The Candice Malcolm Show - 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.

00:00:03.820 Today we're joined by Paul Wells to talk about his new venture into the world of independent media.

00:00:08.080 I'm Candice Malcolm and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.

00:00:21.820 Hi everyone, thank you so much for tuning into the podcast.

00:00:24.700 So this week we learned that Canada's most prominent political writer and journalist,

00:00:28.460 Paul Wells, my guest on the podcast today, will not be joining another big corporate media outlet.

00:00:33.820 Instead, he's launched his own sub-stack called Paul Wells,

00:00:36.800 where you can directly subscribe to his content and consume his political writing.

00:00:41.080 In mid-March, Paul announced that he was leaving McLean's magazine,

00:00:44.280 where he had written on and off for 20 years, and we just learned today that he is gone independent.

00:00:50.040 One of Canada's leading political journalists, he's been a political journalist in Ottawa for 28 years

00:00:54.480 before making this jump into independent media.

00:00:56.900 He was a columnist over at McLean's.

00:00:58.900 He's also written for the Toronto Star, National Post, and Montreal Gazette.

00:01:03.060 Wells is a three-time gold recipient of the National Magazine Award,

00:01:07.220 the John W. Defoe Book Prize winner, and the Shaughnessy Cohen Book Prize for Political Writing.

00:01:13.640 He moderated the federal debates in 2015 and 2019.

00:01:17.540 And in addition to being a print journalist, he's hosted McLean's Live.

00:01:21.160 He has interviewed just about every major political and cultural figure in Canada.

00:01:25.000 And for a time, he was a member of the At Issue panel over on CBC.

00:01:30.040 So, Paul, it's such an honor to have you on the podcast.

00:01:32.400 Thanks for joining us today.

00:01:33.740 Hi, Candice. Thanks for asking me.

00:01:35.740 Okay. So, I know you've been a political journalist for 28 years in Ottawa, you tell me.

00:01:41.200 And I'm just wondering, before we get into your foray here into independent media and your sub-stack,

00:01:46.800 what got you into journalism in the first place?

00:01:48.900 Maybe you can tell us a little bit about what reporting and what journalism looked like back then

00:01:53.300 and how it's changed over the years.

00:01:55.200 So, in the very earliest incarnation, and this goes back further into the 20th century than I like to contemplate,

00:02:02.480 I started writing for my campus newspaper at Western because a friend of mine was taking photographs for the Western Gazette.

00:02:10.820 And he said that if you take pictures of a concert or review a concert, you can get in for free.

00:02:18.220 And the great jazz trumpeter, Dizzy Gillespie, was coming to Western, and I didn't want to spend $17 on a ticket.

00:02:24.600 So, I went and offered to review it.

00:02:27.120 And fortunately, nobody else ever wants to write about jazz.

00:02:31.080 So, that was my first piece for the Gazette.

00:02:35.800 I'm shy by nature.

00:02:37.220 Journalism allows you to go where the action is and ask rude questions.

00:02:41.340 And there was no other way in life that I was going to get to do that.

00:02:46.320 And so, that's really what the appeal was.

00:02:50.480 You go to places where fascinating and sometimes terrifying things are happening,

00:02:55.860 and you indulge your curiosity, and you explain it to people, and you try and put it into context.

00:03:00.880 And so, from the Western Gazette, I went to the Montreal Gazette.

00:03:03.700 They sent me to Ottawa, and I somehow never left.

00:03:09.100 Interesting.

00:03:09.420 And so, maybe you can walk us through how the industry has changed over the years.

00:03:13.440 You know that us here at True North have been very critical of the Trudeau government's meddling

00:03:17.720 and the funding bailouts and the new legislation.

00:03:21.440 I'm wondering from your perspective, though, how has media changed?

00:03:24.800 How has it stayed the same?

00:03:26.360 And what sort of led you to choose to leave McLean's and go independent?

00:03:31.120 Okay.

00:03:36.000 You'll agree, Candice, that there are issues that you and I don't agree on,

00:03:39.420 but I've also been very critical of the government attempts to subsidize news production.

00:03:45.140 I think all it does is it opens us up to allegations of not being impartial, of being bought out.

00:03:54.580 And you can debate those allegations all day long, but the fact is, news organizations are getting money from the government.

