What We Don’t Know About The Presidents We Elect

Notes on the occasion of an inauguration

Like most Americans, I applaud the recent ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas that was approved today by the Israeli security cabinet, and I was glad to learn that the incoming Trump administration was directly involved in support of the Biden team in the most positive way: by telling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that a deal had to be made.

I did not like much of the Biden administration’s foreign policy, and I worried a lot, as a journalist and a citizen, about what Donald Trump’s new team would do. But I learned long ago that you cannot tell a presidency by its cover.

In late 1967 I was a freelance journalist in Washington and totally hostile to the ongoing American war in South Vietnam. I was persuaded to join the then nascent staff of the only Democratic member of the Senate, Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, who was willing to take on President Lyndon B. Johnson, a fellow Democrat, then running for second term, who had escalated the war he inherited with mass bombing campaigns. I would be the press secretary and, while traveling with the candidate, draft daily policy statements and work on speeches.

McCarthy, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, was far from a shining star. But, as a devout Catholic, he saw the Vietnam War in moral terms and was troubled by the Pentagon’s decision to lower the minimal acceptable scores on the Army’s standard intelligence tests in an effort to enlist more young men from the ghettos and barrios of America, where educational opportunities were fewer, as they still are today. McCarthy publicly called such action “changing the color of the corpses.” He quickly became my man.

A few weeks into the job, I was traveling with McCarthy on a fundraising tour in California and found myself outside a Hollywood mansion where McCarthy was making a money pitch to the rich and famous. Such events were always boring, and I found myself hanging around outside the mansion with a few of the local and national reporters tagging along. One of those outside was Peter Lisagor, then the brilliant Washington bureau chief for the Chicago Daily News. He had joined our antiwar campaign out of curiosity, I suspected, since the chances of forcing Johnson to change his aggressive Vietnam policy seemed to be nil amid relentless US bombings. As I later learned, Lisagor had been one of the few journalists invited to fly in 1966 on Air Force One with the president on one of his early trips to Vietnam. The flight was kept secret until Johnson arrived in Saigon.

Lisagor told me a story—most likely he meant to cheer me up, since we were polling at 5 percent at the time—about time he had spent in 1961 at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I do not recall whether he was on a reporting project there—he had been a Nieman fellow at Harvard in 1948—but there he was on inauguration day of 1961, while in Washington the glamorous John F. Kennedy was being sworn in as president by Chief Justice Earl Warren.

As Lisagor told it, he was watching the swearing in with a bunch of MIT students and faculty members at a cafeteria that had a TV, and just as Warren pronounced JFK president a young faculty member named Noam Chomsky stunned the small crowd by saying, of Kennedy and his Harvard ties: “And now the terror begins.”

Chomsky’s point, as would become clear in his later writings, was that Kennedy’s notion of American exceptionalism was not going to work in Vietnam. As it did not. And Lisagor’s point to me, as I came to understand it over the years, was that one cannot always tell which president will become a peacemaker and which will become a destroyer. Lisagor died, far too young at age 61, in 1976.

Joe Biden talked peace—and withdrew US forces from Afghanistan—but helped put Europe, and America, into a war against Russia in Ukraine and supported Benjamin Netanyahu’s war against Hamas and, ultimately, against the Palestinian people in Gaza.

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Donald Trump is always talking tough but one of his first major foreign moves after winning the presidency was to order his senior aides to work with Biden’s foreign policy people to perhaps end a war in Gaza and save untold thousands of lives. And I hear serious talks are underway to bring an end to the Ukraine War.

One never knows.

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Alberta / 29 mins ago

Alberta Next Panel calls for less Ottawa—and it could pay off

Fraser Institute / 36 mins ago

Carney government sowing seeds for corruption in Ottawa

Alberta

Alberta Next Panel calls for less Ottawa—and it could pay off

Published on December 26, 2025

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Tegan Hill

Last Friday, less than a week before Christmas, the Smith government quietly released the final report from its Alberta Next Panel, which assessed Alberta’s role in Canada. Among other things, the panel recommends that the federal government transfer some of its tax revenue to provincial governments so they can assume more control over the delivery of provincial services. Based on Canada’s experience in the 1990s, this plan could deliver real benefits for Albertans and all Canadians.

Federations such as Canada typically work best when governments stick to their constitutional lanes. Indeed, one of the benefits of being a federalist country is that different levels of government assume responsibility for programs they’re best suited to deliver. For example, it’s logical that the federal government handle national defence, while provincial governments are typically best positioned to understand and address the unique health-care and education needs of their citizens.

But there’s currently a mismatch between the share of taxes the provinces collect and the cost of delivering provincial responsibilities (e.g. health care, education, childcare, and social services). As such, Ottawa uses transfers—including the Canada Health Transfer (CHT)—to financially support the provinces in their areas of responsibility. But these funds come with conditions.

