Articles by Paul Wells

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, […]

Nov 23 2022 — Paul Wells — Paul Wells Newsletter — Daniel Sanger’s 2021 book Saving the City: The Challenge of Transforming a Modern Metropolis is a history of Projet Montréal, the left-ecologist municipal political party that has governed Montreal since 2017. Sanger, a good reporter for many years, was a key participant in Projet Montréal’s success. Near the end he describes the arrival of a […]

Nov 21 2022 — Paul Wells — Paul Wells Newsletter — The world’s a mess. Vladimir Putin still has no better idea than to keep grinding Russia’s army into Ukraine. North Korea has launched more than 30 missiles in November alone. Xi Jinping has consolidated his flinty hold on power in China. Europe is heading for a cold winter, disease stalks the world, food and energy […]

Nov 20 2022 — Paul Wells — Paul Wells Newsletter — Today Pierre Poilievre posted this Twitter video about opioid policy. The argument in the video is that British Columbia and Alberta are pursuing very different policies on opioids. As it happens, I wrote a detailed rebuttal of this argument last week. Since he’s pressing on with the argument, I’m going to re-share the rebuttal. And […]

Nov 16 2022 — Paul Wells — Paul Wells Newsletter — If there’s one thing we can all agree on as a nation, after a year of hard lessons and bitter reckonings, it’s that being in a meeting with Brenda Lucki is way more interesting than asking her about it later. The RCMP commissioner was on the witness stand Tuesday at the Public Order Emergency Commission […]

Nov 4 2022 — Paul Wells — Paul Wells Newsletter — Two families, both alike in dignity. Chrystia Freeland delivered her fall economic statement to the House of Commons on Thursday. Pierre Poilievre gave a keynote speech to the Empire Club in Toronto. Of course one of them couldn’t resist talking about cryptocurrencies. Although if you think you know which, you might be surprised. I have […]

Oct 29 2022 — Paul Wells — Paul Wells Newsletter — In Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s 2019 novel Fleishman Is In Trouble, which will soon be a miniseries starring Jesse Eisenberg and Claire Danes, most of the novel is about Toby Fleishman, a young physician, reeling after his estranged wife Rachel drops their children off at his place and vanishes. The kids cramp his style as a born-again […]

Oct 26 2022 — Paul Wells — Paul Wells Newsletter — Today’s cop, or at least this morning’s, was Ottawa Police Service Superintendent Robert Bernier. They run together after a while. It’s day 10. Bernier is important: On Feb. 10, two weeks into the Siege of Ottawa, he was appointed Event Commander for convoy-related operations, a job he would keep long enough to clear the Red […]

Oct 25 2022 — Paul Wells — Paul Wells Newsletter — It’s cops all the way down this week at the Public Order Emergency Commission over on Wellington St. I spent the morning listening to the testimony of Steve Bell, the Ottawa Police Service’s interim chief. To give you a sense of how unsettled things have been at the OPS, it’s worth recalling that Bell replaced […]

Oct 19 2022 — Paul Wells — Paul Wells Newsletter — In the quarter-century since Jim Watson first became mayor of Ottawa — he has served in two stints, from 1997 to 2000 and from 2010 until very soon now — he has become an expected, indeed almost assumed, feature of the city’s landscape. He is Ottawa’s longest-serving mayor. It feels strange that he isn’t running […]

Oct 18 2022 — Paul Wells — Paul Wells Newsletter — As a warm-up act for one of the main attractions at the big convoy commission down on Wellington Street, you could do worse than Steve Kanellakos and Serge Arpin. First because the two Ottawa municipal officials have clout: Kanellakos is the city manager, essentially its top-ranking bureaucrat, and Arpin is the mayor’s chief of staff, […]

Oct 12 2022 — Paul Wells — Paul Wells Newsletter — In 2016 I started to notice increasing divergence between what Canada’s foreign minister was saying about Ukraine and what Chrystia Freeland was saying. So I got Freeland on the phone and she said a bunch of stuff the then-foreign minister, Stéphane Dion, would not have said. Soon enough Dion was not the foreign minister. It’s […]

Oct 5 2022 — Paul Wells — Paul Wells Newsletter — In April 1995, when he was the freshly-elected premier of Quebec, Jacques Parizeau showed up at a game between the Montreal Canadiens and Quebec Nordiques. His wife, Lisette Lapointe, was wearing a Nordiques jersey. It seemed a terrible tactical decision. Honestly if I were advising Parizeau today I’d be nervous. Petty rivalry is the stuff […]

Oct 1 2022 — Paul Wells — Paul Wells Newsletter — A big Legault majority with a Montreal-shaped hole in it. François Legault and the Coalition Avenir Québec (centre-right, suburban populist) are going to win big. Poll analyst Philippe J. Fournier says they’re on track to win 92 seats, the biggest majority since Robert Bourassa’s comeback in 1985. This is mostly a trick of the electoral […]