00:04:00.480 And, you know, it responds to, I mean, that wrongheaded policy responds to an obvious and objective truth,

00:04:07.220 which is that there's less money in journalism than there used to be.

00:04:10.520 When I started, again, in the 80s, at the end of the 80s, if you lived in Montreal and you wanted to sell a chest of drawers

00:04:21.440 or a bicycle or a futon, or you had a truck and you were willing to hire it out to drive stuff around,

00:04:30.240 you had to take out a classified ad in the Montreal Gazette.

00:04:32.740 There was no other way to let people know what was going on.

00:04:36.300 And so the Gazette had thousands and thousands of ads every day, you know, many, many pages of classified ads

00:04:43.340 and car ads and cinema ads and so on.

00:04:46.880 And therefore, it was sitting on a stack of money.

00:04:50.300 And similarly, because this is before the internet, if you wanted to know what got said in parliament yesterday

00:04:57.340 or what the prime minister said at his fundraiser last night or who's playing at the music clubs tonight,

00:05:05.600 you had to pick up a newspaper.

00:05:07.620 You didn't have an independent way of doing it.

00:05:09.400 And so the fact that we lived at the crossroads between people who needed to sell

00:05:14.360 and people who needed to know gave us extraordinary power.

00:05:19.440 And as a result, kind of a middling regional paper like the Montreal Gazette in those days had three people in their Ottawa bureau,

00:05:28.280 two reporters at City Hall, a theatre critic, a food writer, you know, just a kind of an opulent offering of journalism.

00:05:40.960 And over the years, that all stopped because that went from having three reporters in Ottawa to not having any,

00:05:46.340 from having two reporters at City at the courthouse to not having any.

00:05:51.880 And smaller organizations have closed altogether or are struggling mightily.

00:06:01.780 And finally, at some point, in my own case, in my own shop, I mean, I decided I didn't want to work at my old shop.

00:06:10.480 And then it was feasible for me to just hang out my own shingle and at least aspire.

00:06:19.620 We're in very early stages yet, but I can at least aspire to make a decent living at it.

00:06:25.920 Interesting. And so what was it specifically about Subsec?

00:06:28.940 I mean, I assume that when you left McLean's and you wrote that you or you did an interview with Hill Times saying you left McLean's

00:06:34.060 because there's new corporate owners and you didn't really see eye to eye with their management style, you know,

00:06:40.040 was your initial decision to I'm going to go on, do a Subsec,

00:06:44.280 I'm going to kind of follow what Barry Weiss has done very successfully down in the U.S. and so many others?

00:06:49.460 Or were you kind of on the fence?

00:06:51.140 When did you decide to take the plunge and go independent?

00:06:54.080 And what was the sort of main motivating factor there?

00:06:57.820 So I left McLean's five weeks ago.

00:07:00.920 So and it's pointless to litigate why the the the new owners of McLean's are taking it in a different direction.

00:07:10.400 I thought they were doing it clumsily and I figured life is too short to hang out with people who aren't fun to work with.

00:07:15.600 So but when I quit, I had no idea what I was going to do next.

00:07:22.560 I'm now at the age where friends of mine who are teachers are starting to retire.

00:07:27.340 So I thought maybe I'll just stop working.

00:07:29.200 I looked around for some corporate gig outside of journalism and and A, there were not a lot of offers.

00:07:38.760 B, none of them sounded fun.

00:07:41.340 And then in journalism, I mean, I could work as a freelancer.

00:07:45.180 I've written a half dozen pieces in a month for a bunch of organizations.

00:07:50.140 But I figured at some point editors would get tired of me calling.

00:07:56.400 The same thing would happen that has happened to other freelancers.

00:07:59.440 I could, you know, petitions one of the big news organizations to hire me full time.

00:08:07.540 But for 20 years, people have been saying, Paul, why don't you just go out on your own?

00:08:13.400 You like, you know, 20 years ago, people were saying you could just write a blog and then, you know, hold out a tip jar and people will give you money if they want.

00:08:23.520 And frankly, I found that terrifying.

00:08:26.040 But the Substack platform makes it super easy for people to pay if they want.

00:08:36.040 And it makes it really easy for journalists to organize and to decide, you know, what they want to charge for, what they want to distribute for free.

