A speech about Canada, advertising, and Canada’s advertising

This Substack is not done, and the memoir it contains is definitely not done. I have noticed, though, that when a man promises a serialized memoir and then goes quiet for a few months, people start to use the past tense on him. (In January the Hill Times ran a genuinely lovely piece on the eight takeaways from my “eight-part memoir.” Sincerely: thank you for the writeup, but I’ve got more to say about my time at PMO.) It’s just that I have more to say about lots of things, and I won’t always be saying those things here. Sometimes – you’ll see this if you keep reading – I’ll be talking about my time at PMO within a different or larger context.

I’ve been doing a lot of speechmaking and consulting, but I’m especially proud to announce that I have two separate longform essays coming out in actual print publications. The second is in The University of Toronto’s Rotman Management Magazine, and it comes out in September; it’s about creativity and AI and there are tickets for the linked event on September 15^th available here.

The first is a piece on Canadian advertising in the inaugural issue of Rebrief.

Rebrief is a brand-new print journal about Canadian advertising, made out of sheer will by Canadian advertising people. They asked me to contribute an essay and I was exactly as cool about that as you’d expect, which is not at all. It’s called “Must There Be Canadian Advertising?” It is long, it is personal, and none of it is online. That’s on purpose: Rebrief launched as a thing you buy and hold, the way God and Condé Nast intended, and I love that. A shareable digital version will exist eventually. When it does, I will link it here immediately and repeatedly. But please buy the magazine. While the folks in charge of it have done the right thing in leaving all content rights with its authors – meaning I could publish the article here if I wanted – that means fewer people buying the magazine itself, and Rebrief is very deserving of our support.

But a magazine launch means a launch party, and a launch party needs speakers, and I have never once in my life declined a microphone. So: what follows is my speech. It’s based on the essay the way a movie is based on a true story: same bones, but fewer rules and bigger swings, maybe. I’ve tightened a couple of spots where you could hear me tripping over my own tongue, and left everything else the way it was said. The speech is called “The Client Is Canada,” and I hope you have as much fun reading it as I had making it.

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“THE CLIENT IS CANADA”

I. OPEN

Superman is half Canadian.

Okay, so not really. He’s one hundred percent Kryptonian. I’ve checked.

But Joe Shuster (who was one of his two creators) was from Toronto. Joe delivered a paper called the Toronto Daily Star when he was a kid. In the earliest comics, Clark Kent doesn’t work at the Daily Planet. He works at the Daily Star.

Metropolis is Toronto with a supervillain problem, but much better PR.

I wrote six thousand words about Canadian Advertising for Rebrief, and still the first thousand words were about Superman. You’re getting it in 30 seconds. You’re welcome!

I’m hoping you’ll read the full essay, called “Must There Be Canadian Advertising?” It hangs on the thing I’ve been saying forever about how we feel about being Canadian:

Proud to be it. Hard to see it.

We don’t fly our flag as much as we file it. We fold it, carefully, and we put it away until there’s a very specific occasion. Our patriotism (or at least the outward expression of it) sits in storage most of the time, pulled out for Canada Day or international hockey tournaments. We only wave it when somebody waves theirs in our faces first, say by imposing tariffs or making a “51st state” joke. We sew it on our knapsacks when we travel, not to bring attention to where we’re from; rather, it’s to make sure people understand that we’re not from somewhere else. More on that later: everyone in this room understands that the worst thing a brand can do is let itself be defined by the competition. Somehow, Canada does that all the time.

II. REBRIEF, AND A REINTRODUCTION

Speaking of pride: what a monumental achievement the launch of Rebrief is. I am so honoured that the team invited me to contribute. I realize I’m about to give real cringe-unc energy when I say this, but: I’m a fifty-three-year-old dude who fell in love with magazines in the 1990s, profoundly and deeply. To actually be in a print journal is thrilling to me.

But more than that: I am thrilled to be part of such an excellent and ambitious undertaking, and thrilled that Rebrief was willed into existence. The people who made it are already overworked and probably underpaid but that didn’t stop them from being ambitious. Industries that believe in themselves celebrate themselves and interrogate themselves; the rigour that it takes to publish an industry journal demonstrates to the world that what we do is worthy of serious consideration. That should not be taken lightly. So let’s take fifteen valuable seconds of my time to applaud the living fuck out of them.

I have almost 30 years of private-sector industry experience – boutique agencies, independents, huge international shops, even owning and operating my own firm. That doesn’t make me special; it just makes me old.

There is one line on my résumé that is unique, though: from 2023 to 2025 I was the Executive Director of Communications for the Office of the Prime Minister of Canada. Very few people have ever held that title; I’m the only one who took it on to run not just straight-up strategic comms but also research and digital and advertising, integrating those four practices in a model that I would say resembles more of a private-sector style of brand management than it does the Government.

The four most successful ad campaigns in the history of the Government of Canada – at least since we started measuring this stuff properly – were done on my watch. Some of them were already in motion when I arrived, and my job was to shepherd them home without breaking them. Others we built from a blank page. The Prime Minister’s digital footprint was transformed from an announcement factory into a destination for some really great content, delivering all the buzzword metrics we love (engagement! reach! sentiment!) and even managed to break through, on occasion.

The best example: the night Canada beat the United States in the Four Nations, we posted one line from the Prime Minister’s account. “You can’t take our country – and you can’t take our game.” I think many of you saw it, because roughly seventy million people did on the tire fire formerly known as Twitter alone. And then it jumped! The CBC. CTV. Global. The Toronto Star. The Globe and Mail. And it crossed the border: The New York Times, the New York Post. One line, from a phone screen to every newscast in the country in a single night, and the most amazing thing was that not one Canadian asked us for a disclaimer. For one night, forty million people agreed we were allowed to say we’re the best.

I bring all of that up for one reason. Everyone on the agency side of this room is in the client-service business. And I’m here to talk about the client.

The client is Canada.

III. THE MACHINE

Now: ninety seconds of civics, because this exact confusion is currently being weaponized. Canadians call two completely different things “political advertising.”

Bucket one: party advertising. Donor money that the Conservatives and Liberals and NDP and everyone else use to pump their program. Partisan isn’t a bug here; partisan is the entire job. And it’s big: in 2025, the Liberals and Conservatives combined for sixty million dollars in advertising spend. In 2024 (not an election year!), the Conservative party alone spent sixteen and a half million dollars on advertising, for extremely partisan messaging.

A note on the craft, though. Those ads weren’t really asking you to vote for Pierre Poilievre. Most of them were asking you to not vote for Justin Trudeau. This is a strategy Poilievre stayed faithful to deep into the election he lost to … Mark Carney. I admire the dedication, still running against a man who had moved on from politics. (This isn’t me taking a cheap shot at Pierre. His own former campaign manager asked afterward, out loud, whether they’d leaned too hard on anti-Trudeau instead of making their own case. I didn’t perform this autopsy. I’m just quoting the post-mortem.)

There is a deeper issue baked into the very nature of that kind of advertising. A political ad that isn’t asking you to vote for someone can only ask you to think poorly of someone else. And the only way to do that is to make the case that the person – and their government, and eventually the country they govern – is terrible. The way that’s done is to find however people feel things aren’t working in their own lives and weaponize it. That message got reduced to three words, repeated ad nauseam in 2024 and 2025:

Canada is broken. Canada is broken. Canada is broken.

Across those two years the Conservative Party of Canada spent nearly fifty-six million dollars of donor money on advertising, and the single-minded message was, “your country sucks.” Which is really bad for all of us. Arguing for change or that things can be better is one thing. Peddling falsehoods that make people feel that things are worse than they truly are is something else, and it’s much worse. This is not me saying that Canada is perfect; it certainly isn’t. But there is a real difference between aggressive partisan messaging and the poisoning of something essential that we all share, for the purpose of getting elected.

So that’s bucket one. Well-funded. Aggressive. Unburdened by scrutiny, or even truth. Free to be bombastic and relentless.

Bucket two: government advertising. Which is made with your tax dollars! Rich – but by design, also kind of mute. The machinery is built, on purpose, to keep bucket one’s hands off of it. But it’s complicated. The government is partisan andmeant to serve all Canadians; we elect them to execute their particular platform (which is automatically a partisan thing), but they’re supposed to talk about it in a way that is essentially neutral. An elected Ministry’s ads flow through the Departments, which are the permanent public servants who stay when governments fall. There are something like 20 people who report into the Minister of Health and every one of them will lose their job if this government loses the next election. There are probably ten thousand public servants who work at Health Canada and many of them have been there through multiple different governments. The advertising process sits in the Privy Council Office, the permanent centre, enforcing the non-partisan rules. But I sat in the most partisan building in town – the Prime Minister’s Office – and still had oversight on all Government of Canada advertising. The partisan building has the agenda. The permanent and non-partisan buildings have the money. That’s the client. Every single government ad walks that tightrope.

I can tell you exactly what serving that client looks like from the inside. Early in my time in Ottawa, I was given a chart to put on my wall. I took a picture of it, the way you take a picture of your car after it’s been totalled. Not for the insurance: just so that later, when you describe the wreck, somebody believes you.

Picture a poster wider than your arms can spread. A single timeline runs across the middle of it like a spine, and the spine adds up to almost half a year. To make one ad. Hanging off that spine are dozens of little boxes, colour-coded by who has to approve what: green for the department, blue for procurement, cream for the Privy Council Office. The agencies, meaning the people who actually make the ads, are purple. There are about five purple boxes. And in the bottom corner, in small print, the chart hedges itself: this timeline is “an estimate, offered as a guideline.” What could be more governmental than a six-month advertising timeline that pre-hedges itself in the fine print? Proud to be it, hard to see it, indeed.

The chart is only the timeline. I haven’t even mentioned the briefs. Everyone on the agency side of this room has complained about a client brief at some point in their career. “It was four pages when it should have been one; it had seven mandatories and three logos.” These complaints are adorable, by comparison. The Government of Canada ad briefs that I saw – the RFPs, such as they are, prepared by the individual Departments to engage ad agencies – ran on average to something like fifteen thousand words.

Somewhere inside those fifteen thousand words there is a single-minded message, in the sense that somewhere inside the ocean there is one specific fish. Distilling to it is the hardest strategic act in the industry, because every step of the process is designed to add, and no step of the process is designed to subtract. “Positioning necessitates sacrifice” is something a boss of mine imprinted on me quite a while ago. It’s the branding maxim I repeat more than any other. The best brands and the best brand advertising happen when we decide to stand for something specific, which necessarily means excluding other things. For Government of Canada advertising, the mandate is to do the opposite. Every possible constituent needs to be accounted for and every point of view needs to be considered – both for the good reason of good governance and the bad reason of trying to avoid political fallout (which is unavoidable anyway).

Alongside this chart sat a written rule: government advertising must not be “self-congratulatory.” In this country, it was against the rules for Canada to encourage Canada. We don’t just have a national character flaw. We gave it a policy number. We did this for the right reasons: making sure that bucket two (Government of Canada advertising paid with your tax dollars) doesn’t act like bucket one (the partisan political stuff). Which is a noble endeavour. We even engaged an external agency – Ad Standards – to vet all our ads (twice!) over the course of the process and reject any campaign they thought was breaking this rule.

This all led to the strictest interpretation of this guideline. Our ads weren’t just “not-self-congratulatory.” They were informational to the exclusion of anything else; they were safe to the point that they often felt like they didn’t believe in themselves.

There’s a reason why it’s mostly montages with voiceovers from the Government: that’s the kind of stuff that gets through the system. It probably tests well in a room when someone’s eyeballs are being held open with toothpicks. In the moment it may even do a good job of communicating that a new policy or program exists. But it doesn’t live beyond that. Work like this doesn’t do anything bigger for the brand of Canada itself. That’s a real problem. I mean, any client spending north of $100 million on yearly advertising in this country should expect to add to the value of the brand itself. This is especially important for a country like ours facing the issues that we are right now.

What does it mean when the Government of Canada isn’t allowed to celebrate what it does for its people, or even speak in a way that sounds optimistic about the system that binds us all? We spend millions and millions of dollars to announce policy initiatives while committing the cardinal sin for any big brand: we do not create any equity.

Maybe that was okay – because unlike any private sector brand the country didn’t really face any “competitors,” as it were. But that’s not the case anymore. We are being told that Canada is broken. Sometimes that comes from foreign interference and sometimes that call is coming from inside the house. Either way, it’s become such a political football that we refuse to call it out. It’s something that I can’t quite wrap my head around, the way that Canadians will accept hearing from our own politicians that our country absolutely sucks – to the point where it’s painted as a partisan act to stand up for ourselves, to offer the conflicting point of view. What does it take for Canadians to take a stand on behalf of Canada? What does it take for the Government of Canada to make pro-Canada messaging a part of its advertising?

IV. THE WAR

Oh, that’s right: war. We’re in the middle of one right now. Not a violent shooting kind of war but a noisy trade and tariff war that is unfolding under periodic is-this-a-joke-or-isn’t-it threats to turn us into the 51st state.

Nothing collapses previously immovable timelines and roadblocks like the end of peacetime. Here is what that war did to the Government of Canada advertising machine. It took the six months in the chart I described and shrank it to three weeks. It allowed for the creation of a national campaign that had fostering patriotism as its express goal. Nobody amended the process. Nobody reprinted the foam core. We simply did what needed to be done, because the work suddenly mattered more than the fear.

I oversaw the creation of two separate advertising campaigns under these conditions. One had a “tariffs are a tax on you” message, and it ran in the US. The other was a 30-second spot you’ve probably seen. Rick Mercer lent us his beautiful voice. Japandroids’ stellar “The House That Heaven Built” was the music track. “Choose Canada” was the message. Concept to air in under three weeks. Yes, it’s a montage with a voiceover, because in that timeline it’s what the physics allowed. But legit-Canadian-icon and all-around excellent human Rick Mercer said yes to us as soon as we asked. A terrific Canadian band let us use their all-timer of a song without a second thought.

Nobody donates their time to a compliance exercise. Purpose doesn’t just guide the work. Purpose recruits. It recruited within the Government, as well: the same public servants at the Privy Council Office who administer the six-month chart turned around ads in three weeks, because they are good at what they do. The capability was in the building the whole time. The machine’s problem isn’t what its people can do, it’s what they will do.

To wit: the Carney government eliminated that ads-have-to-be-not-self-congratulatory rule. Quietly, with no announcement, the way you’d fix a typo. I tried to get rid of that rule and failed. I tried more than once. What happened instead was that I got handed from office to office by a series of people – all of whom agreed with me and not one of whom was the person to do it. It was so frustrating, and I felt so impotent. I hung on to that failure for a while, I’ll admit.

Now that the rule is gone, though, I realize that all it took to get rid of it was political will. Down in the polls by 20 points, we didn’t have any of that. It’s the same context that led to a few high-profile MPs announcing that they’d be resigning (or not running again) in late 2024 because they wanted to spend more time with their families. Then Justin Trudeau stepped down, the polls turned around, and some of those MPs decided they’d spent enough time with their families, I guess, and ran again.

Political will is the most powerful input in government, but there’s no way to put it on an advertising timeline chart.

V. SERVE THE CLIENT

So: here’s where you come in, because there’s some main character energy missing from this story, and that energy is in this room. Also, it isn’t going to come from me.

For a couple of years, I oversaw the largest advertising budget in this country. My appointment was covered in every trade publication. Advertising was, explicitly, my file. And in all that time, the ICA never lobbied me. Not once! Now, people do lobby the Government of Canada on behalf of this industry, and that work is real and worthy. But it’s lobbying for tax breaks, policy improvements, industry grants. The support-program stuff. Nobody ever walked into my office (or any office, to my knowledge) to make the only pitch that actually matters: buy more of our product, because it is excellent.

Here’s the wild part. They bought it anyway.

While I was there, we managed to get the Central Advertising Fund up to almost a hundred million dollars. But I did the quieter work too, or I hope I did: making the case to Caucus and Cabinet, most of whom are still there, that advertising deserves more investment, not less. Because advertising is how a country speaks to itself at scale.

After I left, the government kept going: from about a hundred million a year to three hundred and twenty million a few years from now (!), after regular increases.

