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

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

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I did not know British Columbia Premier David Eby would bring a kettlebell. A few minutes before the Paul Wells Road Show — Vancouver began on March 20, a member of Eby’s staff came into the backstage green room looking for adhesive tape. Something in her expression made me realize something was up. “This is for shtick, isn’t it,” I said. She nodded, not without a hint of mischief.

I’m all for guests bringing their own comic bits. Even better if they work. The kettlebell — a nod to the pervasive cultural influence of Poilievre and Rogan — was a hit. I would even go so far as to say the whole interview with Eby went over well with a crowd that was not exactly packed with diehard Eby fans, such creatures being hard to find in the wild these days.

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The whole show was a great success. I’m so grateful to my presenting sponsors at Netflix, who made all of this possible. We sold out the 318-seat Rothstein Theatre a few hours before the show began. The staff there were superb and a pleasure to work with. Highlights of the show:

• We premiered a new arrangement of Kevin Breit’s theme music for the podcast, now arranged for two violins by composer Kevin Lau. Vancouver Opera, our artistic partners for the night, have a professional resident orchestra; I was happy to have violinists Rebecca Ruthven and Andrea Siradze from the orchestra play Kevin’s arrangement.

• I did a monologue about Vancouver as a frequent destination in my wasted youth, and as a place where many of the big Canadian debates have particular relevance.

• David Eby came out to joke (a bit) and talk shop (more). We covered a lot of ground in the time we had.

• Suzanne Simard, recently dubbed “the Indiana Jones of trees” by The Guardian, talked about her new book When The Forest Breathes, which will be released next Tuesday. It’s about how trees communicate, and whether people listen. A lot of my West Coast friends were much more excited that Simard would be at the show than that I would.

• We had a panel, as we usually do for my live events. This one was excellent and extremely locavore: James Moore, Rachael Segal and Richard Zussman. Richard was into it. He spent the whole panel doing the lean-in while the others did the lean-back:

And we had new friends representing Vancouver Opera. It was Ashley Daniel Foot, the director of engagement and civic practice at Vancouver Opera, who first suggested I come do a show in Vancouver. I said I’d need a flight, a venue, and some singers. In the end I covered my own flight and rented a bigger venue but we kept the singers. Meet Aaron Durand and Chloé Hurst, whom you’ll hear from a few times in this show:

This was my first live event outside Ottawa. There’ll be more; we had a planning call this morning for an event that’s coming soon. We’re settling into a working model: a local artistic partner like the National Arts Centre or Vancouver Opera; a mix of the conversation you expect (politics!) and some you might not (fungus in old-growth forests!); and, when I’m on the road, a relentless focus on the local over the generic.

Je vais le dire ouvertement : je rêve d’organiser à Montréal un événement de ce genre, en français, pour célébrer la culture et la création montréalaises. Avis aux intéressés.

I never stop reminding myself that my original goal with these events is to thank my subscribers. You’ll always get advance notice and first crack at tickets for these events. My goal here isn’t to generate more subscriptions, although who am I kidding, the more the merrier; it’s to show my gratitude to the people who are already on board. I never stop thinking about ways to make myself useful and surprising to you.

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These events generate bills. I’m pleased that some excellent groups are helping me pay them. This time out, it was my presenting sponsor, Netflix; and another frequent partner, the Canadian Bankers’ Association. They recognize the value of serious, respectful conversation and thoughtful community-building. And they and other businesses and organizations understand the value of an audience like you, precisely because there aren’t a lot of audiences like you.

I’m probably a small number of weeks away from announcing another Road Show that will take place in another Canadian city in June. There’ll be still another one somewhere else in the fall, and then back to Ottawa for the holidays. In the meantime, I’m not about to quit my day job, which is writing. Thanks for coming along on the ride.

UPDATE: Hey, we made a trailer. Here’s some video to give you a sense of how it all felt in the room.

The bookshelves in Pierre Poilievre’s Stornaway office hold two volumes, the first I’ve seen, from Conrad Black’s upcoming three-million-word (!) history of the world, sent to Poilievre by the author. There’s also a complete set of Winston Churchill’s works, donated by a Conservative Party supporter to be held in trust — at Stornoway, 24 Sussex, or whatever replaces that beleaguered residence — by each Conservative Party leader in turn.

This Conservative leader doesn’t have much reading time. Shortly after our interview Thursday he was leaving for a trip in the United States; he’ll skip Washington, and a thoroughly-reported piece by Mickey Djuric in Politico suggests it’s just as well.

I have been requesting an interview with Poilievre for four years. The requests had become increasingly pro forma. But when even Mansbridge got him, I started to believe Poilievre had nowhere left to go but me. His office arranged this interview over the last two weeks.

I decided to let Poilievre talk, mostly. He’ll be Conservative leader in a year or not, prime minister in three years or not. The polls really aren’t great. But if Poilievre ever gets to pack those Churchill books for a move to bigger digs, it’ll still be useful for the rest of us to know what he thinks about trade, energy, university funding, federalism, and the elephant next door.

Paul Wells: I want to begin by talking about something that you plainly wanted to talk about last week, when Peter Mansbridge interviewed you. He was asking you about floor crossers, which has to be a preoccupation. But you said that this is an Ottawa obsession that gets us away from the real issues. You said, ‘Ottawa is absolutely fixated on the inside-baseball machinations in the halls of power,’ but meanwhile, there are people who are $200 a month away from going bankrupt. There are 2 million people lined up at food banks. There are cases of malnutrition, and that Brampton and Surrey are being torn apart by extortion. I do get the impression this is kind of what drives your political action: that you want to focus on what’s not working in the country, rather than what’s not working as well as you might like in Ottawa.

Poilievre: Yes. And, look fair question about floor crossers. Obviously, there has to be some discussion on that, I just find that there’s a disproportionate obsession among the parliamentary press gallery and the commentariat on what I call “small-itics” — this or that political analysis, who’s meeting with whom, which politician is getting along with which other politician, when you have 41 million people whose lives are distant from all of that. You know we still have an entire generation of young people who can’t afford a home. We’ve got record crime on our streets. And you mentioned Brampton and Surrey, we’ve seen a 500% increase in extortion.

When I go to those two places, there are literally lineups of people recounting the phone calls they’re getting from extortionists demanding a million dollars, or there will be a bullet fly through their children’s window in the morning. Our economy is the only one shrinking in the G7. We have the worst food price inflation in that same group of nations. No wonder 2.2 million people are lined up at food banks, and to top it all off, our government has the biggest deficit, outside of COVID, in its history. So these are things that affect people’s daily lives. That’s what we’re supposed to be focused on. I would like to see our discourse on Parliament Hill focus more on what matters in the daily lives of our people. And I think we’d then get better results for them.

PW: In what communities are these? Let’s stay on that extortion thing for a bit. What communities are we talking about?

Poilievre: Well, it is the South Asian community that’s there, there as a result of there’s an organization called the Bishnoi gang. It’s now a listed terrorist organization that’s a gang that runs from it’s run remotely by Lawrence Bishnoi, who is a very powerful, albeit imprisoned gangster, but he has an enormous network. And he, along with other organizations, have seen vulnerabilities in our criminal justice and border system that has allowed them to carry out mass extortion operations throughout the communities I just mentioned.

And now what has happened is, because the threat is so real, there are these little guys who are grifting off it. So, you know, they might not be part of the gang, they might even be able to execute on their threats, but they basically call everybody in the neighborhood and demand 20 grand, 50 grand. And of course, the recipients of the call know that there’s, there is actually a serious threat of extortion, so they don’t know if they have to pay in order to stay alive.

I’ve been to numerous events in these communities where I always do a photo line, where people can come up and they can talk to me about anything. And I’ve been to some of these events where, you know, a quarter of the people in the lineup tell me they have personally, or a personal friend of theirs has received these threatening calls. And it’s serious stuff. You know, ‘Deposit this money in this account, or someone’s going to harm your kid or shoot you at your workplace.’ And there have been murders, prominent businessmen gunned down. So these are very serious problems, and we have solutions. We want to bring in a 10-year mandatory minimum for extortion. We want all the those who are visiting here who are linked to the Bishnoi gang to be deported from the country. We want better screening of people who come into the country, so that we don’t bring foreign extortionists to visit that danger on our people. And we want the RCMP to do a much better job of interrupting transnational organized crime.

PW: On the broader question of people who are suffering and not getting ahead. You did another podcast interview with the Triggernometry guys in Britain. You said: “The biggest phenomenon in the western world over the last decade or two has been the total betrayal of the working class — the people who make stuff, fix stuff, move stuff and build stuff, the younger people who are entering the job market, trying to start a life — who’ve seen their opportunities absolutely destroyed by massive government interventions that have concentrated wealth among a group of well-connected insiders.” You said this is especially the case in Canada. It kind of makes Canada sound like a great big Ponzi scheme.

Poilievre: I wouldn’t put it that way, but I would say that the policies that governments, writ large, have been implementing have had the effect of taking from the the working-class people and giving to a very small group of elite insiders through interventions that are kind of reverse Robin Hood. I’ll walk through them. You’ve got a massive expansion of corporate welfare and consulting contracts. We’re spending $26 billion as a federal government on consultants. This works out to about $1,500 per family in Canada in federal taxes just to pay high-priced consultants. And the government hired more consultants to figure out how we can spend less on consultants, by the way, or these massive corporate-welfare checks that go to favoured industries. Or you’ve got the so-called environmental policies, which raise energy costs, block our resource development, and then shut blue-collar working-class people out of jobs they should be earning six-figure salaries doing.

And then, of course, the greatest example is the money printing. It’s the most complicated one for anyone to understand. I don’t think there are 10 Members of Parliament who even understand how government is creating inflation by printing money. But the reality is, we’ve been creating cash about seven times faster than we build homes. So the result is that housing costs continually inflate.

