Mar 28 2023 — Paul Wells — Paul Wells Newsletter — Look, the thing you don’t understand is that government shouldn’t be in the business of picking winners. “This approach is not about the government picking individual corporate winners in an effort to engineer a preferred vision of the economy in 2050,” it says right here on Page 19 of Chrystia Freeland’s 2023 federal budget. Picking […]
Mar 14 2023 — Paul Wells — Paul Wells Newsletter — He was trained to admit every error. Then he went into politics. A feature interview with the retiring MP for Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Westmount. When you resign your seat in the House of Commons, you get to keep your phone for 90 days. The deadlines for cleaning out your offices on Parliament Hill and in your riding are […]
Mar 9 2023 — Paul Wells — Paul Wells Newsletter — Here’s Michael Cooper, Conservative MP for St. Albert — Edmonton, indulging in a little theatre a week ago at the Procedure and House Affairs Committee. It really is worth watching the video: And here’s Justin Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada, indulging in a little theatre Thursday in the Commons lobby:
Feb 27 2023 — Paul Wells — Paul Wells Newsletter — Plus: Sometimes you go around the biased media, sometimes you go through them. To me, Artur Wilcynski is the interesting name on this list. Reporters for Global and The Globe and Mail, the news organizations that have been breaking most of the stories on CSIS leaks about alleged China interference in Canada’s 2021 election, have […]
Feb 18 2023 — Paul Wells — Paul Wells Newsletter — The notion that Canada constitutes a community whose attributes extend beyond its tax rate, its weather forecasts and the latest ledger of offences inflicted and endured has always rallied too many detractors and too few champions. The champions took a heavy loss overnight when Peter Herrndorf, one of the people I admired most in this […]
Feb 17 2023 — Paul Wells — Paul Wells Newsletter — The Prime Minister’s Office could not have received a better report on their handling of the Freedom Convoy if they had written it. In fact anything they wrote would certainly have been of less use to them than the five-volume report of Justice Paul Rouleau’s Public Order Emergency Commission, because the PMO version would have […]
Feb 8 2023 — Paul Wells — Paul Wells Newsletter — Hi, and welcome to Laurentian Hospital! We’re not just a compassionate provider of patient-centred care, we’re also an extended allegory designed to poke fun at current trends in executive federalism. Take a seat! Sometime in November at the earliest! I just want to remind you that if you’re here for a hip replacement, you can […]
Jan 31 2023 — Paul Wells — Paul Wells Newsletter — To understand why some Ontario Liberals are eager to have the province’s Green Party leader Mike Schreiner lead them, it helps if you recall that the gap between the two parties has never been smaller. Liberals and Greens were separated by 1.96 million votes and 72 seats in 2003. By last autumn’s election, the gap […]
Jan 26 2023 — Paul Wells — Paul Wells Newsletter — Here’s a former leader of Quebec’s Parti Québécois calling for people who walk across the Canada-US border and claim asylum to be packed onto buses and sent to Ottawa. The panel is an oddly popular feature on Radio-Canada’s all-news channel, featuring people who used to be involved in politics. The guy talking is Jean-François Lisée, […]
Jan 23 2023 — Paul Wells — In hindsight, we should have known the serious talks began as soon as everyone started saying they were over. On Nov. 8, federal health minister Jean-Yves Duclos met his provincial counterparts in Vancouver for the first in-person meeting of federal and provincial health ministers since 2018. The meeting collapsed in acrimony. Provincial premiers blamed Duclos […]
Jan 16 2023 — Paul Wells — Paul Wells Newsletter — You’re forgiven if you haven’t heard that the Government Operations committee of the House of Commons will be investigating the Trudeau government’s increasing use of private consulting firms, including McKinsey & Co., in deciding government strategy and figuring out how to deliver programs. My piece here two weeks ago was part of a smattering of […]
Jan 7 2023 — Paul Wells — Paul Wells Newsletter — Chronic weaknesses in the Liberal government weren’t fixed, the former finance minister says in a new book, and Canada’s prosperity suffered. Justin Trudeau’s “management and interpersonal communication abilities were sorely lacking,” former finance minister Bill Morneau writes in a new book. Lingering challenges were “not managed on a daily basis at the highest level.” The […]
Jan 4 2023 — Paul Wells — Paul Wells Newsletter — From Radio-Canada, and not yet translated into English at this hour, comes news that the Trudeau Liberals have paid 30 times as much to the global consulting firm McKinsey and Company as the Harper Conservatives did, even though the Liberals have so far spent less time in office than the Conservatives did. That’s $2.2 million […]
Nov 29 2022 — Paul Wells — Paul Wells Newsletter — Two unions representing four-fifths of the National Gallery of Canada’s employees wrote to Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez in early November expressing alarm at the art museum’s management culture. The unions’ letter had already been sent before four experienced senior managers were dismissed on Nov. 18, a source familiar with the unionized employees’ concerns says. And […]
Nov 25 2022 — Paul Wells — Paul Wells Newsletter — This was the Justin Trudeau you hear about from people who have meetings with him: attentive, perceptive, with a good memory and a keen ear. There’s been grumbling from Quebec about how almost all the testimony at the Rouleau Commission has been in English, so he began his remarks in French. When prompted he remembered, […]