None of the Parties Deserve Your Vote

I think Canada’s politics has sunk into deep ruts. I think we need fresh and serious thinking about what kind of country we want to be. I worry that euphoria after an election in the winning camp, followed immediately by the crush of events, risks preempting fresh approaches. For a decade, our political parties, our Parliament, our public service, and the other institutions of our democracy have been putting more and more energy into forgetting how to make decisions. Instead, they’re all in for message amplification. They’re so busy saying that they don’t hear—don’t, in fact, dare to hear because new information would only complicate lives they barely control. There’s a forced, hollow certainty to too much of our political discourse that barely masks timidity and confusion behind. Our leaders are horrified at the prospect of being disagreed with, a phobia exemplified by the deepening moral cowardice of Pierre Poilievre in the face of the most routine journalistic inquiry. But I see Poilievre as an increasingly pathetic symptom of a widespread phobia, rather than as a particular instigator. After all, a prominent unperson, whose decade-long tenure as prime minister we are now asked to forget, spent last summer popping up unannounced, each time in the presence of a single reporter who was formally forbidden from asking him any questions. Sorry, I just said something mean about your favourite leader, everyone. But that’s a big part of the problem. We’re building cults of personality around people with unremarkable personalities. In a polarized age, supporters of our hollow parties have been betting everything on a succession of unpersuasive leaders, and investing not nearly enough in the institutions that would help us navigate wild times, if we let them. This is best exemplified by something that just happened, although it’s remarkable how few people talk about it. The Liberal Party of Canada spent years digging trenches to defend a few policy totems: a consumer carbon tax, a deep distrust of resource exports and of spending on national security in an increasingly addled world, a late-blooming fascination with increasing the capital-gains tax as a means of prosecuting a purely symbolic class war. The party ignored every debate about any of these matters. Canadians were free to disagree, but they had no chance of being heard. Indeed, the governing party distributed favour and sanction in proportion to its members’ willingness to endorse these totems without thinking. By 2025, the only way the party could survive an election was by ejecting Trudeau in favour of a new leader, whose name might as well be Plausible Deniability and whose first task was to take all these sacred policy cows out to be shot. The party that used to believe in one set of things now believes as fervently in their opposites. Have you heard? Oceania’s at war with Eastasia, and it’s awesome. The Conservatives responded to the Liberal edifice, while it held, by building their own, incorporating variations borrowed from ancient Sparta. Endorsement of the leader’s views was insufficient: members of Parliament and candidates must use his vocabulary. I stopped reading statements from Conservative MPs after the first appearance of the phrase “sneaky Mark Carney,” knowing that the MP who had signed the statement hadn’t written it and might not have seen it. The Conservatives’ high command forbade conversations with infidels. A reporter I know was chatting outdoors with an MP when the MP received a text: “Get away from that reporter.” Parliamentary committees were used as video production studios for the production of social media morality plays about the superiority of the party. To the extent that those meetings might otherwise have been useful for the business of Parliament, too bad. One of these parties will win the election. Its supporters will view the win as wall-to-wall vindication and, indeed, as proof that the winners’ opponents should be ashamed of themselves. But while the Liberals and Conservatives have discernibly different projects, I think either would bring comparable bad habits to office. The good news is, because you actually don’t have to be a towering jerk to be a Conservative or a figure out of Orwell to be a Liberal, it’s just possible that these characters can still improve. What’s more, the burdens of citizenship are on us, too, and we can go a long way toward revitalizing our debates and institutions, whether our purported leaders feel like leading or not. The first step is to remember that democracy is a conversation and to measure the poverty of our modern Canadian conversations. Political parties these days are so busy trying to persuade that they are afraid to listen. They are so sure their opponents are terrible—not just terrible, but dangerous—that they permit themselves any excess. Thin-skinned and defensive, the factions of our leadership class isolate in bubbles. It’s bad for the country. Let’s see how this plays out, in concentric circles from the prime minister outward.