This is a truly monumental announcement that will have a profound impact on the Canadian advertising industry. That’s an extra quarter of a billion dollars every year.

As far as I can tell, this happened independent of the industry’s governmental efforts. There was no announcement or press release ready to go. Traditionally, when something like this is announced by the Government there is an enormous amount of engineered media coverage that happens concurrently. There was none of that here. Sit with the shape of that. The industry came to government asking for incentives and protections. The government answered with something better. It said: no, we want to buy more of what you make. And that seemed to take the advertising industry by surprise.

Proud to be it. Hard to see it. The country, and the advertising industry.

I am not asking us to become unreservedly more like the United States. Notice something about our neighbours to the south, though. Whether an American sits on the left of their spectrum or the right, there is still a shared belief in what America stands for, or at least a shared belief that it is worth standing for America. Some Americans define freedom as the right to carry a gun everywhere, and others define it as the right to never get shot. I’m not here to debate who is correct (although it’s obviously the people who support gun control). The point is that both “sides” are at least fighting over the same word. The dark side of this is the exceptionalism, which runs from insufferable to downright dangerous.

The bright side is unity, and unity pays dividends. It feels good to feel good about the country we live in. Americans of allpolitical stripes fly their flag with pride. Canadians don’t, and so our flag was co-opted by a particularly vocal anti-Canada minority five or so years ago. I understand that this is overwhelmingly reductive, but this speech can’t go on forever. There is no simple or easy answer here, but I do know this: when we don’t stand for something, we can fall to almost anything. Increasingly, a country’s position on the world stage flows directly from how strongly its own citizens believe in it.

That belief is under attack. There is foreign interference. There are bad actors inside the house. There are people working, with real budgets, to tear the very fabric of this country apart, because a divided Canada advances their agenda.

People ask if I would ever go back to fight that fight. Honestly, I’m not sure. I’m not sure this government is quite progressive enough for me. Lord knows I’m not sure they would even ask; the clean break from Trudeau was a huge part of the election strategy, and it worked.

But there is one job that would interest me: Chief Marketing Officer of the Government of Canada. That’s a job that doesn’t exist but should, because the most important thing three hundred million marketing dollars a year can do is build a shared equity in this country for its own citizens.

Here’s the catch, though, and it’s the reason I’m ending on you. The mechanism we built is, by design, a bad mechanism for getting Canadians excited about Canada. Remember the tightrope. Remember the rules. The government can inform; that it is no longer explicitly prevented from being “self-congratulatory” doesn’t mean that it’s designed to cheer, or even to see the value of cheering. The communication of belief has to come from somewhere else, and the only industry on earth that is professionally trained to build belief at scale is sitting in this room.

I want to be precise about the gap, with no disrespect to anyone working in advertising inside the federal government or to the agencies on its roster. The public service’s expertise is in getting ads through the government. That is a real skill; I watched it up close. And remember the three weeks: when it mattered most, the people inside delivered and delivered hard.

Understand what I am not saying: this is not an indictment of anyone who works for the Government of Canada. It is an observation about defaults. The machine defaults to (actually, it demands) government-y advertising, and so the people inside it – smart, dedicated, capable people – default to it too. There is no Creative Director in that building. There is no Head of Strategy. There is partisan political opposition looking to pounce on anything and news media who (rightfully) should be interrogating everything. The machine was built to approve, not to imagine. To delay the inevitable scrutiny, not to take any risks.

My fear is that we are about to spend three hundred million dollars a year on ads that are purposefully designed to be forgettable in the long term. Since the new government came in, there have been several new national campaigns and … they are all montages of stock footage (or worse, new video that looks like stock footage) with a voiceover. We can make this in three weeks (with Rick Mercer and Japandroids!) when we aren’t supposed to be self-congratulatory; why are we still making this when we have six months and fewer constraints? It’s not about technical expertise. It’s about belief in the value of advertising Canada to Canadians. That’s a belief the machine was never built to hold because, until recently, it didn’t have to.

So how does that belief get inside the machine? It starts with us recognizing there is value in what we do and lobbying for it. Not for tax breaks. Not for incentives. Lobbying that says: we want to provide more of what we do here. We have a plan for it. And we have a reason.

We serve the client. And the client is Canada.

VI. CLOSE

I’ll leave you with something I noticed from the outside. I spent a couple of years away from this industry, buried in politics, and from out there you can see something we can’t seem to say in here: Canada punches absurdly above its weight in advertising. Look at the international shows. In 2024, Canadian agencies had their best year at Cannes ever: sixty-six Lions, two Grand Prix, and a Vancouver-born independent named the best independent agency and the best independent network in the world. Not best in Canada. Best in the world.

And yet the least cool thing you can do in Canadian advertising is say that Canadian advertising is cool. That is our own cynicism talking. As should be patently obvious by now, I am not a cynic. I am a proud (but realistic) optimist. The hardest part of working in this industry, for me, was never the hours or the clients. It was the cynicism running through the business. That is a whole other speech. But my favourite thing about Superman, the thing I have loved since I was a kid, is his relentless optimism. The belief that everyone can be better if someone sets an example.

So: it starts with us. It starts with us being optimistic and, yes, self-congratulatory about what we do. It starts with us celebrating ourselves. Canada, the brand, needs more great advertising to make Canadians feel great about Canada, the brand and the country. That only happens if the Canadians who work in advertising put that S-shield on their own chests first and say: look at the value we bring to the table. What we do is good. What we do matters. We are good at it. We can do good with it. And that is how we demand the seat at that table, to make sure the three hundred million gets spent like it matters.

Which brings me back to why I am so happy Rebrief exists. A magazine of this substance and calibre made by Canadians for the Canadian advertising industry is a magazine willing to say: we matter, so take us seriously.

The Government of Canada is committing to a three-hundred-million-dollar yearly spend to explain Canada to Canadians, at scale. That won’t work out well without the people in this room.

Superman’s most famous move was never the flying. It was the reveal. Clark Kent, tugging at his collar, ripping open the shirt, showing what was underneath the entire time. That’s the move. Take off the glasses. Show them the S.

Because here is the truth about Superman. The real one. It was never that he does it all himself. The truth about Superman is that he inspires everyone around him to be better. You put the shield on, and everyone watching gets permission to put on theirs. That’s what the country needs, and that’s what the industry needs, too.

Proud to be it. Time to see it!

Thank you.

Forty-six years is long enough that the players who just took gold weren’t alive to watch the Olympics in Lake Placid when it happened (and I’m not sure they’d have the patience to sit through the full 1980 broadcast in all its “was this filmed inside a snow globe?” resolution now, either). But they all know the myth, because it was turned into a story that can be watched and rewatched: Disney’s Miracle (2004), with Kurt Russell as coach Herb Brooks. A very good movie and a very good reminder that sports history doesn’t just happen — it gets a story treatment and an edit and a soundtrack, and then it gets passed down.

And it works. Like every “based on a true story” sports movie, Miracle compresses, rearranges, and upgrades reality into something we can feel in our ribs — even the famous locker-room speech is part fact, part invention. Yet Mike Eruzione (the captain of that 1980 team) recently said he’s heard many of these current U.S. players talk about watching Miracle when they were kids. That’s how the impossible becomes doable: someone needs to tell the story first, so that the story can then tell someone else that if it can be imagined, it can be done.

So yes, congratulations to Team USA (and yes, they were already quoting “the 1980 Miracle” on the live broadcast). Canada will be back. For me, I guess it’s nice to know that a tweet my team put out almost a year ago (when Canada beat the U.S. in the Four Nations) has lived rent-free in the heads of Americans since then, if their latest response to it is any indication.

If anyone wants to understand that a silly little hockey story can reshape what a whole audience thinks is possible, one could do worse than starting with a movie whose title is Miracle. And then maybe looking, with fresh eyes, at another improbable hockey story that’s currently breaking brains (as well as other parts): Heated Rivalry.

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In the communications business there’s a line that goes something like this: by the time we’re tired of saying it, they’re only just beginning to hear it. There’s also the truism that Canadians don’t venerate our own English-language culture until the rest of the world has decided it’s great. All of which makes this moment a little disorienting. If Heated Rivalry feels like it’s reached oversaturation for us, it’s not because it’s over — it’s because it saturated Canadians first.

I know how that last part sounds, but we’re talking about a smutty gay TV hockey romance, so buckle up. Or lace up, I guess.

Heated Rivalry is, in other words, the rare Canadian pop culture thing that didn’t have Canadians waiting politely for America to tell us that it’s great. It showed up on Crave like a weird little homegrown comet, and then it just kept going. And if it currently feels like we’ve already lived through the entire cultural lifecycle of it up here — the memes, the group chats, the think pieces, the think-pieces about the think pieces — it’s because the show has shifted from “Canadian obsession” into “thing that keeps traveling.”

(I did not have nation-and-then-the-world-becomes-entranced-by-a-smutty-gay-hockey-romance-produced-by-what-I-believe-is-North-America’s-tenth-largest-streaming-service on my 2025/2026 bingo card, but here we are.)

In a nifty little bit of timing, the two main stars of Heated Rivalry carried the Olympic torch. Not in a “sponsored on TikTok” kind of way, but rather as a part of the institutionally sanctioned and globally legible ritual of being official torchbearers. They are famous enough to represent the world’s vibes while holding fire. Connor Storrie, who plays Ilya, hosted Saturday Night at the end of February, and Hudson Williams, who plays Shane, made a guest appearance that stopped the show cold for a full 20 seconds of audience applause.

Three months ago Williams and Storrie were basically unknown. Repping the Olympics flame or hosting SNL that quickly is rare, but it’s the kind of rare that Hollywood can still understand. What’s harder to wrap one’s head around is that the on-ramp to those big, mainstream moments is a show in which fifteen minutes into episode one a man masturbates in a shower while another man watches.

That detail is not from my memory; it is from a Vulture essay about Heated Rivalry reaction videos. The shower-scene-to-Olympic-torchbearer timeline is a special kind of cultural efficiency, one that was borne not just from people watching the show, but from people talking about watching the show, too. And I guess people like me sharing links to other people talking about how people are watching the show, as well. It’s viewers all the way down.

Just as improbable is how Heated Rivalry became a hit in the first place. It wasn’t launched like a giant American franchise. It wasn’t made with a lot of money. The source material is a romance series that was successful inside its genre but didn’t transcend it. And there were no huge celebrities attached at the outset. (The show has made its actors into big stars, as opposed to having big stars that made the show a success.)

Heated Rivalry did something streaming shows almost never do: it was released weekly and it got bigger. A lot bigger. Crave reported that viewership jumped more than 400% from week one to week two — which is basically the opposite of the normal streaming curve, where the premiere is the peak and gravity does the rest. Bell Media’s Season 2 renewal release correctly framed the whole thing as a story of uncommon momentum. Maybe not a miracle, but still incredibly rare.

The U.S. rollout was even weirder. HBO Max reportedly acquired the series only nine days before its premiere — no runway for big traditional marketing, no time to build a “next week on...” machine, just a tiny window to toss a Canadian show into the American content ocean and hope it didn’t sink.

But word of mouth is as powerful as a Scott Stevens hit when it’s real. Industry data shows that it went from roughly 30 million minutes streamed for the debut episode in the U.S. to 324 million minutes for the finale — a tenfold jump.

The argument about whether Heated Rivalry “counts” as a hit has lingered longer than it should, because in the streaming era anyone can cherry-pick numbers to support almost any conclusion. Ratings used to just mean how many people viewed of a particular episode, but now they are often expressed in terms of total minutes viewed by an entire audience in a given period. So a six-episode series that totals roughly 300 minutes will never compete in a time-based chart with something like Grey’s Anatomy, which has hundreds of 45-minute episodes available. Heated Rivalry has never been a top ten show, strictly speaking — but it’s been everywhere, somehow.

This is where Heated Rivalry shows us something, in the biases of the people trying to make sense of it. I don’t just mean the openly partisan anti-gay corner of the internet. (There’s a Fox-adjacent anti-gay site called OutKick that argued the show’s success was a fabricated, desperate, “pro-woke” media invention. I won’t link to it because, eww, and also because they’re wrong about this, the way they’re wrong about everything, and they aren’t especially interesting.)

What is interesting is how much skepticism came from people who do not share OutKick’s odious politics. Far more even-keeled industry observers — without any explicit anti-gay agenda — struggled to accept that the show could be a genuine hit. Pundit Matt Belloni from Puck Media (who is smart and informed, if something of a cynic) suggested early on that reports of Heated Rivalry’s success were overblown. Not because he’s some culture-war crusader, and not only because the numbers didn’t look like they’re “supposed” to look for a hit. But also, I think, because there’s never been a show like it. Nothing about it fits the template.

And when something doesn’t fit the template, our brains tend to search for confirmation that what appears to be happening isn’t real rather than evidence that the template might be wrong — or that what is happening might be reshaping the template altogether. Instead of asking, “what am I not seeing?” we ask, “what is it that everyone else thinks they’re seeing but isn’t real?” The skepticism isn’t necessarily malicious — there’s a real difference between homophobia and heteronormativity — but it is telling.

Quick aside, because I can’t help myself: women (often younger women) and queer men have their pop culture tastes mocked all the time, and then — with exhausting regularity — it turns out they were right, but they were early. No less than the Beatles were dismissed by many as talentless because their first fans were teenage girls. Entire genres get pre-devalued because the loudest people loving them aren’t straight men. This is not new. It’s just regularly renewed, with new examples.

* * *

Heated Rivalry found its earliest success with gay men, but even more so with straight women — like my wife, who (he says, trying to find the right way to express this) is completely fucking obsessed with this show.

I’m seventeen years into a blissful relationship with this woman, and she is my favourite person in the whole world (grown-up division). But before her there were other relationships (gasp!), and some were with women and some were with men (double gasp!) I’m proudly, openly queer. I’m also intensely monogamous. I just happened to be gifted with a dating pool twice as large as the one most people get in which I swam around to find my one and only.

This makes me the gayest person in my household. I am also, by a long shot, the most sports-watching and sports-loving person in my household. I’m the most TV-watching person in the household and the most pop-culture-obsessed person in the household, too — so it is hilarious that my wife is the one completely undone by a gay hockey TV romance. She’s so into it that she referred to the decorated undersides of this year’s Christmas cookies as “festive bottoms,” which feels like relevant information somehow.

She is not suddenly into hockey, though. She remains, at her core, constitutionally opposed to watching an actual game. And I’m not sure she’s ever watched any TV series twice before, much less four times. So why this?

Part of the appeal of Heated Rivalry for her is the same as it is for everyone: Ilya is hot as fuck. But what she really loves is the emotion of it — the tenderness, the yearning, the relief of finally being seen. And while I am moved by the show in all the ways a person can be moved (parts are moving more than others), I just love how deeply she is moved. There is something profoundly inspiring about watching a straight woman scream at the screen because two fictional dudes are finally kissing on a fictional TV hockey broadcast. Love is love, right?

This may sound sentimental, and I guess it is. But it’s also personal. That same instinct is why she has never once made me feel like I need to be something I’m not to love her fully. Not that she (or anyone) should — but when we first got together there was a lot of chatter in her ear about whether she would be “enough” for me because I can also love men. (I genuinely cannot imagine how she would not be enough, as she’s everything.) Most of these people — gay and straight alike, this was an equal-opportunity prejudice — were sure that I was gay and not anything else, so any woman was doomed with me. That wasn’t really about her and in a way it wasn’t even really about me, either. It was about bisexuality, or more precisely how to some people bisexuality simply doesn’t exist.

That wasn’t a surprising narrative. I’d believed versions of it myself. For a while I managed the neat and devastating trick of thinking I could never make it work with any woman because I was “really” gay, while also believing it was hopeless for me with any man because I was “really” straight. I spent a good chunk of my life trying to solve myself like a math problem where the only acceptable answers were A or B, even though no other letters were even presented as possibilities. (This is also why they call me Math Valiquette.)

