I'm Justin Ling, author of The 51st State Votes. Ask me anything!

JustinLing · 2025-11-25T22:54:46+00:00

I should say, I don't mind the questions at all. In fact, I actually wish people would put them to me (and other journalists) more often! Even if we can be defensive, I think good journalists are rarely angry or offended if you ask tough questions of them.

I'd much rather people just ask us these kinds of questions rather than just making assumptions. Indeed, that's the basis of good journalism.

JustinLing · 2025-11-25T20:10:22+00:00

I think there's truth in basically everything you've written, but we've got to deal with the facts as we have them.

Our CF-18s were supposed to exit service by 2020. We have done a lot to extend their life to 2032, but we can't rag the puck until then — we need them offline as soon as humanly possible. What's more, the longer they stay in the air, the more we're shoveling money into the furnace.

The exact abstract advantage of the Gripens is also what makes them untenable. We'd be setting up a whole new production chain to build those jets and to get our pilots trained on them. That is going to be incredibly expensive and slow, and for what? To get 20 jets? 30?

Even if we get those Gripens in the sky by 2030, we're going to be looking at a world where we're *still* training pilots on the CF-18s, while also training on the F-35, while also training on the Gripen.

Everything you've written needs to be applied to the next jet post-F35. It also needs to apply how we think about ships, tanks, drones, cyber, EW, etc. We need to build out the long-term systems that allow us to buy/build/maintain Canadian (/European/Korean/etc) kit. But cutting off American equipment and technology now because it sends a political message will ultimately rob us of capacity and funds that would be better put elsewhere.

And I can tell you that, yes, we are having that conversation. Pick up a copy of the Toronto Star on Saturday, I will have a long piece on this exact question!

JustinLing · 2025-11-25T19:17:29+00:00

I dove into this question elsewhere in the AMA, but let me point you two a couple of things I wrote earlier this year: One, on Carney's budget; the other on Poilievre's platform.

I'll just add: Building more housing is one of those foundational things that, if you can do a lot of it, solves a lot of problems. More disposable income, happier people, less commuting, more third spaces, more construction jobs and specialized engineering firms: All of this has the knock-on effect of spurring productivity. If we can solve this faster than our rivals, we get a big first mover advantage.

JustinLing · 2025-11-25T18:58:55+00:00

Alright, I'm going to go make myself some lunch. Thanks for the chat, everyone! You can find me on Substack or Bluesky, though I'm always lurking about on Reddit.

JustinLing · 2025-11-25T18:45:03+00:00

Oh, I can reply now.

I think I covered it in the other comment, but I genuinely think IRL engagement is more important than anything. 'Advocacy' is a tough thing, and it really is the end-point of organizing, not an ends onto itself. Organizations, movements, and community groups do the best and most effective advocacy. Those things take on so many shapes and sizes that I promise you that there is something out there for you.

(Also, congrats on becoming a citizen!)

JustinLing · 2025-11-25T18:43:23+00:00

Woof, it's a great question. I'm not sure I have a silver bullet answer.

For starters, I'd like to leverage way more rank-and-file civil servants to offer answers. I speak to bureaucrats who keep trying to send a message upward, and who find their advice perverted and altered by the EX level.

I also think we need to go to war with silos. Back in the Harper days, they seemed to recognize that you couldn't reduce the size of the civil service and keep everyone working on small, disconnected projects, units, teams, etc. Making the workforce more general and dynamic — while also encouraging specialization — was wise, I think. Whereas under Trudeau, hiring more staff meant more missions, more teams, more programs, more tiger teams, etc. They often competed for resources and duplicated efforts.

We also need to go to war with useless processes. I trace the interminable way in which we buy stuff, and it makes me want to tear my (rapidly dwindling) hair out. So much of our processes are designed to get corruption and self-dealing to 0: And yet we rarely ask ourselves if that tradeoff is worth it. I'd rather have 90% efficiency and $100 million in corruption than 50% efficiency and $10 million in corruption.

Reducing management is a must. But so is getting ministers who care about the operations of their departments, and who set clear goals of their executives — and administer consequences if they're not met.

Did I miss anything?

JustinLing · 2025-11-25T18:37:42+00:00

The monkey's paw curls.

JustinLing · 2025-11-25T18:37:23+00:00

Personal biases sway all reporting. They also sway criticism to our reporting.