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In January, a senior Liberal told me that in the late years of Justin Trudeau’s government, most cabinet decisions were marked ”ad referendum” by the prime minister and the finance minister. That meant that for each of those decisions, the cabinet hadn’t decided. Ad referendum means the final decision rests with the PM; it’s mentioned in this document as something that happens “on occasion.” It eventually became routine. Adding the finance minister means that everything about a cabinet “decision” was out of the cabinet’s hands: the binary decision on whether to proceed with a given change and the fiscal decision of how much money to spend on it. A cabinet committee, or the full cabinet, would deliberate, decide on a course of action, and then the decision would vanish. Days or months later, an announcement would come. The size of the spend would be a complete surprise. Or, not infrequently, nothing would happen at all, even after the cabinet believed it had decided to do something. A cabinet whose decisions aren’t decisions will tend, over time, to decide to do more things than it can afford or execute, on the principle of throwing pasta at a wall. And it will tend to worry less about the feasibility or appropriateness of its decisions because they aren’t decisions. Such a cabinet ceases to be a cabinet and becomes a consultative committee of hopes and druthers. Now we know why ministers were so attentive when standing in rows behind Trudeau to nod: they were finding out what the government had decided, while pretending to be the government. This simple defensive play by the Prime Minister’s Office—we’re just adding a tactical layer over the cabinet’s good work—erodes ministers’ influence and puts far too much influence in the hands of a few staffers in the PMO. Similarly, at meetings of Trudeau’s cabinet, ministers were discouraged from asking hard questions or trying to debate decisions in the cabinet room. It slows down the discussion, they were told. Just circle back later—as petitioners to the staff, who would make the real decisions. Jody Wilson-Raybould wrote that ministers were discouraged from gathering to meet in private, in the absence of their PMO-appointed chiefs of staff. Bill Morneau wrote that draft statements explaining a decision would circulate within the government before an issue had been discussed, let alone decisions made. All of this is bad. A government is likelier to make childish decisions if its members are treated like children by staffers. The pressure to make all those decisions is, incidentally, also unfair on staff, who would often burn out or self-medicate. After the 2019 election, on the heels of the SNC-Lavalin controversy, Trudeau appointed two experienced outsiders to run an unusually long transition exercise for a re-elected incumbent. The exercise produced no perceptible change. I’m told now that the real attraction of the long transition was that it allowed Trudeau to isolate himself from his caucus, Parliament, and the press gallery for weeks at the end of a disappointing year. Members of Parliament now routinely receive information on the state of public finances long after they have voted on plans for the year ahead. This alone is such an extravagant gift to prime ministerial fiat that I cannot imagine any future prime minister permitting it to change. MPs almost always vote a straight party line. They need no encouragement from the party leadership to ostracize troublemakers. And especially if they are men from Ontario with no prospect of a cabinet appointment, they while away their days shitposting on Twitter. There are two venues where we need MPs to act more like MPs, but probably won’t. One is in parliamentary committees; these are, even today, effective if lurid venues for forcing government accountability. The Poilievre Conservatives often extracted useful information that the Trudeau Liberals would have preferred not to divulge. It’s entirely appropriate for Parliament to be confrontational. But increasingly, the Conservatives’ goal was to obtain video, not results, so MPs could cast themselves as heroes on TikTok for potential voters and donors. In this, they mirrored their leader’s narcissistic fascination with cameras pointed backwards. The problem is that these antics destroy the minimal good faith that’s needed for a committee to get anything done because everybody, including invited expert witnesses, soon realizes that no conversation is really a conversation. It’s a process of cueing people up so they can look confused, or stumble briefly, or raise an eyebrow, so an MP’s staff can assemble these shots into a two-minute online morality play. This is unlikely to stop unless parties select different kinds of leaders, and that’s unlikely to happen unless they feel some influence over the leaders they have. One tool has proven useful in exerting that influence. It requires decisions immediately after an election. Liberal MPs refused to avail themselves of it last time, and it nearly ruined them. I refer, of course, to the 2015 Reform Act, which lets caucuses of MPs decide whether they’ll retain the right, later, to depose their current leader. It was written by the Conservative member of Parliament Michael Chong, and only the Conservatives have used it to remove Erin O’Toole as leader in 2021. Liberals and the New Democratic Party simply ignored it after the 2019 election, and both caucuses voted to refrain from using it after the 2021 election. I have some sympathy, from my heartless distance, for the feeling of togetherness that comes from partisan engagement. In his classic text on power in Ottawa, Ian Brodie writes impressively about what’s gained from joining a party, even at the cost of agreeing to lose some internal fights for the