Last week Mark Carney joined the premiers in Charlottetown for their annual conference and joined them for the closing news conference. Topic included Donald Trump; and assorted variations on Donald Trump (Carney’s three tries at explaining who was paying for the Gordie Howe Bridge, for instance).

Many of the questions were about what the prime minister will do if the US president implements his latest threatened tariffs. One reporter, Global’s David Akin, asked a two-parter: how Carney would respond to new tariffs; but also how he could trust any deal to avoid tariffs — or any other CUSMA-reaffirming trade arrangement — given how lightly Trump takes his own word.

On responding to eventual tariffs, Carney said: “There’s a full range of things we can do in that regard.” He added: “It’s important to know what your options are.” He wouldn’t say what the full range might entail, but he did drop a big hint. “We are united in direction and objective and purpose and seriousness about the response. We are going to support Canadian families, workers, businesses, full stop.”

On whether to trust a deal with Trump, Carney used the Greek rhetorical device of epistrophe, which I never thought I’d get a chance to write about: “I have to be convinced. We have to be convinced. The team has to be convinced, the premiers have to be convinced, that an agreement is worth the paper it is printed on. At the core of that is that the agreement recognizes the benefits — the very, very many benefits — that trade with Canada brings, not just to Canadians but to Americans.”

What would this trade-benefit-recognizing language look like? “We will know it when we see it,” Carney said. “You know, we go in from Missouri, to use an American expression.”

Missouri is sometimes called the Show Me State. Carney was saying, bring me your proposed language and I’ll tell you whether it’s good enough.

“And final point,” he said. “There are other things we could have done in the intervening time that we didn't do — in agreements — perhaps because of the nature of your question.”

I can’t know for sure what the Prime Minister meant by all of this. I hope to ask him. But meanwhile let’s dig out the ol’ parsing stick and work our way through it.

That last bit — “There are other things we could have done… that we didn’t” — sounds like in the past year, the Americans offered some kind of “agreement,” even more than one, that didn’t persuade Carney. In his capacity as, well, Missouri, he sent the talkers packing. Or that’s the claim.

What sort of agreement would have persuaded him? Apparently one whose text “recognizes the benefits” of trade. I’m really not sure what to make of this.

That’s because the text of the last agreement recognized the benefits of trade at great length.

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Faithful subscribers will recall that I did this last year, and that it was tremendous fun:

The rules are simple. Three guests, plus your host. Two rounds: Each panelist discusses a book they’re reading this summer, then each panelist discusses a book that comes to mind when we think of all the reading we’ve ever done in all our summers. I made a point of encouraging the panelists not to try to come up with the perfect book, or a book that will necessarily improve humanity. Good reading is its own reward. You’ll find the four of us still came up with an impressive variety of choices.

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Last year, off the top of my head, I invited The Globe and Mail’s Ottawa feature writer Shannon Proudfoot, who of course is an old friend from the days when we both worked at a magazine; acclaimed singer-songwriter Donovan Woods; and Curse of Politics regular Scott Reid.

This year, now that I have some precedent for the exercise, I figured the formula had to be: somebody from Sarnia; an unusually bookish politico; and Shannon Proudfoot. So this year’s Summer Book Club panelists are:

Susan Chamberlain, owner since 2001 of Sarnia’s leading independent bookstore, The Book Keeper;

John Delacourt, a senior vice president at Counsel Public Affairs, whose sixth novel, The Innocent Canadian, was published in April;

And Shannon Proudfoot.

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To help you keep track, here are the books we discussed:

Opioids and Organs by Arizona O’Neill;

London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe;

Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician by Christoph Wolff;

Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman;

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara;

The Aubrey McKee trilogy of novels by Alex Pugsley;

Young Men and Fire by Norman Maclean;

Atonement by Ian McEwan.

If you prefer to watch this episode on video rather than listen on the podcast feed, I’ve got you covered. Here you go, from my YouTube channel. Hit Like and Subscribe if you want access to all my video content:

Let me know what you think of this unusual episode. And if you like, drop some thoughts in the comments about a book you’re reading now or a summer book you recall fondly. I’m quite sure this won’t be the last time we convene a book club for this show.

Thanks for reading, listening, subscribing and sharing. And thanks, especially, to the other members of this year’s Summer Reading Club.

Like most journalists I came up local: Student council, city hall, bigger city hall, Parliament. I didn’t do much journalism outside Canada for a long time, mostly because there seemed no way in, but also because global affairs felt like the preserve of superbly educated people who understood the world’s exquisite subtleties.

When I started covering international relations more frequently I began to realize that people who specialize in global affairs — decision-makers, journalists, academics — aren’t necessarily finer thinkers, just because their theatre is bigger and its stakes are higher.

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Partly this is because it’s just as easy to fake it, to surf, to bullshit at the highest levels as it is at the corner store. In fact it may be easier. You’ll be recognized the next time you poke your head into the corner store, and reminded of what you got wrong yesterday. Whereas you could flit forever from one visiting fellowship to the next without being reminded that you were wrong on Iraq or Brexit or whether Trump would make it. The food is usually better too.

Secondly, international relations is a bluffer’s game because the way the world works can’t be known: it’s a too-complex system with too many variables. Even brilliant thinkers and conscientious students can’t get everything right, or even most things. The too-easy belief that we understand things is what cognitive psychologists call the Illusion of Explanatory Depth and, I think, what Hayek called the pretense of knowledge.

The more time I spent in drawing rooms and trouble spots, the more I found people who didn’t have the faintest idea what would happen next. I come bearing anecdotes.

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Why do you rob banks, a reporter once asked Willie Sutton, a prominent bank robber. “Because that’s where the money is,” Sutton replied. And so to Jeddah, on the banks of the Red Sea, where Mark Carney spent Thursday holding meetings with the people in Saudi Arabia who know where the money is.

The PM’s first meeting was with Bandar al-Khorayef, the Saudi Minister of Industry and Mineral Resources; and Bob Wilt, CEO of Ma’aden, the Saudi-owned mining company with a market capitalization of a quarter of a trillion dollars.

Next meeting: Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, Minister of Energy; and Amin H. Nasser, President and CEO of Saudi Aramco. Aramco is the country’s national oil company. Its market cap is $6.5 trillion, or about 26 times as big as Ma’aden. Prince Abdulaziz is the first member of the House of Saud to be his country’s energy minister.

Carney’s third meeting was with Fahad bin Abduljalil Al-Saif, who became the country’s Minister of Investment after a long career making decisions about titanic amounts of money; Yasir Al-Rumayyan, who runs the Public Investment Fund (PIF), which is like what Quebec’s Caisse de dépôt would be if the Caisse was fuelled by the wealth of Saudi Arabia; and Tariq Amin, CEO of HUMAIN, the “full-stack AI ecosystem” launched by PIF with $100 billion two weeks after the Carney Liberals won re-election last year.

Then Carney had a late lunch with the Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman. The Crown Prince, essentially the head of the Saudi government, thinks big. His Vision 2030 project is a trillion-dollar plan to diversify the Kingdom from an oil monoculture to a do-everything society of the future. It started big and ran straight into some speed bumps — cost overruns, a decline in oil revenues, expropriation hassles. All the same, that’s a trillion dollars on the table, and any government looking for money has to come through today’s Saudi Arabia.

There are downsides. One needs no civil-rights monitor more sophisticated than the government’s own standing travel advisory for Saudi Arabia, which warns of lengthy jail terms for simply “liking” tweets that are seen to mock the Saudi regime.

Why come? Carney’s answer was a little longer than Willie Sutton’s. “Engagement is not endorsement,” he said. “So engaging with a country doesn’t mean that we agree with everything that the country is doing. In fact, I can’t think of a country on the planet that we agree with everything that they do… We don’t even agree with everything that’s happening in Canada.”

Second, Carney mentioned the need to diversify Canada’s investments and partnerships, having become “over-reliant” on the US. Third, the need to improve relationships with influential regional players on files important to Canada. In the Middle East, those include Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

“That doesn't mean that they have the key to unlock things. But not being engaged? Not talking to them? I’m the first prime minister to come here in 25 years. I was the first prime minister to speak to President Erdoğan in over a decade — speak to him.” (The last PM to visit Jeddah was Jean Chrétien, and he got lousy reviews, though mainly for gaffes he committed before he got to Saudi Arabia.)

I asked Carney about all the obstacles the Saudis’ Vision 2030 has run into. Should any of that be a warning to Canada? The PM wasn’t buying my memento mori. The IMF just forecast 5.5% growth for the Saudi economy, said Carney, who’s just spent a month arguing on which side of zero Canadian growth lies. Oil has gone from 75% of government revenues to below 50%. Tourism has gone from near zero to 150 million visitors a year in the last six years.

How to avoid trouble? “Track what you’re trying to accomplish. Have KPIs, key performance indicators. Make course directions when necessary. Cut your losses if something isn’t working. That’s always good advice.” I mean, it was practically his Liberal leadership philosophy.

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Carney had just announced that the Saudi PIF will attend his Canada Investment Summit in Toronto in September, an event that will be central to the government’s attempt to pitch Canada as a global investment destination. I pointed out that Justin Trudeau hosted an investment summit in Toronto 10 years ago, without notable result, and that Carney himself had advised the current UK government on attracting investment two years ago. How to get better results now than they did?

The PM rummaged around a bit, looking for an answer. Eventually he said part of the strategy should be to obviously have a strategy. “This isn’t just flavor of the month. It’s something you’re going to build out over over time. You’ve got a big market. You’ve got the rule of law. You’ve got smart people, you’ve got an ambitious country, and you’re connected to the world.”

