielle Smith owes them, basically, and that she is their person, and that she should be doing what they want, which is, a real referendum now. Certainly, in some quarters of the party, they’re very, very unhappy with her, and that could turn into a leadership vote or something like that in the months ahead.

PW: But it seems to me that a year down the road, we’re sort of where we’ve been, which is that there’s a virulent presence of sovereignist sentiment in Alberta that doesn’t have an effective channel. Is there any possibility you could replace Danielle Smith with somebody who’s more overtly separatist?

Dawson: I think it’s a possibility. Polling does suggest that UCP supporters are about 50-55% separatist. Strangely, Rob Smith, the party’s president, is out speaking about things, and then the Premier has to go on the radio and contradict him. But anyways, Rob Smith did the rounds about a week and a half ago, saying that probably a majority of our members are separatists, but we’re not a separatist party at this point. I think there’s an acknowledgement within the party and on Alberta’s right that you could have the UCP morph into a more explicitly separatist party, which would potentially have some pretty serious consequences.

There’s an election—at the latest— in October 2027. You could have a situation in which you have a separatist leader of the United Conservative Party running against Naheed Nenshi’s New Democrats in the 2027 election, which would be a totally bizarre state of affairs. You really have to wonder what happens to the people who voted Conservative their entire lives in Alberta, because that’s just what they do. Then they have to make some hard choices about who they vote for. I don’t think that’s particularly likely — I think the thing to remember is that Jason Kenny, when he was ousted as leader of the party, he still won that vote. He barely won that vote, but he did win that vote by, like, 51% to 49%. And he said, that’s not enough for me to stay on as leader, and that’s why he left, and that’s why Danielle Smith is the party leader.

There are a good many people within the United Conservative Party who are very skilled organizers, who have very deep networks. You know, not everyone in the party is sort of these anti-COVID yahoos that we’ve seen become more influential in the last few years. There are people from the old Progressive Conservative days, there are old Wild Rosers who are not separatists. And they are still very influential. They’re not nearly as noisy, but they do have ground game, they do have contacts, they do have institutional power and things like that. So it would be harder for the separatists to stage a takeover than they probably think.

[Tickets are still available for The Paul Wells Road Show — Toronto! I promise you it’s not sold out yet. Coming Saturday, June 20 at Hugh’s Room Live in Toronto. Tickets are available for purchase at this link. Come see me in person. I’ll have a stellar list of guests, including the mayor, the newspaper editor, the rapper, the playwright, and the guitar-slinging kid. After three sold-out shows in Ottawa and one in Vancouver, this will be my first live Paul Wells Show event in Toronto. Come on out. Tell some friends.]

On Monday afternoon the offices of Prime Minister Mark Carney and Quebec premier Christine Fréchette announced their bosses’ itineraries for Tuesday. Turns out their paths would intersect at a transit-system bus garage in Longueuil, across the St. Lawrence River from Montreal. I cancelled my appointments and hopped in the car.

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The body language is always intense when prime ministers and Quebec premiers share a stage. Jean Chrétien and Bernard Landry met as teenagers studying at the Séminaire de Joliette in the 1950s. Half a century later their relationship hadn’t improved, but they still made the odd announcement together. Each doing politics past the other, as it were. Stephen Harper and Jean Charest sat in rival Progressive Conservative and Reform caucuses in the 1990s. A decade later Harper thought they should be allies but he couldn’t stand Charest’s tendency to think for himself. Justin Trudeau tried to help Philippe Couillard, clumsily, and wound up working with François Legault for five years. `

Fréchette has been premier for six weeks. She might not be premier in five months. She inherited the leadership of the Coalition Avenir Québec from its founding leader, François Legault, in April. She’s been so impressive she’s lifted the flatlining CAQ from zero seats in the Qc125 polling projection, where they had languished all year, all the way to nine. She’ll need to do better to save her party. Honestly I wouldn’t bet on any particular outcome. The PQ leader hasn’t worn well, the Liberal leader can’t seem to make an impression. The polls are bouncing around, listlessly. If “None of the above” were fielding candidates, they’d win in a landslide.

Now here were Fréchette and Carney in a bus station, and Carney had brought $10 billion for infrastructure over 10 years. “One of the largest infrastructure investments in Québec’s history,” the federal press release said. Most of the money would come from the Canada Public Transit Fund, which Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland announced every several months from 2021 to 2024. Depending how you count these things, this was therefore either the second favour Freeland ever did for Carney or, through the miracle of time travel, the first.

Federal money under the CPTF is disbursed upon the conclusion of negotiation with provinces over the terms. Quebec was the last province that hadn’t agreed on terms. Whatever province you live in that isn’t Quebec, your premier already cut a deal with the Ottawa Liberals for the money. But Trudeau and Legault never managed it. Finally, somebody in the new governments of Carney and Fréchette hit on a formula that just might work:

(1) The federal government would send the money.

(2) The Quebec government would spend it.

Mazel tov. The announcement required various concessions to provincial autonomy. Carney said the money “might” go to this or that metro line or tramway. Fréchette will make announcements later. The announced details amount to “You’ll see.”

Paul St.-Pierre Plamondon, the Parti Québécois leader, said in Quebec City before the announcement that Carney was releasing the funding to take the wind out of the PQ’s sails. PSPP probably thinks Carly Simon wrote a song about him. Back to Qc125: the PQ’s sails have been deflating since December, though their support seems to have bottomed out at a level that would still make them competitive to govern.

I wondered: if Carney does want to play politics, why would he help Fréchette? Every federal Liberal in Quebec hopes Charles Milliard, the amiable but unmemorable leader of the province’s Liberal party, to be premier. Yet Carney spent the afternoon handing Milliard’s rival a win.

I thought I would put that question to Carney. Your activist base in Quebec wants you to help the other guy. How do you reconcile that with your day job? In the end I decided this was a perish-the-thought question, the kind that any leader would answer by denying the premise. That’s the answer a colleague got when he asked whether Carney was trying to block the PQ.

“This is policy,” Carney said. “This is the governments coming together to serve the people we serve. It’s not a political calculation at all.” Perish the thought.

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The question I ended up asking was simpler. In Ottawa before making his way to Montreal, Carney took questions from reporters. One asked: What unblocked between the Trudeau-Legault standoff and the Carney-Fréchette agreement. Carney answered: “We unblocked.” I asked: What needed unblocking? What did unblocking entail? And, since Fréchette said twice that Quebec was getting more than its population share of the transit money, who would get less?

I didn’t understand a word of Carney’s answer. Try for yourself: mine is the second question in this video, and some readers will be relieved to hear it’s in English. After the event, Carney came up to me and added to his answer: Transit funding. Quebec has more public transit ridership than most provinces, so it gets more transit funding. All around us, electric Longueuil buses sat waiting to be put to work.

[Je publie ici en traduction une tribune de George Anderson qui vient de paraître en anglais dans le Globe and Mail. Le Canada semble se diriger vers au moins un référendum sur la souveraineté d’une province, le drôle de référendum albertain d’octobre prochain. Il y en aura peut–être un deuxième, au Québec, peu de temps après, advenant l’élection d’un gouvernement du Parti québécois. La polémique autour des remarques de Mark Carney cette semaine concernant la Loi fédérale sur la clarté démontre que peu de gens ont réfléchi au processus qu’un vote en faveur de la sécession pourrait enclencher. J’ai cru que ce texte de George Anderson mérite la lecture, en français comme en anglais.

George Anderson est un ancien sous-ministre des Affaires intergouvernementales, au Bureau du Conseil privé (1996-2002) et de Ressources naturelles Canada (2002-2005). Il a étudié la science politique à l’Université Queen’s, à l’Université d’Oxford, ainsi qu’à l’École nationale d’administration, à Paris. — pw]

[And now in English: This is a translation of an op-ed by George Anderson, one of Canada’s most experienced former civil servants, which was published online Thursday by the Globe and Mail. English-speaking readers will find it at this link. Of course I’ll return to publishing in English soon. — pw]

Par George Anderson

En 1978, alors que je faisais des recherches comparatives sur les référendums en prévision d’un référendum québécois sur la souveraineté-association, je suis allé en Norvège, qui avait tenu un référendum en 1972 sur l’adhésion à la Communauté économique européenne. Je me souviens que le grand politologue Henry Valen m’avait alors dit : «Vous allez tenir un référendum. Je ne vous le conseille pas. Je n’ai jamais rien vu d’aussi destructeur pour les relations familiales, sociales et pour la communauté politique.» Les Norvégiens ont voté « non » en 1972, puis encore en 1994.

Aujourd’hui, 31 ans après le dernier référendum québécois sur l’indépendance, le Canada fait face à la possibilité d’un retour à cette forme de politique parmi les plus destructrices.

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En février, la première ministre de l’Alberta, Danielle Smith, a annoncé que la province poserait neuf questions lors d’un référendum en octobre. Par certaines de ces questions, elle cherche un appui populaire pour réduire d’importants pouvoirs fédéraux.

Elle a repris la vieille blague de l’humoriste québécois Yvon Deschamps sur «un Québec indépendant dans un Canada uni» et l’a transformée en programme politique: «une Alberta souveraine dans un Canada uni».

Même cela ne suffit pas aux séparatistes albertains, qui font campagne pour un référendum sur l’indépendance tout court. Toutefois, leurs plans ont été contrecarrés par un juge qui a conclu que la Couronne n’avait pas rempli son devoir de consulter les peuples autochtones de la province au sujet d’un référendum sur l’indépendance. Mme Smith a réagi rapidement et a annoncé la semaine dernière qu’elle ajouterait au référendum d’octobre sa propre longue question, dans laquelle les électeurs devront décider s’il veulent demeurer au Canada ou s’il veulent tenir un référendum sur l’indépendance. Un référendum sur la tenue éventuelle d’un référendum serait peut-être une première mondiale.

En octobre, les Québécois voteront eux aussi, dans le cadre d’une élection générale où le Parti québécois, actuellement en tête dans les sondages, promet qu’un nouveau référendum sur l’indépendance du Québec sera une priorité s’il obtient un mandat. Les électeurs des deux provinces pourraient donc nous engager sur la voie de référendums sur la sécession provinciale.

Les sondages indiquent qu’il est peu probable que les Albertains ou les Québécois votent majoritairement en faveur de la sécession si un référendum sur l’indépendance avait lieu. Il est tentant d’attendre que la tempête passe. Mais l’opinion publique peut changer rapidement, surtout à la suite d’un événement mobilisateur. L’appui au camp du « oui » au Québec en 1995 avait bondi lorsque le premier ministre Jacques Parizeau avait annoncé que le très populaire Lucien Bouchard serait le « négociateur en chef » du Québec.

Après la victoire extrêmement serrée du « non » au référendum québécois de 1995, le gouvernement fédéral, déterminé à mettre un peu d’ordre dans la politique sécessionniste, a soumis à la Cour suprême la question de la possible sécession du Québec. Les juges ont conclu à l’unanimité qu’aucune province n’a le droit, en droit canadien ou international, de faire sécession unilatéralement.

Ils ont toutefois soutenu que si une majorité claire de la population d’une province votait pour l’indépendance à une question claire, le gouvernement fédéral, la province voulant faire sécession et les autres provinces auraient un «devoir réciproque» d’engager des «négociations de bonne foi».

Le Parlement a ensuite adopté la Loi sur la clarté référendaire, qui exige une question claire et une majorité claire — telles qu’évaluées par la Chambre des communes — pour que le gouvernement fédéral accepte d’ouvrir des négociations.