greater good. I know that, especially in the moment of triumph after winning an election, nobody wants to spoil the celebration. But Brodie’s old boss was a reformer, and the basis of Reform was a refusal to give leaders carte blanche forever. It’s a useful instinct. Just look to the south. I’m not even a huge fan of the Reform Act. It doesn’t bestow new rights. In practice, a leader whose caucus rejects him can’t lead for long. But in practice, Trudeau’s Liberal caucus put up with lakes of abuse from him for months because, in the absence of a formal mechanism, they couldn’t decide how to improvise one. The Reform Act is, in the end, simply a reminder. It doesn’t put leaders on notice so much as it does MPs. Its message is simple: grow a spine now because it might come in handy later. Over dinner last year, an acquaintance in the middle ranks of the public service told me he routinely ends the day with 400 unanswered emails newly arrived that day in his inbox. This is absolutely routine. Everybody with a government job has stories like this. It’s amazing what you can miss in that kind of blizzard. After a Canadian diplomat attended a garden party at the Russian embassy shortly after Putin invaded Ukraine, it was revealed that emails discussing the visit had been sent, in advance, to the foreign minister’s chief of staff and the deputy minister. Most people in Ottawa read the story as, “Why did these top officials not stop the diplomat from attending the party?” I read it differently: Why in heaven’s name were questions about an afternoon’s social arrangements clogging the inbox of the deputy minister and the foreign minister’s chief of staff? It is a rhetorical question. Questions about everything clog everyone’s inbox. This is because in Ottawa in the last decade, no one person makes any decision. When faced with a decision, a typical Ottawa person will MIRV into dozens of people on the same email chain—“touching base” and “looping in” and “tweaking the wording” and “how about this”—until they all leave the office (or, more recently, until they clamshell their laptops at home) with 400 unanswered emails in their inboxes. I have made good money in recent years describing some of these choking furballs of governance. There was the time the government took twelve days to, in effect, send my own question back to me with the question marks removed. There was the whole Walport thing. During the Freedom Convoy commission, a federal government email chain was tabled as evidence that showed how, while the trucks were rolling toward Ottawa, Mary-Liz and Alex looped in Caroline and Sam and they told two friends, and so on, and so on, until seven staffers in two cabinet ministers’ offices were politely debating which minister was best for “getting in on the narrative of the truckers,” a bonanza of opportunities for “framing” and “high-level messaging.” The transcript of this river of bullshit runs to many pages. What struck me at the time, and still does to this day, was that all this debate about what to say about the convoy took place three days before the thing had arrived in Ottawa. So, one thing Canada’s next prime minister could do is fire the first thirty people who start preparing “high-level messaging” about a thing before the thing has begun to happen. There will certainly be many more than thirty of them. The departed won’t be missed, and it would never otherwise occur to them that there could possibly be anything wrong with “touching base” and “looping in” on “narrative.” In fact, the greater risk is that such people will keep doing their thing in a new government, if it’s Liberal. Any illusion Carney might have that he represented a new kind of prime minister would soon be buried under 400 emails a day. People who ask a question in Ottawa before they start scripting answers are harder to find. Elsewhere in the convoy commission’s testimony, judge Paul Rouleau heard testimony from Rob Stewart, who was Deputy Minister of Public Safety during the trucker convoy. The protesters showed no sign of leaving. Stewart followed advice from the Clerk of the Privy Council, who was kind of his boss, to ask ”the person in Canada who knew the most about policing large political demonstrations” for ideas. That person was Marcel Beaudin of the Ontario Provincial Police, whom I was lucky enough to interview much later for my podcast. Beaudin suggested it would be a good idea if somebody from the government talked to the protesters. Stewart put that suggestion in a proposed plan of action. Of course, a bunch of people who had never dealt with any large political protest were sure this was a terrible idea. Very soon, Rob Stewart was no longer the Deputy Minister of Public Safety. I don’t know Stewart at all, but I’m delighted to see that he’s still the Deputy Minister of International Trade, the Elba to which he was banished after the trucks left town. We’re apparently supposed to turn eighty years of north-south trade patterns toward new destinations in the west and east. I’m not sure it can be done, but in trying, I suspect it’ll be useful to have input from that most exotic of Ottawa creatures: a person who asks questions to new people about new situations. After a while, I got used to running into Trudeau cabinet ministers who would talk until I retreated. You know what a conversation is like. I mean, just a normal conversation. You say something. “The neighbours are partying loud again.” The other person incorporates some of what you said into what they say next. “Damn, that’s got to be annoying. I remember this one time  . . . ” Then you say something that reflects what they just said. Pretty soon, the two of you have built this invisible thing in the air that is partly about you, partly about them, and partly about the topic of your conversation. You’ve been