What’s bracing, if not unnerving, about asking the world to take a bet on Canada is that ultimately it will be the world’s decision. Sooner or later everyone visits Jeddah, even a Canadian prime minister. They all make a pitch. Carney’s visit generated a lot of interest this week in Jeddah. Soon we will see how many zeros come at the end of that.

The wide streets of Ankara are empty and silent this week. Not most of them, I’m sure, but certainly the ones carrying official vehicles to and from the various activities of the NATO heads-of-government summit. Broad boulevards, freshly paved, are closed to most traffic. Just about everyone on the streets I saw were uniformed police. Most seemed bored.

Distractions are unwelcome this week in Turkey’s capital. So, this being Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s town, they aren’t permitted.

Donald Trump has said he only came to this summit because Erdoğan, who’s been a kindred spirit, is the host. He marked his visit by dropping sanctions he put in place against Turkey in 2020 for buying Russian surface-to-air missiles. He said he might sell Turkey F-35 fighters. But this isn’t just a Trump thing. Mark Carney had a meeting with the Turkish president too on Tuesday. There’s a general sense here that, despite the Erdoğan regime’s continuing contempt for pluralism and free speech, Turkey pulls considerably more than its weight in NATO. And NATO could use the help.

At the summit’s Defence Industry Forum, the alliance’s secretary general, Mark Rutte, said this year’s meeting is about “delivering results.” NATO member countries and big defense suppliers are signing contracts “worth billions, literally billions of dollars,” Rutte said. Finland is joining a multinational consortium to buy Airbus refuelling planes. Seven other countries are going in together on heavy-lift transport planes, also from Airbus. Swedish Saab GlobalEye aircraft will replace aging Boeing airborne surveillance planes across Europe after Canada selected the same plane in May. Still another group is buying up to five high-altitude, long-range drones — this time from Northrup Grumman.

Refuelling, heavy lift, airborne theatre surveillance: this is unglamorous but indispensable work, and for most of NATO’s history the Americans delivered almost all of it. Rutte kept calling these new capabilities “made in NATO.” They kind of have to be: the US is reducing its presence in Europe. Last week the alliance’s top commander, US Air Force Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, said NATO has replaced most of the capability the U.S. withdrew earlier this year. But more burden-shifting, to use a voguish and genteel term, could be on the way. The Americans are conducting a longer-term review of their force levels in Europe. The Trump administration’s standard tone for talking about the old continent is exasperation.

Trump arrived in Ankara stewing about allies’ reluctance to join his attack on Iran. “Why are we spending hundreds of billions of dollars, and they’re not there for us?” he said. “We’ve always been there for them.”

On Wednesday morning, Mark Carney spoke to reporters on his way into the summit’s main plenary session. I asked him: Is there a mismatch between Alliance leaders who want to talk about what NATO can do, and a US President who’s fixated on what NATO won’t do?

“The alliances is a defensive alliance,” Carney replied, restating something that’s true, worth repeating, and consistently uninteresting to Donald Trump. “It’s important… that we put ourselves in a position where we can defend our citizens. That robust defense has to be highly highly credible to deter attacks and prevent the type of suffering we’re seeing in Ukraine.

“Yes, the president of the United States had a desire for more offensive support with respect to the Iran conflict. And it wasn’t a direct ask of Canada. We didn’t have the capabilities, we’re not relevant from a base perspective in that theater. And that’s between him and specific NATO allies.”

Translation: if Trump is angry at Germany, France, Italy or the Brits over Iran, he should take it up with them, rather than blaming the military alliance at which he keeps running into the leaders of Germany, France, Italy and Great Britain. Sure, but perhaps it’s unsurprising that such distinctions sound to Trump like so much nitpicking.

I ran into an acquaintance from NATO’s administration who grumbled that the focus of these meetings is always on Trump’s mood. A Europe-plus-Canada that can handle the sort of big logistics that Rutte announced is “kind of post-Trump,” this person said gamely. Maybe. But if Trump’s mood leads him to write NATO off as an alliance in defence of decadence, as he seems constantly on the verge of doing, NATO might wind up being a lot more post-Trump than it counted on.

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Back home, citizens will also have questions about what their governments are buying with their suddenly soaring defence budgets. Not in terms of capability but of purpose. All the questions Carney faces — about whether he’s taking the sign out of the window or Making America Great Again — are amplified in a world of lethal force with nine zeroes at the end of all the numbers.

He told reporters the fall budget will answer some of the fiscal questions. “We will lay out, in the budget, an update with the decisions we’re taking, where the fiscal track is with the defense spending, how we’re spending the one and a half percent on defense-related expenditures, resilience expenditures,” he said. “And that’s the right time to do it.” He argued that Canada is overdue to shoulder its responsibilities. “We’ve got 15% of the world’s coastline. Arctic security is not a ‘flank.’”

I’m a big advocate of much of this security spending, and have been for some time. But as the numbers get bigger, the questions about the point of it all will grow apace.

Reporters travelling with Prime Minister Mark Carney on this week’s trip to the NATO Summit in Ankara and to Saudi Arabia to scare up investment dollars were told the details of Carney’s Halifax announcement along the way. To get it all, we had to sign forms saying we wouldn’t make the information public before the PM started speaking in Halifax. But the suspense was limited, because The Globe had it all this morning.

The PM has spoken, so now it can be (re-)revealed: Canada is getting the 212CD sub from Germany’s Thyssenkrupp Marine Systems (TKMS). Look, it’s on Youtube:

I mean, Canada is probably getting the 212CD. Perhaps as many as 12 of them. Or, alternatively, not. Much remains up in air.

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TKMS is, as of today, designated as the “Preferred Supplier” for Canada’s largest-ever procurement project, which the Globe puts between $20 and $80 billion, depending how you count it. Carney’s office isn’t naming any price, citing the sensitivity of intense negotiations with a large private company that, in a formal sense, only began today. If those negotiations go kaput, which I’m told is a German word, Canada retains the right to call the South Korean sub-maker Hanwha off the bench and designate it as the new Preferred Supplier. We may yet hear more from Peter Mansbridge.

But the planning assumption, and all of the effort with a goal to signing purchase contracts by the end of next year, is that it’ll be the Germans. Or really, the Germans and Norwegians, who designed the 212CD together and plan to have six each in a decade, compared to Canada’s up-to-12 (the final number, like everything else, is subject to commercial negotiation). More subs for Canada because Canada has more coastline and territorial water to navigate. Surely this was part of the appeal: While Canada’s navy must operate anywhere in the world, much of its attention will be in the North Atlantic, as Anita Anand keeps saying. It must have been alluring for Canada’s fleet to be part of a 24-sub fleet (up to 24) shared with countries that know these waters and their threats.

Carney, and his staff speaking on a not-for-attribution basis before he spoke, were careful to sing the praises of the Korean bid. But Carney emphasized the importance of neighbourhood and neighbours: The TKMS sub “is optimised for Arctic waters and fully NATO interoperable,” and “used widely by our allies,” and “will operate seamlessly alongside our NATO partners.”

The Germans and Norwegians have each agreed to wait longer for delivery of a sub, so Canada can get four by 2034. (The 212CD is so bleeding-edge that none has sailed yet; the plan is for the first to go into the water under German colours next year.)

Part of the extended preliminary courtship for this was a series of extravagant promises that the subs, while designed on the other side of the Atlantic, will generate countless jobs on this side. “Well over a hundred thousand well-paying jobs,” Carney said in Halifax. I’ve never known how to judge such claims, but I’ve never heard a prime minister or aspiring prime minister who argued for off-the-rack procurement. Instead we get an elaborate Industrial and Technical Benefits policy.

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Almost everything — the total number of boats Canada will buy, the cost, the distribution of the 100,000-odd jobs Carney promises — remains to be seen. The future is a complex place. Which led to one of my questions.

Carney said, “The nature of warfare is changing rapidly, driven by the proliferation of drones, autonomous systems, and hypersonic missiles.” I asked a PMO official: In a decade, will Canada need 12 subs or 500 submersible drone platforms? Maybe both, the official said. The revolution in military doctrine will continue, and Canada will try to stay on top of that, but submarines are good for asserting maritime sovereignty and underwater mapping and lots of other useful stuff. That’s “not necessarily mutually incompatible” with the platforms of the future, currently getting wave after wave of sneak previews in Ukraine.

I claim no certainty about what the future holds. But that’s how the first day went on Carney’s trip to Ankara and Saudi Arabia. I’m able to travel with him because enough of you pay for your subscriptions to give me a travel budget. I am always grateful for your support.

[Previously: The Longing, Oct. 17, 2025]

The House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance, FINA for short, seems better integrated into the budget-making process this year than it did last year, when a new prime minister and a late-spring election jumbled things up.

Committee chair Karina Gould (Liberal, Burlington) announced pre-budget consultations in March with an April 30 deadline for submissions from interested groups. That’s three months earlier than last year. The committee finished hearing from witnesses just before the House rose for the summer, in mid-June. The finance minister, François-Philippe Champagne, will start his own, separate consultations this coming Monday. Last year he was holding his consultations while the committee was holding its consultations, and it was all a shambles.

The public life of Canada is an endless, constant asking. The committee consults, the minister consults, but meanwhile there is lobbying every day, scrupulously logged. The lobbying meetings are, surely, the biggest influence on government, but the public consultations are useful in a belts-and-suspenders way. If nothing else, they help groups refine their pitch for future lobbying meetings, and the message they want to send the public year-round.

