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Category: Chairman’s Desk

It’s time for Joe Biden and Justin Trudeau’s advisers to speak truth to power

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Dr. Martin Luther King said the true measure of an individual is not how they behave in moments of comfort and convenience but how they stand at times of controversy and challenge.

For political advisers, this principle isn’t just part of their job description — it’s the very essence of it.

It is never easy to speak truth to power, and it is even more difficult in the face of genuine competing priorities that pit your allegiance to a candidate against your loyalties to your party and your duty to your country.

And yet, this is precisely the spot those who work with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and U.S. President Joe Biden find themselves in. Whether you agree with their politics or not is immaterial. These people have chosen to go into public life to make this place — our place — a better one.

To do this, they have picked a side (a party), a quarterback (a candidate), put the rest of their life on hold (family and friends) and worked like hell to make that difference.

But as hard as these advisers work and as smart as they are as analysts or strategists or leaders, to truly serve well, they must never lose their objectivity. As the truism goes, a candidate who is their own campaign manager, leads a campaign doomed from the get-go.

But what is that objectivity? Where does it sit? How does an adviser know when they are too close to be both the partisan warrior and the ruthlessly dispassionate adviser their principal needs them to be? How do they know the moment that the only door before their candidate is the one marked “exit.”

Those entrusted with supporting both Trudeau and Biden are facing that moment, that decision, right now.

And as much as it might seem blindingly obvious based on every tanking poll, raving pundit, rat leaving the ship, not to mention plain old common sense, it is extraordinarily difficult advice to give.

Having been one of those advisers, I know how hard it is. I’d love to say I dared to stand tall and stand up to the leader, my colleagues and friends, and spoken my piece. But the truth is that for every time I have done that, I have succumbed to group think too many times and signed on to the machismo of the political locker room and opted to be “one of the boys.”

I have explained my choices away by describing how difficult or complex the situation was. And even though the truth of the matter is that it wasn’t, there are usually three things that make arriving at a decision seem more difficult than it is.

First, political leaders exist in a bubble shared with people whose jobs depend on that leader keeping their job. And while these are at their core opportunities rather than jobs, advisers have just as challenging a time grieving a defeat as their candidate.

Second, wishful thinking spreads like wildfire in these bubbles. Often expressed as an “out-of-the-box idea” or a “Hail Mary pass,” it is most often presented with a sense of obligation on the part of the campaign to deliver it for the candidate. Of course, this is nonsense. When the campaign gets to this stage, it’s time to stop feeding the fire with the furniture and make the tough decisions needed to preserve resources to fight another day.

Third, there is no luxury of indecision. And that’s because the leader is the leader until they are not. The entire campaign must convey the image that they are in it until the end. That’s why you will hear Trudeau and Biden resoundingly declare they’re staying on until, seemingly suddenly, they announce they’re going.

Getting to the point where advisers show a candidate the exit may be a straightforward exercise, but it is complicated by the conflicting priorities of the candidate, the party and the country. These competing challenges and their relative imports are unknowable.

What is known is the importance of being surrounded by advisers during those moments of controversy and challenge. Advisers don’t just form the present; they are a direct driver of what shape that leader’s legacy takes for all time.

If Joe Biden really wants to stop Donald Trump, he’ll get out of the way

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It was over before it began.

Thursday night, U.S. President Joe Biden lost the moment he walked onto the CNN stage. He moved like an animatronic from Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum. He spoke softly, like a hoarse ghost. He looked down — like someone who didn’t know where he was.

If there is one sound Americans will remember, it will be that of their President struggling to find the words that just didn’t come.
And if there is one image that will be seared onto the collective psyche of the American imagination, it will be the look of fatigue and bewilderment cast across their President’s face.

Joe Biden’s candidacy is over.

It will either go down in a fireball of defeat on Nov. 5 — taking many “lower ballot” candidates with him — or President Biden will do what’s right for his country, his party, his family and, quite frankly, himself, and resign as the Democratic nominee by the time the last Independence Day fireworks disappear from the sky.

If the way Biden walked on stage was the indictment, the following exchange was the final verdict.

