You know what? It’s almost the holidays, I hosted a two-and-a-half-hour variety show at the National Arts Centre on Monday night — we’re going to bring it to you, in two podcast episodes, before and after Christmas — and I didn’t have a guest for the pod this week. So it’s time for a Very Special Mailbag Edition of The Paul Wells Show.
I asked subscribers to send questions via Substack Chat, and many of you did. Producer Kevin Sexton sifted through the questions, curated them thematically, and threw the questions at me. Many questions about the near future, as befits a year-end frame of mind: Is Canada a lucky country? Can our luck hold? What does a Trump presidency mean? What might a Poilievre government in Canada portend?
As I say at the top of the episode, even though this is the lowest-tech episode in the pod’s history, The Paul Wells Show is doing very well in general these days. Weekly downloads from this newsletter have quadrupled since the fall of 2023, a formidable rate of growth. The audience increased with almost every episode this autumn. I expect that to continue: last year’s Holiday Show episode sharply increased the rate of audience growth, and I expect a similar result when this year’s Holiday Show episodes go up.
It all makes me feel a little sorry that fun conversations from earlier in the podcast’s life, like actor Paul Gross on playing King Lear at Stratford, got only a fraction of the audience the show’s getting these days. Hint, hint. The full podcast archive is here if you want to catch up, or simply sample randomly.
I’m also conscious that I haven’t written as many posts in the main channel this autumn as usual. Concentrating too much on logistics, not enough on telling you tales. I’ll make partial amends in the next two weeks — there’s some high-profile politics to write about, of course, and also some other stuff — and return to my usual writing and reporting pace in the new year. Frankly I’m in a better mood when I can send you more posts.
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 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, almost always thanks to the efforts of Kevin Sexton in particular. That’s Kevin co-hosting this week’s episode. 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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