Melih Can is a third-year Ph.D. student in Social Psychology with a keen focus on how group-level concerns shape outgroup attitudes and sociopolitical preferences. Currently, he delves deep into the exploration of these concerns in the context of historical injustices in Canada. Melih has joined LISPOP as the R suite and statistics expert this semester. We’re delighted to have Melih as part of the LISPOP team! Listed below are a few of the projects he has worked on in the past.

Sahin, M.C., Wilson, A., Kachanoff, F., Jiao, Y., & Saini, P. (2024, February 8-10). Collective Narcissism is boosting conservative but eroding liberal support for reparation [poster presentation, submitted]. SPSP Annual Convention, San Diego, CA, USA.

Williams, S., Sahin, M.C. & Wilson, A. (2023). (Subjective) Time heals all wounds: The competing roles of objective and subjective time in reactions to past events [Manuscript submitted for publication]

Sahin, M.C. & Wilson, A. (2023, February 23-25). Colonization transmitted across generations: effects of disease metaphor and temporal Framing of injustice against the indigenous people in Canada [poster presentation]. SPSP 2023 Annual Convention, Atlanta, USA.

Sahin, M.C. & Wilson, A. (2023, July 9-11). Too great to allow injustice: could collective narcissism ever underlie Reparations for historical misdeeds? [poster presentation]. ISPP 2023 Annual Convention, Montréal, Québec, Canada.

The extreme price increase during the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the volatility of the housing market. On the supply side, a variety of factors limited the number of available properties on the market. On the demand side, the combination of more remote work options, coupled with flight from the prohibitively expensive GTA resulted in prices across Ontario nearly doubling from 2020-2022.  

I will never forget an article from 2021 entitled “Your House Makes More Than You Do,” which sarcastically noted that home prices in the rural area of Woodstock increased in one year by $118,000 while the average household income was less than $90,000. This may have been amusing for homeowners, but what if you didn’t already own your own house? 

This had a profound impact on the rental market, with the average 2-bedroom rental unit in Ontario surging past $2,000 per month in early 2023. Unlike the average housing price, which has been in decline since early 2022, rental prices have not seen the same kind of correction. This had an enormous impact on renters who could barely afford increasing rents, while simultaneously needing to save even more to buy a home due to historically high mortgage rates. While this was a challenge in past years, home ownership has become practically unattainable for first-time homebuyers since the pandemic. It was against this backdrop that the 2022 Ontario Provincial Election was held, and candidates were finally taking notice of the housing situation. 

The 2022 Ontario Provincial election was fascinating because for the first time that I can recall, every one of the major parties (Liberals, Progressive Conservatives, NDPs and Greens) not only acknowledged the housing affordability crisis, but also had a plan to address it. This was a major step forward as MPPs acknowledged that the housing market was out of reach for many first-time homebuyers. The sheer importance and timing of the issue inspired LISPOP to develop and deploy a survey during the 2022 election campaign.  

In general, the goals of this survey were to capture opinions of voters on the causes, solutions and tradeoffs related to housing policy. In order to compare respondents from different backgrounds as well as control for different variables in our models, a series of demographic and political preference questions were also included. You can peruse the report in its entirety here, but some highlights related to the original question of first-time homeownership will be discussed herein. 

A plurality of respondents (23%) who did not currently own their home but wanted to buy had cited housing as their most important issue in the 2022 Provincial election. Among homeowners, a mere 5% believed that housing was the most important issue. One would expect this cleavage to translate over to opinions towards the cause and remedy of the housing crisis.  

Many potential causes were viewed similarly by both homeowners and non-homeowners. Some areas of divergence include non-homeowners more stanchly blaming low rent control and low public housing investment. Considering that these respondents are much more likely to be renters and/or living in public housing than homeowners, it is unsurprising that they would be more likely to put the onus on those reasons. Alternatively, low interest rates were viewed as a stronger cause by homeowners, who would be much more experienced with mortgage and interest rate fluctuations than non-homeowners. The most fascinating discussion was surrounding investor speculation, which was a hot button issue for many MPP candidates, especially in the context of property as a foreign investment. It was likewise perceived to be a serious cause by both homeowners and non-homeowners.  