I was in a coffee shop in PEI and I asked how much the espresso machine costs. And the lady said it was $11,000 for this little espresso machine. It wasn’t that fancy. There was a lady on the other side of the counter, a little old lady who said, “I bought my first house in Montreal for $9,000.” Less than the espresso machine. I said, “How much did you and her husband make that year?” And this was back in, you know, ’69, ’70, but she said, “We made about $16,000, $17,000 between us.” So it was the equivalent of a half year salary. Now depending on the market, it’s five to 10 times earnings to buy a house. Paul, it should be cheaper to buy a house today, because we have so much more technology to build them. And yet, where we used to be able to own a house with a single income, put meat and potatoes on the table every night, today, a couple working — they should be making twice as much because there’s two people working — they can’t afford a house.

Something is fundamentally broken, and I believe that the core problem is that we’re creating all of this cash to fund government deficits and spending, and this has inflated the cost of things that working people buy. The assets of the billionaire class, their assets go up in in monetary value.

PW: This is the line of thought that led you, when you were running for the Conservative leadership, to call for the dismissal of Tiff Macklem as Bank of Canada governor. I haven’t heard you talk about that as much lately.

Poilievre: Well, his term is all all but over now. I think it’s either this year or next year, so there’s no point in pursuing that any further.

I hope that the Prime Minister, when he does appoint the new governor, it will be someone whose focus is on sound, hard money, low inflation, stable prices, because that’s what we have to get back to. And in fairness, we did that for a long time after Brian Mulroney led the world in bringing in the inflation targeting in ’92 I think it was. And for basically 20 years, we had very low inflation and stable prices.

But what happened was Japan experimented with something that came to be known as quantitative easing. And whenever they use these, you know, convoluted Latinate words like that, you have to be suspicious about what they’re really talking about. And Japan did it. So the Americans said, “Let’s try that. They got away with it.” And then the Americans did it. So we got in on the action in COVID, and in the years that followed. And what quantitative easing effectively was, was the central banks buying enormous quantities of government bonds, which flooded the marketplace with easy money. That money goes to very well-connected and well-off people first, because they ultimately have more connections to credit, and they get to spend it before it loses its value. By the time it makes its way to the hands of the working people, it’s lost its value, and their wages are undermined. And that is the problem I seek to solve right now.

Mark Carney’s deficit is $78 billion. I worry that the temptation will be to print money again to pay for it, because it’s easier than than the alternative, but the results will be the same. And so I would caution against that. We have to get back to fiscal responsibility, reducing deficits, balanced budgets and sound money.

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PW: When I first heard you talking along these lines at a labour-union event in Gatineau a couple years ago, capital accumulates value. Labor doesn’t. I thought, my God, he’s gone Marxist. I mean, control of the means of production is an old bit of discourse in Western thought. And what you’re essentially saying is the people who are lucky enough to have a house, or who got into the game early enough to have a house, now have have an interest in the current system, whereas people who don’t yet have a house are locked out.

Poilievre: Well, I don’t think it’s quite the case. There’s two things I’ll object to. One is the Marxist thing. Won’t be surprising, but I’ll just address the issue.

Homeowners today are actually not the winners, because even if you have a house that has doubled in price, and let’s say you’re eventually planning to go into a senior’s residence, the increased cost of real estate means that the seniors residence is ultimately going to charge you more for your monthly payment. Amortized over the, say, 15 years you’re going to be there, you’re going to pay more for that. So you’re not actually winning in the long run. The only ones who win are the extremely wealthy people who are able to borrow money at rock-bottom rates, buy assets that then inflate in price, while the real value of their debts shrink as a result. Those are the very, very small number of people who actually benefit from it. It’s not that the mainstream homeowner that actually wins in the end, because they have tolive somewhere.

The big losers are, of course, the young people who can never own a place, or the people who can no longer afford food that they earlier took for granted. But let me be clear about this. What I’m talking about is, you want to talk about political philosophy, it’s basic Adam Smith. Adam Smith said that all the value that exists in the economy comes from labour. Every resource that we use, including the microphone in front of me, it was worthless when it was in the ground until someone’s labour brought it forward. And he believed, not in the supremacy of capital, but in the free, voluntary exchange of of capital with labor, work for wages, product for payment, investment for interest. Workers always win in that kind of free market environment, because they they have to be compensated enough to be willing to take the job, and that’s what I want.

I want workers to get what they’re owed, and they’re not getting it right now. They’re working harder and longer, and they’re not able to afford homes and food. And the first foundational thing we have to get right is sound money and low inflation, so that the workers’ wages, the retirees’ pension retains its value and buys them a really good life. And I think all of the political resentments that you’re seeing right now are partly the result of the fact that people say, “I’m working harder than ever before and I’m not getting anywhere.” We can fix that. I think we’ll have a much happier, harmonious and stable country.

PW: You said something else to the Triggernometry guys that I had a harder time following. You were talking about what you call “the net-zero fraud,” which is environmental policy as we’ve seen it over the last decade or so. You said, “It has nothing to do with the environment. It is entirely a pretext to take from the working classes and give to a small group of insiders through the mechanism of the state. “You said, “It’s all about concentrating power and money in the hands of fewer and fewer people.” It’s got nothing to do with the environment?

Poilievre: Let me give you example after example of where it clearly has nothing to do with the environment. You know, in Ontario, the Liberal government of Wynne and McGuinty doubled electricity prices to subsidize wind and solar power. And what do we get? Still, the vast majority of the electricity does not come from wind and solar, but the people are paying vastly more to fund these crazy subsidies. The solar power has to use Chinese component parts in order to make the solar wafers and panels. The inputs into the windmills come largely from China. So we’re basically subsidizing a foreign economy that is the single biggest emitter of greenhouse gasses anywhere in the world, and we’re profiting a very small number of people by raising the energy prices on the working class.

Mark Carney himself bragged about how he had profited by lobbying for fuel regulation in the aviation sector that required airlines pay for more expensive fuels that he had invested in. In Germany, I met with a Social Democratic politician who was telling me that one of the reasons there’s so much resentment among working-class communities of the German countryside is because they massively increased energy prices to shut down conventional forms of energy. They de-industrialized, and now they’re having to hold open coal-fire plants because there are no alternatives to power their grid. So how did that help the environment? It didn’t help, but there was a bunch of insiders and grifters who probably got all kinds of grants and subsidies and handouts to pay for a transition that never happened and wouldn’t have made much benefit to the environment had it happened. So my approach is to focus on liberating abundant, affordable energy, including oil and gas, because that is the single biggest and best thing you can do to defeat poverty and empower your economy. Cheap energy that’s reliable and affordable.

PW: Since 2025 that has been Mark Carney and Tim Hodgson’s policy too.

Poilievre: I’m glad you put a date on that.

You only have to read his book. He wrote this book called Value(s), and he said his values were that he wanted to keep half of our oil in the ground. He testified against the pipeline to the Pacific. He said Trudeau’s carbon taxes were not big and broad enough, and that these were his values. And remember, this is only like three years ago. And now he expects us to believe that he has thrown away his entire book of Value(s) and that he has new values. But so far we haven’t actually seen any results to support that it’s a real change of heart.

PW: Danielle Smith seems sold on it. I mean, she talks up the concrete benefits to her economy of this MOU, today. Whe says it’s already drawing investor interest in Alberta.

Poilievre: Danielle Smith is doing what she should be doing, which is fighting for her province. What Mark Carney is doing is signing agreements to do a little bit less damage than he was originally threatening. So let’s be clear, Carney did not give Alberta anything in the MOU. He withdrew some of the damaging policies that he had been threatening. If I show up at your house and I steal your lawn mower, your blender, your microwave, your television, and then I sign an agreement to give you back the lawn mower and the blender, I haven’t given you anything. I just let you have back what some of what you already had.

That’s what Mark Carney has done in this so-called MOU. He’s agreed to back down on the production cap and on a few other very damaging liberal regulations. But if I were Prime Minister, I would have done all of that by default the first week on the job without forcing Danielle Smith to sign on to an agreement. And by the way, there are still some extremely damaging federal liberal policies. The industrial carbon tax is cited by CNRL, one of our biggest oil companies, for canceling an $8 billion investment just last week in the middle of this price spike around the world. The Americans don’t even have an equivalent carbon tax on their industry, so we’re losing vis-à-vis our competitors. And as for the pipeline, let’s see if it actually happens. So far, the federal government hasn’t done any indigenous consultation. They haven’t recruited a proponent. And they’ve done nothing to clear the way for the project to actually occur. A year into office, this is not moving at the lightning speeds that Mr. Carney promised.

PW: You’re heading off to the United States on a multi-city tour. First of all, there’s all this stress about whether it’s okay with the Government of Canada that a Conservative is traveling in the United States. Have you spoken to the Prime Minister about this trip?

Poilievre: Yes, I spoke to him on the margins of Question Period [Wednesday]. We had a pull-aside meeting, and I told him where I was planning to go, Detroit, Texas, New York, that I’m focused on autos, energy, finance, and that that I would keep him apprised. He raised no concerns whatsoever about it. And in fact, I think he suggested some ideas on some people I might meet. My plan is to debrief him on my return.

I’m not going to get involved in negotiations, though. We’ve got a prime minister. He has a chief negotiator and a minister responsible. We’re not going to divide Canada. I wish him all the success in those negotiations. My goal, more than anything, is to build more continued American support for Canada. We have a lot already. We have a great reputation as a country in the US. All the polling data shows that. But let’s leverage it even more with American business, American audiences, the American people, so that we can increase the likelihood of our success in the negotiations, in the broader relationship.

PW: What took you so long?

