National
Paul Wells: The Second Finance Ministers Club

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.
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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2025 Federal Election
Don’t let the Liberals fool you on electric cars

Dan McTeague
“The Liberals, hoodwinked by the ideological (and false) narrative that EVs are better for the environment, want to force you to replace the car or truck you love with one you can’t afford which doesn’t do what you need it to do.”
The Liberals’ carbon tax ploy is utterly shameless. For years they’ve been telling us that the Carbon Tax was a hallmark of Canadian patriotism, that it was the best way to save the planet, that it was really a “price on pollution,” which would ultimately benefit the little guy, in the form of a rebate in which Canadians would get back all the money they paid in, and more!
Meanwhile big, faceless Captain Planet villain corporations — who are out there wrecking the planet for the sheer fun of it! — will shoulder the whole burden.
But then, as people started to feel the hit to their wallets and polling on the topic fell off a cliff, the Liberals’ newly anointed leader — the environmentalist fanatic Mark Carney — threw himself a Trumpian signing ceremony, at which he and the party (at least rhetorically) kicked the carbon tax to the curb and started patting themselves on the back for saving Canada from the foul beast. “Don’t ask where it came from,” they seem to be saying. “The point is, it’s gone.”
Of course, it’s not. The Consumer Carbon Tax has been zeroed out, at least for the moment, not repealed. Meanwhile, the Industrial Carbon Tax, on business and industry, is not only being left in place, it’s being talked up in exactly the same terms as the Consumer Tax was.
No matter that it will continue to go up at the same rate as the Consumer Tax would have, such that it will be indistinguishable from the Consumer Tax by 2030. And no matter that the burden of that tax will ultimately be passed down to working Canadians in the form of higher prices.
Of course, when that happens, Carney & Co will probably blame Donald Trump, rather than their own crooked tax regime.
Yes, it is shameless. But it also puts Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives in a bind. They’ve been proclaiming their intention to “Axe the Tax” for quite some time now. On the energy file, it was pretty much all you could get them to talk about. So much so that I was worried that upon entering government, they might just go after the low hanging fruit, repeal the Carbon Tax, and move on to other things, leaving the rest of the rotten Net-Zero superstructure in place.
But now, since the Liberals beat them to it (or claim they did,) the Conservatives are left grasping for a straightforward, signature policy which they can use to differentiate themselves from their opponents.
Poilievre’s recently announced intention to kill the Industrial Carbon Tax is welcome, especially at a time when Canadian business is under a tariff threat from both the U.S. and China. But that requires some explanation, and as the old political saying goes, “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.”
There is one policy change however, which comes to mind as a potential replacement. It’s bold, it would make the lives of Canadians materially better, and it’s so deeply interwoven with the “Green” grift of the environmentalist movement of which Mark Carney is so much a part that his party couldn’t possibly bring themselves to steal it.
Pierre Poilievre should pledge to repeal the Liberals’ Electric Vehicle mandate.
The EV mandate is bad policy. It forces Canadians to buy an expensive product — EVs cost more than Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) vehicles even when the federal government was subsidizing their purchase with a taxpayer-funded rebate of $5,000 per vehicle, but that program ran out of money in January and was discontinued. Without that rebate, EVs haven’t a prayer of competing with ICE vehicles.
EVs are particularly ill-suited for Canada. Their batteries are bad at holding a charge in the cold. Even in mild weather, EVs aren’t known for their reliability, a major downside in a country as spread out as ours. Maybe it’ll work out if you live in a big city, but what if you’re in the country? Heaven help you if your EV battery dies when you’re an hour away from everywhere.
Moreover, Canada doesn’t have the infrastructure to support a total replacement of gas-and-diesel driven vehicles with EVs. Our already-strained electrical grid just doesn’t have the capacity to support millions of EVs being plugged in every night. Natural Resources Canada estimates that we will need somewhere in the neighborhood of 450,000 public charging stations to support an entirely electric fleet. At the moment, we have roughly 30,000. That’s a pretty big gap to fill in ten years.
And that’s another fact which doesn’t get nearly as much attention as it should. The law mandates that every new vehicle sold in Canada must be electric by 2035. Maybe that sounded incredibly far in the future when it was passed, but now it’s only ten years away! That’s not a lot of time for these technological problems or cost issues to be resolved.
So the pitch from Poilievre here is simple.
“The Liberals, hoodwinked by the ideological (and false) narrative that EVs are better for the environment, want to force you to replace the car or truck you love with one you can’t afford which doesn’t do what you need it to do. If you vote Conservative, we will fix that, so you will be free to buy the vehicle that meets your needs, whether it’s battery or gas powered, because we trust you to make decisions for yourself. Mark Carney, on the other hand, does not. We won’t just Axe the Tax, we will End the EV Mandate!”
A decade (and counting) of Liberal misrule has saddled this country with a raft of onerous and expensive Net-Zero legislation I’d like to see the Conservative Party campaign against.
These include so-called “Clean Fuel” Regulations, Emissions Caps, their war on pipelines and Natural Gas terminals, not to mention Bill C-59, which bans businesses from touting the environmental benefits of their work if it doesn’t meet a government-approved standard.
But the EV mandate is bad for Canada, and terrible for Canadians. A pledge to repeal it would be an excellent start.
Dan McTeague is President of Canadians for Affordable Energy.
2025 Federal Election
MORE OF THE SAME: Mark Carney Admits He Will Not Repeal the Liberal’s Bill C-69 – The ‘No Pipelines’ Bill

From EnergyNow.Ca
Mark Carney on Tuesday explicitly stated the Liberals will not repeal their controversial Bill C-69, legislation that prevents new pipelines being built.
Carney has been campaigning on boosting the economy and the “need to act forcefully” against President Donald Trump and his tariffs by harvesting Canada’s wealth of natural resources — until it all fell flat around him when he admitted he actually had no intention to build pipelines at all.
When a reporter asked Carney how he plans to maintain Bill C-69 while simultaneously building infrastructure in Canada, Carney replied, “we do not plan to repeal Bill C-69.”
“What we have said, formally at a First Ministers meeting, is that we will move for projects of national interest, to remove duplication in terms of environmental assessments and other approvals, and we will follow the principle of ‘one project, one approval,’ to move forward from that.”
“What’s essential is to work at this time of crisis, to come together as a nation, all levels of government, to focus on those projects that are going to make material differences to our country, to Canadian workers, to our future.”
“The federal government is looking to lead with that, by saying we will accept provincial environmental assessments, for example clean energy projects or conventional energy projects, there’s many others that could be there.”
“We will always ensure these projects move forward in partnership with First Nations.”
Tory leader Pierre Poilievre was quick to respond to Carney’s admission that he has no intention to build new pipelines. “This Liberal law blocked BILLIONS of dollars of investment in oil & gas projects, pipelines, LNG plants, mines, and so much more — all of which would create powerful paychecks for our people,” wrote Poilievre on X.
“A fourth Liberal term will block even more and keep us reliant on the US,” he wrote, urging people to vote Conservative.
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