Consider health care. To receive CHT payments from Ottawa, provinces must abide by the Canada Health Act, which effectively prevents the provinces from experimenting with new ways of delivering and financing health care—including policies that are successful in other universal health-care countries. Given Canada’s health-care system is one of the developed world’s most expensive universal systems, yet Canadians face some of the longest wait times for physicians and worst access to medical technology (e.g. MRIs) and hospital beds, these restrictions limit badly needed innovation and hurt patients.

To give the provinces more flexibility, the Alberta Next Panel suggests the federal government shift tax points (and transfer GST) to the provinces to better align provincial revenues with provincial responsibilities while eliminating “strings” attached to such federal transfers. In other words, Ottawa would transfer a portion of its tax revenues from the federal income tax and federal sales tax to the provincial government so they have funds to experiment with what works best for their citizens, without conditions on how that money can be used.

According to the Alberta Next Panel poll, at least in Alberta, a majority of citizens support this type of provincial autonomy in delivering provincial programs—and again, it’s paid off before.

In the 1990s, amid a fiscal crisis (greater in scale, but not dissimilar to the one Ottawa faces today), the federal government reduced welfare and social assistance transfers to the provinces while simultaneously removing most of the “strings” attached to these dollars. These reforms allowed the provinces to introduce work incentives, for example, which would have previously triggered a reduction in federal transfers. The change to federal transfers sparked a wave of reforms as the provinces experimented with new ways to improve their welfare programs, and ultimately led to significant innovation that reduced welfare dependency from a high of 3.1 million in 1994 to a low of 1.6 million in 2008, while also reducing government spending on social assistance.

The Smith government’s Alberta Next Panel wants the federal government to transfer some of its tax revenues to the provinces and reduce restrictions on provincial program delivery. As Canada’s experience in the 1990s shows, this could spur real innovation that ultimately improves services for Albertans and all Canadians.

Tegan Hill

Director, Alberta Policy, Fraser Institute

Fraser Institute

Carney government sowing seeds for corruption in Ottawa

Published on December 26, 2025

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Jason Clemens and Niels Veldhuis

A number of pundits and commentators have observed the self-confidence and near-unilateralist approach of our prime minister, Mark Carney. The seemingly boundless self-assurance of the prime minister in his own abilities to do the right thing has produced legislation that sets the foundation for corruption.

Consider the Carney government’s signature legislation, known as the Building Canada Act (Bill C-5), which among other things established the Major Projects Office (MPO). The stated purpose of the MPO and the act is to create a process whereby the government—in practical terms, the prime minister and his cabinet—identify projects in the “national interest” and fast-track their approval by overriding existing laws and regulations.

Put differently, a small group of politicians are now able to circumvent the laws and regulations that apply to every other entrepreneur, businessowner and investor to expedite projects they deem will benefit the country. According to several reports, senators openly referred to the bill as the “trust me” act because it lacked details and guardrails, which meant “trusting” that the prime minister and cabinet would use these new powers reasonably and responsibly.

Rather than fix the actual policies causing problems, which include a litany of laws and regulations from the Trudeau era such as Bill C-69 (which added vague criteria to the approval process for large infrastructure projects including pipelines) and Bill C-48 (which bans oil tankers from docking in British Columbia ports), the Carney government chose to create a new bureaucracy and political process to get around these rules.

And that’s the problem. By granting itself power to get around rules that everyone else has to play by, the government created the opportunity for corruption. Entrepreneurs, businessowners and investors interested in infrastructure projects, particularly energy projects, now need to consider how to convince a handful of politicians of the merits of their project. This lays the groundwork for potentially corrosive and damaging corruption now and into the future. While this prime minister may have an infinite amount of confidence in his abilities to do the right thing, what about the next prime minister, or the next one? These rules will outlive Prime Minister Carney and his government.

And it’s not just the Carney government’s signature Build Canada Act. The more recent Bill C-15, which implements certain aspects of the federal budget, contains provisions similar to the Build Canada Act that would also allow cabinet ministers to circumvent existing laws and regulations. A number of commentators have raised red flags about how the legislation would empower any minister to exempt any entity (i.e. person or firm) from any law or regulation—except the Criminal Code—under the minister’s responsibility for up to six years in order to foster innovation. The underlying rationale is that we have laws and regulations on the books that impede experimentation and innovation.

Again, rather than undertake the difficult work of updating and modernizing existing laws and regulations to empower entrepreneurs, businessowners, workers, and investors, and ensure they all play by the same rules, the Carney government instead wants to create a new mechanism for a select few to be able to sidestep existing laws and regulations.

A different way to think about both legislative initiatives is that the prime minister and his ministers are now able to provide specific companies with enormous advantages over their competitors through the political system. Those advantages have enormous value, and that value creates the opportunity for corruption now and in the future.

The Carney government recognizes that our regulatory system is badly broken, otherwise it wouldn’t create these work-around laws. It should do the hard work, which it was elected to do, and actually fix the laws and regulations that impede economic development and progress for all entrepreneurs, businessowners and investors. Otherwise, we risk a future littered with stories of advantage and corruption for political insiders.