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I wrote above that “interested groups” were invited to tell MPs what they want in the budget. But on the question of how the government should spend half a trillion dollars, there is no uninterested group. I’ve taken to counting written briefs submitted to FINA each year for their consultations. The number keeps growing.

(FINA held two rounds of consultations ahead of the 2025 budget: First for a spring budget that Chrystia Freeland never got to deliver on Justin Trudeau’s behalf, and then for a fall budget that Champagne delivered for Mark Carney. The effect of this false start seems to have been to put the nation’s budget-asking groups on a hair trigger, and this year the number of written submissions is 30% higher than ever before.)

I’m told that the FINA consultations are not meaningless: after the automatic spending and the stuff that was announced in previous years’ budgets, after all the things a government thinks to do in a year, there’s always a little room left over for stuff that outside groups requested. What makes the cut? It’s a mix of things that make sense, things a government can point to as proof of its humanity, and random chance. Your pre-budget brief is a lottery ticket.

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As part of its consultations, FINA hears witnesses in person, in waves, during the committee’s regular meetings over several weeks. Witnesses do what they can with the available time. “I'm here to tell you that food infrastructure is not boring,” Aaron Vansintjan from Food Secure Canada gamely told the FINA MPs. “In fact, it is a matter of national priority. We need a serious countrywide build-out.” How serious? “We need you to expand the local food infrastructure fund from $20 million per year to—watch out—$500 million per year,” he said. There is an element of cutting to the chase in these meetings that’s refreshing.

But even with everyone on their best behaviour — a five-minute cap on any group’s introductory remarks, surprisingly pertinent questions from MPs — the committee could only hear 90 witnesses this year. Most of the asking comes in the written submissions. The committee published over 80 of the briefs it received on Friday, July 3 alone, 80 in a single day. Here’s what’s in some of them.

• The Canadian Association of Importers and Exporters — which is basically every company in Canada that trades — can’t believe how outdated the IT at the borders is. “These legacy systems are increasingly unable to handle current transaction volumes, particularly with the rapid growth in e-commerce shipments,” which basically means packages from Amazon and Shopify. “System slowdowns and outages have caused delays at ports of entry, including congestion affecting truck, rail, and passenger traffic.” They’d like quicker tariff relief too. “Failure to act leaves Canadian exporters subsidizing the cost of a trade dispute that is not of their making.” So here’s one surprise: the country’s exporters and importers are less worried about trade policy than about the mechanics of customs work at border crossings.

• Canola farmers thought they knew where trouble was coming from: Trump tariffs and Chinese tariffs. They weren’t counting on the Strait of Hormuz to become congested. “The impacts of the conflict in the Strait of Hormuz on the costs of diesel fuel and fertilizer are estimated to increase the cost of producing a crop by 15-20%,” the Canadian Canola Growers Association writes. They’d like a Buy North America requirement for biofuel production, to enlarge the domestic market for their product. They also want the Carney government to “uphold the swift renewal of CUSMA” — even as the feds “make continued progress with China.” Which sounds like a tricky bank shot.

• There is, I discover, something called Climate Caucus, which isn’t that group of Liberal MPs who miss Justin Trudeau but is, instead, an association of municipal officials who are trying to adapt to climate change. Here are their recommendations in total:

Not a word on carbon pricing. That ship would seem to have sailed. These local officials want new buildings designed and built to handle hotter temperatures and heavier rainfall. Note, in particular, that second recommendation: they’re worried about AI data centres, which they view as secretive water and electricity hogs, rather than as outposts of any sort of benevolent future.

• The Fruit and Vegetable Growers of Canada wishes farms didn’t have to post job openings for agricultural labour on the federal Job Bank. Apparently it slows hiring down, because of minimal posting requirements, and it leads to a flood of applications from people who don’t know much about farm work.

• The International Air Transport Association, the global club of airlines, has mixed feelings about Canadian airports. I’m going to pause here to quote from their brief at some length, because I’m not sure what to make of it.

On one hand, IATA thinks our airports are pointlessly overpriced. “Canada is widely recognized as one of the highest-cost aviation markets globally,” IATA’s pre-budget brief states, “driven by the cumulative impact of airport charges, security charges, and air navigation fees, as well as regulatory costs, including those associated with APPR” — the Air Passenger Protection Regulations. “This high-cost structure directly translates into higher ticket prices, lower demand, and reduced connectivity.”

So: Cut regulations to cut costs? Privatize airports? Not so fast, IATA says!

“International experience demonstrates that strong economic regulation and safeguards must be implemented before changing the ownership or financing model of airports or air navigation providers. A private monopolistic airport operator will focus on maximizing returns, but without any competition the benefits to the State or consumers risk being offset by even higher costs and less affordable aviation infrastructure. This ultimately translates into higher airfares, reduced demand, and diminished connectivity, directly impacting the broader economy.

“We point notably to the cases of Australia, where ‘light touch’ regulation along with privatization has led to poor outcomes for consumers and unchecked record profits for monopoly shareholders. Another example is Portugal, where record returns for shareholders accompany catastrophic service quality levels.”

So: Cut regulation, but not too much. Chaos lies on either side of that sweet spot. Best of luck to you, whoever pulls the IATA brief out of the pile of 1,231 other pre-budget submissions!

• The Directors Guild of Canada wants CBC funding indexed to inflation and population growth and “protected from short-term political and ideological shifts,” and hints strongly that in an ideal world, CBC funding would more than double. The nation’s TV and film directors would also like an AI policy based on “consent, compensation and credit”: nobody’s work should train AI without explicit consent, paid through licensing, and acknowledged in the final product. “These principles are not aspirational,” the directors write in bold-face. “They are the minimum standard required to protect Canadian creative workers from exploitation as this technology scales.” This would indeed be nice, I think, in the sure knowledge that my own work has been strip-mined by robots.

• The Greater Vancouver Board of Trade offers 12 recommendations, which is a lot, but the first is poignant: “That the government accelerate and modernize procurement processes to reduce delays and improve transparency and predictability for industry.” This amounts to hoping that the entire economy would be treated the way a few designated teacher’s-pet Major Projects are treated: in ways that aren’t confusing, frustrating and incomprehensible for companies that are just trying to sell a project or service. This is like the importers and exporters who wish they didn’t have to lose days of transport waiting for the software to work. We talk a lot about policy in this country and less about execution. The people on the ground are very worried about execution.

• There’s a brief from a group called Results Canada. I learn that the result they have in mind is ending extreme poverty worldwide. It would be hard to find stronger currents to row against: countries are cutting foreign aid all over, spectacularly in the US and Britain, but also in Canada. The Results Canada submission largely warns against further retreat.

That’s eight pre-budget submissions. Follow along for the next 153 consecutive days while I work through the rest of the pile. Just kidding. It’s reckless to generalize from a highly unrepresentative sample, so here we go: a lot of these groups sound like they can barely get a handle on today and they’re worried about tomorrow. We all have that much in common.

[Previously: Festival International de Jazz de Montréal 2025: Binney: A Montreal Story. Festival International de Jazz de Montréal 2024: The Beauty of Dissolving Portraits. And my coverage of the 2022 festival for the Globe and Mail

I’m self-conscious about giving you two music posts in a week. I’ll be off to Ankara next week to cover Mark Carney’s trip to the NATO summit, so hang tight, there’s politics coming. Meanwhile, telling you about this festival is a summer tradition for me.]

1. Cécile

Near the end of Cécile McLorin Salvant’s concert at Théâtre Maisonneuve on Friday night, the band cleared the stage and the house lights came up. Three members of the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal’s administration, including programming director Maurin Auxéméry, came onstage to announce that Salvant, a triple Grammy winner, was the winner of the festival’s in-house Prix Ella Fitzgerald.

The award has gone to 25 more or less randomly-selected singers since 1999, usually distinguished, sometimes less so. There is no formal selection process. It’s a prize with a healthy sense of its own modest significance. Who’s in town? Have they won before? All righty. Salvant, the Miami-born daughter of a Haitian doctor and a French schoolteacher, accepted the prize with a gracious smile, deposited the bouquet she’d been handed inside the cabinet of her bandmate Sullivan Fortner’s grand piano, and counted in the next song without further comment. It was an elegant way to assert priorities: prizes are nice but music is its own reward.

This was the fourth time I’ve heard Salvant in public since 2022. I’m increasingly fascinated by the gap between her material and the way audiences respond to it. Her influences and impulses range far from jazz, embracing contemporary theatre, French chanson and the music of assorted Caribbean diasporas. (Also electronic keyboards, although honestly their use feels perfunctory.) Saturday’s concert included a faithful cover of Donna Summer’s 1977 disco hit “I Feel Love” and closed with incidental music Harrison Birtwistle wrote for a Tony Harrison adaptation of Aeschylus’s Oresteia. In between she covered “The Trolley Song” from Meet Me In St. Louis (1944) and “Le monde est stone” from Starmania (1978). Her vocals are sometimes girlish or grotesque, in keeping with the dramatic demands of a song or a single phrase. At other times she soars like a popular-song star from an earlier epoch. She’s like Nancy Wilson divided by Laurie Anderson, or rather like the two multiplied together. Her concerts are work, but they also reward it. I’m not surprised to hear from friends who aren’t persuaded by her albums. Visual cues help. You really have to be there.

