Juno News - Canada’s top political journalist goes independent (ft. Paul Wells)

00:00:00.000 One of Canada's top political journalists just left the legacy media. Today we're joined by

00:00:04.480 Paul Wells to talk about his new venture into the world of independent media. I'm Candice

00:00:08.300 Malcolm and this is The Candice Malcolm Show. Hi everyone, thank you so much for tuning into

00:00:23.780 the podcast. So this week we learned that Canada's most prominent political writer and journalist,

00:00:28.440 Paul Wells, my guest on the podcast today, will not be joining another big corporate media outlet.

00:00:33.780 Instead, he's launched his own sub stack called Paul Wells, where you can directly subscribe to

00:00:38.300 his content and consume his political writing. In mid-March, Paul announced that he was leaving

00:00:43.200 McLean's magazine where he had written on and off for 20 years and we just learned today that he is

00:00:48.420 gone independent. So Paul Wells is Canada's leading, one of Canada's leading political journalists. He's

00:00:53.740 been a political journalist in Ottawa for 28 years before making this jump into independent

00:00:58.420 media. He was a columnist over at McLean's. He's also written for the Toronto Star, National Post,

00:01:03.560 and Montreal Gazette. Wells is a three-time gold recipient of the National Magazine Award,

00:01:09.060 the John W. Defoe Book Prize winner, and the Shaughnessy Cohen Book Prize for Political Writing.

00:01:15.480 He moderated the federal debates in 2015 and 2019. And in addition to being a print journalist,

00:01:21.340 he's hosted McLean's Live. He has interviewed just about every major political and cultural figure

00:01:26.260 in Canada. And for a time, he was a member of the At Issue panel over on CBC. So Paul,

00:01:32.400 it's such an honor to have you on the podcast. Thanks for joining us today.

00:01:35.580 Hi, Candice. Thanks for asking me.

00:01:37.600 Okay. So I know you've been a political journalist for 28 years in Ottawa, you tell me.

00:01:43.200 And I'm just wondering, before we get into your foray here into independent media and your sub stack,

00:01:49.780 what got you into journalism in the first place? Maybe you can tell us a little bit about

00:01:53.080 what reporting and what journalism looked like back then and how it's changed over the years.

00:01:58.220 So in the very earliest incarnation, and this goes back further into the 20th century than I

00:02:03.560 like to contemplate, I started writing for my campus newspaper at Western,

00:02:09.040 because a friend of mine was taking photographs for the Western Gazette. And he said that

00:02:14.600 if you take pictures of a concert or review a concert, you can get in for free. And

00:02:21.400 the great jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie was coming to Western and I didn't want to spend $17 on a

00:02:27.320 ticket. So I went and offered to review it. And fortunately, nobody else ever wants to write

00:02:33.480 about jazz. So that was my first piece for the Gazette. I'm shy by nature. Journalism allows you

00:02:41.140 to go where the action is and ask rude questions. And there was no other way in life that I was going

00:02:48.540 to get to do that. And so that's, that's really what the appeal was. You go to places where

00:02:55.260 fascinating and sometimes terrifying things are happening, and you indulge your curiosity and you

00:03:00.660 explain it to people and you try and put it in context. And so from the Western Gazette, I went to

00:03:05.900 the Montreal Gazette, they sent me to Ottawa, and I've somehow never left. Interesting. And so maybe you

00:03:13.260 can walk us through how the industry has changed over the years. You know that us here at TrueNorth

00:03:17.980 have been very critical of the Trudeau government's meddling and the funding bailouts and the new

00:03:23.580 legislation. I'm wondering from your perspective, though, how has media changed? How has it stayed the

00:03:28.560 same? And what sort of led you to choose to leave McLean's and go independent?