Le jugement de la Cour et la Loi sur la clarté ont établi un cadre démocratique et fondé sur des principes pour évaluer la question et la majorité. Ce qui a été relativement négligé, c’est la réflexion sur la manière dont des négociations sur la sécession devraient être organisées.

En 1995, certains sondages inquiétants ont amené quelques ministres libéraux à réfléchir aux conséquences d’une victoire du «oui» au référendum québécois. Le premier ministre Jean Chrétien venait du Québec, tout comme de nombreux députés libéraux. Un premier ministre québécois pourrait-il diriger efficacement un gouvernement fédéral confronté aux conséquences d’un «oui» au référendum québécois? Comment le gouvernement devrait-il s’organiser face à une véritable crise? Heureusement, le camp du « oui » a perdu, mais cette question reviendrait si un référendum créait un devoir de négocier la possible sécession d’une province.

Même si la Cour suprême envisageait un rôle pour le gouvernement fédéral et tous les gouvernements provinciaux dans les négociations, elle n’est pas entrée dans les détails de ce processus, surtout au niveau fédéral.

La Cour indiquait que les négociations devraient «tenir compte des intérêts des autres provinces, du gouvernement fédéral et du Québec, ainsi que des droits de tous les Canadiens, à l’intérieur comme à l’extérieur du Québec, et particulièrement des droits des minorités. Le processus de négociation exigerait la conciliation des droits et obligations de deux majorités légitimes, soit la majorité de la population du Québec et celle du Canada dans son ensemble.»

Une interprétation possible serait que le gouvernement fédéral dirigerait les négociations. Mais le pourrait-il vraiment? Les négociations opposeraient les intérêts de la province cherchant à faire sécession à ceux du reste du pays. Or, le gouvernement fédéral représente l’ensemble du pays. Je crois donc qu’il ne pourrait pas négocier le démembrement du Canada au nom de neuf provinces contre une seule.

Logiquement, la province voulant faire sécession négocierait avec des représentants du « reste du Canada ». La Cour indiquait que toutes les provinces participeraient aux négociations, mais qu’en serait-il d’un rôle fédéral? Je suggère que l’approche la plus logique serait que les députés fédéraux du reste du Canada, y compris ceux de l’opposition, élisent un « négociateur en chef » et une équipe de négociation responsables devant eux. Cette équipe fédérale du « reste du Canada » coordonnerait ensuite son action avec les neuf provinces dans les négociations avec la province cherchant à faire sécession.

Bien sûr, les neuf provinces auraient leurs propres intérêts et pourraient refuser de reconnaître l’autorité d’un « négociateur en chef ».

Comme si cela n’était pas déjà assez complexe, il faut ajouter le rôle des peuples autochtones dans les négociations. Les Inuits et les Cris du nord du Québec ont massivement voté « non » au référendum québécois de 1995. Dans leurs propres référendums, les Cris ont voté à 96 % et les Inuits du Nunavik à 96 % pour demeurer au Canada, démontrant ainsi leur opposition à la sécession.

Récemment, des Premières Nations en Alberta ont contesté avec succès le processus provincial pouvant mener à une question référendaire sur l’indépendance. Les droits issus des traités et les droits ancestraux des peuples autochtones seraient au cœur de toute négociation sur la sécession, surtout compte tenu de la position de la Cour suprême selon laquelle il ne devrait y avoir «aucune conclusion prédéterminée par le droit sur quelque question que ce soit», ainsi que de ses références aux droits autochtones et aux frontières.

Ainsi, les groupes autochtones, particulièrement ceux de la province cherchant à faire sécession, voudraient participer aux négociations.

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Le gouvernement fédéral continuerait néanmoins d’avoir d’importantes responsabilités pendant les négociations. Il continuerait d’assurer le gouvernement normal de l’ensemble du pays. Il voudrait préserver sa légitimité, surtout si la sécession échouait, puisqu’il faudrait ensuite rétablir un sentiment d’appartenance commune au pays. Ainsi, le cabinet fédéral devrait continuer à inclure des ministres de toutes les provinces, y compris de la province ayant voté pour la sécession.

De même, tous les députés et sénateurs en poste, y compris ceux de la province cherchant à faire sécession, devraient continuer d’exercer leurs fonctions — même si des députés séparatistes pourraient choisir de se retirer — y compris l’adoption des lois. Le gouvernement fédéral aurait aussi le devoir de faciliter des négociations «fondées sur des principes ». Exceptionnellement, il pourrait être une partie aux négociations sur les droits autochtones, étant donné ses responsabilités juridiques liées aux traités. Il pourrait aider à organiser le travail des différentes équipes de négociation, y compris celle de la province voulant faire sécession. Il devrait aussi fournir à toutes les parties les renseignements pertinents aux négociations, par exemple sur les actifs et les passifs fédéraux.

Pendant tout le processus, le gouvernement fédéral devrait surveiller l’évolution de la situation, compte tenu de ses responsabilités envers l’ensemble du pays. Il devrait suivre l’opinion publique ainsi que l’avancement des négociations. Si les négociateurs s’entendaient sur les conditions de la sécession, le gouvernement fédéral aurait la responsabilité de promouvoir les modifications constitutionnelles nécessaires et les nombreuses mesures de transition concernant les actifs, les nouvelles ententes commerciales, etc.

Cependant, les négociations pourraient aboutir à une impasse. Ou encore, il pourrait exister des preuves solides que l’appui populaire à l’indépendance dans la province ayant voté pour celle-ci a fortement diminué. Dans ces cas, compte tenu de sa responsabilité envers l’ensemble du pays, on pourrait considérer que le gouvernement fédéral soit en droit de suspendre les négociations afin de clarifier la situation au moyen d’un élection fédérale, ou d’un référendum fédéral dans la province souhaitant faire sécession. Selon les résultats, cela pourrait mettre fin au processus ou mener à une reprise des négociations.

Il est évident que le processus de négociation serait extrêmement difficile. La double structure fédérale composée d’un « négociateur en chef » responsable devant les députés du reste du Canada et d’un premier ministre et d’un gouvernement fédéral demeurant responsables devant tous les députés serait très complexe et alimenterait des tensions. Un tel arrangement n’a aucun précédent dans le monde, mais il possède une logique convaincante. La province cherchant à faire sécession pourrait donc se retrouver devant la perspective redoutable de négocier avec une équipe fédérale du « reste du Canada », neuf gouvernements provinciaux et potentiellement un ou plusieurs groupes autochtones.

Ces négociations pourraient être longues et pénibles. Il a fallu plus de trois ans après le vote sur le Brexit au Royaume-Uni pour que d’intenses négociations aboutissent finalement à l’Accord de retrait du Brexit. Les parties ont ensuite entamé d’autres négociations pendant une période de transition de 11 mois afin de fixer les modalités de leur relation future. On estime qu’après le vote sur le Brexit, l’investissement au Royaume-Uni a chuté d’environ 12 %.

Bien sûr, les enjeux fondamentaux liés au démantèlement du pays seraient eux-mêmes redoutables. Les négociations avec une province faisant sécession devraient porter sur le partage des actifs et des dettes, la citoyenneté et la mobilité, le transit sur les territoires et possiblement les droits des minorités. Les dizaines de traités et d’accords conclus avec les États-Unis donnent une idée du nombre de questions qu’il faudrait régler. Aucun enjeu ne serait peut-être plus difficile que celui des droits autochtones, qui pourraient remettre en cause l’intégrité territoriale d’une province cherchant à faire sécession. La position juridique des peuples autochtones est très forte.

Les enjeux de fond et la complexité du processus de sécession démontrent ensemble l’absurdité d’une telle tentative. La tragédie de la politique sécessionniste est qu’elle mise sur les questions identitaires et sur des solutions simplistes. L’expérience britannique montre qu’il n’existe pas de solutions simples et qu’on ne devrait pas entreprendre la rupture d’une relation profonde — si tant est qu’on doive le faire — sur la base d’une majorité étroite. Il existe maintenant au Royaume-Uni une majorité claire de citoyens qui regrettent le Brexit.

Après plus de 50 ans de promotion de l’indépendance, le Parti québécois n’a jamais présenté une analyse réaliste ni une proposition crédible sur le comment et le pourquoi de l’indépendance. Le mouvement séparatiste albertain n’a même pas commencé à réfléchir sérieusement aux questions difficiles. Le Canada, qui est l’une des démocraties les plus admirées au monde, mérite mieux que la politique stérile et destructrice du sécessionnisme.

Every few weeks Mark Carney holds a news conference in front of some half-built houses and Gregor Robertson. This happened in Nepean in April and it happened in Orleans on Monday morning. The message is always, roughly, “Hey, we’re building houses.” The Parliamentary Budget Officer is skeptical. We’ll see.

But the prime minister also reliably takes questions from reporters at such events. The questions can be about anything. On Monday many of them were about Alberta separatism.

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(I’m hosting a live show in Toronto on June 20 at Hugh’s Room Live, and you’re invited. Details here:)

What you think about Danielle Smith’s 14-minute speech to Albertans on Thursday night will have much to do with whether you think it’s every Albertan’s duty to help her outlast Jason Kenney as leader of the United Conservative Party.

By my count, Smith needs to hang on until late October to tie Kenney’s longevity record. He was ousted by people who thought he wasn’t Albertan enough, is how I guess I’d phrase it, applying their own peculiar definition of Albertan. She’d like to do better, and by “do better” I’m now quite sure I mean nothing more than “last longer.” If you live in Alberta and you think her ability to stay ahead of the province’s separatist-populist-nativist clique’s efforts to hound her out is your struggle too, then I’m sure you’ll be delighted that her speech Thursday night conscripted you into her cause. If not, not.

The referendum question she proposed adding to the previous nine is a kind of exquisite annoyance. Here it is:

“Should Alberta remain a province of Canada or should the Government of Alberta commence the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether or not Alberta should separate from Canada?”

In its phrasing or construction, I don’t think it’s particularly outrageous. I mean, its two parts are easy to understand and I know how I’d vote. Thursday night on Substack Notes, people were asking how the hell you’re supposed to answer it, because it’s not a yes-or-no question, but to me it’s easy enough to have one box marked “Remain a Province” and another marked “Start the Process,” and most people would easily understand which box reflected their preference.

If most Albertans vote, and I believe every eligible Albertan should, the “Remain a Province” option should get a comfortable majority. And that would be the end of that, for some time to come. If the Process-Starters managed to get a majority, a long process would indeed start. Its outcome would be years of arguing, followed, perhaps, by some future referendum which the pro-Canada side should also normally expect to win. My impression is that the question is designed to produce a Remain majority. Everything about it says so. Even the length and amount of Latin content in the two clauses. “Should Alberta [five simple words] or should the Government of Alberta [24 long words]?”

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Let’s get rid of a red herring: the Clarity Act would have very little to do with this question. Few people ever read the Clarity Act, but it’s quite narrow: it doesn’t seek to limit any provincial government’s ability to ask any referendum question it wants. It demands only that Parliament determine whether a question clearly measures voters’ desire to leave the country. But Danielle Smith’s question doesn’t purport to seek Albertan’s opinion on whether they should leave. It asks their opinion on whether they’d like to be asked. See “exquisite annoyance,” above.

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Let’s look at how well Smith’s proposed question satisfies the interests of various Albertans.

Federalists: Probably dissatisfied. If you want Alberta to remain a province, you know this goal is best addressed by letting Alberta remain a province. No referendum is needed, certainly not from a premier who didn’t run on holding a referendum.