 
When looking at possible solutions, there’s also a lot of consensuses across the board regardless of housing status. The general idea of “increasing housing supply” seems to be universally accepted, although the implementation seems to be easier said than done. However, there were a few areas that really stand out, including government loans for first-time buyers, which was overwhelmingly supported by those looking to buy. Rent control, also unsurprisingly, is slightly favored by non-homeowners more than homeowners. The most surprising finding was not so much the differences between homeowners and non-homeowners, it was the common ground. I would have expected prospective first-time homebuyers to be clamoring for any change to promote development and reduce housing prices, including taxing foreign home buyers and those that own multiple homes, adding more properties to existing units, eliminating density/height restriction etc., etc.  

This observation is supported when looking at policy tradeoffs, in which respondents were asked to choose between pro-housing and other policies on a sliding scale. There is barely even 50% support for reducing barriers and/or increasing investment in housing if it results in higher taxes, reduced environmental regulation or deficit spending. Interestingly, respondents who were not in the market seemed to be most in favor of the pro-housing tradeoff option. This might suggest that some non-homeowners may be already locked out of the market, and hence why they are not looking to buy now.  

It is quite surprising to see such minor variation between homeowners and non-homeowners, especially among those who are in the market to buy. One would have expected prospective first-time homebuyers to be more in favor of changes that would potentially reduce prices and allow them to achieve their goal of owning a home. Alas, while prospective homeowners are very concerned about housing affordability, this doesn’t translate to an strong position that the government should take drastic action to fix the problem. When a group that would greatly benefit from a change in provincial housing policy doesn’t seem that excited about changing the status quo, it probably won’t.  

This was just a snapshot of the findings included in the grey literature report, which is available on our website.

Why has Reconciliation in Canada stalled? What barriers exist to the implementation of transitional justice? Sometimes the simplest questions can yield the most important findings. That is certainly the case for our multi-year study of settler public opinions towards Reconciliation and Indigenous peoples.

We understand a settler as anyone who does not self-identify as Indigenous and is not recognized as a member of an Indigenous nation by that nation.[1] We chose to study settlers specifically due to their powerful and privileged positions in Canadian society. This over-empowerment is intended result of centuries of developing matrices of settler colonial control in what is now Canada. As political actors, settlers wield an incredible amount of political sway and can choose to accept the need for Reconciliation, as called for by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) or choose to disregard calls for fundamental justice for Indigenous peoples as yet another frivolous minority rights issue that can be brushed aside.

Guided by genocide studies literatures, we found that denial has been classically understood as the final stage of genocide. Recent innovations suggest that denial is also part-and-parcel of atrocity programmes whereby perpetrators create obfuscated worlds to justify their actions. Canada has such a genocidal past – the Indian Residential School (IRS) system (1830s-1997) – as uncovered by the TRC and this history sends incredible ripple effects to the present day. Colonial violence in Canada is not limited to the IRS system, though, and also includes the similar Day School system, disease and starvation to clear the plains, forced sterilization programs, Sixties and Millennium Scoops, domicide and the destruction of Indigenous homes, and intense segregation and pauperization of Indigenous nations and peoples. Amidst this backdrop of atrocity and repression, Canada has much to answer for. The IRS system is one of the most important processes for which to make amends. When denial is allowed to continue, cycles of violence remain opened and paths to justice are closed. Thus, denial is a potent barrier to justice that must be overcome for Reconciliation to succeed.

As part of our wide-ranging study, where denial is but one piece of the puzzle, we investigated unique types of genocide denial offered by some settlers to prevent justice for atrocity and tested for their prevalence among survey respondents. Our research uncovered ten types of denial in Canada (visualized in Table 1 below). All ten types can be shown to be demonstrably false through careful interrogations of history and its reverberations across space and time, but the problem remains: what is the prevalence of these beliefs among settlers? If denial is prevalent, Reconciliation will almost certainly not succeed as it cannot even take flight. If denial is not prevalent, Reconciliation at least stands a chance as barriers to justice have been removed.

Across three waves of national, online, opt-in surveys administered from 2021 to 2023, we have totaled nearly 4,500 respondents and new understandings of settler Canadians’ understandings of the past and how it connects to the present. Survey participants offered responses based on a Likert scale.

For the questions in Table 1 and the test of Dissociation, the higher the mean, the higher the level of agreement with the statement. Regarding Paradigm denials: the low level of agreement means that respondents do not believe the IRS system is comparable to the Holocaust. Importantly, ordinally scaling suffering like this is generally viewed as illegitimate in genocide studies canon.

