The Q&A: "I don't want to work less. That's not a talent I have."

Stéphane Dion is back home in Canada, wondering what to do next. Two national-unity crises and a rowdy neighbour loom. He's watching.

Stéphane Dion in Montreal, Dec. 31, 2025. Photo: PW

Over tea before our interview, Stéphane Dion heard the wheels of a neighbour’s car spinning on December ice. “I’ll go help him,” the former cabinet minister, federal Liberal leader and ambassador to Germany and then France said.

In a minute he was in parka and boots, advising the hapless neighbour to back up rather than keep trying to go forward. With a push from Dion and a hapless Substacker, the neighbour was soon on his way. “I’m a Quebec City boy,” Dion said a minute later, back inside. “I’ve pushed a lot of cars out of snow banks.”

Dion tries to be helpful. He doesn’t often wait for an invitation. He returned home from Paris in mid-December. On Christmas Eve, La Presse published an interview with Bloc Québécois leader Yves-François Blanchet, who said, “Not to be mean, but I don’t even know what a federalist argument is.” On Boxing Day, the paper published Dion’s rebuttal to Blanchet. “The great majority of Quebecers — as all opinion polls show — also see themselves as Canadians, and they balance these two fine identities in different ways. And why should we not do so?” he wrote in part. “We have every reason to be proud of this decentralized federation, admired around the world, which we have built together with other Canadians.”

I wanted to follow up. Fortunately I had already run into Dion on Sherbrooke Street in Montreal, and we agreed to meet for tea and an interview. I first heard about him when I left university in 1989. I asked my favourite prof, Robert A. Young, who was doing interesting work in Montreal, where I’d be working. Young recommended “Léon Dion and his son Stéphane.” So I had my eye on the young political scientist as he played a very minor role in the 1995 Quebec referendum debate. So did Jean Chrétien, who put Dion in his cabinet 30 years ago this month. The rest is history, in which Dion sometimes shone and sometimes didn’t. I have always enjoyed a long conversation with him, though.

This interview took place in French. I’ve translated it and edited it for length and clarity.

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Paul Wells: We’ll talk about lots of other things. But do you miss this debate on national unity?

Stéphane Dion: Not at all. I find it depressing. That reply I wrote to Mr. Blanchet’s text, I could have written it 30 years ago. Of course I wouldn’t have mentioned Trump. But all the themes are the same. We should get away from that. But it keeps coming back. There are reasons why it comes back. But it comes back.

I intervene when I think it’s useful to society that something be said, and when nobody else is saying it.

PW: Reading that article in Radio-Canada [a profile of Dion as he prepared to leave Paris], one gets the impression that Dion is rushing back to Canada to save it.

Dion: (Laughs) I hope it won’t be necessary and that others will take care of it. But I’ll do my part in that debate if it starts up again, that’s for sure. But at the same time, other issues preoccupy me. I think it’s important to keep a strong connection to Europe; it’s a continent I think I know relatively well. And the whole environmental dimension, we can’t lose sight of that. Democracy. But what happens is, those subjects play differently in Canada from other countries. In Canada, as soon as there’s a disagreement about those topics, somebody puts the existence of the country in play. That doesn’t happen in other places.

If you look at the two big sources of polarization — as I saw them in Europe, but I think you see it on other continents as well — it’s, first, the ethno-cultural and second, the eco-climatic.

The ethno-cultural, I call that “the phenomenon of worried majorities.” Majorities that start acting like minorities. Minorities group their people, it’s a reflex to have more influence, whereas majorities are confident: they occupy the entire political spectrum, from conservative to liberal to social-democrat. But when, all of a sudden, majorities start to worry and they act more like minorities — not everyone, but a lot — they vote for parties that say, “We’ll protect you.” That leads to the rise of ethno-cultural parties that disrupt the party system. In Italy today there’s not a single party that remains from the 1970s or 1980s. All the parties are new. France, new parties. And so on. All because of new parties, ethno-cultural parties. In India, it’s Hindus. Here, it’s white Christians. An aging population that sees immigration from other continents that it wasn’t really ready for, and which is particularly worried about Muslims because that religion is struggling with a violent Islamism. Of course not everyone sees things that way, but there’s some of that. And the result is that when somebody says, “We’re going to build a wall to guard the people you know against the people you fear,” lots of people listen.

The other polarizing phenomenon is eco-climatic. There’s a divorce between humanity and the planet, This implies enormous changes. Some people want us to move faster, and many more think we’re going too fast. And if politicians say to them,
”Listen, these are the whims of disconnected elites, we won’t ask you to do anything, keep your lifestyle and we won’t bug you,” lots of people pay attention. And often the same parties act on both the ethno-cultural and the eco-climatic registers.

There’s one country where all of that translates into separatism. Quebec separatism for the ethno-cultural, Alberta separatism for the eco-climatic. That’s the connection between the two. It’s not that I’m delighted to return to this debate, it’s that there’s an obvious connection.

