Category: Chairman’s Desk

In the aftermath of a major historical event, the causative chain that produced it is often shrouded in mystery. The real drivers are almost always impossible to discover in real time. Clarity only emerges decades later, when long-classified documents are finally released from the archives, illuminating what truly transpired.

But sometimes, history doesn’t make us wait. This is undeniably true of the recent announcement by our 23rd Prime Minister to resign his office this past week.

No sane human being on planet Earth is asking: “Why?” or “How?” They’re asking, “What the hell took him so long?” And maybe that’s the question only the historians can solve. But, at the moment, it doesn’t matter in the least.

What matters is that this country is staring down the barrel of existential threats. And to appreciate their magnitude, we only need to put two things side by side.

One. We are facing the greatest threat to our sovereignty and prosperity in generations.

Two. We are currently led by a lame-duck Prime Minister who the majority of Canadians have exactly zero confidence in to lead us — let alone guide us through the storm. Whose perhaps final decision of consequence — to prorogue Parliament — has plunged our nation into a state of paralysis.

Trudeau’s resignation has left a vacuum for genuine, popularly supported, leadership in this country.

So, what happens next? Who steps up in this moment of historic challenge?

It’s a painfully familiar feeling: just when you need something the very most, you find it’s hiding from you. Right now, I wish I meant my car keys.

The simple fact is that in our hour of greatest need, we need our greatest people to lead us. And in the wake of the fallout to Justin Trudeau’s resignation and Trump’s very real threat of economic war, this is what concerns me: that many of our best and brightest will succumb to the temptation to bury their heads in the sand and pretend this is all a dream.

It’s not. It’s anything but a dream. And nothing is a foregone conclusion.

Leadership is not a title; it’s behaviour. It is how you act. It is what you do. And it is what you are prepared to sacrifice for the good of your country.

Fortunately, across jurisdictional and partisan lines we’ve seen examples of just that. Premier Doug Ford is going into the snake pit on Fox News. Finance Minister Dominic LeBlanc has decided it’s better to focus his attention on the threat of U.S. tariffs than his personal ambitions to become Liberal leader.  Former central banker Mark Carney, on the other hand, who could certainly be spending his time doing something less grueling than politics is expected to throw his hat into the ring. These are commendable actions, but we need far more — and not just from our politicians.

In a recent interview with Jordan Peterson, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre underlined that Canadians cannot assume, “by simply voting in an election that … all the problems are going to reverse instantaneously.”

That’s neither cynicism nor mere expectation management. It’s an acknowledgment of reality. National challenges aren’t solved at the ballot box alone — they’re solved by extraordinary people stepping up, not just in politics, but in every corner of public life.

Trump himself said he does not care who wins our next federal election. What he does care about is pretty clear: beating us.

That kind of pressure can drive a country into despair, numbing it with a fatalistic sense of inevitability. Or it can do the opposite. It can light a fire. It can inspire resilience, defiance, and the will to fight back.

The most critical question we ought to be asking in this historic moment is not whether Trudeau deserved the slings and arrows or how his legacy will take shape. That will be a rigidly partisan, tiresome tug of war.

The real question is where do we go from here and who rises to the occasion?

“History never looks like history when you are living through it,” so the saying goes. Except when it does. This week, many Canadians woke up to the realization that they are living through a turning point. The Prime Minister’s resignation isn’t the end of the story. It’s the prologue to one of the most challenging chapters in our history.

Now comes the hard part.

More than 200 years ago, Edmund Burke penned the definitive defence of tradition. In it, he denounced the revolution still burning in France and endorsed the monarchy at home.

In response, across the ocean, Thomas Paine delivered a famous rebuke: “He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird.”

While the ideological lines in the sand have shifted radically over the centuries, Paine’s observation serves to perfectly describe recent attempts by left-wing commentators to try and make sense of the seismic political events of 2024. Most notably, Kamala Harris’s disastrous defeat and Justin Trudeau’s slow motion car wreck of ever-collapsing support.

The line Paine draws is between the superficial and the substantive. And it’s one that continues to elude many progressives today, as they stumble through campaigns and misdiagnose the roots of their political decline.

Take, for example, the convenient fiction that resurfaces in Canada’s progressive circles every few years: the notion that any shift toward the Conservative party and away from the “safe” shores of the Liberal party is the result of an imported American conspiracy.

It’s the familiar bogeyman of “dangerous U.S. political trends” seeping into Canada’s supposedly idyllic, progressive landscape. If it sounds unconvincing and lazy, that’s because it is.

The very latest buzzword many commentators have latched onto to explain away this shift is “rage.”

Attempting to make sense of the Democratic Party’s devastating loss in the 2024 U.S. presidential race, Rahm Emanuel — current Ambassador to Japan, former Obama chief of staff and a veteran Democratic operative — offered this analysis in a recent Washington Post op-ed:

“Campaigns of joy in an era of rage don’t win elections. When Donald Trump declared, ‘I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution,’ he was channeling a nation’s fury. The online cheerleading for the killer of a health-care insurance CEO in New York City is just more evidence of this seething, populist anger.”

Critics of conservative electoral success use the term “rage” as if it was invented the moment Trump announced his candidacy back in 2016. That he installed into every working-class heart a sense of grievance and alienation that was previously unimaginable.

It’s a fundamentally spurious view. It’s also profoundly ahistorical.

The United States is a country forged in revolutionary rage and repeatedly fractured by it.

Rage is not new.