doing this since you were two. Believe me when I tell you, this is not what a conversation with François-Philippe Champagne is like. Canada’s finance minister—because he’s the finance minister now, has been since March, that’s the chair that was left for him the last time the music stopped—is like a wind-up doll that nobody wound up. But somehow, the thing is still coming at you. And you can’t get away. And it won’t stop telling you anecdotes. I once wrote about an interview with Champagne, in which five minutes and twenty-one seconds went by before I was able to ask my first question. Champagne wasn’t even the only person who could talk you into a full retreat. It’s a trick a bunch of them learned in the cabinet. I know people I was able to talk to until the day they became cabinet ministers, and whom I can talk to now that they’re out, but while they were cabinet ministers, they would put up a wall of words every time I got too close. I hope I’m making it sound funny, but the results are less funny. I believe it’s related to the 400 unread emails, the seven-staffer preemptive communications strategies, and the way it sure looks like a deputy minister got into big trouble for trying to help solve an urgent problem. What all these stories have in common is that they reflect a place where no person has responsibility over any choice or action; everything is a group construct with undefined boundaries and players; the goal is to say excellent things about the excellent government, if you’re in government; and new information is deeply distrusted because it may bring the unwelcome news that something the government did isn’t working. In any functioning workplace, “What’s happening?” is a welcome question, or at least one people can handle. In the politics of the last several years, it’s terrifying. There’s a constant political imperative to answer such questions with “only excellent things are happening” and you can thank us. The public service is tasked with proving this claim, which never changes. Liberals and Conservatives blame each other for denying reality, but if you want fresh evidence that everyone can play, I offer you Pierre Poilievre’s campaign team  . . .  and the only document on economic policy that Mark Carney released before he became prime minister. It called for Canada to spend $2 trillion to “achieve net zero” by 2050, and said the way to do this is to “catalyze multiples of private investment.” Canada has already tried twice to catalyze multiples of private investment via the Infrastructure Bank and the Canada Growth Fund. Results are mixed. I’d hope a future prime minister would know and think about that. No such luck. I’ve written about this before, in the third instalment of my 2023 series on modern communications, called “The Message Factory.” That article quotes at length from Brand Command: Canadian Politics and Democracy in the Age of Message Control, an important 2016 book by Memorial University political scientist Alex Marland. People sometimes ask me for lists of Canadian political books they should read. I would name Marland’s first, and would probably delay naming a second until you confirm you’ve read Marland’s. I’d add the caveat that it should be read as a cautionary tale, although everyone in Ottawa seems to take it as a how-to guide. Marland writes that the social media revolution of the late 2000s led to an avalanche of noise in the communications environment that’s simply off the scale from anything that came before. Political actors responded by radically simplifying their message and repeating it endlessly. “Core information repeatedly communicated in an uncomplicated, consistent, and efficient way to targeted subgroups is more likely to secure support for the sender’s agenda,” he wrote. Axe the tax. Crafting these infantile messages is a burden, but the far larger burden is making sure that literally everybody in a vast organization stays on message. Eventually—quite quickly, in fact—this process stops being a work model and becomes a habit of mind. Nobody talks unless they’re repeating the message. In that environment, new information is worse than useless because it interrupts the message factory. Questions are dangerous because they might prompt an off-message response. That is why it takes weeks for the factory to provide a useless answer to a simple question. Marland finds a civil servant who is delighted with this state of affairs because it guarantees that the first question from any outsider will be the last: “It takes so goddamn long to answer a routine question,” this person marvels, that “there’s no chance for the journalist to get anything extra or get any sort of a different twist on things.” I’ve repeated my earlier arguments at some length because I think it’s now clear that this message factory is toxic to proper government. It’s alienating because citizens learn early that they cannot ask questions or receive answers. It destroys responsibility because every decision is made by a cloud of people. It badly erodes work within and between governments because the meaningless garbage that governments produce for public consumption is the only information they have time to produce, so they end up talking to one another like infants, exactly as they talk to us. This is what I heard at a 2023 think-tank conference on government response to COVID-19: when large numbers of lives were on the line, desperate governments started telling one another what was happening. It was so bracing that they still talked about it three years later in excited tones because it had already stopped happening again. Finally, while of course I’ve been describing elements of bureaucracy that exist everywhere and have always existed, I believe it has been markedly worse in Canada in the last decade, to the point where the