Separatists: Probably dissatisfied. If you want Alberta to separate from Canada, you’d like to get started. We will see whether the purported leaders of this movement seek revenge on Smith for thwarting them, and whether they have the cards, but I’m pretty sure they feel thwarted.

People who want to help Danielle Smith last longer as UCP leader than Jason Kenney: Probably OK with all this.

I’m just not sure the third group is as large as the first two. In fact I’m quite sure I ranked them correctly here, [federalists]>[separatists]>[fans of preserving Smith’s political hide.]

I can’t work up too much anger over all this. Even if it somehow led to a Yes vote to secession on some distant day… look, at some point, a country that could manage to step on that many rakes is one whose descent into bickering would be hard to mourn. But it’s a bit pathetic, isn’t it? This behaviour of Danielle Smith’s, I mean. All this stalling and hedging. A leader could have said, “I want no part of this pointless adventure. You want to take Alberta out of Canada and deliver it to the United States, you’re going to have to go through me.” A leader of a very different kind could have said, “To hell with this country, we’re out, let’s go.” The person who says, “Please just let me hang on for a few more months” is… not leading.

They’re breathtaking. Or not. I mean, you decide. But this 2021 RAAF video of the Roulettes aerobatic display team over Hobart might complicate some of the hand-wringing over the Carney Liberals’ plans to ground the Snowbirds fleet and replace its antique CT-114 Tutor jets with… with… with wind-up toys, dammit.

I’m just catching up to this story now, after a long weekend away. I won’t keep you long. I just want to make a few points. These are:

1. Airplanes get old. Eventually it becomes harder to fly them safely, and harder to be proud of owning them when they do fly.

2. Concern about the Snowbirds is almost as old as the Snowbirds. The Tutor jet is a sturdy beast, as are many things that first saw light in 1960 — the Twist, Hitchcock’s Psycho, televised presidential debates — but it’s always been fair to wonder whether a barnstorming team is the best use of scarce military resources, and people have wondered.

3. Other countries have, on occasion, grounded their aerobatic teams; replaced old fleets with newer fleets for those teams; even occasionally replaced older jet-propelled fleets with newer prop-driven fleets. There seem to be countries that have viewed this sort of decision as routine and easy. Canada hasn’t been one of them. It would be good if we got better at making simple decisions that obviously have to be made.

Here now are gems from my reading in the archives. Much, of course, has been reported elsewhere.

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In 1989, several weeks after a Snowbirds pilot crashed and died in front of 70,000 spectators at the Toronto Air Show, Harvey Schachter penned a mighty column in the Kingston Whig-Standard:

“[A] Snowbirds pilot's job is one of exaggerated, unnecessary risk. The pilots choose a frivolous undertaking. There is no societal need for their endeavor and the risks they undergo are therefore totally unnecessary. To highlight a daredevil stunt team in a film on workplace safety [as Dupont had done with the Snowbirds] is breathtakingly inappropriate. What the people at Du Pont do is valuable. What the Snowbirds do is foolish and unessential.”

Here’s a good paragraph from a decade later, in a 1999 Charlottetown Guardian editorial:

The best solution would be preserving the Snowbirds in a strong air force. The most short-sighted answer to the problem would be to preserve this precision flying team while allowing the force it represents to weaken on a starvation budget.

In August 2003 the Defence Department’s director of major service delivery procurement wrote that the Snowbirds Tutors might last until 2010, or if heroic measures were used, perhaps as far as 2020. “With each passing year, the technical, safety and financial risk associated with extending the Tutor into its fifth decade and beyond, will escalate,” the review said. Emphasis, as always, added.

The Defence department should proceed “immediately” with Snowbirds fleet replacement, the report said.

It didn’t.

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In April 2006, an air force briefing note repeated the message: “Due to obsolescence issues, in the 2010 time frame, the Tutor will no longer be a viable aircraft for the Snowbirds.” The story I’m quoting, by the Ottawa Citizen’s David Pugliese, says the note discussed options. Replace Tutors with CF-18s, the best fighter available to Canadians, and cut the team from nine planes flying at a time to four? Nope: The fighters would spend most of a show miles away from any audience, turning around for the next fast run; they couldn’t use short runways outside small towns; and the tiny invisible CF-18 fleet would cost 20 times more to operate than the Tutors.

In 2009, the air force pulled what’s known in Ottawa as a classic “Musical Ride” manoeuvre, countering threats of defence budget cuts from Stephen Harper’s government by producing lists of fun stuff that might have to go, including the Snowbirds and the Challenger jet fleet that flew Harper and his cabinet ministers around.

In 2021, Nick Taylor-Vaisey wrote this excellent feature article for a magazine on “questions about the [Snowbirds] program’s future,” after yet another fatal accident. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: the questions led to no government decision.

Meanwhile in Australia — a country that is sometimes the object of Canadian neurosis over our purported chronic failure to field a proper fighting force — the Royal Australian Air Force launched the Roulettes in 1970, flying jaunty Italian jet trainers. Those planes got old, as planes do, and in 1989 the Roulettes replaced their Macchi jets with Pilatus turboprops, and then with a later generation of Pilatus comparable to what the Snowbirds might use. I’ve seen some reference to controversy in 1989 when props first replaced jets, but can’t find a reference for you on short notice. The turboprops can’t climb as fast as jets, and they don’t produce a satisfying jet roar. But they do most other air-show things well. They’re cheap as borscht to fly. And as we’ve discussed, air show manoeuvres rarely take place at top speed, because it’s generally thought to be useful if they can stay close to the audiences watching. So turboprops are perfectly effective in those settings.

We’re supposed to get weepy over the beloved Snowbirds, but with great respect to the flight crews that have flown the Tutors with durable proficiency and the ground crews that have kept them airborne, surely it wouldn’t be a big deal if they never came back? Other countries sometimes ground their aerobatics teams — the Asas de Portugal in 2010, the Philippine Blue Diamonds in 2005, Sweden’s Team 60 in 2024. The old newspaper stories I just quoted all called the Snowbirds an unbeatable recruitment tool for the Canadian Armed Forces, but I suspect the Afghanistan war was a bigger boost to recruitment and morale, and Donald Trump might yet give it a run for its money. Also useful: the internet, which the Tutors predate.

I have enjoyed many fun hours at air shows, and in my high-school days was a bit of a fighter geek. But it’s always been strange to idolize a particular model of vintage trainer rather than the whole portfolio of work a competent military performs. Perhaps a parliamentary committee or, I don’t know, a parliament could have discussed such matters, at some point in my lifetime. Perhaps a government could make a decision. “Air shows are fine, but participating in them is not a priority of government policy,” one might say. And even: “We’re taking the sign out of the window.”

Committees, parliaments and governments having proven reluctant to grasp the nettle, perhaps we could farm it out to some arms-length body. An equivalent of the Parliamentary Budget Officer could make decisions, rather than simply costing them. Call her or him the Parliamentary Finding Some Stones Officer. Her or his office would make actual decisions, with funding attached, about official residences, flight-show equipment, and supply management. Parliamentarians could flutter their hands over their brows and exclaim, “I had nothing to do with it!” Everybody wins. Sorry that it’s come to this, but we tried it the other way and it went poorly.

Three months to the day after my sold-out Vancouver Road Show, I’ll be in Toronto on Saturday, June 20 for a big night at the reborn Hugh’s Room Live on Broadview Ave.

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In 2023 I started planning these live events, at the end of the year in Ottawa at first — to thank my subscribers, have some fun, and force-mingle this newsletter’s assorted audiences: political junkies, music fans, people who’d rather listen than shout. So far every one of my Ottawa Holiday Shows, and my first Road Show in Vancouver, has sold out. This first Toronto Road Show should sell out too. Hugh’s Room is a comfy, relaxed community hall with a glorious history. But given its modest capacity of 200, I expect tickets to move fast.

Tickets are now available for purchase to everyone at this link:

https://www.showpass.com/the-paul-wells-road-show-toronto/?no-cache=1

I’m viewing this show as a proof-of-concept, on my way to what I hope will be bigger Toronto shows next year and after. But there’ll be a lot going on at this one. (I polled readers who attended earlier shows. They said they wanted more in each show. All righty then…)

I’m pleased to be joined by Mayor Olivia Chow for a discussion about the challenges facing Canada’s biggest city. I’ll have a not-overly-partisan panel to follow up, with Mark Carney’s former chief of staff Marco Mendicino, former top Conservative staffer Jason Lietaer, and the editor-in-chief of the Toronto Star, Nicole MacIntyre, who’s been greatly expanding the Star’s own slate of live events.

And because it’s not a party without a party, I’ve got three representatives of Toronto’s arts community. I’ll talk with playwright Michael Healey, whose plays Rogers v. Rogers and The Master Plan at Crow’s Theatre, not far from Hugh’s Room, are mighty contributions to a literature of contemporary Toronto. Rapper Cadence Weapon will be on hand, fresh off the release of a new album, Forager — and a new book, Ways of Listening, about music in an age of streaming, published under his given name, Rollie Pemberton.

And I’m thrilled to introduce the audience to a young Toronto (well, Milton) singer-songwriter, Gavin McLeod. Perhaps you haven’t heard of him. That’s about to change.

I’m so grateful to my Presenting Sponsor, the good folks at Cameco, for making this event possible.

I’ve never lived in Toronto, but I think it’s a wonderful, often-inspiring city that’s had a rough time in recent years. We’ll talk about all of that on the 20th. I hope you can join me.

Tickets for the general public cost $60 and are now available at this link. Click it, share it with your friends, get your tickets and we’ll see you there. Thanks, always, for your support.

I’m trying to figure out what Mark Carney thought he was doing at this year’s Global Progress Action Summit.

The Global Progress Action Summit is an annual gathering of Canadian Liberals, UK Labour figures, US Democrats, and assorted compatible figures from other countries. Carney spoke at this year’s summit on Saturday in Toronto, which took place the day after Barack Obama gave a speech for Canada 2020, the Canadian organizers of the Global Progress Action Summit. This was, in turn, the day after the Public Policy Forum’s annual Testimonial Dinner and its affiliated Canada Growth Summit. Which is why if you work in Ottawa, you might have had a hard time getting calls returned last week.

The PM read from his prepared remarks after a few minutes of impromptu nervous-jokey preliminaries of the sort he often indulges when he knows a lot of the people in a room. He also half-apologized for speaking French to a room of mostly anglophones, which is also something he unfortunately can’t seem to stop doing.

Then he said this, reading from remarks in French that I’ll translate for you.

“Today, I want to talk to you about the rupture in the world. Our response, at this time, must be to resist any temptation to preserve or restore elements of the past. We prefer to build anew. New infrastructure, new energy systems, new trade relationships, and new institutions. This is what the new progressive politics could be.”

I’m wondering how this sort of writing made it past quality control. The best that can be said for it is that it means nothing. I’m pretty sure the Carney government will continue trying to preserve supply management, the CBC, the St. Lawrence Seaway, federalism, the monarchy, and other elements of the past.

This is the sort of prose that reads better in all upper-case. RESIST ANY TEMPTATION TO PRESERVE OR RESTORE ELEMENTS OF THE PAST, the sign over the dingy entryway to the Ministry of Love read. WE PREFER TO BUILD ANEW.