What is new — or at least more prevalent — is the left’s tendency to pretend that rage is either misplaced or misguided, as if that delegitimizes its presence. In progressive circles, this wilful ignorance is the real problem. And if the left, on both sides of the border, has any hope of regaining their footing in 2025 and beyond, it must stop focusing on the mere presence of rage and start addressing the deeper issues that created it.

Emanuel is right. The politics of joy, at least at the moment, is finished. Finished because it has been exposed as utterly out of step with the realities people are living with. Unless the problems of grocery prices, job insecurity, the collapse of manufacturing and economic inequality vanish overnight, this will continue to hold true.

For all of Donald Trump’s hyperbole and invented injustices, the wellspring of rage he’s tapped into is not.

And the very worst any politician can do going forward is to pretend it’s simply not there.

Let me put it this way. Sometimes, you walk into a room with the wrong speech.

It’s not that you misplaced your notes, it’s rather that your message does not align with what your eyes and ears tell you is happening in the room.

In other words, if you hear people are worried about skyrocketing prices, citing positive macroeconomic statistics from Bay Street won’t reassure them. If they’re upset that everyday items are locked behind glass at the pharmacy, rhyming off crime statistics to suggest “things aren’t so bad” will only alienate them further. And if they’re repeatedly telling you they no longer have faith in institutions, the answer can’t be to go to bat for those same institutions.

This isn’t to say that progressives should fold over on every issue that they’re losing to their conservative counterparts. But they have to start from the basic premise that if people are angry, they have every right to be. And to get to work in articulating a more compelling response to that anger.

For many progressives, that means ripping up the speech, listening committedly and starting from scratch based on what they hear people in the room are actually saying.

The world is not asking for speeches filled with hopeful platitudes; it’s demanding leaders who can diagnose the rot beneath the surface and offer real solutions to the frustrations fuelling people’s anger.

Often in romantic comedies there’s a moment where the protagonist realizes, “he’s just not that into you.” For Canada, that moment has arrived with President-elect Donald Trump.

Trump’s recent public comments and Truth Social post deriding us as the 51st state and referring to our Prime Minister as a governor, said the quiet part out loud. Adding insult to injury is Trump ally Elon Musk referring to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as an “insufferable tool.” Trump isn’t just uninterested — he harbors a deep, visceral dislike, and disrespect for both the Prime Minister and his government — Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland chief among them.

People have good reason to doubt the veracity of campaign promises because they have good, abundant evidence that politicians hardly feel honour-bound to keep them.

For many politicians, making promises you can’t keep is as natural as breathing on the campaign trail. In turn, the electorate is conditioned to expect political promises to be like piñatas: designed to be broken.

But it looks like the Donald Trump’s victory may be ushering in a new era.

Exhibit A — Trump’s statement in his victory address on election night: “We will govern by a simple motto: Promises made, promises kept. We’re going to keep our promises.” (Sharp political observers will remember these exact words helped propel former Ontario Conservative leader Mike Harris to two majority governments in Ontario.)

Fooled once (as if one vast helping of humble pie wasn’t enough), his opponents are now clinging to the refuge of an additional fantasy — that it’s still all smoke and mirrors, that he won’t make good on those seemingly terrifying promises.

There is not a cup of coffee in the world strong enough to wake these people up — because there is absolutely zero indication anyone can reasonably cling to this belief. Trump’s ever-running announcements of yet more appointments of the most rabid, radical elements of the MAGA movement to the highest offices of the land is a shotgun blast to these life rafts. Conspiracy enthusiast RFK Jr. as health secretary. Russia enthusiast Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence. Don’t get me started on Matt Gaetz as attorney general.

But I suspect the deeper point is that the 2024 U.S. election represents a larger, more fundamental sea change — a definitive transition from values-based politics to transaction politics.

And there is no better testimony to this shift than Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the difference between the political movement that first swept him into office and the one that is going to blow him out.

In 2015, Trudeau had it all: celebrity, charisma, charm. But more than anything, he spoke to and represented values. The core tenet of Trudeau-ism was politics done, if only notionally, differently.

In 2024, here’s what is crystal clear: people are sick to death of this. What they want delivered is not the talk but the goods. They want prices down. They want criminals in their neighbourhoods locked up.

Simply put, they want results.

What is clearer still is that Canadians believe Trudeau can’t deliver those results.

So, Trump’s victory will do absolutely nothing for Trudeau’s chances in the next election. In fact, it will do the opposite. It will inspire Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre’s team to keep pursuing the scent they’ve already so sharply picked up: that when life gets tough people desire — not a lecture on political correctness — but a promise on making life affordable.  And more than that, a government that they can count on.

But, more importantly, it should do something else too. It should serve as a wake-up call to those who believe in the utter nonsense that Poilievre won’t do or doesn’t mean what he says. Axe the tax. Shutter the CBC. Cut the GST on new homes. He will do these things. And, critically, he’ll do so faster than you expect.

Having served as an MP since 2004, Poilievre’s long record in the House of Commons is often used against him by his critics. They cast him as a permanent politician. But experience is the ultimate teacher. Don’t forget, the early Stephen Harper years were minority governments, and the agenda was largely frustrated by constant deal-making with the opposition parties.

Eventually, Harper got his majority and Poilievre his seat at the cabinet table. But it took precious time to get there.

So, the point is this: should (and it is essentially certain) the Conservatives win a majority, the new government will face a crucial window of opportunity. A mandate to act and not a minute to spare.

Because the 2024 presidential race has underscored the public appetite for results over rhetoric. And, for my money, it is as clear a signal as any that Poilievre will spend zero time on symbolic gestures and all his time delivering on his promises.