00:08:45.900 It takes care of it.

00:08:46.860 It's sort of like Shopify for for journalism.

00:08:50.120 It takes care of all of the back office plumbing that I'm really not good at.

00:08:55.680 And it leaves the journalists free to write.

00:08:58.140 And so I thought I would give it a shot.

00:08:59.660 And first day has been very encouraging.

00:09:01.700 Well, it is sort of a scary thing to go out on your own and especially to start a business, which is essentially what you're doing.

00:09:10.260 So I certainly applaud the entrepreneurship.

00:09:12.620 It's interesting you talk about the early days of media and the fact that you needed to go to these outlets in order to get information.

00:09:19.800 You know, we live in a world now where all of that information is at your fingertips in a thousand different places.

00:09:24.500 And so you don't really need these intermediaries as much.

00:09:28.600 And there's definite pros and cons about that.

00:09:30.820 I mean, the cons is that you lose, you know, a lot of the local flavor, like you don't have, like you said, a courtroom reporter or a local reporter holding City Hall and the mayor accountable.

00:09:41.320 Whereas, you know, a large, prominent voice like yours, Paul Wells, everyone knows it.

00:09:46.240 I'm sure you're going to get flooded with subscribers.

00:09:49.100 Do you think that there's room on the platform or that there's still space for that sort of local reporting?

00:09:53.320 Or do you think that that's going to be one of the big casualties of this change to online media world?

00:10:00.820 I always thought, I mean, back when it was just blogging, back when there were a thousand people in Canada who were doing blogs more or less for free, I thought that this would allow for blossoming of local reporting.

00:10:14.800 Someone who's just interested are mad at City Hall and won't let go of that.

00:10:20.020 And it really hasn't panned out that way.

00:10:24.240 There is a few people, Joey Coleman, who runs an independent news organization in Hamilton, and is far and away the toughest observer of how the city government in Hamilton works.

00:10:39.480 He's been able to make a go of it.

00:10:40.900 But there aren't a lot of other examples.

00:10:43.400 And I do think local journalism suffers because local audiences are usually not big enough to support, you know, a single entrepreneur.

00:10:56.760 We talk about the federal subsidies to these organizations.

00:11:05.300 I mean, I worry about the health of journalism in this country, but I think that there are some cures that are at least arguably worse than the disease.

00:11:13.400 And I don't think the federal government's efforts to help much.

00:11:20.280 Well, you've written quite a bit about that, Paul.

00:11:24.100 And I know, like, Justin Trudeau's preference seems to be to just subsidize everything, right?

00:11:28.340 Like, I've talked about this on my show in the past, but in 2015, he pledged all this money to the CBC to make up for cuts that the Harper government had made during their drop deficit reduction action plan.

00:11:39.860 He promised them much more.

00:11:41.860 The CBC used the money to create an online news outlet, essentially, where everyone could get the news for free.

00:11:48.240 And then at the same time, you know, Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, National Post are trying to compete in the world of getting subscriptions and creating a paywall.

00:11:56.500 And so, you know, rather than taking a look at his initial subsidy, he just chose to sprinkle the subsidies everywhere and start paying newsrooms to do their news.

00:12:07.100 I just I want I want to sort of ask you, like, how do you think has changed the media landscape in the last two years since he's introduced this this program?

00:12:15.840 I mean, what it hasn't done has been to make a lot of conspicuously healthier news organizations like the big old line news organizations, the ones that where I've spent my career are not.

00:12:31.800 Further from death's door after a couple of years of these subsidy programs, there are there's something called the local local journalism initiative, which is an effort to chip in money for people who work in places that wouldn't ordinarily

00:12:48.320 get many journalists. So Le Devoir has a reporter who writes in French about what happens in small town Ontario, and that's government money.

00:13:00.280 And I can't get really angry about that, but I think that the amount of money the feds have put in is not really enough to help us do our work on a on a large scale, but it's it's absolutely enough to shatter our credibility with some of our readership and our some of our audiences.

00:13:25.620 And when when when someone now I mean, the nice thing is I'm not going to be getting any federal money at Substack, I can't be bought and paid for except by my readers.