00:03:34.120 Okay. You'll agree, Candice, that there are issues that you and I don't agree on. But I've also been

00:03:43.240 very critical of the government attempts to subsidize news production. I think all it does

00:03:49.400 is it opens us up to allegations of not being impartial, of being bought out. And you can debate

00:03:58.600 those allegations all day long. But the fact is, news organizations are getting money from the

00:04:02.680 government. And, you know, it responds to, I mean, that wrongheaded policy responds to an obvious and

00:04:09.480 objective truth, which is that there's less money in journalism than there used to be. When I started,

00:04:14.520 again, in the 80s, at the end of the 80s, if you lived in Montreal, and you wanted to

00:04:23.160 sell a chest of drawers, or a bicycle, or a futon, or you had a truck and you were willing to hire

00:04:31.560 it out to drive stuff around, you had to take out a classified ad in the Montreal Gazette, there was

00:04:35.800 no other way to let people know what was going on. And so the Gazette had thousands and thousands of

00:04:42.040 ads every day, you know, many, many pages of classified ads, and car ads, and cinema ads,

00:04:48.520 and so on. And, and, and therefore, it was sitting on a stack of money. And similarly, because this is

00:04:55.240 before the internet, if you wanted to know what got said in Parliament yesterday, or what the Prime

00:05:02.040 Minister said at his fundraiser last night, or who's playing at the music clubs tonight, you had to pick

00:05:09.720 up a newspaper, you didn't have an independent way of doing it. And so that the fact that we lived at

00:05:14.280 the crossroads between people who needed to sell, and people who needed to know, gave us extraordinary

00:05:22.120 power. And as a result, kind of a middling regional paper like the Montreal Gazette in those days,

00:05:28.520 had three people in their Ottawa bureau, two reporters at City Hall, a theatre critic, a food writer,

00:05:39.560 you know, just just a kind of an opulent offering for journalism. And over the years, that all stopped,

00:05:46.600 because that went from having three reporters in Ottawa to not having any from having two reporters at

00:05:50.920 the at the courthouse to not having any. And, and smaller organizations have closed altogether or

00:06:03.080 struggling mightily. And finally, at some point, in my own case, in my own shop. I mean, I decided I

00:06:12.120 didn't want to work at my old shop. And then it was feasible for me to just hang out my own shingle. And

00:06:19.320 at least aspire, it's we're in very early stages yet. But I can at least aspire to make a decent

00:06:26.920 living. Interesting. And so what was it specifically about subsec? I mean, I assume that when you left

00:06:33.080 McLean's, and you wrote that you or you did an interview with Hill Times saying you left McLean's

00:06:37.000 because there's new corporate owners, and you didn't didn't really see eye to eye with their management

00:06:41.160 style. You know, was your initial decision to I'm going to go on do a sub stack, I'm going to kind

00:06:47.720 of follow what Barry Weiss has done very successfully down the US and so many others? Or were you kind of

00:06:53.560 on the fence? When did you decide to take the plunge and go independent? And what was the sort of main

00:06:58.200 motivating factor there? So I left McLean's five weeks ago. And it's pointless to litigate why the

00:07:10.520 the new owners of McLean's are taking it in a different direction. I thought they were doing

00:07:13.960 it clumsily. And I figured life is too short to hang out with people who aren't fun to work with. So

00:07:18.760 when I quit, I had no idea what I was going to do next. I'm now at the age where friends of mine who

00:07:27.640 are teachers are starting to retire. So I thought maybe I'll just stop working. I looked around for

00:07:34.840 some corporate gig outside of journalism and, and a there were not a lot of offers, be none of them

00:07:42.280 sounded fun. And then in journalism, I mean, I could work as a freelancer, I've written a half dozen

00:07:49.960 pieces in a month for a bunch of organizations. But I figured at some point, editors would get tired

00:07:58.520 of me calling I the same thing would happen that has happened other freelancers, I could, you know,

00:08:05.480 petitions one of the big news organizations to hire me full time. But for 20 years, people have been

00:08:12.760 saying, Paul, why don't you just go out on your own? You like, you know, 20 years ago, people were

00:08:18.360 saying you could just write a blog and then, you know, hold out a tip jar, and people will give you

00:08:25.640 money if they want. And frankly, I found that terrifying. But the the Substack platform 1.00

00:08:32.360 makes it super easy for people to pay if they want, it makes it really easy for journalists to

00:08:42.520 organize and to decide, you know, what they want to charge for what they want to distribute for free.

00:08:49.080 It takes care of it's sort of like Shopify for for journalism, it takes care of all of the back

00:08:54.360 office plumbing that I'm really not good at. And it leaves the journalists free to write. And so I

00:09:01.320 thought I would give it a shot. And first day has been very encouraging.