Which brings me to the audiences. Hers are slowly getting bigger. Théatre Maisonneuve’s seating capacity is 1,450, three-quarters larger than the hall she played at during the 2022 festival. What’s striking is that Salvant’s audiences are reliably ecstatic by the end of the night, stomping and shouting their approval after what would be displays of bookish eclecticism if Salvant didn’t bring such conviction and joy to her work. I see that she’s 36, which means she was born six weeks after I covered my first Montreal jazz festival in 1989. I’ve heard so many great musicians at that festival. Benny Carter, Tony Bennett, Geri Allen. Different kinds of musicians, Paul Bley, George Benson. If I keep coming back, it’s because once or twice a year, if I’m lucky, I get to hear another musician at that level. Salvant is at that level.

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2. Sullivan

So, arguably, is her piano player and partner, Sullivan Fortner. Increasingly he has had to learn how to juggle a solo career with his work in Salvant’s band. The impetus for his higher profile was, of all things, a 2023 social-media post by a leading pianist of the immediately preceding generation, Brad Mehldau. Mehldau raved about Fortner’s abilities on X, Facebook and Instagram (“He just blows me away”), and generated a market for Fortner as a headliner.

He played solo on Thursday night at Le Gesù, a decommissioned church that since the 1990s has wrapped audiences tightly around the stage for the “Jazz dans la nuit” late-night concert series. Fortner came out at 10:30 p.m., toting a tea cup and his smartphone, and grumbled cheerfully about the late hour. He has a vast repertoire, from classic jazz of the 1930s to a broad range of recent compositions by other musicians. He brought no prepared set list. Introducing the tunes later, he often struggled to recall what he had just played.

He’s from New Orleans and he keeps a steady left-hand pulse going, but he had a lot of other teachers in other places. (Here’s a good interview about that.) In his hands the material is refracted and provisional. He often plays in three or four registers simultaneously, jumping back and forth between the ends of the keyboard and the middle in ways that resemble stride, Bach and Chopin. He’s one of the busiest pianists I know, not because he’s showing off but because each tune seems to trigger so many associations. Playing the Thelonious Monk ballad “Ugly Beauty,” an audience request, he interpolated bits of a half-dozen other Monk tunes. The title of his next album will be Leave That In There, a reference to his amiable maximalism.

I thought maybe he liked this piano, a Kawai grand, because a lot of what he played was tunes by pianists. But the next night in a different room he was on a Steinway, so he seems content to leave that to chance too. Near the end of the Gesù concert he played “Place St. Henri” from Oscar Peterson’s Canadiana Suite. He needed the first uptempo chorus to remind himself how the tune goes and he briefly sounded like hell, but once he locked it in all was well. You get the impression he enjoys going to his concerts to find out what Sullivan Fortner will play.

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3. Skylar

Skylar Tang is 20, a trumpet player from San Francisco. She’s studying at Columbia University and The Juilliard School. She brought three other Juilliard students to the Molson Pub, a free no-tickets-needed aluminum-frame tent on the festival grounds. She’s been climbing the student-competition ladder available to promising kids (Here she is in crocs at 16, leading distinguished older colleagues in one of her compositions). I’m told her first album is ready for release, but most of the people who heard her on Thursday night cannot have heard of her before. Much of the attendance at these free concerts is just Brownian motion. I suspect many made a mental note to hear her again if she returns, as seems likely.

The Bay Area’s cloud of diffuse musical influences includes Tang’s mentor Joshua Redman, the Fillmore West, and Los Angeles’s Laurel Canyon songwriters including Joni Mitchell. At Juilliard Tang strip-mined the practice rooms for kindred spirits. There’s Woody Shaw and Keith Jarrett in her reference bag, a pentatonic yearning that isn’t stodgy. She’s an agile trumpeter who rarely just shows off, and the interest level didn’t flag when the focus shifted to her bandmates, drummer Ethan Oliver, pianist William Schwartzman and especially bassist John Murray, from San Diego. So this was an auspicious festival debut, and not just for Tang.

4. Jim and Chet

Saxophonist Chet Doxas is 46, his drummer brother Jim a little older, which means they’ve been familiar faces in Montreal’s little jazz community for more than half their lives. Chet lives with his family in Brooklyn. Jim mostly stays home in Montreal and teaches at McGill, though his association with the pianist Oliver Jones and Oscar Peterson’s family led him to play dozens of Peterson centennial concerts around the world last year.

They’ve recorded many albums with other musicians and two albums as The Doxas Brothers, roomy and abstract in the manner, again, of Keith Jarrett’s quartets. Their festival-opening showcase at the Studio TD was the sort of courtesy this global festival has often paid to local musicians, but in this case it was also just a wonderful concert.

They didn’t play much past a medium tempo, and if their music was often free, it was rarely dissonant. The brothers played two duets, just the two of them alone, a public version of an improvised dialogue that must have began in middle school or earlier. Even when bassist Walter Stinson and pianist Steve Amirault joined in, the band left plenty of space between notes. If music is about making what you play a function of what the other musicians are playing, there’s no band more musical than this.

I heard three other concerts that I won’t trouble you with here. I couldn’t get within a block of Angine de Poitrine, but the crowd they drew was like a special community trick that only Montreal knows how to pull off. I missed concerts by some of my favourite musicians, just because of scheduling. Je ne regrette rien. A festival devoted to listening is always a good idea.

At the bottom of this post, under a paywall, I’ll post a clean transcript of the script for Mark Carney’s second “Forward Guidance” video. Keen students will recall the first video under that rubric, from April, in which the prime minister contemplated a toy soldier and discussed the implications of living with the Americans even as his government seeks opportunity abroad.

I’ve posted the new video above. It’s more interesting than the first. It clearly distances Carney’s position on energy and the environment from Justin Trudeau’s. And it constitutes his first intervention in the Alberta secession referendum-referendum.

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It also lays on more history homework. In the first episode of Forward Guidance, we were asked to contemplate Sir Isaac Brock. Now it’s Adam Beck, the trailblazing Yardbirds guitarist who made Rod Stewart a star — no, wait, that’s Jeff Beck. Adam Beck founded Ontario Hydro. Here’s the encyclopedia entry from the great historian Viv Nelles, if you need to brush up. By damming the Niagara River at the dawn of the 20th century, Beck made public energy utilities a thing in Canada. In his video, Carney indulges a Heritage Minute tour of highlights, before taking a stark turn. The language he uses to describe the National Energy Program isn’t what people east of Manitoba are used to hearing from anyone wearing an Order of Canada pin:

“It hasn’t always been good news. I was a teenager in Edmonton when the National Energy Program was introduced, and I remember how Ottawa made Albertans feel like our resources weren’t our own. And then more recently, we were made to feel that our energy contributions were running against the tides of history. What should have brought us together began to divide us, contributing to a half century of politics that have too often pulled us apart. I’ve acted as Prime Minister, to the best of my abilities, to help put those divisions in the past by focusing on what we can build together for the future.”

This tracks. There’ll be as many skeptics in Alberta as in Ontario at the notion that this Harvard-and-Oxford man actually means to sell Alberta oil, and that he sees that intention specifically as a national-unity play, but it’s at least consistent with hints Carney’s been dropping.

At a meeting during the 2023 Calgary Stampede, a visiting Mark Carney surprised Alberta premier Danielle Smith by greeting not just her, but her two most senior advisors at the time, Marshall Smith and Rob Anderson, by name. That’s how closely he was following Alberta politics almost two years before he became PM.

At the unveiling of Stephen Harper’s official portrait in Ottawa five months ago, Carney said that while in office, Harper “spoke directly to Western Canada’s sense of contribution and responsibility, not as a region to be managed, but as a core pillar of the national project.” Add this to the pile of ways Carney’s career echos Harper’s: Harper moved from Leaside, ON to Edmonton in 1978, Carney left Edmonton to study at Harvard in 1983.

Alberta oil for unity? Yes, and for global security too, Carney says. “Nobody knows how long the global economy will rely on conventional energy, but while it does, as much of that energy as possible should come from Canada,” he says. That argument has come a long way since Ezra Levant made it in his 2011 book, Ethical Oil. And with that, I’ve written a paragraph that may actually make both Levant’s and Carney’s heads explode. Along with a few heads in my audience. It’s like the last reel of Mars Attacks out here.

I mean:

Here’s where Carney’s argument gets tricky, if not potentially Sorcerer’s-Apprentice-y. He’s still all for the “energy transition,” the term for the shift from a high-carbon economy to a low-carbon economy. Canada can “thrive in both eras,” he insists. But Justin Trudeau thought the advent of low-carbon could drive the disappearance of high-carbon: that the more wind and solar we had, the less oil and gas we’d need. Carney wants them to overlap — to make more of both kinds of energy, on the way to an Adam Beck future. And if a central Liberal shibboleth of the last decade has to be sacrificed, he’s just the man to do it.

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“We can’t afford to restrain the growth of an important part of our energy mix, oil and gas, to meet a short-term goal,” he says.

“I want to be clear on this point. The changes we have made will mean that our emissions will be higher in the next few years than they were projected to be under the previous government’s plan. But in my judgment, that plan was not sustainable over the long term. It would have been too expensive for Canadians…. It would have let down our partners…. And it would have been too divisive for our country.” Care to lay it on even thicker, big guy? You bet: in a world of Trump II, a belligerent Russia and a half-blocked Strait of Hormuz, a policy of driving carbon prices up and driving carbon exports down would have been “an open opportunity for those people who wish to pull Canada apart, both at home and from abroad.”

As I’ve written periodically, this is Bidenism, or rather, Hochsteinism. When Chrystia Freeland’s book comes out, I’m going to have a few quick tests for whether it’s worth reading. One will be whether she even begins to acknowledge the irony of sitting across the table at a “Canada-US Energy Transformation Task Force” from Amos Hochstein, Joe Biden’s top energy-security advisor, who defined “energy security” as “selling the absolute maximum amount of American oil and gas abroad.” It was like a hen sitting across from a fox for a Henhouse Security Task Force.

