Category: Chairman’s Desk

There is nothing small about Alberta. It is a towering place, of mountain peaks and prairie sky. It is a powerhouse of energy and agriculture and business. Just for good measure, it also throws the country’s most famous party every July.

So why, in such a bold place, is a Captain Canada MIA? I refer, of course, to how quiet federalists have been in recent months, as a faction in the province agitates for independence.

We know something about referendums in this country. In 1995, Quebec came within a whisper of leaving. A one-point gap separated “Oui” and “Non.”

It was Jean Charest, then the national leader of the Progressive Conservatives, who got the federalists over the line. He went out and made the case for Canada, delivering impassioned speeches across the province. There was fire in his belly. He pulled his Canadian passport from his jacket pocket and waved it with pride at rallies.

The messenger matters

Canada is whole thanks to him. So, we know messengers matter.

This brings us to the big question. Who will be the voice for federalism in Alberta? Who will wrap themselves in the flag and champion unity with conviction and gravitas? There is one person who has the chops and the most to gain from taking on this role. I’m looking at you, Jason Kenney.

Timing is everything in politics. It’s been nearly four years since Kenney resigned as premier of Alberta, beset by a collapse in his approval ratings and opponents who smelled blood. (Lately, serving as premier of Alberta has been a thankless job. Not since Ralph Klein has someone won a second term.) Kenney’s had time to reflect. To rally.

If there’s anything worth returning to centre stage for, it’s the future of the country.

Kenney has lived nearly his entire life in Canada’s four Western provinces and calls Alberta home. In his 20s, he began his career as an anti-tax crusader with the nascent Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

You’ve probably heard of it. That’s because he turned it into one of the most successful advocacy groups in the country. During this time, he also happened to get on a first-name basis with many of the same folks who are now out there preaching the Alberta First gospel.

Make no mistake. Knowing your opponents is the first step in triumphing over them.

As a Member of Parliament and later as an influential cabinet minister under Stephen Harper, Kenney was everywhere, all at once. He is hyper-competent. He suffers no fools. He offers clear-eyed assessments.

Then, let’s recall how effective Kenney was in 2016, when he set out to unite the right in Alberta. He drove back and forth across the province in a blue Dodge Ram, visiting all 87 constituencies. He won the UCP leadership, then a majority government in 2019. This is someone who knows how to build a movement. He knows how to reach people.

A challenge Kenney can rise to

If Kenney and his truck were to hit the road again this summer, not all voters would be thrilled to see him. But that’s a challenge he can rise to. Kenney has a bone-deep understanding of what’s shifting in Alberta. He’s been on the receiving end of it. And we learn more from our losses than our wins.

In an interesting twist, Kenney’s more social conservative views — which have put him at odds with Canadian public opinion over the years — play okay in rural Alberta. They take a backseat anyway when the question is simply, “Should Alberta remain a province of Canada?”

Like I said, timing is everything and the time is now. Danielle Smith’s referendum on whether to have a referendum is set for Oct. 19. The separatist forces have been preparing for this. They’ve assembled volunteers and circulated white papers. They’re also, shamefully, aided by the possession of the personal data of 2.9 million electors in the province.

Where Kenney has always shone, where no one can touch him, is when he’s campaigning. He’s a pro. He can speak to anyone — including frustrated federalists — and turn out votes. So, my message to the messenger is this: You have a next act in you and it will be your most important yet.

The red Chanel dress that Nicole Kidman wore to this year’s Met Gala took a team of artisans 800 hours to make. It took about eight seconds for a chorus of critics to line up and decry the entire evening as obscene.

I see things differently.

Make no mistake: Jeff Bezos buying his way into fashion’s biggest night is a particular kind of provocation right now. It comes on the heels of his Venice wedding. His wife’s 10-minute joyride to space. All this while ordinary people are watching their grocery bills rise faster than their paycheques. The protests that sprung up in New York to draw attention to the gap between Bezos’s lifestyle and the lives of his Amazon employees were compelling.

But the case against the Met Gala — and against the broader culture of big-money philanthropy it stands for — collapses the moment you examine it seriously.

This is not abstract for me. I am alive because of philanthropy. The treatments that helped me to beat cancer were funded, in meaningful part, by people whose cheques cleared long before I needed them. So, when the same impulse that equips a cancer ward with the latest technology gets dismissed as vanity because some of it shows up on a red carpet, I take it personally.