00:13:38.340 And I didn't think I was bought and paid for before. Actually, McLean's didn't, as a magazine, didn't qualify for a lot of these new programs. We qualified for a program that James Moore used to run when he was the conservative minister of heritage, just as his liberal successors have run him.

00:13:55.900 But when someone says you're in the tank of the government, after all, they're paying part of your paycheck. I had no rebuttal. I know how I feel. I know I, I, I, I, I believe my journalism to be entirely credible.

00:14:08.400 But what am I going to say? Like, I'm not, we're not getting federal money? Well, yes, we were. That's not the sort of thing. That's not the very essence of a conflict of interest.

00:14:19.420 And any definition of conflict of interest I've ever seen, says it doesn't matter whether your work is corrupted. What matters is whether an observer could reasonably wonder whether your work is corrupted. And like I say, I have no, I have no rebuttal to those claims.

00:14:33.700 Well, and I think a lot of people who would be critical of these government subsidies, myself included, would say that it wouldn't necessarily always be the local journalist on the ground, although they might have that idea in the back of their head, especially during an election, when you have two parties and one is promising more money for your organization, one is promising less.

00:14:50.320 But the idea that sort of higher ups, the corporate executives are choosing, you know, which, which overall storylines to kill and chase and where to do your research and where to do the ATIPs.

00:15:01.000 And then those are where the conflicts may take place.

00:15:03.600 It's hard to argue against that when there's lobbying campaigns being done to try to ensure places like Google and Facebook pay their what's called fair share.

00:15:12.900 You know, they're, you know, they're, they're openly doing advocacy and then turning around and calling groups like True North activists when, you know, we're not, we're not running full page ads in our, in our, on our website, promoting one government policy or another.

00:15:27.320 So let's, let's go, let's talk about your new website, your sub stack called Paul Wells.

00:15:32.580 Can you tell us about your first scoop, which is this mysterious $15 billion billion?

00:15:38.080 I just happen to have the URL right here, Paul Wells.substack.com.

00:15:42.900 That was from a previous call.

00:15:45.540 Yeah, it's, it's pretty thin right now.

00:15:47.260 As we speak, there's one piece on the, on the site.

00:15:50.320 It's about a, a big ticket item in last week's federal budget, something called the Canada Growth Plan, which is a fund of $15 billion that will invest in green technology.

00:16:05.660 And actually it'll, it'll invest in quite a wide variety of things.

00:16:09.800 And, and the idea is that it'll attract $3 from outside institutional investors, basically pension funds for every dollar that it spends.

00:16:20.360 There's a couple of problems.

00:16:24.800 And basically my, my, my, my, my piece amounts to a bunch of questions about that.

00:16:28.940 First of all, it's really not clear to me how it's going to be $15 billion.

00:16:33.440 When you look in the columns of the budget, it's only $1.5 billion.

00:16:38.240 And they say that that money comes from savings elsewhere, which they don't specify so that, so that in effect, this $15 billion fund won't cost anything.

00:16:51.380 This is because of an, essentially an accounting technique where they say the only money that's going to get spent is the,

00:16:58.520 essentially bargain rate they're going to charge on interest rates.

00:17:04.860 So they're going to, they're going to offer loans, they're going to charge less than prime to these big pension funds.

00:17:11.020 And so they're going to make back about 90 cents on the dollar.

00:17:14.820 First of all, I don't believe any of that.

00:17:17.280 I believe that, I believe they honestly hope that's the way it's going to work.

00:17:20.200 But the thing is when you're offering concessions on huge loans in a complex environment on edgy new technology,

00:17:30.920 I don't see how you can have any idea who's going to be investing three or four or eight years out

00:17:39.660 and on, and how likely they're going to be able to pay you back.

00:17:44.840 And then the other thing I wonder is, well, I just have a bunch of questions about how it's going to work.

00:17:56.760 And, and, and, and the reason I peck away at this and peck away at this is I think governments get themselves in trouble

00:18:04.840 when they announce solutions to complex problems that just aren't going to work.

00:18:12.920 I think that undermines trust in government.

00:18:18.120 And as someone who thinks that government can be a force for good,

00:18:21.080 I would really like people to stop making false promises on its behalf.

00:18:24.760 Well, one of the things that Trudeau government seems to love to do is put out big round numbers

00:18:30.220 and then claim that they, like you said, have the solution to complex problems.