Biden: … Making sure that we’re able to make every single solitary … person … eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the COVID — excuse me — with — um — dealing with everything we have to do with — look — we finally beat Medicare. (Anchor interjects)

Trump: He’s right he did beat Medicare; he beat it to death.

That was not the only Biden bluster. And it was far from the only Trump savaging.

Joe Biden’s performance Thursday night came up well short. He was wide of the mark on every metric that matters.

On the economy, he failed to convince Americans he was working to make life more affordable and to explain what was wrong with Trump’s vision. On Afghanistan, in which Trump hammered Biden on the embarrassing withdrawal, Biden failed to point out that it was Trump who made the exit deal with the Taliban in the first place. On abortion, this election cycle’s equivalent to a “get out of jail free card” for Democrats, he failed to directly and persuasively speak to women voters about what a second Trump presidency would put at stake for them.

On golf, well, don’t even get me started. All I can say is both men deserve an Academy Award nomination for best impersonations of seven-year-olds at recess.

And if all of that wasn’t horrifying enough, this shambolic performance allowed former president Trump to do what he is a master at: lie, dissemble, conflate; to get away with the symbolic debate equivalent of “shooting people and not losing any votes.”

But worst of all, Biden never told the American people how, exactly, they would benefit from a second Biden term.

This was a glaring indication of a campaign — and a candidate — fundamentally lost.

Remember, it was the Biden camp that wanted this debate: at this surprisingly early time, on this stage, with muted microphones.

They did so because they knew they were down: in crucial swing states, with disengaged voters, with younger voters and with African American voters.

But little did they know what down was. That is until 9 p.m. last night when they found out that it is a place from which there is, for their team, simply no way back.

I’ll spare you more pile on. Biden deserves better after a lifetime of public service.

And I’ll spare you the lengthy campaign strategy lecture that underpins this advice.

But of this I am certain: If Biden really wants to defeat Trump, he will get out of the way. There simply isn’t a minute to wait because the value of such a withdrawal is logarithmic. The truism says, “go to end game as fast as possible.” After all, you are going there anyway.

I know because I’ve been there before from my years of experience as an adviser on municipal, provincial, and federal campaigns here at home. I’ve been in the room alongside headstrong candidates, who — after a self-inflicted blow — are coddled by members of the inner circle attempting to justify the unjustifiable. My only regret was not saying what needed to be said as early and often as necessary: that there was no coming back.

I understand well that the options in front of the president are as lousy as they are unfair. But he is where he is. And the only way he can recover a modicum of respect is to follow those great leaders who have gone before him and not only put country before self but done so at the expense of self.

Olivia Chow’s greatest vulnerability? Her friends

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Imagine the confusion.

Toronto’s most labour friendly mayor in recent memory and still — a major strike that would have paralyzed this city. Or, as Mayor Chow put it, wrought “huge, huge economic damage.”

Sometimes in politics, success rides not on the platforms you pronounce or the policies you deliver, but on the bullets you dodge. And a TTC strike would be about as destructive a bullet for Mayor Chow to duck as can be conceived. Because while the political confusion and upheaval that would have followed is challenging to predict, the wrath of Torontonians would not be.

Already faced with a congestion nightmare, a housing crisis and high crime rates, the inability to commute to work or an urgent doctor’s appointment would have amounted to an unbearable degree of frustration. Make no mistake, that frustration would have turned to outright anger and Mayor Chow would have borne the brunt.

To deepen the political trap, provincial sources made it crystal clear they would have only drafted back-to-work legislation at the request of the Mayor.

But Olivia Chow never let it get that far — stepping right over this trap. As she acknowledged in the days that followed the last-minute agreement, she wisely set aside enough money in her budget to account for this negotiation. And behind the scenes, she undoubtedly used her political capital with the union in a way that John Tory never could.

This win, therefore, is as good an opportunity as any to consider what lies ahead and what avoiding this catastrophe reveals about her future.

Let’s start with the pure political numbers.

At the outset of her tenure, Her Worship’s popularity was nothing short of stratospheric, fluctuating between 71 per cent and 75 per cent approval. Since the budget this February, those numbers have predictably returned to earth. But while the honeymoon may be over, her approximately 50 per cent approval today is still impressive — especially considering how negatively Toronto residents continue to view the state of the city.