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Miles Davis and John Coltrane were born 100 years ago this year, Davis in Illinois on May 26, Coltrane in North Carolina on Sept. 23. There were no more influential players in jazz after 1955 than these two. When I saw Miles’s trumpet and Trane’s tenor saxophone in a display case at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ mighty We Want Miles exhibition in 2010, I got a little emotional. Various musicians will be running Miles and Trane tribute tours all summer; I’ll list Montreal highlights at the end of this post.

What do Miles and Trane mean now, 71 years after they first recorded together? In general, I think both were prime examples of the postwar cultural ferment that Louis Menand labours mightily to sum up in his encyclopedic 2021 history of that period, The Free World. Neither Davis nor Coltrane was playing in the way most people understood the word, or the work of jazz’s greatest practitioners, only a few years earlier. This was serious new music for a bewildering new time. It’s no wonder that even the best writers of an earlier age, people like Ralph Ellison or Philip Larkin, never warmed to them. Davis was detached, critical, still heartbreaking but in the way an antihero at the movies might break hearts. Coltrane was so fervently invested in his work that he could be unnerving, too, in a different way.

Specifically what do we take from their legacies? Surely different people will take different things on different days. I’ve selected some albums by each man that reflect some things I’ve been thinking about them lately. The examples I’ve chosen are illustrative, not definitive. Kind of Blue and A Love Supreme aren’t on this list. Partly because you didn’t need me to tell you about them. Mostly because no talent this large should be reduced to one album.

I’ll get back to politics this week. Warmer days always make me think of jazz. Here’s some jazz.

Miles: Points of departure

The restless experimentation of his 1964-68 quintet, followed by the long use of amplified instruments and rock beats that followed, have earned Miles Davis a reputation as a ceaseless explorer. “I have to change,” he said. “It’s like a curse.” He often sounded aloof, not only from his audiences but from his bands, as though auditioning everyone for his favour.

Listening back to his records for the thousandth time, what I notice isn’t just how often he started something new. It’s also how thoroughly he refined whatever he’d been working on, before departing for the next thing. He wasn’t fickle. He rarely left material on the table unexamined. His charisma and record-industry success gave him advantages not every jazz bandleader could count on: he worked a lot, and musicians would stick with him for a long time if he’d have them. So he could work through a context or a group dynamic more thoroughly than most. This short list of Davis albums concentrates on those pinnacle moments, just before he moved on to something else.

1. Milestones, 1958

Kind of Blue, from 1959, is the Miles album everyone writes about. (Here’s my take from many years ago). Milestones is the album before it. Kind of Blue is approachable but experimental in its use of slow-changing harmonies and minimal compositions. Milestones is more conventional. To some ears it must sound like a misfire before the revolution. To me it functions as a summation of everything Davis had done since he arrived in New York City and joined Charlie Parker in 1944. It’s a graduate thesis, examining music his elders wrote for big bands (John Lewis’s “Two Bass Hit,” written for Dizzy Gillespie in 1947); the intricate bebop of the Charlie Parker era (Jackie McLean’s “Dr. Jackle,” taken at a faster tempo than almost anything Davis ever played later); and the work of two contemporaries (Thelonious Monk’s “Straight, No Chaser” and Ahmad Jamal’s arrangement of “Billy Boy,” on which Davis and the band’s other horns don’t even play). On “Straight, No Chaser,” Red Garland plays a Davis trumpet solo from 1945 note-for-note on piano. It’s high classicism of a sort Davis would later reproach in younger musicians. Only one tune, the title track, hints at Davis’s future directions. The quintet that brought Davis this far — courtly Garland on piano, impeccable Philly Joe Jones on drums — disbanded soon after. I’m not aware of a more persuasive valedictory document in all of jazz. This is how we got here, Davis is saying in effect. Here is the road travelled.

2. In Person Friday and Saturday Nights at the Blackhawk, 1961

By 1961, visiting a smoky San Francisco club, Davis was a celebrity shaken by changes he hadn’t asked for. Coltrane had left to launch a solo career. Davis wasn’t entirely satisfied with his new saxophonist, Hank Mobley, or drummer Jimmy Cobb, who were merely human. To compensate for Coltrane’s absence, Davis recast himself as the band’s extrovert. He plays more brashly than a year earlier, almost arrogantly. But the new players here are, at the very least, quick and game, as is the crystalline melodist Wynton Kelly on piano.

The Blackhawk sessions capture Davis on tunes he’d been playing for years, with musicians who knew the recordings like they knew their names, in a band that had honed its reflexes on the road. This is a music of gesture and convention — if Cobb plays this, Kelly lands here, and then Paul Chambers sets up this figure on bass so Miles or Mobley can go here. It’s improvisation, not as invention ex nihilo, but as shared vocabulary and context. This is the Davis album I recommend most often to friends. As a rule they’ve rarely heard it and they’re always glad to learn about it.

3. Filles de Kilimanjaro, 1969

In 1963 Davis hired a 17-year-old drummer from Boston, Tony Williams. Williams brought in pianist Herbie Hancock and bassist Ron Carter; after trying a few other saxophonists they settled on Wayne Shorter. Davis had his second great quintet. They had many adventures, which I’ll skip here. Of their half-dozen albums, Filles de Kilimanjaro is the last. It was recorded in two 1968 sessions; by the second, Chick Corea and Dave Holland had replaced Hancock and Carter. Electric bass and piano make appearances, but really this is the last time Davis played by the rules of acoustic small-group jazz. Soon everything around him would be plugged in.

Filles is mostly pensive and delicate. It dismantles assumptions of jazz but doesn’t yet replace them with assumptions from rock and roll. Instead it leans on the band members’ ability to solve musical riddles persuasively. In its structure and mood, though I think quite by accident, this album functions as a sequel to Kind of Blue. It’s the calmest recording Davis made in the 1960s. It doesn’t dare you, it draws you in. Special mention to Tony Williams. In performance he often used his drums to goad Davis out of his comfort zone. Here, by contrast, he often plays at a whisper, putting the subtlest scaffolding under the proceedings.

This short list of albums doesn’t include anything from Davis’s later electric period, but don’t let me stop you. I have long loved his albums We Want Miles (1983) and Decoy (1985), and if this were an essay about Keith Jarrett I’d use it to marvel at how Jarrett Plays on Miles’s The Cellar Door Sessions 1970 (released in 2005).

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Trane: Never alone

Coltrane died young, at 40 in 1967. In his last couple of years he was trying to escape any formal structure, but before that his music sounds driven, complex — and tantalizingly susceptible to analysis, which helps explain why generations of saxophonists have sought to analyze and imitate his solos. If you spent a week in the basement with a horn and one of his solos, you could figure some of it out. And yet for all the logic in his music, an impenetrable layer of mystery remains. Not mystery he cultivated for drama’s sake. Just an unresolved question at the heart of him.

His 1961-65 quartet was perfect. Nobody played drums like Elvin Jones or piano like McCoy Tyner or bass like Jimmy Garrison, and even they didn’t play quite like that until they came together with Coltrane. Still, two of my selections here feature Coltrane in other settings besides that quartet. I guess I like the sound of Coltrane working out his relationship to others.

1. Miles Davis and John Coltrane — The Final Tour, released 2018

These performances were recorded in March 1960, in Paris, Stockholm, Copenhagen. It’s a year before the Davis dates at San Francisco’s Blackhawk club that I discussed above. The material is substantially the same. The only independent variable is Coltrane. Davis had to coax Coltrane into doing the tour. He knew Coltrane would leave the band when it was over. You can hear why. Coltrane’s playing was sometimes tentative when he joined Davis’s band in 1955, but by 1960 he had arrived at another level. He was impatient to see what he could do next.

“Nobody played more saxophone anywhere, ever, than Trane on this 1960 Miles tour,” Ethan Iverson wrote last year. And it’s not subtly more, not “I wonder whether I can hear what they’re talking about” more. Coltrane administers mauling after mauling to his colleagues. Listening last winter to remind myself after Iverson wrote his post, I was amazed once again.

2. Duke Ellington and John Coltrane, 1963

On the strength of strong early moves as a solo artist, Coltrane signed with Impulse! Records, the jazz subsidiary of a major label, in 1961. Impulse was cautious about introducing Coltrane to a larger audience: one early album featured only ballads, another teamed the quartet with a suave big-band crooner named Johnny Hartman. The third matched Coltrane with Duke Ellington, a legend, 27 years Coltrane’s senior.

I’ve read many times they were poorly matched. I don’t hear it. Their version of “In A Sentimental Mood” is definitive. Some tracks use Coltrane’s bassist and drummer, Garrison and Jones; some use Ellington’s, Aaron Bell and Sam Woodyard. Ellington brings most of the tunes, as you’d expect. There are stylistic differences but nobody sounds uncomfortable. Coltrane’s soprano saxophone solo on his tune “Big Nick” is entirely uninhibited. Ellington needs a half chorus to gather his thoughts when it’s done, but he rallies nicely.

Three years later, when Coltrane’s increasing experimentation chased Elvin Jones out of the band, the drummer’s next employer was Duke Ellington. There’s video. It lasted only three weeks. Jones had to work with another drummer, which was unusual in any band and unheard-of in Ellington’s. Having to work with another drummer was why he’d just left Coltrane. But I like the thought of Ellington thinking, He sounded so good on my tunes a few years ago. Might as well try.

3. Crescent, 1964

The album before A Love Supreme. Some musicians (though not all!) have always preferred this one. It’s just the quartet, with Coltrane playing only tenor saxophone, no soprano. There’s a solemnity here that the only uptempo tune, “Bessie’s Blues,” doesn’t quite dispel. Every other composition, even the closing feature for Jone’s drums, is a meditation. Crescent is a bit like Davis’s Filles de Kilimanjaro, although I think it’s indisputably the better of the two albums: in an era of rapid change, an important band pauses for a moment of calm assurance.

No album on this short list showcases the Coltrane quartet operating at full throttle. You can hear that on “Live” at the Village Vanguard from 1961, and on Live at the Half Note: One Down, One Up from nearly four years later. I strongly recommend the latter, which has an almost punk energy to it, especially from Tyner on piano.

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Bassist Marcus Miller will convene three other veterans of Davis’ 1981 comeback band — saxophonist Bill Evans, guitarist Mike Stern and percussionist Mino Cinelu — for a concert at the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal on June 25. Coltrane’s A Love Supreme will be the basis for Chicago saxophonist Isaiah Collier’s Montreal concert on July 8. Montreal trumpeter Ron di Lauro has been touring with an excellent band playing Davis’s Kind of Blue; that tour comes home to Montreal on July 3. Tributes aside, I suspect that if Davis or Coltrane themselves were looking for the strongest musical personality they could find this year, they might bump into each other at singer Cécile McLorin Salvant’s concert on June 26, or even at this un-ticketed indoor concert by the Doxas Brothers of Montreal and Brooklyn, a day earlier.

At a conference at the University of Toronto’s Munk School in 2023, I heard two academics discussing “affective polarization” as though everyone should know what it meant. One of them was Eric Merkley, a political scientist at the University of Toronto.

I interviewed Merkley this week because he has a new book on the topic: “Polarization, Eh? The Causes and Consequences of Affective Polarization in Canada.” In a nod to the surreal economics of academic publishing, he’s just giving it away in one-chapter chunks at this website, although you can also buy a paper copy at the same website.

Affective polarization is the degree to which supporters of a political party or movement feel its opponents are repellent or dangerous. Voting expresses a choice between political visions or leadership styles, but for some people — and sometimes for entire populations to varying degrees — it’s more than that, almost a way of life.

You notice affective polarization when you find yourself thinking less of somebody because they support the party you never vote for. Or when you start thinking, “God help this country if so-and-so gets in.” It’s different from, or at least only incidentally related to, real differences on issues. It’s a gut thing.

