On our topic of tonight, what role do you see history playing in the future of Canada?

Well, thank you, Sandra.

The role of history in understanding Canada's present is foundational.

How foundational? Back in the days when we had journalism schools and journalism students more than we do today, I was asked, what is the best training as an undergraduate before entering journalism school? And I said, there are only two courses you must take.

You must take philosophy and you must take history.

because the story that you are covering down at City Hall is rooted in philosophical disputes that go back at least to the Greeks.

And so you need to know those philosophical streams so that you'll understand what's going on here at City Hall.

And I think you had some thoughts about that.

But can you take us back to how free trade between the US and Canada started?

Yeah.

So you have to go back a long way.

You have to go back to the 19th century.

There was a great fear among Canadian businesses that, again, we would just be overwhelmed by the United States.

And so John A. Macdonald established what was called the National Policy, which essentially was a, a, a set of tariffs that, um, made it uneconomic for Americans to trade into Canada so that Canadian companies, uh, could substitute for those products.

What it meant, in fact, very much was, uh, the creation of American branch plants, uh, all across Canada in order to jump that tariff barrier.

I think it's worth going back to, um, this election in, uh, in 19, uh, 88 where free trade was the main election issue, right? What were the arguments for and against intertwining our trade with the US? Because there, there were for and against arguments, right?

A- and I do have questions for you, uh, about the, the specific, uh, provinces and, and the state of the Liberal Party in, in different provinces across Canada, but I, I, I just wanna know, is there any shared factor that could be attributed to, to liberal decline at the provincial level? Like, understanding, of course, that the fortunes of provincial liberals are, are, are greatly depending on local dynamics, but for instance, how much has the Trudeau brand weakened their support?

That's a really good question.

So in Breaking Point, um, a book that Darrell Bricker and I co-authored, which, uh, came out i- in the fall of, uh, 2025, we maintained, as we've maintained in the past, as I maintained all the way back to the original Big Shift, uh, v- in, in 2011, that the progressive left in Canada should gel into a single dominant party.

It could either be, uh, through the union of the New Democrats and the Liberals, or it could be that one of the parties becomes so dominant that the other party, uh, becomes quite irrelevant, and so that you would have, as you have in most countries, um, a dominant party of the center right, the Conservative Party of Canada at the federal level, uh, progressive conservative parties and other parties at the provincial level, um, and then you would have a dominant progressive party, uh, on the left facing it.

Um, at the, at the federal level, it appears right now that you have a quite a, a dominant Liberal Party.

Uh, the NDP was very badly defeated in the last election, although under Avi Lewis, it's beginning to show signs of life again.

Um, um, and at the, at the, uh, the provincial level, uh, as I said, uh, th- sometimes, uh, the NDP has, has become the dominant party.

Uh-uh what's your read on just how much internal division there is right now?

It is a marriage of convenience, a survival strategy, a nation held together not by a shared vision, but by barely managed tensions."Can you speak m- more about, you know, how, how fragile that coalition is, and wh- how, how worried we, we should maybe be in coming months?

The fragile- the coalition's always potentially fragile depending on how the federal government handles relations between Ottawa and the provinces.

So, um, I mean, this isn't a book that's Conservative or, or a book that's Liberal.

I mean, yeah, I think you'll find the, the...

there are some pretty progressive arguments in the book, uh, and some that are Conservative as well.

But one thing we do point out is that when Stephen Harper was prime minister, whatever else you thought of him, um, he made it a point of not interfering in provincial affairs.

Uh, he stuck to his, um, to his constitutional knitting, did the sort of things that the federal government's supposed to do, and we had 10 years of really greater peace and harmony in the federation than at any time in the...

Um, how far has he moved the ball forward on some of these files you've mentioned? Like, is there actual change on the ground?

Why do you say that?

Yeah, because Canada for almost this entire century has had a unique competitive advantage over other countries, where other countries were roiled about the question of immigration, about bringing foreigners in and causing... huge dissension in the United States and in Europe over how many people should be allowed into the country and what kind of people they should be.

Canada had this amazing multicultural asset.

We brought in 250,000 people a year.

That's an awful lot of people.

We brought them from all different parts of the world based on their ability to integrate into and work with Canada and the Canadian economy.

And we had a broad consensus across the country in favor of this, that this is a really great idea, that it develops our economy, that it improves our productivity, and that it makes us a really exciting, cosmopolitan, diverse society to live in.

Well, John, tell us first of all what you don't like about what you see and then how you'd reinvigorate it.

its way to a port, and the boat would have gone to Korea.

Exactly.

Collided with the Transcontinental, which was going in the opposite direction, and a bunch of people were killed, almost all of them servicemen on the train.

A telegraph operator, 19 or 20 years old, Jack Atherton was his name, and he was charged with manslaughter because the Crown and CN alleged that he had failed to properly take down the instructions for one of the trains to move to a siding.

Again, Jack Atherton's father was desperate.

Edna was in the hospital dying of leukemia.

And the father went to Diefenbaker and said, will you represent my son? And he said, I can't.

Tell us about that.