I don’t hold grudges about the cultural confusion, because twenty years ago we did not talk about sexuality as a spectrum the way we do now. My favourite TV comedy of all time, 30 Rock, captured the prevailing attitude perfectly with this line: “There’s no such thing as bisexual. That’s something they invented in the ’90s to sell hair products.” I still think that joke is funny — but doubly so now because it’s also a clean artifact of how much more misunderstood bisexuality was just fifteen years ago. (Which is not to say we have progressed far enough, but I don’t think any decent writers’ room would suggest such a joke today.)

It was unfathomable to a lot of people (probably most people) that being bi was anything other than a brief layover on a not-so-direct flight to Gayland. I get it. For plenty of queer people “bisexual” did function as a staging area — a safer label to try on out loud, or a way to buy time with your family, your friends, your industry, or your own terrified brain. That’s not dishonesty so much as navigation, and sometimes it was just the least catastrophic option available. Elton John’s 1976 Rolling Stone interview is a famous example of complicated public labeling — and his memoir-era reflections underline how much pressure and self-protection can shape what someone says before they can say what they mean. Nonetheless, the impact left on the landscape was another high-profile example of someone saying they’re bi when they’re actually gay. We weren’t getting any other stories, in the real world or in popular culture. Eventually, that started to change.

* * *

Here’s the hinge: when a pattern repeats often enough, it starts to feel like reality. And “realistic” becomes a synonym not for what is empirically true, but for what we’ve been trained to expect. That’s why “realism” is such a slippery accusation in stories about identity and belonging, because there is a moving sidewalk of what a culture finds thinkable.

We call that framework the Overton Window — the range of ideas a society treats as acceptable at a given time. The thing about this window is that it shifts. It always shifts. But it shifts fastest when we stop pretending the current window is permanent architecture.

I think this is why I talk about my own sexuality as often as I do. I didn’t exist anywhere else that I could see when I was figuring out who I am. That was a lonely and difficult place. I felt pre-erased, if that makes sense. This feeling, I think, of not existing – of not seeing ourselves – is a part of what leads far too many queer people to erase themselves from the world. I still assert my queerness, clearly and publicly, not to make it more real, but to make the reality of it more visible.

Which brings us back to Heated Rivalry — and a take I keep seeing from all sides: it’s unrealistic. This isn’t wrong, strictly speaking. It’s not just that (spoiler alert) there aren’t any out and accepted and thriving NHLers — it’s that no one who has ever played in an NHL game is queer and out. There is absolutely a “culture of silence” in the NHL. (And we’re reminded time and time and time again that hockey’s culture and silence problems are much bigger than how it deals with queerness. Which isn’t the subject here but is so flagrant and so gross that it can’t go unmentioned.)

The “unrealistic” critique lands so oddly to me. Because as much as Heated Rivalry exists in a particular space all its own, it is still a work of sports fiction — a genre that is not (and has never been) a documentary enterprise. Sports fiction is built on taking something we rarely or never see, and bringing it to life in a way that makes us rethink what is and isn’t possible, what is and isn’t real.

Rocky is the ne plus ultra of sports movies — the undefeated champ, if you will. It’s a Best Picture winner and one of the most culturally influential films of all time. And it is just absurd: a punk club fighter from the back streets of Philadelphia gets a crack at the world title and goes the distance with the heavyweight champion. It’s statistically ridiculous. But nobody leaves Rocky asking for a probability model. We leave believing even harder and running up some stairs.

Rocky was such a hit they made more Rockys. So many more! I guess that once we accept the first miracle, the brain becomes extremely flexible about what counts as “possible.” By the time we got to Rocky Balboa (2006), we were watching a nearly sixty-year-old Rocky come out of retirement to fight the reigning champ, which is about 30 years less plausible than it was in the first Rocky. Still, critics and audiences mostly went along with it.

There’s also Rudy, which is Hollywood’s most common sports fiction qualifier in the form of a movie: “based on a true story,” a phrase that is usually code for “this wasn’t inspiring enough yet, so we turned the volume up.” Rudy is the story of a no-chance Notre Dame college football walk-on who, in the movie, becomes a one-play folk hero. The true story is more complicated than that, but the movie legend is so powerful that even the people involved have spent decades trying (and largely failing) to correct the record.

What’s even more fascinating is what happens after the embellishment and the myth becomes medicine. New England Patriots linebacker Rob Ninkovich once said he watched Rudy before games “just to get (himself) going”. (That’s not a critique! It’s the whole point!) An actual Pro Football Hall of Fame quarterback, Joe Montana, has publicly debunked parts of the film — and people basically shrug, or even complain that he’s ruining things, because the emotional effect matters more than the documentary details. It must be convenient for Montana to have those Super Bowl rings so he can stick something in his ears to drown out the sound of people who have never played football explaining to him what is and isn’t real in sports.

I make a lot of speeches about innovation, and one essential truth in that arena is that doing the thing first is usually what’s truly difficult, more so than doing the thing at all. It takes more than just imagination to will newness into existence. It can take the kind of self-possession that is usually reserved for people who see themselves as separate from (or even above) the world as it exists. (This is why a lot of the world’s “great” innovators are also people with terrible interpersonal skills.)

Actively living in this world while trying to make a better version of it is profoundly exhausting, and most of us end up doing one or the other. It is an enormous burden that we place on people who are “different,” demanding that they live authentically as themselves in a world that tells them they aren’t real while expecting that they’ll change it.

Which is why I keep coming back to the same question: why do we accept and even expect the miracles, montages, and destiny-defeating underdogs in our sports stories – until the miracle is queer?

* * *

The blunt answer is that it’s the audience. It’s not about what did or didn’t happen in the world, or even what could happen but hasn’t. It’s about the viewer, who will usually only admit that different is possible if they can see themselves in the story in the first place.

Here’s the thing about straight cis white men and pop culture: they’re genuinely bad at finding themselves in characters who aren’t like them. I say this without particular malice — and also, full disclosure, with only partial standing. I’m male. I’m white. I’m cis. I’m half-straight, which gives me what I consider a solid 3.5 out of 4 on the things-that-have-made-your-life-easier scorecard. The queer part is the only reason I’m not at a perfect four.

I’m not sure I’d have developed any particular gift for finding myself in other people’s stories if I hadn’t been forced to. My queerness put me on the outside of the assumed audience early enough that I had to learn the translation work — not as a moral achievement, but as a sort of basic necessity. I’m not alone in that experience, obviously. There’s a reason so many of us queers, especially those who grew up in the monoculture of the ‘80s and early ‘90s, ended up falling so hard for the X-Men. None of those X-Men were explicitly gay. The franchise was built on a team of people born different, feared by the society that surrounded them, hunted, registered, occasionally offered a “cure” they hadn’t asked for — and finding family in each other because nowhere else would have them. The ‘90s animated series — which aired during the peak of the AIDS crisis and ran a storyline about a virus that only killed mutants until it infected someone “normal,” at which point a cure was suddenly discovered — spoke to an entire generation of queer kids who longed to see themselves in a story and found the closest thing available. The first openly gay character in a mainstream Marvel comic was, tellingly, Northstar — an X-Men adjacent Canadian, because of course he was. More on him shortly.

The point is: queer people have always been extraordinarily good at seeing themselves in stories that were not made for them, because for most of history, there was no alternative. That skill — the ability to locate your own self in a story centred on someone who doesn’t immediately look or feel like you — is one straight cis white men have rarely had to develop, because they’ve never needed to. The whole architecture of mainstream culture was built with them as the assumed centre. No one develops a muscle they’ve never needed.

In fact, if anything, one develops the opposite: a kind of fragility, coupled with a complete inability to recognize it as such.

It wasn’t that long ago that an all-female reboot of Ghostbusters — a film with a 74% on Rotten Tomatoes that grossed $229 million worldwide — was met with a torrent of online rage from men who said it was ruining their childhood. Leslie Jones received death threats. Racist abuse. Hack attempts on her social accounts. For being in a movie. When the sequel Ghostbusters: Afterlife was announced — reverting to a male-led cast, ignoring the 2016 film entirely — director Jason Reitman said it would “give the franchise back to the fans.” Jones called that out immediately for what it was: a shout-out to the people who had harassed her and her castmates for the crime of existing in a story that wasn’t centered on men. It’s a cliché now — it’s become a cliché precisely because it keeps happening — but there is no better illustration than this that a lot of men (#notallmen, but it’s always men) experience the loss of even a sliver of assumed cultural centrality as an existential threat.

Women have (obviously, no one needs a dude to explain this) been doing the translation work — finding themselves in stories not made by or for them — for as long as there have been stories. The M/M romance subgenre — gay male romance novels about men falling in love with men — is read by more women than men, and women dominate its authorship too.

That is the muscle in action — and the proof that emotional truth travels. You don’t have to be a man to find yourself in a story about men. You don’t have to be gay to find yourself in a story about queer love. Maybe you just have to have spent enough of your life looking for yourself in stories that weren’t quite made for you. Women have had millennia of practice with that, but still the women who claimed Heated Rivalry loudly and joyfully got grief for doing that, too. The Guardian ran a piece asking why women couldn’t just be allowed to enjoy the show — as apparently that requires a defence.

Maybe that’s because even in the sports stories that aren’t about straight white men we still give them a big chunk of the narrative.

Take A League of Their Own (1992). It’s the story of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League — women stepping up to play pro ball while the men went to war. It’s a wonderful film. And Tom Hanks is very funny in it. But his character, Jimmy Dugan — a Jimmie Foxx stand-in who manages the Rockford Peaches — was so prominent because the filmmakers felt they needed a big male star. He is not a minor presence. His arc — drunk cynic learns to believe in women’s baseball — is practically equal to the actual women’s baseball story. His “there’s no crying in baseball” moment is the line most people can quote. The movie about women’s baseball is, in significant part, remembered for Tom Hanks’ transformation into a believer in women’s baseball, when it’s the women themselves who have the story that needs and deserves to be told.

42 (2013) is the Chadwick Boseman Jackie Robinson biopic. It’s a good movie about one of the most important athletes in American history. Harrison Ford plays Branch Rickey, the Brooklyn Dodgers executive who signed Robinson to break baseball’s colour line. Rickey was real, and his role was real, and Ford plays him with a kind of growling, scenery-chewing commitment. But here’s what Common Sense Media noted in their review: Ford’s performance “gets more screen time than strictly necessary for a biopic about a Black icon.” The Student Life review puts it directly: “Although marketed as the story of Robinson, this may actually be the story of the general manager who hired him... He gets as much, if not more, screen time as Robinson.”

None of this is to say these films are worthless. A League of Their Own is genuinely charming. 42 is a good, useful introduction to Jackie Robinson’s importance. But the pattern is striking: if the underdog sports hero isn’t a white man, there still has to be one of those in the foreground somewhere. It isn’t any more complicated than straight white dudes expecting that all culture is for them and being too fragile not to feel personally attacked by the stuff that isn’t.

But #notallmen, and this time I mean it.

Heated Rivalry has been a huge focus of the Empty Netters podcast. Hosts Dan and Chris Powers are brothers, former hockey players, and theirs is one of the more popular hockey podcasts going — and they became some of the show’s most vocal and enthusiastic champions. Their reaction videos went viral. The New York Times noted them. Vogue called them a positive example of non-toxic masculinity in sports culture. That part is genuinely wonderful, and I mean that.

But before all of that, Outsports reported that Dan had privately texted calling the show “trash” and its creators “cowards,” saying it was made to “check inclusivity boxes.” His defence, when the texts leaked, was that he’d only seen ten minutes — and that as someone who had tried and failed to get an authentic hockey drama made in Hollywood, his instinct was to resent a “smutty romance” getting the green light instead.

I believe him. The arc that followed — his genuine engagement, his visible emotion, his willingness to say I came at this wrong — is real, and it matters. That kind of public course-correction takes something. I love him for it.

But that initial reaction is worth sitting with for just a second, because it is such a clean, human version of the pattern I’ve been describing. Authentic hockey drama versus gay romance — as if authenticity is the exclusive property of one kind of story. As if a show about two men falling in love is automatically less real than a show about a grizzled coach and a team fighting for the Cup. As if there aren’t gay hockey players! The show wasn’t pre-judged as bad hockey. It was pre-judged as not real hockey — before a full episode had been watched — because the story it was telling wasn’t the one a certain kind of hockey fan had been trained to expect. Dan Powers isn’t responsible for how he was programmed; none of us are. That he transcended his programming is just fucking lovely. It also reinforces why we can’t let our programming tell us what is and isn’t real.

* * *

Back to Northstar.

When Alpha Flight #106 gave Marvel its first openly gay superhero in 1992, the creative team didn’t just write him a coming-out scene. They wrote him a dying baby. Northstar finds an infant abandoned in an alley — a baby with AIDS. He takes her in. She dies in his arms. Her death is what moves him to publicly declare his homosexuality, to put a face on the crisis, to be visible in a world that was being ravaged by a disease the culture was barely acknowledging. The coming-out and the suffering were literally the same issue. Could not have one without the other.

This is the thing about the “unrealistic” critique of Heated Rivalry that I don’t think gets named clearly enough. The objection isn’t really about hockey accuracy. It’s about the absence of punishment. Nobody paying enough of a price. And we have been so thoroughly trained — by decades of stories in which queer visibility and queer suffering arrived in the same package — to expect that price that its absence reads, to some, as a lie. Or at best, a fantasy. The Canadian utopia, as Lexie Angelo generously and pointedly calls it in her terrific essay.

Dan Levy was asked, repeatedly, to explain the absence of homophobia in Schitt’s Creek. He has talked openly about the choice — the deliberate decision to build a world in which queer characters existed without even the threat of being punished for it. And I love him for that, and I love the show. But I also want us to sit with the fact that he was asked the question at all. That someone looked at a world where queer people weren’t facing existential threats because of their queerness and thought: this requires a justification. Why?

That’s the burden. Not “show us the drama.” Not “show us the stakes.” Specifically: show us the suffering. Prove the identity is real because it costs something. Which is a demand made of almost no one else.

* * *

Here’s the part that makes me hopeful: Heated Rivalry is already doing what the best sports stories do. People are using it as a rehearsal space for courage. Amateur hockey player Jesse Kortuem came out publicly and credited the show with helping him do it.

And it’s also okay to hold two thoughts at once: that the show offers hope even as it reminds us that the real world is harsher. Zach Sullivan, an out bisexual pro hockey player, wrote about loving the show while also being skeptical about how quickly real hockey changes.

Meanwhile, star Hudson Williams has said closeted athletes have been reaching out to him privately — which reinforces just how “real” this whole thing is, and always has been.

Sports culture loves to say “impossible is nothing,” because athletics constantly challenges that limits are negotiable. But in the NHL — and in all major North American men’s team sports — we’ve somehow built a world where the impossible isn’t winning a championship, or playing through pain, or dominating a sport against all odds.

The impossible, apparently, is being gay and out while doing any of that. Which is absurd, because the leagues are already full of gay champions and gay MVPs and gay role players and gay grinders (grindrs?) and gay healthy scratches. They’re just doing all of that quietly, because the cost of not doing it quietly is still too high.

So if Heated Rivalry is unrealistic, it is so only in that the definition of what real must be is still too narrow. The question isn’t whether it mirrors the current world perfectly. The question is whether it can stretch the definition of what we think is possible in the world we’re actively building. If you watch it and your first reaction is “that could never happen,” I hear you. But I also want to gently suggest the follow-up question: do you say that about Rocky?

Because the burden we put on marginalized creators — “show me the pain or you’re lying” — is one of the ways we keep the pain in place. The point of telling a story like Heated Rivalry isn’t to pretend the world is kinder than it has been: it’s to remind us that we can make the world better than it is.

But first, speaking of brands and weirdness: there’s been a delay between the last chapter and this one because my Substack got suspended. By Substack. Apparently, a “bad actor” (not in the Gal-Gadot-in-everything-but-the-first-Wonder-Woman-movie sense of that term, but rather someone or something nefarious) gave me 30,000 fake subscribers which triggers Substack to automatically shut my whole thing down. The problem wasn’t hard to fix, I don’t think, once I reached a human being. The hard part was me reaching any human being in the first place. My work vanished and my community was cut off and all Substack offered me for help was a form to fill out, followed by the weak assurance of the automatically-generated reply that thanked me for my concern and promised to follow up.

