It took me a minute to catch Ilya Senchuk’s point about the 2021 Leaning Post “The Fifty” Chardonnay. It was mostly, he explained, in tanks he bought from Winona Concrete, just down the road from the farm he and his wife Nadia have turned into one of Niagara’s premium wineries. Then I pieced it together: Winona makes concrete from aggregate mined from local quarries.

The Leaning Post Chardonnay might be as Niagara as you can get. It’s literally made in vessels produced from the limestone of the Escarpment. If that doesn’t say something about terroir and ‘taste of place’, let alone cool climate minerality, I don’t know what does.

The Senchuks’ delicious Chardonnay was one of dozens I tasted over the four days I spent at the International Cool Climate Chardonnay Celebration (known as i4C), as a guest of the Wine Marketing Association of Ontario in the middle of July. The Niagara-based conference and series of events features most of the Chardonnay producers of the region as well as other Canadian wineries from Prince Edward County, the Okanagan, and Annapolis Valleys, and from far away as France, Italy, and South Africa.

One of the attending South African producers was Hamilton Russell Vineyards, namely in the person of Anthony Hamilton Russell. Hamilton Russell, both the winery and the person, make only two kinds of wine: Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. They are situated in Hermanus, on the coast Southeast of Cape Town towards Africa’s southernmost tip.

The influence of the nearby South Atlantic, and the winds that blow from all the way from Antarctica, qualify Anthony Hamilton Russell’s Chardonnays as cool climate and, indeed, they have an old school Burgundian character. Addressing an audience of 275 winemakers, wine traders, wine students, and wine writers, Hamilton Russell made a comparison between farming and making wine with Chardonnay versus Pinot Noir.

Pinot Noir is often called “the heartbreak grape” as it is notoriously hard to grow, requires specific sites to do well, and is prone to disaster. Chardonnay, on the other hand, will pretty much grow anywhere any other kind of grape might. As a result, despite all the Grand Cru Chardonnay in Burgundy, it tends not to get as much attention.

Hamilton Russell likened Chardonnay to “a well-balanced child that behaves well, does its homework and goes to bed on time… and as a result, it is neglected.” Then he reminded a very receptive audience why they were there. He said, “But if you give Chardonnay the attention it needs, the results are great.”

Of the many Chardonnays I paid attention to, over the course of i4C, a number stood out. One was from a winery I was not familiar with, 16 Mile Cellars. Their young winemaker, Morgan Juniper, was on a panel called Chardonnay Unbound. For this session, the audience tasted eight wines blind. We were told by our Master Sommelier moderator, London-based Stefan Neumann, that two were French and the rest from Niagara.

Juniper’s wine was the last one in the array, the 2016 16 Mile Cellar “Civility” Chardonnay, left to age in bottle after 18 months on the lees in French barrels. During the blind tasting, it was one of the wines I thought might be French because of its richness and slightly old-fashioned profile.

Another wine on that panel that caught my attention was the 2020 Dobbin Estate Chardonnay from the 20 Mile Bench. The next day I visited the Dobbin vineyards and winery and tried the 2019 Chardonnay from Magnum. Both were exquisite.

I had heard rumblings about Dobbin, but couldn’t really place it. The story came together at i4C. The Dobbin family had bought the vineyard in 2018 and quickly hired on Canadian superstar wine consultants Peter Gamble and Anne Sperling. The property had been an organic farm for about 20 years, which particularly attracted Sperling. But when Gamble tested the soils for their chemical content, he told Wade Dobbins that he had “an obligation” to make wine on it.

Centred around a seven-acre pond and surrounded by woodlands high up on the Escarpment, what caught Gamble’s interest was the exceptionally high calcium content of the vineyard soils. Here was an opportunity to make seriously Burgundian-style Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. It’s still early days at Dobbin, but these wines are bound to find their place at the apex of the Niagara scene. Unfortunately, at about $75 a bottle, they’re priced for it.

If the Dobbin Estate is aiming for elite Chardonnay status, then Flat Rock Cellars, which is not very far away, is doing the encouraging work of democratizing fine wine made from the grape. Proprietor Ed Madronich told me and a small group of visiting journalists, as we gazed from the top of his rows of vines down and northwards across Lake Ontario at the Toronto skyline, that his family’s high country vineyards mean he and his team can make “awesome wine” that’s both approachable and affordable.