00:09:05.560 Well, it is a sort of a scary thing to go out on your own, and especially to start a business,

00:09:11.080 which is essentially what you're doing. So certainly applaud the entrepreneurship. It's

00:09:15.640 interesting, you talk about the early days of media and the fact that you needed to go to these outlets

00:09:21.400 in order to get information. You know, we live in a world now where all of that information is at your

00:09:25.800 fingertips in 1000 different places. And so you don't really need these intermediaries as much.

00:09:31.400 And there's definite pros and cons about that. I mean, the cons is that you lose, you know, a lot

00:09:36.200 of the local flavor, like you don't have, like you said, a courtroom reporter, or a local reporter,

00:09:41.400 you know, holding City Hall and the mayor accountable. Whereas, you know, a large prominent

00:09:46.200 voice like yours, Paul Wells, everyone knows it, I'm sure you're going to get flooded with subscribers.

00:09:51.960 Do you think that there's room on the platform that there's still space for that sort of local

00:09:55.800 reporting? Or do you think that that's going to be one of the big casualties of this change to

00:10:00.360 online media world?

00:10:04.440 I always thought I mean, back when it was just blogging back when

00:10:07.080 when there were 1000 people in Canada who were doing blogs, more or less for free, I thought that

00:10:11.880 this would allow for blossoming of local reporting, someone who's just interested or mad at City Hall,

00:10:20.760 and won't let go of that. And it really hasn't panned out that way. There's a few people, Joey

00:10:29.240 Coleman, who runs an independent news organization in Hamilton, and is far and away the toughest

00:10:37.480 observer of how the city government in Hamilton works. He's been able to make a go of it. But there

00:10:44.920 aren't a lot of other examples. And I do think local journalism suffers, because local audiences

00:10:53.800 are usually not big enough to support, you know, a single entrepreneur.

00:10:59.880 We talk about the federal subsidies to these organizations. I mean, I worry about the health

00:11:09.640 of journalism in this country. But I think that there are some cures that are at least arguably

00:11:15.000 worse than the disease. And I don't think the federal government's efforts to help help much.

00:11:23.160 Well, you've written, you've written quite a bit about that, Paul. And I know, like,

00:11:28.440 Justin Trudeau's preference seems to be to just subsidize everything, right? Like, I've talked about

00:11:32.280 this on my show in the past. But in 2015, he pledged all this money to the CBC to make up for

00:11:37.720 cuts that the Harper government had made during their drop deficit reduction action plan. He promised

00:11:43.400 them much more. The CBC used the money to create an online news outlet, essentially, where everyone

00:11:49.800 could get the news for free. And then at the same time, you know, Globe and Mail, Toronto Star,

00:11:54.760 National Post are trying to compete in the world of getting subscriptions and creating a paywall.

00:11:59.240 And so, you know, rather than taking a look at his initial subsidy, he just chose to sprinkle the

00:12:05.000 subsidies everywhere and start paying newsrooms to do their news. I just, I want to sort of ask you,

00:12:13.880 like, how do you think has changed the media landscape in the last two years since he's introduced

00:12:17.880 this program? I mean, what it hasn't done has been to make a lot of conspicuously healthier

00:12:27.960 news organizations. Like, the big old line news organizations, the ones where I've spent my career,

00:12:33.960 are not further from death's door after a couple of years of these subsidy programs. There's something

00:12:42.520 called the Local Journalism Initiative, which is an effort to chip in money for people who work in

00:12:49.640 places that wouldn't ordinarily get many journalists. So Le Devoir has a reporter who writes in French

00:13:00.040 about what happens in small town Ontario, and that's government money. And I can't get really angry

00:13:07.320 about that. But I think that the amount of money the feds have put in is not really enough to

00:13:19.480 help us do our work on a large scale. But it's absolutely enough to shatter our credibility with

00:13:26.200 some of our readership and some of our audiences. And when someone, I mean, the nice thing is I'm not

00:13:33.400 going to be getting any federal money at Substack. I can't be bought and paid for except by my readers.

00:13:43.640 And I didn't think I was bought and paid for before. Actually, McLean's didn't, as a magazine,

00:13:49.320 didn't qualify for a lot of these new programs. We qualified for a program that James Moore used to run

00:13:54.840 when he was the Conservative Minister of Heritage, just as his liberal successors have run it.