It’s also all the rage. The first graph in Merkley’s book tracks occurrences of the word “polarization” in newspaper coverage of Canadian politics. Look at it go:

I used some of Merkley’s research and writing for my indispensable 2024 classic book Trudeau on the Ropes, which will haunt you forever if you don’t buy many copies for your friends and loved ones. The Globe ran an excerpt on this specific topic. I’m grateful for this chance to go deeper on the topic with Merkley. I interviewed him on Wednesday. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

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Paul Wells: I’ve been fascinated by your writing on “affective polarization.” A lot of people still have a hard time wrapping their heads around the idea. What is affective polarization?

Eric Merkley: Affective polarization is about how partisans feel about one another. It’s most notably the hostility that people feel towards their political opponents. That is the component that most academics focus on, and probably the political discourse is most interested in, but part of polarization is also about how intensely warm you feel towards your own team as well. It’s a combination of both those things, but it’s that hostility that we tend to key off of.

PW: There’s a robust literature on the notion that how adherents of political movements feel about each other is measurably different from actual distance between political parties, and that it’s a significant thing. This is an international literature that I was surprised to find is quite robust.

Merkley: Yes, there’s a lot of work out there on affective polarization. Not as much on comparing countries to one another — that’s still evolving — but affective polarization is pretty high in a lot of Western democracies. There is an argument out there that there are some countries, like Canada and the United States, that are, to some degree, catching up to what’s common in other Western democracies.

PW: Are there any countries that have escaped the significant effect of polarization?

Merkley: I’m not entirely sure. I would say that the Nordic countries have generally lower levels of polarization, but that’s kind of on the margins. The reality is that polarization is pretty normal in most countries. To some degree, Canada was abnormal on that dimension for a very long time.

In a lot of other countries, their party systems are structured by deep-seated social divides along class and religion, and those things got people polarized. It goes to prove this point that there wasn’t really a “golden age” of depolarization in most countries. It’s just that in this present moment, some countries are better able to grapple with those polarizing tendencies, while other countries’ institutions are not able to do so. I think we see the strains of that in the United States right now, and to a lesser extent in Canada and the UK.

PW: Thanks to the Canadian Election Study, which has been done after every federal election for many years, we see that there’s sort of a progressive increase in this affective polarization from 1988 until 2019. I blame social media. You don’t seem to agree.

Merkley: I don’t. I’ll first start by saying the things that lead me away from the social media explanation. Polarization’s a long-running process. In Canada, it’s been ongoing since the 1980s and it’s been a pretty linear trend. It’s kind of just a gradual evolution. We see this in the United States, too, with comparable measures, like “feeling thermometers” and the stuff that I use in this book.

People that use social media and the internet less, are more polarized, on average, than people that use the internet more and use social media more. These are inconvenient findings for this kind of social media-driven narrative.

In my work, I find that we also worry about the fragmentation of the media environment, and how everyone’s just picking news that reinforces their beliefs, and that we live in echo chambers. In Canada, though, the reality is that Conservatives, Liberals, and NDP supporters, actually live in very similar media environments. As much as Conservatives gripe about the CBC, it’s one of their top three outlets that they read and digest. Echo chambers are more of a myth than a reality in Canada.

Social media use itself—at the aggregate or mass level—isn’t really predictive of how hostile you are towards your political opponents, or how warm you are towards your own team. When all those things are combined, I just don’t see there being a social media driver to a lot of this stuff.

That being said, there are indirect pathways for how social media can make things worse. One thing that scholars are increasingly picking up on is that [the content] we see on social media, [platforms like X and Blue Sky] is not what normal people produce. People that use and comment and post and do all this stuff, they select into it. People that get rewarded by engaging in all this sort of behavior, they tend to be more inflammatory, more toxic. They see their behavior rewarded because of algorithms and then they post more. But people that are moderate tune out, or they just don’t engage. It’s not worth it to express your view on a social media platform, because you’re just going to get piled on. You just tune out.

There are selection effects, where what we see on social media is not reflective of what normal Canadians think or do, or really anything about politics. But for journalists, and for politicians, this is the world that they live in. They see it, it influences their beliefs about what the public thinks, and all this feeds into the polarization process. I think there’s an indirect pathway that social media can produce “elite-level” polarization. It can make journalists think that we’re more polarized than we really are, and it influences their coverage of politics. I think all this stuff matters.

The second thing is that there are definitely small, radicalized communities, where I think the internet and social media really makes things a lot worse. And we should care about radicalization in those communities, like “incels”, for instance. But it’s not going to pop up in a national survey of Canadians. It’s a small group that’s being radicalized by these sorts of technologies. I don’t dispute any of that. But when we think about long-running trends to polarization, we can’t just put it all at the feet of social media. It’s more structural, it’s more about our institutions and our parties than it is about social media.

PW: Okay, so there is a subset of the population that becomes a little obsessive online, but that doesn’t… spread. Their particular monomania becomes deeper, but it doesn’t get broader?

Merkley: Right, exactly.

PW: We should take some time to enumerate the ways in which you and some of your colleagues measure this stuff. It’s by asking questions like: “How would you feel if your neighbor supported another party?” Or: “How would you feel if a member of your family married a supporter of another party?” Why is that a handy way to get at the sort of thing you’re trying to measure?

Merkley: Those measures tap into what we call “social distance”, or how averse you feel to out-partisans— you just don’t want them in your social circle. You aren’t comfortable interacting with them. So that’s one way of measuring [affective polarization]. It’s not the only way, and you can replicate that approach for other groups in society. Like, how comfortable would you feel if a convicted felon moved next door? [Those questions] measure people’s feelings about out-partisans in their close social proximity. If you become more hostile as a consequence of polarization, you then become more averse to people in your network.

In the Canadian Election Study, they’ve had what they call “feeling thermometers”, which are very crude but useful measures that allow us to do comparisons across countries and over time. They measure how “warm” and “cold” you feel towards certain parties, or other groups in society. We use those thermometers typically for over-time measures of polarization. There are some really neat measures that are being developed right now—and I use some of this in the book. One is a concept called “political sectarianism” which gets at more than just mere hostility. It’s about really feeling like you hate the other side, you think they’re evil and immoral, and your politics become moralized in a really important way. That’s one dimension of this concept. It gets at the intensity that some subsets of the population feel towards their political opponents, that the “feeling thermometers” don’t get at.

My work uses some of these measures at different points in time, and it all leads to the same conclusion, that we have become more polarized affectively, regardless of how we measure it.

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PW: It struck me, as I was thinking about your work before this book, that Pierre Poilievre and Justin Trudeau seemed highly adapted to a polarized environment. I wonder whether you think the same about Mark Carney? One thing I’ve noticed is that he rarely says the word “Conservative” in public outside of Parliament. That seems to me almost a throwback to an earlier time when everyone was competing for all voters, with greater or lesser success. Do you buy that, and are you seeing any changes in your results recently?

Merkley: We’re going to have to collect more data to really know. My analysis in the book stopped at 2019 because of data comparability reasons, and the fact that the Canadian Election Study moved fully online, and you can’t really compare that to eras before, and so there’s all sorts of issues there.

As soon as I wrapped writing this book, we had Donald Trump coming in with all the… chaos, and then Carney coming in and completely changing the direction of the Liberal Party. There’s been a lot of change.

I would say that it does seem that Carney has moved the Liberal Party back to the centre — and some would say centre-right — and that’s a big change. Canadian political parties are so leader-centric and so hollowed out that it is more doable in Canada to have this sudden change in direction of a party. So this is always on the table as a possibility. But the reality is that the Liberal Party base is not where [Carney] is. The Liberal Party base is where the NDP is. Maybe not under Avi Lewis, but they’ve converged. One of the lessons from my book is that the NDP and the Liberals have become much more similar ideologically over time in terms of who supports them in the electorate and their core base.

Carney can get away with this right now because of the threat that Trump poses. He’s able to assemble all the support among Boomers that usually gravitate towards the Conservatives, and the left is so weak right now in Canada as a result of all of this, that [Carney] is able to take this position that is distinct from where the party is.

I don’t know if this is a durable change. Right now, we are in a two-party consolidated system, which has been unheard-of for decades. So, part of me is skeptical that this is a new equilibrium that will have a fundamental shift in the party system. But I can’t rule it out. Political scientists are very bad at predictions. And I am also bad at predictions. So I don’t know what the future holds. If Trump’s threat abates, will we return to politics as normal? It’s very possible. Or maybe there’s some durable changes that are happening where we have two-party consolidation and the Liberals have moved towards the center. If that happens, it could depolarize Canada.

We do see this in other countries. The classic example I make is in the UK after the climb down from Thatcherism. After Thatcher, you have New Labour with Tony Blair, and then you had affective depolarization in the UK through this period. Now, obviously things in the UK, because of Brexit, took a crazy turn. But [after Thatcher] you had this period of depolarization because of changes at the elite level, and so it is possible that Carney could turn down the temperature on polarization. But, again, the durability of this change is yet to be determined.

PW: One of the things that you argue is that if perceptions of the parties have been moving away from each other, it’s partly because the parties have been moving— the Conservatives have moved to the right on social issues, and the Liberals to the left on economic issues over the period that you’re studying.

Merkley: Yes. Conservatives moved to the right. Some of this was out of my period of study, because most of my surveys had to start in 1993, and a lot of the action was Mulroney in the 80s, and the rise of the Blue Tories. That rise happened first, but you also had movement to the left by the Liberals, and that was in fits and starts, and then really accelerated with the merger of the Conservative Party.

The classic model of the Liberal Party is that it’s the brokerage party, and that it encompasses all groups, that it’s non-ideological, and that it’s in the center. The paradox, comparatively, is that around the world, centrist parties do not survive. The Liberal Party’s an anomaly for this. Great work by Richard Johnston and others show that [the Liberal Party] was able to do this because of Quebec, because they were able to marshal a large base of seats in Quebec, historically, and they were able to hold the center because of that.

The Conservatives had trouble winning durable coalitions because they had to pair Westerners with Quebec nationalists, and that just wasn’t durable in the long run, as we saw with Mulroney. That changed with Meech Lake and Charlottetown, and the rise of the Bloc, and Liberals lost their solid base of seats in Quebec. In the 1990s, vote splitting between Reform and Alliance and the PC Party masked the Liberal weakness because it allowed them to sweep Ontario, and so they were able to win majority governments. But their actual position was much more vulnerable.

When the Conservative Party merged in the early 2000s, that old model of the Liberal brokerage party just wasn’t tenable, and so they had to find a way to avoid getting squeezed by the Conservatives and the NDP, especially with the changes that Jack Layton brought to the party. The Liberals moved to the left, even more sharply. That’s a big part of the story.

Now, because of Trump, there’s this other new shock that’s fundamentally changed the system, and maybe we are entering a new era where a different logic is emerging. It’ll be interesting to see what happens.

PW: You talk a lot about “motivated reasoning” as a driver of affective polarization. What is that, and how does it play?

Merkley: [Motivated reasoning] is a consequence of polarization. Some people use other words like “confirmation bias.” It gets at the notion that when we see political information, and if we’re really polarized, we don’t look at that information in good faith. We think about how it connects with our prior beliefs, our partisan identities. If it conflicts with those, we counter-argue and reject it out of hand, without seriously considering it. And if it supports our side, we tend to be lazy about it. We don’t ask the tough questions, we’re not critical. [Motivated reasoning] gets at this notion that in a polarized climate, it’s very hard for different sides to really come to common understandings about the realities of the world, because they fundamentally are hard to persuade. That is a consequence of polarized politics.