All the while, I’m thinking: if Substack’s tech could automatically detect some bad bots and suspend my account, couldn’t it automatically delete those new and fake subscribers (or at least remove them temporarily) and let me continue to publish? More importantly, shouldn’t a brand that says it’s about the empowerment of content creators not actively depower one of them? I expected more from Substack. Why?

It’s because Substack’s business is publishing, but its brand is the empowerment, and I didn’t pick Substack for its dashboard or analytics or functionality. I picked it for what it stood for. That’s what great brands do: they mean something, not just to their current users but to everyone who might join them someday. They make their purpose visible through their marketing, so even the people who haven’t picked them yet already know why they should.

Inside politics, people talk endlessly about “communications,” “messaging,” and “strategy,” but almost never about brand. Big-B Brand marketing shows up mostly during elections. The rest of the time, it’s an unrelenting firehose of tactics and talking points focused on winning the next headline instead of building the next belief. The relentless cadence means we talk about what (and count it as a success when that what gets heard) instead of why, and why we should matter to Canadians.

This mirrors how most marketing works, as the broader practice largely divides into two buckets: brand marketing and performance marketing.

Brand marketing is about building meaning, emotion, loyalty and all the things that give a brand equity. It’s hard to measure but impossible to replace. Think about the Super Bowl: most of those (really expensive) ads aren’t trying to make anyone buy something right away. The good ones attach specific attributes to their brands (like “it’s for young people!” or “it’s the most dependable!”) and the best ones do that while making us feel something profoundly motivating about their brands, too. Trust, love, nostalgia, excitement, even identification.

Performance marketing, on the other hand, is about short-term results. The clicks, conversions, donations, sign-ups, and everything else that can be measured, tracked, and reported by Monday morning. It’s immediate and tangible and therefore addictive. Here’s the thing, though: it usually only works if the brand work has already been done.

My good friend, the genius Jon Crowley, wrote an excellent piece about this in his Substack. In “What advertising is for” he argues that we’ve confused the click that happens before the sale with the reason the sale happens. And he’s right. Performance marketing exists in a world of seemingly infinite metrics, so it is great for drawing a line from message to tap to checkout, but that’s attribution theatre and not the whole story. The want usually comes from brand. The choice usually comes from the brand.

Apple’s “1984” Super Bowl ad ran in commercial time only once. Once! And it didn’t feature any Apple products! Yet it jump-started 40 years of brand gravity that can’t be measured in CPMs but no doubt helped generate billions and billions and billions in sales. In politics, Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign made hope feel like a tangible product and he rode that all the way to the White House. That was brand alchemy: getting people to believe in something and eventually (but actively) make a choice because of that belief. Clark Kent and Superman are the same guy, but only one of them has amazing branding, and only one of them stands for something.

Trudeau’s 2015 brand remains one of the most extraordinary in modern politics. He took a moribund party and turned it into a majority government, and the power of his personal political brand was the game-changer. Only one poll of the 50-plus conducted in the three months leading up to that election predicted that his Liberals would end up with their share of the popular vote. It’s hard to measure what a great brand did at the moment of choice, but it’s even harder to predict what a great brand will do. Brand doesn’t always show up in the research.

But the Justin Trudeau brand, like any brand, can’t overcome everything. And it couldn’t overcome what happened in the second half of December of 2024.

That’s because Chrystia Freeland also had a political brand, and a powerful one. (Not powerful enough to get her what she wanted, though, as we will see soon enough.)

Plenty of events could have dealt the critical blow to Justin Trudeau before Chrystia Freeland resigned from his cabinet. Two dozen Caucus members had already demanded he step down. Popular Cabinet Ministers like Seamus O’Reagan and Sean Fraser had quit. Still, approval hovered around 30%. Nothing really moved the needle. Then Freeland left, and within days Trudeau’s rating dropped to a catastrophic 22%. That wasn’t just politics. It was brand-on-brand violence. Freeland’s departure told Canadians that the warranty on the Trudeau brand had expired. 24 anonymous MPs working together couldn’t do that. Her lone brand could.

I meant what I said: there is a lot to admire in Chrystia Freeland. She has a brain that is working about ten steps ahead of everyone else’s, and she used it for the greater good. She did so while dealing with an extra-large share of the brutal misogyny that plagues every woman who enters the public sphere of political life.

But no one can foresee everything. Over the course of the weekend that preceded the publication of her resignation letter there was the expected flurry of phone calls and outreach, but none of it turned into the kind of support that she wanted. The Liberal Caucus that wanted her to add to the pile-on wasn’t going to put her on top of that same pile. Supporting Chrystia’s Freeland’s resignation because of what it did to the Justin Trudeau brand isn’t the same as supporting Chrystia Freeland. What was meant to be the first step in her ascendancy turned into her last big public act.

Which isn’t what she wanted, obviously. She didn’t publicly un-endorse the PM in December to finish a distant second in a leadership race in March. (A contest she lost by 70-some points even in her own riding.) She didn’t resign so that she could leave Cabinet and take a $70K+ pay cut for a position that has no staff and no budget shortly after that. Every brand has its limits, and a brand powerful enough to force the Prime Minister to resign isn’t necessarily a brand powerful enough to lead the party. (It’s the same thing outside the bubble, too. Porsche can sell us sunglasses, but Ray-Ban can’t sell us cars. When it comes to brands, the limit does exist.)

She’s not exactly a popular human with Trudeau’s former PMO staff, but I take no pleasure in what happened to Chrystia Freeland. She gave her all to the party and to Canada and I just can’t celebrate her demise.

Others have though! At a public taping of The Herle Burly podcast in the spring I watched as some of the Liberal éminence grise quasi-humourously said they were grateful to Chrystia for resigning. There were more chuckles in the room. That’s gross. Freeland didn’t blow up her political career to make Mark Carney Prime Minister. She resigned to be Prime Minister and instead she triggered his rise. That worked out well, but it’s still like thanking Bruce Wayne’s parents for getting shot. Sure, Gotham got Batman – but they died.

So, political brands: they’re weird, but weird can also be good. (This is what people say about pineapple on pizza, and I may be coming around.) In the past decade we’ve had two new Liberal Prime Ministers. They both soared to victories that no one saw coming. One was too green to be “ready,” and the other had never even run for office before – things that can be catastrophic when properly weaponized by an opposing campaign. But both carried with them the considerable equities of their own brands, and those brands met the moment. Justin Trudeau 2015 was the real change Canadians wanted; his relative youth and his celebrity were brand assets, as much as the Conservatives tried to make them negatives. 2025 Pierre Poilievre had built his whole brand on how broken Canada was; Mark Carney 2025 told us that he would keep Canada Strong and he won with that. He did so with brand-building ads that sometimes didn’t even address politics, but built up his Canadian bona fides and his relatability.

When Trudeau left office in 2025, he had a 47% approval rating and a net -2 favourability score (both excellent for an outgoing Prime Minister and both far better than Poilievre’s ratings at the time). That was an incredible 50-point jump over just a few months. His resignation wasn’t a fall from grace as much as it was a climb back up. I wasn’t surprised. Brands fall out of favour all the time. If a personal political brand is strong enough to deliver a majority government, then it’s strong enough to recover.

Next: speaking of brands, we’ll get into what should never have been named the Climate Action Incentive Payment and the Carbon Tax Election™ that never was. Canadians couldn’t possibly be against getting a bunch of money in their bank accounts every quarter, could they? COULD THEY?

I just realized that I haven’t given enough ammunition to anyone eager to label me a woke-Liberal-social‑justice warrior. Don’t worry! You’ll get your fill right here. (Also: why is “woke” a pejorative term? Oh, I know why: because bad actors like to ridicule their opponents by turning the table on positive labels. “Woke” used to mean awake to injustice; now it’s a slur used by the people who prefer we stay asleep. Fine. Set your alarms.)

Last time I said Justin Trudeau lives rent-free in a lot of heads. The people around him do too, by extension (hi). Case in point: former Harper staffer Howard Anglin picked a culture-war hill to die on (“Should a grown man know a Katy Perry song?”) and Twitter (sorry, X) roasted his take. Mostly civil and mostly on the argument, which is how it should be. You say something silly in public; the public says, “Sir, that’s silly, and here’s why,” and life goes on.

That pop‑culture skirmish isn’t the point: it’s the diagnostic. So: what are the diseases?

It’s partisanship so rigid we can’t walk back dumb takes. It’s a reflex to discount women, it’s numbness to their abuse, and it’s a habit of ditching them when it’s inconvenient. It’s all of the above, and it happens in every political party, including mine.

(See, I told you there would be plenty for the Woke Police™ to go after.)

The stakes aren’t very high when we’re talking about a pop song, but the past few weeks have reaffirmed that the stakes are often a lot higher, especially for people who don’t look like me. There’s something instructive in what I saw when I was at the PMO that foreshadowed my least favourite Liberal moment of post-JT 2025 (so far). Let’s get into it and see how many friends I lose after this one!

Katie Telford (Chief of Staff to the PM) and Supriya Dwivedi (Senior Advisor) are excellent humans. They both happen to be women. One is a woman of colour. (That’s probably the woman named “Supriya Dwivedi,” but anything is possible.) I loved working with them, and I love having them as friends. I do not love how much crap they put up with for daring to be women in politics. It comes out of nowhere and comes from all sides, including ours.

If you’re still here and think progressives and Liberals (or Conservatives!) “deserve” abuse, feel free to bail. That’s always the worst take, but after the recent pile-ons directed at anyone not sufficiently mournful about Charlie Kirk, it’s not just bad – it’s Scheer hypocrisy. (Astute readers will notice the pun in the last sentence, and I promise that chicken will come home to roost by the end of this thing.)

Howard Anglin and Katie Telford have a lot in common: political operatives, senior roles at the PMO, now private citizens but still active online. They also have some clear differences: he’s a Conservative man and she’s a Liberal woman.

Another difference: Howard fired off a culture-war tweet that was combative and a little political, but people went after his argument, not the man himself.

Katie Telford posts anything – anything – and the replies go straight to gendered abuse. Not just name-calling but false accusations and, of course, threats-threats-threats. Just look at how people responded to her tweet about Canadian tennis success. Two of the first four replies use a word that I won’t repeat here, but it rhymes with “buying shawarma with Bitcoin was a really dumb stunt.” And this is comparatively benign. It’s usually more than gendered slurs. It’s creepy obsessions and promises of violence. Not disagreement but dehumanization. If Howard gets corrected, Katie gets crucified.

Political violence isn’t only what happens when a gun is involved (still a relatively rare occurrence in Canada). It’s the daily barrage designed to shove women (and others) out of public life, to make the cost of showing up higher than most people can afford.

I worked with Katie: I saw firsthand the volume and the relentlessness of the bile. It was (and is) extraordinary. It’s like being pelted with gravel: one stone is nothing but a thousand stones a day will take your skin off. Thankfully, she’s not just one of the smartest people I know, she’s also one of the strongest. So nevertheless, she persisted (for a record ten years). But this shouldn’t be the cost of getting into politics.

Name calling and ad hominem attacks have a disproportionately negative effect on women in politics (and women who therefore might not want to get into politics). I know this to be true not only because of the studies and the research (but all that exists). Recently, a Conservative woman told me (and a room full of mostly women) the same thing.

I went to an election-night party for the multi-partisan Beyond a Ballot podcast (mission: get more women into politics). Liberal Amanda Alvaro, who is a dear friend, is the one of the co-hosts. Amanda is whip-smart and successful as hell. She believes that multi-partisan is possible and she acts like it, and I love her for it. On good days she makes me feel optimistic that we might return to the days in which political disagreements were viewed as bridges to cross, not immovable barriers.

That night, it was Conservative co-host Rachael Segal who made a point I agree with down to the syllable: verbal napalm lands harder on women than on men because women know what comes next for them. Men often hear “clowns/idiots/morons/whatever” as background static; women know those words are an on-ramp to the unwanted DMs, the anonymous shitty emails, the parking-lot comments, and even “We know where you live.” Words aren’t just words. They’re a forecast. So, in politics name-calling changes the math for women and it doesn’t even matter who those bad words are directed towards. Ad hominem attacks against anyone are a signal to women that they should stay away.

Which is why something else Rachael said surprised me: she told the room (of mostly women) that she liked a late-campaign Conservative spot, the one with the two guys on the golf course who call Liberals “clowns.”

This might sound small. It isn’t. Small things normalize bigger things. If “clowns” is just how we talk about people who run the country, then “witch,” “bitch,” and “c—t” are just how some people will talk about the women who are doing that, too. The thermostat ratchets down, the room gets colder, and we all pretend not to notice why fewer women want to come in.

(It’s obviously possible that Rachael just didn’t remember hearing that word. It’s incredible to me that anyone can remember any specific words from that ad at all. This was the come-from-behind game-changer for the Tories? Two curmudgeonly old white guys complaining on a golf course? Were Statler and Waldorf unavailable?)

More recently Rachel Gilmore (a Canadian journalist and former member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery) posted that she was “terrified” of escalating violence in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. This seems like a reasonable emotional reaction. She didn’t gloat, dunk, or do a touchdown dance. She said: I’m scared this gets worse. She knows of what she speaks here. Rachel has dealt with threats before; she’s also presented about this very subject at the freakin’ UN.

Andrew Scheer (Conservative MP and former Leader of the Opposition) decided that the right thing for an elected official to do when a Canadian citizen says she’s afraid of further violence is to blast out a tweet that calls her “hateful” and “twisted” with a screenshot of her post. He sent this to his audience, not hers, with his framing and his characterizations. Which means there was an army of people primed to come after her before she would have known what was happening. It’s a classic Twitter tactic: isolate, label, unleash. This is designed to hurt.

It’s horrific that Charlie Kirk was assassinated; so horrific that no one should have to repeat something that obvious. Yet many of us do, because the Andrew Scheers of this world treat any reaction short of full-throated lament as if we are celebrating his death. We aren’t.

That’s 1.6 million views for Mr. Scheer’s tweet; his followers number only about 1/6 of that. Which means this thing went viral. Other Conservatives retweeted him, as did far-right influencer types. This is the most “successful” thing he’s ever tweeted by a country mile.

Rachel Gilmore then made it to the top of a list of “Charlie Kirk’s Murderers” on a (now shuttered) American website that vowed to “expose” the people who “murdered” him. “Murder” is the word they used, and that deserves a comment: only one person murdered Charlie Kirk and it sure as hell wasn’t Rachel Gilmore.

That didn’t matter. Shortly thereafter, Rachel Gilmore was the target of some truly horrendous threats. Threats that were serious enough for police to step in.

Correlation isn’t causation, but let’s all spare each other the pretense of the Coincidence Fairy here. I’m not playing the causation game; I’m playing the common-sense game. A woman says she’s afraid. A politician calls her hateful to a city-sized audience. The threats surge.

I don’t think it’s possible that Conservative Rachael Segal missed it when Andrew Scheer characterized progressive journalist Rachel Gilmore with some awful language in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. This is exactly what Rachael Segal says keeps women out of politics, and in this case Scheer’s words were followed by words that promised much worse.

So why didn’t she say anything?

I’m not surprised by Andrew Scheer’s actions because this is exactly the man he’s always been. (And for anyone looking to give Scheer a pass on his terrible behaviour because he was so affected by Charlie Kirk’s murder, should I say that anyone who can’t control their emotions for a few days a month isn’t fit to take office?)

I am a little surprised by Rachael Segal. I get that she’s probably much less multi-party than she is Conservative Party, but what does it say about how we treat women in politics that even the women who want to make things better for other women won’t call out their own party for making things worse?

I’m not sure that I should be surprised that so many Liberals leapt to their feet to support the Conservative statement in the House condemning “political violence” that was really condemning “political violence when the target is someone like Charlie Kirk.”

Not every Liberal stood, which is good, I guess. But that’s not how it was widely reported, and not how it played out to Canadians. To progressives it read like “the party that claims to defend women stood and clapped while the other side consecrated a culture warrior who opposed abortion and told women to submit to their husbands.”

Melissa Hortman is a name the Conservatives didn’t mention that day. She was also an American and also a recent victim of a politically motivated assassination. She was an elected official in Minnesota. She was murdered alongside her husband and their dog earlier this summer (when our Parliament wasn’t in session). Her assassin shot and injured two others as well; he also had a target list of 70 more public supporters of a woman’s right to choose on him. He was captured before he could kill anyone else.

