Goodbye to 2023, Part 1

A Personal Look Back as We Look Forward

I started my Substack account a year ago to be part of longer-form discussions of serious issues facing Canada at a time when the rise of social media and decline in traditional media have combined to shorten attention spans and reduce serious coverage of the issues. I was inspired by the great work done by many people on this platform including my friend and former colleague

Michelle Rempel Garner

. Michelle and several other smart voices have built an impressive audience on this channel showing that people are still interested in serious content. Many journalists have decamped from traditional platforms to Substack and are producing excellent content that many Canadians - including me - pay for. This end of year series will look back at a range of issues and trends I wrote about a year ago to see where they stand now. It will begin, however, with a look at this year of change for me on a personal level.

Political Gravity

On a personal level, the biggest change at the end of 2023 is the fact that I am no longer a Member of Parliament. After a decade in public life, I announced in the spring that I would wrap up my time as an MP during the summer recess. While I am sure this change was welcome news to many of my critics, I can safely say that it was indeed welcome news to my family. Rebecca, Mollie and Jack gave up a lot over the decade that we dedicated ourselves to public life. While I miss many aspects of the role and the profound privilege I had to sit in parliament, the wisdom I gained during that time led me to know that it was the right decision for our family for two main reasons.

First, you can wear out your welcome in public life if you stay too long. I see this reflected in the polarization around Prime Minister Trudeau right now and I am sure this reality will be part of his own year end reflections. For me, I think I left public office having made solid contributions that included both success and failure, but the time was not too long and was generally viewed as positive. I have enjoyed the last six months of speaking with Canadians in airports, Uber rides or when I am out with my family. People often come over to say ‘thanks’ for my service or to share a reflection or two. Many of these kind Canadians are actually surprised to learn I am no longer an MP, which confirms that most Canadians don’t follow the minutia of politics. The best response I have received has been from people who voted for the first time, or voted Conservative for the first time and were happy to share that fact with me. I consider these exchanges to be a real privilege and they help make leaving public life a little easier.

The second reason why I know that I chose the right time to leave public life is based on an even bigger issue that each politician must come to terms with, and that is the longer you stay in office the more it changes you. A large part of this change comes from the change to the way people perceive you in your elected role. It is a subtle and almost unnoticeable change at first, but within a few years it is easy to see how your elected role comes to define all of your relationships. From your family to friends to colleagues from previous careers, politics becomes dominant and almost inescapable. Everything in your life slowly begins to orbit around your role and it seems like all conversations and interactions inevitably fall into the gravity well of politics. Politics can be like a black hole putting tension on all aspects of your life and making it hard for you to keep aspects of your life untouched by politics. Even light cannot escape the pull of a black hole, so it is important that you do not change so much that you get pulled past the event horizon and can no longer relate to other aspects of your life and the wider community.

Before your election, most people you worked with had a diversity of experiences and viewpoints that made an impression on you. That is less likely after you are elected. In political life, all your colleagues focus on politics, but soon you will find that even people you worked with before now tend to see you by your new identity and seem to only talk about politics, or lead with the subject, when you have the chance to connect with them. You also notice this in a big way when you take your first break from Ottawa with your family and realize your political persona follows you to Great Wolf Lodge, to a sunny beach or even to a family cottage. When you meet people, they have already heard about the ‘brother in politics’, or ‘I saw you on TV’ can start a conversation even at a time that you were hoping to get away from it all. All of this can of course be very gratifying and even intoxicating, but you do start to see a change. I used to laugh it off with the old line that ‘politics is Hollywood for ugly people’, but the reality is there is an allure to your new persona and that starts to change the way you behave.

Political FOMO and Social Media

If politicians are honest with themselves, they will admit that alongside this new political identity they also develop an intense, almost insatiable, desire to be part of everything happening in politics regardless of the issue or whether it even relates to their level of government. It is like a version of Political FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). Every conversation, each news story, every event brings a political angle that you feel compelled to weigh in on. In the past, politicians would weigh in on issues in the House of Commons or through events or town halls in their ridings, but the ability to quench your Political FOMO has been taken to a whole new level in the era of social media.

With social media, your political persona never needs to ‘miss out’ on any issue anywhere at any time. In fact, you don’t even need to be in Ottawa - let alone the House of Commons - to be part of the action. You can post a video from the airport or from the side of the road if you get the urge (and some do). You can add your spin to a trending story on your X (Twitter) feed without even leaving your kitchen table. I know many politicians will reach for their phone to see what is trending each morning before they even get out of bed because for a time I was one of them. Political FOMO in the age of social media is accelerating the evolution of people in politics because political success is now being assessed by success with social media. Content creation and surfing the algorithm of anger or outrage is becoming the new metric for politics despite the fact that most of the engagement comes from people who are not even your voters. The bubble is not just in Ottawa anymore. Political gravity in the social media age allows the bubble to travel with you and is making it next to impossible to escape its forces.