PW: So I’m building a little resentment ball, and every piece of news that confirms my resentment gets pasted onto it, but everything that shows that the other side is kind of like my side, I reject it as boring?

Merkley: Yes. And again, it’s for people who are really, really polarized. They’re the ones that have this intense motivation to protect their identities, and to defend their worldviews. That’s not everybody, but it’s a good portion of the public who are politically influential, they’re politically active, they’re politically sophisticated. So it’s a problem. But there’s lots of evidence now in political science that persuasion is possible, that it is possible to break through this sort of reasoning. I don’t want to give the impression that we can’t ever agree on the same set of facts. It’s just a tendency that people have that makes that challenging in a polarized climate.

PW: I’ve heard that in the States, there are even social groups where their thing is that they go into online fora, and they debate reasonably. They find someone who’s just spitting fury, and they say, “Well, you know, actually, recent evidence suggests that crime isn’t that bad in New York…” or stuff like that.

Merkley: That wouldn’t surprise me. There’s all this work out there now about how you can have conversations with ChatGPT, or any of the new, large language models, and that there’s some evidence that these conversations can persuade people to soften their views on things. Persuasion is possible, it’s just that for people that are really, really hunkered down, it can be pretty tough.

PW: You’ve now spent several years studying this stuff. How come?

Merkley: I think it’s important. We have a tendency to import U.S. political trends into Canada and we get lazy about it. Like, “If it’s happening down there, it’s happening here.” But we need the evidence. What does the evidence show?

There are pretty troubling consequences that can emerge from polarization. In my work, I’ve found that it can lead to discrimination against political opponents, and I think polarization in Canada made dealing with the pandemic worse and more challenging for public health experts.

The thing that really worries me now is the health of democracy. I’ve found some evidence that people are very willing to agree with anti-democratic actions by political elites if it’s their team doing it. They’re much more vigilant when it’s their opposing team doing such anti-democratic actions. That leaves us vulnerable. We see in the U.S. where we have elite-level norm breakdown about the core pillars of democracy, and Republicans threatening U.S. democracy from a whole bunch of different directions now. Many people are willing to go along with it. That’s a real risk. I think part of the problem is that we are not fully able to connect anti-democratic actions to broader democratic principles. Polarization makes all of this much worse.

There’s a real risk there that we need to worry about. With what’s going on in the US and in other countries too, we do need to be more concerned about democracy. Some of that’s about polarization, but not all of it. The next steps in the research here will be about shoring up that democratic vigilance in the Canadian public.

Less than two weeks after the House and Senate approved her appointment, Annette Ryan on Monday released her first analyses as the new Parliamentary Budget Officer. There was drama over the appointment, which the Conservatives and Bloc opposed because they liked the penchant of Ryan’s interim predecessor, Jason Jacques, for making headlines.

I’ve eventually met every Parliamentary Budget Officer and found them all impressive in different ways. None had a vendetta against the government they served [UPDATE: A reader properly rapped me on the knuckles for this phrasing. It’s closer to good form to say they served Parliament and didn’t have it in for the governments they watched — pw], none was carrying water for the government. I include Kevin Page and Jason Jacques in that assertion, though I know in each case a lot of people disagreed. Each has had a different style. Different styles should be welcome. The work speaks for itself: nothing a PBO produces is definitive just because a PBO produced it, but each offers the valuable perspective of a dedicated public servant with a dedicated staff checking numbers and claims against the documented record. That’s worth something.

Ryan, whom I don’t believe I’ve met, released not one but five short analyses of last week’s spring economic update. Let’s get to them.

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1. The dog ate my resilience windfall, and also, I’m the dog

Ryan sets the table with an analysis of the economic and fiscal track — the government’s best guess at the medium-term evolution of the economy, and its own spending provisions.

The “Highlights” box captures what you need to know: the economy’s showing some resilience, “with most indicators better than anticipated in Budget 2025. Notably, unemployment was improved from Budget 2025.” A local Substacker reached a similar conclusion last week. The deficit is lower by an average of $2.5 billion a year, heavily front-loaded; the actual changes to the forecasts is $11.4 billion in the first year and peanuts thereafter. New spending announced last week “offsets almost all of the additional fiscal room,” which is to say, the Carney government spent its windfall as soon as it found it.

Problem: There’s no mention of Canada’s new goal of devoting 5% of GDP to defence or defence-flavoured things (3.5% of core defence spending), which Ryan says would add $65 billion to the deficit in 2035-36. This adds “material upside risk to the deficit and debt projections,” Ryan said, showing a gift for understatement. She will return to this point later, with gusto.

2. I am meeting my targets. And now, my definition of “meeting”

Ryan’s second note compares François-Philippe Champagne’s progress against his two late-blooming “fiscal anchors”:

• keep debt declining as a share of GDP; and

• eliminate the deficit of operating spending by 2028-29. Capital spending could keep rising, as long as debt-to-GDP declines.

Here we start to notice a certain “yes, but” two-step in Ryan’s analyses. She seems categorical: “The SEU projections indicate that the Government is on track to respect its two fiscal anchors.”

But then she complains at length about the projections. Champagne’s 2025 used very relaxed definitions of “capital” spending. The spring update offers “no additional insights on the definitions used.” So “it is not possible to advise” whether the government’s “assertion” that it’s respecting its anchor is correct. “Assertion” is a strong choice of word here.

Does Ryan have a better idea? She sure does. A month after Champagne’s budget, she writes, the International Monetary Fund found Champagne’s anchors unimpressive. The IMF advised “standard statistical frameworks” such as the System of National Accounts. It’s quite stingy about what qualifies as capital spending: you have to build something. Carney and Champagne throw in “certain tax expenditures and operating subsidies.” This “may overstate capital formation.”

Anyway, the only useful anchor is a declining debt load, Ryan writes, again citing the IMF. Projections need to be over a longer term than what Carney and Champagne provide, and the practice — by now utterly standard — of spending more every six months than you projected in the last budget or update can “erode… credibility…weaken confidence… and raise concerns.”

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3. “Delivery risks have begun to emerge”

It gets blunter. The Major Projects Office is designed to get big projects approved within two years. Five months into that process, “the MPO has not yet published progress reports or approval‑timeline scorecards.” We simply don’t know how it’s going.

How are the budget’s Productivity Super-Deduction and the One Canadian Economy Act working out? “It is not yet possible to assess.” How will we know whether productivity improves after being “essentially flat” for three years? “Specific metrics will be informative,” i.e., if they ever show up.

On housing construction, which was to double in tempo over the next decade, the spring update offers “no specific targets or metrics.” Ryan’s office figures Build Canada Homes might build 26,000 units over five years. That “would be insufficient” to overcome a general decline in housing starts.

Then Ryan returns to defence plans. That 3.5% commitment (the smaller, more concrete of the two new NATO commitments) is for 2035, which feels far away but really isn’t. “No year‑by‑year profile has been published” with the steps to reach that goal, and it’s huge: it represents $159 billion in defence spending per year, well more than double current rates, increasing the budget deficit by $63 billion and pushing that debt-to-GDP ratio back up.

There’s more. Ryan’s fifth note makes it sound like the government is already bored with the Comprehensive Expenditure Review it announced last fall. That’s “well underway,” the spring update chirps, but Ryan notes the update “does not provide details on actual savings in 2026-27 by department and agencies, nor any updates on the reduction of full-time equivalents.” Her fifth note says interesting things about the distributional effect of the pause in fuel excise taxes, which I won’t try to summarize.

I don’t want to attach too much importance to all this. If Champagne or whoever’s finance minister this fall provides detailed updates on progress building homes and ports and pink-slipping civil servants and ramping up military spending; if his colleagues can pass up the temptation to spend every dollar good fortune frees up; — well, actually, even if all of that happens, it’ll still be tremendously difficult to hold the fiscal line in a tariff hurricane. While adding tens of billions to defence spending. While propelling Canada into a new multilateral world. It would have been hard for anyone. Thanks to the new PBO for pointing out the fault lines.

Mood-swinging on the Russia-Ukraine war has lately swung toward unaccustomed optimism among supporters of Ukraine in its long defence against Russian attack. In March Ukraine said it took back more territory than Russia gained, for the first time in three years. Of course in a chaotic conflict with sky-high stakes, much could change. But Australian defence analyst Mick Ryan, a retired major-general, has noted Ukraine’s “strategic momentum.”

Much of Ukraine’s resilience is attributable to a fascinating longer-term development, which began before 2022 and has picked up momentum. That’s the revolution in automated warfare — not just airborne drones, but automated ground and sea vehicles too. Increasingly deployed in combination. Constantly improving thanks to a wide-scale culture of tinkering and revision. Deployed in ever-increasing scale.

I figured it was time for an update. Olena Kryzhanivska is a Senior Editor at the NATO Association of Canada and a Post-Doctoral Fellow in Defence Innovation at the Canadian Global Affairs Institute. Her Ukraine’s Arms Monitor newsletter on Substack is a frequently-updated digest of news from the Ukraine conflict.

Ukraine's Arms Monitor

Ukraine’s Arms Monitor is a curated intelligence digest of armament-related developments in the Russia-Ukraine war, covering drone warfare, military transfers, production, and defence innovation.

By Olena Kryzhanivska

I spoke to Olena Kryzhanivska on Friday. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. A reminder that this post is part of my occasional Q&A series, transcribed long-form interviews with newsmakers. I’ve done 19 of these in just over a year. They live under the Q&A tab on my website, and you can revisit them any time.

Paul Wells: You’ve been writing about drones for the last few years, and it feels like the definition of drone has been changing along with everything else. Let’s start with three acronyms to situate everything for our readers: UAV, USV, and UGV. What do they mean, and how have they been changing?

Olena Kryzhanivska: When we talk about drones, we mean unmanned systems. We can refer to aerial systems, ground systems, and waterborne systems. UAV is the most commonly used acronym: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. We are talking about Mavic-type drones, FPV [First Person View] drones, and long-range strike drones. Shahed-type drones also can be named UAVs.

UGVs are Unmanned Ground Vehicles. These are ground robots. They are little armored vehicles—not tanks, of course—but they are pretty small and they are used for a variety of logistical purposes, military evacuation on the battlefield, and strike purposes, as well.

And then we have USVs, which are part of the larger class of waterborne drones, Unmanned Surface Vehicles. They are unmanned boats. There are also Unmanned Underwater Vehicles, that’s another class.

PW: How much use of these systems was Ukraine involved with in the middle of 2022, and how much have they scaled up?

Kryzhanivska: Well, they’ve scaled up significantly. First of all, the developments of drone technologies in Ukraine started already before the full-scale war. We know that the war in Ukraine started in 2014, and since then, Ukrainian forces have been using different types of drones, mostly Aerial Vehicles. We are talking about small drones used for racing, but then, of course, there are larger drones used for agricultural purposes. Since 2022, the use of these systems has transformed completely.

What we see now is that drones are used for battlefield purposes. They deliver explosive payloads, conduct reconnaissance, and this can be used with small systems like FPV, first-person-view drones, which are usually used for civilian purposes. Also, Mavic-type drones, produced by the Chinese DJI company.

