00:07:41.340And then in journalism, I mean, I could work as a freelancer.
00:07:45.180I've written a half dozen pieces in a month for a bunch of organizations.
00:07:50.140But I figured at some point editors would get tired of me calling.
00:07:56.400The same thing would happen that has happened to other freelancers.
00:07:59.440I could, you know, petitions one of the big news organizations to hire me full time.
00:08:07.540But for 20 years, people have been saying, Paul, why don't you just go out on your own?
00:08:13.400You 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.
00:08:26.040But the Substack platform makes it super easy for people to pay if they want.
00:08:36.040And 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.
00:08:46.860It's sort of like Shopify for for journalism.
00:08:50.120It takes care of all of the back office plumbing that I'm really not good at.
00:08:55.680And it leaves the journalists free to write.
00:08:58.140And so I thought I would give it a shot.
00:08:59.660And first day has been very encouraging.
00:09:01.700Well, 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.
00:09:10.260So I certainly applaud the entrepreneurship.
00:09:12.620It'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.
00:09:19.800You know, we live in a world now where all of that information is at your fingertips in a thousand different places.
00:09:24.500And so you don't really need these intermediaries as much.
00:09:28.600And there's definite pros and cons about that.
00:09:30.820I 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.
00:09:41.320Whereas, you know, a large, prominent voice like yours, Paul Wells, everyone knows it.
00:09:46.240I'm sure you're going to get flooded with subscribers.
00:09:49.100Do you think that there's room on the platform or that there's still space for that sort of local reporting?
00:09:53.320Or do you think that that's going to be one of the big casualties of this change to online media world?
00:10:00.820I 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.
00:10:14.800Someone who's just interested are mad at City Hall and won't let go of that.
00:10:20.020And it really hasn't panned out that way.
00:10:24.240There 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.
00:10:40.900But there aren't a lot of other examples.
00:10:43.400And I do think local journalism suffers because local audiences are usually not big enough to support, you know, a single entrepreneur.
00:10:56.760We talk about the federal subsidies to these organizations.
00:11:05.300I 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.
00:11:13.400And I don't think the federal government's efforts to help much.
00:11:20.280Well, you've written quite a bit about that, Paul.
00:11:24.100And I know, like, Justin Trudeau's preference seems to be to just subsidize everything, right?
00:11:28.340Like, 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.
00:11:41.860The CBC used the money to create an online news outlet, essentially, where everyone could get the news for free.
00:11:48.240And 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.
00:11:56.500And 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.
00:12:07.100I 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?
00:12:15.840I 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.
00:12:31.800Further 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
00:12:48.320get many journalists. So Le Devoir has a reporter who writes in French about what happens in small town Ontario, and that's government money.
00:13:00.280And 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.
00:13:25.620And 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.
00:13:38.340And 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.
00:13:55.900But 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.
00:14:08.400But 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.
00:14:19.420And 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.
00:14:33.700Well, 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.
00:14:50.320But 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.
00:15:01.000And then those are where the conflicts may take place.
00:15:03.600It'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.
00:15:12.900You 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.
00:15:27.320So let's, let's go, let's talk about your new website, your sub stack called Paul Wells.
00:15:32.580Can you tell us about your first scoop, which is this mysterious $15 billion billion?
00:15:38.080I just happen to have the URL right here, Paul Wells.substack.com.
00:15:45.540Yeah, it's, it's pretty thin right now.
00:15:47.260As we speak, there's one piece on the, on the site.
00:15:50.320It'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.
00:16:05.660And actually it'll, it'll invest in quite a wide variety of things.
00:16:09.800And, and the idea is that it'll attract $3 from outside institutional investors, basically pension funds for every dollar that it spends.
00:16:24.800And basically my, my, my, my, my piece amounts to a bunch of questions about that.
00:16:28.940First of all, it's really not clear to me how it's going to be $15 billion.
00:16:33.440When you look in the columns of the budget, it's only $1.5 billion.
00:16:38.240And 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.
00:16:51.380This is because of an, essentially an accounting technique where they say the only money that's going to get spent is the,
00:16:58.520essentially bargain rate they're going to charge on interest rates.
00:17:04.860So they're going to, they're going to offer loans, they're going to charge less than prime to these big pension funds.
00:17:11.020And so they're going to make back about 90 cents on the dollar.
00:17:14.820First of all, I don't believe any of that.
00:17:17.280I believe that, I believe they honestly hope that's the way it's going to work.