So Carney’s plan — more oil and gas for a greener future — has a robust intellectual heritage. Yet I still can’t help thinking, gee, that’s a rickety footbridge you’re heading toward, Doctor Jones. It’s true that the number of people who want to export more oil and gas is large, and the number of people who support renewable energy is large, but as a political matter I’m not sure you can just add them together. Do the oil and gas people understand their industry is supposed to fade away? Actually, they might, which is why Peter Nicholson says that while there might be a government-generated market for a new Carney-Smith pipeline, there’s no private-sector market for the oil sands development that would be needed to fill it with 1.2 million barrels of oil a day.

SAGE

A PIPELINE ISN'T A FIELD OF DREAMS: Before Canada builds another west coast pipeline, someone has to show where the new oil will come from

Peter Nicholson is a former Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy in the Office of the Prime Minister of Canada and currently serves as Chair of the Board of the Canadian Climate Institute…

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a month ago · 25 likes · 14 comments · Peter Nicholson

So the “and” Carney describes here isn’t necessarily more politically stable than Trudeau’s “or.” We’ll find out. Any prime minister needs some kind of energy policy, and as Justin Trudeau used to say, “No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and just leave them there.” Indeed, while Trudeau was prime minister, Canada didn’t. As Carney said in today’s video: “Canada is producing far more oil than we ever have. In fact, only two countries have increased oil production more than we have this century: the United States and Russia.”

The elements of Carney’s message are real. There’s going to be an energy transition no matter who’s in charge. And smart people often say they’d rather have Canadian oil and gas than almost anyone’s. But navigating those two currents will take immense skill and even more luck. There was once another prime minister who wanted to combine two potent forces, Quebec nationalism and western regionalism, to repair the errors of an earlier Trudeau. His name was Mulroney, and I bet he’d be fascinated to watch this year’s politics play out.

Below the paywall, for your reading pleasure, the text of Carney’s video script.

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Conducting symphony orchestras is an odd existence: Dozens of musicians on a stage, and the one they’re all watching doesn’t make a sound. That’s the conductor, guiding the others in tempo, tone and phrasing through vast compositions that sometimes last an hour. When the conductor also selects repertoire, leads hiring, and guides the whole organization’s musical philosophy, he’s called the music director. Alexander Shelley has been the music director of the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa for 11 years. Last week he conducted his last two subscription-season concerts in that role. On the program: Mahler’s monumental Second Symphony.1 Shelley will be back on July 1 and 2 to conduct two more concerts, and then we’ll see him less often in Canada.2

He’s 46. I volunteered on the search committee that selected him for the role in 2013. I’ve been well satisfied with our choice ever since, though the rest of the committee didn’t need me to tell them this guy was a keeper. Shelley is a charming Brit, focussed and productive in rehearsal, persuasive with donors, fun at parties, an eloquent speaker who loves to explain what orchestras do. Early in his first season as music director, the orchestra’s audiences became a lot younger and noticeably more diverse. Under his leadership, the orchestra has commissioned and premiered more than 50 new compositions. They’ve recorded all the symphonies of Brahms and Schumann, along with the underappreciated composer Clara Schumann, who was Robert Schumann’s wife and at least Johannes Brahms’s close friend.

He’s a dynamite Beethoven conductor, brisk and never pompous. I began by asking him about something that happened in January. Shelley was conducting Beethoven’s Third Symphony, called the Eroica (“Heroic”) because of Beethoven’s complicated feelings about Napoleon. It usually ends at race-horse tempo. Shelley took one section at the tempo that Beethoven actually marked in the score, which is half as fast as it’s usually played. As far as he can tell, conductors today simply never make that choice. Because Shelley followed Beethoven’s tempo marking, the finale felt like Beethoven’s hero was an ocean liner pulling into port. Dramatic, but in a different way. Since conducting is all about choices, I started there.

This interview has been edited, sometimes aggressively, for length and clarity. It also has footnotes, a capability the Substack platform provides that I never thought I’d need. Until now.

Paul Wells: Let’s jump into the geeky deep end. What did you do in the finale of the Beethoven Third Symphony? It was a tempo indication…

Alexander Shelley: I am very passionate about starting with the information the composer gives us. That sounds like a really obvious thing to say, but if one understands the ecosystem of music generally, and I think just humans, we very often start with what we’ve heard, and first felt, rather than what the original text is.

There’s any number of quotes that are attributed to Shakespeare or to Oscar Wilde or whatever that are actually halfway right, or they’re taken so badly out of context that they end up meaning something completely different, but then they become the standard. “Oh, you know, that’s Shakespeare” or “That’s Oscar Wilde.” But oftentimes when you go to the text, the original source is sometimes wildly different.

New music is the easiest thing in the world because you’re the first person to do it. So you just take the score, and you do what’s written. With older music, and particularly, let’s call them museum pieces — works that people revere – one tends to perform them, and look at the score, having inherited lots of traditions through recordings over your lifetime. This is where music and interpretation moves into the world of, let’s say, political and ideological beliefs. People find it very hard, if they believe that something should be a certain way, to let go of it.

At the end of the Eroica, there’s this question. Beethoven gives us, on one hand, a remarkably slow speed on the metronome. On the other hand, a really practical one. Traditionally it’s been done at double the speed he asked for, because somehow it feels more heroic. But I think the interesting challenge is to say, “Huh. So he asked for that speed at the metronome mark. How does that fit with my notion of the heroic?” Because technically it makes a lot of sense. The strings are playing all ya-ga-da-ga-da-ga-da — these double notes, triple, quadruple notes.. But in that speed that he asks for, you can actually play it. And in the other speed, the double speed, they just have to fake it all the way through. So it’s never been an elegant solution.

I was remarking to Henry3 that even great conductors who’ve done unbelievable amounts to shift attitudes in such areas, like John Eliot Gardiner, even he shied away from that particular choice. And I said to Henry, “F— it, I’m just tired of it. I’m just gonna do it. I’m going to make us believe in it, you know, and just see what it feels like.” And I love it. I think it’s amazing.

You know, it’s an avatar for a broader picture. I’m doing the same thing in the Mahler. I’ve been through every source you can find, and I don’t understand why certain traditions have accumulated. People will say, “Listen to those early recordings.” I have, and they’re all different. The people who studied with Mahler — they all do it differently.

PW: Now the valedictory question. This is your 11th season with NACO, but it’s 13 or 14 years since you began the relationship.

Shelley: Yeah, if not longer.

PW: Do you feel older?

Shelley: Oh yeah, I’m older. I was saying to my wife, the other day, it’s official now: to look behind me, I have to turn my entire torso. My internal workings, I’m like a mid-20-year-old. I love activity and motion. I love being very full in life and very engaged. I love love. I love food and drink, and at the same time I love trying to be balanced in all of it. Because otherwise you get f—ed up. I love feeling older. Every year that goes by, I enjoy life more and more, and I already loved life.

But becoming a father4 has been transformative. I didn’t realize all the things that I didn’t feel or know before I had children. Sounds like such a dickish thing to say. I always hated it when people said, “One day, when you’re a parent, you’ll understand.” Phases of life each have their important meaning, and I miss certain aspects of not being a parent. The freedom to do whatever you want whenever you want. The deep values that being a parent imparts and — this is such a cliché — but a thing outside of yourself being more important than you.

The most fundamental way that that’s been transformative for me is that I feel it in my music. I don’t know if it’s changed the way I make music. The finale of Mahler’s Second Symphony has always touched me profoundly. But the thing I connect to most readily, and I said this to the chorus the other day, when they first sing Auferstehen5 and it’s whispered, I said, “You know, you’ll all have your own vision of what your greatest moment of fragility would be and meaning. For me, it would be looking at my child sleeping and realizing that I’m no longer there for them, that I’m a spirit, visiting. And the knowledge that they’re about to lead a life in which I’m no longer present.”

I’m definitely older. I don’t know if any wiser, I feel like I am. I feel like I’ve experienced lots of amazing and wonderful and challenging things. Pick any decade, but this has been a tough decade.

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PW: Yeah, it’ll hit you like a two-by-four, everything that can happen in that amount of time.

How has this orchestra changed?

Shelley: I find it difficult to be the judge of that. You know, people have asked me what my effect has been on this. I know what I have tried to do in every performance. I know what I think we need to try and achieve every time we go on stage. But how the orchestra has changed? I can talk about personnel, you know, we’ve had a big turnover of personnel. We’ve lost some dear members of the orchestra over the last decade. We’ve gained incredible colleagues and we’ve made wonderful hires. A transition, such as Christopher [Millard] on the bassoon leaving, and Darren [Hicks] coming in, and it felt like a lineage somehow. The sound production, the way of making music. That’s happened in some areas. But I would just leave it to others to describe how the orchestra has changed. If I may.

PW: I’ll bite. They feel more fulfilled. They felt like they had stuff to show that they weren’t getting to show more than a decade ago. Now they have room to indulge all their interests. Your take on the standard repertoire is broader. There’s so much new stuff. Even the programming of concerts, it’s a lot less overture-concerto-symphony, you know.

Shelley: It’s funny, a member of the team — Gregg, who does social media — he was doing an interview with me yesterday for the on-demand version of this Mahler. And off camera, so to speak, he was saying that apparently there’s a gentleman on Twitter who always gets really upset when we do things like Mahler. I haven’t seen it because I don’t go on Twitter because it’s just full of hate and angry people. But the guy blames me, apparently, for shifting what this orchestra was, which was this great chamber orchestra. And I found that very interesting.