00:13:59.080 But when someone says you're in the tank of the government, after all, they're paying part of

00:14:02.600 your paycheck, I had no rebuttal. I know how I feel. I know, I believe my journalism to be entirely

00:14:11.000 credible. But what am I going to say? Like, I'm not, we're not getting federal money? Well, yes, we were.

00:14:18.200 That's not the sort of thing, that's not the very essence of a conflict of interest. I mean,

00:14:23.000 any definition of conflict of interest I've ever seen,

00:14:25.720 says it doesn't matter whether your work is corrupted. What matters is whether an observer

00:14:31.480 could reasonably wonder whether your work is corrupted. And like I say, I have no rebuttal to

00:14:36.120 those claims. Well, and I think a lot of people who would be critical of these government subsidies,

00:14:41.320 myself included, would say that it wouldn't necessarily always be the local journalist

00:14:45.880 on the ground, although they might have that idea in the back of their head, especially during an

00:14:49.000 election, when you have two parties, and one is promising more money for your organization,

00:14:52.440 one is promising less. But the idea that sort of higher ups, the corporate executives are choosing,

00:14:58.360 you know, which overall storylines to kill and chase and where to do your research and where to do the

00:15:03.160 ATIPS. And then those are where the conflicts may take place. It's hard to argue against that when

00:15:08.040 there's lobbying campaigns being done to try to ensure places like Google and Facebook pay their

00:15:14.680 what's called fair share. You know, they're openly doing advocacy, and then turning around and calling

00:15:20.840 groups like True North activists when you know, we're not running full page ads in our on our website,

00:15:27.240 promoting one government policy or another. So let's let's go. Let's talk about your new website,

00:15:33.880 your sub stack called Paul Wells. Can you tell us about your first scoop, which is this mysterious

00:15:39.000 15 billion dollar billion? I just happen to have the URL right here. Paulwells.substack.com. That was

00:15:46.120 from a previous call. Yeah, it's pretty thin right now. As we speak, there's one piece on the on the

00:15:52.520 site. It's about a big ticket item in last week's federal budget, something called the Canada Growth Plan,

00:16:00.360 which is a fund of $15 billion that will invest in green technology. And actually, it'll invest in

00:16:10.760 quite a wide variety of things. And the idea is that it'll attract $3 from outside institutional

00:16:19.160 investors, basically pension funds for every dollar that it spends. There's a couple problems and

00:16:27.960 basically my piece amounts to a bunch of questions about that. First of all, it's really not clear to

00:16:34.680 me how it's going to be $15 billion. When you look in the columns of the budget, it's only $1.5 billion.

00:16:42.280 And they say that that money comes from savings elsewhere, which they don't specify so that so that

00:16:48.600 in effect, this $15 billion fund won't cost anything. This is because of an essentially an accounting

00:16:56.280 technique, where they say the only money that's going to get spent is the essentially bargain

00:17:05.960 rate they're going to charge on interest rates. So they're going to they're going to offer loans,

00:17:10.120 they're going to charge less than prime to these big pension funds. And so they're going to make

00:17:14.920 back about 90 cents on the dollar. First of all, I don't believe any of that. I believe that I believe

00:17:21.400 they honestly hope that's the way it's going to work. But the thing is, when you're offering

00:17:27.720 concessions on huge loans, in a complex environment on edgy new technology, I don't see how you can have

00:17:35.160 any idea who's going to be investing three or four or eight years out, and on and how likely they're going

00:17:45.800 to be able to pay you back. And then the other thing I wonder is, well, I just have a bunch of

00:17:57.960 questions about how it's going to work. And, and the reason I peck away at this and peck away at this

00:18:04.040 is, I think governments get themselves in trouble when they announce solutions to complex problems that

00:18:14.520 just aren't going to work. I think that undermines trust in government. And as someone who thinks

00:18:22.120 that government can be a force for good, I would really like people to stop making false promises

00:18:27.000 on its behalf. Well, one of the things that Trudeau government seems to love to do is put out big,

00:18:32.520 round numbers, and then claim that they, like you said, have the solution to complex problems. So

00:18:37.800 it seems to me that words like innovation and Canada Growth Fund, those are kind of buzzwords that the

