Paul Wells: The Second Finance Ministers Club

Notes on a capital city in slightly-amused shock

I want to write 5,000 words of narrative in the wake of Chrystia Freeland’s resignation, but we’re still in the middle of the story. Thoughts kind of pour out. I found myself telling La Presse, “‘What the f—k?’ has replaced ‘Hello’ as the standard greeting in Ottawa since Monday.” We’ll see whether they use that quote.

Here are some thoughts, from different angles. I don’t know whether Freeland’s resignation will blow over, the way Justin Trudeau’s last 20 messes did, because I don’t have a crystal ball, but I think Justin Trudeau hopes it’ll blow over. Because he always hopes it’ll blow over. I hear, as you do, rumours that the PM will resign.

On Monday night at the Laurier Club he didn’t look like he’d received the memo yet. On Tuesday his staff cancelled his year-end interviews, something I’ve never seen in 30 years in Ottawa. We’ll see.

Meanwhile, some thoughts.

1. A very British resignation

A standard conversational gambit in Ottawa this week is to point out that nobody’s ever seen a resignation letter like Freeland’s — I’ve given it some thought, and I’ve decided you’re a dink. (I paraphrase, barely.) Except that’s not quite true. Millions of people have seen dozens of resignation letters like it, because you see them every few weeks in the United Kingdom. And Chrystia Freeland was an editor in London for the Financial Times for years.

Canada is in some ways an unhealthily reticent country. I once covered an international summit where the only reason I knew anything the Canadian delegation had done was that I was sitting next to the journalists from France and I could overhear the French government’s briefings. Resignation letters here follow suit: it’s been a privilege, more time with my family, and out. You’re often left wondering, if you loved the boss so much, why leave?

But in England…

Rosie Duffield to Keir Starmer: “How dare you take our longed-for victory, the electorate’s sacred and precious trust, and throw it back in their individual faces and the faces of dedicated and hardworking Labour MPs?! The sleaze, nepotism and apparent avarice are off the scale. I am so ashamed of what you and your inner circle have done to tarnish and humiliate our once proud party.”

John Glen to Boris Johnson: “I can no longer reconcile my commitment to the role and to the financial services sector with the complete lack of confidence I have in your continuing leadership of our country… [R]ecent events concerning the handling of the appointment of the former Deputy Chief Whip, and the poor judgement you have shown, have made it impossible for me to square continued service with my conscience. The country deserves better…”

Nadine Dorries to Rishi Sunak: “You flashed your gleaming smile in your Prada shoes and Savile Row suit from behind a camera, but you just weren’t listening… But worst of all has been the spectacle of a prime minister demeaning his office by opening the gates to whip up a public frenzy against one of his own MPs…Since you took office a year ago, the country is run by a zombie Parliament where nothing meaningful has happened. What exactly has been done or have you achieved?”

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2. The Zoom call

I resist biography as an analytical tool. People outgrow their backgrounds all the time.

But just about everybody who follows politics has been wondering how Trudeau could fire his most loyal lieutenant by a Zoom call three days before he needed her to deliver a crucial fall economic statement. If the Globe’s latest story is true, and he told her Mark Carney would take the job without knowing whether Carney will take the job, that’s even wilder. Who does that?

The short answer is, somebody who is used to getting his way. Then you look at Trudeau’s life and you think, why wouldn’t he expect to get his way?

The rich kid always knows the normies will cover for him. If he needs a ride, some kid with stars in his eyes will wave his keys and volunteer. If he’s hung over he can borrow the lecture notes. He shows up in racist makeup to yet another party — forcing every other person in the venue to decide how to respond — and once again nobody stands up to him or makes a fuss. Indeed, when the record of that behaviour threatens his political career decades later, there’ll be plenty of volunteers to criticize anyone who mentions the record, rather than criticizing the guy who acted like that.

He runs for the leadership of a national political party on a platform of “I’ll tell you what I stand for after I win.” He mentions carbon pricing precisely one time at his first national leaders’ debate. He dumps his electoral-reform promise at the first hurdle, and later, when asked about it, he blames the person who asks. He gaslights Canada’s first Indigenous attorney-general for months, but he is not particularly kinder to her replacement, who is ejected from Cabinet because, I don’t know, it’s Wednesday or whatever. He lets a 72-year-old man run for re-election and only after it’s over does he let the guy know he’s getting dumped from Cabinet.

He fires the Clerk of the Privy Council by news release while travelling.

In particular, if there’s anyone in the world he might have expected to tolerate the kind of high-handedness we’re hearing about Friday’s Zoom call, it’s Chrystia Freeland. Her eagerness to endorse him in the immediate aftermath of his latest cockup has been such a reliable feature of Canadian public life it’s devolved into a kind of shtick. SNC-Lavalin, 2019: “she has absolute confidence.” Blackface, six months later: “tremendous confidence.” WE Charity, 10 months after that: “The prime minister has my complete confidence.”