To be clear, I believe she’s earned that approval. Far from the harbinger of doom her opponents promised she would be, the Mayor has proven to be an effective leader. So, credit where credit’s due: she has expanded affordable housing, improved public transit, taken steps to enhance community safety and services and advanced various climate action initiatives.

More importantly, overall, there still persists a strong sense that she is a breath of fresh air, an antidote to the status quo and someone with the ambition and determination to actually turn this City around.

But politics is an unfair sport and if she is not vigilant, that sense will disappear overnight. And it’s now, when the Mayor is in a position of relative strength, that she must assess her greatest vulnerability.

Matt Elliot hit the nail on the head when he identified that to be exactly 30,735 — the number of City workers belonging to CUPE Local 79 and CUPE 416 whose contracts expire at year’s end. These are workers who feel they got a raw deal last time out and who make our city “go”: they clean the parks, run essential programs, process permits, collect the garbage (need I say more?).

But the reason those 30,000 plus workers walking off the job presents such an existential challenge for Chow is not just the obvious furor and chaos that would reign as a result, but rather because it is a direct assault on the pro-union, labour-friendly Chow brand.

Put another way, her greatest vulnerability lies not with her enemies but rather with friends. In politics, as in life, friends have expectations and sometimes, regrettably, they’ll try and take advantage of you. And given the impossible fiscal situation Chow has inherited, she has zero wiggle room.

In other words, the math simply does not work.

But Mayor Chow’s path to re-election in 2026 will only remain open and clear if she can maintain her core base of support. This danger is the same one that faced Bob Rae provincially in 1995, when he lost his core base and subsequently his government after a crushing electoral defeat.

And it is only by finding a way to make the math work — to keep her friends friendly — that Chow will avoid a fracturing of her strong left-wing coalition and the ire of Torontonians whose eyes are watering from the smell of rotting garbage.

After all, that smell has a way of lingering and translating to dire political consequences. Just open the history books to 2009 and ask former mayor David Miller about that.

Canada needs to become a world leader in the AI economy but first we need to build public support

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It’s a politico’s axiom that perception is reality.

Call it a rudimentary observation in a “post-truth world,” but if it weren’t so, we would be living in a very different world with very different headlines. Joe Biden would be in for a slam-dunk re-election victory based on what the hard economic data says is a booming U.S. economy.

Instead, Americans perceive their economy as a house of cards, and Biden’s corresponding polling numbers are worse than ever.

Point is: perception matters. It can swing elections, shape policy, steer national priorities and futures. And in my view, there is no greater question of perception when it comes to our national future than how Canadians perceive AI.

Any prognosticator, economist, hell even your local barista, can tell you it’s the future of our economy and that massive structural investments will be required in that future. Yet, for as much as that might seem as obvious as the summer following the spring, the perception of many Canadians around AI are fundamentally misaligned with the urgent need to go “all in” — to spend big and spend now.

In fact, our views on AI are shifting as the technology expands. According to a recent TECHNATION survey, a whopping 87 per cent of those polled expressed concern over AI stealing their job.

Let’s be clear: it’s fair Canadians are worried. As with all disruptive revolutions, the AI revolution will generate both winners and losers. And while that corresponding upheaval will complicate life, it doesn’t cancel what lies in front of us. In fact, it leaves us with a choice.

We can choose to pick grass and meditate on the cruelty of life. Or, we can choose to refuse to be left in the dust by our international competitors and seize the opportunity to make a strategic, generational investment in this technology, investment that depends on two major steps.

Step one: establish a super Ministry of AI to shape an aggressive investment strategy to ensure we pull ahead. While this idea is not new — several of our competitor nations have already brought this idea to life — neither is it too late.

The mandate of this new ministry would be both crystal clear and precise: ensure Canada has all the necessary ingredients — chips, energy and talent — to be a global leader in AI.

Step two: we need to invest, as a foundational step, in public support for the endeavour overall. Why? Because the only way a “Manhattan” or “Apollo” AI mission will work is with the support of Canadians.