00:18:43.160 government loves to put out there. And of course, it's not just Trudeau and Freeland. We see this

00:18:49.160 provincially, we saw this in Ontario with the Wynn government, where they would love to announce that

00:18:54.120 they were partnering with Google and a new building in Waterloo or whatever. And it's like, you know,

00:19:02.920 what is it that a government, like, why would the government want to get involved in subsidizing

00:19:08.760 big tech companies? Or what specifically would a Canada Growth Fund do to attract investment aside

00:19:18.680 from, again, just going the route of subsidies? Personally, as a Conservative, I would like to see

00:19:23.960 just a more competitive work environment, less regulations, lower taxes across the board,

00:19:28.760 you know, more predictability from the government as opposed to these schemes. Why is it that you think

00:19:35.000 that Trudeau goes for these schemes? And do you think that they will be successful? When you look

00:19:40.280 at Canada's growth rate right now, GDP growth, I think we're lagging last in the G7. Our economy

00:19:46.440 doesn't seem to be as robust as it ought to be. It doesn't seem like these kind of growth funds really

00:19:51.000 work from my perspective. I'm wondering what you think about it? Well, so we can kind of saw it off.

00:19:56.360 And instead of, or at least in addition to debating back and forth, whether these things work or not,

00:20:05.400 we could hope for governments that instead of constantly only announcing what's going to happen,

00:20:12.520 they sometimes report on what did happen. So, you know, for a while there, there was this trend about

00:20:21.400 deliverology, which everybody made fun of, because deliverology was a made up name that sounded silly.

00:20:25.960 But it was the idea that instead of, instead of getting excited about announcements about inputs,

00:20:32.840 how much money are we spending on this? You would track results you would. So if you hope to influence

00:20:44.040 infant birth weight, because low birth weight children have, have often a difficult future ahead of

00:20:51.320 them. You would simply report on infant birth weight over time. And if you want, if you're worried

00:20:56.520 about mercury and water, you would just report on the rate of mercury and water. And if you're trying

00:21:01.320 to attract, and for goodness sake, if you're trying to attract a global investment into Canadian

00:21:07.960 technology projects, you should report at regular intervals about how much investment you've

00:21:12.840 attracted. Because this new Canada Growth Fund is plainly modeled after the Canada Infrastructure Bank,

00:21:19.800 which was going to build roads and ports and bridges and irrigation systems with, you know, a little

00:21:26.200 bit, a little bit, a fair amount of federal money, and then a bunch of investment from these international

00:21:30.840 pension funds. And with a team of bloodhounds, if you went to the Canada Infrastructure Bank website

00:21:36.600 today, you could not find how much, how much extra private investment they've managed to attract to go

00:21:43.480 along with these federal dollars. Because the answer is, it hasn't worked, or it hasn't worked very well,

00:21:48.120 or it has, it's, you know, it's sometimes worked and sometimes not. And I know that's embarrassing. But if

00:21:55.160 you report on results, instead of on inputs, then everyone can see how well things are going. And maybe some

00:22:00.920 people would come up with a better idea. And, and what you certainly wouldn't do is, is clone a flawed

00:22:09.880 model, hoping that people wouldn't notice that it didn't work. It didn't work great the last time,

00:22:18.520 and therefore, it's odds of working, you know, I'm all about a higher level of accountability than what

00:22:26.200 we have. And that's why I mean, it's, it was a pretty risky proposition, I'm starting to use a

00:22:32.520 newsletter that I hope a lot of people are going to be interested in. And the first piece is this

00:22:38.040 pretty wonky deep dive into the fiscal tables in the last budget. But I've been doing that for a long

00:22:47.960 time. And because a lot of my colleagues don't have the luxury of working at that level of detail,

00:22:54.840 they don't have curiosity about it. And, and, frankly, successful governments hope that their,

00:23:03.560 their work won't be scrutinized at that level, because it's easier to just kind of surf on vague

00:23:10.360 impressions. Well, that's what the Trudeau government is, is very good at is, you know,

00:23:16.120 pithy one liners and platitudes, not so much the details I find personally, the whole budget process to

00:23:23.320 just be numbingly, just out of touch, because, you know, you expect a budget to be line item,

00:23:33.000 this is what we're spending the money on. But instead, what you get, and I've been in those

