Thank you for having me.

When I was going back-and-forth with the Canadian Club on what my speech would be, we settled on me speaking about being a Liberal in a sea of blue.

But to be honest, the longer I’ve thought about that framing, the less it felt right (which is not fair to the Canadian Club because I agreed to the topic - I might even have proposed it).

It doesn’t feel right because it doesn’t feel like a sea of blue. It feels like a place that’s more complicated than that – and has been for a long while.

…

Now, I understand where the idea comes from. If you look at a federal electoral map, Calgary looks pretty uniform. I’m the only Liberal MP in the city. That part is true. But it’s also incomplete.

In the last election, Liberals received 37 percent of the vote in Calgary – literally the best we’ve ever done, going back to the founding of the province in 1905.

If you believe the polling, it’s currently higher still – approaching a tie with Conservative voter intent in our fair city.

So yes, I may be alone. Literally, technically, on the Sunday night flight to Ottawa. But I’m not lonely.

And more importantly, the story people tell about Calgary – especially from a distance – is simpler than the place actually is.

That gap between perceptions of Calgary and our reality is something I spend a lot of time thinking about. I’ve been a Liberal for a long time now, but I don’t come to this as someone who grew up steeped in Liberal politics.

The Nova Scotia branch of my family were proud conservatives. The Quebec branch proud liberals. Growing up, I’m not sure I ever gave a moment’s thought to my parents day-to-day politics. To this day I couldn’t tell you how they voted back then.

I did love politics and government though. Ever since I was in the sixth grade and we went on a trip to Calgary City Hall. I met then-Mayor Al Duerr and thought he had the coolest job in the world. I was enamoured with the idea that we govern ourselves. That we get together and make decisions on who makes decisions.

But that wasn’t party politics. And like pretty much anyone of my age who grew up in the west, my first instinct was not to join the Liberal Party of Canada.

In fact, the first political party I ever joined was the Reform Party of Canada.

I was in Grade 9. My friend Matt and I – bleached blonde hair and all (it was the 90s, in our defence) – went down to our local MP Preston Manning’s constituency office in Glenmore Landing in southwest Calgary.

We didn’t really understand the difference between a constituency office and a party office. We asked how to sign up as members. The staff were utterly bewildered. They politely pointed us in the right direction and ushered us out of the office.

And then I signed up.

What attracted me to Reform wasn’t ideology, exactly. It was the idea of democracy. Accountability. The sense that regular people should have a more direct say in how things were run. That government should work to the benefit of regular people. That resonated with me. That’s what resonated with me at Calgary City Hall years earlier.

It’s still, at its core, a fundamentally thrilling idea that we take for granted. That we are in charge. And for a while, the degree through which citizens directly influenced the process was the lens I looked at politics through.

But over time, I started to notice something. I liked the mechanism – the idea of direct democracy. I liked the idea of Senate reform. I liked the idea of voting on policy.

But when I followed it through to the outcomes, particularly in the context of the Reform Party membership of that day, I didn’t always like the conclusions that the party I was a member of came to.

And then in high school, my social studies teacher, Mr. Schwartz, assigned roles for a model parliament. For reasons I’m still not entirely clear on – but I assume were to amuse himself with this “Canadian Content” Alex P. Keaton he’d inherited – he made me the Liberal prime minister.

At the time, felt like a bit of a stretch. But it forced me to do something I hadn’t really done before – to engage seriously with what the Liberal Party stood for. And that’s where things started to click for me politically.

I realized that while I was drawn to Reform’s focus on process, the outcomes I actually believed in – on inclusion, on the role of government, on how you build a country as diverse as Canada – looked a lot more like the outcomes the Liberal Party was fighting for.

So I didn’t inherit being a Liberal. I reasoned my way into it.

But even now, if I’m being honest, “Liberal” is not the primary lens through which I understand my politics.

I am a Liberal. I’m proud to be one.

But above Liberal, I put both Canadian and westerner. And it’s my western-ness that makes me a Liberal.

Now, that might sound counterintuitive, given how we tend to talk about politics in this country. But let me tell you what I think a westerner is.

Westerners are direct.

We don’t have a lot of patience for artifice or unnecessary complexity. We like things to be said plainly. We like arguments that stand up to scrutiny.

Westerners are practical.

We’re less interested in whether something sounds good than whether it actually works.

Westerners are egalitarian.

Not in an abstract, ideological sense – but in a very grounded way. People should get a fair shot. Effort should matter. Systems shouldn’t be rigged. Fair’s fair. You are what you do, not your pedigree. I am 44 years old. I can count on one hand how many times someone in Alberta has asked me where I went to school. And I was a vice president at a University. Honestly, it’s a topic you’d think would have come up more.

Westerners are welcoming.

People come here from everywhere – and they build lives. We don’t spend much time asking where you came from. We care whether you’re willing to contribute. It leads you to a politics that is open, that values you for who you are.

Westerners have a strong sense of stewardship.

Of land. Of resources. Of leaving things in better shape than we found them.

And westerners are patriots.

We never stop building this country. We never stop fighting for it.

…

None of these are partisan traits. But if you take them seriously – if you actually follow them through – they lead you to a certain kind of politics.

A politics that values evidence. That cares about outcomes. That doesn’t care where you or your ideas came from. That recognizes the value of practicality. That recognizes the necessity of balance. That puts country first.

That’s not always what the Liberal Party of Canada has been. But, for me, it is what liberalism is. And that’s certainly what Mark Carney is.

So I see no contradiction between being a westerner and being a Liberal. My liberalism is driven by my western outlook.

Let me put it a slightly different way.

There’s something former Liberal MLA Harry Chase told me years ago, that I think about a lot – and some of you have maybe even heard me say before.

He said that in the west, politicians come in two types: gun-slingers or barn-builders.

And politics, if we’re honest, does a pretty good job of rewarding gun-slingers. It rewards conflict. It rewards sharp lines. It rewards the ability to land a hit and move on. And look, sometimes it feels really fun to land a hit. Politics as sport, right?

But the country doesn’t get built that way. The things that last – the things that actually improve people’s lives – those are built through cooperation.

Through coming together as neighbours and recognizing that a government in a democracy isn’t a thing happening to us. It’s you – and me – doing together what we cannot do apart.

Maybe you need the community today and I don’t. But I probably did in the past and I probably will in the future. We don’t count IOUs. We help each other, and we survive the winter together.

That’s barn-building.

…

Now, I don’t want to pretend that everything is easy. It’s not always straightforward being a Liberal in Calgary or a Liberal from Calgary.

There are assumptions. There are shortcuts people take in how they understand you.

To be fair, some of that exists here at home. But I would actually argue that the idea of Alberta as a monolith is more prevalent outside the province than inside it.

Because if you live here, you know that’s not what this place is. We had an NDP government from 2015-2019 and but for a few thousand votes we would have had one in 2023 as well - Calgary elected more NDP MLAs than UCP MLAs. You can easily make the case at this point that provincial conservative governments are more secure in Ontario than here.

Municipal politics here doesn’t map cleanly onto federal or provincial lines, but it has mostly tilted progressive for decades.

And if you spend time talking to people – really talking – you hear a wide range of views. Often held by the same person at the same time.

So the challenge isn’t just disagreement. It’s miscalibration.

It’s when decisions get made based on a simplified understanding of a place that is anything but simple.

When politicians here cosplay to a stereotype that doesn’t exist. When politicians elsewhere buy into that stereotype unthinkingly.

And that brings me to something I spend a lot of time on in Ottawa. Canada works best when we understand each other. And we are not always very good at that. From a distance, the nuance is harder to see.

I like to remind my colleagues out east that Calgary and Edmonton are as far apart culturally and geographically as Montreal and Quebec City. That Calgary and Regina are as far apart as Toronto and Montreal.

And that the secret to success in Alberta isn’t playing to the stereotype in your head of Alberta. It’s understanding Alberta, and what makes us tick.

A true embrace of the west doesn’t mean embracing conservative ideology. It means understanding western values. A true embrace of the west doesn’t mean agreeing with the Alberta government on everything.

It doesn’t mean avoiding disagreement. It doesn’t mean acquiescing to conservatism any more than it means imposing eastern liberalism.

It means grounding decisions in the values people here actually hold – practicality, fairness, stewardship, patriotism, and a strong sense of contribution.

There are real disagreements between governments and regions. On energy. On the environment. On the role of government. We should always aim for constructive conversations. But those disagreements aren’t going away.

The question is whether the discussions we have will be rooted in an understanding of this place.

If you try to govern Alberta – or for Alberta – by imposing an outside worldview, you’ll fail. Whether that be eastern-style liberalism or importing MAGA-style conservatism.

If you govern it by understanding its values, you have a chance. And you can see the difference in how things land. If a policy is framed as Ottawa imposing its worldview, as Albertans our instinct will be to reject it.

But if a policy is grounded and framed terms of in stewardship, in economic strength, in long-term competitiveness – in western values – it may still be debated, but it gets a fair hearing. That’s the difference calibration makes.

And that’s what constructive engagement is, at least to me. Understanding where people are actually coming from.

So when I think about representation, I don’t think about it as matching a stereotype. I don’t remotely care to. I think about it as making sure the place I love, and that I come from, is understood on its own terms.

Because if it’s not, we get decisions that don’t fit. We get policies that don’t land. We get frustration that builds, not because people are opposed to everything – but because they don’t feel seen accurately in the first place.

My job is to make sure Ottawa understands Calgary as it is – not as it’s imagined by either conservatives or liberals.

A city that is pragmatic. That is evolving. That doesn’t like being told what it is. And that, I would argue, is not a sea of blue.

It’s something far more interesting than that.

…

So I’ll end where I started.

I was asked to speak about being a Liberal in a sea of blue. But I don’t think that’s quite right.

It’s not me against the sea.

One thing I didn’t mention earlier is that Pierre Poilievre and I went to the same high school at the same time. We had the same teachers.

We walked the same halls. We heard the same stories and learned the same lessons.

It’s not me against the sea.

Me and the sea were made of the same stuff. It just manifests differently. There are lots of ways to carry western values. There is the way of Pierre Poilievre and the Conservative Party.

And I understand it. Small government. Simple. Self-reliant. Free on the land. Stay out of my way and I’ll stay out of yours.

There’s an appeal.

But there’s also the path Prime Minister Carney (who is of course also an Albertan) and I try to walk.

Pragmatic. Welcoming. Collaborative. People who love their country – all of it – and have a strong sense of stewardship. We set ourselves up for the future together. You can go further together. You survive the winter together.

There’s a liberal way. There are barn builders in the world.

And I’m not a Liberal in spite of Calgary.

I’m a Liberal because of it.

Thank you.

I do not generally recommend waving a flag in anger. But that evening, like so many other Canadians, I wanted to mark a line. Not against another country or another people, but in defence of something I had often taken for granted and that felt very tangible at that moment – Canada, and my Canadian-ness.

Canada is often described through its programs or symbols: health care, the Charter, hockey, geography, peacekeeping, a flag. Each of these matters. None of them, on its own, explain what Canada is, the pull of Canada, or why moments of instability elsewhere can make that pull feel urgent.