As Table 1 shows, generally few respondents agreed with denialist sentiments. Many survey respondents rejected the ten denialist sentiments. This may suggest that Reconciliation-oriented public education efforts have had demonstrable effects in overcoming potential genocide denials. In this sense, we can confirm that transitional justice in Canada is possible as settlers do not generally reject accurate understandings of IRS genocide. However, four other important implications emerge from this aspect of our study.

First, survey respondents did, unfortunately, strongly agree with “dissociative” denialism and “moves to innocence”. It is troubling that in light of years of truth telling and experience sharing, a majority of settlers believe Indigenous peoples unfairly claim that racism exists in Canada and that Settlers today do not want to take responsibility for the past. These two types of denialism should be combatted with targeted public education efforts to make settlers better understand connections of the past to the present and to help them believe the experiences of Indigenous peoples.

Second, along demographic lines, average levels of denialism are higher among males, those who reside in the three Prairie provinces, and those whose education is less than a high school diploma. However, the differences are not always very pronounced. Thus, denial exists across different Canadian demographic sectors and is not always easily predictable.

Third, no study has ever postulated on what levels of denial form barriers to justice. We are thus concerned that while our findings demonstrate many settlers do not agree with statements concerning genocide denial in Canada, any level of denial could potentially derail transitional justice efforts. This requires significant more comparative quantitative and qualitative research in the future.

Fourth, utilizing insights from other parts of our study, we can confirm that overcoming denial does not necessarily mean an automatic recognition of past wrongs. To recall: denial is a mechanism one can engage to prevent acting on new information. More specifically, genocide denial is the final stage of violence and a barrier to justice. Recognition, on the other hand, is an active first step towards justice where one accepts historical realities, their meanings for acting in the present, and the beginning of building a more just future.

On this third annual National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, it is important to reflect on progress made and progress yet to be achieved. This reassuring fact may open opportunities for justice to occur. However, implementing transitional justice programs in settler colonial contexts where violence is often structural is a difficult task. It is up to settlers to ensure elected representatives keep Reconciliation and treaty promises as we are all inheritors of Canada’s past, occupy its present, and craft its future with our decisions and actions daily. Minimally, according to our research, many settlers reject statements of denial meaning justice may be possible. Fundamental justice, however, does not stop with overcoming denial. The latter is just the starting point.

[1] It is important to recognize that some peoples were forcibly brought to Canada through violent processes like the institution of slavery and these people may not identify as settlers.

Keywords: Survey Research, 2023 Ontario Provincial Election, Housing Policy, Ontario Housing Affordability

Suggested Citation: Arp, et al. (2023). “Summary Findings of the 2022 Ontario Provincial Election Survey.” Grey Literature Report. Laurier Institute for the Study of Public Opinion and Policy. Waterloo, Canada

Hello everyone!  

My name is Gabrielle and I am going into my third year of Political Science and Criminology at Wilfrid Laurier University. I’m excited to be a part of LISPOP because I am interested in politics, the development of policy, and finding solutions to crucial issues such as housing and human rights.  

While working in LISPOP I am most looking forward to increasing the social media engagement and sharing with more people what it is that we do at LISPOP. I’m also looking forward to the Housing Forum in October, and I can’t wait to hear people’s ideas and solutions for the current housing situation.  

When I’m not in school or working I enjoy reading, going to the gym, watching Netflix, and baking.  

After university I hope to work in the legal field, either as a paralegal or lawyer because I like conducting research, gathering data, and writing reports. I’m also interested in criminal law and in the future I would like to help those who do not have access to legal resources and help them become educated in Canadian criminal law.  

Thanks, 

Gabby

Throughout his career, Geoffrey wrote countless articles and editorials for leading news media outlets. In a somewhat lower profile role, however, Geoffrey was a much-valued weekly contributor to the LISPOP blog. His last blog post, from just a few weeks ago, was a humorous and heartfelt delivery of “gratuitous advice” to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Through his many blog posts over the years, Geoffrey highlighted dimensions of democratic accountability through commentary on journalistic ethics, political maneuvering, parliamentary procedure and more.  