Liberals could have said, “We condemn political violence, and we say Hortman’s name, too.” Liberals could have shamed the Conservatives for leaving her out and used their own statement against them. They didn’t.

The Liberal Party needs to let go of the fantasy that true bipartisanship is still on offer even when events dictate that all parties should take the same “side” and say the same things. Because the Conservatives will not do that.

It took Andrew Scheer only three hours after Rachel Gilmore said she was terrified to attack her.

In 2020, a man rammed the gates at Rideau Hall in a truck full of firearms, intending to kill Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Andrew Scheer was the leader of the Conservative Party then and I don’t think he’s ever made a statement about it.

Liberals stood to applaud a Conservative motion rebuking “political violence,” even though it’s clear the Conservatives welcome that when it’s directed at progressive Canadian women, and won’t denounce it when it’s directed at a Liberal Prime Minister. But the Liberals will still (mostly) stand and applaud Charlie Kirk.

I believe that was momentary fecklessness on the part of the Liberal Caucus, borne from a lack of clear direction. I’m afraid it may be a pattern that has more to do with how Liberal MPs see women than anything else.

Because this type of behaviour matches some of the things I saw from our Caucus when I was at PMO, exemplified by how some of them treated Supriya Dwivedi.

Wait! Nothing I’m about to say is a “both-sides” play. The parties are not equivalent on women’s rights (or on the rights of anyone who isn’t a straight cis white man) and that gap is real and consequential. That’s exactly why we must call out sexism and marginalization wherever it shows up, to make sure everyone knows that the fight is real. Rights don’t fall with a drumroll; they erode while “reasonable” people insist they’re safe. (Before Mark Carney took over, I lost count of Canadian men “who support women” telling me they would vote for Pierre Poilievre because “overturning Roe could never happen here.” Um, it was never supposed to happen THERE.) We fight the rot everywhere or we watch it spread. There are powerful forces in the Conservative Party that are waiting for any chance to undo as much of the progress made in Canada that they can. Vote Liberal, but demand more of the Liberals.

Supriya started shortly after I did, and right away there were some “interesting” dynamics. People (so, so many people) assumed I was her boss, even though she’s smarter than I am (ask anyone, including Supriya) and more accomplished than I am and was more senior at the PMO than I was (as she reported into someone more senior than I did). It was just a lazy assumption layered with the usual biases. It wouldn’t be the last time I saw that.

Early on, Supriya fired back at Canada Proud for retweeting a post of hers to their followers with the comment that she was having a “mental breakdown” and she used three coarse words (“gooning,” “boner,” and “cum.” That was fun to write!). This was on Twitter/X. The site that prints slurs on beach towels. Supriya faces daily torrents of racist and sexist abuse, including threats to her safety and to her family, but the words she used were unacceptable, somehow.

For context, Canada Proud is a far-right operation whose Twitter bio says their purpose is to defeat the Liberal Party, and that’s not me making a joke. They exist to attack people like Supriya, and they do.

Defending her in those circumstances should have been instinctive, so of course some of the very Liberals who stood alongside the Conservatives in support of Charlie Kirk also stood alongside Canada Proud and their efforts to get Supriya fired. This is particularly egregious because it punishes Supriya for defending herself in the way that she sees fit, which is standing up to bullies with the kinds of words they use themselves, which is all a bully understands. Turn the other cheek doesn’t work, and it never has. Women should not feel that they have to take abuse for any reason. No one should.

I have no problem with these words and the party of “fuddle-duddle” shouldn’t have a problem with them either. That isn’t a principled stand. It’s policing a woman’s tone while ignoring the men who say stuff that is so much worse.

Three Liberal MPs (that I know of) contacted the PMO directly to demand her dismissal. I am sure that these men were also a part of the Invisible 24, that group who pushed for Justin Trudeau’s resignation via a letter that they wouldn’t sign their names to. I would think that the dudes who were too afraid to put their names on something because of the pushback they might get from their own Caucus would understand the need to protect oneself and support a team member who did so. Maybe they’ve been acting in their own self-interest for so long that they don’t know what courage looks like.

One of those men congratulated me on my early work at the PMO one day. Which is nice! But then he added, “especially since you’ve managed to do it without causing a scandal on Twitter,” which is not nice. This same MP is no stranger to saying things in his socials that cause problems for the rest of Caucus (but I guess a scandal is something that only happens to other people). I can’t imagine he’d take issue with a member of his own community saying “bad” words in response to a hate group, but maybe his community doesn’t include women.

So what does it mean for the Liberal community to truly include women?

The Liberal Party’s structural challenge is baked in: we try to be the biggest possible centre – broad, plural, inclusive. That worked when the map had one viable national rival parked centre-right. It’s different now. The Conservatives have shifted further right and paid no price; they just posted their best popular-vote share in almost 40 years (as they’ll remind everyone over and over). Our 2025 win came from an 11-point lift that largely mirrored the NDP’s drop. The next risk isn’t a Tory surge; it’s the NDP snapping back while progressives (especially women) walk.

That’s why even symbolic alignment with the hard-right culture war is lethal. This month, many Liberals stood for a tribute to a media figure who opposed abortion in any circumstance and preached female “submission.” They didn’t try to qualify that support in the public eye in any way. They don’t seem to think that they needed to. Liberal MP Ernie Klassen, who didn’t stand (thank you Ernie), said that the Liberals with whom he spoke who stood and clapped “said they were applauding freedom of speech, not the rest of it.” That distinction didn’t land with Canadians, which should surprise no one. People are calling the party out, whether it’s this highly upvoted thread on Reddit about that standing O, or articles and opinion pieces that wonder if the government is abandoning women.

“When you’re caught in a moment like that, it’s hard to make a decision,” Klassen said. It shouldn’t be. It wouldn’t be, if everyone in Caucus was one hundred percent clear that supporting women is non-negotiable, and that means going after the Conservatives, not going along with them.

I saw first-hand how some Liberal MPs offered Supriya Dwivedi up for sacrifice when she pushed back against the harassment she (and all women) face online. I watched from afar as the Liberal Caucus stood with Conservatives to venerate an American man who wanted to roll women's rights back by a century, even though those same Conservatives aggressively targeted a Canadian woman who then feared for her life. Women delivered Liberals the victory in 2025, and the party will need those votes again in the next election. If Liberals won’t show up for women, they shouldn’t be surprised if women don’t show up for them.

Next: back to the business of chronicling my time at PMO; it’s the Winter of Our Discontent (and by “Discontent” I mean “Resignations”)

This is a detour, but a necessary one. I’ll still talk about the PMO, the Liberal caucus, the Ottawa press, and Conservative operatives. But what happened at PMO when I worked there is intersecting with what is happening now. There are patterns to look at.

Plus, I love talking about pop culture and this is the longest I’ve ever gone without writing about Katy Perry, so let’s fix that, too.

Lat week, a columnist for a US hedge-fund-owned “Canadian” paper reminded me of something: Justin Trudeau still (always?) lives rent-free in the minds of a lot of people. So much so that someone Trudeau-adjacent (that’s me!) can merit a whole column in a national newspaper – a column whose headline makes quite clear that I’m not even all that important. What a paradox.

Dear Diary: does Colby Cosh think I’m important or not? And what does it mean when he snaps my bra strap and runs away?

Cosh is a sharp writer. But his big “gotcha” was that I hated how well the Conservatives were doing in digital and social.

As was once said to a constipated detective: “No shit, Sherlock.”

That isn’t just something I’ve said already – it was one of my biggest reasons for taking on the whole job in the first place. Marketing effectiveness is one of my areas of expertise. I knew that the Conservatives were handing our asses to us because I don’t let my politics cloud my judgment. I have no trouble recognizing when the CPC (or anyone) is doing something well and that it bugs me.

This is a skill that a lot of private sector strategists develop, especially those who work for ad agencies rather than brands themselves. Our intellectual independence is an asset in assessing the landscape, so we protect it: seeing what everyone else sees, how they see it, is a necessary skill for a marketing agency strategist. Often we’ve worked for multiple competitors in the same category, which is kind of the opposite of partisan politics. (At different times, I’ve worked on Rogers and Bell, on TD and Scotiabank; political staffers don’t work for both Harper and Trudeau’s PMO.) Third-party contractors don’t end up living and dying with a brand the way that someone who works for it does. All of which means that we don’t drink the Kool-Aid even when we’re working on Kool-Aid.

Regardless, I thank Mr. Cosh for the subscribers he sent my way. And if he can’t stop thinking about Justin Trudeau, he’s not alone.

Then there’s Howard Anglin, a former Harper political staffer turned think-tank regular. In July (months after Justin Trudeau resigned and Mark Carney won the election) he asked his followers on Twitter/X: “Why does a 53 year old man know the words to a pop song?”

This was, obviously, a response to the former (emphasis on former) Prime Minister singing along to Katy Perry’s ‘Firework’ at her concert in Montreal.

Twitter/X leans to the right (that’s putting it mildly) and still Anglin’s thinly veiled indictment of men who aren’t afraid to bop out with their pop out was met with scores of responses about how bad his take was.

And not just a little bit bad: the top fifteen responses, ranked by likes, were all people explaining how wrong he was and why. (He got ratioed, as they say.) People pointed out that ‘Firework’ is one of the biggest pop anthems of the last twenty years, that it’s on one of the most successful albums in history, and that knowing the chorus isn’t strange. It’s commonplace.

Let me add to that: ‘Firework’ is one of a small collection of songs with both over a billion streams on Spotify and over a billion views on YouTube. In 2018, Billboard Magazine ranked it as the 208^th biggest hit of all time in pop music history. Katy Perry used it to close out her Super Bowl halftime show. (Maybe Mr. Anglin switched over to a Preston Manning documentary until the football came back on?)

I like the song so much I quoted its first line, “Do you ever feel like a plastic bag,” when I was on Cross-Country Checkup this summer. I get that not all her recent PR is amazing, but nine Billboard number-one singles makes Katy Perry an all-timer. (My bias: I met her when she performed at an HIV/AIDS fundraiser I ran marketing for, and she was generous and great.)

Not for nothing: she delivered the song, beautifully and memorably, at President Biden’s 2021 Inauguration event. Perhaps Mr. Anglin skipped watching that to try to unload some unused “Trump 2020” merch. I can’t say.

The genius of the song (like many classic pop songs) is its simplicity and universality. It’s meant to be memorized. Listening to it a few times on a playlist of her songs (the day someone was going to her show, say) would be enough to lodge the chorus in anyone’s head. It’s extremely weird that someone at a Katy Perry concert wouldn’t know it.

But it’s just plain wrong to make knowing the chorus to ‘Firework’ seem like a failing in anyone, much less a 53 year old man attending a Katy Perry concert with his teenage daughter.

I despise this kind of cultural snobbery. Especially because so often it comes from so-called “high-minded” men who can’t imagine that there is value in something adored by anyone who isn’t one of them. Often, that means dismissing the taste of teenage girls, who tend to be correct about this stuff before anyone else jumps on the bandwagon. Lots of adult men in the 1960s were famously dismissive of the Beatles, because they made the young girls lose their minds. (Howard Anglin didn’t say “a 53 year old person,” he said “man,” and I think he's quite deliberate with his word choices. He doubled down by saying “grown man,” as well.)

It’s possible that Mr. Anglin thinks there’s nothing misogynistic in his take, but that’s what most misogynists think, isn’t it?

A video of a father and his daughter having a great time shouldn’t trigger “what kind of a grown man does this?” as a response. Singing along with one’s daughter is what being a good father looks like. (It also carries bonus points as being potentially embarrassing for said kid, which is a parent’s God-given right.) The world would be a better place if men celebrated the men who do this type of thing. Why does a 53-year-old man know the words to a pop song? Because he wanted to show up for his child.

What is it that might cause a champion of family values to mock a loving father for enjoying a night with his daughter? Why is someone from the party of don’t-tell-parents-how-to-raise-their-kids commenting about a private citizen on a family outing?

Feelings, that’s why. Mr. Anglin has incredibly negative feelings about the PM. That’s his right. Those feelings drive a lot of his choices and actions, and this tweet was one such thing. But those feelings don’t care about facts.

Mr. Anglin is a later-in-life doctoral student at Oxford with an impressive legal and political career already. I would imagine such a person would have to be skilled at looking at evidence and understanding objective truths. I would hope that such a person would also be able to claw back a hot take in the face of new information.

That wasn’t what happened here. Like many who are by driven by bias, he simply couldn’t consider that he might be wrong about this one tiny, inconsequential-by-his-own-admission thing. That is because to do so would mean he would have to retract something negative he said about Justin Trudeau. I don’t think he can do that.

The way he handled the fallout from his tweet was a masterclass in two linked habits; these are habits that often surface when people who won’t admit that they’re wrong are wrong about something.

The first is the refusal to genuinely weigh evidence or even consider that other perspectives might be valid. There’s an intense dismissiveness of facts and opinions that demonstrates that someone was never even open to the possibility of their own wrongness. And the second, which follows from the first, is the performance of superiority. Pretending that the subject was trivial or beneath oneself, even when one is the person who raised the subject in the first place.

So, he has an opinion and he asked a question about it, but he was never going to be convinced that his opinion was wrong. It’s bad faith arguing, which didn’t stop him from arguing with people. (It looks like almost nothing does.)

People were mostly respectful in their replies to him, but he got owned, and his rebuttals just made the K-hole (K is for Katy) he was in that much deeper. So, to the surprise of no one, he decided to mute his mentions, meaning that he left his own conversation. Apparently, the answers to his question were too much for him to take.

He didn’t seem to take any issue with his ex-boss Stephen Harper leading the crowd in a singalong to “Sweet Caroline.” I guess, to Mr. Anglin, Neil Diamond rocks so, so very hard that that his MOR hits are beyond reproach. (I have zero issues with Mr. Harper’s second career an easy listening cover artist, but knowing the words to “Sweet Caroline” is basically the same thing as knowing the words to “Firework.” Millions of Canadians can sing along to both. “Make ‘em go ah, ah, ah!” is the new “So good, so good.”)

This is what an unwillingness to admit that we’re wrong does to us: it makes us look foolish, and it turns us into hypocrites. It also takes away a moment of growth, no matter how small.

As he receded into the bushes, Mr. Anglin did his best to put some blame on those who responded to his meaningless tweet about pop music for caring too much about…meaningless tweets about pop music. He plugged his ears and told people to have fun “emoting into the void” because he found his Twitter/X feed “tedious.” (Howard and I finally agree on something.)

I know that Justin Trudeau continues to occupy so much space in the minds of right-wing pundits. I don’t think they know that he does, which is why so many of them end up doing or saying things that make no sense.

They give up valuable column space to talk about someone who isn’t important enough to merit it. They die on a hill for something admittedly inconsequential. They run away from the arguments they started because they can’t fathom that they weren’t right. They blame people they asked to be a part of their conversation for responding.

My interest in this isn’t the “gotcha.” I don’t care about scoring meaningless points on Colby or Howard or anyone in a context like this.

What I care about is the way people handle being wrong.

I care about the connections between the big things that motivate us, like our politics and our identities and our loyalties, and the tiny ways those same impulses play out in what we say and do. The problem is that most of the time we don’t recognize those connections. Especially when we’re unaware of what motivates us.

That’s when we start to adjust what is an isn’t acceptable in our own heads. We convince ourselves that any words we choose to use are justified; then that we aren’t responsible for the consequences of those words; and eventually that the people with whom we disagree deserve whatever comes their way.

There’s a real difference in that last part: what it is that comes “our” way varies greatly, depending on who we are. Or maybe depending on what we are is a better way to put it.

For men like me, it usually doesn’t get worse than a bad headline or some tiresome mentions. I could trade barbs with Cosh forever and probably wouldn’t have to deal with much. Howard Anglin is a former Chief for a former PM and when he tweets something about culture, he faces very little name-calling or personal attacks. Certainly, no one threatens his physical safety; no one tells him he should be dead. No one promises to inflict gender-based violence.