Perhaps only Jagmeet Singh has shown more confidence than Freeland, over the years, in Trudeau’s leadership. Given that record — and his own much longer record of taking advantage of others’ generosity — it’s not too much of a stretch to think that at some point he decided his deputy prime minister was just another easy mark.

Turns out that’s the kind of mistake he only needed to make once.

3. Speaking of Jagmeet Singh

He’ll qualify for his pension in 70 days. After his astonishing scrum on Monday, he might as well put it on a T-shirt.

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4. After Trudeau

Say he quits. What next?

Here’s something I’m starting to hear from Liberals. I don’t believe I’m the first to write about it, but it hasn’t received enough attention yet.

Can the party ensure the legitimacy of its leadership succession process?

I suspect some large number of the presumed candidates for his succession won’t run. They haven’t exactly been a bold lot so far. But assume for the sake of argument that there are four or five candidates, and none has an insurmountable advantage.

The Liberal Party transformed its leadership-selection process for the 2013 race: preferential vote among “supporters.” Supporters didn’t need any record of involvement with the party, didn’t need to pledge any support, didn’t need to pay a dime in return for voting rights. Whee! Populist rush: 300,000 people registered as supporters, 130,000 voted. Trudeau won overwhelmingly on the first ballot. Of course: he was the only candidate most people voting in the contest had ever heard of.

After a big defeat, or with such a defeat looming, figure far less than half as many people would be involved next time. Say, very generously, 40,000 supporters.

How hard would it be to rig that contest for mischievous purposes or worse? Probably not hard enough. In a vote open to every random “supporter,” it would take only a few thousand, or tens of thousands, of supporters to capture a major national political party for any cause or faction that might want one.

I traded emails with a former senior Liberal organizer about all this today. Without prompting, this veteran of many leadership contests mentioned the need to “ensure… that groups not Liberal-friendly are not organizing to disrupt the democratic process within the Party.” Those groups could include supporters of one side in the Israel-Hamas dispute. Or proxies for a hostile regime. Or pro-life or anti-MAID or anti-vaccine groups. Or practical jokers: Could the process as currently constituted block a write-in campaign for Doris Day?

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Net zero’s cost-benefit ratio is crazy high

Media / 8 hours ago

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Bjorn Lomborg

Net zero’s cost-benefit ratio is crazy high

Published on April 22, 2025

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Bjørn Lomborg

The best academic estimates show that over the century, policies to achieve net zero would cost every person on Earth the equivalent of more than CAD $4,000 every year. Of course, most people in poor countries cannot afford anywhere near this. If the cost falls solely on the rich world, the price-tag adds up to almost $30,000 (CAD) per person, per year, over the century.

Canada has made a legal commitment to achieve “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050. Back in 2015, then-Prime Minister Trudeau promised that climate action will “create jobs and economic growth” and the federal government insists it will create a “strong economy.” The truth is that the net zero policy generates vast costs and very little benefit—and Canada would be better off changing direction.

Achieving net zero carbon emissions is far more daunting than politicians have ever admitted. Canada is nowhere near on track. Annual Canadian CO₂ emissions have increased 20 per cent since 1990. In the time that Trudeau was prime minister, fossil fuel energy supply actually increased over 11 per cent. Similarly, the share of fossil fuels in Canada’s total energy supply (not just electricity) increased from 75 per cent in 2015 to 77 per cent in 2023.

Over the same period, the switch from coal to gas, and a tiny 0.4 percentage point increase in the energy from solar and wind, has reduced annual CO₂ emissions by less than three per cent. On that trend, getting to zero won’t take 25 years as the Liberal government promised, but more than 160 years. One study shows that the government’s current plan which won’t even reach net-zero will cost Canada a quarter of a million jobs, seven per cent lower GDP and wages on average $8,000 lower.

Globally, achieving net-zero will be even harder. Remember, Canada makes up about 1.5 per cent of global CO₂ emissions, and while Canada is already rich with plenty of energy, the world’s poor want much more energy.

In order to achieve global net-zero by 2050, by 2030 we would already need to achieve the equivalent of removing the combined emissions of China and the United States — every year. This is in the realm of science fiction.

The painful Covid lockdowns of 2020 only reduced global emissions by about six per cent. To achieve net zero, the UN points out that we would need to have doubled those reductions in 2021, tripled them in 2022, quadrupled them in 2023, and so on. This year they would need to be sextupled, and by 2030 increased 11-fold. So far, the world hasn’t even managed to start reducing global carbon emissions, which last year hit a new record.