00:23:36.200 budget lockups before, where they give you they give the budget out to journalists and stakeholders

00:23:40.920 a couple hours before it gets released publicly. And what you're looking at is like a 500 page marketing

00:23:46.360 material book, with all the government, you know, buzzwords and promoting their own stuff,

00:23:51.640 and you really have to dig deep to get to some of the details. So I think a lot of people appreciate

00:23:57.080 you doing a deep dive, even though it might not be the, you know, most glamorous subject for your first

00:24:04.200 blog post. But I want to ask you about another piece that you wrote a couple weeks ago, a couple

00:24:09.160 months ago, sorry, over at McLean's in November, you described Trudeau's handling of COVID as twisting

00:24:14.440 the spending knob to 11, and the accountability knob to zero, you questioned whether he would use a

00:24:19.480 similar approach to his other pet issues, naming climate change, and housing. Well, this latest budget,

00:24:26.280 we sort of saw a little bit like that. So it's almost like you predicted this budget in the future.

00:24:31.800 Do you think that this is the legacy that Dustin Trudeau had in mind for himself during his time

00:24:36.360 as Prime Minister? Oh, probably not. I got to say probably the accountability knob probably hasn't

00:24:46.440 turned to zero. It's lower than I want to be, and I'm always trying to force it up.

00:24:55.240 A couple of examples, you quoted, growth over the next several years is projected to be lower in

00:25:01.000 Canada than in the rest of the G7. Amazingly, we can find that piece of information in the

00:25:05.640 latest budget. And there's also a thing that total spending on research and development

00:25:16.040 has been declining in Canada, and it's the only G7 country where that's been happening.

00:25:20.760 I was honestly amazed that they admit these two things in the budget. I think that

00:25:25.080 some people are starting to say, look, we've been here for almost seven years, and the results aren't

00:25:33.640 great. And so they kind of snuck that stuff into the budget. You asked about whether this is the

00:25:42.760 legacy that Trudeau wanted. I keep coming back to a speech that he gave in 2014, the beginning of 2014,

00:25:48.840 in Montreal, at the last Liberal Party convention before the 2015 election. And what he said is,

00:25:58.600 if governments can't demonstrate that their efforts work for regular people,

00:26:02.760 then people are going to start to look around for other alternatives. He described them as extreme

00:26:07.240 alternatives.

00:26:07.800 I think he was right about that. I think if, you know, the mainstream parties, the Christian Democrats

00:26:20.280 in Germany, the Liberals and Conservative Party in Canada, you know, go around the circle, the Labour and

00:26:30.840 the Tories and the Social Democrats, the Liberal Democrats in the UK, if they can't show that the

00:26:37.320 work they do makes sense to people and has an effect on their life and helps them, then you're going to

00:26:46.840 start to see people considering other alternatives. And just my temperament, I'm not the guy who's going to

00:26:55.640 say, you should consider those extreme alternatives. I'm going to be the guy who reminds the brokerage

00:27:02.200 parties, the traditional parties, you have a responsibility. You can't make wild promises you

00:27:07.320 can't fulfill. You can't make wild claims that aren't backed up. You can't hose money around if it doesn't

00:27:12.600 help. Because just as Justin Trudeau said, you're undermining the case for a politics

00:27:20.600 of consensus. And, and I don't think that's healthy. Just, and I'm not trying to pick on you here, Paul,

00:27:27.400 but it seems to me that there are a lot of voices in the media, a lot of pundits, a lot of columnists

00:27:32.360 who are very quick to do just what you described to Conservatives, to say, you know, these Conservatives

00:27:37.640 are doing dog whistle politics, they're playing into populism, look at these horrible truckers. And

00:27:44.120 I know you wrote a little bit about the truckers. It doesn't seem like you were a big fan of them,

00:27:48.120 but at the same time, you didn't seem to support Justin Trudeau's use of the Emergency Act.

00:27:55.080 It seems like there's a willingness to hold the Conservatives to account for things that they say

00:28:00.440 that journalists think have crossed the line, but not so much when it comes to Trudeau and the

00:28:05.640 Liberals. I'll give you an example. During the last election, he referred to the unvaccinated. He said that

00:28:11.800 they're usually racist, misogynistic, people who don't believe in science.