The ethno-cultural — there are populations that were always particularly sensitive to that, because they were already in a minority. A majority on their territory but a minority in their country, or their continent. That’s the francophone population in Quebec. And because there’s an international trend toward a return of this theme, of course this population will be very vulnerable to that sort of approach.

As for the eco-climatic, there’s a region in the world with the most oil and gas per person, and with the most control over that resource, because there’s a sub-national government that controls the resource — and suddenly they’re being told, “You have to find more careful ways to exploit the resource.” That generates the backlash we’ve seen.

In Canada, this translates as separatism.

PW: In Canada, it also led to the abolition of the consumer carbon tax by the new prime minister. What did you think of that choice?

Dion: It’s an international phenomenon. Humanity balks, it hesitates before the challenge. The challenge is very, very big: to change the material basis of our civilization, hydrocarbons. If we hadn’t used oil, gas and coal, our world wouldn’t be what it is. But now we’re trying to move away from it, because it’s messing up our relationship with the planet by causing global warming.

It’s very, very difficult to do, because humanity has never gone through an energy transition. We added. We didn’t give up on wood to use coal — we needed lots of wood to get at the coal. And coal, oil, gas have always been part of the total energy picture. Now we have windmills, we have solar — but we’re using more coal than ever.

[Twenty years ago] when the political system became preoccupied with climate change, hydrocarbons accounted for 87% of energy use worldwide. Today it’s still over 80%, despite all the effort we’ve made. So it’s an enormous effort and people are worried about it.

As long as politicians could talk about targets that seemed distant, it wasn’t too hard, and there were even bidding wars to see who could promise the most. But when the targets have to be translated into regulations, and the targets get closer, you start to see the lobbies get into the action. Industrial lobbies, farm lobbies, consumer lobbies. And there are political entrepreneurs who grab onto those worries. You see a backlash. We see it in Europe. In the United States, what are Mr. Trump’s favourite themes? “I’ll build a wall” and “Drill, baby, drill.” Both of them.

PW: Is Mark Carney one of the political entrepreneurs you mention? And is he making the sort of concessions to Alberta separatists that you’ve always warned against making to Quebec separatists?

Dion: I think that people who are worried about this situation, after all the effort that’s been put into this difficult transition, are reduced to celebrating when the “do-littles” win over the “do-nothings.” Even though the science tells us, “Do much more.” This explains why Mr. [Steven] Guilbeault — my former student! — left the government but not the Liberal caucus. Because the alternative was somebody who’s proud to do nothing, rather than somebody who says, “I’ll do something, but don’t worry, I won’t do too much.”

The constraint we’ll face is that we’ll get nowhere if we lose the people. And we’re losing them. Green movements are dissolving. The governments that manage to do a little bit more are the ones that reassure people. I think that’s what Mr. Carney is trying to do.

Dion looked at the photos I’d taken and asked me to take one where he’s smiling.

PW: OK, let’s open a parenthesis that lasted, after all, eight and a half years. You were an ambassador. What does an ambassador do?

Dion: An ambassador represents Canada, pushes its interests in every domain. …[After wandering through a series of answers to this very general question, Dion lights on an aspect of his diplomatic work that’s closer to his heart — pw]

…The other thing we’ve done in Canada that should be corrected is, we’ve hugely expanded our investment in [foreign-affairs bureaucracy] in Canada compared to our investment overseas. There are more Global Affairs employees in Canada than in the world. That’s unique. Our friends and competitors in other countries keep a ratio of around one-third [inside the country] to two-thirds [overseas]. I hope the current exercise of finding cuts will mostly lead to cuts in Ottawa, and as little as possible overseas. Especially because we now need to be more active in the Indo-Pacific, not just in Europe. We mustn’t rob Peter to pay Paul. Whenever there’s a crisis anywhere in the world, what do our ministers and our prime minister do? They call Washington, when things are going better. And then right away, they call London, they call Paris, they call Brussels and they call Berlin. And, more and more, Poland and Italy, new Italian players. The ratio between the number of people we have in Europe and the work that needs doing in Europe is out of balance.

PW: Europeans have the impression that Canadians don’t understand Europe well. Did you feel the same way?

Dion: I didn’t feel that under Mr. Trudeau. First, he named me special envoy to Europe. He told me, “I’m expecting difficulties with the US. I don’t think you’re a good minister for Mr. Trump. I have somebody else in mind who understands the arcana of the American system than you do. But I want you in Europe so that at least we won’t have problems with that continent.”

Where I think you have a point is that, after all, it’s still true that three-quarters of our commerce is with the US, that our protector is the US, that we do NORAD with the US… There’s the risk that any agreement with Brussels or London or Paris or Berlin, that the agreement will only exist on paper. That back in Ottawa, it’ll be very difficult to push Europe higher in the priority list. That’s where we have to change our reflexes. The political will is there, but everyday preoccupations keep holding us back.

PW: I keep hearing from European diplomats that we have to make better use of CETA.

