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Justin Trudeau. Campaigning. With Doug Ford.

Well, not quite, but pretty close. Just this week — just one (1) day before the formal launch of the 2022 Ontario election campaign! — there were Messrs. Trudeau and Ford. At a campaign-style event, announcing a huge auto sector investment.

Trudeau with Ford. In Windsor. In Ontario. In Canada. In Windsor. We did not make this up.

OK, OK, I’m having a bit of insider-politico fun, there. Remember the 2006 federal election campaign?

Paul Martin’s resident campaign wizards came up with that ad about soldiers in Canadian cities with guns. The ad was intensely idiotic, and it was mocked widely. Martin was later obliged to pull it.

So: members of the oxymoronic Paul Martin brain trust were on Twitter this week, following the big Trudeau/Ford auto sector announcement. They were unhappy.

“What is Trudeau doing?” one Martinite fumed, adding that Ontario Liberal Leader Steven Del Duca “should try to get Trudeau defined as a third party to at least limit his spending.”

Ho, ho.

Now, it is somewhat understandable why the Martin folks were upset. (I guess.) After the aforementioned 2006 federal election debacle, in which they wrecked the Liberal Party of Canada for a decade, the Martinettes headed down Hwy. 401 to Toronto. Whereupon they proceeded to wreck the Ontario Liberal Party for a decade, reducing it from a majority government to a political rump with seven (7) seats.

And here they were, back like a stain on the carpet. Angry that Justin Trudeau was doing an announcement with Doug Ford.

Except, um, this: Justin Trudeau is Prime Minister of Canada. Doug Ford is the Premier of Ontario. Partisan differences notwithstanding, it’s their job to occasionally work cooperatively to help create, you know, jobs.

Do they vacation together? Not as far as we are aware. Do they have sleep-overs, and read comic books with flashlights in their sleeping bags? Unlikely. Is there a bromance brewing?

Well, not necessarily. But a Justin-Doug bromance isn’t outside the realm of possibility, either. Let us explain.

As this space has observed previously, Ontario voters are pretty smart. They’re not like my home province of Alberta, where voters elect conservatives at every level of government, and then are shocked and hurt when conservatives start taking them for granted.

No, Ontario voters favour “alternation” — that is, they put Liberal Justin Trudeau in power in Ottawa. And then they put Conservative Doug Ford in power at Queen’s Park.

And that’s how it has always been, really.

For nearly six decades, one party winning at both levels has happened only once. That was in 2003, when Dalton McGuinty’s Ontario Liberals won big — and after Jean Chretien’s federal Liberals won big in 2000. (Key factor in each: some Warren Kinsella fellow ran the war rooms for both leaders. Here’s my business card, etc.)

So, in fairness to Justin Trudeau and Doug Ford: the two leaders may not love each other, but they definitely need each other. Victory by one practically guarantees victory by the other. So get ready for more of this:

Trudeau with Ford. In Windsor. In Ontario. In Canada. In Windsor. We did not make this up.

(Because it makes sense.)

— Kinsella was chairman of Jean Chretien’s war rooms in 1993 and 2000, and Dalton McGuinty’s in 2003, 2007 and 2011.

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Think the U.S. Supreme Court decision to outlaw abortion is irrelevant to Canada?

Think again.

Because Politico’s bombshell revelation Monday night — a leak of a draft opinion of America’s highest court on the seminal decision that legalized abortion in the United States, Roe v. Wade — is going to have profound consequences for many politicians. On both sides of the border.

In the U.S., overturning Roe v. Wade isn’t a political earthquake — it is bigger than that. It’s something beyond description. It’s akin to the shifting of political tectonic plates.

Among other things, it will lead to many Democratic Party victories in the coming mid-terms. That’s important, because Joe Biden was heading to an electoral pounding in November. No longer: He now has a wedge that will hasten the end of Republican careers.

It’ll lead to demands — which Biden may grant, after the mid-terms — to enlarge the high court and load it up with progressive jurists. That’s a given.

And how Politico got their hands on a draft Supreme Court opinion? That’s big, too. The resulting inquiries will certainly preoccupy lawyers and politicos (and maybe detectives) for years to come. Why? Because such a leak is something that has never, ever happened before. It means the Supreme Court justices are at war with each other, basically.

