In French politics they used to ask whether Gaullism would outlive De Gaulle — and then whether it would outlive the various Gaullist parties that formed and competed on the centre-right. Was there, simply, a new and durable way of thinking about the world that would define French public life for generations? (Short answer: Yes, but maybe not forever.)
There’s a moment in my interview with Jonathan Wilkinson where he talks about the possibility of Trumpism outliving Donald Trump. “Possibility” may be too soft a word for it. Near-certainty, more like. It’s at least a reasonable planning scenario that this isn’t an odd phase, it’s the rest of our lives. It’s fair to say Wilkinson doesn’t propose a final answer about what that entails, nor any definitive battle plan for Canadian success in this new world. But he’s been thinking a lot about things, and he’s admirably frank and scrappy about sharing his thoughts.
Wilkinson thought hard about running for the Liberal leadership, and one way you can tell he finally decided against it is that he’s on my podcast this week. Ahem. In fact it took some time to arrange, and the fault for that is largely mine: when things got weird at the end of 2024, I put an end to a few weeks’ worth of scheduling ping-pong and told his staff we’d reconvene when we had a slightly better idea what the world would look like.
The upshot is that this episode comes to you two and a half months after Wilkinson’s office offered him up. So we ended up discussing a lot of things he didn’t think he’d be talking about last November. Spare a thought, and some empathy, for 21st-century politicians of every stripe: whatever they expected their career would look like, this wasn’t it.
My interview with Wilkinson comes a few days after he was in Washington to speak to the Atlantic Council, a think tank built by eminent stewards of an ’80s and ’90s Washington policy consensus that has lately flown into some turbulence.
In his remarks, Wilkinson made a hearty pitch for Canada as an answer to all of America’s resource needs. A more full-throated pitch than I recall from him. This ends up being the basis for much of our interview.
I’ve lost count of how many episodes of the podcast I’ve made since November that were based in a sense of uprootedness following the Trump re-election. I doubt I’m close to being done. We have much to discuss. Thanks to Minister Wilkinson for joining the discussion.
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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.
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