According to recent updates, 75% of casualties on the battlefield are happening due to those small drones. They are very effective. But also, what we saw from 2022 is that Ukraine has been innovating extremely well. Ukraine always starts with some improvised systems, for example, unmanned boats. They start with the usual boats, and then adapt them to battlefield purposes. First adapting to logistic purposes like transporting cargo, but then they started to transport explosive payloads, and then the technology has been maturing as it was used more on the battlefield.

What we see right now is a dynamically changing battlefield in the drone warfare in Ukraine and Russia. We see that drones are used in multi-domain operations, which means that we see the increasing integration between ground vehicles and aerial vehicles. Ground drones are carrying FPV aerial vehicles. Ground drones can carry interceptor drones. USVs [unmanned boats] can carry aerial vehicles. It’s like the integration of different capabilities which is something that Ukraine has been using increasingly on the battlefield during the last year. We do not see fully autonomous drones on the battlefield just yet. There are a lot of claims about experiments, but no full autonomy. But that’s something that’s going to happen in the future.

I think one of the interesting uses of drones is for air defense, something that was very important in the context of the war with Iran, when Iran was launching hundreds and thousands of those Shahed-type munitions. The Gulf countries didn’t have anything else except for very expensive interceptor missiles that cost millions of dollars to counter those Shaheds. Ukraine was able to show that there are other cost-effective methods of doing that.

PW: The scale of production is massive. We’re talking about 4 million aerial vehicles produced by Ukraine this year, and they would like to increase that. It feels like a completely different way of doing war.

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Boulerice is off to provincial politics as a candidate for the lefty, sovereignist Québec Solidaire. His former caucus colleague Lori Idlout now sits with Mark Carney’s Liberals. So now the NDP caucus is down to five MPs and the new leader isn’t one of them.

In the end Lewis was only a few minutes late, and he was generous with his time. We covered a lot of ground, beginning of course with the NDP’s current straits. “We have significant rebuilding to do,” he said. For him, “being in the House of Commons is not the first priority.”

The supply-and-confidence agreement through which the NDP propped up Justin Trudeau’s government made more sense to New Democrats on the Hill than to voters, Lewis said. Then Donald Trump returned to office next door. “You could just see this wave of fear sweep through the electorate.”

So now what? Lewis favours a “progressive populism” that offers bolder solutions to street-level concerns. “Something has broken in our social contract,” he said. “We’re living in an era of market failure.” Hence his proposal for government-run groceries. He knows a lot of people think it’s absurd. He won’t drop the idea. ““The goal is absolutely not to make money,” he said; it’s for government to cover operating losses while the stores put pressure on existing grocers.

You sound like a socialist, I said at one point. “I am,” Lewis said mildly. The NDP has always struggled with such labels. His father Stephen Lewis and grandfather David Lewis duelled against a left-nationalist current in the party in the early 1970s. It’s not his fight, Lewis said (“I was four!”), but he sounded at least sympathetic to those old academic lefties his career-politician elders battled. “I’m trying to bring a new boldness… and a new political offer.”

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This corner offers no prediction about the new leader’s ability to pull the NDP out of a steep decline. We shall see. In the meantime I found Lewis thoughtful, frank and forthcoming about his plans. I hope you enjoy this conversation.

I was able to book a nice venue and hire professional videographers because subscribers pay to support the work I do here. This video is also available on my Youtube channel, where you can smash the Like and Subscribe buttons. Audio goes out on this Substack’s podcast channel; transcript is in the Transcript tab if you can find it (it hides in different places depending on how you read these posts, and I’m afraid I just can’t go find yours for you). Thanks for reading and listening.

“What you see is we have been prudent fiscal managers,” François-Philippe Champagne said, many times, in his remarks to locked-up reporters on Tuesday. Also: “We’re growing twice as much as Germany.” He said this many times too, surely more than twice as many as any German would have. The finance minister has never been one to let a good line languish through under-use. He had good news to deliver, in measured doses, through pursed lips under wary eyes. Through an accident of language Champagne sometimes gets called Frankie Bubbles around Ottawa, yet I’ve rarely seen him less effervescent. What you see is he has been a prudent fiscal manager.

The budget deficit that was going to be immense is only extremely large. The four prime ministers between Pierre Trudeau and Justin Trudeau were careful managers, to varying degrees, and they left their successors with fiscal room that still hasn’t yet been completely blown out, which is more than some other countries can say:

The fiscal windfall of a lower-than-forecast deficit permitted Champagne to bankroll two new attention-getting things, the new Canada Strong Fund and a new Team Canada Strong program to train up to 100,000 new Red Seal skilled trades workers by 2030-31. I’m not sure whether this latter will particularly change the course of history: in 2024 alone nearly 47,000 apprentices registered in the skilled trades before Ottawa thought to help them. But it’s hardly outrageous to want their path to be easier, and above all what’s striking is that Champagne didn’t have much else to announce.

The star of this story might be the Canadian economy itself. The country has been in something close to a nightmare scenario since 2024, and it’s doing… a little better than before?

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My March podcast interview with Pierre Poilievre drew a lot of attention, but one of the sharpest responses came from Max Fawcett, an award-winning Calgary journalist who’s been sharply critical of the notion that the West’s resource sector is singled out for mistreatment. Max just flat cancelled his subscription to this newsletter, and tore a strip off me on Bluesky for swallowing Poilievre’s claims of federal Liberal stonewalling on LNG projects without challenge. That’s one way to get my attention, although for the record it’s not one I recommend. Once I saw what he wrote, I wrote to Fawcett to invite him to make his case here.

Fawcett maintains that it’s global markets, not Liberal obtuseness, that have limited LNG development in Canada in recent years. In the spirit of the debate he wishes I’d offered, here’s his case. I’m pleased to say that after I wrote him, he renewed his subscription. - pw

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Pierre Poilievre is nothing if not consistent. For all of his recent tactical shifts, ones that had him talking to more mainstream journalists like Peter Mansbridge and, yes, Paul Wells, his message remained the same: blame Canada. Nowhere was that more clear, or more wrong, than on the issue of LNG exports.

“Natural gas is the most hilarious example of reverse protectionism,” he said in his interview with Wells. “The Germans are saying, ‘Please sell us your natural gas,’ and we’re saying no, or at least the Liberal government was saying that. And so they’re getting 95% of their natural gas now from the United States because we, our government, blocked 16 LNG plants from happening over the last 10 years.”

For what it’s worth, almost none of this is true. The federal government has never blocked an LNG project. It did concur with the decision by the Quebec government — the conservative Quebec government, to be clear — rejecting the Saguenay LNG project in 2021, but that was more about respecting provincial jurisdiction than overriding an approval. On west coast LNG projects, the federal record is clear: multiple approvals, including duty waivers for LNG Canada worth nearly $1 billion, and zero rejections. As it happens, the federal government just approved a new $4 billion gas pipeline that will help feed — you guessed it — LNG projects on the west coast.

This isn’t the story that Poilievre and his fellow Conservatives are telling Canadians, though. Instead, they’re blaming the federal government for every project, no matter how half-baked or economically dubious, that didn’t get built. Most were proposed during the frenzy in the early 2010s, when the combination of $100-plus global oil prices (LNG contracts were generally linked to oil prices at the time) and abundant domestic gas reserves made the economics incredibly appealing.

Then, of course, the OPEC cartel decided to flood the market in 2014 and crash prices in order to bring soaring production from the United States and Canada to heel. You will, I hope, note the timing on that. It has nothing to do with the election of a different federal government in late 2015, as I’ve tried to point out any number of times to people drawing that conclusion. The same is true of upstream investment in oil and gas, which fell off a cliff in Canada and everywhere else beginning in 2014.

Conservative politicians in Canada have been dining out on this spurious correlation ever since. Social media is absolutely littered with people carrying that message forward, often with charts and graphs that clearly (and deliberately?) misrepresent the timing of the 2015 election.

Here’s an example.

Here’s what it should actually look like.

As to the notion that the federal government is responsible for the cancellation of all the LNG projects that were on the books in the early 2010s by their proponents? I’ve pulled that apart as well, at length and with receipts.

And yes, Germany and other LNG-importing countries have expressed an interest in Canada increasing its LNG exports, just as they would about any other country. The reason is simple: they’re buyers, and more supply, all things being equal, lowers the price they would pay. None of these countries have expressed a willingness to lock in the sort of long-term pricing that would make an east coast LNG project economically viable. None of them have pledged the sort of capital required to build one. For all the caterwauling about former prime minister Justin Trudeau saying that there wasn’t a business case for an east coast LNG facility, he was right then — and he’s still right today.

That’s because while the joint US-Israel war with Iran has crippled energy markets, removing a significant volume of near-term LNG supply and spiking prices, it’s also strengthening the resolve of importing countries — hello, France! Come on down, Great Britain! — to more rapidly remove their reliance on volatile fossil fuel imports. As International Energy Agency executive director Fatih Birol told The Guardian, “their perception of risk and reliability will change. Governments will review their energy strategies. There will be a significant boost to renewables and nuclear power and a further shift towards a more electrified future.”

For all of my apparent interest in re-litigating what happened over the last decade, this is the conversation we need to be having in Canada right now. We need to better understand the opportunities and risks associated with a more rapidly electrifying global economy, especially in places like China, India, and the global south. But if we don’t have an accurate picture of what happened in the recent past, we aren’t going to be equipped to understand what’s about to happen in the near future. That’s why I think journalists need to be better prepared to interrogate the sort of bad-faith arguments and weaponized spurious correlations around energy policy that have unfortunately become the Conservative Party of Canada’s stock in trade. As I said on Bluesky, “it sure would be nice if the folks interviewing him had some modicum of interest (and expertise) in the details around energy markets and policy.”

I genuinely appreciate Paul’s willingness to let me unspool some of my frustrations here. I do understand why most journalists don’t want to get into the weeds on this stuff, and why they let Poilievre’s revisionist history of it pass unchallenged. Very few people are as passionate, or as pedantic, about this stuff as I am. Meanwhile, Poilievre has done a very good job of raising the price on public disagreement, and it’s one many people would rather not pay.

But if we can’t have a more honest conversation in this country about energy policy, past and present, we are going to get absolutely walloped by the future. The energy transition is moving far more quickly than I think most Canadians understand, and it has real consequences for both our economy and our politics. I am happy — well, okay, not happy — to keep pushing this particular rock up the hill. But I would certainly appreciate more help.

Max Fawcett is lead columnist for Canada’s National Observer, where he writes the Receipts newsletter, which you can read and subscribe to here. His Substack newsletter is here.

[Earlier this month Radio-Canada reported that more than 100 support staff working in Montreal’s largest school board had lost their jobs because of Quebec’s new secularism law, Bill 94. Quebec has already had a law since 2019 making it illegal for teachers to wear conspicuous religious symbols. That’s Bill 21, recently the subject of a week’s hearings at the Supreme Court of Canada. The new law extends that ban to special-education teachers, lunchroom monitors and other support staff, and while it applies in theory to men and women of any religion, every reported actual job loss has been a case of Muslim women who insisted on wearing head scarves.

On Monday Jean-François Nadeau dedicated his weekly column in the Montreal newspaper Le Devoir to the new job losses caused by the extended secularism law. While it took the long way around to getting to its main topic, it ended up as a memorably angry column, one that took the side of the women who’ve lost their jobs rather than indulging some theoretical debate about constitutional law. I decided to republish Nadeau’s column in English, and I am grateful to Le Devoir for granting me the rights.