Geoffrey’s exceptional talents extended beyond his writing prowess. As an educator, mentor, and advocate for journalistic ethics at the University of Guelph and Wilfrid Laurier University, he nurtured the next generation of aspiring political scientists, imparting his wisdom and instilling in them the values that lie at the heart of responsible journalism. In recognition of his work, Wilfrid Laurier awarded him an honorary Doctorate of Letters in 2007.

As we bid farewell to Geoffrey Stevens and thank him for his many contributions to LISPOP over the years, we recognize the profound impact he had on the journalistic landscape in Canada and beyond. His dedication to the truth, his unwavering commitment to holding power accountable, and his eloquence in conveying complex issues made him a pillar of journalistic integrity. His legacy will continue to inspire and guide us in our pursuit of a well-informed and transparent society.

My Dear Prime Minister,

Please forgive me for taking so long to come to your aid with my counsel. It is, as always, gratuitous, gratis, and worth every penny of it.

 I speak for your legions of true believers when I say we still have your back. You and your cabinet –  the Best and Brightest, as all Canadians know – have been going through an uncommonly rough patch. You’ve been accused of allowing Chinese spies to roam the country (or at least to nibble at the electoral system); you’ve been yelled at in the House, insulted and badgered, week after week, to call a public inquiry; your point man, a former governor general no less, bailed on you. The opposition, which had demanded you fire him, turned on a dime and blamed you for making the poor soul suffer until he quit. It’s no wonder that you needed to slip away from the hurly burly of Ottawa for a weekend of R and R with Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Ukraine.

When you got home, you learned that the Correctional Service of Canada had decided to make life more comfortable for Paul Bernardo by moving him from maximum to medium security. Paul Bernardo? Unbelievable! Your pal at Queen’s Park, Doug Ford, reacted the way I suspect 90 per cent of Canadians hoped you would react. Said the Premier: “(Bernardo) should rot in a maximum-security prison for the rest of his miserable existence.”  

The leader of the opposition, one Pierre Poilievre, is demanding that you resign. My sources tell me that this Poilievre person has an ulterior motive: he wants your job. Imagine that! He wants to return the county to the Harperian Golden Age of Enlightenment. It can’t happen.

 Except it could. Some polls (not all) show the Conservatives with enough support to form a government, even a majority one. However improbable, it might not hurt, Sir, to take a few defensive steps.  Here are my suggestions:

First, find people who have the ability to “see around corners,” and surround yourself with them. In other words, with people who have the power of anticipation, the knack of spotting issues before they turn dangerous, so that they can be disarmed before they sneak up and bash you over the head. Foreign interference is an obvious example.

Second, build some rigour into your communications at the top level by finding and blowing up  blockages that prevent important (in the case of Bernardo) or secret (as with foreign interference) information from reaching your desk. It is absurd that messages get stalled for months while bureaucrats and political staffers chew over what to do about them. The public gets the impression that your B and B team couldn’t run a stable in a one-horse town.  

Third, take the advice of former PM Joe Clark in this space last week. Tone down the partisanship in Parliament. Stop using Question Period to score cheap political points – on both sides of the House. Use it as it was intended, to provide information about government actions to parliamentarians and, in the process, to the public, and to enable everyone to see the different positions that parties advance on the issues of the day.

Last, Prime Minister, why don’t you introduce a course for all incoming MPs on Parliament and democracy, on how to use and how not to abuse the institution? Just a thought.

Cambridge resident Geoffrey Stevens is an author and former Ottawa columnist and managing editor of the Globe and Mail and Maclean’s. He welcomes comments atgeoffstevens40@gmail.com

Why, I asked myself, did the official opposition, so determined to discredit every word and deed of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, feel it necessary along the way to savage the reputation of an eminent Canadian whose only “sin” was to take on what proved, thanks to Poilievre and Co., to be an impossible task?

Johnston, the government’s “independent special rapporteur” on foreign intervention in Canadian elections, emerged from the PROC hearing on Tuesday afternoon, shaken to the core by his three-hour ordeal. He had gone in expecting – naively, perhaps – to discuss his report on national security flaws and failures, only to discover that the opposition members, who hogged the committee proceedings, had no interest in foreign interference or national security; their only interest was in demolishing his integrity as they portrayed him as a Trudeau stooge.

Three days later, David Johnston did what he had never done before: he quit, abandoning a task he had undertaken as a public service.   