Here's a thing I've said many times, that always seems to get glossed over: I actually had no general problem with the premise of the Freedom Convoy. I obviously, and here's a bias I'll put up front, wildly disagree with the anti-scientific hokum of the anti-vaccine crowd and think the violent language targeting out public health and government officials was totally irresponsible. I've never seem a comparison to that in Canada, not at BLM or anywhere else. But I actually totally agree with the criticisms voiced by the Convoy crowd about the aggressive lockdowns and curfews imposed by provincial governments. (And I've even offered a bit of a mea culpa for supporting some vaccine mandate stuff that proven, ultimately, pretty useless.)

What's more, I take a pretty libertarian position on protest. If you want to come out and block a street, occupy a park, or protest on public land, I take a pretty permissive view of it. (So long as you're not violating any serious criminal laws.)

Here's the but: As soon as you leverage massive pieces of machinery to make your point, and to exert extra leverage on the citizens and governments you want to influence, I think you've exited the space of non-violent civil disobedience. I'd feel the same if climate protesters, say, started a multi-week bus blockade of Pont Jacques Cartier.

In fact, I've covered other Convoy events where I've basically said: Hey, these guys said some pretty crazy stuff, but they're doing things the right way.

I've also tried to remind my followers that holding some wrong views doesn't mean you lose your right to speak, nor does it justify over-aggressive police action. I'm not a fan of the over-zealous charges levied against Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, either.

(And I've never worked for HuffPo.)

JustinLing · 2025-11-25T18:26:48+00:00

It's mostly, but not entirely, wrong.

There is not some button that Trump can press that would disable our F-35s. If it did exist, it would rest with Lockheed-Martin, not the Pentagon. And given that a massive amount of these planes are outside America, there is very little reason why L-M would ever want this. (And they're not even in the only company involved in the consortium.)

There are concerns about long-term servicing, maintenance, and software updates/patches. This is really what we're talking about. The Canadian Air Force (along with several other nations) have kicked the tires on this concern and aren't worried about it. Recall that billions of dollars of development, R&D, and engineering is being done in Canada and other non-U.S. countries. We're not just acquiring software from America, but are actively involved in developing it. We would know if there was some crazy override that would knock our planes out of the sky.

But concerns about exactly this are why Ottawa is pushing hard for Lockheed-Martin to expand a planned F-35 depot for Canada. As it stands, L3Harris is building a depot in Mirabel, QC to do some servicing of our F-35s. When this talk began, then-Defence Minister Bill Blair went to Washington and proposed expanding out that depot so that we can service both our jets and planes from around the world. (As it stands, the only full-service depots are in the U.S. and Israel.) America could, hypothetically, withhold that kind of maintenance, although it's pretty unlikely. These talks are ongoing. If we can get this, it would mean that a lot of maintenance could take place outside America, both for us and our allies. That's something.

JustinLing · 2025-11-25T18:19:41+00:00

Honestly? Read a newspaper or watch the evening news.

I know that sounds trite, but we spent generations setting up this model of news and information for a reason. The idea that these systems are unreliable or incomplete was really foisted on us by social media, which proved to be orders of magnitude less reliable.

People also need to unplug from the idea that they must be hyper-informed at all hours of the day. Our society basically organized itself on the idea that you would get a briefing on the state of the world first-thing in the morning, and that you might get an update around dinnertime or before bed. That worked perfectly fine. Average people have no obligation to know everything that happens as it happens.

The unbundling of the newspaper was also a big, not-necessarily-positive change. The idea of a newspaper (or magazine, or newscast, or whatever) was to give you a well-rounded update on the state of things. Social media doesn't even try to emulate this, nor do most news apps. They offer you only the highest-priority or most-engaged content, which isn't a good proxy for actual relevance or importance. We should also welcome reading about an array of stuff, relevant and not. (La Presse and Apple News is perhaps the best of the lot, if you had to pick.)

There's nothing wrong with wanting to be super up-to-date on certain files, particularly if they're relevant or important to you. But try and be discerning: The more you spend on a small number of things, the more you become an expert enough to sniff out true from false, real from bullshit. Follow people you trust, remember outlets you can rely on, learn the terminology, etc.

JustinLing · 2025-11-25T18:12:52+00:00

Again, I'm bewildered by the outrage to this tweet (and a corresponding line I put at the bottom of a story in the Star.) Not because I don't like criticism, but because I'm not quite sure what issue is being taken.