People reserve that stuff for a different former Chief of Staff, who is a woman. And they are terrible when they go after her.

Last week’s assassination was a whole other level of terrible. It is a shocking reminder of how fragile political life can be. But it doesn’t change the reality that political violence (which includes abuse, harassment, and threats) still falls far more heavily on women than on men.

I’m disappointed in how our Liberal caucus has handled the latest fallout. I wish I could say I was surprised. I saw firsthand how some of them treated the women on our own team when they faced online abuse. If I weren’t feeling charitable, I might say some decided one particular woman was “asking for it.” They certainly treated her that way.

Maybe this is why they’ve been silent as a Canadian journalist – a woman – has been targeted with the violent threats that presage violent actions. Her supposed crime was admitting she was “terrified” of violent escalation after the September 10th shooting. Within hours, one of our most prominent Conservative politicians called her “twisted” and “hateful” for saying so – to nearly two million people on Twitter/X. Soon after, a U.S. website branded her a “murderer,” a charge as false as it is dangerous. The result: threats so credible that police are now involved, as she fears for her safety. This is exactly the sort of thing that Canadian politicians who truly care about “political violence” should speak out against, instead of formenting it online. (What kind of a person hears a woman say she’s terrified and decides to make it worse for her is another topic for another day. No, wait, we can cover this now: it’s a gross person.)

Still, most Liberals leapt to their feet to applaud a Conservative statement that lionized Charlie Kirk under the cover of rebuking all political violence. This was after the Conservatives made it clear that by their definition the vilification and spotlighting of women in Canadian media, women who are already scared of further violence, is fine.

In doing so, our side only encouraged a dangerous double standard. I want to believe this is momentary fecklessness. But what if it’s a pattern? I can draw some parallels between what I saw a year ago with what is happening now.

But that deserves its own section, so that’s where we go next.

Our Four Nations content may have been the most widely seen example of the change in our approach to Digital, but it was hardly the only one. We were finding lots of new opportunities because we were thinking and moving quickly. These two things are critical in digital communications, period – but especially so working at the PMO. Unlike the private sector, we didn’t really work from shared foundational strategic documents. Things like Brand Bibles and User Journeys don’t exist as a matter of course. It’s different during an election, but even then the amount of time between the writ dropping and election day is often shorter than how long a big brand would take just to create and test a new strategic positioning.

Government works slowly in a lot of ways. Politics moves really quickly. Leaders who get elected do so with a campaign-driven machine that has done the heavy lifting in defining what the leader’s brand will be. That brand is brought to life over the course of the election, and that continues into the governing term (without question, usually, because a leader getting elected is considered proof that the brand works). 10 years and three elections in, though, the brand wasn’t working anymore. (You may have read something about this already.)

We were going to have to re-launch Justin Trudeau. And to do that we were going to have to put together a real strategic plan. That is a difficult thing to do in the best of times, and an almost impossible thing to do in the importance and noise of the day-to-day business of governing — while also trying to manage a singularly disgruntled caucus. A challenge with fast-moving environments is people convincing themselves that they don’t need a plan, because they’ve been working without one (and there’s no time anyway).

That doesn’t matter, though, because it’s still critical.

Here’s the funny thing, though: caucus also really wanted a plan. And I mean really, really wanted a plan. So much so that I started to refer to the Nanaimo caucus retreat in October as “PLANAIMO, 2024.” (Come for the political dish and the communications insights and stay for the puns, everyone.)

I can’t share very much about what went on at caucus retreats of course, because they are privileged. I say that while stifling a rising tide of vomit in the back of my throat, because over the course of my year and a half at PMO I did not attend a single retreat in which things (so, so many things) weren’t leaked to the press pretty much as soon as they happened.

This was beyond crappy. Of course I’m aware now just as I was then how frustrated caucus was, and they had every right to be. The leaders’ brand is the one that floats the party brand, and those two things have a huge impact on the popularity and electability of every MP. We were underwater, and they felt that we were pulling all of them down to drown with us. Or, because I haven’t made a pop culture reference in a bit: there wasn’t room for anyone on that floating door, but still we were insisting that everybody hop on.

I just…don’t know what it was people thought they were accomplishing with leaks. Maybe it wasn’t about accomplishing anything at all, maybe it was just about venting. The leaks certainly made our jobs harder, as it’s even more difficult to find the time to work on the aforementioned critical strategic documents when one has to spend hours managing fallout from leakers. The leaks were also terribly good at driving further fissures into an already fractured team, which is such a counterintuitive outcome. We were only ever going to win as a team or lose a team. At our lowest the polls said that only 30 or so Liberal MPs were going to get re-elected. There were times when I felt like all 150-some of our caucus members were certain that somehow they would be amongst those 30. That math doesn’t math.

So while I won’t break any confidences, I can share some detail around things that have already been leaked. And also maybe correct the record a bit.

I left the secure caucus-and-staff-only room in Nanaimo about 5 minutes after having presented … something … and I was immediately approached by a few journalists asking me if the folder in my hand contained “the plan.” Jesus! I lasted longer on prom night! (That’s a joke, I was years away from losing my virginity on prom night.)

I said nothing, of course, but at least one of the things I said in the “secure” room was leaked to the press, but leaked incorrectly. Someone misquoted something I said. A reporter tried to reach me to ask me about it while I was on a plane, and I didn’t respond. Thankfully, that quote never ran.

A month after that, this article appeared in the Toronto Star.

I’m mentioned in it, and I meant what I said when I took the job as EDC for the PMO: one of the things I had to do was not make any story about me. Which means I wouldn’t correct this when it was published.

But it’s a new day and a new world, so let’s get to it now.

The Star article is a very good example of why anonymous sources, especially when they are leaking privileged information, are the worst. There’s no accountability, and that creates a chain reaction of more no-accountability.

Near the beginning, the column reports that there are “at least 30 to 40 MPs ready to sign” a letter urging the Prime Minister to resign, “according to several caucus sources.” Which is incredible, since such a letter did get written a couple of months later (when things were even worse for the PM!) and not one member of caucus was willing to put their name to it. The number of MPs who even supported it anonymously was only 24 (which is quite a bit less than “at least 30 to 40”) and in case it’s not clear, “anonymously” means that not one of them actually signed their name, as the column suggested they would.

That piece of paper was a joke. The entire thing was typed and printed out, except for a small space in which the handwritten number “24” had been added to give number to those resignation-calling MPs. The whole thing had such Mean Girls Burn Book vibes, from 24 public servants who couldn’t make fetch happen. It’s the cowardice that I especially dislike. If you're going to do something like that, be an adult and put your name to it. Sam Seaborn did. (It’s also going to have more of an impact if it isn’t anonymous, but why bother trying to actually get done the thing you want done, when it might cause you some blowback?)

There are so many problems with anonymous sources breaking confidences to pursue their own agenda. It makes for a hot story – but also one that is going to be broken soon by someone. The same people who have entered into a confidential meeting and leaked what they heard aren’t going to stop with one reporter. So it’s not just a hot story, it’s as hot story with a ticking clock. There might not be time to confirm anything properly.

So why bother trying to confirm anything at all?

The same story contains the following: “Few members wanted to spill the beans. For some, it’s a fear of retaliation from the Prime Minister’s Office — it’s on the hunt for leakers, and the prime minister’s director of communications Max Valiquette earlier warned MPs that journalists should not be trusted, and that they would “trade” their names for access and information from the PMO.”

First: I had been on the job for almost a year and my title was Executive Director of Communications. This is so fundamentally disrespectful. Not to me, but to the actual PMO Director of Communications. She had been on the job for longer than I had and met the author of this piece a bunch of times. Her name is Vanessa Hage-Moussa; she’s the best sequential strategist (meaning someone who manages the messaging, dissemination, and intersection of multiple pieces of communications) that I have ever seen. She worked every day during COVID (one of the rare periods in which Communications is truly life and death for Canadians) and worked like hell every day I was there, too. She deserves respect, not erasure.

A Toronto Star writer who considers themselves a journalist of quality shouldn’t be fucking up a details like that. (Pro tip: you can search through your own paper’s archives and read any of the articles that mentioned me and my title already.) But maybe when someone doesn’t bother to get the easy, obvious things right it means they’re less interested in factual reporting than they are getting some dish out quickly.

Oh, also: we were never on the hunt for leakers because we didn’t have to be. The political staff at PMO with whom I worked were incredibly smart and incredibly plugged in, far beyond any connections I was able to forge in the short time that I was there. The day before that 24-MP letter appeared, they knew that it was coming (though we weren’t supposed to have any idea as to who was going to be a part of it, or even how many people were on board). They came up with 23 names they were certain were in support; a day later that number turned out to be 24. PMO staff was off by one. These people were incredible at this shit.

The bigger mistake in the article (for me) is I that I never said that “journalists should not be trusted.” I simply never would because I don’t believe that, and I’m extremely careful about what I say in those rooms. To the point that I would write out my entire script, word for word, before delivering remarks. (I’m the most extemporaneous person I know and I have no trouble speaking off the cuff, but that is how incredibly seriously I took this job.)

“Journalists are not your friends and can’t be trusted” was said in the room when I was there, though, by someone else who was working at PMO. Savvy political types might even be able to guess who said it!

That person got deplatformed by some MP who couldn’t wait to blab with a columnist. Who then reported it without asking for confirmation from me or anyone on my team, getting both the quote and the source wrong. I think it got published when I was on a flight and I got to land to a bunch of text messages asking me some version of “what the hey, dude?” Lovely.

The extra-lovely thing (of course!) is that people took it and ran with it. My name appears in a bunch of subreddits discussing that column, for instance. Now, this type of collateral damage was always a potential part of the job. I also could have spoken up about it, but that would have meant breaking with how I wanted to do my job. (I shouldn’t have had to speak up, though. If you’re going to put words in my mouth and you weren’t in the room, confirm with me that those are in fact my words.) But it’s maybe not great for me in whatever my next job in communications is that such a damaging falsehood is out there.

In the end, this is hardly the end of the world. And I suppose part of what I want to do here is show that it’s not just the “right-wing” media that caused us some problems. (Now I’m both-sidesing, I guess.)

But wow, wowee wow wow wow: this is the kind of thing that makes media relations really difficult.

The truth is I didn’t do this job perfectly. Re-litigating it now might not be my best look either – but this memoir is written by me and for me, and I am clear about why I am doing this. That’s the thing: the environment can bring out the worst in anyone if we let it. Leaks must feel cathartic in the moment. Rushed, half-sourced stories feel like a scoop, which is a currency of its own. Staff might even feel useful or important when the inbox explodes.

None of that helps. There is nothing to be gained by leaking privileged conversations except a dopamine hit and more shit to clean up tomorrow. If there is anything to be gained by publishing the spicy, unconfirmed version as soon as it’s half-baked (other than clicks), I don’t know what that is. Readers weren’t in possession of anything more true after this column ran.

None of us can control the whole system, but now I can do what I want with this, my piece of it. And in the interest of truth, I’ll share this: it hurts for my name to be in the media, attached to a bunch of words I didn’t say. I’m friendly with lots of journalists, and quite close to a few, too. The first thing that I felt after reading was a panicked hope that the people I know and appreciate in this field didn’t feel hurt by the words I never actually said. (One of those texts I mentioned was from a reporter whom I like quite a bit, who said “so we can’t be trusted, eh?” Blurgh.) As much as I see the problems that exist in the media right now, I have great admiration for the profession of journalism. It’s one of the reasons I take such issue with people who are doing a shit job of it.

So: I didn’t say “journalists shouldn’t be trusted,” and I’m not going to pretend I did. You can quote me on that.

In the end, though, all of this was a distraction from the biggest of the issues. In spite of the spoiled orgasm that was caucus’ Dear Justin letter, we were on an unstoppable train heading towards a resignation destination. None of us could have foreseen the route we were going to take to get there. It wouldn’t even be one resignation, but two. One of my favourite Ministers – someone whom I will always admire, even though her timing absolutely nuked my family vacation – would end up leaving a month before the PM did.

Jesus Christ. We couldn’t even come in first at resigning?

Next: Hate and shittiness, both online and off, as we take a quick detour to grapple with the real-world consequences of political rhetoric.

I’d forgotten what it was like to write publicly in my own voice. The internet is mostly hot garbage, but it does allow to hear from people as soon as I’ve put something out there and I appreciate the feedback, the kind words, and the constructive thoughts.

It’s a lot better than the first email I got after I took the PMO job. That was from someone who took time away from having to insist that he’s not a Nazi to track down my website, so he could pretend to be interested in hiring me (email subject: “Question on consultancy”) only to pull the old bait-and-switch (email body: “fuck you Trudeau puppet”). For a bunch of people who insist that trans people need to publicly present themselves as who they “truly” are, the far-right sure does spend a lot of time lying to others about themselves.

Anyway, recent feedback here has revealed something. Or maybe reinforced something: I have two different audiences for this Substack, and those reflect the two very different parts of my life, which are the time spent inside the Ottawa bubble and the time spent outside of it. (If you’re wondering what the Ottawa bubble is, think of it as the collective of politicians, staffers, media, and others who live, breathe and work federal politics.) Right now, there’s too much politics for some of you here. In the future, I think there won’t be enough politics for others.

This memoir is meant to be more than just a reckoning of my time in Ottawa. It's meant to be a kind of reconciliation between what was before that time, what was during, and what is coming up. In the same way, when I talk about something like the Housing Hell video, I hope that I’m doing so in a way that anyone working in media, marketing, or digital (outside of politics) will get something out of it, too. I’m hoping to pierce the bubble, as it were. And that’s mostly because I don’t think I really believe in those bubbles.

Everyone thinks that their industry is unique. Everyone thinks that their industry is somehow more unique (not a thing!) than anyone else’s. Packaged goods marketers are certain that their vertical operates in a way that is specific only to them. The first thing I was told when working on automotive brands is how the “car guys” (“guys” being their word, not mine, but unfortunately too-often-true) have their own set of rules and any experience out of that category simply isn't relevant. I didn’t believe that then, and I don’t believe that now.

Nowhere is this as true as in politics, an area so certain of its own uniqueness that it is accepted as fact that there is a magical bubble that envelops it all, a bubble that reinforces how different things are on the inside and on the outside. I faced quite a bit of resistance when I started this job, and a lot of that was because I was outside the bubble. I get it!

But everything pierces through every bubble now. We’re 15 years into carrying a device that brings all parts of our lives together, in the palm of our hand. A critical feature of that device is that it has fundamentally disintermediated our world. Everyone is a broadcaster, everyone is an audience, the shortest distance is, often, the straight line between author and audience, with nothing in between. The Prime Minister didn’t always need the inside-the-bubble media to get his message to Canadians as he would have in years prior. The most popular tweet that we wrote was viewed 26 million times and crossed over into the media, and even outside of Canada, where some of the biggest news organizations in the world ran with it. Oh! A tweet like this seems really simple (it’s just a few words, right?) but actually requires a lot of skill and stick-handling to get done right. This was an amazing piece of digital comms in a night full of them, and Jordan Collacutt and Maddy Robert were responsible for all of it. I look forward to working for one or both of them in the future.

I don’t think that breakthrough happens without a focus on “the end user,” as one might say in the private sector. We didn’t write that tweet for the bubble. We wrote it for everyone. The problem with a bubble is that it can also be an echo chamber, but any expert on innovation will tell you that it is essential to take best practices from anywhere: “borrow what already works from outside your industry and adapt it faster than the competition.”

When I started, the Conservatives were so much better at looking outside of government for what works best and adapting it for their needs. That includes how to deploy digital communications. I once watched it happen in real-time, because one of their highest-profile MPs gave me a front-row seat (almost literally!) to the action.

My flights to and from Ottawa were often filled with MPs. More than once, this included highly-visible Conservative Melissa Lantsman, who is the party’s number two (if we weren’t counting Jenni Byrne).

Ms. Lantsman usually sat in the first row, and I was often seated right behind her and to her right. I can't fault her for not working constantly, as her phone was usually out until the moment that she had to turn it off. I could fault her for the way she held her phone, though, which was almost at eye level in front of her and to the side in a way that made it extremely visible to the person sitting one row behind her one seat to the right. I would have had to close my eyes or turn away to miss what she was doing.