Firstly, it’s a terrible reality of today’s world that conversations are defined by the outliers on the bell curve, and it’s just these shouty people over here, and these shouty people over here, who are exceptions rather than rules. But I’ll bite. Part of the issue I have with that is that I inherited an orchestra that had a full low-brass complement, harp, four horns and percussion.6

Now, it was only with Mozart symphonies that clarinets were introduced into the orchestra, let alone low brass, four horns, percussion, harp. So, I inherited an orchestra where I also had an obligation to say, “This isn’t just a chamber orchestra that’s set up for Haydn and Bach. It’s set up for Mozart and beyond.” And I think that’s entirely appropriate for serving a national capital. I think it’s a lazy assumption that by broadening the repertoire, you become less good at any of it. Which is just simply not true. An audience member saying, “I like certain things, therefore, the orchestra should what I like all the time,” also feels lacking in generosity. There might be lots and lots of people in the community who would love to hear Beethoven and Bruckner and Nicole Lizée and Mahler and Strauss, as well as Haydn and Bach. So I was a little bit surprised by, let’s say the intensity of feeling with such things.

PW: Part of it is that people today, nearly 20 years into having smartphones, feel like they should be able to curate anything. It’s occurred to me a couple times at various concerts, yours and others’, that it’s an odd bargain that we’re making — you’re putting yourself in the hands of 60 musicians for the night. You know, you get your hat back at the end of the night, but in the meantime, you don’t actually get to control anything.

Shelley: So what do you get to control in life, Paul? Do you choose where you’re born?

PW: I control who I follow on Instagram.

Shelley: But do you? Because the vast majority of people on Instagram won’t appear on your algorithm ever.

PW: I think the reason I still come out to concerts — there’s a million reasons, but one of them is, I think it’s healthy. It’s a trust exercise: you fall back into someone else’s hands.

Shelley: But that’s what I’m getting at. Either one is going to be somebody who will have their face up to the window of life, or you can step back and say, “Listen, almost everything about existence is circumstance. It’s coincidence. Almost everything about it. This veneer of control is just that.” On one hand, being a nihilist and saying, “Oh then, f—- it, I’m just going to do whatever I want” is, of course, absurd too. But for me, I’m going to act as if I have agency. I’m going to act as if I can define my own future — but I’m also going to try and find the distance to let go. There’s such enormous beauty in accepting that things will come across my path that I have no control over.

I agree with your framing of it: People are used to having this and this and this, and they want that and that. But even these assertion that “I want to curate everything” is — you’re not really curating anyway, because the algorithm is giving you almost everything that you think you’re curating.

A tiny, tiny, fleeting number of people actually make any effort to truly step outside the things that they’re comfortable with. I sound like some kind of anarchist or something. But I do think it’s very important to accept that. And then to say the curatorial part of what’s happening, in terms of putting things on stage, is actually the least interesting or important thing. The most interesting, important thing, I think, is to come into a space and say — whether it’s a night with Paul Wells, whether it’s Mahler’s Second Symphony, or there’s something else — to come in and say, “You know what? I have no idea what’s about to happen or what the conversation is going to be about. Or where this music is going to lead me. Who the musicians are going to be who Paul loves and puts on stage. But with an open mind, and an open heart, I’m going to engage in an adventure.” And that is incredibly valuable. Let’s not pretend that we truly control what’s going on in life. Let’s actually embrace the opportunity we have as never before.

That’s why you’ve got people who listen to four-hour podcasts and watch 12 episodes of Netflix back-to-back. There’s no fear of long form whatsoever. They’ll read your articles, they’ll listen to your podcasts, and they’ll come to your shows. And they’ll be open and interested. It’s just a belief in the content. When I perform a new piece by Nicole Lizée, it’s my job to work really hard to try and get inside it as far as I can. And then to advocate for it. And if advocating means saying from the stage, “It’s going to be f—ing weird. The next half an hour is just going to be weird, but incredible, and she’s a brilliant mind. You won’t have heard anything like this,” it’s already a framing.

I don’t know where I’m going with this. The USP [unique selling proposition] of live is that we let go. We let go and allow the moment to be real, rather than trying to control it.

I need more coffee.

PW: The next stage of your career is going to be kind of tripedal, right?

Shelley: That’s a nice way of putting it.

PW: You’ve got Naples Philharmonic, Pacific Symphony, and National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland —

Shelley: National Symphony Orchestra Ireland.7 There’s no “of.” It’s a bit of marketing.

PW: When we launched the National Post, the owner and the editor were adamant that you must not call it The National Post. It was just, “It’s National Post.”

Shelley: I was having this conversation with my dad the other day, and he was getting really worked up about it. He says “All these orchestras are dropping the ‘The.’ So I have to say, ‘I’m going to London Mozart Players tonight.’”

PW: This sort of jet-setting existence, essentially splitting your year up into quarters — family is a quarter, and then the three orchestras are the other quarters, or whatever the ratio is — Why not just work all year with one orchestra? What do you gain? What do they gain? Why is that the plan for the next little bit?

Shelley: “They” being the orchestras? And my family, I suppose? This is something that people sometimes miss in the equation. Almost any orchestra you can name asks their music director contractually to do a maximum of 12 weeks [per year]. It’s very important that there’s turnover of other conductors, other personalities on stage. It’s healthy for the orchestra, it’s healthy for an audience. In Naples, with the Naples Philharmonic, we have a truncated season because of the nature of the community. You know, it’s a community that really only fills up at the end of October, beginning of November. And everyone’s gone by the end of May. So we truncate our season. The whole of September, the orchestra plays 45-50 concerts for kids. So I do seven, eight weeks there. I do 12 weeks in Pacific Symphony, which takes over the footprint of NACO, and I do seven projects of four to five days with National Symphony Orchestra Ireland. In Dublin, we’ll go to Cork, Galway, we’ll record.

But when I was just in Nuremberg [his first music-director job from 2009-2017], those equivalent weeks, I was traveling all over the world as a guest conductor. So the number of weeks traveling and performing is identical, and the only thing that’s changed in my life is less guest conducting. So, actually, what looks like a picture of becoming diffuse is a picture of me becoming more focused.

I might have gone to Pacific Symphony once every five years, but now I’m doing 12 weeks with them. I’m doing the eight weeks in Naples. I’m doing this seven, eight weeks with Dublin — as a choice. To actually focus in on those orchestras rather than spending what would have been 20 or so weeks just around the world, different orchestras, one-offs, every few seasons come back to the same place. So actually it’s an expression of focus. For me personally, at this stage of my life and my career, what interests me most is the long arc of building things.

You know, I work — as a lot of people do — but I wake up at eight, I don’t have breakfast, and I stop work at like 11 p.m. I just work all day long. I love working. I love planning. I love writing emails. I love thinking, I love reading around it. I love studying scores, I love rehearsing, doing interviews, I love doing marketing and social media and everything I can. Because I feel unbelievably fortunate and grateful that I get to have, on one hand, this experience of entering into symbiosis with extraordinary people every day for several hours. Which is what conducting means. It’s what performing is. It is so hard to describe what an extraordinary human gift that is, and how that fills up the soul and the mind.

And at the same time it also demands of you that you are entirely present. Alert, awake, prepared, ready. Because the responsibility is enormous as well, to these people who have been doing it for so long. So, it’s life — as I see it; other people have their own ways of living — but it’s life, as I see it at, its most vibrant and its most awake. And to have that at the core of what I do, I realize it’s an unbelievable gift. To then have, the next layer of the onion, the gift of saying, I get — here; in Nuremberg; in Orange County; in Naples; in Dublin — to be part of telling the story of, “Why symphonic music?” Sharing that passion. Charting a course for the orchestra. Hiring members. Thinking about our repertoire. Thinking about how we communicate what we do, both externally and internally. To be able to have that as the next layer is extraordinarily meaningful to me. And much more meaningful than guest conducting, which I’ve done for 25 years, and I love, but it’s a much more narrow undertaking.

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PW: You’re doing Nixon in China,8 a short drive from the Nixon Presidential Library. That’s got to be unbelievably resonant. And probably something new for that orchestra.

Shelley: They haven’t done Nixon in China before, but they do an opera every year. That is traditionally a traditional opera. Puccini, Verdi, a lot of Italian stuff, some Germans as well. So this is a departure. But our season is celebrating US 250 [the 250th anniversary of Independence]. For all these reasons, including the fact that Nixon was from Orange County, it is the right piece to do. The parallels with now, this question of great power relationships, different perspectives on the world, how and whether to bridge that through politics and personalities — it’s always going to be current, right?

It wasn’t a given for the orchestra. Ticket sales are very important down there. In the initial conversations they were saying, “Well, you know…” You just worry that our traditional opera audience might be fearful of it. But we’re going to work hard to generate awareness.

PW: The political fault lines that you’re navigating have to be something that you’re aware of all the time. The Naples gig, I’m sure it would not even have been on your radar if it weren’t for some Canadian snowbirds — who may or may not now be going to Florida as often as before. What considerations do you have in mind when you’re thinking about that sort of stuff? About, basically, Trump’s world. And I’ll put this much of a finer point on it: I think you’ve been sometimes bemused by the visceral reaction that Canadians have to the needling from Trump-land. And now, you’re going to be spending more time in the middle of all that.