But overturning Roe v. Wade won’t just shake up American politics. It is going to have big political consequences up here, too.

Because if you think Justin Trudeau will hesitate to use abortion against his conservative opponents, you are dreaming in Technicolor. Abortion is the ultimate political wedge — one that mobilizes most Canadian women, of all stripes, to vote to maintain control over their bodies.

For Pierre Poilievre, the frontrunner in the Conservative Party leadership race, the return of the abortion debate is very, very unhelpful. For years, the Ottawa-area MP has enjoyed the support of the Campaign Life Coalition, the powerful lobby group that wants to outlaw abortion, gay marriage and euthanasia.

On its web site, the Campaign Life Coalition gave approving green check marks to Poilievre for voting for bills that would make it an offence to “kill or injure a pre-born child” — and to “protect women from coercion to abort.” For most of his political career, Poilievre has opposed abortion, full stop.

Only very recently — as the prospect of seizing the Conservative leadership grew larger — did Poilievre abandon his previous positions on abortion and gay marriage, thereby angering the Campaign Life Coalition. But, under his leadership, he still admits he would permit MPs to bring forward laws to criminalize abortion.

That matters. Because, even if Poilievre has magically experienced a whiplash-inducing reversal on abortion, the likes of MP Leslyn Lewis have not. Lewis is a social conservative extremist — and her presence in the upper ranks of the leadership contenders can’t be dismissed. Lewis doesn’t hide her opposition to abortion, saying: (There’s) nothing hidden about it.”

Exasperated conservatives will point out, correctly, that conservative jurists do not presently dominate on the Canadian Supreme Court. They will say, correctly, that neither Stephen Harper nor Brian Mulroney rigged our highest court with social conservatives.

But do you think Trudeau will ever hesitate to use a divisive social issue to pulverize his Conservative opponents? In 2015, 2019 and 2021, did the Liberal leader ever seem reluctant to beat Tories with whatever club was laying nearby, however cynical that may be?

No and no. Trudeau has used abortion to hobble Conservatives before, and he’ll do so again. The reversal of Roe v. Wade guarantees it.

On Monday night, you could almost hear the corks being popped on the Veuve Clicquot at the Office of the Prime Minister.

Because abortion is back.

And abortion kills — Tory political careers.

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Ukraine.

Remember that? Country in Eastern Europe, 40 million citizens. Has been invaded by Vladimir Putin, a war criminal, who has been murdering thousands of Ukrainian men, women and children since Feb. 22.

It was in all the papers, Putin’s Ukrainian war. Everyone, everywhere, was paying attention to it.

And then … many of us just stopped paying attention.

Instead, many of us have pointed our clickers in the direction of the vomitous Johnny Depp and Amber Heard. Or the vainglorious Elon Musk buying Twitter. Or housing prices. Or an election in Ontario. Or the weather.

But the Russian slaughter in Ukraine? Not as many are paying as much attention to that one anymore. And — given that Putin’s criminality is getting dramatically worse at this precise moment — that is a problem.

A big problem, because Putin has been counting on us moving on from his campaign of wholesale slaughter against the Ukrainian people. Like the Nazis before him, the Russian autocrat knows that genocide is always much more efficient in the dark.

Many of us, this writer included, are guilty of turning away from what is happening in Ukraine. And, indirectly, aiding and abetting Vladimir Putin as we do so.

Children pose for a photo on the pedestal of the Soviet monument to Ukraine-Russia friendship dismantled by workers in Kyiv on April 26, 2022, amid Russian invasion of Ukraine. (Photo by GENYA SAVILOV/AFP via Getty Images)

Children pose for a photo on the pedestal of the Soviet monument to Ukraine-Russia friendship dismantled by workers in Kyiv on April 26, 2022, amid Russian invasion of Ukraine. (Photo by GENYA SAVILOV/AFP via Getty Images)

In politics, the successful players know all about this tendency. When a scandal breaks, for instance, they know that if they hunker down and stay quiet, the mob will usually move on. They’ll carry their pitchforks and torches to protest the next outrage.

In the political war rooms I’ve run, I will therefore often say this to the assembled youngsters: “We have a national memory of seven minutes.”