We do not get to celebrate the philanthropy that feels noble and mock the philanthropy that feels frivolous. Same world. Same donors. The same impulse to put a name on something that lasts.

We like to imagine that art transcends money. It doesn’t. It just depends on it quietly.

The Met Gala runs on the model that built the Sistine Chapel. The Medici, the Sforzas, a string of popes — wealthy families and powerful institutions paid artists to make beautiful things in exchange for prestige and the cultural immortality of a name on a masterpiece. Botticelli had a sponsor. Leonardo had a sponsor. Michelangelo had a very demanding sponsor with a chapel ceiling to fill.

It’s worth noting the critics of those patrons said precisely what the critics of the Met Gala say now: What vanity! What excess!

Five centuries on, Bezos ponies up a reported $10 million (U.S.) to sponsor the Met Gala. The Costume Institute has a record-breaking night. And then a world-class exhibit opens that more than a million people will visit. (The same cannot be said of his superyacht.)

The alternative here isn’t a more just world. It’s a less beautiful one. Because the gowns at the Met Gala are art. Wearable sculpture. The snobbery cuts both ways — painting gets reverence, fashion gets eye-rolls — even though fashion is the most democratic art form we have. It touches every life and encodes every culture. The Met Gala is, every year, an argument that fashion belongs in the same conversation as Botticelli. And it is the visible end of a culture of private giving that steps in when the public purse is empty.

In my role as the Chancellor of OCAD University, I see firsthand that our cultural institutions are operating in a far harder environment than a generation ago. Endowments are smaller. Operating grants are flat or shrinking in real terms. And government, at every level, is wrestling with socio-economic pressures and growing uncertainty. If we want our cultural institutions to keep their doors open and their collections growing, we need more wealthy Canadians showing up, not fewer. We need them on boards. We need them at galas. We need their names on hospital wings, and scholarships, and research labs.

Some Canadians may find this a tough pill to swallow. This country has never made up its mind about the wealthy. We are uncomfortable with their existence and uncomfortable with their absence. We tax their toys, we lecture them at budget time, and then we are quietly relieved when they cover the gap between what our public institutions need and what our public budgets are willing to provide.

Philanthropy is not a betrayal of the public good. It is how the public good gets built when the public purse is stretched.

Spectacle, properly directed, is one of the oldest tools we have for funding the things worth keeping.

Use it. Don’t sneer at it.

Let me be clear: on the underlying question, Doug Ford was right.

Every serious executive in this country, every CEO running a national operation, every big-city mayor, every premier who has to be in Thunder Bay in the morning and Windsor by dinner understands the same elementary truth. Time is the one resource you cannot manufacture. And that’s why a plane is not a perk. It is a tool. The prime minister has one. The federal cabinet uses it. Major bank CEOs have access to one. Heads of government across the Western world have one. The reason is not vanity. The reason is that a leader who spends 11 hours on a commercial flight with a layover at Pearson is not leading.

Ontario is the economic engine of Confederation. Its premier runs a government larger, by GDP, than all but a handful of countries. Ford’s own stated rationale: that the province is geographically vast, that single-prop aircraft are the grim alternative for northern travel, that a secure aircraft matters when you’re flying into hostile Trump-era trade meetings, is not unreasonable. It is, in fact, precisely the case that should have been made to taxpayers before the purchase, not after it.

That was the mistake. Not the plane. The ambush.

But here’s what’s important: when Ford realized the politics had turned past the point of recovery, he did exactly the right thing. He killed the decision. The plane went back to Bombardier. The full $28.9 million came back to the province. No loss to the taxpayer. He apologized for how the transaction was rolled out, he refused to apologize for the underlying logic, and he moved on. Total elapsed time from announcement to reversal: four days.

He ended the game.

I’ve just written a book on crisis management, and if there is a single lesson drawn from decades of watching leaders either survive their bad days or be destroyed by them, it is this one. When a story turns, you have one job: compress the news cycle. Get ahead of it. Deny it oxygen. The single worst thing a political leader can do when a decision has gone sideways is to defend the indefensible one news day at a time, bleeding credibility in daily increments until the only remaining question is why it took so long to do what was obvious from the start.

Think of the leaders who got this right. Think of the ones who didn’t.

