2025: The year in Wells

This year only felt like it was 10 years long. Thanks, always, for your support.

Your roving correspondent, June 14

At year’s end, we take stock. I am always grateful for your attention, your suggestions, and your thoughtful participation in this community we’re still building. Today I’ll give you a brief subscriber update and mention a few of this overloaded year’s highlights.

This is the 154th post on the Paul Wells newsletter in 2025. That’s about 40% more than I posted in 2024 and 2023. There was a lot going on, especially in March and April, when the Liberals chose a new prime minister and the voters got a chance to check their work. My output was frenzied during those two months and has since returned to the pace I set in the first two years, roughly two posts a week.

As the country followed the Trudeau succession drama and the ensuing election, paid and free subscriptions surged way past my previous growth rates, from December 2024 to May 2025. They have been declining, very slowly, since then. The net result is that free and paid subscriptions are both nicely higher today than a year ago.

I’m glad to be read by anyone on any basis. I would much rather have more free subscribers than have one more free subscriber awkwardly apologize to me for not being a paid subscriber. I’ll be honest with you, it’s awkward when people do that. Just talk about the weather.

I say this next part often, but I really mean it. I would be pleased if more subscribers took it to heart: The best way you can support my work is to talk about it to people you know. Real talking, to real people, as in conversations in public places. There are still lots of people out there who might like to read the work I do here, but who don’t know I’m doing it. It would be great to spread the news to them. Send people this URL. It will take them to a website with all of the 450-odd posts I’ve written since 2022: paulwells.substack.com

This remains a brighter chapter in my career than I could have hoped for. It is all because of readers like you. It’s become clear to me that I’ll wind up doing this for longer than the five years I spent at the National Post, probably much longer. I take this work as seriously as anything I’ve ever done. I owe that much to you.

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Here are a few highlights from my work in 2025.

Two long essays about Pierre Poilievre from early in 2025 are now the most widely-read pieces I’ve published here. This piece from February, originally written for the Quebec newsmagazine L’actualité, was an extended exercise in empathy, written for an audience that hasn’t often heard the case for Poilievre. This piece, posted three days before the spring election campaign began in March, surveyed Poilievre’s weaknesses as a campaigner and was more critical. I stand by both pieces.

Understanding the second Trump administration was full-time work after the returning US President’s second inauguration on Jan. 20, and will remain a theme of my work for the foreseeable future. At the end of Trump’s first week in office, events demanded a quick history of Manifest Destiny, the Monroe Doctrine, and the strongly US-influenced notion of a post-Soviet “Near Abroad.” A week later, I examined Trump’s foreign policy in light of his early career as a bad landlord. Later, a more introspective piece about what it feels like for a kid from a border town to find himself in, well, 2025:

O beautiful

By May I was in the full-time business of trying to understand Mark Carney’s theory and practice of government. I suggested he avoid needlessly complicating Poilievre’s path back to Parliament after he blew his first candidacy of the year, a deeply controversial bit of advice among polarization-addicted Liberals until the PM took most of my counsel. I raised questions about Carney’s choice of Michael Sabia for Clerk of the Privy Council. I described Carney as a “Mandarin,” using an old typology from Nicholas Lemann. I watched the PM’s elbows come down. I transcribed a Carney scrum in its original dialect, Briefing Memo. I offered substantial profiles of Anita Anand and Tim Hodgson. I marvelled at some stuff Stephen Harper said in Saskatoon.

I didn’t think I was starting a new regular feature when I launched The Q&A, an edited transcript of an interview with a subject-matter expert. Since February I’ve published 12 of them, all collected at this link, with Le Monde’s top foreign correspondent, a Finnish defence analyst, the singer Dan Mangan on marketing music in an age of mass distraction, and assorted authors. I like how The Q&A gets the sound of my writing out of the newsletter and brings you other voices. I believe I’m not close to meeting reader demand for this feature. I’ll have a new Q&A for you by the weekend.

I’m sorry I shut the podcast down. It will continue as a very occasional feature, when my other work produces audio that’s worth your time. All the episodes I produced are archived here. Interviews with Anne Applebaum, Wayne Eyre, Branford Marsalis, Danielle Smith and Ben Woodfinden were highlights in 2025. But what I loved most was the Summer Reading Episode with Scott Reid, Donovan Woods and Shannon Proudfoot, who stole the show by getting verklempt over one of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s later novels. I will find a way to do more of this next summer. Shannon will be back.

All of my arts coverage is archived here, under the rubric Positive Jam, named for a Hold Steady song. There’s never a plan for the arts stuff. I wrote none until June, and then eight pieces in the rest of the year, a higher rate than usual. There’s a portrait-painting contest in Kingston you probably hadn’t heard of. The paintings, collected in a new book, are wondrous. My attempts to figure out the guitar led me to spend an afternoon with Rik Emmett from Triumph, a fantastic story-teller. And Michael Healey’s new play about the Rogers corporate succession crisis, starring Tom Rooney in every role, sold out nearly two months of shows, partly because you trust me when I tell you something is good. Thank you for that too.

Happy New Year. It will go better if we don’t all wander around looking for excuses to fight one another.