A country is an accumulation of habits, expectations, and shared understandings. It is built slowly, practiced daily, and noticed most clearly in contrast, or when they are absent. It is an environment – political, economic, and cultural – in which certain assumptions hold.

That environment does not have sharp boundaries. The view of what is within and without the national character of a country can be blurry. Sometimes even, as I believe is the case with Canada, that blurriness is intentional, and a virtue.

Everyone, especially at the margins of the definition of Canada, will have a different view. But Canada matters, Canada is special – more special than we sometimes realize – and Canada is worth defending.

Shaped by geography and first peoples

Canada’s character is inseparable from its land and from the peoples who learned how to live on it first. It has a natural beauty – second to none. It’s also dangerous.

We live here, we have built comfortable lives here so it’s easy to forget how hostile the land can be or how unusual it is to live in a place like this. But when an American says it is freezing outside, they mean it is below zero degrees. When a Canadian says it is freezing outside, we mean without proper clothing you will be unconscious within minutes.

This is a vast, cold, sparsely populated country. Nature is not forgiving. Much of the land resists easy settlement, rapid extraction, or tight control. Survival and prosperity here have always required planning, cooperation, and respect for limits.

Long before Confederation, Indigenous nations developed systems of governance, stewardship, and responsibility suited to this reality – practical frameworks for living in places where carelessness had consequences.

European settlement did not replace those realities; it collided with them. Over time, the state that emerged was shaped by the contradictory forces of constraint and ambition. With our size and resources, opportunities were and are endless. But you could not govern Canada through force. The land was too large, the communities too dispersed, the costs of failure too high. Authority had to be mediated, delegated, and justified.

This produced habits that still define the country: federalism instead of centralization; negotiation instead of decree; accommodation instead of uniformity. Geography made absolute control impractical. Indigenous presence made legitimacy conditional.

Resource abundance reinforced this logic. Canada is wealthy not because extraction is easy, but because of coordination – between regions, governments, workers, and communities. Development here has always been slower, more contested, and more procedural than elsewhere. That friction is often frustrating. It is also stabilizing.

Indigenous stewardship continues to materially shape how Canada functions today. Duty to consult, co-management regimes, Indigenous protected areas, and modern treaties place real constraints on state and corporate power. They slow decisions. They also make them more durable and more thoughtful.

The result is a country oriented toward patience over spectacle, process over force, and legitimacy over speed. Compromise here is not a moral pose. It is a survival strategy learned from the land and from those who knew it first.

We are a northern people, and caution was taught.

A national restraint

There is an understatement to the Canadian project. We are one of the largest, wealthiest and most powerful nations in the world. Even saying that can sometimes feel funny, wrong, or embarrassing to Canadian ears. Despite our size and resources, we are more comfortable with balance than bravado.

Years ago, the CBC’s Peter Gzowski ran a contest to find the Canadian equivalent of the phrase “as American as apple pie.” Listeners were asked to complete the sentence “As Canadian as…”, with the winning entry being “as Canadian as possible – under the circumstances.”

It was funny because it was true. Everything has limits here, even having limits. We believe, often implicitly, that freedom is strengthened – not diminished – when rules are applied fairly. We believe that rights matter, but that rights carry obligations. We believe that there are always exceptions.

Europe can war over ideological impurity. The United States can state inalienable rights. We have the Oakes Test.

Markets exist, but are not worshipped. Freedom is prized, but understood as fragile. Power is constrained, but not because we distrust the state – we distrust concentration, public or private. Progress is expected, but abrupt rupture is treated with suspicion.

Canada is shaped by restraint, balance, and a comfort with what others might dismiss as ideological impurity. We do not require perfection. We accept a certain level of contradiction. We avoid absolute solutions or extreme speed. We work through, without wide swings, and we do so together.

A global heritage

Modern Canada is not a replica of any single tradition.

We inherited market economies and personal freedom common across the Americas – a comfort with risk, mobility, and individual ambition. We inherited institutional restraint, social obligation, and procedural legitimacy from European political traditions. Further waves of immigration brought us eastern and African cultural inheritances. And we live on land shaped by Indigenous systems of stewardship, continuity, and responsibility that predate the state itself.

But Canada is not a blend in the way a compromise is a blend. It is not European norms diluted by North American dynamism, nor American freedom softened by Old World caution. Over time, something else emerged – a civic culture that is more distinct and more than the sum of its parts.

We live with multiple loyalties – regional, linguistic, Indigenous, immigrant – without insisting that they compete for dominance.

Canadians, and our ancestors, come from everywhere.

In addition to contributing to a distinct basket of values, it pushes the Canadian instinct to cooperate beyond our borders. We have deep connections and amicable relations with most everyone. This shows up in the prosaic (we are the only G7 country with trade deals with every other G7 country) but also in our cultural festivals, our diplomatic outreach, and our commitment to global systems and global action.

A collective sense of responsibility

Canada sees a civic role in launching people – in giving them a fair start, helping them reach their potential, and enabling them to contribute. When people stumble, we do not treat that as moral failure. We see value in helping them back into the race.

For Canadians, this is not about guaranteeing outcomes or insulating anyone from effort or consequence. It is about refusing to waste people. You survive the winter together.

Education, health care, public infrastructure, social insurance, and immigration are not acts of charity in this view. These things are the great levellers of opportunity. They are investments in shared capacity – and in a country that works better when more people can fully participate.

This is both a moral and an economic proposition. Countries that sideline large portions of their population are poorer, less resilient, and more brittle. Countries that widen participation are stronger – not despite the cost, but because of it.

Canada’s social architecture reflects a belief that a broad middle, shared risk, and accessible opportunity are sources of national strength.

This is reflected in outcomes. America is wealthier than Canada. The United States’ GDP per capita is US$89,600 compared to Canada’s US$55,000. That’s a 63% difference1.

But Canadians are wealthier than Americans. Median wealth in Canada is US$152,000 – 23% above America’s US$124,0002.

Why the difference? The rich in America are very rich. In Canada, what we have is spread more evenly, and the average Canadian is better for it.

An individual sense of opportunity

We often speak as though globalization is flattening difference – as though countries are converging toward a common model of politics, markets, and culture.

In practice, many societies are polarizing. Some are embracing maximalist ideologies; others are hollowing out institutions in favour of personality, spectacle, or force. The space for pluralism without fracture is narrowing.

Against that backdrop is Canada. It is an open place where liberal democracy, social obligation, historic tradition, plural identity, and economic openness coexist without any single one claiming supremacy, and where those things are available to the vast majority, not an elite few.

This distinctiveness is easy to miss because it is not loud, and it does not announce itself as exceptional. It is felt instead in the absence of fear – fear of the state, fear of neighbours, fear of instability, fear of tomorrow. It is felt in the confidence that the next days will be better but they will resemble today closely enough to plan a life.

In Canada, we expect institutions to matter. We expect courts to constrain abuses. We expect elections to be decisive and losing sides to accept the result. We assume governments will justify themselves, that rules will apply broadly, and that authority will be exercised judiciously and with explanation rather than spectacle, and that we will be free to live our lives. That none of these expectations strike us as noteworthy is noteworthy. Most of the world does not live under such conditions.

A project unfinished

Every day in Parliament, we begin with a prayer that gives voice to this responsibility. We give thanks for the blessings of freedom, opportunity, and peace – and ask for the wisdom to preserve them for the benefit of all.

Those words assume that what we have is neither accidental nor guaranteed. They frame Canada not as something we possess, but as something we are responsible for. They frame our advantages as something to be shared.

Canada is imperfect. Its history is unfinished. Its promises are unevenly realized.

But a country worth defending is not one that claims perfection. It is one that commits to improvement, to repair, to inclusion and to opportunity. One that understands itself as a project, not a trophy.

A friend of mine who immigrated to Canada speaks about taking the oath of citizenship. About how emotional it was. About a room full of people from different backgrounds, many of them tearing up. She observed: the idea of a nation with Canada’s virtues can seem abstract – but they mean so much when you’ve seen the absence.

That observation stayed with me. For people who have lived without stable institutions, without basic trust in the rule of law, without the expectation of peace, a country like Canada is freedom, opportunity, and peace – experienced daily.

That January evening, standing in the cold with my son, I was not making a statement about identity. I was acknowledging obligation.

Canada has shaped me. It will shape him. And it is shaped, in turn, by whether we are willing to take responsibility for it.

It is capacity. It is the ability of a democratic people to make common cause and take collective action – economically, politically, culturally and institutionally.

In Canada today, national sovereignty is formally intact but practically weakened – less by foreign actions than by domestic drift. We remain a sovereign country, but our collective ability to act as one has thinned. This erosion has not occurred because Canadians rejected sovereignty, but because we stopped teaching ourselves what that is and what it requires.

Sovereignty as a shared project

Canadian sovereignty is not centralized in the way of a unitary state, nor fractured in the way of a loose confederation. It rests on a balance: federal authority, provincial autonomy, Indigenous self-determination, and democratic legitimacy. This balance was meant to allow a diverse people to coexist with individual, shared, and common purposes.

But over time, national purpose has taken a back seat to both global and provincial priority.

Globally, post-war cooperation gave way to interdependence which gave way to dependence. Pushing comparative advantage to its limits created short term economic benefit but left us exposed and less able to act independently as a nation.

Meanwhile, provinces became more assertive about their own autonomy while growing less attentive to the collective project. Jurisdiction has increasingly been treated not as a tool for self-government, but as a line of defense.

This is not an argument against provincial power. Provincial governments are closer to citizens. They reflect regional realities. They are essential to Canadian democracy. But sovereignty does not reside in provinces acting alone. No province, however large or resource-rich, can be sovereign in a meaningful sense on its own. Sovereignty exists when a people can act collectively and freely in the world – where they can have and assert capacity. For Canadians, that power exists when we work together, at the national level.

When provincial autonomy becomes detached from common purpose, it does not, over the long term, strengthen provincial interests. It weakens the shared shield that protects all provinces.

The drift towards provincialism

Over the past several decades, there has been a marked shift in Canadian federalism from collaboration to competition. Today, it is almost impossible to imagine nation building (and national projects) at the scale we saw in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.

Provinces increasingly define success not in terms of national outcomes, but in terms of relative advantage – over other provinces, or over the federal government itself. Projects that require scale (energy corridors, climate action, interprovincial infrastructure, common regulatory frameworks, to name a few) stall not because they lack economic or public merit, but because the benefit versus risk equation breaks down when we consider the pros and cons on an atomic level. Delay becomes safer than decision, and jurisdiction becomes a veto rather than a vehicle for action.

Each province seeks maximum freedom of action, yet collectively Canadians lose the freedom on the world stage that a strong federal government provides. We fragment regulatory regimes, duplicate effort, and weaken our bargaining position abroad.

The result is a country that sometimes behaves less like a single sovereign actor and more like a collection of adjacent administrations.

This drift is not ideological. It is structural and cultural. Premiers are rewarded by voters for defending jurisdiction, not for strengthening the federation. National outcomes are treated as abstractions, while provincial wins are tangible and immediate. Over time, the habit of thinking nationally atrophies.