In Flat Rock’s newly renovated winery, which really does have a spectacular view, Madronich led us through a tasting of their 2021 Foundation Chardonnay ($21.95) and the “micro-lot” selection, the 2021 Rusty Shed Chardonnay ($36.95). Then, we got the real star: the 2013 Rusty Shed Chardonnay. At 11 years old, this wine was completely fresh, alive, and vibrant. It had a beautifully concentrated lemony citrus character and a crispness that really wanted food.

In Champagne they like to shroud their wines in a little mystery. How else could you charge around $100 a bottle for a run of production of millions of cases? In any event, it’s easy to forget that Chardonnay is the original gangster grape of sparkling wine. Unless you visit Henry of Pelham.

At the Henry of Pelham Winery, the Speck brothers will tell you that they helped their parents plant some of the older vines on the estate, while you sip a refreshing glass of the Cuvée Catharine non-vintage sparkling wine or the 2017 Cuvée Catharine Carte Blanche made entirely from Chardonnay. The latter, I discovered at lunch with Daniel and Paul Speck at their restaurant, goes particularly well with a Nova Scotia lobster roll.

Food was, in fact, an important aspect of i4C. Cool climate wines are almost by definition higher in acidity and made to clean the palate and enhance a meal between bites. The last event of the conference for me was a brunch at The Foreign Affair Winery, which may have proved definitively that Chardonnay is the breakfast drink of champions.

FA Winemaker René Van Ede hosted Santi Planeta of the eponymous Sicilian house with dual 2022 Chardonnays from each winery. The pairing was a smoked salmon eggs Benedict. The richness of the fish, eggs, and Hollandaise was cut through with lemony crispness and then settled down into a round and weighty wash. It was a good day for Chardonnay.

There is no question that the federal public service has become too big, bloated, and unaffordable. Rightsizing government should be a critical priority for this and any future government. Given the significant reductions required to put the federal public service on the right path, and the disruption this can create, governments will need to carefully consider the best way to address this challenge. There is a right and wrong way to go about it.

First, the facts. Rapid public service growth under the Trudeau government has accompanied a massive increase in overall government spending. In Fiscal Year 2015-16, which covers the last year of the Harper government, federal government spending was 13 percent of GDP. In FY 2022-23, the most recent year for which data is available, government spending had risen to 15.6 percent of GDP.

This has resulted in a fundamental imbalance in the government’s books, with a structural deficit of 1.4 percent of GDP, because spending has outpaced revenues.

One of the main drivers of program spending is public service growth.

At the beginning of 2016, there were 259,000 federal public servants. By 2023, there were 357,000—a whopping 38 percent increase.

In comparison, employment in the overall economy grew by only 13 percent from 2016 to 2023. As a result, growth in federal public service has been three times faster than the general workforce over this period.

The situation is simply unsustainable. Why?

Critics rightly contend that the costs of such growth are unsustainable and that constant full-time equivalent increases mean that the public service is not seeking to be efficient or recruiting the right talent. But there is another important reason that we should be concerned about such significant growth in the public service.

The federal government’s use of labour and capital removes resources from the private sector and stifles productivity. With the exception of recessionary periods, bigger government makes hiring workers and investing harder for the private sector. When unemployment is as low as it is now, the federal government should be leaving space for the private sector to do its thing. Now is the time that the federal government should be running a surplus to reduce the federal debt (now 69.7 percent of GDP).

So, what is the best way to trim the fat while ensuring Canadians are effectively served by their government?

Let’s start with the wrong way. As many economists have pointed out, raising taxes won’t solve the problem and will only stifle innovation and growth.

Further, mandating across-the-board cuts for all federal departments and agencies, which would force massive layoffs of workers and stoke labour unrest, is the wrong approach and political suicide for any politician whose constituents are federal workers. This kind of an approach may also lead to less-than-optimal outcomes in terms of ensuring the right services and programs are maintained across government.

The right way is a multi-faceted approach that encourages worker-initiated, as opposed to government-initiated, separations through a fair and humane process and ensures robust analysis of government services and programming across the board to understand what can go and what must stay.

There are several options that can be considered in developing the right approach, some better than others.