Equifax waited a month to acknowledge its 2017 data breach. By the time executives spoke, the story had already hardened into “cover-up,” and they spent years in front of Congress paying for that hesitation. Ticketmaster, more recently, waited so long to disclose a massive hack that the hackers themselves broke the news. Buckingham Palace operated for decades under the “never complain, never explain” rule— right up until the former prince Andrew’s behaviour around his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein curdled into something the Crown decided there could no longer tolerate as it had become something from which they could not recover.

In every case, the leader or institution believed that holding the line was the safer play.

In every case, they were dead wrong.

The fact is that the modern news cycle does not reward stubbornness. It rewards clarity. A bad decision acknowledged quickly is a one-day story. A bad decision defended becomes a week. A bad decision defended badly becomes a referendum on your judgment itself.

Ford, to his credit, saw where the story was going and changed course before the narrative could calcify. Over the weekend, the calls flooded his cellphone. The “gravy plane” label was already airborne. The auditor general was about to be asked to investigate. By Sunday, he had agreed to sell. By Wednesday, he confirmed the money was back in the treasury. The oxygen was cut.

Make no mistake: There is a political cost to reversing course. Interim Liberal leader John Fraser is already calling him out of touch. Opposition leader Marit Stiles is pushing for an audit anyway. The penguin line will get quoted for weeks. None of it matters much. The damage from a four-day climbdown is an order of magnitude smaller than the damage from a four-month defence.

This is the thing most politicians never learn, and the thing Ford, despite the pundits eyerolling about his style, has learned better than most of his peers. He governs with the same instinct he campaigns. Read the voter. Respect the voter. When you are offside the voter, stop being offside the voter. Don’t explain. Don’t litigate. Move.

Here’s the thing: the premier was right about the substance of the plane. He was wrong about the plane’s politics and the communications around it. And when he figured out which of those things mattered more to the people who elected him, he acted on it in a weekend.

That is not weakness. That is discipline.

Other political leaders, watching from their capitals across the country, should take note. The premier who spent years being caricatured as impulsive just executed a textbook reversal — no money lost, no lingering contract, no dragged-out defence. The jet is back with Bombardier. The story is running out of runway.

And the rest of Ontario’s agenda, the one that actually matters to the people who elected him, gets to move forward.

Doug Ford read the voter – then moved on. That’s the story.

By the time this column appears in print, the Liberal party will have wrapped up its convention in Montreal.

It promises to have been quite the celebration, and with good reason. The party is riding high in the polls, drawing support from unexpected quarters, and, by all accounts, is on track to secure a majority government following this week’s byelections. It has all the makings of a victory parade.

Cue the rain.

With this momentum, the national media has begun poking holes in the Liberal “big tent,” questioning whether it can plausibly accommodate politicians with sharply divergent ideological histories.

These are valid concerns. But let’s not stray too far from the big picture.

Prime Minister Mark Carney has engineered a remarkable political turnaround for the Liberal party. The fact it is being reshaped into a broader, more ideologically elastic coalition should not come as a surprise. Nor should the willingness to welcome floor crossers.

Make no mistake: a majority is worth securing. Beyond the basic stability of not living vote to vote, control over parliamentary committees provides the government with the ability to set agendas, manage scrutiny, and advance legislation with far greater certainty.

But majorities, especially those assembled in unconventional ways, come with their own challenges. And mitigating these challenges depends on the hard, unglamorous work of caucus management.

It is not a headline-grabbing skill. But it is an essential one. Because the effort required to attract floor crossers and secure a governing majority can quickly turn pyrrhic if it produces a caucus that is unwieldy, internally inconsistent, or prone to fracture.

Prime Minister Mark Carney says any MP who joins his caucus must adhere to Liberal values, including support for abortion and LGBTQ rights.

What these floor crossings ultimately reveal is something simple: politicians are people just like us. And in recent months, we’ve seen several make the calculation that influence in government is preferable to obscurity in opposition. But that same instinct reveals something less flattering, a willingness, in some cases, to abandon former allegiances for a blend of conviction, opportunity and self-interest.

In a slim majority Parliament, that matters. Backbench MPs, particularly those with independent streaks or divergent ideological roots, can quickly become centres of leverage. At the same time, slim majorities can, in some ways, be easier to manage than large ones. Big majorities breed complacency. They also prove the adage that idle hands are the devil’s workshop. Smaller ones demand discipline. They require focus. They force governments to pay attention, both to their opponents and, critically, to themselves.