Data from both the International Energy Agency and the US Energy Information Administration give added cause for skepticism. Both organizations foresee the world getting more energy from renewables: an increase from today’s 16 per cent to between one-quarter to one-third of all primary energy by 2050. But that is far from a transition. On an optimistically linear trend, this means we’re a century or two away from achieving 100 percent renewables.

Politicians like to blithely suggest the shift away from fossil fuels isn’t unprecedented, because in the past we transitioned from wood to coal, from coal to oil, and from oil to gas. The truth is, humanity hasn’t made a real energy transition even once. Coal didn’t replace wood but mostly added to global energy, just like oil and gas have added further additional energy. As in the past, solar and wind are now mostly adding to our global energy output, rather than replacing fossil fuels.

Indeed, it’s worth remembering that even after two centuries, humanity’s transition away from wood is not over. More than two billion mostly poor people still depend on wood for cooking and heating, and it still provides about 5 per cent of global energy.

Like Canada, the world remains fossil fuel-based, as it delivers more than four-fifths of energy. Over the last half century, our dependence has declined only slightly from 87 per cent to 82 per cent, but in absolute terms we have increased our fossil fuel use by more than 150 per cent. On the trajectory since 1971, we will reach zero fossil fuel use some nine centuries from now, and even the fastest period of recent decline from 2014 would see us taking over three centuries.

Global warming will create more problems than benefits, so achieving net-zero would see real benefits. Over the century, the average person would experience benefits worth $700 (CAD) each year.

But net zero policies will be much more expensive. The best academic estimates show that over the century, policies to achieve net zero would cost every person on Earth the equivalent of more than CAD $4,000 every year. Of course, most people in poor countries cannot afford anywhere near this. If the cost falls solely on the rich world, the price-tag adds up to almost $30,000 (CAD) per person, per year, over the century.

Every year over the 21st century, costs would vastly outweigh benefits, and global costs would exceed benefits by over CAD 32 trillion each year.

We would see much higher transport costs, higher electricity costs, higher heating and cooling costs and — as businesses would also have to pay for all this — drastic increases in the price of food and all other necessities. Just one example: net-zero targets would likely increase gas costs some two-to-four times even by 2030, costing consumers up to $US52.6 trillion. All that makes it a policy that just doesn’t make sense—for Canada and for the world.

Bjørn Lomborg

Media

CBC retracts false claims about residential schools after accusing Rebel News of ‘misinformation’

Published on April 22, 2025

Todayville

From LifeSiteNews

By Clare Marie Merkowsky

CBC has issued a correction after falsely accused Rebel News of spreading misinformation while itself promoting the false claim that remains of Indigenous children were found in unmarked graves at residential schools.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) has issued a correction after blaming Rebel News of “misinformation” while spreading false information itself.

On April 17, CBC corrected a comment from chief political correspondent Rosemary Barton who accused Rebel News reporter Drea Humphrey of spreading “misinformation,” while repeating the false claim that bodies have been found in unmarked graves at Indigenous residential schools.

“Yes, there have been remains of Indigenous children found in various places across the country,” Barton falsely stated during a live broadcast following the French-language federal election leaders’ debate.

Her comment was in reference to New Democratic Leader (NDP) Jagmeet Singh refusing to answer a reporter’s question whether he would condemn the rash of church burnings and acts of vandalism across Canada.

“In this case you saw Mr. Singh, and this has been his position for some time, to refuse to answer questions,” Barton said during the live stream.

“Rebel News in particular traffics in misinformation, lack of facts, and as you heard in that question, which was woven with some truth and some things that weren’t true,” she claimed.

“Yes, there have been burnings of Christian, Catholic churches,” she admitted.

“Yes, there have been remains of Indigenous children found in various places around the country, which she misrepresented,” Barton falsely stated.

Despite mass excavations, there have still been no mass graves discovered at any residential schools across Canada, but politicians and media continue to promote the false narrative.

However, even in their correction statement, CBC failed to mention that, to date, no human remains have been discovered.

“As CBC News has reported on multiple occasions, what several Indigenous communities across Canada have discovered on the sites of some former residential schools are potential burial sites or unmarked graves,” the statement read.

However, CBC is now well known for pushing the false narrative that hundreds of children were buried and disregarded by Catholic priests and nuns who ran some of the schools. As a consequence of that false narrative, since 2021, over 100 churches have been burned or vandalized across Canada in seeming retribution.

Indeed, in addition to perpetuating the “mass graves” narrative, media and politicians have even threatened to punish those who oppose it. In October 2024, CBC ran a story which suggested that “residential school denialism” should be criminalized.