I…did not do either of those things.

I saw some sort of a notification or email come to her phone while we were still on the tarmac. I can’t say for sure from whom: it could have been from the Conservative party; it could have been from Sun Media columnist and all-around right-wing dude Brian Lilley; it could have been from someone else. (More on this in a second.) It contained a short video taken from a Jagmeet Singh press conference, as well as some sharetext. I don’t know what the instructions were, or even if there were any.

Ms. Lantsman saved the video to her phone (more on this in a second, too) and then made some alterations to the text that was provided (including changing “Jagmeet Singh” to #SelloutSingh, I could see that quite clearly). She also kept some key words, and tweeted her new version of the whole thing with the video she had saved, uploaded along with her tweet. All this before takeoff. (The Ottawa-Toronto Island flights don’t have wi-fi. That clock was ticking!)

Why do I think that she may have been working from something sent to her by Brian Lilley? Or that they had both been using the same assets, sent by someone else? Because about an hour before her post Lilley tweeted something similar, with the exact same video.

I know what I saw. That being said, I only saw the actions of one person. So who knows? But it is the exact same video – one that runs for almost 32 seconds but has a 31 second timestamp and was cut to begin and end at precise moments. I don’t think that can be a coincidence. It’s also noteworthy that both parties uploaded their own separate copies of said video. Here’s why.

It’s a lot easier for Ms. Lantsman to re-tweet Lilley than it is for her to download and re-upload the same video. She can even re-tweet him with as much new or different text as she wants, as someone did here. Except: then the account that is the source of the re-shared clip is clearly visible to everyone. (There’s a “From Brian Lilley” in the bottom left-hand corner of that last one.)

I’ll repeat: I don’t know what anyone’s instructions were, if any. And I’d hate to ascribe motivations. It’s possible that both a Conservative Party MP and a “conservative” columnist would shrug their shoulders and say: of course we both use the same assets, and of course it’s coordinated, and no one is hiding anything. (Which, given the way Ms. Lantsman held her phone, is a fair point.)

But then why not just re-tweet Lilley in the first place? We know (as I covered in the last chapter) that a single tweet re-tweeted by many gets higher aggregated numbers than multiple different tweets, and this can lead to a greater impact. We also saw that the Conservatives are very good at getting their people to that. Why give that up, if not to maintain some sense of distance between an elected official and a newspaper columnist? Had I not seen this happen myself (and then gone and looked at the tweets) I wouldn’t have noticed. But not everyone is lucky enough to be sitting behind and to the right of seat 1A.

Longer versions of the video were also posted by organizations that are to the right of Sun Media. Everyone focused on the same things: Jagmeet Singh is “propping up” the Trudeau government; democracy is at stake; and here’s a clip from Singh’s presser as proof.

If you’re in the bubble, none of this may seem new or interesting or notable to you. (That might be part of a larger problem.) If you’re not in the bubble, you may wonder exactly what it is I’m going on about.

If what I think happened is what happened, it supports the notion that there is a working relationship between the right / far-right media and the Conservative Party of Canada.

Working is the operative word. I get that to some this isn’t a revelation, and I must seem like the bumpkiniest of bumpkins for even bringing it up. Still, I think that a lot of Canadians – outside the bubble Canadians, surely – would be surprised to learn that elected officials and accredited journalists might work together in this way to deliver coordinated communications. They might be surprised that the columnist is instructing and helping the politician, or that both are being given assets and instructions from the same source. I think some would be surprised by the apparent lack of transparency.

I can’t prove that’s what happened here. But I did see what I saw in person on June 13^th, 2024, and I can see the tweets that were delivered that afternoon, too. Maybe that’s why I’m so proud of so much of the work that we did. Not everything we did broke through the bubble like it did on Four Nations night. But at least we did it ourselves.

Next: Caucus gets really leaky, a journalist deplatforms someone so they can put her words in my mouth, and we careen towards resignation

(Warning: lots of talk about marketing and tonnes of digital metrics.)

When I was hired at PMO, there was only one full-time videographer on the Digital team of three. (It was five when I left; it should be a much larger team.) I believe Poilievre was running with two full-time videographers on his taxpayer-funded team at the time, and at least one other full-time digital staffer. The Conservative Party of Canada also retained an outside consulting firm at their own expense that had (at last check) at least nine content creators who focus mostly on video. This firm has enough expertise in digital political messaging to publish white papers on subjects like the rise of the political influencer in Canada. Those Conservative fundraising dollars are real — and really useful!

Good digital communications can have a huge impact. It’s also possible for not-so-good digital communications to appear to have a huge impact, which is a whole other thing. I saw this happen just before I started, as a video I don’t think anyone outside the Ottawa bubble bothered to watch in full was treated like it was the second coming of the 2008 Barack Obama campaign.

Here’s the context. Everyone in the media is chasing clicks now. Beyond just chasing clicks, the media are also reporting on things that get clicks as if those things are newsworthy themselves. This means that “news” can be anything that is getting traction online. A media organization might still decide what the most newsworthy items of the day are, but if there’s enough chatter in social about something else they probably have to cover it. It’s a chicken and egg scenario. Reporting on something can make it trend; if something is trending, that makes it worth covering.

The stuff government and politicians put out there that gets coverage in the “news” is usually things like announcements, whatever policy was being released, press conferences. A piece of political communications (like an ad) is rarely deemed to be “headline news,” in that sense. If it was, in the past, coverage would focus on its content and message, rather than its popularity. It was rare that a political ad was “popular” enough for that to be news in and of itself. It was also extremely hard to measure how many people had seen or heard a political ad in pre-internet times.

It’s now a world in which a political ad that looks like it’s getting great viewership online might “force” journalists to talk about it. They might even think that it’s good because it’s been seen by many.

As with everything, the algorithms get manipulated. The numbers do, in fact, lie. There are bot farms artificially goosing the Spotify streams of recording artists (so much so that Spotify has had to flag and remove “artificial streaming.”) Ad impressions can be faked. It’s not all necessarily illegal or fraudulent: platforms want it to be as easy as possible for content providers to show big numbers. Sometimes a dedicated group of people posting and liking in real time can give something the head start it needs to get noticed.

Sometimes it’s not the numbers themselves, but rather what people think the numbers mean, and how they talk about that.

Let me show you how big this can get.

Just before I started in December of 2023, Poilievre’s team released their infamous “Housing Hell” video. It was, to use the technical term, a complete crock of shit. Both in content and impact. But no one would have thought so based on how it was covered.

'“Housing Hell” was a 15-minute long fear-mongering slog that was riddled with inaccuracies, if not outright falsehoods. To their credit the Conservatives managed to convince many that it was far more popular and far more effective than it truly was.

A few days after the video launched, The Globe and Mail reported that it had been viewed “four million times” on X (the social network formerly known as Twitter). This parroted a tweet from Pierre in which he thanked the “2 million people who have watched “Housing Hell” on X in its first 36 hours.” (It’s over 4.5 million now.)

The Conservatives knew how to deploy their work. Poilievre’s team posted it from his account multiple times and his caucus amplified it. Some other big Conservative names (like Conrad Black) re-posted it too — praising its content, style, and innovativeness.

What does “watch” mean in this context? Just two seconds of a video playing on X gets counted as a “view,” and this would have played automatically in many viewers’ feeds. Calling two seconds of an autoplay video a “watch” is like someone saying they saw a movie last night, when they were forced to go to the theatre and left before the opening credits were done. (That was me at Captain America: Brave New World. I saw it on a plane and still nearly left the theatre.)

I don’t know how many people viewed the all of “Housing Hell,” or even more than two seconds of it. I do know that it has only 19,000 “likes” on X, and that’s a number, so let’s do some math. (This is why they call me Math Valiquette.)

If 4.5 million people watched this video and only 19 thousand of them (that’s one in 240) clicked that they liked it, has it done a good job? No, obviously. That ratio is far below Poilievre’s norm. If that 4.5 million number is real, then a shockingly low percentage of those viewers “liked” what they saw.

On YouTube, it’s not even one of Poilievre’s ten most watched videos. It has about half a million views there, or a quarter what Justin Trudeau’s “Why Canada is Changing Its Immigration System” video has (combined English and French). Pierre had roughly half a million subscribers to his YouTube channel when he put out his housing video. The PM had far fewer when the aforementioned immigration clip hit. And yet: four times as many people watched Trudeau’s video on YouTube, from a subscriber base one twentieth the size of Pierre’s.

When we posted the full-length immigration video on YouTube, we put a 30-second teaser on Twitter/X with a link to the longform YouTube video. Our tweeted version has 8 million “views,” and I can say not everyone stuck around for the full 30 seconds (which is a lot less than 15 minutes). People clicked the link, though. That tweet drove much of the YouTube viewership, which is what we wanted. Long videos aren’t really a thing on Twitter/X; the platform is built on the bite-sized. (So much so that only users who pay for a premium account can post anything longer than 140 seconds.)

This was the genius move by Poilievre’s team. Posting the full 15-minute version (and only that version) to Twitter/X — the platform that would automatically play it and record a view as two seconds or more — meant they could point to a publicly visible third-party “view” count and claim massive numbers. That is legit brilliant. It’s also based on something so obviously false.

If I’m being pedantic, it’s because pedantry is kind of fun for the pedant. It’s also because the housing video’s numbers weren’t all that great, and they weren’t all that real. I wish the media had dug deeper into the data at the time.

There was nothing I saw in any polling that suggested “Housing Hell” accomplished anything significant with Canadians. Housing was one of the top issues of concern for Canadians before the video aired, and it was at about the same level after.

Hey! There was and is a housing crisis. But the Liberals were already taking the blame for it. Poilievre’s video could have spent 30 seconds telling people what they already knew, instead of ten minutes. (In those ten minutes it pretty much skipped over anything that happened between 2005 and 2015 for some reason.) If there was a “solutions” part to “Housing Hell,” I don’t think many made it that far.

Nanos (the research company) tracks Canadians’ “Preferred PM” choice in regular surveys, and they found that Pierre’s “Preferred PM” score was essentially unchanged after the housing video came out. It might have even declined a little bit.

This didn’t stop John Ibbitson in The Globe from proclaiming that “with this one video” Poilievre “took control of the housing debate.” The purported number of viewers was cited as a proof point, and that number was contrasted against a one-minute Twitter/X video by then Housing Minister Sean Fraser that had “only” 119,000 views. (I love Sean Fraser and I love his at-the-time Director of Communications Matt Dillon-Leitch, so take this with whatever grain of salt you think is necessary: their work was so much better, and punched far above its weight. “Housing Hell” would have taken at least two full weeks of resourced working hours to get made; Minister Fraser’s video might have taken half a day, at most.)

It gets messier. The Globe’s Andrew Coyne had retweeted Poilievre’s initial “Housing Hell” post only an hour and a half after launch (four days before Ibbitson’s article appeared) and generated more than 400K of its total “views” (almost 10 percent!) on Twitter/X. I take no issue with Coyne doing this, of course. It’s his job to engage on these things, and he’s developed a strong presence on the platform because he does it well. It is possible to reference and comment on Poilievre’s video without re-tweeting it, though.

Perhaps this is some sort of conflict. Perhaps Ibbitson’s column could have mentioned that hundreds of thousands of the views he was citing came from a colleague’s tweet. What are the correct practices here for the national paper of record? What was considered? Did anyone ask Poilievre’s team (who would have had access to so much data, including how long the average view was, how many people followed or unfollowed after seeing “Housing Hell,” when people dropped off, and lots more) to define what “watched” meant? To share their dashboard?

When I say there’s a disconnect between “new” and “old” this is the sort of thing I’m pointing to. If one’s contention is that Poilievre took control of a national issue because millions of Canadians watched a video, one had better be certain that millions of Canadians did just that.

I am not suggesting an agenda here: a different Globe columnist went at the content of the video hard. But he also reported the 4M number as if it was a fact.

It wasn’t just that column. Elsewhere it was called “Extremely impressive” and a “hit movie” and a “viral” success and there was lots more like that. For further contrast, Prime Minister Trudeau’s “anti-trade war” tweet in March of 2025 had four times as many views and 15 times as many likes. And still, I would not claim that this one piece of communications completely changed anything. (One piece of communications almost never does.)

The Globe article mentioned that more videos like “Housing Hell” were to follow. I heard so too, that there was supposed to be four more. Those never surfaced. It’s possible that Poilievre’s two “Debtonation” vids were the next parts of the same series, but I can’t say either way. Neither of those came anywhere close to the alleged highs of the housing video, each performing more poorly than the last. If there were 4.5 million viewers of “Housing Hell,” fewer than 400K watched “Debtonation 2” (not subtitled “Electric Boogaloo,” unfortunately). I can’t find any opinion pieces about how 90% of the people who viewed “Housing Hell” couldn’t be arsed to look at another we-are-in-crisis video from the same source just four months later.

Like most of us, the Conservative Party of Canada doesn’t change course when something is working. (The last election showed that CPC isn’t great at pivoting when things aren’t working, also.) Had “Housing Hell” been effective, we would have had four more videos (and maybe more after that). Instead, the CPC doubled down on three-word slogans, which was smart. “Axe the Tax” was much more effective than “Housing Hell” and it didn’t need a 15-minute movie to get it going.

One reason Poilievre had such an easy time Emperor-has-no-clothesing everyone with this video is that he was already regarded by many as the digital communications leader in Canadian politics. The field of battle had long shifted to online, but what online meant had changed dramatically from the time of campaign 2015, when Justin Trudeau’s personal reach in social was a game-changer. Life moves pretty fast (Ferris Bueller voice). In less than a decade, the digital leader was the digital laggard.

At this time the PMO approach to digital wasn’t particularly aggressive, in a political sense. That isn’t a knock against the work anyone was doing. Videos were high quality and communication was clear. A heavy workload and a heavy pace were maintained by a small team, who had to post to both @JustinTrudeau and @CanadianPM in channels. The problem was that too often those accounts mirrored each other. All @CanadianPM socials (the official Government of Canada accounts for whomever is the sitting PM) need to be non-partisan. But @JustinTrudeau can be almost anything it wants to be, just like @PierrePoilievre or @JagmeetSingh. @CanadianPM and @JustinTrudeau were mirroring each other far too often. PMO Digital was operating as more of an announcement factory than anything else.

I thought that we could take some (or a lot) of our territory back, and that we might have more to gain in digital than anywhere else. Cynicism says the game is rigged by algorithms and outrage. Optimism says find your own way to play. Cynicism says the Conservatives are winning the war now and forever. Optimism says try new things anyway.

To do that we would have to embrace doing things differently. Be on the offence, but with purpose and accountability. Integrate functions in a way that might not be the norm in the public sector. Find a way to think big picture even as the pressure to deal with the immediate was immense. And work the system. Not to game it, but to meet Canadians where they are, earning the right to be heard.

This would require a lot of buy-in to a new approach, with a new Communications team leader. Sounds easy enough. Right?

Next: far fewer digital metrics and a shorter post, I promise. I share a story about an MP who couldn’t keep their phone to themselves. That’s fun.

So let’s get into the job for a second.

Except before we do that let's talk about optimism and cynicism, and why I’m here.

Publishing part one of this a few days ago generated some comments, which reminded me of something: while I think I'm a realistic optimist, I am most definitely an optimist. I don't have a lot of time for cynicism. I think that any one of us and every one of us can make the world a better place, and if that sounds naïve to you, then you sound like a cynic to me.

So if you're here to comment with a negative take on what I say, have at it. (I'm well aware that publishing anything runs the risk of that, and I'm hyperactively aware that writing a memoir about working for the Trudeau government guarantees it.)

But I’m not interested in engaging with relentless negativity. That doesn’t mean I'm going to pretend that I got everything right. Indeed, sometimes I think I failed at the single biggest part of my job. (More on that later.) But I am here, as I am everywhere, to look for the good.

At the PMO, I worked with a tremendously talented woman named Kate VanGerven (I would hire her to run literally anything!) who once said to me that optimism is my superpower. I automatically look for solutions when presented with problems and I can find opportunities for better in anything. (She was half right. It’s one of my superpowers.)