A passive national government

It would be incomplete – and self-serving – to place this drift at the feet of provinces. The federal government has not been a neutral bystander in the weakening of national capacity.

At times, Ottawa has traded coherence for quiet, accepting fragmentation as the price of short-term stability. At times, it has deferred difficult national conversations in favour of transactional federalism: managing disputes rather than resolving them, accommodating fragmentation rather than challenging it.

In some cases, the federal government has reinforced the very dynamics it now confronts – designing programs that respect jurisdictional sensitivities but fail to build durable and coherent national systems; tolerating regulatory patchworks rather than insisting on interoperability; retreating from leadership when leadership carried political risk.

Sovereignty in a federal system cannot be strengthened by a national government that behaves as though coordination is optional. Federal authority exists not to dominate provinces, but to do what provinces and citizens cannot do alone, and what provinces and citizens can do better together. When that role is underplayed, capacity erodes.

Sovereignty requires federal leadership that articulates national objectives clearly, accepts political risk, and treats coordination and national policy not as intrusion but as core responsibility.

Federalism without a national story

Part of the problem is narrative. Canada has become comfortable talking about what provinces are owed, but less comfortable talking about what the country requires. We debate fiscal arrangements, jurisdictional boundaries, and constitutional limits with great sophistication – but often without reference to a shared national objective.

A national government cannot hope to function without a national story. Without one, a nation’s government will instead default to whatever factional purpose has numeric advantage at any given time, which only breeds division and resentment. When we treat any national ambition or action as unwelcome, unity suffers. Canadians suffer. Capacity suffers.

That capacity matters. This is especially evident in moments of crisis, such as the one we find ourselves in today. During emergencies, Canadians expect national action. They expect borders to matter, supply chains to function, and institutions to respond. Yet once the crisis passes, we often revert to fragmentation, treating coordination as an exception, or a wartime measure, rather than a norm.

A sovereign country cannot afford to relearn how to act collectively every time circumstances demand it. The capacity must be permanent.

Indigenous sovereignty and national strength

Serious discussion of Canadian sovereignty must also reckon with Indigenous sovereignty. Indigenous self-determination is not a concession from the state; it is a foundational reality that predates it.

For a long time, this relationship was framed as a zero-sum conflict between competing sovereignties. But sovereignty in Canada is and always has been layered. It is strengthened, not weakened, when governance and benefit is shared with those who have enduring ties to the land and responsibility for its stewardship.

A Canada that cannot reconcile its own internal sovereignties will struggle to assert itself externally. Justice and capacity are linked. Legitimacy is a form of sovereign power.

Strengthening Canadian sovereignty

The erosion of sovereignty did not occur because Canadians rejected it. It occurred because we stopped naming it as a value. Sovereignty has been treated as settled – the result of acts of British Parliaments long ago. It has been treated as something inherited rather than maintained.

Strengthening a sense of Canadian sovereignty is a civic task. It means restoring an understanding that self-government requires effort, coordination, and sometimes restraint. It requires citizens to see themselves not only as residents of provinces, but as participants in a national project.

We should be able to speak plainly about national interest. Not in opposition to global cooperation, but in recognition that such cooperation is meaningful only when participants bring real capacity to the table, and only when participants have real ability to say yes or no. It is collectively, as Canadians, not as residents of provinces or as individuals, that we find that capacity.

It also requires renewing respect for institutions that operate at scale: national infrastructure, national regulation, national data, national standards. These are not threats to local identity. They are the instruments through which a diverse country acts as one.

There is also a deeper habit we must unlearn. We often treat government as something that happens to us – remote, abstract, and external to our own choices.

But Canada is a democracy. The government is not a force imposed from afar. It is the mechanism through which we act together to accomplish things we cannot accomplish apart.

Sovereignty requires participation, not just begrudging consent. It asks citizens to think beyond immediate jurisdictional loyalties and to hold politicians – federal and provincial alike – accountable for collective outcomes. It requires patience for coordination and an understanding that scale, common interest and compromise can be a source of strength and a source of freedom.

This is how sovereignty is sustained in practice: when citizens expect national standards to function and national infrastructure to endure. When they demand national effectiveness, not just provincial advantage.

Without that civic expectation, even the best-designed systems will fail.

Sovereignty as responsibility

Ultimately, sovereignty is about responsibility: the responsibility to make choices, to bear their consequences, and to shape the future rather than inheriting it or being subjected to it.

Canada today faces a choice. We can choose to practice sovereignty deliberately: fostering national purpose, strengthening internal cooperation, and rebuilding the capacity to act collectively as Canadians. Or we can find ourselves fragmented, in a world that has never seemed more dangerous to be the small fish or the uncoordinated nation.

To be sovereign is not merely to exist as a country. It is to behave like one.

I thought it presented a good opportunity to answer the question you never knew you had: “what the hell is a take-note debate”?

Most debate in the House of Commons is directed towards a vote. We debate bills, we debate motions, we debate government supply (spending money) – all of which end in us picking sides and casting yea or nay.

A take-note debate is a special type of debate the House of Commons holds when MPs want to discuss an issue that isn’t tied to a vote.

Below, you’ll find twenty minutes of that debate, and timestamps to explain what’s happening, why, and what it means.

Above is bilingual feed. Click here to watch all-English video.

[0:00] Recognized by the Chair at 8:53pm

Normally, the House of Commons begins adjournment proceedings at 6:30pm. But if a take-note debate has been called, the House instead reorganizes into “Committee of the Whole” format for the evening to discuss the issue at hand.

Why isn’t this usually done during normal sitting hours? Because it would delay House business, and push government bills and motions back. The drawback? A take-note debate can mean a very long day - this one ended at 11:20pm.

The House being in Committee of the Whole during a take-note debate means some of the rules are different. You can speak from anywhere (normally an MP is required to speak from their desk). You can speak more than once on a matter.

The different rules are also reflected in some modifications to the normal pageantry of the House. If you look closely, you can see that the mace is not in its usual place on the table, but below the table on a secondary stand. That symbolizes the House not sitting as the House.

[0:03] “Thank you, Mr. Speaker”

I referred to Deputy Speaker Tom Kmiec as “Mr. Speaker”, as did every other MP through the course of the night. This is technically incorrect! In Committee of the Whole, the Speaker is referred to as the Chair.

This is corrected in Hansard, which is a faithful but not literal transcription of discussion in the House. In addition to correcting errors like this, Hansard removes pause words, repetitions, corrects other unintentional errors and even usually omits the reflexive and unnecessary “Thank you, Mr. Speaker” that we begin our remarks with.

[0:04] “I will be using the entirety of the block.”

Normally in the House, debate happens in thirty-minute blocks: twenty-minute speeches with ten minutes of questions and comments from other members, or (more commonly) the time is split between two speakers from the same party, who each give ten-minute speeches with five minutes of questions and comments.

In the case of a take-note debate, debate happens in twenty-minute blocks: ten-minute speeches with ten minutes of questions and comments from other members. Again, it’s more common for it to be split between two speakers - who in this case give five-minute speeches with five minutes of questions and comments.

Debate blocks are rotated between the parties in a pre-set order based on standing and number of seats in the House.

During this speech, I am using the entire block. Each party will have different processes for allocating their time, but in the Liberal Party a full block is reserved for the relevant government representative - the Minister or Parliamentary Secretary responsible. The rest is allotted to other MPs who ask to speak, usually because of a personal or constituency interest in the issue.

[0:36] “…back to when Antoine Bouchard married Madeleine Simard in the Saguenay in the early 1700s…”

This quip about an ancestor of mine is a great example of some of the checks that exist in the Hansard process. Only about an hour after I said it, I got an email from the House of Commons editors saying they found records of Antoine Bouchard’s marriage in 1703 but that his wife’s proper name was Marie-Madeleine.

“Whenever names and specific details are read into the record, the editors require that the information be verified ahead of publication to ensure that the Hansard is as accurate as possible.”

Hansard as published reflects that research.

[1:06] “C’est un devoir moral, mais c’est aussi une décision judicieuse sur le plan économique et environnemental.”

At this point, I switch to French. Speeches in the House of Commons are often bilingual, and I switch between English and French regularly in this speech.

Generally, when representing the Government, as I am here, I will try to ensure my speeches are at least one-third French. When I am speaking on behalf of Calgary Confederation, my speech will usually be entirely in the common language of my constituents – English. Each member will have their own style and preference depending on their constituency, philosophy, and their second language proficiency.

Both languages have equal standing, and every member is free to use either in any circumstance.

Members have earpieces that provide simultaneous translation in either official language, should they wish. The earpieces are often necessary regardless - to hear what the speaker is saying. Especially during Question Period or other times the House is full, it is hard to hear your neighbour, let alone somebody across the aisle.

[8:00] The Chamber

You might notice that the House of Commons Chamber behind me is mostly empty. This is common, and not just during evening debates.

Members are quite busy – days start early and go very late – and it would be effectively impossible to attend to the stakeholder meetings, parliamentary committees and constituency work needed to do our jobs properly if we were all in the House of Commons during all sitting hours.

Instead, Members will attend debates they are passionate about, when they want to read something into the record, or when they are on “house duty”.

During the day, the government members need to maintain quorum of twenty members (including the speaker) in the House. To maintain quorum, the government ensures enough members are present at all times, with a healthy buffer – either in the Chamber or in the adjoining government lobby. Being the group required to be there to maintain quorum is referred to as being on “house duty”.

During a take-note debate, no quorum calls are permitted.

[9:12] “Questions and comments…”

Within the speaking blocks, after a speech there is the opportunity for questions and comments from other members. A member stands, asks their brief question, and the person who made the speech responds. This repeats – rotating through parties in a pre-set order – until there are no more questions or the time runs out.

[11:27] “Je remercie le député de sa question.”

While I’m happy to prepare remarks in French, it’s more difficult for me to organize my thoughts in French on the fly, so will often respond in English to questions and comments I receive in French.

However, when I can, I like to respond to questions in the language asked. This is an exception where I responded in French – facilitated by the fact I was sure this was something Mario Simard would ask.

[13:05] Gord Johns makes a proposal

During the debate, NDP MP Gord Johns proposed a working table to fast-track solutions in the forestry sector. The ability of MPs of all parties to have a discussion that can influence government policy without a vote is one of the real strengths of a take-note debate.

Gord Johns’ idea struck us as a good one, and the creation of such a group was announced the next day by the Prime Minister as part of increased supports for forestry.

[17:55] Watching the Chair

What the cameras don’t pick up is the Chair watches our time and when our short responses start to get overlong, they will give us signals to wrap it up or keep it moving. Here I went on a bit and the Chair Tom Kmiec started giving a hard to miss hand signal to conclude my remarks.

[19:37] “Resuming debate…”

When the time for questions and comments is up, the chair announces we are “resuming debate”, which means we are moving on to the next speaker. This process continues until the take-note debate has run for four hours or until nobody stands to speak.

Take-note debates, like all debates in the House of Commons, are an opportunity to discuss the issues of the day and register the opinions of the government and of constituents. Take-note debates in particular tend to draw in people most passionate about the issues. They’re an opportunity for members of all parties to elevate issues and solutions for the government to consider.