neighbours are talking. Most of my conversations with diplomats happen off the record, and I’m sorry if that makes me sound like a Laurentian whatever, but there are common themes. “This large government thing you’re doing doesn’t work. Our people can’t get answers to simple questions. There is an important thing happening in our part of the world, and I can’t find anybody in your government who is interested. There is an important thing happening in your part of the world, and I can’t find anybody in your government who is interested.” Now the woods are on fire, and our government can’t talk, listen, act, or learn. Two changes are needed: inside the government and out. Them and us. The government needs a radical simplification. On the face of it, this would seem to be at odds with the increasing complexity of the modern world. So it’s important to emphasize that I’m not calling for a government that does less but for one that yanks out layer after layer of stultifying multiple redundancy. The only way that can happen is if many more people within the government are handed real responsibility. That means decisions about attending garden parties are made by the person who got the invitation alone. It means her superiors don’t get to freak out if she makes a decision they wouldn’t have. It means questions get answers because a government that stonewalls outsiders cheats their citizens and will inevitably finish by lying to itself. The stakes are too high for that any longer. Open the windows. Let some facts in, such as the Walport report on the government response to COVID. The next health minister should sit in the National Press Theatre with reporters and listen attentively while members of the committee read their conclusions. It will not be pleasant. Too bad. She should invite them to publish quarterly updates in public. Half the cabinet should spend a week this summer visiting Canadian Armed Forces members in the Arctic, or Latvia, or on the deck of a frigate, getting up early for briefings, free from the obligation to scrum at any point about the exciting things the government is doing. They would be there to watch and learn. The chief historian of the Canadian War Museum told me he has never been invited to speak to any elected political leader. Invite him. Just lunch, sandwiches. The editor of the only book on Canadian prime ministers’ foreign policies has never been asked about his conclusions by any current or aspiring prime minister. Invite him. The premiers haven’t been invited to Ottawa for an in-person, open-ended discussion of issues in years because some of them are Conservatives, and none of them shared the federal government’s messaging priorities. Screw messaging. Have the premiers over. Some will make trouble. That’s what having a real country is like. We can’t afford to live in the imaginary country anymore. Canadians who are angry at Donald Trump speculate airily about Canada joining the European Union, always on the blithe assumption that the Europeans can hardly wait to welcome us. What Europeans can hardly wait for is for Canadians to return routine phone calls and correspondence. Canada doesn’t have the bandwidth. It’s too busy sending itself 400 unread emails a day about narrative and looping in. That has to change. This town needs an enema. Ministers have to be ministers, decisions have to be made and owned at every level, facts have to be facts, questions need answers, and results must not only be measured but acknowledged in public with humility. Or we’re all sunk. Call what happened before “the Trudeau years,” thank it for its service, and banish it beyond hope of return. That leaves the rest of us. We cannot spend the first two years of a new leader’s tenure defending that leader against all opponents. That’s how abscesses grow. We cannot greet a new leader with shitty little books about how evil they are. Our leaders are imperfect, but they try hard. We don’t help them when we make them soldiers in our own little morality plays. X’s over. It was never great, and it’s worse now. Flame wars and hero worship make bad citizenship. Get past both instincts. Civil society groups that claim to promote science or democracy need to be far more aggressive in calling out the shortcomings of every government. Political parties need to stop being lapdogs to their leaders. The last federal Liberal convention in 2023 was a consummate failure, and the country paid for it. Trudeau was proud to be the first modern Liberal leader to be spared factional disputes within his party, but factional disputes are one measure of a party’s health and vitality because they show the members are awake and thinking. If you’re wondering which federal party wishes this week that it had given its leadership echelon a harder ride, I can tell you. It’s the one whose leadership echelon is wearing stupid sweatshirts to its rallies. We put too much burden on our leaders, and it makes them act silly. They shouldn’t be the perfect weapon of our vengeance, or the model of every virtue we admire but never quite get around to practicing. They don’t need to know everything. They can’t possibly get everything right on the first try, and we court trouble when we ask them to pretend they’ve managed the trick. We would lighten their load if we carried more of it ourselves. If we asked more questions for the simple pleasure of learning something from the answers. If we let other people be other people instead of demanding they agree with us. That’s what a community does. It’s what our country could do. Sorry to be sappy. I get emotional at election time. Adapted from “What an Election Won’t Fix” and “The Leader in Your Mirror” by Paul Wells (Substack). Reprinted with permission of the author.The post None of the Parties Deserve Your Vote first appeared on The Walrus.