Inviting who?
Or, is Project 2025 news to the Carney Cabinet?
I will keep this short. It’s hard to go long about a blown fuse. But I am trying to digest the news that our PM, or some bright spark around him, invited the maestro of the US right-wing revolution to sit down with his Cabinet during their retreat in Toronto. [1] Maestro’s name is Kevin Roberts. Maestro runs the right-wing Heritage Foundation think tank in Washington, D.C. Maestro and his think tank were key animators behind the “Project 2025” playbook for the return of a hard-right leaning administration to power in Washington.
The latest twist is that Roberts now says he is not attending. This doesn’t erase the bad judgement of inviting him in the first place.
Most Canadians will never have heard of Roberts, Project 2025, or even the Heritage Foundation. Bless our stars. A recent informal poll I took among government officials who attended a course of mine on intelligence and national security suggested that many were in the same boat of blissful ignorance.
The ostensible rationale behind the invitation was to gain deep insights into the thinking of the Trump administration. Really? Do we need to hear about the dangers of the deep state, about the woke ideology undermining American society and the need to root it out from the media and Universities, about the requirement to centralize power in the White House, about an American First foreign policy that beggars allies, about the primacy of US homeland security in the face of illegal migrants and drug cartels, about the need to reshore manufacturing to the US. If any of this is news to the Carney cabinet we are in deep trouble.
Now Project 2025 is 900 + pages of agit prop. But still, I think we could do our own summary. After all no one had the brilliant idea of inviting Joseph Goebbels to Whitehall for tea. Annotated copies of Mein Kampf did circulate, especially throughout the Foreign Office, where there was a coterie of officials clear-eyed about the dangers posed by the Third Reich.
So, yes, I think inviting Roberts to Toronto was a terrible idea, terrible because unnecessary and unnecessarily flattering. And now he has delivered a back-hander by declining to come.
But being gob-smacked by this invitation led me to wonder about the rest of the guest list and what it says about the state of Canadian expertise (as seen from the Wellington building, ex. Langevin) concerning the global challenges we face. For this I am indebted to Paul Well’s substack column, “No retreat, baby.” [2] (The line, I think, is from a Bruce Springsteen song. Bruce is no friend of Trump).
Paul has the guest list. Who’s in:
Pollsters (dear God)
CEOs (natch)
Economists (double natch)
Mike Greeney, CEO of MDA space (good catch)
Kevin Rudd (former Australian PM, China expert, current ambass to Washington, D.C., interesting)
What’s missing? Made in Canada geopolitical expertise. No one to speak from a Canadian perspective on global issues, including the Ukraine war, the state of the “coalition of the willing,” NATO, China, India, the United States, or Mexico. That’s a gaping set of holes for a government that says it is committed to fundamental shifts in defence and national security.
Are we so bereft?
But while they have Greeney, there is an opportunity to talk about Canada and the space economy, which really should be on the minds of the Carney Cabinet as they think big. No bigger canvas than space. There’s an opening for more deep-dive discussions about the next generation radarsat system, US controls over Canadian imagery, and even posing the question about why we are no longer supplying radarsat imagery to Ukraine to help it in its fight. How about some discussion of the need for capital funding for satellite start-ups and the imperative of developing Canadian rocket launch sites? How about some deliberation on how to keep key Canadian industries in the space sector, such as Calian, out of American hands.
With Rudd, there is a chance to compare notes on dealing with Trump, but Australia is in no brighter position than is Canada. Might have been more interesting to have a Mexico expert at the table.
I can’t close without quoting a funny line from Paul Wells, concerning Roberts. “You bite the heads off bats? Come do it over lunch.” That’s funnier than anything I could come up with; also far more tolerant.
We have to get over that instinct when it comes to dealing with the US. But, sure, keep laughing.
[1] Catherine Tunney, CBC News,”Project 2025 mastermind invited to Carney’s cabinet meeting no longer speaking,” September 4, 2025, https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/kevin-roberts-project-2025-carney-1.7624327
[2] Paul Wells, “No retreat, baby,” September 4, 2024,
Thanks all for varying responses. I am all for a deep understanding of the directions of the Trump administration. But there are better ways to achieve that and I hold to my view that there was nothing to gain and much to lose by inviting Roberts. But what I was really trying to get across in the post is the need for us to be able to call on diverse Canadian expertise on geopoliticial issues, something that successive governments have been bad at. We also need to take a hard look at the existing quotient of expertise and ask ourselves what needs to be done to restore or boost it.
You’re wrong.
There is value in having Roberts speak with cabinet. You’re quick to dismiss him as a a propagandist, and that may be so, but Project 2025 has a significant impact on the policy ambitions of the American government. Obtaining direct insight into the zeitgeist of the administration is absolutely critical, given its incredible departure from traditional policy.
Separate the reprehensible ideas from their impact on us as a nation. We need to understand the direction our neighbours are going. It’s critical. We don’t exist in isolation, and cannot expect to not be impacted by this. Being prepared for what is coming is worth more than any amount of moral grandstanding. That’s why Trudeau was turfed.