Transcript: Paul Wells

My interview with the Canadian political journalist and author

Canadian politics have hit new low point. According to a recent poll, 70 percent of Canadians now believe that everything is broken in this country — and 59 percent said they are angry about how the country is being managed.

My guest on the program this week has a new book about our Prime Minister, and the chaotic times we live in.

Paul Wells is a Canadian political journalist, a frequent commentator on radio and television, and a fellow Substacker. His latest book is Justin Trudeau on the Ropes: Governing in Troubled Times. (You can listen to our previous interview about his last book on the trucker crisis, An Emergency in Ottawa, here.)

This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the interview for free here.

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TH: I'm really glad you wrote this book-length essay. It is such an important moment for stocktaking, and it is full of really interesting points, so there’s lots to discuss today. You write in the book that just about anyone can make a list of Canada's intractable problems. Here's a few things, to sketch out the situation for our listeners outside of Canada. Canadian productivity is lagging. Our birth rate is plummeting. We have serious housing, opioid, cost-of-living and healthcare crises. Our immigration consensus has collapsed under the weight of high increases in temporary foreign workers and foreign students. Our politics are polarized and hostile. Trudeau and the Liberals have had multiple ethics scandals. In a recent hearing into foreign interference, we heard our spy agency knew that China “clandestinely and deceptively” interfered in the last two elections — that's from a briefing document to the PMO. There are serious concerns about corruption in our federal bureaucracy. The revelations on the ArriveCan app, in particular, have been quite mind-boggling. Spending is high. To quote something from your book, Radio-Canada reported last year that the Trudeau government had paid McKinsey 30 times as much as the Harper government did. Our journalists, including yourself, in this book and elsewhere, say the government transparency systems are not functional. Our federal government just spent $2.2 million in taxpayer dollars fighting a federal court challenge on the invocation of the Emergencies Act, which it lost. And lastly, I know this is a long list, a recent poll showed that 70% of Canadians agree that everything is broken in the country right now. That includes 66% of NDP voters and 43% of Liberal voters. Even for those of us who swim in these waters daily, it is an astonishing moment in our politics. Paul, how would you characterize the moment that we are in right now?

PW: So, in the last installment of the CBC Power & Politics show, before everything shut down under Covid, the then-host Vassy Kapelos asked why the health minister Patty Hajdu was calling on people to stockpile food staples. And she said, “Isn't that a bad signal to send?”

I said, “I think she's basically just telling people that it's going to be a bad time for a while.” The easiest way to characterize everything you’ve just listed is: It's a bad time. It's not a bad time that’s not relievable. It's still possible for people to be happy and to do wonderful things. But a generalized assumption throughout the 90s, with the Cold War behind us, was that the West could move from strength to strength. Free trade, open borders, widening international alliances, and rising wealth and prosperity and health for much of the world's population — it was reasonable to expect all of that, basically until 9/11. It’s not that 9/11 in itself was such a big deal, but it was the beginning of a cascading series of messes. The subtitle of my book was going to be “Governing in an Age of Chaos.” The publisher preferred “Governing in Troubled Times.” But I think “Age of Chaos” also works pretty well. The only reason I wanted to write about Justin Trudeau was, first of all, because my publisher Ken Whyte dared me to. And secondly, because I wanted to fit him into that broader context. I think Trudeau is a perfectly interesting politician, but he's most interesting in that broader context of a really difficult time.

TH: We are seeing a rejection of some of those policies, and some of those ethos that you've been describing, from the electorate — which I would put under the umbrella of neoliberalism. But I want to start with the point that you opened the book with. That Trudeau has been discounted in the past. You referenced a famous boxing match, a moment he apparently returns to to energize himself. Tell us about that match, and why you see it as a good metaphor for where he is at right now.

PW: I almost feel like I should apologize for making that boxing match the thread on which I hang much of the argument of the book, but I'm stuck with it. And I'm stuck with it because Trudeau attaches considerable importance to it. In 2012, he was turning 40, he was a Member of Parliament in the Liberal caucus, which was the smallest Liberal caucus in the history of the country, because of a succession of really battering electoral defeats. Yet the interim leader of the party, Bob Rae, hadn't given him heavy responsibilities. He wasn't the finance critic, he wasn't in charge of a committee, in charge of party rebuilding. He was just nice Justin in the corner. He had a lot of time on his hands. 

One of the things he did was he got himself into a charity boxing match with a conservative senator of Indigenous descent, Patrick Brazeau. They raised a lot of money for charity, and they went into the ring and they boxed a few rounds. Just about everyone expected Trudeau to get beaten senseless. That's not the way it worked out. It turns out Trudeau actually had been a fairly ambitious amateur boxer for much of his adult life. It turns out he knew how to train, and that he did train for this. Patrick Brazeau was a much more physically imposing guy and was almost certainly much stronger. But he wore himself out really quickly and Trudeau was able to win through endurance. 

This became his own personal metaphor for every challenge he has faced since then: I was on the ropes, I was written off, I was mocked. Remember that the Sun News Network at the time carried that fight live and Ezra Levant was there basically to make fun of Trudeau while he suffered. And it didn't work. 

Almost immediately, in the run for the Liberal leadership, and then in the 2015 campaign — in which he was also written off, by the time the campaign came along — he got into a series of situations where he was underestimated, and yet managed to win. To this day, as you and I talk today, there are headlines in the papers this morning that suggest that he is still pedaling this notion. “Just you wait. The folks who don't think very highly of me will get their comeuppance.” And so, that's why the name of the book is Justin Trudeau on the Ropes. It's about the many situations in which he's been in trouble and yet has managed to win. Which is why it's, to some extent, about how, even now, Trudeau hangs on to some hope.