What, I wondered, has happened to Parliament? Where is the civility and decorum that Canadians had come to expect from the central institution of our democracy? Was the government so weak or unfocussed that it could not prevent the opposition from taking control of Question Period, the showpiece of the parliamentary day, and keep it from abusing the rules of QP and ignoring the Speaker’s feeble attempts to maintain order?

I thought I had some answers from my years covering Parliament, but I wanted a second opinion – ideally from a student of the institution who had personal experience of Parliament at its best and at its worst. So I called Joe Clark.

Last week happened to mark an anniversary for Clark, who became Canada’s youngest prime minister, at 39, when he took office on June 4, 1979. With his partisan years long behind him, Clark has become something of an elder statesman, a thoughtful observer and commentator who worries about declining voter turnouts and other symptoms of a disengaged public in a time when democracy is being challenged on all sides, from apostles of negativism like Poilievre, to charlatans in the Donald Trump mold, to hard-right extremists only too willing to use the tools of democracy to bring it down.

How, I asked him, can the public be expected to respect politicians who have so little respect for Parliament and for the democracy it represents?

“That’s a good question,” he replied, “In my time (referring to the years following his initial election to Parliament in 1972) most members regarded themselves as parliamentarians first and as agents for their parties second. There were role models, or mentors, such as the house leaders and party whips for new members to follow. The house leaders, in particular, were people of experience – Jed Baldwin for the Conservatives, Stanley Knowles of the NDP and Allan MacEachen for the Liberals. They were certainly partisan to the extent that each wanted the best arrangement he could get for his party in negotiations with the other house leaders. But the important thing to them was to make sure legislation was properly handled and considered and that members had an opportunity to make their contributions before the measures were passed. Same thing with the whips. Parliament was more important than party.”

Are there no role models today? Clark said he doesn’t see any. “It seems that rookie MPs are being made house leaders before they have served even one term in Parliament.”

Asked for his thoughts on David Johnston’s treatment and resignation, he offered a nuanced response: “I think the genuinely distinguished former governor general should not have been asked to accept that role and the PMO was trading upon his legitimate and earned general reputation for good judgement and public service.

“In retrospect, he was probably unwise to agree, although I understand his own deep sense of duty compelled him both to accept the assignment, and to step aside when the toxic debate had undermined his authority.  I’m a former leader of the opposition, who dug in on some constitutional and other issues, and co-operated on others. I don’t want to see toxicity become the trademark of Parliament.”

Clark also talked about possible ways to restore public respect for Parliament. We’ll return to the subject another week.

Cambridge resident Geoffrey Stevens is an author and former Ottawa columnist and managing editor of the Globe and Mail and Maclean’s. He welcomes comments atgeoffstevens40@gmail.com

The distance between the governors and the governed has never seemed greater. Last week, with COVID dropping off the chart of public worries, most people, according to the polls, were preoccupied with pocketbook issues – jobs, wages that don’t keep pace with inflation, food prices, rents and mortgage rates – not to mention a deteriorating, under-resourced health care system, personal safety in schools, shopping plazas, streets and public transit, and, not least, climate change in this season of catastrophic wildfires, and the imperative of a clean, safe environment for today and for future generations.

Nowhere in any of the opinion surveys that visited my inbox did I find mention of the government’s management of national security. Yet it’s the issue that is still gripping Parliament Hill nearly four months after the deliberate disclosure of classified CSIS reports on foreign interference by enemies of the Liberal government who were working, and still are, within the ranks of the security service.  

It seems incredible that CSIS has been unable to identify and prosecute the conspirators. The failure destroys trust in the agency and speaks volumes about its management ills.

The issue took a bizarre turn on Parliament Hill last week when the opposition parties tried a novel approach to personalize security shortcomings and to nail responsibility for all errors of commission or omission to Justin Trudeau’s door.

Let me try to explain it this way. The deep thinkers who direct opposition strategy determined that the surest way to nail the prime minister’s hide to the same office door would be to slay a unicorn.

A unicorn? The unicorn is David Johnston, who has to be the only member of a rare species, former governor generals, ever to be hired by a prime minister to provide the PM with cover from opposition attacks, to fail in that mission, to be fired for his efforts by a majority vote in House of Commons, to refuse to accept his dismissal and to press stoically on, turning up important evidence of more serious flaws in the security system than the quislings at CSIS are revealing. To my mind, and I suspect to Johnston’s, the continued functioning of a political opposition within the primary intelligence service tops the list of urgent security issues.