Poilievre: Well, I wanted to clear the way for the government to do its job right. We had a foreign president who was threatening tariffs and our sovereignty, so I wanted to allow the Liberal government to have a clear field to do the job of representing the country. We have one prime minister at a time. But you know, as the time has gone on, I thought, “Is there a way I can be helpful?” And the thing I can do is just champion and fight for Canada towards the American people, American business, American legislators — as distinct from the executive branch, which is the purview of the federal government. And I think I’ve got the right balance in this approach.

PW: You have begun to curtain-raise elements of what would be a Conservative negotiating strategy if you were Prime Minister, which is to use leverage to improve Canada’s chances in CUSMA renewal negotiations: Canada’s airspace, the abundance of critical minerals, the huge energy supply and the capacity to rebuild the military. And what you’ve said in a speech in Toronto a couple of weeks ago is that access to a Strategic Mineral and Energy Reserve, that you would build up, would depend on tariff-free trade, and that the amount Canada would spend on US weapons would depend on tariff-free access to the United States. So: “We’ll let you have our critical minerals, and we will buy our military kit from you if there are no tariffs.” I’m nervous about how that negotiation would go. I mean, I’m not aware of a country in the world that the United States is maintaining a tariff-free arrangement with.

Poilievre: We have to start our negotiating position from the absolute ideal outcome and then negotiate from there. The alternative is to make a bunch of preemptive concessions and then ultimately make more later on. My approach would be to walk into the room and say, “On my left, I have all of this leverage. This is what we can offer. We have 10 of the 12 NATO-defined defence minerals. We have the fourth-biggest supply of oil. We have a massive defense spend coming up that your industry would love to compete for. We’re your second biggest customer.” And I want to use all that leverage to get what I want, which is tariff-free access to the United States. And obviously the negotiation begins from there. I think building up a Strategic Mineral and Oil Reserve would give us leverage with the Americans. They would see the opportunity, because frankly, modern warfare depends on fueling your military, but also building the component parts out of these very rare minerals that we have in abundance. So why not build leverage and convert that leverage into results at the negotiating table?

PW: Seems like a pretty easy bluff to call if they keep the tariffs on. Does that mean that Canada’s stuck with Swedish fighters and Belgian rifles?

Poilievre: I don’t think necessarily. Here’s the situation that we’re in right now. On the fighters, the military has recommended the F-35 repeatedly, and there have been competitions between the F-35 and the Gripen that the Air Force has made clear it prefers the F-35 and a single fleet. That said, it’s a very large purchase, and I think we should just include that in our leverage as we seek to have access to the American market. And I think we can. I think we can end up with the best of both worlds, meaning we can get the best purchase of a plane and and also use it to to get ourselves more access to the American market.

PW: During the campaign, you talked about your vision for Canada-US negotiations, and you said that we could deepen trade so profoundly that there’d be a kind of trade liberalization bonus that you could use to increase military spending. I mean, given the amount of military spending that needs to happen in this country, it seems, again, optimistic that after 30 years of free trade, we could have so much freer trade that we could spend it on guns and planes.

Poilievre: Look, I don’t think the entire military budget increase is going to come exclusively from an enhanced trade deal. But the point I was making is, let’s show our American friends how our security and economic interests are aligned. So the more you trade with us, the bigger the economy we have. The bigger economy we have, the more we spend on defense. And it necessarily benefits the Americans when we are doing a better job of securing our Arctic. For example, right now, we have a dedicated and permanent full time contingent of 300 soldiers for the entire Canadian Arctic, which is the size of the European Union. That’s one soldier for every 15,000 square kilometers. Well, if we could massively increase that number, have three bases in the north fully surveil our waters with drones, Poseidons, and have it all backed up with the best fighter jets in the world, then our American friends would know that the likelihood of them facing danger from their northern flank would be significantly reduced. And so we say to the to the Americans, look, we can help keep you keep us both safer from the northern side if we have a stronger economy. So let’s link what we want, market access, to what they want, greater continental security. And we’d increase the likelihood of a positive outcome for both.

PW: I think I’m seeing here the elements of a real difference between you and Prime Minister Carney on relations with the United States, which is that you’re more aligned with businesses, and a lot of other people who say, “Look, we’re stuck with the United States, so we might as well make the best of it.” You have said that we can’t move away from being next door the United States; that the American population likes us. And you have said, “Let’s not make short-term decisions to rupture that partnership because of what we hope will be a short-term dispute.” Do you see, regardless of its utility as a negotiating stance, the elbows-up rhetoric that we’re hearing from various corners, do you see that as unrealistic over the long term? That at some point people are not going to be able to stay out of the United States, they’re not going to be able to stop buying American products, and that we might as well jump to that position of greater realism, despite how bad it feels.

Poilievre: I’ll say two things. First of all, it is a false proposition to have a permanent rupture with our biggest customer and closest neighbor in favour of a strategic partnership for a new world order with China. It is also unrealistic to think that there is any other country that can replace the United States as our main customer. We sell, depending on the year, between two-thirds and three-quarters of all our exports to the United States of America. That is the biggest economy the world has ever seen, and it’s right next door. None of those things are going to change, so my view is that we need to get the best possible deal we can, while at the same time we are stronger at home. Stronger at home means we need to unlock our resources so that we can reach other markets at the same time.

And this is the real difference between Mr. Carney and I. He believes that lots of meetings and handshakes and unenforceable MOUs will get us more trade diversification. Reality is, most of the countries he’s meeting with already have free trade in open markets with Canada. The problem is not that they won’t let our products in. It’s that we won’t let them out.

You know, natural gas is the most hilarious example of reverse protectionism. The Germans are saying, “Please sell us your natural gas,” and we’re saying no, or at least the Liberal government was saying that. And so they’re getting 95% of their natural gas now from the United States because we, our government, blocked 16 LNG plants from happening over the last 10 years. One of these tankers, Paul, has a quarter billion dollars of gas in it. One of them. Carney is bragging about a new free trade deal with Indonesia. Fine. It’s a $400-million deal. That’s two tankers of natural gas. And no one’s blocking our gas but us. So if you want to diversify markets, the problem is not abroad. The problem is here at home with our own government policy.

So what I would do is repeal C-69 and C-48, the anti-development and export laws. Approve pipelines, LNG plants in six months, not 15 years. Get rid of the industrial carbon tax and unlock our incredible resources to vastly diversify markets overseas. That is how you build more diversity and strength at home.

PW: This mechanism of offering bounty to the Americans and withholding it if the free trade talks were to collapse, is a mechanism that you have used in various fields, kind of what economists would call a bonus-malus [Actually, it comes from insurance — pw]. Offer good things if things go your way and withhold them if they don’t. So you have said that you would reward cities that build homes and punish those that don’t you said that you would withhold research funding from universities and operating grants from museums if their policies are too woke, or if they if they too openly permit antisemitism. And you have said you would reward provinces for reducing trade barriers. It seems to be a vision of the federal government as a kind of a wicket: add up everything in the adding machine. And if you liberalize trade, but you don’t build enough houses, then it comes out, you know, sort of even this year, but we’ll see next year. Don’t governments traditionally get stuff done by meeting and discussing and coming up with common projects, rather than with this sort of “If you’re good, you can have dessert” attitude?

Poilievre: Well, the current attitude is, if you’re bad, you get dessert, and the worse you are, the more dessert you get. And that’s the result we’re getting. You’re asking, don’t governments get things done by having these meetings? Well, that’s not been happening over the last 10 years. Let’s take housing. For example. We have the most expensive housing in the G7. We have the fewest homes per capita of any G7 country, even though we have 10 times as much land to build on per person than the second closest country. Why is that everyone who builds homes will give you exactly the same answer — that the taxes and red tape block them from building? 60% of the cost of a new home in Vancouver today, according to a CD Howe study, is government, taxes, red tape, fees, charges, lawyers, lobbyists, etc. That means twice as much money goes to bureaucrats in offices for a new home than goes to the workers, the suppliers and the land on which that home is built. Okay, so what have we been doing for 10 years? Holding meetings and sending cheques. And it doesn’t matter how badly local governments block projects, stand in the way, screw things up. They get more money from the taxpayer.

It’s not my money. If, God willing, I’m Prime Minister, I will be custodian of the money of taxpayers. They want the money to be spent on results. So what I would say to municipalities is the amount of federal infrastructure money you get will depend proportionally on the number of homes you allow to be built. And I would require them to cut their development taxes to a level that is necessary to build the pipes, the parks, the roads, etc, but nothing more. In Toronto, for example, they’ve increased their development charges tenfold. Is it 10 times more expensive to build a pipe or a park today than it was a decade ago? Of course not. It’s all going to fatten bureaucracy. I would insist on on municipalities like that cutting those taxes, getting out of the way, so that we can unlock a building boom and we have more carpenters earning six figure salaries and more people owning young people owning homes. That’s the result I want to achieve.

PW: You said the amount of federal funding that a city would get, the program that you chose to increase or withhold that funding, is the Canada Community Building Fund — which the federal government doesn’t pay to cities. It pays under tripartite agreements to provinces. How could you target municipal performance with a fund that you pay to provinces?

Poilievre: You just put it in the funding agreement that the province will distribute the federal money on the basis of homes built, and that’s the condition of sending the federal money. It is federal money. After all, I’m not talking about doing anything with municipal or provincial money. I’m talking with money that’s collected by the federal government and spent by the federal government, for which the federal Prime Minister has the responsibility.

PW: On university funding, on some occasions, you’ve talked about if universities are too woke, or if there is antisemitism felt by Jewish students somewhere on a university campus, then you’ll withhold research money. Researchers aren’t committing acts of antisemitism. How come they’re the ones whose budgets get withheld if something happens on a large university campus that you don’t like?