TH: It’s interesting trying to figure out how we got to the point that we are at right now. There's a number of turning points. One of them that you touch on is the SNC-Lavalin scandal, which was a turning point for a lot of voters. I was living in Jody Wilson-Raybould’s riding at the time. I had people close to me who had campaigned for her and voted for her. So, I saw that shift happening, in real time, when that scandal broke. For listeners who are not familiar, or who maybe don't recall, can you summarize that scandal — and comment on the impact you feel it had for Trudeau?

PW: Jody Wilson-Raybould was the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada. The first Indigenous Minister of Justice. And a damn good lawyer, with a national profile before she came into the Liberal party. Her candidacy was one of the things that made people sit up and take notice, that Trudeau was bringing talent into the party. She had to decide whether to override the Office of the Public Prosecutor of Canada, which had decided not to apply a novel new mechanism for settling criminal cases out of court. These things are called deferred prosecution agreements. They have been in use in the United States forever, and have been much more recently introduced in Britain, France, and Germany. The idea is that somebody facing onerous criminal charges could plead guilty and set up a payment plan rather than going through a reputation destroying criminal trial. 

For very good reasons, the criminal prosecutor decided that this new mechanism, which had been imported into Canadian law specifically to settle the SNC-Lavalin dispute — because SNC-Lavalin a well-liked company in the corridors of power — decided that, for all that, they didn't qualify. All that Jody Wilson-Raybould did was decide that the public prosecutor had good reasons to make that decision and that she, as Attorney General, didn't have to overrule that. She would have been the first Attorney General ever to overrule a public prosecutor. It would have been very unusual for her to do so. 

But the Prime Minister's office freaked out and they kept saying, “Are you sure? Why don't you consider overruling the public prosecutor? Why don't you think about it another way? Why don't you listen to other advice?” There were dozens of meetings over several months that essentially amounted to people near the Prime Minister trying to get Jody Wilson-Raybould to change her mind. Which violates the independence of the Attorney General in our system. Eventually she was shuffled down to a humiliatingly junior position, and she quit soon after, and it became a huge mess. 

I actually don't spend a lot of time in the book thinking about what this has to say about our system of justice, because I see it as what it has to say about the mechanisms of control and cajolement that Trudeau set up to handle an original problem. The original problem was that he had the most inexperienced government in history. The original problem was that before he was ever the leader of the Liberal Party, three other guys lost three elections in a row, in a progressively more devastating fashion. Paul Martin lost pretty bad. Stéphane Dion lost much worse. And Michael Ignatieff lost by far the worst defeat in the history of the party.  

So, when they came roaring back because of Trudeau's popularity — which was an amazing accomplishment — the people who came back were a bunch of amateurs in politics. Most of them had done interesting things outside politics, but they didn't know politics. Trudeau's entourage decided to put them all on short leashes, and pretty soon he became frustrated with the way any of them would behave if they slipped their leashes. And so, the Jody Wilson-Raybould thing was: Look, the only way this is going to work is if people get what I want and implement it. And you, Jody Wilson-Raybould aren't doing that. So get with the program. She refused, so she was out. That essentially defensive instinct to urge anyone who deals with the Prime Minister to get with his program has become a dominant theme in his time in power.

TH: Absolutely. I wanted to go back to the pandemic. One of the more disturbing things that you noted in the book was something I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about: The “euphoria” that Trudeau expressed about the pandemic as an “unprecedented opportunity.” That is really chilling. Can you say more about that?

PW: I get why you see it as chilling. I see it as simply the damndest thing. I think it's because every leader starts to wonder whether they're going to be a great leader. And every leader starts to get that they can't be a great leader in ordinary times. Bill Clinton used to complain that he would never be remembered as a great president because he hadn't been president during a war. My gentle advice to Bill Clinton would be, “Please don't see that as a problem.”

But a once in a century catastrophe befalls the world, and it's very clear — I think it's incontrovertible — that Trudeau's reaction to this at some level was here's my chance. The people near Trudeau, staffers of my acquaintance, and staffers talking to other reporters, then Trudeau himself, started to talk about the wonderful opportunities in this global viral pandemic. That we can rewire all the systems of the global economy. We can rethink all of the ways that the government acts. And we can build a richer, fairer, greener tomorrow.

He didn't just say this … first of all, he had a lot of company. A lot of international progressives, many of whom often show up once a year at the World Economic Forum in Davos, started talking about a “great reset.” Which absolutely, in their terms, advocated a rewiring of the global economy. Then he [forced out] his finance minister and replaced him with Chrystia Freeland in the middle of what was among other things, a global fiscal crisis once again because Bill Morneau wouldn't get with the program and Chrystia Freeland would. This weirdly euphoric response to catastrophe led Trudeau to make a long series of lousy decisions, basically at least until mid-2022. Adopting vaccine mandates after rejecting them. His very hard line response to the trucker convoy, which I think was a problematic and complicated phenomenon, but he basically showed them the back of his hand. By the end of that long stretch, which begins with that strange reaction to the pandemic, the country is much more polarized and our politics is much angrier than at the beginning of that process.

TH: It's so true. I find it really interesting that you referenced the World Economic Forum in the book. Of course, Chrystia Freeland being a board member there. A lot of our colleagues do not wade into that story. I think it's on account of a trend that Ruy Teixeira, the author of Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, has called the “Fox News Fallacy.” If it's a conservative talking point, it should be ignored or dismissed. So, if Fox News covers it or, in our case, if Pierre Poilievre is talking about it, as he did, then there's nothing to see here. But there is a good argument, as you note, that it is worth discussing. This is a body of unelected elites who are actively trying to shape public policy. They do have a lot of influence. And as you write, the fact that Freeland refuses to talk about it fuels a lot of the speculation around what they are up to. What was your thinking on including that thread in the book?