00:18:34.340 So it seems to me that words like innovation and Canada Growth Fund,

00:18:38.880 those are kind of buzzwords that the government loves to put out there.

00:18:43.820 And of course, it's not just Trudeau and Freeland.

00:18:45.740 We see this provincially.

00:18:47.020 We saw this in Ontario with the Wynn government,

00:18:49.520 where they would love to announce that they were, you know,

00:18:52.780 partnering with Google and a new building in Waterloo or whatever.

00:18:56.220 And it's like, you know, what, what is it that a government,

00:19:02.360 like why did, why would the government want to get involved in subsidizing big tech companies?

00:19:06.680 Or, or why, what, what, like, what, what, what, what specifically would a Canada Growth Fund

00:19:13.260 do to attract investment aside from, again, just going the route of, of subsidies?

00:19:18.340 Personally, as a conservative, I would like to see just a more competitive work environment,

00:19:23.160 less regulations, lower taxes across the board, you know,

00:19:26.660 more, more predictability from the government as opposed to these schemes.

00:19:30.760 Why is it that you think that, that Trudeau goes for these schemes?

00:19:34.720 And do you think that they will be successful?

00:19:37.080 I mean, you look at Canada's growth rate right now, GDP growth,

00:19:39.900 I think we're lagging last in the G7.

00:19:42.560 Our economy doesn't seem to be as robust as it ought to be.

00:19:45.440 It doesn't seem like these kind of growth funds really work from my perspective.

00:19:49.140 I'm wondering what you think about it.

00:19:51.500 Well, so we can kind of saw it off and, and, and instead of, or at least in addition to debating

00:19:58.680 back and forth, whether these things work or not, we could hope for governments that

00:20:04.220 instead of announce, instead of constantly only announcing what, what's going to happen,

00:20:08.700 they sometimes report on what did happen.

00:20:14.240 So, you know, for a while there, there was this trend about deliverology, which everybody

00:20:19.680 made fun of because deliverology was a made up name that sounded silly, but it was the idea

00:20:23.900 that instead of, instead of getting excited about announcements, about inputs, how much money

00:20:30.480 are we spending on this?

00:20:33.760 You would track results.

00:20:35.940 You would, so if you hope to influence infant birth weight, because low birth weight children

00:20:44.600 have, have often a difficult future ahead of them, you would simply report on infant birth

00:20:50.580 weight over time.

00:20:51.560 And if you want, if you're worried about mercury and water, you would just report on the rate

00:20:56.340 of mercury and water. And if you're trying to attract, and for goodness sake, if you're trying

00:21:00.780 to attract a global investment into Canadian technology projects, you should report at regular

00:21:07.840 intervals about how much investment you've attracted, because this new Canada growth fund

00:21:12.500 is plainly modeled after the Canada infrastructure bank, which was going to build roads and ports

00:21:19.020 and bridges and irrigation systems with, you know, a little bit, a little bit, a fair amount

00:21:24.600 of federal money, and then a bunch of investment from these international pension funds.

00:21:29.400 And with a team of bloodhounds, if you went to the Canada infrastructure bank website today,

00:21:33.960 you could not find how much, how much extra private investment they've managed to attract

00:21:40.140 to go along with these federal dollars. Because the answer is it hasn't worked. It hasn't worked

00:21:44.740 very well, or it has, it's, you know, it's sometimes worked and sometimes not. And I know

00:21:50.240 that's embarrassing. But if you report on results, instead of on inputs, then everyone can see how

00:21:56.620 well things are going. And maybe some people will come up with a better idea. And, and what

00:22:03.700 you certainly wouldn't do is, is clone a flawed model, hoping that people wouldn't notice that

00:22:11.980 it didn't work. It didn't work great the last time, and therefore, it's odds of working,

00:22:16.660 you know, I'm all about a higher level of accountability than what we have. And that's

00:22:24.680 why I mean, it's, it's a pretty risky proposition, I'm starting a news newsletter, that I hope a lot

00:22:32.240 of people are going to be interested in. And the first piece is this pretty wonky deep dive into

00:22:37.220 the fiscal tables in the last budget. But I've been doing that for a long time. And because a lot

00:22:47.820 of my colleagues don't have the luxury of working at that level of detail, they don't have curiosity

00:22:52.960 about it. And, and, frankly, successful governments hope that their, their work won't be scrutinized at

00:23:02.320 that level. Because it's easier to just kind of surf on vague impressions.