Shelley: You and I have discussed this before. I’m, by temperament, and also led by my temperament through persuasion, a person who, whether I’m speaking to an ultra-progressive or an ultra-conservative, I try to see what it is in what they’re saying that I can learn from. Rather than being needled by it. And it’s not always easy on either side. There have been times I’ve been in Canada, and there have been things that have been asserted and said, where I thought, “I find it difficult to get on board with that.” And there’s plenty that’s said elsewhere in the world where I find it difficult to get on board with. However, maybe it’s having spent 20 years in Germany, but I think, if you see anybody on any branch of the political spectrum asserting something, and it’s something you disagree with — but you see momentum building behind them — then the more important thing to do than to be angry with them or call them demons is to say, “How could it be that there’s momentum behind that perspective?” That interests me far more.

When I’m with people in Orange County, in Dublin, in Ottawa, and in Naples, They don’t sit around throwing darts at pictures of politicians, and they don’t walk into a room and start screaming at each other. They talk about the things that most humans talk about. Which is family and community. Work and art. And, you know, sports. If one perceives the world through the prism of politics, division and anger, then that’s all you see around. If you enter the world with a completely different lens, just don’t encounter it as much. And you don’t have to spend your whole time arguing with people

If you put on a song about love and tenderness when you’re feeling violent, you will, at the end of that song, feel less violent. Maybe a psychopath or sociopath won’t. But I’ve never had an experience where you go into a concert hall, you play something genuinely calming and beautiful, and you don’t turn around, look at the audience, and you see, they’ve shifted. They’re breathing differently. And it’s been measured. So if we can agree that decision-making is not governed by reason alone, but rather reason tends to be created as a scaffolding around what we’ve already decided, then music genuinely has the power to change the world. Because you get 2,000 people in a hall; you give them reason to believe in something greater than all of us, and in human capacity for hope and optimism; and then you release them out into the world — whether it’s for 10 minutes or 10 hours or 10 days, the world will be just a little bit better. I honestly believe that.

“First off, thank you for asking me that question,” Mark Carney told The Globe and Mail’s Marieke Walsh during his session-ending news conference on Thursday.

Walsh had asked about what her colleague, Globe columnist Robyn Urback, calls a “ridiculous, myopic plan to bail out condo developers.” Pierre Poilievre is urging his followers to “stop the Carney Condo Buyout.”

This was all in regards to an announcement a week earlier in South Vancouver by Carney and BC Premier David Eby, who said their two governments will spend some amount of money to do something in regards to housing in British Columbia. Part of the plan is to take already-built condos off the market and convert them to affordable housing. Since the two heads of government didn’t say how much money would go towards doing that, and they did mention $3.2 billion would go to public infrastructure that would support housing construction (roads and sewers, for example), it was easy to conclude the big number would go to the odd project. The prospect of spending in the 10 figures to — well, to bail out the authors of a condo glut, many of them offshore businesses, caused more outrage than anything I’ve seen Carney provoke yet.

Now, here was a chance to put the toothpaste back in the tube. Something the prime minister hadn’t chosen to do, on the BC condo file, during his 14-minute opening statement. (I wasn’t there. I’m writing this from video on CPAC.)

“I want to say up front, I don’t think we’ve done… a particularly good job of rolling this out and explaining exactly what it is,” Carney said, as he began to address Walsh’s question. Boy howdy.

“So, with your indulgence, I’m going to say — I think it’s important to say a few words of what this is and what this isn’t,” he continued.

With your indulgence I’m going to quote him at length. This is the answer of someone who was grateful for the question and hoped he’d get asked. I suspect it was only modestly successful in achieving its goal, which was damage control.

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Ten years ago, on June 24, 2016, I was new in what would turn out to be a short stint at the Toronto Star, driving between Ottawa and Oshawa on family business, and trying to digest the returns from the previous day’s Brexit referendum. It hadn’t gone as I’d hoped.

“I think I need to write about this,” I said to an editor I was still getting to know.

“Actually, I think somebody else is already writing about Brexit,” my editor said.

“Look, just as a subscriber, if there’s anybody in tomorrow’s paper who doesn’t write about Brexit, I’ll be upset,” I said. Sometimes I think this situation where I’m the only writer who’s stuck working with me was the inevitable end of things.

Anyway, I got to write about Brexit. I used much of my space to write that the European Union and its advocates needed to share some of the blame. I admire the EU, but if such a powerful generator of peace and prosperity couldn’t make a case for itself, then that wasn’t only the fault of its detractors.

I believe the Brexit adventure has slowed Britain’s economic growth. This chart from a Guardian article based on a paper from several economists makes that case:

Soon after the Brexit vote, I learned that a large number of Canadian Conservatives — I mean probably six or 10, not hundreds — had gone to the UK to campaign for the Leave side. The timing was propitious: Conservatives had lost the previous autumn’s federal election, they were out of office in Ontario and Alberta. There weren’t a lot of outlets for Conservatives’ energies. Door-knocking and desk work over ’ome was an obvious outlet.

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[UPDATE, Wednesday night: At the request of my friends at Hugh’s Room, I’ve added the script of my monologue from Saturday’s show. It’s now at the bottom of this post. — pw]

Saturday was mild and sunny in Toronto. The traffic chaos that some had predicted because of a FIFA match on the CNE grounds didn’t materialize. Torontonians, who are capable of many moods, were mostly beaming, and many of them came to Hugh’s Room in the East end to make an excellent audience for the second Paul Wells Road Show. Today I’m thrilled to bring you photos and audio.

This one looked action-packed on paper, but in the event it matched the cheerful mood of Hugh’s Room in the new location it’s inhabited since 2023: a decommissioned church, low-slung and comfy, with very little distance between audience and stage. I came out wearing a Côte d’Ivoire jersey, and we were off.

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Toronto mayor Olivia Chow talked about the challenges of city government. She’s in a tough race for re-election, but our show was one of six events she had scheduled that day, so she’s showing up for the fight. I had a great panel to discuss the city’s challenges and promise: Toronto Star editor Nicole MacIntyre, longtime provincial and federal Conservative strategist Jason Lietaer, and Marco Mendicino, who’s senior counsel at Cassels (it took me two tries to get that right) and who was Justin Trudeau’s minister of public safety and, briefly there at the start, Mark Carney’s chief of staff. Mendicino came out in kicks and a t-shirt, quaffing canned gin and tonic. Note to future Road Show guests: this is the correct attitude.

Michael Healey, the playwright whose latest hits Rogers v. Rogers and The Master Plan have helped make Crow’s Theatre one of Canada’s leading venues for new Canadian theatre, dropped by to share his thoughts on Toronto as setting and character for his plays. Rollie Pemberton came to discuss his new book Ways of Listening, about hanging on to your personality in an age of streaming and AI slop, and to rap “Alpenflage” off his latest Cadence Weapon album Forager. Incidentally, even after practicing, I mispronounced Pemberton’s first name: it’s Role-y, not Rawl-y. Sigh. Nerves. But more than anyone else on the bill, he performed a central function of my live events: convincing a confused and skeptical audience that there’s much more to a good life than can be contained on Parliament Hill.

We heard three songs from the young singer-songwriter Gavin McLeod, who will shortly need no introduction. He’s been playing and singing since he was 10, and he’s ready for everyone to hear his music. As he made abundantly clear.

And I did one of my monologues, about how Queen Street concert flyers made an impression on me when I was just another nerdy kid from Sarnia.

Big show. I want to thank my Presenting Sponsor, Cameco, for making this show possible. You’ll hear from their Managing Director of Government Relations, Dale Austin, welcoming the audience at the top of the show. Cameco is turning into a formidable Canadian success story, and I’m always grateful for their support.

I do these shows because I want my subscribers to know how much you mean to me. Thank you, always, for your interest and support. Keep spreading the word.

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UPDATE: The good folks at Hugh’s Room asked whether I’ve published my monologue anywhere. Here it is.

What a great city is for

What can I tell you about Toronto when I don’t even live here and you do? Maybe I can start here: If I had to nominate a great novel of Toronto, it might be Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion.

There’s a scene in it that I’ve never forgotten.

It’s right around the First World War. A Macedonian immigrant named Nicholas Temilcoff is new in Toronto. And he’s working on his English.

Ondaatje writes:

“Most immigrants learned their English... through mimicking actors on stage. It was a common habit to select one actor and follow him throughout his career, annoyed when he was given a small part, and seeing each of his plays as often as possible.

“Usually by the end of an east-end production at the Fox or Parrot Theatres the actors’ speeches would be followed by growing echoes as Macedonians, Finns, and Greeks repeated the phrases after a half-second pause, trying to get the pronunciation right.

“This infuriated the actors, especially when a line such as “Who put the stove in the living room, Kristin?” – which had originally brought the house down – was now spoken simultaneously by at least seventy people and so tended to lose its spontaneity.

“When the matinee idol Wayne Burnett dropped dead during a performance, a Sicilian butcher took over, knowing his lines and his blocking meticulously, and money did not have to be refunded.”

Now, that’s not my Toronto story. As far as I can tell, it’s not even based on something that ever happened in real life. But it rang true for me when I read it.

People have always taken what they needed from Toronto. Different people take different things. You could almost say that’s what a great city is for.

I was coming to Toronto for years before I came here for journalism or politics. Years.

I grew up in Sarnia, three hours away. When I was a kid, we’d come here every year for Caribana and the CNE. When my dad was young he lived on farms, so the Coliseum at the Ex was his best chance every year to catch up with what the livestock were up to.

When he was older, my Dad lived in Barbados for a while. So the Caribana parade was his best chance to feel like he was revisiting that part of the world and that part of his life. I was just along for the ride.

Any great city is a Choose Your Own Adventure. When I was a little older, I had my own reasons to come to Toronto. Video games, mostly, and then Bakka Books, in its original location on Queen Street, a bookstore that sold nothing but science fiction.