Take-note debates don’t decide the future. But they help shape it. They offer a less zero-sum environment to debate important issues – like softwood lumber and supporting our forestry communities – and force every party to put their thinking on the table.

I couldn’t agree less with the content of these bills. It continues a troubling trend of big government “solutions” that stigmatize and penalize small populations that are seen as easy targets. What happened to the libertarian Danielle Smith of 2012? Why would a so-called conservative government be so heavy handed with government intervention into so many institutions and so many private lives?

Of course, governments scapegoating minority groups is not new. It’s a tradition as old as hate. To combat this, for centuries liberal democracies have put checks on majority rule to protect minorities from this scapegoating: rule of law, charters of rights, and political norms around restraint.

This is a delicate balancing act. The line between minority rights and an unreasonable frustration of majority rights is not always clear. Every issue is different. Canada, with our blend of written and unwritten constitutional law, settles these matters through the courts.

Most famously, in Canada, a government imposing limits on rights is subject to the Oakes test.

This framework was established by the Supreme Court for determining whether a limitation on a Charter right can be justified under section 1 of the Charter, which allows “reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.”

The test has two main parts: first, the law or government action that limits a right must pursue a pressing and substantial objective; second, the means chosen must be proportionate. That is, the act must actually be connected to the objective, the infringement on rights must infringe as minimally as possible, and the public benefits must outweigh the downsides.

There’s a misconception that the notwithstanding clause allows the government to put reasonable limits on the charter of rights and freedoms.

But let’s be clear: the constitution, by default, allows reasonable limits.

The use of the notwithstanding clause, by definition, is to allow government to impose unreasonable limits. The notwithstanding clause serves a purpose. But the clause was supposed to be so politically severe that only issues with overwhelming majorities could possibly prop up its use.

This is the key point. The primary defence of the use of the notwithstanding clause seems to have become: it’s in the constitution and I’m allowed to do it. Over time, its use has become seemingly benign.

But it’s not, and as any parent tires of telling a young child, just because you can do something does not mean you should.

The protections we have for minority rights are rule of law, our Charter of Rights, and political norms around restraint. Rule of law and our Charter will not, it seems, help us in this moment.

Over to us, Albertans, as the last line of defence. We need to enforce political norms around restraint. If you’re displeased, get loud - make your displeasure known. Mete out political consequences. Even if this is not the specific issue that animates you, consider whether you feel the government’s concern is so grave as to override the Charter. What happens to those least able to defend themselves happens to all of us. All of our rights are on the line.

We are a free people. As Albertans, we need to push back against pre-emptive, unreasonable limits on rights. You never know – your rights might be next.

Before I was an MP, before I worked in higher education, I was a public servant.

From 2016 through 2020, I served as head of Alberta’s cross-government communications department, Communications and Public Engagement (CPE).

In three years, and with no layoffs, we reduced the size of our budget by 18%, saving $7.4 million a year in the process. That three-year project spanned two premiers – New Democrat Rachel Notley and Conservative Jason Kenney – and had the support of both.

That’s because wanting an efficient public service, one that is careful with money, is not a partisan position. Governments of all stripes – arguably especially governments that believe in the good of government – need to be careful stewards of public dollars and aggressively chase value for the people they serve.

CPE was not the biggest government department (though by no means was it the smallest). But our experience and what we learned (sometimes only after doing it wrong a few times) provides many practical lessons for Ministers, Deputy Ministers, ADMs, Directors-General and all the other public servants in leadership positions across this country.

Here’s ten lessons I think are particularly important:

1. HAVE A PLAN

In the words of Yogi Berra - if you don’t know where you’re going, you might end up somewhere else.

Having a plan might seem obvious, but my experience is that plans are unpopular. Plans require you to choose programs that are winners and programs that are losers – and to act accordingly. Flat cross-department cuts seem much more popular. They seem easy to sell: a Deputy Minister gets to say things like “we’re all in this together” and “I trust local decision-making”.

Similarly, shrinking through not filling vacancies seems popular. Nobody is reassigned and nobody loses their position.

But flat cuts within a department, cutting just where vacancies occur, and cutting only the contracts that come up for renewal are not good strategies and certainly not a plan. You’d have to be incredibly lucky to lose the right positions and the right contracts in the right areas. Success IS possible, but success in such a model is accidental.

More likely, a creeping sense that the department is in drift and decline will set in among your staff. If you don’t change how you work but do change how many people are doing the work, people just have more to do. Everything becomes harder. Resentment spreads: programs that were already efficient feel punished, and the bloated ones feel judged.

Even just reviewing every program in isolation is not, in my opinion, good strategy. You optimize programs but you don’t ask if the programs are what they need to be within a broader context.

So – don’t do that!

There are lots of planning models. My preferred is blank paper: if your department didn’t exist and somebody asked you to create it tomorrow – what services would you offer? Why? How would you structure it? Why?

Once you have that, you know where you’re going. You know which vacancies you fill and which you don’t. You know which verticals to grow, which to maintain, and which to wind down.

The rest is just implementation.

2. COORDINATE YOUR PLAN WITH EVERYBODY ELSE’S PLAN

As you consider the work that needs to be done, consider whether you’re the one that needs to be doing the work.

Don’t be territorial, don’t be an empire builder. The best leaders in the public service are the ones who know their value isn’t in the size of their org chart. It takes incredible confidence in yourself and team to let go – to be able to say to a colleague: “You know what? It’s yours. I trust we can work together on this.”

3. REMEMBER THAT DOLLARS ARE REAL - FTEs ARE NOT

In tighter times, big organizations will often strengthen position control or introduce additional rules around long-term spending and contracting. Departments are often given, in addition to their dollar budget, “Full-Time Equivalency (FTE)” budgets that limit how many staff they can hire, and whether those staff can be permanent or temporary.

Be very careful.

Position control is not an end in its own right. It is a means to save money and reduce long-term risk. I have seen many public servants decide to outsource because they didn’t have the FTE budget, even when it cost more. I’d be lying if I said I never did that.

I’ve also seen the opposite – insourcing when the work could be done cheaper, better and faster (and with less long-term commitment) by contractors, simply because the rules push people that way.

But FTEs aren’t real, nor are contracting restrictions. They serve a purpose, but they are created by government and can be changed by government. Money is real. Outcomes are real. You should make decisions because they save money or improve outcomes. That’s the goal. Don’t get lost in the forest of rules and regulations. Any sensible rules have exemptions for just such cases.

4. INSIST ON CLEAR ACCOUNTABILITIES

In a letter to the public service, new-head-of-public-service Michael Sabia summarized his approach in three words: focus, simplicity, accountability. Certainly, that’s a lot tighter than the 2,000 I’m providing you and I think it’s an incredible roadmap for better services.

I feel like most would think the biggest cost savings come from the first two words – focus and simplicity. My experience is, in government, real savings comes from the third – accountability.

Government is a notoriously soft-power environment. Much of what is done is done through unwritten rules and negotiation – between ministers, between departments, between colleagues whose work deeply overlaps.

It is also a notoriously CYA environment. Recommendations move up chains. People get mad about said recommendations. People get mad the right person wasn’t in the meeting. There is safety in numbers.

All this means a lot of government work is done by committees as opposed to by individuals. A press release is jointly written by six people in a two-hour meeting. A policy recommendation is pitched to a Minister by ten public servants from across four departments.

In most government departments, people’s time – that is, salaries and benefits – is going to be the most expensive line item. A culture of accountability means one person writes a press release, and it takes three hours instead of twelve. It means four public servants brief the minister instead of ten, halving the cost of that activity.

A culture of accountability requires politicians, public service leaders, and public servants across Government to increase their tolerance for being left out of decisions, increase their patience with the decisions that reach their desk and increase their willingness to delegate and trust the teams that report to them – to resist the urge to override.

Accountability is a much bigger ask than it seems. But accountability is one of the most powerful tools available to reduce public service workloads and – in turn – the size and cost of government.

5. IF YOU ARE LEANING UP AREAS, BE INCREMENTAL

In business school, I had an Operations Management instructor who said nobody looks dumber than the person who has run the numbers from a distance and comes in and tells the people on the ground exactly how much they need to cut (or grow) their batch size or staff complement.

His lesson is a good one: precise models are precisely wrong. Every job has an unmeasurable component. Your idea, from the distance of leadership, of how many staff are required for any given task is an approximation at best. If, rather than feeling you need to rethink your business, you simply feel you are overstaffed, reduce staffing gradually (this is a great place for reducing team size through attrition) and carefully watch outcomes.

Be alert to the signs that you might have reached the end of gains. Work closely with the affected team on strategies to manage shifting workload, including encouraging them (and giving them permission) to focus on value-adding work, and deprioritize low value work.

6. IN EVERYTHING ELSE, BE QUICK

For bigger, more fundamental changes, you have to move quickly, especially once it has been communicated as a possibility.

Adopt a mantra: that which will be done eventually, must be done immediately. I promise you, it will not be better when people have had two months to adjust to the thought of future change. It’s two months to fret and not know what their future holds.

You can move so much faster than you think you can.

7. DON’T CHANGE WHAT YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND

Fight the instinct to feel something is useless if you don’t engage with it or understand it. When you don’t understand the usefulness or function of an area is when you need to tread most carefully. “Do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place.”

And track time – every task. It’s unpopular, but less so than you think, and very common in many sectors (as well as many parts of the federal bureaucracy). Time is the public service’s largest expenditure. You cannot properly weigh the cost of an internal team doing a project vs. alternatives if you don’t know how much time people are working on that project.

8. CENTRALIZATION IS NOT ALWAYS THE ANSWER

Anyone who has ever worked in a big organization knows how much duplication can occur the minute you have a departmental model. Organizations in search of savings often look to centralize functions.

This makes sense. But central models aren’t perfect.

Both central and distributed models have benefits. Both also have drawbacks. And what tends to happen over time is the benefits of your model get taken for granted and the drawbacks start to dominate your thinking.

So, before you centralize, ask yourself if you might be taking for granted the responsiveness, innovation and local accountability inherent in decentralized models. Also remember that any reorganization of this nature incurs significant change costs, and performance will likely dip for quite some time before you see any of the benefits. Do you have the time? Do you have the patience?

If you do decide to reorg, remember that neither the benefits nor drawbacks of a model are destiny. Build your systems accordingly – and watch their performance.

9. REMEMBER, ANY BIG CHANGE COMES WITH A SHAKEDOWN PERIOD - MAKE SURE YOUR TEAM KNOWS TOO

Change rarely makes things better in the short term.

A McKinsey survey of 1,800 executives identified that in 60% of cases reorgs “noticeably reduced productivity” until the new structure had firmly established itself.

It’s important to be honest with your team about what change feels like. Things often get harder before they get better. People lose familiar routines, teams get shuffled, and everyone spends more time figuring things out and less time getting things done.

That’s normal.

Keep your overall direction, but embrace that you’ll be making course corrections. Commit to fixing things as they come up and making the transition work. And if it’s clear something will never work, don’t be stubborn. Fail fast.