Poilievre: So to be clear, what I’m talking about is universities, administrators, etc, promoting an environment that is not safe for the Jewish people. Our country has become a very, very dangerous place to be Jewish. Let’s just be blunt. In the last week, we’ve had two or three synagogues shot up, which has become a regular occurrence in this country. Unfortunately, that antisemitism is coming from the top down. It is in government departments that give out grants to overt, repulsive anti semitism. It is in university professors who have antisemitic backgrounds, who have supported antisemitic causes. It is in violence and intimidation that is targeting our Jewish population. I’m not interested in governing the political ideology of professors. That’s none of my business. But nor am I going to allow Canadian tax dollars to subsidize antisemitism or to create an environment that is violent and dangerous for our Jewish population. I don’t think we should be funding antisemitism. It’s as simple as that.

PW: I’ve gotten this far into the interview without comparing you to Donald Trump, because I don’t think it’s a useful comparison, but the only government in the world that has implemented similar policies has been the Trump administration, and what we’ve seen is hundreds of millions of dollars of grants withheld from large numbers of universities.

Poilievre: That’s a different thing entirely. I’m talking about where there are acts of antisemitism, or where the Jewish population is put at risk. The government should not be funding it. And that’s not just at a university level. It’s, for example, the Heritage Department, where the government gave a grant to Laith Marouf, who was supposed to promote an anti-racist agenda, and he himself is a vicious antisemitic racist who is on the record, in public comments the government easily could have found, making repulsive, horrific comments about Jews that I can’t even possibly repeat on your show because they are so disgusting. So it’s in those kinds of rare and extremely obvious cases that I think the government should make sure that its tax dollars do not go to funding this kind of hatred.

Hoekstra has been known to use salty language in some of his exchanges with other officials, but in this conversation he was businesslike. A big year is coming up on the Canada-US relations front, maybe even bigger than the year now ending, with a scheduled review of the Canada-US-Mexico free trade agreement. That one could end with a cheerful endorsement of the status quo or with abrogation of the treaty. Hoekstra figures it’ll land somewhere in between. That’ll cause enough headaches.

The ambassador, a longtime Michigan congressman, also looks forward to some celebratory moments in the year ahead. We’ll see who feels like celebrating.

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Paul Wells: Pete Hoekstra, thanks for joining me. It’s been a year since you told President Trump you wanted to be the ambassador to Canada. Was that a good call? Was that a smart thing to ask for it?

Pete Hoekstra: Yes. I always like being in the mix on critical issues. And with the relationship between the US and Canada, I’m in the mix of really important issues to both countries. It’s a good place to be.

PW: It hasn’t always been the calmest conversation. It’s been reported that you had some harsh words with Ontario’s representative in Washington. Does it ever get kind of hot compared to what you expected?

Hoekstra: Maybe to what I expected, but not to what I’ve done. When I got my start, I beat a 26-year Republican incumbent for my first race in Congress. If you’re going to beat an incumbent and you’re outspent 15 to 1, you know that that gets to be a pretty intense fight. I investigated the Teamsters. Our efforts, combined with other folks, led to the resignation of a Teamsters president. That wasn’t easy. Developing our legislative response to 9/11 and the intelligence reform bill. That’s not easy. Running the Michigan Republican Party in 2024 where it’s bitterly divided and has no money. We’ve got five months to win an election. And I win by 50.1% of the vote to become the new chairman of the party. That’s not easy. In almost every single one of those examples, we came out successful and I expect the same here in Canada. I don’t expect it to be easy.

PW: What are your goals? If you had a fridge magnet that says what you want to do in Canada in the next three years, what would it say?

Hoekstra: Prosperity, security and safety. The president has given me that mandate. We want to make Americans more prosperous. We want to make Americans safer. We want to make Americans more secure. So, we think that we can partner with Canada because we think the Canadian people and the Canadian government wants to provide the same things. More prosperity, more safety and more security.

PW: There’s room to enhance the prosperity, safety and security of both countries?

Hoekstra: I think that we can go through this process and we will have a stronger outcome, a stronger relationship at the end of this than at the beginning.

PW: When you came to Canada, Prime Minister Carney had been saying things like this from speech he gave on March 28^th: “It is clear that the United States is no longer a reliable partner. It is possible that with comprehensive negotiations we will be able to restore some trust, but there will be no turning back. The next government and all that follow will have a fundamentally different relationship with the United States.” Do you agree?

Hoekstra: The Prime Minister can drive the relationship wherever he wants. That’s not the indication that I think I’m getting from him today, that’s not where he wants the relationship to end up. But it’s possible. It could. But I’m on the other side. I’m more optimistic. I think it’ll be a bigger and better relationship.

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PW: Clearly the return of substantial tariffs on some important components of the Canadian economy have rattled Canadians. And so did the president’s early talk about Canada as a 51st state. It’s not stuff that Canadians have been used to hearing. I mean, it can’t be too surprising that they didn’t take it well.

Hoekstra: As I’ve said—and people don’t like me to say— I don’t quite understand the emotional reaction to those comments. I will formally retract those comments and say: I have no idea. And if you’re offended by me saying I don’t understand, I will say thank you for sharing with me how you feel about this. And I will not make a clarifying statement as to whether I understand your response or not.

PW: Okay, but it sounds like you don’t view this return of high tariffs as a root and branch rejection of the Canada-U.S. trading relationship? It’s just sort of a new cost of doing business?

Hoekstra: Well, you got two things here. I mean, you got the increased tariffs on steel and aluminum under section 232. We’re just saying, it’s unfair competition that’s allowed for under USMCA or CUSMA. We were very close to reaching a settlement on that on those four areas just before our Thanksgiving in the middle of November. That would have been very helpful. It would have been helpful to the automotive industry, as well as the steel and aluminum, because there’s lots of steel and aluminum components that go into an automobiles.

When you’re talking about tariffs, remember, that tariffs were imposed on every country in the world at different rates. When the President announced tariffs in the Rose Garden, he had, I think, at least two fairly significant poster boards listing countries. And I was thinking: Where’s Canada? Where’s the line that says Canada? Canada wasn’t even on the two charts. So, it’s not high tariffs coming to Canada. It was tariffs going to everybody in the world.

PW: When Mark Carney says that Canada got the best deal in the world right now, with regards to trade in the United States, do you agree?

Hoekstra: Yeah. I used that phrase and [Carney] says he stole it from me. I think we’re both in agreement. From day one when the President announced tariffs, the United States has adhered to the rules and the agreement that we had in the USMCA, which basically takes 85% of the trade between the two countries and puts it at zero tariffs. That’s not a bad deal.

PW: And now we’re going to review that deal. What’s your understanding of American goals in that review of USMCA? What do you think is going to result from that review?

Hoekstra: We want an agreement that, from our perspective, is a fair agreement. I’ve never been a proponent of free trade. I don’t think free trade exist. When we voted on NAFTA in Congress in the early 90s, I told my constituents I will read the [Free Trade] agreement, which you’re thinking, oh, that should be about one page—Canadian goods coming into the U.S. is zero and U.S. stuff coming into Canada is zero tariffs. And I think it was actually 1,000 pages. I read them all, but I could read them very, very quickly. I could just kind of flip through it because the agreement was primarily tables. Here’s the tariff schedule on asparagus for the next ten years. Here’s the tariff schedule on XYZ for the next ten, 15 years. That’s not free trade. That’s negotiated trade. The U.S., Canada and Mexico, will have to reach an agreement on what is an equitable and fair agreement between all countries.

PW: Do you anticipate another negotiation on the details of terms of trade like that?

Hoekstra: I think that’s the ultimate outcome over the next 10 or 12 months. And the fundamental question that will be answered—that the agreement allows for— is for it to continue exactly the way it is, all the way to termination. I don’t think it will be terminated. And there will also be a review as to whether a trilateral agreement, or three bilateral agreements is the best way to go. The President has indicated some interest in doing bilateral. I think all of that stuff’s on the table. And the President, Sheinbaum, and Carney are going to have to figure out exactly where they want to end up.

PW: Do they have a decent working relationship right now? I mean, the President and the Prime Minister were speaking quite frequently, and it seems like that’s been largely interrupted since those Ontario Reagan ads.

Hoekstra: I think from what I hear, they’re still talking. They’re still texting. They got together at FIFA, I think for up to 45 minutes, with Sheinbaum. So, I think they still have a constructive working relationship. Absolutely.

PW: Pierre Poilievre, as the Conservative leader has sometimes said that Trump prefers Carney because Carney’s a pushover. Do you share that evaluation?

Hoekstra: Heaven forbid that I get into characterizations of Pierre or the Prime Minister, or characterizations of the other political parties. I’m hands off on Canadian politics. Obviously, the [Reagan] ads kind of torpedoed the agreement, or the approaching agreement, in November. You’ve got your political system. You guys understand your political system. And, you know, I’m learning about your system, but it’s fundamentally different than how we work.

I would not voice my opinions on Canadian politics. And I think a lot of times when I’m hearing Canadians who are experts on American politics, I kind of look at them and say, you might be better off if you didn’t talk about this stuff because clearly, they demonstrate a lack of understanding of how our politics work.

PW: Is it possible to boil it down to 1 or 2 things that you wish Canadians understood better about American politics? Just that they don’t have a feel for them?

Hoekstra: No, I didn’t say they don’t have a feel for them. But, you know, when I ran for office, and I got elected [I knew that I’d get elected] on November 5th, and I would know that in two years, I’d have another election. The first Tuesday following the first Monday in November. You just kind of plan that way. That’s what you factor into your decision making. In Canada, well, you know, [someone can get] elected on this date and we could have another election in five months, or it could be four years.

That’s a whole different calculus, that you have to factor into your decision making that we don’t have to. Relationships between your provinces and your federal government is different than our states and our federal government. The powers of our states versus the powers of your provinces are very, very different. They may not seem that significant, but when it comes to political calculus and how you make their decisions, they’re probably very, very significant.