For some, this personal evolution may just be part of the price of being in politics. I was of this view for the first half of my time in elected office. You view the change politics is having on you as a natural evolution that comes with the office and a role representing the hopes, fears and aspirations of the citizens you serve. After a few years, however, I began to worry about this evolution as I watched social media drive political discourse in more extreme directions. It led me to begin to reach out more to people in my network or experts outside of politics to make sure important issues I was dealing with - from Veteran suicides to vaccine hesitancy - had direct input from the people outside of the bubble. For politicians without such networks or without significant work experience before politics it may hard to hard to gain this outside perspective or even realize that it is important.

I firmly believe that everyone who runs for office does so because they want to make their community or country better according to their personal experience or their political philosophy. Therefore, I think every politician will have to confront their own evolution to find the best way to balance the pull of Political FOMO while also staying true to themselves.

Meet with your adversaries

Over my time in parliament I would take criticism in the news or on social media from people I knew in the private sector or those who had served in the military very personally. Claims that I was disconnected - or ‘selling out’ - from my professional peer groups would sting on social media, but it was important to me that I never shut it out. In fact, I found by not shutting it out it made me perform better as a politician. A lot of the time I found that if I just called a person directly, or asked for meetings with people who were being critical that it would build understanding and take down the temperature. The gravitational friction caused by my political evolution and professional groups that I still had an affinity with would often force me to consider views from outside of the political bubble. At times, it would allow me to confirm my views on issues, but often it had me alter a view or promote a compromise. At the very least, it helped keep me connected to people outside of politics.

I remember this in the legal context during debates around the Fair Elections Act in 2014. Several former colleagues and law professors called me out for my role in advancing the legislation and being a spokesperson for the government. While their criticism hurt given their status, it did lead me to discuss the legislation with them and temper some of my views. It led me to propose a few amendments to the legislation and it made a few of the critics realize that they had some of their assumptions wrong. Not cutting myself off from voices outside of my bubble was important, but connecting with them directly to drive an understanding was critical.

The most difficult time I had in politics in terms of tension between my life before politics and my political identity came during my time as Minister of Veterans Affairs. Claims that I was ‘a sell out’ or even ‘a traitor’ caused me a lot of anxiety and even some sleepless nights because military service forms a big part of who I am as a person. Most of the worst attacks came online, but I also received a few harsh words at in several Legion halls across the country. I did not cut myself off from the criticism and even brought in some friends from my military and legal circles to ensure that I had some expert voices from outside of the bubble to help me improve service and regain trust. I remember well many difficult conversations with Veterans and family members from the Equitas Society, who were suing the government over changes to Veteran benefits that went back to the government of Paul Martin. These conversations were important because they helped me understand the frustration and loss of trust that had led to the lawsuit in the first place. It also led me to confront some of my own blind spots as a politician who thought I understood Veteran issues. These meetings allowed us to build trust and make progress together and the Equitas families went from being political adversaries to advisors, partners and even good friends. One of them even travelled to Ottawa this spring to be the keynote speaker at my final mental health event as an MP. I was very touched by this and his jokes about our ‘difficult’ first meetings years ago. Trust, progress and friendship because both sides stepped out of our bubbles and got to know one another.

The way politics changes you was my most constant persona; struggle during my decade in public life. Engaging with people outside of my bubble and comfort zone was the best decision I made throughout my years in office, but the next best decision was to come off of social media entirely for my final three years in office. My wife and my chief of staff both encouraged this for many years as they could see how social media changed my moods and impacted my tone. I could see this too, but I had Political FOMO like everyone else and could not resist being part of the action. After writing about the problems with social media and seeing the growth of misinformation and growing divisions online, I finally made the decision to leave social media during my run for Conservative leader in 2020. While having me off the channels that continued to bear my name was often a pain for my staff having to run things by me, it was a welcome change for my mental health and family time. I also believe that it kept me better connected with the real needs of the country amid the challenging times of the pandemic.

I will eternally be thankful to my friends from the military and from law and business for the role they played during my time in politics. Their perspective and feedback often kept me grounded. They also served as the measuring stick, against which, I could track my values and keep my bearings. Many of them were also the friends from business and the military who rallied around Rebecca and I after the setbacks of our 2021 election loss and the loss of my leadership vote. When my RMC friends showed up unannounced at Stornoway days after the vote with some libations to be served with a side of old stories from college, it was a special gift to our family at a difficult time. I count it as a blessing to have left politics with most of the friends I entered with. I am also thankful that their friendship and the perspective of other people from outside of my political orbit prevented me from being stretched beyond all recognition by the event horizon of political life.

Next up - a look back at key issues