10. WORK WITH THE UNIONS. THEY’RE OUR PARTNERS, AND WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER

Efficient government is sustainable government, and sustainable government offers job security. The work the government is doing to reduce costs frees up the fiscal capacity that we need. My experience is such cost saving can be done in a way that maintains the government as an employer of choice and makes life better for workers. It can reduce workloads, it can improve job satisfaction and increase internal job opportunities – and it can be implemented gradually and smartly, in a way that avoids the worst horror stories of government restructurings past and present.

Your odds of doing all that are better when you treat organized labour as a true partner. Engage them early. Listen to their ideas.

In my department, CPE, we managed to reduce costs (18%) while improving client satisfaction (up 19 points to 94%) and increase employee satisfaction to among the highest in the Alberta public service (12 points above average).

We were lucky. This was the marriage of good political leadership, good public service leadership, good union leadership and a team that was willing to work together to fundamentally rethink our business.

It was essential work.

It’s even more essential today, for the Government of Canada. To build, to protect, and to secure this country, it’s going to take money. It’s going to take focus, simplicity and accountability. It’s going to take Government doing things smarter and better than we’ve ever done before. And it’s going to require change.

But now’s the time. Delivering for Canadians has never been more important.

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It captured a moment where I, an exhausted and sunburned candidate who needed a haircut, didn't know what was going to happen. Now, the work begins.

It should fill us with moral concerns. It presents countless treaty concerns. The attack on the Canadian experience it represents - especially at this time - is extremely hurtful to many and incredibly short sighted. It is a concept that can divide us at a time we cannot afford to be divided.

Beyond that, the end goal - creating a landlocked country of 5 million people - is wildly impractical. The idea Canada is divisible, but Alberta is not - is wildly impractical. We should all be very concerned about prominent voices treating Alberta separatism as a legitimate notion.

Even the discourse will hurt us - it probably already has. Stoking frustrations into separatism and riding discontent for political gain could have profound consequences for our province.

A clear majority of Albertans are opposed to separation. But a minority are open to the idea, and under proposed referendum rules that minority will be able to force the question. Some of those open to the idea rest their openness on online arguments that have been circulated that are false, inaccurate, or dubious-at-best:

• The idea that a sovereign Alberta could force Canada to build pipelines to the coast.

• The idea that a sovereign Alberta would have more money.

• The idea that a sovereign Alberta would always have conservative government.

Rebutting these myths risks spreading them, or them being treated as more legitimate than they are, or treating Alberta separatism as a more popular movement than it is. But with the referendum thresholds lowering, it’s worth making sure the facts are out there for people considering signing a petition that would bring a damaging conversation on our province.

MYTH 1: “If we were a separate nation, the rest of Canada would be OBLIGED to give us pipelines to the coasts under international law.”

The belief that being a sovereign country would give Alberta unlimited ability to create pipelines to tidewater hinges on a read of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and the 1965 New York Convention on Transit Trade of Land-locked States. Under those treaties, landlocked countries have rights of access to and from the sea.

But ask the oil-producing jurisdictions of South Sudan, Uganda or Kazakhstan how those treaties works for getting oil to market (spoiler: not well). The treaties guarantee rights of access but they do not guarantee the right to build infrastructure across another country’s territory. The right is a right to transit, not transit infrastructure.

Even access to existing infrastructure is not a given. Tensions between countries can and do lead to pipeline shutdowns and limits to existing access. The treaties certainly do not force the creation of new infrastructure. A host country retains full control over environmental regulation, route approvals, and conditions. Access is gotten and maintained, if at all, through negotiation - often difficult, always costly, rarely linear.

The International Court of Justice has recently taken up a case where a country tried to compel another country to give access to the coast. Bolivia wanted access to the Pacific through Chile. In the 2018 ruling Obligation to Negotiate Access to the Pacific Ocean (Bolivia v. Chile), the court reaffirmed that states cannot be compelled to negotiate unless they have explicitly agreed to do so.

The “one neat trick to get to tidewater” proposed by some relies on a right that is more moral and diplomatic than legal. Like similar claims for weight loss and bunions all over your aunt’s Facebook page, approach with skepticism. No higher authority is going to compel Canada to build infrastructure on behalf of a sovereign nation.

In Canada, we have seen pipelines built by the federal government using its authority, even over concerns of provinces (see: TMX). There would be no reason or benefit for a Canada divorced from Alberta to do the same. As frustrating as it can sometimes seem, it should be self-evident that the legal ability to build energy infrastructure in Canada is far stronger when you’re in Canada than if you are outside of it.

MYTH 2: “If we were a separate nation, we’d have more money for ourselves.”

This is based on the idea that Albertans pay more in federal taxes than the federal government spends in Alberta. The thinking goes: keep that money here, replicate the functions of the federal government, and we’ll end up ahead.

So let’s set aside what has been established elsewhere - that our economy would be suffering from an environment of economic uncertainty and a lack of guaranteed access even through the infrastructure that exists today.

Let’s instead focus on what it costs to run a federal government and economies of scale.

When it comes to cost, small countries have big disadvantages. Fixed costs of governance (e.g., a legislature, judiciary, ministries) are spread across fewer people, so per capita costs tend to be higher.

Canada is the 8th largest economy and 37th most populous country in the world. Alberta would be the 125th. Instead of 41 million people paying for 270 diplomatic offices across the globe, 5 million people would be doing it. The same level of service would cost the average taxpayer 8 times as much.

This ties into the concept of economies of scale and the de-risking that occurs the larger and more diversified an economy is. We see it most prominently with the Canada Pension Plan - which gets greater returns than the smaller Quebec Pension Plan. We also see it with spending on armed forces, innovation, trade, housing and agriculture. Fixed costs for smaller countries are a bigger percent of spending - and more limited dollars go less distance.

There’s every reason to believe Albertans would spend more on a sovereign Alberta than what Albertans currently spend on a sovereign Canada.

MYTH 3: “If we were a separate nation, my party/conservatives could always win.”

Gang, the NDP were in power provincially as recently as six years ago. But for a couple thousand votes in Calgary last election, they would be in power right now. This is not ancient history. At this point you could easily make the case Alberta is more likely than Ontario to vote for a non-conservative government.

Not only is future conservative rule far from guaranteed in a sovereign Alberta, Alberta has arguably never been more central to confederation. Our Prime Minister grew up here. Our leader of the Opposition grew up here. The interim leader of the New Democratic caucus grew up here. All have deep roots and deep understanding of this place.

So many recent Canadian leaders are Albertans. In fact, Mark Carney is the first Prime Minister elected since 1965 to represent a province other than Alberta or Quebec.

I’m a Liberal in Alberta. I’m pretty acutely aware of how frustrating it can be to routinely be on the losing side of elections. But picking up your ball and leaving because haven’t won the last few games is loser talk. Albertans are not losers.

* * *

The next several months could be a dangerous time for Alberta. It does not take a majority of Albertans voting to separate to severely damage our home - serious talk alone will be sufficient.

Consider the example of Quebec in the 1970s: companies moved from Montreal to Toronto to escape political uncertainty. This was despite the fact that corporate taxes were lower in Quebec than Ontario at that time.

Putting so much political risk into the equation will more than undo any other Alberta Advantage we create. It’s incumbent on all of us to tread carefully. Now is a time for cool heads and facts.

Elon Musk and DOGE are in the news for the USDA needing to reverse “several” accidental firings over the weekend of “agency employees who are working on the federal government's response to the H5N1 avian flu outbreak”.

It's easy to look at this and think "what a bunch of idiots". And they are. But ask yourself - if Bird Flu wasn't a thing right now, would you feel the same way?

Firing people working on a current crisis is what we will call visibly stupid. But firing people working on preventing or responding to the next crisis is what we can call invisibly stupid.

Government maintains capacity (and builds that capacity elsewhere) for moments of crisis. Government doesn’t know what that next crisis will be.

What a waste of money IT tabletop exercises are - until you have a cyberattack. So unnecessary is financial oversight - until a bank fails. How foolish to have emergency crews around doing nothing - until something happens.

This is why Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s fast actions are a slow rolling crisis. They’re making the bet nothing will go wrong.

But in government, and I speak from some experience here, everyday something goes wrong. Over a big enough population, that’s simply the law of large numbers. You don’t know what will hit, but you know you’re going to get hit. It’s not even a matter of time. You know when - it’s always. You don’t know what. What, and how bad are the only questions yet to be answered.

Government is not perfect and not perfectly run. You can certainly find examples of government waste. There are programs that have run their course, there are entitlements that could be combined. There are regulations that were put in thoughtlessly or reflexively or so long ago that they no longer serve a purpose. But most government?

Most government is prevention and insurance. Oversight on companies to prevent them from breaking labour laws. Data and analysis about environmental and geopolitical threats – many of which will not come to pass. Health care, social supports and research to keep us safe against the risks to our wellbeing that are lurking out there. Armies we hope to never need.

This is very different from the startup world Musk and his cronies come from. In a startup environment, you have one purpose, and you’re allowed to spend a little bit of time to find it. You work at an unsustainable pace. You try things. Things break. The mantra is “fail fast”.

The mantra of government is “fail never”. Government always has to work. The stakes aren’t your app bombs and your investors lose money. The stakes are people’s lives and livelihoods if you’re lucky and you eff up your country and the planet if you’re unlucky.

Indiscriminate cuts make any government less resilient. The depth and thoughtlessness of the cuts going on in the United States right now will certainly make America less resilient. The consequences of cutting your insurance aren’t seen on Day One. If anything, you save a little money and get to feel better about yourself! The consequences are felt on Day 100, Day 1000 and beyond.

Trump and Musk think they’re trimming the fat. They would do well to remember – today’s fat is tomorrow’s necessity.

As Canadians grapple with our new relationship with the United States, we find ourselves caring about things we haven’t for years. East-west infrastructure, where to buy a Canadian flag, and media sovereignty.

Interest in the latter peaks whenever an American-owned outlet publishes a column that seems unusually supportive of the United States.

People are entitled to their opinions. I’m glad I live in a country where people can take the minority view in a 90-10 issue. But it’s hard not to interpret, at least a little, those opinions through the lens of Postmedia’s U.S. ownership. And it’s hard not to have nagging concern that ownership has influenced these opinions.

Postmedia owns over a hundred Canadian newspapers and most of our major dailies – from the National Post to the Edmonton Journal to the Pembroke Observer and News. Their channels are the primary source of news for millions of Canadians.

That Postmedia is majority owned by a foreign corporation was probably never a good idea. As a country, there was always a strategic interest in Canadians controlling Canadian news. But now, as we face an erratic and bellicose U.S. president it becomes more urgent to ask:

If Postmedia needed to choose between what’s good for its American owners and what’s good for Canada, what would they choose? And – even if they were invested in always doing what’s good for Canada – how would we know and how would we have confidence in that fact?

Postmedia’s dedicated journalists, columnists and staff have done nothing wrong. David Staples is welcome to have doubts about Confederation. But it’s reasonable as Canadians to insist such an important Canadian media property should be in the hands of Canadians.