PW: You come from a border state. The net effect of this tariff policy is to put an extra cost on imports into the American market from Canada. To put a transaction cost on trade that had been much lower cost. Is that a hard case? You’re now operating for the entire United States, but you go home to Michigan. Is that a hard case to make in Michigan?

Hoekstra: I think Michigan looks at certain trade agreements and those types of things and people in Michigan say those things were devastating to our industry and to our economy, to our jobs, to our communities, and those types of things. It doesn’t necessarily make it easy. But it means that there are a lot of people in Michigan who believe that certain trade agreements were devastating to them, to Michigan’s economy, and it’s time to rethink them.

PW: Including, but not only, NAFTA? I mean, you campaigned on China and the WTO as a very bad deal for Michigan.

Hoekstra: Yeah. We had the Central American Free Trade Agreement. We had NAFTA. We had China entering the WTO. And probably 4 or 5 other trade agreements. And my record was kind of mixed. There were some that I voted for— I voted for NAFTA. There are just so many similarities, and the integration between trade with Michigan and Canada. I voted against the China thing because I think China cheats on trade. They cheat on intellectual property. Those were never concerns I had with Canada. Canada protects intellectual property. So, it’s complicated, but I think a lot of folks in Michigan and across the country believe the net effect of a lot of these trade deals has been negative.

PW: A lot of the big policy choices that Canada’s made in the last year have to do with reducing Canadian reliance on the American market and building up the internal Canadian market and looking for third markets east and west, rather than north and south. First of all, do you understand the impulse behind that shift in Canadian priorities?

Hoekstra: Yeah, it makes sense. I met with the Belgian ambassador recently and he said, hey, our biggest trading partners are the Netherlands, Germany and France. Oh, those are your three neighbors. Developing more distant relationships is hard. It may be easier in the financial sector but it’s hard in a manufacturing sector. I’ve talked with a lot of Canadian manufacturers. They love doing business with the United States. Your energy sector loves doing business with the United States. Over the last 50 years, we’ve brought a lot of prosperity to both sides of the border because of those relationships. If Canada wants to diversify the people it’s doing business with, you know, go for it. Just recognize that your friends south of the border are probably going to be trying to continue to present ourselves as one of the best places for Canadians to do business.

PW: One reason Belgium trades mostly with France, Germany and the Netherlands is they’re all part of a great long-term, stable single market trading relationship. Ours doesn’t feel as stable these days.

Hoekstra: I think the real potential exists to build a more stable, stronger relationship than we have today. There have always been irritants in the relationship. Tariffs is one thing. But there are non-tariff barriers that are out there that have been put in place which create some real problems.

Having spent some time in Europe— not as an expert in how that all works—but there are some real irritants in the relationships between individual governments and the European Council that sets trade policy. I experienced some of those in the Netherlands in terms of their environmental standards. Their fishing standards, and those kinds of things. It’s not necessarily that everyone is one big happy family. There are all kinds of trade disputes that go on in the EU at different times. I’ve experienced it.

PW: A visitor [to the U.S.] from Britain next year might have to cough up five-year’s worth of social media history. All the emails that they’ve used. That’s not something that the Brits were expecting a couple of weeks ago. Is that something that Canadian travelers might have to face?

Hoekstra: I’m not aware of those specifics. I find it hard to believe. I mean, obviously with what recently happened in Australia, I think that we’ve just taken down a potential threat. And, you know, some of this may be homegrown, and all those kinds of things, but we are going to put in place steps to identify those who are threats to the security and the safety of Americans.

PW: The President continues to make surprising statements, sometimes about potential terrorists in the future. On December 8th, he said he might impose very severe tariffs on fertilizer. Is that something that potash companies in Saskatchewan should worry about?

Hoekstra: My guess is that they don’t have to worry about it all that much because we import 83% of our potash from Canada. We don’t have natural sources of potash ourselves. I kind of like the position of where potash producers in Canada might be right now.

PW: Does that mean they don’t have to worry about tariffs when the President talks about tariffs?

Hoekstra: I think when the President speaks, you should take what the President of the United States says seriously. When Prime Minister Carney speaks, we take seriously what the Prime Minister says. So, yes.

PW: I’m still not sure whether very severe tariffs on potash are coming.

Hoekstra: I’m not either. I wouldn’t expect them, but, you know, we’re in a process called negotiations and reviews. When Mexico and Canada and the US announced a five-year review [of USMCA] I think it was insightful that they put that clause in there. It says that the whole thing’s up for review. I think coming out of that, I’m optimistic we can create a better and a stronger agreement than what we had before.

PW: Is it fair to characterize your response to some of the Canadian talk about the bilateral relationship as overreacting? Do you think some Canadians are overreacting to the Trump presidency?

Hoekstra: Far be it for me to characterize Canadian behavior. I will not characterize the behavior of the Prime Minister, or of the Canadian people. That just has no benefit. They may react. They can do that.

PW: Do those reactions affect the choices America has to make in the next little while? If we squeal, are we going to get in bigger trouble?

Hoekstra: These are professional trade negotiators. They may listen to some of the noise that’s out there. But it’s not like they’re going to react to a squeak or whatever.

On major issues? Yes, there will be a response. You start using taxpayer dollars in Canada to personally attack our President, attack his policies, I think it’s fair to say, yes, that will get our attention.

PW: The ads in question didn’t mention President Trump, if I’m not mistaken?

Hoekstra: They clearly talked about the President’s policies. They clearly referenced a former President of the United States. And the holders of the flame, so to speak, of that group said that it mischaracterized a former President.

On tariffs, it’s pretty hard to differentiate between the President and his policies. That [Reagan ad] was one that our negotiators and the President took notice of. But in terms of a lot of the other, stuff that’s going on, no, I don’t think [they will react to a squeak].

PW: The National Security Strategy that was released last week talks about cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations. That sounds like settled American policy of influencing internal European politics.

Hoekstra: It says we’ve expressed an opinion about them. We don’t agree with them. We don’t agree on specific areas. We have concerns about mass migration—the impact it’s had on the United States and on Europe, and the impact it may have. We’ve talked about the concept of freedom of speech and freedom of religion that are happening in Europe. Those are areas that we are concerned about.

PW: How do you expect your activity here in Ottawa, dealing with the Canadian public and the Canadian government, to be different in ’26? Do you have plans for ’26?

Hoekstra: We’ve got all kinds of plans for ‘26. 2026 is going to be a great year. We’re celebrating our 250th anniversary, so there will be a lot of activities there. We will highlight a lot of the successes and relationships that we’ve had with allies throughout that time. I’m sure that at some point in time we will talk about the success the United States and Canada had when they liberated significant parts of the Netherlands, including, the Canadians liberating my family and, my parents and the city of Groningen.

We will talk about after 9/11, places like Gander and Halifax taking in large numbers of people from around the world who were headed to the United States on that day. When we said, sorry, our airspace is closed and the Canadians opened airports and their homes for people who couldn’t get to the United States.

We’ll spend a tremendous amount of time talking about the number of American businesses and Canadian businesses who have such a significant partnership across the border that have brought prosperity and investment and jobs to both sides of the border. 2026 will be a year of highlighting a lot of the relationships and the friendships that we’ve developed over those 250 years that have helped make the world a better place because of those kinds of relationships.

I am happy to bring you these photos and this audio from the Paul Wells Holiday Show, presented by Cameco, that took place last Saturday night, December 6, at the Azrieli Studio of Canada’s National Arts Centre. My podcast feed has been too quiet lately. This will help change that.

I launched this annual event in 2023 as a way to thank my subscribers, who have made this chapter the most rewarding in my long (I mean, it’s getting long) career. I wanted to give some of you a chance to see and hear me in person, and more than that, I wanted to send you into the Christmas season with some things to think about and some music to enjoy.

For that first edition of the Holiday Show, free tickets got snapped up fast. The second edition in 2024 produced two podcast episodes — and in our first year selling tickets, we sold out almost immediately.

This year we hiked the ticket price and booked a room twice as big — and we still sold out just as quickly. This odd event that is so hard to describe is turning into a major Christmas-season event in the capital. We’ll be back next year, in an even bigger venue. And I am making rapid progress on the first Paul Wells Road Show, in Vancouver in March. More details soon.

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Here’s some of how last Saturday’s Holiday Show went. Click on any of Blair Gable’s excellent photos to see a larger version.

The Studio at the NAC seats 300 people in a sharply-raked amphitheatre that allowed everyone to sit huddled around the stage. I loved the reception afterward, where I got to meet the audience, including some who took road trips to get there and some who were there for their third Holiday Show in a row.

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I was, of course, hardly the evening’s only entertainment. We heard songs from three of Canada’s finest singers: Ottawa-based Juno winner Kellylee Evans, Montreal-based three-time Juno winner Caity Gyorgy, and Toronto-based Juno winner and Grammy nominee Laila Biali. (Kellylee has her own Winter Song concert, another NAC holiday tradition, next week. Information and tickets are here. It’s always a wonderful evening out.) At the end of the night, all three singers joined forces on Laila’s arrangement of “Joy to the World.”

You won’t hear any of that on the podcast, because copyright is tricky. But there’s still more than an hour of highlights to hear, because there was a lot of talking too. I invited my friends Vassy Kapelos from CTV, David Herle from The Curse of Politics and Brian Lilley from the Toronto Sun for an extended super-panel.

And Bob Rae, fresh from his five-year posting as Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations, came to share his thoughts on the world, the neighbours, and the future. (And a song.)

I want to thank my sponsors, who understand why community, conversation and creation are worth supporting. Cameco is a great success story for Canada and for their home province of Saskatchewan. They’ve had a tremendous year and I was proud to have them as my Presenting Sponsor. I’m also grateful to our Gold Sponsor, Netflix, and to our Sponsor The Canadian Bankers Association.