A few times over the last several years in my own writing I’ve sometimes tried to explain the motivation behind these laws, a desire to establish a strong separation between church and state, inspired to some extent by political thinking in France and by Quebec’s own heritage of Catholic Church domination before the Quiet Revolution. For my efforts I’ve sometimes been roundly mocked by colleagues in Toronto. In fact, as I’ve also written, whatever their motivation, I think these laws are deeply misguided. What encourages me is that one hardly needs to be an anglophone or an outsider to share this opinion. A large number of journalists, lawyers, politicians and academics in Quebec do too. The so-called Quebec consensus on these matters is shaky indeed. Here’s Jean-Francois Nadeau. — pw]

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“The first time I saw homeless people was when I arrived in Paris. There weren’t any in Montreal.” That is what Montreal pianist Hélène Mercier-Arnault stated, in all seriousness, during an interview.

This happened in France, on RTL, a leading private radio outlet. The pianist was there to promote a new album. This particular bit of her interview was discreetly edited out before broadcast. But it resurfaced anyway, and several news outlets picked it up. Since then, Hélène Mercier-Arnault has insisted she was misunderstood.

So what are we to make of another excerpt, also trimmed before airing, in which she added: “What I’m about to say may shock you. The homeless — I don’t think about them every day.”

And why would she, really? After all, homelessness, in her view, is a “lifestyle choice, made by people who have decided to give up on society. It’s a withdrawal from the world.”

Faced with such a phenomenon, the only thing to do, apparently, is to recoil. It’s every man for himself, and to each their own choices. Pianist Hélène Mercier-Arnault has chosen to live in luxury. It must be said that in marrying Bernard Arnault, she didn’t exactly wed a pauper. Her husband reigns over the LVMH group, the global giant of ultra-luxury. In the palm of his hand he holds brands like Louis Vuitton, Dior, Givenchy, Fendi, Bulgari, Sephora, Dom Pérignon, and Tiffany & Co. The man also owns newspapers, and is an avid art collector. In short: these are people who do not end up on the pavement.

The 77-year-old magnate holds an estimated fortune of $220 billion, an amount comparable to the GDP of countries like New Zealand, Hungary, or Greece. Bernard Arnault ranks ninth among the wealthiest people in the world, and possesses Europe’s single largest fortune. His wife therefore orbits, like him, in a gilded nebula alongside such latter-day gods as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg. No wonder these people see no homeless on the sidewalks they walk. In their world, which no longer touches the ground, one looks toward the heavens of money before looking at people.

The most recent count of homelessness in Quebec recorded more than 12,000 people living on the streets. Yet faced with such injustice, it’s not the super-rich who face scrutiny. While social inequalities multiply, we instead tighten the screws elsewhere: on people whose crime is to be too visible.

School service centres, a legacy of the Legault government, have begun applying the new provisions of the secularism law, leading to the dismissal or forced departure of daycare educators who wear the veil. Yet surely a society’s right to swing its fist should stop where somebody else’s nose begins.

In Montreal, nearly 150 employees have been fired or forced out. And Radio-Canada reports that 146 positions remain unfilled. So even though schools are short of qualified staff, we push people out in the name of a whim.

We show the door to women who have broken no law, harmed no one, and failed in no professional duty. Their veil becomes a pretext for fantasies and suspicions, in contempt of the essential work they perform every day for children.

In a school system already grappling with challenges like dropout rates, overcrowded classrooms, special needs, and lack of resources, was it really so urgent this spring to fire appreciated, qualified, well-integrated women? Is this truly how the injustices within this leaking-from-every-seam education system will be corrected?

This is what the operation unfolding before our eyes comes down to: making a very real shortage worse in order to satisfy an idea of secularism presented as an almost sacred necessity. Tying ourselves in knots to fend off some great Satan on the verge of devouring our children.

In fact what we’re doing is sacrificing competent, beloved people on the altar of principles whipped into a froth, even if it means pressing others deemed more acceptable into service, simply because they dress differently. It’s as though we decided symbols matter more than children. Is Quebec mad about its children, or just mad?

A friend, stunned by this law being applied without restraint, told me: we now have to explain to children why women they love, who care for them well, are being forced to leave from one day to the next. It makes the children cry more often than smile. This same friend also noted that many of these women are among the most educated in the system. They came here with credentials the system doesn’t recognize. Their French is impeccable. We applauded their arrival, celebrated their presence. Now we show them the door.

Once again, it is women who pay the price of this moral crusade. Competent educators, technicians, supervisors, and attendants. We tell ourselves we’re defending their freedom by punishing them. We say we’re protecting them as we humiliate them. We claim equality is our goal while we target those who, in practice, have the least of it. And then we let ourselves off the hook by saying they made a “lifestyle choice.” Just a simple choice. What a convenient turn of phrase. It covers up so many injustices.

It’s a disgrace.

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Here are some thoughts on Mark Carney’s weekend Youtube video. If I had one big thing to say I’d have written one big thing. Here are four smaller things. They tend toward different conclusions: some are meant as criticism, some as encouragement.

1. Attempting to rally the citizenry

I’ve been reading about Isaac Brock. “If accomplishing the improbable is the mark of a great leader, Brock fits the bill,” Peter Shawn Taylor wrote in Canadian Business magazine (reprinted in another magazine) during the last big outbreak of War-of-1812 metaphors, in 2012. “He met the American threat with a combination of positive thinking, careful planning, communication, collaboration and, when necessary, bold action.”

2012’s burst of War-of-1812 boosterism was sparked by Stephen Harper, who was prime minister at the time. I wonder what Harper thought about the passage in his successor Mark Carney’s much-discussed new Youtube video, in which Carney picks up a General Brock figurine from his desk.

“It was given to me by Mike Myers just over a year ago,” Carney says. “And this is general Isaac Brock. Brock was a hero who fought and gave his life for our forebears in the War of 1812. Before Canada even existed on paper, it had a shape in Brock’s imagination. Faced with the threat of an American invasion, Brock built alliances across our land, and inspired what would eventually become Canada. Others carried that effort forward — people like General de Salaberry, citizens like the Voltigeurs who defended Châteauguay and Indigenous heroes such as Chief Tecumseh.”

When Harper was saying nearly identical things as prime minister, of course, several observers sternly criticized his 1812 romanticism. In Policy Options, Georgian College’s Scott Staring wrote that these odes to redcoats were “usually inspired by romantic ideals that are at best inchoate, and at worst tip over into a confused and destructive opposition to what exists.” He accused Harper of “undoing decades of diplomatic tradition that have become part of the very fabric of Canada’s identity.”

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What’s going to happen on Parliamentary committees, where the Liberals haven’t commanded a majority and where most committee chairs weren’t Liberals — and still aren’t? What happened with Marilyn Gladu? (Garry has an anecdote.) What will happen in the Senate? What’s going on in Pierre Poilievre’s head, and in the Conservative Party more broadly? Will Avi Lewis change everything, or for that matter, anything?

Of course most of our answers contain an element of speculation. That’s half the fun. Thanks to our panelists for joining, and to you for watching. Have a great weekend.

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1. Putting in the reps

Saturday will mark the fourth anniversary of the Paul Wells newsletter. This is the 491st post. I’ve sent out 131 posts in the past year, compared to 132 in the previous year. On average I send you a little more than two posts a week, a rate I don’t enforce against myself but one that’s hardly changed since I launched.

After three years of exhilarating growth, subscriptions have levelled out. I now have 40,446 total subscribers, up about 4% from a year ago. Paid subscribers, always a subset of the bigger number, are actually down 10% year-on-year. But if I take a longer view, I see paid subscriptions are still 15% higher than two years ago, so I’m happy. Last year we were in the home stretch of a federal election campaign that goosed demand for this political newsletter, but not all of that demand lasted. There are a few other drags on discoverability that are just part of life these days: general Substack saturation, the collapse of Twitter and Facebook as referral tools, and the way AI search produces answers without links. Given all that, I’m hearing that a number of long-time Substacks have seen growth level out.

I also took my podcast out of regular production. That’s probably had some effect on audience growth. I still wonder whether that was the correct decision. A lot would be involved in reversing it, so I still have some thinking to do.

The biggest new development was my decision to take my year-end Holiday Shows on the road with the first Road Show in Vancouver. We’re actively planning for Road Shows in two other cities this year, before the next Holiday Show in Ottawa. Stay tuned. I will always give paying subscribers a chance to buy tickets before the general public. These events have generated real interest from excellent sponsors — have I mentioned Cameco and Netflix and the Canadian Bankers Association lately? — and some potential new sponsors. That allows me to stage events of consistently high quality, and to pay properly for good work. Above all, audiences get these events when they’re lucky enough to get tickets. The celebratory tone, the serious and festive and weird all tossed together. The reminder that there can be third places, away from work and home, where a community can become more of a community. I won’t let these Road Shows become so frequent that they detract from my other work, but I’ve come to believe they’re an important part of what we’re all building here.

This year the work felt a little more like work. There’s less novelty in the form itself, and I’ve been noticing some of the limitations. My own imperfections as a journalist, sometimes. The constant ceiling of simple awareness: When I meet somebody who says, “I loved your work at [the National Post] or [the Toronto Star] or [a magazine]. What are you up to these days?” That’s a potential reader who doesn’t know they can still read me. There are always too many of those. That’s why I always mean it when I say the best thing you can do to help me is to tell friends, or if you work in traditional or new media, your audiences.

So it’s work. But I am comfortable with honourable work and grateful for the chance to do it. I feel like I’m still figuring a lot of this stuff out. I intend to stay at it for the foreseeable future, and then, since these days the foreseeable future rarely extends past lunch, well into the unforeseeable future.

When I launched this newsletter some people assumed I was rebelling against journalism as it’s long been practiced. I’ve never felt that way. My model is the humility, care and clarion voice that I’ve always seen and heard in the work of the best journalists. I spent part of the year reading old Norman Webster columns and marveling at how well it was possible to write for the Globe and Mail in 1976. I get schooled every day by Ashley Burke, Stephanie Levitz, Mark Ramzy, Matt Gurney, Jen Gerson, Hélène Buzzetti and so many others. I miss John Griffin. I’m proud to do some version of what they do. I try to live up to the best ideals of the craft. I’m grateful for your help and interest.

2. Calls to action

Tell your friends. Here’s the Share button, but even better than Sharing my work electronically is using my name in a conversation with somebody you care about.

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If you read this newsletter, consider paying for it. At $8 a month or $80 a year, it’s the cost of buying me a fancy coffee every month.

In particular, if a bunch of people in your office routinely share my work, come on. This is my job. I do this for a living.

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A few subscribers choose to become “next-level subscribers” and pay more than the basic subscription rate. That’s tremendously encouragaing. You can do that on this page, which is also the page you can use to send gift subscriptions.

If you can’t afford a subscription, send me a note saying so, by hitting “reply” to any post you receive from me by email. There is no need to provide details. I’ll give you a free subscription to tide you over.

And if you simply prefer to remain a free subscriber, thank you for that. Some of my work will always be free, because I’m always grateful for anyone’s attention in a busy world.

3. Cue the theme music

Here are some of the posts I’m proudest of, published since the New Year. Send these to friends who might be curious.

A profile of Transport Minister Steven MacKinnon. Interviews with Pierre Poilievre, Danielle Smith and Stéphane Dion. Thoughts on Stephen Harper’s legacy, and on his piano. An essay about the overdue and tentative return of talking to our politics. Fresh tea from the Senate. Mark Lepage on Khn and Klek de Poitrine.

I used to think my career was slowing down. It’s sped up. I used to think the range of the possible was contracting. It’s expanded. I owe all of that to you and I will never forget it. Thank you all. Onward.