It’s also essentially my point of view, and this is my voice. If you’re not into it, this might not be the right place for you. There’s a lot of cynicism in politics. (Don’t worry, advertising industry, you’re still number one!) There’s also a lot of hope. There’s so much genuine desire to make things better. I’m always happy to have conversations with people with whom I disagree. But I won’t be giving oxygen to anyone looking to fan the flames of discord and distrust while pretending to have a conversation.

That’s something that really took told hold in me in Ottawa: is there is zero use in having a “debate” with anyone who is incapable of admitting that they’re wrong. My God, the free speech grifters who act like they’ve got an open mind, like they’re entering into a debate in good faith, but are so incapable of saying “I’m wrong” they may as well be The Fonz. (Nothing says, “I’m at the forefront of modern thought leadership” like a 50-year-old pop culture reference. Ask your parents! Crap, ask your grandparents.)

I’m also not a dyed-in-the-wool political operative. I’m a communicator and a strategist; I’m more outside the Ottawa bubble than in. My observations are going to come from a bunch of different places. I think that was something I brought to the job; I think that’s part of my value here. Your mileage may vary.

So, now about the job.

When I started, there was no Executive Director of Communications in the PMO. “Communications” was split into four semi-siloed areas. These were Communications, which meant Strategic Comms/Speechwriting/Media Relations; Advertising; Research; and Digital – each with its own Director or Manager. I put “Communications” in quotes in my title for a reason. I was the Executive Director of four different practice areas, but only one appeared in my actual title. That’s because Governmental messaging, writ large, was always driven by “traditional” capital-C Communications, as outlined above.

That used to make sense all the time. Now it makes sense some of the time. Policy and announcements are what’s on the agenda, and the agenda should drive the messaging. But that messaging (like all messaging) is less reliant on the press to pass it along to Canadians. Plenty of Canadians bypass “traditional” media entirely in how they get their news, and many of us (if not most) rely on some combination of “traditional” and “new” media. We even go right to the source in a way that never used to happen. Politicians can tweet at their followers and reach thousands (or even millions!) without ever having to think about how the media might cover their message.

This is not a knock on the institution that is the press, in any way. There is a not-small part of me that wishes things were a little more like they used to be (at the risk of sounding like an old man yelling at clouds). The terrifying rise of misinformation and disinformation is a direct byproduct of our digitally-driven-and-disintermediated world. People can and will say anything; this has always been the case. Now it’s possible to say anything to a potentially huge audience, without anyone needing to care about whether it’s true before it gets out there.

We were playing catch up with all of this, at PMO. Not just in our approach to combatting misinfo and disinfo – but also in how much we embraced new opportunities to get our messaging out to Canadians.

I like to think that if I’d been there longer, I would have helped to change this by radically altering some of our own legacy processes. I don’t know that I could have, though. I certainly didn’t do enough in the time that I was there. (I don’t feel great about that.) But it was also an incredibly overwhelming period, in that we went from crisis to crisis to crisis. There will always be an element of that in running the country, but late ’23 to mid ’25 was one sustained period of what-the-fuck. Down in the polls could make it easier to try new things. But this wasn’t just down in the polls; it was that plus something seismic every month. It’s hard to make change happen internally when it feels like there so much uncertainty in the external world.

We floated the idea of a US-style Press Secretary, for instance. (Think Jen Psaki or Bill Moyers or Dee Dee Myers but think CJ Cregg if you need to. I insist.) Maybe it would have been a group of people! I think that we already had the talent in house to do it. I like the idea of a daily (or even weekly) public briefing of the gallery by PMO staff who have that as a primary function. We could have accompanied it with a bespoke digital press release, by which I mean a digital product (audio and video), designed to be re-broadcast by news outlets but also easily re-purposed in our own digital channels. I was never able to make that happen, and the idea faced some resistance, so maybe it wasn’t a great one. Maybe it was, though? Maybe it could still happen under calmer circumstances.

But I got the feeling that the reason some people didn’t like it was because it wasn’t something that had been done before. (This is my least favourite reason for not trying something new.) This isn’t just a PMO thing: people do not like change. I may have been less married to what was and more interested in what could be because I was new. But I’ve also made a career in predicting trends and talking about innovation. I don’t like standing still.

I think it would have given the PMO more people on the front lines who are media trained and on message – can’t ever have too many of those! It would have made it easier to set the message of the day (or the week) for everyone. I think it would have taken some pressure off Cabinet and Caucus, also. I think that it could have been less combative (or at least less highly charged) media-and-government situation.

The relationship between government and journalists is never going to be easy. But “real” reporters (I know I’m going to catch shit for saying “real” and I don’t care) have a huge and important role to play in how our democracy functions. It drives me nuts, the way this critical industry is being diminished. It drives me quite nuts that some people in that very industry still act as if it’s the same world as it was 30 years ago.

But it drives me especially nuts that the Conservatives are so good at exploiting how media is changing. They’re conservative! It’s in the name! They’re the ones who are supposed to be terrible at dealing with change.

Pierre Poilievre just gave the CBC his first interview in an awfully long time. I can’t be sure why a dude who promised to shut down the “Liberal-propaganda” peddling “State Broadcaster™” decided to talk to one of its people on the record for 15 minutes. If I had to guess, I’d say it was because he and his team finally felt that he had to, what with losing the last election and losing his own seat and still trailing Mark Carney by a large margin in the polls.

I get why the CBC granted him an interview. I get why the CBC kept asking him for one: he is the Leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, and by the time you read this he may even be an elected official again. I understand (and support!) the role that responsible media outlets should be playing in this country.

But I struggle with the feeling that some are still playing by a set of rules that the political extremes have abandoned, and in the name of both-sides-ing we let those extremes get away with too much. I think (I think, but I’m not a hundred percent sure) that it’s still the right thing to do, for the CBC to grant Poilievre an interview. And yet, it means platforming the very person who calls the CBC a “billion dollar propaganda arm” of the Liberal Party. It’s a smart move by Pierre, to ask for an audience with the CBC. If they refuse to talk to him, he can point to that as proof of his claim of bias. And if they interview him, he’ll say whatever he wants anyway, and can then use whatever airs as the building block of more of his own digital content. But I don’t think he was even asked about his stance on the broadcaster by the broadcaster. Was that because it would be seen as a conflict? Should it be?

Earlier this year, Poilievre went to the extreme length of ceasing to take any questions at his own press conferences from media that he hadn’t already cherry-picked. At one point, this meant that only two far-right organizations, two “ethno-cultural” media channels, and Radio-Canada were permitted to ask him anything. (Poilievre must have determined that the French-language arm of the otherwise-corrupt “State Broadcaster™ was somehow bias-free. Or…it could be that this was the easiest way to create some French content, and the only way to get play in Québec, a province underserved by those alt-right media outlets who would rather everyone in Canada just spoke English.)

It’s smart for the CPC to do this because they get to control the message more.

But it’s bad for journalism, which means it’s bad for democracy. Is the new normal that the Leader of the Opposition, the presumed next Prime Minister, stops taking tough questions? I remember when Stephen Harper stopped taking any questions. This is a step further. (I find it cowardly, as much as anything. It would be like Poilievre’s campaign manager appearing on a bi-partisan podcast, but only if the Liberal host wasn’t there to ask her questions.)

The CPC nearly won the last election without ever really engaging our national broadcaster directly (or many other legacy media outlets, for that matter). That big Conservative lead wasn’t built by being embedded in the Parliamentary Press Gallery – it was built by mostly bypassing it. Sure, Poilievre’s press conferences got (and get) coverage. But he doesn’t need traditional media to carry his message when he has a direct pipeline to a million Canadians via his personal Twitter, say. Or when he can pick and choose to be questioned by only the friendliest of interviewers and podcasters and influencers, who will relay (and endorse!) his messages to their followers.

This doesn’t just save him from having to respond to (or dodge) difficult questions. It also means that he is constantly creating easily clippable video content. Those rehearsed answers to softball questions make for great short online videos. Friendly media asking friendly questions are even more important when broadcasting live, which is something that Pierre has been forced to do more often lately to keep his presence up. As he’s not an elected official, he can’t participate in Question Period, so he’s lost a chief source of high-quality rage-farming soundbites. Poilievre’s three most viewed YouTube vids are all lifted whole cloth from QP (and there are loads more with millions and millions of views). Question Period means quality video with decent lighting and good sound. There’s often a background of cheering Conservative MPs. Leaders (from all parties) are prepped for it by their teams and usually have a few soundbite-y sentences they’re looking to force into their answers. (Pierre’s late 2024 QPs were often a series of three-word slogans repeated one after the other. I think it went “Axe the Tax, Build the Homes, Pass the Gas, Rhyme with Crime.”) It’s a lot easier to repurpose QP content than it is to make something brand new; we’re talking a couple of hours versus a couple of days (or more). All one needs is a decent-sized digital team.

And Pierre and the Conservatives have a very decent-sized digital team. But I think their success has been at least as much a byproduct of how much we have all bought into this: the facts just don’t matter as much as clicks. That’s not me being a cynic, because you’ll remember I’m not capable of that. It’s the reality of the current political media landscape, and I’d find out exactly how much of a problem that could be in my very first week.

Next: we get deep (probably too deep) into the Housing Hell video, and what it did not do

I’ll be releasing this in sections on my Substack over the next few weeks; subscribe (it’s free) to get each section as soon as they’re published.

Part One, in which our hero (I am our hero!) answers a literal and metaphorical call

From late 2023 to early 2025 I had the enormous privilege (and equally enormous responsibility) of being the Executive Director of Communications for the Office of the Prime Minister of Canada. That’s not a sentence I ever thought I’d say. It’s not a time I’ll ever forget.

Let’s get the obvious questions out of the way, so we can focus on the rest of this:

Yes, I think that Justin Trudeau was a good PM, and yes I was proud to serve him. (I am quite sure history will be kind to him; history is already being kind more quickly than many would have thought.) Yes, he really is that attractive (and by “attractive,” I don’t just mean handsome; he has a kind of gravity that can’t be duplicated, and he knows how to work a room better than anyone I’ve ever seen). No, he’s not an idiot, and shame on anyone who buys into that. He’s genuinely very smart and very fast; he’s extremely gifted at taking in a lot and making informed decisions. Yes, he was a terrific boss. Yes, he’s a huge nerd. (When it comes to the Stars, he prefers the Wars to the Trek.) Yes, it was grueling. No, I didn’t take any real vacation in the time I was there. Yes, I moved to Ottawa part-time, made less money, and saw less of my family. Yes, it was brutal: the media landscape is rough, opposition politics are relentless, and the inbox never sleeps. Yes, I’m quite certain that Pierre Poilievre wears a lot of makeup (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Yes, I had a level of security clearance and got to carry something we called the Bat-phone.

No, it wasn’t perfect. Yes, I grew a lot and learned a lot about myself.

But also: I learned just as much about you.

And yes, it was worth it.

The calls started coming in the summer of 2023. First from Chief of Staff Katie Telford, who asked, “What would it take to convince you to come join our team?” (To which I thought, “I’m already convinced, and it’s an honour that you asked, you weirdly self-effacing genius.”) Then Deputy Chief of Staff Brian Clow, who made sure my Is were dotted and my Ts were crossed. Then Senior Advisor Ben Chin, who deadpanned, “Why do you want to make less money and spend more time in Ottawa?” (Ben Chin is tremendous.)

On a Friday evening in October, an unknown number from a 613 area code rang my phone. “I have a call for Max Valiquette,” someone said. “This is he,” I replied with a phrase I haven’t used before or since, in the most official voice I could manage.

“Please hold for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.”

Oh, okay. Not a typical Friday, then. Family pizza night would have to wait a bit.

A click. Someone said something like, “You’re secure, you have go.” And then a voice recognizable to all of Canada said, “Max!” and I had what is one of the three most important conversations of my life.

(The actual phone call. Photo: Alison Lawler-Dean)

I said yes to the job almost immediately. I only paused for a short consultation with my partner, who said “you have to take this!” with zero hesitation. (Alison Lawler-Dean is not only my favourite human but also the best human, I could not have done this without her. The greatest feeling is being in a relationship in which both partners know that if it’s important to the other, they will make it work.)

I didn’t say yes because I underestimated the challenge; I said yes because I understood it completely. (Or as completely as I could at the time.) Approval ratings for the PM were terrible. Public perception of the whole government and the entire Liberal party was also very bad. Pierre Poilievre wasn’t just being called “the probable next Prime Minister;” he was being called “the next Prime Minister.” By himself, as often as by anyone else: if I had a nickel for every time Poilievre said, “when I’m Prime Minister,” I could afford a million tight t-shirts.

Also: how did that work out?

The job was hard. Intense, unrelenting, and unyielding. The whiplash from having to deal with the massive and then the minute was unparalleled. The hardest job I’ve ever had, by a factor of 10. But the best job I’ve ever had, by a factor of 100. (And I’ve worked for myself, y’all.)

Next: we get into the job itself, and how much rhyming one man can do in Question Period

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“What are you doing now, Max?”

I’m getting that question a lot lately. But I think it’s really

two questions. There’s the question as asked that is really asking, “what’s next?” And then, somewhere in there, there’s another: “Anything you want to say about the past couple of years?”

Of course there is. But I wanted the kind of clarity that is only provided by distance, and I wanted to wait until I was ready to talk about what’s next, too.

I spent about a year and a half deep inside the Prime Minister’s Office, serving as the Executive Director of Communications for the Prime Minister of Canada. It was intense in ways that are far beyond what one might imagine. It was so much more complicated than it looks from the outside. And it was an extraordinary privilege to be a part of the government’s leadership team during what I will delicately call a batshit-crazy time in Canadian politics.

But…the job wasn’t about me. At all. I took that very seriously. I made a conscious, considered decision to remove myself from my own story, as it were. I had a very robust speaking career before working at the PMO and obviously had to pause that (as well as any other paid work). I was also a constant (some of you are thinking, too constant) presence in my own networks and in the media writ large. So I shut my website down. I stopped posting my own thoughts in my own voice. I wasn’t on radio or TV or in the papers. I didn’t write columns, do podcasts, or take speaking gigs. I only (re)posted the work my team was doing; the only personal exception was re-sharing things people had tagged me in. (And that was mostly to show off my cooking.)

I’ve spent my whole career with a strong public presence: speaking on stages, appearing in national media, writing for major outlets. Weighing in on culture, politics, and business. But in the PMO, my role was to tell others’ stories. The Prime Minister’s story, the government’s story, Canada’s story. I believed then, and still believe now, that public service comes with a responsibility to make it about the work, not about yourself. (That I was capable of that may come as a surprise to some of you.)

It was a privilege to do that. And it was transformative.

So I get to speak in my own voice again, but now it’s a voice that’s been shaped by my experience on the biggest of stages, with the highest of stakes.

Which brings us back to that first question: what am I doing these days?

I’m writing. A lot! The first draft of my first book is about halfway done and should be published next year. It’s nonfiction. I hope it’s the first in a series of academically-rigorous-but-highly-entertaining books, each tackling a single huge idea that shapes how we think and act and live. I want to challenge how we think, but I’d also like to make you laugh. So, to quote my dating history: why not do both?

I’ve also abso-fucking-lutely written a 10,000-or-so-word memoir of my time at PMO, which I’ll serialize here. There’s insight. There’s context. There’s tea. You can subscribe to this Substack if you’d like to read that as I release it.

And yay, I’m back on stages delivering speeches. There’s updated versions of existing presentations and brand new ones, too. (Contact melanie@speakers.ca for bookings!) I’ll be hosting the 2025 Strategy Awards in late September.

I’m back in your feeds: I did an hour on CBC’s Cross-Country Checkup yesterday, talking about the conflict between generations. You can listen to that here or here or anywhere you find your podcasts. (I’m happy with this one. It felt like a “proper” return to media.)

This Substack will be the hub: essays, analysis, and behind-the-scenes insight from a career that bridges politics, business, and pop culture. I will continue to dive deep into the way the world works, how our lives are changing, and why we behave the way we do. And whether it’s on stage or on the page, my goal is the same: to make sure you enjoy every minute of the conversation.

(Subscribe to get each drop of my PMO memoir as they land, plus regular thoughts, essays and links to media appearances.)