In politics, that can be good news or bad news. If you are grappling with some bad news (see scandals above), you can be reasonably confident it’ll “blow over” soon enough. But if you’ve got a good story to tell — as Doug Ford, Steven del Duca and Andrea Horwath will all be labouring to do on the Ontario campaign trail over the next few weeks — short attention spans are pretty unhelpful, too.

It’s not that voters and/or citizens are in any way dumb, I tell my war room charges. They’re smart and intuitive and highly attuned to their own self-interest. It’s just that they are also very, very busy. Getting the kids to hockey or soccer practice, getting to and from work, making ends meet, worrying about the rent or a mortgage payment, catching up on sleep. They’re busy.

So, says Democratic Party thinker David Shenk, an overabundance of news and information — about everything from Johnny Depp to a genocidal war — becomes “data smog.” There’s too much of it, so Joe and Jane Frontporch just tune it all out.

In the era of smartphones — which are neither smart nor phones, anymore — that’s a simple survival mechanism. To remain sane, a lot of us disconnect to avoid information overload.

A picture taken on April 23, 2022 shows a child living in a large underground parking lot in Kharkiv, eastern Ukraine, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. (Photo by SERGEY BOBOK/AFP via Getty Images)
A picture taken on April 23, 2022 shows a child living in a large underground parking lot in Kharkiv, eastern Ukraine, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. (Photo by SERGEY BOBOK/AFP via Getty Images)
Which, as noted, is what Vladimir Putin is counting on. He needs us to turn our attention away from Ukraine.

If we all care less about Ukraine, so too will governments. Here in little old Canada, our national government — surprisingly, happily — has been doing a pretty good job supporting the heroic efforts of Ukrainians in this war. But, if the Trudeau government senses that our collective focus on the war has diminished, so will their efforts. That’s how politics works.

So, turn off Johnny and Amber. Turn off Elon Musk. Turn off all of the other things that, at the present time, just aren’t as important.

Ukraine, and the valiant Ukrainian people, need more than our ammunition and armaments and aid.

They need our attention, too.

Now, and until the end.

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The great Calgary Herald writer Howard Solomon arched an eyebrow.

“Owners of media properties,” said Howard, “should be seen and not heard.”

There was general agreement about that, in the Herald newsroom, and we all soberly nodded our heads.

Except, even as a lowly summer Herald student and general assignment reporter, I knew that the media world Howard Solomon described wasn’t actually the media world we all lived in. And besides, as I learned much later, having an owner — of a newspaper, of a radio or TV station, of a social media platform — was much more preferable than having no owner at all.

And, really, the issue isn’t having an owner of a media enterprise. The issue is having the right owner.

Which leads us, in a circuitous fashion, to Elon Musk and Twitter. Is the former the right owner for the latter?

You’ve heard of Musk, of course. He went to Queen’s University for a couple years and is now the world’s richest man — Tesla, Starlink, etcetera. Twitter, meanwhile, is a social network platform that offers “micro-blogging” in the form of “tweets.”

On Monday, it was announced that Musk had reached an agreement to buy Twitter for $44 billion. Immediately thereafter, forests were felled to print thumb-sucker analyses of what Musk Twitter would mean for free speech, politics and Donald Trump.

Some conservatives, who believe that Musk is one of them, think it’ll be a brave new world. Some progressives, who are suspicious of Musk, were encouraged by his (typically) amorphous promise to start “authenticating all humans” — which, they thought, possibly meant eliminating bots and trolls and fraudsters on Twitter. Who, most agree, have rendered Twitter a cyber-sewer.

Me, I’m not so sure either side is right. At any media company I’ve worked for, all of us ink-stained wretches always feared the arrival of new owners. We’d fret about whether they would try to censor and control what we write. We’d wonder if they’d make us walk the plank.

But, almost inevitably, the new owners would stay on their side of the newsroom, preoccupied only with the bottom line, not the black lines. (Which has always been my experience at the newspaper you clutch in your sweaty maulers, by the way: Not once — not once, ever — have the owners tried to control what I write.)

Musk, I suspect, is about to learn some of the same media lessons. If he messes with Twitter overmuch, he’ll wreck it. And then someone else will come along and start something new, and everyone will go over there.

For Musk, Twitter is potentially problematic for another reason: It is wildly popular among the two constituencies who can have a measurable impact on his various enterprises — politicians and journalists. Both politicos and hacks love Twitter because it resembles a Rorschach pattern of our tiny craniums: It flits all over the place, it’s bit-sized, and it’s nasty.