Thanks always to my subscribers. We had quite a year together. Thank you for your support and your interest. Consider giving gift subscriptions to Paul Wells to your loved ones; just click here. Tell your friends and family when you read or hear something interesting here; the best way you can help me is to spread the word about what we’re building here.

I’ll write here a few more times before year’s end, but in case I forget later, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

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Topic One had to be Prime Minister Mark Carney’s remarks in Johannesburg, where he said “Who cares?” when a reporter asked him the last time he spoke to Donald Trump. This gave the Liberal leader’s Conservative opponents conniptions, and it also poses the eternal question of what the Canadian PM’s proper stance with regard to the U.S. President should be. The question is even fresher today, with news that Carney is “weighing” a trip to Washington next week.

We also discussed the complicated autumn on the Conservative benches, with Chris d’Entremont jumping to the Liberals and Matt Jeneroux briefly occupying a political Schrödinger box. All that jumping around makes it hard to count MPs right when it’s important to count them accurately, for a series of confidence votes — not yet finished! — on the budget.

And we discuss the appointment of Steve Outhouse as the Conservatives’ new campaign manager, whenever a campaign might happen. Outhouse is a faithful subscriber to your favourite Substack, and he helped get out the vote for Garry Keller’s near-upset in the spring election, so your panelists know him well. What does his appointment mean for the Liberals, and how should other parties respond? (For more on Outhouse, here’s his appearance on the Herly Burly podcast.)

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Thanks as always for listening and watching.

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You can listen for yourself, but it becomes clear early on that I’m in the unaccustomed position of disagreeing. To me, in a democracy anyone should be able to say anything to anyone. Especially if the “anything” is true, important, and (this part is secondary, but a bonus) something Ronald Reagan said first. I think it’s fine to advertise for trade policy in the U.S., given that this will displace ads for McDonald’s and online sports gambling. And most of all, I can’t imagine living in fear of provoking a level of fiat that the President has shown is at the heart of his style. Buy peace now and live forever in fear of confrontation next week? No thanks.

So we have a debate. I think I was pretty good about letting the gang do most of the talking? Also, we check in on the odd insistence from the Liberal House Leader, Steve McKinnon, that he’s short some votes for a confidence vote that could come next week.

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A good conversation all around. Thanks for listening and watching.

Specifically, this is the OG panel, with the return of Garry Keller, who took the campaign off to run as the Conservative candidate in Nipissing—Timiskaming. Garry was the party’s last nominated candidate before the writ drop (sorry, the drawing up of the writs), after a previous candidate withdrew, and in the end he came close to putting a longtime Liberal riding in the Conservative column. But it was not to be. So we get him back. Garry dishes a bit here about what he heard from voters at the door. Thanks to Jason Lietaer for his excellent work as interim campaign-period panellist while Garry was running.

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Returning as always are the NDP-adjacent Allison Gifford and Liberal Marci Surkes. It was great to have everyone back, in fulfilment of my promise to keep producing occasional video and audio product. We convened at the end of the third week since Parliament returned in September. Mark Carney has kept up a steady tempo of announcements, trips and appointments. Pierre Poilievre has resumed his steady tempo of reminders that trips and appointments butter no parsnips. And there’s an NDP leadership race shaping up, too.

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Thanks for watching and listening.

Hi, back with the podcast. I didn’t want to release this episode until Brian Stewart’s new book was released. It’s frustrating for readers to hear about a book they can’t buy yet. But Stewart’s generous, introspective memoir, On The Ground: My Life as a Foreign Correspondent, was published on Tuesday, so here’s my interview with him.

Stewart was a globe-trotting CBC foreign correspondent in, especially, the 1980s, and he continued doing a mix of reporting and anchor work until about 15 years ago. These were the apex years at the Corp, when few people who cared about politics dared go to bed without watching The National, and the CBC’s team of foreign correspondents was often viewers’ only window into big international stories.

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One of those stories had a visibility and effect that few reporters can imagine achieving, and fittingly, it opens Stewart’s book. That was Stewart’s 1984 reporting from the Ethiopian famine, which led straight to the newly-elected government of Brian Mulroney taking a lead in the international humanitarian response, and onward to Live Aid and much else. This short video from Adrienne Arsenault features a clip of David Bowie introducing an edited version of Stewart’s Ethiopia report from the stage at Wembley Stadium. That’s one definition of hitting the big time.

But there’s a lot else in the book, including Stewart’s early days, when his father’s work for the Simpson’s department-store chain allowed the family to live beyond its means, abroad and at home. So Stewart was at Upper Canada College when a lad named Conrad Black was expelled for peddling exams. They became friends for life.

Because it’s my show, I dwell longer than you might on Stewart’s work at the Montreal Gazette, in a city that has always punched above its weight for news generation. Stewart got on The Gazette in 1967 by writing about school-board reform, which is a special love language that only a newspaper for Montreal anglophones could understand. He arrived just in time for Charles De Gaulle’s Vive le Québec Libre! speech, Trudeaumania and the deadliest years of the FLQ. (I came along a generation later, just in time for Meech Lake, Oka and the Polytechnique massacre.) Going to TV meant Stewart had to give up a widely-read column in the Gazette. Can’t have been easy, but he obviously chose correctly.

I think this was our first conversation or close to it, but this business is a succession of echoes, and we found much to talk about. There’s a little handwringing about the state of the industry, but mostly this is a celebration of work worth doing.

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Since I have no plans for more podcast episodes, we’re doing things a little differently. This episode exists only on Substack and on Youtube. Here’s the Youtube video, which lets you see Stewart talk.

I’ll have more video content from time to time, but these days I’m more of a writer. Thanks for watching, listening and reading.

In September of 2022, when this newsletter was five months old, I announced that the time had come to make “a big bet on in-depth conversation” with a new podcast, which I called The Paul Wells Show. In a lot of ways that bet paid off nicely. I’m proud of the podcast. But after three seasons, I’m cashing in my chips. I’m ending production of The Paul Wells Show as a weekly podcast.

This decision was hard to make. It came as a surprise to some people who were ready to work with me on making a fourth season. While the show’s had a rocky couple of years behind the scenes — twice losing the institutional support that came from partnerships with large universities — I had every reason to believe I could now make the podcast work with advertiser support. Indeed I’ve been curious to see how advertisers would welcome a chance to put their money where my mouth is. The Paul Wells Show has a good story to tell. The audience it reaches in any given month quintupled in the last year. More people are listening than ever, by a lot, and it’s a highly-educated, influential audience.

But in recent days, I’ve begun asking myself a different question: Is podcasting where I can keep doing my best work? That led to a different answer.

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Podcasting uses production skills I don’t have, and time I don’t want to spend on editing, so I need a team. That costs money, more than the newsletter, which is a solo act. The costs were borne first by the Munk School at the University of Toronto, then by the Max Bell School at McGill University and their founding patron, the Max Bell Foundation. Neither arrangement lasted as long as I’d hoped. Time to try advertising.

I had good talks with professionals who have a track record of making political podcasts work in Canada. It works best if I make a lot of episodes, and if I read advertisers’ ads, essentially making myself their pitchman.

These are fair things to ask. In fact they’re routine in podcasting. I don’t skip a beat when I hear Bill Simmons or Prof G read commercials.

But the year-round production schedule started to look like a hamster wheel. A lighter schedule could be imagined, but it’d reduce advertiser interest. And as for the ads… Look, sometimes I’m wrong about something, but at least I’m the one who’s wrong. I didn’t want anyone in any corner of my audience to wonder who they’re hearing when they hear my voice, not ever.

One more thing. I’ve been going through my stats. The posts on this Substack that get the most likes, comments, new subscriptions and shares are consistently the written posts. I mean, here are my top posts, from throughout the life of this newsletter, ranked by audience and engagement. You have to go through more than 90 of them before you hit the top podcast episode. It’s like you’ve all been trying to tell me something.

I recorded a really good interview last week with Brian Stewart, the veteran CBC foreign correspondent who’s got a new memoir coming out. We’ll post that episode in mid-September, after the book hits the market. I don’t expect to have any more podcast episodes after that. I’ll still do audio and video — but occasionally, when it suits the material, or on the spur of the moment when news is breaking. I won’t polish it up to quite the same gloss before sharing it. You’ll find it here, and maybe on my Youtube channel, but probably not on every podcast platform under the sky. The time I save can go into more elaborate reporting and more focussed writing. I’ll try to keep getting better at the work I do best.

I’ve been doing interviews my entire adult life. I started letting audiences listen to the interviews in 2018, when I began interviewing newsmakers at the National Arts Centre for a magazine. That series went online during the COVID lockdown — and then it became this podcast, essentially without a pause when I went independent. So I’ve been doing this for something like eight years. I’m grateful that so many people gave thoughtful answers to my questions, and that a growing audience gave this work their time and attention.

I hope you’ll keep reading.

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With the FBI searching John Bolton’s home, the president trying to fire a Fed governor the way his administration fired the heads of the Defence Intelligence Agency and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and National Guard troops patrolling two American cities with perhaps more to come, it is time for Anne Applebaum to resist the urge to say she told us this would happen.

Rather, she says early in this week’s podcast episode, Donald Trump told us it would happen. This or something like it. “He promised revenge and retribution… he talked about his enemies as vermin. …He has been telling us for the last couple of years that this was going to be a really different kind of presidency. And just a lot of people chose not to believe it.”

It was the sort of rollicking start to an interview that caused me to jump straight to a question I had planned to save for later. Does Applebaum expect the 2026 midterm elections to be free and fair?

“I don’t want to be scaremongering or doom-mongering,” Applebaum replies. There’s a substantial structural advantage to U.S. elections, which is that they’re run by the states, which are jealous of their prerogatives and which therefore turn every “national” election into a patchwork of rules and procedures that makes them simply difficult to rig. And yet… “I also fear that Americans have a lack of imagination when it comes to the possibility of stolen elections or assaults on our political system,” Applebaum says.