Making this happen is going to take someone’s money. While it doesn’t necessarily need to be the Government of Canada’s, our government has already declared supporting private media a public interest – and is best positioned to get a deal done promptly. In fact, the purchase could be financed for what the government is currently spending on subsidizing Postmedia, if the will were there.

So here then, is a three-step plan for the Government of Canada to return Postmedia to Canada – and leave it on stronger footing for years to come.

1. Buy Postmedia

2. Fix Postmedia

3. Sell Postmedia to the Canadians who work there – and let them pay with an IOU.

Those who came for a quick “repatriate Postmedia” hit – feel free to like, comment, share and leave now. But for those of you who would like to come join me in the weeds, let’s expand on how we might accomplish each of these points.

1) Government of Canada buys Postmedia

Postmedia Network Canada Corp is majority owned by New Jersey hedge fund Chatham Asset Management LLC.

There is a voting “A” share class, and a non-voting “B” share class. For reasons1, things are structured so Chatham doesn’t have a majority of voting shares, but we don’t really need to get into it: between their overall majority ownership position and holding over 90% of Postmedia’s debt, Chatham has the ability to exert significant influence.

The purchase of Postmedia can be done through negotiation with the current owners or an Act of Parliament to expropriate the company, which you must admit is a pretty good BATNA.

Because Postmedia is publicly traded, a fair price shouldn’t be very difficult to calculate. Postmedia isn’t worth very much these days - the total enterprise value (equity + debt2) is less than half a billion dollars. If that sounds like a lot, consider what it owns, and consider this is less than what the government committed to spending on Canadian journalism when it launched its current suite of supports in 2018. Most of the cost of purchasing Postmedia – about three quarters of it – would be paying off Postmedia’s substantial debts.

2) Government of Canada fixes Postmedia

You see, Postmedia is swimming in debt and that has affected their operations.

Don’t blame that entirely on newspapers being a dying, unsustainable industry. Blame it on the company’s leaders not clocking a shifting dynamic twenty years ago, and going on a debt-fueled buying spree at the same time revenue from subscriptions and classified sections collapsed3.

After Postmedia couldn’t pay, the U.S. companies who financed the buying spree took what was owed to them and negotiated some of that debt’s conversion into a majority ownership of the company. This didn’t, to be clear, solve the debt problem. Postmedia was still swimming in debt – and that debt has grown.

As of their last quarter’s financials, Postmedia’s long-term debt stands at $363 million. $337 million of that debt is paying 10.25-10.5% annual interest to Chatham who – as we know – has a majority stake in Postmedia.

Hey, welcome to finance.

It’s not as crazy as it might sound, but the situation has meant Postmedia hasn’t really had a chance to do more than push further consolidation of the Canadian news landscape, manage the decline of its portfolio and shovel money to New Jersey.

It also means there’s no way to separate the purchase of Postmedia from the settling or restructuring of its debts – also, to be clear, not unusual. But that’s fine – clearing the debts is something the government should do anyhow.

Often, a purchase like this would see the buyer simply refinance the debt. But that just leaves a different type of albatross around Postmedia’s neck. It’s time for a bailout. This one move – even if you were to couple it with an elimination of the Canadian Journalism Tax Credit – would be a significant step in the right direction in turning Postmedia from a money-losing venture into a sustainable one.

3) Government of Canada privatizes Postmedia – selling it to the people who work there in exchange for IOUs

The Government of Canada should not own Postmedia. We already have a public broadcaster in CBC. The Canadian Journalism Tax Credit and Online News Act already entwine the Government (in my opinion far too deeply) with private news media.

Once purchased and its debt problem fixed, Postmedia should be promptly sold so it can return to its role as one of the crown jewels of Canada’s private news ecosystem.

Certainly, the Government could find a Canadian corporation to buy – and while Canada would probably take a significant loss on the transaction, such a sale would serve the sovereignty function and represent a clean exit.

But many of the same financialization and internationalization pressures that led Postmedia to its current state would reappear. If the Government has an interest in local news and a durable private news media, they should consider a different path:

Each of its 2000 employees are offered the opportunity to purchase equal share of Postmedia. If we assume that it cost the Government of Canada $500,000,000 each share would be valued at $250,000.

Concurrently, the Government of Canada offers them an interest free loan of the value of the share. The terms are that the principle is due upon sale or transfer of the share – or forgiven at $10,000 (4%) per year for 25 years4.

Borrowing the half billion dollars to do all this would cost the Government of Canada about $16 million annually at today’s bond rates. This is comparable to what Postmedia currently receives annually in government support. Forgiving the interest-free loans would cost the Government of Canada an additional $20 million annually5 - a new project, but one that’s much smaller in scale than our current media bailouts and one that could probably replace some of our existing media bailouts.

Well that sounds pretty good, but I’m skeptical.

Good! But while “spend less, get more” should always trigger doubting response, it’s not magic. It’s not “one neat trick” your aunt sends you on Facebook. At its core, it’s taking a big debt that was financed at 10.5% interest – payable to a New Jersey hedge fund – and turning it into something financed at 3.25% interest – payable to Government of Canada bondholders. The difference is then used to improve the overall situation for Canada’s private news ecosystem.

But it’s not wins all around. The debt is also effectively moved from Postmedia’s books to Canada’s – with an explicit understanding that we’ll cover it if the company’s value doesn’t climb (if the value increases rapidly, people will sell, rather than take their debt forgiveness). There are opportunity costs. There are moral hazards. There are fairness concerns.

But there are also opportunities. It would mean the current $37 million a year debt servicing expense at Postmedia disappears. That in turn would mean – even if you were to eliminate Postmedia’s eligibility for the Canadian Journalism Tax Credit – the company has millions more for operations, and a much more stable company owned by a motivated Canadian workforce.

Most importantly, it’s one path to return one of Canada’s largest news properties to Canadian ownership.

We can all hope the moment with America passes. But hopefully, the lessons won’t. We live in an attention economy. It’s dangerous for a country’s news to be controlled by entities outside of the country. Prudence dictates we address it. So – let’s repatriate Postmedia.

And then, maybe we can talk about what we do about Twitter.

A few years ago, I taught a course on presentation skills.

In one of the sessions, we discussed what I call “contentious communications” – when what you are saying is debated or interrogated.

In politics, most communication would fall in this category. Your opponent will explain all the reasons you’re wrong. The media will find the gap in your argument and stick in the blade.

And the first lesson I offered is that a heated debate or interrogation is for the benefit of observers, not participants^[1].

Successful politicians know this. Pierre Poilievre’s actions aren’t to try to convince Justin Trudeau how right he is. Stephen Harper didn’t answer questions with the goal of getting the Globe and Mail to love him. The audience is Canadians – or, more accurately, the subset of Canadians that 1) the politician needs and 2) can be moved on this issue.

But I digress.

Because your actions are for observers, not opponents, you don’t want to appear to be forever on the defensive. You want to stay on relevant ground. You want to define goals, and you want to keep your opponent from moving goalposts – moving from one resolved objection to a new one. You want to get quickly to the root concern, and you want to establish the terms of victory. You don’t want to be dragged through – or spend a bunch of time on – a bunch of superfluous complaints.

This has always been my concern with Canada’s response to Donald Trump’s tariff threat. It’s not about fentanyl, and it’s silly to act as though it is. It’s also not about fair trade. It’s about money, and it’s about control.

Donald Trump himself has been explicit about this. He has - on multiple occasions - said he is going to use economic force to conquer Canada, that the border is an “artificially drawn line”. Even on Monday he said that what he’d like to see is Canada “become [America’s] 51^st state”.

Let’s get real. There is no coherent way to argue that erasing the border reduces flows across the border. If we “solve” fentanyl, the goalposts will move. If we negotiate a new free trade agreement to replace the one Trump himself signed, the goalposts will move. We will have wasted time, but we will still, ultimately, end up at the root problem: he has eyes on our country. Those are his terms of victory.

For Canada to resolve this problem, Canada has to name it. Only then can we properly focus our energy and action.

So whether planned or accidental, Justin Trudeau telling business leaders that Trump has in mind that “the easiest way to [get our resources] is absorbing our country and it is a real thing”, and that leaking into the media, is a very good thing.

Because we are dealing with Donald Trump, I believe there’s one other big benefit – he will almost certainly confirm it. First – he’s said it before. Second - he can’t help himself.

STEP ONE: TRUDEAU CALLS IT WHAT IT IS (WE ARE HERE).

Ideally, this would move from private conversation to public conversation. There is a saying in politics that you can’t solve a problem that people don’t know they have. This is why both governments and oppositions spend so much time on problem definition.

The public will not support solutions to a problem they do not believe exists, and the bigger the problem, the truer this is. Big problems take big investments - of time, of money, of interest. People don’t want to make those investments if they don’t have to.

By Trudeau properly defining the problem, receptivity to solutions increases.

STEP TWO: THOSE IN DENIAL, REBUT. THOSE NOT, SET TERMS.

People will come out and say Trudeau is being alarmist. He has misdiagnosed the situation. It is a negotiating ploy and the real challenges are the border issues. Look, after all, at the 30-day delay! Doesn’t that show he can be reasoned with?

Arguments will ensue over whether Trump means it and whether Trump backed down from tariffs because people reasoned with him or because markets showed signs of early panic. This discourse is an important part of the process.

At this point, Trudeau can lock the goalposts. He can put to the critics: “If Donald Trump agreed that he did want to annex Canada, would you accept that’s what this is all about?”

Opposition politicians will of course refuse to be pinned down. That’s fine. A heated debate is for the benefit of observers, not participants. Canadians will be able to judge the reasonableness of those terms. And by naming moving goalposts, you make their movement less likely.

STEP THREE: DONALD TRUMP ADMITS IT

He can’t help himself. You can start the countdown. He could do it from the washroom at 3am tonight:

Whatever the form of his confession, this becomes the point the goalposts are passed, allowing a more unified national conversation. Those in denial will have trouble denying. Those who will have been willfully misinterpreting his actions will find it difficult to hide.

STEP FOUR: WE ACT

Having identified the problem, articulated how we confirm it, and having had Donald confirm, Canada can move on to a more productive conversation. Our leaders can drop the pretense that we’re protecting the border from fentanyl and move on to the reality we’re protecting it from Trump.

Extracting ourselves from that situation can’t happen overnight. But today’s leak was a good start. Our Prime Minister should now say the same thing – to all of us.

^[1] I tried, to no avail, to get this known as “Hogan’s Law”. Spread the word!

After weeks of uncertainty, Donald Trump will make good on his tariff threat on Saturday, February 1.

It turned out we couldn’t fix his problems, because they were imaginary. The money he gets from import duties, however, was not.

A 25% tariff on goods coming from Canada or Mexico, and 10% on goods coming from China. There are some caveats, of course – as there always are when dealing with Trump.

First, oil will be hit at a lower rate (10%). Second, that rate will not take effect until February 18. Third, as I write this, we do not yet know the response – from our governments or from Americans who are only now starting to realize that this might affect the cost and ways that business is done in America.