00:23:08.920 Well, that's what the Trudeau government is, is very good at is, you know, pithy one liners and

00:23:14.700 platitudes, not so much the details. I find personally, the whole budget process to just be

00:23:21.360 numingly, just out of touch, because, you know, you expect a budget to be line item,

00:23:29.600 you know, this is what we're spending the money on. But instead, what you get, and I've been in

00:23:33.140 those budget lockups before, where they give you they give the budget out to journalists and

00:23:37.220 stakeholders a couple hours before it gets released publicly. And what you're looking at is like a 500

00:23:42.160 page marketing material book, with all the government, you know, buzzwords and promoting

00:23:48.180 their own stuff. And you really have to dig deep to get to some of the details. So I think a lot of

00:23:53.560 people appreciate you doing a deep dive, even though it might not be the, you know, most glamorous

00:23:58.900 subject for your first blog post. But I want to ask you about another piece that you wrote a couple

00:24:04.560 weeks ago, a couple months ago, sorry, over at McLean's in November, you described Trudeau's

00:24:09.840 handling of COVID as twisting the spending knob to 11, and the accountability knob to zero, you

00:24:15.460 questioned whether he would use a similar approach to his other pet issues, naming climate change,

00:24:20.580 and housing. Well, this latest budget, we sort of saw a little bit like that. So it's almost like

00:24:26.300 you predicted this budget in the future. Do you think that this is the legacy that Dustin

00:24:30.840 Trudeau had in mind for himself during his time as Prime Minister?

00:24:35.600 Oh, probably not. I got to say probably the accountability knob probably hasn't been

00:24:42.520 turned to zero. It's lower than I want to be. And I'm always trying to force it up.

00:24:48.360 A couple of examples, you quoted, growth over the next several years is projected to be lower in

00:24:58.140 Canada than in the rest of the G7. Amazingly, we can find that piece of information in the latest

00:25:04.120 budget. And there's also a thing that total research, total spending on research and development

00:25:10.980 has been declining in Canada. And it's the only G7 country where that's been happening.

00:25:17.760 I was honestly amazed that they admit these two things in the budget. I think that

00:25:22.220 some people are starting to say, look, we've been here for almost seven years,

00:25:29.220 and the results aren't great. And so they kind of snuck that stuff into the budget.

00:25:34.640 You asked about whether this is the legacy that Trudeau wanted. I keep coming back to a speech

00:25:42.300 that he gave in 2014, the beginning of 2014, in Montreal at the last Liberal Party convention

00:25:49.320 before the 2015 election. And what he said is, if governments can't demonstrate that their efforts

00:25:57.940 work for regular people, then people are going to start to look around for other alternatives. He

00:26:03.380 described them as extreme alternatives. I think he was right about that. I think if, you know,

00:26:13.620 the mainstream parties, the Christian Democrats in Germany, the Liberals and Conservative Party in

00:26:21.740 Canada, you know, go around the circle, the Labour and the Tories and the Liberal Democrats in the UK,

00:26:31.540 if they can't show that the work they do makes sense to people and has an effect on their life and helps

00:26:42.120 them, then you're going to start to see people considering other alternatives. And just my temperament,

00:26:51.660 I'm not the guy who's going to say, you should consider those extreme alternatives. I'm going to be the guy

00:26:56.380 who reminds the brokerage parties, the traditional parties, you have a responsibility. You can't make

00:27:03.460 wild promises you can't fulfill. You can't make wild claims that aren't backed up. You can't hose money

00:27:08.780 around if it doesn't help. Because just as Justin Trudeau said, you're undermining the case for a politics

00:27:17.600 of consensus. And I don't think that's healthy.