00:17:20.200But the thing is when you're offering concessions on huge loans in a complex environment on edgy new technology,
00:17:30.920I don't see how you can have any idea who's going to be investing three or four or eight years out
00:17:39.660and on, and how likely they're going to be able to pay you back.
00:17:44.840And then the other thing I wonder is, well, I just have a bunch of questions about how it's going to work.
00:17:56.760And, and, and, and the reason I peck away at this and peck away at this is I think governments get themselves in trouble
00:18:04.840when they announce solutions to complex problems that just aren't going to work.
00:18:12.920I think that undermines trust in government.
00:18:18.120And as someone who thinks that government can be a force for good,
00:18:21.080I would really like people to stop making false promises on its behalf.
00:18:24.760Well, one of the things that Trudeau government seems to love to do is put out big round numbers
00:18:30.220and then claim that they, like you said, have the solution to complex problems.
00:18:34.340So it seems to me that words like innovation and Canada Growth Fund,
00:18:38.880those are kind of buzzwords that the government loves to put out there.
00:18:43.820And of course, it's not just Trudeau and Freeland.
00:32:17.340It's funny, I just gave a talk to another group about trust. And I said,
00:32:26.340we have to think about who the subject and the object is in conversations about trust. And instead
00:32:36.260of wondering, why don't people trust me? Or, you know, why don't people accept what I have to say at face value?
00:32:47.940We should remember that we're the subject in the question. The question is, do I trust other people?
00:32:54.200Do I take the leap of faith to believe that maybe they are speaking in good faith and looking for
00:33:02.900solutions rather than just being annoying to me? And am I trustworthy? Is my own work honest,
00:33:09.360based on fact, expressed in a way that isn't looking for a fight, but is, you know, looking for a response
00:33:24.960and 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.
00:33:36.560Um, 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.
00:33:55.120Um, and I, uh, lean, uh, lean hard on, uh, limiting
00:34:04.840the, the, the, the natural response to say, man, to hell with you. If you don't agree with me. Um, uh,
00:34:15.760we'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,
00:34:34.840I 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.
00:34:51.120Absolutely. 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,
00:35:05.320well, 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?
00:35:26.100No, 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,
00:35:32.100I'm going to test some of the assumptions about, about the newsletter life. Uh, I'm, uh,
00:35:42.600not going to claim that some mob of wrong thinking people is out to get me. I'm not going to, um, uh,
00:35:50.600I'm not going to try and sharpen points of, of dispute. I'm going to like this piece I wrote this
00:35:58.460morning that is, um, uh, uh, you know, opens the path to uncomfortable questions, uh, but doesn't
00:36:06.580make sort of blanket allegations or claims. Um, I'm going to see how much of that stuff I can do.
00:36:11.340I mean, now look, I've got an advantage. A lot of people don't have, which is that I've, I've, I've
00:36:15.960built a large audience over the years, but, um, uh, we both know people who are happy to, you know,
00:36:24.160stride into battle every day. Uh, I'm just going to, I'm going to, I'm going to see if, uh, it's
00:36:29.360possible to make it work with a different style. Well, that's great, Paul. I think that there's
00:36:33.400so many Canadians out there that are happy to see, uh, you're writing again, happy to see that
00:36:37.720there's a place where they can find your work on a regular basis. And, uh, we're all looking forward
00:36:42.300to the work we do that you do. I know that, uh, there's probably some members of the, uh, Trudeau
00:36:47.220government that aren't, that are not so, um, thrilled with, with the fact that you're doing this
00:36:51.020because hopefully, uh, you'll be, uh, holding them to account in a way that, uh, is duly
00:36:55.880needed. So I, I thank you for your time. Appreciate you coming on. I know, uh, like you said, we
00:37:00.360don't always agree, but it's just nice to hear your perspective and we wish you all the best
00:37:03.980in your Substack. Thanks for the invitation. All right. That's Paul Wells. You can find his
00:37:09.380Substack over at Paul Wells. Uh, sorry, let me just get that right. It's Substack.PaulWells.com,
00:37:15.240right? It's PaulWells.substack.com. Okay. I'll, uh, I'll let Paul
00:37:20.960hold up his, uh, his URL there. So paulwells.substack.com, uh, go check it out, go subscribe, go support,
00:37:27.800uh, independent journalism. I'm Candace Malcolm, and this is The Candace Malcolm Show.