It’s time, in short, for this podcast to return to its periodic outbursts of alarm at the Trump presidency. I don’t follow U.S. politics with quite the concentration of some colleagues, but I am rarely encouraged by what I see. Lately there has been much to see.

The Trump II presidency seems more built out than the first, more industrious. That they even had time to fire the Kennedy Center’s director of dance is one measure of the change. Trump 2017-2021 would often tweet about what he saw on TV until past noon. This one has exacted tribute and treasure from law firms, universities, TV networks and Japan. Courts that once ruled against him down the line are becoming less predictable. And of course, public figures who hitched their wagon to Trump years ago are not close to losing their allegiance over whatever he did last week or might tomorrow. Just about the only figure who seems unmoved by Trump is Vladimir Putin.

It’s been ten months since Applebaum made her first appearance on The Paul Wells Show. Probably most of my readers are familiar with her work. She’s a Contributing Writer for The Atlantic, an award-winning author, and she writes a popular Substack on politics, human rights and foreign policy. Much has changed since I spoke to her last, and this week’s publication of a paperback edition of her book Autocracy, Inc. was a good moment to take the measure of those changes.

I’m pleased for the chance to catch up with Applebaum, whose books Gulag and Iron Curtain are modern classics of popular history. She spoke to me from Poland, where her husband Radosław Sikorski is deputy prime minister and foreign minister. With luck I’ll have him on sometime too.

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You can listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts and a bunch of other platforms via the “Listen On” button that you can see at the top of this post when you view it on your desktop browser. If you listen on a podcast platform, hit “Like” and “Subscribe” buttons, and leave a good review, to help spread the word.

You can read a (machine-generated) transcript of this week’s episode via the "Transcript” button at the top of this page which should be visible on most platforms when you view it on your desktop browser.

Wayne Eyre’s predecessor as Chief of the Defence Staff held the position for a shorter time than anyone who ever held the job. It was messy at the end. So Eyre’s rise to the top job came faster than he expected, in 2021 — at a time when Canadian electoral politics was as polarized as I’ve ever seen. He retired last summer, not long before Justin Trudeau did. So much has changed since Eyre left the top military job. I thought it was a good time to catch up.

I don’t know him well. I’ve interviewed senior officers in the Canadian Armed Forces, but had never had more than brief chats with Eyre. But he was eager to talk, and our conversation covered a lot of ground. We discussed:

• The challenges of going from less than 2% of GDP on military spending to the odd 3.5%+1.5% target that’s become Mark Carney’s daunting goal;

• Challenges in recruitment and retention;

• A spike in political extremism in the ranks that led to high-profile criminal charges this summer;

• Pierre Poilievre’s call for a “warrior culture” to replace the “woke culture” in the CAF. I’d mentioned this to Eyre as a topic I would want to cover. It’s clear he took time to prepare his answer. Eyre himself came in for criticism on these issues while he was CDS. I’ve been a skeptic of any sweeping woke-to-warrior transformation in Canada’s military, given recent precedent to our south, but I thought it was important to hear what Eyre had to say;

• And of course, we talked about relations between Canada’s military and that of the U.S. — by its very nature one of the closest military-to-military working relationships in the world, and one that risks being tested by tensions between Donald Trump and Canadians. Yes, Eyre thinks Canada should proceed with an order for American F-35 fighters.

I’ve been struck by a bunch of recent conversations I’ve had with people in non-military roles — provincial politicians in economic portfolios, university administrators — who’ve begun factoring the prospect of higher military spending into their plans. We seem to be heading for a sea change, and I thought Wayne Eyre would help us better understand where Canada’s been and where it might be going. I’m grateful to him for sharing his thoughts.

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You can listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts and a bunch of other platforms via the “Listen On” button that you can see at the top of this post when you view it on your desktop browser. If you listen on a podcast platform, hit “Like” and “Subscribe” buttons, and leave a good review, to help spread the word.

You can read a (machine-generated) transcript of this week’s episode via the "Transcript” button at the top of this page which should be visible on most platforms when you view it on your desktop browser.

You’ve earned another fresh podcast episode. This week my guest is Scott Anderson, the leading war correspondent who’s written for The New York Times Magazine, GQ, Vanity Fair, Esquire and a bunch of others. His ninth and latest book is King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation. (Anderson has, himself, sometimes commented on his fondness for long subtitles.) King of Kings tells of the 1979 fall of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi at the hands of an Iranian population whose resentment and hunger for change the Shah never understood, and the ascension to power from long exile of the Ayatollah Khomeini.

The book opens with a smashing personal anecdote — Anderson, still a student, was in the crowd when the Shah’s last visit to Washington in 1977 was obscured by billows of tear gas and the crack of billy clubs — and a bold claim: “If one were to make a list of that small handful of revolutions that spurred change on a truly global scale in the modern era, that caused a paradigm shift in the way the world works, to the American, French and Russian Revolutions might be added the Iranian.”

This is unusual subject matter for my podcast. But to say the least, Iran is still in the news, and I had a hunch that an author this experienced would serve up quite a tale. It was obvious early in my reading that I was right. It’s mostly a tale of almost wilful incompetence in two capitals, the Shah’s Tehran and Jimmy Carter’s Washington.

Anderson’s not particularly a critic of Carter in general, but he shows how a freshman President with a stacked foreign-policy agenda was always distracted by something else while Iran tilted closer and closer to uprising. And Carter was terribly served by a US nationl-security apparatus in which senior officials knew nothing of Iran outside the Shah’s palace — and systematically ostracized junior officials who tried to learn. You’d think that people entrusted with heavy responsibility would act responsibly. When it came to US-Iran relations through the 1970s, you’d have been wrong.

This is big history with big consequences that ring down to the current day. I’m grateful to Scott Anderson for coming on the show to talk about it.

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You can read a (machine-generated) transcript of this week’s episode via the "Transcript” button at the top of this page which should be visible on most platforms when you view it on your desktop browser.

For a while there we were doing these live podcast recording sessions at the Munk School in Toronto.

My relationship with Toronto is better than many Canadians’: I’ve never lived there, but I’ve often worked for Toronto-based organizations and I always look forward to visiting. But Toronto has become increasingly ungovernable, a place where it’s easier to find gridlock than a home, and where there’s no wholly satisfactory way to travel more than a dozen or so blocks in any direction.

This turn of events is chronicled in Michael Healey’s astonishing play The Master Plan, which ran forever at Crow’s Theatre and Soulpepper and can’t seem to get staged anywhere outside Toronto, which is a shame; and in the often wistful columns of Toronto Star columnists, of which this is a representative example:

Into this mess rode Olivia Chow, who was a Toronto city councillor, then a federal NDP MP, then an unsuccessful mayoral candidate (she finished third in 2014, and that seemed to be that) — then the successful candidate in a 2023 election nobody expected. Very much including the incumbent.

On the fall night in 2023 when Chow joined me and a live audience to talk about her job, much of the contradiction and disappointment in the mayor’s job still lay ahead. “There will be problems and setbacks aplenty for her as there is for anyone in public life,” I wrote the first time this episode went out, hedging my bets mightily. But “for this one night, it was a pleasure to meet a pro at the top of her game.”

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To oversimplify, what’s happened since 2023 is that Chow has been reluctant to realize that housing construction has to be a top priority. This has led to large missteps. It’s not clear that she can win re-election, although in Toronto as in most local races, much will depend on who runs against her. This episode of The Paul Wells Show, more than most, has fermented a bit in the vault, but a reminder that political honeymoons can end is always timely.

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You can listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts and a bunch of other platforms via the “Listen On” button that you can see at the top of this post when you view it on your desktop browser. If you listen on a podcast platform, hit “Like” and “Subscribe” buttons, and leave a good review, to help spread the word.

You can read a (machine-generated) transcript of this week’s episode via the "Transcript” button at the top of this page which should be visible on most platforms when you view it on your desktop browser.

This week’s deep dive ino the archive of The Paul Wells Show is an episode from May 2024, with veteran journalist Jonathan Manthorpe. The topic is China, and Canada’s long history of optimistic engagement with China.

Specifically the topic is Manthorpe’s book Claws of the Panda, first published in 2019. I’ve had nearly nothing to do with its success — it’s a superb book, a pocket history of Canada-China relations told with a storyteller’s real flair — but I’ve tried to spread word of its existence every chance I got since it first came out. In 2024 Manthorpe had just published a substantially updated version of Claws of the Panda, and along the way it’s become almost a standard text on the topic for interested Canadians.

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Claws of the Panda is a methodical summary of decades of Canada-China relations, beginning with Christian missions in China in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Canada, Manthorpe argues, has always had a missionary impulse with regard to China: relations between the two countries, the theory went, could help China become more like Canada. It’s worked out rather the reverse: Canada has too often had to trade its own democratic standards for market access. That’s the story Manthorpe tells, as timely now as ever.

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You can listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts and a bunch of other platforms via the “Listen On” button that you can see at the top of this post when you view it on your desktop browser. If you listen on a podcast platform, hit “Like” and “Subscribe” buttons, and leave a good review, to help spread the word.

You can read a (machine-generated) transcript of this week’s episode via the "Transcript” button at the top of this page which should be visible on most platforms when you view it on your desktop browser.

I am grateful to be the Max Bell Foundation Senior Fellow at McGill University, the principal patron of this podcast. Antica Productions turns these interviews into a podcast every week. Kevin Breit wrote and performed the theme music. Andy Milne plays it on piano at the end of each episode. Thanks to all of them and to you. Please tell your friends to subscribe to The Paul Wells Show on their favourite podcast app, or here on the newsletter.