No matter how generous your curve, the Canadian response up to this moment hasn’t been great – most clearly illustrated by a leadership vacuum caused by a prime minister who overstayed his welcome and has no moral authority, and a premier who has set aside her usual obsession with governments staying in their lane to create new foreign policy for Alberta. Another premier has decided this is a great time for an election.

But there’s nothing so clarifying as a crisis. So here’s hoping our politicians get on the same page, get serious and get down to the business of moving us through the short term and long term challenges these tariffs present.

As this becomes real, new considerations arise.

First – we need to react to the situation as it unfolds, not as we planned or hoped. Donald Trump has shown his hand by saying oil should only have a 10% tariff. I absolutely guarantee he’ll begin exempting other things (certain pharmaceuticals, etc.) when the consequences become felt. When he does such things, he’s telling us what his pain points are. We’ll see what the federal government does with that information.

Second – we need confidence that internal debate about what Canadians are doing is free from both foreign interference and the appearance of foreign interference. It’s probably not great that most of our daily newspapers are owned by an American hedge fund.

Maybe we can even take a page out of somebody else’s finest hour and create a media “lend-lease” plan. Nationalize Postmedia and immediately distribute ownership evenly to each of its Canadian-based employees. Put a lien on each of those shares for the cost of the nationalization, to be repaid upon sale or transfer of the share. If anybody working there doesn’t want their share, that’s fine. Just reduce the number of ownership shares by one, reallocate accordingly.

Third – we’re going to have to give the federal government at least a bit of the benefit of the doubt. There is no shortage of ideas as to how to approach Trump’s tariffs. Part of me would love to see the federal government introduce incredibly punitive countervailing tariffs. The other part feels this would just add needless self-destruction to the pile of destruction. Neither of those parts has access to the resources of the Government of Canada – the detail, the intel, the modelling, the other conversations that might be happening with global allies.

There is a huge information disparity that exists between being inside the government and outside the government. This does not mean government is always right – far from it, governments can become paralyzed by how much they know. But good strategy comes from good analysis and nobody has access to better analysis right now than our federal officials. Let’s give them a shot.

Fourth, and most importantly – we need to stick together. Families fight and families hold grudges. But when they’re attacked from the outside, they stick together. If you love this country, now’s the time to act like it. Put the grievance politics aside. Burn the ledgers where you calculate who’s paying the most and getting the least. None of us are getting through this without a bit of sacrifice. Some of us will have to sacrifice more.

It's okay to disagree about what’s best to do. Right-brain Canadian pride and left-brain Canadian education in finance can whipsaw us all back-and-forth on the appropriate response. You can have the same goals and different perspectives.

Hopefully our leaders keep that in mind too, as we move through the next few weeks and months, and lower the internal temperature as the external one rises.

Good luck, everybody.

Politicians have learned over the years to be very careful with the words they use. They’re aware they’re always recorded. Their communications teams have exploded in size and function, and – particularly at national levels – audiences are identified, phrasings are focus tested, delivery is rehearsed.

With less opportunity to amplify errors, a tactic has sprung up where politicians and parties use their channels and their ad budgets to manipulate the public’s sense of how often their opponent brings up a topic. While it doesn’t distort a politician’s words, it does distort a voter’s perception of the target politician’s priorities, and leaves those targets open to criticism that they are woefully out of touch.

This is not the same as a politician saying something stupid and their opponent broadcasting it everywhere.

This is a politician saying something reasonable, but then their opponent broadcasting it everywhere to create a sense they won’t shut up about it.

LET’S TALK ABOUT KAMALA HARRIS

Consider this Donald Trump ad declaring that Trump was for “you”, and Harris was for “they/them”.

Donald Trump wanted voters to think “Here we are, in the middle of an inflationary crisis, and Harris is focusing on what, exactly?”

And what percent of the Kamala Harris campaign do you think was dedicated to transgender issues?

• She mentioned transgender people or rights zero times in the Presidential debate.

• No major Democratic ad campaign focused on transgender issues.

• In the 91-page Democratic Party platform, “transgender” shows up only in the two-page section on LGBTQI+ rights.

The word transgender appears eight times in the 43,000 word platform. For contrast, the word affordability shows up 53 times, infrastructure 43, education 45, freedom 35, military 59, border 49, safety 42, police 27, crime 16, and energy 99.

But I would be willing to bet more than a few of you thought one of the ways the Harris campaign erred is they wouldn’t stop pushing issues Americans didn’t care about, wouldn’t focus on the issues that matter. And you might have thought about “woke” policies and transgender issues as a specific example.

So if the data doesn’t back that up, why might we think that?

Well, one of the Presidential candidates did bring up transgender issues in the debate: Donald Trump. 10% of the Republican platform promises were dedicated to “gender indoctrination” or “left wing gender insanity”. And, most importantly, the Trump campaign and associated political action committees spent tens of millions pushing the idea that Harris wouldn’t shut up about the issue.

YOUR OPPONENTS CONTROL YOUR VOLUME

Speech is not just about what you say, it’s about how often you say it. Campaigns have learned that they also have a hand on their rival’s volume knob.

In Darrell Huff’s 1954 classic “How to Lie With Statistics”, readers learn how not to fall for the statistical tricks used by salespeople, pundits and politicians to manipulate data and create inaccurate sense of reality.

One of Huff’s lessons has to do with the roadside merchant “who was asked to explain how he could sell rabbit sandwiches so cheap.”

“Well”, he said, “I have to put in some horse meat too. But I mix ‘em fifty-fifty: one horse, one rabbit.”

Not every utterance by a politician shows equal interest or equal focus, but any utterance made now risks being blown up in a way that suggests it carries an outsized amount of mindshare.

Modern campaigns don’t just play with their opponents words, they playing with our perception of how often they’re used, the size of the politician’s interest in the issue.

They want you to think their opponent cares about issues you don’t, at the expense of issues you do. They make the rabbit seem equivalent to the horse.

Pundits, journalists and voters need to be alert to this rabbit-horsing, and keep in mind that just because somebody says a politician spends a lot of time on an issue doesn’t mean they do.

Until that realization sets in, politicians need to be aware that any comment they make can be blown up to look like it’s every second comment. Modern message discipline means not just staying on message, but avoiding comment altogether on certain matters.

Somewhere, around Christmas, it became clear that Donald Trump wasn’t entirely joking about wanting to annex Canada.

He shifted from simply denigrating Canadians by calling us the 51^st state to putting together a sales pitch to us that included lower taxes, stronger businesses and the umbrella of the U.S. military.

Not immediately finding us running to the ticker-tape store to get ready for his parade, he then pushed on to outright threats – specifically, the threat of using “economic force” to annex our nation.

And then, his ever-reliable proxies and supplicants – Donald Trump Jr., Elon Musk, Mike Lee, Ben Shapiro and the like – amplified this message, carrying it from the-parts-of-the-internet-that-we-know-we-should-clean-but-don’t onto the main feeds. Arming, in the process, millions of MAGA with dreams of manifest destiny.

Let’s be clear: Canada isn’t joining the United States. There’s no interest from Canadians and it’s hard to believe even this version of America has the appetite for the classic “invade to ‘protect’ an internal group from the government we wish to overthrow” gambit used by expansionists since antiquity.

But Trump, full of visions of adding stars to the flag, might just be deluded enough to think we’ll come begging to join if he inflicts enough economic pain. And he might be nuts enough to give it a shot.

Not great.

So here then, is a practical guide in how Canada can resist, reorient, and renew in the age of Trump.

STEP ONE: GET THROUGH THIS MOMENT OF CRISIS

Whenever you’re doing a restructuring – whether of a corporate division or a G7 nation – what matters most is time and money. Time provides optionality. Change costs cash.

Our integrated relationship with the United States took centuries to build. It won’t be changed overnight, it won’t be meaningfully changed this year. And a serious reimagining of our relationships with the world can’t happen if our GDP drops 10% - we’ll be far too busy dealing with more rudimentary challenges.

The first thing we need to do is extract ourselves from tariffs should the current 25% tariff threat prove more than just bluster:

• Get this country on one page and present a unified front.
  
  My bad, I promised a practical guide. Let’s move on.
  
  

• Define your opponent - it’s Trump, not the American people.
  
  The election was close and the ideas Trump presents are stupid. Don’t assume that Americans are on board with this madness.
  
  As I like to remind folk – even if you were to think only a quarter of Americans were good people, that’s still 84 million good people. They’re our friends and neighbours. Remember that, and remember that the worst case scenario for Canada is that Americans start to have actual reason to have beef with Canada. Don’t give them that, and plan responses accordingly. From that flows…
  
  

• The threat of broad-based retaliation is worth more than actual broad-based retaliation.
  
  Imagine we say we are going to stop shipments of oil and electricity.
  
  The threat, delivered in a “we really don’t want to but…” way to Americans, gives the sense things might be worse tomorrow. That hurts Trump. It makes people anxious and reasonably ask: “what is this guy doing?”
  
  Actual retaliation hurts Americans, who – we’ve defined – are not our enemy. Hurt people lash out. Be very careful about taking broad-based steps, which could turn Americans against us and make the worst outcomes more likely. Instead, limit retaliation in terms of target and – if it is necessary to go broad - time.
  
  

• Target Trump and his allies. They’re acting like kleptomaniacal oligarchs. Treat them as such.
  
  Cancel the Trump trademarks in Canada. Freeze Twitter and Tesla’s assets while Musk is backing annexation. Remove Fox News from the airwaves. Force Apple and Spotify to delist far-right podcasts pushing for our annexation. Refuse to accept Donald Trump’s ambassador. Expel any U.S. diplomatic staff that threaten Canadian sovereignty.
  
  Sovereign countries don’t put up with this shit, and while these actions hurt individual actors, they do not hurt Americans broadly.
  
  We have a playbook for oligarchs. Use it judiciously, but use it.
  
  

• Make any broader retaliations big, but time limited.
  
  Nothing will backfire worse than a retaliation nobody notices. We don’t wade into this one. If they do 25% tariffs, and we decide to retaliate, we do things Americans will notice, and notice immediately. There are only two obvious options: energy and electricity.
  
  Set a date when those things will be turned off for a set period of time, give notice, follow through. Conclude, repeat as necessary, but only as necessary.
  
  Now, you can’t just “turn off the taps”. That’s not how these things work. On oil, the federal government should tell the Alberta government this is likely to happen, and to work with industry to ease production, and to create additional storage capacity. That has the added benefit of broadcasting the threat and making some of the consequences (price, etc.) happen faster, because you have to know Danielle Smith will have things to say about that. On electricity, work with the system operators to be ready for what will no doubt be a very wild day.
  
  This is a very serious avenue. Energy is essential for a lot more than jobs and cheap gas. Don’t go into this half-hearted and don’t surprise Americans. Give them lots of time. Have an avenue where we immediately pause action if they pause their tariffs. Use the power of the eleventh hour. Have off-ramps.
  
  

• Fight randomness with randomness.
  
  Roll a 20-sided die each day to see if this is the day we announce we’re turning off the taps next week. Be nice one day and a lunatic the next. Keep Trump off balance, that’s what Trump does to us. It’s exhausting. Make him exhausted.
  