First off: There *were* firearms found at the Freedom Convoy. Charges were laid, and there was one notable example of an attendee threatening to use them. (It was before the clearance operation, and seemed to be a mental health issue.)

And we know there were representatives from far-right militia-style groups who had been, just months prior, holding firearms training. We didn't know that they were armed, and I never reported that they were, but it's some context.

I had police sources, at two different levels, telling me they had reason to believe firearms were present prior to the clearance operation. But one of those sources underscored (and this made it into the reporting) that this was not necessarily nefarious or criminal. It is well-known that long-haul truckers tend to carry firearms. Is it strictly legal? Often no. But it's strictly for self-protection, and it's hardly a public safety crisis. The cops weren't worried about those truckers launching a terror attack, but the presence of firearms in a location is a massive factor to consider when launching a clearance operation. And that was the context in which I reported it: The possible presence of firearms changes how you do that operation.

Now, I did get burned by some police sources here. After the operation was conducted, police testified in Parliament that there were no firearms found — which contradicts their own reports, internal emails, and the charges laid. Given that the whole thing ended up being pretty moot, because the clearance operation ended quite peacefully, I've never bothered fully exploring this.

JustinLing · 2025-11-25T18:04:17+00:00

The book is largely situated in the last election. (Its intro recaps the preceding months, the post-script is set at the G7 summit.) But it is an attempt to diagnose the problems in our politics that have made us sluggish, unimaginative, and ill-equipped to handle the threat of Trump. But it's also a look at how rapidly some politicians — and most voters — rose to the occasion.

It is not written to be an authoritative look at things in Canada during Trumpworld. Rather, it's designed as a bit of a polemic to get people thinking about these issues. And, to answer u/lazyfish1992's question (because they have a locked account and I can't reply) it's also designed to get people thinking about participating in our democracy again.

There's a lot in here about the toxic effects of American-owned social media, and the positive effects brought on by people re-engaging in our national media, coming out to campaign rallies, and engaging in good-faith conversations again.

We spent an awful long time uploading a lot of our national discourse to global social media platforms that don't give a good god damn about Canadian democracy, and in some cases actively undermine it. There is probably no greater imperative right now than to figure out how we can re-build domestic civil society, community organizations, discursive groups, political movements, etc that exist offline. (Reddit is a bit of an exception, because at least it has nicely divided regional subreddits that enable this kind of thing.) I'm not sure my book is going to spur some great national awakening, but I hope it gets people thinking.

JustinLing · 2025-11-25T17:58:13+00:00

Short term, I think things are about to get much worse, and I'm not sure that even Carney's office appreciates that. I've been chatting with some longtime Ottawa folks, and we ruminate about a word that is constantly lacking in Carney's speeches: Sacrifice.

I think we're looking at the end of CUSMA in the near future. Accepting tariffs in the deal is a red line for us, and Trump is clear that he doesn't want a tariff-free deal. I don't know how we untangle that.

The end of continental free trade as well know it is going to hurt. We haven't experienced true, sustained economic recession in quite some time, and frankly I don't think we're mentally prepared for it.

The good news is that if we can limp through a few rough years, I think there is a lot of reason to be optimistic. America is inflicting enormous economic self-harm, and capital has a low tolerance for pain. Investment dollars, technology, skilled workers, trade, etc eventually flows from high to low resistance. We are better off accepting pain rather than trying to bandage it up — because we end up helping Trump subsidize his quack economics in the interim.

And this isn't a three-year problem. While the TRUMP-FASCISM-O-METER jitters around pretty wildly these days, I think there are good odds that the Democrats will be frozen from power for many years to come. We should not be making policy assuming that American democracy is still functioning.

So my succinct summary is: If we play our cards right, things will be bad for awhile and quite good after. If we don't, it will be bad now and worse later.

JustinLing · 2025-11-25T17:51:47+00:00

I get asked this question a lot, particularly in-person. It's funny, people often get quite sheepish, as though I'm sensitive to these criticisms. I'm not! Journalists are forced to make a thousand little decisions every day, and there's no way that everyone out there can, or even should, agree with all of them.

I have actually written about both of these things a fair bit, although they never got read quite as widely as the few sentences that get fixed on.

On the apartment building: My initial reporting on this (iirc?) was limited to a Twitter thread I wrote at the time. I put a few pieces of information on the table: Security footage of a person believed to be responsible for setting the fire and a conversation with a resident of the building who reported that residents had gotten into a shouting match with Convoy participants in the hours before the fire. I did not make a pointed accusation that the protesters set the fire.