Dion: I agree completely. I worked on that a lot with my teams. According to GAC’s chief economist, CETA is only used to 60 per cent of its potential. For some countries, like France, it’s even 50 per cent. To change that, it’s an enormous job. Why? Because our businesses are used to having the US market. They’re beginning to understand it’s not guaranteed, but it’s still entirely normal for businesses to focus on their neighbours. That’s not only the case for Canada. The US trades more with Canada than China, Japan, the UK and France put together. France trades as much with little Belgium as with the US. You trade with your neighbours.

To break into a new market, on another continent, with different habits and different regulations — regulations in the EU are pretty opaque at times, and then there’s whatever each country adds on top — that makes our entrepreneurs and our exporters very nervous.

So if Prime Minister Carney wants to meet his goal, which is a good goal and necessary, to double our exports outside the US in 10 years, we’ll need to greatly accelerate the growth of our exports. And to do that, we need to take our businesses in hand. Convince them to go to Europe. Tell them we have extraordinary trade representatives and ambassadors.

There’s something else to watch closely. Right now Mr. Carney’s reflex is to surround himself with people he knows and trusts. Everyone has that reflex. So right now he’s opening all these offices in Ottawa. One to improve our military purchases, one to help diversify our exports. If those offices repeat work that’s being done elsewhere, it’ll just make everything heavier.

The people we have in Europe, they do extraordinary work, Paul. I had a guy [in Berlin] named Detlef, German, a Visigoth [i.e., a big guy — pw]. This guy’s been working for us for decades, nobody knows who he is in Canada. Plenty of companies, plenty of families have been able to start new lives, with children who could go to school, thanks to him. He’ll never get a medal for that, but there are plenty more like him. In France too.

These are heroes. Canada will never know them, but they help us a lot. And if we want to build up our trade — Europe can never replace the United States, of course not, but it can help us depend less on the US — we have to use these resources we have.

PW: We keep hearing about the possibility of secession referendums in Quebec and Alberta, perhaps as early as 2026. Is that something that preoccupies you?

Yes. I think it would be a mistake. I don’t want this debate to return. But because it’s returned — because Mr. Blanchet, the leader of the third party in the House of Commons, says that if you don’t think like him you’re not Québécois — somebody has to respond. And if nobody responds, that means I have to. I mean, it’s incredible. When he says he doesn’t even know what a federalist argument might sound like — that he can’t imagine a point of view different from his own — that’s not okay.

PW: I don’t know whether you saw the National Post article that said Guilbeault had started working on a national unity strategy, that Joel Lightbound has the file now, and that he prefers a more “discreet” approach. I’m not sure how they could be more discreet than they’ve been for the last five years.

Dion: It’s always the way. When I went to Ottawa in 1996, what was the argument? “We just had a referendum campaign.” They didn’t want to intervene. “Let sleeping dogs lie. Don’t provoke them.” If I succeeded in clarifying matters, it’s thanks to the support of Jean Chrétien. The cabinet was always very worried about what I did.

People don’t like this debate. Independentists don’t like to think their project is complicated and hard to do. Pro-Canadians don’t like to imagine losing their country. They think it’ll be a self-fulfilling prophecy if they talk about it. And they think the option is unpopular, so let the independentists get caught up in it, they’ll get stuck all by themselves. I’ve never believed this reasoning. I think there are arguments the population won’t understand unless you make the argument. And in the turmoil of a referendum, it’ll be too late. You have to make them now. Of course it’s hard. I so wish we could talk about other things. But it’s necessary.

PW: You’re 70. Do you know young people who are willing to take up this challenge?

Dion: I’m sure there are some. They just have to feel the need to do it. What I said in response to Mr. Blanchet, nobody says that. It’s bizarre. Of course we’re lucky to be in a federation, when you see the state of democracy in the world. What would the world be, if the United States wasn’t a federation? Why does nobody say this? I think there are lots of young people who study political science who think these things. Of course we’re lucky to have access to the Canadian market without too much trouble. Imagine if we didn’t? I’m sure there are young economists who are able to say that. We just have to encourage them.

PW: Have you been able to discuss all this with Mark Carney?

Dion: Yes.

PW: Since your return to Canada?

Dion: I think the PM is well aware that he has a country to keep united. In his New Year’s message, which was very short and very clear, he said we’re never stronger than when we’re united. I think this message of unity is one he’ll be returning to.

PW: More generally, what do you want to do in the years ahead? Teach? Work more, work less?

Dion: It’s not to work less. That’s not a talent I have. I want to stay busy. I want to help society. I hope I did that for 30 years, I did my best, within federal institutions. I think I’ve more or less done the rounds of federal roles. Now I’ll pause, see what’s possible, but I have no fixed idea.

It’s a shame that we put the existence of this country at risk with our debates. We shouldn’t do that. We should encourage other peoples, tell them, “Yes, different populations with different languages can make great countries. Look at Canada. Invent your own Canadas, with your own cultures. But the one we have, we’re going to keep it. For ourselves, and as an example to the world.” It seems to me we should all be able to say that.