  

• Zag.
  
  There will be a big desire to match tariffs dollar for dollar. Remember, there’s a reason we like free trade agreements. They make us richer.
  
  They add tariffs? Eliminate tariffs – and not just from America. It will make goods cheaper for Canadians.
  
  They add visa requirements? Loosen ours – invite talent into this country.

  
  

STEP TWO: START EXTRACTING OURSELVES FROM THIS SITUATION

Outside of the threat of immediate 25% tariffs, Canada needs to get serious.

There’s one thing Trump isn’t wrong about. With our only neighbour – and best friend – being the world’s largest economy and the world’s most powerful military, we have had the luxury of floating about in a way that a serious nation should not.

Canada is a big country – bigger than we often act. We are one of the world’s largest economies, with the resources of the world’s second largest land mass. We have a GDP larger than Russia’s and still-not-insignificant alliances and diplomatic capital.

We have been dealt a hand almost any other nation would kill to have been dealt. But we’re playing it like amateurs.

If we want this country to be more than a historical footnote, we need to very intentionally focus on three things – all of which will take time to build or rebuild:

• Economic sovereignty.
  
  Diversify our trade relationships. Increase productivity. Take competitiveness seriously. Eliminate interprovincial trade barriers. Reduce red tape. Reduce regulation.
  
  Build things! Support major infrastructure projects. I love our national parks, but this country is not a national park. Smart development is possible.
  
  Increase training and education. Invest like crazy in post-secondary and knowledge creation. Take sensible steps to move up the value chain.
  
  

• Cultural sovereignty.
  
  Invest in cultural industries. Don’t eliminate the CBC – triple its budget and tell it to knock off the commercial stuff. Drown us in Canadian Heritage Minutes. Do that thing we all laughed about that Sheila Copps did in the 90s and send us all Canadian flags. Fund Canadian art. Fund Canadian music. Fund Canadian storytelling. Do it at a level not seen before.
  
  And celebrate this country. No country is perfect. But wave the flag, launch the fireworks, be proud of what we’ve built here. Be proud of what we can build if we continue down this path.
  
  

• Military sovereignty.
  
  Build our armed forces. Make additional military alliances. Strengthen partnerships. Increase the prestige of our armed forces and encourage more people to join them. If it wasn’t clear before November, I hope it’s clear now – this is an increasingly dangerous world. To protect ourselves, to protect our friends, to fight the good fight on the things that matter to us when we have to – it’s time to make the investments we’ve long put off making in our armed forces.

And while we don’t want to be wasteful – by all means, go into debt to do it all at once. This is not the time to sit on our wallet. Do I wish we’d taken better care of our finances for this rainy day? Yeah, but let’s not drown to avoid a VISA bill.

Hopefully along the way, Canadians can also find political unity. We need to act like a country again. We have to knock off this crypto-American folklore that we are a bunch of states that do things the American-way. That way leads to… America.

We’re a unique nation. We’re a collection of people who turned one of the most uninhabitable countries on earth into the greatest. I mean, honestly, folk – it’s a climate that is actively trying to kill us half the year. When an American says it’s freezing, they mean it’s below 0. When we say it’s freezing, we mean without a jacket you will die outside in twenty minutes.

We built something here, against odds. A generous and prosperous land. Where we look out for one another. Where the state provides the opportunity and you provide the outcome. Where we help you up when you stumble. And we did it by working together. We’ve got a lot of which to be proud.

SO, I GUESS WHAT I’M SAYING IS…

It should have been clear since – oh, 2016? – that America was becoming a less reliable ally. We’ve waited beyond reason, and we find ourselves in a moment of crisis.

Let’s get through that moment. Let’s be tough if we need to. But let’s not let this moment pass without learning something. Let’s take back control of our destiny and come up with a better plan for the next eight years than crossing our fingers and hoping 2028’s Kamala Harris wins an election we have little-to-no influence over.

Here we are. Now let’s start digging ourselves out of this mess.

Donald Trump - twice impeached, thirty-four times convicted – has won the U.S. Presidential election and a lot of people are deep in their feelings on this one.

But let’s move past the feelings and ask ourselves – how has our understanding of politics changed or been reinforced by this election?

After all, Canadian politics is just U.S. politics on time delay and the political organizer class needs to take a hard look at what happened. So whether you want to recreate the Trump win or resist it, here’s six lessons from the U.S. Presidential election:

1. People see democracy as a means, not an end.

Thirty-five years out from the Cold War, the perception of democracy having intrinsic value is badly damaged. Polling continues to show an increase in support for authoritarianism – an increase tied to feelings the system is not working for them. People want results, not a critique on whether someone is sufficiently reverent of the system. The “he’s a tyrant!” well is dry.

Long term, an increased focus on civics is needed. Long term, the only path to shared prosperity we have is liberal democracy; we need to relearn the lesson that a commitment to democratic norms protects us all. But this is a generational challenge. For the next few elections, political organizers need to find something more electorally effective than banging that drum.

2. The economy and safety are how people feel, not charts and data.

Almost everything said the U.S. economy was actually doing very well. Yes, inflation was high, but wage growth was faster. But people didn’t feel it. Housing felt more out of reach. Opportunity felt less available. Side hustles have become the norm for a generation of young adults and everything feels horribly precarious: the number of Americans that couldn’t absorb an unexpected $2000 cost is alarming.

Similarly, charts showed crime was declining across America. But the feelings of urban decline were real – and tied to the point about the economy. The Fentanyl crisis has exacerbated a housing crisis. All of this has been far too visible on our streets and creating huge senses of discomfort at the very bottom of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

Arguing that it’s not a growing problem – bringing all the data to back that point – was thoroughly ineffective. People felt the economy and safety were a problem, and they voted accordingly.

3. Virtue politics have given incredible ammunition to the right.

A caricature of progressives has taken hold – obsessed with “woke” policies, disinterested in the issues that matter to you, the voter.

There are no doubt cases where the Democrats picked issues that failed to resonate – abortion appears to be the primary one (an example of their organizers fighting the last campaign – the 2022 midterm election – rather than the current one). But any fair read of policies would show the vast weight of Democratic focus was on issues with well understood resonance.

All to say, I don’t think the left is lost. But I do think it’s easy to make the left look lost.

Love it or hate it, it’s clear that the views and attitudes of the leftward flank of progressive parties are more disqualifying to the average voter than the views of the rightward flank of conservative parties.

My personal view is inclusiveness is good. But my political assessment is moralizing about inclusiveness, even in small doses, is a very bad strategy. It provides the foundation for attack ads that can create an outsized sense of focus on issues that not only fail to land with many voters, but actively concern them or turn them away.

4. Polls are broken.

I feel for pollsters. Even when they’re within a reasonable margin of error, they can appear horribly wrong. That’s the nature of elections decided by 1% of the vote. That’s the nature of 19 times out of 20.

But pollsters also largely failed, for the third straight election with Trump on the ballot, to see the currents. He once again out performed. This is after corrections post 2016 and corrections post 2020. At this point, most pollsters are simply weighting against the factors relevant to the last election and hoping like hell they still matter.

It’s clear they don’t.

Meanwhile, I’m beginning to strongly suspect that partisans – having discovered the propaganda value of a good poll – are actively seeking out participation and ruining their usefulness. This is Goodhart’s Law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

In the most recent elections in BC, Alberta and Saskatchewan the batch of polls from just BEFORE the writ dropped were more predictive of the result than the final polls. It may too be the case in the U.S. that the polls before Biden dropped out were more predictive. It may be that, once the game begins, the usefulness of polling plummets.

This isn’t a purely theoretical observation. Polling drives decision making. And bad polls are driving campaigns to allocate resources poorly and make decisions that land flat – or with the wrong group.

5. Campaigns are broken.

As former Alberta NDP MLA Shannon Phillips put it on the morning-of-the-day-after, “we do NOT understand how to reach people and even more than that, we don’t even know how the Right are reaching people in 2024. Our tactics are old and wrong”.

I agree but I’d go further – I’m not convinced most on the right know how to reach people either. Campaigns of all stripes are chasing inaccurate polls, using tactics that made sense in 1990 and talking to themselves in echo chambers.

We do not have a strong grasp on how information is consumed and voting decisions are made in 2024.

Campaigns of all stripes continue allocating resources to ground game that looks increasingly like a bad investment. By plan or incompetence, Donald Trump seems to have stumbled upon an optimal strategy of indifference and disregard to regular canvass and get-out-the-vote activities. That freed up a lot of money and focus for other activities.

You see, canvass is broadly misunderstood by the general public. The purpose of door knocking in a campaign is not to change your mind, it’s to identify supporters. The campaign will then do whatever it can to get you, the supporters identified, to the ballot box. They’ll call. They’ll show up at your door. They’ll offer to watch your kids or drive you. And maybe that was really important when elections were one day affairs. But maybe, now that you have a week of days to vote, if you care enough to answer the door you care enough to show up anyhow. Maybe it’s all a waste of time.

But let me not just pick on canvass. Where do people advertise? Why? What media outlets are they using? Why?

The modern campaign has no theory of change. They do not know how they think they change minds. They make small, micro-targeted swings to win the game of inches. Meanwhile, they ignore or under-resource the game of yards dictated by story and emotion.

They do this through traditional channels. And sorry, Millenials, YouTube and X are now traditional channels. Modern campaigns are lost.

As noted above – polls before the election are in so many recent cases more predictive than polls at the end of the election. That’s not just a condemnation of polling. That’s a condemnation of campaigns, which appear unable to move opinion in meaningful ways.

Campaigns are begging for a fundamental rethink.

6. To save democracy in our nation, we need to end democracy in our political parties.

If we want to resist unchecked populism and factionalism in our national elections, we need to end it in our parties. They’re too small, too easy to take control of through motivated short-term or narrow interests.

I used to think the solution was to throw the doors wide open and invite more people. I used to think the solution was small donations and broad support. It’s now clear to me that only a certain type of person will walk through that door. It’s now clear to me only high emotion generates small donations in useful amounts.

Parties need to operate more like private clubs and step outside of the democratic framework. Party leaders being chosen by popular support has not been healthy for democracies here or in the United States.

Parties need to be built to defend moderate views, not be highjacked by the most motivated.

Return to delegated conventions. Reduce the number of elected delegates. Give caucuses power over party leadership. Give party brokers power over the selection of candidates.

Acknowledge that our current system drives parties to the extremes, which then makes our general elections choices between extremes.

And governments – end the restrictive fundraising rules. Let corporations and unions donate again. Increase the limits.

Let money flow through our democratic systems rather than around them and under them through third party advertisers and political action committees. Break the addiction to rage-fueled small donations that all parties have. If you want to make our politics moderate, normal and boring, you must find ways to make our parties normal and boring.

Our current parties are too valuable a prize and too weakly defended. Rather than groups pushing coherent ideologies, they have become loose confederations of interest groups to be bought off by charismatic outsiders. That’s not healthy.

Canada sometimes feels like a very small boat on a very big ocean. But we have the advantage of seeing the waves coming.

It’s now up to us to decide what we do to get ready for them.

Corey Hogan