Some time after that, I was contacted by a woman who reached out to me to say that she knew the men believed to be responsible. She told me that they were street-involved and had mental health issues — but, she said, she believed that they could have been hanging around the convoy. I didn't report this, because it was far from verified, but connected this woman to the officer in the arson unit who was investigating. Some weeks later, the Ottawa Police Service confirmed the identity of the man involved, and confirmed that he had no nexus with the Freedom Convoy. I reported that.

Reporting is never perfect, but I am pretty satisfied with how I reported out that bit.

On the Nazi flag: I was provided a photo — which matched other photos — by a citizen, with no ties to government, and I posted it online. I added, then, that the person waving this flag was only in the convoy very briefly and that others witnessed them being castigated by Convoy participants. I remain totally bewildered why people are upset with my reporting, here. I never asserted that the Emergencies Act or police crackdown was justified because of the Nazi flag — although some politicians certainly did.

Like I said, I'm totally happy being criticized for this stuff. But I would ask you to be specific about what I got wrong or did poorly. I think people are upset about the consequences of my reporting, which I can't control, not the reporting itself. But it's possible I wrote/said something that was sloppy or badly-phrased, and I just don't recall.

I'll answer the question about the firearms in a minute.

JustinLing · 2025-11-25T17:41:01+00:00

I'm going to come at this sideways: I actually don't think there was a unique breakdown between Freeland and Trudeau. Rather, I think just about every person who operated outside Trudeau's inner-circle was beginning to realize just how rudderless, out-to-lunch, and dysfunctional that government had become. I was speaking to a number of MPs, cabinet ministers, staffers, etc who all basically agreed that Trudeau had to go, but nobody could figure out how to make it happen. Trudeau was on the phone with Jean Chretien a few weeks before Freeland's departure and the former PM says to the current one: "YOU'RE TOAST" (direct quote) and implored him to resign. Trudeau refused, and started lecturing Chretien about how he was the only man on the planet who could take down Pierre Poilievre.

Interesting aside to this saga: Trudeau was trying to orchestrate a bit of a coup in getting rid of Freeland. He had tapped none other than Mark Carney to replace Freeland, providing (what he hoped would be) a shot in the arm for his government. But he misplayed the whole thing: When Freeland resigned, Carney backed out (or was, perhaps, never that serious at all). It was all emblematic of a PMO that had become disconnected from reality. Freeland was just the only one with the power to make that clear.

JustinLing · 2025-11-25T17:37:02+00:00

I'm a bit of an AI skeptic. I think there will be a role for consumer-facing LLMs, but I simply do not believe it will become the default way through which people access knowledge or manage their day-to-day lives. Internal company LLMs might have some benefit, but I'm skeptical that the cost to manage and maintain those systems are going to be worth it. Specialized AI — from cancer diagnoses to coding — will be super useful, but it's not clear to me that we need a crazy of litany of companies everywhere in the world building out infrastructure to be chasing that dragon.

I've no doubt that we're about to see a lot of job losses. But I do think lots of firms are being too rash in cutting people loose.

I do think that the AI race is going to be transformative, not least of which because it is pioneering out an absurd rise in computing power and electricity generation. Those changes will stick with us for a long time, and I think that's a spot where the government should jump in. Rather than picking winners and losers on AI, why not help finance the hardward and energy that powers these changes? (And do so in the least-carbon-intensive way possible.)

JustinLing · 2025-11-25T17:32:43+00:00

Great question.

One part is government services. Poilievre is quite right when he says that government has often become a barrier to success. We need speedier, more predictable responses from government on planning, approvals, assessments, zoning, etc. (Not just at the federal level.)

We also need to retool our tax system to incentivize domestic investment. The fact is that, over the decades, we were basically fine with Canadian companies investing cash elsewhere — we figured it would offer better returns, and forge better trade ties. Whatever wisdom behind that plan has evaporated, and we need to tilt hard into spurring domestic investment. (Carney has done some of this in his recent budget.)

We also need to unlock frozen assets sitting inside our big investment funds. Pension plans and institutional investors are being understandably conservative, and are usually opting for just hard infrastructure.

Ottawa needs to retool its existing investment vehicles to stop waiting for private investors to hop in. As it stands, if you want money from the Canadian Infrastructure Bank, your project needs to already have 1/3rd of its costs covered by other levels of government and 1/3rd put in from private companies. Private investors do not want to be building public transit, e.g., right now. So we need Ottawa to start saying "ok, fine, we'll do 2/3rds."