And then, when I was maybe 16, I came here on a school trip, and I had a couple of hours on my own, after dark, before I had to be someplace. I walked up to Queen Street from the train station, because for me, Toronto was Queen Street.

The bookstore was closed. So, for the first time, I looked around.

What I noticed were the concert flyers. Hundreds of them. Taped to lamp posts.

This was the early 1980s. Punk was a few years old, and in Toronto Queen Street was the centre of it, although if word of that had reached Sarnia, it hadn’t reached me. The spirit of the age was Do-It-Yourself. If you had a gig, the best way to let people know about it was to tape flyers to lamp posts.

I don’t know if I can convey to you how much of an impression these homemade posters made on me — a good student on a school trip, a kid who didn’t get out much. Posters for bands like The Viletones, Stark Naked and the Fleshtones, Cardboard Brains, Crash Kills Five. Venues like the Black Bull Tavern, the Beverley Hotel, the Horseshoe. These little posters — really little manifestos — were almost aggressively ugly and weird. Hand lettered, or with type cut out of magazines, taped to a page, and Xeroxed like ransom notes. Photos you could hardly decipher.

It all seemed a bit — unwise. Dangerous. And free. Everything I wasn’t.

Now, who am I kidding, a bunch of flyers taped to light poles didn’t make me run away and join the circus. I did wind up seeing some of those bands later, at university or after I moved to Montreal for work. But mostly this… information was something I tucked away. Like I’d caught a whiff of something subtly corrupting.

It said: There are places in a big city where you could be yourself. Make your statement. Find your people. And do it all again the next night.

Eventually I started coming back to Toronto for myself, by myself. To hear music. You might not be surprised to hear that mostly it was jazz clubs. In those days it was much more common for a prominent American jazz musician to come to Toronto with his band. Or to come as a “single” and play with a local bassist and drummer. That was almost better. You could see — and hear — the musicians getting to know one another in real time.

In the space of a few years, I saw Clark Terry at Bourbon Street. Woody Shaw at East 85th and Front. Freddie Hubbard at the Bermuda Onion. Doc Cheatham at Café des Copains. Those names won’t mean much to some of you. They meant everything to me.

Even later, what kept me coming back to Toronto was journalism. I was working for the Montreal Gazette and living in Ottawa, but there was a magazine here that was willing to buy my longer articles. At first the only reason I had to write anything that ambitious. It was called Saturday Night. It had a young editor who thought I might make something of myself. His name was Ken Whyte.

After I’d written a couple of articles for Saturday Night, Ken started inviting me to editorial meetings. And then, to the office parties.

To this day, nothing in this world triggers my imposter complex more than a Toronto media party.

Everybody looks so cool! Every time! And they’re not even trying! It’s like they just… know where things are.

For my first party at the Saturday Night offices, some kind of survival instinct told me to dress in black from head to toe. Like 90s hipster camo.

When I got to the party, it seemed like every man there was dressed in black. From head to toe. It was like a convention of very approximate Johnny Cash imitators.

I say every man was dressed in black, but it can’t be true, because Terence Corcoran was there too, and he only ever wears a navy suit. He was a business columnist at the Globe and Mail in those days. Imperious and sure of himself. Younger then than I am today, but not by much. Later I learned that Terry Corcoran is a total sweetheart. But in those days he was terrifying, because I’d seen his little photo staring out at me from the Globe’s business pages.

Now here he was in three dimensions, and as I watched, horrified, he became the first person I’ve ever met who physically looked down his nose at me.

Later there were more parties. Christmas at Conrad and Barbara Black’s. National Post launch party. National Post anniversary party. A party at Christie Blatchford’s a few weeks before I quit the National Post.

Somehow Terry Corcoran was at every one of those parties. Looking at me. I tried to be strong.

I said I’ve never actually lived in Toronto, because I’ve never worked here. But I came close once.

In 2006 the CBC called and asked me if I wanted to audition to be host of As It Happens. In those days, the Corp would cast its net wide for new talent. They told me to come to Toronto to record some fake interviews, so they could hear whether I had any chops. And they asked me to write a monologue, so they could hear how I wrote and talked. It can be about anything, they said.

I wrote about going to hear a guitarist I liked named Kevin Breit, at a legendary club called Hugh’s Room.

In those days it was in a very different part of town. Go west on Bloor until you fall off the end of the world, I said. Then go a little further. Then turn left on Roncesvalles. And then you’ll be in one of those spots that every city has. A place where everyone can be themselves.

I didn’t get the gig. That was the year Carol Off joined As it Happens, so I think the producers got it right. But they liked the monologue. That’s all I needed.

And tonight, 20 years later, I’m back. At Hugh’s Room. A great city always gives you what you need.

This week the House of Commons will wrap up its work for the summer. It’ll be late September before they reconvene. There’ll already be a lot happening when MPs see one another again. It’ll be only days before a bunch of referendums in Alberta. Quebec will be in the middle of a volatile provincial election campaign. We’ll be on the other side of an apparently near-meaningless July 1 deadline for CUSMA renewal. And it will be only six weeks before US congressional midterm elections.

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Two pieces of reading might help us think about the next half-year in our politics. One comes from today’s New York Times. There’s peace, of a sort and dearly bought, in Iran, but don’t expect a return to the status quo, the analysis by Patricia Cohen says. “The war has set in motion changes that will be hard to reverse.”

“The profound vulnerability of countries throughout Asia, Europe and elsewhere that depend on imported energy is supercharging the hunt for alternatives. In some places, like South Korea and Japan, that has led to an increased use of dirtier fuels like coal.

“But over the longer term, this energy shock — the second in just four years — is likely to accelerate a transition to renewables like solar and wind as well as nuclear power.”

Wind and solar generated more energy worldwide than gas in April for the first time, according to UK energy think tank Ember. But that doesn’t mean fossil fuels are off the table. The Hormuz bottleneck, which will probably continue even in “peace” and could return any time, means there’s also a scramble to find new suppliers. “Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Argentina and Guyana are building their oil production capacity as the world looks for alternative suppliers,” the Times says.

There’s a country missing from that list, at least potentially. During an Ottawa visit last month, International Energy Agency head Fatih Birol said Canada’s quaint cultural insistence on enforceable contract law should lure investors willing to pay a premium for (always relative!) stability.

Birol made those remarks while sharing a stage with Tim Hodgson, Mark Carney’s energy minister. People in Ottawa pay close attention to what Hodgson, a political rookie with outsized clout, says. Which brings me to your second piece of assigned reading today: an op-ed that Hodgson published in the Financial Post on Monday.

It’s a national-unity pitch, in the runup to the Alberta referendum I promised not to write about for a while. Oh well. “In this time of global uncertainty, the countries that succeed will not be the ones that fight amongst themselves,” Hodgson writes. “They will be the ones that build.”

So Canada should “build,” he writes. “Let’s build major projects… partnerships between provinces and territories and with Indigenous Peoples…. And let’s build institutions strong enough to carry us forward, while others backslide.” All of that is the very definition of “easier said than done.” Including the bit about “strong institutions.” Institutions predate governments and operate without particular regard to whether a given government is in a hurry. So there’s often a tension between governments and institutions. Which makes Althia Raj’s recent string of Toronto Star columns reminding the Carney government of those necessary institutions such fascinating reading.

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Meanwhile, look at what Hodgson wants to build and sell. The centrepiece of his argument, and of his recent effort, is of course the Alberta-Canada Memorandum of Understanding on oil-sands exports and electricity grid expansion. “The MOU sends a signal to Canadians, to investors, and to our allies that Canada can act like the federation it was designed to be,” Hodgson writes. Perhaps by now some people in Ottawa are starting to realize the whole project is not a tactical feint but something Hodgson and Carney actually want to deliver.

But Hodgson is talking about more than Alberta oil and gas. He mentions “vast energy resources in our western and Atlantic provinces… some of the world’s best hydro projects… nuclear assets [in] Ontario and New Brunswick,” and “mining opportunities” in the territories. “So, let’s argue less and build more.”

A couple of broad observations about this. First, Hodgson is calling for a kind of full-meal deal on energy and resources. Fossil fuels and renewables. The fossil part is a change from the Trudeau Liberals. But recognition of the growing place of renewables, if it ever came, would be a change from the Poilievre Conservatives. And it’s not as though there aren’t significant trends near the Conservative leader’s current riding. From Statistics Canada:

To a great extent, if you’re dismissing wind, solar and batteries because of something you heard a decade ago, you might want to refresh your information.

The second thing I notice in Hodgson’s speech is how he starts with national unity. (He even announces that he sees himself as a national-unity minister. I… hadn’t heard that around town?)

The country’s unity seems an odd basis for designing its external relations, but it’s not new.

I’ve written before about Louis St. Laurent’s 1947 Gray Lecture at the University of Toronto, which sketched the basis for Canada’s postwar foreign policy. A decade of blood had shown that foreign policy was crucial. The first “basic principle” of the policy St. Laurent depicted was national unity. He was careful to define this notion more broadly than the unity of French- and English-speaking Canadians, which conscription crises in two wars had tested. “No policy can be regarded as wise which divides the people whose effort and resources must put it into effect,” he said. “A disunited Canada will be a powerless one.”

On this as on everything else, the devil is in the details. And the details are big. How do you use resource development for unity? In a country with an Alberta and a British Columbia and a Quebec in it, the answer isn’t obvious. Hodgson is pushing an abundance agenda in which every corner of the country wins by doing more. Probably better than squabbling over who loses more amid general decline. Still tricky.

[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.