00:28:15.800 And really, we saw villainization, demonization of people who, for whatever reason, maybe it was because

00:28:22.040 of a medical choice, or just because they had already had COVID and they had natural immunity.

00:28:28.120 We saw a real villainization of people by this Prime Minister. And I didn't see a lot of journalists

00:28:35.400 really jumping to hold him to account for that. I'm wondering your perspective on that.

00:28:40.120 Well, there's a lot in there. I've had some good conversations with people who were in that convoy.

00:28:48.920 I spoke to grain farmers of Ontario, in London, Ontario, a few weeks ago. And some of the guys

00:28:54.360 there had been in the convoy. And we had such an exchange that after it was over, we went out in the

00:28:59.880 hallway afterwards and talked for another hour. I didn't like the convoy. I didn't like the center

00:29:11.880 of a major Canadian city getting shut down for weeks on end. Neither do I like politics that are designed to

00:29:22.760 push substantial segments of society into a corner and delegitimize the way they think about things.

00:29:32.040 And so I think I'm for a politics that tries to reconcile the apparent contradictions there.

00:29:37.560 There were members of the leadership of the Freedom Convoy whose Facebook accounts, social media posts

00:29:51.480 expressed at length sentiments that I would consider were racist.

00:29:55.160 I don't, but neither do I think that that's an appropriate blanket description of everyone who was there,

00:30:06.200 or everyone who was supporting them, or everyone who, as some of the polling showed,

00:30:13.640 shares the frustrations with the restrictions that we've all had to go through.

00:30:18.680 And so, and look, I mean, Candace, you know, I don't share all your politics. You don't share

00:30:27.560 all of mine. You invited me on to talk about the work that I do. And I appreciated the invitation.

00:30:35.640 I'd rather have a conversation than not have a conversation. And I think, I think that instinct

00:30:41.080 to say you have a bad take. Therefore, I'm going to rat on you to your, like the stuff we see on Twitter

00:30:47.240 every day. I'm going to rat you out to your boss because I disagree with what you just said.

00:30:52.040 Or I'm going to get all of my friends to declare that we're going to stop paying attention to you.

00:31:03.960 I mean, I, I, I try to avoid cliches, so I don't, I don't like that. I don't like the term cancel culture.

00:31:10.120 But I think we've gotten to a place as a country where, where, where we need to encourage ourselves

00:31:23.880 to have more conversations with people who think differently, rather than

00:31:29.160 barricading ourselves with the people who agree with us about everything.

00:31:32.440 I think that that latter impulse, it might be understandable, but it's not producing good results.

00:31:39.240 I saw you had a guest op-ed in the National Post not too long ago, talking about how you liked

00:31:45.160 working for the Post back in the day because there was so much freedom and everyone always

00:31:49.000 disagreed with each other. And that was part of the fun of the National Post, whereas now

00:31:52.360 it seems that people get really upset when they read opinions that they don't like. And there's this

00:31:56.040 sort of change in mood and culture. And you wrote, you wrote that it felt like political correctness

00:32:00.440 was coming back. From my perspective, it seems like political correctness never went away. It's just

00:32:05.400 now it's on steroids and, and the, the, the amount of conversation, the topics that you're allowed

00:32:12.040 to have has gotten a lot more narrow when it comes to the sort of mainstream acceptable society. What do

00:32:19.000 you think the remedy to that is?

00:32:23.720 It's funny, I just gave a talk to another group about trust. And I said,

00:32:27.640 we have to think about who the subject and the object is in, in, in, in, in conversations about

00:32:37.640 trust. And instead of wondering why don't people trust me or how, you know, why, why don't people

00:32:47.080 accept what I have to say at face value? We should remember that, that, that we're the subject in the

00:32:54.120 question. The question is, do I trust other people? Do I take the leap of faith to believe that maybe

00:33:00.600 they are, uh, speaking in, in, in, in, in good faith and, and, and, and looking for solutions rather

00:33:06.600 than just being annoying to me? And am I trustworthy? Is my own work honest, uh, based on fact, um,

00:33:16.840 um, uh, expressed in a way that isn't looking for a fight, but is, uh, uh, you know, looking for,

00:33:25.720 for, uh, uh, a response in a conversation and, um, uh, I can't control what anyone else does.