The level of cash necessary to build out our AI economy — to fund the data centres, refine the rare earths, and generate the power — cannot be met by the private sector alone. Governments must become partners, which means government must make monumental, unprecedented outlays. Outlays which will require them to say no to important immediate priorities and yes to strategic investments that will pay dividends well outside electoral cycles. Decisions that will require the expenditure of political capital.

And that’s why we need to change how Canadians perceive the absolutely necessary advantages of AI.

That effort will have nothing to do with lecturing Canadians on the intricacies of machine learning and everything to do with showing how AI can allow Canadians to take better care of their aging parents, curb the amount of time they spend in traffic, and reduce wait times in the ER.

Simply put, you can’t ask Canadians to believe in and invest in the long-term without bringing them along with you. So as much as we invest in chips, energy and talent, we need to invest in building genuine and durable public support for the long and challenging mission ahead.

It is only with and through that support that we stand any chance to catch up, become competitive and win this race.

Democrats are running out of time as Donald Trump’s troubles are only making him stronger

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If there has even been such a thing as the world’s greatest circus, this is surely it: the trial of Donald J. Trump.

And just when you thought it could not get any more pathetic, lurid, absurd, crazier or demeaning (have your pick), this week a new clown car rolled on in: crammed with Trump’s cronies, allies and most significantly, potential running mates for the 2024 general election.

It appears Trump is determined to make his VP selection resemble the latest season of “The Apprentice.” This week’s tasks included assailing the judge’s daughter and attacking witnesses. A ceremonial ring kissing doesn’t capture it. When you consider Trump was content to feed Mike Pence, his last VP, to the wolves on Jan. 6, it’s more accurately described as auditioning for the role of sacrificial lamb in the school play. Let’s pray the curtain never opens.

Now, I usually share the view of most pundits that VP selection rodeos are nothing more than a sideshow to the main act. In most cases, fair enough.

In this case, not even close.

If Trump is elected, he will be a lame-duck president — unable to run again — and whoever he chooses as his VP will have an inside track to becoming the next president. Meaning: the stakes could not be higher.

What’s more, if Biden (a former VP himself) wins he won’t be permitted to seek another term either. Combined with the increasing likelihood that he won’t be able to last a full second term, that puts a renewed spotlight on Kamala Harris.

The 2024 presidential race will primarily come down to six battleground states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — all of which Biden won in 2020. While he need not win all six again, his path to victory is severely obstructed if he cannot hold on to most. Yet, this past Monday, a New York Times/Siena College poll found that Trump was ahead in five of those six states.

What does this mean for the VP X-factor? Everything.

If Trump selects a VP from one of these key states, that will go a long way toward locking it up. Moreover, a wise, more centrist choice might give Trump the bump he needs in these states — most of which only narrowly went blue last time. Overall, so long as Trump does not choose a noted dog-killer (seriously) his selection will likely be a major asset to his campaign.

What does this mean for Democrats? It’s time to wake the hell up.

The fact is, a trial about Trump’s alleged hush money payments to a porn star has not damaged his standing in the polls one iota.

Rather, he is pulling ahead.

The morality play is a bona fide crowd pleaser and its production is not damaging but empowering its protagonist.

And that means Democrats simply cannot continue to cross their fingers and hope the justice system takes care of their problem for them. The irony here is palpable. Were the conspiracy Trump is peddling true — that this entire trial is a political witch hunt concocted by a Machiavellian Biden in a DNC backroom — it would be achieving the exact opposite of its intention. Tantamount to fighting fire with gasoline.

And yet, instead of providing the Democratic ticket with a much needed shot in the arm, the current VP instead offers a unique disadvantage — with analysis by FiveThirtyEight pegging her approval rating at a historically abysmal 38.2 per cent. In other words: she’s a liability, not an asset.

But that is far from the Democrats’ biggest worry. In a week meant to spotlight the moral deficiencies of the Republican candidate, the Democrats’ electoral vulnerabilities were underlined with crystal clarity.

If there was any doubt left, this trial definitively proves the Trumpian media circus is alive, well and works only to his benefit.

This means one thing and one thing alone for the Biden/Harris ticket: desperate times call for desperate measures. They need to break out that war chest and start fighting like their backs are against the wall.

Because that’s where they are.

With six months to go, time is running out before the circus is the only show in town.