00:27:21.020 Just, and I'm not trying to pick on you here, Paul, but it seems to me that there are a lot of

00:27:26.820 voices in the media, a lot of pundits, a lot of columnists who are very quick to do just what you

00:27:31.300 described to Conservatives, to say, you know, these Conservatives are doing dog whistle politics,

00:27:36.260 they're playing into populism, look at these horrible truckers. And I know you wrote a little

00:27:41.980 bit about the truckers. It doesn't seem like you were a big fan of them. But at the same time,

00:27:46.100 you didn't seem to support Justin Trudeau's use of the Emergency Act. It seems like there's a

00:27:53.360 willingness to hold the Conservatives to account for things that they say that journalists think

00:27:58.820 have crossed the line. But not so much when it comes to Trudeau and the Liberals. I'll give you

00:28:04.240 an example. During the last election, he referred to the unvaccinated. He said that they're usually

00:28:09.820 racist, misogynistic, people who don't believe in science. Really, we saw villainization

00:28:15.940 demonization of people who, for whatever reason, maybe it was because of a medical choice,

00:28:20.320 or just because they had already had COVID and they had natural immunity. We saw a real

00:28:26.220 villainization of people by this Prime Minister. And I didn't see a lot of journalists really

00:28:32.740 jumping to hold him to account for that. I'm wondering your perspective on that.

00:28:39.360 Boy, there's a lot in there. I've had some good conversations with people who were in that

00:28:44.720 convoy. I spoke to grain farmers of Ontario in London, Ontario a few weeks ago. And some of the

00:28:51.280 guys there had been in the convoy. And we had such an exchange that after it was over, we went out in

00:28:56.900 the hallway afterwards and talked for another hour. I didn't like the convoy. I didn't like

00:29:08.060 the center of a major Canadian city getting shut down for weeks on end. Neither do I like politics

00:29:17.740 that are designed to push substantial segments of society into a corner and delegitimize

00:29:25.520 the way they think about things. And so I think I'm for a politics that tries to reconcile

00:29:32.460 the apparent contradictions there. There were members of the leadership of the Freedom Convoy,

00:29:43.020 whose Facebook accounts, social media posts, expressed at length sentiments that I would consider

00:29:51.600 racist. But neither do I think that that's an appropriate blanket description of everything.

00:30:02.440 everyone who was there, or everyone who was supporting them, or everyone who, as some of the polling

00:30:09.640 showed, shares the frustrations with the restrictions that that we've all had to go through.

00:30:18.140 And so, and look, I mean, Candace, you know, I don't share all your politics. You don't share all of

00:30:24.900 mine. You invited me on to talk about the work that I do. And I appreciated the invitation. I'd rather

00:30:33.120 have a conversation than not have a conversation. And I think, I think that instinct to say you have

00:30:38.920 a bad take. Therefore, I'm going to rat on you to your like the stuff we see on Twitter every day.

00:30:44.740 I'm going to rat you out to your boss, because I disagree with what you just said. Or I'm going to

00:30:50.480 get all of my friends to declare that we're going to stop paying attention to you.

00:30:56.840 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. But

00:31:08.060 I think we've gotten to a place as a country where we're, where, where we need to encourage

00:31:19.120 ourselves to have more conversations with people who think differently, rather than

00:31:24.820 barricading ourselves with the people who agree with us about everything. I think that that latter

00:31:32.460 impulse, it might be understandable, but it's not producing good results.

00:31:36.320 I saw you had a guest op-ed in the National Post not too long ago, talking about how you liked

00:31:42.260 working for the Post back in the day, because there's so much freedom, and everyone always

00:31:46.100 disagreed with each other. And that was part of the fun of the National Post, whereas now,

00:31:49.240 it seems that people get really upset when they read opinions that they don't like. And there's this

00:31:53.160 sort of change in mood and culture. And you wrote, you wrote that it felt like political correctness

00:31:57.500 was coming back. From my perspective, it seems like political correctness never went away. It's just now

00:32:02.740 it's on steroids. And the amount of conversation, the topics that you're allowed to have has gotten

00:32:09.860 a lot more narrow when it comes to the sort of mainstream acceptable society. What do you think

00:32:16.340 the remedy to that is?

00:32:17.340 It's funny, I just gave a talk to another group about trust. And I said,

00:32:26.340 we have to think about who the subject and the object is in conversations about trust. And instead

00:32:36.260 of wondering, why don't people trust me? Or, you know, why don't people accept what I have to say at face value?

00:32:47.940 We should remember that we're the subject in the question. The question is, do I trust other people?