00:33:35.800 Um, I left Twitter cause I didn't like most of what I was seeing on Twitter. Um, uh, the only thing

00:33:43.720 I am like, I'm, what is it? I'm captain of my soul or something. I, uh, the only thing I've got

00:33:47.800 sovereignty over is my own reactions. So I try and produce work that people, I try and produce work

00:33:52.760 that I believe in, uh, that I think people will find is worth their time. And I, uh, lean hard on

00:34:04.920 the, um, uh, limiting the, the, the natural response to say, Amanda, hell with you. If you 0.97

00:34:15.080 don't agree with me, um, uh, we've all had a tough couple of years. Um, I have been amazed

00:34:26.040 at the way some people have responded to a virus. That's too dumb to know what side of the debate 0.99

00:34:30.200 it's supposed to be on. Um, and I, I get that we're all tired, but, uh, I don't, I don't, 0.99

00:34:37.800 I don't think I improve things by, uh, you know, playing, playing, uh, appropriateness cop.

00:34:50.760 That just seems like a bit of a lame response.

00:34:52.600 Absolutely. I, I, I agree that, um, you know, everyone seems to be, uh, you know,

00:35:00.280 tightly wound up these days and there's a lot of tension. And I think that we would be, uh,

00:35:06.040 all very advised to, well, uh, your style of, of journalism writing is always sort of the

00:35:12.200 cool, calm, collected, uh, afterthought, the sober afterthought, as opposed to the, uh,

00:35:17.880 the hot takes on Twitter. I was wondering, I'm going to ask you now that you're going independent

00:35:22.280 and you, you need to promote your sub stack. Are you going to, are you planning on coming back onto

00:35:26.200 Twitter or are you still, uh, on a Twitter hiatus? No, my wife asked me about that this morning and

00:35:31.160 I said, no, I'm going to stay off. I'm going to stay off Twitter. Um, I'm going to, I'm going to test

00:35:39.080 some of the assumptions about, about the newsletter life. Uh, I'm, uh, not going to claim that some mob

00:35:47.560 of wrong thinking people is out to get me. I'm not going to, um, uh, I'm not going to try and

00:35:57.160 sharpen points of, of dispute. I'm going to like this piece I wrote this morning that is, um,

00:36:03.880 uh, uh, you know, opens the path to uncomfortable questions, uh, but doesn't make sort of blanket

00:36:10.520 allegations or claims. Um, I'm going to see how much of that stuff I can do. I mean, now look,

00:36:15.000 I've got an advantage. A lot of people don't have, which is that I've, I've, I've built a large

00:36:19.480 audience over the years, but, um, uh, we both know people who are happy to, you know, stride into

00:36:27.800 battle every day. Uh, I'm just going to, I'm going to, I'm going to see if, uh, it's possible to make

00:36:32.840 it work with a different style. Well, that's great, Paul. I think that there's so many Canadians out

00:36:37.080 there that are happy to see, uh, your writing again, happy to see that there's a place where they can

00:36:42.040 find your work on a regular basis. And, uh, we're all looking forward to the work we do,

00:36:45.960 that you do. I know that, uh, there's probably some members of the, uh, Trudeau government that

00:36:50.680 are, that are not so, um, thrilled with, with the fact that you're doing this because hopefully,

00:36:55.000 uh, you'll be, uh, holding them to account in a way that, uh, is duly needed. So I, I thank you

00:37:00.680 for your time. Appreciate you coming on. I know, uh, like you said, we don't always agree, but it's just

00:37:04.440 nice to hear your perspective and we wish you all the best in your sub stack.

00:37:07.720 Thanks for the invitation. All right. That's Paul Wells. You can find his sub stack

00:37:13.080 over at Paul Wells. Uh, sorry, let me just get that right. It's substack.paulwells.com, right?

00:37:18.760 It's paulwells.substack.com. Okay. I'll, uh, I'll let Paul hold up his, uh,

00:37:25.320 his URL there. So paulwells.substack.com, uh, go check it out, go subscribe, go support, uh,

00:37:31.320 independent journalism. I'm Candace Malcolm, and this is The Candace Malcolm Show.

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Juno News - April 20, 2022

Canada’s top political journalist goes independent (ft. Paul Wells)

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