Connect with us
[the_ad id="89560"]

National

Paul Wells: The Second Finance Ministers Club

Published

12 minute read

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?”

This newsletter is my full-time job. Paid subscriptions at $5 a month or $50 a year are a great way to read all my work here.


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.

Share


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?

This newsletter is my full-time job. Paid subscriptions at $5 a month

or $50 a year are a great way to read all my work here.

Paul Wells
Send the gift of Paul Wells this holiday season

Business

Canadian Police Raid Sophisticated Vancouver Fentanyl Labs, But Insist Millions of Pills Not Destined for U.S.

Published on

Sam Cooper

Mounties say labs outfitted with high-grade chemistry equipment and a trained chemist reveal transnational crime groups are advancing in technical sophistication and drug production capacity

Amid a growing trade war between Washington and Beijing, Canada—targeted alongside Mexico and China for special tariffs related to Chinese fentanyl supply chains—has dismantled a sophisticated network of fentanyl labs across British Columbia and arrested an academic lab chemist, the RCMP said Thursday.

At a press conference in Vancouver, senior investigators stood behind seized lab equipment and fentanyl supplies, telling reporters the operation had prevented millions of potentially lethal pills from reaching the streets.

“This interdiction has prevented several million potentially lethal doses of fentanyl from being produced and distributed across Canada,” said Cpl. Arash Seyed. But the presence of commercial-grade laboratory equipment at each of the sites—paired with the arrest of a suspect believed to have formal training in chemistry—signals an evolution in the capabilities of organized crime networks, with “progressively enhanced scientific and technical expertise among transnational organized crime groups involved in the production and distribution of illicit drugs,” Seyed added.

This investigation is ongoing, while the seized drugs, precursor chemicals, and other evidence continue to be processed, police said.

Recent Canadian data confirms the country has become an exporter of fentanyl, and experts identify British Columbia as the epicenter of clandestine labs supplied by Chinese precursors and linked to Mexican cartel distributors upstream.

In a statement that appears politically responsive to the evolving Trump trade threats, Assistant Commissioner David Teboul said, “There continues to be no evidence, in this case and others, that these labs are producing fentanyl for exportation into the United States.”

In late March, during coordinated raids across the suburban municipalities of Pitt Meadows, Mission, Aldergrove, Langley, and Richmond, investigators took down three clandestine fentanyl production sites.

The labs were described by the RCMP as “equipped with specialized chemical processing equipment often found in academic and professional research facilities.” Photos released by authorities show stainless steel reaction vessels, industrial filters, and what appear to be commercial-scale tablet presses and drying trays—pointing to mass production capabilities.

The takedown comes as Canada finds itself in the crosshairs of intensifying geopolitical tension.

Fentanyl remains the leading cause of drug-related deaths in Canada, with toxic supply chains increasingly linked to hybrid transnational networks involving Chinese chemical brokers and domestic Canadian producers.

RCMP said the sprawling B.C. lab probe was launched in the summer of 2023, with teams initiating an investigation into the importation of unregulated chemicals and commercial laboratory equipment that could be used for synthesizing illicit drugs including fentanyl, MDMA, and GHB.

The Bureau is a reader-supported publication.

To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Invite your friends and earn rewards

If you enjoy The Bureau, share it with your friends and earn rewards when they subscribe.

Invite Friends

Continue Reading

2025 Federal Election

Carney needs to cancel gun ban and buyback

Published on

 Gage Haubrich

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation is calling on Liberal Leader Mark Carney to stop the gun ban and buyback after he announced he would  continue with the scheme.

“Carney needs to scrap this plan and stop wasting taxpayer’s money on it,” said Gage Haubrich, CTF Prairie Director. “Planning to spend potentially billions of dollars on a program that is not going to make Canadians safer is a waste of money.

“Carney needs to be cancelling this wasteful plan, not doubling down on it.”

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is promising to get rid of Ottawa’s gun bans.

The government said the buyback would cost taxpayers $200 million in 2019. Only buying back the guns could cost up to $756 million, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer. Government documents show that the buyback is now likely to cost almost $2 billion.

The banned gun list includes more than 2,000 different types of firearms.

Every year since the gun ban was announced in 2020, violent gun crime in Canada has increased.

New Zealand conducted a similar, but more extensive, gun ban and buyback in 2019. New Zealand had 1,216 violent firearm offenses in 2023. That’s 349 more offences than the year before the buyback.

Experts also agree that the buyback won’t make Canadians any safer.

The National Police Federation, the union representing the RCMP, says Ottawa’s buyback “diverts extremely important personnel, resources, and funding away from addressing the more immediate and growing threat of criminal use of illegal firearms.”

“Buyback programs are largely ineffective at reducing gun violence, in large part because the people who participate in such programs are not likely to use those guns to commit violence,” said University of Toronto professor Jooyoung Lee

“Experts say that this gun ban and buyback won’t do anything to make Canadians safer,” Haubrich said. “Carney needs to listen to the experts and commit to cancelling this scheme before it costs taxpayers any more money.”

Continue Reading

Trending

X