If Musk takes a hacksaw to Twitter, politicians and journalists will start sniping at him even more than they already do. Journalists, as a collective, can maul Musk’s reputation in and out of the market — and the politicians, acting at the behest of the journalists, have the regulatory power to make life complicated for Internet-based companies like his.

There are other problems: Personally, I think Musk is possibly insane to spend that much money on a social media platform that — unlike Facebook and Instagram — has never really figured out how to make money. And, whether he likes it or not, civil and criminal speech laws will still have the final say over what he puts online.

But, for me, I think the pearl-clutching about Elon Musk Twitter is — like Musk himself — a bit overblown. If he can do just one thing — eliminate anonymous accounts whose bile have made Twitter a perfectly awful place for many, women in particular — he will have improved people’s lives.

In the meantime, however, some of us will remember Howard Solomon’s wise words about media owners.

And we will comfort ourselves with the knowledge that the media universe, like the Internet universe, is simply too big for one person to control.

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Full disclosure: Doug Ford is going to win.

And, before we get this little column going, further full disclosure: my firm sometimes lobbies his government, just like we did all the ones before his.

Also: we’re on the Ontario government’s standing offer list for communications. But we haven’t gotten a stitch of work from him. Zero, zippo, zilch.

That’s okay, because here’s a bit more disclosure: I like the guy. My mom, an Irish Catholic Montreal Liberal, loves him. Asked her why.

“He’s got a big heart,” said my mom. “He cares about people.”

And he does, he does. If you’d told me that a few years back, when Ford and I would duel to the death on radio and TV political panels, I would’ve said you were crazy. Back then, I didn’t really know him, and I figured he was one of those Trump-style ideological right-wing types.

I was wrong, wrong, wrong. He ain’t. And I’m not the only one who knows it, now. Polls say he is cruising towards a second big majority government on June 2.

Here’s five reasons why.

1. Ford Nation. I don’t like the name, because it sounds a bit boasty to me. But that’s quibbling. Despite the criticisms of the pink-skinned, Blundstone-wearing deepest Annex types, I’d wager that Ford’s base is more racially diverse than that of any other conservative politician in North America. I first saw it almost a decade ago, during a Toronto mayoral race. Downtown progressives sneered that he was a racist – but Ford had the support of 70% of people of colour. Ford Nation is like the United Nations: everyone is represented there.

2. The pandemic. He’s made a misstep or two during the pandemic — the quickly-rescinded playground and police lockdown comes to mind — but, for the most part, Ford has done a pretty good job throughout the past two tough years. His critics didn’t expect that. They assumed he hated government, and he’d leave people to the ravages of the virus. He didn’t. He pushed vaccinations and sensible public health measures, and he pushed hope. You could see, too, that the COVID-related death toll weighed heavily on him on TV every morning — his voice raw, his face ashen. He didn’t care what his haters said, but he sure seemed to care about keeping them alive.

3. His government. The pandemic was the biggest economic, cultural and personal event of our collective lifetimes. Everyone had an opinion on it, because everyone was hurt by it. More than once, the hardcore Leftie types were mad at Ford for not shutting everything down. Simultaneously, the hardcore Rightie types were mad at him for shutting anything down. I spoke to a former Liberal prime minister about it. “When the hard Left and the hard Right are both mad at you, it’s a good day,” he said. And it’s true: Ontario voters are smack-dab in the middle of the road. That’s where Ford mostly is, too.

4. His opponents. Ontario New Democrats grumble that their leader, Andrea Horwath, has lost too many elections and needs to go. But they don’t do anything about it. Ontario Liberals give interviews to the Toronto Star — anonymously — and agree their guy, Steven Del Duca, is “not a leader.” During the pandemic, when the consequences were literally life-and-death, Horwath and Del Duca were up and down like a toilet seat — demanding masking, then holding mask-free superspreader rallies (as Del Duca did). Or falsely claiming public sector workers had “a Charter right” to refuse vaccinations (as Horwath did). Right now, the Ontario election is a battle for second place, between the Dippers and the Grits. And they act like Ford has already won. But he doesn’t — it’s not his personality to take anything for granted.