00:32:54.200 Do I take the leap of faith to believe that maybe they are speaking in good faith and looking for

00:33:02.900 solutions rather than just being annoying to me? And am I trustworthy? Is my own work honest,

00:33:09.360 based on fact, expressed in a way that isn't looking for a fight, but is, you know, looking for a response

00:33:24.960 and a conversation. And I can't control what anyone else does. I left Twitter because I didn't like most of what I was seeing on Twitter.

00:33:36.560 Um, uh, the only thing I am like, I'm, what is it? I'm captive to my soul or something. I, uh, the only thing I've got sovereignty over is my own reactions. So I try and produce work that people, I try and produce work that I believe in, uh, that I think people will find is worth their time.

00:33:55.120 Um, and I, uh, lean, uh, lean hard on, uh, limiting 0.97

00:34:04.840 the, the, the, the natural response to say, man, to hell with you. If you don't agree with me. Um, uh, 0.86

00:34:15.760 we've all had a tough couple of years. Um, I have been amazed at the way some people have responded to a virus. That's too dumb to know what side of the debate it's supposed to be on. Um, and I, I get that we're all tired, but, uh, I don't, I don't,

00:34:34.840 I don't think I improve things by, uh, you know, playing, playing, uh, appropriateness cop. That just seems like a bit of a lame response.

00:34:51.120 Absolutely. I, I, I agree that, um, you know, everyone seems to be, uh, you know, tightly wound up these days and there's a lot of tension. And I think that we would be, uh, all very advised to,

00:35:05.320 well, uh, your style of, of journalism and writing is always sort of the cool, calm, collected, uh, afterthought, the sober afterthought, as opposed to the, uh, the hot takes on Twitter. I was wondering, I'm going to ask you now that you're going independent and you need to promote your sub stack. Are you going to be planning on coming back onto Twitter? Are you still, uh, on a Twitter hiatus?

00:35:26.100 No, my wife asked me about that this morning. And I said, no, I'm going to stay off. I'm going to stay off Twitter. Um, I'm going to,

00:35:32.100 I'm going to test some of the assumptions about, about the newsletter life. Uh, I'm, uh,

00:35:42.600 not going to claim that some mob of wrong thinking people is out to get me. I'm not going to, um, uh,

00:35:50.600 I'm not going to try and sharpen points of, of dispute. I'm going to like this piece I wrote this

00:35:58.460 morning that is, um, uh, uh, you know, opens the path to uncomfortable questions, uh, but doesn't

00:36:06.580 make sort of blanket allegations or claims. Um, I'm going to see how much of that stuff I can do.

00:36:11.340 I mean, now look, I've got an advantage. A lot of people don't have, which is that I've, I've, I've

00:36:15.960 built a large audience over the years, but, um, uh, we both know people who are happy to, you know,

00:36:24.160 stride into battle every day. Uh, I'm just going to, I'm going to, I'm going to see if, uh, it's

00:36:29.360 possible to make it work with a different style. Well, that's great, Paul. I think that there's

00:36:33.400 so many Canadians out there that are happy to see, uh, you're writing again, happy to see that

00:36:37.720 there's a place where they can find your work on a regular basis. And, uh, we're all looking forward

00:36:42.300 to the work we do that you do. I know that, uh, there's probably some members of the, uh, Trudeau

00:36:47.220 government that aren't, that are not so, um, thrilled with, with the fact that you're doing this

00:36:51.020 because hopefully, uh, you'll be, uh, holding them to account in a way that, uh, is duly

00:36:55.880 needed. So I, I thank you for your time. Appreciate you coming on. I know, uh, like you said, we

00:37:00.360 don't always agree, but it's just nice to hear your perspective and we wish you all the best

00:37:03.980 in your Substack. Thanks for the invitation. All right. That's Paul Wells. You can find his

00:37:09.380 Substack over at Paul Wells. Uh, sorry, let me just get that right. It's Substack.PaulWells.com,

00:37:15.240 right? It's PaulWells.substack.com. Okay. I'll, uh, I'll let Paul

00:37:20.960 hold up his, uh, his URL there. So paulwells.substack.com, uh, go check it out, go subscribe, go support,

00:37:27.800 uh, independent journalism. I'm Candace Malcolm, and this is The Candace Malcolm Show.

The Candice Malcolm Show - April 20, 2022

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

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