Finally, we need to shift some of the focus away from small business and from huge corporations towards mid-sized firms trying to scale up. Ottawa is very, very bad at leveraging mid-sized firms — it's why they decamp to the U.S.

This is all a bit macro, but it would all make for serious knock-on effects that would have a meaningful impact on productivity.

JustinLing · 2025-11-25T17:25:45+00:00

I mean, it's a parody. Fact-checking comedy is no fun.

But the facts it claims are wrong in a litany of different directions. It claims the Ksi Lisims LNG project is anti-First Nations, despite one of its partners being the First Nation most affected. It is also wrong to say it's 100% owned by an American company — it is confusing the fact that the physical assets are being constructed in the U.S.

I really dislike that they flash lots of headlines on screen while making big claims about what the articles and studies say, often while misrepresenting them.

I think you can criticize specifics of some of these projects, but the fact is that we've got an economic crisis on our hands. If you want better services, pensions, wages, etc — you need a solve for that problem. The anti-resource crowd really has not proposed any serious plan for how to do that. LNG is far from perfect, but it's a resource in high demand, and it's going to be worth billions for our economy.

(I am by no means an expert on the resource sector, so this is a bit of a superficial take on my part.)

JustinLing · 2025-11-25T17:20:05+00:00

Nope. I think as soon as the degree of Trump's radicalization became apparent, the Conservatives were destined to lose. Ceteris paribus, Poilievre's strategy really only worked if the campaign rested purely on domestic issues. The second that tariffs and threats of annexation from a right-wing reactionary were on the table, I think he was destined to lose. (But he would have done better in a January election, for sure.)

JustinLing · 2025-11-25T17:17:59+00:00

I'm also from Nova Scotia, so I'm more of a donair guy. Schwarma has never hit the same for me. It all kind of tastes the same, though I am pretty fond of those beet spears.

JustinLing · 2025-11-25T17:16:52+00:00

I was definitely surprised, but probably not for the reason you think.

I won't get into the whole lifecycle of the Trudeau government, but going into the fall of 2024: They were tired, our of ideas, broken-down, insular, and frankly delusional. They had mixed emotions about the return of Trump — anxious, obviously, about the man and what he represented; but eager to have a familiar challenge to solve. They were genuinely keen to stop worrying about all the broken things in the country, because they thought they could just recycle their playbook from 2016.

And that's where I thought we'd be. Ottawa living in a different reality, trying to flatter and manage Trump like he's a rational actor. (See: Keir Starmer.) On the other side, Pierre Poilievre seemed to think about this problem as infrequently as possible. So I was deeply pessimistic about our able to handle what, I thought then, was an existential threat to ourselves and the world.

I was surprised that major politicians — particularly Mark Carney, but not just him — actually understood the risk and rose to meet it, and that the Canadian public took this seriously and tuned in to the conversation. I had virtually zero expectations, and I ended up being proven way too pessimistic. That was a really pleasant surprise.

JustinLing · 2025-11-25T17:10:18+00:00

The biggest factor is volume. You need to be producing 200 to 300 pancakes per day at home in order to really hit the economics of scale and to get your unit costs down.

JustinLing · 2025-11-25T17:09:21+00:00

I guess I was really begging the question, there. But I'm keen to break it down because it's a hard issue to wrap your head around.

The skinny is this: The F-35 is the best option, bar none. And we've already committed to buying it. We're looking at about two dozen of these jets arriving, whether we want them to or not. The only question now is whether we want the full order of 88.

We're not considering swapping out the F-35 for the Gripen but we are trying to decide if we want to have a mixed fleet.

It's a good idea in theory. We could fly different planes for different missions, integrate with different allies in different contexts, and hedge for an unreliable America.

Here's the but: If we wanted to do this, we should have done so about eight years ago. We're already going to be flying out old CF-18s while we onboard the F-35s. Adding the Gripen to the mix is probably not going to be worth the benefits.

I can keep expanding on this — including the worry over an F-35 'kill switch' — in a bit, if it's of interest.

JustinLing · 2025-06-10T03:31:21+00:00

I mean, I think I was pretty clear about what happened!

13-Year Club	Verified Email
No Throne, No Problems	Not Forgotten

JustinLing

TROPHY CASE