And it is precisely that discipline that will now be tested.

Because this is, at its core, a test of political leadership for Carney. It’s not economic stewardship or policy design, but rather the craft of holding together a coalition of competing interests, personalities and ambitions.

It is a skill every great prime minister has had to master. Jean Chrétien, for example, managed to keep both “orange or red Liberals” and “blue Liberals” around the same cabinet table, no small feat. Brian Mulroney, for his part, held together a coalition of Quebec nationalists and Western conservatives long enough to deliver transformational change. Eventually, those tensions proved unsustainable. But that is precisely the point. Managing the internal politics of a party riding high is every bit as important as managing the external political battlefield.

Which brings us back to the present moment.

The differences between figures like former Ontario NDP deputy leader Doly Begum (who might well be elected as a Liberal MP in Scarborough Southwest this week) and newly minted Liberal Marilyn Gladu are not trivial. They are real. And over time, they will need to be reconciled, managed, or, at the very least, contained.

History suggests that is easier said than done. And it is in moments of strength that these pressures begin to build.

Because when the polls are strong, when momentum is on your side, and when your opponents are preoccupied with their own internal divisions, the greatest risk is not from outside. It is from within.

History, after all, is littered with governments undone not by their opponents, but by themselves.

By now, it’s clear that no matter what kind of resolution U.S. President Donald Trump attempts to impose on his latest misadventure in Iran, this conflict and its global repercussions will be far from over.

More likely, it will resemble George W. Bush’s infamous “mission accomplished” moment aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln in 2003: a premature declaration of victory that gave way to years of prolonged conflict, with consequences that are still unfolding today.

Whatever branding Trump chooses, it won’t stick.

But the economic consequences will.

As any reasonable observer can see, the ripple effects of this conflict will continue to move through the global economy and, like countries the world over, will land squarely in Canadian households in the form of higher prices.

Canada may be less exposed to oil shocks than it was in the 1970s and 80s, but when prices rise at the pump, the impact is immediate and unavoidable for consumers. And those pressures rarely stay contained. They spill over.

As BMO chief economist Doug Porter explains, higher energy costs cascade through the economy, raising the cost of transporting goods, producing packaging and moving food from farm to table. For example, with the Gulf region playing a key role in the production and shipment of fertilizer inputs, the conflict will increase costs for farmers, compounding pressure throughout the food supply chain.

And this is hitting a market already under strain. Statistics Canada reported food inflation spiking to 7.3 per cent in January, driven by supply constraints and persistent pressure on staples like coffee and beef.

This may not amount to a full-blown recession or stagflation. But that misses the point.

These are price shocks that hit the essentials of our everyday lives, the goods Canadians cannot substitute away from. Groceries. Fuel. The basics.

And that is where political risk lives.

Voters notice these pressures immediately because they experience them daily. And as history repeatedly shows, sustained affordability pain quickly translates into political frustration and then into blame.

That creates both risks and opportunities for the Carney government.

It is an opportunity to demonstrate that they understand the moment and are prepared to act decisively on affordability in ways that the Trudeau government was too slow to do.

The spectre of an affordability crisis should be treated the same way a political opponent is: define it before it defines you.

The Trudeau government hesitated too long to signal urgency on affordability amid rising inflation and global price instability. Pierre Poilievre filled that vacuum, owned the issue, and nearly rode it all the way to 24 Sussex.

The current government cannot afford to repeat that mistake, particularly as we head into what could be a difficult spring and summer economically.

But they are not without options.

On fuel, the federal government could offer temporary relief through adjustments to the excise tax or targeted rebates, even if only for a defined period.

On food, it must work with provinces and industry to reduce interprovincial trade barriers and provide targeted support along the agricultural supply chain to ease cost pressures before they reach consumers.

None of these measures will be a silver bullet.

But in politics, as in economics, marginal gains matter.

Even modest relief signals the government is paying attention to what matters to most Canadians. It demonstrates that the government is engaged, responsive and focused on the daily pressures Canadians are actually feeling.

And just as importantly, it prevents the opposition from owning the issue unchallenged.

Because in the end, affordability is not an abstract economic concept. It is a daily lived experience. Governments that fail to act early and visibly with plans to deal with it rarely get a second chance.