Welcome to Need to Know, The Hub’s roundup of experts and insiders providing insights into the developments Canadians need to be keeping an eye on.
Today’s edition touches on the most important political stories capturing headlines this week, including the Canadian reaction to Donald Trump’s inauguration, the need to restore patriotic pride in our country, and the dizzying details uncovered in Metro Vancouver’s Statement of Financial Information.
Canadian complacency, meet American confidence
By Howard Anglin, former deputy chief of staff to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, now a doctoral student at Oxford University
Official Canada watched Donald Trump’s second inauguration this week with unconcealed horror. As well they might, considering it has been their frittering fecklessness that has left us exposed to newly rumbustious American power.
They stifled our energy sector, smothered us in debt, suffocated development under permits, red tape, and consultations, swamped our cities, and starved our military, leaving us poorer, weaker, and vulnerable.
Facing a wake-up call from Washington—Trump redivivus!—you would think they might finally show some introspection. But if you think that, you don’t know Official Canada. All they could do was sneer. The spectacle was just so gross, you see. Crude, brash, vulgar, ostentatious, arriviste.
Official Canada watched, but they didn’t understand. Of course Trump is coarse. It’s the most obvious and least interesting thing about him. But if that is all you see, you’re missing the point. Monday’s ceremony is what cultural confidence looks like, and Official Canada is uncomfortable with confidence.
Energy is brash. Vigour is vulgar. It always has been. And like all empires, America does not suffer from a lack of confidence. It is the country of Whitmanesque exuberance and Sandburgian Big Shoulders. Not for nothing was “Trimalchio” Fitzgerald’s working title for The Great Gatsby.
Will Trump’s bold tech-fueled bet on moving fast and breaking things work? Will America go to Mars or crash back to Earth? Who knows. But America is trying, while Official Canada has long since resigned itself to complacent irrelevance. Watching Washington this week, and watching Official Canada watching Washington, you could feel the difference.
Restore the statues and turn Canadian identity up to 11
By Kelden Formosa, an elementary school teacher in Calgary
I can’t be the only Canadian who felt a sinking feeling as Donald Trump proclaimed a renewed age of Manifest Destiny in his inauguration speech. Many of us are worried that he could use American economic and political might to harm our economy and undermine our sovereignty. Now is the perfect time for Canadian leaders to lift our spirits with a few dramatic moves to remind us of our historic independence and vigour.

A person walks with a Canadian flag near the statue of Sir John A. Macdonald in Kingston, Ontario on Friday June 18, 2021. Lars Hagberg/The Canadian Press.
For example, let’s restore all the Sir John A. Macdonald statues, many of which were taken down or boarded up in a fit of Trudeauian guilt and post-nationalism, starting with the one in front of Queen’s Park in Toronto. Sir John A. spent his whole career creating Canada’s east-west union and working to limit American influence north of the border.
Premier Doug Ford should stand in front of his restored statue at Queen’s Park and give a speech about our country’s proud tradition of independence from American empire. It would stiffen the spine and stir the soul—and serve him well in an early election.
But Ford had better act quickly, or he will be outflanked. Bonnie Crombie has already indicated she supports a restoration, and her resurgent Ontario Liberal Party is poised to seize the mantle of patriotism and respect for our past from Ford’s Progressive Conservatives.
Who knew politics was such a lucrative business?
By Kirk LaPointe, The Hub’s B.C. correspondent
Every year in British Columbia’s Lower Mainland, the release of the Statement of Financial Information (SOFI) for Metro Vancouver stirs quite the pot. On the surface, it’s a withering blitz of expense data, the most recent one occupying 131 pages; in the weeds, though, is to be found an annual trove to satisfy the crankiest of taxpayers.
It takes a little forensic mastery, but the document reveals the side hustles of mayors and councillors in the 21 municipalities, one electoral area, and one First Nation. In the absence of an elected regional government, its various responsibilities are directed by people elected locally. Beyond what they earn from winning an election in their home communities, they’re eligible for a top-up—a few, in fact—when they are appointed by their councils to various public agencies.
The mayor of Burnaby, a city of about 250,000, pulled in $393,075 from his various duties. The mayor of Delta, a community of about 110,000, took in $346,780. The mayor of Port Coquitlam, a town of about 60,000, earned $342,512. The chair gets $109,337 and vice-chair gets $54,668, and they and the full 40-member board qualify for daily fees of $547 for four-hour meetings and $1,094 if the meetings run any longer.
The most recent SOFI dropped in the context of a failure by the board to keep itself and the public aware that a wastewater treatment plant’s budget had soared from the initial $550 million contract to $3.86 billion in the space of a half-dozen years. In the middle of this, we learned its hired chief administrative officer took home a pay packet of more than $700,000 in 2023. Not the best advertisement for the brand. The provincial government, which created Metro Vancouver presumably to bring more localized guidance to regional issues, has steered the hell away.
But a much larger infrastructure project looms, a sewage plant on the books for more than $10 billion, and the multi-dipping boards and committees will have their hands full—of challenging budget management, of extra pay packets for themselves.