5. His personality. So, this column ends where it started: on Doug Ford’s personality. Way back when, I used to crap all over Doug Ford in the media. I went after him every chance I got. And then one day, when I got in a whole lot of trouble for a stupid tweet, guess who was the first person to call? Yep: Doug Ford. “Warren, you’ve kicked me and my brother around a lot, but we respect you,” he said. “Hang in there.”

I’ve heard dozens of similar tales from dozens of other folks, of all political persuasions. Doug Ford, they agree, is one of the best retail politicians Canada has ever produced. (My former boss Jean Chretien, naturally, is the best. And Chretien and Ford know and like each other, tellingly.)

Are other factors at play? Sure. Justin Trudeau’s re-election helped Doug Ford, because Ontario voters prefer to have different parties representing them in Ottawa and Queen’s Park. And Pierre Poilievre’s crusade to turn the Conservative Party into a wing of the far-Right People’s Party doesn’t hurt, either: it makes Ford look like a kind-hearted centrist.

Except he already was. He is.

And, full disclosure: that’s why he’s going to win again.

— Kinsella ran Dalton McGuinty’s three war rooms

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Life imitates art.

The reverse is true, too. But what does it mean when those who promote art – those who are supposed to know a great deal about art – are engaged in actual lies?

What happens when all that they are “imitating“ is woke stupidity?

It’s a fair question, this week, because the Canada Council for the Arts – a federal government cultural agency that is entirely paid for by you and me – this week actually issued the following statement on Twitter:

“Let’s liberate the Canadian landscape from the Group of Seven and their nationalist mythmaking: By erasing Indigenous perspectives, Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven painted a new nation into being.”

That is a quote. That is real. That is an actual tweet by an actual government agency. And it is madness. Insanity.

The government of Canada’s principal cultural agency is saying, in effect, that the Group of Seven – among our greatest artists in our history – were crypto-Nazi nationalists. That they consciously “erased“ Indigenous culture – and, one presumes, Indigenous people along the way.

They didn’t. In no way, whatsoever, did the Group of Seven “erase“ Indigenous culture. In no way, whatsoever, were they “nationalists” – in the way that Hitler’s filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl, assuredly was.

The basis for the Canada Council tweet? An op-ed that had been published online – surprise, surprise – by the CBCs elflords. The op-ed‘s author is Indigenous, and he is absolutely entitled to his (misguided) perspective.

But the Canada Council is not entitled to state, as a fact, that some of our greatest-ever painters were “nationalists” who “eliminated” Indigenous culture. Because that is offensive and a lie.

But don’t just asked me, a privileged white guy who knows a little bit about Indigenous art. Don’t ask me.

Ask Norval Moriseau, arguably the greatest Canadian Indigenous artist, the Picasso of the North, who literally took up residence in Tom Thomson’s shack in Algonquin Park for weeks on end, painting. When Morriseau did that, does the Canada Council think that he was participating in the elimination of his own culture?

Or ask Emily Carr, who Lawren Harris said was indeed a member of the Group of Seven, and who painted astonishingly beautiful scenes of West Coast Indigenous life – and whose works have been showcased alongside that of the other greatest Canadian Indigenous artist, Haida Bill Reid?

Oh, wait. We can’t ask Morriseau or Reid or Carr or Harris, because they are all dead. So, perhaps, the Canada Council thought it was safe to defame them.

The best person to quote, here, is not some conservative who reflexively hates taxpayer-funded culture, or institutions like the Canada Council. The best person to quote is a person of color named Barack Obama.

“I get a sense among certain young people on social media that the way of making change is to be as judgemental as possible about other people.

“If I tweet or hashtag about how you didn’t do something right or used the wrong verb, then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself because ‘Man did you see how woke I was? I called you out!'”

“That’s enough,” Obama said. “If all you’re doing is casting stones, you are probably not going to get that far.”

After the Canada Council published their tweet, and cast stones at the Group of Seven for something they never did, this writer got in touch with the Council’s media representatives. I asked them questions. They didn’t respond.

Their tweet, however, silently disappeared.

Ironic, isn’t it? The Canada Council alleged that the Group of Seven “eliminated“ Indigenous culture.

And then, when called out on their woke lie, went and “eliminated” their own tweet.

[Kinsella is a painter who represents first Nations across Canada.]

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