I don’t mean to include most backbenchers among the cynics who specialize in weaponizing issues. The worst cynics are the opposition MPs who don’t know about or care about the national security system or its state of repair. Their interest does not extend beyond the point where they find or can conjure up a problem for which they can blame Trudeau.

 Most new MPs arrive in town with high expectations and intentions of helping to bring about changes to make Canada a better place for their constituents. Through no inadequacy of their own, they find themselves assigned by their caucus seniors to the party choir, there to applaud the empty rhetoric of the cynics (government as well as opposition); they are most definitely not there to disturb the negative fug of the House with interesting questions or positive ideas.

The mood on the Hill these days is not conducive to unsanctioned initiatives. Watching the House from afar, I sense a mood more of fear than of opportunity. Each party is battening its hatches down in anticipation of an election that may not come for two more years but that could happen as early as this summer.

They are trying to reinforce their chances by wringing every last vote out of their existing pool of potential supporters rather than by hunting for uncommitted voters or by fishing in other parties’ pools.

The summer of 2023 is not a time for idealism in the Ottawa bubble. On the Hill, the passport to advancement is a closed mind and a shut mouth.

Cambridge resident Geoffrey Stevens is an author and former Ottawa columnist and managing editor of the Globe and Mail and Maclean’s. He welcomes comments atgeoffstevens40@gmail.com

As the Liberals rose in applause, joined by most of the Conservatives’ female MPs, the President stole a glance to his left, at a block of male Tories, who remained rooted to their seats like tree stumps in a storm. “Even if you don’t agree, guys, I’d stand up,” he said. Slowly, sheepishly, they rose, to a chorus of good natured laughter.

It was small moment – one of a number of departures from script that helped to make Biden’s 27 hours in Ottawa (an “official” working visit) a spectacular success. From the moment on Thursday evening when Justin and Sophie welcomed Joe and Jill with hugs on the steps of Rideau Cottage and invited them in for dinner with the three Trudeau children, the visit took on the comfortable feel of a family gathering. “Family” became a theme the President and Prime Minister kept returning to.

It was “my friend, Joe” and “my pal, Justin” – staunchest of allies, best of friends and more: the leaders of two nations sharing one vision and the leadership of the world’s liberal  democracies in their struggle against aggressive authoritarian regimes  – whether Russia in Ukraine, China in the Pacific or Iran in the Middle East, or the covert activity of those regimes as they try to undermine democratic institutions in North America and beyond.

Trudeau had three practical reasons for being delighted with the visit.

First, Biden’s agreement to amend the Safe Third Country Act got the Prime Minister out of a losing political fight with the government of Quebec over the tens of thousands of undocumented refugees who had been pouring into the province from upstate New York through the unofficial crossing at Roxham Road. With Roxham closed, refugee claimants are being sent to regular border crossings to be interviewed and documented by immigration officers.

Second, the President made it clear he shares Trudeau’s commitment to a green future. The two countries, he promised, would share the benefits of an integrated North American green economy: thousands good-paying new jobs in such endeavours as the manufacture of electric vehicles and the creation of a transborder corridor for the production and assembly of next-generation semiconductors.

The two leaders’ enthusiasm for a green economy was a contrast to the weary cynicism of Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre whose party cannot agree whether climate change is real, and who believes Canada should increase, not phase out, oil production, and denounces the carbon tax as a job-killer that he will scrap when he is prime minister. He seemed out of place, a relic of the 1950s who had fallen, backward, out of a time machine.

Third, the visit gave Trudeau an opportunity to regain control of his agenda and priorities. Day after day, he had been hammered by the opposition about allegations of Chinese interference in the federal elections of 2019 and 2021. What had he known? When had he known it? Why hadn’t he done something about it?

It was a brilliant stroke to bring “the two Michaels” – Spavor and Kovrig – to Ottawa as honored guests. Their presence in Members’ Gallery set the stage for Biden and Trudeau to describe how, by working closely together, they had negotiated the release of the two Canadians after 1,020 days of harsh imprisonment.

The “two Michaels moment” signaled a shift from the problems of today to the promise of a green future, as articulated by the best buddies. It is a shift to be savoured, while it lasts.

Cambridge resident Geoffrey Stevens is an author and former Ottawa columnist and managing editor of the Globe and Mail and Maclean’s. He welcomes comments atgeoffstevens40@gmail.com