We know so little about Canada’s largest corporations, which makes this episode of The Paul Wells Show, from early 2024, such a revelation. My guest is Alexandra Posadzki, whose book Rogers v. Rogers: The Battle for Control of Canada’s Telecom Empire recounts the amazing period when just about everyone in Canada’s leading telecomms company was suddenly saying the quiet parts out loud.

Posadzki’s book recounts the extraordinarily public falling-out among the heirs of Ted Rogers’ $30-billion telecoms empire. At stake was a fundamental question of direction: who the company’s CEO should be. And an important question of governance: is a company better run if most shareholders get ordinary shares while a few get special super-powered shares? All of this drama unfolded while Rogers was trying to close a $20-billion merger with Shaw Communications that would test the limits of competition regulation in this country.

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The story features cameos from David Peterson, who was Ontario’s premier more than 30 years ago and has since become a key figure in just about every important Toronto story. And John Tory, who was Toronto’s mayor while this story was happening, even as he was moonlighting as fixer-in-chief at the company he helped build. There’s even an appearance from Brian Cox, the star of HBO’s Succession. Look!:

You can listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts and a bunch of other platforms via the “Listen On” button that you can see at the top of this post when you view it on your desktop browser. If you listen on a podcast platform, hit “Like” and “Subscribe” buttons, and leave a good review, to help spread the word.

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I am grateful to be the Max Bell Foundation Senior Fellow at McGill University, the principal patron of this podcast. Antica Productions turns these interviews into a podcast every week. Kevin Breit wrote and performed the theme music. Andy Milne plays it on piano at the end of each episode. Thanks to all of them and to you. Please tell your friends to subscribe to The Paul Wells Show on their favourite podcast app, or here on the newsletter.

You’ve earned a fresh podcast episode. This summer I’ve been giving you encore episodes from The Paul Wells Show’s modest but action-packed archive. But this week I’ve got new content for you.

On July 15 I sat down with three friends — The Globe and Mail’s star Ottawa feature writer Shannon Proudfoot, veteran Liberal strategist and analyst Scott Reid, and Juno-winning singer-songwriter Donovan Woods — to talk about books. I swiped the basic idea from an episode of the design podcast 99% Invisible, and in fact I’m just realizing now that entirely by coincidence, the same book is discussed in both episodes.

My ground rules were simple: Each panelist (the three guests plus me) got to discuss a book we’re reading this summer, and then another book we’d recommend from all our previous summers of reading. I made a point of encouraging everyone not to try to come up with anything definitive or monumental. Summer reading should be a break from curriculum. But, since each of this week’s panelists makes a living with words, it shouldn’t be a surprise that some weighty tomes got tossed around. Almost every book selected by each panelist was a surprise to the rest of the panel. We had a blast, and I bet you will too.

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To help you follow through if you hear about something you might like, here are the books discussed in this episode.

What it Takes by Richard Ben Cramer

The Spiritualist Prime Minister by Anton Wagner

I Regret Almost Everything by Keith McNally

Going Around: Selected Journalism by Murray Kempton

Rilla of Ingleside by L.M. Montgomery

Fifth Business by Robertson Davies

Canada by Richard Ford

Solomon Gursky Was Here by Mordecai Richler

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 suspect this won’t be the last time we convene a book club for this show.

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Thanks to my executive producer, Suzanne Hancock, for producing this episode. If you like what you hear on the podcast or read in the newsletter, please make sure to tell some friends.

This one was kind of intense. It first ran in November, 2022, a week after Elon Musk finalized his purchase of Twitter. It was recorded, in fact, just before Musk closed that particular deal. It’s a handy reminder that there was a lot to say about social media even before Musk started trying to improve things.

A book’s worth, in fact: my guest, for one of The Paul Wells Show’s first episodes, was Max Fisher, whose book The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Brains and Our World discusses how the basic goal of all the big social-media platforms — “engagement,” or time spent online — led the big platforms to find techniques to keep us coming back for more. Techniques that also tap into a human weakness for tribalism, strong emotion, polarized debate, and revenge.

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Fisher’s reporting on these issues for the New York Times made him a finalist for a 2019 Pulitzer prize. He left the Times a few months after this interview, teasing a “new venture” whose nature he’s said he’ll reveal this autumn. Meanwhile he’s left us with this book, which adds a hefty dose of social and perceptual psychology to his on-the-ground reporting in a handful of countries. And with this interview.

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Canada Day goes into extra innings with this week’s podcast episode. It’s actually the third podcast episode I ever recorded, in the fall of 2022, and the first time I threw a curve ball at an audience that was expecting politics. It’s an interview with the singer-songwriter Sarah Slean about the music of Joni Mitchell.

Slean’s always had a wider emotional range than most singers, and it’s partly because she’s got serious classical-music chops. She frequently arranges music for the National Arts Centre Orchestra. She teaches film scoring at York University. But I caught up with her because she was getting ready to perform Joni Mitchell’s music with the Vancouver Symphony, something she’s done before and since with other orchestras. I figured a musician would have particular insights into another musician’s work, and it turned out to be a good guess.

Near the end of her active recording career, Joni revisited material from earlier in her career, with an orchestra arranged by the brilliant Vince Mendoza. Their late-period take on “Both Sides Now” became a highlight of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics opening ceremony:

This was my first conversation with Slean. I’m pleased that it wasn’t the last. She was actually feeling under the weather when we talked, but there’s no sign of that here. She’s obviously delighted to talk about Joni Mitchell, about working with orchestras, and about how a career in music can become a life in music.

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You can listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts and a bunch of other platforms via the “Listen On” button that you can see at the top of this post when you view it on your desktop browser. If you listen on a podcast platform, hit “Like” and “Subscribe” buttons, and leave a good review, to help spread the word.

I am grateful to be the Max Bell Foundation Senior Fellow at McGill University, the principal patron of this podcast. Antica Productions turns these interviews into a podcast every week. Kevin Breit wrote and performed the theme music. Andy Milne plays it on piano at the end of each episode. Thanks to all of them and to you. Please tell your friends to subscribe to The Paul Wells Show on their favourite podcast app, or here on the newsletter.

Timing’s pretty good for this week’s return of a podcast episode you probably missed.

The timing is this week’s NATO summit, which featured commitments from all member states, including Canada, to spend even more on our assorted militaries than the even more we’ve already pledged to spend. It also featured the alliance’s secretary-general, Mark Rutte, texting his extravagant praise to Donald Trump, which the US president took all of one minute to share with the world:

This raises a question: what’s Canada buying with an incremental $50 to $150 billion a year, which incidentally is up to six times the incremental health-care spending the provinces sought in vain two years ago? Independence? The right to join a Donald Trump flattery club? Bit of both?

These are handy questions to keep in mind in a week when Canada’s prime minister shows up in Brussels praising the “triple alignment of values, of interest and of trust” that makes Canada the “most European of non-European countries.” Which values? Trust whom? And precisely how interesting do we want things to get?

These are, to some extent, Zen riddles. They don’t have definitive answers. That’s okay: they’ll still be there the next time you have spare bandwidth to think about them. Europeans’ proper distance from one another, and from trans-Atlantic allies of great and modest means, are eternal questions.

Few Europeans have spent longer considering these questions than Timothy Garton Ash, professor of European studies at Oxford, sometime journalist and chronicler of Europe’s growing pains since the 1970s. I spoke to him two years ago, when he had a new book out, Homelands: A Personal History of Europe. It’s a kind of reported memoir, the story of Ash’s own travels through Europe from the last days of the Cold War to the deepening disillusionment of the new century’s first decades. It’s intended as a spiritual sequel to Tony Judt’s great history/ essay, Postwar.

Ash’s book, as I wrote when I first ran this episode, is studded with excellent old Iron Curtain jokes (“‘Socialism,’ went the joke in Budapest, ‘is the longest and most painful road from capitalism to capitalism’”). It takes note of ironies of history. “One might even say that the West won the Cold War because it feared it was losing it,” he writes. “The contrast with the early 2000s is instructive. At the turn of the millennium, giddy with success and seeing no major systemic rival, the West became complacent and hubristic. Just look what happened next.”

And of course Ash’s book notes the big moments in Europe in his lifetime: 1945, 1968, 1989, 2016, 2022. “I felt a pang when the European flags came down on official buildings in Britain after Brexit,” he writes, “and we were faced instead with the spectacle of Churchill-parody Boris Johnson blustering away flanked only by two Union Jacks. Something larger was lost, as important as freedom of movement or membership of the single market: an aspiration to be at once our national selves and something more than just our national selves.”

Ash was one of the first prominent English-language writers whose idea of Europe was big enough to match the EU’s current borders. He fell in love with Central Europe early. He gets the whole space, in a way that too few mid-Atlantic Canadians do. He also has a marvellously plummy accent, and crackerjack anecdotes about what Blair, Bush, Thatcher and others were like behind closed doors.

“I’ve said often, only half in jest, that Canada would be a perfect member of the EU,” he says in the excerpt from our interview that leads this episode. My read of the relevant treaties is that it could never happen, but no matter: if any kind of closer relationship sounds only like flattery — instead of like a challenge as big as the potential benefit — then we haven’t been paying attention. And Europeans always notice when Canadians haven’t been paying attention.

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You can listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts and a bunch of other platforms via the “Listen On” button that you can see at the top of this post when you view it on your desktop browser. If you listen on a podcast platform, hit “Like” and “Subscribe” buttons, and leave a good review, to help spread the word.

I am grateful to be the Max Bell Foundation Senior Fellow at McGill University, the principal patron of this podcast. Antica Productions turns these interviews into a podcast every week. Kevin Breit wrote and performed the theme music. Andy Milne plays it on piano at the end of each episode. Thanks to all of them and to you. Please tell your friends to subscribe to The Paul Wells Show on their favourite podcast app, or here on the newsletter.